Convene Podcast Transcript
Convene Interview, ep. 22
*Note: the transcript is AI generated, excuse typos and inaccuracies
Magdalina Atanassova: This is the Convene Podcast.
In this episode, Mark Adams, serial entrepreneur, global innovation strategist, and one of the most trusted voices at the intersection of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the Fortune 500, talks with Barbara Palmer, deputy editor of Convene, about how to recognize the signals that matter amid digital saturation, and how AI can serve as a creative ally rather than a threat. He shares a bold framework for reimagining leadership, communication, and impact in an age defined by intelligent networks.
They discuss what the world’s most adaptive brands do differently, how AI‑driven creativity can reshape strategy and experience design, and why the future belongs to communities — not audiences. And above all, Mark offers an inspiring vision for how leaders can meet this moment with clarity, courage, and imagination.
We start now.
Barbara Palmer: I'm talking today with Mark Adams, who will be speaking in April at Convening APAC in Singapore. It's a future focused gathering of business events professionals. So welcome, Mark.
Mark Adams: It's an absolute pleasure, Barbara. Thank you.
Barbara Palmer: Thank you. Okay, so your journey is just fascinating.
You initially studied to be a human rights lawyer,
but while you were still in university,
you co founded with one of Facebook's founders what essentially was the first social media agency.
And then you led digital transformation for some of the world's best known celebrities and public figures. Just, oh,
you know, you might have heard of Lady Gaga and Barack Obama and then brands including l' Oreal and Unilever.
And that company was acquired by Vice Media,
where you served as Chief Innovation officer.
And for the last decade, you've served on the AI Leadership Council in London in partnership with the University College London.
And you sit on the board of major brands like Gymshark, Headspace, and Ocean Bottle. Did I get that mostly right?
Mark Adams: You did. You absolutely did. And you know, after all of that, my dear mom shared a Facebook post a few years back saying because I'd been award, I'd been awarded some silly award thing and my mum wrote, summarized the whole career, you know, in a beautiful way by saying,
my son has worked, has won an award for working with computers. He has always loved computers and other machines. I will need to get a dress, but your war's by.
So I realized that after all that, my mom has no idea what I do. Still sounds like moms, right?
Mark Adams: Yes. Isn't it so much better? Because it's kind of like you need people who don't know and don't care but love you anyway.
Barbara Palmer: Yeah. And I was like, they're going to be there when you get it. She's like, I'm Going to get a dress of how I'm going to be you there.
Mark Adams: Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Barbara Palmer: Well, you know, I've just. When you look back to when you're still a student,
how were you able to pick up on that shift?
That was when Facebook was coming on, when that we're not just going to the web and passively consuming information. It's connecting person to person.
And so how were you, like, how were you able to detach that shift and act on it?
Mark Adams: I truly believe it was right place, right time. I just happened to be in. A friend of mine went to the London School of Economics and I was in the library in the London School of Economics, not doing any work, just, you know, talking with him.
And he said, have you seen this? And showed me the early Facebook when it was still Facebook and you had to have a lse.ac.uk email address to get on it.
So this was still in the phase when you literally couldn't even get onto Facebook unless you were a student.
And so it was the first university in the UK that it arrived at was lse.
So we really. I just remember looking at it and honestly shows you that to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And all I wanted to do,
all I ever wanted to do was run parties. That was it.
All I was thinking was, how can I use this to run parties? That was all I was thinking,
yeah.
Barbara Palmer: Oh, that's amazing.
And then that was maybe, I don't know, 2002, 2003.
Right. Okay. So what are the things that you talk about in terms of adapting to change, including these big technological changes, is signal detection.
And your talk at convening APAC is Signal to shift is in the title.
So could you talk about what you mean by that?
Mark Adams: Yeah, absolutely. I love that you've already got my language so down.
I think that this stuff can be really scary or really exciting, and it's usually somewhere in between.
And I think that the thing that gives me sanity, and I always use this analogy of like when I was a kid reading this Aesop's Fables book.
And in the fable, Aesop talks about the fox and hedgehog, and the fox knows everything.
He's a wily character and he's constantly learning.
You know, I'm sure if you're reading Wired magazine or something these days,
and he's up on every trend and then. But the hedgehog just knows one thing.
And so in the kind of analogy of the fox trying to eat the hedgehog, the fox tries a million different ways to try and lure the hedgehog into all these traps and stuff.
And. And basically the hedgehog just knows if he curls up in a ball,
the fox will never be able to eat him. And I kind of come back to being the hedgehog all the time. Like, you know, there are millions of things that I'm sure many, many, many people know a lot more than I do about,
but I really do think I was lucky enough very early to find the kind of the what we would now call an operating system. Like something that you could just.
A bunch of first principles that you could just apply to every technological shift that would suddenly make you go, oh, this is not actually that scary.
Barbara Palmer: Could you expound a little bit on those skeleton keys?
Mark Adams: Yeah,
that's a great way of saying it. Skeleton keys. And so really, I mean, the.
You mentioned that I was lucky enough to co found a business with Sean Parker, who was one of the co founders of or the kind of earliest president of Facebook.
And the way that that came about was ridiculous. It was just that when we did get our hands on this Facebook thing, obviously the first thing we thought to do was just try and run parties and, you know, and we did that and it worked out and it was a hell of a lot of fun.
And then after a while we realized that we built this kind of infrastructure. We had built every single university in London and we had built pages for these universities. So we'd stay like class of 20, 24, 2004 and incoming law students, Facebook group.
And then, you know, that would fill up, you know, and then we would do that for each of the universities. So we'd end up with like,
I think we must have had about 400, 500 pages. Every single. We broke it down, every single course,
every single university,
you know, 11 different universities, you know, so we had, we were running hundreds of pages and we were the official pages, basically. It's very naughty actually.
And so we had this massive network and then we realized, well, you know, we can do other things with this network. So, you know, at one point, just for the fun of it really, we realized that there's a big TV show in UK Expat,
and it had,
I think it was four at this point, Christmas number ones, which in the UK, I don't know why we seem to think the Christmas number one is this really important thing.
We were a bit peed off, to be honest, that this like, you know, this one dude called Silent Cow, which is. Was just manufacturing these artists and having Christmas number one and kind of.
And we kind of felt he was hijacking culture. And so we said, well, why don't we try and get us on to number one? And we've got this massive network.
So we took a song that we liked, which was Rage against the Machine, Killing in the Name, which is aggressive anti corporate song with a lot of uses of the F word in.
And we started a campaign on all these, you know, these pages that we ran to get that to number one. And it went to number one. And I remember getting a phone call from Simon Cowell, who's Eli, a very powerful man in media, saying, I had no idea how you beat me,
but congratulations. And it was after that that Sean Parker from Facebook reached out and said, you know, I hear what happened in the UK, like, we should meet. And anyway, long story short, just really quickly coming back to that.
When I first met Sean,
he said something that really resonated with me and it stuck with me ever since, which is really everything.
Everything,
every app,
every platform,
AI,
all of it just comes back to one word really.
And that word is networks.
And when you realize that everything is networks, you know, Barbara, you and I are speaking, we've never met before, and we're meeting through the platform network of this Google Meets right now, you know, and, but we're only two nodes on this very small network.
But you know, when there's more people on a call, you, you know, think of each individual on that, on that call as a, as a different node of the network.
And anyway, long story short, he said to me, look, think of the Internet as the network of networks and the clues in the name, right?
Internet interconnected networks,
you know, and so when, when I started thinking really a lot more about the network analogy, I realized that the beautiful thing about networks is they're very mathematical, you know, like you can literally measure all sorts of kind of, you know,
a network is a really electronic engineering concept. And so you can say things like,
okay, well, this part of the network is emitting a signal and this part of the network is emitting another signal. And you know, if you think about it in modern day terminology, everybody thinks something like Uber's such an exciting business, but there's, you know, wow, how did they do that?
And really, if you think about it, all they did was they had the insight that every city that you live in is a network of roads. And that instead of just randomly walking out onto one of those roads and hoping that your demand for a taxi would accidentally bump into the supply of a taxi,
they realized that you could emit a signal on that network and that another taxi could say, oh, I get you, I can now see that signal. And then,
you know, supply and demand could meet within the network.
So actually the more you think about this network thing, the more it describes everything. So essentially what I always come back to is to try and give people just a good first principles base to think about every single shift that's going to come and actually just realize that it's all about networks and it's all about these signals within the networks.
And once you realize that, you know, these signals of, of demand are arising,
you can start to build amazing ways to kind of, you know, contribute to helping that, that demand.
And that's how you make a lot of money, but it's also how you have a lot of fun.
So yeah, so that's the kind of
Barbara Palmer: signal to shift, I think,
thinking about signals. I mean, I know, I know that it's very. You encounter the word tsunami when they talk about information, but I don't think that even works anymore for to describe the way that digital information is grabbing your ankles and saying, be part of this, be part of that.
So how does that affect the ability to like get through to the networks that you want to serve?
And how do you detect those signals in that somebody's going to come up with a new way to describe it because saturation isn't really even to begin
Mark Adams: to do it completely. You're so right. I mean, there's a good statistic that came out very recently that said that if every one of the 8 billion of U.S. on Earth just sat and watched content on YouTube and Netflix and you know, Amazon prime is that if all of us just watch content for all the hours we have in the day and didn't even sleep,
there would still be 10 times more content than there was human hours to watch it.
So we have, you know, I guess, you know, say that this is kind of the global warming of the content ecosystem. Like it's a completely unsustainable ecosystem now.
And by the way, for anyone listening who's in the conference and events and convening industry,
this is the trillion dollar opportunity of,
I wouldn't even say a generation, I would say of every generation that's ever existed in the history of humanity is that human beings no longer get the hit that they used to get from the content.
It's not enough. Now we want not just to experience content, we want to experience the community around the content.
And so that's where the events industry is an extremely exciting place to be in my humble opinion.
Barbara Palmer: Oh, that's great. That was actually my next question just because, well, I think you've been in media,
entertainment and academic life. Those are all worlds of the business, events, industry.
So I was going to ask, where do you see the best, best opportunities for innovation?
How do you begin to organize that opportunity? And look a bit.
Mark Adams: It's a great question. And the way you phrased it as how do you begin to organize it is such a smart way to phrase the question because it is an organizational nightmare in one regard, but it's also extremely addressable if you are willing to think in a different way.
So I think where we are as a society right now, and I certainly find this within the large Fortune 500 companies that I advise is the biggest issue we have.
And you know, we started our conversation before we started recording, you know, talking about books and I can instantly see, you know, from the, you know, I can see the stuff, you know, the beautiful art you have behind you and the photographs.
And I feel, you know, instantly like we could probably dive down some rabbit holes and have some shared interests and shared films and books and, and art and.
And so the beautiful thing about the modern world, what the Internet has done as a piece of architecture is actually quite marvelous. It's actually shown us that we are stranger of kind of weirder,
more fascinating,
more passionate,
more driven by values and ideas than we ever actually kind of took ourselves,
gave ourselves credit for.
Like, there is a community for every single thing you can possibly imagine online,
you know, and even to the point where, you know, some of us would rightly say, yeah, and there's also communities for things you don't want there to be communities for.
It's an incredible,
you know, actually it's a testament to the human spirit that these communities are. There's almost nothing now that is, that's left that we could really describe as niche.
You know, like, I mean, like the biggest TV show two years ago or three years ago, you know, was Squid Game. If someone had said that, you know, South Korean hyper violent, you know, TV show would be like number one all around the world, everyone would say, no way.
You know, and so there's just this really fascinating. In economics, this is called long tail economics. What it basically comes from this very, very smart guy called Chris Anderson, who.
He's to give you an idea for how some archives.
Yes, exactly. That's the guy.
And you know, this is the guy who started TED Right now you can imagine how smart you have to be the start head. And in 1990, 8 he wrote this article and why called the Long Tail is getting longer.
What he meant by that was in previous generations, you know, my dad really loves Pink Floyd, right? And I could go to any room in anywhere and say, who loves Pink Floyd?
And I would get a lot of people. And I love Pink Floyd, right? But when my dad was growing up, there's great reasons to love Pink Floyd, and that is the.
One of the most important bands in history of the world. But also, there was only really about 100 major bands in the world at that point, you know, and the ones that managed to get distribution on large radio shows and stuff, you know, so actually, you know, there wasn't.
You couldn't go on Spotify and go down this rabbit hole of the long tail of all these niches. And we can do that now. So,
anyway, what's interesting about that is the first phase of the Internet gave us information.
It didn't necessarily gather communities around the information.
The second phase of the Internet that we were talking about earlier allowed us as communities and networks to gather around every idea you could possibly imagine,
from the most bizarre to the most sublime.
And now this. And then, you know, what was really a really.
It was real arrogance on behalf of the digital overlords was that they believed that the next phase of the Internet would be web.
And what they meant by that was the metaverse. What they meant was, well, and you can see the argument they thought, well,
first of all, put all the information on the Internet, then we put all the people on the Internet so that they can connect around all the different ideas in culture.
And.
And now those people are going to want a place to meet online and talk about that. That's beyond just a forum or Facebook group or Instagram page or whatever. And I can see why they thought that was a good idea.
But what they had completely not accounted for was the events industry,
the IRL events industry,
because people don't want to meet online as an avatar and talk about the future of this thing that they're passionate about. They want to meet in real life,
right?
And so,
just as Covid was happening and everyone was betting on the death of the events industry and the rise of the metaverse,
soon as we came out of COVID it totally went the other way. The metaverse tanked and became nothing, and the events industry took off and exploded exponentially.
And for me, I love that story because it reminds us that we are tribal species.
We want to spend time looking into one another's eyes and learning from each other. And long May that continue. And I love this idea now that the biggest opportunity in digital is to take the communities in the digital world and let them meet in real life.
Barbara Palmer: Yes,
yes,
yes.
I heard this amazing story and this happened in Britain. I believe that they had like there was a metaverse, some agency did a big event and there were literally like three people that logged in.
Because that's not what, that's not what people want.
Mark Adams: I think what the Internet has proven to us is that we are a tribal species, but not in the way that we thought.
We thought that we were tribal in a demographic sense. So we thought we were tribal as an, oh, I'm a Catholic and you're a Protestant and I'm a. I'm this color skin and you're that color skin.
The Internet completely disproves that. For all of the kind of horror stories that come in the news, it really incredibly positive and amazingly, you kind of unexpected story of the Internet is that billions of people who are kind of living behind a pseudonym that you don't even really know,
who are completely different from a demographic point of view,
are finding that they share incredibly deep interests around hundreds of millions of topics. Great. And that is such an interesting realization for humanity, I think.
Barbara Palmer: Yeah,
yeah. Well, and I'm okay. A question that I have is like, when like thinking about the long tail and niche and then thinking about business objectives,
like how do you scale niche?
Mark Adams: It is a paradox, right? It is the, in the infinite paradox, how do you scale niche?
So it's a brilliant question, Barbara, Unless, you know, it's the question really. Because if I could kind of define my last 20 years, it's essentially been answering this question.
I think the first step is to realize something which is that in the earlier part of this century, we discovered technologies like radio and tv. Last century, in fact,
we discovered technologies like radio and TV where we could broadcast and create, let's call it an audience.
And then I think, if I'm honest, we haven't properly re examined whether that is still a very smart idea.
And you know, when I was building Vice,
I left in 2019, but at the time when I left, well, you know, we were $5.7 billion business. And I think that the reason for that was that we would not in the get this as a statement, we were a media company, the biggest media company in you that ever existed,
but was not in the least bit interested in audience.
So then you go, well, what were you interested in?
And the answer was community networks.
Barbara Palmer: Okay.
Mark Adams: So basically, I think in the old way of thinking was,
I want to build an audience.
But the problem about an audience is you never really own an audience. They can just as easily switch channels as the radio and the television industry have found. They can just as easily just go,
you know, it's. It's never a real relationship, you know.
Barbara Palmer: Right.
Mark Adams: Because there's not actually anything in it for the. For the audience member other than kind of this vapor has to drop.
And so the difference between an audience member being an audience member and being a community member.
And, you know, I don't know this, but I imagine I can. I just met you. I can imagine you're not just an audience member.
You seem like somebody who's an active participant in things,
not a passive observer of things. Right. And so if you think about it, audiences,
they're not really asked to do very much,
but it's actually fan bases and communities that help to build anything. You know, I was at Disney for a short time during the time when Disney acquired Star wars,
and when, when we were asking them why they were going to pay 4 billion in Star wars, they said, well,
basically paying 4 billion for the Star wars fan base.
Barbara Palmer: Ah.
Mark Adams: AKA the community.
And so, you know, something like Game of Thrones, you know, seems to most people like, oh, wow, that just came out nowhere. But to people who have been reading the books for 15 years, they were like, no, no, no.
This is a huge thing. You just don't know about it.
Barbara Palmer: Right.
Mark Adams: And the most beautiful thing about the modern world is that we can't.
No one of us can know all these little niches that exist.
But one of the things about it is once you get into that niche, you find out it isn't as niche as you thought at all.
And as opposed to an audience which is passive,
the members of these niches are super active in the community.
So I used to say, give me a real active community of 100 people and I will make more money than if you give me a passive audience of a million.
Barbara Palmer: Oh, wow. Yeah.
Mark Adams: Do you know what I mean? Like, give me a hundred permitted community members and I will.
I will turn that into more money than a million passive audience members.
Barbara Palmer: Right?
Yeah.
So could you just talk a little bit more about that? Because, I mean, I still had this thought of, like, okay,
I think I'm using this extraction mentality, which is probably not the right way to think of it. Like, how could you get more money out of than. Than a big number of people.
Mark Adams: Yeah. I would argue what we're talking about right now is the most important and under appreciated thing in modern economics. I mean it doesn't matter what your business is.
What we are talking about right now is the new playbook. And it takes quite a while to get our heads around rag the industrial era. If you think about what the industrial era really was,
everything was built upon scalability.
So the first question in every single, you know, Fortune 500 company still to this day is what is the total addressable market and is it big enough for us to kind of serve and the Internet continuously and AI is just supercharging.
This continuously makes a mockery of that argument.
It basically it proves that we don't really understand.
I hate to say this, but we don't really yet as a society understand the fundamental digital economics that have come with the new systems that we all talk about. We will talk about the systems, but we don't see that those new systems actually by their very architecture require us to kind of approach this with a new playbook.
But we, but we don't want to do that because we think it's safe to play the scale game. And I'll give you a great example. MTV. I had to write strategy for Vice when I first joined Vice and Vice was a magazine and the original founder bought me on and said look,
why don't you co found a new business with me, VI Vice Media Group. We'll take this magazine and we'll make it digital, we'll grow this.
Anyway, so I had to kind of think, well, who's our biggest competitor? And I looked at mtv, who were the biggest competitor at the time and There were about 11 billion valuation at that time.
And anyway, long story short, if you look at MTV in the 90s,
they were quite niche. You know, it was like the Banner and you know, the Pixies and you know, it was quite niche kind of program. And they,
they actually did win well out of that. And then if you look at MTV in the 2000s, they moved to what I would call from what I would call niche to what I would call community.
So niche networks to community network. There's definitions around that that won't get into. But let's just say that community networks is more self sustaining than a niche.
So I'm actually not that interested in niches. Once a niche proves itself to be a long lasting community,
that's when it becomes a better investment of time and energy and you're kind of waiting for a niche can come and go.
A niche that kind of has resilience, let's call it, it becomes a community network. At certain point it kind of congeals into a set of network principles. Anyway, you know, this was the period when they were writing, they were killing it, absolute killing it.
So they moved to kind of, let's call it community networks. And then in 2010 they moved again to what I would call mass culture networks. So they started to, you know, create TV shows.
Like,
I don't know if you remember this, but it was like him my right or MTV Cribs or. And so they basically moved away from there. From the 90s to the 2010s, MTV did a complete reversal of strategy from niche to community to mass culture.
And then in 2025, December 31st, they shut down because they were bankrupt.
Barbara Palmer: Right?
Mark Adams: You think to yourself, how can going for more mass equal less resonance?
But actually it, what they were doing was they were, they were swimming against the current of digital.
Did you all, if you, if you open any app in the world now, let's say you open TikTok, which is the most extreme example. I don't use it, it's mind wrong.
But you know, without even asking you who you are, where you live,
who your friends are, tech doesn't care about any of that. It just suggests a bunch of content.
And then the AI driven algorithm observes the fact that you paused for 2.6 seconds longer than the average on that thing and it remembers that.
And then it starts to very quickly figure out who you are,
almost to the point that it figures you out more than you even explicitly know yourself.
And before long you're down some algorithmic rabbit hole looking at all these things that you didn't really realize that you're really interested in. And the algorithm is widening deeper and deeper into these kind of sub domains of that interest.
So, you know, it's like we always used to say, you know, radio stations define music in eight genres.
Spotify has 2,600 genres within their architecture. And County Cinemas, the traditional cinema trains define, you know, films by, let's call it 15 genres. Horror, you know, romance, et cetera. Netflix has nearly 2,000 genres within its data set, right, because it realizes that there's a genre called nostalgic 80s horror.
And that is what strangest things is,
right? So you want to realize that like we just didn't have classifications for all these genres that actually are fascinating. And so then you start to realize that in modern economics is to try and test the demand in each of the potential spaces at the lowest cost and lowest,
I guess it would be the lowest,
you know, investment really,
and then see the ones that are going to work the best.
And then scale up your investment there and you'll find all these little miracles that you'll be like, oh, my God, who would have known that an 80s revival TV show that's based on the work of Stephen King, that in a retro way this base is, you know, like Stranger Things would become the biggest TV show in the world.
And if you'd written it on paper, people would say, what even genre is this? This is completely mixed up. No, we can't fund this.
Barbara Palmer: Right.
Mark Adams: But the modern. The modern economy goes. No,
this is just a genre that previous boardrooms didn't have a name for. But we can see that it actually does need addressed and it has. It has demand space. You know, is.
Barbara Palmer: Is that kind of what you're getting at? I've heard you talk about, and I'm paraphrasing, but, like the difference between pushing and. And seeing the pull.
Mark Adams: Yes.
Barbara Palmer: Like you're, like,
just going out there and seeing where.
Instead of like, this is what we think you need here. It is like listening,
finding out where that. Where the pole is.
Mark Adams: You nailed it. I mean, earlier you used a brilliant expression which was skeleton keys.
Right. You take the metaphor of a key. I can see a door in the background there. There's a door here.
There are two ways to think about keys and doors. One is to say, well, there's a door, and this is what Fortune 5000 that were built on a playbook that was based on the industrial era do.
What they do is they say,
there's a door here.
And we're going to try every single key of all the keys that we've already made to see which one desk fits the door.
And of course, none of the keys really fit the door perfectly. Right. Because they defined people very demographically,
so they don't really even know what the lock of the door looks like. And then they try every key they try.
I work with Unilever, and they'll be like, let's try Dove would be able to address that. No. Or what about. And what about Tresma? No, that doesn't really work. We know this market share behind this door.
Which one of the keys of all 36 brands is going to be able to open that door? Smart entrepreneurs these days go say, okay, show me the door. Okay, you're telling me this demand behind there.
Amazing. I'm going to build a key that's specific to that door and open it.
Mark Adams: And that's the difference between starting with supply logic and then trying to find demand for that supply or the new economics which is start with demand signal and work back to build something bespoke that sends supply directly and bespoke key to that demand.
Barbara Palmer: I do want to ask you about another big area just recently,
we are talking now in mid February,
just in the last week I've been reading more stories about how the exponential ability of AI, how it's getting better and better.
Stories about coding,
you know how coding is like drastically.
I read a website that would have cost $350,000 to build not that long ago is now like the guy like basically set it to work and it's done when he gets off the subway.
That the video that went viral of two actors fighting where everyone's like this is it.
So Hal do how do you see the relationship between AI creativity and humans and the future of work?
Mark Adams: I think that we will probably see this exponential increase in the rate of AI's capabilities continue maybe for another 12 or 18 months, but then eventually it will start to level off.
So we're really in the high velocity,
we're in like escape velocity moment right now. Which is why it's quite scary because it's a day to day we're seeing new *****.
But it will as all technologies do, kind of tailor off and then we'll. If you think about the iPhone, the iPhone was such a leap forward and now we're on like the iPhone 18 and you can't really tell difference in the iPhone 18 and the iPhone 12.
You know what I mean? It's like, you know, you get to the point where you're like oh, a new iPhone. Oh really? You know,
and so we'll get there with AI. I, you know, it's very much, we're in that kind of same kind of rate of money, but so that the beautiful thing and it will be, don't get me wrong, it's going to take you a while to,
to percolate through. But the beautiful thing is,
I think a good analogy would be, you know, my great great great grandmother may have spent six or seven hours a day washing clothes by hand and putting them out on the line and then going back and she lived in Glasgow, so it's probably freezing and, and, and then one day in the 1950s,
somebody entered, you know, created the washer dryer,
right? And suddenly that was just as, not as not saying wasn't work, but it just wasn't as much work. You know, our, our forefathers and foremothers probably invariably had to work, work for a certain amount of Time every day to go and get some water.
Right.
And so, and now return the tap on and, and what's really interesting is I, I guess the best way to think about this is that the ability,
I would, I would put it this way, intelligence, or kind of the ability to throw more than just your own cognitive abilities at a problem is now reflowing the way water is.
So the best way to think about it. But here's what's beautiful,
is that's only one type of intelligence.
Barbara Palmer: Yes.
Mark Adams: So it's going to force us to ask ourselves what other types of intelligence are there?
And we kind of know, and I'll be honest with you here, this is controversial, but I think,
I think we women know this very instinctively.
I think a lot of the females in my life know that, you know,
mind based intelligence actually isn't the only form of intelligence.
Right.
And so we are going to have to come to terms with the idea that there are very many other things that you can be smart at, you can be emotionally intelligent, you can be spiritually intelligent, you can, you can, you can deploy what you uniquely have to give in ways that aren't just what we were told when we were at school.
And so we are going into, as society have to figure out what that is. And I think the bat, the bar of what art will be considered to be will, will, you know, as a result will rise with that.
And I think that it will come back to what it's always been, which is taking risks.
I think the difference between kind of commerce and art is that art could in some ways take a risk,
you know, whereas commerce is about like a calculated decision about what an audience will like in advance,
you know. And so this then becomes a really beautiful provocation to a new generation of,
you know, of workers and artists about like,
you know, what is the hard thing now? Because if the easy thing is intelligence,
we have to find what the hard thing is.
And probably my answer is a hard thing is going to be compassion.
Because business in the end is based on the idea that you, you know, I'm not a big fan of oligarchs and billionaires and things, but I would say if there is anything to commend business in its general form,
it is that in order to actually start and be good at business,
you first of all really have to find a group of people in some type of pain and ideally a group of people in some type of pain that nobody else has really had the compassion to notice enough yet.
And so when you realize that people are in when you find a cohort of people who are in a very similar type of pain and then you have the compassion to understand and empathize with them enough to dedicate your life to trying to solve their problem.
I think if that goes well, you do deserve the spoils of your labor. But not because you were clever,
but because you were empathetic.
Barbara Palmer: Right?
Mark Adams: I think now, I mean,
Lord knows there are enough problems to be solved in this world. And so my, my thing to anyone listening is, I promise you this,
you will be needed.
You will be deeply, deeply needed.
It's just that you might not be needed for your intellect alone.
You'll be needed for.
It's almost, I don't know, you know, if anyone listening is spiritual, but it almost couldn't be a more perfectly constructed way of forcing our human species out of the kind of cul de sac that we put ourselves down since the,
since the Enlightenment, which brought a lot of positivity to it, it brought a lot positive things. But the Enlightenment defined us in that Descartesian sense of I think, therefore I am so thinking intellectual.
Actual pursuit and rationality became the only way that we defined ourselves. And now a nation of Nobel Prize winning AIs living in a data center is going to be able to do that better than we ever could.
And so we now have to start to ask the very deep identity question, which is in what other ways can we add value? And I think the answer is that we are here to look after one another, serve and care for one another.
And I think those are the industries where things are going to explode. If I would just bring it back to events and the convening industry,
I think you guys are going to see the most explosive period of growth ever.
Because just as everything is solved, you know,
I often ask audiences,
you could probably watch this conference on replay online.
So why did you get a flight to come here in person?
And actually the answer to that answers a lot of this.
It's belonging,
it's the, it's the therapy and the catharsis of being with people who have similar frustrations, pains,
anxieties, excitabilities that you do.
It's the wonder of wondering who you might meet and bump into and the kind of collision idea that you might just meet someone and all these things. We don't really have good, we don't have good enough understandings for them.
In our modern, in our, in our current economic playbook. We just think everything's about rationality and it's highly irrational to get on a plane and fly to,
you know, wherever the next conference is when you could easily, easily watch it online.
But that's not. It's just that we don't respect it enough yet. But we will have to start respecting it now.
Barbara Palmer: Great.
Well,
I can't think of a better kind of conclusion to our talk. I do want to ask you,
is there anything that I haven't touched on?
Like we've really talked very abstractly.
Is there anything that's very specific to the events industry that that's going.
I mean, you just, you just addressed that very,
very pointedly. But just. I'm just wondering if there's kind of any other areas,
like just ways that people use AI tools.
Because I think I know that I've seen data that a lot of people are using it, like to,
to write content.
And that doesn't seem to be like where the magic lies.
Mark Adams: I think the most, the most asked question of Chuck GPT is about preparing food.
So people say, do you think this pasta sauce would go with olives or,
you know, and that, that's fine, but it just, you know, it is mind blowing that you would ask a Nobel laureate in every single discipline. You know something, it's nine and there is no soup as that, but it's beautiful.
But I would just say to people in the industry,
I think we may as a species have forgotten the reason that we even exist and the reason that we even exist. When there was a period of time in kind of the distant past where there was Neanderthals, there was Homo erectus,
there were like other forms of humanoids that were way bigger than we were,
way bigger than Homo sapiens. They were actually way smarter than Homo sapiens, but they're not around anymore. They all died off. And we survived. And the reason that we survived is because we were collaborators.
We worked together in tribes where there's. The rest of them all. Tried to be in a network analogy, we formed networks, but Neanderthals and Homo erectus were just nodes. They never formed networks.
Right, okay. And so the most powerful business model in the world is to take disparate networks and form network. They're disparate nodes and form networks that endure out that.
And I really. And you know, you see this, you know, my clients were people like lady gargoyles you mentioned in Taylor Swift. Right. You know, we started to implement things where we would say if there was a Taylor, if Taylor was going to play in Nashville, we would say to the Marriott Hotel or the local hotels,
look, you know, we we're happy to kind of promote you guys alongside this tour,
but we want like, we want five floors of the hotel. There's like seven floors. We want five floors of the hotel to be like Taylor Swift, only five fan rooms.
Right.
So we want you to know when you enter floor number three,
that that is a Taylor fan floor for that weekend. And if you bump into someone on the lift who gets off on three, you can guarantee they're also going to that show.
And why did we want that? Because we wanted to stimulate more conversation. We wanted to remove as many intellectual or emotional barriers to that community finding one another as possible.
And we. And you know what it's like. You know, we've all been in a conference lift and you think you kind of want to ask that person who's in the lift with you, oh, are you going to the conference?
Why? But you don't because you think, well, there's no way of finding out if they are or not. Right. We wanted to get rid of that.
So I would just say to, to the conference industry,
my kind of loving provocation would be,
you're definitely thinking about audiences and you're doing a great job.
The difference between an audience and a community is a community persists for 365 days somewhere.
The Burning man community doesn't stop talking about Burning man the week after Burning Man's finished.
They start planning next year.
And I might say to the conference industry,
I think you're doing an amazing job of convening audiences around passion points and business verticals and stuff.
What's the next step? How do we make that thing a 365 day long citizenship of a community?
And if you can do that,
I really think you're going to get something wonderful there. And people, people are living nowadays. They're starved for community. We are so desperate. It's our, it's our most basic instinct and we're being denied it, actually.
And I think there's something, you know, not to be too spiritual about it, but there's, there's something really like it's holy work to find disparate, lonely nodes and wire them together in meaningful communities.
And I think that's part of the work that you guys are already doing. But I would just urge you to think about how you might be able to really make that shift from thinking about audiences turning up to something to communities that engage all year round around it.
Oh, all right.
Barbara Palmer: Well, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure.
Mark Adams: Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to meet you.
Magdalina Atanassova: Thank you.
Remember to subscribe to the Convene Podcast on your favorite listening platform to stay updated with our latest episodes. For further industry insights from the Convene team, head over to PCMA.org/convene. My name is Maggie. Stay inspired. Keep inspiring. And until next time.
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