I’m proud to say that Meeting my Heroes is now published, brought to you by Odd Hours Media! It contains all 75+ of the newsletter posts (edited!) plus some bonus stories including one very special one that came together very close to press time. The photos (and some bonus photos) are included, too – in color!

Meeting my Heroes is a lot of things, but one clear intent was a way for me to say thank you to all the folks who have shaped me, and to share their collected wisdom with those who know me.

If you’ve enjoyed the newsletter, I think you’ll really like the paperback (or ebook) versions! I’ve also posted a web site at meetingmyheroes.com.

On telling the story you want and need to tell

When I started at Ipsos I was given a creative brief. “Ipsos is thought of as a traditional, somewhat boring research firm. Newer firms are winning our business from us. But the good news is that we actually are quite forward-thinking, so how can we tell that story?”

As mentioned, around this time I read a book by Chuck Klosterman that talked about this idea of “thinking about the present as if were the past.”

Because I had a survey at my disposal where I could ask 1,000 people a day essentially anything I wanted to, I had a way to pivot this slightly.

On finding inspiration and making things

My dad’s advice to… really to anyone, was to read. More importantly, he said, don’t just read your favorite kinds of books. Read books far and wide that will challenge you and inspire your curiosity and creativity. He was right and I’ve applied that time and again. Here’s a story of one of those books and the impact.
I read a book of short essays by Chuck Klosterman called “But What if We’re Wrong.” The premise was, what if we think about the present as if it were the past. 100 or 500 years from now, what ideas from our current era will still matter, or be covered in the history books. For instance, not even all of the most popular movies or music will still be talked about.
The idea really struck me, and I realized it was an interesting way to think not just about the past but about the future. All I had to do is flip it around. If you think about the future, what is something you’re going to wish you had tracking data on. (Tracking data is when you ask the same question over time and see how the responses change.) It’s a way to measure trends, which is a big part of what we do at Ipsos.
This little seed of an idea became the foundation for how we told stories about Ipsos and the work we do. It lead to the Q&A series. I created my own grad school program by interviewing my new industry heroes, just like I had at AdAge and Livability before.
And the prompt about “what will you wish you had a trend line on” was the genesis of What the Future.
Since he was the inspiration for all of this, I had to interview Chuck Klosterman about the book to learn even more. It was one of the first pieces that ran on my short-lived Ipsos magazine, GenPop. In short, the future-pivot of the one Klosterman idea in this one set of essays shaped the next several years of my career.

Here’s the seminal GenPop interview:

In his latest work, best-selling author, journalist, and all-around interesting guy Chuck Klosterman asks a compelling question: “But What if We’re Wrong.” If we fast-forward 100 years or 500 years and look back at our present from the perspective of the future—what will still be important? What cultural figures will have stood the test of time. Who will be Rock and Roll’s Shakespeare? What medical treatments will seem as barbaric as “leaching” does now?
It’s a great question and made us think about the implications for consumer research. Can we challenge our assumptions as marketers and as researchers? Can we look just a little further ahead – maybe 5 years, not 100 – and think about what will matter then and reverse engineer products and services for that?

On the basics

I never thought I would be the parent of an athlete, let alone a coach. Of a travel team, no less. Likewise I never thought one of my all-time favorite WTF interviews would be from a professional trainer. And then I met Buddy Morris, virtually anyway although I still hope to meet up with him next time the Arizona Cardinals come play the Bears.

In the issue about Ryder Carroll, creator of the Bullet Journal, I talked a lot about the importance of habits and routines. Buddy Morris and I chatted about that, too.

I admittedly haven’t spent enough effort on my own health and fitness over the course of my life. I haven’t eaten well. Sports were never my thing, even when I did try.

In the back of my head, this newsletter could be a lot of things: A book. A podcast. A TED talk. This week I delivered part of it to an audience for the first time. The venue was perhaps unexpected. Or perhaps perfect.

I introduced Meeting my Heroes to… middle school career day.

It is, after all, the story of my career in many ways. So I told the kids versions of several of the stories here as I talked about what journalism is, its importance, how I practice it, and lessons I’ve learned along the way. All through the lens of these heroes.

I asked the kids who their heroes were for starters and got a lot of one-name stars: LeBron. Taylor. Mom. Jesus.

When I think about Almost Matt Almost Famous I often think about the role of the young journalist’s mom in his career and story arc. She dropped him off at concerts and picked him up afterward. And she let him go off on tour into the world generally referred to as a three-headed Cerberus where “rocknroll” is the most virtuous.

At one point in the movie his mom winds up on the phone with one of the band members her 15-year-old is touring with and tells him, “This is not some apron-wearing mother you're speaking with - I know all about your Valhalla of decadence and I shouldn't have let him go. He's not ready for your world of compromised values and diminished brain cells that you throw away like confetti. Am I speaking to you clearly?”

Now, my mom would not have cared for the Dead Milkmen had she listened. She wouldn’t have liked some of the words they said in their songs, nor that her son was listening to them. She was, and is, pretty strict about many things.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are the two Washington Post reporters credited with leading the investigation into the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon.

I have some mixed feelings about all of that.

On one hand, they inspired a lot of amazing journalism and journalists. On the other hand, a lot of journalists have since spent their careers trying to turn stories into the next ___gate. I’m not sure that’s always the best goal. There’s a difference in bringing light to problems in our institutions and letting the systems fix them vs. taking down the institutions.

A coworker recently made the analogy that the film about Watergate, All the President’s Men, was to Baby Boomer journalists as Almost Famous was to Millennial journalists. That’s an interesting analogy to me, especially and I think there’s something to the different kinds of inspiration these generations found.

Books are a gift. But author readings are an absolute treasure. Not only do the authors give you the book, but they often come to your town to read it with you, or sign it or talk about it, or all of the above. They’re as concerts are to records,  but usually way more intimate. They’re a great way to meet your heroes and learn from them directly. Assuming your heroes are a bunch of authors, I guess. (I will now have Moxy Früvous stuck in my head.) I’ve told some stories in longer form, like Orson Scott Card and Douglas Adams, but I’ll do these as a series of shorter vignettes.

One of the best classes I ever took was a high school English class focused on Short Stories. The teacher put together an amazing reading list of classics of the genre and introduced two sections worth of avid readers to Carver and Cheever and Shirley Jackson and one author who became a particular favorite for me, T. Coraghessan Boyle.

I loved his short fiction and his novels and he, like Mitch Albom to an extent, showed that good writing can take you in a lot of different directions. Not just that he could be serious or funny, but that he could write short fiction and long form. He could also write non-fiction and tell really compelling stories that might not have sounded like the kind of set-up that would lead to a good story. If there’s one theme that has often woven through his work it’s the fragility and importance of our climate and that of course resonated with my hippier high-school self and my futurism-leaning present.

I met him at, I think, a Border’s book store (checks notes, in September 2000) with my friend Liz who was also a fan. There were maybe 25 folks there?

On the power of creating and community and making “good nights…”

In the history of Twitter, two things stand out to me as the best uses of the platform. These are two instances of people who took advantage of its strengths and did something unique and special. Oddly, I know both dudes involved in these very different uses and both turned their use cases into books. The first is Andy Carvin, whom I’ve name-checked here before. He’s a friend from college, another of the amazing people who lived in Willard’s room 121 at some point. While working at NPR, he used Twitter to report on the mid-East uprising known as Arab Spring. Using the platform to find (and fact check!) on-the-ground sources, he quarterbacked coverage in real-time, and at great personal cost. You can read about it in his book, Distant Witness.  Andy probably merits his own post here, but I do find it odd to write about people I actually know well. He’s since gone on to do heroes work with one of the great challenges of our time: fighting disinformation, which I interviewed him about for What the Future.

But today I want to tell the story of the other guy, Dan Sinker. Dan is a Chicago journalist, muck raker, punk chronicler, zine publisher, educator, genre-bender, the Candle King of Kickstarter, and (and this is how I met him) dad. When Rahm Emanuel began his quest to be Chicago’s Mayor, Dan started a Twitter feed called @mayoremanuel. Except no one knew who was behind it at the time. It chronicled a parallel universe to Rahm’s actual campaign. There were amazing characters developed like a campaign sidekick duck named Quaxelrod (a nod to Rahm advisor David Axelrod). There were otherworldly plot arcs. People around town, including Rahm himself, speculated about who was behind it, but everyone was talking about the feed and had alerts set up on their phones to let them know when new posts dropped.

It’s hard to explain how amazingly epic this story was, and all done when Twitter still had its 140-character limit. It made a small corner of the world a better place for a brief moment in time.

On lessons learned by the those leading the charge

Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution in his book “Metropolitan Revolution,” talks about Mayors as people who get stuff done. They have to, he says, because they are the front line. If they don’t get the trash picked up, keep the streets safe, and plow the snow, they’re done. That last one led to the first (and only) female mayor in Chicago’s history, Jane Byrne. Really.

During my time at Livability I had the opportunity to meet and/or interview many mayors of cities of all sizes. They were all thoughtful and pragmatic. They came from cities in red states and blue states. Their focus, however was on making their cities great places to live. The building blocks of livability are a thing that there is largely bipartisan agreement on. I should know, I’ve been surveying about that for 10+ years now. Sure, they have to deal with politics, but the conversations were never political. They really did just focus on what needed to be done and how to do it.

Oddly the only one I remember turning me down was Oak Park’s! Looking back through those interviews I thought I’d pull out some favorite quotes and lesson and share a few stories of how I met a few of them.

On giving interesting people interesting challenges

This is the story of, among other things, how What the Future came to be. I’m telling you this on the day we release the 50^th issue somehow. The long and short is how much I owe Richard Florida.

Richard Florida and I are sitting at a bar, eating pizza. We’re in Toronto where he teaches at the University. Teaches is an understatement. He has his own institute. But for now, we’re eating and talking about cities and music, two of our favorite topics. I got extremely lucky and happened to be in town on a night when his family was already at his winter home in Miami and the class he was teaching was winding down so when I shot him a “hey, I’m going to be in town” dart he was actually available.

Richard Florida was once aptly described as “the closest an urbanist will ever get to being a household name.” He would beg to differ and suggest Jane Jacobs, one of his heroes and mentors, qualifies. But he is known for coining an idea of a “creative class” of people and their importance to cities. This idea helped spark a renaissance and remaking of many of the world’s cities large and small. He’s a big deal in many of the worlds I have worked in. I was first introduced to his work when I was writing about stats and demographics at Ad Age, and I then interviewed him for the blog I started there. Then again at Crain’s Chicago.

On the things we acquire and the connections we make.

As you’ve been reading, I like meeting the people behind the music, or writing or other kinds of makers. Between fandom and my job I’ve been able to make a lot of opportunities to do so. So far I’ve written about a lot of rock stars and other celebrities. But I have other kinds of heroes. Including some that will expose me for being an odd amalgam of nerdinesses. So this post is a bit of a confession about one of those spheres.

For a hot minute, the U.S. imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada (as of this writing). Whatever your politics, you likely agree that a policy like that should help U.S. businesses. But that’s not the only outcome. Take Dearborn Denim, a Chicago-based manufacturer of jeans and other apparel. It faces daily challenges in its quest as a small U.S.-based manufacturer: how to sell and market its products, how to deal with lulls or sudden rushes of orders, how to balance the desire to make new products with the need to stock classics and favorites, etc. They source most of their materials in the U.S. but it’s not easy. There aren’t many cotton mills left in the U.S. making denim. They’re able to source all their cotton denim domestically, but they import their stretch denim from… Mexico. It gives them a really small and tight supply chain. Until tariffs.

The tariffs were quickly rescinded for now, but in the meantime the company announced it would try to eat the cost increases as long as it could, cutting its tight margins so it could keep its promise to its customers of quality jeans, providing quality jobs at an affordable price.

This tale isn’t about meeting Wilco… yet. Although this story had to happen in order for that to happen (see meeting John Stirratt.) This is a story of transition, and home.

It’s early 2000. Twenty five years ago, today. I mentioned in the Steve Yahn/Ad Age story that my job was moving to New York. What I didn’t mention was that they wanted me to move with it. New York is a great place and I really loved visiting the city – on someone else’s dime. The handwriting was on the wall, so when I would go to NYC (almost monthly in this period) I’d always be thinking in the back of my head if I wanted to live there.

The answer was typically no, I didn’t. It was just more of everything… more expensive, more crowded, more dirty. Chicago also doesn’t lack for things to do. If you’re bored here, that’s on you. This is where I was making a life and home for myself.

Another factor was my photography. On the side, I was a young rock photographer and had achieved some success and was somewhat known in the community. In Chicago I was one of a handful of people shooting shows on a regular basis. The fact that Chicago had a scene so full of opportunity – so many bands, so many shows, so many special, unique experiences – and yet so few took advantage… Well, that played to my advantage.

When I think about the term, “Hero” it often is soundtracked by David Bowie. He is one of my top five favorite artists and “Heroes” is one of my top three favorite Bowie songs. DJ John Richards has been known to play 30-minute sets with different versions and covers.

Bowie was so creative, so inventive, so always willing to change course and yet his career also followed a discernible path.

Nothing was random, it was a constant evolution.

When my kids were young, they seemed to think that every song was written by David Bowie. Which is my fault. I played a lot of his songs for them as part of my ongoing efforts to teach them the ins and outs of rocknroll.

Elissa Slotkin is one of my few political heroes. As a member of the U.S. House Of Representatives she’s won in some very swingy districts in Michigan. As of today, she is Michigan’s newest United States Senator, having won as a Democrat against a well-funded opponent in a state that Trump carried. Before running for election, she worked in the CIA and Department of Defense, serving several tours in Iraq. She’s lived a life of public service, called to it after 9/11.

Her family also did a great but very different service to our nation: inventing the Ball Park Frank.

Lin Brehmer was the morning DJ on WXRT for most of my Chicago-living life. Like John on KEXP, he had a couple of mantras. One, that he was your best friend in the whole wide world. And two, that it’s great to be alive. And it was great when he was alive.

Lin Brehmer was a Chicago treasure. When he died in 2023, it seemed like every social feed in Chicago was filled with photos of one’s friends standing next to him. Because as he always said, he was everywhere. He was smiling in all of those photos. And it was genuine.

30 years ago we got a demo tape of Johnson by the Fat Lady Sings at the Art & Performance office. Several copies actually. And I think most of the editors picked it out of the pile and thought “Ok. It’s an Irish band with a song called Drunkard Logic. Intrigued.”

Several of us took it back to our dorms and apartments and popped the cassette in and gave it a listen. Turns out it was a really great album. It lived in my Walkman during the brutally cold winter of ’94.

Sadly it was the bands’ last. They didn’t break through in the U.S. and called it a day.

Never got to see them live, but my friend Sean I always joked that if they got back together we would have to get on a plane.

At the height of my photography career, I wanted to do something to give back. But also something to push myself. I didn’t know a lot about lighting. I’d never worked with an assistant. I’d never really done portraits. But hey, I’d taken *a* class and I knew a lot of people. So, largely inspired by Nick Tremulis and the Waltz I decided to combine all the things. I approached a local charity, Rock For Kids, which helped raise money to provide music education in Chicago public schools. It was pretty tied to Metro and WXRT (both of whom were photo clients of mine) and had an auction I had contributed prints to so I knew some folks there, too. I reached out and suggested I could photograph Chicago musicians in their favorite locations in the city and then we could do a calendar of the images. They were super enthusiastic and I got the green light. Now I just had to will this into existence.

Now I just needed 12 artists to agree. I started, of course, with Frank Orrall and did a really informal, natural-light shot of him in front of the Picasso statue downtown. It was a little awkward because a huge part of portrait photography isn’t photography at all, it’s working with people (known as “models” in the business). And I wasn’t good at that … yet?

I needed help. Chicago photographer John Shearer was a friend of mine and also shot at Metro and helped me cover all the shows at Tweeter, where I was also House Photographer. He graciously accepted my unpaid offer to assist on the photos. I explained he was basically going to be doing the lighting because while I now had lights, I didn’t have a ton of experience using them. He wanted to play around more too and thought this would be a fun project.

My friend and former colleague, Anne, has a newsletter featuring her writing and thoughts on creativity called Glisk* In a recent issue, she wrote about… me, and this newsletter. She wrote about how music can bend time. To me, that means how hearing music can put you in a time, or a place. My daughter Meredith talks with clarity about the first time she heard various songs. Where she was, what she was doing. All of this makes me think of… Blind Melon. All these years later I still remember this feeling. And the noise and the sweat.

One of the best shows I ever saw, and there are those who roll their eyes at this, was Blind Melon playing at Northwestern. My roommate freshman year was Jon R. (Side note, I have never lived with someone who wasn’t named Jo(h)n or Pam). Jon had gotten their CD for Christmas and we played it on repeat when he got back. So we were excited when they came to campus. We were right up front. The stage was less than a foot tall, and the ceilings were low so the band was right on top of us, rocking and sweating away in the tiny space.

It was still in heavy rotation in my room the next year, with a different Jon, Jon M. We would play it loud on Friday afternoons as we cleaned the room in advance of hosting parties under the disco ball of rm 121.

Hubert Sumlin was one of those people who never quite made the big time, household fame, but inspired a lot of people who did (and countless other who didn’t either). He was a blues guitarist. Played with the greats most notably as Howlin’ Wolf’s sideman, but also with Muddy Waters. He inspired Clapton and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones. “Hubert was an incisive yet delicate blues player,”Mick Jagger said in a statement when Sumlin died. “He had a really distinctive and original tone and was a wonderful foil for Howlin’ Wolf’s growling vocal style.” (Keith and Mick paid his funeral expenses.)

I met Sumlin a couple times. He played two benefits I worked on. One was the Waltz with Nick Tremulis. He was performing with David Johansen, himself a legend as the frontman for punk stalwarts, the New York Dolls, who later also had some solo hits under the name Buster Poindexter. Johansen was a big blues fan and that influenced his own music. But how these two hooked up I don’t really remember. What I do remember is how well they sounded together, and clearly appreciated each other as musicians and people.