Luke Carrell, Marketing Strategist
💭 Thoughts on AI, Gustav Holst's "The Planets”, and Mini Rodini.
Thought Enthusiast is an AdHoc Project where we chat with fascinating thought leaders across various facets of music, tech, and culture whose work we admire, simply asking “what’s on your mind?” and “why do you care?” 💭
Luke Carrell is a marketer, who leads branding, creative, media, etc. work for brands and businesses. He works at Google, but his opinions do not necessarily reflect those of his employer. His favorite thing is getting to know what people need and finding surprising ways businesses can help. He used to "blog" and "DJ" and "host a radio show" and "play music," which is how he got mixed up with AdHoc, when it was Ric and Emilie and a well intentioned website. Luke lives in Brooklyn with his family. He is from Austin, TX but do not ask him where the good tacos are. He doesn't know anymore.
🎯 Current focus
I get to work on exciting things in the technology space, so I find myself thinking about the notion of "hype" a lot. Whether it's good or bad, it's one of those things that moves markets and defies sense. Novelty, belonging, and all sorts of very human feelings get mashed together with economic guesswork. Tactics like drops and collabs that manufacture scarcity, high touch community building, and all kinds of social proof have been absorbed into the mainstream. The replacements all seem extremely and inherently low scale, for now. But that's always how it starts.
🤖 If someone trained an AI on my text outputs, would I be able to tell?
One thing that’s been on my mind is if someone trained an AI on my text outputs, would I be able to tell? I've been setting aside some time each week to review and organize work I did, earlier in my career. It's not worthy of being called an "archive," by any stretch. It's more of a retroactive journaling exercise. Some of what I find is genuinely intriguing and makes me worry I've gotten dull over time. Some of it is cringey in the non-fashionable way. Some of it was obviously tuned to the taste of a collaborator, boss, or client in a way that makes it feel like it's not mine – a bit like the .biz version of karaoke. With so much of my explicit output reflecting the audience I was writing for more than myself, I have a hunch things could get soupy. So to answer my own question: I'm not sure, but I have a hunch I'll get to find out soon.
🪐 Gustav Holst's "The Planets”
It's been fun to listen to composer Gustav Holst's "The Planets," while my daughter is learning about the planets.
🍕 Toddler party planning
We are planning my daughter's birthday party. It's a curation exercise that involves trying to extrapolate what other toddlers like and their parents would approve of. Cake and pizza are cheat codes.
🏔️ "The higher you go, the thinner the air."
I find myself going to great lengths to try and cultivate perspective; to find the forest vs just trees and all that. I use this phrase to remind myself that disconnection leads to bad decisions. Theory describes reality, but it's not real. I find a lot of value "in the trees" and a lot less in pretending to be purely objective angels who hover above history.
There is a lot of Mini Rodini in our house. We started off dressing our daughter in an extremely beige sort of style that swung between post-Victorian and low budget utopian. As her personality grows, we try to pick clothes that suit her. Right now, she is in her whimsical graphical print era.
🥴 The path to getting real weird
Even though I don't use social media as much anymore, I still think like I do. My memes are personal memes now. I find the offhanded little thoughts that I would expel via a tweet (Xweet?) and forget are sticking with me longer and stronger. Some of them prove to be useful shortcuts for memory or personal shorthand for complicated things. Not always a good thing! Perhaps this is the path to getting real weird.
Follow Luke on Instagram & Linkedin, check out his website here.