THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Peter Spear

5.0 (2)
Business
Updated Weekly

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

1d ago

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 got to this point where the word brand is almost like the reverse of the word snow for the Inuit. You know how they talk about how the Inuit have over 50 words for snow? Marketers have over 50 definitions for the word brand. So I come from the corporate identity, organization-out tradition of the branding world. That’s my core business. I'm certainly part of the problem when it comes to that definition thing. There's some attachment to trying to define it, and I appreciate how clear you're being about it. What more can you say about the lineage, and about the role Wally Olins played in defining this practice of organization out? Is that his language, or your way of differentiating your approach? And what's the alternative to organization out? Well, I think there’s a couple of things. That’s not his language. That’s certainly my interpretation, just as a clarifying way of describing it. I think there are multiple schools. And what happens is the schools tend to look at the subject through their own lens, and then they use that lens to define the subject. But the problem is they’re not really defining the subject, they’re defining the piece of the subject that they can see through their particular lens. So if you’re an advertising planner, or as they call themselves these days, strategists, you’re looking at that from a market-back perspective. Look, what’s the consumer insight that we can attach to this brand that will drive this campaign, that will drive this behavior change, or whatever it is we’re trying to create? And so that then becomes what you might call platform-specific. They talk about campaign platforms, or it might be campaign-specific, but there’s much more of a market back. So if you deal with most, not all by any stretch, but most advertising strategists, they’re far less interested
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 what I believe. And I believe I’m right. So it is a way of understanding people other than just asking people what they think or asking them to rate a question on a scale. It is an additional and, I believe, helpful way to understand people. Yeah. Well, I’m here for all the nuance, to dig a little bit deeper, if there’s more that you want to share about it. I’m curious about how you identify them or measure them. How do they become something that you tracked? I loved what you said too; so much of this I’m enjoying. There’s the trends. It’s one thing to know about the trends, which are interesting, but your real interest is what’s happening underneath. So maybe tell me a little bit more about that. I’m using underneath as a metaphor for the values, right? But tell me more about how you get in there and what you do with the values, how you get them, how you measure them. It came from a lot of experience, actually. At the time when we were building Iconoculture, we developed what we refer to as macro trends, and they were kind of a collection of behaviors that reflected a certain set of values. And that’s kind of how we continued to build our understanding: whenever we would observe something, we would slot it into one of those macro trends, because the values aligned, like around safety or something. Many different experiences or products that you can engage with can be very different in the category they exist in, or the reason for buying, or demographic groups, et cetera. But if they all center around this idea of safety, just as a for-instance, that’s where you can look to understand that that’s what matters to people. And then anybody can build on that. It’s not just the Ring doorbell people; anybody can build on that. So it was a lot of experience. And when my partner and I left Iconoculture, I had also wanted to see
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, philosophically. For me, once I see things differently, I can’t go do the old thing. I can’t do advertising. I’m single-minded. And what I’m interested in is, as I got better, I began to document everything in a way that wasn’t utilitarian. It was just like, what’s going on? What’s going on? I made little apps for myself to read at night. Lots of it’s cheesy, but it’s been a hell of a lot of work. So I’ve spent the last two years focused just on groups, whether it’s me and you right now, which is called a dyad, or groups up to 10 or 12, after which things change. And I never knew any of these things. I just wasn’t interested. And so what I fell into doing was building movements. And I’ve contributed to a couple big ones that you’ll see in public, one for the environment. Another, sort of a men’s movement, that’s not about going to the desert and eating fire, but more like growth. And it’s what I’m into. So it turns out this is a very hard, hard problem. Right? Yeah. It’s hard there. If you actually study movements, first you have to ask, what is a movement? Right? Is the Pepsi campaign a movement, because it says it is? The answer almost always is no, brands have movements. Yeah. The other thing is, top down or bottom up. You start with a charismatic leader. Right? The second thing that’s super important is the first follower. Right? So there’s a great video on YouTube called First Follower. And that video is people dancing at a concert. One guy gets up and dances. That’s the leader. The first person who gets up and validates them is more important. And so movements are a mode of creative expression and movement towards a goal that are sort of built and told with people. It’s tribal. It’s nice. Yeah. Yeah, it’s beautiful. I feel like two questions are always trying to get o
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 friends with somebody in Brooklyn who also wanted to invest more time and energy in upstate. At some point along my entrepreneurial journey, I started a coworking space in Brooklyn. In 2018, I started thinking about the idea of what if there were coworking spaces in upstate New York that were an escape for people from the city if remote work was to grow as an accepting way to do things. And in 2020, I opened up the first coworking space in Hudson called Barn Fox. And our launch party was two weeks before we were all told to stay home. So COVID obviously started. And yeah, essentially, in that moment, it was a lot of questions in the air as to what was going to happen next. But I had this gut feeling that we put our eggs in this basket of remote work would help our business. And obviously we’re like, well, in the grand scheme of things, this should be helpful to what our goals are here with this business. And I guess almost seven years later, we’re still here. So it’s grown and it’s grown, especially in Hudson. It’s been our most successful location. We were up to four locations. We’ve actually reduced our locations, but Hudson’s always been our best performing location. And it’s grown a lot. And obviously we’ve grown into the Cannonball Factory, which I essentially took over the whole building and now do a number of other things in this building. So yeah. What was your discovery moment with Hudson, of all places upstate, to plant that first location? What was your first experience of Hudson? So one of my previous businesses was a media company, digital media company, and we actually got a publishing deal. It was a travel blog that got really popular and turned into, yeah, a pretty popular website for backpackers, actually. Oh, all right. Yeah. What was it? Do you want to mention the name of it? It was called Off Track Planet. Oh, play on like the millennia
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 out there and work and make things. I’ve got two questions coming at once. One, can you tell us a little bit more about Ghost Robot, the work that you do, and then I’m curious about what those early years might’ve been like? Yeah. So right as I was finishing up school, I met Zach Mortensen, who’s my partner in Ghost Robot. He was working on films in the city right around the same time, and we would work on projects together. And then both, I think at the same time, realized we didn’t like working for other people and didn’t like busting our asses to execute on somebody else’s vision, and that we needed a platform to explore our own creative ideas and ideas of what creating a company looked like. The easiest way for us to do that at the time was a lot of music videos. So that was the early years, was tons of music videos. Again, always loved music. So it was really easy and satisfying for me to reach out to up and coming artists and offer to do music videos for next to nothing and just see that grow and expound over time. And I think that’s one of the things I really liked about it, was just that you’re done with a project in four to five weeks. The cycle of success and failure and experimentation was just a lot more rapid than it was when I was working on feature films. And that became a really big part of the Ghost Robot ethos, which was just try as much as you can as quickly as possible and don’t let your last project define you. The next project is just another opportunity to try something new and try something different. And that’s what we became known for. And it’s also right around the time when digital media was becoming a thing. So all of these brands started finding, hey, now I need content for my YouTube page and content for my website and then content for Facebook and then content for Instagram. And so just our e
Aug 31

Richard Young on Place & Agency

Richard Young is the founder and executive director of CivicLex, a Lexington, Kentucky nonprofit he launched in 2017 that builds civic knowledge, strengthens relationships across the city, and pushes local institutions to be more responsive to residents. It runs civic engagement programs alongside a local newsroom. Previously he was executive director of North Limestone CDC, Lexington’s first place-based community development corporation, where he raised $2.2M and helped create a new city zoning classification. He has also run the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, co-owned a coffee shop, and co-founded MusicWorks, Kentucky’s first El Sistema-inspired youth program. He is an Ashoka Fellow. So I’m not sure that you know this, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s also sort of, she’s a neighbor and she helps people tell their stories. And she has this beautiful question, which I stole from her because I can’t think of any better way to get into a conversation out of nowhere. But it’s a big conversation. 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’re in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. Sounds great. The question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. Yeah, I come from Kentucky. This place that I live in, I wasn’t actually born here, although most of my family’s from here. I’ve got some family here in Lexington where I live, and then the rest of my family’s in a more rural county in Kentucky. But I wasn’t born here. My family moved back when I was five. I’ve always had a really complicated relationship with Kentucky, especially when I moved back and as a young man. But throughout my 20s and 30s, I gained, I think, a better understanding and appreciation for the depth and complexity, not just here in Lexington, where I live, but all across the state. Thanks to relationships that I started building, and I feel like this place has really raised me into a person that values place, into a person that thinks of place as sort of the starting point, right? Both for my work, but also for, I would say, almost everything about my life. So the question of like, where are you from is a question that I feel like I hear a lot. And 15 years ago, I don’t know how I would have answered that, but I feel like now it is, yeah, I’m from Kentucky. Yeah. And what does it mean to you to be from Kentucky? Are there moments or sort of circumstances in which you feel the Kentucky in you in a particular way? Yeah, I think I feel the Kentucky in me most thoroughly when I’m outside in nature here. There’s something really special and sort of sacred about the land here in Kentucky. It is diverse and bountiful. It is a state with a lot of regions that really have their own topographies and ecologies that are incredible and beautiful. So I feel like a Kentuckian, especially when I’m in nature, when I’ve got my feet in a creek, or when I’m climbing a hiking trail. But I also feel like a Kentuckian when I’m around other Kentuckians. Your voice changes, right? I feel like there becomes this unspoken permission of like, oh, I can actually just talk how I normally talk. And I don’t have to sort of vaguely disguise. I don’t have much of an accent to begin with. But what is there, there’s a subconscious effort to cover it up when I’m talking with other folks around the country. But when I feel most like a Kentuckian is when I’m around other ones. And when I’m out in nature. And I think both of those come from a lot of my 20s, I spent deeply involved in an organization called the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange that sort of took me throughout the state and helped me build a lot of really deep and meaningful relationships with some of the closest relationships I still have to this day. And it also sort of seeded my work into the class. And so I think those are two things that were really deeply ingrained in me, the sort of people in the history of the people here, and then the land and the place that we are in. But to me, what it means to be a Kentuckian. I think it really depends on where you’re from. To me, I think there are a few things that are really special about being from Kentucky. It is a place where people are incredibly kind and incredibly resilient. It’s a place where folks really value being a neighbor, really value each other. It’s a place where people feel a really deep sense of pride of place. We have 120 counties in this state, which is a lot of counties. Wow. And everyone’s really proud of their county, right? Like when you ask people where they’re from, they’ll be like, Oh, I’m from Perry County, or I’m from Muhlenberg County or whatever. And so people have a really deep pride of place of the county, of the very specific place they’re from. I think people have a shared identity as Kentuckians. And then for me, I think there’s also this deep thought tradition in this state. Some of the writers and thinkers that have most clearly informed my approach to my work and my approach to my life — Wendell Berry and Thomas Merton and bell hooks — are all from the state and have had, and have, equally, I think, shared deep complex relationships to this place, to the land and the people that are here. So yeah, that’s what it means to be a Kentuckian, I guess, to me. Yeah, it’s beautiful. Thank you so much for that. I always ask this question, do you have a recollection of being young, being a boy, and knowing what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did young Richard want to be when he grew up? Young Richard wanted to do a lot of different things, but all of them were in some way related to snakes and/or dinosaurs. So take that for what it’s worth. My mom tells the story about how I was in preschool or kindergarten, and all the parents were around, and they were going around, kids, what do you want to be when you grow up, in this like firemen, policemen, and I was like, I want to be a herpetologist. Was a weirdo then and I’m a weirdo now. Yeah, though. Yeah. If it had to do with snakes or dinosaurs, I was super into it. Thankfully, I guess my career doesn’t involve those two things now. Yeah, so catch us up now. So tell us, where are you, and sort of introduce the work? What keeps you busy? What are you working on? Yeah. So my work is here in Lexington, in Fayette County. And it’s focused on trying to build a sort of civic life in my community, in which people have a meaningful say over the decisions that shape their lives. For me, a lot of that is rooted in the past, like, sort of 15 years of when I moved back to Kentucky after school. I did not go very far for school, just went across the river to Ohio. So it wasn’t that far. But moving back home, I sort of made my way into community development and found myself really exploring these questions of agency and who has a say over the decisions that shape their lives. I had a really complicated job that was challenging in a number of ways. And I think through that experience, I really gained an appreciation for our role in civic life, being to enable others, right? But that is what everyone’s role should be, is to enable other people to more deeply experience our sort of shared civic life. And so that kind of led me into starting the organization that I run today, which is called CivicLex. And we’re about nine years old, soon to be 10 next year. And our work is focused around, yeah, trying to strengthen the civic health of our community, trying to help folks understand and engage in local issues here, help people connect with their neighbors and build new relationships. And ultimately try and reimagine the role that our public here in Lexington plays in the decision-making process that shapes every aspect of our community. Yeah. I mean, you hinted at it a little bit, but I guess there’s two questions that are bouncing around in my head and hopefully they come out in one coherent question. I guess the first thing is sort of where did this begin for you, like the origins of CivicLex, but then how do you talk about the problem? I imagine you encounter a problem that needs a solution. And I guess I’m wondering, what’s the diagnosis, or how do you describe the situation that you encountered that sort of has driven you and that CivicLex is trying to address? How do we talk about what the diagnosis is? Yeah. I think in my previous job before starting CivicLex, like I said, I was in the community development space. And in that, I remember hearing these sort of two distinct conversations that were happening at the same time in my day-to-day life. Like one was with policymakers where I was in city hall, sitting on boards and commissions or trying to move some sort of legislation through local government. And I remember hearing frustrations from government about like, oh, no one knows what’s going on here. No one’s engaged. Like no one knows anything about government, or people show up and they’ve got a bunch of bad information and dah, dah, dah, dah, but we really want people to be involved, but they’re not involved. And so we don’t know how to do that. And then I remember observing just the same 30 people in the majority of city meetings, right? It’s like the same, very much a case of the usual suspects. And so government, I think, recognized that there’s an issue, that people were not deeply engaged and the people that were engaged had some sort of self-interest beyond, in more of a professional capacity, right, than in the sort of live life as a citizen. And then at the same time, I remember doing community development work, you spend a lot of time talking with folks that are just going about their daily lives. And I remember hearing so much from my neighbors and the fol
Aug 24

Michael Anton Dila on Conversation & Governance

Michael Anton Dila is the Director of the Policy Futures Lab at Americans for Responsible Innovation. He is a Partner at Torch Partnership, where he shapes strategic conversations that help organizations confront their “wicked problems,” and an advisor to Helpful Places. Previously he was Director of Oslo for AI, and a director at the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Innovation Network. I start all the conversations that I do with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s also why I kind of over-explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control.What a great question. Having just recently made a plan to go to Romania at the end of September, where my father’s family are from, that sense of fromness is probably readily to my mind. I’ve always identified with my Romanian heritage, although I frankly do not really know much about it, more strongly than with my mother’s heritage, which is more confused and has a number of different parts and pieces, but in ways that are probably not fair to my mother, in all honesty. On the other hand, the thing that springs to mind, which again is not without its contentiousness among those near and dear, is that often when people ask where I’m from, the first thing I say is Chicago. Now, I was born in Chicago. I lived there all of six months, but I identify as being from there, and I identify always first as being an American, in spite of the fact that at this point, as I close in on 63 years in the fall, I have lived far more of my life in Canada than in the US, and I am also a Canadian citizen. But I always say first that I’m an American. So those are only some of the things that we think of, or that I think about, when we think about where we’re from. Other thing, I’m just going to say for fun and s***s and giggles, because I know this connects us in some way: I’m going to say that I’m from planet conversation, so we can dig into what that might mean. I think I am from there too. I’m really curious, from your position in Canada, what does it mean to be American? How do you think about that, if I dare ask that question? Well, it’s certainly not something that stands still, particularly these days. I will say that I know there are people who do say this. I’ve never said that I’m ashamed to be an American. I’ve never felt that. I have certainly felt like identifying as an American is not always an easy thing. It’s not always to identify with something that I think of as uniformly and unquestionably good — to the contrary, and more and more so. I think that’s just, to me, being part of an educated, ethical and conscientious person, to acknowledge that the place we call America, the country we call America, the way we think about what that country is and its history, has, as certain poets have said, a long and terrible history of violence, among other things. And yet I’m also mindful that we have a constitution that enshrines the idea of pursuing happiness as a central civic good, which I think is probably not a bad place to start. It’s certainly not sufficient and not a good place to end, but there’s that. I think the thing, interestingly enough, about thinking about being an American from the perspective of Canada and living as a Canadian: there’s a long history of Canadians thinking that they’re different from Americans, which certainly they are in important respects, and in many times that they’re better than Americans in certain kinds of ways. And there are certainly merits to that point of view, and reasons for that point of view. On the other hand, Canada also has an unfortunate and long history attached to colonialism, the legacy of which is still very much a real thing, the way the legacy of colonialism remains a present thing in all of the places in which it operated. And so I guess where that lands me up is, no matter where one is, we’ve still got a lot of work to do. So you indicated you grew up and you were born in Chicago. Where did you do your growing up? Where was childhood? So childhood and home. When I think of, well, where did I grow up? I used to identify home and where I grew up as the same. When I was four and a bit, we moved to Montreal from California. My dad had been in the navy during Vietnam, and when he got out we moved to Montreal, and that’s where I grew up, which was an incredibly lucky place to grow up. An amazing city. Many, many things that I think of as core to my identity certainly come from having grown up in Montreal. And do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be as a kid? What you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, questions like this trigger very specific memories for me. So as a teenager, a young teenager — maybe I was 13, maybe I was still 12 — it was the absolute zenith of the fame of Jacques Cousteau. And we had some family friends who had a couple of sons, one of whom was considerably older than me. This family also had a VCR, which at the time was very unusual. And the family recorded the Jacques Cousteau National Geographic specials, and so I would go over there to watch with this guy Andrew. And at the time I wanted to be, when I grew up, an oceanographer, and more than that, a shark specialist. And Andrew, who I say was probably, I don’t know, five, six years older, also wanted to be an oceanographer. I don’t remember if he had a specific intention, or as specific an intention. But then a couple of years later some prick named Steven Spielberg made a movie called Jaws and ruined everything. And so I would likely be an oceanographer, and a very famous one at that. Famous, successful, celebrated, all these things. Maybe already have a mind of their own. But for Steven Spielberg. So thank you very much, Mr. Spielberg. Yeah, thank you. And Peter Benchley, for writing the book. Yeah. But the thing that I really like about the story, and telling the story, is Andrew Bowen, the guy who I used to watch these videos with, did indeed go on to become an oceanographer, and worked and works his entire career at the Woods Hole Institution. Has, as an engineer, helped design the submersibles that went down to the Titanic, among many other things. And has had many, all of the experiences I at one time dreamed of having. I cannot imagine that life. But I feel very cool. It feels cool that he does, and that I have some connection with that. Yeah. That would make that alternate timeline, or the loss of that alternate timeline, really palpable — that the person you were there watching it with actually arrived. Yeah. And I think there are ways in which that pattern — I was going to say that theme, not exactly that theme, but that pattern — has shown up way more than once in my life. I wanted later in my teenage years, young post-secondary school years, to be an actor, or involved in theater and film. And again, I have many friends from those days who did in fact end up having careers doing that. Certainly not in the case of oceanography, but for sure in the case of theater and film and that experience. I do think that there are things that I learned on my way that have definitely stayed with me and are part of my personal and professional life. So catch us up. Where are you now, and what’s the work that you’re doing? Well, because people are just listening to our voices, I expect they don’t have the benefit of seeing behind me the illustration of the Capitol building, which is fitting, because I’m sitting in an office in Washington, DC. In fact, our office is directly across the street from the White House. And I started work here in February at an organization called Americans for Responsible Innovation, and was led here on a couple of different paths. But I had begun to be actively interested and involved in questions about the governance of technology, particularly pertaining to AI, over the last four or five years, and was following that path. I wasn’t sure where it would end up, but it ended up here, at an organization that is doing policy advocacy around emerging technology, and AI is certainly the focus. And what we are trying to do here is generate ideas, frameworks and blueprints for what we think both the content and the institutional forms of governance of AI ought to look like. So, heady stuff. I play very much a stewarding role, in that I work within our policy department, and part of my role here is to help all of those smart people become masters at their work. So I am very much engaged in helping give them tools that they don’t have that might be useful in doing their work — tools from other places, other than traditional policy and think-tanky, more academic sources. And so I’ve been doing that almost seven-ish months. Lots and lots more to do. It’s a pretty exciting space to be a part of. It could be both exciting and frustrating, but I was going to say at times boring, in the sense that although there’s a lot of conversation, as anybody knows, about this, there isn’t as much movement in the space, particularly in the US and North America, on actually creating new kinds of regulation, and even or especially new kinds of institutional homes and structures that might be adequate to the work that I think is ahead of us. I guess there are two things bouncing around in my head, which is always the case. The first is, I want to ask you where’s the best place to start to try to make this conversation about AI governance tangible or real. What’s the doorway in, to understand what you’re actually trying to do and what the solution might look like? I’m super attracted to and really feel th
Aug 17

Preeti Varma on Listening & Belonging

Preeti Varma is a cultural strategist and qualitative researcher who has worked across fifty markets and lived in eight countries. She has held roles at Flamingo, Ipsos MORI, and Cactus Communications; her clients include Google, Meta, Amazon, BBC, Unilever, Diageo, and Samsung. She holds a Master’s in Gender and Culture from SOAS, University of London, and conducted the qualitative fieldwork for Phase 2 of The Rift. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from my friend of mine, a neighbor, who helps people tell their story. It’s a big question, which is why I use it and also why 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 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 are in absolute control. I love this question. I also kind of dread it. It is a big question. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot. So bear with me as I go through it. So I’ve thought about it. So there are three parts to this. Biologically, I am Indian. And even within that, my mother is from the south, from Kerala. My father is from up north. And I don’t know how much you know about India, but those two are very, very different culturally, linguistically, religiously as well in some ways. But also, both of their families are incredibly different. My mother comes from a Kerala royal family who placed a lot of emphasis on education and culture. And so she was brought up to be very cultured, read a lot, place a lot of emphasis on education. All her parents were very progressive. My aunt has a PhD and they grew up way in the 60s. My mother, she didn’t get her master’s due to family circumstances, but went to college, got great grades, etc. Versus my dad, my father is from farmer stock, from up north. His mother got married at 14. So very different backgrounds. So there’s that as well. My father didn’t learn to speak English till he went to college. So he’s very self-made in that sense as well. And somehow they met, got married. There was an arranged marriage. It was very much a love match, as they say. And then they moved to Japan, which is where culturally my second point comes in. I was born and brought up in Japan, which is what I feel most culturally connected to, which is very different. Because I wasn’t always necessarily accepted as in Japan or seen as Japanese. But that’s what I feel I think most culturally connected with, having been born and brought up there. And I think the third point is where I feel most like I belong. And I think this is the most complicated answer, because I don’t think I belong anywhere really. As an adult, I’ve moved around quite a lot. We’ve lived in eight countries since I turned, I think, 18. And so since then, yeah, we’ve just moved around a lot. And so I feel like I am part of the world in the larger sense. But if you ask me where I come from, I’m not really sure. Yeah, well, it’s a wonderful answer. I have so many things that I’m curious about. I love the third layer of belonging. And I wonder, yeah, well, where are you now? Where do you live now? Right now we are in San Francisco. So we moved here about two and a half years ago. Yeah. And how is San Francisco treating you? Oh, that’s a complex question. So this is my first time living in the West Coast. It’s the first time I’ve lived in the US as a parent. And as an adult, the last time I lived in New York was when I was in college. So I was 18 in New York. It was a very different experience. I loved New York. I loved everything about the East Coast, my experience in New York. As a parent, living in the West Coast, living in San Francisco, it’s been very eye-opening because I do think there are the systems for parents are lacking. And it is a very difficult place to be a parent. And I don’t know if it’s the West Coast. I don’t know if it’s San Francisco in particular. But it hasn’t been the easiest place. And how old are your little ones? Oh, nine and six. Oh, yes. Nice. Well, I want to go back to your biography and where you come from. I spent time in India. I spent time in Kerala. I know just enough about it to be really unbelievably admiring of it. And yeah, were you there? What’s your relationship with Kerala? It’s interesting because I don’t really have much of a relationship with India in general, apart from the fact that I did live there after I graduated college. I do have extended family in India, but they’ve also not lived in the places my parents are from. As Indians, we migrate to wherever we need to be, right? So most of my family actually live in Delhi and in Madras or Chennai. So I only have one grand aunt who continues to live in Cochin. And we visited her very recently. And she still lives there. She still lives in the house that I remember going to when I was very little. But that’s my only real connection to it. And growing up in Japan, do you have a recollection of what young Preeti wanted to be when she grew up? Indiana Jones. I love those movies. I remember it was such a treat watching them with my father. He also loved watching these movies. And he also, he had a huge passion for ancient history, which I think passed on to me. So ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Phoenicians, etc. And so there was some, there was a sense of romance to Indiana Jones. I mean, he was, he got to study archaeology and history, but also be the one who discovers it. There was an element of him being a spy and go on all these adventures. I mean, it was all of that, right? So I just, I really wanted to be Indiana Jones when I grew up. But no, I’m just a humble brand strategist, cultural strategist now. Yeah. Tell us, so you’re in San Francisco, you’ve been there a couple of years, you’ve got a couple of kids. What is the work that you’re doing? What is the work that you do? So I somehow stumbled into a bit of a portfolio career at the moment. It’s not something that I’d actually thought I would ever enter into, but it’s actually provided me with something that I do enjoy, which is variety, which I really, really like. And so I have my own agency, which is called Ginza Bagh, which is an amalgamation of my upbringing, if you will. Ginza is a neighborhood in Japan, where my dad had his restaurant and we would spend a lot of time in. And Bagh means neighborhood in Hindi. And so I put those together to make Ginza Bagh, so neighborhood of Ginza, essentially. And that is my little consultancy that I run, where I do cultural intelligence, foresight and brand strategy work. So I have that, which I run and I work with clients as well as agencies. And then I’m also helping a friend run marketing for their agency here, as well as I’ve just started helping audience growth for a podcast called On Strategy Showcase, which is quite a fun podcast run by a wonderful Irish person named Fergus and he’s a hoot. And then I’ve just started writing a lot. And I’ve started a series of my own called an object story, where I interview people about a particular object that they resonate with. But it’s not really about the object itself. It’s about what the object reveals about them. And so it’s an interesting way to get to know a person. And I’ve been having some very interesting conversations. Yeah. What was the origin story of that project? I am part of a group, I think, which you were a part of called exposure therapy. And there was a topic where we discussed that we had someone, an expert come in who talked about whether or not you can be intimate with objects and places. And the way she used the word intimate wasn’t necessarily, it wasn’t sexual in nature, but it was more about having a relationship with that meant that you had, it was a two way street with an object or a place. And that was a very interesting concept to me, because I remember thinking, as someone who’s moved around a lot, I don’t necessarily feel connected to places very often. Sometimes you feel embrace of a certain place. Sometimes you don’t. But what about objects? What are some objects that I feel I move around with a lot? And how do I relate to that? And what are the stories that it tells about me? What are the stories that I want it to tell other people about me? And that was really the genesis of this idea. And I thought, oh, this is a really interesting idea. I wonder if other people feel this way. And what are the stories that they want to tell about themselves through a particular object. And the idea wasn’t that I didn’t want people to become, it wasn’t an idea for the object to be a sentimental object. I didn’t want people bringing a wedding ring and talking about how they fell in love with their husband or their wife or their significant other. It was more about certain ideologies or stories about their identity and how that tied into that particular object. So my first person was a jeweler friend of mine. And they brought a bottle of whiskey, which I remember thinking, wow, this is going to be an interesting conversation. And he revealed this beautiful story of how he had a friend who had died 10 years ago that week. And this was a gift from that friend. And it became this story of male friendship, and this wonderful intergenerational friendship between Johnny and this person that passed away. And it just revealed so much about Johnny, but also about this friend that had passed away. And it was just a really lovely, poignant story. And I said, okay, I’m onto something. This is a beautiful way to get to know someone. That’s wonderful. I want to hear, tell me a little bit about the work. You said cultural intelligence. What does that mean as you understand it? And when did you first discover that you could make a living doing that kind of thing? Cultural intelligence for me is

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out of 5

2 Ratings

Depth & brilliance & kindness

05/02/2025

Big-hearted & open-minded

I wish I could ask questions as smart & curious & kind as Peter’s. But I love that he asks them, and I love where he takes these conversations. A great listener, a great thinker, and a great podcaster.

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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Peter Spear
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2024 - 2026
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138
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THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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Paul Worthington on Organizations & Identity

Mary Meehan on Values & Measurement

Reuben Steiger on Movements & Recovery

Freddie Pikovsky on Hospitality & Work

Mark DePace on Community & Creativity

Richard Young on Place & Agency

Michael Anton Dila on Conversation & Governance

Preeti Varma on Listening & Belonging

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