THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Remi Carlioz on Luck & Contradiction

Remi Carlioz [https://www.linkedin.com/in/remicarlioz/] is a French-born creative director, writer, and cultural strategist based in New York. Founder of Studio Paname [https://www.paname.studio/] and Love Machine [https://www.lvmchn.com/], he has led campaigns for Lizzo, Rihanna, and PUMA, bridging art, politics, and commerce through a humanistic lens that explores creativity, technology, and cultural transformation. He has a fantastic newsletter, La Nona Ora [https://lanonaora.substack.com/] So I start all my conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a beautiful question, which is why I stole it. But it’s pretty big, so I kind of over-explain it—the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. But the question is: Where do you come from? And again, you can answer any way that you want to. Well, that’s a loaded question. I think, look, there’s the obvious answer—the very basic one. I’m French. I live in New York City. I work globally. I’m actually not only French now—I’m also a U.S. citizen, which probably matters for our conversation. So that’s the obvious, but it’s not very helpful. It’s interesting because people ask me, “Where is home?” and I can’t answer that question anymore. Obviously, I’ve been in the U.S. for 15 years now. I used to answer “Paris,” but New York is not really home, and Paris is not really home anymore. So I struggle to answer this question. I think if I were to answer—because I was thinking a lot, given the political situation in France and in the U.S., about my own situation—I come from luck. And I’m saying I come from luck because I was reading this very interesting philosopher called Milanovic, who worked on this concept he called “citizenship premium,” which means that 50 to 60% of your total life income is just determined by where you’re born or your country of citizenship. And I have this double advantage—being born in France, living in the U.S., and having dual citizenship—which means 60 to 70% of my life income is just determined by the pure luck of being born in France and being both a French and U.S. citizen. Which, I guess, gives me a moral duty to think about it. I could have been born in Uganda. I could have been born in Bangladesh. And obviously, the citizenship premium for those countries is way lower. So I come from luck. And it’s very important in my trajectory. I also think I come—and I used to feel guilty about this, you know, 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian guilt—and I come from a bunch of contradictions. Who said that? Bob Dylan—I come from multitudes. So I come from the collision between high and low, between theory and practice, between French rationalism and U.S. capitalism. I come from a lot of contradictions, which I feel now are part of me, and I’m fairly comfortable with. And the American citizenship is relatively recent, is it not? Yeah, I think I got the citizenship in June or something like that. So it’s like four or five months. And what was that like, to become a citizen? Yeah, I mean, you know what? For me, it’s important because I’ve been living here 15 years. But once again, I was in a room when I took the oath with, I don’t know, 100 people, and it was clear that for some people, it was way, way more important. And I’m not saying important morally, but like economically—like, as security, the ability to stay in this country, to be safe. So I had mixed feelings. It was important to me, to my wife, to my kids. But then I realized that for me, it was less important than for some people. And we can see that if you read the press and look at the news—for some people, it’s actually a matter of life or death. And it was not to me. But it adds a level of contradiction. To hold two passports adds a level where, when people ask you where is home, it becomes harder to answer. I love how you said it’s not a matter of life and death, even though it was for people that you saw there. What is it a matter of for you? Why do it at all? I did it because it made sense after 15 years. I had a green card for five or six years. My kids grew up here. It made sense. And I wanted to be involved. I wanted to have the right to vote. I don’t know if you saw, but there were elections last November where President Trump was elected for another four years. I submitted my application literally the day after because I wanted to have the right to vote. I wanted the First Amendment and the freedom of speech. And I wanted to be free. But also, you know, this country gave me a lot—a lot of opportunities, to me, to my kids. And I wanted, in a way, to give back. And it just made sense. When I say life and death, I’ve worked a lot recently on this notion of border and this notion of frontier. You know, American people love this notion of frontier, and they hate borders, which is interesting because in French, it’s the same word. We don’t have two words. It’s “frontière,” and it means both border and frontier. In English, you have two words. But I realized that for me, and for people in my situation, I can cross borders. I can use whatever passport I need so easily. I just jump on a plane. I go for the weekend to Paris or for work. I come back. I go to Mexico City. For me, borders are not an issue. It’s immaterial. Whereas for 90% of the population, a border is literally a wall. So it was interesting for me to think about what “border” means for me, and what this notion of frontier means as well. Yeah, that’s amazing. The language part of that—I remember that you’ve written. I want to go back. Do you remember as a child what you wanted to be when you grew up—young Remy in France? Yeah. I wanted first—I was fascinated by the ocean. It didn’t last very long, but I wanted to be—I don’t know the word in English. In France, it’s “océanographe.” Sorry, the guy who goes—like... It lasted like two years, but I was absolutely captivated by the ocean. I don’t know why. And then quite early, I think I was involved in politics. Quite early—at 13 or 14. And then I wanted to be a diplomat. My dream was to be an ambassador. And then I met someone who was fairly high up in the French government who told me, “You need three criteria to be a diplomat, and you have none of them.” The criteria being: coming from money—I don’t. Coming from a noble family in France—I don’t. And having done one of the elite schools in France called L’ENA, which is the equivalent of Harvard or Yale—and I hadn’t. So he said, “You can try, but you’ll never be a diplomat.” Which was hard to hear, but it was a good piece of advice because at least I didn’t waste my time. Wow. And you said you were involved in politics at 13. What was your involvement? Well, I think—I’m sorry—I think I grew up in the ‘80s, and we had a conjunction of very interesting events. And probably the collision of all those political events was very formative to me. So for example, I was very young, but in ’81, we got the first socialist president—knowing that in Europe, “socialist” is not an insult. It means left-wing. It means caring for a greater good or for public service. We got the first French president elected in ’81 after 25 years of right-wing presidents—De Gaulle, etc. His name was François Mitterrand. And what he did—and for my family, it was a huge relief. It’s actually the first time—I was 10 years old, something like that—the first time that I drank champagne with my parents. And then he abolished the death penalty. He decriminalized homosexuality. He introduced a fifth week of time off. He reduced the working week to—I can’t remember exactly, probably 45 hours a week or something like that. So at least the first two years, it was like this new utopia. Then it became more complicated because the left converted to neoliberalism. But at least the first two years were very hopeful. Then at the same time, there was this movement in Poland, if you remember, with Lech Wałęsa—the Solidarność movement of unions and strikes in Gdańsk. And I don’t know why—I need to do some research—but it was extremely popular in France. We were all wearing the pin. There was a great movement of solidarity. At the same time, two or three years after, there was this anti-racist movement called SOS Racisme in France. And then what happened in ’86, the majority lost the election, and it was a right-wing government for the first time in two years—but a very bad one. That’s when the National Front started to gain ground, had members of parliament, and there was repression—very hardliners on security, and so on. So those five years were very formative to my political and intellectual beliefs. And I guess that’s where I started to be involved in politics. Yeah. And what are you doing now? Catch us up—sort of, where are you now, and what are you doing for work? I know it’s a big leap from there to where you are now. Yeah, yeah. I basically sold my soul to capitalism when I came to the U.S. So yeah, I spent 10 or 15 years in politics, and 10 or 15 years working with brands. And your question is interesting because six months ago, it would have been very easy for me to answer. For the past 10 years, I was basically a creative director in-house—mostly global creative director for Puma, then at Crocs, Hedo, then at Blue Bottle Coffee, then at Fabletics. So it was very easy to answer, “I’m a creative director.” Since June, I took a different turn, and now I actually don’t know how to answer this question. Because I’m back to—I contain multitudes. Or I’m the b*****d child of many contradictions. I still have my creative and brand strategy agency—that’s doing okay for some clients. I co-created with partners in France a global information warfare agency to fight disinformation in France. I spend 50% of my time heading strategy and being chairman of the advisory board of a major philanthropic fund against antisemitism here in the U.S. And then I co-created, with partners in Portland, Oregon, an AI content studio. So I guess that’s a lot. I guess I would need to think about what’s the red thread—and talk to my shrink—but I’m comfortable with that now. I think, back to your question, I don’t know exactly where home is, but I know that I’m very good in all the spaces between things. And I feel—and I felt very guilty or unsure about that for many years. Now I’m very comfortable with it, and it’s how my brain operates. I’m very happy to be in between—in spaces in between. Yeah. As much as this space doesn’t really have any labels or titles, when do you feel like you first discovered that it was a way you could make a living? I think by accident. I was reflecting on this imposter syndrome that a lot of creative people say they have. And in a way, I did have it. I also think it’s kind of like false or fake modesty sometimes. It’s very easy to say, “Oh, I have imposter syndrome,” but at the same time, I’m global creative director for a $5 billion brand. I remember precisely—I got let go in June from my previous job. And what I would have done previously is go to LinkedIn straight away, update my resume, do some b******t post trying to sound smart, send 100 resumes, and get two answers. But I woke up one morning and consciously decided I didn’t want to work for Corporate America—at least not in-house—because the violence of capitalism really impacted me mentally, psychologically, and my family. And I was like, I don’t have to play this game. I still have corporate clients, but I’m on my own. I decide. I don’t have a boss. It’s not easy. It’s more challenging, but it’s also way more rewarding. So I genuinely remember this morning when I was like, “F*** it. I’m not going back. I’m going to do my own things. Let’s see if it works.” And I was lucky enough—it works. I’m curious about what to ask now. Maybe I’m curious about the violence of capitalism—you mentioned it. What were you thinking of when you said that? As a creative director, as somebody who works in this space? Yeah. Look, I think—it’s a weird thing. Because obviously, coming from my position—I discussed what Milanovic called the citizenship premium—I’ve highly benefited from capitalism, or from neoliberalism. I live in a nice apartment in Brooklyn. I’m a wannabe hipster. I benefit—I highly benefit—from capitalism. My kids did, my wife did. So it’s a bit ambivalent, the relationship I have with it. I don’t want to abolish capitalism. I don’t want that. But I think there are ways to make it more human—like in Northern Europe, like in France. In France, when you’re fired, you have a three-month notice period. You have an adult conversation where you sit with your boss to understand the decision. Then you have some kind of unemployment wages, some kind of coaching. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but at least it’s human. Here, after spending 10 hours a day working at a job—spending more time with your colleagues than with your family—you’re let go in 15 minutes. They basically cancel your life from their system. You lose your email access within two minutes, and your colleagues don’t call you back. Not out of malice—it’s just because they move on. Because you’re not useful anymore. Compared to other countries in which I’ve worked, the violence of capitalism here—which, by the way, is probably very much rooted in slavery, which we don’t have in the same way in France—we had other problems. France was a very bad colonialist country. But the second you start looking at individuals like goods—where you can put a price tag on them—it has consequences on how you look at value. That’s the first part. The second part—I think in America, there’s a tendency—do you know the McNamara fallacy? Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. He was trained as an accountant, I think, at GM or somewhere. He didn’t mean to, but he was counting everything in the Vietnam War on a spreadsheet—the number of deaths, the body count, etc. At the same time, he was losing the war. It became the McNamara fallacy: if you can’t count it, it doesn’t matter. I think that became foundational to American capitalism. Everything has to be quantified. If it’s not quantified, it doesn’t have value. Whereas—at least from my perspective—everything that matters to me is not quantifiable. Honestly, when I’m on my deathbed—not too soon, hopefully—what will matter to me is not what’s quantifiable. It’s my wife, my kids, an artwork, a landscape in Tuscany, the smile of my first child—or second child, sorry if she’s listening. All of this—you can’t put a price tag on it. And that really matters. So yeah, the violence of capitalism really wore me down, year after year, here. France isn’t perfect. It’s just more human in how we deal with individuals. Yeah. Yeah. That’s amazing. I really appreciate you sharing all that. And I know that—I mean, that sounds—it’s a horrible experience. No, it’s not. Sorry to interrupt you, Peter. It’s not a horrible experience. I mean, the American Dream worked for me. But I got swallowed. I got imprisoned. I lost my freedom. Have you been on LinkedIn recently? Yeah. I mean, the level of b******t on LinkedIn—the quotes, the self-congratulations—it’s like LinkedIn is probably today the epitome of what neoliberalism has become. And it’s frightening. So when you said, “It must have been terrible”—no. I was privileged and lucky enough, and the American Dream worked for me. It’s just that at my age, after a certain time—sorry—it was not for me anymore. It was too violent. And I was like, why do I have to put myself through this? And I can’t even imagine what it means for most people, for whom the American Dream is not working. Yeah. I appreciate the correction very much. Tell me more about what you see. I want to hear more about your diagnosis of LinkedIn—what you see when you go there. I mean, it’s everything I hate. It’s just purely performative. Including for myself. I realized that when I have to post—and I try to post less and less—but sometimes I have to, because it’s an important professional network. There’s nothing authentic. There’s nothing genuine. There’s this fake vulnerability. Everyone’s fishing for compliments. Now it’s 90% AI-generated. It’s just the same quotes, the same... Yeah. “So my routine is: I wake up at 4 a.m., I’m doing 100 squats. Then I read and write my gratitude journal for two hours. Now it’s 6 a.m., I take care of my kids for two hours.” It’s just—first, it’s false. And then it’s b******t. It’s not helpful. But also—it’s like, come on. Can’t people just be like—I was going to say “themselves,” but maybe the problem is they are themselves. I don’t know. But like—let me know the last time you saw something interesting on LinkedIn. I mean, something that—like, “Huh. That made me think differently.” Yeah. It can be interesting from a business standpoint. “This company acquired this company.” “This company released this new ad campaign.” Okay. You look at it. So I still go on LinkedIn from time to time. But it’s some kind of b******t generator. Yes. Quotes always from the same people. It’s tiring. Yes. I love too—you reminded me. So, my daughter goes to a Waldorf school. And so I found myself at some lecture, I think a while ago, with a woman in that community—sort of a matriarch. And you’re familiar with Waldorf and Rudolf Steiner? Do you know him? Yep. And so I always remember—she had this quote, which I paraphrase, but she said something to the effect that Steiner had written these observations about the West and the East. And he said about the West—that it wanted to be a machine when it grew up. That was what I took from what she said. I don’t know what she was saying about it, but I thought about that. And I think about that a lot. As somebody who—I love talking to people. I’m a qualitative researcher. It’s a human experience to understand everything. All the value happens in these qualitative interactions. So I’m always looking to make the case for the qualitative. And you just—I mean, you just articulated perfectly the terror of the quantification of everything. And I just want to sort of celebrate how clear you were about it, because I totally think it’s the case. And AI only seems to sort of manifest it at another level—you know what I mean? Where we still—we just have this instinct. And maybe there’s something about the articulation—that it’s an aspiration. There’s something aspirational about this mechanization that we have in the West. What does that do? What do you make of that? So what do you mean—when Steiner said, “building a machine”—what do you think he meant? Or what do you think your daughter meant by “a machine”? Because a machine can be very positive. It can be very negative. It can break you. So—what kind of machine? Yeah, well—it was a woman in the community, not my daughter. It was a woman in the community who was talking at a lecture for parents. And what I took her to be saying—was that Rudolf Steiner said the West kind of wants to be a machine when it grows up. And maybe he was writing between the wars. Maybe he was—I thought about it as maybe just this industrialization of the civilization in the West. Yeah. And maybe sometimes, unfortunately, it’s a Rube Goldberg machine. But yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know if it answers your question, but obviously I thought a lot about this. And I read a lot about this as well. And as you know, I have my own newsletter. I think what’s interesting in the West—or at least in this current neoliberal model—is that, and you can see it with President Trump right now—there’s a French philosopher who just wrote a book called Finitude Capitalism. So, the fact that capitalism is—do you say “finite” or “finite”? F-I-N-I-T-E. Finite. Finite, sorry. Capitalism is finite right now. So for the past 300 years, to use a very stereotypical analogy, we would grow the pie, with the hope that everybody could have a piece of the pie by growing it. But then what we realized, for the past 30 years, is that the pie is finite. Whether it’s in terms of natural resources, or people, or whatever—it’s now finite. There is no new territory to explore. That’s probably why Musk wants to go to Mars. So the only way to grow the pie is not to share the common goods or the resources with your neighbor—it’s to steal it. It’s to literally steal the pizza slice from your neighbor. Meaning, “We want to annex Greenland.” Or “Canada is going to be the 51st state.” Or “We’re going to take over the Panama Canal.” So back to violence—now that we can’t grow the pie, you have to steal the pizza slice from your neighbor. And it’s pretty brutal. Because it’s back to mercantilism and imperialism. And that’s why some of the right-wing people admire—what was the name of that president? Edward McKinney, or whatever? At the end of the 19th century. McKinley. Yeah, McKinley. So I think it adds another level of violence. Rather than sharing the resources with everyone in an equal way—and once again, sorry to come back to that—this citizenship premium I benefited from is a pure accident. A pure coincidence. Pure luck. So if you don’t realize that, why would you share common goods or resources with other people? You’re like, “I’m fine stealing the pizza slice and eating it myself.” So in a finite world, this machine that is breaking a lot of people—it completely redefines how we need to interact, in terms of sharing resources and wealth, and this notion of solidarity. I’m looking at my notes and reminded of your—you mentioned your newsletter. What’s the—can you talk about the inspiration for the newsletter? And the name itself, I think, has a meaning. It’s called La Nona Ora, which in Italian means “the ninth hour.” And it’s—I’m a huge fan of a contemporary artist called Maurizio Cattelan. He’s also, by the way, a creative director, a very brilliant creative director, but he’s mostly known for being a contemporary artist. Very well known. Almost as a joke, you know—he’s the guy who taped a banana at Art Basel on the wall and sold it for $300,000 or something like that. But he did a piece where the Pope—I think it was John Paul II—is hit by a meteorite. Meteorite, meteorite. I never know how to say “I” or “E” in English. Meteorite. On the ground. I saw this piece the first time in Italy, and then in France, and so on. And it’s basically a long story about how to question—constantly question—the seats of power and the systems of power. And so my newsletter, in a very pretentious way—but I’m French, so I’m allowed to be pretentious—is looking at, through language, through art, through economic models, through everything, at the systems of power. And how language is a power, how art or propaganda can be a power. Because—back to your question about capitalism and a machine—what’s very specific about the U.S. compared to France is that everything is very individual in a way. In the U.S., your success is individual and your failures are individual. So if you fail in America, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough, or it’s because you’re bad, or it’s because you’re stupid. Which can be true, but it also completely cancels the system—and how people, what people place and room in these systems. And it’s not true. But it’s the same when you’re successful—it’s individual. It’s because you’re a genius, and it’s because you’re smart, and so on. Forgetting about the fact that most of the innovation and most success came from publicly funded labs and universities. And what about the roads, and what about childcare, and what about— So there is no myth of the lone genius. As smart as people are, they are part of an ecosystem. So the fact that American capitalism individualizes failure and individualizes success made me think about the system they’re part of. Because if you don’t look at the system, I think the picture you have of society is only partial. Yes. I mean, this makes me want to ask you about—maybe explore—the sort of nameless role that you play in between things, right? It’s sort of a banal question though, but when we think about what is the role of creativity, that you can be doing what you do in the context of antisemitism in the U.S., and that you can be doing it also about disinformation in France, that you can be doing it about coffee or sneakers—like, what are you doing? Or what’s the role of what you do in all of those contexts? What’s the role of creativity in combating antisemitism? What’s the role of creativity in fighting disinformation? Well, if I had the answer, I would be very, very happy—and probably very rich as well. So that’s literally the question you’re asking. It’s not banal at all. It’s literally what keeps me up at night. I want to believe that for everything you mentioned—whether it’s a brand campaign for Blue Bottle Coffee or Puma, or whether it’s fighting antisemitism, or whether it’s misinformation—I want to believe that creativity more and more, by the way, has a huge role to play. Especially because of the algorithm world we’re living in. So, you know, it’s harder and harder to cut through the noise, to rig the algorithm, to play with the algorithm. And I think one of the ways is creativity. You constantly have to be more creative than your competitor, or your adversary, or your enemy—because you’re losing. And then the larger question is, like, what is creativity? And I have a fairly loose definition of this because, once again, I come from high and low. So creativity is not just Mark Rothko and David Hockney and, you know, Philip Roth. It’s also the memes. You know, a meme can cut through the noise, and can be viral, and can be extremely brilliant. The problem is, when you’re fighting against antisemitism—or, as you might have understood by now, I’m fairly left-wing—is like, what kind of tools do you adopt to counter what your opponent or adversary is using? You know? And it’s hard. It’s very, very hard. I very much admire—I think it’s Michelle Obama who said—“When they go low, we go high.” And on paper, it’s very noble. In an age of algorithm and TikTok and misinformation, does it work, really? When they go low, you go high? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. That’s something that really, morally and in terms of efficiency, keeps me up at night. Because yes, I want to keep my moral principles, but also—will I be able to create a piece of creative that’s going to be picked up by the algorithm by, you know, “we go high”? I don’t have the answer. But for example, when it comes to antisemitism—the Jewish population is 0.2% of the 8 billion population in the world. So Jews are outnumbered, by definition. On social media, everywhere. So if you’re not creative, you don’t have a voice. You simply don’t have a voice. And it’s the same—I don’t want to compare antisemitism with anything that’s less serious or less important—but it’s the same when you’re a challenger brand. You know, if you’re creating a challenger DTC brand in the same space as Apple, Intel, or Nike—if you’re not creative, you have absolutely no way of cutting through the noise. So I think it’s very interesting. My last point is, I’ve always had a very—always, I mean it’s been two years—but a complex relationship with AI. Because, you know, a lot of my peers, or including my own job and so on, are threatened with AI. But I kind of changed my mind. It’s very dangerous in the way it is used today. And it raises a lot of ethical questions. But for me, it’s amazing. Because my entire career, people told me, “Remy, we love you, but it’s too conceptual,” or whatever. And now, with AI, the only thing that matters is to be too conceptual. Because we all have the same tools. So we can all do the same. It’s dead easy to create a 10-second video or an image that’s almost perfect and so on. So now everything comes back to creativity as a new potentiality. Because we all have the same tools. So it’s all about storytelling, script writing, being smart, and being too conceptual. So if I were pretentious—or if I were in a session with my shrink—I won’t. Not with AI, but I won’t. Because the only thing that matters now is concept and execution. Yeah. Can you say more about this? And you’re talking about—is it Love Machine? Is that what it is? Yeah, it’s Love Machine. It was created by a friend of mine. Actually, his client was at Puma. He had an amazing creative studio called Juliet Zulu in Portland, working with Nike and big brands. Then we created another creative agency together during COVID called Never Concept. And then we reunited this year around Love Machine. It’s just like—we’re both creative directors and brand strategists. How can we use AI in an ethical way, but as a new way to unlock creative possibilities? And it’s pretty amazing, I can tell you. What AI allows me to do personally in my work every day is to focus on things that matter. I used to spend way too much time on paid media and creating assets for paid media. Now I can do that in one hour, because it’s dead easy and it should be systematized. And so now I can spend my brain and my time on what makes a difference. How can I fight misinformation? How can I do something cool for a brand that has not been done before? And I don’t have any technical or budget limitations. When you can create an amazing 10-second video in five hours for $500—or zero, by the way, because it’s just our brains—the marginal cost, it’s a game changer. How can you use this power to move really in a direction that matters, whether it’s for causes absolutely paramount like antisemitism, but also for brands, or for nation branding, or other things, or to fight misinformation online? Creativity is, to me at least from my vantage point, the answer to this. And did you have a—was there a turning point for you with generative AI? Or a moment where you went from “I don’t know about this” to—? Or were you—how has your relationship with it evolved or shifted? Oh, you know, it’s like—once again, I feel you’re measuring this morning, Peter. My dad was raised—how do you say in English—Jesuit. My dad was very—yeah, he was raised Jesuit. Being raised Jesuit, which was a key part of my childhood, means you are literally wearing the burden of 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian guilt on your shoulder. Like everything is about guilt. You’re not allowed to be happy. You’re not allowed to be sad. It’s guilt, and guilt, and guilt, and guilt. My dad is doing better right now because he stopped believing. But I had to deal with that. And so AI is the same thing. At the beginning, I felt very guilty. She’s rubbish. It’s going to displace and cancel a lot of jobs—which, by the way, it’s going to. It’s going to change also the systems of power between the West and the Global South. And so it has a huge impact on the environment. And I know all of that. But I’m not fatalist. You can either ignore AI and say, “I hate it”—but it’s kind of a losing proposal because it’s here and it’s only the beginning—or you can try to use it in purposeful ways. I was very intrigued and very impacted by the way the internet evolved. You know, you and I, 20 years ago, the internet was still a place of freedom, and it was magical. And, you know, the HTML and the rabbit hole—and then you could still jump from one place to another. And then, you know, until 2011 with the Arab Spring, where Facebook and some social networks had a real role. And now it’s like—to quote this guy I fully admire, Yanis Varoufakis, who was a former Minister of Finance in Greece—all of this is concentrated and held by five techno-feudalists who have total monopoly on all of these social networks, AI, and so on. But either you give up on AI and stay in your cabin somewhere in the woods, or you say, “I’m smart enough, I have enough experience to try to shape it.” I’m not pretentious enough to think I’m going to shape Anthropic or OpenAI, but at least I can use it in a moral, creative, interesting way that can move the needle. I’m interested—we’ve got just a few minutes left—but you described that as guilt. Your reaction, the rejection or the anxiety about AI, was guilt? Yeah. Well, it is guilt. Because if I look at my teams over the years—a lot of those jobs I had in my previous team—I had a person who was a proofreader and a copy editor. Their job is probably going to disappear very soon. Entry-level graphic designers, or people who were doing paid media assets—that’s probably going to disappear pretty soon. CRM managers. I was looking at my team—I had 12 or 15 people on my team—and I was like, s**t, probably 6 to 10 people won’t have a job. Maybe they’ll have different jobs, but it’s going to be very brutal, once again. So I felt guilt because I won’t lose my job. I’m actually using AI to my benefit, and it makes my work better and I can work faster. And so once again, it’s about privilege. It’s not a citizenship premium anymore—it’s a skills premium, or it’s a job premium, or it’s an experience premium. So I felt guilty that I was benefiting from AI, while a lot of people on my team probably won’t have a job in a year from now. And at the same time, you have people in the Global South who are paid $1 a day to make AI function the way we use it—when we ask a question to ChatGPT. Yeah. One last question. Maybe I’m just curious to hear you re-articulate what you already articulated about high concept. But I can’t remember how you phrased it—that because of AI, it makes the conceptual... And there’s this logic that somehow slips—it always evades me—this idea that, maybe I just didn’t study enough business, but that the new technology comes in and it eliminates all the stuff in the middle, but it creates all this opportunity either at the fringe or at the high end. You know what I mean? Can you tell me what that looks like for you? Look, and that’s why—I come from contradiction. There is a political answer and then there is a business answer. The political answer is always the same: people like me are going to benefit from AI. People from Wall Street benefited from the 2008 crisis—none of them went to jail, they’re doing fine. So people are—and I’m far from being part of the top 1%—but I’m part of an elite that’s going to benefit from AI, that’s going to benefit from globalization, that’s going to benefit from crossing borders. So that’s the political answer. And I don’t have guilt anymore because I think guilt is a waste of time. I have more of a moral responsibility to act and to use it in a meaningful way. The business answer—the creative answer—is that, yeah, it’s a complete, absolute game changer. All the limits I had—budget limits to do a photo shoot at $250,000, or all the physical, financial, technical limits I had to push a concept or to bring a concept from inception to execution—I don’t have those limits anymore. So it’s pure creativity at its core. You can do whatever you want. Like, literally, whatever you want. There are no limits anymore. And so how do you use this creativity? Yeah, to make money, to win deals, to do brand campaigns—but also to fight antisemitism, to fight disinformation. Or, you know—that’s absolutely captivating: how you can use this tool. Remi, I want to thank you so much for accepting my invitation. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Melissa Vogel PhD on Anthropology & Business

Melissa Vogel, PhD [https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-vogel/], is a business anthropologist specializing in business and organizational research. She founded the Business Anthropology program at Clemson University, directed UX research at Capital One, and leads Great Heron Insights LLC. Prior to this, she studied the Casma culture of Peru as an archaeologist. She has a regular series of short videos called The Anthro Minute [https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7281406136216424448/], and a substack, On Being Human [https://melissavogelphd.substack.com/s/thoughts-on-being-human]. Melissa’s writing. “From trowels to tech - how can an archeologist work for a Fortune 100 Company? [https://anthrocareerready.net/from-trowels-to-tech-how-can-an-archaeologist-work-for-a-fortune-100-company/]” Anthropology Career Readiness Network “Articulating Anthropology’s Value to Business [https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/articulating-anthropologys-value-to-business/]” with Adam Gamwell in Anthropology News So, 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, beautiful question—one of the reasons I use it—but because it's so big, I tend to over-explain it the way I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—any way you want to. The question is: Where do you come from? Yeah, that's a cool question because you can choose to answer it a number of different ways. I'm going to take it pretty literally. I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m a first-generation American. My dad's family immigrated from Europe after World War II, and honestly, the Midwest never really suited me. It was quite conservative for my taste, including my family. I was very fortunate that, when I was applying to colleges, my parents didn’t restrict me to the local area. I got into the college of my dreams, which was UCLA. Oh, wow. So, I'm a proud Bruin alum. What was the attraction to UCLA? Do you remember when it first entered your consciousness—when you first became aware of it? I think when I started looking at colleges in high school. I’ll be frank: one of my criteria was, how far can I get away from St. Louis? So again, I feel lucky that my parents told me, "You get the grades, and we’ll figure out how to send you where you want to go." I’ve always been the overachiever type—give me a goal, and I run for it. Or I give myself a goal. We did a little trip out West after I decided it would be really cool to go to school in California. We checked out UCLA, UC San Diego, and I think we swung by Arizona State as well—which was really interesting because, for years afterward, Arizona State just sent me postcard after postcard: "Why didn’t you come here?" I was like, "Because I went to UCLA—what do you think?" That was an easy choice. Sorry, ASU. But yeah, when we actually visited, I had already heard of the university—obviously, it’s world-famous and incredibly high quality. But then the campus was beautiful, and I loved the idea of being in a big city like L.A. It just seemed like it had everything to offer. My dad loves to tell the story of our campus tour. He asked the tour guide, “How many of your students come from out of state?” The guide said, “Oh, I don’t know the numbers, but it’s less than five percent.” So my dad was like, "Phew, well we won’t have to worry about this place."Surprise, Dad—I got in. I'm curious to return to that earlier thread. What does it mean to you to be from the Midwest—or maybe is there a story you can tell about growing up there that feels significant? Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I grew up in a pretty darn white suburb, and my parents very much prized education. Neither of them came from families with education—none of my grandparents finished high school. My dad had come over from Europe; my mom’s family was from rural Missouri. So when my dad announced he was going to quit his factory job and go to college, my grandmother apparently said, “Are you crazy? Nobody's going to pay you to sit around and read books.” And then when he eventually became a stockbroker, he was like, “Look, Mom—people are paying me to give me their money!” So yeah, it was a big deal for them to move to a location with a good school district. We were in this very affluent, white suburb, but we didn’t share the same values as a lot of the families around us because of my parents’ backgrounds. I never felt like I fit in there. This was the ’80s—it was all about conspicuous consumption, what brands you were wearing, who got what car for their birthday. My parents didn’t believe in any of that. We didn’t get an allowance. I actually continue this with my son—I think it was a great idea. My parents wanted us to learn that you have to work for your money. You don’t just get $5, $10, $20 a week because you exist. There were some chores we had to do for free, but a lot of them they paid us for, to prove the point: you do this work, you get paid. I figured out real quick I made the most money mowing the lawn, so I took that up as soon as my dad would let me. I started babysitting at 11, and eventually, when I was 15—because I’m a late-summer baby—I got a work permit to start waiting tables. I was always trying to figure out, “How do I make the most money in my current circumstances?” It was a kind of environment where, because there was so much homogeneity, people focused on things like, “Oh, they’re Catholic”—as if that was a big deal. But that’s how little diversity there was. It was a big deal if someone was Lutheran versus Methodist versus Catholic. And it was amazing if there was a Jewish kid in your class. Whoa. I just never wanted to be a part of that. One little fun story: when I went back for my sister’s graduation—she stayed in Missouri for college, like a lot of my friends did, and went to the University of Missouri—I ran into a girl who had been in my class. My sister's younger, so we were about three years older than her classmates. This girl said, “Melissa, you got out.” And I said, “You could too!” It was this amazing thing to her that I had managed to leave St. Louis. And yeah—my sister literally still lives a mile from where we grew up.If that—it might be less than a mile. Actually, it’s probably like half a mile. Well, it feels like a very... I mean, I grew up in the suburbs outside of Rochester, so the suburban experience is what I feel like you’re describing. Is that fair? Oh yeah, for sure. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I mean, I hear you loud and clear on “get me out of here.” But did you know what you wanted to be? Oh yeah, I had lots of ideas. When I was in kindergarten, I wanted to be an astronaut—I think that was right around the time of Sally Ride—and I just thought it was the coolest thing to go to outer space. Unfortunately, as I got older and needed glasses—at least back then—that was a no-no. You couldn’t become an astronaut if you needed glasses, so that was out the window. Then I remember in second grade, like many second graders, I thought dinosaurs were the coolest thing. I asked my parents, “What do you call a scientist who studies dinosaurs?” and they said “a paleontologist.” So when my second grade teacher was asking the class what we wanted to be, I said “paleontologist”—and she didn’t even know what I was talking about. As I got older, again, I feel very fortunate. Because my dad was from Europe and both my parents enjoyed traveling, they took us with them to a lot of places other kids didn’t get to go. We went back to Europe a couple of times to see my dad’s family, and I developed a love of international travel very young. I think the first time we went to Spain to see his cousins, I was about 12 years old. I was studying German in school, since that’s the language my dad’s family spoke—although they spoke this obscure dialect I couldn’t understand after learning high German. We went to Germany a couple of years later. So, I really wanted a career that would allow me to see the world, learn other languages, and learn about other cultures. I only got a tiny introduction to what anthropology was in high school, but I didn’t fully understand how you could do that as a career—especially because I think what I was exposed to was more the evolutionary aspects of anthropology, which has never been my favorite part. When I started at UCLA, I was actually a political science and international relations major. On that same trip to Germany, we visited cousins in Austria and went to this really cool restaurant up on one of the little mountains. There was this big table of people, all speaking different languages, and there were women at different spots around the table translating. They looked very fancy—I don’t know who they were, maybe businesspeople or diplomats. I asked my parents, “What’s going on over there?” and my dad said, “It looks like they’re translating for them.” I thought, Oh, that would be cool. That was one of the possibilities I considered. I was lucky that I seemed to have inherited my dad’s ability with languages. He could speak German, French, and English pretty well—though he lost his French after moving to the U.S.—and he picked up a little Spanish along the way too. When I took German in school, it was super easy for me—embarrassingly easy—having been around it a bit with my family, even though it was a different dialect. Later, when I had to pick up Spanish to work in Latin America, that came pretty easily as well. I just knew I wanted something where I could travel the world. But when I got to UCLA and started political science, I was really disappointed. The classes were huge—hundreds of people in the lecture halls—and I have to admit, my poli-sci professors came off pretty arrogant. I remember in particular my international relations intro professor. He’d stroll in late and say, “Sorry folks, I just got in from Moscow. I’m not on West Coast time yet.” And I just thought, Oh wow, must be nice for you. I worked for him through a summer research program students could do, and we were basically writing his book for him. I was appalled. I don’t even know if we got mentioned in the acknowledgments. That’s crazy. The students were doing all the research. He would just talk into a recorder—he’d say, “Okay, this is what I want to cover in Chapter One, blah blah,” and we’d do everything else. In the meantime, I had luckily signed up for a couple of anthropology classes, and I just thought, These are my people. The students in the poli-sci classes were mostly pre-law and had very different goals in life. It felt almost like that same group back in St. Louis that I hadn’t fit into. The anthro kids, on the other hand, were from everywhere, doing all sorts of interesting things, very nonjudgmental, just interested in the world. So I found my people sophomore year and switched majors. Yeah, amazing. And catch us up—where are you now? What is the work you're doing? You’ve made a career out of anthropology. What have you been up to? Yeah, so when I switched majors, my dad was horrified. He was so hoping I was going to end up in law. The quote of his that I love to repeat is, “Anthropology? What do you want to be—poor for the rest of your life?” Yes, Dad, that’s my goal—to be poor for the rest of my life. But once I got into it, I was serious. Again, I set a goal and ran for it. I went all the way through my doctorate. At the time, I wasn’t really aware—because they don’t broadcast it in grad school—that there are non-academic ways to be an anthropologist. So I thought, Okay, what do I have to do to be a professor? That’s the only option, right? So I did that. And there were great things about being an academic. I mean, the best part is you get to research whatever you want. You just have to fund it yourself—but as long as you can find someone to give you a grant, go for it. It took me three years to get a tenure-track job. I had told myself, Okay, I’ve seen other folks just suffer—going from adjunct to adjunct, or visiting professorship to visiting professorship, moving all over the country—and I’m not doing that. I gave myself five years to get a tenure-track job, and I considered myself lucky that I got it in three. But when you're on the academic track, you go where the job is. You don’t have the luxury of saying, Well, I love California. I want to stay here. The job I got was in South Carolina. I had no family, no friends there, and honestly hadn’t been interested in living in the South. But you go where the job is, right? So I thought, Okay, I’m more fortunate than a lot of my peers—I got a tenure-track job. Let’s make lemonade. I helped build the program there. I was only the second anthropologist in the entire department. We built a major. Eventually, I became the grad director and converted their master’s in applied sociology into a master’s in social science—because I’d never had a sociology class in my life. I said, We’re going to have to update this if you want me to be grad director. I’d always wanted to get into administration, but that just wasn’t happening. I didn’t fit into their idea of who was going to be department chair or dean. And if your own university won’t give you that opportunity, no one else will give you the time of day. In the meantime, I’d always done applied research. I’ve always thought that was important. I’m very passionate about my discipline—I think anthropology has so much to offer the world. Everyone can be their own little anthropologist in their own way, if they’re so inclined. So I’d done applied research since grad school, and I just got more and more interested in doing that instead. I’d written something like 18 articles and two books on academic topics that—maybe, if I’m lucky—100 or 200 people ever read. You know, so I decided to create a business anthropology program. It took a lot of work and a few years to get through all the different approvals, and I was happy with the results. But at the same time, I was banging my head against the wall trying to get an administrative role and not getting anywhere. Luckily, at that point, I had met my partner, because I really needed the support to make the decision to leave academia. That was a huge, huge decision. I had invested 20 years of my life. I had tenure. I was a full professor. I was the director of a grad program. People don't just walk away from that—it’s unheard of. But I was deeply unhappy. Even though I had built this program, nobody in the administration seemed to care. Students liked it—they were thrilled to have a practical way to apply their anthropology degree—and it was slowly growing. It was still early days, but the administration just didn’t seem interested in me. I started to feel like I had hit a glass ceiling. I wasn’t going to be able to grow anymore. At the time, I was around 40-ish, early 40s, and I thought, I’m not okay with continuing in this situation for the next 20, 30, however many years I have left to work. So, after long discussions with my partner, I finally had the guts to say, Okay, I’m going to try applying for industry jobs, take my applied skills, and use them full-time. At first, we were trying to stay local because I have stepkids—we have a blended family—and it just wasn’t happening. And I hate to say this, but even in bigger cities like Charlotte or Atlanta, they just didn’t seem to understand how my experience translated to the business world, no matter how hard I tried to explain it. When my younger stepkids were ready to go off to college, we agreed we’d consider moving. And sure enough, the first place I applied to in D.C. hired me in six weeks, because it was very easy for folks around here to understand how my experience translated to market research. By then, that was my fourth market research company, but it wasn’t the first one full-time—because I did do a year full-time in between grad school and my academic job. It was a great place to transition out of academia. It was full of people just like me—former academics who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be in academia anymore. Just super smart people who knew what they were doing. But it was also the start of COVID. Oh wow. Yeah, so it was a tough time for all businesses, certainly for market research. It was just a struggle. But I’m really proud of what we were able to do there. I helped them dramatically update their program. I was the director, and eventually senior director, of qualitative research. I helped them update their pricing model—they were way underpricing their qual work. I created a more streamlined work process to bring timelines down. We expanded into all sorts of online qual, because before the pandemic, they hadn’t done any. So yeah, did some really cool things, despite the struggles. I want to return and talk about the transition, but before that, I was curious—I’d love to hear you celebrate anthropology. What makes anthropology so important? I can’t remember the language you used, but there’s something that anthropology does that nothing else does. How do you think about what makes it powerful? Yeah, well, you’ll have to watch me, or we’ll be here all day. I should note that I was introduced to you through The Anthro Minute, this beautiful series of wonderful little introductory videos on YouTube—I’ll share a link to it. I’m always excited to hear really accomplished people champion the beautiful things about anthropology. So, back to the question—what is the power of anthropology? Well, thanks for asking, because I did want to make sure to mention The Anthro Minute at some point. Oh yes, of course. So, for those who may not know—because I think anthropologists, unfortunately, have done a terrible job of explaining who we are, what we do, and why anyone should care—anthropology is the broadest of all the social sciences. It’s the study of every single aspect of humanity: the biological, the cultural, the linguistic, and our past. That’s literally our four subfields. And that’s what I love about it—you can completely immerse yourself in anything about humans that fascinates you. Everything from how we got to be Homo sapiens from our ancestors—I was a specialist in archaeology for a long time, so I loved learning about past civilizations. I loved that in archaeology you got to use all the subfields. Archaeologists need all of them. We don’t just know about the past—we know about cultural, linguistic, and biological anthropology because we use it in our work. Also, in the United States, graduate programs are usually what we call four-field programs. You have to know about all four fields and be able to teach at least a little bit of each to be competitive in the work environment. I loved that—it was so holistic, so comprehensive. But I also just love the fact that one of the major things anthropology teaches us is cultural relativism, meaning every culture is just as good as any other. There’s no superior culture—there’s no “this one’s better than that one.” They all have their own cultural logic as to why they do what they do. And I just thought that was fantastic. Having felt kind of like an outsider for a good chunk of my younger life, it was really appealing to me to understand that not every culture is like mine. They don’t all do things the way I do. Sometimes I like how they do it better. So yeah, I think anthropology has so much to offer everyday life, because it’s really just about understanding humans—who we are, where we come from, our beliefs, our behaviors that are passed down, that are learned and shared among groups of people. I created The Anthro Minute because people don’t know what we do. I mean, you walk up to someone on the street and ask, “What does a psychologist do?” and hopefully, at bare minimum, they can tell you what a therapist does. Maybe they’ll think of counseling, even if they don’t know all the subfields of psychology. But you walk up to someone on the street and ask what an anthropologist does, and they’re probably going to think of the retail store. That’s the first thing that comes to mind—Isn’t that a store? Or maybe they’ll think about archaeology, although a lot of times archaeologists are confused with paleontologists. No, we don’t dig up dinosaurs—which is kind of a bummer. I like dinosaurs. It’s so funny—Indiana Jones came to mind as you were talking. Oh yeah, that’s the number one response you get when you tell someone you’ve been an archaeologist. Certainly. But for some reason, it came up even just now as we were talking about anthropology, which is kind of funny. That’s strange. But of course, I completely agree. Anthropology—I'm not an anthropologist, but even qualitative research has, in my experience, done a very poor job of articulating itself. What do you love about the work? Of all the different things involved in what you do as an anthropologist, what’s the part you love most? Where’s the joy in it for you? I got to do what I wanted to do as a kid—I’ve gotten to see the world. And I’m not done. I got to spend 20 years working in Latin America—either being on or running projects in Nicaragua, Belize, and mostly Peru—and traveling to nearby countries while I was there. And then you get other opportunities because you have friends working in other areas, so you get to visit them. I got to visit friends in the UK. I had other friends I ended up visiting in Bali. You get around. And you get to see the insider’s view of things, because you’re not just there as a tourist all the time. I like being a tourist too, don’t get me wrong. But I really love the opportunity to get out in the world and understand how people live in different places—and try to see it the way they see it, if I can. That’s one of the big concepts in the anthropological perspective: balancing what we call the emic and the etic, the insider and the outsider perspectives. In my case, now that I do a lot of work in the United States, I’m not necessarily an outsider. But traditionally, we were outsiders trying to understand the insider perspective. And it works both ways. It’s a really wonderful way to—hopefully—understand the best of humanity. Although you’re probably going to come across some things that aren’t so great, too. But that’s what I love about it. What kinds of things were you exploring? Can you tell me a story about some of the research you’ve done? Yeah. Most of my work in Peru focused on a culture called the Casma, who are not very well known. Most folks—if they’ve heard of pre-colonial Peruvian cultures—only know about the Inca. Again, we haven’t done the greatest job of publicizing that. The Casma existed from about 700 to 1400 AD on the north coast of Peru. I was looking at the whole development of their civilization, but especially the origins of urban environments—so, Andean urbanism. The preservation you get on the coast of Peru is rivaled only by Egypt. It’s this incredibly dry desert, and what’s wonderful about that is you get a window into ancient people’s lives that can be hard to get in other climates where preservation isn’t as good. I was able to study and write books about how these people lived—how they built their cities, how they seemed to run their religion and their economy, what we could see about their social structure. I really tried to take as holistic a view as I could to understand them and how they fit into the larger picture of Peruvian prehistory. They came after a group called the Moche, who were very theocratic, with a lot of dependency on ritual and religion to maintain authority. After them comes an empire called the Chimu, who were very bureaucratic—very much like all roads lead to Chan Chan, which was their capital city. Very highly centralized. The Casma occupy this niche in between, showing a kind of transition—from people using spectacle and elaborate rituals to maintain authority (not that ritual ever goes away), to something with less emphasis on centralized bureaucracy, like with the Chimu. The Casma seem to have been this grassroots, local group that managed to get out from under the thumb of the Moche. Eventually, they fall under the Chimu, but for a few hundred years, they seem to have been running their own show. More of a heterarchy than a hierarchy. I think you said Andean urbanism, is that correct? What can you tell me? I mean, in my sort of narcissistic way, I’m really interested in urbanism and cities. What’s the most interesting thing you learned about Andean urbanism? What were cities like? Yeah, I mean, what was fascinating with the Casma—and so different from what we see after them with the Chimu—is that the growth of the cities seems to be pretty organic. While there is a more elite sector of their capital city at El Purgatorio, which has these grand compounds with big high walls, and within them small—not the big giant pyramids you think of, say, in Mexico—but small pyramidal mounds with either stairways or ramps, and plazas in front of them, they’re all inside these walled compounds, which is a long-standing tradition on the north coast. So they do have more formal elite sectors eventually, but when you start digging through those layers, you find all sorts of places where they’ve remodeled and built on top of what was a much more organic growth underneath. And as you see the rest of the city—and we get radiocarbon dates to support this—you can see where the city expanded around the side of this mountain and up onto a little saddle on top, where there was more of a working-class living sector. We see the differences in the material culture to recognize the different statuses of people and the different activities they’re doing, and indications of trade—both between the farmers in the valley and the fishermen on the coast, as well as with other nearby cultures up in the mountains and things like that. There are certain things that don’t grow on the coast, but we find them, so we know they’re trading for those. Yeah, I think that’s what’s really cool—to see how these larger and larger conglomerations of people just sort of organically pop up. Andean cities never seem to have gotten as big as, say, Central American cities like Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan. We don’t have those massive piles of people together, and yet they were very complex. And if you’re familiar at all with the quipus that the Inka used—it’s a series of knotted strings used for accounting purposes—there was someone called a quipucamayoc, who was the person who kept the quipu and would read it for the ruler. To me, it was just fascinating to see that people can reach more complex levels of civilization in different ways. They didn’t have the written language that the Central Americans or folks in the Old World had, but they still had their own complicated way of keeping track of things and running cities and governments. So, for dramatic effect, I’m curious now to talk about the transition into business anthropology—being an anthropologist in the corporate space. What in God’s name do you do with that kind of thinking and perspective when trying to apply it to a market research context? How did that go? If you want, we can put in the show notes the article I wrote about this called From Trials to Tech: How an Archaeologist Ended Up at a Fortune 100 Company, because I make the argument that being an archaeologist actually gives you a lot of the skills you need to run a corporate team. Archaeologists don’t work alone—ever. Where some cultural or linguistic anthropologists might venture off into whatever area they’re trying to study all by themselves, we don’t do that. We always have a team, and it’s nearly always interdisciplinary. We can’t be masters of everything. So when I was directing projects, I had my faunal and floral expert who handled all those remains. I had my osteologist who handled the human skeletal remains. My expertise was more in architecture, ceramics, and iconography. But yeah, to do excavations, you need a lot of people. You learn, the hard way if you have to, how to manage a team, how to manage a budget. Also, when you’re working in another country—I never did archaeology in the United States—I always thought, Wow, that must be so easy. I mean, that may not be true, but when you’re working abroad, you have to navigate a foreign government, a foreign language. You’re expected to do permits and hiring and all sorts of stuff in that country. You need to adjust to their customs. You’re going to be eating their food. You need to fit in enough with their culture that you’re not putting yourself in jeopardy. And it behooves you to use all your cultural anthropology skills too. As much as I used to joke that the nice thing about archaeology is “my people don’t talk back,” the reality is there’s virtually no archaeological site in the world that isn’t near a modern community anymore. It really behooves you to take an interest in that local community from the beginning, and make sure you’re involving them in any way you can—and hopefully in a way that they appreciate, not in a way that makes them want you out. We would hire local workers, and we always had a public interest component where we’d ask, “Is there something you would like to get out of this work we’re doing?” For example, on my last project, they said, “We want to learn English.” So we did—we had informal Saturday classes for anyone who wanted to show up and learn how to speak some English. All of those skills translate directly to a corporate experience. You learn how to manage people, budgets, timelines, deal with different types of governmental regulations or communities. And you need to be able to relate to people. Part of the decision to switch from working in Peru to doing business anthropology primarily in the U.S. was that I had a family of my own by then. It’s extremely difficult to work internationally once you have kids. That was something that was important to me—I didn’t want to miss any part of my son’s life. So, on top of being frustrated in my career, I also didn’t want to be away from him. And it wasn’t feasible for my partner to spend every summer in Peru, like I’d been doing for 18 years. So it just made sense to go back to the applied work that I was also passionate about. I wanted people to see the value of anthropology for solving everyday business problems—which is what business anthropologists do. My original way into it was through market research, but eventually I transitioned into design anthropology, doing user experience work at a fintech. We had done a little of that at the market research company I was at as well. I also had been doing the third subfield of business anthropology, which is organizational culture work—especially around what later became known as DEI. When I first started doing it, it wasn’t called DEI, that was the later term. But I did that work in academic institutions and then through the market research firm. And that’s now what I want to do in my own company, which I’m starting right now. What were the challenges or difficulties in translating anthropology into market research—or in helping market researchers understand and make room for anthropology? Where did these things fit—or not fit—together as you tried to make it work? Well, I think one thing that helped a lot is that, as an archaeologist, we use both qualitative and quantitative data. We don’t restrict ourselves to one or the other. So, for example, I’ve literally mapped archaeological sites with a total station or a transit, and used survey software to create that—I used to have to do AutoCAD and all that kind of stuff. We take lots of measurements. We don’t do super sophisticated statistical analyses, but we do use statistics for various things—to group things into categories or for a lot of spatial analysis. So we’re quite comfortable moving between qual and quant. That made it pretty easy to translate into market research, where—to be successful—you really need to be comfortable with both. You don’t have to be a statistician, but if you’re really... I mean, that’s one thing I tried to help my teams with. I would certainly bill myself, if I had to, as more of a qualitative than quantitative person, because I don’t have the heavy stats background. But numbers don’t scare me. I’d really try to help my qual researchers understand the importance of being able to administer a survey, understand what the results mean, and how to properly represent those numbers. I was surprised when I entered the business world how many people didn’t seem to know how to do that. So, yeah—I think that helped. But I mean, you also just have to explain to people the hard way—with examples. And I was fortunate that I had been doing this work off and on the whole time. I don’t think it would’ve been so easy for me to transition if I hadn’t. I was doing it in grad school just to make extra money, but I had no idea I was building a muscle I would end up using full time. I always say, no experience is ever wasted. When I finished my PhD and didn’t have an academic job, I ended up working with other grad students at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evaluation. That was a team environment where we were the folks doing the fieldwork—going out and doing interviews, observations, different types of qualitative techniques, and also administering the surveys. Then our statisticians back at the university would do the heavier stats work for us, and we would write up the reports. I had no idea that job—which was just to pay the bills—was going to be what I would end up doing full time. That would've been, let’s see, like 15 years later. So there was just instance after instance where you’re doing something that uses your skill set, but mostly you’re just trying to pay the bills—and then you realize later, wow, I have all these foundational skills that I developed in all these jobs I picked up along the way. I know you're a member of EPIC, which is a beautiful organization. Do you have a point of view on the state of business anthropology—or anthropology in the corporate sector—and where we are today? Oh, yeah. I mean, we still have a big PR problem, which is one of the reasons I created The Anthro Minute. We've unfortunately been targeted politically. Even though we do what I think is really important, useful research on humans, we’ve unfortunately—since Margaret Mead died—not had a public spokesperson to really represent our discipline for decades. So people... we sort of were like, Oh yeah, we’re not going to worry about that—we just want to do our research and be left alone. And that’s been to our detriment, because now folks don’t know what we do. They think it’s frivolous. They don’t understand how it’s highly relevant to their everyday lives. The skills we build as anthropologists help companies build better products—things people actually want and need—understanding what customers are looking for to market those products and actually gain greater market share. Especially if you're going internationally and want to broaden the cultural audiences you’re selling to. And to improve their own cultures—to be workplaces where people actually want to be. Unfortunately, right now in the U.S., we’re in a really bad place. The trend has done a total 180. There’s a real lack of concern for humans—a lack of concern for what people want or need. A lack of caring about whether your employees like where they work. There just don’t seem to be enough companies that care about being a great place to work. I’m sure there are some, but that doesn’t seem to be the dominant trend this year. So, I think we really have our work cut out for us as anthropologists—to continue explaining why a deep understanding of humanity in all its variety, and globally—having that global mindset, not just this trend of being insular and focusing locally—why that matters. Because there’s no turning back the clock. We live in a global economy. That’s not going to stop. It’s going to continue. I think people like anthropologists—who can help you understand the world and people—are going to be much more successful than someone who thinks they can just turn inward, shut out the rest of the world, and shut out different opinions. I love that you mentioned Margaret Mead. I wonder if you might talk a little about her role—what was the role she played that you say is currently lacking? Well, I’ll be honest—I wasn’t alive, so this is just from what I’ve read. But yeah, my understanding is that she was the public figure for a long time in the United States. She published a column in Redbook, which was a popular women’s magazine at the time, and really made an effort to put herself out there. Unfortunately, as we now know even more than when Margaret Mead was alive, when you put yourself out there, you can become a target. So she certainly had to deal with some controversies during her lifetime. And with hindsight, we can always look back at someone’s work and say, “Oh, they should’ve done this better or that better,” or whatever. But she was one of the pioneering anthropologists that came out of the original circa 1900 group of anthropologists—all students of Franz Boas. For a while, there was a biological anthropologist doing research on love and attraction—and of course, now I’m blanking on her last name. I know her name was Helen, and I just lost the last name. But she did get a little bit of public attention for a while, which was great. Then... I don’t know if she decided she didn’t like it anymore, or people just weren’t as interested anymore. Like, she really stayed focused on her one subject area, so maybe that’s why. So yeah, I really think—and I’d be happy to be one of the people who tries—to become one of these public anthropologists who really helps people understand: Why do we need to know about other cultures? Why do we need to care what motivates human beings in different places? Because, you know, one of the areas where we tend to disagree with psychologists is in thinking that we all operate the same way. Anthropologists tend to celebrate the differences as well as the similarities across cultures. So, we’re kind of near the end of our time. What Anthro Minutes do you have coming up, or what topics will you be tackling, if you have any in the queue? Well, I had a request for more business anthro case studies, so I’m currently working on that. I’ve already mentioned a bunch of them as examples, and now I’m hunting down new ones, because I’d really like to have some that are more recent and a little more relevant. So that’s a work in progress. But the one coming out next week is about environmental anthropology and sustainability. Then there’ll be one after that talking more explicitly about user experience in the design anthropology world. And I’ll keep seeking out more case studies that really bring home for people the practical applications. And, you know, I only keep myself to under 90 seconds, so I can’t get that deep into any case study. But the more I can demonstrate for folks how anthropologists are actually impacting... you know, we have Go-Gurt and Toughbooks because of anthropologists, right? So, the different ways that we've led to innovations. Well, hold on—now I need to hear either a Go-Gurt story or a Toughbook story. Your choice. So, Sue Squires is an anthropologist who was doing research for—I believe it was a breakfast cereal company—and doing ethnography in people’s homes while they were getting ready for the day, getting off to school and work. Interviewing them as they were doing that, asking what they were looking for in breakfast foods. She made a lot of important observations. One of the things that’s really important about our primary methodology, participant observation, is that people will often say one thing and do another. So, you want to ask them, but you also want to watch them, if you can. She found that parents would talk about how important it was to give their kids a nutritious breakfast and send them off to school fueled to learn. This sounded great—like what every parent would want. But she was watching the kids do things that contradicted that—either refusing to eat what was put in front of them, secretly sneaking off and throwing it in the trash, or sneaking to the cupboard to get some kind of snack food to stick in their backpack for later. She noticed all of this going on. And at the same time, these poor, harried parents were just trying to get their kids ready and out the door. That led to the idea for Go-Gurt—that you could take yogurt on the go. The kids could eat it in the car. One thing I didn’t know—since I’ve not been a big Go-Gurt user myself—is that you can actually freeze Go-Gurt, stick it in your kid’s lunchbox in the morning, and by lunchtime it’s defrosted, but still safe to eat. It hasn’t gotten all hot and gross. So yeah, it was the idea of: how could we have a healthy breakfast food that kids can take with them on the go? That has to do with John Sherry at Intel. He was sent up to do research on Alaskan fishing boats—what they needed from a computer. He was watching these guys—if you’ve seen that show Deadliest Catch, where they’re throwing tons of fish on the deck, processing them, and blood and guts are flying everywhere—it’s just disgusting. He’s watching this and talking to them, and they’re like, “Look, what I really need from a computer is to be able to hose it down when I hose down the deck.” And out of that research eventually came what we now think of as rugged-use computers—Toughbooks that can stand up to conditions like fishing boats, construction sites, or other places where the more delicate computers of the past would have been a disaster. And that was Panasonic? Is that a Panasonic Toughbook—is that what it was? I think so. But John was working at Intel, so it must’ve been a partnership. That Toughbook brand—I remember it. I had never seen anything like it. Yeah, that story is really powerful. Awesome. Melissa, again, I really appreciate you accepting my invitation and sharing your wisdom with us. I’ll put all the links to all your good stuff here. It’s been wonderful to get to know you a little more, and I appreciate what you’re doing. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was fun. 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Philip McKenzie on Brooklyn & Discovery

Philip McKenzie [https://www.linkedin.com/in/philiplesliemckenzie/] is a cultural anthropologist and strategist who founded InfluencerCon and hosts The Deep Dive [https://open.spotify.com/show/6Eqbqr5B2WACWvOCh0x5WG?si=a7ba791765174d91] podcast. A former Goldman Sachs trader, he has served as Chief Strategy Officer at MediaVillage, advises global organizations, and teaches at Hyper Island. I think you know this already, but I start all these conversations with the same question. I actually borrowed it from a friend of mine who lives in Hudson. She uses it to help people tell their stories, and I love it so much because it’s such a big question. And because it’s so big, I tend to over-explain it before I even ask. So I want you to know you’re in complete control—answer however you want, or not at all. I just really love the question. And the question is, where do you come from? Again, you’re in absolute control. Absolutely. Thank you for that. I think it’s a great question. Where I’m from is Brooklyn. I talk about Brooklyn all the time, and I always very specifically introduce myself as being from Brooklyn—which I think is distinct from saying I’m from New York. I’m a proud New Yorker, and I understand Brooklyn is part of New York, but anyone who’s a native New Yorker understands the specificity of the borough you’re from. Growing up, being from Brooklyn meant a lot. It shaped everything about who I am. My parents are from the Caribbean—my mom’s from Barbados, and my dad’s from Guyana. I’m the only one in my family born in New York—born in Brooklyn. And Brooklyn has the largest Caribbean and West Indian population outside of the West Indies. All the islands are represented: Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, Haiti—you name it. That microcosm of being in New York, but specifically being in Brooklyn, feels very different from being in other parts of the city. So, long-winded answer, but: I’m from Brooklyn. Beautiful. What part of Brooklyn were you from, and what was it like? Maybe tell me more—what does it mean to you to be from Brooklyn? Oh man, it means everything. I grew up in Brownsville, then moved to East Flatbush. I grew up in New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s—I graduated from high school in 1990, which I kind of use as a clear demarcation point. That was actually the year with the highest murder rate in New York City’s history. Crime has been declining ever since—current narratives in the media aside. If you only watched the news, you’d think New York was the Badlands, but it’s definitely not. Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s was just different. It was the New York people tend to mythologize, which, culturally, was very important to me—even when I didn’t realize it at the time. I remember Reggie Jackson, the Yankees winning in ’77 and ’78, the blackout... all of that. I remember riots and looting in our neighborhood during the blackout in ’77. Those kinds of moments were just part of the world we grew up in. I joke with friends that graffiti was everywhere. The trains were covered in it. Back then, it was considered a crime. Now it’s a marker of gentrification—luxury condos feature graffiti murals to make them feel “authentic.” It’s wild how those things come full circle. That’s part of the Brooklyn identity for me—watching culture shift. One era’s criminality becomes another era’s marketing aesthetic. Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, I remember all that too. We’re the same age—I graduated in 1990, but I was in the suburbs in Western New York. OK, yeah. But I definitely remember Reggie Jackson. The straw that stirred the drink. Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you have a sense of what young Philip imagined for himself? Yeah, I think I went through a bunch of different phases—wanting to be different things without really knowing what it took to become any of them. My parents got me a telescope pretty early—I must’ve been eight or nine. I don’t think I was ten yet. Cosmos was on PBS—the Carl Sagan documentary—and it just blew my mind. I didn’t understand all of it, but what I did understand was like, wow: space. The stars. That kind of wonder. So in my mind, I was going to be an astronomer. But that faded as I got older. I think I always had a curiosity, a desire to discover things. I used to go to work with my dad—he was a zoning consultant in the city. At the time, they were called expeditors, but zoning consultant is another term. New York City’s building code is a labyrinth, so architects and engineers would hire people like my dad to help them navigate their projects. Each borough has its own Department of Buildings, and in the summers I’d go with him across the city. That’s when I first saw Manhattan during the day, saw people going to work. That made a huge impression on me. My first thought was, “I want to be in business.” I didn’t know what that meant—I just knew I wanted to be a part of that world. My dad would be running around and I’d hang out at Barnes & Noble or Borders—back when Borders still existed. I’d get lost in the bookstores, reading, exploring. But the thing that stuck with me was seeing people in suits, carrying briefcases. That, to me, was business. And I knew I wanted to be in those canyons of buildings, in and around Wall Street. And eventually, I did all that. But I think the seed was planted back then—being in that environment, seeing those faces, and associating it all with success. And that was Manhattan—you’re talking about the experience of Manhattan. Yeah, exactly. Because the Department of Buildings used to be in the old municipal building. For those who might be familiar with New York City, the municipal building sits right off the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s this big, kind of Art Deco-looking building—like One New York Plaza. The city, the police department is right behind it. You’ve got the court building nearby. But the municipal building is a big government building. It was probably more fully occupied back then than it is now, because, you know, things have changed. Back in those days, the Department of Buildings was on the 20th floor. I used to spend a lot of time in that building. Then there were all the bookstores I mentioned earlier, along Broadway. A bunch of other stores too—like Trinity Church used to have a bookstore. There were all these little outlets that had magazines, books—places I would just wander around. We lived in a different society then, where a 10-year-old could roam the streets of New York alone. Right? And no one thought anything of it. Today, that parent would probably be arrested. But in the latchkey era? It was different. I love that conflation of business and a bookstore. I am in the world of business. And the experience of being in the world of business... was a bookstore. That sounds amazing. Yeah, yeah. Because walking to those bookstores was where I saw people doing things. Even the shoeshine guys—they always had magazines and stuff. That was a popular thing back then. If you watch an old movie from the ‘70s or ‘80s, you’d see someone getting their shoes shined on the street. I just attributed all of that to what, in my mind, was “business.” Awesome. So, catch us up—where are you now, and what are you doing in the world of business? If you’re still in that world, how do you talk about what you’re up to? Yeah, I’m definitely in the world of business. Officially, I’m a cultural anthropologist and strategist, and I’ve had my own consulting practice now for what feels like forever. I kind of reject the term “futurist” because I just don’t like the word. But basically, I help organizations understand culture. It’s more than just trying to be predictive—it’s a practice rooted in rigor around foresight and applying that within a broader cultural context. I use that to help organizations better understand their place in the world—not just to avoid pitfalls, but to identify potential opportunities. I’m happy with the work because it allows me to engage with a wide range of organizations. I always say I’m industry-agnostic—it doesn’t really matter what the business is, because it usually comes down to people. There are some things I won’t do, based on my own ethical compass—like defense work or anything I feel is about harming people. But beyond that, I’m open to engaging. That approach has allowed me to build a business that puts me in active contact with many different people and industries. It’s broadened my horizons beyond what I could have imagined as a kid—or even as a young professional. When I left business school, I worked for Goldman Sachs for many years. I was doing what I had envisioned as a kid: One New York Plaza, 50th floor, top of the world. Master of the universe on a massive trading desk. And even though, at the time, that was the thing I most wanted in the world—and I killed myself to get it—it turned out not to be what made me happy or fulfilled. Lots of lessons in there. Yeah. And what was it, to the degree you’re comfortable sharing? What caused the shift? I mean, we’ve known each other a bit, so I know some of the story. But what happened—what was the shift from the 50th floor to cultural anthropology? Yeah, you know, it wasn’t any one thing, to be honest. It was more of a gradual acceptance that I could have sat in that seat for a really long time—and made goo-gobs of money. Because a big part of my interest in that world was the money. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. You know, I used to joke with friends at business school that, for a kid like me coming out of Brooklyn, this was the most money you could make without having to throw or catch a ball—neither of which I was particularly good at doing professionally. So I was like, this Wall Street ticket is a huge opportunity for me. I went back to business school specifically to work at Goldman Sachs. I wasn’t even that enamored with Wall Street as a general idea—Goldman, specifically, was the draw for me. And trading, as an extension of that. So, to answer the question, I only share that to emphasize how much I did want that job. And the reasons I left weren’t specific to Goldman Sachs. I don’t really have anything negative to say about Goldman specifically. I think Goldman was just part of a larger culture that didn’t align with my values over the long haul. These environments can be really toxic. And I think a trading desk—particularly when I was trading, in the late ’90s into the 2000s—was a prime example. I can’t speak to what it looks like now, and maybe it’s better. Someone listening might say, “Oh, it’s not like that at all.” But my experience was that it was a very toxic environment. It can really grind you down. And even with that, those weren’t necessarily the reasons I left. I’m just recognizing what the environment was like. Because, in a lot of ways, I fit the profile of someone who would do that job. I’m a former athlete—high school and college—and trading desks are full of those types. A lot of military folks, ex-athletes, or a mix of both. It’s a very male environment. And the women there—again, when I was there—mirrored that. They often out-maled the males in many respects, in their demeanor and style. That doesn’t work for everybody. That kind of constant, what our president once called “locker room talk,” doesn’t align with everyone’s personality. It didn’t really bother me that much—but I knew it wasn’t going to make me happy in the long run. So I decided to leave. And I didn’t know what I was going to do next. It’s not like I left for a thing—I left just to leave. I spent some months in Argentina and Brazil. Then I came back, and that led to this second iteration of myself as a professional. I started working with some friends I went to school with—friends and fraternity brothers. They had started a nonprofit, and that eventually led to us starting a multicultural agency called Free DMC. We published a magazine called Free Magazine, and we were fully engaged with lifestyle brands around multicultural marketing—helping them reach this elusive audience they didn’t fully understand. And we were part of that audience. That audience was shifting tremendously at the time we were growing the business, and we just plugged right into that. That’s really where all of my interest in culture led to what I do now. Yeah. I’m so fascinated—I just did a project on young analysts and associates, the recruitment experience for investment banking. I spent a lot of time in that space, and I feel like you and I could probably talk for hours about the anthropology of that whole recruitment process and the culture of those banks. It is a crazy process, but it also—and I saw this from the other side, too—it really speaks to how significant finance is in our broader culture. There’s this extreme hazing or initiation process around it that’s just... in plain sight. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I ran the summer analyst program at Goldman. Because at Goldman, you wear multiple hats. My job-job was on the trading desk. But they ask professionals to run a lot of these programs. So it was me and two other folks, in different areas, who ran the summer analyst program for equities. And it was the same thing I had experienced as a summer associate: 80, 90 kids jammed into the bullpen, being run around the city for 10 to 12 weeks. Right. You were just expected to live, breathe, sleep the “Goldman experience.” Stay late, get there early, go out socially with Goldman people. It was full-on—like, it never stopped. Yeah, it’s a crazy thing. So I want to talk about... what’s an example? Can you tell a story about the kind of work you love to do now? Yeah—two examples. I work with Hyper Island, and this is more of an academic example, but I love what Hyper Island is all about. I’ve been working with them for a few years now, basically as a supervisor for students going through their IRP process, which is essentially their master’s thesis. You really get the opportunity to get under the hood and help someone younger—though not necessarily young, because it is a master’s program, but younger than me. Which, at this point, is not miraculous in any way—just a statement of fact. Class of ’90. Exactly. You get to work with these folks on shaping what will be their final thesis as they finish the program. And selfishly, I learn a lot from these students. Honestly, I think they impart more to me than I give to them. But you also get to provide some real, practical knowledge based on what you’re seeing out in the field. So when they’re building a research project or a product, or incorporating research into their thesis—I’ve done all that. I’ve done a ton of ethnographies. I’m big on the qualitative side of the business. I think there are really important stories to uncover through longer-form interviews and deeper engagement. What I’ve noticed with this newer generation is the opposite—they’re very focused on just doing the quantitative stuff. They’re not necessarily strong with numbers, and they’re often skeptical of qualitative work... but they don’t really know why. They just feel like, “My thing is data”—whatever that means to them. So I get the chance to talk to them about opening up to the qualitative side. Because that’s the culture piece. That’s the human layer. Working with those students has been really incredible for me. So that’s one engagement. And then, on a completely different side, I work with a client in venture—helping them figure out how to do venture in a way that creates better outcomes. Not just for investors, but also for the founders. It’s been an incredible ride. It’s an incredibly strong team, with a clear focus and a sharp investment thesis—so all the boxes are checked. But what’s really inspiring is the foresight the partners have. They’re thinking about how their firm fits into a much larger infrastructure. Just like how Wall Street has its own culture and way of being, venture has its own rhythm, its own norms—and especially with the way technology shapes so much of our world. That’s the bigger story. And the fact that they see that clearly, and want to think long-term about how they grow their business—that’s been deeply inspiring to me. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? The joy is in discovering really big things—and then bringing them to life. I often tell clients, prospective clients, or collaborators: I am not the holder of the answers. There are a lot of people in this space who present themselves as having the answers. Like, “Work with me and I’ll help you increase your ROI,” or, “I’ll make sure your strategy moves in the right direction.” I stay away from that approach, because I don’t think it reflects what any of us can actually deliver. We don’t know. And because I work with many different types of organizations, I’m not going to be the expert on every business I walk into. That would be impossible. What I do try to discern is: where are there foundational similarities across industries? What universal themes can we discover and work through together? All of my work depends on teams and deep collaboration. I can’t do this if I walk into an organization and people aren’t willing to give me truthful, accurate answers. I can’t just make it up myself. So it really depends on the willingness of the organization to share. What I’ve found—and then I’ll stop here—is that a lot of times, an organization will come to me with one project. But once I start digging in, it often has very little to do with what they originally presented. They’ll say, “We just implemented these new systems, and we’re having trouble getting people to use them. Can you help us understand where the gaps are?” And then I dig in—and it has nothing to do with the systems. For example, I worked with a media company that had grown by acquisition. They had done three or four fairly large acquisitions over four or five years. So the company had grown quickly. They had reporting schedules, forms, processes—all the usual stuff. But they said, “It’s not working. What’s the problem?” And the issue wasn’t the forms. It was that people didn’t trust the reporting lines inside the organization. The company had all these formal lines—this person reports to that person, and this team feeds into that team. But after working with them for a few months, I realized the place was full of indirect lines that no one was seeing or acknowledging. They thought things were working in a static, top-down way—but they weren’t. It wasn’t about the reporting methodology at all. The real issue was trust within the organization. Right. So those are just a couple of examples, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to say whether I advocate for it. What I’d say is—I just use it. You know, these distinctions we lean on... to a certain extent, they’re kind of false. Right? We’re caught in these dichotomies—right brain vs. left brain, technical vs. non-technical—and we treat them like gospel in professional settings. People throw around terms like “hard skills” and “soft skills,” or “skilled” vs. “unskilled” labor. But all of those definitions miss the richness of how we actually interact to solve problems. From my perspective, as someone who leans toward long-form interviews—like yourself—yeah, of course I can send out a bunch of surveys. But I find that surveys usually just lead me to more questions. The structure of a survey is set up to check a box or fill in a field. But there are very few things in life where I can give you a meaningful answer just by checking a box. So the whole model feels kind of weird to me. And then we try to compensate by saying, “Well, we’ll send this to a lot of people,” as if volume will make up for depth. But to me, you’re just collecting a bunch of half-answers—or assumptive data—that often fits into a narrative you’ve already built. You’re looking for something to prove it out, hoping the numbers will materialize a solution. And I find that hard to believe. I just think you’ve got to get under the hood with people and ask them more questions. Even if the sample size is small, that doesn’t mean the observations aren’t deep. Like—I don’t need a hundred 70-degree days to know I love 70-degree days. I kind of only need one. Have you ever heard this? I share it too often, but there’s that quote that goes around: “The plural of anecdote is not data.” It’s one of those popular phrases people throw out. But when you dig into it, that’s actually a bastardization of the original quote. It came from a Stanford economics professor, and what he actually said was: “The plural of anecdote is data.” We just have this weird bias toward numbers and measurement. I love how you were describing surveys—this idea that just by measuring something, it somehow becomes more real. That’s it. And maybe I’m overstating it, but I try to bring these things together. Because even the word data—it’s loaded. It pushes you toward a very technical or technological understanding of the phenomenon you’re trying to explore. But we take in so much information, and we sense so many things. That’s actually the language I prefer: What we take in. How we make sense of the world. Can you try to break that down into data? Perhaps. But I push back on this idea that we’re machines. We’re not computers. This logic-heavy worldview has become the dominant story—and it’s not a new story. It’s a 500-year-old Age of Enlightenment story. But it’s a broken story. Because it doesn’t allow us to put equal weight on the things that truly matter. It reminds me of the trading floor. People would say, “To be a trader, you’ve got to be able to process tons of information and manage risk.” And yeah, that’s true. That’s what they talked about—managing risk, operating with imperfect information. But it was also a place full of emotional ding-dongs. I always said the trading desk was just an excuse for adults to act like children. Throw things. Blow up. Break things—literally break things. Phones, monitors—all kinds of stuff. And that behavior was just chalked up to testosterone and “being a man.” But when you see emotions expressed in other bodies, in other spaces, we discredit them. Exactly. Emotions held in some bodies make sense. In other bodies, they’re dismissed. That’s what I try to unpack. I try to move away from these binaries. People say, “Turn off your emotions. Be logical. Don’t get emotional.” And I’m like—I’m emotional about everything. Emotions are what make us feel alive. Yeah. I love that. I love what you’re saying—it’s a perfect segue into your podcast. I want to hear you talk about where it came from. I’ve been introduced to so many ideas and incredible thinkers through it—especially from corners of the world I wasn’t familiar with. So how do you think about what you’re doing with the show, and how do you invite people into the conversation? Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the kind words about the show. It’s called The Deep Dive, and I’ve been doing it for five years now. I actually came to podcasting through a previous show called Two Dope Boys and a Podcast, which was an homage to OutKast’s second album, ATLiens—specifically, the track Two Dope Boyz in a Cadillac. It was me and Michael Brooks, who has since passed away. Michael really introduced me to podcasting—he was already part of that world. He co-hosted The Majority Report with Sam Seder. Michael and I were just friends. We’d sit around my kitchen, put a bottle down between us, and just talk—about all kinds of b******t. And at some point, we were like, “Man, these conversations are pretty awesome. People might actually want to listen to them.” That became Two Dope Boys and a Podcast. We did that show for a little over two years—amazing team, and I loved working with him. He passed away—not due to COVID, but during the COVID period. Michael was a huge, huge star. I often wonder, in the times we’re in now, where he would be, and what he’d be building. He had already built so much. He was really my entry point into podcasting. Later, he launched The Michael Brooks Show, which was his own thing. I wasn’t looking to start another podcast or get back into that world. But the opportunity came up to create The Deep Dive—a show where I could just sit down, have a conversation like this one, and see where it goes. And so The Deep Dive was born. It’s a Culture & Insights show—at least the way I define Culture & Insights. I try to talk to a wide range of people who I think have interesting ideas. There’s connective tissue between episodes, but it’s not the kind of show where you’re going to hear me talk to the same type of guest every week. They probably skew toward design, and there’s always a lot of economics, history, and politics woven in. I think those are inseparable from how we view everything else. But I say I’m in it for the books and the good conversations. Not everyone I interview has written a book, but many have, and I get to dive into some really dope ideas with great people—folks I might not have a chance to talk to otherwise. For example, I’m going to be interviewing Cory Doctorow again in a couple of weeks. He’s always writing—super prolific. He’s got a new book coming out on “enshittification,” which is a term he coined to describe how tech systems deteriorate over time. I asked him, “Hey, want to come back on the show?” and he said, “Yeah, I’m down.” I’ve got the book, I’m reading it now, and we’ll probably record in October. But like—if I just emailed Cory Doctorow out of the blue, I don’t know if he’d sit down with me for 90 minutes. He’s got a lot of stuff to do, right? But having The Deep Dive gives me that kind of access. Another example is Saree Makdisi—I’ve interviewed him twice and will again later this week. Just another incredible thinker whose work I admire. So the show is really my greedy way of getting into people’s worlds and having great conversations. That’s what it’s about. It’s been really well received, and I’m so grateful for the support. I get amazing responses from listeners all over the world, and honestly, I have no idea how they even find the show. I’m not on a network. I don’t buy ads on Facebook. I’m not even on Facebook. But people find it. They share it. A lot of teachers and professors assign it, so I’ll see spikes in older episodes and realize—“Oh, that must be on someone’s syllabus now.” It’s incredibly rewarding. And I’m always grateful when people agree to come on, because I know it’s a real commitment of their time and energy. But they go down the rabbit hole with me, and I love that. Nice. Well, congratulations on what you’ve built—it’s really wonderful. Thanks. I have two questions I often ask—I tend to combine them, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it’ll make sense to you. First: do you have any mentors? Who are the people who’ve influenced you? And second: are there any touchstones—ideas or concepts—you find yourself returning to again and again? Yeah. I’ll do mentors first. That’s a tough one. I have a few obvious ones I can name. Some of them might sound cliché, but my dad is definitely someone I’d put in that category. He showed me everything about New York growing up. He took me everywhere. I know the city as well as I do because of him. While a lot of kids were just hanging around Brooklyn, my dad would take me and my sister into the city. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. We did the Circle Line, the Day Line. He took us on all these little adventures. That had a big impact on me as a kid. It gave me a deep appreciation for the city I was in. I love New York. I love Brooklyn—even though it irritates me sometimes, the way it’s changed. But my deep passion for all things New York and Brooklyn really came from those trips with my dad. My high school track coach was another major influence—Mr. Malik. Shout out to Mr. Malik. He gave us lessons that weren’t just about track—they were about life. We were really close as a team. Going to Brooklyn Tech was another huge turning point. That’s where I started running track, so it all came together. It’s kind of a perfect New York story. For those who don’t know, Brooklyn Tech is one of the three specialized high schools in New York. We were mostly a bunch of immigrant kids from all over the city. My graduating class alone was almost a thousand kids—so it was also huge. And we all got along. That was the thing. I was in high school during some pretty polarized times in New York City. There was a lot of regular violence, but also police violence. The Central Park Five case happened when I was in high school—those young guys who were falsely accused and later exonerated. There was Howard Beach. The Bensonhurst killing. It was a time that, if you only looked at the headlines, seemed incredibly polarizing. But then you had us—these super diverse kids from all over: Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island—and we all got along. One of my closest friends was this white guy—I won’t say his name here to protect his privacy—but he’s an awesome dude. One of my best friends in high school. He gave me Led Zeppelin IV. The first time I ever got that cassette tape, it was from him. We were on the track team together. He gave me that tape, and it changed my entire trajectory on music. And that’s just how we were. I can’t say we were always super kind to one another—we were just regular kids—but we didn’t bring the b******t that was going on around the city into Tech. We had our friend groups, but we got along. So when I hear all these stories now about people not getting along, I’m like, how the f**k is that possible? We were dealing with so much more, and we still found ways to coexist. Anyway, I’ll leave the mentor piece there. There were others—people on the team. One guy I ran with was a sophomore when I was a freshman. Coach Malik used to give us our summer training program. Since we were from all over the city, we didn’t see each other again until the fall. He never checked up on us. We kept our own calendars. One day we asked him, “Coach, how do you know we’re doing the workouts over the summer?” He said, “If you do the workouts, I’ll know. And if you don’t do the workouts, I’ll know. It’ll be obvious.” It was one of those early lessons in trust. And that older teammate? He called me up and said, “Hey, we live kind of near each other. Let’s run together over the summer.” That summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I made huge progress—physically, yes, but more than that, I learned something deeper. He didn’t have to train with me. He extended himself. He pulled me along. And that became a lifelong lesson: always help people. In every part of my life, someone has helped me—sometimes when I didn’t even realize I needed help. Someone always extended a hand. So I try to carry that with me in everything I do—personally and professionally. It’s one of the saddest things to me: how helping others has become commoditized. People say, “If you want 15 minutes of my time, you’ve got to do this, book that...” F**k off, man. Just take the f*****g call. Answer the email. Who cares? I will die on that hill. No one is that busy. I don’t believe it. Either you’re lying to yourself, or you’re lying to the rest of us. That’s my thing. And I learned it from that teammate—and I’ve tried to carry it with me ever since. Yeah. And the other question—what was it again? Touchstones. Right, right. Touchstones. That’s a weird one, but I’ll keep it short. One of the best decisions I ever made was going to Howard University. It changed everything for me. And I bring that up because it was another one of those pivotal, transitional moments. Like I said earlier, my parents are from the West Indies. They didn’t go to college in the U.S. My dad took some college classes while on a student visa, but didn’t finish. My mom didn’t attend college at all. So the Black college experience was foreign to them—and to me, initially. But during high school, I started to find my political self, which was different even from my parents’. I watched Eyes on the Prize, Roots—all of that. My life as a progressive person was taking shape. And Spike Lee was right across the street from my high school. He took over an old firehouse, turned it into his studio and home. I’d see him all the time. He filmed a video for School Daze—that “Doing the Butt” scene—in my high school. That’s how present he was in my world. And School Daze, of course, is all about a fictional Black college, modeled on Morehouse. So everything in my politics was pointing me toward an HBCU experience. Howard was, in my view, the best. So I said, “I’m going to Howard.” None of my teachers understood the decision. My dad would go to parent-teacher night, and my AP English and AP History teachers were like, “Philip is so well-adjusted... we’re surprised he wants to go to Howard.” It was this existential crisis for them. Even my coach was surprised at first. Howard was a big running school, and I was tracking for a track scholarship. He actually reminded me of this recently—about a year ago—when I saw him. I explained why I chose Howard, and he said, “Once you told me that, it made perfect sense. I never second-guessed you after that.” To me, it was important. Getting an education in an all-Black environment is no less valuable than getting one in an all-white environment. So it was a political and philosophical decision. And I surrounded myself with some of the greatest people I’ve ever known. We’ve all joined the ranks of the many Howard alumni who’ve gone on to do amazing things. It changed everything for me. I pledged my fraternity there. Those are the people who have carried me through my life since I first set foot on campus. Lifelong friends. People I’ve worked with. My fraternity. So shout out to all the bros—and yes, going to Howard was the best decision I ever made. That’s such a beautiful story. And maybe I’m being super naïve, but—what were they surprised about? Was it just the perception of historically Black colleges being inferior? Exactly. And it doesn’t make them bad people—it was just the prevailing bias. Being at Brooklyn Tech, the expectation was that I’d go to an Ivy League school, or a top engineering school—RPI, Carnegie Mellon, something like that. Howard wasn’t even on their radar. The underlying assumption was: “Howard isn’t as good as the places your son could be going.” But I was decked out in Malcolm X gear, all of that. Actually, I was going through some old storage stuff recently and found one of my drafting notebooks—because I was an architecture major at Tech. Oh, right—your dad worked in zoning. Is that what got you into it? Yeah, exactly. So I opened this old notebook, and it was filled with Black radical stuff—“By Any Means Necessary,” “Black Panther Party,” all of that. And I thought—yo, I was always this dude. If people think that came later, nah. This was 14-year-old me. It was Public Enemy. Boogie Down Productions. Hip-hop at the time. All of that was politically shifting how I saw the world and my place in it. That led me to Howard. And Howard led me to everything else. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we could talk for another hour. But I want to thank you so much—this has been such a joy. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. I love what you’re doing. Thank you. It was great to be here—thank you so much. Oh, thank you, man. Anything for you. You call, I answer. And I love what you’re doing. Like I told you before we started recording—I listen to the show, I check out the transcripts. Sometimes it’s actually faster for me to read than to listen. Same—I’m a reader too. You bring on such amazing guests—thoughtful, deep thinkers. I love that, because we need more thoughtfulness in the world, not less. Yes. If we can model some thoughtfulness and curiosity, maybe we can make the world a better place. Thanks, Philip. Thank you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Sam Pressler on Place & Renewal

Sam Pressler [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampressler/] is co-founder of Connective Tissue [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/p/sam-pressler-on-place-and-renewal], which helps communities and leaders rebuild civic life. He founded the Armed Services Arts Partnership, the nation’s largest community arts group for veterans and families. He is a Fellow at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, a Research Affiliate at Harvard, and studied at William & Mary, Harvard, and Stanford. This was the piece that inspired me to invite Sam into a conversation: “Beyond Bob [https://connectivetissue.substack.com/p/beyond-bob]” : By granting Robert Putnam intellectual hegemony on all things community in America, we limit our understanding of the past and constrain our visions of what’s possible for the future So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And it's a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it's big, I kind of over-explain it the way that I'm doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. And you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And it is impossible to make a mistake. The question is, where do you come from? I'll start with place. I come from a place called Wayne, New Jersey, not too far from where you live. And I come from a place where I was the third generation of my family in that town. That town is probably not too far from where my family, when they were Jewish European immigrants in the late 1800s, early 1900s, came into the New York–New Jersey area. And I came up in a place where, because of that history, I was deeply known in ways that were, I think, really positive when you think about being in a community where most people knew your grandma and your grandpa, and they knew your dad and your uncles and your aunts, and the kind of support structure that can come from that. And I think I got to see the other side of that, which is when you're a teenager and being deeply known is not necessarily the best thing, where you feel like you don't necessarily have a place to hide and just be your own person. And so I think the place where I'm from shapes me in ways visible and invisible to this point. I think the New Jersey and New York area has the funniest people on earth. And I think, particularly growing up in a very comedic Jewish family, my sense of humor and my ability to joke around with people comes from that place. I think my directness comes from being in that place. And I think the path that I'm on, and as I've thought about the importance of community and the kinds of relationships and bonds that hold us together, a lot of that is the model of my grandma from that particular place and the way that she was embedded in that community and building institutions of that community and being a part of it. And seeing what that looked like at the time of her death when she was in her late 80s and passed away. And I think when most folks grow old—grow that old—and have a funeral, maybe it's a small gathering. And she had several hundred people there. And it was one of these things where every single grandchild needed to eulogize her. And they shut down a four-lane highway to help us get to the cemetery. And I think all of that came from a sense of rootedness and an actual commitment to a particular place over a long period of time. I love hearing you talk about being really known, is how you said it. And what can you tell us? Can you tell us a little bit more about a story about what it was like being known growing up in Wayne, or maybe even more about your grandmother? She sounds like quite a figure. Yeah, I like the excuse to talk about Grandma Sandy. I was the first grandchild in the whole extended family. So they used to joke around that I was like baby Jesus to her, like I could do no wrong in her eyes, which was true. The thing about Grandma Sandy was, when you were with her—and I think me in particular, because I was baby Jesus, but also other people—you were the most important person in the room. We would joke that she moonlighted as a detective because you couldn't get through a conversation without having 20 questions asked of you. The funny thing about growing up with Grandma Sandy was, she would do the Jewish grandma thing where she would guilt trip you—like, "Hi, I haven't seen you in a few days. Where have you been?" But then on the other hand, you'd say, "Okay, I'm around at this time, Grandma," and she'd say, "Well, I’ve got plans. I'm playing cards with Bev on Tuesday, and then I have dinner on Wednesday with the girls, and then Thursday I'm going to a show." So you had to schedule out with her several weeks in advance. That is maybe where I do have a bit of my social side—it comes from her—but also someone who was both deeply committed to her people, but also didn't take herself too seriously. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid, like what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, I wanted to be a comedy writer for SNL. It was funny—in my fifth-grade yearbook, everyone had "basketball player," "baseball player," "football player," and I was like, no—comedy writer for SNL. I grew up with the VHS and the DVDs of "Best of Adam Sandler," "Best of Chris Farley," and I would watch those pretty religiously. From as early as I can remember, I wanted to be a comedy writer. There's a funny story from this. My dad, in the building he worked in, there was a physical therapist that he went to, and Tina Fey also went to that physical therapist. One day, he went and said, "Hey, my son really wants to be a comedy writer. Do you think Tina Fey would meet with him?" Fast forward a few weeks, I'm having a lunch meeting as a nine- or ten-year-old with Tina Fey. I had a list of questions that I’m sure my parents helped me develop. She spent an hour—hour plus—with me over lunch, a nine- or ten-year-old, answering these questions about being a comedy writer. This was when she was the head writer for SNL. Apparently, I was really into Jimmy Fallon at the time and kept asking about Jimmy Fallon. She wrote me a note after our time together, and she basically said, "I hope to become the next Jimmy Fallon." That was a huge part of my aspirations and never really left me. So catch us up. Tell us sort of where you are now, what you're up to, what keeps you busy, what are you working on? Yeah. So, interestingly, my first real thing I did in my life after college—and while I was in college—was in comedy. Somewhat not directly as a comedy writer, but I spent seven years building this organization called the Armed Services Arts Partnership, or ASAP, which is now the largest community arts organization in the country for veterans and military families. That started with a stand-up comedy class for veterans because I wanted to do—comedy was kind of like how I connected with people; it's how I coped. And I also wanted to do something at the intersection of humor and comedy and service, and was living in Southeast Virginia, which is a big military community. So I was like, let's do a stand-up comedy class for veterans. I spent my formative years building that organization. There's a lot that came from that, but I'd say the biggest thing was having this experience of going from a 20-year-old to a 27-year-old and becoming the face of this large military arts organization—while not being a veteran and not being an artist. It was kind of bizarre that my identity and purpose were tied to something that I was not. Then I kind of had this set of realizations—while I was there, but then after—that the thing underneath the thing for me was not just the art or comedy. It wasn't veterans or the military necessarily. It was: how do we connect, or how do we reconnect people to the communities, commitments, and connections that make our lives worth living? Following that thread in grad school, I did a fellowship at Harvard. While I was there, I was doing a bunch of academic research on the intersection of civic life and social connection and class. I was also doing my own kind of spiritual exploration through the Divinity School there and through my own writing and reading—people like Rabbi Heschel and Thomas Merton. I’ve really just been following those threads since. So now, I guess my life is focused on those things, both in theory and practice. I have a newsletter called Connected Tissue, which is on the communities, commitments, and connections that make our lives worth living—that bind us together. I’m doing policy work around the role of government in strengthening connection in American communities. I published a policy framework on that last year and continue to work with leaders at the federal, state, and local level along those lines. I published research on the role of civic life, social connection, and class—creating one report last year called Disconnected that got quite a bit of attention. Where I'm kind of going now is doing more network-based organizing around how we realize our generational project of renewing civic life and our relationships. What is the role of building new forms of networks that are centering people who are rooted in place, who are drawing on principles of participation, who are centering relationships as ends in and of themselves, and who are really thinking of this work as not a one-, three-, or five-year problem to be solved—but like a real generational project. How do you talk about the problem—or the “how did we get here”? Do you know what I mean? I feel like, what has changed? What happened in the past 25 or 35, or whatever timescale, that we've ended up needing to do all this work so intentionally, as if starting over? That's been my experience. So how do you think about it? Well, there's like a Russian nesting doll of timescales, right? You can look at this on various timescales. The most immediate, I think, is maybe starting with the last 20 years, where there was this sense that the internet and technology would bring us closer together. Maybe that would be the thing that would replace and rebuild community—that Robert Putnam wrote about in his work on Bowling Alone and the decline of community. I think we've come to the end of that narrative. Now, there's this real sense that the business models and incentive structures of our tech and media ecosystem have pulled us more inward—less in community with people. Because ultimately, the local community group is competing with your social media apps, your streaming services, all of these things—for your leisure time, just as television was doing before. So that's the more immediate timescale story—a kind of leisure time competition and capture of our attention. Then you can zoom out to the next nesting doll, which would be the more Robert Putnam story around the decline of community. You had these great civic institutions that were cross-class, spread across the United States, and quite accessible. They boomed through the mid-20th century and then started experiencing steep declines. You see significant drop-offs in participation, membership, and connection—through to when he wrote Bowling Alone in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There are lots of culprits in that story. One is the role of television. Television makes it really easy to get a synthetic experience of connection and entertainment, so you don't need to leave the home. That's a strong culprit. It’s also changing labor market dynamics. A lot of those groups were supported by women who were working for free. Then women entered the workforce and could no longer provide that free support—which is understandable. It’s also, frankly, a story of organizational calcification—organizations that emerged to meet a need but were no longer keeping up with the times. For example, when veterans came home from the post-9/11 wars, they weren't going to the American Legion or the VFW nearly as much. They were forming their own new institutions because those past institutions weren’t meeting that need for purpose, community, or translatable skills. They were more active in orientation—not just sitting around the bar. That’s the 60-year story—the decline of community. But then there's the 150-year story, which is the story of industrialization itself. The 150- to 200-year period we’re living in right now is quite unique in human history. Historically, we were hunter-gatherers. Then we were living village and agrarian lives, where the scale of the human experience was much smaller. We were more rooted in place, more connected across time. Then industrialization happened. Men moved into cities, became displaced from organic networks of relationships, connections, memberships. That brought a complete change in our way of life. Durkheim writes about suicide in that period—the sense of alienation and disconnection that happened as we became uprooted. Much of what Putnam talks about—the birth of civic life in the late 1800s through mid-1900s—was trying to replicate the lost village and agrarian life as people entered cities. That’s when the YMCA was built. You had all these disconnected men going to brothels and abusing alcohol, and people said, “We need a more pro-social place for men.” The YMCA movement began. That’s when you start to see the Rotaries come about. Not to mention settlement houses and things like that. That, in and of itself, was a simulacrum of something that was missing. So it's worth thinking about how much of a generational project this is, how much there is to learn and pull from the past that we’ve forgotten—and how much we need to imagine anew. That was more than you probably thought you were going to get bargained for. Yeah, it was great. I loved how you picked up the timescale part of the argument. It puts it in amazing context and relief. You mentioned Robert Putnam and Bowling Alone, which is one of those books I think a lot of people— I can confess it’s one of those books I own and can nod knowingly about but haven’t actually read. You know what I mean? It's like 600 pages of charts. You're like, yeah, I get the point. But I think you had a post where you said sort of “Beyond Bob”—that he’s sort of monopolized our imagination of the problem. You introduced me to— is it Theda? Theda Skocpol? Skocpol. Theda Skocpol, yeah. And I felt like her diagnosis of the situation was something I really identified with and connected with. It seemed to speak to what I experienced here in my town of Hudson, which had maybe a different kind of culprit. How would you talk about her culprit? Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up. I wrote this article about thinking beyond Bob Putnam, and it was much less about Bob himself and more about our inability to expand beyond Bob as our primary reference point. I think he’s potentially one of the top three most prolific and influential social scientists of the last 50 years. So it’s not a critique of Bob as much as a critique of our inability to expand our horizons and the stories we’re telling—because Bob is telling one story, and there are actually a multitude of stories. One of those stories is by a contemporary of Bob—actually, they’re close friends—Theda Skocpol, also a professor at Harvard. She's likewise prolific and has written a bunch, but the particular relevant line of research is from her book Diminished Democracy, which is about how we’ve shifted from participatory membership to top-down management in civic life. And what that’s done to our experience of being members, neighbors, and citizens within community. She makes the case that over the same time period that Putnam is talking about civic life declining, civic life was also transforming. The federated, locally rooted membership networks started to be displaced by top-down, managerial, more “grass-tops” advocacy organizations. What that did was change the relationship between three things: membership, governance, and revenue. In the old organizations, members were the source of both revenue and governance. They gave the money, and from that, they made decisions about how it was spent. As things shifted, outside funders—big philanthropy—became the source of money. So now, when you're running an organization, you're answering to where the money comes from. That changes civic life. Instead of being treated as active members who shape the experience—who practice everyday democracy in a very Tocquevillian sense—you become another consumer or client to be delivered a set of services, or to be used instrumentally toward some kind of mobilization endgame. She argues that this has significantly shaped how we experience democracy. Not to mention, the grass-tops groups became much more upper-middle class in orientation. We actually lost the genuine cross-class membership that defined civic life—particularly from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s—where it really was a cross-class experience to be a member of the Rotary, the YMCA, and things like that. That aligns with the research we published last year, which was about the growing class divide in civic life. We found that people with college degrees are three to four times more likely to be members of not only community groups, but also religious groups, unions, and other civic forms of participation. They’re also more likely to access what is now a commercialized and privatized version of community—like SoulCycle, CrossFit, or Equinox, which cost $200 a month, or improv classes that cost $500. We are really seeing what Theda was writing about in the late ’90s and early 2000s just accelerate even further with growing class divides in civic life. Maybe this is an opportunity to talk about what you're up to and the work that you're doing, and how you see us tackling this generational problem and civic renewal. I feel like this is at the heart—this is what attracted me to your work. So yeah, at Connected Tissue, what's the vision moving forward? What do we do? Yeah. There are so many ways to tackle this question. I think the first thing is just actually being able to say—to imagine what's possible. What could things be like 100 years from now? What does it look, feel, smell like to be in a community where you're deeply known, where you're actively participating, where you know your neighbors, where when you're falling on a time of need, you can be supported, where you feel like you have the agency and the trust to shape the direction and the future of your community? How do we imagine what that possibility is? Then I think, what are the first few steps you take? Because there's no—part of the problem here is we think that there's a strategic plan. We think these things can be measured in this corporate, managerial way. And that's just not how this stuff works. It's much more improvisational and emergent. If anything, those things are part of the problem because we apply the principles of the machine and these managerial approaches to life and community, which is much more alive, much more organic, much more like an ecosystem than a machine. So the way I think about it, there are really three— and even this is creating a separation that shouldn't be a separation, but just for the sake of understanding where we can begin—three elements, or three paths, that we can really go down to start to shift civic life and change our experience of relationships and communities. In no particular order: One is cultural. We’re in a moment of hyper-individualism and self-orientation. What does it look like to shift this back into a more communitarian or solidaristic type of culture? And what are the avenues for exercising cultural change? In my opinion, one of the most important things we can be doing is relocalizing our fragmented media environment. If you think of the trajectory of media in this country, we went from locally rooted culture—oral and written traditions—to mass culture through radio and television. Now we're in fragmented culture, where I don't have a shared reality with many people, but I do know everyone who's interested in civic life, or everyone who's interested in lifestyle trends, or whatever. Fragmented culture allows voices and interests that weren't part of the conversation in mass or local culture to have access. Where it could have real potential is using the new forms of media to rebuild localized media ecosystems that are more participatory and community-driven—not just local news telling us what’s best, but incorporating the voices that have been left out. To me, that's a really interesting potential—making people feel connected to the local culture of their place through the media channels and instruments we have today. This is even an example—you could do a Hudson Today podcast that gets at that. The second piece is probably equally important, if not more important, enabling the local cultivators of civic life. That means promoting and supporting the people who do the work that makes civic life work—allowing them to do more of it, and creating more people who feel like that’s part of their purpose and meaning in life. It’s also about creating permission structures to experiment with new things and to share those experiments. “This worked here in Hudson, let’s try it in Charlottesville—how do we adapt that?” And it's about building networks that aren’t mediated by philanthropy, government, corporations, or nonprofits—networks of people rooted in place who are strengthening civic and communal life locally, but also connected across place. They have the ability to shape their own communities and these networks—in the way Theda Skocpol talked about—where they’re genuine members, actually driving governance decisions, actually figuring out revenue sources to sustain the work so they're not reliant on outside actors. It's about regenerating local activity and organizing to promote it. The third is really structural change. Thinking about shifting institutions, government, and policy. There’s a lot to be done there. My friend Pete Davis is more fluent on this than I am. He has ideas about building communitarian, community-oriented fields in every institution—reimagining those institutions to be in service of connection and community, rather than just their current purpose. The policy framework I published is one example. I worked with federal, state, but especially local policymakers to ask: “How do you shift your attention?” For $10,000, you can give away 100 micro-grants for neighbors to gather with neighbors. A block party, a dinner series—whatever it is—that gathering can have positive effects for civic life. It’s affordable, but it’s a shift in attention that can transform the local experience. These institutions—just like the ones Putnam was talking about in the 1960s—are going through the same process of calcification and rigidity. They need to die, in some cases, and be reborn to serve our shared lives together. That is very much a generational project. And it doesn’t come easily, because there are lots of existing interests keeping institutions the way they are—whether it's the over-professionalization of nonprofits, or the risk mitigation mindset of local governments. These are major shifts. But those are your three pillars to start with. I think the last thing I'll say—because this is a very long response—but the last thing I'll say is, it's worth thinking through what are the principles that will underpin this moment. Because if we can ground onto principles that hold us together, the practices, in some ways, should flow from those principles and should be adapted and responsive to local context, because every place is going to be different. The principles that I've kind of started to land on—I alluded to it, but I'll just spell it out a little bit more. First is centering the role of proximity and place. What's important is place-based work in particular places, with particular leaders who are embedded in those places. Thinking of scale not as something that happens top-down in a corporate style, but about locally rooted people who are connected across place. That's in opposition to the kinds of abstractions we see—particularly in the nonprofit and government world, but also from this leap of scale that happened from venture capital and private equity and corporate world into civic world—where it's about ownership and owning as much as possible across place. That’s what we’re pushing back against. The second thing is participation and participatory practices. It’s not treating residents as customers, consumers, or clients to be delivered a set of services. It's not that technocratic approach. It's actually inviting residents and neighbors to participate at every phase of the process. I know you’ve talked a little about citizens’ assemblies; I know you’re interested in this. But it’s everything—from the beginning to the end—should be participatory, including governance, including decision-making. The third piece, I think, is really important and could be lost: emphasizing relational approaches and relationships as ends in and of themselves. I’m not talking to you because I want to get my voice out there through a podcast. Our relationship started from mutual appreciation, and things can flow from that. But that has to be translated into all elements of civic life. Right now, we're so caught in this transactionalization and instrumentalization of things, where everything becomes “in order to.” To really recover relationships, it’s a shift toward the sense that relationships are ends in and of themselves. Then the last piece—you could call it durability, you could call it generational work—is what I was saying: you need to be thinking about this in much larger timescales. Because if we're not thinking about it that way, we're going to be disappointed. This stuff isn’t going to change overnight. This stuff is not going to have measurable outcomes in a short period of time. So thinking about this in terms of that generational context is quite important. No, it’s wonderful. What do you love about the work that you’re doing? I mean, clearly, in listening to you tell the story, this sort of came out of you and it comes from a deep place. What do you love about the work, and where’s the joy in it for you? Yeah. I’ll say this because I think it’s worth naming: I think people who feel a good sense of belonging and feel very much at home are not often the people who are doing this work. I think you're often doing it because you’ve had bad experiences with groups, or discomfort with groups, and you’re curious about why and want to understand it. I very much fit into that. My friends make fun of me that I’ve left more group chats than anyone they know. So I very much fit into that category. What brings me joy—I think there’s such a moment of potential right now. There are so many cool experiments happening in communities across the United States. Every day I learn about a new one. I see people doing work that is very countercultural, which is to say, “I’m going to come up with creative ways to bring people together around a shared purpose in a particular place.” So much of that is happening right now. That’s extraordinarily joyful—meeting those people, seeing this moment of tense experimentation and creativity. I think it’s happening because we’re in this in-between story. We’re at the end of the post–World War II, particularly neoliberal, narrative, and the new story hasn’t been written yet. It’s a fraught moment—there could be very scary narratives that fill that void—but it’s also a moment of intense possibility. A lot of people are waking up to that. Being in relationship with those people, learning from them, and sharing what they’re doing is really exciting. There’s also a cultural shift. I've been saying this: a recovery of the idea that you don’t need permission to do s**t. You can just do stuff. This collective recognition that, “Oh, I don’t need the expert to tell me how. I don’t need the manager to approve it. I can just turn my garage into a bar for my neighbors, and we can hang out there.” That’s really exciting. It’s a big part of recovering a sense of agency—recovering what it means to be an active member of a community. The last thing I’ll say is, there’s a real spirit underpinning this. For some it’s religious; for others, broadly spiritual. But the turn toward saying, “The destinies and fates of the people who live near me are important, and I want to be in solidarity and communion with them”—that’s a spiritual turn. For me, being Jewish, maybe it’s the idea that other humans are made in the image of God. For someone else, it might be an ecological sense that we’re all part of a bigger project. But the injection of spirit into a world that, for me at least, has felt very material and dead in many ways—that’s quite energizing. Yeah, I mean, so much you said I connect with there. In particular, that recovery of agency. My story in Hudson is a very generic sort of—I was just a new dad frustrated about an intersection, you know what I mean? And it's really banal, but somebody in government said to me, “No one will stop you.” I had never been told that before. But it was exactly what I needed to hear because I was operating under the assumption that I'm not somebody that can do something like this. There are other people that do this for a living, and it's all very complicated and way above my pay grade. But it was a giant unlock for me to be told that you can just do these things because you live where you live, and it’s yours to make it into what you want it to be, in a way. Or at least to invite the people around you into imagining—yeah, that you could do something different. And then what? You're—how many years later now—you’re actually saying, “Well, I could run for mayor.” I could do that. Yeah. Yeah. One hundred percent. Yeah, it is, too. Yeah, it's amazing. And I'm curious—two things there, but I have two questions trying to get out at the same time. One, I think, is: how do you know that we're in this moment? Both in terms of: how do you know that it's as bad as it is, or that there's a problem? What's the evidence that you have? Because I think you and I connect, because there's a lot of abstractions even in what you and I are talking about. I'm wondering, on the day-to-day, on-the-ground level, what do you point to to help people see the absence, the gap, the lack? Yeah, it's interesting. It's one of those things where you draw on data to tell a story about the problem. And then, part of the story about what goes forward is saying: we need to rely a little bit less on data. Because data can give us one window into our reality, but it's one of many windows. So I’ll start with the statistical, the data story. Then I’ll say what I think is the experiential story, which hopefully goes beyond the data. What we know from a data perspective is that the story Putnam told about the decline of civic life has just amplified in the 25 years since he wrote it. Religious membership is at an all-time low. Religious participation is at an all-time low—though it seems to be bottoming out. It doesn’t seem to be dropping further, which is interesting. Union membership—particularly for people without college degrees—has declined. Unions were, for working-class people, not only a source of worker protections and stability, but also a community. That has declined, and it’s now become more dominated by people with college degrees. Think about public-sector unions. Community participation—though harder to measure, because community has transformed—has particularly declined among people without college degrees. When we think about the outcomes of all these avenues for community participation, it’s our relationships. What we see is that a quarter of Americans without degrees have no close friends, compared to 10 percent of Americans with degrees. That’s up since 1990. It used to be only 3 percent of Americans without degrees and 2 percent of Americans with degrees had no close friends. So you're seeing an eightfold increase. I don't even think it's loneliness—because loneliness is subjective. This is just being left alone. It’s aloneness. You don’t have anyone to turn to. That translates into social support. Particularly among people without degrees, a good portion—if they lost housing—don’t have someone they can turn to who could put a roof over their head. Many don’t have someone to turn to who could care for their child in a time of need. So this is not just an abstract thing, or what could feel like a squishy thing. It’s the difference between having a roof over your head or not. It’s the difference between having care or not. Then we can look at the data on premature mortality for people without college degrees—particularly men—which has increased significantly. The lifespan for people without college degrees has gone down. Life expectancy has gone down in the last 15 years. Part of that’s the opioid epidemic, part is suicide, part is heart disease and things like that. But people’s lives are being cut short. All of those things, I think, are part of it. Then there's the experiential part. When I’ve shared it, it seems like people relate to it. I think many people feel like there are forces—this is where the agency piece comes in—there are forces outside of your control that are exerting influence on your life, where you feel like you're a pawn in someone else's game. That could be government. Honestly, people on both sides have felt this for a period of time. That could be corporations—our technology, our concentrated tech ecosystem, which is shaping human behavior. It could also be nonprofits and the social sector. Particularly poor people, who are more often dealing with social services, feel like they are being treated as pawns in the social services ecosystem. There’s this experiential feeling. On the other side of that is: we’re designed for connection. Not only connection to other people, but connection to the natural world, and to something transcendent or beyond us. The disembodiedness, disembeddedness, disconnectedness, and alienation of many people’s modern experiences is a signal—a turn toward something else. I’ve observed a real shift toward the mystical. Toward mysticism—not just in my circles, but across the world. There’s this new kind of theism emerging. I think that's in response to the deadness of the world in some ways. You're seeing mass turns to people going out into nature. Hiking has gone through the roof in the last 15 years. Visitation of national parks has gone through the roof. That's a direct response to this disembeddedness and disembodiedness. We can point to the data, but we can also point to: “Huh, something doesn’t feel right.” And that’s okay. Honestly, I think we should be able to try—part of the realization that we don’t need permission to do anything is realizing we can trust our intuition. If something feels off, trust that something feels off. So I don’t know. It’s messy and complicated. But I think it’s all of those things, and much, much more. Yeah, well, I love that you pushed back on my request for data and argued for the validity of intuition. I mean, I’m a qualitative researcher who talks to people face-to-face and is advocating all the time, you know what I mean? For the validity of intuition and imagination and all the messy, squishy human stuff. It’s funny how much of what you're talking about mirrors the corporatization of life, you know what I mean? With quantitative data and measurement as the lingua franca, just edging out any space for creative, imaginative talk or anything. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's just one of—it's not illegitimate. It’s one of many ways of knowing. And I think it’s about recognizing that we need a pluralism of ways of knowing—a multiplicity of ways of knowing. That changes how we show up, the stories we tell, and all of these types of things. I have this sense that life, our place on Earth, the universe—it’s much more ineffable, much more bizarre, much weirder than we can really put into words or fully understand. There’s a kind of hubris in thinking that we can know a lot of these things. Hopefully, as I’m talking, this doesn’t come off as authoritative. My real orientation is curiosity and openness. In Judaism, it’s very much about living into the questions—being driven by inquiry rather than by answers. That’s how I hope to keep showing up. Yeah, it’s beautiful. I really love what you’re doing. I’m excited that you joined me here for this conversation. I have one thought that’s bouncing around, which gets to what you’re talking about. Actually, I’m going to forget the guy’s name—the author who wrote Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. David Van Reybrouck. My butchered summarization is that democratic participation has been winnowed down to voting every four years. The whole landscape of opportunity to behave as a citizen has been minimized to this one act—flipping a switch or checking a box every four years. So it’s no wonder we don’t have any behaviors. We need to develop new ways of interacting with each other and coming together. Yeah. One of the groups I always shout out—they’re a member of one of the networks I’m helping bring together—is called Warm Cookies of the Revolution. They’re in Denver, Colorado, and throughout Colorado. Their motto is: “Vote every day.” It’s exactly that idea. Voting, when it becomes a transaction—and when we’re treated by politicians as instruments—it becomes just a checkbox. Sure, voting is a part of democracy. But it should be one expression of it, not the only expression. It’s about how we all collectively work to vote every day—to make it part of our day-to-day experiences, not just one little thing we do. That’s right. I think he had said that we’ve democratized everything except democracy. Are there other—what other beacons of hope are there? You mentioned Warm Cookies. What are the models out there that you see that are working, that excite you? Any other stories from the network that you’d want to share or call attention to as part of the evidence of the future story? Yeah. There are so many little examples. We’re doing an event at the end of September—talking in September now—where we’re doing a showcase of people who are cultivating civic membership. It’s all these people asking: how do we welcome newcomers? How do we deepen a sense of connection and membership when you're in a place? And even, how do you feel like an alumni of a place after you leave? Some of this is just recovering things we've always done. There are groups around the country. I wrote a piece called “Why Every Town Should Have a Welcome Kit.” Now, there are groups all over the country creating welcome kits for newcomers—making it part of a welcoming process for new neighbors. Because transitioning to a new place is a moment of great peril, but also great possibility. You can reconnect with people, connect to participation, all of that. So let’s actually think about welcoming when people arrive. There’s a ton happening now to deepen that sense of membership. One of the people joining our event has been hosting activities fairs in Philadelphia, where people can meet different clubs—like the activities fairs you’d have in high school or college, but for participating in community as an adult. There are people building directories of local groups and clubs, so you can easily find how to get involved. Boston has an Office of Civic Organizing that gives out $500 block party grants to neighbors across the city—to just host block parties and bring people together. It’s government-funded. They make permitting easier so you don’t have to deal with all the BS. They don’t ask for receipts. They just say, “Send us a picture to prove the block party happened.” That’s a great example of something that’s popular. Why doesn’t every government do that? Every government should be giving out these grants. That’s all really exciting examples of things that are going on. Then there are traditions we forget about that were part of culture in so many places—like this idea of old home days or old home weeks. Throughout the country, every year or every few years, you invite people who’ve left your place to come back and reconnect. It’s like a homecoming. That creates a sense of rootedness. That stuff alone is really quite interesting. I think there’s a ton of experimentation that’s just starting to happen around how we make third places more accessible while also being commercially viable. I just heard of a guy who’s doing phone-free third places. You go to a coffee shop, bar, or gym, and you have to put your phone in a pouch—so you interact with people when you’re there. You’re not just on your phone or computer while you’re in that place. I also just think—you’re starting to see it in the culture. For the first time in the ten years I’ve been working on this, I actually think we are at the start of that generational moment. I think it has the potential to be much more durable. Part of that is because the conditions have gotten so dire technologically. I think the threat of AI is going to challenge what it means to be human, and people are going to lean into more human experiences because of that. We’re at this hinge-point moment. When you start looking around, you start seeing that these seeds of renewal are popping up everywhere. I’m sure you’re seeing that in Hudson. Again, I learn a new thing every day that’s going on, which is really cool. That’s the time that we have. How should people find you? What’s the best way to connect with you? I’m not a big social media guy, but the Connective Tissue newsletter is probably the best way to keep up with what we’re doing. You can contact me directly through that if you want. I’m honestly always interested in not only learning about what people are doing, but as people are thinking about experimenting in their place—being of support for these little local experiments. Sam, thank you so much. Thanks, Peter. 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]

Meg Kinney on Instinct & Emotion

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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