Preeti Varma on Listening & Belonging

Preeti Varma on Listening & Belonging

Preeti Varma [https://www.linkedin.com/in/varmapreeti/] is a cultural strategist and qualitative researcher who has worked across fifty markets and lived in eight countries. She has held roles at Flamingo, Ipsos MORI, and Cactus Communications; her clients include Google, Meta, Amazon, BBC, Unilever, Diageo, and Samsung. She holds a Master’s in Gender and Culture from SOAS, University of London, and conducted the qualitative fieldwork for Phase 2 of The Rift [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/varmapreeti_so-happy-to-be-involved-in-the-rift-2-such-share-7420152928369418240-bstB/]. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from my friend of mine, a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. It’s a big question, which is why I use it and also why 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 absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control. I love this question. I also kind of dread it. It is a big question. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. So bear with me as I go through it. So I’ve thought about it. So there are three parts to this. Biologically, I am Indian. And even within that, my mother is from the south, from Kerala. My father is from up north. And I don’t know how much you know about India, but those two are very, very different culturally, linguistically, religiously as well in some ways. But also, both of their families are incredibly different. My mother comes from a Kerala royal family who placed a lot of emphasis on education and culture. And so she was brought up to be very cultured, read a lot, place a lot of emphasis on education. All her parents were very progressive. My aunt has a PhD and they grew up way in the 60s. My mother, she didn’t get her master’s due to family circumstances, but went to college, got great grades, etc. Versus my dad, my father is from farmer stock, from up north. His mother got married at 14. So very different backgrounds. So there’s that as well. My father didn’t learn to speak English till he went to college. So he’s very self-made in that sense as well. And somehow they met, got married. There was an arranged marriage. It was very much a love match, as they say. And then they moved to Japan, which is where culturally my second point comes in. I was born and brought up in Japan, which is what I feel most culturally connected to, which is very different. Because I wasn’t always necessarily accepted as in Japan or seen as Japanese. But that’s what I feel I think most culturally connected with, having been born and brought up there. And I think the third point is where I feel most like I belong. And I think this is the most complicated answer, because I don’t think I belong anywhere really. As an adult, I’ve moved around quite a lot. We’ve lived in eight countries since I turned, I think, 18. And so since then, yeah, we’ve just moved around a lot. And so I feel like I am part of the world in the larger sense. But if you ask me where I come from, I’m not really sure. Yeah, well, it’s a wonderful answer. I have so many things that I’m curious about. I love the third layer of belonging. And I wonder, yeah, well, where are you now? Where do you live now? Right now we are in San Francisco. So we moved here about two and a half years ago. Yeah. And how is San Francisco treating you? Oh, that’s a complex question. So this is my first time living in the West Coast. It’s the first time I’ve lived in the US as a parent. And as an adult, the last time I lived in New York was when I was in college. So I was 18 in New York. It was a very different experience. I loved New York. I loved everything about the East Coast, my experience in New York. As a parent, living in the West Coast, living in San Francisco, it’s been very eye-opening because I do think there are the systems for parents are lacking. And it is a very difficult place to be a parent. And I don’t know if it’s the West Coast. I don’t know if it’s San Francisco in particular. But it hasn’t been the easiest place. And how old are your little ones? Oh, nine and six. Oh, yes. Nice. Well, I want to go back to your biography and where you come from. I spent time in India. I spent time in Kerala. I know just enough about it to be really unbelievably admiring of it. And yeah, were you there? What’s your relationship with Kerala? It’s interesting because I don’t really have much of a relationship with India in general, apart from the fact that I did live there after I graduated college. I do have extended family in India, but they’ve also not lived in the places my parents are from. As Indians, we migrate to wherever we need to be, right? So most of my family actually live in Delhi and in Madras or Chennai. So I only have one grand aunt who continues to live in Cochin. And we visited her very recently. And she still lives there. She still lives in the house that I remember going to when I was very little. But that’s my only real connection to it. And growing up in Japan, do you have a recollection of what young Preeti wanted to be when she grew up? Indiana Jones. I love those movies. I remember it was such a treat watching them with my father. He also loved watching these movies. And he also, he had a huge passion for ancient history, which I think passed on to me. So ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, etc. And so there was some, there was a sense of romance to Indiana Jones. I mean, he was, he got to study archaeology and history, but also be the one who discovers it. There was an element of him being a spy and go on all these adventures. I mean, it was all of that, right? So I just, I really wanted to be Indiana Jones when I grew up. But no, I’m just a humble brand strategist, cultural strategist now. Yeah. Tell us, so you’re in San Francisco, you’ve been there a couple of years, you’ve got a couple of kids. What is the work that you’re doing? What is the work that you do? So I somehow stumbled into a bit of a portfolio career at the moment. It’s not something that I’d actually thought I would ever enter into, but it’s actually provided me with something that I do enjoy, which is variety, which I really, really like. And so I have my own agency, which is called Ginza Bagh, which is an amalgamation of my upbringing, if you will. Ginza is a neighborhood in Japan, where my dad had his restaurant and we would spend a lot of time in. And Bagh means neighborhood in Hindi. And so I put those together to make Ginza Bagh, so neighborhood of Ginza, essentially. And that is my little consultancy that I run, where I do cultural intelligence, foresight and brand strategy work. So I have that, which I run and I work with clients as well as agencies. And then I’m also helping a friend run marketing for their agency here, as well as I’ve just started helping audience growth for a podcast called On Strategy Showcase, which is quite a fun podcast run by a wonderful Irish person named Fergus and he’s a hoot. And then I’ve just started writing a lot. And I’ve started a series of my own called an object story, where I interview people about a particular object that they resonate with. But it’s not really about the object itself. It’s about what the object reveals about them. And so it’s an interesting way to get to know a person. And I’ve been having some very interesting conversations. Yeah. What was the origin story of that project? I am part of a group, I think, which you were a part of called exposure therapy. And there was a topic where we discussed that we had someone, an expert come in who talked about whether or not you can be intimate with objects and places. And the way she used the word intimate wasn’t necessarily, it wasn’t sexual in nature, but it was more about having a relationship with that meant that you had, it was a two way street with an object or a place. And that was a very interesting concept to me, because I remember thinking, as someone who’s moved around a lot, I don’t necessarily feel connected to places very often. Sometimes you feel embrace of a certain place. Sometimes you don’t. But what about objects? What are some objects that I feel I move around with a lot? And how do I relate to that? And what are the stories that it tells about me? What are the stories that I want it to tell other people about me? And that was really the genesis of this idea. And I thought, oh, this is a really interesting idea. I wonder if other people feel this way. And what are the stories that they want to tell about themselves through a particular object. And the idea wasn’t that I didn’t want people to become, it wasn’t an idea for the object to be a sentimental object. I didn’t want people bringing a wedding ring and talking about how they fell in love with their husband or their wife or their significant other. It was more about certain ideologies or stories about their identity and how that tied into that particular object. So my first person was a jeweler friend of mine. And they brought a bottle of whiskey, which I remember thinking, wow, this is going to be an interesting conversation. And he revealed this beautiful story of how he had a friend who had died 10 years ago that week. And this was a gift from that friend. And it became this story of male friendship, and this wonderful intergenerational friendship between Johnny and this person that passed away. And it just revealed so much about Johnny, but also about this friend that had passed away. And it was just a really lovely, poignant story. And I said, okay, I’m onto something. This is a beautiful way to get to know someone. That’s wonderful. I want to hear, tell me a little bit about the work. You said cultural intelligence. What does that mean as you understand it? And when did you first discover that you could make a living doing that kind of thing? Cultural intelligence for me is something that I first encountered about 13 years ago when I joined Flamingo. Flamingo was an Omnicom agency that no longer exists. But I worked with the brilliant Annie and Adam of Starlink Strategy. They were my teachers, my mentors, and some of my best friends today. And I continue to work with them. And so they coined the term cultural intelligence, and they were heads of cultural intelligence at Flamingo. And so they were the ones who taught me how to look at culture all around us. Not necessarily just look at qualitative research and the customer today, but look at what’s happening in culture, what had happened in history, what’s happening right now, but also then connect those things together and see what the tensions are and see where we can push forward. So it’s not just about what the customer is saying today, but how we can push the thinking forward. And so that was where I learned what I do. How did you get there? Just to take one step back, what brought you to Flamingo to begin with? What was the attraction to Flamingo? I had been working in India at small startups. And I was leaving India to move to Singapore. I’d just gotten married. And a friend of mine had said, oh, you would really this agency. You should look them up. And I looked them up. And the way they talked about rooting what they were doing in culture was really... There was something about the way they spoke about looking at culture and rooting what they were thinking about in culture that really resonated with me. And this was at a time when... So I studied fashion design. I had nothing to do with marketing or insights or anything that. But one of the things that I learned while I was at fashion design school at Parsons was this idea of looking at culture, looking at what’s happening around you to start thinking about what’s happening next. It’s a skill that you pick up when you’re working in fashion. You’re looking all around you. You’re looking at culture. You’re looking at all kinds of different reference points to start thinking about where are people looking? What’s the direction people are starting to lean into in order? And what’s that direction that you can then go further into for the next step? And that idea of looking at culture deeply really resonated with me. And that friend connected me with someone who was already at Flamingo, who is Sam Hornsby, who is now the CEO of Triptych. And Sam and I had a great conversation. And he connected me with Emma Gage, who was at the time the CEO of Flamingo Singapore. And she really me. And she then connected me with Adam and Annie. And they said, yeah, no, we love you. And we think you’d be great. So that’s how I got into Flamingo. And that really just escalated my love for everything in the industry. I want to focus on this, the fashion that you came in, you came out of fashion. I wonder how would you articulate what you carry with you that makes you particularly good at your job? You were talking about a little bit. What is it about being trained in fashion or appreciating fashion that makes you able to pay attention to culture in a particular way? I don’t necessarily think it was being good at fashion per se. I will say that I will attribute it to one particular professor I had at Parsons, whom I was very lucky to have. She was someone who spent a lot of time trying to develop our taste and our cultural reference points. So for her, it wasn’t about teaching us drawing croquis, which is like the fashion drawing or tailoring or stitching, sewing. And all of those are skills that we definitely got while we were at Parsons, which by the way, I don’t think Parsons teaches anymore. You’re not, you don’t even need to learn to sew anymore, which is ludicrous to me. Feels like the pendulum might swing back. I hope so. Right. But back then we’d have to sit at a sewing machine and learn how to sew properly and with our hands as well. And for her, it was all of that was base level. You needed to know that. But on top of that, she would talk to us about culture in a way that was eye-opening. So she was one of those professors that either you got her and you loved her, or you just were flabbergasted as to why she was assigning you book reports on Tolstoy or the latest New York Times article. You have to have book reports on some book that she’d assign you. Thomas Hardy was one of her favorites. And for her, it was about creating a point of view. And I think that exercise in expansion of culture, so understanding different ways you can understand culture, high culture, low culture, different varieties of culture, and then having that point of view that was defensible has helped me a lot today because what it has allowed me to do is look at culture in different ways. I think that’s one thing. I think the other thing for me is the fact that bringing it back to the point of belonging is I’ve always been a bit of an outsider. And so I’ve always sat on the outside on the periphery of every place I’ve lived in, which has given me a little bit of a unique perspective. I’ve always been able to see what’s happening from an outsider’s perspective, which allows you to have a little bit more clarity versus when you’re inside the culture. And that’s true even for a culture that is supposedly my own, which is India, right? Because no one sees me as Indian, even when I’m there. Yeah. I’d be curious to hear you describe, pushing you maybe into a level of detail around what is it about being an outsider that changes what you’re able to see? How do you view things differently because of that coming from nowhere, feeling belonging nowhere, being on the outside? I think it’s a good question. I think it gives me a bit more, I don’t feel connected or I think it allows me to be a bit removed from certain things. So I don’t feel sometimes the need to perhaps defend or maybe it’s more of an exercise and I don’t understand sometimes fully. And so it means I can investigate a bit further without feeling like I may offend or perhaps it comes from a place of curiosity, I think. And that outsider perspective allows for that. And even within my own culture, because people have positioned me that way as well, it allows me that leeway as well. And I use it, right, Peter? There are times when my mom’s like, we’re Indian. We have to be this. I’m like, I don’t know. I didn’t grow up there. I don’t know. It’s not my fault. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I think the two biggest joys for me, one is the people I speak to. I mean, both in terms of the consumers or the participants I get to speak to and then the brilliant minds that I do get to work with on a daily basis. I love speaking to people. I love trying to get their stories out in any way possible. And it just, yeah, it does fill me with a lot of joy and especially I think more recently and maybe also because of my dint of where I’m living, where it’s so much about AI and technology, I’m more and more drawn to the human stories. And I do love just talking to people and getting the stories out of people. And that really does bring me a lot of joy. I think the other part of it is, I think what Annie said on your podcast was the alchemy, that magic, when you are in the room with people and suddenly something is connected and you’re saying, oh wait, yes, yeah, that makes sense. There’s an interesting tension here and you’re talking about it, you’re brainstorming with the people in your team and you say, yes, that’s exciting. I think those two are my favorite parts. Yeah. And what’s your experience been, well, I’m always interested in how people learn and research. So, do you have a, yeah, how would you describe your relationship with research, with qualitative? How do you learn? How do you like to practice? I mean, like I said, I think I’m always talking to lots of people. So, that’s one thing. And I think now that I’ve started my own, an object story, I am speaking to a ton of people. So, that does get that. I am lucky that I have this ability to talk to people. Exposure therapy is another amazing group that does allow me to have access to a lot of information as well as just really clever people that are so generous with their time and thinking. And that’s really, really, it’s a nice synthesized way of getting information. And I have to say, so I’ve been off social media for two years. I decided it wasn’t for me. I left it. I think the only thing I’m on is LinkedIn because I need it professionally. But what it has allowed me to do is read newspapers and books more earnestly. And so, my Sunday newspaper time has become this hallowed time where I have about three newspapers and I spread it all out on my living room floor with a cup of coffee. And I just sit and read for about two hours, just the newspaper. And then I cut them out. And then I save them, which has become this very cathartic old school practice, which I really like doing. And I think the act of reading them tangibly, if you will, and then cutting them out has helped stick them in my head a little bit more. Yeah. What have you noticed in those two years of getting off of social media? I don’t care. I don’t care about what people, I don’t. I mean, I think I used to spend so much time taking photos and posting and trying to impress upon some image to the world in a way that I just, it was just so exhausting. And also the funny thing is like my accounts were private, so it wasn’t even necessarily to like, it was just to my friends, I guess, in a way. And like, no, they don’t care. Like, who am I trying to impress? Like, it was so weird. And I think I don’t know why it suddenly dawned on me. Like my friends like me for who I am. I don’t need to show them, like, what am I trying to, like, who am I trying to impress? And it, I felt, I felt relief, but also just more happiness, I think. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Going out on your own as a transition into being independent and having your own practice, what’s that experience been like? I mean, it’s been nerve wracking. It’s, yeah, it’s been nerve wracking. I think there’s a lot of excitement and I love the flexibility. That’s lovely. But at the same time, as I said, culturally, I feel Japanese a lot of the time. And I think that makes me feel a lot more reserved. And especially in America where I do think the culture of selling yourself is so professionalized and people do it so well, that sometimes I am really trying to get over the, I don’t think it’s, I don’t find it cringey because I do think there are people who do it really, really well. And I’m in such awe of people who are able to put themselves out there in such a, in a such a wonderfully wonderful way. It’s almost just I feel very reserved and I just don’t feel I have earned the right yet to put myself out there. So I’m trying. What critique, I mean, I feel, I remember, what do I want to ask? How do you feel about the state of things or the industry or research or cultural intelligence? You know, do you have a critique of how things are practiced or a provocation for how it’s done today as somebody coming up and starting their own practice, inheriting a lot of structures that are already in place. What’s your, how do you feel about things? Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And I think very recently I have been feeling, and I again, I don’t know if this is because I am in the US or and in the West, which is new to me. So there, I think I have two provocations or critiques, if you will. One is obviously I’m in San Francisco where everything is very quantitative. And there is a huge emphasis on the quantitative nature of things where so much so that people do forget that there are humans behind the story. And people like to look so much at the numbers so much at, yeah, the numbers and they forget that behind each number, there is a human and there’s a human story. And that story is incredibly important. And when I first moved here, someone told me, yeah, don’t ever say the word brand. It’s a dirty word here. And I remember thinking, that’s a really funny way of looking at things. And other people saying, you know, you really need to learn the Silicon Valley lingo. And I remember thinking that’s also really bizarre because what you’re saying and what I’m saying are the same thing. It’s just the same different words. And finally I can learn it, but you still need to understand at the end of the day, well, who are we talking to? Who are we trying to sell to? They’re humans. And we need to be looking at the humans at the end of the day. And the second one is so bear with me because it is a very new thought and I am still grappling with it. And I’m still trying to make sense of it is for so much of history, we have centered the West in a lot of our thinking, a lot of our research, a lot of the way systems and businesses have been run. And we tend to center it so much in the West that we forget that there have been traditions, legacies, things that have been happening in other parts of the world. That might seem new to the West, but are not new to the rest of the world. And when we frame it as new and revelatory without acknowledging the fact that it’s been done in other places for a long, long time, it’s quite insulting. And actually, again, forgets the fact that there are other places in the world that have a long history, a long education, and a long celebration of doing things differently that doesn’t center the West and doesn’t always need the West to acknowledge it. And I think as strategists and as clever people, we should be remembering that. I think it’s our job to do that. And I think sometimes it’s our, also our job to, we’re human, we forget. But when someone points that out, yeah. Yeah. Are there any good examples of what you’re describing being done really well, where you’ve seen that tendency to center the West and to be disrespectful to the rest of the world? Are there ways you, are there good examples of people doing it right? Or good examples of the bad behavior you’re talking about? I don’t have an example of good right now. No, sorry. That’s all right. When people ask you, well, let’s talk a little bit more about the first bit about the Bay Area being quantitative versus qualitative. And you talked about this a little bit. What is it that makes qualitative so valuable? How do you make the case for what qualitative brings and yeah, that’s the question. I think the way I positioned qualitative is that I like telling the stories that get forgotten. And that to me is what qualitative can bring forth. That’s the nuance it’s the living in the gray. I think these are the things that qualitative can actually really help highlight. Yes, we can always flatten that. There’s no doubt about it, but I think one of the beauties of qualitative research is that you get to speak to individuals. And an individual story is an individual story and there’s uniqueness in every single person. And as romanticized as that is, it’s true. Every single person is unique and every single person has a very different story to share. And I think that is the beauty in qualitative research. Because I think Peter was someone you shared who wrote a wonderful piece and apologies. I don’t remember who it was. Qualitative research is about it’s quality over quantity, right? You’re looking at, you’re not looking to do it on mass. You’re looking for a few select group of people. And that’s the beauty of it. We’re not trying to get hundreds of thousands of people. You’re trying to get those special stories in order to illustrate something unique and special and nuanced. And I think that’s what a lot of people forget when they’re looking at qual versus quant. I love how you described it as the stories that would be forgotten. Is that what you said? Is that your own expression? I quite like it. Yeah. I’ve just, I’ve actually been playing around with how I start selling myself a little bit and that’s what I’ve landed on is I tell stories that get forgotten. One of my favorite, cause I’ve had this pet peeve about quantitative, I guess basically it’s that quantitative is the lingua franca of business and qualitative ends up, people are illiterate in qualitative. There’s a qualitative illiteracy that leads people to believe that qualitative is a degraded form of quantitative. You know, we end up looking, we end up trying to make qualitative into quantitative. And one of my favorite, and I’ve told this story before, is that there’s a quote that goes around and it says that, in defense of quantitative, over qualitative, that the plural of anecdote is not data. And that’s what somebody would say to justify the superiority of quantitative. Do you know Snopes.com? Snopes did a fact check on it and they found the source. And it was a Stanford actually professor who actually said the exact opposite, but it got warped in our culture into what it was not meant to be. And the original was, of course, the plural of anecdote is data. What else could it be? And I always thought that was so sweet. And my hackles always go up when we call things anecdotal. The dismissiveness with which these descriptions of lived experience get treated. It’s always very frustrating. Yeah. I just actually wrote a LinkedIn post cause I’d read a great article in the New York Times this weekend. I think it was in the magazine about Tilly Norwood, the AI actress. And it was, they had sent their celebrity journalist, the person who does profiles to profile Tilly Norwood. And it was, she paints this hilarious picture of how the creator of Tilly sat next to her. And then the publicist sat on the other side at Groucho club in London. And they all ordered lunch and then the laptop sat opposite them with no lunch because a computer doesn’t eat lunch. And so it was about how there’s this AI actress, Tilly Norwood and how she is a decent enough actress, I guess. And everyone’s up in arms about AI actors. And I remember my post was basically essentially like, how can AI convey human emotion when it has no lived experience? Like it just, it’s a Xerox copy, right? Like you are living an experience that it has copied off, but it has no emotion. It has no empathy. Like how is it going to convey anything when it has no ability to feel itself? The humans are able to convey things because even if you have not had that lived experience, we have empathy enough to know that you can feel something or you can live it in some other way. Right. So it was an interesting article. Yeah. It’s quite amazing. I don’t know. What’s your experience with AI? Not that we need to get into some AI conversation about it, but what’s your interaction been with it? How do you feel? Do you incorporate it into your work? Very limitedly. I think it’s, I feel it’s very boring to me, to be honest. I think it’s great for transcripts and things. But apart from that, I don’t know. I just, I don’t want something else doing my thinking for me. I don’t really want, yeah, I just don’t want it. Like I just don’t, yeah, I don’t want it. Yes. Yeah. It’s a strange time. And certainly we, I feel like the cultural conversation around it is getting more and more interesting and more and more polarized and intense. It feels like a whole, generationally it feels like unbelievable really what’s happening. Yeah. And so I worked with Annie and Adam on the Rift. And it was fascinating to listen to young people talk about AI because they are vehemently opposed to it. Or these people we spoke to were vehemently opposed to it because they really felt like it was, they were being dumbed down and they just did not want it. They were, they just said, no, why would we want this all for ourselves? Like, we don’t want something that’s going to, we already have everything around us that we feel is dumbing us down. Like now something else that’s going to make our lives this much, it was interesting to hear them talk about that. That’s a dumbing down of our generation. So interesting. So there’s like an awareness that these things have been dumbing them down, that they’re, that’s happening. It’s something that’s being done to them. Yeah, absolutely. Can you share a little bit more about what the Rift is for those who don’t know? Yeah. So the Rift, so there’s a two-part pro bono piece of work that Starling Strategy have done. The first was about the Rift in genders, which was fueled by the algorithmic diversification between boys and girls. So boys are being fed manosphere content. I think it was Dublin University that did a study that showed they created some puppet accounts and within the first, I believe, 20 minutes, those fake puppet boy accounts were fed manosphere account content. And girls are fed get ready with me, makeup content, trad wife type content. So the algorithms are very much feeding boys and girls very different things from the get-go. And what that is causing is a Rift between boys and girls. And of course, other cultural and societal forces as well, and how that is deepening the Rift and as what people in the industry, marketers, brand strategists, et cetera, can do to help heal this Rift and how it is our responsibility to try to bring young people together. Because at the end of the day, we need each other as a species to survive. But also just as humanity, we need each other to survive. So that was part one. Part two is about the future and how young people feel about the fact that social contracts have been broken down and whether or not, how they’re feeling about the future. And I believe the term that they had coined is the future of futurelessness, because the sentiment is that there’s a feeling that their future has been taken away from them. And so how are they coping with this and what are their sentiments around it? Yeah, the futurelessness. My conversation with them was pretty amazing. That work is really quite beautiful. We’re coming to the near the end of time. I’m curious, what are you most looking forward to in your own work and yeah, in general? Yeah, I think just continuing to doing what I’m doing. I feel like I’m at a precipice, which is quite exciting. I’m turning 40 in a couple of weeks. So that’s quite exciting. Someone told me that 40 is always the best time in their lives. Yeah, so just doing what I’m doing and doing more of it, I guess, is what I’m excited for. Nice. Well, I thank you so much for accepting the invitation. Happy birthday in advance. Thank you, 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]

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm on Critique & Listening

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm [https://religion.williams.edu/faculty/jason-josephson/] is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College, and the author of “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55623551-metamodernism].” Most recently, he debated Timotheus Vermeulen and Hilary Lawson live at IAI’s “The Metamodernist Turn [https://iai.tv/live/iai-live-august-the-metamodernist-turn],” pressing the same distinction he draws here between his own project and Vermeulen’s. His next book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, is out from University of Chicago Press in April. This is the third of three interviews. The first is “Myth & Metamodernism [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/p/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-myth].” The second is “Revolution & Happiness [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/p/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-revolution].” A heads up to regular listeners & readers. My conversations with Jason are unlike others, in that it I am really punching above my weight. I am really attracted to his thinking around metamodernism and sincerely believe it holds real promise for informing how we move forward. I believe in the diagnosis that it makes, and am inspired by the recommendation it offers to build, with full awareness of the critique. This is pre-interview caveat that, even as I don’t always grasp what is being discussed, I am tuned in. I ask that you join me in stretching towards what Jason is showing us. Where the term ‘metamodernism’ comes from I keep fixating on metamodernism. I don’t have a structure for this conversation — full confession. But maybe we start with you giving us a map. What is it you’re doing with the term, and where does it sit relative to everyone else using it? Meta just means the same thing as post, if we’re precise about etymology — beyond. Though it also has a secondary sense post lacks: an over-and-above. People have been gluing “meta” onto isms since the seventies, but in a meaningful way the term metamodernism emerges in two places. First there’s the cultural studies version — Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s work on structures of feeling, a shift in the zeitgeist, an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist projects. I think that stuff is great. It’s not what I do. I’m not interested in analyzing the current paradigm so much as trying to trigger a paradigm shift — not sorting art into modern, postmodern, metamodern. I actually get my use of the term from a different lineage: the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji. He describes the metamodern artist as someone who deploys, positions, fractures, and reforms both the modern and the postmodern. He’s an artist himself, owning that term for his own project. That’s closer to my version. When I wrote what became Metamodernism and the Future of Theory, it was originally titled Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory After Postmodernism. People wanted me not just to critique postmodernism but to name a movement — and the alternative on the table was “post-postmodernism,” which makes you want to throw up. That’s when I remembered Okediji. Parallel to that, there’s a Scandinavian duo — a sociologist and a political theorist writing under the name Hanzi Freinacht — who wrote The Listening Society. Less interested in characterizing or sorting art than in producing political change under the same term. I like some of their project and not other parts — there’s a developmentalism in it you have to be careful with. So when I started using “metamodern,” I found myself in company with other people also trying to work past postmodernism, in art or philosophy or elsewhere. I love my fellow metamodernistas, but to be clear, mine isn’t an oscillationist account. If I have one criticism of Vermeulen — who seems like a cool dude — it’s that oscillation is hard to falsify and conceptually weak. What’s valuable in that cultural-studies work is characterizing new patterns in cultural production and a change in tone. That’s just not what I’m doing. The postmodernism I’m reacting to was forged as a specific academic model — often as a polemical other, a bricolage of French, American, and German theorists whose inconsistencies got smoothed over into an idea of what humanities scholarship should look like. That model was good at chipping away received wisdom, but it was delivering diminishing returns. For those of us trying to move intellectual life forward, it had stopped helping. It was mostly kneecapping us. I want to be clear my reaction isn’t someone externally mocking postmodernism. I marinated in it. I went to Derrida’s lectures. I studied under Rorty at Stanford when he was emeritus. I read the work, did the graduate seminars on Heidegger and French social thought. That’s the older generation of theory — Derrida was Elvis-generation, there’s a reason he rocked a pompadour his whole life. It’s time to figure out what was good, consolidate the gains, and shed what’s no longer working. I’ve been thinking about people who are part of something and then step outside it — Paul Kingsnorth, the eco-activist turned religious convert; Chuck Marohn, the traffic engineer who renounced his own field’s methodology and started Strong Towns. Do you identify with that as a transition you made? What was it like? Yeah, I identify with that. I first encountered postmodernism — I can be specific — on a drive from Ohio to college in Massachusetts. My parents, both philosophers, had a set of “great ideas” books on tape, and one unit near the end was on postmodern philosophers: Derrida, maybe Lyotard. It seemed exciting and dangerous. I was a punk rocker and a goth — it read as rebellion against the status quo, politically emancipatory. I marinated in it from undergrad through grad school. What turned me away was that it wasn’t a good set of tools. It was leading toward conclusions that made us less informed, less active — the payoff wasn’t there. We started by questioning authority, ended by questioning truth, and authority was still standing when we were done. I had a sense we were learning bad translations from the French as though they described reality — like the medievals who, when they wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, looked it up in Aristotle instead of counting. When people had a question about language, instead of asking what linguists were currently saying, they’d cite Derrida. That’s not to say Derrida had nothing to offer — but the anti-canon movement had just installed a new canon of critical thinkers in place of the old one. I’ve always been someone who naively asks: how did we get here, why do we think this? Over time I became disaffected, while still holding onto what was genuinely useful. And my teachers were part of that movement — this was partly just growing up, recognizing where your teachers and ancestors made mistakes even as you recognize your debt to them. What frustrated me most was hearing peers act as if there’s no “after” certain thinkers — as if philosophy stopped with Heidegger. And practically: when I started my own scholarship, I had real questions — about knowledge, value, translation. I had a stack of nineteenth-century Japanese sources and needed to figure out which to use for my thesis. Being told translation is impossible, in an environment where I was producing a translation, was the opposite of helpful. Or on value — there was a confusion between being neutral and being critical. You could call out racism, which matters, but you couldn’t stand up for a better political order without “violating” cultural relativism. That paradox bothered me more and more. We needed emancipatory theories, not just critical ones, and they were missing. Absolute disruption [This section is dense — Storm is thinking through Hegel out loud. Here’s the short version of where it’s headed: some thinkers argue language traps us so completely that translation and stable meaning are impossible. Storm disagrees. His answer is that language shapes how we see the world, but doesn’t cut us off from it — we just need a world stable enough that people can roughly agree on what they’re pointing at. Everything below is him building the case for that, using Hegel as the springboard.] The title Tell me about the title Absolute Disruption. Where did it come from? From two places. First, a line from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit I used to have memorized — something like: spirit obtains its truth only in its absolute disruption, it finds itself. Hegel was working on the problem of skepticism, of essentializing opposites — he describes skepticism elsewhere as waiting around to hurl anything into the abyss. You can see that in the postmodern moment: deconstruction, anti-essentialism, all different forms of negation. Hegel, as the master thinker of the dialectic, seemed like a clue to the other side of it. The spoiler: his dialectic isn’t thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It’s abstraction, negation, and negation of the negation — that last move is the fulcrum. Absolute Disruption was a signal toward that moment: we need to negate the negation. It was also a gesture at the idea that catastrophe creates the opportunity for new configurations of knowledge. I didn’t have complexity theory in hand yet, but one of its insights is the phase transition — water tips over into boiling, a seed crystal spreads through and the whole thing freezes. Those transitions come at moments of instability. I felt our intellectual world was at a crisis point — a moment of both danger and opportunity. I’m not an accelerationist who wants more crises. But crisis can open a phase transition. Negating the negation Walk me through negating the negation. What’s that move? In his Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel describes three sides of thought. First, you apprehend the specific differences of existing objects and produce a limited abstraction — a generalization, lifting away from the concrete. That process of abstracting hits limits, which challenge the project itself and lead to negating the initial abstraction — a critical stage where things encounter their opposites. Then there’s a third stage: the negation of the negation, the speculative stage, where you get a reconciliation of opposites — what he calls determinate negation, grasping something by determining its boundaries. Here’s where I depart from standard Hegel scholarship: I read this as a response to Kant’s reading of Hume. Hume’s skeptical challenge to causation says, roughly, that because causation can’t be demonstrated, we can’t really know anything about the world. Kant’s negation of the negation is his transcendental categories. He doesn’t deny Hume’s conclusion — he makes it the precondition of his own philosophy: any finite being necessarily experiences the world already structured by space, time, and causation. The cost is that we can never know the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich. But that’s a limit on confidence, not a collapse into “we can’t know anything.” So the challenge I set for myself in Absolute Disruption was to take postmodernism’s skeptical positions in their clearest form. Take the “prison house of language” — Heidegger’s hermeneutics of being, or Fredric Jameson’s clean statement of it: we think in language, therefore we’re trapped in it. Taken to Saussure’s maximal extension, language only relates to other language, never to the world — so translation is impossible, meaning never stabilizes. Derrida can be read as a reductio of this: there is no outside-the-text. You could respond by ignoring it — a broadly modernist move that just insists the world is the world, and philosophers like Putnam or Kripke tried to make that respectable by arguing language designates natural kinds. That’s a weak view — it generates real paradoxes (look up the Superman/Clark Kent paradox if you want). Hylosemiotics: the payoff What I try to do instead is think seriously about how language could have evolved in the first place. This becomes the longest chapter in the book, on hylosemiotics. The key insight worth granting is that language and perception are connected — linguistic categories do shape perception. But you can show, first, that the skeptical view is self-contradictory: Derrida argues translation is impossible by translating a line of Joyce and telling us why it can’t be done in French — and we read that argument in English. And second, if you don’t presume language and the world are separate — if language always occurs in a world — you don’t need robust natural-kind categories. All you need is a world stable enough to have “clumps” we can roughly coordinate reference to: a building, a mountain, a tree. Language coordinates reference sloppily, not with rigid designation. My spouse and I agree on focal blue but disagree at the edges — languages carve up the color spectrum differently, speakers of the same language disagree on whether a napkin is a piece of clothing, or whether a hot dog is a sandwich. So we’re always interpreting the world. Linguistic categories shape that interpretation without fully constraining it — we never fully encounter the world as it is, but we’re not imprisoned in language either. There’s a naturalized semiotics behind this too: evidence from linguistics and evolutionary biology, animal and plant perception and communication — our tongues and hands may be wired together in the brain because our primate ancestors gestured as communication. Even if that particular biological detail turns out wrong, there are other ways to ground how communication and perception evolved together. That whole edifice — how translation is possible, how meaning shapes thought without imprisoning it — is my negation of the negation, in a way I think Hegel would recognize. Though to be clear, he’s not a meat grinder you feed a problem into and get an answer out. He’s a clue to where to look. The proof is in the payoff: I can give an account of how language evolved, locate humans within it, do sign perception properly. I’ve had responses from animal-communication researchers, and I have a piece under review now building toward more-than-human ethnography — looking at multi-species environments through this lens. The term hylosemiotics — I coined it with my brother, who does animal studies. Hyle, matter or forest in Greek, plus semiotics, signs. It names the error at the root of the skeptical philosophy of language: a hyper-specialization that bifurcated language from the world in the first place. You can’t hear if your eardrums aren’t vibrating, can’t read without light bouncing off something. We exist in a world. That doesn’t settle which cosmology is true — Nahuatl cosmology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, scientific materialism could all be candidates. My theory just needs a world with language speakers in it, stable enough that trees don’t randomly turn into sheep. The payoff has to stand on its own, separate from the ladder that got me there. That’s what I mean by a no-b******t philosophy that doesn’t enshrine canonical figures. I love the anti-canonicity of early postmodernism — we don’t need an enshrined canon. We take inspiration from people without owing them justification. Hegel is about discovery for me, not justification — he was wrong about Asia, Eurocentric, thought the Prussian state was cooler than it was, wrong about the number of planets. He was a dude in a particular period. Great to be inspired by, not an authority to cite as proof. Critique isn’t the end point I took a literary criticism class in the nineties and remember the real feeling of power in applying deconstructive tactics. What drew me to your work is that it escapes that trap and is constructive. Last time we talked about revolutionary happiness, human flourishing — you’re clear you don’t want to just criticize, you want to build. Is that right? It’s a two-step process. We criticize first — we just don’t end there. Some people ask if I’m anti-critique because I spend so much time criticizing the criticizers. I’m against automatic criticism. I want critique to be more fine-grained. It’s important to call out injustice and conceptual hubris — critique is valuable. The problem is when it’s the only move, when it never reflects on its own limits. That’s the swamp postmodernism led us into. Even in the metamodernism book, I open a section with what I call a deconstructive dojo — teaching people to do the critical moves first, but as a starting point, not an endpoint. I think this maps onto how the culture wars get handled: a lot of my fellow lefties terminate in critique; another camp wants to shut down all critique, insisting you can’t criticize the country or its politics. Both are dead ends. We have to be able to say: the founding fathers built terrible institutions, failed on slavery, were sexist — we grant that, we don’t deny it — and also held up ideals worth recuperating even though they themselves couldn’t live up to them. Holding that tension is part of growing up. That language of holding the tension is what I find attractive, and it feels like something we’ve lost — we’re stuck in binary mode. Is there a metamodern way of constructing, once the critique is done? It’s something I’m calling for more than something I’ve fully identified, though I’ve seen people working toward it. We shouldn’t assume one cookie-cutter solution works across all problems. What I’m advocating is an orientation: critique, identify the problems, critique the critique, then figure out what to hold and what to build. I’ve had encouraging responses from people doing movement work — helping people out of their presumptive categories of left or right, recognizing a movement’s problems without getting defensive, and asking what would make it stronger from there. Hanzi Freinacht identified something real here: the importance of listening. There’s a tendency — especially from people in my position, in the ivory tower — to arrive with solutions and impose them without listening to what people are actually looking for. You can see this in how the consultancy class has misguided left politics in recent cycles. One thing Mamdani seems to have gotten right: he did a real tour of listening to different groups in New York, figuring out the actual problems people were encountering rather than telling them what their problems should be. That does two things — it identifies where coalitions and resources should go, and it lets people feel heard, in a society where a lot of people feel ignored and out of control of their own communities. AI: neither boomer nor doomer I sent you some links on AI. It’s happening to all of us whether we like it or not, and maybe it’s a canvas for talking about what it means to be metamodern. How do you think about AI through your work? What AI actually is We have to recognize AI is both profoundly transformative and overhyped. What we’re calling AI — generative pre-trained transformers, large language models — I don’t want to knock the amount of work and potential in them, but they are not general intelligences. There’s confusion in public discourse because the people pushing AI keep promising a series of ever-greater intelligence leaps. That’s misleading, partly because scaling produces diminishing returns. There was a huge leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3.5, but they ate an internet’s worth of data to get there, and there isn’t another internet’s worth waiting. What these models do is transform language into a mathematical vector space — interesting for producing the geometry of certain concepts, but not an innovator. A lot of the discourse presumes a discredited model of intelligence as a linear scale, like IQ. Sociologists of intelligence, even ones who believe in the IQ scale, note that the people who make the biggest innovations don’t have the highest IQs. Intelligence is richly contextual. And there’s a background assumption from Turing that intelligence reduces to fooling a human linguistically — these models are great linguistic agents, great chatbots, a real technological leap, but that’s not general intelligence. I went back and reread a piece by the French AI researcher François Chollet, “The Implausibility of Intelligence Explosion,” which makes the same point. AI has real uses — it’s good at pattern recognition. I saw a phrase somewhere I liked: the best use of AI is going to be boring. Automating the boring stuff — sorting supply chains, finding patterns in thick data sets. It’s not going to produce the transformations people expect. It’s going to reorganize labor, and it’s already eroding trust and notions of authorship in ways that are hard on artists. It has a real environmental cost, and it doesn’t have a profitability model — if these companies start running ads, no one will want to use it, and it’ll enshittify faster than other platforms. It doesn’t scale the way people think — you need exponentially more data for incremental gains, which is why Elon Musk’s self-driving timeline keeps slipping. Where it’s genuinely useful is streamlining existing processes — I use it to write boring bureaucratic reports, turning a meeting transcript into something we can put in a report, where the prose quality doesn’t matter. The ironies of automation There’s a classic piece from the eighties, Lisanne Bainbridge’s “Ironies of Automation” — foundational in industrial design and catastrophe theory. The paradox: automation is good at routine tasks, but humans are still needed when things go wrong. As automation takes over the routine, the human’s skill at that routine atrophies — so when the automation fails, it fails suddenly, in ways the human is no longer prepared for. That’s the problem with a certain kind of self-driving car — my dad loves his Tesla’s self-driving feature, but it presumes he stays hyper-alert for edge cases. I’d rather automation handle it the other way: I do the routine task, and automation intervenes when I make a mistake I don’t catch — the dog running into the road. The same is true teaching undergrads, and I wish more of my colleagues internalized it. Large language models are great at summarizing readings and generating plausible prose — the boring, low-stakes stuff. What’s left to humans is knowing when an argument is wrong, spotting a bad frame, making a judgment call. Those are exactly the skills that atrophy when students lean on the models — and exactly what they’ll need when they hit real problems. When we automate, we atrophy. The more the machine thinks for you, the less you can think when it fails. That echoes the phase transition you described earlier — things happening slowly, then all at once. It sounds like the same progression, applied to our relationship with automation: we keep surrendering activities, assuming we could rescue things if they failed, and then things collapse in front of our atrophied ability to respond. Exactly. Which is why, in higher ed, students need training in the low-stakes basics — precisely because that training prepares them for the high-stakes ruptures. If they have that foundation, they can use AI responsibly later, as long as they know that overusing it accelerates the atrophy. I’m not anti-AI, and I’m not a booster either. There are genuinely new things opening up because of it. But anyone who thinks large language models will replace basic education hasn’t internalized Bainbridge’s point. Even responsible adult users have to guard against their own skills eroding. The environmental impact is a separate, serious conversation. When I raise it with people in the field, they say they know, and the plan is to scale toward more efficient models — I have doubts about whether that’s actually happening, versus functioning as cover for an enormous amount of electrical and water-cooling resources going into things being wedged into places they don’t belong. My college auto-installed Copilot on every student’s Microsoft Word. I don’t want that — we want to be building some barriers, not removing them. People will keep using it. That’s fine, as long as they’ve trained themselves to spot when it’s about to go wrong. Getting past boomer vs. doomer So — is there a way out of the binary? It feels like we’re stuck between accelerationists and doomers, boomers and doomers, and metamodernism might be an escape hatch, a framework for moving past that. True, or am I overreaching? I’d hope so. The concrete stakes are worth thinking through, but as an abstract program: integrate the positive potential the boomers have identified without denying the doomers’ critiques, and figure out an equitable system on the other side. That’s not going to be every AI platform — it’ll have to be a particular, environmentally responsible AI that absorbs some of those critiques. What that looks like around authorship, I don’t know yet — that’s one I’m not sure how we navigate. On the prose side: AI produces derivative prose that all sounds like the same voice, and unfortunately a lot of people seem to want exactly that — maybe it helps people who aren’t confident public speakers or writers find a voice. There’s a real upside there. But I’m sick of the “it’s not X, it’s Y” formulation showing up everywhere, and the AI-generated images that almost look like real people but the lighting’s a hair too uniform. There are real trust questions, and I think we’re going to want watermarking, at least for generated images. There’s concrete policy an AI platform could adopt that would address the doomers’ real concerns and unlock what the boomers have rightly identified — without indulging the utopian fantasy that scaling alone produces superintelligence that solves everything. That fantasy rests on treating Moore’s Law for processor power as if it applied directly to the human mind, which runs against a huge amount of evidence. Large language models are also good at handling complexity in another sense — recognizing that vocabulary is context-rich, that things mean different things in different contexts, and at producing iterative results. Other forms of AI are good at this too — my father did research in evolutionary algorithms, where you launch variations through a design space, keep the ones that succeed, and iterate. That’s brought us real gains — protein folding, pattern identification in shipping — and will keep bringing them. It’s not going to mean nobody works. We’ll lose some jobs, not nearly as many as people fear, but the structure of the jobs we keep will change. What’s the book coming out? With University of Chicago Press, who’s published my last three: The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History. “Genealogy” is a weird term — it’s our word for critical history in parts of the academy, and in ordinary language it means descent or ancestry. The book is a critical history of critical history: why we love criticizing the past, what the blind spots are in how we’ve done it. It blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis, offers fresh readings of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault against the familiar narratives about their relationship to critique, and charts the history of history departments and philosophy as academic disciplines — including genealogy’s own uncomfortable entanglement with eugenics and power. A method built to criticize authority carrying its own unexamined legacies. It’s also a metamodern book. It closes with a call for a new metamodern historiography — new ways of doing history that don’t deny the troubled parts of the past but also look for the occluded histories, the buried germs of positive projects worth recovering and carrying forward. An alternative historiography, encouraging new methods for writing history. 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]

Ben Jenkins on Creativity & Play

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

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

Gideon Lichfield on Fairness & Storytelling

Gideon Lichfield [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gideonlichfield/] is a journalist and Policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, affiliated with the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. He writes Futurepolis [https://futurepolis.substack.com/], a Substack on reinventing democracy, governance, and government for the 21st century. He was previously Global Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of WIRED; Editor-in-Chief of MIT Technology Review; a founding editor at Quartz, and a foreign correspondent and science writer at The Economist. He lives in Berkeley, California. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their stories. And it’s this big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But it’s so big, I tend to over explain it the way I’m doing right now before I ask it. So I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. That’s a very tricky question to answer. I think physically, I come from the UK. Ancestrally, I come from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Philosophically, I come from just a belief in fairness and desire to see fairness in the world. Which I think is why I’m interested in democracy, because someone asked me the other day, if you had to describe the point of democracy in one word, what would it be? And I said, fairness. It’s the system where the bullies don’t get to win. That’s beautiful. And do you have a recollection as a kid? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you remember? I mean, the usual things, astronaut, writer. I can’t remember the others, but nothing very unusual. Yeah. And where was most of your childhood? Where did you spend your childhood? I grew up in London, and I was born and raised almost all my childhood in exactly the same district in Northwest London. Nice. And catch us up. Where are you now? And what is the work that you do? So right now, I live in the Bay Area in Berkeley. I’ve bounced around the world a lot. I was a journalist in Mexico City, Moscow, Jerusalem, came to the US, lived in New York for several years, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a while for another job, became bi-coastal New York Bay Area, and now I’m full-time Bay Area. And the thing I work on now is what could the future of democracy look like? How would it look if we were trying to invent that system today instead of three centuries ago? And what could come after the current period of, I could say authoritarianism, but I think even more broadly just institutional fracturing, the clear inadequacy of the governing institutions that we have. I appreciate that distinction. I think a lot of conversations get captivated by the authoritarian bit, and we don’t end up actually looking at the degree to which the institutions that we currently have aren’t functioning or aren’t functional or aren’t fit for purpose. Can you say more about that, just the diagnosis of the current state? I mean, I think as you said, we don’t talk enough about that. We focus on the authoritarian lens, and that’s one of the things that frustrates me a little right now about the conversation about democracy in the U.S., because it is very focused on the Democratic Party winning back power. And there is this unspoken assumption that if the Democrats retake Congress or the White House, then, in quotes, democracy will be restored, and things will go back to some degree to where they were. And I think that that misses both the amount of dismantling of institutions that has gone on under the Trump administration, but also just the uselessness, the increasing uselessness of those institutions over the past, I would say, at least couple of decades, probably longer. And so what I mean by that is we have these systems of governance and representation that were created in the 18th century before we even had railways and the telegraph. Information moved much more slowly, goods moved more slowly, the world was less globalized, change just happened at a much slower pace. Just if we take the electoral system, it was designed to enable people to delegate decision-making to a small group of people, because any kind of broader national level decision-making in which citizens had participation simply wasn’t practical, obviously. And we also have to remember that even though we call this country a democracy and we call other countries democracies, the systems, the electoral systems that were created there were not intended to be democratic. They were intended to allow a fairly small number of privileged male people, people who were men, educated, relatively prosperous, to make the decisions because they were considered the people who were competent to make the decisions. So everything that we have now that we call democracy is this kludge. It’s been, bits and pieces that have been added onto that system that was designed for this very different era. And so some of the ways in which it falls short are that it gives people notionally a voice in the form of votes, but it doesn’t involve them in decision-making in a meaningful way, and it doesn’t create a feeling of citizenship in a meaningful way, at least certainly not at the national level. Systems of government, systems of lawmaking respond very, very slowly to technological change. Lawmaking especially, we take ages to draft laws, we take ages to pass them, and then we don’t revise them for the most part as time goes by, and they don’t update to the reality of the world. We also, our systems of information, of the information environment, were created in an era when information was fairly sparse and expensive to produce, and so free speech laws were in part designed to make sure that interesting ideas and useful thoughts could be expressed and could not be suppressed. And today we have the opposite problem where misinformation lies and general slop crowds out the stuff that is useful and worthwhile. And so while we don’t want to abolish the idea of free speech, we have to think differently about what the goal of that principle is and how we create an informed citizenry and how we inform good decision-making. So there are all these assumptions and structures that date from that time, from centuries ago, that don’t function very well in this new world. And so this is even leaving aside the problem of political polarization that we have today, which has created all this deadlock. Even if you did not have that, the structures that we have are still pretty inadequate to the task of governing the 21st century and do not take advantage of the tools and methods that we could have today for making citizens more engaged and making government more responsive. That’s amazing. What you just said, I don’t think it really occurred to me that, again, you’re peeling apart these pieces that, again, we can get really distracted by polarization. And again, forget to look at just structurally how the system is either counterproductive or doesn’t help us do the work. Can you speak? And maybe this is relevant, but the degree to which this plays out at a local level versus a national level, is there a difference in the way that the institutions are working or not working in that way? Yes. I mean, I think so at one level, the polarization, I think is probably worse at the national level. In other words, in local communities, there is at least the opportunity to bring people together around the problems that their community shares. And I think for me, I said that democracy for me means fairness, but I think it also as a process, maybe fairness is the outcome that we want. But as a process to me, democracy just means shared problem solving. You have a bunch of people, there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t agree with, but they face a problem that they need to solve because they live together in the same community. And so there is a process for bringing them together and creating a system or a process for reaching an agreement on the solution, even if not everybody likes it, or even if nobody likes it completely, and trusting that process and being willing to accept the results of it. That’s what democracy is. So at a local level, there is at least the potential to do that more. And the obstacles there, I think, are number one, well, in the US specifically, we have the decline of local news, which makes it difficult for everybody to be on the same page about what’s happening. And we also have the fact that local authorities are under-resourced, particularly when it comes to using technology. And so it makes it very difficult for them to be responsive and keep up to date with the changes that are happening. At the national level, you have government theoretically more capable, but in fact, very sclerotic, so much institutional cruft that has developed and very polarized because at a national level, we’re not a community in the same way as we are in a town. And so it is easy for the polarizing voices to have more sway in the media and for that to drive the sense of national divide. So what does it mean to work in this space? What are the things that you’re doing? What are you following? Just paint a picture of where you spend your time and what you’re learning and discovering. So I’m still figuring out what it is to work in this space for me. I keep my thumb or try to keep my thumb on the pulse of many different things that I think count as part of this problem of how you govern democratically. And I already sketched out some of the broad pillars. There are methods of civic participation that aren’t just voting and also aren’t just turning up to town hall meetings, which are a very time consuming thing that only a few people can really allow themselves to do. So there are technological innovations and social innovations around deliberative democracy and participatory democracy of various kinds. So I keep an eye on those. I keep an eye on work in improving state capacity and reforming the way government works and making its processes less clunky. And that can include everything from just bureaucratic management and process reform to procurement. These are very, very dull things, but they actually clog up the works of government enormously. I obviously, as a journalist, pay a lot of attention to what I mentioned about the information environment and how do you create informational spaces that are less toxic, less polarizing. Some of that is about what is the business model for news media in this world of AI. Some of that is can you build social platforms that create more coming together of community and less polarization. So those are some of the pillars and there’s interesting work going on in all of those areas. I think the challenge is that you can come up with a scenario, and I’ve come up with scenarios where you bring all of these innovations together and you have a form of democracy that works much better, where people are more informed, they have more civic engagement, government is more responsive, it all works better. But getting from here to there, of course, is the really difficult part. And the chief obstacles that I think I see to that are, number one, as we said earlier, everyone is talking about democracy or restoring democracy as getting the Democratic Party back in power, not deeper institutional reform. Number two, a lot of these changes simply mean going against incentives that a lot of people have to keep the current system the same. Politicians, no matter of what party, have an incentive to keep things as they are because they have learned the game of political fundraising and voter mobilization and manipulating the message and so forth. And if you create structures that give citizens more of a say in day-to-day governance, that threatens their control. And so you’ve seen a lot of experiments in the U.S. and elsewhere with things like citizen assemblies, where you give a particularly thorny problem to a group of randomly selected citizens and they hash it out and come to a consensus. And in some places that works, but it doesn’t work unless you get the politicians to buy into the process and say, yes, we will take the recommendation seriously. And often that is the hardest work and often that is the work that is not done. Or one administration, one mayor may be open to that kind of civic participation, the next one who comes along is not interested. And so those things don’t get institutionalized. Similarly with government reform, process reform, there are a lot of government bureaucrats who have an interest in keeping the system the way it is because of the control they have. There are a lot of private contractors who benefit from the way the procurement happens and don’t really want to upset the apple cart. So it’s this challenging thing where I know a lot of people who work in democratic innovation in one or another of these areas and they have fantastic ideas, but connecting those ideas to how to bring those ideas about is difficult. And I think connecting the conversation that the democratic innovators have to the conversation that the people involved in mainstream politics and movement building and campaigning have, that’s a very difficult gap to bridge as well. Can you say more about that gap? So I’ve been to gatherings where you have people who are veteran campaign organizers and they are thinking, how do we win the next election? They’re thinking, how do we improve voter registration? They may be thinking about slightly more out there things like how do you change, how do you combat gerrymandering? How do you change a state to having open primaries? Or how do you change the electoral college? Those kinds of systems, those kinds of changes, those are basically changes to the electoral system, to the voting, the way that we do voting. That feels like stuff that they are working on, that is relevant to them, that has measurable outcomes, which are who gets into office. That’s where the funding is. And for those people, for those people, a citizens assembly or a government process reform is not really relevant to the goals that they have. So how do you bring about, how do you tie a conversation about deep institutional change or deep democratic process change to the very real imperatives that the people who actually occupy most of politics and most of organizing and most of what we would call the democracy industry, if you like, how do you tie that to what their needs are? So I was in Athens last week and for a House of Beautiful Business for this event and I had a walking tour. Have you been there at all? Have you visited any of these sites? I imagine you have. I have. Yes. I’ve walked around the Agora and all of those things. So I’m going to test this on you. Please correct me if I’m wrong. But I had a walking tour of the Pnyx, which is not a site that I had ever really heard of. But my understanding is that it was the site where they built a stage for citizens to stand upon and address an assembly and they met regularly. And it was where it was sort of the birth of deliberation. Right. And that was the deliberation before the vote that was the real innovation of Athenian democracy. Is that fair? Yes. I think that’s right. I visited that site, too, and there’s not much you can see right now, but there is this stone platform, right? Where the speaker could stand and then there’s this area all around it where potentially thousands of people could sit and listen. That’s right. So, yes, I think obviously that is seen as a precursor. It’s seen as a democracy and it’s still a modern democracy and that it’s seen as an inspiration to the deliberative process that the people talk about today. And it worked very well for its time and place and for the size of the population and the kind of place that it was. So I think the question is always, all right, what is it that you can take from that and apply today? Yeah. It seemed to me, what brought it to mind was this sense that we’re sort of obsessed with voting and we’ve sort of abandoned or forgotten how central deliberation was to begin with. And also, and I’m wondering, my experience here in Hudson, I think this is how you and I first sort of engaged is that I became interested in Citizens Assembly because I encountered it at Bard and I had experienced what I felt in Hudson, this feeling that the way that we gather in the public meetings, in the spaces where we come together, they simply have been overwhelmed by social media and the impact of technology on everything that we do. And I wonder, I guess I’m just sort of presenting that to you, the degree to which, and this is where we started, that these institutions, these habits, these rituals of democratic and civic engagement, we keep doing the same thing, even though the world has transformed radically in terms of how we share information, how we interact with each other, and we pretend that everything is fine and that we’re doing everything right. And this gets to, I know I’m rambling a little bit, but I’ve had conversations recently with people who say, listen, this is how it’s supposed to work. Everything’s fine. But I guess my question to you is, does that resonate with you, this diagnosis that so much of the technological change that’s happened in the last 15, 20 years with social media has really, really changed the role of just the public meeting, the town hall, and the degree to which that’s a piece of the argument for these deliberative processes? I don’t know if it has changed the role of the traditional town hall, because I think for the most part, those town halls still operate the way they did. A thing that comes to mind with this, when you raise that question, is there’s a film that is making the rounds now, and it’s going to be, I think, on public release in December, made by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, who is one of the doyennes of deliberative processes here in the US. And it’s about how after 9-11, after the Twin Towers fell, the city of New York decided to try to involve people in the process of deciding what to build in their place. They held a number of town hall meetings, traditional-style town hall meetings. There was a theater, there were some guys on the stage, and then hundreds of people in the audience. And they were a mess. And they were a mess because it just became an opportunity for grandstanding, and people threw ideas back and forth, but there was no process for getting to a consensus. And so Carolyn was brought in to run a deliberative process where they invited 5,000 people. They filled the Javits Center in New York, that giant convention center with tables, and they had a bunch of technology, which was very advanced to its day. And they had this process by which people were brought to a consensus on what they wanted for the site. And famously, this process led to, the city came in with six proposals from different developers on what to do with the World Trade Center site. And this assembly overwhelmingly rejected them all and forced the city to go back to the drawing board. So that’s a long preamble by way of saying, I don’t think the town hall meetings in their traditional form have changed much. There is some work going on in places I think like Massachusetts to try to broaden access to the town hall, give people ways to take part in it remotely and so forth. But again, it’s clunky. It doesn’t necessarily work very well. But at least those town hall, the benefit those town hall meetings have is that they’re already an accepted part of the political process. Politicians understand them. They understand this is a thing that you do when you want to interact with the public. And this is a way that the public is seen to have a voice. And so a more, better run deliberative process like a assembly is probably much better for achieving an outcome. But as I said, institutionalizing it, fitting it into the way politicians work is the hard part. Yes, absolutely. And I feel I didn’t communicate very well. I think I’m completely aligned with what you said that somehow because the world has changed around the town halls, what’s asked of them or how they’re used has been sort of warped to your point, the story you told where we come in really well-informed or we’ve done all the deliberation on social media with our people and we come in and it’s this performance of something that’s not, it’s not deliberation meaningfully, it doesn’t seem to me. And I wonder, yes, I love the story that you just told. But also, you just said we come in well-informed in the deliberation on social media, or we don’t. In some cases, people come in with extreme views fanned by what they’ve seen on social media and that can make the town halls even more fractious. Yes, yes, yes, you’re exactly right. I think that we just had, excuse me for being a little rambly here a little bit, we had a vote on the budget here in Hudson, and it was a yes-no vote. And it’s just all the heat and all the energy that happens in this zero-sum vote in a small town where the stakes are really high. Things get really emotional and they get really complicated. And it’s quite intense to see decisions like this just divide a town, and get in between relationships between neighbors. And everybody can say that the district created the spaces for the meetings, they had public meetings, they had the town, they had the budget workshops, they did all those things, but people don’t show up because nobody can find time to show up. And so the spaces that we create for this stuff aren’t utilized, it seems to me. Yeah, I’m just sort of, and this is what for me makes the call for new forms of democratic participation so urgent, but I’ve also experienced the obstacle that people have a hard time recognizing the problem, and then they really don’t understand the solution. They’re struggling on both sides of this thing where they think this is fine, this is supposed to happen, this is how it is supposed to be. And then the solution seems so strange, they can’t quite wrap their head around it. Yes, yes. Where have you seen it work, and where are the shining lights, what are the kinds of things that you’re seeing that you’re most excited about that represent possibility in this space? There’s a handful of examples that people point to around the world of where this has really worked, and the one that is always cited is Ireland, which used a Citizens’ Assembly to decide really tricky issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and it has become an institution. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly is now almost a branch of government. Every year it convenes, every year they tackle difficult issues, and a bunch of factors came together to make that work that were very specific, and it succeeded because it was seen as having achieved consensus on these issues which were incredibly politically divisive, that the politicians themselves couldn’t solve, and also because it was run in such a way that people were able to see the process, there was a lot of transparency, there were some good stories that came out of it about people who started on very different sides of the fence coming to see each other’s point of view. So it is a lot about the perception and the initial success, and whenever you see these poster child cases, then the question arises, well, why doesn’t that happen here, or why doesn’t it happen there? And again, it is because it’s so dependent on certain things going well. I made a list recently of deliberative processes in the US, and actually what I found to my surprise was that if you go back about six years, there have been one, maybe two deliberative processes in American cities per year between 2019 and 2024, and for 2026, I count probably half a dozen. Oh my gosh. And this is still small. These are small towns or cities that are debating quite small scale local issues. Fort Collins, Colorado, last year, deliberated on how to redevelop a local stadium. Lexington, Kentucky, this spring, did something on council members’ pay and review of the local charter. Connecticut is doing something on property taxes. Akron, Ohio, is doing something on housing. So it’s hopeful that these are happening, and the question is always going to be what does it make an impact? And the question around impact is, first of all, do people actually feel, the citizens actually feel like they knew about the process, that it reached a result? Did the local politicians pay attention to it? Did they adopt the recommendations? And then if it did work out well, is there some structure in place for it to be repeated? And we don’t have the answers yet in any of those places. So yeah, I think, again, going back to Ireland and other places where it’s worked, I think the key thing has been there is a really thorny problem that everybody agrees is a problem, and everybody agrees the politicians are not solving. There is political buy-in. The politicians agree to take notice of this process. There is public awareness about the process and how it works and what makes it better than other things. And then there is a successful outcome, a consensus that they reach, that the politicians adopt, and that actually demonstrates the proof of concept. You have to have all of those things for it to really take hold. I’m curious where you first encountered these ideas. I have my experience where I really can point at a time and place where I encountered this idea, I saw it as something that was beautiful, and it is new to everybody else. So I’m wondering, what was your moment of discovery where you encountered this? You were doing work in other territories, I think, or maybe as a journalist. When did you see democratic reform or citizens’ assembly or these processes? What was your first experience? And what did that mean? I can’t remember specifically. I remember that about 15 years ago, when I was working for The Economist, and I was in New York City, and I had a beat that allowed me to range quite widely. And so I focused it somewhat on technology and society. And that was where I became aware of some participatory processes happening in other parts of the world. And I went to meeting something called the Open Government Partnership, which was this gathering from different countries of people trying to figure out different ways to make government more transparent and more participatory. And so I gradually started to build the awareness of those processes then, and started to ask the question of that basic animating question. All right, if we were doing democracy, if we were inventing a democracy today, what are the things we would do? And these seemed to be some of the answers. Yeah. What do you love about it? What’s the joy in the work that you’re doing for you? For me, the joy is talking to interesting people who are really, really dedicated to the cause. I constantly meet people who are fighting these really difficult battles where the outcome is not at all guaranteed. And if it does work out well, it’s probably going to take years. And it can be incredibly frustrating. And they’re just such dedicated souls. And that is very inspiring. And then some of the more, I suppose, conceptual stuff, thinking about questioning all our assumptions that we’re raised with about what is a democracy? Why is it good? Who does it benefit? And peeling away all these things that we’re educated on and never really questioned. Which also then, I think, makes you see more clearly why the current system has failed so badly. See the blind spots of the, even the people who defend the system and the democracy campaigners and the politicians, see all of the assumptions that are baked into it. So for, one of those assumptions, for example, you brought up Athens. The founders of the U.S. did not like the word democracy. For them, it was associated with mob rule and tyranny of the majority. They consciously created a republic, not a democracy, that was premised on this idea that you delegated your decisions to a small group of people who were somehow mentally equipped to take them. And so even getting the majority of people to question the meaning of the word democracy in that context and think about what it could be, as opposed to what they think it is. I think that’s a fascinating problem and part of, I suppose, what I have been trying to do, and I’m not sure with much success yet, is storytelling around it. How do you tell a story about what democracy could be that breaks people’s conceptions of it as this broken, useless, unresponsive system that we have today and gives them a sense of it being potentially something else? Yeah, that’s beautiful. I was, well, it’s funny, you’re reminding me, Democracy Next is now, they’ve embraced this elected oligarchy. They’re taking this same approach. They’re saying, we think we have a democracy, but what we actually have is this elected oligarchy. And what we really need is a true democracy, a deliberative democracy. And so I thought that was an interesting example of them also trying to find ways of communicating this issue. Yeah, and what’s interesting, sorry, just sorry to interrupt, but the elected oligarchy frame, what’s interesting to me is it resonates right across the political spectrum. And so Noam Chomsky, the famous political thinker, has been saying some variants of that for decades. In the 1960s, he wrote about how essentially corporate power has captured political institutions. Curtis Yavin, who is this theorist of the neo-reactionary dark enlightenment, very right wing, believes that democracy should be dismantled and the country should be ruled by a monarch, makes essentially a similar diagnosis that what we have is not really democracy. It is a thing he calls the cathedral, but elected oligarchy would be another decent phrase for it. I do think that there is an issue here that this is particularly true of the US. And I think because of the structure of the political system, because of the role that big money plays in politics, and because of the degree to which capitalism is less regulated here than it is elsewhere, it creates that elected oligarchy much more strongly than it does in some other countries in Europe. Yeah. I’ve had the experience, and I’m curious what your take on this is, where I feel like citizens’ assembly has been picked up in some places as a way of going around the institution. I feel like the climate activism world has taken it as a way of just trying to take shortcuts around the actual democratic institutions, whereas I never really felt like that was my attraction. My attraction was more about as a supplement or a way of reforming the current one. And so there’s a way in which this stuff can be, feel more, I guess, is there a reformist view of this versus a more radical view, and that those are different ways of picking up the same tool? I think that that is generally true of social movements. There is always a reformist view and a radicalist view. There’s a reformist wing and there’s a radicalist wing. There’s Martin Luther King and there’s the Black Panthers. When I was growing up in the UK, there were two key organisations that were campaigning for gay rights. And one was very much about trying to work inside institutions and talk to politicians and push from the inside. Another one was about activism and demonstrations. And I actually think in any social movement, these things work together. Often they seem like they’re fighting each other, but actually they’re both necessary. And so when people talk about introducing deliberative democracy, I similarly hear two strands. And I hear the people who say, in order for this to work, you have to start by getting the political buy-in. You have to convince the politicians it’s in their interests to listen to this. And then there’s another strand that says, if you can build enough of a social movement around a deliberative democracy project, around holding a citizens’ assembly on some issue, then you can pressure the politicians to take it seriously. So I think both approaches maybe can be suitable for different contexts. Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you for that. I had never really considered it that way. You said something earlier that I wanted to follow up on. You talked about, I can’t remember what the... You talked about the feeling of citizenship, that some of these things can imbue that feeling of citizenship and some maybe don’t. Do you know what I’m referring to and what does it mean to have the feeling of citizenship? I suppose I would say it’s to have a sense of, number one, agency. I can influence the processes. It’s having a sense of community. I share something in common with all of these people around me, even though we disagree on a whole bunch of things. Maybe it’s also a sense of responsibility. A friend of mine, a guy called Jon Alexander, who’s a very big deliberative democracy guy and one of the, I think, co-founders of Democracy Next, has this framework. He talks about people as subjects, consumers, or citizens. Subjects was when we were all ruled by kings and really had no say in anything. Consumers is how a lot of people relate to democracy and to government in the 20th century. They’re expecting government to just provide good services and for them to be able to push back if it doesn’t. Citizens is the mindset in which you actually see yourself as an active participant who has a responsibility to make it work yourself. You have agency, you have responsibility, and you have a sense of community. His question, his animating question is, can we move from most people seeing themselves as consumers to most people seeing themselves as citizens? That’s probably my answer to what you asked. It’s beautiful. I met Jon. He was there at the event in Athens. His story is really powerful. He makes it very clear that we are, in some respect, trapped in a consumer story about what we expect, what we think is expected of us. Trying to invite people into a citizen story seems to be... Would you say that that’s part of your project too? Your project fits into that, is how to invite people into a citizen’s mindset where they have a different relationship instead of expectations about what’s available to them and what’s asked of them. Yeah, very much so. I think maybe the distinction for me is that I’m trying to think about all the pieces of the puzzle as well. John, for example, I know is very strong on the idea that there’s no deliverism, which is if only government delivered services better, people would trust it more. He’s very skeptical of that. I am more inclined to say, well, you need both. You need the civic engagement that gets people a sense of participation and a feeling of agency. You also need the government to deliver services better and be more responsive so that they feel they’re getting something that works for them. Then you also need, as I said, the media, the communication information environment part so that they feel that they’re informed and so they don’t feel completely separated and polarized from their fellow citizens. To me, all of these things fit together and you can’t really... I don’t think one can really advance without the other. Yeah. I’m trying to think of... I guess I’m curious more about the fairness... I haven’t really... Yeah. Can you say more about fairness and your feelings about it? I think this is probably just my childhood psychology, but I hate unfairness and I hate it when people get to abuse their power. I think of democratic governance as an inoculation against that, simply by virtue of the fact that it causes alternations in power and makes it hard for people to consolidate power to the extent that a dictator or a monarch does. Ideally, it gives people voice and it enables those who are being discriminated against or oppressed or just left out or impoverished. It gives those people agency and a voice to campaign for or agitate for better treatment for themselves. That ideally should be the outcome. I don’t believe in a utopian socialist paradise where everybody has equal wealth and is equal in every way, but I do believe in a society where everybody is treated fairly. Obviously, certain basic rights and processes, an ability to advance, but an ability to defend themselves against abuse by the powerful. To me, that’s... Why else do we have this? Yeah. I’ve stumbled on a good question, I hope. If you were to design a role for yourself, either at the national level or maybe in a city, what would it be and what would you do? If you had the power and the budget and if you were given the license to implement some of these ideas, what kinds of changes do you think you would want to make? That’s a great question. Because I go in different directions. One of them is trying to do what I do now, which is be a storyteller and help change people’s minds. And so that might be a role where if you’re working for a city or a government, your job is to go around and be the explainer to people, whether it’s in local communities, whether it’s in the bureaucracy, whether it’s in the media. And all of these different sectors explain to them what a democracy could look like and how their piece of it fits together with the other pieces and why they have to work together. So that storyteller would be the most obvious thing, since that’s what I’ve done as a profession. I also sometimes think maybe it would be nice to actually be a facilitator of processes, deliberative processes, conflict resolution, and help people bridge those divides. Another potentially could be focused more on the process side of things. What does it take to get a bureaucracy to move faster? What does it take to get a legislature to do lawmaking differently and to move and to be more responsive to technological change? That’s more, that’s less my area of expertise. But I think that could also be a valuable thing where I think there’s a lot of, in bureaucracy and in legislatures, they’re just not very good understanding of technology and what its implications are and how it’s changing things they do and also of how they could do things differently. And so just creating some space, some opening, some vision around what is possible and how you might change things, how you might change those processes, that could also be something good to do. Yeah. I love the explainer or the storyteller as the first, as that. I think very often, obviously, I’m just thinking my own experience in Hudson where a lot of these, they don’t really take a lot of responsibility for telling that story. One of the biggest troubles is that just the city or the place that you live in very often is incoherent, I think. Incoherence is almost the first level of complication. There’s this woman, Fiona McNae, who’s a British semiotician, and she did a TED talk and the title was Taking Responsibility for Being Understood. And I’ve always felt that phrase, especially when applied to government or civic stuff, is really powerful because they don’t often do that work. Maybe this is related to that deliverism critique. I mean, people said Biden delivered a lot of stuff, but if you’re not telling people that stuff has been delivered, nobody really knows that it’s been delivered in a way that so that these things come together. Do you know what I mean? That you have to take responsibility for making sure that the delivery has been understood or has been received. Yes. And that then, again, becomes a problem in the information environment. The Biden administration, one of the biggest complaints of the people who worked in it was, we did all this great stuff. We passed the Inflation Reduction Act. We passed the CHIPS Act. We created all this investment and nobody knows about it. And some of that may have been poor storytelling. A lot of it was probably the media environment, which meant that those stories didn’t surface. Some of it was that inflation eclipsed those achievements. And I think this is, in fact, one of the critiques of deliverism is that, is precisely that, that you can deliver, but that people don’t necessarily know you delivered because, maybe because the storytelling is inadequate. But yes, you’re right. Ideally, a government would be able to say, here are the good things we did. And people would appreciate them, but people also need to see the bad things that it did or the ways in which it fell short. In some ways, I think that perhaps the more useful way, I’m thinking out loud, but a more useful way to show people that a government is responsive is not, here are all the great things we did that you should be grateful for, but you have a complaint, here’s how we’re responding to it. And make it really about the citizen’s individual interaction over the thing that they particularly care about, rather than the program that maybe has some broad effect on the economy, but that doesn’t necessarily touch them. Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, what you just, for whatever reason, the arrival of AI into all of this just popped into my consciousness. You’ve been in this space for a long time. What has that done to the work? What’s exciting about it? What’s challenging about it? What does it do to this issue of democratic reform? It complicates it hugely. Again, it accelerates the pace of change even further, which means that government institutions are that much more incapable of keeping up with things. So there’s that aspect. It probably upends the economy, which is another thing that government is not good at responding to. What is a new economic structure, policy compact that we can have in the age of AI? It creates all sorts of possibilities. There’s a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Schneider called Rewiring Democracy, where they list all of the ways in which AI could be used to help things like the judicial system, the bureaucracy, the electoral system, political campaigning, and all of the ways in which it could blow those things up and create problems. It’s a long list, but the takeaway really is that what the technology will do is a function of how we use it and what choices we make about how it’s used. We can make choices in which it benefits things and makes processes smoother and eliminates unnecessary bureaucracy and improves people’s interactions with government and makes it more responsive. There’s also uses in which it gums up the works, creates all kinds of slop, or enables more authoritarian surveillance, for instance. So we have just a few minutes left, but I wanted to point to the work you’re currently doing. You’re on Substack, obviously, and you have this Protopian Prize. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, so the Protopian Prize, it’s a speculative fiction prize, which I’m co-judging with a science fiction writer, Ruth Anna Emrys. The idea is it’s run by a couple of organizations, MetaGov and the Public AI Network. The first one is about a confederation of people who work on new forms of governance and what governance could look like in the 21st century. The second is about imagining forms of AI that are not owned by big corporations and serving their interests, but are actually designed and developed and controlled in the public interest. So that could mean AI that is designed to solve specific social problems, or is based on data that is really relevant to a particular locality instead of all being just scraped randomly from the English-language internet, or is not based on data that was copyrighted and stolen, or has various safety guardrails to make sure that it’s not doing socially bad things. So these organizations have created this prize, and the idea is for people to write about what could better forms of democracy look like, and what could better forms of AI that serves people look like. And our idea is simply, and it’s what I am trying to do, people have these notions of what democracy is that they can’t see beyond, and they can’t imagine a form of it that looks better because the stories are not there. People have this notion of what AI is, they can’t imagine a world in which it is not controlled by these big tech companies, and so helping that imagination, helping people see possibilities of how the world could look different, that is a first step towards actually bringing about that world. Obviously, a hell of a lot more than that, but at least sets you on the path, because it gives people a sense of what they should be demanding from their leaders, and what they could agitate for, and what they could try building themselves. Are you familiar with Helen and Dave Edwards? They have the Artificiality Institute. I do, I even worked with them at one point. Oh, wonderful. Well, I love them, and I’m really their language and their framework is stuff that really informs, it’s how I think about things, which I think is the great gift they’ve given us, and they talk about this cognitive sovereignty, and this language of sovereignty being a way of describing the relationship that we have with AI somehow, that we need to create these boundaries, because we are living alongside this intelligence, and so we have to manage these boundaries, and so my question is, when I think about AI, I’ve thought that, well, there’s cognitive sovereignty at the individual level, but is there sovereignty at the local level too, or at the municipal level? Is sovereignty something that needs to be defined all over the place, that that’s part of this disruption of AI, is that we’re all defining our own boundaries, and are there examples of local AI, whatever that means, that municipalities take ownership of, or have a space? I run out of language to describe it, but to your point, it’s coming from the billionaire platforms up there, what examples are there of localities maybe taking control, or defining their own way of being in this, with AI? I don’t, I’ve never actually heard this on cognitive sovereignty before, can you say a couple more words about what it is? Oh yeah, so it’s her description of saying that it’s because AI is a cognitive technology, when we work with it, it changes us, as much as we’re changing it, and the boundaries between what’s us and what’s it are really blurry, and so she has a, if she talks about that, that it’s almost like a discipline of being aware of what role am I in, what role am I putting AI in, with regards to the idea, or the work, or the output, and so just being very disciplined about the boundary, and I think of sovereignty as this drawing hard boundaries around control, and that’s what she sees, it’s almost like a practice, but then we hear people working with AI, and they, what do they call it, AI psychosis, or things get really blurry, it gets very confusing, so anyway, the question really was, how are there examples of municipalities, or places, or defining their own relationship with AI? Not that I know of. I feel like this is the problem everyone is struggling with. There’s, I guess the parallel term cognitive offloading, which is when you surrender your decision making, or your mental processing to an AI, and it is also related to the question we have about whether AI will replace workers, or augment them. You can make choices as a company, for example, as an employer, about whether you’re going to use AI just to do the same work with fewer people, or whether you’re going to keep the same number of people, and use AI to empower them to do more things, because some of the more routine aspects of their work can now be automated. That is related to the cognitive sovereignty, to the extent that if you use AI, if you identify the things that are actually not a good use of your time, and use AI to do those, you’re empowering yourself to take cognitive sovereignty, to identify where your human mind is actually at its most useful, and ensure that you are the person in charge, that you are using AI in those ways that supplement and empower you. We’re seeing the question of cognitive sovereignty in education, and whether if students are just turning in papers that are AI written, they’re surrendering their cognitive faculties to it. One of the distinctions that someone I know has also used in this context is that you can use AI in summative and formative ways, he calls it, and apparently this is also a distinction that comes from education theory. Summative is basically about the output, you use AI to produce a spreadsheet, or something, or write an email, or create a business plan. Formative is where using the, formative is where it is helping you, where the point is the process itself, it’s the learning, it’s the gathering of, it’s the creating of a network, let’s say, or it’s something that develops you, and AI can be used to help with formative processes too. So I think I’m just using different words for similar things here, where there is this notion that we’re all struggling with, how do we be disciplined about ensuring that AI doesn’t replace us, doesn’t substitute for our thinking, but instead gives us more power. I think very few people are actually in a position, or have the luxury to be disciplined about that, and to think about it in a very clear way. In most people, many people’s, perhaps most people’s cases, that choice is out of their hands, because it’s in the hands of their employer, or simply the thing is moving too fast, and it’s too complex for us to even be aware that our cognitive sovereignty is eroding. So I think we’re really just at the very beginning of that journey of figuring out whether we will retain our cognitive sovereignty or lose it. Do you want to end before we say goodbye on a positive thought for the future of democracy? I think the positive thing is that as scary as things are, this is also the moment when anything is possible, there’s an open space for innovation. I think about this in the context of journalism as well. AI is going to disrupt the business models of an awful lot of publications, because when you get your information through ChatGPT, you’re much less likely to go to the website of the publication and read its stories, and so a lot of the traffic it depends on is going away already. There is an open space to experiment with what new forms of journalism might arise, what new business models might arise, and I think there is an open space to experiment with in many other areas too. And one of the things that AI does, it allows us to code, so it allows us to prototype ideas and try out solutions to things much more easily than we could before. So that is the optimism, is that there is the space for experimentation. Whether those experiments succeed in producing a better world also depends on whether we organize to undercut the existing power structures that have kept the institutions that we have going for so long. So it’s not, I always want to emphasize this because I hear so many people talking about how a technology will solve this or that problem, and it’s never about the technology. The technology is always just a tool. It’s about the choices we make on how to use it, and about the power structures in which it exists and who can take, who benefits from those or who can direct them in a different way. Beautiful. Gideon, I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. This has been really great. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Great to talk. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]