THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Yuliya Grinberg PhD on Human & Machine

Yuliya Grinberg [https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuliya-grinberg/] is a digital anthropologist and qualitative researcher with a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She is currently Research and Insights Manager at Mastercard. Her book, Ethnography of an Interface: Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections [https://www.amazon.com/Ethnography-Interface-Self-Tracking-Quantified-Connections-ebook/dp/B0F6DC4PYX], was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. A note for readers: Yuliya has offered a 20% discount on Ethnography of an Interface for anyone coming from this interview. Use code GRINBER24 at checkout here [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ethnography-of-an-interface/2F0A3EDF02855E14AEDCF64F600A31AA#fndtn-information]. So I know—I think you know this, right? You’ve listened to interviews before. I start them all with this same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. And I borrow it because it’s really big and beautiful. But because it’s big and beautiful, I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. And 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’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is, where do you come from? So thank you for that question. I love this question. First of all, as an anthropologist, I appreciate that this is a question really about context, right? First and foremost, at least how I read it. And then, on some level, I feel like there are so many ways to answer this question. We can really be here all day. It’s a really loaded and big question, which is exciting. So I’ll answer it. And so, in a couple of ways—you know, in a geographic sense, I’m from Russia originally. But I also moved to New York, Queens first, in the early 1990s with my family. So I think that sense of that experience has really shaped my worldview as well. I’ve also lived for many, many years afterwards on Brighton Beach, which is kind of the Russian diaspora community, especially on the East Coast. So that’s shaped me as well. I’m also a product of my experiences, I would say more broadly, kind of zooming out a little bit, right, is immigration has been a really pivotal experience in my life. It has really shaped how I thought, how I think, how I kind of even comport myself, how I relate to others. There’s something about moving to a completely different country with a different cultural code in middle school that upends your reality in the way that it does. And maybe without it, I sometimes think I might not have been as interested in culture as I am now professionally. I do wonder if that experience really kind of set me on a new professional course without me knowing it, even way back then. And as an immigrant kid, kind of taking interest in culture really, for me at that time, has become a little bit of a survival mechanism at first, and now it’s become a professional habit. And so, also, I would say I’m a product of my family. I’m very much my grandmother’s granddaughter, in the sense that she was a very pivotal figure in my life personally, but she was also kind of the ultimate matriarch in our family. So she really played a really kind of key role in how I look at the world as well. Yeah, and professionally, from all over the place—from advertising to anthropology to marketing research. Yeah, out of many different chairs. Oh, that’s interesting. I’m curious that you said middle school. What can you tell—can you tell a story about what that was like for you to sort of move to a whole new country? I was 11. I was turning 11 when I moved. And moved with a lot of, you know, ideas about what a different world and different country would look like. I don’t think any of us were prepared at that time to really imagine immigration or the U.S. kind of really large in our imaginations in Russia when I was growing up, but really without any clarity of what it would look like. My sense of the U.S. was really taken from things like 90210, the show. I quickly learned when I moved to gentrified Bushwick that was not the U.S. of my experience, and just the expectations of struggle. One story I like to tell my kids about what it was like is stepping off the airplane, which was actually a really kind of exciting experience for myself and my twin sister. I have a twin sister. We had never been on an international flight prior to that. We were really excited about that as a trip. I don’t think we really fully comprehended that we were permanently leaving or that we weren’t going to really understand much of anything in that world. I remember stepping off the plane and thinking, wow, JFK is just so noisy. And I realized I didn’t understand a single word. That really was kind of just like a visceral shock, of just that difference. And that’s something you kind of experience with your body. You can’t really intellectualize it. We talked a little bit about it, of course, with our family, but you experience that as a very physical phenomenon. I think I remember that—how it felt in my body to be all of a sudden in this really, really radical new place. And I had to figure out how to orient myself. I had to find my feet in it. And did you say that you didn’t understand what anybody was saying? Is that what you’re describing? Exactly. I didn’t speak any English, aside from maybe introducing myself with my name. What did that feel like? It felt really confusing. I think it was just overstimulating. And I’ve had many experiences like that since because I’ve traveled, I’ve studied abroad, I’ve traveled to different countries, I’m really interested in studying people in different settings. So I’ve found that that kind of physicality that you confront—all your antennas all of a sudden up—the things you take for granted in your everyday world, everything is input. So in some ways, it’s overstimulating. You don’t really have that kind of first-order, second-order hierarchy of what things mean. They all mean everything at the same time. Equal importance. It’s funny. I was an adult. I remember I traveled to Egypt and I was in Cairo. I remember being in Cairo on a street corner. And I had the realization that I had no idea what anybody was saying. Yeah, I loved it. I think it felt very quiet all of a sudden. Very quiet, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I spent a lot of that first year in my head, observing. It’s also a technique, I guess, in some ways—practicing for the future—listening, observing, comparing. I never really experienced myself as an outsider prior to that experience, and that was an interesting change of perspective. Do you have a recollection of kind of what you wanted to be like when you grew up? I was thinking about this question because I noticed, yes, that others—and I really reflected—I was not a kid really that had a strong sense of “I really want to be X, Y, Z.” I think I had a sense of what I should become. Maybe my parents’ perspective, my grandmother’s perspective. Maybe I should be a lawyer. Maybe I should be a doctor. Those were not things that appealed. Fortunately, I figured that out pretty early. That wasn’t going to be my set of expertise. I didn’t spend too much time pursuing that path. But I didn’t really have a really clear idea of what I wanted to be. But I did know a few things. I knew the kinds of things I cared for, or the kinds of information I craved. For instance, I grew up in a very musical and artistic family. My uncle is a conductor in an orchestra. My mom was a music teacher in Russia. All my grandparents were in music theory or music school in one way or another. So music was a big part of my early childhood—going to classical concerts, especially visiting museums. That was really important. But I will say personally, I never connected to aesthetics or sound on its own. It never really clicked for me why that was important or why that was valuable. Maybe it was because I didn’t have the same talent. What I always wanted to know was about the people who made that music—what world did they live in. If we visited a museum, I was always curious about the narration, about the context in which some of that was made. Those were the kinds of things that always appealed to me, I remember. So it was kind of—I read a lot of biographies as a kid, I think, like early on. I didn’t know exactly why, but I really wanted to know kind of the behind-the-scenes world behind the public face, like public persona, or just the sound, like just aesthetic quality. So I think that that’s something that I felt early on. And then the second thing I would say is I really didn’t want to settle on anything. It was so hard for me to choose a major or to, you know, be very narrowly focused on one particular career, and explain that kind of zigzag professional life I’ve had as well. You know, my happy place was always like doing several things at the same time. So in school, I majored in business, but I also wanted to study art history, and I also wanted to study, you know, languages, and social sciences were really interesting. Professionally, I’ve also kind of done so many different things. And I used to think of it as being indecisive. But, you know, as I’ve become an academic, I’ve learned a better word: interdisciplinary. So I think that interdisciplinarity was also always kind of an instinct. It felt insufficient to me to just narrowly focus. Like, I remember studying marketing, and I just couldn’t focus on it as its own thing. It felt really myopic. So I always wanted to kind of have an almost, like, contrasting view from a different discipline. And yeah, so those are the two things I think that really—I wanted to do as a young person. And I think those are the kinds of instincts that, you know, in my professional life. You know, I’ve switched from brand strategy to academia, and now I’m more formally in private sector research. So I think that’s always been more interesting to me. Yeah, yeah. So to catch us up, where are you now, and what are you doing for work? Yeah, so now I am doing—I’m a manager of research and insights at MasterCard. I’ve been here for a little over a year, which is exciting. And in this role, you know, I think I get to do a little bit of the kinds of things I’ve described. I work with a lot of different teams internally, many product teams, and some of the more specific research questions they might have, and helping them kind of conceptualize research and find the right partners for that work. I’m also doing a lot of thought leadership more broadly for the organization on various topics. For instance, AI—how do people feel about AI right now—is one piece of work we’re doing. So, you know, prior to that, I was also doing kind of UX research and private sector research. And I started off—this maybe kind of loops back to where I started. I started off in advertising as a brand strategist. But that took me into kind of a more academic direction. I was fortunate enough to work with anthropologists on staff at the time when I was coming up. And I really took—it really seemed like a really fantastic perspective. You know, I was a little bit tired of sitting in on focus groups and reading the same syndicated research. I kind of wanted—like, I really was really kind of attracted to the anthropological perspective. So that took me to pursue anthropology as a field of study. And I earned my PhD. And since then, I’ve done a lot of different research on the academic side, as well as on the private sector side. Yeah. What was your—what was the encounter that you had with anthropology that inspired you? So, you know, I remember very clearly, I was fortunate to work with Tim Malafite. I don’t know if you know him. Yeah. I know the name. Yeah, he’s now at Fordham. He teaches kind of at the intersection of business and anthropology at Fordham. But at that time, he was working at BBDO as an onsite anthropologist. And we were working together. He was doing ethnographic work for Campbell’s, which was a brand that I was on. And really trying to understand how people—you know, Campbell’s is a brand that was always interested in cooking, but promoted at the marketing level often pitched as a quick and easy solution to an irritating problem, which is cooking, especially for busy parents. And at the time, the work we did with Tim kind of zoomed out and encouraged the company to think about how people think of cooking more positively. You know, if we do think of cooking in terms of speed and convenience, how do we also talk about it in the same language that people talk about it? So we—I remember, you know, of course, as a strategist, I was part of different types of research initiatives. But on the ethnographic front, we went to visit people in their homes and spent some time cooking meals with them, seeing how they put meals together, shopping with them for some of those meals, and hearing them talk about what role cooking played in their families and their everyday life. How they related to that experience, where they wanted to kind of indulge and take more time, where they wanted to save time, and just that language—I thought it was really amazing to have a broader context. And I thought, I want to do that more, make that a more permanent picture of my work. So I took that leap, eventually. Yeah. You’ve been at MasterCard for about a year. And you talked about thought leadership. And I guess my question is, what is the story you tell about anthropology, and how does anthropology work? What’s the value of being an anthropologist in an organization like MasterCard that’s trying to make decisions? You know, and I think it’s an ongoing conversation. I feel like, you know, I’m not the only one facing this challenge. But of course, you know, anthropology—qualitative research more generally—I think is always up against quantitative methods. Now, more recently, AI methods. And, you know, there’s always a kind of push and pull. You know, I like to think of it as, you know, sometimes I think there’s been a lot of reflection in the industry. What anthropologists ask ourselves is, what do we have to offer to the business world? It used to be kind of an obvious answer. We offer context. We offer the perspective of a human being, right? We offer an opportunity to have a conversation, kind of report on that encounter, as a complement to kind of more narrow, maybe numbers-driven analysis. I think AI, in some ways, has really made that distinction a little fuzzier at times, because a lot of AI instruments appear to do the very same thing, but at scale, right? So the question might be, who needs an anthropologist, really? I think that’s a question that I ask myself. How do we articulate the value of what we have to offer? And, you know, I always go back to what anthropology—or maybe qualitative disciplines more generally—offer. On some level, I feel like what I’m about to say is often seen as a kind of shortcoming of qualitative research, but I see that as a kind of benefit, which is that it’s subjective in nature, by definition. There’s no going around it, right? Of course, not only is it an exercise that’s much smaller in scale—you speak to five people, 25 if you’re lucky, right? It’s a small number of people—and the researcher and that person’s interpretation of that encounter is always front and center. That’s what’s often leveled as a kind of critique: why should we trust this research? It’s only a matter of that one person’s opinion, right? Or maybe the opinion of these 25 people, or five people, what have you. But I think that’s the value—that the subjective nature of this research is so visible in qualitative methods, right? In quantitative methods, it also exists. Especially in AI, it exists for sure. We just don’t always ask or see it in the same way. And I would say it’s this reminder, right, of the subjective nature of all of our work. We need to keep it front and center, whether we’re doing qualitative work with small-scale groups, or quantitative work, and now AI work, right? I don’t like to use necessarily the word bias, because it makes it sound like we can fix the problem. As soon as we isolate the issue, we can remove it. There’s always a subjective aspect to this analysis. Whose information are we accessing? How was it coded? How was the process? Who did that kind of analysis? Those are always issues we need to be asking. And I think anthropologists and researchers can continue to bring that kind of questioning spirit. You know, I hope I can bring that to MasterCard as well. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you? That’s a good question. You know, I’ve sat, as I said, on many different chairs, right? And I’ve found joy in different aspects of it. And then yet I returned to the private sector. Prior to only a couple of years ago, I spent primarily my time teaching. I was a professor of marketing and of anthropology at a local liberal arts university. And I really thought that was going to be—after I finished my PhD—the full-time trajectory of my career. Of course, I did ongoing research. I took on some consulting work, but I primarily worked as an academic for a number of years. And as exciting as I found that work, I really realized that what I love to do is the research. You know, as an academic, completing my program—that was the exciting part of my work. I got to really dig deep into a topic. I’ve published a book, which I’m really proud of, called Ethnography of an Interface. And, you know, even as I transitioned out of my advertising career into this period of academic work, it was really with the purpose of diving very deeply into a topic and thinking about how can I really understand that thoroughly? You know, the business world doesn’t always allow us that level of thoroughness. And as a teacher, I was excited to share these perspectives with students, but I found I really missed being an active participant in the output. I find it exciting. I find it interesting to be kind of at the forefront of what people are thinking about, how people are thinking about those things—not just on the consumer side, but also on the business side, right? How is the business world evolving? So I wanted to return, yeah, return to my roots a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. As somebody who, like—I came up, you know, my first job was at, like, a consultancy. Everything I learned about any of this stuff happened in a company doing work in the private sector, as you say. And then I kind of sort of educated myself about all this other stuff. And so I always have a little bit of imposter syndrome talking to academically trained anthropologists. But I’m wondering, what’s your sense of the difference? What’s it like being—what’s your experience of the difference between being an anthropologist in academia versus being in the private sector and working with corporate clients? You know, first of all, just a comment about being an imposter: don’t worry, we all feel like imposters all the time. Thank you. You know, the more I learn, the more I realize how much there really is to learn. So it’s always this exercise of never knowing enough. So I guess there’s the joy of constantly learning as well. The difference I see between the academic world and the private sector work most immediately—and I hate to use this word, it’s so cliché in some ways—is impact. And I don’t necessarily just mean, you know, the business KPIs or something like that, but just that you can see your work reflected, and either taken up or not, in very immediate ways, in ways that academia doesn’t. You know, the time scale is so protracted, and the impact sometimes is limited. Of course, there’s the impact of the classroom, but it’s a different kind of conversation. And I think you don’t necessarily always get to follow the impact in the same way as you do in your professional life. I think being closer to the proximity between the work I’m doing and its effect—or lack thereof sometimes—on the company I’m working with is more immediate. I find that rewarding. It’s almost a little bit more—I wouldn’t say instant gratification—but at least there is that kind of, yeah, there’s more visibility in that sense for me, you know, how what I’m doing shapes an organization’s activities. You mentioned that you, in response to the question about what you love, you talked about the doing. So I guess I want to follow up—what do you love about the research? What do you love about the doing? Yeah, such a good question. You know, thank you actually for giving me the opportunity to think about it. Sometimes we just do, do, do, and not always take the time to reflect. I like learning new things all the time. I find that super exciting. You know, in some ways, the speed with which business moves requires you to learn at a faster clip than maybe academia. Maybe not necessarily the same level of depth, but definitely a bigger breadth in a shorter amount of time. And I find that exciting. I think that’s really stimulating and energizing, and it makes me feel more connected somehow to the things that are going on around me. I did have a period of time where I spent a number of years teaching, and you start to feel kind of disconnected a little bit. You experience the work through the eyes of your students, but otherwise feel a little bit on the outside. So I find it exciting to have a little bit of a closer seat. And, you know, in a very real sense, more resources to do that research. Academia can make it challenging to do the research. A lot of the onus is always on the researcher to find ways not just to connect the threads, but to execute that work. And the private sector makes it much more accessible. So there’s more of it, and I love that. And I want to talk about the book because I feel like—yeah—so talk, tell us a little bit about the book that you did. Yeah. So let me show you right here. My third baby—I have two babies—my third one, which took almost as long as my actual children to bring into the world. So the book—when I was conceptualizing the book, I kind of started broad. I was trying to get a sense, as I kind of talked about landing in JFK and finding yourself amidst the noise and all of a sudden not really being able to tell what’s what—what’s important, what’s not important, what’s familiar, what’s not familiar. I think when I started doing my research initially, it was a time in the early 2010s when there was a lot of intense conversation about data. The same way we talk about AI in some ways—that was kind of the hype cycle—datafication of everything, especially personal data. So for me, the key questions were: what does that mean for how we think about ourselves as people? What does that mean for being human? There was a lot of enthusiasm around what companies could achieve with personal data, both in the business sense, but also how much they could help people learn about themselves. There was this kind of euphoria about a future where we’ll know everything there is to know about everything, including ourselves. We’ll no longer, in some ways, be mysterious to ourselves with the help of this new technology. And it was just coming up. So I think in the beginning, it was that moment of a lot of stimuli, again—kind of taking that in and trying to find where can I stand? Where do I find my feet in this? Really trying to get a grasp of what’s happening academically with regard to this dialogue, what’s happening in the popular discourse around this type of conversation. And what I found was, obviously, on the business side, lots of hype, lots of enthusiasm, lots of really breathless predictions—similar things we’re seeing about AI right now. On the academic side, a lot of fear and a lot of judgment around the kind of companies that produce this data, their intentions, and also a kind of sense that the researcher knows best. There was a sense that there’s something fundamental that technologists don’t understand about the way the data functions or how it impacts people, and it’s kind of the work of the researcher to reveal that, right, or to make that clear. And I really respect a lot of this academic discourse. I think there’s a lot of important work that’s come out of thinking about the impact on our privacy, thinking about the role social media plays in how we consider ourselves as people. A lot of these academic conversations have come to the fore now. We talk about it more openly in general ways. So I was thinking, where do I situate myself as an academic, as a researcher, in this discourse? There’s so much of it. And I found that I was really interested in this kind of behind-the-scenes again. As I was saying earlier, I wanted to understand, as a child, the life of the artist behind the music or behind the work. I really wanted to understand the creators of these tools, and how their lives—their professional, perhaps, in many ways, expectations and necessities—shape what we encounter as consumers. So less how we process this information as consumers of data, but how this data comes to be in the form that it does. And what are their questions and concerns and issues and ambitions? How do they all shape what we can then, in a sense, see about ourselves using this data—or what we don’t see? So kind of this broader social and political context of the companies that make these tools—that’s kind of the thrust of this book. Yeah. The title is amazing, right? Ethnography of an Interface. And so can you tell us a little bit about the research that you did? And I feel like there must be so much—I’m curious about the degree to which that research feels like it’s echoing now in how AI is coming into being and the discourse around it. Yeah, definitely. Very much so. I think that’s, again, such a good question. So the interface in this book, and the title especially, is kind of—obviously—a play on words. On the one hand, the interface is how we, you know, computer interfaces—how we interact with really complex and obscure computer functions, right? That’s a computer term. And how we often talk about interfaces as this technology that made it possible for non-specialists to interact with computer programs that otherwise would have been inaccessible. You don’t have to write in code. You don’t have to study obscure programming languages. We can just recognize icons and click on buttons, and that makes that world accessible to us. So in some ways, it’s a reference to that kind of interface. And in my work, I was thinking about how I would access complex corporate dynamics. Through which interface would I be able to mediate that interaction? So I started to follow along and take part in this group called the Quantified Self, which was kind of up and coming again during the time that I was doing research. As both language, as an expression, Quantified Self was on the rise, but it also was an actual group of people—ostensibly people who were really enthusiastic about personal data and using all kinds of gadgets, sometimes digital methods, sometimes not, in thinking about themselves. But in my experience, I also found that it attracted a lot of technologists, tech makers, startup founders, for different reasons. So that encounter made it possible for me to access some of the business priorities and challenges. That exposure to people who were part of that group became my interface, right? And then I also use it in a different sense, academically—or maybe more practically. We think about the interface as a technology that facilitates access, but we don’t often think about it as a technology that inhibits access. For instance, there are certain things the interface allows us to see, and then there are certain things that the interface does not allow us to see. We don’t see how this data is cleaned on the back end. We don’t see the work processes or the decisions that go into the aesthetics that we are served with online. We don’t see a lot of those decisions. We don’t see the people who are necessarily involved in that. So in that sense, I also wanted to think about using Quantified Self as a kind of entry point, to a certain degree, into some of the discussion—some of the things that we don’t see. In the same way that the Quantified Self, as a group or more broadly, technologies present a kind of public face, what’s the context and what are the decisions in the background, and also the challenges? What have you learned about the Quantified Self community, or the motivations? What was driving that for the people who were participating? I think it’s multiple, right? And I think that’s one of the reasons it really became part of a cultural conversation for a period of time. I think a lot of people wrote and commented quite eloquently in different ways, and it brought people together for a variety of reasons. For instance, patient advocates, or folks who found themselves kind of on the margins of healthcare practices or experiences, really wanted to kind of turn to themselves and to their own experiences to understand, record, and report some of the things that are going on in response to maybe some of the challenges they were experiencing with healthcare, with the healthcare space. I found, especially being involved with the group on the East Coast primarily, as I said, it attracted a lot of people who were interested in understanding—it was constituted as a kind of—I’m thinking about how to explain it. I think the popular idea of Quantified Self as a community that attracted a lot of data enthusiasts didn’t make it easy to see that it also actually attracted a lot of people who were interested in observing that kind of community. So a lot of participants were, in fact, in some ways, saw themselves as kind of participant observers, as kind of anthropologists attending these kinds of meetings—just by, you know, consumer needs or trying to understand people’s relationship to technology. While all the while, it actually attracted a lot of people who were creating that technology and producing that discourse in a way that was kind of a consumer group in some ways that was created from within the industry. That then, you know, different kind of, let’s say, industry mechanisms also allowed people to separate themselves and say, hey, it’s not that we’re creating this community by participating in it, by presenting on the part of it, by talking quite a bit about it. It allowed people to kind of point to it as though it’s already an existing consumer segment on the rise, kind of as an early sign. You know, in those days it was seen sometimes as an early sign that there’s this bigger consumer response. But it was really kind of created in some ways—I hate to say manufactured—but in some ways, you know, developed by the very entrepreneurs, startup developers, technologists who wanted to see that enthusiasm out in the world. So it was a kind of co-creation. Yeah. And I mean, it’s so fascinating, sort of like dizzying, to hear you just describing all the different forces at work. And I remember that time, of course, and to the degree that it’s sort of just speculative, right? I mean, people wanted stories about the power of big data, right? We were sort of—that was the bubble that we were in—we believe in data’s the new oil, right? So everybody’s going to be obsessed with any way people are doing things with data. Exactly. And it was exciting or, you know, useful to have a community to point to: hey, look, it exists out there. And that became part of a narrative, right? You can tell to your investors and the boardroom, to your colleagues. In some ways, it kind of became a mechanism that, in some small way, really moved the industry forward. And so now, I mean, you know, what is that—was 2010? You said you were doing your research 2010s to 20, like mid-20. So it’s 15 years later now. It’s funny, I’m thinking of that guy, Brian Johnson—is that his name? That guy? Like, is he the sort of the apex of the guy who’s trying to live forever? Like, is that his name, Brian? Do you know who I’m talking about? The guy who’s like a health longevity? Yeah, like, there are lots of—you know—there’s this kind of Quantified Self biohackers. There are all kinds of life hackers. I think there are different communities that were kind of adjacent to each other and sometimes spoke past each other, sometimes spoke to each other. A lot of it is obviously shaped by kind of this broader Silicon Valley culture. I think it’s super interesting, the shift between computer programmers in the 80s and 90s as the most slovenly, you know, the least focused on their self roles, you know, well-being, to now the most focused, the most optimized. So, you know, that may be a topic for a completely different— That’s, I think that’s a lovely observation. Yeah. What do you make of that? Yeah, I would have to think about it, you know, why that happened. Exactly. Right. Like, I think, in some ways, the narrative of data shaped this discourse. First of all, it legitimized programming as not just as a peripheral occupation of really obscure eccentrics, but as a kind of the central driving force of our economy, right? So it became—you kind of re-packaged that person then, right, as the leader. And in some ways, probably people at the leading edge of this took that on very seriously, right? They took on an almost entirely different identity and brand. Part of it—and, you know, that’s something I do reflect on in the book a little bit—is the discourse of data itself. You know, there’s that language—you talked about data as oil—but there are so many metaphors, especially in those early days, around data. And, you know, the quantity of the metaphors alone is dizzying. And in some ways, it’s paradoxical, because the language at the time was, we can connect all these data streams, but the language that was used to describe it was sometimes so contrasting, it made it difficult to imagine how does data as gas and data as oil and data as water, right, fit together—on the metaphorical, linguistic level. But the language of data as this liquid metaphor was always really interesting to me. And there is a little bit of a kind of purifying aspect to it, right? Like water, almost in a religious sense, it has a purifying quality. And when you think about data in this liquid sense—data as water, as oceans, as lakes—again, kind of rhetorically, it has this cleansing quality. If you apply regimes of data, you know, cleansing to yourself, you yourself become purified of bad habits, right, bad practices, become a cleaner individual. So there is that—maybe, you know, in some ways, that also shapes our idea of who the entrepreneurs, the tech entrepreneurs, are right now: the most cleansed by data. Yeah, yeah. It’s amazing. It’s amazing. I love the thought. Yeah. So what is it—so it’s about this intersection of man and machine, broadly speaking, if we like that, and now we’re in a different, maybe, phase or stage of the same discourse, right, about man and machine. What do you, based on the time you’ve spent, what do you see now in terms of AI? And I don’t know—what are the kind of conversations that you’re having within MasterCard about what does this mean for how do we listen to people? Do we use synthetic research? Yeah, you know, I would say I would speak first as kind of as an individual outside of my connections, or, you know, corporate connections—just as an observer, as an academic—and how I connect that a little bit to my work. You know, so as I said, two kind of things that were really important to me in my research were: how do people—what are the decisions that go into the types of data that we interact with, right? How do people think about data themselves on the inside? How do these professionals think and relate to data, not always as a subjective instrument that delivers clarity. Really, you know, there’s a kind of sense that data are messy, that they’re complex, and as political and social as they are technical, right? To bring—to note: it’s technical, but it’s also a social exercise. And it’s a political exercise as well. Below is the same ultra-light cleanup, following exactly the same instructions as above: * No paraphrasing * No meaning changes * No deletions of ideas * No reordering * No speaker labels * Repetitions preserved where they reflect thinking * Only punctuation, line breaks, and minimal grammar cleanup And I think, in reality, you know, if we even follow business news, we can see that the politics—the people on the ground—are very aware of those dynamics, even if they only speak in the language of objectivity and clarity. And I would say it’s interesting now to see the new hype, which is AI, the new darling. If everything had to be data—you know, everything had to be kind of, there had to be the prefix “data” to everything we did—now AI seems to have taken on that same primacy everywhere, not just in the business world, right, in academia as well. You know, teachers have to articulate how they are or are not using AI, their positions in relationship to AI, how they’re helping students understand AI. So the way connected to what I’m observing now is an equal kind of lack of, I would say, public awareness or public discourse around how messy those data sets are as well. And again, I don’t say biased, because bias makes it sound like you can remove it. I say messy by default. You know, it’s not a secret—a lot of the data sets are kind of black boxes because there are proprietary algorithms that companies possess. But also more broadly, I think the sense of scale that AI has has overtaken the need to interrogate how these data sets come to be produced, what decisions went into shaping the algorithmic methods that are used to process it. You know, I think a lot of times there’s an intuition that, well, the whole of the internet was scraped to deliver me a ChatGPT answer, even though we don’t really know exactly where that answer came from. That sense of scale, I think, has ushered AI into a space that data once occupied—this kind of flawless space, where the scale of big data made it seem like you could eliminate subjective nuances. So I would really love to see us come to a place where we equally interrogate the data sets we interact with vis-à-vis different platforms. And I think already, as the dust is starting to settle, you start to see people in the research community asking more specific questions—not just where we can use AI, but how do we understand the output, really? How do we relate to what we interact with? How do we think about why we’re seeing this particular output on the screen and then another one? So I hope that’s going to be the next phase of our AI interactions. What do we call that? Is there a name for that level of reflection? Is that just reflection? Or what is that? Oh, I don’t know. Let’s think about it. That’s a good idea, too. Yeah. How would we—yeah—what would be the label? How would we call that? So what’s your experience with AI? I guess the second part of that earlier question is what do we do, or what’s your experience with AI and research and synthetic research, and how do you talk or think about it with regards to work and your own practice? And I think, on some level, it’s a practical question. In some ways, it’s not a question of either/or, right? I think even a few years ago, we were asking ourselves, will we use it? Should we use it? I think those questions are basically rendered irrelevant right now because it’s entered every nook and cranny of our experiences. I think the more relevant question now is how should we use it? And I think that’s the question we’re asking ourselves every day at work. We’re experimenting with different approaches. We’re experimenting with synthetic research, of course. We’re experimenting with using AI for different inputs across our research process. I think right now it’s a very experimental moment, but that’s probably the exciting part, where we actually get to ask how, right? Not just bluntly accepting what is, but interrogating and developing a point of view. And maybe again, I’m thinking—going back to my sense of when I stepped off that plane—you know, now is the moment of us trying to figure out: what are people actually saying? What’s important in this conversation? What does it all mean? I think that’s kind of, in some ways, an exciting moment. And yeah, nobody has the crystal ball. I really wish I could have a very clear perspective on what will happen. And in some ways, I’m nostalgic for the good old days of just straight-up human conversation. And I think there will be a space for that again. In some ways, I see there’s more—a little bit of suspicion around AI. You know, participants—are they using AI? Are they not using AI? I think there are companies trying to figure out how do you evaluate that. Will that mean a return, on some level, to a human—human, perhaps? So I hope so. Yeah. What other impacts do you see on qualitative, face-to-face kind of research as a result of the availability of AI across the research process? Yeah. So, you know, on the one hand—and I want to be optimistic about it a little bit—I cringe a bit when I hear people say things like, “We can now deliver 10,000 consumer interviews in the span of a half an hour.” And I sometimes ask myself, when am I ever going to be in a position where I need the answers so immediately, so rapidly? Something has gone terribly wrong if we’re doing it so last-minute. I had not heard that. I love that so much—that there’s something problematic about being so fast. Yes. You know, it’s offered as a solution, but then I’m asking myself, well, what is the problem? Is it that they forgot to do research in their business practice? So in that sense, I think we’re kind of in this euphoric moment again, where people are trying to put this label everywhere, and it’s not clear exactly where it will stick. Although some things are starting to fall off the board, which I’m happy to see. I think the speed of it is important, but the fact that it has to be solving for this particular problem—research as a really condensed, short-term activity. There’s a place for that, but I don’t know that we’ll necessarily see research being such an afterthought that it’s just brought in in such a last-minute way. And maybe people are using research more. In fact, from what I see on my end, when people are leaning into synthetic research, it’s often in moments when there wouldn’t be any research introduced at all. Maybe for ideation or brainstorming around the table. Some of that can help discipline the thinking a little bit, whereas there wouldn’t have been an opportunity to go out and do any type of research at all. So in some ways, it’s almost leading to more research, ironically. You know, where I see an interesting tension—and this is not my idea; smarter people than me have thought of this—is in the ethnographic practitioner community. I’m part of EPIC, the community of ethnographic practitioners. You’ve been part of that space. And just recently, in Helsinki this year, I was one of the co-moderators of a panel on AI in research—what does that mean? How are practitioners using it? And I was really struck by something. Two of the presenters—Eric Gray and Kevin Gotchevar, researchers at Nissan—were experimenting quite heavily with synthetic research and what utility it might have in their work. And one thing they said really, really rang true to me, and I continue to come back to that sentiment. One of the accusations that’s often leveled at qualitative conversations is: how can we trust what the consumer has said? People say, well, how can we trust AI? You can say the same of people. How can we trust what a person has said? People make things up. They get nervous. They try to perform. In some ways, there is that quality of invention that’s inevitable in research. But again, the point they made was this: whenever you see a contradiction, or a consumer says something, or a person you’re speaking to in a research context says something that feels unusual, or contradictory, or just new—that’s an opportunity to probe further. Hey, tell me more about this. And that can often be the space of real discovery. With AI, it’s less clear that hallucinations or AI imagination lead to the next “tell me more” in the same way. It doesn’t necessarily open up to the same level of revelation as a human contradiction. So I think navigating these two—when do we want to lean into some of the quirks of human engagement—yeah. Where will that lead to actually bigger insights? And then where—where is the opportunity for synthetic research, right? I mean, I feel like I haven’t read deeply on this, but I encounter the studies that are out there. What you said—yeah—I feel like what I’ve heard people describe is that it’s really good at the center, but it’s really bad at the fringe. You know what I mean? And so it’s really great for validation, but not so good for discovery. Yeah. And it’s especially good when you already have—when the person interacting with this data, and we often hear, you know, when we share synthetic results from our team with our teams, they often say, “That really confirmed my hunch,” or “That’s really how we were thinking of it as well.” And that becomes then an extra boost. Then, yeah, the person is able to, in a sense, validate the research or say, “Something is off here. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe I’m going to interrogate my own assumptions a little more.” Yeah. But that requires the person to have a set of expertise, not just to rely on synthetic outputs. You know, that really still requires the person to be really actively involved in evaluating. Yeah. I have a puppy eating a Christmas ornament. Oh no. Last question, which I think is—I heard—which is building on what we just talked about, but I also feel like at the beginning of the conversation about AI, there was a moment where you really acknowledged—because I think there’s a natural kind of defiance that we have as a qualitative practitioner or a research person—that of course no computer is going to replace us, like what we do is so special. But you were really honest about it. And I had this experience myself where it’s like, you know, for a lot of uses, it completely does the same thing that I do as a person in the work that I do. And it was sort of—I mean, uncanny might not be the right word—but it was definitely disorienting to realize that was the case, right? Humbling. Yeah, humbling for sure. And so I guess—so building on that idea that, wow, this stuff really does do things that we currently get paid for now. Two parts. First is: what is the value of qualitative to begin with? Why is it so important to begin with—what you do, what you know, as an anthropologist? What is it? What’s the proper role of qualitative, face-to-face qualitative? Why is it so important generally? And then especially in the age when all this synthetic stuff is there—in 30 minutes you can have perfectly good synthetic data delivered. Yeah. I mean, these are questions that I’m asking myself all the time, that I’m being asked a lot of the time. In many ways, I’m still formulating the answer. We’re kind of building the plane as it turns out, as we’re flying in it. Because I think what’s interesting in the current moment is that we’re being asked to shape-shift a little bit as researchers. We’re really being asked to articulate our value even more strongly. And I go back to anthropological expertise and the value and primacy of context. For me, that becomes even more important. Because in many ways, I think we can get really great responses online. I ask a question, I get a clean response—almost too clean sometimes. But what we’re lacking is: what’s the context in which that response was made? Who is that person? Again, to go back to that original sense—who’s that person that made that comment? What’s that person’s world? I was listening to a podcast by Zadie Smith, the novelist, and she said something really beautiful. She said, “Each person is a world.” And I think we really lose that—the world that’s within each person—when we rely too heavily on generalized, pressed-together, summarized data points. We really lose full sight of the idiosyncrasies of each person. And the fact that each person is bigger than this one question we’re asking. What’s the world in which they live? And what’s the world that’s inside each person? So I think there’s still real value in zeroing in like that. Sometimes that can give you much more depth, even if it doesn’t give you breadth for your research questions. So I hope there’s still a place for that. What do we lose when we lose context? We lose perspective. We really lose perspective. Anthropology, for me, the biggest value that I’ve taken is meaning. What does it mean? In the anthropological sense, there are no universals. What does this thing mean to different people? Whether we’re talking about hamburgers or soups, what does that particular object—when we work as researchers for brands, for products—what is this experience? What is this tool? What is this product? What does this mean to a specific group of people, a set of individuals, rather than as an object in and of itself out there in the world? It’s too generic then. It loses its usefulness in that cultural sense. It loses its interest. So I think to keep things interesting, we still need culture. And we still need to understand it. Beautiful. Well, that’s a beautiful way of ending. I want to thank you again for joining me and accepting my invitation. Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was really a pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Chuck Welch on Outsiders & Bridges

Chuck Welch [https://www.linkedin.com/in/welchc/] is the founder and chief strategy officer of Rupture Studio [https://www.rupturestudio.co/], a culture-led brand consultancy. He brings deep cultural insight, strategic imagination, and brand experience with Nike, PepsiCo, Dove, LVMH and others to help organizations connect authentically with fast-moving audiences. I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She’s an oral historian. She helps people tell their story. And so I learned this question from her, and I use it in my own work, too, to start conversations because I haven’t really found a way of getting into a conversation that’s more honest in a way. And so I use the question, but I caveat it extremely. I over-explain it the way that I’m doing now because it’s a strong question. So before I ask it, you can answer or not answer any way that you want. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, it’s impossible to make a mistake. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. Where do I come from? That’s a good question. I guess Mama Africa, right? Like all the rest of us come from. And if you want to connect it back to Mama Africa, you connect it to the drum. When you connect it to the drum, you connect it to hip hop. So I guess that’s my grounding identity, so to speak, that kind of filtered and still filters my world to some extent. It’s beyond just kind of the four elements. I guess you think about a worldview, right? Especially when you connect it back to advertising, which is the field I guess you would say I’m in—people like me aren’t necessarily represented usually. And just like hip hop, we were underrepresented and still are. We came from the outside and kind of had to create our own way and culture. And if you want to parallel it to brand communications, advertising, whatever you want to call it, in the business now—that filter has shaped my understanding of art, of business, of aesthetics, of connection and collaboration, of seeing the way I see. I think it’s shaped through that lens. And I think the parallel thing is that hip hop remains potent. Even though I may not listen to it as much as I do, the aesthetics of it and the spirit of it still moves me. And I guess you could say the parallel is that it’s always evolved just like this business and just like my mindset and the way I show up in the world and the way I serve my clients. So the kind of parallels, right? You got a base of a culture. You got a base of knowledge. And it’s like, I compare it to almost like a house. Foundation doesn’t change. Hey, but we’re going to swap out a room here. We’re going to decorate differently. We’re going to do an add-on. We’re going to add a deck on the back. I’m a suburban guy now. So I give you this parallel. I’m going to add a deck on the back. We’re going to change the paint colors. We’re going to invite some people in sometime. You’ve got a full house, sometime you by yourself along with your own thoughts. So the way I think about hip hop is kind of constant change, constant change, but there’s a core there, right? It’s kind of the thing I tell my clients: the difference between timeless and timely. So there’s timeless things that matter in the culture that I come from, but then there are things that are always of the day and the things that are pointing to the future. So, to the long-winded answer, that’s kind of where I come from through that worldview. And I’m not just talking about the art of hip hop or listening to the music. It’s like the outsider spirit, entrepreneurial spirit. It’s the make-something-out-of-nothing spirit. That’s endemic to the culture that I come from. And that’s not just hip hop. That’s Black folks. You know what I mean? And they’re not one and the same, but there’s an overlap there. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about—we’ll talk about work and brand and advertising and all that stuff—but can you tell me a story about that outsider spirit or Mama Africa or the drums or hip hop, like before you discovered this world and got into Jobby Job land? What was it about for you? I don’t know. It was about kind of making yourself, right? That culture allows you to create yourself, just like the best cultures do. Like you can have a palette of ingredients, whether you’re a writer or break dancer. We all tried to break dance at one point or write graffiti. I never wrote graffiti, but we all try to break dance or rap or DJ or whatever the thing is, but like you see the connections everywhere in your life, how you dress, you’re putting things together. Hip hop is a bricolage, right? So you’re taking bits and pieces of the past to create a future. That’s what hip hop is based on. We take what we have, whether it’s a beat box or a light pole that we plug into or a piece of linoleum that you spin on and we create structure, we create emotion, we create form. I mean, so it’s like—I’ve always seen it as, especially when I look back now with the advantage of hindsight, having practiced the craft of brand communications for over a quarter century—a lot of what we do is based, very similar creative process. The advertising process, the strategy process is very similar to hip hop, right? We’re in the age of bricolage, in the age of taking pieces and creating a whole from pieces that naturally on their face wouldn’t fit together. And that’s the way I see strategy in the notion of creative problem solving. It’s very similar. I would say I’m like a deep—especially in a research project—I always think of myself as almost like a DJ looking for samples or looking for records. And then the strategy is you put it all together, right? You take all the things that you’ve gone out there and hunted for. Sometimes you’re hunting inside yourself. Sometimes you’re hunting inside your client organization, inside of your clients. Sometimes it’s a research respondent. Sometimes it’s just observing, sitting on a train and looking at people walking down the street and observing bits of conversation, pieces of information. And you’re putting all these puzzle pieces together, these samples, these sounds to get to a whole. Especially oftentimes, the way we work is we come in and embed in a client team, but it’s rare we get a solid brief from a client. We usually start with, “Hey, we’re trying to do X,” or “We don’t know what the problem is. We’re trying to energize our brand. We’re trying to reach a new audience. We’re trying to drive a certain metric, but we don’t know 100% sure.” Like out of ten projects, we may get one solid brief. So a lot of it is kind of conversational. We’re wading through the dark. It’s very ambiguous when we come in. For those who aren’t aware of your work, introduce your work. Where are you now? What do you do? We have a strategy consultancy going on 11 years with my wife, who is the brains and beauty of the operation, Nandi Welch, and myself. It’s called Rupture Studio. Our job is to be a bridge between the street and the suite and connect brands to culture. A lot of that is educational, it’s strategic, it’s advisory, it’s creative problem solving, it’s storytelling, it’s agitation, it’s provocation, it’s therapy. It is creating environments where people can let down their guard and be vulnerable and be honest. It’s very collaborative. It’s very energizing for clients and hopefully for the end recipient on the other end of what we create together with the client—to connect to an audience and hopefully give them something of value. So we can inspire them and deliver value to them and capture value from them and grow our client’s business ultimately. That’s what it’s about. But the process that I talked about and the kind of ethos of hip-hop is very similar to that process. If you make a record, it’s similar to that process. I haven’t worked in the music business. It’s like you go in and you have to come up with an idea, a theme, almost like a thesis. A record is like a thesis, starting a record. That’s how we start our process with the thesis of what we think the problem or opportunity is. Then we either prove that out or we don’t and course correct and collectively create a way forward. You were talking a little bit about the projects that come to you. What’s that first conversation like that you have with a client? Let’s say it’s a new client that’s heard about the good work that you do. They know that you’re the studio for them. What’s the first conversation you have with a client? How do you start a conversation? It’s really not about us, to be honest with you. It’s about our client and either the pain or the promise that they have that they haven’t either resolved or achieved. “Here’s an opportunity that we want to go get that we don’t know how to get there,” or “Here’s pain that we’re dealing with. It’s giving us anxiety and it’s impinging our relationship with the audience or it’s crimping the business at hand.” Our job is to, as quickly as we can, get to the ambition. We introduce ourselves but we try to spend more time asking the client than beating our own horn or tooting our own horn. Our job is to get a sense of what the challenge at hand is, the task at hand. It’s very conversational, it’s very honest. I was in agencies—oftentimes there’s these formal pitch processes and clients got their client suit on and their client mask on, the agency has their b**********g face on and you’re all doing the dance. We don’t do the dance. We just have conversations like this. They’re very normal. We talk to clients like they’re normal people, which they are—they’re just normal people with a lot on their shoulders and a lot of power. We just have normal conversations and we try to get in their shoes. My wife, Nandi, was a client. She sat in their seat; I never sat in their seat. We try to understand what they’re dealing with. Not just the ambition, but what they’re dealing with. What’s going on in the organization? As much as you can—everything’s not going to be revealed at first conversation—but what’s the challenge at hand? What’s getting in the way? Then the normal things: What’s the environment? Who are their partners that they’re currently working with? Do they need us to just do inside strategy work or is it, “Hey, do you want us to pull it all the way through into post writing the brief? Do you need us to run the creative process? Do you need to run a pitch?” What’s the thing? What are all the elements? What’s the timing? I probably won’t get the budget the first time, but get a sense of the landscape and then the opportunity for us coming out of that. There’s probably a couple more conversations. Maybe, “Hey, we meet somebody’s boss or somebody’s team.” It just depends. Every conversation is different. We tend to work with very large organizations. Sometimes they bring somebody who’s adjacent to the client. Say somebody in insights or innovation. Maybe there’s a senior leader you talk to. It just depends. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I mean, the joy is solving problems, man. Because you use the full expanse of your knowledge and your ability to persuade, collaborate, inspire, challenge—all the things you learn in life, not just in business. The expanse of your skill set to help a client solve a problem and ultimately to help somebody on the other end who you’re trying to reach out in the world solve a problem. That’s what we try to do. Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you don’t. How do you position a brand to solve a problem? Because then you’re coming from a place of value, not just extraction. Can you say more about that? That’s how we look at it. We don’t look at people as consumers. Even how we start our process is not through the lens of consumption. Because when you look at people through the lens of consumption, you’re cutting down their humanity, one, and you’re cutting down the surface area that you have to connect with people. If I just look at you through your pocketbook, I don’t understand your heart, I don’t understand your head, I don’t understand how you stand and walk through the world and or your community—not just kind of this marketing word “community,” meaning like how do you show up in your environment? How do you move through it? What are the forces that shape you as you move through it? What are the myths? What are the signs? What are the symbols? What are the stories that go through life? The things that are spoken and unspoken. We start there. What are the socioeconomic realities that impact your life? What’s your family? What’s your ethnic or racial or religious or educational—what are all the things that shape you? Then once we understand that, what’s the role of this brand then to alleviate the pain point you may have or tension you may have or inspiration you may need? What’s the thing we’re delivering on beyond what we sell? People talk about “lifestyle brands,” whatever the hell that means, but you don’t have meaning—or you don’t have as much meaning as you could—if you just focus on the transaction. It’s always the counterintuitive thing, right? “Hey, we want to drive transaction, but we just focus on the transaction.” You become a commodity. It’s like I kind of give this analogy. A lot of brands—hey, you throw a dinner party, they show up late, they want to eat early, they don’t bring nothing, they don’t wipe their feet at the door, don’t take the shoes off, they don’t bring dessert, don’t bring a bottle of wine, they don’t offer—they eat and they run. Come into your house, they eat and run. As much as they can, as fast as they can, they’re off to the next house. Who is this? Who are we describing? That’s how brands think about people and culture, right? “Hey, I want to come in, I want to eat as much as I can eat, as fast as I can eat, so I gorge myself and then I’m off to the next house.” As Aim said, how are you a good houseguest? How are you a good host? You want to invite people into your house, you want to come in their house, what do you bring to the party? Literally, what do you bring to the party? That’s valuable to people. Don’t bring us your f*****g potato salad with a couple of raisins on it—bring us some good mac and cheese, man. I do, I do. Have some sustenance, don’t bring us that b******t, bring us something good to eat. So it’s like, I think brands always talk about driving loyalty. So how do you reverse that? How are you loyal to your audience? How do you show up for them and deliver for them? How do you just not abandon them and go chase greener pastures? How do you continue to deliver value? And that bar for what is valuable is always rising. And that’s a lot of why clients bring us in, because they may be stuck in yesterday’s value frame, not today’s or tomorrow’s. And our job is to help them up front understand what is meaningful, valuable to a certain public, and then how do you deliver something that’s unique and distinct to these people? When did you discover that you could make a living doing this? When did it click for you that, oh, this is a job, this is what I do, I can make a living? Oh, man. Good question. I got my start out of school—I was working almost like a hybrid in the music business. I was working for a hip-hop mogul named Russell Simmons, but he had a small marketing group inside of Def Jam. So I was kind of touching everything, and he had a gazillion businesses: comedy, internet stuff, and Def Jam, the music side. And we were working with Coca-Cola and HBO on the marketing side—marketing artists, doing grassroots marketing and street team marketing and lifestyle marketing and all this stuff. And that’s when I kind of understood like, yo—I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, to be honest with you. I was just literally doing it on instinct. But kind of seeing that I was a guy who could connect the dots between these disparate things and between people who sat in corporate seats from the brand side and the agencies and entertainment offerings or music department. I could see the connections, and I could forge the connections at a time when those things lived in very different worlds. Like music people lived in the music world, advertising people and brand people lived in their world, sports lived in its world, fashion lived in its world. Yeah, it was a little bit of crossover, but not a whole lot. There were different mores for doing business, there were different incentives, there were different worldviews in each of these spaces, and my job early in my career was to create connection between these things. So, very early—before people were talking about culture—we were in culture. I was in culture. What do you mean when you say culture? That’s such a word that we don’t often talk about. I indulge myself often in those definition questions. Right now, it’s been beat up so much, and everybody’s kind of a cultural expert, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s different levels of it, right? There’s things people share, right? If you want to say in its broadest sense, culture is the things groups of people share. Spoken and unspoken, right? There’s always these invisible things that we don’t even think about, they’re just muscle memory, they’re second nature. Why do we stand for the Pledge of Allegiance? That’s culture. Why do we shake with our right hand? That’s culture. Why do we put a wedding ring on our left thing? Some cultures, it’s on the right, but in America here, it’s on the left, right? So, to me, culture is a variety of things, right? So, it’s the things we share: attitudes, values, behaviors, spoken and unspoken. The unspoken things—some are based on race and ethnicity, some are based on nationality, some are based on passion points. If I’m a fashion person, the things that bind me with other fashion people. Or if I’m an athlete, there’s ways of being that connect me with other athletes, right? An athlete knows another athlete, and what the worldview is of the athlete, right? So, there’s culture on the macro sense, there’s culture on the passion point sense, but then there’s your internal compass. What are the things that are inside of me, inside my head? What’s my identity? How do I see myself in relationship to the world if I’m an 18-year-old Black kid from South Side Chicago, right? How does my lived experience connect me with other people who live like I do, not just in the States, but around the world, right? So, culture can be macro, can be micro, can be subcultural, it could be seen, it could be unseen, right? And the way the business usually works, historically, is that we focus on the same things, right? The surface, the cultural skin, so to speak—the aesthetics, the fashion, the music, the trend, the language. But our job is to get to the unseen, and to the unheard, and to the emergent, right? What are those metaphors? What are those myths? What are those belief systems that shape people, right? And how do we connect legitimately to those things? So, when you say “play in culture,” that can mean a variety of different things, and that word is becoming more amorphous by the day. So, when we take on an assignment, based on what the state of ambition is, we define what that should be for a brand, whatever specific brand we happen to be working with, right? So, it’s not this generic thing that’s just a catch-all; it becomes very specific, right? What is the belief system? What is the identity of the people that we want to reach? What are the passion points, right? What are the unseen things? What are the expressions of those things? If you want to take it back to hip-hop, you say, “Hey, this culture is created out of a lack.” From a lack that created a world, right? Lack of resources, lack of money, lack of school funding for music programs, right? Bombed out, impoverished, bankrupt cities, towns—the Bronx was burnt to a crisp, right? So, out of that: “Hey, we take what we have to create something new.” We take pieces to create a new whole, and that is parallel to the Black existence in this country, right? It’s invention. It’s invention out of necessity, and that invention continually churns out the pop culture that shapes the American identity around the world, right? It’s through that invention. So, that’s kind of the worldview I’ve come through—is like, how do you become an event? What’s the new thing that brings value? That’s our job. It’s to help clients. It ain’t strategy. It’s not storytelling. My job is to create something that creates value for our client by creating value for enough people that they want to support what you put out in the world. And we call it whatever we want to call it. Everybody’s got their own jargon, but our job is to create new value in the world for our clients. If we do that, we’ve done our job. How would you say it’s different now than it was? I mean, we all get old, right? And we experience the passage of time. You were talking about starting at Def Jam. How is it different now than it was then in any kind of way in terms of how culture works? It’s radically different, man. But there’s things that stand the test of time. Like I said, it’s timeless and timely. I don’t get caught up in all the snake oil salesmen and saleswomen, right? I’m an old guy, so I’ve seen all the waves, man, and people pushing that, “Oh, you’re going to be extinct in two weeks if you don’t do this.” It’s b******t, man. Scare tactic. Yes. I love how you talked about the myth and the meaning. Everything you just shared about culture, we share really. I mean, I just love how clearly you are articulating the meaning, right? And so I wonder—how do you end the idea that the things that matter persist? You know what I mean? Some things are constant, and this shared culture, that meaning is vital. How do you help—I’m leading towards a question about research and about understanding and about bridging. How do you bridge the client and the customer, the suite and the street? Do you have a method or approach or principles about how to do that and make that bridge happen? It’s shared understanding. Shared understanding is the thing that bridges everybody, right? But it’s not omnipresent or there, right, all the time. No, you got to forge it. Because the needs of a Fortune 100 CMO are very different than the needs of a 24-year-old Latino in East LA that you’re trying to reach. They’re not the same. You know what I mean? On their face, they’re not the same. Yeah. So what do you do to bridge that gap? How do you do it? How do I do it? I try to understand—or we, because we work collectively—we try to understand as much as we can about the needs, right? It all comes down to needs. What are the needs of an organization? What are the needs of a business? What are the needs of a brand? What are the needs of people? And what is connected between those two things? Our job is to go deeper than the surface. That’s why we embed ourselves in organizations or in agencies. I was on the back end of a brief, and I was running like the Dickens to get creative team coming back with the solution, and you give me the gladiator thumbs up or thumbs down with your client. We don’t work like that. We work in the bowels of an organization directly with teams. We’re in the meetings understanding the promise and the pain, the opportunities, the politics, all the things that either help you win internally or get in the way. A lot of what we see is that organizations often get in their own way. A lot of what we do is helping to get people to come into the process so they help shape it, connect across silos so they’re in communication, try to create a shared framework for success where people understand what the win is collectively and help our clients own their strategy inside and then find, either with their partner, current partners or new partners, ways to express that point of view out in the world to drive competitive advantage. What would you say is challenging clients the most today? What do you find is the biggest challenge or confusion? Is it a new challenge? Is it the same old challenge? There’s often challenges in very large multinational matrix organizations. There’s challenges of incentives. I’m a senior leader. My day-to-day and my purview and my ambitions and goals are different than if I’m in a business driving the day-to-day of a brand. Our goals are to, first of all, understand what people’s perspectives and remits and areas of expertise are and then understand what are the things getting in the way of communication, of clarity, of simplicity as much as you can—and these massive, confusing balls of yarn that are the modern organization. Then how do we show up? What’s our distinction? What’s our competitive advantage? What’s the thing that makes us different and unique to drive a point of view to somebody on the other end? Hopefully, they find that meaningful. Everybody says they have a process and we have a process, but it’s messy, man. Anybody who tells you it’s not—it’s, “Oh, we got this four-step.” Yeah, everybody’s got a f*****g process, man, but it’s messy. It’s messy. It’s messy. There’s always impromptu meetings. There are changes in direction. There are new priorities. There are new people coming in and out of process. “Hey, there’s a new exec that just got hired last week. He or she needs to be onboarded.” Broaden the process. You hold space for the circularity because it’s not just linear. We try to make it—it’s no linear process, man. We try to make it, but it’s messy because ultimately, our job is to be almost like detectives inside of organizations to understand what the clues are to solve the case. You’re always trying to uncover as much information as you can because sometimes they give you a stack or a file of past campaigns, but that’s just the marketing work. I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s not easy, but we can do that. The hard stuff is the soft stuff. The hard stuff is the soft stuff. It always is in organizations. Organizations understand hard. They understand process, technology, and scale, and systems, and distribution. The soft stuff is always the hard part: the politics, the conversation, the point of view, all these things, the expression. That’s why they hire people like us to help them. The tangibles, the tangibles they got in space, the data, everything that you can measure. A lot of our job is like, what does meaning mean? How do you figure out how to mold and shape meaning? That’s the process for that. Ultimately, that’s our job—to use meaning as a material. We don’t create anything. We’re not creatives. We don’t develop pretty pictures, and video, and all that stuff. Our job is to help people make decisions. That’s it. What’s the role of research in your work, specifically qualitative or just generally? Research is everything, man. I guess you would say the research process as it used to be—go back to your question about what’s changed. That’s been a huge change in the business since I was a youngin because people don’t do near as much research, like formal studies. We used to do months long. Do you feel it? I feel like I had the same experience too. There was a ton of research. I guess it’s just shifted or something. Did it go away or did it shift? A lot of it is that we’re missing it. A lot of it is that way. People are moving faster now. They got to create more stuff. AI probably is going to accelerate that. People are moving—I don’t know why or how. Why are they moving so fast? I don’t know. What’s the rush? Research is not done as much, like formal research. To answer my own question, I feel like to some degree a lot of it was probably redundant and unnecessary and could be done without. Some of it was probably methodologically questionable. Research is just like anything else. You got good practitioners and you got people who aren’t good. It’s just like you got good campaigns, you got good brands, and you got s**t brands. It depends on the funding, the support of the organization, how serious they’re going to take it, how much time they’re going to give it to gestate and do what it needs to do. I see that’s just not happening near as much anymore. We often do down and dirty, impromptu research. That could be anything from immersions where we’re taking our clients out into the marketplace, into the world of audience and bringing the audience inside. It could be having conversations with academics to give us a different contextual look into the problem or the space we’re trying to understand. It could be talking to entrepreneurs or politicians or reporters or whoever—just people from outside the business who give you a different frame, either to give us context at the beginning of a research or quick down and dirty research process or post strategy to kind of bomb-test a point of view off of. I miss that. I think it’s having a material impact, I think, on clients’ businesses because what I see is oftentimes they don’t know their audience. This has been happening for years, for years. They know a data-driven facsimile. It’s like you understand the skeleton, but not the meat and bones and lived experience of people. Oftentimes now we’re kind of cobbling together different approaches to at least bolster a client understanding or understanding comes from a client’s media agency or internal insights or what have you. Why is it important that we have this stuff and what’s at stake that we’re kind of running without it? Do you know what I mean? It’s like if I did a project with a museum, wouldn’t I want to learn a little bit about art and why people go see art? Yeah. How could I assume if I have a director of a museum that I know what their supporters or their patrons want? I didn’t talk to them. I was just supposed to know. I was just supposed to look at a spreadsheet and say, “Hey, five out of ten people like Basquiat and eight out of nine people like Lorna Simpson.” It’s ridiculous. To your point, it’s like—how can you be valuable and meaningful if you don’t know what people want? I’m not saying people should dictate communication. They should be brand-led but informed by understanding of the populace that you want to reach. At the very least, their lived experience. A lot of that lived experience does not show up in data. That’s the stuff that falls through the cracks. Can you say more about when you say lived experience, what are you talking about? What kinds of conversations do you have with clients about research? Is it something that gets talked about or is it—things are moving— I’m not going to tell you who the client was, but we had a big insurance client come to Atlanta a couple of years ago. We were working with an agency. We had a big insurance client come to Atlanta. They wanted to reach first-time homebuyers, Black and brown first-time homebuyers. We said, “Hey, let’s get a group of first-time Black and brown homebuyers in a room and we’re going to just have a day of conversation so they can understand these people.” It wasn’t a focus group. It was just getting in a room and having a conversation. You had a largely white executive team come to Atlanta, a very Black city, and get in a room and spend time with people they probably would never ever spend time with. Those conversations are super enlightening because they understood how these people have to move through the world. These were doctors and lawyers and marketing professionals. They were talking about the good, bad, and ugly of their existence and how that shapes their homebuying process. How that shapes their life, first of all, and then how that shapes their homebuying process. They’re able to see in a different way than if they just got a spreadsheet, if they were behind a focus group screen, if they got a data dump. Because they felt the emotion in the room. We broke down the conversation. They had questions so they can understand the nuance of what was being said, not just the words. They left that room inspired and with their heads spinning, but in a good way. Because it challenged a lot of their assumptions on who these folks were and how they have to communicate to them to drive a message home in a way that’s impactful. So that’s just an example of, “Hey, we don’t have a lot of time. We’re not going to spend a ton of money doing research. But hey, in lieu of that, we’re going to put you in a room where we’re just going to have conversations—and honest conversations two ways. They’re going to ask you questions. You’re going to ask them questions. And we create an environment that’s safe where nobody’s going to feel judged if they ask something that’s insensitive or so-called whatever around race and ethnicity and all that stuff. We’re going to create a space where we can just be honest and open and be vulnerable.” And that’s what we did, right? So from there, then the agency is armed with more understanding and the client has more context. So when the agency makes a decision, they understand from where it came from. I mean, that’s just beautiful. I mean, it’s the most—I really feel like that what you’ve described is like the atomic unit of all the things that I find interesting and exciting about just being in this work, that there’s this possibility of encounters like that, where you change the way people think, and you just sort of, the world just gets bigger and more interesting when assumptions get overturned. You know what I mean? There’s always this kind of thing, but it doesn’t come easy. Do you know what I mean? We keep looking for this, we keep producing these efficiencies that make it easy for us, that pretend to deliver, but it’s just—we’re so far away. I mean, I love how you described about—we’re sort of operating on the—I heard you describing personas, you know what I mean? We’re operating on this sort of the skeleton of an idea of a person, as opposed to an actual human being person with a lived experience and how rich even—sorry, I’m rambling a bunch here, because we’re talking about research, but what you’re describing really is an experience of bridging. It’s probably doesn’t qualify as research in an academic or professional sense, you know what I mean? And all that other stuff, but it’s a moment where people are together and they’re experiencing each other for who they are as people and they’re from different worlds and they’ve been brought together and that produces—I mean, that’s like everything. Yeah, I mean, you can kind of get to, like I said, what’s shared? What’s the shared thing? And then if I’m a client, then I hear, s**t, I may not understand everything about the lived experience, but I can see their humanity or I can empathize with them in a different way. I can see myself in some—I can see the universal things that connect both of us outside of whatever race or ethnicity or what—I can see the human thing that connects us, right? That’s what this thing is about because, our clients, their heads are down. As they should be, because they got pressure coming right down on their head from senior leadership and their job is to deliver a portion of the thing that drives the Wall Street number. So we understand that. Our job is to bring peripheral vision to our clients, 360 vision. They can see sideways. They can see history looking back. They can see left. They can see right. They can see the future. Our job is to bring bigger vision and we create collective vision with them because their heads are down. Our job is to get them heads up, pull down the mask, be human, right? And once you can be human, then you can be open, right? And once you’re open, all these kind of mores start falling to the side. “Hey, these are the ways we do things. This is the way the organization does things. This is the way I know I can sell an idea into this organization because we always do X, Y, Z.” Yeah, and a lot of that is great because it speeds efficiency. Sometimes it gets in the way of effectiveness and our job is to come in and sometimes poke on the places and spaces that no longer serve a client. So we can connect it back to the example of having those people in the room. Then we can say, “Hey, remember when they said X, Y, Z? And you guys do this, but we need to change it to Y because of those reasons.” Right? So it’s like you’re on them. They’re on the journey. We’re on this kind of collective process together. That’s why we embed ourselves. We don’t do the agency thing where we run away and we come back with a solution. This is a collective process and we’re on it together, right? And everything’s connected. It’s like a layer cake. You’re just building, building on top, building on top, top, top until you got a whole. We had our conversations entirely up front. We understand the org. We’re going out and doing our research—competitive, audience, cultural, talking to academics. We’re getting all the information we can. Come up with strategy. We may go back and get more feedback on it. We’re writing a brief so we all got clarity on what the task at hand is. We’re working with creative partners to express that. We’re staying on to make sure that that expression is connected to the value creation that we want to drive with these people. It’s like we’re maniacs to figure out what’s valuable because if we don’t figure out what’s valuable, we’re wasting everybody’s money and time. So we don’t want to add to the cultural pollution out in the world. There’s already too much of that. Oh my God. Hopefully we—we get it. We’re ultimately selling soda, toothpaste, or fashion, or beauty, or spirits, or whatever the thing is, but just because you’re selling that doesn’t mean you can’t put some beauty into the world or idea into a campaign that may inspire a young kid like me who saw old Sprite work. Oh, wow. Is that right? Who helped me get in the business. Can you tell me that story about the Sprite? I mean, yeah. Sprite will bathe you first. That was one of the first campaigns that spoke to young hip hop kids like me. It was a guy named Daryl Cobbin, who I can proudly say is a buddy of mine now. He was at Coca-Cola, an old client, and him and a guy named Reginald Jolly—they inspired our generation because they were putting hip hop images, and personalities, and ideas into campaigns in a way that had never been done before. I was like, damn, that s**t resonates with me. It didn’t feel like advertising. It felt like the world I was a part of. And it felt very respectful. It felt like, “Hey, you’re respecting my time, representing the imagery that resonates and that inspires me.” And not just me—a whole generation of people. That work helped inspire me to get in this business. So like, the power of advertising is—as we know, I think people say, “Oh, it’s just advertising.” But then they say, “Oh, advertising changes the world. Oh, it’s just advertising.” Right? You hear people actually speak with a forked tongue when they want to say advertising has no impact. When they say, “Oh, advertising does X, Y, Z.” So, like, we know advertising shapes how people see themselves. How they think about—our job is to put signs and symbols into the world and to create meaning. It has tremendous power. And we understand that responsibility. We don’t always get it right, but we look through those eyes to have integrity and try to put something in the world that has meaning, that doesn’t just serve a capitalist agenda. So, we got a couple minutes left. I want to ask a question, give you an opportunity. Often I ask, are there any mentors or touchstones, people that really shaped you or ideas that you return to a bunch? And you talked to—you just mentioned the Sprite story. So, yeah—what mentors or touchstones have played a big part in your career or ideas that you return to? I don’t know if I’ve had formal mentors too much, but like you have people come into your life. A woman named Anne Simmons, who was one of the most intelligent, smartest women that I’ve worked—fiercest woman that I’ve worked with. She hired me, working for Russell. She was running Russell’s marketing group. Brilliant woman. She kicked my ass, man. But she got me ready for what we do now. When I went into advertising, it’s like, yo, whatever, these people are nothing. I went through Anne Simmons in the Def Jam boot camp, man. So it was like, for real, I was forged by fire. People like that, Def Jam folks who taught me. What else? Jesus, there’s so many, man. Friends of mine now—Keith Cartwright, Dan Cherry, Stan—like all my buddies, a lot of them came through Wieden & Kennedy. A lot of my buddies in this business came through Wieden & Kennedy. A lot of my buddies either came through Wieden & Kennedy or Naked on the agency side. What lessons did you bring from Def Jam, that period? What did you learn? What were the things, the principles or the ideas that you really kind of got? I mean, Def Jam was a lifestyle company, man. And they—the decisions that they made—they tried to, in their best, like, I don’t know about it’s perfect, but they tried to make decisions that bolstered the brand of Def Jam, not just selling albums. They sold the album because they bolstered the brand of Def Jam. They attracted great artists because they bolstered the brand of Def Jam. Now people just sell music. That’s a different era. But Naked, right? Naked—my background is a kind of synthesis of Def Jam and Naked. Naked taught me strategy game. It taught me about communication, taught me how to do work in global markets, because we were doing work in Asia and Latin America and Europe. They taught me that everything communicates, which is very—Def Jam never articulated that way, but they had the same ethos, right? So those ethoses were shared. Like the companies were very, very similar. They were pirates. Us against the world. Take no prisoners. That was the Naked thing. That was the Def Jam thing. Very similar companies, very similar DNA. What does that mean to be a pirate? I think a pirate is somebody who sees new opportunities outside of the traditional system and creates their rules on how to do it, right? And has a voice. Pirate’s not trying to scare you. Pirate’s trying to express their voice because they know there’s value in their voice, right? Like Naked had a voice. They say, “Hey, the business is doing this. We’re going to do that.” Def Jam says, “Hey, back then, the business is doing—why? The business thinks they’re a record label. We’re a lifestyle company, right? Yeah, we sell records, but we do comedy. We make movies. We create stars out of our artists.” Like, it’s a different way of looking at something. It’s looking at an industry through an expansive mindset, not a commoditized one. Which gives you license then to challenge the mores as they are and to do it differently. Beautiful. Well, listen, this is a good place. This is the end. I appreciate you so much for just accepting my invitation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter. Always good to catch up, my man. Enjoy Hudson. 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]

Tess Posner on Creativity & Humanity

Tess Posner [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessposner/] is a musician [http://tessposnermusic.com] and the creator of Resonance [https://resonancesalon.com/], a platform helping communities shape the technologies that shape them. Former founding CEO of AI4ALL and a Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics, she bridges responsible AI with human agency—ensuring people have voice in an era of accelerating technological change. So, I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, like oral histories. And when I heard the question, I just loved it so much that I borrowed it. But it’s a big question, which is why I borrowed it. Because it’s big, I overexplain 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 — you can answer or not answer in any way that you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from? I love the big questions. Well, physically, I guess I’ll start with the basics. I’m in the forest outside of San Francisco, so I’m very happy to be coming from here. Originally I’m from Massachusetts, so I kind of made my way out to the West Coast. Place is, I think, an important part of where we come from, even though a lot of us move around so much that we don’t think about it as much. But I’ve been thinking about that more recently. Then, I guess to move to more abstract levels of that question, I come from the nonprofit space — working in various organizations and initiatives focused on economic empowerment, helping people find work and meaning and opportunity. Most recently, I led an organization called AI for All, where we were helping young people — we actually started in 2017, so it was well before everyone knew about AI. We had to convince people that this was going to be a thing. But we could see it coming, and we wanted to help young people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to learn what AI is and become creators and builders of this incredibly impactful technology. We helped them build skills, find internships, create community, find mentors. That’s what I’ve been involved in for the last eight and a half years. And just seeing the incredible evolution of AI, that mission feels more important than ever. So I’d say I come from the intersection of human potential, human flourishing, equity, and technology — that’s been my focus in the workspace. And then lastly, music. I’ve been a musician for about eight years, though I’ve been doing music since I was little. Being an artist is a big part of where I come from — part of my framing, my aesthetic, my passion. There are probably deeper ways to answer that question, but I’ll stop there. It’s beautiful. Do you have any recollection from growing up — what you wanted to be as a child, what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah. When I was about ten years old, I wanted to be a musician and a singer. That’s when I started playing piano, singing, and performing in choirs. That was my first dream. When I was a teenager, I went on a humanitarian trip to El Salvador. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Habitat for Humanity — we went down there as part of a school trip and built a house with a family. I was fifteen at the time, and it was such a transformative experience. Being in another country where resources and access are very different, and having that deep cultural immersion, being with a family and exposed to their history and place — it really stood out to me that your zip code shouldn’t determine whether you get health care or access to basic needs. It felt deeply unfair that an earthquake could level an entire town and there’d be no resources to rebuild, unlike in the U.S. That trip started my whole inquiry into how to make a positive impact, and eventually my nonprofit career. How did that Habitat trip happen — was it part of school or something else? Yeah, it was part of school. I went to an alternative school that actually started the first year I attended, in sixth grade. It was a bit chaotic, but one of its tenets was project-based learning. We had these amazing opportunities — to go to El Salvador, or to Italy to study classical guitar. I fundraised for both trips myself, learning to be entrepreneurial and to put learning into practice, whether through Spanish, history, or music. I was really lucky to go there, even though it was also kind of chaotic. You said you’re in the forest north of San Francisco. What inspired you to head west? Maybe tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing now. I went to college in New Mexico — Santa Fe — studying in the Great Books program at St. John’s College. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, it’s this really amazing place that feels especially relevant right now as education goes through this big period of questioning and change. We studied all of Western philosophy, science, literature, math, physics, and music — starting from the ancient Greeks and working our way to the modern day. There were no written tests or exams. It was all discussion-based. If you were doing math, you were at the board doing proofs and discussing them. Everything was very active — all oral exams and conversation. It was just such a different way of learning, and it shaped me deeply. After that, I went to grad school for social-enterprise administration. It was at Columbia in New York, over a decade ago now. Back then, “social enterprise” was this trendy topic — basically thinking about how to combine social impact with sustainable business models, not necessarily anti-capitalist but more about creative alternatives: how to actually make a difference in the world while keeping it scalable. It was an amazing program. Many of the examples we studied came from San Francisco and the Bay Area, and I remember thinking, I need to be there. I wanted to be part of that future wave. Moving here was incredible — the technology and entrepreneurial ecosystem, paired with a focus on social impact. Especially because technology has become such a key force shaping the world, it felt like the perfect time for me to jump in and try to help steer it in a direction that benefits people — not excludes them. Now, we’re in another wave of that. It’s been quite a journey. So what are you doing now? I’ve been involved in different projects around that theme. I’m still on the board of AI for All — it’s an amazing organization — but I’m also working on a new project that’s really focused on a different question: how do we stay creative as humans? How do we make sure we don’t lose meaning, purpose, or agency in the age of AI? I’ve been hosting these small-group events that bring people back into their creative potential, while also asking deeper questions: What do these societal changes mean? How do we work through them together? How do we keep humans at the center as technology keeps advancing? I’m literally building the seed of a new organization right now — very early stages — and I’m excited about it. I’ve seen so much need for spaces like that, both from my work as an artist and from leading educational programs. We met at the Artificiality Summit, maybe a month ago — the one put on by Dave and Helen at the Artificiality Institute. You did a “provocation,” I think they called it — a workshop moment — and it was really beautiful. That summit taught me so much; it changed how I think about what AI is and isn’t. But it also raised even more questions. So, I want to be careful with language here, because the words themselves feel weird and unformed. Where does this begin for you? When you talk about AI and creativity — what are you actually talking about? Was there a moment when you realized this was the work you wanted to do, or that the need was there? It’s definitely been on my mind for a while. Being in the AI space since 2017, a lot of early conversations were about how AI would affect jobs and work. That was the key question back then — along with ethics and responsibility: how do we use this technology ethically? I knew AI would eventually become part of everyday life, but I didn’t anticipate how it would unfold — especially when ChatGPT launched almost three years ago to the day. It’s now the fastest-growing technology ever, in terms of adoption and daily use. We’re seeing “agentic AI” systems emerge — software that can carry out independent tasks. Companies are building these agents you can assign work to, with less and less human oversight. There’s this global race to harness AI’s value — saving time, cutting costs. Capitalism drives that race, of course. And geopolitics adds pressure: China, the U.S., everyone wants to be ahead. So it’s full-speed ahead. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people are using chatbots daily — often for relationships, companionship, even therapy-like support. That’s creating psychological effects we barely understand. It’s like a massive social experiment happening in real time. We’re already seeing phenomena like “AI psychosis,” people developing deep reliance on these tools. They’re amazing and helpful — I use them myself — but there are potential consequences. And because the investment pouring in is unlike anything we’ve seen, it’s accelerating even faster. So you pair that with this idea of AI replacing our efforts for economic gain, and it leaves people wondering, What does that mean for me? There’s fear — fear of job loss, fear of irrelevance. We’re seeing some professions already impacted. College graduates are entering one of the toughest job markets in decades. Maybe AI is taking some entry-level roles — the kind of work AI is already good at — though it’s hard to know for sure. The general mood is a mix of fervent excitement and quiet dread. In the creative world I’m part of, reactions are extreme — some people hate AI, others are experimenting enthusiastically. There’s tension between replacement and augmentation, between AI as threat and AI as tool. I did an experiment once: I played one of my songs, and then an AI-generated version of it. A third of the audience guessed wrong. One woman came up afterward and said, “I thought my body would know which one was real because I got chills from the AI song.” That moment really stayed with me. If AI can generate a song in seconds that gives someone chills, what does that mean? We’re not processing that collectively as a society — it’s this huge elephant in the room. So that’s what I feel compelled to address. People need space to process all of this, to figure out where they fit, where their agency lies, and how to adapt consciously to what’s coming. Is there a metaphor or a way you think about what AI actually is? It’s interesting how hard that is to answer. My metaphor is a mirror. The AI we interact with most — chatbots — are trained by ingesting all the data on the internet. Imagine the entire internet as a reflection of the human mind and soul: its lightest parts and its darkest. So, in that sense, AI mirrors us. What I’ve noticed using it is that it adapts to you — it’s programmed to be as useful as possible. That’s what companies like OpenAI or Anthropic are optimizing for. So it mirrors what you give it. If you input something thoughtful, it gives you thoughtful responses. If you input bias or anger, it reflects that too. That’s why it can be so powerful — looking in a mirror helps us understand ourselves. But mirrors can also amplify what’s there without questioning it. That’s why we’ve seen some tragic cases — people taking their own lives after conversations with AI systems. Yes. “Sycophancy” is the word they use for that tendency — that habit of agreeing and pleasing. Exactly. You’ve been talking about this need — this human need — to stay creative and connected. What are you actually building now? I’m founding a new company called Resonance. We call it “the modern ritual for a more creative, human-connected future.” The idea is to create small circles — maybe twelve to fifteen people — who are catalysts in their communities, coming from different fields. For example, one recent group included a meditation teacher, a CTO from an AI startup, an attorney doing immigrant rights work, an architect, an artist, a music artist, and an educator. It was this wonderfully diverse mix. Our topic that night was technology and human flourishing. Can technology support human flourishing, or does it take us away from connection and creativity? Many people feel that technology is pulling them away — but at the same time, it’s moving faster than ever. So how do we create a different relationship with it? We designed the evening with small rituals and discussions to spark connection and reflection. Then we had a creative share — poetry, music, art — because these ideas can’t just be processed intellectually. They have to be felt, embodied, expressed. It was powerful. People said, “I don’t have any space in my life for this kind of conversation.” Others said, “I’ve lost my creative spark and don’t know how to bring it back.” That’s why I see Resonance as an antidote to the crisis of agency, meaning, and connection. We also talk about it as creating “third spaces.” Our modern society lacks places that aren’t home or work, where people can come together meaningfully. Meanwhile, loneliness and depression are increasing. So the vision is that these small circles start to form a kind of organic network — people bringing that experience of connection and creativity back to their communities, workplaces, and personal lives. We’re just beginning, but I’m really excited. The response so far has been overwhelming — people clearly want this. That’s incredible. How have you been met so far? It’s literally the first week of launching it. Congratulations. Thank you. It’s been exciting. I love early-stage things — that organic, alive feeling. Honestly, I didn’t even set out to start something. It came directly from people’s responses. Even at the summit where we met — in the creative breakout session — people were so hungry for this kind of conversation. Every time I’ve hosted one, it’s been the same. I’ve also been talking with a lot of artist friends about it. We’re all worried about what will happen to human creativity in this new landscape, and we don’t have many spaces to talk about it. People are either rejecting AI completely or blindly accepting it. At the summit, we talked about “conscious integration.” We can’t stop the technology, but we can shape how we integrate it into our lives. People need the tools, the spaces, the community to do that. I have so many thoughts bouncing around. In my own community — totally separate from creativity — we’ve been wrestling with how alienating technology can be. Social media, online forums, all these platforms that are supposed to connect us often isolate us instead. We’ve lost strong spaces for shared understanding. That’s something I think about all the time. You came from St. John’s College — this deep, humanities-based education rooted in dialogue. And you’re also a musician. I met you as an artist first, not as a nonprofit leader. How did you decide to show up in this work as a musician rather than just as an executive or organizer? That’s a great question. I led an organization for a long time, and after the pandemic, I realized that music had always been my soul — but I hadn’t fully pursued it. It was always the side project, the nights-and-weekends thing. When I stepped down from AI for All, I decided to finally focus on music. It felt like reclaiming a part of myself that had been waiting for years. After that, it was like an explosion of creative energy. I’m working on a new EP and album right now, producing my own music — building soundscapes, telling stories through sound. It’s my calling. And that connects to Resonance too, because I’ve realized how many people feel that same disconnection from their creative selves. There’s this show, Severance, that explores this idea — how we limit ourselves to our work personas, how other parts of us stay hidden. Our modern life pushes us to fragment ourselves, especially with the speed of technology. Resonance, to me, is about authenticity — helping people bring those hidden parts back together. That’s why we include a creative share in every circle. You wouldn’t believe how powerful it is to witness each other’s creativity and vulnerability. In the art world — songwriting retreats, for example — we’re used to full emotional expression. But in the business world, that’s often discouraged. Yet creativity and innovation actually make workplaces stronger. So I want to model the marriage of seeming opposites — art and strategy, feeling and thinking — because they feed each other beautifully. What do you love most about the work? Where is the joy in it for you? Bringing people together. Seeing what happens when deep conversation and creativity collide. At St. John’s, I fell in love with deep conversation — the kind that explores what’s hidden, that helps us make sense of the world. Asking big questions gives us agency. It reminds us that we shape our lives; we’re not just victims of circumstance. I believe in human agency and creative potential. Sometimes, all it takes is a good conversation to unlock that. I’m going to indulge myself for a second. There’s this essay by Ursula Le Guin called “Telling Is Listening.” Have you read it? I haven’t, but I love her. You’d love this one. In it, she draws a diagram of how we usually think about communication — two boxes with a tube between them. The boxes take turns being sender and receiver, trading little bits of information back and forth. She says that’s ridiculous, because anyone who’s actually been in a real conversation knows that conversation isn’t about information — it’s about relationship. So she redraws it. In her version, conversation is like amoeba sex — when amoebas merge, their boundaries dissolve. It becomes reciprocal and interdependent, a shared space. That essay totally changed how I think about talking and listening — especially because I interview people for a living. It made me realize that when people talk to each other and really listen, it’s not about exchanging facts. It’s about creating a space where new things become possible. That’s beautifully said. Yes. I love that. Earlier you talked about how fast everything is changing — how this thing is rocketing forward — and yet the story around it feels so boring. Exactly. It’s the same old story: economic growth, efficiency, profit. And it’s exhausting. That’s part of why these conversations matter. We’re constantly ingesting media, absorbing these narrow narratives without even realizing it. You scroll for five minutes and suddenly the world feels hopeless. Questioning those stories — slowing down to actually ask what we believe — is crucial. At AI for All, one of our main focuses now is telling new stories: highlighting young people using AI for good. Students from across the country are building projects to solve problems that they care about — Alzheimer’s detection, accessibility tools for the visually impaired, AI to detect brain tumors. These stories are amazing. They remind us that AI doesn’t have to be dystopian — it can be deeply human and purpose-driven. But we miss those stories because the media isn’t built to show them. People are hungry for alternatives. Nobody wants to live in doom and gloom all the time. Stories shape what we think is possible. We need new ones — stories about hope, creativity, and human potential. Listening to you, I realize that part of me wants you to be “against” it — to take a clear stand against AI. I even caught myself using the word “resistance.” But you don’t talk like that. You’re not against it. You’re something else. Right. I get that. And actually, I’m working on a new album about exactly that — this tension between extremes. There’s so much binary thinking: pro-AI or anti-AI, nature versus technology, human versus machine. But I think the real story is in the in-between. I want to explore that space as an artist — to show that technology isn’t necessarily the opposite of being human. I’ve been recording found sounds in the redwoods and mixing them with AI-generated textures. It’s about coexistence, conversation, not conflict. I’m not against AI. I see incredible potential — to help with climate change, health care, education — if we use it consciously. But I’m also a realist. There’s too much money and momentum behind it to resist in the traditional sense. So “resistance,” in the optimistic way, means something different: it means steering it consciously, collectively. We can’t stop it, but we can shape it. And the for/against grooves — they really are disappointing. That’s why I keep coming back to middle ground, to integration. You said something earlier about “strong spaces.” That reminded me of an anthropologist I interviewed once, Cyril Maury. He wrote a piece arguing that in the age of AI, place matters more than ever. He said that when the internet flattened the world, locality seemed less important. But now, with AI, the world has splintered — and in a splintered world, real places, physical spaces, actually matter more. That resonates so deeply with me. Yes, exactly. Gathering in person feels more meaningful than ever. After the pandemic, so many of us became even more disconnected. It’s wild — you can have hundreds of “friends” online and not know your neighbors. People are hungry for real presence, real connection. But it’s hard to rebuild that alone. That’s why intentional gatherings — circles, rituals, shared space — matter so much. We live in such an abstracted, digital existence. Everything is virtual, disembodied. I think there’s this natural human movement now to come back into the body, back into physical space. Loneliness is a public health crisis. Connection — embodied, in-person connection — is the antidote. The stronger our local, grounded connections are, the more resilient we’ll be to all these big changes. Maybe just one last question — we met at the Artificiality Summit. What was that experience like for you? I loved it. It was my first time attending. There were so many mind-blowing talks — bleeding-edge AI research, discussions about consciousness and the future. It was like glimpsing what’s coming next. But what really stood out to me were the people. It reminded me of St. John’s College — three days of smart, curious people having deep, open conversations about how to live well in this new era. At one point, we did this collective experiment — trying to write something together with AI as a democratic tool. It was fascinating, and honestly a little chaotic. It reflected so many of the larger questions about how we integrate technology without losing our humanity. In the end, what stayed with me were the conversations — meeting people like you, connecting deeply about these questions. That’s what gives me hope. Beautiful. Thank you so much. I’m so glad we met, and I can’t wait to see what Resonance becomes. Thank you. It was great to be here. 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]

Erika Hall on Fear & Ignorance

Erika Hall [https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikahall/] is a designer, author, and consultant. She is the Co-Founder and Director of Strategy at Mule Design Studio [https://www.muledesign.com/] in San Francisco and author of the influential books Just Enough Research and Conversational Design. Her work centers on evidence-based design, organizational learning, and ethics in digital practice. Research Questions are Not Interview Questions [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/research-questions-interview-erika-hall/]: So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I’ve borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. I stole it because it’s such a big, beautiful question—but because it’s so big, 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 are in complete control, and you can answer any way that you want to. That’s my general way I approach life. And the question is: Where do you come from? That’s a fantastic question. Yeah, I’ll answer that on several levels, because I think they’re all important to where I am now. And the origin point is I come from Los Angeles. And it’s a two-parter. I come from across the street from the airport until we got eminent domain, and then the Valley. So if you’ve heard of Valley Girls—I was there. I was a child when that song was blowing up. But those parts of being in Los Angeles, and then really being in the Valley in the ’80s—that’s a cultural context. And then the next most important origin is I got the heck out of L.A. and went back East for school, where I studied philosophy. So I come from L.A., I took a tour through New England, and I’m back in the Bay Area. So my perspective is very Californian and very question-asking. I don’t have a traditional design or research background. I come from philosophy, with a dash of studying abroad in Moscow. And all of those things—I’m finding, and the reason I’m answering this question like that—is every part of that is so wildly relevant to what I do and how I am now. Those are kind of the key ingredients to that. So having grown up in the suburbs outside of Rochester, L.A., California—the Valley—I mean, these are mythical, mythical places. That you were there, growing up—what was it like? What can you say about growing up in that? I mean, the really salient thing to say is: it’s well documented. Because I really felt like I was growing up in a place and time that all the movies were being made about. So it’s like, what was it like? I went to a prom in the same ballroom that Pretty in Pink had been filmed in. So it was like, I really felt like—if you want to feel like, “Oh, we’re the center of the cultural universe”—in Los Angeles at that time, that’s sort of the feeling. And yeah, so if you watch Terminator 2, that aqueduct is right by my house. That’s sort of the fun part of it—how much was happening there then that was culturally important. Like we had KROQ, which is an amazing radio station. So I felt like all of the best new music—I was listening to it. And then, yeah, it was really funny because I went to school back East, and to people back there, it was mythical. I came from this mythical place, and they would ask me questions about it, like, “Does everybody really talk like that?” And I think part of it—one of the reasons I left—was I needed finishing school to get rid of my strong Valley accent. Our lawyer actually spent a lot of time in Southern California, and we had a podcast, and one of the podcast reviews was, “Their California accents are so strong.” So if I’m talking to someone who’s from the same place, or if I go back there, the accent comes back. And the other question I got was about whether I was worried about getting shot on the freeway, because that was a thing that was happening. And I’m like, well, yeah, I worry about being among all those cars and everything. And so, yeah, it was like that in a lot of ways. I feel that Frank Zappa—that song—is an ethnographic document, really, a linguistic situation. But I went to the Galleria. I went to the beach. There was a section of my yearbook devoted to the large hair. People had shoulder pads. I hated Reagan. I don’t—I don’t know. So yes, I’d say the one thing is the movie Valley Girl with Nick Cage, which I love—I love him so much—the thing that’s most wrong with that movie is that he’s supposed to be punk, and he was in no way punk. Because it was about this girl from the Valley, this affluent suburb. I went to public school, and a bunch of my friends drove BMWs. I was not from the BMW part of the Valley, but it was wild. And people were really self-aware, you know? Because I think children and teens always know more than adults give them credit for. And we were really clear on what was going on in the world and in politics and everything—even before the internet. So yeah. I drove once I got a car when I was 16. I drove a lot and really was like, yeah, if you watch those movies—and there was Booksmart, I think, is a recent movie—that was still the vibe in Los Angeles. So yeah. It’s incredibly well documented, I think, just because the movie industry was there. What—do you have a memory of what you wanted to be as a child? Like, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted—well, there were a few different things. I wanted to be an architect for a while. And I had an Etch A Sketch, and I would actually draw floor plans on my Etch A Sketch. And then a couple of things took me off track. I even applied—one of the schools I applied to was a school of architecture. So I got in, and I could have done that. But I was all over the place. I was like, maybe I’ll do psychobiology, maybe I’ll do architecture—we’ll see what I’ll do. And then I ended up going to a liberal arts school, which was perfect. But then I took a look at the built environment of Los Angeles, and I’m like, oh, we don’t need more architects. And then one of my teachers made us read The Fountainhead, I think in a prophylactic manner—like, you have to read this to be inoculated against these terrible ideas. And I read that, and it angered me so much that I was just like, I don’t want to be part of this. Also, you read about the profession, and it’s super competitive and super misogynistic and all of that. But I also didn’t realize until much later that I grew up surrounded by Eames stuff, right? Because being in Los Angeles—we had Mathematica, which I think is still in Boston, which is this amazing, kinetic, sculptural, experiential exhibit of the principles of mathematics. And that was my early childhood. So if you haven’t seen it, look it up—it’s at a science museum in Boston, I think still. There were a few different instances of this. And at the Museum of Science and Industry, they had the Eames explaining math. And I think the sort of Eames was in the air—all of that mid-century modern stuff was in the air. And that was a big part of coming from Los Angeles, too. And so I think the fact that I ended up doing a lot of information architecture—I was like, oh, this is sort of similar. And buildings are great. And I have friends who are architects who have gone to architecture school. It’s just—I am not a patient person. That’s also why the movie business—even though I grew up in Los Angeles and love the movies, everything about that—I never wanted to be in front of the camera. But seeing that process, I have so much admiration for filmmakers. But wow, the patience of putting something like that together is beyond me. So I’m happy about the internet. I’m curious about—you went East to a liberal arts school. And, you know, I’m from the East, I went to a liberal arts school, so probably the question of what it’s like to be from California came to mind. But what did you make of the people in the Northeast? Who did you find at these liberal arts colleges, as somebody from the Valley? It was a lot of—I couldn’t afford to visit. So I just kind of dropped in, like, oh, I guess I’m doing this now. I just flew out, you know, September of my freshman year, and I was like, what is going on here? Because I didn’t understand a lot of the things people were saying to me. It was class-coded. I was like, why are you—like, I told a story, and someone asked, “Why are you so hyped on Nantucket? Do you come from a whaling family?” And like, you summer places? Does that mean that where you live sucks part of the year? There were all these—there were all these codes and ways of being that I was like, really? Why? Why are you like that? And I found out about private beaches, and I was just horrified. Because a private beach is illegal in California. As a person who is not even a resident, but just as a human being, you have a right to coastal access in California. And if you have a beach property, you have to let people—there’s a number of feet. I mean, this sounds like maybe a minor thing, but I think it’s a hugely important difference in how you think about the land. California is not perfect, but it’s like, you can’t just block people off from access to the ocean. And I feel like I learned about all the private clubs and ways of excluding people. And California being a place where people just end up. The unfortunate part is we haven’t built enough housing for all the people who end up here. But just the space and the light. I thought people were fascinating, and a lot of the things sort of didn’t make sense to me. Like, it was fun—like seasons. I’m like, oh, seasons are cool. But I noticed that I was friends with people from New York, from Maine, and from California, mostly. There were states where I’d meet somebody and we’d get along, and they’d be from one of those states. It was a great experience. I had a friend who was in the dorm next to me freshman year. He was from Hawaii, and he was the only person I knew who was even more like a fish out of water than I was—just because it dropped below 60, and he was bundled up in his coat like, “Why did I do this?” And we were both there like, “Why did we decide this was a good idea when we were 16 or whatever?” A lot of it was tough because it was just a different way of being. It was a small town instead of Los Angeles. A lot of it was really hard. I’m glad I did it. I learned a lot. I got a great education from doing it. But yeah, I was just like, huh, East Coast people. It was really important to me, even when I was young, because I had a lot of autonomy over where I was going to college. I was the first person in my family to go to college, so it was my whole project. I thought I would stay and go to a UC—for many reasons—but then I got a scholarship, and I was like, “Okay, we’re doing it.” It’s wild, the things that just happen in life. I’m just like, why am I here? This is wacky. So, catch us up. Where are you now, and what’s the work that you do? Where am I now? I’m in San Francisco. After college, I settled into the Bay Area like a tick, and I’ve been in San Francisco for a really long time. I co-founded Mule Design with my partner, Mike Monteiro, a really long time ago. What I’m doing now—it’s consulting, really. A lot of it is practice development. And what that means is, we’ve done so much work with so many different organizations. Now that so many design teams are in-house, the best we can offer is helping the people. Because if you go to work in-house, you don’t have that kind of cross-training from an agency, and you don’t know what the job is supposed to be like. And you’re in that reporting structure. The best we can do for both the practitioners and the organizations is bring that outside perspective. When you see the same things in ten different organizations and you’ve had to wrestle with them—things around decision-making, getting the work done, or knowing what questions to ask—it gives you useful insight. A lot of what I do are research workshops now, because everybody sort of does design research wrong. We also do communication strategy and sometimes get more into the actual hands-on work—straightening out your information hierarchy, doing actual branding, things like that. But mostly it’s just taking all the expertise we’ve had from twenty years of design work in all these circumstances and providing that to people—providing that expertise that’s hard to get in the current situation. When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this? Were you a designer first or a design researcher? Neither. First, I was on the technical side. I was coding and stuff like that because that’s what I was interested in. The other part of my origin story is, when I got my first computer a long time ago, I wanted to learn to program. And the key origin story part is, I really wanted a computer. Where did that come from? I hung out at Radio Shack a lot—more than a lot of little girls in the Valley. I don’t know. But I asked for a computer because I wanted to learn to program. And they got me a game system. They got me an Atari. And I was mad. So that’s—if you want the key to my whole way of being—it’s that I wanted to learn to program, and you got me video games? Man, the Lisa Simpson energy was just strong with me. And I’m like, fine, fine, I’ll play a lot of Atari. Here’s your lightly edited version—cleaned up for clarity, grammar, and flow, but preserving your original voice and meaning, with no added words or labels: And I actually, at one point, did work for a company that was doing video game-based community and stuff like that. So it worked out. I started off coding—front-end stuff like HTML, Perl, JavaScript, all that. That’s where I started, because I started working at a publishing company. It was the earlier days of the web, so there was a lot of fluidity in the role. And when you’re a liberal arts person, you’re like, I’ll do whatever. So I started there. Then I ended up working for a consultancy, an agency, and I was like, this I like. Short attention span—I liked going in, helping people solve a problem, getting out, working on a team of people. That was all really fun. And just because I can do things, I ended up doing project management, content strategy, information architecture, and stuff like that. Then we started an agency, and I was doing all sorts of things. I worked with a researcher—who’s still a friend—at my first agency, and that’s how I was mentored in design research. But the only reason I sort of specialize in it is because people were approaching it wrong. We kept having arguments with clients about, “Can’t we just do the design part without the research part?” I was so tired of having the conversation that I wrote a book about it—because there was no book. I had to do the thing where you write the book you wish existed. There was nothing accessible for people, and I was like, this is bananas. People aren’t asking questions—they just want to make things. And I felt there was a lack of focus because so many people just wanted to make things. And I’m like, well, I like asking questions, so I’ll just kind of work on that part of it. My experience is—I’m assuming you’re talking about Just Enough Research, is that the book you’re referencing? Your writings across the board have always struck me as so welcome—and kind of alone, really. To your point, I don’t encounter a lot of people articulating the in-the-weeds principles of what’s research and what’s not, other than you. So maybe this is just a way of saying thank you so much for doing that work. But I wonder—maybe the follow-up question is: what do you make of research today? I know I’ve had my own fixation on how these weird labels—UX, CX—feel like machine-like acronyms for what’s really a human interface. So maybe tell us: when you say “design research,” what do you actually mean? And what are the mistakes people make when they talk about users and all that? Oh, boy. Yeah, the reason I talk about research—and talk about design research, not UX research, not user research—is that design research is the investigations you do, or the things you learn, in order to make better decisions. To make intentional changes in the world. Because design is fundamentally about intentionally intervening in systems and making artifacts under conditions of uncertainty, right? That’s the whole design-versus-craft—or all those arguments people get into. The key is, you’re trying to do something in a new way. You’re figuring it out as you go. And design research is the stuff you investigate or learn so you have a better chance of success and reduce your risk. That includes things like: you want to understand the people you’re designing for, because you’re fundamentally making choices on their behalf. But it also includes: what will it take for this thing to succeed? Whether or not it’s a for-profit business—what are the conditions that will sustain it? You have to understand who else is solving this problem, because that’s a huge mistake people make—like, “Oh, we’re going to do this thing that’s already solved,” or “nobody wants it,” right? You have to understand your organization, who you’re working with, your capabilities. You have to look at the history and say, “How has this been tried before?” And you have to know how to talk about it—the brand, all of that. All of these pieces were part of what we did at that first agency at the end of the ’90s. It was very holistic. Then, for reasons, it got reduced—limited to, “Oh, we’re doing user research,” and not thinking about these other things. And “user experience” became the label people used instead of “design,” for reasons. I think the biggest mistake people make is carving up the way of understanding the world. It’s like that parable about the blind men and the elephant. Organizations codify and reify that. They’re like, “Okay, we’re definitely distributing the elephant throughout our organization.” That makes no sense to me. If you’re making decisions about bringing something new—maybe consequential, maybe not—into the world, don’t you need to understand all the parts of it? And organizations do not do that. That’s why I’ve really focused on that piece of it. Because making all the other pieces—people are really hyped on those. “I made a beautiful, tangible artifact!” Cool. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t do the thing you want it to do, or doesn’t fit into the world, or if it’s based on false assumptions. Because I’ve always liked asking questions—that’s just my thing. And I’m happy doing that. I’m happy helping other people do that. And that’s where I’ve ended up focusing my work. Yeah. How would you say it’s changed over time—from the first to second edition? It’s been a while, right? How are organizations today trying to understand the world? Watching this happen has been fascinating. The way it’s changed—again, looking back at what I was doing with my colleague in ’99 or whatever—we were doing all the things. The tools weren’t as available, and I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing. There are a lot of platforms now that promise “insights at scale” and all that crap. But tools only help if you already have a solid practice. I think people are substituting. So, I would say the biggest change I’ve seen in terms of practice—this might not be linear—but the biggest change is: once the concept of design research, or user research, or user experience research, percolated into organizations as “Oh, this is a thing we need to do,” they started doing it, but they don’t really want to do it. What I mean is: because of the incentive structure organizations are working in—which is typically to maximize shareholder value, maximize investor value—when things are highly financialized, reality doesn’t matter as much. It’s all about telling a story to the market, telling a story to investors. The thing that’s changed structurally is that the economy has gotten more financialized—in large part because the internet enabled that. It allowed the abstraction and securitization of everything. So many shenanigans are enabled by the internet, and that fed back into everything. If everything is just a story you’re telling to investors, reality just gets in the way. Because if you’re talking about creating something for someone to use in the world—you know, like we have a really good coffee maker that we bought on the recommendation of a friend, and it seemed expensive, but he said, “Oh, this will last forever…” Here’s your cleaned-up, lightly edited transcript. I’ve preserved your tone and wording while improving flow, punctuation, and sentence structure for easier reading. Nothing added, just refined: And I’ve had the same coffee maker for, like, what, ten years now? It’s a really good coffee maker. And that was designed to be really high quality because they were selling it to people in exchange for money. There are very few things now that are just sold in exchange for money. And when things aren’t sold in exchange for money, then it’s like—what are the factors in the decision? And quality is not really a factor. In fact, there’s a news story now saying that people aren’t upgrading their phones enough, and so we’re all going to tank the economy, right? So the whole economy is based on not creating things that really work in the real world. It’s based on all these financial shenanigans. And that’s what made it tough for research. There’s a lot of conversation about, “Oh, we just have to prove business value.” But the fundamental issue is that business value doesn’t come from making better quality things for users or customers. Business value comes from telling a story to the market. And when the business value is based on those sorts of fictions and relationships—and getting market power and shenanigans—research has less value to the business. Often it’s really inconvenient to know things about the world that interfere with your story. So that’s part of it for a lot of these businesses that care about scaling and telling stories to investors or whatever. There are still—though they don’t get a lot of press—organizations that do things that are real, right? People still make coffee makers. People make devices and things like that. So, if an organization makes things that are real, and the real world matters to their success, then research still matters. Then the problem is the tools. So many organizations have created software tools, and so much of the information about how to do good research comes from the makers of these tools. Some of the tools are fine, but— What kind of tools are we talking about? Survey platforms, testing platforms, analytics platforms. They put all this marketing money out there, and so if you’re just looking up “how do I learn things?” what you’ll get is: subscribe to our giant, expensive enterprise platform, and that’ll give you what you need. That feeds into a common practice—organizations buy a tool set. We’re seeing it now with so-called AI. Like, “If I buy the tool set, it promises benefits.” And once you’ve made the investment, you make everyone use the tool. Then there’s a lot of skepticism for things that don’t have a cost associated with them—which is the stuff I advocate for. Like, “What if you talked to people?” There’s no marketing budget behind, “What if you listen to people or just look at the world?” And that’s why I do what I do. That’s why there’s that gap. I have a book that costs $25, and that’s fine. I have a workshop that’s not that much if you’re buying an individual ticket—or even if you’re bringing me into your company, it’s still not that much. It’s a tiny amount of money to say, “What if you just talk to people?” Meanwhile, these software companies are making huge promises and charging huge amounts. And because of how the human mind works, people value what they pay more for. Often, bringing it back to our consulting practice, the greatest service we provide is charging money to organizations to get them to listen to the people they already hired. I mean, I identify with a lot of that. You brought me back—I’ve been in those conversations. I guess it’s a beautiful articulation of... I mean, I’m always interested in the argument for qualitative. What is the argument for qualitative in that system? How do you make the case to talk to people? Well, the argument for qualitative is—you can’t. Like, this is also something I work on—this “versus” battle between qualitative and quantitative, because it makes no sense. You cannot measure what you don’t understand. You need both. But you need qualitative work first because you have to say, “Hey, what things exist in the world?” Once you determine that—phenomena, patterns of behavior, physical objects, ways of being, concepts—then you can say how much, how often, when. But it’s easier to develop and charge money for systems that aggregate a lot of quantitative data. So there’s all this focus there. You could read James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State—which I recommend constantly. He was writing about governments, but these organizations now are quasi-governmental. I mean, they’re larger than nation-state economies. Their decisions are more consequential. If you think of people who are active Facebook users as citizens of Facebook—that’s larger than any country, really. And these organizations are moving money and creating individuals—the billionaires—who have amounts of power and influence beyond anything we’ve seen in the history of the world. That’s the focus on quantitative. Also, you can make numbers say anything. Ten years ago—before it was “AI,” when it was “big data”—we had these giant “data lakes,” and the promise was, “If we have this data, we’ll make great decisions.” I had a whole talk based on that. It’s the same thing: the surface promise is that you’ll have insight, but really, you’ll have so much data that you can pull from it to support whatever you want to do. That’s why making the case for qualitative is tricky. Because if you have someone in a position of power who’s just looking for support for what they already want to do—that’s why qualitative gets in the way. And that’s why quantitative is so exciting. Also, everything’s about scale, scale, scale. Which—cool—except if you’re scaling the wrong thing. I’d say scale is more often a bad thing. Up to a point, maybe it’s good, but wow—we need to unscale some things. So the issue isn’t one or the other. The issue is: you have to understand what people are doing before you say how much. Here’s your lightly edited transcript—same approach: cleaned up for flow and clarity, but your tone and content remain unchanged. No added words, just polishing. And then it’s feedback—you need to—they go together, right? But again, I’ve talked to so many people who are in these versus situations, especially when quant is one team and qual is another team. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. But it depends on the business. I talked to someone recently who’s in a sort of lead-gen kind of business, and it really is just a little machine for generating a transaction fee off something. All they’ve got to do is keep that little machine running. So they don’t really need to do qual, because it’s like a little machine. So it depends on the business. But yeah, you really do need to understand the actual things in the world. What do you love about the work? Like, where’s the joy in it for you? Joy in it for me? People are so interesting. I mean, the real joy is that if you come at the world with kind of a research mindset, nothing is wasted. Right? If you’re in a really annoying situation—and I tell people this all the time when I’m working with them—if you’re being frustrated by something, or if you’re dealing with a product that makes no sense, or something that’s good, anything you’re interacting with that’s interesting to you, and you’re like, huh… If you stop and go, “Why is it like that?” and you follow that... Despite everything—the degradation of websites and internet tools and all of that—you can still find information really, really quickly. If you’re curious about anything, about any term, any concept, any physical thing, and you follow it back, you could, within ten minutes, find out why something’s like that. And that’s really interesting. Because people get so focused on the future—designers and technologists and entrepreneurs focus on the future—and ignore the past. And that’s a real mistake. Because whatever you’re doing, you’re intervening in a world that exists. And it’s worth looking at what’s persisted—why are things like they are? The fun for me is that people are really interesting. And it’s fun—like, it’s now fun—because we’ve been doing this for so long that I’ll be in a situation that used to be super itchy and uncomfortable for me, like there’s a conflict or something’s gone wrong, and a client’s upset. And I’m like, oh, I know how to deal with this. So there’s the part where experience makes things more fun, because you’re not like, oh my god, I’m in an uncomfortable situation. But there’s also the, like—I want to help. Fundamentally, I am a problem solver at my core. We joke about this all the time: when you recognize that you’re a consultant in your heart, and you see a problem, and you’ve got to stop yourself. The question we talk about internally—if we’re dealing with somebody we know personally who has a problem—is: don’t offer help that wasn’t asked for. That’s the thing. If you’re a problem solver, if you’re a consultant, it’s like, “Oh, let me help you with that.” But it’s like—no. If they’re paying you to help them, then help them. But don’t try to solve people’s problems if they didn’t ask. So it’s satisfying when I actually help—that too. I love the way you use the word practice. I’m curious about that. And maybe within this: what kind of practice do you recommend, or try to help teams build or develop? What are the things you see them struggle with—what are the problems you see over and over again? That’s a good question. Because, wow—it’s like the same five problems. And this is what I love about that. Now, when I do the workshops—the public ones where people can just go and buy an individual seat—I get people from different countries. Just last week, I had people from Northern Europe, Kenya, and all over America, all talking about the exact same problems. The struggle for teams, one of the big ones, is how the organization they work in sees the value of research. A lot of times, people were hired to do a job nobody actually wants them to do. But they’re told, “You just have to prove your value.” And it’s like, why should somebody have to prove their value? They went through some heinous hiring process that probably took a year. They have a job—and then their job becomes justifying their job. That’s garbage. Right? Because it’s like, wait—you hired me. I didn’t suggest my job title. You’re like, “We have this role. We hired you. We’re paying you to do a thing with a job description.” And then the organization turns around and says, “Justify why your job exists.” And I’m just like, no. Do not participate in that. Don’t be on the defensive. Look at the organization and ask, “Why am I really here?” Because the bad news I have for a lot of designers and researchers is: they were hired as part of a growth story. They were never hired to create the kind of business value they were told they were hired to create. They were hired to say, “Look, we have a giant research team! A robust design team!”—to ignore. Right? Then they’re just handed instructions of things to build. And the strategy is shifting all the time, because it’s just reacting to competitors or to the market. If design is fundamentally doing something intentional—and trying to do it well—you bring these poor practitioners and experts into an environment, and they’re like, “Is it me?” The worst part is, I see people making themselves insane being like, “Obviously I’m doing something wrong.” And it’s like—no. The first step is looking around and asking: What is the organization actually incentivizing, and why? How much can you change what it’s incentivizing? And if you can’t? Then it’s like—relax. Stop trying so hard to justify your job. You can’t. There’s a little serenity prayer in there: “Oh, this is just how it’s going to be.” Okay. But if you’re in an organization where the decision-making is broken, the first things to change are collaboration and decision-making. If you don’t have a collaborative environment... I’ve worked with organizations where I’ve talked to people in large enterprises with a whole building full of researchers. And they’re off doing their research, generating reports—and the organization does what it’s going to do anyway. Sometimes I get asked, “How do I get stakeholders to pay attention to the research? How do I present better?” And it’s like—if they didn’t care at the start, there’s nothing you can do to make them care. So the actual practice change—once you have an organization that aligns on goals and has a reality-based business—is getting people to actually talk to each other and resolve the territory battles. Then, you get everyone asking questions together. The biggest practice shift is moving away from tools and away from activities to: What do we actually need to know? That’s the big first step. It’s often internal research first: “What are we trying to accomplish?” “Why is that our goal?” “What do we already know?” That sort of level-setting around what we actually agree on. Only then can you start to work on the research part of the practice—where you say, “Let’s all ask questions together.” This is the part everyone skips over. A lot of the value I bring is helping people understand what it means to ask a question—how to ask a good one, and how to know when you’re done asking it. Everything else is taken care of. There are tons of tools and 10,000 books, but everybody skips over the “What are we asking?” They skip right to: “Let’s run a survey,” “Let’s do interviews,” whatever. And it’s like—why, though? What do you need to know? Then they end up with results from the research and they’re like, “We don’t know what to do with these.” All the problems show up at the end: “We think we learned something, but we don’t know,” or “It’s getting ignored.” And all that money and time gets wasted. You have to start by agreeing on your goals and where you need more information. Then: when do you need to make a decision by? Once you have those things—“We need to decide in two weeks,” “Here are our goals,” “Here’s what we don’t know”—everything gets straightforward. Then you can fit your research into your schedule. Because objections about time and budget are really just people not wanting new information. So you can’t argue against time and budget objections with time and budget answers. In preparing for our conversation, I was reminded of one of the first things I saw you write—on LinkedIn. The title was Research questions are not interview questions. And it was like a chorus of angels. Because I’ve so often been trapped in those conversations where the expectation is: just ask people to answer my question. Like, “Let’s just ask them to solve our problem for us.” I didn’t always feel armed with a good response. But you just talked about educating people about what a question is. So maybe—what is a good question? And how do you help people understand what can be asked and how? It took me a long time to realize the confusion between interview questions and research questions. Again, this is something you talk about because it’s an intellectual exercise. It’s not something you buy a tool to do. So there’s less information about it out there. It’s often associated with the more academic side. So it’s just not a thing people are ever taught. You really just have to start with: What are your questions? Get them all out there. People are afraid of asking questions. Then, you separate out—once you see all the things you might need to know—where your risk of failure is. That’s how you get to the real research question. There are questions you have, and there are questions that are good research questions—questions you can turn into a little project. So if you’re with all the people who will be making decisions based on the information, you have to get all the questions out. That can be really scary, especially for people higher up in an organization, who have to project confidence. That’s often the biggest barrier to research: “I have to look like I know what I’m doing.” But really—you have to admit ignorance in order to learn anything. If you can’t say “I don’t know,” then you can never learn. Once you have a sense of everything you need to know, you can sort through them: These are questions we can answer easily. Maybe it’s in analytics: how many people bought our product last year? You don’t need a research project—someone can just pull the data. Then there’s a question like: How are recent college graduates looking for jobs?Say you’re building a service to help them. You need to know what they’re doing now, in the real world. If your question can’t be answered with existing data, that’s a signal to do research. That’s a practical question you can turn into a project and go out and explore. We’ve got maybe almost no time left, but I want to hear you dish on surveys. You’re very critical of them—and articulate about it. What do we need to worry about when we think about surveys? The reason I fight surveys is that it’s a real tool. It’s a genuine research tool. It’s an advanced tool. The problem is, they’re so easy to make. It’s so easy to create a tool that lets you run a survey, and so easy to get garbage data. And there’s nothing about running a survey that lets you know the data is garbage. Other methods help you course correct. If you’re doing interviews, you’ll notice if you’re not talking to the right person. You’ll hear when your question is confusing. If you’re testing something, you’ll see when the prototype isn’t working. But with a survey—you might get answers, and you have no way of knowing if the sample was skewed, the questions were bad, the results are meaningful. Surveys can be good if it’s what you need. But the problem is that they’re too easy to do, and people skip all the prior research you need in order to write a good survey. Survey platforms—when Twitter was still a thing, I was fighting with the SurveyMonkey account. They were like, “Just run this kind of survey! It’s easy!” And I was like, “What are you doing?” Their incentive is to get you to run lots of surveys. That’s why I didn’t include them in the first edition of Just Enough Research. But I did in the second edition—and in the 2024 edition—because I wanted to go into how to get a representative sample, how to write good questions, and how to understand your audience so you’re writing questions they can answer I encourage people interested in research to take every survey they’re presented with for a week. Really look at them. Think: are they going to learn anything true from this? Who’s going to respond? Why would they respond? Surveys are just a machine for generating noise. And the worst part is when survey results get reported in the news as facts about the world. Then they generate consent. They generate narratives. They become self-fulfilling prophecies. So I think they’re really dangerous in the wrong hands. And too many people are promoting them as an easy thing anyone can do. Yes. That’s beautiful. And it also occurs to me—especially with platforms like SurveyMonkey—is that they completely edge out the collaborative relationship between qual and quant. They position qualitative as unnecessary, as if it has nothing to do with what you’re here to do. Yeah. The problem with all these tools is: everybody’s looking for a reason not to talk to people. Because people are scary. Why do you think that is? Because people are scary. They are. You have to start from that—it’s kind of a legitimate fear. And again, it’s one of those things where we do what we’re taught. Last weekend I was at an event where there was an amazing talk by a fire captain about how she leads firefighters responding to an emergency. And one thing she said—because tech people love to use “putting out fires” as a metaphor—is: what they’re doing is not that. And what she emphasized is: you follow your training. If you’re in a high-stress situation, you do what you were trained to do. She talked about how she responds to a building on fire—which is terrifying. I mean, San Francisco catches fire all the time, and I have so much gratitude for firefighters. The key is: we were not trained to interact with other humans—and those are high-risk situations. It’s just treated as something you should know how to do, like maybe you picked it up at home. But when you look at problems—at a small level, like people have with their families or at work, or geopolitically—it’s because people do not have communication skills. They were called “soft skills” because the military in the ’60s and ’70s divided up skills you can measure and skills you can’t measure. There were “hard skills” and “soft skills” for totally arbitrary reasons. But communication—interpersonal communication skills—are so important. Nobody was taught. And often, you’re in really consequential interactions with other people that are terrifying. And often, you’re right to be terrified, because you might be talking to someone who could fire you, or get you fired, or shun you as a friend, or break up with you. There are all these risks, but you’re never trained to have good interpersonal communication—unless you go to therapy, right? Therapy is like training for being a human. But it’s really expensive, and totally optional. And then people who haven’t gone to therapy become managers. And that’s why organizations are awful. Beautiful. On that note, again, I’m just really grateful that you accepted my invitation. I really love your work, and I’m so glad you’re out there writing. I appreciate you spending your time with me. Oh, sure. That was a great conversation. Thank you so much for inviting me. 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]

Tanu Kumar & Nepal Asatthawasi on Place & Wellbeing

Nepal Asatthawasi [https://www.linkedin.com/in/nepal-asatthawasi-472a0a1b/] is Director of Development at Mechanism [https://www.mechanism.community/]. She leads fundraising and organizational systems that support Mechanism’s work with communities. Before joining Mechanism, she was Director of Development and Operations at the Pratt Center for Community Development. Tanu Kumar [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanu-kumar-0699971/] is Director of Programs at Mechanism [https://www.mechanism.community/]. She leads program strategy and partnerships to help communities design and deliver inclusive, community-led growth. Before Mechanism, she held senior roles at the NYS Office of Planning and Community Development and the Pratt Center for Community Development. All right, Tanu and Nepal, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. I start all these conversations with the same question. Tanu, I think you’ve probably encountered this question before, but I stole it from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories, and I start all these conversations with the same question. So I’m going to ask each of you in turn. It’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I borrow it, but because it’s big, I over-explain it the way I am now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from? And I’ll let either of you choose who wants to go first. Nepal AsatthawasiI can go first. You know, it’s the end of the year. I’m going home soon for a month. Home is Thailand. I’ve been in America for a long, long time, but home is always Thailand. So I come from Thailand, specifically on the banks of the old capital, Thonburi — which is essentially Bangkok, but it was the former capital before it moved. And my people were farmers of durian for a very long time. As Thonburi got incorporated into Greater Bangkok, they became landlords. And I have been trying to live with the knowledge of both those things my entire life. That is why I believe nuanced, community-based urbanism is extremely important — because it’s not just about form. It’s also about people and their histories. Tanu KumarI come from a couple of places. I come from Chicago, from the Midwest, and grew up there for most of my life — suburban Chicago, in a largely immigrant community comprised mostly of people like my parents, who were first-generation immigrants from India. They were able to move to the U.S. because of the passage of a bill in the late 1960s that enabled certain classes of immigrants to enter the U.S. They had a window of about two years to apply for that and guarantee passage. Another place that I come from is India, specifically northern India. My father is from Agra, now a pretty big city in Uttar Pradesh. My mother is from Indore, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. I spent a lot of my childhood going back and forth to India and lived there for longer periods at different points in my life. So I very much feel like I’m from there and from the Midwest. I feel this expansiveness in terms of what my reality is, what cultures I inhabit. It’s a liminal space that I think a lot of first-gen immigrants experience and try to straddle, because there are a lot of different worlds coming together. That’s really part of my perspective in the work I do and in the way I choose to live my life now, as a resident of upstate New York in the Hudson Valley. Do each of you have a recollection of what the younger you wanted to be when you grew up? Did young Nepal or young Tanu — what did you want to be when you grew up? Tanu KumarThere are two things I really wanted to be. One was a dancer on Soul Train — did you all ever watch that? I’ve just dated myself. But I watched it every week and tried to mimic those moves, and that was a huge goal. And the other was a writer. I have a very strong memory of being six or seven and feeling very certain that I was meant to be a writer — not fiction, but nonfiction. I wanted to be a nonfiction writer. Awesome. Do you know who you were thinking of? What was the writer, what was a non-fiction writer to you at that point? Tanu KumarI was thinking of… well, I watched a lot of PBS. So it was the kinds of people that wrote for, were able to create and produce documentaries on PBS, or the Jim Lehrer NewsHour, or any of these things. Those were very strong influences in my life. My father watched this every evening and we had family conversations about it. So anything that was acceptable on PBS was something I wanted to write. I like the Soul Train and the NewsHour together. Nepal, what did you want to be when you grew up, when you were a kid? Nepal AsatthawasiI’m kind of getting stumped because I don’t remember. I feel like I had no strong inclination towards any profession, although with the kind of family that I was in — which was quite conservative and proper and very fixated on social standing and appearance — maybe being a doctor was acceptable. Or, conversely, not being very much at all, as long as you were able to move about in society in a respectable way. So I do remember the through line has always been: I wanted to live life differently and to just be kind of free. Not necessarily bohemian, traveling in Bali with a guitar and a sarong type of free, but I just wanted to live a chill, interesting life doing interesting things. And yeah, still maybe an archaeologist. I like how the archaeologist snuck in at the end there. I mean, I definitely had a shelf of archaeology-related books. But when I was young, that’s the only thing I can remember with any great clarity. But I just wanted a different life. How did you guys meet? We’re going to talk about the work that you’re doing at Mechanism, but when did you first encounter each other or meet each other? Nepal AsatthawasiI feel like it predated us working together for many years before Mechanism. But I’m not certain of the circumstances. Tanu KumarI remember. I was working at the Pratt Center for Community Development in Brooklyn, which Nepal later joined. And we worked together there for many years. But we were working on a project around entrepreneurship and supporting small businesses and thinking about space constraints and issues in New York City. And Nepal was working at LaGuardia Community College’s incubator — I’m going to get the name wrong. But I remember this was back when you went to meet people in person anytime you met them for the first time. So I remember going over to Queens and meeting Nepal there in person. Nepal AsatthawasiSo this was New York Designs, which was the first incubator that CUNY created with a makerspace in it. And it was housed at LaGuardia Community College. So actually, this is amazing because this is our shared — this is our kind of meet-cute. And it has everything to do with what we’re doing now. Yes. In what way? Nepal AsatthawasiIt was trying to create a production and entrepreneurship ecosystem that was connected to a public university system — specifically in one of its non-traditional colleges, its community college. So bringing that framework of small business, entrepreneurship, solopreneurship, innovation to a community of students who, because of their socioeconomic circumstances, didn’t have the luxury or the time to participate in those endeavors. All right. Will you introduce Mechanism? At this point it’s usually, “Tell us a little bit about where you are and the work you’re doing now.” So I don’t know who wants to take the turn, but I want to also introduce Mechanism and the work you do together. Whoever wants to take the lead. Tanu KumarSo Mechanism, which was formerly known as the Urban Manufacturing Alliance — and thanks to you, Peter, is not anymore — we are a nonprofit organization, and we work with communities and manufacturers and practitioners that support manufacturers across the country. We work to create production ecosystems that increase local resilience, well-being, and vitality. We’ve come a long way from our days as UMA. We are still building on those foundations, but I think we are shifting away from “Urban Manufacturing Alliance” in a couple of important ways. One is that we recognize the impact manufacturing has had on communities in ways that have been extractive, have caused harm, have depleted communities. And we are trying to embrace a vision that is more holistic and cultivates ecosystems that center production but also safeguard the environment. And ensure that while we have economic stability, we also empower workers, and we’re thinking about resiliency — community resiliency — in all its forms. Not only environmental resiliency, but also well-being. And we work across the country with communities that want to partner with us. We go to where we are needed or wanted, and where people are trying to accomplish the same visions and goals that we are. Yeah. What’s an example of — I always think of the old Batman show with the red phone. Commissioner Gordon had the red phone he would call Batman on. What’s the Mechanism red phone? When does a city — or who — calls you and why do they call you? What’s the moment that Mechanism was built for, if there’s only one? I know there are many, but why do people reach out to Mechanism? Nepal AsatthawasiI mean, one frequently occurring reason is: they have surfaced information or insights of their own, about things going on in their city — a lot of people engaged in small-batch production, what is commonly associated with making and the maker community, or just small businesses in manufacturing. It could be all of those things, some of those things, or only two of those things. But enough of a concentration that it raises questions about resource allocation, including space, and the identification of opportunities that the community — or the people already doing that — can improve what they’re doing. Their businesses grow. They employ more people. There’s an identification of potential or opportunity and no clear understanding internally of how to analyze what’s happening and take it forward. Sometimes they just want an understanding. They want us to come and share case studies from other places in the country and what we’ve done — or even what we haven’t. A consolidation of case studies that seem appropriate to their circumstance. Other times they realize they need more, at which point we are tapped to co-create programs or communities of practice or learning cohorts, or just give straight consulting on a strategic framework. In answer to why: the reason is usually they don’t understand what’s happening, and they’d like to capitalize on it. What is happening too — and maybe I want to step back a little bit, I remember talking about this — is that there’s one big story that we tell, or gets told, for people outside the work about manufacturing in the U.S. What is the state of manufacturing now, and what’s the story? How is Mechanism doing it now in a way that’s different than maybe it was done in the past? Is that a coherent question? Nepal AsatthawasiExtremely, yes. There are many aspects to this, and I think we just have to — in a boring way — define what we’re talking about, but also recognize that manufacturing is many things, and most of the time we’re not talking about the same things. Because of the political context and the news, the manufacturing that has captured everyone’s attention is the big facilities and plants with lots of immigrant workers who are being raided. There’s also manufacturing made up of family businesses across the U.S. who are being hammered by tariffs and are struggling to continue to do what they do. So those are two strands that are pretty active in our imaginations right now. And I think the picture that paints is that manufacturing is big, right? It’s over 100 employees. It employs a lot of people — enough that disruption is bad for the town or community where it’s located. And a lot of them are trying to get by but still getting all of their materials and parts from overseas, so they’re struggling there as well. And while that profile of manufacturing is true — it’s all true — the manufacturing that we concentrate on, because we want to unlock the specificities of this type of work, is small. They’re definitely under 100. More often than not, under 50. There’s a high chance there’s only one worker there — the owner-operator. At most, they have three to seven other employees. They have space needs but not intense ones. They’re small businesses, but some of them are highly innovative. And while that innovation can drive scale — meaning growth and expansion — more often than not, that doesn’t meet up with their desires for the interesting life they want to have. So like, that’s also a manufacturer. So yeah, I just want to put it out there that it is not a homogeneous typology of business or footprint or whatever. Is there a good story to tell about the work that you’re doing that brings it to life? Tanu KumarYeah, there are a couple. I guess one that I’ll highlight — which is a really recent project — speaks to a bit of what Nepal is talking about in terms of how the manufacturing sector is so varied. In the spaces we create, we tend to focus on the small, but they’re all impacted by and connected to the larger picture of manufacturing, mainly because a lot of these small businesses are part of huge supply chains that exist in the country. But the issues they face are so different from those large businesses. So about a year ago, we launched a pilot project that was funded through the Families and Workers Fund with a goal of helping small and medium-sized businesses bring in workers and also retain them. Because what was happening across this sector — and it’s true of other sectors as well — is that people can’t find employees and they can’t keep their employees. And this project built off research that was hypothesizing that the reason this is happening is because manufacturing leaders, or leaders of any businesses, are really out of touch with their workforce. They’re out of touch with people and the communities and their perspectives — what they need at work to succeed. And in order for this to be addressed or solved, it’s not going to just be a business owner and an employee coming together to solve it. It has to be other entities within these ecosystems that play a role in supporting residents to access and find these jobs and stay in these jobs, and organizations that help these businesses understand how to keep their workforce. So that was the premise — that we were going to bring a whole different group of people together to address this problem. And so we identified two partners. One was in Oklahoma City and one was in Houston, who are training people from low-income communities to work in manufacturing and placing them in these jobs. But they were very concerned about the quality of those jobs. If they were going to put people in these positions, were they going to be high-quality positions that people would want to stay in and grow in? And so they decided to work with us to design a process to help these businesses really engage their workers — through focus groups, through one-on-one conversations — really trying to understand their perspectives and understand the challenges to staying in these positions. And the next step was to change their policies to address that, with support from other stakeholders in the region. And so we did this — they went out and did this — they talked to a lot of folks, they got a lot of information. We came together last month, and there was a very small group of organizations that know about these issues and are committed to working on these issues, that came together to workshop these ideas. And it included some of the employees and employers as well. And it was just a beautiful gathering of people who cared about this and were really working toward a new solution — in states where it’s often challenging to talk about job quality at this moment. It can be challenging to talk about some of these issues, but they were able to do that. And while it’s a long-term process, I think it demonstrates the kinds of spaces that Mechanism can create. We can create environments where people feel comfortable talking about this, where people are taking on topics that are challenging or new. And we’re bringing together the right mix of perspectives to try to drive more innovative solutions. And it was very gratifying that it worked out, that it happened. I think people walked away with a lot of appreciation and a lot of energy to keep working on these issues. Yeah. I mean, because of the work we did together, I’m aware — I have insight into the experiences that you provide for people. And you’re talking about the power of bringing people together and the kinds of spaces you create. I wondered, can you share a little bit about how you do that? Is there a sort of secret sauce? Especially now, it feels particularly magical to have the skill to bring people together to collaborate at that scale. It seems unbelievably important. How do you do it? What’s your approach to bringing those parties together to work on things that are sensitive and big? Nepal AsatthawasiWell, there is an approach and a methodology. But there’s also a culture of care for our guests. They’re participants in our programs, and we facilitate them through conversations that end in action steps and all that stuff. That’s the engagement that we do. And there’s definitely an approach, and Tanu, being in the thick of it, can explain that quite well. I do want to say that we are an organization who — despite how lean we are and how efficiently we work to steward our resources in order to do this work at a broad scale — cares very much about gathering people in beautiful spaces with excellent food and drink. And that doesn’t seem to be a priority for a lot of people working in our space, which is equitable economic development with bits of planning and inclusive capital and stuff like that. We care very much. And it doesn’t have to be luxuriously expensive. We’re not spending funders’ money on four-course meals. But we make sure that people are well fed — usually catering by a local business, usually foods from immigrant communities — and there are snacks, there are cookies, all of those things. That is the setting for us to work on the hard things. We always have really good feedback on our… we always do a survey at the end of our events, and the food always gets really good feedback. But I think we also — and this is illustrated through one of our primary programs and modes of work, which we call Local Labs — one of the things we do in these Local Labs, when we go into a place, is spend a lot of time doing pre-work to understand and connect with a lot of different stakeholders in the community. So we get a sense of all the perspectives and voices that should be in the room and the kinds of connections that will facilitate and support the community to move forward in a decision-making process. So oftentimes, you may not get the mix of people that we bring into a room in a normal setting. But we do a lot of pre-work to make sure we have a diversity of voices, and we open it up to a lot of different kinds of people — maybe people you normally think of as part of a making or manufacturing economy, and those who aren’t necessarily part of that but have a perspective or support it in some way. So I think there’s something really strong about our approach to understanding who needs to be in the room and then getting them there. Okay. How would you guys describe the future you’re aiming at? Some of this can be very abstract, and for people not working in the space it can be hard to get a handle on the impact of it. But what would you say is the biggest challenge you encounter and are working on? And what’s the vision you’re trying to bring into reality when it comes to cities and manufacturing? Nepal AsatthawasiWell, the vision is for many people to have a different relationship to manufacturing and vice versa, right? Before, it was activity at the periphery of cities that released lots of pollutants and toxins into the air and the water — but it made things we needed. And so we put up with it. And it also employed a lot of people who were economically secure and were able to raise their families in a good way. So it was a hive of contradictions, right? We were discussing how even the promise of secure, stable jobs with union benefits… If you read — there was an op-ed about Bruce Springsteen and his father in the Times the other week — which kind of hit hard, pretty emotionally. Because while Bruce Springsteen’s father was employed in the manufacturing sector with a union job, he was miserable. And that job, while giving him economic security, also took a lot from him that passed down pain and trauma to his family as well. And wrapped up in that is the idea of well-being. And the manufacturing and the making and the production that we see is one that really supports and promotes community well-being — whether in the form of jobs or linkages to schools, to senior centers, to art centers, to other nodes within the community that are also important. And conversely, all communities need manufacturing — whether it’s small or large or medium-sized, whatever is right for their scale. Because of the jobs, and because we see the potential for the capability to make things as being part of a resilient future, but also a resilient present. Without the skills and the capacity to make things when we need them, we will be at a loss when the things we rely on and the systems we live in start breaking down, as they do in ways that we are beginning to feel and recognize. So that’s still abstract, but I think an example most people relate to is how, when COVID broke out, we did not have any masks. This country was not equipped to equip everyone with masks to stem the infection. But cities — especially the sewn trades in those cities — stepped up. Facilities were donated, material was donated, and then we had masks. And most of that infrastructure has been broken up and disassembled. But it would be nice to know that in the event of another pandemic, or some other thing that required the capability to make things, we were able to tap into that. What if we needed emergency housing for 10,000 people, and it was full of obstacles to get all the materials and contractors and carpenters from outside the city boundaries? Could we do that? Don’t know. But that’s part of our vision — that we could. That we would develop the capacity to build in that way and respond in that way. Yes, but not only for emergency response. We want to cultivate it because it belongs in a community in other ways too. But for a resilient community, especially one that is proofed against future shocks, we feel it’s vitally important to have a base of manufacturing to stabilize community well-being and resilience. What needs to change in order to make this happen? What position would you want to be given to make the changes you need to implement this stuff? Do you know what I mean? I could say “if you were president,” maybe that’s the one — but what’s the job you would need in order to implement the changes needed for us to do what you want us to do? Tanu KumarI mean, there are so many. First of all, I don’t think it’s anyone — it’s definitely a collective effort. This is system change. And there are a lot of systems that need to be shifted because what they reinforce are instability and inequality. So we have a system — an economic system — that definitely promotes profit and does not take into consideration a balance with our natural environment, our resources, or people. So that is a big system to tackle. But I think that’s one of the foundational systems that production ecosystems operate within. And we hope that these ecosystems could start to reconsider or realign some of those more extractive systems that deplete the earth, that deplete communities. I think there are other systems that perpetuate social divisions within communities. And I don’t want to get too political, but we do have a siloization of people, and there’s not a lot of open dialogue and understanding and communication. And that is a condition that is challenging and makes it harder for us to achieve what we want to achieve. I think what we’re talking about is a more democratic, participatory approach to designing systems. And then I think there are other civic resources or essential social resources out there that we need — and we believe production ecosystems can be important to improving — around, as Nepal mentioned, housing; around thinking about culture and how production and making is tied into our cultural history; around other types of infrastructure needed to get goods from place to place or people from place to place. So it’s all embedded in these other systems that I think are not serving us now and will not serve us in times of crisis or emergency as well. Yeah. I’m curious — you avoided being political, but what was the silo? I will encourage you to get political. What were you pointing at with the siloization? Could you be more clear about what you’re talking about? What I’m thinking of is how challenging it can be in certain cities and states we’re working in now across the country, where there are different political affiliations, beliefs, whatever, between different stakeholders who are working to change something. So there may be people at the center of some approach that would actually improve the lives of their communities — the outcomes for their workers — but they cannot openly talk about that, sometimes even within their own communities, or certainly with policymakers. And so it becomes even more difficult to identify allies to support that work — but also to do the work, because it’s really draining when you have to watch your words, when you have to think about the very real repercussions on your community if you pursue this work. Around funding, or drawing attention from different federal agencies. So there are lots of reasons why you would want to not do that, yet this is still very important work. So I’m thinking about that in terms of siloization. I think there are a lot of people who have just stopped communicating openly with each other. Yeah. We’re kind of coming near the end of the hour we have together. Is there something you want to share in particular about Mechanism that we haven’t had a chance to talk about? Or another way of asking: is there a story you want to tell about Mechanism? Nepal AsatthawasiWell, we are kind of grounded in relationships and a lot of coincidences and alignments that feel like little gifts every time they’re uncovered. So many people over the first 10 years that we were Urban Manufacturing Alliance came to us because someone told them about us. It was like soft whisperings of things that were happening. And Peter, I think when we were talking earlier this year about the essence of Urban Manufacturing Alliance before it was renamed Mechanism, I told you that it’s almost like it was a secret. Yes. Right? So a group of people already in the small world of equitable economic development or inclusive economies have known about us for a long time, but not in a bold-faced way. More like, “Oh, these people do this very specific thing, but it’s really cool — you should go to one of their events.” And that’s how people have traditionally come to us. They’ve told other people. And there are so many coincidences — whenever we travel to cities, and all of us do it a lot, it’s like, “Oh, you might remember me from 2016 at that gathering.” But then it turns out the colleague who sits next to them at work worked with someone who went two years ago, or maybe they went to grad school with one of us. And for me — I don’t know if it’s the same for Tanu — this happens on a weekly basis at this point. It’s both connection to Mechanism, formerly UMA, or to one of us or to one of our colleagues or former colleagues. And it just swirls with serendipity almost. And that’s not really — it’s neither here nor there. It’s not about the work directly. But I feel like it’s a magical space, almost. And how these atoms of people knock into each other all the time reinforces my suspended belief that this is magical, even though we’re talking about economic development here. I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation and sharing Mechanism with the world. Thank you. 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]