No Free Lunches

Here's what we've been consuming.

Why We Don't Talk About Job Destruction (JCal from All In): "Zipline is delivering thousands upon thousands of packages in Dallas by drone as we speak. DoorDash and Amazon have their homemade drone systems ready to go. Waymo, Zoox, Tesla, WeRide, Pony, VW, and Uber are all in various stages of deployment for ride-sharing in the USA — with another two dozen firms hard at work outside our shores. Tens of millions of people deliver stuff and move folks around in the USA -- hundreds of millions globally. The majority of those jobs will be retired in 10 years. All of this has happened slowly, but we're entering the "all at once" moment.”

Pope Leo Takes On AI as a Potential Threat to Humanity (Wall Street Journal): “Over the past decade, many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful executives have flown to Rome to shape how the world’s largest Christian denomination thinks and speaks about their innovations. The leaders of Google, Microsoft, Cisco and other tech powerhouses have debated the philosophical and societal implications of increasingly intelligent machines with the Vatican, hoping to share the benefits of emerging technologies, win over the moral authority and potentially steer its influence over governments and policymakers.”

BNPL to factor in FICO scores (Axios): “Over 90 million Americans are expected to use BNPL for purchases this year, according to data from Capital One. And critics say existing credit scores paint an incomplete picture of an individual's ability to pay back loans. "These [BNPL-enhanced] scores provide lenders with greater visibility into consumers' repayment behaviors, enabling a more comprehensive view of their credit readiness which ultimately improves the lending experience," FICO said today. The big question: Will the credit profile of borrowers improve or deteriorate after BNPL loans are integrated?”

So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers (The Emerald Podcast): “The drive to create AI goes beyond narratives of ingenuity, progress, profit, or the creation of a more controllable, convenient world. Buried deep in this urge to tinker with animacy and sentience are core mythic drives — the longing for mystery, the want to live again in a world of great powers beyond our control, the longing for death, and ultimately, the unconscious longing for guidance and initiation. Traditionally, there was an initiatory process through which potentially world-altering knowledge was embodied slowly over time. And so… what needs to be done about ‘The AI question’ might bear much more of a resemblance to the guiding principles of ancient magic and mystery schools than it does to questions of scientific ethics.”

[BONUS] I spoke with The Agenda about travel trends and where tourism is headed. Stargazing, digital detoxes, ‘romancing’ getaways, mega concerts, forest bathing - we want to feel transformed and connected to something bigger than ourselves.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got on how to build my strategic mind came from the world’s #3 female poker player Maria Ho when she came to speak to us at Exposure Therapy:

"Treat everything like information."

Don’t get low on your losses.

Don’t get high on your wins.

Everything you do - right or wrong - is just information you can use to get better. Don't get personal about it and don't get subjective. The best poker players see every tiny bit of feedback from the table as another data point to update their mental models.

Strategists have to work in much the same way.

Make everything an input. Strip it of bias and emotion, and use it to fuel your understanding. And from that perspective, failing is no better or worse than winning.

The only way to make any of it matter is to treat it like information that you feed into the machine.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where I share my best original research that you won’t find in any of my public posts. Members say the research drops are like “Christmas morning” every month. I hand pick every person here. Apply to meet incredible thinkers and get better at your craft.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!

We are a culture surrounded by losses we haven’t yet processed. Things that are kind of dead but we won’t let them die completely.

So much so that we’ve had to create a whole new raft of words - like ghosting, breadcrumbing, blanding, airspaces, liminal spaces, requels and nostalgia bait - to hold what we refuse to bury. 

I’ve probably bought Sasha Sagan’s book For Small Creatures Such As We at least 20 times in my life for other people. It deals with the concept of endings and death rituals in a way that makes sense of the world and human behavior.

She tells us, “We pretend these rituals are for our dead, but they are for the living, for us.”

Her book has stayed with me because, as a digital native, I could see how unequipped we are to properly, decidedly mark the time something ends or dies. It is so critical to mark that moment. The rhythm of life demands it. 

We cannot make new things when our spaces are cluttered with infinite half-dead brands, platforms, trends, jokes, technologies, ideas and memories that steal endless little fragments of our attention.

We’re weighed down by purgatorial ghosts both in the digital world and the physical one. And now with AI, the ghosts are multiplying. Synthetic content floods Pinterest and Twitter, trained on old material and endlessly recombined with what came before. Our deceased loved ones are reanimated via AI texting agents and holograms. The dead don’t die. They just loop and echo, or even worse, become a template for something else. 

That’s making it harder to imagine and create. When nothing is allowed to end, nothing is allowed to transform.

There are a lot of reasons floating out there as to why so much of culture is effectively undead. Some say it’s the algorithm. Others say its mass accessibility and the death of subcultures. Historians like Will Durant might have said, at least for the US, it’s a clear sign of an empire in decline. All of them are probably right. 

But I also know that if all of our physical and digital ghosts were properly laid to rest and we were left with only the living artifacts of our world, we would almost certainly be reborn. 

This is a time of zombie-like memories and generative content, and the most radical act right now might be learning how to let things die.

And when I say die, what I really mean is letting them permanently end. Intentionally and deliberately. 

(Un)Dead Internet

The dead internet theory posits that the majority of content on the internet has been fake for a long time. If that sounds hyperbolic, try carefully scrolling through Pinterest or Twitter. It might not seem so crazy after you see how hard it is to find a real image or voice.

The viral emotional support kangaroo, a video that perfectly blends highly charged emotions with low-res patina, is a good symbol of what’s haunting us. It might be better to call it the undead internet theory because what characterizes all of this AI content isn’t that it’s lifeless. It’s the pervading sense that something artificial is animating things that shouldn’t be alive. 

In 2021, Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote for the Atlantic that the dead internet theory is “patently ridiculous” but also that “dead-internet people kind of have a point,” as evidenced by the co-opted i hate texting tweet trend of the time. The same ideas and trends are regurgitated over and over, and it's increasingly hard to find where something originated because we all keep blatantly stealing content from each other for engagement. We started copying ourselves way before AI started copying us. This was destined to happen.

Drew Austin perfectly describes how and why nothing ends:

You may call some of it simple nostalgia, but nostalgia’s real risk is that we take a quirk of the human brain and then platform it. 

A 2022 replication of a long-standing study on musical nostalgia found that listeners’ preferences for new music consistently peak at around 17 years old. Our musical tastes are shaped most deeply at that age and get locked in on social. We live in a prison of our own making, and the soundtrack keeps us stuck in mid- to late-adolescence. 

We have entire unicorn companies that have been zombified, functionally dead but still incorporated. Beyond Meat, once valued at over $10B+ is now barely a mid-sized company at about $287 million.

WeWork ($47B → $750M), Vice Media ($5.7B → $350M), and Bird ($3.8B → $100M) are others on the list. All of them overvalued during their hypecycles, but I bet their PR and investor decks will tell you they’re still culturally relevant. We’ll probably never have a formal tombstone for these companies. 

Myspace isn’t dead but it’s not alive either. Clubhouse’s carcass continues to twitch. Tumblr is making a comeback, but is it? Or is that headline itself also just another sleepwalking piece of content?

Of the 1.1 billion websites that are on the internet right now, only about 17% are actually active. On Facebook, deceased people with ongoing profiles are expected to outnumber the living by 2070. If you count Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to unleash an army of undead AI personas, that tipping point could happen even sooner. 

In the digital world, we fail to bury our deceased, and the seemingly living aren’t really alive.

I’ve been tempted to believe that perhaps all of this will force people to live more in the real world. It’s reasonable (blindly optimistic?) to imagine that a lonely, empty, undead internet would gently push people into the physical and face-to-face realm.

But we have some interesting challenges there, too.

Empty Funerals

I’ve witnessed the passing of a loved one and it’s been my experience that without spiritual or ritual context, death does not present its own innate magic. Despite how badly you need that magic to exist when you stand at their bedside, it does not miraculously appear. You must create it. You have to give the messy, fleshy, corporeality of death your own meaning, so that they can die and you can move on.

The sandwich generation of millennials needs this meaning more than anyone else right now, because the immense stress of raising children while transitioning parents is a lot harder to bear when it doesn’t ladder up to some greater purpose or beauty. Without it, there is no finality. 

What’s puzzling is that we’re also abandoning our traditional end of life rituals at the same time. “Direct cremation”, where the body is cremated with no funeral ceremony or mourners present has soared. About 41% of all US funeral consumers in 2021 chose direct cremation with no formal service. Less than half of people want a funeral when they die, and it’s not always because they have alternative plans like a virtual wake or a living funeral. 

But I don’t see any deathtech companies successfully building the kinds of rituals we need at scale. There are about 1,000 deathtech startups out there right now, and while many of them are doing a great job of removing the administrative hell of managing a dying parent’s estate, there aren’t any standouts in the “marking the ending” category.

The best we get are AIs that let us text dead relatives or play with their holograms, which are quite the opposite of that. 

It’s hard to overstate the fact that we’re not letting our family members properly die. We’re not saying goodbye at the funeral and we’re not saying goodbye to their digitized afterlives.

What is it going to feel like in 5 years when you can easily text your dead grandparents… but you don’t? It’ll be like ghosting a ghost. 

At this point, ghosting could be our new national pastime. We ghost (and are ghosted by) both the deceased and the living. Three out of four people have been ghosted by romantic partners. We’re ghosted by friends from college, children who’ve gone no-contact, recruiters that stopped returning emails, neighbors that moved away (did you know the average person moves at least 11 times in their life?) or… dead relatives.  

These unresolved endings, or “open loops” really tax the brain. One study found that lacking closure leads to greater regret, more intense emotion, and more frequent, intrusive replays of the situation in our minds. When someone disappears without closure, our minds keep cycling through the what-ifs and it prolongs the pain. You would think we’d know better than to forego the endings that life offers up to us. We need them so badly.

Our avoidance of difficult endings, whether it’s ghosting instead of honest goodbyes, skipping funerals, or hyper-nostalgia, might spare short-term discomfort, but the research suggests it creates identity confusion in the long run. 

That’s because we build identity through endings and transitions, finishing one chapter to begin another. But in a culture without marked endings, people drift through infinite selves, never shedding, only layering. You’re still kind of who you were at 15, and 22, and 30 and 45.

There’s a reason why new gym memberships peak in January, why people deep clean their houses in the spring, and why midlife crises happen at 40. We make big changes at the beginning of new years, new decades, and new seasons because we cross a threshold of time. What we’ve lost with our inability to let things end is the sanctity and significance of new beginnings. 

We’re leaving so much value on the table because we’ve forgotten how important death is to renewal. 

And it’s critical we get used to endings right now, because everything around us is about to start dying a lot faster.  

Do Not Resuscitate 

Any ideas we had about work and career, ideas of community and family and identity, of creativity and authorship and building - they’re passing and something new is coming in their place, and AI has put it all on rails. But we cannot fully realize the potential of what may be if we don’t find a way to properly honor and let go of what is leaving. 

Brands have long claimed to support transformation, but few ever create space for endings. If your users are stuck inside outdated perceptions of themselves, how might you help them mark the death of who they used to be? How might your product, campaign, or community offer a kind of funeral or permission to leave the past behind? 

Even brands themselves need to die sometimes. Not just rebrand or pivot, but die. Acknowledge that an era is over and let the next one begin with meaning. 

I hesitate to invoke the name Jaguar in a brand strategy newsletter, but they did exactly that. The marketing department caused a lot of hoopla, but they did what almost no brands do nowadays. They made it very clear that something old was dead. They’re transforming into an all-electric ultra-luxury brand and despite the turbulence, they stayed the course and their parent company posted its highest annual pre-tax profit in a decade with long waiting lists on upcoming models. They made that ending matter.

If we want to realize the full potential of what’s next - new kinds of brands, products and connection, new economies and new selves - we need to create space for those possibilities to live. And that means we have to let the old things die. Not disappear or fade, but die with intention and ceremony. 

Endings can be incredibly powerful framing devices. They give us the power to define what something means before we move on. When we skip that step and refuse to mourn, we give away our right to shape the story.

Anthropologists mark the emergence of death rituals as one of the earliest signs of complex human thought. To bury the dead is to reckon with mortality and imagine something beyond the present. Our ability to ritualize endings to begin anew is what makes us the ultimate generative being. We need endings in order to be human.

In the Global North, we’re entering our summer and a time of movement. Life is stirring again. It’s a good time to make something new by burying something old. We need to become a death-literate culture that knows how to throw a real banger of a funeral, both literally and figuratively. One that understands that mourning is about the deep satisfaction of metabolizing reality. 

That grief, when processed, becomes clarity. Finality, when honored, becomes power. 

Death is our missing technology right now. It’s what gives form to change. Without it, we’ll continue to hoard outdated ideas of ourselves and our value systems, and confuse preservation with progress. 

Endings will both free us and fuel us.

Cannes 2025

I'll be in Cannes to present my Psychotechnology report to the Women + AI Futures delegation at Beyond The Croisette in a couple of weeks, and I'm very excited to be among such a special group of people.

I'll be talking about how to shape the future by rewriting the code underneath surface-level trends. Despite what the headlines say, the future doesn’t emerge from technology alone.

It emerges from psychotechnology: the invisible mental models, meaning systems, and narratives that determine how we perceive reality.

The sooner you stop letting every manufactured AI headline pitch you in a different direction, the sooner you can actually see the real cultural movements happening underneath. That is where the future of AI will be decided, and it's where you should be looking to figure out your bets as a leader or a brand.

Request an invite.

Or if you're around and want to meet up, let me know!

Kids These Days

Here's what we've been consuming.

College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life (Wall Street Journal): “Over the past 10 years, however, the circumstances under which a student might request an NCO have expanded considerably. Their quiet use for other purposes—roommate disputes, ruptures between friends, relationship issues that don’t rise to the level of sexual harassment—is so secretive, traumatizing and potentially damaging that most students and administrators interviewed for this story would only speak anonymously.”

When Did People Stop Dancing At The Club? (Vox): “On the surface, the divide seems split between movers and non-shakers (with a little sprinkle of generational warfare), but it speaks to the very tenets of nightlife. The puzzling act of not dancing at a place designated for dancing is one of those mysteries that raises questions, if not calls for a full-blown investigation. Why did people stop dancing? What are they doing at the club if they’re not dancing? Who’s sitting out and who can we blame? Who’s complaining?”

We Watched Dozens of Graduation Speeches. Here’s What We Found. (New York Times): “Vice President JD Vance told U.S. Naval Academy graduates that “the era of uncontested U.S. dominance is over,” and Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Notre Dame graduates that they were entering a world where “rival powers contest one another from the seabed to space.” Melonie D. Parker, a Google executive, spoke to Stillman College graduates about a “rapidly evolving job market” and “the transformative rise of artificial intelligence.” Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, urged students at Yale’s Class Day to remember that “we are connected” beyond national borders.”

The work is the art. The struggle is the art. The craft is the art. The flow state of toiling and tangling with something but still not being able to help yourself from coming back to it - this is such a human need. It's not going away. We will find new struggles, we always do.

I think the brands that are building tools for the new age of creation need to keep this in mind. The artist is looking to lose themselves in the making.

Solve for inspiration and access and education, but don't eliminate the struggle.

Ask any real creator and they will know this about themselves. Art is about wrestling something from within yourself and showing it to the world. Without the fight, there's no true creative urge.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!

I took my kids to Disneyland last weekend in 93°F heat. You can plan for the rides and check the weather, but something about that park always manages to surprise you. I know this because I grew up in Anaheim and Disney was my backyard. 

The park has changed almost entirely in my lifetime. My favorite childhood attractions have been rebranded and ride operators crack sarcastic jokes now. The experience is largely mediated through your phone, with crowds are so thick you can hardly see the park itself.  

But at the end of the day when the weather cools down and people take a load off on Main Street’s curbs and benches, you can spend an hour or two just people watching. And the people are one thing that has not changed. 

There will always be teenagers on dates and packs of girls giggling in Minnie ears. There will always be Disney adults and out of state families consuming every ride and food with equanimity. There will always be people offering to take pictures and complementing each other’s niche outfit references.

I study culture for a living and I also know these same people are struggling with jobs and family and meaning. Many of them are anxious and burned out. But in the park, I also get to see how they play and open themselves to wonder. It’s a place where you see people let their guard down and be carried away, despite what headlines and research tell us. 

The consumerism can overshadow it, but what you see at Disney is also just a very human attempt to stay connected to each other and ourselves. 

That energy culminates on Main Street during sunset. If you sit there long enough, you start to see thousands of people move freely. Lighthearted but in sync. You start to feel a quiet pulse. Proof that in the macro, people always find a way to survive and find joy.

That pulse is getting louder in some corners of culture. Beneath the paralyzing shock of global change, we’re also seeing a quiet reanimation of daily life. 

Cool People Who Play

Last March, adults overtook 3-5 year olds as the most important segment for the toy industry, with 43% of people over the age of 18 buying a toy for themselves in 2024. Toys are big business, and this is the first time in history that the business had a customer that could buy its wares without asking their parents. 

Out of the top 10 toys adults bought for themselves, #1, #3, #6 and #9 were all some form of Squishmallow. 

I’ve had a special interest in the rise of Squishmallows since I first wrote about them in 2023. It started when the Washington Post had published an article about a guy they dubbed “Nick” who was obsessed with the stuffed plushy toys, but didn’t want to use his real name for fear of losing his job. 

If tweets about the trend were any indication, Nick was smart not to divulge his identity because people were vicious. In 2022, having an adult toy habit was akin to having a mental illness. 

But my oh my, so much has changed in the last 2.5 years. 

Major categories of adult gameplay, from boardgames to pickleball, have shot up. Suddenly it’s cool that actor Joe Manganiello is playing D&D in his homemade lair and the Critical Role guys have cultural cache, but the fact is they started making their millions a long time ago. Everyone is playing games for real now. Playing the way children would, getting lost in fantasy worlds without shame or apology. 

There’s been a wholesale rejection of cynicism around play that was so apparent just a few years ago. Some stigmas may remain, but they remain the way avocado toast memes linger. Everyone knows the joke is based on a lie.

Adult play is increasing everywhere. Real play. Play that gets you in a flow state, with special rules and special energy. Play that no one thinks of monetizing or turning into a side hustle. We're re-learning what it means to play simply because it fulfills a deep, human need.

This month in Exposure Therapy we’re studying the cultural catalysts of play and how it both builds the nascent norms of society and breaks them down. Play is deceptively powerful.

Play is how new cultures are born. Play is how we test out the new futures we may choose to pursue. 

Ottawa, Canada has named its first-ever Nightlife Commissioner to bring play to the city after dark. In California, Santa Monica's City Council recently approved a motion to convert its Third Street Promenade into an entertainment zone where (gasp!) you can drink alcohol outdoors while kids play lawn games. Multigenerational playgrounds, adult camps, empty lots converted into creative zones - when we play, we break and remake things. 

The play that is emerging will turn into laws and social structures, because play always breaks out into the physical world around it. 

Instagram therapists love to say that people who don’t know how to play as adults never felt safe playing as children. That checks out. Or maybe COVID sucked the spirit out of us. Maybe things feel too serious now. But you and I, dear reader, had better learn how to play again because it will improve every other part of our world and our lives. 

Play is the starting point of everything we might want for ourselves.

Sydney Sweeney’s Used Bath Water

There are endless thinkpieces and TikToks on the death of social media, but it’s hard to really believe them until you look at the statistics. 

The number of people using social has plateaued at 82% since 2021 and it’s not budging. Global minutes per day spent on social media have also plateaued and started to decrease. The numbers are still high but not going higher. Perhaps there was going to always be a ceiling. People still have to live and get things done.

At the same time, attitudes are shifting. More and more people are simply opting out of social, and you've probably seen it yourself. My community slack has been talking about this, and I've seen it first hand in psychographic research we're doing for brands and their gen z and millennial audiences. People are increasingly anxious about touching social like it’s something toxic (Jonathan Haidt, no one knows how to name a catchy movement like you do).

Hyper-consumerism, parasocial worship, addictive trend cycles - I think there’s a real chance all of it has peaked. Yes, a changing economy and the enshittification of platforms are part of the equation. But these are also things we wanted to be free of. We’re very tired.  

Sydney Sweeney has joked about selling her used bath water. That’s very Sydney Sweeney of her, because she’s made no secret of the fact that she wants to get those brand deals locked down while her star shines bright. You have to respect it. 

Naturally, Dr. Squatch partnered with her to sell some used bath water in a bar of soap. The collab did what it needed to do and got lots of tweets and pseudo-discourse and will probably sell many units. But will anyone really care? Was anyone really scandalized? Is anyone truly bothered by what those soaps will actually be used for?

Social media has stretched our limits of caring. Our emotions are not infinite. At some point we have to turn off our phones and preserve what little fucks we have left.

It’s the same reason why the only people who think or care about Liquid Death activations are marketers. It’s why Hawk Tuah girl’s real crime wasn’t blatant financial fraud, but the fact that she didn’t call her crypto “SpitCoin”. 

People are pulling away from social because social has given us everything it has to offer and it’s left us wanting. That’s great. It means we want something more meaningful and fulfilling, and now we have a chance at finding it elsewhere. 

Working The Good Life

I once knew the founder of a VC studio who had a particular way of recruiting CEOs for the portfolio of startups he was incubating. He looked for McKinsey people in their late 30s who’d stalled on the corporate ladder, and were closely networked to crypto and tech founders with successful exits. 

He was looking for someone who felt like they were losing, surrounded by people who were winning, because what he was really after in a CEO was someone with a chip on their shoulder. When you’re in the prime years of your career and you know that your next move is your last chance to prove your worth to your peers and the world, you have a different kind of hunger. 

People in that world will always exist because the consulting-to-startup-founder pipeline is efficient and lucrative. It’s not bad or wrong. Everyone knows what the deal is and we all find happiness and meaning in different ways. People needing to prove themselves have benefited larger society since the beginning of time. 

The issue today, however, is that hard work and reward are starting to decouple in some pretty fundamental ways. Or at least it looks like that, and perception trumps reality right now. If it seems like working harder, being more loyal, trusting the system or putting in your hours no longer promise greater economic or social capital, then it is a very rational response to de-prioritize work and reprioritize your life. 

People feel the shifting landscape of work, but they're also changing their perceptions of what it means to live a good life and putting work in its secondary place. 

Across the U.S. and beyond, there are growing stories of Millennials walking away from conventional career paths to pursue simpler, more fulfilling lives. Major media have profiled burned out young professionals who quit big corporate jobs to move to rural areas or small towns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But people are experimenting. 

22.1 million Americans were working part-time by choice as of this past April 2025, which is nearly 5 times the number of involuntary part-timers. Researchers have been watching this trend for the past few years and attribute a growing portion of it to millennials choosing part-time work and more modest lifestyles in order to keep their mental health in place. Either people are getting lazier or the work-reward equation is so messed up that workers are recalculating their values.

Do you watch #tinyhome content? Do you pay for a #vanlife Patreon like I do? Unfortunately our shared interests are not that special. These two trends in particular have had massive success, and if you read the reddit threads, it’s because they breed the modern fantasy of minimalism and mobility. 

While Mr. Beast (who now has more subscribers than Netflix) recently had a leaked memo that reads like a manifesto for audience capture, dearly beloved creators like Outdoor Boys have decided to walk away from money and fame in order to raise their families and live more normal lives. We thought Luke posted because he loves us, which he does, but it was good to be reminded that he loves his kids and sanity more. RIP my favorite channel.

The renegotiation of work and life is a sign of our adaptability. Never underestimate peoples’ ability to find non-obvious ways of making life work. Change is deeply disruptive at first, but then we slowly learn to control our emotions around it. We can't slow it down, but we can learn to not let it overtake our nervous systems. For many, the first and best way to do that is to change the meaning and significance of work.

A Cultural Audit of Vitality

Sometimes our industry thinks the best way to understand where culture is headed is to study what’s dying. That sounds silly when I write it down. To know culture you have to track what’s coming to life.

Positive signals are indicators of emergent systems and where new values are starting to take root. They’re where energy is gathering for what comes next. If you only study what's on the doomscroll, you miss the cultural infrastructure that’s being built right under your feet. 

Within minutes of walking into Disney one of my kids asked, “Is there a Netflix-land?” (I swear my kids don’t watch that much TV.) He doesn’t know about nostalgia or why a streaming service with no IP might have trouble getting people to spend a fortune on long lines and churros. He thinks that if something plays a role in life, it should show up in the world, too.

When something begins to matter to us, we start looking for it in the world around us. We want to see it echoed in our spaces, our systems, and in the ways we come together. That desire is subtle but powerful. It shapes how culture moves forward, often long before institutions catch up.

The signs of life aren’t usually loud or spectacular, but they are persistent. I don’t think you have to be an optimist to see them, but you do have to be brave enough to look past the naysayers.

Big Feelings

Here's what we've been consuming.

OpenAI has an unsubtle communications strategy. (The Future, Now and Then): “In order to keep the money spigot flowing at full force across time, you’re going to need to maintain that halo of futurity. Investor cash isn’t premised on deep technical knowledge. It’s premised on hopes and hunches about future returns. They are participating in a Keynesian Beauty Contest. It’s vibes all the way down.”

What I Tell Mothers Who Feel Rejected by Their Adult Children (Wall Street Journal): “Although it’s more common for children to be estranged from their fathers than their mothers—26% v. 6%, according to a nationally representative survey in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2022—I see mothers struggling more with it. For mothers, who tend to identify more than fathers with their job as a parent, the anguish of a child’s rejection can feel existential. For the ruminating mothers in my practice, we begin by getting to a place of strength in themselves.”

What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now (Wall Street Journal): “In both “ACOTAR” and Rebecca Yarros’s “Fourth Wing,” two of the most popular series, mind-reading and “mental bonds” figure prominently…The fantasy of total transparency in romantic communication might be especially refreshing for readers who have come of age in the era of the “situationship”… Many romantasy novels also feature lovers who are fated to be together, biologically or spiritually. In an age of ghosting and endless swiping, this trope seems at least as fantastical as being courted by a suitor with wings… “I always say what I’m looking for in a man is, like—” she paused. “I’m looking for men written by women.””

My Brain Finally Broke (The New Yorker): “More than a decade of complaining about this situation has done nothing to change my compulsion to induce dissociation anew each day. And, though there was once a time when my physical surroundings felt more concrete than whatever I was looking at on my phone, this year has marked a turning point. Now the cognitive tendrils of a phone-based psychosis frequently seem more descriptive of contemporary reality—“Houthi PC small group,” etc.—than the daffodils I see springing up in the park. The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino.”

Magical Plastic Reality II: The Intimacy Economy, Ambient Trust, and our probable futures under algorithmic skies (Anice Hassim on Medium): “It’s plastic in that it’s malleable, shapeable — capable of being bent and molded. And it’s magical in that it enchants us, blurs the line between the real and the imagined. In South Africa and across the world, people increasingly occupy digital spaces that feel as real as the physical world. We find community, meaning, and emotion online — yet something is off-kilter. “We are watching, but not feeling. Living, but slightly offbeat… a simulation of intimacy, a performance of connection”. In this uncanny valley of ourselves, we sense a “dissonance, an eerie hum” beneath the surface of our machined and engineered feeds.”

Practical imagination (Whispers & Giants): “It is possible to train creativity like a muscle—to generate novelty through recombination, transformation or adaptive iteration. Creativity thrives within constraint and is usually focused on producing outcomes. Imagination, however, is something else entirely. It is not just the ability to make something new, but the capacity to hold together what is not yet fully known, to maintain contact with ambiguity and to construct meaning in the absence of certainty. It enables the projection of possibilities that cannot yet be tested, modeled or verified.”

Sometimes the best brand strategy is to give your consumers a new mental model.

This works especially well in categories where the functional benefits are commoditized, but the emotional stakes remain high.

Mental models tell us how to evaluate things and make decisions. Change the mental model and you change the way people choose things:

• Beds are for sleeping, but Eight Sleep tells us beds are for healing
   

• Food is fuel, but Ezekiel tells us food is holy
   

• Baby formula is science, but Bobbie tells us formula simplicity

And the only reason any of these new mental models have spoken to us is because deep down we already felt them, we just hadn't consciously realized it yet. The spectrum of healing was already starting to expand in culture, nutrition was already becoming a new battleground for virtue, motherhood was already retreating to a narrative of ‘simpler times’.

You can use mental models for both good and evil, you can use them to create positive behaviors or bad ones, but you can’t fabricate them out of nothing.

You have to tap into a latent belief that isn’t being addressed in the market yet. You can’t just tell people to care about something different, you have to match your model to the energy of the time.

Goop worked because women who were already invisible to the medical establishment were ready for an experience of wellness that embraced their spirits and emotional states instead of treating them like a disorder. Airbnb worked because it offered a sense of belonging to a millennial class that felt disenfranchised in the world, but now had money to spend.

Mental models can create entire industries that didn’t exist before, that’s how powerful they are. And when they’re that powerful, they go wide.

At some point everything was Goopified or became the Airbnb of X. The only reason everything is a detox now is because brands like Eight Sleep, Ezekiel and Bobbie have cemented the idea that the body is already perfect, it just needs less interference.

Mental models can change who is buying, what other brands are in the consideration set, and what people are willing to pay a premium for. It's a level of positioning that goes deeper than product or UX differentiation, or mere “framing”.

They're not easy to come by, nor are they easy to change, but they are one of the holy grails of brand strategy.

They can make your weaknesses irrelevant and your strengths all that matter.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!

In season 2 of Farmer Wants A Wife (essentially The Bachelor but with cowboys), Amy, a real-estate agent from New York, asks handsome Texas farmer Ty, “Does the country bring you peace?” and his confused reaction is telling. “I wouldn’t say that it brings me peace. I think it’s… I’m in a peaceful place. Just as much as, for you, being able to get out brings you peace, the city brings me excitement.” 

Anyone who knows anything about farm life knows it’s a grueling, financially unstable, politically charged existence. Farmers are over 3 times more likely to die by suicide, and the show, for it’s part, leaves room in its quiet interviews for the struggle to peak through. Any sense of peace may be fleeting. 

I’ve been watching more reality TV lately, in large part because (if you can believe it) my principal strategist Zach Lamb is on this season’s MasterChef. Watching him bravely go on his competitive odyssey these past few months made me spend more time with the genre. 

I see something in Farmer Wants A Wife just as I see it in Blue Ribbon Baking Championship, the many iterations of Fixer Upper, and even scripted hits like Nobody Wants This.

People are shoving meaning into places that were never meant to hold it, and Amy and Ty’s exchange shows just how hard we’re working to wrap our smooth fantasies around very rough realities.

The city-girl-chooses-the-simple-life trope is nothing new, but the sheer level of symbolic overload we ascribe to it, the intense need we have for the idealized (mis)conceptions of marrying into what seems like a simpler culture to be true, and the constellation of industries, social media trends and brands that revolve around it, tells us something in the audience has changed. 

And something definitely has, because despite Farmer Wants A Wife being a massive global hit over the past 20 years in countries around the world (a fruitful format resulting in 200 marriages and 500 children!), it failed the first time it aired in the US back in 2008. It wasn’t until producers tried again in 2023 that it turned into one of FOX’s top-performing reality series. 

There is a fever pitch of forced meaning-making in culture right now, and that’s exactly why this show has found its moment.

What have we become?

We’ve changed in ways we don’t even know yet. We’ve gone through acute, life-altering transformations via technologies, political events and health disasters these past few years that I won’t even list here. You already know them by heart. 

So much change in so little time is simply too much for a culture to metabolize. We’ve emerged different, but we don’t quite know what we’ve turned into yet. Processing all of that existential rewiring takes time - time that we were never afforded, and now here we are on the other side of the revolving door, not sure how to define ourselves.

Transformative experiences like these are so significant they reshape our preferences, values, priorities, and even our sense of self. They change both how we see the world and what we want from it.

That leaves us in a philosophically uncomfortable place. If your values change, your identity shifts, your relationships recalibrate, are you still you? Or are you someone else wearing the memory of an earlier version?

We are post-transformation but pre-definition. An earlier philosopher likened it to, “Not a girl, not yet a woman”, and when I see the undercurrent of shows like Farmer Wants A Wife, I see an ambient confusion about who we are, what we believe, and what matters now.

That’s why we’re seeing meaning projected onto things never built to hold it. 

Confused Oracles

Years ago in the before times, my new husband and I hosted a small dinner party in our apartment, drinking wine around an IKEA table, the name chatGPT having not yet entered our world, our sense of selves fully intact. 

My husband’s good friend, an incredibly gifted thinker who had built an AI startup for the hospitality industry, started talking about the possibility of AI becoming conscious. He didn’t say it like a provocation. He said it like he believed it.

I pushed back. “We don’t even know how our consciousness works. Why would we expect it to arise from a machine?”

He pointed out that while we don’t fully understand consciousness, we do know it tends to emerge from complexity. With brains, and possibly even ecosystems and networks, consciousness appears to be correlated with systems that grow more sophisticated over time. Maybe it wasn’t impossible, he said. Maybe it was inevitable.

I think about that moment all the time now. Because whatever I believed then, I can’t help but notice what we’re doing now. We are treating our AI systems as if they can tell us something true. Not factually true but existentially true. We ask them about our dreams, our marriages, our careers, and we accept their answers as insight.

Even though they hallucinate constantly. 

Chatbot hallucinations continue to rise with newer reasoning systems, with OpenAI’s going from 1-2% all the way up to 6.8% in the past year and a half. Its latest model has been shown to hallucinate up to 79% of the time in benchmark testing, and yet we continue to trust it even though their own engineers don’t know entirely how it works and reasons.  

But that doesn’t matter because our trust in these models doesn’t come from accuracy. It comes from the fact that they feel right and validating and comforting. They feel coherent, as if they know something.

As Rachel Botsman has pointed out, trust hasn’t vanished, it’s just moved. It no longer flows upward to experts and institutions. Modern technology and platforms have instead changed the flow of trust to go sideways toward peers, strangers and crowds. And what is chatGPT if not the exponential intelligence of strangers and crowds, wrapped up in a voice that feels like a peer? 

Sam Altman knows this. As Dave Karpf writes, OpenAI’s entire communications strategy is less about technical progress than about sustaining the illusion of futurity. The cadence of announcements is the product.

And if you step back, what we’re doing starts to look very familiar again. We’re shoving meaning into something that was never built to carry it.

In our hunger for direction, we’ve begun to treat AI outputs like prophecies. We are not treating them like systems of knowledge, we are projecting meaning onto them. We treat these technologies like soft models: emotionally loaded, unstable frameworks we project meaning onto in order to navigate identity, selfhood, and culture in a post-transformation era.

And we’re the ones doing the mental gymnastics to believe it’s true.

I am deeply excited about the potential of AI to solve many of the world’s ills. My agency and work has always been embedded in the tech world, and I am more familiar than most with both its tremendous possibilities and human pitfalls. Maybe one day AI will become conscious. I’m not betting either way. But if that day ever comes, it will only be a footnote to the real story because long before AI woke up, we had already crowned it an oracle.

The Adult Baptism of Pete Davidson

There’s a photo of Pete Davidson that made the rounds earlier this year, shirtless and conspicuously bare. The once chaotic collage of tattoos that covered his body had been mostly scrubbed clean. A GQ story called it an adult baptism, adding “he looked fantastic.”

Tattoo removal is having a moment. Clinics are booming and demand is very high. The stories people tell about why they’re doing it sound less like regret and more like absolution, with one person saying “I’ll return to the grave with a clean body.” Who knew that the real market winners of our trauma-induced reinvention would be laser removal clinics?  

At least some of this is tethered to the aesthetics of clean wellness. I.e. smooth skin, clean slates, optimized lives. But that’s only the surface. What’s really being marketed is rebirth.

Wellness used to be about feeling better. At some point it turned into becoming someone else entirely.

You can see it in the rise of psychedelic retreats, cold plunges, trauma breathwork, and rituals that look more like modern mysticism than medicine. In the now-canonical Netflix series The Goop Lab, many episodes are punctuated by someone sobbing as if they’ve been spiritually reborn. And in some sense, they have. Wellness today is about burning off the self that no longer fits.

And yes, all of this began as a necessary response to a medical system that has long ignored the needs of women and marginalized people. It gave people language for the unspeakable and offered tools when the institutions failed. 

But somewhere along the way, we started to load it with meaning that went far beyond healing. Wellness became the vessel into which we poured all our cultural confusion about purpose and identity. 

It’s why despite all of the transcendence modern wellness promises some of us (myself included) find it to be an uncomfortable bedfellow to the $6.3 trillion megaindustry of powders, pills, devices, retreats and questionable influences that power it. 

At some point, it requires a certain level of willful meaning-making, or at least an increasing share of your disposable income, to place all of your purpose and identity on the shaky pillar of something like cleanliness.

Temporary Scaffolding

The instinct to make meaning is not new. But the speed, scale, and saturation of it today is. Culture has become a hall of mirrors where everything gets loaded with symbolic weight it was never built to hold. From our media and movements to our presidents, platforms and products, we make identity out of objects far too fragile to hold the sheer burden of the meaning we throw onto them.  

This is what happens when transformation outpaces definition. We’re trying to reassemble identity in real time, with whatever tools are lying around.

It’s important to be cognizant of what we are doing and to make meaning with our eyes wide open.

We have to remember that we are the ones assigning meaning. Let us be careful about assuming any of these soft models carry an inherent meaning that is beyond us. We can choose what defines us, and in our rush to land on a solid sense of identity, we should also make sure to not settle for anything that wasn’t designed to bear the pressure of what we require. 

This is how conflict shows up too. We see someone else’s soft model and call it delusion, extremism, a personality cult. And in some cases it very much is those things. But they’re also doing exactly what we are - grasping for something stable to stand on. Cultural conflict, at its core, often isn’t about different values but about different coping strategies. And we are all coping right now. 

If there’s a call to action here, it’s not to stop building meaning. It’s to stay aware of the scaffolding. To know when we’re myth-making. To hold our soft models lightly and be willing to build better, stronger, more resilient ones. I can’t tell you what those are, you will have to find them for yourself, but make sure you find them. Do not settle for what is easily at hand. 

At some point, the scaffolding will start to harden and we’ll be locked into our systems of meaning. Culture will metabolize everything it’s been through, and the soft models we once reached for will become fixed realities. The meanings we project today will define the selves we have to live with tomorrow.

Private Matters

Here's what we've been consuming.

Uncertainty is on the rise. Here’s how people can cope (ScienceNews): “Though anxiety-inducing, uncertainty also imbues life with a sense of adventure, surprise and novelty. If the world were entirely predictable, how would people know when to pay attention or take action? “There are positives to uncertainty,” Alquist says. “We view that feeling as just entirely negative without recognizing how useful it is.””

This Is Your Priest on Drugs (The New Yorker): “Among participants who had two sessions, the researchers found that a striking number—seventy-nine per cent—reported that the experience had enriched their prayer, their effectiveness in their vocation, and their sense of the sacred in daily life. Ninety-six per cent rated their first encounters with psilocybin as being among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.”

Free Coffee for Gossip, a Millennial Hobby Comeback and the Future of Animation (Non-Obvious): “This is personality marketing at its best. One woman admitted she got a secret nose job. Another exposed a friend who is cheating on her boyfriend. The gossip is fun to hear, but it works because this is so unique, memorable and easily shareable. The shop already has more than 100k followers and is generating lots of unexpected conversation … and people coming by for coffee too.”

The Great Foodification Of Fashion & Decor (Coveteur): “Now that we’re back in the full swing of dinner parties (with themes and dress codes), dressing a table to the nines is the new standard for post-pandemic life. The design world has quite literally been feeding into this curious fixation with corn stools, jelly lighters, and accent chairs inspired by doughnuts, fortune cookies, and cauliflower. “We forget that all of these things in design are always in conversation with each other—what’s happening in restaurants somehow gets back to fashion and the home,” says Shannon Maldonado, founder and creative director of YOWIE. “Especially right now in this economy, elevating food in this way is a luxury.””

[BONUS] I was recently invited to be on the amazing Good Thinking podcast to talk about the final frontier for brands: shame. We talked about why shame is valuable for brands and why it’s not just about bringing awareness to taboo topics, but about completely reframing the story (and exactly how to do that). We chat menopause, debt, obesity, illness, depression and more areas that are ripe for cultural change. If you’re a brand that touches shame, this is the time to go well beyond awareness. Give people a new identity to step into.

What gets people into strategy is the same thing that gets them out of it.

This is something I’ve observed again and again in Exposure Therapy, but also across the field of strategy at large. I’ve even felt it myself.

People come to strategy because they want to understand the world. They want to name the unnameable forces that create identities and build desires (and, of course, move markets). Strategy teaches you to locate where power lies in culture, see patterns in chaos, and to find the hidden levers beneath the stuff that seems like coincidence or fate.

But at some point after you’ve been handed the tools to decode the world, you want to start encoding your own.

Because the deeper truth we all learn through strategy is this:

It’s all made up.

Categories are made up. Value is made up. Culture is a little bit made up. And once you really, deeply absorb that, you want to start playing with reality, too.

People come into Exposure Therapy as strategists, but also start to grow into something else on top of it.

• Our amazing member Peter Spear is running for mayor of Hudson New York(!), and Earl Dos Santos has started a collective for political influencers
   

• Members Allison Dobkin and Carina Bhavnani are writing a novel together, Iñaki Escudero just published a book, and Cassandra Marketos has a book deal with Hachette. Nazy Farkhondeh and Michelle Mattar are both writing their first graphic novels.
   

• Brandon Noah Kleinman just produced his first film and it's winning awards
   

• Two of our members, Jamica El and Lisa Edwards have become legit artists and Jaime Derringer is a celebrated artist I would buy anything from right now
   

• Charles Fulford's whiskey brand is taking off (and that's just his side project), Laura Bernier is creating a retreat space for deep healing, Jess Cervellon is launching a CPG brand this year, Aleya Samji is building a new social platform.

... not to mention all of the other members who are launching, publishing, producing, and building new things. Keep in mind that all of these people are still strategists and creatives by day, but also have the urge to go beyond that.

And the beauty of this community is that it becomes doubly relevant to people like this because yes, it informs and supercharges your work as a strategist, but more importantly, it gives you the insight and room to PLAY in culture as well. You both understand it and start bending it to your will.

You need to have an insatiable thirst for the world, and the guts to think that things could be a little bit different to get into this field, but that mindset carries you into new lives.

Strategists like us are in the business of culture, but sooner or later, the brave ones realize they can also make their own world altogether. And it's a privilege to watch them do it.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!

Control is becoming the organizing principle of modern life, and the next engine of economic and cultural value.

But not all control is created equal.  

We name economies by what’s being monetized. The Knowledge Economy, Sharing Economy, Experience Economy, and Attention Economy were all new engines of value creation. Each name was a signal of where systems, money, and cultural innovation were headed, and beyond anything else, they revealed what we were really hungry for.

But the nature of our hunger has shifted so dramatically in the past few years that it feels pretty inadequate to call it by any of those names.  

A new economic logic tells us what we want now is control. Not dominance, but rather a sense of power over the extreme complexity that pervades our everyday lives. Complexity that feels more and more like chaos. 

We don’t always see the complexity, but we feel it in the disconnect between the everyday and the existential, like the way a cracked eggshell is somehow entangled with American religiosity and Turkish geopolitics. Just last week, a New York Times headline asked Why is everything so coded now? while another headline in the same paper posed the question Can I wear a sheath dress without looking MAGA? 

We feel complexity in the constant churn of events we can’t quite explain, but somehow know we’re supposed to manage on levels both profound and inane. 

The laugh-out-loud existential ennui of TikTok is now creeping into the broetry posts of LinkedIn, stripped of any charming humor (some of it written by yours truly, sans broetry), and you don’t have to scroll for long to see that time itself feels broken under the weight of acceleration. We’ve all got one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. Without a shared truth, one person’s “I’m thrilled to announce…” becomes another person’s “Late-stage capitalism is a vibe.” You know the drill. 

This is the kind of complexity that doesn’t announce itself but still governs everything we do. And in response, people are willing to pay a premium for anything that promises even the illusion of control. 

Just look around. Every single part of your life now has a control panel you can (and probably do) pay for. 

Your body has a control panel, and it can take many forms, from sleep trackers and glucose monitors, to biohacking protocols and period alignment apps. We are self-surveilling our body fat percentages on our phones and our physiques in every reflective surface.

Your relationships have control panels too, governed by therapy scripts and templates for boundary-keeping. Your work, whether you’re an entrepreneur or an artist, is a series of Notion boards and inspiration apps that hold your ambition in place.

Parenting has infinite dashboards. Dating has them. Your nervous system has many. Even your personality is being flattened into an interface you can optimize. We’ve been taught to believe that if we can track it, if we can measure it, if we can optimize it and maxx it, then we can control it. 

Religion is rising in the zeitgeist but I’d say that’s just a fancy control panel for spirituality. The religiosity of today doesn’t feel like belief so much as it feels like design. Techy incarnations of manifestation and bible study, when examined a little more closely, are really more like protocols for productivity culture. When Mark Wahlberg, the man famous for waking up at 2:30am and working out twice a day, is behind the #1 Christian prayer app in the world, you have to ask yourself if our religious control panels are more about systematizing than they are about surrender.

AI isn’t to blame, this movement started before, but it’s definitely speeding things up. A while back I posted an HBR chart that showed, according to mostly Reddit data, the top 3 use cases for AI have gone from being about ideas and search, to being about emotional needs like therapy and finding life purpose. People in the comments were split - some excited that AI was growing into a more emotional form, others alarmed that this may be the clearest sign yet of people retreating to a dangerous technology at the expense of real-life relationships. 

It seems to me that we are adapting our shiniest new control panel to serve our deepest need. Perhaps the place where we feel we have the least power is with each other. Maybe AI isn’t profiting off our need for intelligence but rather our need to feel like we have control.  

Different control needs yield different interfaces, whether they be emotional, biological, or metaphysical. But the logic stays the same: build a dashboard of control around the chaos and hope it holds.

But if you look closely, the control here isn’t always real. These interfaces sometimes seem to engender a lack of trust in ourselves and a false promise of power. We have more tools than ever, and yet feel less in control than ever. Every control panel is actually a portal to anxiety: Am I doing enough? Am I optimizing this right?

Is it really control, the real kind of control that we want, when everything is over-analyzed and over-optimized? When people across the political spectrum are increasingly “prepping” for disaster and fantasizing about moving to a homestead, does anyone really feel more in control of their lives?

The shadow side of control is reliance on systems that make us obsess over the minutiae that are far downstream from where control actually comes from.

That’s because the control economy we see today is largely reactive. 

Reactive Control is about helping people cope with the chaos by giving them small optimizations within it. It’s about symptom management instead of fixing the underlying condition, and it often delivers control only in narrow, incremental bursts. These systems aren’t necessarily malicious but they’re definitely tired and most of them are deep in their curve of diminishing returns. They’ve been iterated so many times that all we’re left with is a finely tuned but fundamentally exhausted architecture. 

You see it everywhere: supplements that target increasingly obscure biomarkers, productivity apps that shave minutes off workflows, dashboards that let you micromanage parts of your life that were never meant to be managed.

These systems condition us to believe we’re gaining control, when in fact we’re just rearranging our anxieties. You can optimize the wrong thing perfectly, but it’s still going to be the wrong thing.  

What we need at a time like this, what we are really hungry for, is something generative. 

Generative Control takes the chaos and builds meaning within it. Rather than offering better tools within a broken system, it builds entirely new ones that reshape the context altogether. If reactive control is about optimization, generative control is about agency. It offers the chance to reimagine the entire environment.

Generative control doesn’t just ask, “How can I manage this better?” It asks, “What if this didn’t need managing at all?” Generative control is a non-incremental jump forward, and for all the noisy (and lucrative) reactive control out there, we’re starting to see generative control peek through the cracks.

In education, we see concepts like Alpha School that uses AI to teach kids an entire, customized curriculum in just 2 hours a day, while the rest of the day is reserved for social and life skills led by guides (i.e. their form of teachers). It gives kids a chance to experience highly efficient learning with personalized instruction, but also have the rest of the day to just be a kid. Most of the day is spent away from the desk, and children learn to interact and collaborate on lessons disguised as play.

In marriage, we see different cultures exploring new relationship structures. In Japan, a growing number of young people are choosing to design their own version of marriage built around mutual respect, shared values, and practical partnership, rather than romance or tradition. They’re called friendship marriages and these arrangements might include cohabiting, or not. Parenting, if it happens, is often intentional and planned through artificial insemination. For many, it’s a way to reclaim agency in the face of rising economic pressure and evolving ideas around intimacy.

These are not concepts and systems for managing chaos. These are systems for finding new meaning in a changed world, and for giving people authentic control that has been missing. Now imagine if this logic of generative control started moving beyond education and relationships, and into other domains of life. 

What would it look like if end-of-life care wasn’t treated as a series of medicalized checklists, but as an opportunity to reassert agency and meaning? What if families could choose models of dying that center emotional authorship, ritual, and dignity, as customizable and culturally resonant frameworks? Death itself, long relegated to reactive systems of care, could become a domain where people reclaim authorship over how they are celebrated and ultimately transition.

In America, the way we live is starting to change. I’ve talked about the rise of mommunes, communes and friendship-centered living, but a generative control economy could take us even further to include multi-generational living. What’s often seen in the West as a sign of economic precarity could be reframed through generative control as a purposeful structure where power, caregiving, and decision-making are intentionally distributed across generations. Instead of defaulting to the nuclear family or the senior home, people could design living arrangements that reflect the needs and values of everyone under one roof. 

Medicine, food, transportation, travel, play, identity... when you start to feel the line between reactive and generative control, you start to see net-new ideas for how every part of life can be reinvented in our new control economy.

There is, however, an undeniable strangeness to generative control, and you’re probably already feeling it. 

Generative control often enters the scene under the guise of the weird. It feels disconcerting at first, perhaps morally or socially abrasive. Something about it may even feel perverse because it breaks conventions and norms, just like an AI-based school or marriages of friendship may feel questionable. But weird is a clue that something new is trying to be born. 

We’re living through a moment of historically high tolerance for weirdness. In the past few years alone, we’ve watched mainstream culture absorb things like mass resignations, the gamification of finance, therapy speak on dating apps, and billionaires talking about brain interfaces on morning shows. Things feel unstable, yes, but instability also signals openness. When the pace of weirdness accelerates, the conditions for reinvention are at their peak.

So if it feels like anything could happen right now, it’s because anything can, and that is a fantastic position to be in.

Cultural norms are more plastic than they’ve been in a generation. Expectations are up for grabs and there’s room, for once, to create rather than conform. 

The control economy is still in flux and it can go in two different directions. You will be asked, implicitly or explicitly, to buy into one version or the other. In some places there is no generative option and reactive control is as we have. In other places, generative options are emerging but they require imagination, work and some risk taking. 

Choose intentionally in what you invest in (time, money or otherwise), because the reactive control economy will make short-term money, but the generative control economy can create wholly new markets and massive new financial, cultural, and systemic value. We all need some reactive control in parts of our lives, but do not let it be a distraction from the promise of something more generative. 

Generative control will be the economy that smart investors, brands, and governments will bet on because they know the upside potential is beyond anything you can get on the reactive side.  

The control economy has only just arrived. We’ll all need to distinguish between reactive models that fill a short-term need, or generative systems that reshape our markets and reality.

Things can get weird, they should get weird, and you should be playing with the weirdness. There’s new value to be found and created.

For the Intellectually Isolated

I didn’t always know what to do with the parts of myself that overflowed my job.

The obsessive curiosity, ambition, obsession with finding meaning. Strategy was my work, but the rooms I was in didn’t always make sense to have the full conversation.

If you feel the same and are wondering what it's like to find a place where you can put all that energy and connect with others who are just like you, watch our new Exposure Therapy testimonial video below to hear exactly what it’s like:

“One of the most instrumental things for my career.”

“I'd pay 3x what I'm paying for all of this.”

“If you're anybody who is searching for anything, you will gain so much insight.”

“Just do it. You won’t regret it.”

We all need a community like this.

The people that feel intellectually isolated in the world... those people end up becoming our members. One year in and it’s become even more than I ever imagined it could be.

If this is what you’re seeking, come join us.

The Answer Is Easy

Here's what we've been consuming.

Married couples have more sex, so why does our culture think the opposite? (Happy Endings): “Our dearth of fulfilled romantic examples is media-wide and predates film. The stories that grip us have drama. A happy marriage simply doesn't make a good narrative - at least, that's what we've been told. People want the sordid before. They want the after-after - the drama when things fall apart. But we’re missing the bliss because it’s mistaken for boring.”

What is hauntology? (The Week): “Hauntology is an idea developed by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, one of the most well-known 20th-century thinkers. While “hauntology” may sound like the study of invented ghosts and ghouls, it is actually a concept that considers the real-world effects of how “dead” futures can haunt the present… The concept asks people to consider how “spectres” of alternative futures influence current and historical discourse, and acknowledges that this “haunting” – or the study of the non-existent – has real effects.”

Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk (The New York Times): “Get in the room with other people (more D.I.Y. and I.R.L.). Embrace the analog, which can’t be surveilled by artificial intelligence. Reach out to unexpected, even problematic (I prefer “problemagic”), allies, with different but compatible definitions of justice. Luckily, kindness looks the same to most of us. And as you start making that useful thing, you might lock eyes with the person working at your side, and maybe this time you won’t flinch. The walls of identity crumble in the face of our greatest human strength: empathy.”

Welcome to a fix for loneliness (and an investable trend) (Tailwind Radar): "When we're running, we experience "low load sociality." This social interaction is superbly optional or call it optionful. We are surrounded by people. When one of us catches our interest (or steals our heart) we can, without risk of embarrassment, fall into step, and say hi. Not working out? Move on. Some spark of mutual interest? Keep talking. This social interaction is small risk and therefore low load. Apart from the running (of course), it's effortless. Exit is easy.”

The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes (New York Times): “But A.I. is a parasite. It attaches itself to a robust learning ecosystem and speeds up some parts of the decision process. The parasite and the host can peacefully coexist as long as the parasite does not starve its host. The political problem with A.I.’s hype is that its most compelling use case is starving the host — fewer teachers, fewer degrees, fewer workers, fewer healthy information environments.”

Addison Rae, or: When Gas Is Mid and Mid Is Gas (smartdumb): “This not a qualitative judgment about “Diet Pepsi” or “Aquamarine” or any of these songs or productions. I am saying that gas, as a quality, is perhaps at odds with success in the social media personality becomes pop star world, where you first and foremost must be believable. (This has always been the case, in my opinion, in the more rarified corners of underground dance music where I’ve made my mutton, but that’s a different piece.) Mid – when perfectly calibrated – is its own kind of gas.”

The final battleground for brands is shame. Bring down shame and you can own the market.

The biggest disruptions in any industry are always structural, and shame is the single biggest structural dinosaur living in our minds.

Think of the most provocative technologies and brands of our time - weight loss, hormone therapy, money, sex, dating, parenting, illness, whatever lurks in the shadows - shame is a deeply, deeply embedded architecture limiting our progress, and it will finally have to come down.

Brands are starting to feel its walls.

Because access, tech, and supply chains are all solved problems. Shame is not. It has survived every market and cultural disruption, and if left unchecked, it will survive AI, and it will survive us.

Do not underestimate it. It governs behavior in ways most brands misunderstand, and if your product lives anywhere near shame, then you’re already in the business of rewriting identity, whether you realize it or not.

Most brands working in these spaces try to normalize the old story. They aim to make the shame less taboo and more palatable. But the brands that will actually change culture are the ones that replace the shame story entirely.

It's very simple, but never easy to replace a shame story. It can look like sex brands that move from dysfunction to ritual, mental health tools that make healing a flex instead of a confession, or financial platforms that treat debt as a system failure, not a personal one. If you look closely at all of these, you'll see that smart brands that replace the shame story also change what it means to belong.

Because shame only works in the context of the group. Change the group (or kill the old one) and you dismantle the shame.

This is the high leverage work of brands... giving people a narrative and identity so compelling, they're willing to leave what (and perhaps who) they know behind. Imagine what markets would look like if shame evaporated. Imagine how the intersection of brands and culture would change.

This is perhaps the only major challenge left, that really matters.

If your brand touches shame, this is your moment. Just don’t waste it on awareness. Build a new story.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!

It might feel like the world is falling apart because everything is so fragmented and contradictory, but the truth is that things are not falling apart. They are fusing together.

The reason you keep cracking little bits of eggshell into your omelet is because eggshells are more fragile now, because younger hens are laying eggs, because millions of older hens had to be killed after a bird flu outbreak borne of environmental changes, which caused prices to soar, memes to be made, Trump to get elected, and opened the door for a renewed embrace of religious identity and moral politics. We had to start importing eggs from places like Turkey, whose incumbent government got Elon Musk’s X to suspend opposition accounts amid civil unrest, in a move that only likely happened because the price of eggs is a big part of why Musk got into the government in the first place.  

Your omelet has very real political, economic and spiritual implications now. 

Your omelet is why everything about your user - their beliefs, behaviors, stories, preferences, aspirations - has changed. 

So how can any of us expect cursory trend decks and industry conferences to be enough for a brand strategist to do their job anymore? 

If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be this: start diversifying your information inputs.

Everything has become deeply interconnected, but we’re still using first-order mindsets to understand third-order markets. You have to start getting outside of your comfort zone and learning more broadly in order to anticipate what is coming.

Here are some of the unexpected places I look to stretch my own thinking and see where the future is headed with more clarity:

1. Geopolitics 

An area that has always intimidated me until I joined Peter Zeihan's Patreon. He will help you see the 3rd/ 4th/ 5th order effects and tell it to you in a story that you can hold in your head. Easily the best thing I’ve paid for this year. His quarterly calls are especially enlightening.

2. Threat Tech

This isn’t a thing, I just call it that, but it’s essentially any technology built in response to threat. Digital Twins. Climate Tech. Defense Tech. Palmer Luckey and his cohort. Where threat meets tech is where we get a glimpse of the future under stress.

3. Underground Economies

Vigilante child predator hunters make real money on social and they’re getting more violent. Underground economies pop up when people have such intense unmet needs, they’re willing to break norms and laws. You have to go to Locals and Kick for stuff like this, but I read about it from a distance in articles and Reddit threads.

4. Finance

Gen Z & millennials treat money like manifestation. Money betrays peoples’ beliefs about the future, debt is the only real shame in a capitalist society, and how we save/ spend our cash decides who has power down the road. Watch money influencers, both the straight-laced budgeters and the new-age manifesters. They’re both saying the same thing: money is an emotion. 

5. God

God doesn't look like he used to. Silicon Valley is getting religious in curious ways. Megachurches continue to preach the prosperity gospel. Non religious church experiments continue to fail. When the FDA opened up public comments for the definition of “natural foods”, a surprising number of them referenced god. People like Tara Isabella Burton and Amanda Montell are great follows here.

6. Children’s Media 

If you want to know the values of a generation, look at their children's films. In "The Mitchells vs. The Machines" the villain is an AI founder. In "Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2" the bad guy’s headquarters are in a place called San Franjose. “Toy Story 5” is about the toys vs. Bonnie’s iPad. If our kids films are teaching our youngest generations to be suspect of technology and its leaders, that's going to shape how they allow it to be in the world.

7. Demographics 

Books like Going Solo really imprinted on me early in my career. The 15-Minute City makes people either really happy or really angry. Mommunes and communes are growing, but so are other non-conventional living arrangements. Pay attention to what happens when people de-center marriage because that will change a lot of things.

8. History 

The big one. Gives you patterns but also perspective. I've started re-reading Durant’s ‘Lessons of History’. Perhaps my favorite history book is ‘The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets’ and I’ve bought 20+ copies for friends and community members. I very much regret not paying attention to history when I was in college, but as the saying goes, it takes a mature mind to appreciate the topic. 

9. Death

So much activity is happening here as we finally start to grieve all of the people, ideas and promises that died over the past few years. Michael Erard just published a great book called ‘Bye Bye, I Love You’ about first and last words and what we owe each other. Living funerals and regular funerals are getting upgrades. We’re seeing early, stuttering attempts to create new rituals around grief, and we will need them in the immediate years ahead. 

I was on a panel a few months ago and when the organizer asked me my title, I found that ‘brand strategist’ just wasn’t enough anymore. So I added ‘cultural futurist’ to my headline. It felt awkward at first, but it quickly became natural to me because it’s the truth. 

What we do is literally take in signals, create a model of culture in the future, and build a brand that lives in that future. People either really get the brand and walk into the future to meet it, or really don’t get it and walk away. And that’s the best outcome you could hope for, because the worst outcome is a brand that people think is ‘nice’ but remain largely apathetic toward. 

Be that kind of strategist. I don’t think you can afford to be any other kind.

Social Realities

How culture is tunneling, and keeping mental hygiene.

If my husband’s social feed is different from mine, we will literally be experiencing two different realities in waking life.

Which brings up a bigger question: we keep talking about AI, social media, and culture, but we rarely stop to ask, How do our brains construct reality in the first place?

Contrary to what you might believe, current science says our brains don’t passively absorb data from the outside. Our brains are actually nonstop prediction machines, constantly anticipating what will happen next, and our reality is mostly a prediction coming from inside our brains, not the outside world.

That means anomalies, not consensus, often drive belief change.

It was very important to me to get cognitive scientist and philosopher Dr. Mark Miller to come speak with us at Exposure Therapy because this all has big implications for how culture evolves in the age of social media and AI:

1. If our brains are wired to update based on surprise, then the dominant driving force of culture in the age of social and AI is rupture.
    

2. When outside forces distort our belief networks, they effectively distort the realities we experience.
    

3. Belief hygiene is crucial. You shouldn’t live in a bubble or ignore hard realities, but you do have to protect the inner scaffolding that builds your outer world. I seek out people and places where possibility, imagination, and optimism are actively practiced, because that’s the world I want to live in. (It’s a struggle, especially in my profession, but I try to keep perspective.)

Reality is so, so malleable that it's almost a wonder that we expect everyone to be living the same version. We have our own little reality machines in our pockets and offices, yet we haven’t learned how to properly control and use them yet. I think the science gives us more empathy and clarity for understanding the age we’re in.

This is what underpins everything else in the world right now. Remember that culture is just as much cognition as it is content. Watch Dr. Miller explain it beautifully in the clip below.

Wake Up Call

Here's what we've been consuming.

What Mr. Beast Teaches Us About The American Dream (Neuroscience Of): “In virtually any other field, once you’ve sufficiently “made it,” you can exert more creative conviction and take more risks. As we’ve seen in music, for example, success provides significant creative breathing room. When a musician wins a Grammy, their music begins to sound more unique and idiosyncratic, while those who are merely nominated tend to sound more like the masses. The same does not appear to be true for Mr. Beast. The more success he accrues, the more he is required to dig deeper into what already works - refining, repeating, and amplifying the same formula rather than branching into new creative territory.”

Empty shelves are coming, Apollo economist says — and so is a 'voluntary' recession (Quartz): “Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management (APO), earlier this month calculated the probability of what he calls a “voluntary trade reset recession” at 90% in the face of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. And in a new report published this weekend, he points to the decreasing flow of container ships from China to the U.S. as a major domino that will lead to that recession in a matter of months.”

Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed? (GQ): “They’re having babies, paying mortgages, sobering up, getting colonoscopies, and eating clean. They want their bodies to reflect those dramatic existential shifts […] Just as celebrities have carried the torch for all manner of body modification, from GLP-1 injections to buccal fat removal, they are leading the tattoo-removal revolution. Pharrell made waves almost two decades ago when he started the process of removing some of his tattoos. During the promotional run for Wicked, intrepid observers began speculating that Ariana Grande’s longstanding butterfly tattoo, once prominently visible on the outside of her left arm, seemed to have faded almost completely.”

How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025 (Harvard Business Review): “Therapy (more on this one later) is the new top use case. There are two other entrants in the top 5: “Organizing my life” and “Finding purpose.” These three uses reflect efforts toward self-actualization, marking a shift from technical to more emotive applications over the past year.”

Women Usher in Strength Training’s New Era (Fitt Insider): “The future of strength training is female. Between 2011 and 2021, women’s use of free weights increased by 150%, while resistance machine use jumped 558%, per Harrison Co. On Strava, strength training uploads climbed 25% in 2024, making it the fastest-growing sport among women. More than aesthetics, resistance training is essential for aging well, boosting bone density, preserving muscle, and improving metabolic health. A call to arms, experts like Dr. Stacy Sims and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon are pushing strength as a cornerstone of women’s healthspan.”

I often say strategists are great at analyzing culture, but bad at participating in it. As subcultures get deeper and parts of the zeitgeist retreat to places untouched by AI, it will be hard to be a good strategist without the embodied knowledge of participation.

Go find a niche, a scene, a social current and give yourself over to the experience. Nearly all subcultures contain the early signals of what will become mainstream. They're little satellites out in the future, sending norms and new truths back to the masses. That's where you need to be.

It can get easy to get caught up in the heady work of strategy or the grind of daily life, but the best among us feel the answers in their bones before they know the answers in their minds, and that only comes from participating deeply.

But you can't participate with an agenda in mind.

Deep participation means giving freely, joyfully to the community as an equal and letting yourself grow because of it, irrespective of your day job. You have to create instead of extract. You have to forget what you want and remember who you are... and when you do that, you'll have something better than insight. You'll have instinct.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!

Brand strategy has been reduced to reaction.

We’ve replaced vision with vibes. We’ve mistaken trends for truths, and every trend demands an immediate response. AI, robotics, and ‘the algorithm’ mean signals are crossing everywhere and it’s making the future feel impossible to predict.

But it’s not technology that will decide the future. 

It’s the hidden psychotechnologies of our world that will change everything. 

I’ve written a new report on how to build a psychotechnology brand that wins when the outer world feels unpredictable.

Psychotechnology is the architecture of belief that shapes how we see the world. It’s the powerful ideas, concepts, and mental models that ultimately decide how everything plays out, even the most powerful technologies among us today. It is the container that holds it all.

When you play in psychotechnology, you play at a level that predicates everything else. The technology, the culture, and the market will all follow. 

This 90-slide report is both the culmination and the next step of my strategic approach to branding:

In it, I explore the three most powerful psychotechnologies that you will need now and into the next few years.

1. Big Ideas: These reveal the values people unconsciously organize their lives around, and tell us where we can create new values that people will actually adopt. Big Ideas don’t stay in their lanes. They go broad across culture in unexpected ways, and the new big ideas that are emerging are especially provocative.

    

2. Market Conditioning: This shows how those values are normalized and scaled, and how to place your brand on the critical path while your competitors fall off. If you’re not bending the will of the market toward your brand, you’re paving the path of the market toward your competitor. Bending the market is an incredible ability - almost like a strategic magic trick - and you have to learn how to see it happening.
    

3. Units of Culture: My favorite signals, these expose the outdated frameworks still shaping our experiences, and the latent demand you can tap into with your brand. There have never been so many outdated units of culture at the same time, and there is a lot of value to be captured right now. People are literally waiting to live their lives differently.

Strategy is in a tough spot right now.

I get the sense everyone is grasping for something deeper, some system of insight that can cut through the noise. As brand leaders, we’re trained to find patterns, but in the chaos of the moment we’ve failed to update our own models for understanding the world and our markets. 

This report is how I am building both my own brands and those of our clients with a different lens.

No matter how fast the world moves, no technology, no trend, and no tool can ever live outside the psychotechnology of its time.

That’s an exciting thing because psychotechnologies are powerful, and they announce their approach years and decades in advance.

This is where you can build your culture brand.

Living In Dreamland

Here's what we've been consuming.

Built for Disorder: The Next Era of Business (NOBL): “The next generation of companies won’t just make different choices—they’ll be built differently. They’ll be embedded locally, acting less like distant corporations and more like trusted neighbors. They’ll push authority to the edge, enabling real-time decisions. They’ll run on minimum viable bureaucracy—just enough structure to align, never enough to stall. They’ll favor redundancy and flexibility over efficiency—because resilience is the real advantage. These aren’t upgrades. They’re structural overhauls. And they’re what it takes to survive—and lead—in an era of disorder and distrust.”

The Whiff of AI Aesthetics: Dream Logic Episode 1 (Kirby Ferguson): “It’s the start of a weekly conversation: musings, artist interviews, and long looks into the strange, evolving landscape of new creative tools. In this episode, Karin reflects on the unexpected freedoms and failures of this medium, and what she's noticed among peers in the design world. What it makes possible. What it doesn’t. It’s an open invitation to think differently.”

The Houston Rodeo: The cultural moment no one is talking about (The Pollinatr): “The Houston Rodeo is becoming an epicenter for culture, fashion, food, and music. I love that it’s in a different city besides NY, LA, and SF. I love that so many different cultures are represented and take pride in this moment. As people are seeking more IRL experiences, this is an amazing opportunity for your brand to stand out that a lot of non-cowboy brands haven’t discovered yet.”

Models Aren't Moats: Three Signals Amongst the AI Noise (Digital Native): “Yes, ARR Is Dead, which unpacks how low-quality some of this AI revenue is. Annual Recurring Revenue is a beautiful thing because it’s recurring—it’s right there in the name!—and because it’s predictable, high-margin, and typically expands as customer adoption broadens. In the world of AI, though, much of the revenue is experimental. It’s not really recurring; it’s not really predictable; it’s lower-margin; and churn is way worse. So should we really be valuing companies on the same ARR multiples?”

Want to Sell More Romance Novels? First, Have a Really Great Hat (Inc.): “Don’t call it a publishing company. 831 Stories is selling romance as a concept […] Most of the time, merch tends to be an afterthought. There is no shortage of brands that stick their logo on T-shirts and tote bags and put them up for sale or gift to influencers hoping to get cheap exposure or squeeze extra revenue out of their IPs. The opposite is the case 831 Stories. New merch is introduced alongside and between book releases in two strategic categories—community-forward pieces that play into the evergreen romance tropes, and in-universe artifacts based on the unique elements of each 831 Stories book.”

An Obituary for Millennial Culture (VICE): “After all, millennials have nowhere to go. The internet is where they live […] One of the emergent qualities of the digital culture millennials shaped is that nothing ends any more. Wars and pandemics drag on; aging bands keep touring in a perpetual state of reunion rather than breaking up; politicians circle the drain into their eighties and nineties; bygone aesthetics and styles are forgotten and rediscovered in shorter and shorter cycles. We seem unable to fully metabolize experiences and move on, for better or worse; we suffer from cultural acid reflux.”

You’re looking for a method, a tactic, a framework, but ultimately, you are the tool.

I keep coming back to this.

Every month we host great minds for our strategist’s club – people like Rory Sutherland, the world’s #3 female poker player Maria Ho, famous mentalist Andy Nunn, breakthrough cognitive scientist Mark Miller, uncertainty expert Sam Conniff, Seth Godin, Zoe Scaman, Matt Klein, Nir Eyal – and their collective wisdom all comes back to the same thing.

It’s not about what you know. It’s about how you see.

These are different people, in different industries with different experiences, yet somehow again and again, they arrive at the same truth. We spend so much time searching for the right playbook or the perfect method that will help us unlock strategy, but no outside tool can really do that work for you.

The real work is on you.

You have to be able to control your biases, see yourself/ the market/ the world clearly and without blindspots, experience others' lives with empathy, to understand what patterns you default to, and to recognize when fear or folly is making your decisions for you. You’ll be better served by learning when to trust your instincts and when to challenge them than by any external organizing force.

That’s the unlock, and it’s not just about our work as strategists.

This applies to everything. It defines success, happiness, clarity. Whatever the thing is that you struggle with. The way you show up in relationships, the way you handle change, and the way you rebuild after setbacks. It’s how you’re able to balance conflicting truths without your identity feeling conflicted.

To me, it’s the difference between trying to solve life like it’s a problem versus learning how to play it so it’s a game you’re actually good at.

The answer isn’t out there and you will never find it outside of yourself.

The real secret isn’t finding the perfect system or tool. It’s sharpening your own senses so you can navigate any system effectively.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!

There is an incredible decoupling happening at the very heart of our culture, and it will affect brands and people more than anything else over the next decade:

Work is untethering from reward.

And for a country founded on the Protestant mythology where the virtue of hard work means you are rewarded with greater economic, social and political value, it means there is no gravity holding things together anymore.

You can see this decoupling being encoded in our most important systems right now:

• AI means anyone can be a master, so your hard work doesn’t win you more accolades. The marketplace of achievements is suddenly becoming way more unpredictable, and disruptive forces like AI are opening back doors, short-circuiting traditional paths to success, and normalizing a sense of randomness in work. 
   

• GLP-1s mean anyone can be skinny, so your hard work (or maybe just genes?) doesn’t get you more social favor. The ‘morality’ and economics of thinness start to fall apart, and it’s hard to know how we should celebrate work as it relates to the body (which is perhaps the most profitable moral highground, as evidenced by the nearly $7T wellness industry).
   

• Crypto means anyone can strike gold, so your hard earned investing acumen doesn’t win you special fortunes. A single timely decision could outpace years of smart portfolio-building. Tokens and sh*tcoins proved fortunes could materialize far faster than the usual hard-earned, rags-to-riches story we see in the stock market or the movies we grew up with. 
   

• The TikTok-ification of everything means anyone can have viral content overnight in the slot machine that is social media, and the followers that you’ve spent years cultivating don’t win you extra views or extra reach. And yet brands and influencers alike still cling to follower count because the truth of the matter - the increasing randomness of reach - is just too hard to accept. 

When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they lock in.

We're locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance. 

Chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time.

It’s hard to make a narrative story out of that. There is no mythology available to us that will help make meaning out of the decoupling, although we’re seeing different factions of people try. Silicon Valley, faced with the imminent consequences of their own creation, is quickly revamping Christianity to be an absolving version of the prosperity gospel. The victimhood narrative that has characterized the far (over)reaches of politics, most recently America’s vengeful tariffs, may give people some small sense of purpose and understanding in a strange new world, but it will be insufficient. 

What makes the decoupling so pervasive is the massive infrastructures that enforce it by default. Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing... the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us. 

The void will touch everything. How do we value an employee, a member of the community, a partner, a leader, a teacher, a political movement, an education, a lifestyle, a brand, a product, or an idea when we can no longer point to work and dedication as a reliable measure of shared value? 

Where can we extract meaning when the singular measure a life well-lived no longer holds?

Some early signals suggest “we’re cooked” as my principal strategist Zach Lamb likes to jokingly say. We see darker versions of Christianity, politics, dating, tribalism and identity taking hold. Not because people are necessarily cruel, but because these versions are simply better adapted for this new world where beating (or cheating) the system is the only rational strategy.

But we’d be poor brand strategists and futurists if we accepted the next bad thing as our ultimate fate. The long trajectory of history has always pointed toward progress, social innovation, and most importantly, surprises in foresight that look like common sense in hindsight. 

So what might those common sense surprises look like?

What we’re seeing now are early, clumsy attempts of a culture trying to reform itself, but there are also lighter versions of things coming into focus: people finding meaning outside of work, radical new forms of community building, psychedelic therapy, enlightened spirituality, and a redefinition of success.

When we can no longer value ourselves or each other by the "work" or the effort, we have to find other ways to decide who and what is valuable. In the short-term, there will be two concurrent tracks we see culture taking: worshipping chance or playing with meaning.

Worshipping chance is a natural extension of a system that has burned through its illusions of fairness. When hard work no longer guarantees reward, our default response is to elevate randomness itself, investing it with a near-spiritual authority. The hustle once revolved around effort, but now it’s about catching lightning in a bottle. The algorithm’s next wave or a stray viral moment can bestow wealth or influence more swiftly than years of honest grind, so chance becomes something to venerate. A chaotic deity in an otherwise disenchanted world.

In practice, this devotion to luck reveals itself everywhere from retail trading frenzies to viral overnight success stories. Instead of following predictable career ladders or carefully planned investments, people chase sudden gains, hoping to decode the next market upswing or social media glitch. 

Brands, influencers, and even entire platforms amplify these tales of instant fortune, further fueling the belief that chance might be our last reliable path to success. When we glamorize this volatility, we risk normalizing the idea that pursuing (or even engineering) random breaks is the most rational option.  

But worshipping chance also sets the stage for playing with meaning.

Once we recognize just how mercurial success can be, we can move beyond passive acceptance of the system’s randomness and begin actively reshaping our notions of value. There will be people who throw themselves headfirst into the glitch in the system and turn it into an art form. If everyone can cheat their way to mastery, wealth, or beauty, they will see it as a giant permission slip to create new ways of finding meaning.

When effort is no longer the golden path, we’re finally free to invent purpose that isn’t measured by sweat and grind. We can build cosmic parties, societies, religions where creativity is currency. We can remix our social rituals with absurd new rules. We can pursue weirdness like it’s sacred.

And some of that could really happen. Some of it is already happening in our homes, gathering places, and centers of worship. 

If the old myth is gone, we are just as likely as not to write new ones so brilliant and so joyful, that they actually thrive in a system that precludes us from making work the pathway to meaning. When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.

For brands and their leaders, this decoupling has profound implications. If success can strike at random, then the old playbooks, where you simply celebrate hard work or exclusivity, might no longer resonate with consumers who feel the ground shifting under their feet. 

When anyone can go viral, re-sculpt their body, or amass sudden wealth, it becomes harder to sell the myth that effort alone is what makes a product, lifestyle, or status truly valuable (which is how most products and aspirations are branded today). 

Instead, you have to help people navigate this unpredictable landscape in a meaningful way. And the good news is that both worshipping chance and playing with meaning open the door for brands to build new kinds of trust and loyalty. 

The obvious way is to acknowledge the randomness and empower consumers to experiment, take creative risks, and find joy in the unexpected. Lots of brands will lean into this chance-heavy side of the equation. It’s easier to feed into game mechanics, gambling experiences, and the overall sense of worshipping chance when it ensnares audiences into deeper usage. It can be as simple as a loot box or as sophisticated as an all-knowing slot machine algorithm.  

But I think the far more exciting and lucrative path is for brands to play with meaning alongside their consumers. 

There are the obvious ways, such as facilitating deeper forms of meaning-making through genuine community, playful engagement, or creative self expression. I haven’t seen any of these formats reliably solved so there’s plenty of room for brands to grow here alone.

But what if brands went further? What if we curate moments of shared wonder and purpose? What if we created joyful new norms around connection, family and belonging? Can you imagine a brand that makes people feel human again? Or makes them feel even more than human? The most exciting thing about all of this is that brands can finally, thankfully, build long term connections that go beyond the next viral spike because people are ready and waiting for it. 

I firmly believe brands can help consumers rewrite the script, and transform a disorienting decoupling into an opportunity for collective reinvention. 

There is an invisible but open need for a story that makes sense of this all. The decoupling may look like threads coming apart today, but culture always weaves itself back together. We can redefine what value looks like.

We can create new measures of experience and value that go well beyond the idea of work and reward, and help us measure our lives in more accurate ways.

Don’t Tax My Flex

Here's what we've been consuming.

Will Tariffs Blow Up Wellness & Longevity "Culture?" (The Business of Women): “No doubt, a certain subset of Gen Z and coastals will continue their march to pleasure-free, high-investment status living. But for the rest? Why go through all the pain-staking trouble, deprivation and true budget killing when your feed pummels you that AI will take your job and our way of life is over? Nihilism has never looked so good.”

Don’t Make Small Talk. Think Big Talk. (The Atlantic): “Arguably, the foremost reason that conversations are difficult is because we don’t prepare for them or work to get better at them... People generally spend more time thinking about what they will wear to a dinner party than what they will talk about. Researchers have found that, laziness aside, this insouciance about conversation is because 50 percent believe that thinking about topics in advance will make a conversation feel forced and artificial; only 12 percent of people think such mental preparation will enhance the experience.”

Prototyping Social Forms of Care (Care Culture): “What role do therapists, coaches, healers, guides, clinicians, and other “helping professions” have to play in establishing new social forms—social forms which themselves heal, enliven, and strengthen the social fabric? By researching how different people and communities answer this question, we may begin to understand the pattern languages and even design methodologies for these new institutions of care. Increasingly I see my role as encouraging these kinds of experiments.”

The Rise of the New Romanticism (Political Currents by Ross Barkan): “In the coming years, if AI cannot metastasize as promised, the oligarchs will lash out like wounded beasts. They cannot accept the inevitability of a world without rapid ascent. Despite what the technologists believe, there are laws of gravity as well as valleys to follow peaks. Nothing is promised to us. We will advance, but not always on their terms. And they’ll find the public growing more recalcitrant.”

Is 'bypassing' a better way to battle misinformation? Researchers say new approach has advantages over the standard (Phys.org): “Rather than directly addressing the misinformation, this strategy involves offering accurate information that has an implication opposite to that of the misinformation. For example, faced with the factually incorrect statement "genetically modified foods have health risks," a bypassing approach might highlight the fact that genetically modified foods help the bee population. This counters the negative implication of the misinformation with positive implications, without taking the difficult path of confrontation..”

America Is Done Pretending About Meat (The Atlantic): "A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat. Many people are relieved to hear it. Despite all of the attention on why people should eat less meat—climate change, health, animal welfare—Americans have kept consuming more and more of it."

Want to Sell More Romance Novels? First, Have a Really Great Hat (Inc.): “When Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur launched the romantic fiction brand 831 Stories last August, their intention was not only to invest in up-and-coming romance writers, but also to create immersive entertainment universes around their stories for the romance superfans. Think less Simon & Schuster and more Disney, A24, and Bravo—companies that turn shows and movies into expansive worlds through merchandise, events, and theme parks.”

[BONUS 1] Some of my team was interviewed on the amazing podcast That Business of Meaning. My cofounder Jean-Louis talks about levers of attention and value creation, and our principal strategist Zach Lamb talks about how brands can help people find meaning in a disoriented world.

[BONUS 2] I spoke with BBC about what we’re seeing in travel trends for 2025: it’s a year of looking for new anchors. Travel trends like stargazing, holiday romance, nostalgia tourism, sleep tourism, digital detoxes and so on show us that people are searching to be reconnected to something bigger than themselves.

Something crazy is happening in our everyday language and brands need to pay attention.

A study of our language shows that as rationality words are decreasing, intuition words are increasing.

Meanwhile, another HBR study of job descriptions for CEOs shows that less and less job descriptions are asking for skills around managing financial and materials resources, while more and more are mentioning social skills.

Correlation is not causation, but you have to admit the lines on these charts do look like near-perfect inverse relationships.

We're swapping reason for feeling.

We’re structurally embedding it into leadership, decision-making, and culture... and intuition is becoming our default operating system.

And if you're a brand trying to change beliefs and behaviors in your market, you have to start asking yourself how intuition plays into your UX and customer journey.

Intuition is felt. It's alchemic, but its not impossible to understand. You just have to learn its language.

It isn’t irrational, but it is processed differently. It moves through symbols, signals, and subconscious cues. If you’re a brand trying to shift beliefs and behaviors, you can’t just logic people into change.

You have to design for instinct. Shape the unspoken.

Build experiences that feel right before they make sense.

As intuition becomes our default operating system, brands have to learn to resonate in deeper ways.

(I shared this post on LinkedIn 1 month ago. If you want my most up-to-date insights, connect with me on LinkedIn here.)

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

For The Intellectually Isolated

I’ve made a new video that gives you a peek inside what we’ve lovingly built for brand strategists at Exposure Therapy.

Anyone who creates a truly great brand knows two essential things: 1) They know strategy, and 2) they deeply understand the culture of their time.

Master those two, and you’re unstoppable.

I started Exposure Therapy because brand strategists, especially the great ones, often feel intellectually isolated. We’re endlessly curious—we want to understand why the world works the way it does and why people behave the way they do.

That kind of curiosity isn’t just for our careers. It’s for something bigger. It’s about having something meaningful to give back—not just to our profession, but to the world around us. And people like that deserve to invest in themselves.

If that's you, I invite you to apply.

Annual membership goes up to $4,000 soon. Apply before Dec. 10th to get the current rate of $3,000/ year.

Break A Leg

Here's what we've been consuming.

It's Time to Embrace the Era of Mid Entertainment (Harper’s Bazaar): “Crucially, mid entertainment is anti-discourse. Or maybe it's more accurate to call it discourse-proof. The drive to create discourse has taken over nearly every aspect of narrative media. Yellowjackets is the subject of thousand-word essays, deconstructing every angle of a very entertaining show that is also pretty transparent about its sympathies and thesis statement. The trashy multiverse of the Real Housewives franchise have spawned whole academic sub-disciplines on race, class and power. Even the most basic sitcoms of our youth–Boy Meets World and Clarissa Explains It All and so many others–are the subject of season-long recap podcasts.”

Why are age-gap relationships everywhere right now? (Dazed): "But in recent years, it seems as though all nuance has been lost when it comes to conversations about abuse, to such a degree that it’s now assumed that lopsided relationships are inherently exploitative. Perhaps it’s for this reason that age-gap relationships have been conspicuously absent from both the screen and page: it’s been difficult to conceptualise a relationship that is imbalanced without being predatory. However, it seems as though there’s a burgeoning pushback against the proliferation of uncomplicated, sanitised portrayals of sex."

Your mind needs chaos (Vox): "It turns out that one of the best ways to become healthier, more adaptive creatures is to regularly expose ourselves to different kinds of uncertainty. Miller’s work goes on to use this idea to explain the value of everything from art and horror movies to meditation and psychedelics. In each case, we’re brought to “the edge of informational chaos,” where our predictive models begin to break down. Surprisingly, he sees creativity and optimizing our predictive powers as complementary forces that help sustain life itself.”

If you want to create a monocultural event, start a war (objects of): "Why are we so attracted to war at extraordinary scale? We often blame the algorithm for sowing division and inciting rage. Social media has certainly increased the speed and volume at which we are fed media that sparks an angered emotional response – but it’s not the algorithm alone. Many of the war-driven monocultural events discussed in this essay happened before social media and these algorithms even existed. Rather, the algorithm is a mirror to our culture and ourselves."

Sgt. Slaughter, Sleepy Joe, Little Marco & Political Kayfabe (La Nona Ora): “Wrestling, as Barthes noted, isn't about fooling anyone. Everyone knows it's staged. That's not the point. It is a “known pretense”. The audience participates in what wrestlers call "kayfabe" - the “willing suspension of disbelief” that makes the show work. “We'll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it's real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined.—Nick Rogers”

If you loathe the idea of a "personal brand", this is for you.

We had the honor of hosting Seth Godin at Exposure Therapy recently for Personal Branding month, and he spoke directly to those of us that feel personal branding is "cringey" or "salesy" (and there were quite a few members in our group who felt exactly that).

A true personal brand is about being of service. If you have something to offer the world, it's selfish to keep it to yourself.

And if you can honestly project how you serve people, then there's nothing salesy or cringey about it.

A personal brand is the directing of attention, and it's something you have to take responsibility for. It's hard work, you will get criticism as well as praise, you'll have self-doubt and there will always be someone who's out ahead of you, but none of that takes away from the truth of the matter:

If you have something to give the world, it's your job to find a way to give it.

... and he has some ideas about authenticity as well ;) Let me know your thoughts on that.

I know many of us needed to hear this at Exposure Therapy. I hope this finds you if you need it as well.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

Here’s what I didn’t know when we launched Exposure Therapy:

You can only ever really build half a community.

Your members build the other half, and you can never know what the whole of your community will look like until they show up. Now that we’re nearly a year into building this, I can see what Exposure Therapy really is.

This is where strategic minds come to decode culture, together.

• This year alone we will have given our community 10+ original, in-depth research reports on topics ranging from Build Your Strategic Mind and How To Predict The Future to Matters of the Heart. In 2025, we’ll be tackling topics like Infinite Play, Body Culture, Creativity and The Evolution of Trust. You can see our full slate of 2025 topics here.
   

• We’ve brought in experts like Rory Sutherland, Matt Klein, April Dunford and Zoe Scaman to give us insights that go beyond what they share anywhere else. We’ve also welcomed people like the world’s #3 female poker player, Australia’s most famous mentalist and uncertainty experts to teach us from the margins of strategy.
   

• I’ve made hundreds of personal connections between the founders, CMOs, strategists, creative directors, thought leaders and marketers in our community and relationships are flourishing. There are long standing think tank groups, people planning vacations together, and members that are collaborating on projects and new ventures.
   

• We’ve had immersive wildcard activities and workshops that exposed us to the edges of emerging culture and strategy like rage rituals, neuroplasticity challenges, future artifacts and placemaking.
   

• Members have used the resources and learnings in Exposure Therapy to create provocative brand strategies, innovate product roadmaps, win clients, enrich their research and grow their skills.
   

• We’ve hosted 3 incredible private, specially curated dinners in LA and NYC for members that flew in from around the world to meet others who share their passions and curiosities (and we have one final dinner happening this December).
   

• Every single day conversations are happening in our Slack channel, because with this much programming, people have a lot they want to process and understand together.

I’m so motivated by the wonderful platform that Exposure Therapy has grown into in just 9 months that I find myself working harder and harder to make this place unlike anything else that’s out there.

And it’s only going to get better from here. We’re adding retreats (our biggest request from members), special guests and other surprises along the way.

That’s why we’re increasing the annual membership to $4,000 beginning in 2025.

Join us for the current $3k price by applying before Tuesday, December 10th. 

After that prices go up. We only have 2 cohorts open before it’ll be too late.

If you feel intellectually isolated but wildly curious about culture, strategy and why the world works the way it works, you deserve to invest in yourself.

I think people like us want to learn everything because we have a lot to give back, not just to our professions, but to the world around us.

Come join us.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

Strike A Pose

Here's what we've been consuming.

Why Does Gen Z Love Nirvana Tees, Thrasher Hoodies, and Bass Pro Shops Hats? (GQ): “Looking back to her formative years in the ’90s and early 2000s, Lewis remembers the “shame associated with being a poser, where I think if you wore a band tee that you weren't actually a fan of, then people would call you a poser. I would see that play out in teen magazines, or you'd see it play out in movies.” Few insults stung worse. “But now [many] of the ‘trending aesthetics’ we see are kind of the definition of poser: cottagecore, fairycore. People are trying on these identities that they aren't, but there's no shame associated with it now.””

Can AI Companions Help Cure the Loneliness Epidemic? (The Wall Street Journal): "We found that the more people felt heard—as measured by asking them how much they agreed with statements like “The chatbot seems able to appropriately recognize the mood of the user from the conversation and to respond accordingly” and “The chatbot was empathetic”—the greater the reduction in loneliness they experienced. Similarly, those who interacted with the AI companion experienced a significantly greater average reduction in loneliness levels (24 percentage points) than those who interacted with the AI assistant (6 percentage points)."

Everybody wants to be Beyoncé, nobody wants to be Beyoncé (as seen on): "Celebrities of Beyoncé’s size and relevance launching brands should be expected, even welcomed. And yet, House of Deréon was no Skims, and Cécred is no Fenty Beauty (or Pattern, or Blake Brown Beauty) […] When people aspire to wealth, they’re really aspiring to a lifestyle. But for most young people today, there’s very little of Beyoncé’s lifestyle we see, and therefore very little we can aspire to. There’s no specific home, car, outfit, vacation, or party that makes its way to our mood boards. It’s one thing to recognize excellence. It’s quite another to envy."

The Misogyny of Gen Z Men Has Been Overstated (The New York Times): “Recent surveys and a new book by the political scientist Melissa Deckman, “The Politics of Gen Z,” complicate the view of male Zoomers as overwhelmingly conservative or anti-woman. Young men are, in fact, largely supportive of gender equality, though most are reluctant to call themselves feminists. The majority of young men support legal access to abortion, though the issue is not as important to them as it is to young women.”

A Food Critic Walks Into a Fasting Spa (The New Yorker): “A tour through Erewhon is a tour through the cultural pathologies of the day: seed-oil paranoia, Jordan Peterson-influenced masculinity panic, gratuitous self-medication for the remote-work set. In my first few weeks as a resident of L.A., where I moved recently from New York, I stalked the aisles with forensic focus. A narrative of modern ills emerged, and if these are universal—who among us does not seek higher energy, improved immunity, and better sleep, sex, skin, and hair?—the means for achieving them seemed to boil down to two strikingly polar schools of thought. One side, more predictably, extolls the plant-based diet, which eschews animal products, while the other recommends consuming as many products from as many different animals as possible.”

Outsized Effects

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• 0.1 % of users share 80% of fake news
   

• Forget virtual reality, the next big thing is actual reality
   

• The motherload of advertising

Comfort Zone

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• Paris’ retrofuturistic cinema
   

• Healing novels
   

• No CGI. Just ferrofluid on a microscopic slide.

Why do brands suck at creating special spaces?

Every special space has 3 elements: People, Portal and Permissions.

Of all three of these dimensions, permissions are perhaps the most important, and it's the one dimension brands never pay attention to.

This month in Exposure Therapy we're exploring "Special Spaces" because spaces are becoming more polarized, more customized, and far more interpersonal. Space is the last bastion of control. Brands that create the physical/ digital spaces that hold us will probably be the ones that win.

Image from our October 2024 Exposure Therapy research drop.

We often don’t realize how our lives consist of shifting spaces of permission. We behave differently at home, at work, at school, in the car, in the bedroom, in the therapy office, in the comment section, and on social media.

If you’re designing a space, forget the room for a moment and focus on what new permissions you plan to create, and how you can build a portal into them.

Any brand can create a vibey pop up or glittery immersive experience. Very few brands can actually create spaces that have special permissions for people to feel/ think/ behave differently in, and that's why those spaces fail.

Special permissions change our behavior.

They change our expectations.

They change how we connect with one another.

The holy grail for any brand is to create a space where people feel transformed, but there's no transforming the user if you don't first change the permissions around them.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

Here are 3 of the most important things I’ve learned in my career as a brand strategist, and they aren’t things that people normally talk about:

#1) There are no brand strategy tools. YOU are the tool.

You have to sharpen your own mind, work hard to eliminate your biases as much as possible, control your reactions in the face of uncertainty, remove your ego and experience the world from a place of true empathy, and resist lazy pattern-making.

Stop looking for the model or framework that will do the work for you.

The answer is already there, but you can only see it once your mind is clear.

#2) Don't see people's choices as good or bad, right or wrong. Everything is just a tradeoff.

I learned this one from Jean Twenge. Gen Z isn't soft. BookTok girlies aren't delusional. Margaritaville isn't full of cringey retirees.

Every psychographic of people is making the tradeoffs they feel will give them the best life.

Gen Z growing up slowly is a smart tradeoff between resources and aspirations. BookTok girlhood is a smart tradeoff between power structures and bodily autonomy. Living in a senior community like Margaritaville is a smart tradeoff between independence and human connection.

The tradeoff tells you the real desires and motivations of a person.

#3) Let the work change you.

The reason why strategists love what they do is because it allows them to constantly evolve past their own limited beliefs.

Working with a beauty brand made me excited about getting older. Branding a construction tech company made me proud of the American work ethic. Spending time with the fans of a plus size clothing brand made me grateful for parts of myself I once tried to erase.

In fact, “Let the work change you” is our company’s first value. It’s that important.

It requires a vulnerability and humility not many people are open to, but when the work changes you, you get closer to a real strategy. You get closer to a new perspective that can unlock massive value.

If you’re not changing, you’re not really doing the work.

And if there was a fourth, I would say don't just learn. Take what you learn and digest it with a community. I would have never had these insights if I didn't have my community.

Your community is the most important strategic advantage you've got.

How To Reach A True Insight

So many useless "insights" are always flying around. A few of my faves:

• "XYZ is dead!" No, it's not. It's either not dead or it died a long time ago and everyone already knows it.
   

• "XYZ trend changes everything!" No, it's not even a trend. It's a small wave of TikToks that will die in the next 2 weeks.
   

• Or my perennial favorite, "Industry vet complains about everything we're doing wrong without providing any new solutions!"

But we recently had a real insights mastermind with us at Exposure Therapy who gave us the single, most useful formula for an insight I've ever heard.

Matt Klein is Head of Foresight at Reddit, an incredible thinker, and a great friend who came and shared so many meaningful ideas and approaches with us - things that I'm still thinking about and know I will carry for the rest of my career.

Here’s Matt’s formula for a true insight:

Trend + Countertrend = Insight

Trends and countertrends don't mean anything on their own. They're radio frequencies that tune us into a larger, unseen insight.

They're opposites on the surface but actually both signals of the same thing.

You need to figure out what they ladder up to. It takes a real breadth of thinking and knowledge to find a true insight because its hidden in the patterns among opposites, not the moments. It's in the contradictions, not the similarities.

And according to Matt, most strategists stop halfway.

It's easy to see something new and call it an insight.

It's far more uncomfortable to hold two conflicting things at once and find what binds them together.

Masters & Disasters of Scale

Here's what we've been consuming.

Breaking Down OnlyFans’ Stunning Economics (MatthewBall.co): “In 2024, OnlyFans generated $6.3 billion in gross revenues, up from $300 million five years earlier... Though OnlyFans is based around subscriptions, over 60% over consumer spending is now via transactions (and unlike say, Candy Crush, these are not micro transactions but instead add-on purchases that can cost dozens of dollars or more). Indeed, subscription revenues are up only 9% since 2021 (or $227 million) whereas transactional spending is up 70% (or $1.6 billion), representing 88% of total growth.”

The Power of Anomaly (Harvard Business Review): “Ambiguity creates opportunity. If a signal were clear, everyone would see and act on it, making it competitively neutral. As the military strategist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “[Attempts] to equip the conduct of war with principles, rules, or even systems [that] considered only factors that could be mathematically calculated are objectionable…because they aim at fixed values. In war everything is uncertain and variable.” Similarly, to imagine and respond to trends before they are clear, leaders must act on uncertain and shifting information.”

Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic so Hard to Cure? (The New York Times): “Loneliness is a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any chronically lonely person can tell you. A clerk at a crowded grocery store can be wildly lonely, just as a wizened hermit living in a cave can weather solitude in perfect bliss. (If you want to infuriate an expert in loneliness, try confusing the word “isolation” with “loneliness.”) For convenience’ sake, most researchers still use the definition… “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” Unfortunately, that definition is pretty subjective, too.”

The information wars are about to get worse, Yuval Noah Harari argues (The Economist): "And many may wonder why, for a book about information that promises new perspectives on AI, he spends so much time on religious history, and in particular the history of the Bible. The reason is that holy books and AI are both attempts, he argues, to create an “infallible superhuman authority”. Just as decisions made in the fourth century AD about which books to include in the Bible turned out to have far-reaching consequences centuries later, the same, he worries, is true today about AI: the decisions made about it now will shape humanity’s future.”

Turning OpenAI Into a Real Business Is Tearing It Apart (The Wall Street Journal): “Some at the company say such developments are needed for OpenAI to be financially viable, given the billions of dollars it costs to develop and operate AI models. And they argue AI needs to move beyond the lab and into the world to change people’s lives. Others, including AI scientists who have been with the company for years, believe infusions of cash and the prospect of massive profits have corrupted OpenAI’s culture.”

Losing Touch With Reality

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• China’s startup ecosystem has almost completely collapsed in the last 5 years

   

• The future of parasocial platforms (unsurprisingly) cuts out humans
   

• Workers needed at S&P 500 companies to generate $1 million in revenue has fallen rapidly

Just Lovely

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• 1980s Hong Kong wedding photography

   

• What a nobody has in his heart

   

• Feasting table

I gave a keynote at TikTok’s GlobalTok conference last week, a closed-door event in San Jose solely for the platform’s largest brand partners.

The energy was amazing.

The theme was “moonshots” and I really wanted to add my cultural lens to the conversation.

While the world focuses on technology on the surface of culture, the smartest brands will also be paying very close attention to psychotechnology beneath the surface - the tech of the mind, our models and frameworks that create the reality around us - because as we’ve seen over and over again, there is not a single technology that can live outside the psychotechnology of its time.

Psychotechnology tells us how to build the future our audiences are asking for - the futures that they are already living in their inner worlds but might not know how to articulate.

• When mommunes and communes start trending, it’s not about co-living. It’s about a desire to de-center marriage and re-center friendship.
   

• When titans of industry stop making public monuments like Rockefeller Center and start buying private islands to build apocalypse bunkers, status is no longer about building society. It’s about exiting society.
   

• When bootkok girlies who read the Shadow Work Journal and romantasy books buy perfumes with names like “Laughing With A Mouthful of Blood”, fragrance is no longer about attraction but about power. (Credit to the amazing Lily McGonigal for her research here.)

You can be a brand that tries to chase the signs of change, or you can be a brand that plays with the deeper mechanisms of change.

You can be constantly reacting to the market, or you could be creating the future people want.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

Article also published in Adweek.

When Ozempic was first becoming a household name last year, the public discourse around semaglutides took on a predictable pattern.

First there was concern about its safety, then skepticism of its effectiveness, and finally the conversation landed on the question of its morality. Was it immoral for obese people to “cheat” and use semaglutides to shed extra weight?

When every other practical concern was rebuffed, and even after offshoot brands like Zepbound were developed and released specifically for weight loss management instead of diabetes, the argument of morality only grew louder.

This is not an uncommon pattern for brands like Ozempic and their counterparts.

If you were paying attention you would have seen a similar pattern playing out in the public discourse around OpenAI, OnlyFans, Oatly, and smaller brands in emerging categories like female hormone replacement therapy, polyamory, end-of-life care, and baby formula.

One of the most interesting brand frontiers I see is companies tackling what I call "moral static", and I recently wrote about it for Adweek.

We see moral static in categories where new technologies, inventions or ideas are forcing us to face our deeply held, sometimes deeply false, biases. When those biases are laid bare, we resort to an argument of morality.

Moral static isn’t genuine, nuanced moral discourse.

It’s the chaotic buzz of blunt moral objection with no real path to discussion or progress. When new ideas and innovations threaten peoples’ identities, they cling to one-size-fits-all moral arguments even when there is no logical argument left.

Instead of producing a clear conversation about how we can update our models of what is right and wrong, these categories produce static.

Food brands, which operate in a highly identity-driven category, see their fair share of moral static. Oatly faced initial pushback in its native Sweden with critics discounting their oat milk as nutritionally inferior to cow’s milk, and asserting the company’s sustainability promises were inflated.

Oatly easily dismissed or disproved those claims, but it wasn’t until dairy farmers and consumers pointed at Oatly’s slogan “Flush the milk” as attacking a Swedish way of life for both dairy farmers and consumers that Oatly’s narrative was finally complicated with moral static.

America’s own relationship with food is especially plagued by moral static.

Ten years ago, buzzy brands like Soylent and Huel were initially praised for their convenience and nutritional value, but eventually saw themselves in debates about the degradation of meal culture and America’s toxic relationship with food.

Today is no different. When the FDA opened public comments on how to officially define “natural foods”, consumers often invoked moral references to God, what God intended, or Mother Nature instead of more practical definitions that precluded additives or chemicals.

While discussions of morality and ethics are vitally important when culture is faced with any new technological frontier, moral static is different.

Kranzberg's first law of technology says that ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ People will always have biased reactions to new ideas, but today moral static is our lazy default. It’s the outrage in TikTok comments and Instagram clapback videos that only scares and confuses people, with no real intention of finding a new moral commons.

Morality is extremely difficult terrain for brands to navigate. Rather than doubling down on the moral question, it’s almost always better to deal with it through humor, irreverence or irony.

However for some brands, moral static is on the critical path to growth and the only way to go through it is to just go through it.

In cases like that, it’s important to remember that moral static places both the brand and the user at the center of a very difficult question: What is the right way to live?

That question can only be answered from the horizon of a new world, not the horizon of our old one, and the one thing brands do really well is build new worlds.

But there are rules to building a new world.

Brands have to be smart about how they support new moral beliefs, how they position themselves against common enemies, and the communities they nurture for their users.

The Future of Love and Carnage

A new generation of readers is redefining love, relationships, and intimacy by redrawing the lines of power. And with so many brands dealing in love and intimacy, this is a vitally important part of culture to be paying attention to.

I think of all the cultural movements right now, this is one of the MOST important to watch.

We had the incredible genre expert Sarah Wendell come and school us at Exposure Therapy about last month's topic on Matters of the Heart where we asked, "What kind of love does our culture feel it deserves today?"

It was like getting a sneak peak behind the curtain of the global psyche (because this is a global phenomenon btw).

The booming genre of romance and the sub-category romantasy has 2 wings:

1) A liberation wing where the protagonists will bend the world to find their joy

2) A compliance wing where the people bend themselves to find their joy

And both wings are interestingly having a renaissance.

P.S. We also had our Emotional Alchemy for the Bravehearted dinner in NYC. If you’re looking for provocations, new ideas and people to get your strategic mind going, you should come join us.

The End Is Just The Beginning

Here's what we've been consuming.

The fringes of online gutter culture (Garbage Day): "The conclusion I’ve come to this summer — one I’m still not totally sure I fully believe yet — is that what’s really happening here is that virality is decoupling from popularity. And I think you could even argue that the very idea that mass appeal had to be accurately reflected back at us online and vice versa was an entirely millennial idea. A neurotic need to know, and quantify, exactly what everyone else was seeing and doing."

Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet (Read Max): “These groups may never have really been organized into a subculture absent two other important developments: The first is Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which has been extremely beneficial to all kinds of demonstratively macho subcultures for reasons that have been discussed ad nauseaum. The second is the legalization of sports gambling in many states, which has flooded media properties that cater to Zynternet demographics with cash, either as advertisers or often as owners.”

The evolution of vigilante girl code on TikTok (#CursedContent): "Women are banding together in creative, cunning, and what some would consider batshit crazy ways to protect themselves and others from heartbreak caused by cheaters [...] These social media quests for truth are a new form of female solidarity, transforming isolated experiences of betrayal into a never before seen act of collective justice and empowerment."

Is the End of Marriage the Beginning of Self-Knowledge? (The New Yorker): “Babies, it turns out, have been falsely accused; babies, these writers suggest, were never really to blame. It was the husbands all along—husbands who were useless with the children and domestic duties, who themselves needed constant care, whose envy of their wives’ professional success could drip a slow stream of poison into the marriage. In “Splinters,” Jamison recounts preparing for a nineteen-city book tour. Her husband at the time, also a writer, once told her, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there holding your purse.””

They’re Putting Some Fun in Funerals (New York Times): “Exit Here is among a small group of funeral homes around the world — like Sparrow in New York, Poppy’s in London and Altima in Spain — with a modern feel. Exit Here’s new Crouch End space, with its velvet upholstery and curved archways, resembles a fancy members-only club… For funeral homes, they’re surprisingly hip. Looks aren’t everything, of course. These businesses also tend to offer nontraditional services like support groups for the bereaved and memorials personalized down to every detail.”

Fast Food Forever: How McHaters Lost the Culture War (New York Times): “It turns out that years of saturating American childhood with fast food has paid real dividends. The 6-to-9-year-olds in that 2000 statistic are now younger millennials, among the group with the highest rate of fast-food consumption today. They have a lifetime of memories that connect them to fast-food brands, and to McDonald’s in particular. All that needed to be done was to connect the power of that comfort and nostalgia to the power of celebrity. Fast food isn’t just cheap, accessible calories; it’s a universal experience. You’re eating the same fries as your idols."

[BONUS 1] I recently sat down with the Practical History Podcast to talk about strategy’s intimate relationship with time - something strategists often forget to factor into their scenarios. We talked about time as something to be played rather than lost, pre- and post-purchase branding, access to the past as a status symbol, and how the past and the future have collapsed into the “eternal now”.

[BONUS 2] I also was on a panel for the Conference Board on cultural brand strategy where we discussed how brands become socially and culturally relevant, how to properly measure the impact of brand, leveraging social and influencers in foreign markets, and how to find a common message for multiple audiences.

Living In Impermanence

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• Best show about marketing (and it’s not Mad Men)
   

• Working against “no worries” culture

   

• Temporary aesthetics and lives as eras
   

• 66% of Gen Z spend more time engaging with fan-made content than the original material  
   

• The loneliness of mythlessness
   

• How differentiation works among siblings and why the youngest is smartest
   

Open-Heart Artistry

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• You gotta wear the g*ddamn necklace
   

• The beauty of A$AP Rocky’s new video
   

• Drop off party for the mamas
   

• Map of compound curse words
   

There are three big mental shifts that can turn you into an incredible brand strategist:

#1) There are no brand strategy tools. YOU are the tool.

You have to sharpen your own mind, work hard to eliminate your biases as much as possible, control your reactions in the face of uncertainty, remove your ego and experience the world from a place of true empathy, and resist lazy pattern-making.

Stop looking for the model or framework that will do the work for you.

The answer is already there. But you can only see it once your mind is clear.

#2) Don't see people's choices as good or bad, right or wrong. Everything is just a tradeoff.

I learned this one from Jean Twenge. Gen Z isn't soft. BookTok girlies aren't delusional. Margaritaville isn't full of cringey retirees.

Every psychographic of people is making the tradeoffs they feel will give them the best life.

Gen Z growing up slowly is a smart tradeoff between resources and aspirations. BookTok girlhood is a smart tradeoff between power structures and bodily autonomy. Living in a senior community like Margaritaville is a smart tradeoff between independence and human connection.

The tradeoff tells you the real desires and motivations of a person.

#3) Let the work change you.

The reason why strategists love what they do is because it allows them to constantly evolve past their own limited beliefs.

Working with a beauty brand made me excited about getting older. Branding a construction tech company made me proud of the American work ethic. Spending time with the fans of a plus size clothing brand made me grateful for parts of myself I once tried to erase.

In fact, “Let the work change you” is our company’s first value. It’s that important.

It requires a vulnerability and humility not many people are open to, but when the work changes you, you get closer to a real strategy. You get closer to a new perspective that can unlock massive value.

If you’re not changing, you’re not really doing the work.

And if there was a fourth, I would say don't just learn. Take what you learn and digest it with a community. I would have never had these insights if I didn't have my community.

Your community is the most important strategic advantage you've got.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO

Everywhere you look, our cultural rulers have become outdated. Marriage is about self-actualization but we still measure in units of love. Travel is about emotional restoration but we still measure in units of leisure. Wellness is about rebirth but we still measure in units of health.

My talk, “How Brands Create New Units of Culture To Win New Audiences”, has been selected for the SXSW PanelPicker and it’s a deep dive on how brands can seize tremendous opportunities in the places where we’re using old rulers to measure new things.

If you want to see this talk, help us get it on stage by voting for it here. And a BIG THANK YOU to all of our readers - every single one of you.

Context is everything now

There’s a famous Virgil Abloh quote where he says, “If I put a candle in an all-white gallery space it looks like a piece of art. If I put it in a garage it looks like a piece of trash.”

Abloh understood something that very few brand strategists get: the context is what creates the need for the product in the first place.

• Merit Beauty could only feel like a calming Millennial brand once it was positioned in the chaos of Sephora’s Gen Z aisles.

• Costco spends a lot of money to make their warehouses look stripped down, so what you buy off the crate feels like a good deal.

• Red Bull didn’t mean anything until Dietrich Mateschitz and Chaleo Yoovidhya started placing empty cans outside of trendy nightclubs.

But context isn’t just about the physical space.

It’s the emotional world you create around your users. It’s the permissions and guardrails you create so that they can show up the way you want them to.

Nara Smith’s wardrobe is context. Ezekiel’s bible verse recipes are context. Mindbloom’s ketamine therapy tracks for ailments such as “heartbreak” and “rejection” are context.

It’s that carefully crafted context that creates a very specific need among their users.

That’s incredibly powerful - being able to define how your user shows up - but how is a brand supposed to balance between creating the context and creating the product?

I recently spoke on this topic with the incredible brand master Rory Sutherland for Exposure Therapy, and asked him about the importance of context in branding.

When you have limited resources and have to choose between investing in the candle or investing in the room, which one matters more?

For Rory, context makes the product.

The right context can make food taste good or taste awful, art look inspiring or look depressing, laughter sound hopeful or sound sinister.

But I would take this even further and say that context is in fact more important than the product.

And you don’t need to look further than any celebrity beauty brand, health startup, functional food company, or the entire luxury category to see that it’s true.

As a brand strategist, your most important job is creating a world of context and experience for people to travel through. The product is just the souvenir.

Don’t ask yourself what souvenirs you want to sell.

Ask yourself what experience would be worth the souvenir.

Reality Creep

Here's what we've been consuming.

Our New Religion Isn’t Enough (GIRLS): "People say Gen Z follow these new faiths because we crave belonging and connection, but what if we also crave commandments? What if we are desperate to be delivered from something? To be at the mercy of something? I think we underestimate how hard it is for young people today to feel their way through life without moral guardrails and guidance, to follow the whims and wishes of our ego and be affirmed by adults every step of the way. I’m not sure that’s actual freedom. And if it is, I’m not sure freedom is what any of us actually wants."

Sex in the metaverse isn’t all fun and games (Hunger): "Yet while we are aware of this disparity between how we act online and how we act in person, the results of a Statista study last year still prove shocking. When asked “What things would you do in the metaverse but never in real life?”, 20% of respondents said they would play adult games that engage in extreme violence and/or sex; 18% would conduct unethical experiments on virtual humans; 18% would watch virtual executions; 17% would own a virtual harem; and 14% admitted they would engage in hate speech."

Gambling Enters the Family Zone (The Atlantic): “The restaurant-and-arcade chain announced a new way to help people part with their money: gambling[...]But make no mistake: The company’s new initiative is a move into commercialized betting, a symptom of a larger and troubling trend. Suddenly, gambling seems to be everywhere. This sort of vice creep, a societal normalization of what used to be seen as unsavory habits—gambling, smoking marijuana, watching porn—is accelerated by people’s addiction to devices, in this case giving casual bettors the tools to become compulsive wagerers and easing the way for gambling to become a constant part of life."

The New Generation of Online Culture Curators (The New Yorker): “Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.”

You Might Be A Late Bloomer (The Atlantic): "It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.”"

America’s Top Export May Be Anxiety (The Atlantic): “By 2013, the number of disorders listed in the DSM had swelled to nearly 300. In his 2013 book, Saving Normal, Frances warned that “a looser definition of sickness” could make people worse off. “DSM-V opens up the possibility that millions and millions of people currently considered normal will be diagnosed as having a mental disorder,” he told the Canadian Medical Association Journal that year.”

The search for the random numbers that run our lives (BBC): “People have long sought external sources of randomness as the basis of random number generators. In this search for true randomness, they have looked practically everywhere for chaotic phenomena that can't be predicted or manipulated. They have listened to the racket of electrical storms, captured pictures of raindrops on glass, and played with the tiniest particles in the known Universe. The search is far from over.”
 

New Beginnings

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• No, 50% of marriages do not end in divorce
   

• Periodization and why we keep naming our summers 
   

• How Traeger changed its brand and made hundreds of millions 
   

• Peoples rankings of how erotic various emotions are
   

Did you feel that?

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• Gender discrimination as performance art
   

• How epistrophe brings dialogue to life
   

• If female rage was a painting
   

• China's feidu wax dyeing process
   

• Sha'Carri’s coldest finishing photos 
   

• Each sentence is worse than the last 
   

I'm finding that the core of all great strategic thinking is really just about knowing how to play and leverage the element of time.

Time and strategy go hand in hand. The best strategists are exceptional at futures thinking, knowing when to make a move, how to create conditions for certain outcomes, reaching tipping points, and making the future feel like the present.

All of these are just expressions of time.

When we ignore the element of time, we make weak decisions that at best will work in the present, but do nothing to propel us forward into the future.

To be a great strategist, you have to learn to understand time as another dimension that changes the playing field, and get comfortable with time as both a threat and an opportunity.

If it doesn't account for time, it's not a strategic.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO

If you’re looking for brand strategy, workshops and talks for your company, check us out at Concept Bureau. If you want to develop yourself as a brand strategist, come join us at Exposure Therapy.

Strategists consume so much content. We ingest everything we can. We believe the more we learn, the healthier our performance.

But most of us aren’t healthy.

If we’re lucky, maybe 20-30% of our information diet is actually nutritious (i.e. quality research and analysis). The rest is crap.

Be honest: how much of your reading consists of fluffy articles, b.s. industry reports or low-context social posts? It’s highly processed, artificial information that’s full of empty calories.

But what if you could control your diet?

How much better of a strategist would you be if you were intentional about what went into your brain?

Poor information can ruin your career the same way poor food can ruin your health, and a brand strategist needs to be on an especially high-performance information diet if they want to own the playing field.

In this week’s article, my cofounder Jean-Louis Rawlence shares his powerful framework for ‘How To Create a High Performance Information Diet’ and the very specific ways you can get your health back on track.

You can and should change your information diet. It can unlock new levels of creativity and insight you simply didn’t have before, and it starts with an understanding of content as hormones.

Just like nutrients affect our body, information impacts our mental state through hormones like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol, and adrenaline. These hormones are the “macronutrients” of our emotional and perceptual systems. Create an imbalance and you’ll screw up your performance.

So what’s the ideal information diet for a brand strategist then?

You need to balance between the 5 major hormones, digest your insights through connection and community, and find your ‘scenius’ to find your genius.

Like a weightlifter’s carefully planned diet, you have to curate and practice self-discipline. The content that gives you the biggest dopamine hit isn’t always what’s going to make you better at your work, and it’s not just about who you follow but about having a thoughtful relationship with the content you consume.

When you clean up your information intake, you navigate the complex world of strategy with better insight and balance.

Because in our industry, you are what you eat.

Gen Z’s Slow Life Strategy

The 'slow life strategy' explains why some employers see Gen Z bringing their parents to job interviews and performance reviews. In fact, some firms have started sending recruiting materials directly to parents.

But the slow life strategy also answers a much bigger question that we asked ourselves all last month in Exposure Therapy as we explored our topic of Eternal Youth:

"If we're all going to live longer, how are we going to fill up those extra 20-30 years?"

We had the incredible privilege of posing this question to one of my favorite thinkers, researcher and professor Jean Twenge whose work is all over the news right now.

Dr. Twenge argues that instead of fitting multiple lifetimes into one (which was my hypothesis) all of her research points toward the slow life strategy where younger generations (both Gen Z and Millennials) will draw out the growth and milestones of a single life over many more years.

They’ll take longer to grow up and longer to grow old.

Economics of Splurging

Here's what we've been consuming.

The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam (Wall Street Journal): “The rate of improvement for AIs is slowing, and there appear to be fewer applications than originally imagined for even the most capable of them. It is wildly expensive to build and run AI. New, competing AI models are popping up constantly, but it takes a long time for them to have a meaningful impact on how most people actually work. These factors raise questions about whether AI could become commoditized, about its potential to produce revenue and especially profits, and whether a new economy is actually being born."

When Did Teen Boys Get a Nose for $300 Cologne? (New York Times): “Hannah Glover, a middle-school physical fitness teacher in Bluffton, S.C., has been shocked by how early the cosmetic products of adulthood have been gaining a foothold with her 11-to-15-year-old students. Boys in her class bring bottles of Gucci, Dior and Yves Saint Laurent cologne to school and show them off to their classmates, she said, while girls are obsessed with lip products and Sol De Janeiro moisturizers.”

Baby-boomers are loaded. Why are they so stingy? (The Economist): "Perhaps boomers will stop hoarding. Many are healthier than their predecessors, which has allowed them to delay retirement and accumulate more wealth... Governments have introduced anti-ageism legislation, encouraging older people into the labour force. Yet there could be deeper forces at play, making boomers reluctant to spend what they have earned, and in turn pressing down on interest rates and inflation. Three factors stand out: “bequest motives”, the covid-19 pandemic and worries about care."

The cult of Costco: How one of America’s biggest retailers methodically turns casual shoppers into fanatics (Fortune): “They’ve learned that it’s the unexpected finds—that La Mer jar, or dill-pickle-flavored cashew nuts, or trendy new Birkenstocks—that stoke obsession. The “treasure hunt” ethos also explains why Costco has no signs in its aisles flagging product categories; that absence forces shoppers to wander, increasing the chance of shopping serendipity. It pays off: Treasure-hunt buys represent about 15% of what Costco sells, but contribute disproportionately to customer loyalty."

How many American children have cut contact with their parents? (The Economist): "People are increasingly likely to reject relatives who obstruct feelings of well-being in some way, by holding clashing beliefs or failing to embrace those of others. Personal fulfillment has increasingly come to displace filial duty, says Dr Coleman. Whereas families have always fought and relatives fallen out, he says, the idea of cutting oneself off from a relative as a path to one’s own happiness seems to be new. In some ways it is a positive development: people find it easier to separate from parents who have been abusive. But it can also carry heavy costs."

Psych Studies

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• Marketing is powerful

• Ashley Madison and the psychology of dishonesty

• What gives life meaning in different countries

What You Make of It

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• How BÉIS turned around a bad PR moment

• Elite self-talk

• The 3 messages of Hello Kitty

Luxury isn't about money, it's about distance.

When anyone can buy a small piece of Hermès and flaunt it like they've got it on social, people have to find new ways of signaling their status.

And they do that by creating distance: distance in time, culture, pace of life, quantity, conspicuousness or aesthetic.

Professor Silvia Bellezza's fantastic research on the distance model of status is still in my mind since she spoke to us at Exposure Therapy.

It's a single model that beautifully explains every single weird thing we see in the luxury market right now.

So the next time you see something luxury that doesn’t make sense to you - like 'why would somebody ever buy that?!' or 'who would want to wear that?!' - don't look at it in terms of money.

Look at it in terms of distance and it'll probably make sense.

@jasmine_bina

Luxury isn’t about money. It’s about distance, Pt. 2 There are 6 forms of distance that luxury brands and consumers use to separate themse... See more

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

People say the world is crazy right now because everything is so disconnected, but I would argue the opposite.

The world is crazy right now because suddenly everything is so connected.

Electric vehicles are causing food instability in Congo, Silicon Valley tech culture is eroding the friendship between a cab driver and his pizzaiolo in Italy, and we’re all eating crunchy omelettes because wild birds are changing their migration patterns.

All of these are examples of convergence, and convergence is coming for your brand.

In our newest episode of Talks at Concept Bureau, strategy and innovation advisor Lydia Kostopoulos gives us a lesson on “Convergence Literacy”, which is really the practice of knowing how everything is connected, and predicting how those connections will change our world.

Lydia has brought her insights to the United Nations, NATO, US Special Operations, US Secret Services, IEEE, and the European Commission. It’s her (awesome) job to see how seemingly unrelated dynamics are converging together and creating wholly new market opportunities.

I feel convergence is the biggest blindspot in nearly every brand strategist’s view right now.

We can hardly see past a year into the future and we think that’s because things are so uncertain, but that’s not what’s really going on.

We feel uncertain because we’re still using first-order mindsets to understand third-order markets.

We haven’t developed the skill of seeing how everything is connected. It is unwillingness, not uncertainty, that’s limiting us. If you truly want to innovate your brand, you can’t do it in the confines of your market anymore because your market no longer lives in a silo.

And that’s why I’m so excited to share today’s talk with you.

Convergence Literacy is a skill that takes constant practice, but once you begin to master it, it can reveal a whole new horizon of opportunities for your brand.

New Talks & Workshops

Friends, I’m really excited to share our new slate of talks and workshops.

Each is based on one of the top 5 challenges your company will face in the next year, and all of them are borne of our original research at Concept Bureau.

Future Proof Workshop
A fast-track workshop for predicting the future of your category, aligning on high-value opportunities, and creating a plan of action.

Culture Fluent Workshop
Disruption comes from culture, not technology. Find the hidden cultural levers in the market that only your brand can capitalize on.

The Revaluing of Everything: Strategic Thinking in the Age of AI
Using AI to completely change your strategic perspective, and practices to put it immediately into action.

Brand Storytelling for the Meaning Crisis 
New, unexpected centers of meaning are emerging in our culture. This is how your brand can meet users where they are.

How To Build Your Strategic Mind 
The skills, secrets and methodologies that can make your team a strategic powerhouse.

Email me at jasmine@theconceptbureau.com for details and pricing.

Tear Up The Rule Book

Here's what we've been consuming.

When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’? (The New York Times): ““Putting on your socks can be a journey of self-discovery,” said Beth Patton, who lives in Central Indiana and has relapsing polychondritis, an inflammatory disorder. In the chronic disease community, she said, “journey” is a debated word. “It’s a way to romanticize ordinary or unpleasant experiences, like, ‘Oh, this is something special and magical.’” Not everyone appreciates this, she said.”

How TikTok Is Wiring Gen Z’s Money Brain (The Wall Street Journal): “Sprinkle, a financial analyst at an asset-management firm in Nashville, Tenn., uses a budgeting app and has been cooking at home lately to save money—and to be able to afford the things she feels she has to buy, like Lululemon leggings. “Between TikTok and having your friends around you, you’re pressured to buy the things because you want to fit in,” she says. “That’s always been the case, but with TikTok it’s more prominent.””

Why Everything is Becoming a Game (The Prism): “For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun.”

Brands from Burger King to Coke to Lockheed Martin are leaning in on scholarships to capture Gen Z (Fast Company): ““Increasingly, consumers expect corporations to pick up some pieces where other social services are failing,” Lamberton says, pointing to the student debt crisis. But “I don’t think we’d consider this unethichical—we want to see that a firm, if they’re being responsive to vulnerability in a society, that the actions they’re taking are not increasing that vulnerability.””

Why Members-Only Clubs Are Everywhere Right Now (GQ): “Members’ clubs—golf, yacht, university—are nothing new for middle-aged New Yorkers with cash to spend. What’s new is the idea that private clubs, as opposed to Carrie Bradshaw–approved velvet-rope bars, are places for people who are under 40, single, and possibly not even New Yorkers, to spend their Friday nights.”

Prom Dresses Are Just Dresses Now (The Atlantic): “Over the past decade or so, the style divisions among age groups have become far more fluid...This trend aligns with the dissolving of generational boundaries more broadly. Some members of Gen Alpha (infamously dubbed the “Sephora tweens”) have been emulating the multistep skin-care routines of influencers double their age. Adults are buying stuffed animals, a phenomenon some have labeled “kidulthood.” Strict age-based taste distinctions aren’t necessarily innate, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the categories we’ve constructed are converging."

Not So Scary

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• KFC in Chinese hospitals 

• Drake and Kendrick pull the feminist arrow out of the quiver

• The most common dreams by country

Something To Remember

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• A graphic designer you should know about 

• The Pessimist’s Archive

• Email reminders for all those bookmarks you'll never read

One of my new favorite things is chaos packaging.

Michael Miraflor first coined the term and it’s the perfect name for it.

Chaos packaging works because it breaks the unspoken rules of economic and cultural capital, and I made a video that shows you how you can break the same rules with your own brand for tremendous benefit:

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

Branding has always had its place throughout the purchase funnel, but the funnel has changed and it’s time that branding changes, too.

In the old funnel model, the stories and narratives of a brand evolve as people move linearly down the funnel, and the more perceived value and emotional investment a brand can create as people reach the bottom, the more likely the purchase and loyal the customer.

Yet as we know, the funnel isn’t linear anymore for most Gen Z and millennial consumers. It’s now an endless loop of inspiration and exploration.

By way of influencers, a nascent social shopping scene and general information overload, millennials and Gen Z are skipping a lot of the brand connection that used to happen before conversion, and instead shifting it to after conversion.

When 50% of global consumers say they do most of their brand research after they buy, an even greater 78% say they uncover things that attract them to a brand and make them loyal after purchase, and pre-purchase is increasingly dedicated to price and feature research, it’s clear that post-purchase is where real branding begins.

But you’d be hard pressed to find many brand leaders that prioritize post-purchase branding in their own companies. It’s time we changed that.

In my newest article published in AdAge, I explore why the greatest opportunity for brand building is increasingly happening after the first sale is made, not before it.

And that means new rules for making sure your brand is connecting with your user.

Careful Pivots

Here's what we've been consuming.

Nicotine's Glow Up (The Business of Women): "With its mint-like packaging, vapey flavors and names, these nicotine pouches—alongside gum, lozenges and more—are sold as a way to chill, focus and feel better. In fact, “&Chill” “&Focus” are some pouch product names in the UK. The vibe evokes upscale edibles, fresh breath and more self-care than rebellion... Zyn Girlies started on the more conservative side of the sociopolitical sphere... But it’s quickly mainstreaming past the red state aesthetic and into other female spaces."

Meetings are now your culture carriers (Priya Parker): “The art of virtual and hybrid gathering – when we are not all in the same physical space – is the ability to create psychological togetherness […] It’s easy to get frustrated with hybrid meetings. And they’re increasingly important. When people can work from anywhere, and some are in the office, and many are remote, the primary way we now experience each other is through meetings. It's time to get good at them.”

‘Carefluencers’ are helping older loved ones, and posting about it (Seattle Times): ““I decided to document us because I felt it was important,” Punsalan, 30, said. “It’s not only for me to be able to look back on, but I also slowly realized that it was very helpful for people who have been through a somewhat similar situation.” Punsalan, who has over 2 million followers on TikTok, has created content out of tending to his grandmother’s bedsores, cooking her breakfast and sharing the products he uses to tend to her needs.”

A Time We Never Knew (After Babel): “There is a beautiful and melancholic word I like called anemoia. It means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known. This is a sentiment I often sense from my generation, Gen Z—especially in recent years. I see it in the YouTube videos of old concerts that get millions of views. I see it in our fascination with polaroids, vinyls, vintage cameras, and VHS tapes. And I see it in our reaction to gut-wrenching videos about how life has changed.”

Meet the ‘professional namer’ who directed Accenture’s $100 million name change: ‘It’s the best job in the world’ (Fortune): “What makes a great name? Shore points to three key characteristics—that it’s inspirational, differentiable, and, of course, legally available. “I have feelings about names when I see them—whether I want those feelings or not,” he said. “I can’t turn it off.””

[BONUS] I’m finally on TikTok talking about how real brand strategy works, my favorite advice for brands, the argument dilution effect, my talk with Rory Sutherland, and being different not better.

Incremental Gains

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• AI winter is here

   

• Fragmentation of psychological science
   

• The intensity dial of design

Warm Memories

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• How dads made our lives magical

   

• Jean Paul Sartre, Fidel Castro, and Simone de Beauvoir ride a boat in Cuba, 1960

   

• Difference between western music and Indian music

Just like you, my team and I were recently discussing how AI is going to replace certain parts of labor, but its worth remembering that oftentimes when new tech shows up, labor behaves in weird ways.

Or as Tom Vanderbilt puts it, “When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect.”

I’ve written before about the strange ways in which culture wraps itself around the future, and how technology can only go as far as our biases will let it.

The washing machine had the potential to liberate housewives from the home, but instead it freed them up to do the work their housemaids once did. Women ended up doing more domestic labor.

Though the technology changed, the idea behind a woman’s role had not.

Predicting the future is fundamental to your brand strategy but not as easy as it may seem. The correct signals often get lost in the noise of invention.

Futurists of the 1960s predicted online shopping, but not female financial independence.

They predicted emails, but not remote work.

They predicted microwaves and other kitchen technology, but did not predict that fewer and fewer people would be eating around a dinner table together.

Ideas, not technology or invention, are what change the future most, and that is what you should be betting on.

The future isn’t new technology. The future is changed people. Your brand should be placing its bets on who we will become.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau

This month's edition of Brand & Outliers is all about the incredible lengths people are going to in order to make meaning in their lives, and how brands are meeting them there.

I've outlined some of the larger themes below, but as you watch the video, pay attention to how meaning-making is at the root of nearly everything happening this month. Notice how much we are stretching to make things matter, and what a huge opportunity that opens up for brands.

Industrial Tourism and Ensouled Consumption: Industrial tourism is an emerging trend in travel where people visit destination factories and production plants. Sure, people travel to Porsche facilities or the town where their favorite chocolate gets made, but this new form of tourism is about fetishizing something quite mundane.

It's about feeling something in the boring and forgotten corners of life, and making meaning in remote places - what modern travel has perhaps always been about.

Does Being Left-Wing Make You Unhappy?: I'll admit I'm being a little click-baity here, but there is plenty of good evidence that left-wing people tend to be less happy, or perhaps more accurately, right-wingers are more happy, likely because they have tight cultures with strong norms that create cohesion and comfort in the group.

You combine that with the negativity economy and the omniscient algorithm that dictates the feed of life, and you have the conditions for a new kind of politics that trades on pessimism over optimism.

When Culture Will Migrate Back To The Real World: A question came up in our discussion on this call - culture happens in our phones today, but what will it take to migrate back into the real world? At what point will we have events and gatherings and subcultures rooted in real places, inaccessible to our timelines, and only experienced by way of, "You had to be there, man"?

Some strong signals among millennials and gen z tell us there's a real chance the tide may turn (you may have seen this article on Heineken tapping into the boring phone market). People who are becoming more private, more lurk-y, more averse to censorship or being called out, are keeping life private while consuming public content. All it takes is a critical mass of that behavior and culture could jump back into the real world.

The Distance Model of Status and Brands: Columbia Professor Silvia Bellezza came and spoke to us at Exposure Therapy about her genius Distance Model of Status and the concept will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. It's the idea that old status signifiers used to go upmarket (more money, more access, more time) but when all of that has become democratized, our new model of status is about gaining distance from the mainstream. It so eloquently explains what other models of luxury and status cannot: phenomena like ugly luxury, quiet luxury, athleisure, and conspicuous non-consumption. 

It came up again in our Outliers call this month because it may also explain current trends we're seeing in why the rich don't eat anymore, deep sleep flexes and the remote husband.

Nothing Can Fix EdTech, Not Even AI (For Now): Yet another startup has raised money to make world-class education accessible to everyone. But we've seen this before with Section, Udemy, and a long list of other startups that believed access was the real problem in education. But here's the thing - access was solved a long time ago. The real bottleneck to learning is the format.

Any educator will tell you that after decades upon decades of research, there is only one truth that stands the test of time: one-on-one instruction or tutoring is among the most (if not the most) effective way to learn. Some even argue that when the historical tradition of mentorship was lost, we also stopped having geniuses. Since education was made public and the mentor-style of learning faded away, so did the da Vincis, Einsteins and Hawkings of our times.

People pay exorbitant prices for university because of the community and connection, and people who learn most effectively tend to learn in one-on-one environments. Edtech, much of it already in the AI sphere, misses the point. Until we develop edtech that feels like 'someone' is teaching you, is invested in your growth, and makes you feel accountable, it won't solve the education "problem". Edtech needs emotion.

So much good stuff this month. 

Come join our conversation.

Our First Dinner for Strategists

We just held our first member's dinner for Exposure Therapy - our educational community for strategic minds - and it was an incredible evening. Watch it here.

Our community is not only highly programmed with provocative topics, speakers, original research and education, it's also deeply connective. Every member is intentionally selected for their expertise and generous spirit of curiosity. As one of our members describes it, "I feel like I'm getting a PhD."

Applications for our next cohort are now open and close on May 17th.

(Apply now to join in time for our upcoming NYC dinner: "Emotional Alchemy for the Bravehearted". It'll be a special night.)

Who Am I?

Here's what we've been consuming.

What is an AI anyway? (TED): "I think AI should best be understood as something like a new digital species. Now, don't take this too literally, but I predict that we'll come to see them as digital companions, new partners in the journeys of all our lives. Whether you think we’re on a 10-, 20- or 30-year path here, this is, in my view, the most accurate and most fundamentally honest way of describing what's actually coming."

It’s time to retire the term “user” (MIT Technology Review): "“User” is vague, so it creates distance, enabling a slippery culture of hacky marketing where companies are incentivized to grow for the sake of growth as opposed to actual utility. “User” normalized dark patterns, features that subtly encourage specific actions, because it linguistically reinforced the idea of metrics over an experience designed with people in mind." 

"He Gets Us" is one of the most provocative campaigns in decades (On Strategy Showcase): "And if we're truly interested in doing the things that we say we want to do in marketing and in the selling products—which includes building community, which is building preference, which is changing minds, which is being provocative, for good reason to be memorable and engaging audiences—then this is a phenomenal example of that in a territory that many people shy away from. This campaign has caused conversation in my own family. And I'm the father of three teenage daughters."

How to use ‘possibility thinking’ (Psyche): "Yes, it can help you solve problems and be more creative. But it also invites you to think beyond the problem in front of you, to explore a whole universe you did not even realise existed, and find your own path within it. It can sometimes feel vertiginous, and you might not know where to start. If that’s the case, look in turn at each branch on your map. How does it feel? Can you see yourself doing that? Why? Why not? Which options could you explore first? What about as a last resort?"

How deep sleep became a status symbol (Dazed): "We can gladly bid farewell to the #girlboss mentality of wearing sleeplessness as a badge of honour, but our new-found obsession with “sleep performance” is hyper-individualising a collective issue. In a time where the average person in the US gets less than seven hours sleep a night, celebrities are bragging about sleeping 14 hours a night."

A New Framework to Help B2B Founders Find Product-Market Fit (First Round): "There isn’t nearly enough emphasis on repeatability. As you move your way up through the different levels of product-market fit, what you’re really unlocking is repeatability — across demand generation, product development, customer satisfaction and unit economics. A startup hasn’t reached the upper levels of product-market fit until it has developed a fine-grained understanding of who the right customer is, how to land them, and how to deliver a product that (in most cases) isn’t bespoke for each customer yet consistently solves a significant need."

[BONUS] I spoke with Peter Spear for his podcast That Business of Meaning about my career and building Concept Bureau, how we approach our strategy work, the role of prediction in branding, and what it means to be a cultural futurist. It ended up being a deep (and sometimes personal) conversation about untangling the way humans behave, but that makes sense because Peter is a masterful ethnographer who knows how to get to a person's deep story very quickly.

No Sh*t.

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• A hack to become a better speaker
   

• Swear words in Taylor Swift albums
   

• How Nestle converted Japan into a country of coffee drinkers
   

• The new quarter-life crisis
   

• Charting a boring culture

Just Delightful.

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• C-suite astrology
   

• A pep talk from kindergartners
   

• AI reconstructs faces from sculptures

Living funerals are becoming a thing.

People who are close to death have living funerals, also known as pre-funerals, for a chance to "say goodbye to their friends and families on their own terms and to celebrate their life while they are still alive." 

When you read the stories and experiences of people who have living funerals, you cannot avoid the deep vulnerability that arises. 

This makes me think about grieftech startups, and I see two paths emerging: tech that helps us circumvent loss (AI of deceased loved ones/ ghostbots, avatars), and tech that helps us navigate loss (logistics planning, interactive memory apps). 

And I think this is a classic example of how sometimes we feel that tech is changing culture, but really its ideas that are changing culture.

We're rethinking death and grief as a larger idea (especially after Covid, and a whole generation of people in their feelings, who were able to normalize therapy, etc.) and that's creating conditions for new grieftech to emerge.

It would be really great for a brand in this category to lead with a new thesis or belief of what death and grief are supposed to mean to us today. That could change everything.

We're asking ourselves, but don't have an answer for that yet.

The right answer could platform the whole category. I think that's what's still missing.

The closest thing I've seen to a new belief can be found in the growing number of death doulas (similar to birth doulas). This idea that we must "nurture" death the same way we must nurture new life is not new to ancient cultures, but it is new to modern American culture, and its the kind of powerful idea that can make a category grow.

What we need is a new organizing idea the revalues and reprices everything around death, both literally and metaphorically, both in the markets and in life.

As someone who did hospice care for a dying parent while I was still healing from the birth of my third child, nursing a new baby in the same room my father was passing away in, I can tell you the connection was not lost on me.

And yet there was no meaning-making (there's that phrase again), no playbook, no default ritual, no bigger idea or cultural norm that told me how to interpret and process it all.

Grieftech isn't going to go anywhere if we don't know the bigger belief it ladders up to.

And we really need a bigger idea around death right now.

People are searching for it.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

In our first podcast episode of 2020, we share a unique brand strategy tool called the 100 Year Thought Experiment.

It will show you patterns and trends that are otherwise imperceptible: patterns and trends that can change the course of your strategy.

We use 100 Year Thought Experiments all of the time in our client work for Concept Bureau, and it helps us get out of the common thinking ruts that every strategist finds themselves in.

It starts with a simple premise. We’re used to looking at history in order to understand the present, but what happens when we look to the future instead? ⁣ ⁣If we force ourselves to see a very clear vision of the world in 100 years, what does that tell us about all of the current steps we need to take in order to get there?

In that answer lies an entire frontier of possibility for your brand moves. 

When you push yourself to really envision a 100 year timeline, you start to see new truths you can't see by looking into the past.

The 100 Year Thought Experiment is a mental device borrowed from the worlds of philosophy and science, and in this house episode we apply it to health and wellness, work and careers, environmentalism and food.⁣ ⁣

We discuss how maybe work isn't ethical and what that means for education, how today's alternative meat brands misunderstand our changing relationship to the act of eating, and how health has diffused into every category to become something nearly unrecognizable. 

“When the definition of something changes, the stigma around it changes, too.“

That's a powerful insight for those of us operating in problematic, emotion-driven categories that sometimes defy logic. ⁣It's also an insight that you start to see when you look into the years ahead, and something we explored in this podcast.

The episode is live now. I hope you are able to use this tool in your own work. I know it has been very valuable for us. 

You can also listen and subscribe on Google Play , Spotify and Stitcher.

Don't forget to rate and review!

Plant your flag.

Here's what we've been consuming.

Micronations (Quartz Daily Obsession): "After all, people aren’t born agreeing to be part of a nation. Why isn’t it their right not to recognize, say, the jurisdiction of their birthplace, and form another one—even as a country of one? Part utopia, part extreme libertarianism, and often works of art, micronations embody the ideal that the world could potentially be a federation of countries comprising one person, or just a few. It’s self-determination, but at the individual level. In this view, a fight with a neighbor becomes a war; a marriage an international treaty."

War once helped build nations, now it destroys them (Aeon): "The age of nation-building might be over. Let’s hope so. Nation-building involves, at bottom, the violence of internal repression and external conflict. Revolutionary-era France, Jacksonian America and Maoist China – three signature periods of nation-building in global history – are as notorious for their crimes as for their enduring accomplishments. While the end of the age of nation-building might be a boon to the world generally, it is little comfort to countries struggling to establish themselves."

Virtual Travel Could Change The World - If It Gets Off The Ground (Wall Street Journal):  "You strap on a slim, comfortable headset, pick up your controls and press a button. A drone takes off, whizzing down flooded city streets. Through the goggles, you see what the drone sees—a crisp, live, 360-degree view of battered houses and uprooted trees. When you look down, you see what’s below the drone. The full-color picture doesn’t seize up; there’s no latency. You are, essentially, digitally teleporting into the aftermath of a natural disaster."

A battle over gifted education is brewing in America (The Economist): The debate over whether gifted education segregates students on the basis of pre-existing privilege rather than cognitive ability is neither new nor uniquely American. The number of selective, state-run grammar schools in Britain reached a zenith in 1965. The three-tiered German education system has always been criticized for fostering social segregation. That the children of new Turkish migrants are now disproportionately sorted into lower-tier secondary schools instead of selective Gymnasiums adds a disquieting racial divide."

(Fly it proud.)

The Verdict Is In For These Millennial Phrases - Man Repeller via Instagram

The Baby Names That Defined The Decade - New York Times

Should We Still Be Building Single-Family Homes? - Curbed

Unlocking The Zeitgeist - Ana Andjelic via Medium

The Problem of Mindfulness - Aeon

In 2020, DTC brands will hit a revenue wall - Modern Retail

Predictions on the biggest trends in beauty in 2020 - Glossy

Malls are now targeting millionaires - CNN

What Markets and Models Expect In 2020 - The Economist

In the news.

Other places you can find us.

I wrote a predictions piece for Jumpstart Magazine where I reviewed the last 10 years in branding, and mapped out with the 10 years ahead of us might look like. "We’ve been searching for personal transformation these past ten years. We wanted experiences that changed us. Even the brands we hated to love (or loved to hate) like WeWork, Uber and Away tapped into this desire. No matter how many times we tore them down, we found others to build back up in the exact same way. They gave us a way to place ourselves in the world. Now with 2020 upon us, they signal what the next 10 years might look like." - 20 Going On 30

Our branding work for Skillshare was recently profiled in Creative Review: "The rebrand comes as Skillshare is poised to enter its second decade of operation, having grown a community of over eight million users. 'With the help of [brand strategist’s] Concept Bureau, Skillshare had already completed the research and insights needed to signal the desire for a brand evolution,' explains Perez-Cruz [...] At a time when digital rebrands are often accused of being bland, the team were conscious of the need to create an identity that would stand out." - Skillshare Launches New Identity

I was also on the Wavemakers podcast where I talked about my work and research on Cognitive Dissonance. The concept reveals our human nature by exposing both what we want to believe about ourselves⁣⁣ vs. how we actually behave. A good brand will make it easy for a consumer to narrow the gap between what they believe and what they do. But there are some brands that let you have your cake and eat it, too. They covertly allow you to maintain your current behaviors, but reap the rewards of lowered Cognitive Dissonance. - Using Cognitive Dissonance To Compete With Bigger Brands

Speaking & Workshops

We're currently booking speaking engagements and corporate workshops for 2020, and this year we have some excellent, needle-moving content to share with you and your team. 

If you're interested in collaborating or having us be a part of your growth in 2020, please email jean-louis@theconceptbureau.com for a list of topics and descriptions. 

Concept Bureau helped us to see our brand from a new perspective, ask hard questions about our work, and understand the value of owning a story in the market. We now have a shared language and understanding of what brand means and its value.

We've used the tools and concepts multiple times in the past few months to work through narratives and build stronger creative concepts. Our team found the workshop engaging, enlightening, and most importantly, challenging."

-Jami Oetting
Director, Brand & Editorial at HubSpot

Strategy Thought Of The Day

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.

We’re leaving the current age of social media and entering a new one where our symbols and our languages are changing.

Any time a new age is born, the rules get harder, the audience becomes more discerning, and all of us - people, brands, identities - are separated into those that move ahead and those that are left behind.

The question now is, what is this new age that we’re walking into?

What lies ahead is a far more nuanced and layered playing field for brands. 

And as the landscape matures to be more demanding, it also carries more reward for those that know the code.

In this week's podcast, I speak with two experts - a media exec and a psychologist - about the coming renaissance of deep storytelling in social media that's already starting to emerge in our languages and our symbols online.

Erin Weinger and Dr. Therese Mascardo

Erin Weinger is the Vice President, Social Editorial, at Sony Pictures Television who has also worked with some of the biggest influencers and publishers in the game.  

She sees trends that will force brands to stop seeing their social audiences as users, and instead start to treat them as 'communities of interest' - groups searching for a certain kind of intelligence that can go unnoticed to those on the outside.

We also speak with Dr. Therese Mascardo, a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of the wellness community Exploring Therapy. Dr. Mascardo is in a unique position to talk about the cultural shifts happening in social because she’s both in the practice of mental health, where much of social media can be more clearly understood, and in the practice of building a social media brand… as an influencer herself.

She sees how social is rewiring us to hear and communicate differently. And as someone who has used social media to break out of the narrow confines of the therapy industry, she translates her learnings for other brands that want to build identities that give them freedom to change over time.

There's a big change happening in social.

Let's explore.

You can also listen and subscribe on Google Play , Spotify and Stitcher.

This feels like home.

Here's what we've been consuming.

America Loves Its Unregulated Wellness Chemicals (The Atlantic): "Cannabinoids, and particularly CBD, are marketed to fit into the deepening cracks in the American health-care system. The things their purveyors claim they address—from pain, anxiety, and nausea, to inflammatory diseases, multiple sclerosis, and cancer—are chronic problems with few accessible, safe treatments, and often no cure."

Inside the $2,000-a-Month, Invite-Only Fitness Clubs (Elemental): "Wellness was already battling a perception as the new luxury signifier, but it’s escalated to a new echelon. It’s no longer about where you work out but also about with whom you work out. You need to know the right people, be in the right shape, and offer something in return — social cache — for application approval. It’s the next step for those who see fitness as being intertwined with their personal brand."

E-boys are the new teen heartthrobs — and they’re poised to make serious money (Vox): "E-boyhood, it seems, is now a viable career path. When the term became a meme in the fall of 2018, it mostly referred to an aesthetic... Now, however, “e-boy” is perhaps a lacking term for an increasingly visible brand of influencer: the teen creator collective."

Who Killed the Knapp Family? (New York Times): "We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”"

How the Definition of an American Family Has Changed (Wall Street Journal): "The transformation of the American family deepened over the past decade, as an increasingly diverse array of arrangements replaced the married-with-children paradigm. Marriage is playing a smaller role within families, as more people delay tying the knot, live together without marrying or divorce."

(Take the back door.)

The Most Searched Words Of 2019 - Dictionary.com

“It’s more than a shoe, it’s a sisterhood”: inside the Rothy’s fandom - Vox

These Are the Products, Brands & Creative Directors That Defined the Last Decade - Highsnobiety

Amazon Is a Brand Disaster Waiting to Happen - Inc.

The positioning of the three most valuable B2B brands in the world - BrandStruck

Strategy Thought Of The Day

"The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don't have any cons at all."

- Ray Dalio

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.