Where did it come from? And what are some of the examples of companies or movements that you've experienced where there is alignment between that backstage and front stage?

Oh, yeah.

You know, honestly, I didn't have any initial desire or want to start studying the literature and organizational culture.

I was totally fine being a marketer and like it's been my career as a practitioner, as a marketer.

So I felt like I was in like the right space, if you will.

But I went to go give a talk at a company called Elf, this beauty company.

And I go there to their offsite.

So like what's where's what's missing? What's the gap there?

But, you know, maybe you could share the steps in your world of how an idea becomes alive.

Well, I think about it to a world that you and I shared at one time, the world of music.

You know, there was a time where if you went to record an album, you had to have a lot of money to get studio time and then get an engineer and then get it mixed and then get it mastered.

It required a lot of capital until like the early 2000s where you could record in your basement and like people couldn't really tell the difference between, you know, what was recording your basement was recorded at the hit factory.

In fact, people weren't even discerning about it.

And at that point, not only did you have a reduction in the barrier to entry from a creativity capture perspective, but you also had a reduction in barrier to entry for distribution.

So you didn't need to have the radio per se to get your songs heard.

But why can't people really get it?

Yeah.

Are, are, are you safe? Do you want something to eat? Like, it's, you know, these things, all these meanings, and the idea is that we're saying a thing so that people can interpret what we actually mean, and the way we say it makes all the difference.

Like, you know, he talks about things being simple.

These are using very easy words that people can understand.

It goes back to the top of the hour, profanity.

Very easy words that people know exactly what you mean.

You know, use short sentences so that they're easily transferable, easily socializable.

We can read it at Forbes, but top-line it for us.

How do we navigate these differences to really come down to what makes what can make our culture great? I love when you talked about expand and explore and interrogate.

Lauren Hill said it best.

How are you going to win if you ain't right within? You got to start with like, what do we believe? How do we see the world? What are our shared cognitions or shared imaginations? And what is true? Because there is an ideal state and there's a reality.

And the question becomes, who are we really? And then who do we want to be? And what's the delta between those two? Because the delta may be so large you go, I don't have an appetite for that.

Mm.

So because we don't have an appetite for that, then we have to rock where we are and maybe marginally over time.

At least I don't have an appetite for that right now today.

What are you thinking about this?

Okay.

Um, it, it sort of edges off or shaves off the elbows.

It files the teeth on a thing because there is evidence to say that if we do this, this might be problematic.

But that doesn't mean that it's actually going to happen.

And what I, what I say, even though, like, I believe in data, I leverage data, I'm a researcher, so I care about data, you know, insights matter a ton, but what I think is that, you know, w- we have amassed more data than ever before, like just reams and reams of data.

We have exponentially grown, uh, our, our access to data.

But our ability to extract insights from said data have only grown marginally.

I literally was about to say that and say, and it, uh, uh, you finish your point, but that's insane that I literally-

[laughs]

One of the other things that when we're talking about this through the lens of effectiveness, um, to this idea of truth, there are a lot of assumptions in...

There's a lot of what we don't know that's stated in a brief that may be related to the business, that may be related to the products, that may be rel- related to our version of reality.

How do you interrogate that? Because there's a risk of accepting what's put in front of us, uh, versus what might actually be achievable.

So do we interrogate the assumptions of the brief, and do we spend a lot of time doing that? Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I, I mean, for me, every brief starts with what is true.

What is true to the brand? Like, the, the reality that it has constructed for itself, like what it wants to mean, what it wants its products to be seen as, and then what's true in the minds of people.

Yeah

It's all yours.

I mean, the chaos is the point.

That's the entire point of all this.

You know, I think about that clip you just played of Steve Bannon saying this is a chess move.

It's like this is chess.

This is checkers.

It's very, very clear what's happening here.

It might not be, but it's working for him.

We're all gonna bury our face in our phones, and life goes on."

Well, this is where you get counterculture or subcultures, that people who say, "You know what? I don't, I don't...

I'm not for this," and what they do is they say, "I'm going to reject this and pick up new behaviors, a new normal." And we see this now.

There are small groups of people who are saying, "I'm giving up my smartphone and going back to flip phones." In some cases, it seem like they're being irreverent, but then really what they're doing is demonstrating an ideology, a belief system, and saying, to your point, that, "These, these mobile devices, they, they have become too all-encompassing, too pervasive, and now I feel like I'm serving it versus it serving me.

Therefore, I want to take more agency and change my device." Now, we look at those people and go, "Oh, man, you're crazy.

[chuckles] What are you doing?" But here's the interesting part, that everything that is now normal, everything that is now massively adopted, all started with the fringe group of people that looked crazy, that was willing to look crazy in the early stages, just for a moment, to start to create momentum where this idea, this product adoption, begins to propagate within the community.

Everything that is now cool was once crazy.

I don't think anyone looked at that and said, "Yep, we planned this all along."

Run with it.

Well, you know, sometimes we get accustomed to a thing.

It's almost a gift of humanity that, you know, what will be an uncomfortable situation we're able to adopt or adapt rather, we're able to acclimate ourselves to our surroundings and therefore survive.

You know, there's people who, you know, are incarcerated and the idea of being in jail just seems like it's unfathomable.

For me, I couldn't even imagine it.

But when they find themselves in that situation, they realize they have to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive.

It's in us.

Culturally, that kind of threat means what to you, Marcus?

Marcus, what do you think?

You know, when a minister preaches, the congregation says, amen.

That's my response.

Amen.

I mean, everything David has mentioned is spot on.

To me, there's two things happening here.

There's this, to your point, this idea of a fascination with regards to awareness, penetration, and imagery, right? Like we talk about brand, people typically think about logos, iconographies, the marks of ownership, because by its very nature, brands are marks, right? Right.

if you give them this list and say pick out four or five that are really important in your world and use them to help people try to understand why they need brands and what kind of brand strength they need to make their business strategy work

Run with it.

Well, you know, sometimes we get accustomed to a thing.

It's almost a gift of humanity that, you know, what will be an uncomfortable situation, we're able to adopt or adapt rather, we're able to acclimate ourselves to our surroundings and therefore survive.

You know, there's people who, you know, are incarcerated and the idea of being in jail just seems like it's unfathomable.

For me, I couldn't even imagine it.

But when they find themselves in that situation, they realize they have to adapt to their surroundings in order to survive.

It's in us.

Culturally, that kind of threat means what to you, Marcus?

This is a publicly traded company that... reported over a billion dollars in revenue in 2024 so that's a huge jump we had the pandemic and we had the meme stocks and the short squeeze with gamestop amc hertz and all of these other companies but it seems like both from a user growth perspective and from a monetization perspective reddit has been able to make a few leaps and bounds specifically in the past seven years

For sure.

They've been able to grow with regards to users because they've been able to see the benefit of Reddit, the unique benefit of Reddit relative to the competitor set, if we call social networking platform the category which people typically think of it.

Not only that, but they found other ways to monetize what it does well.

Large language models are a treasure trove of richness.

And they have some of the most natural language happening from a community perspective.

That is extremely valuable.

So if you were in charge and you were trying to help push things forward, how would you balance both of those while still trying to grow and build a profitable company?

what it

is.

Maybe.

That resonates with me.

That definitely resonates with me.

I've always found myself gravitating towards the ambiguity In an organization, like I go, no one's paying attention to this, but this is really interesting.

We should be looking at this.

I think marketing's done a pretty awful job at marketing itself inside client organizations.

But when they get back to the

essence of what made them work, they're good at it.

So I'm working on a new project now.

I'm working on a new book now.

And it's all about the culture of work.

And what I'm realizing is that in a capitalistic framework, there is an insatiable desire for scale, efficiency, and productivity.

And by its very nature, it removes humanity.

Can you tell us a little bit about