How Cannabis Goes Mainstream: Jasmine Bina on Culture, Risk & Reinvention, part 1

[00:00:06] Jasmine Bina: The thing is people wanna use this. People do it surreptitiously or secretly already anyways. If they would be more public about it, it would help destigmatize. So how do you help people become more public about it? You just need to give them a new identity to step into.

[00:00:23] Ellen Scanlon: Welcome to How To Do the Pot, the award-winning podcast, helping you feel confident about cannabis. I’m your host, Ellen Scanlan.

[00:00:38] You just heard from Jasmine Bina, a cultural futurist and the founder of Concept Bureau, a brand strategy agency. Jasmine advises top global brands on how culture is shifting often before it’s visible to the rest of us. I reached out to her because I wanted to get her take on how stigmatized [00:01:00] industries like cannabis make their way toward the mainstream.

[00:01:05] In this episode, part one of my conversation with Jasmine, we talk about why cannabis is still stuck in outdated narratives, why a fear of taking risks is connected to people drinking less alcohol, and how change actually happens. Who gets to lead it and how culture makes space for new ideas. And if you’re looking for more tips, favorite products and exclusive discounts to help you enjoy your summer a little more, subscribe to my newsletter on substack.

[00:01:37] It’s free to read. And if you’d like to support our work, there’s a paid option too for just $6 a month. Find it on substack@dothepot.com or in the link in the show notes. Thank you for your support. I hope you enjoy part one of my conversation with Jasmine Bina.[00:02:00]

[00:02:09] At the beginning of the year, we did a three part series about alcohol and cannabis and someone tagged you on a LinkedIn post, and so I said, who is this person who was tagged? And that’s when I started following you and I just was absolutely fascinated by all of the work you’re putting out.

[00:02:24] Jasmine Bina: What we like to say is that we work with brands that need to move the needle of culture in order to win their markets.

[00:02:29] So we work primarily with deeply culturally embedded brands. And then Exposure Therapy is a community that we have for. Anybody who’s obsessed with culture, so strategists, brand builders, creative directors, social media people, marketers, obviously anybody who’s somewhere in the brand meets culture world, and it’s a very high touch community where we interrogate and come to understand where culture is headed and what that means for business.

[00:02:59] Ellen Scanlon: Working in [00:03:00] cannabis has been a very fascinating six years for me. I used to say that I loved it because it touched every part of culture, and over the past few years, I have to say, it has been a disappointing moment in cannabis culture. It really has not been, uh, taking off in the way that I think many people in the industry hope.

[00:03:18] Mostly because legalization has just really, really slowed and so much about. The business side of this industry requires legalization. So it’s been a disappointment for me, but it’s also given me an opportunity to just look at culture broadly and think about emerging industries and what happens with emerging industries and stigma and all kinds of things.

[00:03:40] So I’m really excited for the conversation.

[00:03:42] Jasmine Bina: May I ask, why has legalization slowed?

[00:03:45] Ellen Scanlon: There’s very little political will I see. I think in general, you know, it’s a popular topic and it’s a popular thing that voters like, but I wouldn’t say it’s like a thing that is gonna bring people out to the polls except for a [00:04:00] small group.

[00:04:00] And so lobbyists and politicians and all of the things that happen that actually create changes in law just haven’t really happened. Biden at the end of his administration recommended that cannabis. Be scheduled from schedule one to schedule three, which would change its designation, which would make a lot of things possible, including medical research.

[00:04:20] And with the new administration, it’s just really been completely stalled, and they show no signs of particularly caring. I started my career on Wall Street, so I love the business side of things, and when I. Think about the challenges of being federally legal. That to me is sort of the root of the problem in general.

[00:04:38] Jasmine Bina: Yeah. Yeah. I have a kind of naive question with all this. Talk about psychedelics and RFK. Is this at all, would that change anything for where the cannabis industry is going?

[00:04:48] Ellen Scanlon: I think that alternative health. Options are grouped together. Plant medicine can be grouped together. I would say that a lot of people who were early in cannabis [00:05:00] and kind of made a lot of money in the first wave of it have moved on to psychedelics because they’re excited about that frontier.

[00:05:07] Then there’s actually a very large body of research around psychedelics, and so I think psychedelics have tried to take a more medical approach. They’ve really partnered with the veterans groups and well, it hasn’t been successful yet. It’s just been a very different. Approach to legalization than cannabis.

[00:05:22] Jasmine Bina: Yeah, and it’s an interesting nut to crack. Okay, so this is a different take. There is somebody actually I know named Sierra Windrose. She’s a member in our community. She recently posted an article that I’ve been thinking about where she talked about how, interestingly, even though we see like something like psychedelics kind of getting further in the public consciousness and like cannabis might.

[00:05:42] On the flip side, we see alcohol being demonized a lot, but cannabis seems to be, when you put it next to alcohol, it seems to be a lot more accepted. And it’s interesting to ask why one’s being demonized for one reason and why the other one isn’t.

[00:05:56] Ellen Scanlon: I think that the changes in [00:06:00] perception of alcohol have confused people in a way that they weren’t expecting to be confused.

[00:06:05] So they were like, wait, this thing I thought was fine, suddenly you’re telling me it’s not. Oh, and there’s cannabis, which is now like pretty legal and available in a lot of places. Maybe it’s not as bad as I thought it was. And so I think that there’s a bit of an equalizing that’s happening between the two.

[00:06:20] Because I’ve been so embedded in cannabis, honestly, whenever I’m anywhere and I see alcohol just being so ubiquitous in some ways, to me it feels like the moment that like cigarettes used to be widely accepted, when I lived in New York City in my twenties, you could smoke in bars. So I look around and I just see how everyone is.

[00:06:38] Totally okay with huge amounts of alcohol, and yet cannabis is still not allowed in places. And so that’s a very bright blinking light for me when I’m out, and I’m very curious about what’s gonna happen. I think the younger generations have made such a stark turn in the way that they consider alcohol.

[00:06:59] And as [00:07:00] you talk about a lot with these psychographic trends, you don’t know how people are gonna respond.

[00:07:05] Jasmine Bina: Yeah.

[00:07:06] Ellen Scanlon: A lot of times

[00:07:07] Jasmine Bina: you don’t. It’s just because there’s so many other factors that go into why a group might change a certain behavior. ’cause like Gen Z and alcohol, it’s so much more than just alcohol or like for health reasons.

[00:07:20] There is also the way they socialize. Has completely changed because of COVID or a much lower risk tolerance than the generations before them, and it’s pretty multi-layered when you look at the reasons for why people would abruptly change a behavior like that. But the drop in alcohol consumption for Gen Z is like remarkable.

[00:07:39] That is something I’ve not seen that’s so pronounced anywhere else.

[00:07:42] Ellen Scanlon: A friend, uh, who I’ve had on the show was a Wall Street analyst. She was covering alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis for Cowen for many years. And she also talks about all different kinds of trends, but she said something to me, which I hadn’t thought of before she said it, and now I can’t get it outta my head, which is when [00:08:00] everything you do can be on video and on the internet in two seconds.

[00:08:03] You just are thinking differently about what you put in your body and what it makes you do. Do you feel like social media is a larger piece of that for this

[00:08:11] Jasmine Bina: generation? Oh yeah, for sure. And I would say it’s even broader. Just I think that risk tolerance I talked about before, I would connect those two things and we see it like anecdotally in our research.

[00:08:20] You know, I’ve. Had thousands of interviews in my life with, with people from all walks of life, all ages, and you see it with Gen Z. They really, especially more recently, really treat social media like it’s something toxic. They know like how to take breaks and when to take breaks. They are very careful about if they post or not.

[00:08:37] And I mean, if you’re creating your own brand, you post, but if not, a lot of people just. Go to scroll, but don’t actually put themselves out in the world. Yeah. When they grew up, seeing that you can have your entire life ruined or turned upside down if you say the wrong thing, whether you meant it or not, or whether it was right or not, that made a really incredible impression on that generation.

[00:08:57] So the tolerance for risk in [00:09:00] general just went down because that’s a very different kind of world to grow up in when you think about like how social media is the one place where the past never dies. We’ve never had a generation deal with that, and it directly plays into things like less alcohol consumption for sure.

[00:09:18] Ellen Scanlon: Well, I could start talking about all different kinds of topics, but I do wanna get to some of the ones that I was super curious to ask you about. And I just want to learn a little bit more about you first. So as a cultural futurist, you analyze patterns to predict where society is heading. And can you share what initially drew you to studying these cultural dynamics?

[00:09:40] Jasmine Bina: It was very organic. I had a PR agency before this a long time ago. I started it while I was in grad school and we kind of cut our teeth on tech. So we came up in the app economy and we did a lot of work for Silicon Valley brands. And at that time, your app could get huge. You wouldn’t know why. [00:10:00] And then I’d get these clients that would wanna go to press, but they didn’t have a story.

[00:10:03] They didn’t even know what they really were yet. So we would kind of like do the quick and dirty work of like just creating a brand really quickly so I could go and take them to media. And then that became more of our work and I realized that’s the part that I really like. Anyway. So I, I come to brand strategy through like a storytelling perspective.

[00:10:19] I always saw it as a way of telling stories, uh, in a way that people would care about. And because they came through pr, those stories had to be culturally relevant. Over time, I really came to really be obsessed with where culture was headed. I can’t explain why, but I’ve always had a personal vested interest in just understanding culture.

[00:10:37] People like us just, you know, you had a big dopamine hit. When you kind of make a connection and you realize, oh, this is why things are moving in this direction, or this is why people behave a certain way. It just helps you update your model of the world, which I think is a very exciting thing for people who care about that.

[00:10:52] So I actually started publishing and writing about culture. Way before I started doing this work, I wasn’t necessarily like working on [00:11:00] clients that were like, here, here’s a giant budget. Go like, figure out what’s happening in our category culturally and help us like, you know, change the zeitgeist. So I just started writing and my early pieces went a little viral.

[00:11:10] And then, uh, then we started getting hired to do that kind of work. And then organically we just figure it out. What are our systems? How do I create an actual practice out of this? Building up our like research capabilities, which was a big part of this, learning how to be a forecaster, learning how to make well-informed predictions and basically consult clients on like where they should be investing their resources next, but all from a cultural lens and not every brand needs that.

[00:11:36] Especially now with cycles happening so quickly, a lot of times you are lucky to just be along for the ride as a brand, but some brands really do set the tenor or some brands can’t afford to invest in changing the direction of where things are headed, uh, to better serve what the cultural needs of their audiences are.

[00:11:53] And those are the brands we typically work with, but. It just comes from a place of deep curiosity about people. I [00:12:00] don’t know how good I actually am, but I think I’m, I’m pretty decent at like, understanding people and it brings me great comfort in understanding people, and I feel good. I like to connect. I like being among people and like making.

[00:12:12] Very soulful, heartfelt connections and this kind of work lets you feel like you are connected to the pulse of humanity. That’s what I love about it, and that’s why I write about it. I, I love the work, but it’s almost secondary. I just love the, the writing and the research, which is what I’m more known for.

[00:12:28] And so luckily I kind of wrote myself into a position where, where I can do that.

[00:12:34] Ellen Scanlon: Well, your output and then knowing that you have a three-year-old and six-year-old twins is so incredible to me. I have a 7-year-old and one of the things that I have experienced over this period of being a mother is. My sort of prime creative time starts about 3:00 PM and goes sort of into the evening, which is absolutely terrible for being a mother.[00:13:00]

[00:13:00] Jasmine Bina: That’s prime time for children.

[00:13:02] Ellen Scanlon: And so I’m, uh, you know, just how have you set up your life so that you can maintain your creativity, maintain this deep interest, and also have this incredible amount of output.

[00:13:14] Jasmine Bina: So a few things. I have incredible people in my life. My husband is my co-founder at Exposure Therapy.

[00:13:20] My partner at Concept Bureau. We make a very good team. Like we’re very high functioning. We get stuff done. I have an incredible team at Concept Bureau who also supports exposure therapy. Our strategists, our, our EAs, like everybody here is just an incredible performer. We have a lot of systems. For how things should get done.

[00:13:41] I learned early on, especially when I started hiring assistants, which are probably, I think one of the most important roles at any company that’s growing is. I had to make a decision. I was like, I saw that I wasn’t really utilizing them the way I should have been. And you have to decide, are you going to let go of what’s precious to you and just learn [00:14:00] how to properly delegate and deal with the messiness of like training people to do things the way that you want, having tolerance when it’s not exactly the way you would do it necessarily, but the output’s still good.

[00:14:10] So really learning to delegate. Like crazy and to the point where now when anything crosses my desk, the first question is not like, how am I gonna get this done? It’s never that. It’s like, is there any possible way to get this off my desk and into somebody else’s hands so I can just focus on the really, really mission critical stuff.

[00:14:29] Other than that, I also learned. You know, when you’re pregnant you think like, these will be my hours and I’ll feed the baby at this time and do whatever. And I also learned really quickly during early motherhood that you can’t really put off anything till later. If you think of it, you gotta take care of it now.

[00:14:46] It’s just not gonna happen later. So I’ve gotten really good at like. Context switching really quickly. So if I like, have 10 minutes between calls and I know I have a couple emails to send, normally in the past I may have been like, Ugh, I’m not in the mood to [00:15:00] send emails. I’m just gonna go get a snack or something like that.

[00:15:02] Now I just, I just get over that seal of hesitation. Just do it. Get out there. And that way, like it’s incredible how much work you can complete in the little in between bits of time. So just like anything I’ve learned when it comes to strategy, when it comes to like being a leader, whatever. It’s just your mindset.

[00:15:19] You have to train your brain. You have to train your brain, tam your emotions, and hold yourself accountable to that. I like to say this all the time. When you’re a strategist or if you’re creating anything, there’s no tool. You are the tool. You have to learn to have an incredible amount of self-discipline if you wanna accomplish what you want to accomplish.

[00:15:38] I think becoming a parent. It really turns you into a superhuman ’cause you kind of, you have to get it together. And I don’t know that I would’ve ever accomplished even a fraction of what I’ve accomplished if I didn’t have kids, to be honest.

[00:15:52] Ellen Scanlon: It’s a beautiful thing to think about. The thing that, you know, feels sometimes like this obstacle, you know, I can feel resentment sometimes [00:16:00] when I’m just getting going and then I have to go do something.

[00:16:02] And yet I think you’re right that it has also created like new doors that I get to open all the time in my life that are driven because I’ve just got like people pounding on my back. You know, you kind of don’t have a choice. Let’s talk a little bit about cannabis. Does cannabis play any role in your life?

[00:16:24] Jasmine Bina: Not right now, really, to be honest, but I’m in California. It’s kind of everywhere, so I’m living among it, but I don’t know, people go through seasons. I’m not in that season right now, but cannabis is like a non-issue where I, I’m in LA so it plays a role in that way. From

[00:16:41] Ellen Scanlon: your work studying kind of cultural evolution, do you notice patterns in how stigmatized or taboo topics shift into cultural acceptance?

[00:16:54] Jasmine Bina: So I talk about moral static in my writing and research a lot, and you [00:17:00] see we’re like a fever pitch of moral aesthetic right now. Meaning when new technologies or new inventions. Change the norms of how we live. People can sometimes find that affronting to their identities, and when they don’t have a logical argument against it, they’ll default to a moral argument.

[00:17:20] ’cause moral arguments are kind of conversation enders. There’s no discussion. Like if you say it’s like morally wrong to do something, there’s no like intellectual interrogation after that. There’s no way to go from there in the conversation. So when you’re dealing with that kind of. Moral static. I know from like when I, when we consult with our brands.

[00:17:42] The best way to deal with moral static is to leapfrog it. And there’s a few ways to do it, but I think especially when it comes to something like cannabis, it’s the identity piece. Because right now we only have a pretty shallow version of what a cannabis user looks like. It’s a very like [00:18:00] sticky, what’s the word?

[00:18:01] Like it refuses to die with that image. It’s, it’s a stubborn image in our heads when you look at other things like GLP ones, so weight has. A massive amount of stigma attached to it. And then all this stigma around people taking GLP ones because people think they’re cheating, or people being concerned about the health risks of it, which is, I, I don’t personally, I think it’s, it’s laughable, but you see that it’s, it comes back to a moral argument.

[00:18:25] Like people try to argue that it’s morally wrong. Like you should be working and developing, you know, healthy habits. Who’s to say that people in GLP ones aren’t? But I just see that ridiculous argument come up over and over again, and because it’s all such a construct. And GLP ones. That is one place where I feel like you see stigmas changing, surprisingly.

[00:18:45] Quicker than you would’ve expected. And I think one of the avenues through which that’s happening is that people want to take GLP ones, but they don’t wanna deal with the stigma. So you see people like in the biohacking community talking about taking GLP ones, uh, for [00:19:00] longevity, for example. Or people taking it in, like menopause or perimenopause, people taking it as part of their stack for different reasons.

[00:19:09] And then that changes the conversation about like what they’re actually for. And it broadens and complicates the narrative. Ideally, you wanna complicate the narrative and make it hard to have a moral argument against something. And you do that by like introducing new use cases and broadening the aperture of what this kind of user looks like.

[00:19:28] I’m not saying that’s gonna be like a hole in one for people in this industry, but it, I see it being effective in other places. You know, there are people like, I think Peter Attia, um, Dave Asprey, you know, maybe a bit more on the fringes, but they are longevity influencers who I think are doing tremendous work trying to destigmatize it doesn’t even matter why you use this thing for GLP ones.

[00:19:48] It has a great use case. Why would we not use it for that use case? And I felt like Med Men was kind of doing this. It’s so. Sad that it ended up [00:20:00] collapsing and that it was like corrupt. And they did awful things that really hurt the industry, especially in California. But when they had that campaign, you would see these massive posters of like people’s faces and it would have the words pot user or like marijuana smoker crossed out and it would say, I’m a, not that but a teacher.

[00:20:17] I’m not that, but a construction worker. And it made you realize that like. People who smoke or whatever use, use cannabis are actually like pillars of the community. They are not people on the fringes of society. And I feel like at that time, the rest of the industry was taking more of a disempowered approach where it was like.

[00:20:36] Asking for permission, asking, you know, you shouldn’t suffer if you have pain. You shouldn’t suffer if you’re dealing with an ailment that cannabis can help you with. And so they always showed kind of like a hurt version of the user. I really was excited by what Mud Bend was doing. I think that could have gone further before it all collapsed, but that kind of thing was a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

[00:20:56] The thing is. People wanna use this. [00:21:00] People do it surreptitiously or secretly already anyways. If they would be more public about it, it would help de-stigmatize. So how do you help people become more public about it? You just need to give them a new identity to step into. If it canvas brands ever have an opportunity to change the vision and the visual of who their user is.

[00:21:19] I think that’s an opportunity worth taking. Again, it’s not gonna be like a hole in one, but I think that’s one really important piece of it.

[00:21:26] Ellen Scanlon: I think that’s really, really insightful. Is there a specific part of that that relates to women more than men? The example of the longevity that you gave was these are sort of like these dudes and does it complicate it around women?

[00:21:43] Jasmine Bina: I think it is complicated around women. Women have always a different set of biases that are placed among them. Longevity is a very male coded part of society. Also, western medicine, longevity, science. This idea of like the body as a machine. We actually [00:22:00] talked about this. We had a a a month in January in exposure therapy called Body Culture.

[00:22:03] We talked about the body, so I’m, I’m borrowing from there a little bit, but that metaphor for the body is very male coded. And it usually leaves the woman out. There’s no room for a woman’s emotions. You know, a lot of western medicine is even tested on women’s bodies ’cause we have periods and they see it as an anomaly in the research.

[00:22:21] And that’s why you have this new metaphor of the body coming forward where it’s more about the body as the temple. You see a lot of female influencers talking about. You know, it’s like books, like the Body keeps the Score or like eating according to your cycle. It’s basically the whole metaphor and movement that goop burst into the world for whatever you might blame her for.

[00:22:40] She really did everyone a service by expanding the definition of what. Good healthcare and wellness is because it included women in a way. It includes women’s emotions, it includes women’s intuitions, it includes their sexuality, things that are always excised or cut out of the [00:23:00] western medicine narrative.

[00:23:02] She brought that in like single-handedly. She helped bring that in. So I think in the longevity biohacking world, yeah, it’s always gonna be male coded. Maybe that will trickle down to women. I think it would be interesting to see how. Wellness influencers. On the more temple side of the body metaphor, if they incorporated or were to take on, I don’t know, cannabis is like a movement or something like that.

[00:23:25] That would create a lot more room for what society or these communities allow women to do when it comes to cannabis. That’s a really good point. Because right now the places where using alternative medicines for acceptable purposes is allowed, are in the male spaces, but you don’t see it so much in the female spaces.

[00:23:47] Ellen Scanlon: The thing that that makes me think about is going back to your GLP one example, like if you go on the drugs and they work, you physically change. So there’s kind of no denying the change, [00:24:00] but cannabis is, it’s a personal thing. You can pop a gummy, you can drink a cannabis beverage. Now it really can, can continue to be something that is personal, that is discreet.

[00:24:09] And so as. Culture changes and waxes and wanes about how excited it is about this. You know, there’s sort of no reason that you have to talk about it unless you, you really want to. And the GLP ones, it’s such a, I hadn’t thought about that as stigmatized in the same way, but I think you’re absolutely right.

[00:24:29] Jasmine Bina: Yeah, for sure. In some ways it is. And that’s another place where it seems to be far more penalizing that stigma penalizes women a lot more than men.

[00:24:37] Ellen Scanlon: Thank you for listening to How to Do the Pot. Stay tuned for part two of my conversation with Jasmine Bina. And if this conversation sparked something for you, whether you work in healthcare, consumer brands, or media, I’d love to help you tell better stories that connect, reach out to me on LinkedIn or on Substack[00:25:00]

[00:25:03] for lots more information and past. Episodes visit do the pot.com, and that’s also where you can sign up for my substack newsletter. If you like how to do the pot, please rate and review us on the podcast platform that you use for listening. It really helps more people find the show. Thank you to our producer Nick Patri.

[00:25:24] I’m Ellen Scanlan, and stay tuned for more of how to Do the Pot.