Michael Campion: Last but by no means least is the Anti-hero. This is my personal favourite of the brand archetypes and I ask Bob, what makes the Anti-hero so special?

Bob Sheard: What makes the Anti-hero so special, is it's new. One of the things in storytelling that has accelerated our absorption of archetypes is the rise of streaming, the rise of the box set, the ability within streaming and the box set for us to indulge in a much deeper way with characters. If we look at 5,000 years of human history, storytelling started as being oral and then we get to the last 100 years with the invention of cinema and it started to accelerate. We'd go out and see a film a month or it was before. We'd go to the theatre maybe once every six months and now we're seeing films every day through TV and through streaming. So you can see the acceleration of the consumption of roles and storytelling, which has given rise to new, deeper archetypes, and the one that's emerging is the archetype of the Anti-hero. Why it's special is it's clearly evident in culture. It's there in Walter White, it's there in Tony Soprano, but it's not that evident at the moment in brands. So this is new white space as regards meaning systems. I think a critic in a film critic in Hollywood said that not since Hamlet as anybody written a character with the tapestry and texture and depth of Tony Soprano. So it's kind of interesting when you get that kind of level of insight into it. But the Anti-hero, in terms of their effect, is they're uninhibited, you're more at ease with your own flaws and fallibilities, you're emboldened to embrace your dark side and there's a kind of release from moral and legal constraints with the Anti-hero. What they stand for is breaking the rules. What they stand against is following the following the rules. Their ritual is one I love which is embracing the dark side. We need night and shade. You don't really understand someone's character until you've seen their dark side. So it's the ritual of embracing the dark side. The time is the right time to embrace the dark side but ironically, the place of the Anti-hero is to always be in the wrong place at the right time, embracing the dark side. So it's the dark side, the right time and the place for this role. Their core emotional and rational values are interesting. Rationally, they're about provocation, imperfection and integrity. Because they're imperfect, we kind of fall in love with them and they have a code of integrity that's slightly warped in normal life but it makes sense in their life. Those deliver the emotional values of autonomy, of freedom and of defiance. So all of them add up to being uninhibited. In culture, it's Tony Soprano, it's Money Heist, it's Deadpool, it's Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey, it is Walter White in Breaking Bad. All of them have the narratives of controversy, redemption, being unrestrained, being impulsive, demonstrating moral contrast and in some way being conflicted. In brands we kind of see it with Harley Davidson, its Palace skateboards, there's a little bit of Diesel in here and Vetements in here, and they all have controversy, redemption, they're slightly unrestrained, impulsive, the contrast of light and shade, and they are in some way, demonstrate some means of being conflicted, whether a confliction between the raw and the civilized. So it's very, very interesting as a role. I think it's new white space and I haven't yet seen. We see some, some brands there, but there's no global player at scale. Yeah, that's doing this at scale.

Michael Campion: Yeah, no, I really like. I really like this archetype as well. I'm excited to see evidence more in in brands, Deadpool was the one that came to mind. For me, I think the important thing to remember with the the Anti-hero is not to go too far in on the dark side. And the defiance, because what, what is consistent with all anti-heroes is, as you said, that deep sense of integrity and they have a good heart right, which is why we love them despite their imperfections. Is that fair?

Bob Sheard: The people that follow them think they have a good heart. People that don't follow them think otherwise. So, I kind of, if you think about this role, a great many of the people that voted in the American elections were of a certain age and they grew up on the Western. Consuming the Western, and they grew up where, consuming a narrative, where things weren't quite right in the town. The sheriff wasn't cleaning the town up and the Anti-hero was gonna come clean the town up and leave. And they knew the Anti-hero had some dark sides to him, but they accepted that he was gonna come clean the town up and leave. So the last brand that kind of did that in an interesting way was the brand that promised to come into Washington, drain the swamp and he left, and that was Trump. He fed off that very, very simple black hat narrative, black hat, white hat narrative. So in a way, he was an Anti-hero brand in politics that recognized that very, very, very simple story that was in the subconscious of many people that grew up watching Westerns in America. He chose to leverage it as part of his whole election struggle, clean the town up, make America great again, get rid of the bad guys, drain the swamp.

Michael Campion: It was all in there, yeah, and like all Anti-heroes, like all the followers, of all Anti-heroes, the end justified the means. To them, to his supporters yeah and justifies the media. Super simple,

Bob Sheard: He's spoke in a language that those people understood, he didn't use political prose, he almost spoke in nursery rhymes. But he used kind of interesting names for people, monikers for people. You know, crooked Hillary, sleepy Joe, you know. He used those almost made characters, film characters out of them. So people didn't have to understand politics, they just had to understand simple storytelling, which shows you the power of storytelling. It can change human history, and sometimes not for the better. So that's why we have to understand it and understand the levers that we need to pull, and if we understand it better we can, we can make sure that human progress is marching in the right direction instead of in difficult directions.