Jonathan Taee on Rhizomes & Meaning

Dr. Jonathan Taee is a social anthropologist and the founder of Rhizome Consulting, a New York digital strategy and brand systems agency. His clients range from Fortune 500 organizations like Target to mission-driven farms, real estate groups, and emerging consumer brands. His focus is on building "living brand systems" — adaptive structures that reflect how meaning is actually created today. He lives in the Hudson Valley, where he runs Ironwood Farm with his family.

So, you may or may not know this, but I start every conversation, and I do this in my work too, with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s a neighbor, who you know, Suzanne Snyder, I imagine. And I use it because it’s a big, beautiful question.

I can’t imagine a better question for getting into a conversation out of nowhere. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it. So, before I ask, I want you to know that you are 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?

My goodness. Out the gate with the existential big question. I, the first place I go to, because I’m a Brit living in the US, is I’m from England.

But that, in a sense, is its own problematic answer, because I think I’ve lived more years in the States now than I have in the UK. So, it’s a question I’m asking myself all the time. But I was born in England and came to the US for, when I was probably about one year old.

Lived here till I was eight, and then went back to the UK. My parents decided they wanted to put me back in English school. Finished my schooling there, and then did a gap year and all that, and then decided I wanted to come to the US for university.

Met a woman, and here I am living in the Hudson Valley next to you, Peter, living the dream. But you know, where do I come from? You know, I identify as English, 100%. My kids have American accents.

When I speak to English people, they think I’m American, because my accent’s all going all over the place. And every time they say that, it hurts a little bit. So, I’m going to claim the space here.

I’m English.

Are there moments when you feel particularly English?

When I talk about being English. I hear my accent go. But when I’m in England, I almost feel less English. But you know, I’d say when I invite my friends over for a Sunday dinner, and they don’t know the decorum of what a Sunday lunch is, that makes me feel very English. When I feel offended about something that other people should know, but why would they know, because it’s culturally different, but I get offended about it, I’m like, oh yeah, that’s an original point for me.

I think we’ve got to a very strong answer. What is the appropriate behavior for a Sunday dinner?

It could be a podcast in and of itself, to be honest with you. I’ll give you the top line.

If you accept the invite, you have to turn up unless something really bad happens. It’s not a casual invite. It’s not a potluck.

When you’re invited, you’re expected to come because someone’s been cooking for 48 hours. You bring a bottle of wine. You don’t bring a dish.

You are being fully hosted when you are invited to a Sunday lunch. Reciprocity and all that. Accept the gift and bring the bottle and play that role. That’s another good one.

Those two feel like those could be very common. That must happen all the time. Americans just trampling all over the Sunday dinner.

I’ve seen it all, Peter. I’ve been offended by it all.

The other one is a good Sunday lunch is about hanging out with people. It’s about having drinks and talking. It’s then about eating a big meal probably more than you should.

Then it’s about staying afterwards and sitting on the couch and kicking back. It’s something we don’t get to do that often. It’s not something that you come 45 minutes.

I think I could make that two o’clock other friend. No, no, no, no. You don’t want to hear about any other friends.

No, no new friends.

No new friends on a Sunday lunch.

I had an experience of something like that. It was a holiday feast at your place many years ago when both our kids were much smaller and you only had one, I think.

Yeah, back when I could do things like that. Well, you know, my wife’s a farmer, so she grows it, I cook it.

I’ve always enjoyed doing the cooking bit. The hosting piece, that’s a big Brit thing. We like to host people for meals, etc.

I want to know, when you were a kid, did you have an idea? Do you have a of young Johnny and what he wanted to be when he grew up?

I’m embarrassed about the answer. They did all these, you know, testing in England at school that would tell you sort of what career you could potentially be good for, which I always got really frustrated with later in life.

So I always thought I’d love to be a doctor, like a emergency room doctor. Maybe it’s because I’m just watching the pit too much. And I was told I wasn’t good at science.

And so as a young person, I really steered myself away from that. And I feel like I really did myself a disservice, saying, no, I can do that. I’ll just apply myself more and I could make it through.

It was like, because I was told I wasn’t good at science, being a doctor was never a thing I could do. And so I can’t remember what the tests told me. It’s probably something like you’d be good as a career counselor or something.

But I think the answer that I’m embarrassed by is I said I wanted to be a businessman. Ah. And what was a businessman? I don’t know what business it was.

I was naive at that time, but I’m almost like, am I that now? You know, I deal with for-profit businesses and digital marketing and I’m constantly talking to people about our services and selling what we do or talking about other people and their businesses and, you know, the problems they face and the solutions we could deploy. And maybe I am strangely become that businessman that I never thought I would be.

Johnny, I mean, that would mean that you’ve achieved your childhood dreams.

Oh, no. Another existential dilemma, Peter.

So catch us up. Where are you and what is the work that you do?

So I run a digital studio. Sometimes we call ourselves an agency, depending what day it is, in the Hudson Valley, New York. We’re based in Hudson, New York.

But we work nationally and internationally. We have some international clients as well. We’re defined by three main pillars of work.

We build brands, brand strategy and identity systems. We build websites, both sort of informational sites as well as full e-commerce sites. We’re in Shopify daily.

And then we do full 360 digital marketing for our clients. And our best projects are the ones that span all three of those pillars, because that means that we’re working with clients over several years. The relationship is very deep.

The results are very are productive and keep the client, you know, coming back and wanting to work with us. And we get to see growth. You know, that’s really if we worked across all three of those pillars, we’ve seen growth and some positive marketing market feedback.

How did you come to Hudson Valley, Hudson, New York? What do you love about it?

So I met a woman at the University of Virginia and we fell in love. And I went off to do a PhD and she went off to farm in New York in the Hudson Valley. She came here because of what’s called the craft program, which is this amazing young farmers program, especially in the Northeast, where if you want to farm and you don’t know how to get into it, you can join this program.

And that was her. And so she was doing this thing in the Hudson Valley. I remember visiting her when when when she was here thinking, where are we? She’s living in a box in the woods on this random farm up in Chatham.

But there was something beautiful about it reminded me of home, reminded me of England. And then things pretty good were getting serious with the woman. And then eventually she said, I want to farm.

I want a baby and I want it in the Hudson Valley. Are we doing this? And I took a moment to think about it and then said, yeah, all right. Sounds great.

Let’s go. And so fast forward. Here I am.

Yeah. And the PhD, I remember when we met. I mean, when did you arrive in Hudson?

I remember going to Baba Louie’s pizza in Hudson about 2010, I think was the first time. So I was writing the PhD when I was I was living in Kinderhook. Yeah. In Hudson, Kinderhook area at that time, post fieldwork.

Yeah. Would you want to tell the story of the fieldwork you did? You went, you were you’re an anthropologist.

Yeah. So I got into anthropology in undergrad. The gap year that I mentioned to was quite informative for me. I was 18.

I thought I knew everything about the world and myself. And I knew that I was living in England in a bubble and I was like, I’m going to get out of the West. So I lived in Nepal basically for a year with an organization called it’s now called Relentless Development, I think.

And they would put someone like me at 18 years old, paired up with a Nepali counterpart in a village in the south of Nepal. And very quickly, it was a shock. It was a shocking experience because I didn’t know everything.

I knew actually very little. And the West that I was trying to escape was actually in me. And then it started to pour out of me in these strange ways.

And I was like embarrassed about it, confused about it. It was a great experience. I loved living in that village and the people were so wonderful.

It was during the Maoist rebellion there. So there was a lot of violence going on at the time. But basically when I got to UVA, I was like, what did I just do? I mean, my brain was scrambled.

My identity was scrambled. And then I discovered in the, literally in back in that day, there was like the course book that they would print. And I was flicking through.

I was like, what courses am I going to take? Oh, this thing called anthropology. What’s that? I looked it up in the dictionary, literally. And I was like, that’s interesting.

That’s exactly what I want to do. Fast forward, went to Cambridge to do a PhD in social anthropology, which lent more towards medical anthropology. And then the field work was in Bhutan, studying the different types of healthcare that people use in Bhutan.

I spent a year doing the field work there, wrote it, published it as a book. Yeah. I love how you described the West of being in you and then coming out of you in all these uncomfortable ways.

I feel like I’ve identified with that a lot. And yeah, what else can you say about that experience, about being so far from home? What is, what’s the thing that no matter where you go, there you are, right?

Yeah. The first thing to say, I think about it is I problematize the whole thing in my head a lot now that I’m older. I mean, we went there to help and volunteer. So there are these gap year programs, you know, where you get to river raft one month and then you’re building a well in a village.

This was all about helping. And I really was on my high horse, you know, I was like, I want to volunteer and serve. But, you know, did anybody ask those villagers, you know, did they want this English white guy to come in? You know, the boundaries of consent there in the work and, and, um, it’s pretty, pretty blurred.

I did like the program though, because they, the teaming up with national volunteers was a big part of it. So we had language training. I had two Napoli counterparts actually, who we lived with and worked with.

So it was we were very embedded and the whole program was to get involved with the school, you know, create a student youth club, then ask the youth club to see if they wanted to, you know, what did they want to do? What did the community want to do? And then try to action that work. So as you know, well-building and, and Western, you know, top of the spear kind of international relief and development goes, it was pretty, it was soft, but still to this day, I’m like, whoa, well, what was I doing? What was I doing? And I, you know, I was 18. I didn’t, I didn’t know much.

You know, I wasn’t really that reflective of who I was and that’s what was coming out of me. I was like, oh, you know, getting frustrated at things or the slowness of things, things that I thought the way the work should go or what the youth team should do, or the community was not necessarily grateful for the work that I was doing confused me. Cause I thought that, oh, service is service.

Health is health. It’s not, you know, what did you love about, what drew you to anthropology or what was the, what was that like? I, when I came back from Nepal and I landed, I call it like landing in the full marching band, college marching band of university in the States. I mean, university of Virginia, big state university, all the things that you, you know, in love and like those old school nineties university movies was seemed to be happening there.

And I just felt so lost, you know, like, how do I make sense of these different world views that I had experienced in Nepal, in England and now in the States? I found it really confusing and anthropology it didn’t actually start to build the first thing it did. It started breaking everything down, you know, that postmodern breakdown where it’s like everything you ever thought was truth. We’re going to, we’re going to break it into component parts, start looking at the parts, break them even further down.

You know, it wasn’t till way later where I think I started to build back again. It was just four years of brutal destruction. I think anthropology gave the framework of how to do that without going crazy or down, down a certain rabbit hole.

It kept you quite honest and the whole, the whole exercise seemed to be very, self-critical in itself. So, you know, it’s, it helped me do that. And then when it start, when I started to understand the practice in itself and then started to go do field work and putting myself in that space through the PhD, you start to see a lot more of the value of the practice out in the world, you know, what the work that you’re doing, the people I was talking to, yeah, yeah.

So it did become a positive thing in the end. It wasn’t just destruction because I know a lot of anthropologists can feel that way, you know, like, what are we doing? We’re just talking in circles and circles. And whereas I work, you know, is it applied at all ever? Yeah. It’s challenging.

What was the role of the field work? And then I want to get to sort of where you’re at now, but I’m just, I’m sort of, and there’s a piece of me that’s also envious. I came to sort of, you know, the anthropological ideas really late.

So I sort of envy being a student and learning and then engaging it with it in that way. And at that age, but I’m just curious, the field work, what was that like for you and what was it like to pick up as a skill or as an ability or even just as an experience?

Yeah. I loved it. I feel very blessed and lucky that I got to do the field work. I went to Bhutan, a country that is, has been very closed off for a long time. And then when it did start to let folks in, whoever they were, Westerners, Indian, Chinese, or Indonesian Malaysians, a lot of people from there, you know, they did it in a very protected manner.

They were very controlled. You know, if you $250 a day, at least through the visas and the tour company there, they don’t let Johnny Tay. And when he was 18 years old, backpacking in Nepal, the neighbor, you know, they let me live off $3 a day.

So they’re very protective over what they have. And so the field work, you know, to get access is a story in of itself of how that happened. And essentially I was given a visa for a year, with a lot of freedom to move around the country.

I bought a car in there and I was just allowed to drive wherever, which is just all very, it’s a very, very rare thing. The field work itself was, you know, looking at the different types of healthcare that were available to patients in Bhutan. And then how they navigated between them.

It really became about healthcare seeking behavior, and trying to look, look at that in the context of Bhutan, which is very interesting, very quickly. They have a national healthcare service that’s biomedical. They have, so it’s paid for by the state.

If you get, say for example, cancer or you have a heart problem in the East of Bhutan, you’ll get referred from your national health clinic on the mountain side to the Mongar health clinic or hospital in the East of the country, which is the biggest, one of the biggest hospital in the East. If they can’t treat you there, you’ll get sent to Timpu, the capital. If you can’t get treated there, they’ll even pay for you and a family member to go to India.

So they’ve got this, you know, it’s a very active state controlled, all paid for health system in a country that is, you know, quite economically challenged. And so, you know, there aren’t that many doctors in, like in Bhutan. I’m sure it’s, I don’t know what the number is today, but it was really low before.

So in some ways, you know, speaking from the American point of view, amazing because I just seek the care that I need. But the question they have is, is the doctor actually there, the medication there that I need to get? That’s actually their problem. Then you have a national healthcare service that’s traditional medicine.

So I can walk, when I walk into a hospital in Mongar, the receptionist will ask me, would you like, but they call it modern, really modern healthcare, which is the biomedical, would you like traditional medicine, which is, it comes from, sort of Tibetan medicine history there. That region, all medicines grown, medicines come from plants and elements grown on the Himalayan mountain range in Bhutan, whole medicine collection thing that happens there. And it’s a very structured, well-known, systematized form of traditional medicine.

And then there’s a third category of alternative practice. So shamans, ritual healers, religious healing, folk remedies, a whole bunch of stuff, which the state is not involved in. And there’s a tango that happens between state practice and those other pieces.

So it was all about that when you’re sick as a patient there, people are referencing and using all of these things, oftentimes all at once or in competing intensity and timeframe. And so there’s a lot of complexity that arises there about how people seek care, what’s meaningful.

What do you feel like you learned? I guess being an anthropologist and somebody who’s done that kind of field work, what do you feel like you carry with you that somebody that doesn’t, hasn’t had that experience? I don’t know if I finished that question correctly.

No, I, I hear it. I think, I think it’s about how to talk to people. And I think you’re quite good at this Peter.

You want to start writing questions. Just asking questions, being able to walk into a room and sit down with anybody and be yourself, an open listening book, and ask the types of questions that get beyond just that surface level and start really diving deep into someone’s life, their, their context, physical context, their knowledge, context, all of that, and just go deep and deep and deep and not be too preoccupied with yourself and your agenda and what you’re thinking about. I think that’s what the training tries to get you to be, you know, and again, anthropology problematizes that, you know, we’re loaded as a, as a human being we’re loaded with culture.

And so we try to make ourselves, we’re trained to be as neutral as possible when going into situations, but you never truly are. But I think as anthropologists who’ve done that field work and enjoyed it and liked it, you probably come out with some pretty good listening skills. And so my tolerance to sit down with people from all walks of life, different political sides or, education side, any, wherever you come from.

I just love it. I love sitting down, speaking, talking to people, especially when they’re really out of my context. You know, if I meet someone who’s just really different from my everyday walk of life, that’s exciting for me.

Yeah. So how do you, what’s the story from social anthropology, Bhutan to Rhizome, your agency, your studio? How did you start this work?

It turns out, I don’t know if all your guests, your anthropologist guests are like this, maybe they, you’re speaking to the successful ones, but anthropology is just never paid. Reading books and doing field work.

I mean, there’s a whole story to have about how I funded my PhD. I mean, I felt like I ran it like a business. You know, I, I was never that good, Peter.

So I never got the big fellowships where Cambridge was like, yeah, we’ll just four years. We got you, Johnny. It wasn’t like that.

They actually let me in and said, we won’t pay for you. So, I had to self fund it and I did it through finding, lots of different scholarships. And you know, when, once you enter that world, there is opportunity, but it was very entrepreneurial.

Yeah. But you’re speaking as if the anthropologist in you isn’t a work or at work or alive in the work that you’re doing now, which yeah.

Well, they are aligned then they emerging every day more and more.

But you know, while I was running basically while I was at the university of Virginia learning anthropology and becoming a budding anthropologist, I was also spinning hard drives doing graphic work and eventually ended up running the digital media lab. It was called the UVA. And by the time I graduated, I was spinning four different hard drives across three different paid gigs for graphics, graphic design, motion graphics, everything.

I mean, I was basically teaching digital media by the time I left and my gosh, Peter, that worked paid. So throughout the PhD, I would take small projects here or there. And then it all, it all sort of came to a head when the PhD finished and we decided my wife and I decided to move to the Hudson Valley permanently and have that farm and that baby.

I looked around and I was like, well, what, what am I going to do? And so I just, I founded the agency then, and then started taking it really seriously and it just blossomed. I mean, it was like project to project, new client to new client. There was a lot of need for it.

Again, there’s listening skills, I think really helped because all of our clients had different challenges or problems that they’re trying to solve. And I’ve found that the work comes when you really understand the client and what challenge they face. You know, if you’re a specialist in Google ads, for example, you want your problem, your client’s problem to be a Google ads problem.

And it’s nice when it is, but it’s usually not. And so we, yeah, we flexed and changed and adapted a lot over the years to help our problems, clients solve, you know, very specific business problems. What do you love about the work that you’re doing at Rhizome? I have a question about the name too, Rhizome, but, what do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you? I really, I really like working with small to medium sized businesses where someone’s doing something really quite unique and special and you just help them get to where they want to go.

This is a lot, we spend a lot of our day talking to folks who are like, we’ve got this vision, but we just don’t quite know how to get there. And my team and I can come in and, do a little bit of work, put some systems in place, put some tech in place, put some education in place, and then you just watch something grow. And it’s thrilling, you know, when we get a client that calls us or we meet them and they’re like, look at this, look what happened.

And you’re like, we know it works. It feels like magic, you know? And it, and it does boil down to the anthropology thing. What, why is it working? It’s because we’re moving people, you know, our clients want some type of action to occur in the world.

They want people to do something. And when we see people doing that, it’s quite, it still blows my mind. It’s exciting.

Yeah. Is there a good story you can tell about the work that you’re doing, but you’re comfortable sharing? If not, that’s fine.

I love talking about work. We had a very interesting project, a year or two ago where we helped the city of battle Creek in Michigan, which is formerly known as serial city rebrand itself. They didn’t quite like serial city.

It felt, old the city in which Kellogg was founded as well as Ford. But in which serial is no longer made. And actually a lot of incredible stuff is happening in battle Creek.

Now, a lot of art going down a lot of new business, incredible education programs and things like that. And small businesses are being born every day in battle Creek. And so the city came forth with a project where they, they wanted a new identity.

They, you know, and it had to be born from a very community-based, process. This was not about big consultants coming in and telling them what you should be positioned here, because we’ve looked at the competitive sets of all of the cities around you. And we think there’s white space quote unquote here.

No, the opposite was true. It was about really understanding who battle Creek was, who they wanted to be, who they were in the past as well, because that was all, it was all sort of compressed into one layer and then asserting a type of identity, visual and words that would not only be reflective of who they were, but allow room to grow as well, because they, they were in a real, an upswing, like an inflection point of growth for them, culturally, economically size, you know, demographic as well. So that’s a, that’s a cool problem to solve when you come to like branding and identity, because you’ve got to build something that is hyper flexibility and applicability to the, to set community.

And it was real privilege to, you know, work with, with those people to come, come forth with a solution. And I think we did it. We had a cool design that was very flexible.

The end up, it was the, the visuals that the tagline was, battle Creek, our city, your home. And the visual was a very simple, a hand with a heart placed where battle Creek is because in Michigan, they often have the mitten shape of the state. So it’s a recognizable shape that especially Michigan folks know.

And then we put the heart right at battle Creek. And the whole idea was that the design could be rebuilt in any style that you wanted. So for example, the battle Creek zoo could do an animal pool and place a heart in the animal pool and make it their own, you know, a rock symbol, if you were a rock band from with the battle Creek, but there was, so there was, a connection to the identity and who they were, but then massive extendability to the brand design.

Very, very cool. Very cool. And I’m curious about process. What do you want to, when a question like that comes in front of you, how do you learn or what’s your approach to sort of orienting yourself to a project and thinking about how to, how to learn? And I guess for there’s, there’s always a selfish question or motivation behind my question. And it’s sort of like, what’s the role of research in the work that you do and how you think about it?

Every project is different in the bandwidth we have for research. So that is a good, the battle Creek projects, a great example where there was a, there was demand and a requirement for a ton of research and listening.

And there was the funding for it. It was a nonprofit in scope, the, but a lot of our clients are for-profit businesses and the appetite for a lot of research is not there, especially in the small to medium sized business. Sets people need results really quickly and they want to get right to it.

And so our approach really, again, is about listening to the client where they are in their journey and trying to tune a project, that fits their context perfectly. There’s a lot of layers of technical stuff, professional stuff, digital marketing stuff. You know, when you’re building a Shopify site, there’s a lot of rules, best practices that you have to follow.

Or if you’re doing digital marketing, if you’re going to run a Google ads campaign or, you know what you’re doing, there’s a lot, just expertise around that. But that’s just not enough. It needs to be the, the tactics of the digital marketing or website work needs to meet with the goals and the strategy of where the client is.

And that’s that magic point. So I spend my time really trying to think about before we even sign engagements, our proposal process takes a long time because we try to really line those things up so that we’re not just doing digital marketing tactics all day. And it’s not producing the end results.

That’s how projects fail. You know, where you’ve gone past, you’ve done 12 months of work and you look back and no one’s happy about it. Yeah.

Typically it’s not because the tactics were wrong. It’s not because the client didn’t have goals. It’s because they didn’t match up.

Yeah. What is your, it’s, what kinds of, I’m curious about how you listen to clients and how you engage with them in order to make sure that you’re learning and understanding, are there any tricks of the trades or ways that you think about, being in conversation with them or structuring that kind of conversation with them?

I find, maybe this is the anthropologist in me and the ethnographer, but you need to put your body in space and time with the client and you need a lot of time. I’ve tried to do it just over zoom, for example, or in a couple of meetings.

We never use things like surveys anymore. You know, it needs to be exploratory, discovery based conversation and that the more hours, the better really. And just when I think I know something about a client or their business and their problem, another conversation unveiled something new, and you’re always surprised.

So I try to go a little ethnographic with it, you know, ethnographer, just try to be in their place of business. We did a really lovely project in Pittsburgh, last year and continuing to work with the company called Elmhurst. Elmhurst group is formerly they’re a real estate developer in the Pittsburgh region.

And we spent a week there just, you know, literally meeting everybody that they work with going to events, that were only tangentially connected with real estate development, but it’s all input and interesting talking with every single employee from the company, talking to, all their vendors and suppliers and, partners in the business, investors, you know, the whole stack, everyone, the network, you know, and anyone connected to the network, let’s do active listening. So that’s what I mean, if we, if we’re doing it, right, we’ve got a body in place in time where the client is, beautiful.

And the name Rhizome, what’s the, why name it Rhizome?

This is a very existential question where I was worried you were going to ask me because Rhizome is going through its own rebranding process. It’s finally come the time where we haven’t spoken about the work that we’ve done really ever. We do, you know, a little on our website. And I’m quite excited about presenting us to the world in a more formal sense.

And the term Rhizome was deeply personal to me and very, influential in the way that I think about the world. It comes from Deleuze and Guattari, work, you know, a thousand plateaus, anti-Oedipus and the work with rhizomatic theory, versus arborescent tree-based structure. So it’s a whole, it’s a whole ontology about the world, which is like, Oh, do I really, am I, I, there are many other professional philosophers out there that should be talking about this, not me, but I’ve found myself as we start to rebrand, asking ourselves the question of like, who are we? Why, why do we do what we do? What’s the philosophy behind it? And the answer is yes.

Rhizomatic assemblage theory applied then to digital marketing in the way that we think about business and digital marketing. So. Yeah.

So, but unpack that stuff for me that what, what is rhizomatic assembly theory? What is the, what, what’s the significance, or is this something you know? Oh, I I’ll give it, I’ll give it. I just want to make sure I’m interpreting correctly. You were leaning into rhizome. You were owning and claiming rhizome.

I am. Yes, I am. Yeah. So I’ll give it my best shot. I think Deleuze and Guattari or Guattari, they were writing at, you know, late sixties, early seventies, and they were writing in response to Freud specifically, like anti Oedipus, one of their major first works was specifically critiquing Freud.

And so in the sixties, by the sixties, you had something happening where scientific thought, cultural thought knowledge was getting very, very narrow and trying to sort of put itself around a very specific way the world is and the way things are like that. And that’s the arborescent structure. So you’ve got a tree with a trunk.

It is the single source of truth. And then if you could just get that trunk of knowledge set and you really knew what the way it works, then it blooms into leaves and it has all this emergent quality to it of meaning. So if I’m sitting on the Freud’s couch and you’re like, I had this dream about riding my bike, you know, Freud will distill it through those from the tree back through the branches to this trunk of knowledge about, oh, it’s an Oedipus complex.

You know, you love your mother, whatever. Deleuze and Guattari would then really trying to problematize that. And they were like, no, no, no, no, no.

There isn’t this central structure of knowledge. The world doesn’t really work like that. It works more like a rhizome.

It works more like a network with nodes in it. So nodes being anything, physical knowledge, human beings, literally, it could be anything. But the, you start to think about the relationality between different things in a network, how they come together to create power.

Thank you, Foucault. And then how they emerge out into the world to create meaning, production, etc. And so when you do that as an anthropologist, it’s interesting because it allows you to really complexify meaning and complexify anything that you’re studying systems, for example, instead of strict structures.

And then you can break those systems apart, put them back together again. And so that’s a rhizome. It’s non-linear.

Like if you imagine that rhizome tuber under the earth, it grows in all different directions. It grows up, down, left, right. It can connect itself sometimes like branches of rhizomes come together and create single tubers that then go on and branch off again.

Very networked type of physical thing. Also, my wife grows ginger, which is so you know, I see those rhizomes a lot every day. So the name of this... Did that make any sense by the way? It did, it did.

What’s the application to a brand? In what ways is sort of, I’m assuming, brand or the work you do rhizomatic, if that’s the appropriate use of that term? Yeah, yeah. Or am I pushing too hard? Tell me the story.

This is really where like the rubber hits the road. Like what’s the point of talking about a digital studio’s philosophical thing if you can’t actually make meaning in the digital universe? You know, I think, and I actually really believe in this in the work that we do, which is there is one way to approach digital marketing, where there’s like, there is one brand truth, one way something has to be. And again, at that tactical level of digital marketing, this is the one way you do it. Like when you come to my digital agency, we’ll do this for you, this for you, this for you, and it’ll produce these results.

And these are the tools that we have. I think that what I have learned in my experience is that no one set of tactical digital marketing solutions fits every use case. And if there’s anything true with what’s happening with AI in the world now, and every marketing startup company, I mean, there are so many different platforms that could be used, so much time that could be spent on different types of marketing or tool sets in the work that we do.

That there is no one size fits all. There are always layers, connections and things that need to be connected or disconnected, reassembled into something else. And so when we think about marketing, we try to approach it that way.

We really open the network and say, what does this client need? What are they trying to solve objectively? And then what are all the different tools and methods that we could apply here? How can we layer them? When we layer them or connect them, do we see added growth? Interconnectivity, essentially, because the digital world is so interconnected in ways. And as you think about what’s about to happen, what is happening with SEO currently now, and LLMs, and LLMs now driving a large percentage of, or replacing a large percentage of search traffic and organic traffic, it’s a whole new expansion set. And no one really, I don’t think anybody really knows what’s going... The old days of SEO, it was like you use keywords and a meta title and a description, and that will move Google in the search results.

I think it’s getting more and more complex every day with what actually makes a difference out there in the digital space. Do you have an idea or an image of what that looks like? I mean, I hear people talk about share of model from an advertising thing, where you used to worry about share of voice, but now the LLM is its own thing that, of course, now needs to be dealt with and managed. I’m just, I mean, I’m not expecting anything, but I’m just... Do you even have a mental model of what’s going on or ways of talking about it? I think, if we think about it rhizomatically and non-linearly, I think there is a massive expansion happening right now, like laterally, like there’s a growth of pathways digitally happening.

Systems are being connected, new systems are growing and being connected further. And so it’s becoming a very dynamic, expanding network of digital presence. And in that sense, no one, I don’t think anybody really knows, because what’s driving it is also human beings, right? Like our behavior, our search behavior.

What app do you open? What do you search for? You know, what do you click on? And the digital universe now really knows that, you know, it grows on data and it will follow human beings. So there’s a lot of experimental expansion. And I think a lot of different folks are learning about where humans are actually engaging with those sort of different expansions.

Where it’s going to go? And I don’t know. I don’t know. I also think we’re always like moments away from big platform changes and introductions, especially with AI.

I think that if everybody was using Twitter as a growth engine five years ago, what’s going to be the growth engine of next year? I don’t know. Could it be chat, GBT? Which of the major LLMs will drive the majority of traffic to shop? I don’t know yet. We will know soon. So yeah, it’s a lot of unknowns. .

Last question. The newsletter that I, is that Business of Meaning? You’ve used the word meaning a handful of times, and I know you like big philosophical questions. What are we talking about when we talk about meaning? Are you glad you accepted this invitation, Jonny?

I’ll pull it to the human thing. I think meaning matters to a human being, at least I think in a lot of what we do.

I actually think that’s also problematic. I think meaning, there is meaning for protons and neutrons in the way that they connect. The way the universe is formed, I think the universe is really going to get heady with it.

The universe has a meaning that has nothing to do with human beings, which is also a crazy AI thought, because what if AI is the universe’s next way of knowing itself? Human knowledge and humans’ idea of meaning and what we think is important to me is about to be overrun. But I think right now, for me, we have two daughters, a wife and a life and a business that relies on human beings. Meaning is what humans make it to be, and where they put their time, bodies, and actions.

In the biggest sense, I think it’s that. What you do with that, then, in my work, we’re often trying to make people take an action. In marketing speak, the CTA, the call to action.

How do I get somebody to click that button? How do I get somebody to read something that we think is important? I know somebody’s out there that wants this thing. How do we connect it? We have a lovely client right now. They’re called Stonehouse Grain.

They make certified organic animal feed from grain that they grow in the Hudson Valley. Our current challenge right now is that we know there are people all over the Northeast that would love their product, that they’re looking to raise the healthiest possible animals they can, and they want the best quality feed, but they don’t know that this business exists. In this sense, our meaning is we’ve got folks who really love farming and raising animals.

We have someone who just loves growing the best quality grain, and we have to make them meet. There is a meaning production there when that meeting happens. That’s pretty exciting.

Was that an answer? I don’t know.

It was a perfect answer. It was great. We’re at time. I want to thank you very much. I really appreciate you accepting the invitation. Yes, it’s been great. Thank you so much.

It’s been a pleasure. I invite you to Sunday lunch, Peter.

I will know how to behave now, or at least I know a couple of mistakes that I can avoid.

Sounds good.

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