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THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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by Peter Spear

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A weekly conversation between Peter Spear and people he finds fascinating working in and with THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING <a href="https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com</a>

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August 10, 2026

Jason Anânda Josephson Storm on Critique & Listening

<a target="_blank" href="https://religion.williams.edu/faculty/jason-josephson/">Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm</a> is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College, and the author of “<a target="_blank" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55623551-metamodernism">Metamodernism: The Future of Theory</a>.” Most recently, he debated Timotheus Vermeulen and Hilary Lawson live at IAI’s “<a target="_blank" href="https://iai.tv/live/iai-live-august-the-metamodernist-turn">The Metamodernist Turn</a>,” pressing the same distinction he draws here between his own project and Vermeulen’s. His next book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, is out from University of Chicago Press in April.This is the third of three interviews. The first is “<a target="_blank" href="https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/p/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-myth">Myth & Metamodernism</a>.” The second is “<a target="_blank" href="https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/p/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-revolution">Revolution & Happiness</a>.”A heads up to regular listeners & readers. My conversations with Jason are unlike others, in that it I am really punching above my weight. I am really attracted to his thinking around metamodernism and sincerely believe it holds real promise for informing how we move forward. I believe in the diagnosis that it makes, and am inspired by the recommendation it offers to build, with full awareness of the critique. This is pre-interview caveat that, even as I don’t always grasp what is being discussed, I am tuned in. I ask that you join me in stretching towards what Jason is showing us.Where the term ‘metamodernism’ comes fromI keep fixating on metamodernism. I don’t have a structure for this conversation — full confession. But maybe we start with you giving us a map. What is it you’re doing with the term, and where does it sit relative to everyone else using it?Meta just means the same thing as post, if we’re precise about etymology — beyond. Though it also has a secondary sense post lacks: an over-and-above. People have been gluing “meta” onto isms since the seventies, but in a meaningful way the term metamodernism emerges in two places.First there’s the cultural studies version — Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s work on structures of feeling, a shift in the zeitgeist, an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist projects. I think that stuff is great. It’s not what I do. I’m not interested in analyzing the current paradigm so much as trying to trigger a paradigm shift — not sorting art into modern, postmodern, metamodern.I actually get my use of the term from a different lineage: the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji. He describes the metamodern artist as someone who deploys, positions, fractures, and reforms both the modern and the postmodern. He’s an artist himself, owning that term for his own project. That’s closer to my version.When I wrote what became Metamodernism and the Future of Theory, it was originally titled Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory After Postmodernism. People wanted me not just to critique postmodernism but to name a movement — and the alternative on the table was “post-postmodernism,” which makes you want to throw up. That’s when I remembered Okediji.Parallel to that, there’s a Scandinavian duo — a sociologist and a political theorist writing under the name Hanzi Freinacht — who wrote The Listening Society. Less interested in characterizing or sorting art than in producing political change under the same term. I like some of their project and not other parts — there’s a developmentalism in it you have to be careful with.So when I started using “metamodern,” I found myself in company with other people also trying to work past postmodernism, in art or philosophy or elsewhere. I love my fellow metamodernistas, but to be clear, mine isn’t an oscillationist account. If I have one criticism of Vermeulen — who seems like a cool dude — it’s that oscillation is hard to falsify and conceptually weak. What’s valuable in that cultural-studies work is characterizing new patterns in cultural production and a change in tone. That’s just not what I’m doing.The postmodernism I’m reacting to was forged as a specific academic model — often as a polemical other, a bricolage of French, American, and German theorists whose inconsistencies got smoothed over into an idea of what humanities scholarship should look like. That model was good at chipping away received wisdom, but it was delivering diminishing returns. For those of us trying to move intellectual life forward, it had stopped helping. It was mostly kneecapping us.I want to be clear my reaction isn’t someone externally mocking postmodernism. I marinated in it. I went to Derrida’s lectures. I studied under Rorty at Stanford when he was emeritus. I read the work, did the graduate seminars on Heidegger and French social thought. That’s the older generation of theory — Derrida was Elvis-generation, there’s a reason he rocked a pompadour his whole life. It’s time to figure out what was good, consolidate the gains, and shed what’s no longer working.I’ve been thinking about people who are part of something and then step outside it — Paul Kingsnorth, the eco-activist turned religious convert; Chuck Marohn, the traffic engineer who renounced his own field’s methodology and started Strong Towns. Do you identify with that as a transition you made? What was it like?Yeah, I identify with that. I first encountered postmodernism — I can be specific — on a drive from Ohio to college in Massachusetts. My parents, both philosophers, had a set of “great ideas” books on tape, and one unit near the end was on postmodern philosophers: Derrida, maybe Lyotard. It seemed exciting and dangerous. I was a punk rocker and a goth — it read as rebellion against the status quo, politically emancipatory. I marinated in it from undergrad through grad school.What turned me away was that it wasn’t a good set of tools. It was leading toward conclusions that made us less informed, less active — the payoff wasn’t there. We started by questioning authority, ended by questioning truth, and authority was still standing when we were done. I had a sense we were learning bad translations from the French as though they described reality — like the medievals who, when they wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, looked it up in Aristotle instead of counting. When people had a question about language, instead of asking what linguists were currently saying, they’d cite Derrida.That’s not to say Derrida had nothing to offer — but the anti-canon movement had just installed a new canon of critical thinkers in place of the old one. I’ve always been someone who naively asks: how did we get here, why do we think this? Over time I became disaffected, while still holding onto what was genuinely useful. And my teachers were part of that movement — this was partly just growing up, recognizing where your teachers and ancestors made mistakes even as you recognize your debt to them.What frustrated me most was hearing peers act as if there’s no “after” certain thinkers — as if philosophy stopped with Heidegger. And practically: when I started my own scholarship, I had real questions — about knowledge, value, translation. I had a stack of nineteenth-century Japanese sources and needed to figure out which to use for my thesis. Being told translation is impossible, in an environment where I was producing a translation, was the opposite of helpful. Or on value — there was a confusion between being neutral and being critical. You could call out racism, which matters, but you couldn’t stand up for a better political order without “violating” cultural relativism. That paradox bothered me more and more. We needed emancipatory theories, not just critical ones, and they were missing.Absolute disruption[This section is dense — Storm is thinking through Hegel out loud. Here’s the short version of where it’s headed: some thinkers argue language traps us so completely that translation and stable meaning are impossible. Storm disagrees. His answer is that language shapes how we see the world, but doesn’t cut us off from it — we just need a world stable enough that people can roughly agree on what they’re pointing at. Everything below is him building the case for that, using Hegel as the springboard.]The titleTell me about the title Absolute Disruption. Where did it come from?From two places. First, a line from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit I used to have memorized — something like: spirit obtains its truth only in its absolute disruption, it finds itself. Hegel was working on the problem of skepticism, of essentializing opposites — he describes skepticism elsewhere as waiting around to hurl anything into the abyss. You can see that in the postmodern moment: deconstruction, anti-essentialism, all different forms of negation. Hegel, as the master thinker of the dialectic, seemed like a clue to the other side of it.The spoiler: his dialectic isn’t thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It’s abstraction, negation, and negation of the negation — that last move is the fulcrum. Absolute Disruption was a signal toward that moment: we need to negate the negation. It was also a gesture at the idea that catastrophe creates the opportunity for new configurations of knowledge. I didn’t have complexity theory in hand yet, but one of its insights is the phase transition — water tips over into boiling, a seed crystal spreads through and the whole thing freezes. Those transitions come at moments of instability. I felt our intellectual world was at a crisis point — a moment of both danger and opportunity. I’m not an accelerationist who wants more crises. But crisis can open a phase transition.Negating the negationWalk me through negating the negation. What’s that move?In his Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel describes three sides of thought. First, you apprehend the specific differences of existing objects and produce a limited abstraction — a generalization, lifting away from the concrete. That process of abstracting hits limits, which challenge the project itself and lead to negating the initial abstraction — a critical stage where things encounter their opposites. Then there’s a third stage: the negation of the negation, the speculative stage, where you get a reconciliation of opposites — what he calls determinate negation, grasping something by determining its boundaries.Here’s where I depart from standard Hegel scholarship: I read this as a response to Kant’s reading of Hume. Hume’s skeptical challenge to causation says, roughly, that because causation can’t be demonstrated, we can’t really know anything about the world. Kant’s negation of the negation is his transcendental categories. He doesn’t deny Hume’s conclusion — he makes it the precondition of his own philosophy: any finite being necessarily experiences the world already structured by space, time, and causation. The cost is that we can never know the thing-in-itself, the Ding an sich. But that’s a limit on confidence, not a collapse into “we can’t know anything.”So the challenge I set for myself in Absolute Disruption was to take postmodernism’s skeptical positions in their clearest form. Take the “prison house of language” — Heidegger’s hermeneutics of being, or Fredric Jameson’s clean statement of it: we think in language, therefore we’re trapped in it. Taken to Saussure’s maximal extension, language only relates to other language, never to the world — so translation is impossible, meaning never stabilizes. Derrida can be read as a reductio of this: there is no outside-the-text.You could respond by ignoring it — a broadly modernist move that just insists the world is the world, and philosophers like Putnam or Kripke tried to make that respectable by arguing language designates natural kinds. That’s a weak view — it generates real paradoxes (look up the Superman/Clark Kent paradox if you want).Hylosemiotics: the payoffWhat I try to do instead is think seriously about how language could have evolved in the first place. This becomes the longest chapter in the book, on hylosemiotics. The key insight worth granting is that language and perception are connected — linguistic categories do shape perception. But you can show, first, that the skeptical view is self-contradictory: Derrida argues translation is impossible by translating a line of Joyce and telling us why it can’t be done in French — and we read that argument in English. And second, if you don’t presume language and the world are separate — if language always occurs in a world — you don’t need robust natural-kind categories. All you need is a world stable enough to have “clumps” we can roughly coordinate reference to: a building, a mountain, a tree. Language coordinates reference sloppily, not with rigid designation. My spouse and I agree on focal blue but disagree at the edges — languages carve up the color spectrum differently, speakers of the same language disagree on whether a napkin is a piece of clothing, or whether a hot dog is a sandwich.So we’re always interpreting the world. Linguistic categories shape that interpretation without fully constraining it — we never fully encounter the world as it is, but we’re not imprisoned in language either. There’s a naturalized semiotics behind this too: evidence from linguistics and evolutionary biology, animal and plant perception and communication — our tongues and hands may be wired together in the brain because our primate ancestors gestured as communication. Even if that particular biological detail turns out wrong, there are other ways to ground how communication and perception evolved together.That whole edifice — how translation is possible, how meaning shapes thought without imprisoning it — is my negation of the negation, in a way I think Hegel would recognize. Though to be clear, he’s not a meat grinder you feed a problem into and get an answer out. He’s a clue to where to look. The proof is in the payoff: I can give an account of how language evolved, locate humans within it, do sign perception properly. I’ve had responses from animal-communication researchers, and I have a piece under review now building toward more-than-human ethnography — looking at multi-species environments through this lens.The term hylosemiotics — I coined it with my brother, who does animal studies. Hyle, matter or forest in Greek, plus semiotics, signs. It names the error at the root of the skeptical philosophy of language: a hyper-specialization that bifurcated language from the world in the first place. You can’t hear if your eardrums aren’t vibrating, can’t read without light bouncing off something. We exist in a world. That doesn’t settle which cosmology is true — Nahuatl cosmology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, scientific materialism could all be candidates. My theory just needs a world with language speakers in it, stable enough that trees don’t randomly turn into sheep.The payoff has to stand on its own, separate from the ladder that got me there. That’s what I mean by a no-b******t philosophy that doesn’t enshrine canonical figures. I love the anti-canonicity of early postmodernism — we don’t need an enshrined canon. We take inspiration from people without owing them justification. Hegel is about discovery for me, not justification — he was wrong about Asia, Eurocentric, thought the Prussian state was cooler than it was, wrong about the number of planets. He was a dude in a particular period. Great to be inspired by, not an authority to cite as proof.Critique isn’t the end pointI took a literary criticism class in the nineties and remember the real feeling of power in applying deconstructive tactics. What drew me to your work is that it escapes that trap and is constructive. Last time we talked about revolutionary happiness, human flourishing — you’re clear you don’t want to just criticize, you want to build. Is that right?It’s a two-step process. We criticize first — we just don’t end there. Some people ask if I’m anti-critique because I spend so much time criticizing the criticizers. I’m against automatic criticism. I want critique to be more fine-grained. It’s important to call out injustice and conceptual hubris — critique is valuable. The problem is when it’s the only move, when it never reflects on its own limits. That’s the swamp postmodernism led us into.Even in the metamodernism book, I open a section with what I call a deconstructive dojo — teaching people to do the critical moves first, but as a starting point, not an endpoint. I think this maps onto how the culture wars get handled: a lot of my fellow lefties terminate in critique; another camp wants to shut down all critique, insisting you can’t criticize the country or its politics. Both are dead ends. We have to be able to say: the founding fathers built terrible institutions, failed on slavery, were sexist — we grant that, we don’t deny it — and also held up ideals worth recuperating even though they themselves couldn’t live up to them. Holding that tension is part of growing up.That language of holding the tension is what I find attractive, and it feels like something we’ve lost — we’re stuck in binary mode. Is there a metamodern way of constructing, once the critique is done?It’s something I’m calling for more than something I’ve fully identified, though I’ve seen people working toward it. We shouldn’t assume one cookie-cutter solution works across all problems. What I’m advocating is an orientation: critique, identify the problems, critique the critique, then figure out what to hold and what to build. I’ve had encouraging responses from people doing movement work — helping people out of their presumptive categories of left or right, recognizing a movement’s problems without getting defensive, and asking what would make it stronger from there.Hanzi Freinacht identified something real here: the importance of listening. There’s a tendency — especially from people in my position, in the ivory tower — to arrive with solutions and impose them without listening to what people are actually looking for. You can see this in how the consultancy class has misguided left politics in recent cycles. One thing Mamdani seems to have gotten right: he did a real tour of listening to different groups in New York, figuring out the actual problems people were encountering rather than telling them what their problems should be. That does two things — it identifies where coalitions and resources should go, and it lets people feel heard, in a society where a lot of people feel ignored and out of control of their own communities.AI: neither boomer nor doomerI sent you some links on AI. It’s happening to all of us whether we like it or not, and maybe it’s a canvas for talking about what it means to be metamodern. How do you think about AI through your work?What AI actually isWe have to recognize AI is both profoundly transformative and overhyped. What we’re calling AI — generative pre-trained transformers, large language models — I don’t want to knock the amount of work and potential in them, but they are not general intelligences. There’s confusion in public discourse because the people pushing AI keep promising a series of ever-greater intelligence leaps. That’s misleading, partly because scaling produces diminishing returns. There was a huge leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3.5, but they ate an internet’s worth of data to get there, and there isn’t another internet’s worth waiting. What these models do is transform language into a mathematical vector space — interesting for producing the geometry of certain concepts, but not an innovator.A lot of the discourse presumes a discredited model of intelligence as a linear scale, like IQ. Sociologists of intelligence, even ones who believe in the IQ scale, note that the people who make the biggest innovations don’t have the highest IQs. Intelligence is richly contextual. And there’s a background assumption from Turing that intelligence reduces to fooling a human linguistically — these models are great linguistic agents, great chatbots, a real technological leap, but that’s not general intelligence. I went back and reread a piece by the French AI researcher François Chollet, “The Implausibility of Intelligence Explosion,” which makes the same point.AI has real uses — it’s good at pattern recognition. I saw a phrase somewhere I liked: the best use of AI is going to be boring. Automating the boring stuff — sorting supply chains, finding patterns in thick data sets. It’s not going to produce the transformations people expect. It’s going to reorganize labor, and it’s already eroding trust and notions of authorship in ways that are hard on artists. It has a real environmental cost, and it doesn’t have a profitability model — if these companies start running ads, no one will want to use it, and it’ll enshittify faster than other platforms. It doesn’t scale the way people think — you need exponentially more data for incremental gains, which is why Elon Musk’s self-driving timeline keeps slipping.Where it’s genuinely useful is streamlining existing processes — I use it to write boring bureaucratic reports, turning a meeting transcript into something we can put in a report, where the prose quality doesn’t matter.The ironies of automationThere’s a classic piece from the eighties, Lisanne Bainbridge’s “Ironies of Automation” — foundational in industrial design and catastrophe theory. The paradox: automation is good at routine tasks, but humans are still needed when things go wrong. As automation takes over the routine, the human’s skill at that routine atrophies — so when the automation fails, it fails suddenly, in ways the human is no longer prepared for. That’s the problem with a certain kind of self-driving car — my dad loves his Tesla’s self-driving feature, but it presumes he stays hyper-alert for edge cases. I’d rather automation handle it the other way: I do the routine task, and automation intervenes when I make a mistake I don’t catch — the dog running into the road.The same is true teaching undergrads, and I wish more of my colleagues internalized it. Large language models are great at summarizing readings and generating plausible prose — the boring, low-stakes stuff. What’s left to humans is knowing when an argument is wrong, spotting a bad frame, making a judgment call. Those are exactly the skills that atrophy when students lean on the models — and exactly what they’ll need when they hit real problems. When we automate, we atrophy. The more the machine thinks for you, the less you can think when it fails.That echoes the phase transition you described earlier — things happening slowly, then all at once. It sounds like the same progression, applied to our relationship with automation: we keep surrendering activities, assuming we could rescue things if they failed, and then things collapse in front of our atrophied ability to respond.Exactly. Which is why, in higher ed, students need training in the low-stakes basics — precisely because that training prepares them for the high-stakes ruptures. If they have that foundation, they can use AI responsibly later, as long as they know that overusing it accelerates the atrophy. I’m not anti-AI, and I’m not a booster either. There are genuinely new things opening up because of it. But anyone who thinks large language models will replace basic education hasn’t internalized Bainbridge’s point. Even responsible adult users have to guard against their own skills eroding.The environmental impact is a separate, serious conversation. When I raise it with people in the field, they say they know, and the plan is to scale toward more efficient models — I have doubts about whether that’s actually happening, versus functioning as cover for an enormous amount of electrical and water-cooling resources going into things being wedged into places they don’t belong. My college auto-installed Copilot on every student’s Microsoft Word. I don’t want that — we want to be building some barriers, not removing them. People will keep using it. That’s fine, as long as they’ve trained themselves to spot when it’s about to go wrong.Getting past boomer vs. doomerSo — is there a way out of the binary? It feels like we’re stuck between accelerationists and doomers, boomers and doomers, and metamodernism might be an escape hatch, a framework for moving past that. True, or am I overreaching?I’d hope so. The concrete stakes are worth thinking through, but as an abstract program: integrate the positive potential the boomers have identified without denying the doomers’ critiques, and figure out an equitable system on the other side. That’s not going to be every AI platform — it’ll have to be a particular, environmentally responsible AI that absorbs some of those critiques. What that looks like around authorship, I don’t know yet — that’s one I’m not sure how we navigate.On the prose side: AI produces derivative prose that all sounds like the same voice, and unfortunately a lot of people seem to want exactly that — maybe it helps people who aren’t confident public speakers or writers find a voice. There’s a real upside there. But I’m sick of the “it’s not X, it’s Y” formulation showing up everywhere, and the AI-generated images that almost look like real people but the lighting’s a hair too uniform. There are real trust questions, and I think we’re going to want watermarking, at least for generated images. There’s concrete policy an AI platform could adopt that would address the doomers’ real concerns and unlock what the boomers have rightly identified — without indulging the utopian fantasy that scaling alone produces superintelligence that solves everything. That fantasy rests on treating Moore’s Law for processor power as if it applied directly to the human mind, which runs against a huge amount of evidence.Large language models are also good at handling complexity in another sense — recognizing that vocabulary is context-rich, that things mean different things in different contexts, and at producing iterative results. Other forms of AI are good at this too — my father did research in evolutionary algorithms, where you launch variations through a design space, keep the ones that succeed, and iterate. That’s brought us real gains — protein folding, pattern identification in shipping — and will keep bringing them. It’s not going to mean nobody works. We’ll lose some jobs, not nearly as many as people fear, but the structure of the jobs we keep will change.What’s the book coming out?With University of Chicago Press, who’s published my last three: The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History. “Genealogy” is a weird term — it’s our word for critical history in parts of the academy, and in ordinary language it means descent or ancestry. The book is a critical history of critical history: why we love criticizing the past, what the blind spots are in how we’ve done it. It blends intellectual history with philosophical analysis, offers fresh readings of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault against the familiar narratives about their relationship to critique, and charts the history of history departments and philosophy as academic disciplines — including genealogy’s own uncomfortable entanglement with eugenics and power. A method built to criticize authority carrying its own unexamined legacies.It’s also a metamodern book. It closes with a call for a new metamodern historiography — new ways of doing history that don’t deny the troubled parts of the past but also look for the occluded histories, the buried germs of positive projects worth recovering and carrying forward. An alternative historiography, encouraging new methods for writing history. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at <a href="https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe</a>

August 3, 2026

Ben Jenkins on Creativity & Play

<a target="_blank" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensjenkins/">Ben Jenkins</a> is co-founder and CEO of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.okayhuman.com/">Okay Human</a>, a New York-based consumer insights company formerly known as Sympler, which he co-founded in 2018 and rebranded in 2025. The firm uses chat-based, AI-assisted qualitative research to help brands including NBC, Foot Locker, and Mars understand consumer emotion and behavior. Jenkins has spent 25 years studying consumers for brands such as Levi’s, Johnnie Walker, and Axe. He began as a youth ethnographer at McCann-Erickson, then held senior strategy roles at BBH, Ogilvy, and Droga5. He writes the Substack <a target="_blank" href="https://benjen.substack.com/">Becoming Human</a>.So I think you know this, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And I think what I loved about it is that it’s the best question I’ve found for getting into a conversation out of nowhere. But it’s a big question, so I over-explain it the way I do now.So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control.Now that I’m in America, the simplest answer is that I come from the UK. Before, I would have started with, “I come from the countryside” — a little like D’Artagnan from the Musketeers books. I left the countryside and went to the big city.But now I think about it in terms of creativity a lot more. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently, which I’m sure we’ll come to, about what happened to creativity, and I realize it comes back to me spontaneously from people I’m interviewing: I think I came from a more creative culture.I noticed that a little bit when I got to the US. It’s a much bigger country, worrying about much larger sums of money — each company I’ve worked for here thinks in terms of billions or hundreds of billions, whereas the UK deals in much smaller quantities.So we got to be less scared of making mistakes. Now I answer that question in terms of time and place, because I started my career exactly at the turn of the century, when I still had the fortune of working with people who’d come from an analogue time — who’d grown up making things very creatively, using instinct and intuition, understanding physical beauty.I come from a time when we were allowed to use our right brains and feel our way to the creative answer. And I come from a place that, even today — I’ve been in the US 18 years now — I look at the agency culture in the UK and it’s still creative. I’m just not in that world anymore.I’m adjacent now. But I was interviewing some people at VCCP a couple of weeks ago — the head office is in London, but these are all Americans — and they said the last time they had a really big flow experience, got themselves into a flow state for creativity, was when they worked in London.This person has been in the US for five years now. The reason I’m doing what I’m doing now — focusing on how to enable creativity and resurrect people’s creative states — is because I believe lots of people are more creative than they let on. And I think I come from a place and a time that afforded me the luxury of learning some of that stuff, before I either left the location or the time. But we left that era — everyone’s struggling a little now, in this more tech-subjugated one.And one more. What has it been like being in the States? 18 years? What’s it like being from the UK in the States? What’s that experience like?So I often get that question. It’s normally social situations. It’s really hard to answer it in a non-glib way….. I think it relates to what I’ve just been saying — when you’re in your own country and your own tribe, you don’t see yourself through an identity. I’m not of the generation living now that talks about identity so much.The first time I’ve ever talked about my identity was as a foreigner in another country. So the first answer to that question is, I feel foreign, and I like that. Being foreign gives you an extra bit of credit.And I don’t just mean British — people give us extra IQ points, which I don’t think we deserve. That’s not the part I mean. It’s being any form of foreigner.It’s curiosity — you get into a play state more easily. Being the funny person with an accent in the room immediately gives you that sense of energy.It gives the dynamic a sense of energy, because people go, oh, this is interesting. When people ask me good questions about what it’s like being here, I think that’s what they’re after — something different.So you’re a curiosity, especially in the more liberal side of things.Yeah, it’s fun to be a foreigner in this country, for me anyway. And on the previous point, I do think it gives me a bit of access to ask more basic questions — which is what we should all be doing anyway.In your own country, you don’t ask big core questions about how things work, because you’re supposed to know — and you believe you already do. I remember when I first got here, the creatives in the agency I was working at were being surly, just like creatives always do.And I was still quite junior then, and I was frightened of surly creatives in London. You’re briefing them and they’re pan or miserable — even just bored, miserable, disenchanted. And here I was like, they were my age as well.Here I was like, but because it was all in a funny accent to me — we have monopoly money, everyone’s walking around with funny accents, the cultures are different — it just felt like play. It felt like I was on TV, felt like pretend.So I called them out for the first time ever. I was like, why are you looking so miserable? We’ve got some really interesting stuff in.And they apologized — they were like, sorry, that’s just the way our faces are. I was like, well, where I come from, if someone’s giving you information in an excited way, the custom is to mirror them.That wasn’t true — where I come from, they were just as miserable. But I allowed myself a cultural difference, and I got them to stop being like creatives often are — which ruins briefings.What was the attraction to come over here in the first place?I think that was part of it — to get that energy for myself, for exploration, and to throw away a lot of my belief systems and any ruts I was finding myself stuck in. You can get stuck in rituals and habits you don’t really need or want to be in, but you don’t leave them because it’s easier to stay. So I wanted a deliberate push out of my comfort zone.When I left uni, or during uni, I went to live in France for a bit. I wanted to do everything I was doing in life in a more difficult place, in another language, in another culture — to get the free boost of difficulty. You don’t bring difficulty on yourself unless it’s forced on you.So living in another culture, especially when it’s another language, forces you to grow further and faster. So America — same language, very different culture. Part of it was a growth tool.Part of it was an adventure, and part of it was to feel different enough that I could ask very basic questions we’d never think to ask. I just read this really interesting essay about Nietzsche, where I learned for the first time that nihilism — the word we associate with him — isn’t about giving up and being a Kurt Cobain waster, who cares.It’s not depression. Nihilism in Nietzsche’s terms was actually a necessary step that you need to take where you burn it all down and burn down all your assumptions and all the rules and rituals that you followed in order to get to a more truthful place. It was part of a philosophy that the reason why it’s always been taken as a negative is because the orthodoxies, whether it’s the church or whatever, didn’t want you to burn it all down.They wanted to just stand by your beds and stick with the program because it helped them. But if you want to stick to what your, get to what your truth is, there is a certain amount of creative, we call it in advertising, we call it creative destruction. There is a need to destroy before you rebuild.And so I’m going through another one of those at the moment. I think that’s what I did 18 years ago by coming here. I also had this, now it seems quite, I wouldn’t call it nihilistic, but maybe, I’ve forgotten the word.Now it seems silly, but I knew that advertising wasn’t as cool in America as it was in the UK. So you could be lulled into this false sense of your own importance in England. Like a lot of people who don’t work in the business know the names of ad agencies and they’ve heard of that, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which is the agency I worked at.They’d heard of that. Oh, they’d ask you, did you work on that campaign that did this? Or did you ever work on this commercial?Like people were still interested and thought advertising was cool. And I knew that there were no such pretenses around that in America. Like it was a grubby business when I was, even grubbier now, it was a grubby business when I arrived.And so I would get out of any form of pomposity and comfort that I’d gained and I’d learned something else. And so a little bit was that, I don’t want to be in an industry where when it falls down, everyone will be like entitled. I want to go into a place where they don’t rate it that much.I’m gonna have to work, sing for my supper.And do you have a recollection of when you were growing up? What did you want to be? What did young Ben want to be when he grew up?Probably everything. Yeah — I wanted to be a pilot, a policeman at one point, which baffles me now. I wasn’t like one of those, Quentin Tarantino always knew he wanted to be a movie maker because he was obsessed with cartoons and comic books.I saw things the way a child sees them — I didn’t know what it was, so I wouldn’t have known. I remember when somebody first told me about anthropology and I didn’t know what it was. In hindsight, I probably always wanted to do something involving psychology, anthropology, or even philosophy. I was a daydreamer.I certainly didn’t believe that I wanted to do anything to do with thinking and philosophy when I was a child. I wanted to drive cars, fly planes, and do the stuff that young boys wanted to do. But when I look back, the things that interested me were thinking about the way things, the way humans work in systems. I would never have been able to articulate that then.It’s always struck me as strange — when I read about celebrities who knew what they wanted from a young age, I think, how would you even know? It took me a long time to understand where everyone stood, where all the things were. But if I think about it, from a very young age, I was a daydreamer.I would go very laterally on topics and think right off the scale, a bit, maybe like my conversations go. I would meander into new thoughts.Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now? And what are you working on?So I’m now co-founder of Okay Human, which broadly speaking is in your world of ethnography. The reason there’s some other things that I’m doing with it, but the reason we founded it in the first place a few years ago was because we saw a lack in the way, I hate the word data actually, because it’s been taken by the tech bros. But when I was before the tech bros were the dominant feature in our world, in our lives, researchers were there at the service of big new ideas, especially in my world.They’re in service of creativity and service of new products, new brands, new ideas, new campaigns, new stories. And data was one of the forms of research that you triangulated with the other forms of research. Unfortunately, I noticed that when the tech bro got hold of research, it kicked out my beloved form of research, qualitative and ethnographic.And it wrapped its arms around quant, renamed things, coined the term AB tests, taking it out of randomized controlled experiments or whatever we used to call it, even forgetting what we used to call it. And it stole the rest of research by making, by pointing everything at one or two forms. The AB test became hero because it was easy to do. And they now had the ability to reach more people.So they can just throw AB tests at everyone. And as a result, new people coming into many industries, not just mine, marketing, anything that had tech in it, suddenly believed that this, all of a small part of research was the entirety of it. And that people had found the idea of speaking to a human being anathema, found it ridiculous and highly inefficient to use a tech word.And it felt sad that we were losing those moments of true humanity that for me, those little foibles of humanity and those weird moments, so slightly intuitive, nutty, unhinged moments that you have with a real human being out in the wild were fewer and further between. And if you don’t get those, you don’t get those. The, I used to call it a cheat when I was a brand strategist going off and doing, having a couple of conversations with completely crazy consumers or humans was my way of cheating the creative process.It’s the way of getting like, it wasn’t going to come to my head unless it came out of someone else’s mouth or life or bedroom or underwear drawer or filthy fridge. That’s where I got my, that’s where I cheated to get my ideas from because I…What are you pointing at by calling it cheating? What do you know?I mean, it’s like, I don’t know. It’s funny, isn’t it? I think like, I’m thinking like a child, which is, I used to think the creatives had this ability to conjure up ideas.And I was like, well, I can’t do that. I need my ideas to be triggered by crazy humans. And so I would, to be able to earn my seat at the creative table in an agency, I needed to show up with something unhinged and it should find that I’d have to go and get consumers into a state of unhingedness.And there, by going, I’ve just found this thing in your underwear drawer. Talk to me about that. And they’d be like, oh my God, funny story behind that is.And then all of a sudden you open up the flow of where humans really reside. They reside in the lies and in the things that they hide and in the emotional twitches that you spot when you’re talking to them. And that’s the stuff around which you build really big new ideas, companies, brands, creative design, whatever.And so I was like, we’ve stopped doing that. So Okay Human was born to go.You’re not going to be able to do it as most people, most clients no longer want to spend as much time and money on classic qual, unfortunately. But if we can get in a short amount of time to those crazy moments with a human, the tears, the laughs, the performances, the dressing up and cosplaying different roles, the projections, we can get to that in a much shorter period of time. Will people still buy it?Will brands and agencies still put it back onto their process, into their processes? And they did. And so that we’ve been doing that for eight years.What I’ve realized recently is that what I’ve, my condition of speaking to people, I don’t want to talk to survey takers because survey takers is the world I didn’t want to be in. That’s quant. But the world that I’ve had to force myself into, it looks a bit like surveys.And we use digital platforms to talk to people. We talk to them inside chat messaging where we think they’re having much more authentic, vulnerable, real conversations with their best friends. But we never want to put them into the dynamic of, it feels like they’re just filling out a survey.So we don’t do quant in that environment. We have very unstructured, crazy, projective, creative, lateral conversations, audio visual. But I’m like, even then, I don’t want to stop there.And the environment makes them more relaxed. It makes them more themselves. Half the time they’re not wearing clothes, which we love because it makes them both physically and emotionally naked, which is the best state for us to be talking to people in.But I still want to move their state. I want to move them to that moment when they’re walking out of the focus group room, when they’re fully relaxed. They’re like, oh, they asked you a question.And then you turn it back around and ask a question back to them. And then they give you the best answer is in the time that they’re walking out of the room. So I want them to be in that stage.Or when suddenly a thought has occurred to them that they re-find their emotional state that they’re in when they’re telling that story. So we change their state. So our whole mission has been, don’t talk to survey takers.So how do you not talk to survey takers? You turn them into crazy people or fun people or emotional people or whatever it is you need to get them into that state. And then you interview those people.And those are the humans that make their buying decisions and appreciate good art and design to those people. And why talk to the survey taking types? Because that’s not how we go through life.Yeah. Well, so can you tell us say more about how your product works, how you smuggled in the qualitative, the beauty. I mean, this is what I remember about my conversation with you before that the appreciation for what qualitative brings, but delivering it in these digital platforms in a way, which I don’t know that everybody really does very well.So I guess one, my first part of my question is how does what you offer work and what is that thing that you try to preserve? And because we’re in such a strange period when it comes to qualitative and quant. And I have even a tertiary question here.I don’t know if you remember when Claude launched the largest qualitative research project ever with 80,000 interviews. And it was all so this idea of what qualitative is and blah, blah, blah. But my question is really about how does what you have work and what is it about qualitative that’s magical and how do you preserve it in this context?Yeah, I’m going to start with how you preserve it, because that’s where it started from. If you were inventing qualitative research today, you would not probably go to the focus group vicinity with their bright strip lights and their two way mirrors and their bunch of strangers sitting judging you and a person with a clipboard. You wouldn’t start there.You would start, it more in the same way that the psychiatrist’s chair has been designed to lie you back and get you into a state of there’s a great Instagram project done by one of Freud’s grandchildren. I think it’s about fashion and psychology and it lies down celebrities. They’re fully lying down.And when you’re fully lying down, it does actually create, you are in a slightly different state. And so the thing I wanted to preserve was the best moments I’ve ever seen of qual. And to be honest, it was mostly either in a beautifully designed and moderated qual group if it’s sometimes or out in the field immersions.It was when you’re like, you catch them in their real life because you’re with them for a while and you observe them. And then suddenly they do something. You’re like, what just happened there?They’re like, do you know what? I was completely doing that on autopilot. I didn’t realize I was doing it.And so we don’t have the luxury of being able to study people for months on end and immerse. But how about if we can move them into those moments momentarily? And storytelling is always one of my favorites.You get someone to go on a long rambling story and eventually they forget where they are and they’re there again. And so that’s a really simple one. But the other one is to play with them.And so I believe that to answer one of your other questions very quickly as I go into this, I actually believe that qualitative research and strategy, which I root very closely together, are the first step of creativity. Creativity begins there, not when you brief the creative. And if you’re thinking about qual as a creative pursuit rather than a analytical scientific pursuit, you’re going to come at it in a very different way.So if you do, then you want to animate people from day one, from the first moment. So the dynamic between a participant and a practitioner in qual research is one a little bit more like sparring, more like the creative duo. And so the more you get them into a state of play, of heightened emotion, the more they’ll reveal to you, the more that you’ll get triggered.And you want to essentially be in a flow state. Now, because of the way that we do things, so coming on to our tool, I hate calling it a tool because again, that puts it back into left brain world. There is still some mechanics.The first is, for me, the lying down psychiatrist chair is the environment. We’ll talk to people inside, chat messaging, places where they’re already talking to their nearest and dearest. We’re not forcing them into either a physical room or a digital room that isn’t theirs.They’ve been here every hour of every day for the last 10 years. It’s Facebook Messenger. It’s the DMs in Instagram where they talk to a lot of their friends.It’s WhatsApp. And in this environment, it’s fully your environment. Conversation you’ve just had with your grandma about how to bake a cake or how much you love your granddaughter, whatever is in one is there.So there’s no code switching if you’re talking about love and emotion and something that’s close to your heart. The conversation can flow immediately with us. We’ll recruit people also in those environments.So we’re not getting them out of their world into our world. We’re coming into their world. So it’s a bit more ethnographic in that way.We’ll join them on their terms in their space. So I see that as a little bit like they’re lying down. I love the fact, one of our competitors talked about apologetically to a conference I went to going, it’s OK, clients.Our respondents will wear clothes when they’re talking to us. You won’t have any naked respondents. I’m like, no, no, ours won’t.We hope that they don’t. Don’t put your shirt on, because as soon as you do that, you’re changing your state into professionalism again. Stay naked when you’re talking to us.Stay horizontal when you’re talking. We often get people engaged in pillow talk with us. And we want them to stay there, because that’s where truth leaks out.And so then you’ll know this as an ethnographer. Then we’ll throw some of the old favorites, some new ones, projective techniques at them in that state. And I talk about it in the same way that when you meet a dog, it play bows at you.It grabs. It goes like this. And you know what to do when it does that.Yeah.Play is an invitation to get silly. And we do that in all sorts of different ways. Tell me a joke.Tell me where you lie. Tell me what your therapist would say to your last three questions. Show me your bins right now.Video your bins and tell me what your therapist would say about that. If your best friend was spotting some lies in the last thing you just said, what would they say? What’s the last 10 pictures on your camera say about you.We’re wrongfooting. We’re playing. We’re asking them to storytell. We’re asking to draw and draw a picture of what such and such means and make me a collage.All of the things that are some of which are recognized from classic qual and some are new. Identify the coolest object in your house and tell me what it would say about you, which is a reflection of how cool you think you are. You’re asking your cool object to talk about you. So personification of objects, of brands.We’re doing embodied semiotics. Get a brand to walk into the room right now and tell me as though it’s a catwalk and tell me what it would do and why. And so just really animating the process of walking around one’s emotional space in this environment. They do.It’s not awkward like in a focus group. If you remember back in the day, you go rip up this magazine and make a collage of what it means to be a consumer. And they were like, where do I start here? There is no hesitation.Yeah. I love so much of what you’re saying, of course. And I wanted to isolate two things that you said that I totally align with. And one is the idea that this is a creative exercise and to choose to lean into that, which is something I think I learned or recognized as uniquely. And then the other thing you said, which I don’t hear a lot said, is that research and you said research and strategy are they’re like right next to each other or they’re the same enterprise. You talked about somehow the relationship between research and strategy being much more intimate than maybe is generally discussed. And I wanted to hear you talk about that.It’s funny that it seems new to you. I found it one way or another. The main tool of a strategist in an ad agency or a branding agency was research.That was your physical tool that you walked in the room with. And then how you did it would diverge depending on what sort of brain you had. And so the left brain is often favored the desk research with quantum Intel and MRI and Simmons and all that stuff or the surveys, the quant surveys and the more right brainers would favor qual and meeting consumers.But all of us had to master both and we’d have to triangulate both. I just always felt that the strategists that had the closest relationships with the creatives and the ones that were thinking more creatively were the ones that allied themselves with qual. And because there was more.And I think now I realize that now I fully have embedded that the idea of especially qual is the first line of creativity, then that makes sense, you’re already being creative and you can see through all of these tools and devices and exercises that we’ve been using at OKHuman that they are creative exercise. They’re exercise to energize and animate the creative process to begin with in participants and consumers.But ultimately, what’s animated there continues to animate ideas later on as well. So I think that if you recognize in those businesses that I’m talking about, even a little bit in consultancy, but I think certainly ad agencies and branding agencies and brand consultancies, the output is creative. And if you’re not starting that process early, and I believe that process starts in research, you’re not going to get there.What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you?I think there’s two places. One is just every time I look at a consumer, hate calling it because he was every time I look at a human human being a real human, I get this huge jump of joy, these huge emotional kind of like.What’s the way of looking at it?Yeah, if I’m feeling down, I’ll go into because I don’t always do all of the work anymore. So often I’m not often looking through the raw data. But when I do, I feel grateful that humanity is still interesting because we can live in a world where you’re just reading the news and operating on autopilot. But I go in deeply into a piece of research that we’ve done and go through the videos or the verbatims and look at individual consumers being themselves, individual humans being themselves. I’m like it heartens me.It reminds me that humanity is still here, still doing odd things, still being weird and individual. And so one of it is that it’s grounding, especially during covid when everything felt like it was up in the air. We did a study about we actually created a whole new brand and a web platform called How Do You Feel Dot Live.And we literally interviewed people all over the world. We built a map, an interactive map, where I interviewed people and it just felt grounding that people were still they had their own little habits and feelings and thoughts about what was going on. And it was really nice to be connected.There was a moment when we weren’t connected enough with each other and it was unusual voices because they were being mediated by big or small media, traditional or social media. We were hearing them unfettered, unfiltered. And so that’s one of them is just having that direct access to people all over the world and reminding, which reminds me that we’re all still nutters and we’re all still interesting.We’re all still getting on with it. And whenever there’s a big polemic, and I’ll often use it as an excuse if we’ve got a project going on to ask people about it, to see if it’s as crazily divided as the media would have us believe, which they do obviously to sell column inches. And it never is.It’s like people are so much more wise and philosophical and thoughtful and loving. And so that’s one of them. That’s a comfort part of it.And the other one is that I like creativity. I like the idea of building things. So doing the, building the company in the first place, obviously, scratches that entrepreneurial itch to build something.But on every project we are using the building blocks of qual research to, I think the most important building blocks of creativity are qual. And so stimulating, and I keep using this word animating is one of my favorite words at the moment. Nothing comes to being.It’s even at a quantum physics level, isn’t it? Einsteinian level, like everything is just the degree to which things vibrate and move. And so the more you animate something, the more it comes into existence.We’re not just moving matter around. We’re not just taking, that’s why I hate the world of like the way people talk about data today. It’s like data is an object that you put into a process and then you make a thing from it.Whereas with qual, I think the more animation you do to humans and the more vibrations that you can generate, the more you actually make. So I think that creativity in that way is, you’re essentially stimulating things into existence when you animate things. So I’ve got really lofty there, but.Oh, I’m right there. I will meet you there. I don’t know if you’ve encountered, have you ever heard of appreciative inquiry?No, I love it already.I think it came out of the organizational transformational world, this guy, David Cooperider. And I only know just enough about it to be dangerous and to tell this story, but it was that transformation that follows a problem solution mindset ends up just pushing the problem around. And maybe there’s a better way of basically identifying the peak experiences when everything happens beautifully and pushing into the positive. And he says, there’s a line, he says that we live in, and I’m only mentioning it because you’re expressing it, that we live in the world that our questions create. Right. And it’s just this beautiful thing. How does that feel or how does that resonate with you?Absolutely brilliant. There’s a line of inquiry that I can now go after because I went to this talk about quantum physics the other day, and there’s a really fascinating guy. And this is in person in Brooklyn, this British scientist who had the air of a Monty Python comic about him on stage.So he made it so he just talked to, he just kept saying, it’s just so weird. And his animation of also similarly, at a similar moment, I’ve been listening to the book on creativity by John Cleese. So he’s a real Python.And I listened to it instead of reading it because I was wanting to do it while I was doing other things. So I could hear his voice and he narrated it. And it felt like there’s a similarity.The fact that I was told about quantum physics by a Python-esque voice and that it’s weird and that it’s a creative experience and the whole Schrodinger’s cat, it doesn’t exist until you look at it. I love that idea. It’s like, unless you decide to be curious, to inquire, it doesn’t really exist.And Einstein was there in the 20s on this. And we’re still finding that difficult to understand that the whole of the 20th century was about moving matter around and in doing it in a more efficient, faster, cheaper way. And that has infected, and this is my biggest rant, that infected the business of creativity that I was in.But as the tech bros assumed domination on this planet. But the thing that the tech bros were afforded before they got there was all created by creators, by people who understood creativity. And they did it in a slightly different way.Two together are a superpower. We need both. But when you overly worship one doctrine, you have this tendency to negate the other.And I think right now we’ve spent a little bit too long, I’d say 20 years, negating the tools, which are a little bit more woo-woo to some people, of creativity. I love the idea that someone’s named it appreciative inquiry. It doesn’t exist until you ask the question.And then it does.Yeah. How beautiful. I’m curious, because you started out, the conversation and then your work, too, is a real challenge to everything you’re talking about.How would you describe where we are now, the state of things? And I love that you’re advocating and you’re building around the imaginative part of qualitative. I feel like qualitative has its own obstacles for lots of people, just even talking to people face-to-face, having an analytical conversation with somebody is too far for some people.But then to embed it in this really appreciative, imaginative, creative way that you’re doing now, I guess my question is, how are you being met? And what do you say to clients to help them see the value of what you’re doing?Yeah, there’s two ways of looking at that as well, which is on one front, it’s being met well through the brand. So when we spoke before you switched the tape on about rebranding to OKHuman, what our last name was doing was it was clearly situating us in that last era of tech, efficiency, simplicity, sass, that world that was a race to the bottom. And I felt it while I was in it and we needed to get out of it because a brand name does a lot of work for you before and after you’re in the room.While I was in the room, people were like, great, this is fascinating. When you leave the room, when they look back at who you are, they see your name and go, oh, it must be about simplicity and efficiency. Or before they meet you, your name walks into the room before you and sets you up like your pre-act.And the pre-act now with OKHuman is doing a lot of work for us. And the assumptions that people are mostly correctly making is that, oh, you’ve seen this moment in the zeitgeist where it was all about the OK computer, the OK Google. It was about use your agents to do the work for you.And we’re rushing towards the future. And you’re trolling that a little bit. You’re jamming the orthodoxy or that prevailing wind and going, OK, how about OKHuman?How about we just spend a beat? There’s still the OK in there. We know you’re probably going to be harnessing some form of technology. So the first answer to that is that people were like, sigh of relief. Thank you. What are you doing?How can you bring a bit of that back? So there’s definitely a feeling of there’s a hinge point I see in culture where people are going, we’ve been rushing very hard and fast towards AI. This acceleration since November 2022 has freaked people out even more, has spooked them a little bit.So while some of us are still running very fast, others are going, wait, what’s going to happen next? More conversation is happening about what does it mean to be human? Because now we’ve got artificial ones.We’re now asking the questions. I’m very pleased that non-social scientists, non-philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists are asking questions that only those three were asking before. So I’m pleased about that.So I just feel like from a zeitgeist perspective, it fits into that moment, people going, yes. Then there’s a second one, which is born out of the fact that we’ve started to bring some of our methodology to a different case study, which is organisations. I realised that the humans that we should be studying aren’t only the humans on the outside of your company, your buyers, your consumers, but also the ones inside the company, because we’ve forgotten to ask questions of those.So under this working title, Becoming Human, I’ve been writing and proposing ideas around what happened to the creative sparks of the individuals within your company, because I’ve been noticing quite a long time that there’s a lot of dead behind the eyes clients that I meet, especially more junior ones. It’s almost like we’ve had our agency taken away from us and we don’t know what we’re allowed to do or they don’t know what they’re allowed to do. So what about if some of these techniques that we’ve learnt in service of ethnography, in service of qual, that has reanimated conversations inside research, what if some of this could be used inside organisations to reanimate the processes there that have been really prevented by processes, by expectations, by the reduction of money and time from clients, and most importantly, by everything being run through a system, a technological system, which culminated in AI. There’s mandates across a lot of my clients to use this AI in this amount of time.You need a quota of how much you use AI. People have been so pushed into these boxes and funnels that they have no space to use their own intuition and their own human agency. And so my proposal to clients has been, before you fire your last organic human, why don’t you retrain some of the ones that are still there to be as human as they can possibly be?Because I believe they’re working at a small fraction of their capacity. They’re switching off their intuition. They’re frightened to be instinctive and feeling, because they’ve been told that the master is a dogmatic left brain, either human or machine.All the people who’ve been promoted in the last 10, 20 years are the ones that are very left brain and very analytical. And all the crazy right brainers have been pushed to the side. The AI era is going to need these.We’ve heard this a lot in the last couple of years. The AI era is going to need the right brainers. So could we have a role in getting them back either through some form of training or some form of help?And in answer to that, to get back to your question, it’s funny because there’s been a lot of pull from the smaller, cooler boutique companies who already know a bit about it, and an absolute paralysis from the others. To the point where I met a creative consultant who’s changed her company name to take the word creativity out of it. Because she’s like, ultimately, I’m a creativity consultant, but I have talked about it being more about growth.And creativity is a thing I hide in the background to get them there. So all of her bigger clients don’t want that word in the definition of what they do. They think it’s frivolous.What do you mean by that? I’m frightened about that. As a strategist, I’ve quickly gotten nerdy about it and gone, well, one is the means and one of the end.So the end is growth. Just because you’re talking a lot about creativity. We all know, as strategists, we knew this client would go, this is all very interesting, all very fun, but how are you going to sell my product?And we were like, the fact we need to have that conversation is worrying, but we did used to have that conversation, even 20 years ago. So on one practical front, I get it. But when you’re talking to very senior people who have benefited from brands that have benefited from creativity, for them to go easy on the creativity love, that’s a little bit worrying.At senior level, they’re like, let’s maybe reduce the mention of that word and get back to growth.I wonder, and we’re very near the end of time and tell me if I’m off base or not, but I feel like, well, there’s all that work and I’m going to forget his name, Orlando Lemon Creativity Crisis Advertising, Ian McGilchrist. Yeah, that’s right.And Ian McGilchrist. And what I hear you talking about stuff that lays right on top of all those observations about the dominance and the monopoly of left brain and corporate advertising and the need of the right brain to come back. And I always felt like that was applied to advertising, but you’re really, and tell me if I’m wrong, you’re applying it to research, that researchers have the same crisis of creativity and humanity, and that that needs to be restored in a way too, because they’re all, as you said, they’re the same, two ends of the same line. In a way. Yeah. But I’m, because I’m still an ad man at heart.I’m probably, when I say it, I’m mostly talking about advertising as well. It’s only been a recent revelation and to begin with a guilty one and now a proud one, that research is the first line of creativity and is therefore qual is a creative pursuit. So yes, I’m bringing it to research as well.But I think there’s even more pushback there because qual gets a bad enough rap as it is in the room full of quant pros. So you don’t want to let that out of the bag too much. We, you and I know this, but I don’t think we should be going out there shouting too much about it because that’ll give more people more excuse to kick it out of the room.So mostly I have been talking about it in yes, advertising industry, but also clients and brand clients. I know that McDonald’s for instance, loves an offsite where it gets to ideate, Diageo and Unilever back in the day when I worked with them had rooms dedicated to brainstorms and ideation sessions. And it wasn’t just Google that had the ball pits back in the day, Unilever had beanbag ridden rooms called seventh heaven with colors and hacky sacks to throw around and that they, but they’ve gotten rid of that a little bit.They will also kind of charmed by the tech world and believed that they needed to dress up in their clothes and start to get serious and quanty. And so I’m speaking really to all of those people that dropped a lot of your creativity, right brain thinking and thinkers in favor of this very mesmerizing and compelling efficiency narrative. And the irony is that the people who are jumping back into it more than Unilever and PNG and Pepsi, and those cool clients, Nike is the tech companies.Cause they’ve got all the money. They’ve done all the efficiency and now they’ve got all the staff and they’re bringing in staff, very right brain, very numinous thinkers. And it’s amazing.So open AI and Anthropic have brought in people I know from to be extremely right brain recently have very senior positions. Google has been doing it for a while.And so the irony now is the very people who put us here are the first ones to be going back.Beautiful. Well, listen, I want to thank you very much, Ben, for accepting the invitation and congratulations on Okay Human. Thank you.I hope that was useful. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at <a href="https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe</a>

July 27, 2026

Mark Kingsley on AI as a Condition & Belonging

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

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What is THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast?: A weekly conversation between Peter Spear and people he finds fascinating working in and with THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING <a href="https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com</a>
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