I found Mickey through her YouTube think pieces, where lo-fi production and a Google Doc are pretty much all she needs to pull you into whatever she’s thinking about. You watch the ideas take shape as she goes, which feels especially satisfying at a time when I’ve been craving more thoughtful, long-form stuff online.

This week she stops by the studio to chat about the overlap of video essays and acting and the way her curiosities lead her creative practice.

Mickey Galvin is a creator, actor, filmmaker, and creative based in Brooklyn. She runs a YouTube channel with over 120k subscribers, where she explores film, culture, and her creative practice through video essays and vlogs. She also writes and directs her own narrative film work and is currently developing her first feature film. She is a creative lead at COPY, an online arts publication supporting emerging artists.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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The Cutting Room Floor

With my video essays, a lot of the writing happens in the edit and in how much I leave on the cutting room floor. Most of them are unscripted. It’s really just an outline, and I let myself come to conclusions live. I don’t want to make a video essay unless I actually want to make one, and I don’t want to say something unless I have something to say. Sometimes when I’m really in it, working on two videos at once and then I get a self-tape, it starts to feel a little echo chamber-y. I’m like, I don’t want to look at my face this much.

I think whatever I can do on YouTube, or speaking publicly in general, comes from acting school, hundreds of self-tapes, and presenting yourself to people over and over again. A lot of acting is about being truthful and trying to make something as authentic as possible. I’m able to do that on YouTube too, but there are a lot fewer steps, so it actually feels easier sometimes. I’m often filming, editing, and putting everything up by myself.

Pulling the Curtain Back

I’ve always been really intrigued by what’s actually behind something. When things are fake, I want to uncover what’s underneath or understand how they actually work. Living in New York has made me especially passionate about that because people see certain things here as very glamorous, and then the minute you actually experience them or get close to them, you realize they’re not - fashion, beauty, filmmaking, and acting. Those things can still be magical and beautiful, but understanding how they operate puts everyone on a little bit more of an even playing field. I don’t like putting anything on a pedestal.

There’s an authenticity in wanting to cut the bullshit a little bit, or at least attempting to. Obviously, it’s social media. Everything is always a performance to some extent. But I also think YouTube gives you space to actually sit with an idea. There’s so much intellectual content on TikTok now where everybody is critiquing everything, but it’s a minute-long video. How deep can you really get into that critique in 60 seconds? I hope there’s something different about spending real time with an idea. I like that a lot, I think it keeps the magic.

Making What You Want to Make

The first video essay I ever made was balance & sacrifice / art & time, and then I recently made so you want to quit your job. They feel connected to me because they’re both about this constant dilemma: How do I do what I want to do, what I feel called to do, at the same time as I need to make money? How do I balance that? Unfortunately, I think that’s a very American experience right now, especially if you’re a young creative. I had left my corporate job in January 2025, and that summer I was thinking a lot about making art, making enough money, and what I actually wanted my life to look like.

At the same time, making things online introduces this other pressure. My stop trying to be a cool girl video got really big, but that concept was also just incredibly topical. People wanted to be part of that conversation. To me, its success almost speaks more to the algorithm than it being my best work. Since then, I’ve actually tried to avoid super hot-button topics in some ways. It's ok if those interests intersect, but I try to allow my curiosity to lead. I’m more interested in making the things I want to make. I just finished Intuitive Cycles, which is this very campy, micro-budget short we shot on a camcorder about an influencer who gets a deal promoting a cycle-tracking app and then has a mental breakdown. I’m also making a web series with my friend Sam. We’ve been acting together since we were kids. I really just want to practice and make more stuff.

Listen to the Woman

I grew up Christian, so there wasn’t a ton of film education happening in my household. There was even this movie store my family liked that would censor the films for you so you could watch them with your kids. It was shut down for obvious legal reasons. Because of that, there are a lot of classic movies I’ve just never seen. I’m pretty sure I’ve never watched a James Bond film. I used to be really insecure about it, especially in art school.

Recently I had this realization that I mostly prefer female directors. I love watching movies by everybody, but if most of film history is by men, why do I need to feel insecure or spend all this time investing my energy into watching those films? I love Lynne Ramsay and the way she plays with fragmented memory. I’m still interested in understanding the progression of film and watching things I haven’t seen, but I’m also trying to appreciate that, one, I can’t know everything, and two, I feel like I learn more from the women.

The Serious and the Mundane

I just read my second Magda Szabó book. I read The Door first and then Katalin Street, and for some reason I keep putting her in conversation with Rachel Cusk, who is one of my favorite writers. They’re not necessarily that similar, but I’m always drawn to these very introspective female stories that are often quite depressing. I also read Cusk’s Coventry earlier this year and loved it. I’m really interested in having very well-read feminist thought happening at the same time as these slice-of-life, observational, almost mundane moments.

I’m also just a very visual learner. I can start to feel like I’m drowning when there’s nothing visual to hold onto, and I’m the same way with podcasts. There’s an emotional connection to images for me, even if it’s something stupid. If it’s a silly meme, I’m like, okay, this is floating me in this world. I like being able to move between something philosophical or political and something completely mundane. I don’t usually have an end goal in mind when I start researching something. I know how to throw myself into it and see what comes out.

More thoughts soon.

Follow Mickey on Instagram and Substack

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring. Want to make something cool together? Hit us up at partnerships@adhoc.xyz

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This week Paolo stops by to talk the new way people are touching grass and why the outdoors never really goes out of style.

Paolo Mottola is REI Co-op's Divisional Vice President of Partnerships, Content and Community. He has served in various marketing roles at REI for more than a decade. His brand and agency communications work includes Microsoft, Samsung, U.S. Army, and Eddie Bauer. He is an alumnus and senior affiliate faculty at the Communications Leadership graduate program at the University of Washington and studied journalism at Western Washington University.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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Always Be a Beginner

I got into skiing, and I tried bouldering, and my most recent passion is fishing, which is hard in a different kind of way. You have to learn the seasonality, when the runs come, how to tie lures and fishing knots. I find that I get deep enough in something that I want to get into the next thing because I just love the process of learning it.

The outdoors is filled with activities, a lifetime’s worth of activities that you can just start to learn again. REI, being this speciality outdoor retailer provides me both the gear access, but also the activity access and a network of people to learn from and do those activities with.

Touch Grass, Together

Everything outdoors right now is really trending towards smaller in-person community experiences. We’re on this arc where maybe a decade ago it was about being part of some national trend or movement or hashtag that made you feel like you’re part of some mass group. Everything in the outdoors just feels like it’s getting smaller in a good way. People aren’t wanting to capture content and share it publicly the same way. They want to feel more connected to nature, to touch grass, and to do it with people they care about. They just want to have a shared experience and be more human.

You can see that in the kinds of events people gravitate toward. Stewardship events are some of our top events, where people are doing trail cleanups together and taking care of the places where they recreate. We’ve also had everything from zombie apocalypse survival classes to classes that help people learn practical skills or understand their gear. All of the above creates meaningful, memorable experiences. You’re investing in yourself, your community and your relationships, and that’s probably a better day than spending all those hours on a screen.

Built to Outlast the Trend

What I like about this category is that the brands stay true to themselves. Culture kind of comes to us, and sometimes it gravitates away from us, and it comes back to us, but we don’t chase culture a lot. We’re here because we have a consistent set of beliefs. We care about durability. We care about sustainability and how things are made. The creative signatures of these products don’t change much either. You can go back 10, 20 or even 50 years with some brands and see it. The North Face Nuptse jacket didn’t change very much. The Blundstone Chelsea hasn’t changed very much. These products stay true to themselves.

What’s interesting with something like gorpcore is that tastemakers see that authenticity and say, “Yeah, this can be on trend too.” They bring it to the public, but the garment didn’t change, the jacket didn’t change, the footwear didn’t really change. Most of the gorpcore we see in the market tends to be these timeless styles. Whether it’s Keen or Patagonia or The North Face, a kid, their super-hip 20-something cousin, a parent and a retiree can all authentically wear the same brand. Maybe we’re on trend or off trend, but I like the fact that we don’t change for trends.

Your Tent Grows Up With You

That’s the thing about the outdoors: we bring people into new life stages. You shop and find yourself and develop your own style, and maybe you go backpacking or skiing. Then you get into your first apartment and you’re getting the inflatable stand-up paddle board or the collapsible bike because you don’t have a lot of room. Maybe later you have more space and build out your bikes or get a pair of skis. If you choose to have a family, you’re getting into the kid carrier backpack and putting away the backpacking pack. You get into your first family tent and out of your two-person tent. This category follows you through your phase of life and keeps that life phase really exciting and something to look forward to.

At some point, you’re creating a tradition, or you’re part of a tradition that you came up in that you’re excited to continue with your own lineage. Then people become empty nesters or early retirees and go on an overseas trip as a couple. The through line is some of the same brands and products you’ve loved over those years, but it’s also that connection to the outdoors and the sense of community along the way. Whether it’s moms doing a park walk together or families camping across generations, the product is an enabler of that. There’s so much emotion in those life stages, and our jobs are just to help people navigate them and stay connected to the outdoors and each other.

Black Friday as a Value Statement

A co-op is set up to serve members, and that’s a really different incentive and driver. While publicly traded companies are driven by quarterly earnings, we get to make really long-term bets because there’s not a stock price or shareholder value holding us to a quarter or even a year. Some of the projects I get to work on take a year or years to manifest, and that’s okay because ultimately the measuring stick is serving and adding value for our members.

The best example is the Opt Outside campaign that I was able to work on with my teams over the years. In 2015, in the chaos of consumerism around the holidays, we decided to close our stores on Black Friday, and we’re now closed every Black Friday as a value statement. You get to do those kinds of things when you’re at a co-op because the lens is, “What should a co-op do?” not “How do we drive shareholder value?” It’s shared values instead of shareholder value.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring. Want to make something cool together? Hit us up at partnerships@adhoc.xyz

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This week Dan stops by to talk about what makes design actually work, from Super Bowl ads to green apple gummies.

Dan Kenger is a seasoned design leader, renowned for shaping the creative direction of brands and crafting impactful consumer experiences. In his current role as Chief Design Officer, Kenger spearheads design at Hims & Hers, guiding the creative team responsible for every customer interaction from physical packaging to the seamless digital experience on websites and mobile apps. Kenger ensures a cohesive and innovative approach to brand engagement.

Before joining Hims & Hers, Kenger served as the Vice President of Creative at Pattern Brands, where he directed the creative strategy for a portfolio of brands, including Open Spaces. His leadership at Pattern evolved from his decade-long tenure as a partner at Gin Lane, an agency recognized for its transformative work with direct-to-consumer businesses.

Throughout his career, Kenger has defined the aesthetic of the direct-to-consumer category, drawing inspiration from his curiosity and passion for creating designs that resonate across generations. His work continues to influence the way brands connect with modern consumers, blending creativity and purpose to leave a lasting impression.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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The Patient Experience

Healthcare treats design as decoration instead of infrastructure. From what I see, most of the industry focuses on the technical provision of care, treating everything else as an afterthought. The packaging, the waiting room, the portal you have to log into just to see results—all of it gets treated like window dressing tacked on once the real work is done. Walk into almost any healthcare experience and you can feel that hierarchy: the medicine has years of necessary rigor, but too often, the consideration for patient experience stops there. That gap is exactly where people can fall off, whether it’s a form nobody fills out correctly, medical results people can’t understand, or a treatment plan nobody sticks with because the whole experience feels like a chore.

The uncomfortable truth is that the best medicine in the world does nothing if people don’t actually engage with and take it, and engagement is a design problem as much as a clinical one. Every other industry figured this out years ago, banking, retail, travel, they all treat the experience as the product experience, not something bolted on afterward. Healthcare is finally catching up, but there’s still this instinct to treat design as polish rather than a lever that changes outcomes. Until that shifts industry-wide, healthcare is going to keep leaving real results on the table, not because the science wasn’t good enough, but because nobody made it easy, or worth showing up for.

You Can’t Outsource the Soul of a Brand

I’ve believed the same thing since my agency days at Gin Lane: you can’t outsource the soul of a brand. Tactics change constantly, platforms change, what’s trending on TikTok this week will be dead in a month, but the thing that actually builds trust with people is consistency of voice and care, and that only comes from people who deeply understand what the brand is trying to say and why. The moment you hand that off to a rotating cast of vendors, you get something that looks fine but feels like nothing.

That’s part of why we build so much of our creative in-house at Hims & Hers. When you’re telling stories that are vulnerable, stigmatized, or medically nuanced, and healthcare can be all three, you need people in the room who understand the weight of that, not just a brief that got handed off. That means it can be slower and harder to scale, but it’s the only way I’ve found to keep a brand’s soul intact as it grows.

Why Intentionality Matters

Attractive brands look good scrolling past you. Culturally influential brands make you stop, because they say something to you that strikes a chord or you feel deep in your bones. This year when we took Hims & Hers to the Super Bowl to spotlight the health-wealth gap, the bet wasn’t that people would find the ad beautiful, it was that they’d recognize themselves in it. We watched the conversation shift in real time, from “what are they selling” to “this is about equity.” That’s the difference. Attractive gets admired, influential gets absorbed.

Cultural influence also requires follow-through, which is where a lot of good campaigns fall apart. It’s not enough to make a big cultural statement once a year and hope it sticks. We carry that same message across the way we approach social content, into the packaging and design of a treatment, into how the UX of a lab result actually appears to a customer. If the big cultural moment isn’t backed up by a hundred smaller, intentional design decisions, people notice, and the brand just becomes another company that ran a nice ad.

Restraint Creates Honesty

You have to treat every touchpoint like it has a specific job, rather than trying to make everything sound the same. An ad can push harder and be more provocative because its job is to get attention. A product experience has to be clear without being condescending because its job is to help someone make a decision about their body. Minimalism helps here, not because less is trendy, but because restraint reads as confidence, and stripping away everything that isn’t doing real work forces whatever’s left to be honest. That’s also why at Hims & Hers we insist on real people over stock photography or polished models. Healthcare is full of stigmatized, vulnerable, medically nuanced stories, and tone only lands if the person on the other side of it actually feels like someone you’d trust with something real.

The other piece is obsessive testing, even on the smallest details. The green apple flavor on our hair gummy went through round after round of testing before we landed on it, tart and bright enough to enjoy, but not so intense it felt like candy first thing in the morning. That’s a tonal decision as much as a flavor one. Getting a brand’s tone right isn’t about picking the right adjectives in a brand deck, it’s about testing whether the actual experience feels the way you intend it to, in the moments that matter.

Working for a Five-Year-Old’s Attention Span

Honestly, I get more inspiration from my own house than from healthcare. I’ll watch my wife go through her nightly skincare routine and pay attention to what she actually reaches for versus what sits untouched on the shelf, because that tells you more about good design than any trend report ever could. Half the thinking behind the hair gummy’s jar came from paying attention to how skincare brands make a $12 product feel like a $50 one, and honestly, most of that education happened on my own bathroom counter.

Being a parent has changed how I design, too, mostly because kids have zero patience for anything that isn’t immediately obvious or genuinely fun. If something doesn’t work for a five-year-old’s attention span, it’s probably too complicated, and that’s a surprisingly useful filter to run everything else through. I also intentionally give myself over-the-top constraints, like designing something as if it had to fit in someone’s pocket, or as if I could never use the color blue. Constraints force you out of the default answer, which is usually the least interesting one. And sometimes it’s as simple as putting on the right playlist after the kids are asleep and sitting with a bad first draft longer than feels comfortable, because the second and third drafts are almost always where the actual idea shows up.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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This week, we caught up with César to talk about why neutrality is boring, what Mexico City gets right about creativity, and the importance of making culture—not just content.

César Álvarez is a New York–based Creative Director and Stylist, as well as the Editor-in-Chief of Tótem Magazine. Through fashion
level RIO, César has presented multiple collections at New York Fashion Week serving as both a consultant and stylist. His work is recognized for blending fashion, art, and storytelling into compelling runway presentations.

Throughout his career, César has collaborated with artists including Zara Larsson, Rauw Alejandro, Olivia Rodrigo, and Noah Cyrus, among many others.

His portfolio also includes work with internationally renowned brands and publications such as Balmain, Saint Laurent (YSL), PAPER Magazine, Rollacoaster Magazine, InStyle, GQ and more.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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Creating Conversations

At Tótem Magazine we’ve been working a lot on social media, on how we create conversation with people, create identity, and see how people react to that. It’s a little bit about getting out of the niche and having conversations with a wider audience, but also, again, feeling more unapologetic and kind of being controversial in a way that’s like, “Let’s talk about something.” There are different opinions. We’re not saying, “This is the truth,” or “This is what you should think.” It’s just, “This is what I think. What do you think?”

Keeping it safe and reporting what’s happening is cool, but when you’re giving people something they can think about, react to, and learn from, that’s when it becomes really interesting. That’s one of the most important shifts in the Tótem world. We’re like, “Let’s have conversations,” because we’re very good at storytelling creatively. We do editorial shoots, and honestly, what am I gonna say? They’re beautiful. But now it’s like, “Okay, that’s great. We have that. Now let’s get involved with our community and have these conversations that are uncomfortable sometimes.” At the end, the goal is to have this interaction and learn from each other.

The Culture of Clothes

Let’s start with Mexico City. The lack of resources is bliss in some way because people are so creative. You come here and see people wearing crazy things they made or repurposed. We call them pacas. You go to the tianguis, and there are mountains of clothes. Kids buy them for cheap and transform them into something new. That’s what I love about Mexico: the creativity. It’s always, “What can I do with what I have?” Mexico is very dark, very punk, very sad. The biggest artists in Mexico are sad boys or sad girls because we’re so passionate about love and drinking, and you can see that in how people present themselves through fashion.

L.A. is the opposite. People just want to be comfortable. You’re in your shorts, your sweatpants, your Crocs, your sunglasses. You spend so much time in your car that nobody really sees you, so you don’t care as much. In New York, it’s completely different. You can feel the energy. Everybody wants to look hot, everybody wants to be seen, and everybody wants to see people. When it’s summer, no matter who you are or what you look like, you want to show some skin, legs, shoulders. I always say you step out of your apartment, and life happens.

Fashion Recession

I feel like right now, because we’re in the middle of a recession, brands are going to take whatever comes. A brand that comes to mind is Willy Chavarria. He’d been working for years, and then around the pandemic, he really took off. It’s like… “I’ve been working on this for years. If Adidas is coming and giving me the money to produce and do all of this, I’m gonna take it.” I understand that, because you need to make that money in order to keep bringing what you want to the conversation. How do we play the game in order to keep showing your identity and who you are as an artist while still working with these brands. That’s where you’re going to get the money to keep producing.

You see a lot of fashion brands that start, have a moment for a year, and then vanish because they’re creatives who don’t have the business side. We need to figure out how to find the middle. That’s what happens to a lot of brands—they have great ideas and start off super powerful, but the lack of experience on the business side catches up with them. I’m always telling my friends, “You need to find a partner who does all the things you don’t do.” Instead of trying to keep the whole cake for yourself, share the cake and make something bigger with somebody who can help you achieve what you want.

Tacos & Alok

In 2022 we worked with Vans, and that was the first print issue we were able to do because they were supporting us. They were like, “What do you want to do?” And I was like, “We’re a magazine, so we want to do a magazine.” They were like, “Great.” I remember in that first issue we featured this woman we call Lady Tacos de Canasta. She’s a trans woman who sold tacos de canasta from her bike. Nobody was listening to her, so she started yelling, “¡Tacos! ¡Tacos de canasta!” with a manly voice. Everybody was like, “What the hell?” She went viral, and it became this huge phenomenon. So we put her in the magazine.

Then, at the release party in L.A., these kids came up to me and said, “Oh my God, thank you so much. I never thought I would see Lady Tacos de Canasta and Alok in the same magazine.” They were like, “Thank you for doing this. I feel happy. I’m dancing. I’m having a great time in a safe space.” The goal of Tótem is to create bridges of cultural information between Mexico, New York, and L.A. When these Chicano kids from L.A.—whose parents are Mexican but aren’t always connected to the culture—see that there are trans people and non-binary people in Mexico living successful lives and careers. To me, that’s the most beautiful thing.

The Real Ones

My friend Rio from Gypsy Sport, now called RIO. I used to go to New York Fashion Week and think, “Who the heck is this person? This is blowing my mind.” Then I found out it was a Latino guy my age. It’s very inspiring, and I admire him as a designer. We find our people through what we love, which is fashion. The same with my friend Paloma Lira, who’s another fashion designer based in Mexico. I love what you do, and I want to support you because you deserve it.

Again, I’ve seen them grow and stay in fashion for more than a decade. It’s like, you’re a real one. You’re not going to vanish because this is who you are. This is what you do. You can’t do anything else because you were born for this. Those are the people I like to support. To me, I get very inspired by women and queer people. Overall, all my narrative around fashion and creativity is about that. I grew up with my mom and my sister. Very matriarchal. If we talk about men in Totem, it’s just to sexualize them (hehe). We’ve had several years of that. Let us play now. Fashion isn’t perfect at all. It gives us so much joy, but it also has these controversies. I understand the beauty of it, but this is also beautiful. Let’s also rely on that.

Find Tótem Magazine on Instagram: @totem_magazine.

Pre-order ISSUE 3 here.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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This week, we caught up with Elena to talk about creative blocks, reality TV rabbit holes, manipulative serifs, and the WNBA collab of her dreams.

Elena Foraker is a RISD trained creative director and graphic designer based in Oakland, CA. By day she is the creative director for BAGGU. She is also the executive producer of Not Here to Make Friends, a zine and publishing practice examining reality television through a critical, often anthropologic, always feminist lens. Graphic design IS her passion, along with the WNBA, wild blackberries on the trail, and her cats Petey Pablo and Lucifer.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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Design Never Sleeps

I love book design, and I don’t really get to do that at BAGGU. So I design books for people on the side sometimes. Having multiple distinct projects at once really helps if I’m feeling stuck on anything. For me, the best way to get through a creative block is just to work. If I don’t have an idea for this project right now, I’ll go work on that, and usually it’ll unlock something in the other project. It also prevents me from getting bored. Also, as a creative director, I’m not doing much of the graphic design myself anymore, and I miss that. So having freelance design work fulfills that on the side.

I am releasing a new book, which I designed, called Chef of Pictures. It is an archive of over 400 screenshots or photos of the TV whenever a character is talking about graphic design or fonts or photography or anything that my professional creative world touches. It is so funny how people perceive graphic design or any of the related things I do for work. There are a lot of misconceptions. It’s a project a decade in the making and the sources are wide-ranging. There’s some early stuff from The Office, where Pam went to Pratt to become a graphic designer, and she comes back to Scranton and she’s like, “I don’t like graphic design. I really didn’t like it. It’s just designing logos and stuff.” And there’s even some really recent stuff from The Moment where there is a lot of creative conflict between her Brat tour’s creative director and the concert film director.

Reality TV as Creative Research

I’ve always been interested in pop culture. I was a really big Britney Spears head early on. I’ve seen more reality TV than anyone I know. As an only child, I would be home alone after middle school, and I would watch TV for hours until my parents came home. MTV, VH1, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, Rock of Love, America’s Next Top Model, all of the early aughts, really cringey stuff. My personal work investigates how the stuff we’re watching on TV affects people personally and culturally, how it promotes these standards of women and relationships, etc. I have a self-publishing project called Not Here to Make Friends. I started that in grad school, and it’s a anthology of writing examining reality television through a critical, often anthropologic, always feminist lens. I commission writers, work with an editor, and then I design and sell the books. I have done three issues (aka Seasons) so far and am about to start Season 4. Stack Magazines distributed Season 3 as their September magazine last year and we were able to reach a wide global audience, which was really exciting!

So I can no longer watch reality TV just as a fan. Well I’m still a fan, but critical. I’m currently watching 90 Day Fiancé, Project Runway, Next Gen NYC, The Valley, Married at First Sight, The City, and Below Deck Mediterranean. I can proudly say that I’ve seen every episode of every Below Deck ever… I also watch more obscure, “reality TV for men” shows, things like Forged in Fire or The Curse of Oak Island. If I’m commissioning a writer to write about a specific show, I have to have watched it too in order to know if I agree with the point they are making.So if we’re commissioning someone, I’ll be like, “Okay, gotta go binge-watch that.” So that time needs to be factored into the publishing process/timeline.

Let Them Cook

Creative direction, art direction even, is such a mysterious career for people outside the creative fields, and even for people within it who are just starting. They’re like, “What is it? How do I get there? What do you even do?” The biggest learning curve for me was that I do really like being in the weeds, and I am a perfectionist. Having to let go and be like, “This is not my job to do it myself,” and trust your team and empower your team. I like to say, “Let them cook.” So it’s up to me to guide them and encourage them, and then at the end, or along the way, give edits and notes and have opinions on what they’re doing. But ultimately, trust them and their expertise. Letting go of that need to control everything has been really important in my growth as a creative director.

In terms of work-related visual inspiration, I really love what UNNA, the Swedish running brand is doing and I’ve always loved Sara Cwynar because she is an artist using advertising and design as her medium. At BAGGU I try to make our marketing materials as different from the conventional, sales-y visual language as possible. My hope is that it looks like someone who went to RISD designed it versus… AI. I had a convo with my boss recently about how you’re never going to make anything truly new or innovative because AI just spits out a compilation of other stuff. I’m still most inspired by typography, especially vernacular typography and signs in the wild. I love chaotic strip mall signs. I tell people the number one thing I miss about L.A. (besides friends) is the typography. But now I’m in the woods, and that’s become my new inspiration. I’m inspired by the colors of the sunset, the shadows, the shapes. I’m getting inspiration for props to use or lighting for a shoot.

Dream Collab

I’m a huge WNBA fan and the Bay Area just got its expansion team last year, which has been super exciting to be a part of. The Valkyries play at the Chase Center in SF, which is like blocks away from the BAGGU office so we go together after work sometimes. The atmosphere of a WNBA game is so supportive and queer and free of toxic masculinity. My dream BAGGU collab would actually be a WNBA collab because we did an MLB collab this year, and I’m like, “We’re soooo close. Can we do a collab with women’s sports, maybe?”

I love the WNBA pre-game tunnel fits. I think they’re super cool, and as a 6 foot tall, former basketball player myself, I’m always interested to see how tall, athletic women are styling themselves. They don’t shy away from heels and embrace looking powerful. On the other hand, a lot of WNBA players are dressing more androgynously, which is a style we definitely appeal to at BAGGU. The bags are designed to be genderless because BAGGU is truly for everyone. We also intentionally work with models who are nontraditional, which I know is another reason people appreciate the brand. Paige Bueckers photographed in the tunnel wearing a BAGGU bag would be the ultimate dream come true for me.

Dystopian Tech Marketing

Honestly, it’s been kind of depressing living in the Bay and driving past all the AI billboards in San Francisco. It’s so dystopian. But I spend a lot of my time in the woods. I’m lucky to live really close to hiking trails in the Oakland hills, so I escape the computer, I escape the AI, and I go as far into the woods as possible as often as possible. Draw Down Books publishes and sells books and zines about graphic design, art, etc. They were my professors at RISD and also the first people to sell Not Here to Make Friends for me in 2020.They’re publishing a new title called Should I Be Worried?, which is a collection of visual responses to the AI moment. I did a collage for it. Every time I go into the woods, I take a picture of the blackberries in my hand. I have, like, 100 photos of my hand holding different blackberries. So I made a collage of that. That’s my response to AI. I want to get as far away from it as possible.

If something has that really specific tech design look, anything tech design, it’s so off-putting. There was an interesting advertisement at the last WNBA game I went to. It was for a new AI law company, but their branding was this sans serif that was pretending not to be tech, which I found interesting and somehow even more off-putting. All the tech companies are using these manipulative serifs now. Manipulative serifs give me the ick. I’ll stand by that.

Find Elena on Instagram: @eforaker, and check out her zine, Not Here to Make Friends.

Very cool pubs mentioned Draw Down Books and Stack Magazines.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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This week, we caught up with Claire and Ashley to talk about what makes a podcast worth listening to, building an audience, and why obsession beats good taste.

Good Noticings is the pop culture podcast that makes you smarter. Every week, comedians Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton dive beyond the biggest headlines with thoughtful analysis, weekly recommendations, and a steady flow of banter. Formerly known as Celebrity Memoir Book Club, over the last five years, Claire and Ashley have been the favorite podcasters of Vogue, Esquire, The Guardian, and more.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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Nobody Asked for This Podcast

C: Every time we’ve been in podcasting, people have said there are already too many podcasts. When we started in 2017, everyone was saying the same thing. It’s important for people to remember that because you’re always going to be told the market is too saturated. You have to have a value add. What is the thing you’re offering? Someone recently said something to us about YouTube that really stuck with me: YouTube is a search engine. What question are people asking that you’re answering? If you’re not already a known entity, why are people listening to you? You have to do that second layer of work.

A: You also have to figure out what you can be consistent with and stick to it. A lot of people get discouraged really quickly and assume that if something doesn’t hit right away, it’s never going to. It also just takes time for people to find you. You have to cast your net as wide as possible and give people the opportunity to discover what you’re making. But if you really want to do it, you have to keep going because the idea that people are going to find it immediately and become obsessed is incredibly rare. No one has ever been able to listen to every podcast, read every Substack, or keep up with everything that’s out there. It’s really about becoming the thing that breaks through, no matter how crowded the field is.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

C: I think the biggest thing we realized after making three podcasts—Celebrity Memoir Book Club is our third—is that you have to have a value add. Unless you come out of Bachelor Nation, you can’t just be a personality people listen to. We did the Britney Spears podcast because people liked hearing us talk about pop culture, and we liked talking about it. But we didn’t want to do endless research because it felt infinite. Stan culture just wasn’t something we were part of. We’re not stans, so we couldn’t honestly make a stan podcast.

People want to feel like they’re learning something. You have to do some work for them. You can’t just show up with opinions. Even some of the great Twitter minds or Substack writers—I watch them get into podcasting, and unless you’re doing something for someone else, people don’t want to listen. I think we figured out that this was our value add, and we kept honing it.

A: We’ve definitely adjusted our content based on who we want paying attention to it. I don’t know if it was ever a conscious choice, but you can aim toward a certain audience, and we’ve always aimed toward people who are interested in pop culture analysis more than pop culture itself—like Claire said, not stan culture.

Even with Celebrity Memoir Book Club, there was a version of the show where people just wanted to hear you say how great a book was and how brave someone was. Over the years, we naturally weeded out the people who were like, “You gave your opinions, and I hated that.” Which always made me laugh because audiobooks already exist. If all you wanted was someone to tell you what happened in the book, why listen to a podcast?

17 Smart People on Twitter

C: I’m actually still on Twitter, which makes me feel like the last person there. I feel like it’s just you and me. But there are maybe 17 really smart people I’m following, and I’m always curious what they’re talking about. I also follow journalists from some of the more non-mainstream publications, like The Baffler, n+1, and a newer one called The Equator. Twitter is still where I see what they’re discussing.

A: We took that even further with Good Noticing. It was another step toward having conversations about culture instead of just fanning out over the existence of celebrities. It’s really about perspective. With comedy, you’re always looking for a misdirect or a way to lead people in an unexpected direction. What we do is pretty similar. We’re looking at what everyone is consuming, and while we’re not necessarily searching for the joke, we are looking for an alternative perspective or a way to broaden the conversation. That’s actually very similar to trying to crack a joke.

Enough About Taste!

A: One of the biggest trends right now is having taste, and I think it’s pretty lame. A lot of what I see on social media is people posting roundups of ways to show you have good taste, and it’s always the same seven brands. A lot of the conversation around taste just comes down to hyper-consumption. People aren’t recommending things because they genuinely love them. They’re saying, “If you want people to think you have good taste, here are seven things you should buy and wear to signal that you do.” That’s very different from being genuinely passionate about something.

C: Being obsessed with your personal style is one of the most boring things I’ve ever heard. It’s really funny to me when people equate whatever’s trending at the moment with having taste. A lot of people think having a maximalist kitchen instead of a white kitchen means they have taste. I’m like, no—that’s just the new trend.

I’m sick of people’s idea of taste because it usually just means a curated list of elite things. I’d much rather hear from someone who’s genuinely passionate about something. I want people with hobbies and interests who can show me why they care so much. I always joke about this, but I don’t know if you’ve watched The Real Housewives of Rhode Island. There’s this kooky woman who’s obsessed with her dolls. I wasn’t even into dolls when I was five, but I love that she’s into dolls. That’s so much more interesting to me than someone with “taste.” I want to hear what people love, why they love it, and all the research they’ve done. I want a collector.

Slow Obsessions

C: A niche thing that’s inspiring me right now is gardening. I’ve been looking into climbing flowering plants that will survive in Zone 7, which is what Brooklyn is. I’ve been watching all these YouTube videos—not from content creators, but from people who are just really knowledgeable. One rose I’m considering is the Thomas à Becket yellow rose because it’s so hardy. It’s one of England’s most famous roses. I’m also thinking about planting a purple clematis. What I find really inspiring is knowing it’s going to take years to build it into what I want and just being okay with that.

A: I started knitting this year, and I love being able to make something with my hands. It’s changed the way I look at everything. I think a lot more about what it took to make something, who made it, and whether it’s even worth buying if I could learn to make it myself. There are also so many knitters online that I’m fascinated by. I love listening to people talk about what they love. Hearing someone go deep on a particular type of yarn is incredibly soothing to me.

There’s one designer who creates knitting patterns inspired by different parts of San Francisco. She made a sweater inspired by Dolores Park and another called the Marina Sweater. The way she looks at a city she loves and translates it into a garment is really interesting to me.

Catch Good Noticings’ live shows at Clash Talk on 7/26 and 8/6 at Union Hall, Edinburgh Fringe Festival on 8/24-8/30, and at the 312 Festival in Chicago on 11/11.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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This week, we caught up with Mary-Louise Foss to talk about the return of messy makeup, why every great trend starts in a subculture, New York as an endless source of inspiration, and why creative directors should always know how to make the work themselves.

Mary-Louise Foss is a mom and Creative Director currently leading the North America 360° creative team at M·A·C Cosmetics. Beginning her career in fashion and entertainment media for publications like New York Magazine, she has now been bringing her love of creative subcultures and human connection to the beauty world for the past 7 years with brands like Amika, Kiehl’s, Laura Mercier, bareMinerals, Buxom, NYX, and now, M·A·C.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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Walk the Walk

Creative directors should know how to use the same tools as the people they’re leading. They should understand the software. They should understand the craft. I absolutely believe people can come from a lot of different backgrounds and become creative directors now. Social media has changed everything. A filmmaker can become a creative director. Furniture designers can become creative directors. There are so many different paths. But I do think you should have paid your dues a little bit.

You should understand the work because it makes you a better creative director. It allows you to give specific feedback and actually help people get to the place you’re trying to take them. My biggest pet peeve is working with a creative director who just says, “It’s not working. Keep trying.” I hate that. My hot take is: if you’re going to present yourself as an expert, you should be able to back it up.

Young, Wild, and Free: After Dark in the Early Aughts; All Photos: Mary-Louise Foss

Night Shift

I love being out in the world. I’m a vampire. I just like to absorb it all. If there’s any kind of event—a concert, a movie, whatever—I’ll go, even if I don’t really know the band. After moving to New York in 2003, I got into the party scene, but it was really adjacent to the music scene. I had the time of my freaking life. I look back at my journals and I’m like, “Oh yeah, The Walkmen were playing some random store opening.” I don’t even remember half of it until I read those entries, but it was a magical time. I still love music. Going to shows is probably my biggest source of inspiration – Not only for the music, but the people-watching and overall energy of human connection.

I’m pretty stoked to see Die Spitz at Warsaw in the Fall. They’re this super powerful rock band out of Austin, TX. I have always loved creative-led venues. For example, back in the day, if 285 Kent, Death by Audio, or Secret Project Robot were putting on a show, you knew whoever they booked was probably going to be cool in some way. It’s harder to find that now. There’s less DIY culture, but it’s still out there. I love How To with John Wilson. I love how he observes the randomness of New York. That’s what I love about this city—those weird little moments that are really just someone’s ordinary life. There’s something about living side by side with people who are completely different from you and watching all those lives overlap. That’s why New York is the best city. I don’t know if I want to live here forever, but I know I want to die here. I’ll always come back no matter if I stray for a while.

Messy girl is Making a Comeback

One thing I’ve noticed is that brands are getting nostalgic. In makeup, people are moving away from the clean girl aesthetic and back toward messy girl and I love it. As a kid I loved playing with makeup, and clean girl is absolutely my least favorite trend. Honestly, I don’t even wear that much makeup myself, but I love working in beauty because it reminds me of painting. It’s tactile. It’s about getting your hands dirty. I love texture swatches—smearing product across paper. Makeup is one of the best ways people can express themselves because everybody has a face. You can buy one great lipstick and feel amazing putting it on. I love when people get freaky with their makeup. Let’s get weird again. Let’s be more human. Humans are flawed, and that’s okay. That’s what makes people beautiful. That’s why I’m excited to be working with M·A·C, because they’ve always had counter-cultural beauty in their DNA.

Almost every cool makeup look or fashion trend started in a subculture. That’s always been the most interesting thing to me because those ideas came from people simply expressing themselves. It’s really the punk ethos. I’ve mellowed over the years, but I’ve never liked subscribing to trends. I try to think about what actually moves me. I also think the best way to discover new work is to make things yourself. Once you’re putting your own work into the world, you naturally start finding other people doing the same.

Beautiful Enough to Eat

This past year, I had the pleasure of doing the holiday campaign for Laura Mercier. While the brand’s vibe is more reserved, I believe Laura Mercier is a punk at heart. Laura started her career in Paris as an artist – a painter – before becoming a makeup artist in New York, and always has had the goal of making women feel confident in their skin. The brand has always lived somewhere between Paris and New York.

With the Paris connection in mind, the packaging team designed the holiday boxes to look like French pâtisserie boxes. We used those boxes as the jumping-off point for the campaign. We treated all the products like desserts. We shot them in this beautiful pâtisserie-style lighting and paired them with macarons and other pastries. A lot of it was photographed really close-up and macro, so it feels very tangible. We wanted the products to look so good you could almost eat them. The campaign ended up running in Times Square, which was a huge moment for me. It was the first thing I’d ever worked on that made it to Times Square, so I was really proud of that.

The Movie of Everything

I have this thing in my head called "The Movie of Everything." Whenever I see something funny or quirky happen in the world, I put it in this mental archive and think, "That's going in the movie." I don't know if I'll ever actually make it, but I love the idea of building a movie around all these funny little characters and strange moments I've collected over the years. It would definitely have a romantic, nostalgic vibe to it. I’d love to work with Jessie Buckley. She really is just such a raw talent. As a fellow working creative mom, her speech at the Oscars really touched me. To quote Jessie, “To the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”

As for current commercial photographers, there are so many people doing cool work that I admire — Petra Collins, Szilveszter Makó, Vanessa Grande, Carin Backoff, Nadine Ijewere — I could go on. When it comes to my own personal work, I love candid and photojournalistic photography. I always go back to the pioneers: Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, etc. I’ve also always been into the juxtaposition of words and images – which is perhaps how I ended up making this my career. The work of Duane Michels and Barbara Kruger, as well as zines and magazines like WET magazine continue to be huge influences. I think that's really my thing—I just like capturing the beautiful rawness of life as it actually is.

Check out more of Mary-Louise’s work on her website.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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This week, we caught up with Andy to talk about why the funniest ideas are often the smartest, what stand-up comedians can teach marketers, the unexpected overlap between ultrarunning and creativity, and why brands should stop trying so hard to be authentic.

Andy Pearson is the VP of Creative at Liquid Death, one of the fastest growing non-alc beverage brands of all time. As part of Liquid Death’s evil mission to make the world healthier and more sustainable, leads the creative team and in-house production studio known as Death Machine. Since 2022, Liquid Death has produced almost all its work in house, and Andy has directed or co-directed most of it since 2024. Prior, Andy spent 12+ years as an award-winning creative director and copywriter at ad agencies.

Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

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Make Something Stupid Make Sense

I have to make something stupid make sense. When we’re working on something, we’re often just trying to make the other people laugh in the room. We’re trying to come up with the dumbest idea, but then a lot of times I’m like, “Okay, cool, that’s really stupid. I love that. But how do we make that make sense? How do we make this dumb thing actually a really smart idea?”

That’s always the fun thing for me. I call it Liquid Death logic. It tickles both sides of your brain simultaneously, where an idea is both the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard and also the smartest thing you’ve ever heard. Those are the ideas that have always spoken to me, like Nathan for You. It’s arguably stupid and smart at the same time. Those are the kind of ideas that I love, and that’s what I’m always trying to get to.

The Metallica to Martha Stewart Spectrum

Some of the fun with us is that we’re always bending genres and remixing things. The fact that Liquid Death was using metal from early on was only because it was a funny thing to do, not because we were trying to be like Monster Energy on Warped Tour or something like that. As we’ve grown, we get to expand into all these other things. We’ve done country songs, we did a dance album for Greatest Hates, like an ‘80s dance-pop album, and so we get to kind of flex all these different weird muscles all the time. We get to write bad jingles, like soap jingles from the ‘90s or a beer commercial jingle or something like that, and they’re really good at faithfully recreating that.

It’s funny, we get asked by the press sometimes, “Who is this for?” It’s for anyone who has to drink water, and that’s a pretty big Venn diagram of people. The stuff becomes funnier by pushing the edges, so we do stuff with Metallica, but also Martha Stewart, and that makes both of those things feel funnier. We’re always mining pop culture and marketing culture, and eventually we’ll end up somewhere that someone has an interest. Then we get to ingest whatever that thing is and regurgitate it through our own weird Liquid Death sensibility. In that sense, we get to move around culture instead of staying in our little aesthetic bubble.

Throw More Spaghetti

Make as much stuff as you can. There’s not another secret. Look at how stand-up comedians work. They get up on stage constantly, and they’re constantly workshopping new jokes, the order of jokes, and the way they say something. Agencies and marketing departments treat the ads we make so preciously that it’s like, “It has to be perfect, and we have to spend all this money and all this time making this thing.”

We’re just the opposite. We’re like, “Throw something out there. We’re not going to spend a bunch of time on it. Just keep chucking stuff out there and seeing what sticks.” That’s way more fun for us because we get to learn along the way. You definitely have misses, which is totally fine because we’re doing a bunch of stuff. Making peace with the fact that some things are going to be great and some things aren’t is important. You don’t have to bat a thousand, but you obviously want to learn from the mistakes.

200 Miles & 2 Hours of Sleep

I realized a couple years ago that running is just meditation in a different form. That’s all it is because it’s this active, full-body meditation. I’ve even mapped it. There are a few stages in a run when I’m out in the morning. At first you’re like, “This is pretty rough.” Once you push past that physical bit, you sort of plateau into this space where you’ve disassociated from your body in a way, and it lets your mind drift and be still. Then, past that, you get into a place where you start to think and analyze, which is very funny because now you’re totally disassociated from the run. Your body has fully taken over.

It’s a special time to be up and see a different side of everything for a bit, and see a sunrise from the top of a mountain or a peak. No one can touch you for the rest of the day because you’ve already run to the top of something and watched the sunrise up there. It’s funny, ultrarunning is not considered an extreme sport. Over time, that extreme athlete mentality has kind of seeped into my brain as a result of doing this, which has been helpful on both a personal and professional level. The last race I did was the Tahoe 200, so we ran 200 miles around Lake Tahoe over 68 and a half hours. Across the entire race, I only slept for two hours — 30 minutes the second morning and 90 minutes the third overnight. Certainly by the end, though, I was tripping balls. For the last eight or nine hours, I was having a full psychedelic experience just from sleep deprivation.

Long Live Satire

A creative hill I’m willing to die on is: stop making crap that people don’t want. I always liken marketing to getting mugged. It’s like you’re trying to go do something else. You’re walking to your car, and then someone jumps out of the bushes with a gun like, “Give me all your money. Oh, and here, also listen to these five copy points.”

You can just sniff work from a mile away where people don’t care about the person who’s on the receiving end. One thing that’s become common now is trying to appear authentic because that was such a buzzword for so many years. Style has now been so co-opted that it just reeks of, ironically, inauthenticity. The funny thing now is I see think pieces on LinkedIn about how Liquid Death is such an authentic brand, which is so funny because we are a satirical brand. Inherently, we are a parody of marketing. It’s a satirical mirror that we’re holding up to things. So, almost by definition, it is inauthentic. Maybe it’s refreshing that we’re shining a light on stuff and saying the things out loud that other marketers are secretly trying to hide.

Listen and follow Andy’s podcast Between Two Pines.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

Sofía Manfredi is a staff writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She previously wrote for Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj and for ClickHole. She lives in New York.

This week, we caught up with Sofía to talk about musical comedy in Antarctica, the importance of sibling bits, and feeding your comedy brain.

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Promo Tour Ick

The way that people have to promote their work now is so different from what it used to be. It's weird now that the interview circuit is, "I'm going to do an activity on camera with X or Y person." Why are you not allowed to just ask somebody something in a normal format? Why do we have to be doing things? I am such a sucker for a good old-fashioned interview. When people have fun with it, it's so fun. We should have done today's interview going under Niagara Falls on the Maid of the Mist while making pasta salad. But a lot of times I'm watching this and thinking, Oh, I wish they were sitting on a sofa and talking to each other. Interviews are too involved now and often feature crafts or activities in a way that I don't need.

The Balancing Act of Comedy

The way that I view the format of comedy has evolved because there are a lot of new ways that people do comedy and share comedy. A lot of that was just the advent of TikTok and social media and all these new ways for people to put comedy out there. Sometimes I feel I will always be a comedy nerd and always take in comedy, but sometimes I want to make sure that I am consuming things broadly and reading widely, just to make sure I’m not in one specific area of writing or of entertainment.

Whatever book I do read, I try to have it be very different from the last one that I read. I read this book of short stories called Siete Casas Vacias (Seven Empty Houses), which is this sort of unsettling collection of dreamlike short stories. It has a little bit of magical realism. Then after that, I moved to The Journalist and the Murderer, which is a nonfiction book about a a guy who was convicted of brutally murdering his wife and children. He invites this journalist to come to his defense team in advance of his trial, with the understanding that that journalist believes there’s been a miscarriage of justice. They hang out for years and become really close, and then when the journalist’s book comes out, he’s painted the other guy as a confirmed psychopath who for sure committed the crime. The murderer then sues the journalist for fraud, and that fraud trial is what the book is about.

Polymath Envy

I am very inspired by polymaths because I’m not one. I was watching a YouTube documentary with my grandma about Federico García Lorca because she loves him. He was an incredibly talented musician, then he decided to do playwriting instead, then he decided to do poetry. Just someone who does a zillion different things. I’m not a musician, but I admire that, and I’m aware that I don’t have that. I draw inspiration from things that are not the format I’m working in at the moment. Sometimes the best inspiration is to leave the arena that you’re in and go check out what other creative people are doing, and trust that it’ll make its way in somehow. I also think it’s inspiring when people write from different settings.

You can take in art from whenever. I am a big believer that stuff from the past can be as relevant as ever and can be a nice way to take a break from feeling overwhelmed by everything in front of you that’s coming out right now. A big mix of genres and time periods is very rewarding, and it leads you down unexpected little mental hallways sometimes. I feel everything you take in informs your writing, but when it's fun and exciting and surprising, a lot of it can be for your writing and still make you feel like a kid again. That is just the best place to be.

The World’s Coldest Writers’ Room

Something I've always been interested in—and would love to learn more about at some point—is that on Antarctic expeditions back in the early 1900s, because there had been a series of failed expeditions where the sun would go away for four months and everybody would go insane, they started deliberately finding ways for these guys to pass the time. So on one specific expedition, these extremely rugged sailor types who were eating elephant seals all day and living on this frozen ship wrote and put on a musical comedy at the bottom of the Earth. Part of me feels like you could make a serious scholarly argument about art and survival. Part of me is just like, that's just funny. Those guys did it. They made the costumes. That's just a great time. They really committed to the bit in a historic way, and I find it inspiring. If I feel like I'm in my apartment and not able to get stuff done, I'm like, "People have written in the craziest contexts imaginable." Just get a coffee and start typing.

The Importance of Long Standing Bits

There was a period of time where my brother was given this book by someone on the street called From Prison to Praise. It was this religious revelation by a guy who had reportedly been in prison. It was this pretty clearly self-published book about finding God. I don’t know if any of his life story was real. Someone saw my brother when he was 18 and was like, “Here, kid.” He put it in my room, and I was like, “What is this?” Then I put it back in his room, and it kind of escalated. We’ve just kind of been forever giving each other this From Prison to Praise book that neither of us has ever even cracked open. I have it right now, which means I need to hide it in his attic so he finds it in 20 years. Congratulations to that guy who found praise in prison. He’s changed my life by giving me a good bit.

My sense of humor is a little absurd, a little dry. Sometimes absurd gets mistaken for nonsensical, but absurd comedy still follows rules—it still has setups and punchlines, they just come at stranger angles. I definitely have a soft spot for dry satire. Growing up I was most into The Onion, and I still think ClickHole is scratching an itch that no one else is. I feel like some of the stuff on social media now veers a little bit toward cringe, but that also might just be that it’s for someone younger than me. It’s just taste. I might just be an old crotchety person who’s like, “Oh, I literally don’t get the joke.” Humiliating.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

Maryam Tantawy is a marketing leader with over 15 years building luxury beauty and wellness brands, from global conglomerates to high-growth independents. A self-described "third culture kid," she brings a lifelong fascination with culture and subculture to understanding what makes people fall for a brand.

This week, we caught up with Maryam to talk about wellness clubs, Knicks games, and what happens when every brand wants to be a lifestyle.

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How to Market to the Marketer

I see marketing in everything. You’re seeing ads everywhere. You’re seeing products everywhere. So you can’t turn off that instinct. It’s cool to understand, but as a consumer, it’s human nature that if something resonates with you, it could be fulfilling a necessity. But then which brand of food do you want to align with and support? I’m still a consumer, and that’s where my marketing hat turns off. It’s all about what brands align with my values or feel like they understand me.

I love the idea of getting into the brain of the consumer. I love studying so I can understand what she’s looking for, what’s important to her, and what she wants to hear from a brand. So even if it’s not necessarily my taste, I immerse myself in her mindset. And I think when it comes to campaigns, it’s translating her world in a way that makes sense for the brand. Maybe my taste takes a step back sometimes. I’m not into this, but I know exactly what’s going on in the mindset of the woman who is, and who our customer is.

The Search for the Perfect Product

A category that’s really important to me is curly haircare. For a very long time, I couldn’t find the perfect product. I still can’t find the perfect product, but I’m starting to hone in on a curly haircare that’s helped me style my hair. We weren’t catered to for a very long time. Coming from Egypt, coming from a different culture than here, and being embedded in this idea that your hair should be straight and sleek. In the early 2000s there were no curly hair products, and if there were, they were not that great. We just had to burn our hair. A lot of times, I remember growing up, a haircare brand would launch curly haircare products and then discontinue them.

These days, I’ve been buying a lot of Jones Road, which I really appreciate because Bobbi Brown is a makeup artist, but she’s not one to ever tell you that you need to hide, conceal, or change the look of your face. She’s like, “I don’t believe in contour.” I love that about her and I love her products. It’s very minimal coverage. She’s like, “You should look like you, always.” I love that philosophy.

Cardi B as the North Star

Maybe I’m a purist, but wellness goes way beyond your outward appearance. Your outward appearance is a result of being well and taking care of yourself. But, I have an issue with fragrance brands or skincare brands touting that they’re for wellness. It’s about taking care of your health versus slapping a cream on. Healthy skin is great, but being healthy inward is so much more important. All the brands see there’s a wellness trend right now. People want to be the healthiest version of themselves, so you see brands leaning into it. But that’s not authentic.

In culture, especially in music the most authentic people are the ones that inspire me. Not the ones that are polished and PR-ready. The ones who pick up their camera, get on TikTok or Instagram, and are just speaking their mind. You can eventually tell how raw someone is because they make mistakes. People are willing to forgive people that are human. Cardi B is one that comes to mind for me.

Sorry, I’m Luteal

What we’re seeing is that the term “wellness” has evolved so much. When I was at Hum Nutrition, this was 2019, it used to be your vitamins and your supplements. Now it’s fragrance, it’s skincare, even some of these tech devices are considered wellness. Where I see it going, and you’re already seeing the start of this, is the experience of wellness becoming a thing. All of these wellness clubs that are popping up all over the city. It’s going to continue evolving into an experiential thing. The way we eat, the music we consume, it’s everything now. I feel like it’s going to continue being instead of products we consume, the environments we’re putting ourselves in.

Men especially have an interesting mindset when it comes to wellness. When marketing to men about wellness, it’s all about optimizing yourself. For women, it’s more about feeling like yourself again. It’s a different mindset. I know that’s very binary, but men want to optimize their performance, and longevity is huge for them. It’s not that it isn’t for women, but I think women are more inward-looking and want to be more in tune with their bodies and listen to, “Why do I feel off today?” Maybe it’s related to our cycles. Our body changes in 28 days.

Beauty and the Knicks

A lot of beauty pop-ups look exactly the same. It’s either a flower market or a coffee shop. I don’t want to say lazy, but I think it’s easy. Girls love matcha and beauty, so the formula becomes: let’s combine the two. The sad thing is that people forget about most of these pop-ups a week later. What would be cooler to see is brands building their own personality. Build a pop-up around that.

I think about Red Bull. They’re an energy drink, but they were like, who are we as a brand? We’re these risk-takers. Let’s find this super niche stunt sport and just lean into it. The coolest brands are carving their own niche, versus brands that don’t have a strong sense of their own personality. A great example of this is that Saie Beauty is the official beauty brand of Madison Square Garden. I watched an interview with the founder, and I think she was just at a Knicks game and was like, “Why are there no beauty brands being marketed in here?” I love that idea of finding a whole avenue to be discovered.

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

Veronica Pulcini oversees Programming and Learning at The Lighthouse, a Creator-first campus and cultural hub built for Creators and the teams behind them.

Professional dot-connector. Collector of interesting people, ambitious ideas, and niche cultural references. Occasionally turns them into events. Third-generation Angeleno. Defender of print magazines. Devotee of Rilo Kiley, Jason Molina, Pharoah Sanders, and Art Laboe. Unapologetic fan of the Bravoverse. Perpetually curious.

This week, we caught up with Veronica to talk about the music scenes that shaped her, the communities built around shared taste, and why genuine curiosity still matters in an increasingly performative world.

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What Indie Sleaze Taught Me

I started working in the music industry around 2008, and it was the heyday of indie music. My mentor developed The Rumble, which brought together one emerging indie headliner in every city through partnerships with local record stores, independent newspapers, and blogs. I handled all of the promotion, discovering incredible bands, working directly with them, and building relationships with writers and tastemakers across the country, and that experience shaped a lot of what came next.

If you know what matters to someone musically, you can start understanding what tickets sell, what merchandise moves, what bars they go to, what restaurants they visit, and what they spend money on. Music becomes a lens for understanding culture more broadly. When artists say no, they’re telling you something incredibly valuable. Nurturing the things you love is really important because those interests eventually fold back into the work you do and the things you put in front of people from a cultural perspective.

Shared Taste, Shared Fate

It’s incredibly important to honor influence and understand where things come from. I had to drive to Tower Records. I had to drive to Amoeba. I carried index cards with albums I wanted to buy that I’d written down from magazines. You’d hear a Pavement record and suddenly want to listen to every band that sounded like Pavement. Then you’d become interested in the magazines they were featured in, the photographers who shot them, and the broader ecosystem around them. That’s what made it so exciting. It wasn’t just a band. It was a world.

Some of my closest friends and I joke that if we’d grown up in the same town, we probably would’ve met standing in line for the same show. I wasn’t necessarily finding that community in my immediate environment, but I was always confident in what I liked. Over time, you realize the challenge isn’t keeping culture to yourself—it’s finding thoughtful ways to share it with people outside your bubble.

Moshing Encouraged

You learn a tremendous amount sitting in the back of a venue, watching ticket sales, watching bar sales, talking to artists, talking to talent buyers, and seeing who actually shows up. You learn about neighborhoods. You learn about communities. You learn about culture. Niche music communities often aren’t treated with respect. There’s a stigma attached to them. People assume hardcore fans are going to destroy things or hip-hop audiences are difficult. In reality, some of the strongest communities I’ve ever encountered exist within those scenes.

The mosh pit at a hardcore show is actually one of the safest places you’ll find because everyone is looking out for one another. If somebody falls, people pick them up. There’s a real sense of care and responsibility. A lot of people simply wanted to know they could come somewhere, be respected, and have a good experience.

2,920 Songs and Counting

For the last eight years, I’ve had a daily practice called MORNING Jahms. Every morning, I choose a song and share it. Then it goes into a monthly playlist. At the end of the year, those playlists become one larger playlist. I’ve done it every single day for eight years. It’s a form of intention-setting. It’s a daily practice, and I genuinely look forward to it every morning.

Music gives me an opportunity to track how I’m feeling, what I’m curious about, and what I’m discovering. It’s basically a diary.

Taking a (Non-Performative) Stance

Immerse yourself in things that give you something to talk about on your own. Let that be the challenge: figure out what you’re interested in and be excited to talk about it. Be curious because you’re not always going to have someone facilitating the conversation

People don’t always take the time to go inward. The next evolution of that trend is getting quieter about what you’re interested in and owning it– not performing it, not branding it. Genuinely being interested in something and allowing yourself to care about it. It’s okay to have a firm point of view.

Check out Veronica’s MORNING playlist on Spotify and Apple Music

AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

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Thought Enthusiast is an editorial project from AdHoc, a New York experiential agency exploring the people, ideas, and cultural currents shaping what’s next.

Justin Ryan Kim is a creative director based in NYC currently at Gap.

We caught up with Justin to talk about simplicity, storytelling, successful brand campaigns, and what it takes to build lasting relationships with consumers.

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On creative taking the wheel

A creative director’s job is to drive. The best creative directors are just good communicators because they understand how to listen to people and say, “Hey, that’s a really great idea. Let’s figure out how to make it work.”

Our job is to take the story and make it clear to understand, make it easy to understand. Make it so that all you have to do is look at the slide and you’re like, “I see it. I feel it. I understand it.”

Then you start to realize maybe the goal of this campaign is not to convince this person of anything. Maybe the goal of this campaign is to get them to put their phone down and dance.

On the power of less

If you watch campaigns and content, it should never be about giving a solution. I don't think the answer is to give people a solution. It’s more that we need to give people a POV. And through that POV, you should be thinking about how people will react to it. You should be thinking about how people will see it five days later, ten days later, three weeks later, two years later.

The best things are really simple.

Over the years, I’ve always been someone who thinks, “What more? What more? What more? What can we add? What can we add? What can we add?” At the time, we needed that because there wasn’t enough. It was a question of what do we add. Now the question is: what do we take away?

If you look at narrative, if you look at how people are storytelling, and if you look at ads, no one’s doing that anymore.

It’s not about hitting people with all the best collaborations and all the biggest moves all at once, even though I totally could have. What has been done instead is build a relationship with our consumer. Now they’re excited to hear what is next. They feel optimistic about what we’re doing.

On being the cool older kid

If you want someone to buy something, you need them to feel safe about what they're buying and a lot of that comes from trust. And so then it just becomes how do I—how do we—create scenarios in which people feel they can trust a brand?

What I do is I put my six-year-old hat on. When I was a kid, I would always get excited by looking at the cool kids. The cool kids were never kids my age. The cool kids were always the big kids. I wanted to be them. I wanted to see what they’re doing and what they’re into.

Now when I make work, I think about that person who’s that cool big bro, big sis, older kid in the neighborhood.

By doing that, you’re able to create safety. I want someone to watch something and not just feel good, but feel supported and feel heard. That comes from building trust.

You build trust first by shifting perspective. Because if you’re a brand and you’re doing the same things as everyone else, you’re just following the status quo. When you’re following the status quo, you’re not growing. You’re stagnant. You’re actually failing. If you want to constantly think about growth, you have to constantly think about how to improve the communication.

You should be chasing trust.

It’s not about changing the game or destroying the internet every time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t destroy the internet every once in a while.

On being present

Something that I’m working on right now, and something that inspires me, is people with a strong sense of self.

Honestly, a lot of times these days, I don’t get inspired by looking at things anymore. I get inspired through conversations. I get inspired through hearing stories. I get inspired by being outside and seeing how happy people are not to be doing much.

I try to stay off my phone. I try to stay unplugged. I try to be outside. I try not to get in my own head.

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AdHoc’s campaigns live in the spirit of creating experiences with an emphasis on the unconventional, unfounded, and new to build things that feel culturally embedded and considered rather than overbranded and boring.

Izzy Fradin is a Chicago-based curator, creative producer, and sound designer working across music, design, and hospitality. She cut her teeth curating for Numero Group, before taking on roles with Earth Libraries,22Twenty, and co-producing Sub Pop’s Margo Guryan tribute compilation, Like Someone I Know. Her collaborations include work with Aquarium Drunkard, New Commute, and NTS radio among others.

Outside her career, Izzy works with fine art and hospitality spaces through her project Space Crafting. Through this project she crafts sonic identities, physical media, and live experiences, including 2023’s Flagstaff Fadeaway festival and the ongoing Fadeaway Sessions series. She is also editor-in-chief of abracadabra!, a quarterly print magazine exploring the powers of manifestation through visual art and the spoken word.

We caught up with Izzy to chat about her archival work in music and running her own magazine and the future of cultural discovery in the face of automation.

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With all you have going on, walk me through what your week looks like. Which of these roles is leading the charge in your life right now?

It’s a tough question. My main focus is Earth Libraries, which is my full-time job, so that definitely takes up the majority of my time.

I do spend a lot of time on other projects, though, the magazine being one example. abracadabra! really comes in waves because it depends on where we are in the production process. We’re just wrapping up our seventh issue, so lately I’ve been in editor mode: writing for the magazine, coordinating contributors, ordering bonus items, things like that.

What is your main role for Earth Libraries? How do you play a role at the label?

I’m doing a lot of A&R, which stands for Artists and Repertoire, bringing new artists into the label, particularly on the archival side.

I have a background in archival releases from my time at Numero Group, and I was originally brought into Earth Libraries almost as a consultant because no one on the team had prior label experience. I’ve helped streamline some of the operational side of the business while also thinking through release strategy, storytelling, and ways to build awareness around what we’re doing in Chicago. Over time, the role evolved to include more of my curation experience. I help shape playlists, support sync licensing efforts, contribute to editorial content, and think about how we connect great music with the right audiences.

Connecting audiences with music is such a big part of what we do, which makes me curious about how you approach that challenge in a live setting. Can you walk me through what you think makes a pop-up or activation really special?

When I was at Numero Group I was in charge of doing a pop-up around a compilation record called Whispers Lounge. It’s a really amazing record featuring lost ‘70s lounge acts that recorded these private-press records, and it showcases some of the best music from that genre.

We took over this jazz club in Chicago called Dorian’s and kind of made these silly videos imagining Dorian’s as Whispers Lounge, a fictional supper club with nightly entertainment. We had custom old-fashioned glasses made, custom coasters, and custom matchbooks. The whole record was packaged like a matchbook, and we had the bar create a special menu with cocktails that referenced songs and artists featured on the record.

Every detail was considered because we really wanted to transform the space into this fictional world. So I think it’s about attention to detail and really creating an experience that feels one of a kind and brings people together. That’s the other piece of it: the humanity. Events are worthwhile when they create a sense of community that feels novel and rallies people around something.

How did you come up with these little details, and how did the idea come to be? Did you all brainstorm together, or were you responsible for any of the specifics you're particularly proud of?

Yeah, I mean, it’s always a lot of collaboration. Especially for that Numero event, there were a number of brainstorming sessions. I think we had even more ideas than what we ended up doing. But it became a matter of, okay, we have budgets and we have to rein it in.

That was one of the first really big projects I was involved in personally. It was the biggest pop-up or experience I’d worked on up to that point. Tim Breen, who’s been a collaborator of mine for years now, was really the creative mastermind behind Whispers and that event in so many ways.

He’s an expert at a lot of things, and he was really helpful in taking the ideas we had and figuring out how to bring them to life. I’m grateful to have had mentors like Tim who brought me into those conversations early on and gave me the opportunity to have a voice in those spaces.

You've helped create a lot of memorable experiences. What do you think is the most important element of a good party?

The people. You could have absolutely nothing planned, but if you’re in good company, it doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters if the people are there and a sense of community is there.

Before the interview you mentioned tastemaking and curation. That's similar to what we do at AdHoc. We brand ourselves as tastemakers, understanding trends and what's happening in culture and being able to put these things into experiences for brands. How would you define a tastemaker?

I guess tastemakers are just people who have a point of view. People who have spent the time in the trenches listening, caring, and educating themselves on the history of whatever they’re passionate about and develop that through extensive love, fascination and curiosity. A sort of curatorial angle of expertise that’s backed by experience and knowledge.

I’ve spent my life worshipping at the school of music. But I’m equally a proponent of the Bob Dylan philosophy of: “if it sounds good, I like it”.

A point of view is often defined as much by what you reject as what you embrace. Is there anything in culture right now that people seem really into, but that you don't totally understand or that feels a bit like a fad to you?

I don't love how widespread adopting AI has become. That's definitely something I struggle with. Is it a fad? As much as I would like to think so, I don't think it is. I think it's going to continue evolving and becoming more integrated into our lives. My hope is that it becomes more thoughtfully regulated, because people left to their own devices tend to do some pretty questionable things with technology, and corporations aren't exactly known for exercising restraint either.

So, where do you go when you’re looking to discover something new?

Daytrotter comes to mind. Before it was part of Paste, there was a platform called Daytrotter that, in the 2000s and early 2010s, operated as a music discovery platform before that was really a thing.

They were one of the first outlets doing intimate recording sessions with emerging artists. They had a few different locations over the years. It started somewhere in rural Illinois, then moved to Iowa, and then Texas. They would have artists come in, record a live session, and then give away the downloads for free on their website.

When I was a burgeoning teenage DJ and music obsessive, it was such a huge platform for discovery. They’ve been on hiatus for something like 10 or 12 years, and then a month or so ago announced their return.

The return of Daytrotter is a sign of the times. What does the future of tastemaking and cultural discovery look like when big tech companies push for integrated AI and automation?

I think people are getting tired of the algorithmification of taste, especially in music. It’s become increasingly difficult to find large platforms that are doing real music journalism rather than functioning as influencers. There are still some great Substacks and niche corners of the internet where tastemaker-driven discovery exists, [shoutout New Commute in memoriam for blog culture], but it’s much more fragmented than it used to be.

That’s why Daytrotter’s return feels so meaningful to me. It feels like an editorial decision on the part of Paste rooted in a real understanding of what people are hungry for. Looking back through the archives, they had sessions from Charli XCX and Dua Lipa from over 12, 14 years ago, long before either artist became the global stars they are today.

I talk to so many musicians, and working with record labels, we’re constantly having conversations about press, exposure, and what the path forward looks like. Getting discovered today looks really different from the blogosphere era.

I don’t know exactly what the solution is. But things like Daytrotter coming back feel like harbingers of a better future. They represent a model that prioritizes discovery, curiosity, and genuine enthusiasm for music. Daytrotter is one of many solutions, and I think we need more things like it. That’s what gets me excited.

When you have things like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and all these playlists that are curated for you, they’re still built on algorithms. In many ways that takes away the fun of spending time searching for new artists and stumbling across things by accident.

Do you think there’s enough of a human element left in music discovery? Enough people helping other people find things they love, rather than machines deciding what we should hear next?

My take is that the people who are genuinely curious and care about discovery are on the long tail, but they’re unchanging. They’re not going anywhere.

The people who are content with their Daylists and Release Radars are the same people who, before Spotify, were satisfied with their mainstream radio stations. It’s literally the same thing. And there are a lot more of those people. There always will be. That’s just kind of how the world works, because most people don’t really care what they’re listening to. They want to be part of the collective conversation. They want to watch the shows everyone’s watching, see the movies everyone’s seeing, read the books everyone’s reading, and participate in a shared cultural experience.

And I’m not saying that with any judgment. It’s human nature!

For the people who care a lot there’s more to discover than ever. But I even think about something like NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts as a comparison to Daytrotter. Tiny Desk used to be an incredible platform for discovery, and in some ways it still is. But it’s also become, “Okay, now Bruno Mars is doing a Tiny Desk.” And you start to wonder, is that discovery anymore? Or is it just another major promotional platform? Is the goal now to get Drake to do a Tiny Desk? Tiny Desk used to be for the little guys. Now it isn’t, at least not exclusively.

What I’m getting at is that the outlets for emerging artists are becoming fewer and farther between. We need these outlets, and we need them to have enough reach and bandwidth that discovery doesn’t become entirely dependent on influencers with audiences operating inside social media ecosystems. You shouldn’t have to be on social media to find interesting new music.

That’s part of what excites me so much about Daytrotter coming back. It’s online, sure, but it’s not just another social platform. It’s also an opportunity for smaller artists to be discovered.

The first two artists they’ve brought back, Wendy Eisenberg and Theo Lawrence, are both incredible musicians. Both sessions are fantastic. Honestly, listening to the Theo Lawrence session made me emotional. Part of it was nostalgia I think. It immediately transported me back to high school, sitting in study hall with terrible headphones plugged into my iPod, listening to a Daytrotter session and having that feeling of hearing something amazing for the very first time.

That’s the power of human-led, curated discovery. And that’s something I don’t think is ever going away.

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Writing is just what Sami does, and has always done. When he moved to NYC he started in sports editing for MLB.com, VICE Sports and the NHL. In 2014 he began his bestselling newsletter SNAKE, where he covered vintage clothing. The archives of SNAKE have been collected into a book Sheer Drift: The Snake America Newsletters, which is available on Shining Life Press. He expanded into SNAKE SUPER HEALTH (also bestselling) where he covers the fascinating and twisted topics of wellness, peptides, hairline implants, etc. He is now able to write his newsletters full-time, while writing for magazines like AD and GQ on the side.

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🤪 On being super geeked

I finished some fiction work lately that I’m excited about. I’m also super geeked up about my health newsletter. I love writing and thinking about this topic, and following where it’s moving in the culture and what people are doing. I’ve been lifting and tracking protein and doing this shit since high school, so it’s fun.

Lately, I’ve been holding weekly calisthenics workouts every Sunday, through the Snake Super Health letter. That’s been awesome. It’s a way of making what I cover more real, more accessible, and more fun. The workouts are a nice way to break down the wall between “working out” and life. More than that, it’s just awesome to break a sweat and chop it up outside with all the cool, nice people who have been coming through.

📖 On the best book ever written

I have noticed lately I’ve been thinking about hand and grip strength: wrist strength, and shoulder health a lot: looking it up and doing all sorts of odd pronated and supinated grip exercises to make my hands and arms feel better. Music-wise I’ve been listening to a lot of George Wassouf. Syrian singer with one of the most beautiful and subtle/majestic voices ever. Always on these days. I just finished the 1,001 Nights—best book ever written? Mind-blowing shit. What can I say? I read, I lift, I listen to music, I work, repeat.

🍲 On Navel and Tripe

Pho Bang. The #5 with the navel and tripe. Best place on earth. I also like the Brooklyn Heights pier for calisthenics. Any park really. God bless these places, they’re like the library. Free and available for all citizens. It’s so cool.

🏋️‍♂️ On temporary pain

I loved working on Pain is Temporary, a movie zine with A24 last year for The Smashing Machine starring The Rock. We made an MMA/lifting magazine from 2000, which was decidedly different than now, and when I got into lifting and physical culture. It was the most fun I’ve had collaborating on a project before. It was seriously just the best time.

👾 On delivering down to the last pixel

I like the latest Camelbak campaign; a buddy Justin has been involved/making decisions on the graphic and creative side. It looks excellent and is vibrant. Jumps off the page. Cool product too and brand. It delivers down to the last pixel.

👟 On moments that become a part of you

The first Inspiration vintage fair in NYC in like 2011. I went and saw so much (on racks, on different people) that went into my blood, and I got carried away with vintage for about a decade after that. It felt like that Sex Pistols show in 24 Hour Party People—30 people in attendance, everyone makes something clutch after. Another moment was being in Paris when the Notre Dame cathedral burned down. It felt like the last scene of a Fellini film. I’ve never seen a street scene like that. Emotions all up and down the gamut, people 20, 30 deep, for miles.

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Mayssa Chehata is the founder of BEHAVE Candy. BEHAVE is the first low-sugar, clean-label candy that doesn’t spike blood sugar. It was her love of sweets and her father's diabetes that inspired Mayssa to create a better candy option. BEHAVE partners with chefs and food scientists to create candy that tastes too good to be true, in order to reduce the amount of sugar in the food system.

Mayssa is also the host of the ROCK BOTTOM podcast, a writer & speaker. She previously held roles at the NFL, Uber, Daily Harvest, and SoulCycle. She moonlights as a DJ.

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👵 On fanbases aging gracefully

Merit tapped a customer's 89-year-old grandmother, after the customer emailed telling them her grandma was their biggest fan, for a campaign. It's so beautiful, I love seeing brands promoting age diversity in casting and content, and the authenticity of the story having been sourced organically through a customer was so beautiful.

🎇 On life-changing founders

I look up to Melanie from Ghia so much. I admire the brand she’s built and her products really changed the game for me when I became sober-curious and cut out alcohol for over 2 years.

🌬️ On In 2,3,4, Out 2,3,4,

There are a few breath work events I’ve both attended and hosted that I believe changed the course and direction of my life. Where I was able to tap into a deep level of connection and understanding within myself that was truly healing and allowed me to slowly become to person I am today.

🔮 On having friends who are as woo-woo as you

My biggest, most favorite collaborators are my friends. I feel like we're collaborating on life together. My co-founder of course is the biggest one in my business, but a handful of my closest friends many of whom are founders as well. And my sister (who I also work with on the BEHAVE business and some of my other projects). I'm so grateful to be surrounded by incredible women everyday. and they're all as woo-woo as me so they don't hesitate when I ask them to do a witching ritual for manifestation or to pull tarot cards so we can figure out what to do next.

🎧 On staying sonically fresh

I realized that I need to expose my brain to new music, rather than replaying old music, as part of the process of rewiring. Every couple months I create a new playlist and add new music that matches the vibe I am trying to emulate in my life at that moment. It's been truly life changing. Oh and actually getting up and dancing throughout my day - whether at home, taking a dance class, or going out dancing with friends. Here's a playlist I was listening to for a mind reset end of last year.

🍭 On breaking the sugar ceiling

I'd bring more women into the candy industry, because I believe that would solve the bigger issue which is that the candy industry makes products that are killing people. There are very few female founded and run companies in the candy world, and almost all of them are better-for-you. So more women in the space would likely amplify this shift towards cleaner, lower sugar products that we are trying to create with our brand.

Follow Mayssa on Instagram & check out her podcast ROCKBOTTOM here.

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Maceo “Paisley” Keeling III is a performance artist, writer, TEDx speaker, filmmaker, and marketing consultant. His many accomplishments range from a fellowship with the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, running his own storefront gallery in LA, publishing his first book of essays Tao Of Maceo: Identity, Relationships,Work: A Journal On Living, to being in a Justin Timberlake music video.

His compounded experience in art, culture, community building, and strategy has honed his ability to translate cultural trends into real social needs for businesses to offer solutions to. He is currently leading Experiential and Cultural Marketing at Feeld, aiding in the great return of in-person gatherings. In addition to his 9-5 he runs a philosophy club, non-profit think tank, and publishes essays on Substack and Citizensofculture.com

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🤣 On the value of a good sitcom

The funniest thing I have watched recently is Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat. There is also something interesting about it still feeling like television, as opposed to quick social content. It's a challenge to keep people engaged in longer form content with everything happening right now so I really value a sitcom.

👀 On looking over instead of looking up

Its hard to say what my "industry" is, but I will say that I do more looking over than looking UP. I have a friend Jenny Gottstein who is head of experiential at Happily and she is not only a bonafied genius but also one of the kindest people I have ever know.

Next to her is Nu Goteh who is on the editorial team of Deem a progressive design publication. They have an annual conference with MCA in Chicago and he's just a really funny guy to be around.

⛳️ 🎾 On the future of the green

I am really interested in what is happening both in Golf and Tennis right now. We have brands like Malbon (golf) who are new players in a world where legacy and tradition are so key. And then brands like Wilson (tennis) who are a heritage brand that needs to keep up with the fast paced growth. These are different sports and different brands both trying to address a fundamental scale and culture problem.

Malbon's job is somewhat more straight forward, as revenue and customer base grows their brand dollars will go further to sponsor young talent and to some extent legacy institutions like the Master's have to validate them or risk loosing touch with the next generation. It's an uphill battle but they can start at the fringes and work their way into the mainstream once they have proven authority.

Wilson has another challenge and which has some complexity, they have the purse strings to advertise, but their name is almost synonymous with tennis to the point that that their struggle is that consumers might think they already know what Wilson is about. So they are repositioning to win incoming tennis payers with edge, but they also have to maintain what what they have established.

New brands get to be more risk tolerant and experimental, heritage brands have more to lose, but a lot more resources. I am interested in these dynamics where ever I see them but with the Master's and the Miami open having just passed this is top of mind for me.

🎷 On music that’s jazzy, listenable and thought-provoking.

My friend Aja Monet just dropped these new tracks Elsewhere and Hollyweird which are absurdist reflections on society that point the mirror back at the inconsistencies between what we say and do, and to a large extent, what that means for who we are as individuals and a society. It’s jazzy and listenable, but also thought-provoking which I need.

🎢 On Let’s-a-go to Universal Studios

You know what!? I went to Universal Studios Hollywood Theme park and was so blown away by the level of execution at the Mario World attraction. It was the kind experiential activation that I hope to be able to create one day with such a powerful and nostalgic IP, and budget.

I imagine being able to open up a Dragon Ball Z exhibit or something. But it reminded me that some of the biggest goals are still out there and to remain inspired to reach the highest level of delivery.

🎙️ On raising your creative ceiling

I gave a TED talk a few years ago that helped me realize I was actually no where near my ceiling when it comes to creative thinking. I realized that sometimes you have to just sign up for the thing or say "Yes" and then figure the rest out as you go.

This isn't the same as fake it until you make it, but rather realizing that learning happens along the way to a place and its not always about arriving, but becoming. So in order to deliver the TED talk I had to gain new skills and practice them. So I was initially correct in thinking I wasn't ready, but it was imposter syndrome convincing me that I couldn't learn and grow.

So now I think about the direction I want to go and who I have to become to feel like I belong there.

📵 On cool projects that never made it to Instagram

My buddy Daniel Johnson, has made some of the best work I have ever created with him as a photographer. We captured work that led to a film project with another friend of mine Leila Jarman. These two projects were exceptional.

Another cool collaboration was with a buddy of mine Lorenzo Diggins, we created a collaborative sock collection that lead to some really great opportunities for both of us. There have actually been a lot of cool projects I completed that never made it to Instagram. Which in some ways I value and in other ways I think are missed opportunities. I think about my dream project and it would be something like working with the team from Braindead on a philosophy book or something that has a lot of really powerful quotes or a calendar that people can peel off to be inspired.

Follow Maceo on Instagram & check out his Substack here.

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To Marty, “access” is such a buzzword, but how she sees it — access to the arts isn’t just about inclusion, it’s about enabling radical transformation once people are in the room. She’s been in arts and culture for about 15 years now, and her vision has been about expanding access and rethinking systems so people can fully participate.

Marty started in media, with leadership roles at NYLON and VICE en Español, where she elevated voices across independent music and art scenes through community-centered storytelling. She later moved into the arts and cultural sector, working across museums, cultural institutions, and government to deepen community engagement. She has led initiatives that connect institutions to broader civic ecosystems, from public programming in spaces like Grand Park, to reimagining the community engagement department at the Academy Museum, to now leading community partnerships and initiatives at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work focuses on designing systems that center historically excluded communities and actively welcome non-dominant languages.

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📢 On sonic landscapes building community power

I’m working on a music research project documenting the artists, organizers, and spaces that sustain the sounds of Mexican immigrant communities in NYC. From Puebla York to norteño and corridos, I’m exploring how migration shapes music, how sounds travel, evolve, and take on new life in the city. I’m especially interested in how these sonic landscapes build community power.

📝 On The Rag

On The Rag, a literary magazine. It’s critical thinking at its most messy, unfiltered, and unapologetically human way. It gets it right, it embraces vulnerability and imperfection; it’s not polished yet honest. 100% recommended, approved and obsessed.

🗣️ On salon-style gatherings

I’m very inspired by salon-style gatherings where friends and strangers come together to critique, dissent, and think through ideas in real time. I want to see more spaces that actively invite critical thinking and meaningful dialogue, where people can humanize one another, debate openly, and stay open to shifting perspectives. I think one of the most human and effective ways to shake the status quo is by creating spaces where people can question it, mobilize around change, and collectively process and share that excitement.

🎨 On true reminders of human care and art

Bob Baker Marionette Theater isn’t a brand, but it’s a community institution. They are based in Los Angeles and rooted in preserving the art of puppetry. I love how grounded and dedicated they are to craft, care, and legacy. In a moment shaped by AI and rapid digital production, they are true reminder of human care and art.

🌎 On the world’s borough

Queens. It reinforces my commitment to this city every time. I usually start the day with coffee at Mokafé in Astoria. One of my favorite museums there is the Museum of the Moving Image which has amazing screenings, exhibitions and galleries that remind us of the power of the moving image. I also want to shout out my friend Rana Abdelhamid, who runs Malikah in Queens, a mutual aid and community self-defense organization. A must is browsing books by local writers at World’s Borough Bookshop and a great meal at Chivito de Oro.

☎️ On call me maybe Mamdani?

I’m manifesting a future collaborator: Mayor Mamdani. I keep thinking about the need for stronger linguistic bridges between institutional spaces and the communities they serve. To take the responsibility to think beyond English, and engage New Yorkers in the many languages they actually speak at home, on the train, and at the bodega... My dream for New York is where language access in cultural institutions isn’t an afterthought, but a core practice. My pitch is simple: any institution receiving city funding should be held to standards of language justice. Anyway, DEAR MAYOR I have a few thoughts on cultural policy, specifically how to mobilize the arts in ways that are linguistically accessible and intentionally participatory, CALL ME.

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Lauren Bliss has been in the beauty industry for the past 12 years, previously at amika, and cocokind. She got her start working at MAC as a makeup artist, just like Trixie Mattel and Patrick Ta. She is currently the Senior Brand Marketing Manager at Experiment, a chemist-founded beauty brand fresh on the scene; you may recognize them for their iconic reusable silicone mask.

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🎨 On prioritizing creativity

When I left my role as Director of Social Media at cocokind in early 2024, I was super burnt out and started to question whether the beauty industry was still for me. Looking back, I realize I was questioning it because I wasn’t working for a brand that prioritized creativity. No shade, but the emphasis on community without equal investment in creative just wasn’t scratching that itch.

I started sharing my thoughts on my personal socials about how beauty brands had lost their way, how creativity felt deprioritized, and how fearmongering had started to replace inspiration as a sales tactic. Turns out, a lot of people agreed!

Through that very public vent session, I started discovering brands I wasn’t as familiar with, brands that brought me back to that same feeling I had in my teens and early 20s. One of those brands was Experiment, where I now lead the brand marketing team. It’s been such a joy to work for a brand that cares just as much about visuals and storytelling as it does about science.

🧪 On the next big experiment

We’re less than 3 weeks away from our biggest product launch of the year at Experiment, and this one has been a fun challenge. It’s the brand’s first treatment for breakout-prone skin, and anyone who’s worked in skincare knows how hard those can be to sell. People, understandably, want results: before and afters, clinicals, all of it. We’ll have that (duh, we’re a chemist-founded brand!!!!), but being Experiment, that’s not enough. We always have to bring the smart AND the hot. Our CEO and co-founder, Lisa Guerrera, really set the tone for a fun creative world, and it’s been exciting to help bring it to life across different parts of the marketing funnel. This will also be the brand’s first A-tier launch at Sephora, so there’s a lot riding on it, which honestly just makes it even more exciting.

💄 On C-beauty

I’m absolutely obsessed with Kaleidos. They’re a makeup brand based out of Shanghai, and their packaging and formulations are so unique. Their new Glassload Lip Melts come in these refillable glass and metal capsules that you can mix and match to make your own. There’s a nice weight to them which makes it feel super luxe while staying at an accessible price point. Packaging aside, I really appreciate that they’re making makeup that feels fun to play with: metallic, loud, and often in unexpected shades.

I’m generally really into C-beauty makeup brands and would love to see them get more hype in the States (like how K-beauty is for skincare).

🏡 On taking an extended vacation at the cottage

I know it’s been months, but I’m still at The Cottage. I didn’t watch Heated Rivalry until weeks after the finale aired, and honestly, I can’t believe I was so late to it. This year has been an emotional rollercoaster, and watching Connor and Hudson rise to fame, watching that show, reading the books... it has become a bit of a safe place for me. I read all six books in the series within the span of weeks back in February. I am specifically obsessed with the rise of Hudson as a modern-day heart throb (Shout out to Aika Flores his Groomer, she really knows how to do his hair and skin). My TikTok FYP is still filled with Heated Rivalry edits...I hope it never stops and I have no shame about it. Okay I’m rambling now...;p

📵 On letting the marketing manager unplug!

I recently took a month off from social media, and while I initially thought it would be detrimental to my work, like I needed to stay tapped into trends and what other brands are doing, it actually had the opposite effect. I felt like I had more creative ideas because my brain wasn’t bogged down by endless content (and constant bad news). It also pushed me to finally film a couple videos for my personal socials that had been sitting on my to-do list for way longer than I’d like to admit. While I can’t always take breaks that long, I always try to read a lot, which naturally leads to less screen time.

🤳 On ending influencer brands

No more influencer brands. Please, I’m begging. Influencers who are actual experts in their field, like makeup artists turned creators turned founders, are one thing. But 90% of the time, these brands feel like cash grabs. They don’t offer real innovation for consumers, and at that point, it’s just more…stuff.

Follow Lauren on Instagram!

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Anu has worked across trend forecasting, cultural insight and brand strategy for the past ten years in-house at brands like Nordstrom and Mejuri, and on the agency side at Kantar Futures and Spring Studios. The past few years, she has been carving out her own niche, which she calls “trend strategy.” She is now embarking on being an indie writer and consultant, finally allowing herself the time to explore all the ideas she has kept on the back burner, like the Q1 trend report she shared on her Substack WHAT’S ANU. We’ve been eating up her reports and are so excited that she is sharing what’s been on her mind with us.

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🇫🇷 🇮🇳 On bridging Paris and Jaipur

I’m obsessed with Rescha, a brand bridging Paris and Jaipur. I’ve been yearning for a female-focused version of Kartik Research, and this is a beautiful iteration. I’m desperate to buy the Galaxy Skirt. Which is why I need to post more on Pickle.

🧠 On not getting caught in the hype

I really admire Matt Klein’s foresight work, which has definitely been influential in informing how I approach trends. He doesn’t get caught up in the hype cycles, integrates a critical perspective, and has managed to create a space for deep thinking about topics that are often otherwise treated superficially.

🥒 On being a pickle girl

So, I’m intrigued by Pickle, the clothing rental app. I’d first heard about it a few years ago, and I’ve seen sporadic press mentions, but I’ve never heard anyone I know talk about it in real life. Maybe I’m just too old, though. Because less than two months ago, I uploaded (1) dress, and it’s already been rented 3x. I’ve made nearly $300, and the dress cost me $600, so it’s going to pay for itself soon. I’d previously tried ByRotation, which is very popular in the UK, but they don’t seem to have been able to make inroads in the US — nobody ever rented anything I uploaded there. My takeaways are: I need to add more stuff to Pickle, and this rental thing might be worth paying attention to.

🌳 On hedging your bets

I’m really fascinated by how drastically divergent it feels like the American Eagle and Aerie marketing strategies are getting. American Eagle with their Sydney Sweeney eugenics pun and Ella Langely/Stagecoach country music sponsorships, both with highly produced and retouched campaign imagery,

vs. Aerie continuing to emphasize inclusivity and taking a stance against AI imagery.

Are they betting that these are the same customer? Or are they purposefully splitting their bet between two segments?

🍝 On lunchtime lasagna

Saraghina. It’s not groundbreaking, just the quintessential neighborhood spot. By day, the bakery has decadent morning croissants, lunchtime lasagna, and the perfect array of host presents. I’ve recently taken to bringing over a bottle of their house chili oil rather than wine. By night, the restaurant has perfect negronis, fritto misto, and chocolate mousse. And then, across the street is Lunatico for live music every single day. What more can you ask for?

📈 On repackaged ideas

I wish we’d stop renaming “trends” every year for the sake of an annual report, when in reality it’s usually just a repackaged version of the same idea. Trends don’t change every year, and that’s the point. Tracking trend trajectories should help us make sense of how culture is evolving, but the endlessly generated catchy copy lines just create confusion instead.

The sad part is that most seasoned trend experts understand this, but fold under the commercial pressure to invent newness. I feel like I’m sort of taking a subversive approach to trends by consciously slowing things down. I don’t change the trend titles in my framework every year — in fact, they’ve been the same for 5+ years. And my newsletter intentionally looks back on 4+ weeks of signals before doing any analysis, because that timeline offers more pattern-recognition perspective.

Follow Anu on Substack and Instagram

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Keith Richards is not a member of The Rolling Stones. He’s been in the music biz for over a decade, spanning digital and live production, buying, and agency experience, formerly Warner Music Group and Paradigm. He was recently brought on to build Ground Control’s first festival department. When he’s not creating meaningful opportunities for artists, he’s spending time with his wife and three boys—coaching two of them on their baseball teams.

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📝 On songwriting that lingers long after the song ends

Improvement Movement’s sound really jumped out at me the first time I heard it. There’s something about it that feels like a modern take on that indie rock, Eagles-type vibe—I just keep coming back to it.

I had the chance to catch Dean at the Blue Room here in Nashville not long after I started at Ground Control. I wasn’t familiar with him beforehand, but he had that packed room completely locked in from the first note. His wit and banter perfectly complemented the melodies and thoughtful lyrics—it all just clicked. I’m really excited to watch what feels like a pretty meteoric rise unfold from here

🏟️ On Keith’s MVPs

A few people have played a really meaningful role in shaping my career.

Paul Steele and Aaron Sawyer at Triple 8 were instrumental early on. They saw something in me and believed in my potential—honestly, probably more than I believed in myself at the time. That kind of trust and support made a lasting impact and helped set the foundation for everything that’s come since.

Micah Davidson is another person who’s been incredibly important in my journey. We were coming up in a similar time and space, figuring things out side by side, and that shared experience is something I really value. Those early years of building together are irreplaceable.

And Eric Tobias is someone I continue to lean on. His perspective—coming from the tech world but deeply rooted as a music fan—has always stood out. He sees things differently, and that’s challenged and inspired me since the day we met.

🥪 On breaking bread

I’ve got a few local sandwich shops in the regular rotation; Mitchell Deli , Fat Belly Deli , Bill’s Sandwich Palace. I go often enough now that it feels like they actually know me, and I love that sense of being part of something—even in a small, consistent way.

🇨🇦 On Québécois je ne sais quoi

Festival D’été. I don’t think there’s another event quite like it, and the team behind it consistently does an incredible job year after year. They’re truly some of the best in the business, and it shows in everything they build.

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