What is culture—and who gets to shape it? Danielle sits down with cultural strategist and Cultique cofounder Linda Ong for a conversation that will change the way you see the world around you. From brand identity to the rise of private clubs, from "trad wives" to TikTok aesthetics, and the future of luxury. Whether you're a brand builder, pop culture lover, or just want to understand the world a little better—this episode will give you the tools to read between the lines of what's NEXT. In this episode, we explore:
- How to identify emergent cultural signals before they hit the mainstream
- What culture really means in 2024—and why it's changing faster than ever
- Are we living through the decline of American society? Linda weighs in
- The "Cultural Curve" and how to know if something is emerging, dominant, or done
- Why AI can't replicate culture—and what makes human creativity irreplaceable
- Why Gen Z is full of contradictions—and what that tells us about the future
- How Linda turned her personal pain into cultural intuition (and career superpower)
- The future of luxury and why it's shifting from exclusivity to experience Why your personal and professional lives are not separate—and never were
- The difference between analyzing culture and predicting trends—and why the former matters more
- Why understanding your brand's cultural DNA is more important than ever
- The real reason "collabs" went from cool to cliché—and what's replacing themThe science of why horror movies are trending (hint: it's emotional regulation)
Follow Linda Ong here.
Follow Sarah Jane Dhall here.
Check out Cultique here.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
No one has all the answers, but when we ask
the right questions, we get a little closer, closer to truths,
closer to each other, even closer to ourselves. I'm journalist
Danielle Robe and each week, my guests and I come
together to challenge the status quo and our own ways
of thinking by daring to ask what if, why not?
(00:28):
And who says? So? Come curious, dig deep, and join
the conversation. It's time to question everything. Hello. I hope
you're having a really great week. I have been thinking
about hope and optimism lately, and before we jump into
today's episode, I just want to share something with you
(00:50):
that I learned hosting the World Happiness Conference, because there
were some of the world's leaders in hope and optimism
and happiness and mental health and they were all sharing
their knowledge. I said this on my Instagram. You may
have seen the video, but those speakers on the stage
had over five hundred years of knowledge and research and
(01:12):
experience between them. I really felt like I was taking
a masterclass. And the first speaker of the day was
doctor Dan Thomasulo, who researched hope and this was super
fascinating to me. Hope is the only positive emotion that
requires uncertainty or negativity to be activated. And why that's
(01:34):
so interesting is I think a lot of people mistake
hope or optimism even as blind positivity. But hope is
not about ignoring what's hard or sad or even dark. Hope,
I think is looking at all those things and still
acknowledging them and seeing the light at the end of
(01:56):
the tunnel. It's saying, I don't know how long it's
going to take me to get and I don't know
exactly how I'm going to make it to the end
of the tunnel, but I know that when I do,
I'll be better and stronger for it. And so I
always think of hope as those little glimmers of light
that you see in the distance, you know, like if
you're driving down a totally dark tunnel, you can't see
the end, but see you see a little glimmer of
(02:18):
light from a car or something ahead of you, you know.
And I just wanted to share that because a lot
of my friends have been talking about how hard it
is to find hope lately. And I do think that
our brains are wired to pick up things that are negative.
So if we think about hope is imagery like that
little glimmer, and we practice maybe like a little appreciation
(02:41):
or a little gratitude each day. At least for me,
it helps me stretch my hope. I just find little
things in my life that spark joy, and I just
feel like they stack up. I hope that wasn't corny.
I've been thinking about it a lot, and usually if
I'm thinking about it, you guys are too at some point.
So ah, that's my ted talk today, Okay. And speaking
(03:06):
of thinking about things in the distance, I've always been
fascinated by the people who can see things before the
rest of us do. And I know I'm not talking
about psychics. I'm talking about the type of people who
can look at a TikTok aesthetic or a fashion show,
or a vampire movie trend or the Kardashians and just
(03:27):
know that this isn't random, that this moment in culture
is part of something bigger. And Linda Ang is one
of those people. She's a cultural strategist and the co
founder of a company called Cultique, which advises some of
the world's biggest brands. Think lvmh American Express, Lego, HBO, Disney,
(03:50):
like brands on that level, okay, and she advises them
on how to not just keep up with culture, but
actually understand where it's headed, where it's going. The New
York Times that her company, Caltique quote sells cool, but honestly,
after interviewing her, I feel like that barely scratches the surface.
Linda doesn't just study culture, she literally feels it. She
(04:12):
and her co founder, Sarah Jane Hall, help brands read
the room before they walk into it. She calls herself
a real time anthropologist, and they were both supposed to
come on the show together. They have a really fun
dynamic and Sarah is so awesome, but she got food
poisoning the night before our interviews. So today it's just
Linda giving us the goods and the goods she gives. Okay,
(04:34):
what is culture, who is shaping it? And how is
it shaping us? I had so many questions because I
think that culture isn't just trends in tiktoks. It's honestly
the signals all around us that hint at the future
we're building and the stories that we're telling about ourselves
and each other. You can probably tell if you've been
listening to this pod for a while that I'm obsessed
(04:55):
with pop culture, and not in the traditional sense. It's
not because I love gossip. Okay, maybe a little bit.
I have been very interested in this Blake Lively justin
Baldoni case, but that is a story for another day.
I'm not in the weeds of pop culture drama. What
I love about culture and pop culture is that I
really believe it holds up a mirror to where we
(05:17):
are and where we're going. I mean, think of the
rise of tradwives on TikTok, right, It's not just this
traditional homey aesthetic. It's a signal. I think it's a
reaction to feminism, to burn out to capitalism. And honestly,
even loneliness trends like this don't just appear, they are
saying something. And in this episode, I think we're really
(05:39):
going to hold up that mirror. So some of my
questions why is there a sudden rise in private member
clubs like Zero Bonn and San Vicente Bungalows, why are
horror movies trending right now? And where is the future
of luxury headed like will Gucci Belts ever be cool again?
Linda has some interesting thoughts on that and these all
might sound silly questions, but I promise you all of
(06:02):
them are signaling something much deeper happening beneath the surface.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Culture is it's an ecosystem of ideas, but the ideas
are all created by men and women civilization. They're the
products of our time.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I want you to keep an ear out for how
Linda describes culture. She says she sees it as a
wave or a bell curve. Okay, so it can be
broken down into three boxes, emerging, dominant, or recessive. Emerging
meaning what's coming, dominant meaning what's happening right now, what's dominating,
and recessive meaning like what has.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Been snl would always pick targets that were residual because
everybody can laugh at them.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
But my favorite part of this conversation is when Linda
shares her why why she does this work. She opens
up about growing up as a Chinese, Indonesian Dutch American
in Houston, Texas at a time when nobody knew what
to make of her, and then she talks about how
that experience of being misunderstood made her develop a kind
(07:06):
of emotional and cultural radar that she now uses every
single day.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
If you don't tell people who you are. They will
assign qualities to you that are not necessarily who you are.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
We talk about the shift from exclusivity to experience and luxury,
why collapse went from cool to kind of cliche, and
what it really means when a word like woke becomes weaponized.
But I've thrown out a ton of questions. The big
question we're circling today is how does culture really work
(07:40):
and what does it reveal about who we are becoming? So?
Who are we becoming? It's time to question everything with Linda. Ah,
this has been a long time coming. I'm so excited
to talk about culture with you.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
The suspense has been building, and so much has changed
since we started talking. And that's culture today.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
I know. So I think in order to find a baseline,
we have to figure out what the definition of culture is.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
What is it? What do you think it is? I'd
love to hear how you define it.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Oh, I've been thinking about this as I've been preparing.
I think when I was growing up, culture was about
mass appeal, desirability. It's music, fashion, food, all of the
things that make up culture. And now I'm not sure
(08:38):
desirability is even part of it anymore.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
That's a great change. I think you're one hundred percent right, okay,
And I would maybe just dimensionalize it a little bit.
But I would love to wind back a little bit
and say in two thousand and eight, when I started
working in culture, after years of being a marketing lead
and brand strategist, I would go round to clients that
(09:02):
had been very loyal and long term and smart clients
in the entertainment business, and I said, I want to
start looking into culture and adding that on to my
brand practice, and people, for the most part said culture,
you mean like yogurt? Literally literally two thousand and eight.
(09:23):
So since that time, culture is one of the most
search words on Google. You can see the spike and trends.
And to me and I think, the way my co
founder Sarah Hunger and I think about culture is it's
an ecosystem of ideas. But the ideas are all created
(09:44):
by men, men and women civilization. They're the products of
our time. So desirability plays. So you're right when you
say art, fashion, we would say sports, architecture, writing, television, advertise, internet,
social media. Like a lot of people when they say, oh,
you work in culture, you must be a social listener,
(10:06):
It's like, no, that's like a teeny tiny part of
what we do. But it's anything that man creates, that
civilization creates. It's like we're real time anthropologists.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
So if that's interesting that you said, it's just a
little piece of it. How much is URL versus ir
L Well, I.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Would say you it's a great question. I think in
terms of tools, the Internet is our primary tool. But
in terms of the things we're looking at, you know,
we go to art fairs like you know, Freeze in
La or Art Basel or Venice, the Bienale we go to.
I have a background in fashion. I grew up going
(10:45):
to fashion shows and shooting interviews with designers and supermodels
before Naomi Campbell had thrown a phone at anybody. You know,
it's really about being immersed. And actually one reason Sarah
and I have decided for cull Tia to have a
four day week, we actually were pioneers in participating in
(11:06):
a study, a global study during the pandemic on people
switching over to a four day week. And we did
that not because we didn't want to work on Friday,
but in order to do our jobs well, we have
to be out in the world and immerse ourselves. And
we also found the best analysts are not on staff.
There are people who are digital nomads or running the
world or exploring And I think that being in culture
(11:29):
is as important as reading about it. But of course
the Internet is a great portal to learn about people
in places and things to explore.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So you mentioned starting in two thousand and eight, and
in twenty fourteen, culture became the word of the year.
It's so ever changing. I love that you use the
word ecosystem. It really feels like it's growing and contracting
all the time. Who are some of the celebrities, artists, architects, like,
(11:59):
who are some of the people that on those fridays
when you have time, yeah, that you're sort of checking on?
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah? Wow. A lot of our inquiries are directed by
our clients. We actually kind of laugh that we get
paid to be smart, and it's you know, for people
like our team who are just already incredibly smart but
incredibly curious, right and we want to know about the world,
you know, Like we had one client who wanted to
(12:25):
understand the history of horror movies and vampires and you know,
why is no Sperato doing well right now? You know,
and it's like that kind of stuff is so fascinating.
But I think, you know, when we look at culture,
you mentioned desirability. Desirability is a really great framework and
lens for looking at culture because we think of it
(12:45):
as a curve, like a Bell curve in school, where
the top of the curve is what we would call
the zeitgeist ideas. The things that people who pay attention
to culture are conversant. They all know, we all know
Travis and Taylor are dating. Whether you like that or not,
you know, it doesn't it's not a judgment. It's not
a value judgment, right. The desirability is to you could
(13:08):
say desirability is to consume, but sometimes the desirability is
just to have a conversation. So I think of those
Zeitgey's moments as if you go to a cocktail party
and you meet somebody for the first time, what are
you going to talk about? You're going to pick a
topic that you think is somewhat available to them, right,
So that's a desirability of a conversation. You used to
(13:29):
have conversations about other topics that you don't have those
sort of Zeitgey's conversations about anymore, but they may be
very present in culture, they're just in the background now
that we're the zeitgeist is in the foreground. The residual,
as we call them, ideas are sort of less desirable
as conversation, but we all know if we take them
for granted. It's sort of like if you took a
(13:50):
retail analogy. If you go to Walmart or Costco, you
might buy you know, toilet paper or discount body lotion
or whatever, and you just you'll patronize that, but you
may not talk about it as much unless it's ironic,
do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yes, there's like a kitchiness right to it, and it's
just it looks like it's familiar and traditional as opposed
to kind new of an excite doesn't animate people? How
does that come about?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Like?
Speaker 1 (14:17):
How does it? Is it all marketing?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Not necessarily in fact, less so marketing these days than
it used to be, because I will say, the other
end of the curve, the ascending part, is what we
call the emergent ideas, and those are ones that are
starting to shake things up or evolve from what the
zeitgeist is, or even be counter to the zeitgeist. Okay,
and so that's really where Sarah and I and Cultique
(14:42):
love to live is like looking at what's emerging, how
it's changing. The zeitgeist really focus on shifts more than
we're not trend forecasters. Were really looking at what is
changing and why, what does it mean? And so sometimes
that can happen because somebody, you know, like, let's talk
about the core hashtags, right, Like that wasn't marketing. That
(15:05):
was people talking about things and framing them in a
language where you know at the time and still you know,
asthetics are a huge identification tool, especially for gen Z, right,
and somebody I don't even know who invented the core hashtag,
you know, started coming up with cottage core or you know,
(15:26):
gothcore or whatever, like anything like it's core core, right,
and it just becomes gen Z in particular are really
handy with messaging codes and q's and their natural analysts
cultural analysts because they've grown.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Up digitally codes and cues. That's interesting. So when you
say you are not a trend predictor are figuring out
the why?
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Why is the why important? Is culture cyclical? Are you
able to spot or predict even what will happen because
of understanding the why.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, it's a great question. We don't like to use
the word predict because it sort of puts us into
a fortune teller kind of place. But we do give
an able yet no, but we anticipate and I like
to think of it as our telescope lens is just
higher powered and more focused on the edge of what
people are aware of. But back to your question of like,
(16:21):
who are the people in places and things that get
my attention? I think wherever change happens. I was thinking
this morning and working on a project and for a
music project, and I was trying to think of a
musician who's been influential in culture but for a long
time in different iterations, and I was thinking about Pharrell,
and I was thinking about the song Happy, and it's like,
you know, Pharrell just came out with another spectacular men's
(16:45):
collection for Louis Vutant, and that is somebody who can
really move culture in different directions. And he's obviously a polymath.
And there's a lot of amazing personalities who are like that.
But you even have you know, I mean, let's talk
about Travis Kelcey and his brother, you know, starting an
entertainment and empire, like the Mannings, and so I admire
(17:07):
people who are able to take what they do and
have that core skill set and just expand and not
be kind of beholden to old ideas and kind of
staying in your lane.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
I'm curious if you come from the like Rick Rubin
school of thought, where it's like, do what you're interested in, yeah,
and like build it and they will come, or if
you think, after like after analyzing all these companies, if
it's really important to tap into the audience.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I'm kind of in the middle. My background is advertising
and brand strategy, and I really believe that that DNA,
which is language that Sarah and I use, what is
your cultural DNA? What is the cultural DNA of the brand?
Is incredibly important And in fact, we've done studies where
we looked at reboots of TV shows that were really
(17:58):
popular and which were successful and which were not, and
by far the ones that were not successful forgot what
their DNA was, and that is something that we love investigating.
And in fact, before I brought in the cultural discipline
of my practice working as a brand strategist, I would
work with a lot of times we end up working
(18:18):
with legacy brands that want to reinvent themselves. But the
first place I go to is Wikipedia and said, why
did this brand start, why was it successful in what years?
And what was going on in the world. So to
your point about audience, I think context is everything, which
is why when I evolved my practice to move from
brand strategy to include culture, it was really about just
(18:42):
trying to make sure that we weren't creating brands in
a vacuum, that we understood the context. Culture is a context.
Like one of the things I say is our clients
are launching rocket ships and we monitor the atmosphere, so
if the wind changes, or a hurricane's coming, or you know,
you have to recalibrate. And people spend so much money
(19:03):
to launch a brand a lot of times in marketing,
but if you don't, I mean Starlink or NASA would
never launch a rocket. In fact, sometimes they scruble launch
if the condestions are right. So that's what we're doing.
We're just monitoring conditions.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
As I'm hearing you talk about culture, I'm really curious
what in your life prepared you for a job like this.
It's so unique.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Honestly, I never really thought there was a job like this,
and I just lean into what works for me, honestly,
and really I look at the work I do as
kind of a coping mechanism for all my personal issues
which were growing up as a fifth generation Chinese American.
(19:49):
But my parents were born in Indonesia, which was a
Dutch colony during the war. So after the war they
went to school and the Netherlands, and then they moved
to the States, got married, had me. I was raised
in New York. They spoke Dutch all the time. Nobody
in my family speaks Chinese. And then when I was eight,
we moved to Houston and there were at that time
(20:10):
very few Asian people. Now it's a very Asian metropolis,
but at the time, I was like one of five kids,
did not understand who I was. And I realized a
couple of things. One is about branding is that if
you don't tell people who you are, they will assign
qualities to you that are not necessarily who you are.
(20:30):
I mean, I was bullied as a kid. I got
beat up by my girl Scout troop when third grade
for being different, and I never really understood. In the beginning,
I was ashamed, and then I understood when I went
to college that I had control over how I presented
myself to the world, and I could embrace the things
I liked about myself. So that really the DNA piece
(20:55):
I just translated to my work, and that's what I
preached to people, is that you you don't tell people
what your brand is, they are going to decide for you.
So you back to your question about the discipline of
branding versus, you know, just letting people be who they are.
I think codifying those pieces are really important, and I
think I subconsciously did that. The second thing is because
(21:17):
of my crazy upbringing. I would literally come to the
dinner table every night and ask my mom is this
food Chinese? Is it Dutch? Is it Indonesian? Is it Texan?
Is it from me? Like what? Because I didn't know
as kid, we just have soup, right, where's the soup from?
And she'd say, oh, this is a soup that you
know is a Dutch tradition or whatever, and the next
(21:38):
day we'd have Chinese food. So for me, culture was interchangeable,
and what I learned at an early age is there
many ways to look at a bowl of soup.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
That's really powerful.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Linda Well I don't know how to process the world
any other way. So I mean, one thing of my
one kind of guiding principle I've had throughout my professional
career is I always wanted to be the best at
whatever I did. And so I would say, Okay, I
want to be an art director, which is what I
did after college. And then I met these art directors
(22:11):
who were so much better than me, and I'm like,
I can't do that anymore. I got to do something else, so,
you know, kind of shifting and changing, and then you know,
even brand strategy. I thought I had a unique approach
to brand strategy, and I did that and got to
develop amazing brands like Bravo and Univision and Animal Planet.
But then all these brand strategy companies came up and
(22:32):
I was like, oh, there are a lot of people,
there's a lot of smart people. I better do something else.
And I added culture, you know, and now like everybody's
in the culture business. So we're pivoting once again. But
I kind of look at my career as kind of
I think professionally, just as we physically have a metabolism.
I think that about every eight years, I look back
at my career and I've changed. I pivoted a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
I hosted a marketing conference and they had all these
brilliant speakers come, and one of them was this guy
known as the billion Dollar Man, and it was because
he like sold over a billion dollars or in ad
dollars to these companies. He was like in charge of
the priceless MasterCard campaign. Okay, And I said, how did
you sell all these things through? Like what was the
(23:18):
what was the secret? And he said, very plainly that
he knew what people wanted before he walked into the room.
And I said, that sounds like a great line, but
how do you determine that? And he said, well, very honestly.
I grew up in the Midwest and I was gay
at a time when that was not accepted, And because
(23:41):
of that, I developed this spidey sense of understanding if
somebody was going to be okay or not okay with me.
I could feel people, and I just like had this
moment when I it was sort of a light bulb
for me that so much of our pain as people, ultimately,
if you can somehow direct it, Yeah, comes the spidey
(24:03):
sense in it. That's what I'm hearing it.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Really became my superpower. And I think, you know, meeting
Sarah and the wonderful people that we get to work
with on our team all seem to have what I
call like a super sensitivity to change. I will be
the first person to be cold in a room. I
will be the first person to say in a restaurant,
somebody just lit a match or lit up a cigarette, like.
(24:27):
I just am sensed like and I'm emotionally extremely sensitive.
I'm an EmPATH. So when culture shifts or things change,
I mean it could be we were talking about cozy
and q's a new word or a word being used
a different way than it had ever been used before.
You know, there was David Lynch just passed, and there
was a piece in New York Times yesterday about how
(24:49):
Lynchian became an adjective like that's a cultural. Culture is
just what civilization decides, right. So words and visuals and
owns and smells are all cues and codes, right, and
so we're just more sensitive to them, and especially when
they're new or they change, or look at look at
(25:10):
how a word like woke over the last six years
has gone from a value to a liability.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah, and the people that are using it has shifted.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Context and how they use it and what they mean.
You know, it's all shifted. So that's and depending on
that one. That's a really good point. Also when I
talk about the curve and the zeitgeist and what's residual
and what's emergent, every brand, every culture has a different curve.
It's not just one, right, And so that's why our
(25:45):
business is about tailoring the curve to a person or
I've worked with a lot of personalities in the entertainment business.
Or it could be a brand, or it could be
you know.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
When you say you work with a personality, I mean
I've worked with talent. Right, but what do you what
would you do for talent?
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Well, one thing we do is look at what their
cultural profile is. Where do they live in the culture,
how do people regard them?
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Interesting?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Yeah, and so again not just social media, but yes,
social media is a part of it. But we can say,
what if critics said, what has this person put out
in the world? What have they said? What are their
most lauded or most loathed pieces of work?
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Right? There's also this interesting distinction between digital sentiment like
social media sentiment, and what people are saying at a
dinner table. Yeah, and they could be two separate things.
Like I think about the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively situation.
The sentiment online is different than the sentiment right at
a dinner.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Right, Well, because it's an ecosystem, right, And like Justin
Baldoni's gonna have a very different lens on culture than Blake.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Lively, Right, Sarah, your co founder, said, pre pandemic, understand
the zeitgeist might have been a nice to have for
a big brand. Now it's a must have. Yeah, how
did the pandemic change that?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
That's a really good question. I haven't thought about that. Well.
I think two things. One, I started in two thousand
and eight, when I started the cultural practice, it was
right in the right as a recession hit. And I
think what happened because of the rise of social media
and the iPhone in that era two thousand and eight
to twenty ten, people just became more aware of things
(27:30):
beyond their own immediate surrounding. And I think when the
pandemic hit, it sort of doubled down on that idea,
which is, there are other people who were suffering like me,
what are they doing? And there was way more interest,
especially in global activity, of what how other people were
(27:53):
dealing with the same situation. So essentially, my bowl of
soup that I didn't know whether it was Dutch or Chinese,
or Indonesian or Texan was the pandemic for people, and
so everybody could look at everybody in the world could
look at the pandemic and go, oh, that's how they're
dealing with it there, or you know, oh, people are working.
(28:14):
What is this zoom thing? You asked about cycles before.
I do believe that there's a great book by some
really amazing cultural theorists Strauss and Howe called The Fourth Turning,
and it's for me, it's sort of my fundamental culture tone.
But I do subscribe to their theory, which is basically,
(28:36):
there are four cycles, and we tend to repeat them.
They always manifest differently, Yeah, but they have certain kinds
of elements that are the same.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
So you know, when we did this horror study that
we just did, you know, we looked back at wise
horror having a moment. Now, well, horror is a way
that people process uncertainty. Some people want to escape and
just watch you know, like smooth Brain TV. But other
people want to feel the pain but not but in
a safe space. Right. So like the Demi Moor movie
(29:09):
The Substance, which i'd heard about and heard about it.
I don't really like horror, but I like Demi Moore
and I heard her performance was spectacular. I wanted to
watch it. I wanted to watch it. The only day
I could watch it was the day before Halloween because
I was kind of like in a Halloween mood, and
I'm like, Okay, now watch a scary movie.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
That was the only horror movie I could ever read.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I yeah, it's really scary.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
So pop culture is forever changing. Yeah, and now with
social media, it changes sometimes by the day, by the minute,
by the minute. Have you noticed any through lines between
things that really pop off?
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I mean yes and no. Yes, and that we think
culture always follows a thread that all these you know,
part of our work in the ecosystem is connecting the dots.
So we're looking at those threads. Are those what are
those through lines? But at the same time, culture is
a living, breathing organism and it's going to do stuff.
(30:06):
It's it's why you know. I know, we're not going
to have a huge conversation about AI. But It's why
AI and human created content will never be equal because
there's a randomness and imperfection to humanity that AI and
technology have never been able to replicate. It's why when
(30:28):
you see an AI model, there's always something off. You know,
it's it's called the uncanny valley, where you can just
kind of there's just like a weird feeling you have
that it's not it's just too perfect. It's too perfect,
and it's also yeah, it's also it's just not human.
And humanity in an AI context is imperfection and inconsistency
(30:49):
and flaws. And you know, so I think that it's
going to be the next you know, five, ten, twenty
years is going to be really interesting to see what
the human component is.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
What creates a phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Momentum. And I think, you know, another thing we look
at when we're anticipating, and we have a really good
published track record of what we say, calling things a
year and a half to two years before people are
really aware of them. We did studies that Sarah read.
Sarah led to a study during the pandemic on how the
(31:27):
workplace was going to be changing because we had our
American Express Global Business Travel client Their business was business travel,
and the pandemic closed everything, and in order to assert leadership,
they wanted to be able to go to their clients
and say, here's what you need to be thinking about
for the future. So they commissioned us to do a study.
And what we saw was that this idea that your
(31:50):
work life and your home life, you know, were very
segregated like severance, you know, wasn't actually real and that's
not really gave people fulfillment. So just understanding those kinds
of changes allowed us to understand what a phenomenon hybrid working,
remote working it's going to be. Because people were realizing,
(32:11):
in the context again context being really important of people dying,
that what you do when you're not working is actually
maybe more important than what you do when you're working.
And that was a huge shift from a very very
capitalist couple of decades.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yeah, we were coming off the heels of girl boss culture.
I read a book cup by Derek Thompson called hit Makers.
He looked at like musical phenomenons and MTV, and his
sort of consensus was that a hit happens when it's
familiar and different enough. There is something to that. I
(32:52):
interview will I am yeah, And I asked him because
he has so many number one hits and I was like,
what how do you keep making these number one singles
these hits? And he said, you want to know the
real answer, and I was like yeah, and he goes, well,
you take a nineties hit song and you change one chord.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
We use the term familiar but fresh all the time
with our clients. Give them something familiar because people in
a world where our attention is you know, everyone's vying
for attention, it's actually much harder to educate and differentiate
(33:34):
at the same time, right, Like I'm going to tell
you this new idea and I'm going to tell you
why you're going to love it. At the same time,
it's easier to say, hey, you know this thing that
you know and love. That's an entry point, right, It's
a point of connection, and then we're going to take
(33:54):
it over here, like lego. You know what a lego
brick is, but now I'm going to make it into flowers. What. Yeah,
that's new. I've never seen that before, So yeah, I
think that's right.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Do you think it's possible to hack culture?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, I think we've seen people do it, right, We've
seen people break the Internet, like, I'll never freak?
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Kuim Kardashian on the cover of Paper magazine was like
the first time that phrase was used, break the Internet.
So I think people do. I don't think there's a
formula for it. I think it's always it's the same
as you know, we've worked in television a long time.
Every person will tell you that they never saw the
hit show coming, right if they're honest. Some people may
(34:38):
lie and say, oh, I knew it was going to
be hit. Most people will say we had no idea.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Jersey Shore was a show that MTV.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Was trying to bury and it became a phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
It became a phenomenon, and that was a show that
was familiar, but fresh people knew what containment shows were
never seen an exotic subculture that had been marginalized for
the past, you know or whatever centuries and culture. Nobody
had ever seen guidos before. And in the midst of
the recession, when everyone is feeling really fearial, to see
(35:15):
these kids just having a great time and loving their lives, yes,
like that was inspirational for people.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
So this is sort of tangential. But as we're on
the topic of reality TV. I think a lot about
like the Rise of the Kardashians or Duck Dynasty, which
happened in the same work on Duck.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Dynasty you did. Yeah, we help them come up with
that name.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Well, it's sort of when things become a hit like that. Yeah,
there's this element of timing. Yeah, I think that happened
right after nine to eleven probably, Yeah, you know, and
so like we're in this cultural moment and then this
thing happens and you can't plan that. No, no, but
(35:55):
it's timing.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah, well, you know, I think for us it would
be when we see something happen and blow up in culture,
we always want.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
To know why.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, and you know, again, we can't. I don't think
you can manufa. I've never met anybody who could manufacture
a hit, anything like manufacturer a phenomen a phenom on
their own or a TV show or a musical single
you know that they knew was going to be number one.
It's never like that. But I think you can do
a post analysis and look at what we're the cultural
(36:32):
conditions allowed that to happen, and typically we would say
there's a shift involved that nobody was paying attention to
right then, and then people. You know, part of what
makes an idea go from like dominant zeitgeist to residual
is when too many people copy it. Everybody does collapse. Now,
(36:52):
so collabs are not so special collapse or you know,
sort of on the checklist.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Twilight was a hit, and then there was twelve vampire shows. Yeah,
I want to break down some cultural trends that we're seeing.
Get your thoughts on them. I know you have a
lot of heart for the ever changing workplace. Yes, talk
to me about what you think is dominant right now
and then where we're going.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah, I mean the workplace is becoming a battleground in
an interesting way. I think that there's so much change
happening so quickly and at such scale that I think
a lot of old rules and expectations are not going
to serve people well in this world. You have five
(37:37):
generations in the workplace right now, and they all look
at work extremely differently. And just even the battle I'm
talking about is you know, remote versus hybrid versus rto,
which I think is the reason I frame it as
a battle, is because there's a lot of economic discrimination
(37:59):
in those conversations. There's gender discrimination, and I'm talking about
even like return to office like that discriminates against largely
women who a lot of them parents as well, parents
as well, which, let's face it, as much as men
are involved, women are still the primary caregivers. But yes,
parents in general. This hybrid working is the new reality,
(38:22):
and I think that especially if you have more and
more people working independently in the creator economy. I just
think the workplace is a different entity and serves and
really should be a place that connects people. But forcing
them to be there in the office every day is
not necessarily the way to do it, my opinion.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
I'm really curious about your thoughts on luxury. I remember
Virgil Ablow's twenty sixteen Fall Winter Runway show and he
had a neon signs saying you're obviously in the wrong place,
and I thought that signaled such a shift. It's obviously
referencing a pretty woman in the movie line, which is great,
but I think it meant that, like aspiration never meant
(39:08):
more or less.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Hmm, Well, you know, rip Virgil Ablow. Yeah, you know,
he was always playing with the irony of selling to
an economy that he felt that that proposition was already ridiculous,
do you know what I mean? So he really do.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
You mean like he had like sarcasm about luxury. Yeah,
but I think that changed everything.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
It did. However, I would say, you know, having worked
in the fashion business in my younger days, I still
follow it and I look, you know, you've got gen
z who are incredibly scared with good reason about the
future of the planet, and yet they're the number one's
consumers of fast fashion. So fashion is always lived in
(40:00):
a sort of counterintuitive, juxtaposition, ironic place, and that makes
it even more so in this world of you know
and gen z is generations. It's inherently contradictory. It's like
they're the most optimistic nihilist or the most nihilistic optimists
(40:22):
you will ever find, because the world is not a
hospitable place to them right now. And yet they're young
and they want to have the optimism of youth. But
I think what's interesting about luxury is that luxury the
business has had been doing really well, that global business
is faltering. There. I think luxuries big emerging markets are
(40:44):
going to be you know, like India and Africa going forward,
and that's really you know, that's the anticipatory part of
our work, and a lot of creativity is coming out
of Africa and it's going to be very exciting. But ultimately,
all of the luxury companies are in the mass market
business because they don't make money off coture. They barely
(41:04):
make money off ready to wear. They make money off
perfume and key chains. That's I mean, that's because.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
People want a piece. People want changing because things like
the real real and these resale shops that have I
think really exploded over the last five years in particular.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Have changed.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Who can buy a Gucci belt.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yes, but again it's making it more mass market, it's
making which accessible, which.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Makes the people who could originally afford a Gucci belt
not want it.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Well, they still want it, but they want it customized.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
They want it different, they want it different, they want
it familiar but fresh.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
They don't want the same Gucci belt that you have,
They want owned version of that. And that's why for luxury,
the luxury the future I spoke on a panel of
years ago, but the future luxuries customization and personalization. Yeah, right,
because that is luxury when you can in a mass
market world, when you can have the only one, and
(42:07):
that's why vintage is so popular, right, right, But now
you go on you know, the real reel and it's
stuffed from two years ago. You know, it's like, okay,
well that's not it's just a marketplace.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
I also see a bend towards luxury being sustainability. Like
there's this sort of shift I've seen that luxury is
about a value system now, whereas before it was about
just an item. Now it's like the story of the item.
It's who would where who's won the item before you wore?
Speaker 2 (42:37):
Right, Well, that's like the art world, right, the art
world is and this is really a conversation to me
about value, right, and luxury being the highest end of
the value conversation. But like if you look at Mauricio
Catalan's banana which just sold, you know, the banana that
was duct taped. I was in art Basel. I saw
(42:57):
the original that sold for one hundred and fifty grand.
And I love Mauricio Catalan. He's the prankster of the
art world. But it you know, a copy of it
or the I guess a copy of the instructions for
it just sold for six point five million dollars. Now
the problem, and then the story was that they bought
the banana for thirty five cents or something from the
(43:19):
street vendor. But the problem with that in the value
chain is that Mauricio Catalan got the one hundred and
fifty thousand and paid his Galerus discommission. He did not
get a piece of the six point five million, right,
So something's kind of messed up. But in the art world, yes, provenance,
that's what we call provenance is like for vintage. Yeah,
(43:40):
if you're going to own, it's like when you see
the Oscars and the Grammys and all these award shows,
it's like, oh, well, you know, she's wearing the dress
that Audrey Hepburn wore in nineteen sixty five. You know.
But again, I think that's the aspiration. Do you talk
about aspiration. That's the aspiration that it's unique in one
of a kind. But again, in the luxury market, it's like, Okay,
(44:02):
I'm going to buy that keychain that gets me closer
to that thing.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Do you think part of the future of luxury is
investing in things that money can't buy Experiences health, longevity.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
For sure, but that's an experience, right, So like LVMH
owns hotels, right, you know, LVMH was also just invested
in F one. What's that about experiences? They want to
provide next level experiences that nobody else can provide.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Our invite only experiences or these supper clubs or private
social experiences like soho how or Sandacenti, Bungalows or zero
Bond in New York? Right? Is that part of emerging culture?
Is that even residual at this point, I would say
it's dominant trending residual. We anticipated in the pandemic that
(44:55):
private and social clubs would would rise. And why don't
we anticipate that because people were already behaving that way
in the pandemic. They were selecting their pods of people
that they trusted to be around from a health perspective.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Right, So when they emerge from the pandemic, that behavior
doesn't just go back to I'm going to be with strangers.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
No.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
In fact, the people go out less other than like
big sporting events and concerts, which we know has been
like huge, but like just sort of like socializing, you know,
has a health price, a health risk now, right, So
people want to socialize, but they want to do it
in safer spaces. So that's why those clubs have become
(45:37):
really popular. And now, you know, I mean Sohouse is
already a publicly traded company they're talking about Daniel Lobe
is talking about now taking it over from Ron Berkele.
So to me, that means it's all trending. Residual. Yeah,
one thing doesn't mean.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
By do you mean that means the sale means it's residual.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
The fact that so many people are talking about, you know,
putting money into it and it's got fifty three clubs
around the world and whatever. By the way, residual can
be extremely profitable. It doesn't mean that it's not good.
It just means it doesn't have necessarily like the you know,
oh private club Like, yeah, it's sort of like, oh,
(46:16):
you know, which private club do you belong to? Because
I belong to these three. You know. It's sort of
like it's like having a loyalty program with an airline.
It's like you probably have more than one and it's great.
It's not you know, culture. When we look at culture
on the curve, it's not a value judgment. It's just
about what's animating people. Right. So, private clubs, by the way,
(46:37):
you know, Walmart, Costco, CBS, very residual brands make a
lot of money. So it is not about money and success.
It is just about cultural cachet.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
And well, like the New York Times said that you
guys basically sell cool.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah, we wouldn't say that, but that's the word I
keep thinking about, right. I think it's a shorthand, right,
And I think because what we do is really abstract
and intangible, and we still have a really hard time
explaining it. But I you know, I think real time
anthropology is sort of like how do you take what's
(47:14):
going on and find opportunity in that. That's really what
we're like, you know, opportunity hunters for businesses and really
putting business lens on culture. So oh, you know talent
and talent, well, like a lot of people are talking about,
you know, dating in your like Golden Bachelor age right
when we've been talking about that for a long time.
(47:35):
But now with Golden Bachelor and Grey divorce and people
are becoming you know, we have a lot more movies
of women in metopause, so there's more interest now in
the older lives of women, and so you know, that's
opportunity for businesses, for brands for personalities and so depending
on you know, we we we follow what's changing and
(47:59):
then helped translate that for businesses.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Okay, I want to do some rapid fire with.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
You, Okay, the Queen of course, Time to be.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
What's a trend you're most proud of accurately identifying Brooklyn?
You knew Brooklyn was going to happen. Yes, you and
Lena Dunnam both.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Now, I have clients who I had a client who
came up to me at a conference like years later
and he said, he grabbed me and he said, because
it was a Manhattan brand, and he said, you you
told us about Brooklyn and you were right, and we
didn't listen.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
And so where should everyone move now? Is Montana going
to happen? No, I would say Carolina's interesting. I think
Utah is going to do really well, you know, South Texas. Okay,
I think it's you know, we're we're looking a lot
at tourism because we work in travel, and you know,
(48:56):
the phenomenon of post pandemic travel has caused so much
trouble for the usual cities that I mean, there's so
much overcrowding and you've probably read about it, like protests
in Barcelona and people are a lot of it's because
of Airbnb, but a lot of it's just and remote
work right with the pandemic. So I think I just
(49:17):
was on a hillacious in a bad way.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
And hilacious is a good word or a bad word,
but a hellish, a hellish Christmas trip that at a
place that I won't mention. That was, you know, a
resort area that everybody raved about, our friends raved about,
and we got there was so overcrowded, and I think
people just discovered it. So I think what you're going
to see is people are going to go to places
both to live and to travel that are highly localized,
(49:45):
highly regionalized.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
Well, remote work has changed that too.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Percent.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Okay, what is your favorite place to travel to? Speaking
of I love.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Costa Rica right now. I find Costa Rica to be
an energetic, energizing and you know, a healing place. I
worry because the drug cartels are coming in again. I
look at change right. Drug cartels are coming in because
they're all coming in from South America. I love New Zealand.
(50:15):
New Zealand's amazing. I like nature, I like really being immersed.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
What is a cultural contradiction that you could point to
right now, Well, I would go back to the gen
Z example. Okay, you know gen Z?
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Have you know gen Z? We look at as my son,
who's twenty nine, is an older gen Z, right, and
the younger ones are in their teens, maybe fourteen fifteen,
but they've He was in on the fourth day of
kindergarten when nine to eleven happened. We were four blocks
from the towers in New York. His school was four
blocks in the towers. His life has been defined by crisis.
(50:53):
He's only known in America in decline. And I talk
to gen xers and boomers and they it's not something
that they understand.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
I want to ask something about what you just said.
In America in decline? Are we living through the decline?
Oh yeah, of America? Oh yeah, Yeah, it's been it's
the fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah, since nine to eleven. They've lived through war, they
lived through recession, they lived through tumultuous political times, they
live through a climate crisis. They can't afford eggs. I
can't afford eggs. It's very different than when I grew
up as a child of the sixties, where it was
(51:33):
like coming out of the Civil rights era, and then
you know, not that it was the end of the
Vietnam War, and you know, things looked like they were
getting better. The country was doing really you know, a
lot of prosperity in the eighties and nineties, and so we.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Also enjoyed a lot of progressive values that I think
we're seeing the pendula like it's a backlash forwards completely completely.
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I mean, the post World War two world global pob
is completely shifted, not just in America but in every
country around the world. So, you know, it's just a
different time for gen Z and they feel we used
to joke about gen Z looks at boomers as the
walking dead, you know, and they've squandered all the resources.
(52:18):
They're literally dying. They've wrecked the world for youth. And
then at the same time, gen Z are young and
they're starting their lives and they need to be optimistic.
So that contradiction exists, and that's their existence is about
living with contradiction, and that's normal, and I don't fight that.
(52:39):
That's just the way the world is.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
What's something every woman should try once.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
Thinking of their work lives and their personal lives as
one life. Try that it changed my life.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
Literally, what's a book that you've read that did change
your life? Something you think everybody should.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Read a lot? There's so many. Well, I really loved
Mirandagalize latest book, All Fours may not be for everybody,
so good, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
It was one of my favorite books of the year.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
It is so good. Yeah. For me. The last book
that changed, the book that changed my life is probably
the last or the book i'm reading or the last
book that I read.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
Okay, grab the question everything card? Okay and pick a
card which everyone calls you.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
What's the story behind my name? What's my nickname? And
who gave it to you? I'll tell you that. So
my name is actually not Linda. My birth name is
Pick Lynn Ong Pick being a generational name that I
share Pik that I share with my cousins of the
same generation on my father's side. That's a Chinese tradition. Yeah,
so I have cousins that have pick Chwo, pick Low,
(53:52):
pick whatever, picto and Lynn. My parents named me knowing
they they've alway they were the ones who called me Linda.
I didn't pick Linda. They just raised me. They called
me Lynn, but when I went to school, they said
call her Linda, so it wasn't It wasn't me. And
actually some of my nearest and dearest friends and my
mom always called me Lynn, but my nickname was Buns
in high school. It has nothing to do with my butt.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
It's that I was thinking you had a good dairy air.
Speaker 2 (54:17):
No, I didn't have a good dairy air. But it's
Chinese New Year cool. And I was born in the
Year of the Rabbit, and I always loved rabbits, so
my friends called me Buns.
Speaker 1 (54:26):
It's super cute. Thank you for sharing so much with us.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
To thank you, that was really fun.
Speaker 1 (54:36):
Okay, you know what time it is. Today is a
good day. To have a good day. I'll see you
next week.
No one has all the answers, but when we ask
the right questions, we get a little closer, closer to truths,
closer to each other, even closer to ourselves. I'm journalist
Danielle Robe and each week, my guests and I come
together to challenge the status quo and our own ways
of thinking by daring to ask what if, why not?
(00:28):
And who says? So? Come curious, dig deep, and join
the conversation. It's time to question everything. Hello. I hope
you're having a really great week. I have been thinking
about hope and optimism lately, and before we jump into
today's episode, I just want to share something with you
(00:50):
that I learned hosting the World Happiness Conference, because there
were some of the world's leaders in hope and optimism
and happiness and mental health and they were all sharing
their knowledge. I said this on my Instagram. You may
have seen the video, but those speakers on the stage
had over five hundred years of knowledge and research and
(01:12):
experience between them. I really felt like I was taking
a masterclass. And the first speaker of the day was
doctor Dan Thomasulo, who researched hope and this was super
fascinating to me. Hope is the only positive emotion that
requires uncertainty or negativity to be activated. And why that's
(01:34):
so interesting is I think a lot of people mistake
hope or optimism even as blind positivity. But hope is
not about ignoring what's hard or sad or even dark. Hope,
I think is looking at all those things and still
acknowledging them and seeing the light at the end of
(01:56):
the tunnel. It's saying, I don't know how long it's
going to take me to get and I don't know
exactly how I'm going to make it to the end
of the tunnel, but I know that when I do,
I'll be better and stronger for it. And so I
always think of hope as those little glimmers of light
that you see in the distance, you know, like if
you're driving down a totally dark tunnel, you can't see
the end, but see you see a little glimmer of
(02:18):
light from a car or something ahead of you, you know.
And I just wanted to share that because a lot
of my friends have been talking about how hard it
is to find hope lately. And I do think that
our brains are wired to pick up things that are negative.
So if we think about hope is imagery like that
little glimmer, and we practice maybe like a little appreciation
(02:41):
or a little gratitude each day. At least for me,
it helps me stretch my hope. I just find little
things in my life that spark joy, and I just
feel like they stack up. I hope that wasn't corny.
I've been thinking about it a lot, and usually if
I'm thinking about it, you guys are too at some point.
So ah, that's my ted talk today, Okay. And speaking
(03:06):
of thinking about things in the distance, I've always been
fascinated by the people who can see things before the
rest of us do. And I know I'm not talking
about psychics. I'm talking about the type of people who
can look at a TikTok aesthetic or a fashion show,
or a vampire movie trend or the Kardashians and just
(03:27):
know that this isn't random, that this moment in culture
is part of something bigger. And Linda Ang is one
of those people. She's a cultural strategist and the co
founder of a company called Cultique, which advises some of
the world's biggest brands. Think lvmh American Express, Lego, HBO, Disney,
(03:50):
like brands on that level, okay, and she advises them
on how to not just keep up with culture, but
actually understand where it's headed, where it's going. The New
York Times that her company, Caltique quote sells cool, but honestly,
after interviewing her, I feel like that barely scratches the surface.
Linda doesn't just study culture, she literally feels it. She
(04:12):
and her co founder, Sarah Jane Hall, help brands read
the room before they walk into it. She calls herself
a real time anthropologist, and they were both supposed to
come on the show together. They have a really fun
dynamic and Sarah is so awesome, but she got food
poisoning the night before our interviews. So today it's just
Linda giving us the goods and the goods she gives. Okay,
(04:34):
what is culture, who is shaping it? And how is
it shaping us? I had so many questions because I
think that culture isn't just trends in tiktoks. It's honestly
the signals all around us that hint at the future
we're building and the stories that we're telling about ourselves
and each other. You can probably tell if you've been
listening to this pod for a while that I'm obsessed
(04:55):
with pop culture, and not in the traditional sense. It's
not because I love gossip. Okay, maybe a little bit.
I have been very interested in this Blake Lively justin
Baldoni case, but that is a story for another day.
I'm not in the weeds of pop culture drama. What
I love about culture and pop culture is that I
really believe it holds up a mirror to where we
(05:17):
are and where we're going. I mean, think of the
rise of tradwives on TikTok, right, It's not just this
traditional homey aesthetic. It's a signal. I think it's a
reaction to feminism, to burn out to capitalism. And honestly,
even loneliness trends like this don't just appear, they are
saying something. And in this episode, I think we're really
(05:39):
going to hold up that mirror. So some of my
questions why is there a sudden rise in private member
clubs like Zero Bonn and San Vicente Bungalows, why are
horror movies trending right now? And where is the future
of luxury headed like will Gucci Belts ever be cool again?
Linda has some interesting thoughts on that and these all
might sound silly questions, but I promise you all of
(06:02):
them are signaling something much deeper happening beneath the surface.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Culture is it's an ecosystem of ideas, but the ideas
are all created by men and women civilization. They're the
products of our time.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I want you to keep an ear out for how
Linda describes culture. She says she sees it as a
wave or a bell curve. Okay, so it can be
broken down into three boxes, emerging, dominant, or recessive. Emerging
meaning what's coming, dominant meaning what's happening right now, what's dominating,
and recessive meaning like what has.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Been snl would always pick targets that were residual because
everybody can laugh at them.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
But my favorite part of this conversation is when Linda
shares her why why she does this work. She opens
up about growing up as a Chinese, Indonesian Dutch American
in Houston, Texas at a time when nobody knew what
to make of her, and then she talks about how
that experience of being misunderstood made her develop a kind
(07:06):
of emotional and cultural radar that she now uses every
single day.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
If you don't tell people who you are. They will
assign qualities to you that are not necessarily who you are.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
We talk about the shift from exclusivity to experience and luxury,
why collapse went from cool to kind of cliche, and
what it really means when a word like woke becomes weaponized.
But I've thrown out a ton of questions. The big
question we're circling today is how does culture really work
(07:40):
and what does it reveal about who we are becoming? So?
Who are we becoming? It's time to question everything with Linda. Ah,
this has been a long time coming. I'm so excited
to talk about culture with you.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
The suspense has been building, and so much has changed
since we started talking. And that's culture today.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
I know. So I think in order to find a baseline,
we have to figure out what the definition of culture is.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
What is it? What do you think it is? I'd
love to hear how you define it.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
Oh, I've been thinking about this as I've been preparing.
I think when I was growing up, culture was about
mass appeal, desirability. It's music, fashion, food, all of the
things that make up culture. And now I'm not sure
(08:38):
desirability is even part of it anymore.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
That's a great change. I think you're one hundred percent right, okay,
And I would maybe just dimensionalize it a little bit.
But I would love to wind back a little bit
and say in two thousand and eight, when I started
working in culture, after years of being a marketing lead
and brand strategist, I would go round to clients that
(09:02):
had been very loyal and long term and smart clients
in the entertainment business, and I said, I want to
start looking into culture and adding that on to my
brand practice, and people, for the most part said culture,
you mean like yogurt? Literally literally two thousand and eight.
(09:23):
So since that time, culture is one of the most
search words on Google. You can see the spike and trends.
And to me and I think, the way my co
founder Sarah Hunger and I think about culture is it's
an ecosystem of ideas. But the ideas are all created
(09:44):
by men, men and women civilization. They're the products of
our time. So desirability plays. So you're right when you
say art, fashion, we would say sports, architecture, writing, television, advertise, internet,
social media. Like a lot of people when they say, oh,
you work in culture, you must be a social listener,
(10:06):
It's like, no, that's like a teeny tiny part of
what we do. But it's anything that man creates, that
civilization creates. It's like we're real time anthropologists.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
So if that's interesting that you said, it's just a
little piece of it. How much is URL versus ir
L Well, I.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Would say you it's a great question. I think in
terms of tools, the Internet is our primary tool. But
in terms of the things we're looking at, you know,
we go to art fairs like you know, Freeze in
La or Art Basel or Venice, the Bienale we go to.
I have a background in fashion. I grew up going
(10:45):
to fashion shows and shooting interviews with designers and supermodels
before Naomi Campbell had thrown a phone at anybody. You know,
it's really about being immersed. And actually one reason Sarah
and I have decided for cull Tia to have a
four day week, we actually were pioneers in participating in
(11:06):
a study, a global study during the pandemic on people
switching over to a four day week. And we did
that not because we didn't want to work on Friday,
but in order to do our jobs well, we have
to be out in the world and immerse ourselves. And
we also found the best analysts are not on staff.
There are people who are digital nomads or running the
world or exploring And I think that being in culture
(11:29):
is as important as reading about it. But of course
the Internet is a great portal to learn about people
in places and things to explore.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So you mentioned starting in two thousand and eight, and
in twenty fourteen, culture became the word of the year.
It's so ever changing. I love that you use the
word ecosystem. It really feels like it's growing and contracting
all the time. Who are some of the celebrities, artists, architects, like,
(11:59):
who are some of the people that on those fridays
when you have time, yeah, that you're sort of checking on?
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah? Wow. A lot of our inquiries are directed by
our clients. We actually kind of laugh that we get
paid to be smart, and it's you know, for people
like our team who are just already incredibly smart but
incredibly curious, right and we want to know about the world,
you know, Like we had one client who wanted to
(12:25):
understand the history of horror movies and vampires and you know,
why is no Sperato doing well right now? You know,
and it's like that kind of stuff is so fascinating.
But I think, you know, when we look at culture,
you mentioned desirability. Desirability is a really great framework and
lens for looking at culture because we think of it
(12:45):
as a curve, like a Bell curve in school, where
the top of the curve is what we would call
the zeitgeist ideas. The things that people who pay attention
to culture are conversant. They all know, we all know
Travis and Taylor are dating. Whether you like that or not,
you know, it doesn't it's not a judgment. It's not
a value judgment, right. The desirability is to you could
(13:08):
say desirability is to consume, but sometimes the desirability is
just to have a conversation. So I think of those
Zeitgey's moments as if you go to a cocktail party
and you meet somebody for the first time, what are
you going to talk about? You're going to pick a
topic that you think is somewhat available to them, right,
So that's a desirability of a conversation. You used to
(13:29):
have conversations about other topics that you don't have those
sort of Zeitgey's conversations about anymore, but they may be
very present in culture, they're just in the background now
that we're the zeitgeist is in the foreground. The residual,
as we call them, ideas are sort of less desirable
as conversation, but we all know if we take them
for granted. It's sort of like if you took a
(13:50):
retail analogy. If you go to Walmart or Costco, you
might buy you know, toilet paper or discount body lotion
or whatever, and you just you'll patronize that, but you
may not talk about it as much unless it's ironic,
do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Yes, there's like a kitchiness right to it, and it's
just it looks like it's familiar and traditional as opposed
to kind new of an excite doesn't animate people? How
does that come about?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Like?
Speaker 1 (14:17):
How does it? Is it all marketing?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Not necessarily in fact, less so marketing these days than
it used to be, because I will say, the other
end of the curve, the ascending part, is what we
call the emergent ideas, and those are ones that are
starting to shake things up or evolve from what the
zeitgeist is, or even be counter to the zeitgeist. Okay,
and so that's really where Sarah and I and Cultique
(14:42):
love to live is like looking at what's emerging, how
it's changing. The zeitgeist really focus on shifts more than
we're not trend forecasters. Were really looking at what is
changing and why, what does it mean? And so sometimes
that can happen because somebody, you know, like, let's talk
about the core hashtags, right, Like that wasn't marketing. That
(15:05):
was people talking about things and framing them in a
language where you know at the time and still you know,
asthetics are a huge identification tool, especially for gen Z, right,
and somebody I don't even know who invented the core hashtag,
you know, started coming up with cottage core or you know,
(15:26):
gothcore or whatever, like anything like it's core core, right,
and it just becomes gen Z in particular are really
handy with messaging codes and q's and their natural analysts
cultural analysts because they've grown.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Up digitally codes and cues. That's interesting. So when you
say you are not a trend predictor are figuring out
the why?
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Why is the why important? Is culture cyclical? Are you
able to spot or predict even what will happen because
of understanding the why.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, it's a great question. We don't like to use
the word predict because it sort of puts us into
a fortune teller kind of place. But we do give
an able yet no, but we anticipate and I like
to think of it as our telescope lens is just
higher powered and more focused on the edge of what
people are aware of. But back to your question of like,
(16:21):
who are the people in places and things that get
my attention? I think wherever change happens. I was thinking
this morning and working on a project and for a
music project, and I was trying to think of a
musician who's been influential in culture but for a long
time in different iterations, and I was thinking about Pharrell,
and I was thinking about the song Happy, and it's like,
you know, Pharrell just came out with another spectacular men's
(16:45):
collection for Louis Vutant, and that is somebody who can
really move culture in different directions. And he's obviously a polymath.
And there's a lot of amazing personalities who are like that.
But you even have you know, I mean, let's talk
about Travis Kelcey and his brother, you know, starting an
entertainment and empire, like the Mannings, and so I admire
(17:07):
people who are able to take what they do and
have that core skill set and just expand and not
be kind of beholden to old ideas and kind of
staying in your lane.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
I'm curious if you come from the like Rick Rubin
school of thought, where it's like, do what you're interested in, yeah,
and like build it and they will come, or if
you think, after like after analyzing all these companies, if
it's really important to tap into the audience.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
I'm kind of in the middle. My background is advertising
and brand strategy, and I really believe that that DNA,
which is language that Sarah and I use, what is
your cultural DNA? What is the cultural DNA of the brand?
Is incredibly important And in fact, we've done studies where
we looked at reboots of TV shows that were really
(17:58):
popular and which were successful and which were not, and
by far the ones that were not successful forgot what
their DNA was, and that is something that we love investigating.
And in fact, before I brought in the cultural discipline
of my practice working as a brand strategist, I would
work with a lot of times we end up working
(18:18):
with legacy brands that want to reinvent themselves. But the
first place I go to is Wikipedia and said, why
did this brand start, why was it successful in what years?
And what was going on in the world. So to
your point about audience, I think context is everything, which
is why when I evolved my practice to move from
brand strategy to include culture, it was really about just
(18:42):
trying to make sure that we weren't creating brands in
a vacuum, that we understood the context. Culture is a context.
Like one of the things I say is our clients
are launching rocket ships and we monitor the atmosphere, so
if the wind changes, or a hurricane's coming, or you know,
you have to recalibrate. And people spend so much money
(19:03):
to launch a brand a lot of times in marketing,
but if you don't, I mean Starlink or NASA would
never launch a rocket. In fact, sometimes they scruble launch
if the condestions are right. So that's what we're doing.
We're just monitoring conditions.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
As I'm hearing you talk about culture, I'm really curious
what in your life prepared you for a job like this.
It's so unique.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Honestly, I never really thought there was a job like this,
and I just lean into what works for me, honestly,
and really I look at the work I do as
kind of a coping mechanism for all my personal issues
which were growing up as a fifth generation Chinese American.
(19:49):
But my parents were born in Indonesia, which was a
Dutch colony during the war. So after the war they
went to school and the Netherlands, and then they moved
to the States, got married, had me. I was raised
in New York. They spoke Dutch all the time. Nobody
in my family speaks Chinese. And then when I was eight,
we moved to Houston and there were at that time
(20:10):
very few Asian people. Now it's a very Asian metropolis,
but at the time, I was like one of five kids,
did not understand who I was. And I realized a
couple of things. One is about branding is that if
you don't tell people who you are, they will assign
qualities to you that are not necessarily who you are.
(20:30):
I mean, I was bullied as a kid. I got
beat up by my girl Scout troop when third grade
for being different, and I never really understood. In the beginning,
I was ashamed, and then I understood when I went
to college that I had control over how I presented
myself to the world, and I could embrace the things
I liked about myself. So that really the DNA piece
(20:55):
I just translated to my work, and that's what I
preached to people, is that you you don't tell people
what your brand is, they are going to decide for you.
So you back to your question about the discipline of
branding versus, you know, just letting people be who they are.
I think codifying those pieces are really important, and I
think I subconsciously did that. The second thing is because
(21:17):
of my crazy upbringing. I would literally come to the
dinner table every night and ask my mom is this
food Chinese? Is it Dutch? Is it Indonesian? Is it Texan?
Is it from me? Like what? Because I didn't know
as kid, we just have soup, right, where's the soup from?
And she'd say, oh, this is a soup that you
know is a Dutch tradition or whatever, and the next
(21:38):
day we'd have Chinese food. So for me, culture was interchangeable,
and what I learned at an early age is there
many ways to look at a bowl of soup.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
That's really powerful.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Linda Well I don't know how to process the world
any other way. So I mean, one thing of my
one kind of guiding principle I've had throughout my professional
career is I always wanted to be the best at
whatever I did. And so I would say, Okay, I
want to be an art director, which is what I
did after college. And then I met these art directors
(22:11):
who were so much better than me, and I'm like,
I can't do that anymore. I got to do something else, so,
you know, kind of shifting and changing, and then you know,
even brand strategy. I thought I had a unique approach
to brand strategy, and I did that and got to
develop amazing brands like Bravo and Univision and Animal Planet.
But then all these brand strategy companies came up and
(22:32):
I was like, oh, there are a lot of people,
there's a lot of smart people. I better do something else.
And I added culture, you know, and now like everybody's
in the culture business. So we're pivoting once again. But
I kind of look at my career as kind of
I think professionally, just as we physically have a metabolism.
I think that about every eight years, I look back
at my career and I've changed. I pivoted a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
I hosted a marketing conference and they had all these
brilliant speakers come, and one of them was this guy
known as the billion Dollar Man, and it was because
he like sold over a billion dollars or in ad
dollars to these companies. He was like in charge of
the priceless MasterCard campaign. Okay, And I said, how did
you sell all these things through? Like what was the
(23:18):
what was the secret? And he said, very plainly that
he knew what people wanted before he walked into the room.
And I said, that sounds like a great line, but
how do you determine that? And he said, well, very honestly.
I grew up in the Midwest and I was gay
at a time when that was not accepted, And because
(23:41):
of that, I developed this spidey sense of understanding if
somebody was going to be okay or not okay with me.
I could feel people, and I just like had this
moment when I it was sort of a light bulb
for me that so much of our pain as people, ultimately,
if you can somehow direct it, Yeah, comes the spidey
(24:03):
sense in it. That's what I'm hearing it.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Really became my superpower. And I think, you know, meeting
Sarah and the wonderful people that we get to work
with on our team all seem to have what I
call like a super sensitivity to change. I will be
the first person to be cold in a room. I
will be the first person to say in a restaurant,
somebody just lit a match or lit up a cigarette, like.
(24:27):
I just am sensed like and I'm emotionally extremely sensitive.
I'm an EmPATH. So when culture shifts or things change,
I mean it could be we were talking about cozy
and q's a new word or a word being used
a different way than it had ever been used before.
You know, there was David Lynch just passed, and there
was a piece in New York Times yesterday about how
(24:49):
Lynchian became an adjective like that's a cultural. Culture is
just what civilization decides, right. So words and visuals and
owns and smells are all cues and codes, right, and
so we're just more sensitive to them, and especially when
they're new or they change, or look at look at
(25:10):
how a word like woke over the last six years
has gone from a value to a liability.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
Yeah, and the people that are using it has shifted.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Context and how they use it and what they mean.
You know, it's all shifted. So that's and depending on
that one. That's a really good point. Also when I
talk about the curve and the zeitgeist and what's residual
and what's emergent, every brand, every culture has a different curve.
It's not just one, right, And so that's why our
(25:45):
business is about tailoring the curve to a person or
I've worked with a lot of personalities in the entertainment business.
Or it could be a brand, or it could be
you know.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
When you say you work with a personality, I mean
I've worked with talent. Right, but what do you what
would you do for talent?
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Well, one thing we do is look at what their
cultural profile is. Where do they live in the culture,
how do people regard them?
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Right?
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Interesting?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
Yeah, and so again not just social media, but yes,
social media is a part of it. But we can say,
what if critics said, what has this person put out
in the world? What have they said? What are their
most lauded or most loathed pieces of work?
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Right? There's also this interesting distinction between digital sentiment like
social media sentiment, and what people are saying at a
dinner table. Yeah, and they could be two separate things.
Like I think about the Justin Baldoni Blake Lively situation.
The sentiment online is different than the sentiment right at
a dinner.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Right, Well, because it's an ecosystem, right, And like Justin
Baldoni's gonna have a very different lens on culture than Blake.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Lively, Right, Sarah, your co founder, said, pre pandemic, understand
the zeitgeist might have been a nice to have for
a big brand. Now it's a must have. Yeah, how
did the pandemic change that?
Speaker 2 (27:07):
That's a really good question. I haven't thought about that. Well.
I think two things. One, I started in two thousand
and eight, when I started the cultural practice, it was
right in the right as a recession hit. And I
think what happened because of the rise of social media
and the iPhone in that era two thousand and eight
to twenty ten, people just became more aware of things
(27:30):
beyond their own immediate surrounding. And I think when the
pandemic hit, it sort of doubled down on that idea,
which is, there are other people who were suffering like me,
what are they doing? And there was way more interest,
especially in global activity, of what how other people were
(27:53):
dealing with the same situation. So essentially, my bowl of
soup that I didn't know whether it was Dutch or Chinese,
or Indonesian or Texan was the pandemic for people, and
so everybody could look at everybody in the world could
look at the pandemic and go, oh, that's how they're
dealing with it there, or you know, oh, people are working.
(28:14):
What is this zoom thing? You asked about cycles before.
I do believe that there's a great book by some
really amazing cultural theorists Strauss and Howe called The Fourth Turning,
and it's for me, it's sort of my fundamental culture tone.
But I do subscribe to their theory, which is basically,
(28:36):
there are four cycles, and we tend to repeat them.
They always manifest differently, Yeah, but they have certain kinds
of elements that are the same.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
So you know, when we did this horror study that
we just did, you know, we looked back at wise
horror having a moment. Now, well, horror is a way
that people process uncertainty. Some people want to escape and
just watch you know, like smooth Brain TV. But other
people want to feel the pain but not but in
a safe space. Right. So like the Demi Moor movie
(29:09):
The Substance, which i'd heard about and heard about it.
I don't really like horror, but I like Demi Moore
and I heard her performance was spectacular. I wanted to
watch it. I wanted to watch it. The only day
I could watch it was the day before Halloween because
I was kind of like in a Halloween mood, and
I'm like, Okay, now watch a scary movie.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
That was the only horror movie I could ever read.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
I yeah, it's really scary.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
So pop culture is forever changing. Yeah, and now with
social media, it changes sometimes by the day, by the minute,
by the minute. Have you noticed any through lines between
things that really pop off?
Speaker 2 (29:46):
I mean yes and no. Yes, and that we think
culture always follows a thread that all these you know,
part of our work in the ecosystem is connecting the dots.
So we're looking at those threads. Are those what are
those through lines? But at the same time, culture is
a living, breathing organism and it's going to do stuff.
(30:06):
It's it's why you know. I know, we're not going
to have a huge conversation about AI. But It's why
AI and human created content will never be equal because
there's a randomness and imperfection to humanity that AI and
technology have never been able to replicate. It's why when
(30:28):
you see an AI model, there's always something off. You know,
it's it's called the uncanny valley, where you can just
kind of there's just like a weird feeling you have
that it's not it's just too perfect. It's too perfect,
and it's also yeah, it's also it's just not human.
And humanity in an AI context is imperfection and inconsistency
(30:49):
and flaws. And you know, so I think that it's
going to be the next you know, five, ten, twenty
years is going to be really interesting to see what
the human component is.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
What creates a phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Momentum. And I think, you know, another thing we look
at when we're anticipating, and we have a really good
published track record of what we say, calling things a
year and a half to two years before people are
really aware of them. We did studies that Sarah read.
Sarah led to a study during the pandemic on how the
(31:27):
workplace was going to be changing because we had our
American Express Global Business Travel client Their business was business travel,
and the pandemic closed everything, and in order to assert leadership,
they wanted to be able to go to their clients
and say, here's what you need to be thinking about
for the future. So they commissioned us to do a study.
And what we saw was that this idea that your
(31:50):
work life and your home life, you know, were very
segregated like severance, you know, wasn't actually real and that's
not really gave people fulfillment. So just understanding those kinds
of changes allowed us to understand what a phenomenon hybrid working,
remote working it's going to be. Because people were realizing,
(32:11):
in the context again context being really important of people dying,
that what you do when you're not working is actually
maybe more important than what you do when you're working.
And that was a huge shift from a very very
capitalist couple of decades.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yeah, we were coming off the heels of girl boss culture.
I read a book cup by Derek Thompson called hit Makers.
He looked at like musical phenomenons and MTV, and his
sort of consensus was that a hit happens when it's
familiar and different enough. There is something to that. I
(32:52):
interview will I am yeah, And I asked him because
he has so many number one hits and I was like,
what how do you keep making these number one singles
these hits? And he said, you want to know the
real answer, and I was like yeah, and he goes, well,
you take a nineties hit song and you change one chord.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
We use the term familiar but fresh all the time
with our clients. Give them something familiar because people in
a world where our attention is you know, everyone's vying
for attention, it's actually much harder to educate and differentiate
(33:34):
at the same time, right, Like I'm going to tell
you this new idea and I'm going to tell you
why you're going to love it. At the same time,
it's easier to say, hey, you know this thing that
you know and love. That's an entry point, right, It's
a point of connection, and then we're going to take
(33:54):
it over here, like lego. You know what a lego
brick is, but now I'm going to make it into flowers. What. Yeah,
that's new. I've never seen that before, So yeah, I
think that's right.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Do you think it's possible to hack culture?
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, I think we've seen people do it, right, We've
seen people break the Internet, like, I'll never freak?
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Was it?
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Kuim Kardashian on the cover of Paper magazine was like
the first time that phrase was used, break the Internet.
So I think people do. I don't think there's a
formula for it. I think it's always it's the same
as you know, we've worked in television a long time.
Every person will tell you that they never saw the
hit show coming, right if they're honest. Some people may
(34:38):
lie and say, oh, I knew it was going to
be hit. Most people will say we had no idea.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Jersey Shore was a show that MTV.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Was trying to bury and it became a phenomenon.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
It became a phenomenon, and that was a show that
was familiar, but fresh people knew what containment shows were
never seen an exotic subculture that had been marginalized for
the past, you know or whatever centuries and culture. Nobody
had ever seen guidos before. And in the midst of
the recession, when everyone is feeling really fearial, to see
(35:15):
these kids just having a great time and loving their lives, yes,
like that was inspirational for people.
Speaker 1 (35:21):
So this is sort of tangential. But as we're on
the topic of reality TV. I think a lot about
like the Rise of the Kardashians or Duck Dynasty, which
happened in the same work on Duck.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Dynasty you did. Yeah, we help them come up with
that name.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
Well, it's sort of when things become a hit like that. Yeah,
there's this element of timing. Yeah, I think that happened
right after nine to eleven probably, Yeah, you know, and
so like we're in this cultural moment and then this
thing happens and you can't plan that. No, no, but
(35:55):
it's timing.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah, well, you know, I think for us it would
be when we see something happen and blow up in culture,
we always want.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
To know why.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Yeah, and you know, again, we can't. I don't think
you can manufa. I've never met anybody who could manufacture
a hit, anything like manufacturer a phenomen a phenom on
their own or a TV show or a musical single
you know that they knew was going to be number one.
It's never like that. But I think you can do
a post analysis and look at what we're the cultural
(36:32):
conditions allowed that to happen, and typically we would say
there's a shift involved that nobody was paying attention to
right then, and then people. You know, part of what
makes an idea go from like dominant zeitgeist to residual
is when too many people copy it. Everybody does collapse. Now,
(36:52):
so collabs are not so special collapse or you know,
sort of on the checklist.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
Twilight was a hit, and then there was twelve vampire shows. Yeah,
I want to break down some cultural trends that we're seeing.
Get your thoughts on them. I know you have a
lot of heart for the ever changing workplace. Yes, talk
to me about what you think is dominant right now
and then where we're going.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah, I mean the workplace is becoming a battleground in
an interesting way. I think that there's so much change
happening so quickly and at such scale that I think
a lot of old rules and expectations are not going
to serve people well in this world. You have five
(37:37):
generations in the workplace right now, and they all look
at work extremely differently. And just even the battle I'm
talking about is you know, remote versus hybrid versus rto,
which I think is the reason I frame it as
a battle, is because there's a lot of economic discrimination
(37:59):
in those conversations. There's gender discrimination, and I'm talking about
even like return to office like that discriminates against largely
women who a lot of them parents as well, parents
as well, which, let's face it, as much as men
are involved, women are still the primary caregivers. But yes,
parents in general. This hybrid working is the new reality,
(38:22):
and I think that especially if you have more and
more people working independently in the creator economy. I just
think the workplace is a different entity and serves and
really should be a place that connects people. But forcing
them to be there in the office every day is
not necessarily the way to do it, my opinion.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
I'm really curious about your thoughts on luxury. I remember
Virgil Ablow's twenty sixteen Fall Winter Runway show and he
had a neon signs saying you're obviously in the wrong place,
and I thought that signaled such a shift. It's obviously
referencing a pretty woman in the movie line, which is great,
but I think it meant that, like aspiration never meant
(39:08):
more or less.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
Hmm, Well, you know, rip Virgil Ablow. Yeah, you know,
he was always playing with the irony of selling to
an economy that he felt that that proposition was already ridiculous,
do you know what I mean? So he really do.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
You mean like he had like sarcasm about luxury. Yeah,
but I think that changed everything.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
It did. However, I would say, you know, having worked
in the fashion business in my younger days, I still
follow it and I look, you know, you've got gen
z who are incredibly scared with good reason about the
future of the planet, and yet they're the number one's
consumers of fast fashion. So fashion is always lived in
(40:00):
a sort of counterintuitive, juxtaposition, ironic place, and that makes
it even more so in this world of you know
and gen z is generations. It's inherently contradictory. It's like
they're the most optimistic nihilist or the most nihilistic optimists
(40:22):
you will ever find, because the world is not a
hospitable place to them right now. And yet they're young
and they want to have the optimism of youth. But
I think what's interesting about luxury is that luxury the
business has had been doing really well, that global business
is faltering. There. I think luxuries big emerging markets are
(40:44):
going to be you know, like India and Africa going forward,
and that's really you know, that's the anticipatory part of
our work, and a lot of creativity is coming out
of Africa and it's going to be very exciting. But ultimately,
all of the luxury companies are in the mass market
business because they don't make money off coture. They barely
(41:04):
make money off ready to wear. They make money off
perfume and key chains. That's I mean, that's because.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
People want a piece. People want changing because things like
the real real and these resale shops that have I
think really exploded over the last five years in particular.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
Have changed.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Who can buy a Gucci belt.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yes, but again it's making it more mass market, it's
making which accessible, which.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
Makes the people who could originally afford a Gucci belt
not want it.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Well, they still want it, but they want it customized.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
They want it different, they want it different, they want
it familiar but fresh.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
They don't want the same Gucci belt that you have,
They want owned version of that. And that's why for luxury,
the luxury the future I spoke on a panel of
years ago, but the future luxuries customization and personalization. Yeah, right,
because that is luxury when you can in a mass
market world, when you can have the only one, and
(42:07):
that's why vintage is so popular, right, right, But now
you go on you know, the real reel and it's
stuffed from two years ago. You know, it's like, okay,
well that's not it's just a marketplace.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
I also see a bend towards luxury being sustainability. Like
there's this sort of shift I've seen that luxury is
about a value system now, whereas before it was about
just an item. Now it's like the story of the item.
It's who would where who's won the item before you wore?
Speaker 2 (42:37):
Right, Well, that's like the art world, right, the art
world is and this is really a conversation to me
about value, right, and luxury being the highest end of
the value conversation. But like if you look at Mauricio
Catalan's banana which just sold, you know, the banana that
was duct taped. I was in art Basel. I saw
(42:57):
the original that sold for one hundred and fifty grand.
And I love Mauricio Catalan. He's the prankster of the
art world. But it you know, a copy of it
or the I guess a copy of the instructions for
it just sold for six point five million dollars. Now
the problem, and then the story was that they bought
the banana for thirty five cents or something from the
(43:19):
street vendor. But the problem with that in the value
chain is that Mauricio Catalan got the one hundred and
fifty thousand and paid his Galerus discommission. He did not
get a piece of the six point five million, right,
So something's kind of messed up. But in the art world, yes, provenance,
that's what we call provenance is like for vintage. Yeah,
(43:40):
if you're going to own, it's like when you see
the Oscars and the Grammys and all these award shows,
it's like, oh, well, you know, she's wearing the dress
that Audrey Hepburn wore in nineteen sixty five. You know.
But again, I think that's the aspiration. Do you talk
about aspiration. That's the aspiration that it's unique in one
of a kind. But again, in the luxury market, it's like, Okay,
(44:02):
I'm going to buy that keychain that gets me closer
to that thing.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Do you think part of the future of luxury is
investing in things that money can't buy Experiences health, longevity.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
For sure, but that's an experience, right, So like LVMH
owns hotels, right, you know, LVMH was also just invested
in F one. What's that about experiences? They want to
provide next level experiences that nobody else can provide.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
Our invite only experiences or these supper clubs or private
social experiences like soho how or Sandacenti, Bungalows or zero
Bond in New York? Right? Is that part of emerging culture?
Is that even residual at this point, I would say
it's dominant trending residual. We anticipated in the pandemic that
(44:55):
private and social clubs would would rise. And why don't
we anticipate that because people were already behaving that way
in the pandemic. They were selecting their pods of people
that they trusted to be around from a health perspective.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Right, So when they emerge from the pandemic, that behavior
doesn't just go back to I'm going to be with strangers.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
No.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
In fact, the people go out less other than like
big sporting events and concerts, which we know has been
like huge, but like just sort of like socializing, you know,
has a health price, a health risk now, right, So
people want to socialize, but they want to do it
in safer spaces. So that's why those clubs have become
(45:37):
really popular. And now, you know, I mean Sohouse is
already a publicly traded company they're talking about Daniel Lobe
is talking about now taking it over from Ron Berkele.
So to me, that means it's all trending. Residual. Yeah,
one thing doesn't mean.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
By do you mean that means the sale means it's residual.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
The fact that so many people are talking about, you know,
putting money into it and it's got fifty three clubs
around the world and whatever. By the way, residual can
be extremely profitable. It doesn't mean that it's not good.
It just means it doesn't have necessarily like the you know,
oh private club Like, yeah, it's sort of like, oh,
(46:16):
you know, which private club do you belong to? Because
I belong to these three. You know. It's sort of
like it's like having a loyalty program with an airline.
It's like you probably have more than one and it's great.
It's not you know, culture. When we look at culture
on the curve, it's not a value judgment. It's just
about what's animating people. Right. So, private clubs, by the way,
(46:37):
you know, Walmart, Costco, CBS, very residual brands make a
lot of money. So it is not about money and success.
It is just about cultural cachet.
Speaker 1 (46:49):
And well, like the New York Times said that you
guys basically sell cool.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah, we wouldn't say that, but that's the word I
keep thinking about, right. I think it's a shorthand, right,
And I think because what we do is really abstract
and intangible, and we still have a really hard time
explaining it. But I you know, I think real time
anthropology is sort of like how do you take what's
(47:14):
going on and find opportunity in that. That's really what
we're like, you know, opportunity hunters for businesses and really
putting business lens on culture. So oh, you know talent
and talent, well, like a lot of people are talking about,
you know, dating in your like Golden Bachelor age right
when we've been talking about that for a long time.
(47:35):
But now with Golden Bachelor and Grey divorce and people
are becoming you know, we have a lot more movies
of women in metopause, so there's more interest now in
the older lives of women, and so you know, that's
opportunity for businesses, for brands for personalities and so depending
on you know, we we we follow what's changing and
(47:59):
then helped translate that for businesses.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Okay, I want to do some rapid fire with.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
You, Okay, the Queen of course, Time to be.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
What's a trend you're most proud of accurately identifying Brooklyn?
You knew Brooklyn was going to happen. Yes, you and
Lena Dunnam both.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Now, I have clients who I had a client who
came up to me at a conference like years later
and he said, he grabbed me and he said, because
it was a Manhattan brand, and he said, you you
told us about Brooklyn and you were right, and we
didn't listen.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
And so where should everyone move now? Is Montana going
to happen? No, I would say Carolina's interesting. I think
Utah is going to do really well, you know, South Texas. Okay,
I think it's you know, we're we're looking a lot
at tourism because we work in travel, and you know,
(48:56):
the phenomenon of post pandemic travel has caused so much
trouble for the usual cities that I mean, there's so
much overcrowding and you've probably read about it, like protests
in Barcelona and people are a lot of it's because
of Airbnb, but a lot of it's just and remote
work right with the pandemic. So I think I just
(49:17):
was on a hillacious in a bad way.
Speaker 2 (49:21):
And hilacious is a good word or a bad word,
but a hellish, a hellish Christmas trip that at a
place that I won't mention. That was, you know, a
resort area that everybody raved about, our friends raved about,
and we got there was so overcrowded, and I think
people just discovered it. So I think what you're going
to see is people are going to go to places
both to live and to travel that are highly localized,
(49:45):
highly regionalized.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
Well, remote work has changed that too.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Percent.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Okay, what is your favorite place to travel to? Speaking
of I love.
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Costa Rica right now. I find Costa Rica to be
an energetic, energizing and you know, a healing place. I
worry because the drug cartels are coming in again. I
look at change right. Drug cartels are coming in because
they're all coming in from South America. I love New Zealand.
(50:15):
New Zealand's amazing. I like nature, I like really being immersed.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
What is a cultural contradiction that you could point to
right now, Well, I would go back to the gen
Z example. Okay, you know gen Z?
Speaker 2 (50:29):
Have you know gen Z? We look at as my son,
who's twenty nine, is an older gen Z, right, and
the younger ones are in their teens, maybe fourteen fifteen,
but they've He was in on the fourth day of
kindergarten when nine to eleven happened. We were four blocks
from the towers in New York. His school was four
blocks in the towers. His life has been defined by crisis.
(50:53):
He's only known in America in decline. And I talk
to gen xers and boomers and they it's not something
that they understand.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
I want to ask something about what you just said.
In America in decline? Are we living through the decline?
Oh yeah, of America? Oh yeah, Yeah, it's been it's
the fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah, since nine to eleven. They've lived through war, they
lived through recession, they lived through tumultuous political times, they
live through a climate crisis. They can't afford eggs. I
can't afford eggs. It's very different than when I grew
up as a child of the sixties, where it was
(51:33):
like coming out of the Civil rights era, and then
you know, not that it was the end of the
Vietnam War, and you know, things looked like they were
getting better. The country was doing really you know, a
lot of prosperity in the eighties and nineties, and so we.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Also enjoyed a lot of progressive values that I think
we're seeing the pendula like it's a backlash forwards completely completely.
Speaker 2 (51:55):
I mean, the post World War two world global pob
is completely shifted, not just in America but in every
country around the world. So, you know, it's just a
different time for gen Z and they feel we used
to joke about gen Z looks at boomers as the
walking dead, you know, and they've squandered all the resources.
(52:18):
They're literally dying. They've wrecked the world for youth. And
then at the same time, gen Z are young and
they're starting their lives and they need to be optimistic.
So that contradiction exists, and that's their existence is about
living with contradiction, and that's normal, and I don't fight that.
(52:39):
That's just the way the world is.
Speaker 1 (52:41):
What's something every woman should try once.
Speaker 2 (52:44):
Thinking of their work lives and their personal lives as
one life. Try that it changed my life.
Speaker 1 (52:53):
Literally, what's a book that you've read that did change
your life? Something you think everybody should.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
Read a lot? There's so many. Well, I really loved
Mirandagalize latest book, All Fours may not be for everybody,
so good, it's so good.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
It was one of my favorite books of the year.
Speaker 2 (53:11):
It is so good. Yeah. For me. The last book
that changed, the book that changed my life is probably
the last or the book i'm reading or the last
book that I read.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
Okay, grab the question everything card? Okay and pick a
card which everyone calls you.
Speaker 2 (53:28):
What's the story behind my name? What's my nickname? And
who gave it to you? I'll tell you that. So
my name is actually not Linda. My birth name is
Pick Lynn Ong Pick being a generational name that I
share Pik that I share with my cousins of the
same generation on my father's side. That's a Chinese tradition. Yeah,
so I have cousins that have pick Chwo, pick Low,
(53:52):
pick whatever, picto and Lynn. My parents named me knowing
they they've alway they were the ones who called me Linda.
I didn't pick Linda. They just raised me. They called
me Lynn, but when I went to school, they said
call her Linda, so it wasn't It wasn't me. And
actually some of my nearest and dearest friends and my
mom always called me Lynn, but my nickname was Buns
in high school. It has nothing to do with my butt.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
It's that I was thinking you had a good dairy air.
Speaker 2 (54:17):
No, I didn't have a good dairy air. But it's
Chinese New Year cool. And I was born in the
Year of the Rabbit, and I always loved rabbits, so
my friends called me Buns.
Speaker 1 (54:26):
It's super cute. Thank you for sharing so much with us.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
To thank you, that was really fun.
Speaker 1 (54:36):
Okay, you know what time it is. Today is a
good day. To have a good day. I'll see you
next week.
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