Gideon Lichfield on Fairness & Storytelling

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]

Amy Daroukakis on Difference & Signal

Amy Daroukakis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/amydaroukakis/] is co-founder of Culture Connectors [https://thecultureconnectors.com/], a global cultural intelligence collective linking brands to 100+ locally embedded experts. Over 20 years across 60+ countries, she has built strategy for Google, LVMH, Airbnb, and Unilever. Her Trend Galaxy Framework challenges the industry’s habit of mistaking ten cities for the world. She helped the Young V&A win Museum of the Year in 2024, and has spoken at Cannes Lions. She splits her time between Brighton, Athens, and Berlin. So I start all of these conversations with the same question. I use this in my work too. It’s a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story — it’s such a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But it’s really big. So I over-explain it the way I’m doing right now before I ask it. I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? It’s such a great question. And actually, I saw the conversation you did with Katie Dreke and loved it. So practically — I come from Vancouver, Canada. But I come from a father who was an immigrant who fell in love with what Vancouver was and literally jumped ship and ate pie for too long. Because that was what he could point to until some Greek guys in the kitchen were like, do you want anything else? I think that’s the roots of my roots, because working hard was indoctrinated young. I started working young within the realm of a restaurant. And it’s still the roots of the roots today because the reason I can talk to anyone and dive into a conversation was from waitressing. From growing up and being able to read a table, anticipate a need, bridge a conversation, help with a lull. All of that stuff came from waitressing. So that came from working with my father. Not to say that this was a joyous experience — I got fired as many times as I quit. But I can tell people, and I actually look for people who have worked in service. There’s a different level of humanity for people who have had to serve others. And you can tell those who cannot. I’ve ended friendships in a cab once where someone talked to the taxi driver the wrong way. Even in a restaurant, I’ve stopped a friendship. It becomes a real validator of the type of human someone is by how they treat someone else. So I guess I come from service. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Can you tell us a story about the restaurant where you started — your first job? So I talked about this initially when I launched Cultural Connectors, because my father was a trapped creative in the realms of the classic Greek restaurant. And that’s what you do as an immigrant, right? You land in things that are known. He landed into that. But he never just served souvlaki. He started tapas in the 90s — he had this Greek dim sum menu where you would pick out different tapas. But people were like, what the hell is this? They would walk out. Or he started whole wheat pizza in the 80s and thought it was the best pizza. So there was always an entrepreneurial edge to this restaurant. It was always served up differently. Experimental. Different. And I saw this trapped artistic creative within the realms of sameness. I realized in this heightened dizzy when building something at 4 a.m. — how your brain is at its best and worst — that he had given me all the tools to do different, but I had chosen same and started to work away from that. And what do you mean when you say the different and the same? What were you pointing at? So I started this thing called Cultural Connectors. In our industry, there’s a sameness and homogeny that’s always been really sold and really sought after. And it tends to be very global north in perspective. There’s a homogeny that comes when cars look the same and hotels look the same and voices look the same. So I did a love letter ask globally and 68 countries responded. And then there are 55 human truth specialists — in grief, loneliness, rest. We’re inside ingredients, and everyone is paid the same postcode rates. It’s community as much as commerce. And our industry hasn’t always been known for that. So the sameness comes from just getting really tired of hearing things like, this is great for your portfolio, or, well, they’re based in this country, so we should pay that rate. Challenging systems. And my father did that too in his own way, but in a Greek restaurant. That’s awesome. And I’m so excited to talk more about your work. Before we get to the adult professional stuff, I’d love to ask — do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be, young Amy as a waitress? What did you want to be when you grew up? Oh, my gosh. I really wanted to design drag queen clothing. I was just obsessed. I would sketch and draw. And I loved Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I’m now 46, so that was that moment in time when there was this immense creativity. I loved fashion design, all of those things of expression. I remember making hats, designing shirt colors. Just playfulness. But then I grew up with a very traditional father. If I had said, hey, I want to go to fashion school, he wouldn’t have supported it. But I went for fashion business. And that was supported. Yeah. So catch us up — where are you now? Tell us a little bit more about the work that you do. So I’m calling in from Brighton. Postcodes matter in this work because I live between Brighton, Berlin, and Athens. And it gives me this beautiful triangle. Brighton — I live right across from a nude beach. So I can’t take anything too seriously in terms of work. There’s a joyousness right now of how many naked people are out in May. But Greece matters because it’s the home of where my aunt now lives, in the house that was my grandmother’s. So I don’t talk about flying cars, because that contextually isn’t the edge of everyone’s conversation in a Greek home. Or in any home, to be honest. AI is not the lifeblood of every dinner conversation. And I think we need that realisticness — the importance of that. And then Germany is my husband. So I like to see him. He works for one of Germany’s largest cruise companies, so I’ve gotten to go on all these German cruises, randomly. So when I get asked by a German client, I’m like, I’ve been with 10,000 Germans — I know Germany better than you do. It peaks. All of this — the thorough thread and the red thread — is one foot in and one foot out. Acknowledging that. Knowing the limitations. I’m not the best expert for Germany, but I know somebody. I think you should always speak to lived experience. Mine is just a little more multicolored. Multi-postcode at the same time. I have a question — I want to ask about the origins of your cultural connection. But first, I want a little more information about the tradition of nude bathing in... oh my gosh. Do not think this is the norm and societal norm of the UK. There is still a layer of decorum. But in this one pocket that happens to live right outside my window, there’s this freedom. And the fact that I can see an ass pretty much at all temperatures of the year — I just think it’s really something that roots you in humanity. I once had this really important presenting call, and I heard all this noise. I couldn’t show anyone, but I said, I just have to stop and tell you — there are about a thousand people on bikes. They’re all naked in front of my yard. It adds laughter to the elements. And I think we can get so deep in our heads that — I don’t know, it’s my view of nature. It’s like touching grass, but in a form of nudeness that I really appreciate. Yeah, that’s remarkable. It must be quite something to preserve this space for people to do that. Everybody’s in agreement that this is... Yes, there’s an agreement to it. It’s one of those quirks of culture — these microcultures that live within, with written rules. There’s an organic border where people start to wear clothing. And sometimes another favorite hobby — this is the worst — I’ll see more conservative families start to go on the beach, and the kids are running to the ocean. And then there’ll be this turn back. And it’s this moment where you see the families retreating. So what’s the story of Cultural Connectors? Where did it come out of? What’s the origin story of the work you’re doing now and the network you’ve built? So I’d been described as having played outside for 20 years — two decades outside. I’d worked across 25 categories and been to 60-plus countries, but only in the form of Baskin Robbins. There’s only so much of a flavor you can get. The best example I can give: I was in Lisbon with a friend and she said, I’m going to take you to my favorite restaurant, but you can never tell anyone we’re going. Nobody can know where this is — we have to keep it local. Fair enough. And on that day, there were so many men with children taking them out for ice cream. They were out for dinner. It was this magical scene. And if I had just parachuted in without knowing anything about cultural identity, I would have thought, oh my God, the progressiveness of Portuguese culture, that men are so involved in children’s lives. It turned out it was Father’s Day. So this very special moment was just a moment. And that’s why we have to be careful with our cultural assumptions — parachuting into a market and saying, well, this is what it is, you start to lose the edge. So I’ve looked for voices in each of those markets that represent their local reality. Not just by country — though country is important because you start to learn what it means. Mapala, based in the Philippines, talked about the evolving identity with music and how a Filipino band was at Coachella for the first time. This is a musical culture, but for the longest time it’s always been in English. So what does that mean for change? You don’t learn these stories until you actually have a conversation. But just as important: categories. An expert in loneliness completely shifted a project I was working on — the future of work for 2030. If you’re thinking about Gen Z and workforce, what are the interconnection points you need to build in for a UX experience of onboarding? Where are the places of safety where we don’t necessarily have those moments? These experts — that’s why the insight ingredients are so important. When we were onboarding 25 people in the first year — it’s a new class every year, but some remain — there was this amazing woman, Ludo from Botswana, and she said, I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here because we move so slow. We’re a much slower culture. And the entire Zoom group globally went, oh my God, you’re supposed to be here. We all want to move slower. So where we’re getting lessons from — there are places in the world we haven’t necessarily looked for insight that are gold mines of imagination and rethinking. And the joyous part: I have a podcast too, where I interview them. I’ve done 53 now, which is insane. But it’s also the way I can do a culture casting for a client — similar to model casting. Here’s their thinking within the sensory signals. I have this framework called the Trend Galaxy — shooting stars, constellations, new planets, and unexplored universe — and each has a business implication. One’s for behavior change, one for campaigns, one for new product development. I need to test and see how they think, because the thinking part is so important. And then I send the podcast with the culture casting: forget the CV, I want you to see how they look on a project. That’s what I’ve been doing for a year and a half. Nice, congratulations. What’s an example of the kind of question that clients come to you with? One we worked with was an entertainment brand that had hired a UK-centric agency. And the client said, you won. But we do think you’re going to have homogeny in how you put messaging out, and we’re worried about sameness. So they came to us and we did a 10-market piece across the senses. What’s the journey from somebody in Italy compared to Finland when unlocking what could seed their creative concepts and campaigns? One amazing thing that came up from Italy was the WhatsApp message — because that’s a lifeblood of communication. How one person gets invited to a movie and then six show up but only three seats were booked. So they could use that as a seed. Or I asked everyone: what’s the film genre of your market right now? And for Finland, it was dark. Very dark. All the things you’d expect of Scandi. But then they could speak to that in a campaign — it’s dark outside, we’ll come in for darkness too. You move away from popcorn. Not everyone has the same journey to how they spend time together. That was one of the projects we worked on. And when did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing? This one is a work in progress. Building out a network, selling yourself — I describe it as there’s a me and a we element. I know how to sell me, for the most part. The we is a whole new journey stage, because I’m by no means an agency. Agency energy is a different type of body and being. The me was the start, but it got boring. I still like it, but it’s been nicer to play with other people. The first gig I ever did was an amazing thing — I got to travel the world for Target, meeting in secret rooms every three months and bringing back what we’d found. This was pre-Pinterest. Pre online trend tools. You still had to go out in the world. And the point of difference, the reason our team was special: when others would go to a city, they’d get a recce budget, stay in the great hotel, go to the top restaurants. A very company-wide experience of traveling to find cool-hunting, however you want to call it. But I would stay with my friend’s friend in Sydney — pre-Airbnb — take local transportation. And on a bus there was this graffiti-type pattern. They’d taken what people do on buses and made it a fabric. I took pictures of it and it became sheets. I always check things like that. Take the back alley. I will sometimes still stay at a hostel — you may question my life choices on that one. I mean, I still stay at Lux sometimes. But when it’s more uncomfortable, the insights are richer. There was somebody whose name was Seven, and he asked people to put things in Petri dishes — something that represented their place in the world. And this woman scraped off a subway handle and put it in. She goes, I live in LA, I only touch my things — and how weird it is to be in a place where everyone touches the same things. I live in an everyone-touches-the-same-things world. Those insights land differently in storytelling to a client because it’s not just saying, my Four Seasons was amazing. It’s: at the hostel, we talked about fill-in-the-blank. You have the weird conversations with the woman in her 80s traveling for the first time. Or I woke up one time to a room filled with 15 people for a bachelorette party. I need better life choices. It’s deeply uncomfortable work. But it’s fun. I’m curious about — and you said it yourself — that you’ve been at this for a very long time, so much that it feels, as you said, that we’ve come full circle. We’re back in this place of appreciating the analog and the tangible and the fringe. And I’m wondering: what are your reflections on how the practice of cultural intelligence — or whatever you call it — has changed? And how do you describe where we are now? I think we’re at an apex. A real tipping point. And I deeply worry about the skill set of people just coming into this work. I can give you an example — I was doing a breakfast club in Berlin that brings people together, and someone said: I just hired a junior recently and she brought back everything with AI. And he goes, I could do that myself. I hired her for her opinion. The her-ness was missing. That cultural exploration work is the her. It’s the you. And that muscle takes longer to build. Let me give you a peek at something I’m going to write. I’m going to write about in-real-life erotica. Because I’ve just had four magical days where erotica showed up in different ways. I went to the Chelsea Flower Show and there was this long line for this Garden of Eden. It turned out it was sponsored by a sex toy company — and it won the gold medal. The sex industry is something like six times smaller than the garden sector in the UK. So that flip was amazing. I had never seen anything like it in that space. Then I went to a sensory event on Friday by this amazing woman called Sarah Heinemann. She brought in a speaker who made us look at our hands and said: the cup of your hand is your bowl, the top of your hand is your plate, and your fingers are your forks. She designs dinner sensory experiences, sensual experiences using your hands. And she walked us through a five-course meal. Flipping amazing. And then Dr. Bridget spoke at Futurist Friends on Friday and talked about slime and bubbles. Slime was representative of sex, of not touching each other enough. All the elements, the semiotics of what slime means in culture. See how I don’t know where any of this is going to live yet. It’s the gathering. It’s the signal hunting. The joy of playing outside without a sense that it has to be a contained idea. And I worry about this industry needing to tie bows on everything — like, this is the latest trend. I’m not going to say this means we’re heading toward a more erotic cultural landscape when people are not actually having sex. The signal doesn’t necessarily match, but it will linger. Those lingered in my mind specifically, and I know they’ll end up somewhere in a report or a conversation with a team at some point. If you’re only looking at this from a virtual world, it’s a bit hollow. Because I can’t tell you — the gasps in that room when slime was introduced told me more about how achingly we crave connection than the slime itself. The people literally licking their fingers like they thought it was food, because they craved intimacy. You did that in person. That’s the analog part. And so what’s the ability you’re pointing at — this thing the story came out of? This concern about the state of the industry and young people coming in? How would you describe what you’re doing when you’re having all these experiences and holding them open? What are you doing? I call it getting lost on purpose. It’s not just wandering aimlessly, because you have to put yourself in the right rooms. There is strategy for where you place yourself — being selective about going out of the boxes and bubbles you’re already in. So I try to break my own algorithm, either through bringing speakers together or holding breakfast clubs. I love the term brain dance because it’s when the neurons light up. It’s a muscle. And I’m worried about that — a lot of people are starting to just look at the TikTok of vacation. I can see it. I can see it in media. There’s a laziness to just looking in one form and one space for insight. I’ll call it what it is. This is a theme, just listening to you talk. But you’ve talked about working against sameness, about breaking the algorithm. Can you say more about what you mean when you say breaking the algorithm? And how do you stay away from sameness? I identify with that a lot. I recognize in myself that sometimes if I find myself spending time with things that feel too common or popular or big, I have some sort of an aversion. There’s some piece of me that’s trying to navigate in the same way you’re describing. I don’t think I’m anywhere near as disciplined as you. So what does it mean to break the algorithm? And how do you avoid sameness? Well, with full gratitude for Cultural Connectors specifically — I can give you an example. I was in Bangkok for the wedding of Tregg from UAE. An Indian wedding in Bangkok. In itself, that was a view into luxury. Forget the traditional wedding — it was the most glorious thing I’d ever attended. Top 10 of my life. Did it change perception? There was a moment in the elevator where I was talking to one of the guests and I went, are you here for the wedding? And they looked me up and down and said, are you? And it was this minutia of judgment — like, who is she? And I was like, oh my god. That’s what it felt like to be othered as a white woman. How many times in my lifetime has that ever happened to me? Almost never. So to just have even the tiniest glance into what it feels like to be judged like that — I was like, this is amazing. So that’s an algorithm burst. A bubble burst. I felt that judgment that so many cultures feel — the ripple beneath of who are you, where do you belong? I had never experienced that before. And it came from just placing myself in a different algorithm — of wedding. But in that experience too, there was a huge lineup in Chinatown for gold. I’d never seen anything like it — on a Sunday, massive lines. So I asked Romanthea, our Thailand voice: is this unusual? It feels unusual. And she goes, this is very unusual. I looked in the news — it was the day that gold had indexed higher than ever. The peak of gold sales. So then I put it in the WhatsApp group for Cultural Connectors, and eight people weighed in and talked about what gold means in their culture. It was escapism. Gifting. Ritual. Being in close proximity to so many different opinions made me go, oh my god — it’s not just about wealth creation. It’s not just about identity. It’s also about escape. Safety for some women in some cultures. The fact that you save away a little bit for when you’re buying groceries — and what does that mean? So there’s an activeness to joyfully and respectfully not just using it as consumable — because then you’re just running a buffet of one. Being in spaces where I go, well, who else wants some cake? It’s a shared experience. I only get a ticket to my own brain. You’ve got to share the Ferris wheel. I’m telling you, it’s so much fun in here. Wait, I feel like there was a mixed metaphor somewhere in there. It went from my brain and then there was a Ferris wheel... Oh — I meant that it’s so much fun to play. I get such stimulation that if I could give Ferris wheel tickets, I’m telling you, it’s a ride you want to go on. But because we can’t, it’s better to do this out in the open with other people and give them the experience too. Beautiful. How do you describe the people, the members of your network? How do you discover them? What are you looking for? How do you describe them to clients? What’s the role they play? Locally nuanced understanding is core. Can you speak to a truth that matches your postcode or your identity? That’s really important. The ability to be a community member first, commerce second — those are really important. Right now, 48 people are sending postcards to each other. We’ve done a pen pal exchange. Because if we’re going to talk about analog, let’s do it. Once a month, we come together, and for the April session, each person picked a color and then unpacked their culture or category through that color. These are internal groupings of sharing. There was this amazing garbage bag share from Taiwan — she chose hot pink. In Taiwan, you pay for utility services through buying the garbage bag. I wouldn’t have known that. And Finland for blue: we have Blue Thursday instead of Black Friday, and it’s about supporting waterways. I wouldn’t have known that either. So it gives them an opportunity not only to learn from each other, but to even learn from their own knowledge. The podcast itself is — I don’t spell this out loud because I don’t think it’s fair — but it’s my testing ground. If someone can speak beyond the category they’ve written about, they’ve got it. Deep curiosity. And the majority have collectively worked with every Fortune 50 in the world. But new talent like Mustafa, who just joined from Somalia — he’s new in the game, but he’s got real sharpness. And Ethiopia Blend is also an amazing music producer. At first she said, well, I’m not a trend person. Guess what? She has all the muscle. The Trend Galaxy framework just enabled her to contain her thinking. But how they unweave and unpack stories — I’m deeply dazzled. And then there are occasions where I go, I don’t know. That’s part of curating. And why it’s important for this to be a living black book — there are too many agencies that say, we have over 100 people in our network, and then when you really dig down, they’ve never worked with them. So it’s important to be able to say: have you had enough time on the Ferris wheel? Do we hand it over to somebody else? I’m going to instigate something for next year where it’s a two-year max sitting, and then there’s a whole refreshment of new voices. That’s how we shift the industry forward. It can’t be a closed society. That’s really important. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? Peter, I could cry, I love this work so much. I’ve never, ever gone to a grocery store and just bought anything. I look at behavior in the store. I look at the new end aisle. I look at new flavor profiles. I look at what somebody’s bought, I ask the cashier what people are buying, I look at shifting behavior, I look at what’s missing. To have places where this can go is so important. I don’t just ride on a bus — I listen to every conversation. I’m awful. Work enables a container for deep curiosity to live in. And working across 25 sectors means I’ve gotten to shape a brand new neighborhood that needed a completely new identity. I worked on a museum moving into a new space and had to be honest with them that their legacy wasn’t going to just shift — they had to become a new neighbor in that particular instance too. Or the cultural zeitgeist of AI: for a year I brought in porn and crime signals because those are the earliest adopters, and that’s so much more interesting when talking to AI technologists who only look at it from a technical angle. To be like, okay, well September we’re talking about sperm. To wake people up. Or a favorite: understanding the future of true crime for a streamer. What is the new lexicon and identity around murder and victimhood? How far can we go and how much responsibility do we have for bringing in our armchair sleuths? Sometimes it’s ice cream flavors. It’s always wildly different. Which means I have to look endlessly — but that’s a hobby. The problem is there’s no off switch, and that’s the challenge. I watch terrible, terrible television. Law and Order, 90s crime, on repeat, just to stop my brain. There has to be a place of rest — probably a meditation app is healthier than murder — but the off switch is never totally off. I’m curious, returning to something you were talking about earlier. In these conversations I always like to give people an opportunity to explain or justify qualitative research — the insight or understanding that comes from the kind of work you do. What is the thing you’re delivering to the client, and what does it do for them that they wouldn’t have otherwise? Do you feel like what you’re doing is qualitative and fits into that world of nuance and qualitative research? I’m always advocating for: we should be talking face to face, and qualitative is the science of description — which you’ve talked about. I’m always trying to build the argument that we need more of that. I see what you’re doing in that way. But I’m wondering — do you identify with that tradition of qualitative and ethnographic? I can give you two examples. Once I was working with a luxury speaker company. I was in Mayfair doing a site visit to one of their premium stores, and there was literally their dream target market walking by as I was walking in. And he goes, one day I’d love to go in there. He did not feel like he belonged. And they were shocked — like, he is who we want. But the layers of their communication were off the mark. And that kind of story could give them some teeth, some meat on the bone, as to why they weren’t landing. Another example: I worked with a sneaker head community — people with massive collections of sneaker culture — and I did all these interviews to reframe their brand strategy. The core center point that became the unlock: they became a sneaker head the minute they opened a sneaker box. Because for so many, especially men — and it over-indexes with men — the commonality among the biggest collectors, the pure aficionados, was that at a core point of identity, they couldn’t afford the shoe. There’s a reclamation and a real pride in being the 40-year-old who has the shoes the 13-year-old version of themselves never could have gotten. Their family couldn’t afford it. So the insight: they became part of your community 25 years ago. Yeah. That’s amazing. Or once I worked with a massive streamer. And the last, hardest person to get in the interview room is always the most senior person in any company — it’ll always be your last interview. For this company, it was the chairman of the board. If you’ve ever seen The Morning Show, he was that guy — that level. I had interviewed his entire HR teams. I was working on an employee value proposition, reframing how they would attract people — specifically within the era of massive tech hiring — to work for them. So at the very end, he interviewed me. I’ve never seen that. This is now my gold standard of what a leader looks like. Because he knew I had interviewed his entire team, every multi-layer from the onboarding person to the benefits person. He’d come in to transform the company. And I could tell him at the end: guess what — you’ve done it. You’re on the road. This is where I saw it. This is where I heard it. This is where it still needs work. And I saw pride in this man. It was so amazing to be able to first be asked the right questions to unpack what he needed — and that’s our role. It’s the knowledge. But to be able to hear that it was working, and working in the layers he didn’t necessarily know about. Because I’m an outsider, there’s an honesty that comes from that. There’s an anonymity — I get to hear all the good and the bad, and I have absolutely no problem saying both. I’ve once had to tell a museum that the neighborhood they were moving into, they had never welcomed into their own neighborhood. And they were like — oh! From a cultural perspective, they just hadn’t. And so that’s our job: to bring in the honesty and the voice of others. That’s what’s so beautiful about qualitative research and storytelling — the red threads of many have felt this way and have never told you, because you don’t have a safe space for this particular thing to be said. Or you all feel this way but you’re not saying it out loud, so I’m going to say it for you. Yeah. That’s beautiful. We’ve got a little bit of time left and I want to talk about our shared experience. We met in person in Athens three weeks ago at the House of Beautiful Business World Forum. It was my first experience in Athens. It was my first experience at the House of Beautiful Business. It was lovely to meet you. I liked the afternoon refreshment with Zoe Scaman, who was there. What are your reflections on that whole experience? Joyous. Again, we’re talking about the grocery store and the bus. This is like Disneyland of brain thinking. I just kept gathering things that people were saying that really struck me. One was they were talking about how as a room we operate at 120%. Which is true. But what if you went down to 80? What would you welcome in if you weren’t trying to control and lead and do so much? I’m trying to lean more into the 80. I love that somebody said she’s trying to add more life into her life. I’m starting to do that more. Those are the lessons. But also the experiences. Because I hosted a dinner the day before it kicked off and 35 wonderful people came. It was with Monica Jang, our Cultural Connectors expert on loneliness. And on the very last day, on the rooftop where I saw you, I saw five people standing together and I thought, oh my gosh — yeah, we met at the dinner. To me, that’s a marker. Talk about the clichés of KPIs — that was success. They had met each other, found each other through the rest of it, and there they were standing together at the end. That was really special. And Zoe knows this, so it’s not a secret — she stayed with me for five days. I’ve known her for 12 years, but I know the kitchen and I know the dining room, meaning her content and the things she puts out in the world. I had never seen the graft of what it looks like to be a supreme sous chef. The practicing, the listening — because her talk was one of the most mentioned and most beloved from the experience. I cannot tell you how that transformed how I want to do speaking in the future. To see the Olympian nature of it — okay, that’s where you put in the hard work. Really honor that. That was an unexpected, transformational career highlight. But then also this really unexpected thing. Athens is home, but I don’t speak enough Greek. And there’s always been a layer of deep guilt. So much guilt for not speaking more Greek. Family layers of guilt. My aunt and I try — and sometimes I get defensive. I’ll say, would you like me to build an airport for 2050? Once I retire I’m really going to lean into Greek. But at the very end, Tim and Till said, okay, all the Greeks come up and dance. And again I wanted to cry. Because I thought, I’m not Greek, quote unquote. I’m not Greek enough to go up. And then I got over myself. I thought about it for this millisecond — how fast your brain moves with this stuff — and I was like: I live in the house that was my grandfather’s. My aunt lives in the house that was my grandmother’s. I cook with the lemon trees. I welcome like a flipping Greek. I cook like a Greek. I live in Greece. My last name is as Greek as you can get. I have a Grego. I have all the elements of a Greek, but language. And identity is hard. I went up and danced, and it was a reclamation. I say this because I’m not the only one who struggles with multi-identity — when you have parts of a culture but not all of it. I grew up in the Greek kitchen, but that Greek kitchen only taught me how to swear in Greek. My dad didn’t teach me how to be a good Greek citizen. I can swear like a sailor because of him, but that’s not enough. That was a healing part of the experience. And I want to put the baton to you — what was a really special moment for you? Oh man. I remember the culmination of the event, the final keynote in that beautiful theater. They just called everybody up and I remember seeing you ascend the stage and join the dance. My experience overall — what came to mind listening to you talk was that going to the House of Beautiful Business was, for me, an effort to try to belong. I don’t really do conferences. I’ve always been a little allergic to that. But it was a real moment of saying, these are absolutely my people and I want to go spend time with them. So for that reason it was significant to make a big trip like that. And then — I think we talked about this on that Sunday — I had a visit to the Agora and the Pnyx. I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and civic engagement and civics, and I was surprised at how moved I was by being there. Connecting with the origins of that practice of self-governance. That was really powerful. There was a philosopher, Christoph Koch, who I’m going to interview as well, and what he did to bring it to life for me was really powerful. So I returned to that as the thing I was most touched by. And it was amazing to meet you in person, to meet Zoe in person. Some of those keynotes were just really powerful — messages and ideas done beautifully. I felt really grateful to just be in the presence of very smart people trying to bring some coherence into this very strange time we’re in. I love that. There’s one — I wonder if this one struck with you. Do you remember the student, the young woman who came on stage to speak and then left? Oh my god. Heartbreaking. Peter, we’ve got to talk about this one. There was a youth delegation sitting on stage — about a hundred of them — and she was speaking, and she wasn’t speaking loud enough. There was this moment where she got a little jolted and she left, ran off stage. And we all went — oh, you know that moment. But that’s where it could have ended. That’s where most of the time it ends. But half an hour later — and the back story came later — there were a lot of professionals in the back, people who had spoken many many times, and they ran and got her. They talked to her. They told her about all the experiences they’d had, the mess-ups. And when she came back: no shoes, hair down, had taken off the heels. Very much herself. I cannot tell you — and I heard this enough times from others — there was a deep healing for all the second chances that we didn’t always get. The recognition of how vital it was. That experience could have debilitated her entire speaking career. But it elevated her. She will be an amazing speaker because of that experience. I’m moved just recalling it. She really just had a full panic in the moment she was meant to be delivering. Stopped and ran backstage. And I felt like everybody had the same instinct — oh no, we’ve got to help. And they really did rally around her and made sure she had another chance. She came out and she delivered. And the fact that there were more than a couple of dozen young people on stage the whole time was also a real signal — how smart and how sensitive the design of that whole experience was. So touching. Deeply human. And the unlock — where it starts to unpack things. I once had a boss who told me I was a terrible writer. He was specifically talking about package design writing — like, these potatoes were kissed by grandma, whipped and golden — and I can’t do that. But he cloaked it in writing. And I didn’t write for five years. Writing has since transformed my whole life. So if I hadn’t gotten over it — but it took years to give myself that second chance. Though ultimately I gave it to myself. I think there was something in that student’s moment where the beauty of these experiences is they create shared space for contemplation. New neurons and brain pathways open up. And I know what you do, Peter. I don’t know what most people who went to that conference do. And I think that’s pretty great. It’s true. That’s awesome. Well, Amy — we’ve run to the end of the hour. Thank you so much. It was wonderful to spend time with you, and this has been so much fun getting to know you and your work better. Thank you so much. With pleasure, Peter. Always. 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]

Christoph Quarch on Aliveness & Cosmos

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