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Unseen UnknownAuthor: Jasmine Bina, Jean-Louis Rawlence
Unseen Unknown is a brand and business strategy podcast about the hidden threads that connect even the most distant of cultural concepts. We look at the emerging trends and behaviors that may be pointing to a deeper truth and ask the bigger question, Why is society moving in this direction, and how can we apply it to business? We believe if we cant see it in our culture, then we cant know it in the market. From retail and consumerism to politics, gender, identity and values, there are patterns everywhere that illuminate a path forward for brands. Your hosts, Jasmine Bina and Jean-Louis Rawlence, are brand strategists and futurists that explore these questions every day in their work for companies around the world. Well be interviewing thought leaders and domain experts both within brand strategy and outside of it. Expect to hear from people from all walks of life: artists, scientists, CEOs, journalists, professors, technologists and everyone in between. If youre a founder, leader, storyteller or creator, this podcast will compel you to think at a macro level you havent considered before. We also write and publish videos on everything brand strategy. You can see all of that here: https://www.theconceptbureau.com/ Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Marketing Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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29: Pruned Futures
Monday, 6 April, 2026
Some of our most prominent expectations of the future just died. In this episode, we explore what replaces them. We start with achievement. For decades, culture has been organized around progress and accomplishment. But as AI accelerates discovery and takes over more forms of achievement, that model begins to break. Achievement becomes less meaningful, and attention shifts toward experience, connection, and how life feels. At the same time, AI has become a mythology. As belief in collective human solutions declines, many futures have collapsed into one idea: AI will solve it for us. Not because we know it will, but because it is the only narrative that can hold that scale of hope. This leaves us in a liminal space. Old systems no longer work, and new ones have not formed. You can see this in motherhood and beauty as well. The idea that motherhood can be incrementally improved has given way to a need for entirely new models. Beauty is also fragmenting, moving from a single ideal to many competing definitions, with cultural signals reflecting a rejection of the old standard. Across all of this, the pattern is the same. We are moving from progress to ambiguity. From clear signals to contested ones. From knowing what to strive for to having to invent it ourselves. Links to interesting things mentioned in this episode and further reading: The Futures That Just Died (Concept Bureau) Deep Utopia (Nick Bostrom) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (John Vervaeke) The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil) Meta told to pay $375m for misleading users over child safety (BBC) Check out our Substack for more brand strategy thinking, and our community Exposure Therapy.
