Zach Lamb is a Principal Brand Strategist at Concept Bureau, with previous roles at Martin Williams, and Colle McVoy. He holds an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and B.A. degrees in Economics and Anthropology from St. Cloud State University. He lives in Minneapolis, and is wintering in Florida.
So I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine and a neighbor who helps people tell their story. And I love it so much because it's a big question and it's a beautiful question. But because it's so big and beautiful, I tend to over explain it before I ask. So before I ask, I want you to know that you are in complete control. You can answer any way that you want to, and it is impossible to make a mistake. The question is, where do you come from?
At the highest level, I wish I had the answer to that question. But I think I got to take you at face value. I come from Spring Valley, Wisconsin, a tiny farming town of about a thousand people.
I have to answer that way because both of my grandparents were high school sweethearts. Both sets were high school sweethearts in the same graduating class of 1940 from Spring Valley. And then they had their families and included my parents who were high school sweethearts in Spring Valley in the graduating class of 1978. And my grandpa started a farm supply store that became like a hub of that community that I worked at growing up. So yeah, it's just deep roots in rural farming, Wisconsin. And I bucked the trend. I didn't meet my high school. I didn't marry my high school sweetheart from the class of 2005. But both sets of grandparents and parents did that.
And I hated it at the time, being like a budding intellectual, wanting to get out of rural life. But now I just cherish it. It's given me such a more sensitive, I think, human perspective than if I hadn't seen all of the poverty around me, all of the farming culture and rural lifestyle. So now I'm actually really grateful for it in my work as a strategist and social thinker. I feel like I wouldn't be me without that. So long way of answering, I come from farmland of Wisconsin.
What was Spring Valley like? What was it like growing up there?
My graduating class was 50. So you knew everybody, the whole town. I got Robert Putnam's bowling alone. There were bowling leagues. There were the Lions Club. There was a civic feeling. And my mom would drop me off downtown and I would ride my bike around all day. And that was daycare. It really felt like I was the last boat out of NAM before the world got real scary, before we had to stop hanging out. So there was a civic life to it.
What do you carry with you from that? You said that you've got a new, I don't know, a new gratitude of some sort. But what do you carry with you from that?
I think just a sensitivity for the aching people's hearts, the desire to make something of yourself and maybe not be able to do it. And then making yourself okay with that. And just humility, just seeing humble people and seeing the goodness and the virtue of that kind of work and that kind of discipline. And just like how you make meaning out of a life that is more grounded in a community and in connection with others versus such a maybe striving, you know, like a material acquisitive form of meaning making.
And yeah, I just I just it's influenced the writers I like. And, you know, I looked around one day and I realized all of my friends, you know, you all fit the same pattern. You're all kind of like rural kids made good, you know, you're all you're all rural kids that have left the city, or I mean, left the left the country and moved to the city and it was kind of like a realization that it's like, ah, this is somehow something I'm selecting for and the people around me now.
Yeah, that's amazing. What was young Zach like? What did you want to be when you grew up?
I remember getting that question from the guidance counselor and thinking it was the most absurd question. What do you mean? I don't want to be anything. Yeah, I don't want to do anything like just like the fact of doing anything seems preposterous, like, why would we do that, you know, and then of course I went carrying that in, you know, I went through a phase of like what's bumming you out this week. I don't know the fact that I have to work 40 hours on this planet that I didn't choose to be born on in the first place, just to pay bills, you know, so that that was kind of my 20s. But, you know, young me I think I just always liked ideas and I was always just a question like, why do we do the things that we do, you know, that was like my overarching question and so once I got to college and found social science, it was a pretty natural fit.
Yeah, yeah, can you tell me a little bit about that when you discovered that question, I guess, or when you recognize that was something that drove you.
Yeah, I think, you know, it's kind of connected to the small town thing I'm going to pick on religion here and I don't mean to because I you know I've now become a more spiritual person but you know when I'm in middle school and all my friends are going to like catechism and, you know, Jesus and religion was such a part of like their lives. Coming from their parents, of course, but then I'm just like, why I remember thinking like why are we, why are we not questioning this why why is why are you doing this, you know, like, why is this so appealing to so many people, because it's like, not for me, you know, I just, you know, my mom always said you don't have to be, you don't have to go to church to be a good person I wasn't ever baptized I was kind of just raised, you know, independently and it was that confrontation with the religiosity of my peers, I think really started, you know, tuning my eye to social construction of reality and social norms and how culture ultimately works and how this whole this damn thing is all knitted together, you know.
So catch us up. Tell us, tell me, where are you now and what do you do.
So right now, I'm the principal strategist at Concept Bureau. Awesome, awesome place I'm so thrilled to be there we have a community called Exposure Therapy which I'm so grateful that you are a member of. And, yeah, I had been in a PhD program, I was going to be an academic and sociology, and then started to get a little disenchanted with that, and realize I didn't want to spend the next 10 years of my life, hopefully finishing this PhD, it's kind of like all of the men that entered this class they all dropped out to pursue other things you know, funny how that broke down on gender lines and checked out.
But the two that made it the two that made it all the way through were women?
Correct. Yes. And so anyway, and so then I did a year of that and I was like, you know what, I don't think I can finish this I don't think I want to finish this and read about that time a friend of mine was dating a girl and he's like, she's got a job that I think that you would really like you should get a coffee with her and it turned out that job is brand strategy.
And so from then it was like Yep, all right, this is my path I can do sociology, and I can do it faster and I get all the same skills and I was kind of off and running and so then I kind of bided my time in Minneapolis, doing the ad circle there's a lot of advertising agencies in Minneapolis and so you can make a career there pretty easily. I was getting jaded with that too, you know, maybe commitment issues, I guess, after about six, seven years.
I was like, I don't want to keep going to work every day, like in an office and it was like, you know, just, this is right before coven and I started to decide I wanted to be a couples therapist. So I made that, you know what, I'm going to change my career, it's not too late, I'm only about 30. And so then I enrolled in a program I was taking classes at night coven hit, lost a job kept taking classes and then Concept Bureau called an email showed up in my in my inbox and I'd always wanted to be at a think tank, you know, I'd always wanted to be at a consultancy, not making ads getting bigger like what does this brand mean? How should we be in the world, you know, just some of the like it's a it's a more existential way of like building brands and a more philosophical way and I just had never been able to hit that level because we were trapped in this world of COVID where you had to physically go to work and there were just no consultancies in Minneapolis. So then I'm like, you know what, I can always come back to being a couples therapist. I just love this right now. So, you know, the greatest decision I've made career-wise for sure.
Well, tell me about what was the couples therapy? Where did that come from? And what did you learn in that brief exploration?
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think—maybe I’m hoping—I’m laying down the theme and doing myself justice, just in terms of the sensitivity in my heart, you know? I just wanted to help people. I wanted to... you know, I understand—we started this conversation talking about coming from a rural area, and what it feels like to watch someone not make it, despite trying their best, or getting in their own way.
And there's just a part of me that can't help but help. I do strategy from a perspective of inside out, you know—psychology out. I’m always asking, “What does it feel like to be you?” That’s how I make decisions about what strategy we should recommend.
So when I’m doing qualitative work—interviews, not with clients, but with people—I’m asking things like, “What doesn’t the world understand about you?” I’m trying to understand how people tell stories about themselves to themselves, to make sense of their place in the world. What is the story they’re telling?
I’m just really sensitive to that kind of thing. So when I hit a bit of an existential crisis around 30—you know, that moment when you realize life always has a next step, and suddenly you’ve done all the steps—you start to wonder, “Now what?” That’s a common moment, I think. I started asking, “Do I really like advertising?” And I thought, “I don’t think I do.” It was starting to feel kind of soulless. So I decided to try something else.
I spent about a year and a half in grad school, in an LPCC program for therapy, and that definitely made me a more sensitive strategist. I engaged with Carl Rogers. I’d read Freud before, but this time I really read Freud. Not that he’s the most sensitive thinker, but still—there were a lot of frameworks I hadn’t had before. Things like internal family systems. I already had anthropology, economics, sociology, and a bit of armchair philosophy from podcasts—but not this.
And I think that was the missing piece. Now I can trace a through-line—from structures and culture, all the way into someone’s head, into their feelings and emotions. It’s all connected.
What do you what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?
I think the joy—I love the puzzle of the work. And, you know, because it is creative. It’s a creative act. A strategist who tells you it’s science—it's bullshit. It’s not science. You use inputs from science, sure, but ultimately, you’re going with your gut. Five strategists can be given the same problem, and they’re going to come up with five different answers. You put yourself into this work.
One of our values at Concept, which I really like, is that you let the work change you. You're changed by what you learn. So it’s this dance, approaching the horizon of the unknown, solving a problem—between you and the work. You get to put yourself in it. Like I said, it’s a creative act.
And so, solving that puzzle, and trying to do right by the people—that’s the part I love. Clients can very easily check their humanity at the door and recommend things, and I’m like, “Would you be moved by that? If you saw that, would you do it?” No, right? So the other part I love is being able to advocate for what I think are real people with real human emotions.
Yeah. Where did your relationship with qualitative begin? And how do you what's the role of fall and how you learn how you work?
Well, I think it is—you know, I suck at math. So, I mean, it started there—not really liking quants. But as I’ve gotten deeper into the business, I think qual is the only thing that feels real.
I’d be way more comfortable making a brand recommendation based on ten one-on-one, hour-long in-depth interviews than on a 300-person quant study. Like, that’s just where all my druthers are. And I know you’ve talked about this with others on the podcast, so we don’t have to go too deep into it—but I want to hear your view.
Why? Why is it? Why is it more real? That's a confrontational question in me that in my world to ask you why, Zach, but why you say it's more real, you'd rather make a decision based on 10 interviews or 300 survey. Well, what's that about?
Now I back myself into a corner. Yeah, I just I just think because again, I trust my it's not all comes back to like I do believe it's an art and it's not a science and like I trust my ability to pick up on nonverbal cues to pick up on what's being communicated without being communicated, you know, to read between the lines and to get to get for lack of a better word alive and to really like sit with a person and understand them from the inside out.
And to the best that you possibly can in an hour long interview over Zoom. But that's just going to give you so much more information than a quant survey. And who are these people like there's all kinds of sampling biases, who's going to give their time up to like fill out a survey right there, you're biasing something, you know, and so yeah, and I came up like my undergrad was anthropology.
So we didn't do any quantum it like it was all ethnography I was going out in the field and so just just died in the wool I guess of that approach and took the GRE and I got a high score and verbal and like a 15 percentile in math. So it's like, yep, what's, you're going to be a cool guy. Yeah, we have we have much in common.
When it comes to math and numbers, it reminded me of something I’ve shared before about Freakonomics. Someone had asked about a quote that was going around in engineering and development circles. It said, “The plural of anecdote is not data,” and it was often used to advocate for quantitative research while dismissing any value in qualitative interactions.
We have this bias that’s really shocking—against actual human interaction. We call it “anecdotal” as a way of dismissing it. But Freakonomics did a kind of Snopes-style investigation into the origin of that quote and found that it had been misattributed. The original version actually came from an economics class at Stanford, where the professor said, “Of course the plural of anecdote is data. What else could it be?”
It really highlights how blind we can be to the value of qualitative work. And I’m always looking to celebrate it.
You mentioned two things earlier—that you studied anthropology, and that you tend to work from the inside out. So I’m curious: how do you think about brand? When did you first encounter the idea of “brand” as a big concept? I know you talked about being in Minneapolis, in that advertising-adjacent world, dreaming of a think tank or consultancy. But when did the idea of brand as a “big idea” click for you?
I was kind of a weird kid in the sociology PhD program because I wanted to study what we buy—how we use purchases to communicate, to tell stories about ourselves. I was fascinated by the daydreaming we do inside our own heads, and how that links to identity. How we carry that into the world for status, for social signaling—for what we’d now call personal brand-building, even though that term wasn’t really in use at the time.
Everyone else in the program was focused on race, class, and gender—not that those aren’t valuable topics—but I was always drawn to questions about identity crafting through consumption. I think because I felt it. I’d done that myself. I always reasoned from the inside out: how do I feel, and then, are those inner feelings shared by others? And if not, what explains the difference?
That’s my process. I think it’s everybody’s process, whether they admit it or not—starting from themselves and reasoning outward.
So once I got into advertising, I was immediately drawn to semiotics. It’s right in that space: what is the sign value of a commodity? Not just the economic value—what I pay for it—or the use value—what I do with it—but the symbolic value, which in our society is often the most powerful.
That was the kind of question I really wanted to dig into. I had some background in semiotics through anthropology, and it just clicked. That lens on brand—the symbolic dimension—has always fascinated me.
I truly believe brands do own themselves, but not really. They’re owned by people. A brand is only as meaningful as the meaning I assign to it in my own head. So while companies are constantly trying to steward a brand image, they’re only one half of the conversation. The real work happens in people’s minds and hearts, in the way they experience life and make meaning of the world around them.
That’s where brand lives: in the heads, hearts, and souls of the people. And that realization—that brands live in people—has really shaped everything for me.
What do we mean when we say “meaning”? Or maybe more specifically, what do you mean when you say it?
The word of the young decade, I think.
Do you think that’s true?
I really do. Yeah. I mean, when we say “meaning”—or “meaning orientation”—what we’re really talking about is a reading of the world that makes sense. Like: I know who I am. I know what’s going on here. I understand the rules people are playing by. I have a sense of what’s likely to happen if I do X. That’s the foundation. So, my first take at defining “meaning” would be simply: orientation. And from there, it moves into purpose—what is my role within this system that I now understand? Where do I fit?
And the reason I say it’s the word of the decade is because I think we’re in a meaning crisis. Hopefully we can dig into that…
Let’s do it now.
Okay, yeah. Where do you want to take it? It's an easy rabbit hole to fall into.
What do you mean when you say “meaning crisis”?
I’ll give you a theoretical answer first, then a practical one. But to get to the practical, I kind of have to start with the theoretical.
I always start this conversation with my guy, Nietzsche: “God is dead, and we have killed him.” That one short aphorism really captures the shift. For most of human history—up until the last 150 years or so—people didn’t have to think deeply about who they were, how they ought to live, or what they were supposed to do. You were born into a place, likely died in that same place, and probably lived just like your parents did. Life was short, and all the big questions had answers already mapped out for you.
There was structure. There was orientation. And a lot of that came from an abiding belief in a divine force—Christianity, or earlier, animism or other religious systems. But over time, we secularized. Nietzsche saw that coming. He predicted the consequences: nihilism, existential boredom, the unraveling of shared meaning. He saw it all coming in the 1880s.
Then came the existentialists—Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—who picked up where Nietzsche left off. They said, “We’re free now. We get to create ourselves.” But wow—what an obligation that is. It’s not just a gift, it’s a burden. Suddenly, it’s up to us to define who we are, how we live, what we stand for.
That’s where Sartre’s quote comes in—possibly borrowed from Kierkegaard—“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” And that’s it. Freedom sounds amazing. Who would say no to it? But the flipside is: there’s no map. You have to draw your own. And that can be terrifying.
From a sociology perspective, the thinker closest to my heart is Émile Durkheim, the founder of the field. One of his landmark studies was on suicide. His big idea was that suicide isn’t just an individual act—it’s socially patterned and measurable. He defined four types of suicide, and one of them was anomic suicide, which comes from his concept of anomie, or normlessness.
Durkheim argued that during times of rapid social change—when norms dissolve—suicide rates go up. That lack of orientation is deeply destabilizing. And he was right. Later sociologists built on this, like when the Soviet Union collapsed and countries had to transition into capitalist economies. Suicide rates spiked. Why? Because the map disappeared. The rules changed. People were thrown into the dizziness of freedom. And that’s hard for humans. We don’t like that. We crave structure, clarity, meaning.
So how do you articulate what drives someone to suicide in those moments? Is it the dizziness of freedom? Is that what you’re saying?
Yes. Exactly. It’s just—people can’t handle the change. It’s ironic, because the Buddhists are right: life is nothing but ceaseless change. But we aren’t built for it, not really. We crave structure and order and norms.
For a long time, we had that in society. And now, we don’t. So we’re left to figure it out alone. And that’s a huge part of the meaning crisis.
There’s also an economic piece. De-industrialization was brutal. You used to be able to support a family of four without a college degree—just by walking down the street to a decent job. And yeah, gender roles were repressive—but there was stability in that. It came with orientation.
I have a low-key theory that the meaning crisis is, in many ways, a very masculine crisis. I don’t think women spend nearly as much energy writing or talking about it.
And to get really practical: I’m from Wisconsin. I was once at this dive bar in a rural town, and there was a guy there with his wife. I didn’t know them, but I guess he had a habit of getting too drunk and locking himself in the bathroom. Sure enough, he did it that night.
Eventually, some guy goes out to his truck, grabs his tools, and pops the door open in two minutes. And he was so proud. For the rest of the night, he was telling everyone about how he opened that door. He puffed his chest out. And I remember thinking: guys just need to be needed. That’s it. They need a role.
So yeah, in addition to the breakdown of the big, guiding stories and narratives, there’s also economic breakdown. And a lot of men don’t feel needed anymore. They’re not helping themselves much either. It’s just kind of a mess.
That’s really interesting—framing the meaning crisis as, at least in part, a crisis of masculinity. I also loved your earlier point about orientation. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it described that way before. Can you say more about what you mean by that?
Yeah. I mean, think about how many choices you have to make now—every single day. Every single moment. My co-founder at John the Lead likes to say we’re living at peak complexity when it comes to decision-making.
There’s an overwhelming number of decisions, not just day-to-day ones, but also big ones about who you want to be, how you want to live. That wasn’t always the case.
Like, Sartre—he used the example of being a waiter. I don’t know why, maybe because it’s a very French thing. He said, “My dad was a waiter, my grandfather was a waiter, so I’ll be a waiter.” That’s how it worked for so long. You didn’t have to choose your path—it was chosen for you.
But now? That entire system is blown up. We all have to make a million choices, and we’re responsible for them. It’s incredibly anxiety-producing.
So now, anything that can give us orientation—a narrative, a system, a structure—we run toward it. And that’s where brands come in. They’re not just products anymore. They’re part of a marketplace of meaning systems.
Have you seen The Leftovers on HBO...?
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
It’s my all-time favorite show because it’s a parallel for exactly what we’re talking about. Suddenly, nothing makes sense anymore. In The Leftovers, 2% of the world’s population vanishes—poof. But the story’s not about where they went. It’s about how everyone left behind tries to reorient themselves in the wake of sudden chaos.
That’s the exact parallel to where we are now. We’re living in chaos. And everything that happens in The Leftovers—the mystics, the soothsayers, the prophets, the rise of religiosity, the pull toward nihilism—you name it, we’re seeing it now. It’s all a response to the bomb dropping, to that 2% disappearing—whatever you want to call that moment where meaninglessness arrives and orientation disappears.
And now we’re all scrambling to find something to hold onto, however we can. Brands are doing it. Influencers are doing it. That’s what post-reality is to me: it’s a marketplace for meaning. A marketplace for orientation. Something to solve the cognitive burden of too many choices. Just—let me be a person, right?
That’s also the appeal of a cult. Joining a cult is like being a child again. You don’t have to make choices. Everything’s decided for you. And I don’t mean to belittle that—I worry maybe I sound like I am—but honestly, it speaks to a deep human need for order and meaning. I don’t blame anyone for the way they try to solve the meaning crisis.
Yeah, 100%. I remember, as a young man, bristling at the idea of being a self-made man. I mean, it was romantic, sure—but it also felt like too much. Too much work. Too much pressure. The responsibility was overwhelming.
Right. And that’s the thing—this meaning crisis is also a culture crisis. It’s a breakdown of what culture is supposed to do. I remember talking with Grant McCracken and he said it explicitly: our culture doesn’t play the role of culture anymore.
And if you look at someone like Joseph Campbell, he’d say that the role of mythology—of culture—is to help us transition from childhood into responsible adulthood. To help us understand how to be a person. And we’ve lost that. Culture doesn’t do that now.
There’s so much evidence for that—especially when it comes to men. That’s part of why I’ve paid attention to the conversation around masculinity for a while, even when it felt like something you weren’t allowed to talk about. Because it was seen as zero-sum: if we talk about men’s struggles, does that take away from gender equality?
But more and more, I think we’re seeing that it’s not either/or. It’s a huge, complex shift. And we’ve just been through a period of uninstalling one dominant cultural system—a more feminine-coded system, if we’re thinking in binaries—and now we’re installing a new one. And it feels deeply masculine.
Yeah. How does that feel to you? What do you make of that?
I agree. I think society is in its Übermensch era—the age of the hyper-individualist. The aggressive, self-authoring individual. And it makes total sense as a backdrop to the meaning crisis.
Because when there’s no script anymore, when institutions break down, you’ve basically got two options: you either sink into nihilism, debauchery, the Dionysian—carnal, chaotic energy (and trust me, I’ve been there)—or you flip into the opposite: “Fuck it, let’s go.” You try to make something. Be a creator. Be an agent of chaos. You say, “There are no rules—so I’ll make my own.” That’s the Übermensch impulse.
And, of course, Trump fueled a lot of that institutional breakage. That’s a whole other conversation. But what he did—intentionally or not—was break open the sense that anything was real or trustworthy. And that fed right into this moment we’re in.
So those are two very common reactions to this cultural void: one is collapse, the other is assertion. And then there’s another group, too—those who just... don’t make it. People who feel like they’re not even in the game. The incel archetype, for example. Where nothing’s happening in your life. You’re just stuck. And that’s where I worry most. Remind me what the original question was again?
I was just asking for your just thoughts on the vibe shift. You know what I mean?
We were talking about Zuckerberg—you know, how he’s sort of remade himself—and Elon, and all the behaviors and shifts that have happened. I’ve often said that people like you and me, we know what we’re talking about when we talk about culture and meaning. But when I talk to someone outside our field and use the word culture, they usually have no idea what I mean.
But I remember—on the Wednesday after the election, I forget the exact date—it felt like everyone in America, maybe even the world, felt something shift in the air. Do you know what I mean? That was culture. It was palpable.
Yeah. For me, that moment—well, I think for a lot of people—it was after the assassination attempt. You could feel something start to shift. That was the first real clarion call that the way we’ve been doing things needed to end. I’m not a Trump supporter, but obviously—thank God he didn’t die. You could just feel that things were about to change. And certainly, that feeling intensified after the inauguration.
Yeah. I feel like, for all its best intentions, the last 10 years of left politics have left a lot to be desired. It tried to put its best foot forward, but ultimately, I don’t think it served the people it was supposed to be serving. Sorry—I’m kind of losing my train of thought on this one.
No apology necessary. We’re pulling on a lot of threads here. One of the conversations you and I had—and I’m just going to indulge myself a little bit—was about that moment when Elon did the salute. I’m not sure if “salute” is the right word; there’s a specific name for that gesture.
Well, it depends on who you ask.
Right, that’s true. But through the lens of everything we’ve just talked about—the cultural shift—I kept coming back to Elon as a father. His son—well, I don’t want to say “got caught up,” that’s unfair and I’ll probably bumble through this—but his child transitioned. And that experience seems to have been an inciting incident for him. So I interpreted that gesture—at the inauguration or whatever event it was—as vice signaling. That was the phrase I landed on. It felt like a mirror to all the virtue signaling that’s been the dominant cultural expression over the past several years. What do you make of that? I’ll admit—I’m a little too fond of that phrase, which is why I’m asking.
I love it. I absolutely love it. As soon as you put that into the community, I was like, yes, that’s it. It tracks perfectly with this broader shift others have described—from light to dark, from Apollonian to Dionysian.
Earlier this summer, I went to a Zach Bryan concert—big country musician—and it was the first time in a long time that I was around a crowd that was probably center, center-right, to far-right. Sixty thousand people. And being there, I started paying attention to the culture around it—how much energy is behind things like the internet’s young right, and this rightward shift among younger people.
And I was like, well, duh. Especially after going to that show—it’s just more fun. It’s a much easier glass of water to drink. It doesn’t demand as much of you. It doesn’t require constant self-questioning and work. And I think that’s what I was trying to get at with wokeism: even at its best, with the best intentions, it prescribed a tremendous amount of labor—emotional, moral, intellectual. It was all about deconstructing.
And a lot of the time, it felt like we were trying to convince ourselves that very real aspects of life—especially gender differences—didn’t exist. And of course, well-meaning people like you and me went along with it, because of course we’re not bad people. But there were always some clear-headed voices—I always appreciated Sam Harris for this—saying, “Hey, we can still be liberal, but what is happening here?”
So that brings me back to the Trump assassination attempt—it felt like the first big signal flare. Like, we have to stop. This has gone too far. And sure, the right has gone too far too. But right now, they’re offering a simpler form of orientation—something the left is not doing, particularly in addressing the masculine meaning crisis.
And there are figures on the right offering real prescriptions for how to live—ones that actually make people feel good. Like, yes, you should work out. I wish I did it more. Yes, you should exercise. It’s good to have a role. It’s good to provide for others. These are things that were once vilified but are, at their core, good.
I’ve got to credit my wife here—she’s going to listen to this—because she talks about the overcorrection theory of culture and personal growth. The idea is, when you notice something in yourself that needs to change, you often overcorrect. But eventually, you pull back to the right middle point—and in doing that, you’ve solved the problem. I think culture works the same way.
So when people on the left bristle at what Meta or Zuckerberg are doing, or the more masculine posturing we’re seeing—I’m leaving aside the potential Nazi signaling from Elon for now—it looks like overcorrection. And maybe it is.
I actually wrote a piece a while back and called it Conspicuous Commitment. Because I started noticing a pattern online—especially among men. You started seeing these videos: guys alone, often no one else in the frame, going through intense morning routines—supplements, red light therapy, cold plunges, weightlifting. No people. Just them. It was like, “I’m exiting society. I’ve already exited society.”
Self-care became the perfect accompaniment to our era of solitude. Against the backdrop of nihilism—where it’s hard to believe in anything, hard to find orientation—these routines were a way to signal: I’m committed to something. I’m doing something.
And often, it included aesthetic self-denial. We were inventing structure where there was none, just to feel okay. And it reminded me: it’s a luxury to have hope. To have commitment. To be able to say you believe in something.
And for a lot of men, those commitments have taken the form of martial arts, weightlifting, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Theo Von.
And like, I’m fascinated by the comedian—the rightward embrace of comedians. I don’t think that’s because they’re necessarily on the right. It’s because they’ve always challenged structures. And suddenly—like a frog in boiling water—the left, which started off with good intentions, became the man. With its growing inability to tolerate dissent, with the thought-policing that started happening, comedians were vilified. So naturally, they moved into opposition. There was this shift, this clustering around all of that.
And then, of course, Trump won. And Trump does what he does—he floods the zone. You know, issuing a million actions so no one can keep up. Most of it’s not true, or it’s not really going to happen, but he creates the perception that it is. He crafts the narrative. And honestly, Trump is great at reality crafting. He just is. You’ve got to give the man his credit. It all just feels like the last... I don’t know, this has all happened really fast. I love the auto-correction—or overcorrection—theory.
And I’m thinking back—you mentioned deconstruction—and in one of these conversations, I spoke with Jason Josephson Storm, who wrote a book called Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. I’m going to speak with him again, but I’m so drawn to metamodernism as a framework because it helps explain where we are now.
In talking to him, the core idea is this: and I remember David Graeber had an amazing piece in Harper’s called “Army of Altruists,” where he pointed out how many people on the left got highly educated and went into academia. You can see a lot of progressive social movements as an expression of a generation inspired by the ’60s countercultural revolution—people who picked up the tool of deconstruction and just started tearing everything apart.
But with no constructive impulse. No capacity for building anything meaningful. It became, really, a weaponization of critical intellect. I remember taking a literary criticism course in college and how powerful it felt—how comfortable it was—to deconstruct a text. It was easy. You could take anything, tear it apart, and rebuild a whole alternate reading of the world around it.
So I guess I’m indulging myself here, but I wonder: what’s your awareness of metamodernism? Jason talks about it as a corrective—an opportunity to reintroduce a constructive, creative, relational, productive way of being. Someone else described it as “maximum irony and maximum sincerity”—this idea that we can be naive again, believe in something, be idealistic, and try to build something real in the world. Because it’s like we’ve been in a desert for 10 years just breaking rocks.
Yes. So well said. I feel that completely. And I think the culture of the left that we’re now trying to move beyond was, in many ways, the last gasp of the postmodern impulse—to deconstruct everything, to tear everything down. And that’s an incredibly important energy. But it can’t be the only energy. Because there’s no creative force in it. It’s entirely destructive.
And after you’ve destroyed everything, what’s left? You’ve got the leftovers, right? I’m not saying that postmodernism alone is to blame, but it played a big part.
And yeah—I love that. I’m a huge David Foster Wallace fan, and I love that he’s getting his due in these metamodern conversations. Because even in the ’90s, he was already critiquing postmodernism. He quit drinking, and while he wasn’t a teetotaler, he started trying to live his life grounded in sincerity. That was his whole thing. And what he saw around him was a culture that had become allergic to sincerity.
It took a while, but now it seems like we’re coming back to that. His politics were often kind of oblique—you weren’t always sure where he stood—but what was always front and center was this call for, and belief in, the importance of sincerity. Sincerity as a kind of salvation.
So it’s encouraging to see that come back through metamodernism. I think it was Paul Anleitner where I first heard that phrase—maximum irony and maximum sincerity. That’s it. That’s the kind of fiction I like, the kind of storytelling that feels most alive now. I think maybe that’s always been true—we just over-indexed for too long on critique. And if I borrow my wife’s overcorrection theory, it’s hard to imagine us overcorrecting into sincerity right now.
It's funny—this has been so much fun. The last interview I did was with Michael Erard, a linguist who wrote a book exploring what he discovered about ritual through people’s last words and babies’ first words. He developed this framework of ritual that had sincerity as a fundamental principle. That word hadn’t really landed for me like that before. And now here we are, ending up talking about it again.
So I want to dig deeper into what we even mean when we say “sincerity.” He mentioned the Quakers—how they may choose not to say anything unless it feels sincere. That it’s important to mean what you say, to speak with authenticity and truth.
Yeah. I don't think that’s the case anymore.
No, it’s true. Or—it’s hopeful, maybe.
Maybe. I have one closing question for you, since you just mentioned your last interview. That one sounds fascinating. But what do you get out of this podcast? What have you learned? How has it changed you?
I mean... you shared earlier that idea—that principle from Concept Bureau—that you have to let the work change you. And I think I discovered, probably too late, that I learn through people. You know what I mean?
So I carry something from every conversation. Some part of what gets shared stays with me. I’ve become really wealthy in different perspectives. And I do—I feel changed by this conversation. I’m really grateful for it.
Love it. That’s a very sincere answer.
Yeah, it’s true.
It’s true. Nice. Well, listen—enjoy your snowbirding.
Will do. And thank you so very much.
Thank you so much, Peter.
Talk to you later.
Bye.
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