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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Geopolitics 

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

2. Threat Tech

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

3. Underground Economies

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

4. Finance

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

5. God

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

6. Children’s Media 

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

7. Demographics 

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

8. History 

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

9. Death

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

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

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

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

Social Realities

How culture is tunneling, and keeping mental hygiene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wake Up Call

Here's what we've been consuming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours,

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

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

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

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