Horizontal by Day, Vertical by Night

Welcome to this new series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Frederic Raillard is the CEO and co-founder of Fred & Farid, an international advertising agency, and the founder of [Ai]magination, where he’s exploring the intersection of branding, storytelling, and artificial intelligence. We met on a TV set during the 2024 US elections.When I asked him what keeps him up at night, I expected something about AI disruption or the attention economy. I got something else entirely.Frederic talked about clairvoyance. About the tension between his accelerating professional life—selling, persuading, performing—and a private search for something he calls “verticality.” He’s learning to distinguish imagination from what he describes as “downloading” information, working with people who, as he puts it, access what he calls the invisible world.This conversation went in directions I didn’t anticipate, and I let it run. But underneath the unexpected territory, there’s a diagnosis worth hearing. “The society we live in is losing sense completely,” he said. Brands succeed when they provide meaning—because we’re starving for it. And when I brought up the international success of Stranger Things, we landed on something that’s stayed with me: the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle, you solve, like an Agatha Christie murder. A mystery, you don’t even know what you’re looking at, like when you’re watching a Stranger Things episode.The world, right now, looks more like Stranger Things than like Agatha Christie’s stories. Some people build new analytical models. Some people turn to something older.This is the unedited conversation. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe