THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

I am a true fan of Jeffrey Kripal’s work. I think his invitation to re-think the humanities by seriously engaging with the study of mystical and paranormal experiences is a beautiful thing. We talk about category creation in the marketing of products. Here, we are talking about the humanities, and the discipline we use to explore and understand the world, and our experiences of it. I was absolutely thrilled to get a chance to speak with him. I hope you enjoy.PeterAI Summary. Scholar Jeffrey Kripal discusses his efforts to "re-enchant" the humanities by taking seriously the extraordinary experiences that have shaped many great thinkers. He explores the distinctly American "spiritual but not religious" movement, its roots in the country's pluralistic approach to spirituality, and the challenges it poses in creating stable communities. Kripal also reflects on the mental health struggles of younger generations, who often feel depressed by the world they have inherited. He suggests that "The Superhumanities," by offering positive visions of human potential and the future, can provide hope in the face of these challenges. The conversation ultimately highlights the importance of integrating extraordinary human experiences into our understanding of ourselves and the world.Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he served as the Associate Dean of the School of Humanities (2019-2023), chaired the Department of Religion for eight years, and also helped create the GEM Program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism that is the largest program of its kind in the world. He presently helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he served as Chair of Board from 2015 to 2020. Rice is the home of the Archives of the Impossible.He specializes in the study of extreme religious states and the re-visioning of a New Comparativism, particularly as both involve putting “the impossible” back on the academic table again. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the history of religions and the sciences for The University of Chicago Press, collectively entitled The Super Story.Thank you for being here. I start all my conversations with the same question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She teaches oral history, and it's this beautiful question, so I always use it, but then I over-explain it, because I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? That's a loaded question. I can tell you where I come from organically or biologically. I'm not sure I can tell you where I come from metaphysically. I come from Nebraska. I grew up in the American Midwest, a little farming community, actually grew up in a hardware store. Oh, wow. Metaphysically, I'm not so sure. I don't know. I don't remember, I'll put it that way. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you were a kid, when you grew up? Yeah, I do. I wanted to be a comic book artist. That was my first dream and that didn't happen. Then I wanted to be an NFL quarterback. Then I wanted to be probably a Catholic missionary, and then I wanted to be a medical doctor, and then I became a professor of religion of all things. We fail at certain things, and we succeed at other things. What was your first comic book? What was your sort of entry into comics?I was born in '62. And I grew up, of course, in the late '60s, early '70s, and Marvel Comics was still inappropriate at that point, which meant it was good. Marvel Comics was a radical disjunction from what we call the DC universe - Superman and Batman. They were blocky figures in the '60s. They knew right from wrong, and they stood for the American way, and it was all this sort of impenetrable man kind of thing going on. With Marvel, the so-called heroes were always making fun of themselves and their villains, and the Hulk was always battling the U.S. Army. Dr. Strange was on God only knows what. We, as kids, didn't know anything about LSD or psychedelics, but the comics were wild and they were psychedelic in a creative or an inspirational sense. Those were really what inspired me early on as a kid, as a little kid. I couldn't explain why I found these bodies so attractive and so exciting but I did. I was what, 11 or 12 or whatever I was.So that was my initial fascination. It was actually comic books, and I know they make a lot of money now, and they're all over the screen and the television, but they weren't in the '60s and '70s. They were just basically a kind of junk literature for kids that was sold where your dad bought pornography. It was a drug store. So they were like drugs for 11-year-olds. Tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're working on. I think I'm at the same place. I think I'm stuck into superhumans and comics. I don't do psychedelics, but maybe sometimes I wish I did. I'm still really interested in people's extraordinary experiences. I think the human being is an extraordinary being and is far more than we imagined. So I think I'm still with the superhero comics of my youth. I just call them saints or mystics or something else now. I think it's the same kind of fascination. I resonated with your work. I really have read everything and just connected on so many levels throughout. I'm excited to talk to you about this stuff and I'm really amazed at what you're doing at Rice. You're formalizing this stuff in a pretty radical way. It seems to me anyway, like you're asking for things that never felt like they were taken seriously to be really considered. I just wonder what that's been like and when did that actually begin? When did you decide that this was what you wanted to be doing? First of all, I want to hear what you resonated with, because that to me is the real key here. I think with an academic or an intellectual, you either move or you create an environment around you that reflects something of what you're doing. I think I've done the latter. Rice University is a very friendly, very good place to be and to work, and it allows a kind of creativity that a lot of other schools don't allow. I know that because I've taught at other schools. I used to live on the East Coast and I lived in Pennsylvania and I interviewed at a lot of East Coast schools, including Ivy League schools, and they all wanted to tell me what to do. When I came to Rice, they were like, "You can do whatever you want. We'll follow you." I didn't believe them, Peter, because I had been told the opposite for many years, but I believe it now. I think it's essentially true, at least of this institution. So what I've done is I've created an ecosystem around myself and have tried to authorize and mainstream a lot of the interests I've always had and I've always written about, but didn't seem to have a home or a stable home. What I'm finding is that the academy and my colleagues are very friendly to these interests and that most people have these interests. They just don't admit it. So when I talk about these things or when I write about them or host conferences around them, people are like, "Yeah, we should be doing this." And I'm like, "Yeah, you should." Of course, I think the reason the humanities are being defunded and ignored is because we don't do this. We don't address the issues that really matter to a lot of people. I think we should. I also think all the critical theory and all the issues around race and gender and class are really important. But I think we also need to do this sort of vertical dimension. You wrote, "Why do we let the physicists go off and they tell these fabulous stories about string theory and yet we don't allow ourselves to talk about this stuff?" Can you tell me a little bit about what it is, for people who don't know your work, like what are you asking the humanities to do? I think I said that in "The Secret Body." It’s a memoir I wrote and what I was trying to talk about was that scientists and physicists can get away with the craziest s**t. They can say the most outrageous things, and because they're a physicist, everybody's like, "Oh yeah, that's possible." I'm like, "We've been saying that for thousands of years in the history of religions. Why are we crazy and they're not?" Of course, the answer is they're scientists and you're not. That doesn't really work for me. That's just a kind of invocation of authority. So what I do is I look at people's anomalous experiences that are not supposed to happen - things like out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, UFO encounters with entities, these sorts of things. I look at them and I realize that they do happen and that the people are actually telling the truth about what happens to them. They don't understand what happened to them. I don't think they're their own authorities. I don't think they understand or can interpret their own experiences. I don't think I can either, but I think we're being invited to try to do that. So that's what I do. I sit with and I think with people who have had these extraordinary or impossible experiences and I put them on the table with the table and the chairs and history and literature and everything else. I say, "Okay, let's think about all this together. Why do these things happen to people? And why do they happen to people in every culture at every time as far back as we can see?" If there's a universal in human experience, it's definitely the anomalous or the impossible. We've been having these experiences from way, way back. How did we get separated from these experiences?I would say by the 18th, 19th century, we start to separate from them, and certainly in the 20th century, we separate from them dramatically, at least in Western culture, Euro-American culture. I wrote an intellectual history of the word "paranormal" called "Authors of the Impossible." One of the takeaways of that little book is that all of the words we use today, like paranormal, psychical, parapsychological, all these terms were all originated or were coined by scientists and intellectuals, mostly in the 19th or early 20th century. During the 20th century, what happens is science and technology arise, and we turn to kind of computer mechanistic models of the mind, and suddenly the mind just becomes a kind of software of the wetware of the brain, and all of these things don't make any sense within that model. So people say they don't happen. They're hallucinations or people are crazy, or they're making this up, or they're looking for money or whatever the rhetoric is. But in fact, that's wrong. What I mean by the impossible is essentially these things that happen all the time, but aren't supposed to happen because of the parameters of our particular worldview. They're not actually possible within the parameters of what we consider to be real, but they happen anyway. So the big thought experiment for me is, "Okay, what must reality be like if these things happen?" Of course, there's no "if" - they do happen. Okay, so what must reality be? It's not what we're told it is. That's a part of the answer for sure. That can explain certainly my daily life, most of my daily life, but it actually can't explain these extraordinary moments. I'm basically making the wager that reality has to take in these extraordinary moments as well as these ordinary moments.Your most recent book is "The Superhumanities," which is a proposal to rethink the way comparative religion approaches this stuff. I don’t know enough about academia. What are you teaching today about how to approach these kinds of things? First of all, the academy is culture. You are a part of the academy and to the extent you're part of culture, of course you are. The academy is really just a bunch of people who are trained to think about culture and to think about the history of it and the contours of what a human being is and what reality is. So I think what academics or professors do is really a reflection of what society thinks. The argument of "The Superhumanities" is that if you look at the canon, if you will, or the people we read over and over again in the humanities, they all base their ideas on altered states. They had ecstatic experiences, they had precognitions, they had near-death experiences. They don't always write about those in the books, but they're behind the ideas that they write. Or they were taking psychedelics. William James is a good example. He's literally sucking nitrous oxide and eating peyote on the side and studying psychics, by the way. He spent his whole adult life studying mediums and psychics. So once you realize that the books we read and the ideas we teach are based on these extraordinary states, this modern notion that we can strip out all the extraordinary stuff, all the altered stuff, it's just crazy. Of course, the result is depression and a kind of boredom with what professors and universities do, and I get that. I share that. I think it's flatland, too, and so I want to add this sort of vertical dimension to things. The other joke I tell is last Halloween all these kids came up to our door looking for candy, and I'd say about two-thirds of them were dressed up as superhumans. No one was dressed up as a professor of religion, by the way. No one. No kid wanted to be an academic or a professor of anything. But about two-thirds of them wanted to be superhuman. So it's also a marketing issue, to be banal about it. It's a marketing crisis. We are not talking about higher education in a way that's attractive and that's actually faithful to the history of what higher education is. I think it's exciting. I think it's incredibly cool and I think we make it not cool or we make it too real or we only talk about the critical aspects which are again important but we don't talk about the positive or the affirmative aspects. It's beautiful. I really appreciate that, absolutely, that you corrected me by eliminating the division I put between the academy and culture immediately. I grew up in a hardware store, Peter. I grew up in the Midwest. My family are all farmers and small business people. They're people. I don't imagine for a moment standing outside of that or being somehow special. I think higher education has given me a lot of special ideas, but I think those special ideas again originated in these altered states and in these other people. So it's really human beings that I think are special, not academics. Academics just have the luxury and the benefit or the opportunity to write and to make film and to make art and to be creative in a way and not have to worry about our paycheck or our health insurance. That's extraordinary. And that's, by the way, historically unique as well. I don't take that for granted either. Do you remember, when did you realize that this is something you could make a living doing? I didn't. I never did. I was a weird kid, Peter. I was super religious, by the way. I was more religious than you probably would have liked. What is that? That's rather presumptuous. Yeah, it is a presumption, but it's a pretty fair presumption because I think I annoyed and offended lots of people with my piety. Why I'm saying that is I was fascinated. I got into religion. I wanted to be a monk, actually. I learned about the unconscious. I learned about Freud. I learned psychoanalysis. I was just a kid again from Nebraska. I didn't know any of this. Wow, that was mind-blowing. So I just pursued this. I guess this is what I'm trying to say. I just pursued these ideas. Then when the time came to get a job, magically, I got a job, but that didn't have to happen, Peter. A lot of my colleagues didn't get jobs and a lot of my students don't get jobs. Why did I get a job? I don't know. I know somebody made a mistake and hired me. But then when you back in, as I say, we all back into the academy, particularly the study of religion, you back into it. You don't grow up wanting to be it. You confront some problem or some issue with your community or your tradition or your culture that it cannot answer. It probably can't even ask that question, but you realize that these questions are asked all the time in the university. So you're like, "I can do this." That's why I say you back into the discipline or the field, not because you grew up wanting to be that, but because that was the only institution that will have you essentially, is what I'm trying to say. But that's important. That's really important. That's culture, by the way, again. So I think there's something remarkable about our culture that lifts up higher education, even though that same higher education is very challenging to the broader kind of social structures that lift it up. You define culture, I think, as "consciousness encoded." Is this phrase that I remember that you use. Can you talk more about - I'm, that just hit me like lightning when I read it. I hadn't encountered that idea exactly that way before. Yeah, I think the definition is - what is the definition? The humanities. The humanities are consciousness coded in culture. What I mean by that is you think, and I think - I'm saying you think, I don't know what you think, but I know I think what I think because of the society I live in. Even my sense of inwardness, even my sense of what's conscious and unconscious is really a function of this mad social imaginary that has raised me. I'm speaking English now, which is an entirely learned skill that I learned in this social imaginary. So this social world that we're in literally creates us, and it literally allows certain kinds of forms of consciousness and doesn't allow other forms of consciousness. When I describe society or the humanities as consciousness coded in culture, what I mean is that there's a particular form of awareness that's coded in things like language and ritual and law and politics and all these things that we just take for granted as the way the world really works, but it actually doesn't really work like that. Those are all local ways that we shape consciousness and that we create a person. You can think about this if you think about your dog or your cat. They have a very different personhood than you do because they've been shaped by different social practices. That's what I mean. I think we underestimate how deep our conditioned or constructed nature goes. I remember reading - do you know Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm? Yeah.So I fed, I'll confess, I fed some of your stuff into the AI and asked it to tell me questions to ask you. And one of it said, I'm going to quote this just for your entertainment: "Kripal's current focus is on renewing and revisioning the comparative method for the study of religion, aiming to re-enchant the field and make it magical and miraculous again." I just got that off of my bio. I just stole that off my bio. I don't think very much of AI, by the way. It's just stealing crap. That's all it's doing. So what about this idea of re-enchantment? Does this feel, does this connect with what you're doing or is it - do you want me to talk about Jason? Yes, I would love to hear that. Yes. He doesn't think we've ever been disenchanted and I think he's right. What he means by that is that the birth of the human sciences or what we now call the humanities and the social sciences, really have all of these moments in them that are literally magical. So people like Madame Curie are going to seances, for example, and seeing electricity around the heads of mediums. Somehow this is connected to her work on radioactivity and the birth of modern physics. Jason traces hundreds of these moments and shows that actually, if you look at the very individuals who say there was disenchantment, or who we say are responsible for disenchantment, they're actually enchanted. They're doing enchantment as they work. This is very much the argument of "The Superhumanities," which is that yeah, we can talk about a re-enchantment because we have disenchanted the fields to a great extent. But in fact, they've always had this enchantment inside them. This is what draws people to these books and these ideas.You also identify Esalen, or the Human Potential Movement - and please correct me if I'm wrong - as being a particularly American thing. Is that true? Does that feel fair? Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that if you talk to scholars of American religion, what they'll often say is what makes America, and by America the U.S., is its experimental, combinative nature. In other words, it's always combining stuff and experimenting with stuff that hasn't been done before. That's why I subtitled the book "America and the Religion of No Religion." It's this notion that all religions and all spiritual practices are attempts to realize this future human nature, but none of them are absolute or speak for all humankind. The religion of no religion - it's not atheism, it's not secularism. It's this idea that whatever we want to call God is just too big for any particular religious system or psychology or science or anything else. All of these are just attempts to approximate this greater whole. That's really what makes it American. I think at least in the U.S., legally, we have this separation of church and state, and we do not allow any religion to take over, as it were. We haven't so far. That is very Esalen-esque. That's very American. If you don't allow a religion to take over, it means all religions can prosper. It has this sort of paradoxical or ironic feature to it. If you allow one religion to take over, it's going to suppress all the others. If you only have two religions, they're going to kill each other, which is what you saw in Europe with the Protestants and the Catholics. But if you have thousands of religions, guess what? They can coexist in relative peace. That's the American experiment. It's an experiment, Peter. I want to emphasize that it's not a conclusion. It may be that human beings are just too intolerant and stupid and dumb to live together. I think that's entirely possible. But so far, we've managed to live with each other in a way that's not without fault and certainly has nasty histories, but it's also, I think, potentially promising.What I'm just thinking about - I feel like I read a lot or I see headlines around de-churching, and that the belief and religious practice and the behaviors around belief in America, in the U.S., and I think in the West generally, are really shifting and changing and morphing. I'm wondering what kind of observations do you have on how people are - the phrase that young people use now is "spiritual but not religious." Or they talk about the "nones" or the refusal to affiliate. My own sense of that - first of all, it's very American. Again, it's also very European. The Europeans are much more secular than the Americans. The Americans are nutty, by the way. They're spiritually nutty in a way that the Europeans are - I'm engaging in stereotypes here, but the Europeans are much more secular and scientific or secular about this. The Americans are like, "Oh, let's just put things together. Let's do yoga and let's meditate. Let's go to church and the synagogue and the temple and let's do it all." That's cool. But if you put a bunch of things together, what it means is you're not worshiping or honoring any one of those pieces. So there's this irony in that. To the extent we combine things, we also recognize that none of those things are absolute in themselves. This refusal to affiliate, it actually goes way back, certainly as far as American transcendentalism in the 19th century, which was essentially a very literary, very intellectual movement out of Boston that saw the soul as transcendental, and it's not connected, or not uniquely Christian or Jewish or anything else. It's just the soul. It's transcendent. When I taught at Harvard for a year, my office was two doors down from the chapel where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a famous address to some graduating students. He said something like, "I call it consciousness, you call it Christianity." So it's this move. This is like 1835 or something. I don't know. I don't know what the date is. He was kicked out of Harvard for 50 years for saying that and for giving that sermon. But that then became, I think, the kind of core of what much later became the "spiritual but not religious" movement.The other thing I'll say is "spiritual but not religious" is a phrase that is also connected to AA, believe it or not. It's Alcoholics Anonymous that realized that you could be religious without being religious, that you could have some connection to some higher power or higher source without being, without going to a particular building on a particular day or being part of a particular community. They also realized that was really important, particularly if you happen to be an alcoholic. That's really what can save you or create a lifestyle that's not an alcoholic one. So there's a history, there's a long history here. When I hear young people say "I'm spiritual but not religious," what I hear, Peter, is a kind of moral protest. They don't like the local religious community condemning their friends or themselves for a particular set of desires or orientation. So they're like, "Screw it. I don't need that." But they do need, some human beings need some rootedness in some greater sense of reality or some cosmic scope. Saying "I'm spiritual but not religious" essentially means "I'm not intolerant of people's genders or sexualities or races, but I am rooted in a greater reality that goes well beyond me or my community." I think that's frankly very honest and quite healthy. The problem with it is it doesn't create community very well. One last question, which is a thread I feel like I heard in what you were - I guess just being a professor and having a relationship with all of these ideas, but also young people. You talked about sort of mental health and I just wonder, what do you - what have you learned about young people and their - how they are doing, do you know what I mean? How are the kids doing in this culture? Not well. If you're doing well in this culture, there's something wrong with you. I'll put it that way. If we want to define health and well-being as a kind of harmony with one's social environment, then how can you be healthy or happy when your social environment is systematically racist and killing the environment and threatening nuclear war and all kinds of things that are just insane, frankly? So the young people, at least I work with, they're often depressed, frankly, by their surroundings, by the world that their parents and their grandparents have created. It's not a good world. There are some people who succeed and flourish in that world and become rich, but they're few and far between. Most people do not succeed and suffer tremendously because of that world. So I don't want to paint too grim a picture, but I think it's pretty grim at points. I think a lot of young people are very concerned about the climate in particular. They see that in a way, they feel that in a way that their parents and grandparents do not. They know that they're growing up in that world. So there's more at stake in it than there are for older people. This seems a little trite, this question, but what does "The Superhumanities" have to offer or bring to that challenge? I think it can give people hope. One of the things I often say is, "Why, when you turn your streaming service on, is every movie about the future? Why is it always bad? Why are there only dystopias? Why are there no utopias? Why is the future never good?" There are lots of very, as I also say, there are a lot of good reasons to be dystopian, but thought tends to produce itself. In other words, if we think the world's bad, then the world is going to be bad. We're probably going to create a bad future. If, on the other hand, we think the world's good, then the chances are that we're going to act on those thoughts and that we're going to create a good future.So again, it goes back to this notion of authoring. I really think it's in some ways up to not you or me, but it's certainly up to us as a species about what kind of stories we tell. I think "The Superhumanities" have something to offer here because some of these stories are really quite positive about the future and they're not all negative. Certainly, the religions all have a kind of positive future woven right into them, rightfully or wrongfully, they do. I think that's what "The Superhumanities" can offer - a vision of the human that is future-oriented and not just bad and negative. That's what I would say. I want to thank you so much. I'm just a huge fan and super grateful that you shared your time. I just - yeah, it's been a real honor and a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. I hope it was useful, Peter. I'm humbled by your enthusiasm. I always want to look around. I'm like, "Who is he talking to?" Maybe Iron Man. Maybe you're talking to him. But I, yeah, I hear that. I need to sit with that. I need to hear that more, I think. Yeah, that's wonderful. So I'm really - I feel, anyway, I know you got to go but thank you so much. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

AI summary. In this conversation, part of a series of conversations by Peter Spear, Ethan Decker shares his unique background and how it has shaped his approach to brand science. He introduces key concepts, such as the "banana curve" of buyer distribution and the importance of signaling theory in branding. Ethan emphasizes the limitations of synthetic research and the critical role of qualitative research in understanding consumer behavior. The conversation offers insights into Ethan's perspective on branding and marketing, influenced by his multidisciplinary experience.Ethan is the Founder and President of Applied Brand Science. He is a brand strategist and marketing expert who has spent 20 years doing award-winning brand strategy, advertising, and market research for some of the world’s biggest brands. Prior to launching his own company, he was Planning Director at 72andSunny and a Group Strategy Director at Crispin Porter Bogusky. Check out his TED Talk “We’re All in Marketing: What Evolution Tells us About Advertising”I start all these interviews with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian. She helps people tell their stories and it's a beautiful question. I always over explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. And, the question is, where do you come from?Where do I come from? I come from two streams that merged. One being a waspy New England Protestant white community, and a Russian Jewish lineage that in many ways is still fleeing from the pogroms of their soul. Pogroms? I'm not sure how to pronounce that.And where did this, where did you grow up? Where did these streams cross?Philadelphia. I grew up downtown, Center City, Philadelphia, so being in big cities is my resonant frequency. I hum and vibrate in those spaces. And left Philly for Maine a little bit, that's where I fell in love with the outdoors. And then went to Ohio for college and New Mexico for grad school and now I'm in Boulder.Did you have an idea growing up in Philly, like what you wanted to be when you grew up?Yeah, and it hasn't happened that way.What was it? Will you share?I thought I would end up on Broadway. Really? Yeah. My mother is very talented and had a professional career and I inherited some of her talent, but then did not pursue it. And she did not push me into it either, which was interesting as well. So I did not become a Broadway person that could have been on stage or behind the stage. I did write musicals for a little while.And did you perform?I did. I performed as well.What was that like?Fun. I love it. I step on a stage and I feel at home. It's the opposite of the people who have massive crippling stage fright. For me getting on stage is, ah, all right, let's do this.I was looking at your LinkedIn, and you went from Oberlin studying sociology, to Santa Fe to study complexity and urban ecology. What's the thread?It's more of a web than a thread. I have a brain that happens to be pretty good at a lot of different things. Some of my friends used to be annoyed like, oh, God, of course, you're good at this, Ethan, and I have very many natural limits. So they were wrong in many ways. But it meant that I had a proclivity for science and I was okay at it. And then I had proclivity for creativity and writing and music. And I was okay at that too. So I ended up bouncing around. The undergraduate work in sociology was my attempt to understand culture and identity and how humans interact and how societies form. And then I hit a limit there of objectivity or pseudo subjectivity. I don't know really what to call it anymore. But, the postmodern analysis of things. Which is to say there's no one way to read a book, you can read it however you interpret it, and culture and context matter for how you read and interpret things, let's say. The postmodern analysis of biology left me wanting. And I said, I think there's an actual there there, I think there's something we can say for sure, DNA is DNA is DNA. And your interpretation of DNA is not as relevant. That there's an objective truth. And the place it really showed up the most was for things like gender. And I'm sure you can appreciate this being, I think, a fellow Gen Xer, gender, like the current craze about gender, they're standing on our shoulders. Of course, we were the ones to say, we have to bust gender norms. And Boy George, God bless ya, we did bust a lot of gender norms, but it also meant that there were some things that I was dissatisfied with when it came to understanding gender, because I think that there is biology, there is objective truth as well. And after having so many interpretations of identity and humanity and things like gender, I wanted to study something hard, hard science. Let's say, because actually the social sciences are indeed the hard sciences. They're the hardest sciences. Physics and chemistry. They're hard sciences. Sociology, psychology. They're the hardest sciences. So goddamn hard to do them. So getting to an exciting, but slightly frustrating point with understanding people and sociology and minds and identity. I said, let me go back to something more objective and concrete and hard science and environmental science was my other draw. So I got a PhD in ecology and I studied fractal ecosystems and complex systems theory, and I did quantitative modeling. So that was fun. And then I hit my limit on that. And I said, okay, I will only ever be restaurant conversational level of math. And I think to really excel in this world, I need to be fluent in math and probability theory. And I was never going to be fluent in probability theory or even coding, even though I wasn't a bad coder.And you were in New Mexico.That was New Mexico. I did grad school and the study of complex systems in New Mexico.And that must serve you well now, or not?It does. It actually does. It helps. In a couple of big ways, and I assume you mean the complex thing, not New Mexico. But New Mexico is helping.Sure, New Mexico was good for you too, but the complexity science.Yeah, the complexity science has helped because markets, marketing, advertising, these are inherently, technically speaking, complex systems. Which means there are feedback loops. There are deep interconnected webs. There's non linear responses to things. A small thing like having a trans kid get a customized beer can blow up to two billion dollars in lost revenue for the company, the country's largest beer maker. And then there are levels. There are different levels of understanding. The personal level, the group level, the cultural level, the societal level, and those are hallmarks of complex systems. So understanding that does help me understand a bit of how to approach it and how to analyze it in a way that a lot of classically trained marketers just won't see it the same way.When did you first bump into marketing as a way of work, like something to do with your time?I fell ass backwards into it. I left academia to become an editor of an outdoor magazine with an old buddy. I ran that for a couple years and I ran it right into the ground.What is the role of research to help a marketer in that shift towards developing a new intuition about how to grow?I start by saying data is data is data. And there's just comes in different flavors and qualities. And just because data is big and quantitative doesn't necessarily make it good or useful or insightful. And just because data is small or hard to quantify doesn't make it meaningless and unhelpful. So that's my first foray, usually, into the world of research and information, is trying to break down people's assumptions and biases when it comes to what kind of data they prioritize. Research, I think, is critical because it helps you understand the world you're operating in. You need to know the environment, you need to understand your market, you need to understand your shopper, and you don't get that without doing some kind of research.You used the word intuition in a very intentional way, it seemed to me. What do you mean when you say intuition and you're working with a client?Here's a good example. You've probably heard a client say, we need to educate our consumer about blah diddy blah diddy blah. And that always is the big flag for me. Ding! It's going up. That says, this person has a certain intuition about how people shop and buy and think about brands and how they relate to my brand. So I need to work on that intuition, that intuitive understanding, because you're not going to educate anybody. I hate to say, no one gets educated from outside. I've never been educated on how to use olive oil, or I've never been educated on low sodium anything, or on selvedge denim. No one's educated me, and therefore made me want to buy their stuff. And so the intuition is wrong about the relationship between the buyer and the brand.So if you look at the science of consumer psychology, the brand science, one of the fundamental laws is that we are mental misers. We think as little as possible about the least amount we can, because we've got more important s**t we got to think about. Our doctor's appointments, our kids doctor's appointments, our mom's medication, where the hell my car keys are, my next five meetings, the 200 emails I haven't done, planning for my next vacation, all of those things, that's taking up the space in our brains as it should. You know what's not? Whether my bleach is made in America. Or whether it has a ESG corporate social program. So my bleach isn't going to educate me on s**t. And so if a marketer mentions, we got to educate our consumer about the quality of our bleach or something. Then I realized their intuition is off about how to connect with shoppers.And then if they understand something like how much we are mental misers, and that means we're trying to think less about bleach. And when we have a hard question about bleach, like, is this eco friendly? Cause I thought all bleach was inherently not eco friendly. We substitute that with an easy question. Like what does Peter buy? Cause Peter's an eco nut. So I'll just do whatever Peter says. And that's how we think. So then that marketer with a retrained intuition, instead of saying we need to educate them on our eco friendliness of our bleach would say, huh, what are the shortcuts we can give them so that they know our bleach is eco friendly or feel our bleach is eco friendly? It's a really different approach.I feel like marketing science can have a behaviorist streak in it that says we're all creatures of habit, mental misers, as you say. And what this does is make brand kind of meaningless. Or makes it just an empty mnemonic device, or distinctive asset. So granting any significance to brand is irrelevant. Is that how you feel? That's one of the elements and that's one of the laws. If one of the laws is we're mental misers, we're trying to think less. And so brands function in a certain way, given that law, but there's another law that is extremely pertinent and relevant to brands, which seems to be a counterpoint or an opposite of that, which is that we are symbolic creatures. We signal to each other. So I studied evolutionary biology and organisms of all flavors and all stripes, whether they walk or quack or swim, organisms are constantly signaling to each other all kinds of information. The 1st type of signaling is, am I a threat? Will I kill you or eat you? Am I poisonous? Do I have spikes and thorns? That kind of stuff. And then critically, we also very much signal to each other about being a good mate or being a good community member. So the peacock feathers, the classic one, although I like the peacock spider better. Little tiny peacock spiders.For those that don't have video, Ethan did a wonderful impersonation of the peacock.Oh, you can watch it on my TED Talk. I do.Oh, it's a bit you do?Yeah. I do a peacock spider dance. Peacock spiders, they have these beautiful carapaces that are multicolored and iridescent. And when they're mating, the males flip up their back flap, and it looks like a peacock tail. And then out of their eight little legs, they flip up a couple of their legs, and they do a little dance. They dance back and forth. It's like they're shaking maracas to impress the females and those are all symbols to impress the female to mate with them.And as humans, we cue in on symbols all the time. Number one, people's hair. Oh my God. We are obsessed with hair, aren't we? But then clothes. And the kind of car you drive. And nowadays with Zoom, what's in your backdrop. We're very, very sensitive to all these symbols and signals. So technically it's called signaling theory. How do we signal certain things to each other to show that we're a member of the group or that we're cool or that we're trendy or whatever? Brands play a huge role in how we signal to each other. If you've ever seen a fad like Ugg boots or Hunter boots or of course Crocs are back now.What about the Stanley tumbler?Stanley tumblers. BAM! Great example. Those kind of trends and fads are some of the best examples of how we use brands to signal to each other. Stanley is no better or worse, I would say, than two or three other brands just like it that are built for tough. But you need to have the Stanley, and even better yet, you need to have one of the limited edition Stanley colors. To signal to your friends that you're cool and hip and that kind of stuff. So this seems opposite of what I just said about brands are shorthand and you think less. But in a way they connect because the Stanley cup, the Stanley brand, is shorthand for me signaling to my friends that I'm hip and that I have a certain level of status and I'm in the club.Yeah, that's I mean, I don't know that I've ever heard it articulated like that. So the tension between, because I hear the behaviorist thing and it feels like it really is just an erasure of the significance. So you've got signal theory on one side and then on the other side, it's just brands as a heuristic, a shortcut, a heuristic brand is a heuristic to make a choice easier and faster and simpler. I'm just going to buy the same olive oil I always buy. It's a safe bet. Whereas on the flip side, I have to very carefully choose the brand of jeans I wear because I wanted to symbolize and signal something particular to the people in my life. And what's the role of a marketer to make a brand a potent signal? How do you help them do that?Well, if you want to make the brand a potent symbol or effective signal, whatever a signal that grows, you need to play in the realm of signaling. And who cares more about signals and which people care about which signals. Obviously there are plenty of people who don't care or who choose very actively to signal other things. Like a great example is if you're the head of Morgan Stanley, this also comes from my TED Talk. This is not an ad for my TED Talk.I'll include a link to your TED Talk, Ethan. (Here it is)If you're the head of Goldman Sachs, what do you wear? A custom Armani suit with a beautiful Italian tie and you wear the most expensive Rolex you can buy. If you wore that onto the campus of the University of Iowa, into the biology department to talk about ant biology, you'd be laughed at because everyone would say you're superficial. And why are you flashing all this expensive bling and you clearly don't care about scholarship. So if you're the world's preeminent ant biologist, like E.O. Wilson was, you wear a suit from the 80s because it still fits. And you wear a tie that has a couple stains but nobody really notices because it still matches your suit well enough. And you wear a Swiss Army watch because it's very practical and all watches tell time equally well. So there's no point in spending more on a Rolex. And then you go into your lab and you are lauded, and you are respected because the vestments you're wearing signal that you care about scholarship more than you care about clothing. And so both of those people are wearing clothes that signal the right things in their environments. So, if you want to be successful and build a strong brand, you need to understand the signals that your brand gives off or supports in the environments where you want it to be bought.We're near the end of time, but I was invited to answer a couple of questions. The role of qualitative in the age of what is now, I think we're just agreeing is called synthetic research. Do you have any encounters or experiences with either synthetic research or thoughts about the impact of LLMs and generative AI on how your marketer develops an intuition?I think synthetic research is a crappy first step, let's call it. It's good at giving you a bland, basic summary of things, but I would never rely on synthetic research or LLMs to really understand the state of things, or the nuances, or importantly, the less common things that are bubbling up. And that's, I think, where a lot of qualitative is so vital. It's not getting the average what do people want out of jackets? They want them to be warm, to be waterproof sometimes, tolook good. Puffy jackets are popular. Like, no s**t. An LLM can tell you that. An LLM will tell you the middle. Yeah, and it will summarize it in a nice bland way. Beige. It'll give you beige. If you want to understand where things are going or the nuances or the potent meanings under there, you definitely have to go beyond LLMs.And the other critical reason is when we get back to the signaling stuff. And even the other stuff about some of the laws of mental misers and how we make decisions. A lot of the real reasons are not even available to us. We don't even know why we do what we do. You ask someone why they buy the clothes they do and they say, oh, because it makes me feel like an individual and it expresses myself and I like blah, blah, blah. When in fact, that's 180 degrees from the truth. It makes them feel like they fit in. Yeah. It's acceptable to their group. Or it's lauded by their group.  And that's why they choose the brand, not because it's unique or makes them feel individual. So you don't get that from LLMs. And I do think you probably don't even get that from quant surveys. Like there's not a single quant survey. I think if you had five years ago, polled people in general who drinks sparkling water and said, what are the aspects you look for in a sparkling water brand? And you'd, of course, you'd have to populate it with a refreshing, easy to buy, comes in different flavors, good price, available everywhere I want to go. You wouldn't have ever said also has a crazy death metal style brand and makes kooky marketing that makes me feel like a punk teenage boy. You never would have gotten that from a quant survey. You never would have gotten it from an LLM. And yet by going out and doing real qualitative listening and understanding an audience you would have realized there are a whole bunch of action sports dude bros who would never buy Evian or Fiji because they're sponsored by Monster. That's why you now have Liquid Death as an 800 million dollar brand of bubbly water.I hadn't heard that story. Is that the sort of the origin story of Liquid Death?You know what, yeah, I think even before the founder threw up a fake little website to gauge interest, he did that because his intuition from talking to humans. Yes. Hanging out at X Game type things. Hanging out at the skate park. Hanging out where people were shredding on snowboards on rails and skates and BMX and stuff. These were folks who were sponsored head to toe by energy drinks. And they had gotten to a point where they didn't want to poison their body with all that s**t. So they would take their Red Bull and Monster and fill it with water. They couldn't walk around with a Fiji because a) Fiji wasn't sponsoring anybody and b) it looked stupid if you're a dude bro. Yeah, I used the term affectionately. They wanted something fun and tough and whatever. And that's when the guy who created it said wow. There is no brand of water for the sports culture. Holy s**t. He didn't want to just go pure branding. It's the same product. He made sure it's real Austrian sparkling water. So great. But mostly 99 percent of the play was that dripping skull logo and a brand called Liquid Death in that old Germanic black letter.It's amazing.It's amazing. Doesn't come from quant, doesn't come from big data, doesn't come from LLMs. Amazing.All right. Listen, I want to thank you so much. I hope it was painless for you.You're welcome. There was that moment in the middle.I know. I felt that too.Where my ego got bruised a little bit.Oh, really?I'm joking. I'm just kidding. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Zoe Scaman is the CEO and Founder at Bodacious, a strategy studio delivering bold and audacious thinking. I have followed her for years, and have devoured her work. She is prolific and generous, having published in the past few years an amazing collection of work: The New Fandom Formula, Mad Men. Furious Women, Decoding Community, , The Multiplayer Brand, and Strategy in the Era of AI.All the interviews, I start the same way with this question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian and she helps people tell their stories. It's such a beautiful question. I always use it, but I also overexplain it because it is so powerful. So before I ask it, you're in total control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. So with that, the biggest lead into a question ever, the question is, where do you come from? I think I come from a mashup of lots of different experiences, positives and negatives. I have always felt other. I've never really felt like I fitted in any of the stereotypes that were assigned to me. I think that when I was younger, that was seen as a flaw. Looking back on it now, I see it as a huge benefit that I've grown into over time.What, how would you articulate the benefits? What does it feel like to be on this side of that otherness?I think because you never really fit, it gives you an appetite for exploration of self and of possibility that you wouldn't necessarily have if you felt entirely comfortable in the situation that you'd started in. So I think it forces you to stretch yourself and to have more of a view on what else is out there and what kind of things you can pull together to make something your own, as opposed to just being happy with whatever it is that you're handed.Tell me a little bit about where you are now. Where are you situated right now? And what are you up to these days?I'm currently in the middle of the South Downs in a very leafy green West Sussex, which is lovely. I grew up round here and migrated back like a homing pigeon after COVID-19. Bought myself a 16th century cottage and did a big renovation on my own. Then met my partner and now almost giving birth to baby number two, which is very exciting. It's all moved very quickly. In terms of what I'm up to, it's a mixture of trying to keep up momentum with my own brain and the business, and also trying to find a way of slowing down into impending motherhood number two, which is always difficult for me. I know I need to slow down, but I seem impossibly incapable of doing it. And then also just wanting to enjoy my surroundings over the summer. That's what I'm really excited by. I think when you live in such a fast paced industry and world, we don't really stop and quite literally touch grass and smell the roses enough. So that's what I'm hoping to be able to do.I don't know the area. Can you help me understand where you are? Did you move there at COVID-19? Was it a rural exodus?Yes, it was. I grew up around here and obviously when you're 15, 16, 17, and you're living somewhere rural, you cannot wait to escape and get the hell out of there. You think it's the most boring place on earth. So I went on a bit of a 20 year road show around the world. I lived in Sydney in Australia for a while. Then I came back to London and then I moved to New York. Then I was in Ethiopia and then I was in Paris. And then back to London. When COVID hit, I was living on my own in London with no outdoor space. It was really lonely. I just thought, why am I here? Most of my clients are virtual. I've got the money, I've got the means. So I decided to move into this tiny little village in the middle of nowhere, which is about two hours outside of London. It's absolutely beautiful, but all of my neighbors are geriatric and everyone thought I was insane because I was in my mid-thirties and moving there alone, but it all worked out. It was almost like I needed to make the shift and then the universe would meet me where I was at, which is a lovely place to be.How far away are you now from where you grew up? How close?Probably about 10 minutes.What's that like?It's interesting because I think that it's a village that I had never set foot in because it's in the middle of a forest. You wouldn't even know it was there unless you've been there. So even though I grew up in the area, I had never been to this particular village. I feel like I've got the best of both worlds in terms of familiarity of wider place, but also the ability to discover my own place within it. Sometimes when you move back to your hometown, it feels like you've regressed and like you've changed, but the area hasn't. So I needed to try and find that happy medium.Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? As a girl in that area, did you know what you wanted to be or have an idea?I went through the whole stage of wanting to be Britney Spears, wanting to be famous and all that kind of stuff, but I never really knew, to be honest. I don't think I was particularly attracted to any one subject and I didn't go to university. I ended up dropping out of school when I was 18 because I just didn't know. The only options that were on the table that I was aware of at the time were things like business studies and economics. I just thought, do I really want to go and spend tens of thousands, which I'm going to spend my life paying off, on a course that I don't really know I want to do? I just want to get out there and work and see what comes my way. I think I've just been figuring it out ever since.When did you encounter the work you're doing now? When you think back, when did you first encounter brand or strategy? What was the first moment you realized you could do this kind of work?I've been doing this for over 20 years. I answered an ad in a local paper. That's how I got my first job in advertising because that was the way that you did it back then. It was just looking for a junior person for a startup agency. It was outside of London. It was in a county called Surrey. They paid me 11,000 pounds a year and I basically just made coffee. But I was in the right place at the right time because it was the era of pay-per-click advertising. So Google taking off and search engines. This company had created a piece of software that allowed you to close the gap between someone clicking on an ad on Google and landing on your website. At the time, that was groundbreaking. I got to go into London and wear a different hat, selling this kind of bit of software into all of these big ad agencies. It was the very first time that I had been exposed to that world. I'd never seen it before. It was really glamorous. It was the early 2000s.I remember walking into a place called Walker Media, which was famous in London for this woman called Christine Walker, who would sit surrounded by her bevy of other women and just chain smoke in the middle of the office. I remember walking past going, "God, that's so cool. I want to be like them when I grow up." That kind of opened my eyes to this world of brand and advertising. But I think it took me probably a good 10 years in the industry to really wrap my head around what it was and actually what we did.What's the origin story of Bodacious?  I think pretty much my entire career, I've been looking for a place that felt like home and that felt like I could do a number of different things under one roof. I haven't ever really found it. Probably the closest I came was when I was working at a place called Naked Communications when I was in Australia. It just felt like this crazy chaotic home for brilliant misfits. That's what we used to call ourselves. People that didn't really fit, who weren't the corporate type, who didn't necessarily have a background in advertising, who didn't always believe in brand but wanted to do things differently. It was just this incredible engine of wild thinking. I think some of the ideas that we put out into the world during that time were amazing.I got there probably the last two years of it being that kind of place. Then there were mergers and acquisitions and it all just went to s**t after that. I was really sad about the whole thing. I just job hopped after that. I then left Australia, I went to London. I worked in a couple of different agencies there and nothing felt right. Everything felt like it was narrow and pigeonholed. I was only able to explore one small facet of what interested me.So I jumped around a lot and I went into client side. I went into innovation. As I mentioned, I went to Ethiopia with Nike Foundation and thought I'll try that because I'd never done that kind of stuff before. I just never found something that really lit my brain on fire. I think all of that hopping around taught me that I was much more of a portfolio player, as opposed to one person who wanted to go on one trajectory.  So I've just got lots of bits that I wanted to hold together. The whole point of Bodacious was to give me the freedom to be able to explore all those different facets, because Bodacious is ultimately me. It's all about where I want to go and where I want to take my thinking.You mentioned in your experience at Naked that you were people that didn't believe in brand. What's the significance of that?I think there's a lot of agencies or pretty much predominantly the vast majority of agencies, advertising companies, et cetera, that have this kind of evangelical belief in certain brand frameworks or ways of thinking. They could worship Byron Sharp. They could worship John Steel. They could be all about a certain way of building performance over brand or whether they're entrenched in this idea of brand purpose. But wherever you go, there's always some sort of dominant belief system in terms of what they stand for and what they believe that brand and advertising is all about. I've never subscribed to any of it, to be honest. I'm much more of a fluid thinker in terms of, I'll have a look at what I think might work for any given project, for any given problem. There's no kind of dominating proprietary thing that I'm trying to sell.I really found that within Naked, they would basically say, we don't have a framework. We don't have a replicable formula. We don't have something that we constantly try and repeat and sell and repeat and sell because every problem is different. They come up with some crazy stuff. There was a pirate radio station in Australia that was shutting down and they were desperately trying to find a way to get funding to keep this pirate radio station going. There was nothing to do with brands. There was nothing to do with campaigns. We put out this kind of challenge to the people of Australia and said, we want you to do some crazy s**t to get funding. We're going to leave it in your hands and see what you come up with. There were no parameters to it.One guy got a boat as far as he could, and then dove into the sea and swam to Necker Island and filmed himself pleading on his knees with Richard Branson to try and give him some cash to keep the pirate radio station going. It's that just crazy, chaotic stuff that came out of Naked because there were no things that we were trying to box things into. I think that when you have that freedom to be anything and be a creative company on all different fronts, I think the work that comes out of that is just so much more interesting.You mentioned you used the phrase "lit your brain on fire". What do you love about the work that you do? Where's the joy in Bodacious for you?I think it's the variety. And then it's also the clients that kind of self select working with me. Because I very rarely work now on projects where the output is some form of advertising. Instead it's looking at new ways we could explore commercial models. It's looking at the future of gaming. It's looking at what is an athlete in 10 years time? And how do we start to prepare for that? It's what is the future of music? So it's these big kind of knotty questions that nobody really knows the answer to, including me and the ability for me to dive down different rabbit holes and get excited about research and see where it may lead me.Are there any touchstones for you, ideas or people that you keep returning to as you, when somebody comes at you with a new problem? I have mentors in my life. There are people I'll bring close if I'm, if I feel a little lost.I think I've got a quasi board of directors in my brain. They don't know I exist. But I have these people that I turn to.So I'm a huge fan of Brené Brown, for example, and Esther Perel. I love the idea of bringing more vulnerability and honesty to workplace relationships. I've been a huge fan of Brené since she first came out with her first book. I think Unlocking Us is probably my favorite podcast that exists ever. I just listened to the most recent one with Esther Perel, where she was talking about the other AI and she called it artificial intimacy. I just think that kind of thinking is groundbreaking. So I keep going back to thinkers like her.As I mentioned, Esther Perel as well. I love David Epstein's work on generalism. For me, that was the very first time that I had the language to articulate the journey that I had been on and the ability to look at my career in a positive light, as opposed to the way that I painted it, that I was unreliable or flighty, or I never saw the light or I got bored too easily.Michaela Coel is a brilliant screenwriter, actor and director…Our connection went out for a bit…..Oh, I was mentioning Michaela Coel. She is a writer, director, actor. She wrote a book called Misfits: A Personal Manifesto. She talked about her initial struggle to fit into the British broadcasting society and production, the way that film works. Then she talked about the fact that she really then embraced that and rejected everything that they stood for and built her own platform.  So I think I lean on different thinkers like that. None of them are in advertising. None of them are in brand. That doesn't really interest me that much. There's probably only one person who I think is doing really interesting work in that space who has moved herself along and that's Heidi Hackemer, who you may have come across. I've known Heidi for 15 years. I did some work with her when she had Wolf and Wilhelmina. Obviously she went to Chan Zuckerberg and then off to Oatly. Now she's doing her own thing again. I've just watched her journey and we've spoken a lot about it as well in terms of finding her passion and her place and what she really wants to do - lean on all the experience that she's had in advertising and brand and facilitation and really make a positive impact when it comes to indigenous communities within the U.S. Actually, how do we go back to basics and learn from their values and their rituals and their practices and bring that old world knowledge into the modern economy and modern world, which is breaking and broken. So I think she's probably one of the only ones that really inspires me in that world, because she has just unapologetically gone after what matters to her.What is the value of the outsider for the, what do you bring as the outsider?I think as the outsider, you're less afraid of fitting in, or not fitting in as the case may be. I think you're less afraid of asking challenging, difficult questions and of provoking people and being the provocateur in the room.  Not necessarily being the provocateur for the sake of it, but being the provocateur because you're trying to get to the right question in the first instance. I think if you're not adhering to quote unquote best practice or certain proprietary frameworks or certain methodologies of thinking, it just frees you up to be that kid at the back of the classroom going, "But why are we doing this? Why are we doing this way? Is there not a better way? Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Let me ask the stupid question."But that's always been me. I think that in agencies, not all agencies, but in agencies that I've been in, it's been like, "Shut up. You're supposed to be the smartest person in the room." And I was like, "I don't want to be the smartest person in the room because then who am I learning from?" That's not going to work for me. So I want to make sure that I'm always trying to expand and progress and connect to people who are three steps ahead of where I am in whatever field that they're in, and then I get to absorb from them, which is such a wonderful place to be, I think.So you reject the invitation to be the brightest person, the smartest person in the room, and you choose instead to become - what's the position you take in that room?It's the person who's asking all the damn questions. You assume they're dumb questions, but actually in many cases, they're not because there are other people in that room who don't know the answer and who would love to ask the question, but don't want to position themselves as being the one that doesn't know.  I've never felt like that. I've always felt very comfortable raising my hand and saying "Call me stupid, but" and then introducing a new aspect. Sometimes it is a stupid question, but sometimes it can open up brand new conversations, which everyone's like "Oh, actually we hadn't thought about it in that way."So I think that's always the position that I want to play is just thinking, how can I dig a little bit deeper? How can I go left of center? How can I be more abstract? If I can do all of those things, is that going to then open up something else or lead us in a different direction?It's the power of the stupid question is what you're talking about, right?  Yeah, I read about, I've completely forgotten his name, but there's a Harvard professor, I think he published a book in which this was a thing where he called, there's a brainstorming practice that he has called a question storm. I love it. I've practiced it a few times with clients and the idea is that you come into the room and you're only allowed to ask questions. You're not allowed to offer any solutions. You're not allowed to dig further into an initial question that you've asked. You just have to ask questions constantly for about 15 or 20 minutes. Once you think you've got the questions out of you, then you go back to the questions that you've written and if you can write them a different way.The whole premise of that is the best work, be it innovation, be it whatever direction you want to go in, comes from asking the best question. Often we skim over that completely and we jump into solutions because we find that easier, but then we don't know if we're providing solutions to the thing that we need to.So if you're spending 15 to 20 minutes with really smart people in a room, reframing the question a hundred times, then you might get to a better articulation that can again, open a door that you hadn't expected previously.What's your experience trying to open that space in the rooms that you're in, the teams, the clients? Is it difficult to do that?It can be. I think it's getting easier for me over time. I think when I very first started doing it, I was in agency land and I would sometimes get shut down. I would get told "Don't ask such a stupid question." Or again, as I said, "You're supposed to be the smart person in the room. Don't make yourself look like you're ignorant in any way." I was young, I was impressionable. That made me crawl back into my box and kind of shut myself down.I think as I've gotten more confident with my own practice, I will push it. So if a client says, "Oh, I don't think we need to go down that route," I'll go "No, actually I'd really like to spend 10 minutes just exploring this space." Or if they say "We've already answered that question," I'll say, "Okay, but I don't feel like I've got the answer to that. So if you could explain it to me again." Just finding ways to navigate first of all, the kind of dismissal that you get because it's not dismissal from a negative standpoint or from a mean-spirited standpoint. It's just that they want to fast track again towards a solution because that's a natural avenue for many of us to want to go.  But I think if we can just spend some time really working through those conversations in those areas, they may well lead nowhere, but I think it's worth the energy. So now I feel less pressure to conform in those situations. I feel much more comfortable kind of pushing that agenda because I also know that ultimately the buck stops with me in terms of whatever this output is going to be. So I should have more autonomy in navigating that process.Tell me a little bit about the thought leadership, the work you've been doing on fandom and multiplayer brand. It's just been amazing. It's unbelief, it's very prolific and smart. Was that a, how did it come to be that you would start doing this kind of thought leadership and what's that experience been like?I think it started a while ago. One of the very first pieces that I wrote, I think I was at Undercurrent actually in New York. Undercurrent doesn't exist anymore, but it was a quite experimental, non-hierarchical, organizational design company. It was all about teal organizations and what happens if you remove layers of hierarchy and you go into kind of slam teams and different ways of working.  I loved it to a certain degree, but I also felt that it was very sterile. It almost took human beings out of the process and over-engineered it to the point that I actually needed to have a glossary at the back of my notebook to know what the f**k anyone was talking about on a daily basis.It was a lot of super, super smart young people that they had hired from some of the top universities across the U.S., who had no emotional maturity, really, including myself. I think that we were going into these organizations - PepsiCo, American Express, Al Gore's Climate Reality Project - and we were like bulls in a China shop because we were not listening to people. We were not listening to the reality of an organization, which is made up of people. When you go into a company and you go to someone who's been working in a department for 20 years and you say "We're going to take away your team. We're going to take away your title and we're going to take away your remit, but don't worry. You get to work in a slam team now" - that's obviously going to piss them off because you are taking away all of the ways that they have defined their success in their progression. We just didn't get it.  I think that we were genuinely shocked when people would dig their heels in. So I started really, this is when I started reading into Brené Brown. This is probably about 10 years ago. I really started to get this idea of empathy and vulnerability and understanding individuals' ways of thinking. I wrote an article called "The Importance of Empathy within Organizational Design". I tried to get it published to Undercurrent, but they were not interested. They didn't think that it mattered at the time. So I self published it. I put it out onto LinkedIn and it did really well.  A lot of people came back and said, "Yes, this is what's missing. We're looking at these kind of progressive organizations that demolish hierarchy in favor of these new ways of thinking, but we're not thinking about the people. We're turning organizations into chess boards and it's not working." That's why it's not working. So that was the first one.Then when I was at Droga, I wrote a gigantic long piece on the importance of diversity. This was in 2016, and it was thoroughly researched, took me days and days to put together. I went to Droga, and I said, "Can I publish this under the banner of Droga?" Absolutely not. They didn't want Droga to take a point of view on diversity. They certainly didn't want it coming from me. So no, if I wanted to publish it, I could do it on my own, but they weren't going to help me get it to Campaign Magazine or anything like that. So I self-published it. Cindy Gallop got hold of it, pushed it far and wide. Then Brad Jakeman, who at the time was the CMO of PepsiCo got hold of it as well. He was like, "This is brilliant. Love this thinking."Then obviously Droga were like, "Oh, Brad Jakeman, the CMO of PepsiCo quite likes it. Zoe, can we take this and put it into Campaign Magazine under the banner of Droga?" And I said, "No, you can't." So again, I just learned this lesson that I needed to self-publish and I needed to have the freedom to be able to share my voice the way that I saw fit. Because every single time I tried to take my ideas to a company, I was pushing against a brick wall trying to get them to believe me or understand me or actually want to support my initial point of view, yet it was constantly being well received externally.  So I just kept on going after that. Obviously I wrote "Mad Men, Furious Women". I did a piece on "Breaking our addiction to non-fiction". So actually saying that creative people need to read more novels and fictional universes because everyone was getting obsessed with these brainy books that were actually killing our way of thinking. I said I would rather spend an evening reading Harry Potter than I would a book about strategy and planning. I don't think I've ever read a full book about strategy and planning. I thought that was important.Then it just progressed and then I started not necessarily writing just articles, but I started writing almost quasi-talks/presentations, which were a way of me communicating a new idea or something that I thought was evolving or shifting that was interesting. So I did "Fandom: The New Fandom Formula", "Decoding Community", "The Multiplayer Brand". I've just done "Strategy in the Era of AI". I've got two more in the works as well, which is exciting.I was politely invited to answer questions about the role of qualitative research in the age of AI, and I've gotten lost. What is the humanist argument for how we learn when AI is sitting there and it can be intuitive, generative and imaginative. Anything that you say about us, what we do with each other, I can find somebody who says this is possible with AI also. What do you think?I don't think it always is. I think that AI at the moment, if we're being generous about it, is a knowledge aggregation platform or knowledge aggregation system. So essentially it's drinking the entire internet and then regurgitating it in a way that uses predictive sentence structure to make it feel like it is human or conscious or helping us in that way.  I think that there is a huge amount of value to the ability for us to use knowledge aggregation engines in terms of moving us faster in certain instances, uncovering knowledge that we don't have, upskilling us in new categories, like all of that is great. But one of the big things that we have that I hope machines will never have is that ability to connect to one another and to have real complexity and nuance and challenge in the way that we are building relationships with each other and the way that we communicate and the way that we interact with the world and the way that we see it and move through it. AI doesn't have that ability yet.  We're still talking about AI potentially coming into having its own body. That's a conversation that is live at the moment. We're saying the only way for AI to evolve is for it to have a relationship with the real world in the way that we do. But even if that's the case, even if it can touch and it can feel, and it can hear and it can converse, that kind of myriad of complexity and emotion and messiness that makes us uniquely human - I just don't see that ever being translated into a machine.That's where the richness of qualitative research comes from - you have these in-depth conversations with individuals who have had fundamentally different life experiences, which have given them whatever it is that they are leaning into today. That's their own version of wisdom, that's their own version of life experience, and that makes them fundamentally unique in their opinions and their view of the world. If you're using AI to do that, you're going to miss out on all of that wonderful detail.What is the role of qualitative? What's your relationship with qualitative? Is it something that you use or what's your relationship with, how do you use research?I've actually just finished a massive research study, which is coming out next week, which was with children. It was with the Walton Family Foundation who obviously own Walmart, but they've got a huge foundation in the U.S. and they're one of the biggest spenders on educational philanthropy. They came to me about a year ago and said, "If you could study anything, what would it be?"I said, "I am fascinated by the changing landscape of how children are self-educating using games like Roblox and Minecraft. If you think about where gaming has been for the last two decades or so, gaming has been an escape. It's been a way for us to pick up a controller and put it on our television screens and to play a narrative, which takes us out of our everyday. But what's interesting about these new games and platforms that are coming up where the vast majority of under 13s are spending their time is within Roblox and Minecraft. You're not embodying a narrative necessarily that somebody else has built for you, you're actually creating as part of your play."So if these kids are creating, and that is the way that they are playing these different environments, what does that mean for the way that they're educating themselves and actually for the experiences and expectations they're going to have as they age up?We undertook this massive research study across the U.S., so about two and a half thousand children with a bunch of qualitative interviews as well with parents, children as young as five, as old as 13. We chatted to them about all of this stuff. The original hypothesis that I went in with, which is gaming is potentially helping with kids learning different subjects - where we got to was completely different.  What we found was that there is now proper evidence to suggest that children are being cognitively developed via these games. These games are character development playgrounds. They actually help them with perseverance, with resilience, with collaboration, with their creativity, 21st century lateral skills. So while they're not teaching them biology necessarily, or individual physics lessons, or adapting to the curriculum, they're teaching them much more expansive skill sets, which are going to be desperately needed for a work world that is completely uncertain. We have no idea what jobs are going to be around in 10 years, 20 years.  These kids are learning that level of kind of lateral thinking alongside the character development pieces within these games. Some of the interviews that we had with the parents and with the kids were just fascinating as a result of really delving into that and being flexible about where the conversation went.I think that's the biggest lesson for me with research, and I'm actually about to start another massive project into youth sports, which is looking at the same thing. We start with one hypothesis, but we're not fixed on that hypothesis. We're actually saying if there's something interesting that comes up in the research in the early stages and we want to pivot, let's pivot because that's the whole beauty of it - you have no idea where it's going to take you.  If you try and use research as a way of doing a kind of Q&A with your own thinking, you're not really letting go and really getting into the exploration side of things. I think that's where the richness is.It's beautiful. I was taught that people have experiences, not answers. Very often the research industry, we treat people like answer machines, and we're very willing and very good at providing the answers that we think people want. But it's much more interesting to just get lost in the experience and figure out what it's like.Exactly. I think AI can do the Q&A stuff. If you want to, you can turn to AI and synthetic users and you can say, "I want to do some quant research on kids who like to surf in Southern California." It will probably give you something that's 99% accurate if you're going to do quant.  But it won't give you the really rich insights and experiences that you were just mentioning. I think that's where we need to spend more energy if we can.I asked Claude for some questions to ask you. I fed some of your stuff and it's so, I'm going to try out a couple of those and we'll see how...I don't think I've been asked any interview questions by an AI before. This is the first.Let's see. There was a number of them. They were good. So with community becoming a bigger imperative for brands, how does this change the skill sets and capabilities needed within agencies? What new roles or departments might be required?I think it's a huge overhaul, to be honest. I think agencies have been teaching their staff for years and years how to be sausage factories. We get a brief, we go through the same formulaic process, we waterfall it down to creative and then production and then project managers. We produce a bunch of assets that people scroll past in two minutes. Then we repeat the whole process all over again, and we call that a successful business model.  I think that is short-term, disconnected campaign thinking. That's what we've been trained to do. When you're looking at the future of community for brands, that is long-term reciprocal relationship building which is much more embedded in the day-to-day activities of a brand. The skill sets are like night and day. We just simply do not have the ability to understand where to even begin on that front.So I think that it'll probably start as every other piece has started, whether it's search engine optimization or PPC or social media or whatever. There's going to be a bunch of shops that are set up outside of the norm to actually cater to this. Then over time, they're going to be sucked into the big holding companies. That's how it's always been.A second synthetic question. The research dives into various forms community can take - from subcultures to fandoms to collectibles and more. How can qualitative research be leveraged to map the community landscape around a brand and surface new opportunities?I think that's a fascinating area that not enough attention has actually been paid to, which is this idea of kind of community mapping. I did a bit of it for a project that I did year before last with Axe and Lynx, so the Unilever body spray. We looked at what are the adjacencies to the brand?  We thought hustle culture is one, comedy is another one, anime is another one, rap is another one. Then actually how do we look into each of these different adjacencies and say where are the different sub-communities and subcultures within these different areas? But again, you have to almost do the manual research. When we tried to go through a normal research company, which was much more quant focused, they came back and they were like, "Yeah, people who like basketball also like plants. You should look at plants." We were like, "What the f**k is this?" There was no real insight or intelligence driving it. It was just data for data's sake, but they hadn't analyzed it and they hadn't actually said, "Is this even worth saying in a meeting or even worth bringing up with a client? Because is it going to add to the conversation?" It didn't and it was a complete waste of time and energy.  So we went back to desk research and manual mining of information and connecting those different dots. That's what created the richness of the ecosystem that we made in the end.We've got just a few minutes. I guess maybe one big question just came to me and just thinking about the reports that you've put out - subcultures, right? Niches, the rise of niches and fandom and the multiplayer brand. There's a way that for me, it reminds me of, I had a boomer as a mentor and he would always talk about, he grew up in a binary world and then, and it's just like this, the fragmentation is this sort of natural process of the marketplace, it seems to me. It's what gives birth to brands or brand opportunity as a very, at least that's my elementary understanding, or idea of it.  To what degree do you think that's the case, that fragmentation is just how things work? Then, what does it mean to be a multiplayer brand? Is that what your, is that your diagnosis? Or, am I understanding you correctly, I guess is my question. Then, where does the multiplayer brand, what comes after the multiplayer brand, I guess is the question.I think we are in an era of just increasing fragmentation. I don't think it's new as you said, I think it's been happening since the advent of the internet and arguably even the printing press. What we're actually talking about is the proliferation of user-generated tools. That's what drives fragmentation.  When people got the printing press, suddenly you had more people able to publish their opinions and distribute those opinions with different groups of people who may or may not agree with them. Then we had radio and suddenly there was an explosion of different radio stations and again, different voices, different opinions, different genres of music. We had the television and so on. Obviously all the way through to the internet. It's just a constant push towards more niches, towards more subcultures, towards more varied voices, and towards more power being in the hands of just everyday people. You can spread those opinions and those ideas and find other people who belong in their tribe.  What I've been calling at the moment is the kind of third phase of internet-based UGC. We started out with when the internet first came around, we had forums. So we had people kind of writing blogs, for example, and we had people playing weird spin-off Dungeons and Dragons games on these obscure forums and Club Penguin, all those kinds of things.Then we moved into UGC phase two, which is where we've been for the last 15 years or so, maybe a bit longer. That was the advent of YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and that burst influencer culture and you had the kind of famous saying, I can't remember who said it, that YouTube would never take off because there was a certain amount of people who were still in the closet with a little bit of talent. Obviously that was completely bollocks and everything exploded from there.  Now we're moving into this new era of UGC, which is basically democratizing it even further by giving people access to incredibly powerful creation tools like Unreal Editor for Fortnite, Roblox Studio, and also the advent of AI, which means that actually that gap between idea and manifestation has closed to almost nothing because I don't need to know how to code now to build a website. I don't need to know how to produce a television show to create an animation. I don't need to know how to, I don't know, for example pull a bike apart and put it back together in a different way, I can just ask ChatGPT for instructions.  That ability to reduce that friction down to almost zero is then going to birth a brand new version of UGC and what people are calling it is UGGC, so user-guided generative content. That's just going to mean that we've got a proliferation of just stuff. A lot of that stuff's going to be s**t, but it's also potentially going to birth brand new genres and subcultures and fandoms and all that kind of stuff.  Think about the power of a fandom. For years, we've had fandoms creating fan fiction, spin-off characters, different ideas with particular characters. The very famous Trekkie one where Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock are secretly in love - that's been going for decades. But now imagine the ability for a fandom to train an AI. Suddenly you have the ability to generate brand new character tangents, different storylines that may or may not have existed previously. It's just turbocharging their creativity, which I think is amazing.  So I think that fragmentation is just going to continue. I think that the reason the multiplayer brand idea then came about was I was just thinking about the power in people's hands, the tools that they have at their disposal, but also their newfound expectations for how they want to interact with IP that they love, with brands that they love, with worlds that they love. They want to be a part of it and they want to be a part of it to the point of not just participation, but active navigation and contribution. They have the tools to do so.  Again, I'm looking at the Generation Alpha research that I've got coming out next week and these kids are tinkerers. They're coders, they're making toolkits. 25% of the kids that we interviewed who are under the age of 13 are actively selling their virtual creations on Roblox marketplace. It's crazy.You take all of that together and you look at this generation who have been trained on creation tools as their form of primary play, all of these other tools that are starting to close that gap between idea and manifestation by reducing all of the hurdles of friction. Suddenly you go, what relationship do they want to have with these brands? Are they going to be happy just to be given a sneaker that Nike has made? Or do they want the 3D files so they can create their own and 3D print them in their houses? Or do they want to create their own spin-off characters for LEGO? Or do they want to parachute themselves into a personalized story within the Pixar universe and actually decide where that navigation then goes in terms of narrative and storytelling and character arcs?  I think that's the answer. I'm not necessarily saying that every brand lends itself into multiplayer. There's a certain amount of multiplayer stuff that a toilet paper brand could do or toothbrushes, for example. But I think for the vast majority of brands who operate in entertainment, in sport, in apparel, anything like that, we're starting to see the need for them to open up to a certain degree, not everything, because I think if everything is open, you don't have a brand. You still need some control and parameters around it. But how do you really start to open up and allow people to come on in and mess around with your IP within certain guardrails, but giving them that permission to co-create.I think one of the biggest moves that I've seen recently which has got me really excited, is the newly announced partnership between Disney and Fortnite. Disney is building this absolutely massive map that covers every single one of their IPs within the world of Fortnite. Which not only makes their IP playable, but also if you start thinking about Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and the ability that Fortnite has given all of the players to create their own islands, characters, aesthetics. Then you overlay that onto Disney and the actual trailer for the partnership did talk about co-creation for the very first time. Disney will let people potentially play with their IP. That's a huge shift that we've never seen before.I want to thank you so much. You're so generous with the thinking that you put out there in the world. I really appreciate you sharing your time and your thoughts with me now.Of course. Thank you so much for having me. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Jasmine Bina is the CEO of Concept Bureau, a brand consultancy in Santa Monica, California. I first met Jasmine and her partner, Jean-Louis Rawlence, through LinkedIn, as you do. We had a great conversation and stayed in touch. (We hit it off so well, they invited me to kick of their Talks at Concept Bureau.)In the few years since that first meeting, it seems to me, they have really hit their stride, as a unique kind of consultancy that’s not afraid to be intellectual in public. And they to do it with style. Not only are they doing smart work for brands like Upwork, Skillshare and Feeld, they have launched their own community : Exposure Therapy - a “haven for the intellectually isolated” and “highly programmed educational community for strategic thinkers.”I was super excited to get into a conversation with Jasmine, to get to know her, and hear her talk about how they work with clients, and think about brand. I thank you so much for spending some time with me. This is a real experiment for me to invite people into a conversation and I'm excited to talk to you. When I do these things I always start my interviews with a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who's an oral historian. She has people tell their story. I'm going to start with that question, but before I do, I want you to know that you are in absolute control. You can answer the question, or not answer the question, any way that you want to.That question has layers. I've been asking myself that question recently, actually, because when you have kids, it makes you question who your community is, what your tribe is, and what you're going to pass on to them. I've had to choose what holidays we celebrate from which of my cultures, going back and relearning what they meant, who is in our lives and the things that we value.Where I come from, the best thing I can say is that I was raised with a real love and appreciation for this country because my parents came from Iran. They basically fled, so I feel definitely American, but there's something about American history that I've always felt very deeply connected to.The things you learned about in high school, in the little yellow margins of your history books, about manifest destiny, the way West, and the mentality of this country - all the mythology, good or bad, right or wrong. I feel that I come from this country in that sense, that I love the ideals of the country.I am just as much of a cultural mashup as anybody else who's here. I would say that I come from it in the sense that I am always trying to get into the past of it. I love American history and I love finding out the truth about American history. It's great that in this country you can wrestle with the truth and confront it.That's the best way I can answer that question.It's beautiful. Where has that wrestling led you? What do you go when you try to, with your historical curiosity?I think it's led me to where you arrive at in your 40s anyways, which is acceptance.You just have to accept things the way that they are and be optimistic about the way things can change in the future. At this age, I feel like I've had to learn that about politics, demographics. I've had to learn that even as strategists, you're always in culture.I was just having a conversation about this at dinner recently with people, that you consume a lot of the achiness of culture in our work. I feel like we need a formal place to digest the trauma of it all. Learning to accept things as they are and not constantly be judging them or being hurt by them or traumatized by them or angry about them.It's a more fruitful place to be anyways.I love that. Did you have an idea when you were young of what you wanted to be when you grew up?I used to draw pictures of dresses all the time. I think I wanted to be a fashion designer. I wanted to create beautiful things with my hands.I used to paint a lot. I think I need to get back to it. Maybe I'm a lapsed painter, but I used to write a lot too, which is what I do now. I think I've always been a creative in some ways. What I love about this work is that it gives you bounds to your creativity. It still has to work within a market.It has to work within a culture. It makes it more interesting. I will say, I'm one of those people who doesn't remember their childhood too well, which I'm told is a sign of trauma.I'm right there with you. I can never answer the questions I ask.That's funny. I was going to say we got psychographic super fast here.I should have given you a heads up. How did you come into this work? When did you first encounter Brand and the idea that you could shape them or that they were meaningful?It's not the sexiest story, but I started doing PR in grad school.I had a friend who had a startup and could use some extra cash. So I offered to do his PR and learned how to do it. Then my agency started while I was in grad school. Most of our work was in tech and that was when it was the app economy. Apps could get super big before they even knew why they were big or how it happened.It was a really viral time. We would get these huge overnight successes that wanted to go to press, but they didn't even have stories. They had no identities, nothing. I started creating brands quick and dirty before I would even call them brands myself.Just to have something to - it felt like the pre-work before we could do the PR. Then that became a bigger part of our work. I met my partner, Jean Louis. We got more into the strategy side of things and we've just hacked it together as we've gone, but I never worked in an agency.I think that hindered me in the beginning, but I think it's really freed me in recent years. People always ask how did you create Concept Bureau to be what it is. It's different than other agencies. I think it's because I just never worked at an agency, so I didn't quite know the rules.Even when I hire people from agencies, I get nervous because I feel like they're going to come and be like, this isn't how it's supposed to be done.That's funny. I don't know. Start with that completely. When you say it hindered you in the beginning, in what way did you feel it hindered?Just a lot of self doubt, maybe mistakes I didn't need to make, figuring things out. It was all on the fly in the beginning. It was definitely a shaping experience those first few years.What do you love about it? Where's the joy in the work for you?I do love that now, Concept Bureau is focused a lot more on cultural futurism. It's a lot like future casting and trying to understand - it was always very behavioral. We've always done a lot of studies and trying to figure out where culture's going, behavior, belief systems, values, identities, things like that.I love it for the same reason I know every strategist loves their job - it's because you learn how the world works, but also you learn about who you are in the process. It's always changing you as a person. It's always evolving you. You're becoming more mature and objective and insightful and making connections between things. It makes the world feel like your playground.I feel it when I have conversations with friends. That's when my biggest aha moments come through, is when I'm talking to people and if you have a good partner in conversation, you start to just see the matrix a little bit while you're talking about this stuff. I think that's why it's like solving an eternal mystery.It's so beautiful. When did Concept Bureau start? It's been a long time.I don't really know the dates. I'm really bad with chronology. I think the PR agency started, I can't remember, when I was in grad school in 2010. Then maybe five or six years later, we pivoted to Concept Bureau.So I feel like 2016, 2017 is when we became this. When I say we became a brand strategy agency, I just mean in name. I didn't know what we were doing. That's when I started writing, because I had to figure out what am I even selling? So writing was my way of figuring out what's my philosophy about brand strategy, how do I approach it, what does it mean?How is it changing? That came through my writing, which was interesting. In the beginning, a lot of the way I developed my skill was through writing and not so much the work.What do you find people coming to you for? Why do people come to Concept Bureau? What do you find clients coming to you and asking?Traditionally, our engagements can be on the higher end. People who come to us have been reading our work for a while, usually a number of years. When you come to us after reading all of my writing or watching our content, you're really coming to us to be with like-minded curious people and do a massive thought experiment on what you can build in this world.Where can you take this brand? What new territory can you claim? How can you change your market? How can you change people's perceptions or beliefs? A lot of our work is very heavily research based. I tell people we're for brands that are looking to change a belief or a behavior in the market.They need to change a belief or a behavior in order to succeed, because that's where we start. That's what it's evolved to be, whatever that agency is called.That's beautiful. Can you unpack that a little bit? What does that mean? I love that, that's a very advanced place for most people to start a conversation. But what do you mean when you say change a belief, change a behavior, what are you actually talking about?Usually companies that are operating in a new category, they're trying to create a new category, or if the market is moving ahead of them. Sometimes it's as simple as having a new product or the culture around them is changing.The context where they used to own the market, but now they're not the ones dictating the rules anymore. If there's a bias or a fear or a habituated behavior that's keeping people from converting, or something deeper than just selling them on the benefits of your product.If there's something culturally encoded that is keeping people from helping your company grow, that's keeping you from your customers, that's where we try to play. That's where we try to help you untangle that so that you can access that market. It sounds abstract the way I'm saying it, but certain brands need to - let's say if you're creating a premium brand in a historically non-premium or non-luxury category, there's a belief that you just don't pay extra for that, or there's a belief that this is not something that can be luxury. You change that belief by creating stories around it, or finding a belief underneath that belief that you can tap into, or creating a different kind of demand. It's just, how do you change context, create context that makes people behave in a way that makes your products make sense to them?When I read your work, there's something I encounter there that's really special. I think you make the stakes very high. You connect brand to belief and identity. You make it a real thing in a way that feels meaningful. I think that's what I resonate with. I'm curious when you do sit down with a client, how do you talk, how do you define the role of brand and how do you make it clear to them? You've prepped them, like you said, they've come to you.They've been in our funnel. They've been in our orbit. I find oftentimes what we do explain to people to help level set in the beginning is that we very much believe brand first. Oftentimes brand is the product with the clients that we work with.People are paying the premium for the brand, but the brand informs everything else, including products, including user experience and journey, including your org chart, sales, everything, as well as the obvious stuff like marketing and the actual branding function. The brand is an organizing principle. I'm not the first person to say this, an organizing belief where if you saw the world through that lens then it spells out everything else about your company. That's what a brand does. It gives you this lens, this perspective through which to channel whatever the light of your company is, a specific point and it organizes all of your activities. People are usually relieved to hear that because brand usually feels separate or they feel like they're constantly making big decisions. But when you have a strong brand, you've made the only decision that counts, and everything gets filtered through that decision.Who are we? Or what are we meant to do in this world? When you filter everything through that decision, and it's already been made, and it's specific enough, and it's tied to culture, and it's tied to the future, everything you do is going to be on brand. It creates a real harmony in the company, a real simplicity.It doesn't mean you're not still going to have to make hard decisions and do hard things, but you're going to know - the indecisiveness, which plagues so many companies, or the uncertainty, or the unwillingness to take risk - it's still always going to be a risk. However, you've measured it so that now the risk is worth it, that you understand what the potential upside is.That's how I describe brands to people. Sometimes even our most well-read new clients, they need to hear that. They need to know that that's the way we approach brands. It means we are working with the C-suite and we have access to the whole company. We talk about product development and roadmap and stuff like that.Usually people are quite open to it.You mentioned the indecision and uncertainty and fear of taking risks maybe or something, risk aversion. I'm wondering, what's your diagnosis of the C-suite marketer? What is it like to be in that seat and try to make very big decisions about brand?I feel like we get such a small subset of people. They're already converted. They get it. But there are times where the risk aversion is a bit more endemic and I will say this, it's always top down.It's really always top down. If there is a problem within a company culturally, or just not so much culture, but their habit towards risk aversion or whatever, that's a C-suite problem that comes from leadership. It doesn't come from middle management or from the employees.So that's where if you need to fix it, that's where you start. I think if we're talking about CMOs, we're probably at a point in the business world for the most part, although I still see people who are not like this, but they don't usually become our clients, where I think people have a pretty sophisticated understanding of brands already and brand isn't underestimated.It's just that you really have to stress test - do people really say they want to have a revolutionary brand or they want to have a brand that changes everything or that they're very committed to renovating or redoing or updating the brand. If you don't address that question first, then you're going to have problems down the line.That's obvious. So we do our best to try to get that stuff out of the way upfront. We have a lot of questions that we ask initially, even when we do our initial calls with prospects. It's mostly us just asking questions. It works two ways. It helps us really understand if we can add value.But two, it helps them understand how we work. When they see the kinds of questions we ask and the kinds of uncomfortable discussions we force, and the places that we're snooping or trying to look into, the dark corners or whatever. Oftentimes people get excited by those questions because they've been wanting to talk about them forever and they haven't been able to.That's usually a good sign too.That's amazing. I want to talk about exposure therapy, this community that you've built, which is really pretty amazing. And so much fun, so much more fun than I thought I was going to be having. I was such a curmudgeon about it.There was a conversation today with Sylvia Baletsa, right? How do you say her name?Sylvia Baletsa. She's a professor from Columbia, marketing professor. I introduced her, what she was talking about, her work and her idea about status, because I want to hear it from you.She wrote an incredible paper. I can't remember the exact title, but I think it's like the distance theory of status or something like that. I mentioned this even on our call with her in exposure therapy. I've read a few different luxury books in my life, luxury branding books, and they don't really have much to say.Nothing new. You would think luxury hasn't changed in the last 50 years and really it's just a game for big players. She created a new model that kind of makes sense because things have been cropping up lately in culture that disprove a lot of our models for luxury. Quiet luxury, conspicuous non-consumption, athleisure, ugly luxury, a big one.These things don't make sense because in the typical luxury model, the idea is that luxury consumers want to create distinction, right? They create that distinction by buying expensive products or luxury products and when those things become more common or mainstream, they just go, they upgrade, right?They go upmarket or they buy something more expensive or something that's a higher luxury brand. So why is ugly luxury or ugly fashion a thing? Why are billionaires wearing athleisure? Why any of this stuff? She presents a new model and it's this, it's the distance theory. She says along six different dimensions, I'm trying to remember what the dimensions are now, but the idea is that luxury is not about moving up anymore.It's about moving away. It doesn't matter what direction, it's just moving away from the masses. Because luxury has become so diffused, because anybody can buy a Chanel bag now, because luxury brands have been so messy with their pricing and discounting and the internet has made information about all those secret rules about high society and culture and status democratized.How do you differentiate yourself in a world like that? She talks about these ideas of distance. In fact, I should actually pull up... Give me one second. I just want to pull up because I don't want to butcher what she was talking about. So there are different dimensions. There's time, pace of life, culture, aesthetics, conspicuousness, and quantity.So if the aesthetic of luxury has historically always been beautiful, and luxury consumers need to find new ways of distancing themselves and going up isn't an option anymore, of course ugly luxury, or ugly fashion is going to become a thing. Of course Balenciaga is going to make those like super expensive, the most expensive shoes of all time but they look like they're completely tattered.Or I think they're the ones that also made the duct tape bracelet recently. Or a lot of this peasant life cosplaying and stuff like that you see with celebrities. It's just about finding distance, same thing with time. Luxury has historically, only until very recently, been very much defined by newness, right?You have to buy the newest thing. This was very much true when we were younger. Whatever came out in the last three to six months, that was usually the timeline. This idea of vintage is actually quite new and vintage wasn't a known status signal. Vintage doesn't cost more money necessarily, but it costs in other ways.That's another thing about her model that was unique. It really addresses different kinds of costs that are also status signals that we didn't see in the past. Before it really was just about maybe time and money, but now there's all kinds of costs to pay to be in the know. I think one of the most interesting costs she talks about is misidentification costs.I could wear those tattered luxury sneakers, but the cost is that most people will think that I'm just being unfashionable. Very few people who are my peers will understand the signal that I'm giving. And that's a high cost. That's a cost a lot of people typically aren't willing to pay. But if you're in the upper realms of status and luxury and you're looking for ways to differentiate yourself, it's probably where you're going to go.Anyways, it's a fascinating model. What I love about it is that it really elegantly explains everything. I feel like now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. It's everywhere. So yeah, that's what she talked to us about today.It's amazing, and I think I came in the middle, and that misidentification cost is fascinating to me.It's really a beautiful idea. Tell me a little bit about how has exposure therapy been going, and where did that come from? What was the inspiration?We're only two months in, but it's already exceeded all of my expectations. I talked about this recently. You can only ever really build half of anything.That's what I learned in this process. I could only build half of exposure therapy and it wasn't until people showed up that I knew what it was going to be. And I could see the entirety of this brand for the first time. Really, it was born from the fact that I knew we do strategy differently in our company.I knew we had a fan base that really wanted to spend time with us or somehow consume what we offer and the way that we do things. And I knew that strategists usually, I meet incredible strategists all the time and their curiosities are not being satisfied in their work and they're just not given access to the kinds of cultural intelligence and exposure and therapy that they need to be good strategists.And so we developed this community and it's basically - this is something I learned after my community showed up and people were telling me what exposure therapy is. The thing I heard it described as most is that it's like a haven for the intellectually isolated. So we have a different topic every month that we focus on.It's a highly programmed educational community for strategic thinkers. That's the log line for it. And every month we have a theme and sometimes they're quite strategic and brass tacks like positioning and storytelling we recently did, or this upcoming month is about how to build your strategic mind.We have a month coming up on personal branding. But other months are quite cultural and future focused. So this month we explored what we called modern riches, how we relate to wealth and status, hence why we had Professor Baletsa come and speak to us. Next month, our topic is on like I mentioned, how to build a strategic mind.And our goal is exposure and therapy. So on the exposure side, we drop original research into the group. That becomes the basis of our conversation for the month in Slack, but I'm trying to expose us to this topic from as many angles as possible. We haven't announced it yet, but next month's drop we're going to have the world's second, the number two female poker player in the world will come and talk to us about poker and strategy.We have one of the most well known mentalists who has given a TED Talk. He's going to come talk to us about mentalism, misdirection, holding people's focus, reversing their biases, stuff like that. We have one of the best conflict negotiators or conflict resolution experts coming to talk to us about conflict.It's just different ways of looking at strategy. And then we have some fun stuff planned too, and we have dinners. We just had one of our most recent dinners in LA, it was a remarkable night, and it was called Night of Abundance because we were still exploring the Modern Riches theme. We really played with that theme, it was a very playful, fun night, in a way that can only happen when you get strategists together, or strategists, we have founders and CMOs and leaders, and it's just anybody who has to think strategically for their work. It's really fun, but it's work.People have to stay, you have to work to stay up on the conversations because they're always going in different directions. I have had so many aha moments already in these last couple of months in this community, but it's a place where you can actually get your hands dirty and play in the clay of strategy.And I feel alive in it. I hope and think other people do as well.Absolutely. That's been my experience. The conversations are amazing. And I feel drawn to it even though I don't have time for it.You know what? I keep reminding myself, people make time for the things that are valuable to them.My job is to make it valuable enough that people make the time.That's right. I keep going. Something in what you were just talking about reminded me of, you talked about how you're about cultural futurism now. Is that a recent shift or how did you find that place? And what does that mean in how you work?It is and it isn't. We've always been doing our work like this, where it's always predictive. The whole idea of a brand strategy, the way we do it at least, is most people can create a good brand for today. Most people that come to work with us already have a good brand for today.But it's the whole Red Queen effect, right? Like things are always changing around you. You have to always be changing, even if it looks like there's nothing. And you can't build a strategy without having a prediction. We make a prediction about what the future is going to look like, and then we build a brand that sits in that future.And then your job as a brand is to make that future happen. When people look at your brand, they'll understand either they want to follow you into that future or they don't, but they can't stay apathetic. Because the biggest problem a lot of brands have is that they're nice, but they don't force a reaction, they don't force conversion.I say that you can work with love and hate, but indifference is what kills a brand. So the idea is to get away from that point of indifference. We've always been doing this. The reason I've started calling myself a cultural futurist is because I wrote a Fast Company article and they were asking for a brief bio and I was like, "You know what, I'm a cultural futurist."So I put it in there. But I think I've been circling and trying to figure out what it is that we do. What's something that people would understand and I think right now that's the best way of describing it.It's really powerful. I'm not, I've never heard of the Red Queen effect. What is that?Oh, it's actually going to be in our drop for next month for Exposure Therapy. That's why it's top of mind for me right now. But it's basically from Alice in Wonderland and I think the queen says something like you have to move very fast to stay in the same place.And it's the same thing. If you want to stay in your station in the market, you have to be innovating all the time. And that's the Red Queen effect. Things are constantly changing and you have to work very hard just to stay where you are.What the predictive, how do you, I guess I'm curious about research. I know that it's central to what you do, but tell me a little bit about the role that research plays in your work.It's a very big role. It's the first half of our engagements. I will say when we're not doing client stuff, we are always doing exercises and games and presentations internally just to keep us constantly predicting the future and comfortable with predicting the future.I read a book that kind of really opened my eyes to what research was about and how it's basically the precursor to creativity, at least for us. Jane McGonigal wrote a book called Imaginable that I reference all the time. I've probably bought like 50 copies for people over the years.I read that book and I would get so frustrated because it was just exercises about imagining a future. I was like, "Where does that, when am I going to, when is she going to start talking about how to do it?" It occurred to me that is how to do it. You must get comfortable with the discomfort of predicting it because we all think we can - if I told you, and this is an example she has in the book - describe, you wake up 10 years from now, describe where you are.That's hard. Unless you've been practicing, you can't name if you're in bed or not, what the lighting is like, who's with you, what's the building, you can't. That's hard and it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable because it takes a tremendous amount of imagination. Predicting the future takes huge amounts of imagination because usually the future is not what we think it's going to, or it's not what the obvious answer is.There are always disrupting things from out of left fields. People behave, you might think of the people, the way people are behaving, that's not the way they're going to behave in the future. Although the base nuances of who we are and what drives us probably remain the same, but we fail to interpret how they might change in the future.Jean Louis, my partner, loves to always give the example of we had, people used to be very creative about the future. Postcards about what the future would look like from the 1800s, but they never imagined that people would stop wearing hats. There are things that stay with us.There's so many things that you have to kind of popple in your mind to really be free to create an imagined future. It's an interplay, right? It's only the people who imagine the future that actually create it. So it's not like you're just guessing and hoping it's true. You're guessing so that you know what you need to do to make that guess a reality.And brands have the resources to do that. Brands are probably the only - I don't know that even our governments can do that anymore, but I can see brands doing it. So back to the role of research, which was your original question - it's very instrumental for us and we do three kinds of research: cultural research, psychographic research, and market research.Cultural is truly just trying to understand the narratives and culture that we think will be emerging that will affect people's perspectives and contexts in the next three to five years. Psychographic is - I hate to bring it back down to its very basic pieces, but it is quantum qual.Although we try really hard to make it informed quantum qual that I'm not asking about the product, the brand, I'm asking, I'm trying to understand how people are building their world views and the triggers that will get them to change. And then the market research, again, really isn't about the market.Of course, we need to know what's happening in the market, but I want to know how different players in the market are conditioning your users to expect different things in three to five years. Like in wellness, for example or medicine, yeah, science is going in a certain direction. Yes.Brands are doing certain things. But there are other factors including brands that are conditioning people to expect hyper personalization or conditioning people to expect emotional medical experiences. These conditioning experiences matter even if, especially if they don't come from your direct competitors.But that means they're coming to your doorstep with certain expectations and you have to predict what they're going to be. So that's the main research we do.I love that the question about research led you down a rabbit hole of imagination. I've heard you mention that book before. I'm pretty sure I have it because I remember her saying something amazing in the nineties about reality is broken and game design is going to fix it. She had this amazing quote.Oh yeah, she's great.But I want to tell me a little bit more about the role of imagination in the work. I'm, I think everybody's landing on this idea that we all need, nobody was talking about imagination a while ago, but now I feel like we all... we want to know. I know that I'm thinking about imagination a lot. So what does it mean?I feel like it's the hardest part of our job. And I think imagination for me, I can say personally, we're always trying different ways to engender more imagination in the company. I think imagination will be one of our topics next year for exposure therapy, for sure.But for me, I feel that there is probably unbounded imagination in everybody. It's not about cultivating it so much as it is about excavating and getting rid of everything that sits on top of it. All of your beliefs, all of your limiting narratives - I don't mean identity stuff like "I don't believe I can be that imaginative".I mean that we have so many conditions on what can happen and what's real and what people will accept that really make it hard to imagine something that's really outside of the box that we're living in now. It's like that whole paradigm shift. It's that famous quote, I don't even know if Einstein said it, but "the solution to a problem is never found in the same paradigm that the problem is in".So imagination is really - it sounds so tacky, but you can't like color outside of the lines easily. You really, it's hard to know the confines that you put yourself in mentally when you try to imagine a different future. I know I have a lot of them, but I know, you know when you meet somebody truly imaginative because they say stuff that you realize you could have thought of if you didn't have these weird rules in your head.And I think the innovative, like groundbreaking pieces when they break those rules. So I, it feels like an excavation to me.For some reason I was thinking about improv. Do you do improv?Oh my God. I'll die before I do that. And I probably should. I think somebody on my team does improv.I think Rebecca does it, which to me, she'll be a hero forever for doing that. I've heard improv is valuable for this kind of stuff. I don't know, maybe if I could drink before I got on stage, maybe. No, I'm like you. I'll drink everything before that.I'm like you, it's been suggested to me as something that people in this work do for all the reasons that we're talking about. And I have never done it because I'm terrified of all of that, but I guess I mean that's connected to everything you're talking about - my attachment to the boxes I'm in is strong.Improv is maybe fated on my journey as a strategist, but safer ways that I've been exploring have been reading history, because history really helps you see the patterns that we're doomed to repeat, so it helps you get outside of the box and look at it from the outside.Sci fi too and any kind of art, but sci fi is super interesting because those are like actual thought experiments that you see happening. I wrote about this recently, but for a long time, I wouldn't even let myself read fiction because I thought life is too short. I'm a business owner and I need to learn business and markets and how things work. I remember mentioning that to my team and I think it was Zach who said "you can't be a good strategist if you don't read fiction". And so I started reading fiction and it was just another one of those rules where I felt like fiction isn't the real work, imagination isn't the real work. And so it's just like I said, that's what strategy is - you're just always changing as a person.Do you feel like the idea of brand as a lens, that seems consistent and evergreen as a way of thinking about brand, but what changes for brands now to connect AI? I don't know if it was specifically AI, but just generally speaking.Can I go back to your first question? No, I'm kidding.I'll throw you under the AI bus.I don't think I have anything new to add to that conversation. I think my views are pretty vanilla. They're pretty loosely held. It probably will cut out the lower end of the brand strategy market, which would suck. I'm not concerned - we're not in that lower end. But I feel that another argument could be made, which is what I keep coming back to, that if AI and automation will completely democratize and remove any of the barriers around product tech development, entering a market, having channels - all that's really left is brand. That's basically all that's left. And brand can always be innovated upon. There is no right brand. And I think that's what makes it unique. You can have multiple brands that just grow a market. You can have one brand that stands for one thing, and another brand that stands for the opposite, and they will both work.And they will both grow the pie. That's what's interesting about it. It's not a zero sum game when it comes to brand. So I think in that case, in that regard, and I don't know, I don't know if I'm just being naively optimistic, but that's the natural conclusion I come to.Another conclusion too is that technology is fast, people are slow. My partner always loves to say that and I'm sure it's been said a million times. And I know somebody who's pretty deeply embedded in the AI world and things I'm hearing from people who are working at Fortune 500s - they're just so far behind. It's here and it's exciting, but most companies are extremely far behind in adopting it. We'll see, but I think we'll survive, it'll work out. I'm not having an existential crisis about it.Beautiful. I don't really have any more questions. I just really enjoyed talking to you. I really appreciate you sharing the time and I'm ever grateful for the invitation you extended to me to air my thinking. It was a really rewarding and satisfying experience and I appreciate it.Oh, people loved it. People loved it. It was a fantastic talk and I still use it as a model for all of our new speakers.So it was really, it was a gift to us.That's so kind. I mean it. Nice. So much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.Of course. 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Ben Doepke is the Principal of IX Strategy. I was introduced by Ben my a mutual researcher friend. I remember hitting it off with him the first time we spoke. He’s a big thinker, who has a way of bringing the most compelling parts mythology and archetypes into this work. I was excited to speak him and learn more about how he got to where he is.In addition to the strategy work they do with clients, they also do pretty amazing Brand Behavior Training. I attended an event he organized in Cincinatti several years ago, and had a lot of fun, and met some amazing people. Coming up, I’ll be joining them in New York City. I think you know this, but I'd like to start all of my interviews, all my conversations with this question that I've borrowed from a friend of mine. Her name is Suzanne Snider, and she teaches the Oral History Summer School up here in Hudson. I stole it from her. I always use it all the time, and I love it, but I always over explain it. You can answer this question any way that you want. You're in absolute control. And the question is, where do you come from?Peter, I knew this one was coming. I haven't listened to previous interviews that you've done. I've learned that there seems to be an importance of acknowledging place and that people would answer that question in a geographical sense. So I guess the answer to that. In a geographical sense, Peter I come from Cincinnati. In fact, I am seventh generation Cincinnati. And with these kids now, it's eight generations of Cincinnati, you just can't get out. The cost of living is really low. The parents are so friendly, it's everywhere, it's a nice way of life.But I think the reality is I didn't grow up in Cincinnati. I grew up on a goat farm, about 20, 25 miles outside Cincinnati, which is interesting because my mom was a flutist in the symphony orchestra, my father, an urban designer, very cosmopolitan interests in profession, goat farmer. As I thought about your question, I knew it was coming.It's Cincinnati, but it's not really Cincinnati. And in point of fact, I come from the in between and you and I have talked about this in the past, I think you and I are both fascinated by these transitional moments, the threshold, the liminal and for better or worse, those are the only places that I feel comfortable.What, and so where would that be now? What's another example of where do you find that space?I'm continually finding that space. It's like you're asking me to describe my whole life, every wedge of my life. I'm currently speaking to you in a parking lot. This is endemic. This is built into my rhythm of life, my way of working. I don't know if you've been to my website. Most people who visit, I eventually just had to scrub the entire thing so it just said strategy and insight so that people would know this is what's happening here. And even still, what does strategy mean and what does insight mean? There is not a whole lot of agreement on what those things mean. So of course, that's where I set up shop is the space where people are it could be anything.What did as a young goat farmer, what did you want to be when you grew up?A musician. And so that came true.What kind of, tell me the music story. I don't know this about you Ben.I was a classical pianist and I was a damn good one until I was about 14 and then I quit having left tooth marks on the lid of the piano.I'm confused. I don't know what those teeth marks are about.Frustration, pain. When you're practicing a few hours a day, you're always left with the feeling that you're not as good as you would like to be and so you practice some more but you only exacerbate the situation. When you're 14, it's like dude. So lots of frustration. So I quit we've probably a good call. So where I wouldn't touch it, but then because I was socially awkward, I discovered that if I was going to make friends it would, I would need some sort of avenue.And so I found out that people in my social circles they like music. And so I joined a band, lots of band, and I stayed in bands, eventually toured for, I don't know, five, six, seven years, something like that. Full time. Into my mid toward my late 20s, 26, 27.Are you willing to share band names?Yeah. I got to make peace with it at some point. I was a psychology nerd. Always have been fixated on understanding what it means to be a human. And so getting into psychology, I discovered the somatosensory homunculus. And so the group of guys that I was playing with, they did not want to call the band somatosensory homunculus, but they were okay calling it just homunculus.So there you have it. Homunculus.What is a somatosensory homunculus?If your body parts were sized according to the amount of cortical region designated or the nerves that were how sensitive they are. That's what it, that's the somatosensory homunculus. They're like huge lips, huge fingers, huge feet tiny little legs and midsection, and no butt.Wow. Amazing. How old were you when you named that you're in that? 20.Wow. How long did homunculus survive? What was the peak homunculus experience?So I think the first show was in 96. We got it. I think we hung it up in '03.Nice. You had a good run.Yeah, it was a weird time to be in a band, because it was pre internet, dawn of internet, and then oh, like we don't even have to play live shows to be discovered. I came from, dude, we were the last of the handbill generation. You know what I'm talking about. You're an old. I'm an old. So we were out on the street corners passing out handbills.Painful. I'm with you. I'm with you. That's amazing. I love knowing this. You said that you 20, when did you discover that you were fascinated by what it means to be human? When did psychology become a thing that, that was in your world that you were interested in?Growing up on a farm, but going to school in the inner city every single day driving along the Ohio river. There was that in between period, which as a kid what are you doing? You're staring out the window, watching the river go by every single day. And we didn't have a TV. So when I would get into school, all the kids were talking about the different TV shows or whatever's going on, like cultural stuff.And I was like a freaking space alien who just landed in their frothy little world. In the in between, always in the in between. And so this thing of growing up on the farm, going to school in the inner city and just trying to figure out like, this is such a, I think a universal human response is why is everybody else so different? Why are they so different?  It doesn't dawn on you till probably early teens where you're like, why am I like, what's my problem? Why don't I go to mass? Why don't I, watch Parker Lewis can't lose. That was a TV show or whatever. Or what's happening, I think was a TV show. And kids would, we're talking about these shows and they were going to their religious ceremonies or what have you. And just, I was. Yeah. And I just, I also like in the midst of that, what is the word flummoxedness, flummoxation?Anyway, in the middle of that flummox, I was like, holy hell, I'm so taken by difference. I'm obsessed with difference. And that is a thought that I am still just really fixated on, if you're in a family setting and you look to your left and right, and maybe everybody in your family is speaking the same language, or maybe they all look the same, or there's all this sameness that you might find in your family, and still what is it that makes family life interesting? It's usually they will call out, Oh Peter is this, he's this way.Like he, that as humans, we lust for difference lost for it. And I think it's just, that's all tied into that drive to become who we are.When I started out West the guy that I worked for he would speak in like corporate koans. One of them that I always say was, “We consume what we are afraid we are losing.” What do you make of that? It came to me as you just described this attraction to difference or novelty or difference you were saying.The part it feels a bit careless is the afraid. I wouldn't paint fear as this predominantly defining feature of our existence. I think it's a big part of it. I use the word lust for difference and I think maybe there, these are two sides of the same coin. Maybe, I don't know. But I do believe that we were, we're always, let's say this, I think we're gathering pieces of ourselves through our interactions with each other, which is really a an expression of Vygotsky. So nothing new there.Tell me about Vygotsky.Lev Vygotsky. He, like most of his work I think was originally in Russian and the way it translates is pretty clunky, but I think a good summation of his work was we're always becoming ourselves through each other. He was a developmental psychologist and most of his work really focused on childhood, early childhood, but we just, we keep becoming older children.Yeah. And tell me a little bit, I want to hear about the work you do now. Tell me a little bit about what you do. What you're working on and you're thinking you, I've, we met a while ago and you're thinking is beautiful and the, what you bring to brand and the qualitative is so powerful. How do you talk? How do you start a conversation about the work you do when somebody asks, Hey Ben, what do you do?Thank you for speaking so kindly of the work, Peter. The way I would answer that question is contingent on who I think is asking it. And all the guesswork of trying to understand what it is they want to know.Let's say it's a parent at the swim that's in the bleachers. And the person at the swim meet asks you, ‘Hey what do you do?’So I'll either, if it's really loud and I'll just say I'm a consultant and then that's the end of that.The consultant exit.Yeah. That's fine. But no I say that I work with brands to help them understand who they are, to help them understand who they serve. And to understand what is possible, and then not just what's possible, but what is right. And I think all four of those things structure each other. I think it's just almost like a Buckminster Valerian, model that I hold in my head, like where everything is holding itself together.You know what I mean? I think too often, brands go right to, Oh we could make this, or we could say this, or we could run this particular activation or whatever the case may be. And sometimes you'll run into people who are saying, Oh yes, we can, we could do that, right? That is possible, but let's take a step back and ask Oh, what's going to resonate best with the people we serve.Very rarely do you back up further from that to say who are we and what do we have to offer anything to anyone, i. e. what is our most sacred remit.This isn't, this isn't just about brand purpose or brand promise or I think those statements are really important, by the way. This is really about the essence of the brand. And I think too often what we see is that in the rush to activate, in the rush to make ourselves visible as brands, we leave behind what matters. That's why you see so much cultural pollution coming from brands. Just the detritus of rushing and cleverness. God with the cleverness.What do you mean the cleverness? What's an example of what do you get? What are you talking about?You, in our fields, Peter, and I'm speaking broadly, like marketing, business, innovation. There are very talented, very gifted, brilliant people, truly brilliant, who are under commercial demands to perform, to deliver something, but without the latitude oftentimes to deliver something beautiful or to borrow the parlance of your initiative. Deliver something beautiful and meaningful.There it is. Deliver something meaningful. It sucks, man. Like, how many times have you been in that room and looked around and been like, this is an embarrassment of talent. What could we actually do here? If people understood what this brand was about. What could we do?Oh my God. So talk to me there. Like I just had a, you just painted a picture of that room that we've all been in, right? You've painted a picture that there's like another step all the way back is the sacred remit, right? How do you slip, how do you get, how do you get into a conversation about sacred remit?So again I'm still figuring that out because a lot of that is contingent on who's asking. Or more often, who's charging ahead and has paid for your help. That's not asking by the way.Wait, what do you mean? Same more about the brands are not asking.Brand leaders are not often asking, what are we about? What is our essence? What is sacred that should permeate everything that we are doing? They're not asking that they are asking, how do we hit timing under constraints of budget. How do we deliver quarter by quarter, everything is just this sort of keep the ball rolling down, downhill instead of what is the right thing.And so when I say they're not asking, they're charging ahead, they're charging ahead and they might reach out and say we need to know who our consumer is, or we need a commercial platform for 2025. We need to build out our pipeline, for the next three to five, maybe 10 years. If you're on a real fine one, but they're like, they're not at, to me they're not asking the most important questions that have to do with the sort of sacred origin, the sort of belief underneath the brand.I'm seeing your mind operate, and I think maybe you have a belief about what a brand means and what it is for people and the potential that it represents.   And there's a feeling that if only the client really understood it, the brand leaders understood what that was, then this embarrassment of talent could create just a flourish of beauty, basically. So that's what I feel like I heard. Please tell me if I'm wrong and then maybe I'm just projecting. And then the second part is how do you lead teams to an experience of what that is? How do you articulate that possibility? Is that, am I making sense?You are. The first thing you said is that I have a belief about what the brand is, about what brand essence brand is. It's not that I have a belief, it's that I know that they have a belief about what the brand is, and I don't know that belief has been properly served. If you ask a lot of decision makers that are working on brands, what is the origin story or the primal myth, the creation myth of this brand. They might look at you sideways give you that quizzical dog look.  As an alternate to that, they'll probably start reeling off the chronological history of the brand. That's not the way belief works. Belief tracks back to a creation myth or what bro, Barbara Sproul. S P R O U L. Barbara Sproul, she wrote a book on what did she call it? Primal myth.Low key banger. That book is fantastic. And I'm going to tell you, if you don't read the entire book, that's cool. But the intro come on. All right. Basically the creation myth, which is a dreamlike recollection and of the sacred origin of the brand. It holds the DNA. Like, when we enter into that non linear, into that imaginative space, images flood our minds.Those images carry instruction and it is our work then as we are faithfully delivering through that belief system to activate that essence to carry those instructions all the way through into the products that we are making and the messages that we are delivering and the services that we're offering and the experiences that we're hoping people will remember all of it, all of it should come from an intentional effort to carry that essence all the way.And the reality, Peter, sorry, and I'll wrap up this never ending thought. The reality is that those instructions, they're coming through anyway, but when they come through by accident, the results are usually painful. They are degenerative instead of generative, because when you are talking about this essence in its intentional form, in its deliberate form, it is generative and beautiful and gives the brand and a belief strength and traction, but in its sort of default, where it is not deliberate, where it is unin haphazard, then it shows up and it shows up destructively.  And when you're working with some of, I have so many near and dear friends who are working in these corporations that are characterized by this default way of working. It's just cranking it's just that, it's like somebody is asking you for something. Don't ask a whole bunch of whys just do it.Just get the thing done. And as I said, like I said earlier if you're immensely talented, you can draw from your talent. You can draw from your personal experience. You can be extra clever.But that doesn't change the fact that you've not stopped, paused, and asked what is the sacred content, the ineffable, the essential, that we can drive through here. Your cleverness, notwithstanding.Can you tell a story about helping a team. What's the process? How do you guys work? What I've heard is what I, what's interesting to me is you're collecting teams with their origin story, which is not something that I've ever really thought about like that before. So tell me a little bit more about how you guys work.As you would probably know is important given that you're doing similar type work, you got to meet people where they are like, I can't go streaming through the front door with my robes trailing behind me, my hair, all frizzed out. Come on, man.So when we set up stakeholder interviews, a big part of this is tell me about your time with the brand. What do you love about this brand? What makes you crazy about this brand? We have to start out in the sort of mundane, as it were, and probably even rage into the profane, which is a great setup for getting to the sacred.And usually that's what we'll do and say, All right. Now we built up some rapport. I have a really good picture of the chronology of the brand because everybody loves telling you about the chronology of the brand. And maybe there's an audit of all of its commercial activity going back 107 years.  Okay. That's great. And now I'll say, all right, we're just going to do something a little bit differently now. And we can think about it as creative inspiration. I'm going to ask you three questions. And there's there is actually a wrong answer and the wrong answer is when you start thinking too hard about what you're saying, I'm going to be able to tell, and I'm going to ask you to back up and think less and feel more.Is that an intervention that you'll do? That's how you are in an interview like that? You'll be like, I'm sorry, you were thinking too hard on that one.Yeah. That's fantastic. We have to, we got to hold the line, man, got to hold the line. Otherwise everybody continues to fall back into the default. I want to say something that's smart. I want to say something that's not going to get me fired. I want to say something that, yeah. I'll ask him three questions. It's I want you to imagine that this brand has never existed. Tell me about what comes to mind and tell me about the universe as you are picturing it where this brand never existed.  And oftentimes they will start telling you like, they're going to start playing back. Some historical element. And so I'll say, look, just as a reminder, I'm not interested in the history. I'm interested in the images that are flooding your mind. As you imagine the universe where this brand didn't exist.First reflexive images that are bubbling up. And then, so what I'm looking for in those answers are images, actions, and descriptions, and that's the order of priority image action and description. So there we go. The universe before the brand existed. Now, tell me about the brand. That's like in some moment, the universe went from no brand to now here's this brand again, images, actions, descriptions in that order is what I'm looking for. And then finally, we look at the universe as a comprehensive holistic system, and now there is this new presence that has been injected into it.Tell me about how you are observing the world shift. In response to this new present, how is it integrating or rejecting or whatever the case may be. How does the world adapt? And it's those three chapters that spell out these, what we would call core brand actions, that form the essence of the brand.And was it before, universe before it existed, and then when it arrived? And what are the three?Universe before the brand existed, now the brand exists, how has the universe responded? I don't even get. And based on those core brand actions, now we have psychographics that we can drop into the recruiting for understanding our design target.  We also have these syndicate instructions that can be deployed across the full spectrum of brand engagement, ranging from awareness all the way through to advocacy. It provides an action based line of continuity that, I don't think you often see in most brand strategy structure. You'll see a bullet point list of like first moments of truth, a bullet point list of second moments of truth, whatever the case may be, and what we are trying to say is the brand experience is itself a story that we as human beings have the opportunity to activate within our own lives. And there should be a line of continuity in there. There is a core brand action that we will sense through all touch points.And then other aspects of the brand from an action standpoint will come forward, will fall back. And all of that is baked into these instructions that live in the brand's origin or creation myth.Can you tell a story of a client story about how this plays out? Do you have a, a friendly case study that you are able to share? You express all this work in the story of a brand.Yeah. Without naming anybody we did a project about a year and a half ago that I think finally reached a very convincing point of success. Actually, you know what? Even better going, I think I can probably even share more specifics on this one because it was a while ago. There is a, our client from, I don't know, like five, six years ago called Money Lion. They're a financial tech company. At the time they were just I don't know, they were the startup, and they were at the very beginnings of trying to understand what are we and now they were at, they were not asking that question.They were asking who do we serve and how do we make sure that what we're offering is going to be relevant? So we do the stakeholder interviews. We meet with the entire C suite and we were asking these questions asking even at that time, I think we were even asking more biographical questions of them.What brought you into this, like something in your nature drew you into this brand. Can you tell me about what that might've been? And then we moved on to the questions that I mentioned to you before. And it was very cool. Like these are finance guys. These are like, hardcore, like financial dude.And so this was like pretty novel territory for them. But they ended up getting into it and we had a very we, some of them even called back two or three times and be like, I want to something else. And because narrative, narrative is addictive, when you're really in it, it's you just want to, you just want to keep pulling on that thread.But we did end up getting to some really concrete brand action, some core brand action. When we look at it that way, it's these are the things that you will do all the time. In everything. And so as we transitioned out of the stakeholder interviews, we got into the qualitative research where, as I said, like we injected the psychographics from those stakeholder interviews into the screener and we're going out and we are talking to people who are looking at.  In addition to their they're open to working with a financial app or all this category stuff. In addition to that, these are people who self identify a desire to liberate and be liberated. These were people who self identified as instigating or being instigated, right? Like jump starting.  Also people who were guarding and being guarded and these were just these prevailing action themes in their lives. And so you start to see, what is this configuration? You've got people jumpstarting chain, you've got people who are breaking free and people who are about guarding and safety and providing and all that business, right?And so the cool part is we go into their lives and we're, we are actively looking for how those four brand actions are coming to life already. How did those actions show up in their lives? And again, it's through images, it's through actions, and it's through description. And in the qualitative research, we discover all these insights, but I think some of the ones that were most stallion were the one that showed the relationship between these core brand actions, brought it all to a head to say the way that I take care of myself and my people often means that I need to break the status quo.It often means that I'm going to have to be the one who's turning over tables in the temple. And that whole energy transferred into the brand identity that the agency, We Believers fantastic agency, by the way, in New York We Believers took a lot of that material and codified it into the brand book.And so much of what in the brand today is it's now publicly traded company. It is lift and drop from those first couple phases of the work we did. Yes. Did we produce a comms platform and provide recommendations on what those services should be? Yes. But honestly, Peter, that stuff is a cakewalk compared to some of that chewier upfront stuff.How beautiful. I want to with the time we have left, I want to talk about archetypes. I know I've signed up for the thing in New York. Thank you. I'm so excited. What's the role of archetypes in the work that you do?We've almost stopped using the word archetype because of what you just said. I'm not interested in having this whole linguistic conversation about what is archetype, what does it mean, all this. The reality is most people who are talking about it haven't studied it. So let's not have that conversation.The conversation I am interested in having is the one that looks at the hypocrisy of brands who are willing to concede that they are all wrapped up in human nature. Nobody's going to argue if human nature isn't part of the way that you run a brand. No, one's going to fight you on that. And yet where is the line between human nature and nature, really? Are we just going to say that, Oh, like we're going to use this human nature line of discernment to separate brands from actual nature?Man, that's BS. And so what we try to do, we've backed out of the whole no disrespect to Carol Pearson, by the way, love Carol Pearson for people who are skeptical about archetypes. As you've learned about them through Carol's work, go deeper into Carol's work, because she she has made it very comfortable to linger in the lobby, as it were, but get a room, go deeper into the work.  She does follow it all the way through into its Jungian roots. I think we've gone into the, essentially, to borrow an archetypal reference, the belly of the whale. Where we are basically looking at these universal laws of nature and saying, how do they show up in human life? And then how did they show up consequently in brand life?And so that's it. We are looking at these nine, you could call them forces of nature. These nine different forces of nature. How are they shaping human life? How are they shaping brand decision making? And the, and what I was saying before is. If you work with those forces of nature, those archetypes as they were, if you work with those in a conscious way, in a deliberate, intentional way, then you have a chance at experiencing something generative, creative, harmonious, and of course, if you're working at it from a, from an unconscious standpoint, It's quite likely that you are incurring pain in your own life, as well as your team's lives.And God forbid, and this happens actually all the time you are scaling that oversight into the lives of millions of people. And this is where not to, as we run out of time, go all the way down the rabbit hole. But there is an ethic of brand decision making that I think a lot of people are not seeing, which is you are affecting people on psychological, social, cultural levels that you don't know about, that they don't know about, and it wouldn't take that much effort to stop and look at the essence of what you're doing and to activate it more intentionally.What should I expect in New York with you Brand Behavior Workshop?We are going to help you to embody these forces of nature in a social setting so that firstly you get these sensations in your body and we will then look for those sensations, externally as we go through the galleries at the Museum of Modern Art to say, Are there images, actions, and descriptions that are activating our bodies in a certain way?And we're going to go out and photocapture all of that. We'll bring it all back. We will look at each other's images together. We will discuss them. And we will certainly have a moment where we realize, Oh my God, like there were two or three of these that I couldn't find. And that's really typical.It doesn't mean that they're not in you. It just means that those rooms in your house are dark and we might need each other to help flip on the light. And now we're back to the Vygotsky again. We're always becoming ourselves through each other. It's beautiful.But thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. I appreciate you sharing your time and this was a lot of fun. So thank you so much. It's so great to hear more about your work.Peter, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Veronique Greenwood is a writer and essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Pacific Standard, Aeon, Popular Science, Scientific American, and many others. I kept running into her work as I gathered pieces for my weekly newsletter, so created a Google alert for her. So, when I decided to have these conversations, I knew I wanted to get her take. One of the things I want to talk about is wonder - and this is something she knows well, and incorporates into her work. I hope you enjoy!A selection of my favorite of her pieces:How Trust Shapes Nations' Safety Rules in The Atlantic How does a country decide what risks are acceptable in everyday life? This is a must-read, and keep. The Vodka-Red-Bull Placebo Effect in The Atlantic People take more risks when downing caffeine-and-alcohol cocktails—but only if they know what they’re drinking. Beautiful proof of the power of brand. My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery in The Atlantic His career as an eminent physicist was derailed by an obsession. Was he a genius or a crackpot? A really beautiful story. . Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

When I think about naming, I think about Anthony Shore. He is the founder of Operative Words, and is responsible for more than 250 names. He is the guy people call when they talk about names. And, well, I wanted to talk about names. Here is the piece on the Neuroscience of Trademarks: Vance, Kristy and Sandra M Virtue. “Metaphoric advertisement comprehension: The role of the cerebral hemispheres.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 10 (2011): 41-50 Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

Richard Wise is a brand anthropologist who is a Global Planning Director at VML. I had enjoyed his writing on brand and SXSW, and then I read his book, “Save Your Soul: Work in Advertising.” I can’t recommend the book, or his articles more highly. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

This is the third in a series of conversations I am going to be having with people who make me wonder. Look for them every other Monday.I first encountered Kirsten Bell - the anthropologist, not the actress - by way of her piece, “Do Washing Machines Belong in Kitchens?” and was hooked. Since then, I have been devouring her newsletter, Silent But Deadly, and looking forward to her book “Silent But Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Life.”Where do you come from?Ah, yes, I can see that there are, it's a Rorschach test, isn't it? Where you go with the question. But obviously, in a literal sense, I'm Australian. Originally I moved around a fair bit. So I'm an anthropologist by training, and I suppose as a result of my work, I've done fieldwork in South Korea, I've lived in the U.S., in Australia, Canada, and I'm currently living in the U. K. I have answered your question in a very literal sense. What did you want to be when you grew up? Actually, very unusually, I wanted to be an anthropologist. Most people, I can say this from years of teaching, most come into anthropology in a fairly accidental fashion. It's something they discover at university rather than something that they want to be. And I think that's just because there's not a lot of understanding of what anthropology is.But for me, when I was 11 or 12, I saw a movie called The Serpent and the Rainbow. It's a very loose adaptation of Wade Davis's book of the same name. It's a horror movie Wes Craven. And I actually don't remember that much about it, except that it was about this anthropologist who goes to Haiti to study voodoo.And at the time I was very into the occult, witchcraft, unexplained phenomena. And so when I saw this film, I was like, wow, there's a job that you can do where you get to study this stuff for a living. And so right from the age of 12, I decided that's what I wanted to be. I went to university to study anthropology and become an anthropologist and never really deviated course from that point.PS: I remember that movie very well, and I don't know, I think it was in the, I've seen it a few times, and it had a strong impact on me too, and what I remember, I think, is a line from the movie that they used in the marketing of it, is what he would say in this gasping voice, he would say, Don't let them bury me. I'm not dead.Yes, that's right. It is a horror movie and I remember, I don't remember that much about it except for yes, him being buried alive. And then there's a torture scene where I think he gets a nail through the scrotum. So yeah, it's yeah, but it obviously did have a pretty substantial impact on me.It's funny, actually, lots of movies, like the films that tend to feature anthropologists are mostly horror films.PS: Is that right?Yeah.PS: What other movies come to mind?So I guess the most recent one would be Midsommar. So that's the one, they're all graduate students in the U. S., I think, for students who go to Sweden to study this summer festival and it it's a terrifying, it is a terrifying film anyway, it's, that's the latest one, but I guess The Relic that would be another one, Anaconda.Yeah, there's a bunch of movies that there's an anthropological analysis on why that is, and this idea of the anthropologist, there's a mediator between different realms. The fact that often there's a certain kind of expertise anthropologists might have in non-Western context, and so that the films where it typically features is a, obviously Anaconda midsummer, they're set in a certain cultural context where, you know, the presence of an anthropologist might make sense. But yes, anyway, random fact.What do you make of that?Yeah. So I guess. Yeah, I think it's a slightly maybe romanticized explanation, but it's this idea, of the anthropologist as a mediator between different roles. And so whether that's a sort of Western or non Western, they're the human and they're the spiritual realm. And so this idea of the anthropologist is a kind of cultural mediator. And of course they often have this role in plot exposition or whatever in, in explaining so called exotic practices to the, to, to the audience in it.Where are you now? Tell me a little bit about the work you're doing and where you're at.Yeah, so I'm in London and so I'm a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Imperial College. So I suppose in my, if my academic work I, my specialty is medical anthropology and so really trying to apply anthropological insights to the study of health and illness.And then I suppose my hobby in terms of the sub stack is very much, I think trying to engage with people outside of academia and show and cater to my obsession with bodily odors, which I mean, I do write an unhealthy amount, I think about that topic, , there's something very freeing about writing for the public rather than for an academic audience, you're very constrained in academic writing.And yeah, I think there's a lot of topics that really aren't considered to be fit for academic consumption that I'm very interested in. And so I get to explore those in my sub stack, and then also hopefully introduce people outside of academia to what a sort of anthropological approach looks like and the ways that was the kind of insights that might offer.Can you tell me a story about medical anthropology, your academic life? What does your work look like? I've worked in various different kinds of areas And so I've done a lot of research on say, on cancer survivorship. And so trying to understand the experiences of people who've lived through cancer, because cancer is a very distinctive kind of disease because it's halfway between an acute disease and a chronic disease. It's one that has existential consequences for the person diagnosed because it has these very powerful cultural meanings. It has a very feared form of treatment, chemotherapy. And so trying to understand. The experiences of people living through cancer based on the fact that it's incredibly culturally significant, but also a very life changing disease.And I've also done work, probably the stuff that's a little bit more related to the work that you do would be stuff I've done looking at tobacco control and smoking. And so I've done quite a lot of work on cigarette packaging because it's an area where of course there's intense legislative attention. So tobacco control is focusing on the cigarette packet as this sort of advertising mechanism to try and encourage people to smoke. And they've tried to invert that, to make that into a sort of anti-smoking mechanism to market anti-smoking messages. And so really trying to understand what sort of impact, if any, that has on smokers, all of this intensive focus on the packet itself.What did you discover?And so there was this sense that in effect, the marketing qualities of the cigarette packet could be used against it. to market an anti-smoking message. Cause there's no doubt that they're not neutral health messages that are on the packet.They're of grotesque imagery with very strong messaging. And so very much coming out of social marketing, which is trying to use marketing principles for, to resolve social problems. But my research would suggest that that's an overly simplistic way of thinking about packaging and that people have much more complicated relationships with their packets that aren't just about the visual.And because mostly obviously when you smoke in a very habitual way, you're not focusing on the visual qualities of the packet. The packet is a container for your cigarettes. And so the research that I done, I've done on the area, which was just in situ interviews with people smoking on the streets, going up to smoking and then saying Can you remember the warning label on your packet? And almost no one could remember the warning label on their packet. And in fact, they would often guess, but sometimes they would say warning labels that didn't even exist.And I think there's an assumption, a sort of, mainstream marketing assumption about the power of the visual that I think in the case of cigarette packaging probably needs some rethinking having said that, I think that So the research that I've done in that area would challenge those assumptions, but it has not been widely taken up. I think we've come so far down a certain policy path that people don't want anything that distorts that narrative.These are much more kind of heavy topics and I think that's partly why with the Substack I want to focus on very light inane, mundane things rather because my professional life is spent studying very heavy topics and sometimes, fairly emotionally challenging or for the people experiencing them like cancer, for example.PS: I encounter acronyms every once in a while in work and they have a very strong feeling against them and I'm going to ask you. Before I, reveal my own distaste for them and argument against them what's the argument against acronyms and how do you feel about them?Yeah, I, when I wrote that piece, I'd recently started a new position in at Imperial. And of course, public health is shocking for acronyms. And the first day I was there, the people must have used at least 50 acronyms. And of course, being, being entering a new job, a lot of what you're doing is just learning the language associated with that. And you know that you can do your job once you've mastered the language. And acronyms are a form of technical language or jargon. In theory, they're supposed to make life easier but in reality, obviously they, I think they have the opposite, they have the opposite effect. And and this is very much about identifying you as a member of a particular community once and excluding people from that community in terms of their purpose, I think.PS: In that piece, there was a couple of pieces of data that I really found pretty fascinating. I guess there's been a threefold increase in the use of acronyms. There was something to about the frequency of usage to that. Most like a vast majority of acronyms are used. They have no life.That's right. They're never, that's right. And I think too, there's some really interesting shifts that have happened, of course, with with the rise of digital communications. And so you've got acronyms happening on different levels. So you've got these professional technical acronyms, jargon. You've also got social acronyms as a result of the rise of, text based mediums, texting. And for me as someone who didn't own a mobile phone until I moved to the UK and still primarily use it as a GPS device, the social acronyms. I constantly have to look stuff up.I really genuinely thought that LOL meant lots of love. Yeah, when I first when I first encountered it. And so there's just constant acronyms. And so they have a social function too. Again, if you have teenagers use very different social acronyms to adults. And yeah, these things I think have a, they're very much around a sort of in group and out group and identifying you, if you know the acronym, then you're part of the in group.PS: Yeah, that's what I end up feeling. It's so exclusionary.It is, yeah. I'm with you. I know. Certainly in academic writing, it drives me nuts when people use acronyms and I'm always, when I'm reviewing stuff, telling people to tone down the acronyms, because I think they make the life easier of the person using them, but they don't make life easier at all. In fact, they, they complicate life immeasurably for the poor person having to try and. Make their way through.And of course, you've got these acronyms that have multiple meanings. And so you can run into problems. I just, yeah, I think the example I use in that piece is PMS. And of course, for most of us, when we think of PMS, we think of premenstrual syndrome, but they're all these conferences like the precious metal summit that use the same acronym. And so there's this sort of constant confusion as a result of the multitude of acronyms and the multitude of similar, the same acronym with, a whole variety. of different meanings.A number of your pieces are about conversation, getting into them and getting out of them. What's your interest there?Yeah, I think for me, again this is very much about just living in different Anglophone countries. And so When I moved to the UK and again, I'd lived, yeah, born in Australia, lived in the U S and in Canada, and there are just certain, differences here in terms of greetings. And I was just a bit, I very confused.So for example, when people would greet me with "Alright?". As a greeting, and it was just one of these things. I just didn't really know what it meant. It struck me as a very odd kind of greeting. And so I suppose for me, it's those instances of going, I don't know what the hell that like, I just being just suddenly stopping and going, I have no idea why people are using that. I don't know how I'm supposed to respond. And yeah, I think for me, the interest in has very much come out of living in the UK. And again, just be experiencing differences that are unexpected and that really manifesting in language.And so I know even when I was living in the U S just, I would use expressions or I would hear expressions that were just incomprehensible to me. And so I was quite surprised at. Yeah, and I had some, embarrassing experiences around yeah, like rubber, pussy. There's certain words that have very different meanings in Australian English, for example, versus American English, and you get yourself into trouble fairly quickly with those sorts of confusions around that.And yeah, I think that's where it comes from. It's just living in different anglophone countries and being surprised by linguistic differences that I'm confronted with and a bit confused about how I'm supposed to respond in those situations.There was an observation, I think, in your piece on greeting is that everybody's lying a little bit. You're always lying about something.Yeah. That comes from Harvey Sachs. He's amazing conversational analyst. They just delving into how complicated conversations actually are. I think if you stop to think about the social minefield that constitutes conversations, we would never ever talk to each other. Because they are fraught with potential confusion, with all sorts of issues. And thank God, they're quite ritualized in how we interact with each other. So we have to lie to keep things flowing smoothly.PS: Yeah, absolutely. It's funny. I'm in my world. There's often too often very popular talk about empathy. Yeah, when I'm asked to talk about empathy. I prefer to talk about awkwardness is you're exploring awkwardness in a way the way that I understand it. That it's this experience when the script kind of falls away and we're just left with no idea ....what , who we're supposed to be or what we're supposed to do. What's the appropriate kind of we've lost the script and we can.Yeah, I think that's an excellent way of putting it, actually. And I would say almost in some respects, anthropology as a discipline is intrinsically connected with that sense of awkwardness, which is putting yourself in an awkward, radically different, culturally different situation potentially, and then not knowing at all what to do, and then learning things out the hard way, and then in the process, challenging your own assumptions, because it's why is this awkward?What makes it awkward? Why am I feeling that way? I think there's something, there's a lot to be learned from that feeling of awkwardness. So that's an, I think that's an excellent way of yeah.What do you, can you tell me more about how you've learned from awkwardness? I feel like you're identifying, I'd love to hear you talk more about the role of awkwardness in your own work.When I've moved from country to country finding awkwardness where I didn't expect it. And so when I was doing, so my PhD was looking at a religious movement in South Korea. And my original research was in a radically different cultural context where you're confronted, with pretty radical cultural difference, but you expect that. And so I was constantly committing faux pas, especially in Korea. It's very there's fairly firm social etiquette. It's a fairly, hierarchical etiquette.And so I was, I can remember I, as an Australian, I wouldn't be thinking about if a meal was served, I would start eating. Not waiting for someone who was more senior to eat.I remember being in a religious service that was outside. And I knew that if I was in an a ceremony indoors, you needed to remove your hat, that it would be very inappropriate to have a hat on. And there was a religious ceremony I was observing outdoors and I had my hat on and it just never occurred to me that would be considered disrespectful. And someone came up to me and yanked my hat off. And then I was like, s**t, okay. I just. It's a religious ceremony that trumps the setting of the ceremony.So it's a sort of learning experience because you're like, Oh, okay, this ground is now sacred ground, even though it's in an outdoor setting, the nature of the service has made it sacred. And so you learn from the experience of awkwardness. And then I suppose. I was seeing awkwardness where I didn't expect it when I'm, moving between different Anglophone countries.And then again, like when someone greets you with, all right, and you're, it's an, it's really awkward because you're my, I would be like, I think so. And then the person would look at me and I would look at them and I clearly hadn't responded appropriately. And so the whole thing is really awkward. And so then it's that's really interesting. Why is it awkward? Why are they using this word? Why do I not use this word? And thinking that through about what that means. So I think you're right. Almost every piece I've ever written on that subject, a substack is about something like, farting is obviously intrinsically awkward.PS: Yeah. The piece on so much to talk about, but the piece on I guess the long goodbye, which I'm an, I'm American. I don't, I have some interactions with people that are with people in England and but I've had enough that I experienced that though. What do you call it? It's the wall of goodbyes. Is that what it's like?Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Yes. The wall of goodbyes. Yeah.PS: Which strikes to me in an awkward moment, there's like a panic where you just, there's a total panic and this wall of goodbyes you throw at it just to get out of.That's right.PS: It's just, it's shocking how terrifying this can be, right?So conversational analysts like Harvey Sachs, who I've, I only discovered fairly recently, I don't know why I hadn't read his stuff years ago. This is a guy who spent hundreds and hundreds of hours just analyzing naturally occurring conversations. And so this is where he starts to see all these fascinating patterns in, and they're, they're highly predictable and ritualized the kind of interactions that people have with each other in the context of greetings and goodbyes and all of that. And they sort, they do have to manage what otherwise would be, a tremendously stressful experience that could go potentially anywhere.I think language and conversation and the complexities and dynamics of that are super interesting. And of course, yeah. When you're an American doing business with a Brit and then there's this weird thing that happens at the end of the phone, and it was an American who noticed it actually brought it to my attention.He was like, why the hell are these British, like, why do they say goodbye 10 times? And until he mentioned that it wasn't something I'd consciously registered. And then I was like, yeah, he's right. What on earth is that all about? It's really weird.PS: There was, oh in that same piece about the long goodbye, you quote somebody else who talked, who's just pointing at the fact that this stuff doesn't happen inevitably. Like getting to the end of a conversation required, the language is it involves work and it requires accomplishing.As soon as you start to think about this, it is a bit mind blowing because we just assume that conversations come to a natural conclusion, but if you've ever talked to anyone who is not getting the hints that you're like. Sending you realize that no, actually they have to cooperate with you to end the conversation unless you just want to be rude and hang up on that person. There's a whole sort of cooperative act that's required and it requires accomplishing to get to the end.So you've written a lot, you mentioned it on farts and flatulence and I just wonder where did that begin?The very first academic paper I ever tried to write. So I'd done, finished my PhD and my field work was on a South Korean religious movement. And rather than writing about that, the first academic paper I tried to publish was called Silent But Deadly, Bodily Odors and the Dissipation of Boundaries.Because actually in my field work, I was seeing all these really quite interesting things around bodily odors, et cetera. And so in the family that I was living with, the, the father would fart and just, seeing the reactions to that anyway, it was rejected very resoundingly from the academic journal.And it was, then I just realized that it was not considered appropriate for academic. It wasn't, yeah, it was just considered too, puerile, facile not appropriate to write about academically. And I found that fascinating because anthropologists are living it for the most part they're obviously the nature of anthropological full work is a sort of intensive immersion where you're living in a context with a community for a long period.I'm assuming you're hearing farts. I'm assuming you're farting yourself, but nobody ever writes about it. And I was just like. It's but it's so interesting the whole area because it's this totally natural bodily function that's incredibly symbolically loaded.And so to me, I don't, yeah, I think there are certain areas, that in academic writing have not received the attention they deserve and farting happens to be one. And so I've done my level best to try and address that. But I think as soon as you say farting people, it's not serious. It's not academic.And I know I used to teach a course called being human. And on the first day I would do a lecture on the anthropology of farting and I could see the students. They're like, is this like, why are you talking about this? This seems like completely inappropriate for the students themselves. I just, even though I, I would try and use this as a way of getting them thinking anthropologically and some students would get it, but others like, why the hell is my lecturer talking about farting?This is yeah, it's not I don't expect this in my university lectures. So there's certain topics I think that just, yeah, they're considered too inane, too mundane too facile, too juvenile to be, yeah, considered.PS: What do you say to that challenge? It strikes me as I think it's a wonderful thing that all that you're paying attention to farting and all the various forms. What do you say to the, is it still the case? You think that this is not not fit for academic consumption or what's your argument for, no, this is meaningful. This is part of the human experience.Yeah. So I think there are some people, so I just, there's a book coming out by Berghan called “Matter Out of Place,” which, and I think I, the, one of the editors of the knows my interest in this stuff. And so I was asked to review it. And so the book is all around notions of dirt and pollution. And so people have written about some of this stuff, but even things like defecation, right? This universal process, every society has to manage it. And yet it's massively underwritten about by anthropologists, despite the, incredible significance of shitting.And so there again, so that's changed recently. There are a few people, Zach Van De Yeese, Matthew Wolfmeyer, a few folk who are writing, but there's nothing like the volume of work there should be on something that is so significant.We all have these associations with these things, toilet humor, juvenile, and those associations that we have culturally around those things tend to make the, tend to manifest academically as well. We have our blind spots, academically, I think.PS: I traveled around India with some friends for a while.  They have the International Museum of Toilets in Delhi. So the organization that has this International Museum of Toilets is also an organization that's trying to get rid of the, it's creating public toilets so that the caste system is still alive in India. The caste to people whose job is to manage other people's waste. Yeah. And he's trying to eliminate that need by creating these public toilets.. I told people that I was going to go to the international museum of toilets when I was in India and they thought I was a lunatic.Again, it's just, it seemed to be this thing that's fascinating, but in a fairly puerile sort of way. And those prejudices definitely make themselves feel academically. So there is some stuff, but we're all fascinated by these things. And of course, when you're doing, when you're working in a different country. So in Korea, for example, you've got squatting toilets and what you realize is a certain I realize that I just don't have the right leg muscles. My leg muscles haven't been trained to use, to squat, even though probably from a biological standpoint, it makes the whole defecation process a lot easier squatting versus sitting on a toilet.And there's a whole history there. And there is some stuff actually around toilets in particular. There's a great book by a sociologist, David Ingliss.. And what I find interesting though, because the whole book is around the sociology of shitting basically, but he's very careful to couch it in the excretory experience. You can tell reading the book that he's really concerned that to show that he, this is very serious scholarship. And so the whole thing is a lot more inaccessible than it should be in terms of the language, because he's trying so hard to convince the readership that this is a serious piece of scholarship. And it is a serious piece of scholarship and very good. And it's, it's unfortunate that it's written in the way that it is. Cause I think there's a lot of people outside of academia who would be very interested in it, but the language is a bit off putting because it's so incredibly academic.Tell me more about Mary Douglas and the matter out of place, her definition of dirt, right?Yeah, so I guess she's, she's, these days considered fairly old fashioned in anthropology. She was a structuralist, influenced by Levi Strauss and they were very much interested in cross cultural universals. Especially this idea of binary opposites. So they were looking at really big picture stuff. Which I find fascinating but it's definitely become very unfashionable in anthropology to be focusing on big cross cultural universals, etc. There's a sense that it's, over simplistic, it's decontextualizes things, and that there are conceptual and intellectual problems with that work.And so Mary Douglas, though, I suppose one of her key contributions, she is one, probably she has two very famous books Natural Symbols and Purity and Danger. And one of her key insights was that what we think of as dirt so this is stuff that we consider to be polluting is matter out of place. And so she very much in this frame that you have categories and things that don't fit the categories, tend to be considered to be powerful and polluting. And so she was very interested in bodily excretions, for example, because they're from the body, but they're separate from the body. And so they're the kind of ultimate matter out of place. And so they become very symbolically charged.But she also has those same arguments about things like certain kinds of animals. And so Yeah, so for example, pigs there's, she has arguments about the fact that pig, pork is often tabooed and so from her point of view, that's about the anomalousness of the pig, because it's a hoovened animal, but it eats anything. Whereas most hoovened footed animals eat cud eaters. And so her argument is that it becomes symbolically charged and highly polluting in, is Islam and Judaism because of its anomalous properties. So she has all these sort of interesting arguments about categories, things that defy categories. And those are the things that become charged symbolically and either very powerful or very polluting or mostly both at the same time.PS: I wanted to share. I had a project that I worked on and just talk to you about it and see if anything, it triggered anything. It feels like it's in your sweet spot. It's in the silent, but deadly territory. I did a project for a mattress company. So a bed in a box company. And one of the things that I felt like I observed in those interviews and in those conversations with people was like decorative pillows and this whole idea of making the bed. And it was the first time I really ran into Mary Douglas because it was so obvious how important it was for some people to make the bed, and for it to be very, it's a very special place. This place we put ourselves down to sleep is just unbelievable. It's unbelievable what we're doing for those eight hours. But some places were just unbelievable, so many different pillows and so much decorative. And it blew my mind a little bit. And I wondered if you had any if that triggered any thoughts for you in terms of maybe what does your bed look like? Do you have decorative furniture? What's your relationship withIt's actually a great topic and it's given me an idea for a sub stack. So if I end up writing about it, I'm going to have to mention you. The whole area is fascinating. You're a hundred percent right. Decorative pillows, of course, are interesting because they're quite gendered. And so we tend to find, this was I think, satirized a little bit in the movie Along Came Polly.And so I don't know if you ever saw it, it's a Ben Stiller movie, but there's a scene in where his wife has left him and he's, and Jennifer Aniston is Polly. And then he's got these decorative pillows on the bed and she's like, why do you have all these pillows? You already spent hours taking them off, putting them on. And he was like my wife liked them.When my husband and I first got together, I did have a couple of decorative pillows and he was like, these are completely pointless because you take them off the bed before you go to sleep, right? So they are just, they're not only serve no purpose, they create additional work for you because you're taking them off the bed. You're putting them on the bed. There is an interesting gender dimension to those as well.But yeah, the whole area of bedding in general, I think is again, one of those areas that anthropologists think it's just. Too mundane. It's too inane. And they don't write about it, but it's so interesting.You're saying, it's doing something. What is the work that the decorative pillows are doing? Think, obviously, if you're concerned with the aesthetics of the bedroom space as a whole, then I would say that the function that they serve is as part of a scheme. If you have such a thing in your bedroom, a visual, like a decorative scheme, and it might be a focal point. So it's serving an aesthetic purpose as part of a larger, decorating scheme in a bedroom. And it's a good example of the bedroom being a place, which is sort of your point. A bed has a function to help you sleep, but it also gets tied up into aesthetics, notions of homemaking, notions of Decoration and all of that, that means that you end up with these completely pointless decorative pillows. So no, I have no decorative pillows on my bed as a result of those early conversations that my husband and I had about the pointlessness of of the decorative pillow.Can you tell me a little bit about your book, “Silent but Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Behaviors”?Oh, the book is just, yeah, it's called Silent but Deadly, the underlying cultural patterns of everyday behaviors. And it's really like a series of essays on a whole variety of things, obviously farting. Teeth. Like when I lived in North America, the obsession with white straight teeth, which was very foreign to me as an Australian. Dogs, like dog lovers, I'm not a dog lover. What the whole, like a dog obsession is all about. Tipping, left- handedness. So being a lefty, I'm very interested in, the symbolism and also, mechanisms of handedness. Yep.So the book is just, again, all those inane, mundane topics that aren't considered to be fit for academic attention. And I guess, yeah, Brits keeping their washing machine in their kitchen. That's all the sort of stuff I focus on in the book.PS: Thank you so much. Thanks a lot. Good to talk to you. Bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

John Walter is the inventor of the TrueMirror. Check it out!!I am the only person in the world I experience in reverse.My self-image is wrong in one giant way. And so is yours. The way we appear to ourself in a mirror, is not how we appear to anyone else. And so, I was excited to discover that, John Walter, the inventor of the non-reversing TrueMirror, lived just across the river from me. Within days of connecting with him in Instagram, he invited me to his workshop to try it for myself.I find the topic so baffling and so full of wonder, I wanted to share a conversation with him. Hope you enjoy. PeterWhere do you come from?Where do I come from? First of all, it's a good thing. I know what you mean by that I come from the Bronx, no, where do I come from? So I think, maybe part of the answer comes from how I solved some of my problems. I had some eating disorder issues when I was in my twenties and I went to some therapists and talked about everything other than the eating issues and really. Eventually I just solved it and I suddenly realized I don't have this problem anymore. And really what the solution was to ask myself, what am I really hungry for? Obviously I was going to food because food was filling this hunger inside of me and it really wasn't filling me up. And so I was eating more and more food and all that stuff.So by asking the question, what am I really hungry for? And the answer came back as experiences. I'm hungry for experiences that, you know, and then when I flesh it out, that are meaningful, that are fun, that are exciting, that are adventurous, that's my, that's where my joy comes from is experiences. Coming from that place where that's what I'm valuing is the essence of the experience. What did that ask of you? So I was probably in my mid, early, early to mid twenties, maybe 24, 25. And I think it just turned the focus again from, because I definitely was looking for experiences. So when I realized that's what I was hungry for, when I realized if I go ahead and get experiences, I will fill that hunger.And I think that's been true. I eat to live rather than live to eat and so that what really nourishes me is connection and people and experiences and fun and adventures, that sort of thing. So it just changed the focus a lot for me.What did you want to be when you grew up?My background is in math and physics. So I was at an early age and singled out to be, Oh, he's really smart. I skipped third grade and was like this, considered to be a very smart person.And so there was a sense of, Oh, I'm going to be this person that has some sort of achievement at the end of my name, which was going and physics was going to be the avenue for it. First of all I became popular in college. I was very nerdy and shunned by my peer group and all of a sudden I figured out why and I changed it and all of a sudden became popular. And that's a long story, but it is actually related to the mirrors.PS: You said you figured something out and you changed it. What did you figure out?So it was basically my hair part. I changed my hair part.PS: Is that right?And if you Google hair part theory you'll see my stuff come up on it. In fact, it was a Radiolab episode I think in 2011, where we talked about it. And not just the hair part theory, but the mirrors as well, the true mirror as well.What is the hair part theory?John Walter: So it basically says that when you part your hair, You're emphasizing that side of the brain to the viewer, okay? And because of a thing called interactional continuity, because hair parts, especially for guys, tend to be on the same side for their whole lives, basically that, it's a bias. It's a little bit like body language, but you're signaling constantly more right brain or more left brain.If you part on the left where the part is on the left, then people will see you as more left brained. If they part on the right, they'll see you as more right brained.And as a guy, we tend to like men who look more left-brained. They're more rational, more logical, more masculine, more assertive, more visible. When you put it on the right, then you're projecting an image that's more intuitive and feeling and holistic, mysterious, feminine, all of these qualities.Now, just a big caveat, these are generalizations that neuroscientists and psychologists can't stand that we use in public. This is quote unquote pop psychology. And yet there's a lot of validity to it.And so what happened is when I was in front of the mirror one day, I had just had some photos taken, and the photos were very jarring. It was like, I'm in front of the mirror going, why do pictures always look so weird?I look fine. And that's when I realized the guy in the mirror was a guy with a left part. And I'm wearing a right part, which when you take a photo, that's a true image. And it was like, eh. So I changed my hair part, I actually put my hair from the right to the left.How do you describe True Mirror to somebody that hasn't encountered it yet?And just to preface it the True Mirror is related to this hair part theory, actually. Because I figured it out about three years after I had found this hair part thing and eventually was doing my hair in the middle. What a true mirror is a mirror that doesn't reverse your image. So when you look at yourself, you're not backwards. And it's a very simple idea physically. And so there's, I got a little physics in there, but what happens is that what I discovered is that when you make eye contact with yourself, your eyes actually communicate correctly and they don't backwards. And this is brand new.ADDITIONAL LINKS:“Mirror, Mirror” a 2011 Radiolab episode about John. “What is your hair part saying about you?: The effects of hair parting on social approaisal and personal development” a 1999 paper by John and his sister Catherine Walter“The Mirror of Dorian Gray: Mirrors never lie, they say. But how much truth do we really want?” The Atlantic by Cullen Murphy in 1999'It's in the entire time that such a mirror was actually a thing, it was patented in 1887, no one saw it as anything other than the physical. And yet, when I first saw it, it was like, Oh my God, there you are. And this connection to myself as a kind of a happy, having fun kid on the beach in California, okay, was amazing.And part of the story is I, I was and I guess now because it's legal, I can say this, but I was high as a kite and I was just flying and I walked into the bathroom and the regular mirror just shot me down hard. And that's when I saw this double mirror combination, which is all it takes to make a mirror. True mirrors is two mirrors at right angles. Although, mine, and then I turned the corner and there was this double mirror, and I did a double take. Because I saw something that I recognized. I saw my happiness. I saw the sparkle in my eye. When you're smiling, the light of your eyes in the smile is why you're smiling. And when you flip your eyes in a mirror, you lose that why, and all of a sudden you're just looking like you have a fake smile.If you think about it, you've had that interaction with yourself since you were a child, and you've completely identify with that version. And then all of a sudden I saw myself in the double mirror. I did a double take and I spent like five minutes just absolutely loving on myself and there was so much of All this crud, this self doubt and challenge and struggle just absolutely disappeared. I felt like I'd taken a showerAnd that kind of forms the passion for why I get so into this mirror, because it really fixed me, my internal self image, the main thing is, I'm okay, I'm normal. There's nothing there's nothing abnormal about me, which I see, I still, to this day, I still see in the reverse mirror.What was the journey from that moment to choosing to develop a mirror?So interestingly, because this is part of the story of this. I immediately started to show people. It's yo, check this out, and they didn't get it. It was like, what are you talking about? And, I said no, can't you see the light in your eyes? And it's the people just, I got nowhere.I figured, okay, maybe it's that line in the middle, that's causing it to be too distracting. And so it was like, maybe I can bevel the mirrors and I did all this stuff to try to fix it. and then About 10 years later, it really took that long. And I was so excited, because it was like, wow, I can actually make this so that it actually, people will see what I'm seeing.Funny story, they still didn't see it.The main thing is that I believe is that because the mirror has not been reflecting us in our natural expressions since childhood, we just stopped doing them. We come up to the mirror, as soon as we see ourselves. We shut down and it's just this hardwired neurological pattern that is very common for people. And so if you show up to the true mirror with that same pattern of just shutting down, it's not going to show anything. And so trying to get people to, to interact with themselves is one of the big elements that I discovered makes this experience actually come alive for people.PS: If I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong-  is that we are conditioned to have a non-interactive interaction with a conventional mirror. So people approach the mirror without expecting any interactivity. So that’s an interesting possibility, but it's not the real story, not the full story. Because you can't not interact with yourself. It's just at this other level, and part of the other level is that your face is not part of the communication, usually.Your brain is still thinking, but your face is not reflecting what you're thinking. Like , those circuits have been turned off. And this is where I think it's a real problem, because you're interacting with yourself without your expressive personality, and you're identifying with this kind of mask-like version, and you'll tell yourself stuff, like about how you're feeling what you're thinking about what's going on.And the sad thing is the expressions that really convey positive elements of your experience, like your happiness, your joy, your vibrancy There's a lot of activity in your face with them. The expressions that are more sad and down and or just quiet or they don't have a lot of activity.So it turns out when you show up to the TrueMirror feeling really happy, like I was at that party, those expressions look really patently fake backwards. So you stop doing them. Whereas the ones if you're down and you look at yourself in the reverse mirror, there's not that much difference. The down, down elements still stick around.And in my belief, they get enhanced because there's this layer Of judgment and criticism that kind of goes along with the fact that it's still somewhat fake, and we just don't know it. We just don't know that. The whole world doesn't know that the version in the backwards mirror is somewhat fake.Yeah, I was going to ask, what's the primary difference in the self you encounter in the true mirror versus the self you encounter in a, what do you call a conventional mirror?I'm going to call it a reversing mirror, reverse mirror, regular mirror, standard mirror. I think that the best way to describe the person in the reverse mirror is your doppelganger, it's like almost by definition, it looks like you, but it's not you, doesn't act like you, doesn't feel like you, doesn't express like you.And yet, you think it's you because it looks like you. I think that core element causes so many strange problems. Our self image is built in part on what we're seeing in the mirror. It's built from lots of other things too, but there's this constant element that's in everyone's experience that's not quite real that we interact with in a dynamic feedback loop, that's always got this information distortion going on.And so when you look at a feedback loop, you don't know what's going to happen with it. Like you take a guitar and you stick it next to an amplifier. Any kind of weird sound will start to come out based on where you put that guitar. so Where people end up going with their self image based on this communication feedback loop with distortion is all over the place.It's very strange. One person will be very vain, another person will be afraid of themselves, another person will be, have insane body dysmorphia, another person will ignore themselves, another person will, like in my case, I just struggled.You talked about, anytime that this has been mentioned, it's been explicitly and exclusively about the physical. But you're talking about something else, something different. What is it? What's happening in a TrueMirror?Yeah, I mean to me when you look in a mirror, there's two elements to it: the physical and the personal being. Who you are. How you are. What you're feeling. What you're projecting. What others are gonna see in you. And when you look in a reverse mirror, you're seeing the physical, but the personal gets distorted. The physical does too. But the communication, which is the element of the personal, is what gets altered by being backwards. When you see yourself not reversed, you're getting both the physical and the personal. your right eye and the message of its right eye on the right side where it belongs, left on the left where it belongs. And this is the basis for your expression, and that's how your expressions match.How do you use a true mirror? It seems like a different animal than a conventional mirror.Well, say if this was brand new to you, the first elements are to just discover, what's there what's there that's new for me, it's like finding out what you look like with your real smile. And it turns out that it's a little bit hard to do a genuine smile to yourself. But if you just look in your eyes as your thoughts will flip through your head, your face will start to actually express that.Now I'm seeing me as a person. What did I just learn about me? So when I'm looking at you, for instance, I know what you're seeing. I know how to be authentic, right? Which is really what you need to be doing. And realizing that my expressions are just going to be authentic. I know that if I have the genuine smile, it's gonna have these qualities to it, and therefore I can be comfortable with it. I remember before I was like hiding my smile because I thought it was fake especially my big smilePS: In my work, people often talk about empathy, right? Research is about empathy. And when people ask me about empathy, I end up talking about awkwardness because I think awkwardness is like the frontier. There's a book called Cringeworthy by Melissa Dahl, and she came up with a theory of awkwardness. Which is the irreconcilable gap between how we perceive ourselves and how we think others perceive us. And it's, we get caught in this, this dissonance between, you reminded me of it a little bit when you were, when you described being, the ability to be authentic because you're, you have an awareness. That's how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you are the same. In a lot of ways, part of awkwardness is that we're suffering from this dissonance. We know, on some intuitive level, that the way we appear to other people is not how we appear to ourselves. And we're especially awkward because we know that's not true. I'm going to stop there. What do you make of what I've shared about awkwardness?I agree with where you're coming from. And I just want to add a little bit of the idea that we look different depending on who we're looking at. Okay. Similar. Okay, but my range of expressions with you is going to be different from my range of expressions with someone that is going to be, say my partner. I am different with you than I am with someone else, because it's the conversation, it's the feelings, emotions, it's the levels, it's the degree, it's the depth, all that kind of stuff.When I look at the True mirror, I'm seeing. the authentic version of me, . So I think the goal is to get yourself in sync. So first of all, I learn about myself through you, through my experience with other people. I learned more about myself, but when I come up to the true mirror, It matches, it's like there's not this dissonance. that this doppelganger introduces every time I make eye contact with it,Do you have traditional mirrors in your house or do you have all true mirrors or do you use them differently?So I have the regular medicine cabinet mirror, and I have a true mirror right next to it. And I actively avoid looking at my eyes. in the reverse mirror. So if I'm out and about, I'll go to the restroom at a restaurant I won't make eye contact. It's like literally that's the moment when that doppelganger springs to life. And again, you think about the neural pathways, that's like hard, hard coded, and so by not registering that version of me in my brain, then that whole movie doesn't start. You know what I mean?One of my key recommendations for anyone once they hear about the true mirror is yeah don't even use the other mirror. It doesn't help. It doesn't serve you to connect with that version, which just tells you oddball things.Yeah, even if you like it, you're going to be liking something that's not actually real and I'm saying that Because a lot of people say, but I like my backward self much more and that's usually because you're familiar with it and it's less crooked, but it's not real. . I think that really does a disservice to your mental wellbeing to be connected to this version that doesn't exist.How long have you been making these and how is it going? What's it been like trying to build this business?So it's been 31 years. I started in 1992. So now it's 32 years going into. and like I Said, when I first started showing people, they still didn't get it. And then I would take it around to psychologists and they wouldn't get it. And, so what I found took a really long time to figure out how to talk about it to people.And so it wasn't until probably maybe 10 years ago, actually it was 2003, I went to my first Burning Man, okay, and Burning Man was the first time I had like more than three quarters of the people going, Oh my God, this is amazing.It turns out it's one of the strangest products that you can imagine. You would think, 'cause it's literally applicable to every person in the world. Everyone that has a face is going to have some kind of interaction with this. Unlike any other product, and yet because of that weirdness that's going on, that's deeply embedded in our psyches with the mirror. People are really funky about this.What have you discovered about People that buy TrueMirror? Do you feel like you can pick your customer out of a crowd.I can pick people out of the crowd who will have a good experience, okay? And usually they're vivacious is the best way to describe them. And they can't help but see the difference. But, what's interesting about the coaching is, the biggest complaint I have online in comments is I'm just, it's power of suggestion. this is just b******t. It's Power of suggestion. And I think that it is more of a catalyst like I'm catalyzing the reaction and then, the reaction happens or not, if it happens it's a genuine reaction.In terms of the awkwardness, yeah, I think it's related to the fact that we have this strained relationship with ourself. And again, there's probably a dozen reasons for it, like getting bullied as a kid, for instance, but this primary source of inauthenticity has never been questioned.How has the TikTok, you mentioned you go viral, you get lots of views on there. What has it been like trying to grow the business on TikTok?I think at this point there's 170 million views tagged with True Mirror. They're not all mine. But it's basically a lot. And Instagram, I just had my first million view video that went up. That was great. This algorithm was just designed for this kind of stuff. So it's been great. lots and lots of Interactions, a lot of comments.I really want this to be a helpful thing for people, again, back to experiences we're all hungry for this kind of, being okay with ourselves. And I think it's, if you fix the interface to yourself, you have a much better chance of that.Is TrueMirror is built on a theory of eye contact?It's eye contact with that feedback loop, which is just way more intense. So me and you were in this communication loop and we talked about zoom being Yeah. Disconnected. yeah, it's interesting. You sent some stuff on the ways they're fudging that - using AI to shift your eyes to the lens. Like now I'm looking right at the lens, but now I can't see you.General communication involves eye contact. It's one of the most dynamic things you can imagine in the universe that we know of is two people making eye contact with each other because we're so responsive. Boom, boom. But to yourself, it's amped up even more. And that's where the theory goes is if you flip your eyes, you can't make eye contact with the person behind the eyes. That's where eye contact to yourself, again, for everyone is just absolutely bonkers in reverse, it's not real. It doesn't work. and it's missing so much of what we absolutely know is important with eye contact with other people.PS: No, I feel like the image that keeps coming back to me about my experience of the true mirror is that it called attention to the fact that all my experiences of other human beings are so alive in a way because of this, the eye contact thing, except for my experience of myself. So my own experience of my own appearance is dead, when compared to every other human experience I have with somebody, and it's shocking that's the case and that's the foundation of my self perception is this flat.And you're not alone. This is common. In all the years I Probably just a handful of people could keep themselves really going for more than five seconds in a mirror. Yeah, especially smiles. Almost everyone's smile fades within a few seconds in a mirror. And that's the one that has a lot of light in it,PS: And I wonder too, this is what I'm putting on my marketing hat, the degree to which, the challenge that is that you're moving against this massive cultural, all the behaviors and the questioning and all of the expectations. The culture is so fixed. And the attachment is probably so strong that it's very difficult to see anything other than what is assumed to be there, which is. It's a fascinating challenge as a marketer.It's nuts. And, because You think, oh, this should be great. Improve one of the primary things that every person has in their lives. And then realize, no, there's something else going on.PS: I wondered about that because it feels like you do it with the coaching. In any other kind of Marketing they would be able to build culture around the product. Are there rituals that you are aware of that people have developed around TrueMirror? Sure. the ritual I did with you is the affirmation. A whole thing of, say I love you to yourself in a mirror and, affirm, I am a positive force for good in the world and all of the things that people have that they really want to be.Taking the affirmation concept where you go up to the mirror and you go, I am a force for good in the world, and before you affirm it, you actually ask yourself the question. So you say, am I a force for good in the world? And then you just sit with that for a while. Whatever you come up with will start to show on your face. Your face becomes a dynamic valid accurate reflection of what's in your mind, because that's how they work.So by doing that you're generating the concept in your head and then it shows up on your face and then you affirm anyway. So am I forced for good in the world? Yeah, I'm a force for good in the world. And then you validate, do you know what I mean? Because if it's easy, you go, Oh, hell yeah, I'm a force for good in the world. and you got that strength.PS: I am running near the end of time ....... have you encountered eye gaze that people do eye gazes on instagram? I think it's hashtag eye gaze. And then she'll, I think what she's doing is just looking into the camera, but it's what she's saying or inviting you into is an experience of eye contact with her.So eye gazing in, in practice One on one. Yeah. Have you seen that before? And you just sit in front of someone and you just stare at them?PS: No. Only Marina Abramovich, “The Artist is Present.” Do you remember?That's a very common, exercise with workshops and seminars. Yeah, and I can't stand it, because I need my eye contact to be attached to something as opposed to just staring or just let me be with this other person non verbally. I don't know where to go with it. Other people swear by it. PS: I thought it was striking that she was forming this icon, this, this sort of therapeutic connection on an Instagram account, which of course you weren't there's no it's so strange. Speaks to a hunger to return to the beginning. It speaks to a hunger right that we have for that kind of connection that you get.And part of my belief is that fulfilling that hunger, which is really, “Who are we? What am I about?” Filling that can absolutely take like a dozens of methods. Workshops, reading, interactions Experiences, adventures, eye gazing, affirmations, all that stuff. There is lots and lots of ways to make that add to your experience of yourself. My belief is that the TrueMirror actually works with all of that.How would you describe all of those things? Those are all ways to…?John Walter: you could call them woo wooNo. I'm serious. They're all ways to….what?It's basically self awareness and self understanding in the service of an enhanced experience of your life. The unexamined life, where you are just punching the clock? There is a lot more to life than that. And if you start to search for it, you'll find all sorts of new things to think about.PS: Last question. So this whole conversation I'm using this sort of teleprompter, and in my mind, you're experiencing eye contact. I should be looking directly at you. Have you felt any of my attention or eye contact in our conversation?Oh, that's cool. No, I was noticing that. Yeah. No, I think It's good. It's good. I think that it's good tech, it's good technique. So is it just reflecting off of the glass? Interesting. Of course, are you looking at my reverse face or my forwards face?PS: Oh my god. See, that's the thing where I get dizzy. I can't keep up with all the switching.I'm touching my right eye. Is it the same side as your right eye?PS: Yes.See, so you're looking at my mirrored Image. Yes. you're not Seeing me with my natural expressions.PS: You fix one thing, solve one problem, create another.I'm really appreciating I do see that you're looking right at me. Yeah, but I'm not looking at you. You can see I'm nicer. So now if I look at the lens now I am. I can't see you. So I can't. This is non-interactive. I had that little filter thing. It's because I'm staying with you. It's good. And I'm going to interact with you. So it's interesting, but I like your technique except that it's backwards.PS: We'll get there one day. Listen, John, I want to thank you so much for the time.I'm really excited to have met you and to have seen it.I'm so glad. And it really was fun to say, yeah, I'm just around the corner. And you was like,PS: I had no idea. Yeah, that's cool. Awesome.All right, Peter. All right. Thanks. And I look forward to seeing this and also your other stuff. It looks like you really have a lot of good work here. You've beenPS: Beautiful. Thank you.All right. Cheers, man. All right. Bye bye. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe