About this podcast
Analyzing Trends is written by Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot, co-founders of scenarioDNA, a cultural research and intelligence consultancy. Drawing on more than three decades of global fieldwork, semiotics, cultural mapping, futures analysis, and AI-assisted research, they examine how social change takes form through language, media, consumer behavior, technology, brands, and institutions. Their essays identify the cultural systems producing trends, explain how meanings change across markets and communities, and translate those findings into implications for strategy, innovation, policy, and design. Stock and Tupot are the authors of Story Systems and Cultural Research: A Mixed-Methods Guide to Forecasting Social Change.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 94 episodes
- Foresight Hallucinations · 8 min · Season 5 Episode 8This fall, two randomized trials of AI tutors pointed in opposite directions. Maryland undergraduates who were offered a tutor in their course finished with lower grades, while…
- The Infinite Table · 8 min · Season 5 Episode 7Cultural research has more signal than structure, and the loudest signal usually sets the story. Knolling, the studio habit of squaring every tool on one surface so each can be…
- Super is the New Smart · 4 min · Season 5 Episode 6Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that artificial intelligence would now be called super intelligence, saying the word artificial makes AI sound fake. The word artificial…
- The Word Before The Trend · 6 min · Season 5 Episode 5Cultural change shows up in the words people use long before it shows up in sales figures or policy. People describe a new experience to each other, try out phrases, and argue…
- The Signal Machine is Not the Thinking Machine · 11 min · Season 5 Episode 3Lately it feels like every organization has built a bigger pair of binoculars. There are dashboards for everything, weekly drops of “emerging signals,” and now AI sitting on top…
- The Invasion Economy · 8 min · Season 5 Episode 4When Prada draped the Chelsea Hotel in silver and cleared Katz’s tables for a dance floor this June, the filmmaker it hired to design the takeover described the project as…
- Story Systems in the Age of Creator Cinema · 8 min · Season 5 Episode 2Hollywood still talks about “discoveries,” even as the hard work now happens in public, long before anyone calls it a film. Worlds are tested in comment sections, passed around…
- When Nostalgia Becomes Culture’s Operating System · 8 min · Season 4 Episode 15Most of what passes as “trend” right now is really about how we route memory. Feeds and platforms teach us to click what we already recognize, so nostalgia quietly becomes a…
- Recycling is a Story System · 7 min · Season 5 Episode 1California’s SB 343 “Truth in Recycling” law is interesting partly because it exposes how much the recycling symbol was never really about recycling. The chasing arrows became a…
- When Brand Strategy Runs Out of Story · 11 min · Season 4 Episode 14Brands used to assume that if the numbers added up, the story would fall into place. The cases of Gucci, Nike, and Temu show the opposite is now true. Each looked structurally…
- Imagining The Spaces We Will Need · 15 min · Season 4 Episode 13Physical spaces are not neutral settings. Our offices, kitchens, parks, malls, movie theaters, and classrooms, all tell us who belongs, what behavior is expected. They are…
- Machines Don't Yawn · 14 min · Season 4 Episode 12Most of what we call “looking ahead” is really a mirror turned back on ourselves. Companies hire experts, build models, deploy AI to forecast markets and manage risk, but beneath…
- Stealing Jester’s Privilege · 10 min · Season 4 Episode 11We are living through a moment when “it was just a joke” has become a default way of speaking about serious things, from AI and product launches to corporate apologies and…
- When the Iceberg Starts to Drift · 9 min · Season 4 Episode 10The mood of 2026 is friction at the surface. Reforms stall. Institutions grow brittle. Feeds fill with minor ruptures that never quite resolve. People talk about uncertainty…
- The Loneliness Problem We’re Not Really Solving · 12 min · Season 4 Episode 9Loneliness today is less a simple lack of company than a breakdown in shared meaning about what it means to be connected. Individuals move through days saturated with…
- When the Iceberg Starts to Drift · 9 min · Season 4 Episode 8The mood of 2026 is friction at the surface. Reforms stall. Institutions grow brittle. Feeds fill with minor ruptures that never quite resolve. People talk about uncertainty…
- Looksmaxxing and the Cost of Being Seen · 10 min · Season 4 Episode 7Some of the most telling cultural warning signs do not look important at first. They arrive as spectacle, strange subcultures, compulsive self-performance, borrowed symbols, or…
- The Histories and Futures of Credentialed Intelligence · 10 min · Season 4 Episode 6“Machines scale knowledge; humans preserve wisdom. Intelligence, therefore, is not automation but awareness: the capacity to reflect, adapt, and ethically co-create new systems…
- Beyond the Chat Window · 14 min · Season 4 Episode 5Many AI tools look impressive in a chat window, but that fluency often hides how fragile they are once their outputs drive real decisions. When you move from conversational demos…
- The Grammar of Crisis · 21 min · Season 4 Episode 4That gap between technical planning and lived stories is where crises go sideways. Leaders may think in terms of deterrence curves, transition pathways, or risk matrices, but…
