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

6d ago

Sem Devillart on Observation & Translation

Sem Devillart is a cultural analyst at Harmony Labs in New York and co-founder of Popular Operations, her cultural trend practice. She is founding faculty at the School of Visual Arts’ MPS Branding program. She began her career with Li Edelkoort and later worked for Faith Popcorn’s BrainReserve. Fluent in seven languages and trained in semiotics, design, and comparative religion, she has advised Christian Dior, Camper, PepsiCo, L’Oréal, Philips Design, and Deepak Chopra. So I start all these conversations the same way. I’m not sure if you know this, but it’s a question I borrow from a friend of mine and a neighbor who helps people tell their story. And I learned this question from her and I haven’t really found a better way of getting into a strange conversation than this question, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way that I’m doing right now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you are 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? It’s a deep question. The way you ask it sounds very deep. And if you forgive me, I will answer it in a superficial manner. Or maybe you could almost say a deep manner. I was thinking about this question, it was coming. And the sincere answer is that I feel I don’t come from anywhere because there is a reason, because I moved a lot. So if you’re a nomad, you ask the nomad, where’s your home? You might say, my suitcase, or my tent, or my rug. But in the short, officially, I was born in Lima, Peru. All my four grandparents come from different cultures, different backgrounds, different nationalities. So alone, just genetically, very mixed. And when I was about four years old, I moved to East Africa, Tanzania, where I spent most of my childhood. And from then on, there was a three-year rhythm, more or less, of moving, mainly across Europe, Switzerland, Spain, etc. But let’s say the formative educational years, let’s say high school, I spent in Germany. So probably Germany got the most of me. And then, yeah, my professional career, I worked in Milan, I worked in London, I worked in Paris. Yeah, so, and currently, I live in New Jersey in a place called Montclair, which I find, by the way, very exotic. So yeah. I love how you said Germany got the most of me. Yeah. And I got the most of Germany. Yeah, well, the formative, that means the information, the software system, right? The poems, the literature, the culture, the love of the language, definitely the music. And it started from the classics, like Beethoven, Mozart, the classic stuff, to the techno stuff, to the modern stuff. So I spent these formative years where I delved into music, dance culture, that was very much, very influenced by the German, let’s say, techno movement in the 90s. So I would say that that is still resonating inside of me, very much so, and also the German language, which I love. Oh, wow. And do you have a recollection of being young in Germany, what you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, the biggest recollection, probably the Tanzania, well, it depends on the age, right? But the childhood, let’s say before hitting puberty, was in East Africa. And I wanted, I think, to be between a spy and an archaeologist. Oh, wow. So I lived pretty much, this is really, I think this is really interesting, very isolated in the years in Tanzania and Dar es Salaam, no TV, no phone, hardly any neighbours, very, in deep isolation. So, yeah. What explained all the travel? Parents, jobs. So, yeah, my stepfather, my German stepfather, travelled a lot for his job. And later on, I really, I think, it was also already my constitution. So it’s not just the way I was brought up, but I think it’s, I have a tendency to being a little bit restless. And FOMO is my favourite. It’s probably my state of being. I want to be everywhere and I want to know everything. And I think I’m excessively curious. So, yeah. Well, I identify with that a bunch. Often I describe myself as omnivorous, in a way, and I identify with your FOMO as a state of being. I want to go back to your, you were in Tanzania, you wanted to be a spy and an archaeologist or an archaeologist. I think first, yeah. Well, let’s say archaeologist. I had a few books on ancient Egypt and there was not that much stimulation around me. But so probably, I don’t know, I wonder, I wonder, this is pure interpretation, whether I thought that beneath the surface there was something to be discovered. I was fascinated by pirates and treasures that you had to dig out. So I often used to dig, dig around, make holes all over the place. Oh, I lived also on a cliff upon the Indian Ocean. So there was a lot of beach, very lonely beach, no people. So that captured my infantile imagination. Wow. Can you tell a story? I’ve never thought about these questions. Yes. So it’s good to being asked. Thank you. The image of being a child on an empty beach is quite powerful for some reason. Yes. Yes. It was probably my main playground. What I used to do, and actually, sometimes I share this, well, I used to collect shells. So that was something I loved doing. And luckily, my mother was very hands-off. So I could do whatever I wanted. So I had a lot of freedom. And my room was, I had such a huge shell collection. And one of my favorite activities was to sort them, organize them. So I would constantly reshuffle the order. So the pointy shells in one box, then I would classify them by their color. And so I would keep moving the shells around by classifying by their characteristics. And I think I still do somehow with information the same. And the spy part of the grown-up dream, what was the spy? Well, I think I always found invisibility pretty amazing. I always wanted to be invisible because you find out more about what people are talking about, what they’re thinking. And I think that also goes hand in hand with my introverted character. I’d rather listen in order to find out more. And I also believe this might be, I hope I’m not forcing here an interpretation, but because I moved so much and was constantly exposed to different environments and to different languages, I had to figure out how things work. So you stand on the side, imagine a playground, kids are playing in the playground and I probably would be at the periphery and figuring out how things function. So that’s a way of looking at. So spy is not, I don’t mean in the dubious way of stealing information or lying, but much more the passive observer and recording everything that the awareness that information is valuable, that every information bit counts. I think maybe that has been, that was a, I wonder, I mean, I’m just maybe over-interpreting. I appreciate how cautious you are of your own interpretation. You mentioned now that you’re, my usual question at this point is like, catch us up, where are you now? You mentioned Montclair, New Jersey, and you described it as exotic. Well, first of all, I have my Manhattan studio where I’m talking right now. And so I commute, right? I go between Manhattan and Montclair, but Montclair, I mean, I did not grow up in the American suburbs. I just knew the world of the suburbs through movies like American Beauty, example, or in the several chain of horror movies, right? And how should I explain this without being offensive? I find it very exotic because it’s, I never, I mean, if you consider that I grew up in Tanzania and that was my home, now imagine fast forward, like the contrast of a lonely beach and on a cliff to American suburbia. What is the suburbs like for you? It’s very interesting. I find in particular as a mother, right? The mother scene, very interesting. Luckily, many creatives picked up on the themes and wrote fantastic novels and wrote incredible horror movie scripts and a whole. I mean, it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting. So, and for those who don’t know you, what do you do for work? Talk a little bit about what the work that you do and what keeps you busy? Okay. So what keeps me busy is just recording everything I can get my hands to. I read a lot. I read a lot that keeps me busy and it’s a full-time activity, right? Like taking an information. So there is no real work. I mean, it’s not really work. It’s just basically the way I breathe and everything is my work is my life. I don’t see much distinction, but let’s say that if I had to nail it, I’ll say I do three things. I advise clients on what’s coming next in culture, especially aesthetic and psychological trends or shifts. That’s one area. The another area I do is I teach people also how to spot patterns in society, if it’s zeitgeist or trends in particular areas. I teach at the School of Visual Arts. I teach at the University of the Arts in Zurich, also in Poland and Warsaw, a place called School of Form. So internationally, I also give these workshops on how to sense the zeitgeist to companies. So the teaching aspect. Then the third one is I really love theory, like theory or trend theory and building models and speculate on the nature of trends a lot. I have never published anything in that respect, but that’s my plan of working on a book. Can you say more about that, about the theories and what you’re working on or what interests you about? I guess I’m not even sure what that means. What are the current theories about trends and patterns? That’s a very big question. I would not know where to even start. It’s too big. What’s the work that you’re doing that you’re comfortable sharing on theory? One of the, let’s start with the most macro, like the clumpy part, aspect of what I do. Let’s look at the macro part because it gets really, it can get into a very, almost very molecular level of how observation works. But I started with art history, right? That’s what I studied and noticed, which it’s

58 min
May 25

Igor Kuvychko PhD on Bateson & AI

Igor Kuvychko, PhD is a Principal Data Scientist at INFICON, where he builds ML and optimization systems for semiconductor manufacturing. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from Colorado State University, with over 2,000 academic citations. He was born in the Soviet Far East, grew up in Russia, and came to the US at 21. I encountered him when he posted a piece, “Gregory Bateson & AI” on LinkedIn, connecting Bateson’s ideas about information, mind, and feedback to contemporary AI. So as you may or may not know, but I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story. And I really haven’t found a better way to get into a conversation than this question, but it’s really 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 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 are in absolute control. Oh, this is such a fun question. Well, I’m gonna start from the very beginning. So I paint the picture, paint the story. So I was born and grew up in Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union. So Vladivostok is a coastal city, very close to North Korea and Japan. So to picture it on a map. And it’s very much on the periphery of the country, so pretty far away from the center. So that’s where I grew up. And I was a very curious kid. So curiosity was one of the big themes. And when I was pretty little, I was into many things, including mathematics. And I got really quite into it. And then I just by happenstance, I switched to chemistry. And I was probably around 10 years old or something like that. And it was summer and I was bored. And I found that my older sister’s chemistry textbook, school textbook. And back then in Soviet Union, we had four years of high school, mid school and high school chemistry. So pretty decent problem. And I started reading it and it just clicked with me. It was a fun subject because it was abstract and it was applied at the same time. And I was bored. So I read the textbook and I solved all the homework problems. And I just had a ton of fun. And I kept doing it. And then eventually went through all four years of high school chemistry before high school chemistry started. And the school teachers noticed me and then they gave me a little bit of extra attention and they connected me with a chemistry professor at a local university. And she took me under her wing and she gave me free tutoring, amazingly enough. So every week I would go to this university, and I would hang out with her and other professors in the lab. And she would tutor me on organic chemistry and it was just a blast. So that is one of the themes. But of course, a lot was going on societally, politically at the same time. So when I was 11, Soviet Union collapsed. And so it was a massive change. There was something that was supposed to be enduring and permanent just ceased to exist. So from many perspectives, that was a very turbulent time. And I think that was one of the early injections of just turbulence and change. So that was one of the themes. And then going further, when I was 15, my mom passed away from cancer. And that was, of course, a very one of those forming events in my life. And that pretty very early made me very aware of finitude of life. And it made me ask some existential questions and questions of meaning, specifically, where does meaning come from? So that’s another thing. And fast forward, I was, yeah, Soviet Union collapsed. But one of the lessons was the world ends, and then the sun rises, and life goes on. And we adapt. We are very adaptable creatures. So there was still state funded programs. And back then in Russia, there were these competitions, high school competitions in science. So high school kids were competing. And I was, I went into this program and got a chance to travel on basically on a government dime across the country, compete with other kids. Eventually, it led me to a very good university program in Moscow. So when I was 17, I left Vladivostok, and it’s an eight hour plane flight to Moscow. So it’s pretty far away, and got my undergrad in chemistry. Then I realized pretty early on that I wanted to leave the country. I had a pretty clear sense that the future of Russia was not the future I wanted to be a part of. So I went to the US and got my PhD in chemistry. And at that point, I was, so I was living in Colorado. And my life was just, it was just a straight shot leading me to a career as a chemistry professor. Just everything was making sense, I was going to be a chemistry professor, I was going to work in academia. But the longer I stayed in academia, the less excited I was feeling about it. So at some point, I realized that this is not a path I wanted to take. So I started taking some, I took some business classes. And then I made the decision to say goodbye to chemistry. And that was another big change, because a lot of my identity was tied with being a great chem. But I walked away from that, joined Intel, and started working in the semiconductor factory at Fab. So making chip. And then I had a number of roles at Intel. They did for almost a year. But I was moving closer and closer to software. And since I was a kid, I loved applied mathematics. So I was doing more and more at the intersection of applied mathematics and software. And then, three years ago, at this point, I made the decision to switch to software full time. And I joined Inficon, where I’m currently at. And so currently, I’m a principal data scientist at Inficon. And yeah, I just kept going in the direction of, it’s not really specifically about applied math or software. It is about solving difficult problems at intersections of the main. So, and that’s something that I’m very interested in, especially when the problem is practical and messy. And there is some interesting math and science, that’s always fun. But also the problem that I’m dealing with, there is a human element, there is the politics of change, and how people interact with your systems. So, and I feel that this is where Bateson comes right in. Yeah, hold on, I want to stop there. And because we’re going to get into the Bateson thing, but I still want to spend a little time in your past, when you were a kid, before you discovered, I mean, you told the story very well, of course. But do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? You have a vision of young Igor, what you wanted to be when you grew up? It seems like you found chemistry as a passion. And so maybe that was the answer. But I’m just curious, what did you hope to be when you were a child? I had a very clear vision. So, since I was very little, I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to be a scientist. Yes. And what did that look like? It is interesting, because when I try to think about what was the vision, there was a word scientist. But what did it mean for me, for little me? And I don’t have a clear answer. But it was more with this sense of curiosity and adventure. And I would say playfulness, too, that you’re just wrestling with these difficult problems. And you’re solving puzzles. And it’s very exciting. So I think at that stage, that was really the vision. And I think it worked out quite well. Because although my job is, I’m not like an official scientist, but I feel that this is a lot of what I do. Yeah, that’s wonderful. And I was also curious, too, you told the story of, you were 11, when the Soviet Union fell. And I was just curious, how did you notice it? What, can you tell a story of what did you know? How did you know that it had gone away? You talked about it, this enduring thing is not there anymore. How did you know? So of course, I knew that something big was happening, because my parents were freaked out about it. And that was just a topic of the conversations, right? And everybody was anxious and noticeably scared, right? And kids are very attuned to the state of their, to the mental state of their parents, right? So we know when something isn’t right, right? So that was certainly one aspect, but there was a lot of just purely practical aspects, I remember when I was little, and back then, central heating is typical, was typical in Soviet Union, probably in Russia now. But heating was never a problem. And then after Soviet Union collapsed, it was a problem. And I remember, even after I moved to the US, during winter time, I would make a mental note that I’m warm, because I remember when I was a kid, it’s just, whatever you are, at home, at school, at university, outside, it’s always cold during winter, just this always background of cold. And it’s slowly grinds on you, like, that’s one of the things. Another thing was food insecurity. So, I remember the long queues, and the long queues waiting for US humanitarian aid. And have to, because the aid was given per headcount. So, I had to wait in these queues with my grandpa, and we would get the box. And I still remember the canned mandarins, they were amazing. Yeah, I remember, still, there was this one, like, my grandpa grabbed me, he’s like, okay, there is a humanitarian aid is being given, we need to wait. And we waited for three hours in this queue. And they ran out of canned mandarins. I still remember that. So, it was interesting. It was definitely, there was a lot of crime, and a lot of organized crime going on. There was, it was a very chaotic time, we had to, I’m still an expert in subsistence farming. I mean, I still remember how to grow potatoes, because we would grow enough potatoes to last us through the winter. So, there was this aspect that there is just things that were fine, are not fine, and you have to deal with them. But despite all of this, of course, I was very young, but despite all of this, I remember this, there

1 hr
May 18

Nick Bodor on Strangers & Institutions

Nick Bodor is the founder and owner of Baker Falls, a live music venue and bar at 192 Allen Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He previously created some of the East Village’s most influential independent spots — alt.coffee, Library Bar, and Cake Shop, which booked early shows by MGMT, Vampire Weekend, and the Strokes. A first-generation Hungarian-American from rural Connecticut, he’s spent 30 years building communal spaces in downtown New York where emerging bands, downtown clowns, and anti-folk musicians find a home. Nick is building the kinds of spaces we need. This piece makes the case we should be subsidizing this kind of social infrastructure: “Why ‘Cost Disease’ is The Secret Froce Behind America’s Toxic Solitude:’ There is a strong economic argument for subsidizing health care, education, and even child care. But should we also subsidize sit-down restaurants? Bowling alleys and the local dive bar? Coachella! Of course, I’m joking about Coachella. (Kind of.) But my serious point is that if solitude has a social cost, it’s not crazy to think that local, state, and federal governments should be thinking about creative ways to make it cheaper to hang out. Some policy solutions would be familiar, such as local governments providing more public pools and community spaces. Others might sound a little odd, like making pro-social businesses, such as restaurants, qualify for tax-deductible donations, the same way that Puccini fans can write checks to their favorite opera house. Cost disease is real, and it has a known cure. Today we’re seeing that one price of a successful economy is the rise of anti-social businesses. But if we want our rising living standards to include friendships and shared experiences—and not just a nation of couch potatoes scrolling on their phones for 10 hours a day—then we’ll need to choose our social future. And pay for it. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. I use it in all my conversations because I haven’t found a better way of getting into one of these conversations out of the blue. And it’s a big question. 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 the question is, where do you come from? Yeah, it’s interesting because it is so open-ended. Where do I come from geographically? Where do I come from on my parents’ side that was somewhat formative? And full disclosure, it’s this funny thing that as... I basically came to New York City in the early 90s and I’d been hanging out there since the 80s. And I opened this coffee shop on Avenue A in 1995 across from Tompkins. And everybody was like, hey, Nick, where are you from? What do you do? Well, it was such a what I call exploratory question for people you don’t know. So with the backstory of I opened this coffee shop when I was 27, I think 27 years old. And it was just me and a business partner. We weren’t well funded. It was this very back in the day, we call it do it yourself, DIY coffee house that happened to have internet access. So we were very early internet cafe, but we wanted to be the cool internet cafe. I always called it an online coffee house, not a cyber cafe, which we were opening up at the time. So when people asked me that question, I was very gun shy because I was very proud and I had worked since I was 13 years old, working in restaurants and having coked out chefs throw pots at me, but then bring me under their wing and mentor me. To answer the question where I’m from in that environment was I was like, I’m in New York. I’m a New Yorker. And that doesn’t fly. To answer the question realistically, I think this will be me almost coming to terms with it is I’m from Connecticut. And when you say in 1990s East Village, Avenue A, gritty rock and roll and cool alternative culture, you’re from Connecticut. Everybody just thinks you’re from Westport or Greenwich and you’re a rich kid. Especially being a younger person that opened a coffee shop. Everybody would just assume you’re a rich kid if you say you’re from Connecticut. So I always had this chip on my shoulder about answering that question. But ultimately, it formed me and it formed a lot of what I’m doing now in 2026, many decades later, 30 years later. Yeah, so the way I explain it is not being from Westport or Greenwich. But from an area that’s much more rural. People don’t realize that Connecticut has rural populations like Easton and Georgetown. Where I’m from had literally an abandoned wire mill in the town, and my road was called Old Farm Road. So I grew up thinking everybody had a backyard with woods and an abandoned farmhouse that you could just walk across two neighbors’ yards and be in this giant field that was abandoned and fly kites and make model rockets that we would shoot off and just be young kids in the 70s and 80s. Your parents just said see you for dinner time and you just roamed around. And I thought everybody could kick in the door of an abandoned farm outbuilding and fall through the staircase with rusty nails and everything. Super lucky we didn’t get killed. But that formed a lot of an aesthetic of the woods and abandoned buildings and just exploring and just walking around. And that transferred into New York City, which was a choice that I made to move because I was inspired by the East Village and Lower East Side when I was part of my growing up where I’m from. I’m first generation. My father escaped in a revolution in Hungary in 1956 and came to Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is a factory town. And the Upper East Side had a Hungarian enclave. And the other one was in Youngstown, Ohio, which Jim Jarmusch made a movie about called Strangers in Paradise about Hungarians, New York, Hungary, downtown Hungarians going to a Hungarian enclave in Ohio. All of that formed a lot of what I’m doing these days. And I started working in a restaurant when I was 13 called the Georgetown Saloon. That was where all the working folk, all the working people hung out. But it was also, there was some people that had some money. But it really was the place where people had Harleys and they cut the lawns for the rich people and had really successful landscaping businesses. But they drove Harleys and wore leather vests and stuff. Honky tonk in the middle of everything. So that’s where I’m from. A lot of it, that restaurant, the Georgetown Saloon formed me because there was always one of the owners in the kitchen, one of the owners on the floor, one of the owners behind the bar. And I worked for them for 10 years and they really brought me up. And when I was 18, I said, by the time I’m 28, I want to open a restaurant. I put myself long-term goal there that again is all where I’m from. And if I didn’t have that job at Georgetown Saloon, I probably wouldn’t have been inspired to do my own thing. I probably would have tried to get an office job or something that was the norm if you could make it happen. That really influenced where I’m from. And put me in a position to open. I started getting really into coffee culture when I moved to New York and what I would call a coffee house versus cafe. I was romanticizing 1950s beatnik Greenwich Village coffee houses, but then I would travel to Montreal and I loved the coffee house scene there. And so when I moved to New York, 1992, I was 21 at the time and I got into the coffee business and I was like, oh, I don’t need to open a restaurant when I’m 28. I could open a coffee shop. And so I was able to put myself in a position there where we opened up Alt Coffee when I was 27. But I don’t know if that’s a long answer to that first question or if I should break to let you ask me a question. No, I mean, the answers have their own, they come to their own end. I mean, it’s beautiful. But I do want to go back, because the next question I often ask is, as a kid, maybe before you got that job at the Georgetown Saloon, as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Do you have a recollection of what young Nick wanted to be when he grew up? Well, yeah, that again, it’s where are you from and what are the dates? And I was born the day they landed on the moon, is what I say. So this is also what I love about me being totally frank and honest, because I used to make up backstories for myself and that was such an interesting time. Where you can just make s**t up about your background and there wasn’t the internet to fact check, right? So I thought the Ramones were all brothers. You didn’t fact check it. So I’ve put bits and pieces of things out there, especially being in the cafe business and the bar business where I’m chatty, it’s hospitality. I love talking to various people. I’ve made some s**t up. I’ve dropped some exaggerations. So I always say I was born the day they landed on the moon, July 17th, 1969. But I have to be careful, because if people know, they actually landed on the moon on the 19th, and I was born when they were in space. Because people don’t always realize — other than now we’ve been back to the moon this year, which is coincidental — people know it takes multiple days. So I was technically born while they were on their way to the moon, but I always say I was born the day they landed on the moon. Apollo 11 landed on the moon. So I always wanted to be an astronaut. I’ve always been fascinated by space. I was a sci-fi kid. Star Wars, I was eight years old when Star Wars came out. That was hugely influential. So yeah, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, for sure. It’s amazing. I’m really connecting with, well what a choice to make that choice to say the day that they landed on the moon as opposed to being in the moon. Where does that come from, do you think, that i

53 min
May 11

Jonathan Taee on Rhizomes & Meaning

Dr. Jonathan Taee is a social anthropologist and the founder of Rhizome Consulting, a New York digital strategy and brand systems agency. His clients range from Fortune 500 organizations like Target to mission-driven farms, real estate groups, and emerging consumer brands. His focus is on building "living brand systems" — adaptive structures that reflect how meaning is actually created today. He lives in the Hudson Valley, where he runs Ironwood Farm with his family. So, you may or may not know this, but I start every conversation, and I do this in my work too, with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who’s a neighbor, who you know, Suzanne Snyder, I imagine. And I use it because it’s a big, beautiful question. I can’t imagine a better question for getting into a conversation out of nowhere. But because it’s so big, I kind of over-explain it. So, before I ask, 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? My goodness. Out the gate with the existential big question. I, the first place I go to, because I’m a Brit living in the US, is I’m from England. But that, in a sense, is its own problematic answer, because I think I’ve lived more years in the States now than I have in the UK. So, it’s a question I’m asking myself all the time. But I was born in England and came to the US for, when I was probably about one year old. Lived here till I was eight, and then went back to the UK. My parents decided they wanted to put me back in English school. Finished my schooling there, and then did a gap year and all that, and then decided I wanted to come to the US for university. Met a woman, and here I am living in the Hudson Valley next to you, Peter, living the dream. But you know, where do I come from? You know, I identify as English, 100%. My kids have American accents. When I speak to English people, they think I’m American, because my accent’s all going all over the place. And every time they say that, it hurts a little bit. So, I’m going to claim the space here. I’m English. Are there moments when you feel particularly English? When I talk about being English. I hear my accent go. But when I’m in England, I almost feel less English. But you know, I’d say when I invite my friends over for a Sunday dinner, and they don’t know the decorum of what a Sunday lunch is, that makes me feel very English. When I feel offended about something that other people should know, but why would they know, because it’s culturally different, but I get offended about it, I’m like, oh yeah, that’s an original point for me. I think we’ve got to a very strong answer. What is the appropriate behavior for a Sunday dinner? It could be a podcast in and of itself, to be honest with you. I’ll give you the top line. If you accept the invite, you have to turn up unless something really bad happens. It’s not a casual invite. It’s not a potluck. When you’re invited, you’re expected to come because someone’s been cooking for 48 hours. You bring a bottle of wine. You don’t bring a dish. You are being fully hosted when you are invited to a Sunday lunch. Reciprocity and all that. Accept the gift and bring the bottle and play that role. That’s another good one. Those two feel like those could be very common. That must happen all the time. Americans just trampling all over the Sunday dinner. I’ve seen it all, Peter. I’ve been offended by it all. The other one is a good Sunday lunch is about hanging out with people. It’s about having drinks and talking. It’s then about eating a big meal probably more than you should. Then it’s about staying afterwards and sitting on the couch and kicking back. It’s something we don’t get to do that often. It’s not something that you come 45 minutes. I think I could make that two o’clock other friend. No, no, no, no. You don’t want to hear about any other friends. No, no new friends. No new friends on a Sunday lunch. I had an experience of something like that. It was a holiday feast at your place many years ago when both our kids were much smaller and you only had one, I think. Yeah, back when I could do things like that. Well, you know, my wife’s a farmer, so she grows it, I cook it. I’ve always enjoyed doing the cooking bit. The hosting piece, that’s a big Brit thing. We like to host people for meals, etc. I want to know, when you were a kid, did you have an idea? Do you have a of young Johnny and what he wanted to be when he grew up? I’m embarrassed about the answer. They did all these, you know, testing in England at school that would tell you sort of what career you could potentially be good for, which I always got really frustrated with later in life. So I always thought I’d love to be a doctor, like a emergency room doctor. Maybe it’s because I’m just watching the pit too much. And I was told I wasn’t good at science. And so as a young person, I really steered myself away from that. And I feel like I really did myself a disservice, saying, no, I can do that. I’ll just apply myself more and I could make it through. It was like, because I was told I wasn’t good at science, being a doctor was never a thing I could do. And so I can’t remember what the tests told me. It’s probably something like you’d be good as a career counselor or something. But I think the answer that I’m embarrassed by is I said I wanted to be a businessman. Ah. And what was a businessman? I don’t know what business it was. I was naive at that time, but I’m almost like, am I that now? You know, I deal with for-profit businesses and digital marketing and I’m constantly talking to people about our services and selling what we do or talking about other people and their businesses and, you know, the problems they face and the solutions we could deploy. And maybe I am strangely become that businessman that I never thought I would be. Johnny, I mean, that would mean that you’ve achieved your childhood dreams. Oh, no. Another existential dilemma, Peter. So catch us up. Where are you and what is the work that you do? So I run a digital studio. Sometimes we call ourselves an agency, depending what day it is, in the Hudson Valley, New York. We’re based in Hudson, New York. But we work nationally and internationally. We have some international clients as well. We’re defined by three main pillars of work. We build brands, brand strategy and identity systems. We build websites, both sort of informational sites as well as full e-commerce sites. We’re in Shopify daily. And then we do full 360 digital marketing for our clients. And our best projects are the ones that span all three of those pillars, because that means that we’re working with clients over several years. The relationship is very deep. The results are very are productive and keep the client, you know, coming back and wanting to work with us. And we get to see growth. You know, that’s really if we worked across all three of those pillars, we’ve seen growth and some positive marketing market feedback. How did you come to Hudson Valley, Hudson, New York? What do you love about it? So I met a woman at the University of Virginia and we fell in love. And I went off to do a PhD and she went off to farm in New York in the Hudson Valley. She came here because of what’s called the craft program, which is this amazing young farmers program, especially in the Northeast, where if you want to farm and you don’t know how to get into it, you can join this program. And that was her. And so she was doing this thing in the Hudson Valley. I remember visiting her when when when she was here thinking, where are we? She’s living in a box in the woods on this random farm up in Chatham. But there was something beautiful about it reminded me of home, reminded me of England. And then things pretty good were getting serious with the woman. And then eventually she said, I want to farm. I want a baby and I want it in the Hudson Valley. Are we doing this? And I took a moment to think about it and then said, yeah, all right. Sounds great. Let’s go. And so fast forward. Here I am. Yeah. And the PhD, I remember when we met. I mean, when did you arrive in Hudson? I remember going to Baba Louie’s pizza in Hudson about 2010, I think was the first time. So I was writing the PhD when I was I was living in Kinderhook. Yeah. In Hudson, Kinderhook area at that time, post fieldwork. Yeah. Would you want to tell the story of the fieldwork you did? You went, you were you’re an anthropologist. Yeah. So I got into anthropology in undergrad. The gap year that I mentioned to was quite informative for me. I was 18. I thought I knew everything about the world and myself. And I knew that I was living in England in a bubble and I was like, I’m going to get out of the West. So I lived in Nepal basically for a year with an organization called it’s now called Relentless Development, I think. And they would put someone like me at 18 years old, paired up with a Nepali counterpart in a village in the south of Nepal. And very quickly, it was a shock. It was a shocking experience because I didn’t know everything. I knew actually very little. And the West that I was trying to escape was actually in me. And then it started to pour out of me in these strange ways. And I was like embarrassed about it, confused about it. It was a great experience. I loved living in that village and the people were so wonderful. It was during the Maoist rebellion there. So there was a lot of violence going on at the time. But basically when I got to UVA, I was like, what did I just do? I mean, my brain was scrambled. My identity was scrambled. And then I discovered in the, literally in back in that day, there was like the course book that they would print. And I was flicking through. I was like,

53 min
May 4

John Dutton on Utopia & Nowhere

John B. Dutton is Head of Creative Services at the National Film Board of Canada. He was previously Chief Creative Officer and Partner at Camden, a Montreal-based international advertising agency. He writes the Discomfort Zone newsletter and is the author of the novel 2084. I’m not sure if you know this, but you may or may not know this, but I start every one of these conversations with the same question. It’s this big question that I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their story. And she’s got this question that is, there’s no better question that I found to start a conversation or get into a conversation. But it’s such a big question, I over-explain 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? Yes, and I was aware that this was a question, because I’ve listened to many, I don’t know, several interviews that you give. So I was well aware of this question. And this is going to take up the entire hour, so just so you know. We’ll both take a sip of water. Yeah, get ready. Here it comes. Because I did think about, I knew that you were going to ask, and I was like, oh, this is actually funny. And I don’t want to be literally talking about myself for an hour. But in a way, and this is going to sound overly mysterious, but in a way, the answer is nowhere. And there’s a reason for that, which is that the place I was born was in a county. You see, I have to use the past tense. It actually doesn’t, and this isn’t some story of a war-torn place. Loads of people must have this story. Mine is a very super benign version of this story, right? But basically, I was born in a county where they moved the border for various administrative municipal reasons about four years, three or four years after I was born. So in a way, it doesn’t exist anymore. But there is a bigger answer to why nowhere is the answer, which is that my parents moved from there when I was one year old to the south of England. I was born in the north of England, between Liverpool and Manchester, in a town called Warrington that back then was in Lancashire and is now in Cheshire. And they moved to the south of England. And for an American, for a Canadian, England is a tiny place, right? But back then in the 1968 or 67 or whatever year it was, that was going to the other end of the earth. So I grew up in the south of England, and that led to I was in the north just long enough to get an accent from the north so that I have literally had an accent my entire life. Because I went to school, so I would be teased at school for having an accent from the north because kids are kids, right? And then it became a bit of a mix, right, of accents if you’ve been in a place for long enough. But that also means that it’s an accent of somewhere and sort of undefinable. Then I moved to Montreal when I was 21. Of course, I had an accent then, right? And I don’t know what you think my accent sounds like now, but it’s probably mid-Atlantic-ish, right? And so the answer is nowhere because it’s a, I live, my parents moved a fair bit when I was young as well on top of that. So yeah, so I grew up living in a tiny town, the seaside, the country, a big town, and in London before I was finished being 18. Wow. Do you have a feeling that you’re, you sound different? Are you aware of your accent? Yeah, yes, and it comes and goes. And even in French, because I’m in Montreal, I work in French, minimum half the time. I have the French, the French I learned at school in England has a completely different accent from the French here. So I have to switch my French accent if I go to France because I don’t have to, but I just do because that was the first French I learned. Right. Just if I’m speaking on the phone to my family in England, I’m going to start reverting back to that accent. But even then, I don’t have the same accent as my sister, who’s not even, and even growing up, I didn’t. She’s not even two years younger than me, and we had different accents. Yeah. Literally pronouncing words differently, bath and bath, which I have trouble saying. It’s an effort for me to say that. Because that’s what she says, and that’s not what I say. So those vowels are carved in stone by the time you’re a one-year-old. That’s amazing. I don’t know if it’s amazing, but it’s the long-winded answer to your question. I’m fascinated by it. The awareness of this, of the accent, the placeless accent is really, that seems like an interesting experience, a phenomenon in a way. Is that worth going at? Yeah. There’s no way of not being aware of an accent in England, though, right? Because it’s still fairly class-based. It’s better than it was when you would struggle to get certain jobs if you had what would be called a working class, lower class accent. Now, that’s not really the case. BBC has all kinds of ranges of accents. When, 50 years ago, it was a thing that sounded like the Queen, a posh accent, basically, right? So at least in that respect, it’s a bit more democratized, but it’s still there. Still, you’re very, very aware of somebody’s accent the second they open their mouth in Britain. What do I sound like? You sound American. Well, I know where you live, you live down the road from Montreal. You don’t sound that much different from the Canadians around here, right? So you don’t sound that much different from me if I’m not paying much attention. The thing is that what I know, though, is that my accents, they come and go, just depending on context and without trying. Sometimes I would try, but obviously. Yeah. But I said, if I’m on the phone to my sister or my dad when he was alive, pretty much instantly somebody would listen and be like, wow, he’s doing an accent. But I wasn’t doing an accent. It was just that the context changed enough for me to click back into it. That’s really cool. I mean, but just the same way as you would click, if you did speak more than one language, you wouldn’t be thinking about it. You just change, right? The context would mean that you would just speak it that way. So it’s not that weird. And it could be potentially pretentious. I do know people who are from Canada, went to school in England and yet somehow still have a bit of a British accent. Right? It’s like, OK. Yeah, I’ve had that experience. It immediately comes to mind as an American who played soccer. We had an American who went to play football in England. And he had a British accent. And it was just, yeah, come on, stop. Well, coming back with it depends how long he was there. Yeah, I know. I’m forgiving. This is a child in me responding to this guy coming. Right, right. Exactly right. But that’s exactly what I was getting at about being made fun of for being teased for having an accent. But if he kept it for more than a couple of years, then that would be really, come on. Yeah. So you’re just trying to get the ladies probably, right? Yeah, because that works. That accent works over here. We’ve strayed a little bit. What did you want to be as a kid when you’re young, John, in the south of England? Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, not far off what I ended up doing, because the first in terms of a specifically a job, it was journalist and I’ve never been a journalist, but I’ve been a writer and I’ve worked in TV. Now I work for the National Film Board. So it’s pretty adjacent to that. And the only reason I stopped having that ambition was because finally, once you become aware of what British, especially, what you would call the gutter press, the popular newspapers in Britain are renowned for being pretty. I don’t know what word to even use, just crappy. How far can the swear word me to go in this? Yeah, we’re here all the way. Yeah, all the way. OK, yeah. It’s crass at best. It’s f*****g s****y. The way they treat regular people, never mind celebrity. When I found out what it seemed like. Oh, that’s what journalists do. That’s awful. Growing up in the eight, being a teenager in the 80s, I was like, oh, I don’t want to do that. That’s terrible. Right. Of course, there’s loads of amazing journalists in Britain. Right. But that was what I would see on the tabloid front pages. And every day, right, is this absolute s**t. And so I stopped wanting to do that. And yeah. So but writing was obviously a thing all along. So yeah. And catch us up. Where are you now and what’s the work that you’re doing? So I’m head of creative services at the National Film Board of Canada, which is a storied organization. It’s been around for over 85 years. We just one of our films just won an Oscar two weeks ago. Congratulations. Thank you. I can’t take credit for the film. It won best short animated film, and it’s called The Girl Who Cried Pearls. It’s a stop motion film by a pair of directors who were previously nominated for an Oscar at least 10 years ago. And painstaking, stop motion takes a long time. This was years and years and COVID happened in the middle of it. So it was well over five years of work making this thing. And then the National Film Board, the NFB, has a lot of technical expertise to add to. They have a scene where it’s set in Montreal and Paris, this film. There’s a winter time. There’s some light snow drifting down, which happens in Montreal. And that was CG, right? That was computer animation, right? So there’s little touches that are added to this painstaking craftsmanship and all of the human element. They had real actors who performed the film that then they reproduce the actor’s movements with what are called puppets. But puppet doesn’t do service to the amount of artistry in the creation

1h 1m
Apr 27

Indi Young on Listening & Cognition

Indi Young is a researcher, author, and consultant focused on understanding how people think. She developed the mental models method and is the author of Practical Empathy, Mental Models, and Time to Listen. Her work emphasizes listening, qualitative rigor, and designing systems that support different ways of thinking in practice. And, she has a great substack, Indi Young. So 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 story. And she has this question, which I just think is really beautiful, so I use it, but because it’s so big, I over-explain it before I ask. Because I want to make sure that you 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? I love that that question comes from your neighbor, too. I come from, well, my neighbor is actually a Buddhist meditation teacher, so neighbors are influential. Neighbors is a good word. I would say that I come from the edges of things. I am not a typical anything, and this is true of my entire family. Well, not entire, you know, there’s always, maybe most of the family is black sheep, and there’s a few who aren’t, I don’t know. But, yeah, I’ve never really been the person that anything was designed for. I remember sitting in math class in seventh grade, understanding what the teacher was talking about, but understanding also that the students weren’t understanding, but being way too shy to raise my hand and say, Miss Betsy, if you had just said this, then I think these guys wouldn’t be asking these questions. You know, it’s just I’m not smarter than anyone. I just see things. I can see things, I guess. I don’t know. Everybody can see things. But one of the things that’s interesting is I just visited my dad’s cousin, 87, last weekend, along with my cousin. And we were listening to family stories. And my dad’s cousin is full of vigor and has had a very adventurous life that is not like any other life you would expect. She was a horse trainer and rider, specifically Arabian, specifically endurance trail riding, which is a reenactment of the Pony Express. The original one of those was called Tennis Cup. And it runs from, it’s a hundred mile race that runs across the Sierras following the Pony Express mail trail that used to go across the Sierras. And she was instrumental. I mean, she rode that a bunch of times. I remember as a kid, I would look at the pictures of her going over Cougar Rock, which is an iconic place to take a photo of a horse, jumping up over a rock. And I was just in love. And so, of course, I also followed that path for a little bit. I am not rich enough to have horses on my own. But that was fabulous. She went on, I mean, she ended up working at a county jail for a while. She had just all these different adventures. And one of the things that I keep getting reminded of when I’m visiting her is that the family on her side, on my dad’s side, came to California in 1849. The third year that the Carson Pass was open. I think it was, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t Carson Pass. It was a little bit north of that. But they came over at the exact same month as the Donner Party. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And we have family stories about how typically awful the Donner Party was and how poorly they treated their Native American guides. And stories of how we built, I don’t know, we were, the family was doing something to build. It’s called, it’s the Greenewalt Party. That’s the name of the party that your family came to? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we’re, apparently, and we were the ones who, we went over, we built something so that we could go over it. And the Donner Party wanted to just use our stuff and whatever. Oh, wow. It’s, yeah. And we’re like, no, we’re going to go over it first. And then you’re going to come right on our heels because there’s a big storm coming. And apparently they were miffed and didn’t and stayed. And so you’re like, wow, OK. Few weeks later, we were part of the people coming back to help rescue them. Oh, my gosh. Right. So I think that, I mean, it’s a great little story because it talks about where we come from. I never, yeah, it’s not, we’re not a competitive minded family. We are a let’s cooperate and collaborate and work with our neighbors and get things done so that we all can move forward kind of a family. And that has completely bled into everything I’ve done in my career. I’m trying to help. Originally I grew up in Silicon Valley. It was not called that when I grew up, nor were there any of the tech bros there. There was no money there. There was Hewlett Packard. And I remember Apple being down the road from us in its very original form with a little rainbow Apple logo, although they didn’t. I mean, you only saw the rainbow logo Apple in some brochure because I never saw the actual logo on a building. I don’t think they were big enough for that. Where were you personally? What was the town you grew up in? Oh, that was called Los Altos. Yeah, I call it Los Altos now because there’s no way I can move back. Yeah, but it was like everybody that I knew, I got into computer science not because I wanted to, because it was something. So the story, once I got into it, let me tell that part of it. Once I got into it, everybody was a deep thinker. Everybody thought things through. That was the flavor of the people who were getting into the early computing. And it wasn’t something where I want to make money quick. That was not the goal. The goal was to figure out how these machines might be used for certain things and what that would look like and what the repercussions might be or how we could build on that. It was always about building on things. And then it did start shifting and I can tell you stories about that. But my whole goal with my career is to try to teach Silicon Valley to think more broadly to think about the edges, because the edges are half your market, literally half your market. And I have heard VPs and I don’t know, CTOs and stuff these days stand up and say, oh, we’re not interested in that market because that’s not enough income for us, not enough profit for us. It’s not worth it. Even though, you know, A, it should be worth it because they’re humans, too. I have this good example with a Netflix subscription plan, but it’s worth it because they’re human, too. But it’s also worth it because it’s not going to cost you that much. It’s software. It’s not going to cost you that much. So, yeah. Yeah. I’m curious. I want to get into those stories, but I always enjoy hanging out in the origins. So you’re in Los Altos. What did you, did you have a, do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Yeah, I wanted to be a writer. I loved reading. Yeah, I think, you know, all through grade school, especially fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, I was the student where the teacher would say, speak up. We can’t hear you. But they would also come to me and say, hey, you might want to read this book. And so I read, you know, I read Tolkien. I read Dune. I read all of that before I was out of fifth grade. I just loved reading. And of course, I go back and reread them. And then I go back. I have a list. This list is in Excel spreadsheets. That’s a very core thing to me is spreadsheets. The list goes all the way back to the 70s of books that I’ve read. And then I go back and I reread them and I get a completely different message out of them. And then I’ll go back and I’ll reread them. And this still happens. This happens with, I just reread the N.K. Jemisin Stone Sky series or whatever. It’s a series of three books. And it’s speculative fiction. We don’t call it science fiction anymore because that was the old guy’s way, you know, science. It’s like, no, this is more about understanding how people interact and how people would interact and what society would look like and what government would look like in the future. And in that series, it’s, you know, what, 40,000 years in the future of Earth? And we’re right back where we were during colonial times with respect to the government and the slaves and all of this. So interestingly, I read that for the first time, probably right before the pandemic, maybe a couple of years before the pandemic. And I just reread it last month. And a whole new message comes out. I mean, I caught all, I’ll highlight these things. And then I caught a bunch, you know, I caught a bunch of stuff the first time through. But then I’m like, oh, wait, there’s the lower message. And so next time I read it in another, you know, decade, I’ll find even more message. It would be really awesome. So reading has always been my thing. I wanted to be a writer. I remember my dad, we were standing in the kitchen. I think we were drying dishes or something. And my dad said, come here, I want you to watch this show. This show is called Nova. And it was the very first iteration of Nova, which was, you know, a science show, an early version of a science show. And in their intro, they had some computer graphics, early computer graphics, showing the logo coming together. And he’s all, you know, they did that on a computer. Would you be interested in computers maybe? Because I think you could earn a living on computers and then have writing as your hobby. Something to do on the side. He is also the man who told me, get into something where you provide a service. And instead, well, I don’t know, I provide a service, but nobody wants my service right now with AI. Nobody wants to know about the humans. Yes, yes. Well, now we’re talking. So how do you, let’s catch this up. So you tell us where you are now and the work that you’re doing. What is the work that you’re doing in

1h 9m
Apr 20

Annie Auerbach & Adam Chmielowski on Rifts & Futurelessness

Annie Auerbach & Adam Chmielowski are co-founders of Starling Strategy, a cultural insight and futures consultancy now in its tenth year. They help brands step outside category conventions by mapping the cultural and historical forces that shape how people feel and why. Annie is a trained historian, journalist, and author of several books including a forthcoming one on collaboration. Adam is a trained historian with a background in international qualitative research. Both previously worked at Flamingo, where they created the Cultural Intelligence unit before founding Starling in 2015. Their pro bono project The Rift is amazing: The Rift One: Understanding the growing divide between men and women.The Rift Two: Living in a culture of futurelessness. Mentioned in the conversation is > Richard Huntington “The Mediocrity of Middle Distance in the Insight”> Ella Saltmarshe on Sociological Stories So, as you likely know, I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine, who is also a neighbor, who helps people tell their stories. And I use it because it’s a big question, but because it’s so big, I over explain it before I ask. And I’m going to ask each of you to answer this in turn. And then I’m curious to hear what Starling, your partnership, how that would answer the question too. But the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And Annie, I’ll start with you. Annie: Okay, so there’s probably two ways to think about where I come from. The first one is family and heritage. And so my dad’s grandfather came over from Austria to London in about the 1900s, 1910s, and immediately set up shop in the East End of London, in Jewish community, and he was in the schmutter business or he made clothes. And so my heritage comes on my dad’s side, from this immigrant background and making your way in the world. And big, strong communities, lots of family dinners and jokes. And this core of working hard and trying to better yourself. And a slightly outsider’s perspective, I think, as well, which I think I have in common with Adam, and I think very much tries to inform our work. So that’s one side, which is this heritage point. And then the second one is academics and where I’ve come from educationally. And it’s another thing that Adam and I have in common, but we both studied history. And so trained historians and thinking about the past and trajectories, and then I became a journalist, I became a writer. And so very much thinking about what moment are we in, it was a features journalist, I was always thinking about the moment we’re in the present. And now, of course, Adam and I do cultural futures. So it’s this past, present, future vibe that’s gone with my education and career trajectory. What was the business, the word that you said for your family? Oh, the schmutter business. Yeah, what is the schmutter business? Clothes, can’t you tell? I don’t, that’s not a, that’s a, what is that? That’s not a word I’ve heard before. It’s Yiddish. And it just means in the clothes business. Yeah. Beautiful. Adam. Adam: Well, in echoes of what Annie just talked you through, I can’t pull all the strings or the threads together in such a neat way that says something about how we think and what we do. But maybe they’ll come out as I speak. The older I get, where I come from, gets further back in the past. So most prosaically and more immediately, I come from a really boring, and when I say boring, I mean, the archetypically boring suburb, south of London in the county called Surrey. Nothing happens there. And it’s a place called Carshalton. I’m hoping I’m the only person from Carshalton that’s probably ever been on a podcast at all. And it’s the sort of place that has a wool shop. It had a wool shop when I was there 40 odd years ago. It’s still got a wool shop there, amazingly. And I’ve got no idea who buys the stuff from there. It’s probably surrounded by more chain coffee shops now. But it’s still pretty much the same. And it has that eerie familiarity whenever I go back there. Anyway, that’s the boring British or English, very middle class suburbia is where I’m from, on one level. Further back, but not that further back. So my parents were Polish. And they escaped Poland. Well, I say escaped, they were forced out of Poland during the war, the World War Two. So my dad was, his story was, he was ushered out. Ushered is such a light, ushered, please, sir, could you please leave your dwelling and come to us to our gulag? But that’s effectively what happened. So the Russians came to their door and told them to leave. They had an hour to leave their home, which I never saw again. So him and his two sisters, and their mother, their father, my great grandfather was, sorry, my grandfather was fighting in the war. So they were taken to Siberia. And eventually, I won’t tell you the story because it will take the whole hour. They found their way via India to London in around 1947, I think, eventually got there. And my mother, she was forced out by the Nazis. Same story, different enemy. She, through use of fake passports, got to the UK and also London, different part, to my dad, they met. And then they lived the English middle-class suburban dream. And many immigrants, assimilated into that world seamlessly at the time. And yeah, a few decades later, which sounds a long time, but honestly, it boggles my mind that it’s only what, three decades after that I was born in that really, really boring place called Carshalton. And actually, that’s where I’m from. And that whole story, I keep wishing to know it a bit more. Because as I say, the older I get, the more interested I am in it. It’s probably something to do with wanting my kids to understand it more. And historically, we’re just in a time of forgetting that period. And that has its consequences. So yeah, sorry, slightly long winded. I don’t have any connection to what we do. Maybe we’ll get there at the end of this. I don’t know. But that’s, yeah. So we talk about being ancestors of immigrants quite a lot, actually, funnily enough. It might be part of our connection of what we’re doing and why we’re still doing it. That’s so interesting. Yeah, well, then the next question, the third party in the conversation is Starling is your partnership. So where does your partnership come from? Annie: So we met, funnily enough, we both studied history at the same time at the same place, but never met each other. But we met each other in an agency called Flamingo, which was an international qualitative research agency. And Adam and I found each other. And we set up a wing of Flamingo, which was called Cultural Intelligence. So specifically around sociocultural trends and futures. And we did that together and we worked really well together. And then I badgered Adam to leave and set up Starling and eventually he agreed. But yes, we chose the name Starling quite specifically, didn’t we? Adam: Yeah, well, you said it’s because you were living in Brighton. Annie: Yeah, so I used to live in Brighton and there’s beautiful murmurations that happen, Starling murmurations that happen over the pier at dusk. And when Adam and I were talking about culture, it just felt like a really good metaphor in the sense that obviously you have these very dynamic choreographed movements of birds all happening at once. It’s incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring. So something about culture moving constantly, but also the more we learn about murmurations, the reason for the movement happens because of threats and opportunity of the birds at the edges. So they might see a predator or they might see a food source or a place to rest and they can create these critical transitions of movements to push the entire flock of birds towards or away from something. We think that’s really interesting when you’re thinking about people and how change happens and how change often comes from the margins and how intersected it is. So that’s why we loved the metaphor. That’s so powerful. I feel like I had just listening to you describe it, that what it must be like to be a Starling in one of those murmurations. You’re so attuned to all the Starlings around you and somehow turning into something really moving, something that big, so beautiful. So there’s one question that we, so what did you want to be when you were a kid? Do you remember as a child what you wanted to be when you grew up? Adam: Oh my God. I really don’t, I genuinely don’t, but that just could be a result of a bad memory. Honestly, because I graduated from university and I still didn’t know and I had the luxury, frankly, and again, this paints a picture of a very different time. This is what, late nineties, that I didn’t feel like I felt like I had time to work out what I wanted to do. And as a lot of people who do this sort of work, I think stumbled into doing research and strategy type work. And that was based a lot around traveling a lot. And I also had a language, German, which got me into doing that. But honestly, I really didn’t think ahead. And it was a bit of a privilege and luxury because, you know, we’ve been doing some work around how young people look at the future now. And I looked, I saw it as something that was just going to offer me some possibilities and opportunities, honestly. And partly that was through, you know, my education and that’s what is instilled or was instilled in you, you know, for better or worse. So honestly, no, I don’t have an answer for you what I want to speak when I grew up. Annie: I wanted to be a vet. Is that right? Annie: Yes. I really loved animals. And I think that there was something quite, I don’t know, unadventurous or unimaginative that if you loved anim

1h 2m
Apr 13

Nick Liddell on Architecture & Anthropomorphism

Nick Liddell is a brand strategist, author, and founder of Baron Sauvage, an independent consultancy based in London. Previously Director of Consulting at The Clearing, he has over 25 years of experience working with brands including Google, Prada, McLaren, and Samsung. His most recent books are You Are a Fish: The Truth About Brands and The Brand Architecture Book, which argues for understanding brands as coherent systems rather than singular entities. So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from this friend of mine, who’s a neighbor also, who helps people tell their story. And it’s such a big question and a beautiful question is why I borrow it, but it’s so big, I over explain it the way I am 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 total control. And I think it’s really great that you asked this at the beginning of all of these conversations because I had some time to prepare for it, although I’m not sure you’re ever fully prepared. Yeah, I think as with a lot of people, it’s a complicated one to answer. I was born in Paris. I only moved to the UK when I was three years old. And I initially lived in the north of England near a place called Carlisle. And then I moved down to London when I was 10. So if I just want to give someone a short answer to it, particularly given that London is a pretty great place to work, if you’re working in branding, then I’ll just say London. But from a personal point of view, I’ll always feel I come from the north of England. I don’t sound remotely like I do anymore. But yeah, I’m a northerner spiritually. And what does that mean to be from the north of England? When do you feel most northern? Well, I think professionally, it means that it’s super easy to get sucked into the belief that everywhere is London. You grow up or you live in a bubble, particularly when you work in branding or marketing. And so it’s a really healthy way to remind myself that most of the world is not remotely like London or any major city for that matter. And also just personally, it means that the further north I go, the happier I tend to be. And what was it like growing up? Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? Well, certainly not a brand consultant. I had no idea a brand consultant was even a thing until I started looking for work. And then I saw in the list of things that aren’t being an accountant, a management consultant, a doctor or anything else that I wasn’t remotely qualified to do. Brand consultant was one of the few things left. And so it sounded fun and I went for it. I think I wanted to be a different thing every week when I did it, including ballet dancer and professional footballer and spaceman and everything. And where are you now? And what is the work that you do? So now I am, to all intents and purposes, still London. I’m just outside London. And I still do pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last 26. So helping organizations of all sorts of shape and size understand how they can better use their brands to improve their relationships with the people that they need to have good relationships with in a way that ultimately benefits them and helps them achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve as an organization. Yeah. And when would you say you first discovered that you could make a living doing this thing? Only really when I started doing it. I went to a careers fair and there were a couple of sad looking types in a corner. No one was speaking to them. They had an easel with a couple of British Airways planes with some funky tail fins on the back of them. And I don’t think anyone was remotely interested in speaking to them because they didn’t have a really snazzy stance. They weren’t handing out free things like the Unilever guys and the P&G guys were. So I went and talked to them and asked them what they did. And they told me that they worked at a brand consultancy called Interbrand. And I asked them about the type of work that they did. And it sounded semi interesting. And so I applied for a job and got it. And that was pretty much the extent to which I understood what I was doing, what on earth it involved. I learned it all when I started doing it. Yeah. And what do you enjoy about it? What do you love about it, actually? Or where’s the joy in the work for you? I love — well, personally, what I love about it is and the reason that I applied was I started working in brand valuation. So I studied philosophy and economics at university. So that’s a really nice mix of numbers and thoughts. And so what I initially liked about branding was that very often you’re looking at large data sets and you’re looking for some story or idea that you can extract from those data sets. And then there’s the bit on top of that, which you don’t get from an economics and philosophy degree, which is then you can start working with people who actually do things like designers, writers, creatives of all sorts of shape and size to actually make this idea manifest in all sorts of delightful ways that you probably couldn’t have imagined when you started thinking about that idea. And that for me is just a really lovely process that you go through from you can literally look at an Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of ones and zeros as input. And then output is just this really beautiful, compelling experience that’s been really thoughtfully designed that is going to make the right people really happy and get something and want to engage in it in a way that creates value for them and creates value for the people who are serving it up to them. And that’s still 26 years later, just a really fulfilling thing to do with my time. Yeah, I feel like maybe we started around the same time. And I always say that I feel like when I came into the work world, brand was the new technology. Do you remember on one level? I’m curious, does that resonate with you? Do you feel like that’s valid? And then secondarily, what do you look at 26 years later? It’s a long time has passed. What’s changed and what hasn’t changed when it comes to brand? I feel like I have to apologize before I respond to that. I think the funny thing for me is just how little that resonates. And I think probably the interesting thing about doing something for so long is you get into it and you forget. You forget some of the fundamentals after a while because you’re just used to the process of doing things. And so once in a while, I just find myself thinking, actually, why do these things exist? We’re so surrounded by brands in particular. Right. You can get up probably on a daily basis. You interact without really knowing it with thousands of brands. It’s in the tens within about five minutes of waking up. If you’ve brushed your teeth, picked up your phone, looked at the shower, stared out of the window. And so I think it was about 15 years ago. I just started thinking, well, hang on. Yeah, why? Why do brands exist in the first place? When did they start existing? And maybe I can just learn a little bit about how it all started. And there was a really interesting academic research paper that I stumbled across that basically said, you go back to the earliest civilization in the Indus Valley, something like 4000 BC. There is evidence of what they call proto branding. But effectively, it’s the same thing as what we’re dealing with today. And you’ve got merchants who are putting bulls and fertility gods like images of things onto their wares to signify where they come from. But also there’s symbolic value to those things. And that’s what we’re still doing today. So I would have — I used to go along with the story when I was at Interbrand. We always said the same thing. Brand comes from this Norse term to brand something. So that’s how old it is. It stretches back to Viking times and it’s all about asserting ownership. It’s complete nonsense. Brands go back about as far back as civilization goes, as far as we know. Yeah. And consequently, there’s just something innate about people when they get together and they produce all sorts of things like these artifacts of culture and brands happen to be one of those things. Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’m happy to be corrected on that front. That’s beautiful. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Anthony Shore. He’s a namer. But he pointed out there’s some science and research that talks about how names — they change the brain. We interact with names differently. And in a way that affirms what you’re saying, that the things that we’ve called things that we make and share or sell are fundamentally different than other things in our life. So tell me, what kinds of projects do people come to you for? What are the kind of problems that you like to solve? Well, part of the thing I love is how varied they tend to be. So I think a lot of the time when people talk about branding, lots of the books and literature about branding focus on positioning. So how do we construct a belief system or create meaning around an organization and then use that meaning to help provide a sense of direction for people? And that’s some of the work. But then there’s a lot of stuff which is closer to what I call portfolio strategy, which is — so I’ve got a dog that I need to keep letting in. And some of it’s portfolio strategy. So that’s just a question of, we’ve got all of these different moving parts. Most organizations don’t sell or create one thing for one audience in one place and sell it through one channel. So how do we take all of these different moving parts of teams, divisions, products, services, solutions, families of products? How do we take all of that and make sense of it

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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
Years Active

2024 - 2026
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120
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Explicit
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THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Sem Devillart on Observation & Translation

Igor Kuvychko PhD on Bateson & AI

Nick Bodor on Strangers & Institutions

Jonathan Taee on Rhizomes & Meaning

John Dutton on Utopia & Nowhere

Indi Young on Listening & Cognition

Annie Auerbach & Adam Chmielowski on Rifts & Futurelessness

Nick Liddell on Architecture & Anthropomorphism

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Depth & brilliance & kindness

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THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Episodes

Sem Devillart on Observation & Translation

Igor Kuvychko PhD on Bateson & AI

Nick Bodor on Strangers & Institutions

Jonathan Taee on Rhizomes & Meaning

John Dutton on Utopia & Nowhere

Indi Young on Listening & Cognition

Annie Auerbach & Adam Chmielowski on Rifts & Futurelessness

Nick Liddell on Architecture & Anthropomorphism

Ratings & Reviews

About

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