Michael Powell is a Partner at Practica Group. A cultural anthropologist by training, with a PhD from Rice University, he has been an ethnographic research consultant since 2006. He is the author of, “The Sound of Friction: How to Do Things With Listening” EPIC 2023
I start all these conversations with the same question. I borrowed it from a friend of mine who lives in Hudson. She helps people tell their stories, and it's a big, beautiful question—which is exactly why I use it. Because it's so big, I tend to over-explain it, like I’m doing now. So before I ask, I want you to know you're in total control. You can answer however—or not at all. It’s probably the longest lead-in to any question ever. The question is: Where do you come from? Again, you're in total control. Answer however you like.
I'm from suburban Chicago originally—that’s where I grew up. I was born in the ’70s.
Reflecting on it—and I’ve listened to some of your past conversations, so I had this in mind—I know a lot of folks have interesting things to say about the quirks of where they came from. But for me, there’s something very plain, even monotonous and homogenous, about growing up in suburban Chicago. It’s a product of the suburbanization that began in the 1960s—what people call “white flight.” It created this sense of designed sameness, where everything felt pleasant and easy.
There was a certain kind of privilege baked into it—one that’s not immediately obvious or easy to recognize. Looking back now, especially as someone who works as a cultural anthropologist and social scientist in the corporate world, I see how that upbringing shaped me.
John Hughes comes to mind as a cultural marker. All of those ’80s films—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles—were set in suburban Chicago. You could see the contrast between the suburbs and the city. Something different was happening in each, and while we enjoyed our bubble, we could sense that difference.
I actually started out at art school—art school dropout here—and then went on to university where I majored in anthropology. I continued to graduate school for anthropology too. That whole path was, in many ways, about coming to understand my own positionality—where I’m coming from. That’s always felt important in the work we do as qualitative researchers and ethnographers.
I’m not sure where that answer ends, exactly—it’s a broad question.
Do you have a recollection, as a child, of what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Not really.
I really identify with what you’re saying. I also grew up in the suburbs, and everything you just shared resonates deeply with me. I'm tempted to ask a question that might feel a bit blunt—but since you mentioned the privilege of the suburbs, how would you articulate what that privilege actually is?
I think it's about a certain lack of worry. Of course, some of that had to do with my parents shielding me from anything that might be threatening. But day to day, I remember the sense of freedom. Even in the ’80s, when there were occasional scares about child abductions, by and large, we just wandered off into the neighborhood, hung out with friends, and came home when the streetlights came on. That was our signal it was time for dinner.
I think that sense of ease was also tied to the broader global context of the time. We were living through the tail end of the Cold War, leading up to 1989 and the so-called “end of history” in the ’90s. That period didn’t last long, but there was a sense of global stability for a while—not everywhere, of course, but certainly in the United States, and especially in suburban communities like mine.
So, catch us up—where are you now, and what kind of work are you doing?
I live in Houston, Texas, and I’m a partner at Practica Group. We’re a relatively small research consulting firm that focuses mostly on ethnographic work. We have partners in Chicago and Brooklyn, but I’m the only one in Houston.
We work with a range of clients—mostly U.S.-based—on a variety of projects. Some are consumer and marketing-focused, others are more about user experience and technology. It really spans a pretty broad spectrum.
You mentioned art school earlier. When did you first come across this kind of work? When did you realize it was something you could pursue professionally?
I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do as a kid. It wasn’t until high school that I started to find art compelling. I had always enjoyed creating things, even though it wasn’t something that people around me really understood. My parents didn’t go to college, and while they were interested and somewhat supportive, they didn’t have a clear sense of what a creative career could actually look like. That lack of a roadmap probably contributed to my decision to leave art school.
But even during my time at the University of Illinois, I was exploring different paths, and I somehow found my way to anthropology—maybe through friends. It immediately resonated. Yes, it’s a social science and yes, it’s rigorous. But it also felt creative, thoughtful, and even philosophical in a way that really drew me in.
It starts with the simple premise that other people—and groups of people—often think in ways that are radically different from me and from one another. What does that look like? How do they make sense of the world?
I still consider anthropology a deeply creative discipline for a variety of reasons.
That’s not something most people would immediately associate with anthropology. What do you mean when you say it’s creative? Can you say more about that?
Sure. Let me take you to graduate school. I went to Rice University, which is in Houston. Funny enough, I didn’t really want to be in Houston, but it keeps pulling me back.
Rice’s anthropology department is quite renowned. My advisor, George Marcus, was part of a major movement in the 1980s—a kind of internal critique of anthropology that ended up reshaping the field. He co-authored and edited a couple of key books during that period. One of them, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, written with Michael Fischer in 1986, argued that anthropology needed to become more relevant—more engaged with Western, First World cultures. It pushed the field to study powerful groups and social currents in places like the U.S., while still drawing on the history and methods of anthropology to do so.
The other book, Writing Culture, was heavily influenced by literary theory. Its core idea is that there's no simple, transparent link between what we observe in the field and what we write in our ethnographies. Writing itself—representation—is a creative act. That opened the door to all kinds of critique, some of it difficult or even uncomfortable, especially around anthropology's historical complicities. But it was also incredibly productive.
At Rice, this kind of experimentation—what became known as “experimental ethnography”—was central. My advisor, George Marcus, later focused on what he called “multi-sited ethnography.” The idea was: How can a discipline so rooted in “thick description” and close, immersive fieldwork adapt to studying global phenomena? How do we hold onto the richness of that thick description while addressing more diffuse, interconnected contexts?
So there’s this ongoing tension between the “thick” and the “thin.” And the creative opportunity is in figuring out how to still tell meaningful stories and do real ethnography in these global, multi-sited contexts. What does that look like?
What would you say has been the impact of George Marcus on your work? I often ask people about mentors or touchstones who’ve shaped them. It sounds like Marcus was a major figure for you.
Absolutely. George Marcus has been a mentor in every sense. His influence continues to shape my thinking and approach to the work I do.
Yeah. Well, not being an academic, it's really been a process of mediating and translating a lot of these more intellectual conversations into a professional discipline. But if I go back to what I did in graduate school—
I spent a year living in Warsaw, studying the emergence of anti-corruption policy. It started with an interest in the circulation of freedom of information laws. There were earlier versions elsewhere, but one of the first prominent communities around that topic emerged in the United States with the Freedom of Information Act.
Poland didn’t pass a similar law until well after the fall of communism. And when I arrived, I realized the law had actually developed within a broader context of anti-corruption efforts. That itself was tied to a global shift in development policy. For a long time, the theory had been that corruption helped grease the wheels of an economy—it let things happen. But in the late ’90s, institutions like the World Bank began to shift their stance, arguing instead that transparency was key.
According to this new thinking, the path to development in so-called “Third World” countries lay in building market-driven economies. And for markets to function effectively, transparency was essential. So the narrative shifted: eliminating corruption became central to enabling transparent, efficient markets.
This recast the meaning of freedom of information laws. In the U.S., the law was passed in the 1960s but didn’t take on real significance until the 1970s, largely in response to Watergate and the political climate of that era. It was seen as a democratic tool. Superficially, it looked the same in Poland—but in reality, it wasn’t. In Poland, it was embedded in a global development discourse.
My research essentially asked, what is corruption? I wrote an article at one point arguing that these laws represent a kind of “paranoia within reason.” They claim to promote transparency, but they’re always partial. Full transparency is likely impossible. So people are left to fill in the gaps, and they do so in really fascinating ways. These systems, which are meant to be rational and clear, often end up generating more paranoia—not less.
We tend to view global economic and political regimes as highly rational, especially bureaucratic ones. But in practice, they create conditions for paranoid thinking. Instead of clarity, they make it even harder to figure out what’s really going on.
So, the work I do now is still rooted in this effort to understand complex, modern systems as they’ve emerged. I like tackling thorny, multi-layered problems—unpacking the mess. I mentioned policy and transparency earlier, but you see similar issues arise in business strategies. The companies we work with put forth elaborate plans and theories, which add even more layers to the complexity we’re trying to make sense of.
So, if someone wants me to study why people are buying a certain kind of coffee, I’ll do that. But I’m never doing it without considering all the other layers of context that shape those behaviors.
Yeah. What has it been like? I mean, I guess there are a few things bouncing around in my mind. I mean, the growth of anthropology in the commercial sector has happened over my career, certainly, and we’ve met each other through EPIC, which is this beautiful community. But what’s it been like being a trained academic anthropologist, entering the commercial space, and finding purchase and finding work—and trying to do the kinds of work that you want to do or that you were trained to do—in a commercial context? What’s that been like?
Yeah, it’s been sort of following the opportunities as they arise. I didn’t really have a strong plan when I first entered this. I had moved to Los Angeles and found some others who were doing this kind of work—other anthropologists—and sort of joined in on some existing projects.
And after a year or so—because that is a very difficult way to get into a freelance career...
Which way?
Without any real experience in the professional world.
As an anthropologist looking for work.
Yeah, you’re just supposed to start asking people, “We’ll critique culture.” There’s a lot to learn.
I like that.
I found an opening at a design firm in Los Angeles. They were called Shook Kelley. There are two guys—Terry Shook in Charlotte and Kevin Kelley, who started in Charlotte and moved to Los Angeles—two architects who were just very interested in, especially Kevin Kelley, brand in terms of retail and placemaking, urban districts. A wide range of different kinds of projects that he was involved in, and trying to grow that business, and had never worked with anyone doing research.
And so I just got plugged into all of these projects in the pipeline and mostly spent my time there helping design grocery stores—a lot of food retail, convenience stores too, some restaurants, but then a variety of other kinds of places: place-based businesses, financial services, universities, urban districts.
What did you learn about the American supermarket in that time—or grocery experience?
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about grocery stores. I’ve always been very fascinated. I think this does tie back to that suburban—you know, the suburban origins—that there is something very homogeneous about these grocery stores.
There’s this old joke among grocery executives that if you were to blindfold a grocery executive and place them in aisle five of a grocery store anywhere in the nation, they wouldn’t be able to tell you which store they were in. There might be a few little brand logos here and there, a few little cues that might help you, but by and large—and especially prior to 10 years ago—I think things are starting to slowly change. But for most of America, you can’t tell the difference.
And what do you make of that?
It’s absurd. Yeah. Kind of amazing. Fascinating. Like, what has caused this monstrosity—and all the health-related issues and problems that it has generated as well.
Yeah.
Why has it been so difficult to start a food company and to do something interesting or different?
Early on—so this would have been like the late 2000s—we had a client in Arizona, and I was there spending time visiting stores and doing research, talking to people. And they had a concept store out—it must have been outside of Tucson. I can’t recall exactly. It was well out of the way. And it was a fascinating store. It was sort of circular. And the idea being that the core of the store is produce. And this is what we value most.
And so we’re going to have everything revolve around it. It’s like, wow, that’s so cool. This is the kind of thing that a design firm should be doing—cutting-edge, let’s do this. We’re going to shake things up and make people think.
But I talked to the store manager, and he was basically saying, we’re going to have to close this place down. This is not working. Because it’s so foreign to people. And when you get into these institutions of everyday life, people don’t want to be thinking about grocery shopping—at least not every time they go to the grocery store. Once in a while, maybe.
I always call it: there’s food culture A and food culture B in America. Food culture A is sort of the hip and cool and sexy stuff. It’s the restaurants, what’s on TV, social media—it’s what we want to talk about, what we want to imagine our food life to be. And then food culture B is: this is how we actually shop. This is what we actually eat.
And there are so many reasons why it’s just not possible to live in food culture A. Nor would you even want to, I don’t think. It’s more entertainment. It’s more for show. It’s all very fascinating.
And when you read all the trend reports out there about “this is where food is going,” and “we’re going to be drinking this,” most of it lives in that other world. It doesn’t have a huge amount of relevance to how most people, on most days, eat and think about their food.
Which is frustrating, because I’ve worked on projects with people on food justice projects—so-called food deserts. And it’s very difficult to get them attuned to: okay, what is it that we can do? What are the levers of change? What is possible to maybe make a more equitable food environment possible? And it’s deeply frustrating work.
What do you love about the work? Where’s the joy in it for you, just personally?
You know, even back then when we were working on these grocery stores—well, there were a few things—but one was that you could open up a grocery store that we spent two years designing, and now tens of thousands of people who live there are coming to that store and shopping there. They’re eating there.
And it’s not radically different. It’s not a new human. But it’s different. Things have changed. And you’ve actually helped shape lives—even if it is just that everyday life that people tend to be overlooking. It matters. It’s truly meaningful to them.
And then to work with some of those clients—it was kind of interesting, because our firm is not very big. And so the giant corporate chains—they’re not necessarily working with us. But there was this whole world of more regional chains and smaller chains that needed reinvention and were kind of stuck—not quite sure what comes next.
So, to work with some of those chains—some of them family-owned for generations—and to help them find their way has always been very exciting and gratifying. To see, okay, this is not a monolithic industry. There are possibilities to make things happen and to make change happen.
So yeah, those are some of the things that I find very interesting. In more recent years, I think what’s been really interesting is—because I started, the more I was working at this design firm, and I stopped working there probably about seven or eight years ago—I was more and more working on strategic kinds of plans. More design, research informing design, and design strategy, brand strategy, even corporate strategy.
And then in more recent years, I’ve been getting more back to the craft of research. And I find that very gratifying—talking to people, trying to make sense of the research, struggling through that, and through the EPIC community, sharing those insights, sharing those struggles. I’ve been doing some work recently on teaching interviewing, and I’ve been developing a course on analysis and synthesis as well.
It’s beautiful. I want to segue from what we’ve been talking about into that work—your work on listening, which I think is really amazing. How do you—I'm wondering if you’ve ever encountered sort of conventional research—and how do you articulate the value that your anthropological background brings to that question of what’s possible or what’s not possible? You know what I mean?
Like, these people who are in charge of businesses, who may not be fluent in anthropology, but of course they want growth, they want innovation, they want—what did you say—food culture A, you know what I mean? How does an anthropologist help somebody like that? What do you bring that a more conventional approach doesn’t get? How do you make the case, I guess, is what I’m saying.
Yeah, and I often feel like I’m constantly starting from scratch.
Why is that, do you think?
I’m not good with boilerplates. And I feel like it is sort of antithetical to the ethnographic approach.
I love it.
And so we’re constantly hand-wringing and tearing our hair out like, “What are we going to do? I don’t know.”
Yeah.
As if we’ve never done this before and haven’t been doing it for decades. But I think that’s a good approach.
Which is a good approach?
Well, I think that our clients have the luxury of having a theory and being very sure about that theory: “This is how humans are. This is what people do.” And I don’t have that luxury. I don’t feel like I know. Maybe. I’m like, “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s talk to them. Let’s find out. Let’s see.”
Because with that certainty comes—there’s a connection between that certainty of their theories and their thinking and the certainty of their strategies, and their approach, and their direction, and the design of things. And so, until you start to shake things up and find some cracks and fissures—“Okay, well, maybe… What about this?”—let’s try exploring something else and being curious.
And that’s where things like listening, I think, are so valuable. Because when we are—you know, I mean, listening is such a funny thing, because of course we do it. We all know how to do this, right? We’ve been doing this forever.
But not. We learn to listen. Listening is very cultural. It’s a cultural practice. And we learn to listen for certain things. And when we can step back, step away from that, and try to listen differently—listen for different things—then that creates the opportunity for people to speak differently.
Because people recognize, they can understand and pick up on how we’re listening to them. And people are far more diverse and hard to pin down—and just strange, weird. People are much weirder than I think most folks in business, including in a lot of business research, give them credit for.
You know, you continually find that a company that makes coffee, a company that sells groceries, thinks of people coming into their grocery store as “grocery store shoppers.” And it’s only natural. That’s why you came here. This is what you do, right?
But of course, you’ve got all these other things. When I was a kid, my first jobs were—I worked at the grocery store. I was a bagger, cleaning up grocery stores. I drove an ice cream truck for a couple of summers. You see some things, you know?
Oh, yeah.
You start to see that they’re bringing all kinds of other baggage into this place. It’s open to everyone. Just—everyone. So whatever you thought you knew, stand inside a convenience store for a couple of days and just watch what happens, and you’ll inevitably be surprised.
And I think it’s that sense of openness and possibility—which I feel like is core to, whether it’s interviewing or other kinds of ethnographic research methods—that something will happen. I’ve gotten into the same sort of conundrum where you can’t tell a client, “Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
It’s serendipitous. That’s not a very reassuring sell.
I think you’d have to charge an extraordinary amount of money if that was the pitch. Do you know what I mean? You’d just have to put a giant price tag on it to make that seem persuasive.
Either that, or just charge nothing. Wait until you see the ideas—and then we’ll bill accordingly. “How valuable was that to you?”
I don’t know.
That’s right.
Yeah.
How do you maintain that sense of surprise and serendipity——but then do it in this formulaic way? We keep finding ways to do that and to tell these stories—sharing stories of how other projects have turned out, even though the process was indirect.
I think that has to be the way: just to keep sharing those stories and telling those stories again and again—especially when surprising things happen.
There’s a really interesting relationship between the methods of practice, like listening, and the question of: what is analysis? What are we trying to get to? One of the most provocative areas in my mind is around surprise.
That it's when we hear something surprising—that's when we know it might be insightful or valuable. Because it’s always a question: surprising to whom? I mean, it's not just trivia. That’s one kind of surprise.
Right.
It's not that. It's surprising in a relevant way—relevant to our research questions or our project.
Can you tell me a story of surprise?
Yeah. I'm trying to think of which one. Every project, I feel like, captures a surprise. There was a project I was just sharing recently. A number come to mind. This was kind of an older project I did a while back when I was in L.A. We were working with a Christian university. I spent a lot of time doing research, talking to all these different students—MBA students and others.
We came back to the client and explained that most people didn’t really think of this as a Christian university. A lot of students were surprised, after a year or two, to realize, Wait a minute... And then they would leave.
Oh my gosh.
There were master’s students who were like, Well, I can just disregard all that because I got my credential. I got my MBA. This was a big surprise to many of the people leading the institution.
So much so that they were rebelling against the research: How did you do this? Who did you talk to? Somebody was crying. Other people were upset. You just knew—it was like a bomb went off inside the organization. They needed to do something about it. They thought they were hiring us to do a brand study.
Right.
We did. But it was very surprising to them—in a productive way. They had to deal with it. How do we change things to respond to that? This is not the kind of surprise we want.
It’s beautiful. I have a quote I go to over and over again. I never know where it came from—but it’s from David Graeber. It’s long, and I can’t do it justice now, but he builds this very logical progression of conditions about history and how it’s made to say, basically, that our humanity is inseparable from our capacity to surprise one another. That the measure of our humanity is what we do not know about the other. And so surprise is the measure of what makes us human—that we can surprise each other and be surprised by another. I just think it’s beautiful.
Yeah. I mean, it’s really remarkable—and undervalued in many ways.
Yes. We’re so certain—to your point. I love what you said about the grocery store owner who just sees grocery store shoppers. It’s like a perfect closed system. There’s no need for any more information. All is known and simply runs.
But we have a little bit of time left, and I want to dive into your work on listening—that friction where you ask the question (and maybe you can do it better justice): What does listening do? And we talked about it when you were doing that project. We spoke once, and my experience—and I’ve shared this before—is I feel like listening is sort of invisible.
In a way, interviewing is a skill that—you know, when you see a good interviewer working, you don’t really notice. You just think they’re maybe a friendly person, just sort of having a conversation. It’s not a visible skill. But also, it’s seen as passive, not active.
And so I’m wondering: what were you doing? Tell us a little bit about that project—about what does listening do?
Yeah, yeah. It started because of a project I was working on. It was this year-long, ethnographic, interviewing-based project on Latino voters in Texas. And we wanted to know: Why don’t more Latinos vote in Texas?
These are eligible voters who don’t vote. And so it was in the lead-up to the 2020 election. We talked to over 100 people, and then just before we were about to deliver this study, the pandemic began. And the funder knew, yes, this is going to have some kind of impact. But we can’t talk to everybody again. So let’s talk to—let’s talk to just the non-voters. We had a segmentation of the people we interviewed.
Just talk to the non-voters and ask them, How are you feeling in this moment? And when we called them back and just talked to them on the phone—somewhat briefly—a considerable number of them, when we asked about voting, said, You know, I’ve been thinking—ever since we had that conversation, I’ve been thinking about this. And I don’t know that all of them were going to go vote, but it was on their mind in a new way.
We at no point told them that they should go vote. But the act of having that conversation—just asking them questions, letting them talk, and having them feel like, Oh, someone’s listening to you talk about this—it created this sort of gravity. Suddenly, my opinions matter in a way that maybe they didn’t matter before.
And that, to me, felt like—yes, it is a kind of reciprocity in the interview process—but it also is an example of how listening can do things. Listening is not just a passive act. What it does—that’s a bit of anarchy. You’re unleashing something.
I can’t tell you: Are they going to vote Democrat or Republican? Are they going to vote all the time? I don’t know. What are we unleashing? I don’t know. But we’re regenerating something here. There’s something being produced, which I think is very exciting.
So I kind of started from there. That project around listening captured my attention for this reason. It had some threads to other projects that I had been aware of or been part of—including an artist, Elana Mann, who had been doing some listening projects prior to that. She’s an LA-based artist.
She had done this project—it’s a bit like Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present—kind of project, sort of like sitting and listening with someone, talking about listening. And we took a tour. Instead of just listening to each other, I walked with her around. We were in Chinatown in LA, over near the train station there, the market. And that really kind of resonated with her—that here we weren’t just listening to another person, but to an environment.
And so that sort of started a conversation between us about listening and the different kinds of things that listening might do, which has been very intriguing and productive for me—to kind of think through, Well, what are some other ways that listening might be employed in our work?
So I’ve been trying to explore that more. I wrote a paper for EPIC about that—kind of explores the different modalities of listening that are part of the interviewing process, which I think we approach in too simplistic a way. That it’s just attentive listening, active listening, very careful listening. But actually, there are different kinds of listening going on when you’re doing an interview.
Yeah. Can you talk about that? I’m curious—having done this project, how do you think about the conventional way we think of listening, and what are these other ways that listening happens?
Well, for an interview like this—or an ethnographic interview, very similar, pretty much the same—we’re trying to create a sense of comfort. And it’s very conversational, like a chat among friends. And so we’re trying to—if you’re feeling safe and comfortable—okay, well then you’ll share information.
That’s true, but it’s also a contrived situation. There’s nothing natural about it. This is not a normal thing that people do.
And even if you go to early anthropology—that’s not anthropology. Like Franz Boas, he was talking to people, and that’s what—but social scientists were not. Max Weber, Karl Marx—were not doing interviews with people. That was not a thing people did.
And so you can kind of look at the legacy of—some call it the interview society—that we form. It’s a special format that we have to have an interaction. And then we work within that format. So already our listening is kind of—it’s embedded in that sort of contextual framework.
And then you can start to look at and compare it to other—like, let’s say you’re talking to a friend or relative. You’re not taking notes. You’re not thinking about the questions or the next question.
So when you’re doing this interview, you’re completing the interview, you’re listening for certain things. You’re taking note of certain things and listening for that—and trying to be responsive.
So when you come back to something I said at the outset of the interview, it's a sign of respect. It's also a way to say, Okay, we're connecting here. I'm demonstrating that I'm listening to you, which changes the way that I engage.
There's also things like—when you're working for a client—there are research questions, intellectual questions that you have in mind, that you ask for, seek responses to, and have conversations around. So you're listening in those ways and on these other intellectual and cognitive levels that—again—these are not normal, not natural things.
What you mentioned—the interview society—what is that as an idea?
Yeah, so I was having—because I talk with a lot of anthropologists and researchers about how they do interviews—and Patty Sunderland told me this great story about how, when she had started (she's one of the founders of Practica Group), when she had started doing this professional kind of research in the ’80s and ’90s, you'd always have this time of rapport building. Like, a lot of back and forth.
And she said, in recent years, people don’t want me to share. Usually, you’d be talking about—let’s say—grocery stores, and you might share as the interviewer, Oh yeah, this is where I shop, and have some back and forth. And she’s saying more and more people don’t—not only do they not need that to get going—they don’t want that.
I’m—this is my interview. I’m the star here. These ideas coming from, you know, talk shows in the ’80s, ’90s—now podcasts—and you listen to podcasts and they’re very weird. There are very few good interviewers in the podcast world because most of them are... there’s a lot of rambling. There’s a lot of comedy—looking for like comedic moments—and a lot of propaganda and selling.
Yeah. I love—I mean, that observation about the interview society is amazing. I'm flashing back to moments—maybe it was an interview with Grant McCracken—about how he’s talked about celebrity and how we interact with phones and social media and stuff like that.
And I feel like I’ve had that experience too in interviews. Because you're kind of trained—it’s part of the process of giving, right? To sort of participate in that way. And I can—I’ve had the experience where I feel like the person's like, Just shut up. I’m not here to listen to you. Like, That’s great, but you're just eating up my time, basically.
There’s this short story I recall David Foster Wallace wrote—I think it’s from the collection Girl with Curious Hair—and it’s about this celebrity, unnamed celebrity, going on to an unnamed talk show. It was clearly Letterman, when Letterman was kind of edgy.
And the whole story is about, What’s he going to say? And then, What does he actually mean? How do I say it in a way? Do I want to come off as smart? Or just more genuine and play it straight? And just all of the sort of back and forth and the ironies and all the hand-wringing of that format.
I think now—it’s sort of laughable to read a story like that and the kind of mental gymnastics that people were going through. Because now we have all these other ways to play it. And the interviewer is requesting an authentic self to show up.
Which I think is—well, I think it’s nonsense.
Yeah. Well, listen, we're at the end of our time. This has been so much fun. I could continue for another hour. I really appreciate you.
Yeah, it’s been fun. So thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. Yeah, it’s been—it’s been fun. It’s really nice. And now that I’m reflecting on this, I’m like, Well, I need to ask Peter more questions.
Another time, maybe.
Please.
[We ended it here, then proceeded to get into a great conversation - so turned it on again.]
Yeah, we're talking about the anarchy of listening. Yes, you mentioned that when you listen, you’re inviting anarchy in, in a way.
Yeah, and I think it’s because we often restrict ourselves. We put limits on how we talk—being careful, thinking about the social norms of how we should be. And this does go back, like I said, to what David Graeber was writing about in terms of anarchy. It’s not about rebellion. It’s not about fighting the man.
It’s about the idea that we have the capacity to act as we think best, based on our own common sense. But often, we’re not allowed to be adults. There’s a certain way we’re supposed to speak, certain things that make us sound smart.
Yes. I love how it really shines a light on—well, you talked about certainty and uncertainty—that listening requires a pretty broad openness. There’s that really tacky quote: you shouldn’t listen unless you’re willing to be changed. Have you heard that one? Yeah. It feels sort of tacky in my mind. It’s kind of Hallmark-y, but also fundamentally true. Too often, we’re not actually open. We’re listening, but not open to being transformed by what we hear. What you're saying is that listening, when done properly, is anarchic—or anarchistic?
For both the listener and the one being listened to.
Yeah. Especially if there’s a real interest or willingness to do something. I’ve had bosses, worked places where they said, “We’re going to listen. We’re open to ideas. The customer support line is open—tell us what you think.” B******t. They weren’t going to change anything. They weren’t even interested. Not even a little bit.
That’s right.
And this is why, going back to politics, you can’t go on a listening tour if you’re not really going to change. Like, no—really—I don’t know what to do, so we’re here to listen and let’s see what happens.
That’s a radical notion. That’s the kind of anarchy I have in mind: a self-organizing system, where people choose to do what makes sense to them. Why is our common sense or community sense any less valid? There’s no elevated vantage point in bureaucracy or government where someone sees everything. That perspective doesn’t exist. There’s always that paranoia—maybe someone actually is pulling the strings?
Yes. And this brings us full circle. In my own experience living in a small town, there's this expectation of transparency that becomes totally unrealistic. It drives this feverish need for more information—information that’s not actually connected to producing anything valuable. It becomes a distraction. Just some crazy theater where nobody’s ever really satisfied with what they’ve heard, and nothing’s really been decided. Everyone’s just performing these weird roles inside a structure.
So—and I love this idea—it’s really resonating with me, because I think too often, more often than not, we show up with something already in mind. An outcome, an idea, a concept. We’re only listening to get someone’s approval or just to get through it. We're not actually creating anything together.
Does the language of co-creation mean anything to you? I know it was sort of in vogue for a moment. It speaks to something aspirational, but it always struck me as... I don’t know, maybe I’m just against hyphens.
Yeah, I also—it kind of rubs me the wrong way.
Yeah.
You know, architects have this whole thing about community. They might call it listening: “Oh, we’re going to listen to the community.” And it’s this very almost coercive format. Like, we’ve got the community in the room, we invite people, ten folks show up—and that’s the community. They stick Post-its on things they like. But to me, the problem with that is the mediation involved.
There’s analysis we can do as researchers that changes the shape of things. Translation is required. Designing a master plan for a city isn’t something most people do. And if you’ve never encountered that kind of work, you won’t know what you’re looking at. You can understand pieces of it, and that’s why mediation is needed. That’s something a researcher can do. Some designers can do it too, but they’re part of that chain of mediation.
So it’s never just, “Oh, we heard what they had to say, so that counts.”
That’s right.
You need to process it. That’s the work of analysis. And it doesn’t always happen in the moment of listening.
The other part of the anarchy of listening that really struck me—and I want to hear you say more about this—is about norms. That we’re always abiding by norms. I think about awkwardness as what happens when those norms fall away. It’s like a kind of vertigo—you don’t know what to do. And so we panic, because there’s no script. Can you say more about norms and the anarchy of listening?
Well, you know, it’s interesting, because—okay—there’s this one model where we’re trying to get at an “authentic voice.” Like, “This is what you say to normal people, but really—come on—let’s get inside, let’s hear your deep, dark secret or something.” And there are all kinds of ethical issues with that.
But the other problem is that we’re all a kind of multiplicity of identities. So, I can ask you one thing—but if I’m not aware and conscious of the positionality in discussing things… like, right now, we’re talking as collegial researchers, fellow researchers, so we’re speaking a certain way. But what if I start asking you questions about being a parent—about listening to your kids or your child? That completely changes the frame of the conversation.
And I can shift it again by asking about how you talk to a neighbor, or to the auto mechanic when you show up there. There are different codes we’re constantly switching between to make sense of each context and to be heard in those spaces. Because I don’t talk to you like I talk to my kids. And they don’t listen to me the way you listen to me. Which is scary.
Yeah.
Because—s**t—I’ve told my son the same thing again and again and again, and you’re like, he doesn’t listen. But he is listening to some other things. He’s picking up on something else. And, of course, there's a completely different political dynamic there too.
It’s funny. I mean, this is a very meta observation, but we got into this conversation about the anarchy of listening after we had stopped recording the interview. I think it’s partly because I had sort of shifted out of being “the interviewer,” and we were just having a much more familiar conversation. We got into a topic with an energy that was totally different from what had happened before. And then we decided to record again—which I think is kind of fascinating.
Yeah. No, it does come back to positionality. Charles Briggs wrote this great book in the ’80s about “Learning How to Ask.”
Oh wow.
It’s about considering all the micro-politics of the interview situation, and all the different cultural frames that are possible. I remember, long ago—after we talked about listening for that EPIC paper, because I was speaking to all kinds of people—I was like, okay, I need to come up with experiments and see who’s going to follow through. And one experiment I tossed your way was: what if instead of an interviewer and an interviewee, we had two interviewees talking to each other?
Right.
So like, remove ourselves—and that frame—and all the biases and categories we have in mind. What would happen if they were just talking to one another, and we could somehow choreograph that? I have no idea how that would work. It's a bizarre anarchy.
Well, isn’t that a little bit of what a podcast is? That’s what just came to me, thinking about it. Just people rambling. But anyway.
Yeah. Well, there are two of your grocery store customers.
Right.
Or maybe it’s an avid customer talking to somebody who’s on the fence. But just unleash the conversation. What happens? I don’t know. What are they talking about? What are they going to argue about?
Yeah.
Or do they care? I don’t know.
I love it.
Just to like, remove ourselves from it. Because—well—I don’t know that we can.
Yeah.
But to kind of step away from—
Right.
Because we do things.
Just introduce them to each other, basically, on behalf of a client, and sort of see what happens. Have them report whatever comes out of the conversation.
Or have it recorded.
Yeah.
There are just all these different ways we could play with that. I don’t know if it’s a good solution.
Yeah. No—well—I’m now gathering what you were talking about. I didn’t get it at first. And I definitely know there are people who’ve brought groups together to argue over a topic. You know what I mean? Like, just recruit people on opposite sides of an issue. I mean, of course that’s used in debate or politics, but even in consumer stuff too. Just take sides, make a case, and play like that. But that's play.
But yeah, no, it’s interesting.
Yeah.
I confess that my bias is—I just... it's selfish, I think. I just want to be talking to people. Designing a research project where I’m not talking to people—it’s like... I don’t know. It defeats the purpose for me.
Yeah. Well, because we are mediating all these things. This is super valuable. So to me, it keeps coming back to that sense of positionality. This is who I am. This is where I’m coming from.
I was doing an interview in—Atlanta, a few weeks ago—talking about mobility technology. We went to South Atlanta and talked to this lady. And we knew race played a role in Atlanta history and mobility, access, inequities—things like that. And here’s this one person—she’s a Black person—and two white interviewers show up. She’s not talking about race.
Right.
And somebody else said, “Well, so this doesn’t matter to her.” It’s like, no.
Right.
Because if you know who you are, and the context you’re stepping into—she couldn’t tell us the kinds of things she might tell her friends or family or others. I don’t know. There’s another lived reality she’s dealing with that she’s not going to share with us.
Right. Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you again.
It’s always the conversation after the conversation. Anthropologists always talk about this. They’re like, “Oh, just keep the recorder running.”
That’s right.
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