Insights 2020: Leland Maschmeyer

Leland mash Meyer sometimes references initiative design as which is an elegant thought, and it's a simplicity. But when I look at his work, I tend to fixate on all the elements that seem to defy that simplicity: the love for innovative typography, responsibility towards aesthetic and cultural history, respect for intuition in the face of over-rationalization. One of my favorite quotes of his is when he said that a brand is a consensual hallucination. Do you remember saying that? Yeah, okay. And I think there's something honest and messy in that idea of intentionally sharing in an illusion, or perhaps a delusion. And this complexity is what I think makes Leland such a great thinker: his ability to bring together his disparate interests—everything from systems dynamics to anthropology to food to science fiction to color theory. This must be a part of his success and how he has been able to place design at the center of such vital conversations. He's basically won every award in the book, so I don't have to list that. And his relaunch of the Shivani brand earned at least nine billion media impressions and was universally allotted in both business and design worlds.

But one thing that stuck out to me about his resume is that many of the accolades actually center around his teams. Between his leadership at branding agency Collins, which he co-founded, and his work with Giovanni as their chief creative and strategy officer, his teams have earned honors like Design Agency of the Year, In-House Agency of the Year, and Agency Inventing the Future of Branding, and Agency Creatives would kill to work at Most Innovative Company, etc. So to me, it's obvious that Leland cares just as deeply about creating the spaces in which design can thrive, implementing the systems that allow talented people to build the intentional change that they seek. So it is my honor to have him here. So please join me in welcoming Leland bachmeier.

That was a really good introduction. Thank you. So before I launched into this, there's a there's a couple things that I kind of want to say too, at the outset of this. I really took the idea that this was about insights, and I really took the context of museum that I deeply respect, who's tackled a lot of issues and very heady but also tangible ideas and made them experiencial, and decided to kind of move into that idea with my talk and not do just a simple case study of, "Here's I've done this and I've done this, and here's the business case study on this," because you can read a book, you can like read an article to get that type of stuff. So I kind of wanted to bring something unique and special.

I think the idea of insights is is interesting and challenging at the same time, because sometimes insights can be presented as a panacea, as a truth, as a solution to many things. But there's been a woman who I've been reading a bit about lately, many of the book she wrote—she's a feminist theorist named bell hooks—and she has this really beautiful concept in her books, and this one book called *Teaching to Transgress*, where she talked to her students about the idea of the difference between authority of experience and passion of experience. And I think a lot of times people can come to a stage like this and stand up here with the authority of their experience and say, "This is how the world works; this is how things are done." I don't want to do that; I don't want to say that this is the only way to do it. Instead, I'm approaching this from the perspective of, "This is my passion of experience; this is my passion as a 39-year-old male who's worked in advertising and design and had an eclectic background, started his own company, grew up in the South, lives in New York City." All these different facets of myself have brought me to arrive at certain insights that I find very powerful and very useful in my day-to-day work, and I'm sharing them as a provocation; I'm sharing them as a way to get into an interesting conversation. And in no way am I sharing this as, "This is the end-all and be-all about everything," because I think at the end of the day, no one wants to know my authority; they just want to know what I'm passionate about, because that's infectious and that's what people can build on and stuff. So please see everything in this as where I am in my learning journey, where I am in my passion, and what I get excited about, because there's gonna be a lot of eclectic stuff in here, and you probably got that sense of it from in it setting me up.

There's a lot of beliefs I have that are baked into this: the idea that design should not be called design, as you can be called the designs, the way the sciences and the humanities are called, so because I believe design is the third avenue of human inquiry; I believe that brand building, which I'll get to in a little bit, is just the creation of corporate mythology; I believe that the definition of design is the creation of intentional change. I believe a lot of things. And so what I tend to do with these presentations is, rather than troll out business case studies of my work, is I actually try to present insights and ideas that have been knocking around in my head for quite a while that I have no place to lodge. I can't do an article about it; I don't have time to do a book about it. So what I do instead is I come and open up the top of my brain in front of however many people are standing in front of me that I've never met before and try to hopefully string it all together into a coherent thought of random thoughts that I've had in my head for 10 years and hope that I don't get nervous over along the way and stumble over myself and make a fool of myself.

So with that said, I'm a little nervous because this is the first time I've ever given this talk. So if I screw up, if I if I contradict myself, if I lose where I am and all this, please forgive me. I'm very excited to talk about this, but please know this is my first time ever articulating this particular thought. So with that said, let's get into it. Comics. This is always a great place to start a story. So back in 1940, this comic appeared; it was the Red Bee. Is any—has anyone ever been familiar with this character by any chance? So for the record, there are no hands being raised, and I think that's a good reason, because it's it's sort of an absurd character. Just to kind of give you a sense of who this is, this was this was published again, like I said, in 1940 by Quality Comics. The these secret identity was his name was Rick Rowley; he was an assistant assistant district attorney and a crime fighter at night who wore striped pajamas and a red bandana over his neck. Now the reason he was called the Red Bee was because he had this magical power—to not even magical, he just controlled bees—like, you know, any beat-up criminals and stuff, and you know, wore really tight outfits. And you can see in the upper right-hand corner, like he had a little literally a bee in his pocket that if he needed to go fight a bad guy, he would sic a bad guy on him. So his gun, he affectionately called the stinger gun; he would fight Nazis and gangsters, and you know, is that kind of like slight evolution from the Dick Tracy model of sort of detective crime fighter type of stuff. But he was a really early-on prototype. Just to kind of give you context, I think Superman came out in 1938, so this was the really early era of comics when a lot of these creators were still trying to wrap their head around what a good comic was. This was not one of them. And so he, Rick Rowley, the Red Bee, joins the likes of Jay Pennypacker, who was a CPA working at a camp—I'm not joking, this is a real comic book character—called *Camp Run Amok*. It was a self-esteem camp that actually was run by a mad scientist who was developing a serum which gave everyone superpowers, no matter how you were. And so Jay Pity Packer was known as the Almighty Dollar, and his magic solution was literally to throw money at problems. And you can see him up there doing it. There was another woman, and this came out the 1940s, whose name was Asbestos Lady. I am NOT making this up; this is absolutely true. She was a normal everyday person with nothing miraculous about her except that she took asbestos and turned it into a flame-retardant suit. So the only thing that she could really do as her superpower was walk through fire and then get cancer later on in life. And so, you know, there wasn't anything special about it. And then this one's really good. So this guy named Carlton Laphroaig, he was known as Hindsight Boy. So essentially his superpower was the fact that after the fact he could tell everyone what they should have done instead. So all the superheroes who were putting their lives on the line, he was like, "Yeah, you know, you should have really done this thing that would have worked better," which, you know, everyone has hindsight, and everyone has a plan at the end of the day. So in a sense, it wasn't really like a superpower; I mean, it was kind of like saying like remembering to take out the trash as a superpower, knowing when like *American Idol* was on; it was like that same kind of level of super here. So all he really did was just walk around criticizing people. And I grabbed this shot because I think this is sort of like a perfect shot of his like sort of like Cicero holding his hand up like lecturing about how things should have gone and stuff.

But these people in the Red Bee sort of constitute the trough of characters who didn't really have that magic to them that made them lift. And there was one character who came out in 1939, I think it was, who by all counts should have been in this trough. It was this adult man who had a psychotic break and decided to wear really tight spandex and run around at night with a cape and mask over himself. He hid in a cave; he had a little boy who hung around with him all the time, and he was actually a billionaire who could have done anything with his life, but because of this psychotic break, he decided to dress up in a essentially bat-inspired gear and go out and fight crime—again, being a typical everyday person with nothing special about him. By all means, this character should have been thrown into the trash pit of comics and never resurfaced again after maybe the first issue. But we all know who this character is; we all know because we've seen them in comics and television shows, cartoons, live-action, theme parks, rollercoaster rides—everything you can imagine. This person, the Batman, created by Bob Kane and Bob Finger, ended up becoming one of the most iconic and meaningful superheroes in history, yet he shares many of the exact same characteristics as the Red Bee. It's the question is why—why did Batman rise when everything else about him seemed the same? Well, I think to really understand that we have to look beyond Batman; we have to look beyond comics; and we have to really start having a conversation about the world, our brain, and the psyche—the psyche that kind of develops between all three of them. And this is where the nerdy stuff comes in, so get ready, because in many ways how our brain interacts with the physical environment of the world becomes the material with which we come to understand the world. So I think in many ways to understand what makes certain creativity stand apart from other creativity, we have to go and really interrogate this exact interaction and how these things work together, because in many instances the world is filled with noise; it's filled with lots of things that don't make sense to us. And what we spend most of our time doing is moving these things that we don't know why they're there around until we start understanding what they are or what we can do with them, and we just keep nudging things. And I think for many of the graphic designers in the room, there's a lot of truth to this, because Milton Glaser told me one time that all he really does is he just sits in front of a computer and nudges things around until something emerges that he likes; that's his process. But in many ways, that's symbolic of what we all do. And whatever we do, we are trying to make sense of the chaos and the noise and the sort of meaningless debris that lays all around us that we need to turn into something. And at the end of the day, sometimes we put things in the right combination, and they light up; they mean something to us; we recognize something within the noise, within the structure that we've created or given to the noise. Out of chaos emerges something that is real and alive.

Now what's so interesting about this is that all of a sudden there is motion or emotion; there is a sense of personality; there's so much that is coming to our minds from just nudging two circles in a curve into this basic shape. And I think there's something really powerful in that when we dig into it. The designer Bruno Munari is very famous for this image where he did basically this idea exploring all the different ways that we can express the idea of a human face and have it still feel human, have it still carry that emotion. And I think what's so powerful about this experiment is how it shows that there is an essence; there is a basic pattern to the idea of a face that no matter what you do around it, you always recognize a face. Now many of us in this internet culture experience this as the idea of pareidolia, which is the phenomenon of seeing faces in things. Much like those circles, we can't help but see personality and emotion and movement in these things—like you cannot, no matter how hard you try, see past the face and to see a taillight, an exhaust pipe—and that you can't like your mind keep snapping back to that pattern and what emerges from that pattern. And I think that says something really powerful about the human mind that we overlook because it is so basic and commonplace to our experience of life that we've almost become house-blind to one of the main functions of how our mind works. Because at the end of the day, recognizing pattern is not just recognizing pattern for the sake of meaning, but pattern actually deepens our experience of the material world. The fact that you guys are in a pattern right now with me—you are sitting in seats facing me, and I am facing you—brings with it all sorts of dynamics and expectations, and it deepens the experience, because if I were up here talking to nobody, I would have a much different experience than I have having right now. I'm changing my body language, my modulation; the fear that I'm feeling is getting pushed and recessed inside of me, hoping that this is making sense, and you guys are participating in the same ritual of the pattern, which is patiently sitting and watching; maybe some of you are taking notes; maybe some of you are on your cell phones because you're already bored. But the basic thing is that there's a pattern to this engagement, and it is making it a deeper experience. If there was one person in here, it would feel different for you than there was all of you in this room. So the pattern that we are living together is deepening the experience and making it a richer part of our experience.

Now let me get even nerdier with you for a second. So when we talk about our life, we often talk about it as a sphere of life. So let me use this graphic object as a way to help kind of land some conceptual ideas. So if we think about this graphic object as our experience of the world—how we phenomenologically experience the world—there's basically a duality which we're always playing with, and again you have to look at this phenomenologically, not mathematically, not any way else. There's, in one sense, air, right—air above us, which is kind of nothing. Like when wind blows, we can feel it, but we can't see it. And air in many senses represents this idea of spirit, of abstractness, of things that are disembodied—you know, like when we say words, they just kind of float out into the air, or whenever we think about concepts, we always refer to them as like high-minded or lost in our mind; it's always that idea of being above us. Or when we say like, you know, when we somebody says something really complex to you, you might say, "Well, that just flew over my head," right? It never lodges itself in anything physical and tangible; it's always just up here. Then on the opposite side of that, you do other duality as this idea of Earth, right? So Earth—and it's a bit represented by the pixelation you see behind you—is inert matter; it is nothingness; it is it is the dirt and the debris that just kind of strews all around us waiting for us to build something with it. This is noise; this is meaninglessness; these are objects in our life that we know are there, but we don't make sense of them yet. So in one hand you have the matter on the earth on the bottom, and the other hand you have the earth and the spirit and the body and the concept up top. Now those two worlds separated is what the Greeks would often refer to as chaos. On one hand, you have nothingness; there is nothing there in the air. But in the other hand, you have completeness in the ground; everything is there; there is nothing separated out and categorized and made sense of and organized; it is just all there—all noise. Which looking at this, it's sort of the idea of all noise; there's no shape to it; there's no coherence to it; there's no center to this noise if everything is earth. But what happens is we are constantly challenging ourselves to mix the two—sort of like a yin and yang type of thing—where we bring earth or where we bring air down into earth; we bring life, words into an idea into a form; or we raise up matter to meet an idea, a concept that we have in our head, a dream that we've had. And what you get is essentially a structure like this, where in this little piece of our experience of life, we have carved out a pattern where we have raised matter and brought down air into meeting with each other—idea into concept. And what ends up happening is all this matter, which was noise and meaningless and chaos to us, all of a sudden becomes organized; it has sense to it; it has purpose to it; it has intent to it. Many of you who work in the creative industry experience this every day, which is the notion that any idea you present can be literally made 200 times more persuasive and believable if you just give it a name. Is anybody here ever presented ideas when you don't give it a name and it like fails, then all the sudden you give it a really good catchy name and it sells through, even though it's like a pencil scratch on a piece of paper? It's happened to me all the time. But it is this idea of when you give a name to something that you have made, you have given it the breath of life and imbued it with a concept. And when you look at that form, that form holds that concept, and the two things become alive with each other. And so all of a sudden there is a center that brings these two spheres, these two dualities of life together, and then that is when you have a spark; that is when you have a body to an idea; and that's when things become really, really powerful. And in my belief, that is what imagination does, and that's why imagination is so powerful; it gives form to the formless; it gives it gives it brings ideas into matter.

So we're gonna build on this and come back to it, everyone. Snow, because I know that's like super conceptual, but it's like a really great kind of landing place to kind of talk about the theoretical structure behind some of the stuff that I'm talking about. So when we talk about this again, like I said, this can be spirit and body; it can be idea and form; it can be meaning and matter; it can be something as basic as air and Earth. These are all the exact same things—disembodied things and embodied things coming together. And this is the idea of bringing those two things together and why it's so important, because at the end of the day, when we bring things into pattern—whether that's through naming or organization or literally forming things with our hand—it activates matter. How many of you have made something that totally looked like crap until one day you just nudge something that when you're like, "Oh my god, that's the idea!" Like so much of the work that I've done, some of the ideas that were the worst ideas that were ever put up or proposed, through just a little bit of tweaking, all of a sudden become incredible. I heard M. Night Shyamalan talk one time that he was presenting an idea that to to a bunch of movie studios to get it produced, or a production that were they I don't know management companies or whatever they're called, basically to buy to film and distribute it, and no one would buy it except this one company who basically said, "Yeah, maybe come back to us when when when it's better." And so he was really distraught. And so all he did was he did the exact same thing Milton Glaser talked about, which is he just went back and made little nudges here and there in the film, tweaked it—maybe move the scene, extended this line a little bit; it was nothing substantial—but all of a sudden those little movements blocked it into the proper pattern for the story that he was telling, and the whole thing lit up. And I can't remember which movie it was, which is sort of stupid because that's the whole point of this story, but the the point was it ended up becoming like a massive box-office success, and he made tons of money off of it. But the difference between buying it and not buying it, between moving people and not moving people, were nudges to get it into the right pattern. And so that's what pattern does; it activates matter. It's why we look at this; we can't not look at this and feel something about a sunglass holder, a doorway on the facade of a building; it makes us feel something because of the pattern that it's in. Or this was a wonderful story: I have a four-year-old boy who, when he was three years old, he looked out the window, goes, "Daddy, there's a dragon!" And I literally had no idea what he was looking at, and I all of a sudden looked up and go, "Oh my god," he sees a dragon in the counter space, the negative space of the clouds. And so I took a picture of because I was so proud of him, but he loves—he he told this whole story afterwards about how dragons live in the sky and which ones were nice and what their names were and stuff like that. But he all of this emerged just because water vapor composed of hydrogen and oxygen and some pollution in the sky kind of created this opportunity for a dragon to floor man also, and his imagination lit up in this whole world that he had never thought of before had been activated by water vapor in the sky. Or if we can think more primarily about it, looking at the sky every day and watching the Sun go up and down, up and down, up and down has inspired countless mythologies, countless understandings of of life and where we are in life and how we relate to the mysteries beyond us. Every day people look up to the sky and look at pictures like this—I can't remember what it is, and it's stupid; I should have had it in my notes—but it's called the Rose, and it's a real thing in the galaxy; it's two different galaxies colliding with each other. And you look at this, you like, "There has to be like some greater, you know, thing at work in the world for these two things to match like that; this is too beautiful; this is too well-ordered for it to just be random." Now whether or not you believe there's a higher-order power, this is in essence is what power does—is it takes essentially matter in space and activates it and makes you ask questions and feel things you…

Didn't feel otherwise; had it been in a different arrangement. We can look at toast and believe that Jesus is talking to us and wanting to have breakfast with us. But more closely at home to the designers with us every day. We work with pattern every day; we are creating magic from mess. And I think that's a really powerful idea in all of this: magic from mess. Because we take essentially broken pieces and we align them in a way, to not only into certain patterns, to not only be recognized but to impact people and to transform people. Because you can take these basic components and arrange them into letter forms. And if you really stop and think about that, that's all letter forms are: there are diagonals, they're slashes, they're half circles that we use to create this magic language. That, when presented in the right way, carries such deep, profound meaning, force that it can actually change a person's outlook. It can change how a person feels about something; it can change how a person thinks. And this is the power of pattern making through language. You are bringing a concept down into the form of typography. And what's really powerful is neurologically—and I'm not gonna go into a whole neurological thing—but the basic thing is when people hear a word, "cup," or see the word "cup," they actually see, or see the night picture of a cup in their head. There is a deep interrelation between pattern and imagery. We are constantly trying to give form to imagery and also trying to elicit imagery through form. And that's sort of the, the cognitive relationship between the material world, how our brain works, and psychically how we process the world. And we're always finding deeper relationships in the world through this patterning of the world.

So again, coming back to this, the real power of bringing all of this stuff together is not that it just makes us feel something about the world, but that it reveals something deeply meaningful and powerful about the world that we want to be connected to, that we want to be moved by, that we want to be touched by. So let me talk about that a little bit. And this desire that we're always seeking out pattern or trying to create pattern in our lives in order to be more alive. This is the migration patterns of mule deer at different parts of the year. The deer move in different directions. Now this is a deeply important pattern for a lot of the First Nations that need to understand where their major food source is moving. Because if they don't understand this pattern, that leads to starvation; that leads to a loss of material. So pattern is life in typically non-modern contexts. The Egyptians are famous for this, the idea of looking up at the stars and believing that there was a pattern up there that was there for them to divine and then bring down to earth and then further align themselves to the Pyramids of Giza being aligned with Orion's belt. I mean, this is a profound amount of mathematical engineering and also physical engineering to produce this fact. This is not done by chance; this is not done out of artistry or beauty-making. This is done out of a profound belief that aligning a society, aligning oneself to the patterns that one discerns in the cosmos, that one discerns on the world, are necessary for the thriving on this planet. And that if one is not connected to these patterns, then one is lost, metaphorically in the wilderness; that one does not have a connection to structures of life that allow life to support itself and grow and thrive.

In a more modern context, one can look at stock traders. And so this is actually a stock set of archetypal patterns in the stock market where people who are trading stock actually look for these patterns to discern meaning of what is going to happen, where they can make the more money, where they can thrive in a stock market context. And I think one of the really interesting things about this is the physical nature of the language: an ascending triangle, physically moving up; descending, going down; bullish, falling, rising; bearish, a falling wedge. These are all very conceptual and mathematical things that they're dealing with, but they are rooted and placed in physical-sounding words. And when one gets into sort of etymology and the, the nature of language—Ralph Waldo Emerson was very famous for doing this—one finds that much of the language we use today has its origin in describing the physical objects of the world around us. Like the word "to explain" actually comes from the idea of "to lay flat." Right? To explain is to remove all the irregularities from it and make it a flat, easy idea. So many of the things that we've abstracted through our physical or through our language today are actually rooted in concept being married with some physical, phenomenological experience of the world to make that meaningful and to make it powerful. And I think this chart is a really interesting conception of that within the stock trading space.

What's really funny is if you go on social media, there's this stuff everywhere. There's this really great Instagram account that I love called Starter Pack Only. And what it does—by no means does this person do it as conceptually as I do—but what this person does is they actually pay attention to the social patterns in life and they say, "Okay, everyone who's done a YouTube apology video basically has this face; they don't do makeup; they throw their hair up in a bun; big sure if they take a video on the floor and they're crying a lot." And I guarantee you, go watch all these apology videos, they all do that. And it's all these apology video, or not, it's all these different kind of patterns that this whole account is set to. Because what it's essentially saying is like, "If you want to do a proper apology video, these are the pattern; this is the pattern you need to follow to do it." I think the whole influencer world of Instagram totally fits this as well. This is what I would call a pattern for a travel influencer. And anyone in here who's tried to be an influencer, I guarantee what you've done is you've looked at the ones who are most successful and you've tried to discern the pattern of their style of post and then emulate it. Because the expectation is that person is a role model for you, and you need to mimic that pattern because that is the pattern of success within it. And so there are practical, funny ways that we're constantly aligning ourselves to pattern. And then there are deeply spiritual and profound ways that we try to align ourselves to pattern.

But I think one of the things that has been really interesting in a post-enlightenment era is that this notion of progress has replaced this idea of what I would call patterning. I think a lot of the stuff pre-enlightenment was this idea of returning to patterns, looking back at what we have learned, what are the traditions, and what can that teach us about how to thrive and live in a world where path, where progress is more about, "How do we get to tomorrow? How do we break from today and move towards tomorrow?" The idea that tomorrow is better and that a repetition of where we've been isn't. And I think there's something profoundly wrong in that interpretation, but I'll get to that in a second. But as a modern culture, as a modern society, we really believe in this idea of killing the old in favor of the new. It's why we favor the young over the seniors in our, in our community; it's why we favor technology over more traditional approaches to things. Because we believe that technology is almost a god and that it's going to be this ever-ascent into a higher order of living the more we play with social media and iPhones and stuff. But this is something that isn't new; like I'm not inventing this kind of conflict. Because William Blake—if anyone is a William Blake fan in the audience—had been preaching about this since the 1880s. This picture pretty much summarizes everything that William Blake believed. What you see is man hunched over, turning his back to nature, turning his back to the structure of the world, to life, to flourishing, to beauty, to truth, and instead bending, hunching, contorting himself over to mathematics, to the abstract, to the numerical, to the disembodied. It was turning away from pattern, to turning away, turning towards that which is disembodied. Now there's lots of ways that you could disagree with that, but one of the, but the point is that he recognized this difficulty in turning away from the patterns and the traditions of nature and understanding how the world works to this idea of high-level theoretical abstraction. And he had this really great quote about Francis Bacon and John Locke where they said they all conspire to unweave the rainbow. You know, the idea of like completely dissecting a frog to understanding it on the anatomical level and then putting it back together and wondering why the frog doesn't work anymore. That's what that's what he worried about.

And so this idea of patterning from progressing I think provides a really interesting lens with which to reassess our modern existence. Because patterning is about a return back to age-old understanding, to wisdom gained and shared that is durable over eons, whereas progress is about abandoned, you know, that moving forward, a step up, an ever-ascending ascent into higher-order abstraction, away from ornamentation, away from the brutishness and the bearishness of nature and stuff, but ascending above and beyond it. And there's value to all of this, and it's not necessarily an either/or, but I think it's important for us to understand sometimes which fishbowl we're in and know that we can jump back and forth between the fishbowl to kind of find that right balance. There's a quick side note: The Aztecs have this really great philosophical saying called "the slippery earth," that as you walk the way in life, what you're actually doing is you're walking the top of a very slippery mountain ridge. And at any moment you're gonna slide down to one side and possibly go all the way down. And what you should always be doing is trying to catch yourself on the slide down, get back up on that ridge and walk, walk the middle. You may fall on the other side, but you always got to get back up and walk the middle. And I think this conversation of pattern and progress is the same thing. On one hand you got pattern, on one side you got progress, on the other side, and we're always slipping back and forth on one of them. But I think more recently what we felt in a lot of this modern era of thinking of progress and always chasing the new and youthful is that we've fallen on the progress side and we've continued to slide down that side of the mountain when sometimes what we need to do is climb back up. Because what I think progress has done is it's incurred a lot of spiritual loss in us; it's incurred a lot of searching for meaning and place. I think it has a lot to do with why I come, why people are pursuing this idea of purpose brand. I think it has a lot to do with why Comic-Con and why Harry Potter and all these other places have become these sort of centers of gathering and community and people searching out bonds with each other. Is because we are looking to repattern ourselves in a way that allows us to return to something that is thriving, something that is basic, something that feeds the core of us rather than constantly chasing this ever and never-ending ascent of the new and the better. Because that's not leading us anywhere; there's no destination to that; that is never-ending. But we're pattern; it constantly returns us to the truth and the wisdom and the understanding of how life works and what the structure of life is.

So that was a little bit of a rant, but it let me build on it a little bit. So there's two aspects of this that I think are interesting to get into, which is sort of breaking this down a little bit more. I think when we talk about pattern, similar to what I was talking about, we're talking about the essential; we were talking when you strip away the surface of everything and try to find the underlying structure of something; we're talking about the essential. But when we're talking about progress, we're talking about the material: what is physically changed, what is different; I need to see it. When we're talking about pattern, we're talking about the meaningful; we're searching for something that has purpose and meaning to it. Whereas progress, we're thinking of the mechanical: how has something physically changed? On one hand it's the imaginal, it's the vision, if the fantasy, it's where higher-order ideas sit that hold us and give us identity as a culture, that give us identity as a tribe, that give us identity as a person. Whereas I think progress is about literalness; it is about it is either new or it is old; it is about measurable, enough, did we hit this number, did we hit this metric? No, we didn't, then it wasn't valuable if it didn't hit a certain KPI. I think there's also a really important difference between truth and fact, which I think is related here. I think, you know, is the what of life, like, you know, this is hard, there is X number of us in here. But truth is about a deeper understanding about the why, the meaningfulness, the purposefulness, the truth of why we come together. Yes, there's, I don't know, I'm making up a number, a hundred of us in this room and in Minneapolis at the Walker Art Museum. But the truth of why we come together is because we're like-minded, we're curious people, we're constantly seeking new knowledge beyond just the facts of life. And so I think there's something powerful in understanding that there are facts in the world, but oftentimes there is a truth that lies behind the fact.

And then there's a difference between the idea of the eternal and tomorrow. You know, the idea of patterning is this recursive loop that keeps playing itself back over and over again. And sort of a derogatory sense, we always refer to this recursive mess through the idea of, "Oh, it's history repeating itself," right? But there's value in that if we're aware. I mean, I think anyone who talks about history will always tell you that the best way to understand the world, the best way to create leadership, the best way to understand life is to pay attention to history because the patterns keep repeating themselves. We are reassured by history; we are informed by history. And so there is an eternal, no studies patterns that keep playing on and being recursive. Whereas progress is about tomorrow; that's all we care about is tomorrow, not the past, not the day; that's all stuff to throw away. What can we do and achieve tomorrow? And I think that's where Bruno's Menard's experiment comes in to be very interesting again, because it is that recursiveness again that he returned to. Because it's not about just repeating; it's about reimagining and reinterpreting those patterns and understanding the parts that need to be consistent and eternal and the parts that can be variable and dynamic and flexing. And I think that's personally, for me, one of the most powerful qualities of an artist. An artist is someone who returns to pattern and then returns pattern. And what I mean by that is these are people who go back and in terror again the underlying structures of life or return to something that might have been forgotten and try to bring it back to a modern context in a way that is timely and appropriate for that context and also in a way that that that context can hear it or would want to hear it. There is so much in artwork that reminds us of what is powerful and eternal and where the center is for us as a culture or a people or an individual.

And so as I look, you know, walking around the exhibits here or flipping through a book or reading a book of poetry or whatever, what I see is again and again a return to pattern. Now this always isn't conscious; a lot of it can be subconscious. I don't claim that everyone does this intentionally like a mechanical process, but I think there is an intuitive nesara store trying to find the most essential thing to work with and then express it through their voice at a time that they believe it is most necessary to hear. So you could look at somebody like a modern Tyrell. And if you see past the, the fact of the Tyrell—it's light, it's a space, it's all-encompassing—and start looking at the pattern that sits behind it, you, the, the Tyrell exhibit starts to become transparent to a lot of predecessors and even a bit of nature that comes before him. So on one level it's a Rothko. Rothko played just like Tyrell with this pattern of the abyss, the pattern of eternity, but Rothko, rather than doing it through light and architecture in space, did it through scale and color and form. You could look at J.M. Turner, who did it through a painting and the capturing of light in a way that was appropriate for his time. And you could even look at it as a capturing of something that the Hubble telescope captures today, where you just look into it and it's almost like you don't look at the painting, you look through the painting, because the painting in of itself becomes a window into the experience of eternity. And whether it's this photo or these paintings or the exhibit, these are things that cause you to stand there and just stare and lose yourself and be diffused to that experience. Because these are artists; these are moments that have all perfectly captured the pattern of eternity and activated that material moment for you in a way that it deepens it for you; that it's not just light, it's not just paint, it's not just pigment on a canvas and celluloid and pixels; it's actually something much deeper that pulls you into it and you lose yourself into it.

You can look at Kehinde Wiley's work, the powerful, powerful work that he's been doing. I mean, the guy has not been painting long, and he has set the world afire. And I truly believe that when these moments happen, there is a pattern underneath if that has been activated that is deeply needed and for the first time has been presented to a world in a way that not only it needs to see it but it wants to see it. Because if you look past it again, there's a lineage that he is drawing upon very overtly. I have to look at the motions. On one hand, he's looking at the patterns of power that were defined by a white Western aristocracy, and he explicitly talks about this stuff. Because the African American population has never been depicted in these poses and in these ways, and he wanted to bring his people into that context to reveal the true power of them and that culture. And he could only do that by pulling from these patterns that had been set before. Now what's interesting, these patterns weren't invented by the Western aristocracy; they were, you know, copying them from a much earlier religious context. You know, this is a Carlo Crivelli painting of an apostle, and what you see here are a lot of the exact same formal gestures that Kehinde is pulling on. You see the gold; do you see the hand pulled up; you see the halo around the person. And halos in themselves have a whole powerful visual language of themselves: a throwing off light, of being a, a centering point for duality that resolves that outing, then throws off that light of knowledge of me. I could give a whole talk on that specifically, but nonetheless, you see the continuity and the Harwich of symbolism being pulled on here. Is this repetitive, or is this its own form of progress by returning to the pattern and reinterpreting it in a way to move a culture forward, to move a perception forward, to move a feeling of a people forward?

I loved Victor Moscoso's stuff. This is the guy who did a lot of the psychedelic graphic work in the, in the 1960s and was a huge influence on the work that I did on the Spotify redesign. But deep in his work, again, is a pattern of euphoria, a pattern of understanding a different experience of the world beyond one that is buttoned up and tight and bounded and structured. And so you dig into his work, and what you see is Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was a vociferous reaction to the modernist movement in the creation of machinery. It can be debated that it was a transitional movement; it wasn't even really a movement; it was just decoration; you could say all that type of stuff. But it was a pattern of euphoria because what it was drawing on was actually a lot of the Greek mythology of asperities, a garden of paradise, of beauty, of want, or not of want, but of none, of no corruption, a perfect idealic paradise with which everyone aspired to go. And the two were so tightly connected as into nature that you see that knit, not knit, natural element, that feminine element being brought into the Art Nouveau work. But Mr. Victor Moscoso was bringing in later on a psychedelic element, a drug-induced element specifically because that period was trying to use the visual field, not necessarily drugs, to disorient people, to open them up into a different way of life. So we use vibrating colors; we use bright colors; we use hard typography to read; all of this stuff was ways to open up the mind, to break it up from the structures and structures that previously led it. These are all Bruno Munari reinterpretations of the pattern of euphoria.

I love this one. This, Dorothea Lange created this; she had taken this picture of Florence Owens Thompson, who is 32 years old in this picture. She was a migrant people who, during the Dust Bowl era and the Great Depression, was traveling around trying to find any sort of income for her family to feed her children. And so a lot of these people lived on the road; they lived in tents; they lived in cars; they were just migrants, homeless, trying to find work on farms. This particular woman sold the tires from her car to buy food, and then when she didn't have money to buy anything, she found dead birds to supplement as food for her children. It was a powerful, powerful story behind this picture. And what some artists would look at and take a picture of poverty porn and try to draw out the despair of this woman, Dorothea Lange looked at this and saw a strength; she saw a pattern of the power of motherhood, almost the divinity of motherhood, to rise above difficult circumstances and take care of one's family. And she wanted to capture that in a picture, not the pattern of poverty, but with the same materials, the same things in front of her, capture the pattern of motherhood and motherly strength. And so if you look past her picture and you begin to understand this pattern, what you actually see is a very similar pattern, and that's it's my belief; there's no way of proving any of this stuff, but the parallels between how she took this picture and a lot of the Christian iconography back to Mary is one of the reasons I believe this is one of the most powerful and iconic images in American photography. It's something that has almost transcended the woman, transcended the story, and in of itself that picture has become a picture of strength, of perseverance and love, and a woman being a bedrock of a family in even the most difficult of times that none of us would ever want to go through.

Louis Kahn is one of my favorite architects because he was the type of modernist who worked with the exact same materials, the exact same angles, the exact same kind of scarcity of design choices as many of the modernists did, but his buildings were so powerful and so emotional and so moving that they stopped being buildings; they started being something entirely else. If you ever watch the video, the film called *My Architect*, which was created by his son, who he was a bit of a strange from, and it was the architect, the son trying to understand his father, who obviously passed through his architecture. He interviews one of the people who works in this building, the National Assembly Building in Dakar and Bangladesh. And this particular person, I think he was like a janitor, he was not someone who was like high up; he was like an operations guy within the thing, found out that he was talking to the son of the man who built the building, and he broke down in tears because he was so thankful for what his father had built and brought to that building. And in fact, when India and Bangladesh were in a war and India was bombing Bangladesh and bombing all the major government and military centers of Bangladesh, India flew over this site—this is the National Assembly Building; this is a very important building in Bangladesh—and the Indian Air Force flew over this because they didn't think it was a government building; they actually thought...

It was an ancient ruin of some past civilization, so they thought it was a National Historic Site. So they didn't want to bomb that. But it just goes to show you how someone can take the same basic principles and materials of modernism and create something that is transcendent for the people that walk into it. Because what Kahn built was not something that was just space, the shaping of space; he actually built something that was the pattern of spirituality, the pattern of rebirth. Because at the heart of it, this was the pattern he was drawing upon: the Lotus, which is a key element, a key pattern of the Hindu religion, which again is about spirituality and rebirth. Again, that recursiveness, that pattern, that sense of eternity that the Lotus perfectly exemplifies. And I think the the ceiling of this particular Tower and the Bangladesh building is a beautiful example of that, because one looks up, you see stars, you see this repetitious pattern, and you can't help but not just look at it, but look beyond it to what that part of the building symbolizes, and it becomes an icon for… Is anyone here a fan of Gilligan's Island?

So I didn't want this to feel like this was just a hoity-toity artsy kind of like Yale design crit interpretation of like concrete and lines, because this is stuff that is actually really, really practical and informs a lot of different types of artwork, even mass narratives. So in 1965, Gilligan's Island was created, and it, you know, it wasn't one of the longest-running shows, but it's a show that has sort of seeped itself into the collective consciousness of our culture. And it's not because it was funny; it's not because, you know, it was unique in any way. I believe it seeped itself into our collective consciousness because of the pattern that it drew upon that was profoundly interesting to us.

So if you're not familiar with Gilligan's Island, it's sort of this whimsical comedy about Gilligan, who is a sailor in the red right there, and six other sort of hapless castaways that are trapped on a small Pacific island after a pleasure cruise ends in a violent shipwreck. And the show literally only ran for three years; it only had 98 episodes—that's not very long. But the inhabitants were always trying to leave the island, but they never could. Yet everyone visited the island: the Harlem Globetrotters visited the island, a stunt pilot visited the island, a television crew visited the island. But for some reason, these seven people could never leave the island, ever. It's crazy. And they were just there, doomed to Eternity, to spend it there. So why, why on earth were they there? Well, it's because they're not people; they're symbols of the seven deadly sins, and where they were living was purgatory: you have lust, greed, gluttony, wrath, envy, pride, and this is the most important one, one of the most interesting ones: sloth. Now I'm not gonna go into all of them, and I hope some, many of them are self-explanatory. The one worth leaning into is Gilligan, because I think that's one of the most powerfully symbolic ones of all of this.

Now keep in mind, they're on an island surrounded by nothingness. Water is often represented as chaos and confusion, and an island in mythology is often represented as a center, a pattern that has been brought up out of that chaos to hold itself and to hold a center. So they were on a pleasure cruise, meaning they were indulging in the pleasures of life wholly, and then in a violent accident and a violent crash, as a consequence of their focus on pleasure over the realities of living a more proper life, throughout the rest of their time, they crash into purgatory, essentially dying and going into purgatory. And so this Navy, there, this naval shipment who lives with them, actually is one who can create a boat and sail them away, who can move them from this island into a different island, but he is lazy; he doesn't do it. So this ability to save oneself from purgatory, to save oneself from just living the pattern of the seven deadly sins, is unwilling to do so. So one stays in purgatory because one is not willing to do the work to bring oneself out of purgatory. So that is where they stay. And it's not a comedy—yes, it is, cut; it has taken the form of a comedy—but is it a pattern interpreted not as Dante's Inferno, but as Gilligan's Island? And that is the power of the recursive miss of pattern and being aware of these ancient wisdoms and patterns that inform our understanding of today.

So that brings us back to what we started with: with Batman. The reason I believe that Batman has been so powerful and has, through almost a hundred years of our popular culture, and has never been more powerful and more influential in our culture and our sense of who we are and what we do and the stories we tell about ourselves than now, is because Batman is the belt, the pattern of redemption. It is an interpretation of that pattern. Now that pattern of redemption is told in a lot of different ways in a lot of different cultures, but we are a Western culture heavily influenced by Christianity, heavily influenced by Greek mythology. And so one of the easiest things for us to talk about in this idea of redemption is actually this idea of the Garden of Eden. So I'm not going to assume we're all familiar with it; obviously, the garden and the snake and the apple is something that we're all familiar with to a certain extent. But let me break down sort of the structure of the pattern of redemption that the Garden of Eden interpretation helps make visible and knowable.

So in one sense, there are these two people who live naked in their innocence in a garden. They are saved from death; they are saved from the hostility of the world. It is a perfect Eden where they are so content in their knowledge and the connection and the Rio and the understanding of this perfection that they feel no need to wear clothes. There is no sense of dissonance; everything is one with each other. But at a certain point, they are tempted by a snake, and you're gonna have to take my word for it here, but snakes are often symbols for chaos, for the undefined, for time and change. Again, I won't get into it, but just trust me that that's that's what snakes represent here. Then they take a bite of the Apple; they pull in this bit of chaos into their world and internalize it. And then all of a sudden, they are naked; they realize that they are lacking as individuals; they realize their duality; they realize that the duality of the Garden and the world outside of the Garden—this is their original sin—and it sends their consciousness upside down, and they enter this world of conflict where they know they have done something bad. So they know this difference between good and bad; they know this world of corruption from this world of beauty and innocence. So then they are thrown outside the garden, and at that point, they realize they need to cover up their insufficiency from the elements. So they actually have to make—actually, in the story, they go and hide in a cave afterwards for shelter—then they create clothing for themselves using garments of dead animal skin as a layer to stave off death, which is cold, the elements, and the the difficulties of living in the world outside. And then finally, their descendants, Cain and Abel, start developing technologies to again help protect them from the difficulties of this world so that they might thrive. And so the whole story of the Bible, in many ways, is about that Redemption, about about returning to that Garden of Eden in a relationship with Jesus and and God and stuff. And so I don't want to make this a Christian story, but it's just one interpretation of the narrative of redemption, which is very applicable to the origin story of Batman.

Because in these same structures, Batman lived in a Garden of Eden; he lived in a manor outside of the city. Cities are often associated with corruption and dirt and crime and duality and conflict. He lived as a child of a billionaire businessman in this beautiful, literally walled-off estate. At a certain point, his family leaves a theater show and escapes and goes into an alley, which shows their sense of innocence because they are unaware of their fragility of stepping into an alley, which is often associated with nefariousness, crime, drug-dealing, things like that. And an alley—think of the shape of an alley; it's long and narrow, which again is referencing the sense of a snake. And so they are thrown into this place of chaos where it is not the building on the left; it's not the building on the right; it's this kind of in-between, undefined area. And if you're not familiar with the Batman origin story, that's where the family meets a mugger who tries to rob the family of their jewelry and their money. The father fights back a little bit because the father doesn't understand his insufficiency when faced with this threat. The parents get shot, and Bruce and the robber runs off, and Bruce is left there at the loss of his parents. And so Bruce will forever, in the story of Batman, feel deeply guilty that he didn't do something to save his parents; that is what he feels is his original sin.

So what does Bruce do? Bruce goes and lives in a cave. There is a cave underneath Eden, which is the same structure in the Bible; there's a cave underneath Eden because Eden sits on top of a mountain, so they go into the valley and hide under it. So Bruce goes under the cave, into the cave, and lives under there. That's where he takes on his duality: I am both Bruce Wayne and Batman. And he dawns, metaphorically, dead animal skin as a way to create fear around himself, to strike fear in those who would scare, who would threaten him. So this idea of put of putting things that are fear-inducing on yourself is a way of also scaring away things that would threaten you. So gargoyles on buildings are an exact example of this; gargoyles are not, you know, teddy bears, you know, they're not cute, cuddly things; they are scary things. You put them on a building to ward off bad enemies. The Turkish evil eye is also an example of this; you wear it as a bracelet, you wear it as a pendant, you put it on your door. It's called an evil eye because it is evil, but you use a little bit of it to scare away the evil forces that might come at you. So Batman is using the thing that scared him as a child to scare away and strike fear in the hearts of the criminals who had threatened his family and will threaten others. And he develops technology, most famously known in that yellow tool belt he wears, you know, there's anything he could ever want in that tool belt. But as the story of Batman goes on, he develops the Batmobile, he develops the batwing, he develops a Hulse, a mech suit armor to fight Superman and all of these other people. Bruce Wayne is deeply known for his ability and his company's ability, Wayne Enterprises, to develop technology. And so what Batman does throughout this whole thing is he's trying to overcome his original sin of not being able to protect his family from the vile crime and corruption that broke him and his family into this world of duality. And so that's what he spends his entire narrative life doing, in all sorts of different ways. It is the story of redemption as retold through Batman.

So these archetypal patterns are really powerful, not only for me as an individual and being able to see past the physical, formal things that I'm introduced to, but to also see other movements in pit in time do the same thing. So there have been a lot of—I've kind of learned over that over time—a lot of different kind of key moments in the development of our culture where there has been a return to a lot of these, particularly Greek archetypal patterns. So one is the Romans, famously, when it just looked at essentially Roman mythology and said, "We like that, but we're gonna change the maze." Then the Renaissance did the same thing; the Renaissance returned to the humanist aspects of Greek mythology and Greek philosophy. Toussaint L'Ouverture, in the Haitian rebellion in 1791, would actually use Plutarch's account of Spartacus as a way for motivation, in a way for structuring his own rebellion. So he used the pattern of rebellion in Plutarch's Spartacus as a way to help structure his rebellion, and it ended up becoming the first successful slave rebellion. Then, of course, we have the Romantics who constantly—whether you were William Blake or others, Goethe—returning to a lot of the literature of ancient Greece. I mean, even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was actually the story of Prometheus retold through the advancements of modern medicine to help us understand the same challenges that Prometheus suffered, to remind us of those stories. And then finally—not finally—the Suffragettes—this is what really interesting one that I came across a few months ago—but a lot of times when the Suffragettes would get together, they would read the Euripides plays, particularly this one tragedy that had the heroine Medea and it, who gave this really beautiful monologue about the economic and political and sexual oppression of the entire female sex. And it was the Suffragettes who used this as motivation in the shaping of their ideas of how to find the right pattern to move forward and successfully achieve what they were seeking. And even the Modernists, the early Modernists, not the late Modernists, but the early Modernists were constantly returning to a lot of the Greek imagery and symbols of Mythology, particularly the Vienna Secession and and Klimt would return particularly to the image of Athena. And this is just one thing that was developed, but this this Greek imagery and Nike and Athena were constant themes in the Vienna Secession. If you look at the architecture of the Vienna Secession building, it is overtly Greek architecture.

Now the interesting thing about all of these is that I would dare say most of these people never actually went back to Greece physically. What they did was they went back to the literature, the writings, the stories, the mythologies, the philosophies, to go psychically back to Greece and re- and understand those patterns through the art, go back to where those sources came from. Why? Because I believe that at the end of the day, myth is not a narrative about why the world works the way it does, you know, the story of Dionysus when when her daughter gets pulled into the underworld and Dionysus decides to like raise hell on everyone and so she gets her daughter back. It's not why we have winter and why we have spring. Instead, mythologies are actually stories that reveal the patterns of how life works; it has patterns encoded in stories because that was the way that things could be remembered; it was the way things could be transferred; it was the way that things could really resonate with us. And remember that thing that I said earlier where language is not abstracted things that we just arbitrarily gave meaning to; they are abstracted things that we explained physical phenomena with. So this idea of creating the idea of gods, the idea of creating conflict between the gods was a way of putting something abstract to temporal patterns that happened in the world where there was the Sun moving up and down or why we have seasons or why there are floods or why people who have a lot of hubris end up crashing later on. That's what mythologies do; it teaches us what the map of life is; it teaches us where we are within that map; it teaches us the different stages that we can expect to progress through as we move through those patterns of experience. And at the end of the day, I really hope and believe that it teaches us a reverence for the mysteries that we don't know that we know, the things that we don't know, and that we are always searching and learning to deeply understand and reconnect ourselves to those patterns.

When we start understanding mythology that way, we look at Prometheus as the story and pattern of creativity; we look at Icarus as the pattern of pride; we look at Aphrodite as a pattern of love; we look at Zeus as a pattern of power; we look at the 12 Olympians who sit atop Mount Olympus not as gods who had conflicts with each other and were always fighting with each other, but as 12 different patterns of life that we may live if we choose to purely live it. If you want to be Apollo and you want to purely live in the pursuit of knowledge, then Apollo represents the pattern to do that. If you want to truly live in a pattern of all-consuming, consolidating power, Zeus is the one you look to. That these are the patterns of life, the archetypes of life, so so should we choose to follow them, but they are there for us to understand what the map is so that we can more consciously follow them rather than just stumble into them, unknown about them, and then not move through their stages with confidence and intent and intention. And so this brings me to the last part of what I want to talk about, which is I want to make some of this practical, because this is obviously very theoretical, and it's—it's really hopefully interesting things that I've learned over my career, but this is not just limited to a stage like this; it's not limited to spiritual or philosophical discussions. I firmly believe that it is deeply related to the work that we do, because at the end of the day, I believe that all branding is—and that's just one kind of thing that some of us do in here—is the creation of modern mythologies; that the stories we live today are the same stories that people lived a thousand, ten thousand years ago; they just lived it under different circumstances, with people of different names, under different specificities, but the patterns are the same. And that the more that we can recognize the patterns in ourselves and recognize the patterns and the companies that we lead and the companies that we work with, the more we can get these people and places and things back or to fit a pattern that is right for them so that they might thrive, that they might achieve and do something remarkable rather than stumbling through life like in the darkness hoping to find their way.

And so there's two that I want to speak to about how when one brings pattern to the work, one can turn death into life and turn the mundane into magical, which I think are two of the core promises of understanding pattern and applying its how we live and how we work. So the first one is a case study that I've never shared before, and it's a case study that sort of spans my time at Saatchi & Saatchi, Collins, running that for several years, and then sometime afterwards when the team continued to run with it. I'm sure nobody in here is familiar with Naturalizer; that's part of the reason why the team at Naturalizer asked us to work on it. But Naturalizer is a brand that had been around really since the 1940s, the early 1940s, and had a lot of really early on success because they were creating shoes that were really focused on comfort and utility at a time when this was not the case, and shoes—there's actually a very interesting history and the manufacturing and the design of shoes, which I will not go into—but suffice to say that when Naturalizer was doing this, this was actually a very big idea at the time. So the design was practical; the design was masked; the design was not to be anything other than a comfortable shoe. In fact, it's one of the more iconic images that that they developed in their advertising to show the softness and suppleness of their shoes. Now the challenge is is that over time they they couldn't move beyond physical intrinsic characteristics of their shoe and adapt with the time. So what ended up happening was they sort of lost their relevancy, and they were kind of stumbling around in the dark for decades trying to find it, and they went through the whole gamut of like ways of preventing presenting this stuff, everything from like it's almost like you're, you know, selling a toothpaste dispenser or you're like Lands' End or all of a sudden you hire Bruce Weber and you're trying to do Abercrombie-esque advertising, and in the mid- in late 90s all the way up to, you know, whatever this is more recently. But this is a company who did not have a center to its identity; it did not who know who it was beyond the products that it was making. And you can even see that in the symbol of the company; you know, a symbol is often the things we named ourselves with; it is the thing that we identify with. And so when when you see one symbol changing a lot, to me that is a metaphorical representation of a person searching for identity or a company searching for identity and not knowing that a that you're not making an icon, you're actually making a vessel for meaning. And so they were thinking that, well, if we just change the form a little bit this way, people will like us, versus how do we change the meaning and symbolism of what is in this? And from a business standpoint, I won't really get into a whole lot other than to say that over the decades of them losing their identity and not knowing what they're making and who they're making it for and how to connect, they're essentially their consumer base were the people that they earned in like the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and this was like 2016, so you can kind of imagine what was happening to the majority of that consumer base. So they needed new people to come in, younger people to come in, so we needed to turn a brand that was essentially dying—quite literally, financially dying—into a brand that was thriving and had youth and had both the center of identity but a resurgence in who it was.

Now one of the things that we were working on this as we were trying to find our way into it was we started looking around at very successful fashion companies, and one of the things that we saw was a reoccurring pattern of really successful companies going back to a common theme or a common center of their creative identity. So you have Kate Spade who was drawing upon the pattern of the nineties of the sixties; you have Marc Jacobs who was drawing upon the pattern of the disco era, of the Studio 54 era, with its flashy colors and big gestures and things that were meant to grab attention; then you have Ralph Lauren who was drawing upon the pattern of idealized New England aristocracy. And these were people who were constantly reinterpreting this pattern. The work that Shinola was doing since their launch, they were doing this with partners in Spade; I always thought was amazing because they were drawing upon the pattern of classic idealized Motown Detroit, which I thought was beautiful, and they brought the romance to and they brought the grittiness to it and I brought the realness to it in a really powerful way that I truly think helped them ascend pretty quickly. So what does this all mean? Well, we thought that because all of these brands were creative brands and were defined by their ability to produce interesting things that we were actually talking about a story of the nine Muses. We've all heard the phrase before: Who's your muse? What's your muse? But that actually comes back to Greek mythology. The nine Muses were daughters of Zeus who were placed under the tutelage of Apollo, and Apollo, you may not know, was the the God of knowledge who was deeply invested in this idea of know thyself. So there is a great intelligence that is associated with these nine Muses, and these Muses were designed—not designed—but their story tells them of the people who were about encouraging creativity, enhancing imagination, and inspiring artists, which is why I love this this illustration; it's one person surrounded by these nine Muses, and they again they have the halo around them, which is the spouting of light, holding the lyre, which is the the making of music, the creation of pattern and to beauty. There's so much symbolism rooted in all this, and a lot of poets, a lot of artists would always invoke the Muses before they started working. So Homer would actually—he actually did this in the Odyssey and the Iliad—before he sets out in telling these stories, he actually invokes the Muses to help him tell this story most properly. So at the end of the day, the Muses are symbols of inspiration and artistic creation. So the question for us became, well, who should be the muse for Naturalizer, if all of these powerful brands have theirs and it can be pinpointed, what is the one for Naturalizer? So I think this has to go back to when Naturalizer was created, and we actually looked at the year financially that Naturalizer was most successful, which was the late 1940s and and most of the 1950s and…

We kind of went back and decided to start to look at that period. And what's really interesting, obviously in 1940 is—and especially we go back to Paris in 1940—is this was a period when Chanel was popping. She was bringing a modernist aesthetic to women's clothing, bringing a contemporary—nough stew—the idea of how femininity could be, how women could dress in a modernist European culture. And it completely transformed so much of the fashion trends in Europe at that time.

Now, eventually, some things happen in Paris, and a lot of things had to shut down. Europe was no longer exporting the hot Couture that it was once, and was no longer the center of fashion that it once was because it was preoccupied with some other things. And so what that created was, in sort of the America which had always originally looked to Europe for their fashion and artistic inspiration, it created a moment when America needed to stop looking outward and start looking inward for where its inspiration would come from and who would lead American fashion.

And I think—not I think, I know, because it's been validated by a lot of people—there was one woman who many of you might not know but was extremely influential and transformative in women's fashion in general and American fashion specifically. Her name was Claire McCardell. Claire McCardell had studied in Europe and understood a lot of the modernist sentiment and intent and—and—for making qualities, but she was also deeply American. She was deeply practical. And so what she wanted to do was she wanted to overcome in a lot of American fashion what was considered binding: heavy fabrics, tight, strict fashions designed for women more often than not by men. She believed that women's clothing should—almost—should—this word wasn't invented then, it's a modern word—but be like sportswear. It could have utility; it could be liberating; it could have beauty to it at no matter what point in a woman's day. Clothing did not need to be too utilitarian; it did not need to be too buying. There was this beautiful center where all of this could be brought together. And so this is what she did. She created some of the most contemporary, even by today's standards, designs for women back in the 1940s. Because of the war, because of the limited materials she could work with, she used things like denim, gingham, herringbone—these things that were not considered high-quality fabrics—but yet she cut them into things that brought up beautiful forms that were looser-fitting and came to really define a modern American aesthetic. And many of these pictures, if—if you put them in the context of today—would still feel contemporary.

These are just a few examples. She invented the open-back ideas; she invented the idea of the wraparound. These were all things that gave women at that particular time a completely different experience of wearing clothing and being out in their day. And just to give you kind of a contrast between how she moved the idea of women's clothing forward from the 1930s to the 1940s, I think these are two very good start pictures to each other. The interesting thing was she was also the woman who invented the ballet slipper as a shoe. Oftentimes, it's Chanel who's attributed to that, but it was actually because of the wartime period. Claire couldn't put—didn't have enough leather and shoes to have for her models to make the shoes and stuff, so she found the next best thing that she could do. She used—she used ballet slippers for the runway models. And of course, she was recognized for her work. This is not someone who was often on the sides of the fashion industry. She was on the cover of *Time*; *Vogue* showed her work a lot; and for a period of time, she was one of the most influential female designers in the country, really setting the standard for what American fashion design would be and could be. And even today, we see the echoes of her work in modern fashion, whether it's the utility, the flow, the colors, the use of material. These are all things that have their DNA and their origin back in Claire McCardell.

And so what we did was we said, we believe that Claire McCardell should be the muse of Naturalizer. And so we did a deep dive into her life, her work, and in the aesthetics of the 1940s, and we started pulling out visual language from that that we believed would help us position Naturalizer more to have the pattern of elegant utility that Claire was constantly striving for. And so we took a logo like this, which—to see you at the time—absolutely hated. She inherited—she hated the name; she thought it was too long; she hated the Z and it and everything—and we loved that because that gave us a huge opportunity to make some significant changes. And this is what we ended up creating with Warren Chappell's Linden. It was created in 1938 for the American Type Founders, and we thought it was just a beautiful articulation of the time period that also felt extremely modern. And this gives you a sense of the colorways that we used. And so this was a brand that was not meant to compete with Chanel; it's not meant to compete with top-tier luxury. This is a brand that really needed to feel youthful; it needed to feel contemporary; it needed to feel sort of accessible premium. So a lot of the work that we did needed to feel elevated but also successfully accessible to the people who we're working with. I'm gonna flip through this stuff; I don't need to talk to any of them specifically, but I'm just gonna voiceover that this work and this idea and this source of inspiration were so transformative for the people who worked at the organization that they brought us in to actually work with them on redesigning all of their shoes, creating entirely new collections inspired by Claire McCardell and that period. So a lot of the shoes that you see here were not shoes that they sold prior to this identity development and Andreessen Turing of the brand; they are actually shoes that came out of work sessions and ideas that we worked on and developed with them. And this is all photography work that was led by the team after I had left Collins, but a lot of the conceptual work was done by me and the team prior to me leaving Collins. So they also invited us into changing their retail space. And so we actually envisioned the retail space as if it were Claire McCardell's home. And how would Claire McCardell's home be designed at the time, and where would she put her shoes, and what would be some of the artifacts that she would bring into the home? And so here again, you see the mythology reinterpreted for the different context, trying to bring it out in different ways. And so the brand has been wildly successful since then; it's been reaching a demographic that it had never reached before, and there is absolutely renewed energy on the team and the people that are working on it. And so it's a really great case study and how something that felt like it was dead—it had its Lazarus moment—had been resuscitated because it had been realigned to a pattern that was authentic to it and was more connected to its origin story than any of the shiny objects of contemporary culture that it had been chasing throughout its time.

Now, the last one—inevitably, because I currently work there—is the one that I'm going to talk about. Is one where we took something that is a Neolithic product that has truly been around since that era and made it feel like something—not that you had seen everyday—but made it feel like something that was magical and different in your life. I'm not going to go too much into the background of Chobani other than to say this is what it looked like when I joined it. It was very farm-to-table type of vibe; the design system was—was almost like Apple designed a lot of its product, trying to bring a pattern of technology and apply it to the packaging design. So you had this pattern of like rustic, bucolic farm, and then you had this pattern of technology in this exact same company. And I think it was a really good example of how the company had these dualities: if it wanted to feel both modern but also conservative, progressive but also everyman. And this was a real perfect expression of the dualities that this company was trying to resolve that were both true of who it was but weren't fully resolved in its identity yet. And so when I came in, I wanted to find that mythology. I very intentionally said, the first thing I'm gonna find is the mythology that we are going to live into. And food, in general, has two major mythologies that define it, or two major patterns: one is the pattern on the left, which is food as technology. This is something that really came out of World War II and the sort of mass production of food where we say that food can be fast; it can be easy; it's—it's one simple step, and you can have dinner for everyone. It's really about speed and convenience and how much nutrition is packed into it. Then, on the other side, it takes the pattern of purity: food is something we pluck off a tree or pull from the ground; it is unencumbered by a factory; it is perfect and pure in the form that we receive it from nature. So it is about trust; it is about authenticity; is it about pureness; it is about virtue. That is what that side is about. But neither of those really felt like a Chobani story. And I always felt that there was something else that more truly represented food culture and our relationship with food as humanity. And so I did a lot of my own kind of personal anthropological and sociological dives into this stuff. And as you could probably tell from this presentation, one of the places I started to look was the language we unconsciously used to describe food: brain food, energy shots, soul food, miracle herbs, power smoothies, liquid courage, aphrodisiacs. These are all words that, in and of themselves, are imbued with a sense of supernatural power. Like, even my son—my four-year-old son—to get him to eat something, I tell him that if you eat this carrot, you're gonna be faster than Mommy and Daddy. You know what he does? He eats the carrot. If I didn't tell him that, he did not want to eat the carrot, but because he believed it had magical powers, he eats the carrot. We do that when we drink smoothies; we do that when we eat salmon for brain food; we do that when we drink milk. We all do it.

The other really interesting thing is looking at visual culture. Instagram is packed with these foodies who make food called mermaid milkshakes or unicorn donuts or rainbow—this—these are all things that take on an interpretation of magic and supernatural—nough switch—is all about almost a fantasy type of thing, but nonetheless, it is imbuing these objects with a sense of supernaturalness. There's this great story that someone told me one time: they grew up in Puerto Rico, and one of the things that this person's mom made him do every New Year's Eve was to eat a seed—a citrus seed—because citrus metaphorically promoted growth, and therefore that meant growth and life in the year to come. And so that was a ritual that they did religiously. They all knew it didn't work, but it was participating in the ritual that allowed them to align themselves with a pattern because it wasn't about the fact that the seed didn't sprout in you; it was about what it meant and I'm getting you in the right mindset for the year to come. Now, what's really powerful about all of this is we can find so many stories of this magical power of food: from Aztecs drinking liquid cacao before they go into battle because it gives them supernatural strength, to Popeye, to transubstantiation, to the apple that makes us go to sleep, to Jack and the Beanstalk, to Mario eating a marshmallow and getting really big. This idea of food as magic is deeply embedded in our cultural subconsciousness and the stories that make up our culture. But if you dig even deeper and you look at the stories of paradise across cultures across the entire world, there is one thing—not one thing—but there's sort of one idea, this one element at the heart of all of these ideas of paradise, and that is a magical food. You have the peaches in the garden of immortal peaches; you have, obviously, the apple; and you have the oranges in the garden of Hesperides. The—it's just everywhere; it's a constant pattern we've seen. I was really inspired by that.

Now, what was crazy as I was figuring this out was I would have conversations with our founder because I'm trying to get his origin story, 'cause you wanna make sure you know the origin story, which is inevitably and subconsciously part of our companies and—and vism—entwined and the narrative that we're trying to build for the brand of mythology. And he already tells me—he says he grew up in the Munzur Valley. And I go do a little research on the Munzur Valley, and it's fascinating. It is this valley in between these super jagged, scorched, dogtooth, ragged cliffs that look like—you know—they're—they're just cliffs to impale giants, and then down in the middle of them is this like Eden teeming with life and water and flora and fauna, and it's gorgeous. And in fact, it actually is called Eden on Earth; it is considered like one of those sort of like real Gardens of Edens on Earth just from—from a botanical and horticultural perspective. But the really interesting thing about this area is that it has—to—an origin story rooted around food. It was created—I'm not gonna go into the whole story—but the reason it's called the Munzur Valley is because there was a magical shepherd named Munzur who spilled his milk on these jagged cliffs—he's dusty cliffs—and where his milk spilled started gushing out water. And this is the actual spot where it happened, and that water came to fill down—the valley below it, and that's what created all the life. And so this is a place where—what—life is teeming with food, and no matter how wealthy or prominent or how poor or unknown you are, everyone has access to a bounty of beautiful, delicious, nutritious, healthy food. So when our founder, who grew up in this space, came to America and saw that was not the case here, that became a call for him, a mission for him, because it didn't make any sense: why was the stuff that we pull out of the ground or pull off a tree more expensive than something that a giant multi-million-billion-dollar apparatus produces? And so he ended up buying this super old factory with a small business loan. It was about as dilapidated as this old picture looks. It was in an area of upstate New York which was incredibly economically depressed because all business had moved out of it; the employment was sky-high, and it became this—it became the center of economic prosperity for the entire area. It was death brought to life through the success of this company dedicated to bringing natural, nutritious food to all the people in our country who don't have access to it. And these were the small, innocent people who lived in this factory who tried to make it work, who tried to make it become something powerful that would magically transform the Mohawk Valley—which this factory resides in—into a place teeming with life and thriving in a way that it had never done before for almost 50 years before it. So you get innocence; you get life; you get a resurgence. And what was really interesting in all of this was I came across this quote about the food movement because I was like, there has to be something in the food movement that connects back to all of this. I'm not gonna read you the whole thing, but this is the key element of it: it says, the purpose of life is to maximize the health of all organisms, with the most powerful way to do that being through food. So again, we see the same things about Paradise, the power of food, taking care of everyone, people being free from—what—the health and happiness achieved by all, regardless of class, race, status, background, whatever—but all done through food.

Now, when we were working on this, we had to summarize all this—obviously very heady thinking and patterns that we had seen—and so this phrase became the rallying point for our brand: Good food has great power. And we thought it was a perfect summation of what we believe good food—Nash—simple, healthy food made in a traditional way—could do: it could transform a body; it could transform a mind; it could transform a family, a community, or region and industry. That is magic. Now, the challenge became, how do we bring this pattern to life of food as magic? Well, we didn't want to go the Disney route and do this super cartoony, saccharine, artificial route, nor did we want to do the pattern of goth that Harry Potter had made popular. We had to find our own pattern and a pattern of how do we reinterpret this pattern of Eden in a magical way that was true and authentic to us and also unique but also resonant. And so one of the first things that we found early on was Ektachrome photography. And this comes from the 1960s; Kodak made it. I have no idea how the chemicals do this, but there's something about this photography that you could take a picture of the most prosaic, basic things, and it looks magical; it looks romantic; it looks both everyday but also eternal and otherworldly. You could take a picture of a shirt factory, and it even looks amazing. You could take a peach—this is some of the food photography that we started developing—take a peach, opening up the peach, blueberry, strawberry, a raspberry that's turned into a jewel with the style of photography, and all of a sudden, food doesn't feel prosaic; it doesn't feel basic; it feels magical. And this is one of my favorite pictures that we ever took as a team. The other thing was we needed to figure out the visual language, so we started holding ourselves to a narrative structure. I said, okay, if Chobani lives in this paradise that it created with yogurt—magical yogurt—at the center of it, what would the people who live in Paradise do to express this? Well, they would probably be folk artists because they didn't go to art school; they didn't—you know—they have no idea who Jasper Johns is; they don't know where the Walker museum is; they just—they just express themselves in the only forms that they know to be true and real and authentic. And so we started looking at folk art from the New England area from about 1860 to 1890, particularly a lot of the quilt artwork. We fell in love with the organic forms; we fell in love with the idea that this was something you made to keep you warm; that it had utility; it was often made as a gift to give other people. We loved the beauty and the natural narrative quality of this and the color palettes. And so what we did was—is—we started to create our own folk art elements in our way, hand-drawn, so you could see the artists in this, and they felt purposely naive. We developed our color palette that was natural but also romantic and deep at the same time. And we changed a logo that was developed—the uses a typeface called Broadband, developed by Grant Hutchinson in 1992 to represent the oncoming information internet era—we decided to get rid of that off a yogurt cup and make something like this, which felt like the yogurt felt. And then we just started—making—if we were gonna make a quilt, what would we want on that quilt to help tell a story—a patchwork of stories. We didn't know what they meant yet; we just knew that we were developing that language. I always loved this one; this is one of my favorite ones. And so this is what our visual language ended up becoming. It was hopefully both a mature-feeling but also intelligent-feeling at the same time. Our voice—and you can read it in some of the copy here—was a voice of a fairy tale. Paradise is a place that we're all seeking; it is the endpoint of every fairy tale. So what happens when a brand believes that it has the opportunity to pull—ever—not take people to paradise but to pull everyone into a better life? Well, we believed its voice would be that of a fairy tale book; that we would always be for something, to never against something; that we always believed in big ideas and that anything was possible; and that optimism was not childish, but optimism was motivating; that food could be our—the most radical rallying point for some of the most important changes that have to happen in our society, in our world. And so we brought it to life in as many ways as we possibly could, and it was fantastic, and I loved it. When we started putting it on activist pens and bringing in not just a soft language of optimism but a language of like, let's do something about it. I love the Seed Change pen. And so everything that we design became a window into what paradise would look like. So we had borders around everything, again invoking that quilt artwork, nests. And when we had our cafe, we reimagined the cafe. The rainbow ended up becoming our unofficial symbol because it represented the three things that we wanted to change: we wanted to change people; we wanted to change the communities that we existed in; and we wanted to be stewards of the environment. And we believe that if we delivered on those three things, yes, metaphorically a rainbow would sit over all of us in paradise. And so our packaging went from something that was very serviceable on the shelf but did really represent the ethos and the culture of the company nor the food and was being mimicked by a lot of people trying to carve off some of Chobani's success into something that looked like it was exported from paradise. And this was our controlling idea: that if Chobani made this stuff in paradise and it made it with people who did folk art, what would it look like? Well, it wouldn't look like something that was highly refining; they had Photoshop and, you know, 3D artwork and all this type of stuff. It would look like they made something good enough to tell you what it was but not so much that it's cured what it was. And so everything was hand-done; everything has a sense of imperfection to it and has a sense of a small-batch quality to it. And so we had to vary this system depending on what the proposition was for each product, but in every instance, it is art. You see the human hand in it; there is a sense of playfulness and nostalgia and innocence and optimism that you hopefully see within this because it was the sensibility. This one—we actually even tried to design like a fairy tale book. We invented this woman called Lady Oat, and she was someone—this little fairy creature—who farmed this magic land of organic oats that we sourced our products from. And so every surface of every product became a different page in the storybook of her farming this stuff, whether it was a cross-oat-based yogurt, saw-oat-based milks and creamers, and people loved it. You know, when we launched this, we—we—we were very proud of what we did, but we by no means like expected people to love it. We actually had a conversation where we said, you know, we're very proud of what we did; if everyone hates it, we don't care; we just—we knew it was the right thing to do, and we've had a ball doing it. We had one freelancer tell us that it was the best job she ever had because all she was doing was drawing smiley faces and hearts and flowers, and she was like, no one ever lets me do this. But when we officially launched in November of 2016 the new stuff, the—we were overwhelmed by the responses that people were giving us because they weren't responses of like, oh, this is cool, look what they did, but it was responses like this—like who writes this about a brand identity system? This is what the—the branding critique site—criticism site—wrote about it, which was, you know, a wonderful thing to hear. And then we would get texts like this—this is a screen grab that someone sent me; they ran a design firm, and they asked one junior—potential junior designer—to write about someone who made a design impression on them, and this person was like Chobani because they made yogurt great again. And it was just like—these responses were just amazing; they were almost irrational. And like the number nine billion actually was the lower number on it; the—the number of people who responded to this and like, you know, the vitriol that happens on the…

Internet, the amount of positivity that we got for this—94% was over positive sentiment. There was like five percent that was neutral sentiments that have met what, 1% was negative sentiment—that never happens. We even got one woman who tried to nominate us for the 2020 presidency. So, depending on how Super Tuesday goes, we may jump in and elect and announce our candidacy.

But to give you kind of a before-and-after, this was a brand who was struggling with the duality of its personality, to a brand that resolved that duality of both modernism and tradition into something that hopefully you feel feels both advancing and different, but also something that feels familiar at the exact same time. It's been fascinating to watch this in the year since, you know, Mike. Most people might look at this and sort of start talking crap about the people who kind of drew upon inspiration from the work that we did. These are all brands that launched after we did. I look at it, and I frankly, I love it. I think it's incredible that other people who work in the Wellness space, in the food space, have looked at it and said that was such a perfect articulation of the idea of food, of the idea of wellness, that we just want to bring it into what we do. I see it as something wonderful to celebrate, and hopefully, you know, as people play with this, they'll return to the pattern and continue to reinterpret it their own way.

But I had one person write a comment on one of my Instagram posts one time that says—he or she, I can't remember who it was—always sees the world as BC and AC. BC is before Chobani; AC is after Chobani. There have been comments that have come in that talk about the Chobanization of the wellness space and the food space. It's—it's the only time in my career where the work that I have done has been turned into a verb, has been turned into a milestone marker of people's understanding of time on the design spectrum. And people often ask me like, well, how and why do you think it got to this? And I'm like, you know, honestly, I don't really know. The only way that I can explain it is that I was drawing upon a pattern. I really and truly, with my team, used this pattern to make decisions on everything that we were talking about. When we talked about the language of Chobani, it's fighting for happily ever after. We talked about folk art when we talked about how we talk about our advertised and all that type of stuff. All of that takes us back to the idea of paradise, and how do we—every time we launch a campaign, every time we do a new project—how do we constantly reinterpret that so the brand always feels dynamic and never the exact same, but always feels coherent and the way we express ourselves? Oh, this was one—CBD dog biscuits almost basically took our packaging design and put it on—on their packaging. But I think this comment, I think really sums it up, and it was one of the moments—it's a little fun to laugh at—but it's honestly, it's one of the moments where I felt really proud that the work that we did in terms of patterning the brand paid off, because this person articulated it in their own way. They are drawing upon this island, this idea of paradise; they just happen to say it's in a hamlet, and you know, we're sitting on like a little grassy knoll, like Hansel and Gretel and stuff, but they're—they're remarking upon that exact same pattern.

So I'm gonna close it out. If any of you have ever been to the Academy gallery in Florence, you know that there's a long stretch of hallway to see the Statue of David. Obviously, the Statue of David is structured that way to catch your eye and to pull you in and to focus on that. But if you look just a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right, you see something that isn't the finished product. You see—well, I should say the David is really considered the advancement of art; it's—it's sort of like a pinnacle of statue design and—and sculpting. But if you look to the right, you see things that feel undeveloped, things that feel that maybe they're left in the past. And what they are is Michelangelo's—what they're referred to as—prisoners, these unfinished sculptures. But I think for me personally, I find them actually more profound than the Statue of David, because what I see in this is not something unfinished, but I see that eternal struggle between chaos and order, between the expression of a pattern and the noise from which we are trying to pull that pattern from. And what's interesting is there's a thought that Michelangelo purposely left it this way, that this was how the artwork was supposed to be set, because what you see is a gradual progression and emergence from that chaos. But the final one is not fully free from that chaos; it's still stuck in it, not fully free. And I think that's how we all are at a certain point, and I think that's the ciao that we face every day, is that we may see patterns, but there is so much noise. The speed of progress distracts us; we are blinded from seeing the pattern sometimes because everything that changes in front of us and reflects the light and blinds us in some way. So I think that struggle is really real. And this is—this is my favorite one out of all of them. This one's called Atlas, because it's actually the idea of like lifting the world off of you to kind of emerge. I think there's a real sense of struggle in this one, but I also think, interestingly enough, in this struggle between the duality of pattern trying to emerge from chaos is also one of the reasons why the Batman stories resonate—not because of just the garden being thing—but also what Batman is up against. The stories of Batman are best told and most often told in contrast with the Joker. The Joker is the most powerful villain, the most captivating villain of the entire Batman legacy and anthology, why? Batman represents that character trying to emerge from chaos; he represents that character trying to create order through the language of justice, trying to eradicate the chaos and the disembodied, the—the unknown, the undefined. And the Joker is chaos; the Joker is confusion. And the best moment when you can really understand that is in the Christopher Nolan series when the Heath Ledger Joker basically says, "I'm like a dog trying to catch a car; once I catch it, I don't know what to do." It's that sense of just creating chaos for chaos' sake and breaking apart and pulling apart order. The Joker is the undefined; you don't know where he is, you don't know when he's gonna snap, you don't know if he's being serious or being funny. And Batman constantly struggles with the Joker, never being able to fully eradicate it.

And so this concludes the talk, because I think it is a perfect example of the struggle that we all face in our lives, of trying to extract that pattern from chaos so that we—the collective us, a larger society—might thrive by aligning ourselves with that pattern in the most pure way possible. And that is the fight we as creatives play every single day, trying to return to that pattern, but also return that pattern to our everyday psyche and consciousness of how we exist in the world and what we choose to do. So thank you. I know I ran over a little bit. That's the first time I ever gave it; I didn't know how long that was gonna run. But how much time do we have for Q&A? Okay, so we have about 10 or 15 minutes for Q&A if anyone has any questions. I'm sorry, this one. Okay, I decided this year that I was really gonna research everybody that came and spoke here, and I—I looked at your stuff and I so did not expect this. Time and—and I just—if my goal—I never want to be a—Thank you. Thank you so much. It was really great. And I just wanted to say that I saw one model as part of this, and I don't know if this is a question or not, but that the circle of your—of pattern never really reaches back to its origin; it always advances a little, and that becomes the arrow of progress. Yeah, if you could maybe expound upon—

Yeah, so I think that's a really good comment. So the—this idea—well, so I had a few slides in here that I decided to cut out because of time—but that flat circle can actually be seen as a sphere, right? So there's a—there's a vertical orientation of connecting air and matter with each other, idea and—and form, but there's also horizontal quality as well. The horizontal quality represents the idea of a center and the periphery, which are separated by the fringe. The fringe is that fuzzy area where you don't really know if it's what we're familiar with and orderly and comfortable, or it's the chaos that can't be explained, and no one knows—is what's out there. And so the center is this idea of—here is our true order and values and center stones and pillars of what we believe in. And the further you move away from that, the more you lose sight in connection with that until you're—you're out of the city and into the wilderness, is one way of talking about it. And so the slides that I had in here were actually the ideas expressed in architecture. So you can always walk into any city in the world and find the tallest building, and that tallest building represents what that city is about. And so I had four examples in here: I had a German medieval city-state, which—a king at the top, king's castle and aristocracy, candle at the top of a mountain, because that's what ruled the feudal land. I had a church in Florence that, when you looked at the skyline, the church was by far the biggest thing standing up, because it was the church—the Roman Catholic Church—that ran everything. And then the other one that I had is the tallest building in Tokyo, which is a financial tower, and Tokyo is the world's banking center. So these tallest buildings always represent the center of the culture. And one of the reasons—whether it's a castle or a church or a financial building—and why they're so tall—certainly there's some hubris attached to it and stuff like that—but symbolically what that means is this is the center, and that the further you venture away from this, you'll still be able to see the center. So you can go out into the wilderness, and you'll still be able to see the center that represents and symbolizes everything that we believe in. So the idea of progress—mixing progress with recursiveness of patterning—is the idea both of the return—the return to the center, returning to it—but also as you move outward, still being able to see it from a distance, so that no matter what new things, new unexplained things that you're playing with, you can still connect it back to the patterns that are represented by the center of your sphere of existence. And so, for instance, like I'll just make it practical, like in design. So I believe design is my center. I have ventured out into entrepreneurship; I have ventured out into finance; I have ventured out into advertising; I have ventured out into Greek mythology; I have ventured out into system dynamics. That is me getting away from the center, but I always know that I can bring—I'm connected to design over here, and I can see it when I'm in like socio-bionic dynamics over here, because I'm curious about it. But the recursive—ness—I bring what I learned from the wilderness, from the outside, into the inside of my world, and I make it part of the recursive—ness—pleura in that same center pattern again. Because every time you go back through the center of the pattern, you're bringing it out into the world. You go back to the center of the batter and bring it out into the world. So that's the recursive—ness—meaning turning or—meaning turning—in a matter of matter turning into new meaning and so on. So that's recursiveness, but you can still go—this is so conceptual, I'm so sorry—but—but—but yeah, so it's—it's a bit of a—it's a spiral, but if that's how you combine both—that's me resolved both progress and the recursiveness of patterning with the same thing. I didn't want to get into that because that's super nerdy, and I didn't have time for that, and I thought that was a little too much. But yes, that is how you resolve that into a higher-order idea of growth. Yeah. Yeah, there was a really great question. Thank you.

I was wondering how much of the—sorry, that was not—how much of the work that you're doing ties into either shamanism or plant sciences. Seems like a lot of the overlap with—yeah, role of the shaman in—in culture.

Yeah, so I've—I've many years ago, prior to Chobani, I did a lot of research into sort of First Nation shamanism and stuff, particularly a lot of like the illustrations—the human-animal hybrid illustrations that you see like carved on the cave walls of—let's go—and some of these very primitive cave drawings and stuff. I—what's interesting to me and always stuck with me about that is the being able to migrate through the—to dualities of existence and being able to find—you—that it's a lot of what those human-animal hybrid things represents. It's being able—the idea of representing a unification between the two. And so you can look at it in two ways: one is being able to understand those two worlds and resolve it into the understanding of the individual being able to pattern oneself with the successful patterns of animals who have major threat. There's this book called *Crowds and Power* by Elias Canetti; he's an Italian writer who won a Nobel Prize like back in the 1970s. But one of the first things he talks about early on in the book is how much—like the—an event—Eve story—humans were born innocent and—to lists—and essentially subject to very dangerous things in the world. So what humans had to do phenomenologically was to look around at the patterns of what was successful around them and tried to imitate it. So bears hibernated in caves, so humans went into caves; cheetahs hunted in a certain way, so humans would hunt in that certain way. And so by taking on the animal skins and doing the ceremonial dances and respecting the buffalo like when you killed it and carved it up and stuff like that, was a human—an individual human or a tribe of people—trying to align themselves with the patterns that the animal made manifest, because those animals thrived, and therefore, if—if the human could align themselves with those patterns, the human would be okay as well. The plant sciences stuff, I haven't gotten into as much. The Michael Pollan book is really interesting to me, and at some point, I'd love to get into it, but as you can probably tell, I'm probably overwhelmed with information right now, so that'll probably something I get into in ten years. But that idea of taking those—those plant-based psychedelics and stuff and—it opens it up to a different perspective and the underlying forces of the world is really interesting; it's—it's—it's a little out there for me right now, but it's pretty cool. Thank you for a life based on digging so deep into insight and sharing it with us, and it—and tonight, because of where we are, you know, on primary night, I want to throw something at you that you can answer in a really open-ended way, but with your knowledge of mythology and recursion, as a country, what's your riff on where we are right now and maybe—in vibing some of the optimism you brought into the—into your recent rebrand?

It's so—one of the—so there's—there's a lot of trip wires and landmines in that question. What—one of the things that I will say, 'cause it's—it's obviously a big and difficult question, is that there—there's a disintegrating center to our culture right now. And I think Twitter is a really good example of that as a microcosm for our society right now is that all voices are being amplified, and when all voices are amplified, there is no center; there is only a tyranny of centers. And so what happens is—is that there's no shared narrative or shared sense of reality that we all have together. One person's reality is another person's pseudoscience, which is another person's fake news. And so it's very challenging in our world right now to build a center which is all based on foundations and agreements as we build upward when no one can agree on the most basic of things. And I think that represents a culture that is renegotiating what its center is. It—we are breaking eggs to make a new cake. I have no idea what the new cake is, but it is a creative process that we are going through, and at some point, we're gonna have to stop letting everyone be their own reality and start coming together and starting to build a common reality together. The challenges is that there are so many narratives being introduced, in so many frames of reality that are being introduced, and it's all moving so fast that the second one reality emerges that might feel like it's something to build on, it's immediately washed away by the chorus of new voices, of the course of new complaints that come in. And so you're starting your sandcastle all over again, and that's the real challenge that we have, and it makes it hard for people to come together because of that. And I don't—I don't—obviously, I can't read the future, but the things that I know about mythology and that relationship between the center and the chaos, between meaning and making, and those kind of like those two fields of interaction do give me a sense of what's happening, but they don't tell me where it's going to land. I'm sort of—just for me personally, I'm sort of just riding the waves; I don't quite know where the waves are gonna land me on the shore just yet.

Personally, I am—What uh—books would you recommend? I get this question a lot. The—the thing that I would say is follow your curiosity. Your curiosity will never ever let you down. You—there are things that you have questions about; there are things that you're curious about. Don't try to co-op things that I've read that I've gotten curious about, because one, they won't mean as much to you because it'll feel like a reading assignment, and you're waiting for inspiration. Number two is you won't remember it because it doesn't mean anything to you, and it might not be practical or applicable to you. So when you're curious about something, it's that special little moment of meaning and applicability, and when you have both of those things, the content that you come across becomes more profound and stickier. And I was actually having a conversation—I think it drinks earlier—about this exact same thing, which is don't look to have to build through reading a bag of marbles of knowledge, where I would call Jeopardy knowledge, where you just know random facts about stuff, but they never really synthesized or build up to anything. Build a building of knowledge where every brick—every book you read—is a brick that builds on something else that came before it, because eventually all those things are gonna stick together and hang together, and then one day you'll find out you have a giant cathedral of knowledge and enlightenment that took you years to build, but it's profoundly meaningful and powerful for you in your life. I mean, just to give you like one example, I wrote a book in 2008; it took me four years to write the entire thing. And long story short, I decided not to publish it and just literally closed my laptop, and 13 books or 13 chapters that I wrote like forever left me with incredible sorrow because I was never gonna do anything with them, but it ended up being a springboard to everything that I'm talking about today and more, because I built at least the first room of the cathedral with them, and even though that cathedral didn't end up being the type of value that I thought it was going to, it proved the basis—or at least one facade—that allowed me to build something even much greater than I ever thought I could. And that's all because of curiosity. Okay, I think we're done. [Applause]