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Speakers:

Jeff York, Brad Werner, Dr. Deborah Brown from the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Dr. Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari from the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge

Jeff York  0:14 
Welcome to creative distillation where we distill entrepreneurship research into actionable insights. My name is Jeff York Professor of Entrepreneurship at the LEED School of Business and research director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship. I'm joined as always by my co host,

Brad Werner  0:29 
Brad Warner. I am the teaching director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at elite school. I am an instructor of entrepreneurship. But Jeff, you know me, I'm an entrepreneur.

Jeff York  0:37 
I do indeed, one of the most interesting entrepreneurs I've met, which is why I love doing this show with Brad. I probably told this story many times, but one time I had Brad be the guest judge for like two different classes back to back. And it was pretty hilarious. We had people doing private air transportation to Aspen for large companies, running restaurants designing ease, I believe there was a CBD brownie involved not in the class. But you know, it was one of the pitches. There were many, many things pitched and all the students were advising. Oh, yeah, I was involved in a private airplane business. Oh, yeah. I used to own a restaurant. Oh, yeah, I started, you know, nonprofit bakery. And they're just like, do that. Anyway. So Brad, you're done with classes. We are sitting here the day that grades are due at the Leeds School of Business University of color. I turned mine in right before I came here. So this will be a celebratory podcast for me.

Brad Werner  1:28 
Yeah. And I have about three hours left to go. So the why it'll be helpful.

Jeff York  1:32 
I'm sure your students will be reassured by that the leniency of the grading will advance as Brad's afternoon goes on. So lucky for the students. Well, so we are excited again, as has been our tradition during Well, actually, we should mention that. So one thing that's different this week, for the first time since when was it? God? February 2020. Yes. So over a year, Brian and I are in the same room doing the podcast, we're actually in Brad's kitchen. This is really exciting for us. We're both of course, fully vaccinated. And it's just I don't know, man. It's kind of almost emotional. Like to be sitting here with you doing this.

Brad Werner  2:12 
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, you know what, you kind of get used to lockdown. But it's nice. Actually. I shook Jeff's hand when he walked in the door, and I haven't shaken anybody's hand. I can't even remember the last time I did it. So I immediately got my hand sanitizer after that.

Jeff York  2:26 
Yeah. But I would have done that before. COVID. If I should say, oh, I'll be here all week, folks. No, it's really, really nice to be sitting here with you, Brad. Brad's made us a lovely coffee, in preparation for our beverage of the day, which is not coffee. Because you know, we only do that when the Dean's on the podcast. She's still mad about that. Like, by the way, Brad? She said, Why don't you guys are always like drinking cool stuff. And you get me on and we got a coffee place. What's up with that? We could change that. Yeah, well, anyway, we'll definitely take her out to wherever she wants to go. So we are really excited. We were we were getting ready to do today's subject with the two of us. And with Joel, because Joel, our producer has some really interesting experience in this realm. And then we're like, man, we should go get the authors of this paper. Because this paper is really interesting. I was sort of browsing through the journals like I do looking for interesting papers. And I knew one of the author's work and I was like always interested in what he writes about. I didn't know the other two authors. But man, this is an interesting paper. And again, so we've talked a little bit about administrative science quarterly. I'm sure you don't remember Brad, I have

Brad Werner  3:30 
to stop you right there. There's no way that we can dive into papers without talking about wine and having a little bit of wine first,

Jeff York  3:38 
and then maybe you can sit back. Sorry, no, Brad, we're getting straight to business this week. I can't handle the business man talking about papers. We're gonna talk about the ontological assumptions underlying the theory in this paper ended up anyway. Okay, so Brad's got me up. I will introduce our guests. So we have two guests this week. First, Deborah Brown. Deborah is a doctor at the Department of Politics and International stays at the University of Cambridge. Welcome, Deborah. Deborah. Thanks. It's great to be here. wonderful to see you. Thanks for joining us. And then our second guest is Shahzad shez. And sorry, chose the professor at the judge business school at the University of Cambridge. Thanks for joining us. Yes. Oh, pleasure to be here. Good to see you, everyone. It's great to see you. I shadows are an Irish sort of scene. We were supposed to see each other in class. I was visiting Cambridge, but then he had to travel. And I think somebody told me they might have just been promising this on your behalf without you knowing shares, but apparently you were going to try to get me to a high dinner, or the high table at your house. Is that true? You probably knew nothing about this. They were just promising on your read. No. I would have been glad to be happy. But that is a thing, right? I mean, that's an actual real thing.

Brad Werner  4:47 
Phil said here. Let's back up.

Jeff York  4:48 
What does this mean? I got that's why I'm actually asked to explain because I didn't.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  4:53 
Deborah has been to many as well. I mean, it's just that we do these formal dinners at colleges where students and faculty members and fellows get together. So it's a colleges in Cambridge represent departments from all over the place. So they could be physics law Business School, whereas the department, I only made the business school types. But at the college, you can meet a physicist and oncologist, person who studies divinity. So you get kind of meet all kinds of people at the college and these dinners represented. So you could be sitting next to someone who's discussing philosophy and divinity, and not just business models. So it's kind of interesting to meet all kinds of people at these college dinners, which represent a wide spectrum.

Deborah Brown  5:30 
I would also say it's quite different from what you might expect at a typical dinner at a university in the US. So all students to academics wear gowns, and based on what sort of qualification you have, you wear a different gown, you start with grace in Latin, and in Latin, very specific manner of toast, and it's called the high table because you're sitting literally up high with the master. So to elevated tables,

Brad Werner  5:53 
I'm kind of going back to Harry Potter movies,

Jeff York  5:56 
what every American says when this is described to them, I think, pretty much or anybody, I guess, now, anybody in the world, someday we'll get back and have to do that I, we have signed up to co host the ongoing international entrepreneurship innovation conference, which, you know, Cambridge is one of the sponsor entities along with the Darden School. And, unfortunately, because of the pandemic, of course, that's been delayed, but someday, someday, we're going to come over there when you guys host this, and we're just going to interview everyone. And really, Brad, have you ever been to Cambridge? I have excellent, beautiful, say just a great city. So, but Deborah, you selected our beverage for today. This is really interesting, because we now know you are not English, though. You are American. Is that correct? Deborah? Yeah.

Deborah Brown  6:42 
Well, German father, American Texan mother, and born in England, but grew up in the US.

Jeff York  6:49 
Right? Nice. And so that your pick have any significance to your lineage or anything like that? Or do you just this just what you prefer to drink,

Deborah Brown  6:57 
like California and wines. And I we go all right, coast, you guys kind of being in the in the in the US on the on the at least the west side of the country, even if not exactly on the west coast. Interestingly, your

Jeff York  7:09 
pick was was a little tricky to find, I had to go to three different wine shops here in Boulder, which was a real hardship for me. There's a real challenge. I had to go to these places and, and I bought a lot of beer too, while I was there. But why don't you tell us about your selection? Because I think it's safe to say Brad has one of the most extensive whiskey collections of anyone I've ever known. I have a lot of beer at my house. So between us, we got those things covered. But I don't think either of us know really much of anything about wine other than we like it. So why don't you tell us about this? Why did you choose this? What Well, first of all, what is it and why did you choose?

Deborah Brown  7:41 
So it is obon crema, which is a California Pinot Noir. And I chose it because quite frankly, I like to drink it. So I'm probably in the same camp as you guys when it comes to one. I just like it a lot, frankly, for me, no French ones pretty well, and particularly kind of Southern French wines. But thought it would be nice to choose something that was American, that I had a really good source of urban climate in Cambridge. And actually, prior to my academic years, I spent five years living in Moscow. And for whatever reason, urban climate was one of the wines that I could reliably find much of the time. And so it just kind of became a bit of a safety blanket. So I just think it's a really lovely easy drinking red wine.

Jeff York  8:22 
We just poured ours, and I'm real nerds I'm gonna like be smelling the lines. Yeah. Cheers. Wow, man. That is that is nice to know my first real Cheers.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  8:34 
Gotta love whiskey too, by the way, Brad. So Brad can tell you are you single more fan or just any fan of pens,

Brad Werner  8:41 
I love I love trying all of them. I think that they have such personalities, that it's just fun for me. I can't consume the same amount as wine whiskies but still.

Deborah Brown  8:51 
What's interesting, actually, so the story behind the wine too is when I was working in Russia, one of my biggest clients was the national diamond company. And they would spend a lot of time in Euclidean Siberia. And so all the miners would would drink quite a lot of vodka. So as a defense mechanism, they became like experts in in wine. And so I gathered a bit of knowledge from them, but certainly find it easier to drink half a bottle of red wine than half a bottle of vodka. Oh, yeah.

Brad Werner  9:17 
Oh, yeah. Wow.

Jeff York  9:18 
might be easier to drink half a bottle of vodka is just much worse results in my experience. So you're hanging out with Russians like oh my goodness,

Brad Werner  9:27 
maybe next podcast I can watch you do that?

Jeff York  9:31 
Probably not. But maybe never know. Man. So Alright, I get it. I get super, super Laurel like aroma on this wine to me. I think this might be one of the more expensive bottles of wine ever bought. We just got embarrassed because it's not an expensive one. I go into why I mean, I bought I bought way more expensive bottles of beer than this wine is I go into wine store and I'm like, Okay, I need some wine. What's raid over 90 by Wine Spectator and I don't really care much about so I'll buy whatever's cheapest. That's kind of my wine selection process embarrassing I should be more cultured but I but this the wines I usually buy are like very approachable very jammy is the descriptor I look for you know things that you know typically people at a party we go oh this is nice it's got both layers but this is a really almost like I'm getting like a moral almost like a rose aroma anybody else pick up on that just me being really nerdy

Deborah Brown  10:24 
a bit of like a vanilla to it as well and maybe a bit of like a warm like baking spices I guess I should

Brad Werner  10:30 
get Jeff off of the back so wine I think he's moving up in the world. Yeah, this is really good Deborah.

Deborah Brown  10:37 
I've never had before which is the Isabella bone cream up like I said is this special version of it which is really delicious if you have a chance to try it as well but I said and it

Jeff York  10:47 
was delicious and hopefully available at your local liquor store more than mine which liquor

Brad Werner  10:52 
started you finding it by the way what's the one buy Whole Foods that's not right. Oh, it's a whole foods liquors?

Jeff York  10:58 
Is it Whole Foods liquor? Yeah, I don't know. I just I was there at eight this morning. It's really interesting who's at the liquor store at eight in the morning but they know your name by the way? No, they don't. That's a chi there is a person sleeping outside the liquor store. They did not look like they were experiencing homelessness or anything like that was just a pretty well dressed person sleeping on the door to the liquor store. I don't know what was going on with them. They didn't wake up when I went in. So it was very interesting. And then there was a lady that walked into the liquor store and sort of just stood there as though she was going to ask somebody a question but she never did. She just stood there for a while and then she turned around left it was really interesting in the morning. Very interesting. So if you go to Whole Foods liquor store and bar excellent liquor store had this wine no one else did. I actually went to our other standbys North boulder liquor membered. Support North boulder liquor rights, the liquor store of choice, the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business, excellent establishment or Hazel's, which is another actually really great liquor store in Boulder. And that's enough advertising for boulder liquor stores. Thank you for the pics though. Deborah. This is lovely. I

Brad Werner  12:01 
think it's a great pic. I'll say I really like it. For us in Colorado. I think it's one o'clock. What time is it with you guys? It's a seven or eight in the UK. Right? Yeah, so I think we have a little different vibe going on here.

Jeff York  12:14 
That's what we're having coffee with ours is better than when we did the non alcoholic beer with the British person. That was

Brad Werner  12:20 
one thing we've learned about the podcast. Jeff is never to do it. completely sober.

Jeff York  12:24 
Yeah. Well, you know, we learned we learned these lessons.

Deborah Brown  12:26 
When I was a teenager. I lived in Chile and the studying trick was again, this is a deep Patagonia to have red wine and Coca Cola. collemaggio? Yeah. redlining for people. I have not had it To be fair, maybe. Yeah, close to 30 years would be mixing. Yeah, that was a mix that was kind of like rancid of rum and coke, red wine and cook cola. Like I

Jeff York  12:47 
think the guy was putting MacAllan in his coffee. Oh, yeah.

Brad Werner  12:51 
We don't even know need to go back there.

Jeff York  12:52 
He spent like 20 year MacAllan in like his coffee. That was like

Joel Davis  12:57 
a heart attack. It was great.

Jeff York  12:59 
My favorite part of every podcast ever.

Brad Werner  13:01 
Yeah. The kids not with the university. Mario's doing very well.

Jeff York  13:05 
He's got a really he's a great scholar about his judgment. Brad has has the cannabis stores heard the liquor stores?

Brad Werner  13:13 
Um, I actually don't think that they have. I would love to look at the data on it. They're both very crowded.

Jeff York  13:21 
The guy was asleep in front of the liquor store. Perhaps the cannabis.

Brad Werner  13:27 
Cannabis stores don't open until 10. And the liquor store zone Yes,

Jeff York  13:30 
maybe that I've noticed that it's really hard to get in there before 10 when I'm trying to get down to the cannabis store in the mall on my way to teach you. So anyway,

Brad Werner  13:37 
all right. What we love the wine. I think this was good. I think

Jeff York  13:40 
one I think I've got a warm glow my chest now from it to compliment the buzz from the coffee. So that's great. So we are ready to talk about the paper then. From Katherine jolly to the gospel of sweat, yoga is remarkable transformation from a sacred movement into a thriving global market.

Brad Werner  14:00 
Let's just stop there. Go ahead. Okay. That's the title, correct?

Jeff York  14:03 
Yeah. Now that we first dissect the title, we usually spend half the podcast in the title with Brad so you guys have to bear with us?

Brad Werner  14:10 
Well, it's like going to a bookstore for me, right? I look at titles first. So one more time with that title place cuz I don't know what happened. Le jolly is well, I

Jeff York  14:18 
know. That's why it's intriguing.From Patanjali to the "gospel of sweat": yoga's remarkable transformation from a sacred movement into a thriving global market. Okay.

Brad Werner  14:27 
Well, someone helped me out with the first word though Patanjali?

Deborah Brown  14:31 
Absolutely, patanjali is. He's an Indian sage, or possibly a collection of people that existed kind of 100 to 300. See, and he came up with this sort of text of yoga that is widely cited, and has been institutionalized by a kind of yoga certification yoga training, as like this is the text that is the foundation of yoga, but he dedicates in his 108 sutras sort of one line basically to Asana which is a physical practice which is a steady calm. See, and it is revered as sort of this text to give you the eight limb path that is meant to bring you to liberation. So a very small part of it is about physical posture, and the vast majority is about achieving this divine set of meditation.

Brad Werner  15:13 
So one night Deborah, after a couple bottles of Pinot Noir rethinking, this is my next research projects, how does this How does this happen? I have to be

Deborah Brown  15:21 
honest, it was a little bit slightly more maybe pragmatic, and maybe even a little bit selfish than that, which is that I had done my masters at Cambridge on microfinance and the commercialization of microfinance, microfinance kind of being at the time, and I think perhaps still, in some circles, like a panacea for everything of alleviation of poverty, of making profits of this kind of great world, had designed this incredible PhD research project, which involved quite a lot of time in Mexico and India. And then sort of looked around and realized that with one child under one soul, 11 months old, and a two year old daughter, that perhaps it wasn't the best research design. So I went into meet Kemal Muneer, the lead author on the paper, who very kindly agreed to take me on as a PhD student on the basis of working on microfinance, because he'd been doing some research in the area and said, you know, Kemal, I've just I'm struggling, I know that literally, my course starts tomorrow. But I'm wondering if I couldn't do something where I could spend some more time in the UK, and have a better research design. And there's something I'm really passionate about, which is yoga, and cannot kind of looked at me and he said, yoga, it's kind of like cupcakes, it was nowhere, and now it's everywhere.

Brad Werner  16:28 
Interesting, interesting. Okay, so then is your second call Shas how to how to do to get together then

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  16:34 
we need a couple of supervisors on the committee. So then Kamala and I are colleagues we teach together, we are the same business school. So we formed that PhD Committee, which then became part of the committee or whatever.

Jeff York  16:46 
This is from your your dissertation research, then, Deborah. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Wow, congratulations. Because I mean, for folks that are listening to us that don't know, getting your dissertation research into it. Ministry of Science corollary, or ASU is quite an achievement that is really outstanding. And in that dimension, like if, if you ever wanted to pick up an academic paper from this podcast, I mean, I won't say it's no slide on any of the other papers we've ever talked about. And just read it because you think like, I want to read an academic paper, this is a good one, a good one to start with, because it's very approachable. It's really interesting. And as you just hear from Deborah's explanation, like very steeped in an understanding of the history of yoga as a movement, and then finally, as a market, and I think that's what I found really fascinating about the paper.

Brad Werner  17:34 
And I think that we can think of relationships of other movements, I think is where this is going, and how this the movement, entrepreneurship. And change happens.

Jeff York  17:42 
Absolutely. Well, so tell us a little bit about the paper, just sorry, give us a high level overview of like how you did this research and what you learned,

Brad Werner  17:50 
and words that I can understand.

Deborah Brown  17:52 
I'm pretty good at that. So going, going back to the title of the paper, and not to spend half the podcast discussing it. But the next part of that so you go obviously from this Indian Sage is the gospel of sweat. And the gospel of sweat was an event that Lulu lemon, the very ubiquitous yoga apparel where a company put on at a church in New York City. And literally it had mock Bibles in the pews emblazoned with a little lemon logo, it had inspirational speakers. So it was how you could go from something that was a profoundly sacred text into an event that was very much a corporate marketing event, that still called on a lot of the imagery and on this idea of the sacred, but for very commercial purposes, yoga, becoming obviously a multi billion dollar market. So the paper itself really what we're exploring, and it was very much grounded research. So we didn't go into it with a preconceived notion of what was coming out the other side was just to understand how could you go again, from sacred texts, like Patanjali, into this multi billion dollar market. And what makes it particularly interesting is that the sage who spread really the gospel of Patanjali, in the West is seen by many yoga scholars is kind of being the first one to bring the concept of yoga to the west of Vivekananda. He would talk about how Yoga is antithetical to the west. So you have your consumerist culture, but what we're bringing you is something better we're bringing you meditation, something superior. And obviously, that's just been turned on its head. So really, what we explore in the paper is how you could take a movement and turn it into a market and go into these issues of kind of what what that is required of that because of course, there can be positives to market. You can have better access, it spreads the word you have all the resources, but then also the levels of decontextualize ation of corruption that come alongside it. Maybe let's just talk a little bit more to about I

Brad Werner  19:42 
need to interrupt for a second because I'm just I'm having I'm having a little bit of a tough time. So I'm thinking about yoga and kind of the the high level values that you were referring to. And then I'm thinking about Lulu lemon, a company that use child labor to keep low costs for the products. So how does that work?

Jeff York  19:59 
Well Not to mention putting Iran quotes on their bags at one point.

Deborah Brown  20:04 
So you know, the first two steps of this alien path that potentially outlines a yamas and niyamas are ways that you're meant to lead your life. So cleanliness, abstinence, truth, non stealing. And so they take this concept and they said, we're going to put inspirational quotes on their shopping bags that you know, for a long time were very coveted. But you know, they're, you know, that drink lots of water and be nice to your friends. And they're just completely vacuous and basically saying nothing but making people probably feel kind of good about themselves.

Unknown Speaker  20:33 
Don't be evil. Don't be evil, exactly.

Brad Werner  20:36 
While there's an eight year old embroidering these into their clothing, somewhere in India.

Deborah Brown  20:41 
Yeah. And even like chip Wilson, the guy that founded the lemon he's been quoted directly is talking about how at one point he stopped employing Yogi's in his stores, and he started employing runners because they were kind of more Taipei and on the ball in the early days,

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  20:55 
even faster, sexist comment for which he got chided. Remember, Deborah, he made some comment about the kind of women and the bodies that are suitable for Yeah, yeah, remember that? So that was all? Yeah. Well, I

Jeff York  21:07 
mean, am I mistaken, they were putting like iron, Rand objectivists philosophical quotes about like, self actualization. And, I mean, if those you're not familiar with objectivism, it's basically idea that acting only in your self interest will lead to great outcomes for everybody. I think that's a fair summation of the philosophy, quote, unquote, philosophy.

Deborah Brown  21:25 
a really interesting point you pick up on too, because what we talked about in the paper too, is how, you know yoga went from so in many ways, that collectivist and kind of working you wrong, to take yourself, but still, you're all working towards this kind of greater good, and this somebody and you're observing these kind of moral, moral standards, into this really individual cultural of individualization and sort of it's your own responsibility, and you can be the best you can be. And I think it's something that is incredibly prevalent in yoga classes today, across the board, that it's, there's a lot of talk of, like, you know, making yourself out to be the best. And again, this self actualization, rather than talking about kind of greater society. Yeah,

Brad Werner  22:04 
seems like we're talking about Nike there. This is, this is anything, I'm just I'm just thinking about that. The Clash of values, though, to me is very, very interesting. Obviously, lemon has moved on as a company. They're not like that now. But that early, providing the meeting of the minds to me had to be just, I actually don't understand it.

Jeff York  22:22 
Well, that's that's what this paper eliminates, right? I mean, that's what's so cool about what these authors have achieved, in my opinion, they're charting the path from how does something go from a collectivist anti capitalist, almost loss of self is like the highest aspiration? I mean, I practice yoga by nothing. But how does it go from that to being a market, like literally a market? And I think what's fascinating is they for you, guys, the way you framed the paper is you start off talking about the research or moral markets. So things like organic foods, and grass fed beef, and both green building and renewable energy, all of these markets that we're awash in here in Boulder, and I'm sure you are in Cambridge, as well, that have this moral dimension, and they have become capitalist markets. But those things are all infused with the very simple ideology of like, the more we sell, the more benefit we have, the more renewable energy I sell, the less carbon emissions go into the air. So it's very easy. It's not hard for people to say like, okay, you know, that's fine. I can get on board of that. But yoga, I mean, I learned a lot from read the paper starts off as anti capitalist, anti marketing, and gets morphed over time. And then they actually chart the path through which that happens. But they blame the thing. You're not understanding. I

Brad Werner  23:42 
love it. So what was there a tipping point somewhere that that received critical mass, I guess I'd love to hear you talk me through it a little more.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  23:49 
One thing I would mention is that, which is an important part of the paper is that what two things, what the reviewer has helped us do is not to take not to cast markets as something evil. So we have started talking about Lulu lemon, which is the sort of downside of what's happened. But not everything about yoga becoming mass scale or modified. Not everything about it is bad or evil. So I prefer that for a second to saying that it's not all bad. Second thing. Yes, because it was so far removed from a market, you needed some insider complicity, or some insider support at the beginning. So yoga, which was one of the sort of the key, let's say gatekeeper of how yoga was being diffused, and especially in the West, they wanted some advertisements just to survive just to scale the movement to get subscribers. Like any movement, they would have liked more people to do yoga, they would like more people to join the journal, in doing so decided accepting corporate ads. And when they accepted those corporate ads, gradually that sort of was paving the way and what they what they do. Yoga editor says the genie was out of the bottle. So she says I'm recording her in the paper. And once they allowed this to happen, then it was a gradual change. infiltration, if you like, or the entry of entrepreneurs and others, who then found ways of combining that with their own interests and taking yoga in a different direction, so it was something that the insiders had to sort of initiate before entrepreneurs, anybody else would become interested?

Brad Werner  25:16 
Were they selective chairs and the types of corporate ads that they would allow? Was there some sort of vetting process?

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  25:23 
Yes, there was gone to station. So the more Puritan readers were initially complaining not to allow this as there was contestation within the subscribers and the editors were sort of probably more enthusiastic and more lacks in accepting ads just to increase revenue increases, because subscribership whereas the more hardcore followers were criticizing this, we're opposing this. But eventually, they got kind of sort of silenced out in the sense in this as it began to show the value of having these generate revenue, keep the general live increase subscribership. So they talk about resistance. And I think you're raising an important point, why wasn't any stronger resistance there was, but it because it wasn't opposing any specific thing. It wasn't like anti x or anti why those voices got drowned out. It wasn't like, yeah, antagonizing anyone, so to speak.

Brad Werner  26:14 
Right? Anyway, it wasn't like they were promoting tobacco. And someone could get behind that and say, we're not doing this right, it was more general and diffuse than that.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  26:22 
You for example, you know, help people became interested, oh, it can solve your back pain. Okay, great. It can solve back pain. Now, why not allow the whole holistic medicine field to be part of this yoga thing, because if it solves back pain, then why waste this? Why not use this, why not let all the people with back pain benefit from yoga. So that kind of thinking then got the holistic medicine, merging onto yoga, that thing got Oh, it makes you fit. It can even develop muscles later on in the fitness movement got into the yoga thing. And Deborah can add to that how these different discourses kind of got added onto yoga slowly,

Deborah Brown  26:59 
I think between really the 1970s in the 1990s, the interactions and the intersections between the New Age movement, so the spirituality that was very largely individualistic, the holistic health movement, again, we're looking at alternative health routes. So yoga became something that was almost like prescribed or something that people would do in order to stretch and feel a bit better, and use for health reasons. And then also the fitness movement. And I think if you were to point one of the three to be the largest kind of tipping point in favor of the market, it would have been fitness because there isn't a controversy between a fitness movement necessarily, and the market. So it's a lot easier to kind of commoditize, an exercise class or a certification scheme. So there's certification schemes for personal trainers, and other realms of fitness. So it became something that was kind of more broadly accepted.

Brad Werner  27:47 
This was fascinating. Can you cite an example of another movement that maybe took this approach and it didn't work?

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  27:54 
You're gonna ask a tough question, Brad, let me take the easy way out of movements that have worked, especially anti market movements, think about mindfulness. And that's become corporatized, solid and everywhere where corporations offer mindfulness programs, but mindfulness in to do with this corporatization of mindfulness. But it also became a market if you like, with trainers, certified instructors, so it's very similar to yoga. In some ways. You could argue the Chinese practice of Tai Chi is still kind of limited. You see some people doing their little motions in the morning, I would argue, I'm not sure if someone has made a I talked to a couple of Chinese and that some people have been trying to popularize it and diffuse it and make it bigger than it is it hasn't quite scaled. Isn't there? What Yoga is or mindfulness is?

Brad Werner  28:41 
Let me rephrase the question. What about movements that are currently out there that would benefit from this happening in their space? Um, this is what happens when I have a couple glasses of wine guys.

Jeff York  28:55 
I've actually got something if it give you guys a chance to think I got an idea on that. Yeah.

Deborah Brown  29:02 
That we looked at shares early on the occupy movement, so obviously occupy very contra capitalist. And then you started to see within like occupy tent camps, there would be people springing up selling like t shirts, or save the honey bees, and all of these different organizations would sort of latch on to occupy. And there were all these different intersections. So it became a movement that was first kind of purely anti capitalist and then sort of expanded into a wider camp, but I wouldn't say it's become a market right now. Right? Deborah? That's

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  29:35 
a great example. But maybe Black Lives Matter. I mean, we do mention in that paper, so Black Lives Matter is, is not a market, but there are people who leverage black fashion Black Lives Matter t shirts. Absolutely. I think there is some commoditization already in that, and some people would say it helps spread the word it makes it more known parts of the world where BLM is people don't know what BLM is, maybe maybe wearing a beret. lm t shirt is not so bad, because it spreads the word. On the other hand, the wife of David Beckham, Victoria Beckham, who runs a fashion boutique, she was criticized for charging quite a hefty profit on Black Lives Matter t shirts. And she was saying, Well, this was meant to be for a cause, not for you to profit, the profit from it. So she sold quite a lot of T shirts during this peak of the moment with BLM from her range. So you could argue there's a little bit of that commodification of BLM. But it's nowhere 50 billion market but potentially you could think of it could. Absolutely, that's really interesting.

Jeff York  30:35 
So I think you could see very parallel, there's a great paper it's by Sean Hi, Brandon Lee. Oh, gosh, who else was author on that one? Yeah, launchbury That's right. Yeah, about the organic foods movement, really nice paper about how that morphed over time. And seeing the present that work. And then reading that paper. What I've noticed is agriculture is having a really hard time moving from organic to regenerative and organic sort of an easy sale because you can say to a parent, hey, this doesn't have pesticides on it. You want to feed your kids pesticides or yourself pesticides, or you want to pay a little extra for this organic food. You ain't evil bastard Are you someone who's gonna part with a little more money for this food? It's an easy sale, right? anybody's appearance, like, yeah, I'll buy the organic food. Anybody who's health conscious like, well, I'll buy that. The problem is like, organic food helps some with our problems of agriculture, but not nearly enough. We can't get to like a no deal agriculture. We don't really sequestering carbon through that. It's a problem. regenerative agriculture does do all that could be a huge part of solving climate change. However, there's no self interesting one regenerative agriculture. It's not like hey, you know, this is this was done regenerative agriculture, there's no health benefits sale, there's no flavor sale. There's, it's very tough. magalie Tomas has written a lot about this about the marketing of green products, particularly like, you got to figure out what's the self interest angle. And that's, I think that's a lot of what happens in the study here. I love how it moves from this idea of transcending the self for the sake of a sacred goal, almost a religious attainment of spiritualization. To, hey, here's how you get really toned abs and, and, you know, look super fit and be cool. And I think your points very well taken chess, it's not such a bad thing, right? Because yoga does have huge benefits. I mean, I practiced yoga in the wake of breaking my neck, and it helped me a ton. And I still to this day, really enjoy going to yoga classes. I am not a spiritualist, but I really enjoy it. And I probably never would have known about this movement not occurred. So but I do think it's something we have to think about, like for entrepreneurs, what does this tell entrepreneurs like thinking I get to the what's in it for me to really market things effectively to people? At least that's why I took some of the paper, I don't know if you guys would agree with that or not? Deborah, maybe you can begin to add styles in how she said this for everyone, right? she,

Deborah Brown  33:01 
her whole concept is kind of who made the rules. So this concept that you know, she, she thought that yoga could be too orthodox in New York City. So she wanted to kind of create her own reality and kind of have an extremely unorthodox style of yoga. And in fact, in my bookshelf downstairs for slim, calm, sexy Yoga Book is there and I realized that remove it, because when I was teaching on zoom, I don't know maybe it was my imagination. But the students were staring at it. But she kind of had this attempt to kind of reinvent it. And it's interesting when you talk to about organic foods is I think yoga. And the reason we saw it as like an identity movement as people will really can can consider themselves as like, I am a yogi and kind of a kind of halo effect, which can be really interesting when I mean, I think as an entrepreneur, in my own humble experience and perspective. It's a question of, if you're taking something and you're taking a movement and you're are turning it into a market or you're trying to profit off it, which there's nothing wrong with profit, if you're selectively decentralizing things or recontextualizing things. At what point does that become uncomfortable? Do you say, right? You know, I'm going to teach yoga, but I'm not going to put 50 pictures of Ganesha and Buddha around the studio if I'm not going to explain who they are and what they represent. So like when I went to the Lulu lemon store opening in London, the yoga teachers, they did a free class, she said, We're gonna do a little chanting Ganesha, and he's just this cute little harmless guy, he looks like an elephant before. And actually, is it okay, I mean, I'm not the moral judge of the universe. But it's kind of deciding how you want to be true to something. So if you're going to use what could be considered sacred imagery, whether it is something like looking at Black Lives Matter or something that has a religious that you consider what sort of level of respect you'll actually pay to that if you're going to invoke it in selling, whatever you're selling.

Brad Werner  34:52 
And I also think it's interesting the the tangential businesses that have arisen around yoga, and this is I think, where I could like to pull Joel into the camera. Joe, why don't you kind of speak a little bit to your experience in the yoga music business?

Joel Davis  35:05 
Well, let me just preface it by saying that by far, like 98% of the people that I encountered in my 20 years working in the yoga biz, and the yoga music biz, and just sort of the alternative spirituality and health and healing sector to begin with most of those people, their heart was in the right place, they had very good intentions, and they really were trying to walk the walk. But ultimately, for me, I sort of stumbled into that is long story, but wound up in the yoga music business. And for me, I found myself to be sort of the secular guy at this spiritual conference kind of thing. Like, I really appreciated the sense of community and positivity, and really like people wanting to support each other and build a better life and a better world. But I couldn't, when it got into like the more Teton, montra, omachi, via kind of stuff, I couldn't really go there. And ultimately, I just found that, and this was more from like, you know, seeing it from the from the music sector, and from the artists point of view, as a representative artists, just seeing how even though there's, you know, it's an $80 billion, or 50 billion huge billion dollar industry, most of the artists had to sell tickets to the festival. And the money they made off selling the tickets was their fee for playing the festival, which would be you know, the festival was happening twice a year attended by 1000s of people, there was definitely money being made there. And for the artists to have to pay their own way to this festival, I thought was ridiculous. And then there was the whole worked with some Indian artists who felt like they're being shut out in favor of these more Western white artists to play the music that they were brought up playing. So there was an authenticity thing there and a sincerity thing that that I that I was just having trouble with. And ultimately, you know, I would go to these festivals and work the music tent and sell music and meet a lot of the people attending these festivals, and they were beautiful people, it was really lovely. But I don't know, I started to feel like I was working at the mall. You

Brad Werner  37:22 
bring up a good point. And I'd love to hear our guests opinion on this, about that authenticity component. Because I would say through entrepreneurship, that's really, really a critical piece of this debate. Where do you chime in and kind of how the yoga industry has evolved? With that kind of core piece of authenticity?

Deborah Brown  37:41 
It's something I find really challenging because even just the word authenticity in and of itself is really loaded. So what is authentic to me, versus what might be an ancient practice. And I think obviously, there is going to be some level of evolution, a huge level of evolution. But clearly it is really difficult. You see people, I totally concur with Joel, the vast majority of people I've encountered and met and I was a yoga teacher and that I've taught their hearts in the right place that you know, it's it's a it's a great community. But there is an authenticity question when there isn't a holistic appreciation of what the practice is more than just a sign that's maybe in the bathrooms of a yoga studio. Yeah, really interesting.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  38:20 
I mean, once you say that there's a perception. I mean, imagine if you and I are protesting at a black lives matter movement or make a job, does that cost a different thing as compared to a person of African origin and just the perceptions of that in terms of how people perceive right, even the support for some calls, given a frickin student of mine makes all kinds of jokes, like jokes, if you and I made those jokes, we'd be probably be kicked out in, you know, ostracized. So even those make a difference of where you're coming from and how people perceive.

Brad Werner  38:52 
And I actually think that there are outsiders that come into these and look for ways to manipulate that. And just only you're thinking of dollar signs. And we can think of lots of movements, where you see people that show up that you know that their true motive is not the movements, but how do they personally benefit?

Deborah Brown  39:08 
Yeah, in my humble opinion, it's also a huge difference. I completely agree. But there's a difference between the cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. So if you're appropriating a culture by stealing an image of Ganesh and using Omen a class and overcharging your students, and for example, admitting students onto a yoga teacher training programs that are vastly overcharge and for students, quite frankly, that aren't ready to become teachers, then maybe there is a level of appropriation because you're trying to teach a guru lineage practice. And you're you're doing in a way that again, maybe this question of authenticity comes up versus appreciation, which is agreeing very much with what Joel has had to say that the vast majority of people in the yoga world, their heart is in the right place, and they have a real love for India for yoga. There's been a huge amount of fundraising in the yoga community for India recently around COVID. So and I think that is very much genuine So it's how you can harness that good intention and marry it into the market. That is really the crux.

Brad Werner  40:06 
And I think that some of these people that come in that we were just referring to actually could set those movements back. I think it's dangerous for a movement to have kind of those people intrude into the movement as well, when there's just only self interest at the core of their their motivation.

Jeff York  40:21 
But is that really true, though? I mean, because like, I think what I love about this paper is that that's sort of the interpretation, we can land on pretty quickly. Yep. To say, Okay, these, you know, and I, obviously, it's a podcast about entrepreneurship. We're at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship. Hey, and, yeah, and, you know, we like to believe there's a danger of the heroic entrepreneur story. All entrepreneurs are like, great people, and awesome. And, you know, we all know that's not true, because, well, you know, it's not because we live in the world, and we pay attention. However, there's the other story that, you know, entrepreneurs, all evil bastards, trying to exploit everyone for their own sake, they don't really care about great value for others. And I think that's a narrative that happens all too easily. What I love about this paper, is the complexity of the theorizing that's going on here, the idea that like, Look, you know, many entrepreneurs do utilize movements to create markets. And I think that's the, you know, so the, we're always like, what's actionable insight, hey, entrepreneurs out there, if you're looking for an idea, go look at what's happening in society, what movements are happening, what norms are changing. This is why I try to teach in a lot of my classes when we talk about green building and renewable energy and things like this, like, understand how people's belief systems of values are shifting, and try to tap into that. But also, that these movements need markets. Not all movements, of course, need to have markets. But a market can really accelerate and instantiate a movement in a way that nothing else can in some instances, and they might need this, I'd argue this is a case where the success of yoga, and for every person that's in that yoga class that cares about getting toned abs, there's probably a few people that actually dig a little deeper as well, I would suspect and I think this has propagated the movement of the spiritual aspects of yoga of yoga as well. I don't know if that's true. But

Brad Werner  42:15 
I think you summed it up beautifully. Right? And I guess my next question, then is, was this accidental? This kind of this collision of these two things or, or was this intentional?

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  42:25 
It's hard to always pin down intentionality in in any any process. I think it was emergent for so to speak. So okay, here I am, I am going to create a market out of this and Tara Stiles was ready. And all these people were ready to exploited or something. It's it was more of a evolutionary process, these corporate ads came in. I mean, it's happened to other movements. I mean, look at we there's a great book on it's called a sellout, which is on the gay movement. And the whole description is how advertising became usually a huge part of the LGBT industry. And the whole discourse shifted from gay rights to gay products. Some think about that shift. It wasn't that it was done with a purpose. Okay, it is LGBT community, how do I exploit it? And how do I market these products to the LGBT community and the wider community now or versus an emergent process where this was an idea that that caught on, and then became the few so I think it's more emergent. And one thing that Jeff was referring to small movements versus markets is movements and markets, right, Rob was referring to micro finance. So there, I mean, the idea was poverty reduction, and then it had to be called financial inclusion. And once you redefine poverty reduction as financial inclusion, it widened up a much wider set of people who could be part of it, just like organic food. Jeff, you were mentioning that paper and I had a long discussion with Sean hired was visiting a judge three years ago. And when you mentioned organic food, you had to change the definition from it being producer centric to product centric, the product is much easier than well, much wider and scalable than certifying producer. I mean, you can attend producers, but you can certify millions of products, so that that definition had to change for scaling up. times, it's difficult to sort of scale up things and remain too Puritan. And my opinion yoga, it not everyone can be a hardcore Yogi who spends 30 years meditating and achieving a high level of spirituality and becoming the next achieving Nirvana, or whatever. For a lot of people, it fixes everyday issues. So there is no for everyone to say, Hey, this is authentic yoga limited to these 1000 people who can do this, why not 1000s of others as Jeff you benefit from it, and people are their own ways of benefiting from it. So if it appeals to more people in a wide variety of ways, yes, it may not be doing justice to the core set of values or the authentic beginnings, as Joel was referring to when people could complain got appropriated, but on the other hand, I mean, who has the right to keep a culture preserved, and I don't know Didn't circumscribe or any practice? No,

Brad Werner  45:03 
no it really interesting.

Deborah Brown  45:04 
I think one act or two that we really should be mentioning when we talk about the emergent nature of yoga and, and how it developed into market will be Bikram Choudhury, the hot yoga, disgraced now hot yoga guru, because when he first came to LA, he wasn't charging a huge amount of money and he was teaching on his own and he became popular in his own right. And then he was sort of encouraged like, well, you need to charge more money for your classes. And then he patented it. And he copyrighted a sequences. And he started as extremely, you know, $8,000 teacher training that would have hundreds of teacher trainees in it. franchises have studios across the world. So it was also I think some of it was the collision of cultures. And he would say, and it's an interview, this was the American way. So like, he takes his yoga and he packages it, and he sells it. So it was this kind of commodification of trying to have a system that you could then sell really, really interesting.

Brad Werner  45:57 
My takeaway here is that for entrepreneurs stick to your values, right, develop a values framework and how you make decisions and stay with that. And I think that that would be really helpful. You know, we

Jeff York  46:08 
talked about the the fluid nature of authenticity, how it's always in the eyes of whatever audience is making the judgment. But I think if you do what Brad's prescribing, and you're working with, like trying to take a movement, create a market out of it, or take some piece of a movement. I think if you can align the values of your business with that movements, values, then you can actually help the people. I mean, most people don't do this just out of the blue they are they're aligned and interest in the movement in first place, like, like Deborah was. And so I think if you can do that, then you can tap into that sense of authenticity amongst many audiences, they'll matter and grow your market at the same time.

Brad Werner  46:43 
And I would also add to that, though, I think that the friction comes during scaling, right. And that that's, that's the problem. So you need to make stick to your values as you scale. Right, the early traction should be I think, it seems like it's organic. But beyond that, really hold true to those and I think you'll do all of your stakeholders. Well.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  47:02 
That's really interesting. Coming back to your question of where I've been the challenges, I think of Messy Church, which is a very interesting movement, the Messy Church, Messy Church. That's the church, Messy Church. It's a it's a whole movement. There are papers written about academic papers written about this. It's trying to popularize the church experience, because church attendances have been falling. So how do you popularize attendance and oh, come to the church and messy churches movement due to not commodify. But to to scale to popularize, to make it interesting. I mean, a lot of in London have been converted to restaurants and cafes, because of lack of attendance. My college in Cambridge, St. Edmund's College is a Catholic college. And obviously, there was my executive MBA student who was a priest, and they're worried about this commercialization of churches turning to cafes. So you can you stop this, can you? Can you make this attendance? Beyond Sundays? Can you make people come here, but more people come here, maybe not in the authentic, original way, because maybe that's not appealing to the current setup, or people given their lifestyles, time, pressures, etc. Maybe you need to reframe it. So they have children's playgrounds, and they're more shows, just like Airbnb and to really reinvent itself for COVID, you would have to say, churches, the finger innovative ways to boost attendance, which doesn't mean you need to shed all their core values, but they need to still reinvent, reframe, resignify and package that in a way which has a beam. I mean, I would say that

Brad Werner  48:32 
well, and I'd like to compare that to some of the mega churches in the United States that now on TV stations and AV arenas filled with people. I mean, it's it really is amazing. This is a whole nother podcast. I do not want to walk down this lane. So I am smart enough to stop right there.

Jeff York  48:49 
We could just get Jim and Tammy Faye Baker back everything will be okay. Well, okay, so the name of the paper from Patton jolly to the gospel of sweat Yoga is remarkable transformation from a sacred movement into a thriving global market by Kemal Minar Shas I'm sorry, I'm always wrong. I thank you guys. I appreciate it. And Deborah Brown, it's been just a pleasure having having some wine with you this afternoon and talking about this paper. Again, that's a great paper and congratulations to you both. It's really pleased to be enormously influential. It really is taking the study of moral markets in a further direction expanding that which I think is critically important. As we think about, you know, what do business schools do and what do us as entrepreneurship teachers do? Hopefully, we teach our students how to take on something a little more meaningful than ROI and and spread it and create broader value for society. And the last thing I'll say is you guys have totally inspired me to read this project to have on the shelf, which is tracking this exact same process in skateboarding and how it moved from a punk rock and decaf List total, you know, if you sport, quote, unquote, into being in the Olympics whenever we can have an Olympics again, I think that's personally that's a really meaningful story to me as someone who grew up on skate ramps. And I'm, you've really inspired me to go back to that. And anyway, PhD students could be far worse than reading this paper for inspiration. Nice job to both of you. Kudos.

Brad Werner  50:23 
Yeah. And I just like to say thank you, I really enjoyed the conversation, the afternoon the wine. And when Jeff and I are able to make it to Cambridge, we're going to take you up on a couple of pub crawls or something, I think we'd have a great time. So thanks very much.

Unknown Speaker  50:36 
Love crawls on high table. If that's the name of your next paper, Deborah, I'll read the whole thing. I

Jeff York  50:42 
love the pub crawls in high tables. That's a great name.

Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari  50:45 
I always underestimate how much fun can one have on zoom, always underestimated when we would like to have a real in person ring. But I always underestimate you can have so much fun if you just sort of get into it and connect and just, it's fantastic.

Jeff York  51:01 
Well, that that means a lot to say, I'm glad you had a good time. And we certainly look forward to raising glass June 1. So that's it for creative distillation for this, whatever period we're releasing them in weekly, bi weekly, I don't know. But once again, I'm Jeff yarraka, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Deming, Sarah for entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business, as always joined by,

Brad Werner  51:21 
I'm Brad Warner, I work at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship. It was great seeing all of you. Thank you very much. I hope to really see you in person. I had a blast today.

Jeff York  51:30 
read one more cheers to us being together and love it. Nice to be here. Yep. here's here's everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai