Our global membership and alumni lead some of the most interesting, impactful and creative companies in the world. Brand strategists, creative directors, founders, marketing leaders, writers, artists, researchers — this is a community of people who build at the bleeding edge of culture.
Current and past members have joined from organizations like these. Affiliations for identification only.
Culture is leverage. If your work depends on seeing what’s coming, you shouldn’t have to look for it alone. Part handpicked community, part think tank, every month we explore a new corner of culture and the latest playbooks for building world class businesses and brands.
Monthly 50-plus-slide research drops and presentations: cultural forecasts, sensemaking frameworks, unexpected signals and emerging opportunities. These are decks you come back to all year long.
Every month we bring in people at the frontier of their field for intimate roundtables, workshops and presentations that go deeper than anything you’d find online.
A lively Slack community with over 20 channels, from culture and technology to business and memes, where we react to and unpack the world in real time.
Themed dinners in LA and NYC every quarter, designed to skip the small talk and build deep relationships. Think pyjama party, midnight sound bath on the summer solstice, and s’mores around a campfire.
Thoughtful introductions to exactly the kinds of people you’re looking for, based on your onboarding interview. There’s also regular virtual programming, IRL meetups and a detailed member directory, so you’ll never miss a chance to connect.
A handful of hours each month reserved for one-on-ones with the Concept Bureau team. Bring a specific strategy or brand challenge and leave with a path forward.
Nearly three years of research drops, recorded presentations, interviews and workshops, from a massive array of perspectives and topics. Whatever problem you’re working on, something in here will unlock it.
“Exposure Therapy is incredible, just in the way the team is freely sharing ideas and thoughts, and the power that gives people to go and build brands.”
say it has pushed the boundaries of their thinking
call it their #1 resource for culture and strategy inspiration
say it has made them meaningfully better at what they do
“This is true community. Knowledge exchange. A place where you lean in, get support and give to others.”
We spent a decade reading culture for brands and kept meeting the same problem: brilliant people doing the hardest thinking alone.
“It continues to surprise me the way this community delivers on everything it promises and more.”
The biggest opportunities sit at the edge of culture. Each month we explore a new topic, with original cultural research and deep dives with insiders that give you insights and playbooks you never knew you needed. This is an information diet you won’t find anywhere else.
The existential doors have been blown wide open. A meaning crisis is tearing society apart and nobody can agree on where it came from or what to do about it. And it’s not like the emergence of AI is going to make it any better (or will it?). In moments of meaning crisis, culture is malleable. Old institutions lose trust, new communities form, and brands step into unexpected roles.
We’ll examine what meaning is, how the systems of meaning have changed, and why it matters. You’ll learn how leaders, brands, and creators can offer their audiences meaning instead of just messaging.
Great futurists teach us that the easy thing to do is take a problem, extrapolate into the future, and declare disaster… but that’s not how the future usually unfolds. It’s much harder to project the nuanced, optimistic future that usually wins outsized returns. Optimism may seem like, but it’s truly a discipline—the ability to scan the horizon, see possibility amid uncertainty, and articulate a future people want to follow.
This month is about building that muscle together. Through exercises, workshops and provocations, we’ll learn how optimism becomes a strategic advantage.
Celebration and ritual have always gone hand-in-hand. Ritual has mostly been lost in collective culture, and there’s a palpable sense we’re celebrating less, or at least differently. We’ll analyze how rituals and celebrations are evolving, and where we most need them but no longer have them.
From birthdays to brand launches, holidays to fandom meetups, rituals shape how we connect and celebrations anchor what matters. This month we’ll dive deep into designing modern rituals for yourself, your community, and your brand.
One person with a good stack and clear perspective will outship a department of twelve. We’ll explore how to change your mindset for real advantage using a spectrum of tools, ideologies, and approaches.
You can’t just bolt AI onto a job and think you’re ahead. The real work is upstream in systematizing, breaking problems apart, delegating, and seeing yourself as the most valuable part of a much larger process. This month is about how to manage your energy, not just your time, and how to compound your judgment instead of substituting it. You’ll train yourself in a different mindset for approaching work and rethinking the value you provide.
Every brand has been handed a worldbuilding mandate, but a world is not a moodboard. You have to know how to build it properly, because when everything collapses into story, the world you construct becomes the foundation everything else stands on.
A world is rules, canon, contradiction, energy and evolution. It sets the values, organizes everything into one coherent context, and says “people like us do things like this” — which is the prerequisite for any real brand mythology. We’ll get into how belief systems are made and why people are hungry for far more depth than brands are currently offering them.
People pay in money, time, effort, access and attention. Every one of those is a price, and every price sends a signal. This month is about learning to read those signals, in order to predict where a market is heading and price yourself without leaving money on the table.
We’ll get into the new premiums people are willing to pay and what they reveal about status and value, now that class is measured in time, health, knowledge and access just as much as money. We’ll also cover the irrational side: why we’re so strange about price, and what that exposes about how we make every other decision. It’s part Economics 201, part hidden craft.
Luck is a skill, and approached the right way it produces something close to magic. This month is about engineering your own, so improbable outcomes start finding you instead of everybody else.
We’ll cover the habits behind it, like manufacturing surface area, running cheap bets, keeping strange company, creating collisions, and getting into the right room before it’s a room. There’s real science under all of it, including the neuroscience of manifestation and how the subconscious keeps solving problems you’ve stopped consciously working on. And because you live the life you focus on, we’ll look at the biggest bet available to anyone: reinventing yourself.
Anyone building community is in the business of hospitality, but what it means to be a real host is changing. You must be a master of intimacy, creating spaces with real thresholds that make people vulnerable to one another. Most importantly, they must feel changed.
That kind of transformation is very hard work and as more of life shifts into irl, and greater parts of the economy center on hosted experiences, a new playbook is being written. We’ll go deep into the art and science of placemaking, the practice of vulnerability and risk in order to engage, and the kinds of hosts and experiences people will be yearning for in the next 1-2 years.
What are the emerging fantasies of our time? This month we read fiction, sci-fi, horror and games as forecast data, in order to hear what people want before they’re able to say it out loud.
Everyone dreams of escape, and those escape fantasies are a map of human aspiration. What do people really want from themselves and each other? What story do people want to believe in, and are they actually willing to make it a reality? Our fantasies change when the authors do, and right now those authors are changing the fantasy of collective action in important ways.
Taste isn’t really about taste, it’s downstream of perspective. We’ll be learning how to see things others can’t, in order to attract an audience of true believers that engages more deeply.
When a machine can summarize anything and everyone works on the same facts, information is no longer an asset. What’s valuable instead is interpretation: looking at the same inputs and seeing something they can’t see. We’ll explore everything, from aesthetics and beauty to desire and agency, in order to resist the mean. Originality has never been more valuable.
Most people flinch at the fringe: the strange, taboo, unrecognizable, abnormal and paranormal, goosebump-inducing, terrifyingly intoxicating, repulsing yet attracting. This month we develop a taste for it instead.
The edges of culture are where value lives because by the time something arrives in the mainstream, it’s already lost its value - and that halflife keeps getting shorter. It’s rewritten the economics of brand toward increasingly favoring the small and the strange. We’ll explore where weirdness incubates, how to spot it early, and how to locate the Goldilocks Zone that separates signal from noise.
What future are we actually preparing ourselves for, and what kind of education prepares our children for it? You’ll be auditing your own relationship with the future, so you can find the blindspots in what you were taught and get ahead of what’s becoming valuable instead.
There are dozens of new education experiments running right now and they’re a preview of where learning is headed. We’ll get into the new curriculum and the skills nobody is teaching yet, plus the systems of circumvention that appear whenever old institutions can’t adapt. Access to all of it is uneven, which makes this a question of whose future, and of the bets parents are placing on their behalf.
Fourth turnings, Kondratiev waves, decadence theory — there are many competing instruments for the same question. Our perspective on time has shifted more in the last 50 years than in all of history before it, and it’s changed how we see both legacy and purpose.
Every generation is certain it’s living in the final act, and every generation is wrong. We’ll learn how to read the shape of an era, so you can tell a genuine turning point from passing noise. Whether we read time on the human scale, generational scale, or civilizational scale, or whether we see it as linear, cyclical, or spiral, each one gives us a unique insight that can’t be seen through any other lens.
A higher plane awaits us all. Changing your consciousness doesn’t require a substance anymore, but if you do want a substance, there’s also a new slate of psychedelics available to you. There are many paths all reaching for the same destination.
What used to be a niche discussion is starting to overlay every category and domain. This month is about all of the ways culture is exploring altered states of thinking and being, and how that’s changing our behaviors and expectations. It touches not just spirituality and religious belief systems, but also our bodies and interpersonal relationships. Higher consciousness is the new wellness.
Every decision you’ll ever make will rest on imperfect information, but the decision still needs to be made. Good decision making is crucial so you can act before the window closes.
We’ll get into probabilistic thinking and applied game theory, using mathematics and odds to tilt real problems in your favor. Learn how to actually (scientifically) train your intuition, which matters more now that there’s always a machine in the room with a confident opinion. Most importantly, how to disagree and commit, so you can bring along other stakeholders and make decisions fast.
AI is rapidly democratizing information, putting strategists at risk of working with the same inputs as everyone else. When the playing field of knowledge is level, the advantage belongs to those who can think beyond the obvious. Second-order thinking is poised to become more important than ever.
We’ll study how second-order thinkers anticipate unintended consequences, imagine ripple effects, and train themselves to spot patterns others miss. This month is a crash course in pushing past surface truths to uncover novel, actionable insights.
Work is in free fall. The 9-to-5 is eroding, side hustles are mainstream, AI is rewriting job descriptions, and younger generations are rethinking the entire relationship between work and meaning. Is work about survival, self-expression, or status?
It’s time to understand what happens when traditional career ladders collapse and what replaces them. From creative industries to corporate giants, the question isn’t just how we’ll work but why we’ll work at all. We’ll explore the answer with a slate of provocative guest speakers and presenters thinking beyond the obvious.
Family and home are the most ancient units of meaning, yet both are being radically redefined. We’re seeing a renaissance of parenting ideologies play out alongside a home that is quickly evolving in its design and function. Industries like real estate, entertainment, and consumer goods are rewriting the scripts for how we gather, nurture, and protect.
For strategists and brands, understanding these shifts means understanding the deepest parts of human life, because no matter how much the world changes, everyone is still searching for family and home.
We romanticize starting, but building is the hard part. This month is about how ideas become structures, how vision becomes infrastructure, and how to create something real when the tools and rules keep changing. The way you choose to build reflects what you value and what risks you’re willing to take. We’ll study emerging models across industries to see how raw ideas become lasting structures.
The world is weirder and more open, and the resources needed to create something net new have never been more accessible. So if you have an idea for a business, a side hustle, or a work project that you’re stalled on, this will be your month.
One of the best ways to understand culture is to see how it directs our aspirations. Who do we want to be now? Who will we allow others to become? We’ll chart the new cultural archetypes pulling us into the future and unpack why they’re so resonant mythologically. Beneath every trending figure like The Cowboy or The Witch lies a mountain of brand opportunity.
Each archetype is a map of desire, showing us what people are truly longing for. Learn how to recognize these shifts before they peak and how to channel them into meaning, not just marketing.
Humans long to “run headlong into the question mark.” Awe has existed since the beginning of time, but modern life has largely rooted it out, leaving us few opportunities to “grovel at the feet of the Gods.” This month we’ll explore the things that expand us—art, nature, beauty, the unexplainable—and how awe is the most underutilized tool in a brand’s arsenal.
In an age of endless content, true awe cuts through the noise like nothing else. Brands that can reintroduce awe into everyday life hold disproportionate influence. We’ll uncover how people, communities, and brands can create moments of the sublime that last.
Power permeates everything, from our biggest societal conversations to our most innocuous interactions. This has always been true, but we’re especially aware of it now. It’s no longer just top-down, but lateral, decentralized, and networked. This month we’ll dissect how power is shifting in politics, media, and business.
We’ve become adept at deconstructing power, but what kind of structures do we actually want to build? We’ll examine how brands can shape the systems we need and what resistance and progress look like in the new power paradigm.
Narrative today is a double-edged sword. We live in an age where reality is simply the story that wins. Everyone knows narrative shapes what we see, think, and do, but few can craft one that truly moves through people and changes behavior.
We’ll break down the fundamentals of building narratives that spread from person to person and reshape big cultural ideas. With guidance from guest storytellers and narrative leaders across media and business, we’ll uncover the mechanics of stories that alter the course of culture.
Last year we analyzed the body. This year we’ll analyze what it means to be embodied. How are our primal urges manifesting themselves in culture? And in what new, creative ways are we repressing and denying them?
These urges show up everywhere, from rage rituals in protest to the fetishization of survivalism, the obsession with food and supplementation, or digital spaces where we roleplay instincts. Brands in every category are negotiating with these undercurrents, and we’ll uncover the opportunities hidden in our unmet, primal urges.
We’re moving from an intelligence-based economy to a creativity-based one, and that requires a dramatic shift in how we show up in the world. Our work and our personal lives will demand that we take bigger creative risks if we want to contribute to society.
We’ll be kicking off the year by learning how to be the kind of creative that bends reality. We’ll experience what it means to be creative in the new economy, and how to be vulnerable enough to make something honest and provocative.
Our bodies are the lens through which we experience the world. How we relate to our physical selves - the new permissions gained and boundaries being broken - can tell us a lot about what we value and how we will behave in the future. Understanding how we inhabit our flesh and blood is especially crucial as the world becomes more digitized.
Our bodies are both worshiped and despised. We desperately want to connect with our bodies but also transcend them. Body culture is our central struggle, and understanding it can unlock a world of insight.
Everything is a negotiation. Marketing, sales, leadership, management and nearly any other endeavor rests on your ability to make people see things the way you do. Changing someone’s mind is often the biggest barrier to success.
It requires understanding both the science and the psychology behind decision making. We’ll break down the anatomy of persuasion, the strategic elements of negotiation, and the emotional levers that can unlock change.
In a world increasingly defined by moralization and ethical dilemmas, the frameworks we use to navigate our choices are more consequential than ever. Our values shape everything—from the products we buy to the brands we align with—and understanding the constellation of new moral frameworks that are emerging in society will help us understand ourselves, our markets and our users.
We’ll uncover how new perspectives are reshaping our collective sense of right and wrong, influencing every category of culture and business. Stay ahead of cultural shifts and build strategies that resonate in a morally charged world.
What does it take to communicate and connect effectively in today’s attention economy? We’ll explore both the art and science of powerful writing for work, creation, relationship, and all facets of life.
This month is about going beyond the obvious as we dive into unconventional strategies and techniques that push the boundaries of what effective writing looks like and explore the extremes of language. It’s time to push your writing skills further than they’ve ever gone before.
Adults are reclaiming play and bringing it back into the domain of adulthood. As we redefine how we spend unproductive time, a new relationship with leisure, hobbies, and even travel is emerging. This cultural shift is reshaping how we measure the value of our time and how we connect with others.
We’ll explore how this revival of play is influencing business, culture, and personal fulfillment. By understanding the impact of infinite play, strategists and leaders can tap into new opportunities to engage audiences and rethink our personal value systems.
You can’t be what you’re meant to be without a hefty dose of rejection and resilience. Time to finally accept it. We’ll explore and practice ways to love the rejection and become more resilient people because of it.
We’ll explore practical techniques to build resilience, reframe failure, and thrive despite setbacks. Expert speakers and hands-on exercises will equip you to get comfortable with rejection and use it as a productive force, no matter how much you might hate it.
Who we trust and why we trust them has changed. Meanwhile brands, leaders, and individuals are all grappling with how to build meaningful credibility in this environment. How do we build trust when we don’t know who or what to believe, and optimism about the future is running low?
We’ll unpack the changing landscape of trust and find the levers that matter to building credibility in the age of crumbling rules. We’ll also learn about how our trust issues are shaping culture and what is likely to come after our current era of disbelief.
Understanding people is the key to unlocking better decisions. Whether you’re building a brand, leading a team, or simply trying to live a more fulfilling life, the ability to truly see and understand others is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.
This month, we’ll break down practical tools and techniques for gaining deep insights into human behavior. From improving user research to forging better personal relationships, you’ll learn how to connect quickly to make others feel seen, and generate insights that drive real value—both in business and in life.
The rituals and narratives that once helped us make sense of death and grief are fading, leaving a vacuum in how we find meaning. Understanding how people navigate loss offers a powerful look into the broader shifts in what we hold sacred, and societal structure as a whole.
This month, let’s really get into the many losses we have experienced both collectively and personally. We’ll learn how the meaning of death is changing, how the practices of our grief are evolving, and the new rituals making pageantry out of loss.
Humor is more than just entertainment—it’s the buildup and release of tension that draws people in, builds charisma, and enhances storytelling. Mastering humor can elevate your communication and make for a better life, both personally and professionally.
We’ll dive into how humor can unlock difficult topics and create disarming connections. You’ll learn practical techniques to harness humor as a tool for influence, storytelling, and connection, helping you stand out in today’s content-driven world.
Food has reached new heights. It’s a statement of values and, for many, a near-spiritual experience. As food culture pushes to new extremes, from hyper-sustainability to the rise of meal-based rituals, what we put into our bodies is becoming a form of personal expression.
We’ll explore the shifting norms around food and how dining is redefining community. Our speakers and special guests will help us understand the future of food and how brands can tap into this deeply emotional and personal space.
Positioning is an incredibly powerful tool that few brands do really well. It requires a deep understanding of market forces and how far a consumer audience can be pulled into the future. Storytelling is the vehicle through which positioning is communicated.
We’ll explore a wealth of thinking, research and best practices in both positioning and storytelling, along with guests who will help us understand the levers that make positioning and storytelling as effective as possible.
Has wealth finally decoupled from money or are we just fooling ourselves? The things that make us feel rich are far more varied than they’ve ever been. From social wealth, time wealth, to “health is wealth” and conspicuous commitment, these modern riches have us feeling something different than money in the bank.
How can strategists and brands engender feelings of new wealth in people? What does money even mean anymore? We all want to be rich, but with what?
We’re unlocking your superpower. Many of us only do a fraction of what is possible with our minds, but high-level strategic thinking demands we employ all kinds of cognitive abilities at once.
It’s a constant practice, and we’re sharing our most effective methodologies with you along with guest speakers and experts that will cover first principles, mental training exercises, worldbuilding, finding levers in the system, and the most powerful mental models.
From longevity and biohacking to old standards like beauty and entrepreneurship, the ideas of age and aging have begun to expand to hold a lot more culture and ideology than before. “Youth” is no longer tethered to the “young”.
Get ready to explore the cultural and branding applications of youth through the generations while also bringing a youthful mindset to your own life. We’ll have great guest speakers, and our own team dive deep into helping you both understand and live youth itself.
What does it take to be the top 1% of AI thinkers and doers in your work? If you feel you’ve plateaued when it comes to using AI in your day-to-day, this month is dedicated to teaching you the new methodologies and approaches to gain a significant advantage.
We’ll also approach the broad topic of AI from a cultural standpoint, to understand how it will impact culture, business and the future of brands.
Community is becoming the lens through which all of brand is seen through. Meanwhile, strong tie communities that create deep social connections between members are becoming the dominant threads of our social fabric. In this new era of increased intimacy, what we value and what we create are moving in a markedly new direction.
We’ll explore how to build these new communities, the new rules they follow, and how they will impact the brand landscape over the next few years.
Love, sex, relationships, dating, marriage, friendship. Matters of the heart are a window into the soul of a culture, and through this window we see a lot of new aspirations being measured with old measuring sticks.
As Stephen Chbosky said, “We accept the love we think we deserve”, so what does society think it deserves now? How can brands in all categories center themes of love and connection in a way that moves people to act?
Predicting the future is a highly creative act that very few people are trained in. It requires reaching a bar of imagination that is so high, strategists often find it an uncomfortable way of thinking. But not members of Exposure Therapy (at least not after this month).
In addition to our incredible speakers and experts, we’ll be leaning hard into ‘play’. Be ready to play with reality in order to make it new, retrain your mind to see the future, and apply it to your strategies.
We’re colliding and drifting apart in new ways, as the physical and digital spaces of our lives rapidly evolve. Nearly every brand in every category is affected by how and where we’re gathering, why and when we’re staying home, and what personal space even means anymore.
Our special spaces are becoming more polarized, more customized, and far more interpersonal. Space is the last bastion of control. Brands that create the physical/ digital spaces that hold us will probably be the ones that win.
The future of B2C and B2B is personal brands, but building a personal brand is very different than building a business brand.
We’ve built a lot of personal brands and will share our tools and exercises with you. We’ll also bring in experts who will cover personal branding from different perspectives including PR, thought leadership and social media. Use this month to not only develop personal brands for your company, but more importantly, a personal brand for yourself.
Everything is collapsing into entertainment. There is no category that remains untouched by gamification, social media, VR/ AR or content. The nature of entertainment is becoming the nature of business.
We’ll explore best-in-category examples of entertainment as brand strategy, develop the rules of engagement for brands in any industry that want to tap into this narrative, and predict where the culture of entertainment + business will be in 3-5 years.
“It’s one of the best investments I’ve made in myself, professionally and personally… It’s good for business, but it’s best for being a better, more thoughtful human. Which, yes, happens to be good for business.”
Four times a year we gather for themed dinners in LA and NYC. Relationships can be maintained online, but they’re forged in person. These gatherings are intentionally designed to cut the small talk and connect more deeply with your whole self at the table, or fire pit… Our community members are handpicked, and you’ll feel it here.
“This group makes my brain burst with inspiration.”
“Just two months into Exposure Therapy, I feel like my third eye has fully opened.”
The quality of your work is built on the quality of your insights. That’s why every month we bring in two of the most interesting perspectives to challenge your thinking, reveal new ways of seeing the world, and offer new playbooks for leading your field. These are insights and discussions you can’t get access to anywhere else.
Intellectual isolation is the biggest problem for people like us, exploring the frontiers of culture is lonely work. But being part of a community like this is so much more than a source of inspiration and a sounding board that can push back. Belonging is incredibly rewarding: our members build lifelong friendships, start book clubs, take vacations together, launch businesses together, and collaborate on world class projects.
“People always ask me how I function as a solopreneur and I will always say, find your people. And Exposure Therapy is my people.”
“This group is different. They go deep and explore topics that are profoundly relevant today and are having — and will have — significant impact on the world we live in.”
The quality of your work is built on the quality of your thinking, and in an age when AI is flattening everyone’s thought, this community is dedicated to sharpening our ideas, going deeper in our insights, and expanding our points of view.
The insights, frameworks and mental models we share and discuss are designed to level up your work, give you a powerful radar for everything that’s happening in culture, and ultimately unlock real leverage for your business and career.
This is not your typical paid community. Most are glorified group chats, while Exposure Therapy is a highly programmed space that’s constantly putting out original research drops, finding unexpected experts with points of view you didn’t know you needed, and creating new opportunities to connect our people more deeply — in person at our themed dinners, micro meetups around the world and other excursions, and online with handpicked introductions, member led think tanks, insight sharing sessions, and much, much more.
Our promise to our members: if you come here open-minded and open-hearted, you’ll be expanded, challenged and changed — and you’ll do it among your people.
get insights and trends here they wouldn't see anywhere else
Exposure Therapy started as the thing we wished existed: a place where people could explore the edges of culture together, and have conversations they couldn’t have anywhere else.
Today it’s a global community of people whose work, business and career depend on seeing what’s coming and building for it. If that’s you, you’ve found your people.
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