Unlocking Your Leadership Through Brand Therapy With Jaime Schwarz

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Skot Waldron (00:00.000)
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of you, the people you work with, and the people you do life with. At the time of this recording, I’m offering all of you, yes, my lovely listeners, a free 15 minute communication coaching call. You come with some kind of communication problem, and I give you a solution. My calendar link is in the show notes so check that out.

Hey everybody, today we are going to have a really interesting conversation and you’re going to get to listen to it. We, I’m going to have a really interesting conversation. You’re going to get to listen to it. We together get to enjoy Jamie’s brain. Jamie spelled J -A -I -M -E who also likes to say it goes by J’aime. So, he likes to say it to some bodies love, you know, in French, whatever is super cool, super great guy. I had a really great conversation with him. Jaime Schwarz is somebody that you could probably just sit in a bar or at a coffee shop or at a networking event or in a park bench and just talk to because he has so many ideas and thoughts about so many things. And he sounds super smart when he says them, which makes you go, maybe I should listen to this guy. Like he has that kind of gravitas, which is really kind of cool. Really cool.

12 years of award-winning creative direction in NYC agencies leading to a life of entrepreneurship, 7x co-founding and currently founder of brandthearpy.coach and MRKD as well as the co-founder of teamflow.institute and parallelworlds.us

Skot Waldron (02:29.414)
All right, Jamie, I don’t know where this is going to go, man, but I’m excited to see where it goes. You know, I, just this intro by itself, people are already wondering if they should keep listening.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (02:43.298)
No, no, they should actively listen.

Skot Waldron (02:46.186)
Is that what they should do?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (02:47.298)
Yes, yes. I’m actually trained as an active listener. You have to put a hundred percent of yourself into it. Put down the screens. You’re to be quizzed every second through the entire thing. But what it’s going to mean is you come out of it knowing more than the person who told it to you in the first place. That’s the power of active listening.

Skot Waldron (03:04.042)
Holy moly. I’m here’s a learning moment right here. What are your top three active listening tips?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (03:15.879)

Hmm. The first one is to find a way to care intrinsically about whatever the person is saying. That can be an exercise in pretending that you’re in their world or in their shoes, or more likely it’s if you find some analogous point in your life. If they’re sad, you’ve got to get to a space where you were sad. If they’re talking about something really highfalutin, techie, whatever, then go to an innovative moment in your life where you’re really just curious. Whatever that is, that’s a very good first step because empathy is the number one ingredient for a lot of things, but certainly for active listening. Number two would be what I just said, try to think of it like you’re going to be quizzed at the end of every sentence. And three, think of questions as if there’s going to be a Q &A after while you’re listening. Active listening for the listener it’s really important, one really big bonus, I guess, to repeat back to them what you heard. That doesn’t mean repeat word for word, sometimes it does, but repeat it in your own words. That’s proof that you’re actively listening to them, and that’s what increases engagement. If I’m talking to you and I don’t really know if you’re listening or not, there’s a very big difference between that and if I know you’re actively engaged. I will dive deeper. I will care more. I will deliver the speech of a lifetime, even if it’s two of us talking on the sidewalk.

Skot Waldron (04:50.634)
Yeah, I find that, uh, if I’m talking and I see somebody kind of checking out, no, I’ll, I’m comfortable enough that I’ll just like do something like I wave my hand in front of their eyes or I go, hey, what are you thinking about? Like, I’m always curious. Like instead of being offended by it, I sit there and go, I wonder where they are. Like, I, what are you thinking about right now? Like I’ll ask my, I’ve asked my wife that before and she’ll go nothing. And I’m like, no, you’re thinking about something. And she goes, no, I’m not. I said, so it’s just black. Like there’s nothing there. Like your brain just shut off and it’s done. Like she’s like, yeah. So, I don’t know whether to believe her or not. So I mean, I love that. I love that. Like. Understanding, but if I sense that somebody’s not listening, um, I am more likely after I’ve done all the inquisitive stuff to just kind of hurry up and be done.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (05:45.839)
I’m sorry, what? You walked right into that one.

Skot Waldron (05:17.308)
Dang it. man. I knew it. knew you were drifting. I knew it. I did. Gosh, man. Why, why? Don’t know. I’m going to ask this question so you can introduce yourself, but why I even started with that. Why would I even care that you know about anything in that world? Why are we listening to anything you have to say?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (06:11.832)
Exactly. It doesn’t matter what I say I am. It matters what you see me do. So who cares that my name is Jamie Schwarz? Who cares that I’m a brand therapist? Who cares about the bio that I’ll give or not give that you can look up or not? It’s what that delivers. It’s the benefit. So just be me. If you want to think about whatever school I went to, who’s in my network, what brands I work on, how much money I have. Those are statuses that can fool you. Experience the person.

Skot Waldron (06:15.228)
So, the best way to do that is to keep listening. Right. There we go. There we go. So tell me about brand therapy. Cause here’s the thing. I love both of those things a lot. I am not a therapist. Sometimes my, I’ve told my wife, I feel like a corporate communication therapist and she goes, careful with that term, Skot. You’re not a licensed therapist. And I say, I know, I know, I know I get it. So, but I brand is where I come from coaching. Listening to the psychological side of why we do what we do. The brains, the understanding, the communication is where I am. So mirror marrying those two is like sweetness. my gosh. It’s so great. And then when you came across my email, a brand therapist, I was like, yes.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (06:58.766)
Till death do you part.

Skot Waldron (07:42.009)
Really? How did that happen?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (07:43.766)
I didn’t come up with the title the client did it. I was after leaving full time as a creative director and at agencies, I started a rebellious shop called pro for Bono to work with nonprofits and create new lines of revenue for them specifically focused on liberal groups, in 2017. But the big thing that happened wasn’t what I was doing with the agency, it was that I was finally talking to them. Decision makers directly, creative directors, copywriters, whatever. We don’t have a direct line to the purse strings and the decision makers. There are layers of bureaucracy there. So now that we were finally talking, we finally had that chance to dive deep and really get to what matters. Mission, vision, value or words. it. What is it? And we went for two hours straight, and he said, this feels like therapy. And then I said, well, it’s not therapy for you. It’s therapy for the brand. What’s brand therapy? And I had to answer that question. And I spent the next year doing that. So, 2017 to 2018 and 2018, I basically started transforming pro for bono into brand therapy. Escort became an LLC in 2022, but over that time built a lot of damn tools to reflect what was missing in the industry for me, which was that no matter what you do in marketing, your storytelling and that’s an art. And that is a really hard thing to do to connect with people and stories the way to make that last. But if all you’re doing is telling a story, you’re not connected to what the company’s actually selling because you’re focused on the market and not yourself and the relationship between the two. You have to tie those two together. So, once I started getting into the startup world and I discovered the term product market fit, I realized I was in the market fit business, which is a discipline, but product fit is also a business, but nobody put them together. There was no such thing as a product market shift as a service because the other big thing is that the product market fits a moment. If you have it, the market’s going to keep shifting. Your products are going to keep shifting. The culture is going to keep shifting. So, you have to keep shifting. Adaptability. You’re seeing it all around us. So much saying we change adaptable, innovative, all the big things, whatever it’s coming around the corner were already there. Liar. It’s just what you’re saying. How are you actually doing that? All the companies I’ve ever worked with, no exceptions, are too slow, too ossified, too stuck in yes men and don’t want to go against the grain and whatever it is. We’re all human and that’s what happens when you put us together. So, I spent the years since really trying to find all the solutions I could across every kind of discipline. to get answers for that. So, when 2022 hit, three big things happened. One, AI kicked in. So, brand therapy, which had always had the tagline, let your brand speak for itself, could now literally have brand speaking for itself. We were entering the age of conversational media. Two, a patent that I filed in 2017, which turned out to be the world’s first NFT patent, was granted. Took that long. And three, I became the co-founder of two other companies. One, the Team Flow Institute, which stands on the shoulders of Dr. Yef’en and how it’s worked over the past decade to actually allow for team flow to emerge in teams. You’ve seen it in jazz; you’ve seen it in soccer. How do we all work together in full communication? But for hybrid work, taking advantage of AI, creating collective intelligence for asynchronous teams and autonomy put those two things together, Team Flow and company betterment. I’m sorry, brand therapy, you get company betterment. That was the discipline that I had finally found piecing together, but it took all those services to do it. And also because of the patent, I ended up in web three land like crazy, really innovating and became the co-founder and chief strategy officer of parallel worlds, which is an amalgam of web three companies. And so, during my time with parallel worlds, I started building out my web three companies, not just coming in because I had a patent and some IP to talk with people about and the strategy services that I was offering them. So yeah, I’m using all the tools that are at our disposal now in completely different ways than the system thinks they should be used for, which happens every time there’s a big digital transformation. Hey, cool new tech. Let’s see how we can use it for the things we’re already doing, not actually using it for what we could be doing and creating the new jobs. And it’s been actually; I think pretty destined to all of that stuff. And I only mean that in the sense that I have ADHD. When I was at ad agencies working four to seven clients at a time, I was in my happy place. I had all the people, account strategy, graphic design, art director, partner, creative director, boss that took care of the structure. And I could just go crazy. I had 50 tabs open on my screen and in my head all the time. And I just thought that was a good thing. I didn’t realize I had ADHD. So when I went out on my own as an entrepreneur, that all came crashing like a ton of bricks. And I’ve been lucky enough to rebuild the people I need around me in order for that to work. But now I’m doing everything that I want to do instead of what clients who are assigned to me want to do.

Skot Waldron (13:30.652)
When you think about the way teams’ function now, and you think about the opportunity ahead and things that are happening, what do you see? Like where’s the opportunity and, but let’s start there. And then I want to go into my next question with that one.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (13:55.746)
Nobody would argue that if we look over the past century of work, transforming from agro to industrial to service economy, we’ve had waves of automation and transformation and in recent decades, digital transformation. Those waves come with really bumpy onboardings. The layoffs have gotten bigger jobs that come out of it are more fractionalized every time and everything’s moving faster and faster. And there’s an awful lot of money in the industry of digital transformation and automation, but it’s all focused on the tools. It’s not focused on the people who are using them. We need a human transformation. That is the other side, the actual side that matters. We’ve treated people. As much as we say there’s HR and CSR and DI and whatever soft things we want ahead of people, those are all band-aids to cover symptoms rather than actually working on the cure, is what do the people need? You spend all your time, months hiring somebody, and then all you do is oversee them? I thought the whole point of that long hiring process was you trust them. The teams need autonomy. But what’s the structure that a company can give to move from oversight to support so that the manager isn’t struggling as a peacekeeper between the executives and the doers, but actually in service of the goal that we’ve all agreed to when we were hired in the first place and focus on intrinsic motivation, aligning personal goals with a mutual commitment to the company goal. Authentic teamwork. We need the system. That’s what I think team flow is.

Skot Waldron (15:48.052)
So do you, and this is the next part of that, is what’s holding teams back from that idea of human transformation. And you might’ve just answered it a little bit, but.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (16:0.738)
The biggest one is trust. And there’s a lot of books. There’s a great title, Speed of Trust, that’s out there. But holistically, the model of team flow is measuring six parameters. There’s actually scores for these. Psychological safety, open communication, high skill integration, aligning personal goals, audacious team goals, and mutual commitment. And if those scores are high enough, the four senses that emerge are unity, progress, trust, and focus. And if those scores are high enough, team flow emerges. The same way that juggling does, it’s not something you can sustain, but it’s something you always reach for. And we found that that’s the speed of light at work. The maximum any team can go is when they’re in flow together. So why aren’t you just supporting them getting in flow? Cause that’s the maximum amount of work you’re going to get out of the company or out of each team. And a company is not anything other than teams of teams.

Skot Waldron (16:55.668)
Give me those six again. Safety, open communication.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (17:00.926)
Psychological safety, open communication, high skill integration, aligning personal goals, audacious team goals, you’ve probably heard of BHAG, mutual commitment. Mutual commitment is the big part of where brand therapy kicks in because that’s where the Kool-Aids made. So, giving the executives the real job of aligning the company, what they do, with whatever the Bible is of that company, the mission, vision, values. That’s a huge, huge job and it’s being ignored. So, if you give that responsibility to the executives, that’s what they’ll be doing instead of oversight. But we started this whole company, me and Chris Hewer, who’s a real organizational design guru, because he had been working remotely during COVID and I had been working on Send Thanks Now, which was tokenized gratitude for essential workers. We put those two things together and created tokenized internal motivations, gratitude, recognition, gratitude and glory. We called it in the beginning. While we were thinking about that, we were realizing we were creating moments that could be tracked, AI recordings, stuff like that, of actual intrinsic motivations, but they were proof of productivity. So those could be the measurements that we could send to the executives to say, look how productive they are. Gratitude being a moment because that’s when somebody says to somebody else, hey, you did this thing that was above and beyond. You did this thing that fixed. Going from here to here is always this. And you end up there, if you’re lucky. So every time you’re curving back this way, there’s usually, as long as there’s a good culture, gratitude. Record those and not only saying it, but the why and then tokenize it and provide that to the higher ups and have the managers also work on that on a larger level for recognition.

Skot Waldron (18:58.502)
That’s good. That’s good. I’ve been here. I’ve been talking a lot about trust lately. and how I mean, trust right now, the things I hear is that I, and the things I guess I’m, I don’t hear it as much as I see it, that people don’t trust each other. They don’t trust that there are other people are for them. They kind of feel like they’re for themselves. There’s a lot of silos out there. There’s a lot of fingers pointing. There’s a lot of self-preservation happening. There’s a lot of this stuff that’s eroding the cultures that are out there that you spend months bringing somebody on board and. I don’t know. You leave them in the deep end to learn how to swim for themselves while other people are like throwing rocks at them. and it’s, and it’s gotten toxic to a certain standpoint. So, I don’t know. Are you seeing it? What are you seeing?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (19:50.134)
I mean, to be fair, an alternative word for everything you’ve just said is human nature. We all have better angels and lesser demons, and better angels are harder. Intrinsic motivation is harder. The regression to the norm is lack of trust. It’s something you really, really have to work at. So having measurable numbers, having dedicated managers who are trained in flow facilitation, and high EQ teamwork. Some of those things are actually viral. Having a high EQ is viral. But yeah, that’s a lot of awareness that has to come before it becomes second nature to trust somebody. Open communication doesn’t happen without trust. Trust doesn’t happen without open communication. There’s a lot of those chicken and egg situations that you have to build for.

Skot Waldron (20:45.34)
But when you said that, the norm is a lack of trust. I think that’s a big eye opener. Why is that? Why do we as humans? Like we’re immediately skeptical. We’re immediately. I know. I feel like the generations later, I mean, these later generations have gotten a little, ever since the X-ers have become more and more skeptical. especially of authority and things like that, but

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (21:15.306)
I do want to counter myself and say it’s the norm now. If you look at the stats, the average age of a company has gone from over 61 years to under 18 years in the last half century. You’ll see, and the thing is that everybody’s gone from one job to multiple jobs, to a couple of careers, to seven careers in their lifetime, that’s a lot of, eroding the system. There was a trust in a lot of systems where I’m not going anywhere. Nobody’s getting fired. We’ve got to work this out. You know, there’ll be lots of untrustworthy moments, but they get smoothed over the same way that like, if you own your house in the neighborhood or whatever, you’re going to be nicer to your neighbor, right? If you can’t escape. But if all we’re doing is holding on for the next job, knowing we’re going to get laid off unless we quit first, fractional, freelancers, gig economy. All that stuff broke down a lot of that trust that, just, doesn’t exist anymore. And the companies chose to do that. So, we don’t look at companies with trust anymore. So, there’s an awful lot of, you know, long time to build trust, very easy to break trust scaling that companies have to do if they want to get to that space. If they don’t fine but figure another way.

Skot Waldron (22:40.732)
So how do we build trust best in your eyes? What’s that look like?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (22:46.662)
Well, first of all, trust on the Team Flow map is connected by psychological safety, open communication and mutual commitment. So, we often work with teams when we have their scores. Where’s your highest scores? Where’s your strengths? These are all interconnected. They can build up your weaknesses. So, if, for whatever reason, there’s a really, really high mutual commitment. Tesla 10 years ago, I believe, you know, then you can all point to that as you start to build trust among each other, because we’re all on the same team. We’re all trying to hit this goal. You just have to make that out loud and focused and start communicating around that versus, we did a big nonprofit recently and trust through the roof, mutual commitment through the roof. It’s a nonprofit. They’re doing wonderful things. They’re all believers. You know, the only thing everybody’s given up is basically money. So, what, what, what’s the problem here? We found that everybody still had their own unaligned, personal goals. They were all still trying to do their own sub nonprofit cause instead of unifying around prioritization of causes and agreeing to them. And nobody realized they were doing it because we’re all here for the same thing in general. And then we keep forgetting companies are specific efforts put together and they all have to have all hands-on deck in a specific direction at all times.

Skot Waldron (24:35.664)
Yeah. mean, when, when I think about it’s a tough one, man, because there’s, we’re naturally, we’re, we’re naturally selfish. We kind of think about what’s in this for me with everything we do, whether I’m going to help my neighbor move unselfishly help my neighbor move. I mean, there’s something in it for me. Like I get to feel good about the thing I just did, or I get to look like I’m doing something good for my neighbor, or I get to go to heaven one day because I’m getting rewarded by serving my neighbor. Like, I don’t know. Like, it seems to me like

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (24:39.476)
Add the other Sword. It’s not just that it’s social. You’re not just selfish, you’re social. Those are two usually opposite pulls. So, you have social obligations because you’re in a society and that keeps you acting transactionally altruistically.

Skot Waldron (25:31.986)
Okay. What about, what about non-social decisions that I make things that aren’t like going to help my neighbor? I mean, like, I don’t know me going in, cleaning up my living room by myself when I live by myself. Like, mean, I, well, nobody, cause nobody likes me, man. Nobody likes me, Jamie.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (26:00.35)
You’re bringing up a lovely analogy I usually give when I’m doing brand therapy about not selling the product but selling the benefit. I use soap as my standard example. You’re not selling chemicals in a bottle and you’re not selling a clean home. Who’s your target audience? What’s the benefit of a clean home? That’s what you’re selling. So, you’re either selling the confidence and hosting or the affirmation that you have an eco-product that you want to show off on the kitchen counter, or you’re answering to the mom in the back of your voice. What is it? And figure out that target that’s psychographic and that’s what you’re selling. And that’s your higher purpose that you need to admit that you’re in service of, which is alignment with your audience around that.

Skot Waldron (27:00.002)
Yeah, I totally agree. I think it’s going back to this idea of like paying the picture of having people that have personal goals, personal motivations, personal agendas that they want to see go through because they feel personally aligned and wanting to do that thing. But yet having mutual commitment as a whole to go in the same direction as an organization and achieve the thing. But you said this nonprofit is great on mutual agreement. Not so great on the personal side of things, right. And it broke them apart. They didn’t achieve that flow. Am I right? Is that I get that right?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (27:35.344)
So the thing that they were missing from flow was they all believed in the same thing generally, but it was the action specifically that were breaking them apart, which is why they were blind to it. We’re all working in eco. Yeah, but you’re working in watersheds and you’re working on plastics and you’re not helping each other out, which is the whole point of a federation.

Skot Waldron (27:50.174)
Okay. Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s where I think, I don’t know. I guess I was looking at it like that’s the selfish part of things. Like are they, they’re looking at it as this benefits the thing that I’m wanting to do, what I’m pointed towards. And that might be detracting from the bigger picture of the whole, even though I say that I’m, I believe in the thing that we’re all doing, right?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (28:15.916)
Was anybody getting their watershed or plastic stuff done? No. You have to admit that it takes the social contract to get to the point that, yes, you know what, here’s time for plastics. And now we have 100% of us working on it. Now it’s time for watersheds. Now we are 100% working on it. Wait your turn so you can have the power of the group. Doesn’t mean that you don’t have social wants. That’s what’s driving you. or sorry, selfish wants, but it’s the social structure that’s gonna get you those selfish things.

Skot Waldron (28:45.21)
So what do we need from leaders right now? Where are leaders failing us?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (28:18.784)

Ego. They’re not the boss. Brand therapy was invented to create a voice in the back of people’s heads that was a louder, stronger ego than their own. First, the realization I had when working with decision makers was, I can’t get rid of these egos. It doesn’t work. Mindfulness does shit. But they will always kowtow to a louder, stronger ego, a boss. Make the boss the brand, the one employee, chief purpose officer that can never leave. And if you get that voice in every stakeholder’s head as a voice of conscience, you get a stakeholder alignment because the mutual commitment is personified as the brand. Let’s do this this quarter. Whoa, hey, brand speaking here. Think about that for a second. Take your blinders off, stop thinking from your perspective, think from mine. Is that really good for the long term? Is that going to get us where we need to go? Is that going against what we say we’re doing to everybody?

Skot Waldron (30:00.708)
So what’s the alternative? Where do we go?

Yeah, like how do we do that? How do we do that?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (30:35.724)
Beyond what I just said of listening to your brand, making it. Yes, how do you do it? You make your brand voice. Yes, so you have to make your brand voice. So, the exercise I do in brand therapy is we keep talking until I hear it and I’ll say, that wasn’t you. That was a brand voice. We build it up psychologically in the back of the head. At the same time, we’re using a GPT to feed in brand guidelines and all the things we say we believe in into that GPT so it can become the brand voice. So you can start talking with it and start having back and forths. In the beginning, it’s a lot of, no, no, we’re not that, we’re this, you gotta train it. But then, just like you wake up every morning, go for a jog, wake up every morning, have a conversation with your brand and align each other. It’ll remind you to have that perspective and you’ll keep it up to date with everything it needs to know. To the point that you’ll have a team of brand stewards that are doing this so that the brand is ready to actually speak one-on-one. To every customer 24/7 365 two years, one mouth, listening to both sides, speaking with one voice to all stakeholders.

Skot Waldron (31:13.178)
Okay. Shift that from a corporate brand essence to an individual leader brand. Like that leader has a brand. We all personally have a brand. It follows us around everywhere we go. There’s these perceptions, these ideas of us and everybody’s head might be a little bit different depending on who we interact with and how we interact with them. but we ultimately define it or somebody else defines it for us and. Tell me about how leaders can use that same idea of what you just said to shape intentionally who they are and how they show up.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (32:00.186)
I’m literally doing this in city college right now. I’m an adjunct at CCNY CUNY in New York. We were just finishing up doing a new brand deck for Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the age of AI. So, they learned how to do a brand deck. The next assignment is now you have to do a brand deck for yourself. As you enter into the world, brand of you. Understanding yourself as a brand means it’s not you, it’s an aspect of you. The same way that you have a personality on X and one on Instagram and one in Fortnite. They’re all pieces of you. And we’re to get more and more of that as we start, you know, atomizing into the different metaverses of the world. There’ll be a lot of code switching and there’ll be a lot of different cultures you have to adjust to a lot of authentications proving, but that’s the price of what we’re doing. Your brand is a very big chunk of that. The point there is every exercise of brand therapy starts with being very selfish, very egotistical, very egocentric. What are you birthing? Let’s get all your DNA into it. And then we’ll have a ceremonial cutting of the umbilical cord. Time for the market to shape it. Natures done. It’s nurture time. And you have to find product market fit. I, Jamie, am not doing product market fit for myself. I’m living my life. But my brand As a brand therapist is product market shifting all the time. Jamie, the brand therapist is not me. It is born of me. It has a lot of aspects of me. Stephen Colbert and the Colbert report, Hulk Hogan and his persona. You’ve seen it. That’s how for everybody else. It’s a performative, authentic piece of you. But once you get to live in that space and put on that clothing. You’ll get more and more comfortable switching back between you and your brand. It’s not what I would say. What would my brand say? And that whole line, that’s a very big tool in brand therapy. WWMBD. What would my brand say? What would my brand do? Always back up and say that. I’m at work right now. What would my brand do? And so, when you’re a thought leader, you’re still selling something. You’re selling your IP. And we are moving from the service economy to the IP economy, even if we don’t realize it yet.

Skot Waldron (34:22.428)
There’s a, did you, did you watch that big man documentary on Netflix?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (34:31.43)
I’m going to say that if I did, I blacked it out.

Skot Waldron (34:37.594)
Okay. Okay. Maybe it was so traumatizing. There is a, you know, from, from the guy that built up WWF and, um, kind of took over that whole world and it’s, it’s insane. Right. Just,

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (34:43.804)
Before their own ego got in their way and they lost the WWF title to WWE because the world wildlife fund said we’re staying in our lane. Yep.

Skot Waldron (35:00.464)
That’s what they did. And they shifted and they did their whole thing, right? But the interesting thing about McMahon is that he knows, it’s a theatrical thing, right? It’s dramatized clearly. But what was interesting about his McMahon character is that he developed a character, a persona type, something that everybody saw. And that was like this. The biggest egotistical a whole like you could think of, right? Like, and then in his real life, maybe he wasn’t quite that way at the beginning, but as time went on, the whole conversation came around. Is he the same? Like is his persona that he is on stage taking over who he is in life? And so I think about that when you’re talking about. You know, the essence of you, that brand essence of you is not you. Is there danger in it becoming you or. Yeah.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (36:00.594)
Huge, huge danger. The very first article I wrote for LinkedIn last year was about personal identity disorder in an age of metaverses. As we start, thanks, thanks. I’m pushing up my imaginary glasses right now. Anyway, let me tell you more about it. It’s really just, it’s the recognition. It’s extremely cognitively expensive to code switch.

Skot Waldron (36:15.318)
That sounds super nerdy, dude. I’m just saying. That sounds super nerdy. Yes, I can tell.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (36:27.87)
Jordan Peele had great thought leadership talks on this. It’s really hard to code switch. It can get easier with time, just like driving becomes second nature or whatever. But if you have to do that in all the metaverses you’re gonna keep jumping through, and I mean, I was thinking about this because it was like key metaverse time a few years ago, we have personality disorders that are gonna form. Ironically, what am I doing in brand therapy? Hey, create a personality for you to talk with. I get the irony and the hypocrisy of it, but that’s the point. There’s a, no matter what you’re doing, no matter how you’re innovating, live in the consequences as much as the benefits so that you can create something that is as win, win, win as possible. So, you’re avoiding as many consequences as possible. Everything that we should have done when social media was starting, everything that we should be doing now with AI starting. I’m a member of XRSI.org, X Reality Safety Intelligence. We have annual safety conversations around all these different things. You have to take it all into account because these are the invisible hands of the market. Google really, really meant it when they said we’re not going to be evil. But the invisible hand, the quarterly reports, took all that away. It wasn’t a person; it was a system. So, as we enter into Web 3, are we going to enter into the surveillance economy 2.0? because that’s the way we should have looked at the attention economy as a surveillance economy. Those two go together. Ad-based economies have consequences. So, as we are about to enter advertising into AI, if you didn’t get the news AI and shop, GPT and Shopify, chat GPT just put together, the ads are coming. My CMO, Caitlin Duffy has already put out an article on the ads that have started pushing out from a chat GPT that they’re not talking about, but they’re much more persuasive, psychologically speaking, than any social media ad, even one sent from a friend.

So, let’s create a different invisible hand of the market, sir. And I think we can do that with co-creationism.

Skot Waldron (38:42.154)
That would be awesome. That’d be awesome. I think that there’s a, I think there’s a lot of hope in the world. There’s a lot of fear, think, right? Technology is already kind of a new tech kind of spurs that, for, for a lot of people, new leadership spurs that for a lot of people. Economies spur that for a lot of people. So, I think that the trick is, and I heard somebody say this recently, I was listening to, so. Sports team. I follow the Atlanta United MLS soccer team is absolute garbage this season, but we’re supposed to be one of the top teams that spent more money than some teams have even had in their entire coffers, their entire existence. spent it in one transfer. but we performed horribly, and I heard the coach analyzing what was going on and he kept saying, like, everyone’s like, what are you going to do to fix it? What are you going to do to fix it? And he’s like, I don’t, you know what? He’s like, I don’t know if it’s being afraid of losing. Like I think we’re so afraid of losing that that’s taking over what we’re doing. And it’s keeping us from winning. It’s keeping us from excelling and growing, which I thought was really smart. And I thought it was really interesting to think about how that fear of losing sometimes really holds us back from progress. And as an economy, we’re so afraid of tech, we’re so afraid of this. Is it holding us back from acceleration and growth?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (40:12.53)
You’ve brought us full circle because one of the biggest inspirations that we use for the team flow Institute is Ted Lasso total football, trust, open communication.

Skot Waldron (40:34.492)
So, what it takes, man, it’s what it takes. I mean, I hope, I hope people will take that to heart. Cause I mean, the thing is we overemphasize the competency arm of a lot of the things we do in corporate America. And, I think it’s unfortunate that we underutilize the human side of corporate America. and it’s something I think that we’re going to always just wrestle with.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (41:05.022)
I think we are burying it in CSR, HR, DEI efforts. We have moments of humanity that we try to snuff out in the system with nonprofits. The structures are there that look like the good guys, but they’re really there in service of keeping the bad guys in charge.

Skot Waldron (41:33.774)
So, we should just get rid of all the nonprofits. I think that’s what you just said. Good idea, Jamie.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (41:40.08)
Yeah, that’s what pro-for-bono was. It was teaching nonprofits to be for-profit so they wouldn’t be reliant on the crumbs of the companies that are keeping them in business in the first place.

Skot Waldron (41:50.554)
Serving two masters, serving, you know, like…

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (41:53.774)
serving only one master thinking you’re serving another.

Skot Waldron (41:56.23)
There you go. That’s probably what it is. and that’s a tough one too. That’s a tough one too. but yeah,

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:08.032)
They’re really easy. They’re just really hard to do.

Skot Waldron (42:16.000)
Dude you’ve made my brain exercise a little too much. Like it’s not even noon yet. And I feel like you need to go take a nap.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:18.958)
Then I’m going to use my favorite German word, Ausgezeichnet.

Skot Waldron (42:26.66)
That is such a good word. I’m gonna get a T-shirt with that on it. I don’t have a T-shirt.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:30.814)
That’s a good one.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:34.23)
and I’ll say gizondai to you.

Skot Waldron (42:03.75)
Yeah, you will? That’s… Is that what it sounds like? Does it sound like I’m sneezing? It just sounds like somebody’s sneezing or it sounds like you’re trying to say something pretty, but you don’t actually say something pretty, you know?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:08.16)
All German just sounds like somebody sneezing.

I’ll correct it. Most people sneeze like this.

Skot Waldron (42:22.002)
Those people?

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:22.727)
I sneeze like my father. It is heard around the block. And that sounds like German.

Skot Waldron (42:26.522)
Yeah. Yeah. There you go. And with that, my man, we are done. Thank you so much for being on. You are brilliant. I love your thoughts. I just knew that there was something I wanted to talk about with you and this has been it. Did I hit a record? Dude, I’m so sorry. Well, yeah, whatever. Hey, where do people find you? Brand therapy.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:44.342)
I’m sorry. Was there something you wanted to talk about? Whoops? All right. Hey everybody. Welcome to a new episode.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (42:55.928)
brandtherapy.coach. You can find Jaime Schwarz on LinkedIn. Have some fun, go to mrkd.dj. You’ll find some stuff there. I’m around.

ADHD baby. Superpower with the stimulus.

Skot Waldron (43:05.362)
You are in a lot of places, man. You’ve been doing a lot of things. Um, there you go. It’s a superpower. It’s a superpower. Okay. Yes. Exactly. All right, man. You take your stainless-steel straw and enjoy your day. I hope it’s awesome. I will, uh, hopefully see around.

Jaime Schwarz – Brand Therapist (43:26.286)
Looking forward to it.