Unseen Unknown

Curiosity is a wonderful thing, but it becomes powerful when you’re deliberate about your information diet.In this episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis explore what it means to be a strategist as a bodybuilder of the mind: choosing what to ingest, digesting it through reflection, conversation, community, and play, and training the instinct to recognize what is actually interesting. In a culture drowning in feeds, clips, and AI-generated sameness, there’s no advantage in merely hoarding signals. You have to know where to look, what to ignore, and how to turn information into insight.

The middle is disappearing, leaving two paths. One group is going all in on AI, founder mode, and urgency, while the other is redefining success as non participation through slow living, homesteading, and opting out. As culture splits, the signals that once defined ambition break down, but ambition itself evolves. This episode explores that shift through the lens of distance, showing how aspiration changes when money, productivity, and the social contract lose their meaning. What emerges is a move from having to being, reshaping what people want and what brands need to build.

From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology. This new form of intuitive, noetic knowing is changing how people move through the world, and how brands can speak to them.

What does it mean to be good at thinking? Or more importantly, thinking strategically? It’s the culmination of mental processes that enable us to analyze, reason, solve problems, make decisions, and generate creative ideas in an efficient manner. In other words, it’s a buildable skill. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis take a deep dive into how to cultivate that skill effectively.

The world is starting to reconfigure itself around a very different kind of relationship. Weak ties, the underpinning of social innovation for the last two decades, are declining while strong social ties are starting to emerge as the dominant threads of our social fabric. In this house episode, we’re talking to Concept Bureau’s Chief Strategist Jean-Louis Rawlence, about the huge implications for tech innovation, community building and business. When strong ties become the future of community, community becomes the new brand.

Today and throughout history, a mere six competing stories of ownership have dictated how everything in the world is distributed. As resources have become scarcer, everyone from American homesteaders and ranchers, to tech leaders and consumer brands, have created ways to impose their own preferred ownership story in a world where what it means to “own” something is constantly evolving. We speak with Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading scholars and authorities on ownership, and co-authors of the book Mine!: How The Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. They explain to us how the rules of ownership change in every generation, and how those changes reveal the true brand landscape, the role of business, and most importantly, a society’s shifting values.

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

Whether it’s brand, behavior, or culture, the more you dig into the systems that affect our lives the closer you’ll come to a conversation about capitalism. While capitalism as a model may seem unchanging at a glance, look a little closer and you’ll start to see patterns of change. In this house episode, Jasmine and Jean-Louis dig into divergent systems, the unstable behavior of markets, and how the rules we’ve trusted for a century are now ushering in a new generation of brands, consumers, and capital. This is the first of a series of episodes exploring how divergent systems are shaping the business landscape.

Wellness and self-care have taken over nearly every industry with a whole crop of new brands. But there is a much deeper story about the connected history of politics, race, gender and identity that underpins the self-care space today, and how it’s many interpretations reflect our American culture. We speak with New York Times journalist and editor Aisha Harris, as well as Jerome Nichols, founder of cult favorite self-care brand The Butters, to understand the very radical roots of this now-mainstream movement.

The nature of celebrity culture has changed in recent years, most notably with the rise of the influencer brand. But why is this happening now, and how have our digital tribes changed because of it? We speak with Cameo co-founder Steven Galanis about how he built a platform that has taken celebrity-fan culture to new levels of access, and sociologist and author Chris Rojek about the parasocial relationships and ‘presumed intimacy’ that is outpacing other forms of relationship in our lives.

Rory Sutherland, author of ‘Alchemy’ and Vice Chairman of Ogilvy talks to us about psychological and branding techniques for managing behavior during and after transformative cultural moments like COVID-19 and beyond. We explore models of human behavior, social norms, belief systems and the nuance of what he calls America’s “gloriously optimistic consumer base”.

Times of uncertainty have a way of revealing the mindset of a society, and today’s imminent threats - from COVID-19 to political instability and global warming - are revealing a mental shift that emotion-led brands are responding to. We speak with BBC and Vox journalist Colleen Hagerty, eschatologist and end-of-world expert Phil Torres, and founders Ryan Kuhlman and Lauren Tafuri of the popular disaster kit brand Preppi to ask one big question: How do you brand in a time of crisis?

We speak with Pattern Brands co-founder Emmett Shine and psychotherapist Abby Krom about the undercurrent of burnout in American society and how it has opened the doors to a whole new breed of D2C branding. From analyses to antidotes, our obsession with burnout (and how to heal it) is changing the way we consider products and consider ourselves.