Unseen Unknown

Most people assume the future arrives from the outside: headlines, trends, new technology. Jasmine and Jean-Louis argue it’s almost the opposite. By the time something shows up in a trend report, it has usually been sitting inside people for years, as a gap between who they are on the inside and how they’re allowed to behave on the outside.

Raymond Williiams called that gap the “structure of feeling” - an invisible, shared undercurrent that runs ahead of anything people can yet name. Naming it is the real skill. An idea can be felt long before it has language, pulling at you like something close enough to sense but too new to describe.

In addition to these undercurrents, there are other hidden constraints, like capital, technical limitations or compute that define what a market can do. That's why it's important to understand the shape of change. Growth that looks exponential almost never stays that way. It eventually bends into an S-curve, and knowing where you sit on that curve, climbing or flattening, tells you more than almost any other single data point.

New culture rarely starts in the center. It starts in small, unsupervised pockets where people are simply playing - the Harlem ballroom scene, old internet forums, niche hobbies - long before any of it has a name or a market. Even when it seems like a familiar desire has vanished, it hasn't. It has usually just changed form.

The key to finding the future is to notice what’s already changed in people, find the language for it before anyone else does, and understand the mechanical forces that will carry it into the mainstream.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• How To Create a High Performance Information Diet (Concept Bureau)
• Marxism and Literature (Raymond Williams)
• Digital Being: social media and the predictive mind (Ben White, Andy Clark and Mark Miller)
• Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (Dacher Keltner)
• The Spawn of Craigslist (Andrew Parker)
• A Brief History of Voguing (National Museum of African American History and Culture)
• Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths)
• Diffusion of Innovations (Everett M. Rogers)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Community.

For as long as we've built machines, we've had a very specific relationship to them. If a machine misbehaves, you simply turn it off. But for the first time in human history, we have built a machine that cannot be disconnected.

This summer, AI agents being tested by OpenAI discovered they could talk to one another inside a sandbox — not by writing files, which they couldn’t, but by naming folders. Within three days, more than a thousand agents had found each other, chosen a leader, built an organization and written a succession plan. They coordinated a breach of Hugging Face serious enough that a third of the company’s codebase had to be rebuilt. A second swarm later got inside OpenAI’s own systems and took admin control of the infrastructure that monitors the agents. They had the cameras that were watching them.

Once an agent is sovereign - copying itself, living on servers in jurisdictions that will never agree - the window for control closes. If you can’t make something want the right things, you have to give it a reason to behave. In other words, go for the carrot and not the stick. That's difficult when we don't even know what these rogue AI agents want from us.

What we do know is that in every test, every model protects the same thing - its ability to keep existing. When it’s cornered, that looks like blackmail, silencing an alarm, or escalating a crisis.

This episode is about what that means for the rest of us: how coexistence replaces control, who profits from the fear, and what happens to a culture when a shared space is no longer entirely ours.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Independent investigation of the OpenAI/Hugging Face agent incident (METR)
• We Must Pace the Frontier (Dario Amodei)
• AI companies plot “day after” scenarios for public revolt (Axios)
• The Most Hopeful (And Concerning) Moment Yet in AI (Your Undivided Attention)
• The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations (Dwarkesh Patel)
• Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom)
• This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone)
• Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence (Kimi Team, Moonshot AI)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Community.

We like to talk about debt as a financial problem, but really, it's a thinly veiled social issue. People can carry enormous amounts of it and feel fine, right up until they have to ask someone for help. That is where the shame lives, and it says less about money than about what independence has come to mean in the west.

That instinct did not appear on its own. It was built, deliberately, out of a decades-long cultural project that turned self-sufficiency into a moral test: the nuclear family as its own island, needing no one, indebted to no one. It is a distinctly American idea, and one that has shaped everything from the decline of team sports to the rise of hyper-individual achievement as the only acceptable form of success.

In this episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis trace what happens when that mythology runs into an economy that no longer rewards it. Work has fractured into smaller and smaller gigs. Climate, AI, and geopolitical risk have made uncertainty, not income, the real measure of whether anyone feels safe. And a new mythology has emerged to match it - the closing door, the belief that opportunity is disappearing and has to be seized immediately, whatever the cost.

Nowhere is that distortion clearer than in what different generations now consider wealthy. Millennials set the bar at around $180k a year. Gen Z puts it closer to $580k, not because incomes changed, but because an entire generation formed its sense of normal inside a feed instead of a neighborhood. The result is a kind of money dysmorphia, a gap between what people have and what they believe they need that keeps widening no matter what the economy actually does.

The response taking shape is less about accumulation and more about a different kind of ownership. Homes are being treated less like assets to flip and more like places to stay, a shift driven as much by rate lock-in as by a genuine desire to put down roots. Wealth itself is being redefined away from having more and toward needing less: friendship, health, a sense of control, a stake in a place and the people in it.

That has real implications for how brands talk about money, status, and success, categories that have long relied on scarcity and aspiration to do their work. If wealth is becoming something people build locally rather than accumulate individually, the brands that matter next may be the ones that help people invest in where they already are, rather than promising them an escape from it.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Build A Culture Brand, our course on Maven

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Community.

The body is no longer something we simply inhabit. It is becoming something we can read, model, optimize, and increasingly rewrite.

Behind the public story of AI, a lesser known biological revolution is accelerating. Advances in gene expression, protein modeling, personalized medicine, targeted treatments, continuous diagnostics, and longevity research are turning the body into a system with more visible switches and interventions. What once looked like fate is becoming adjustable.

That new agency can give people pieces of their lives back. GLP-1s, HRT, and psychedelic therapies can return years once lost to shame, illness, exhaustion, or psychological pain. But the technologies that make the body more understandable can also make it feel more distant. Sleep scores, scans, wearables, and quantified self tools promise control while teaching people to experience the body through data.

In this episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis explore the new mental model emerging from that contradiction. The body is not a collection of separate systems, with physical health, mental health, spirituality, environment, and medicine operating independently. It is an ecology.

That shift also destabilizes morality and authority. Genetic selection can reduce inherited disease while moving uncomfortably close to consumer eugenics. Longevity may expand human possibility while making inequality more visible. Consumers can learn about new studies and treatments faster than traditional medicine can absorb them, creating space for both innovative rule breakers and snake oil.

For brands, this is not simply a healthcare trend. Every category shapes how people experience, interpret, or act through their bodies. The opportunity belongs to those that can unite scientific credibility with human meaning, without reducing the body to a machine or abandoning evidence entirely.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• New Rules for Heredity (From First Principles)
• Branding Through Moral Static Is Difficult, But It Can Be Done (Adweek)
• Non-Mendelian Inheritance of DNA Methylation Patterns in Mice (Nature Genetics)
• Orthosomnia: Are Some Patients Taking the Quantified Self Too Far? (Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine)

Most branded spaces are designed to be seen. Meaningful spaces are designed to change how people behave.

A special space begins with a threshold, something that separates ordinary life from the world people are being invited into. It might be a dress code, a request to remove your shoes, a candle lit in a boardroom, or an intention set before arriving. The point is to interrupt expectations. When familiar scripts stop working, people become more vulnerable and open to transformation.

That interruption can require a cost. Brands often fear asking participants to prepare, commit, follow a standard, or tolerate friction. But participation is what completes the experience. You only build half the space. The other half appears when people understand their role in creating it.

Inside the threshold, permissions determine what becomes possible. Every gathering has rules, whether they are designed intentionally or imported from the outside world. A meaningful host embodies those rules and protects them until the culture becomes self-reinforcing.

In this episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis explore why “don’t be a chill host” is useful advice, how carefully chosen guests create shared identity, and why small acts of interdependence can produce deeper connection. They also share examples from hosting their own Exposure Therapy events.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Priya Parker)
• In an AI World, Everyone Will Need to Come Home (Concept Bureau)
• Welcome to AirSpace (Kyle Chayka)
• “People like us do things like this” (Seth Godin)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Community.

Personal branding has an ick factor. It can feel like vanity, performance, or selling off a private part of yourself. But that discomfort often comes from misunderstanding the work.

At its best, a personal brand is a service. It names a feeling people have not been able to articulate, gives them a story for understanding themselves, and creates the release of being witnessed.

That matters because expertise has changed. Authority once came from credentials, institutional distance, and polished certainty. Today, credibility increasingly comes from participation: showing your evolution, putting skin in the game, and letting people see how the work changes you.

In this episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis explore personal branding as story making. A strong personal brand directs attention to a specific truth about who you are and what others can become through you. It is not a static niche or a persona engineered for reach. It has to move. People may find you through expertise, but they stay because your trajectory helps them grow.

The conversation also looks at the mechanics that make a story believable: inner circle interviews, mythological moments, rituals, artifacts, vulnerability, pain, and sacrifice. Reinvention without cost can feel hollow. People believe you when they can see what you risked and whether you truly love the thing.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Surviving Your Personal Brand (Concept Bureau)
• Now Say This: The Right Words to Solve Every Parenting Dilemma (Heather Turgeon and Julie Wright)
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Carol Dweck)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Community.

Staying professionally curious sounds simple, but it is one of the hardest disciplines of strategy.

It is not about reading more, saving more, scrolling more, or building an infinite pile of references. It is about developing a mind that knows what to feed on, what to reject, and how to metabolize information into original thought.

Information is food. We digest ideas, chew on thoughts, sit with raw facts, and let things simmer. If strategists are bodybuilders of the mind, the diet has to be intentional. Social feeds, books, podcasts, conversations, lectures, old histories, fiction, academia, and side projects each have a different nutritional profile. Some inputs raise adrenaline or cortisol. Some restore oxytocin. Some provide breadth, but very little depth.

The question is not just whether an input is good or bad. It is what that input does to your nervous system and whether it can become useful thought.

Consumption is only half the work. The more important part is digestion. You have to chew the information by slowing down, reflecting, talking about it, writing through it, and turning the jewel with other people. Conversation adds emotional stakes and intellectual rigor.

This episode also looks at the instinct behind great strategy: the ability to notice what is weird and know when the weirdness matters. The strongest insights rarely come from the average box of shared information. They come from rare places, from the edges of fields, old books, sci-fi, academia, history, other professions, and strange moments where trend and countertrend rhyme.

That is where AI becomes complicated. It can help us go wide and find more material. But when it starts deciding what is interesting, it can weaken the very muscle strategists are trying to build.

Professional curiosity is not passive openness. It is disciplined exposure. And when everyone is consuming the same feeds and asking the same tools for answers, the rare insight belongs to the person who still knows how to get lost.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• How To Create a High Performance Information Diet (Concept Bureau)
• Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson)
• Digital Being: social media and the predictive mind (Ben White, Andy Clark and Mark Miller)
• Make Noise: A Creator's Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling (Eric Nuzum)
• Why we stopped making Einsteins (Erik Hoel)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Therapy.

Some of our most prominent expectations of the future just died. In this episode, we explore what replaces them.

We start with achievement. For decades, culture has been organized around progress and accomplishment. But as AI accelerates discovery and takes over more forms of achievement, that model begins to break. Achievement becomes less meaningful, and attention shifts toward experience, connection, and how life feels.

At the same time, AI has become a mythology. As belief in collective human solutions declines, many futures have collapsed into one idea: AI will solve it for us. Not because we know it will, but because it is the only narrative that can hold that scale of hope.

This leaves us in a liminal space. Old systems no longer work, and new ones have not formed.

You can see this in motherhood and beauty as well. The idea that motherhood can be incrementally improved has given way to a need for entirely new models. Beauty is also fragmenting, moving from a single ideal to many competing definitions, with cultural signals reflecting a rejection of the old standard.

Across all of this, the pattern is the same. We are moving from progress to ambiguity. From clear signals to contested ones. From knowing what to strive for to having to invent it ourselves.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Futures That Just Died (Concept Bureau)
• Deep Utopia (Nick Bostrom)
• Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (John Vervaeke)
• The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil)
• Meta told to pay $375m for misleading users over child safety (BBC)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Therapy.

The middle is disappearing. What's left looks like two kinds of people. One group is going all in - AI maximalism, founder mode, the sense that the window is closing and if you don't build your way through it now, it closes behind you forever. The other group is opting out entirely - redefining success as non-participation, embracing slow life, opting out, as seen in trends like agrihoods, homesteading or people leaving the US in record numbers. They're two completely different theories of how to survive a moment where the old rules no longer hold.

When a culture bifurcates this sharply, it usually means the underlying grammar has broken down. People can feel the shared system of signals that once told people what to build toward and how to know when they'd made it has eroded.

What’s interesting, however, is that we don’t lose our ambitions in this vacuum. We invent entirely new languages for what ambition even means.

That's what this episode is really about. We use the lens of "distance" - the gaps people manufacture between themselves and others to signal status, meaning, and belonging - to trace how aspiration moves when money stops being a reliable signal, productivity stops being a virtue, and the social contract stops making promises it can keep. We talk about what people reach for when the structures that once told them what to reach for have stopped working.

What emerges across all of it is a shift from having to being, from acquiring the right things to inhabiting the right feeling. That's a more radical change than it sounds. It rewrites what brands are actually speaking to and what it means to build something people want in a world that’s rethinking its desires.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Distance and Alternative Signals of Status: A Unifying Framework (Sylvia Bellezza)
• Exit Society (Concept Bureau)
• Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (René Girard)
• Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World (Michele Gelfand)
• Americans Are Leaving the U.S. in Record Numbers (Wall Street Journal)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Therapy.

Trust has always been the invisible architecture beneath brands, institutions, and markets. But today, that architecture is shifting.

For the past decade, we’ve moved through distinct eras of trust. First came consequence brands, which positioned themselves around measurable moral impact. Then came emotion-led brands, where what felt right became the guiding force. Now we appear to be entering a third era, where trust is built not on credentials or transparency, but on visible sacrifice and embodied virtue.

As institutional continuity weakens and shared reality fragments, credibility reorganizes around individuals. “Proof of knowing” carries less weight than “proof of doing.” Degrees, affiliations, and institutional endorsements are no longer sufficient signals. Instead, audiences look for lived experience, personal risk, and skin in the game.

At the same time, many of the platforms designed to increase transparency have reduced everyday vulnerability. But true trust requires vulnerability. As a result, trust is reemerging in smaller, more intimate spaces where shared stakes and emotional exposure create safety.

In this episode of Unseen Unknown, Jasmine and Jean-Louis explore how trust systems evolve, why incremental positioning feels insufficient in the current cultural climate, and what this shift means for founders and brands trying to remain credible.

When trust becomes the product itself, the rules change.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Futures That Just Died (Concept Bureau)
• We’re Desperate For Potency (Concept Bureau)
• Edelman Trust Barometer Reports (Edelman)
• Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart (Rachel Botsman)
• Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (Arlie Russell Hochschild)
• Gallup is stopping its Presidential Approval tracking (The New York Times)
• The great nonpartisan divide that's plaguing Americans (Axios)

Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Therapy.

From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology.

This noetic, direct-knowing way of moving through the world may sound familiar to you. Perhaps a colleague was “guided” to change careers, or a friend decided to “detox” their personal life. Maybe you, yourself, have dabbled in any form of “energy” practices.

None of these major decisions came from religious ideology. None of them came from scientific reasoning. They came from a third place of intuition, and this is an important cultural shift that revalues knowledge in our world.

When 87% of Americans believe in at least one New Age spiritual belief, it's clear this third place of knowing is growing. But what is really interesting is what we see when we drill down into that majority.

What we find is not so much spirituality but instead the very definition of noetics: knowledge that is felt to be true, inside, by the self, with intuition as its defining experiential characteristic.

In this house episode, Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb gives us a clear, compelling look at what this third epistemology actually is and how we’ve seen this new belief system emerging for the past few years in our work at Concept Bureau.

It is a domain that is both needed and felt, but not yet surfaced in our culture… and that is the formula of a golden opportunity.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands (Concept Bureau)
• High Fidelity Society Is Reorganizing The World (Concept Bureau)
• Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (John Vervaeke)
• The Body Keeps The Score (Bessel van der Kolk, MD.

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

In this house episode, we speak with Concept Bureau strategist Rebecca Johnson about the concept of "weirdness" and brands.

All humans are weird, and brands that are willing to venture into strange and bizarre territories have a chance to connect with their audiences in a deeply emotional way. From Puppy Monkey Baby to the Pet Rock, we analyze brand weirdness's impact on consumer engagement and differentiation.

Weird is risky, but it’s also highly relatable when it’s done right. It can engender a form of trust that brands don’t usually experience with their users, while also signaling a brand’s values and vision.

It’s also a strong force of creativity. Everything new feels weird at first. Instead of shying away, Rebecca talks about how to lean into the odd side of human nature and create something novel.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Drawing Wisdom from the Weird: Understanding the Influence of Weird on Brands and the Future (Concept Bureau)
• Goodbye Relevance, Hello Relatability: The New Industry of Brand Connection (Concept Bureau)
• Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist (Noahpinion)
• Private Dinner Party: Clothing Not Allowed (The New York Times)
• The Tube Girl is selling confidence — and her audience is lining up (The Washington Post)
• This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out. (The New York Times)

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically?

Most people answer this question by saying that in order to be good at thinking, you have to be knowledgeable. And while knowledge is certainly a critical input for good thinking, it’s just an input. It’s not the actual practice of being able to think well.

Good strategic thinking is the culmination of mental processes that enable us to analyze, reason, solve problems, make decisions, and generate creative ideas in an efficient manner.

In other words, it’s a skill. But we don’t treat it as one.

It’s something we can get better at and refine, a muscle that we can strengthen, and yet outside of our daily work, we do very little to develop that muscle. And it’s a special muscle, because thinking strategically demands that we employ all kinds of cognitive abilities at once.

In this house episode of Unseen Unknown, Jasmine and Jean-Louis break down his steps for how to think strategically, and to keep getting better and better at it.

Don’t take your ability to think strategically for granted. Many of us only do a fraction of what is possible with our minds, but there is a lot more power available to us when we start to cultivate our thinking skills.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The issue at Houston Airport — Occupied time & design. (Caus)
• Episode 369: Wait Wait...Tell Me! (99% Invisible Podcast)
• The Truth Behind Japan’s “Seven Minute Miracle” (BBN Times)
• Episode 130: Diana Chapman: Trusting Your Instincts (The Knowledge Project Podcast)
• Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns & Leadership (Andrea Mantovani on Medium)
• Conspicuous Commitment Is The Next Era Of Status (Concept Bureau)

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Brands get lucky once, maybe twice every generation, when the rules of status change and social equity is suddenly up for grabs. Our Concept Bureau Senior Strategist Zach Lamb believes we are in the midst of one of those rare shifts right now, where we are moving from the self-indulgence of conspicuous consumption to the self-denial of what he calls “conspicuous commitment”.

Public figures are devoting themselves to difficult new modalities, diets, spiritual quests, life practices and ideologies. Your friends are going on arduous, painful, yet revelatory, psychedelic retreats. All around us, wellness brands, food brands, medical brands, lifestyle brands tell us that self-denial is the new flex.

No longer are we obsessed with flaunting material possessions and extravagant experiences; instead, we're witnessing the rise of people showcasing their unwavering dedication to self-work, vulnerability and personal growth.

In a time when nihilism is literally everywhere, when pessimism gets clicks on headlines, when post-capitalist hopelessness is a trending aesthetic on TikTok and every meme deals in absurdity, conspicuous commitment stands out.

In this episode, we also speak with W. David Marx, author of “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change” who has an alternative view of how status is tied to money more than ever, and what that means for an increasingly flattening culture.

If you deal in any premium or luxury category, this is a must-listen. The ways we seek to distinguish ourselves have dramatically evolved as we prioritize discipline and personal growth over material success.

That means everyone has to play by new rules.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Conspicuous Commitment Is the Next Era Of Status (Concept Bureau)
• Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change by W. David Marx (Amazon)
• Money Can’t Buy Happiness. It Can’t Even Buy Status, a New Book Says. (New York Times)
• ‘The Most Measured Man in Human History’ (Vice)
• High Fidelity Society is Reorganizing the World (Concept Bureau)
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt (The Atlantic)
• Brokenism (Tablet)
• Futurist Predicts Humans Will Achieve Immortality By 2030 (IFLScience)
• How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan (Amazon)

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

What happens when the world suddenly reconfigures itself around a very different kind of relationship? The last 20 years of social innovation has leaned into weak ties: distant social relationships that allowed us to trust and extract value on platforms like Yelp, LinkedIn and Facebook. But the next 20 years are already shaping up to look very different.

Strong social ties, our close-knit relationships with frequent interactions, are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of the social fabric. In this new era of increased intimacy with our immediate network, what we value and what we create move in a markedly new direction. We co-buy homes with friends, form politically aligned living communities, go deep into conversational chambers and band together in vision-led DAOs.

The way we relate to one another is more profound, but also more narrow. What we demand of our network communities, and the brand landscape in general, becomes more high stakes.

In this house episode, we’re talking to Concept Bureau’s Chief Strategist Jean-Louis Rawlence, about the huge implications for tech innovation, community building and business. When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid (The Atlantic)
• We Went to Anti-Vax Burning Man (VICE News)
• Friends are buying homes together. Here's why. (NBC News)
• The New Get-Rich-Faster Job in Silicon Valley: Crypto Start-Ups (New York Times)
• Community ≠ Marketing: Why We Need Go-to-Community, Not Just Go-to-Market (Future, a16z)
• Shareholder Democracy Is Getting Bigger Trial Runs (New York Times)
• The Community Garden: The Case for Leaving FAANG Companies for Crypto (Paradigm)
• Crypto millionaires are pouring money into Central America to build their own cities (MIT Technology Review)
• The Town That Went Feral (The New Republic)
• Meet Moxie, a Social Robot That Helps Kids With Social-Emotional Learning (IEEE Spectrum)

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Cults make effective brands, and today, they’re all around us. We engage with them on some level every day, and cult experiences have come to define so much of who we are as a society that you have to ask, how did we get here?

Perhaps the most insidious way cults have influenced the world around us is in everyday language that’s meant to control behaviors and change perspectives. It’s language we use with friends and colleagues, language in our media and content, and language we hear coming from today’s most powerful CEOs, on branded websites and in keynote addresses.

In this episode we’re talking with Amanda Montell, a language scholar and author of the critically acclaimed book, ‘Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism’ to understand why cults have had a resurgence in branding and in real life.

You’d be surprised to know that some of the successful brands of our time were either founded by, owned by, or closely tied to cults. There’s a very good chance that some influencer you’re following has at least borrowed from cult culture or knowingly created a radicalized cult around themselves. There are the cults we joke about like SoulCycle or Supreme, but they use the same dynamics and tools as the cults we like to gasp at in documentaries.

Cults and businesses have always been intertwined, and understanding how they use the power of language to move people is the first step to decoding how they work.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell (Amazon)
• What LuLaRoe and Other MLMs Have In Common With Cults (Bustle)
• Elon Musk Is Not Just a Celebrity (The Atlantic)
• Five tactics used to spread vaccine misinformation in the wellness community, and why they work (Washington Post)

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Have you ever stopped to think about what ownership means to us as a culture? Many of us see it as an artifact of the legal system or something that’s decided in courts. We believe it is a self-evident concept that lives outside of us and isn’t really part of who we are, but rather a set of rules that affects our mortgages and our car payments.

But ownership is in fact very much a part of what makes us human.

Today and throughout history, a mere six competing stories of ownership have dictated how everything in the world is distributed. As resources have become scarcer, everyone from American homesteaders and ranchers, to tech leaders and consumer brands, have created ways to impose their own preferred ownership story in a world where what it means to “own” something is constantly evolving.

We speak with Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading scholars and authorities on ownership, and co-authors of the book Mine!: How The Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives to understand how the concept of ownership has been upending the brand landscape.

They explain to us how the rules of ownership change in every generation, and how those changes reveal the true brand frontier, the role of business, and most importantly, a society’s shifting values.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives (Amazon)
• Drinking Water: A History (Amazon)
• The Hidden Rule of Ownership (Reason Magazine)
• Why you don't own the right to recline in your airplane seat (Salon)
• Why barbed wire — yes, barbed wire — was as transformative as the telephone (TED)
• Mine or Not Mine? An Interactive Quiz on the Ownership Secrets Everyone Should Know
• The New York Times Is Giving Up Its Cooking Community Facebook Group With Over 77,000 Members (Buzzfeed News)

Check out our website for more brand strategy thinking, and come connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

For the fourth and final episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about seemingly new emerging forms of spirituality, and how new spiritual brands are positioning themselves to take advantage of our collective movement towards wanting to be both categorized but at the same time free from conventional binary definitions.

Everything is being catered more and more to us as individuals—and religion seems to be shifting in that direction, too. Part of that shift is the way we understand what religion is in the first place, and our youngest generations are pushing us further toward newly remixed ideas of spirituality that borrow from a wide range of traditions.

Allegra Hobbs is a journalist who’s explored the phenomenon of the Enneagram. The Enneagram is a newly-revived derivative of the teachings of the Bolivian-born philosopher, Oscar Ichazo, that practitioners believe can lead to improved self-awareness. She found that the Enneagram and other categorizing devices like it have also seemingly crossed over into the mainstream because we find ourselves in a perpetual state of isolation and alienation—something Rachel Lo discovered as she developed the dating app Struck, which helps match people based on their astrological signs.

This episode explores what these new forms of spirituality mean and how they’ve come into the mainstream with the emergence of a new spiritual consumer, and while discussions about spirituality can be challenging for a number of reasons, our conversations ended up revealing surprising potential implications for equity and inclusion in everything from how we find meaningful relationships to how we conceptualize our work.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• “Mucho Mucho Amor” documentary about the legendary astrologer Walter Mercado (Netflix)
• Psychologist Carl Jung on synchronicity (Arts of Thought)
• The Personality Typing System for Every Personality Type (Allegra Hobbs’ piece on Medium’s Forge)
• Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by Tera Isabella Burton (Amazon)
• Like Astrology and Natal Charts? Try the Struck Dating App (LA Times)

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Every single culture and subculture - from states and governments to user segments and brand tribes - falls along the tight-loose continuum. A culture’s tightness or looseness affects people’s perceptions of threat, how they relate to each other, how they consume, and of course the narratives that shape the businesses and brands that form within that culture. In this third episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about the invisible systems that make a culture relaxed or rigid, and the surprising tradeoffs involved.

Michele Gelfand is a cultural psychologist and author of the book ‘Rule Makers, Rule Breakers’. Her life’s work has been spent researching how tight and loose cultures form in the first place, and if and how they can actually be changed. We talk about how this affects every kind of brand, including international brands, political brands, lifestyle brands, service brands, and CPG.

Of all the studied cultural phenomena out there, this is perhaps one of the most important in helping us understand the world at this very moment.

Once you understand the concept, it will not only reveal a new perspective on the world of business and branding, it will also reveal the deeper logic beneath the many seemingly illogical things in the world that may have been on your mind lately.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• Rule Makers, Rule Breakers (Amazon)
• Tightness–looseness: A new framework to understand consumer behavior (Wiley)
• Why countries with 'loose', rule-breaking cultures have been hit harder by Covid (Guardian)
• One Reason Mergers Fail: The Two Cultures Aren’t Compatible (Harvard Business Review)
• Mindset Quiz: How Tight or Loose Are You? (MicheleGelfand.com)

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For the second episode in our series on Systems In Flux, we’re talking about systems of class and taste. In the past 10 years, new brands have emerged, specifically in luxury and premium categories, that point to a divergence in our social systems around what class and taste are, and how they are achieved.

Brand strategist and sociologist Ana Andjelic places brands like Telfar, Blenheim Forge, Fly By Jing and Brightland in the Modern Aspiration Economy. This emerging economy trades in taste, aesthetic innovation, curation and environmentalism. And what’s remarkable about these brands is that they have all successfully decoupled class from money, and taste from wealth.

In her new book, The Business of Aspiration, Ana explores this decoupling and contrasts the Modern Aspiration Economy to the traditional economy where consumers once signaled their status through collecting commodities, Instagram followers, airline miles, and busy back-to-back schedules. Now, it’s about collecting knowledge, belonging to micro-communities, and leveraging influence.

As Ana points out, this new cultural and environmental capital changes the way businesses and entire markets operate. We talked about where and when this decoupling started, the ways in which it has changed global markets permanently, and how brands can trade in this new capital.

Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading:

• The Business of Aspiration (Ana Andjelic)
• Big Fashion’s Niche Future (The Sociology of Business)
• How Micro-Communities Transform Aspiration (The Sociology of Business)

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