 Marcus, welcome to the show. Your new book is called For The Culture, and it is all about culture. And you've come from a marketing world, but you've also, at the beginning of this book, you said this book is not about marketing. And that's why AJ and I, we recognize that, and we also recognize all those mechanisms that drive great culture. So we're excited to have you on the show to explain more about this to our audience and how they can use these mechanisms and their own lives to find their tribe and to influence them to reach their best. So why did you decide to write this book, Marcus? No, I realized as a practitioner that we use the word culture all the time, especially in marketing. We need to get our ideas out in the culture, what's going on in culture, it needs to be informed by culture, culture, culture, culture, culture, culture. And if you ask five people to find culture, you get 50 different answers, and that's a problem. That's a big problem because if we can't define a thing, how do we ever use it? How do we ever utilize it? And I felt for marketing in particular, at least at the moment, that that was crucial because our job as marketers are to get people to adopt behavior. Don't drink this, drink that. Don't go here, go there, don't buy his shoes, buy my shoes. Don't vote for him, vote for her. Don't go on a date with him, go on a date with me. Like everything we do as marketers is about influencing behavior and there is no external force more influencing the human behavior than culture, full stop. And if we don't understand it, how do we ever leverage it? So I ventured into the world of cultural studies as a practitioner at the time, to become a better marketer. What I realized in this exploration is that not only did I become a better marketer, I became a better leader, I became a better human sort of walking the world because I got to know people better. And that became sort of the biggest cheat code, the better we understand people, the better the world unfolds for us. And culture is the governing operating system of people. So if you wanna know people, you gotta know their cultural subscription. So what are the three systems of culture and how do they affect us? So the first system is beliefs and ideology. Beliefs is our collective understanding of what is true, that we hold to be true. And the ideologies are the stories that we tell ourselves about the world because of those truths, right? And oftentimes our identity is the character in that story. And we're always the protagonist, right? Everyone else is crazy about us. So there's the first system, beliefs and ideologies. And then because of what we believe and how we see the world, we then show up in the world through a shared way of life, the artifacts that we don, the behaviors that are normative, these are the rituals, the unwritten rules, and the language that we use. These are the dialect, the colloquialisms, the abbreviations, the short codes. The inside jokes. And then there is cultural production. That is the expression of shared subscription. This is art, literature, music, film, podcasts, comic books, materials and brands and branded products. And we use these things to express who we are, but they also reflect what people like us ought to do. And the alchemy of those systems, those systems of systems, they constitute our culture. And because of who we are, our identity, we therefore abide by these cultural conventions and expectations. So Marcus, one of the things that AJ and I have recognized in this new modern world, we're so close to a lot of different networks. And a lot of people will define things in terms that are relevant to them and their world and their congregation, which we're gonna be getting into. So for our audience, why don't you go ahead and define this for them as the basis for what we'll be discussing today. So I look at the world through a sociological lens. My research is in consumer culture theory and meaning making. So a lot of my theoretical repertoire sits in sociology. So look at when the founding fathers of sociology, Emile Durkheim, he defines culture as a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and what people like us do. It's a system that carves out our identity and what are the acceptable behaviors of people like us. So because of our identity, we see the world a certain way and because you see the world a certain way, it influences our behaviors, our language, the artifacts that we use and how we express ourselves through cultural production. And if you go one step further, a gentleman by the name of Raymond Williams, half a century later, talked about culture as a meaning making system. It's the way by which we make meaning. So if you kind of buttress those two definitions together, culture is a realized meaning making system that consists of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and what people like us do. Now, would you say it's easiest to identify culture based on the cultural production? So we think of music, film, TV. Obviously, when we hear culture right now, a lot of us think of hip hop culture. It's like almost become synonymous and obviously music is a big part of that culture but how do you as a marketer or someone who's fascinated by culture identify culture? There's a really great way to put it. When we look at the cultural production, we know that that's sort of the mythology of a group of people that help not only express what they are, but also reflect what people like them ought to do. So when we hear hip hop, we go, why don't they tell the police when things bad happen in the neighborhood? Oh, because they believe in don't snitch. We can hear it in the music, right? You know, Kanye, the old Kanye by the way, don't judge me. You know, he has that line, what do you think I rap for to push the effing rap for? And you know what? When my wife and I were gonna buy a car after we had our first child, we were in a hatchback car, we were gonna buy an SUV. We were like, well, we're not buying a rap for, right? The cultural production dictated what people like us do. So cultural production becomes a way by which we're able to visualize or to observe the people's cultural practices made manifest, the artifacts that they wear become a signal for us as well. Their behaviors become a signal and so does their language. But the important part to know is that those are the tangible expressions of their culture, but you don't really know the people until you know the beliefs and ideologies that they use to translate the world, right? The artifacts, the behaviors, the language, the cultural production, they are outward expressions of inward beliefs. So they provide a proxy for us to get a sense of it, but you gotta get much closer to know what are the truths that they hold and what are the stories they tell themselves through the ideological subscription that they have. Now, for me, this feels a little bit like chicken and the egg. So, because I've had instances where culture has shifted my beliefs and then I've had instances where my beliefs have allowed me to find my culture. So in your mind and your study of this, how do you view that from someone who is graduating college trying to find their new tribe maybe isn't quite clear on their beliefs or their identity yet finding culture and does that transform those identities or allow you to find those identities and beliefs? Or do you feel like you should be starting with first defining your identities and beliefs and seeking culture? It's a well-stated provocation that our culture is anchored in our identity in who we are, but oftentimes we navigate life, especially in these transitional moments, kind of not knowing who we are. I mean, college is actually a really good example of this. You go to college having been interpolated for 18 years by your parents on what people like us do. We're Collins's, this is what Collins's do. This is what we believe, this is how we see the world, this is how we show up in the world and this is the cultural production that we take in. And then you go to college and you start bumping into all these people from different cultural backgrounds and you go, I never heard that before. That's interesting. Never heard this band. Tell me about that belief again and we start to sort of discover ourselves who we are. We started to develop new identities and in this new construction of identity we find new people and start to subscribe ourselves to new cultures whether it's a social group like a fraternity, whether it's a scholastic group like people who are in my major or wherever these identity references are. And then once we graduate, we go back into the world and bump into new people who aren't like us, who haven't seen things like us and we started to re-examine ourselves and take inventory. So I would say that what ends up sticking is when our beliefs, our identity and our behaviors align. So say, I bump into you AJ and John and I'm like, I like these guys. They say, I feel like I belong with them. And I go, who are you all? I say, oh man, we're the arch, a charm community. Well, tell me more about that. Maybe that's what I should be. So I take on the moniker. I subscribe because I have volition. I subscribe to that identity marker because I find myself connecting with the ideologies. So I would think that identity is sort of what creates the anchor, but it's the beliefs that we find ourselves most attracted to because the beliefs feel right. And to go along with that, as you mentioned about being raised in a certain environment and then going off to college and now you're exposed to different ideas, different beliefs, different people, different identities, different cultures. The other part about that, and that has been our world for hundreds of years. However, now with the technological advancement, we're in close proximity of more worldviews and ideas than ever before. And of course, that is having an impact on our culture at hand. And certainly in this idea of fast culture and slow culture, more fads and trends than ever before in fast culture. And as we get older, our worldviews are crystallizing in ways that didn't happen in the past due to this exposure of all these ideas. I mean, the technology does what technology does. It extends human behavior. Like that's what technology is. It's an extension of human behavior. As Marshall McLuhan once put it, like the will of extension of the foot, glasses or extension of the eyes, clothes or extension of the skin, and social networking platforms or extensions of real life social networks. I remember going to my 20 year high school reunion and I thought, I'm gonna show people gonna be like, Marcus, I haven't seen you forever. What have you been up to? What have you been doing? Because all the cultural production that I took in, all the movies I saw, all the shows that I've watched, that's what happens. You know, I get dressed up and look my best and get in shape for my high school reunion. And I'm like, you know, I have a style on everybody, let them know what they missed out on. Like that's what I thought I was going into. I came in with my wife and my eldest daughter, Georgia. And it was not that at all. But I showed up, they were like, oh my goodness, Georgia, I love that picture of you at the water park last week. How was your vacation? Right, the technologies, the social network of technologies, they decrease what would normally be a natural decline in connections by extending human behavior. So this idea of like the world moving as fast as it does, it accelerates the rate by which we negotiate and construct meaning in finding people like ourselves. And therefore we see less of a monolithic culture and more of these fragmented subcultures. And the technologies are helping facilitate these subcultures in meaningful ways. So my identity in all of its, you know, hyphenated forms, this is my singular, you know, reference, I'm a professor, there is the social reference, I'm part of Phi Beta Sigma, there's the Afjack referent, I'm a father of two girls, George and Ivy. And I find respite, I find refuge, I find community based on the shared beliefs that we have. And therefore I show up in the world based on what's normal for people like us. When we think about this idea of fast versus slow culture, again, going back to like the belief and the identity, it seems to me like that moves the slowest, but the artifacts and the production and the way that we express that culture will move fast. So I was just reading an article about Allbirds. And it's this fascinating shoe company that the tech culture in SF adopted to show that they were part of this tribe, this community. And then all of a sudden it fell out of favor in fashion because it tried to seek other cultures, grow its customer base, and they tried to go younger and they tried to skew older and they lost their core essence with this tech community. And now if you go around San Francisco where it's like five years ago, everyone was wearing Allbirds, now they're on to OnCloud and Hoka, totally different artifact, but their identities and their beliefs around technology and what they're doing in the Bay Area to change the world have stayed the same. So what's going on there with this idea of like fast parts of culture and slow parts of culture in your understanding of how culture works and expresses itself? Hoka definitely has San Francisco in a chokehold right now, good night. But so this goes back to your earlier question about the chicken or the egg, which one comes first, is that we can observe the cultural production. It's very visible, it's very public. It's very conspicuous. But the things beneath the surface, those are the things that change the slowest. So while the expression, the manifestations are changing through fads, you gotta get much, much closer, you gotta be much more intimate to understand what's actually underneath. What are the mechanisms underneath that is informing those things? And as you grow in size and you bring more people to it, the people who are using your brand as an expression of their identity, they go, I don't wanna be close to that. And therefore they peace out, right? Because they don't want their identity to be misconstrued with something that they're not. And this is not only with brands, right? I would argue that brands are these vessels of meaning that we use as identity projects. But they're also for the communities that we're a part of. If you're a part of a fraternity and they start admitting guys, you go, I don't want y'all to think that these are my brothers. Like these aren't my people. And therefore you go, nah, I'm out. Same thing with religions. The same thing with any social group that we subscribe our identity to, that is with volition, we decide to be a part of it. We're constantly taking inventory or rather or not is congruent with who we are and who we want to be. And the ideologies, they change much slower than the expressions. And if you watch the expressions over a time horizon, you can start to see the connections between the ideological shifts that have manifested in the tangible things. But if you aren't close to it and observing it over a time horizon, you just feel like it's just dynamic and weird and random. So, Marcus, my question here, and this is something that I personally have been struggling with as of late and would love your thoughts on it, which is do in your research, do you feel that there is an inherent beliefs and ideologies to all of us that can be swayed and changed but feel right at certain times in our life for instance, lining up identity, beliefs and those behaviors, sometimes it can feel, if you're in the wrong place that everything is upside down, but when you're in the right place, all of those things then go right side up. And so you're obviously that much more comfortable there. AJ had brought up the chicken and egg thing, but where I'm at and I'm now 49 and the way I look at this thing that there is an inherent set that I think through just generationally and our environment has dictated that we start out with. And then even possibly come back to at a later time, basically we return to the meme. So yeah, so there's the regression to the meme as Daniel Kahneman talks about. So I would say that in our early years, we are interpolated, right? And which is what culture really is, right? If you think about culture in a very literal sense, like agriculture being a cultural rated, right? This is about creating uniformity, harvesting for uniformity. And in our society, our communities and our tribes and our villages and our cities and our towns, we acculturate children to be a certain way. So there is predictability on what they become, right? And that's called interpolation. That is you are exposed to truths and ideologies that you didn't have beforehand because you didn't know anything. They were poured into you and you go, oh, this is how the world is. This is how mom and dad or whoever your guardians were that had framed the world for you until you had agency to be exposed to other ideologies, beliefs. And you go, wow, huh, for some a cow's leather, for others it's a deity, and for some it's dinner. I didn't know that cows are all three, wow. And because of this exposure to new ideas, it widens the aperture of how you see the world. And then you find yourself, especially as students, they find themselves go home over a Thanksgiving break and they go, man, my parents are archaic. Look at this gracious. Like, I don't agree with these. Like, my goodness, my uncles are racist. Like, oh my goodness, which is why at the dinner table, we don't talk about politics, religion, or money because those things reveal ideologies and beliefs. So we keep it very superficial, right? Especially when we come home for Thanksgiving. When you think about students here, these are people who are going out in life and they're exposed to these new ideas. And as they're constantly reframing and reshaping the world, they don't always go back to where they started. I mean, we can look at the decline of organized religion as a perfect example of this. There are people who grew up going to church every single day. And now as adults, it's 30-somethings, 40-somethings, they go, I'm spiritual. I don't subscribe to organized religion. That is a complete revolt of what they're interpolated to. They have developed new meaning-making systems, new meaning-making lenses that we would call cultural framing to see the world a certain way and therefore behaving the world a certain way. So ultimately it goes back to congruence. Who am I? How do I see the world? And does this environment do these people? Does this institution? Does this brand? Does this company align with how I see the world? And when it doesn't, everything just feels wrong. I don't feel like I belong at this company. I don't feel like these are really my friends. I feel like I don't supposed to be a part of this social group. I don't feel like this is right. And it's not until we find congruence that we go, oh, these are my people. And that's why I wanted to ask that question. And I wanted to make that apparent to our audience that when it is right, it feels right. You know it, right? You feel like you're home. That's right. And everything then goes right side up and you can feel good about who you are and your place in it and what you believe and what you see. And I think it's part of searching for that congregation and we'll get to that term here right after, which is until you feel that way. That's right. When you know how you see the world, but you know who you are, the world just feels different. The world just opens up. You have so much more agency because you go, nah, not for me, nah, not for me. And what we know about the human brain is that the brain doesn't really form. The prefrontal cortex doesn't fully form until you're in your late 20s. This does, that's just biologically. So we're still sort of figuring out ourselves and the world and we don't have all the hardware to do it. The world isn't fully developed to make that happen. So it's when you're in your 30s and your 40s not to be demographically focused, but that's when biologically, we're more inclined to say, nah, I'm who I am. Nah, I'm good, no thank you, right? You know, I hear people say often, I'm in my 40s too, is that in your 40s, you just don't give an F anymore because you find yourself in a place, not all of us, but you're more likely to find yourself in a place of knowing who you are and what feels right. And you prioritize those things because we find ourselves having better outcomes when there is congruence in that way. And who you're looking for as part of that tribe. I think when you're younger, there's a lot more impulsivity, right? Because your emotions are really running the show with your prefrontal cortex not fully there developed. So you'll swing from hipster to goth to, and Johnny's probably been through all of them along those rock and roll years. You know, you will have this impulsivity trying to find that tribe and that culture. But as you get older, you start to really know what exactly you're looking for in that tribe, what you wanna surround yourself with and what clearly doesn't feel right and you wanna run from or move from, relocate from. So many people in our audience find themselves sometimes in that situation either through career or through choice that, you know what, this place just doesn't feel right. I need to relocate. And then they'll ask us, well, how do I find my new tribe? How do I really identify and find this new tribe? And we'll often say, well, look at cultural production, right? So look outward, what movies do you like? What activities do you like? Look at the artifacts, what are those people wearing? How are they symbolizing that they're part of that? And then invite them to hang out with you to be part of your tribe. And that's how you build the tribe. But tribes don't just open themselves up to you. You don't just stand on the corner, tribe walks by and says, hey, you're wearing the right artifacts, come on in and join our tribe. It takes effort, it takes action on your part, but you have to be paying attention and identifying these parts of culture that feel right to you. So when you are surrounded by those people, you can be the truest expression of yourself and it feels natural, it feels easy. That's right. And language becomes such a perfect way to do that. You know, when you hear people talk and you go, man, I've always said the exact same thing. Where are you from? Who are you? What do you do? You hear people evangelize the same point of view you have and you go, man, these are my people, you know? I mean, this is kind of what dating is like too. You know, we go on dates and we ask, what do you listen to? Where do you go? What do you like? Where do you stand on this? Then you go, nah, this isn't gonna work out. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, and it's the same thing when it comes to, you know, when it comes to platonic relationships. Like we're trying to find connection, we're trying to find congruence. We often talk about social networking platforms being like an echo chamber, but like our real-life networks are echo chambers too. You know, if you are a right-wing conservative, you do not have liberal best friends, you know? Because you're just ideologically incongruent. Like if you can't agree on anything, everything is a fight. You go, ugh, I can't with this guy, you know? And the same thing goes with our people. We try to find connection. You go, you love Frank Ocean. I love Frank Ocean. What do you think about the soldier Ultra? Oh my God, I love Channel Orange. And like we find ourselves connecting. You go, these are proxies for us to say, you're one of us, right? And it's interesting, like the analogy of like, you don't just drive by and say, oh, you're my tribe. Unless we are wearing the artifacts that signal tribalism, right? So if you're in, I don't know, like if, you know, AJ, you're from Michigan, went to Michigan, if you're walking through an airport and you see someone with the block him, you may go, go blue. No, go blue. You go, look at us together, right? Those branded products become marks of identity, right? If you're in South Central Los Angeles and you wearing red, you may be like, you a blood too, I'm a blood too, you know? Whatever the affiliation may be, we find connection. And I think it's, that's what we're wired to do. We are social animals by nature, as Aristotle says, right? We do everything we can just to crash into each other. Evolutionary anthropologists would argue, the reason we were able to evolve was our ability to socialize, to cooperate. Everything about us is about connecting. And we use every shortcut that we can to surmise, are we together? Are you one of us? And we use these outward expressions, cultural production, artifacts, behaviors and language as proxies to basically say, you believe what I believe. So therefore I'm safe. For the brain, it just means safety and survival. I'm safe around you. I'm not in harm's way around you because we are one and the same. I wouldn't do it to you. So I know you wouldn't do it to me. And that's really what we're after from a very evolutionarily focused viewpoint. It's important to feel safe in the herd, right? Yes. The last thing we wanna be is isolated on our own. And it can be very isolating if there aren't any of those signals for you to identify with. So that's why we use them. And it's a part of the cultural communication that we have. And in the book, you bring up role theory and we love science on the show. What is it and how is it embedded in culture? Role theory is essentially, it comes from this idea from a quote from William Shakespeare that all the world's a stage, right? And men and women, we are merely actors. And one of the most, like such a massive breakthrough in sociology was a gentleman by the name, Guffman. And he took the analogy of the stage as a way to describe what it means to be human, to be social actors. And the idea is that all the world's a stage and then we decide what character we're gonna play, identity, and then we decide what is gonna be the costumery, artifacts, how we speak, script, in an effort to demarcate who we are so that people have expectations of what people like us do. And when we find people who act out of character, you go, I don't even know who you are, dog. I don't even know you, right? It's so we do our best to stay in character by abiding by the cultural characteristics that are ascribed to that individual, right? And Guffman would say that, you know, be careful the mask that you put on because that mask will soon become your face, right? Because we get committed to our identity. And we say, this is who I am. And people like me do something like this, therefore I. And before long, you find yourself doing things that you never thought you would ever do, but you're doing it because that's what people like you do. So Mark is for the, at the individual level, we have our identity and the behaviors and artifacts. And then a smaller group outside that is gonna be that our tribe that we fit into. And then another term that we've been throwing around here is slightly larger, which is the congregation. Can you define that for our audience? So in the book, I leverage a lot of the religious texts because those early scholars of sociology, they studied culture by observing religion, right? Marks, Weber and Durkheim, they studied religion and you see the religious from language in what we talk about all the time. When we talk about people, we talk about brand, talk about communities, you know, someone says something you agree with, you go preach, right? And when someone is communicating a truth, we go, he preaching the gospel, right? And those who go spread the word for you, they are evangelizing for you, right? So that language is already inherent to how we think about people coming together because culture, because religion by its etymology means to bind, means to commit to. And it's the longest lasting culture. Yes, every institution on this planet, the longest lasting institution on this planet has all leveraged culture, the military, government and religion, right? They're on to something, they know what they're doing here. So when we talk about like groups of people, there are people like these tribes, these network tribes we're a part of, but then there is an aggregate of many tribes that we'd call a congregation, congregates. In a religious sense, congregates are people who worship together because they see the world similarly. But like congregations operate beyond a religious context, right? They buy property, but they're not into real estate. They do education, but they're not schools. They're not an art house, but they do productions, right? So the idea of congregations are not just framed by religion, but they're really framed by shared beliefs. And you can look at a large population of people and find the many tribes, the many subcultures, the cultures inside the culture and go, oh, all these people see the world similarly, they just express it through different conventions and cultural production, right? So I say this in the book, Nike believes that every human body is an athlete. Big, small, short, tall, we're all athletes, right? And Nike is speaking to a congregation of athletes that are made up of many, many tribes of different kind of athletes, footballers, soccer players or footballers too, right? Basketball players, hoopers, fencers, runners, they're all tribes inside of what it means to be an athlete. And Nike talks to each one of them specifically through the cultural conventions of what it means to be a runner or fencer or a swimmer, right? But they all subscribe to the same belief. And I think that for us as individuals, we go, okay, if thinking about the kind of job I wanna work for, I don't have to just work at this one job, this one tribe. Like I said, there are many jobs, many organizations to say, many companies that share the same belief system. And this becomes a consideration set for me to think about where I wanna work, which is far different than saying, I wanna work in tech, we're all the tech companies, no, no, instead is I believe this, who are the companies to see the world the way I do? And I think that's just, it may seem nuanced, but the outcomes are demonstratively different because they're bound by congruence, not by convenience. Now with this, obviously, when it comes to selling products or evangelizing ideas, there is appropriation and there's appreciation. And I think a lot of times what may feel like appropriation to some doesn't feel like appropriation to others. So what's the difference between a brand leveraging culture in an appreciative way versus a brand doing it in an appropriative way? So a cultural appropriation by definition is about power. It's about a community with power, group of people with power, taking the cultural markers of a marginalized community that doesn't have as much power and giving it new meaning. It's reworking meaning as if the original meaning was meaningless, right? It's almost like, it's like Christopher Columbus-ing, new things, like, oh, look at this place, we're gonna call it America, we're gonna do this, like, hey, people lived here first, dude. It's taking a thing that already exists, stripping it of its meaning and giving it new meaning, right? I write about this in the book and sort of famously, in some ways, you know, Kim Kardashian shows up on the red carpet of the MTV Music Awards and she's wearing corn rolls and they go, Kim, we love your hair, what are those? And Kim says, oh, they're both Derek Brates. Okay, I'm actually their corn rolls and they existed way before the movie 10 came out. Like, you've taken the cultural markers of a group of people, black people, and you've given it new meaning. You have appropriated other people's culture. The difference between cultural appropriation and a cultural appreciation is that cultural appreciation is that I understand what those things mean. It requires some curiosity and some understanding. And it's because I understand what those things mean that I celebrate in the culture when it's appropriate. So when you see, you know, kids at Coachella wearing headdresses, because it looks cool, clearly they're not aware of what those markers mean because they wouldn't be doing it because it's disrespectful to that community of people. But I understand what those things mean and I use it in the context that is appropriate and that becomes cultural appreciation. You know, when in Rome, you do as the Romans. Like when you go to other countries, you eat what they eat, you wear what they wear, you do their thing. And you're doing that with some knowledge that this is what is appropriate and therefore you. The only difference between two is slight, but the outcomes are just massively different. One is taking someone's culture and giving it new meaning. The other one is understanding its meaning and paying respect to it, but still being able to engage in it. It's that reverence for the meaning behind everything that culture has built and expressed itself instead of seeing it as something that you can leverage to sell more products or to look cool, to gain status. That's right, you can't use people's culture as cosplay. Like it's just like, this isn't like, I mean, put this on right quick, this is kind of fun. And then all right, I'm done with it on to the next thing. It's just paying honor to it. That's it. I mean, it's such a simple thing. It's such a simple thing, but oftentimes the obvious is an obvious until someone points it out to you. Well, from a brand perspective and the work that you do as a marketer, a lot of these brands have been around through many cultural shifts, right? So you have a great example of Budweiser in the book and it takes a level of really understanding and going deeper into the culture than just looking at the production and saying, we're gonna slap Budweiser on this production. And all of a sudden, everyone in this culture is gonna identify with us and drink Budweiser. You have to go much deeper into what is the core belief and identity behind this culture and does it align with the brand? Like truly, or are we just trying to put our sticker on it in hopes that everyone with that identity will pull out their wallet? That's right. This is all about intimacy. I think about it that we can observe groups of people like we're looking at a map, but you need to know the terrain. Like you need to understand what the people are. I mean, it's like flying over New York City and I can say that, oh, there's Central Park and there's Times Square and there's Meat Packet District. I don't know. But you don't have to sit in it until you walk the streets and you talk to people. And some would argue, most New Yorkers would argue that you don't know the city until you know how the city moves. The system that moves the city and what is the system that moves humanity, culture. So you really don't know people until you know the culture which is anchored in identity and beliefs. So as we look at the things that we can observe, like it's like, oh, I'm gonna play the music. I think the music is fun. I'm aware of this thing, this dress because I think that it's looked kind of cool and it's hip and it's funky. I'm gonna put on henna because look how fun the henna is but without understanding why those things exist and what it means to those people because of their beliefs and their ideologies, you run the risk of offending them, right? And the better we understand those things, I think that not only do we learn about them but we also learn about ourselves because I think it's really powerful. This brings up an interesting point which is when culture is socially engineered or astroturfed as the kids like to say where it's top down, comparatively to culture that has been created organically bottom up. And as A.J. brought up all the different musical fads that I had been in as a kid, when I first was exposed to music, it was the most popular stuff during the time that was on the radio. And then as I became a teenager and got more into music, then I realized that there was underground bands but there was a popular underground bands. And then it got to the point where I realized that there was kids my age playing in bands in the town. And I could be a part of that. So which felt more, and this goes back to how you feel in that environment. For myself, if that culture is being pressured top down, it can feel inauthentic, it doesn't vibe with you and you will be uncomfortable. And then when you're in a place that you are comfortable where you're a part of something, where that energy is, everything is right set up. You are now participating in this creation, in the production of that culture and you're partly responsible for that. So you have a hand in it so you can, that you're like, I'm part of that. That's me, that's what my tribe produced. That is the sweetest spot for a brand where the people, the community, the tribe, that they are creating works on behalf of the brand because they feel like the brand is theirs. Like they are co-creating with the brand. It's a great example. Most recently, McDonald's, right? Celebrating Grimace's birthday, right? The Grimace shake. And what does TikTok start to do with the Grimace shake? They start to do it in a very morose, dark way that this is what it looks like when you die and the shake is coming out of it, pretty dark stuff. Pretty dark stuff. And McDonald's goes, whoa. I mean, in a more controlled brand, we need to put the kibosh on this. We need to stop this. We need to come out and say something. But McDonald's' point of view is that, well, we're gonna talk to fans like fans and if this is how fans are creating meaning, reworking and refashioning meaning of the products, then let's get in there with them, right? And the people who are doing things that seem subcultural, it becomes a part of the culture. And the beautiful part about your illustration, John, is that everything that is now normal started subcultural, everything. Oh, yeah. Everything that is cool now was once fringe. And then it propagated into the zeitgeist to become normal, right? 20 years ago, if you were into comic books, you were a loser. Now, every movie we watch comes from comic books. At least the big ones do. And I think that the closer, the more connected you feel to the subculture, to this community of people, you feel like I got to be a part of this. I can't just be on the sideline watching it. I have to be a part of the negotiation and construction. In some cases, I wanna actually do the creating. In other cases, I wanna do the actual critiquing, whether it's through some formalized way, like I'm gonna write for Rolling Stones or I'm gonna write for Hype Beast or I'm gonna write for whatever, or I'm gonna enter into the discourse. The minute something drops, I'm posting it on threads or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, your platform of choice to cast my vote, right? To speak on this, because this thing is so much a part of who I am that I have to contribute to it. And for a brand, good night. Like that's the holy grail that people are creating on our behalf. And for marketers, whether marketing is in your title or not, it's unbelievably powerful because there's nothing, no marketing more influential than word of mouth. People trust people more than any form of marketing communication. Like we trust Sexy Lover 24 from Denver more than we trust the actual brand we're gonna buy from. Like we trust people. So when people are doing the reworking, the meaning making, the refashioning, like we're more inclined to give that a shot than we are the brand talking to us. So we can get folks to be a part of the evangelizing, preaching the gospel on behalf of the brand. It's, that's the place to be. So you've talked about meaning, fashioning. We've sort of talked about fringe goes to mainstream culture. So what are those steps? How do we actually move something from a very small group, fringe, to everyone's listening to it, everyone's drinking the grimoire shake, or everyone is now part of this new belief system. So this is actually my doctoral work, say this is called a cultural contagion. And what the research reveals that there's two main mechanisms at play. When things become a part of the canon, when things go from being fringe, just kind of out there to being something that people like us do. And these mechanisms happen simultaneously. It's evaluation and legitimation. Evaluation is when we decide whether it's good or it's bad, whether it's cool or it's wack. And legitimation is when we decide if people like us do something like this, whether it's acceptable. And there's some things that are bad, but we do it because it's acceptable anyway, right? So the calculus sometimes seems to be out of sync, but those two things are happening at the same time. And what my research revealed is that there are four mechanisms or four sort of elements at play that these mechanisms start to kind of come together. The first is the, it's a recontextualizing. Actually it was responding. So like when things come into exogenous shocks, exogenous shocks happen to the system. They things outside of the community happen. We go, whoa, did y'all see that? What do you think? And as we start to enter the discourse together, the language that we use casts a vote, right? Like if AJ is like, it's stupid. We go, really, why do you think so? Help me figure that out. Because, and then John goes, yeah, it is stupid. I go, maybe it's stupid, right? So I'm being convinced by the rhetoric that's happening in the discourse. And then there's the recontextualizing because I go, AJ, why is it stupid? You go, what's sort of like this Marcus? Think about this. It's sort of like that. You refashioning, you reworking it puts it in new frames. And I go, oh, I get that now. And then there is reconciling. And that's like, those are like the mental gymnastics that we have to overcome. The hurdles we jump over to make it make sense. You know, it doesn't make it make sense, man. We do all these things to help it become a rational things for us. And then arguably the most important and powerful one is the reinforcing. That we then go talk about it. We wear it, we use it, we share it. And these things become conspicuous public votes of, hey, this is acceptable for people like us. And it becomes a part of the culturally constituted world in which we live. It becomes canon. As more people reinforce it, it propagates into the population till it becomes normal. And before you know it, you're like, wow, we're doing this thing. Why am I filming this Grimace Shake TikTok? I mean, I remember so vividly, like you talked about all birds earlier. I remember seeing an ad in my Facebook news feed about all birds. And it's like, it's silhouette was like, like a sock on top with rubber soles. And it was supposed to be super breathable, like New Zealand, Lambs, Merino. Well, I don't know. And the brand name was supposed to be innocuous. And it was like, it's the hottest thing happening right now in tech. And I go, eh, okay, whatever. Keep scrolling. Then I see the ad again. And this time, an old colleague of mine had liked it. And I was like, Julie Chu likes this? No, mind you, we weren't friends. We just had worked together. So I keep on scrolling. And I see the ad again. And this time, Julie Chu not only liked it, but she left a story. And she said, love. I can't wait to get every color and bring it with me on my next trip. Two weeks later, I own all birds. Now, Julie Chu and I aren't best friends, right? But her reinforcing, her vote, if you will, not only signal a positive evaluation, but it legitimated this thing, right? And we are social animals, man. We do everything we can to fit in. And as we see people like us, even if they aren't the closest people to us, they send a signal that this is okay. And before long, you're wearing all birds. Before long, you're making grimace TikToks. Before long, you're watching Tiger King for 10 hours. Before long, you're doing all things. You go, how did I get here? How did I get here? Your people got you there. Now, I'd love for you to put your marketer hat on and just share with us. If you're not part of a culture, what do you do to discover and learn more about that culture, to get to a place of appreciation or to discover, hey, this might be the culture for me. Because again, going back to a lot of our audience who might be going through that transition, trying to find their identity and looking for new cultures that fully express their identity in their belief system or move to a new location and they're encountering new cultures and they don't want to appropriate it. How do you, with all of this experience you have in marketing, go through the steps to really understand that culture at a deep level? Can I just want to add one thing to that as well? There's also those moments in life where your whole world gets shattered and it has to be rebuilt. For a lot of people, the crisis of just dealing with COVID and everything that came with that had woken them up or changed their views on a lot of things. So they had to re-figure that out, revisit some of these ideas or a death in a family can certainly rock somebody to their core, to where they go, oh, who am I? That's right. Well, to your point, John, these are exogenous shocks to the system that are new and they don't have meaning yet. So therefore when they happen, we have to negotiate and construct meaning. We've never been in a global pandemic. Whoa, what does that mean? What does that mean for me? What does it mean for people like me? I have to make meaning of this. And we enter the discourse with our people to try to make some sense of it. As a marketer, if I want to know about a culture, a group of people that I'm unfamiliar with, I become an anthropologist. You know, you study the culture like anthropologists does through ethnography, right? You immerse yourself in the cultural contexts of those people, you kind of go native and observe those people practice their cultural subscription, right? You observe the cultural production. You observe the artifacts, the behaviors, their language, and then you talk to them into the discourse. And as people talk, you go, oh man, you revealed a lot about yourself. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, not for me, right? And it's through the discourse that we make meaning. It's through the discourse that we decide, this is for me or this rub me the wrong way. Something just don't feel right. This isn't gonna work for me, right? So we gotta put our anthropologist head on and go native by getting closer. And that's to me, if there's anything to take away from the book, it's that culture is the governing and operating system of humanity. No external force more influential to human behavior than culture. But we have to understand is that people see the world through cultural lenses and your cultural meaning making system is different than someone else's. And the only way to understand that is to get closer, right? The world is not objective, it's subjective based on who you are and how you see the world. And if we want to understand how people see the world, then we have to engage. We gotta get closer. We gotta be curious. And that requires empathy, just a tremendous amount of empathy. I think that's why traveling is so important to people to immerse themselves in a completely different culture and experience that from that seat rather than through the fishbowl. That's right. You gotta find the, you know, you're forced to find the familiar and the strange when you're traveling. Like you gotta find the things that like, oh, that's sort of like this for me. Like, you know, they do it this way, but I do it this, okay, I give this, this makes sense now. We make meaning of it based on a proxy of our own experiences, our own meaning making systems. I mean, like if you wanna know about yourself, travel the world. And what I love about that concept of anthropologist is you can use it right now. I mean, if you're looking to find a new community, a new tribe, appreciate the artifacts that that tribe is wearing, appreciate the cultural production, have some curiosity around how they discovered that album or why they bought those Nikes or what it was like waiting in line for those Jordans or how they had the connection to get those sneakers. And all of a sudden, through that, because they're not gonna reveal their beliefs, their identity, just like we talked about family at the dinner table, like they're gonna guard and protect that and only look for people who share very similar beliefs and identity before really feeling comfortable. But they'll talk for hours about their favorite music, their favorite films that identify the culture that they're in. So starting at that level and working your way towards the identity and belief system and sharing and expressing that you share that is how you really build that deep connection and find your tribe. That's right, it's just being human. You just gotta be human. You wanna connect with more humans, be human. Be curious, like see the world through other people's lenses. Like just be curious, you know? And I think that like as a marketer, I think that it helps us be a better practitioners, but like just as a citizen of the world, it helps us be like better human beings that this world that we inhabit. And you start finding, I think life gets a little better for you because you find your people and it's not like nothing's wrong with those people, they don't see the world the way I do, right? So long as their worldview doesn't mean my oppression, all good, you know, cool, like all good. You know, I remember my wife and I when we first started dating, she loved Bruce Springsteen, like, like loved Bruce Springsteen. Now I grew up on R&B, right? So when I heard Bruce Springsteen, like I knew like dancing in the dark, right? That's Bruce Springsteen I knew. And she would like play songs for me and I'm like, man, like I don't like this guy's voice. Like I'm used to like a buttery, you know, baby face, you know, sort of Luther Van Dross. I'm like, man, this guy's voice is really tough. Good night. And she was like, oh man, I went to a concert and like we were there for five hours, like five hours, just don't make no sense. But it wasn't until I was like, let me go explore this thing with her. And I was like, I get it. Not for me though, it ain't for me, but I get it. And even that's where we need to come to a place of. We find out who we are so that we can find out whether or not something is for us or not. And once we make that decision, we have the wherewithal to go, it's not like it's bad. It's just not for me. Go enjoy the show with Bruce. Go enjoy the show. We love asking every guest what their X factor is. What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary Marcus? I think that I'm a really good servant. I have an ability to be extremely tunnel vision. Some call it focus. I call it just myopically going against the thing. And I've in a point in my life where I'm in my field Jackson years where I'm more focused on being a good coach than I am being a good player. Phil Jackson, you know, he won chips. Like he won championships as a player but we know Phil Jackson as a coach and he served. And I feel like, you know, when I'm in my bag, I'm a good servant. I love that. Thank you for sharing. Where can our audience find out more about this book that you wrote and all the great work you do in marketing and teaching? Yeah, you could find me on all the socials at MarkToTheC, M-A-R-C-T-O-T-H-E-C and MarkToTheC.com. Thank you for joining us Marcus. This is great.