Looking Outside Meaning: Ujwal Arkalgud, Chief Anthropologist & CEO MotivBase

Episode 7 of Looking Outside takes us deeper into culture and beyond pre-defined ideas, with Cultural Anthropologist and CEO of MotivBase, an AI Anthropology agency, Ujwal Arkalgud. Today we’re looking outside meaning (whatever that … means?).

Ujwal speaks to core concepts of culture, which is in everything around us, and how all things carry the weight of meaning, even seemingly simple concepts and narratives.

Together Jo and Ujwal explore the philosophical aspects of our lives, including the need to look at counter culture, explore the opposite sides to existing ideas that we think we know inside out, and posit uncomfortable suppositions.

Ujwal also provides a unique perspective on empathy, a current corporate obsession. Posing that perhaps instead of obsessing over feeling empathy, something that’s potentially impossible, we instead focus on acceptance of differences and practice understanding.

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To look beyond the familiar, Ujwal loves to dive deep into philosophy, particularly into those concepts he disagrees with (for example, that we have no free will). He actively pushes himself into uncomfortable things in his personal life, like cooking where he has no natural skill. (He makes up for it with all the other brainy stuff.)

Curious about philosophy? Ujwal recommends you start with Sophie’s World: A novel about the history of philosophy. And that you check out philosophy podcasts and audiobooks. Like Lawrence Cahoone on Audible.

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Ujwal is an award-winning cultural anthropologist and a pioneer in the field of digital ethnography and the study of implicit and symbolic meaning using the internet. He co-founded MotivBase in 2015, which is the world's first technology that leverages deep anthropological models to enable the study of meaning with Machine Learning and Big Data.

Ujwal serves on the board of the Center for Food Integrity in the United States.

Connect with Ujwal on Linkedin.

Sign up to his newsletter, Why Meaning Matters.

Check out Ujwal & the MotivBase team's podcast, Why Meaning Matters.

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Looking Outside is new podcast dedicated to exploring fresh perspectives of familiar business topics. With each episode we’ll hear from some of the most influential and original thinkers.

The show is hosted by Joanna Lepore. Jo has been marketing and innovating inside of the consumer goods space for over a decade. Today she heads up strategic foresight for Mars Wrigley North America. Jo follows her curiosity, seeking out fresh perspectives by looking outside her market, industry and field of knowledge.

Find out more about Jo & Looking Outside at www.looking-outside.com.

Connect with Jo and join the Looking Outside community on LinkedIn.

Check out Jo’s foresight podcast Future Imagined (produced for Mars Wrigley).

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Looking Outside is created by Joanna Lepore. All views are that of the host and guests and don’t necessarily reflect those of their employers. Copyright 2022.

OBOY and The Night Driver music features in Episode 7, via Soundstripe.