THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Meg Kinney [https://www.linkedin.com/in/megkinney/] is an ethnographer, strategist and co-founder of Bad Babysitter [https://www.thebadbabysitters.com/], a consultancy blending documentary storytelling with brand strategy. Named MRS/ICG Independent Researcher of the Year in 2017, she's worked with Fortune 500 companies like Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and Nordstrom. Featured in Gillian Tett's "Anthro-Vision," Kinney pioneered video-based shopper ethnography and holds a Master's in Natural Resources from Virginia Tech. I start every conversation with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. It's such a beautiful question, I borrowed it. And it's such a big question, 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 total control. You can answer or not answer in any way that you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from? Oh gosh, I love that. I think I identify myself as coming more from a time than a place—so, the 60s and 70s in Indianapolis, Indiana. More and more, I realize just where I get certain character traits or things I've needed to unlearn. As I really make a point of trying to grow as a person—not just stumbling through life kind of growth, but the actual intentional, "I only have so many years left" kind of growth—I find myself reflecting a lot on my childhood. So much of who I am is informed by the early 70s in a very conservative place. And, without getting too much into it, I had... I was that house on the street where parents of kids were like, “I don’t want you spending the night over there,” or, “I don’t want you going down there.” We were kind of set off in the neighborhood a lot. There was just a lot that always went down at my house. It was a time where things were very stigmatized. My mother suffered mental health issues. My parents got divorced—that didn’t really happen much. I'm the youngest of three, and my older brother and sister were never in school with me; they were always just enough older. But being the 70s, they were very much a part of that scene. I just think I’m from a time that has informed me a lot. But Indianapolis—and I wouldn’t trade a Midwestern upbringing for anything. I think it gives you a very deeply embedded sense of humility. Respect is a big theme, and an agrarian work ethic, and all that. But eventually, it was a place that I realized I simply must leave. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah. I mean, the funny answer that I used to give—without even knowing what it really meant—was, “I want to be a landscape architect.” I don’t know why. But I always loved the outdoors—still do. Spent a lot of time by myself outside in deep and imaginative play. And something about the creative process... So when I went to college, I really wanted... I started out studying fine arts. I’ve always loved the arts. And then quickly realized that I was not going to be an artist. But yeah, something in a creative field of some kind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm curious—you talked a little bit about it—what did it mean? Can you tell a story about 70s Indianapolis? What it was like growing up? Well, I mean, only from my little purview. I didn’t have a lot of adult supervision. I was around a lot of adults. So when I wasn’t left unattended, I was around adults. My dad had a bar. He and his second wife had a bar and a catering business. So I washed dishes at a really young age, but was around the regulars at his bar. My brother and sister—their curse was they could pretty much do whatever they wanted, as long as they took me with them. So, I think by comparison to most kids under ten, I probably saw a lot of things. But as I’ve become more reflective, I’ve realized that really did create a bit of a template for what I do today. I’ve always been an observer, and kind of been most comfortable on the perimeter of something—just sort of seeing things play out. Music was a big part of it. There was a soundtrack, as we all know, to that time. And that, to this day, is an immediate rocket ship right back to times and places. It was in the city. It was kind of rural until it became suburban. What was the bar? Oh, it was called Lord Byron’s British Club. Wow. Yes. It was kind of the neighborhood place for— as I used to say—men who drove Cadillac’s, drank scotch, and wore Sansabelt slacks. You kind of know... I think that helps you locate it. But yeah, my dad, you know, he always found something new to do. He was always self-employed. So he was a builder, then he was in real estate, then he was in the restaurant business, and then he was back. He was very scrappy that way. But yeah, growing up in the bar was kind of fun. And interestingly, I’ve made this connection recently that I’ve always liked being on the service side of an equation. I started out in agency life, and now, as an independent consultant, I’ve worked client-side exactly two times in my career—and they were both very short-lived. So I think it kind of cast the die for me to be in service. I like that. I derived a lot of joy from interacting with people, taking their dishes away, chit-chatting with them, asking if they needed anything else. I liked that—and I still do. Yeah. So catch us up. Tell us—where are you, what are you doing, what’s the work that you’re doing? Well, it’s funny, I talked to somebody the other day who said, as we evolve as independent people, the trick is to never have to actually quit what you do, or quit your company’s name or your website, and start over. Instead, just try to peel layers and make the water go a different direction. Since 2008, I’ve been an independent consultant, using ethnography—or just the ethnographic lens—as a way to contextualize data and tell stories around numbers that can align people, and hopefully make things more human in the process. It’s always sort of been a humble pursuit. Affectionately, I’ve always just said, “Giving a damn is a competitive strategy.” I started my career in the agency business and came up through the ranks in advertising as an account planner, then a strategist, and then led a big insight and strategy group for a publicly traded agency network. I did that whole thing and kind of stepped away from it right at the apex because I realized I really just love qualitative understanding of things. I’ve always been more interested in the immeasurable than the measurable. But, you know, I exist in capitalism, so I completely respect the numbers side of things. I’ve just always thought that helping explain things in human terms—to provide interpretation of numbers and what they actually mean, and why you should care, and the decisions you could make that would benefit you and the people you’re trying to serve at the same time—just seemed like something I wanted to do. I was fortunate that I had met enough people in my advertising career that when I hung my own shingle, they were like, “Hey, we want to bring you into this.” And that just kind of evolved into—I just like to help people get through the mud. When people are stuck, I like helping them get unstuck, whether it’s being paralyzed by too much information, or the market isn’t behaving the way they think it’s supposed to behave, and they don’t know where to go next. I like parachuting into something kind of messy and helping find the signal in the noise. So—long-winded answer—but to my original point about not really quitting your business and opening a new one: now, probably due to a combination of the market, synthetic users, preoccupation with AI, and a little bit of ageism… a lot of my clients who sponsored my projects have retired. It’s a different time for somebody like me. And I know there’s a role—now more than ever, I think. I think what I bring to the table is probably needed more than ever. But that’s not the shiny thing right now. So I feel like presently I’m kind of in a bit of a “waiting out the storm.” I will say during the pandemic, I kind of hit the ejection button. That was my second client-side thing, and I had two years in the cannabis industry—which was a fascinating education in and of itself. But yeah. Yeah, well, I identify quite a bit with what you’ve just described—about waiting out the storm, and just how sort of confounding the current moment is. And having woken up and been in this for so long—or realizing that it has been so long. I appreciate you being open about that. And I wonder, maybe just to return to first principles, what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you? When you talk about giving a damn—I love "giving a damn" as a competitive advantage. Yeah, what do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you? Oh, gosh. On a very practical level, I mean, I love fieldwork. I just love being out in the mix, in situations I know nothing about, for the sole purpose of building trust with somebody so that they'll open their world up to me. I love that entire exchange, and I personally take a lot of pride in that. I really think I can talk to anybody. I can shapeshift. And, you know, quick shout-out to people who have interviewing skills—not everyone has the gift. I just love the fieldwork. I love talking to people. From the business application side, where I derive a lot of joy is when what I bring back contextualizes whatever business problem people are wringing their hands around. When what I bring aligns the room—I love it when I can tell a story from the field that explains data they're looking at but don’t understand what drives it. I love when I can come in and say, “Let me tell you a story,” or better yet, “Let me push play.” Let me play you some footage, because we do video-based ethnography whenever we can. Or just the introduction of the camera in the setting—whether we’re shooting it or the participant is capturing things. I love when you can align a room. Because misinterpretation is so easy, right? Everyone is looking at a business problem through the lens of what the expectations are on them—what am I held accountable for? I kind of call this the strategy cul-de-sac, where a CEO will be like, “Okay, this is what the numbers are saying, this is what we're doing, this is our initiative.” Everyone interprets it through their own lens, goes off, deploys in the way they think they're supposed to—and the needle never moves, right? And then they come back, and it’s like, “What is happening?” There’s nothing like stories from the field to loosen that up and help people realize, “Oh my gosh, you mean that simple thing we're doing in this part of our sales training is creating this speed bump for us?” I love it when the light bulb goes on. Yeah. And I feel like—I mean, we met, or interacted, or connected—I don't know if it was... it feels like ages ago. And, you know, your name—Bad Babysitter—I remember meeting you a long time ago, and it always occurred to me that you guys were really early in video. Really advocating video first, ethnography out front. And I don’t know if that’s factually true, but I wonder—looking back—how has it changed? Where are we? Because I have that same experience too—the power of pushing play. Just a three-minute clip of somebody telling a story just blows the doors off so much, if you can align everybody. So what is my question? I think my question is: What was it like leading with video ethnography in 2008? And how has it changed now? Where are we in the lifecycle of that kind of research and storytelling? Yeah. Man, I appreciate that you come from that era—not to, like, wax nostalgic—but where I really got into it was, I had an amazing boss when I worked in the agency business. He just really believed in my whole approach. And I didn’t even know anything about anthropology. It wasn’t until I met some anthropologists at Procter & Gamble, just as, you know, an agency person. And they said, “You know, you're an ethnographer.” And I was like, “What is that?” And then I learned, “Oh, what is video ethnography?” I just loved that idea of enrolling a research subject in the telling of their own story. It was like, “Oh, we’re going to make a documentary film about you. And it can be whatever you want it to be about. And I’m here to just help you do that.” That was before everyone had a camera in their pocket, right? So it was a rig. And my boss—I said to him, “You know what would drive incredible business for us? If we did a proprietary study.” And he actually funded me to do a year-long proprietary study about the culture of shopping in America. We had a video guy at the agency who did corporate, institutional videos. I grabbed him, and we went into the field. We didn’t know what we were doing. These were clunky rigs, but we were just out there explaining to people—and people got on board. We were doing shop-alongs, and then we rigged the secret camera. I’m sure you did that too. You didn’t used to be able to have a camera in a retail environment. Those were incredible days. But that work product—that deliverable—was incredible. That study was responsible for explosive agency growth. I wanted to do more of it. As people started having cameras in their pockets, there was this shift: “Okay, now I want it through your perspective.” Those are artifacts that are interesting in and of themselves—giving people tasks to do, or reflections, and that sort of thing. I still, though, whenever we can, like to do the old-school version. It’s slimmer now—my partner uses an iPhone. Sometimes he has a bigger DSLR camera. But I still like to be the one capturing the things, because I do think zooming in on things or panning wide at certain times is effective in telling a story. There’s a little bit of film wisdom there. But yeah, it’s changed completely. I’m not opposed to research subjects taking the imagery themselves, at all. But the creating of an industry around that has produced a lot of junk. Well—yes. Yes. Can you say more about this? Oh, and, you know, there are many research tools out there. All of them have a time and a place. But, you know, the whole—in the name of expediency—“Well, can’t we just get 10 people in this age group to go take pictures of things they think are cool?” Sure. Yeah. I don’t know what you think you’re getting, but okay. So, again, as you and I have to evolve, it’s like, all right, that’s a tool in the box. But deep understanding of human motivation and all that does not come from that method. No, it’s interesting. It brings up so much. I mean, a question I had sort of lingering and waiting—because you talked about your instinct for people, being in the interview, being someone who’s interested in people. So there’s one question about the role of the researcher, because very often—I say this a lot—I feel like I’m really good at this, but that my ability becomes invisible because it just looks like a conversation. You know what I mean? Like you say, it’s not something anyone can observe as a notable, remarkable skill. It’s just, “Oh wow, look, Meg’s really great with people,” or “Peter’s really nice with that person.” Or “Well, that’s a great recruit. That person really has command of their thoughts.” That’s right. That’s right. And then the other—so I want—that’s like the bulk of the question. And then I want to bracket your observation about this—I guess is it auto-ethnography? Or the outsourcing of data collection to the consumer. But you used that word “just.” I feel like I have an argument against the word. “Can we just...” Anytime anybody uses that phrase, I feel like they’re doing real harm to something. You know what I mean? “Can we just do this?” It’s just sort of like, well, there’s so much you’re erasing from the process. So I guess my question is: What’s the role of the researcher? And maybe, what have you learned? What does it mean to you to be somebody who talks to people and tries to understand them? Yeah, I think that’s the question. Yeah. I mean, with my clients, the way I come at it always is: What kind of decisions do you need to make from whatever I deliver to you? I am here to help you have confidence in your decisions. I am going to give you that confidence because I’m firing your own human instincts. Yes, you’ve got a lot of numbers. I’m not here to change your interpretation of that. I’m here to help your instincts fire. I’m here to help you smell an emergent signal. So, what decisions do you need to make? What’s preventing you from making your decision? Let’s design research that gives you that. Because I don’t have any interest in research that’s inert, or leaves people still hungry, or like, “Well, so what?” The researcher has been defending their role in the C-suite for as long as I’ve been doing it. So your question, what does it mean to be a researcher today? I’m trying to find new language to describe that. Leaders are always going to need instincts—even with AI. We have to have our instincts. And that’s as much being in touch with your natural environment as getting out of your box. I think collectively there is anxiety around that, with the emergence of the absolute steamroller that is AI. But I’ve got to find the language. People are hearing: “Hey, we’re still going to need people.” The machine doesn’t have taste. The machine can’t probe. The machine can’t ask why. The machine can’t see an emergent signal. The machine’s only about the probabilities of things. It’s predictable. It’s a flattener. All that. We’re hearing that—but at this moment, the fervor and the gold rush is too strong. So I’m not like in a “let’s ride it out” mindset, but I do feel like it’s going to come back around to the question: What is the role of the researcher today? There are those leaders who are always ahead and have always gotten it. And frankly, they’ve always believed in ethnographic work. For everyone else, it’s like: What is the thing that research can say that fits into the slipstream of the conversations that are happening now, that are so efficiency-driven? I always come back to: every leader who’s accountable in a company is always afraid of getting it wrong, right? I want to help people say, “We did the best we could to understand the situation.” I’m not a person who is here to give anyone predictability. But I am a person who’s here to say, “I can help you feel it. You can trust yourself.” Yes. Well, I wanted to ask about the word “instinct.” You keep returning to this idea of instincts. It’s about qualitative understanding. What’s the role of instinct in qualitative understanding? What do you think qualitative actually does for your clients? I think—generally speaking—it’s always just this constant reminder that people are gonna people, you know? I mean, I’m sure you’ve had these situations where there’s this tiny thing you’ve observed or that you hear, but it unlocks so much, right? I think, yeah, it reminds you that humans will surprise you. It reminds you that there are many different ways to get what you want. Giving a damn is one of them. Like, “Hey, we could innovate over here. It would help these people. It would actually be a net positive for your customer. And it would positively impact your bottom line.” I’m always like, “Is that something you might be interested in?” You know? I mean, I have countless stories from the field of that happening. But I don’t—I’m not answering your question. I am somebody who loves emotion. I’ve always loved emotion. I’ve always felt emotion. Why we try to zero it out of a professional situation, I have no idea. I’m fond of saying, every business problem is a human problem. Even if you’re talking about raising the price of something and people don’t buy it—that’s a human problem. People didn’t see the value, and you’re doing that. Everything is about trying to get people to do something—everything in business. You’re trying to get people to do something you want, behave the way you want them to. And qualitative is this reminder that there are so many ways to do that, that can be a net positive, that can be differentiating, that can spark innovation, or can just be kinder. Yeah, as far as—it’s interesting, the role of qualitative. I know you interviewed Simon, and I love his UXification of Research paper. The idea of generative research is now taking a backseat to qualitative being: “Tell me what you think of this.” “How about this prototype?” I think there will be a big swing. I do. I’m optimistic. I think the pendulum will swing.Now, will I still be here for that? I don’t know. But yeah, that’s a long-winded, very indirect, non-answer to your question about qualitative. But the language—I’m presently, as you can see, struggling to determine what is the thing I can say as I’m pitching projects. Because there are plenty of people who are there to take care of efficiency. Yes. I will drop into your workflow, and I will conduct my research and design it in a way that is compatible with the way you work. But I am not here to help you do anything more efficiently. Yeah. This reminds me of when John Dutton invited me [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnbdutton_in-the-latest-edition-of-my-discomfort-zone-activity-7206391654646173696-7ZgL?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAABuiRIgBdBPuWlRYxZgTfPAqzqR0I7cJ1AI] to answer this question for his newsletter. It was kind of, “What’s the role of qualitative in the age of AI and synthetic users?” And it really sparked a real existential crisis. Because when you really look closely at generative AI, it really does—or mimics, or looks like—most things that I think I do. And that’s why the synthetic user stuff is growing the way that it’s growing. Because it looks like it’s doing what we do. But yeah, I really had to come to terms with what it is that we do. And I was attracted to your use of the word instinct, because I feel like qualitative probably apologizes too much for being... you know, or tries to... or abandons the humanity of the work too quickly in order to get access to the C-suite. But what we really do is this sort of magical form of understanding that’s not—like you said, what is it? You said something about the immeasurable up front. What’s the line that you say? Oh, I’ve just always been more interested in the immeasurable than the measurable. Yeah, that’s right. But I think you’re making a really good point about maybe we need to hold the line more as qualitative researchers and not be apologetic. Or build the value in. Sorry—yeah. What did you say? I love what you were saying about maybe we shouldn’t apologize for its squishiness. Yes, right. Because I’m here to take what we’ve learned and put it into the business equation—but let’s let it be squishy. Let’s let it be unruly. Yes. And I feel like—tell me what you think about this—that qualitative, through the business lens, very often looks like a bad form of quantitative. Or some other thing that’s not really connected to data (number one) or real understanding (number two). And so we haven’t even made the case yet to sit alongside quantitative. You know what I mean? Just to sit next to quantitative as a necessary partner that delivers a particular kind of data, collected a particular kind of way, that delivers a particular kind of understanding. That’s not—you don’t even compare it. It’s like... you’re not even in the same boat. And what I came down to is the idea of intuition. Because I’ve had the experience that you’ve had, where you press play on one person telling the tiniest little story about their experience in a category, and it just blows the doors off of the internal understanding of the business. And it’s a story. You know what I mean? It’s not a number. There’s not a measurement in it. And people are—it blows their minds. And it changes everything. Oh my gosh, yes. And I live for those moments. I have a story that I like to tell about that very thing. So I was working with Benjamin Moore. I ended up working with them for like three years, across their entire ecosystem—but beginning with the homeowners and understanding: When is the paint purchase occasion? Well, the quantitative longitudinal studies that they’d always done said, “Why are you painting?” And, you know, you would have regions of people—Benjamin Moore would say, “Well, it’s when you’re moving and you need to improve the value of your home.” You have smoke damage, you have water damage, or you’re bored. That’s when people decide to paint. And this was just institutional understanding—that that was it. So every year they would benchmark to see the changes in that, using the same quantitative instrument over and over again, and tie many of their programs to moving these things. Oh my gosh. You go in and you play one four-minute vignette of a woman talking about—after losing her daughter, she knew her grief was over when she was willing to repaint her room and take it down. Then you hear a guy, in the same vignette, say, “I had this woman who was this wild lover. I was shooting way above the rim, and we were lying in bed, and she’s like, ‘You should paint this room green.’” And he’s like, “We were standing in this room—it was a horrible color green.” And we ask, “Are you still together?” And he’s like, “No.”And the whole C-suite bursts out laughing, right? So you take them from a lump in their throat about a woman who uses paint symbolically to tell herself she can move through her grief, and answer it with this sheepish guy who painted his bedroom this awful color—for sex. You can’t get that any other way. And to your point, that blew the whole thing open. And we were like, so it is emotional. It’s not transactional. That’s right. Right.There are moments in life. And what if we just changed the language at retail to say:What are you going through right now that has you wanting to change?“Oh, we’re having a baby.”“Oh, we just got married.”You know—all these things. And so that’s just one example of how one marketing tactic, sales language, benefits the retailer, benefits the brand—all those things. But you would never get that if you didn’t go spend hours with people talking about paint and life. Yeah, that’s so beautiful. I mean, those really are the thrill. They really are the thrill, because it is a totally different kind of understanding. I like to describe it as: it smuggles in so much information. Do you know what I mean? Right. It’s just sort of like—yes, they don’t see it coming, and they can’t read—when I say “they,” I’m talking about client-side people who are fluent in, I guess, what I think of as an analytical understanding that quantitative data gives. But maybe they’re uncomfortable with the kind of intuitive understanding—or instinctual understanding—you describe from qualitative. And they can’t resist it, because it is sort of elemental. It’s human in that way. Yes. And you’re right—I love this idea that it smuggles in. Because, you know, another layer: the woman moving through grief was basically a ringer for Fran Drescher. She was a New Yorker. She had her little teacup dog. She was dressed head-to-toe leopard. She was very sassy—but then immediately softened when she talked about the loss of her daughter. Right. And so, also, there’s the visual trick that’s being played on the client. And the guy who painted for the woman—a really tall, kind of awkward guy, you know. And it just... there’s so many things. So many layers. To your point, smuggling is a great word for that. It’s just so full. And I don’t know. To me, that kind of work, and that kind of experience you have when you show—when this connection happens, where everyone in the boardroom is suddenly really feeling the business situation—it’s like...I just want to say, “You could feel like this all the time. We can have way more fun than this. And we can drive business.” So, in preparing for our conversation, I dug around a little bit, and I wasn’t aware that your work was featured in Gillian Tett’s book. And there’s a Primrose School by me—I think it’s still around. But I wanted to give you a chance to tell that story. And for anybody who doesn’t know: Jillian Tett, anthropologist at the Financial Times, wrote a book called Anthro-Vision, advocating for all the stuff we’re talking about. What was it like? Can you tell that story about Primrose and what it was like to be featured like that? Oh, that’s so nice of you to bring that up. Yeah, I had submitted a paper to EPIC, which is a global community of people using the ethnographic lens to advance business. I’d submitted it to the annual conference—it got accepted—and I presented the case study. And Gillian Tett happened to be in the audience. Oh, wow. Which was interesting. It was in Providence, Rhode Island. I didn’t know who she was. But then, like two months afterward, I got a call from the PR people at Primrose who were like, “Great job getting in the Financial Times.” We really appreciate that. And I was like, the what? And they’re like, “You—we got mentioned in the Financial Times.” And I was like, “We did?” So Gillian had written—when she was editor-at-large, still for that publication—she’d written about the presentation. And I was like, wow. That was... that was really nice. And then, oddly enough, not too long after that, she reached out directly and said, “Hey, I’m writing this book, and I’m really interested in how you used an anthropological approach to solving this company’s business issues.” Primrose—for those who don’t know—it’s like a billion-dollar early education company. Oh boy. And they have—I think they’re probably up to over 500 franchises of preschools. An incredible story. A female founder, Jo Kirshner, is a supernova. It’s a really incredible company. And again, we ended up with a three-year gig with them, doing their whole ecosystem. But it began with: How does a new generation of parents go about making this decision? Because they had all this data that indicated, “We’re moving people through the funnel. Great. We’re running our social ads. They’re clicking on it. They’re going to the pages on the website. We’re directing them to the tour page. They’re booking the tour.” And then—they’re not signing up. What is happening? And the CEO, Jo, she had a hunch. She said, “I think our franchisees maybe come from a different era of parenting. What’s happening here?” So we did a six-month study—spending time with young parents navigating the decision. Ones who rejected Primrose, ones who had just enrolled, and ones who were at the very beginning of that journey—going with them on school tours. One of the really fascinating things about that was just explaining that this generation is in a peer-to-peer world, and you’re talking to them about your pedagogy up here. You need to break that. Because it used to be Dr. Spock—we had the experts, right? It was one-to-many. And we were like, “No, no, no. You’ve got to—you’re a peer.” So there was a lot of work around just language. And what parents wanted—they wanted resilient kids. It’s like: “My child will learn to read. I don’t need him learning cursive or reading at four. I want him to understand how to be with others.” A lot of generational things like that. But then, one of the other things—again, you could never do this without this kind of research—was going on the tours. Over and over again, when we would be with a young mom and she had her baby—this is for moms giving up for the first time, right? It’s not like, “Oh, he’s three and we’re changing preschools.” It’s, “My baby,” you know? And every tour would start with: you meet the parents—and we always pretended to be like an aunt or something. “Oh, this is my aunt and uncle—they’re going to go along on the tour with us.” Every time, the school director—when they got into the room where the babies are—would immediately launch into how clean the room was. Because apparently, in quantitative surveys, constantly benchmarked in ratings and reviews, cleanliness is obviously a big deal. So they’re like, “Oh, cleanliness is a huge deal—let’s launch into cleanliness.” And every single time, they would give the baby to a teacher—just to put the mom at ease—and the director’s talking about cleaning solutions. And the mom looked nauseous. Just really destabilized. Nothing spoken—purely observed. We noticed this. And when we got back in the car, we’d say, “So when she was talking about the cleaning...” and all these moms were like, “I’m worried if these people are going to love my child. I don’t care about bleach concentrate.” And we were able to go back and say, “You know what? Just don’t say anything for the first minute. Let there be silence.” Just a little tweak like that in the tour was one of those things that unleashed a whole...It’s like—let mom process. Yeah. And get to bleach later. So again—just, you know, thank you for asking. Oh, of course. I definitely feel like I have a weird little underdog complex as a qualitative ethnographic type person. So I’m always excited by moments when it gets celebrated and championed. I was excited to—I don’t know that I knew that when it happened—so I was happy to hear you talk about it. And we have a little bit of time left, and I was curious—you mentioned EPIC. Talk to me about EPIC. Talk to me, maybe about—are you still on the board there? Is that right? I just joined the board. All right. There we go. Yeah. It’s my first board ever. Congratulations. All grown up. I know. Baby’s going places. Yeah. Talk to me about EPIC and what excites you about it and the role. Yeah. I mean, I guess—where does it fit in everything we’re talking about? Yeah. I found—well, both Hal and I found—EPIC 10 years ago. We’ve been members for 10 years, and it was truly out of a moment of just feeling isolation, being in this weird little niche, trying to do business development. Just like, oh my gosh, we need people. We need our people. And just Googling around and stumbling upon this organization that initially—I’ll be honest—I was like, what is this? It has the word “ethnography,” they have a conference, but they talk in ways I don’t understand. And it felt very academic. And it is—it has quite the academic backbone, in the best possible way. But we just rolled the dice and were like, well, this conference is in New York. Let’s just go. And if it’s a bust, hey, we’re in New York City. That’ll be our own good-time growing. So we went. And EPIC is—it’s not a trade group, because it has no agenda. It’s not there to ratify standards or anything like that, that a trade organization might. They describe themselves as a community. It’s global. The language it’s used for the last 10 years—it’s a 20-year-old organization—has been about advancing the value of ethnography in business. Of course, as you might imagine, we’re grappling with the word “ethnography.” It’s the most meaningful method that is so misunderstood. But it is a group. It’s UX researchers, it’s design researchers, it’s anthropologists, it’s social scientists. It’s people like me. I call it purebreds and pound puppies. I’m a pound puppy. Wait—I was going to say, who’s who there? I’m a pound puppy. Yeah. Well, you need them both, right? They do different things. And every year, there’s an annual conference. You can submit to do a case study, a paper, a Pecha Kucha, a speculative design installation. And it’s been a really special, special group where you can go and openly debate things, right? It is that safe space of people who care deeply about the human social science perspective in business. But we’re not in the business of absolutes, right? So there’s lots to debate. And there’s a lot of application of theory versus what actually just happens in the real world. So it’s been a lovely professional oasis—and a lovely debate arena. We’re having our big conference in Helsinki in two weeks. And I think we’re going to try to do a big membership drive at the start of the year. But like many organizations post-pandemic, people are like, “Ah, do I really need to get on a plane? Do I really need to go be there? Can’t I just join virtually?” Or, “Here are all these other virtual webinars, and I never even need to leave my desk.” So we’re kind of suffering that situation, as many in-person events do. So yeah, I kind of came on the board because I have a marketing background. And most people come from other backgrounds—there are a lot of people from socio-technical research, and that sort of thing. So yeah, that’s my remit: to help them get some sea legs under them and broaden the aperture, because it really is for anyone who cares about this thing called humanity and believes that humanity and business don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Beautiful. I want to thank you so much. We’re kind of running out of our time. This has been a blast. It’s nice to see you again. And this is just a real treat. So thank you so much for accepting my invitation. You’re so kind. I’m not used to—I’m not comfortable being the one dominating conversations. So thank you for finding all the buttons to hit play. That didn’t hurt a bit, Peter. Nice. High compliment. I appreciate it very much. Thank you so much. I love what you’re doing. Please don’t stop. That’s kind. Thank you very much. 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Linn Davis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/linndavis/] is Program Director at Healthy Democracy [https://healthydemocracy.org/],, where he leads civic assembly design and innovation. He has managed the Citizens’ Initiative Review [https://healthydemocracy.org/press/2020/05/22/citizens-initiative-review-helping-citizens-make-better-informed-voting-choices/] and co-designed more than a dozen assemblies in the U.S. and abroad. Davis holds a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University. MORE ON THEIR WORK The work of Healthy Democracy was featured in the December 2024 issue of The New Yorker, “What Could Citizens’ Assemblies Do For American Politics? [https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/what-could-citizens-assemblies-do-for-american-politics]”Listen to an interview with the author by Roger Berkowitz of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, “On Citizen Assemblies with Nick Romeo [https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ZjEA8dX4tT1Zw1YGK7N3d?si=DliHNnABT4Otl5oJFoi-cw&nd=1&dlsi=cc8f4abb29dd4abf].” I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It's a big question, which is why I borrow it—and also why I over-explain it the way that I'm explaining it now. Before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. It's the biggest lead-up ever for a question. The question is: Where do you come from? Yeah, I can see why you say that. Let's see. The classic way to answer it: I was born and raised mostly here in Oregon, in the northwestern part of the state, but lived a little bit in Hawaii and California as a kid. I went to college in Iowa and lived on the East Coast and abroad for a bit. Certain parts of my formative years were elsewhere. Recently, I just got back from a backpacking trip, so I've been thinking about the forest a lot. I grew up out in the forest, so I feel like I have a lot of affinity with the forest and different places. Where do I come from? I suppose you could answer that philosophically. I feel like I've discovered that. It took me a few decades to figure that out. I just turned 40, so I'm having thoughts about this in terms of decades as well. I feel like I've figured out that I came from a place of trying to facilitate good conditions—for decision-making to happen, or for a better society to happen—more so than being a direct advocate myself, which I've tried being a few times. I don't think I'm very successful at that. I don't think that's my best niche, but I aim to create space for other people to discover how to be active in our society together. You talked about the forest. Can you tell me more about growing up in the forest or near the forest? I grew up out on a piece of land—about 60-some acres, just south of the area. It was great. It was a wonderful playground. I feel like every kid should have the opportunity, even living in the city, to have some kind of open space on a regular basis, or one of those free-form play areas, or something like that. That was what this was. Lots of playing in the mud. Lots of hedge clippers to cut little rabbit burrows through the blackberry thickets, like we have here in Western Oregon. Lots of building things out of random stuff. Hopefully, I got my tetanus shot at some point, because I was constantly injured and scraped up in one way or another. It was great. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? As a kid, what did you want to be? I thought I wanted to be an environmental scientist or something, because I grew up out there in the woods so much. Then I realized science is not quite where my head is at—although I really appreciate a good science podcast, etc. But then I thought—I don’t know where I went from there—but eventually I landed on journalism. That’s what I thought I wanted to be, as of high school and into college, maybe through college, although I was starting to consider different things. Then I bounced all over the place in my 20s and ended up here in my 30s. I'm curious about growing up in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest—what that means. I grew up in the suburbs of Western New York. I know that has a particular meaning for me. What does it mean for you to be from Oregon and from the Pacific Northwest? Honestly, I don't even think of it. I don't know that I think of it that way that much, actually. There are things to like everywhere. I think I'm often attracted to places that are a little bit more overlooked, actually, than the Pacific Northwest. I like the more overlooked places in this part of the world—especially the eastern side of Oregon and Washington. It's become a big interest recently, or farther south in Oregon, etc. Here in Portland, where I live, I love it—but maybe not for the reasons people might know about it from Portlandia or the New York Times travel section. I lived in Portland for a little bit. What do you love about Portland? I love the unpaved alleys. We've got a vast selection of great unpaved alleys throughout this city. There are some unpaved streets too, which can be an equity issue farther east in the city, that’s for sure. But the alleys aren't really doing anybody any harm, I don't think. They're just this fun, wild little place. You feel like you're out in the country. You pick lots of berries along the side. You wander in these. The only place I could afford to buy a house on a nonprofit salary a number of years ago was near—on the edge of an industrial area or really far out. I found this place that was right on the edge of a train yard. I love the train yard. I'm a five-year-old-level geek about trains. I don't know anything, but I love them.Great. I love being next to the train yard. I just go out there sometimes and sit on the concrete blocks. It feels almost like being on the edge of a natural area, which feels so weird because it's the most industrial place you can probably be—but it feels so open. I've noticed in preparing for this, you have an urban planning background, right? There are alleys here in Hudson, and I'm fixated on the alleys in Hudson, too. What's the allure for you about unpaved alleys, as an extra dimension? Yeah. I had this great urban planning prof who really was a big fan of what he called “unplanned funk.” He was like, yeah, I know we're in a planning school here, but the coolest thing about every city is always the things that the planners don't do—the things that are unpredicted. What you need to do, in kind of an opposite way—and I think this applies beyond urban planning, in virtually everything—is to make sure to plan to leave unplanned spaces. But not plan too much. Just make sure that not everything is controlled and locked down. This applies directly to our work today, as well. It’s the unplanned spaces in our work—talking about time—that are probably the most productive and the best at getting toward agreement and all that kind of thing. It's not actually the fancy things that we've organized—these interlocking small groups or whatever. Yeah, that's cool, but actually the work is probably happening on a lunch break somewhere. Yeah. So to catch us up, tell us where you are now and what your work is, for our listeners. Yeah. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I work—and have for about nine years—for a little organization called Healthy Democracy. We're a nonpartisan nonprofit, and we do civic assemblies in different parts of the U.S., and occasionally consult on things abroad. We started out—we're best known for something called the Citizens’ Initiative Review, which is a specific kind of civic assembly where we gather folks from around a state or a city to review ballot measures—usually initiatives, but sometimes referenda—and produce a statement. Or the assembly would produce a statement of voter information for the voters’ pamphlet. Yeah, that works really well. It's heavily studied—maybe the most studied single process still in the deliberative democracy space. But it's also very specific. At a certain point, we realized, hey, there's not a lot of activity happening on the just local government, kind of bread-and-butter civic assembly front in the U.S. And we also learned some, I think, unique things from the particularly difficult political environment of the CIR—and these campaigns funded by tens of millions of dollars, sort of breathing down, just looking over your shoulder at all times. And so I think we've now moved into a little bit of a broader space, but still doing civic assemblies in different contexts—with some dreams to get back into the initiative system and reforms for that part of the world in a more systemic way. Yeah. For people who are new to this sort of part of the world, what are we talking about when we talk about civic assemblies? And how do you introduce the concept to people? Yeah. It's kind of like jury service, but for policy issues. It's everyday people from all walks of life, drawn randomly from the public, in one room, working on something really in-depth—paid for their time. Usually we're talking really in-depth, like 30, 40, 50, 100, 120 hours. And uniquely, with a lot of gravity and often power to their work—because of the legitimacy they have with the public, given how they’re chosen and the publicity around the event. The structure of the process is built on decades of research. We’re trying to create a space grounded in collaborative architecture rather than debate-oriented architecture—that’s a defining feature, and it filters up throughout the rest of the process. Another key thing is the power we’re trying to instill in the assembly throughout the process itself—not just in its results. You are what you eat—the assembly needs to be as democratic internally as possible, in contrast to the semi-authoritarian style of traditional facilitation, even in deliberative spaces. Those are some of the differentiating factors I often mention. The thing that catches people right away, of course, is the selection process—that it’s random and representative of the public across many demographic factors at once. I end up emphasizing the process itself, because it sometimes gets overlooked. People think, “Once you get folks in the room, it’s just like a committee, right?” No—actually, it’s the opposite, in several important ways, from what we traditionally know about our political infrastructure. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we met at the—I think—I always call it a summer school, but I don't know why. It was like two days at Bard that the Hannah Arendt Center put together. I didn't know at the time that I was really in the room with—sort of—the pioneering practitioners of this form. I mean, does that feel like a fair assessment? And you were one of them. And, excuse me, as somebody who's not in this space, who's just a resident of a small town that's sort of divided and struggles to make decisions, it was apparent to me right off the bat how special it was. I really—and I joke that if it were a circus, I’d want to run away with it. You know what I mean? It's so beautiful. And you talk about a couple of pieces of it that I wanted to sort of focus on. One is the difference between the argument–debate style that we're kind of in now, versus the more collaborative context this creates for decision-making—and how novel that is. I mean, I certainly... can you say more about that difference and the value it brings? Because it is really radical. And I think it's important to mention, even though this space has become very popular over the last decade or decade and a half, that essentially none of this stuff is new. We're putting it together—hopefully—in new ways and improving it iteratively all the time. But the idea of creating a political infrastructure that is collaborative at its base? That goes back who knows how many millennia. Different people have tried different versions of this in lots of ways. It got a big boost in the ’60s and ’70s, but it also existed—just speaking about the United States—going back to Indigenous customs, going back to the customs of what we might now call conservative churches in New England. So it's not necessarily politically tied to other issues, and it has certainly existed all over the world. It's important to mention—we’re building on the shoulders of a thousand giants. And I think it’s interesting—arguably, it makes sense—that our political architecture developed the way it did. It came out of a world of autocracy and deeply hierarchical systems, like feudalism in Europe. And here, what was created was radically different from that. There’s no question about that. But in a way, it didn’t go all the way. It missed the thinking that humans might be guided by their better angels. All that writing around checks and balances—so much of it is about building a system that can work even when we're acting on our worst instincts, and still not fall apart or descend into chaos. And, to be fair, yeah—it does that better than previous systems. But there are further steps. And by no means are we at a final step. There is no final step. It should always be developing. And maybe the next step down is: okay, let’s imagine that we can bank on our better angels. And then ask: what would that look like? This also relates to something people often ask—has this gotten much harder since 2016? With the rise in divisive elections and polarization? And the answer is: no, not really. It hasn’t changed that much. When people are in a single room with a bunch of other individuals, human behavior shows that we really want to work with each other. We’re social animals. And sometimes it goes too far in the other direction—we want to play nice to the point that we avoid conflict altogether. That’s probably our biggest challenge. It's not that people go at each other too harshly—it's that people don't engage in conflict enough. But I think that says something good about the architecture. We’ve created the opposite problem for ourselves. And I think that's the right problem to have. It’s still the right approach: to create an environment where collaboration is expected, and then to build into that space opportunities for generative conflict. Because what we have in the rest of our political system is the opposite: a system built on a basis of conflict, with a few small spaces shoehorned in for collaboration—usually in back rooms, cafeterias, whatever. That’s clearly not working. And it’s clearly the opposite of what we should be doing. So can you just sort of paint a picture of how it works, and who's in the room, and how it's facilitated? Yeah, so typically—I'm—and these processes can take many different forms, and I think there's a lot of experimentation to be had always here. But our processes generally have two kind of main spaces—three main spaces, let's say. There's a panel at the front of the, or a U-shaped table at the front of the room, usually sort of circular, where the plenary work happens, where the whole assembly is together. And this is, by the way, only possible for an assembly of maybe 20 to 50. Let's say you get above that, and then we probably have to deal with some other kinds of arrangements. Although, you know, I don't know—get a big enough room and could have a really big semicircle. But in any case, you've got that sort of space up there, and the sort of—the part of the U that's not connected is often where the lead facilitators sit—or we call them moderators—and any speakers will often sit up there at a table, or sometimes delegates who are presenting to their other delegates. That's what we call folks who are participating in these processes. And then there's a separate space—we like to have it even in the same room, actually, so that we can flip back and forth between spaces and get more creative, and also respond to the assembly more dynamically. But sometimes it has to be in a separate room or separate breakouts, and that's small group tables. We generally like between five and seven folks per table as kind of a baseline, but it can go more and less than that. In fact, it should. We do things in pairs frequently, in threes, fours, and often they're iterative groups that combine or mesh later on in the process. It'll get more—what looks like chaotic—more organic, better word. And sometimes much bigger groups, but groups combining—groups of 10 even—groups like that that may have to be split off, have their own space, their own projector and laptop, and that kind of thing. So there's kind of this work area that's split between these small groups. And then there's a public gallery. We think it's important to protect the privacy of folks who may not want to be public officials. That's a barrier to entry in decision-making currently in most of our systems. But we think it's also important for the public and folks who may be advocates on the topic, et cetera, to have a place to watch the whole thing go down—media as well. And so public gallery—it's open all the time, regardless of what's happening. Although when folks are in small groups, those aren't miked. When the assembly's in the plenary, then that is miked. And then a livestream as well, but not showing folks' faces on the assembly unless they want to be shown. Yeah. And why the U? Is there significance to the U? Yeah, I think we've gone back and forth on this a lot because it's kind of a traditional setup. It looks like a dais, and it's kind of supposed to. In a way, it's supposed to give gravity to the assembly as this decision-making body that we at least treat as if they were legislators, even if they're just advisory. It's a very important kind of philosophical point to our work. We support them. We serve them. They don't serve us. And so it gives that kind of impression, I think, physically, which I think is important. And I think right now we think it's more important than some of the cons to that architecture—for want of—which is that it looks kind of traditional, and it may look a little bit intimidating, and it may look rather just kind of like the existing things that we know and we might not like. And if we're trying to demonstrate something different, wouldn't we want something that looks different? And that, I think, is a powerful argument. Certainly there are great examples of folks doing it entirely in small groups, where the plenary happens in small groups. Every small group table has a mic, and they're interacting with each other—but in small groups. That creates sort of physical problems with people bending themselves around, doing gymnastics just to look at each other. That's hard. I think it also maybe over-emphasizes the small group and doesn't diversify the room quite enough if you're just stuck in groups a lot. I think the different kinds of field—people react—and we don't know how people react, but there are biases to literally everything. And there is no perfect way. So the best we think we can do is to mix it up as much as possible—apply that to everything, including the room. So I think that's important. I've seen things—people talk about not having tables—and that being a philosophical choice. It's a barrier between people. We sometimes use the example early on that, whereas the current way of looking at problems is that we're seated on opposite sides of a table, talking at each other, instead, in this process, we're meant to sit on the same side of the philosophical table, with the problem in the center of the table, all looking at it. It's a classic mediation sort of example. But I think all of these—whether the small group round table, the U, the circle, the whatever—they're all getting at that idea still. I really like that choice. I hadn't considered that at all. And I wonder if you might talk more about—you said that you work in service of the—do you call them delegates? Was that the word that you used? We call them delegates now. Yeah. And so, can you help maybe just talk more about—because it is, I mean, you are putting them in a position. I remember when I talked to Peter MacLeod, he talks beautifully about—the spirit of publicness that's sort of in us, that we call on in a way, that the civic assembly calls on, that when we're organized in that way, we're asked to make a decision on this part of ourselves that's part of something bigger. And it reminded me of that—when you talked about the U—that you're putting people in this position that would more traditionally be held by the legislator or the elected. Is that fair? Yeah. In that kind of context, it's kind of context-triggering in a way, or something like that. Yeah. It's this fine balance, because we don't want to recreate the problems—either societal or sort of political—that, I mean, of course, every space does to some extent. We want to mitigate some of the things that we feel like are the worst. However, yeah, I think the U continues to work for us. And in those certain contexts, I think one of the key things is that really in any of these processes, whether it's 20 people or it's 200 people, most of the actual democracy of this process is happening in small groups of various sizes. It's not happening in the plenary. The plenary is a place to come back, to gather information, to ask some key questions, to get all on the same page, to make big process decisions, or to make some final sort of statements about things just before a decision point. But it's not where the key negotiation is happening, where the creative new ideas are coming about for the most part. And so, yeah—and it's not where the social empathy is being built either, which these processes depend so heavily on. And that's where the kind of little, you know, marginal spaces are so important. Because it's not just about getting in and doing work on policy. It's about caring about your fellow human beings, because that allows you to then get down deeper than the topic—down into what is motivating people, or what the core issues might be—and find those third-way solutions, all that kind of stuff. There's this great—I don't remember the details of this—but there's this researcher who had this great way of kind of summarizing the trajectory of empathy-building throughout an assembly. And he talked about how it started—people come in, don't know anything else. They're often talking about their own experiences, which is great. And the lived experience is equally important to everything else that might come into an assembly, especially because you've got a representative sample—in a very rare instance there. But then folks start to migrate away from that and start to bring in things that they're hearing. “Hey, I heard from so-and-so yesterday in that prison,” or, “I heard from Bob in group two. That's interesting. That relates to whatever.” And then the next step is to bring in things from a little bit farther afield—“My family, you know, my sister had such-and-such an experience two years ago.” And those kinds of things are a little mixed. But the real end goal—it takes several days to get to, I think almost always—is, “I can imagine a person who might have such-and-such experience, maybe in the future, maybe that even hasn’t happened yet. And we need to think about them when we're creating this policy recommendation.” That is the gold. Absolute gold. And that doesn't get built through mechanisms of process exclusively. That also gets built through just the humanity of a group being together. Yeah, that's so beautiful. What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you? The joy is definitely in the folks in the room. I mean, there is a joy to working with colleagues on a new design. There's definitely a design sort of pleasure to it for me. But no, the emotional part is folks in the room—and both in the process itself and sort of discovering new things about what's happening, what the group is doing, or what's unexpected. And also at the end, especially. I mean, there are some great videos of the final reflections of the delegates sitting around at the very end, talking about what it means to them, how important it has been, and what friends they've made. It's an open space. And we've never said, “Oh, please say your thank-yous,” or, “Say what you feel about your fellow delegates.” No. It's a “say whatever you'd like” to each other and the public. It's literally whatever. But universally, it is not a grandstanding space. I've never seen it become that. Only a sort of appreciation space, naturally—which is the best. And it always makes me tear up. Yeah. Why do you think that is? I mean, I think it goes back to that—the importance beyond any of the mechanical things—of the human aspect. I mean, people want to belong to things and be with other humans. We know that. But it's also different to be working on what feels like an important project with people that you didn't expect to be able to work with. I mean, that's a great satisfaction. I know I get satisfaction from that kind of thing. I get satisfaction from just watching it happen. So it must be wonderful to be a part of—and for it to be so unexpected. I mean, people come in... I mean, certainly unexpected for me. I’d say the first one of these I did was in 2016 here in Oregon, as a statewide ballot measure around corporate tax reform. Super—like a super controversial issue. Involved a lot about education funding, but also super technical too. And I wasn't sure. I was like, you know, this group seems to be doing something interesting. I come out of planning school and was kind of a little—I don't know—not very excited about where I felt like public engagement was in the planning world. And this wasn’t—we weren’t doing anything public planning at the time, anything urban planning-related at the time. But I thought, oh, this group is doing something interesting. Let’s see what it looks like. And yeah, first of all—impressed. You know, people did a great job handling this very complex measure. But more importantly than that, I remember on the first day, there were two people. There’s a bartender from Portland—tattoos up one arm, down the other—like, I think, purple hair, I forget. And, you know, pretty left-wing views, and straight out with them right at the beginning. Not necessarily questions as questions, but more as statements. Likewise, there’s this guy—same sort of deal—but he's from a small town in southern Oregon. Khaki pants and a white polo shirt every single one of the four days that we’re in the assembly. And came out as well—statements, not questions. I was like, oh, here we go. Classic. Let’s just see how this goes over the next four days. This is just going to break down, and everybody’s going to get on one side or the other. And here we go, you know. And not only did that not happen, but by day four, they were the two best friends, probably on the whole panel. And they were working together in small groups, trying to figure out what the best quality information was—in this case, to send to voters. And yeah, you know, came out of it as friends, as far as I know. And, you know, I was—I was like, totally blown away. I was like, well, if that’s not going to do it—I mean, that’s, you know—I can do anything. Yeah. So I’m curious to hear you talk about where it is in the USA. Like, I know that I try to spread the word here in Hudson, and there’s this tension between wanting people to acknowledge it as something that’s new and different and offers a different way of doing things. But that makes people uncomfortable. So there’s a need to demonstrate that it’s really proven and right—and that this is something we’re familiar with—but also that it’s really good at very difficult problems. And can you talk a little bit more about—what’s the use case here? What’s the best application of this space? Yeah, I think it’s—it’s often first used—this is the way I often say it now—on the most difficult issues. But I’m not sure that’s the best use, necessarily. I don’t know exactly what the best use is. It’s evolving all the time. The best use may be actually on the more mundane stuff, on a continuous basis. That might be an even better use. And there are certain cases where I think there are really contentious issues where the civic assembly may not be it—where there needs to be something that’s a little bit higher level, or something that happens first. There needs to be some constructive kind of—something that’s more sort of focused on the human side. Something that’s arts-and-culture-related, or something that’s, you know, more public, or whatever. I mean, there’s lots of different things that need to piece together into a democratic ecosystem. And this is just one small piece. It’s also one piece that is emphatically not a single product. We don’t think it should be a product at all. But it should not be a single thing—even. It’s not a single thing. It’s a thing that we’re now using this one term to describe, but it comes in so many different forms. The pieces are put together in so many different ways. I think what’s more important is that the values are there. That the values in terms of the power paradigm being shifted toward everyday people and away from the people running the thing itself—or the people who are traditionally in positions of power receiving the recommendations. That the architecture is there. That representativeness is there. That trying to focus on drawing people out of the woodwork—the 90—who knows how much percent, 99% maybe—of folks who don’t participate very much in most communities in politics, except for maybe voting every couple of years. That is the vast majority of people in this country. And it’s our lack of feeling of ownership—and lack of actual ownership—over public policy that I think drives so much of the ability for authoritarianism to feel enticing. And for dysfunction. And for people to gain power who are not actually the folks who are best at governing, and so on. So we need—we need ownership, not involvement. I think that needs to drive whatever the things are that we’re doing. For me right now, this feels like an essential, sort of big piece that is missing. But if this kind of thing—a lottery-selected and deliberative space—were present throughout the decision-making architecture, in small and big and temporary and permanent ways, then I would be focused on something totally different. Because there would be some other gap, no doubt, that would still align with those values. Yeah. I really appreciate the—the—the completely—it's the corrective. That it’s not really this one-time difficult-question thing. I mean, I know that—I know Cambridge is thinking about doing a permanent assembly, right? I mean, I don’t know if they’ve actually instituted that, but that it's become—and people talk about it as the fourth branch. That there’d be like the people’s branch. Have you heard that? That there’s a way that it would be—it would become a permanent part of local government? Oh, is that the latest iteration? I didn’t know that, actually. I talked to them at a point where they were thinking about just giving council the power to convene one temporary assembly each year. But if they’re thinking about some permanent architecture, that’s even better. Oh. Well, I think that’s what I was interpreting—that there would be an annual residents’ assembly. Seemed permanent enough to me. I hope I didn’t misrepresent it. Yeah, no. Fair enough. I mean, it would certainly be the first city council in the United States to put anything like that into permanence. Just, you know, I think compared to what we feel like is possible, and what some places in other parts of the world are doing, it feels like the sort of the first easiest step. You use council as the sort of agenda-setting body, put in this mandate—don’t set a lot of the terms—those will have to be developed, rules and sort of around it, later. I think that's a totally legit place to start, and certainly nobody's gotten there yet. So, cheers to them. But I think then the next level is putting the governance and agenda-setting power likewise into permanent lottery-selected bodies. And that’s—then we're getting into something that feels more like a self-contained, self-determinative sort of system with its own kind of independence. Can you spell that out for me? I feel like I'm not grasping the distinction you're making—that you're talking about agenda and governance. Can you? Yeah, I'll do it, actually, by using one of our sort of things that we've tried to get funded for forever. And it's kind of our, you know, pie-in-the-sky idea. I should have just asked you: what's your vision? This is the question—what is your vision for civic assembly moving forward? This is just one of the many crazy—in a good way—ideas, I think. But we, since we had this sort of background in the initiative system, we've long thought about what could be the other reforms to direct democracy systems. They come from this arguably very democratic place in the early 20th century—a way to bypass corrupt legislatures and give the people direct access to policymaking power. And there's a reason why they're still so popular. Eighty-plus percent support for the initiative process in most states where it exists, even though they're arguably one of the most corrupt systems in our democracy—hugely flooded with money on all sides, for and against these ballot measures. But it is sort of the only place where, as a voter, you get direct—it is the only place where you get the possibility to make a direct, albeit very small, decision-making point on a policy position—on something that affects you at some point in your life. I mean, think how rare that is—otherwise basically nonexistent for virtually all of us. Which, by the way, that is the core problem that our democracy faces. But could this be used as sort of a mechanism to start to put chinks in that hold on power—away from the public, anyway? So our idea is to create—this is borrowing from work by Terry Berishas in Vermont, and from work in Belgium and elsewhere as well—Madrid. And the idea is to sort of create a cyclical process with a permanent governance body composed entirely not of former electeds or, you know, elder statespeople, but rather of former lottery-selected folks from previous assemblies exclusively, which would have power to hire and fire the people like us—who are sort of their expert technical design consultants—as well as to set other terms and rules related to the process itself. And every two years, there would be an agenda assembly that would be separate from that governance assembly. I think that's important, although sometimes those things have been mixed in the past. That agenda assembly would do agenda-setting across all the policy issues throughout a particular jurisdiction—let's say a state. What is the legislature missing? Get inputs from the public in a variety of, perhaps, online ways—especially from interest groups, advocacy groups, from legislators. “Hey, here's what I couldn't get done in the legislature. Here's what I feel like is being stopped up by our own systems,” etc.—and put those together. That alone is a massive process. We think six months or something—a huge process to really dig through that. And a huge product as well. Imagine the legislature at the end of that coming back and saying, “Oh, wow, we've got this prioritized list of priorities from this representative sample of the public.” That's incredible. Then the legislature would have a little bit of a gap—a little bit of a potential feedback loop—to go away and potentially get some of those things done. In which case, the assembly would come back, review the legislature’s work, and say: “Yeah, okay, we think you did number one priority. You did that pretty well. You made a couple of revisions, but we’re fine with that.” “Number two—you attempted that. You totally watered it down. We don’t like that at all. We’re going to do it better for you.” “Number three—you didn’t address it at all,” etc. So number two and three maybe go on to another assembly. We've been calling this the drafting—a drafting assembly—where they're working again for quite a long period of time to essentially write those laws with legal assistance. And then some kind of store of money, some kind of endowment, that would be unlocked by a supermajority vote at the end of all that process to jumpstart the signature-gathering process and use the initiative system—and hopefully get, you know, other advocacy groups involved at that point. Sort of matchmaking. The assembly will know very well who their allies might be. And, you know, I think for us, we feel like this uses an existing, highly popular American system that has a high degree of potential power. And if it only had sort of a deliberative arm to go with it—and also that it would not just, you know, kind of put negative pressure on the representative system, but hopefully be a positive force. Encourage that system to become more deliberative. If—you know—we know that assemblies and initiatives are essentially the two most popular democratic pieces that we see in polling, maybe the legislature would get a little whiff of, “Hey, maybe we should be more like those things.” Nice. That sounds amazing. We have a little bit of time left, and selfishly, I've got two things that I wanted to ask you about. One is, you know, when I talk to people, there's this disbelief that everyday people can process these complicated issues. You know what I mean? It's such a funny instinct that people have. How do you speak to that? And there's a process of education, I think, also that happens in the assembly too. Can you just speak to that—whether it's distrust or lack of faith in our neighbors to handle complicated issues? Yeah, totally. I mean, it is kind of—it’s the sort of authoritarianism of the mind is the way I think about it. And it’s in all of us, including those of us who are working in this field all the time. We have to—and I have to—sort of think: hey, hold on. Is that trusting the assembly here? Or are we trying to manufacture a situation that will, you know, prevent them from making a mistake, prevent them from—you know—be their parents, protect them from whatever? No, no, no, no, no. All that patronizing crap has to go. That is the old way of thinking. These are adults, just like you and me. They have brains that are extremely capable. And we need to get beyond that elitism. And that becomes very hard when you’re responsible for a project that, you know, people put a lot of money into and that people’s political careers may be riding on a little bit. You really want it to go well. But, you know, not only is that patronizing, but it also often means that we are inserting our own biases in ways that we probably don’t even realize—into a process—and not letting the assembly, in all of its incredible representativeness that we don’t have, that we will never have, do what it can do best on behalf of the public. So we need to get out of our own—we need to get out of everybody’s way—and let the assembly do its job. And I think the other piece of this is that we have a really serious kind of inferiority complex as political people, I think. Most of us. Some of us have giant egos. But what we find is that most people who respond are really unsure about their own ability to participate in this kind of thing. And every single—without fail—every single process we do, we get a phone call that is like, “I'd love to do this. I can do this. I would love to do my civic duty as I see it. But—there’s no way I'm qualified to talk about housing.” There’s one case, a bunch of years ago, a housing-related topic. And the person who had called and said this—she herself had lived in like three different types of housing. The thing was about some government subsidies for housing. She had lived in several different types, and the only one that she hadn’t lived in, her sister had lived in. So nobody could possibly be more qualified, on a personal basis, in evaluating how these things work. So we have to—you know—it’s often young people as well. I remember an instance of a high schooler who was like, “My mom told me to give you guys a call, but there's no way I’m doing this,” right? And we were like, “No, actually, you're perfect. Please.” And she ended up being one of the best people in the room. One of the best at pulling out—very quiet at first—but that's often the folks who are the best at pulling out the most ingenious, sort of cross-disciplinary solutions. So yeah, we need to respect our own capacity—and each other’s capacity.Last question. Cause I know you've done a lot of thinking about this, and I've done a lot of thinking about this, because it applies here in Hudson. We're a community that's thinking about reforming its city charter. And this is like the wonkiest of wonky topics, but can you talk—how do you think about the application of civic assembly to the process of charter reform for a city? Yeah, I think this is one of—it’s a super interesting area. One that we're particularly interested in, because it's complex. It's complex on multiple levels. First of all, it's not very sexy. That's actually not the biggest issue. People often think, "Oh, we need a thing that's going to really pop out at people." But no—we've gotten similar response rates on topics that nobody seems to care about as ones that people do. I think it probably matters a little bit, but the fact is, when people are in the room, they buy into doing a thing about anything that is important. And people very quickly see how it affects them. So that is not actually a challenge. But certainly, there is a challenge of just the mass of material that already exists. So that's kind of an interesting twist. We're not dealing with something that's just brand new. In many of these cases, we're dealing with pre-existing plans and projects—or whatever—that are feeding into something. Existing conditions and so forth. But here is something that's a very dense legal document, and the different kinds of things in a charter, especially one that hasn't been reviewed in a long time, is chock full of all kinds of stuff. So I think there's an interesting thing—we need to think about ways to make the work match the scope, as always. And one of those may be kind of a filtering feature of some kind near the beginning. That's pretty different than another assembly. Maybe there needs to be—well, there needs to be both a filtering of kind of the more administrative tasks, perhaps of charter cleanup, into some subset of the assembly—or perhaps delegated to some other staff body or something. And then there also needs to be an agenda-setting process, maybe kind of similar to this initiative convention idea that I talked about a few minutes ago, to prioritize: What do we want to work on? And then from there, we can get into a more traditional assembly process. But that stuff—that's going to take quite a long time. There also needs to be—you know, and this is true for many processes, but I think even more in this case—a process discovery sort of process. It's terrible, but, you know, an educational period for the assembly to get advice and technical support from a bunch of different angles on just how to understand this thing. What it is, what it's trying to do, where it came from, what are the sort of biases and inputs and whatever things that might have come into it in the past? What are things that we might consider doing with it? All this kind of stuff. It's going to be very heavy on the process discovery phase, I think. Yeah. And beautiful. I want to respect your time—we’re at the end of the hour. This has been so much fun. I really appreciate you accepting my invitation, and I just think the work you're doing is really amazing. I'm going to include a bunch of links with the piece to give people as much chance to sort of encounter what you're doing as possible. So thank you so much, Linn. Oh, well, Peter, I really appreciate your support. Thank you. This has been a pleasure. And just to anybody who's interested in this—we're just a little nonprofit. We'd love to help you out, our friends, or whoever is trying to improve democracy. So please reach out to us any way you see on our website. And thanks so much. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Elle Griffin [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellegriffin/] writes The Elysian [https://www.elysian.press/], a publication dedicated to exploring utopian ideas, reimagining the future of capitalism, democracy, work, and humanity through essays and fiction. She is aformer journalist at Esquire, Insider, and Forbes. She's writing her book "We Should Own The Economy” in public. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories, and it’s such a beautiful question that I’ve adopted it. But it’s a big question, so I tend to over-explain it—just like I’m doing right now. That’s the biggest lead-up ever. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—in any way that feels right to you. The question is: Where do you come from? I was born in Germany. My parents were in the Air Force, and after that, we moved every two to three years all over the U.S. Now I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’ve lived here for ten years—minus two years when we were away traveling. Do you have any recollection of what it was like moving around so much? I really loved it. It was a chance to see new things everywhere we went. It’s interesting because my sister—she’s two years younger than me—didn’t enjoy it as much. Now she wants to stay in one place her whole life. But I loved it, and I still continue to move and travel a lot. I think some people really thrive growing up that way, and I was definitely one of them. Do you remember what young Elle wanted to be when she grew up?I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was in elementary school. Then, from middle school through high school, I wanted to be a Broadway actress. I started college as a dance major because I wasn’t a strong enough singer to make it on Broadway. But pretty quickly, I realized I just wasn’t at the caliber of Broadway performers—you kind of have to be by the time you’re 18. So I thought, Okay, I want to devote my career to the arts—what’s one art form I can stick with for life? I chose writing, and I’ve been doing that ever since. Tell me more about that—when you say you chose writing, what did that look like? How did you make that choice? Well, I didn’t know writing could be a career. In college, I actually graduated with a double major in fashion merchandising and French. My first job out of college was as a buyer for American Eagle Outfitters, and I absolutely hated it. When my husband and I moved to San Francisco, I pivoted and became a buyer for Williams Sonoma, which is a home goods and kitchen retailer. I worked in their cookbook division—buying the books that would appear in Williams Sonoma stores. While I was there, a position opened up in the catalog department. I transitioned to a project focused on overhauling the Williams Sonoma catalog. At the time, I also had a French cooking blog on the side—it was just a fun passion project I had started right after college. I was really into making my own baguettes, my own yogurt—things like that. And the name of said blog—long defunct. It was just a product of my early twenties, and I was really into cooking and I was working. But I didn’t think of it as a career. Being in the Bay Area and going into the Williams Sonoma catalog and working with cookbooks, I kind of thought, okay, maybe there’s something I can do related to writing in my career. But my plan at that time was: have a good job that pays me a good income so I can have free time to write and do my passion, and save all of my money so that I can spend my time as a writer. I ended up working in the Bay Area for probably seven years, all the time with some sort of blog or publication on the side—until one of the publications I had on the side started doing pretty well. When I left—at that time I was working in content marketing for a tech company—I decided to leave the tech world when my husband and I moved to Salt Lake City. And I was going to go full-time with writing and publishing. I got a job as an editor for Forbes and The Muse, working remotely. So then I started getting into the business scene. And then when we moved to Salt Lake City, I got a job as the editor—editor-in-chief—of Utah Business, which is a business publication that covers the tech scene in Utah. So that was kind of like business writing. I did that for a number of years while freelancing for major publications on the side, until I went full-time with my Substack. And how is the Substack going? How do you introduce the Substack to people? Yeah. So I write The Elysian, which actually, again, started as a side project while I was working at Utah Business. At the time, I wanted to publish my Gothic novel, and I decided to serialize it on a newsletter rather than publish it as a standalone. So I did that, and I raised $20,000 from paid subscribers during that process. And it was so fun. I was just like, well, this is a unique way to publish a novel. And then I switched jobs to a new media company. And after three months, they decided they didn’t want to focus on publishing anymore, and I was laid off. So I was like, okay, well, I’ll go full-time with my Substack then. Because at that time, I had a following and some income, and it was pretty decent. So I switched the publication to focus on a combination of my professional and personal interests, rather than just my personal interests. Now I focus on how we can create a better future by reinventing our systems of government, systems of capitalism, and the various systems that support humanity. And I am writing a utopian novel on the side as I research these various systems and how we can change them through my newsletter. Yeah. It’s really wonderful stuff. I can’t—in that way, I can’t recall how I actually encountered the Substack, but I really appreciated what you’re doing. And I think the first one—I mean, I live in a small town and have become really passionate about citizens assembly. That’s one piece I know you had a wonderful interview about. So yeah, maybe—can you tell me a little bit about what you’re learning about the future of governance and what’s possible? Yeah. It’s interesting, because I think—because I approached the topic from the standpoint of, I want to write this utopian novel that takes place 10,000 years in the future. What should the government look like then? What should the economy look like then? I had to do all of this world-building that you would typically do for a novel. But what’s interesting here is that I was using the real world. I was researching real-world things, like: what are the governments that are the best governments in the world? What are the models of economy that work really well for humanity? I was researching these things. And coming at it from that mindset is very different from approaching it from the current modern world and what we have now, and just being like: these are what we have now, so these are what we’re always going to have. So therefore, I don’t know, I think a lot of times if you're focused super on the here and now, you can only come up with options like: we should get rid of capitalism, or we should go back to socialism—even though we've tried these experiments and they haven’t worked out in the real world. So I think it’s worth seeing what case studies worked and what haven’t, but then also seeing, okay, but where could we take that in the future? Because what we have right now is not what we’re going to have 100 years from now. What we have now is not what we had 100 years ago. So we can be more imaginative in our journalism, and that’s definitely the approach I take. I sometimes call it speculative journalism or solutions-oriented journalism, because I’m not reporting on what we currently have—I’m imagining what could be, by focusing on real-world examples and how we could get there. Yeah. It’s amazing. I don’t know that I was aware of your—maybe this is what I responded to. I think my own activities in my community really came out of, I mean, all the problems that we all know, but I remember encountering solutions journalism. And Amanda Ripley’s “Complicating the Narrative [https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/program/complicating-the-narratives]” essay was a big piece of inspiration for me. So it’s cool to hear you reference it. What's your—how would you describe your relationship with solutions journalism? And what does it mean to you to practice it? Yeah, I think it’s interesting, because early on—maybe this was two years ago or something—every time I would write a piece, like I would write a piece about how the states should be in control of their taxation in the U.S., not the federal government. Or I would write about: could all the U.S. states be their own country? Or: could every country in the world be part of NATO and end all world wars? And people would comment, like, this is not possible. You’re living in a delusion. Or: you’re naive. How could you think—obviously we could never do these things. That’s ridiculous. And my response to that was: how could you say that? Literally, the things that people imagined 100 years ago, we now have. And back then, people were like, that’s impossible. That’s impossible, we could never have that. I mean, to think about the Founding Fathers of America writing a new government into existence and being like, hey, what if we didn’t have monarchies? Common Sense by Thomas Paine—I mean, come on—it was no greater work of what you might call fiction to people back then. But they took it seriously. They were like, wait, maybe we actually should be separate from Britain. Wait, maybe we could invent a government that doesn’t have a king. Maybe we do this totally differently. What can we do? What can we do? And people were brainstorming. I mean, The Federalist Papers were like brainstorming out in public. And I love that. I read that stuff. I live for it. And I was like, why shouldn’t we still be doing that today? Why do we have to just be like, what we have now is permanent. Now that we have a government, let’s not amend our Constitution anymore. Let’s not make any changes. What we have is perfect. Let’s keep going. Like, no. We should continue to reimagine these systems, just like writers have been forever. So it just seems to me a natural way to—yeah, everyone’s saying the systems don’t work, the systems don’t work, the systems are failing us. Okay, well, then what should we do instead? We have that power of brainstorming. Yeah, I love it. The—you speak about the imagination, right? I feel like I would love to hear you talk about the role of the imagination in this, because I feel like that’s certainly what you’re pointing at. Yeah. I mean, I actually structure my newsletter as if it's like an old social club. I take a lot of inspiration from the old socialist clubs during the Enlightenment—not because I'm pro-socialism. I'm pro-socialism in the context of how it's used in the modern Nordic countries. But what I’m really interested in is what happened in those social clubs during the Enlightenment. Because here were these people who were like, I don’t know, industrialization has happened, but I don’t really like what this is doing to workers. And maybe workers should be treated differently. Maybe the state should take over the economy so that we can all be workers in it and everybody can be prosperous. And the way they came up with these ideas was through two things. One, it was writing letters, which they published in pamphlets and delivered to every door and circulated in the square for a penny or something. And they published journals. Think of the Royal Societies or the socialist clubs in England and in the U.S.—they published books. Edward Bellamy was the head of the Socialist League in the United States, and he wrote this book Looking Backward, which was a novel that takes place in the year 2000 about what the world should look like. And that inspired everyone at his socialist clubs to be like, we should build this future in real life. And in England, you had William Morris, who didn’t like Bellamy’s book, so he wrote his own in 1890 called News from Nowhere. It also took place in the year 2000, with what the future should look like—but it was more artisans, and it was less high-tech. And his socialist clubs in England were like, yeah, we should support the merchant class and all of this. So on the one hand, we had the writings. And on the other hand, we had the meetings—the socialist clubs themselves—which everyone was a member of. And they got all of the written materials and brainstormed with them when they met in person. Like, “I didn’t like that article you wrote in the last pamphlet,” or “Here’s why I disagree with your novel and what you want for the future.” And people played these ideas out in the clubs and through the letters, and were publicly brainstorming together. That’s how I view my own newsletter—through that lens. We are publishing pamphlets, we are publishing books, we are publishing writings, and then we have gatherings on Zoom. And I did some experiments with in-person this year to talk about these ideas and how we could make them a reality. And now I’m working on a long-term book project that is thinking that through: how could we, in the case of capitalism in particular, take some of these ideas and create a better version for the future? So there’s this writing pamphlets/action/leagues-and-action structure that I’m very interested in. And that is the inspiration for my solutions-oriented journalism. Let’s start with the brainstorming and the ideas. Let’s refine them through discussion. And then—how can we actually create them? Yeah, it’s amazing. What do you love about the work—about your work? Where is the joy in it for you? Really the creative aspect of it. Right now, I’ve been really struggling with understanding the news. I’ve been having to read this wide variety of news sources to try to understand what’s happening in the world. And I’ve found it really frustrating to understand what’s happening in the world. So I’ve worked with ChatGPT to design my own news source that would give me the information I want. And give me a larger view rather than this zoomed-in, sensationalist view. And that’s been a very creative project. It’s been very fun for me. Because at the same time as I’m trying to come up with a better news source for myself, I’m imagining what a better news source could look like. What would that mean? What would that even look like? Could that work on a larger scale than just for me? And I think it’s fun to—I don’t like journalism that focuses too much in the weeds, where there isn’t the imagination and creative element. When you're just focused on, “Here’s how the social system works here, and could we implement that?” I’m interested in the bigger picture—the more creative vision. It’s not all going to happen at once. It’s going to happen over the long term. So being fully imaginative with where it could go in the future is really fun for me. Yeah. You mentioned you're in Salt Lake City. I'm curious, how did you come to be there, and what do you love about it? My husband and I were living in the North Bay of San Francisco for a long time. I felt like I wasn’t close enough to the city—to San Francisco. We were living in Marin, in Fairfax. And my husband thought we weren’t living close enough to Tahoe, the mountains. So we were both working remotely at the time, and we were like, let’s see if we can find a city in the mountains. We did a kind of road trip to a bunch of them, and we ended up liking Salt Lake City the best. It’s a kind of medium-sized city, and it’s right at the base of the mountains, so it works for both of us. As we say, we can go on a beautiful hike in the mountains during the day and go see a Broadway show at night. So that’s a good mix. Nice. Talk to me about utopia. This is an idea that I probably pretend like I know about, but I don’t really know about. What are we talking about when we talk about utopia, and what role does it play for us? Yeah. So I think utopia—utopia is the word developed by Thomas More for his book of the same name. It meant two things. It was a play on words. It meant “good place” in the Greek, but it was spelled with a “u” instead of an “eu,” so it actually meant “no place.” So it was kind of an interesting thought experiment. It was like: here’s a good place, but it’s also not in existence in the world. So it’s no place. But here’s what an ideal little island could look like. And then writers have taken that up since then in so many forms—Francis Bacon, as I said, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, a lot of sci-fi novelists. One of my favorite utopia novels is Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from 1915. So we have this long genre of people writing what a better world could look like—what a better future could look like, what a better government or island community could look like. Aldous Huxley famously rewrote his Brave New World as the sequel Island, which is like: what if we used all the same things that went wrong in Brave New World to create a utopian society in Island? So it’s long haunted the work of writers as a way of imagining what a better future could look like. And it’s conversely what gave us the dystopian genre—writers saying, here’s how things could go terribly wrong. And that makes for a more dramatic novel, of course, and a more fast-paced novel, but gives us a lot of views of the world gone bad. So I kind of wanted to resurrect this utopian genre a bit, because I just feel like the dystopian genre now is haunting our imagination a little too much. We can only imagine the ways things could go wrong. And I think that’s hindering us in our ability to develop things that could do good. So I’m interested in exploring that genre further. It’s amazing. I didn’t really see this coming, but I had a project a long time ago—in my capacity as a research consultant and brand consultant, I would often take out ideas for new products and share them with people to understand how to better communicate them, or even refine what they were. And I had a period where I was working in nonfiction TV, you know what I mean? And so I took out a concept for a whole series, and it was a series about science fiction authors. And I got a bunch of genre people together, and we were talking about what they love about the genre—about science fiction and all that stuff. And they had all these really beautiful, romantic, utopian ideas, and heroic ideas about why that space is so satisfying for them. But all the stories about science fiction were so dark and so dystopian. And I feel like there’s one—is it Neal Stephenson? I think maybe at one point he wrote a piece that said we’ve sort of failed humanity in terms of science fiction. Like we really have such a negative view—we have a dystopian instinct, in a way, in terms of the stories that we tell ourselves about the future. And this is what you're talking about. Exactly. I think it's crazy that we can only think of computer chips in our brain as mind control, when there’s nothing in science fiction—or very little—that uses that to make quadriplegics walk. There are so many good uses for technology, but we can only see the Minority Report vision because that’s how we use it on shows. You mentioned one novel—one science fiction or utopian novel—that you liked quite a bit. What—do you know the one? Can you tell me? Yeah. H-E-R-L-A-N-D. Herland. She was a feminist writer in 1915, part of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. She was a mentor of Edward Bellamy. So I told you—Edward Bellamy was the socialist who wrote this Looking Backward utopian novel that was a high-tech future. He was like, imagine if we could see orchestras in our homes—like Spotify. Or imagine if we could have credit cards where we could buy everything from an Amazon-like warehouse, right? He had kind of a high-tech vision of the future. And then I said, Bellamy wrote his novel, or—William Morris wrote his novel two years later saying, “No, I don’t want that.” We want this more medieval—artisans, stone workers, beautiful architecture, the whole world’s artists kind of novel. And then Charlotte Perkins Gilman was both a friend of William Morris’s daughter and a mentee of Edward Bellamy. She was like, honestly, I think both of your visions won’t function unless we get women involved. So she wrote this response utopian novel that was an entire society of women. The men all died going to war, and only the women are left in this society. And they evolve to reproduce just as women. This women’s society managed to create this competition-less future where there is no capitalism, because everybody just wants to help each other out. They want to create a good society for their children. And the book takes place with these three men who stumble across this society. They think what they’re going to find is—it’ll never work. It'll be a bunch of nuns living in the woods, or they’ll need men to come in and save them and have kings. And they’re so upset when they get there. They’re like, “How do they operate without that? Without a king? How do they operate without competition?” They think this wouldn’t work, but they have this very well-functioning society. So hers was kind of like—actually, it’s the male ego that is making capitalism so warped. And if we didn’t have that, maybe we wouldn’t have that. So it’s kind of an interesting book, for sure. Yeah. What do you love about that? Like, what excites you about the book or that story? What—yeah. Do you know what I mean? What makes a story like that so important to you? Well, I think at the time I wrote an article comparing the book to the Barbie movie when that came out, because both portray this feminine kind of utopia. In Herland, they all live in these pink chateaus—these pink stone chateaus. And it’s this biodynamic forest where every tree is fruit-bearing. And it’s very beautiful—gardens and crushed stone underfoot. And the guys were like, wow, this is so pretty. Why are aesthetics so important? And the Barbie movie has this Barbie Land idea where it’s this hyper-feminine kind of concept. What I thought was interesting about both is that they portrayed the world as if—what would the world be like if it was fully designed by women? And I thought, in both books, you can also see the world as it’s designed by men. You have the Ken character in the Barbie movie who goes into the real world and is like, oh, this is the world designed for patriarchy, you know? And in Herland, it’s the same thing. You have these guys coming from the real world who are like—the real world is—and in both cases, the real world is the masculine utopia, kind of, so to speak. And the feminine utopia is completely foreign to us. When you look at the male utopia, you're like, okay, well, that actually is what our real world is like. And when you look at the feminine utopia, you're like, oh, that isn’t actually what the real world is like. So I found it really interesting. I do think there are elements of our culture that are more male-influenced than female. And I’ve said this before in relation to sci-fi too—like, the fact that sci-fi is all generation ships and technology and going to the moon and silver spacesuits, and not gardens and beautiful treehouse villages and this kind of more aesthetic idea—is because we have so much male-written sci-fi and not as much female-written sci-fi. I’m oversimplifying, obviously. The gender roles are not this specific. But I think it’s interesting to think about: what would the culture be like if there was more of a feminine presence? You know, in the Barbie movie, it’s hyper—it’s like we’re having dance parties every night, and we’re wearing sequins, and we’re doing all of the jobs, and men aren’t in any of them. And it’s kind of this overdone idea, but it’s like, well, there’s kind of not enough of that in the real world. So I find that concept interesting. Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of so many different things—what you were just talking about. I’ve had conversations with people, maybe in journalism too, about the work of Deborah Tannen. She’s a linguist, and she wrote a book about gendered communication. The title of her book was You Just Don’t Understand. She characterizes that there are masculine ways of communicating and feminine ways of communicating. The shorthand version is that men very often communicate to report—they’re reporting information. They don’t really face each other. They’re shoulder to shoulder. And so men are always reporting information. That’s what they do. And women are building rapport. So there’s all of this stuff that’s going on in the conversation between women that has nothing to do with information, but is doing all this other work. And there’s certainly a way—I think I was talking to a journalist friend—and we just sort of looked at news through that lens. And imagined: what would a rapport-building news operation look like, right? And this—does this feel—it feels like a speculative question that would provide rich results, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of my favorite movies is a film called The Pod Generation. And when I watched that, I was like, this is the first time I’ve seen a sci-fi film be beautiful. Like, I actually wanted to live in this future—maybe. And it was because it was a feminine director. She was inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe for all of the color palettes and the architecture and the design. And I was like, this is a pretty future. I love this. What’s the name of that movie? The Pod Generation. I will look it up. Yeah, you have to watch it. It’s so good. So, we’ve talked a little bit about—well, yeah—what other models are out there that you’re particularly excited about, that you see? Whether it’s governance, right? And/or the economy? Yeah. I think most recently—I told you I kind of designed this news source for myself—and what I did was create a report card for the world. I have every country on there, and I’ve used four different indices that rate countries on various factors. There are two very prominent ones that rate countries on democracy, human rights, and freedom—those are V-Dem and Freedom House. Then there’s the World Bank Governance Indicators report, which reports on government quality—so, public voice, corruption, all these different factors. And then there’s the UN’s Human Development Index. I went through and weighted all of these indices and gave each country a score, from one to 100. And that allowed me to rank them A, B, C, D, F, based on what each country gets. This provided me with a framework for how governments around the world are doing. What are the ones we want to study that are doing a really good job? What are the ones that we don’t want to study because they’re not doing a good job—or we want to learn from them what not to do? I’ve been enjoying having this bigger picture, and then using that to ask: now that we know overall how countries are doing, what are the ways that they’re swinging? A lot of these indices—they’re annuals, they come out every year—and ended in 2024. So have things that happened in 2025 really created these drastic swings for any of the countries on this list? It’s been interesting to see how various events could sway things. I’ve been doing this kind of comprehensive analysis—from installing a new social education system and what that would do to your points and swings, to collapsing into dictatorship or totalitarian government and how that swings your country down. And how much of that is possible in a given year. So it’s allowed me to look at everything from a step back and say, okay, what are the actual tangible things that happened in 2025 that are making some of these countries go up or go down? That’s allowed me to explore governance from a more high-level view. Because in the U.S., you’re just—every day you’re like, why don’t we make the island of Alcatraz into a prison again? And then three months later, obviously we’re not turning it into a prison. And then it’s like, why don’t we buy Greenland? And three months later, it’s like, okay, well, we’re not actually buying Greenland. There’s just this kind of weird—there are these wild swings happening every day. And I was like, but I don’t think there are actually wild swings happening, big picture. There are some things that are majorly pivoting us up and pivoting us down, but it’s not what the media is reporting as far as the wild swings. I wanted to be able to understand: how is the world doing? How are the countries doing? What is making them go up or down? This is allowing me to explore how these systems could change for the better. Because we’ve seen what countries have done that have given them wild swings in the up direction. We’ve seen what countries have done that have given them wild swings in the bottom direction. And we can learn from those. I also think it takes a big period of inflection to make a lot of things go through. When FDR came in and did the Labor Act, that had a huge effect across the country—but we had been fighting for labor movements for decades at that point, until we had this wild swing. It was the Great Depression, World War I—everything was in flux. And then we were like, okay, well, now we can do anything because everything’s up for grabs. So let’s just make a bunch of labor movements pass. Let’s go, go, go. And that changed everything—40-hour workweek, minimum wage, no child labor—and drastically changed the whole country. I think we are entering one of those key moments of inflection now, where everything seems up for grabs and nothing is off the table. We’re having these wild ideas coming through in government. So why not have some good ideas ready that are tested, and we can look to other countries that have done them and say: okay, when the next FDR comes, let’s go, go, go, and push through all these major changes and make major good happen in the world. So when you ask what’s exciting to me in these systems—it’s that we actually have opportunities to make big swings in the positive direction in a lot of our countries right now. So why don’t we learn what those are and try to figure out what those are, so that we’re ready when we do have a moment to enact them all? Yeah, it’s super exciting. I really connect with what you said at the end there about just the possibility that we’re living in. Not everybody has that reaction. Of course it’s chaos, and it’s pure, unadulterated chaos. But it is the kind of chaos... I mean, coming from the world I come from, I just think of the ritual process—and that we’re in this really liminal period, where things are sort of betwixt and between, the way Victor Turner would talk about. And I don’t know that I’ve ever really been—I mean, it’s a stupid thing to say—but I’ve never really felt that way. And I didn’t think it would feel like this, you know? That it would be tinged with horror, in a way. Or with real stakes. So I really—there’s a way in which these ideas come across as very beautiful and innocent, but they’re deadly serious ideas, given the context that they’re trying to show up in. Yeah. But I think we have to realize that a lot of good things in our world came from periods of really bad things. I mean, the Labor Act only came across because capitalism was going so badly and people were treated so horribly. And the Depression, and yeah, World War I—that was crazy. And World War II obviously was insane. And even the French revolutions, even the Civil War—getting rid of slavery. To do really good things... I’m not saying we had to do them with war. The United States had a revolution, and then France had a revolution. But then a bunch of European countries were like, we’ll just not have a revolution. Our kings and queens are learning from this and being like, oh, let’s establish a parliament. So I think we can—we can take from this crazy, bad, tumultuous time and be like, okay, now we’re going to come in and say, let’s not do this. Let’s do something different. You are writing a book, We Should Own the Economy? Can you tell us about it? Yeah. I’m writing that one right now in public for my subscribers. So I was kind of researching better models for capitalism. I had written a couple of posts to that extent. Usually, when I research an article, I have a list of things I want to research and learn and solutions that I want to think through and come up with. I read all those things, come to some thoughts, and it ends up being an article. And I had an incredibly long—eventually I realized, okay, this isn’t going to be one article or even a series of articles. This is a whole book’s length worth of things that I’m trying to research here. So I ended up putting the outline—the whole thing—up on a platform called WeFunder, which allows you to crowdfund investment. And I said, “Hey, I’m interested in writing this book called We Should Own the Economy. Here’s what I’m going to research. If you’d like to invest in the book, you can invest, which will help me research the book, which will help me market the book. And in return, you’ll earn a share of the profits when the book eventually sells.” But I’ll write the book live for my subscribers. And you can follow the process and help me crowdfund my research as we go—crowdsource my research. To my surprise, within the first month, we had raised $50,000. On WeFunder, it’s like—you have a test phase. If you reach $50,000 in pledges, then you can officially open a community round. But if you don’t reach the $50,000 in pledges, nobody gets billed and you don’t get the money. It’s a way of just testing if there’s a market. That’s what I was doing. I was just testing if there was a market for this book. Would anybody else want to know this information besides me? And I was shocked when we reached the $50,000 within one month and we opened a raise. Now we’re almost at $70,000. And people were like, yeah, we want this book. So we opened the round this summer. I'm researching chapters now and publishing them as they come out. And my readers are responding in the comments and providing more information. And it's been really fun. So this will be a multi-year project I’ll do over the next few years as I research what a better economy could look like in the future. Yeah, it's amazing. What’s it been like growing the Substack? What's your experience been? I mean, your community sort of predated Substack, is that right? Am I putting that in the right order? I had 1,700 newsletter subscribers on a TinyLetter list before I moved to Substack. And those were just people who had been following me for like 10 years from various blogs I had. It was kind of a hodgepodge. But I had a publication—I pursued my graduate studies in Mariology, which is the study of the Virgin Mary. So I used to write a lot of philosophy and esoteric content. So I had a lot of subscribers from that—that's probably most of them. Wow. And wait, now I’m fascinated about Mariology. I don't know that—this is not something I've encountered before. Can we take a little side trip to Mariology? Yeah. Can you tell me, what is Mariology and where did it take you? Yeah. So interestingly, in the Catholic Church, a lot of the materials pertaining to Jesus and Christianity and the Jewish movement are in the Vatican Library in Vatican City. But interestingly, Mary has kind of her own sort of cult following around the world, and they put all of her materials in the Marian Research Library, which is in Dayton, Ohio. And they actually closed the Vatican Library to researchers—I think it was after Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code, because he had access to the Vatican Library and then wrote these novels that I think the Church deemed heretical. And they were like, okay, we’re not letting journalists in anymore—this is for priests and everything. But the Marian Library was still open, so long as you were a student at the Mariological Institute. So I just thought that would be fun to research. I was interested in the idea that there are a lot of deities around the world, but in the Christian and Western world, Mary is kind of the main female one. And so I think that has influenced our culture in a way. So I was interested in studying that and what she meant to different cultures around the world. Mariology had such a boom during the Renaissance and even Enlightenment periods—there's so much art of Mary and every possible representation of her. So yeah, I spent five years studying her and learning—reading a bunch of really, really old documents at the library. And it was really fun. That was amazing. This is a total non-sequitur—not total non-sequitur. Do you ever read Robertson Davies? Do you know him? No. He’s a Canadian novelist, but I feel like you just took me into a world that reminded me of those novels. They were very academic, esoteric, kind of intellectual novels. So what do we learn about ourselves from Mary? I mean, I can show you—I can link you to my final project there. My final project was to recreate eight Marian icons using modern photography. So using photography, I shot Mary of the Assumption, the Dormition, all this famous Catholic iconography—Mother and Child, her holding the baby. And I recreated them. My goal was to recreate them the way they would have thought of Mary circa the year 0 to 100, as opposed to what she became afterward during the Renaissance and everything. Because the Christian writers in the New Testament were writing a—what would you call it? They were trying to convince people. They were trying to bring people over to their cause. Right. So all of the language they use about Mary and Jesus—they took directly from Isis and Horus and Egyptian mythology. Because this is the Middle East at the time. This is Egypt and Israel, and everybody was well familiar with Isis and Horus and the mother-and-son story. And they were saying, look, this is the same thing. Mary is Isis. They used the same terminology: mother of God, virgin mother. They used all the same ways of describing her. And they used all the same words to describe Jesus—son of God. And so they just took all that language and said: this is the new thing, but for the Jewish people. And this is why we need to rise up against our oppressors. And it was a very powerful statement. The word used in the Greek was parthenos, which doesn’t mean you didn’t have sex—it means you were unmarried. And that was a powerful thing, because women were owned by their husbands at that time. So it wasn’t saying, “look, this woman is pure,” which is how the Renaissance later used it. It was saying, “look, this woman belongs to no man. She belongs to God only.” And that was a very powerful statement to make. To say that Jesus is the son of God and not the son of man is a powerful statement to make. It was saying: we are worth more than how the Romans are treating us. It was a revolution. It was powerful. And it was a peaceful revolution. And I wanted that to come across in the iconography, because it doesn’t come across in the art we have now. So that was the final accumulation of my project. Yeah, that’s amazing. I really appreciate it. I’m glad we took that detour into Mariology. It’s fantastic. Do you have any— I have this question, it doesn’t always work, but—do you have any mentors that have influenced you or shaped you quite a bit? And then there’s sort of a second part to this question, which I ask: are there touchstones—ideas, concepts, or themes—that you kind of return to all the time in your work? Either mentors or touchstones? Mentors—Victor Hugo. My favorite author by far. He was thinking about things the way I think about things. He was like, “This is what’s wrong with the government. It’s the French Revolution. This is what’s wrong with Catholicism. We need to have a revolution there too.” So he was thinking about these same ideas that I’m thinking about—and thinking about them both in the form of nonfiction and fiction, just like I am. So I really, really relate to him. Modern thinkers—let me look around my library really quick. Oh, nice. Beautiful. Probably Kevin Kelly has thought about a lot of these ideas. He’s really influential to me. Rutger Bregman, who wrote Utopia for Realists—I love him. Love him. I’m weirdly really into the book Half-Earth Socialism—not because I’m interested in socialism, but because I’m interested in the idea. They come up with this: if we had a world government that could design the way the world works, here’s how we would design it. And I just think that’s fun to read, even though I wouldn’t want the world they end up creating. It’s interesting to think about. So that would probably be my modern mentors. A lot of children’s authors as well—like Peter Pan. That was a utopia. The idea of Neverland as this place where youth is the most important thing—I think that’s really beautiful. Let’s not grow old and cynical, but let’s keep our childlike wonder. I really love—I think children’s books are the best source for utopia. Utopian thinking. You know, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, those kinds of things. We’re having too much sense. We have too much sense in the world. We need to be a little bit more illogical—with the Alice in Wonderland concept. Literary absurdity or something. Yeah. What always struck me was—he was a mathematician, right? Yeah. And I think that’s so important, because—okay, why would a mathematician write something so absurd? Because you can’t just think fully in rational tones all the time. You have to break out of that mold and be like, blah blah. My nieces do this all the time. They’re like, “Would you come visit my world if we could only travel to everyone’s houses by umbrella, and we were just whisked away in the wind to each other’s houses?” And I’m like, “Yeah! And what if we could also just jump in the ocean and immediately pop up in another body of water somewhere else in the world?” And we just go down these weird, totally absurd ideas. But when you unbundle your mind from rational thought, I think sometimes that’s where the most creative ideas happen. And then you can come back to the rational world and be like, “Wait—some of this we could actually do,” or “Maybe we do want this.” Like, what is the rational way of wanting this absurd idea? Perfect. I want to thank you so much. This has been a pleasure speaking with you. I really love the work that you're doing, and I really appreciate you responding to my invitation. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Shannon Gallagher [https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannon-gallagher-3a3961103/] is a brand strategist & writer based in the Hudson Valley. I start all these conversations with the same question, which you know, of course. I borrowed it from a friend of mine because it’s such a big, beautiful question—but because it’s big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer any way you want to, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is: Where do you come from? Even knowing this is coming, there’s really no way to be prepared. Where do I come from? I come from here. I live in Red Hook. I was born in Hudson, just up the river. I grew up in Tivoli, right in between. I’ve been here for most of my life and definitely feel very of this place. I imagine that happens when you spend so long in the same geographic area. This is where I’m from. What does it feel like to be of this place? What does it mean to be from Tivoli? There’s such a long tail of experience, and it’s changed so much. Now in my 40s, I see how much has shifted in the last five years, and even more in the decades before. So much of my life has happened here. It’s tied to this place. My family is from here too. In a small town, that means something. You and I have had this experience: you run into someone on the sidewalk and they say, “Oh yeah, I know your mom, I went to high school with her.” It feels like we live in generational stories. My family’s story is here too. What was it like growing up here? It was great. Tivoli, which is well known now, was very different. My dad talked about how you couldn’t even get a loan from the bank to live there. There was a motorcycle gang safe house, drugs were dealt there. If you lived in Tivoli, you were probably an artist or some other unsavory character. My parents bought their first house there for $25,000. It was small, on a dead-end road, and everybody knew everybody. You were a Tivoli kid. My older brother says we were the hippie white trash—which feels accurate. We were bused to school in Red Hook, where most kids lived in developments and their parents worked for IBM. If you came from Tivoli, you were different. It’s still very much that way. I lived there for quite some time when my daughter was young and raised her there for years. A lot was the same—the kids had free run of the place, even at a young age. It was safe, intimate. But now it’s definitely fancier. Do you have a recollection—I'm dying to hear this—what did young Shannon want to be when she grew up? Oh boy. I think it changed a lot. Still does. I remember going through a phase where I wanted to be a doctor. A phase where I wanted to be a marine biologist—I think most kids go through that phase. I went through a phase of wanting to be a designer, a fashion designer. But the most pervasive one, I think, was being a writer. I always kind of came back to that. What did that mean to you, do you think? What was a writer to young Shannon? Oh, I mean, I loved books. I read very early, and they were a real refuge for me growing up. My grandmother, who I was extremely close with, was a remedial reading teacher in Hudson. So much of my childhood—so many moments of feeling connected, or inspired, or safe—really came from being read to or reading. Even at a young age, I used to drive my older brother nuts. My mom likes to tell this story, because I would be so excited about what I was reading—about the idea that a story could not just take you somewhere else, but really make you feel things. I would get so excited about that. I’d want to share what I was feeling. I’d be like, “And then this happened, and then this happened, and then they said this…” and my older brother would get so annoyed. He’d say, “Enough, Shannon.” But I just so badly wanted him to have the same experience I was having. So yeah, I think I was really enchanted by the power of language and storytelling at a very young age. And to catch us up—what are you doing now? What are you up to? What’s your work? What’s my work? Well, my work is evolving, let’s say that. I got a degree in literature and creative writing. I did some postgraduate work in literary nonfiction at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine. I intended to be a long-form journalist. I wanted to write for magazines. Life had slightly other plans. I ended up—through someone I met… You know, if you live in the Hudson Valley, especially before COVID and remote work—if you worked here, you did a lot of different things. It wasn’t like now, where we have such a big creative community because people can work on Zoom or have hybrid schedules. I freelanced for a couple of publications. I taught Pilates. I bartended. It was a real mixed bag. Through someone I met teaching Pilates—who then joined a writer’s group I had—I got my first copywriting job. She had an agency. I didn’t even know that was a career. That’s what brought me into the world of branding and advertising. I worked as a copywriter doing comms, and then got into strategy. For the last six years or so, that’s been my job—working at an agency, copywriting, brand strategy. I was recently the head of strategy at a B2B agency in the city, and left that job in mid-June to work with you. That’s right. Congratulations on both counts. I always congratulate people on departures and transformations—good or bad, all big changes deserve it. Congratulations on that. And of course, this is the official announcement of Gallagher Spear. What do you love about your work? Where’s the joy in it for you? Oh man. Where is the joy in it for me? You and I have talked a lot about this. The joy is in the work itself. Talking about the work—great. But it’s doing the work. It’s having a problem to solve. Figuring out what that problem is. Figuring out what questions to ask. All of the research. Gathering all of the information. Talking about it. Hashing it out, like we do—even when we fight. Absolutely. And starting to make sense of things in a way that—yeah, in a way that makes sense. And then translating that into work that makes sense to other people, and that people can do things with. That whole process—I just find it so fun and exhilarating. Sort of the discovery, the act of discovery. Yeah. I'm curious—I really identified with the way you described that. I don't know if I'd heard that story before, that you were doing all these different jobs in Red Hook and Tivoli and then sort of got plucked—or invited—into this world. I identified with that. I mean, I wrote a very arrogant cover letter to a brand consultancy in San Francisco—that was my beginning. And I didn’t really know. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was applying for, really. But I feel like I found a mentor there—this guy, Mark. So I’m curious: can you tell me more about that story? About being pulled into the industry as a copywriter? What that was like, and that relationship? Oh yeah. It was Alicia Johnson, who you’ve now met—Johnson & Wolverton. She had a boutique branding and creative agency. It was complete happenstance that I met her. She went to the Pilates studio in Hudson where I taught. Her teacher was out of town, and I was covering for her. Alicia and I just instantly hit it off and stayed in contact. She had been working on a book, and I had started a writer’s group—just because I was feeling, you know, I had a toddler, I was a single mom, I was doing all these various jobs, but really starving for creative connection and an outlet. So I started this writer’s group. She came, and I ended up editing her book. It was in that relationship—and I guess you'd have to ask her what it was she saw in me—but yeah, it was a project for Food Network. And I just remember being a little gobsmacked, like, I get to play with words? Come up with ideas? The assignment seemed so fun. She still remains my mentor to this day. And she has this gift—I’ve seen it with her and other creatives—she knows exactly what to ask of you, exactly how to give you the assignment in a way that gets all your synapses firing. She teaches you to get comfortable with the idea that you can’t get it wrong. She kept seeing things in me and kind of threw me in the deep end—so I could see what I was capable of. I loved collaborating with her. I loved working with the other creatives. It was this idea that we were taking human insights and cultural insights and translating them into—objects, if you will. That whole process was just... yeah, it was fun. Just like when you and I work together—it’s so fun. And I think that’s where the best work comes from—that chemistry. Between the makers, but also with clients. Yeah. I’m really connecting two things you said. One—well, I guess it was an idea that came to me as you were describing something earlier, about words. You talked about playing with words, and how much of this work is that—just diving into language, moving around in it, seeing what happens, paying attention. So much of it is about words. Mm-hmm. It’s an odd observation, but it’s viscerally true. Yeah. When we used to joke about doing this together, and then we actually started working together—we were on a project, and the client, in one of the early meetings, said they wanted to do some qualitative research. And they said, “We want to be saying things that no one else is saying.” You and I had that conversation—well, if you want to say things no one else is saying, you have to know things no one else knows. And that starts with asking the right questions. And you always say—and I’ve told you this before—I love what you say about how research starts at the invitation. The words really do matter. From the questions you ask to get the information, to the way you then communicate those ideas back to the client so that they really understand. It’s so much about communication and relationship. And then, of course, the final product—saying things that make people think, feel, and do what you want them to do, or what will serve your objectives. That relationship piece—and the clarity of communication—is so important. And it gets lost, right? It gets lost a little in the traditional agency structure. Or maybe not lost, but deprioritized. Stymied. Can you say more? What are you pointing at? What have you learned about how to make that kind of work in an agency structure? Well, I think it can be really challenging, right? Because you're doing a lot of stuff not because it serves what you’re trying to achieve, but because it’s what needs to get done. We’re at a moment—so many people are talking about this—where the agency landscape is changing. There’s this essentialism happening. Clients don’t want big, bloated processes. They have a problem to solve, and they need to solve it. It needs to be effective. It needs to happen quickly and efficiently. There’s not a lot of time for the rest. So, as I said, chemistry really matters. When you have, in my experience—and I think most people in this industry would agree—when you have a strong rapport with the client, when they trust you, when they feel heard, when you understand what they’re trying to do, the work turns out so well. And it’s usually really effective. It becomes a very co-creative process. And you also get to be trusted to be the expert. That’s so much better than when it’s transactional—agency as vendor. A lot of assumptions about what the problem is. A default to recycled, surface-level insights. Everyone kind of doing the same things. That’s part of what excited us about Gallagher Spear. Working the way we want to—just you and me and a client—you get to have that intimacy. I hesitate to use the word collaborative because it’s overused, but it’s really about... It’s not about having a set process. I mean, obviously there are steps. But it’s more about having an opportunity. An opportunity to learn something. To make something. To do something. Again—to play. Yeah. The word that came to me before you said “opportunity” was relationship. That’s what I’ve observed in working with you. You listen unbelievably well to the client, and you build that rapport almost naturally. It makes the work better. And selfishly—it creates a better environment for me. You know, as a researcher, out there talking to people and trying to translate that back into the organization—I don’t always have a safe space. And I’m not always good at that. But you’ve always really understood what I was trying to say. I don’t know if that’s an asset or what, but it’s made our collaboration really fun. That’s how I came up, really. I was told at the beginning to just follow my curiosity—that was the only thing I needed to listen to. And that means sometimes saying things that don’t always make sense to people. I’ve had to learn to be a better communicator. Which is a long-winded way of saying that the bridge you and I provide is really powerful. And we don’t see that much anymore. The last thought in this pile of thoughts coming out of my mouth is this: for so long, as an independent—because I’ve been independent a long time—hearing you talk about agency structure can feel like an alien world. But for a long time, I wanted to appear to be a company. Do you know what I mean? Like, over the last 15, 20 years, the last thing you wanted to be was some jackass out on your own. You wanted to look like a company. But now, on a meaningful level, that’s not the case anymore. You want to appear to be a human being. A person someone can have a relationship with. So you can—like you said—get into that playful space, get creative. That seems to be what people are really hungering for. Yeah. That idea—I can’t remember where I read this—but as we turn more toward things like AI, the thing that becomes scarce is connection. Intimacy. Human-to-human interaction. So being able to offer that has real value. I love that both clients and creatives—designers, account directors—we’ve worked with, when we told them we were doing this, they said, “I want to come work with you.” They enjoy it as much as we do. And I think that says something. You’re right—once upon a time, you couldn’t say, “Well, we’re a lot of fun to work with.” But now, it works. Or at least, we hope it does. Yeah, we hope it does. Yes. So, I’m curious—two things I always circle around. I’m always curious: when did you first encounter the idea of brand? The concept of brand? And then also qualitative research—those are two big buckets for me. So let’s start with brand. When did you first encounter it? Oh, geez. Honestly, I think it was when I started working with Alicia. It was never something I had thought about before. But also, I think brand has really changed—what it is has changed. That was when I really started to understand it as kind of a living, breathing thing. And over the years, it feels like it’s become more malleable. Things change so much faster. Brands need to be everywhere and able to adapt much more quickly than even ten years ago. And that, if I may segue to the qualitative piece—that’s why it’s so important to base your brand work and communications on a real understanding of what’s happening in culture, and with the people you’re trying to connect with. So much of the packaged process—the agency promises we’re trying to get out from under—they perpetuate the idea that we know something, without actually knowing anything. We make assumptions based on what other people are assuming. But when you sit down and talk with people, and listen—and I’ve said this before, but it’s 100% your superpower—you hear things. You learn something. That somehow gets skipped over. We see it all the time. Clients just want to skip the research. “Can’t we just go straight into brand development?” It’s such a missed opportunity. My first exposure—not necessarily to qualitative, but to ethnography—was at school, at SALT. We studied fieldwork, ethics of fieldwork. We spent three months out in the field, working on a story. That’s where I learned about observing, watching, listening—letting stories reveal themselves. And I feel a kind of relief now, in what we’re doing. One thing that was always a bit of a tough fit for me in agency life, especially in strategy—there are a lot of big personalities. People talk a lot, talk fast. It’s very extroverted. I’ve always been quieter. I listen more than I speak. And I’ve gotten feedback in my career that that’s a weakness. But I actually think it’s part of what makes me good at my job. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I feel like, more than ever before, I'm finding myself really articulate—maybe just because I'm old and thinking about this too much—about really championing the value of qualitative, and what it does. You know what I mean? I don't think we're always told—unless you go to school and study this stuff—I don't think the business world tells you, "Hey, you know what? You can get all that quantitative data, and that's great, but there's also this other form of data that gives you a totally different, but absolutely necessary and complementary kind of understanding." It’s the kind of understanding that’s going to make you feel so much better about the decisions you make—and probably allow you to make better decisions—because you’re going to consider things you wouldn’t have considered before. It’s everything you talked about. I think about intuition. This is how I think about it: quantitative is the science of measurement. It gathers big data and gives you an analytical understanding of what’s happening. But qualitative is the science of description. It produces thick data, using that Geertz definition, and gives you an intuitive understanding of what’s happening—why people are doing what they’re doing. And putting intuition at the center of everything—especially in this moment where, like you said, we’re entering this synthetic madness with AI, where we’re so removed from everything—I think that’s actually kind of exciting. Yeah, well, especially too when you're talking to—especially in B2B—where there’s not as much understanding of what brand actually is and how it works. Definitely a gap, in my experience, between B2C and B2B clients. This idea that brand is essentially emotional, right? It’s intangible. It’s a perception. It’s how you make people feel. Yes, it’s communicated through tangible things, but the brand itself is a feeling. So qualitative is critical to that understanding. And I also think it sets brands up for success—especially because of the demand to be adaptable. Quant is a snapshot. It gives you a view of a moment in time—very useful for understanding a situation at scale in that moment—but it doesn’t necessarily tell you where things are going. That’s why I’ve always been amazed by forecasters—people who can see around corners culturally. But that ability is based on what you’re saying: watching, listening, intuition. Making space for that—that’s everything. I feel like I’m being a little indulgent here, talking—but teams are making decisions using an analytical understanding from their big data. But they’re also already making decisions with an intuitive understanding that’s probably not being nurtured or informed. If you’re not working in an organization that has a qualitative practice, then you're still making intuitive decisions—you just don’t know it. You haven’t gone out of your way to inform your intuition through qualitative research. So there’s this kind of blindness, honestly, where quant feels like the “right” thing because it’s correct, it’s mathematical, it’s the lingua franca. It’s numerical. All that. And somehow, it makes you feel like you’re standing on an island of certainty because you're dealing with numbers. But you forget that you’re a human being who’s making all sorts of emotional and imaginative interpretations of what you’re looking at. It’s unbelievable. Now I’m ranting, but it also occurred to me—there’s a difference between an organization understanding the emotion that a brand or category represents, and its decision-makers actually feeling that emotion. You can know the feeling—or you can feel the feeling. And that’s something I’ve enjoyed with you, especially in B2B: using imaginative exercises in a B2B context, and blowing people’s minds with the power of imagination. Helping them unlock the emotional experience of the customer—which isn’t always allowed. Does that feel like a fair description? No, 100%. That’s the thing. And I’ve said this many times, but people—like leadership clients in the B2B world—they’re people. They have imaginations and emotions. We all work more or less the same. But it’s such a human impulse—certainty. We want to feel certain. You're making big, expensive decisions. You want to say, “This is going to work,” or, “This is the right thing.” And numbers give that false sense of certainty. But I’d argue—and I think you’d agree—that having a deep, human understanding of the people you’re serving and trying to reach is a much more stable and secure position. Even in personal relationships, right? Understanding the person you’re in relationship with allows you to navigate all kinds of experiences—good, bad, neutral. You don’t always need to know the right thing to do or say. You just need to be able to show up, be present, and deal with what’s in front of you. So it creates more presence, I think—for a brand and for an organization. It allows them to be in dialogue with the people they’re serving. And like we said earlier, that’s paramount right now. People are super distrusting of brands and institutions. I remember doing a presentation earlier this year for a client’s marketing summit. They wanted to talk about the “state of brand.” And I talked about how Gen Z is super distrusting of brands. They’re like, “Forget all your super polished, cohesive, coordinated communications. We want authenticity. We want to know your people. Who are your leaders? Who works there?” They want it to be messy. They want it to feel real. So there’s this diminishing trust in brand, while also brands still need to be sewn up—organized around an idea. There needs to be a thread. Some consistency. It’s about balancing those two things. Trusting your audience—and also trusting your people. Helping them develop their intuition. Helping them assess their intuition. Beautiful. Well, listen, we’re near the end of our time. What are you most excited about when it comes to Gallagher Spear? What am I most excited about? All of it. The kit and the caboodle? Yes. I’m excited about doing the work with my best friend. I’m excited about doing the work in a way where it can be about the work. And doing it with someone where there’s shared values. I think that’s really it. Yeah. What are you most excited about? Oh, yeah. I mean—working with you. Having fun doing work with my best friend. Enjoying the hell out of it. I’ve been a solo operator for a really long time. So finding someone to collaborate with—and translate the stuff I enjoy into stuff that’s useful for clients—that’s huge. It’s always been a hand-off process for me. So I’m excited to have more contact with the final product. And what occurred to me was truth. You know what I mean? I think you and I share this—and maybe it’s the journalism part of you—but I’m just fascinated by people. No matter the category, I’m dying to know: what’s the truth of the situation? Trying to uncover it. Discover it. Articulate it. And then, with your ability to build relationships, to write and communicate—just excited about all of that. About doing good work. Real understanding of what’s going on. Yeah. And I think too, as we’ve talked about—staying in that space where, you know, especially in my last role, I had a pretty large remit. I was overseeing brand strategy, brand communications, and culture—employer branding. It was broad. But my favorite part is always the research. Translating that research into big ideas. Outlining the implications. Figuring out what to do with them. That’s the sweet spot for both of us. And getting to stay in that space—it’s still fairly broad—but getting to go deep is what delights my cat-like brain. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I know this was not something you were excited to do, so I appreciate you being vulnerable and joining me here to launch Gallagher Spear. Yeah, thank you. And to everybody listening—you’ll find the link. Come say hello if you have a big problem that needs solving. All right. Bye, buddy. 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]

Andy Crysell [https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrysell/] is a cultural strategist, author, and former music journalist. In 2008, he founded **Crowd DNA**, a global cultural insights and strategy consultancy with offices in London, New York, Amsterdam, and beyond. In 2023, he stepped down, and is the author of *Selling The Night [https://www.crowddna.com/2025/05/selling-the-night/]* and *No Way Back [https://magculture.com/blogs/journal/andy-crysell-no-way-back]*, and remains active in creative and cultural projects across the UK and US. I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s also a neighbour. She helps people tell their stories, and she had this question that was just so beautiful, I use it all the time. But it’s so big, I tend to over-explain it because I want you to know, before I ask it, that you are in absolute control. You can answer or not answer in any way you want to, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. The question is: Where do you come from? I've heard this question. I’ve heard you ask it. My answer is a pretty straightforward one. For me, it’s London. That answer is based certainly on geography, but on a bunch of other things as well. It probably sounds quite dramatic to say London made me, but I think in many ways it kind of did. I’ve always taken so much from the place, even now when I’m spending quite a lot of time in the US. I left school when I was 16—technically 15, but officially at 16. Doing that somewhere else could have been pretty scary and maybe a bit bleak. Doing that in London actually felt quite exciting. There was so much you were in close proximity to. It was all on your doorstep. If you didn’t know people, you could still find ways into different areas of culture and media. That’s probably why I feel quite defensive of the city these days. Like with other cities, there’s this rhetoric you hear a lot—especially on social media—that “London’s gone.” There’s this idea that it’s now an outrageously dangerous city, that you’ll be relieved of your mobile phone within 10 minutes of arriving, and probably stabbed 10 minutes after that, which just feels so far removed from reality. I think London is actually having a really strong period at the moment. Everything from US rappers acknowledging that London rappers are good at what they do, to how London dresses, the accents, all of that. I think it has a kind of global cultural cachet right now—probably the strongest since the so-called Cool Britannia days of Tony Blair and Britpop, which, for me, wasn’t that cool at all. These are good days for London. I’m also just kind of obsessed with cities in general. I’ve always found ways to weave that into my work or to look at my work through the lens of cities. The relationship between London and New York is particularly interesting. I’ve heard quite a few people say that London and New York might have more in common than New York and L.A. There’s some strong cultural tie there—a kind of shared cultural conversation that’s been ongoing. When I say I’m proud of being from London, I guess it’s no different than anyone else being proud of coming from Philadelphia or Tokyo or wherever. It’s about the cultural components of the city. It’s always been an incredibly creative place. Like everywhere else, it’s hugely gentrified now, but at its best, it still creates opportunities. It still has that DIY spirit. It’s always felt global, super connected to the rest of the world. It’s always changing. It’s fast—kind of like New York, but also different from it. You mentioned a love of cities, and I’d love to hear more about that. Even the way you talked about London getting a bad rap—it seems like something you hear across the board with big cities. They’re all suffering in similar ways. What do you make of the city today? I think it's emblematic of the fact that people are just a bit scared these days. And when people are scared of the world, cities tend to bear the brunt of that. There’s a tendency to focus on the downside of city life, rather than all the positives. And, you know, don't get me wrong, I love the countryside too. I love the beach, but there's just something about the energy of the city. I kind of hope that people will come around to it again and sort of see the positives there. You know, and cities are growing as well. I think all the statistics say that by, I think it's by 2050, that more people will be living in cities than not in cities. So we kind of need to get, we kind of need to find our way and find our love for cities again. Yeah. I'm curious, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do you have recollections of what young Andy wanted to be as an adult? I think after a very brief period of thinking, maybe I wanted to be a footballer, a soccer player, then realising that was highly unlikely. After that, I think, in a way, all I really knew I wanted to do was something that was kind of a bit cool, some cool s**t, something that felt like it was the centre of the action. That's the sort of shallow level I operate on. I don't think it was particularly about a career, it's just sort of being in something that felt like it had an energy to it. I was very into music. And I was very into the media that came with it and the pop culture that surrounded it. I guess I'm not particularly unique there. Lots of people are when they're in their teens. I suppose I maybe just dug a bit deeper compared to my mates. I kind of, I was the one that read all the details on the record, read the masthead of the magazine and just kind of tried to join the dots between these things. Who were the models of cool at that time for you? I mean, I guess titles like The Face magazine, where there was a sort of, you know, I guess in London, it was sort of smash hits when you're really young. I'm not sure if you're familiar with smash hits. It was a pop magazine, but it kind of talked about pop music in a really, really different way. So on a surface level, it was all cool haircuts and shiny new pop bands. It built up this new kind of language around how you talk about pop music. And a lot of people then would gravitate from that to The Face, which I'm sure you're familiar with. It was more kind of more grown up style mag. But it just kind of, yeah, it felt like it was shining a light on a lot of young entrepreneurialism that was going on in London and elsewhere. So it kind of began from that for me, but it was all a little bit formless. I wasn't really clear how I was going to get into any of these worlds. I didn't really have much sense of access. You know, my dad was a builder. My mum was a cleaner. She cleaned people's houses and worked in pubs. There wasn't any sort of clear routes to that world. I got a job as a runner, first of all, a foot messenger, as they were called, a job that literally wouldn't exist these days. So I worked for, it was a photographic company in Soho that's still there. And my job was to go around to ad agencies with photos. It was a repro house. So I would take these big photos around in brown envelopes. Now they'd literally be emailed in seconds. But back then I got to walk around Soho delivering these photos to these ad agencies. And these places all are very cool. You know, it was, I guess it was the sort of a halcyon age of advertising in the late 80s. But I was definitely very much going in through the tradesman's entrance. I wasn't going in through the front door. So as alluring as it looked, I couldn't really see a way into that world. Yeah, and I think the thing that then changed it for me was the sort of the emergence of acid house or rave culture in London, which kind of really, really blew my mind in many senses. And all of this musical stuff that I've been interested in, but felt a little bit out of reach, suddenly felt much closer to me. You know, if you didn't know the DJ or the club promoter, you're one of your friends didn't know the DJ or the club promoter. So you could you could kind of immerse yourself in that world. And you could you could learn a lot. It felt very democratizing, really, you know, there were no there were no experts in a way. So you could become the expert very quickly. Just to jump forward, I think I’ve benefited from two democratizing moments. One was acid house. The next, about ten years later, was the first dot-com wave. There were experts, I guess, in the form of developers, but there were no experts in terms of how to create content for dot-coms or how to present it to people. So that, again, felt like a democratizing moment. Back during acid house, I didn’t have a clear career path I wanted to follow. I just wanted to be involved with it. I wanted to be immersed in it. So it began as what you’d call a portfolio career. I was running club nights, helping others run bigger ones, selling tickets to raves. I had a record deal—very briefly. I worked in a record shop and did some writing for magazines—mostly by luck rather than planning. That’s the bit that stuck, really. The other parts fell by the wayside. I ended up spending ten years working as a music and subculture journalist. So that was the early stage of my journey into, for want of a better word, a career. I came across you on LinkedIn—the way I come across so many people—and I was curious: what’s the story of Crowd DNA? How did you make the leap from journalism into cultural strategy? And it seems you’ve exited now, right? Yes, I have exited. Back then, I didn’t have a clear path from being a music journalist to running agencies. But I liked the idea of agencies. They seemed like cool places. There was one in London in the ’90s called Tomato, a design agency. It was a cryptic, collective setup that operated more like a band than an agency. I really liked that idea. Their projects felt very different. You didn’t get the sense they were hustling brands for briefs—they seemed in control of their own destiny. The dot-com boom was the bridge for me. I moved from being a print journalist to working at a dot-com startup called Ammo City. That lasted about a year and a half—lots of fun, lots of chaos. No one really knew what they were doing, as I mentioned earlier. But it was amazing. We were bringing journalists online for the first time. We also had video, and we ran an online radio station. As much as I enjoyed the content side of it, I think I also really liked being in a startup. It was the first time I’d ever heard the word “startup.” We were also trying to work with brands—brands that were intrigued by what we were doing and the audience we were building. Some of them wanted to create content on our platform to reach that audience. Others were interested in how they might mine that audience for insights—an early adopter audience, really. When that dot-com venture folded—like so many of them did because we weren’t making any money—I decided not to go back into journalism. I went the agency route instead. My first agency was called Ramp, which I started with someone else. We called ourselves a creative communications agency, and that’s really what we were. We didn’t make ads—it was more long-form content: documentaries, print media, curated events. We did a lot of work with Sony PlayStation. This was the early 2000s—around 2003. They were fun times, and it was still early days for doing creative work online. Brands seemed braver and more ambitious then. With Sony PlayStation, for example, we never did anything related to gaming. It was all about involving them in grime culture and other areas of youth culture. We also worked with Honda, Topshop, and BMW. Eventually, my business partner and I started to go in different directions in terms of what we wanted out of life. I guess you could call it an aborted project—we got about five years in and then sold the agency to St. Luke’s, the advertising agency. I stayed on and ran Ramp as a division of St. Luke’s, while my business partner left. That added a new dimension for me. Even though St. Luke’s is considered an unconventional agency, it was more conventional than Ramp. Ramp was all about ad hoc work; St. Luke’s focused more on retained client work, which created a different kind of relationship with the client. I did that for a while, but I was very keen to start another agency. I had a non-compete clause, so when I left St. Luke’s, I couldn’t immediately start another creative agency. But there was nothing stopping me from starting a more insight- and strategy-based agency. At Ramp, we’d always done a little bit of that, even if we never formally claimed it was our focus. So that was really the sort of the beginning of starting CrowdDNA. So I launched it in 2008. There were three of us at the beginning. I left it three years ago—no, sorry, no I didn’t—I left it two years ago. It was about 110 people at the end and a whole bunch of cities around the world. And yeah, lots of fun adventures along that sort of 16 years of journey. Yeah. Amazing. And what did you—what do you love about that work? Where was the joy in it for you? Of all the different parts of that kind of work, what, for you, did you get the most joy out of? Yeah, I mean, I suppose there are sort of two dimensions to that. One is the work, and one is the business, I suppose. I loved being in a business and just thinking about it obsessively—really trying to plan where you’re going to go with it, thinking about what you can do, and having this sort of blank canvas in front of you. Launching other cities was such a fun thing to do. There are so many reasons not to open offices in other cities around the world. Arguably, you could just do global work out of London. But I think we became a more credible and interesting business by setting up in New York, Amsterdam, Singapore, Sydney, and so on. That side of it was fun and really interesting—trying to build a proposition. And then the actual work—I guess I just quite loved the randomness of the briefs. I loved the brief. I loved receiving the new brief. The promise of the new brief was always really exciting when it arrived by email. You open it, and maybe it’s a topic you’re really familiar with—and that’s exciting, because you can feel how you’ll build on it. Or maybe it’s a brand-new topic, and that’s exciting in a different way—your brain’s racing, trying to find ways in, trying to find hooks, trying to find your way into that topic. So yeah, those are some of the things that come to mind. And I suppose just working with—you know, it blew my mind when this relatively small agency had people like Nike and Apple wanting to work with us. It seemed quite unfeasible, in a way. But yeah, lots of excitement came from that. It’s a little odd to be asking you about this two years after the exit, but I’m just curious: what did you—how did you—how do you talk about what you did, or what that approach was like? And what kind of problems did clients come to you for? Well, I guess we used the culture word a lot. Back in 2008, I wouldn’t say we were the first people to use “culture,” but it was used less heavily. It’s so heavily used now, which I think creates some challenges for sure. Our strapline was “culturally charged commercial advantage.” We had that from about three years in and stuck with it. What we were saying to our clients, in essence, was: we understand you’re going to want to look at your category. We understand you’re going to want to look at your customers. We understand you’re going to want to look at your competitors. And we will be doing all of that in our work. But we also encourage you to look out into culture—because out in culture, you’ll find opportunities, and you’ll find threats. And that could relate to your brand, your products, your services, your experiences. I think we were also encouraging clients to think of people as people—not just as customers or consumers. You could argue: does it matter? Is it just semantics? But I think it does matter. Being a customer is a very thin slice of time. The rest of the time, they’re being a person, with all the hopes and fears and so forth that a person has. I think you need to understand the whole person. So that was our shtick. That’s what we went in there to do. The kind of work we actually did could be anything from culturally informed work around the here and now—what does a brand need to be doing in the next three months—to what I guess you’d describe as futures work: what is the future of socializing in 20 years’ time? It was a very ad hoc business, which certainly keeps you on your toes—constantly pitching, always trying to come up with new ways to do the work. Trying to make something that feels organized in amongst a lot of chaos as well, I suppose. Yeah. And how has it changed? I mean, I guess that’s 20 years, basically—almost 20 years. Is it still the same now as it was in 2008? I mean, I’m curious on your take on culture, and what it’s like now, having... Yeah, I mean, I guess it feels like the term is very, very heavily used these days. I kind of feel it was one of those COVID-related things. COVID—I think lots more agencies started to talk about it. We found a lot more people on the client side were interested in things to do with culture. I think COVID maybe was a bit of a wake-up call—that there are things that may happen in the world that may impact you outside of your category. Not necessarily always pandemics, but other things. So I think that put the idea of culture more on the map. Yeah, I mean, I do think a lot of people are using the term without necessarily describing what they mean by it. And it seems to mean lots of different things to different people. In some circles, when you talk about cultural insights or cultural marketing, it kind of means youth marketing, maybe, or sort of early adopters and influencer-type stuff. Other people will think of it as being to do with the arts. Other people might think of it as being to do with DEI-type topics as well. I think that’s come up quite often. So yeah, lots of different definitions. I mean, what we were at Crowd, we always thought of it as being to do with shared meaning—you know, the sort of Stuart Hall-type end of the definition. We loved doing youth-related work, style-related work, but we also wanted to do work to do with families, to do with people of all sorts of different generations. So we wanted to have a slightly broader perspective on what culture meant. But it was—it's an interesting challenge, getting clients’ heads around culture. I think you have some clients that just get it. You don’t have to explain it to them. And you have a whole set of other clients where you have to work out the best ways to make that kind of work, I guess, viable. Yeah, of interest to them. Yeah, I would love to hear more on that. I’m always reminded in this conversation about culture—are you familiar with Grant McCracken? I am very familiar. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been a fanboy forever. But I remember he wrote a book called Chief Culture Officer. I think I’m talking out of school, but I remember him sort of bemoaning the fact that everybody saw that title and just—the sort of, what he was saying was that the corporation couldn’t help but think it was talking about them. Yeah, it was corporate culture. It didn’t—yeah. He was trying to make an argument about accessing, being porous, and bringing the outside in. But the corporation couldn’t help but see it as an opportunity to talk more about me, me, me. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s very correct. That is another definition of culture that comes up a lot when you talk about it in a business context—it's about the company culture, corporate culture. Yeah. Another thing I love about Grant’s work is the fast/slow. Yes. I don’t know if that was his or if he borrowed it from somewhere else, but I think that’s such an interesting and really nice way to break down this kind of large and messy topic. And it feels—so many times for the client, if they’re struggling to get their bearings around culture, to talk about how there is all the fast stuff—media and food and music and fashion. And then you have the slow stuff, the stuff that’s less observable, that moves under the surface. And depending on the brief at Crowd, sometimes we were really sort of keying into the fast culture side. Other times it may be the slow culture side. Yeah. You mentioned Stuart Hall. And I have this question I like—did you have any mentors or touchstones? I don’t know, I treat this as one question. Any mentors in your career that you really draw on or return to over and over again? Or even concepts that you kind of return to over and over again? Yeah, I find the whole idea of mentors really interesting. I love being a mentor. I’m not sure I’m that good at it, but I love doing it. And I do a lot of it these days. When I was kind of starting out, so to speak, I don’t think we had mentors back then. I just don’t even think the term existed. You know, I remember when I was first writing for magazines, you would hang out with other journalists, but no one would ever talk about—no one would ever give you advice whatsoever. The only way you kind of knew if you were doing the right thing was when you got more phone calls. You know, if you submitted work and you got phone calls, you kind of assumed you were writing the right kind of stuff. If you submitted work and you didn’t get phone calls, then you kind of assumed you weren’t writing the right sort of stuff. That said, there are lots and lots of people who have influenced me. I’m not going to name them all one by one, but yeah, I can think of lots of people that I’ve taken things through from over the years, for sure. Yeah. And you mentioned Stuart Hall, right? What’s your definition of culture? What did you mean—can you tell me more about Stuart Hall and how that influenced you? Yeah. I mean, I think his work is—I mean, obviously, it's widely used, widely reported on, and he might be slightly apoplectic about the fact it’s being used in the context of brand work. But I think the idea of shared meaning—that that is what culture is, this sort of operating system—I like that kind of language. I think that always landed really well with the Crowd team as well. And then how that manifests itself, whether it's through the conversations we have, the codes and the signals, media, advertising, products, and so on. So yeah, I think it's a good place to start when you're building out a perspective as an agency that wants to work in the cultural space. When I look at all of the agencies these days that talk about culture and use words like “cultural relevance” and so forth—without necessarily, I think, having a lot of depth there—I kind of feel they’ve got to go one of two ways. They’ve either got to really go deep into culture and articulate it in stronger, more cogent ways, or they should maybe move away from using that word and try to come up with a different language set. I think there are too many agencies that are talking about culture in a slightly vanillary, hope-for-the-best sort of way at the moment. At the risk of asking too many questions—I often ask this because my newsletter is called That Business of Meaning, and you just talked about shared meaning—what are we talking about when we talk about meaning? How would you articulate the distinction you just made about, you know, if you're going to talk about culture, really talk about culture, talk about shared meaning? How do you think about what meaning is? Sounds like a ridiculous question. Yeah. I mean, in the context of work, I suppose it’s how people relate to brands—that’s through meaning, isn’t it, really? I guess it sort of comes down to fundamentals. When you buy a Mercedes, you want everyone else to also have a shared meaning of what a Mercedes is. You're not just buying it because of its amazing engineering; you're buying it because of what it says about you and your place in the world. So you need everyone to have, I guess, some sense of a shared meaning of what that Mercedes is. Tell me about—there are two things I feel like I’ve learned about you through LinkedIn. One is the book. I want to hear about Selling the Night. So let’s start there. How did that come to be? And how is it going? Yeah. So I guess when I came out of the end of Crowd, I was looking for things to do. I spent one week sanding down the kitchen table on a January week, and I think I found I needed some projects. I was, I guess, trying to reclaim a bit of my identity again. And one of the projects that bubbled to the surface—I had a few things I was thinking about—was writing a book about dance music and club culture, and its relationship with brands and advertising and the wider creative industries. And I guess within that, for me, there are sort of two directions of travel. One is brands moving into dance music to act as sponsors and endorsers, and all of the challenges that come with that around the value exchange and so on. And the other direction is all of the ideas and the people that have emerged out of club culture—the sort of DIY creativity that it manifests—and have gone on to influence everything from travel to advertising to fashion and so on. So that was the remit I set myself. It took me about nine months to write it. Everyone says that was quite quick. For me, that felt like quite a long time. It was a fascinating process. I consider myself a pretty experienced writer, but writing 160,000 words was definitely a kind of next-level challenge. It came out in April of this year, and I guess it's been a project of two halves, really. The first half was writing—it was relatively solitary. I spent about two months in Venice, in L.A., on my own for most of it, writing it. And then the second half has been getting out there, talking about it, which has been lovely, really. I’ve got to meet all kinds of interesting people, travelled to interesting places, had a whole bunch of different conversations. So I’ve got to talk about this book in all kinds of interesting settings. And I have another book project on the go at the moment called No Way Back, which is more of a curated project, so less typing involved with this one. It’s bringing together lots of pieces of music journalism and subculture from other eras and trying to explore ways to... I guess it is about nostalgia, because it’s about the past, but we’re trying to make sure it’s about what you learn from it. We’ve got this line about “learning from, not longing for the past.” We don’t just sort of wallow in the past—it’s: what can you learn from these backstories that can help shape what comes next? So that’s been great. That’s out as well—it’s been out for a few weeks—and I’ve had a lot of fun, actually, over the last couple of days racing around New York, seeing it in the flesh in places like Casa Magazines and Iconic Magazines on Mulberry Street. It’s lovely looking, and it’s lovely selling it via your own platform, but there’s still something quite cool about actually seeing it in situ in a retail space. Yeah, that’s got to be amazing. You mentioned in Selling the Night that there were these two patterns: brands going in and then artists coming out. Can you tell me a story or example of the artists that came out of that culture? Well, I suppose it’s not specific—it can be about artists—but I suppose it’s as much about the creativity that comes out of it. So it could be around boutique hotels. You can trace the birth of the boutique hotel back to disco culture. Ian Schrager is on record saying that his ideas for boutique hotels—and he essentially created the boutique hotel—came out of what was going on in New York disco, and creating those kinds of aspirational spaces. That’s one example. I think travel was another really interesting one. Travel has been just revolutionized by the idea of people going clubbing—whether it’s Berlin for three days, where people don’t actually bother booking a hotel, they just book a flight and go clubbing for three days—or Ibiza, or Goa, you know. Etc., etc., etc. It’s sort of reinvented fashion a million times over. It’s changed drinking habits a million times over. I spoke to Ben Kelly, who designed the Hacienda nightclub, about how Virgil Abloh was incredibly influenced by the stripes that featured in the Hacienda club. And he kind of openly admitted that he borrowed those stripes for his Off-White brand. When Ben Kelly first heard about this, he was pretty irate—this guy was nicking his designs. But then they became the best of mates. In the five years up until Virgil Abloh’s passing, they worked on all kinds of different creative projects together. So yeah, there are endless examples of the kind of creative strands and the through lines that have come out of club culture. And I think there’s something quite interesting about the creativity it offers. It often comes from a kind of place of necessity. It often comes from quite marginalized people. I don’t think it’s the kind of creativity that you could cook up in daylight hours, in studios and creative agency environments. Yeah. Maybe this is associated with the other thing I see you doing quite a bit on LinkedIn—really advocating for access to planning. You often highlight job postings that are very exclusionary. I really appreciate it. I mean, I'm an American and I'm not in England, so I know culturally it’s very distinct, but it seems you’re very consistent in calling this out. How would you describe what you're doing? What’s the problem you're addressing? Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s one of my personal bugbears. And obviously it comes from my own experience. I didn’t go to university. No one in my family had been to university. My daughter is the first one in my family to have gone to university—or still is at university. I just think it’s very unfair, and a bit absurd really, that it should be the only way people are judged on their appropriateness for roles. And I guess it falls into two categories. One is entry-level roles, where you have no chance unless you've been to university. But maybe education didn’t suit someone. Maybe they had health or mental health issues during that period of their life. Maybe they had to care for someone else. There are lots of reasons why people may not have been able to go to university but might be a really good fit for that kind of work. And then you get the roles which aren't entry-level, where they ask for a whole bunch of experience—which makes complete sense—but then they also throw in the requirement for a degree, which just seems a little bit nonsensical to me. It feels like lazy thinking—or non-thinking. So I have written about it in a couple of newspapers. I’m involved in a campaign that’s taking shape. And I’ve been doing my kind of LinkedIn call-outs, which is really interesting each time. I’m staying in my lane with insight agencies, because it’s the world I know. But if I see adverts that make having a degree mandatory, I (hopefully relatively politely) call it out and question it. It’s really interesting what happens after that. I always get people messaging me from the agency in question, agreeing with me. I sometimes have people in the top brass of the agency contacting me and agreeing that they need to update their policies. I think I’m running at about 10–3 now: 10 agencies that have agreed to change their policies, and three that have so far not. So yeah, it's good. It's nice. It’s direct action. Yeah, beautiful. Does it feel particular—I mean, you have experience in other cultures and other cities, right—does it feel particular to the UK? Or is this more broad than that? I think it’s more broad than that. As I understand it, I think the problem is probably worse in the US, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve been on my own for so long, independent—I wouldn’t even know. I think it is. I think it’s worse in the US, I guess. And I have called out agencies in the US. I suppose in some ways, it feels easier—again—to stay in my lane, understanding UK culture. But yeah, I think it needs to change. It was something we definitely tried to change at Crowd DNA. I mean, no one’s going to discount education. This isn’t to suggest that education has no meaning whatsoever. And I’m also very mindful that there are lots of people who go to university who don’t actually come from a privileged background. If you're the first in your family ever to go to university, it’s an incredible achievement. And you don’t need the likes of me coming along and poo-pooing that achievement. So it’s not to say that education isn’t a relevant factor—but I don’t think it should be mandatory in whether people get accepted for roles or not. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I appreciate it so much too. I mean, especially the way you were talking about club culture, right—that it is sort of the fringe, it is a place that’s sort of outside. You know, the kind of creativity and the kind of understanding that comes from there is so fundamentally different to what’s available within the conventional pathways. It’s bonkers. What are you doing? You’re sort of restricting, you’re prohibiting yourself from it—or you’re restricting yourself from access to this really unique... You are, totally. And as you’re saying, I think people learn really fast in those kinds of worlds, you know. And you become very entrepreneurial, and you do join the dots between lots of different things. And if you’re excluding those people, you may be excluding people that are super resourceful, and super good at joining the dots. And I think you end up creating more kind of monocultural—this is really—and it always feels very starkly at odds with the kind of messages that these businesses are generally putting out elsewhere, about how they respect all perspectives. Particularly if you’re a research agency. If research agencies aren’t allowing people in from different backgrounds, that seems kind of weird. Yeah. Yes. I'm not sure—when did you come in? I feel like we are maybe peers. But I remember—I mean, I was early–mid-’90s guy. And the first firm I applied to also seemed kind of like a rock band to me. Like, they were super cool. And I was an English major, you know? I mean, I had no business experience whatsoever. And they were like, “We want you here,” because—for that same reason—this is a creative endeavor. And, you know, that’s what this is about. So I felt a little bit like we were always outsiders from the corporate culture, which was VA-driven, and just so MBA-driven, it really didn’t understand culture. So it’s interesting with that. But really—was it Tomato? Was that the firm? Yeah, Tomato. It was like a Gen X moment happening. Yeah, I think it probably was. No, they were just—they were just very cool. You know, they never really explained exactly what they did. Was it even a business? Or was it kind of a collective? Yeah. Projects seemed incredibly diverse. As I say, you definitely didn’t get the sense they were on a sort of treadmill of waiting for the latest RFP to come in. They were carving probably more unique opportunities with their clients. Yeah. So yeah, I think when you think about business in that sense, it starts to feel like an appealing place to be. Yeah. What you mentioned before—what are you doing now? I mean, there’s the book, you left Crowd, but are you still in the cultural strategy space? Are you still active? What are you working on? Good question. I mean, I suppose I’ve come out the other side of Crowd. And it’s really interesting—when you’ve been doing the same thing for 16 years. And, you know, whether you mean to or not, you do become quite indoctrinated in this thing that you were doing. I guess to me, having come out the other side, it feels sort of two-thirds super exciting, wide, wide open horizons: “What am I going to do next?” One-third existential crisis: “Oh my god, what am I going to do next?” Yeah. I suppose at the moment it’s a lot of projects. It’s the two books. We’re working out how we can maybe make more of No Way Back, how we can maybe start doing events as well—other types of media that may emerge from it. I am working with the Museum of Youth Culture, which is exactly that—it’s a museum about youth culture back in London. It’s existed in pop-up form for a few years, but it has its first permanent home opening in Camden in the autumn. That’s exciting. I work with a few charities—particularly one called 2020 Levels, which is around Black representation in various lines of work, various industries. I’m doing a bit of consulting stuff behind the scenes. I can’t really work in insight at the moment. I’m effectively serving a long-term ban with my restrictive covenants and non-competes. But that’s cool. You know, I feel like I’ve kind of done that. And I'm talking to some people about other business ideas as well. So yeah, it's kind of fun. Whether I go for it with another business or not—or sort of settle into a life of projects—yet to be decided. As you look around, is there anybody—I always think—is there anybody, any projects or brands that seem to be really doing things well or right, that kind of excite you? You know what I mean? Where you feel like, “Oh wow, they're operating in culture in a way that seems interesting and correct,” according to how you enjoy things? Yeah, I probably should have a good answer to that. I see various strands of brands doing good things. I can't necessarily pinpoint one that is nailing it all at present. I think there are some quite interesting agencies emerging at the moment. I like agencies that are playing more on the fringes and not settling into the standard modes of market research or being a creative communications agency. I think there are some interesting new mini, niche holding companies emerging—ones that feel a little bit more curated. Not just smashing together as many agencies as they can, but being more thoughtful about the range of businesses they bring together. But yeah, it’s an interesting time to have departed that world, I suppose. I guess I was leaving just as AI was entering. And when I speak to people still in the world of market research, it does feel like it’s a bit of a challenging place at the moment. Quite a lot of uncertainty out there. I’ve put a few posts out around this topic—of whether even the ethnographic, trends, semiotics, or the more cultural end of market research—should even be part of the market research industry anymore. Should it break free from the world of analytics and panels and start to reframe itself as a different kind of industry? I think that’s an interesting inflection point right now, where you could argue that people doing that kind of work—work that is maybe a bit more human, a bit more cultural, maybe a bit more journalistic in style—maybe that should move away from the other end of market research. 100%. How has that position been met? What kinds of conversations have sprung up around that? I think it strikes a chord with people. It’s kind of strange—under the wider umbrella of market research, I think it sort of encourages those doing the ethnographic and cultural work to be kept in their corner. Maybe if they broke free and were able to premiumise the work they do and charge in a different way, they could start to build up a new language and a new position for that kind of work—rather than being seen as a bit of a nice-to-have alongside more mainstream market research. Is there anybody you see that looks like they’re taking that shape now, close to that kind of positioning? Yeah, I won’t name names, but I can definitely see different agencies emerging that are changing the language, I suppose, around how they talk about the work. I think the language used is really important. I'm not really that interested in people coming up with brand-new methodologies per se. I'm more interested in people who change the way they talk about the work, and therefore, the relevance the work has. So yeah, I think there are some people doing that. It does feel like there are too many agencies at the moment—it’s a very saturated space. But at the same time, I think it’s probably a good time for some people to come through and do some different things. It’s time for a bit of a freshen-up as well. Yeah. How would you describe the role of qual and qualitative research and the benefit of it? I always feel like it’s a little bit of a narcissistic, self-interested question to ask all of my guests to explain the value of qualitative research. But what do you think? What’s the role of it, and what’s the value you think it brings? Yeah, I mean, I guess for me, when I think qualitative research, I probably think as much about ethnographic research. I’ve never been that big on focus groups. I mean, we had to use them on plenty of occasions, but the idea that you put people in a room, feed them Twiglets, pay them £30, and try to get them to remember things from two weeks ago—doesn’t seem the best of routes. For me, it’s about being out there with people, really. Whether you're asking the questions or observing them, it’s being with them while they cook that meal for their family, when they go on that commute, while they buy that beer with their friends. I think you just learn so much from that sort of sense of relatability, really. And I think it’s interesting—everyone in our world wants to be the strategic person. I always feel the “strategy” word is quite a loaded word. Everyone wants to be more strategic than the other person. But I think there’s a lot of value in just being the person who can tell the stories really well. Whether you're doing the strategic piece or not, just telling stories in a way that allows people to empathize with them—and therefore to make good, strong business decisions off the back of them. Yeah. Telling research stories, basically. Yeah. I mean, I guess all of my work, in a way—whether it’s working for magazines, where you go out and tell a story about subculture and present it in a magazine, or whether you go out and do what’s happening in subculture and tell it to a boardroom—in a way, there’s a similarity to the process that’s going on there. Yeah. I feel like I learned that really, really late—that when I was presenting work to a client, just the story I would tell about an interview, or an ethnography, or an observation—that was itself the whole thing. I thought I was doing something else, but the story smuggles in so many other things. It’s sort of transformative. Absolutely. And I think more people then leave that room and go and do things that work. Yeah. If you can switch mode from research to story, and wrap it in story, then I think even people who don’t like market research—and there’s a lot of them out there—when it turns into stories, they’ll go and do good things with that work. That’s right, because we’re obsessed with people—we can’t help but be interested. Well, Andy, I want to thank you so much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation—number one, out of the blue—and then just spending the time. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Peter. It’s been great to talk to you. 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