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. 1d ago

    Nigel Rahimpour on Immersion & Trust

    Nigel Rahimpour is a strategist and Head of Investigative Strategy at Nonfiction Research. Previously he was Head of Strategy at Weber Shandwick Germany; Chief Strategy Officer at TBWA Germany; Global Planning Director at Saatchi and Grey in New York; and Planning Director at Leo Burnett in Chicago. He began his career as a war correspondent for Focus, Spiegel and Stern. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed slash stole from a neighbor friend who’s an oral historian, and she uses it to help people tell their story. I borrowed it because it’s really, really beautiful, but it’s also big, so I kind of over-explain it the way that I am doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or even not answer any way that you want to. Now, the biggest lead-up ever. The question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control with how you choose to answer that. Where do I come from? I come from two great parents. A mother who happened to experience the worst in her life that can happen to a woman before she met my dad, and hard worker, diligent, extremely smart, and street smart. And a father, also hardworking, very street smart, and they were both very, very loving parents, very loving to me. They were incredibly tough on the outside, but with me, they were beautiful, they were wonderful, and I couldn’t have had better parents. And I grew up in Germany, in Hamburg, and so I come from a mixed-race marriage, and it wasn’t always the easiest way to grow up, and I think it really always had the sense of I needed to belong. I wanted to belong because I didn’t belong, and I think that has shaped me really throughout my life because I feel like I’ve become pretty good at becoming a chameleon. Throughout my life, I’ve had no problem speaking with people from all different walks of life, be it working class, be it presidents, be it generals, be it intellectuals, just regular people, criminals, bad people. I can adapt, and I think that has been important, really, for everything that I’ve been doing in my life. Professionally, I started off as a journalist. I wasn’t a trained journalist. I started off, and I covered the wars in Yugoslavia, and obviously, when you do a job like that, you speak to anyone, from the president of a country like President Tudjman of Croatia to Borislav Herak, a war criminal who killed over 220 people, women, men, children, raped them, et cetera, so you develop a way. You need to be a chameleon in order to connect with people. You need to connect with people in order for them to connect with you, in order for them to tell you something. If there’s no connection, nobody’s going to tell you anything, right? But I also used that in planning. After that, I went into strategy, and then I went into research, and this has helped me. It has really helped me. I don’t know, so that was a long-winded way of answering your question. That’s perfect. I’m curious about growing up in Hamburg. Can you tell me the story about what was it like to grow up in Hamburg, and what does it mean to be from Hamburg, if that’s how you feel? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Growing up in Hamburg was beautiful on the one hand. When I grew up there, there weren’t that many people yet with an immigration background, and so I grew up in a neighborhood that was very, very German. Everybody looked ethnically German, and it took me a few years to realize that I looked different, and it was interesting because then at some point, I was the closest to being different. I mean, look at me today. I tell you a little story. When I was a kid, I had these big curls, big curly hair, and some people said, my God, you look like a Zorotti, and I was like, a Zorotti? What is a Zorotti? Until I understood what a Zorotti was. A Zorotti was a character of a chocolate in Germany, blackface, African-looking, and, I mean, real, complete blackface, right? And they said, you look like the Zorotti, and then thinking about it over the years, I realized I was the closest that there was at that time in terms of immigration that could somewhat resemble somebody from Africa. Yeah. And even though I don’t look African really, right? But immigration was at such a low level from those countries, from African countries, North African countries, Africa, that people simply, I was the closest thing to it. And it was interesting because on the one hand, as I said, I always wanted to belong, but on the other hand, I always felt like I was different. I didn’t belong. And that is hurtful. That is hurtful because it is your hometown. I grew up there. It’s a port city. It’s a working-class city. It has a lot of working class, right? Like every port city does, right? And it also has a lot of merchants, right? It has a big merchant history because of the port, again. So you have wealth on the one hand. You have poverty on the other hand. And they have a very strong accent there. And I had a strong accent from Hamburg. Apparently, I still have it. When people speak with me, they are like, oh my God, yeah, you’re from there. And it’s funny. So I never lost it. I do remember I was cast for a commercial as a child, and I didn’t get the role because my accent was too strong. Your Hamburg accent. My Hamburg accent was too strong. But it’s a lovely city. It’s got the biggest red light district in Europe. So you’re growing up with pimps, with prostitutes, with, you know, drugs weren’t really that big yet. I mean, heroin was around. And then I went to school by accident, literally. After fourth grade, elementary school, you have to choose. In Germany, you have to choose what school you go to. And there are three levels. There is the Hauptschule, which goes up to ninth grade, and then you’re done. There is the Realschule, which goes up to tenth grade, and then you’re done. And then there is the Gymnasium, which is, like, the best, right? Thirteen years, and then you’re done, and then you’re allowed to study. So that is the academic path. I chose the academic path because of a friend of mine who followed his girlfriend, and I ended up by accident in the most prestigious school in Hamburg. You don’t have to pay for the school’s fare, but I started with Latin first, you know? Latin. I had Latin for eight years, and I still read books about Rome and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it’s interesting. I grew up as a soccer player, too. I played soccer passionately, and I’m still doing it. But, for instance, at that school, when I came to that school, to give you an idea, people did not appreciate soccer. Actually, it was looked down upon. We were not allowed to play soccer there. What people were playing there in their spare time was tennis, was hockey, and water sports, and I didn’t have access to that. Amazing. I know, right? Think of a German city where soccer is not significant. It was a people’s sport. It was a sport of the proletarians. Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up, young Nigel, in Hamburg? What did you want to be when you grew up? That is interesting. The first thing I wanted to be was, you’re going to laugh, I wanted to be a police officer. And then later on, I wanted to be in the army, a soldier. What do you remember about the police officer, or what was a police officer to you at that point? A police officer had a great uniform, a great hat. And he had integrity. He was doing the right thing. Ah, yes. Yeah, he was doing the right thing. That’s what it was about. That’s beautiful. So catch us up. Where are you now? What is the work that you do? So what I do now is I work for Nonfiction, which is a research company. And we do market research. We do consumer research. I love the job. It’s a very particular kind of research that we do. I very much enjoy it. It’s very immersive research that we do. I mentioned that earlier, but I was a strategic planner for over 20 years. And I was one of those planners who actually didn’t like research, meaning I di… Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

  2. Oct 26

    Marc Hershon on Curiosity & Improvisation

    Marc Hershon is Director of Naming and Verbal Identity at Landor. Previously he was Creative Director at Lexicon Branding, where he worked on names including BlackBerry, Swiffer and Dasani; and an independent naming consultant. He co-authored *I Hate People!* (Little, Brown, 2009) with Jonathan Littman and wrote the Hallmark Channel film *Santa Jr.* (2002). I start all these conversations, and in fact even in my research I start with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who is an oral historian, and she helps people tell their story. It’s a big beautiful question, which is why I stole it, but it’s so big I kind of over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. Before I ask, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. Okay. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. Where do I come from? Interesting. I come from a place of openness and I come from a place, I’m gonna say I come from a place of improvisation. I believe we all do actually, but I consciously believe that the spirit of improvisation, the give-and-take like we’re having it right here, we’ve not sent each other a script of what we’re talking about right now, I think it drives a lot of certainly what I do in my life and has driven me to do the various things that I’ve done in my life quite a bit just by being open to things. And what does it mean to be from a place of improvisation? What does that look like? What does that mean? It means that I am willing to let a conversation or a situation or pretty much anything that’s going on show me where it wants to go without preconceived notions many times. I might go to a show and realize I’m here to see somebody in particular, but oftentimes you’ll go to a show and there’ll be an opening act that was never announced, never expected, and you can go, well, I didn’t expect this, this isn’t going to be pleasant, or, hey, this might be really interesting, let’s see what happens. And so that’s what it looks like. I have my day planned, I have things that I’m going to do, but I’m completely open to the course of action changing and having to do something else and go somewhere else or sometimes just do nothing. It all depends how the day unfolds. Yeah, and were you always in this place of openness and improvisation, or was it earned over time? It was not earned as much as it was learned. I was running a stand-up comedy club in Seattle, Washington in 1982 called the Comedy Underground, and a local group of improvisers as part of the theater sports organization, which had come down from Canada and is a franchised. They had a theater space in Seattle and they’d got kicked out because there was a play taking place and so they were there a night that they wanted to use the theater. And they came to me as the manager of the Comedy Underground. This was in 1983 by then. And they realized that we were dark on Monday nights. There were no acts. We had acts on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and headliners from Thursdays and Saturday and Sunday. We had open mics on Sunday nights. But Monday night we were dark. And so they said, hey, you’re not doing anything on Monday nights. Could we play there? And I said yes. You guys can have the door. We will keep the bar. And the only other condition is you have to teach me how to do improv. And although I was aware of improv and whatnot, I’d never been involved in it until I realized, as I tell my improv students now when I teach a class, we’re doing improv from the time we’re born really. But I didn’t realize that. So I came to realize that after the fact. But anyway, that’s how I realized that improv was such an interesting and kind of a driving force without actually driving anywhere. You’re the one who’s the driver. The improv is not driving. You’re driving. And so yeah, it was that I’ll call it an epiphany of going through those classes and having those shows that I realized that improv had been present in my life most of it. And now I was more welcoming to its effects. And can you recall what was the attraction to improv? Why ask to learn about it? Do you recall what that initial attraction might have been? I had wanted to get on stage. I had wanted to do comedy. I had tried. I was running a comedy club so I certainly had freedom to get up anytime I wanted to. But the onus of having to write a stand-up comedy act was quite daunting. And I would do it in five minute phases and try it out and get some laughs. But I realized the real laughter was coming because of the way I was presenting it. Not so much what it was I was saying. Sometimes what I was saying was funny. But even at that, it was how you couch things and how you say things. And when I started to watch improv in earnest, I realized, oh, I can have the effect I want and not have to worry so much about honing lines, because the other element of running a comedy club, and before that I had been booking comedy out of San Francisco, and I would watch acts at the club I was running. I would watch acts six nights a week. And you realized that if I was watching a national headliner on the stage in Seattle, we had people come through like Jerry Seinfeld and Harry Anderson, Franklin Ajay, and all these comics that have been doing it for many years. They had learned what I started to call the art of making their act bulletproof. They could essentially go to wherever they wanted to in the country and play any comedy club or corporate event or whatever it was. And they had honed their act to a point that it could work for any audience. And if it wasn’t working, they could figure out why and make some adjustments in the moment. Improv once again coming to the fore. As opposed to the comics that were in Seattle and were coming to open mics and trying to learn the craft, they would get hired to do a one night engagement in say Spokane across the state and they’d come back at how to go. Not so good. I just couldn’t figure out how to talk to those people. And it was the same act. They weren’t doing anything different than they were doing in Seattle. It was working in Seattle. But you begin to realize that as sensibilities change in different areas around the country and even just around your state or around your city, you have to make these almost micro corrections to how you deliver a line or who you make the butt of a joke. No sort of things. Yeah. And that was a lot of work. I watched comics that were all pro and they would just, I remember there was a comic Larry Miller. He’s still around and he’d been working on this piece in his act for a long time and it was the one point in the act a devil appears on his shoulder. He just talks about it. You don’t actually see it. And he was trying to figure out how big should the devil be. How should I describe the devil. And at the time when he was performing in Seattle, the devil was the size of a fire hydrant. And then he would call me occasionally once he was back out on the road doing his act. He goes, I thought of German Shepherd devil, the size of a German. And so it kept changing. For two years he worked on how big this devil was supposed to be. And again to me it was like I would rather be able to go up there and not have to worry about that preparation. And could I do it doing improv playing with other people and interacting with people and making something real come to life in the moment as opposed to planning for it. Amazing. So we met at the business of naming conference which I think was the second annual one. And we often ask at this point of the interview what the person as a child wanted to be when they grew up. So let me defer to that. You were in improv before naming. How did you get into improv? And as a boy do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? There were several things. I have a distinct memory of being seven years old and picturing myself in a lab coat being a chemist. I have no idea exactly wh… Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

  3. Oct 19

    Josh Packard PhD on Listening & Faith

    Josh Packard is a sociologist of religion and co-founder of Future of Faith, which builds research and listening tools for churches around the idea that “listening is sacred.” Previously he was Executive Director of Springtide Research Institute, which publishes The State of Religion and Young People; Executive Vice President of Strategy and Operations at the National Catholic Educational Association; and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Northern Colorado. His books are The Emerging Church: Religion at the Margins (2012); Church Refugees (David C Cook, 2015, with Ashleigh Hope), on people who are done with church but not with their faith; Stuck (Fortress, 2022, with Todd W. Ferguson), on clergy alienated from their calling; Belonging: Reconnecting America's Loneliest Generation (Springtide, [2020]); and Faithful Futures (Baker Academic, 2026), on engaging Gen Z and Gen Alpha in conversations about faith. I start all these conversations the same way, with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She’s an oral historian and she’s a neighbor. She helps people tell their story. When I heard this question, I kind of stole it right away. It’s a big question, so I kind of over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. I over explain this question because it is so big and it lands a little bit. Anyway, you’re in absolute control. The question is, where do you come from? Again, you’re in total control and you can answer any way that you want to. My inclination is to try and answer this like a sociologist. That’s how I feel the pressure. If the goal of being on the show is like, let’s talk to a sociologist, then I feel like I should answer it sociologically. The from that sociologists would talk about is their social location. White, middle class, upwardly mobile upbringing, professional parents, cisgender male, but also a first-generation college student who went and got a PhD. That is a gigantic part. It’s something I’m very proud of. I hope my parents are too. I think we know enough that they are. All of that is in some ways, I guess, shaped by growing up in the late 20th century. Geographically, am I from anywhere? I was born in Texas, but my dad’s from California. My mom’s family’s from Minnesota. I identify more with Minnesota than anything else. My wife’s family is also from there. We’re back in that state a lot. It means a great deal to me. In terms of the work that we might end up talking about today, I guess one other way to answer that question is to say I’m a sociologist of religion, but also a religious sociologist. I think it’s appropriate at times for those things to join one another and inform one another. It’d be odd, I think, for a woman studying gender in sociology to not draw on her own experiences. It would be strange, I think, for me to not draw on my own experiences. We’re also trying to do something like science over here and be a little bit objective at the same time. Hopefully, at its best, I think my faith informs the kinds of questions that we ask and gives context to what people say when they talk to me, but isn’t driving the bus when I’m doing sociology. Yeah. I’m curious. You really called attention to first-generation college students. Can you tell me more about what makes that significant or what that felt like? Yeah. Probably not as much as it does for most first-gen college students. I think when you say first-generation college, it codes for a lot of different things in the background that people can reasonably assume. Often, very tight, if precarious even, finances, a family who is skeptical of the investment potentially in college or maybe overly optimistic about what college will do to them. None of that was the case for me. Like I said, we were this upwardly mobile middle and upper-class family when I was coming up. College, even though first-gen, was very much an expectation, there was no question about it. There was no mortgaging or taking out massive loans to try and make it happen. At the same time, there are parts that I can really identify with and try not to lose sight of. When I was a professor teaching, I could empathize with my students in certain situations in terms of how intimidating it can be. If it was intimidating for me as a white middle-class male who was brought up to think that the world essentially operates in service of whatever it is that I’m trying to do, imagine how intimidating it would be for people who exist in a completely different cultural paradigm. For good reason, because the world is not set up to help them do whatever it is that they’re trying to do. Even then, I can remember having questions that I was like, I don’t even know who to ask this question to. It also feels like I should know the answer to it already. Ultimately, just sort of putting my head down and being willing to be embarrassed, I guess. But again, culturally, class-wise, I could afford to be embarrassed. The cost wasn’t catastrophic to me like it was for a lot of my students, who asking an embarrassing question could be incredibly damaging to the stereotypes that people are already carrying around about them. I try to be aware of as much of that stuff as I can be. Where in Texas were you growing up? Did you grow up? Metroplex in Dallas-Fort Worth. My dad still lives there. We go back often. Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a boy when you grew up? Oh, absolutely. I was going to be center fielder for the Texas Rangers, or maybe if that didn’t work out, I’d be quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys or something. Texas is a particularly sports-crazed culture. I’m not sure that there was much imagination outside of that until I got to college. By the time I got to college, I knew I was not any sort of athlete that mattered. No athlete of consequence, but I didn’t know what else to do. Yeah. Catch us up. Where are you now? Tell us a little bit about the work that you do. We live in Colorado now, in Greeley, Colorado. It’s about an hour north of Denver. We ended up coming here because the University of Northern Colorado had an open faculty position. And it’s an applied sociology program from the first intro classes all the way through their master’s degree. And that is a particular strain within sociology that I was always really interested in. I think this is where we get back to that connection of biography, where my conversations around the dinner table when I would go home from college were, I was an English major. I was an English lit major. My mom and dad were franchise owners. They owned McDonald’s and he would say, I’ll be talking to him about Thoreau or something. And he’d be like, well, how does that help me with my managers? And I’m like, I’m not sure it’s supposed to. It’s a long walk from Walden to the drive-thru lane. But what stuck with me was always that question of, well, how does this matter to me? And so it taught me when communicating with people who are outside of my particular discipline, I don’t think they’re being narcissistic or selfish or anything. What they’re just looking for is a foothold for, okay, that may all be great, but how does this matter to me again? And what I really loved about sociology is the premise that it does matter to you. It’s not that it has to. I think there’s lots of really good and important theoretical work being done in sociology and other social sciences that are basically just professors talking to professors. But there is this strain in there too, that makes the promise going all the way back to the foundations of my discipline that sociology can matter to people’s lives. And that was the particular version I was drawn to when I got a chance to teach in an applied sociology program and run a research lab here. I was thrilled to get this job and to get to live in Colorado and do it. Can you introduce me to that strain… Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

  4. Oct 12

    Paul Worthington on Organizations & Identity

    Paul Worthington is a brand consultant and President of Invencion, 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 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… Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

    Paul Worthington on Organizations & Identity

  5. Oct 5

    Mary Meehan on Values & Measurement

    Mary Meehan is a Strategic Cultural Adviser and co-founder of Panoramix Global. 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 wha… Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Sep 28

    Reuben Steiger on Movements & Recovery

    Reuben Steiger is a writer and entrepreneur. He writes at the Fellow Travelers and on AI and democracy for The Contrarian. 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,… Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Sep 21

    Freddie Pikovsky on Hospitality & Work

    Freddie Pikovsky is the founder of Last Human, a placemaking and creative studio built around making places, brands, and experiences that preserve human connection. Its flagship project is Barnfox, the work and retreat club in the Cannonball Factory in Hudson, New York he co-founded in 2017. He has spent his career building spaces and media for people who want to work and live differently: he opened DUMBO Startup Lab, one of Brooklyn’s first coworking spaces, in 2011, and founded Off Track Planet, the travel brand behind Off Track Planet’s Travel Guide for the Young, Sexy, and Broke. He is the co-author with Nicole Caldwell of FARM + LAND’S Back to the Land: A Guide to Modern Outdoor Life (Chronicle Books), a collection of stories about slow living, sustainability, and doing things with your own two hands. So I do this all the time, of course, in every conversation, I start with the same question, which I borrowed from a neighbor of ours, Suzanne Snyder, who runs the Oral History Summer School in Hudson. She has this amazing question, which I stole from her because it’s big and beautiful and great, but because it’s big and beautiful and great, I kind of overexplain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. I’m originally from Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 80s, which was a huge concentration of mobsters in that time in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. And the reason I think that’s important to say is we grew up in a neighborhood that was very family and community oriented. If you ask my mom, she was like, we liked having the mafia in the neighborhood because they protected us. If you ever had a problem, you can go to somebody and they’ll help take care of it for you. So I grew up in the type of neighborhood that it was almost like straight out of a Scorsese movie where kids on the block would play all night. Parents knew each other and everybody felt really safe and protected. And there were a bunch of characters. And we all made up fun stories about that guy who sat on the porch smoking cigars all day and how he probably killed a few people and has a few bones in his closet and things like that. But I grew up in this very tight knit community. I think it made a big impact on me as a person for the rest of my life. And my grandmother and our other family members lived in Los Angeles. And I remember leaving Brooklyn when I was about seven years old, which is why you don’t hear the Bensonhurst Brooklyn accent, although it tends to come out of me when I get passionate about it or I get tipsy. Sorry, this is a really long answer to the question. But we moved to Los Angeles when I was about seven years old and we moved to the San Fernando Valley, which is not the cool part of L.A. It’s very, very spread out, very suburbia. And it was the complete opposite of what I experienced up until that point in my life, which was, people were very disconnected, no sense of community, very spread out. You didn’t really know who your neighbors were. And it lacked a whole lot of character as far as I was concerned. So I longed for Brooklyn ever since I arrived as a seven year old in Los Angeles and eventually moved back to Brooklyn as soon as I had the means to in my 20s. So I think the reason I answer that question in that way is because I think those first few years of my life were really shaped by this unique time and place. And that’s been my perspective on the world is living in this very tight knit community where everybody knows each other and looks out for each other. And that’s been a big impact and shaped my view of the world since I was little. Yeah, it’s amazing. Do you have a way of thinking about what does it mean to be from Brooklyn? When you say that, what does that feel like? I feel like it’s always been a cool thing to say. I’m very proud of it. And even my wife will tease me. She’s like, yeah, you grew up in L.A. Like, don’t lie. And I’m like, I try to downplay the fact that I actually did kind of spend most of my life going to school in Los Angeles because I as a person identify as a Brooklynite, even though I spent a lot of my formidable years in Los Angeles. And I have great friends that I obviously grew up with and went to school with in Los Angeles and still stay in touch and visit all the time. But I never felt that it was my identity. I never identified with the culture of Los Angeles. I always thought they were a bit soft and lacked — not everybody. But there was a lack of character unless you were trying to be a movie star or something like that. I never. Yeah, I was just not my vibe. Yeah. Well, my daughter’s nine. And so seven years is a lifetime. Do you know what I mean? So those early years are really powerful. So I appreciate hearing that. I believe you when you say you’re from Brooklyn. Yeah, when I get passionate about something, though, the Brooklyn really starts to come out and start waving everywhere. I should also mention, we’re Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. So I was the first in my family born in the US period. I have many cousins now younger than me, but I was kind of the first one here. So we were Ukrainians. We were adjacent from Brighton Beach, which is known as Little Odessa, with families from Odessa in the Ukraine. And so it was a melting pot of Ukrainian Jews, Italians, Greeks. So that vibe has always been a big impact on me. Yeah. So you’re in L.A. What did young Fred want to be? What did you want to be when you grew up? You have a recollection of. I still find myself asking that question. What am I going to do? Who am I going to be when I grow up? Yeah, I would say my path is zigged and zagged a whole lot. Again, I grew up with parents who grew up in the Soviet Union and like typical immigrant parents who come to the U.S., they expect you to choose a path, doctor, lawyer, accountant. Those are basically your options. And I was not a good student. I definitely leaned more in the direction of being creative and entrepreneurial. I always kind of liked coming up with my own little projects and things. And so when I graduated, I will barely graduate high school. It was time to go into college. I try to do all the things that you’re told to do and go to college and pick a career and things like that. So I try to do all those things. I went to community college out of high school, but my interests kept kind of taking me in other directions. And I tried a lot of different things. I’ve done everything from working in the music industry in L.A. for a period of time. I was actually even a Hollywood extra for some period of time. It was a gig job, but dabbled in a little bit of that and started businesses when I was very young, without having absolute clues as to what I was doing. But essentially, I didn’t have the type of guidance from my parents that benefited a personality like me. And then also, I think growing up in the U.S. and my parents were not familiar with that sort of entrepreneurial culture here. I mean, I don’t think entrepreneur — the word didn’t really even exist in their lexicon. So it was a lot of figuring things out for myself, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that’s how I met you. And this is the next question I always ask is sort of catch us up. Where are you now and what are you doing? And I got to know you here in Hudson and in Bard Fox and as a real entrepreneur. And so tell us, where are you and what are you working on now? So in my journey, I’ve had a number of entrepreneurial projects, some successful, some not. And eventually, I, like many folks, when I came back to Brooklyn in my 20s, I worked on a bunch of different projects and ended up in a similar place as many folks in the city where I eventually got burned out on hustle, hustle, hustle and started to feel inspired by going upstate and made fr… Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Sep 14

    Mark DePace on Community & Creativity

    Mark DePace is Chief Creative Officer and a partner at Ghost Robot, a creative production studio in Brooklyn, NY, which he joined in 2005. He is the founder of Friendly City Creative Club, an advertising agency and retail space in Hudson, NY, and co-owner of Hudson Ferry Co. He is a visiting professor at Pratt Institute and President of the Hudson City School District Board of Education. I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrow from a neighbor of ours, Suzanne Snider, of Oral History Summer School. And it’s a big question and it’s a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it from her, but I always kind of over explain it because it is pretty big. 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. The question is, where do you come from? Where do I come from? I come from the Hudson Valley. I come from a family of progressive educators and a long line of proud Italian Americans. Yeah. So we know each other in Hudson, New York. What is it like to be from, or what does it mean to you to be from the Hudson Valley? I think what we experience in Hudson here is pretty similar to a lot of towns in the Hudson Valley and probably America in general have experienced, this post-industrial decline, urban renewal, reinvention. So there’s definitely a shared sense of history that I can feel and have experienced my entire life. And what’s nice about Hudson is that it happens on a much smaller scale than someplace like Newburgh where I grew up. But I’ve always been fascinated with the history from where we live and all the amazing things that have happened and some not so amazing things. And also love the natural beauty of it, which I had to leave for a while and come back before I realized how special that really is. What was it like in Newburgh growing up? It was, let’s see, similar to Hudson, there’s a narrative about Newburgh that is very negative that a lot of people perpetuate. And I think when you grow up in an environment like that, you’re motivated to seek out all of the positive things. So it gave me, I think, a unique perspective of when somebody hands you what’s supposed to be a pile of garbage, you look at it and are like, well, no, there’s actually a lot of good things here. And a lot of the things in my childhood growing up that felt like they were accidental or not intentional, I think were actually very intentional decisions made by my parents, who I mentioned were educators, and were drawn to Newburgh because at the time it was one of the first magnet schools in the country. And so it was a real experiment in, okay, what happens when you start funding public schools and giving people opportunities at a young age to try new things and explore new things and learn in different ways. And so the diversity that was there, the wealth of opportunities, the different types of just experiences that I had growing up, I think were really, really amazing and invaluable. Do you have a recollection of what young Mark wanted to be when he grew up? I always loved sports. So every child has the dream of playing sports for a living. That doesn’t pan out for most of us. I don’t know, I was always interested in arts and literature and problem-solving and very project-minded, just loved a project and getting my hands dirty and figuring out how to make something or do something. And it took me a while to figure out what form that would take, but certainly toyed with the idea of being a writer or being even a teacher at some point, always focused around either literature or the arts in some way, shape or form. Outside maybe wanting to be a firefighter when I was really young. I was also obsessed with firetrucks, which I still think are very, very cool. Well, you’re in the right town also. It’s true. It is true. It is true. And as I grew professionally, I think I gained a deeper appreciation for what firefighters do. And when I was working on film sets, I came up with this analogy. It was like, being a firefighter is like, you’re a filmmaker and somebody says, hey, you need to go make this film right now. This is where it is. And you’re able to just put it together just like that. It’s very similar in that there’s lots of trucks and each truck has a different job and each person has a different job. And when you look at it from the outside, you don’t necessarily see that, but they all know. It’s like, hey, I’m the guy that when we get there, I park my truck here and I hook this hose up there. And then this guy does this and this guy does that. And it’s really, really fascinating to think about it in that way, as a system and a process and a procedure that’s been really fine tuned to the smallest detail. Yeah. And so catch us up. Where are you now and what is the work that you do? So right now I’m in Hudson, probably less than a mile from where you are. I mentioned I started as a filmmaker and that’s what I went to school for. And as I got into making films, fell in love with the short form part of it. So music videos and commercials, and just followed that path for over 20 years. And as I’ve gotten deeper and deeper, keep uncovering more layers to all of it and have found myself becoming less intrigued just by the making of things and more intrigued in the reasons why and how, and what’s the purpose of marketing? What’s the purpose of advertising? If we’re going to spend all this time and effort making something that’s supposed to be really cool, we should know that it’s going to be successful, or at least have a decent hypothesis about why it’s necessary to be doing what we’re doing. So I still have a studio in New York City called Ghost Robot, and post pandemic opened up a studio here in Hudson that is a sister company called Friendly City Creative Club. Do you recall, was there a moment you got the itch to be a filmmaker, where you chose that as something to do? Where did that attraction— So I took a video class in high school. And to be honest, I think the thing that really clicked for me was when I was learning how to edit and realized, wait a minute, I’m editing this video and I get to put whatever music I want against it, and love music and never realized that there is some professional utility to having a love for music, and just spending literally hours trying to find the right song and trying different songs against the edit and then editing the song. And I think when I realized that, I was like, oh, this is something that I’ve never considered as a career, but it actually takes all of these little things that I like and combines them into one. And I like taking photos. I like making art projects and making props. And I like music and I like working with other people, that team aspect that I really loved in sports. And so it just became like, oh, I can do this. And really, every single time I do a project, I get to do a little bit of something that I love. And I don’t need to write any more essays. Big motivating factor was like, how do I go to college and not have to read books that I don’t want to read and write papers that seem to have academic value, but not a whole lot else. That’s funny. When did you first discover that, and maybe you just answered this question, but that you could make a living doing what you’re doing now? Yeah, it was probably at NYU. I had some experience, had family members who worked in the industry and did pretty well. So I knew that it could be done. And the great thing about going to a place like NYU is that you’re just in the thick of it and you’re exposed to tons of different people doing tons of different things. And there’s opportunities to intern and work on sets outside of school. And I really was motivated by that. And I think by the time I graduated, I was more motivated to be out there working and meeting people than actually taking more classes or spending more time in school. So I graduated in three and a half years, wanted to just get … Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe

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