Cultural Forecast: Why Everyone’s Craving a Fresh Start + Celebrating our 300th Episode!

[00:00:06] Jasmine Bina: These are ways of serializing your life and what you’re going through so that it gives it meaning. When you go through this much change, the only way to not let it crush you is to give it a meaning, to give it a story, to give it a reason for happening.

[00:00:21] And a great way to do that is through the story of rebirth or reinvention or ascension, or like realizing your potential.

[00:00:28] 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.

[00:00:44] You just heard from Jasmine Bina, a cultural futurist and the founder of Concept Bureau, a brand strategy agency advising global companies on where culture is heading next. If you miss part one of our conversation, definitely check it [00:01:00] out. We talked about how outdated narratives still shape cannabis and why people drinking less alcohol might signal something bigger going on.

[00:01:11] Today in part two, we talk about what’s brewing in the culture right now, how money is getting spiritual, why work is becoming a bigger part of women’s identities, and what it means that everyone seems to be craving a fresh start. I also wanna mention that this is the 300th episode of How to Do the Pot.

[00:01:34] Thank you so much for listening, for sharing episodes with your friends, commenting on our socials or on substack, and just generally being part of what we’re building. I am very grateful that you’re here. If you’d like more of this conversation in your email, you can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack.

[00:01:55] It’s free to read, and if you’d like to support our work, there’s a paid option too [00:02:00] for just $6 a month. Find it@dothepot.com or at the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for your support. I hope you enjoy part two of my conversation with Jasmine Bina.

[00:02:27] So I started my career on Wall Street. I really want to do everything I can to help women get more money and more power and feel okay about that. How do you see women’s relationship with money evolving and what implications might that have for brands in different kinds of industries that are, are trying to capture those dollars?

[00:02:49] Jasmine Bina: I wish I had a bit more insight on women specifically. I have some of my own intuitions that I’ll, I’ll talk about. I will say in general, something else that we were talking about like over a year ago with [00:03:00] our exposure therapy community is that money has become so spiritualized, there has become such a spiritualization of like, you don’t like earn money or invest money.

[00:03:08] You hear like manifesting money and kinda like playing with the unreality of money, especially with Gen Z and definitely into millennials too. Kind of makes sense when, like when we need to kind of like double down on the capitalist ideal of like how money is supposed to work that as inequality or, or wealth gaps get bigger, it becomes a bigger kind of, I don’t wanna say lie, but let’s just say mythology to buy into.

[00:03:31] So like at some point it makes sense that like the final form of all this was going to be the spiritualization of money. Like that’s the only way to keep the machine kind of going. And I see that across the board. I would bet that we would maybe see it slightly elevated for women only because women are just allowed culturally to play more in spiritual spaces than I think men are.

[00:03:51] Especially like the more like emerging non-religious like spiritual spaces. I think it’s well known that women are just gaining more income and upward [00:04:00] mobility and they’re investing more outside of that. The other insight I would have around. Money and women, which is purely anecdotal, but it’s a hunch that I have.

[00:04:11] Do you remember everybody saw that economist chart where it shows the ideologies of men and women, especially young people, diverging, where men were becoming more conservative and women were becoming more liberal. When I first saw that chart, my first thought was. Women are finding a lot of meaning in their work probably right now because they are actually coming into their own, they’re moving up the career ladder.

[00:04:34] They’re making gains in like equitable pay. Work is becoming a really big part of their identity, and it feels good. Like they’re getting a, a newfound sense of meaning out of that. And if you listen to like the Scott Galloways of the world, they’ll tell you that men are actually losing that. At the same time, they’re losing a sense of identity around being a breadwinner or a provider.

[00:04:56] They’re actually losing in the job market. A lot of vocational jobs are [00:05:00] gone now, and it’s, they’re men are outnumbered by women in graduate schools and college and things like that. So they are losing the sense of meaning that they have in their work. And I think that explains that divergence because if you’re gonna lose meaning in work, which is a really important place to get meaning in this culture, at least you gotta find it somewhere.

[00:05:18] And I think. Conservative ideologies are really effective at giving that to people. And so I think it makes sense that men would be diverging in that way. So when I saw that chart, that’s what I saw. So the only thing I would glean in terms of women from that chart is I would argue that women are finding more meaning in their work, finding more meaning in making money.

[00:05:36] And it’s probably directing their ideologies as well. But that’s just my opinion when I saw that chart

[00:05:41] Ellen Scanlon: so fascinating. I wish all the charts that pop into my head, I could sort of just send ’em over and, and have you send me a little clip, but that’s what I get to read on your LinkedIn, so I it’s, it’s terrific.

[00:05:51] Another topic I wanna talk about is attention. And as attention becomes this increasingly scarce resource, what shifts are you [00:06:00] seeing in how people and how women consume and filter and share information?

[00:06:06] Jasmine Bina: In terms of consuming and filtering and sharing, I feel like we’re at such a point where things are changing.

[00:06:12] Right now. Women are highly networked to begin with their relationship builders. I think we’re already starting to see the early signals of social where most of our attention is being commoditized and monetized is not. Really this source of information. It used to be, and there’s an argument that like we’re about to hit the dead internet where most of the content we see will be fake or not real.

[00:06:37] I mean, I’m certainly seeing my feeds completely change. Go on Pinterest. It’s so crazy how quickly Pinterest died. Nothing is real on Pinterest anymore. I was shocked and I, I don’t know why they’re not doing something about it, but that’s just not a, it very much feels like a dead space. There’s a general move towards community.

[00:06:55] Women, I think have, not to say that men don’t, but it is socialized [00:07:00] into them to be community builders, let’s put it that way. And so they kind of have that, that skill already at their disposal. And we see more and more signs of people moving toward higher networked, more narrow communities and narrow communities.

[00:07:15] Virtual or in real life, uh, but also a little bit of an uptick in real life. Narrow communities are a double-edged sword because while they give you a great sense of camaraderie and belonging and identity, and knowing that you are part of something bigger than yourself, which is such a important to human need, like that’s a transcendental need that like we look for in even our religions.

[00:07:38] At the same time, when you have very narrow communities, they can be a little too focused on keeping you safe, keeping you kind of hermetically sealed from the outside. So they also don’t breed a sense of larger community, which is so necessary to the fabric of our culture and society, for example. There was a book, my principal strategist, Zach, [00:08:00] always talks about this bowling alone.

[00:08:02] I haven’t read it, but you know, we don’t have, like, people don’t bowl. They don’t go to PTA meetings. People aren’t having Tupperware parties. You’re not going to places where you’re gonna be mixed with people who are not really in your community, but they are forming a community. So you’re not gonna meet people outside of your socioeconomic background.

[00:08:17] You’re not gonna meet people who share different political views. You’re not gonna meet people who have a very different lifestyle than you. It’s great in some ways, but it’s also a bit of a slippery slope and can be dangerous in other ways too. I read an article about how this isn’t, I think it’s almost a year old now, about how the place where people meet the widest spectrum of people outside of their small bubble is not church.

[00:08:42] Which you would think it would be church. It is like a Chili’s or like an olive garden. It’s like those kinds of like fast casual restaurants where people from different socioeconomic backgrounds meet. We need more places where people from the larger spectrum meet for obvious reasons, and I think we’re kind of losing that, but hopefully this [00:09:00] resurgence of like in real life will change that.

[00:09:01] ’cause in real life it’s a little harder to control the borders of who’s allowed in and who’s not. I also feel like we’re seeing a little bit of a pushback, and this one’s too early of a signal to see just because right now it’s just like TikTok trends, but like a little bit of a pushback against this idea of therapy speak or over therapizing ourselves or always being like in a sense of like, I have to protect myself.

[00:09:27] That’s important. And that was a necessary phase that we had to go through in culture. But there may have been a bit of an overcorrection is, is I think what people are realizing and so. When everything is a threat, you know, you’re not building the kinds of communities and bonds and then you’re not, you don’t have the kinda like open-mindedness that’s necessary for a culture to stay cohesive.

[00:09:45] And I think people are feeling that right now. And so they’re kind of maybe starting to question it a little bit. Definitely I would say millennials. I don’t know about Gen Z so much.

[00:09:55] Ellen Scanlon: I am Gen X and I was with some friends over the weekend who [00:10:00] also are, and we were talking about how as a small generation, you know, we’re not gonna have a huge impact, but we are translators between boomer generation and millennial generation.

[00:10:11] What’s the headline on Gen X in your world? So there’s a great book

[00:10:15] Jasmine Bina: called Generations by Jean Twenge. She has a lot of the research that like Jonathan Het uses right now, she’s worked with Scott Galloway. In fact, I think that economist chart that I talked about was based on her data. She came and spoke to us at the community, and if I remember correctly, she was talking about how Gen X is actually quite a, liberal’s not the right word, but like a very open and flexible and surprising generation.

[00:10:39] They kind of like Buck Trends a little bit. They change like they’re a lot more like willing to evolve themselves and reinvent themselves. In ways that you don’t see with millennials and with boomers. That was my takeaway from, from the talk with her. So when you say like they’re translators, I can see that.

[00:10:55] I can definitely see that. It’s a very useful generation too.

[00:10:59] Ellen Scanlon: I’m at [00:11:00] the millennial end of it, a couple years off being a millennial, but I do feel very Gen X in the way that I grew up in peace, and I love to change and I love to kind of like be curious about things. So yeah, I think you, you, you pegged it for me.

[00:11:14] It’s a great

[00:11:14] Jasmine Bina: generation. Yeah.

[00:11:16] Ellen Scanlon: This kind of leads to this sandwich generation concept and cultural codes that are changing about how generations view themselves. And so for people who are navigating multiple identities, how do you see the best way forward for navigating, holding complex personality traits within you?

[00:11:39] Jasmine Bina: Yeah, so I am one of those people. I dealt with a dying father when I was literally healing from like c-section stitches with my third kid, and I went through that squeeze, man, it will almost destroy you. It’s an incredible, the really, the right word is burden. It’s, it is a burden. It’s an unfair [00:12:00] thing that we have to go through.

[00:12:02] Especially when the world has changed in in so many ways too, where like your internal world is not what was promised to you. Your external world is not what was promised to you. I’m gonna speak about this one, like from personal experience, but I’ve seen it also in the research that we’ve done for our clients, especially with women.

[00:12:19] People are just going through rebirths, they’re reinventing themselves and they’re not waiting for like. A life stage for that to happen. You know, something that we saw with millennials, and I bet if I’ve been back and looked at that research, and we did this a long time ago, but probably with, um, gen X two, is that when women would have babies, they would.

[00:12:39] Quit their jobs and start businesses like that, we’d see an uptick in that and they would reinvent themselves. They’d reinvent their style, right? They were raising their children differently. That was the first generation that didn’t go to their mom for advice. They went to their peers for advice. It’s a very kind of like self-directed for all of the uncertainty we deal with.

[00:12:56] We also have a great amount of feeling [00:13:00] self-possessed. And being able to kind of follow what we think is right for us. And I feel like I see a lot more like points of reinvention for people where they’re not waiting for like, you know, to buy the house or for whatever to happen to hit midlife. They do it when like they, they feel like it’s the right time to do it.

[00:13:20] And again, not to bring it back to Gwyneth Pal, but I have to because she has said she left such a mark on culture. She packaged wellness as an experience of rebirth. People are seeking these rebirth moments. They want to feel transformed. It’s a lot of reasons why, like people do. I’ve talked about travel a lot too.

[00:13:41] You know, we see, you know, the kinds of travel people are doing is like transformative travel. So star gazing trips, sleep retreats, romancing holidays where it’s not about romance, it’s about romanticizing the moment, uh, digital detoxes. People are going to feel like they’re a different person when they come back.

[00:13:59] And this [00:14:00] feeling of reinvention, rebirth, I think is. An incredible way of taking all that change and all of the cultural codes that are changing and taking control of it. Again, I know that I’ve started to see my life that way. You know, there’s this, all this increased discussion of like talking about life in seasons or eras, you know, or cores.

[00:14:19] These are ways of serializing your life and what you’re going through, so it gives it meaning when you go through this much change, the only way to not let it crush you is to give it a meaning. To give it a story. To give it a reason for happening, and a great way to do that is through the story of rebirth or reinvention or ascension or like realizing your potential.

[00:14:41] These are all themes that like we invent, we didn’t invent, but like these are themes that were always top of mind for Gen X and millennials, and to make that like an actual conscious part of coding your life, I think is a really wonderful way of dealing with all that change. I don’t know if that was like what your question was really getting at, but.

[00:14:58] If you’re asking like, you know, how do we actually [00:15:00] deal with this, like the myth making, like we need new mythologies and let’s see, in the absence of like cultural level mythologies, I don’t think we have those yet for the way the world is changing, but I do see people creating their own mythologies, and I think that’s a really effective way of dealing with it.

[00:15:15] Ellen Scanlon: Yes. All I can say is yes. That, that speaks to me in a very real way. And with something like that, I mean this is, this is your work. You know, you identify these things, you figure out what the signals are, and then you talk to culture moving brands about these trends. How do brands respond to, maybe not specifically that example, but to these big, insightful, nuanced ideas that have so much richness to them.

[00:15:46] How do they translate that into something that I guess maybe we wanna buy or we wanna do?

[00:15:52] Jasmine Bina: Well, it depends on the brands. Like I said, we work with brands that need to move the needle of culture. So these are brands that are already creating worlds. They’re already creating immersive experiences. [00:16:00] They’re already creating like brand universes, so they have a lot more latitude and like surface area to play with these stories.

[00:16:05] Like they don’t, it doesn’t boil down to a feature in the product. It certainly can. We do a lot of innovation work too, that’s based on the brand strategies, but. It’s really about figuring out where you want to guide the discussion so that you know you’re bending the will of the market, like I likes to say, so that you know, your brand is kind of on the critical path and your competitors have fallen off.

[00:16:24] Apple did this when Apple like. Created this mythology around technology. You know, all of us being Seth Godin talks about this, you know, turning us into technology, taste makers, making technology an expression of your rebellious individual identity for a generation that was craving those kinds of cultural status markers.

[00:16:44] You know, that’s the way we were defining status back then. But that wasn’t on the surface of culture. That was something that was underneath, and they brought that to the surface. And then when you do that, you win outsized rewards in the market when you can bring to the forefront something that our people are already [00:17:00] craving or are primed for, but they don’t have the space or the settings to actually experience something like that.

[00:17:08] And of course, we saw how, you know, it benefited them tremendously, but these topics interestingly, just touch everybody. You talk about money, it touches every brand. You talk about status, that touches every brand. You talk about identity that touches every brand, gender, every brand. So you could say like, brands don’t need to concern themselves with these things, but you can also make the argument that like every brand really does need to concern themselves with these things.

[00:17:31] Also, it’s just a much more sustainable strategy. Again, some brands need to be very short term. You’re TikTok brands. Yeah. Focus on like the next trend for the next three weeks, but. You can either focus on all these little trends that are changing all the time. These like little like ephemeral trends. But that’s a very hard game to play.

[00:17:49] The cultural trends that are underneath all that, that stuff takes much longer to change people’s ideologies around money. That stuff, if you’re paying attention to the tremors, that kind of stuff announces [00:18:00] its arrival way in advance. But it’s not easy to see. You really have to dig until you find the signals, and then being willing to kind of like place a bet on it.

[00:18:08] And it’s just a, it’s a longer game. It takes more resources, but it’s more effective in the long run if that’s the kind of brand you’re building.

[00:18:16] Ellen Scanlon: This leads me to thinking about your work requiring both analytical thinking and then sort of intuitive pattern recognition. So how do you balance data with imagination in your cultural forecasting?

[00:18:30] Jasmine Bina: They are very, very related. So the thing about seeing where things are headed, like, you know, AI being introduced into our culture or any new technology is that when something new happens, it just creates like this. Huge branching of possibilities ahead of us. Like we could go in so many different directions from here.

[00:18:52] What culture will tell you is which subset of those directions are the most likely to happen, and then you can start forecasting, okay, if we go down [00:19:00] that that branch. What might happen. And that’s where the imagination that needs to come in. And I learned this from Jane McGonigal, an incredible thinker who I had the privilege of interviewing recently.

[00:19:11] And she has a great book called Imaginable. And I remember reading that book and getting so frustrated ’cause it was just a bunch of exercises and I’m like, ah, stop. I don’t need exercise. I just tell me how to do it. And then you come to realize that. Creativity and imagination and literally creating the future.

[00:19:27] It’s not like a, um, a framework. It is really a muscle. The only way to get good at being creative is to practice it. And so she has this exercise that she opens her book with, which is, and I’m still stuck at this, is imagine waking up in 10 years. Can you describe where you are? Can you describe it in detail?

[00:19:45] Can you describe what you see, what you smell, who you’re with, what the light is like? That is so hard, and there’s no framework for that. You just have to get good at being creative because oftentimes the future that comes to fruition is not the one that you would expect. It’s [00:20:00] very easy just to predict the next bad thing that’s gonna happen.

[00:20:02] Super easy. But if you look at the macro, that’s never, the long trajectory of the history is never like the next obvious bad thing. It’s always something unexpected that makes perfect sense in hindsight, but not sense in foresight. And that’s where creativity comes in. You have to get good at imagining things that are hard to imagine because that’s usually the way, the direction that the future takes.

[00:20:26] And that means leaning into the discomfort of. Just pretending how things would be different if it was like this. You just have to practice that. It’s not easy, and I always ask myself like Ev, every month, like it just pops into my head. Can I describe waking up 10 years from now? And it’s hard, but the more comfortable you get with that, the better you are just imagining futures based on the information you have.

[00:20:50] Ellen Scanlon: Some of the best advice I got over the past few years was get comfortable being uncomfortable. Yeah. And I say it to myself all the time because [00:21:00] it is, every time, you know, you run into what feels like a really big obstacle. If you frame it as. You are uncomfortable with this because it’s new or because you’re scared or whatever.

[00:21:10] Like discomfort is just so much easier to play with Yeah. Than whatever else you might be calling it. And, and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is something that I’m really trying to have fun with, which has been uncomfortable.

[00:21:25] Jasmine Bina: That’s a great perspective by the way. And to like, you know, see it, identify it, and then like, you know, find a way to be grateful for it and like actually play with it, I think is super smart.

[00:21:36] Ellen Scanlon: Thank you. All right, so unique practices that are yours that help you do this better, faster, get better. Like do you have any sort of personal things that have blossomed out of this work that really, like you get that feeling in your body, you get that tingle, you’re like, I know this. I know this is coming.

[00:21:56] Jasmine Bina: The thing is, it’s not like intuition comes from nowhere. Intuition really [00:22:00] is just like a deeply embedded wisdom that you don’t necessarily understand how it works, but it’s all informed by your experiences. So I just work on collecting experiences. I talk to a lot of people. Make sure your community is wide.

[00:22:15] That’s what I’ve done. I talk all day to people and I just learn from what they have to say. I come to feel and have like an embodied sense of like, people like this think like this, and people from this walk of life, you know, they interpret things this way. You also have to kind of learn to let go of your biases.

[00:22:32] If you really wanna be a good listener, you have to listen with clear ears and biases. Just kind of, I think, muffle your ears a little bit so you don’t hear what people are necessarily saying, and then kind of learning to deconstruct yourself. I, I wrote about this recently. The more I learn, the more I feel like I don’t really, I think everybody goes through this where like you think like, how can I create the future when like there’s so many different concurrent truths right now.

[00:22:56] I think that you go through that, it’s a bit of an ego death, but eventually from that [00:23:00] you start to build the future that you think would be best for the most people. But going through that, knowing it’s part of the process and it can. It can be a long process. I feel like I’ve been going through that for many years.

[00:23:11] I think sometimes people get irritated by my writing because they’re like, well, what’s your opinion? And I’m just kind of presenting the observations, but they want to know what I think of it. It’s important not to get stuck in observation mode and you have to move out of that. It can be very comfortable just to kind of like be super accepting and you know, make connections, but not like make any kind of decree or have any opinion on like, well I think this is the future I think we should be building together.

[00:23:35] You know, don’t get trapped in that. These are the kinds of things that I, I’ve kind of, I still work on them. You know, I still, I, I would tell anybody, like, work really hard on exposing yourself to ideas that you, that make you feel physically uncomfortable, you know, seek the discomfort. I, I do that. I’ve encountered those ideas all the time, and I still just kind of like let them be and let them wash over me.

[00:23:56] It’s a constant practice, but those are the habits I have developed that have helped me with [00:24:00] developing intuition.

[00:24:01] Ellen Scanlon: Thank you. And this is a broad question and I framed it as women, but I think people is probably a better way to talk about it. You know, for people who wanna be part of shaping culture, not just following it, is there a habit or a mindset shift that will help to facilitate that?

[00:24:22] Jasmine Bina: I think you have to have a little bit of a fearlessness. I think people that hesitate have a fear. I can speak from personal experience. You have to be willing to like create a bit of controversy. I’ve been writing more controversial things lately. I don’t think they’re controversial, but I know like they, some people wouldn’t agree with my takes on things and I’ve just been forcing myself to put it out there and you develop it with thick skin pretty quickly.

[00:24:46] And that’s, I think. Probably the majority of what holds people back from, you know, switching modes between like. Observing and creating. I think that’s the only advice that really [00:25:00] matters because if you spent a night enough time observing, you’re coming from like a good, well informed, I think, sincere perspective.

[00:25:08] So I don’t think there’s anything wanting there. I think it’s then just having the guts to be honest about it and just put it out there and start developing it. And a lot of times that means being able to face criticism or naysayers or failing in public, stuff like that.

[00:25:22] Ellen Scanlon: Yeah. I am an unexpected cannabis advocate.

[00:25:27] I started my career on Wall Street. I have an MBA. I worked in financial services and investments for a long time, and when I started this business six years ago, it just seemed so clear to me that cannabis was going to be a positive thing for women, for women’s health and, and that it was just gonna become this.

[00:25:44] Alternative. That was interesting. And so I, I saw a business opportunity. I saw a way to make an impact, and I really have been interested by people’s response to me being this advocate. I’m a low dose consumer. It’s [00:26:00] something that I am more excited about. Putting out into the world than I am using myself.

[00:26:05] So it’s just been a really interesting road to be on and I think it has required me to have a sense of, of fearlessness, but I wonder if there are just some people who aren’t. Bothered by that, who kind of find meaning in helping. I have endometriosis, and the first podcast I was ever on was talking about my period cramps and endometriosis.

[00:26:27] And that was not what I thought was gonna be my first podcast, but it’s like, all right, if somebody hears it and helps, then they won’t have four years of infertility like I did. And I just don’t care that much. Yeah. And so fearlessness mixed with sort of people are gonna think what they think. Yeah. Like just.

[00:26:44] Try and and push it out has, has been helping me, but I’ve had to gain momentum with it. Yeah. Because it’s one of those things that’s been uncomfortable.

[00:26:52] Jasmine Bina: Yeah. You have to give yourself time and be forgiving with yourself. Like, it’s like a, I hate when people say this, but it’s truly a process. It ebbs and [00:27:00] flows, but you know, as long as you’re generally moving forward and kind of going back to the well of like, why you’re doing this in the first place, there’s just no reason why you wouldn’t be moving forward anyways in creating the kinda impact that you wanna create.

[00:27:12] Ellen Scanlon: Last question. What is something that you’ve been enjoying lately, book, movie, trip, or experience that you would recommend?

[00:27:20] Jasmine Bina: So lately we’ve been doing research on play for our community. So play has been top of mind for me ’cause I’ve always known that I am not good at play. And one of our members mentioned, oh that’s, he just mentioned it.

[00:27:30] Peter Switzer, he just mentioned it like casually in, in the chat. He is like, oh, probably because you were, you were conditioned to compete at a young age. And I was like. Yeah. Oh my God. It blew my mind open. But now with three kids and a husband who’s very play oriented, it’s been really jarring to see how I’ve like turned into a block of concrete.

[00:27:51] Like I just don’t know how to like. Be squishy and fun and play and not care about the rules and let things get messy. Oh, it’s been very humbling. [00:28:00] So I’m just like trying to push myself to play more. So much to my husband’s pleasure. I’ve agreed to start watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy and like the whatever, the prequel and all that stuff.

[00:28:11] And, ’cause there’s a, you know, fantasy especially is like, but fantasy has been an easy entree for me into. And, um, he’s building a d and d universe and board for our kids right now. So I’m forcing myself to like, get involved in that and I’m gonna be playing that and I’ve been helping like be doing the 3D prints and painting and all that stuff for like the setup.

[00:28:32] So that’s been top of mind for me is like how to play more. And I’ve been just more in the world of fantasy. I started reading fiction recently again. I never used to read fiction. We have a little romantic club with a couple of, uh, my friends. That romantic is very easy to get into, super fun. And we went on like a little romantic trip where we just kind of like played with the idea of like, you know, treating ourselves.

[00:28:57] I just, doing stuff like that has been [00:29:00] a bit freeing. I still think I have a lot of ways to go before I play, like my husband does, but that’s the stuff that I’ve been enjoying lately and kind of getting into.

[00:29:10] Ellen Scanlon: I’ve been doing the same thing. I have such a hard time with play. I have an extremely playful child and I, I did the same thing.

[00:29:17] I started reading fantasy books, which I’ve never read. I read the Bright Sword about King Arthur, and I’m trying to just. Play. So when I, when I read your post about that, I was like, this is very resonant for me right now. And it’s hard. It is hard for me to play. I know it sounds silly for people who are playful, but I am not.

[00:29:38] Jasmine Bina: It does sound silly. I know. Yeah. I’m the same way. This was such a great wide ranging conversation. I would just say if, if this kind of cultural discussion interests people, it’s literally all we do at Exposure Therapy and it’s a very, very fun group. So if I could just plug myself, you know, exposure therapy.com.

[00:29:55] If, if you wanna join a group of people who like literally do this in a very [00:30:00] serious, but very fun and deeply emotionally soulful, satisfying way, uh, where you’ll find your community of people, I would invite you to come join us.

[00:30:11] Ellen Scanlon: Thank you for listening to How to Do the Pot. If these conversations sparked something for you, especially if you’re thinking about how to connect with women around health, identity, or other stigmatized topics, I help brands and media tell stories that shift perception and resonate with overlooked audiences.

[00:30:29] Please reach out to me on LinkedIn or on Substack. I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

[00:30:41] 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 [00:31:00] to our producer Nick Patri.

[00:31:02] I’m Ellen Scanlan, and stay tuned for more of how to Do the pot.