The umami experience

31:25So the whole idea is that there is one genre in popular culture, and that genre is literally spectacle. And the spectacle means anything that's going to grab intention. And that means, oh, there is, you know, the metric is media value. And it's kind of like, great, what does that mean? You know, like, yay. and people are like saying oh this fashion show got media value of x xyz and that's kind of like becomes a valuable term in its own and they're comparing it and that's like that great that means that that it's been shared x amount of times on youtube that's been talked about it's been viewed on Instagram.

32:19Yeah. But what about sales? Like, did it sell? What is its cultural value? What is its commercial value? None of that matters. The only thing that matters is we measured spectacle. And we measured spectacle in this particular moment, and you achieved success metrics for this spectacle, and then it's going to drop until the next spectacle. And that's going to be incredibly costly. But sure, go for it. And algorithm now owns spectacle. At the time with Guy Debord, Rodis, there was no such thing as AI or algorithm. But now this is the showmaster. The producer is the algorithm. And it's weird that brands are not getting a hang of it.

33:05Well, I imagine a lot of it just comes down to metrics and what you can report and what you have history on. I mean, there's so many companies that I've worked with who know that there are better metrics to report on. but they continue with the ones that they have. I mean, why? They don't want to lose a job. Yes, exactly. It's a lot of work to change a simple metric. I know. It's hard. Hey, bro, if you're like so numbered, it's lower than the number that you saw. You better explain that. I know. I know. Or you better saw another number that's higher than that number. But I think to the umami point, I think, look, I think, craftsmanship is mean is is both an input and a consequence of it here's what i mean by that so like if if in the context of an attention economy where you're totally playing for scale you're totally playing for just big numbers and you're trying to quickly grab people because you know you have a split second in their feed to get them to stay an extra second for you and register that metric you're not going to invest a lot in craft you're going to go super lazy on the craft do a bunch of super cheap variations, A-B test the hell out of it and let the algorithm sort it out.

34:17I know for a fact there are a lot of agencies who approach it that way. Don't write the one best headline, write 50 headlines and let the algorithm tell us which one's the best one. So you don't invest in Kraft because Kraft doesn't have any value for it because you're operating in a attention economy paradigm. But if you shift to a legibility paradigm, recognizing that signaling is the most important thing and getting people to stick with the content and build the memory structures through engagement with it and have that content linger with them, craft becomes one of the most important things because it rewards them deeply for sticking with it and becomes sort of like a little bit of a dopamine drip in their experience of it.

34:57But you're not going to, you're probably not going to get the scale. No, it's a serotonin experience. Oh, sorry. Is it serotonin? Yes. Dopamine is here. Serotonin is Prozac. Oh, okay. I always get those mixed up. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Anna. It needs to stay in your brain, to circulate. But like, I think to the point of craftsmanship, you know, as people who are makers, you know, you and I, to me, it's optimistic as things move more towards a legibility economy because there's a business rationale behind it that craftsmanship starts elevating again as something meaningful to invest in because it has direct impact on metrics that matter in this context.

35:43Media impact value, that's all things. media input value. Yeah, I mean, look, I think that... Can someone explain me what it means? And no, I don't know what it means in literal sense. But no, I don't know what it means in business sense or cultural sense. I don't think it means anything in cultural sense. I think in business sense, I've always seen it meant as... Oh, how is it in business sense? ...earned impressions and what you would have paid normally to have that type of reach, for example. So it's an... My understanding is it's an equivalency thing. Yes, it's made up. No, it's all. I'm not saying it's not BS.

36:19I'm just saying that's the that's the way it's rationalized. I understand. How much would you pay to reach the audience? Yes. But market determines the price. Like how much would you pay in traditional media at what like what is the price at what point? Those prices change all the time. Oh, yeah. Again, it is absolute BS, but it has a lot of numbers are in reporting. But it all sounds very specific and official. It makes me both sad and amused. Totally amused. Because when I see people who in all seriousness are pitching and they're showing me their pitch decks and they use that, I know how this that meeting is going to end.

37:10anyway i want to stay for one minute on uh bootlegging and also on selection of when you look across the what you just said the the gen z influencer is selected as a creative director chief creative officer that's it that's entirely outcome of the of the society of spectacle because you don't you don't need to have any other skill than spectacle production skills You need to produce as much hoopla as you possibly can, as much media impact value as you possibly can, you know. So that is kind of metrics of success. And then I'm really, really impressed. And I love the idea of knockoffs as the most creative thing around.

38:01Because when you have endless sequels and you have no new things ever happening in luxury fashion brands, which are known for umami in the first place, inordinate amount of time, energy and high quality material that used to go in production of those luxury materials. That's like luxury outfits. That's why they cost so much they did, because it was like, oh, my God, it took 100 hours of human labor to create a dress. That's umami for you. You know, like you wear the dress and it's like you can see that craftsmanship. You kind of get joy just sort of looking at it. And then you have additional joy of knowing how much labor went into it.

38:43And then additional joy for knowing that that was like pearl that was like harvested at the bottom of the ocean for the past like hundred years and so on. This is like endlessly unfolding stories. When you sell a t-shirt for 500 bucks and put a log on it and call it luxury, there is no umami there. I mean, that is umami, actually. But there is no new umami. Then you don't have to work for it. That's like the symbol. That's a spectacle. The symbol is right there for you to consume. And you create scarcity by making 500 of them instead of like, you know, as long as many. So in that sense, knockoffs are like you do a little riff.

39:22That's your connoisseurs, tastemakers, amateurs, fans. Those are the ones that are creating the most creative things around. So tell that to your Austrian economist. Austrian economist. But yes, let's go to sincerity as one of defining moods of this generation, Gen Z, because, you know, Gen X, they had like this remove, cynical remove. And then millennials, they have like ironies. So, you know, you have Balenciaga 2000 IKEA bag and you have like ripped tights. Thanks to Demna as well. Poor Pierpaolo Piccoli. He like inherited that. Like, how the hell am I going to sell ripped tights for$7 ,000 when irony doesn't work anymore, you know?

40:11And I do think that that vulnerability and earnestness is something that has become Gen Z's armor. And that caring is now, I think, like, is that authenticity? Because that can also be gamed. Anything can be gamed by algorithm. It doesn't need to have sort of the story behind it. It can't just be imitated. And I feel it's a lot imitated. Well, I think the sincerity thing is a, it's a play against what normally see in an algorithm, which is highly performative and cultured. But I think this is maybe performative vulnerability. No, it is. It's performative vulnerability. That's 100 % what it is because you have the codes and cues.

40:55You have tears. You have a sheet pulled over your head. The lights turned down. The camera is at a wrong angle and stuff. It's like, oh, it's just to create difference in the consumption feed so that people linger longer and write a quick comment or have some superficial form of engagement on the content. It's Empathy for sale. I love it. Yeah, it's 100 % what it is. I wish Gideborg was alive. So he can see his... You know what? We should totally... It's like Ernest is a spectacle. We should just dump all his writing in an AI avatar and just interview the AI on this and convert it to a voice. I know.

41:36And have him comment about the world today. I mean, but I like sincerity is a spectacle. That's like this article is just writing by itself. Yeah, yeah. You know why? Because there's like, sorry, on Substack, there was this flurry of, is it cool to care, Ernestas? And, you know, like your favorite Eugene Healy, it was like, it's all about, you know, and it's just not true. It's just not like, it's a gotcha moment. Yeah, I mean, it's anything that gets turned into content that moves up in the algorithm is spectacle. I mean, the very performance of that content, it's spread, it's repetition. That in of itself reveals it to be spectacle versus.

42:19It is. That's why it was like Kardashian's is like, yeah, we had so much plastic surgery. Let us tell you all about it. Yeah. We had like, I mean, that's why clavicular is all about looks maxing. Like that's why Lux Maxing is a form of earnestness as a form of spectacle. Love it, you know? So that's it. It's kind of the more you can reveal how much you can do things to your body and talk about them. Like whereas before that was all like, no, this is all natural, you know? That was anti-spectacle. Now the spectacle is in peptides. Hepatites, wellness is, actually spectacle is masked as wellness.

43:03Love that. Take that, Gidebor. There is new kid in town. And that's me and I. I would just generally say if anything pops on the algorithm, it's spectacle. This is inversely. This is spectacle couched as wellness. Oh, yeah. Because it gives you longevity. It gives you discipline. And you can just go more and more and more extreme. Having the theory and the thinking around Neo Mami is really cool because I think it starts to articulate a point of view on how things are kind of evolving and stuff. But I think the part that needs to be kind of grounded a little bit is like for anyone trying to make this, it's nice to point at it and then have like an art critic conversation about what is and what isn't Neo Mami.

43:47But at the end of the day, like how do you actually make it? So Ana and I went through and put together like a list of kind of assessment questions that people can kind of ask themselves as they're building something for the legibility economy. No, I need it, actually. I just chime in. Give credit to you. So one of the first questions is, does it have at least three distinct layers of meaning to it that you can point to? And I think this one's really valuable because at the end of the day, if there's just a superficial meaning that you can quickly grasp and then but there's nothing else rewarding, there's no reason for people to stick around.

44:28And that's really more the attention economy. But if you think of like it as layers where each layer that you decode, each layer that you notice is a reward, it starts to become really interesting. There's this great book by this guy named Stuart Brand called How Buildings Learn. And it's literally about that topic, how buildings learn. But one of the core concepts he had in it was that buildings have different speeds. Because we all know how buildings learn. Yes, I know. They have eyes and personalities and lives. Nears and brains. Okay, go on. But it had layers. And he talked about how some layers of a house, like the foundation, moves really slow.

45:04And other layers move extremely fast. And that would be like the furniture layer. You're constantly rearranging the furniture maybe every two years or so. And then there's like a whole bunch of different layers in between that. But I think when we think of like Neo Umami, there are different layers. There are some layers that should be understood quickly. So you bring people into it, but then other layers that might take a little more effort, a little more time to reward. So maybe it's like hiding some Easter eggs in it or hiding some coded meaning into it. For instance, like if you remember the TV show Arrested Development, which in my opinion is like one of the greatest shows ever.

45:41There was always it rewarded you for watching and rewatching because there were always little moments hidden in the background of each episode that referenced earlier storylines or like Star Wars. So Star Wars has, of course, the space operatic narrative of good versus evil driving the whole thing. But there's all these like kind of coded little moments in it that speak to Norse mythology or Joseph Campbell narrative structures and so on and recurring patterns throughout it. So you keep watching and watching and you're rewarded by seeing all these types of things. That's the difference of like a quick to understand meaning layer and a slow to understand meaning layer.

46:21So I think thinking about that in terms of what you're building, if you're building it for the legibility economy, does it have those different layers to it? It is. And I also love the example that you had in here of Ralph Lauren contains, especially at Spelman College, because one thing is to slap a logo on a T-shirt that has one layer of meaning. This is Gucci t-shirt. But the other is having like a skateboarding Ralph Lauren bear, because that refers to a very particular previous instance when a rapper used Ralph Lauren bear and created that necklace and that was then put on a t-shirt and so on.

47:03You need to know the reference. You need to know the subculture. You need to know who was involved. You kind of have different associations that are all put in one image. And that actually, for some people, that image is just going to be an image. For others, those connoisseurs, fans, and so on, is going to have layers of meaning which are going to be more rewarding. So the next question sounds similar to the first one, but it is a different one. So if the first one is about different layers of meaning, this new question is, are there specific details that reward pausing, zooming, or rereading something?

47:40So like a really great example of this is from my friends at Shopify who launched a Renaissance edition of a website. And if you've been to the website, you could just type in Shopify Renaissance edition to see it. this breaks like every performance best practice of websites it's incredible like it's almost like baroque in the amount of stuff that they put into it but what they're showing is they're showing off a lot of features and at the same time they're hiding all these easter eggs within it you know like when you change it from light to dark mode there are new content there's new features if you You tap something that, you know, you wouldn't have expected.

48:23It reveals something and changes the cursor. All of this goes far and above beyond the functionality of the site. But I haven't seen the metrics for it, but I would imagine the stick time on the site is astronomically longer than what a typical thought leadership website would have been. And so it's a great example of a website designed for the legibility economy versus the attention and algorithmic economy. The other one that I'll jump to is, is there something to decode? Is there like a hidden language or references that you're using? And so like a really famous example of this would be rowing blazers.

49:06So despite all the advice that the founder of that had in starting Rowing Blazers to take the crests and the colors and the stripes and reveal the hidden kind of prep school Ivy League codes language behind them, he said, no, no, no. I don't want to make this accessible. I want to make it discoverable. So it looks great and you're drawn to the aesthetic of it, the style of it, the point of view of it. But you don't actually know what any of this means. You have to go and find it out. And that is putting intentional friction. Whereas, again, a attention economy would have just said, oh, make it accessible, make it so everyone can understand it really quickly.

49:49But understanding without earning it does not translate into memory or appreciation or even taste. And so that entire brand was built around the whole idea of using highly coded prep school language and crest to build its brand equity. Another one is pacing. So Ana and I have talked a little bit about this in past episodes, but is the pacing of how the content or the merchandise releases designed, is it paced to unfold or peak? So if you look at Netflix, Netflix famously puts all the content for a season live all at once. But they did it differently with Stranger Things this time. They phased it into three batches to kind of like extend out the cultural conversation around Netflix so they could do more programming around it.

50:42So they could feed some of the fan communities and some of the online conversations about where the story was going or who or what was going to happen with Vecna and stuff like that. That was a very specific choice to make sure it didn't peak. Another one would be, does what you're creating lead to reconsumption rituals? such as like an annual rewatch or morning routines or tuning in for a drop at a specific point a day or anything that's like every week language. So, again, kind of staying in the streaming example, HBO Max made a decision to do the opposite of what Netflix did. HBO Max, for all its new episodes, drops them once a week over time.

51:25And it's a much different viewing experience with the binging habits on Netflix. And as frustrating as it can be because you want to see whatever the next episode is, it actually is more rewarding because you don't feel burned out by binging on the content and effectively having like a content hangover after sitting on your couch for like eight hours watching the stuff. It's a slow drip so you can think about each episode. And when you get to that final episode, it's earned. And you sort of appreciate it more because you went on that journey through those episodes. And of course, you know, Starbucks pumpkin spice lattes, you know, every it's a seasonal thing.

52:03It's just for that period. And then it goes away. Purposeful restriction to make the heart want it and long for it when it is away so that when it comes back, people are even more excited about it. And then there's the last ones that I'm going to mention is this question of, are you creating an intentional anti-clarity zone, meaning not confusion, but what you might call suggestive ambiguity or productive ambiguity that invites the imagination and subsequent interpretation of the viewer. So this can be as simple as like a blind box, whether you're buying Pokemon cards or a Luvuu, you sort of blind box the product so that people don't know what's in it and their imagination races.

52:47I mean, the mind wants to do nothing more than to complete something that is ambiguous or having scheduled drops where you don't know what's exactly going to drop, but you just know that it's going to be great, for example. So I watched this film, If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You this weekend, which is a great, great A24 film. But one of the really interesting choices that they did in this was – and this doesn't give anything away or ruin it for anyone. But they made a point to stay on the main characters, Rose Byrne's face, for as much as they could because it was all about her expressions reacting to the moments in the environment that she was in.

53:32And so what you never saw was – you heard the voice of the husband, but you never saw his face. And you never saw the face of the daughter, who was a big catalytic character in all of this. And all your mind is doing the whole time while you're looking at Rose's face kind of reacts to this situation around her. You're just constantly feeling in like, why can't I see the daughter? What is happening with the daughter? Why is the daughter off camera? And so you're really mentally invested in trying to interpret and answer these decisions. And it just made the whole experience much more rewarding.

54:08rewarding. And even the ending, the way it ended, leaves open to interpretation as well, which just makes it incredibly satisfying to watch versus something that has a neat, closed, literal ending to the movie. So those are all things that you can kind of ask yourself as you're building something. We also have some stuff around like, after you launch it, what are some things that you can pay attention to to see if the neo-umami quality of what you've made is resonating with people. So what you've just produced, whether it's content, product, aligned, whatever it is, is out in the world. How do you know it's clicking in a, you know, mommy way?

54:48Well, the first is if it is online in some way on socials, are the comments longer than an emoji or a quick tape reaction? Are people writing thoughts around it and trying to interpret it. The other thing is, do people repeat consume it? Are people buying a ticket again to go see it? Are people watching it again? Are people consuming it again? The other question is, do people save, bookmark, clip it at an unusually high rate compared to other forms of content? Next question. Do people collect, customize, or create with it? Are they creating merch off it? I think of severance and the Lumaan aesthetic that people were interpreting and wearing based on what the characters were wearing.

55:33I'm thinking of, you know, like Beyonce's Renaissance tour, how people wore specific outfits to be part of that Renaissance experience. I even think of like Crocs and gibbets, little collectibles that you constantly put on the product to constantly customize them. The other question is, is there a secondary resale market? Meaning has the product built symbolic meaning around it because it is associated with good taste? And so you can think of like Ralph Lauren has this, Patagonia, luxury watches have this as well. I want to stay on this one for a minute because I think it's important for brands.

56:11They can engineer the secondary market value. Basically, a jacket, let's say a jacket that Brad Pitt wore in Fight Club, a leather jacket, is infinitely more valuable than its identical twin that has not been worn by Brad Pitt. So imagine that if you're releasing your hero products or you have a collection, you have foundational items, how do you enrich them? By someone wearing them, an influencer, a creator, a celebrity, or enriching them with a story. It's the whole idea of economy of enrichment, how objects are made more valuable, more legible by being put in a specific cultural context, given specific heritage, being associated with someone or something that gives them that legibility.

57:05And that can be engineered in the production process, in the marketing process. So once they are in the market, the resale value spikes. So I would very much encourage brands to think like that and then to create that unique addition. And that's not just a limited edition. Even your regular collection items can be enriched because they were maybe released at a specific event or pre-owned by someone who is notable that people will want to have it. It's like you want to create a basis for collecting, basically. You don't want to, people are paying so much more for if object is a collectible versus is object is something that you consume.

57:49You know, to sort of wrap it up, one of the things that I've loved about this topic is, and I tend to do this with a lot of different topics, is I love to find like a historical precedent with this stuff. Because a lot of the stuff that we talk about isn't necessarily new. It can feel new. Like, oh, we're reacting to a ghost. Oh, there is nothing new under the sun. There's nothing new. Nothing new. But what I've loved about this is how closely it resembles 16th century oil painting and the masters of that period. Oh my God, I just wanted to say that. Did you really? No. Thank you. Thank you for diminishing my position as I share this thought.

58:30Thank you. But if you go back and look, if you really want to understand like the masters of neo-umami, like a culture that was practiced in this, taught it, built entire mechanisms around how to do it. 16th century oil painting is the way to like it's because when you go and look at these paintings, oil painting was really unique at the period of time because of the way it allowed high contrast and fine detail to happen in the painting. And so what you get with these painters is a lot of layered meaning with emotion, like a lot of Rembrandt. You get a lot of use of light to kind of like add depths of meaning to something you were literally looking at.

59:12So Caravaggio did a lot of this. But you also get a lot of like really tiny hidden details built into it. So you'll see people where the masters were all about painting something for slow seeing, that the more you sat with it, the more it revealed itself to you. So you would see the artist painting their reflection in a mirror. You would see objects positioned next to each other to connote a very specific type of meaning or idea. You would look at like hand gestures and it would say something about the person. And so the painting wasn't documenting what the artist saw. The painting was pulling together all this layered meaning about the subject matter.

59:54And so for anyone who's like really interested in how to build slow seeing or what we were calling, you know, right now is this neo-mommy approach. Those kind of Dutch, Spanish, French masters of that period were great at it. Goya is very famous for that, how he positioned his figures in Little Infanta. And basically how, and then yes, of course Dutch paintings, how you always see the painter in like reflected in those round mirrors. So like totally. Like there's this whole idea in that period of meaning density without exposition. how much meaning can you pack into it was a level which signified a level of your mastery without having to be so literal and on the nose about i mean there are paintings where there are skewed like skulls that when you just look at the painting straight you just see this weird stretch of color and it makes no sense but if you step to the side and step down your perspective on the ink shifts and you see very clearly that it's a skull sitting at the foot of the patron.

1:00:59So anyway, part of me loves this because in a way, the neo-mommy thing is getting us back to that craftsmanship and that layered storytelling that seems to have just been flattened and smoothed over the last 20 years. I love that example, Lee. And you know what, let me just then go to one thing, which is, you know, there is no, it's not accident that Adorno and Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin created culture industry, and they blamed photography for creating the age of mechanical reproduction, because photograph truly flattens all of that. And it can be endlessly reproduced. Everything that was 3D, what Neo-Mami is, it's 3D things, three-dimensional, because your paintings are three-dimensional, not just literally, because paint is three-dimensional, but because the meaning is many-dimensional.

1:01:56So for me, the recap of this conversation is question. Where to introduce taste, friction, craft, skill, time, participation, so that the meaning can accumulate. So participation creates memory. Content creates impressions. So new value unit is participation that creates memories. Yeah, I think for me, I think the really interesting thing about sort of the evolution of this umami idea is this movement from just simply consuming it and appreciating the experience of it to more participating in it. And, you know, accumulating the knowledge, building relationship with the subject, signaling with it and sort of contributing to sort of extending the umami of it.

1:02:47Love that. So next time, let's talk about luxury and how luxury had and lost its soft power. So stay tuned for more 16th century paintings and good conversation. Class up the joint sometimes, you know, sometimes you just got to put a nice painting up and say, this is a nice place. It's going to be recorded at the Met Museum, guys. The East Wing. Bye. Bye.