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The Ethics of Understanding People with Thomas Kennon · Responsibly Different™

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Responsibly Human, a responsibly different podcast from Campfire Consulting.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: We live in a world getting remarkably good at finding patterns in human behavior, but understanding people is something different.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: On this show, we talk with researchers, technologists, marketers, creators, and leaders about what actually moves us, earns our trust, and makes us feel known instead of simply seen.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: And as more of our world becomes automated, one question keeps getting more important.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: What does technology still miss?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get into it, one small way you can support more thoughtful work is by hitting subscribe.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: That simple act helps this show reach more people who are trying to build businesses, communities, and a world that works a little better for all of us.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: If something you hear in these conversations helps someone else think differently or do their work differently, that's the whole point.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Chris Marine, founder and CEO of Kingfire Consulting, and this is responsible for you.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas spent more than three decades studying audiences, developing strategy, and looking for the insights that explain why people actually do what they do.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: But somewhere along the way, his work became about a much bigger question.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: What if growth isn't the goal?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: What if businesses thought about thriving instead?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when we replace suspicion with trust, fairness with something closer to kindness, and start thinking about customers and communities as people we create value with rather than audiences we extract value from?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that gets especially interesting now because Tom isn't anti-technology, he is teaching the next generation of marketers to use sophisticated research, modeling, and AI to understand people more deeply.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So the question becomes what do we do with that understanding once we have it?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: This conversation goes from capitalism and community to Patagonia, Super Bowl advertising, AI, love, fear, and somehow wonder.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Here's my conversation with Thomas Keenan.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm super excited.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I've been feeling like I've been living in your brain for the last couple days reading through your book.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: But before we get into all of that, I mean, tell us a little bit about your background.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know you've had over three decades of experience here, but just kind of tell us a little bit about you, how you got into this work and started questioning everything that you were maybe brought up, trained to think.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thanks, Chris, and thank you for inviting inviting me on.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's so good to be here.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, I started, I backed my way into uh the world of marketing through the uh through the direct and eventually the digital um uh revolutions.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was uh uh I'm old enough to have been around during the database 80s, and uh my first job with an agency was uh working for a guy named Roger Craver in the direct response and fundraising world.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they were a consultancy down in in DC, Craven Matthew Smith.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I I ran systems and audience segmentation and targeting and insights for them.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh from there, I started the agency at the very beginning of digital um in 1994 with a colleague who I still work with and um ISIS New Media, and one of the early generations of uh of digital agencies.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, eventually it turned that into a career on Madison Avenue, in and out of Madison Avenue, global had the great fortune to work for a lot of global brands, working for a couple of the holding company agencies as uh sort of you know um head head of strategy.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and and I became sort of the guy that people went to if they needed fresh insight.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I applied that to um audience strategy, campaign strategy, business strategy, brand strategy, marketing strategy.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been teaching it for about 17 years, uh mostly at the grad level in a couple of different colleges, schools, and universities um around the world, and um had this epiphany a couple of years ago that uh that that there was something really, really important missing.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh decided to commit the the rest of my career, both you know, writing and researching, writing, publishing, teaching, and consulting around figuring out what was missing and how to provide it.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: So um this has been uh this has been the last eight, nine, ten, fifteen years have been a great part of the journey for me uh working with brands that I think uh and businesses that I think I can help.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean you describe yourself as a joyfully contrarian strategist.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Was it always joyful, or did that come after some hard-knock lessons on Madison Avenue?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: Ah, great question.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: So the joy has to be, in my experience, self-manufactured.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the joy has to come from within.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: And oftentimes that joy uh uh is indirect resistance to the forces uh that oppress and and overcoat us.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: So um I really do believe that as a as an inherent positivist, um, you know, which and and and as in we'll probably talk a little bit about you know the new project, uh, as a utopian, um I believe that our only response to the world around us and the forces sometimes that which might work against us, whether we're a business or a community organization or a family or an individual trying to start their career, um is is is joy.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: I actually I read a ridiculous amount of philosophy, and um I understand about a ton of things.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I try to apply it in my teaching, my writing, my my and and and my consulting.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the the philosophers I go back to and it may surprise some, is is Friedrich Nietzsche.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: And and he is the the philosopher of affirmation, of joy.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, so I I I lean on that whenever I need to.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and I find that, you know, and it's not just about seeing the glass half full instead of half empty, it's about um a material affect that that works upon the the forces of the world around us towards better endings.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think joy just has to come from and through that energy.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I like that framing because I I feel like a lot of people can hear contrarian and think cynical.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I like those two are often paired.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like just because you're questioning something, that idea of giving hope is something that like you breathe a lot of light in from bringing philosophy against real-world examples through all your work.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it doesn't it doesn't mean cynical.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's meaning trying to drive towards something for a a better future, a better outcome.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: To question everything, are there is there anything that you've had to unlearn?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a that's a super question, Chris.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that um I think that the uh the act of unlearning is actually probably inherent to the act of a kind of of of joyful and humble um production.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I'll come back down to the everything is is at the level of desire, right?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: We'll talk about this.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the the desire as not lack, and not the kind of desire that the advertising is meant to stimulate, which isn't there until we get there, but the type of desire that businesses and brands and and companies have to serve with their value.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think that to understand that that desire at the heart of the human condition that we solve for is is answered by the by filling in what happens after why dot dot dot.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: So the insight is about why.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in my case, you know, talk about unlearning, um, the humility that came from a recognition, and I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll be I'll I'll reveal something personal here that that may or may not seem relevant, but um, about 17 and a half years ago, I chose uh to begin a path of sobriety.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and up until that point, I I I rarely questioned myself.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: I rarely said why.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I I trusted myself way too much.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that that journey uh of sobriety, and I'm it doesn't take sobriety to teach us this, but boy, it took it, it took it for me, which is this essential um uh uh clarity around humility, around openness, about um, I know nothing.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it the Zen Buddhists call it, you know, beginner's mind.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and so unlearning for me was that reset around beginning again.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh did that influence the first chapter of your book?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like I didn't I didn't absolutely you just open up about that personal moment, but that the killing of the Buddha philosophy, there's a lot that I'm my mind is sparking off right now to be like that has to have had something to do with that personal experience.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: That that wonderful cone, or or or or uh, you know, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill them, um, is which is to say that that there is no Buddha.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: We are the Buddha.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: There, you know, the the you know, we must we must recognize within ourselves the nature of the Buddha if we're to change the world or ourselves into for for good.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so anyway, yeah, getting back to unlearning, you know, that beginner's mind and that first chapter is all about, you know, the the end of the icon, right?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and the and the beginning of, you know, it's an empowering moment for each of us, company CEOs, um, organization leaders, you know, family members, neighborhood watch groups.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: You we have to own the problem sufficiently to understand the reliance upon the other, is how we solve things.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then one of the one of the challenges that uh all of us face as individuals and as as teachers and as as consultants and as business owners or managers is um is recognizing um the historical role we play in the system, okay?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: And and responding to that in the moment, in the day with sufficient resistance that recognizes the only way we can you know uh become more ethical, more productive, more work more connected to the other, I think, in in a material way, is by again, the contrarian says that it doesn't have to be this way.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, you know, I but one of the things that I did in my personal you know decolonization of my my sense of desire was I began to avoid you know, you know, mainstream press stories because of the inherent bias in those angles.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite favorite moments is Noam Chomsky talking to um, I think it was Andrew Maher, uh, and a British journalist.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, that's the one I was referring to.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's such a good idea.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Explain that though, because it is such a powerful moment.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So so Chomsky and uh geez, I forget uh Herman, I forget the gentleman's name, is co-author on on Manufacturing Consent, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're their famous book, where they came up with, they determined there are five, and this is you know heavily, heavily researched.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: There, they're this they're they're both anthropologists, sociologists, and and and uh and uh and linguists, and um they analyzed uh mainstream media, they analyzed the press, the media broadcasts in particular, and they understood that the way that that content was uh briefed, was, was written, was edited, was determined, and then whether or not it was published or not, um had all to do with serving, you know, the greater good of the organization, of the society.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the neoliberalism itself is grounded in everybody behaving according to plant, and everybody meaning the press, the companies, and the banks and and everybody else, because uh, you know, that's how the system works.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's because capitalism.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, this this wonderful, wonderful moment where um Andrew Maher thinks he's got him.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you know, and he's he's talking about the book that they just published, Manufacturing Hessen, and he says, let me get this right, Noam.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Sitting here right now with me, you're telling me that I am biased, right?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is this true, Noam?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm biased.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: And Noam says, I'm not saying you're biased, Andrew.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying that if you weren't, you wouldn't be sitting here right now.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and it's very, very powerful.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's really and it's an amazing moment because again, and and Chomsky says it with such clarity and such humility that that Marr is stunked.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: He doesn't really know what to do or how to respond, because he thought that Chomsky was was was was determining or accusing the individual journalists of bias, and he was saying, no, no, no, no, no.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't have gotten this high up in this system of reward, of punishment, of of of elevation, and and and and without having been part of the of the important part of serving the process and the formula and the outcomes that this system is meant to do.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's it's very powerful.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so as individual careerists, as people, as writers, as as journalists, as producers, are I think it's incumbent upon us to, you know, and this is where the contrarian says, wait a minute, why do we do these things this way?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think that, you know, and it goes back to it when I was a kid, but I was that, I'm sure you were too, I bet.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that you you fought my parents eventually said, stop asking why.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because I always was asking why.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm and I became annoying.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so rather than annoying, I think it's it's maybe it interpreted as the contrarian, but um the the only way we get to a better future is to challenge all of the axioms and the supposed truths of the current system, I believe.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's uh and that's where when it comes to the business community, I mean, we could go into that idea, you call out this notion of like surviving capitalism.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things around in that is, and something you and I have talked about as we've gotten to know each other, but businesses talk constantly about being fair, equitable, um, responsible.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh are those procedural ideas when what we actually need, though, is something more human.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and and and I think that those procedures can be reinformed by what you're suggesting, like which is a uh a shift of focus, right?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: But and it's a very simple but but but a revolutionary shift.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's you know, we go back if you if you study you know the neoliberalism and it's it's a maturation in the in the 80s, 90s, and into the to the turn of the century, um, you see that you know the great debate that which was settled in the wrong direction, you know, when when in um Friedman said that the the moral responsibility of a public company is to serve the interest of its stakeholders, shareholders.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, you know, whatever it was seven, eight, nine years later, Joseph Stiglitz, another famous economist that also won lots of prizes, said, no, no, no.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's about serving the shareholders, countered, of course, by Joseph Stiglitz, another uh uh economist of great of great notoriety, um, who said that Freeman's wrong.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about serving primarily or even, you know, first and foremost, and always the shareholders of a public company.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's about serving the stakeholders of any company, of any organization with equal worth and value.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that includes the shareholders, but they are not paramount.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that shift changes everything.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Which is that neat example that you share about the outdoor company in New Hampshire, where it's like they take into consideration that idea of like, no, I'm I'm looking out for the local organizations outside of here.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking out for the employees, and it's taking consideration all of those as the people that lift up their business.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and what I love about that, you know, Rudy Glockner in Burgeon Outdoor, and you know, the and you know, the epiphany that he had was he because he did what he was told, right?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: He ascended through business at school, MBA, you know, he goes in Walls, Harvard grad, this, and you know, and Adam Wharton.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's killing it.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and he goes back to to you know uh uh uh homecoming and he's sitting in the great seats where the alums, you know, get, and he's sitting there, and he has this moment where my life is a sham.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he sits there at the homecoming game and the football game, and he goes off and he ends up unwinding his job on the and on the Wall Street, and and it says, okay, what am I gonna do now?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it took him a couple of years to figure it out, but Burgeon Outdoor became the company he founded based upon the insight was I'm doing it wrong.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and what he did to your to your point, Chris, which is one of my and and boy, when I teach this case and assign that these concepts inside of class and ask these grad students in marketing and business to go out and find other cases like this that behave like Burgeon Outdoor, it's and apply it to their project, it's phenomenal what they come up with.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because what Rudy said was look, instead of understanding growth as you know, incremental gain at the expense of the other, right?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's zero sum competition is what drives growth, right?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: What's my share, right?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if growth is measured by market share, then it's always gonna be out of someone else's share, right?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's zero sum.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: He says, I'm just gonna do this.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna shift from focusing on shareholders to from uh shareholders to stakeholders, and I'm gonna say, I'm only gonna serve this tight circle of of stakeholders first until I get it right.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: And until when I when my suppliers, my staff, my my direct board of directors, and my and my local, very, very, very local community are s are starting to thrive, and I'm still in business, then I'm gonna expand the circle to the next set of stakeholders.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and this was literally a geographic exercise, right?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because he extended it to the businesses around him and the rest of the community, the the politics, the sociology, and the cultural players inside of Lincoln, New Hampshire, a mountain community.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And only when he got that circle right and thriving did he plan to expand beyond that.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of focusing on growth, he focused on thriving at the stakeholder level, changed everything about the nature of the business and its effect on the world.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: And its effect, like one of the things uh that I uh that that also revolves around is uh how you separate uh fairness and kindness when talking about business.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's also how it impacts the world, but just how then that when we talk about impact, I always share, I think about impact of like the the way it actually supports someone's life, either someone or something that's tied to something tangible with the planet.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like person or planet.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I thought was really interesting that kind of goes along with that story, I think, when I'm connecting the dots, um, is that idea that fairness comes from respect, kindness comes from something closer to love.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: But why isn't fairness enough?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And also, this is completely different than the people of like the the run the heads of the the Netflixes of the world that are like love, family, those kind of things have no place in business.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, treat he's famous for saying like treat your business like a sports team.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: People are in, out, and that's how you grow.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: But that's in complete tension of this like deeper human tie to business, which is yeah, which is that well, and I I love what you're saying, and and it reminds me of what you know, one what for for people like you and me, Chris.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: One of our favorite cases to point to when it comes to business ethics is of course Patagonia, right?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and their formula is exactly as you've said, because what they have done, because cause fairness, fairness is a is is um fairness is a gauge or is a is a is a is a a score that um fits really well into the meritocracy, right?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then and you you you you you get what you deserve and you and you treat others with respect and you know.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Mindful that you know, keep an eye on them.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and fairness is if at its extended best, fairness is about a sympathetic understanding of the world.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Kindness, absolutely different.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Kindness, and if you look at the way that Patagonia treats the planet, its customers, its its own internal stakeholders, it is absolutely with empathy.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And empathy is is vulnerable.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Empathy is a surrender.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: Empathy is is is almost a dissolving of self-interest in the in the in and and get confusing me with the other.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that, you know, so alterity breaks down, all sorts of good things happen when kindness is the igniter to production.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that can all lead to like that big word of I I think that of love.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like, does love belong in business?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: I know that makes some people really squirmish.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, it's it's so great.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: You you land on this, Chris.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: And for several years I've been trying to, and that and it's funny, you have to inch your way into how you get there in an in a in a class or in a discussion.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: But in the last, literally last year, in all my classes, I began to actually say, listen, you know, I teach a class called Real Social.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's called Social Media and the Brand, and NYU and the grad program there.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh, and I my the the philosophical framing for teaching students, grad students, how to do you know, social media and the brand uh uh strategy and production and optimization is about what I call real social.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not media, it's not advertising, it's actually people out there treating each other with empathy in the channel, right?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: On TikTok, on in on LinkedIn, you know, out in email, in texting, in WhatsApp, wherever.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's really hard.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it really and it's about surrendering so much of self as a business, as a marketing team.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: But without a doubt, I began to say to students just last in spring 2026 is when I finally started to put L-O-V-E on the board.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, I'm not gonna be afraid to say that this is the framework for real social.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: It has to be because of the true breakdown in self that dissolves into the other when you do it through love.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's a good segue to this other idea, because I mean, with love, and especially since you're touching on uh your work within the social space, what I think is becoming more trendy as a word, but something that I know you and I have believed in for a long time, is a sense of community.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that idea of community is beginning to spread like wildfire for lack of better terms.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: But how can someone tell the difference between a company actually participating in a commons?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can describe what you talk about in your book about the commons, and a company simply figuring out how to monetize.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because social media, I feel like, is at the crux of that right there.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what is community?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And and talk about the commons, because I think that's really important.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and so you you build the root, uh you build from the root it precisely right, Chris.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so in in in this, this, this, the chapter, the battle for the commons, it, you know, the the the both of those words chose very specifically because it is a battle, and it's a shame it has to be, but it must be, I believe, if we're to get to the other side of this chaos of of, you know, towards what I've been referring to for the last couple of years as this next capitalism that we might aspire to in the face of this uh the forces of chaos of the late capitalism.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so the commons is has deep, deep, deep, you know, genetic roots in our bodies and our in our civilizations, right?
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: The commons, up until, you know, and if you look at capitalism as a as a historical aberration interruption, maybe, you know, it's only 500 years old.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: And almost all of its progress and growth has been based upon um, you know, seizing and appropriating what once was common.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: And whether that's mine space or pasture land or streets or whatever, um, the commons is still there, but it has been appropriated.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: So um in the Battle for the Commons, and we talk about community, we we say, you know, some people will say, fine, you know, social, you know, first social first started, you know, really breaking into um an important channel for for marketers to understand and and and to try to uh optimize for getting and keeping customers, which is the only reason we do marketing.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um we began to think of you know this idea of your tribe, find your tribe, right?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and and that terminology is is ancient, right?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: This is my tribe.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we talk, you know, and I've lived all around the world.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: I left home when I was 18 and ran about, I've lived in San Francisco, I've lived in London, I've lived in DC, I've lived in Philly, I've lived in Brooklyn, I've lived in New York, I've lived and and to me, I've have learned so much from the people who have constructed my found family.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: And anybody who is home knows this, and often for many of us, it's you know, 18, we go away to school, and that's our first found family.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: But found family and community are deeply tied to how we grow as humans in the context of community.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: And every business is a community, and every organization is community, and every family.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so when we enter into a sort of a construct of surrender, of humility, of love in this context of community as a brand, sometimes just changing the terminology from channel manager to community manager shifts the strategy for how you apply social media in the context of the rest of your marketing mix.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and one of the things Ian, you and I have talked about this is taking, and I do this in my consulting work, is working with brands who are reliant on almost exclusively paid media in the context of their social um um um investment, is to slowly but truly, you know, shift that and begin to experiment with community management rather than channel management and media distribution.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: And boy, does that change everything.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the cases I write about is uh is a um a brand, uh a pharmaceutical brand who came to us, in fact, came to the program I teach at NYU and gave us a brief and said, look, we're we're going to market for a product.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we think we got everything right, but we're missing something when it comes to social.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, uh, this is four or five years ago.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is where real social as a as a construct and framework for marketing um evolved from.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we simply said, look, we're gonna build, we suggest for your product go to launch uh go to market launch, you take 5% of your media budget in social, 22 million slotted, and experiment with investing it in people, technology, and content, right?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and then community investment and uh and and measure how over, you know, maybe there's a more latent to it, but measure your brand lift, measure your eventual product sales, and against that same investment, you have to tag and track and optimize and report and measure everything to do this, but you can then begin to demonstrate the incremental lift in investing in community channel, community social rather than just channel social.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: And it shifts everything.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And and every brand, I think, is slowly but surely deciding to come to this, especially with the conditions right now that we suffer under when you look at you know how Meta treats its its its users and its its its its its advertisers and how you know TikTok now with its takeover.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: So there's every reason and incentive for us to begin to experiment with this kind of social community investment.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think that from our experience, I think where that's coming from is like people are seeing that the pendulum swung way too far in the direction of performance and all the stakes that are lost at that.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it takes time to prove all this out that it works.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: But like to your point about the commons, it's like the human wiring, as different as we are today than we were a thousand years ago, we're really not at our core.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, and so I I think as people are starting to understand that more, it's like, okay, we still our job is to actually connect with people.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And to do that, you need to get back to some basic principles of just human, human connection.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what does it mean to be human?
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Without a doubt.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And this goes to something else you've taught, you and I have spoken about, Chris, which is that that the shift away from, I mean, inherently all of us are not even inherently, even vocally.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: We we we we complain, you know, as we say in New York, Vetch about about the surveillance aspect of all of our social, every all of our market, all everything on our phones and then on our laptops is is absolutely overcoated with you know the signals that we surrender and then are monetized back at us through surveillance advertising.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and so one of the things that you and I have have had great conversations, rich planning around, which is talking to brands and businesses about shifting to how we used to do digital to social advertising, which was premium.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then that's a that's a simple ship, but it's massive when you think about it it the connection that it re-enables between businesses, brands, publishers, and humans.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh as opposed to this, the resistance that is uh is pervasive now to surveillance advertising.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think part of this, which you partially answered just with that explanation, which is brilliant, but one of the things you write about is that it's difficult to repress the human urge to share and create together without corporate rent sitting in the middle.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: So is our instinct to collaborate stronger than our instinct to compete?
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because that kind of goes back to surveillance and how all of this has become monetized.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, boy, absolutely.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: And this gets, if you if you think about someone like a burgeon outdoor, right, when they start treating all that next ring of stakeholders with the same sort of empathy and love that they traded the internal ring, um, that includes competitors.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and and without a doubt, one of the, and this is what you know when you shift from growing to thriving, everything changes.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: But boy, do you change with it uh if you believe it.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things I that's that confounds my first year students when I talk about you know all marketing investment and media and online and social and other, is I say, look, um, the fundamental KPI is not sales, the fundamental KPI is not traffic, the fundamental KPI is not, obviously, impressions, the fundamental KPI is to provide something to someone that interrupts them long enough, stops them long enough from you know doom scrolling that they stop, that they consider, that they engage, and then that they share.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: And students say, sh share?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Share is a big idea.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: I said share should be from a planning aspect, from an optimization aspect, from a from a media and marketing investment aspect, the single KPI that everything you do aims at.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, and that goes down to like the idea of uh at our core and something I believe in deeply, which gets into trust.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's like to make that simple action of sharing, that gets to a place of that person is really trusting and putting and attaching themselves to that brand, to that message, to that action.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that can hopefully go beyond trust and build familiarity.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the which reminds me, one of the questions that you had in the book, which, oh my God, there's so many.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I think one of the biggest that I took away was why couldn't we just treat each other with a little less suspicion and a little more trust?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: And if we did that, I mean, this is a lofty question.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: So if, you know, if you don't want to go there, that's fine.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: But like what would change inside an organization if trust were treated as infrastructure rather than sentiment, rather than those traditional KPIs of the traffic, the sales, and all of that.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, no, if we can get people to trust, that is honestly like that gets to the human core.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Without a doubt.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, so it one of my favorite cases that demonstrates what the power of trust uh is actually uh in it trust's ability to um to counter and to again almost dissolve the the primary animating force of almost all of our lives in public and in private, which is fear, right?
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so much so much of the world, but so much of our response to the world is based upon distrust, upon fear, upon insecurity, upon alienation, upon all of these factors which are preying upon us and and and suppressing our our desire instead of unleashing it.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: So one of my favorite ones is this, is is again Patagonia, sorry, but the famous one where during I guess it was the 22, I guess it was 2020 off election, um uh and um uh uh Yvonne Schwinard, their founder emeritus at the time, he was still, you know, signing, you know, writing a newsletter um to the group.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh he pointed out that there were people running in the midterm elections that were you know uh against you know, you know, climate saving the climate, uh the world.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: And that they were climate, you know, uh change deniers.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, make sure that when you go to vote, you vote those bastards out, right?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he was talking about people that did not climb.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they put some of that like in the stitching of their product too.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like so, so so this is exactly what happened, maybe Chris, is is it some what some some uh one of the one of the fabricators in their you know the California you know manufacturing plant saw that email and saw that the newsletter and saw that note at the bottom of the Schminard wrote, P.S.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: Don't forget, vote the bastards out.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: And they knitted that, they stitched that into you know a couple of hundred lots of cargo shorts inside underneath the back label, size label, they stitched it, you know, don't forget, vote the bastards out.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: And when it was brought to your attention, you know, the press roared and screamed and yelled and demanded an answer out of this profanity out and in, and and they brought it to Schwinard's desk.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: And Schwinard said, That's amazing.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Get me one in size 32.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And because he he and his board and his and his team have been hiring people that they trust, trust them back.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: And when you form a company and when you grow a company, and a company thrives on that kind of inherent trust, and they trust suppliers like that, they trust their consumers like that, they trust their partners like that, they trust their employees like that, they trust their board like that.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: And when you change that dynamic inside a company, it can't help but but thrive better than all of the competitors who are trying to invest in all sorts of other kinds of media to pray and you know the surveillance.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a the linkage between joy and trust and love as a response, as a community-enabled response to the fear and alienation of the of where we sit right now in the world, I think are key ingredients in all of this.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean to I that sparked that idea of fear and alienation.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think when it goes back to that idea of like what could change inside an organization, I could see if more organizations didn't have that fear attached to every their decision-making process, they'd be less reactive to the market and more focused on their people.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Their people being the people that work there, the people that, the customers that serve and keep that business afloat.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's like fear, I found from personal experience, is such a driver in so many leaders, decision makers.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, no, I mean, yes, we have to look at what is happening out there, but that shouldn't be part of our framework for how you're moving forward.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: Oh boy, absolutely, Chris.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's funny.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I used to teach, I haven't taught in a couple of semesters, uh uh a course in competitive strategy.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and um what I'm about to describe to you probably is why I don't teach it anymore.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, because it was a little provocative.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: But my first slide, and you know, 80-point font uh was you know, F the competition, um, asterisk, I think.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and uh and the students were startled.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and and the next slide was me deconstructing and tearing down Porter's five forces.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you look at, you know, through for you know, whatever, two generations, we've been teaching the same sort of Brahmins from uh economic and business theory.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, Porter famously came up with his five forces, right?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: And these are the forces that animate, you know, a company's decision making, right?
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: And almost, I think four out of those five forces are absolutely negative.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: They are they are fear, they are a fear-based response to the competition and the market.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: And and so that what Porter said to two generations of business, you know, MBAs was when you get jobs, and you get a position of decision-making and investment and and control, you need to be spend 90% of that time worrying about everybody else.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I and so at the beginning of my take on competitive strategy, it's like, no, no, no, spend 90% of the time thinking about how you as an organization can thrive, starting with your first stakeholders and the outward bound to the next ring.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it changes everything again when you start to think not negatively, but productively, materially productive together.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that tension is interesting, especially taking the bigger leap in just the little bit that I've learned from the agency lab that you're building at NYU, where in kind of similar flow of what you're talking about there on one hand, warning about through all of this about powerful platforms, enclosure, and emerging AI economy, on the other, have to, I believe, teach the future of marketers to combine deterministic research.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is that at all in contradiction?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or is that contradiction the point?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's it's a super question.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it is probably one of the most important questions to ask because the the way with which business strategy is set, right?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I I like to say that, you know, even though I come from, you know, I've been a strategist in the in the marketing consultancies uh for my entire career.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and and I like to think that that you know, all um all you can't just fix the marketing, you have to fix the businessing.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I like to say that every brief is a business brief, right?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: We the only reason we're talking today, Chris, the only reason that that that the how I fed my five kids and how you take care of your family and grow your business and agency is all based upon this idea that that that we need to to serve you know the the the the the the common good of our family, of our company, of our communities, our organizations.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: And capital is the is the is is is the fabric, right?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to make money.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's totally it, right?
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: So and it's it's the it's it's it's the atmosphere and the ground, right?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: So as we do that, we have to think about this this idea of of desire and an audience insight around um investing in a kind of value, content, media, platforms, and channel that it opens us up, humbly, empathetically, through the lens of scary levels of kind of love, to the other, to the stakeholder, to the customer, to the partner, to the competitor.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: So to get the insight to inform that almost reversal of investment against fear, you know, against surveillance, against these kinds of more predatory enclosure, is is really key to all of this.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: So as an agency guy, I've been promoting, you know, sort of as a strategist and a researcher and a consultant, I've been promoting for about 12, 15 years an ethnographic research practice, which leverages tools like Talk Walker, Sysmos, you know, that to can scrape, you know, with a targeted amount of efficacy, scrape the great social system of discourse and dump it into a database and you know, analyze it, model it, but mostly read it.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I have I I've been training a new generation of students and consultants and researchers and analysts to immerse themselves in this ethnographic data.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I go back to Clifford Geertz and some of the and Solens to some of the great ethnographers of the of the 20th century, and and and understand that you have to immerse yourself in this discourse and then surrender yourself to and open up to it and let it change you.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: And what and when it starts to change you, you write down, you type what you think you feel and sense into the heart of the other.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: And those are your insights.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so combining that, right?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: So ethnographic research and their insights with deterministic, right?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Traditional quant, right, where we actually can project what we think people might want and or need or missing based upon what they've done or said before.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then combining that with now, you know, stochastic models, which can do what ifs using, you know, large language models.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: This triangulation of ethnographic deterministic and stochastic, give us a chance now, what we're calling it 360 insights, to do things we never could have imagined before because we have fresh insight we never would have had before.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: So is there any risk, though, of all of that?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, we geek out over research, we get some of our in different ways, fascinated with your triangulated model of research there.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: But at some point, are we extracting from human behavior by trying to understand it this way?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's a great question.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think not.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think um no, insight, um, I think deep insight changes everything.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: It because the insight is the core of the brief, right?
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the brief is an instruction to make something, right?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: And whether it's a channel brief, campaign brief, a business brief, a creative brief.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and at the heart of the ins uh every brief has to have at least three things, right?
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: It has to have an audience, you know, some sort of depiction of an audience.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: It has to have an insight about that audience, and it usually has to have a sort of value proposition that we believe will resonate with that insight for that audience, then we can write a brief.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: We can go make a video, we can go make a landing page, we can go make an advertising spot.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so to me, if we start working and traditional insights that mostly have called come from deterministic, you know, quant the data because of segmentation and because of those kinds of, you know, the I've been researching it at uh human desire for for 35 years.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: And 95% of all of the owners of the truth of research are these great huge holding companies that own all these research uh and are almost all quant, right?
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I have been for the last 12, 15 years espousing, injecting a deeper insight into the brief that is not based upon trying to trigger desire that's not there, as I said earlier, but to serve desire that we know is hiding, it is latent, that is underneath the human condition, that we set we founded this genes company, we founded this coffee company, we founded this spirits brand to solve for.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that briefs our marketing, that briefs our media, that briefs our content, but that also briefs our products.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: It also briefs briefs our our technology.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: Can you give an example of that?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: Of like what some of these have revealed that just kind of sitting around a conference room table or taking, to your point, I mean, so many of the large, I mean, our business, the whole codes, they own their own data sets.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, if you defer just off of that one data set, what that can miss and and what some of your work has kind of opened up for thinking.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I was this, this, uh, this, this contrarian on on Madison Avenue.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: They can't be around because I said interesting things enough of the time, and I came up with interesting briefs enough of the time.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so that that you know, they where's Kenan?
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: What does he think?
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or what does he see?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's not about what we think, it's about what we see, and it's what we see.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Insight is what we see into the heart of the human condition that we solve for.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: So um my only brush with with with infamy, uh with fame, uh, with regard to advertising and Super Bowls was uh working under in YNR, I wrote the brief for what became um Danin's spot uh that they that they flighted in the Super Bowl, you know, whatever, nine, ten, twelve years ago.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it I think it did, you know, top eight or something like that.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: So uh but but they completely tore my brief up and replaced it with their own insight, right?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: So just to give you the business context and the product context.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: So Danin was late to the game in Greek rotor, right?
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: There was Faye, uh there was Stonyfield, which I think you know a whole lot about.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and these were the two big players, and they created Greek yogurt category out of almost nothing, right?
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because in America, right?
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: And and because, you know, if you go to Europe, people have been eating, everyone's eating yogurt all the time.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: Greek yogurt became the kind of yogurt that was not family-based, that was not gendered, that was not that that that, you know, it was it was both healthy, it was tasty, it was not, you know, it became 0% fat if you wanted.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: So what they wanted to do is Danin wanted to become known for Greek yogurt, and they wanted a spot to do it.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: And they what they the insight that they ended up taking for that brief was this sense of of this powerful, powerful, almost violent uh enactment of uh of a voracious appetite.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: So John Stamos, and no one knows now, but he was in a TV guy at that time, and he's he's there and and and and he he went to the wheel.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: So he's Greek, get it?
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so he's he's he's eating this yogurt, he's you know, and a woman across from him, he's flirting with at this cafe or whatever, and she wants some yogurt, and he's like, no, no, no, it's all mine because it was about voracious appetite and about ownership and about me, and that me, and that my desire.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and instead of you know waiting for him to finally give her a spoonful, which he teases her with, she butts him in the head.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and uh my my the insight I had was was about about secret desire um for something that changed the way I related to this kind of this kind of food thing, right?
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, and and they turned it into this this violent appropriation of of physical ownership and because they wanted the woman to come out as strong and she'd do anything, and including headbutting John Stamos, you know, and it was football, right?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: Get it headbutting.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it turned out to be a turned out to be a massive, massive strategic error because we know it was just at the beginning of these commissions that were meant to study the brain injuries and things like that.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it became something of a gaff.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: But go getting back to your point is that as much as we try to change the nature of and the content of our business, our marketing, our advertising, our media, um uh left to our own, we often continue to default and defer to the status quo of competitive, you know, um ferocity.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so they couldn't just let a nice, they couldn't figure out a way to creatively let the narrative speak about secret desire that was shareable instead of ownable and violently appropriate.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, that's a that's a long-winded way to go to say that it's really hard to convince the you know existing brands and businesses to change the way they think about their marketing without getting them first to understand the power, the potential for fresh insight.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, Tom, with the triangulated model that you described around how you approach your research, is there anything that that fundamentally can't know or discover about human behavior?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because there is a difference that I've found through our work when sometimes there's things that are just patterns in research, and it doesn't actually mean it's a actionable insight.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: So the the and and it to answer your question, Chris, it it it's it's the the missing piece in regard to what you're you're you're you're getting at has always been um the the flaw in in in traditional you know quant uh uh research, which is that we ask people what they want, what they think, what they feel, what they prefer, what they would do, what they did do, what they might do.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and so it's obviously it's self-reported.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then we quantify with some measure of statistical reliability, right, right, what they would do, right, when it comes to preference or behavior or consumption, and then we brief with it, right?
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's so those insights that we've got from traditional quant were always missing something, which was the reality, the gap that existed between what people actually feel and what they say they feel, what they actually do and what they say they do, uh what they actually did and what they say they did.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: So um that that gap was always there.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: And we we figured, well, as long as we're just looking for superficial insights, which which we have been, right?
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because we were looking for things about uh uh uh about propensity to change my behavior and to buy a new soap instead of the old soap.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love that old soap.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_01: But wait a minute, what's this, right?
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: So all of marketing and advertising and media was based upon getting an insight that created a brief to get people to change behavior.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: So for three generations of marketers since the 1930s, we've been trained to use insights that we glean primarily from from uh quantitative um um uh uh uh deterministic research methods.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it was always missing that.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: But we we got by because all our competitors only had that depth of insight as well.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, in you know, in my generation of consulting uh strategists and researchers in the early aughts were exposed to digital ethnographic tools that allow us for the first time to really probe human desire through a whole different lens.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it was from how they behave, what they said and what they did and what they wrote on social media and social channels and social communities, right?
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: And some of the great, you know, the sources for these insights was places like Reddit or forums or BBS's, where there was this wild open discourse about everything.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: And people would say, well, how can you base insight on what you know all those randos say on Reddit?
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you have to expose yourself to enough randos and enough contexts and over hours and hours and hours and hours and weeks of qualitative ethnographic exposure and analysis to say, hmm, you know what?
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: And and we and we started coming up with insights that quantitative deterministic uh research could not reveal.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: They were that much deeper.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the great ways we tested this and is is we would say we'd have some time at a qual group, right, in between breaks, and we would trial some of our new insights that we got from Esna uh with our subjects that came in for a focus group.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and uh I said, I'll never forget.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking to one of a colleague at uh uh uh at one of the holding company agencies and brought me in for uh eight, nine months to to help them revamp the research and strategy and uh uh brilliant young strategists.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: And and I said, Yeah, sometimes I test these during you know breaks during qual groups, and I'll say, you know, how does how does this insight resonate with you?
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll know I'm deep enough, I know I'm fresh enough when they deny it.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: When they go, Oh, yeah, yeah, I I know people like that, but that's not me.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I said this to this colleague, this young colleague, this woman, uh the strategist, and 10 times more brilliant than I'll ever babe.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, Yeah, I've done that.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Or they cry.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good signal.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right, because it's touch something.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now this sounds yeah, and so but what I'm getting at here is that that there are the the technique and the methodology can only get you so far.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: It takes a different when I I I I talk about being an insights whisperer, it takes an analyst of the human condition, an analyst of desire itself, to go, wow, I think I see what's going on.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think I see in sight what's going on inside people when it comes to you know their preference in soap, their preference in automobiles, their preference in in social media.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and then let's write a brief and test that insight.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: So all that that's that that's ethnographic.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have stochastic, now we have large language models, now we have you know AI that can model what might happen based upon your very important word that you said, Chris, which is patterns, right?
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because deterministic quant is all based upon pattern recognition and then and then you know guessing better, right?
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: Stochastic LLM, absolutely, it's nothing but pattern.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: I uh uh Corey Doctorow, one of my favorite, you know, uh contrarian uh analysts and commentators on the general condition of technology and business on the round world, uh, he says he calls it the the the trillion dollar word guessing machine.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's that's how you know generated AI and a large language models work, is based upon all they've been trained on, they guess the next right letter or word or number, and then that's how that stuff has output.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: Is on that notion though, is could and thinking about the commons, because that's all that's rattling through my mind lately since since reading your book, is could AI strengthen the commons by expanding access to all this knowledge, or does that just create another enclosure because it's owned by uh a much bigger force that just is blocking off and gating that information?
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh answered your question.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, right now, I mean, so we have no idea how and to what degree, if we were to truly open up models, and there are a bunch of instances.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big fan of the Fediverse, and I spent a lot of time on the FEDI, you know, and Mastodon and PeerTube and things like that.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's this shadow social world that is not monetizable, it's not ownable, it's not colonizable.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore, it's very small in the world that we live in now because there's no businesses, brands there, you know, trying to drive traffic there to make money.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: But what I have learned is that to your exact point, is that we don't know what the power of LLMs and Gen AI or AI could be in the hands of the commons, because it has only ever exclusively been revealed to us in the form of monetizing and enclosure and predatory applications that have, first of all, stole everything from our the book reports we wrote to the recipes that we wrote uh and our pictures of our kids on vacation and used it to, you know, to create the the train and then create these these predictors of the next best word guessing machines.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we don't know yet.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think what you've just suggested there, Chris, is a big idea.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think that, and and there are a bunch of people, ethical um technologists and utopiists and people on the Fediverse and outside that come from their disappointment in the free and open software uh uh uh community, right?
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, FOSS that has been struggling to maintain.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look at how you know how Linux has survived, you look at the original GitHub, and you look at the FOSS movement in software and engineering, there that this this urge back towards the commons where we share, where abundance is a measure instead of enclosure.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I I would love to see exactly what you're suggesting, Chris, which is experiments that turn that that unleash LLM and Gen AI trained on ethical data and content to to the benefit of the commons.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think that this is a huge idea.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: So in in that vein, and as we are rounding out here for folks that are listening, we're going over because it's I this is a fascinating conversation.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I appreciate your time, Tom.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, so with that same sense of like, because we just don't know, how do you teach the next generation of stewards of all of this technology and and everything?
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: What are you asking your students to protect about that messy, subjective and sometimes I don't know, occasionally irrational work that goes into understanding all of this?
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's just such a such an important place for us to to sort of wrap on.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um right now, Chris, is as I've mentioned to you over the last several weeks.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm working on um my third book in the series and the leaps project, right?
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and the first was the big leap and ethics of insight.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that's all we need, better insight.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_01: My second book is, you know, the bigger leap, right, and ethics of next capitalism, which which is to me is this is is how we need to start behaving right now to get to the other side of where we are in late capitalism and and still make money and still grow businesses or thrive with businesses.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm working on the third book in the project, which will be the last in this trilogy, which is the biggest leap and ethics of utopias.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: And uh part of that is is doing deep research into actually existing utopias, your current and recent and past, and then showing how they work and how we might replicate or at least model our new businesses around them.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: My hero case right now is Wikipedia, because Wikipedia confounds anybody who tries to apply a typical business model, even a nonprofit model, to why is that thing still around, 25 years and counting, right?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and the answer is that there is a resilience baked into this recognition of this ancient need to be with the other in these material forms of shared production.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so we talk about the rhizome instead of the arboreal model of material creation.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: And to answer your question, Chris, what I've developed, and it's it's if it's a modest term, I'll I'll call it a mild invention, is a new model for value creation that I think that everybody from you know YMCAs to to neighborhood with you know groups to to Fortune 500 companies can begin to experiment with, which which says that first and foremost, culture should resubsume its over, you know, its umbrella roll over everything, which includes, you know, it's it's it's being subsumed under markets for the last 500 years.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that the answer is in culture.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: The answer is in these tribal connections and these familial connections and these commons connections that come up from culture and then are transformed through these gateways of creation and sharing into the social, into the political, and then into the organizational.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that to get on that, I'm trying to build a model that will take us through next capitalism beyond the chaos of the current into this world.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: And literally, you know, I'll be assigning these texts to students and seeing what they do with them in their own projects, but I think these are the kids that are gonna be trained on stuff like this, at least to provoke the different thinking, to go out there and fix the world that my generation broke.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's the plan.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, well, I mean, we're gonna have to have more conversations as you get into it with your students too, this this upcoming semester.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one final question, though, is what is one thing about human behavior that no algorithm do you believe will ever be able to replicate?
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wonder.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: I love that.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: I know I never thought about it before.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: But but but wonder is is in wonder is actually almost impossible to describe the contents of wonder because I think what wonder is, is the absent absence of specific content, and it it combines some kind of yearning with some kind of of of of tantalizing allure.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_01: Wonder.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: Let's work on wonder together, Chris.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man, that's gonna be a tough one to beat for upcoming guests.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: Wonder.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good one.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks, Tom.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate your time, and yes, we'll definitely have to have uh follow-up many times over because I love it.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: Gosh, you sparked a lot of wonder in me.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Chris, what I I so love chatting with you, man.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for bringing me on.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: I keep coming back to something Tom said in this conversation.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: The methodology can only get you so far.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: We can build better models, we can combine quantitative research with ethnography and AI, we can get increasingly sophisticated at recognizing patterns and predicting what someone might do next.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: But eventually, somebody still has to look at all of it and ask what it means.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe even more importantly, what we're going to do with that understanding.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: Are we using it to trigger something in people that benefits us?
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or to better serve something that was already there?
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: Are we building communities or figuring out how to monetize them?
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: Are we making decisions out of fear and competition?
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or trust and belief that value can actually be shared?
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then Tom ended with wonder.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: Of all the things an algorithm may never be able to replicate, wonder feels almost beautifully inconvenient.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can't quite define it, you can't optimize toward it.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: You don't necessarily know what you're looking for when you experience it.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's exactly why it's worth protecting.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: This has been Responsibly Human, a responsibly different podcast from Campfire Consulting.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_00: At Campfire, we believe data can tell us a lot about people, but building brands people actually connect with still takes curiosity, judgment, empathy, and a willingness to see the person behind the pattern.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: If this conversation gave you something worth thinking about, subscribe and share it with someone else doing the work that could benefit from it.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: Every listen, follow, and share helps these ideas reach more people trying to make business, media, and culture a little more human.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: Responsibly Human is hosted by me, Chris Maureen, with Pip Colmar and Kaylee Elwell helping shape and produce the series.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, our cover art was made by actual humans, illustrated by our friends at Narrative.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, keep making room for what can't be measured.