THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Peter Spear
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A weekly conversation between Peter Spear and people he finds fascinating working in and with THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com

  1. 2D AGO

    Lucy Neiland on Invisibility & Ethnography

    Hi all, I sent out the wrong transcript this morning. My apologies. Here is the actual conversation. Thank you for your patience, and for being here in the first place. Peter Lucy Neiland is a Business Anthropologist at Ipsos UK and a founding member of the Ipsos Ethnography Centre of Excellence. She previously led ethnographic research at Serco ExperienceLab and worked at Ethnographic Research, Inc. in Kansas City. She holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her published work includes "Hysterical Health: Unpicking the cultural belief's that shape women's healthcare" and "From Purity to Power: The wellness cultural operating system." And I think you know this, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a beautiful question, I borrow it, but it’s so big, 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 really any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? It’s a really nice question, it is, and I’m not sure I the being in total control. I’ll give it a go. Because I am used to asking the questions and not answering them. So bear with me. So I feel the question is two parts. For me, really, there’s people and there’s place. And I think, in terms of people, I’m from, I don’t know, I’ve always felt my family were a little bit crazy. So there’s, my mum is, she’s Polish Jewish heritage. So second generation, I think her family, through, they flew in contraband during the Second World War. And we’re sort of East End Jewish gangsters, as far as I can tell. And then on the other side, my dad is Irish Catholic. And they weren’t parented well. My mum, I think she was, she had to leave home and live with her relatives, because she was too much, her mum said. And then my dad, he was put into a home and then taken out again. And as a long roundabout way of saying, my parents are really nice. They’re both still alive, I’m lucky. But they are, they never knew how to parent. And so I always felt a bit feral. And a bit, yeah, I think, and also on top of that, they’re both artists. So they take up a lot of space with their worldviews and their noise. And, and it’s made me quite an observer of people, I think, watching their, their craziness. Yeah. And where were you? Where was this all? So I grew up in South London, in Clapham. So 70s and 80s is really multicultural, nice, lots of nice things about it. But when I was there, at that time, there was no national curriculum at school. And it adds to my sense, I had really feral childhood, but, maybe in my mind, but sometimes my boss says, I’m not trying hard enough with spreadsheets or numbers. And I don’t think he understands that I probably did maths, for half an hour, once every two weeks, there wasn’t, it’s not, it’s no joke. But it was also there was a lot of good things about it. But it was also a really violent place back then. And it felt very polarised in that sense. And I was mugged and attacked a few times, as was my dad and my sister. And it just felt, it felt a bit of a, I don’t know, a rough era in London. And I’m now I’m in Tooting, which I really, but I’m hoping we don’t slide back into 80s London, but I don’t think we will. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? I don’t know, not really. I do. I do remember saying to my mum, I’ve got to work outside, I can’t sit still. I can’t, I need to be moving around. I might have to make my desk into a standing desk in a minute, because I will need to stand up. I’m not very good at staying still for a long period of time. But yeah, I remember my, my mum, we had a school play at primary school, and it was the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Do you know that one? And I had to be a rat. And I had these brown itchy tights. And my parents were watching. And they were saying to each other, who is that kid on stage that just can’t sit still, jumping around? Really glad it’s not our kid. That’s really embarrassing. And then realised it was me. And I feel that’s been the story of my life a bit. But I feel, it’s, I really have always been a people watcher, and really fascinated by rules and rule breaking and notions of authority and, and people who are so certain about things trying to unpick why? How can people be so sure of things? But yeah, no, not, not really. I applied to art college, and I got a place in a really good London art school. But then I thought, oh, that’s my parents career. So I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t do that. I should try something new, they’ll interfere too much. So I mixed art with anthropology and did a master’s degree in visual anthropology. Yeah. I love, I mean, I was just about to ask about, you had talked about how growing up in the house, you grew up and turned you into an observer of people. And then you use that phrase people watcher. And I feel I say often that I’m a people, people watching, it’s my favorite pastime. Can you say more about people being a people watcher? Is that if I’m just even the phrase itself? Do you have a record where that comes from? It’s so nice, isn’t it? It’s, it is such a nice thing to do, even a bus stop, or I think it was Mike Agar, the anthropologist said, you can do, ethnography, a bus stop with one person. And I think that’s really true. You don’t need to be anywhere exotic, or it doesn’t have to be too complex, you can find patterns and norms and change and just by, your local superstore or wherever, it’s, I can’t help it. I’m a real watcher, starer. And I’ve also always felt I’ve been, I’m invisible. So I took a, I took this cup of tea to an exercise class the other day. And I had a china cup. And I drank it. And I was just standing there with my cup. And everyone was, why have you got a cup? And I just, I thought no one would be able to see me, it wouldn’t have made any difference. But yeah, just from a young age, I remember when, when my parents, when we all live together, there would always be people over and they’d always be, drinking and gambling. And they’d be, smoke in the living room. Everyone was smoky in that era. And I just love to watch them all argue and try and work out what the hell was going on with them all. Yeah, I feel that continued into my life today. Definitely. It’s my favorite part of my job. Yeah. And so catch us up. Tell us where are you now? And what’s the work that you do? So now I work at Ipsos. And I work in business anthropology or ethnography and run all sorts of projects on everything on, what’s it being a patient with a certain illness or, looking at financial services and interactions with products or what’s missing in people’s lives. So a bit of everything. I think some of my favorite projects have been around things like weight stigma and obesity and masculinity and things that you really feel like social silences or stigma or that aren’t well explored or maybe society isn’t thinking about in a complex way. What have you been working on? What’s the most recent social silence that you’ve been really fixated on or spending time thinking about? I think wellness is one I’m really interested in the kind of rise of wellness culture and how it’s become a kind of total operating system almost in how it shapes how people think and eat and what they buy. And I guess that’s tied in with misinformation is one strand of it. But also this idea I’m really interested across all the projects I see in that your health is your responsibility as an individual and that you need to take control of it. And it’s almost like this gentle gaslighting of people to that they’ve caused weight gain. They’ve caused themselves to be sick. Therefore, they need to fix it. And I feel like these are the narratives that we’re hearing in health in finances, when you think about things like pensions, you didn’t save enough, you made some bad decisions, and not taking into account where you’re born, what you’re born with your family circumstances, life choices, pressures, this idea that we’re these autonomous individuals who should be able to navigate things almost like a rich white man. And that you’re ultimately accountable, or you’re responsible for your outcomes. But I guess more interestingly, that the society isn’t what you’re saying. Yeah, that society isn’t. And that, I’m seeing more chatter. I mean, I don’t on in the social media I’m looking at in terms of the growth of community, community support. I’m working with a great group of people on this idea for community pension. So just things like that are really giving me hope for the future that people want to be together and draw from each other. When did you first discover that you could make a living doing this kind of thing? So during my master’s, I remember I was working with this company called Ethnographic Research Incorporated. I think they were the first company to do business anthropology. They were based in Kansas City and run by Melinda Ray Holloway, really great ethnographer and Ken Erickson. And they, so I was freelancing for them, whilst I was doing my master’s degree. And I remember going back to my colleagues on my master’s who were saying, how can you, how can you work for these car companies or these, what are you doing? It should be for social good. Why are you doing business anthropology? And really getting it in the neck. Because I felt like it was interesting because they, a lot of the course were, it was this idea that you should be looking for something exotic or, to put it bluntly, study people that are poorer than you, go to communities where you can, I think, could be more extractive.

    52 min

  2. FEB 23

    Katie Dreke on Humanity & Time

    Katie Dreke is founder of DRKE, a Portland-based strategy consultancy. At Nike (2014-2021), she relocated to Tokyo to launch the company's first membership program outside North America, led concept development for Nike Women including the maternity collection launch, and designed global media strategy for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Previously, she led strategy at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, Droga5 Sydney, and 180 Amsterdam, with clients including Honda, Adidas, Coca-Cola, and the United Nations across four continents. I start all these conversations, you may or may not know this, but the same question which I borrow from a friend of mine, she helps, she’s an oral historian, she helps people tell their story. And she has this big, beautiful question, which I stole from her, because it’s so big and beautiful. But it’s so big and beautiful, I kind of over explain it, I’m doing 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 yes, this is probably the biggest lead up to a question ever. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control of and can answer or not answer any way that you want to. That’s a great question. I think I’ll answer it in a couple different ways, more like a conceptual way. And then like a literal way. I would say I’ll start with the literal, I’m from the Pacific Northwest. And I think that really means something. It means something to me anyway. It’s upper left, it’s West Coast, best coast, as I like to think of it. It’s Cascadia, which is kind of a collection of ideas that sit near and on the west side of the Cascadian, Cascade Mountains. But I think just culturally, I’m really proud of where I’m from. I feel like having studied people in the United States, and then comparatively across other different regions of the world. The things that I like about where I’m from, the United States was obviously inhabited by plenty of incredible people before the West arrived, before Europeans arrived. But that movement, at any rate, started on the east and moved out west. And so the people who took those big gambles early on, Oregon Trail, etc., pioneers, people who enjoyed that idea of going into the unknown, I feel like their DNA stock is still alive and well out here on the West Coast, which I think lends to a certain affection and affinity to nature, to a certain sort of casualness. We don’t have time for the frivolities and the frailties and the gilded nature of things that come from Europe or from the East Coast and silver spoonage, family lineages and VIP back rooms with cigars. Not to say those things don’t exist today on the West Coast, but they’re just not part of our origin story. It’s a lot less about who you are and what your family name is, but what can you do? Can you fish? Can you trap? Can you build something with your hands? What do you do when things break? Can you fix them? And there’s a little bit of a collaboration that is involved in that, because no one exists on an island when you’re up against the realities of nature and an environment that didn’t have infrastructure. So you needed to know what the guy and gal next door knew how to do, and you needed to care about each other. So there’s, I think, some nice things, and I could be completely authoring a worldview that is self-serving right here, but I feel like in the people that I’ve met, even some of the brands that spring out of the ground from this side of the nation, I feel a lot of pleasure and pride. So I come from this, and I acknowledge that, and I feel like I bring it with me when I go other places. But the conceptual response to that question is that I’m from the future, meaning my brain spends an inordinate amount of time in the future. Sometimes for work, it’s like what’s happening next quarter, next year, or where do we think this trend is going to play out in the next decade? But again, selfishly, when I get free time, I throw my brain into the deep future. I’m reading a story right now that takes place 300 years in the future. I read an inordinate amount of science fiction, largely because it is a thought experiment that is just so enjoyable, and given the type of authors that I like, I really go deep on authors that are spending a s**t ton of time on the world-building aspect. All the details, the nuances, the future mundane, as Julian Bleeker would put it, the wallpaper, those things that really give you that lived-in sense of this is a very viable and authentic sort of space to occupy. The characters are very well built, and I feel like it’s not that dissimilar to being a strategist. A science fiction author really tries to understand the human nature of the people that they are trying to inhabit, and then they extrapolate. The most respectful ways that that’s been done, Ursula K. Le Guin here, her portrait on my wall, she’s one of my mother muses. Kim Stanley, Neil Stevenson, these guys, they really, all of them, N.K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, they create these very tactile, very tangible, viable thought experiments. So that’s where I’m from. I’m from the Pacific Northwest, but I’m also from the future. Yeah, so I’m gonna ask a follow-up for each of those. The Pacific Northwest, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a girl? What did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be Indiana Jones when I was little. I think in a way that’s kind of stayed with me. I wanted to study the artifacts and the record. I even named part of my company about the deep record. My company is DRKE, which is my last name minus one vowel. It’s an exercise in editing, which I think strategy is an exercise in good editing. But if I take each of those letters and turn it into an acronym, which I have, it’s a deep record knowledge exchange. So I am really fixated on what came before and left a mark on the record. If you do your little CSI experiment, what lasts? Which then when you look forward, what can we create that lasts? What will be in the deep record of the future? And of course the knowledge exchange bit is like, it’s going to take a village to really understand all these things and put them into action. So it’s about radical generosity and no gatekeeping and mixing it up with a lot of disciplines. So who did I want to be when I was little? I saw Indiana Jones and was like, I want to go into the unknown. I want to be in those hard to reach places. I want to understand the artifacts of peoples that have come before, covet them, teach people about them. And also be cavalier and cool. I thought that was really awesome. For a while, I thought I wanted to be an anthropologist. When I was in university for a while, I took courses around etymology and language. I ended up getting a degree in speech communications, which was the study of how you create written form speech writing. Also incorporated a lot of, it was, I remember taking this incredible course about cultured communication, but not culture like national culture, but like Vietnam veterans, deadheads, sorority girls, subcultures, and studying their styles of communication, verbal, nonverbal, semiotics, and so on. I was drawn to it because it was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I had no idea that there was a world within a creative industry where these things could be put into practice for business. I had no understanding of this. My dad was like, what are you going to do with this? What’s going to be your job? And I’m like, I don’t know. I’m just going to follow what I like and see where it takes me. It wasn’t until I graduated from college and was in an interview and they said, what did you study? What classes did you like? That I suddenly was like, ding, ding, ding. The thing that I was drawn to is really useful to me in the creative world. Advertising, I was a quote unquote planner at the time, connections planning was a big thing at the time, which was all about that. So life makes sense in the rear view mirror, not often through the windscreen in front of you. But yeah, that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be Indiana Jones. And catch us up, where are you now and what’s the work that you’re doing now? Yeah, well, it’s not quite Indiana Jones, but I like to play Indiana Jones on television. I run my own consultancy, like I mentioned, I started in the end of 2020, early 2021. So it’s been about five years. I’m a strategist. I learned early on that I’m the person who likes to try to understand the landscape and the lay of the land, trying to figure out the connectivity that either exists or could exist there, that creates either sometimes a practical efficiency or a cleaner line through to the consumer, or not even the consumer, it could be any sort of invested party on the outside of the organization. And then also a lot about, again, going back to that sort of projection mapping that science fiction trains me to do all the time. It’s like, what else could it be? Where else could it go? Why is it not there already? What’s holding us back? Is it us? Is it something else in the industry or in the culture? And why not us? Could it be us that takes this to a new place? Creates the next white space. When did you, I’m curious about the moth, when did the moth meet the flame? What’s the, when was the first moment you really realized that you can make a living doing this kind of thing? Let’s see. I think like a lot of young people, and I want to make an assumption, but I feel like I’ve heard this from other younger people. I didn’t realize that the things that I love to do, I couldn’t do for a job. I guess you hear people say, find what you love and never work a day in your life. And it’s so cliche and transparent. It’s like nobody does, people who say that already have a bajillion dollars, that’s not real. A lot of

    1h 4m

  3. FEB 9

    Darrel Rhea on Judgment & Coherence

    Darrel Rhea is a design strategist and innovation leader who served as CEO of Cheskin, where he expanded its global research and innovation practice. He is coauthor of Making Meaning, a foundational book on meaning-driven innovation, and founder of Rhea Insight, advising Fortune 1000 leaders on strategy, design, and customer-led innovation. So, as you may or may not know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their stories. I love it because it’s a big question—but because it’s really big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control. You can answer or not answer in any way you want, and it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is: Where do you come from? So, first, let me just acknowledge the kind of the brilliance of that question, right? Which is to say that you’re modeling great qualitative research technique by starting there, right? Because it automatically flips the power in the conversation to the subject and makes them an author rather than just the subject of the interview. So, I just, I love that. And it’s a great way to segue into identity and meaning. So, where do I come from? I grew up in Southern California in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. And that was a really dynamic point in time—kind of a historical anomaly in a lot of ways. And when I was growing up in that period from the ’50s to 1970, the population of California doubled. And that’s really significant. And I was in Southern California, and that even grew even at a greater rate there. So, people were arriving from everywhere. Almost nobody was from California. My family was actually a couple of generations there, but that was kind of rare. So, you had people leaving their old cultures behind, and they’re busy inventing new ones. And so, identity was this kind of DIY thing that was happening. You had this explosive post-war prosperity that was happening in Southern California. You had Hollywood, and you had movies and the music industry exploding. You had defense-driven technology and the University of California research influence on that. So you had this strange mix of abundance and innovation and social mobility and permission that other places in the world, I don’t think, had that at the same time. So, the message was come to California, you can be whoever you want to be. So, it attracted a whole lot of people who wanted to be something different. And that was the soup the cultural waters that I was growing up in. And it created an explosion of subcultures that were created while I was young. And I participated in that. One of those was the surf culture. So I lived close to the beach, and the surfing culture kind of emerged and was invented in my neighborhood. Not surfing itself, but surfing culture. I knew—friends of mine went to school with the Beach Boys. And it was like, this was an essential kind of rite of passage. I spent my youth chasing waves, going up and down the coast. And so the savoring the sublime of beauty and protecting the environment and that was very much a subculture that I felt like I was not just part of, but helping invent, which is, I think, kind of a different thing. Also, in Southern California—well, in California at that time—the countercultural movement was in some ways centered there. It was certainly a center of the countercultural movement of the sixties. And it wasn’t something I read about. It was not something I experienced on TV. It was on our streets. And where were you? What town were you in? I was in Fullerton and Newport Beach, and in Orange County—basically just south of Los Angeles. But hippie culture the Summer of Love, the Age of Aquarius, the anti-war movement—I mean, that was what I was just immersed in. And that that sense of oneness and harmony and community and enlightenment—those were all kind of meanings and values that were embedded in that countercultural movement that were something I experienced kind of deeply. And at the same time, I went to an experimental liberal arts college. So we were reinventing education, or what college education was, and seeking meaning in new ways. So, that was another subculture that was emerging there. When you were young, what did you—did you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, I wandering around, I had a sense of wanting to be a designer. So, another subculture that I can speak of kind of on a personal level was Southern California was the epicenter of the global car culture. And so the most important marker of identity in Southern California—where cars are everything, and you drove everywhere—was: what car did you drive? Not just what car did you drive, but what brand did you choose, and how did you personalize it, and how did you customize it? And so that was a marker of identity. And my family’s business was at the epicenter of that. So, we were part of the hot rod culture. We were part of the performance car culture. And, so I grew up from the age of seven working in my dad’s business in that. What was the business? It was basically car customization—interior design. Cars, boats. We were doing cars for Hollywood, and we were doing automotive restorations for the museums. And, my uncle started the Hot Rod Association, National Hot Rod Association. Wow. So it’s like—right. Yeah. Doing land speed—trying for land speed records in the salt flats. And this was car culture. Right? And so I was in that, and not just as a participant, but as a designer. Right? So, I was designing cars and interiors. So, I had that—I think I had that sensitivity to industrial design as an expression of identity. And that was really important to me. And I knew I wanted to take that somewhere. Pursuing design was one of those things. And where are you now, and what are you up to? What’s your sort of catch-up in terms of where you are now and the work that you’re doing now? So, yeah, after 30 years with Cheskin—the company that I helped build; didn’t start, but helped build and scale—sold that to WPP. And for the last decade, I’ve been an independent consultant, kind of committed to not having employees and not doing another performance review in my life, after having a large organization. And yeah, I’ve mostly been doing strategy consulting, working with senior executives on those issues, and also doing a lot of AI implementation work to say, how do we bring technology and make it actually useful to how organizations operate? Yeah. And how did you go from all those subcultures to Cheskin? What was that journey? How did you get into—your CEO of Cheskin, and you built that business—how did you get into that position? Yeah, so I kind of went from designer to— I tried working in the field of design and found that not very satisfying. I didn’t have really good mentors. I wanted to participate in design at a higher level than craft, but I didn’t have access to that. And I didn’t know enough that I should just go down the street and hang out with Charles and Ray Eames, like a friend of mine did, and understand systems design. And that was, like, over my head. I didn’t have access to that. So, I kind of dropped out of design. I’d gotten a degree in psychology because I was really interested in how people learn and evolve and grow. And that didn’t hold a lot of promise for me either, because I didn’t want to get a Ph.D., and I didn’t want to work with sick people. So, bottom line was, I wasn’t just a surfer or hippie or gearhead. my parents had grown up in—that part of that economic expansion was—they went from poverty to wealth by being entrepreneurs and starting their own businesses. And, the dinner table reality was it’s all about value creation. And you’re going to grow up to be a business leader and an innovator and an entrepreneur. So, what did I do? I started a company with a college roommate of mine. And part of that was introducing 20 new products—happened to be in the agriculture or cut-flower industry—introducing 20 new products into the domestic market that hadn’t seen a new product for 20 years. And I needed to brand them. I needed to call them something. And the only person I knew in marketing was a father of a friend of mine who happened to be Louis Cheskin. And through introductions and through another friend, I connected. And when I decided I wasn’t a farmer, and the floriculture industry was interesting but it wasn’t where I wanted to— I got hired by Louis Cheskin in Chicago. And I thought I’d be there for a year and ended up there being CEO, owning it, and running it for 31 years. Amazing. I encountered Cheskin, I think, through Added Value, maybe later in its lifetime, and I’m aware of its reputation. But how do you place Louis Cheskin in the broader legacy of research and strategy? Yeah, well, he was a seminal figure and pioneer in the field of consumer research. And it’s—I think in today’s world, very few people in the industry tend to know much about Lewis Cheskin. But he made design something that was—from and took it from subjective taste to science, basically. So, he was a Ph.D. psychologist trained in University of Chicago in the ’30s, at a time that was this really interesting, revolutionary time where physics and statistics and psychology and the social sciences were actually becoming first truly empirical. And he moved in these circles. He hung out with Einstein and Fermi and kind of the scientific elite back in those early days. And he told—Cheskin, he told Einstein, “I want to define what the science of art is,” which was a really kind of avant-garde, really ambitious kind of aspiration—and controversial at the time, because art—the applied arts—were subjective and could not be quantified. So, he had that aspiration. During th

    1h 2m

  4. FEB 9

    Sam Ford on Place & Transformation

    Sam Ford is a founding partner of InnoEngine, an innovation strategy firm based in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He serves as Fractional Chief Partnership Officer for the Metals Innovation Initiative, a nonprofit supporting Kentucky's metals industry, and as Innovation and Culture Fellow at Western Kentucky University's Innovation Campus. He sits on the boards of Canopy and Employward through AccelerateKY. He previously co-authored Spreadable Media and holds an MS from MIT. He lives in Bowling Green. “Polarization Doesn’t Have to be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” Joe Karaganis & Sam Ford, and The Civic Imagination Project at USC. I don’t know if you know this, but I start every conversation with the same question. I borrowed it from a friend who helps people tell their story. I overexplain it because it’s so big and beautiful. But before I ask it, I want you to know you’re in total control—you can answer or not answer in any way you want. The question is: Where do you come from? Well, I come from what’s called the Western Kentucky coal fields—not the Appalachian side of my native state. It’s a coal mining and tobacco farming region. My family has a multi-generational background in those industries. My Papaw CW worked at the coal-fired power plant in Paradise, Kentucky, which was made famous by a John Prine song. On my dad’s side, my grandparents had 15 kids in 16 years. I’m a first-generation college student and an only child. My dad switched industries and worked in manufacturing. None of those were industries I wanted to go into. But on my mom’s side, my grandmother was a volunteer writer for the local newspaper in a small town of about 400 people. She was the community contributor for “News and Outposts from McHenry, Kentucky.” Her name was Beulah Hillard—everyone called her Memaw Beulah—and she managed that section of the paper. This was pre-social media. So if you wanted to know who’d been on vacation, who was sick, or who had a birthday, you went to the weekly county paper and found the section about your neck of the woods. These community contributors curated that news. I took that over when I was in middle school. There were a lot of 60- and 70-year-old women... and me, one middle school boy. But that helped me realize newspapers loved free content. By high school, I had written a serialized private investigator story with a friend. It probably added up to a novel’s worth by the end. I also started a pro-wrestling news and rumors column. That’s what took me to journalism school. As a first-generation college student, I thought, “I’m doing this for free, but newspapers pay people to write. Maybe I can do that.” I went to Western Kentucky University, about 45 minutes north of Nashville in Bowling Green. My wife and I moved here as college students—we got married in high school—and I worked my way through college at various newspapers. And you’re still in Bowling Green now? In Bowling Green. I’ve spent time outside of it—lived in Boston for a few years, then split time between New York City and Bowling Green ever since. Work takes me to New York, but when it doesn’t, we’re here. It’s a fast-growing area and an interesting place to be. Can you tell me more about growing up where you did? What was your childhood like? Oh, I loved my childhood. I was an only child, and most of my neighbors were older, so I spent a lot of time with my imagination. Being a kid of the 1980s, pop culture provided plenty of material. I collected G.I. Joe figures, and they had character dossiers on the back. That got me into what I later called “immersive story worlds”—narratives so large they’re bigger than any single story, with no sole creator behind them. Pro wrestling fascinated me too—this fictional world layered on top of our real one, with shifting characters and leagues. It was a messy narrative world. My master’s thesis ended up being on daytime soap operas. I got really interested in fictional towns with dozens of characters. By the ’80s and ’90s, some shows had been on for decades. Characters would be referenced but not seen, or return after years, and you’d have to find an older fan to explain it all. There was also the story world of my real community. My dad was a deacon at Minnebaptist Church. We went to the funeral home every week, it seemed—didn’t matter who it was, we knew someone in the family. And curating the community news helped me see how stories were unfolding all around me, not just in fiction. I was certainly interested in writing and storytelling. Narrative was the key. When I became fascinated with these story worlds, I imagined there must be teams of people who write and plan them—maybe that could be my job. That was more on the dreaming side. Journalism was more about tackling the real world and telling the stories of people, characters, happenings. That’s what took me down the journalism path—especially after getting married and needing to be practical. A fiction writer’s room job from rural Kentucky felt out of reach. But a job at a newspaper seemed tangible. I’d already worked at a few. It felt more real. Of course, I ended up not doing either one of those things. But that was the path I was on when I headed to college. I’m back in Bowling Green, Kentucky—Kentucky’s third-largest city. It’s a college town that’s grown fast over the past several decades. Advanced manufacturing, automotive, food and beverage—being located along I-65, one of the key corridors in the manufacturing supply chain—has brought a lot of growth. It’s also close to Nashville, just 45 minutes north. And when a city like Nashville starts booming like it has—attracting talent, investment—that ripple effect helps neighboring cities grow too. In 2024, I co-founded a company called InnoEngine with two partners. We publicly launched in early 2025, so last year was our first full year. We help organizations design and implement innovation projects—especially when they’re trying to do something they’ve never done before, or in a way they’ve never done it. How has it been going - a year in? It’s been going well enough to keep going. When you’re positioning yourself in a way that intentionally doesn’t duplicate an existing market sector, it’s always a bit of a challenge. We don’t consider ourselves a consulting firm. One of our unofficial taglines is: “If you know exactly what you need, it won’t be us.” If you’ve already figured it out and just need someone to execute, there’s probably a firm that does that better. We’re interested in the messy area—when you know you need to act but don’t know exactly what to do yet. We want to be your partner from figuring it out to implementing it. We work with everything from early-stage startups to large multinational organizations. Also, public and nonprofit sectors. Even multi-organizational projects. A simple example: we’re working with several tech startups right now. One is integrating tech systems into their operations for the first time, trying to do it in a way that maximizes value. Another has proven the value of their product and is moving to market—but in several sectors with different sales cycles and value propositions. So we’re helping them think through positioning and strategy for each segment. Another client is a long-established tech company that’s bootstrapped its growth and become a formidable player, but they’ve never raised money. So they don’t have the same public profile, thought leadership presence, or traditional growth milestones. They’re asking: how do we build visibility that matches the heft we already have? On the more complex side, we’re working with multinational companies rolling out products across several countries. Lots of moving parts. Lots of help needed in the middle. Then there are multi-organizational projects, which tie into civic engagement work. One example: we’ve worked closely with a group at MIT Sloan School of Management called the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, or MIT REAP. They’ve studied what makes an innovation ecosystem thrive—what preconditions need to exist for growth to take off, and what steps regions often take to realize their potential. About a decade ago, while working on some pilots with MIT—my grad school alma mater—I got involved. MIT was thinking about the future of work, AI, automation. This was back in 2016–2017, before it was as widely discussed as it is now. We built a team across Kentucky and became the first U.S. mainland region to get into the MIT REAP program. It’s a two-year accelerator for regions that have some growth and alignment, but want to go further. One core idea is you must have stakeholders from across government, corporations, entrepreneurs, capital, and higher education all at the table—with shared interests and goals. We fielded that Kentucky team in 2018. I helped put the team together. They graduated from REAP in 2020 and formed a nonprofit called Accelerate Kentucky, focused on strengthening the region’s innovation ecosystem. One big opportunity: Kentucky is at the center of the U.S. metals supply chain—aluminum, steel, copper. Automotive and food manufacturing activity has shifted south over time, while the Midwest remains strong. Kentucky sits at that intersection. There’s been growing national interest in reshoring manufacturing, both for job growth and national security. So, in late 2022, we helped start the Metals Innovation Initiative—a public-private partnership between the Kentucky state government and major industry players. It focuses on identifying shared challenges and working on collaborative innovation projects. That could be talent and workforce development. Recycling is a huge area—it’s more expensive to import new metal than to recycle what we’ve already used. Energy innovation is anothe

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  5. FEB 2

    Yuliya Grinberg PhD on Human & Machine

    Yuliya Grinberg is a digital anthropologist and qualitative researcher with a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She is currently Research and Insights Manager at Mastercard. Her book, Ethnography of an Interface: Self-Tracking, Quantified Self, and the Work of Digital Connections, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. A note for readers: Yuliya has offered a 20% discount on Ethnography of an Interface for anyone coming from this interview. Use code GRINBER24 at checkout here. So I know—I think you know this, right? You’ve listened to interviews before. I start them all with this same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. And I borrow it because it’s really big and beautiful. But because it’s big and beautiful, I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. And 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 it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is, where do you come from? So thank you for that question. I love this question. First of all, as an anthropologist, I appreciate that this is a question really about context, right? First and foremost, at least how I read it. And then, on some level, I feel like there are so many ways to answer this question. We can really be here all day. It’s a really loaded and big question, which is exciting. So I’ll answer it. And so, in a couple of ways—you know, in a geographic sense, I’m from Russia originally. But I also moved to New York, Queens first, in the early 1990s with my family. So I think that sense of that experience has really shaped my worldview as well. I’ve also lived for many, many years afterwards on Brighton Beach, which is kind of the Russian diaspora community, especially on the East Coast. So that’s shaped me as well. I’m also a product of my experiences, I would say more broadly, kind of zooming out a little bit, right, is immigration has been a really pivotal experience in my life. It has really shaped how I thought, how I think, how I kind of even comport myself, how I relate to others. There’s something about moving to a completely different country with a different cultural code in middle school that upends your reality in the way that it does. And maybe without it, I sometimes think I might not have been as interested in culture as I am now professionally. I do wonder if that experience really kind of set me on a new professional course without me knowing it, even way back then. And as an immigrant kid, kind of taking interest in culture really, for me at that time, has become a little bit of a survival mechanism at first, and now it’s become a professional habit. And so, also, I would say I’m a product of my family. I’m very much my grandmother’s granddaughter, in the sense that she was a very pivotal figure in my life personally, but she was also kind of the ultimate matriarch in our family. So she really played a really kind of key role in how I look at the world as well. Yeah, and professionally, from all over the place—from advertising to anthropology to marketing research. Yeah, out of many different chairs. Oh, that’s interesting. I’m curious that you said middle school. What can you tell—can you tell a story about what that was like for you to sort of move to a whole new country? I was 11. I was turning 11 when I moved. And moved with a lot of, you know, ideas about what a different world and different country would look like. I don’t think any of us were prepared at that time to really imagine immigration or the U.S. kind of really large in our imaginations in Russia when I was growing up, but really without any clarity of what it would look like. My sense of the U.S. was really taken from things like 90210, the show. I quickly learned when I moved to gentrified Bushwick that was not the U.S. of my experience, and just the expectations of struggle. One story I like to tell my kids about what it was like is stepping off the airplane, which was actually a really kind of exciting experience for myself and my twin sister. I have a twin sister. We had never been on an international flight prior to that. We were really excited about that as a trip. I don’t think we really fully comprehended that we were permanently leaving or that we weren’t going to really understand much of anything in that world. I remember stepping off the plane and thinking, wow, JFK is just so noisy. And I realized I didn’t understand a single word. That really was kind of just like a visceral shock, of just that difference. And that’s something you kind of experience with your body. You can’t really intellectualize it. We talked a little bit about it, of course, with our family, but you experience that as a very physical phenomenon. I think I remember that—how it felt in my body to be all of a sudden in this really, really radical new place. And I had to figure out how to orient myself. I had to find my feet in it. And did you say that you didn’t understand what anybody was saying? Is that what you’re describing? Exactly. I didn’t speak any English, aside from maybe introducing myself with my name. What did that feel like? It felt really confusing. I think it was just overstimulating. And I’ve had many experiences like that since because I’ve traveled, I’ve studied abroad, I’ve traveled to different countries, I’m really interested in studying people in different settings. So I’ve found that that kind of physicality that you confront—all your antennas all of a sudden up—the things you take for granted in your everyday world, everything is input. So in some ways, it’s overstimulating. You don’t really have that kind of first-order, second-order hierarchy of what things mean. They all mean everything at the same time. Equal importance. It’s funny. I was an adult. I remember I traveled to Egypt and I was in Cairo. I remember being in Cairo on a street corner. And I had the realization that I had no idea what anybody was saying. Yeah, I loved it. I think it felt very quiet all of a sudden. Very quiet, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I spent a lot of that first year in my head, observing. It’s also a technique, I guess, in some ways—practicing for the future—listening, observing, comparing. I never really experienced myself as an outsider prior to that experience, and that was an interesting change of perspective. Do you have a recollection of kind of what you wanted to be like when you grew up? I was thinking about this question because I noticed, yes, that others—and I really reflected—I was not a kid really that had a strong sense of “I really want to be X, Y, Z.” I think I had a sense of what I should become. Maybe my parents’ perspective, my grandmother’s perspective. Maybe I should be a lawyer. Maybe I should be a doctor. Those were not things that appealed. Fortunately, I figured that out pretty early. That wasn’t going to be my set of expertise. I didn’t spend too much time pursuing that path. But I didn’t really have a really clear idea of what I wanted to be. But I did know a few things. I knew the kinds of things I cared for, or the kinds of information I craved. For instance, I grew up in a very musical and artistic family. My uncle is a conductor in an orchestra. My mom was a music teacher in Russia. All my grandparents were in music theory or music school in one way or another. So music was a big part of my early childhood—going to classical concerts, especially visiting museums. That was really important. But I will say personally, I never connected to aesthetics or sound on its own. It never really clicked for me why that was important or why that was valuable. Maybe it was because I didn’t have the same talent. What I always wanted to know was about the people who made that music—what world did they live in. If we visited a museum, I was always curious about the narration, about the context in which some of that was made. Those were the kinds of things that always appealed to me, I remember. So it was kind of—I read a lot of biographies as a kid, I think, like early on. I didn’t know exactly why, but I really wanted to know kind of the behind-the-scenes world behind the public face, like public persona, or just the sound, like just aesthetic quality. So I think that that’s something that I felt early on. And then the second thing I would say is I really didn’t want to settle on anything. It was so hard for me to choose a major or to, you know, be very narrowly focused on one particular career, and explain that kind of zigzag professional life I’ve had as well. You know, my happy place was always like doing several things at the same time. So in school, I majored in business, but I also wanted to study art history, and I also wanted to study, you know, languages, and social sciences were really interesting. Professionally, I’ve also kind of done so many different things. And I used to think of it as being indecisive. But, you know, as I’ve become an academic, I’ve learned a better word: interdisciplinary. So I think that interdisciplinarity was also always kind of an instinct. It felt insufficient to me to just narrowly focus. Like, I remember studying marketing, and I just couldn’t focus on it as its own thing. It felt really myopic. So I always wanted to kind of have an almost, like, contrasting view from a different discipline. And yeah, so those are the two things I think that really—I wanted to do as a young person. And I think those are the kinds of instincts that, you know, in my professional life. You know, I’ve switched from brand strategy to academia, and now I’m more formally in private sector research. So I think that’s always been more interesting to me. Yeah, yeah. So to catch us up, where are

    58 min

  6. JAN 26

    Chuck Welch on Outsiders & Bridges

    Chuck Welch is the founder and chief strategy officer of Rupture Studio, a culture-led brand consultancy. He brings deep cultural insight, strategic imagination, and brand experience with Nike, PepsiCo, Dove, LVMH and others to help organizations connect authentically with fast-moving audiences. I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She’s an oral historian. She helps people tell their story. And so I learned this question from her, and I use it in my own work, too, to start conversations because I haven’t really found a way of getting into a conversation that’s more honest in a way. And so I use the question, but I caveat it extremely. I over-explain it the way that I’m doing now because it’s a strong question. So before I ask it, you can answer or not answer any way that you want. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, it’s impossible to make a mistake. You can answer or not answer any way that you want. Where do I come from? That’s a good question. I guess Mama Africa, right? Like all the rest of us come from. And if you want to connect it back to Mama Africa, you connect it to the drum. When you connect it to the drum, you connect it to hip hop. So I guess that’s my grounding identity, so to speak, that kind of filtered and still filters my world to some extent. It’s beyond just kind of the four elements. I guess you think about a worldview, right? Especially when you connect it back to advertising, which is the field I guess you would say I’m in—people like me aren’t necessarily represented usually. And just like hip hop, we were underrepresented and still are. We came from the outside and kind of had to create our own way and culture. And if you want to parallel it to brand communications, advertising, whatever you want to call it, in the business now—that filter has shaped my understanding of art, of business, of aesthetics, of connection and collaboration, of seeing the way I see. I think it’s shaped through that lens. And I think the parallel thing is that hip hop remains potent. Even though I may not listen to it as much as I do, the aesthetics of it and the spirit of it still moves me. And I guess you could say the parallel is that it’s always evolved just like this business and just like my mindset and the way I show up in the world and the way I serve my clients. So the kind of parallels, right? You got a base of a culture. You got a base of knowledge. And it’s like, I compare it to almost like a house. Foundation doesn’t change. Hey, but we’re going to swap out a room here. We’re going to decorate differently. We’re going to do an add-on. We’re going to add a deck on the back. I’m a suburban guy now. So I give you this parallel. I’m going to add a deck on the back. We’re going to change the paint colors. We’re going to invite some people in sometime. You’ve got a full house, sometime you by yourself along with your own thoughts. So the way I think about hip hop is kind of constant change, constant change, but there’s a core there, right? It’s kind of the thing I tell my clients: the difference between timeless and timely. So there’s timeless things that matter in the culture that I come from, but then there are things that are always of the day and the things that are pointing to the future. So, to the long-winded answer, that’s kind of where I come from through that worldview. And I’m not just talking about the art of hip hop or listening to the music. It’s like the outsider spirit, entrepreneurial spirit. It’s the make-something-out-of-nothing spirit. That’s endemic to the culture that I come from. And that’s not just hip hop. That’s Black folks. You know what I mean? And they’re not one and the same, but there’s an overlap there. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about—we’ll talk about work and brand and advertising and all that stuff—but can you tell me a story about that outsider spirit or Mama Africa or the drums or hip hop, like before you discovered this world and got into Jobby Job land? What was it about for you? I don’t know. It was about kind of making yourself, right? That culture allows you to create yourself, just like the best cultures do. Like you can have a palette of ingredients, whether you’re a writer or break dancer. We all tried to break dance at one point or write graffiti. I never wrote graffiti, but we all try to break dance or rap or DJ or whatever the thing is, but like you see the connections everywhere in your life, how you dress, you’re putting things together. Hip hop is a bricolage, right? So you’re taking bits and pieces of the past to create a future. That’s what hip hop is based on. We take what we have, whether it’s a beat box or a light pole that we plug into or a piece of linoleum that you spin on and we create structure, we create emotion, we create form. I mean, so it’s like—I’ve always seen it as, especially when I look back now with the advantage of hindsight, having practiced the craft of brand communications for over a quarter century—a lot of what we do is based, very similar creative process. The advertising process, the strategy process is very similar to hip hop, right? We’re in the age of bricolage, in the age of taking pieces and creating a whole from pieces that naturally on their face wouldn’t fit together. And that’s the way I see strategy in the notion of creative problem solving. It’s very similar. I would say I’m like a deep—especially in a research project—I always think of myself as almost like a DJ looking for samples or looking for records. And then the strategy is you put it all together, right? You take all the things that you’ve gone out there and hunted for. Sometimes you’re hunting inside yourself. Sometimes you’re hunting inside your client organization, inside of your clients. Sometimes it’s a research respondent. Sometimes it’s just observing, sitting on a train and looking at people walking down the street and observing bits of conversation, pieces of information. And you’re putting all these puzzle pieces together, these samples, these sounds to get to a whole. Especially oftentimes, the way we work is we come in and embed in a client team, but it’s rare we get a solid brief from a client. We usually start with, “Hey, we’re trying to do X,” or “We don’t know what the problem is. We’re trying to energize our brand. We’re trying to reach a new audience. We’re trying to drive a certain metric, but we don’t know 100% sure.” Like out of ten projects, we may get one solid brief. So a lot of it is kind of conversational. We’re wading through the dark. It’s very ambiguous when we come in. For those who aren’t aware of your work, introduce your work. Where are you now? What do you do? We have a strategy consultancy going on 11 years with my wife, who is the brains and beauty of the operation, Nandi Welch, and myself. It’s called Rupture Studio. Our job is to be a bridge between the street and the suite and connect brands to culture. A lot of that is educational, it’s strategic, it’s advisory, it’s creative problem solving, it’s storytelling, it’s agitation, it’s provocation, it’s therapy. It is creating environments where people can let down their guard and be vulnerable and be honest. It’s very collaborative. It’s very energizing for clients and hopefully for the end recipient on the other end of what we create together with the client—to connect to an audience and hopefully give them something of value. So we can inspire them and deliver value to them and capture value from them and grow our client’s business ultimately. That’s what it’s about. But the process that I talked about and the kind of ethos of hip-hop is very similar to that process. If you make a record, it’s similar to that process. I haven’t worked in the music business. It’s like you go in and you have to come up with an idea, a theme, almost like a thesis. A record is like a thesis, starting a record. That’s how we start our process with the thesis of what we think the problem or opportunity is. Then we either prove that out or we don’t and course correct and collectively create a way forward. You were talking a little bit about the projects that come to you. What’s that first conversation like that you have with a client? Let’s say it’s a new client that’s heard about the good work that you do. They know that you’re the studio for them. What’s the first conversation you have with a client? How do you start a conversation? It’s really not about us, to be honest with you. It’s about our client and either the pain or the promise that they have that they haven’t either resolved or achieved. “Here’s an opportunity that we want to go get that we don’t know how to get there,” or “Here’s pain that we’re dealing with. It’s giving us anxiety and it’s impinging our relationship with the audience or it’s crimping the business at hand.” Our job is to, as quickly as we can, get to the ambition. We introduce ourselves but we try to spend more time asking the client than beating our own horn or tooting our own horn. Our job is to get a sense of what the challenge at hand is, the task at hand. It’s very conversational, it’s very honest. I was in agencies—oftentimes there’s these formal pitch processes and clients got their client suit on and their client mask on, the agency has their b**********g face on and you’re all doing the dance. We don’t do the dance. We just have conversations like this. They’re very normal. We talk to clients like they’re normal people, which they are—they’re just normal people with a lot on their shoulders and a lot of power. We just have normal conversations and we try to get in their shoes. My wife, Nand

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  7. JAN 12

    Tess Posner on Creativity & Humanity

    Tess Posner is a musician and the creator of Resonance, a platform helping communities shape the technologies that shape them. Former founding CEO of AI4ALL and a Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics, she bridges responsible AI with human agency—ensuring people have voice in an era of accelerating technological change. So, I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, like oral histories. And when I heard the question, I just loved it so much that I borrowed it. But it’s a big question, which is why I borrowed it. Because it’s big, I overexplain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control — you can answer or not answer in any way that you want to. And the question is: Where do you come from? I love the big questions. Well, physically, I guess I’ll start with the basics. I’m in the forest outside of San Francisco, so I’m very happy to be coming from here. Originally I’m from Massachusetts, so I kind of made my way out to the West Coast. Place is, I think, an important part of where we come from, even though a lot of us move around so much that we don’t think about it as much. But I’ve been thinking about that more recently. Then, I guess to move to more abstract levels of that question, I come from the nonprofit space — working in various organizations and initiatives focused on economic empowerment, helping people find work and meaning and opportunity. Most recently, I led an organization called AI for All, where we were helping young people — we actually started in 2017, so it was well before everyone knew about AI. We had to convince people that this was going to be a thing. But we could see it coming, and we wanted to help young people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to learn what AI is and become creators and builders of this incredibly impactful technology. We helped them build skills, find internships, create community, find mentors. That’s what I’ve been involved in for the last eight and a half years. And just seeing the incredible evolution of AI, that mission feels more important than ever. So I’d say I come from the intersection of human potential, human flourishing, equity, and technology — that’s been my focus in the workspace. And then lastly, music. I’ve been a musician for about eight years, though I’ve been doing music since I was little. Being an artist is a big part of where I come from — part of my framing, my aesthetic, my passion. There are probably deeper ways to answer that question, but I’ll stop there. It’s beautiful. Do you have any recollection from growing up — what you wanted to be as a child, what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah. When I was about ten years old, I wanted to be a musician and a singer. That’s when I started playing piano, singing, and performing in choirs. That was my first dream. When I was a teenager, I went on a humanitarian trip to El Salvador. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Habitat for Humanity — we went down there as part of a school trip and built a house with a family. I was fifteen at the time, and it was such a transformative experience. Being in another country where resources and access are very different, and having that deep cultural immersion, being with a family and exposed to their history and place — it really stood out to me that your zip code shouldn’t determine whether you get health care or access to basic needs. It felt deeply unfair that an earthquake could level an entire town and there’d be no resources to rebuild, unlike in the U.S. That trip started my whole inquiry into how to make a positive impact, and eventually my nonprofit career. How did that Habitat trip happen — was it part of school or something else? Yeah, it was part of school. I went to an alternative school that actually started the first year I attended, in sixth grade. It was a bit chaotic, but one of its tenets was project-based learning. We had these amazing opportunities — to go to El Salvador, or to Italy to study classical guitar. I fundraised for both trips myself, learning to be entrepreneurial and to put learning into practice, whether through Spanish, history, or music. I was really lucky to go there, even though it was also kind of chaotic. You said you’re in the forest north of San Francisco. What inspired you to head west? Maybe tell us a little bit about the work you’re doing now. I went to college in New Mexico — Santa Fe — studying in the Great Books program at St. John’s College. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, it’s this really amazing place that feels especially relevant right now as education goes through this big period of questioning and change. We studied all of Western philosophy, science, literature, math, physics, and music — starting from the ancient Greeks and working our way to the modern day. There were no written tests or exams. It was all discussion-based. If you were doing math, you were at the board doing proofs and discussing them. Everything was very active — all oral exams and conversation. It was just such a different way of learning, and it shaped me deeply. After that, I went to grad school for social-enterprise administration. It was at Columbia in New York, over a decade ago now. Back then, “social enterprise” was this trendy topic — basically thinking about how to combine social impact with sustainable business models, not necessarily anti-capitalist but more about creative alternatives: how to actually make a difference in the world while keeping it scalable. It was an amazing program. Many of the examples we studied came from San Francisco and the Bay Area, and I remember thinking, I need to be there. I wanted to be part of that future wave. Moving here was incredible — the technology and entrepreneurial ecosystem, paired with a focus on social impact. Especially because technology has become such a key force shaping the world, it felt like the perfect time for me to jump in and try to help steer it in a direction that benefits people — not excludes them. Now, we’re in another wave of that. It’s been quite a journey. So what are you doing now? I’ve been involved in different projects around that theme. I’m still on the board of AI for All — it’s an amazing organization — but I’m also working on a new project that’s really focused on a different question: how do we stay creative as humans? How do we make sure we don’t lose meaning, purpose, or agency in the age of AI? I’ve been hosting these small-group events that bring people back into their creative potential, while also asking deeper questions: What do these societal changes mean? How do we work through them together? How do we keep humans at the center as technology keeps advancing? I’m literally building the seed of a new organization right now — very early stages — and I’m excited about it. I’ve seen so much need for spaces like that, both from my work as an artist and from leading educational programs. We met at the Artificiality Summit, maybe a month ago — the one put on by Dave and Helen at the Artificiality Institute. You did a “provocation,” I think they called it — a workshop moment — and it was really beautiful. That summit taught me so much; it changed how I think about what AI is and isn’t. But it also raised even more questions. So, I want to be careful with language here, because the words themselves feel weird and unformed. Where does this begin for you? When you talk about AI and creativity — what are you actually talking about? Was there a moment when you realized this was the work you wanted to do, or that the need was there? It’s definitely been on my mind for a while. Being in the AI space since 2017, a lot of early conversations were about how AI would affect jobs and work. That was the key question back then — along with ethics and responsibility: how do we use this technology ethically? I knew AI would eventually become part of everyday life, but I didn’t anticipate how it would unfold — especially when ChatGPT launched almost three years ago to the day. It’s now the fastest-growing technology ever, in terms of adoption and daily use. We’re seeing “agentic AI” systems emerge — software that can carry out independent tasks. Companies are building these agents you can assign work to, with less and less human oversight. There’s this global race to harness AI’s value — saving time, cutting costs. Capitalism drives that race, of course. And geopolitics adds pressure: China, the U.S., everyone wants to be ahead. So it’s full-speed ahead. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people are using chatbots daily — often for relationships, companionship, even therapy-like support. That’s creating psychological effects we barely understand. It’s like a massive social experiment happening in real time. We’re already seeing phenomena like “AI psychosis,” people developing deep reliance on these tools. They’re amazing and helpful — I use them myself — but there are potential consequences. And because the investment pouring in is unlike anything we’ve seen, it’s accelerating even faster. So you pair that with this idea of AI replacing our efforts for economic gain, and it leaves people wondering, What does that mean for me? There’s fear — fear of job loss, fear of irrelevance. We’re seeing some professions already impacted. College graduates are entering one of the toughest job markets in decades. Maybe AI is taking some entry-level roles — the kind of work AI is already good at — though it’s hard to know for sure. The general mood is a mix of fervent excitement and quiet dread. In the creative world I’m part of, reactions are extreme — some people hate AI, others are experimenting enthusiast

    52 min

  8. JAN 5

    Erika Hall on Fear & Ignorance

    Erika Hall is a designer, author, and consultant. She is the Co-Founder and Director of Strategy at Mule Design Studio in San Francisco and author of the influential books Just Enough Research and Conversational Design. Her work centers on evidence-based design, organizational learning, and ethics in digital practice. Research Questions are Not Interview Questions: So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I’ve borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. I stole it because it’s such a big, beautiful question—but because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in complete control, and you can answer any way that you want to. That’s my general way I approach life. And the question is: Where do you come from? That’s a fantastic question. Yeah, I’ll answer that on several levels, because I think they’re all important to where I am now. And the origin point is I come from Los Angeles. And it’s a two-parter. I come from across the street from the airport until we got eminent domain, and then the Valley. So if you’ve heard of Valley Girls—I was there. I was a child when that song was blowing up. But those parts of being in Los Angeles, and then really being in the Valley in the ’80s—that’s a cultural context. And then the next most important origin is I got the heck out of L.A. and went back East for school, where I studied philosophy. So I come from L.A., I took a tour through New England, and I’m back in the Bay Area. So my perspective is very Californian and very question-asking. I don’t have a traditional design or research background. I come from philosophy, with a dash of studying abroad in Moscow. And all of those things—I’m finding, and the reason I’m answering this question like that—is every part of that is so wildly relevant to what I do and how I am now. Those are kind of the key ingredients to that. So having grown up in the suburbs outside of Rochester, L.A., California—the Valley—I mean, these are mythical, mythical places. That you were there, growing up—what was it like? What can you say about growing up in that? I mean, the really salient thing to say is: it’s well documented. Because I really felt like I was growing up in a place and time that all the movies were being made about. So it’s like, what was it like? I went to a prom in the same ballroom that Pretty in Pink had been filmed in. So it was like, I really felt like—if you want to feel like, “Oh, we’re the center of the cultural universe”—in Los Angeles at that time, that’s sort of the feeling. And yeah, so if you watch Terminator 2, that aqueduct is right by my house. That’s sort of the fun part of it—how much was happening there then that was culturally important. Like we had KROQ, which is an amazing radio station. So I felt like all of the best new music—I was listening to it. And then, yeah, it was really funny because I went to school back East, and to people back there, it was mythical. I came from this mythical place, and they would ask me questions about it, like, “Does everybody really talk like that?” And I think part of it—one of the reasons I left—was I needed finishing school to get rid of my strong Valley accent. Our lawyer actually spent a lot of time in Southern California, and we had a podcast, and one of the podcast reviews was, “Their California accents are so strong.” So if I’m talking to someone who’s from the same place, or if I go back there, the accent comes back. And the other question I got was about whether I was worried about getting shot on the freeway, because that was a thing that was happening. And I’m like, well, yeah, I worry about being among all those cars and everything. And so, yeah, it was like that in a lot of ways. I feel that Frank Zappa—that song—is an ethnographic document, really, a linguistic situation. But I went to the Galleria. I went to the beach. There was a section of my yearbook devoted to the large hair. People had shoulder pads. I hated Reagan. I don’t—I don’t know. So yes, I’d say the one thing is the movie Valley Girl with Nick Cage, which I love—I love him so much—the thing that’s most wrong with that movie is that he’s supposed to be punk, and he was in no way punk. Because it was about this girl from the Valley, this affluent suburb. I went to public school, and a bunch of my friends drove BMWs. I was not from the BMW part of the Valley, but it was wild. And people were really self-aware, you know? Because I think children and teens always know more than adults give them credit for. And we were really clear on what was going on in the world and in politics and everything—even before the internet. So yeah. I drove once I got a car when I was 16. I drove a lot and really was like, yeah, if you watch those movies—and there was Booksmart, I think, is a recent movie—that was still the vibe in Los Angeles. So yeah. It’s incredibly well documented, I think, just because the movie industry was there. What—do you have a memory of what you wanted to be as a child? Like, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted—well, there were a few different things. I wanted to be an architect for a while. And I had an Etch A Sketch, and I would actually draw floor plans on my Etch A Sketch. And then a couple of things took me off track. I even applied—one of the schools I applied to was a school of architecture. So I got in, and I could have done that. But I was all over the place. I was like, maybe I’ll do psychobiology, maybe I’ll do architecture—we’ll see what I’ll do. And then I ended up going to a liberal arts school, which was perfect. But then I took a look at the built environment of Los Angeles, and I’m like, oh, we don’t need more architects. And then one of my teachers made us read The Fountainhead, I think in a prophylactic manner—like, you have to read this to be inoculated against these terrible ideas. And I read that, and it angered me so much that I was just like, I don’t want to be part of this. Also, you read about the profession, and it’s super competitive and super misogynistic and all of that. But I also didn’t realize until much later that I grew up surrounded by Eames stuff, right? Because being in Los Angeles—we had Mathematica, which I think is still in Boston, which is this amazing, kinetic, sculptural, experiential exhibit of the principles of mathematics. And that was my early childhood. So if you haven’t seen it, look it up—it’s at a science museum in Boston, I think still. There were a few different instances of this. And at the Museum of Science and Industry, they had the Eames explaining math. And I think the sort of Eames was in the air—all of that mid-century modern stuff was in the air. And that was a big part of coming from Los Angeles, too. And so I think the fact that I ended up doing a lot of information architecture—I was like, oh, this is sort of similar. And buildings are great. And I have friends who are architects who have gone to architecture school. It’s just—I am not a patient person. That’s also why the movie business—even though I grew up in Los Angeles and love the movies, everything about that—I never wanted to be in front of the camera. But seeing that process, I have so much admiration for filmmakers. But wow, the patience of putting something like that together is beyond me. So I’m happy about the internet. I’m curious about—you went East to a liberal arts school. And, you know, I’m from the East, I went to a liberal arts school, so probably the question of what it’s like to be from California came to mind. But what did you make of the people in the Northeast? Who did you find at these liberal arts colleges, as somebody from the Valley? It was a lot of—I couldn’t afford to visit. So I just kind of dropped in, like, oh, I guess I’m doing this now. I just flew out, you know, September of my freshman year, and I was like, what is going on here? Because I didn’t understand a lot of the things people were saying to me. It was class-coded. I was like, why are you—like, I told a story, and someone asked, “Why are you so hyped on Nantucket? Do you come from a whaling family?” And like, you summer places? Does that mean that where you live sucks part of the year? There were all these—there were all these codes and ways of being that I was like, really? Why? Why are you like that? And I found out about private beaches, and I was just horrified. Because a private beach is illegal in California. As a person who is not even a resident, but just as a human being, you have a right to coastal access in California. And if you have a beach property, you have to let people—there’s a number of feet. I mean, this sounds like maybe a minor thing, but I think it’s a hugely important difference in how you think about the land. California is not perfect, but it’s like, you can’t just block people off from access to the ocean. And I feel like I learned about all the private clubs and ways of excluding people. And California being a place where people just end up. The unfortunate part is we haven’t built enough housing for all the people who end up here. But just the space and the light. I thought people were fascinating, and a lot of the things sort of didn’t make sense to me. Like, it was fun—like seasons. I’m like, oh, seasons are cool. But I noticed that I was friends with people from New York, from Maine, and from California, mostly. There were states where I’d meet somebody and we’d get along, and they’d be from one of those states. It was a great experience. I had a friend who was in the dorm next to me freshman year. He was from Hawaii, and he was the only person I knew who was even more like a fish out of water than I was

    55 min
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A weekly conversation between Peter Spear and people he finds fascinating working in and with THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com

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