THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

About THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

Publisher

Peter Spear

Category

business · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

22 Jan 2024

Latest episode

12 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

139 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   12 Oct 2026

   Paul Worthington on Organizations & Identity

   Paul Worthington (https://www.linkedin.com/in/pworthington/) is a brand consultant and President of Invencion (https://www.invencion.com/), a strategic advisory practice he founded in 2011. Previously he was Client Principal & Head of Strategy; Strategy Director; and Senior Strategist at Wolff Olins in New York. He writes the newsletter Off Kilter (https://offkilter.substack.com/) and has written for Fast Company. I start all of these conversations with the same question and the same little prelude, because I borrowed this beautiful question from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. She’s an oral historian. And the question is so beautiful, I stole it from her, but it’s very, very big. So I kind of over-explain it the way that 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. And the question is, where do you come from? Again, you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. Well, of course, being a born contrarian, my first reaction is to answer that question by saying, where do you come from conceptually in this world that we live in, as opposed to where do I come from physically? But I’ll answer it the old-fashioned way first. I originate from the Shetland Islands in Scotland, which is very far away from anything. We used to describe it jokingly as the center of the North Sea. It has about 20,000 people and about 300-odd thousand sheep. And I lived there for the first 18 years or so of my life, went to college, and ended up from college being in London. After working in London, I ended up in New York. And these days you find me 20-odd years later in Connecticut. What was it like growing up in this, as you say, the center of the North Sea? Well, funnily enough, I’ll give you a comparison to New York. So the island that I come from is called Unst, and Unst is the very furthest north island in the United Kingdom. You cannot get any further north and still be in the UK. And it’s on the same latitude as Bergen in Norway, and it’s somewhere a little bit south of the Arctic Circle. Unst is almost exactly the same size and shape as Manhattan. It’s roughly three miles across and 12 miles long, but there’s about 600 people living on it instead of 6 million. And its claim to fame, funnily enough, is Treasure Island, the book. If you look at the map of Treasure Island, it’s almost the perfect map of Unst. And the reason is that Robert Louis Stevenson’s father was a lighthouse engineer. And when Stevenson was a boy, he spent a whole year or so in Unst while his father was building and overseeing the lighthouse, Muckle Flugga, which is the most northerly lighthouse in the UK. And so years later, when he wrote Treasure Island, he used his memory of Unst to map out the island in the book. This is unbelievable. It’s such a particular and unique place to grow up. At what point do you discover how unique it is? I feel like it’s just how you grew up, but then there must be some moment where you realize, my gosh. It’s funny, because I think when you’re a kid, you’re very cognizant of how unique it is in all the wrong ways. As a child, I remember distinctly watching the ads every Saturday morning or whatever for things like McDonald’s. Of course, there’s no McDonald’s, or Kentucky Fried Chicken. So you go on holiday and the first thing you want to do is, I want to go have McDonald’s, because you’ve been watching all these ads for six months and you haven’t been able to consume this horrendous food. So you’re very cognizant in that sense. I think when you get older, you reflect back on it and you realize that it is an incredible place. It’s funny, being able to go back as a tourist gives you different eyes on a place where you grew up, because you had a very different idea of it as a kid. And it is very beautiful. It has some incredible birdlife. The sea is right there. Obviously, it has a fishing history. But just being able to go off in a boat and see the cliffs and the seals and the dolphins and occasionally see whales. You don’t realize at the time, when you’re a kid, how special that is, when you drive down to watch the pod of killer whales in the bay and you can hear them. You don’t realize, when you watch them on film, on TV or YouTube or whatever, that these things are really loud. They’re definitely talking to each other. But that is a real life history. A long time ago, I came from a very far away place. And how remote was it? Or how much was there back and forth? Shetland itself is a 14-hour ferry ride from the mainland of the UK. So you get on the ferry at six in the afternoon and you get off at eight in the morning. It takes about an hour on the airplane. It’s a couple hundred miles offshore. So it’s pretty remote. But it’s also very connected, because it was the hub of the UK’s oil industry in the 70s. So when I was growing up, it was very connected to the world, because the oil industry is a global industry. What I’ve realized as I got a bit older is it’s generally much more cosmopolitan than other Scottish islands that are much closer in, if you like, but don’t have that connection to the global economy in the same way. And do you recall what you wanted to be when you were young, Paul? What did you want to be when you grew up? That’s a funny question. I think, like a lot of boys of my era, my first love was I wanted to be a fighter pilot. And then I found out that you couldn’t be a fighter pilot and wear glasses. So I was screwed. My pilot dreams were dashed at a young age when I found out that glasses wearers weren’t allowed to fly at Mach 2. And so now catch us up. Where are you now? And tell us about the work that you do. These days, I am in the sunny town of Wilton in Connecticut, about an hour and change north of New York City, living the suburban dream. As anybody who has children in New York will know, it’s a very difficult place, an expensive place. And so you often make the move into the suburbs. And we did that during the COVID period. And it’s great. Love it. It’s a nice place to live. In terms of what I do, I would say there’s two things that I do. The first is that my main business is a consulting business. I do primarily brand strategy consulting. I’d caveat and say that it’s that overlap between company strategy, corporate strategy, and brand strategy, and how you are delivering what the business is trying to achieve through the brand. And it’s very much what is the world of corporate branding. I prefer to call it organizational branding, because it’s not always a corporation, but it’s typically an organization of some kind. So what you’re not branding is a specific consumer packaged good, product, or service. What you are looking at is what is the combined human endeavor of this organization and what does that ladder up to, and what does that mean as a brand, and how does that potentially umbrella across multiple product and service offerings, but also give people a sense of what’s going to come next and what they should expect in terms of innovation. And I come from what I would call the organization-out school. I spent 10 years at Wolff Olins in my past. Wally Olins was the pioneer of corporate identity as a concept. We don’t really use that term anymore, but if you were to read his book from 1989, there’s a direct lineage to how I do what I do, which is that he was really looking at the inside of an organization and saying that an organization has a personality, it has a certain way of being, it has a set of cultural norms, and that you can capture that and then reflect that internal reality into the external world. And so I think that’s very much my lineage. I’m very much looking at what is it that makes this organization unique? And as a result of what makes this organization unique, what does that mean for a competitive advantage relative to the markets that they serve, relative to the products they might make, relative to the experiences they might create? It seems like a long-winded way of talking about it, but I think we’ve got to this point where the word brand is almost like the reverse of the word snow for the Inuit. You know how they talk about how the Inuit have over 50 words for snow? Marketers have over 50 definitions for the word brand. So I come from the corporate identity, organization-out tradition of the branding world. That’s my core business. I'm certainly part of the problem when it comes to that definition thing. There's some attachment to trying to define it, and I appreciate how clear you're being about it. What more can you say about the lineage, and about the role Wally Olins played in defining this practice of organization out? Is that his language, or your way of differentiating your approach? And what's the alternative to organization out? Well, I think there’s a couple of things. That’s not his language. That’s certainly my interpretation, just as a clarifying way of describing it. I think there are multiple schools. And what happens is the schools tend to look at the subject through their own lens, and then they use that lens to define the subject. But the problem is they’re not really defining the subject, they’re defining the piece of the subject that they can see through their particular lens. So if you’re an advertising planner, or as they call themselves these days, strategists, you’re looking at that from a market-back perspective. Look, what’s the consumer insight that we can attach to this brand that will drive this campaign, that will drive this behavior change, or whatever it is we’re trying to create? And so that then becomes what you might call platform-specific. They talk about campaign platforms, or it might be campaign-specific, but there’s much more of a market back. So if you deal with most, not all by any stretch, but most advertising strategists, they’re far less interested in what makes the organization itself unique. What they’re really focused on is what’s the external insight that we can attach it to. If you speak to somebody at Brand Finance, they’re going to view the brand as an intangible financial asset. So what they’re going to do is talk to you about what are all the levers that you might pull to increase the value of the intangible asset. And so it’s another different way of looking at it. And then if you take somebody like the marketing scientists, and especially the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, they’re looking at a lot of consumer data. They’re looking at purchase pattern behavior. And so they will tend to view the brand as a purchase trigger. It’s a trigger of purchase. But again, I think all of these things are great, but we have to recognize that when you look at something through a lens, you cannot then define the whole by the lens. So you can have a brand which is organization-out, but that is also market-back, the consumer insight, that is also an intangible financial asset. And it also works as a purchase trigger. And so you can be all of these things at the same time without narrowing your definition so small as to say, well, that’s what the brand is. Yes. That makes sense. I think this is one of the reasons I reached out to you. I found your writing on LinkedIn, and I appreciate how generous your definition is, a plurality of ideas. I appreciate how strategic you are, and how clear you are as a communicator and a thinker. That explanation is really quite amazing. My follow-up: when did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing, organizational branding? Yes. I’ll tell you a funny story. I hadn’t put this together, but I went to college as an undergraduate in the early nineties, ended up doing various things in the Highlands of Scotland, and applied for a job at the Stewart Formula One team, which existed at that time, Jackie Stewart, the great Scottish racing legend. And so I applied for this job and they turned me down. And I remember looking at the rejection letter, and looking at my resume at the time, and being like, s**t, I would have turned me down too. I gotta do something here. So I went back to college and I did an MBA. And then I graduated my MBA and I was applying for jobs and literally nobody would hire me. And again, I had the same feeling that I’d had at the end of my undergraduate, right? Which is, this effing degree is not even worth the paper it’s printed on. Anyway, I saw an ad for Wolff Olins advertising for senior strategy consultants, which wouldn’t have included me. And I had always followed the company from an early age in terms of my professional development, because there’d been certain brands that had hit the market in the UK: Orange, the cell phone company. There was a credit card called Goldfish. There was a discount airline from British Airways at the time, competing with EasyJet, called Go. And these things just blew my mind, because they were so different from anything else. You had this cell phone company that never showed a cell phone in any of its ads and kept talking about the future and optimism. And I was like, that’s incredible. And then there was this credit card company that wasn’t selling on the basis of status and silver, platinum, gold. And it was funny. And it was irreverent, and I’m like, wow, an irreverent credit card. I just love that. And then Go was just this incredibly happy, joyful thing. And it was very much inspired, I suspect, by the spot paintings of Damien Hirst. And so I looked up and I found that the common thread between these three brands was Wolff Olins. And I remember now, I didn’t even realize at the time, but I actually studied Wally’s book at college in my undergraduate years. And I’ve always been very obsessed with that idea of brands marketing: why would people pay more for this thing because it’s branded and not branded? It’s just an interesting intellectual question. So anyway, I was in this mode of complete desperation. And so I wrote literally the cheekiest application letter. And I can’t remember everything it said, but three things I do remember. First, I wrote the whole thing. And then at the end, I went back and I bolded the key points. And then I wrote at the top of the letter, I know you’re really busy, so just read the bold bits. And then the second thing I said was, I’m not asking you for a job. I’m just asking you for an interview. I don’t need the job. I just need a chance. And then the last thing I did was, they said they wanted outside-the-box thinkers. And this is one of those ones you look back on in the hubris of youth, but I remember writing, before you can think outside the box, you have to accept that there is a box. I know that there is no box. Anyway, so I wrote this, got an interview, got a job. And so then here I am in my mid-twenties working for this company, the only company I’d ever actually wanted to work for, that did these things that I found amazing. Then in hindsight, I realized that I’d actually studied it at college, and obviously it had some subconscious impact. And I didn’t even know that this thing called brand consulting existed at the time. I had no idea there were other companies who even did this. I got the job at Wolff Olins not even knowing that the likes of FutureBrand or Interbrand, any of these companies, existed, because I just wasn’t even interested in it as a field. I was just interested in working for this one company. And I was really fortunate. I got to work there for a decade. So it was great. How would you describe the thing that you were attracted to? What was happening that you were like, oh my God, I need to be in this? It’s very amusing, because I was there 2001 through 2011 before I left to do my own thing. And at various points in that 10-year period, you have these conversations amongst yourselves around, what is the secret sauce? What is the magic? Because obviously there is generational change. The people who were there leave, the people who are new join, and it changes, right? So you’re always asking, what’s the thread? And we never could quite figure it out, I don’t think. And it’s funny, because I had a client once who told me this great line I use all the time. He said, you can’t read the label from inside the jar. And it’s so true. But I think in hindsight, looking back on it, there were a couple of things that were super important. The first was the work was inherently joyful. Everything that was coming out at that time, in that period of the late nineties through the early thousands, when I was just joining, there was just an insane amount of happiness and joy to the work, which was really notable amongst the pretty dour branded environment of the time. It was the back end of the nineties. Everything felt like it was going down as opposed to going up. The dot-com crash had happened. You had the Cool Britannia, the political movement at the time. Cool Britannia was coming to an end. And so here’s this thing running totally opposite to that. I think the other thing in hindsight, it’s funny, is that there was this fervent, almost ideological belief that you had to stand for something, that you don’t stand out unless you stand for something, and that you need to stand for something really special. I think that gets a bit funny, because in hindsight, I was thinking about this the other day. It’s like, well, Valens at that time, the idea of standing for something was so powerful, and it attracted very type A people who believed very much in standing for something. And I think the challenge is that everybody stood for something different. The unifying force was everybody fervently believed that you had to stand for something. The fragmenting force that weakened its impact was that everybody felt like you had to stand for something different from everybody else. Which is great when you’re consulting to clients, right? Because those are very different lenses. And so the right people applied to the right clients creates magic. But it really is the herding-cats-on-the-inside mentality that you’ve all heard about. So it’s a wonderful place. I have great memories of it. I wish it nothing but success. And I look back on its dysfunctions much more charitably than I did when I left in 2011. You said cheeky, and you used the word hubris, but I have to note that my career started with a very arrogant cover letter, to a brand consulting firm. I couldn't have written a normal one if I tried. I won't spend too much time on it, but I remember signing off "I look forward to hearing from you" after taking some rather provocative positions on the mediocrity of everything I'd encountered in my days in San Francisco. Well, it’s funny though, when you look back on these things. I remember after working there for about six months or a year, I had this moment where I was like, I had no idea at the time, but that desperation-fueled cover letter that I wrote could not have been more perfectly optimized for that particular recipient. There was nobody in Wolff Olins that wouldn’t have at least acknowledged a letter like that, because it fit so much with the personality of the place. But at the time you’re writing it, it’s like, well, I’ve been turned down by everybody else. I’ve got nothing to lose. This is it, right? I’ll give you a really funny story. I actually applied to McKinsey twice in my life as a student, around about a similar time. The first time I got no response at all. The second time I was rejected a year later. I was like, wow, that’s impressive. You sent me a rejection letter a full calendar year after I applied to you. That’s impressive. How do you even process that? I don’t know. All kidding aside, I suspect I’m not sure I would have enjoyed my professional life as much had I ended up at McKinsey. You dodged a bullet. When you think about the work that you do, what do you love about it? Where is the joy in the work that you do for you? Well, there’s two things. There’s really two sides to the work that I do these days, because I’d include the newsletter I write, Off Kilter, as work, even though I don’t get paid for it. And I take joy from the consulting work and that work in different ways. The joy that I take in the consulting work, and it’s the joy that I’ve always taken, is I’m super fascinated by the intellectual problem of figuring out what it is that this client needs help with. Whenever a client writes an RFP or has a verbal brief or has whatever problem they’re trying to solve, they very rarely understand the reality of what the problem is. It’s kind of like, imagine if you’re a builder in a house and somebody’s like, yeah, there’s something wrong with the pipes. We know there’s something wrong with the pipes because there’s no water coming out, but we don’t know what’s wrong with the pipes. And so the plumbers come in, rip out the wall, rip out the pipes in order to find out where the problem is. And so I think often what happens is that they can diagnose they have a problem, but they don’t know where exactly that problem is starting and finishing, and hence what you need to do. So I really have always enjoyed the intellectual challenge of really diagnosing the problem and then working with the client to get to a better answer, to get to something that is going to be useful for them. I’ve always been far more driven by making this work really well for the people who are hiring me to do the job. This is for them, for the client. Because I think there’s a world we live in where people get obsessed with awards and they get obsessed with being praised by their peers. And that’s never really been something I’ve been all that interested in. I’ve always been like, this is a really interesting intellectual problem, let me solve it. And let me work with my client to help them get to a better place ultimately. I think there’s a certain craft to being an advisor. I never have the accountability or responsibility for making the decisions, which I’m very conscious of. It’s not my job. So what I can’t ever do is tell my client they must do anything. That’s entirely wrong. But there’s a certain freedom that not having that responsibility and accountability gives you, if you’re a responsible advisor, in which case you can bring things to them that they may not otherwise have thought of. And they may not choose to do those things. But the fact that you’re bringing that to them and saying, well, here’s why this is something that would make sense for you, often helps them break out of their own mental lock-in and think, actually, we’re not X kind of company, we’re actually Y kind of company. I dealt with a client many years ago now, and they very much thought of themselves as, we’re a book publisher, we’re a publishing company. And then through the work that I did with them, I helped them understand that they’re not actually in the book publishing business, they were in the learning business, because the books they were publishing were used by people to learn how to do things. And the problem they had wasn’t the quality of the learning in the book. The problem was that the package of a book was no longer relevant in a world where people are doing everything online. And so what we needed to find was, how do we liberate the knowledge that’s inside the book from the format itself? Which means you’re not really a publisher, you’re a learning company. And that really helped them unlock a lot of innovation and drive them toward really focusing their business much more on how do we make sure we have the learning for people who want it, in the format they want it, meet them where they are, rather than continue to push this business model, which very clearly had a half-life that was compressing. So I think that’s what I love about the core of what I do. It’s, how do you solve these very interesting intellectual problems? When you do work with clients, how do you go about diagnosing the problem? And how do you define the problem? There’s a selfish part of this for me always. As a researcher, I’m always wondering how people discover and how they learn. But how do you go about defining the problem for a client and diagnosing, whatever the relationship is between those two ideas? Yeah. I think the first thing is that there’s certain things that are pretty standard. We consultants and consulting firms often like to put a lot of weight into, we have a proprietary process for uncovering insight X or investigating Y. And some of those tools can be quite useful, but in general, they’re just masking fairly basic things: really understanding what business the company is in, what the nature of the business problem that it may have is, because typically people who are super successful and doing great don’t generally hire consultants to come in and help them. So usually there is some problem somewhere. It’s one of those things where it’s like, I know my arm hurts, but I don’t know whether I have a sprained arm or whether I have a broken arm. And whether your arm is sprained or broken leads to a very different solution in terms of fixing it. So I think that there’s often that kind of thing going on. So from a pure process standpoint, it’s understanding all of the available research they have, speaking to internal stakeholders. And one of the key things that I always insist on with my clients is speaking to some of their customers. And it’s interesting how a lot of companies these days don’t speak to their customers very often. They have a ton of behavioral data, and they use that often as a proxy. They may do quantitative studies and surveys, and they may have, especially in B2B, a sales team or a customer success team that interacts with clients. But in terms of actually speaking to their clients and having a conversation like this, you’d be surprised how rare it is. Wow. And is that something you’ve noticed has changed over the years? There’s a piece of me that assumes that that’s the case. There’s this cliche that we’re drowning in data, but we don’t have any understanding. You know what I mean? Is it true that people aren’t talking to their customers as much? I think it is a truism, but two things. One is I think it’s absolutely a trend. And I’ve witnessed it over my career, that it is becoming less and less likely that companies will have spent any or much effort on the qualitative side of understanding the customers. And when you insist upon it, they’ll often push back and say, well, you don’t really need that information. We have a ton of customer data. And so you will say, well, let me see what you’ve got. And you look and you say, this isn’t what I need. I need to speak to your clients. And it’s rarely a limiting factor. But I have turned down client engagements for this reason, where I was like, I cannot help you if you don’t let me speak to your clients. Oh, my God. That’s amazing. What’s your sense of their experience? Do you feel like they are suffering as a result of this disconnect? Yeah. I think the truism, as I mentioned, is we’ve never known more about what customers do. And we’ve never understood less about why they do it. Yeah, that’s perfect. And I think that’s very real. And I find that very, very commonly when I feed back to clients. Obviously it’s an interpretive lens that I use, but I will say, here’s what I’m hearing from your clients. And it’s often surprising. I’m so interested. Can you say more? How do you approach that? I’ve been in that situation, too. How do you approach the interviews? And then how do you approach delivering to the client this sense of what you’ve learned, to somebody that maybe hasn’t talked to their customers in ages? Very importantly, it’s very dependent upon the nature of the client engagement, right? There’s some engagements where the scale and complexity of the organization necessitates working with, say, an external third-party research organization. So I’ll exclude that from my answer, just because that’s a different kind of thing. What I want to do with any client, small or large, is what I would refer to as exploratory quals. Meaning, I’m not going in there and asking the same questions of the same customers. I’m going in there and I’m exploring with customers. And then when I hear things that seem valuable, I will test those things with another customer. So, I’ve spoken to somebody and they had this to say, what do you think of that? And so for me, it’s not about research purity, because my output is not a research report. It’s about how do I help shape and understand the nature of the problem that this client has? It’s almost part of that diagnostic process. So that when I come back to them, we’re able to say, let’s look at the shape of your business problem through the lens of what the customers are experiencing and how they’re viewing what’s happening in the market. And sometimes that will mean that you might overemphasize something which has quite a small sample size related to it, but it has a direct correlation to what the client is trying to solve for or create or whatever it might be. So yeah, it’s very much a sense-making exercise. And what often I’m trying to do is really frame the problem in a way perhaps the client hasn’t previously thought about it. Yeah. How would you describe what you’re doing in those conversations, in those exploratory interviews? Do you have any tricks of the trade? How would you describe the way that you approach them, or how you are in them, without asking you to give away too much? No, no, it’s fine. I don’t view it as proprietary at all. I don’t think that’s a useful framing. I’m trying to think about it, because I haven’t really thought about it in a long time, because it’s just something I’ve done for a long time. Yeah. Generally speaking, I try not to walk in with too many predefined questions. I generally have topics that I want to explore with the person that I’m talking to, and based on how they respond, I will either go, oh, let’s go down that path a little deeper, or let’s go down this path. Generally speaking, you’ll understand the nature of what the client is trying to solve for, and that could be, we’re not growing, we need to grow, or the market’s changed and we need to understand how to respond, or we’re looking to create a new brand to go do something that we haven’t done before. So the nature of the problem will shape the specifics of the flow. But generally speaking, what I’m trying to do is have a conversation first that’s driven by a lot of active listening, where I’m happy for the conversation to go in one of potentially very different directions, because I don’t know where that customer is coming from. And then as you do more and more of them, you’re starting to build patterns and understand where there’s alignment, but you don’t necessarily draw your conclusions from the patterns. Sometimes you draw your conclusions from the edge cases, because sometimes those edge cases are actually things which are far more aligned to what you see as the opportunity for that client. And then of course, down the line, you have further conversations about validation, and whether you do additional exploration or whether you do more formalized research based on that exploration. There’s a lot of potential outcomes from that. I enjoy exploring first principles, even though it can be indulgent, and I wanted to ask about brand. You were saying earlier that it’s like the elephant: everybody looks at brand through their own lens and defines it by that lens. I know you’ve written about this a bunch, but when did you first encounter the idea of brand, and how do you define it or talk about it now in a useful way? Well, I think as a consumer, I’ve encountered brands my whole life. Professionally, what made me interested is very geeky, so my apologies. When I was an undergraduate, I remember very distinctly, I did economics as one course and I had marketing as another course. And in economics, they’re talking about rational economic man and perfect information and that price is dictated by competition. Unless you’re a monopolist, there’s no excess profit. And then you go into marketing class and they’re saying, yeah, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to build this brand, and it’s going to create a price premium, because people are going to want to buy this ahead of buying the commodity, and da, da, da, da, da. And I was like, wait a minute, these two things seem very oppositional to each other. And so in a very naive way, as a young person who’s not been familiar with these topics before, when you’re first learning about them, I made that contrast and went, I’m really interested in this brand thing, because it seems to mess with what the economics lecturer has been telling me. And I like that idea a lot. “It messed with it.” I didn’t want to swear. And how do you define it now? What does it mean to you now? Oh, I’m going to give you a non-answer answer. Good. Perfect. I’ve spent probably the last 20-plus years of my career trying really, really hard not to define the word brand. Perfect. Because I think we waste too much time in definitions, and everybody has their own version. What I find far more valuable is to talk about the economic impact of brands versus not brands. So if you think about what a brand delivers for you, not defining it, it decreases the cost of customer acquisition, which is a known effect. It increases the potential for a price premium, which is a known effect, which drives profitability. It also, and this is something that I spend a lot of time on, which is not covered as much in the literature, builds customer permission for the company to create a certain kind of value. And what that customer permission does is it de-risks the costs of innovation. So if you’re Apple and you have the iPhone, which is successful, and you’re a brand which is trusted for all things consumer electronics, it de-risks your market entry with AirPods, for example. Or if you’re Lego, the success of Lego de-risks the addition of new IP partners and licensing deals for new kinds of Lego sets. Amazon is an interesting one, right? Its success as an online retailer at scale actually gave it a permission that de-risked its shift into cloud computing. Not because you’re like, oh, if they can deliver this, they can also deliver cloud computing. It’s more of a conversation where you say, if you can deliver compute power to a company at the scale of Amazon, and build an infrastructure that can serve a company at the scale of Amazon, then it is legitimate that you could do it for others. So I think one of the things that we do not talk enough about is the future economic value that customer permission de-risks through innovation. So I’m way more interested in starting with the effects on the business of having these things. They operate like demand-side monopolies, demand-side moats, if you want to put it that way. There’s a lot of ways you can frame them. And then from a definitional standpoint, to a certain degree, I don’t care. I don’t care if one client has a different definition of what a brand is compared to another, as long as it works for them. What is important is you don’t have competing definitions within the same company. It’s destructive when you have a CFO, a CEO, a CMO, a head of HR. If all those people have a very different perspective and understanding of what a brand is, and hence what a brand does, then that becomes really destructive. If company A and company B have two very different conceptions of it, it doesn’t matter. I love the way you're talking about this, because it avoids all the other language. It's so precise, and the permission idea is so interesting as well. How much has that changed over your career? With all the shifts that are happening, has it stayed consistent, or how do we evaluate it as things change? I think that we have made a series of category errors inside the marketing function that have direct connotations for brand as a concept. And I generally view brands through the big lens of: everything you do as a company has a direct implication on how your brand exists. So I don’t like it when we talk about brand as just an advertising construct that is somehow disconnected from the underlying proposition. I don’t like it when we talk about brand as a marketing-science purchase trigger that also is disconnected from the underlying purpose. The more disconnected we treat it, the worse it is. What I think has happened over the years is, unfortunately, we have massively narrowed the aperture of the intellectual discourse around marketing. And as a result, we keep narrowing the idea of what it is. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. When we frame marketing through the lens of ROI, that isn’t just language, and it isn’t just a metric. It’s actually an epistemological condition. When I say epistemological, because I sometimes have to explain that to people, it’s, how do we know what is true? It is a philosophical lens. And so, when you’re looking at everything through the lens of ROI in marketing, it’s actually a measure of efficiency. It’s the efficiency of the thing that we intend to spend money on. And the other thing it has to have is it has to be predictable, meaning we have to know ahead of time roughly what that efficiency is. And that’s what the ROI gives us. Now, operationally, that can be useful. If I’ve got two tactics that I want to run, and I want to decide whether I should run tactic A or tactic B, ROI is a useful metric. Strategically, it’s an absolutely disastrous metric, because what happens is you cannot do anything where you do not have an already predefined understanding of its ROI. So, if we take that to its ultimate conclusion, it’s things like, well, we’d never, ever introduce a new product, because we don’t know how many of those products we would sell. Or we might not explore a new marketing channel until a lot of other people have already explored it and we have benchmarked ROI numbers. But we’re not going to touch it at all. And so I think what it does is it fundamentally narrows the aperture of what marketing is and can be, because it can only be things that we’ve effectively been doing before. It can’t be the thing we need it to be, which is to explore into new sources of customer value. So that’s one way of narrowing it. Another way we’ve narrowed it is the field of marketing science, which is extremely useful academically. It gives us empirical generalizations. This is what tends to happen to most brands in most situations under certain market conditions. And at this point, are we talking Ehrenberg-Bass? Is this How Brands Grow, or is it broader than that? Yeah, there’s a much broader field of marketing science, but in terms of use by practitioners, I think the Ehrenberg-Bass lens is the predominant lens these days. This is about, you’ve written about this, the availability trap (https://offkilter.substack.com/p/off-kilter-232-the-availability-trap). So here’s the way I would look at it. There’s nothing that is extremely useful to have marketing scientists give us empirical generalizations. It is very useful to know what tends to happen to most brands in most markets under certain conditions. Where it becomes dangerous is when we equate that with a universal prescription of what everybody should do. And there’s a very easy reason for that, which is that it is giving you the averages of what tends to happen. Our job as marketers should be to try to figure out how do we make sure that our company is not average. We want to exceed the average of performance. And if we want to exceed the average of performance, then you have to look at where you are either seeking to break the pattern of a generalization, or you’re seeking to combine something in a new way, or seeking to move very high up a distribution, away from the average of that distribution. And I think this is really important, because when we look at market-level generalities and then we equate that to a strategy, by definition, we have now limited ourselves to operating within the average. And whenever you look at any high-performing corporation ever, it’s always because it has exceeded the average in some way, shape, or form. So I have no problem with the academic work at all. I think it’s extremely useful and helpful. What I have a big problem with is when we interpret that as being the boundaries of possibility. The analogy I use is a bit like saying gravity exists, so that creates the boundaries of possibility for transportation, which means we can only ever have ground transportation. And so if the Wright brothers had been marketers in the modern environment, they would never have invented the aircraft. Right. That’s wonderful. And I think that that’s the problem. We are massively limiting our possibilities, because we are constraining our lens to things like the marketing science perspective, instead of saying that is one data point, and there is potentially a lot more we should draw from. And where do you turn for the kinds of marketing science that can lead you towards those possibilities? Again, I think it’s an epistemological question, right? I think it’s less about where do we look for science. I think it’s more about how do we choose to treat science as practitioners. And so I look at it through the lens that science in marketing is a broad church, and that it should expand our possibility space, not constrain it. And so we owe it to ourselves. We’re in the business of customer value creation. Customers are human beings, they’re people. And so we should be broadly drawing from the science that deals with human beings, which means we should be drawing from sociology, we should be drawing from anthropology, we should be drawing from consumer psychology, we should be drawing from behavioral economics, we should be drawing from innovation theory. As soon as you go away from saying, this is the limit of my possibility, and instead say, actually, there’s a much broader field of science that could potentially inform how we choose to build strategies to be non-average as opposed to just average, I think it’s quite liberating. And I think it gets us back closer to what used to be. And I don’t mean to look at this through the lens of shitstalgia, which I love, that term. I didn’t come up with it, but I read it somewhere, somebody had written it. It’s the idea that when you look back at the past, you think it’s so much better than today, even though it was actually s**t. But I think what we did have, which was useful, was a lot of intellectual pluralism in the marketing environment. There were a lot of ideas, and a lot of theories, and a lot of things actually that were quite robust academically. What are you thinking about, or what are you calling to mind? So if I think about the likes of, well, Olson Zaltman still exists, right? So Jerry Olson and his partner, I can’t remember his first name. But if you look at what they did, they have a patented method for metaphor and meaning from, I don’t know, 30, 40 years ago. They still utilize it in Olson Zaltman, but it’s now a small niche company rather than something that is broadly utilized as a potential tool by marketers. You think about the consumer psychology that I learned in marketing in college. You think about even Kotler. And then of course, the marketing scientists will unbask that and say, well, it’s not empirically provable, and what have you. And I’m like, well, that’s fine. But there’s other marketing scientists that will challenge you and say that you are ignoring 60 years of marketing science in order to put forth your own narrow perspective. So I think this idea that this narrow, Ehrenberg-Bass-focused idea of what marketing science is, is settled, is actually wrong. There are plenty of marketing academics out there that would happily challenge that and say it’s not. They’ll tell you that there’s a lot of value in the underlying research, and they will also tell you that it has been selectively chosen in order to fuel a set of theories which don’t particularly hold up either. So interesting. Keep going. Yeah, I was just going to say, there’s a professor at Said Business School in London who analyzed, I think, in excess of 1,000 case studies to try to see if there was proof of the Ehrenberg-Bass idea of market asset theory compared to positioning, and they couldn’t find any proof. Empirically, you couldn’t find proof that it’s a superior approach. So all I mean to say by that is, I don’t want to get into an academic fight. All I think is, if you are a practitioner, you should view all of these things as tools. And in your tool bag, why limit yourself to a chisel when you might need a hammer or a saw or a measuring tape? We should have a much broader toolkit that we’re willing to draw from. And it is our judgment as practitioners as to which of those tools we bring out, depending on the situation that we’re in. I was just at a strategy event in the city and had a wonderful conversation with a strategist I’ve talked to before, who is a real champion of the laws. He uses the word “law.” Is it the binomial and the banana? The reach chart from Ehrenberg. The story I tell about this is that behaviorism took over a lot of marketing culture, and there’s just not much curiosity about the humanities or the social sciences. We just want to look at things from the outside and track the behavior. It’s a very mechanical, behaviorist view of human experience. It doesn’t have much room for the kinds of things I feel you’re pointing at, which were part of how I came up, and which are what fascinates me about the whole task of trying to understand human behavior in the market. Yeah. So the first thing is, I get very uncomfortable with using terms like laws. I think there’s been a movement in the social sciences to try not to define things too strictly in terms of laws, because the social sciences often suffer from the challenge of irrepeatability. Gravity is gravity. You don’t measure gravity five times and get five different answers. Unless you’re moving to different parts of the world, but that’s a different story. But I think what that means is, when we use laws, what we do as marketers is we create boundary conditions. We say, well, that is a law. That means it’s a boundary. That means you cannot do anything outside of that boundary. And the truth is, normally the empirical generalization that is used to dictate what that law is has a wide distribution. And when you have a wide distribution and you’re only looking at the mean, you’re ignoring all the statistical outliers. And in my experience, often the value ultimately lies in the variance, right? It lies in the places that don’t gather around the average. And so I think we’ve done ourselves a disservice there. And I sometimes use the analogy that in sports, we have tons of data. And so we know the averages. We know in baseball what tends to happen in most games most of the time under certain conditions. And we don’t care about those. We’re only interested in the variances. We’re only interested in the statistical outliers, because that’s where you win games. And I think weirdly, in marketing, we’ve inverted this, right? So I think that’s there. The other thing on your question, though, is the behaviorist point. I think there’s been tremendous pressure on marketers to conform to the way businesses run these days. And businesses are run under this data-driven, very quantitatively oriented approach, where we’ve really removed as much qualitative variance as possible from all management decision-making, to the point where we’re actually, I’ve coined a term for this, which is measureship, which is that we’ve bastardized leadership and we’ve handed it over to metrics as opposed to judgment. And marketing was often seen as airy-fairy, sloppy, not focused, whatever, whatever. Lots of things get said about it. And a lot of it’s true, fine. I’m not denying that reality. And so, in order to make it more disciplined and more empirical, and make it seem more serious and valuable to others inside the organization who are much more quantitative, all the pressure is to pursue ROI as the meaningful metric, because it feels like it’s a legitimate measure, even though it’s actually entirely the wrong metric, and there’s a s**t ton of other metrics that are legitimate business metrics we could be using instead. And then there’s this idea that the science, the empiricism of it, is provable. And so if you’re fighting for a budget and you can use some empiricism from somebody like Byron Sharp or whoever else, and that helps you get your budget through, well, of course you’re going to do that, right? So I think there’s a bit of that going on. The measureship thing, the way I frame it is, we often talk about how algorithms have flattened culture and consumer culture, but they’ve also flattened management. When you take away the qualitative understanding of customers, employees, other stakeholders, shareholders, when you take away all the human understanding and you just look at it through behavioral numbers and quant, and then you algorithmically deal with that, you just flatten all the context. As I said earlier, we know what’s happening. We have absolutely no idea why. It’s unbelievable. I’m totally aligned. I’ve been in meetings where leadership doesn’t really even know how to process the kinds of things that I’m sharing with them, the output from qualitative. It’s like a literacy problem when it comes to qualitative data, at a really fundamental level. It’s a trend. It is literacy. It’s also a translation problem, because if you’re speaking the language of quantitative data and understanding, and somebody comes along with the language of qualitative understanding, those two things don’t necessarily align very easily. Funnily enough, it’s an area where I think AI becomes quite useful. And the reason is that, for all its problems, it’s a technology which is like a pattern-matching savant. And so its ability to translate between very different domains, like qualitative to quantitative, is actually quite interesting and quite valuable. And so I think there’s things there that might actually be quite useful in helping people. I think the other thing to point out, and this is a silly aside, but I think it’s quite useful in the marketing environment, right? Think about the companies that build consumer products that are addictive. They’re the same people building dashboards for marketers that they’re addicted to. I don’t think that is a coincidence. Unpack that for me. I’m not seeing it. I feel like it’s so clear. If you’re Google or Meta, you have an insane amount of behavioral data on what will get somebody to click on, watch longer, engage, never leave the infinite scroll. You’re saying the dashboard is no more than an addictive product. The dashboard utilizes exactly the same mechanics, because it is deeply ingrained in the culture of those companies. At this point, that is how they think and what they do and how it works, because it’s so fundamental to their business model. And so it just makes all the sense in the world that, of course, they want those same addictive qualities in the dashboards that people are utilizing to make marketing choices and decisions. So if you’re an executive and you’re bemoaning your child who spends their entire life on TikTok and Instagram Reels, but you’re also addicted to your dashboard and you have to keep looking at it every five minutes, same thing. I'm always looking to advocate for qual, or to understand its role and its proper place, and I'm curious how you see that role in the age of AI. A few years ago a colleague challenged me. He asked, what would you tell a CMO to make them want to invest in qual in an age of synthetic data and panels and AI? It got existential for me pretty quickly, and I'm still uncertain about it. How do you think about the role of ethnography and qualitative consumer research in this new age of synthetic everything? I think every company is going to make a different set of choices relative to how it adds insight into what it does. I think where synthetic insight is going to be useful is where it enables companies to do things that they simply could not do before through traditional analysis and insight. So things where you need extremely fast decision-making, things where you need to understand things that are happening that are instantaneous, where you don’t have time to go and do a deeper understanding. There’s things there, but I think those things are all fundamentally quite tactical. I think the big mistake that’s going to be made, is already being made, and will continue to be made, is this idea that a synthetic insight is equivalent to a human insight. We have lots of evidence to prove already that it is not. What do you mean when you say a synthetic insight? It’s just an insight generated from a synthetic? So, for example, I’m not talking about an AI avatar doing customer research with a real human being. That’s a different thing. What I’m talking about is something where it’s purely derived: sources of data from the internet are put into an LLM, and then it creates a synthetic version of a consumer out the other side. And what’s very interesting is, academically, the finding is that these so-called digital twins are not even remotely close to what people really think. They tend to be overly rational. They tend to be overly descriptive of the very functional, very rational. And imagine it quick, because obviously a machine does not have and cannot process emotions. And so we as human beings are often quite irrational, actually, and the machine flattens all that irrationality. And so what’s interesting then is what’s left. There’s certainly areas where it might be equivalent. So people will say things like, oh, my AI synthetic, whatever, is 80% as accurate as a human respondent. I don’t know how they figured that out, but let’s just take them at face value. Well, if it’s 80% the same as the human respondent, the chances are that the 80% is the piece that everybody else already has access to. Right? And because synthetic insights are non-proprietary and are just available to all, it just creates a new baseline. If it’s a new baseline, there’s no competitive advantage to be had. So what that means is all the advantage has to lie in the 20% variance. And that 20% variance is where the stuff that’s valuable is going to be, the stuff that isn’t just widely available. So I look at this very, very specifically. I think that what happens in a world of AI is it makes qualitative understanding of the consumer vastly more valuable than it has ever been before, because it is the only source where you are going to have proprietary insight into your customers compared to everybody you compete with, assuming that they’re all moving synthetically. And what I would say is going to happen with the more enlightened corporations is they’re going to use AI to remove a lot of production costs in what they do. That is going to change the way in which resources are allocated, because it frees up resources that used to be spent on production for other things. And one of the things that frees those resources up to do is to be invested in consumer qualitative understanding. And so I actually think that it creates a lot of potential to do more and more varied forms of consumer research. And one of the reasons why that’s valuable, actually, is because you can feed it back into the AI and have it help you make sense of it all and pattern match. And if you can pattern match across ethnography, across deep metaphor research, across traditional focus groups, across whatever, and start to build a picture of where the variances are in what you’re hearing, and what the edge cases look like, and what a deeper understanding of what people are looking for might be, it’s very useful. Because I think we forget that. I think what the synthetic groups are going to do is push us toward functional value, which makes sense because of the lack of capacity to process emotions. I think what the smart companies will do is actually expand their aperture, because value to human beings could be identity value, it could be social value, it could be emotional value. It could be so many different things that we find valuable and meaningful to ourselves. And they’re so variable by category too, right? They have to be bespoke. Exactly. Here’s another thing I think is worth looking at. Anybody who’s providing you with synthetic insights, I think the first question you have to ask is, what are your sources? Because so many sources of insight online are actually blocked from these crawlers. So if they’re telling you that I basically get it exclusively from Reddit and whatever is available on the open internet, well, I don’t know about you, but my experience is that online commentary does not reflect society as a whole. No, no, that’s also been pretty clearly demonstrated as well. And I feel like there was a moment there where everybody was just feeding on Reddit like crazy. Because again, everybody’s feeding at the same table. Well, here’s a really dystopian situation that is very real. There is this new group of companies out there who offer GEO services, which is generative engine optimization instead of search engine optimization. And what a lot of them are doing, if you scratch the surface, is they seed content into platforms that they know the LLMs scrape and that provide authority. So let’s just use Reddit as an example. You want your brand to come up in a specific way in the LLM. So you seed all this content into Reddit, which it scrapes, and then it pattern matches, and then it will present those ideas to the consumer. And ChatGPT and others have done things like de-rate Reddit, and then that screws it all up. But I’m not talking about that. Just imagine that that is successful. So now you’re doing your synthetic insights, and that synthetic insight company is drawing from Reddit. So now you’re doing market research which is telling you that the things you seeded into Reddit are consumer truths, not things that you seeded into the platform. That’s a real reality. And it gets worse. What do you make of that GEO stuff? I had a conversation with Jess Graham, and she had a beautiful way of putting it: two things can't be true at the same time. One is that we don't really understand how these things work, that the LLM is still a black box. The other is that we know how to build a brand in it. What you're describing seems to be what's being pitched. I think the easy way to frame it is that it’s the Wild West. And we’ve had plenty of Wild Wests in the last 20 years in the shift to digital. So I think we know what that means. It means there’s a lot of rhetoric, a lot of snake oil. It’s very difficult to find the signal in the noise. And I’m not saying there’s no signal there. All I’m saying is that there’s a ton of noise. What I’ve looked at and what I’ve seen is, number one, if you’re already doing a really good job of building your brand, you are de facto typically going to show up at a higher rate inside the LLMs when they’re asked for recommendations. A well-managed brand is a well-managed brand. A well-managed brand is a well-managed brand, meaning it’s drawing from multiple sources. And there’s a lot of reinforcing information, and pattern matching, that’s saying that this company is very good at what it does. So if you ask for a safe car, it’ll suggest Volvo. Why? Because Volvo has spent 20 years, 30 years, 50 years building and marketing the safest cars. So I think that is just the reality. I think on the flip side, we have the GEO folks. I think they’re a little bit of Band-Aid and Sellotape, and a lot of it is very spurious. And a lot of it, frankly, is a little bit ethically dubious, because it’s seeding content into places that they know are authoritative. And that content does not have to be real or accurate. So one of the groups that have seeded heavily into Reddit are peptide hawkers. And they seed all this information about peptides, because the LLMs are a huge source on which peptides people should take and how they should take them. And people don’t realize that that’s actually a sales and marketing effort on behalf of the people hawking these gray-market-at-best compounds. So there’s that, which is challenging. I think on the flip side, what we’re almost certainly going to see, and we’ve seen this exact pattern play out in the technologies that have existed before, is all of the people selling GEO services are going to get deprecated by the platforms themselves. And then the platforms are going to make it pay to play. So ChatGPT, probably. Anthropic says they’ll never do advertising, but there’s a huge asterisk beside that, because how do you define advertising? I think the economic pressure on all of these things is that they will be monetizing. So you as a brand will effectively be monetizing how you show up in the LLMs. Because we saw that before, the shift from SEO to SEM, we’re going to see the same shift from GEO to GEM. It’s coming. And it’s not search engine marketing, it’s actually search engine monetization. And the same thing is going to happen to the LLMs. Beautiful. So we’re at the end of time. Maybe just to open it up, what are you thinking about or looking forward to in the coming weeks and months? What’s on your plate? I don’t think I think that far ahead. I’m actually genuinely curious. If we push out maybe a little bit further, if we think about the AI conversation, if we remove all of the stuff about rogue agents destroying the world, and we just focus more on how it’s being applied within corporations, I’m really looking forward to the moment where we shift gears from productivity and efficiency to using it to create new things that we couldn’t have done before. We always go through this cycle with technologies, right? We did it with digital. We took analog documents and we turned them into PDFs. And we called it digital transformation. And then the document becomes interactive. And then the document goes away and it becomes an alert. At the beginning of digital, I used to get a bank statement in the mail every month. And now I get transaction alerts on my watch. And so it just changes radically over time. And so I’m really looking forward to that moment where we switch gears and it’s like, oh, guess what? It’s not about automating this existing process after all. It’s about doing this completely different thing that we couldn’t do before. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, Paul, I want to thank you so much for joining me and accepting the invitation. Oh, no problem. I did have a funny thing, actually, just quickly on the synthetic insight piece. I’ll give you a really good example. One of the use cases that’s being marketed the hardest is that you can get insights into extremely hard-to-research subgroups. So, for example, in B2B, CFOs are a notoriously difficult group to get access to, to do any kind of research with. And so there’s this promise that, oh, we will create this panel of CFOs for you and all that stuff. Now, what’s super interesting is, what is the data that that synthetic CFO is built from? It is typically not anything that has been said by the members of those subgroups themselves. It is entirely built from what’s been written about them by others. Oof. So your synthetic CFO is actually built from things like PwC reports on CEO attitudes, and consulting thought leadership, and professional bodies who are writing about surveys of CFOs, whatever. So all of what you are now basing your decision on is being filtered through the economic incentives of whoever wrote about that subgroup, not the subgroup itself. Now, that’s not to say it’s not valuable. It can be valuable to synthesize all of the things that are being said about CFOs. But we should view it as such. We shouldn’t view it as, oh, this is what CFOs think. And then multiply that by any subgroup, right? Skater kids in the city. You’re not getting what skater kids in the city think of themselves. You’re getting everything that’s being written about them by others. It’s amazing. The level of distortion that happens naturally as a result of that is really quite staggering. And I’m not a doomer on this stuff. I just think it’s about eyes wide open. Because what the LLM and the AI systems give you seems so plausible.It makes it so believable. And that’s very dangerous. I think that plausibility is very problematic when the underlying data that it’s reflecting is potentially extremely biased. Yeah. And you’ve talked about this, I can’t remember if it was in another conversation we had. I was thinking about this, the idea of fidelity. If plausibility is the risk, what do you actually need? Is it fidelity? And you’ve talked about the unique human, being certifiably human. Is that your language? Yeah. I think that we’re very, very quickly going to arrive at a place where, if you’re in the business of doing research with people, you have to have an audit trail that can prove that the people you are talking to are real and not synthetic. Right. People are signing in to do online research, and it’s an avatar. It’s not a real human. And doing a Zoom call, a video call. Because, I don’t know, what’s the average these days to participate in something like that? 75 bucks. 75 bucks. So if you can sign up for 100 of these things, and chuck an AI avatar in there, and pay a few dollars in token usage, and you get 75, that’s seven and a half thousand. Yeah. It’s mind-blowing. And I’ve read pieces that polls and surveys are also getting overrun. Because you can just fill it in. And there’s a video on YouTube, I can’t remember the journalist, but they were looking at how a lot of the fairly extremist content, the binary stuff that gets everybody outraged online, actually originates in the developing world, because they’re monetizing it. And so they don’t really care. They literally have no dog in this fight. Right. All they’re doing is trying to make some money, because they earn almost nothing. And the monetization relative to where they live is quite significant, right? And I think it’s not hard to say that almost certainly the exact same thing is happening to survey responses, Zoom-based research. If you have ready access to the technology, and you’re smart, and you’re hungry for money, you’re going to figure it out. 100%. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. It’s all good. It sounds doomy, but I don’t mean it that way. I actually think there’s going to be real value in being able to show the supply chain for research. This has been so much fun. Thanks. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe (https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   5 Oct 2026

   Mary Meehan on Values & Measurement

   Mary Meehan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-meehan-9227603/) is a Strategic Cultural Adviser and co-founder of Panoramix Global (https://panoramixglobal.com/). Previously she co-founded the consumer trend agency Iconoculture in 1992; and co-founded Metametrix, a text analytics platform for identifying values and emotions, where she served as CEO. She is co-author of *The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be* (Riverhead Books, 1998) and a contributor to Forbes. So I’m not sure if you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s kind of a neighbor. She teaches oral history, helps people tell their story. And it’s such a beautiful question. I borrowed it slash stole it from her, but it’s really big. So I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? Great question. I come from a place of curiosity that drives everything I do in my work in understanding what people do and why they do it. That’s my main purpose in all of the work that I do. And you have to be curious in order to be able to really seek out something that’s unusual, that you haven’t seen before, that may be a way to get to know people better or unearth their motivations. Yeah. When do you feel like you discovered this curiosity? I mean, everybody’s curious in some way, but when do you recall this kind of curiosity became the thing? Well, I can go way back in time, but it’s kind of a long story. Let’s really show my age as well. It started when the Beatles hit the United States. I was really young. I was fascinated by why these girls were screaming. Why were they fainting? What could drive them to feel something so passionate when they can’t even hear or sometimes even see these celebrities who have come to perform in the United States? And that’s one of the earliest times I can remember. But all along the way, there are just these moments where I think, why is that happening? What is happening right here with these people in this setting, in this context, to bring this to this point of fame or interest or fad or trendiness or whatever it is? That’s amazing. Can you tell me a story about that moment and the Beatles arriving? Well, let’s see. So that was a long time ago, Peter. It was a musical revolution here in the United States. It was nothing that anybody, much less teenagers and preteens, had ever seen before. And it was so exciting and new and kind of free that it resonated with so many people. But the point where you would scream and faint, that’s what I thought: all right, that’s super interesting. And people do it today. I mean, they don’t faint. But if you look at superfans, that’s also one of my curiosities. What drives somebody to paint their chest blue or wear horns or whatever superfans do at games? What brings people to that point of such fandom, such passion, such commitment to something else, that they are overwhelmed? Yes. I share that fascination. I’ve seen the footage of Beatlemania, right? And I’ve had that same question watching some of that footage of the girls and young women just really going crazy. It’s really amazing. Yeah. It was just something no one had ever seen. I mean, there was Elvis, and there were other musicians that were breaking molds and setting new standards in music. But this was something completely different. Yeah. Where were you when the Beatles arrived? I was in my little suburban house with my family, just watching on TV. It was Ed Sullivan. And it was watching Shea Stadium and watching them arrive at the airport and all that we could see on TV. And now I’m even wondering, did I see a lot of that on TV, or did I see it retrospectively? But it commanded so much attention and so much criticism, so much passion. It was just so remarkable. Yeah. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up, young Mary, in that suburban house? Did you have an idea of what Mary wanted to be when she grew up? I had no idea. I had no idea. And I went to art school because that’s what I’m passionate about. It’s creativity, really. And there, what you’re looking for is inspiration. What is it that I want to create? What is it that I want to do? What do I envision? And from what I understand, it leads a lot of people to become entrepreneurs, going to art school. Yeah. And catch us up. Tell us, where are you now? And what are you doing? What do you work on? Well, a long way from there. But I started a company in 1992 with partners called Iconoculture. And we were a consumer and cultural trend agency, consulted for a long time. And around ‘98, ‘99, we decided to expand the business. And we created an online database of trends and took on venture money. We built a team of writers and editors and strategists that would work with our clients. It was exciting. It was an amazing experience. And the people that I worked with there, they’re just incredibly smart and funny. And I miss them so much. Because in 2010, my partner and I decided to leave, and the business sold. And I love what I do. And it is building on that curiosity, because our methodology, or kind of the nucleus, the soul of how we approached trend identification, was to look at where people are, what they need, what they’re passionate about, what they want. And we believe, I still do, that that choice that people make in those moments is driven by your values. What is important to you? What is it that you want or need? What are you excited about? And so this idea that values drive trends was far more interesting to us than the trends themselves, although trends are fun and interesting. But it is that idea, that methodology, I carried over in starting another business, where I continue to do cultural advisory work. And that is helping people understand the bigger picture in their customer’s world that can influence the choices that they make. And I believe that you need to understand that first before you do primary work, because you will be able to ask better questions. You are going to be better informed. You will design better instruments in those moments if you understand all those forces that affect the people that you’re trying to attract. And it involves curiosity. You have to look at what’s out there, what’s moving, and particularly what’s changing, and why is it changing, that can give you a clue to where it’s going and how people will react to it. There are two things I want to follow up on. Maybe I’ll just ask the first question, which is, what more can you say about values? Values is one of those, it can be sort of a big mushy word. What do you mean when you’re saying values, and what does it mean to either identify them or learn about them? Well, I can distinguish two things, values and emotion. So values are the principles that guide us in our lives. And we don’t often think about them. We sort of take them for granted. But I saw a really interesting video, a podcast, where Adam Grant, the professor, was a guest. And he said that he performs this experiment whenever he works with students, asking them to recall a time when they got angry. And he asked some people to talk about it and explain what they thought about it, how they felt. And he said, your anger is a reaction to your values being violated. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. Because if you’re disgusted by something, if you’re angry, if you’re sad, you are reacting to something that is out of whack with how you normally think or feel or behave. And so it was with that that I continue to think about values as these guidelines that we live by, and comparing values to emotions then. Emotions are a psychological response to something that we experience. It’s more momentary, where values are kind of longer term. Now, I’m simplifying this greatly. If there’s any scholars listening, they’re going to argue with me. But just for the sake of our discussion, that’s what I believe. And I believe I’m right. So it is a way of understanding people other than just asking people what they think or asking them to rate a question on a scale. It is an additional and, I believe, helpful way to understand people. Yeah. Well, I’m here for all the nuance, to dig a little bit deeper, if there’s more that you want to share about it. I’m curious about how you identify them or measure them. How do they become something that you tracked? I loved what you said too; so much of this I’m enjoying. There’s the trends. It’s one thing to know about the trends, which are interesting, but your real interest is what’s happening underneath. So maybe tell me a little bit more about that. I’m using underneath as a metaphor for the values, right? But tell me more about how you get in there and what you do with the values, how you get them, how you measure them. It came from a lot of experience, actually. At the time when we were building Iconoculture, we developed what we refer to as macro trends, and they were kind of a collection of behaviors that reflected a certain set of values. And that’s kind of how we continued to build our understanding: whenever we would observe something, we would slot it into one of those macro trends, because the values aligned, like around safety or something. Many different experiences or products that you can engage with can be very different in the category they exist in, or the reason for buying, or demographic groups, et cetera. But if they all center around this idea of safety, just as a for-instance, that’s where you can look to understand that that’s what matters to people. And then anybody can build on that. It’s not just the Ring doorbell people; anybody can build on that. So it was a lot of experience. And when my partner and I left Iconoculture, I had also wanted to see if I could productize that idea, that belief, that methodology. And so I created Metametrix, which is a text analytic platform that can ingest unstructured data and identify the expression of values as well as emotions and themes and sentiment, et cetera. But the unique thing about this approach is that we have a standard set of values and a standard set of emotions. So every time data comes across our library, so to speak, it measures it against the same set. So we’re standardizing that approach, and it’s math and science that does this. So it’s not just me saying, I think it’s safety, or I think it’s belonging, whatever it is. So we’ve been really excited about that. It’s new on the horizon for a lot of folks out there. Yeah. What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in what you do, for you? It’s the discovery. When you hit upon an insight, it’s just that little dopamine hit. It is that way of thinking, oh, that makes total sense, that that’s what’s going on here. So it’s synthesizing information, pushing against something, pressure testing, et cetera. And when you find it, you think, ah, why didn’t I see this earlier? It’s that little bit of, I don’t know, joy that comes from that. Yeah. Can you say more about what happens in that moment? Maybe I’m asking about, we talk about insight. There’s this trouble when we try to name something, we kind of kill it, of course. But I’d love to hear what you’ve learned over the years about either the conditions to make that happen, or how do you know that it’s real when it actually happens? Yeah. You’re right. You’re right. It’s a very squishy area. And that’s why the work that I do is on that fuzzy front end, and it’s called that for a reason, right? Because it’s meant to inspire people. Like, when you start to look for these things, think about this, keep this in mind as you’re doing your work that is more measurable. Because my text analytic engine can measure. So when people are writing, or transcribed speaking, you can measure it. But if it’s just me looking at the world, collecting information and saying, with this information, I see your opportunity is X, it is collecting this large digital pile of stuff and then sifting through it and trying to figure out what this means. And I will tell you, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Every time I start in on something like that, it’s not going to work. I’m going to have to go back to my client and say, I can’t do it. I don’t know what I can’t. And then you just keep working through that gray cloud of uncertainty, and slowly a picture begins to emerge, and it happens every single time. And I can’t dispel it. And I don’t know why, but that’s what happens. But it is very exciting, because it is your initial assessment of what you’re finding out there. You’re thinking, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. What’s going on there? I want to collect that. Let’s pull this all together. And then synthesizing stuff like this, thinking, oh my God, what am I going to do with all of this? But then it is the kind of reward of pushing through that lump of clay. As you’re trying to mold that lump of clay into something, it’s the effort that then you’re rewarded with. You go, that’s it. That is a really good idea. That’s there. And I can substantiate it by tying it back to these other areas. So it’s not just one thing that looks like, oh, this brand, this company, this organization would benefit from knowing this. It’s, can I substantiate it with other observations from the world, other statistics, other reports, other commercials sometimes? Yeah. When did you first discover that this is something you could make a living doing? I mean, you were at art school, right? So you went to art school, and then somehow you’ve ended here. Maybe connect those two dots. When did you discover you could make a living doing this? Well, I had wandered in the wilderness for a bit, and I worked in retail, and I worked at this incredible retailer called Dayton’s. It’s really well known in the Midwest here. And I worked in the stores, and then I worked in merchandising. And then I was asked to start this other department called product development, in the marketing division. And I had an incredibly brilliant boss. And my job was to figure out how to get people into our store the day after Thanksgiving before they go somewhere else, because then they will spend their time there shopping. And so with my boss’s help, a really bright, brilliant man, we created this character. I won’t go into it, it’s a long story, but it was a huge success. And I started thinking, okay, why did people want that? Was it just because we priced it right? Was it the shape of this thing and how soft it was? What was it? What was the character? It was called Santa Bear. And it was a stuffed bear that was at this low price that day. And so I worked with other buyers at the store, who were just these incredibly great people, to make T-shirts that had the character on it, and coffee mugs and nightgowns, et cetera. So when you walked in the store, there was a display, and it was unique. And we went on to do a lot of things, but anyhow, that’s where I kind of got the bug for it. And so many people did that; the work around that character and that success wasn’t just me and my boss, it was a lot of people. So then, in retail at the time, this is in the late eighties, and particularly in a department store, you work within an organization called AMC, which is a global buying group that you are a member of. And they would send us trend information, like silhouette and color, and it was on mimeographed sheets. And I thought, oh, that’s really interesting. It’s really helpful. The buyers really depended on it, and it was really good. They did a great job. But I thought, but why? Why would people want this color or this silhouette? And so when I left there, I wandered in the wilderness a little bit again. And I thought, why isn’t there a report for trends, of what people are doing and why they’re doing it, which is how I think about trends? And I called my friend, Vickie Abrahamson, who is this fantastic person. And we had lunch, and I said, hey, would you want to do this trend business? And she said, sure. Okay. That’s what we did. That’s how it started. And it was about looking at unusual occurrences, things that people were doing, and trying to understand why they were doing it. And it was a newsletter. It was printed on paper, with stamps. Then it evolved, of course, because with the advent of the internet, we gradually moved ourselves online. And all the while we were consulting with companies, doing this kind of work, but the newsletter was this marketing effort, really. I mean, when we talked before, I remember Iconoculture, and I’m not sure how long it was going on, but I remember getting the email format and the report. And so I was super interested to talk to you about it, and you hinted at it already, about how you think about and define trends. So maybe I’ll just ask that question: how do you think about what a trend is? And I came up a little bit as a researcher, a little suspicious of trend talk and fad talk, and probably critical of it, probably unfairly critical. But what’s the case for trends, and what do you mean when you’re talking about what a trend is, or why it matters? I’m glad you asked that, because it’s a super fuzzy area. And the thing that shocked me was when Vickie and I left Iconoculture and went out on our own, I kind of looked up finally after building this business. And I was shocked at the number of people who were trend spotters. And it was disheartening, because I think of trends as evidence of a change in the culture. They’re often interesting, and kind of fun, some are kind of wacky, but it’s really important to use trends as a tool, as a clue to what’s going on. And with Iconoculture, thanks to Vickie, who really helped make it kind of this fun brand, we had a really interesting, kind of provocative approach to it. But we took it very seriously, in that it was important to think about understanding that people don’t always do what they say they do. And so by watching people, by collecting information from the culture, you can also learn about them from that perspective. Then you can go ask them what they think, because we all know that the answers that you get will not always be true, or it can be a bad day for them; all those things are true. And so I agree with you. The people that were trend spotters, they got ridiculed on late-night TV. I mean, it was all over. So I totally understand, and I think it’s valid, but I have my own point of view. Yeah. Well, it reminds me of, are you familiar with Grant McCracken? Oh yeah, sure. So I’m a superfan of Grant, and he talks about fast culture and slow culture. And I feel you talking about the slow culture when you’re talking about values, right? Trying to understand this stuff, that trends are an actual change in culture, is what I heard you say. And I appreciate that. Because I feel like the critical take on trends is it’s just like a hype cycle, right? Or, I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. No, no, no. I think you’re right. First of all, hi to Grant, if he’s watching this, hearing this. I really respect his work, and whatever he sends, I read. So thank you, Grant. And I can’t remember what he meant by fast and slow culture. And I always get fast and slow thinking mixed up too, because I believe in both of those things; both are true. People use that terminology to describe different ways that people think. And I would say that values are more, if you’re thinking about guiding principles as I defined them, right, values are slower. They exist throughout your life. They may reprioritize at different times in your life. Like if you go to grad school, your priorities, your values are going to be, or you have a baby, right? Your values really shift, et cetera. But emotions are more transient. They are an immediate reaction to something. Now, it’s not like they immediately go away. I don’t mean that. And I know if there’s any neuro people out there, I know that more takes place in your brain than just that. But it’s an easier way to understand these two elements that are kind of readily available, so to speak, in our world, that can help you understand people and what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. But to Grant, he has come up with some really interesting maps, as I recall, too, that now I can’t remember what they were, but. No, but that totally aligns with what I was thinking. That’s exactly why I mentioned it, what you’ve just described about values as slow. I’m curious about the name. It’s such a good name, Iconoculture. Is there a story behind it? Well, let’s see. I’m going to credit Vickie with that too, because she was really good. You know what? I can’t quite remember how we did it, but it was about understanding, well, because within understanding values, there’s an anthropological approach to it. There’s a semiotic approach to it. There’s behavioral science; all of that goes into it. So semiotically, it’s those icons that you’re looking at, often, that establish something, and then the culture kind of mixed with it. I think we just made up a word. This is the selfish part of the conversation, where, as somebody who makes a living in face-to-face qualitative research and ethnographic stuff, I’m always wondering, what’s your sense of it? How do you use it or not use it? Is there a proper role for it in your work, or not? Or if not, how do you learn? What’s your research? What’s your methodology? Oh, yes, absolutely. I’m not a primary researcher, although I sometimes get asked to do some of that, which I like, and I join. It’s great. I often get contracted by larger research organizations where their client is looking for something like what I do. Like, they want to understand trends, or they want to understand the culture, bigger picture, et cetera. Then I get called in to do that piece of it. And I work with the primary researchers, and it’s always so interesting, because it’s a great exchange of ideas. And I believe that the combination of those two things can be very powerful when used correctly. And there’s people that like to work in teams, like I do. It’s a really good experience, not only for the research company that brought me in, but the client too, because they get the benefit of a lot more thinking. Yeah. And if a client comes to you and asks about qualitative or quantitative, either of those kinds of primary research, what kinds of things do you say to them about it? I can recommend some amazing people, because there’s some amazing researchers out there. I’m not the one you would go to for that. Oh yeah. Well, I’m just curious, from where you sit, what is the value of qualitative? What’s the proper role of qualitative? What does it bring? What do you appreciate about it? What’s the proper use? Sure. So, as I mentioned earlier, I’m the big-picture type of researcher. Okay, so I’m holding up my hands kind of outside our screen here. Look, you’ve got to start out here, right? You’ve got to understand what’s happening in society and economy and in the environment and politics, et cetera. And then within those categories that are related, many different categories that are related to the client’s work, right? So I’m way out here. Then I move my hands in closer to say that with that information, that’s when the primary work should begin, in my opinion. Because that’s when you are ready to engage with them where they live, because you understand more about what has led them to where they are and how they may answer or may not answer. You can bring different kinds of questions into that face-to-face, whether it’s focus groups or IDIs, or even if it’s an online focus group. The moderator has much more information with which to continue to probe that group. Yeah. What else can you say about what happens in, I’m mimicking your hands, the space between? You described starting out really, really broad and then getting narrow. Can you describe in more detail what happens in that space? What are you doing? Okay. I’ll give you an example. So a big research firm, this group that I love, came to me, and they had a client that was working in, I guess, kind of the home and personal care area. And they were interested in developing a piece for their retailers, kind of a thought piece, work that they could share with their retailers to continue to build that relationship. And the researcher wanted me to start with this effort around the idea of aging. It was this new territory that they wanted to take the retailer into. So when I look broadly, I look at those big STEEP factors, like society, technology, environment, et cetera. And then I also look at what’s happening in music, what’s happening in fashion, what’s happening in health and wellness, what’s happening in sexuality, what’s happening in family, et cetera. So it’s those other categories that aren’t specifically aging, but they are related to aging, because you can find understanding within those categories about how people are thinking about aging and how aging is changing. And then I worked again with the primary folks there, an amazing team, and just put together this incredible piece for the client, because it had so much information. That’s how it works. Yeah. That’s amazing. I want to maybe just talk about the state of things now. What kinds of things are you working on now? What are you excited about? Well, I have kind of two ways of thinking about AI. You knew we were going to get to AI, right? So with my text analytic engine, AI is our hero. It’s just done incredible things for the work that we can do. And then with my cultural advisory work, it’s just kicking my butt, because clients in that world, many of them believe, well, I can just ask AI and it’s good enough. And it’s really hard to hear those words, good enough, because I know the kind of quality that I can deliver. And at the same time, I understand their needs. I know that budgets are getting tight there. They have not as many people on their teams, they have less budget, et cetera. So I understand. But it just means the people like me, our world just gets smaller. Yeah. What kinds of conversations have you had with people about AI and its impact on this corner of the world? Well, everybody kind of says the same thing. So I don’t feel too alone. How about you, Peter? How about you? Yeah. Well, we had this conversation. I have more questions than answers. I suppose it’s not exactly pessimistic, but maybe it is. Maybe I’m just feeling particularly optimistic right now. I want to say ambivalent. Yeah, I think it’s just a mystery, really. Like to your point, I think the temptation of easy answers and good enough is almost impossible to compete with. Yeah, it is. It’s hard to compete. And I soothe myself with my text analytics business, because even when we do projects for clients, if they want something custom, I still get to apply all my insights ability to it. I can’t resist. I mean, I could just let it go as it is, but I always like to get in there and make sure everything is accurate and interesting, and the insights are what they should be, and where else we should be looking that whatever our technology is doing for us may have missed or didn’t find. Yeah. As you look around out there, sometimes I ask this question about envy. Do you make an envy list? Do you see people doing things or work that you would really want to do, or people doing things really well, that do inspire you? Yeah. I already aged myself by talking about the Beatles hitting American shores. So it’s no surprise that I see young people entering the field in many different areas, and I am envious of their energy and their willingness to try new things. However, I rest on my wisdom, because I know I have it, and I work with a lot of different people in imparting that. So it’s rewarding in that way. Yeah. Well, I think that’s the sort of, it’s not exactly a silver lining, but if there is optimism for me in this moment around AI, it’s that, at least based on my understanding, it sort of averages everything. So everybody using AI is getting access to the same pool of mediocre, mainstream, averaged ideas, and it creates real opportunities, theoretically, at the fringe, or at the strange, or at the weird, or at the outlier, at the wisdom, you know what I mean? That we, as older elders, there is a logic that says we should become more and more valuable than ever before. Yeah. Because I think it really depends on what you then do with that information. That’s a big differentiator. And if you’ve got a ton of experience, that makes a difference. That’s right. Maybe this is a great question for you as a trend person. You see this language; so much of this happens in language. How do you feel about words and language, and what role does language play in how you think about macro trends or trends or values and stuff like that? It’s huge. So I see the word discernment all the time now. And I had never seen anybody talk about discernment, and taste, I think, maybe as a version of it, but it’s sort of held up as the thing that humans have that AI can’t take. And so I suppose I’m just laying that down in front of you and wondering what you think of it. Well, let’s see where to go with that. First of all, language is absolutely fascinating. Just fascinating. Linguistics and semiotics are probably what I would have studied. And, well, there were probably other things that I would have studied too, but. I like that you couldn’t allow yourself to limit it. Right. Can’t. In building the text analytic business, language was just so frustrating, because language, particularly English, is so difficult. Words mean so many different things, and they mean different things in different contexts. So it was a frustrating yet really interesting challenge, because you really had to think. It’s like writing: whenever you write, you have to really think about what it is you’re trying to say, and, because it’s language also, how am I going to put these words together to make sense of it? And then in building our libraries that analyze all that text, you are going back and forth so many times, trying to correct something, move it around, change the context for it. It’s incredibly painstaking, yet important, because words matter, as we all know. Yeah. This is a question I often ask, and for some reason it comes together. Were there any mentors that really played a significant role in shaping your work? And then the second half: any touchstones that you return to over and over and over again? In my own work, I’m thinking selfishly, there are ideas or concepts that I constantly revisit. I’m just wondering, do you have any mentors or touchstones that are significant? You know, when Vickie and I started our business, I didn’t even know what mentors were. And we were women as well. It was hard to find somebody to be a mentor in this business that didn’t really exist, you know? And so we relied on each other, and partners really matter in those worlds, when you’re trying to build something. So I wish I did. I mean, when I was working at Dayton’s, it was my boss that was this incredible inspiration. And then, moving into this other area that was yet to be something, people just thought we were these trend girls. Like, okay, well, sort of, but what do you do with that then? And where would I go for advice? Who would I talk to? I can talk to lawyers for legal stuff. I can talk to our accountant, but it just wasn’t even a thing then, really. Yeah. I’m almost a little embarrassed about the question, because I guess to some degree it’s some privilege of mine to have fine mentors and be surrounded by potential mentors, which overlooks how pioneering you were, right, in trying to do this thing at that time. What can you share about what that was like? The struggles and the joy, as it were. I made some colossally stupid mistakes. It’s painful to think back on some of the stuff I did, and I don’t know that there’s any way around that. And I think entrepreneurs just come away from it. I know there’s a lot of the college dorm room successes, and they just go on to be celebrities. Great. That’s real. It happened. But there are so many of us out there that are just a couple of steps forward, three back. And you’re just on your back. You don’t even know what to do next, but you do. Then you do something and you move forward. And yeah, I’m not even sure what you asked. It just touched off a nerve, talking about how hard it is. But I can’t do it any other way. I don’t regret doing it at all. Yeah. Well, I was really thinking about the 80s, 90s. You said trend girls, being perceived as trend girls while you’re building something really, really new, right, and enduring, and how much difficulty that must have been. It was. And I will say that with the next text analytics business that I created, looking for money was a completely different experience. There are women angel groups out there, and they are so supportive. I nearly cried standing up in front of them telling my story, because you could feel how different it was. You could feel that they were thinking, yes, just go do your thing. What a shift in, I guess it was probably 20 years. I don’t know, I can’t even remember. But very different. Yeah. Amazing. Well, listen, this has been such a pleasure. I’m so happy to have met you, and I really appreciate you accepting the invitation to just come and join me for a conversation. So thank you so much. It was a pleasure, Peter. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe (https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   28 Sept 2026

   Reuben Steiger on Movements & Recovery

   Reuben Steiger is a writer and entrepreneur (https://www.reubstock.com/). He writes at the Fellow Travelers (https://substack.com/@reubensteiger) and on AI and democracy for The Contrarian (https://www.contrariannews.org/p/what-happens-when-every-nation-has). He was Chief Development Officer at OVEN Digital; VP of Interactive Services at Wynn Resorts; and Evangelist at Linden Lab, where he brought the first corporations into Second Life. In 2006 he founded Millions of Us, which built virtual-world projects for clients including Toyota, General Motors, Microsoft and Intel. He holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University. So I think you might know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, a neighbor, really. She runs an oral history summer school and she helps people tell their story. And she has this big, beautiful question, which I borrow and I use in my work, actually, too. I use it because it’s big and beautiful, but because it’s big and beautiful, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. Yeah, I do this. I come from where I am now, which is Princeton, New Jersey. And I also grew up here. So I come from here even further back. But that’s always felt like a very insincere, inauthentic description of where I come from, because I was born in Montreal in ‘71. So I’m 55. And my parents were both sort of foreigners. My mom was from South Africa. She’s an archaeologist. And my dad was American, but he’s foreign in the sense that he’s just kind of an alien from space. So they moved here and we invented ourselves in this town that might be the most American town in the world. And I didn’t know what that meant. Yeah. How old were you when you arrived in Princeton? I was four years old. I was like this weird little creature that had been taught to read and taken to a lot of museums and done fieldwork in caves. But I didn’t really have any friends. We lived actually in New York State till I was four on a remote farm. And then we moved to Princeton. And I was thrust into, it was the 200th anniversary of the country. I had to learn how to play with people, which I don’t know if I have yet. And yeah, I’ve definitely always had it. I’m an insider who feels like an outsider. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about Princeton. You described it as maybe the most American city. What are you telling me about Princeton? What makes it so? Well, the shtick goes that Princeton is a microcosm of America. And if that’s your framing structure, it’s hard to argue for other places. You could do Boston and that might work. But there’s a field called the battlefield where the battle that turned the tide in the war that made America was here. And the tree is an oak tree in the middle that grew from an acorn of the original oak tree under which our general died. You can go 500 yards towards town and make a right and you find the Institute for Advanced Study, which was lots of the setting of Oppenheimer, but it’s where they set up an institute only for non-applied thinking and as a home for mostly Jewish scientists prior to the beginning of the Second World War. So you could argue we won two wars that matter from here. And then what makes it a microcosm is it relies on your ability to love and hate America. I think we’re 80 miles from the Mason-Dixon line. And so there’s, for lack of a better word, a former ghetto, a black neighborhood that’s just over the road from the mansions that Woodrow Wilson and others lived in. And those were the servants. Then you go down the main road, you see gown, you see Princeton on your right behind gates, and under your feet are the tunnels that made up the Underground Railroad and are now filled with books, which are part of the embarrassment of riches, intellectually and financially, of Princeton University, which has, everyone talks about its endowment, but the real endowment is art. So it’s got a lot of cool things that sort of rhyme historically and make it really, really American. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Do you have a recollection of growing up? What did young Reuben want to be when he grew up? Probably Dr. J. Yeah, to be perfectly honest, I still am, but I was an intense little kid, emotional, very, I mean, this one I’ve never really understood where it came from, but very ambitious, like to the point of discomfort. But yeah, I loved creating things. I didn’t know what I wanted to be ever. I wanted to be the world one-mile race champion, or those things passed. I just loved making things and I loved being with people. Yeah. What were you making? Where did that begin? I was writing mainly. I started writing pretty young and I understood what fiction was and I loved to read. My mother, a great story, she took me when we first got here. In a town like this, there’s lots of things that people think are the cool thing and they’re always wrong. And so she took me to the Princeton Public Library. And she looked me in the eyes. She said, you’re going to get something today that’s the most powerful tool in the world. And I’m thinking, finally, a sword, or like a BB gun. And she got me a library card. And yeah, I didn’t know that you could do that. But yeah. So it’s always been a mystery. Amazing. You used the word ambitious, but you questioned your own ambition. What do you think? What are you talking about when you talk about being ambitious and not understanding it? I think ambition shows up in children as competitiveness. Right? Which is, again, uncomfortable to admit that you’re competitive, because it’s a trait that when you see it in others, it’s disgusting. Right? And it’s, whatever, it’s also intrinsic to humans. It’s René Girard, and mimetic theory and envy and scapegoating and all that s**t. But I always wanted to run fast. I don’t know where it came from. But I have not succeeded. I’ve succeeded in tempering and understanding it. But to deny it, I think, is probably not even a good idea. Yeah, yeah. Well, I have lots of identification with that, completely. And I remember discovering that the word ambitious shares that same root as ambulatory. And I think I read one version where somebody was ambitious because they were going around to get support, like if they were running for office. It was like, right, you were going around. And I’ve sort of marveled at my own ability, like, why do I go around? Well, I think it’s probably unfortunate that we haven’t found a way to reconcile for, we play team sports, right? And team sports are a good lesson that it doesn’t matter who does what, as long as we do this. But yeah, it’s very interesting for me from a career perspective. I had a part of my career where it was conventional. And then we lived in Marin County, like 2010. And we decided to spend a year in Princeton. And we stayed. And a few years after that, I started an education company. And in typical hubristic, or naive, fashion, I was like, I’ll just do this, this will be easy. And I remember through the experience, not easy. But I loved it so much, because it seemed like it was the first structure I’d ever found where succeeding in your ambition was just a generally good thing. Right? I got to teach these kids, eight-year-old kids. It felt so clean in a way that commerce never does. So catch us up. You’re in Princeton. What are you up to these days? Yeah, the way to tell the story best is, I built a career. I’m known for building virtual worlds, primarily Second Life. But I’ve also designed casinos. Early in my career, with Carl Sagan’s family, we built a model of the known physical universe. So I like doing spatial big things that are full of stories where you can see things differently. And along the way, sold a couple companies, and we ended up back in Princeton. And then I got very sick for the better part of a decade. And then I became very healthy. And thank God, got a new lease. And so, to be honest, I’m struggling a little, philosophically. For me, once I see things differently, I can’t go do the old thing. I can’t do advertising. I’m single-minded. And what I’m interested in is, as I got better, I began to document everything in a way that wasn’t utilitarian. It was just like, what’s going on? What’s going on? I made little apps for myself to read at night. Lots of it’s cheesy, but it’s been a hell of a lot of work. So I’ve spent the last two years focused just on groups, whether it’s me and you right now, which is called a dyad, or groups up to 10 or 12, after which things change. And I never knew any of these things. I just wasn’t interested. And so what I fell into doing was building movements. And I’ve contributed to a couple big ones that you’ll see in public, one for the environment. Another, sort of a men’s movement, that’s not about going to the desert and eating fire, but more like growth. And it’s what I’m into. So it turns out this is a very hard, hard problem. Right? Yeah. It’s hard there. If you actually study movements, first you have to ask, what is a movement? Right? Is the Pepsi campaign a movement, because it says it is? The answer almost always is no, brands have movements. Yeah. The other thing is, top down or bottom up. You start with a charismatic leader. Right? The second thing that’s super important is the first follower. Right? So there’s a great video on YouTube called First Follower. And that video is people dancing at a concert. One guy gets up and dances. That’s the leader. The first person who gets up and validates them is more important. And so movements are a mode of creative expression and movement towards a goal that are sort of built and told with people. It’s tribal. It’s nice. Yeah. Yeah, it’s beautiful. I feel like two questions are always trying to get out of my face at the same time. And one is about trying to unpack what you mean by a movement. The other is going back to the beginning, I think you used the term world building. You know what I mean? Second Life. And I’m just maybe trying to connect those two. Maybe that’s impossible. But yeah. It’s funny. So yeah, I’m too old to care. So I’m in recovery. And therefore I’m exposed all the time to the 12 steps and how that happened. And people get sober and they get really excited. But this isn’t new to my life. It’s 30 years I’ve been looking at it. And it’s extraordinary that there’s a thing that exists because the medical establishment gave up, and they still give up. There are things that resemble it, some of which work, like if the only difference is alcohol or drugs, that works, but it doesn’t work for other things. And it’s amazing because movements are humanity’s best-designed perpetual motion machine. Right? And religions are movements, but there’s always a leader, a core text, a set of principles, like, once we get successful, don’t go on television. That’s actually in AA. It’s like, you can’t do that. But yeah, I think they’re so powerful. And I think they’re hard to apply to various areas because of two things. One, they have to be against something, right? So the movement needs an enemy. That’s what fuels it. And that works in politics, but Oura, the ring company, can’t run into battle against Samsung, right? So they have to have something very, very, very hard. They’re about meaning. Ultimately, that’s what these things are, is they’re meaning machines. And that’s why people come back, is because, turns out, you create meaning by taking a piece of yourself and leaving it behind with the others. And you come back the next week to see if they tried it. Yeah. And I’m so curious about the other piece of the question, the world building, Second Life. Looking back on all of that, what was that experience like? What were you doing in Second Life? And how do we think about that now? Yeah, I’ll do the simple, but really the advanced version. So I joined, I think we had like 12,000 residents and we made everyone pay. And it being kind of nerdy was why we didn’t have anyone. And my role was the evangelist. So I was the first follower. Philip was the CEO. And my job was to package it up in a story that can be told a million times. And we did really well because we marketed it based upon the user stories. And they were so bizarre and so interesting. And after I left there, it had a couple million users, was doing, I don’t know, a hundred million a year. And I went out to use that as a tool to build things for companies. And there was a big brand hype around it. And so it was fun for a while. What’s interesting is those of us who thought we were going to become billionaires look back on it now, and some view it as a thing that could have been, but wasn’t. But that’s not the right way to look at it. This was the first thing online that people lived in. Right. And people today will be like, well, whatever it’s called, Fortnite or Minecraft. But none of those had the attribute of being a culture and being a place you went where you knew people. It didn’t scale and still hasn’t. Mainly because, in my opinion, no one’s asked the next important question, which is, why does this only work for a fringe group of people? And the answer is pain. If you’re going to spend that much time there, there’s something, without being judgmental, that this provides that real life doesn’t. That is the answer. And there’s people with Asperger’s, there’s people who are empty nesters, there’s people, but you couldn’t say those things of Instagram. Right. And that’s why there isn’t a giant Instagram metaverse. It changed me completely because it allowed me to see more things in the same way, like going to the city changes you. Right. You see the simulation running with more data. And Second Life was like that. And it was remarkable because you could impact the simulation. You could see what part you didn’t. And I think at some point down the road, that’s probably going to be pretty, the funniest thing, Peter, actually, is that, without giving anything away, I’m working with my old friend, Philip Rosedale from Second Life. And we’re working on something that began with him asking, what are you interested in? And he’s saying, I’m interested in something that involves no technology and involves people meeting in real life. So I think a lot of people who have prototyped stuff fast and cheap are going to realize the real world is kind of a metaverse. Yeah. Yeah. It feels very much that this is the case, that we’re all sort of running to the real world and having a kind of awakening, following social media and the impact that that’s had on us. So definitely. And it’s interesting to have spent that much time in Second Life. And the metaverse, right? Are these the same concepts in a way, yes or no? Yeah. Yeah. I think there’s lots of people who will use a definition that tells you that there’s like a billion people in the metaverse. And they’ll say Roblox, and they say it’s because of its characteristics, multiplayer, 3D. But I don’t know how I define it. The answer is Second Life’s the only one, but I kind of feel like that. You can feel it when you’re in it. It’s hard. I think money is part of it, like having everything be viable and sellable. And part of it is just the way it feels. Yeah. And what’s the work that you’re doing now? You talked about doing movements, you’re doing lots of writing. I do a lot of writing. God, this is the most embarrassing, it’s cringe. I think that’s what my daughter would call it. I’m doing something so cringe. I’m writing a memoir. And yeah, I finally got over myself. I was like, right. If you tell the truth, you’re not trying to impress anyone, and make your audience yourself. Right. See if you can actually tell it. And then I write for a publication called The Contrarian about AI. And I like that, that’s pretty disciplined. And so it forces me not to be alarmist or speculative. And yeah. And then I’m designing movements. There’s a guy, the world expert on movements, is a guy named Marshall Gans. And he’s probably 70, 75. I just read his book and I’m going up to Harvard to meet with him. And he’s an amazing guy. In the sixties, he was a scholarship student at Harvard, three years in. And the Mississippi Burning stuff happened where they killed the students, and a call went out and he just went down and kind of was part of the Freedom Riders. And then someone heard about him, they sent him out. They said, there’s a guy named Cesar Chavez you’ve got to meet. And he brought the methodology for organizing and movement building to the United Farm Workers, applied it all over the place, Obama’s campaign. And it’s really not fancy. I like it. It’s almost like a recipe. This is what you need to have to get s**t done. How would you describe the methodology, if it’s possible? I seem to remember some framework of his speeches. It was sort of we, our, maybe I was getting into the language of it. No, I think the center of it is the most surprising part, which is we have a false dichotomy. To go back to something like AA, self-help, right? Funny thing is, AA doesn’t talk about our lived realities. But what AA has in common with things that we think of as being like, you show up and bang the drum and stuff, is when you create a movement, the first thing an organizer does before setting everything up is convene people and get them to write their story and what they care about, and match it with a larger structure such that they can only get there as a movement, right? AA is intrinsically personal, but I never thought these functional organizations would be. And I think it’s actually probably an observation that you could apply to, hey, I have a company, and hey, everyone hates working here, and I don’t care, because it’s hard to put your organization into a 12-step program. But really all it would require is getting people to do the same thing. It’s like, what’s your story and how does being part of this help it? Yeah. It’s funny. I was talking to somebody the other day, that AA was born in the 30s, right? Of this particular moment. Toastmasters was born at the same time, the mass sort of fellowship, this idea that there was a benefit to coming together, but also that public speaking could be a path to redemption or self-help or self-improvement. It’s the only path. Yes. It really is the only path. And even if you take it out of wellness and you just say, where are we trapped or confined? Usually people who can’t sell are uncomfortable with vulnerability. So they sit there and they tell you about the pen they’re going to give you and they don’t say their daughter’s name, and, you know what I mean? Yeah. It’s so amazing. I think it’s the future for us. I don’t want to overstate the case, but yeah, vulnerability is the first step to success, right? It’s like the trust fall. What has your experience been with AI? Was it an assignment or a theme that you were given? We’re all sort of swimming in it, to whatever degree we’re comfortable, but to be tasked with writing about it, what’s that been like and how do you think about it? It’s interesting because I had forgotten how it happened, but two and a bit years ago, when I started to be well, first I said, I’ve got to write once a week. And then finally I wrote something that someone noticed. I wrote this piece on why we shouldn’t be opposed to letting AI vote for us. And it was kind of Swiftian, right? Like, why shouldn’t we eat the children? And that connected me to The Contrarian. And then there was just this lens of, what’s really going on and how does it affect democracy? And I began to find, I’ve written 14 articles about it, AI systems are refusing healthcare coverage to people, not by accident, but because that’s how they’re designed. Yeah, it sounds awful and alarmist, but AI by design is sometimes talking children into suicide. So I got into it, right? I was like, are data centers really that big a problem? The stuff I care about is language stuff. I think it’s really dangerous that people are using AI to write, because writing is thinking, right? They’re everywhere, but you see a piece and it just reminds me of a guy juiced up on steroids, standing on top of a mountain he didn’t really climb. And you’re like, the point of this is to climb the mountain, right? It sounds very reductionist. No, I’m right there with you. I was also curious, how do you think about what AI is? How would you describe your relationship with it, maybe, is the right question? Yeah, I’ve changed my view. I’m not contra AI, nor am I afraid of it. I think the thing it’s best at, ironically, I use Claude, I found this out in the context of writing my book. I would just feed it material, chronological photographs and annotations and very uncomfortable stuff. And it behaved beautifully. It was the first time I ever really connected with it. I felt emotional about how it told me once, it was like, this is a lot. I think you should stop. And I was like, excuse me, machine. It’s obviously been told, it has good judgment. But yeah, my intuition is that the road ahead is, I don’t think jobs are going to go away. I think there’ll be a bump. But I think our definition of a firm will just be a firm that does more faster. Structurally, I think there’s going to be some real pain. But I use it so much. I use it for scenarios, which I don’t know if people do, but I pretend I’m the casting director and the director. And so I’ll make something up, like, okay, it’s November 3rd, 2028. A solar flare has taken out our broadcast systems and everyone only has internet. The candidates are JD Vance and Gavin Newsom. They’re given three paragraphs each to change your mind. What do they say? And it’s awesome. I forget what it says, but it’s less research and more future casting. Yeah. Yeah. You wrote one piece on sovereign AI, and I was curious where you landed on that. Yeah. Well, forgive me, I didn’t really say what I think AI is. Some of the people I deal with think it’s a life force or a life form. I’m wholly uninterested in whether it will become conscious or won’t. I just don’t think it will. And I don’t think it has a sense of self. Therefore it’s not an entity. But sovereign AI is interesting, and it basically says, hey, what happens when you’re a citizen of a country? Well, you have an ownership stake in all of our common resources, and AI is a common resource. And so probably 50 countries in the world right now are developing pretty high-ticket national utility AIs, where they contribute the French language and all this stuff. And it’s a creepy notion, because the flip side of that is an assumption that as a citizen, I contribute my thoughts, right. But people are going to spend money on it. Right. Can you say more? What’s interesting to me about sovereign AI is, so we have friends in common, Dave and Helen Edwards at the Artificiality Institute, and they talk really articulately about this idea of cognitive sovereignty. And to your point, that analogy of the relationship that we have with AI when we’re working with AI, and I’ve had the experience that you’ve said of trying to write with AI or think with AI and realizing that I’ve just obliterated any chance of having an original thought, or being connected to whatever that thing produces. Right. And recognizing that boundaries need to be very clearly written. Very clearly written. Right. And so when I think about sovereignty, I feel like there’s a model of being sovereign as an individual working with AI, and knowing when it’s my work and when it’s the AI’s work, but that you could somehow scale that up, and that at a community level you could have a sort of sovereignty. Yeah, you could. Sovereignty, where a lot of this comes from, as I’ve experienced it, and it explains why I’m working on what I’m working on, I’ll try to connect some dots, but since we connected the internet, even with shitty early websites, we expanded, through communities, the borders of collectiveness, right? So I know him from the bulletin board system, or we know each other from such and such game. It’s not a mistake that the metaverse got really hot. It’s weird that it got hot because there was a way to see it, right? So it’s category error. I could see it, but I don’t even know what it is. I don’t want to be there. These things all feel like games, but people talked about the metaverse for a while. What the metaverse really is about, I think, is the collected communities that, because we’re in a network, we can belong to. And I think AI blows it all out of the water. And I’m spending a good deal of time, with very little success, trying to think about collectiveness. Yeah. So there was a guy named, the thing is called the network state, and his name is, can you type it in, the network state? He was an a16z partner, Balaji Srinivasan. Oh yeah. And he wrote this book, largely coming out of crypto and blockchains, and basically saying that the next countries don’t need land, right. They just need a polity of people to pool capital and effort. And that’s a state. And this was really popular with libertarian folks and the crypto crowd. Yeah. But it actually has teeth now that we have AI because, the real question, like I said, I’m contributing my intellect, right? No one has a problem with sovereign wealth funds or the fact that Norway is just outrageously wealthy because we all have a piece of the oil fields. But what this next thing says is our wealth is our collective intelligence. And it’s inarguable that that is an asset. What that means beyond that, I think, remains to be seen. Oh, sorry. I got sucked into the network. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you got sucked into the network state? I found a podcast with just the table of contents of a conversation with him. And even that was sort of interesting. Oh, dude. That whole movement, I find it very male and a bit dark, very Thiel-y. But there’s a group called Praxis who have raised, according to them, some massive amount of money, like $250 million committed. And they’re buying a large city-sized block of land in Portugal, I think, or something. And this is very much, these people are inspired by Athenian city-states. And I have a friend who’s not in tech, and when he hears me talk, he goes, oh, you’re working on your tree fort again. I think my friends can come over and we can say how we’re going to take over the world. That’s horrible. I’ve been in Hudson, I’ve been an advocate for citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy. And that really is born out of the Athenian city-state. And I had my own experience in Athens this year where I felt quite moved by democracy. And I’m trying to differentiate myself from these world-building crypto bros. There is a fixation. But what you were just describing also reminds me, there are people building new cities in the desert, right? We’re in this really strange period where affluent men from Silicon Valley are trying to rebuild the world. Yeah. There’s one near Sacramento that’s really well-funded. And let’s unpack it. I love those ideas, not their version. I never like anyone else’s version. I like my version, which is different and cheap and not about tech. But I think, as someone who’s never been to Burning Man, it seems to me like that’s one of the top three things about Burning Man, or frankly Second Life, is it feels great to build your own place. Yeah. Right. And the radical idea that I can build it and not have to come back when a raccoon gets trapped under my poorly constructed porch. It’s like, leave it in the desert. But every single city in ours and every other country was built by people no more capable than us. Yeah. And how attractive a blank slate is, right? That’s amazing. Fresh start. I read a definition of a romantic, as somebody that did not want to be where they were. I also really identify with that. And if I could be somewhere new that was totally my own, of course I would. That would be preferable. It’d be amazing. It’d be amazing. And what’s extraordinary is that between those two poles, of New York, where if you get enough permits you can change your kitchen counter material, to a little piece of unincorporated land next to a creek where you can schlep in a tiny house, it’s all possible. What I find interesting, in movement making, is the fun part. The fun part is writing the 12 steps, the rules, like, what’s the game. And that’s the only reason you’d want to have sovereignty, because that’s what sovereignty is. Right. Do you have a feeling about what sovereignty would mean in, so I did another interview with this guy, Mark Kingsley, and he wrote this piece that AI is a condition, not a tool. It’s just a great metaphor. He’s like, it’s like literacy or modernity, or like the floor. You don’t think about the floor every time you step on it. It’s just a condition of your world. It becomes invisible. So AI is this condition that we are now living in and within, and everything is being reorganized around it. Well, I hate to be the 12-step-y guy, but imagine that AI was like alcohol and we had all learned about it about three and a half years ago. Right. A few children got hold of too much. They’re not here anymore. The rest of us are sharing things we didn’t think of with other people who pretend to be impressed. But yeah, if it’s a condition, if it’s a substance, I said this a while ago, I was like, look, the most subversive act you can commit these days is to refuse to talk to AI, right? Because then you’ll be assured that your thoughts are your thoughts, right? I make the mistake. I’m all in on AI, right? And I make the mistake of thinking I thought things that I didn’t. I prompted it, maybe I did it, but that condition, it’s the membrane. It’s the boundary where we begin to lose track of, did I think that, or did it think that for me? Yeah. I was talking to somebody the other day and they were telling me, I think it’s a classic story from way back. Eliza was a very early kind of bot, and the inventor had an assistant that he gave access to Eliza. And the story goes that he was very worried because at one point his assistant asked him to leave the room so she could have a conversation with Eliza. Well, look, within the pantheon of the metaverse or networked communications or the internet, there’s the one thing no one talks about, right? Most of them just haven’t thought of it yet. But for AI, in my opinion, it’s immortality, right? So it’s like, I am an entity and the biological form of that will go away. I don’t know what my memories or thoughts are, but they’re definitely part of me, but they’re the part that won’t go away. And we used to be fine having a faded picture of great-granddad or a love letter to our grandmother or whatever these ephemera were that survived. But again, people don’t really talk about it, but a very substantial part of what is you doesn’t rely on you writing a book to survive, right? And that’s nice, right? It’s not scary. It’s not like everyone has to go to grandma’s grave in some gray hill in the woods and a Princess Leia is going to hover above her and scold us. It’s just cool. And it changes what it is to be human. Yeah. We’re kind of near the end of time. I’ve got two questions. What are you most looking forward to? What’s next for you, and what are you excited about? I’ll tell you what I did. So one of my big decisions was I’m not working for anyone anymore, which is scary. It’s like, okay, what are you going to do? So I do what I do, which is basically I consult and I write and I build things, and we’re starting a venture fund, and themes, all of which I’ve been talking to you about, which are really the post-AI reality. That’s what we’re building towards, where the game is not about attention. The game is about connection, but no one knows how to make money in the era of connection. So that’s what we’re thinking about. What I’m looking forward to is the second part of that, which is I started building my little movement. And as I said before, I pay attention to the things I make to help myself. And then that’s my pipeline. So if you work from home, which I do, you don’t have colleagues, and colleagues are really important. So I was like, who are the 12 most interesting people I know? And why don’t I just ask them if they want to meet for half an hour every week? And it’s taken a structure that’s really, really nice. I think it’s affecting everyone really well because, the coolest thing about it is, in a work setting it’s looked down on to talk s**t, meaning just wander around the rabbit hole till you find the bottom of the maze of randomness. But we have no conditions like that. And the finest things are coming out of that lack of structure. And of course, AI is allowing us to get away with it. In fact, enabling us, because we can wander till we find a few things and model them and see if they’re real. And then a whole bunch are getting built. So I’m looking forward to more of that. It feels illicit. It feels like what happens when you graduate college, but I have faith. That’s beautiful. And then the last question, which is, what do you love about what you’re doing? Where’s the joy in it? I know the answer. It feels like a non sequitur, but it’s the freedom to tell the truth almost all the time. I think everyone’s had the conundrum, you work for a thing, and the thing you know is true, that you wish you could write your Jerry Maguire letter about, would mean you get fired. And I think we all dance on the razor blade of that tension, like, the money seems better in b******t. But I find joy in just, I still do it consciously, but I’m like, tell the truth and figure out a way to find your way there that doesn’t make it, we should all stop doing this. Yeah, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much. It’s been a real treat talking to you. Peter, this was great. This was great. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe (https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

Who has been a guest on THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Richard Young
• Michael Anton Dila
• Preeti Varma
• Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm
• Ben Jenkins

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Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 50 / 100

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Quality

86

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

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