Ben Jenkins on Creativity & Play

Ben Jenkins on Creativity & Play

Ben Jenkins [https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensjenkins/] is co-founder and CEO of Okay Human [https://www.okayhuman.com/], a New York-based consumer insights company formerly known as Sympler, which he co-founded in 2018 and rebranded in 2025. The firm uses chat-based, AI-assisted qualitative research to help brands including NBC, Foot Locker, and Mars understand consumer emotion and behavior. Jenkins has spent 25 years studying consumers for brands such as Levi’s, Johnnie Walker, and Axe. He began as a youth ethnographer at McCann-Erickson, then held senior strategy roles at BBH, Ogilvy, and Droga5. He writes the Substack Becoming Human [https://benjen.substack.com/]. So I think you know this, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And I think what I loved about it is that it’s the best question I’ve found for getting into a conversation out of nowhere. But it’s a big question, so I over-explain it the way I do 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. The question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control. Now that I’m in America, the simplest answer is that I come from the UK. Before, I would have started with, “I come from the countryside” — a little like D’Artagnan from the Musketeers books. I left the countryside and went to the big city. But now I think about it in terms of creativity a lot more. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently, which I’m sure we’ll come to, about what happened to creativity, and I realize it comes back to me spontaneously from people I’m interviewing: I think I came from a more creative culture. I noticed that a little bit when I got to the US. It’s a much bigger country, worrying about much larger sums of money — each company I’ve worked for here thinks in terms of billions or hundreds of billions, whereas the UK deals in much smaller quantities. So we got to be less scared of making mistakes. Now I answer that question in terms of time and place, because I started my career exactly at the turn of the century, when I still had the fortune of working with people who’d come from an analogue time — who’d grown up making things very creatively, using instinct and intuition, understanding physical beauty. I come from a time when we were allowed to use our right brains and feel our way to the creative answer. And I come from a place that, even today — I’ve been in the US 18 years now — I look at the agency culture in the UK and it’s still creative. I’m just not in that world anymore. I’m adjacent now. But I was interviewing some people at VCCP a couple of weeks ago — the head office is in London, but these are all Americans — and they said the last time they had a really big flow experience, got themselves into a flow state for creativity, was when they worked in London. This person has been in the US for five years now. The reason I’m doing what I’m doing now — focusing on how to enable creativity and resurrect people’s creative states — is because I believe lots of people are more creative than they let on. And I think I come from a place and a time that afforded me the luxury of learning some of that stuff, before I either left the location or the time. But we left that era — everyone’s struggling a little now, in this more tech-subjugated one. And one more. What has it been like being in the States? 18 years? What’s it like being from the UK in the States? What’s that experience like? So I often get that question. It’s normally social situations. It’s really hard to answer it in a non-glib way….. I think it relates to what I’ve just been saying — when you’re in your own country and your own tribe, you don’t see yourself through an identity. I’m not of the generation living now that talks about identity so much. The first time I’ve ever talked about my identity was as a foreigner in another country. So the first answer to that question is, I feel foreign, and I like that. Being foreign gives you an extra bit of credit. And I don’t just mean British — people give us extra IQ points, which I don’t think we deserve. That’s not the part I mean. It’s being any form of foreigner. It’s curiosity — you get into a play state more easily. Being the funny person with an accent in the room immediately gives you that sense of energy. It gives the dynamic a sense of energy, because people go, oh, this is interesting. When people ask me good questions about what it’s like being here, I think that’s what they’re after — something different. So you’re a curiosity, especially in the more liberal side of things. Yeah, it’s fun to be a foreigner in this country, for me anyway. And on the previous point, I do think it gives me a bit of access to ask more basic questions — which is what we should all be doing anyway. In your own country, you don’t ask big core questions about how things work, because you’re supposed to know — and you believe you already do. I remember when I first got here, the creatives in the agency I was working at were being surly, just like creatives always do. And I was still quite junior then, and I was frightened of surly creatives in London. You’re briefing them and they’re pan or miserable — even just bored, miserable, disenchanted. And here I was like, they were my age as well. Here I was like, but because it was all in a funny accent to me — we have monopoly money, everyone’s walking around with funny accents, the cultures are different — it just felt like play. It felt like I was on TV, felt like pretend. So I called them out for the first time ever. I was like, why are you looking so miserable? We’ve got some really interesting stuff in. And they apologized — they were like, sorry, that’s just the way our faces are. I was like, well, where I come from, if someone’s giving you information in an excited way, the custom is to mirror them. That wasn’t true — where I come from, they were just as miserable. But I allowed myself a cultural difference, and I got them to stop being like creatives often are — which ruins briefings. What was the attraction to come over here in the first place? I think that was part of it — to get that energy for myself, for exploration, and to throw away a lot of my belief systems and any ruts I was finding myself stuck in. You can get stuck in rituals and habits you don’t really need or want to be in, but you don’t leave them because it’s easier to stay. So I wanted a deliberate push out of my comfort zone. When I left uni, or during uni, I went to live in France for a bit. I wanted to do everything I was doing in life in a more difficult place, in another language, in another culture — to get the free boost of difficulty. You don’t bring difficulty on yourself unless it’s forced on you. So living in another culture, especially when it’s another language, forces you to grow further and faster. So America — same language, very different culture. Part of it was a growth tool. Part of it was an adventure, and part of it was to feel different enough that I could ask very basic questions we’d never think to ask. I just read this really interesting essay about Nietzsche, where I learned for the first time that nihilism — the word we associate with him — isn’t about giving up and being a Kurt Cobain waster, who cares. It’s not depression. Nihilism in Nietzsche’s terms was actually a necessary step that you need to take where you burn it all down and burn down all your assumptions and all the rules and rituals that you followed in order to get to a more truthful place. It was part of a philosophy that the reason why it’s always been taken as a negative is because the orthodoxies, whether it’s the church or whatever, didn’t want you to burn it all down. They wanted to just stand by your beds and stick with the program because it helped them. But if you want to stick to what your, get to what your truth is, there is a certain amount of creative, we call it in advertising, we call it creative destruction. There is a need to destroy before you rebuild. And so I’m going through another one of those at the moment. I think that’s what I did 18 years ago by coming here. I also had this, now it seems quite, I wouldn’t call it nihilistic, but maybe, I’ve forgotten the word. Now it seems silly, but I knew that advertising wasn’t as cool in America as it was in the UK. So you could be lulled into this false sense of your own importance in England. Like a lot of people who don’t work in the business know the names of ad agencies and they’ve heard of that, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which is the agency I worked at. They’d heard of that. Oh, they’d ask you, did you work on that campaign that did this? Or did you ever work on this commercial? Like people were still interested and thought advertising was cool. And I knew that there were no such pretenses around that in America. Like it was a grubby business when I was, even grubbier now, it was a grubby business when I arrived. And so I would get out of any form of pomposity and comfort that I’d gained and I’d learned something else. And so a little bit was that, I don’t want to be in an industry where when it falls down, everyone will be like entitled. I want to go into a place where they don’t rate it that much. I’m gonna have to work, sing for my supper. And do you have a recollection of when you were growing up? What did you want to be? What did young Ben want to be when he grew up? Probably everything. Yeah — I wanted to be a pilot, a policeman at one point, which baffles me now. I wasn’t like one of those, Quentin Tarantino always knew he wanted to be a movie maker because he was obsessed with cartoons and comic books. I saw things the way a child sees them — I didn’t know what it was, so I wouldn’t have known. I remember when somebody first told me about anthropology and I didn’t know what it was. In hindsight, I probably always wanted to do something involving psychology, anthropology, or even philosophy. I was a daydreamer. I certainly didn’t believe that I wanted to do anything to do with thinking and philosophy when I was a child. I wanted to drive cars, fly planes, and do the stuff that young boys wanted to do. But when I look back, the things that interested me were thinking about the way things, the way humans work in systems. I would never have been able to articulate that then. It’s always struck me as strange — when I read about celebrities who knew what they wanted from a young age, I think, how would you even know? It took me a long time to understand where everyone stood, where all the things were. But if I think about it, from a very young age, I was a daydreamer. I would go very laterally on topics and think right off the scale, a bit, maybe like my conversations go. I would meander into new thoughts. Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now? And what are you working on? So I’m now co-founder of Okay Human, which broadly speaking is in your world of ethnography. The reason there’s some other things that I’m doing with it, but the reason we founded it in the first place a few years ago was because we saw a lack in the way, I hate the word data actually, because it’s been taken by the tech bros. But when I was before the tech bros were the dominant feature in our world, in our lives, researchers were there at the service of big new ideas, especially in my world. They’re in service of creativity and service of new products, new brands, new ideas, new campaigns, new stories. And data was one of the forms of research that you triangulated with the other forms of research. Unfortunately, I noticed that when the tech bro got hold of research, it kicked out my beloved form of research, qualitative and ethnographic. And it wrapped its arms around quant, renamed things, coined the term AB tests, taking it out of randomized controlled experiments or whatever we used to call it, even forgetting what we used to call it. And it stole the rest of research by making, by pointing everything at one or two forms. The AB test became hero because it was easy to do. And they now had the ability to reach more people. So they can just throw AB tests at everyone. And as a result, new people coming into many industries, not just mine, marketing, anything that had tech in it, suddenly believed that this, all of a small part of research was the entirety of it. And that people had found the idea of speaking to a human being anathema, found it ridiculous and highly inefficient to use a tech word. And it felt sad that we were losing those moments of true humanity that for me, those little foibles of humanity and those weird moments, so slightly intuitive, nutty, unhinged moments that you have with a real human being out in the wild were fewer and further between. And if you don’t get those, you don’t get those. The, I used to call it a cheat when I was a brand strategist going off and doing, having a couple of conversations with completely crazy consumers or humans was my way of cheating the creative process. It’s the way of getting like, it wasn’t going to come to my head unless it came out of someone else’s mouth or life or bedroom or underwear drawer or filthy fridge. That’s where I got my, that’s where I cheated to get my ideas from because I… What are you pointing at by calling it cheating? What do you know? I mean, it’s like, I don’t know. It’s funny, isn’t it? I think like, I’m thinking like a child, which is, I used to think the creatives had this ability to conjure up ideas. And I was like, well, I can’t do that. I need my ideas to be triggered by crazy humans. And so I would, to be able to earn my seat at the creative table in an agency, I needed to show up with something unhinged and it should find that I’d have to go and get consumers into a state of unhingedness. And there, by going, I’ve just found this thing in your underwear drawer. Talk to me about that. And they’d be like, oh my God, funny story behind that is. And then all of a sudden you open up the flow of where humans really reside. They reside in the lies and in the things that they hide and in the emotional twitches that you spot when you’re talking to them. And that’s the stuff around which you build really big new ideas, companies, brands, creative design, whatever. And so I was like, we’ve stopped doing that. So Okay Human was born to go. You’re not going to be able to do it as most people, most clients no longer want to spend as much time and money on classic qual, unfortunately. But if we can get in a short amount of time to those crazy moments with a human, the tears, the laughs, the performances, the dressing up and cosplaying different roles, the projections, we can get to that in a much shorter period of time. Will people still buy it? Will brands and agencies still put it back onto their process, into their processes? And they did. And so that we’ve been doing that for eight years. What I’ve realized recently is that what I’ve, my condition of speaking to people, I don’t want to talk to survey takers because survey takers is the world I didn’t want to be in. That’s quant. But the world that I’ve had to force myself into, it looks a bit like surveys. And we use digital platforms to talk to people. We talk to them inside chat messaging where we think they’re having much more authentic, vulnerable, real conversations with their best friends. But we never want to put them into the dynamic of, it feels like they’re just filling out a survey. So we don’t do quant in that environment. We have very unstructured, crazy, projective, creative, lateral conversations, audio visual. But I’m like, even then, I don’t want to stop there. And the environment makes them more relaxed. It makes them more themselves. Half the time they’re not wearing clothes, which we love because it makes them both physically and emotionally naked, which is the best state for us to be talking to people in. But I still want to move their state. I want to move them to that moment when they’re walking out of the focus group room, when they’re fully relaxed. They’re like, oh, they asked you a question. And then you turn it back around and ask a question back to them. And then they give you the best answer is in the time that they’re walking out of the room. So I want them to be in that stage. Or when suddenly a thought has occurred to them that they re-find their emotional state that they’re in when they’re telling that story. So we change their state. So our whole mission has been, don’t talk to survey takers. So how do you not talk to survey takers? You turn them into crazy people or fun people or emotional people or whatever it is you need to get them into that state. And then you interview those people. And those are the humans that make their buying decisions and appreciate good art and design to those people. And why talk to the survey taking types? Because that’s not how we go through life. Yeah. Well, so can you tell us say more about how your product works, how you smuggled in the qualitative, the beauty. I mean, this is what I remember about my conversation with you before that the appreciation for what qualitative brings, but delivering it in these digital platforms in a way, which I don’t know that everybody really does very well. So I guess one, my first part of my question is how does what you offer work and what is that thing that you try to preserve? And because we’re in such a strange period when it comes to qualitative and quant. And I have even a tertiary question here. I don’t know if you remember when Claude launched the largest qualitative research project ever with 80,000 interviews. And it was all so this idea of what qualitative is and blah, blah, blah. But my question is really about how does what you have work and what is it about qualitative that’s magical and how do you preserve it in this context? Yeah, I’m going to start with how you preserve it, because that’s where it started from. If you were inventing qualitative research today, you would not probably go to the focus group vicinity with their bright strip lights and their two way mirrors and their bunch of strangers sitting judging you and a person with a clipboard. You wouldn’t start there. You would start, it more in the same way that the psychiatrist’s chair has been designed to lie you back and get you into a state of there’s a great Instagram project done by one of Freud’s grandchildren. I think it’s about fashion and psychology and it lies down celebrities. They’re fully lying down. And when you’re fully lying down, it does actually create, you are in a slightly different state. And so the thing I wanted to preserve was the best moments I’ve ever seen of qual. And to be honest, it was mostly either in a beautifully designed and moderated qual group if it’s sometimes or out in the field immersions. It was when you’re like, you catch them in their real life because you’re with them for a while and you observe them. And then suddenly they do something. You’re like, what just happened there? They’re like, do you know what? I was completely doing that on autopilot. I didn’t realize I was doing it. And so we don’t have the luxury of being able to study people for months on end and immerse. But how about if we can move them into those moments momentarily? And storytelling is always one of my favorites. You get someone to go on a long rambling story and eventually they forget where they are and they’re there again. And so that’s a really simple one. But the other one is to play with them. And so I believe that to answer one of your other questions very quickly as I go into this, I actually believe that qualitative research and strategy, which I root very closely together, are the first step of creativity. Creativity begins there, not when you brief the creative. And if you’re thinking about qual as a creative pursuit rather than a analytical scientific pursuit, you’re going to come at it in a very different way. So if you do, then you want to animate people from day one, from the first moment. So the dynamic between a participant and a practitioner in qual research is one a little bit more like sparring, more like the creative duo. And so the more you get them into a state of play, of heightened emotion, the more they’ll reveal to you, the more that you’ll get triggered. And you want to essentially be in a flow state. Now, because of the way that we do things, so coming on to our tool, I hate calling it a tool because again, that puts it back into left brain world. There is still some mechanics. The first is, for me, the lying down psychiatrist chair is the environment. We’ll talk to people inside, chat messaging, places where they’re already talking to their nearest and dearest. We’re not forcing them into either a physical room or a digital room that isn’t theirs. They’ve been here every hour of every day for the last 10 years. It’s Facebook Messenger. It’s the DMs in Instagram where they talk to a lot of their friends. It’s WhatsApp. And in this environment, it’s fully your environment. Conversation you’ve just had with your grandma about how to bake a cake or how much you love your granddaughter, whatever is in one is there. So there’s no code switching if you’re talking about love and emotion and something that’s close to your heart. The conversation can flow immediately with us. We’ll recruit people also in those environments. So we’re not getting them out of their world into our world. We’re coming into their world. So it’s a bit more ethnographic in that way. We’ll join them on their terms in their space. So I see that as a little bit like they’re lying down. I love the fact, one of our competitors talked about apologetically to a conference I went to going, it’s OK, clients. Our respondents will wear clothes when they’re talking to us. You won’t have any naked respondents. I’m like, no, no, ours won’t. We hope that they don’t. Don’t put your shirt on, because as soon as you do that, you’re changing your state into professionalism again. Stay naked when you’re talking to us. Stay horizontal when you’re talking. We often get people engaged in pillow talk with us. And we want them to stay there, because that’s where truth leaks out. And so then you’ll know this as an ethnographer. Then we’ll throw some of the old favorites, some new ones, projective techniques at them in that state. And I talk about it in the same way that when you meet a dog, it play bows at you. It grabs. It goes like this. And you know what to do when it does that. Yeah. Play is an invitation to get silly. And we do that in all sorts of different ways. Tell me a joke. Tell me where you lie. Tell me what your therapist would say to your last three questions. Show me your bins right now. Video your bins and tell me what your therapist would say about that. If your best friend was spotting some lies in the last thing you just said, what would they say? What’s the last 10 pictures on your camera say about you. We’re wrongfooting. We’re playing. We’re asking them to storytell. We’re asking to draw and draw a picture of what such and such means and make me a collage. All of the things that are some of which are recognized from classic qual and some are new. Identify the coolest object in your house and tell me what it would say about you, which is a reflection of how cool you think you are. You’re asking your cool object to talk about you. So personification of objects, of brands. We’re doing embodied semiotics. Get a brand to walk into the room right now and tell me as though it’s a catwalk and tell me what it would do and why. And so just really animating the process of walking around one’s emotional space in this environment. They do. It’s not awkward like in a focus group. If you remember back in the day, you go rip up this magazine and make a collage of what it means to be a consumer. And they were like, where do I start here? There is no hesitation. Yeah. I love so much of what you’re saying, of course. And I wanted to isolate two things that you said that I totally align with. And one is the idea that this is a creative exercise and to choose to lean into that, which is something I think I learned or recognized as uniquely. And then the other thing you said, which I don’t hear a lot said, is that research and you said research and strategy are they’re like right next to each other or they’re the same enterprise. You talked about somehow the relationship between research and strategy being much more intimate than maybe is generally discussed. And I wanted to hear you talk about that. It’s funny that it seems new to you. I found it one way or another. The main tool of a strategist in an ad agency or a branding agency was research. That was your physical tool that you walked in the room with. And then how you did it would diverge depending on what sort of brain you had. And so the left brain is often favored the desk research with quantum Intel and MRI and Simmons and all that stuff or the surveys, the quant surveys and the more right brainers would favor qual and meeting consumers. But all of us had to master both and we’d have to triangulate both. I just always felt that the strategists that had the closest relationships with the creatives and the ones that were thinking more creatively were the ones that allied themselves with qual. And because there was more. And I think now I realize that now I fully have embedded that the idea of especially qual is the first line of creativity, then that makes sense, you’re already being creative and you can see through all of these tools and devices and exercises that we’ve been using at OKHuman that they are creative exercise. They’re exercise to energize and animate the creative process to begin with in participants and consumers. But ultimately, what’s animated there continues to animate ideas later on as well. So I think that if you recognize in those businesses that I’m talking about, even a little bit in consultancy, but I think certainly ad agencies and branding agencies and brand consultancies, the output is creative. And if you’re not starting that process early, and I believe that process starts in research, you’re not going to get there. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I think there’s two places. One is just every time I look at a consumer, hate calling it because he was every time I look at a human human being a real human, I get this huge jump of joy, these huge emotional kind of like. What’s the way of looking at it? Yeah, if I’m feeling down, I’ll go into because I don’t always do all of the work anymore. So often I’m not often looking through the raw data. But when I do, I feel grateful that humanity is still interesting because we can live in a world where you’re just reading the news and operating on autopilot. But I go in deeply into a piece of research that we’ve done and go through the videos or the verbatims and look at individual consumers being themselves, individual humans being themselves. I’m like it heartens me. It reminds me that humanity is still here, still doing odd things, still being weird and individual. And so one of it is that it’s grounding, especially during covid when everything felt like it was up in the air. We did a study about we actually created a whole new brand and a web platform called How Do You Feel Dot Live. And we literally interviewed people all over the world. We built a map, an interactive map, where I interviewed people and it just felt grounding that people were still they had their own little habits and feelings and thoughts about what was going on. And it was really nice to be connected. There was a moment when we weren’t connected enough with each other and it was unusual voices because they were being mediated by big or small media, traditional or social media. We were hearing them unfettered, unfiltered. And so that’s one of them is just having that direct access to people all over the world and reminding, which reminds me that we’re all still nutters and we’re all still interesting. We’re all still getting on with it. And whenever there’s a big polemic, and I’ll often use it as an excuse if we’ve got a project going on to ask people about it, to see if it’s as crazily divided as the media would have us believe, which they do obviously to sell column inches. And it never is. It’s like people are so much more wise and philosophical and thoughtful and loving. And so that’s one of them. That’s a comfort part of it. And the other one is that I like creativity. I like the idea of building things. So doing the, building the company in the first place, obviously, scratches that entrepreneurial itch to build something. But on every project we are using the building blocks of qual research to, I think the most important building blocks of creativity are qual. And so stimulating, and I keep using this word animating is one of my favorite words at the moment. Nothing comes to being. It’s even at a quantum physics level, isn’t it? Einsteinian level, like everything is just the degree to which things vibrate and move. And so the more you animate something, the more it comes into existence. We’re not just moving matter around. We’re not just taking, that’s why I hate the world of like the way people talk about data today. It’s like data is an object that you put into a process and then you make a thing from it. Whereas with qual, I think the more animation you do to humans and the more vibrations that you can generate, the more you actually make. So I think that creativity in that way is, you’re essentially stimulating things into existence when you animate things. So I’ve got really lofty there, but. Oh, I’m right there. I will meet you there. I don’t know if you’ve encountered, have you ever heard of appreciative inquiry? No, I love it already. I think it came out of the organizational transformational world, this guy, David Cooperider. And I only know just enough about it to be dangerous and to tell this story, but it was that transformation that follows a problem solution mindset ends up just pushing the problem around. And maybe there’s a better way of basically identifying the peak experiences when everything happens beautifully and pushing into the positive. And he says, there’s a line, he says that we live in, and I’m only mentioning it because you’re expressing it, that we live in the world that our questions create. Right. And it’s just this beautiful thing. How does that feel or how does that resonate with you? Absolutely brilliant. There’s a line of inquiry that I can now go after because I went to this talk about quantum physics the other day, and there’s a really fascinating guy. And this is in person in Brooklyn, this British scientist who had the air of a Monty Python comic about him on stage. So he made it so he just talked to, he just kept saying, it’s just so weird. And his animation of also similarly, at a similar moment, I’ve been listening to the book on creativity by John Cleese. So he’s a real Python. And I listened to it instead of reading it because I was wanting to do it while I was doing other things. So I could hear his voice and he narrated it. And it felt like there’s a similarity. The fact that I was told about quantum physics by a Python-esque voice and that it’s weird and that it’s a creative experience and the whole Schrodinger’s cat, it doesn’t exist until you look at it. I love that idea. It’s like, unless you decide to be curious, to inquire, it doesn’t really exist. And Einstein was there in the 20s on this. And we’re still finding that difficult to understand that the whole of the 20th century was about moving matter around and in doing it in a more efficient, faster, cheaper way. And that has infected, and this is my biggest rant, that infected the business of creativity that I was in. But as the tech bros assumed domination on this planet. But the thing that the tech bros were afforded before they got there was all created by creators, by people who understood creativity. And they did it in a slightly different way. Two together are a superpower. We need both. But when you overly worship one doctrine, you have this tendency to negate the other. And I think right now we’ve spent a little bit too long, I’d say 20 years, negating the tools, which are a little bit more woo-woo to some people, of creativity. I love the idea that someone’s named it appreciative inquiry. It doesn’t exist until you ask the question. And then it does. Yeah. How beautiful. I’m curious, because you started out, the conversation and then your work, too, is a real challenge to everything you’re talking about. How would you describe where we are now, the state of things? And I love that you’re advocating and you’re building around the imaginative part of qualitative. I feel like qualitative has its own obstacles for lots of people, just even talking to people face-to-face, having an analytical conversation with somebody is too far for some people. But then to embed it in this really appreciative, imaginative, creative way that you’re doing now, I guess my question is, how are you being met? And what do you say to clients to help them see the value of what you’re doing? Yeah, there’s two ways of looking at that as well, which is on one front, it’s being met well through the brand. So when we spoke before you switched the tape on about rebranding to OKHuman, what our last name was doing was it was clearly situating us in that last era of tech, efficiency, simplicity, sass, that world that was a race to the bottom. And I felt it while I was in it and we needed to get out of it because a brand name does a lot of work for you before and after you’re in the room. While I was in the room, people were like, great, this is fascinating. When you leave the room, when they look back at who you are, they see your name and go, oh, it must be about simplicity and efficiency. Or before they meet you, your name walks into the room before you and sets you up like your pre-act. And the pre-act now with OKHuman is doing a lot of work for us. And the assumptions that people are mostly correctly making is that, oh, you’ve seen this moment in the zeitgeist where it was all about the OK computer, the OK Google. It was about use your agents to do the work for you. And we’re rushing towards the future. And you’re trolling that a little bit. You’re jamming the orthodoxy or that prevailing wind and going, OK, how about OKHuman? How about we just spend a beat? There’s still the OK in there. We know you’re probably going to be harnessing some form of technology. So the first answer to that is that people were like, sigh of relief. Thank you. What are you doing? How can you bring a bit of that back? So there’s definitely a feeling of there’s a hinge point I see in culture where people are going, we’ve been rushing very hard and fast towards AI. This acceleration since November 2022 has freaked people out even more, has spooked them a little bit. So while some of us are still running very fast, others are going, wait, what’s going to happen next? More conversation is happening about what does it mean to be human? Because now we’ve got artificial ones. We’re now asking the questions. I’m very pleased that non-social scientists, non-philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists are asking questions that only those three were asking before. So I’m pleased about that. So I just feel like from a zeitgeist perspective, it fits into that moment, people going, yes. Then there’s a second one, which is born out of the fact that we’ve started to bring some of our methodology to a different case study, which is organisations. I realised that the humans that we should be studying aren’t only the humans on the outside of your company, your buyers, your consumers, but also the ones inside the company, because we’ve forgotten to ask questions of those. So under this working title, Becoming Human, I’ve been writing and proposing ideas around what happened to the creative sparks of the individuals within your company, because I’ve been noticing quite a long time that there’s a lot of dead behind the eyes clients that I meet, especially more junior ones. It’s almost like we’ve had our agency taken away from us and we don’t know what we’re allowed to do or they don’t know what they’re allowed to do. So what about if some of these techniques that we’ve learnt in service of ethnography, in service of qual, that has reanimated conversations inside research, what if some of this could be used inside organisations to reanimate the processes there that have been really prevented by processes, by expectations, by the reduction of money and time from clients, and most importantly, by everything being run through a system, a technological system, which culminated in AI. There’s mandates across a lot of my clients to use this AI in this amount of time. You need a quota of how much you use AI. People have been so pushed into these boxes and funnels that they have no space to use their own intuition and their own human agency. And so my proposal to clients has been, before you fire your last organic human, why don’t you retrain some of the ones that are still there to be as human as they can possibly be? Because I believe they’re working at a small fraction of their capacity. They’re switching off their intuition. They’re frightened to be instinctive and feeling, because they’ve been told that the master is a dogmatic left brain, either human or machine. All the people who’ve been promoted in the last 10, 20 years are the ones that are very left brain and very analytical. And all the crazy right brainers have been pushed to the side. The AI era is going to need these. We’ve heard this a lot in the last couple of years. The AI era is going to need the right brainers. So could we have a role in getting them back either through some form of training or some form of help? And in answer to that, to get back to your question, it’s funny because there’s been a lot of pull from the smaller, cooler boutique companies who already know a bit about it, and an absolute paralysis from the others. To the point where I met a creative consultant who’s changed her company name to take the word creativity out of it. Because she’s like, ultimately, I’m a creativity consultant, but I have talked about it being more about growth. And creativity is a thing I hide in the background to get them there. So all of her bigger clients don’t want that word in the definition of what they do. They think it’s frivolous. What do you mean by that? I’m frightened about that. As a strategist, I’ve quickly gotten nerdy about it and gone, well, one is the means and one of the end. So the end is growth. Just because you’re talking a lot about creativity. We all know, as strategists, we knew this client would go, this is all very interesting, all very fun, but how are you going to sell my product? And we were like, the fact we need to have that conversation is worrying, but we did used to have that conversation, even 20 years ago. So on one practical front, I get it. But when you’re talking to very senior people who have benefited from brands that have benefited from creativity, for them to go easy on the creativity love, that’s a little bit worrying. At senior level, they’re like, let’s maybe reduce the mention of that word and get back to growth. I wonder, and we’re very near the end of time and tell me if I’m off base or not, but I feel like, well, there’s all that work and I’m going to forget his name, Orlando Lemon Creativity Crisis Advertising, Ian McGilchrist. Yeah, that’s right. And Ian McGilchrist. And what I hear you talking about stuff that lays right on top of all those observations about the dominance and the monopoly of left brain and corporate advertising and the need of the right brain to come back. And I always felt like that was applied to advertising, but you’re really, and tell me if I’m wrong, you’re applying it to research, that researchers have the same crisis of creativity and humanity, and that that needs to be restored in a way too, because they’re all, as you said, they’re the same, two ends of the same line. In a way. Yeah. But I’m, because I’m still an ad man at heart. I’m probably, when I say it, I’m mostly talking about advertising as well. It’s only been a recent revelation and to begin with a guilty one and now a proud one, that research is the first line of creativity and is therefore qual is a creative pursuit. So yes, I’m bringing it to research as well. But I think there’s even more pushback there because qual gets a bad enough rap as it is in the room full of quant pros. So you don’t want to let that out of the bag too much. We, you and I know this, but I don’t think we should be going out there shouting too much about it because that’ll give more people more excuse to kick it out of the room. So mostly I have been talking about it in yes, advertising industry, but also clients and brand clients. I know that McDonald’s for instance, loves an offsite where it gets to ideate, Diageo and Unilever back in the day when I worked with them had rooms dedicated to brainstorms and ideation sessions. And it wasn’t just Google that had the ball pits back in the day, Unilever had beanbag ridden rooms called seventh heaven with colors and hacky sacks to throw around and that they, but they’ve gotten rid of that a little bit. They will also kind of charmed by the tech world and believed that they needed to dress up in their clothes and start to get serious and quanty. And so I’m speaking really to all of those people that dropped a lot of your creativity, right brain thinking and thinkers in favor of this very mesmerizing and compelling efficiency narrative. And the irony is that the people who are jumping back into it more than Unilever and PNG and Pepsi, and those cool clients, Nike is the tech companies. Cause they’ve got all the money. They’ve done all the efficiency and now they’ve got all the staff and they’re bringing in staff, very right brain, very numinous thinkers. And it’s amazing. So open AI and Anthropic have brought in people I know from to be extremely right brain recently have very senior positions. Google has been doing it for a while. And so the irony now is the very people who put us here are the first ones to be going back. Beautiful. Well, listen, I want to thank you very much, Ben, for accepting the invitation and congratulations on Okay Human. Thank you. I hope that was useful. 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Mark Kingsley on AI as a Condition & Belonging

Mark Kingsley [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markingsley/] is a brand strategist and designer, the founder of the brand studio Malcontent [https://malcontent.com/], and an instructor in the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program. Earlier in his career, he designed album packages for John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, Quincy Jones, Ginger Baker, and Jewel at Blue Note Records, earning a 2001 Grammy nomination. He moved into brand strategy, serving as global creative lead on Citi at Landor and Executive Strategy Director at Collins. He is the author of Universal Principles of Branding (2023) and Brands in the Age of AI [https://malcontent.com/] (2025). He also has a great substack [https://markingsley.substack.com/]. So I start all these conversations the same way with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It’s a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s kind of big, so I kind of over explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? Well, there’s the geographical, obviously. So I was born in Pittsburgh, but grew up in Western New York, which is kind of a magical place. And I was born and grew up in the 1970s. So Western New York in the 1970s was the recipient of an embarrassment of riches. The school that I went to, the elementary school and high school that I went to, is exactly between Rochester and Buffalo. So what that did is it attracted some of the better candidates for teachers from both of those areas. So I had a really good intellectual foundation. My father was a college professor. My mother was a math teacher at the school for the blind, at the New York State School for the Blind. So I had educators as parents and as guides. And it’s also across the lake from Toronto. So I had access to Canadian TV, which meant Monty Python and curling. And also Rochester and Buffalo were like highlights on the concert tour for bands and musicians in the 1970s and 80s. And then on top of that, New York State in the 1980s had some really wonderful arts funding. So I went to school in Rochester and the musicians that I saw come through Rochester were absolutely astounding. I saw Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Reich, David Von Teegum. The harmonic choir, which is a group of musicians who sing in overtones. It was just incredible. An incredibly rich experience. And I got to meet and I took a class with Allen Ginsberg. I took two classes with Allen Ginsberg. I got to meet Ed Sanders from the Lower East Side Fugs. It was just incredible what came through all because of New York State arts funding, which is now gone. And it’s kind of a tragedy. So I come from abundance and live in tragedy. What was the town that you grew up in? I grew up outside of Rochester, so I’m excited to hear you talk about Western New York is a magical place. So tell me more about what made it so magical. Well, I grew up in a town called Oakfield. At the time, it had one stoplight. I think now it has two, and five miles north of a town called Batavia. So if you drive the New York State’s railway between Buffalo and Rochester, there’s a thing right next to it that says Batavia Turf Farms. It’s basically they grow grass. And so there’s a sign that says Batavia Turf Farms. So that’s the wonder, I guess, of that. But also, the other advantage of growing up between Buffalo and Rochester is I got CBC radio out of Toronto. And at the time there was a radio program called Brave New Waves that was begun by a magical person named Augusta LaPay. And this thing would go from midnight till six in the morning. And she would have all night conversations on the Dow or an all night interview with Philip Glass. And then at like five o’clock in the morning, they would start playing music and you would hear a segue from John Cage to Charlie Parker to John Zorn. And this was normal. And then Rochester had an obscure little radio station called WSAY that was out of like Greece, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester. And then Buffalo had WUWU, W-U-W-U, out of East Aurora, New York, where the Roycrofters were. And that also was just anarchic, free form, anything that comes to your mind kind of radio. So the inspiration of not really anarchy, but just do it yourself and allow yourself to be yourself. Because this is before algorithms, because right now algorithms funnel us into a certain sort of generic beige-ness. So this was the opportunity for you to really be distinctive, individual, and not feel any shame about that. It just was all accepted. So that’s part of that magic. And also, you’re outside of New York, you’re outside of any kind of major metropolitan area. So you could do your thing and no one really cared. Because no one was watching. No one paid attention. I love that. I wanted to go back to that first list of musicians that you were marveling that you had access to. I didn’t recognize a single one of those names. What kind of music are you talking about? And were you... Everything from avant-garde music, like new music, what they would call kind of a pejorative term, to jazz, free jazz, members of the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was a group of black musicians out of Chicago who had this... The group that you would know would be the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had a great tagline, which is great black music from the past to the future. That’s beautiful. Yeah. I was a big Sun Ra fan. I saw Sonny play maybe 40 times when I moved to New York. And I first saw Sonny up in... There’s a place near Niagara Falls called Art Park, which was another beneficiary of New York State’s arts funding, where they took a toxic waste dump along the Niagara River, just down the river from Niagara Falls, and they converted it into an open air performance art and art installation place where like Vito Acconci would do an installation. That’s where Chris Burden did his original beam dropper. He took I-beams off a crane and lifted them maybe 60 feet in the air and then dropped them into a puddle of wet cement. So I was there for the beam drop, right? But it’s also at Art Park where I saw the North American premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, or where I saw Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I saw Oregon. All these great improvised music groups, jazz musicians, Cecil Taylor. It was incredible, really, what came through. Where did this begin, this love of or appreciation or interest in music? Where did that begin for you? The radio, the radio that was available. And you just hear this weird thing. My parents were open-minded and didn’t necessarily say that you had to follow a certain kind of program other than educate yourself, learn about the world, read, write, the basics that we want from our children. My parents were very individualistic also. She worked for the state as an educator, but she also was a union person. And my father was briefly in seminar before he met my mother. So a friend of mine says that I have a certain Jesuitical kind of attitude, and I think I got that from my father. So I would ask him questions, and he would respond with that kind of Jesuitical response. It was basically like me responding to the world. Like, for example, I’m watching Johnny Carson one night, and Johnny Carson tells a joke where he says, don’t trust a proctologist who wears wax lips. It was this strange, surreal sentence. And I said to my father the next day, I said, what does that mean? What is a proctologist? And he goes, it’s the study of the anus, right? As opposed to, don’t talk about it. It was, here, this is what this is. So it was a matter of fact, openness and acceptance to the world. And I’m curious about your setup with the radio. Where were you listening to the radio, and where were you with the radio listening to getting the CBC? Well, the CBC was powerful, and it would come across Lake Ontario. So I would get it. And I first started listening to Brave New Waves when I was in college in Rochester. And I was in art school. And when you’re in art school, you stay up all night. That’s what you do. And that’s my chronotype, I guess. And so that’s basically what you do. And this was the thing. And all the other radio, for me, was a bit common. I like Led Zeppelin, but I don’t need to listen to Led Zeppelin all day. So it’s just WCMF, 96.5. It’s garbage. It’s absolute garbage. And for a brief time, I did work in college radio at WITR, and I was the jazz program director of WITR when we had maybe a hundred Watts or something like that. That’s how powerful that station was. What do you recall? As young Mark, what did you want to be when you grew up? As a kid, you remember? I didn’t know this until I heard Santana. So for me, that formative moment is watching television and seeing Santana on television. I think it was California Jam. It was a concert series in a Speedway out in California that was on ABC. And this band came out and he was touring the worst Santana record, which is Festival, but I didn’t know any better. Right. And so here’s this man who doesn’t look like me with a band playing instruments that I hadn’t seen before, congas and timbales and stuff. And with rhythms I hadn’t quite heard. And he was an amazing guitar player. It was like, what the. And so from there, I was like, I needed to find everything out that I could about Santana. So I would ride my bike around Batavia and Oakfield going to garage sales and buying for like $2 a piece or $3 a piece, because I had a job and all that, I would buy a used Santana vinyl. And then from Santana, I look on the back cover and like, who, he did a record. Who’s this guy? John McLaughlin. And why does he have this weird first name? Mahavishnu. What does that mean? So of course I have to buy some Mahavishnu Orchestra records. And then they both talk about how much they love John Coltrane. I’m like, who’s John Coltrane? Okay. And then boom, you’re in the deep water. Yeah. It’s amazing. It’s just one television show. And that’s the other thing, Peter. At this moment in the seventies when there was an openness and corporate control of media and all that, but it wasn’t as tight as it was, because I’m a late night guy. I’m watching Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert or The Midnight Special. And who did they have on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and The Midnight Special? Jeff Beck with Billy Preston, Kraftwerk, Parliament Funkadelic. It’s like, what is this poor white boy going to do? Yeah. And I saw an interview just yesterday with, I’m going to forget his name. He’s a comedy writer. And we were talking about the end of late night TV. And the hypothesis was that it’s just dead. The format’s dead right now. And he talked about how when it came up, it was dangerous. It was risky and reckless. It was all very experimental. And I remember turning it on and Letterman was sort of crazy. It was sort of crazy what was going on there. But there’s no craziness in late night now. But Letterman started as a daytime talk show. He started in the middle of the day. And I saw that as a kid. I was like, this man is insane. Or late night with Tom Snyder, who would have the great Harlan Ellison, the great science fiction writer. And Harlan Ellison was a dangerous person. He was a crank, but he was brilliant. And he saw through pretense. I have people like that on television. This is better than Dick Cavett for me. Yes. So catch us up. Tell us, where are you now? What is the work that you do? So I have my own small branding firm called Malcontent. I named it because that’s basically my approach to standard practices. I’m always trying to find a different way of doing things. And nothing kills me more than to sit in a meeting and listen to someone talk about how they’re going to leverage these assets. We say things like, I can’t boil the ocean. This kind of professionalist jargon, which is meaningless. And so I have that. And I have a few clients, small clients. I have designed logos for multi-billion dollar corporations, but I’m not doing that now. I also teach at the School of Visual Arts, Master’s in Branding Program. And I started during COVID. We all had to find a place for ourselves during COVID. So I found myself with an endowed professorship at RIT. And in the School of Design, where I went to school. So I basically was on the other side of the lectern. And I was there briefly, just for a couple of years. But when I arrived, I got this email out of the blue from the acquisitions editor at Quarto Rockport out of a town near Boston, asking me if I would be interested in writing a book called The Universal Principles of Branding. And I’m a fool, so I’ll step in. I’m like, yeah, why not? And he goes, OK, well, what are your list of the principles? And I came up with about 60 of them. And he’s like, you need 100. I’m like, who says? Well, the series is 100. I’m like, OK. So I wrote 100. And then from that book, which did relatively well, I got to travel a little bit and do some speaking engagements, like in Dublin. So after that, they came back to me and shared with me a series of books done by Stanford at the D School. And said, what do you think? And I said, are you asking me if I would be interested in working on a series on branding? And he goes, yes, exactly. So I pulled together a 16-page proposal, working off the syllabuses from my colleagues, and pitched 16 books. They selected three. First one that came out was A History of Brands by my colleague Richard Scheer. And then The Meaning of Branded Objects by my colleague Dr. Tom Guariello. And I proposed, because I was concerned that I didn’t want the series to be too didactic, I proposed a book called Brands in the Age of AI, which I was going to write. And they chose that as the third one. So I became the series editor, and basically bringing my colleagues kicking and screaming into the world of narrative text as opposed to bulleted PowerPoint slides. So it was a great education for all of us. And then the book Brands in the Age of AI came out in December. I’ve been doing the occasional talk about it, interviews with it. And then last month in May, I was asked to speak at the NYC Design Festival on their first, what they called the AI Summit. It was the first day dedicated to artificial intelligence. And that basically fueled my thoughts. The book Brands in the Age of AI gets relatively good reviews, but it also gets some, like people on Amazon will say, well, this didn’t teach me how to work my small business with AI. And it’s like, no book can do that for you. Because artificial intelligence is a domain that once you type a word, it’s obsolete five minutes later. And so you have to approach it from a different direction. Instead of the tactical, you have to approach it from the more philosophical, the more meditative, the more contextual. Which is my yoke, because that’s basically the class that I teach at the School of Visual Arts. I teach a class that applies Western philosophy and critical theory, and applies it to brand strategy. All right. I want to pause you there. We’re going to get into the book and then your Substack, because I really love the way you’re writing about, thinking about AI. But I want to connect you with brand. You came in, all this talk about music, and I know that’s where you started. When did you first encounter brand? And when did it become this, that you could make a living with this thing called brand? Making a living, it’s like that feels a little too tactical and a little too mercenary, I guess. So, I love music, as you can probably guess. And the thing that I want, oh, I forgot to tell you. Yeah. So, I’m watching Santana and I realized what I want to be is a music album cover designer, because I was kind of artistic. I was always drawing and doing posters for friends. They pay me $5. I draw a picture of like Gene Simmons from Kiss off the Kiss Destroyer. I draw that picture and give it to them for five bucks. So, I wanted to be a record cover designer. And that’s what I went to school for, not record cover design, but graphic design. And bang my head against the wall for a few years and then started doing record covers. Well, there’s a well-known record cover designer named Mike Mills, who’s also a film director. And he once said this great line. He said, the quickest way to the poorhouse is to design record covers. So, I kept at it. But the MP3 basically destroyed the industry. And then the industry ate itself with all the mergers that have happened and this corporatization of music. So, I had to find something else. And through a dear friend of mine, a designer named Alan Horry, who was working at a division of Ogilvy called BIG, the Brand Innovation Group, asked me to come in and help out on a project. And I ended up staying like a couple of years or something like that, working on big pitches, like pitches for Walmart, work for American Express, some online interface design. That’s where I did my first billion-dollar logo, the logo for DoubleClick, before they got acquired by Google. So, projects like that. And did that for a while. Ended up getting a gig at Landor, which is the world’s largest corporate identity and branding firm. And got a gig with them in the San Francisco office. I was basically the global creative lead on the Citi accounts. So, they were in San Francisco, but the main office was Citi in New York. And so, they had some Californians serving that client, but there was a sensibility difference. So, they hired a New Yorker to move to San Francisco to deal with the New York client, which was great. Landor was my graduate school on brands and how people think about brand. Landor is a huge company. They’re the ones who did the Levi’s logo. They did the San Francisco Muni logo. They did the FedEx logo. So, this is a huge firm with, at the time, 22 offices around the globe, several thousand employees. It was really a great opportunity. And because Citi was a global client and I had to travel the world, I have friends all over the world. And so, I’m about to have a conversation with a friend of mine in Singapore, right? So, there’s a beauty to that. I have these connections. But I was working on Citi at the height of the global financial crisis. So, there was inevitably layoffs that happened. So, at the height of the financial crisis, they ended up moving the center of gravity of the account back to New York. I moved with them to New York. The New York office basically gave up the account. Because they wanted to bill it differently. There’s a whole way in which you bill large clients like that. And they went on a per project basis. They weren’t making the money that they needed to. And so, they basically let go of the whole team. So, there I was, again, what am I doing? And that’s why I said, let’s do this thing Malcontent. And so, I started it out very slowly. Was working on it for a while. And I would be invited to do pitches and write scopes of work. And so, I found myself writing scopes of work, which I was writing it for the same amount of money and then find out that I would lose it to a company like Lippincott. Which is another large corporate identity and branding firm. And so, that became a little frustrating. Because the truth of the matter is, in branding, the teams that work on the very large projects, the teams are never more than like five people. Because the greatest expenditure in branding is labor, or the employees. So, you need to keep your labor down. So, your teams are very lean. And that’s just the nature of the thing. And so, me working by myself, I pull together teams of four to five people. And I would have teams of four to five people in this large corporate. But people feel more comfortable going to a firm with a long list and a conference room. So, that was a little frustrating. And then, the person who ran the brand innovation group at Ogilvy ended up having his own place, a place called Collins. And so, he invited me to come in for a project on the Equinox Hotel, taking Equinox the gym and expanding them into a hotel. And the reason they did that is that they were owned by a development firm that basically built Hudson Yards. So, they were going to build this hotel in Hudson Yards. And so, I ended up doing the upfront work. It did well. We won the accounts. And I stayed there for a couple of years and got to work on some really great things, including repositioning Ogilvy for what they called their global refounding. So, that was some exhilarating, very heady activity. So, I came into branding because there was a vacuum in the world with the music industry. And branding is, the interesting thing about my approach to design is that I don’t design because I have an aesthetic agenda that I need to follow. I began in design because I love music and I love musicians deeply and profoundly. And I wanted to do anything I could to hang around with musicians. I wanted to meet great musicians. And I have, right? So, you get to shake the hand of Wayne Shorter, that kind of stuff, right? So, I’ve had these moments, I’ve had conversations with Santana’s drummer, Michael Shrieve, talking about weird drum instruments out of Southeast Asia. I’ll have like a 10-minute conversation with them on that. So, that vacuum, but also that ability to speak with people and try and meet people in a middle place, I was able to pivot that into branding. Because my work specifically with Citi, I’m not an expert in financial services. I’m a bit more of one now, but to be able to sit in a room and begin to unravel what people are talking about was really the education. So, it wasn’t about the procedural process of building brands or analyzing brands or doing brand audits or anything like that. It was the capacity for listening and spending time with people and then trying to understand what their goals were within a certain time. Yeah. What, I mean, you’ve just sort of given a clue, but I always love to ask this question of what do you love about the work when you think about all of it and the projects that you have now? Where’s the joy in this work for you? Well, I realized that, a bit of a callback, because I realized that my ability and my opportunity to speak with musicians, I was there because I had a chip that I could bring to the table. The ante that I had was my capacity as a designer. So, the ante that I have in branding is my work as a designer and then on top of it, I’ve been writing for like 40 years on and off, often badly. When I was in college, because I love music, I started writing music reviews. And then when I was working, I had my own design studio doing music packaging, I would write articles and posts for one of the first design blogs, a blog called Speak Up. So, I always had a certain critical approach to it. And luckily, when I was in college, another great thing about being in school in the 80s is that I got to study under Dr. Mihai Nadin, who was a semiologist out of Brown University. And so, I had my first deep dive into semiotics and linguistics. And then from there, I met Michael Steranko, who was the editor-in-chief of Afterimage magazine, which was a very heady intellectual photography magazine out of the visual studies workshop. And I wrote some really, really bad reviews for him. But then I got to study under Michael. He taught a summer course out of the State University of New York at Brockport on postmodern theory. So, I got to read with him. So, I had this dog’s breakfast of a background that I could bring to the writing that I did at Speak Up. And that dog’s breakfast of an approach is something that I could bring into brands, because most people think of brands in that very operational instrumental way. Okay, you’re going to do the logo here, and you’re going to have the tagline here, and that kind of thing. And I was much more interested in the context. So, my capacity for being in a room and knowing that the ante that I have is my design work, but on top of it, the ante that I had was also a certain nascent critical capacity to consider the context in a larger context, like thinking of the design work. But then I also have to think of it within an economic context when I was working at Citi. And then I also had to think of it in a governmental context and a societal context. And then when I’m doing work in other countries, I have to think about those regional contexts and understand the differences in behavior from Japan, the way they do banking in Japan versus the way they do banking in China and Hong Kong versus the way they do banking in San Francisco. So, it’s like all of that. Literally, it’s a dog’s breakfast coming together into a certain capacity. You can’t program this. This is like you stumble upon it, right? So, my love of brand is really the openness and the available opportunities it gives me to meet people. How do you, maybe, I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this question. How do you explain brand to somebody that’s not in it? So, most people think brands are logos and taglines and stuff like that. And that’s a very trivial description. So, in the class that I teach, I say brands are an association. So, I approach it from the phenomenological sense. A brand is the association that one holds in their mind. So, the association that I have in my mind about Nike is different than the one that you have. I don’t play pickup basketball, right? So, my relationship to Nike is, occasionally, there’s a sneaker that I like to hang out and go to the bar. While you may play pickup basketball, and for you, Nike is the shoe I got to have. I got to have this kind of shoe from this kind of line because it makes my feet feel comfortable. So, it’s the same brand, but different associations. And so, branding is navigating that world of different associations and being open to it and having the capacity to listen to what your audience is telling you, what society is telling you, what the brand user or even adjacent stakeholders may have about it. You used one of my favorite words, listen. And I’m curious, how do you learn and listen upfront? Like, everybody’s got their own way of getting their feet underneath them on a project. But how do you listen or learn? And selfishly, I’m always curious about qualitative research or ethnography and the role that those things play and how you work if they play a role. Yeah. I tend to be, my personality is more qualitative than quantitative, I’m sorry. Because when you look at data, data only tells you what happened yesterday. But qualitative is an opportunity to dive into ideas as they’re forming or this affect that things have. And that’s actually a thing that I’m very interested in recently, especially with AI. And people speak about consciousness. And they think about consciousness in this mechanical computational manner. But for me, consciousness is also this bringing together of all these vectors together. And consciousness is also very much influenced by the affect, the physical affect of being in a room next to someone, the smells, the pheromones, what they call volatile organic compounds that we emit in rooms as we have emotions. Our emotional responses, this is why dogs can sense how we’re feeling much more sensitively than maybe a human being can. It’s because they have that olfactory capacity to sense changes in your volatile organic compounds that you’re emitting. So I’m very much interested in that. So when you talk about listening, it’s spending time. It is tending, right, to use a Heideggerian term. Like, how do I tend to attend to this moment and slow down and try and find a way to remove my taste, because my taste is a filter that I have, that I interpret the world. And so how do I combat my taste or how do I understand that my taste is coloring my impression of things? And so it’s a meditation, I guess, to overuse a word badly, but it’s kind of like that. So the process is just being open and the process is slowing down. The process is also not doing the research the way that people tell you to do the research, right? Just as a principle. Can you tell me a story about that? That’s fantastic. For example, I’m working on a project for a copper mining project. It’s a weird project. I can’t talk too much about it because I’m about to go into it. But because I’m talking about copper and I’m talking about mining and I’m talking about the environment and I’m talking about governments and various community stakeholders, my mind is open to things that I may hear. And I have to allow those things to come in and bump around. So the other night I’m watching cable TV. I like to have cable TV on when I work, right? I heard that at Warhol, that’s how we worked. I want to work like Warhol. And because I’m a man of a certain age and also a grownup, a teenage boy with arrested development, I love watching the Heroes and Icons channel, which is Star Trek, Highlander, Renegade, Walker, Texas Ranger. I love all that overly macho b******t. I love it because that’s what I grew up on. So I’m watching this and this is like a fringe cable network. I wouldn’t even call it a network, right? It’s just like they license a bunch of shows and they put them on to have commercials for diuretics and old people medicine and that kind of stuff. But I’m listening, I just have it on, and I hear this guy talking about antimony. He’s like, all the bullets that are fired need antimony. I’m like, what? And then he talks about it as a natural, vital resource. And I was like, oh, this is interesting because there’s an adjacency here with copper. So then I reached out to the client. I’m like, we have a conversation about that. And so that’s what I mean about not doing the research, because if I was really doing the research the way I should be, I’d sit here with Wikipedia and I’d open up the Internet and I’d use Claude or ChatGPT to do some research, like tell me what you can about copper. Tell me what you can about copper, the copper industry, the copper market, what is copper cathode and all that kind of stuff. That’s the proper way that you do research, right? And that’s the way that we’re taught. And that’s the way that our junior strategists and all of our branding firms will do this, right? That is what we call donkey work, right? But the donkey work only gets you so far. You need to be open to hearing other things, adjacencies, for example, for me, the antimony with copper. And that’s just a recent thing that happened in the last week. Yeah, it’s amazing. I’m curious. We’ve got, I want to manage time on the back end of this conversation. I want to get to the piece that you wrote, but maybe tell us a little bit about how you got into teaching and then philosophy, right? You teach brand through the lens of philosophy. And now it seems to be the right time to be talking about the value of philosophy, especially in light of brand. So how did you get into that position and what does that mean to do that? I’ve always been interested, and I guess that’s part of that Jesuitical streak that I take from my father. So my early foundation in semiotics led to this early foundation in postmodern theory. And it was the 1980s. And there was a publisher named Semiotext that was pretty popular, had very thin, little, beautiful books. They would publish translations of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, all the great contemporary French Marxist philosophers. And then Baudrillard would come to New York and speak. And I’d sit in the audience and listen to Baudrillard speak with a translator. So it was a very heady and beautiful moment. And this was also pre-iPhone. So you’d see people on the subway reading Baudrillard. And it was this little signal to other people, like, I’m a smart person, like I’m sexy, I’m smart, and I have a brain. So I was reading a lot of this stuff, but it wasn’t guided. I didn’t have the proper guidance that I needed. So at one point, about seven, eight years ago, I started teaching at SVA and basically doing it out of my semiotics background and building from there, doing reading and building a syllabus out of that. And it was OK. And then about seven or eight years ago, I started getting really serious and started doing seminars with philosophy PhDs. And so I’d sit in these seminars, I’d read, OK, we’re going to read Heidegger’s Being and Time as much as we can. Right. Or we’re going to read all of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We’re going to read, I’ve read Zizek. I’ve read all the Hannah Arendt. A lot of Nietzsche, tons of Nietzsche. All the foundational stuff that you need. And what’s beautiful is having someone whose life has been committed to that intellectual pursuit guide you through and make the connections for you. So you’re speaking like, I now understand the role of Nietzsche in Foucault’s thinking. And I understand the role of Brentano in Heidegger’s thinking, that kind of stuff. So I’m able to make these connections. And from these connections, you understand how it’s all a large conversation building upon, what about this? What about that? It’s like a big improv game. So as I got serious, my syllabus at SVA got tighter and tighter. And I’m very, very proud of the syllabus. And I’m always developing the syllabus, too. And so I have certain bugbears that I want to pursue, that I want to kill. And one of them is in brands, a lot of people use history. And they feel very strongly about history. And then when they do brand research, they’ll look at the history of the brands. But the reality is, what you need to do is look at the genealogy of the brand, which is a bit more rigorous because the genealogy of a brand is to be open to adjacencies and other things that may emerge out of it, as opposed to the official told story. You need to do your research and build a different story. Because if I can build a different genealogy, then I have a different approach to the brand, then I can offer a different solution to my client. And so that’s how I take it and apply it. That’s one thing. Another idea is when people say, well, this is what Nike stands for. Nike stands for athleticism. I’m like, not necessarily, right? And from there, I take a clue from queer studies, who say that the body that you’re born into is not necessarily the gender that you behave as, because that gender is regulated by society. Well, if I just swap out the word gender with the word brand, I have a different understanding of brand. Yeah. We’ve got 15 minutes left, and I want to get into your observations on AI. You have this piece on Substack, which maybe I’ll just let you introduce. I read it, and I think the last time we talked, you said the same thing too. And you make this declaration that, and I love where you go with it, and I’m dying to hear you talk about it, but this idea that AI is a condition. And just as an intro, what do you mean when you say AI is a condition? And how is that different? It’s just such a different angle on the conversation that everybody’s having now about what AI is and all that stuff? Well, this is also a result of that being open to other things, open to adjacencies. So the greatest live action role-playing game for men in their 50s is LinkedIn, right? I’m going to come back to that personally, Mark. Hey, I’m all over it too. I’m all over it, like white on rice. So LinkedIn is the place where experts, and I’m using that in scary quotes, go on and on about how AI slop is bad, AI is stealing from artists and all that. And the reality of the thing is, when I was in design school and in art school, I learned how to be a designer by copying other designers. So I do exactly what AI does, not as efficiently, but I do it, that’s exactly that. So to stand on that moral ground is duplicitous. I have a problem with that, people tell me what is morally correct about that position. And so from there, I’m like, okay, what is going on here? And so part of my class that I teach, I do Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction, where we talk about a thing called the optical unconscious. And the optical unconscious is the result that I have a different relationship to the world because of photography and film. Because I can slow film down, I could speed it up, I know how the body moves in a different way than just the way that I move my body. And so that affects the way in which I see the world. It makes me, as Benjamin says, it makes me more of a critic when I look at film, because I am judging like action scenes. I am judging the action of the action scene, as opposed to like, wow, that’s kind of cool, what’s going on? My relationship to photography is removed, and I am analyzing things in a different way where I become a critic. Now what’s happened over time is social media has embraced the visual, Instagram. And we now perform our lives. It’s like we are auditioning for perfection. We have commoditized our lives in such a way where it’s only if I have a beautiful vacation that makes everyone jealous. If I have a beautiful piece of latte art, I have the perfect latte every morning, or I have a great meal. And I can show you, I was at this obscure little tasting menu in this obscure little pizzeria in Brooklyn. I can prove my extreme value. I’m basically auditioning for perfection. And I’ve commoditized my life where I can enjoy my life. I only enjoy it if it satisfies that neurosis that social media has instilled in me. And so you realize then that the optical unconscious, there’s also a relationship to the branded unconscious. We see the world through brands. We understand the world through brands, right? And so this is an expanse of concepts. So if I look at AI, this is basically a hop, skip and a jump from computation. Computers change the way in which we go through the world. We think about the world in a different way. We live in a computational world and computers are this condition that is imposed upon us that we have to work within. And so I realized then that AI is equally a condition, much like modernism is a condition, right? Because we live in a modern society, a modernity, not modernist, but a modernity, which modernity is our relationship to authority, our relationship to institutions, our relationship to even ourselves. We see ourselves as individuals who can be enlightened, right? Or urbanization. Urbanization is a way in which we understand the built world around us. Instead of me living in Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack out with no running water, I live in a structure, in a system where water is delivered to me, electricity is delivered to me. I have a parking garage, all that stuff, right? That’s urbanism. And then you expand, you keep going on. Like literacy is a condition that we live in, right? Because I can only be an effective member of society if I am literate. And so that is a condition that I exist within, and that allows me to interrelate with other people. So from there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to AI, because AI is now this condition. Whether you say, I am pro-AI, I love using AI tools, and I love it like Donald Trump and the pictures that he comes out with. Or I hate AI slop because heaven forbid, here’s another image of somebody with six fingers out of hands. And I find that to be too binary, and I find that to be too simplistic. But if I understand AI as a condition, then I operate within that condition differently. I see AI potentially as the framing for why things are the way they are. And I also see it as a framing for how things can be, which means that I have a structural approach to AI, as opposed to an instrumental approach. So instead of me looking at AI as like, how am I going to make my life more efficient? I’m a junior strategist. I need to do customer research. I’ll just type it into AI, and it’ll give it to me. That’ll do a relatively good job. I have to check it, but it’ll do a quick, relatively good job. And my billings are falling through the floor, unfortunately, because clients are waking up to that reality. So I can look at AI that way, but I’m more interested in what the infrastructure of AI can allow us. So the infrastructure of urbanism allows us a different political mode, right? It allows us the opportunity to interact with people who aren’t necessarily like us. And so we have things like all the marches that happened after George Floyd in 2020, right? That is a result of modernity, and those marches were also a result of urbanization. And so the opportunity for AI to create a system where I can look at people, and the way that I’m articulating it is it’s either assumed belonging or earned belonging. So right now, everything that we do is earned belonging. I have to have a credit score. I have to do the little tab with my watch or the tab with my card. I have to show a credential when I go into an airport. That’s earned belonging to a space, earned belonging to an interaction. But assumed belonging is an infrastructure thing, right? Because our faces are in every computer system around the world. A couple of years ago, we’re going through Heathrow Airport from Shannon, and it does a little face zoom. It goes, oh, hi, Mark. My real first name, David. It goes, hello, welcome, that kind of thing. I was like, I hadn’t been to the UK since the development of facial recognition technology, but you already have it. You already know who I am, and you’ve let me in. This is kind of amazing. So the data is out there. How do we use this data in such a way to remove friction? And in removing that friction, potentially, this is the opportunity to also remove other aspects of earned belonging, which are about our bodies. Our race, our gender. Yeah. I see this as an opportunity. Now, granted, there have been nascent attempts to control this information, right? Through HIPAA, the GDPR in Europe, that kind of stuff. And they’re beginning steps, and there needs to be greater governance. There also needs to be greater intention for why we’re designing these systems. But I see it as an opportunity. And the reason why I find this an interesting opportunity is there’s a historian named Lynn Hunt who wrote a couple books on the French Revolution. And she proposed that the French Revolution happened because of an emerging subjectivity, a collective subjectivity that happened in France through the proliferation of prints and books, and printing allowed this to happen, and also certain plays that were performed. And tea parties where men and women gathered instead of just beer halls or coffee shops, which were predominantly male, opportunity for both genders, both sexes to get together and speak. And this created a potential subjectivity, which then allowed for the French Revolution. And this is an idea that I originally got from an Italian Marxist named Maurizio Lazzarato. And he begins a book on the creation of the subject within capitalism. He proposes that Germany and Japan after the first, second world war, within 20 years were economic powerhouses. What is it that created that? So yes, we did have American aid, but also collectively the Germans and the Japanese developed a whole new subjectivity that allowed them to exercise economic dominance in the world, where Germany very quickly became one of the economic powerhouses on the planet. Size-wise, they punched above their weight. So I’m intrigued because I see, if we can build a system where there’s an assumed belonging, that then opens the door for a different kind of subjectivity, a collective subjectivity. Now, I see this. Can you describe what it means, the distinction between the assumed belonging and the earned belonging? Because this stuff intuitively, it feels really right, and I’m really attracted to it, but there’s pieces of it mechanically that I’m not totally tracking. So when you say assumed belonging as the result of AI as a condition, what are you pointing at? What’s an example of what that means? Maybe it’s an example of what I’m pointing away from. So social media has deeply fractured our collective subjectivity into individuality. The only powerful, the strongest subjectivity that exists in the United States right now, I think, is MAGA. Because that subjectivity of, world’s not working for me, things aren’t right, everything’s broken. Make America Great Again is an inchoate way of describing it, but it does capture that feeling, right? It captures that subjective feeling. Otherwise, I drill down deep into whether or not I am queer, whether or not I am black, whether or not I am a Boy Scout, this amplification of our own individuality, we need to do that, right? We need to find ourselves. But there’s also a collective quality to it, which is a result of urbanization. There’s a collective quality that we are as a political group, right? And we occasionally just wink, tip our head over the edge of the wall here, like with the 99% idea during the financial crisis. So there’s a potential here. And the fact that people are beginning to wake up to the inherent danger of data centers, which are placed willy-nilly without attention to environment and location and all that, this for me are all nascent rumblings of a potential new subjectivity, which can be enhanced. Now, as designers, we have the opportunity to design and create a system that allows for people to see themselves as part of a different subjectivity. Instead of drilling down into each individuality, which is what happens with brands, what happens with a lot of design work, right? What it does is it just reifies or it confirms or underlines your own sense of individuality. What would happen if we didn’t design to make people feel more like themselves, but design in such a way where people felt that there was a larger connectivity, right? It just comes down to intention. Yeah. We’ve got just a couple of minutes left. And so I want to try to close this up in a way that’s coherent. And one of the things that I love about this piece, this way of thinking about AI, is that it tries to get away from the binary, right? That we’re really trapped in this. And it’s so hard to get away from the tool. Basically, you know that AI is the worst thing that’s ever happened or the best thing, the boomers versus the doomers. So how would you talk about AI as a condition, or what do we lose when we think about AI as one of these two poles? As we talked about it, as if it’s either good or bad, what are we missing? Well, we are rewarded. This is basically the effect of Rene Descartes and this whole mind body separation and this dualism, subject object. And so when I look at AI as an object, as a tool, I am operating in that binary. But the thing is, we don’t operate in the binary all day. When I walk across a floor, I don’t think with every step is the floor solid. I just walk across the floor, right? And this is an idea that Heidegger calls transparency or the ready at hand. So he describes a carpenter with a hammer. And when I’m using it, if I’m a really good carpenter and I’m using a hammer, I’m thinking about what I’m having for lunch. I’m not thinking about the fact that I’m holding a hammer made by Stanley, right? I am not holding that hammer in that kind of binary subject object relationship. I’m just using it and I am being part of, I am existing within that thing. And so for people to think of AI in that subject object dualism, they’re not realizing that they exist within the condition of AI, right? Because it’s freaking everywhere, right? There’s the little cameras that when I go park my car at the long-term parking lot of JFK, I make a reservation. I show up, there’s no one at the gate, but there’s a little camera that reads my license plate and says, oh, hi Mark, come on in, right? So it’s that potential for recognition within a system where I don’t have to worry about, there’s no one here, how am I going to get a ticket to put on the dashboard of my car so they won’t tow my car in a week, because I’m going on vacation. So it removes all of these things. And we already live in this world. We live in this world where, when I drive on the thruway, if I don’t have an EZ Pass, it’s reading my license plate and sending me a bill. So we already behave in this way. So why are we removing ourselves in that subject object manner? And instead, let’s think about the condition. So when I’m on the thruway, I’m not worried about how I’m paying the tolls. I’m on the thruway. I’m worried about whether the idiot next to me is on the phone, or the person in the left lane, who’s in the left lane without left lane ambition, right? That kind of stuff. I’m worrying about the stuff that I should be worried about, as opposed to the stuff that AI takes care of. Beautiful. Well, Mark, I want to thank you so much. It’s been great talking with you. I appreciate you accepting the invitation. And yeah, thank you so much. My pleasure. 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]

Gideon Lichfield on Fairness & Storytelling

Gideon Lichfield [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gideonlichfield/] is a journalist and Policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, affiliated with the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. He writes Futurepolis [https://futurepolis.substack.com/], a Substack on reinventing democracy, governance, and government for the 21st century. He was previously Global Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of WIRED; Editor-in-Chief of MIT Technology Review; a founding editor at Quartz, and a foreign correspondent and science writer at The Economist. He lives in Berkeley, California. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their stories. And it’s this big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But it’s so big, I tend to over explain it the way I’m doing right now before I ask it. So 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. That’s a very tricky question to answer. I think physically, I come from the UK. Ancestrally, I come from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Philosophically, I come from just a belief in fairness and desire to see fairness in the world. Which I think is why I’m interested in democracy, because someone asked me the other day, if you had to describe the point of democracy in one word, what would it be? And I said, fairness. It’s the system where the bullies don’t get to win. That’s beautiful. And do you have a recollection as a kid? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you remember? I mean, the usual things, astronaut, writer. I can’t remember the others, but nothing very unusual. Yeah. And where was most of your childhood? Where did you spend your childhood? I grew up in London, and I was born and raised almost all my childhood in exactly the same district in Northwest London. Nice. And catch us up. Where are you now? And what is the work that you do? So right now, I live in the Bay Area in Berkeley. I’ve bounced around the world a lot. I was a journalist in Mexico City, Moscow, Jerusalem, came to the US, lived in New York for several years, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a while for another job, became bi-coastal New York Bay Area, and now I’m full-time Bay Area. And the thing I work on now is what could the future of democracy look like? How would it look if we were trying to invent that system today instead of three centuries ago? And what could come after the current period of, I could say authoritarianism, but I think even more broadly just institutional fracturing, the clear inadequacy of the governing institutions that we have. I appreciate that distinction. I think a lot of conversations get captivated by the authoritarian bit, and we don’t end up actually looking at the degree to which the institutions that we currently have aren’t functioning or aren’t functional or aren’t fit for purpose. Can you say more about that, just the diagnosis of the current state? I mean, I think as you said, we don’t talk enough about that. We focus on the authoritarian lens, and that’s one of the things that frustrates me a little right now about the conversation about democracy in the U.S., because it is very focused on the Democratic Party winning back power. And there is this unspoken assumption that if the Democrats retake Congress or the White House, then, in quotes, democracy will be restored, and things will go back to some degree to where they were. And I think that that misses both the amount of dismantling of institutions that has gone on under the Trump administration, but also just the uselessness, the increasing uselessness of those institutions over the past, I would say, at least couple of decades, probably longer. And so what I mean by that is we have these systems of governance and representation that were created in the 18th century before we even had railways and the telegraph. Information moved much more slowly, goods moved more slowly, the world was less globalized, change just happened at a much slower pace. Just if we take the electoral system, it was designed to enable people to delegate decision-making to a small group of people, because any kind of broader national level decision-making in which citizens had participation simply wasn’t practical, obviously. And we also have to remember that even though we call this country a democracy and we call other countries democracies, the systems, the electoral systems that were created there were not intended to be democratic. They were intended to allow a fairly small number of privileged male people, people who were men, educated, relatively prosperous, to make the decisions because they were considered the people who were competent to make the decisions. So everything that we have now that we call democracy is this kludge. It’s been, bits and pieces that have been added onto that system that was designed for this very different era. And so some of the ways in which it falls short are that it gives people notionally a voice in the form of votes, but it doesn’t involve them in decision-making in a meaningful way, and it doesn’t create a feeling of citizenship in a meaningful way, at least certainly not at the national level. Systems of government, systems of lawmaking respond very, very slowly to technological change. Lawmaking especially, we take ages to draft laws, we take ages to pass them, and then we don’t revise them for the most part as time goes by, and they don’t update to the reality of the world. We also, our systems of information, of the information environment, were created in an era when information was fairly sparse and expensive to produce, and so free speech laws were in part designed to make sure that interesting ideas and useful thoughts could be expressed and could not be suppressed. And today we have the opposite problem where misinformation lies and general slop crowds out the stuff that is useful and worthwhile. And so while we don’t want to abolish the idea of free speech, we have to think differently about what the goal of that principle is and how we create an informed citizenry and how we inform good decision-making. So there are all these assumptions and structures that date from that time, from centuries ago, that don’t function very well in this new world. And so this is even leaving aside the problem of political polarization that we have today, which has created all this deadlock. Even if you did not have that, the structures that we have are still pretty inadequate to the task of governing the 21st century and do not take advantage of the tools and methods that we could have today for making citizens more engaged and making government more responsive. That’s amazing. What you just said, I don’t think it really occurred to me that, again, you’re peeling apart these pieces that, again, we can get really distracted by polarization. And again, forget to look at just structurally how the system is either counterproductive or doesn’t help us do the work. Can you speak? And maybe this is relevant, but the degree to which this plays out at a local level versus a national level, is there a difference in the way that the institutions are working or not working in that way? Yes. I mean, I think so at one level, the polarization, I think is probably worse at the national level. In other words, in local communities, there is at least the opportunity to bring people together around the problems that their community shares. And I think for me, I said that democracy for me means fairness, but I think it also as a process, maybe fairness is the outcome that we want. But as a process to me, democracy just means shared problem solving. You have a bunch of people, there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t agree with, but they face a problem that they need to solve because they live together in the same community. And so there is a process for bringing them together and creating a system or a process for reaching an agreement on the solution, even if not everybody likes it, or even if nobody likes it completely, and trusting that process and being willing to accept the results of it. That’s what democracy is. So at a local level, there is at least the potential to do that more. And the obstacles there, I think, are number one, well, in the US specifically, we have the decline of local news, which makes it difficult for everybody to be on the same page about what’s happening. And we also have the fact that local authorities are under-resourced, particularly when it comes to using technology. And so it makes it very difficult for them to be responsive and keep up to date with the changes that are happening. At the national level, you have government theoretically more capable, but in fact, very sclerotic, so much institutional cruft that has developed and very polarized because at a national level, we’re not a community in the same way as we are in a town. And so it is easy for the polarizing voices to have more sway in the media and for that to drive the sense of national divide. So what does it mean to work in this space? What are the things that you’re doing? What are you following? Just paint a picture of where you spend your time and what you’re learning and discovering. So I’m still figuring out what it is to work in this space for me. I keep my thumb or try to keep my thumb on the pulse of many different things that I think count as part of this problem of how you govern democratically. And I already sketched out some of the broad pillars. There are methods of civic participation that aren’t just voting and also aren’t just turning up to town hall meetings, which are a very time consuming thing that only a few people can really allow themselves to do. So there are technological innovations and social innovations around deliberative democracy and participatory democracy of various kinds. So I keep an eye on those. I keep an eye on work in improving state capacity and reforming the way government works and making its processes less clunky. And that can include everything from just bureaucratic management and process reform to procurement. These are very, very dull things, but they actually clog up the works of government enormously. I obviously, as a journalist, pay a lot of attention to what I mentioned about the information environment and how do you create informational spaces that are less toxic, less polarizing. Some of that is about what is the business model for news media in this world of AI. Some of that is can you build social platforms that create more coming together of community and less polarization. So those are some of the pillars and there’s interesting work going on in all of those areas. I think the challenge is that you can come up with a scenario, and I’ve come up with scenarios where you bring all of these innovations together and you have a form of democracy that works much better, where people are more informed, they have more civic engagement, government is more responsive, it all works better. But getting from here to there, of course, is the really difficult part. And the chief obstacles that I think I see to that are, number one, as we said earlier, everyone is talking about democracy or restoring democracy as getting the Democratic Party back in power, not deeper institutional reform. Number two, a lot of these changes simply mean going against incentives that a lot of people have to keep the current system the same. Politicians, no matter of what party, have an incentive to keep things as they are because they have learned the game of political fundraising and voter mobilization and manipulating the message and so forth. And if you create structures that give citizens more of a say in day-to-day governance, that threatens their control. And so you’ve seen a lot of experiments in the U.S. and elsewhere with things like citizen assemblies, where you give a particularly thorny problem to a group of randomly selected citizens and they hash it out and come to a consensus. And in some places that works, but it doesn’t work unless you get the politicians to buy into the process and say, yes, we will take the recommendation seriously. And often that is the hardest work and often that is the work that is not done. Or one administration, one mayor may be open to that kind of civic participation, the next one who comes along is not interested. And so those things don’t get institutionalized. Similarly with government reform, process reform, there are a lot of government bureaucrats who have an interest in keeping the system the way it is because of the control they have. There are a lot of private contractors who benefit from the way the procurement happens and don’t really want to upset the apple cart. So it’s this challenging thing where I know a lot of people who work in democratic innovation in one or another of these areas and they have fantastic ideas, but connecting those ideas to how to bring those ideas about is difficult. And I think connecting the conversation that the democratic innovators have to the conversation that the people involved in mainstream politics and movement building and campaigning have, that’s a very difficult gap to bridge as well. Can you say more about that gap? So I’ve been to gatherings where you have people who are veteran campaign organizers and they are thinking, how do we win the next election? They’re thinking, how do we improve voter registration? They may be thinking about slightly more out there things like how do you change, how do you combat gerrymandering? How do you change a state to having open primaries? Or how do you change the electoral college? Those kinds of systems, those kinds of changes, those are basically changes to the electoral system, to the voting, the way that we do voting. That feels like stuff that they are working on, that is relevant to them, that has measurable outcomes, which are who gets into office. That’s where the funding is. And for those people, for those people, a citizens assembly or a government process reform is not really relevant to the goals that they have. So how do you bring about, how do you tie a conversation about deep institutional change or deep democratic process change to the very real imperatives that the people who actually occupy most of politics and most of organizing and most of what we would call the democracy industry, if you like, how do you tie that to what their needs are? So I was in Athens last week and for a House of Beautiful Business for this event and I had a walking tour. Have you been there at all? Have you visited any of these sites? I imagine you have. I have. Yes. I’ve walked around the Agora and all of those things. So I’m going to test this on you. Please correct me if I’m wrong. But I had a walking tour of the Pnyx, which is not a site that I had ever really heard of. But my understanding is that it was the site where they built a stage for citizens to stand upon and address an assembly and they met regularly. And it was where it was sort of the birth of deliberation. Right. And that was the deliberation before the vote that was the real innovation of Athenian democracy. Is that fair? Yes. I think that’s right. I visited that site, too, and there’s not much you can see right now, but there is this stone platform, right? Where the speaker could stand and then there’s this area all around it where potentially thousands of people could sit and listen. That’s right. So, yes, I think obviously that is seen as a precursor. It’s seen as a democracy and it’s still a modern democracy and that it’s seen as an inspiration to the deliberative process that the people talk about today. And it worked very well for its time and place and for the size of the population and the kind of place that it was. So I think the question is always, all right, what is it that you can take from that and apply today? Yeah. It seemed to me, what brought it to mind was this sense that we’re sort of obsessed with voting and we’ve sort of abandoned or forgotten how central deliberation was to begin with. And also, and I’m wondering, my experience here in Hudson, I think this is how you and I first sort of engaged is that I became interested in Citizens Assembly because I encountered it at Bard and I had experienced what I felt in Hudson, this feeling that the way that we gather in the public meetings, in the spaces where we come together, they simply have been overwhelmed by social media and the impact of technology on everything that we do. And I wonder, I guess I’m just sort of presenting that to you, the degree to which, and this is where we started, that these institutions, these habits, these rituals of democratic and civic engagement, we keep doing the same thing, even though the world has transformed radically in terms of how we share information, how we interact with each other, and we pretend that everything is fine and that we’re doing everything right. And this gets to, I know I’m rambling a little bit, but I’ve had conversations recently with people who say, listen, this is how it’s supposed to work. Everything’s fine. But I guess my question to you is, does that resonate with you, this diagnosis that so much of the technological change that’s happened in the last 15, 20 years with social media has really, really changed the role of just the public meeting, the town hall, and the degree to which that’s a piece of the argument for these deliberative processes? I don’t know if it has changed the role of the traditional town hall, because I think for the most part, those town halls still operate the way they did. A thing that comes to mind with this, when you raise that question, is there’s a film that is making the rounds now, and it’s going to be, I think, on public release in December, made by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, who is one of the doyennes of deliberative processes here in the US. And it’s about how after 9-11, after the Twin Towers fell, the city of New York decided to try to involve people in the process of deciding what to build in their place. They held a number of town hall meetings, traditional-style town hall meetings. There was a theater, there were some guys on the stage, and then hundreds of people in the audience. And they were a mess. And they were a mess because it just became an opportunity for grandstanding, and people threw ideas back and forth, but there was no process for getting to a consensus. And so Carolyn was brought in to run a deliberative process where they invited 5,000 people. They filled the Javits Center in New York, that giant convention center with tables, and they had a bunch of technology, which was very advanced to its day. And they had this process by which people were brought to a consensus on what they wanted for the site. And famously, this process led to, the city came in with six proposals from different developers on what to do with the World Trade Center site. And this assembly overwhelmingly rejected them all and forced the city to go back to the drawing board. So that’s a long preamble by way of saying, I don’t think the town hall meetings in their traditional form have changed much. There is some work going on in places I think like Massachusetts to try to broaden access to the town hall, give people ways to take part in it remotely and so forth. But again, it’s clunky. It doesn’t necessarily work very well. But at least those town hall, the benefit those town hall meetings have is that they’re already an accepted part of the political process. Politicians understand them. They understand this is a thing that you do when you want to interact with the public. And this is a way that the public is seen to have a voice. And so a more, better run deliberative process like a assembly is probably much better for achieving an outcome. But as I said, institutionalizing it, fitting it into the way politicians work is the hard part. Yes, absolutely. And I feel I didn’t communicate very well. I think I’m completely aligned with what you said that somehow because the world has changed around the town halls, what’s asked of them or how they’re used has been sort of warped to your point, the story you told where we come in really well-informed or we’ve done all the deliberation on social media with our people and we come in and it’s this performance of something that’s not, it’s not deliberation meaningfully, it doesn’t seem to me. And I wonder, yes, I love the story that you just told. But also, you just said we come in well-informed in the deliberation on social media, or we don’t. In some cases, people come in with extreme views fanned by what they’ve seen on social media and that can make the town halls even more fractious. Yes, yes, yes, you’re exactly right. I think that we just had, excuse me for being a little rambly here a little bit, we had a vote on the budget here in Hudson, and it was a yes-no vote. And it’s just all the heat and all the energy that happens in this zero-sum vote in a small town where the stakes are really high. Things get really emotional and they get really complicated. And it’s quite intense to see decisions like this just divide a town, and get in between relationships between neighbors. And everybody can say that the district created the spaces for the meetings, they had public meetings, they had the town, they had the budget workshops, they did all those things, but people don’t show up because nobody can find time to show up. And so the spaces that we create for this stuff aren’t utilized, it seems to me. Yeah, I’m just sort of, and this is what for me makes the call for new forms of democratic participation so urgent, but I’ve also experienced the obstacle that people have a hard time recognizing the problem, and then they really don’t understand the solution. They’re struggling on both sides of this thing where they think this is fine, this is supposed to happen, this is how it is supposed to be. And then the solution seems so strange, they can’t quite wrap their head around it. Yes, yes. Where have you seen it work, and where are the shining lights, what are the kinds of things that you’re seeing that you’re most excited about that represent possibility in this space? There’s a handful of examples that people point to around the world of where this has really worked, and the one that is always cited is Ireland, which used a Citizens’ Assembly to decide really tricky issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and it has become an institution. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly is now almost a branch of government. Every year it convenes, every year they tackle difficult issues, and a bunch of factors came together to make that work that were very specific, and it succeeded because it was seen as having achieved consensus on these issues which were incredibly politically divisive, that the politicians themselves couldn’t solve, and also because it was run in such a way that people were able to see the process, there was a lot of transparency, there were some good stories that came out of it about people who started on very different sides of the fence coming to see each other’s point of view. So it is a lot about the perception and the initial success, and whenever you see these poster child cases, then the question arises, well, why doesn’t that happen here, or why doesn’t it happen there? And again, it is because it’s so dependent on certain things going well. I made a list recently of deliberative processes in the US, and actually what I found to my surprise was that if you go back about six years, there have been one, maybe two deliberative processes in American cities per year between 2019 and 2024, and for 2026, I count probably half a dozen. Oh my gosh. And this is still small. These are small towns or cities that are debating quite small scale local issues. Fort Collins, Colorado, last year, deliberated on how to redevelop a local stadium. Lexington, Kentucky, this spring, did something on council members’ pay and review of the local charter. Connecticut is doing something on property taxes. Akron, Ohio, is doing something on housing. So it’s hopeful that these are happening, and the question is always going to be what does it make an impact? And the question around impact is, first of all, do people actually feel, the citizens actually feel like they knew about the process, that it reached a result? Did the local politicians pay attention to it? Did they adopt the recommendations? And then if it did work out well, is there some structure in place for it to be repeated? And we don’t have the answers yet in any of those places. So yeah, I think, again, going back to Ireland and other places where it’s worked, I think the key thing has been there is a really thorny problem that everybody agrees is a problem, and everybody agrees the politicians are not solving. There is political buy-in. The politicians agree to take notice of this process. There is public awareness about the process and how it works and what makes it better than other things. And then there is a successful outcome, a consensus that they reach, that the politicians adopt, and that actually demonstrates the proof of concept. You have to have all of those things for it to really take hold. I’m curious where you first encountered these ideas. I have my experience where I really can point at a time and place where I encountered this idea, I saw it as something that was beautiful, and it is new to everybody else. So I’m wondering, what was your moment of discovery where you encountered this? You were doing work in other territories, I think, or maybe as a journalist. When did you see democratic reform or citizens’ assembly or these processes? What was your first experience? And what did that mean? I can’t remember specifically. I remember that about 15 years ago, when I was working for The Economist, and I was in New York City, and I had a beat that allowed me to range quite widely. And so I focused it somewhat on technology and society. And that was where I became aware of some participatory processes happening in other parts of the world. And I went to meeting something called the Open Government Partnership, which was this gathering from different countries of people trying to figure out different ways to make government more transparent and more participatory. And so I gradually started to build the awareness of those processes then, and started to ask the question of that basic animating question. All right, if we were doing democracy, if we were inventing a democracy today, what are the things we would do? And these seemed to be some of the answers. Yeah. What do you love about it? What’s the joy in the work that you’re doing for you? For me, the joy is talking to interesting people who are really, really dedicated to the cause. I constantly meet people who are fighting these really difficult battles where the outcome is not at all guaranteed. And if it does work out well, it’s probably going to take years. And it can be incredibly frustrating. And they’re just such dedicated souls. And that is very inspiring. And then some of the more, I suppose, conceptual stuff, thinking about questioning all our assumptions that we’re raised with about what is a democracy? Why is it good? Who does it benefit? And peeling away all these things that we’re educated on and never really questioned. Which also then, I think, makes you see more clearly why the current system has failed so badly. See the blind spots of the, even the people who defend the system and the democracy campaigners and the politicians, see all of the assumptions that are baked into it. So for, one of those assumptions, for example, you brought up Athens. The founders of the U.S. did not like the word democracy. For them, it was associated with mob rule and tyranny of the majority. They consciously created a republic, not a democracy, that was premised on this idea that you delegated your decisions to a small group of people who were somehow mentally equipped to take them. And so even getting the majority of people to question the meaning of the word democracy in that context and think about what it could be, as opposed to what they think it is. I think that’s a fascinating problem and part of, I suppose, what I have been trying to do, and I’m not sure with much success yet, is storytelling around it. How do you tell a story about what democracy could be that breaks people’s conceptions of it as this broken, useless, unresponsive system that we have today and gives them a sense of it being potentially something else? Yeah, that’s beautiful. I was, well, it’s funny, you’re reminding me, Democracy Next is now, they’ve embraced this elected oligarchy. They’re taking this same approach. They’re saying, we think we have a democracy, but what we actually have is this elected oligarchy. And what we really need is a true democracy, a deliberative democracy. And so I thought that was an interesting example of them also trying to find ways of communicating this issue. Yeah, and what’s interesting, sorry, just sorry to interrupt, but the elected oligarchy frame, what’s interesting to me is it resonates right across the political spectrum. And so Noam Chomsky, the famous political thinker, has been saying some variants of that for decades. In the 1960s, he wrote about how essentially corporate power has captured political institutions. Curtis Yavin, who is this theorist of the neo-reactionary dark enlightenment, very right wing, believes that democracy should be dismantled and the country should be ruled by a monarch, makes essentially a similar diagnosis that what we have is not really democracy. It is a thing he calls the cathedral, but elected oligarchy would be another decent phrase for it. I do think that there is an issue here that this is particularly true of the US. And I think because of the structure of the political system, because of the role that big money plays in politics, and because of the degree to which capitalism is less regulated here than it is elsewhere, it creates that elected oligarchy much more strongly than it does in some other countries in Europe. Yeah. I’ve had the experience, and I’m curious what your take on this is, where I feel like citizens’ assembly has been picked up in some places as a way of going around the institution. I feel like the climate activism world has taken it as a way of just trying to take shortcuts around the actual democratic institutions, whereas I never really felt like that was my attraction. My attraction was more about as a supplement or a way of reforming the current one. And so there’s a way in which this stuff can be, feel more, I guess, is there a reformist view of this versus a more radical view, and that those are different ways of picking up the same tool? I think that that is generally true of social movements. There is always a reformist view and a radicalist view. There’s a reformist wing and there’s a radicalist wing. There’s Martin Luther King and there’s the Black Panthers. When I was growing up in the UK, there were two key organisations that were campaigning for gay rights. And one was very much about trying to work inside institutions and talk to politicians and push from the inside. Another one was about activism and demonstrations. And I actually think in any social movement, these things work together. Often they seem like they’re fighting each other, but actually they’re both necessary. And so when people talk about introducing deliberative democracy, I similarly hear two strands. And I hear the people who say, in order for this to work, you have to start by getting the political buy-in. You have to convince the politicians it’s in their interests to listen to this. And then there’s another strand that says, if you can build enough of a social movement around a deliberative democracy project, around holding a citizens’ assembly on some issue, then you can pressure the politicians to take it seriously. So I think both approaches maybe can be suitable for different contexts. Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you for that. I had never really considered it that way. You said something earlier that I wanted to follow up on. You talked about, I can’t remember what the... You talked about the feeling of citizenship, that some of these things can imbue that feeling of citizenship and some maybe don’t. Do you know what I’m referring to and what does it mean to have the feeling of citizenship? I suppose I would say it’s to have a sense of, number one, agency. I can influence the processes. It’s having a sense of community. I share something in common with all of these people around me, even though we disagree on a whole bunch of things. Maybe it’s also a sense of responsibility. A friend of mine, a guy called Jon Alexander, who’s a very big deliberative democracy guy and one of the, I think, co-founders of Democracy Next, has this framework. He talks about people as subjects, consumers, or citizens. Subjects was when we were all ruled by kings and really had no say in anything. Consumers is how a lot of people relate to democracy and to government in the 20th century. They’re expecting government to just provide good services and for them to be able to push back if it doesn’t. Citizens is the mindset in which you actually see yourself as an active participant who has a responsibility to make it work yourself. You have agency, you have responsibility, and you have a sense of community. His question, his animating question is, can we move from most people seeing themselves as consumers to most people seeing themselves as citizens? That’s probably my answer to what you asked. It’s beautiful. I met Jon. He was there at the event in Athens. His story is really powerful. He makes it very clear that we are, in some respect, trapped in a consumer story about what we expect, what we think is expected of us. Trying to invite people into a citizen story seems to be... Would you say that that’s part of your project too? Your project fits into that, is how to invite people into a citizen’s mindset where they have a different relationship instead of expectations about what’s available to them and what’s asked of them. Yeah, very much so. I think maybe the distinction for me is that I’m trying to think about all the pieces of the puzzle as well. John, for example, I know is very strong on the idea that there’s no deliverism, which is if only government delivered services better, people would trust it more. He’s very skeptical of that. I am more inclined to say, well, you need both. You need the civic engagement that gets people a sense of participation and a feeling of agency. You also need the government to deliver services better and be more responsive so that they feel they’re getting something that works for them. Then you also need, as I said, the media, the communication information environment part so that they feel that they’re informed and so they don’t feel completely separated and polarized from their fellow citizens. To me, all of these things fit together and you can’t really... I don’t think one can really advance without the other. Yeah. I’m trying to think of... I guess I’m curious more about the fairness... I haven’t really... Yeah. Can you say more about fairness and your feelings about it? I think this is probably just my childhood psychology, but I hate unfairness and I hate it when people get to abuse their power. I think of democratic governance as an inoculation against that, simply by virtue of the fact that it causes alternations in power and makes it hard for people to consolidate power to the extent that a dictator or a monarch does. Ideally, it gives people voice and it enables those who are being discriminated against or oppressed or just left out or impoverished. It gives those people agency and a voice to campaign for or agitate for better treatment for themselves. That ideally should be the outcome. I don’t believe in a utopian socialist paradise where everybody has equal wealth and is equal in every way, but I do believe in a society where everybody is treated fairly. Obviously, certain basic rights and processes, an ability to advance, but an ability to defend themselves against abuse by the powerful. To me, that’s... Why else do we have this? Yeah. I’ve stumbled on a good question, I hope. If you were to design a role for yourself, either at the national level or maybe in a city, what would it be and what would you do? If you had the power and the budget and if you were given the license to implement some of these ideas, what kinds of changes do you think you would want to make? That’s a great question. Because I go in different directions. One of them is trying to do what I do now, which is be a storyteller and help change people’s minds. And so that might be a role where if you’re working for a city or a government, your job is to go around and be the explainer to people, whether it’s in local communities, whether it’s in the bureaucracy, whether it’s in the media. And all of these different sectors explain to them what a democracy could look like and how their piece of it fits together with the other pieces and why they have to work together. So that storyteller would be the most obvious thing, since that’s what I’ve done as a profession. I also sometimes think maybe it would be nice to actually be a facilitator of processes, deliberative processes, conflict resolution, and help people bridge those divides. Another potentially could be focused more on the process side of things. What does it take to get a bureaucracy to move faster? What does it take to get a legislature to do lawmaking differently and to move and to be more responsive to technological change? That’s more, that’s less my area of expertise. But I think that could also be a valuable thing where I think there’s a lot of, in bureaucracy and in legislatures, they’re just not very good understanding of technology and what its implications are and how it’s changing things they do and also of how they could do things differently. And so just creating some space, some opening, some vision around what is possible and how you might change things, how you might change those processes, that could also be something good to do. Yeah. I love the explainer or the storyteller as the first, as that. I think very often, obviously, I’m just thinking my own experience in Hudson where a lot of these, they don’t really take a lot of responsibility for telling that story. One of the biggest troubles is that just the city or the place that you live in very often is incoherent, I think. Incoherence is almost the first level of complication. There’s this woman, Fiona McNae, who’s a British semiotician, and she did a TED talk and the title was Taking Responsibility for Being Understood. And I’ve always felt that phrase, especially when applied to government or civic stuff, is really powerful because they don’t often do that work. Maybe this is related to that deliverism critique. I mean, people said Biden delivered a lot of stuff, but if you’re not telling people that stuff has been delivered, nobody really knows that it’s been delivered in a way that so that these things come together. Do you know what I mean? That you have to take responsibility for making sure that the delivery has been understood or has been received. Yes. And that then, again, becomes a problem in the information environment. The Biden administration, one of the biggest complaints of the people who worked in it was, we did all this great stuff. We passed the Inflation Reduction Act. We passed the CHIPS Act. We created all this investment and nobody knows about it. And some of that may have been poor storytelling. A lot of it was probably the media environment, which meant that those stories didn’t surface. Some of it was that inflation eclipsed those achievements. And I think this is, in fact, one of the critiques of deliverism is that, is precisely that, that you can deliver, but that people don’t necessarily know you delivered because, maybe because the storytelling is inadequate. But yes, you’re right. Ideally, a government would be able to say, here are the good things we did. And people would appreciate them, but people also need to see the bad things that it did or the ways in which it fell short. In some ways, I think that perhaps the more useful way, I’m thinking out loud, but a more useful way to show people that a government is responsive is not, here are all the great things we did that you should be grateful for, but you have a complaint, here’s how we’re responding to it. And make it really about the citizen’s individual interaction over the thing that they particularly care about, rather than the program that maybe has some broad effect on the economy, but that doesn’t necessarily touch them. Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, what you just, for whatever reason, the arrival of AI into all of this just popped into my consciousness. You’ve been in this space for a long time. What has that done to the work? What’s exciting about it? What’s challenging about it? What does it do to this issue of democratic reform? It complicates it hugely. Again, it accelerates the pace of change even further, which means that government institutions are that much more incapable of keeping up with things. So there’s that aspect. It probably upends the economy, which is another thing that government is not good at responding to. What is a new economic structure, policy compact that we can have in the age of AI? It creates all sorts of possibilities. There’s a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Schneider called Rewiring Democracy, where they list all of the ways in which AI could be used to help things like the judicial system, the bureaucracy, the electoral system, political campaigning, and all of the ways in which it could blow those things up and create problems. It’s a long list, but the takeaway really is that what the technology will do is a function of how we use it and what choices we make about how it’s used. We can make choices in which it benefits things and makes processes smoother and eliminates unnecessary bureaucracy and improves people’s interactions with government and makes it more responsive. There’s also uses in which it gums up the works, creates all kinds of slop, or enables more authoritarian surveillance, for instance. So we have just a few minutes left, but I wanted to point to the work you’re currently doing. You’re on Substack, obviously, and you have this Protopian Prize. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, so the Protopian Prize, it’s a speculative fiction prize, which I’m co-judging with a science fiction writer, Ruth Anna Emrys. The idea is it’s run by a couple of organizations, MetaGov and the Public AI Network. The first one is about a confederation of people who work on new forms of governance and what governance could look like in the 21st century. The second is about imagining forms of AI that are not owned by big corporations and serving their interests, but are actually designed and developed and controlled in the public interest. So that could mean AI that is designed to solve specific social problems, or is based on data that is really relevant to a particular locality instead of all being just scraped randomly from the English-language internet, or is not based on data that was copyrighted and stolen, or has various safety guardrails to make sure that it’s not doing socially bad things. So these organizations have created this prize, and the idea is for people to write about what could better forms of democracy look like, and what could better forms of AI that serves people look like. And our idea is simply, and it’s what I am trying to do, people have these notions of what democracy is that they can’t see beyond, and they can’t imagine a form of it that looks better because the stories are not there. People have this notion of what AI is, they can’t imagine a world in which it is not controlled by these big tech companies, and so helping that imagination, helping people see possibilities of how the world could look different, that is a first step towards actually bringing about that world. Obviously, a hell of a lot more than that, but at least sets you on the path, because it gives people a sense of what they should be demanding from their leaders, and what they could agitate for, and what they could try building themselves. Are you familiar with Helen and Dave Edwards? They have the Artificiality Institute. I do, I even worked with them at one point. Oh, wonderful. Well, I love them, and I’m really their language and their framework is stuff that really informs, it’s how I think about things, which I think is the great gift they’ve given us, and they talk about this cognitive sovereignty, and this language of sovereignty being a way of describing the relationship that we have with AI somehow, that we need to create these boundaries, because we are living alongside this intelligence, and so we have to manage these boundaries, and so my question is, when I think about AI, I’ve thought that, well, there’s cognitive sovereignty at the individual level, but is there sovereignty at the local level too, or at the municipal level? Is sovereignty something that needs to be defined all over the place, that that’s part of this disruption of AI, is that we’re all defining our own boundaries, and are there examples of local AI, whatever that means, that municipalities take ownership of, or have a space? I run out of language to describe it, but to your point, it’s coming from the billionaire platforms up there, what examples are there of localities maybe taking control, or defining their own way of being in this, with AI? I don’t, I’ve never actually heard this on cognitive sovereignty before, can you say a couple more words about what it is? Oh yeah, so it’s her description of saying that it’s because AI is a cognitive technology, when we work with it, it changes us, as much as we’re changing it, and the boundaries between what’s us and what’s it are really blurry, and so she has a, if she talks about that, that it’s almost like a discipline of being aware of what role am I in, what role am I putting AI in, with regards to the idea, or the work, or the output, and so just being very disciplined about the boundary, and I think of sovereignty as this drawing hard boundaries around control, and that’s what she sees, it’s almost like a practice, but then we hear people working with AI, and they, what do they call it, AI psychosis, or things get really blurry, it gets very confusing, so anyway, the question really was, how are there examples of municipalities, or places, or defining their own relationship with AI? Not that I know of. I feel like this is the problem everyone is struggling with. There’s, I guess the parallel term cognitive offloading, which is when you surrender your decision making, or your mental processing to an AI, and it is also related to the question we have about whether AI will replace workers, or augment them. You can make choices as a company, for example, as an employer, about whether you’re going to use AI just to do the same work with fewer people, or whether you’re going to keep the same number of people, and use AI to empower them to do more things, because some of the more routine aspects of their work can now be automated. That is related to the cognitive sovereignty, to the extent that if you use AI, if you identify the things that are actually not a good use of your time, and use AI to do those, you’re empowering yourself to take cognitive sovereignty, to identify where your human mind is actually at its most useful, and ensure that you are the person in charge, that you are using AI in those ways that supplement and empower you. We’re seeing the question of cognitive sovereignty in education, and whether if students are just turning in papers that are AI written, they’re surrendering their cognitive faculties to it. One of the distinctions that someone I know has also used in this context is that you can use AI in summative and formative ways, he calls it, and apparently this is also a distinction that comes from education theory. Summative is basically about the output, you use AI to produce a spreadsheet, or something, or write an email, or create a business plan. Formative is where using the, formative is where it is helping you, where the point is the process itself, it’s the learning, it’s the gathering of, it’s the creating of a network, let’s say, or it’s something that develops you, and AI can be used to help with formative processes too. So I think I’m just using different words for similar things here, where there is this notion that we’re all struggling with, how do we be disciplined about ensuring that AI doesn’t replace us, doesn’t substitute for our thinking, but instead gives us more power. I think very few people are actually in a position, or have the luxury to be disciplined about that, and to think about it in a very clear way. In most people, many people’s, perhaps most people’s cases, that choice is out of their hands, because it’s in the hands of their employer, or simply the thing is moving too fast, and it’s too complex for us to even be aware that our cognitive sovereignty is eroding. So I think we’re really just at the very beginning of that journey of figuring out whether we will retain our cognitive sovereignty or lose it. Do you want to end before we say goodbye on a positive thought for the future of democracy? I think the positive thing is that as scary as things are, this is also the moment when anything is possible, there’s an open space for innovation. I think about this in the context of journalism as well. AI is going to disrupt the business models of an awful lot of publications, because when you get your information through ChatGPT, you’re much less likely to go to the website of the publication and read its stories, and so a lot of the traffic it depends on is going away already. There is an open space to experiment with what new forms of journalism might arise, what new business models might arise, and I think there is an open space to experiment with in many other areas too. And one of the things that AI does, it allows us to code, so it allows us to prototype ideas and try out solutions to things much more easily than we could before. So that is the optimism, is that there is the space for experimentation. Whether those experiments succeed in producing a better world also depends on whether we organize to undercut the existing power structures that have kept the institutions that we have going for so long. So it’s not, I always want to emphasize this because I hear so many people talking about how a technology will solve this or that problem, and it’s never about the technology. The technology is always just a tool. It’s about the choices we make on how to use it, and about the power structures in which it exists and who can take, who benefits from those or who can direct them in a different way. Beautiful. Gideon, I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. This has been really great. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Great to talk. 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]

Baiba Matisone on Translation & Community

Baiba Matisone [https://www.linkedin.com/in/baiba-matisone/] is a brand & creative strategist in Berlin. She is the co-founder of brandLingual [https://www.brandlingual.co/], a learning platform that bridges evidence-based and intuitive marketing. Previously, she has held strategy roles at Ogilvy, Grey, Fallon, Kantar Millward Brown, and Antoni Berlin, working on global accounts including Mercedes-Benz, Vodafone, L’Oréal Paris, and Google across Asia, Europe, and North America. She lectures at Miami Ad School, and is the founder of strategy community Planning Folklore, and practitioner community Strategy Pints Berlin. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine who’s a neighbor and she helps people tell their stories. It’s a beautiful question, but it’s very 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 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? And what was it like growing up in Latvia. It was very challenging. I think that times were very different and it was right after when the regime collapsed. And I do believe people were very traumatized by what happened during those 60 years while the country was occupied. And to break a lot of patterns or cycles how they have behaved or how their parents have behaved or how the system pushed people to behave during those days. And I see a lot of changes happening in the culture at the moment. And I have this fresh now impression because I was just last week in Siberia. So for me, it feels like, okay, I’m still reflecting and I’m still trying to make some conclusions about. Yeah. What was it like to return home? I think that the biggest difference was that conversations internationally on these video calls, we always talk about something intellectual. It’s not something that is so personal towards ourselves, which is more about ideas and what the future or things that we are not happy about in culture or in politics or whatever. When I went back home, it was just a weird thing that everybody was just talking about themselves. And that honesty and raw honesty about what life means to them and what experiences they have faced in the past couple of years or in the past decade. It was just very refreshing and also a little bit weird in a way because it felt so honest and so true. But then again, it’s where’s the boundary? And yeah, I think that’s still a question in my head. And do you have recollections of being young, being a girl and what you wanted to be when you grew up? Oh yeah, this is a very big question again. When I graduated my kindergarten, they pushed me to write down what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said that I want to be in the air. And they were do you want to be a pilot? And you want to manage an airplane? I was no, I don’t want to be a pilot. Do you want to be a stewardess? I was no, I don’t want to be a stewardess. And they were, my teachers, they were trying to figure out what does it mean to be in the air? In the air? In the air, yeah. I just didn’t have an explanation. I just got a feeling I want to be in the air, up somewhere in the sky. And now, by looking back, I am in the air. I’m constantly having these conversations with people from different parts of the world. Internet basically means that we are in the air. That’s amazing. They didn’t know what the internet means during that time. But I had the feeling where I want to be in my life. So I think that I have succeeded. Yeah, you were just reporting from the future about where you’re going to be. Yes. And they pissed me off. And I said, in the end, because I needed to write down something very concrete. And I said that I want to be a teacher. And now by looking back and by knowing what we have created with Christopher Rowan’s Brandlingual project, I’m also a teacher. So I did both things. That’s amazing. You’re a teacher in the air, is what you’re saying. Congratulations. Yes. I succeeded on my own future vision about myself and also what I needed to tell to these people who are just pushing me to answer these questions. That’s amazing. So catch us up. Tell us, you’re doing it a little bit already, but where are you now? And what is the work that you’re doing? I mean, last year in December 15th, we launched Brandlingual, which is an educational and training platform together with Christopher Rowan, who has also been part of this podcast. As I made the joke that he’s the only A-list celebrity who has been on this podcast. And I think that it’s still a great joke. But anyways, we are trying to solve a very big problem. I would say that there is this gap in our industry between the theory and the practice, and that everybody has these theory books in their bookshelf, but not that many people know how to actually translate them in practice. And also we are trying to find a way how to create a better understanding about the language and how people in creative strategy or in the advertising world, they are using the language and what do they mean by the words or terms that they are using on a daily basis. And I know for a fact that before we planned this conversation with you, Peter, we had a call and we talked about Otto Scharmer. And today I was just checking some notes and I felt the problem about seeing this gap between what is going on now and what is highest potential in the future, what Scharmer is talking about, is something that is actually being built at the core of Leonard Brown. Yeah. Yes. I was at the morning we talked last time that you and I connected about Otto Scharmer and he just had this piece in Noema, I think is how you say it, talking about us approaching a second axial age [https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/]. Yeah, so I’m excited to talk to you about Scharmer. And you’re saying that the diagnosis that you and Christopher have in the industry is similar to the diagnosis that he has had broadly? Can you say more about the overlap between Scharmer and what you’re doing? I think that for us it’s the same thing that we spotted a very clear problem in our industry and what Scharmer is talking about in theory U is that people are creating the world with their actions and then they don’t want to take collective responsibility. They basically want to say, I didn’t do it. Someone else came and did. Someone built the system and they did it. It’s not me. I’m not part of the system. But what Scharmer is basically saying that each one of us should need to take responsibility because we are all building the system together. And if we are talking about marketing and advertising, it’s the same principle. It’s just that people don’t want to be accountable and take responsibility. And I think there’s the that is the problem that we are actually embedding at the core also of the brand label. Can you tell me a little bit of your history, your work that led you up to brandling? Well, you and Christopher, you’re solving this big problem. How did you discover the problem? What was your experience of the problem? What did it like to work in the problem that so much so that you developed this program? How did you come to identify the problem? I think that it started in 2024 when I think it was the first wave when the was created. It was launched, sorry. And everybody was starting to test and share their observations about how to better use this tool and how to use other AI tools and what AI means and how to adapt to this transition into this new era. And what I was seeing as a pattern is actually that what is actually important is not that much what AI is bringing new to our everyday life or everyday practice. But what is more important is that actually most of the planners or most of the strategists or practitioners on the marketing side, they actually don’t understand the fundamentals. And this conversation started to become more and more stronger across multiple smaller circles of different people who were also working inside of the industry. And during that time, I came up with this idea, let’s do a strategy retreat. Let’s come together for one weekend in presence here in Berlin and let’s just try to go back to the fundamentals. Let’s just think about all together what are the key fundamentals in marketing brand and creative strategy. And we came together last year in May 2025 and we did a retreat and it was a fantastic experience and also incredibly challenging experience to bring 10 people in the room. And then basically I realized that actually it’s even hard for us to figure out what are the roots or what are these fundamental principle that hasn’t changed through the time. So brand lingual grew out from this retreat. It’s just that Christopher and I was the most hyped ones who were okay, let’s build something bigger out of this. Let’s not just create the PDF and share with people on LinkedIn and just let this whole idea go. But we were we saw that there’s a fundamental problem and that problem needs to be addressed and the problem needs to be solved. Especially by knowing that there will be more and more people who will be using AI and to actually use an AI, you need to be an expert. So the first step to actually use an AI as a marketer or as a creative strategist or brand strategist is actually by knowing and understanding fundamental principles. Because how can you prompt AI if you don’t know the core things about your own that you need to practice. And only when you know these fundamental principles, then you can judge what AI is providing as an information to you. And then you know how to go in the right direction. Because what is happening at the moment is that a lot of people are jumping just on the fool’s goal by believing that this is something revolutionary. And actually it’s nothing new or nothing interesting, or maybe it’s even false information. But just because they don’t have a clear understanding about what they have found, they believe that it’s something big. Yeah. When did you first discover that you could make a living in this world of brand and advertising and marketing? What was your first experience? I mean, I think this goes back, I don’t know, back in my personal history more than 15 or something years ago, which is more about, yeah, when I was I don’t know, 20 something in my, I don’t know, maybe even early 20s, or maybe I was 18 years old when I was trying to figure out what do I want to study in my bachelor studies, or what kind of bachelor degree do I want to take. And during that time, I knew that I want to take a bachelor degree in commercial arts. I just figured out that I’m not a good artist. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to stay close to the commercial arts. And I do believe advertising has always been called as commercial arts. And I do believe that this is just something where I have been for a very long time. And it’s just that if you are passionate about something, and you care, people feel this, and they want to come closer to you, and they want to collaborate with you, and they want to learn from you. And I do believe that that is the answer to your question, how do you stay still into this business? And how do you still figure out how to also stay successful? Yeah. In what way is it an art? I think you spoke to it a little bit. But yeah, in what way is commercial is what we do or what you do art? I mean, advertising has always been called as commercial arts. During that time, when I was studying, there was a clear line between what is art and what is commercial art. And I was always very much into the idea that I need to create something that would, first of all, it would help other people, it would be very helpful to a large masses, it would make some change. And the other thing, of course, is how to make it profitable for myself. And in my academia, where I was studying, none of my professors were on the same page. They were thinking that they were more into this idea that art is for art reason. And it’s not about commercial aspects around your ideas when you’re creating art. And, and I think that there, I found out that I am not into the art scene, they’re more into the advertising scene. And even in nowadays, I’ve had, of course, multiple conversations with the artists who are trying to survive nowadays, and every artist is now a brand. So every artist is now thinking about their own way how to survive and be still profitable. So I would say that art in general has transitioned to be a commercial art. It’s my personal take. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in what you do for you? I think that I was just reflecting this morning that I saw someone who was also incredibly passionate about what she’s doing. And I was reflecting on myself. And I thought that, oh, there was a time I don’t know, five, six years ago, I was the same person. Now I feel I learned some things. And I feel I figure out something, but I love this phase. And I do believe it’s in everyone’s life, when you just try to figure out what is this thing that I’m trying to understand in my business or in my industry, where I am working. And then you are open to do a lot of interviews, you are open to do a lot of coffee chats with so many practitioners and professionals, just to figure out how do they do their thing? Did this resonate with you? Because I do believe it did. Yeah, very much. Very much. Of course, it did. That’s beautiful. And I wonder, yeah, can you tell me a story about where that began for you? I mean, yeah, I mean, you’re really just describing having a big, big question. It was during the COVID time, because everybody was available, everybody was more or less in lockdowns, and they were sitting at home. And during that time, I came up with this idea of why not to interview a bunch of strategists across the globe and figure out how they are doing their daily work? How do they think about the strategy? Where is there some internal process, how they go about the client’s problem? And I interviewed more than 50 strategists. Wow. Nice. What would you say? Do you have an idea of what the question is? Because I recognize this in myself. I don’t know exactly why I’m doing what I’m doing, but there’s definitely something in me that wants to keep doing it. It is a question. I don’t know that it’s very concrete. But do you have a feeling of what it is that you’re after? During that time, I tried to figure out what are the undervalued skills. So I thought that everybody who is now fired, and then there will be a phase when people will be hired back, then these undervalued skills will help them to have some competitive edge in the market. So it wasn’t a selfish project. It was a more selfless project that I wanted to share these findings with everyone and just to help others to also feel supported and that they would have hope and inspiration and also some guidance where to look, in which direction to look to skill up or to become more competitive. So yeah, I think that the core for me, it wasn’t the question itself. It was more about how can I help others? How can I bring more value to the whole community, the strategy bubble in general? It doesn’t mean in Europe or Asia or in States, but it’s more about how can I globally give something to others. I don’t know, maybe it’s a very selfless idea, but it felt good to me. It felt, yeah, it gave a lot of positive feeling to me. Well, I see in your biography, you have all these few, you created planning folklore, which was a community of practitioners, is that right? And then you built, I guess there’s their strategy pints in Berlin, another convening. And then even brand label is another way of really bringing people together around this stuff. I mean, clearly you recognize, what makes that something that you do that is so important to you to bring people together, it seems? Again, we can go back to Otto Scharmer. If you have read the Theory U book, or at least the core idea about Theory U, it is also about collective thinking about industry in which you are operating in, and it’s not about, and Otto Scharmer has this very clear shift. It’s not about ego, it’s about eco, and eco meaning that it’s about the collective thinking about how we all together are actually creating the reality. Yeah. I mean, did you get a chance to read the recent piece that we talked about? We’ve assigned it to each other, and out of guilt and fear of you having read it and me not reading it, I read it this morning. Here it is: “We may be entering a second axial age [https://www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-entering-a-second-axial-age/],” by Otto Scharmer in NOEMA I have no judgment if you were not able to, but of course, it builds on everything he’s done in the past, and it’s a beautiful diagnosis that basically the first axial age was this moment when civilization discovered its interior life, and we’ve been living in this really inward focused way for a very long time, and this age, the second axial age is this moment where he’s saying we have to discover this, he called it collective interiority, but it is. I mean, it’s the same thing we talk about, that the space between us is completely abandoned, and he uses these three words, anomie, atomie, and atrophy as being the diagnosis of we’re alienated from each other, we’re separated, and we’ve lost all these muscles of how to collect and how to connect with each other, which I just resonate with quite a bit. So maybe the question for me is when did you first discover Otto Scharmer, and what made it so significant? I mean, he’s very popular in Latvia, his book was published in two formats, one was his original theory u-book, and then there was a smaller book, which was almost some already key ideas in a smaller version, but for myself, I think, as a person who is still coming from Latvia, or from, let’s say, Eastern Europe, I do believe this collective thinking has been embedded in us as a culture in general, as a culture, since the occupation, because we needed to be collective, we needed to collaborate together, and it wasn’t about anyone’s egocentricity, or ego, but it was more about how we can collectively create the best solution, or the best work that could possibly be out there, and I do believe that there’s some unwritten way how to look at the world is still inside of me, and it’s just something that I still want to bring in other countries, or in other cultures, where people are more focusing towards themselves, or being very individual. For me, I don’t understand this thing, because I have never thought, or I have never believed in this idea that one person can win a war, you need to always have a team, or you need to have your supporters, which is your team, and that’s why I am, but this is my very personal belief, that I don’t think that people feel mentally good by actually living in a very individualistic environment. We are social animals at the core, or social creatures, and we need to socialize, and we need to feel that there are other people, similar, like-minded people in the room, and that’s also something that we have put at the core on Brandlingual, which is the idea about the community, even to learn, or to unlearn some things, you need to have a group of other people around you who can help you to see what are these blind spots in your way of thinking, or where you are not clearly understanding what’s going on, and yeah, and I do believe that this crowd support is super, super important, and again, it goes back to Otto Scharmer, who talks about the same thing. I want to talk a little bit more about BRANDLingual. Can you tell me more about what does the name mean, why BRANDLingual, and yeah, and what happens there? I think that this is the question that you need to ask Christopher, because this was his creation, that there needs to be these two words put together. We wanted to call our idea translation, but Jay-Z was the one who took this idea, so he has an agency called Translation, and that’s why we needed to find another word how to call. The idea was somehow to play around this thought about how to be bilingual inside of the marketing, brand, and creative strategy for how to talk in multiple languages, and from there came this idea, let’s put brand as a first word, and then becoming BRANDLingual, that you can understand multiple languages, and you can go in the room understanding what language your client is talking or speaking at the moment. What are the different languages that is, I mean, not to push this metaphor to the brink, but yeah, what are the different languages that are out there? I guess maybe for me, I came up at a point where there wasn’t, I mean, I don’t recall, but I came up in a brand consultancy. There wasn’t a ton of science or rigor around stuff. I mean, I learned research practices and stuff like that, but the conversation about marketing science and rigor and theory and practice has grown quite a bit over my career. We’re in a very different position now than we have been in the past. I guess maybe what’s that been like for you, and what does it mean to be rigorous or to speak multiple languages today? There is huge chaos, and I think that the biggest problem is for a young talent who wants to join the industry, because there are a lot of terms and words that people are using in most of the cases, some buzzwords that are actually relabeled some old terms just in a new code. That’s why I do believe that Brandlingual actually is the most useful training platform for those who are joining the industry, because you will not be messed up with these buzzwords, but you can learn a clean language or to understand what is a clean way how to look at two key schools of thought, what are these two key thinking systems or schools of thought in our industry, and one of them is more intuitive one, how people are looking at the marketing from a very intuitive perspective, which is not very scientific or evidence-based, but it was the best way how to explain things if you are just trying to explain them in an intuitive way, and it’s very much anchored in the way Philip Kotler is talking about the marketing frame, how marketing should need to work through the STP framework, which is segmentation, targeting, and positioning, and nowadays we know that there is a much more accurate view how to look at these same things, and which is evidence-based view, which is more scientific, which is more researched, and that comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Yeah. What’s the relationship between these two? Do they coexist together? Do they interact with each other healthily, or are they in conflict? I do believe that there is a conflict, and there is also some translate these thinking systems back and forth, and that’s where the brand lingo comes in, that we want, because we are basically saying that you need to, of course, speak in both languages. It’s not about one or the other. It’s actually about how to keep this duality alive at the same time by acknowledging that you can speak in one language, or you can speak in another, or even if your client speaks in intuitive way, you can translate them back and bring them to the next level, so they could start to realize that there are better ways how to grow the brand or how to improve things around the brand and the marketing. Yeah, and how has it been going? You’ve been, how long has brand lingo been out there now? Since December 15th, so it’s almost six months. Congratulations. Are you enjoying yourself? What’s been the best part so far? I think that there have been a lot of interesting moments, and there have been a lot of challenging moments. I do believe the most interesting thing is that in our podcast, we are placing a similar, it’s not the same question, but we are also having one question with which we are normally starting at every podcast episode, and that’s the question about unlearning. I do believe that we have unlearned a lot of things in our journey, because we had a lot of assumptions how things will work out, and life is a very interesting, messy thing, which makes its own corrections in our perceptions about how things could work out. Yeah, and what’s an example of, I mean, I love that idea of unlearning. What’s an example of some things that you feel, I mean, people are listening, what’s a big assumption that everybody should try to unlearn, or it might benefit from loosening their attachment to it, at least? I mean, we have our seminar, or webinar, however you want to call it, which is Unlearn 10 Myths in 2026, so there we are talking about things that are more closer to the marketing world and advertising world, but if you want to address this question more towards what I have unlearned while doing a brand legal thing, I do believe that that’s a maybe even more interesting question that I need to think for a moment, what are some interesting things that I have unlearned. I think that the one thing that I have unlearned is about thinking about collaboration with people in general, that I had a little bit different way conversations, and how I was opening conversations with others. And now just because we have talked with so many people, not only through our podcast, but also with potential students, and with so many people inside of our community, that I feel like people are so different, and people are so interesting, and you never know if the word which you are saying, or the phrase that you are using will or someone will get offended, or how it is excitement and fear sometimes at the same time, whatever which side of the coin you want to look, because it’s the same feeling. It’s just that on one side if you want to look from the negative perspective, it’s fear, and it’s scary, and if you want to look from the positive side, it’s oh, it’s exciting, it’s always something new pops up, but it’s challenging, and sometimes you just get exhausted from those things, and I think it’s also very human. Yeah, yeah, so what do you do differently as a result? I think I try to reflect more, and I try to take some moments to just figure out what is not just the noise, or emotions, but what is actually at the core, and what is the most important thing, so that’s why I try to practice meditation, to just take all the noise out of my head, and then just I try to focus on what is the one most important thing at the center, or at the core of this whole conversation, or on this whole collaboration. What, I’m curious if there, I hear more about the 10 myths that people need to unlearn, or maybe a teaser, what’s the top one or two of the myths in your webinar? Yeah, yeah, I mean this was our very first webinar that we did actually in January, and this is the whole concept that has impacted how BrandLingual is talking about, how we are at BrandLingual, we are talking about certain things, and at the core of these myths are still this distinction that in a school of thought, when you are looking at the marketing from intuitive perspective, for example, you focus on the word awareness, or brand love, but when you are looking from the other school of thought, from the other perspective, from the evidence-based school of thought, you think more about the mental availability, and physical availability, and this is this new shift that you need to actually understand, that it’s not about the age-old terms, or age-old words that we are using, but it’s actually about this transition, and also this new translation that we need to bring into the room. And what does BrandLingual say about research in terms of practice, both qual and quant, of course, I’m always selfishly really interested in the role of qualitative, and how you argue for qualitative, but what does BrandLingual say about how to learn qualitatively and quantitatively? I think that this was a question that we discussed, Peter, before in this call, and I think we also had a very interesting chat that you said that, why do you guys are putting this shift on memory? What is so important about memory? That’s nothing new. Well, I did, and just to interrupt a little bit, I felt this is the experience of getting old, I think, and what I think what you guys are doing really effectively is you’re packaging these first principles in a way where, I mean, was it memory-first branding or something? And I was my gosh, it’s just clear communication, but it struck me that you were saying the thing that I feel I learned right away. Thank you. But yeah, at the core, it is about this shift that marketing and advertising industry has focused on how to change the consumer behavior for a very, very long time. And it has been, I don’t know, since the 1930s, I would say, that it’s okay, we need to have some very persuasive message. And with this message, we will make people to buy our product or buy more of our products. And that’s actually, if we look at scientific evidence, it’s not actually how people are convinced to buy one product towards the other product, or why they choose one brand towards the other brand. And I think that a lot of people hasn’t noticed the shift yet. So that’s why we are emphasizing this new way how to look not only at the research that you need to start to think about from the mental perspective, how people make decisions, how they store the memories, how do they create the memories, how do they remember the brand. There is some brand that will come in your mind that you potentially normally are buying and using. But then when you are in the store, and this brand is not on the shelf, what do you do? And that’s interesting. Not the message oh, rational or emotional message, how to convince someone to change the behavior, which is, as I said, it’s not possible. And yeah, we are placing the shift at the center. Also, in Brandlingual, when we are not only talking about the research, but when we are also talking about the creative strategy and advertising, that advertising in general should need to focus on how to build new memories about the brand. And so that shift, just to be really explicit, the shift to memory first is a shift from what to what? From focusing on, from focusing in research process to analyze the consumer behavior, when they buy the product, how did they buy the product, what was some need when they bought the product. Now it’s more about what came into their mind, what kind of thing, or I need to solve some problem. Suddenly, I broke something, I need to buy a new, I don’t know, some thing in my home or in my office to, I don’t know, replace this broken, I don’t know, chair or whatever. And that problem won’t be solved by some emotional or rational message, nobody will go back. I saw the ad, there was a commercial about the chair. And now I will be checking some website. Normally, it goes more into the very fast mental process inside of the human brain, where the person is just quickly trying to remember, hey, what was, what is this brand that I have broken? How can I replace with the same product or object or the thing that is, in this particular example, broken. But normally, it’s just that you go back into your memories, and you try to figure out what was the last brand. Was I happy about it? Was my experience satisfying? And then if it wasn’t, you will start to think about, okay, what are some alternatives? Because my last experience wasn’t happy, or I wasn’t happy with my last experience by, I don’t know, buying some certain brand or by having an experience with certain brand. So it’s not about behavior, because when we analyze behavior, we can never understand the question, why people are actually doing something. It’s more about everything that is happening around. But when we are starting to figure out what is this mental pathway since the problem arise? And until the solution until the product is bought, that’s something more interesting and more valuable for the marketing and marketers and also for the advertising world to build campaign. Yeah. So what would you say, I guess I’m curious, what’s the role of qualitative research of face to face research in in this in the shift that you’re talking about? And how is it different than how it’s been in the past? I mean, according to Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s way, how they explain how to do a qualitative research, to figure out what are some memories that people have in mind about particular category, it goes through three phases. First is when the problem arise, what happened in the background? Why do you have this problem? Why is the situation now happening? I don’t know, you don’t have a mill or something is broken, whatever you need to as a researcher or as a strategist, you need to understand this context. Then you go into the next phase where you start to where you with your questions, you need to understand, okay, okay, first, we understand why you have a problem. What was your feelings? What was other things that was happening in the background? Did you need someone else with whom to go to buy this stuff or you were alone? All of these things are, again, super important for the research process. Then you go into the next stage, which is the second phase. And you start to ask the questions to understand, okay, what did you do to solve this problem or to fix this problem. And again, you try to understand what happened in the context? What was the mood? What kind of emotions person was feeling? What is coming in mind when they need to start to go in this solution phase? And then the third phase in the research process is to understand how did the purchase process actually happen? Did the person in the end bought the same product that they thought about at the very beginning or they change their choice or and choose another product? Or what happened and if the process was successful? And what was the experience again with the product or with the, I don’t know, service when this purchase was made? Because all of these things, almost a mental pathway through three phases, are incredibly important to understand how people think about products and also how do they choose the brand? You have a problem and then which brand you will choose? What is your decision making process? This is basically the pathway that you can take as a researcher to figure out what is going on in the consumer’s mind or buyer’s mind. And then you do multiple, of course, conversations and then you try to figure out what are some most common patterns, how people think about the category. Yeah. I’m curious, you’re spending time with young people, I imagine. Who’s signing up or who are you finding, that’s an assumption, who’s signing up so far? For us, it’s not that much as young people because I do believe that industry has this problem for a very long time and it’s before AI was launched or something that agencies just in general don’t train young strategists and young strategists or new talent need to find a way how to find this information by themselves. And as we know, the people who are entering the industry, they are not also paid very well, so they don’t have a chance to take a very expensive course program and scale up. So it’s more about trying to figure out, can I find a mentor on LinkedIn or in my team who can help me to understand the strategy or can I find some free resources and then get a little bit lost because still you need the guidance. So for us, it’s more about more senior practitioners, which is brands, creative strategies, brand strategists, also people who are working on the client side who are more in the process of unlearning because they are in a business, I don’t know, for 10, maybe 15 years, they have learned a lot of things, they have practiced a lot of things, but now they have came to a realization or conclusion that maybe I should need to double think what I know because I’m seeing a lot of problems. For example, yeah, there is some messiness around the language, but I have never thought about how to put these terms and all these key concepts in a place, what is actually this, what terms are coming from the intuitive school of thought or what terms are coming from the evidence-based school of thought, it’s just for a lot of people, a lot of mess in their heads. And then we are trying to make some clarity, we are trying to help to see that, hey, there are some patterns, there is a way how to see things more clearer, and we are, of course, Nice. How would you describe, we’re coming near the end of our time together, but how would you describe where we are right now? I mean, you talked about so much of the stuff that you, we’ve talked about, it came out of your reaction to the pandemic and then the arrival of AI and we’re, how do you describe where we are now? Do you have thoughts about, you know, where are we now when it comes to the state of marketing and the state of brand given everything that’s going on? It’s a really big question, you definitely don’t have to. It is a very big question, but I still believe that you need to be first an expert, you need to have a solid understanding about key principles around how things are operating, and then you can use AI to actually expand your way of thinking, but you can’t do vice versa, because as I said earlier also in this conversation, if you don’t have a solid understanding about what you are doing, you will believe that fool’s gold is something important, or it’s a treasure that you have found with the help of AI, but I do believe that a lot of people will make a lot of mistakes, and the ones who will pay about it, of course, will be the business owners or stakeholders who are investing the money into these companies, and I do believe there will be some financial collapse after some time, because even this idea that you can replace a junior strategist with AI, I do believe it’s completely false. It’s a wrong way how to look at the things, because I still believe that you need to give to any junior strategist a good understanding about the fundamental principles, give them a clear understanding what a strategy, what a creative strategist or brand strategist should need to do, how to actually help a marketer or a brand to become more successful, and then you can give the AI tool or a bunch of them, so they could speed up their work, but at the core, they still need to have a good understanding about the fundamental principles. I feel like my tongue is moving around and saying the same things, but yeah, I do believe it’s about good junior strategist who is eager to learn plus the AI, and then some magic can happen. Yeah, it’s beautiful. I really appreciate and admire what you and Christopher are doing with Brandlingual, and in this word of atrophy, which is a word that Sharma uses in that piece, and I think it’s true across the board that we’ve put of the digital world we just fell out of the habit of using so many of these muscles in some way, that it’s not just that we don’t know them, it’s that we forgot how to use them, you know what I mean? We just, and the only real answer is to practice them is to get back into the work of doing it, and that seems to be what you do naturally. So, congratulations on what you’ve done, and I appreciate you joining me here. Thank you very much for the invitation. It was my pleasure to have a conversation with you, and I hope I said something interesting, and that at least this was also a meaningful one hour for you, because I always say to everyone with whom I have a coffee chat, hey, just be mindful, we are still spending each other’s time, and life is short. That’s right, that’s right. Well, it certainly was, it was all interesting and very meaningful, and I’m glad to have gotten to know you a little bit better, so thank you. Thank you very much. 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]

Jelena Veselinović on Truth & Brokenness

Jelena Veselinovic [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jelena-veselinovic/] is an advisor and fractional CMO at Brand Intelligents.ai. Previously, she was Head of Brand Marketing at Miro. Prior to that, she was VP of Global Brand Marketing Campaigns at Coca-Cola. She has a great substack, “Rewire Your Mind [https://rewireurmind.substack.com/],” where she’s dismantling the assumptions of brand theory one essay at a time. So I start all these conversations with the same question, and I actually use it in my research, too. I borrowed it from a friend of mine, and she helps people tell their story. And it’s such a big question. I use it, but it’s so big, I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want to make sure 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? Okay. It is a big question, yes. Well, obviously, I can answer that question on many different levels. So I will start for a smaller, lower level, and then I’ll try to explain how that connects to a real place where I’m coming from. So originally, I come in terms of where I was born. I was born in Serbia, in Belgrade, which is a little country in Balkans or Eastern Europe. And I spent there, well, most of my young adulthood. And then when I got married, when I got my first child, I left with work and I never came back. Now, why is all this important? It is important for many different reasons, because it truly made me into who I am. So firstly, when I’m saying that I’m coming from Balkans, what is important in there that I am carrying in my DNA a certain way, a certain history, a certain set of beliefs, a certain baggage, I would say. And that really makes me who I am. And there are a couple of things that I believe are important to know about me. The first one is that I don’t know how not to speak or how not to say what I think. And that’s something that in my culture, in the culture where I’m coming from, I mean, first of all, you are taught from a very early childhood to always speak the truth, but I guess that’s generally true. But also I think what is important is that speaking truth is considered a respect. When you respect someone, you will always tell them the truth. You will not try to manipulate that truth to make people better or to make it sound easier or more convenient or any of this. If you respect someone, if you love someone, if you care about someone, you will always deliver them the most brutal, no matter how painful truth, because you care and because you want people to be better, to improve. Now, that’s something that I carry deeply inside of me. And it is something that helped me in my professional life, but I think it also cost me more than it helped me. And something that is also connected with that is I was always seen, and I don’t know, we might or might not talk about my career, but I was seen always in my working environments, as someone who is always keeping others honest. And I to say, whenever we were doing all this psychological tests and stuff, I was always the majority of people would always be mapped somewhere in the center of the map. And I was not only extreme, I’m joking, I was probably outside of the map, because they couldn’t even fit me in. Which meant, and I was talking to these coaches, how is that? Why is that? What’s wrong with me? And they explained to me, nothing is wrong with you. You are actually very valuable to the organization, because you are balancing everyone out. And I’m well, I never, ever asked in my life to have a role to balance someone out, it’s a hard role to play. But apparently, people appreciated that. And they appreciated it in a way that whenever there was an uncomfortable conversation, they would bring me in. And they’re why are you even bringing me in? I’m not a confrontational person. I swear, I’m not. I’m a nice person. Everyone likes to believe about themselves. But then I realized that a lot of people that know me or see me, they see a couple of things. One of the things is that they believe that I’m brave, that I am, that I have courage to stand up and to say things, which is honestly, I mean, for God’s sake, it can’t be further from the truth. I’m not brave. I’m scared every moment of my life, which is probably because I built all these shields to make me perceived as brave. But the reason why I’m saying and how is that connected to my culture is that the bravery is not about being courage, it’s not about having courage to do something, to go against something, to whatever, to fight. Not about that. It’s when you’re seeing the truth so clearly that you cannot help it. You need to go after it. And that’s why I’m saying that truth speaking quality, or I would say, probably, inability of not speaking truth is also what makes me in the eyes of other people confrontational, brave, intimidating, all these things, which is very much not true. So that’s why I’m saying I’m coming from Balkans and because I want people to understand me and I want people to see beyond that hard shell. The other thing that is important about my origin is that I was born, I was born at the time, I am giving my age now, but I think it’s important. I was born in a country that was called Yugoslavia. That country does not exist anymore. It was completely, I don’t know what, dispersed in the 80s and 90s, which resulted in a big civil war. And I was I happened to be born in a country that was Yugoslavia, that was all built on this idea the different nations and different religions should live, work together and feel that sense of unity. That’s how I was brought up. But also my parents came from the mixed backgrounds or different backgrounds, so my mother is Croatian, Jewish, my father is Orthodox, Montenegrin, Serbian, what have you. The point is I have in myself any possible combination of different nations, different religions, different everything. And this is what makes me, me, and this is, I was brought up, firstly, not to recognize that, because it wasn’t important, why would it ever be important to me, where is someone coming from, what’s the religion, what’s the nationality. My parents taught me, it’s not important, the second thing, I believe I’m carrying this complexity of different things, or multitude of different identities. But anyhow, why is that important? It is important that, as I said, sometime in 80s and 90s, specifically 90s, the country and Serbia, Croatia, all of that, went through the massive, ugly, bloody civil war. And it was a situation that was going against everything I am, against every single fiber in my body, against every belief that I ever had. And I just couldn’t take it, and I left the country. I left the country actually one day before the bombing started. And I left with the idea to never go back, because it’s not really about the war, it’s about the values, and I felt deeply betrayed by that country, by the history, by being born where I was born or when I was born, and I decided to build a new life. So that’s how I left, and I’ve been living for, I don’t know, 30 years now, abroad. But anyhow, that’s where I’m coming from in terms of my origins. But that’s why I said, I’ll give you that part first, and then I’ll try to connect it to a bigger, most important part. When people ask me a similar question, I am, I’m always saying I am coming from a from a place of confusion. I’m coming from a place of being permanently lost. And when I say something that, well, permanently lost, place of confusion and brokenness. And what, by the way, there was a, sorry for a digression, but I read about some Indian semi-goddess, and I wouldn’t be able to repeat her name, but her name in English meant never not broken. Because it’s a goddess, by the way, she is riding a crocodile, and the crocodile as a symbol of fear, a crocodile that represents her biggest fear. So she’s riding that, and then she’s always coming in situations where she’s breaking down. So she’s never not broken, or she’s always broken, and she’s always arising from the ashes and from the brokenness. But it’s actually that situation and the energy of brokenness that is her real power. And that’s something that I identify with strongly, so I’m saying the place of being lost, confusion, brokenness, that’s really who I am. But I’m not saying this in a sense that if something is wrong with that, I’m actually in love with that state. It’s my most productive, my most creative, the most happiest place, state. And why is that? Because I think, and that’s why I was saying, that’s why I was giving you the story also about leaving myself, my country, my place of birth, my family, my friends, everything, when I was 20 something years old, six, seven, and deciding to go and create a new life, because I’m not afraid of building new. I’m actually I think that that’s the most powerful state you can be. And I think I was writing recently, I’m confused, I don’t know if I wrote it or if it is just in my head, but anyhow, it is this moment, moment, moment, zero moment, it is a moment before you make a first step, and I believe that that’s the moment with the highest potential. And it is a moment without fear. It is a moment that exists almost in some sort of a limbo, it’s a moment that lives in a limbo, it’s between the past and between the future, between the past and the future. It’s a moment in which everything is possible. So I to stay in that moment. Anyhow, that’s my long answer to your powerful question. Oh, my gosh, it’s a wonderful, it’s a wonderful, beautiful answer. Thank you so much for it. I have so many questions about it. I’m not sure exactly how to. I guess I’m curious about, usually in this, at this point in the conversation, I’ll ask, what did you want to be when you were a child? And I wonder, yeah, when you were young, what did you what idea did you have about what you wanted to be when you grew up? I didn’t, I mean, it’s probably. Okay, that’s a hard question. So honestly, I don’t know. I can’t really recall exactly. I know. I’ll tell you what I wish I did instead of what I’m doing. But I think early on, I definitely didn’t want to become a princess or unicorn or any of these things. I remember that I was most, I don’t know, lost, immersed in the flow when I was playing kitchen with my friends, not kitchen, but cooking, cutting little whatever, leaves and grass and ingredients and pretending to be cooking. I think I remember that. But then I, as I was growing up, I have this bad thing, and bad thing is that I have this constant need to do the most difficult things in life and prove to myself that I can do it. And in every single aspect of my life. And I remember, anyhow, when I was at one point in time, I was swimming, training, swimming. And I remember that I was always choosing the most difficult techniques because I was just not interested in being in the easy stuff. I had to be the best in the hardest thing. So I applied that kind of thinking everywhere. And then eventually, as I was growing up, that most difficult thing for me to dedicate my life to became philosophy. And philosophy in a sense of not so much philosophers, this and that. Yes, I mean, I was absolutely in love with that. But more as a need to know everything and to answer the meaning of life. I mean, let’s not kid ourselves. I just wanted to understand the meaning of life. But in a sense, you started with that big question, which is seemingly very simple, but it’s also very deep. So, I wanted to go the deepest I could under everything there is. And to answer that, I don’t know, primary, initial, first question. So, that’s what really brought me to philosophy. Now, I don’t practice philosophy now, even though that remains my biggest love in life. But I do apply that way of thinking, the rigor, the curiosity, the need to go beyond the obvious, because I believe the obvious is probably one of the biggest dangers of our lives, because so many people settle for what’s the easiest, what’s the most convenient truth, what’s the obvious truth. I always to push, provoke people to, just to see things from the other perspective. So, anyhow, it was philosophy. So, I always wanted to be a philosopher, and I would say specifically, I wanted to be a philosopher in ancient Greece, and sit under the olive tree and think about life. So, that would be my ideal life situation. But then, there is something else, which is an even bigger truth, if you can imagine that. So, as I said, when I was a little girl, I loved cooking. Now, when I’m, now that I’m a big girl, I love cooking probably even more. And it is, I don’t know whether to call it a passion, I don’t know what to call it, but it’s not about that I’m good at cooking. Yes, I am, but that’s a by-product of it. But it’s really the process of cooking that is the only activity, well, maybe not only, but one of the very few activities in life that puts me immediately into the state of love. And this is when I feel free, this is when I feel myself, this is when I feel happy. And I believe, it’s interesting, because I kept saying about philosophy, how I love philosophy, and how I specifically love the Greek philosophy. Now, when you think about the Greek philosophy, the one, western philosophy, there is one specific idea that really defined that approach to life, which is the supremacy of mind over matter, or mind over body. And it is that idea that the intellectual, the abstract, the ideal world, will always be something to strive for, something that will always be superior to the physical. And for my entire life, I believed in that. And which, in turn, made me live in my head, in my mind. And I was absolutely, not only content with that, if I could even boost it even stronger, I was why would you even need this, earthy, bodily things, it is really just about ideas, the plateau. I mean, I am striving to understand it all. I want to touch the real thing. But then, the cooking does the opposite to me. And again, I am saying, it is not about the product of cooking. I do not care. I to believe that I cook well, and I love to eat it. But it is not about that. It is still about slicing, dicing, touching, feeling, tasting, smelling, it is really engaging. But it is not only about engaging the senses. It is connecting the senses with your mind, because you cannot, I do not cook by the recipe. I cook by the intuition. And what that means is you imagine, I do not know where exactly, but somewhere, you imagine the taste. And then, you cook the taste, idea of taste. And you cook towards that, until you reach it. So, if I could do everything over, I would definitely become a chef. Because that is where the happiest version of me exists. It reminds me of, it is a little pat or cute, but there is a wonderful quote, a moment in, with Joseph Campbell interviewed by Bill Moyers. And he says this thing where he says, “People say that what they want to know is the meaning of life. I do not think that is it. I think what they want is the experience of being alive.” Oh, Peter, do not get me with that. I was reading somewhere, and I cannot remember where, probably it shocked me so much that I forgot. There was this question, when you are smelling a rose, are you smelling a rose or are you smelling the idea of what the rose should smell? And I was oh, my God, I do not know. I really do not know. And I was scared that I actually do not smell the rose. And, yeah, I mean, now, opposite to my whole Western philosophy background, if there is one thing I want to do, I want to escape from the, I do not know, the prison of my mind. Yeah. How, tell what, so where are you, and let us talk about work. How do you think about, how do you talk about what you do for people that do not know you Where are you, and what is the work you do? A hard transition. Okay. So there is a simple story. There is a complex story. So the simple story is I am a classically trained marketeer. And for the most of my career, I believe that is a good thing. Now, I do not know anymore. But as I said, I have a philosophy background, not marketing background, but I carried over all that critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity that comes, and curiosity and understanding of human condition, I believe. And I brought that over to marketing. I worked, at first, I worked at the agency, Saatchi and Saatchi. But then, very soon after that, I, and Coca-Cola was one of my clients at that time. But then very soon, I moved over to the client side. And I stayed with Coke for 18 years. And everything I learned about marketing, I learned there. And, I mean, Coke is obviously the best school of marketing there is. I can confidently say that I learned a lot. And then, then after that, I left. And we can talk about the hard transition. But for now, I’ll just give you a simple story. So I left. And for a couple of years, I was working as a consultant. Then I moved to Miro, to lead, to lead the brand marketing at Miro. And I stayed, stayed there for four years. And, and since then, I am working now as a fractional CMO, or fractional, whatever you need me. And really, working with the companies to solve their biggest problems, or to help them remove the, I would say that the biggest obstacles, to identify and then to remove the obstacles for the growth. So that is a simple story. The more complex story is, I reached the point, most, partially because I had, I was exposed to my co-career, and it was a wonderful career, local, regional, global, on all different levels. And, for a little girl from Serbia and Belgrade, I moved to the global team and had a senior role in the global team. I to believe that I achieved a lot. But anyhow, it was just a wonderful place to learn. But, yes. Can I ask you about Coca-Cola? I’m wondering, because you’re, what are the hallmarks of a Coca-Cola approach? What does Coca-Cola do? What do you carry with you from that time that feels like it’s a particular way of thinking about the market, or going out into the market, or learning about the market that seems like this is how Coke does it. Is there a Coca-Cola way of doing it? Oh, yes, yes. There is a Coca-Cola way to everything, yes. So we had a very comprehensive, complex curriculum, Coca-Cola way of marketing, which, I don’t know, for good or bad reason, I still think it’s the most progressive and sophisticated thing that I ever seen, which is sad, because the time of the world moved on. And it’s still the best I’ve seen. But, okay, so how do I describe this? I would say the most important thing, two most important things. So Coca-Cola believes in a brand, and Coca-Cola believes that the brand is the most valuable, although intangible asset for the business, for all the reasons that I’m sure everyone understands and knows. But I’m just saying that’s the first postulate that they believe in brand. I would just qualify this. And this is probably one of also the most important things to understand. When they said Coca-Cola believes in a brand, that doesn’t mean that Coca-Cola does not believe in product. I mean, it is one of the most, the best, the most valuable products in the world. And the brand can never exist without the product. And Coca-Cola is super aware of that, and it’s never, ever, ever trying to separate the two. So that’s the first thing. The second thing that I learned that was very important for who I am as a marketeer, is accountability. And yeah, that’s probably interesting. The first time, the first, I don’t want to exaggerate, maybe it was not the first day, but very early in my career, I found this quote, or maybe it was, I think it was actually a part of our onboarding booklet. And the quote said, the quality of your decisions will make or destroy the value for the company. And maybe it’s not word for word, but that’s what I now can recall. Because it is that understanding that whichever part of organization are you at, you are making decisions that will create or destroy the value for the company. So they don’t treat marketing as this fluffy layer that is free from accountability. And yes, maybe you cannot measure every single thing with a yardstick, but there are ways of knowing whether something is working or not working. And also, as a marketing company, Coca-Cola, which is in essence a marketing company, the biggest, that is investing, I can’t remember now the percentages, but probably more than 50-60% of the budget goes to marketing. So, when you’re investing so much money, you need to know whether it’s working or not. You cannot let go these people off the hook of accountability. So, accountability is built into the marketing hook, but not the same accountability, not the last-click attribution type of accountability that we have now. Now, the reason I’m saying this is important for me, because I learned one thing, or that’s the way I work, that you need to link up every single thing, you always, always, without exception, start from the business problem. You need to understand what the problem is, what are the barriers for growth, what is preventing, what are the hurdles, what do you need to change, or what are the opportunities. And even today, I say, behind every brief, marketing brief, or advertising brief, or whichever brief you want, there is always a people problem. There is always someone, somewhere, doing or not doing what you want them to do. So, you need to go back to that business problem to understand what is preventing the growth, and who are these people, not your target audience, behavioral audience, who are these people that are not doing what you want them to do. And then link up everything else, so that you are addressing that specific problem. And again, that’s not the performance marketing, I’m just saying that everything we do, or what I learned, that everything we do needs to be in a function of business. And later on, in my consulting career, and when I’m doing workshops, etc., I’m saying, yes, brand love, wonderful, Coke has the highest brand love in the world. It’s all, I mean, maybe not, but that’s why we do things that we do. But marketing, my job as a marketeer is not to build a brand love, it’s to translate that brand love, to use brand love as a tool to make company the money. Yes. And I think it’s that understanding of how everything connects, and not doing marketing in isolation, not doing advertising in isolation. I used to say, the best, the most creative idea you can imagine, that is not solving the right problem, is wasted. Which is sad. So I’ve been trained my whole life to think about that, or to think in that way. And that’s what I call classic marketing. Yeah, so I want to, there’s two things I want to do, and I want to do this one first, which is, I’m always, this is a very selfish question, but as somebody who’s a qualitative researcher and an ethnographer who believes in what qualitative and face-to-face stuff can do, what’s the role that, how do you think about, and what’s the proper role of qualitative or ethnographic research in what you do, and how you do what you’ve just described? Oh, Peter, what a wonderful question. So let me start with qualitative, typical focus group type of things, which I hate and I don’t hate. And I hate because people either read, whatever, the transcripts, learnings, whatever, reports from the qualitative focus groups, or they sit and watch people, in some sort of a zoo, that are talking about your brand. And they’re writing these quotes, etc., and they’re taking everything, the most usual thing is that people, clients, are taking everything on the face value level. And that’s a complete waste, because people obviously never say what they think, but, because they don’t know how to say what they think, that, I mean, it requires meta thinking, thinking about thinking. And most of people, especially people that we recruit for the research, are not able to express. So, the real value is really about trying to understand why people are saying the things that are saying, what is behind it. And that’s very difficult, and it’s very rare, and it really depends on a researcher, interpreter, to make it valuable, by translating the face value quotes, into something that really can change, the things for the business. So, in that sense, I believe it’s very valuable, but I think it’s very often misused, or misunderstood, or, I don’t know, just wasted. So, that’s what I think about the qualitative research. I love it, I enjoyed it, and I didn’t see many people around me using it for, in a way that it should be used. Now, you asked me about, I’ll tell you about the ethnographic research, but before ethnographic research, I’ll tell you something else. So, when I was at Koch, we used to have this thing, I forgot how it was called, but it was basically, once per quarter, or two times per year, whatever the frequency was. We were supposed, we, marketeers from the ivory tower, we were supposed to go to the store to merchandise the point of sale, and shelves, and fridges, and all that. So, that was a mandatory thing for us. And I mean, it was, it would, in a way, it was a fun day out of office, you go with a bunch of people you are working with, you go there, you make jokes, you have fun, you work for a couple of hours, and you go home. But, underneath all of that, I think it was a very important lesson. It was, if nothing else, it was a lesson in humility. It was a lesson that, whoever you are in a Koch system, you have to go and roll your sleeves, and wash the shelves, wash the fridge, restock, the shelves, the fridge, etc. Turn the bottles to face the label, to the front, etc. So, that had to be done. The other lesson, especially for me, who was always responsible for communication, advertising communication, any single touch point between the brand and the consumer, how much money Koch is spending into producing the in-store material, point-of-sale material, a huge amount, absolutely huge amount. And we do it, it looks good on a screen, PowerPoint, this and that, the bottler prints out, you come to the store, and whatever it is, a shelf talk, or this or that, it cannot fit the shelf. And then you are throwing money out of the window, but not by not being connected to the reality, because in our minds we have some illusion about how the stores look. And we don’t create stuff for the real life. I mean, this is extreme. Honestly, it doesn’t happen. But it’s a wonderful example. It’s so clear how the lack of awareness of the reality costs when you make something that doesn’t fit. And it costs, you bring it to the store owner, whatever, they throw it away, and it’s all lost. But not only that, then the most important part is looking at the people buying your product. And there is a lot of arrogance in marketing, and we all love to believe that we are the smartest and the best, and all of that. And that salespeople are people that go and execute, so it’s a different class. But I also read somewhere, and I keep saying this, I am just an overpaid salesperson, because my job is to sell, the same as the job of whatever sales rep is to sell, I’m selling just on a different level. So, meaning, you go to the store, you observe how people buy, how do they choose between different brands, and then you realize that actually this point of sale material does matter, and for the big part of my career, I thought it’s just an unnecessary nuance, it’s something that you have to do beside all these flashy advertising campaigns. But, again, someone recently told me, and I’m like, it’s the best quote someone ever told me, is that my job as a marketeer is to move someone’s hand six inches to the right, to grab my product. It all comes down to that. And, perhaps, the point of sale material that we all as super clever, creative, intellectual marketeers are always going down at, that is going to move someone’s hand six inches to the right. Yeah. So, anyhow, so that was not exactly ethnographic research, but it’s kind of. That’s perfect. And that was very important. So, we have about 10 minutes left, and I want to give you this space to address what I think you’re addressing, and certainly in your writing at your substack, and you set it up before that, you’ve said earlier that you’re classically trained, you have lots of respect for everything you learned at Coca-Cola, but you’re, we’re at a point now where you’re not sure if that’s enough, and your writing is calling everything into question a little bit, I mean, more than a little bit. You’re going right at a lot of the assumptions about what it means to build a brand. And so, I just wanted to open up the space and just say, yeah, how are you feeling about, what does it mean to build a brand now, and to what degree have the rules changed? Yeah. So, when you ask me where I’m coming from, and I said that I’m coming from a place of being lost and confusion, I think this is now a good example to repeat that. So, yes, I’m totally confused and lost, because on one hand, I truly believe in all these rules, laws of classical marketing. I still truly, deeply believe they are right. But at the same time, I’m not sure this is still relevant when you, in today’s world to build a brand. And in one of my articles, I wrote, it’s like, imagine, all the entire toolbox, that your marketing toolbox is still correct. It’s still right. And yes, you can debate and argue, brand versus performance, this versus that, these endless, pointless debates, you can still do that. But, in the meanwhile, the space, the entire world in which this toolbox exists, have changed. So you might have the right toolbox, but in a different world. And what I’m saying by a different, what I mean by a different world is not, I’m not one of these, oh, the everything is changing the fastest ever. And, people now can buy through my single click and this and that. I mean, these are just circumstances, yes, of course, people are behaving differently. But deep inside, they are still the same people. So, I don’t believe in this, the world has changed, but something else changed. And I was writing about this. Firstly, I was writing, what I said about, the one thing that makes me different is that I always go back to the business problem and I try to solve the business problem with the right tools. Now, the underlining assumption behind that is that marketing and brand creates value, by making people buy and buy more often, your brand versus other brands, at premium. Now, the financial conditions underneath that value chain have changed. Including that margin, and margin is not the margin that it used to be before. So, therefore, the brand marketing or the marketing does not work the same way it worked before. Because I was saying, I was giving example, of a story that I heard, someone was telling me that, and I’m talking about the FMCG, I’m not even talking about B2B, but FMCG, that companies stopped believing in brands. Basically, they are just launching things, riding this wave of innovation, curiosity, newness, and harvesting, harnessing, harvesting, the impulse to try something and to buy something new. And when that impulse stop, I mean, when that product stops being new, they launch something else. So, the companies, because of the P&L, not because of anything else, the margin system does not work. So, they don’t believe in a long-term brand building, they believe in rotation of brands. That will create profit fast, and then they will just launch something else, I guess, because the cost of entry, the cost of production, the cost of innovation, all became very low. And that’s the better way of creating margin, than investing in a single brand long-term. So, I’m just saying, and I don’t understand enough of it, but I’m just saying, the entire financial conditions of the value chain have changed, and that requires a different thinking about the brand. So, that’s one thing. Wait, I want to... We’re very near end of time, and I want to ask one final question with the two minutes that we have, which is one of my favorite ones to ask, which is, what do you love about the work? Where is the joy in it for you? Okay, I need to tell you one more story. So, when I was at Koch, and now the World Cup is coming, World Cup is coming to the US, so it’s a relevant story. I used to be responsible a couple of times for leading the trophy tour, which is an experiential event that Coca-Cola has with FIFA, where they are, or where Koch is taking the trophy, around the world and making it accessible to people to come and see. Now, I’m not a soccer, football fan, so I was never able to really relate to that passion, and I was like, okay, fine, trophy tour, great, good, let’s do it. It costs a lot of money, I thought it was a waste, but anyhow, you have to do it. So, I was doing this, I was leading that event, and then, when you are organizer, it starts very early in the morning, so, one day, around six o’clock, you come there, and you’re thinking, oh, my God, it’s snowing, it’s cold, who is crazy enough to come under this weather, to come to the event that we paid so much money for? And then, and then the event started, and people started flooding in, and not only flood, people flooding in, but what I experienced in this moment changed my perspective forever, because you see people’s faces, and you see people’s faces change, you see the transformation, you see the smile, you see the delight, you see the energy, you see, making their dream come true. And I love seeing the brand create value for people, making something that will change them, that will turn them for better, to give them something, whichever way that is, whether it’s experiential, whether it’s idea, whether it’s a TV spot, whatever that is, I love the moment of brand touching people and creating something good. That’s beautiful. I want to thank you so much. It was a pleasure sort of meeting you here and diving into this conversation with you. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Peter. It was a pleasure. Thank you for wonderful questions. 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]