THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

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

  1. 2d ago

    Jason Anânda Josephson Storm on Critique & Listening

    Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College, and the author of “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.” Most recently, he debated Timotheus Vermeulen and Hilary Lawson live at IAI’s “The Metamodernist Turn,” pressing the same distinction he draws here between his own project and Vermeulen’s. His next book, The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History, is out from University of Chicago Press in April. This is the third of three interviews. The first is “Myth & Metamodernism.” The second is “Revolution & Happiness.” A heads up to regular listeners & readers. My conversations with Jason are unlike others, in that it I am really punching above my weight. I am really attracted to his thinking around metamodernism and sincerely believe it holds real promise for informing how we move forward. I believe in the diagnosis that it makes, and am inspired by the recommendation it offers to build, with full awareness of the critique. This is pre-interview caveat that, even as I don’t always grasp what is being discussed, I am tuned in. I ask that you join me in stretching towards what Jason is showing us. Where the term ‘metamodernism’ comes from I keep fixating on metamodernism. I don’t have a structure for this conversation — full confession. But maybe we start with you giving us a map. What is it you’re doing with the term, and where does it sit relative to everyone else using it? Meta just means the same thing as post, if we’re precise about etymology — beyond. Though it also has a secondary sense post lacks: an over-and-above. People have been gluing “meta” onto isms since the seventies, but in a meaningful way the term metamodernism emerges in two places. First there’s the cultural studies version — Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s work on structures of feeling, a shift in the zeitgeist, an oscillation between modernist and postmodernist projects. I think that stuff is great. It’s not what I do. I’m not interested in analyzing the current paradigm so much as trying to trigger a paradigm shift — not sorting art into modern, postmodern, metamodern. I actually get my use of the term from a different lineage: the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji. He describes the metamodern artist as someone who deploys, positions, fractures, and reforms both the modern and the postmodern. He’s an artist himself, owning that term for his own project. That’s closer to my version. When I wrote what became Metamodernism and the Future of Theory, it was originally titled Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory After Postmodernism. People wanted me not just to critique postmodernism but to name a movement — and the alternative on the table was “post-postmodernism,” which makes you want to throw up. That’s when I remembered Okediji. Parallel to that, there’s a Scandinavian duo — a sociologist and a political theorist writing under the name Hanzi Freinacht — who wrote The Listening Society. Less interested in characterizing or sorting art than in producing political change under the same term. I like some of their project and not other parts — there’s a developmentalism in it you have to be careful with. So when I started using “metamodern,” I found myself in company with other people also trying to work past postmodernism, in art or philosophy or elsewhere. I love my fellow metamodernistas, but to be clear, mine isn’t an oscillationist account. If I have one criticism of Vermeulen — who seems like a cool dude — it’s that oscillation is hard to falsify and conceptually weak. What’s valuable in that cultural-studies work is characterizing new patterns in cultural production and a change in tone. That’s just not what I’m doing. The postmodernism I’m reacting to was forged as a specific academic model — often as a polemical other, a bricolage of French, American, and German theorists whose inconsistencies got smoothed over into an idea of what humanities scholarship should look like. That model was good at chipping away received wisdom, but it was delivering diminishing returns. For those of us trying to move intellectual life forward, it had stopped helping. It was mostly kneecapping us. I want to be clear my reaction isn’t someone externally mocking postmodernism. I marinated in it. I went to Derrida’s lectures. I studied under Rorty at Stanford when he was emeritus. I read the work, did the graduate seminars on Heidegger and French social thought. That’s the older generation of theory — Derrida was Elvis-generation, there’s a reason he rocked a pompadour his whole life. It’s time to figure out what was good, consolidate the gains, and shed what’s no longer working. I’ve been thinking about people who are part of something and then step outside it — Paul Kingsnorth, the eco-activist turned religious convert; Chuck Marohn, the traffic engineer who renounced his own field’s methodology and started Strong Towns. Do you identify with that as a transition you made? What was it like? Yeah, I identify with that. I first encountered postmodernism — I can be specific — on a drive from Ohio to college in Massachusetts. My parents, both philosophers, had a set of “great ideas” books on tape, and one unit near the end was on postmodern philosophers: Derrida, maybe Lyotard. It seemed exciting and dangerous. I was a punk rocker and a goth — it read as rebellion against the status quo, politically emancipatory. I marinated in it from undergrad through grad school. What turned me away was that it wasn’t a good set of tools. It was leading toward conclusions that made us less informed, less active — the payoff wasn’t there. We started by questioning authority, ended by questioning truth, and authority was still standing when we were done. I had a sense we were learning bad translations from the French as though they described reality — like the medievals who, when they wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, looked it up in Aristotle instead of counting. When people had a question about language, instead of asking what linguists were currently saying, they’d cite Derrida. That’s not to say Derrida had nothing to offer — but the anti-canon movement had just installed a new canon of critical thinkers in place of the old one. I’ve always been someone who naively asks: how did we get here, why do we think this? Over time I became disaffected, while still holding onto what was genuinely useful. And my teachers were part of that movement — this was partly just growing up, recognizing where your teachers and ancestors made mistakes even as you recognize your debt to them. What frustrated me most was hearing peers act as if there’s no “after” certain thinkers — as if philosophy stopped with Heidegger. And practically: when I started my own scholarship, I had real questions — about knowledge, value, translation. I had a stack of nineteenth-century Japanese sources and needed to figure out which to use for my thesis. Being told translation is impossible, in an environment where I was producing a translation, was the opposite of helpful. Or on value — there was a confusion between being neutral and being critical. You could call out racism, which matters, but you couldn’t stand up for a better political order without “violating” cultural relativism. That paradox bothered me more and more. We needed emancipatory theories, not just critical ones, and they were missing. Absolute disruption [This section is dense — Storm is thinking through Hegel out loud. Here’s the short version of where it’s headed: some thinkers argue language traps us so completely that translation and stable meaning are impossible. Storm disagrees. His answer is that language shapes how we see the world, but doesn’t cut us off from it — we just need a world stable enough that people can roughly agree on what they’re pointing at. Everything below is him building the case for that, using Hegel as the springboard.] The title Tell me about the title Absolute Disruption. Where did it come from? From two places. First, a line from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit I used to have memorized — something like: spirit obtains its truth only in its absolute disruption, it finds itself. Hegel was working on the problem of skepticism, of essentializing opposites — he describes skepticism elsewhere as waiting around to hurl anything into the abyss. You can see that in the postmodern moment: deconstruction, anti-essentialism, all different forms of negation. Hegel, as the master thinker of the dialectic, seemed like a clue to the other side of it. The spoiler: his dialectic isn’t thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It’s abstraction, negation, and negation of the negation — that last move is the fulcrum. Absolute Disruption was a signal toward that moment: we need to negate the negation. It was also a gesture at the idea that catastrophe creates the opportunity for new configurations of knowledge. I didn’t have complexity theory in hand yet, but one of its insights is the phase transition — water tips over into boiling, a seed crystal spreads through and the whole thing freezes. Those transitions come at moments of instability. I felt our intellectual world was at a crisis point — a moment of both danger and opportunity. I’m not an accelerationist who wants more crises. But crisis can open a phase transition. Negating the negation Walk me through negating the negation. What’s that move? In his Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel describes three sides of thought. First, you apprehend the specific differences of existing objects and produce a limited abstraction — a generalization, lifting away from the concrete. That process of abstracting hits limits, which challenge the project itself and lead to negating the initial

    Jason Anânda Josephson Storm on Critique & Listening

  2. Aug 3

    Ben Jenkins on Creativity & Play

    Ben Jenkins is co-founder and CEO of Okay Human, a New York-based consumer insights company formerly known as Sympler, which he co-founded in 2018 and rebranded in 2025. The firm uses chat-based, AI-assisted qualitative research to help brands including NBC, Foot Locker, and Mars understand consumer emotion and behavior. Jenkins has spent 25 years studying consumers for brands such as Levi’s, Johnnie Walker, and Axe. He began as a youth ethnographer at McCann-Erickson, then held senior strategy roles at BBH, Ogilvy, and Droga5. He writes the Substack Becoming Human. So I think you know this, I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. And I think what I loved about it is that it’s the best question I’ve found for getting into a conversation out of nowhere. But it’s a big question, so I over-explain it the way I do now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? And again, you are in absolute control. Now that I’m in America, the simplest answer is that I come from the UK. Before, I would have started with, “I come from the countryside” — a little like D’Artagnan from the Musketeers books. I left the countryside and went to the big city. But now I think about it in terms of creativity a lot more. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently, which I’m sure we’ll come to, about what happened to creativity, and I realize it comes back to me spontaneously from people I’m interviewing: I think I came from a more creative culture. I noticed that a little bit when I got to the US. It’s a much bigger country, worrying about much larger sums of money — each company I’ve worked for here thinks in terms of billions or hundreds of billions, whereas the UK deals in much smaller quantities. So we got to be less scared of making mistakes. Now I answer that question in terms of time and place, because I started my career exactly at the turn of the century, when I still had the fortune of working with people who’d come from an analogue time — who’d grown up making things very creatively, using instinct and intuition, understanding physical beauty. I come from a time when we were allowed to use our right brains and feel our way to the creative answer. And I come from a place that, even today — I’ve been in the US 18 years now — I look at the agency culture in the UK and it’s still creative. I’m just not in that world anymore. I’m adjacent now. But I was interviewing some people at VCCP a couple of weeks ago — the head office is in London, but these are all Americans — and they said the last time they had a really big flow experience, got themselves into a flow state for creativity, was when they worked in London. This person has been in the US for five years now. The reason I’m doing what I’m doing now — focusing on how to enable creativity and resurrect people’s creative states — is because I believe lots of people are more creative than they let on. And I think I come from a place and a time that afforded me the luxury of learning some of that stuff, before I either left the location or the time. But we left that era — everyone’s struggling a little now, in this more tech-subjugated one. And one more. What has it been like being in the States? 18 years? What’s it like being from the UK in the States? What’s that experience like? So I often get that question. It’s normally social situations. It’s really hard to answer it in a non-glib way….. I think it relates to what I’ve just been saying — when you’re in your own country and your own tribe, you don’t see yourself through an identity. I’m not of the generation living now that talks about identity so much. The first time I’ve ever talked about my identity was as a foreigner in another country. So the first answer to that question is, I feel foreign, and I like that. Being foreign gives you an extra bit of credit. And I don’t just mean British — people give us extra IQ points, which I don’t think we deserve. That’s not the part I mean. It’s being any form of foreigner. It’s curiosity — you get into a play state more easily. Being the funny person with an accent in the room immediately gives you that sense of energy. It gives the dynamic a sense of energy, because people go, oh, this is interesting. When people ask me good questions about what it’s like being here, I think that’s what they’re after — something different. So you’re a curiosity, especially in the more liberal side of things. Yeah, it’s fun to be a foreigner in this country, for me anyway. And on the previous point, I do think it gives me a bit of access to ask more basic questions — which is what we should all be doing anyway. In your own country, you don’t ask big core questions about how things work, because you’re supposed to know — and you believe you already do. I remember when I first got here, the creatives in the agency I was working at were being surly, just like creatives always do. And I was still quite junior then, and I was frightened of surly creatives in London. You’re briefing them and they’re pan or miserable — even just bored, miserable, disenchanted. And here I was like, they were my age as well. Here I was like, but because it was all in a funny accent to me — we have monopoly money, everyone’s walking around with funny accents, the cultures are different — it just felt like play. It felt like I was on TV, felt like pretend. So I called them out for the first time ever. I was like, why are you looking so miserable? We’ve got some really interesting stuff in. And they apologized — they were like, sorry, that’s just the way our faces are. I was like, well, where I come from, if someone’s giving you information in an excited way, the custom is to mirror them. That wasn’t true — where I come from, they were just as miserable. But I allowed myself a cultural difference, and I got them to stop being like creatives often are — which ruins briefings. What was the attraction to come over here in the first place? I think that was part of it — to get that energy for myself, for exploration, and to throw away a lot of my belief systems and any ruts I was finding myself stuck in. You can get stuck in rituals and habits you don’t really need or want to be in, but you don’t leave them because it’s easier to stay. So I wanted a deliberate push out of my comfort zone. When I left uni, or during uni, I went to live in France for a bit. I wanted to do everything I was doing in life in a more difficult place, in another language, in another culture — to get the free boost of difficulty. You don’t bring difficulty on yourself unless it’s forced on you. So living in another culture, especially when it’s another language, forces you to grow further and faster. So America — same language, very different culture. Part of it was a growth tool. Part of it was an adventure, and part of it was to feel different enough that I could ask very basic questions we’d never think to ask. I just read this really interesting essay about Nietzsche, where I learned for the first time that nihilism — the word we associate with him — isn’t about giving up and being a Kurt Cobain waster, who cares. It’s not depression. Nihilism in Nietzsche’s terms was actually a necessary step that you need to take where you burn it all down and burn down all your assumptions and all the rules and rituals that you followed in order to get to a more truthful place. It was part of a philosophy that the reason why it’s always been taken as a negative is because the orthodoxies, whether it’s the church or whatever, didn’t want you to burn it all down. They wanted to just stand by your beds and stick with the program because it helped them. But if you want to stick to what your, get to what your truth is, there is a certain amount of creative, we call it in advertising, we call it creative destruction. There is a need to destroy before you rebuild. And so I’m going through another one of those at the moment. I think that’s what I did 18 years ago by coming here. I also had this, now it seems quite, I wouldn’t call it nihilistic, but maybe, I’ve forgotten the word. Now it seems silly, but I knew that advertising wasn’t as cool in America as it was in the UK. So you could be lulled into this false sense of your own importance in England. Like a lot of people who don’t work in the business know the names of ad agencies and they’ve heard of that, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which is the agency I worked at. They’d heard of that. Oh, they’d ask you, did you work on that campaign that did this? Or did you ever work on this commercial? Like people were still interested and thought advertising was cool. And I knew that there were no such pretenses around that in America. Like it was a grubby business when I was, even grubbier now, it was a grubby business when I arrived. And so I would get out of any form of pomposity and comfort that I’d gained and I’d learned something else. And so a little bit was that, I don’t want to be in an industry where when it falls down, everyone will be like entitled. I want to go into a place where they don’t rate it that much. I’m gonna have to work, sing for my supper. And do you have a recollection of when you were growing up? What did you want to be? What did young Ben want to be when he grew up? Probably everything. Yeah — I wanted to be a pilot, a policeman at one point, which baffles me now. I wasn’t like one of those, Quentin Tarantino always knew he wanted to be a movie maker because he was obsessed with cartoons and comic books. I saw things the way a child sees them — I didn’t know what it was, so I would

  3. Jul 27

    Mark Kingsley on AI as a Condition & Belonging

    Mark Kingsley is a brand strategist and designer, the founder of the brand studio Malcontent, and an instructor in the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program. Earlier in his career, he designed album packages for John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, Quincy Jones, Ginger Baker, and Jewel at Blue Note Records, earning a 2001 Grammy nomination. He moved into brand strategy, serving as global creative lead on Citi at Landor and Executive Strategy Director at Collins. He is the author of Universal Principles of Branding (2023) and Brands in the Age of AI (2025). He also has a great substack. So I start all these conversations the same way with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It’s a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s kind of big, so I kind of over explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? Well, there’s the geographical, obviously. So I was born in Pittsburgh, but grew up in Western New York, which is kind of a magical place. And I was born and grew up in the 1970s. So Western New York in the 1970s was the recipient of an embarrassment of riches. The school that I went to, the elementary school and high school that I went to, is exactly between Rochester and Buffalo. So what that did is it attracted some of the better candidates for teachers from both of those areas. So I had a really good intellectual foundation. My father was a college professor. My mother was a math teacher at the school for the blind, at the New York State School for the Blind. So I had educators as parents and as guides. And it’s also across the lake from Toronto. So I had access to Canadian TV, which meant Monty Python and curling. And also Rochester and Buffalo were like highlights on the concert tour for bands and musicians in the 1970s and 80s. And then on top of that, New York State in the 1980s had some really wonderful arts funding. So I went to school in Rochester and the musicians that I saw come through Rochester were absolutely astounding. I saw Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Reich, David Von Teegum. The harmonic choir, which is a group of musicians who sing in overtones. It was just incredible. An incredibly rich experience. And I got to meet and I took a class with Allen Ginsberg. I took two classes with Allen Ginsberg. I got to meet Ed Sanders from the Lower East Side Fugs. It was just incredible what came through all because of New York State arts funding, which is now gone. And it’s kind of a tragedy. So I come from abundance and live in tragedy. What was the town that you grew up in? I grew up outside of Rochester, so I’m excited to hear you talk about Western New York is a magical place. So tell me more about what made it so magical. Well, I grew up in a town called Oakfield. At the time, it had one stoplight. I think now it has two, and five miles north of a town called Batavia. So if you drive the New York State’s railway between Buffalo and Rochester, there’s a thing right next to it that says Batavia Turf Farms. It’s basically they grow grass. And so there’s a sign that says Batavia Turf Farms. So that’s the wonder, I guess, of that. But also, the other advantage of growing up between Buffalo and Rochester is I got CBC radio out of Toronto. And at the time there was a radio program called Brave New Waves that was begun by a magical person named Augusta LaPay. And this thing would go from midnight till six in the morning. And she would have all night conversations on the Dow or an all night interview with Philip Glass. And then at like five o’clock in the morning, they would start playing music and you would hear a segue from John Cage to Charlie Parker to John Zorn. And this was normal. And then Rochester had an obscure little radio station called WSAY that was out of like Greece, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester. And then Buffalo had WUWU, W-U-W-U, out of East Aurora, New York, where the Roycrofters were. And that also was just anarchic, free form, anything that comes to your mind kind of radio. So the inspiration of not really anarchy, but just do it yourself and allow yourself to be yourself. Because this is before algorithms, because right now algorithms funnel us into a certain sort of generic beige-ness. So this was the opportunity for you to really be distinctive, individual, and not feel any shame about that. It just was all accepted. So that’s part of that magic. And also, you’re outside of New York, you’re outside of any kind of major metropolitan area. So you could do your thing and no one really cared. Because no one was watching. No one paid attention. I love that. I wanted to go back to that first list of musicians that you were marveling that you had access to. I didn’t recognize a single one of those names. What kind of music are you talking about? And were you... Everything from avant-garde music, like new music, what they would call kind of a pejorative term, to jazz, free jazz, members of the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was a group of black musicians out of Chicago who had this... The group that you would know would be the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had a great tagline, which is great black music from the past to the future. That’s beautiful. Yeah. I was a big Sun Ra fan. I saw Sonny play maybe 40 times when I moved to New York. And I first saw Sonny up in... There’s a place near Niagara Falls called Art Park, which was another beneficiary of New York State’s arts funding, where they took a toxic waste dump along the Niagara River, just down the river from Niagara Falls, and they converted it into an open air performance art and art installation place where like Vito Acconci would do an installation. That’s where Chris Burden did his original beam dropper. He took I-beams off a crane and lifted them maybe 60 feet in the air and then dropped them into a puddle of wet cement. So I was there for the beam drop, right? But it’s also at Art Park where I saw the North American premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, or where I saw Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I saw Oregon. All these great improvised music groups, jazz musicians, Cecil Taylor. It was incredible, really, what came through. Where did this begin, this love of or appreciation or interest in music? Where did that begin for you? The radio, the radio that was available. And you just hear this weird thing. My parents were open-minded and didn’t necessarily say that you had to follow a certain kind of program other than educate yourself, learn about the world, read, write, the basics that we want from our children. My parents were very individualistic also. She worked for the state as an educator, but she also was a union person. And my father was briefly in seminar before he met my mother. So a friend of mine says that I have a certain Jesuitical kind of attitude, and I think I got that from my father. So I would ask him questions, and he would respond with that kind of Jesuitical response. It was basically like me responding to the world. Like, for example, I’m watching Johnny Carson one night, and Johnny Carson tells a joke where he says, don’t trust a proctologist who wears wax lips. It was this strange, surreal sentence. And I said to my father the next day, I said, what does that mean? What is a proctologist? And he goes, it’s the study of the anus, right? As opposed to, don’t talk about it. It was, here, this is what this is. So it was a matter of fact, openness and acceptance to the world. And I’m curious about your setup with the radio. Where were you listening to the radio, and where were you with the radio listening to getting the CBC? Well, the CBC was powerful, and it would come across Lake Ontario. So I would get it. And I first started listening to Brave New Waves when I was in college in Rochester. And I was in art school. And when you’re in art school, you stay up all night. That’s what you do. And that’s my chronotype, I guess. And so that’s basically what you do. And this was the thing. And all the other radio, for me, was a bit common. I like Led Zeppelin, but I don’t need to listen to Led Zeppelin all day. So it’s just WCMF, 96.5. It’s garbage. It’s absolute garbage. And for a brief time, I did work in college radio at WITR, and I was the jazz program director of WITR when we had maybe a hundred Watts or something like that. That’s how powerful that station was. What do you recall? As young Mark, what did you want to be when you grew up? As a kid, you remember? I didn’t know this until I heard Santana. So for me, that formative moment is watching television and seeing Santana on television. I think it was California Jam. It was a concert series in a Speedway out in California that was on ABC. And this band came out and he was touring the worst Santana record, which is Festival, but I didn’t know any better. Right. And so here’s this man who doesn’t look like me with a band playing instruments that I hadn’t seen before, congas and timbales and stuff. And with rhythms I hadn’t quite heard. And he was an amazing guitar player. It was like, what the. And so from there, I was like, I needed to find everything out that I could about Santana. So I would ride my bike around Batavia and Oakfield going to garage sales and buying for like $2 a piece or $3 a piece, because I had a job and all that, I would buy a used Santana vinyl. And then from Santana, I look on the back cover and like, who, he did a record. Who’s this guy? John McLaughlin. And why does he have this weird first name? Mahavishnu. What does that mean? So of course I have to buy some Mahavishnu Orchestra records. And then they both talk about how much they love

  4. Jul 20

    Gideon Lichfield on Fairness & Storytelling

    Gideon Lichfield is a journalist and Policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, affiliated with the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. He writes Futurepolis, a Substack on reinventing democracy, governance, and government for the 21st century. He was previously Global Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of WIRED; Editor-in-Chief of MIT Technology Review; a founding editor at Quartz, and a foreign correspondent and science writer at The Economist. He lives in Berkeley, California. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their stories. And it’s this big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But it’s so big, I tend to over explain it the way I’m doing right now before I ask it. So 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. That’s a very tricky question to answer. I think physically, I come from the UK. Ancestrally, I come from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Philosophically, I come from just a belief in fairness and desire to see fairness in the world. Which I think is why I’m interested in democracy, because someone asked me the other day, if you had to describe the point of democracy in one word, what would it be? And I said, fairness. It’s the system where the bullies don’t get to win. That’s beautiful. And do you have a recollection as a kid? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you remember? I mean, the usual things, astronaut, writer. I can’t remember the others, but nothing very unusual. Yeah. And where was most of your childhood? Where did you spend your childhood? I grew up in London, and I was born and raised almost all my childhood in exactly the same district in Northwest London. Nice. And catch us up. Where are you now? And what is the work that you do? So right now, I live in the Bay Area in Berkeley. I’ve bounced around the world a lot. I was a journalist in Mexico City, Moscow, Jerusalem, came to the US, lived in New York for several years, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a while for another job, became bi-coastal New York Bay Area, and now I’m full-time Bay Area. And the thing I work on now is what could the future of democracy look like? How would it look if we were trying to invent that system today instead of three centuries ago? And what could come after the current period of, I could say authoritarianism, but I think even more broadly just institutional fracturing, the clear inadequacy of the governing institutions that we have. I appreciate that distinction. I think a lot of conversations get captivated by the authoritarian bit, and we don’t end up actually looking at the degree to which the institutions that we currently have aren’t functioning or aren’t functional or aren’t fit for purpose. Can you say more about that, just the diagnosis of the current state? I mean, I think as you said, we don’t talk enough about that. We focus on the authoritarian lens, and that’s one of the things that frustrates me a little right now about the conversation about democracy in the U.S., because it is very focused on the Democratic Party winning back power. And there is this unspoken assumption that if the Democrats retake Congress or the White House, then, in quotes, democracy will be restored, and things will go back to some degree to where they were. And I think that that misses both the amount of dismantling of institutions that has gone on under the Trump administration, but also just the uselessness, the increasing uselessness of those institutions over the past, I would say, at least couple of decades, probably longer. And so what I mean by that is we have these systems of governance and representation that were created in the 18th century before we even had railways and the telegraph. Information moved much more slowly, goods moved more slowly, the world was less globalized, change just happened at a much slower pace. Just if we take the electoral system, it was designed to enable people to delegate decision-making to a small group of people, because any kind of broader national level decision-making in which citizens had participation simply wasn’t practical, obviously. And we also have to remember that even though we call this country a democracy and we call other countries democracies, the systems, the electoral systems that were created there were not intended to be democratic. They were intended to allow a fairly small number of privileged male people, people who were men, educated, relatively prosperous, to make the decisions because they were considered the people who were competent to make the decisions. So everything that we have now that we call democracy is this kludge. It’s been, bits and pieces that have been added onto that system that was designed for this very different era. And so some of the ways in which it falls short are that it gives people notionally a voice in the form of votes, but it doesn’t involve them in decision-making in a meaningful way, and it doesn’t create a feeling of citizenship in a meaningful way, at least certainly not at the national level. Systems of government, systems of lawmaking respond very, very slowly to technological change. Lawmaking especially, we take ages to draft laws, we take ages to pass them, and then we don’t revise them for the most part as time goes by, and they don’t update to the reality of the world. We also, our systems of information, of the information environment, were created in an era when information was fairly sparse and expensive to produce, and so free speech laws were in part designed to make sure that interesting ideas and useful thoughts could be expressed and could not be suppressed. And today we have the opposite problem where misinformation lies and general slop crowds out the stuff that is useful and worthwhile. And so while we don’t want to abolish the idea of free speech, we have to think differently about what the goal of that principle is and how we create an informed citizenry and how we inform good decision-making. So there are all these assumptions and structures that date from that time, from centuries ago, that don’t function very well in this new world. And so this is even leaving aside the problem of political polarization that we have today, which has created all this deadlock. Even if you did not have that, the structures that we have are still pretty inadequate to the task of governing the 21st century and do not take advantage of the tools and methods that we could have today for making citizens more engaged and making government more responsive. That’s amazing. What you just said, I don’t think it really occurred to me that, again, you’re peeling apart these pieces that, again, we can get really distracted by polarization. And again, forget to look at just structurally how the system is either counterproductive or doesn’t help us do the work. Can you speak? And maybe this is relevant, but the degree to which this plays out at a local level versus a national level, is there a difference in the way that the institutions are working or not working in that way? Yes. I mean, I think so at one level, the polarization, I think is probably worse at the national level. In other words, in local communities, there is at least the opportunity to bring people together around the problems that their community shares. And I think for me, I said that democracy for me means fairness, but I think it also as a process, maybe fairness is the outcome that we want. But as a process to me, democracy just means shared problem solving. You have a bunch of people, there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t agree with, but they face a problem that they need to solve because they live together in the same community. And so there is a process for bringing them together and creating a system or a process for reaching an agreement on the solution, even if not everybody likes it, or even if nobody likes it completely, and trusting that process and being willing to accept the results of it. That’s what democracy is. So at a local level, there is at least the potential to do that more. And the obstacles there, I think, are number one, well, in the US specifically, we have the decline of local news, which makes it difficult for everybody to be on the same page about what’s happening. And we also have the fact that local authorities are under-resourced, particularly when it comes to using technology. And so it makes it very difficult for them to be responsive and keep up to date with the changes that are happening. At the national level, you have government theoretically more capable, but in fact, very sclerotic, so much institutional cruft that has developed and very polarized because at a national level, we’re not a community in the same way as we are in a town. And so it is easy for the polarizing voices to have more sway in the media and for that to drive the sense of national divide. So what does it mean to work in this space? What are the things that you’re doing? What are you following? Just paint a picture of where you spend your time and what you’re learning and discovering. So I’m still figuring out what it is to work in this space for me. I keep my thumb or try to keep my thumb on the pulse of many different things that I think count as part of this problem of how you govern democratically. And I already sketched out some of the broad pillars. There are methods of civic participation that aren’t just voting and also aren’t just turning up to town hall meetings, which are a very time consuming thing that only a few people can really allow themselves to do. So there are technological innov

  5. Jul 13

    Baiba Matisone on Translation & Community

    Baiba Matisone is a brand & creative strategist in Berlin. She is the co-founder of brandLingual, a learning platform that bridges evidence-based and intuitive marketing. Previously, she has held strategy roles at Ogilvy, Grey, Fallon, Kantar Millward Brown, and Antoni Berlin, working on global accounts including Mercedes-Benz, Vodafone, L’Oréal Paris, and Google across Asia, Europe, and North America. She lectures at Miami Ad School, and is the founder of strategy community Planning Folklore, and practitioner community Strategy Pints Berlin. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine who’s a neighbor and she helps people tell their stories. It’s a beautiful question, but it’s very big. So I 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 it’s impossible to make a mistake. And the question is, where do you come from? And what was it like growing up in Latvia. It was very challenging. I think that times were very different and it was right after when the regime collapsed. And I do believe people were very traumatized by what happened during those 60 years while the country was occupied. And to break a lot of patterns or cycles how they have behaved or how their parents have behaved or how the system pushed people to behave during those days. And I see a lot of changes happening in the culture at the moment. And I have this fresh now impression because I was just last week in Siberia. So for me, it feels like, okay, I’m still reflecting and I’m still trying to make some conclusions about. Yeah. What was it like to return home? I think that the biggest difference was that conversations internationally on these video calls, we always talk about something intellectual. It’s not something that is so personal towards ourselves, which is more about ideas and what the future or things that we are not happy about in culture or in politics or whatever. When I went back home, it was just a weird thing that everybody was just talking about themselves. And that honesty and raw honesty about what life means to them and what experiences they have faced in the past couple of years or in the past decade. It was just very refreshing and also a little bit weird in a way because it felt so honest and so true. But then again, it’s where’s the boundary? And yeah, I think that’s still a question in my head. And do you have recollections of being young, being a girl and what you wanted to be when you grew up? Oh yeah, this is a very big question again. When I graduated my kindergarten, they pushed me to write down what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said that I want to be in the air. And they were do you want to be a pilot? And you want to manage an airplane? I was no, I don’t want to be a pilot. Do you want to be a stewardess? I was no, I don’t want to be a stewardess. And they were, my teachers, they were trying to figure out what does it mean to be in the air? In the air? In the air, yeah. I just didn’t have an explanation. I just got a feeling I want to be in the air, up somewhere in the sky. And now, by looking back, I am in the air. I’m constantly having these conversations with people from different parts of the world. Internet basically means that we are in the air. That’s amazing. They didn’t know what the internet means during that time. But I had the feeling where I want to be in my life. So I think that I have succeeded. Yeah, you were just reporting from the future about where you’re going to be. Yes. And they pissed me off. And I said, in the end, because I needed to write down something very concrete. And I said that I want to be a teacher. And now by looking back and by knowing what we have created with Christopher Rowan’s Brandlingual project, I’m also a teacher. So I did both things. That’s amazing. You’re a teacher in the air, is what you’re saying. Congratulations. Yes. I succeeded on my own future vision about myself and also what I needed to tell to these people who are just pushing me to answer these questions. That’s amazing. So catch us up. Tell us, you’re doing it a little bit already, but where are you now? And what is the work that you’re doing? I mean, last year in December 15th, we launched Brandlingual, which is an educational and training platform together with Christopher Rowan, who has also been part of this podcast. As I made the joke that he’s the only A-list celebrity who has been on this podcast. And I think that it’s still a great joke. But anyways, we are trying to solve a very big problem. I would say that there is this gap in our industry between the theory and the practice, and that everybody has these theory books in their bookshelf, but not that many people know how to actually translate them in practice. And also we are trying to find a way how to create a better understanding about the language and how people in creative strategy or in the advertising world, they are using the language and what do they mean by the words or terms that they are using on a daily basis. And I know for a fact that before we planned this conversation with you, Peter, we had a call and we talked about Otto Scharmer. And today I was just checking some notes and I felt the problem about seeing this gap between what is going on now and what is highest potential in the future, what Scharmer is talking about, is something that is actually being built at the core of Leonard Brown. Yeah. Yes. I was at the morning we talked last time that you and I connected about Otto Scharmer and he just had this piece in Noema, I think is how you say it, talking about us approaching a second axial age. Yeah, so I’m excited to talk to you about Scharmer. And you’re saying that the diagnosis that you and Christopher have in the industry is similar to the diagnosis that he has had broadly? Can you say more about the overlap between Scharmer and what you’re doing? I think that for us it’s the same thing that we spotted a very clear problem in our industry and what Scharmer is talking about in theory U is that people are creating the world with their actions and then they don’t want to take collective responsibility. They basically want to say, I didn’t do it. Someone else came and did. Someone built the system and they did it. It’s not me. I’m not part of the system. But what Scharmer is basically saying that each one of us should need to take responsibility because we are all building the system together. And if we are talking about marketing and advertising, it’s the same principle. It’s just that people don’t want to be accountable and take responsibility. And I think there’s the that is the problem that we are actually embedding at the core also of the brand label. Can you tell me a little bit of your history, your work that led you up to brandling? Well, you and Christopher, you’re solving this big problem. How did you discover the problem? What was your experience of the problem? What did it like to work in the problem that so much so that you developed this program? How did you come to identify the problem? I think that it started in 2024 when I think it was the first wave when the was created. It was launched, sorry. And everybody was starting to test and share their observations about how to better use this tool and how to use other AI tools and what AI means and how to adapt to this transition into this new era. And what I was seeing as a pattern is actually that what is actually important is not that much what AI is bringing new to our everyday life or everyday practice. But what is more important is that actually most of the planners or most of the strategists or practitioners on the marketing side, they actually don’t understand the fundamentals. And this conversation started to become more and more stronger across multiple smaller circles of different people who were also working inside of the industry. And during that time, I came up with this idea, let’s do a strategy retreat. Let’s come together for one weekend in presence here in Berlin and let’s just try to go back to the fundamentals. Let’s just think about all together what are the key fundamentals in marketing brand and creative strategy. And we came together last year in May 2025 and we did a retreat and it was a fantastic experience and also incredibly challenging experience to bring 10 people in the room. And then basically I realized that actually it’s even hard for us to figure out what are the roots or what are these fundamental principle that hasn’t changed through the time. So brand lingual grew out from this retreat. It’s just that Christopher and I was the most hyped ones who were okay, let’s build something bigger out of this. Let’s not just create the PDF and share with people on LinkedIn and just let this whole idea go. But we were we saw that there’s a fundamental problem and that problem needs to be addressed and the problem needs to be solved. Especially by knowing that there will be more and more people who will be using AI and to actually use an AI, you need to be an expert. So the first step to actually use an AI as a marketer or as a creative strategist or brand strategist is actually by knowing and understanding fundamental principles. Because how can you prompt AI if you don’t know the core things about your own that you need to practice. And only when you know these fundamental principles, then you can judge what AI is providing as an information to you. And then you know how to go in the right direction. Because what is happening at the moment is that a lot of people are jumping just on the fool’s goal by believing that this is something revolutionary. And actually it’s nothing new or nothing interesting, or maybe it’s even fals

  6. Jul 6

    Jelena Veselinović on Truth & Brokenness

    Jelena Veselinovic is an advisor and fractional CMO at Brand Intelligents.ai. Previously, she was Head of Brand Marketing at Miro. Prior to that, she was VP of Global Brand Marketing Campaigns at Coca-Cola. She has a great substack, “Rewire Your Mind,” where she’s dismantling the assumptions of brand theory one essay at a time. So I start all these conversations with the same question, and I actually use it in my research, too. I borrowed it from a friend of mine, and she helps people tell their story. And it’s such a big question. I use it, but it’s so big, I over-explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want to make sure 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? Okay. It is a big question, yes. Well, obviously, I can answer that question on many different levels. So I will start for a smaller, lower level, and then I’ll try to explain how that connects to a real place where I’m coming from. So originally, I come in terms of where I was born. I was born in Serbia, in Belgrade, which is a little country in Balkans or Eastern Europe. And I spent there, well, most of my young adulthood. And then when I got married, when I got my first child, I left with work and I never came back. Now, why is all this important? It is important for many different reasons, because it truly made me into who I am. So firstly, when I’m saying that I’m coming from Balkans, what is important in there that I am carrying in my DNA a certain way, a certain history, a certain set of beliefs, a certain baggage, I would say. And that really makes me who I am. And there are a couple of things that I believe are important to know about me. The first one is that I don’t know how not to speak or how not to say what I think. And that’s something that in my culture, in the culture where I’m coming from, I mean, first of all, you are taught from a very early childhood to always speak the truth, but I guess that’s generally true. But also I think what is important is that speaking truth is considered a respect. When you respect someone, you will always tell them the truth. You will not try to manipulate that truth to make people better or to make it sound easier or more convenient or any of this. If you respect someone, if you love someone, if you care about someone, you will always deliver them the most brutal, no matter how painful truth, because you care and because you want people to be better, to improve. Now, that’s something that I carry deeply inside of me. And it is something that helped me in my professional life, but I think it also cost me more than it helped me. And something that is also connected with that is I was always seen, and I don’t know, we might or might not talk about my career, but I was seen always in my working environments, as someone who is always keeping others honest. And I to say, whenever we were doing all this psychological tests and stuff, I was always the majority of people would always be mapped somewhere in the center of the map. And I was not only extreme, I’m joking, I was probably outside of the map, because they couldn’t even fit me in. Which meant, and I was talking to these coaches, how is that? Why is that? What’s wrong with me? And they explained to me, nothing is wrong with you. You are actually very valuable to the organization, because you are balancing everyone out. And I’m well, I never, ever asked in my life to have a role to balance someone out, it’s a hard role to play. But apparently, people appreciated that. And they appreciated it in a way that whenever there was an uncomfortable conversation, they would bring me in. And they’re why are you even bringing me in? I’m not a confrontational person. I swear, I’m not. I’m a nice person. Everyone likes to believe about themselves. But then I realized that a lot of people that know me or see me, they see a couple of things. One of the things is that they believe that I’m brave, that I am, that I have courage to stand up and to say things, which is honestly, I mean, for God’s sake, it can’t be further from the truth. I’m not brave. I’m scared every moment of my life, which is probably because I built all these shields to make me perceived as brave. But the reason why I’m saying and how is that connected to my culture is that the bravery is not about being courage, it’s not about having courage to do something, to go against something, to whatever, to fight. Not about that. It’s when you’re seeing the truth so clearly that you cannot help it. You need to go after it. And that’s why I’m saying that truth speaking quality, or I would say, probably, inability of not speaking truth is also what makes me in the eyes of other people confrontational, brave, intimidating, all these things, which is very much not true. So that’s why I’m saying I’m coming from Balkans and because I want people to understand me and I want people to see beyond that hard shell. The other thing that is important about my origin is that I was born, I was born at the time, I am giving my age now, but I think it’s important. I was born in a country that was called Yugoslavia. That country does not exist anymore. It was completely, I don’t know what, dispersed in the 80s and 90s, which resulted in a big civil war. And I was I happened to be born in a country that was Yugoslavia, that was all built on this idea the different nations and different religions should live, work together and feel that sense of unity. That’s how I was brought up. But also my parents came from the mixed backgrounds or different backgrounds, so my mother is Croatian, Jewish, my father is Orthodox, Montenegrin, Serbian, what have you. The point is I have in myself any possible combination of different nations, different religions, different everything. And this is what makes me, me, and this is, I was brought up, firstly, not to recognize that, because it wasn’t important, why would it ever be important to me, where is someone coming from, what’s the religion, what’s the nationality. My parents taught me, it’s not important, the second thing, I believe I’m carrying this complexity of different things, or multitude of different identities. But anyhow, why is that important? It is important that, as I said, sometime in 80s and 90s, specifically 90s, the country and Serbia, Croatia, all of that, went through the massive, ugly, bloody civil war. And it was a situation that was going against everything I am, against every single fiber in my body, against every belief that I ever had. And I just couldn’t take it, and I left the country. I left the country actually one day before the bombing started. And I left with the idea to never go back, because it’s not really about the war, it’s about the values, and I felt deeply betrayed by that country, by the history, by being born where I was born or when I was born, and I decided to build a new life. So that’s how I left, and I’ve been living for, I don’t know, 30 years now, abroad. But anyhow, that’s where I’m coming from in terms of my origins. But that’s why I said, I’ll give you that part first, and then I’ll try to connect it to a bigger, most important part. When people ask me a similar question, I am, I’m always saying I am coming from a from a place of confusion. I’m coming from a place of being permanently lost. And when I say something that, well, permanently lost, place of confusion and brokenness. And what, by the way, there was a, sorry for a digression, but I read about some Indian semi-goddess, and I wouldn’t be able to repeat her name, but her name in English meant never not broken. Because it’s a goddess, by the way, she is riding a crocodile, and the crocodile as a symbol of fear, a crocodile that represents her biggest fear. So she’s riding that, and then she’s always coming in situations where she’s breaking down. So she’s never not broken, or she’s always broken, and she’s always arising from the ashes and from the brokenness. But it’s actually that situation and the energy of brokenness that is her real power. And that’s something that I identify with strongly, so I’m saying the place of being lost, confusion, brokenness, that’s really who I am. But I’m not saying this in a sense that if something is wrong with that, I’m actually in love with that state. It’s my most productive, my most creative, the most happiest place, state. And why is that? Because I think, and that’s why I was saying, that’s why I was giving you the story also about leaving myself, my country, my place of birth, my family, my friends, everything, when I was 20 something years old, six, seven, and deciding to go and create a new life, because I’m not afraid of building new. I’m actually I think that that’s the most powerful state you can be. And I think I was writing recently, I’m confused, I don’t know if I wrote it or if it is just in my head, but anyhow, it is this moment, moment, moment, zero moment, it is a moment before you make a first step, and I believe that that’s the moment with the highest potential. And it is a moment without fear. It is a moment that exists almost in some sort of a limbo, it’s a moment that lives in a limbo, it’s between the past and between the future, between the past and the future. It’s a moment in which everything is possible. So I to stay in that moment. Anyhow, that’s my long answer to your powerful question. Oh, my gosh, it’s a wonderful, it’s a wonderful, beautiful answer. Thank you so much for it. I have so many questions about it. I’m not sure exactly how to. I guess I’m curious about, usually in this, at this point in the conversation, I’ll ask, what did you want to be when you were a child? And I wonder, yeah, when you were young, what

  7. Jun 29

    Amy Daroukakis on Difference & Signal

    Amy Daroukakis is co-founder of Culture Connectors, a global cultural intelligence collective linking brands to 100+ locally embedded experts. Over 20 years across 60+ countries, she has built strategy for Google, LVMH, Airbnb, and Unilever. Her Trend Galaxy Framework challenges the industry’s habit of mistaking ten cities for the world. She helped the Young V&A win Museum of the Year in 2024, and has spoken at Cannes Lions. She splits her time between Brighton, Athens, and Berlin. So I start all of these conversations with the same question. I use this in my work too. It’s a question I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story — it’s such a beautiful question, which is why I borrow it. But it’s really big. So I over-explain it the way I’m doing right now 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? It’s such a great question. And actually, I saw the conversation you did with Katie Dreke and loved it. So practically — I come from Vancouver, Canada. But I come from a father who was an immigrant who fell in love with what Vancouver was and literally jumped ship and ate pie for too long. Because that was what he could point to until some Greek guys in the kitchen were like, do you want anything else? I think that’s the roots of my roots, because working hard was indoctrinated young. I started working young within the realm of a restaurant. And it’s still the roots of the roots today because the reason I can talk to anyone and dive into a conversation was from waitressing. From growing up and being able to read a table, anticipate a need, bridge a conversation, help with a lull. All of that stuff came from waitressing. So that came from working with my father. Not to say that this was a joyous experience — I got fired as many times as I quit. But I can tell people, and I actually look for people who have worked in service. There’s a different level of humanity for people who have had to serve others. And you can tell those who cannot. I’ve ended friendships in a cab once where someone talked to the taxi driver the wrong way. Even in a restaurant, I’ve stopped a friendship. It becomes a real validator of the type of human someone is by how they treat someone else. So I guess I come from service. Yeah, that’s beautiful. Can you tell us a story about the restaurant where you started — your first job? So I talked about this initially when I launched Cultural Connectors, because my father was a trapped creative in the realms of the classic Greek restaurant. And that’s what you do as an immigrant, right? You land in things that are known. He landed into that. But he never just served souvlaki. He started tapas in the 90s — he had this Greek dim sum menu where you would pick out different tapas. But people were like, what the hell is this? They would walk out. Or he started whole wheat pizza in the 80s and thought it was the best pizza. So there was always an entrepreneurial edge to this restaurant. It was always served up differently. Experimental. Different. And I saw this trapped artistic creative within the realms of sameness. I realized in this heightened dizzy when building something at 4 a.m. — how your brain is at its best and worst — that he had given me all the tools to do different, but I had chosen same and started to work away from that. And what do you mean when you say the different and the same? What were you pointing at? So I started this thing called Cultural Connectors. In our industry, there’s a sameness and homogeny that’s always been really sold and really sought after. And it tends to be very global north in perspective. There’s a homogeny that comes when cars look the same and hotels look the same and voices look the same. So I did a love letter ask globally and 68 countries responded. And then there are 55 human truth specialists — in grief, loneliness, rest. We’re inside ingredients, and everyone is paid the same postcode rates. It’s community as much as commerce. And our industry hasn’t always been known for that. So the sameness comes from just getting really tired of hearing things like, this is great for your portfolio, or, well, they’re based in this country, so we should pay that rate. Challenging systems. And my father did that too in his own way, but in a Greek restaurant. That’s awesome. And I’m so excited to talk more about your work. Before we get to the adult professional stuff, I’d love to ask — do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be, young Amy as a waitress? What did you want to be when you grew up? Oh, my gosh. I really wanted to design drag queen clothing. I was just obsessed. I would sketch and draw. And I loved Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I’m now 46, so that was that moment in time when there was this immense creativity. I loved fashion design, all of those things of expression. I remember making hats, designing shirt colors. Just playfulness. But then I grew up with a very traditional father. If I had said, hey, I want to go to fashion school, he wouldn’t have supported it. But I went for fashion business. And that was supported. Yeah. So catch us up — where are you now? Tell us a little bit more about the work that you do. So I’m calling in from Brighton. Postcodes matter in this work because I live between Brighton, Berlin, and Athens. And it gives me this beautiful triangle. Brighton — I live right across from a nude beach. So I can’t take anything too seriously in terms of work. There’s a joyousness right now of how many naked people are out in May. But Greece matters because it’s the home of where my aunt now lives, in the house that was my grandmother’s. So I don’t talk about flying cars, because that contextually isn’t the edge of everyone’s conversation in a Greek home. Or in any home, to be honest. AI is not the lifeblood of every dinner conversation. And I think we need that realisticness — the importance of that. And then Germany is my husband. So I like to see him. He works for one of Germany’s largest cruise companies, so I’ve gotten to go on all these German cruises, randomly. So when I get asked by a German client, I’m like, I’ve been with 10,000 Germans — I know Germany better than you do. It peaks. All of this — the thorough thread and the red thread — is one foot in and one foot out. Acknowledging that. Knowing the limitations. I’m not the best expert for Germany, but I know somebody. I think you should always speak to lived experience. Mine is just a little more multicolored. Multi-postcode at the same time. I have a question — I want to ask about the origins of your cultural connection. But first, I want a little more information about the tradition of nude bathing in... oh my gosh. Do not think this is the norm and societal norm of the UK. There is still a layer of decorum. But in this one pocket that happens to live right outside my window, there’s this freedom. And the fact that I can see an ass pretty much at all temperatures of the year — I just think it’s really something that roots you in humanity. I once had this really important presenting call, and I heard all this noise. I couldn’t show anyone, but I said, I just have to stop and tell you — there are about a thousand people on bikes. They’re all naked in front of my yard. It adds laughter to the elements. And I think we can get so deep in our heads that — I don’t know, it’s my view of nature. It’s like touching grass, but in a form of nudeness that I really appreciate. Yeah, that’s remarkable. It must be quite something to preserve this space for people to do that. Everybody’s in agreement that this is... Yes, there’s an agreement to it. It’s one of those quirks of culture — these microcultures that live within, with written rules. There’s an organic border where people start to wear clothing. And sometimes another favorite hobby — this is the worst — I’ll see more conservative families start to go on the beach, and the kids are running to the ocean. And then there’ll be this turn back. And it’s this moment where you see the families retreating. So what’s the story of Cultural Connectors? Where did it come out of? What’s the origin story of the work you’re doing now and the network you’ve built? So I’d been described as having played outside for 20 years — two decades outside. I’d worked across 25 categories and been to 60-plus countries, but only in the form of Baskin Robbins. There’s only so much of a flavor you can get. The best example I can give: I was in Lisbon with a friend and she said, I’m going to take you to my favorite restaurant, but you can never tell anyone we’re going. Nobody can know where this is — we have to keep it local. Fair enough. And on that day, there were so many men with children taking them out for ice cream. They were out for dinner. It was this magical scene. And if I had just parachuted in without knowing anything about cultural identity, I would have thought, oh my God, the progressiveness of Portuguese culture, that men are so involved in children’s lives. It turned out it was Father’s Day. So this very special moment was just a moment. And that’s why we have to be careful with our cultural assumptions — parachuting into a market and saying, well, this is what it is, you start to lose the edge. So I’ve looked for voices in each of those markets that represent their local reality. Not just by country — though country is important because you start to learn what it means. Mapala, based in the Philippines, talked about the evolving identity with music and how a Filipino band was at Coachella for the first time. This is a musical culture, but for the longest time it’s always been in English. So what does that mean f

  8. Jun 22

    Christoph Quarch on Aliveness & Cosmos

    Christoph Quarch is a philosopher and author in Germany. He co-founded the New Platonic Academy, teaches ethics and business philosophy at universities including Danube Private University in Krems. He has written or edited more than 50 books. A handful are available in English, including Plato’s Metaphysics of Soul, The Donkey School for Leadership, and Awaken the Spirit of Europe; his German works include Lebenselixier Schönheit (”Beauty Will Save the World”) and Wahre Wirtschaft (on rethinking economics). We met in Athens, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. You may know this or you may not, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I imagine you’re going to enjoy. I borrowed it from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and it’s a big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But because it’s big, 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 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. This is an excellent question. So, where do I come from? This is a profound question, mostly for the philosopher, for philosophers for centuries posed this question. I would say I come from the universe. I am part of the universe, some kind of distillation of the universal spirit in an individual form, which will dwell on planet earth for a couple of years before probably my individual form will dissolve again, and I will become part of a greater whole again — without a personal identity, without subjectivity, but nevertheless being part of the cosmic consciousness. When do you feel like you discovered you were part of the universe, that you came from the universe? Well, to be honest, this is based on two columns. On the one column, it is philosophical reflection, mostly in conversation with ancient Greek philosophy, because this is a topic that I studied all my life. Mostly Plato, who inspired me very much indeed. But there’s also a kind of personal experience, which resonates with this philosophical reflection. This comes right from my childhood days, from a period when I was still adolescent. I remember very well the first spiritual experience, even though I don’t like these big concepts. As a young man, I was pretty much influenced and inspired by a kind of Christian congregation, which is called Taizé. It is a congregation located in Burgundy in France, and they practice a very contemplative kind of Christian faith. As a young man, at the age of 16 or 17, I went to their place very often. And I remember sitting on the ground floor of an old Romanesque church from the 12th century, contemplating, and suddenly it felt like my whole body opened up and a stream of warm energy — I would call it love — flowed straight through my body. This experience really had a huge impact on me. I could feel it for a decade at least, and it was my sincere intention to understand what happened to me in this moment and what it was all about. So first I studied theology, because I thought it must have something to do with Christian faith. But to be honest, I didn’t find answers in Christian theology, and therefore I proceeded to philosophy, which always attracted me, mostly ancient Greek philosophy. And there I found a concept and a mental explanation for this amazing experience of being fully alive. And when you were young, what did Christoph want to be when he grew up? Do you have a recollection, maybe before this experience — what was the imagination of Christoph of what he would be when he grew up? There was no very precise idea of what I was supposed to do in later days. It was about the same period when my spirit started to grow, to unfold itself, to evolve somehow. And in this period, I remember very well standing in front of the bookshelf of my father and finding a book called Plato’s Master Dialogues. I took that book and read a bit in it. I didn’t understand very much, to be honest, but there was something I did understand — namely that this had something to do with me. I became somehow attracted by this mind, this spirit that spoke to me through the lines I read in this book. And so it was the idea to do something that had to do with spirit, but also with beauty. I had the imagination that one day I could become a kind of poet and photographer who writes books, takes pictures, and through this makes a living. To be honest, this was very optimistic. I think in the 21st century, due to technological revolutions, this project would have failed anyway. So I became a philosopher. And when talking about this, there comes a line to my mind from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who once said that philosophy is a kind of asylum for those who felt attracted by poetry but didn’t dare to become a full-time poet. That’s quite beautiful. And that resonates with you and your experience. It does. And to be honest, sometimes it still feels to me that I should give up this philosophy, with these mental operations and dialectics and conversations, and return to poetry. As a young man I wrote a lot of poetry. Sometimes I think, in the time of AI, even philosophy seems to be substituted by automatically generated texts and books. But when it comes to poetry, there always remains something mysterious about it, something that I’m pretty convinced will never be substituted by artificial intelligence, even though it can pretend to write poetry. Real poetry, in my understanding, has to do with that early adolescent experience I was talking about. It has to do with the universal spirit, which sometimes grasps you, inspires you, fills you with inspiration and enthusiasm. And without that, I’m pretty convinced no real poetry will ever come into existence. So catch us up. What does it mean? Tell us a little bit about your work. What does it mean to be a philosopher? And what do you do? What’s the work that you do? I’m sitting here thinking all day long. No, I’m just kidding. It’s not that easy to explain, because when I decided to become a full-time philosopher, it was really a challenge. And if I had known at that time what it meant to do this, I’m not quite sure whether I would have decided to take that road. But anyway, what I’m actually doing is a kind of multi-task work. On the one hand — not that surprising for a philosopher — is teaching. I’m a lecturer at several universities, both in Germany and in Austria. But this is only part-time work. I’m not a professor at university; it’s freelance philosophy, and I’m invited to give some seminars. On the one hand, in a business school, in order to discuss with future entrepreneurs what it takes to reflect on what they are doing, what it takes to reflect on the spiritual dimension of economy, which actually exists. On the other hand, in Austria, I’m a lecturer at a medical school, and it’s about doing the same thing with future doctors. It’s quite inspiring for me to converse with young people and to understand how they look into the world, what kind of ideas they have for their future. Another thing is that I work a lot in collaboration with a German broadcasting corporation. I have a weekly format in which I reflect in a philosophical way on political topics that are important these days. Another thing is consulting work with corporations, mostly with leadership, when it comes to the question of corporate culture development — what needs to be reflected beyond figures and numbers and the hardcore economy stuff, but is important in order to have a good relationship with employees, all these things we call corporate culture in German. And the last thing — and this is the fun part of the whole thing — is the philosophical journeys I do in collaboration with a weekly German newspaper called Die Zeit, which is very widespread in Germany. These are philosophical journeys where we stay together with a group of interested, open-minded people to discuss week-long central issues. For instance, I go with them to Athens, where we met, to discuss the origin of democracy and political thought. Or last week, I just returned from Norway, where I had a seminar on the philosophy of nature. It’s really fun to go to places in which you can easily combine the experience of people with the topics that we are talking about. We met in Athens. I was there for the House of Beautiful Business. You were there, and you led a tour — the birthplace of democracy, of the Pnyx. And without question, it was the most powerful part of that journey for me. I was there in large part because I live in a very small town. I have concerns about the way that community conversations have struggled in the social media age, and democracy and all that good stuff. So I was excited to be in Athens, and that tour was really powerful. And I guess my question to you is this: it seems like your attraction from the beginning was to the ancient Greeks. So what do the ancient Greeks have to tell us now? And in particular, Athens and the Pnyx — the role that it plays — what do you think is significant about the Pnyx and the Athenians that we should be listening to? Well, they have so much that’s really important for us in our modern epoch. Let me try to put it like this. Ancient Greece is somehow the birthplace of Western civilization. That’s where our roots come from. Of course, there are other influences as well, from Jerusalem and Rome. But when we talk about politics and about democracy, it’s obviously Athens, or Greece, from which the whole story began. And what attracts me so much about these ancient Greeks is that they thought in a very inspiring way, differently than we do today. If you accept a metaphor from modern information technology, I would say the ancient Greeks operated with a different operating syste

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

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