The Gap Between Who We Say We Are And Who They Think We Are: Elie Jacobs Meets Eric Markowitz On JUST PRESS RECORD

Casually ask a political strategist, who’s spent an entire career navigating reputational landmines, what the difference between a brand and a reputation is, and you might hear this:

"Brand is what you say you do, reputation is what everybody else says you do."

Let that one swirl in your head for a second. That sentence is simple enough to be a tweet and complex enough to build a career around. Not to mention, the distance between those two things, your brand and your reputation, that gap is everything.

Elie Jacobs is the man with the quote here. He even has a name for the gap. He calls it your "risk aperture" - and he’s quick to point out how it’s the space where things can spectacularly implode or explode, if you don’t have a grasp on the story you want to tell about it.

How much of our lives do we spend in this gap? All of it? And maybe all that changes is the size of the gap from one part of our life to another?

At its most basic, the gap is the difference between the picture you took of your meal that you put on Instagram relative to the sidelong glance you gave to the disaster on your kitchen counter before you gave in for the night and promised your wife you’d clean it up in the morning. It’s the LinkedIn leadership accomplishments listicle that don’t mention the 3 AM panicked impostor self-attack. You don’t need me to go on (but we both know we both could).

I had the great pleasure of capturing Elie Jacobs meet Eric Markowitz for the very first time on Just Press Record to talk about this idea. I already knew they were both master pattern matchers in their own rights. Elie, as a political strategist and brand consultant, specializes in repairing broken narratives, and Eric, as a hedge fund analyst and writer, makes his living spotting hairline fractures before they crack entirely.

Eric cut his teeth as an investigative journalist. It’s in his DNA, every day now, in the work he does as a hedge fund analyst. His version of Elie’s logic is asking, "What's the gap between the story they're telling and what's actually happening?" It's the question that built his career and the one that now guides his firm’s investment decisions.

"The mismatch between our conviction in an investment and its actual long-term outcomes - that's risk," Eric told us, live from a London hotel room. Its also worth mentioning why he was there - his current writing (and book!) project is based on telling the stories of the oldest surviving businesses in the world.

As he’s explaining risk, as a function of opportunity, I couldn’t help but notice the perfect symmetry between the two of them. I had one guest who steps in when narrative chasms become crises, and another who spots them as investment opportunities in a mispriced future.

We started connecting all of their experiences to regular life, to personal relationships, to personal trajectory survival.

Elie told a story about hearing, "I'll get you next time," from his local bartender the other week when he realized he’d forgotten his wallet a drink too late.

That small moment of trust - that micro-extension of credit based on relationship rather than transaction - it somehow emerged as the emotional center of our conversation. Both of these professionals, despite their analytical prowess, seemed almost nostalgic about these small moments of human connection that our efficiency-obsessed culture is systematically eliminating.

Me too guys, me too.

Eric has been traveling the world studying companies that have survived hundreds of years. What's their secret? You know we asked. You also know he answered. Not efficiency. Not technology. Not even innovation in the disruptive sense we worship today.

"Face-to-face business was essential," he explained, describing Lloyd's of London's insistence on in-person underwriting even post-pandemic. "There's a lot of alpha and advantage and edge to be gained by doing the opposite" of what our digital-first culture preaches.

I found myself thinking about how many Zoom calls I've taken this week. How many texts instead of calls. How this recording didn’t come to pass without a history of zooms and emails and impersonal messages.

"Real innovation comes from wandering," Eric says with the quiet confidence of someone who's studied enough innovation cycles to spot the pattern.

Meanwhile, Ellie describes keeping a wax pencil in the shower to capture those fleeting moments of insight that come precisely when you're not hunting for them. Both of these guys separately arrived at the same counterintuitive truth, how our increasingly structured digital lives might be killing the very conditions that lead to breakthrough thinking.

It’s hard to celebrate inefficiency. It’s hard to tell people you’re building something that just won’t scale. It’s hard to say the path is pathless, or at least meandering, and that you’re doing it on purpose.

Eric is literally flying around the world to do research he could theoretically do online. Ellie told us about how he pushes back on clients, sometimes so hard, that they want to throw him out of the very rooms they're paying him good money to have him in. Both are betting that this type of friction creates value in ways that frictionless efficiency cannot.

These are not career lessons, these are life design lessons. We're all navigating the gap between who we say we are and who others think we are. We're all losing serendipitous moments to the convenience of digital life. We're all sacrificing the magic of meandering for the efficiency of direct search.

What if the most revolutionary act today isn't embracing the latest technology but preserving space for the inefficient human connections that technology is designed to optimize away?

It kind of feels like the whole purpose of this podcast (without the insistence on in person). AI can’t do meandering serendipity with cool people. They’re preaching to the choir, and I’m parading in front of the church with my “the end of the world is nigh” pamphlets for the passersby.

Maybe I needed to hear a strategist and an analyst tell me the value is in knowing you don’t know nothing. Maybe I needed to hear Eric and Elie’s version of how the value is in getting lost, in stumbling upon rather than searching for, in embracing inefficiency in the name of durable relationship building when the opportunity presents itself.

Keep it all in our mind as you listen/watch this one.

What patterns do you notice in the gap between your brand and your reputation? What patterns do you notice in the gaps between the brands and reputations of others (corporate, personal, etc.)? And, where in your life might you benefit from a little more wandering?

Watch Eric Markowitz meet Elie Jacobs for the first time ever, via JUST PRESS RECORD, out now on Cultish Creative YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.