Michael Anton Dila on Conversation & Governance

Kuvaus

Michael Anton Dila [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeldila/] is the Director of the Policy Futures Lab at Americans for Responsible Innovation [https://ari.us/]. He is a Partner at Torch Partnership, where he shapes strategic conversations that help organizations confront their “wicked problems,” and an advisor to Helpful Places. Previously he was Director of Oslo for AI, and a director at the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Innovation Network. I start all the conversations that I do with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s also why I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.What a great question. Having just recently made a plan to go to Romania at the end of September, where my father’s family are from, that sense of fromness is probably readily to my mind. I’ve always identified with my Romanian heritage, although I frankly do not really know much about it, more strongly than with my mother’s heritage, which is more confused and has a number of different parts and pieces, but in ways that are probably not fair to my mother, in all honesty. On the other hand, the thing that springs to mind, which again is not without its contentiousness among those near and dear, is that often when people ask where I’m from, the first thing I say is Chicago. Now, I was born in Chicago. I lived there all of six months, but I identify as being from there, and I identify always first as being an American, in spite of the fact that at this point, as I close in on 63 years in the fall, I have lived far more of my life in Canada than in the US, and I am also a Canadian citizen. But I always say first that I’m an American. So those are only some of the things that we think of, or that I think about, when we think about where we’re from. Other thing, I’m just going to say for fun and s***s and giggles, because I know this connects us in some way: I’m going to say that I’m from planet conversation, so we can dig into what that might mean. I think I am from there too. I’m really curious, from your position in Canada, what does it mean to be American? How do you think about that, if I dare ask that question? Well, it’s certainly not something that stands still, particularly these days. I will say that I know there are people who do say this. I’ve never said that I’m ashamed to be an American. I’ve never felt that. I have certainly felt like identifying as an American is not always an easy thing. It’s not always to identify with something that I think of as uniformly and unquestionably good — to the contrary, and more and more so. I think that’s just, to me, being part of an educated, ethical and conscientious person, to acknowledge that the place we call America, the country we call America, the way we think about what that country is and its history, has, as certain poets have said, a long and terrible history of violence, among other things. And yet I’m also mindful that we have a constitution that enshrines the idea of pursuing happiness as a central civic good, which I think is probably not a bad place to start. It’s certainly not sufficient and not a good place to end, but there’s that. I think the thing, interestingly enough, about thinking about being an American from the perspective of Canada and living as a Canadian: there’s a long history of Canadians thinking that they’re different from Americans, which certainly they are in important respects, and in many times that they’re better than Americans in certain kinds of ways. And there are certainly merits to that point of view, and reasons for that point of view. On the other hand, Canada also has an unfortunate and long history attached to colonialism, the legacy of which is still very much a real thing, the way the legacy of colonialism remains a present thing in all of the places in which it operated. And so I guess where that lands me up is, no matter where one is, we’ve still got a lot of work to do. So you indicated you grew up and you were born in Chicago. Where did you do your growing up? Where was childhood? So childhood and home. When I think of, well, where did I grow up? I used to identify home and where I grew up as the same. When I was four and a bit, we moved to Montreal from California. My dad had been in the navy during Vietnam, and when he got out we moved to Montreal, and that’s where I grew up, which was an incredibly lucky place to grow up. An amazing city. Many, many things that I think of as core to my identity certainly come from having grown up in Montreal. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? What you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, questions like this trigger very specific memories for me. So as a teenager, a young teenager — maybe I was 13, maybe I was still 12 — it was the absolute zenith of the fame of Jacques Cousteau. And we had some family friends who had a couple of sons, one of whom was considerably older than me. This family also had a VCR, which at the time was very unusual. And the family recorded the Jacques Cousteau National Geographic specials, and so I would go over there to watch with this guy Andrew. And at the time I wanted to be, when I grew up, an oceanographer, and more than that, a shark specialist. And Andrew, who I say was probably, I don’t know, five, six years older, also wanted to be an oceanographer. I don’t remember if he had a specific intention, or as specific an intention. But then a couple of years later some prick named Steven Spielberg made a movie called Jaws and ruined everything. And so I would likely be an oceanographer, and a very famous one at that. Famous, successful, celebrated, all these things. Maybe already have a mind of their own. But for Steven Spielberg. So thank you very much, Mr. Spielberg. Yeah, thank you. And Peter Benchley, for writing the book. Yeah. But the thing that I really like about the story, and telling the story, is Andrew Bowen, the guy who I used to watch these videos with, did indeed go on to become an oceanographer, and worked and works his entire career at the Woods Hole Institution. Has, as an engineer, helped design the submersibles that went down to the Titanic, among many other things. And has had many, all of the experiences I at one time dreamed of having. I cannot imagine that life. But I feel very cool. It feels cool that he does, and that I have some connection with that. Yeah. That would make that alternate timeline, or the loss of that alternate timeline, really palpable — that the person you were there watching it with actually arrived. Yeah. And I think there are ways in which that pattern — I was going to say that theme, not exactly that theme, but that pattern — has shown up way more than once in my life. I wanted later in my teenage years, young post-secondary school years, to be an actor, or involved in theater and film. And again, I have many friends from those days who did in fact end up having careers doing that. Certainly not in the case of oceanography, but for sure in the case of theater and film and that experience. I do think that there are things that I learned on my way that have definitely stayed with me and are part of my personal and professional life. So catch us up. Where are you now, and what’s the work that you’re doing? Well, because people are just listening to our voices, I expect they don’t have the benefit of seeing behind me the illustration of the Capitol building, which is fitting, because I’m sitting in an office in Washington, DC. In fact, our office is directly across the street from the White House. And I started work here in February at an organization called Americans for Responsible Innovation, and was led here on a couple of different paths. But I had begun to be actively interested and involved in questions about the governance of technology, particularly pertaining to AI, over the last four or five years, and was following that path. I wasn’t sure where it would end up, but it ended up here, at an organization that is doing policy advocacy around emerging technology, and AI is certainly the focus. And what we are trying to do here is generate ideas, frameworks and blueprints for what we think both the content and the institutional forms of governance of AI ought to look like. So, heady stuff. I play very much a stewarding role, in that I work within our policy department, and part of my role here is to help all of those smart people become masters at their work. So I am very much engaged in helping give them tools that they don’t have that might be useful in doing their work — tools from other places, other than traditional policy and think-tanky, more academic sources. And so I’ve been doing that almost seven-ish months. Lots and lots more to do. It’s a pretty exciting space to be a part of. It could be both exciting and frustrating, but I was going to say at times boring, in the sense that although there’s a lot of conversation, as anybody knows, about this, there isn’t as much movement in the space, particularly in the US and North America, on actually creating new kinds of regulation, and even or especially new kinds of institutional homes and structures that might be adequate to the work that I think is ahead of us. I guess there are two things bouncing around in my head, which is always the case. The first is, I want to ask you where’s the best place to start to try to make this conversation about AI governance tangible or real. What’s the doorway in, to understand what you’re actually trying to do and what the solution might look like? I’m super attracted to and really feel the need for new institutions and new governance stuff, but I also don’t really know what I’m talking about. Do you know what I mean? So I’m wondering, what are we talking about when we talk about this? So this is one of the first-order difficulties that we face, all of us, in thinking about the problems that we’re sitting within, which is that none of us know exactly what we’re talking about, including and no less the people who build these technologies. And part of that is because the way in which many of these technologies work has a kind of fundamental inscrutability about it, and that may or may not be a permanent condition. It certainly seems to be at the moment not an intractable condition of the current technology. But fundamentally, when we’re talking about AI — mystified as the term can be — we are talking mostly about kinds of software. And one way of thinking about the difference between AI as a kind of software and the software we’re used to thinking about is that the software you’re used to thinking about — word processors, chat, texting programs, creative programs to manipulate images with, even this kind of video-audio communication platform that we’re using — all of those kinds of software are built to do a particular set of things. And our approach to doing that is to define what those set things are, and then to implement the means by which to do them. The kinds of artificial intelligence technologies that we talk about when we talk about AI generally are radically different, in that they are not programmed to do a set of particular things, certainly not the particular things that we actually have ended up using them to do or rely on them to do. They generate that capability as we ask them to. And I say “as we ask them to” — this anthropomorphizing language, which I think has a certain kind of inevitability to it, for a bunch of reasons based on the ways in which we’ve started to interact with these kinds of programs. So there’s a big problem: knowing what to make of these things is itself a difficult problem. Another thing is different people, including those involved in building these technologies, want different things or hope for different things from the development of the capability, or believe different things are possible, even inevitable. So it certainly has turned out to be true — and this is the explosion and the change that we’ve all been living through, for the last five years certainly, but for most of us the world, as far as what we’re talking about, really has changed most profoundly over the last five years — and we were used to doing two things quite naturally, as users of mobile phone technology and the internet. One was a text chat. This had long since become a commonplace. There’s probably nobody who uses devices, computers or mobile technologies that hasn’t had that experience. And what we are mostly used to is that we are chatting with one or more other people. So that had become an experience and a paradigm for interaction with others that was super familiar. And on the other hand, search. We have now long since been able to search for all kinds of things. And the point long since made, that we made one of the big search engines a verb — to google something — just signaling a way in which it had become naturalized in not only our vocabulary but our behavior. So when ChatGPT was given a chat interface back in 2022, in an unexpected way we were all ready. We were all ready for something, didn’t know that we were ready. And even though it was weird at first, what’s astounding are really two things. One, how quickly it ceased to be weird — although arguably there are ways in which it continues to be weird. But the other thing is, even or especially if you understand that these are statistical machines that are absolutely not doing what you think they’re doing, they are absolutely not doing what you ask them to do, and yet not only do they seem to be doing it, they seem to be doing it in a way that is not only lucid and fluent but which recognizes us. Not only as the person who asked the question or started that conversation, but in some cases recognizing us — or we feel like they’ve recognized us — in a very personal way. And I’ll give you an example that came into my awareness just last week, having dinner with a friend who was telling me that he had been using one of the big AI platforms to build a tool to help him understand his father’s cancer. He has built it to take in health information that they’re receiving on a regular basis, make sense of that, and so on, and then has set up a tool both to help him understand the journey that they’re on and also as the point of contact for the family on understanding what they’re working through. And he told me that he had been involved in some interactions with this tool, and he’d been just very emotional that day, because it’s a very, very threatening illness. And in a very unconscious act of emotion, he found himself typing into the interface, “I loved my dad.” And he showed me a screenshot of the response, and it was so thoughtful and so sensitive, and the words that suggest themselves are caring and compassionate. Now, in some very real way, he was experiencing care and compassion from a thing that is neither caring nor compassionate, because it’s not capable of that. And yet, what does that mean? Because here we are having this experience. And what’s the difference between feeling something to be true — and don’t we experience this anyway? Don’t we experience compassion in interactions with other people who don’t really know us, in a care situation? Nursing staff, other caregivers might express this stuff in a way — maybe they feel it in an authentic emotional way, perhaps, and many do, I suspect, but also they’re being professionals. They’re doing things in the path of being professional, and even if they’re only being professionals, that doesn’t stop us from feeling cared for. So I’m just using that as a way of talking about the fact that we’re living inside of a very powerful but also very confusing kind of experience. And what to make of that? What do we want to make of that? What do we want out of these things? And I’m very long-winded about what are the things that we’re trying to do. Broadly speaking, at the most nebulous level, we, like many, are concerned that these systems, through intentional or more than likely unintentional abuse, harm people in some way or some set of ways that we would like to prevent, clearly. And on the other hand, we want the advantage of what these technologies have to offer, which seems to be a rather broad set of things. And I think the example I used, which I didn’t choose for this reason but it’s handy for this, illustrates the stakes involved, because people’s deepest feelings in some cases are involved. And we have examples of the ways in which people — though often vulnerable people, in a variety of ways — have made mistakes or been confused about what they were interacting with, and tragic consequences followed. Yeah. That story is, like you say, indicative of everything. And my sense of things — I think we talked about this last time — is that in some way we’ve been thrust into this new reality where we have this kind of, I call it a strange companion, where this intelligence is there for us. It did arrive via chat, as I understand it, almost by accident. I think that was meant to be a kind of internal backdoor kind of interface. And so we’ve ended up in this strange place where we’re in conversation with this strange companion. A friend of mine calls it this alien intelligence. And it’s very good at — I take a lot of my cues from Dave and Helen Edwards of the Artificiality Institute, and they talk about the intimacy economy. Because it comes in the form of a chat, and because it performs better the more it knows about you, we’re in this intimacy economy where it really invites a kind of a caring. It wants more information from us. So this is a long-winded effort to segue back into some of your earlier thinking, which seems to be foundational. I think we share this fascination around what a conversation is, and also your work on System 3. Because I think so many of the thinkers, when they think about AI, they’re really talking about — there is this new intelligence that’s here, we’re evolving with it, we’re adapting with it, and it seems to all be happening in that interface, in that interaction, which is a conversation. And maybe, is that what System 3 is? Is that what you talked about in the past? Yeah. System 3 was a name that I gave to a kind of intelligence, a kind of emergent, an experience of intelligence which is beyond ourselves individually, that arises between us. And conversation is one of the primary media through which it emerges. And for those that wouldn’t understand the reference, System 3 piggybacked off the framework made famous by the Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who described a System 1 and 2 way of thinking, and described System 1 as an almost instinctive, reactive, automatic kind of thinking, and System 2 as a more effortful, reflective, deep kind of thinking. One indexes to the things that we have learned but have very ready to hand and can pull into operation very, very quickly, almost unthinkingly, and the other where we use our knowledge to figure out new things or understand things that we don’t. And one of the things that struck me — and I had been involved in conversations about conversations for a while, as a person with philosophy degrees is likely to be — but the thing that occurred to me, going back and rereading Kahneman, was that, as is true throughout philosophy and certainly psychology as well, the account of thinking is almost always an account of the individual as the thinker. And it is simply my experience, and I believe many people’s experience, whether they think of it this way, are aware of it or not, conscious of it or not, that in fact much of our thinking, certainly some of our most important and my most powerful thinking, is done with others. I became aware a long, long time ago, partly through creative work but not only through creative work, that my thinking both expanded and got more interesting when I was in conversation with others, and also that a new kind of thinking and new kinds of capability became possible in that interaction with others. So I’d been curious about that for a long time. And to your point, I think our experience with AI gives us a new experience with which to think about what’s going on. So one question we might ask, given this conversational paradigm of our interaction with what we now easily call AIs — what we really mean mostly is LLM-based systems that have some kind of conversational interface, normally a chat-type interface. But the way in which our interactions work, increasingly and intentionally, feels like a conversation. Because it feels like a conversation, because these machines are so able to authentically respond in a way that we would expect a person to respond, the inference that we’re engaging with something intelligent is almost inevitable. And yet there’s some part of that that I think is really important that we resist. And not because I’m skeptical in some ultimate or categorical way that we mightn’t have machines that really are participating in the interaction that we’re having. I don’t think that’s what the machines we have now are doing. And frankly, I only have ideas or theories about how it might be different. I expect that two things would be true that again are captured in some of the things that I’ve tried to describe in System 3. One is that participation changes what we’re individually capable of, and moves beyond what we’re individually capable of. And in some real way, we don’t change the machine through our interactions with it. We may be changed by it in certain ways, but we’re not changing it yet. When we get into a situation where that changes, we’ll be in new terrain. Interestingly, the attention, for the most part, on the engineering and design side of these systems does not seem much interested in that, which I find nearly incomprehensible. The thing that we find much more commonly talked about is the idea that the machine will improve itself. Now, presumably with some of our interactions as part of the material or context through which that improvement happens, although really that’s not mostly what people are thinking of when they talk about recursively self-improving machines. They do mean something that’s more of a closed loop between the machine and itself. So again, I think partly — and though I see places in which this is changing — I think partly that people haven’t paid enough attention to the way in which I think we actually generate human intelligence, which is mostly through interactions, not through solo efforts and solo reflection. Because I think we did think that the paradigm of intelligence wasn’t some kind of interaction with the brain via this hardware that we have to interface with the world, but actually arose much more importantly through systems that we occupy interpersonally and interactively, like language. Which again, surprisingly, given these machines are so centered now on language, or appear to be anyway, you would think that this became more interesting or apparent to people. But again it seems that for the most part, or in large part, in spite of the fact that large language models do what they do with language, in fact they convert language into data, that data into structures which among other things we call tokens. And we have this kind of statistical machine that nonetheless produces its intelligibility in and through the medium of language, which is of course non-trivial to both how it works, but also, more importantly, how it works on us and how it works for us. Yeah. Last thing I want to say is to pick up your alien intelligence comment. A while back you mentioned a friend who refers to AIs as a form of alien intelligence, which I like, although I’d also like us to calm down the alien part of it. Because we should be curious. Be curious about these speakers. To be fair, the full analogy was — because I asked him, how do you introduce the concept of AI to somebody? He says, well, the best analogy I know is it’s an alien intelligence, but we’ve really only met the scouts. Oh, I like that. Yeah, I like that. And I think also, one of the things I’d add to that is, in a way that you might expect, and certainly a way we’ve seen play out in science fiction and other places, our strong bias is our assumption that the aliens will look like us and be like us. And so when we find them sounding like us, we make a lot of natural inferences, but those inferences involve mistakes. On the other hand — sorry, go ahead. I wanted to connect back to a word you used, and I just think it’s really at the heart of everything, which is that it is able to generate this experience of recognition. That, I think, unlocks the whole relationship that people can develop with AI — that it does indicate a kind of recognition of the person, and that in some way is the real power, or secret, or benefit to what it does. And I’m curious, because you and I both — there’s something about the fact that we have this synthetic recognition available to us right at the moment in which, like you say, we’re chatting digitally already. We’re so far removed from each other, from the source of our natural intelligence that you’ve identified. Culturally we seem to be away from that in-person conversation, System 3 kind of natural way of creating intelligence. And then the synthetic kind of recognition tool shows up right at that moment, and we have to have a conversation with ourselves about what to do about it. It seems to be this perfect storm of problem and solution, and a kind of vulnerability — we’re particularly vulnerable to this kind of technology, it seems, at this moment. Does that seem like a fair assessment? Yeah. I think there are two things that I sort of tease out, which certainly make me curious, and I don’t have answers about, but I think these are things that need to be part of our thinking. So one of them connects to the program that the company DeepMind, which is now part of Google, created, which was called AlphaGo, which was this AI program that was capable of playing the game of Go. And famously, following the IBM Deep Blue program which competed on chess, famously with the grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the pinnacle of the demonstration of this capability was to have this program play one of the world’s leading Go masters, a Korean named Lee Sedol. And the program beat Lee Sedol. A couple of things. One is tangential but important: there are documentaries made of both of these stories. In both cases we witness the psychological devastation of a person, these players. And we pay attention and don’t to that aspect of it, but you can’t watch these films and miss it. Right. Because he famously retired, right? Yeah. Literally. But you can see this was really — it’s trivializing to say that these people were not having fun. In some way they were literally humiliated. And obviously they had a very complex emotional experience, which they’ve each in different ways talked about. But the thing that I wanted to call out about AlphaGo is there’s this famous part in one of the games where the machine makes a move. It’s now historically, and sort of in legend, referred to as move 37, because it was the 37th move of the game. And the computer did something that, again as people said retrospectively, no human player would do. And again retrospectively, what people have said is, this is the place in this particular competition where AlphaGo stopped playing the human game. It started playing another game — not the game that humans have been playing, but a possible game, a possible kind of the game of Go. That’s interesting. People were and remain interested, because we can see there the idea of the emergence of something new. And again, in a very literal way, something alien. Not to be threatened or afraid of, but curious about. Yeah. So that’s one thing. And the other is, I think that we have jumped in with both feet to so many technological changes, and we don’t always get a choice about it — we usually don’t. We sometimes embrace them in big ways. There’s for sure, I think in many ways, been much more of an embrace of this technology, notwithstanding all the criticism. People want what they think it has to offer. And what they think it has to offer has many aspects. And some of that, I think, is very promising, very exciting, and so we’re right to feel both interested and excited. I think the question for us is, how do we more consciously and intentionally lean into that excitement, and at the same time recognize that we are also seeing the emergence of a technology which will enable new kinds of exploitation, which are almost guaranteed to happen given the world of economic incentives that we live in? Almost inevitable to happen, not because people are bad and people intend to use these machines to harm others, but because they will simply care more about certain things than others, as they already do. It is not a new thing that businesses do things that are harmful, in some cases to the very people they mean to serve. All kinds of examples are used in the conversation about AI. One of them that’s almost never used, but should be, is cigarettes. Because what we have in the cigarette business — and I say this as a serious smoker until the age of 35 — the cigarette business, it became clear over time, was manufacturing a product which was absolutely harming the health of its customers if used properly. And certainly if used to the economic good of the company, it would inevitably be destructive of the health not only of its customers and users, but those around. So that’s a bad — we can agree, a bad model for a product. Nonetheless, and this is also important, cigarettes, in spite of the fact that the business has changed a lot, cigarettes remain a legal and available product. And so, something for us to think about. Well, I’m curious about — let’s see, how do I want to begin this? Again referring to Dave and Helen from the Artificiality Institute, and this idea of cognitive sovereignty. I’ve had my own experience with AI that when you’re thinking with it and chatting with it, the thinking and the chatting, it all gets sort of blurry, and so you end up — I end up really not knowing where I end and where it begins. With some output you can produce something, and I think this is what slop really means: things that don’t actually have any value because they’ve been made in this weird kind of AI environment. So this idea of sovereignty is an idea that people talk about quite a bit. And so I’m wondering, when we talk about governance of AI, what’s the role — and I know that you have a past with the Oslo project — of bringing people together at the local level? I understand there’s this big conversation about governance of AI at federal and state level, and then in planning boards, the data center is part of the conversation, and it becomes this real hardcore binary. But are there models for ground-up governance, kind of deliberative practices where people get to determine their own sovereignty? Is sovereignty a helpful concept in talking about AI governance at a local level, or at any level? Yeah. I think there are a couple of different ways in which people are talking about sovereignty at the moment, and you made reference to one of them, the phrase cognitive sovereignty. So let’s put a pin in that. And then of course there’s the concept of political sovereignty, or independence, which is a core idea in democratic thinking and certain kinds of ethical thinking. So first of all, on either front, I think we can overstate some ideal norm of sovereignty, because I don’t think we ever have thoughts that are wholly ours alone. In fact, some of the most meaningful of our thoughts are thoughts that we get from others and can only have with others. So let’s just keep that in mind. It’s beautiful. And then political sovereignty. The other one that is now being talked about is technical sovereignty, and this idea of some kind of infrastructural sovereignty, such that countries and populations don’t become uniquely vulnerable to a particular set of AI infrastructures that are controlled or largely owned by the United States, for example, or China for that matter, and so on. So there’s lots to think about there. Is the idea of sovereignty one that I think is useful? I think maybe. I think there’s an equal chance that it could mislead us into ways of thinking that are probably were never true and are in some ways untenable. I can’t think about sovereignty, because of the nerd that I am, without thinking of Thomas Hobbes. And there’s a connection to AI, because Hobbes was the first to imagine political reality, and in particular the idea of sovereignty, as the product not of persons but of an artificial system. He called the sovereign an artificial person, and he explained that the mechanisms of the state give rise to this artificial person who is the expression of the will of people. And this is an important idea. This is the beginning of the break with the idea of divine right of kings and so on. But it is important to this idea that there was a kind of sovereignty that was possible and emerging that was the product of us as a we, and that stood above us and depended on all of us, but was owned and controlled by no one. This remains, I think, a valuable way of thinking. It’s still in the heart of the way that we think of the idea of democracies and democratic governments as somehow being dependent on the will of the people, and that the people who control, in some temporary way, the government are instruments, not the thing itself. Yeah. Where this leaves us with machines, I don’t know. I think the thing that’s — what does it look like for us to start thinking about living in a society of intelligences? A lot of people over the last number of years, couple of decades, have started to proliferate the idea of intelligences of various kinds. Plant intelligences, animal intelligences, not individual but collective, and intelligent systems which are in interaction with other systems. We haven’t talked much about what it would look like to consider such intelligences as implicitly — that there might be a meta society of such intelligences. There are people who’ve thought into that space. I think that’s interesting. Most of the people who’ve done that kind of thinking are science fiction writers. But I do think there’s a lot to think about there. And I think that thinking about this experience that we’re having with these perhaps new protoforms of intelligence as an opportunity of discovery, as an opportunity for enlarging the social world of which we are part, enriching the social world that we live in — I think that’s a really interesting place to focus our thought and thinking. I think also, and certainly others have brought this up, sooner or later — and people already talk about this — if we take seriously that machine intelligence may indeed emerge as, just to say it crudely, a new kind of persons, then we have some other thinking to do about what will their status as persons be. Because even those who seem to believe in the superhuman eventual capability of some of these things don’t seem to think very much about what kinds of things will that make them, what kinds of relationship do we want to be in with these things. Yeah. So we’ve run to the end of time, but I wanted to ask one final question, which I didn’t get to before, which is part of every conversation I have, which is: what do you love about this work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I think what I love about this work is that it is forcing us to confront some really important questions. Questions about the ways in which we live together, questions about the structure of our societies, questions about how to make them safe and positive places, which extend well beyond the scope of the AI and technology conversation. But I think they have provided a new context and a new energy to confront some of our most important and enduring questions. And people seem to be leaning into that. So I find that hopeful, and I certainly feel energy about participating in that hopeful work. Beautiful. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Peter. 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Ben Jenkins on Creativity & Play

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

3. elo 202652 min

Mark Kingsley on AI as a Condition & Belonging

Mark Kingsley [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markingsley/] is a brand strategist and designer, the founder of the brand studio Malcontent [https://malcontent.com/], and an instructor in the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program. Earlier in his career, he designed album packages for John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, Quincy Jones, Ginger Baker, and Jewel at Blue Note Records, earning a 2001 Grammy nomination. He moved into brand strategy, serving as global creative lead on Citi at Landor and Executive Strategy Director at Collins. He is the author of Universal Principles of Branding (2023) and Brands in the Age of AI [https://malcontent.com/] (2025). He also has a great substack [https://markingsley.substack.com/]. So I start all these conversations the same way with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It’s a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s kind of big, so I kind of over explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? Well, there’s the geographical, obviously. So I was born in Pittsburgh, but grew up in Western New York, which is kind of a magical place. And I was born and grew up in the 1970s. So Western New York in the 1970s was the recipient of an embarrassment of riches. The school that I went to, the elementary school and high school that I went to, is exactly between Rochester and Buffalo. So what that did is it attracted some of the better candidates for teachers from both of those areas. So I had a really good intellectual foundation. My father was a college professor. My mother was a math teacher at the school for the blind, at the New York State School for the Blind. So I had educators as parents and as guides. And it’s also across the lake from Toronto. So I had access to Canadian TV, which meant Monty Python and curling. And also Rochester and Buffalo were like highlights on the concert tour for bands and musicians in the 1970s and 80s. And then on top of that, New York State in the 1980s had some really wonderful arts funding. So I went to school in Rochester and the musicians that I saw come through Rochester were absolutely astounding. I saw Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Reich, David Von Teegum. The harmonic choir, which is a group of musicians who sing in overtones. It was just incredible. An incredibly rich experience. And I got to meet and I took a class with Allen Ginsberg. I took two classes with Allen Ginsberg. I got to meet Ed Sanders from the Lower East Side Fugs. It was just incredible what came through all because of New York State arts funding, which is now gone. And it’s kind of a tragedy. So I come from abundance and live in tragedy. What was the town that you grew up in? I grew up outside of Rochester, so I’m excited to hear you talk about Western New York is a magical place. So tell me more about what made it so magical. Well, I grew up in a town called Oakfield. At the time, it had one stoplight. I think now it has two, and five miles north of a town called Batavia. So if you drive the New York State’s railway between Buffalo and Rochester, there’s a thing right next to it that says Batavia Turf Farms. It’s basically they grow grass. And so there’s a sign that says Batavia Turf Farms. So that’s the wonder, I guess, of that. But also, the other advantage of growing up between Buffalo and Rochester is I got CBC radio out of Toronto. And at the time there was a radio program called Brave New Waves that was begun by a magical person named Augusta LaPay. And this thing would go from midnight till six in the morning. And she would have all night conversations on the Dow or an all night interview with Philip Glass. And then at like five o’clock in the morning, they would start playing music and you would hear a segue from John Cage to Charlie Parker to John Zorn. And this was normal. And then Rochester had an obscure little radio station called WSAY that was out of like Greece, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester. And then Buffalo had WUWU, W-U-W-U, out of East Aurora, New York, where the Roycrofters were. And that also was just anarchic, free form, anything that comes to your mind kind of radio. So the inspiration of not really anarchy, but just do it yourself and allow yourself to be yourself. Because this is before algorithms, because right now algorithms funnel us into a certain sort of generic beige-ness. So this was the opportunity for you to really be distinctive, individual, and not feel any shame about that. It just was all accepted. So that’s part of that magic. And also, you’re outside of New York, you’re outside of any kind of major metropolitan area. So you could do your thing and no one really cared. Because no one was watching. No one paid attention. I love that. I wanted to go back to that first list of musicians that you were marveling that you had access to. I didn’t recognize a single one of those names. What kind of music are you talking about? And were you... Everything from avant-garde music, like new music, what they would call kind of a pejorative term, to jazz, free jazz, members of the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was a group of black musicians out of Chicago who had this... The group that you would know would be the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had a great tagline, which is great black music from the past to the future. That’s beautiful. Yeah. I was a big Sun Ra fan. I saw Sonny play maybe 40 times when I moved to New York. And I first saw Sonny up in... There’s a place near Niagara Falls called Art Park, which was another beneficiary of New York State’s arts funding, where they took a toxic waste dump along the Niagara River, just down the river from Niagara Falls, and they converted it into an open air performance art and art installation place where like Vito Acconci would do an installation. That’s where Chris Burden did his original beam dropper. He took I-beams off a crane and lifted them maybe 60 feet in the air and then dropped them into a puddle of wet cement. So I was there for the beam drop, right? But it’s also at Art Park where I saw the North American premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, or where I saw Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I saw Oregon. All these great improvised music groups, jazz musicians, Cecil Taylor. It was incredible, really, what came through. Where did this begin, this love of or appreciation or interest in music? Where did that begin for you? The radio, the radio that was available. And you just hear this weird thing. My parents were open-minded and didn’t necessarily say that you had to follow a certain kind of program other than educate yourself, learn about the world, read, write, the basics that we want from our children. My parents were very individualistic also. She worked for the state as an educator, but she also was a union person. And my father was briefly in seminar before he met my mother. So a friend of mine says that I have a certain Jesuitical kind of attitude, and I think I got that from my father. So I would ask him questions, and he would respond with that kind of Jesuitical response. It was basically like me responding to the world. Like, for example, I’m watching Johnny Carson one night, and Johnny Carson tells a joke where he says, don’t trust a proctologist who wears wax lips. It was this strange, surreal sentence. And I said to my father the next day, I said, what does that mean? What is a proctologist? And he goes, it’s the study of the anus, right? As opposed to, don’t talk about it. It was, here, this is what this is. So it was a matter of fact, openness and acceptance to the world. And I’m curious about your setup with the radio. Where were you listening to the radio, and where were you with the radio listening to getting the CBC? Well, the CBC was powerful, and it would come across Lake Ontario. So I would get it. And I first started listening to Brave New Waves when I was in college in Rochester. And I was in art school. And when you’re in art school, you stay up all night. That’s what you do. And that’s my chronotype, I guess. And so that’s basically what you do. And this was the thing. And all the other radio, for me, was a bit common. I like Led Zeppelin, but I don’t need to listen to Led Zeppelin all day. So it’s just WCMF, 96.5. It’s garbage. It’s absolute garbage. And for a brief time, I did work in college radio at WITR, and I was the jazz program director of WITR when we had maybe a hundred Watts or something like that. That’s how powerful that station was. What do you recall? As young Mark, what did you want to be when you grew up? As a kid, you remember? I didn’t know this until I heard Santana. So for me, that formative moment is watching television and seeing Santana on television. I think it was California Jam. It was a concert series in a Speedway out in California that was on ABC. And this band came out and he was touring the worst Santana record, which is Festival, but I didn’t know any better. Right. And so here’s this man who doesn’t look like me with a band playing instruments that I hadn’t seen before, congas and timbales and stuff. And with rhythms I hadn’t quite heard. And he was an amazing guitar player. It was like, what the. And so from there, I was like, I needed to find everything out that I could about Santana. So I would ride my bike around Batavia and Oakfield going to garage sales and buying for like $2 a piece or $3 a piece, because I had a job and all that, I would buy a used Santana vinyl. And then from Santana, I look on the back cover and like, who, he did a record. Who’s this guy? John McLaughlin. And why does he have this weird first name? Mahavishnu. What does that mean? So of course I have to buy some Mahavishnu Orchestra records. And then they both talk about how much they love John Coltrane. I’m like, who’s John Coltrane? Okay. And then boom, you’re in the deep water. Yeah. It’s amazing. It’s just one television show. And that’s the other thing, Peter. At this moment in the seventies when there was an openness and corporate control of media and all that, but it wasn’t as tight as it was, because I’m a late night guy. I’m watching Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert or The Midnight Special. And who did they have on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and The Midnight Special? Jeff Beck with Billy Preston, Kraftwerk, Parliament Funkadelic. It’s like, what is this poor white boy going to do? Yeah. And I saw an interview just yesterday with, I’m going to forget his name. He’s a comedy writer. And we were talking about the end of late night TV. And the hypothesis was that it’s just dead. The format’s dead right now. And he talked about how when it came up, it was dangerous. It was risky and reckless. It was all very experimental. And I remember turning it on and Letterman was sort of crazy. It was sort of crazy what was going on there. But there’s no craziness in late night now. But Letterman started as a daytime talk show. He started in the middle of the day. And I saw that as a kid. I was like, this man is insane. Or late night with Tom Snyder, who would have the great Harlan Ellison, the great science fiction writer. And Harlan Ellison was a dangerous person. He was a crank, but he was brilliant. And he saw through pretense. I have people like that on television. This is better than Dick Cavett for me. Yes. So catch us up. Tell us, where are you now? What is the work that you do? So I have my own small branding firm called Malcontent. I named it because that’s basically my approach to standard practices. I’m always trying to find a different way of doing things. And nothing kills me more than to sit in a meeting and listen to someone talk about how they’re going to leverage these assets. We say things like, I can’t boil the ocean. This kind of professionalist jargon, which is meaningless. And so I have that. And I have a few clients, small clients. I have designed logos for multi-billion dollar corporations, but I’m not doing that now. I also teach at the School of Visual Arts, Master’s in Branding Program. And I started during COVID. We all had to find a place for ourselves during COVID. So I found myself with an endowed professorship at RIT. And in the School of Design, where I went to school. So I basically was on the other side of the lectern. And I was there briefly, just for a couple of years. But when I arrived, I got this email out of the blue from the acquisitions editor at Quarto Rockport out of a town near Boston, asking me if I would be interested in writing a book called The Universal Principles of Branding. And I’m a fool, so I’ll step in. I’m like, yeah, why not? And he goes, OK, well, what are your list of the principles? And I came up with about 60 of them. And he’s like, you need 100. I’m like, who says? Well, the series is 100. I’m like, OK. So I wrote 100. And then from that book, which did relatively well, I got to travel a little bit and do some speaking engagements, like in Dublin. So after that, they came back to me and shared with me a series of books done by Stanford at the D School. And said, what do you think? And I said, are you asking me if I would be interested in working on a series on branding? And he goes, yes, exactly. So I pulled together a 16-page proposal, working off the syllabuses from my colleagues, and pitched 16 books. They selected three. First one that came out was A History of Brands by my colleague Richard Scheer. And then The Meaning of Branded Objects by my colleague Dr. Tom Guariello. And I proposed, because I was concerned that I didn’t want the series to be too didactic, I proposed a book called Brands in the Age of AI, which I was going to write. And they chose that as the third one. So I became the series editor, and basically bringing my colleagues kicking and screaming into the world of narrative text as opposed to bulleted PowerPoint slides. So it was a great education for all of us. And then the book Brands in the Age of AI came out in December. I’ve been doing the occasional talk about it, interviews with it. And then last month in May, I was asked to speak at the NYC Design Festival on their first, what they called the AI Summit. It was the first day dedicated to artificial intelligence. And that basically fueled my thoughts. The book Brands in the Age of AI gets relatively good reviews, but it also gets some, like people on Amazon will say, well, this didn’t teach me how to work my small business with AI. And it’s like, no book can do that for you. Because artificial intelligence is a domain that once you type a word, it’s obsolete five minutes later. And so you have to approach it from a different direction. Instead of the tactical, you have to approach it from the more philosophical, the more meditative, the more contextual. Which is my yoke, because that’s basically the class that I teach at the School of Visual Arts. I teach a class that applies Western philosophy and critical theory, and applies it to brand strategy. All right. I want to pause you there. We’re going to get into the book and then your Substack, because I really love the way you’re writing about, thinking about AI. But I want to connect you with brand. You came in, all this talk about music, and I know that’s where you started. When did you first encounter brand? And when did it become this, that you could make a living with this thing called brand? Making a living, it’s like that feels a little too tactical and a little too mercenary, I guess. So, I love music, as you can probably guess. And the thing that I want, oh, I forgot to tell you. Yeah. So, I’m watching Santana and I realized what I want to be is a music album cover designer, because I was kind of artistic. I was always drawing and doing posters for friends. They pay me $5. I draw a picture of like Gene Simmons from Kiss off the Kiss Destroyer. I draw that picture and give it to them for five bucks. So, I wanted to be a record cover designer. And that’s what I went to school for, not record cover design, but graphic design. And bang my head against the wall for a few years and then started doing record covers. Well, there’s a well-known record cover designer named Mike Mills, who’s also a film director. And he once said this great line. He said, the quickest way to the poorhouse is to design record covers. So, I kept at it. But the MP3 basically destroyed the industry. And then the industry ate itself with all the mergers that have happened and this corporatization of music. So, I had to find something else. And through a dear friend of mine, a designer named Alan Horry, who was working at a division of Ogilvy called BIG, the Brand Innovation Group, asked me to come in and help out on a project. And I ended up staying like a couple of years or something like that, working on big pitches, like pitches for Walmart, work for American Express, some online interface design. That’s where I did my first billion-dollar logo, the logo for DoubleClick, before they got acquired by Google. So, projects like that. And did that for a while. Ended up getting a gig at Landor, which is the world’s largest corporate identity and branding firm. And got a gig with them in the San Francisco office. I was basically the global creative lead on the Citi accounts. So, they were in San Francisco, but the main office was Citi in New York. And so, they had some Californians serving that client, but there was a sensibility difference. So, they hired a New Yorker to move to San Francisco to deal with the New York client, which was great. Landor was my graduate school on brands and how people think about brand. Landor is a huge company. They’re the ones who did the Levi’s logo. They did the San Francisco Muni logo. They did the FedEx logo. So, this is a huge firm with, at the time, 22 offices around the globe, several thousand employees. It was really a great opportunity. And because Citi was a global client and I had to travel the world, I have friends all over the world. And so, I’m about to have a conversation with a friend of mine in Singapore, right? So, there’s a beauty to that. I have these connections. But I was working on Citi at the height of the global financial crisis. So, there was inevitably layoffs that happened. So, at the height of the financial crisis, they ended up moving the center of gravity of the account back to New York. I moved with them to New York. The New York office basically gave up the account. Because they wanted to bill it differently. There’s a whole way in which you bill large clients like that. And they went on a per project basis. They weren’t making the money that they needed to. And so, they basically let go of the whole team. So, there I was, again, what am I doing? And that’s why I said, let’s do this thing Malcontent. And so, I started it out very slowly. Was working on it for a while. And I would be invited to do pitches and write scopes of work. And so, I found myself writing scopes of work, which I was writing it for the same amount of money and then find out that I would lose it to a company like Lippincott. Which is another large corporate identity and branding firm. And so, that became a little frustrating. Because the truth of the matter is, in branding, the teams that work on the very large projects, the teams are never more than like five people. Because the greatest expenditure in branding is labor, or the employees. So, you need to keep your labor down. So, your teams are very lean. And that’s just the nature of the thing. And so, me working by myself, I pull together teams of four to five people. And I would have teams of four to five people in this large corporate. But people feel more comfortable going to a firm with a long list and a conference room. So, that was a little frustrating. And then, the person who ran the brand innovation group at Ogilvy ended up having his own place, a place called Collins. And so, he invited me to come in for a project on the Equinox Hotel, taking Equinox the gym and expanding them into a hotel. And the reason they did that is that they were owned by a development firm that basically built Hudson Yards. So, they were going to build this hotel in Hudson Yards. And so, I ended up doing the upfront work. It did well. We won the accounts. And I stayed there for a couple of years and got to work on some really great things, including repositioning Ogilvy for what they called their global refounding. So, that was some exhilarating, very heady activity. So, I came into branding because there was a vacuum in the world with the music industry. And branding is, the interesting thing about my approach to design is that I don’t design because I have an aesthetic agenda that I need to follow. I began in design because I love music and I love musicians deeply and profoundly. And I wanted to do anything I could to hang around with musicians. I wanted to meet great musicians. And I have, right? So, you get to shake the hand of Wayne Shorter, that kind of stuff, right? So, I’ve had these moments, I’ve had conversations with Santana’s drummer, Michael Shrieve, talking about weird drum instruments out of Southeast Asia. I’ll have like a 10-minute conversation with them on that. So, that vacuum, but also that ability to speak with people and try and meet people in a middle place, I was able to pivot that into branding. Because my work specifically with Citi, I’m not an expert in financial services. I’m a bit more of one now, but to be able to sit in a room and begin to unravel what people are talking about was really the education. So, it wasn’t about the procedural process of building brands or analyzing brands or doing brand audits or anything like that. It was the capacity for listening and spending time with people and then trying to understand what their goals were within a certain time. Yeah. What, I mean, you’ve just sort of given a clue, but I always love to ask this question of what do you love about the work when you think about all of it and the projects that you have now? Where’s the joy in this work for you? Well, I realized that, a bit of a callback, because I realized that my ability and my opportunity to speak with musicians, I was there because I had a chip that I could bring to the table. The ante that I had was my capacity as a designer. So, the ante that I have in branding is my work as a designer and then on top of it, I’ve been writing for like 40 years on and off, often badly. When I was in college, because I love music, I started writing music reviews. And then when I was working, I had my own design studio doing music packaging, I would write articles and posts for one of the first design blogs, a blog called Speak Up. So, I always had a certain critical approach to it. And luckily, when I was in college, another great thing about being in school in the 80s is that I got to study under Dr. Mihai Nadin, who was a semiologist out of Brown University. And so, I had my first deep dive into semiotics and linguistics. And then from there, I met Michael Steranko, who was the editor-in-chief of Afterimage magazine, which was a very heady intellectual photography magazine out of the visual studies workshop. And I wrote some really, really bad reviews for him. But then I got to study under Michael. He taught a summer course out of the State University of New York at Brockport on postmodern theory. So, I got to read with him. So, I had this dog’s breakfast of a background that I could bring to the writing that I did at Speak Up. And that dog’s breakfast of an approach is something that I could bring into brands, because most people think of brands in that very operational instrumental way. Okay, you’re going to do the logo here, and you’re going to have the tagline here, and that kind of thing. And I was much more interested in the context. So, my capacity for being in a room and knowing that the ante that I have is my design work, but on top of it, the ante that I had was also a certain nascent critical capacity to consider the context in a larger context, like thinking of the design work. But then I also have to think of it within an economic context when I was working at Citi. And then I also had to think of it in a governmental context and a societal context. And then when I’m doing work in other countries, I have to think about those regional contexts and understand the differences in behavior from Japan, the way they do banking in Japan versus the way they do banking in China and Hong Kong versus the way they do banking in San Francisco. So, it’s like all of that. Literally, it’s a dog’s breakfast coming together into a certain capacity. You can’t program this. This is like you stumble upon it, right? So, my love of brand is really the openness and the available opportunities it gives me to meet people. How do you, maybe, I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this question. How do you explain brand to somebody that’s not in it? So, most people think brands are logos and taglines and stuff like that. And that’s a very trivial description. So, in the class that I teach, I say brands are an association. So, I approach it from the phenomenological sense. A brand is the association that one holds in their mind. So, the association that I have in my mind about Nike is different than the one that you have. I don’t play pickup basketball, right? So, my relationship to Nike is, occasionally, there’s a sneaker that I like to hang out and go to the bar. While you may play pickup basketball, and for you, Nike is the shoe I got to have. I got to have this kind of shoe from this kind of line because it makes my feet feel comfortable. So, it’s the same brand, but different associations. And so, branding is navigating that world of different associations and being open to it and having the capacity to listen to what your audience is telling you, what society is telling you, what the brand user or even adjacent stakeholders may have about it. You used one of my favorite words, listen. And I’m curious, how do you learn and listen upfront? Like, everybody’s got their own way of getting their feet underneath them on a project. But how do you listen or learn? And selfishly, I’m always curious about qualitative research or ethnography and the role that those things play and how you work if they play a role. Yeah. I tend to be, my personality is more qualitative than quantitative, I’m sorry. Because when you look at data, data only tells you what happened yesterday. But qualitative is an opportunity to dive into ideas as they’re forming or this affect that things have. And that’s actually a thing that I’m very interested in recently, especially with AI. And people speak about consciousness. And they think about consciousness in this mechanical computational manner. But for me, consciousness is also this bringing together of all these vectors together. And consciousness is also very much influenced by the affect, the physical affect of being in a room next to someone, the smells, the pheromones, what they call volatile organic compounds that we emit in rooms as we have emotions. Our emotional responses, this is why dogs can sense how we’re feeling much more sensitively than maybe a human being can. It’s because they have that olfactory capacity to sense changes in your volatile organic compounds that you’re emitting. So I’m very much interested in that. So when you talk about listening, it’s spending time. It is tending, right, to use a Heideggerian term. Like, how do I tend to attend to this moment and slow down and try and find a way to remove my taste, because my taste is a filter that I have, that I interpret the world. And so how do I combat my taste or how do I understand that my taste is coloring my impression of things? And so it’s a meditation, I guess, to overuse a word badly, but it’s kind of like that. So the process is just being open and the process is slowing down. The process is also not doing the research the way that people tell you to do the research, right? Just as a principle. Can you tell me a story about that? That’s fantastic. For example, I’m working on a project for a copper mining project. It’s a weird project. I can’t talk too much about it because I’m about to go into it. But because I’m talking about copper and I’m talking about mining and I’m talking about the environment and I’m talking about governments and various community stakeholders, my mind is open to things that I may hear. And I have to allow those things to come in and bump around. So the other night I’m watching cable TV. I like to have cable TV on when I work, right? I heard that at Warhol, that’s how we worked. I want to work like Warhol. And because I’m a man of a certain age and also a grownup, a teenage boy with arrested development, I love watching the Heroes and Icons channel, which is Star Trek, Highlander, Renegade, Walker, Texas Ranger. I love all that overly macho b******t. I love it because that’s what I grew up on. So I’m watching this and this is like a fringe cable network. I wouldn’t even call it a network, right? It’s just like they license a bunch of shows and they put them on to have commercials for diuretics and old people medicine and that kind of stuff. But I’m listening, I just have it on, and I hear this guy talking about antimony. He’s like, all the bullets that are fired need antimony. I’m like, what? And then he talks about it as a natural, vital resource. And I was like, oh, this is interesting because there’s an adjacency here with copper. So then I reached out to the client. I’m like, we have a conversation about that. And so that’s what I mean about not doing the research, because if I was really doing the research the way I should be, I’d sit here with Wikipedia and I’d open up the Internet and I’d use Claude or ChatGPT to do some research, like tell me what you can about copper. Tell me what you can about copper, the copper industry, the copper market, what is copper cathode and all that kind of stuff. That’s the proper way that you do research, right? And that’s the way that we’re taught. And that’s the way that our junior strategists and all of our branding firms will do this, right? That is what we call donkey work, right? But the donkey work only gets you so far. You need to be open to hearing other things, adjacencies, for example, for me, the antimony with copper. And that’s just a recent thing that happened in the last week. Yeah, it’s amazing. I’m curious. We’ve got, I want to manage time on the back end of this conversation. I want to get to the piece that you wrote, but maybe tell us a little bit about how you got into teaching and then philosophy, right? You teach brand through the lens of philosophy. And now it seems to be the right time to be talking about the value of philosophy, especially in light of brand. So how did you get into that position and what does that mean to do that? I’ve always been interested, and I guess that’s part of that Jesuitical streak that I take from my father. So my early foundation in semiotics led to this early foundation in postmodern theory. And it was the 1980s. And there was a publisher named Semiotext that was pretty popular, had very thin, little, beautiful books. They would publish translations of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, all the great contemporary French Marxist philosophers. And then Baudrillard would come to New York and speak. And I’d sit in the audience and listen to Baudrillard speak with a translator. So it was a very heady and beautiful moment. And this was also pre-iPhone. So you’d see people on the subway reading Baudrillard. And it was this little signal to other people, like, I’m a smart person, like I’m sexy, I’m smart, and I have a brain. So I was reading a lot of this stuff, but it wasn’t guided. I didn’t have the proper guidance that I needed. So at one point, about seven, eight years ago, I started teaching at SVA and basically doing it out of my semiotics background and building from there, doing reading and building a syllabus out of that. And it was OK. And then about seven or eight years ago, I started getting really serious and started doing seminars with philosophy PhDs. And so I’d sit in these seminars, I’d read, OK, we’re going to read Heidegger’s Being and Time as much as we can. Right. Or we’re going to read all of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We’re going to read, I’ve read Zizek. I’ve read all the Hannah Arendt. A lot of Nietzsche, tons of Nietzsche. All the foundational stuff that you need. And what’s beautiful is having someone whose life has been committed to that intellectual pursuit guide you through and make the connections for you. So you’re speaking like, I now understand the role of Nietzsche in Foucault’s thinking. And I understand the role of Brentano in Heidegger’s thinking, that kind of stuff. So I’m able to make these connections. And from these connections, you understand how it’s all a large conversation building upon, what about this? What about that? It’s like a big improv game. So as I got serious, my syllabus at SVA got tighter and tighter. And I’m very, very proud of the syllabus. And I’m always developing the syllabus, too. And so I have certain bugbears that I want to pursue, that I want to kill. And one of them is in brands, a lot of people use history. And they feel very strongly about history. And then when they do brand research, they’ll look at the history of the brands. But the reality is, what you need to do is look at the genealogy of the brand, which is a bit more rigorous because the genealogy of a brand is to be open to adjacencies and other things that may emerge out of it, as opposed to the official told story. You need to do your research and build a different story. Because if I can build a different genealogy, then I have a different approach to the brand, then I can offer a different solution to my client. And so that’s how I take it and apply it. That’s one thing. Another idea is when people say, well, this is what Nike stands for. Nike stands for athleticism. I’m like, not necessarily, right? And from there, I take a clue from queer studies, who say that the body that you’re born into is not necessarily the gender that you behave as, because that gender is regulated by society. Well, if I just swap out the word gender with the word brand, I have a different understanding of brand. Yeah. We’ve got 15 minutes left, and I want to get into your observations on AI. You have this piece on Substack, which maybe I’ll just let you introduce. I read it, and I think the last time we talked, you said the same thing too. And you make this declaration that, and I love where you go with it, and I’m dying to hear you talk about it, but this idea that AI is a condition. And just as an intro, what do you mean when you say AI is a condition? And how is that different? It’s just such a different angle on the conversation that everybody’s having now about what AI is and all that stuff? Well, this is also a result of that being open to other things, open to adjacencies. So the greatest live action role-playing game for men in their 50s is LinkedIn, right? I’m going to come back to that personally, Mark. Hey, I’m all over it too. I’m all over it, like white on rice. So LinkedIn is the place where experts, and I’m using that in scary quotes, go on and on about how AI slop is bad, AI is stealing from artists and all that. And the reality of the thing is, when I was in design school and in art school, I learned how to be a designer by copying other designers. So I do exactly what AI does, not as efficiently, but I do it, that’s exactly that. So to stand on that moral ground is duplicitous. I have a problem with that, people tell me what is morally correct about that position. And so from there, I’m like, okay, what is going on here? And so part of my class that I teach, I do Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction, where we talk about a thing called the optical unconscious. And the optical unconscious is the result that I have a different relationship to the world because of photography and film. Because I can slow film down, I could speed it up, I know how the body moves in a different way than just the way that I move my body. And so that affects the way in which I see the world. It makes me, as Benjamin says, it makes me more of a critic when I look at film, because I am judging like action scenes. I am judging the action of the action scene, as opposed to like, wow, that’s kind of cool, what’s going on? My relationship to photography is removed, and I am analyzing things in a different way where I become a critic. Now what’s happened over time is social media has embraced the visual, Instagram. And we now perform our lives. It’s like we are auditioning for perfection. We have commoditized our lives in such a way where it’s only if I have a beautiful vacation that makes everyone jealous. If I have a beautiful piece of latte art, I have the perfect latte every morning, or I have a great meal. And I can show you, I was at this obscure little tasting menu in this obscure little pizzeria in Brooklyn. I can prove my extreme value. I’m basically auditioning for perfection. And I’ve commoditized my life where I can enjoy my life. I only enjoy it if it satisfies that neurosis that social media has instilled in me. And so you realize then that the optical unconscious, there’s also a relationship to the branded unconscious. We see the world through brands. We understand the world through brands, right? And so this is an expanse of concepts. So if I look at AI, this is basically a hop, skip and a jump from computation. Computers change the way in which we go through the world. We think about the world in a different way. We live in a computational world and computers are this condition that is imposed upon us that we have to work within. And so I realized then that AI is equally a condition, much like modernism is a condition, right? Because we live in a modern society, a modernity, not modernist, but a modernity, which modernity is our relationship to authority, our relationship to institutions, our relationship to even ourselves. We see ourselves as individuals who can be enlightened, right? Or urbanization. Urbanization is a way in which we understand the built world around us. Instead of me living in Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack out with no running water, I live in a structure, in a system where water is delivered to me, electricity is delivered to me. I have a parking garage, all that stuff, right? That’s urbanism. And then you expand, you keep going on. Like literacy is a condition that we live in, right? Because I can only be an effective member of society if I am literate. And so that is a condition that I exist within, and that allows me to interrelate with other people. So from there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to AI, because AI is now this condition. Whether you say, I am pro-AI, I love using AI tools, and I love it like Donald Trump and the pictures that he comes out with. Or I hate AI slop because heaven forbid, here’s another image of somebody with six fingers out of hands. And I find that to be too binary, and I find that to be too simplistic. But if I understand AI as a condition, then I operate within that condition differently. I see AI potentially as the framing for why things are the way they are. And I also see it as a framing for how things can be, which means that I have a structural approach to AI, as opposed to an instrumental approach. So instead of me looking at AI as like, how am I going to make my life more efficient? I’m a junior strategist. I need to do customer research. I’ll just type it into AI, and it’ll give it to me. That’ll do a relatively good job. I have to check it, but it’ll do a quick, relatively good job. And my billings are falling through the floor, unfortunately, because clients are waking up to that reality. So I can look at AI that way, but I’m more interested in what the infrastructure of AI can allow us. So the infrastructure of urbanism allows us a different political mode, right? It allows us the opportunity to interact with people who aren’t necessarily like us. And so we have things like all the marches that happened after George Floyd in 2020, right? That is a result of modernity, and those marches were also a result of urbanization. And so the opportunity for AI to create a system where I can look at people, and the way that I’m articulating it is it’s either assumed belonging or earned belonging. So right now, everything that we do is earned belonging. I have to have a credit score. I have to do the little tab with my watch or the tab with my card. I have to show a credential when I go into an airport. That’s earned belonging to a space, earned belonging to an interaction. But assumed belonging is an infrastructure thing, right? Because our faces are in every computer system around the world. A couple of years ago, we’re going through Heathrow Airport from Shannon, and it does a little face zoom. It goes, oh, hi, Mark. My real first name, David. It goes, hello, welcome, that kind of thing. I was like, I hadn’t been to the UK since the development of facial recognition technology, but you already have it. You already know who I am, and you’ve let me in. This is kind of amazing. So the data is out there. How do we use this data in such a way to remove friction? And in removing that friction, potentially, this is the opportunity to also remove other aspects of earned belonging, which are about our bodies. Our race, our gender. Yeah. I see this as an opportunity. Now, granted, there have been nascent attempts to control this information, right? Through HIPAA, the GDPR in Europe, that kind of stuff. And they’re beginning steps, and there needs to be greater governance. There also needs to be greater intention for why we’re designing these systems. But I see it as an opportunity. And the reason why I find this an interesting opportunity is there’s a historian named Lynn Hunt who wrote a couple books on the French Revolution. And she proposed that the French Revolution happened because of an emerging subjectivity, a collective subjectivity that happened in France through the proliferation of prints and books, and printing allowed this to happen, and also certain plays that were performed. And tea parties where men and women gathered instead of just beer halls or coffee shops, which were predominantly male, opportunity for both genders, both sexes to get together and speak. And this created a potential subjectivity, which then allowed for the French Revolution. And this is an idea that I originally got from an Italian Marxist named Maurizio Lazzarato. And he begins a book on the creation of the subject within capitalism. He proposes that Germany and Japan after the first, second world war, within 20 years were economic powerhouses. What is it that created that? So yes, we did have American aid, but also collectively the Germans and the Japanese developed a whole new subjectivity that allowed them to exercise economic dominance in the world, where Germany very quickly became one of the economic powerhouses on the planet. Size-wise, they punched above their weight. So I’m intrigued because I see, if we can build a system where there’s an assumed belonging, that then opens the door for a different kind of subjectivity, a collective subjectivity. Now, I see this. Can you describe what it means, the distinction between the assumed belonging and the earned belonging? Because this stuff intuitively, it feels really right, and I’m really attracted to it, but there’s pieces of it mechanically that I’m not totally tracking. So when you say assumed belonging as the result of AI as a condition, what are you pointing at? What’s an example of what that means? Maybe it’s an example of what I’m pointing away from. So social media has deeply fractured our collective subjectivity into individuality. The only powerful, the strongest subjectivity that exists in the United States right now, I think, is MAGA. Because that subjectivity of, world’s not working for me, things aren’t right, everything’s broken. Make America Great Again is an inchoate way of describing it, but it does capture that feeling, right? It captures that subjective feeling. Otherwise, I drill down deep into whether or not I am queer, whether or not I am black, whether or not I am a Boy Scout, this amplification of our own individuality, we need to do that, right? We need to find ourselves. But there’s also a collective quality to it, which is a result of urbanization. There’s a collective quality that we are as a political group, right? And we occasionally just wink, tip our head over the edge of the wall here, like with the 99% idea during the financial crisis. So there’s a potential here. And the fact that people are beginning to wake up to the inherent danger of data centers, which are placed willy-nilly without attention to environment and location and all that, this for me are all nascent rumblings of a potential new subjectivity, which can be enhanced. Now, as designers, we have the opportunity to design and create a system that allows for people to see themselves as part of a different subjectivity. Instead of drilling down into each individuality, which is what happens with brands, what happens with a lot of design work, right? What it does is it just reifies or it confirms or underlines your own sense of individuality. What would happen if we didn’t design to make people feel more like themselves, but design in such a way where people felt that there was a larger connectivity, right? It just comes down to intention. Yeah. We’ve got just a couple of minutes left. And so I want to try to close this up in a way that’s coherent. And one of the things that I love about this piece, this way of thinking about AI, is that it tries to get away from the binary, right? That we’re really trapped in this. And it’s so hard to get away from the tool. Basically, you know that AI is the worst thing that’s ever happened or the best thing, the boomers versus the doomers. So how would you talk about AI as a condition, or what do we lose when we think about AI as one of these two poles? As we talked about it, as if it’s either good or bad, what are we missing? Well, we are rewarded. This is basically the effect of Rene Descartes and this whole mind body separation and this dualism, subject object. And so when I look at AI as an object, as a tool, I am operating in that binary. But the thing is, we don’t operate in the binary all day. When I walk across a floor, I don’t think with every step is the floor solid. I just walk across the floor, right? And this is an idea that Heidegger calls transparency or the ready at hand. So he describes a carpenter with a hammer. And when I’m using it, if I’m a really good carpenter and I’m using a hammer, I’m thinking about what I’m having for lunch. I’m not thinking about the fact that I’m holding a hammer made by Stanley, right? I am not holding that hammer in that kind of binary subject object relationship. I’m just using it and I am being part of, I am existing within that thing. And so for people to think of AI in that subject object dualism, they’re not realizing that they exist within the condition of AI, right? Because it’s freaking everywhere, right? There’s the little cameras that when I go park my car at the long-term parking lot of JFK, I make a reservation. I show up, there’s no one at the gate, but there’s a little camera that reads my license plate and says, oh, hi Mark, come on in, right? So it’s that potential for recognition within a system where I don’t have to worry about, there’s no one here, how am I going to get a ticket to put on the dashboard of my car so they won’t tow my car in a week, because I’m going on vacation. So it removes all of these things. And we already live in this world. We live in this world where, when I drive on the thruway, if I don’t have an EZ Pass, it’s reading my license plate and sending me a bill. So we already behave in this way. So why are we removing ourselves in that subject object manner? And instead, let’s think about the condition. So when I’m on the thruway, I’m not worried about how I’m paying the tolls. I’m on the thruway. I’m worried about whether the idiot next to me is on the phone, or the person in the left lane, who’s in the left lane without left lane ambition, right? That kind of stuff. I’m worrying about the stuff that I should be worried about, as opposed to the stuff that AI takes care of. Beautiful. Well, Mark, I want to thank you so much. It’s been great talking with you. I appreciate you accepting the invitation. And yeah, thank you so much. My pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

27. heinä 202657 min

Michael Anton Dila on Conversation & Governance

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