My recent conversation with furniture designer Diane LeCornu convinced me that, yes, we do. Especially if we happen to fall within the archetype I call the Visionary.

The Visionary is one of 32 Aesthetic Archetypes I’ve identified as part of my ongoing work to decode taste. If Aesthetic Intelligence is essentially about why taste matters, then Aesthetic Archetypes is about where taste comes from, how it expresses itself, and why tastes differ so dramatically from one person to the next.

My framework for the archetypes is based on the premise that our personal tastes aren’t random. They reflect a distinct combination of instincts and sensibilities that determine what we like and why.

What distinguishes Visionaries like Diane isn’t just what they like. It’s how they see. And that way of seeing is something machines may be able to imitate, but cannot replicate.

Diane is a longtime friend and extraordinarily talented furniture and lighting designer. She and I met years ago at one of my book launch events in Philadelphia, and she later joined me for an Aesthetic Intelligence retreat in Sintra, Portugal. It was there that I got my first real glimpse into how her creative mind works.

The Art of Noticing

Diane notices things. Not just furniture. In fact, furniture seems to be the last place she looks for inspiration when designing furniture. Rather, she’ll notice a piece of jewelry at a flea market. An architectural detail on a building. The metallic finish on a rusty iron gate. She then lets those observations sit with her - sometimes for months, sometimes for years - until eventually they become something else.

Recently, Diane and her partner, Justin Binnix, an executive at Century Furniture, joined me on my SiriusXM show for a behind-the-scenes look at the world of interiors. I used the opportunity not only to understand how furniture gets made, but to explore a more universal question: How are original ideas born?

That question got me thinking about the particular kind of originality that distinguishes a Visionary, and how their way of seeing and creating differs from, say, a Precisionist or an Alchemist, both of whom I’ve profiled in earlier essays.

The Visionary at Work

As mentioned above, the Visionary is one of the 32 archetypes that I’ve identified as part of my work on the typologies of taste.

In general, Visionaries gravitate toward styles that are fluid, bold, experimental, warm, and detailed. They’re drawn to things and experiences that feel rich, layered, and spontaneous. And they’re fueled by imagination and a hunger for what’s new and different.

But what really distinguishes Visionaries is the way they see possibilities where others might not. Where most of us might see nothing more than a slat of wood or a cobblestone street, a Visionary sees the seeds of a new idea. And that’s how Diane approaches furniture design.

As she explained during our podcast conversation, on one of her travels she bought a pair of earrings. Something about the design caught her attention and stayed with her for nearly a year. It eventually became the inspiration for a new lighting collection. From there, a two-dimensional sketch evolved into a three-dimensional rendering, followed by decisions about materials, scale, engineering, fabrication, and finish. Ultimately, the idea became a salable collection.

I love Diane’s recounting of this experience because it says so much about the Visionary mind. We tend to think of vision as something that arrives in a flash. More often than not, though, it emerges through deep contemplation, lots of experimentation, and, ultimately, the ability to make creative connections. And some people, like Diane, are unusually gifted at making those connections.

The Wider the Lens, the More Original the View

Diane didn’t begin her career intending to become a furniture designer. She studied international relations and political science and worked on Capitol Hill before deciding, against her father’s wishes, to go to art school.

As she told me: “when you’re a maker, you just have to make.”

Over the years, Diane experimented with many different forms of making. She painted, sculpted, designed costumes, restored paintings, developed specialty finishes, and created furniture and lighting.

That breadth matters. Visionaries are experimental by nature. They resist staying neatly within a single discipline, style, or source of influence. Their curiosity pulls them sideways. And those sideways journeys often become their greatest creative advantage.

Furniture fairs, Diane says, actually make it harder for her to design furniture. Instead, she prefers to retreat into what she calls her “solo world,” finding inspiration in architecture, jewelry, travel, art, and other seemingly unrelated sources.

There is a lesson in that for all of us. If you look for inspiration in the same places as everyone else in your industry, your output will inevitably start to look just like theirs. I’ve seen this happen time and again in fashion. In beauty. In hotels. In restaurants. In homes. In automobiles. (On that last point, see my earlier Substack, “The Blobification of Car Designs.”)

Algorithms compound the problem. The more we click on things we already like, the more we’re shown things that resemble them. Our feeds have become extremely efficient at reflecting our existing preferences back to us and at serving up endless variations of what we already know.

Diane sees the danger. She shares my view that social media is flattening our tastes. The antidote isn’t to consume more. It’s to look farther afield.

Vision Isn’t About Newness

There is another aspect of Diane’s taste that makes her a Visionary. For all her experimentation, she doesn’t pursue newness for the sake of newness.

When I asked what younger consumers today are looking for in their homes, Diane talked about comfort: natural materials, rich textures, reclaimed woods, vintage objects, and good craftsmanship. Things that connect us to nature and to the past.

And when I asked about an object in her own home that brings her joy, she described an Asian-inspired dining table with a stone top. She couldn’t point to a single reason she loved it. The whole “vibe,” she said, just makes her happy.

This is where the warmth of the Visionary comes through. She doesn’t experiment simply to provoke. She experiments as a way to discover original forms of expression and, through them, deeper connections and joy.

The Difference Between Seeing and Choosing

Our podcast conversation inevitably turned to AI.

Diane uses it. Once a design is sufficiently developed, she may place it into an AI-generated lifestyle rendering and visualize how it might live in a room. But she deliberately avoids bringing those tools into the earliest stages of her creative process.

I think that distinction matters. AI can help us visualize possibilities, but it cannot decide which possibilities are worth pursuing. That requires judgment, taste, and experience. And, above all, it requires a point of view.

At one point, Diane offered what may be the simplest decorating advice I’ve ever heard: “If something really resonates with you, buy what you love. It will work together.”

Great rooms, like great wardrobes, are never assembled in a single shopping spree. They come together over time: a table found years ago, a painting from a friend, a chair inherited from a grandmother, a strange object discovered on a trip, a contemporary lamp beside an antique chest.

Individually, the pieces may have very little in common. The common denominator is the person who chose them. And that may be the greatest lesson of the Visionary.

We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to make things match. Visionaries are more interested in making connections. They tolerate ambiguity long enough for an idea to develop. They allow seemingly unrelated influences to coexist until, eventually, something clicks.

Diane told me about another pendant inspired by something she encountered when she and I were together at a retreat in Portugal several years ago. She’s been working on it ever since.

It still isn’t finished. But she knows it will get there.

I love that because creativity isn’t simply knowing what you’re looking for. It’s knowing how to recognize something when it finally appears. And in an age of AI, the future won’t belong to those who can generate the most ideas, but to those who know which ideas are most worth pursuing.

Next up, I return to the MasterClass series with a class on how to identify and capitalize on new aesthetic trends. After all, spotting a trend before it becomes obvious is one of the most valuable applications of Aesthetic Intelligence. Thereafter, the Aesthetic Archetypes Series continues with profiles of two very different women: one who epitomizes the Steward, the other, the Nomad.

For more on Aesthetic Intelligence check out our website or follow me on IG

Cheers, Pauline

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It began with a simple question: Is there any accounting for taste?

That question led to others: Is there such a thing as good taste and bad? Why do people’s personal tastes vary so dramatically? Even people who were born to the same parents, who grew up in the same households, and who inhabit the same worlds seem to have different perceptions of beauty. So why do we each like what we like?

Whatever the answer, I don’t believe it’s random.

As I’ve written before, taste is about more than image or style. It’s a reflection of our underlying values. And it expresses itself across every domain of our lives, affecting everything from the products we buy and the people we’re attracted to, to the experiences we seek and the careers we choose.

In other words, what each of us finds beautiful reveals something about who we are. And that’s the idea at the heart of Aesthetic Archetypes.

This week, I found myself thinking about one archetype in particular. I call this one: the Seeker.

It surfaced in two unrelated places. First, while watching the new biopic about Anthony Bourdain. Then, during my most recent SiriusXM recording with a longtime friend Larissa Roesch.

On the surface, these two individuals couldn’t be more different. One was a chef, author, and inveterate traveler. The other spent most of her career as a professional investor. And yet, beneath those differences, I recognized a common sensibility: a particular way of seeing and moving through the world.

The Beauty of Becoming

The Seeker is driven by curiosity. They’re drawn to new places, new ideas, new people, and new possibilities. For them, exploration is a form of discovery. Every new experience offers another clue about the world around them and who they are within it.

But perhaps the deepest expression of the Seeker is their preference for the unfinished. They would rather stay curious than be certain. They would rather continue the process of becoming than arrive at some fixed version of themselves.

You can see that sensibility in their personal style as well. Seekers are drawn to things that bear the marks of experience: objects with provenance, materials that have acquired a patina, books that have been read and reread, artifacts gathered on their travels, rooms that have evolved over time. Nothing feels too finished, too composed, or too precious.

That same sensibility extends to the choices they make in life. Seekers are more willing than most to change course, switch careers, pursue unexpected passions, move somewhere new, and become a beginner all over again.

The Seeker with a Spoon

Long before I saw the film Tony, before I watched the documentary Roadrunner, or read the memoir, Kitchen Confidential, I had a crush on Anthony Bourdain.

In 1998, shortly after moving back to New York from Boston, I met a friend for dinner at Brasserie Les Halles in the Flatiron District, where Bourdain was the executive chef. For whatever reason, that tall, lanky, brazen, tattooed man in the kitchen caught my attention. (And I don’t even like tattoos!)

Over the years, I followed his ascent from a local chef to bestselling author to TV star. Then, in 2016, I met with his agent and a few executives at CNN to pitch a programming idea that was inspired by his series, Parts Unknown. Rather than explore the world through food, my own show would explore it through local artisans: their craft, culture, and creativity, and how their wares could be re-interpreted through the lens of contemporary fashion.

Needless to say, my show never got off the ground. But my fascination with Bourdain only grew. I took inspiration from the way he moved through the world.

Like countless others, I was just devastated by his death.

The Man Before the Icon

The biopic Tony reveals a side of Anthony Bourdain’s story I didn’t know. I knew the public version: the swagger, the cigarettes, the gravelly New Jersey accent. But that was Bourdain in his 50s, already an icon.

The film takes us back to him at 19, when he was just starting to become. He is restless, impressionable, observant. He follows one curiosity to the next, with no idea where any of it will lead.

And that, I realized, is what makes Bourdain such a compelling example of the Seeker. He was never really defined by where he was heading. He was defined by the ways he changed along the way.

The Taste for Discovery

Like Bourdain himself, Tony doesn’t focus on the celebrated milestones of his eventual success: the book deals, the TV shows, the Emmys. Instead, it focuses on his early becoming.

Before Bourdain became “Bourdain,” he was just hungry to learn the codes of the kitchen. Over time, that hunger continued. The Bourdain we came to know was hungry to see the world, to eat what other people ate, to understand how they lived.

His aesthetic reflected the archetype: his battered boots, unkempt hair, faded T-shirts. His lack of polish became, paradoxically, its own kind of polish.

Even at the height of his success, his on-camera style remained gritty and unvarnished. The same was true of the way he presented food. The dishes were never really the point. They were portals into other worlds.

And that’s another tell of the Seeker: the object of their fascination is not the destination, but the journey. In Bourdain’s case, cooking led to travel. Travel led to culture. Culture led to history. And history led to conversations with the people who embodied it.

The Shadow Side of Seeking

Of course, there’s an underbelly to the perpetual Seeker. Their openness can become a kind of restlessness. And it can serve as an escape.

Bourdain experienced profound struggles that can’t and shouldn’t be reduced to an archetype. But his story does expose a tension within the Seeker: the same hunger to feel fully alive can also make it difficult to know when, or where, to stop.

Larissa: The Courage to Stop

Larissa Roesch’s version of the Seeker is quieter, more joyful, and much more hopeful.

As she shared on our SiriusXM podcast, Larissa spent several decades in one of the most structured worlds in business: first on a trading desk, then as a portfolio manager at the century-old San Francisco investment firm Dodge & Cox. Her professional life demanded an extraordinary degree of focus. By her own admission, she rarely even left her desk for lunch.

Then, somewhere around 2018, her questions started to outnumber her answers. Instead of coming up with a new five-year plan, as one might expect of a consummate professional investor, she did something far more Seeker-coded: she stopped.

She left her job and her professional identity for, well, nothing. She called it her “year of listening.” Eventually, that period of listening led her to Ayurveda, and back to school to become a wellness coach.

After a year of formal study at the Shakti School, Larissa still describes herself as a beginner. She’s not being modest. She’s being true to her archetype. Seekers take comfort, even pleasure, in remaining permanently, productively unfinished.

What’s notable isn’t just that she pivoted. It’s what she pivoted toward. Ayurveda, as Larissa describes it, is the antithesis of a one-size-fits-all system. It’s entirely bespoke. Its premise is that no two bodies work in exactly the same way, and therefore true health can’t be found through generalized solutions, but by learning to listen to the individual body.

Even Larissa’s daily fitness routine bears the markings of a Seeker. She swims in open water every day, without a wetsuit. There’s nothing fixed or predictable about the ocean. No two swims are ever the same.

One Seeker Travels Outward. Another, Inward.

Bourdain and Larissa followed their curiosities in radically different directions.

Bourdain’s carried him outward, across kitchens, countries, cultures, and conversations. Larissa’s carried her inward, toward ancient practices, deeper listening, and a new way of living.

But the underlying impulse was the same. Neither set out in search of a new identity. Neither knew exactly where the journey would lead. They simply followed their curiosities. That, I think, is what distinguishes the Seeker from the rest of us who simply enjoy novelty. Seekers aren’t motivated by what comes next so much as by what might be discovered along the way.

The tell is not what they do, but why they do it.

Cheers, Pauline

Next Up…

I’ll be back with a new module in the MasterClass series, this time on aesthetic trendspotting. I’ll share a framework for identifying emerging trends and deciding which ones are worth acting on. After that, I’ll return to the Aesthetic Archetypes Series with a deep dive into yet another archetype, what I call the Ornamentalist, inspired by a recent conversation with two veteran furniture designers. In contrast to the Seeker, the Precisionist, or the Curator, the Ornamentalist finds beauty in embellishment and abundance. For this archetype, more is always more!

Keep Exploring…

Watch: Looking for practical exercises to help hone your taste? See MasterClass 06.

Explore: Visit our website to learn more about my work and upcoming events.

Follow Along: Join me on Instagram for ongoing insights, behind-the-scenes conversations, and more from our community.

And, as always, I’d love to hear from you. If you have questions, feedback, or ideas for future essays or podcasts, drop us a note at hello@aestheticintelligence.com.

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Dear Student,

This MasterClass marks a bit of a departure from our previous sessions.

Until now, our classes have focused on the conceptual foundations of Aesthetic Intelligence: what it is, why it matters, and how it influences the way we perceive and create value. This class is much more practical. Rather than simply explaining Aesthetic Intelligence, I’ll show you how to cultivate it.

One of the central ideas in this course is that taste is not an innate gift. It is a muscle. And like any muscle, it grows stronger through deliberate, repeated exercise. In this MasterClass, I introduce a series of exercises designed to help you build your own aesthetic muscles.

I’ve organized these workout routines around four distinct “muscle types.” Each one builds upon the last, creating a progressive path toward stronger aesthetic judgment.

Read more

They were born in different eras and countries, raised in different cultures, and worked in entirely different creative disciplines. Yet they expressed their aesthetic sensibilities in remarkably similar ways.

• Gaudí saw his buildings as otherworldly sculptures. He famously said, “The straight line belongs to men, the curved line to God.”

• Campion tells stories - like The Piano, An Angel at My Table and The Power of the Dog - as much through haunting landscapes and atmosphere as dialogue.

• García Márquez blurred the line between myth and reality, transforming the ordinary into the magical.

• And Van Noten designed dreamlike collections through unexpected combinations of color, pattern, and texture.

As I’ve shared in previous essays, I’ve constructed a framework for I call Aesthetic Archetypes that codifies patterns in the way people perceive, create, and express beauty. Each archetype is defined by a unique set of underlying values and motivations. Some are driven by precision. Others by novelty. These four artists, despite working in different media, show similar patterns. They see beauty as something transformative, emotive, and imaginative.

In the language of Aesthetic Archetypes, they are the Alchemists.

The genius of these Alchemists lies in their capacity to dream. Whether working in stone, film, fiction, or fabric, they know how to transform raw materials into emotional experiences. As I recently discovered, the same holds true for a visionaries in fragrance.

The Accidental Alchemist

As soon as Paul Austin walked into the SiriusXM studio, I caught a distinct scent. It was warm and spicy. For a moment, it took me somewhere else entirely. Back to the Taj Palace in India. That’s the thing about Paul: he doesn’t just talk about the transportive power of scents. He embodies it.

Paul is the founder of Austin Advisory Group, an authority in fine fragrances. After two decades at Unilever and Quest (now part of Givaudan, the world’s largest flavor and fragrance company), he launched his own consultancy and now advises heritage houses as well as emerging brands on brand strategy and creative marketing. More recently, he also has partnered with companies in India to help develop the country’s homegrown luxury fragrance sector.

But none of that was part of the plan. Growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Paul had no particular interest in perfume. A training program with Unilever took him to the UK and, serendipitously, into the company's fragrance division. Before long, his work took him to Paris, despite not speaking a word of French. There, he found himself in rooms with legendary perfumers, or "noses," and visionary fashion designers, watching them build entire worlds from a single idea.

One of those rooms gave rise to Thierry Mugler’s Angel, the first modern gourmand perfume, composed of unconventional notes like coffee, cotton candy, and toffee apple. These notes were chosen for one simple reason: Mugler loved them. By Paul’s account, Angel was initially rejected by industry insiders as too sweet, too intense, and too food-like. But it ultimately changed the industry forever and, to this day, remains one of the best-selling perfumes in the world.

It was also in Paris that Paul realized that to excel in French fragrance, he also had to immerse himself in French food, wine, art, and culture. Fragrance, after all, is an expression of a much broader aesthetic worldview.

That view became the foundation of Paul's career. He developed what he calls the sensory narrative: treating fragrance not as a product, but as a way of transporting people into a memory, a place, or a feeling.

By the time Paul and I turned to his creative process, I understood why he has flourished in the world of fragrance. Paul is, unmistakably, an Alchemist.

The Alchemist’s Method

Throughout our conversation, Paul kept returning to the same idea: scent isn’t something you engineer. It’s something you feel your way toward.

When I asked Paul why fragrance still matters in a world dominated by sight and sound, his answer captured the essence of the Alchemist.

“Scent is the only sense that’s fully developed at birth, and it has the power to evoke memory much more quickly than any of the other senses. It goes to a different part of the brain.”

That belief - that scent bypasses reasoning and links directly to memory and emotion - is fundamental to how Paul is wired. He doesn't begin with a marketing brief or a market gap. He begins with a feeling and a story.

Take the project he developed for Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, to create a signature scent for GoldenEye, Blackwell’s resort in Jamaica. Paul didn’t start with a mood board. He started by sourcing a local spice from a Jamaican farmer. The fragrance wasn't inspired by Jamaica. It literally came from Jamaica.

Or take the scent experience Paul created for one of Bibhu Mohapatra’s fashion shows in New York. The goal was to transport guests, many of them fellow Indian Americans, into the experience of a pilgrimage in India. Paul choreographed the experience, with subtle spice notes greeting guests upon arrival before giving way to the full bloom of Indian jasmine.

This is the Alchemist’s method: begin with a feeling, a memory, or a place. Even the way Paul talks about ingredients reflects this philosophy. Asked about the most underrated fragrance note, he described ambrette as “a shapeshifter of a scent. It’s enigmatic, but it provides structure.”

And when asked what makes a scent sexy, he said he’s drawn to unexpected pairings and juxtapositions that create tension rather than harmony.

Where the Precisionist (whom I profiled in my last essay) finds beauty in structure and control, the Alchemist finds it in romance, spontaneity, and experimentation.

Looking Back…

In 1997, when I first arrived at Estée Lauder as head of corporate strategy, I did what any good former Bain consultant would do. I built PowerPoint decks filled with charts and graphs. I sized markets. I pored over consumer research. I used data to explain why people bought what they bought.

My boss at the time, the COO Fred Langhammer, immediately set me straight.

“Our customers don’t think like Bain strategists. If they did, they wouldn’t buy anything we sell. They buy our products because of how they make them feel.”

In other words, to succeed in our business, I needed to stop analyzing consumers like a Precisionist. I needed to empathize with them like an Alchemist.

I learned a similar lesson years later at LVMH. In describing the company, LVMH Chairman Bernard Arnault, never used the word luxury.

“We’re in the business of desire,” he’d say.

That, too, reflects the worldview of an Alchemist: understanding that people don't buy luxury goods through any sort of cost-benefit analysis. They buy them because they make them feel something.

Paul knows he isn’t selling ingredients or formulas. He’s selling memory, identity, and belonging, the very things that make us feel, however briefly, like the most alive version of ourselves.

Behind Every Great Business Is the Right Archetype

Paul is a gifted creative marketer, but he would never thrive at a company like A. Lange & Söhne, as described in my last essay and podcast. The world of fine watchmaking rewards discipline, restraint, and precision. The fragrance world rewards something quite different: intuition, expressiveness, and abundance.

That isn’t a knock on either business. It’s simply a reminder that different businesses reward different aesthetic instincts. The CEO of A. Lange & Söhne finds meaning in the parts of a watch no customer will ever see. Paul finds meaning in the memories awakened by a single spritz. Both pursue excellence. They simply pursue it in different ways.

Which brings me back to the idea I return to again and again: culture is, at its core, aesthetic. The best companies don’t simply hire for skills. They hire for alignment. When the instincts of their people align with the values of the brand, culture no longer needs to be manufactured. It just is.

As AI continues to commoditize technical skills, knowing your own Aesthetic Archetype will become more, not less, important. It will help you recognize the environments where your instincts serve as an advantage rather than a liability. Just as importantly, it will help you recognize and value the aesthetic instincts of others, preparing you to be a better leader and collaborator.

Behind every great brand, every great leader, and every great creative partnership, I’ve come to believe, is the right archetype.

Cheers, Pauline

Next up, I return to the MasterClass series with practical ways to strengthen your own Aesthetic Intelligence. After that, the Aesthetic Archetypes Series continues with the profile of Larissa Roesch, an Ayurvedic wellness coach whose approach to beauty and balance embodies a very different archetype: the Naturalist.

As always, stay tuned and attuned!

For more on Aesthetic Intelligence check out our website and follow me on IG

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“There’s only one thing I do better than anyone else on earth: being Pauline Brown.”

I know many people who are smarter than I am, more knowledgeable, more gifted, more accomplished. But no one, and I mean no one, is better at being me than I am.

In fact, that’s my only real competitive advantage. So shame on me if I don’t put it to good use.

I believe that insight applies to everyone. When I think about the most successful people I’ve known, they seldom are the smartest or most talented ones. But they all have one thing in common: they lean into who they are.

That Said, Authenticity Is Not Enough

My MBA students often ask: “What if my company’s culture is at odds with who I authentically am?”

My response? “Change companies!”

Authenticity, on its own, isn’t enough to be successful. You also need to choose environments that reward the very qualities you naturally possess.

Of course, you still need to adapt along the way. You need to develop new skills, learn new industries, and broaden your experiences. But never suppress the way you naturally see the world. That's where Aesthetic Intelligence comes in.

When people hear the word aesthetic, they think of beauty or design. I think of something much broader. Aesthetic Intelligence is the ability to express externally who you are internally. At its highest level, it’s the manifestation of your values and beliefs: of how you define excellence, make decisions, and inspire others.

As I’ve shared in previous essays, I’ve been working on a new framework around what I call Aesthetic Archetypes. Each archetype reflects a different set of underlying ideals and motivations. Some people are driven by harmony. Others by innovation or even disruption. Others by mastery and control.

A Master at Work

I certainly didn't set out to discuss the concept of archetypes during my recent podcast interview with Wilhelm Schmid, the CEO of the luxury watchmaker A. Lange & Söhne.. But as our conversation unfolded, I realized I was speaking with someone whose aesthetic motivations are deeply rooted in mastery and control.

Unlike many of the executives I’ve met in the luxury watch industry, Wilhelm is neither Swiss nor a lifelong watchmaker. He began his career in the oil and gas industry, then spent about a decade at BMW in sales and marketing. In 2011, he joined A. Lange & Söhne as CEO.

On the surface, the energy, automotive, and watch industries seem quite different. Yet Wilhelm has thrived in all three. By the end of our conversation, I understood why. Beneath the surface, they share a common aesthetic DNA - one that rewards precision, technical excellence, restraint, and refinement.

A Distinctly German Sensibility

A. Lange & Söhne’s history mirrors that of modern Germany. Founded in the Kingdom of Saxony in 1845, the company flourished during Germany’s industrial rise, disappeared after World War II, and reemerged only after German reunification. It’s hard to separate the identity of the brand from the history of the nation that produced it.

The same is true of Wilhelm himself. Spend an hour with him and you begin to appreciate an aesthetic sensibility deeply rooted in the German tradition of precision, engineering, and craftsmanship. He is disciplined, exacting, and strategic. And he exemplifies what I call the Precisionist archetype.

In retrospect, I don’t think Wilhelm succeeded at A. Lange & Söhne because of his expertise in watches. I think he succeeded because his leadership style is so naturally aligned with the company’s culture and philosophy.

Meet The Precisionist

During our podcast conversation, Wilhelm never mentioned words like prestige, status or exclusivity. Instead, he talked about history, engineering, and craftsmanship. He described how A. Lange & Söhne trains young watchmakers for three years in its own school, followed by another two years before they’re considered fully proficient. He explained that much of the most painstaking work goes into parts of a watch that the buyers never see.

He told the remarkable story of the company's founder, Ferdinand Adolph Lange, who received a government loan in 1845 to establish a watchmaking school in the then-impoverished Saxon town of Glashütte, creating an entirely new industry in the region. He recounted how the company disappeared after World War II, following its expropriation by the East German government. For the next 42 years, the company lay dormant. Soon after German reunification, however, the founder's great-grandson revived it, designing and launching an entirely new collection of watches that became the foundation of the modern A. Lange & Söhne.

Today, the company occupies a unique place among the world's great watch brands. Unlike many of its Swiss counterparts, it has not built its mythology through mass-marketed sports sponsorships or celebrity spectacle. Its world is more private, connoisseurial, and intellectual. Rather than shouting for attention, it rewards the attention of a very select few.

The Precisionist Archetype

Throughout our conversation, Wilhelm’s style reflected the same underlying philosophy. When I asked him whether A. Lange & Söhne watches make good investments, he answered:

“If your goal is financial return, buy securities. Buy one of our watches because it gives you joy.”

The Precisionist derives joy not simply by possessing beauty, but creating it through attention to detail, discipline, meticulousness and mastery.

That devotion surfaced repeatedly throughout our conversation. When I casually remarked that the company presumably had no electricity around the turn of the 20th century, Wilhelm corrected me, explaining that it had, in fact, generated its own electricity through a turbine. When I asked how many parts were in a "standard watch," he responded with a question of his own: "What is a standard watch?" And when I asked about regulation (the process of mechanically adjusting a watch for accuracy), he paused to explain exactly what that term means in watchmaking.

These moments were all windows into how he thinks and how he shows up. The Precisionist has little tolerance for approximation. Their precision is seen in their language, their judgment, their style and their leadership. Precision is not merely a manufacturing technique; it’s an aesthetic philosophy.

You see that same philosophy expressed across other disciplines as well. In architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became renowned for reducing buildings to their essential form. At the consumer electronics company Braun, legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams inspired generations of products defined by restraint, functionality, and precision - or what he famously described as "less, but better." And camera brand Leica built a cult following through its relentless pursuit of optical precision, mechanical excellence, and timeless design.

Although these companies operate in very different industries, they share a common aesthetic philosophy - one that conveys confidence and commands trust.

Looking Back on LVMH

The more I work with different organizations, the more convinced I am that culture is, at its core, aesthetic. I saw this firsthand during my years leading LVMH's North American business. Although LVMH is a thoroughly global company - with 75 brands operating in more than 80 countries - its culture remains unmistakably French.

Over the years, I watched many talented executives from around the world join the organization. Some adapted and fared well; others did not. Yet very few non-French executives rose to its highest ranks. The difference was not competence, but fit.

I experienced this firsthand. More than once during my years at LVMH, I was told I was "too American." As the daughter of European immigrants and someone who had lived and studied abroad, I found it easier than many of my American colleagues to decode French culture. Even so, it required conscious effort. I had to learn not only the language of the business, but also the language of the culture: its assumptions about luxury, creativity, elegance, and leadership. Looking back, I realize that effort was less about learning an industry than learning an aesthetic philosophy.

Every company has its own aesthetic philosophy that shapes how it makes decisions, recognizes talent, and defines excellence. Even organizations that appear indifferent to aesthetics express it through their priorities and ways of working. The people who rise to the top are often those whose instincts are naturally aligned with that philosophy.

Behind Every Great Brand Is an Archetype

Wilhelm is clearly an exceptional executive, but he’d never succeed at leading a luxury fashion brand like Brunello Cucinelli. Brunello celebrates a different aesthetic philosophy. Its culture is rooted in human dignity, harmony, nature, and the ethical responsibility of business. It rewards leaders who naturally gravitate toward humanism more than precision.

The same is true of another luxury brand, Bulgari, which celebrates sensuality, theatricality, emotion, and bold expression. Success at Bulgari requires an entirely different set of instincts. Likewise, at Hermès, artisanal excellence defines the culture. In fact, every enduring company develops an aesthetic culture that extends far beyond its products and defines the people who thrive within it.

Finding Your Aesthetic Home

When we think about cultural fit, most of us focus on values. But if culture is expressed through aesthetics, then cultural fit is also, fundamentally, about aesthetics.

Aesthetic choices make values visible. They reveal an organization’s shared beliefs about what excellence looks like, how decisions are made, what deserves attention, and where time, energy, and resources should be invested.

In my experience, executives rarely fail because they lack talent. But they usually fail when they operate in cultural environments that reward different instincts.

Some leaders come alive inside highly disciplined engineering-driven companies, while others thrive inside design-oriented companies built on creativity and emotional expression.

Understanding your own archetype changes your prospects for success. It gives you language for the environments in which you are most likely to flourish. The goal isn’t simply to be yourself. It’s to know yourself well enough to choose the culture where you can win at being your best self.

Not every master is a Precisionist. In my next Substack, I’ll introduce a very different aesthetic archetype through my podcast conversation with a world-renowned perfumer whose approach to beauty is shaped not by control, but by memory, meaning, and sensory imagination. As always, stay tuned and attuned.

Cheers, Pauline

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For me, turning 60 has led to more soul-searching than any birthday before it. At 30, I felt like I had finally grown up. At 40, I felt like I had finally settled in. And at 50, I felt surprisingly youthful. But 60 feels different. At 60, I’m not only coming to terms with the person I thought I was at, say, 20 or 40, but also the person I still aspire to be.

Looking around the room at my former classmates, I found myself wondering about their hopes and aspirations, too. We had started in the same place at the same time, yet our lives had unfolded in very different ways.

I knew some of my classmates quite well. Others, I barely knew at all. Some I knew only through previous reunions or snippets in class newsletters. Yet in every case, beneath the surface lay an entire life shaped by decades of choices and circumstances, achievements and setbacks.

While replaying some of the conversations from that event, I found myself thinking about the concept of archetypes. Not Jungian archetypes, but Aesthetic Archetypes. The longer we live, it seems, the more distinct our archetypes become.

What Age Reveals

At 20, my classmates all looked fairly similar to me. As I wrote several years ago in my book Aesthetic Intelligence:

“At Dartmouth College, I was introduced to a very particular aesthetic: that of the New England prep school kids. At the time, I was enthralled by their carefree, fun-loving, and confident air. Physically free, but not tarty. Tousled yet clean-cut. Their style of dress was best represented by L.L. Bean. But the aesthetics of Dartmouth went well beyond the conventional ‘uniform’ of my classmates. It was embedded in all sorts of institutional codes, and it served as a constant reminder of a distinctly American spirit.”

Back then, we seemed to be members of the same tribe. But by 60, much of the social scaffolding has fallen away. Our children have grown up. Our marriages have evolved or, in my case, dissolved. Our careers no longer define us quite so completely. Our geographic and cultural identifiers have loosened. And what remains is something more profound.

We’re no longer all that much alike. Not because our tribe has drifted apart - in fact, our sense of community is still quite strong - but because members of the tribe have grown into the unique individuals we always were.

And it’s in those differences that I now recognize something else: the emergence of what I call Aesthetic Archetypes. Beneath our life experiences, careers, and personal histories lie patterns of taste that become more visible with age. Over time, those patterns become expressions of identity. They are our aesthetic signatures.

The Curator

These archetypes are not only visible to me in my classmates. I see one in myself too. I am, unmistakably, the Curator.

When my Dartmouth friend Regina Glocker and I began discussing how to celebrate our collective 60th birthday, I was less interested in organizing a reunion than in designing a unique and memorable experience. I wanted classmates to leave our event having learned something new, felt something different, discovered someone new.

The event became a series of conversations about health and longevity, artificial intelligence, reinvention, purpose, and community. Even the seating arrangements were designed to encourage new connections rather than reinforce old social patterns.

Looking back, I realize I wasn't just coordinating an event. I was curating the conditions for discovery and connection.

The Emergence of Archetypes

A few weeks later, I invited Regina and two other classmates to join me at the SiriusXM Studios for a podcast conversation about identity, aging, aspiration, and friendship.

As the conversation unfolded, I was struck by how differently we each express ourselves and move through the world. Those differences are reflected not only in our personalities, career choices, and life stories, but also in our Aesthetic Archetypes.

The Romantic

One of my guests, Judith Greenberg, is a professor, writer, and scholar. She finds deep meaning in memory and is more drawn to the past than to imagining the future. Yet she also loves fashion, theater, art, and contemporary culture.

In Judith, I see what I call the Intellectual Romantic archetype. She notices details, finds meaning in nuance, and seeks beauty through understanding. Her tastes are layered, literary, and emotive.

Judith's Romantic sensibility extends from the books she reads to the spaces she creates around her books. Her extensive personal library is a good expression of her archetype. In her home, shelves are filled with novels, biographies, plays and poetry. Her books tell the story of a life spent in conversation with ideas. For the Romantic, objects are not just objects; they’re vessels of memory and identity.

The Precisionist

Then there’s Perla Delson.

Perla knew she wanted to become an architect before she even arrived at Dartmouth. She has spent decades building her own practice, creating homes that reflect the lives and aspirations of the people who inhabit them.

What amazes me about Perla is how seamlessly her professional philosophy mirrors her personal one. During the podcast, she spoke about helping clients discover their own tastes rather than imposing her own, and about favoring timeless designs over passing trends.

Perla embodies what I think of as the Precisionist archetype. Her aesthetic is defined by clarity, order, intentionality, and coherence. Every element in her designs serves a purpose. Every choice feels considered. Even her wardrobe reflects this sensibility, with its clean lines, timeless pieces, and absence of embellishment.

The Steward

And then there’s Regina.

Professionally, Regina is longtime executive recruiter. Archetypically, she’s the Steward.

Regina notices people. She is highly attuned to them. And she understands social dynamics as well as anyone I’ve ever met.

What struck me most during the planning of our 60th celebration was not just Regina's organizational skills, but her commitment to making everyone feel comfortable, welcomed, and seen.

The Steward’s aesthetic medium is not things or ideas; it’s relationships. Regina's archetype expresses itself not only in the quality of the connections she cultivates, but also in the care and intention she brings to designing experiences around them.

I’ve been to several of Regina’s parties in the Hamptons. They’re invariably filled with good food, lively conversation, an eclectic mix of people, creative touches, and lots of laughter. To Regina, details matter. But her true gift lies in using those details to create something larger: a sense of community, and belonging.

The Freedom of Becoming

As I look back on our 60th birthday celebration, I see my classmates differently. It’s not that they look older. It’s that they look more individual.

For years I’ve argued that Aesthetic Intelligence is not about beauty, style, or image. It’s about the ability to express our inner values through our outer choices.

Perhaps that’s the real gift of aging. At 20, we try to fit in a tribe. At 60, we have the confidence to bring our differences to the tribe. And that alignment is, ultimately, what Aesthetic Intelligence is all about.

Coming Next: The Precisionist

What do a German master watchmaker, a classic car collector, and a former BMW executive have in common? More than you might think.

In my next Substack, I’ll return to the Precisionist archetype through the lens of a conversation I recently had with Wilhelm Schmid, CEO of the luxury watch brand A. Lange & Söhne. As you’ll learn from the essay and podcast, Wilhelm is obsessed with craftsmanship, engineering and timeless design. And like all Precisionists, he’s driven by excellence.

But what makes the Precisionist so fascinating is that their excellence extends far beyond products. It drives how they work, what they collect, the brands they admire, and even the way they move through the world.

Stay tuned to discover why the Precisionist is one of the most prevalent archetypes in the luxury sector and where else you might be surprised to find it.

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Cheers, Pauline

In our latest class, we explore a powerful concept: aesthetic value is not created through strategic planning alone, but also through sensorial delight. Brand desirability emerges when products, services, and experiences engage us in emotionally resonant and sensorially rich ways.

Sensory literacy is foundational to Aesthetic Intelligence. The most compelling brands do not simply convey information about their products and services; they create experiences that resonate and emotional connections that last.

As I share in this class, humans possess far more than just five senses. Some scientists have suggested we may have as many as 54. Regardless of the actual count, what matters is that perception is shaped by a complex network of interconnected sensory systems.

Sound influences taste. Sight affects flavor. Smell triggers memory. Touch creates emotional connection. These cross-sensory interactions help explain why certain brands feel more desirable, memorable, and meaningful than others.

Tune in to learn how our sensory systems shape perception, emotion, and behavior and to gain practical tools for developing your own sensory literacy and applying it build a more compelling brand of your own.

Coming Up….

In our next MasterClass, I’ll share more practical tools for building your Aesthetic Intelligence and putting your aesthetic muscles to work.

But before we return to the classroom, we have a few more Aesthetic Archetypes to explore. If Aesthetic Intelligence is about why taste matters and how it can be cultivated, the Archetypes series examines the myriad forces that shape how we express ourselves and how those forces manifest in the lives and work of industry leaders, creative entrepreneurs and tastemakers.

As always, stay tuned and attuned!

Cheers, Pauline

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Yet taste remains chronically overlooked. We don’t teach it in schools. We don’t measure it. We rarely discuss it with any degree of seriousness. Instead, we treat our preferences as arbitrary and subjective.

But what if taste is something deeper? What if it is a map of identity?

My team and I have spent much of this year developing new tools to explore that very question. This fall, we’ll launch the Aesthetic Archetypes Assessment, an innovative “taste test” designed to map how individuals respond to aesthetic cues across a broad range of style domains. The assessment will uncover the patterns that determine how we perceive the world, what we value, and ultimately how we choose to live. (More on that soon.)

Until then, this newsletter will continue to explore Aesthetic Archetypes as part of this ongoing series. Together, we'll examine the forces that shape them- from biology and temperament to upbringing, environment, and cultural exposure - and consider how they apply to business, branding, and beyond.

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One archetype I’ve returned to repeatedly is the Curator.

The Curator’s gift is the ability to impose structure on complexity. Curators continually compose and refine their environments, wardrobes, work, and activities until every element meets their exacting standards and feels in harmony with the whole.

Their motive is to order the world around them. But unlike another control-driven archetype, the Precisionist, the Curator does not shy away from detail or complexity. And unlike the Classicist, who also seeks order, the Curator remains open to experimentation.

I was reminded of the Curator archetype during a recent SiriusXM conversation with Andrea Scherz, the third-generation owner and operator of Gstaad Palace in Switzerland. Andrea is the quintessential Curator.

Inside the Curator’s World

Throughout the past century, Andrea and his family have transformed Gstaad Palace into something far more remarkable than a five-star hotel. They’ve created a world unto itself, one defined by elegance, heritage, and deep connections. It offers a glimpse into a way of living that’s long forgotten, but more valuable than ever.

My conversation with Andrea revealed several characteristics of the Curator archetype.

1. Curators are not drawn to accumulate, but to edit.
   One of the most striking qualities of Andrea is his restraint. While many luxury brands chase trends, he remains very selective about what belongs and what does not.

2. Curators preserve culture through stewardship.
   The Latin root of the word curator, curare, means “to care for.” Andrea feels a responsibility to protect something larger than himself and to preserve and transmit the values, traditions, and standards that were set generations ago.

3. Curators find meaning in continuity.
   In a world obsessed with disruption, Andrea’s philosophy is remarkably different. He knows that his guests return to Gstaad Palace time and again, because of its consistency. They don’t see it as a sign of stagnation, but as a source of trust and connection.

4. Curators make complexity feel effortless.
   Behind the scenes, Gstaad Palace is extraordinarily complex. It welcomes thousands of guests from around the world, manages hundreds of employees, maintains a century old property, and upholds exacting standards of service across every touchpoint. Yet guests experience none of that complexity. What they encounter instead is something that feels natural, elegant, harmonious, and complete.

Curious to learn more about the remarkable story of Gstaad Palace? Discover how three generations of a family-owned hotel not only survived and thrived through decades of change, but also helped shape the beautiful alpine village of Gstaad as we know it today. Tune in to the full podcast conversation below.

César Ritz: The First Great Curator of Luxury

Andrea Scherz is not the only hotelier who embodies the curator archetype. In an earlier podcast episode, I explored the life and legacy of César Ritz, another Swiss hotelier, founder of the Ritz-Carlton brand, whose name has become synonymous with luxury itself.

Like Andrea, César understood that true luxury is not about opulence. It’s about seamlessly arranging, refining, and orchestrating every aspect of the guest experience. He was known to obsess over every detail in his hotels, from the lighting and seating to the service and social choreography. I call these details "invisible design." They usually go unnoticed, but have an enormous impact on how people feel within a space.

César understood then what Andrea sees today: that hospitality, at its best, is not measured by occupancy rates or guest satisfaction scores. It emerges from a total aesthetic system, where every detail contributes to a coherent whole.

The Curator’s Shadow Side

The same sensitivity that allows Curators to recognize subtle distinctions and create aesthetic environments can also make them vulnerable to perfectionism.

Curators often become overly attached to their rules, standards, and customs. They may resist change, not because they reject innovation, but because change threatens their need for order and control.

César Ritz offers a powerful example. His almost superhuman ability to anticipate guests’ needs, combined with his relentless attention to every detail, ultimately led to a mental breakdown. In 1902, at the height of his success, César suffered a nervous collapse from which he never fully recovered. He spent the final years of his life largely incapacitated, unable to return to the business that bore his name

The Curator’s challenge is to learn when to stop editing and recognize that beauty comes from thoughtful selection, not absolute control.

Why the Curator Matters More Than Ever

The Curator archetype is especially relevant in this age of abundance.

We now have access to more information, products, content, choices, and stimulation than at any point in human history. Yet abundance has not necessarily made us richer. If anything, it has made us more overwhelmed, distracted, and disconnected.

Curators help us navigate the noise. They know how to create order without sacrificing richness and how to bring coherence to complexity. In a world of infinite choice, that ability may be one of the most valuable human skills of all.

Perhaps that’s why Gstaad Palace continues to attract many of the world’s most discerning guests. It offers something that money alone cannot buy: a world steeped in history, guided by a clear point of view, and sustained by a rare sense of continuity in an age of constant change.

Are You a Curator?

• Do you feel more comfortable refining existing ideas than creating entirely new ones from scratch?

• Do you seek depth, richness, and complexity, while feeling uneasy around clutter, randomness, or excess?

• Do you notice details that others seem to overlook?

• Do you take pleasure in arranging objects, ideas, experiences, or people into a coherent whole?

• Do you appreciate tradition, while remaining open to experimentation and discovery?

• Are you naturally inclined to collect references, inspirations, books, images, or objects, and organize them in meaningful ways?

• Do you find yourself constantly refining your home, your wardrobe, your work, or your daily routines?

• Do friends and colleagues regularly seek your recommendations, trusting your judgment and point of view?

• Do you believe that environments influence how people think, feel, and behave?

• Do you derive more satisfaction from improving something than from acquiring something new?

If you answered yes to most of these questions, you may be a Curator. But the Curator is just one of several distinct Aesthetic Archetypes my team and I have identified through our research. In the essays and podcast episodes ahead, we'll explore the others and the myriad hidden forces that shape their perceptions, preferences and behaviors.

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Next week, we'll release our latest MasterClass, The Science of the Senses. After all, taste is built on sensation. In this class, I'll explore how our senses function, how they work together, and how they ultimately shape the way we perceive beauty, assign value, and experience the world around us.

As always, stay tuned and attuned.

Pauline

In my LVMH days, one of my favorite “professional” events of the year was the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic on the NYC Harbor. It was equal parts sporting event, fashion spectacle, and social gathering.

My work as head of North America wasn’t all glamour. There were strenuous board meetings, quarterly reviews, and countless flights between New York and Paris. But this particular champagne-fueled affair was, in a word, fun.

In general, I loved working with my colleagues in LVMH’s Wines & Spirits division. They inducted me into a business that is not only centuries old, but also one of the largest and most storied sectors within the luxury industry.

And they possessed extraordinary Aesthetic Intelligence.

Champagne was never just sparkling wine. Cognac was never just a type of brandy. Bottles were designed like works of art. Tastings were staged like theater.

Occasions to drink were, somehow, occasion enough. We drank because it was joyful.

That now feels like a lost art.

The Aesthetic History of Alcohol

In my latest SiriusXM episode, I explored the evolution of the wine and spirits industry through the lens of aesthetic and cultural shifts. What interested me most was not simply how drinking habits have changed over time, but how each era - from Prohibition to craft cocktails to today’s clean-living culture - projected its own values, anxieties, and aspirations onto the rituals of drinking.

During Prohibition, drinking was carried out in secrecy; alcohol itself became a symbol of rebellion. By the 1950s, cocktails evoked social belonging and aspiration. In the 1980s and ’90s, wine connoisseurship became a marker of status, sophistication, and cultural literacy. Then came the craft era, with its emphasis on authenticity, locality, and storytelling.

Today, the sector is undergoing yet another transformation - one that says less about alcohol itself than the psychology of modern life. Younger generations are drinking far less, while traditional spirits brands are giving way to nonalcoholic alternatives, low-ABV cocktails, and adaptogenic beverages. At first glance, the shift appears to be driven by a growing emphasis on health and wellness. But I suspect something deeper - and perhaps more troubling - is happening.

The “Experiencing Self” vs. the “Narrating Self”

In thinking about these new attitudes toward drinking, I turned to Daniel Kahneman’s theory of our two selves: the “experiencing self” and the “narrating self.”

Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist and behavioral economist best known for Thinking, Fast and Slow, spent decades studying happiness, memory, and decision-making. His research revealed that people often evaluate experiences very differently from how they actually live through them in real time.

The experiencing self lives in the present moment. It is sensorial, emotional, embodied, and spontaneous. The narrating self, by contrast, organizes those moments into coherent stories that shape our identity and understanding of our lives. It evaluates, rationalizes, measures, interprets, optimizes, and remembers.

While the narrating self gives our lives continuity and meaning, Kahneman observed that it is often disproportionately shaped by peaks, endings, and simplified narratives rather than by the fullness of lived experience itself.

A healthy life depends on balancing the two. A person governed entirely by the experiencing self can become impulsive, untethered, and devoid of introspection or meaning. But a life dominated by the narrating self risks becoming overly optimized, performative, and disconnected from presence, pleasure, and embodiment.

I believe contemporary culture overwhelmingly privileges the narrating self - tracking, measuring, curating, and optimizing experience in the pursuit of achievement - while neglecting the part of us that simply lives our lives as they unfold.

This may help explain not only Gen Z’s changing relationship to alcohol, but also its broader discomfort with pleasure, indulgence, and spontaneity.

The Alcohol Experience

Historically, alcohol belonged to the domain of the experiencing self. Drinking was not merely about intoxication, but about social connection, embodied pleasure, sensory immersion, and surrender.

The aesthetics surrounding alcohol reflected this orientation through a celebration of excess, seduction and spectacle. As I discussed on SiriusXM, brands like Absolut Vodka mastered this brilliantly. Absolut transformed a commoditized product into a coveted cultural icon through the aesthetic innovation of its bottle designs, advertising campaigns, and artistic collaborations.

Similarly, Grey Goose elevated vodka into a luxury status symbol through minimalist packaging, aspirational branding, and the highly performative rituals of nightclub bottle service. The experience was never just about the alcohol itself. It was about visibility, exclusivity, and social theater.

Champagne brands - like Cristal, Dom Pérignon, and later Ace of Spades - also became deeply embedded in nightclub culture, using theatrics like oversized bottles, illuminated presentations, exclusive VIP rooms, and tie-ins with celebrities, artists, and fashion designers.

Alcohol, in this sense, was managed less as a beverage and more as an aesthetic medium through which consumers pursued pleasure.

The Decline of Pleasure

But today’s consumers, especially younger ones, relate to pleasure differently. Experiences are no longer simply opportunities for enjoyment; they are treated as inputs for optimizing future outcomes. Everything is tracked, recorded, analyzed, shared, and folded into a larger narrative about the self. In the process, the narrating self has begun to eclipse the experiencing self entirely.

That helps explain the steep decline in alcohol consumption. In its purest form, alcohol disrupts optimization. It impairs productivity, weakens self-control, and introduces unpredictability. Above all, it defies a culture that’s organized around performance, self-management, and personal optimization.

The retreat from alcohol is not happening in isolation. Younger generations are also having less sex, dating less, and socializing less than previous generations - part of what researchers now describe as a “sex recession.”

Taken together, these shifts point toward a culture that has become increasingly uncomfortable with embodied pleasure.

The Aesthetics of Wellness

Many of today’s fastest growing nonalcoholic and wellness adjacent beverage brands no longer resemble traditional spirits, which conveyed glamour, excess, indulgence, and the sensual darkness of nightlife culture. Instead, their packaging now looks more like luxury skincare, with their emphasis on transparency, softness, restraint, and botanical purity.

Brands like Kin Euphorics evoke the adaptogenic mystique and celestial minimalism of Moon Juice. Ghia’s muted palette, apothecary typography, and Mediterranean botanical positioning feel closer to Aesop or Byredo than to traditional liquor branding. Meanwhile, wellness beverages like Recess or De Soi often resemble ingestible extensions of brands such as Herbivore Botanicals or Drunk Elephant, with their pastel palettes, clean typography, and language of calm, balance, and self care.

Rather than promising escape or intoxication, these brands promise regulation, clarity, balance, and optimization. This is not simply a branding trend, but a deeper shift in how modern consumers relate to pleasure itself.

Dining: From Appetite to Optimization

This shift extends far beyond alcohol. Food culture offers one of the clearest parallels. Historically, dining centered around appetite, abundance, pleasure, and conviviality. Today, consumers increasingly evaluate food through the lens of optimization: protein content, gut health, glycemic response, anti inflammatory properties, ingredient purity, and functional benefits.

Even traditionally indulgent treats now require nutritional justification. We have protein ice cream, functional desserts, “clean” snacks, and wellness oriented comfort food. Pleasure is no longer enough on its own; it must also signal discipline, health consciousness, or self improvement.

Eating, increasingly, has become another way to optimize the future self rather than simply nourish or delight the present one.

Fitness: From a Healthy Body to a Performance System

Fitness culture, which I explored in an earlier case study (“Religiosity of Fitness”), is undergoing a similar transition. Exercise was once driven mostly by physical exertion, competition, emotional release, and the visceral satisfaction of movement itself. Today, it increasingly revolves around metrics: recovery scores, sleep tracking, longevity protocols, hydration, VO2 max measurements, and heart rate zones. Once again, the narrating self prevails over the experiencing self.

Travel: From Exploration to Restoration

Travel and hospitality have evolved in much the same way. Historically, luxury travel promised escape, indulgence, adventure, and discovery. Today, many premium hospitality experiences revolve around longevity programs, recovery therapies, sleep optimization, biohacking treatments, mindfulness practices, and digital detoxes.

Even the aesthetics of high end hotels have shifted accordingly. Biophilic interiors, muted color palettes, circadian lighting, natural materials, minimalist architecture, meditation spaces, infrared saunas, and wellness centered programming have replaced the glamour and formality of traditional luxury hospitality.

The ideal vacation today is no longer about escaping your normal life, but about returning to it as a more optimized version of yourself.

From Living Life to Managing Life

Across industries, we’re seeing a profound aesthetic and psychological shift: away from experiencing the world around us and toward narrating the world within us.

This does not mean younger generations no longer crave pleasure, beauty, or rich sensory experiences. If anything, I believe they crave them even more intensely. The rise of sauna culture, niche fragrances, layered and tactile interiors, experiential retail, analog hobbies, and contemporary crafting movements all point to a deep hunger for embodiment and sensory immersion.

But these pleasures are not pursued for their own sake. They’re permitted only insofar as they can be rationalized and folded into a productive self narrative around wellness, mindfulness, creativity, or self improvement.

What fascinates me most is how clearly aesthetic trends reveal this deeper psychological transformation. The changing aesthetics of alcohol is ultimately about much more than drinking itself. It’s about a culture increasingly uncomfortable with experiences that can’t be justified, measured, and made useful to our future self.

But the Pendulum Always Swings Back

Human beings are not designed to live inside systems of optimization. Our desire for pleasure, spontaneity, connection, and transcendence is too deeply rooted to remain suppressed for long.

We’ve seen this cultural pendulum swing before. The prudence and social conformity of the 1950s eventually gave way to the experimentation and liberation of the 1960s and ’70s - an era that reasserted “the experiencing self” through sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

I suspect another such correction is coming. And when it does, the aesthetics of culture will transform alongside it.

Next week, I’ll pick up on my Aesthetic Archetypes series with insights from my recent interview with Andrea Scherz, the third generation owner of the legendary Gstaad Palace in Switzerland. Scherz recently joined me in the SiriusXM studio for a fascinating conversation about what it means to deliver an age-old vision of hospitality to a radically different generation of travelers. If Ritz-Carlton founder, César Ritz, whom I profiled last month, helped invent the original language of modern luxury hospitality, Andrea represents a modern version of that archetype: part hotelier, part cultural curator. Our conversation explored how he preserves the intimacy, character, and emotional resonance of his hotel in an era dominated by optimization, standardization, and democratization.

Until then, stay tuned and attuned!

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In our last MasterClass, I posed a personal question: Where does your taste come from? Why are you drawn to certain images, objects, people, brands, or ideas, and repelled by others?

Taste is one of the most intimate expressions of who we are. Yet, as I explained in the class, it is shaped by a range of powerful forces, many of them outside our control: biology, ecology, genetics, and the society and culture into which we are born.

In today’s class, I turn to the implications for brand builders. How can you use your own aesthetic sensibility to forge deeper, more meaningful connections with your customers? How can taste become a tool not only to sell, but to delight and inspire?

Drawing on psychology, behavioral science, and business case studies, I show how the world’s most powerful brands succeed not simply by making and marketing excellent products, but by creating meaning, memories, and ultimately myths.

This session is essential for anyone seeking to build a brand in today’s meaning economy.

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I saw Anna Wintour last week at a film premiere. She was - no surprise - at the center of everything. The launch party itself was a study in excess: a crush of drag queens, celebrities, models, and media personalities. All in full regalia, orbiting brand activations from Tweezerman to Belvedere. It wasn’t an easy room to stand out in. Yet somehow, Anna did.

The premiere was for The Devil Wears Prada 2, with Meryl Streep reprising her role as the formidable fashion editrix Miranda Priestly. Anna is often cited as the character’s real-life analogue. She famously inspired the original novel, written by her former assistant Lauren Weisberger. And yet, Meryl Streep has gone on the record to say her performance drew less from Anna than from a composite of Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood.

Anna had little to do with the film itself. She neither wrote nor directed it, had no hand in the costumes, and didn’t even make a cameo (unlike the many fashion luminaries who did, from Marc Jacobs to Donatella Versace to Naomi Campbell). And yet, her presence at the premiere still loomed large.

It obviously wasn’t a function of her contributions to the film. Nor really about her impact on fashion or even on Vogue. The reality is she inherited an institution shaped by her predecessor Grace Mirabella, who propelled the magazine commercially, and, before her, Diana Vreeland, who transformed it into a global cultural force. Anna’s power stems from a different kind of authority altogether.

My observations of Anna and her outsized position led me to question the nature of influence itself. Who really holds power in creative industries? Is it the people who make things, or the ones who decide what things matter?

On reflection, I see Anna - alongside other luminaries like designer Tom Ford, merchant Dawn Mello, record producer Clive Davis, and media mogul David Geffen - as amassing power through a mastery of curation. They belong to the class that decides what matters.

I thought about this class of curators while recording my latest SiriusXM show. What began as a diatribe on the dehumanizing realities of modern global travel - its frictions and indignities - gave way to a curiosity about the individual who once set the gold standard for luxury travel: César Ritz.

If Anna Wintour is one of the most compelling contemporary examples of an aesthetic curator, César Ritz was one of the first. By codifying the rituals, standards, and aspirations of the ultra-wealthy traveler in the nineteenth century, he didn’t just transform luxury hospitality; he constructed an entire language of luxury.

In my own work with The Ritz-Carlton, I saw what happens when that language breaks down. My goal was to partner with the company’s general managers to understand luxury services not as a checklist of processes, but as a system of aesthetic signals and emotional cues. At its highest level, luxury isn’t imposed, but observed, refined, and delivered with excellence and consistency.

Curating the Luxury Experience

César Ritz was not born into luxury. The son of a farmer, he was raised in a small Swiss village in the mid-1800s. By most accounts, he showed little early promise and was dismissed from his first hotel apprenticeship, told he would never succeed in the industry.

Likewise, Anna Wintour’s ascent in fashion was not smooth or linear. Early in her career in London at Harper’s & Queen, she developed a reputation for being difficult. And, in the 1970s, just a few months after moving to New York to work at Harper’s Bazaar, she was reportedly fired for clashing with the editorial team’s more traditional, commercial direction.

But both she and César persisted. Over the course of the next few decades, he shadowed his well heeled clients through the grand hotels of Europe, from Paris to Vienna to Monte Carlo to the Riviera, studying not just how the finest hotels looked, but how they operated and how they felt to those who passed through.

In time, he came to understand the rhythms of aristocratic life and how to design experiences that not only met his guests’ expectations, but anticipated them. In the process, he built a reputation not just for world-class service, but for creating environments that felt both effortless and exacting.

By the time César Ritz was ready to open his own hotel - the Ritz Paris in 1898- he didn’t need to invent a new concept of luxury; he simply codified his years of experience serving aristocracy, translating it into something marketable, repeatable, and enduring.

The Curator Archetype

Before César Ritz, many others managed Europe’s grand establishments. Antoine-Charles Aubert, for example, was highly respected for his hotel designs, and Georges Auguste Escoffier was renowned for his cuisine. But none mastered the art of curating a hotel in a way that could endure beyond its time and place.

César Ritz understood what curation actually means.

Its roots lie in the idea of “cure” or to restore. To curate is not merely to select or refine; it is to bring an experience into harmony, to orchestrate its elements so they feel seamless, intentional, and complete.

He did not just run hotels; he choreographed them. He considered how guests arrived, how they were greeted, how light entered a room, how a table was set, how service was delivered, and how privacy and attention were balanced. He introduced rituals where they elevated meaning and eliminated friction where it caused unease. He aligned cuisine with setting, service with atmosphere, and staff with a standard of discretion and precision. In doing so, he transformed hospitality from a checklist of services into a coherent, luxurious experience.

The Intelligence of Editing

It’s easy to mistake César’s gifts for other forms of discipline. But his required a particular kind of intelligence - one not built on creation or innovation, but on selection and sequencing: knowing what to keep, what to refine, and what to remove.

This is the intelligence of editing. It begins with discernment. César did not need to invent luxury; it already existed in the private rituals of aristocratic life. What he understood was how to distill it.

Editing, in this sense, is an act of restraint. It requires the confidence to exclude as much as to include. It is also an intelligence of sequencing. César understood that experience unfolds over time. The guest should never feel the seams; what appears effortless is, in fact, highly composed. In this way, editing becomes a form of authorship.

This kind of intelligence is rarely named, and even more rarely taught. Yet it can be developed. In a future masterclass, I’ll explore the art of curation more directly as one of the four essential steps in cultivating Aesthetic Intelligence.

The Nature of the Curator

Behind all of this, there is a broader way of thinking about what I am calling “the Cult of the Curator.”

In my view, taste is not random. It follows patterns - ones that, over time, crystallize into a set of distinct aesthetic archetypes. Each is shaped by a number of underlying forces that govern how we see, select, and refine the world around us. (I’ll explore this framework more fully in my next book.)

Most people operate within these forces unconsciously. But certain individuals - like César Ritz and Anna Wintour - arrive at them with unusual clarity and consistency.

The Curator is one such archetype: defined by a bias toward control, a gift for editing rather than inventing, and a heightened sensitivity to detail.

Same Archetype, Different Mediums

What makes the Curator Archetype so powerful is that its influence extends well beyond any single field.

• You see it in Ralph Lauren, who built an empire not on new ideas, but on the careful curation of existing ones, translated into a complete lifestyle.

• You see it in restaurateurs like Danny Meyer (Union Square Hospitality) and Keith McNally (Balthazar, Pastis), whose power lies in choreographing every element of the experience - from menus and lighting to uniforms and acoustics.

• You see it in record producer Rick Rubin, a master of reduction, who’s known for helping artists edit down and rediscover what matters most in their work.

• And you see it in my former LVMH boss, Bernard Arnault, who has assembled a constellation of houses - each distinct, yet orchestrated within a larger system of taste and perception.

For each of these figures, their power lies in their tasteful composition. The orchestration of people, products, and ideas into systems of meaning that others recognize, adopt, and aspire to.

Where does your power lie?

Last week’s case study on the devolution of car design showed what happens when taste is lost and when everything begins to look the same. This week focuses on the individuals gifted at restoring distinction and meaning. Next week, I’ll build on this idea in more practical terms: how taste is applied to storytelling, and how the same instincts that shape taste can be used to craft a narrative and ultimately turn a brand into something more enduring: a myth.

I hope you’ll join me in the classroom.

Cheers, Pauline

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A Tesla, a Toyota, a Hyundai, a Mercedes.

Four different brands. Four different price points. Four different countries of origin. Yet, they all collapse into the same design. A glossy, grayscale jelly bean.

I remember the first time I fell in love with a car on the road. It was a buttery-yellow AMC Pacer, circa 1976. It had a strange, swollen shape - more glass than metal - and looked like a fishbowl on wheels. It dared to look different, and for that alone, I loved it.

About 20 years later, I fell in love again. This time with a British Racing Green Mazda Miata. Its headlights popped up like blinking eyes, and the whole car seemed to smile. I was charmed by its sweetness.

But it’s not just cars. That flattening of personality and loss of distinction seems to have seeped into everything.

Look at today’s beauty devices. Kitchen appliances. Even logos and apps. They all converge on the same aesthetic language: soft edges, rounded corners, muted neutrals, matte finishes, minimal lines. Designed to disappear.

It’s something I spoke about on my latest SiriusXM show, though strictly through the lens of the auto industry. I traced the sector across nine distinct eras - from Ford’s Model T to today’s Tesla - showing how each era captured the spirit of its time. And how that spirit has since been flattened into… well, a glossy, grayscale jelly bean.

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Aesthetic Trends Are Not Born in a Vacuum

Many people think of design as industry-specific. Fashion designers make dresses. Furniture designers make chairs. Automotive designers make cars.

But design doesn’t evolve in silos. It cuts across categories, as designers, working independently, are still influenced by the same socio-cultural forces, the same technological shifts, the same underlying consumer sentiments, and the same evolving sense of what looks and feels “good.”

The auto industry is an especially interesting sector to study. Cars are among the most visible, most expensive, and most culturally loaded products people buy. They sit at the intersection of innovation, identity, and everyday life. So when their designs change, it’s never just about functionality or economy. It’s a reflection of something much broader. The zeitgeist.

The Aesthetics of Optimism

Take the 1950s. It was a culture of progress. The jet age. The space race. America, in particular, felt alive with possibilities.

Cadillac was the defining car brand of that era. Its exaggerated tail fins made its cars look as if they were about to take flight.

Compare the Cadillac to other iconic designs of the time - like the Eames chair, Sunbeam toaster, and classic American diner. Their lines were all hard but expressive. Their materials shimmered. And their bright colors and bold features projected an unapologetic confidence.

Design in America was infused with optimism.

The Aesthetics of Constraint

By the 1970s, the tone had shifted. The exuberance of the 1950s had drained away. It was an era of oil shocks, inflation, and environmental awakening. Confidence gave way to concern, and design grew smaller, more restrained, more utilitarian.

Cars followed suit. They became smaller, boxier, more subdued. Compare them to the heavy concrete of brutalist buildings, or to the earth-toned palettes of wardrobes and interior spaces.

In an effort to appear relaxed, everything just felt awkward, even anxious.

The Onset of the Jelly Bean

By the 1990s, something else started to happen. Hard edges softened. Cars took on more rounded forms. It was the start of the so-called “jelly bean” era. Think of the Ford Taurus or the Volkswagen New Beetle.

At the same time, consumer electronics were undergoing a parallel shift. Technology was made to feel inviting, not intimidating. Early personal tech products, like the iMac G3 and Motorola pagers, were made in translucent colors and with friendly curves that erased the hard lines and visible wiring of earlier machines. Across categories, objects became smoother, more approachable, less machine-like.

The Deadening Effects of Optimization

Fast forward to today, and we arrive at, well, the blob.

Tesla Model 3. The iPhone. Sonos speakers. Dyson fans. A.I. startup logos. The interiors of a typical Airbnb. They all share a certain something that reads as nothing. Minimal detailing, smooth surfaces, disappearing color palettes, an absence of visual noise. An absence of personality.

Even luxury brands have moved in this direction. The message is no longer about design. It’s about control. We have, in effect, optimized aesthetics.

This is what I see as blobification. It’s not a stylistic choice, but the byproduct of groupthink, digital proliferation, and commercial prioritization.

Sharpness introduces risk, so edges soften. Airflow enhances efficiency and manufacturability, so surfaces smooth out. Neutrality travels better across cultures and markets, so color disappears.

Over time, all objects lose whatever tension or specificity once made them distinct and interesting. And eventually, they turn into an aesthetic blob, shaped by the cumulative effect of systematized decision-making.

This shift hasn’t just reshaped how things look; it’s reshaped the economics behind them. More standardized, optimized designs are easier to engineer, manufacture, and scale across global platforms. On the one hand, this has driven down costs. On the other, as designs converge, individual models become harder to distinguish. The focus shifts away from the more emotive aspects of brand DNA toward technical considerations like features, functions, and financing. In that sense, cars increasingly behave like commodities, and their perceived value and pricing power are eroding.

The Age of Aesthetic Convergence.

But again, it’s not just happening with cars.

Walk into a newly built apartment building and you’ll likely find the same light wood floors, white walls, and matte black fixtures. Open Instagram and scroll past brand after brand using the same muted tones and sans-serif typography. Look at airports, hotels, offices: they’re increasingly interchangeable. It’s as if they were all designed by the same invisible hand.

There’s a tension at the center of all this. Historically, design wasn’t just about solving problems; it was about expressing identity.

Cars, in particular, used to carry meaning. They reflected personal taste and values. A muscle car didn’t just perform; it provoked.

Cars also used to signal national character. A German BMW or Volkswagen conveyed something entirely different from an Italian Ferrari or Fiat, or an American Ford or Chrysler.

Today, that signaling has flattened. Cars still differ in performance and price. But visually, they communicate largely the same thing: competence. They convey that their products are safe, efficient, well-engineered. All of which matter. But none of which make you fall in love.

The Rebirth of Romance

But if product design has always reflected the forces shaping it, this phase is no exception. Looking back, periods of constraint have always been followed by bursts of creativity and expression.

It’s no surprise, then, that the appetite for sameness is already beginning to dissipate. People today don’t just want products, brands, and spaces that work; they want them to mean something, to elicit feeling. The more everything looks the same, the more we crave difference.

If this era has been defined by optimization, I believe the next will be defined by character, soul, and a distinctly human touch. A return to objects that don’t just perform, but captivate, surprise, and delight.

I’ll pick this up next week with a two-part series on the aesthetics of global travel. First, a case study on the devolution of the modern travel experience: how standardization, cost optimization, and global scale have stripped it of joy and wonder. Then, a return to origins: a profile of the world’s first aesthetic genius in hospitality, and how he set the gold standard for luxury and built an empire that still defines the category today. Until then, stay tuned and attuned!

Cheers, Pauline

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In our last MasterClass, we explored a simple but powerful idea: your aesthetic preferences are not arbitrary; they are, in part, evolutionary. Shaped by biological, ecological, and genetic forces, they influence what you perceive as “good,” appealing, and desirable. At their core, these preferences function as mechanisms for survival and flourishing.

Today, we build on that foundation by examining how culture and society refine, reinforce, elevate - or distort - those instincts.

Your taste does not emerge in a vacuum. It is shaped by the world around you: when you came of age, where you’ve lived, the language you speak, the rituals you practice. Each of these layers contributes to the lens through which you see and judge the world.

To sharpen your taste, you must first understand not just what you like, but also why you like it and who and what have influenced you along the way.

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In our last MasterClass, I explored the impact of AI on Aesthetic Intelligence. Specifically, I asked whether artificial intelligence is actually intelligent? And, more importantly, how can we all leverage the benefits of technology, while still maintaining a distinct and sustainable human advantage?

Today, I want to turn that lens inward and pose a more personal and revealing question:

Where does taste come from? Why are we each drawn to certain images, objects, people, brands or ideas, while others leave us cold?

Our aesthetic tastes are the most intimate and authentic expressions of who we are, and they are shaped by a confluence of external forces. In this MasterClass, we will begin to uncover those forces. Not in the abstract, but at their source: the biological, ecological, and genetic foundations that shape what we each perceive as “good,” appealing, and desirable.

This is the first of a two-part inquiry. We begin with evolutionary aesthetics: how certain preferences were developed as mechanisms for survival and flourishing.

In the following session, we’ll explore how culture and society refine, reinforce, and elevate - or distort - those instinctive preferences.

If you want to sharpen your taste, you must first understand where it comes from. And as you’ll see, it’s less random - and more patterned - than you may have expected.

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When I was nine, I loved playing with Barbie dolls. I admired their perfectly proportioned noses, their glassy, pore-less complexions, and their impossibly long legs. My favorite one had red hair, which made her slightly more relatable than her blonde counterparts. She was the version of me I hoped to become. It didn’t matter that I’d never have an 16-inch waist.

Years later, in high school, I remember noticing the mother of a classmate. She was a woman so coiffed, so platinum, so perfectly symmetrical that she seemed almost unreal. She was a living Barbie doll. She looked nothing like her daughter, who had mousy brown hair and a hooked nose. I instinctively registered the mother as the ideal, and the daughter as the deviation.

It wasn’t until decades later, at a high school reunion, that I saw my classmate had grown into her mother’s image. By then, she had the same hair color and same features. Perhaps the same plastic surgeon.

I found myself wondering why, as a teenager, my eye had so easily accepted something so obviously constructed. Why hadn’t I been more disposed to rejecting the artificial in favor of the natural?

I feel a similar bewilderment when it comes to designer dogs - especially pugs, bulldogs, whippets and sharpeis. Just a few generations ago, their ancestors looked entirely different. They were healthier, more proportionate, more canine.

When I used to walk my rescue dog Boo, he would physically recoil at these creatures. He sensed their distortion from the natural world. Why don’t we humans have the same reaction to designer people?

I found myself wondering the same thing during a recent SiriusXM conversation with Tarpley Hitt, author of Barbie Land: The Unauthorized History. On the show, we discussed the enduring cultural power of the world’s most famous doll - a figure whose features and proportions have long defied biological reality, yet remain widely accepted, even aspirational.

Whereas Boo instinctively rejected the unnatural and unhealthy look of purebred dogs, I (and countless other little girls) were conditioned to admire those same distortions in our Barbie dolls.

Barbie and the Edge of the Uncanny Valley

Barbie has always been a strange kind of human. Not realistic, exactly. But not abstract enough to be purely symbolic either. She sits somewhere in between: recognizable, aspirational, and yet utterly artificial. She lives right on the edge of the “uncanny valley.”

Coined in 1970 by Japanese technologist Masahiro Mori, the uncanny valley describes the discomfort we feel when something appears almost human, but not quite. At that point, small imperfections - a slightly off expression, lifeless eyes, unnatural texture - become magnified and evoke a sense of unease.

Which begs the question: why has Barbie endured when other uncanny-looking dolls (like Cabbage Patch kids with their lumpy faces and Bratz with their exaggerated lips and eyes) have fallen by the wayside?

The Aesthetic Strategy of Emptiness

According to Tarpley Hitt, Barbie was never really meant to be a person. She was designed as a slate for projection. She has no real backstory, no fixed personality, no interior life to constrain her. She could be anything because, at her core, she is nothing. Her emptiness was - and still is - an aesthetic strategy.

That strategy has been there from the beginning.

The familiar origin story casts Barbie as a product of maternal insight. Ruth Handler, the company’s founder, claimed that while watching her daughter play with paper dolls, she realized girls wanted to imagine themselves as adults. But in Tarpley’s research, a different origin story emerges.

Before Barbie, there was Bild Lilli, a German doll based on a flirtatious comic-strip character. Lilli was not intended for children; she was sold largely to men as a novelty item. When Ruth Handler encountered Lilli on a trip to Europe, she recognized a gap in the American market: an adult-bodied female doll. She adapted that form, launching Barbie in the United States in 1959.

Barbie Was Not a Toy, but a Tool

Barbie was never just a doll. As Tarpley noted, the real business was in extension lines - like Barbie outfits, accessories, and eventually, entire lifestyle products. Internally, she was even nicknamed by the parent company Mattel: “Our Lady of Perpetual Income.”

That flexibility made her uniquely resilient. Unlike narrative-driven toys, she had no fixed identity to outgrow. When culture shifted, she didn’t need to be replaced, just restyled.

For decades, that blank perfection read as fantasy. Today, it seems to be getting closer to reality. We now live in a world of filtered faces, cosmetic enhancements, and carefully curated identities. As a result, the boundary between the real and the artificial is getting more and more blurry. Our reversion toward the uncanny valley has not disappeared, but the line has definitely moved …or perhaps we’ve moved toward it.

Barbie Walks the Oscars

I was struck by this while watching the Oscars earlier this month. Certain actresses, particularly those who have been in the public eye for decades, looked less like versions of themselves and more like approximations of a shared aesthetic ideal.

Nicole Kidman and Demi Moore, in particular.

Both women, whose careers have spanned a generation, now occupy a space adjacent to the one Barbie has long held. The effect is not obviously unnatural. If anything, it is exquisitely well executed. And yet, the artifice has become so advanced it no longer registers as such.

The signs of aging and typical irregularities that, in earlier generations, distinguished one face from another have been softened or erased. What remains is a frozen surface. The result is beautiful, but disconnected from the messiness of lived experience.

Perhaps the distance between the real and the rendered has narrowed? Or perhaps something simpler: the Barbie form, once an obvious exaggeration, now serves as a template.

The AI Frontier

Our shifting standards become even more unsettling in the realm of AI-generated personas. Consider the emergence of Jessica Foster - a “MAGA girl” who has amassed more than a million social media followers in a few months.

What’s disturbing is not just that she is entirely synthetic, but that she has been calibrated to feel real. Some men have fallen for her, in part, because she is stripped of the very qualities that make real women dimensional and complex.

In that sense, she occupies the same territory Barbie first mapped out: human-adjacent, but optimized. The difference is that Barbie never tried to pass as real. Figures like Jessica Foster do.

Why Barbie Endures

Which brings us back to why the archetype of Barbie still matters. It is not because our society reveres dolls. If anything, as Tarpley noted, girls today age out of them earlier than ever. But while the desire to play with dolls has diminished, the aesthetics of Barbie has not.

What was once contained in plastic has migrated into culture. We are all, to some degree, optimizing versions of ourselves. Barbie’s idealization reveals just how far we’re willing to go. Perhaps that’s why she still feels so current. It’s not because she has changed, but because we have.

If aesthetic tastes are patterned and predictable, then who - or what - shapes them? In next week’s masterclass, I’ll explore how taste is formed: where it originates, how it evolves, and why certain aesthetics take hold while others fade. Because to understand the power of archetypes like Barbie is not just to analyze them, but to recognize the forces that made them feel inevitable in the first place.

Cheers, Pauline

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And if you want to learn more about my world please visit my newly renovated website :

https://aestheticintelligence.com/

The business of ice cream - the focus of my latest Aesthetic Case Study - offers a compelling lens for examining value creation in the meaning economy. Its evolution shows how something seemingly simple can become culturally charged. My interest in the category is not only analytical, but personal. Like many, I associate ice cream with moments of indulgence, as well as nostalgia and identity.

In what follows, I examine ice cream not as a product, but as a sector shaped by a confluence of forces. The environments in which brands emerge encode the sensibilities of their cultural context. The individuals behind them imbue their companies with a distinct form of Aesthetic Intelligence. And while formats, flavors, and business models evolve, the brands that endure are those anchored in a clear set of beliefs about taste, experience, and meaning.

I always thought there were only two kinds of people in the world: sweet and savory. Recently, I learned that, even within the sweet camp, there are four distinct types: crunchy, tart, chewy, and creamy. I have no doubt which one I am.

Creamy. Yes, I’m an unapologetic ice cream person.

That may sound like a simplistic preference, but ice cream actually offers a surprisingly sophisticated lens on consumer culture and economic theory.

In my latest masterclass, I discussed the evolution of value creation: how we moved from the era of industrial goods, to brands, to experiences, and now to meaning. Indeed, we’ve now entered what I call the meaning economy.

In other words, we’ve moved beyond buying products for their function, brands for their identity, or experiences for their emotional impact, into an era where value is rooted in significance. In this context, consumers are not simply purchasing goods; they’re participating in shared systems of meaning composed of narratives, symbols, rituals, and communities that help them make sense of themselves and the world. Differentiation is no longer driven by features, but by philosophy.

Ice Cream as a Case Study in Meaning-Making

I found myself thinking about this progression during a recent SiriusXM podcast conversation with ice cream veterans David Stein and Sasha Grutman. David is a longtime ice cream entrepreneur, who helped shape the category through his early leadership at Steve’s (inventor the “mix-in” concept) and now leads the dairy-free ice cream maker Devoated. Sasha is a close friend and banker by day, whose deep appreciation for food and elevated tastes bring a distinct and discerning perspective to the conversation.

What began as a discussion about the business of ice cream quickly led to something much broader:

What transforms a simple scoop into a meaningful and memorable experience?

Why and how have certain brands redefined the industry, while others disappeared?

And what does the future hold for ice cream as an economic and cultural category?

What follows is my latest Aesthetic Business Case Study - not of a single brand, but of an entire sector - demonstrating how applications of Aesthetic Intelligence have propelled its evolution.

Act I: The Industrial Good: Breyers and the Rise of Trust

For much of its history, ice cream was local. Dairy didn’t travel well, and what you ate depended on what was produced within a relatively small radius. Then came Breyers, which, as my podcast guest David Stein pointed out, became the first nationally distributed packaged ice cream brand.

Founded in 1866 in Philadelphia by William A. Breyer, the company began as a small operation selling hand-churned ice cream made from simple, high-quality ingredients. Breyers expanded steadily in the early 20th century, but it wasn’t until the post–World War II era that it achieved national distribution, as refrigeration, trucking, and supermarket chains scaled across the United States.

The value proposition was not built on a unique brand identity, but on consistency and trust, with simple packaging and a product line that was standardized, stable and legible to a mass market - hallmarks of the industrial age of consumer goods.

Breyers’ competitor Carvel, founded by Tom Carvel in the same era, introduced a hint of something more. Its soft serve format, ice cream cakes, and signature characters like Cookie Puss and Fudgie the Whale created new forms of entertainment and ritual, especially around birthdays and celebrations.

Even then, the category remained largely defined by scale, distribution, and familiarity. Ice cream brands were mostly meant to reassure their customers, not inspire them.

Act II: The Aspirational Image: Häagen-Dazs and the Power of Illusion

The next shift came not from technology, but from perception.

Häagen-Dazs, with a name that sounded vaguely Scandinavian, was founded in 1960 in the Bronx by Polish-American entrepreneurs Reuben and Rose Mattus. The brand did something deceptively simple: it presented ice cream as a luxury good, with its elegantly designed packaging and a name that connoted European refinement. The product felt more indulgent, more sophisticated, more adult.

Yet, nothing about the category had fundamentally changed. Here, branding moved beyond reassurance into aspiration. Consumers were no longer just buying a dessert; they were buying into a slightly more refined version of themselves.

Act III: The Social Experience: Steve’s and Ben & Jerry’s

If Häagen-Dazs elevated ice cream, Steve’s and Ben & Jerry’s transformed it.

When David Stein described his early days at Steve’s parlor in Somerville, MA, he didn’t talk about the flavors or recipes; he talked about the lines - long lines of college students (and their visiting parents) making a pilgrimage to a place that felt like a cultural event. The now-ubiquitous “mix-ins” were, at the time, revolutionary. Candy bars and cookies were chopped on a frozen slab and folded into softer, warmer ice cream.

But the real innovation was the theater. For the first time, ice cream became performance. And it became participatory.

Ben & Jerry’s took that experiential approach and scaled it. As my other guest, Sasha Grutman, observed, their genius was not just in the chunky textures, but in the clever naming of their flavors: Cherry Garcia. Chubby Hubby. Americone Dream. Steve’s may have invented the ice cream experience, but Ben & Jerry’s taught ice cream how to talk.

This was Aesthetic Intelligence at its best:

• multi-sensorial (texture, taste, temperature)

• symbolic (names, humor, identity)

• communal (lines, sharing, discovery)

Ice cream had become a social experience as well as a forum for self-expression.

Act IV: The Breakdown: When Function Replaces Feeling

Not every evolution is linear.

There was an unfortunate period when ice cream tried to become something it was never meant to be. The rise of “better-for-you” brands like TCBY (“The Country’s Best Yogurt”) and, more recently, Halo Top Creamery attempted to strip out the very elements that made ice cream compelling in the first place: sugar and fat.

As David noted in our conversation, the problem was a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the category. Ice cream is not consumed for nourishment; it’s consumed for joy.

This is where Aesthetic Intelligence failed. Function at the expense of feelings may have generated early trials, but it certainly didn’t lead to loyalty. TCBY’s parent company ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and Halo Top, once the top-selling pint in the U.S., is about 50% down from its peak.

Consumers will compromise on many things. Pleasure is not one of them.

That helps explain the rapid ascent of Van Leeuwen. What the team behind the brand seems to have understood, and what many others have missed, is that you cannot win by simply touting what’s removed from a product. You win by what is felt through it.

Van Leeuwen’s joyful colorways, childlike visual language, and emphasis on ingredient integrity work in concert to signal something deeper: this is ice cream that delivers pleasure, not compromise.

Act V: The Meaning Economy: From Experience to Cultural Relevance

Today, we are entering a new phase - one that is less about experience alone and more about meaning.

You see it in the proliferation of local and global variations - Indian ice creams in Brooklyn, Japanese dairy traditions, regional American dairies reclaiming their heritage.

What looks like fragmentation is, in fact, evolution. The new frontier is not just about what ice cream tastes like, but what it represents.

Meaning in ice cream is being constructed through:

• Place: local sourcing, regional identity, cultural specificity

• Memory: childhood rituals, family traditions, moments of first discovery

• Identity: what your preferences signal about who you are

• Community: shared experiences, sampling, belonging to a taste culture

One of the most poignant moments in our conversation came when Sasha described his mother arriving in the United States from Europe in 1942 and being handed a creamsicle. She never forgot it. That simple frozen treat became inseparable from her memory of entering a new country.

That’s not an industrial good. That’s meaning.

The Role of Aesthetic Intelligence

So what does this case study tell us?

At every stage of this evolution, value has been shaped not just by what is produced, but by how it is perceived, experienced, and shared.

Aesthetic Intelligence is the skill set that enables that transformation. It is not simply about making things look good, but about understanding fundamental drivers of human pleasure:

• why do certain textures unleash delight?

• why do certain rituals resonate so deeply?

• why do certain symbols endure over time?

• why do certain experiences become lasting memories?

Branding makes things noticeable. Aesthetic Intelligence makes them matter. And in a world where consumers have more than enough “stuff,” what remains precious is not products, but meaning.

Conclusion: The Future of Ice Cream

The future of ice cream will not be decided by the next flavor innovation or the next dietary workaround.

It will belong to the brands that understand something more fundamental: that consumers are not just choosing what to eat; they’re choosing how to feel, who to be, and what to belong to.

Ice cream, perhaps more than any other category, sits at the intersection of pleasure, memory, and identity. It’s deeply emotional and inherently social. It is, at its best, a small but powerful expression of aliveness.

As always, subscribe to stay in the loop!

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And if you want to learn more about my world please visit my newly renovated website : https://aestheticintelligence.com/

Cheers, Pauline

In our last session, I gave an orientation to my new course on The Foundations of Aesthetic Intelligence. Today, we turn to a topic that’s on everyone’s mind: artificial intelligence.

Specifically, in today’s session, we’ll explore

Is artificial intelligence actually intelligent? What even is intelligence?

As AI becomes more and more capable, what, if anything, can humans do that AI cannot?

How can we all leverage the enormous benefits of AI, while still maintaining a distinct and sustainable competitive advantage?

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In my last Substack, I wrote about the religiosity of healthy practices. But there is also a religious dimension to our ideals about the body itself, particularly the male body.

While body shape matters for women too - sometimes to a disfiguring degree - women still have many more levers of attractiveness: hair, makeup, clothing, accessories.

For men, the body carries disproportionate symbolic weight. Studies show a clearcut “height premium,” with taller men earning more and disproportionately occupying leadership roles.

Beyond height, a man’s strength, build, posture, and hairline are not just physical qualities; they’re status signals. And they’re hard to alter through styling or presentation. A 2025 study of MBA graduates reported that individuals rated as more attractive earned about $2,508 more per year on average, and those in the top 10% of attractiveness earned roughly $5,500 more annually.

Which is why the male body can be read as an aesthetic artifact of its era. Alexander the Great embodied the heroic ideal of the classical world, a vision of masculine beauty later mythologized in the Renaissance through Michelangelo’s smooth, sculpted marble. Some 500 years later, Arnold Schwarzenegger transformed the male body into a spectacle of exaggerated musculature and cinematic strength. Today the ideal persists in a new form: technologically optimized physiques, engineered both for - and increasingly by - digital displays.

The Kennedy Cousins: A Tale of Two Bodies

This was on my mind while watching the latest episode of the television series Love Story. The series chronicles the whirlwind romance of John F. Kennedy Jr., the golden boy of the ‘90s, and his wife Carolyn Bessette.

Watching footage of him today fills me with nostalgia. His body, posture, and style of athleticism embodied a particular version of American masculinity that prevailed during my own coming-of-age.

In contrast, his cousin - U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., fills me with dread. Politics aside (however much I dread his political positions), RFK Jr. embodies a darker strain of American masculinity- one defined less by natural strength than by grievance, suspicion, spectacle, and presumably steroids.

But what strikes me most is how dramatically the masculine archetype can shift within the same family and within a single generation.

Two Kennedys. Two bodies. Two entirely different ideals of the American man.

The Last Patrician Athlete

JFK Jr. embodied the aesthetic of the patrician athlete.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, naturally lean, and had the look of someone who grew up sailing, cycling, and playing touch football. His physique was fit but not aggressively muscular. It suggested healthy activity rather than prescriptive exercise.

This was the era before we felt the need (or had the tools) to engineer every inch of our bodies. Before wearable devices. Before protein macros. Before biohacking podcasts. Health expressed itself through vitality rather than metrics.

The MAHA Body Politic

Now consider RFK Jr.

At 72, he casts himself as a champion of physical and metabolic health - posting shirtless videos, doing pushups, chopping wood, flexing in the sun - all while preaching the virtues of “real food,” like fatty red meat and raw milk.

In his worldview, the body is a project to be mastered - emblematic of optimization culture, with its seed oils, peptides, metabolic health metrics, longevity protocols, cold plunges, and the relentless pursuit of a cleaner, stronger, more resilient self.

This ethos has found a political banner in the MAHA (“Make America Healthy Again”) movement that he has helped popularize. MAHA reframes public health as a battle against industrial food, environmental toxins, and pharmaceutical dependency, casting personal discipline and bodily purity as forms of civic renewal.

In that sense, Kennedy’s physique is not just personal branding but political argument: the optimized body as proof that a different relationship to food, medicine, and the modern world is possible.

Archetypes of Machismo

Seen through the lens of aesthetics, these two men occupy very different masculine archetypes. JFK Jr.’s aesthetic was aspirational but gentlemanly. A masculinity rooted in lineage, social grace, and quiet confidence. He also lived in an era in which we still trusted and admired elite institutions.

RFK Jr’s archetype is oppositional and defiant. He represents the renegade health warrior - the anti-establishment elder who claims to have uncovered truths not only about the human body, but about the broader system.

Two Political Bodies

The shift in masculine aesthetics is also visible across the manosphere.

Across podcasts, YouTube channels, and wellness subcultures, the male body has become a central site of ideological expression. Researchers have found that fitness influencers often serve as gateways into the manosphere, using gym culture, dietary discipline, and endurance challenges to frame physical transformation as a path to masculine authority and status.

The scale of the ecosystem is significant: one study of masculinity communities found more than 28 million posts across dozens of forums, while another study counted 300 million comments across 500 channels.

In this sphere, RFK Jr.’s archetype seems to resonate most with a particular segment: older men, libertarian in temperament, who reject institutional narratives about health (and most other conventional narratives as well) in favor of their own judgment.

But resonance is complicated.

Even among that audience, RFK Jr. doesn’t seem to capture the cultural imagination in the way JFK Jr. did in the 1990s or his father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., did in the 1960s. Robert F. Kennedy Sr.’s authority was earned. John F. Kennedy Jr.’s was inherited. Neither needed to persuade anyone to follow.

The Body as Cultural Barometer

Regardless of political ideology, the contrast between JFK Jr. and RFK Jr. - their body types and their archetypes - is striking. It shows how even the most personal aspects of human identity reflect the cultural currents of their time.

Two Kennedys. Two bodies. Two different ideas of power.

And if archetypes evolve with culture, the next one may already be taking shape. Which raises the question:

What kind of physique will power embody next?

Next week I’ll be hosting my next masterclass, exploring how digital technologies - and more specifically, A.I. - are reshaping aesthetic tastes and what that means for businesses. Most importantly, I’ll offer strategies for you to retain and sharpen your own human advantage in an AI-driven world.

More details soon. Hope to see you in the classroom!

Cheers, Pauline

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That logic applies to bodies, too. Every era converges on a body it wants.

But the body itself is only part of the story. Each era also invents its own belief system around the body - complete with rituals, spaces, visual codes, and moral philosophies. Taken together, they begin to resemble something much older than the fitness industry itself: religion.

In that sense, the wellness industry feels less like a marketplace and more like a collection of competing faiths.

A New Era in the Wellness Industrial Complex

I was thinking about that recently during a conversation on SiriusXM with health writer Bill Gifford. Bill, who has spent decades covering science, sports and fitness, just released his latest book, Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger.

On the radio, Bill talked about the surprising benefits of heat and how age-old practices like saunas and hot baths can improve cardiovascular health, sleep, longevity and even mental health. According to the research, controlled thermal stress strengthens the body in the same way exercise does.

Consumers are clearly catching on. The global sauna market is expected to grow from about $860 million in 2023 to $1.3 billion by 2030.

Cold plunges are rising just as quickly. The market for cold-plunge tubs, once confined to professional sports training facilities, is projected to double within the next five years. (As an aside, Bill says the science behind cold exposure is far less compelling than that of heat. Phew!)

Our conversation made me wonder whether the wellness sector is entering a new era. Instead of choreographed routines or elaborate machines, today’s rituals revolve around elemental oppositions: heat and cold, darkness and light, stress and recovery. They feel less like exercise than acts of purification.

Resilience Through Ritual

Part of the rising popularity of saunas comes from the scientific findings. As Bill Gifford explains in his book, studies show that heat - like exercise, in general - creates a form of controlled stress that stimulates the body to become stronger and more resilient.

But the popularity of saunas (and cold plunges) cannot be explained by physiology alone. I believe the appeal is also aesthetic.

In an era of digital overload, pandemic anxiety, and relentless self-optimization, practices that promise resilience through elemental stressors - steam rooms, sweat lodges, ice baths, intermittent fasting, hyperbaric therapy, hypoxic training, and dawn simulators - feel both ancient and oddly modern.

They echo something familiar across cultures and centuries: the idea that endurance, purification, and transformation can be achieved through ritualized discomfort.

The Purification of Sauna Culture

New sauna spaces don’t look like gyms. They look like sacred monasteries. Cedar-lined sauna rooms glow with amber light. Stone floors lead to silent pools of icy water. Matte black plunge tubs sit like minimalist sculptures.

They evoke something older than wellness itself: the belief that physical suffering - when carefully structured and repeated - can purify the body and renew the self.

Their rituals are simple. Enter the heat. Endure the cold. Repeat.

The Protestant Work Ethic of Jack LaLanne

To understand just how religious today’s health and fitness culture has become, it helps to look back.

Modern American fitness arguably began with Jack LaLanne.

When The Jack LaLanne Show debuted in 1951, television itself was still new. LaLanne appeared in a simple jumpsuit on a bare set, leading viewers through calisthenics while preaching the virtues of vegetables and daily exercise.

The aesthetic was austere: black-and-white broadcasts, minimal equipment, and a tone of cheerful discipline. The philosophy underlying this movement was governed by morality. Fitness was not framed as pleasure or indulgence but as duty.

A strong body symbolized the moral clarity, personal responsibility, and vigor of the post-World War II era.

In this sense, LaLanne’s philosophy resembled a kind of Protestant ethic: daily practice, restraint, and the belief that character is built through arduous physical work.

The Aerobics Revival

By the 1980s, the zeitgeist had changed. If LaLanne represented moral discipline, the aerobics boom felt closer to a Christian revival meeting.

Jane Fonda’s workout tapes, first released in 1982, became a cultural phenomenon. Aerobics classes spread through suburban gyms and community centers, accompanied by pounding music and synchronized choreography.

The aesthetic of this movement was unmistakable: spandex leotards, leg warmers, VHS tapes, mirrored studios, and rows of bodies moving in rhythmic unison. Fitness became theatrical.

Evangelical instructors led groups through rhythmic routines while music surged through brightly lit rooms. The atmosphere was collective, energetic, and exuberant.

The Zen Minimalism of Yoga

By the early 2000s, the pendulum swung again. After decades of high-impact, flashy fitness culture, the next movement was defined by serenity and mindfulness. The goal was no longer to project energy, but to achieve a sense of inner peace and balance.

The spaces themselves reflected that philosophy. Studios were designed to soothe rather than stimulate, with minimalist interiors, natural materials, and hushed atmospheres. They looked less like gyms than like meditation retreats.

Instructors focused on breathing, alignment, and small, controlled movements rather than pounding music or intense exertion.

The Soul Cycle Cathedral

In the 2010s, another denomination prevailed. Luxury studios like SoulCycle and Tracy Anderson Method transformed exercise into a highly choreographed experience.

The design was unmistakably liturgical. Entrances looked like sanctuaries, with marble lobbies, curated scents, and an atmosphere of reverence. The studio itself was dimly lit, candles flickering near the instructor’s podium, as rows of riders faced forward like congregants.

Sessions adhered to a ritual order: warm-up, climb, sprint, recovery, with movements performed in unison to music that swelled like a hymn. At the center stood the instructor, part coach and part deacon, delivering exhortations about strength, gratitude, and transformation.

The experience felt less like a workout than a service.

The Anatomy of All Religious Movements

Across these very different movements, a recognizable pattern emerges. Each sits at the intersection of three forces - many of the same forces that historically gave rise to religious orders themselves.

First, a persuasive physiological insight: a claim about the body that arrives like an enlightenment. Jack LaLanne championed circulation and nutrition as Americans became increasingly sedentary. Aerobics rode the wave of cardiovascular science. Pilates and yoga drew on biomechanics and breath control. Boutique studios emphasized metabolic conditioning and muscle transformation. Today, sauna culture links controlled heat exposure to mental health and longevity.

Second, these ideas gain traction because they address specific sources of societal anxiety. Postwar fears of stagnation, the sedentary office culture of the 1980s, the challenges of work-life balance in the 2000s, and today’s relentless digital assault have each opened the door to new forms of physical activity.

But the third force - and the one most relevant to my thesis here - is aesthetic. Every successful movement develops a visual language, spatial environment, and brand codes that makes participation feel meaningful, even sacred.

• LaLanne’s black-and-white television workouts embodied discipline and moral clarity.

• The aerobics boom played out in mirrored studios filled with neon color and synchronized choreography.

• Yoga studios were designed with pale woods, soft lighting, and minimal architecture to cultivate calm and inward focus.

• SoulCycle and Tracy Anderson created temple-like spaces, with marble entrances, vaulted ceilings, tightly packed congregations, and motivational sermons delivered from on high.

• And today’s sauna culture carries its own monastic codes: cedar-lined rooms glowing with amber light, heaps of stones, rising steam, and silent plunges into icy water to shock the body after rounds of sweat-soaked heat.

Today’s Religion of Resilience

So what is the ideal body type in 2026? And what does it reveal about the religious order of our time?

In today’s age of volatility and unpredictability, the most compelling wellness rituals are those that push our bodies through controlled stress and then allow us to recover.

But the appeal of these practices extends beyond physiology into ritual and belief. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and digital abstraction, the human body has become one of the few domains that still feels indisputably real. We may delegate thinking, writing, and even decision-making to machines, but sweat, heat, cold, exhaustion, and recovery remain stubbornly physical experiences.

That may explain why the dominant wellness rituals revolve around elemental trials: saunas, cold plunges, fasting, breath work, endurance training. They are simple, almost primitive acts that reaffirm something fundamental - that we’re still embodied creatures.

The aesthetics of modern wellness draw on something timeless and ancient: purification through discomfort, renewal through repetition, and the belief that endurance can strengthen the self.

In the age of AI, the body itself has become a kind of sanctuary. And it’s one of the last places where transformation still feels possible.

Cheers, Pauline

For the past decade, I’ve been teaching a concept I call Aesthetic Intelligence - first through a book, then in classrooms at Harvard and Columbia, and later through workshops with corporate leaders and entrepreneurial founders. But I’ve long felt that the curriculum deserved a more accessible home. This masterclass is the result.

In this ne…

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