Dr. Marcus Collins
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Marcus Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Marcus, when you started this journey, man, what was your because? It was because people didn't think I could. People doubted me, and maybe even I doubted myself.
You know, we tend to mistake the obvious because it's there. It's right in front of us.
And I would love for you to elaborate that culture as a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do.
I am blessed and highly favored and so very grateful to be with you.
That's a blessing, man. Thank you so much. That makes two of us. Let's do it.
But you're a Michigan man, right?
I wish I had the answer to that, but I'll tell you a little bit about who I am. I'm a product of Detroit. Now, I always start that way because I feel like Detroit was very influential in how I made sense of the world, how I framed the world. Being a city that is predominantly Black, but living in a world that straddled the fence of both.
I mean, I was a swimmer growing up, which wasn't a ton of Black folks swimming. So I lived in two different worlds at the same time. And having a city like Detroit as the backdrop just always created unique frames for me. It's a big city, but never thought of like as a New York and L.A. or even a Chicago. It was a tough city, but never thought of as sort of as gritty as I don't know.
I don't want to. I don't want to be disparaging of another city, but I was always sort of in the middle. And because of that, there's always a chip on the city's shoulder. And I feel like everybody from the city sort of bears that. And I think that that sort of disposition followed me not only as an adolescent coming of age, but as a college student coming out of college, starting a company.
a music company, much to the chagrin of my parents, to going back to school to get an MBA, to having the audacity to say, I think I can work at Apple, you know, to on the surface and see like I had the credentials to be there, then to then go run digital strategy for Beyonce, then to then go into advertising and then to then be a professor, then to then write a book, like all these things.
It just felt like, you know, no one thought that I could do those things, which made me feel like, oh, well, let me show you what's up.
It was because people didn't think I could. And I think maybe a part of it, maybe I didn't know if I could. I've always hoped for and wanted the most of myself. I wouldn't say more of myself. I'd say the most of myself. I mean, if you asked me when I was in high school, I was going to be the fifth member of Boyz II Men. And I thought that that was possible. I thought it was legit possible. And my
parents, particularly my mother, was like, yo, you better go to school to be an engineer, fam. This music delusion you have in your mind, that's not happening for you. You're going to do this thing because it was logical. And I guess a part of me felt like, well, why should I abide by what is logical?
And I think that my because is that because people doubted me, and maybe even I doubted myself, I wanted to... It wasn't about showing them that I could do it, but it was about proving to myself that I could do it, I suppose.
And I mean, I thank you for that. And I think that, you know, it's the obvious that gets us every time. A gentleman named Duncan Watts wrote a book that essentially said the obvious typically isn't obvious until someone points it out to you. Once someone points out, you go, oh, man, totally. Absolutely. I think that we tend to mistake the obvious because it's there. It's right in front of us.
The obvious thing about us is that we know how influential people are. We know. how influential culture is, but yet we spend a fraction of our time thinking about how do we better understand people so that we can understand how they influence each other? How do we better understand culture so we might be able to engage in such a way to get people to move?
And for me, I was working in an industry advertising where all we talked about was culture, get our ideas out in the culture, what's happening in culture. We had to move at the speed of culture. And I was saying this like multiple times a day. And what I realized that I didn't know very much about culture at all. I knew it sort of intuitively and I knew it conceptually and intellectually, but
But I didn't understand the underlying physics, the mechanisms that make culture work. And the more I came to understand it, the wider the aperture of how I saw the world became. It became so illuminated. In many ways, it was humbling because I realized I didn't know much about anything, which only, if anything, just sort of catalyzed curiosity in me.
And writing the book, to me, was sort of a love letter of sorts. to this exploration of culture. And it's not a period at the end of it all. It's sort of an ellipsis. It's like dot, dot, dot for people to continue to build on top of it. Because I feel like I built on top of those who came before me.
Amen. Amen. So I think about culture through a sociological lens. When the founding father of sociology, Emile Durkheim, talks about culture as a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. And in the book, I try to detail what those systems are.
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