Simone Cicero 

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast, where we explore the future of business models, organisations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. 

 

Today I’m flying solo with no co-host, but I’m excited to introduce the guest for today, Jasmine Bina. Hello, Jasmine.

 

Jasmine Bina 

Hi, how are you?

 

Simone Cicero

Great to have you. Jasmine is a brand strategist, cultural futurist, founder and CEO of Concept Bureau and the mind behind some of the most interesting work out there on how culture, technology and markets reshape one another. She also runs Expositor Therapy, a community for strategic minds. 

 

Jasmine today I want you to start from your latest release. I think a very significant piece of work that you just published a few weeks ago – “Age of Potency”, which is, I would say, a long form exploration of what’s happening as the pillars of the industrial society are dissolving. For decades, we have been grounding our sense of meaning in security and orientation in institutions like work, trust, and time, like you articulate. So I’m curious if you, as a starting point, you want to maybe give our listeners the possibility to familiarize with the framework that you have developed and start navigating your thinking.

 

Jasmine Bina

Yeah, sure. So I study culture. You mentioned I’m a cultural futurist. I forecast culture for our clients. So we work with brands that need to move the needle of culture in order to win in their markets, both internally and externally. And that’s kind of what this was born from, a lot of our research over the years. 

 

And Age of Potency was actually originally a talk that I gave at Amazon. And it’s this idea that culture feels very chaotic right now. And it feels like things are a mess and people have become numb and stuff doesn’t make sense. And we see like black swan events and grey swan events and like weird horseshoes everywhere. But really, there’s rarely ever just disorder in culture. Usually there is something happening beneath it. And what we’re seeing right now is more like a reorganisation of culture.

 

And the reason we see all this chaos is because we’re living with these huge cultural vacuums. And there are three in the areas that you mentioned, work, trust, and time. And vacuums are kind of like these spaces where we’ve lost meaning all of a sudden, because the structures that gave us meaning or the value systems or whatever, the beliefs that gave us meaning in those areas have evaporated. And so we suddenly stand with these huge holes beneath our feet. And they suck down. These kind of like sinkholes, they suck down meaning faster than we c an replace it. But we do need to replace meaning in those three areas. So it’s good to look at what we are starting to replace them with, because that will give us an idea of where the future is headed. 

 

So in work, for example. I think a lot of people can implicitly start to feel that work doesn’t mean what it used to. If you look at work itself, if you look at other signals like crypto or how everything has been tick-tockified or AI, they all kind of tell the same story that work doesn’t equal reward like it used to. And that’s a really foundational equation, at least here in the US. This idea that work equals reward.

 

You can’t really count on it like you used to because you could work really hard, but now there’s an AI that can do your job. You can be really good at investing, but now anybody can get rich off of crypto. You can create a brand and develop followers, but now that we’re all living basically in the TikTok algorithm, none of that stuff means anything anymore. And when people feel like work doesn’t equal reward,

 

You know, you can’t leave that hole open. We start to replace it with other forms of meaning. And what we’re seeing in that area is that people are playing with meaning. So we see a lot of new examples of how people are creating meaning systems outside of work. It could be religion, could be, finding community, it could be leaving community, it can be any number of things, but people are starting to play with meaning. So that’s kind of the first thing that we see that I think is very relevant for organisations because…

 

People just aren’t buying that promise anymore. 

 

And then the second domain where we see a big cultural vacuum is in trust. So we just lived through the trust economy of the last 15 years, right? The sharing economy, had apps like Uber and Yelp and Airbnb, and they created, know, collaboration on skills that we’ve never seen before.

 

And yet somehow we don’t trust anybody today. I don’t know what it’s like in other parts of the world, but I can tell you in the US, every indicator of trust has fallen. We don’t trust anybody from our governments down to our neighbors or our spouses. And the research around trust, though, says that trust doesn’t disappear. Even though it feels like trust has disappeared, doesn’t disappear. Trust just changes form. There’s a researcher named Rachel Botsman that has studied this. 

 

And so we have to find trust where it is. And trust, the real definition of trust is about vulnerability. You know, we’ve had all these apps that kind of reduced any form of vulnerability. They gave us transparency and control and insurance. But real trust is about taking a risk with somebody even though you can’t control them.

 

So if you look at where people are doing that, it’s in very different places. It’s in underground places. If you look at things like, you know, the Disney Adult community or LARPing communities or the death positivity movement, lots of other indicators that show that people are reallocating their trust in very different places where they’re making themselves vulnerable. 

 

And then the third vacuum is time. So this one’s a bit more abstract, but it’s a very important one in that.

 

Nothing begins and nothing ends anymore in the US. Like we have no beginnings and endings. We used to have all kinds of rituals, even as recently as the 70s. We used to have like courtships and the Sabbath and know, town fairs and things like that. We used to have beginnings and endings with like marriage and children. That doesn’t happen anymore like it used to. People don’t even go to funerals anymore. Like funeral attendance has dropped.

 

And when you don’t have beginnings and endings, people become very untethered. So we’re also seeing the way that that cultural vacuum is being filled is that people are finding other ways to punctuate life with intense emotion. Like the retreat business is booming here. If you look at things like the perimenopause movement, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but it’s really big right now here. And it’s creating this like space of time where people are really experiencing and reclaiming what that era of life is about, there are a lot of signals that we are taking back time. 

 

So that was a bit long-winded, but that’s essentially the idea of if you want to see what the future is going to be in culture, you have to see where we’re losing meaning and how we’re replacing it, because that is how culture is created.

 

Simone Cicero 

I mean, thank you for zipping your incredible talk in like like four minutes, because I enjoyed watching the talk and I really suggest everybody to do the same. 

 

So first reflection that I have before jumping into organizational stuff, you know, I mean, to me, this fragmentation and disappearing of easy to consume theories of meaning, if you want, right? You speak about, for example, Protestant ethics of work, Essentially the Protestant ethics of work is a manifestation or rather is the root of the industrial age, right? 

 

So it’s really how we build pieces of work that are easy to consume. You go to the college, you got your job, you go to pension. It’s one thing that you can consume. It’s administered to you, right? From society. 

 

So I think if I’m a brand, a company nowadays, I would be tempted to say what is the next meaning, know, where are we landing? And my, my impression is that we’re not landing anywhere. So we’re landing into plurality of meaning. So we are landing into, or rather we are realizing that the world is complex. It never was simple, but we fake these simple ideas of culture and meaning. 

 

So as a brand, how do you grapple with this? Because this is really, it’s really, you know, I was thinking to, I was talking to Dave before and for the listeners, you know, there is a podcast episode with Dave Gray where we said that in markets, for example, nowadays, the power is shifting from the organisation to the user. 

 

So the user is in power, but also has this responsibility to define: what are the products, the services that the users want to see? So how do you grapple? There are two perspectives I would like to ask you. One is the perspective of the organization. And on the other side, the perspective of users. 

 

So what are the responsibilities that now these two players have?

 

Jasmine Bina 

So the plurality you talk about is very true. We haven’t had a mainstream of ideas or thoughts for a long time. I think at one time there was a mono-culture, and it maybe didn’t serve everybody equally, but it was easy to consume the mono-culture. And the world was just less complex anyways. It was less global, less interconnected. But we’re probably never going to go back to that.

 

When you live in a plural world, when it comes down to the organisation and the market, yeah, you do need to figure out what the next meaning source is going to be. And it’s going to depend on what your audience wants and everybody’s audience is different. What compounds that even more is that I think people are taking on multiple identities too. They’re not just one thing anymore, they’re multi-hyphenates. What I always tell people when they’re looking for that though, is that the future already exists in people’s private lives.

 

They’re already living this new version of themselves, but they just can’t express it either in the market or the products they buy or the services that they participate in. But there’s always a latent demand for a new identity, for a new way of being in the world. But, you know, for example, if you look at like a lot of like the peer-to-peer payment companies that are out there right now.

 

There was this latent demand because people had changed the way that they worked. They changed the way that they saw themselves as professionals. It was something that the banking industry that never saw, but it was always there. You just have to trust that the future is always being rewritten. It’s always unfolding within your people, but most brands just don’t take the time to look. I don’t know if that was the organisation question or the user question, but I think it kind of covered both.

 

Simone Cicero 

That’s rather a civilisational question to some extent.

 

Jasmine Bina 

Yeah, that’s the level I usually operate on. But when we do market research for any of our clients, that’s where we start. Who are these people really when nobody is looking? And usually there are some clues there because it’s rare that people’s true desires and beliefs about themselves match up with how they get to express themselves in the world.

 

Simone Cicero 

I was thinking that when you started, you said it was really always plural, right? But I think maybe we are more used to, as consumers, expect these niche experiences, right? This idea that, yeah, platforms give me the niche experience I want. I can book any Airbnb because it fits my expectations and so on.

 

But then, when it comes to being on the producer side, very producer side, when it comes to how we bring value to society instead of consuming value from society, we are not really keen to to bear this responsibility to create our own story as producers of value. 

 

So this makes me connect with the second point that is you as a brand strategist, you do market research. Is it that maybe we are a big constraint in serving companies with something that they can understand? 

 

For sure, companies cannot understand radical societal and market changes that a technology like AI or blockchains can bring about. So to what extent are we actively preventing brands to really understand, companies to really understand the incredible changes that are coming because these are coming.

 

Jasmine Bina

I don’t know if it’s preventing, I think the information is out there. I I publish it. It’s just a matter of whether you have a leader who wants to embrace it. Not every company needs to play in culture like this. There are companies that just need to provide good products and services. Nothing needs to be customized for the individual. There just very basic needs that needs to be met. Not every company should work with somebody like me, for example. And I always say that when I meet new people, but some brands will only win if they change the beliefs and perceptions in culture. That’s the only way they’re gonna win their market, if they change people’s behaviors and their ideologies. 

 

Then you do need to understand how people are changing and how they’re being conditioned by other parts of the market to behave differently. Conditioning is an important thing too, by the way. I think brands are used to having their consumers conditioned by their industry. So like.

 

An example I like to give is like, you would think that fragrance consumers are being conditioned by the fragrance industry, but that’s not really true anymore. If you look at like how fragrances have changed, and I did a case study on this, I won’t go into too much detail, how fragrances have changed, how buying habits on fragrance have changed, how the buyer themselves has changed. You find that fragrance is actually being conditioned a lot by the publishing industry.

 

A whole new market of fragrance was created because of the books that women were reading in the Romantic category, which is the only category in publishing that’s growing in the US right now. And it feels farfetched until you see how it actually happened over time, but people are being conditioned every moment of every day from all kinds of sources. 

 

You need to understand like they just don’t live inside the vacuum of your industry. The way they eat is informed by the media that they see and the way their families are made up and how they travel. Any kind of consumption now has become so global in its inputs that if you’re a brand that where people buy emotionally instead of logically, you need to be looking more broadly. And then these kinds of inputs matter to you.

 

Simone Cicero

And in your experience, as brands have to grapple with this plurality explosion and also to this shared responsibility between them and the user in defining what is meaningful, what are the implications also from the perspective of practical organisational setups? So for example, if you move from one brand into enabling a family of brands or a process for people to create their own brands. 

 

What is your experience with this type of conversation? Do they actually exist in organisations? How they looking into how do you become like a brand texture or instead of monolithic brands?

 

Jasmine Bina

It can exist, but you have to have a real appetite for like possible failure and for making quick pivots and for change. I think you see it in beauty a lot, especially. You can have a clear idea of like the force you want to be in the world, or a very clear idea of how you think your category should be defined and how you’re going to change the playing field of the category. 

 

But then beyond that, when it comes to like actually being responsive to the consumer, the pace at which you put out your products or the family of brands that you’re developing, it really takes a lot of experimentation. And this is something else I talk about in the age of potency too. I think in addition to this, we are entering an age of experimentation that I think a lot of people don’t really see. 

 

So if you look at any innovation or any market over time. It generally looks like the S curve, which is how we describe a lot of things, right? It starts slow and then we kind of don’t know what we’re dealing with in that early part of the market. And there’s a of value to be had, but a lot of people will make a lot of mistakes and waste a lot of money. But the first person to figure out will capture a lot of value. Then the second half of the curve, things start to kind of like even out. We know what we’re dealing with is a lot easier to capture value, but then the value that’s there to be captured starts to diminish.

 

And I think people don’t realize that we’ve spent the last like 15 to 20 years at the top half of that curve. And it’s built the organisations that we have today. It’s built this huge companies that we have. It’s made an expert out of me. That’s how those markets create experts, right? Where like you get more specialized and more specific and niche. That was the internet age, but we’re entering the AI age right now. And it’s not just the internet or AI. It’s all of the platform technologies that are going to be built around these things.

 

And that curve doesn’t continue indefinitely. It starts over again. And we are starting over again. So now we’re in the bottom half of that curve and the rules are very different. At the top, it’s about optimization and expertise and getting more and more value out of what you have at the bottom it’s just experimentation because we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. So.

 

None of the information you had in the past is going to work. The only way to get new information is to try things. I’ve even done this in my own agency. We’re trying all kinds of things, new kinds of content, new kinds of products and offerings, new ways of working with our clients, because it’s just so evident that what we’ve spent perfecting all this time is just not going to fit into this new world. 

 

So anyway, that’s a bit abstract, but you know, experimentation will be what defines the companies that find their footing in the next 10 to 15 years versus the ones that don’t. And I don’t see that really, even with the brands that we work with, I don’t see the appetite for that experimentation oftentimes.

 

Simone Cicero 

I was curious because what you talk about, it communicates some sort of debasing, know, like everything is changing, we don’t know where to see it, you know, even if you squint, you don’t see anything. 

 

My question is – what is that you believe it’s invariant in the concept of an organization brand that can also stand this crazy wave of change that is coming? We don’t even know if S-curves are going to be there forever, right? Maybe they’re just going to be faster and faster. know, my friend Bill Fisher. Right, exactly. Right. 

 

So what do you, as a brand, what are the elements of culture you can, or generally speaking, what are the things you can attach to? Yes. To what you hold.

 

Jasmine Bina

Trust will stay. That’s a really good question. Yeah, that’s a really good question. Two things come to mind. People will always search for meaning. There’s a lot of future like forecasting and trend forecasting that assumes that people are just giving up, that people are just going to stop caring. We’re just going to like be glued to our screens. We’re going to like, you know, just become more wasteful and more distanced from each other. 

 

And I talk in the age of potency about how there are so many signals that that’s not true. And I think the other thing is a sense of optimism versus pessimism. I can always tell a good thinker from a bad thinker. A bad thinker will easily just predict the next bad thing that’s going to happen. That’s very easy to do. That’s like every agency report. But that almost is never the future.

 

The future is always that thing that comes in from left field that changes everything and puts us back into the path of progress again. And I think you really have to be optimistic and trust in the fact that people don’t give up. People will continue to look for solutions, whether it’s like anything. could be economic solutions, political solutions, social solutions. All areas of life feel like they’re collapsing right now, at least in the Western world. 

 

But I can guarantee it will not just continue on a path of collapse. Solutions will present themselves. People already underneath the surface of culture are beginning to behave differently. And I think you need those two things. I think you need to trust that people will always find meaning. They do not give up meaning. And as long as they do that, you should be optimistic because things will always move towards a path of progress, even if we take one or two steps back once in a while.

 

Simone Cicero 

It’s funny because this conversation brings me back to a movement that I’ve been also somehow, you know, I don’t know how say in English, participating, you know, from the outside, I would say, which is the idea of Doomer Optimism.

 

Jasmine Bina

Yeah. I’ve not heard of doomer optimism. I’ve heard of doomerism, but not doomer optimism.

 

Simone Cicero 

No, doomer optimism is this movement of people that are somehow doomers, that understand all the nuances of the world crumbling into pieces, but at the same time, they are very optimistic, so they grow families. 

 

So, for example, in your talk, you speak about these, you make this reference to homesteading. And it was so funny to listen because myself as well, I bought like 10 homesteading books in my library and I never planted a seed in the last couple of years. But during COVID, I was fantasizing about homesteading for example. And these are people that typically homestead. So.

 

The question that I’m bringing up is to what extent these paths to new forms of meaning is different from the path that we used to. So the path that we used to is innovations, new things, techno-optimism, Promethean ideas that the future is going to be fantastic. 

 

So this idea of doomer-optimism is very interesting because it’s at the same time and it’s about progress, but it’s progress that is rooted in a different worldview. It’s rooted in limits, it’s rooted in relationality, it’s rooted in conviviality. So for example, one of the thesis, the philosophical thesis that I’m fascinated from, also from an organisational development perspective, is Illich’s work. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Ivan Illich’s work. It’s a philosopher from the 70s, basically. 

 

He was a priest. And he has this idea of conviviality. Now he has a book called Tools for Conviviality, which is fantastic. It’s a way to look at technology as a force that you recognize, but in a critical manner. So for example, he speaks about in the book, he quotes Aquinas and he says that you need some sort of austerity, that is a way to renounce to some elements of techniques, of technologies that have a bad impact on, a negative impact on your relationality, right? 

 

Everything that has an impact on relationality should be avoided, right? So to what extent in the future of brands and meaning and culture, there is this element of via negativa/ limits.

 

Jasmine Bina

Okay, so if I answer, if I understand your question correctly, you’re asking me, you know, it’s a different kind of meeting system where we’re kind of decoupling from technology as like, you know, the force for like progress and things like that.

 

Simone Cicero 

Let me clarify. Imagine an optimism or in general a new theory of me being a consumer but with a critical and a consumer that is aware of limits, it’s critical to consumption.

 

Jasmine Bina

Yeah, I see it.

 

Yeah, that’s a really good question. That’s really good. I think that that trend will definitely continue. If you look at like Gen Z and the way that they use social media, for example, they are so aware. They hold their phones like, I mean, I’m saying metaphorically, they hold it like this, like they understand how toxic it can be. There’s no awareness that we didn’t have as millennials when we were coming up through social. I like to joke that millennials were basically a guinea pig generation. 

 

And we shouldn’t project our experience of it forward because we were unprepared. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. We were very naive. But no generation after us is going to be like that. And I think there will be a healthy scepticism and concern for where the line is between the human experience and the technological experience, which I think is just a natural, culture is a pendulum. We go into super extremes, then we come back and go into another extreme. I think this is us, if we look at like at like our lifetimes, it’s just such a small microcosm of these technologies and what they’re going to do to humanity. 

 

And I think we’re going to look back and see that like, man, that generation like had no idea what they were doing. And they just were like lambs to the slaughterhouse. But I don’t think it will be like that afterwards. And I think there will be a healthy scepticism going forward. 

 

Also, you know, now that like, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m personally a little conflicted, but there’s such a rise in spirituality now too. And we’ve never had mental models for understanding the role of technology in our lives, but I think the Pope recently even talks, know, the post been taking meetings with tech founders as the previous Pope did. And didn’t he recently say, you know, AI is an act, it could be an act of creation or a divine creation. We have to be very careful. Like we are starting to have some distance from it now where people can understand, you know, instead of being swept up in it like a tornado and can start to actually look at it with some distance and understand, we decide now how we want technology to fit into our lives. I do see that moving forward. 

 

I don’t think it’s inevitable that like AI or social media or any other technology is going to take over our lives or ruin our lives. And we have yet to see what even works. We think we want robots in our homes, but we’ll see. We thought we wanted Google Glasses, but that didn’t pan out. Human nature surprises you in what it’s willing to accept and what it isn’t.

 

Simone Cicero

In your work, because you spoke about pendulums, for example, and you speak about S-curves, all these things hint towards cycles, something secretive that repeats itself, like hunked down for a few years as a brand, and maybe then there will be another expansion. 

 

So do you feel like this time we are more into a nexus phase, that something new that is coming is really different, radically different. We can’t even imagine it and it may be a one-of-a-kind moment for markets and humanity.

 

Jasmine Bina

Hmm. I don’t know that I have like a professional answer for that. I think intuitively, I don’t know that it’s in Nexus phase necessarily. At least for like the next couple of decades. And I know I’m already hearing my team like screaming at me because they wouldn’t agree with this. 

 

But we still have to see like how powerful AI can actually get. I’m just gonna be honest, every time we get a new model, the error rates go up and adoption has been super slow and we’re not even using AI for the reasons we thought we would use it for. We’re using it more for like emotional relational needs than like actual like intellectual ones.

 

I think we have a long way to go before we can call it a nexus phase. Something that I think is more of a nexus kind of moment is the fact that we’re leaving kind of like the last few hundred years of like the whole rationality movement and moving into something else that is not religious, not spiritual, but it’s like people searching for like some sort of like larger connection to something that is not necessarily human.

 

I think that’s more interesting from a cultural level. And I think that will inform more behaviors. don’t think it’s my, somebody on my team, Zach Lamb always talks about how it’s very interesting that we are getting more religious and spiritual just as AI is entering culture. Cause it does feel like it’s just oxygen to a flame that it will just kind of propel that trend forward more. I think that’s a lot more likely to be like a nexus kind of event than the technologies we have. 

 

I think the technologies will be used. Here’s the thing that I like to say. We always bend our technologies to the needs of our culture. Like we will always use things the way we need them, not the way that they’re created. Like the washing machine, for example, was supposed to liberate women from the home. It didn’t. actually, women ended up doing more housework than ever before when the washing machine was created because now they could fire their housemaids and they could do it themselves. 

 

And the futurists of the 1950s predicted all kinds of wondrous kitchen technology, but they never predicted that more and more people would be eating alone at the table, for example. We get these predictions wrong all the time because we’re just looking at the technology, but it’s the culture that really will define it. And I think culturally, interesting energy around spirituality is probably more impactful.

 

Simone Cicero 

I wanna get back to this but…

 

But one thing I wanted to mention is you seem to hint towards this religious revival, that spiritual revival, right? And I feel like, you know, when you say, I don’t feel like it’s an nexus yet, right?

 

My feeling is that it may be more of a nexus for markets, right? It may be more of a nexus for capitalism than for society, right?

 

Jasmine Bina 

That’s a really good point,

 

Simone Cicero 

What I mean is, if you look at AI from a Marxist perspective, for example, AI is really a manifestation of, especially LLMs – These are really manifestations of the social knowledge we build, the internet. It’s like the internet is phenomenologically manifesting itself as a force of production in the market. 

 

So it’s putting capitalism under crisis, not society in itself. Of course, society is based on capitalism. So it’s going to be maybe not everywhere because, as you know, not everywhere, maybe in Vietnam or China, they have different opinions. 

 

But the point, it feels like that since people are being shattered because they used to be part of capitalism from a consumer perspective, from a producer perspective, so they are looking into spiritual answers, but just because, you know, the problem is the production system, it’s capitalism as a way to produce goods and services and so on. 

 

So my question for you is, how do you advise a company, a commercial company in a moment like this? What are the things that, the practical things that, if there is anything practical that you can share, if I’m a brand, I come to Jasmine and say, how the hell we figure out what we should do in terms of narratives, brands, culture? What are the things that we should be thinking about as a brand?

 

Jasmine Bina 

If you really meant that as a brand, think brands are very capable of helping people create new meaning systems that would help us deal with this capitalistic collapse that you’re talking about, which will probably be more like a slow unfolding if it goes the way that it keeps going.

 

This capitalist collapse is exactly, in the West, it is our religion. Capitalism is very much our religion. We call it the prosperity gospel. The churches here oftentimes relate hard work and earning money to being in God’s good graces. It’s a very tight relationship between money and holiness. That’s the meaning system that’s falling apart. I think as a brand, again, this is not every brand’s job.

 

And very few brands I think could actually do this successfully, but you could create new meaning systems about what it means to be a good person in the world, what it means to be productive, what it means to be like a valuable member of society. And I think that’s where we’re going to need like new storytelling. 

 

Because people are already moving in that direction anyways. People are already, even though they don’t necessarily have to yet opting out of the capitalist mindset or a lot of the signals of what a capital mindset is in work, trust and time. When they start changing those behaviors, you’re talking to a very different kind of person and it’s not a simple answer, but you have to develop a story that speaks to like what these new ideals are. 

 

And a lot of times finding meaning outside of what that is looks a lot more like, mentioned spiritual life, but it could also be like play. It could also be different forms of community, things that oftentimes don’t have a place in the capitalist story.

 

Simone Cicero

Exactly, like trying to sell, I don’t know, perfumes to homesteading moms, right?

 

Jasmine Bina

It would be very different way of selling it to them. For them, it’s not going to be about going out. It’s going to be about the story that that fragrance puts you in, for example. And fragrance is a perfect example because fragrance can be…

 

Simone Cicero

Let me frame it in a bit of a larger story, but as a futurist, right? How do you avoid building the self-fulfilling stories, right? How do you remain open to something radically different as a futurist? 

 

Because I feel like, you know, if you have to invent a story for a homesteading mom to – telling the story of a perfum because you just can’t sell that, right? You can’t do anything else as a company, you know? That’s what you sell. That’s what you are. Then you need to find a story and try to make it self-fulfilling. So as a brand, how do you, how can you be open as a futurist, you know, because I guess you consulted these brands. How do you avoid creating self-fulfilling prophecies or trying to cling to these because – that’s a safe thing that can happen instead of, you know, let’s be open to what is beyond the system that we have now.

 

Jasmine Bina 

Well, the two best things I have found is the first one is exposure. That’s why we named it exposure therapy, too, by the way. But outside of exposure therapy is most of my job is just constantly exposing myself to things that I don’t normally have exposure to. And a lot of times that means being very uncomfortable. I get exposure to things that I don’t like, things that make me sad, things that make me really uncomfortable, ideas, people, narratives, communities, whatever.

 

Being constantly exposed is one, very emotionally taxing, but also it’s like a job. You have to constantly be seeking out signals that you don’t see in other places. Because every trend starts as an anomaly, right? Every anomaly matters because it could become the norm. So finding systems for exposing yourself to the outer edges of where culture is being created is the first thing.

 

And then the other thing is something we’ve already discussed, which is to constantly stay optimistic because you see a lot more signals for what they are when you’re optimistic than when you’re pessimistic. When you’re pessimistic, like everything just looks like a problem, not an opportunity. But when you’re optimistic, you just, can make connections that you can’t make in other contexts. But those two things have been important for me. And that is like, that’s not like a tool. That’s like, that’s like working on yourself. 

 

That’s like the kind of person that you are. And I don’t think that I’m like a, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I was ever like a naturally courageous or necessarily like overly optimistic person. These are all things I’ve had to kind of keep breeding in myself like over and over again.

 

Simone Cicero

That’s great. mean, that’s extremely interesting. I was thinking that it’s like practising brand development a bit like a martial art instead of a pre-formula, you know, existing formula to run it as a job, right? It’s more like immersing. I always, you know, when I think about these times, I often think about the aesthetic of samurai, right?

 

This extremely, know, aura bringing, you know, kind of people that at the same time, are very, you know, very to the point, to the meaning of things, right? So I think this idea of branding as a martial art may be interesting to push you. 

 

So. I’ll borrow that. But it does feel like constant exercise. Yes, when you’re doing your break.

 

Simone Cicero

Right, exactly. So putting yourself into the hard side, into the hard experiences, you said, exposing to things that you don’t like, it seems like training.

 

Jasmine Bina

It does feel like that, yes. You become very resilient over time. Yeah.

 

I was just going to say, and then the other thing too is like, have to, you can have an opinion on things, but when it comes to the work, you have to really not judge things as right or wrong. You just have to accept them for what they are. That’s the other thing that I think can make you good. And I have to work on that all of the time myself.

 

Simone Cicero 

It’s an interesting time for brands, right?

 

Jasmine Bina

It’s a difficult time, yeah, interesting and difficult. I think it’s not just cultural. I think it’s just the market cycle too. And then yeah, you do have this very threatening new technology that like could wipe out a lot of value and equity really quickly. But yeah, that’s why you have to, experimentation is the only way. Nobody really has the answer of like where are you going to be able to capture value in this new market yet? 

 

Nobody’s really, even OpenAI has not figured it out. Sam Altman is talking to Trump about an economic backstop if the AI industry collapses. Nobody knows anything right now. So experimentation really is the only way forward. That’s the only data you have. You need new data, so you have to go out and get it.

 

Simone Cicero

It’s almost like a survival challenge.

 

Jasmine Bina 

It is, it does feel a little bit, it feels like an episode of Survivor a little bit, to be honest.

 

Simone Cicero

Well, if you have to give an example of one interesting thing that you have seen in brand and culture recently that can kind of embody a good approach, good posture to the time we’re living.

 

Simone Cicero

If you don’t have good examples, they’re going to be very, very bad for you.

 

Jasmine Bina 

I have a good example of an industry. I talk about this in the Age of Potency. This is an example of if you weren’t optimistic and if you weren’t really opening yourself up to signals, you would have completely missed this.

 

The perimenopause industry is exploding in this country and it’s just the beginning. Perimenopause is a decade of life that women go through right before menopause. Most doctors are not really, they get no training on it. I saw my mother suffer through it silently. It was awful. She didn’t even know what was happening to her body. It doesn’t affect everybody the same way, but for a lot of women, it’s a very difficult period of time. 

 

And you go through all of these changes and you feel alone and your body breaks down in weird ways. And it’s extremely tumultuous until you get to the other side of it. Now we have an industry of influencers and doctors and brands that have rushed in, know, doctors like Mary Claire Haver and, you know, other brands that are coming in as well to say, no, why don’t we make this the new rite of passage for women?

 

And it has become this movement now where women are taking back those 10 years. They’re announcing their perimenopause. They are taking trips to find themselves, you know, doing like, they’re becoming more spiritual about it. And it’s become like, I mean, how often does a culture develop a new rite of passage? Almost never. And now we’re just in the infancy of perimenopause becoming a thing that women cannot fear but look forward to.

 

And now we’re creating stories around peri-menopause about that’s when like you leave your toxic spouses and that’s when you stop caring what people think. And that’s when you change, you finally dress the way you wanna dress and go for the career that you want. I mean, that’s remarkable. And that is all just storytelling. That’s us just deciding to tell a very different story about that phase of life and look at the market opportunity it’s created, the products that are going to be able to be sold, the innovations that will come of it.

 

It’s going to develop a little economy around itself. I think that’s a great example of looking at things differently, taking something that has historically been very negative and making it a positive. I thought that was quite beautiful. And we need things like that for men too, men and women. It reminds me of an idea that I read recently that was fascinating to me, how we grow through pain. You need pain to grow as a person.

 

But women are born with pain. They have pain in their periods. They have pain in childbirth. They have pain in menopause. Men do not have those presets of pain. So they have to go looking for pain. And we used to give them places for that, you know, the rites of passage, you know, the vision quest or whatever, go hunting or whatever it was.

 

And men are starting to create new rituals for themselves too. And maybe we should think about what pain looks like in those rituals. That’s exactly what has happened in the perimenopause industry. So I don’t mean to ramble, that’s why it’s so useful to look at things on a cultural level. There’s just so much that can be done there. Technologies and things like that, they might erode culture, but there’s so many ways to build it back up. And that’s where the real market opportunity is.

 

Simone Cicero

I guess my impression is that there is an opening in society now and it can be really transformative as long as we don’t make it theater trivial, pointless things. I think that that’s going to be a challenge for brands to really be open to these new meanings.

 

Jasmine Bina 

It will be challenge for brands, but I think people’s appetites are changing. That’s the whole argument. People are looking for meaning. so your consumer is a little different now. They’re not going to be fooled by like the bullshit as much as before. They’re not going to be fooled by like shallow consumerism. They’re looking for like actual meaningful life changing experiences and products and context, whatever. And why wouldn’t you create something like that?

 

I mean, that’s just such a better place to build a brand from. So yes, in that sense, the next 10 years is not going to look like the last 10 because people, we can’t distract ourselves with blind consumerism anymore because the world is falling apart. And so I think that’s an optimistic thing. Sometimes people need to learn their lessons. There you go.

 

Simone Cicero 

Again, doomer optimism. We will end in there again. So, I mean, thank you so much. It was a fantastic conversation. In the closing, maybe you want to share a few breakups for our listeners to get some inspiration in this world, in this time of change.

 

Jasmine Bina

Yes. So Remy Carlioz is an author. He’s also like a creative director and a strategist. He started a new subset called La Nona Ora. And it takes a very, I wish I could think like him, it’s just, you know, he sees art and culture and beauty in a way that is very like, practical for people that are, you know, building in markets. So I recommend that sub stack.

 

I read a book recently called Disney Adults by A.J. Wolfe. You know, it’s not the most fascinating, it’s not the most exciting read, but it did, I do keep thinking about it. And it made me realize, you know, Disney Adults is one of those things where like, you might have a negative reaction. Like I have a negative reaction to that at the beginning, but you read about it and you open yourself up to it and you realize, wow, we are the stupid people. Like I wish I could love something as much as these people love Disney. You know, they give themselves to loving something so deeply.

 

I follow Peter Zeihan, he has a sub stack. He’s a geopolitical analyst. And he’s the only expert in geopolitics that I can actually understand. That really explains the world to you in a meaningful way. And then the last thing is an app that I use called My Mind that I highly recommend.

 

There are a lot of apps for organizing your ideas and your links and the things you want to archive, but this one creates such a magical experience that you’re a lot more thoughtful about the ideas you want to save and what they mean to you. 

Because otherwise it just becomes a wasteland of just thousands of links that you’re dumping in there, but this one is special. It changes the way you record things. So that’s what I would recommend.

 

Simone Cicero 

I mean, of course we’re going to put all the links in the notes, but what are you up to? Your work where people can follow you was coming up.

 

Jasmine Bina 

Yeah. So I have a, my agency is called Concept Bureau. Our substack is by the same name. I publish all of my thinking there every week. you could find me on LinkedIn under Jasmine Bina. That’s where I published like my unfiltered thoughts. I’m pretty active on TikTok and LinkedIn under my name as well. 

 

And I would say anybody who like wants to get exposed to more of these kind of like leading edge, signals, we have a community called exposure therapy. That’s a very rigorous highly programmed, annual program where we are constantly exposing ourselves to the uncomfortable and the different and the outer limits of signal finding and culture. That’s where we do it, is in exposure therapy.

 

Simone Cicero

It’s your dojo of the branding as a martial art practice.

 

Jasmine Bina 

But it’s a fun space because you don’t always get to do that kind of research for your clients. There we don’t have any limits.

 

Simone Cicero 

All right. Right. Thank you so much. I hope you also enjoyed the conversation. It was a good start of your day.

 

Jasmine Bina

Yes, it was. 

 

Simone Cicero 

I just wanted to sell to sell my listeners that they should head to the blog, to the website, boundaries.io slash resources slash podcast. And you will find everything from the conversation, all the fantastic programs and notes that Jasmine has mentioned. And of course, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.