29: Pruned Futures

AI has become our new savior. And there's a reason why AI has become our de facto mythology of the future. I think it's because we've given up or literally incinerated the possibility of any other kind of future because AI is a perfect amorphous idea that can fit into the shape of whatever problem you want to stuff it into. Hey everybody welcome back to Unseen Unknown. I'm Jasmine Beena, my partner Jean-Louis Rollins. Today we're going to talk about dead futures. So every once in a while it might happen that there's a cluster of events that happens in culture and it changes the direction of where that culture is headed. And we might not know where we're going but we know that we're not going any longer in the direction that we thought we were going in before. And futures talk about this through the futures cone model but I think an easier way to look at it is like a tree right the branches of time. And the metaphor we want to use here is that we have some freshly cut off branches that we need to pay attention to. If you play in culture, if you're a leader, if you're in politics in any arena of life because a lot of brands and leaders out there right now are still playing as if those branches exist. And a lot of those branches won't come back. If they do come back, they're not going to look the same. So today we're going to discuss what's been cut and where we're headed now. And we're going to talk about a few domains. The age of achievement, we'll talk about AI, we'll also talk about beauty and motherhood. So let's start with the age of achievement Jean and we get us rolling. What do you think has been cold there? We did a book club at Exposure Therapy a little while back reading Deep Utopia from Nick Bostrom. He's a guy who wrote the book on superintelligence, kind of a seminal book and set of ideas on AI. Not the most exciting read, but some really thought-provoking ideas. And one of the points he brought up is he's exploring essentially, let's say that we actually end up with a good case scenario. Let's say that we get technological maturity, which is really profound and powerful and really solves a lot of problems. Well what are the problems that you have to deal with then? And I've seen this in a few different lenses as we explore. But essentially, Western society, especially the US, is completely oriented around achievement. Everything is around individual achievement. You see that in kids activities where it's no longer group sports, it's individual pursuits. You see that that someone's self-worth. Who do you want to be when you grow up? Or what do you want to be when you grow up? It's really the question of what is the great accomplishment you want to have? Everyone aspires to solve something. I'm going to cure cancer. I'm going to discover a new particle. I'm going to do this in that. So we've built society around achievement. And his argument, and again, you see it elsewhere as well, is that we might be moving away from an achievement-oriented society. And I think that has incredibly profound consequences. And so there are sort of two ways you can look at meaning. I like to call them type one and type two meanings. So type one is achievement. It's a one-way door. I brought us through a thing. Now we know a thing we didn't know before. We can do a thing we didn't know before. Think of all the foundational AI models. That's a new intelligence. That's achievement. That's type one achievement. The other is we had a really nice time together. So there's a sentiment analysis that looks at, especially on X, how do we measure happiness? And the most consistent measure is Christmas. Christmas has this very universal spike. It's higher than everything else. So you can measure the general positive sentiment as that new album is a point to Christmas. Or whatever. You see how that's a unit of measure. And so type two meaning is about the quality time together. It's having it's hosting Thanksgiving. It's deep conversation. It's ritual. It's sport. It's entertainment. It's joy. It's play. It's a two-way door. You can come back over and over again. And here's what's really interesting, especially with AI. We built our society around achieving things. And now AI is going to be doing a lot of the achieving. And so there's already early stats. AI might boost productivity, but it's also killing our job satisfaction. You see this very, in varying, extensive places. But in certain scientific fields, those ones study. And it's like 17% boost in productivity, 82% drop in work satisfaction. So pretty significant. And the point here is just that like our, so there's a lot of forces here that like as we move further and further away from achievement, achievement becomes less fulfilling, but also there's way more of it. So if, you know, just to get into this for a moment, especially if you look into medicine and deep sciences, AI is accelerating the amount of achievements. But it's truly mind blowing. Like if you really get into like the frontier, papers that are coming out on the new discoveries. So, you know, there's so many different things with like drug discovery, with medicine discovery, with new kinds of proteins that we can develop with new kinds of antibiotics, new treatments, all sorts of just new ways of understanding imaging, running simulations of cell simulations of atoms, new astronomical discoveries as well. It's just a lot of the foundational science that you can then build upon is exploding. Right? And so I think what happens is twofold one achievement becomes maybe slightly less satisfying in the age of AI. But two, there's so much more of it that becomes slightly less novel. Right? Like, oh, you're last week with curative type one diabetes next week. We're going to cure this and then we're going to cure that. And it sort of becomes less significant in the landscape because there's so much more of it that like the point here is that I think very gradually we're going to be orienting ourselves differently as to, you know, what we organize our attention in society around. And the last thing I'll say on here is, so John Viveki has this lecture series on. I was just going to mention that. On the meaning crisis. I know what you're going to say. I'm going to say. And this is an anecdote I bring up, but I think it's so interesting, right? You know, what's really interesting, we love Greek mythologies. You know what we don't love is Egyptian mythologies the same. And why? Because we cannot relate to them because there's a big difference. Greek mythologies have the concept of progress. Egyptian mythologies don't, they are cyclical. I live, I die and the world goes on as a cycle. And that is very unrelated to us. The psycho technology of progress is huge. And progress is all about type one meaning, right? And I think what's really interesting is if we keep going down this road of super mature AI, and maybe this is a really big, long, further outtake, but type one meaning becomes less and less important to us. And as it does, the cyclical mythology becomes more relevant to us that, you know, the world doesn't change as much if you kind of look away from it. If we look at like what we are orienting towards. And I think you see that in a lot of small trends, you know, the friction maxing, the distancing from the capitalist machine, the slow life. A lot of that is a type two meaning orientation. This feels like a much longer time horizon in terms of cultural change than we usually study, because I think it would take a long time to decouple ourselves from this idea of achievement and more towards the type two meaning. And you're talking about two things happening at once. One, achievement becomes less possible as the market changes, as the world of work changes, technologies, replace people. But also will become habituated to so much progress that's not done by humans. It becomes irrelevant to us in an interesting way. And it feels like when I'm trying to embody what that world would feel like, it feels like a divergence. Like there are two worlds. There's a world where all this progress is happening. And it's the machines and whoever, the tech leaders. And then there's the people who are left behind to reconfigure what meaning means to them. And you're talking about the branch that's being cut off, which is like how you identify your value in the world, right? Yeah. I think so. How we organize ourselves. Right. That's a big challenge for a culture to figure out how to reorganize themselves. And you're right, we see experiments, but they're very small. Like the whole American mythology of like their frontier and the West and manifest destiny. None of that jives was what you're discussing. Yeah. I think it's like at the base level, you know, one of the most fundamental questions, right, is like, who do you want to be when you grow up? Which is to say, what do you want to achieve? And I think that there is the question that I would say, and again, this is like, we're talking about the tectonic plates of culture. These are gradual but massive movements. And the question is like, how do you want to feel when you grow up? And I think that like when you think about how profoundly different that is and what the consequence of how you pay attention. And I'll give another lens to help understand this. A sort of side quest of mine is exploring folklore and cultural practices around the world, especially indigenous communities. And the thing I notice is that you see it everywhere. Humans as a species, as an animal, we love to sing. You see it in all of these different places. We sing like the birds sing. We're constantly, we're very musical. And you know what's so weird is our modern, especially Western relationship with singing. If you're not good at singing, you shouldn't sing. That's how we perceive it because we see it as an achievement oriented thing. We see singing as it's only worth doing if you're going to achieve something, which is to say, if you're not very good, don't do it because you won't achieve anything. And you know, you think about that of like, you know, these indigenous communities. They don't care if they're good or not. That's not the point at all. You know, it's an orientation around what does it mean to sing with other people and take an echo with them. I think that that metaphor of how we relate to singing is that orientation. And I think that that is a much more profound thing than we realize as again, like any other thing is, you know, take the other extreme, Ray Kurzweil's singularity, you know, the whole idea that the rate of human knowledge doubling is itself accelerating, right? It's like we don't double human knowledge like it used to be like every 10 years and that was every five years. I think it's maybe around the order of like three or four years human knowledge in aggregate doubles. What we don't really pay attention to is when that comes down to like less than a year of human knowledge doubles, you know, less than six months, it becomes boring. You know, I think that like, you know, I think that's what I'm saying. like we don't realize that like sure, yes, we're gonna cure this disease in that disease. And I think it's just like, those are great things. Those are objectively fantastic, wonderful things. Yes, we should cure these diseases. But I think it becomes less exciting in that like I'm gonna dedicate my entire life to this, you know, and it's less of an orientation for us. And I think that's the point. It's not to say that the progress isn't good, it's to say that it becomes, it's not the operating system that we're organizing society around. But another way of looking at the organization that I thought of while you were talking is everything we do is about quantification. That's it, you know, capitalism, we should like literally like that to be the booby word. But like, you know, if you can't measure it, if you can't extract it, if you can't package it, then it has no value. And you could argue that's what's gotten us until our message culturally we're right now. But you're asking people in this vision of your future that you're talking about to resist measuring things, to resist quantifying them. - I think it's different units of measurement, right? Like the challenge is that when you can have a clear metric, then you know, you tend to track it. But you know, we're talking about the felt experience, you know, we're talking about meaning and joy and these kind of things, which obviously are the substance of the experience of life, right? If you can't experience meaning and joy, what are we even doing here? These are the things that matter, but they're hard to measure, right? And so they're hard to commercialize. And you know, capitalize upon. And that's kind of the issue that I think that there's a recognition, right? Like the pushback and the narrative against capitalism is, you know, the fact that like we're recognizing there's a lot of things that are missing. You know, like there's so much in the domain of like spiritual awakenings and personal journeys that people are going on. And this is the second order consequence of that. As everyone does the self work, there's this different orientation. You know, I was just watching a clip from, you know, Brian Johnson doing psychedelics. And his point was like he was concerned that a lot of founders who do psychedelics, they don't want to run their businesses after the trip, you know, when they do like a hero's dose. And like that's the thing that we're talking about here, you know, what is the orientation of your life? And it's just interesting that like, especially with psychedelics, there is this renegotiation of that, you know, what are we prioritizing here? We touched on this in our last episode about aspiration about how the broken contract between work and reward, right, that like, you know, hard work doesn't necessarily equal reward. You know, this whole point of, you know, achievement in type one meaning is essentially a commentary on that to say that like, the achievement isn't maybe worth all the effort, right? And that like the worth of the achievement is changing, you know, the economic value, but also the cost of it, right? The labor, the hustle, the grind, that you know, you work really, really, really hard. And like, is that actually the thing that's gonna fulfill you? And I think that that, it's all, it also comes together in terms of how we aspire, how we look at the balance of work and reward. - All right, let's move on to the next one, which is related to this, which is AI itself. So I have been thinking about what is happening here in terms of futures that are dying. And I wrote recently about how I think there's definitely a clear argument to be made that we've lost a vision of the future where people collaborate on scale to solve real problems. You know, we've had the last decades to solve our climate crisis, now we have a water crisis, wars, you know, oil, whatever, whatever you want to throw at it. Consumers, you know, the many different things that are unsustainable in this world. And we are reaching a point where we can see, like what is it on that Doomer clock, we're at like 11.59 and 59 seconds. We are seeing that maybe we're incapable of it. And instead of continuing to try, AI has become our new savior. I think it's because we've given up or literally incinerated the possibility of any other kind of future, 'cause AI is this perfect amorphous idea that can fit into the shape of whatever problem you want to stuff it into. I don't know that AI will save us. I would, of course, I hope like anybody else that it will. But truly, we don't have any inclination of whether it actually will or if it will in time. And that's the future, the dead future I want to talk about. This future that we are going to wake up one day and realize like our resources are precious. All of the ecological concerns that we have in the world right now, we're gonna have some sort of like I said, collaboration on scale or at scale that would help us kind of start reversing the damage that we've done. I think it's safe to say, especially with AI here now, that's a branch that's been cut. - So you're saying that we're no longer gonna be able to collaborate a scale? I'm not saying that we're not no longer going to. I think our belief in that future, the belief that we will be able to turn back the clock, that we're gonna start conserving and respecting the planet and respecting life. I think that's been replaced by this idea that like AI is gonna solve our problems. AI will help us find a near infinite energy source. It'll help us figure out the game theory of like, you know, different cultures and you know, finding peace among people. That's what I'm talking about. - So essentially, I mean, it's the mythology I think came from Deep Mind, their mission statement from way, way, way back. Well over a decade, it was just, Solve AI, use it to solve everything else. - Exactly. - Right. There you go. - That's basically the dominant mythology that you're saying. And so to clarify, what is it replacing? Like what have we lost here? Like what's the branch in a sentence that's been cut here? - Okay, so the next branch that I wanna talk about is something that's been on my mind and it's anything having to do with like ecological brands, brands around sustainability, brands around, you know, social responsibility, anything in that category. And it's this idea that we used to have a lot of little branches about like, you know, what it meant to, you know, be a future of a culture that like conserves and respects the planet and protects our resources. And dials back the doom clock that, you know, we're at 11, the 11th hour, 59th minute. It feels like all those little branches and all these campaigns and efforts to make people care and you know, protect our world and our environment have fallen off. And now it's all claps into this one big branch which is like AI is gonna save us. AI is this technology where if we can just shove it into any problem we have, we'll have a near infinite power supply, we'll be able to create world peace, we'll be able to, you know, solve the plastics problem or the recycling problem or the water problem. And that's a lot of faith to put into something that could not get here soon enough. And it's amorphous. So it fits into the shape of any problem we have. And it feels like it's killed off some other futures. - Yeah, no, I 100% see that. It is like from the lens of mythology, it is our savior, right? Like every problem has an AI shaped hole. And it's really because the AI, as you say, it's amorphous, it can fit into any hole, right? And so we do that. And you know, I think, I always think back to that, Emerald episode talking about our relationship with AI and how he was kind of driving that it's a bunch of, you know, engineers in Silicon Valley who want to fire the figure and they're rebuilding that for themselves. But you know, even he's using it there in terms of the emotional landscape. But I think, yeah, 100% the mythology is, it will provide these grand solutions to us. And I think it's very related to that whole point about the types of meaning and achievement, right? That it's going to achieve all of these great things. And there is an argument there, but I think the interesting word you use is faith, because I think that that is what that is in large part, you know, because the reality is still very far from it, you know? I was just hearing the, I was just hearing those that AI Safety Study where they ran a very specific simulation of events where there's kind of a nuclear threat and they're a political decision maker. And I think it was like 21 out of 23 of the experiments, they launched the nuclear missiles first. And they were like, no, no, cease fire, cease fire. And then they did it behind the back. Like, I mean, it was, it's really interesting to see, you know, as they run these simulations to see how they behave. And it's fascinating because we put so much faith in it, but it is a mirror of us at the end of the day. And I think that that, we don't reconcile that, you know? - It is interesting how AI has become basically our de facto mythology of the future. And I think something that's important to note is that mythologies as abundant as they may sound, as abundant as AI may sound, every mythology is born of a constraint. That's why we create mythologies because they help us maneuver around a constraint in a way that is narratively continuous for us in a way that helps us understand the world. And that's kind of like the dirty secret behind this mythology of AI. It is obscuring the very real constraint that we have around collaboration and working at a level, or at a scale that would solve a lot of these global problems. And we've basically given up on any hope of that. We've incinerated those other futures. You know, I think the reason why it's become such a sharp mythology for us that everything has snapped to, it's because our relationship with the future is so strange to us right now. Like it's just, if you just zoom out 100 years ago, everyone's expectation of the future was to do what their parents did, right? Like you're a career choice with farmer or farmer or farmer, maybe something else will probably farmer, right? Like the future looked exactly like every post generation. And we are the very first generation who the only thing we know about the future is it will not resemble the past. And that I think it is impossible to understate how disorienting that is. Like every religious, every structure, a container of meaning and storytelling doesn't fit the shape anymore, right? Like we're in uncharted waters, right? And we know that like the climate's different, work is going to be very different, where it declines. planning population very soon in a lot of developed economies, if not already. And that changes the very premise of capitalism when growth is not the default. You've got this meaning crisis, you've got this post-reality, you've got, you know, even just the prospect of like longevity or even just the longevity escape velocity. Like we simply don't, I don't know what I'm going to do, I don't know how long I'm going to live, I don't know what planet I'm going to be inside of. You cannot underestimate the uncertainty of all of those things. And the only common factor is we can be pretty sure AI is going to show up in each of those buckets. It's probably going to do something with climate change. It's probably going to be involved in longevity. It's probably going to be involved in work. It's probably going to be involved in meaning. And so it's the only thing. Like I feel like there's just like, we're kind of falling into the only handle to grab onto. And so it just makes sense that with so much uncertainty, it's the only thing that's probably going to be around, right, as we navigate the future. And I think that that is the vacuum and the reason why AI is such, it's why it's become the dominant narrative. If you're a brand in any category that's impacted by this, especially categories that are dealing with big, complex, global, systemic problems, you have to know that this is what you're competing with now is a mythology that promises a near instant result. So ideas of like incrementalism, slowly fixing things together, personal responsibility, they all feel quite quaint. And they also feel irrelevant because it feels like the world is burning down. We don't have time for those things. It almost feels naive to think that we have time to solve problems by stepping things back slowly. And I think that's the challenge a lot of these brands are facing. Yeah, I think it's kind of there's two sides of this. I mean, the challenge that we have now is that we know the models that we have don't work and they won't work into the future, right? Like, for example, just take climate change. Like, we have to do something different, right? And there's a lot of debate of what that different thing is. But we just simply know we can't do what happened before. We have to do something new. And so we're in this in-between, right? And I think we're in the in-between in so many different territories of we know it's going to be different. We know it's not what it was already. And we are deconstructing everything. But in that messy patch, it's kind of like a kid who takes apart the old Lego model before they build the new one. There's just all these pieces. And we know that they have to go together somehow. And I think that that is the chaos of this liminal space we exist within, right? And as a brand, it's like, you know, we, we, the one thing we kind of handle is uncertainty, right? We need certainty. And that word faith, when we think about AI, right? Like, they're, we simply don't even know what the new models will be. We just have faith that AI will be involved in it. And we're generally optimists as a species. And so I think that that's kind of the notion here. It's just, again, it's just these are huge deconstructions. Okay, let's talk about the last couple of dead futures, which are related to each other. They're both basically big parts of the female experience, which is beauty and motherhood. So starting with motherhood, I don't need to over explain that a certain kind of vision of the future of motherhood, where we kind of like repair and tweak. And like if I could just optimize this and get that right, you know, I'm doing a little bit better than my mother. I'm going to be the best mom and my kids will be happy. That version of the future seems to have died considering all the questions around female autonomy, bodily rights, like we've discussed here in the past, everything that's in the Epstein files. And there's been a big uptake in the discussion around this idea of matriarchy or at least living within a patriarchy or what it means to raise children within a patriarchy. And I think that's really come to the forefront. It's conversation that's been around for a while. But I'm just seeing these words more and more and people are very comfortable with them. And a lot of matriarchal experiments, matriarchal societies, matriarchal communities and clubs and literature. And that's been interesting to see because I think it shows that like we've cut this branch but we're working really hard to create a new one really quickly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, last, last, on our last episode, we talked a little bit about how anxiety shapes so much of this, this industry. But for very good reason, you know, so like I think it's a, this is really impactful. The meta lawsuit that just happened in New Mexico where they basically, essentially what they did is they created precedent for a new type of harm, behavioral harm through neglects, right? And so this is a very big deal. This has just happened, but basically what's happened is we now have legal precedent that companies like meta and Google have through intentional negligence harmed children, right? Or expose them to exploitation and danger in a very active way. So there was a jury it took them one day after reviewing all the stuff to come to that decision. There are now 1600 lawsuits that are coming from different school districts and different areas basically with the same point, which is that these platforms harm our kids. Yeah, but are these things just going to get repealed or so of court? They're usual. Well, this is a categorical new thing. So Jacob Ward has been covering this in a lot of depth. His whole notion is that this is the big tobacco moment for social media where we now have, because we know that it's been harmful, but now we have legal precedent that makes every other case much easier. Because now it might go to the Supreme Court. There's probably going to be some lobbying, but the bottom line is that the court case that already went through is $375 million in damages that they have to pay. There are 1600 court cases just like that coming. So think about that. There's going to be a lot of fighting just like there was with big tobacco, right? But now it's a different conversation. It's not, does it harm? It's like, how much does it harm? You know, now we have the vernacular. We have the language to quantify this. And so, you know, again, it's this point of like, this is all about safety, right? It comes back to safety and this idea that like, I think for a lot of mothers and a lot of parenting, a lot of women, there is, you know, there's two paths. Can we repair it or replace it? And repair is gone. Like that branch of the future is gone. There's no repairing this. This is, we need a step function change and we need to do things very differently. And I think that that to your point is a very big shift, right? There is no incrementalism. There is no like, well-nessing your way there. There is no grab bag of D2C brands that are going to solve this. Like you can't, you know, millennial aesthetic your way out of this. Like I think it's a really big deal that we need new foundational systems and approaches. And so it comes back to the points about like the mimeons, right? Intentional co-living and communal, you know, spaces and, you know, homeschooling is getting really, really big right now. And we're kind of reassessing how we think about that. And I think the subtext of this, which is really important on the parenting side, is that the US is a very young country. It's 250 years old. Relative to a lot of other cultures. There aren't deep parenting norms. We don't have deep expectations. There isn't like a wisdom tradition to lean on here. It's all just been sort of hodjpods together. And so the whole point is that like, you know, there isn't a long precedent to replace here, you know, there. But so, yeah, I think that we're in this phase of replacing the whole model to your point of like there is not, there's no incrementalism. It's a new branch that we need. Another thing that I think people underestimate is that the minute a public gets a little taste for justice. A little taste. I'm not going to say vengeance, but a little taste for retribution and for being witnessed, having their suffering be witnessed and realizing they're not crazy. And this is not going to be forever losing battle. Then you start to get real seen. And I think that's why this case matters. Of course it creates legal precedent. Of course it can be messy. And there's so much money and political power that will push back on this. But now people, it's like kind of like, this is a strange connection to make. I remember somebody shared once, you know, a lottery ticket isn't a lottery ticket. A lottery ticket gives you that feeling that for whatever the days are between when you buy it and when the numbers are announced. In those two or three days, there is a pathway to the kind of future you want. Like there is a possible pathway, like, you know, and I think that's what this, this is the same thing. I hope it's more secure than a lottery ticket. But now there is a possible pathway that has just appeared. And now people can actually kind of like see there could be a way towards the future. Well, I think too that like, you know, coming back to like safety and parenting, like technology has dominated the experience of childhood, right? And so, you know, what happened on Australia with the ban of social media and is being discussed in a lot of other countries. And now we've got this precedent of behavioral harm as a category of harm. You know, we don't come up with categories very often. You know, there is injury and death. It's a big change that shifts mindsets and attitudes around safety. And again, a lot of this comes back to, there is this very deep need for safety. And it comes back to the Epstein files as well, right? That we realize that so much of the structure of society has been designed intentionally against our best interests. You know, I think dawned on a lot of people after the files came out was that most of the consumer culture of the 90s, you know, more culture, you know, clothing aesthetics, like the way in which like the literal, the clothes that we wore, the fragrances, the models that we looked at. And this entire narrative of like young female sexual awakening was engineered by this cabal of fucking deplorable people in the Epstein files. Okay, that brings me to my next topic, which is beauty. It's not just female, but you know, it tends to be focused on female. I wrote this great piece. I think it was endased today about how there's this, a name for this emerging genre of body horror that's focused on beauty and the beauty industry specifically and they call it goop horror. And I remember we were talking to Sarah Wendell, who is this romantic expert, who he even talked to us about last year, and she was talking about how, you know, I asked her, okay, after romantic, what do you think is the next thing we're going to start seeing in literature? And she's like, well, literature is where we go to kind of confront our fears and our desires. And she predicted body horror would be the next thing. And we happen to be seeing it in film now. And it's interesting to see how, you know, this very narrow future that we've lived with for a long time, engineered by the Epstein class. You know, codified into culture around what beauty and femininity and a woman's like literal, you know, bodily value is that branch. I don't say I wouldn't say it's cut off, but it's getting a little banged up. You know, there's little nicks that we're seeing in that branch. And there's this counter discussion about the horror of beauty, the disgustingness of beauty. What was it to me more movie that kind of the sub? Oh my god, we need to wait. Hold on, I'm going to pull it up. It's okay. We don't need to cut this out. It's the sub, not the subtext. That's a great publication. The substance, right? The subtext is a great publication by my friend, Kruis, that just is that you guys should check out if you're into writing or or or or or or brand strategy, but the substance. I was an example of body horror, but like we see a lot of body horror copying up in Asian film as well. I think it's a great start to the discussion because it leapfrogs all of the intellectualism. There's obviously a conversation to be had, but it makes you feel. It makes you feel the horror behind the narrative that we've been living with. Yeah. No, there's something that's really important there when you know, the, the, you know, it makes me think of one of my favorite anecdotes is the movie Godzilla. Like when people understand the story, that changes how you see it, right? So just for a small history lesson, World War II happened and the US put a bunch of restrictions on Japanese media. They didn't want them talking about the bomb. They didn't want them talking about a lot of these things. So Godzilla came out of that. It was a movie about something that came out of nowhere and destroyed a city. It was a direct and very clear metaphor of the bomb, right? And it was their way of processing the feeling of what happened to your point because horror, especially horror, is our way of processing the fears of the time. And so, you know, Godzilla is a wonderful metaphor of the, or example, really, of how we use media to process our experience of these things because it's not the logic of it that we need to understand, it's the emotion that we need to understand. And you understand that when it's reflected back to you, that's why film and TV and media is so powerful for the collective sense making and you can learn a lot about what are the stories that we're consuming. And so your point about body horror, like 100%, like we need to feel that, right? That like there has been this sort of contortion of ourselves. And then we realize like there's been strings behind it of how we've been contorting ourselves to fit into molds that we don't, we want to run as far away from as we can now, you know? We realize what the, you know, the intent behind those were. And I think that there is a deep rejection of that, you know, it's not just that like, hey, we need something different. It's like, no, we need to get away, we need to reject that and move to something actively different, you know? And I think that there is a lot of emotional energy there that we don't see played out in the market yet. But I think there is latent demand. And that's again, like the first signal is the horror movies, but there is a latent demand to act on that, to move away from that. And I think that, you know, like a figure I think is really interesting that leans into that as Chapel Roan. She's a figure that is, you know, she's rejected her agent as soon as she knew they were associated. She doesn't have a public persona outside of her performance, you know? She's not unlike social media. She's living her life. It's a very different way that she shows up. And I think she's an interesting signal of someone who isn't, you know, contorting themselves to fit, you know? She's kind of carving a different path. And I think that that, she represents something quite exciting in the landscape, especially around beauty and the mindset of how we appear and perform. Remy Carlyos, who's a friend and a community member, also has a great subset called La Nona Ora, which I recommend you guys read, but I find brilliant, but he talks about how this is what resistance often looks like. It's a refusal to make yourself smooth. Yes. It's to stay, you know, pointy and uncomfortable in Chapel Roan because she was that kind of woman could easily walk away from her label when maybe a lot of others could not. This also reminds me of something that Tressie McMillan-Cottam talks about. I'm going paraphrase what she said this quote. I hope I'm not getting it wrong, but essentially she says, of course there's nothing wrong with beauty. It's the fact that we've made beauty, you know, we've forced beauty to be consumable in the West that we've perverted it. And I think that points to maybe the future that has died here. This kind of beauty that's easy to consume, we're complicating the story of beauty now. At least the story that we've been fed. We are revealing its ugly underside and this simple story of how beauty is youth and beauty is hairlessness and beauty is smooth skin and shiny long hair. Basically the meme that you were talking about where it's basically pedophilic. That might be a future that is dying. 100%. I think it ties into, you know, some writing that we've done before about high fidelity society about how, you know, before beauty was very homogenous because society, you know, it was like communicated over radio, you know, like there was very low information bandwidth. And now, you know, with social media, like you don't need to see all of culture, you find your niche and you exist within that bubble for better and worse. But the point there is that like society can hold a lot more complexity, a lot more nuance, and a lot more multiplicity. And so it doesn't have to be one thing. It can be many things. And I think that that's what we're seeing. And you know, what, and it kind of ties to what we're talking about before about aspiration that like it's, you know, all of these things are symbols, right? But then what happens when we don't agree on what the symbols mean, you know, like, you know, hairlessness means one thing to someone, but it means something very different to someone else who says I reject that, right? And so all of a sudden these aren't universal languages anymore, right? We have different views and beliefs. And so all this to say that I think beauty is becoming a far more complex landscape. And that changes the business landscape behind it because instead of having one monolithic brand propping up one monolithic story of what it is, now you have many brands propping up many stories of what this looks like. And I think that's a much more healthy ecosystem. I think that's a great place to end it. Thank you guys so much for joining us for this episode of Unseen Unknown. If you want to have more conversations like this, check out our community exposure therapy at exposuretherapy.com. And we, and else is on our last episode, but I'll mention again, we are launching a brand strategy masterclass on maven. Just go to maven.com, look up brand strategy masterclass and you will find us, join us. That is going to be an excellent, excellent course for anybody that is looking for an end to end system for how to build a culture brand. And we will see you next time. Bye everyone.