An Interview With Emily Segal

“nodal points,” the idea that important people, places, ideas, references etc. have shaped the direction of my life and how I see myself

Cayce Pollard as the positive archetype for how to navigate volatility. So by intensely tuning oneself in to subjective responses to things, you can cut through huge amounts of noise and volatility. Even though I couldn’t admit that that’s what I was doing in a lot of trend forecasting settings, that is really what my experience of it was. People w

I felt like I wasn’t being true to myself, basically, and that was the most painful part. I was so far down the rabbit hole of doing something I didn’t believe in and it was my whole life. Whereas with consulting, you’re always in and out. So even if something’s really whack, it ends. If it’s your job, it never ends.

I felt like there was still a lot of room to create a consulting practice that was not just a coldblooded commercial thing, but had an intellectual curiosity to it, and that produced reports that were relevant to a general public, not just to clients. To use consulting as an information-seeking and research process, but not necessarily an art proje

It’s also something that I encourage people to investigate with their own practices. There’s so much that you can do beyond just making your thing. You can also work on the whole system of getting that thing and others like it out into the world. There’s a lot of room for expansion and creativity there. I think the coolest projects look at the whol