Everyone’s jealous of taste right now. It seems to be the one thing AI isn’t threatening to make part of the “permanent underclass,” and it’s annoyingly hard to define. But if anyone can give it some shape, it’s Esther Moisy-Kirschbaum.

I found Esther while looking for writers who think seriously about where culture is going. She writes and edits Magma, a paid business publication where she analyses emerging markets and early signals across industries in French.

Her personal newsletter on trends, Oblique Forecasting, is sharp, informed by her background living in Istanbul, London, Berlin, Vilnius, Dubai, and now Paris…you will read it and walk away with at least one new opinion. Which is, it turns out, what taste requires.

• Taste can't be faked, and tech knows it. The new tech ruling class is looking for a shortcut to cool. But taste inherently takes time to develop and requires confidence and humility.

• Taste is about standards, not aesthetics. You need to have built a voice or a set of references before you sit down with AI, otherwise, you don’t have the discernment to know when the answer is good enough.

• Writing’s edge is precision and portability. You can skim it, go deep, copy a paragraph into your Notion, forward it to a colleague with one section highlighted. A podcast gives you a vibe, but a newsletter gives you a plan and the data to make it happen.

You wear many hats—you run Magma, your own Substack. Tell me about how you spend your time.

My official title is Head of Content for Magma, a paid business publication — I'd compare it more to an online magazine than a newsletter. The readership is mostly entrepreneurs, individual investors, and VC funds.

Every issue we explore three emerging verticals and give specific business opportunities linked to each one. We're not just saying "this field is interesting" — we're saying there's a white space here, and here's how to act on it. I'm the only full-time person, and I commission experts in their own fields rather than journalists. Each brings real depth, but I'm the generalist who holds it together.

What is key to getting those insights before anyone else?

A lot of it is me being attuned to everything — subscribing to a million newsletters and podcasts — but also having real conversations with people who are deeper in their lanes than I am. I still need to be knowledgeable enough to understand them when they pitch me an idea so I know a little bit about a lot of things.

That’s why the network of experts matters, like my food and beverage person, for example. I’m not immersed in that world 24/7, whereas she has a small consulting business and gives me emerging trends as she sees them in hospitality.

Orso Media, which owns Magma, is famous for its podcasts in France, but Magma is the only text-based product in its lineup. In the age of five-hour podcasts, what do you think writing’s edge is?

With podcasts — whether audio or video — you’re confronting different points of view in conversation. It’s almost like a journey you take together. But unless you’re taking notes as you listen, what you come away with is more of a general vibe than an action plan.

The advantage of the written word is that you can copy-paste something into your notes or your Notion, or you can forward an email to your business partner with one paragraph highlighted. If I were to give you a market size figure in a video — say, this market is $3 billion in 2026 but is estimated to reach $15 billion by 2030 — most people can’t hold that in their head. When you read it, however, your brain sees the multiple.

And then there’s skimmability — you can read something quickly, pick out what’s relevant, or follow the links and go deeper. You can’t zoom in and out in the same way with a long-form podcast.

Everyone’s talking about taste right now, especially in relation to AI. Having taste is an important part of your job — it’s necessary to identify upcoming opportunities. How do you cultivate taste?

You usually only say someone has good taste when they have similar taste to you. You’re never going to walk up to someone who only dresses in Versace when you only dress in Issey Miyake and say, “You have great taste.” So taste is almost a bit of a fake concept — you’re looking for someone who’s similar enough to you, but who you’ve elected as having elevated that shared world to the maximum. That person is deemed someone with good taste.

In my opinion, this obsession with taste, driven by the tech world, is symptomatic of a power reversal. 20 years ago, culture — fashion, music, movies — was king, and tech people were seen as uncool nerds. Whereas today, they’re the ruling class in many ways. And they’re trying to find a shortcut to cool, just like AI can be a shortcut to many things. But taste inherently takes time to develop; you can’t fake it, otherwise it stays a surface-level aesthetic.

Taste takes both confidence, to stand for things even when they’re not the consensus, but also humility and curiosity, to be open to new things and sometimes change your mind.

You've just described taste as almost impossible to define — and yet you're asking people to trust your eye when they follow your newsletters. How do you make that case?

I’m often described as a chameleon — that’s good and bad. It’s good in the sense that I can be in a lot of different rooms. But I’m not fully part of any of them. I’m too classic for my fashion friends, too fashion-y for the business people, and too balanced — I still enjoy a martini — for my longevity circles.

People turn to me because I can bridge the gap between industries, geographies, and generations. But that’s also what makes me hard to market, because it’s hard to put me in a box. It’s harder to sell myself with a quick elevator pitch.

Can you give me an example of that bridging — where the cross-generational, cross-industry view changed your opinion about a trend?

We can all agree that dating apps, as they currently exist, are failing us. But a lot of people commenting on these apps — whether they’re proposing new app concepts or completely new approaches — don’t really go back to the root of the problem.

Millennials are the last generation to have dated without dating apps. We started our adult lives without them, and they progressively took over. Whereas Gen Z came of age when Tinder and Bumble were already there.

Today, a lot of new apps try to recreate that first social contact: the feeling of meeting someone in real life. But for the new generation, that’s not a lived experience they’re missing. I see a lot of millennial founders trying to solve a dating problem through their own generational framework, and that’s not actually how social life works for younger people. There needs to be one generation that adapts massively to a new concept before it trickles down. And I don’t think that’s being taken into account enough in category and startup creation.

What about AI? Do you use it in your work?

I do. And when I interviewed for my current job, they asked if I used AI. When I said yes, it was clearly a plus. If you’re going to be speaking to people at the cutting edge of their fields, you also have to be curious enough to explore new tools yourself.

A big part of my job is pattern recognition and bridging different things. Sometimes I’ll be stumped — I’ll have notes, links to different things, names of a few companies — and I can sense there’s a connection, but I can’t quite see it. AI helps me structure it. My analogy is that it’s like dumping the contents of a bag onto someone’s desk and saying: What does this add up to? But I’m not accepting the first answer I get. It’s always a conversation. I’m challenging it, pushing back, saying we’re close but not there yet.

And that goes back to taste. If you’re going to be writing, generating images, whatever, you do need that elusive sense of taste. You need to have already crafted a voice or an eye or a set of references before you sit down with AI. Otherwise, you don’t have the discernment to know when the answer is good enough.

Even if you have that discernment, it feels like it’s getting harder and harder to stand out as a writer or a thought leader.

Exactly. And it goes back to what I was saying — every good thing is also a hard thing. If you want to establish yourself as a leading voice, you also have to do the promotion work that a PR team might have handled for you before. The good news is you can do it. The hard news is that you have to.

You look at trends across geographies. Is there anywhere Europe is actually setting the agenda rather than following the US?

Right now, contrast therapy — sauna and ice bath — is the hottest thing in Paris. Two new places have just opened, both essentially replicas of Othership, which started in Canada and then New York.

But here’s the thing: being late to business trends almost gives France an edge. We can see what worked elsewhere and what didn’t — and then adapt it, because the cultural differences are real. In the US, effort and the process of longevity is the status symbol. People walk around in their Lululemons in LA, they talk openly about their routines. In France, you don’t show the sweat. The status symbol is the outcome — you looking toned, youthful, gorgeous. You can’t just import a concept wholesale.

Where Europe genuinely leads is luxury. France and Italy are still the best in the world at it — the care, the eye for beauty, the quality. When you lean into that, you create something with a real competitive advantage versus the US. That’s not going away.

If you want to go further and read Esther’s writing, here are a few of my favorite posts of hers:

• Esther’s fitness and health journey — a masterclass in business writing meets personal essay.

• An investing experiment that cleverly reveals why consumers can’t get a financial slice of the most habit-forming brands today.

If you haven’t subscribed, join me.

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Sadly, few people put “good writer” on the list of what makes a great CEO. Ted Merz thinks that’s about to change.

Ted was the 15th newsroom hire at Bloomberg and spent 32 years in the most rigorous newsroom in finance, first as a reporter and editor, and subsequently running the news product team. Then, at 57, he was laid off.

Unsure of what to do next, Ted started writing on LinkedIn. Soon, he had 40,000 followers, and executives were sliding into his DMs asking to steal some of his content magic. Now, he runs a ghostwriting agency helping CEOs and founders tell their stories online — a need, he says, that reflects the fact that social platforms are just as important a forum for communication today as traditional media for leaders.

• Good writing has to be memorable. The ingredients for something that sticks are specificity, people, and surprise.

• Anecdotes are powerful tools. The best narratives are built around concrete stories that become metaphors for what sets you apart. Ted spends a lot of time with people extracting these stories.

• CEO content is where public speaking was 30 years ago. Executives who write online and tell their own stories are setting the standard everyone else will eventually have to meet. Watch what Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and Jamie Dimon are doing.

Our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, below.

What did having both perspectives — running editorial coverage, then building the products that delivered it — teach you about storytelling?

When you’re thinking about storytelling, whether you’re a journalist, a novelist, or writing on social media, the first question has to be: is this memorable?

There are a few things that go into that. The most important, for me, is specificity. Bloomberg was very strong on this. When I first covered markets, you could never say, “It was a big day in the stock market.” You’d say it was the biggest one-day decline in 33 months. In 1990, that wasn’t standard practice in financial journalism, partly because most outlets didn’t have the tools to calculate it. Bloomberg reporters did, and it pushed them toward real precision.

Next, you need action, and you need people. I put a huge emphasis on writing about people. Think about how much you read online that is completely devoid of any human beings.

The last thing is surprise. You want something that makes the reader think: “I didn’t see that coming.”

You talk a lot about the importance of anecdotes. Can you say more about that?

Think about how you understand Elon Musk’s work ethic. You understand it because he used to sleep on the factory floor. That anecdote carries enormous weight. It’s not the same as saying, “He works hard.” It’s a specific, concrete image that tells you something about who he is.

Most people don’t recognize the significance of those moments in their own lives. They don’t see the world the way a writer does. What is a throwaway detail to them is, potentially, the whole story.

That connects to something I think about a lot: the ability to excavate those details and stories from someone. That feels like a skill that LLMs are still bad at.

Absolutely. The natural tendency of an LLM is to summarize and provide an overview. And what it leaves out, almost universally, is everything I want as a writer. It leaves out all the details.

There’s a great example. Josh Kushner, who runs Thrive Capital, told a story about being robbed at gunpoint in Guatemala when he was in college on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcast. They didn’t take his watch because he was wearing a cheap Swatch. Ever since then, he’s worn the same model watch. That evocative detail says something about how a formative experience shapes you for the rest of your life. But that story will not be in the LLM summary of that podcast.

Most people won’t surface those anecdotes on their own, because they don’t realize they’re significant. That’s the role of the writer — helping people find and tell their story by asking the right questions.

As you spent more time thinking about this, you developed a bigger thesis about what’s happening in communications. What is it?

For most of my career — the last 50 years, really — if you wanted to get your message out, you hired a PR firm and tried to get the Wall Street Journal to write about you, or you bought an advertisement. Earned media, paid media. Those were the options.

Legacy media has shrunk and moved behind paywalls. Getting quoted in the Journal still matters, but it’s harder to earn and reaches fewer people. Meanwhile, the demand for visibility kept growing.

At the same moment, distribution became free. Not cheaper: free. You used to pay Edelman to get you into the Journal. Now LinkedIn exists. The cost shifted entirely to content creation. You have to make something worth reading.

This phenomenon is less than 10 years old. And most companies, most CEOs, haven’t fully engaged with it. The people who are already doing it — tech founders, Silicon Valley venture capital, a handful of vocal executives — are very visible. But if you look at how many S&P 500 CEOs are actively creating content as a strategy, it’s almost none. They may have a handle, but they’re not in the game.

My term for this kind of person is a “writing-first practitioner,” someone who uses writing as their edge. But it’s a big ask to tell every CEO they need to become one.

I’d compare it to public speaking. Thirty years ago, CEOs were not regularly up on stages giving speeches. At some point, that became not just acceptable, but beneficial. Then, Steve Jobs made it a competitive advantage. His product demos changed what everyone expected from a CEO on stage. The people who rise to CEO today are disproportionately people who can command a room.

What I see happening now is that people who write and communicate effectively online have a disproportionate advantage, because they control their own narrative. They don’t need Edelman.

I want to be clear: when you give a big speech, you might have a speechwriter, you might get coaching and practice. Writing online is no different. You can have an editor, a communications team. But at the end of the day, your name is on it.

I look at what Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai have started doing on LinkedIn: handcrafted earnings recaps, written in their voice. These are not reposted press releases. They’re a masterclass in how a CEO should write for that context. Virtually no other CEOs do this.

How do you help the people you work with unlock this writing?

I ask a lot of questions, and they answer them — they tell me stories. Then we rank them. We pull out the strategically risky ones — there are great stories you don’t want to tell publicly — and we write the ones that are both compelling and useful.

I have clients I write for entirely, and I have clients I coach through writing themselves, because they want to develop the skill. For all of them, though, when you go through the process and see results — when someone writes something and gets a meeting, or an investor connection, or meaningful responses from people they respect — that’s what generates momentum. They start to understand why it’s worth doing.

My prediction is that in five to seven years, this is just something everyone does. Right now, most people look at it and think it’s optional. It’s not going to stay optional.

Other than those doing earnings posts you mentioned, what else are you watching as signals that this is becoming the norm?

The earnings call analogy is a good one. When I was a reporter in the nineties, CEOs were almost never on earnings calls because it was considered beneath them. At some point, that changed, and now the CEO not being on an earnings call is a problem. Communications teams put enormous work into preparing them: scripts, practice, message discipline.

I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen with content. If you don’t write, people will notice. If you write badly, that will also reflect on you. The standard is rising.

With video, I’d say the turning point was Mark Zuckerberg — and not the wakeboarding video. He started posting a Reel shot on an iPhone with every new product launch. No CNBC appearance, no press release. Just a Reel.

Then Jamie Dimon, who has written his annual letter for 25 years, did a video this year for the first time on LinkedIn. Casual shirt, talking directly to the camera. When Jamie Dimon and Mark Zuckerberg communicate that way, that’s what everyone’s going to do.

But I still see so many companies struggle with being too promotional on channels like LinkedIn.

It’s in their DNA. They can’t help it. And you have to be direct with them: promotional content is dead on arrival on social media. It doesn’t work. There are other channels for that — advertising, earned media — and those work the way they work for a reason. Social is a new channel with different rules.

You’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn, and that’s where you’ve found success, but what about other platforms?

LinkedIn is where I tell clients to start, because that’s where the professional audience is. But I try to be clear that this is not only about LinkedIn. It’s about creating visibility online. That could be X, Substack, Threads, Bluesky, or something that launches next year. The storytelling principles are consistent across all of them: write something memorable, be specific, write about people, and don’t be promotional. A good story is a good story on any platform.

What is changing is the dynamics of each platform, faster than most companies want to deal with. Long-form on X has exploded since January. Substack has added comments, and now it’s a place people actually hang out and have conversations, not just read. You have to stay nimble, and that’s genuinely hard for organizations that want to plan years ahead.

How does AI fit into your workflow as a ghostwriter?

The single biggest thing, honestly, is transcripts. Immediate, accurate transcripts of conversations. Before AI-powered transcription, you were recording on a device and typing everything out. That was brutal.

For ghostwriting specifically, if I’m trying to capture someone’s voice, I can search a transcript corpus for idiosyncratic expressions, phrases, and speech patterns and use those. AI hasn’t replaced writing the story, but it’s remarkable for capturing how someone actually talks. That’s what you want: for the writing to sound like them.

The other application is that if you work with someone extensively and accumulate many transcripts, you can ask questions of that whole body of material. What do they say a lot? What do they believe? What haven’t they talked about yet? You can interrogate the corpus in a way that just wasn’t possible before.

Thank you for reading! If you want more, read Ted’s writing on his LinkedIn and his blog. And if you’re not a subscriber yet, join me:

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If you’ve ever read about astrology in places like Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, or Refinery29, chances are you have come across Narayana Montúfar’s writing. Named one Vogue’s 13 astrologers to follow in 2021, she was senior astrologer for Astrology.com and Horoscope.com from 2011 to 2023 and has published two books. Her insights have reached millions — an achievement few writers can claim.

I’m fascinated by writers who make technical subjects feel personal, especially when writing for wide audiences. Narayana describes herself as a bridge between the celestial and the earthly — and in practice, that means translating the mathematical language of planetary cycles into something that helps people understand their own lives. That’s a skill that goes far beyond astrology, and her experiences have lessons for any communicator.

We talked about her path from Mexico City to California, translation as empowerment, and how personal writing has helped her understand herself better.

• Astrologers are translators. Astrology is technical! One of the reasons people shy away from the practice is that the complex and technical terms make them feel disempowered. In any field, good communicators and practitioners translate the hard stuff into something people can use.

• Writing is a window to figuring yourself out. The reflection behind a personal essay cracked open a chapter of Narayana’s life she hadn’t truly understood.

• Write the thing that doesn’t exist yet. Narayana couldn’t find a book on planetary cycles, one of the foundations of astrology, so she wrote one. If you’re looking for something that isn’t out there, that’s your signal.

How did you go from Mexico City to the US, from writing about music to writing about astrology?

Love brought me to San Francisco — my first husband. When I got there, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my career. I ended up landing an internship with the people doing California Home+Design and 7x7 magazine. That led me to the music industry — I love music, I go to shows all the time, and I have a record collection. I did some editorial work — I was at Spin for a while, covering the Latin American music scene here in San Francisco, interviewing musicians. When that fell through, I asked myself: Do you really want to continue in this industry? I saw a job looking for a bilingual editor for Horoscope.com. I decided I was going to get that job.

I found out later that they had already decided on another editor and that they interviewed me as a courtesy. But because I went in knowing I was going to get that job, I got it. That was 2011, and that’s what started my journey in astrology.

I spent years editing and translating content, slowly absorbing the subject. Then one day, I realized the company offered $1,000 a year for education, and most people didn’t use it. So I started going to school on the weekends to study astrology.

That decision changed my life. All of a sudden, this world opened up. It was like touching something I already knew. Everything made sense — my life, my childhood, my trauma. Everything clicked.

At that time, I was a managing editor. I’d climbed the ladder in corporate America, and it was good, but strange. I was always dealing with people who didn’t understand astrology. Developers, managers, suits. When I first started that job, the owner of the company didn’t even believe in astrology. There was constant pushback, but by the time I left, 13 years later, everybody knew their Big Three. Everybody could tell you, “I’m a Virgo Sun, Leo Moon.” The culture had shifted.

But I didn’t like where media was going. Everything was about SEO, about superficiality. So I decided to switch titles, to go from managing editor to senior astrologer. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was doing something that matters, that’s helping people. I felt alive.

Have you seen a broader change in people’s receptiveness to astrology?

I’ve seen people waking up: to their gifts, to their desires, to their powers. And I think it’s going to continue. We had to do a lot of work to unplug from what previous generations taught us, but today’s children don’t have to do as much work.

It’s amazing to see people questioning their lives. “Why am I doing this? Is this making me happy? Do I want to get married? Do I want to have children?” That’s part of my job — to help people understand themselves and their own conditions.

You’ve written for publications with millions of readers. When you sit down to write for that audience, how do you make something feel personal when it’s going out to everyone?

It was a learning curve. I’m a big nerd. Because I’d studied with very technical people, I was starting to write for other astrologers. And people would tell me, “Not everybody’s an astrologer. You have to translate it.”

Astrology is a language. People think it’s a predictive art, and yes, you can predict a lot of things, but it’s really about understanding how the cosmos works — the astral weather, I call it. When astrologers are writing, we’re looking at symbols. We’re reading the mathematical relationships between the planets. So we’re translators, really. We’re translating symbols into words.

Writing for lifestyle publications like Parade and Cosmopolitan really helped me develop that skill. I approach the planets as archetypes — it’s a little bit Jungian, even though I don’t consider myself a Jungian astrologer. I try to inspire people to see the planet within themselves.

A lot of people don’t like astrology because they feel like they’re giving their power away — and the problem is, we’ve had a lot of astrologers practicing that way. Someone has a Saturn transit, and the astrologer says, “Life is going to suck for the next two years.” That’s disempowering.

If you stay in technical language and don’t translate, people feel shut out of their own journey. So I try to be honest about what’s happening. If you’re going to have a Saturn transit for the next two years, you need to embody your inner Saturn. Saturn is the sage, the inner teacher, the great rewarder. Books get published during Saturn transits. People get married — or leave broken marriages. So, how are you going to prepare? How can you make the best of that storm?

When I’m writing a horoscope, I inspire reflection, and I inspire empowerment — through the archetypes.

That’s such a good lesson for anyone communicating anything. You’re not just speaking in one direction — you’re helping the reader take the wisdom you’re sharing and do something with it.

Exactly. And I tell people: whatever you read, whatever you see — look it up. Even what I say. Don’t take it as done. Fact-check it.

I always tell my clients: if there is one single moment, even a tiny one, where you feel disempowered by a spiritual practice, reconsider it. Your body knows. That’s the moment where spirituality gets used as a tool of control.

As a bilingual person, how do you navigate writing about astrology across two languages and cultures?

While I’ve written astrology in Spanish extensively in the past, these days I focus more on English since I’ve been living in California since 2007. But yes — Latinos have always been much more into astrology and the esoteric arts due to our deep cultural roots. In some form or another, we’ve been exposed to tarot, magic, astrology, shamanism. For us, it always made sense that the cosmic forces aren’t random and that there is a method to the celestial madness we live in.

When it comes to astrology going mainstream, American culture is the one that has shifted the most in the past decade, which has been amazing to watch. Overall, humans are reclaiming their connection to spirituality in a self-empowering way. And this doesn’t seem to be a trend — it’s a true rekindling of ancient knowledge.

You’ve also written two books — what made you feel like a book was the thing you needed to write?

In 2020, a friend and colleague said, “Somebody wants me to write a book, but I can’t. I’d like to recommend you.” I was competing with another astrologer who had a much bigger following, but they ended up giving it to me.

The process of giving birth to a book is something so special. It’s like a baby. Especially because the world is moving into reels and three-minute, five-second things, giving birth to something that long and deep is really meaningful.

I got fascinated with the process and decided I didn’t want to be a one-book author. The moon book was a collaboration with the publishing company — we settled on the subject together. But it's very different working with someone else on an idea versus having your own idea, which is what happened with my second book, Written in Your Stars, which just received the Indies Foreword Nomination for 2025's best book in Body, Mind, and Spirit.

One of the things I always struggled with was finding a book that talked about planetary cycles, which is one of the foundations of astrology. So I wrote the book I wished I’d had when I started studying astrology.

I enlisted the help of my husband, who’s an aerospace engineer, for the technical and astronomical parts. And I did all the art direction myself, because I care about that.

What does writing unlock for you as an astrologer?

Writing is something magical. The more I dig into spirituality, the more I see there’s a power in the pen.

You’re able to get off your chest so many things that you wouldn’t even be able to tap into otherwise. I’ll give you an example. An editor assigned me to write my Saturn Return story. Saturn Return is one of the most well-known concepts in astrology, that moment when you truly become an adult, around age 29. I had downplayed mine because I have a good relationship with Saturn.

But when I started going back into emails and photos to write that article, I ended up sobbing. Writing helped me realize how important that moment was. The article was ultimately called, “My Saturn Return Brought More Than Adulting; It Was About Starting a New Career and Leaving a Broken Marriage.” Because right before I got the Horoscope.com job, my first marriage was falling apart. Everything felt like it was falling apart, but it was because I was about to start the next thing.

Writing that article was a deeply personal exercise. It was an assignment, but it became so much more. That’s what writing does — it’s a window to figuring yourself out.

Thank you so much for reading! You can discover more about Narayana on her personal website. See you next week.

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Want to set a writer off on a tirade? Ask them about the death of reading. We love to moan about how smartphones and social media have made it impossible for us to digest anything longer than a few lines. For some, this regression is the bellwether of a civilizational crisis.

This is why I found non-fiction writer Inada Toyoshi’s latest book, The People Who Can No Longer Read (本を読めなくなった人たち), so refreshing. Inada has been a full-time author for over a decade — his livelihood depends on people paying him for his words — yet he approaches reading’s decline with curiosity and fairness, not dismissal.

The book is only available in Japanese for now, so I'm excited to introduce his thinking to a global audience. His conclusion: not reading is a rational adaptation to a world that prioritizes efficiency, where video is readily available, and text is expected to be free.

• Some smart people don’t read books. We need to put aside our assumption that people who don’t read are not intellectually capable — reading might not fit their lifestyle or the way they like to consume information.

• Reportage is an extremely valuable skill for writers in today’s age. How can you give readers information that’s not already on the internet somewhere?

• Writers and books must evolve. The publishing and media industries need to provide formats that fit the lifestyles and preferences of a modern audience, instead of complaining that their audience isn’t consuming the same old thing.

What was the motivation for this book and for tackling this theme?

There were several reasons, but the biggest one was that, as someone who makes a living selling writing, I felt acutely that the economic value of writing was declining. The internet is fundamentally a place where people read for free, so the habit of paying for writing has disappeared. So in one sense, I was holding a magnifying glass over my own wound.

On top of that, there’s the long-discussed decline of the publishing industry and the global shift toward video over text for getting information. I wanted to bring all of that together, including my own experience, into one book.

The book is called The People Who Can No Longer Read. How would you define this population of people?

When someone watches a five-minute video instead of reading a two-thousand-word article, they’re not being lazy — they’re being rational. That’s the phenomenon I needed a word for, so I coined “hi-doku” (非読). Japanese already has a neutral term for “not reading” (不読), but “hi-doku” carries a judgment: that reading itself has become an irrational act, something that feels pointless. People may not articulate it that way, but society is gradually moving in that direction.

This used to be a small group, but it’s been growing, starting with young people and spreading to working professionals. In response, the media is making more videos.

Within that shifting environment, people adapted — and in adapting, they lost the ability to read. They no longer needed to use that muscle. So “the people who can no longer read” includes people today who struggle with long texts, as well as middle-aged and older people who used to be able to read but gradually stopped as they consumed more internet content. It’s not that they lack the ability — they lost it as a consequence of fitting into society.

One of the things that sets the book apart is that you didn’t just rely on third-party surveys or data to assess this trend; you did group interviews with university students and young people. How did you conduct those?

It’s become a staple of my reportage writing. I start by approaching professors I know and asking them to introduce students.

I could have gone to a large lecture hall and asked for volunteers, but that’s not a good approach. The people who raise their hands tend to be the ones who are already engaged with media theory, so you get a skewed sample.

You might ask whether a written survey would be simpler, but this connects to the very theme of the book: most people can’t accurately express their ideas in writing. What they can do is talk. I press them — “What about this?” “Why do you think that?” — and draw things out through rapid back-and-forth. There’s information that only emerges through that kind of conversation.

As for why groups rather than one-on-one: some people simply won’t talk without others around. They get nervous alone, but when someone else in the group brings up a topic, it triggers something — “Oh, now that you mention it, I felt that way too.” Group discussion can surface things that don’t come out when someone is generating ideas solo.

One more crucial point: I never let the professor who introduced me sit in. If the professor is present, students worry about being evaluated and give model-student answers.

What did the group interviews show that didn’t show up in statistical data?

The biggest finding was that there are intellectually sharp kids who don’t read books. It’s a truth that readers are reluctant to accept — we assume that someone who doesn’t read can’t possibly be smart.

What I could only have learned through face-to-face interviews was that students with no reading habit were remarkably sharp in conversation. They gave answers that were right on target. Their communication skills were strong. Communication ability is arguably the most valued skill in business today, and I found it has very little to do with whether someone reads books.

There’s obviously a kind of intelligence you gain from books, but there’s also intelligence that comes from other sources. I wasn’t exactly devouring literary novels as a kid — I was consuming manga, anime, and games — and I developed a certain intelligence through those things that the older generation found hard to accept. But this has been said in every era. When cinema appeared, people probably said that watching movies makes you stupid.

As you said, the truth that people who don’t read can also be intellectual is a hard one for people to accept. But what about the actual quality of the content that is being read? Some people prefer novels, some prefer business books.

In the book, I distinguish between “readers” and “consumers.” Consumers are trying to extract information from books. They think in terms of cost-performance — I paid this much, so I should get this much information in return. Readers, on the other hand, find meaning in the act of reading itself. They read to keep their brain working.

It’s like weight training. What matters in training is the time you spend pushing your muscles. The longer you do it, the stronger you get.

To use food as an analogy, consumer-style reading is like eating carbohydrates — you eat it, and five minutes later, you can move. Reader-style reading is more like eating slow-absorbing food — meat, cheese, protein. You don’t get energy from it immediately. It takes time and effort — combined with something like exercise — to build your body. I’m not saying one is better than the other. But if you want reading that stays with you in the long run, you need the slow kind. Otherwise, it won’t truly nourish you.

How does the work of being a writer change in the context of a world where reading has become irrational for some people?

Writers are in a similar position to craftspeople who lost livelihoods during the Industrial Revolution. Some people appreciate the quality of what a craftsperson makes, but their numbers keep shrinking. More people don’t care whether something was written by AI or a human, and writing itself is losing value.

To survive, therefore, requires creating writing born of a powerful personal impulse — because I’m this particular person, I had no choice but to write it. Nobody will pay for something that’s merely well-written or well-organized.

We cannot change the fact that people don’t want to pay for text, so writers need to write something that can’t be read for free. Everything that generative AI can assemble from information across the internet is effectively free. Anything you can produce sitting at a desk is meaningless.

What’s left is the kind of thing you get from group interviews — listening to real people in person. Information that doesn’t come up in a search. Everything a famous person has ever said is already on the internet, so celebrity quotes have no value — unless you’re asking them something they’ve never been asked before. But when, say, a grandmother in rural Aomori says something remarkable, I’m the only one who heard it. That’s where the value is.

So reporting skills become enormously important. This is good news for me as a journalist!

Exactly. Pounding the pavement and the ability to draw things out of people. Only writers with exceptional communication skills will survive.

In the old days, a writer could be an introvert and make it. But now you have to behave like an extrovert to survive as a writer. Show up in person, be charming, and engage with people on social media.

Speaking of social media, people in publishing and traditional media tend to look down on platforms like TikTok and X. But what you’re saying is the opposite: to succeed as a writer, you need to make content that’s at least as engaging as what’s on TikTok.

Whether the content on social media is trashy or sophisticated is a separate question. But the presentation techniques are something everyone should study. The editing is so well-crafted that viewers are never bored. In fact, TV editing is already converging toward YouTube and TikTok-style editing.

The same applies to writing. Old-guard writers look down on internet-style writing that puts conclusions up front. But a piece that meanders endlessly before getting to the point no longer fits the times. It’s like opera or old-style musicals that ran for five hours. That doesn’t match modern lifestyles. Even movies — sitting in the same seat for two or three hours is increasingly at odds with how people live, and yet the format hasn’t changed in decades.

There must be ways to preserve the density and depth of the content while changing the presentation. The physical format of books hasn’t changed either — the same size, the same 200 to 300 pages. But who says that’s right? Maybe a much larger format would be better, or maybe a much smaller one. Nobody decided how many characters should be on a page. The industry has gone decades without experimenting, and I think it’s been left behind.

I’m taking a fiction writing course, and we’re told that you have to hook the reader from page one. If someone picks up the book at a bookstore and looks at the first page, how can I make sure they walk out having bought it?

I was conscious of this with my book, too — the preface is about ten pages long, and I frontloaded all the most interesting material there. You can read just those few pages and get a sense of what the whole book is about.

The old approach to a preface was to tease — “Something interesting is about to begin!” But that’s not enough anymore. I’ve been doing this intentionally, and the result is that people read the opening and think “This looks interesting.” I think that makes for writing that fits the current era. Writers need to do this, and publishers need to as well.

Thank you so much for reading! I’ll be taking a break next week for Easter and will be back in early April. As always, any comments are appreciated.

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The tech gender gap is already showing up in AI tools, which women are adopting at a 25% lower rate than men. Around me, I see women who are both intimidated by “technical” tools and unable to find the time to get started. Playing around with ChatGPT gets pushed down on the to-do list — then falls off entirely.

Nina Willdorf and Shoshana Berger want to turn that on its head. Nina is a former travel magazine editor turned brand strategist who has worked at Coinbase and Airbnb; Shoshana was also an editor who has had senior roles at IDEO and Notion. Their partnership started at a mutual friend’s birthday party, where they got chatting about AI and discovered they had the same boyfriend: Claude. (Who also happens to be my boyfriend, but I will not air my jealousy here.)

Now they’re using a classic gendered trope — the Tupperware party — to gather women 40-plus around wine and cheese and get them playing with AI. They call it the Aged Intelligence Society.

We chatted about why women should be natural AI power users, what happens when you show someone AI in person for the first time, and what kind of writing actually matters right now.

• Use AI to deal with the annoying life admin. Do the things you like in life — writing, painting, coaching — and let AI deal with the admin.

• Don’t prompt, volley. The biggest mistake people make is treating AI like a search engine: one shot, one answer. You have to have a back and forth.

• Embrace the wabi sabi. AI gives everyone access to the same polished language. What breaks through now is beautiful roughness, writing that shows lived perspective, and a point of view only you can have.

Our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, below.

What is the Aged Intelligence Society?

Nina: We were both obsessed with AI, so we decided to gather some women and do some events around a dinner table. It took us about three events to figure out what the arc would be.

One, how do we create a feeling of “I’m with my people” with people you don’t know? So we really curate who’s at the table. In many ways, it’s an editorial exercise — what are the characters that make for a good story?

And then, what are the beats of an evening? How do we leave people walking away with a feeling, as well as inspiration and information? There’s usually someone who comes in as a skeptic: “I love to write, and I don’t want AI to write my emails.” Then by the end, they’re like, “It can do that? I had no idea.” That little spark in the eye — it’s incredibly gratifying.

Shoshana: I would describe it as two women who have long been in tech circles and understand what it looks like when women are excluded from the conversation.

Midlife is a tricky time to navigate. Women are dealing with relationship changes, career pivots; they still have dependent kids and are also starting to care for increasingly fragile parents or relatives. There’s a big administrative load. We want women to understand that you can put down some of that load if you use these tools.

I don’t think people understand that part of AI. The conversation has been around productivity and optimization — how can we do more, how can we replace basic skills? But it’s the opposite. It’s about how we do more in less time so that we have time to do the things we love, rise to a higher altitude, and do purpose-driven work.

We are taking a tool that is known to be a solitary, one-to-one interaction and making it a group activity — something we can all have conversations about, laugh about, kick the tires on, and think about how, as women, we can shape its use.

Nina: There was a big unlock we had: especially as women 40-plus, 45-plus, who wear so many hats — it’s exhausting. You’re the CEO of your life, but also the CIO, the CMO, the CRO. How many of those do you want to be, and what would you like to outsource?

That is a choice we get to make now that we didn’t have a few years ago. You can confidently outsource certain things. So if you’re a writer, write. Do your craft. And outsource the invoicing, the scheduling, all the other things to AI. We don’t see AI as replacing the magic skills we’ve built. It’s creating more space for that.

So in contrast to the fear and FOMO-driven narrative around AI, you’re telling a very different story — one at the micro level, about what’s really useful for women, every day.

Nina: The thing we’re constantly thinking about is: where does the magic of the human blend with and add to the magic of the machine? We have so many years of experience living in the world, and we bring that to the machine.

For example, we were brainstorming about a trip Shoshana is taking with her daughter. I’m a former travel magazine editor, so I thought about the places in New York that are my absolute favorites for sample sale shopping. This is something you cannot find online.

She took that into Notion AI, and it turned it into a detailed itinerary and walking tour that also flagged when some of the places would be closed. It took it one level further, but the inputs would not have been there without the human.

Shoshana: Exactly. The food recommendations came from a friend who’s a food writer. And then I had the AI look up the best times to go.

What about in your professional lives — how has AI shown up there?

Shoshana: When I was starting out as a consultant, Nina kindly shared a lot of her paperwork with me — how she deals with proposals and all of that. I used ChatGPT to create proposals and tiers of engagement for my initial clients. I had a “70% there” proposal done. I fed it into Claude and said, “Make this an easy yes.” Claude came back and said, “You’re not charging enough money.”

I was like, “Wait—I’m not charging enough?” Classic female problem, right? I asked, “How should I adjust this?” And it said, “Start by doubling your rates.” I took the advice and sent it to the client. They did not bat an eye.

What’s that lightbulb moment for women who come to your gatherings?

Nina: We have a moment we call “library time,” where we give people 10 minutes alone to mess around after we’ve given some general guidance. We prance around the table and help people.

Usually, they’ll type a prompt and be disappointed. For example, one person was dealing with a friend who had gotten very politicized. Her other friends had abandoned this friend, but she didn’t want to, and she was trying to figure out how to navigate the relationship. After getting feedback from Claude that was very surface-level, she said, “See, it doesn’t work.”

I asked her why the feedback didn’t feel right, and typed everything she said into Claude. You have to tell it, “This isn’t resonating for me. I know all of this already.” Talk to it like you would talk to a person — except you don’t need to worry about its feelings.

What we do is demonstrate what Shoshana originally called a “volley.” It’s a tennis match, not a one-shot thing.

That reminds me of learning in business school that women are actually better negotiators because of how we’re socialized to look for outcomes that benefit all stakeholders — the same back-and-forth, dialoguing skills apply here.

Nina: And there's a through-line to voice here. In those moments at the table, the women are saying things out loud to me, and I'm typing exactly what they say into the context window. Your natural voice — the way you talk — is going to get you the best results. You don't need to write the perfect prompt.

Shoshana: I’ve learned so much from Nina’s chatting style, because she really does chat with her AIs like she’s chatting with a friend, where you pull no punches. She’s like, “No, you got this totally wrong. What’s wrong with you?”

Nina: I act like I’m from 1940s Brooklyn.

You both have children — how do you see AI impacting them?

Shoshana: We have a lot of the same reservations that other people have about how kids are adopting the tool. I had a conversation last night with my kids about the best way to learn something: read a book or use AI.

My kids open up AI and say, “Tell me everything about the American Revolution for my test tomorrow.” They get a response in two minutes, and think, “If I had to read the whole book, it would take me days, if not weeks.”

I told them that there is something about the interaction of reading words on a page and appreciating the way an author has put the story together, the discursive way in which the information is revealed to you, that is rich and dimensional in a way that AI will never be. If you don’t read books and take in the stories that way, you will have a very flat and shallow appreciation of things.

They heard me, but I had to lay it on thick. They don’t necessarily want to be history majors, so they think, “Why wouldn’t I just use this shortcut?”

I told them, “If you ever want to get a job, you must be able to write and tell stories and communicate.” Scott Galloway says this all the time. You have to be able to show up without the AI in life. That takes work, and you learn how to do it by reading and practicing.

Nina: We hear from women in our community that some teenagers actually don’t like AI. My younger one, for example, is anti.

But I like to show them different things. For example, with college applications, my daughter and I were brainstorming in the car, and she was coming up with super disjointed ideas for what she might write about. I said, “Take all of those notes, dump them into Claude, and say, ‘What are some potential angles I could take? What questions could you ask me to tease out some of these ideas?’”

She did all the writing and used the AI as a thought partner — almost taking the place of those editors we had growing up who pushed us as thinkers.

Let’s come to words and effective stories. There are so many stories being blasted at us right now. How do you tell an effective story? Can you break through?

Nina: Our instinct comes back to detective work — figuring out what is fundamentally human and resonant, and what gets people to feel something. That is the job of a writer, an editor, a marketer, a communicator. You have to get underneath people’s motivations and understand how you can connect them with what they’re trying to achieve.

It’s awesome that everybody has access to knowledge and information, but it’s creating a flattening. People are getting increasingly annoyed by it.

We don’t write our newsletter using AI. We sit side by side with espresso and our laptops. Shoshana is better at writing at night, I’m better in the morning, and we pass things back and forth.

One of the things Shoshana unlocked yesterday that I think is so apt is this notion of wabi sabi — this beautiful roughness. Right now, in writing and communicating, what you want to show is that you’ve thought about it. Writing is just an embodiment of thinking. When people get annoyed with AI writing, they’re saying: “Don’t be lazy. Put some thought into it, because otherwise you’re wasting my time.” If you don’t demonstrate that you’ve thought about it, it’s an insult.

Shoshana, what would you add?

Shoshana: You know that phrase, “You can’t write this shit”? It’s true. You cannot write this shit — what it feels like to be a human in the world. It is wonky and rough-edged and full of broken things that none of us know how to deal with. AI does not have that experience, no matter how many times it reads the internet and no matter how much we feed it. It does not have embodied experience. And that’s where the most delightful stories come from.

There is something about lived experience that is very hard for AI to approximate. Especially for people who have been working at the craft of writing for a long time, you understand that it’s all about that frictive point of view. It’s not linear. It’s surprising. It works on pattern recognition, but unlike AI, it’s the pattern recognition of someone’s subjective point of view. Nobody sees like you see.

Nina: You know how everyone and their mother wants to be a thought leader? In order to be a thought leader, you have to have a thought. And the uncomfortable truth is that 99% of people do not.

Words indicate a perspective. The perspective that gives you a feeling. Sometimes it makes you uncomfortable, sometimes it gives you pause, sometimes it just makes your brain click on in a different, interesting way. That is what writing can do.

I think we’re all getting annoyed because there’s so much out there that doesn’t make you feel anything. So the value of real writing is just going to increase. English majors, unite.

If you want to learn more about Nina and Shoshana’s work, check out their newsletter.

Have you ever vibe coded with wine? How have you taught someone else about AI? Reply and tell me about it.

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I helped Bek Ventures’ investment team surface a bunch of thinking about their work, and I often come back to the framework they use when a founder comes with an issue. One of the first questions the team asks is, “Is this a communications issue?”

It sounds simple, but I’d go so far as to say the majority of problems in organizations stem from a failure of communications—strategy not clear, expectations not spelled out, or information not shared between teams. The effect of poorly written emails and Slack messages can reverberate. This is why people who are great at internal comms fascinate me.

This week, I spoke to Dublin-based internal communications expert Joanna Parsons. She led crisis comms for Ireland’s national police force during the pandemic and developed an internal comms strategy for employees across 25 countries at Teamwork. She now runs her own consultancy and a membership community for internal comms professionals.

• Communication doesn’t equal dissemination. Sending something out is not enough. You have to understand your audience and have a clear objective to get employees to behave the way you want.

• AI is more than a content marketer. Use it to stress-test your ideas, role-play as your leaders, turn data into stories for your boss, and set measurable goals.

• Curiosity is the difference between someone tactical and someone strategic. If you’re not asking questions, you’re delivering purely what stakeholders tell you. Ask questions, and you can tap into what they really need.

Walk me through your career—how did you get into internal communications?

I didn’t even know internal comms was a thing until I fell into it. It’s the kind of profession many people fall into and then quickly fall in love with it—that’s certainly what happened to me. My background is in sociology, which turned out to be the best possible foundation for this work, even if I didn’t realise it at the time. Sociology is fundamentally about understanding how people behave in groups, how power operates, how narratives form. That academic background has been very helpful to me in the world of internal comms.

What’s your definition of internal comms, and what does it cover?

Internal comms is kind of the glue that holds a company together. If a company can communicate well and develop a shared understanding of what matters, then this can really help the company succeed. We’ve probably all worked somewhere that had crap communication, and it can be a huge problem in companies to the point where people quit, projects fail, and money is wasted.

What does good internal communications look like? What do companies get wrong about it?

Companies often assume that if we send something out, then the communication is done. Box ticked. But of course, communication does not equal dissemination. Communication requires audience understanding and action. So we need to be thinking about who our audience is, what we need them to do, what understanding they already have on this topic, whether they are likely to resist and why, and what we need to communicate in order to drive the desired behaviour change.

There’s a lot of good, deep thinking and planning that goes into comms, far beyond “just send it out”. Good comms starts with a clear objective and links to business priorities, not with tactics or tasks.

What are the attributes of good writing in internal comms?

I’m not sure there’s one clean answer here because your writing will always be different depending on the audience you’re targeting. It’s easy to say “you should always write like XYZ” or “best practice is ABC,” but it’s nuanced and subjective in reality.

Some audiences will appreciate brevity, others want more depth and context. Some audiences won’t tolerate any acronyms, and others may think you’re dumbing it down without using their familiar acronyms. So again, it’s always about knowing your audience and thinking about how to communicate effectively with them.

How do you use AI, and how do you advise internal comms professionals to use AI?

Use it as a sparring partner or a thinking partner, get it to review your ideas and point out holes in your concepts. Get it to role-play as your leaders or members of your target audience. Use it to help set measurable objectives, annual goals, or reporting dashboards. Use it to turn your data into stories targeted at your boss or your leaders. It’s a whole world of possibilities, and I encourage everyone to experiment with it.

What skills do you think internal comms professionals need in the future?

Curiosity is the superpower I think all effective internal comms pros need to master. Ask questions, then ask some more. Observe deeply and get curious about what’s really happening and what the actual business need is. This helps you move beyond operating as a pair of hands and into the strategic space. Asking questions will help you shift from delivering what stakeholders want (“I want a poster”) to understanding what stakeholders really need (“I need employees to stop doing X and to do Y instead”).

Indulging your curiosity will make you more valuable and impactful in the business, and anyone can do it. You don’t need a budget, you don’t need to take a course, you just need a bit of guts to be the one in the meeting to say, “What problem are we trying to solve?” or “Can we clarify our objective here?”

Joanna's point that communication isn't dissemination got me thinking about how important writing is in getting the right message across. I think obsessively about how I’m writing for things as small as Slack messages, because it’s in those little interactions that information gets lost or our intention doesn’t come across. Here’s what I’ve been reading to write better recently:

• Research has shown that articles that counter reader assumptions are seen as more interesting and hold attention; Joanna explains how to harness this in writing in the workplace.

• Former Facebook exec Molly Graham (most famous for the “give away your Legos” framework) believes the most counterintuitive thing needed to scale past 50 employees is communications. Love this: “Always craft your comms for the person who just started this week.”

• Entrepreneur Wes Kao lists the words to delete to make you sound more positive, authoritative, and warmer. Cannot agree more with her advice to delete “just”—I am hacking this word out of my messages to colleagues all the time.

• Software engineering leader and writer Will Larson talks about Barbara Minto’s The Pyramid Principle as a path to clear business writing. (Fun fact: I met Barb at a networking event in London, and she chided me both for not being married and for living in Shoreditch.)

✨ One more thing

This week, I published a piece in Every about it’s more important to show true expertise as AI enables more automation. But how do you demonstrate that expertise? One answer is portfolios—think what creative professionals have always had, but for knowledge workers. Given the amount of feedback, the piece has struck a chord. Wonder what my readers think…Reply and let me know.

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Getting press coverage used to be one of the more straightforward parts of working in communications. As a journalist writing about startups, I saw it from the other side—companies pitched, we wrote, and everyone was happy. Now, newsrooms have tight budgets and and tight agendas. Brands are choosing to tell their stories themselves—with a little help from AI. The old playbook is dead.

So what comes next? This week’s guest, Kim Oguilve—a marketer and comms professional with a decade of experience in retail, beauty, tech, and energy—has some ideas. She is currently head of marketing and communications at Synergi, a Finnish energy startup.

Kim believes earned media is much bigger than press coverage. She thinks if you’re an early-stage company, your messaging should change often. If it doesn't, you're not learning fast enough. And she makes a case for humanness over speed and staying calm when change accelerates.

• Good comms writing is egoless. The output is never just yours—it's the result of input from many people.

• AI can make you a better writer. Don't feel shame about it. If it helps you communicate more clearly for your audience, use it.

• Earned media is bigger than press coverage. It’s everything other people say about you. Now, audiences are migrating to smaller, trusted communities.

• Your comms team has a sixth sense. Let them use it. They are tuned in to every stakeholder in the company, and can see a crisis before you do.

How did you get into comms and marketing?

My dad was a marketing, economics and business professor in Costa Rica, so I grew up with a lot of marketing talk, but from the academic, theoretical perspective.

When I moved to Finland, I was exposed to applied marketing and comms for the first time through internships as part of my studies and then when I started working at startups.

It’s also connected to my passions as a teenager. I loved writing—writing lyrics, specifically, because I was very into music. I loved coming up with sentences that worked nicely together and had a nice sound to them.

Do you think you have to be a good writer to be a comms person?

When you study marketing or comms, nobody actually teaches you to write. That skill comes through practice, through making mistakes, through learning from more senior people in the workplace. You don’t need to be a Nobel Prize winner, but you have to be decent. You also need strong judgment about what makes good writing in a business context, how you interpret information for different audiences and how you make it easy to understand for them.

Another important aspect: humbleness. Even the best writers get edited.

It’s especially true in communications where the output isn’t just your output; it’s the result of input from so many different people.

Exactly. You have to take your ego out of it. My work is not about having my own personality or my own way of doing things. It’s about integrating input from different functions and people on the team and making sense of it all. That’s very different from, say, fiction writing, where it’s more about your personal vision.

I love getting feedback on my work, because I feel like it’s not for me—it’s for everyone else.

Let’s talk about the difference between marketing and comms, because they’re often treated as one function.

Traditionally, marketing is more about product and selling, and comms is more about positioning your company and building its reputation. If marketing is about the “what,” then comms is about the “feeling.” Of course, you can still add “feeling” to the “what” to show differentiation.

The reason we see these two functions coming together is simply about consistency. Why have teams sitting in silos when you can orchestrate a campaign that leverages all the different marketing and communication channels at your disposal and delivers one consistent message?

You’ve always worked in multicultural environments—Finnish companies, international companies. You speak three languages. How does that impact how you think about comms?

I always want to dig a little deeper. When you have to craft messages for different audiences, it’s important to recognize that there might be biases in how you’re approaching something. That international experience has taught me to question whether what I’m crafting has the right values behind it.

Working internationally also teaches you to change contexts and learn different practices. Take media relations, for example. Building relationships with the press in Finland versus Mexico, the US, or Japan—they’re all different. Press releases are different across all these markets.

How does AI help you specifically with writing and crafting communications?

Quite a lot. It helps me make texts flow better. I used to feel a bit of shame about that, because we work in comms, we’re supposed to be good at writing. But I heard a journalist say recently: you should use AI, because if it’s going to help you communicate things better, why not? Why would you restrain yourself from using something that helps you do something better for your audience? It’s the same way an author gets their book edited by an editor.

Let’s talk about the startup side of things. What do startups or fast-growing companies get wrong about messaging and positioning?

Startup messaging and positioning is supposed to change frequently and should always be questioned and validated. If it doesn’t, it means you’re not learning enough about your audience and how your product is finding its fit in the market.

At Synergi, we’ve changed our messaging many times. It usually changes based on what we learn at events from our ideal customer profile. When people come to our stand, I’ll ask them: “What brought you here? Is there something in the booth that caught your attention?” Then they’ll mention a specific word, which confirms what we thought would resonate is resonate. Or sometimes it isn’t, and we adjust.

Have you seen this play out in your own career?

I joined Synergi as the first in-house marketing person, and I’ve learned that I can use journalist responses to improve future pitches, fine-tune the process, and analyze which successful pitches turned into coverage. At Synergi, PR has been our number one user acquisition channel in Finland. Nothing else has come close. But we’ve also learned the shortcomings of relying on it.

Like the fact that getting media coverage is so much harder now than when we started in tech! And audiences are overwhelmed with content. How are you navigating that?

Synergi has existed for three years. At the beginning, it was easy because we were doing something novel. We had credibility because we were showing the numbers. But within the past year, it’s gotten a lot harder. Newsrooms have stricter topic agendas. They’re becoming pickier about featuring the same companies over and over. If you’re a small company, journalists may not want to give you as much space compared to companies that bring in more readers.

So now, instead of pitching Synergi specifically, I have to think on a larger scale—show big changes in the world, bring data points from other companies to show there’s real traction and change in the industry.

On the audience side, people are moving toward small creators. As mistrust in mainstream media grows, there’s a natural shift towards safe spaces where you know the person, you’ve been following them for a while, and you trust them. Brands who thrive amid these changes will embrace authenticity and getting into smaller, more curated communities.

What does that mean for credibility? Traditional media coverage was a mark of credibility. Do those smaller communities provide that?

I don’t think media outlets will disappear or lose credibility entirely. It’s more about diversifying your comms and marketing strategy and not relying on third-party coverage as the main thing.

Earned media is not just getting featured in the press. It’s about everything other people are saying about you—earning the right to be discussed publicly.

What else has changed about your job as a comms and marketing person over the course of your career?

The speed of change. Sometimes a little unbearable! How do you adapt and handle everything? There’s also more risk. There is more to lose for brands and there’s more to learn.

But I’ve worked in companies where I’ve had to build from zero with a tight budget and figure things out amid constant uncertainty and volatility. I think people with startup experience are in a really good place to tackle work life in the future, because of the skills that will be required: resilience, flexibility, and the ability to contextualize for many different situations.

What skill do you think is underrated in comms?

One skill I think is quite underrated in the comms world is creativity. And I don’t mean creativity in the sense of making a flashy campaign. I mean using creativity to navigate complexity. How do you problem-solve when you have XYZ restrictions?

Also, creativity in the sense of doing something you haven’t been doing before, because that’s how brands can continue to get noticed— by trying to do the unexpected. That’s going to be a challenge for corporates that have a lot to lose. But at some point, you need to take risks.

How have you been creative about problem-solving at Synergi?

In our case, creativity means asking: how can we take small bets and test doing things differently? For example, right now we’re selling electricity contracts for other companies under the Synergi brand and trying to validate whether this is an interesting growth model. We need to figure out the best way to position the brand in this situation—If we’re more present, does that help us sell more?

Are there any other skills comms people need?

I think the most important qualities are learning ability, proactivity, and curiosity—the drive to explore new technologies and take on future challenges. Ultimately, thriving in the future will be about your ability to humanize a brand, to keep it relevant and authentic for your audiences, while navigating global complexity in a calm, thoughtful and reflective way. These are all critical strengths for future comms teams because they translate into the qualities that will set brands apart and drive their success.

There is so much AI-generated content that you need to differentiate at all levels so future comms people will need to bring human voices forward. At the same time, they will need a calm mindset.

I like the word “reflective.” When everything seems to be falling down, comms people need to be the ones who force everyone to take a step back and think for a minute.

Not everyone necessarily learns crisis preparedness in school. But since things are changing so rapidly and the world is getting more complex, comms people need to prepare for when things go wrong. Because they will. You can’t avoid a crisis, especially at bigger companies that operate in many different markets and are making decisions tied to what’s happening politically. Everything is so connected. Comms people have to be more aware of everything happening in the world and how it affects their companies.

It goes back to being the voice of reason in that moment.

Exactly. And I wish that leaders would trust their comms people more. We’re really tuned into everything that’s happening in the world. I see so many crises happening and think: I’m sure their comms team could see this coming from miles away. So why did it happen?

We have to work with pretty much every single stakeholder in the company, including external ones. We have this sixth sense about what is going to happen next. So, listen to your comms team before it’s too late!

👩🏻‍💻Kim’s research on media relations

Kim’s master’s thesis, published last year, tackles a gap she noticed in her own career: the PR industry sells media relations as a tool for brand awareness and credibility, but that’s not how early-stage startup founders think.

“What founders want to hear in the early stages is how something impacts the growth of the company,” she says.

Her thesis repositions media relations as a validation tool. Instead of coverage being the end goal, the process itself becomes valuable: how journalists respond to your pitch, which parts of your story they choose to feature, how many customers coverage actually drives.

“Through that exercise of validation, you learn how to leverage media relations as a tool for growth in the future.”

Early-stage startups should treat media relations as an experiment that helps them build better with each iteration.

📖 Read the full thesis

Thank you for reading! How has the playbook changed in your career or specialism? How have you responded? Message me on LinkedIn or reply to this email.

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Wikipedia. Your teachers barred you from citing it. But now it’s one of the frequently cited sources by LLMs. Which means if you work in comms or marketing, you will inevitably be asked to conjure up a Wikipedia page. I usually answer, “Commit a heinous crime today—then you can have one tomorrow!”

Most people assume it’s a piece of cake to insert themselves in its digital pages. What they don’t know is that its 66 million articles (spanning roughly 300 languages) are maintained by volunteers who check content against strict standards. Nothing stays that does not have reliable sources to back it up. Getting in is harder than finding unicorn poo—to borrow the words of my esteemed guest this week.

James Lawrie is a Wikipedia editor and page creator who makes a living creating entries for clients who meet a very high bar. In one of the most hilarious conversations I’ve had for this newsletter, we chatted about paid editing on the encyclopedia, the art of boring writing, and his proudest Wiki moment.

• Don’t try to advertise on Wikipedia. James says his first job with most clients is convincing them that posting promotional content disguised as encyclopedia entries will backfire.

• The best Wikipedia writing is invisible: bland, meditative, encyclopedic prose designed to serve the platform’s mission.

Our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, below.

How did you get into the Wikipedia business?

Completely by accident. I was doing my MA in creative writing, and I always thought my writing would go down the fiction route. I took creative nonfiction as my secondary subject and got really into the research aspect of writing. I enjoyed doing deep dives, rooting through archives, information, documents—getting to the core of a subject.

In 2018, I started taking copywriting jobs on Upwork. Most of them were awful.

What’s the worst one you had to do?

My first Wikipedia gig—it was $30. It was for a guy from Newcastle who had tried to make his own Wikipedia page, but it had been nominated for deletion, and he brought me in to fix it.

I did have some experience with Wikipedia because I was editing in areas that interested me—music and mountain biking—but no paid editing experience. I went in there and gave it my all. And of course, the page got deleted.

He gave me five-star feedback anyway because he saw I’d given it my all. The next day I had an inquiry: “I see you do Wikipedia stuff?” And I thought, ‘Sure, why not?’ Gradually I started to get better.

Then in June or July 2018, I got an email from the Rhodes Trust—the people who run the Rhodes Scholarship. This was in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall scandal.

Did you take the job?

I had no idea what the Rhodes Scholarship was. Who Cecil Rhodes was. I’m just a hillbilly from Shropshire, right? So I go down to Oxford to pitch to them. And I got the project.

That was my first major client, and it was a baptism of fire. I couldn’t fake it anymore. I threw myself into it, learned the ropes, learned how to edit a Wikipedia entry in a way that was low-impact, that didn’t give the game away. It took off from there.

How many clients do you work with in a month?

Five or six? It all depends. I’m very picky about who I take on. I get a lot of inquiries, but only about 2% of inquiries are viable. Viable clients are as rare as unicorn poo.

This is exactly what I try and explain to companies! It’s really hard to get on Wikipedia. Could you explain what you need to get a Wikipedia page?

Most people who come to me haven’t invested in a PR campaign, or if they have, the press hasn’t been interested in them. And they think I can somehow make them famous by typing them onto Wikipedia. It’s just wishful thinking.

If you’re doing a PR campaign, you’re probably going to want to spend about ten years on that campaign, getting featured in places like Sifted, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times. You need to build up independent secondary sources, because a Wikipedia entry is a tertiary source—it’s one step along in the food chain. A lot of people come to me thinking that they can take the Wikipedia shortcut to fame, and most of them end up disappointed.

What kind of clients do you work with—businesses, individuals?

Just about every sort of business. Universities, overfunded tech startups—though that line of work has pretty much dried up. Nowadays, a lot of the businesses are quite established. They’ve been around for 30 or 40 years. A lot of them are pretty boring, but they have somehow managed to get themselves featured in The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, or The Guardian and build up the press they need to make an interesting encyclopedia entry.

What do those businesses want to get out of having a Wikipedia article?

They want to post content on Wikipedia that looks like it’s been posted by the public, that looks organic, like it’s part of the encyclopedia’s ecosystem.

My first job is to convince them that that’s really not in their best interests. Native advertising—using Wikipedia or Reddit or any user-generated platform for advertising—it’s going to make you look bad. My role is basically to save my clients from themselves.

This is often the role of someone in comms, a field I’ve worked in, too. A bit like that meme of the soldier protecting the sleeping child...

I make it very clear: I cannot cite your website, your press releases or your boilerplate. We even have to be pretty careful when we’re citing interviews—even if it’s published via a reliable source.

I come up with something that uses their secondary source material and resembles an encyclopedia entry. I’ll share that with the client on Google Docs. Then the client will then have a narcissistic meltdown.

Yep. We have all been there.

When people see their whole career condensed down to 200 words on a blank page, their brains can’t handle it. They’ll leave a load of abuse in the comments, and then we’ll have a good fight. We’ll go back and forth for several months: “Can we cite this website? Can we cite this press release?”

The worst is when they say, “Well, our rivals’ Wikipedia page says this.” And I’m like, “Well, they have completely different sources. They might have been around for 30 years longer.”

There’s usually a lot of conflict involved with the client. But eventually, they capitulate. They just want the Wikipedia page. They realize that a new page creation is all about just creating a page that A) shows the subject is notable via reliable secondary sources, and B) complies with Wikipedia’s content policies, guidelines, and manual of style.

Then once that’s done, I code the page in Wikitext and upload it to Wikipedia from an account with new page creation rights. I never submit my drafts through the slush pile or the articles-for-creation process.

Interesting! When I did this process once, we used an agency that told us the article would have to be submitted to a slush pile that the Wikipedia editors would review before it was published. Is there a difference between disclosed and undisclosed paid editing?

A bit of Wikipedia history. The site begins in 2001, grows in popularity. Round about 2006, 2007, Wikipedia comes onto the radar of PR. The most infamous case was Bell Pottinger—they got busted editing Wikipedia pages of politicians and things. That’s when Wikipedia realized that paid editing was a thing.

One public relations professionals inside Wikipedia’s community, a gentleman by the name of William Beutler, held a conference with a few big shots from the PR industry and a handful of people in the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia’s broader community wasn’t consulted—that’s important to keep in mind.

They decided that if you’re going to do paid editing on Wikipedia, you shouldn’t edit your client’s page directly unless you’re just making minor edits. Instead, you should put in edit requests via the talk page. And if you’re creating a new page from scratch, you should create it in draft mode and submit it via the articles-for-creation process.

What’s the problem with this approach?

That works great for the white-hat paid editors [editors who disclose their conflict of interest and submit proposed changes for review by volunteer editors], because they charge by the hour. And because they’ve got this agreement with Wikipedia, they’re like, “We’re the legitimate ones.”

I’ve tried white-hat editing, and I found that when you put in your edit request on behalf of the client, or you submit your page to the slush pile, because most of Wikipedia’s community is opposed to paid editing—very anti-business—they’re not going to help you. Why would a volunteer take time out of their day to implement edit requests or clean up a page that somebody else is being paid to do?

What about the style of editing you do? You directly edit, correct?

There is another school of thought in paid editing that basically says that paid editing, if done properly, should be invisible.

If you went on Wikipedia now, you would not be able to spot my work. I write in a bland, encyclopedic style. If it sounds boring, then that means I’m doing my job properly. I have a creative writing background, but what I do is the opposite of creative writing. I have never received a compliment on my writing.

I do a very low-impact style of writing that contributes to the encyclopedia and its mission to document the entire sum of accepted human knowledge. My clients may not be happy that they don’t get to advertise on Wikipedia, but at the end of the day, they’re getting a page on Wikipedia. They’re getting listed in a very exclusive website that only a fraction of businesses get listed on. The Wikipedia Club is a very exclusive club.

I like the writing style, because it’s very meditative and bland. I like the structure, the manual of style, the fact that there are all these little rules and conventions and policies on absolutely everything. The part of Wikipedia that the public see—that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s rare now to see something on the internet that is the result of this kind of consensus, sustained purely by volunteers.

It is a rare thing. And Wikipedia is in a difficult place because it’s got all these existential threats. Governments don’t like it. If they’re not overtly trying to shut it down, they say, “Well, you can’t trust Wikipedia—it’s written by volunteers.” They’re not aware of its peer review system, the fact that we’re constantly checking each other’s work, the fact that the Wikipedia page on a corrupt politician has gone through way more editorial verification than the kind that happens at British tabloids that put out rubbish. The lengths we go to to protect the privacy of Wikipedia’s living subjects and the integrity of people…we’re not supposed to publish anything about anybody unless a reliable secondary source has already published it.

I also feel that this suspicion towards Wikipedia has something to do with authority. People are used to authority coming from one entity or person, instead of a community. How can you trust a huge, nebulous group of people?

One of my favorite essays is David Foster Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage,” [a review of a usage dictionary] in his book Consider the Lobster. He talks about that very thing. Who decides? Whoever puts themselves forward, whoever volunteers for the job—that’s who decides.

But we’re not writing anything original on Wikipedia. We’re not coming up with any original thought or conventions. We’re just taking the knowledge that’s already out there and compiling it.

Have you had clients who want a Wikipedia article specifically because Wikipedia is now a big source for AI tools?

Last year, there was a period where ChatGPT was surfacing a lot of Wikipedia results. Whether it’s always going to be that way is another question.

I’m speaking from the viewpoint of an English-speaking Wikipedian who only operates on the English Wikipedia. But the other Wikipedias—say, the Welsh Wikipedia or the Gaelic—they are the largest corpuses of those languages online. If you want to learn Gaelic with ChatGPT or whatever, there’s a chance that chatbot is basing its knowledge of Gaelic on the Gaelic Wikipedia.

What’s something you’re really proud you got on Wikipedia?

One of my first Wikipedia pages, the page for my local mountain biking trail: Eastridge Mountain Bike Trail Centre. I went out and took all the photos myself on a bike ride, and pieced it together from bits of press I found here and there.

This is so cool!

It actually caused a bit of local controversy because all the dog walkers and horse riders and boomers read this Wikipedia page and thought, “What’s this about unofficial mountain bike trails?” So they called a meeting, and the BBC showed up and reported on the “scourge of unofficial mountain bike trails” at Eastridge. That’s how the controversy section of the Wikipedia page came about.

Knowledge making new knowledge. That’s the beautiful thing about epistemology— knowledge is constantly expanding. You put knowledge out there in the form of an encyclopedia, people pick up on it, they read it, they go away, they make something new, and then that becomes knowledge. It’s like a nuclear reaction. It’s beautiful and terrifying.

📖 James’s reading list

David Sedaris: “His view of British society, the way he sees us, it’s just wonderful.” If you haven’t read him, start with Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: Lee’s memoir of growing up in rural Gloucestershire reminds James of his own home in the Shropshire Hills, and on the latter, he says, “Every Englishman can relate to legging it to Spain.”

Etgar Keret: James discovered the Israeli writer through the indie film Wristcutters: A Love Story (based on Keret’s novella) and fell for his tiny, page-or-two-long stories.

🎧 James is also a big audiobook evangelist: “It frees up the mind to visualize things a bit more...it’s a nascent art form that hasn’t quite come into full fruition.”

What do you think will happen to projects like Wikipedia in the AI age? Message me on LinkedIn or reply to this email.

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I don’t remember when or how I stumbled on Loris Colantuono’s newsletter. But I kept reading because it felt like I had finally found a kindred spirit. Someone who believed that writing and strategy were equally important—and had articulate, original things to say on the topic.

So many of the startups and VCs I’ve worked with don’t understand that narrative—how you tell your business’s story—is core to their survival. Writing is strategy. When AI makes everything look the same, this is even more true.

Loris understands this intimately. He’s helped founders and leadership teams clarify the problem they solve and express it as a narrative that drives everything from sales to product development and worked with companies like Decathlon, Sephora, Mazda and Veolia.

Our conversation gets into why differentiation is overrated, why creatives have lost their seat at the decision-making table, and what AI means for anyone who defines themselves by a skill. There’s so much here—buckle up, bookmark it, bring your notebook.

• Storytelling isn’t a layer of paint, it’s the architecture. When you get the narrative right, everything else (sales, content, product) gets easier.

• Brand the problem, not the solution. In a market with 10,000 options, owning the problem is what makes you stand out.

• AI is accelerating an identity crisis for creatives. Stop defining yourself by a skill; start defining yourself by the problem you solve.

How would you describe the work you do today?

I work at the intersection between strategy and storytelling. I help founders and leadership teams clarify what problem they truly solve, then help them express that in a story that lines up with the product and the growth strategy.

When you have your narrative right, everything gets easier. Sales cycles get shorter. Content gets easier. Product development gets easier.

How did you get here?

About 10 years ago, I was studying cultural and social anthropology at university in Lausanne. My master’s thesis was about how belief systems and narratives shape the amplification and adoption of new forms of money—digital currencies like Bitcoin. I thought my ideas were interesting, and that I would be invited to discuss my ideas by people in the industry. But I had no traction, no interest.

I had ideas, but I couldn’t make people care. And an idea that doesn’t travel doesn’t exist. It’s invisible.

There were two paths to learn how to make my ideas interesting enough that people cared: become a novelist—someone who can make you read 300 pages about an idea—or go into communications and advertising. I chose advertising because I wanted to get paid, and that’s where I rapidly discovered the most powerful tool to make an idea interesting: storytelling.

How did you go from storytelling within advertising to understanding storytelling as strategy?

I don’t remember the exact moment, but I remember working with a startup in the solar tech space—the first time I’d ever worked on a startup fundraise. They were fundraising 5 million Swiss francs but were stuck at 1 million.

Their pitch was dry and very technical: “This is our amazing technology. Give us your money.” So I crafted a story about the future instead of the past: What is the context? What’s the problem? What is changing? What new market is being born? And why is this startup the best to lead that new market?

We raised 7.7 million in three weeks.

That story became more than the pitch. It was the framework for how we thought about everything: the sales funnel, the ads on Meta and the radio, branding. It was a strategy.

It’s a great example of how companies need to inspire their audience and provoke emotion, making people believe that they can go somewhere together. On the flip side, what do companies get wrong?

They think storytelling is like a layer of paint. You build your house, and then storytelling is the paint—something tactical you add at the end. That’s incorrect. Storytelling is the architecture. It’s the design of the house.

Can you give me an example?

I worked with a direct-to-consumer company. My vision was to transform them into a media brand and position them in the landscape, but they just wanted to ship more. So we created storytelling sales pages, storytelling emails, storytelling everything...

Sometimes it worked, and other times it didn’t, but they didn’t know why. Because they were just shipping. You can’t have feedback if you don’t have strategy behind it. Build your story and it will build your strategy.

This reminds me of a mistake I see many technical founders make. They think they don’t have to tell a story because their product is so great that customers will flock to them.

I think engineers need stories the most because they think the product sells itself. They also think they need to cram all the features into the narrative, like when I was doing a strategy workshop with a crypto startup recently. They wanted to talk about exchanges, payment gateways, this and that.

I asked them: do you want to propose a menu with everything? Or a recipe, where every ingredient is essential? Your recipe is your moat—you link every ingredient together to create something original. Then, they understood.

Your clients lead real lives and don’t spend all day thinking about your product like you do. They only care if there’s a good story that can change something about their life.

You mentioned originality. When I went to business school, we learned that branding and marketing was all about differentiation, which is one way of being original. But you argue that standing out is about clearly articulating the problem you’re solving.

I understood this from working with clients. When you have 10,000 products to choose from, and you try to package yours in a different way, sure, it might have a bit of impact, but only a little.

When a market is too heterogeneous, we actually perceive it as homogeneous. Too much difference is like no difference. Think of the shampoo aisle in the supermarket.

I found a beautiful solution to this: brand the problem, not the solution. You explain the problem but reframe it in your terms: “Everyone thinks this, but the real problem is this.” And when you reframe the problem, you de-position the competition and become unique.

There’s a famous story about elevators. In the mid-20th century, people found the lifts in a building too slow, so they hired lots of expensive engineers to find a solution. And then somebody said: “Maybe the problem isn’t the journey time. It’s the perception of time. What if we just put something that could accelerate the perception of time like a mirror?” That’s reframing the problem to find new solutions.

I think that this also explains why big agencies are facing such a crisis. They aren’t reframing the problem. They’re still focused on making a new brand of shampoo look a bit different from all the others.

In the old agency model, there were big clients with very clear briefs who knew what they wanted. Strategists translated the brief, and creative just executed.

But most companies don’t have a strategy. They aren’t unique. So when they come to an agency for help expressing their uniqueness, the creatives at the agency are forced to invent something artificial.

What I do now with narrative strategy is I reveal, I don’t invent. I do a bit of benchmarking on competition, but not market research. I tell founders, “You’ve been in this industry for 10 years. Your insights—what you understand from living in this industry—are more valuable than data. Forget whiteboards and brainstorming. Let’s take a moment, maybe over a glass of wine, and discuss your ideas.” Why pay massive fees for that?

When you do true branding strategy, you end up doing business strategy, because positioning is business.

How does AI affect this kind of narrative positioning?

People introduce themselves in terms of their skills: “I’m a copywriter, I’m a writer, I’m a journalist. What I do is I write.” Tomorrow that might be the wrong framing because writing—or execution in general—is perceived as cheap due to AI. Even if I don’t think you can get beautiful text from AI, perception is reality. We have to act accordingly.

So the first shift for us creatives is an identity shift: stop defining yourself by a skill, and instead identify with a problem. Obsess over a problem that you own—the hole that your clients or your audience want to get out of.

But maybe AI isn’t really changing things so much as accelerating something. In the past, creatives like us—Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy—had a seat at the executive table where decisions were made.

How did you feel that in you work?

When I was working in an agency, I didn’t speak with clients. I did a campaign for Mazda—I worked on strategy, text, everything. Then I met the CMO of Mazda Switzerland and introduced myself. “I’m the copywriter.” “Copy... what?” he replied. He was very happy with the campaign, but he didn’t know my title existed.

Creatives are not at the decision table anymore. And if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. You will get eaten—by other people and by AI.

So creatives have to find a way to have a more strategic relationship with clients, to be invited to the table. That requires developing a more strategic mind, not just focusing on execution.

One thing that came to my mind while you were speaking was about specialization versus generalism. A lot of people say now that we need to be generalists, because execution is easy—you need to know how to pull many different things together. But while you were talking about positioning ourselves as a solver of a problem, I wonder how generalist or specific that positioning needs to be.

This is a question I struggle with myself. I would love to be a generalist, but it’s difficult because you’re a generalist in your own way. And then you have to explain to clients why your generalism is unique. I don’t like specialization either, because it bores me, and I’m not creative when I’m bored.

So I think it’s not specialization, it’s specificity. Be specific about the problem, about your methodology, and about the path you take the client through. Be clear about how you do things, and why. When you’re specific in that way, you can actually be more of a generalist.

Do you have an example of this?

I worked with a consultant who had helped independent hotels with dynamic pricing for 10 years. He had a good network and always had work, but he felt he could do something more.

So we spent a whole day together, and we realized that the real problem he’s solving isn’t about pricing. It’s that independent hotels are not really independent. They’re not part of franchises like Hilton or Marriott, but they’re dependent on big platforms like Booking.com and Airbnb.

So now, he’s developed a methodology to help hotels be really independent—or at least less dependent—on the big platforms. He’s doing more than just dynamic pricing. He’s doing branding, consulting on client onboarding—a complete ecosystem.

So paradoxically, he’s doing something more specific but less specialized. He’s hiring two people because almost all his current and past clients said yes to his offering immediately. They said: “This is our biggest problem, but nobody is talking about this.”

But then some pure skills are still important, no? I believe writing is my superpower.

A strategy or a business plan, in order to be understood and executed, has to be well written. So our skill is incredibly important, and it will be more and more important with AI. People think it’s easy to write, so they delegate their thinking—because writing is thinking.

But you have to sell that skill in a strategic way. Not just, “I will write you 10 posts on LinkedIn.” You have to sell your point of view, a proprietary methodology.

What’s interesting is that if you develop a proprietary methodology, you can then use AI to make it more accessible. You can offer simple AI tools for people who can’t afford the full service, or who just want to taste your methodology.

You could say: “Here’s my framework for writing a strategy document. Play with it on ChatGPT, but if you really want to go deeper, then come work with me.” I actually saw an executive coach do this for his end-of-year reflection document.

You just have to find the sweet spot where it’s not so easy that the user can do everything themselves—they should get maybe 70%. And if they love it, they can book a one-to-one session.

And as writers, I think we also have to raise our ambition.

Our competition is not just our competitors in the market. Our competition is the immortals—the best of the best that existed in the past. We should be trying to create work that lasts.

Resources

🔗 Subscribe to Loris’s newsletter (in French). It’s full of the kind of case studies and narrative thinking we discuss above.

📖 If Loris’s thinking resonated, revisit the original masters he references: David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising and anything on Leo Burnett’s philosophy of finding the “inherent drama” in every product.

🧠 Try Loris’s reframing exercise on your own work: instead of describing what you do, describe the problem you solve. What changes?

When has writing helped your company’s strategy? Message me on LinkedIn or reply to this email.

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Every few weeks, I will be mixing up my regular interviews with some personal thoughts of my own. This week’s I’m sharing two musings: one about learning to love the blank page, the other about why writing still hasn’t been disrupted by AI. I’ll be taking a break next week while a friend visits London. See you in mid-Feb! ✨

Last week, the nature of flight schedules across the Atlantic bestowed upon me an extra day in Panama post-company offsite. I scoped out the closest place to my hotel with good coffee and grabbed my laptop, delighted to have an uninterrupted chunk of writing time alone.

Wifi off, phone away, I had the best writing session I’ve had in a while. It felt fun and effortless; the words flowed. Each sentence led me to a new idea. It was as if the blank page was a road opening up before me.

The blank page doesn’t often feel this good. It’s usually scary, an “existential crisis.” It’s why journaling is hard. And it’s why when I ask people about writing with AI, many say, “I love it because it solves the blank page problem.”

Can we please stop flogging the blank page? With the empty canvas comes infinite possibility, and the opportunity to create something completely original, outside of any template that tech could reproduce. Great writers and people who use writing to build their careers—I call them writing-first practitioners—understand this. But they also do a lot of work before they sit down at their computer to make the leap easier.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions from readers about how to get started with writing and sustain it, and it’s these pre-writing steps that make the difference and get you over the blank page hump.

Understand what your body needs

Our creativity is linked to our physical well-being. When I sat down to write in Panama, I’d done an hour hike in the morning and was riding on a wave of endorphins. I remember a former colleague and brilliant journalist at the Wall Street Journal who said she used to write better when she felt nauseous. More power to her. Ideas flow when our body is in the right state.

Give yourself time to mull

I had spent a few days turning ideas over in my mind before sitting down, so a few threads were already starting to converge. Let ideas roll around in your head, and they will subconsciously congeal.

Reading is your edge in writing

Regular reading makes writing easier. I know a top crisis comms consultant who sits down every Sunday with the physical newspapers and reads them front to back. Just by taking the time to absorb the information fully, he is putting himself ahead of his peers, many of whom only skim information now. When you take the time to fully digest articles or newsletters, you will find connections in the writing that make the things you are already munching on in your brain come together more quickly.

Input 100 to get out 1

To follow up on the above, you need a lot of input if you’re going to birth original ideas. I always characterize the ratio between the amount of things—articles, books, podcasts, conversations—I need to consume in order to produce something of quality as 100:1. Hot take: What you consume does not need to be directly related to the topic you are trying to write about.

Use routine so you can’t run away

When I was trying to post regularly on LinkedIn, I put a 30 minute hold in my diary three days a week and forced myself to squeeze something out in those times. Currently, I try and reserve at least three, two-hour writing sessions in my diary a week. Putting those in my diary on Sunday evening is one of my personal KPIs.

Thinking and writing are a muscle. You need to stretch it before working out!

Final thoughts on writing and disruption

Can someone please tell the people unloading software shares this week because Anthropic released some plugins to just chill? The core of my job—extracting ideas from brilliant people and turning them into compelling narratives—remains stubbornly un-AI-ifiable. Most knowledge work involving original thought hasn’t been disrupted yet.

AI works brilliantly for templatable tasks like routine emails or LinkedIn posts where “good enough” has clear parameters. Codifying how a specific person thinks and sounds, or my editorial taste, on the other hand, is still near impossible.

Tech companies keep missing the mark. They’re trying to “solve” the blank page problem I just spent several paragraphs celebrating. A great AI-powered writing product would give room to roam, not rails. It would understand that the discomfort of starting is part of the creative process.

To truly disrupt writing, a tool also needs seamless integrations. In the past few weeks, I’ve developed newfound respect for Grammarly, which has spent years nailing hundreds of micro-decisions with near-perfect precision and manages to seamlessly integrate into any page on your browser. When I use Claude to write and edit, I still have to open a new window next to Google Docs.

The tools are coming. Coding has been disrupted. But I hope AI labs don’t just chase the easy wins—building for developers because the workflows are clearer and the revenue is obvious. Writing tools that actually work will require understanding writers’ actual needs and workflows, not just applying the coding playbook. I think we can confidently say writing has been disrupted when something dethrones Google Docs. I’ve seen promising experiments (you know who you are!), but we’re nowhere close.

How much of your job has been disrupted by AI? What parts of your job do you think can be automated? Which require judgment? Message me on LinkedIn or reply to this email.

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So far, this newsletter has mostly concerned itself with people who write for an audience: wealth managers for clients, priests for congregations, journalists for readers. But equally important is the writing we do only for ourselves.

I have many dogeared notebooks at home, the contents of which are highly correlated with whether or not “shit was going down” in my life at the time that I filled them. Definitely not for public consumption. They did, however, help me process things.

That’s why I was excited to speak with Berlin-based Meera Innes, a writer and facilitator using journaling as a tool to help people connect more deeply with themselves—and show up more fully for their communities. We discussed her transition from tech, feeling strange calling herself a “writer” when she had mostly been writing for herself, and why journaling is the easiest form of self-care to avoid.

I’m traveling to Panama this week for work, and I have a notebook tucked in my bag with some of Meera’s prompts (see the bottom of this newsletter) jotted down.

• Journaling is a difficult, but rewarding form of self-care. You might be able to spend a yoga class distracted, but you can’t avoid yourself on the page. Because journaling can be daunting, Meera starts people with freewriting.

• The more deeply connected we are to ourselves, the more deeply we can connect to one another. Even if our notebooks are just for us, journaling translates to a richer life off the page.

• People are craving experiences and communities off their screens. Meera predicts journaling will become a more important practice, and notes that people at her workshops love to stay and connect even after the pens are down.

Transition from tech to writing

Tell me about your career and how you came to writing.

I’ve been working in tech and startups for a long time—over a decade at this point. Eight years ago, I moved into VC with a focus on organizational health and cultural development, with a view to supporting founder mental health.

Ironically, I had a huge burnout. I was trying to support other people, but I didn’t have any support. There’s something I always say about working in tech: every startup is a Neverland, and every startup looks for a Wendy to take care of the Lost Boys. Usually that Wendy caretaker role gets assigned to a woman by default, whether or not she’s in a leadership position. I leaned into that role fully, but I wasn’t thinking about what I needed.

Then I started freelancing for Google for Startups—that’s when I got into writing full time. It took me a long time to start writing professionally because I brought it as a skill set to all my work until then, but it was just something I did. It didn’t occur to me to take it seriously as a professional avenue.

I’ve always had a narrator in my head. Now, through a neurodivergent lens, I understand that was maybe my brain’s way of helping me process—by explaining everything to me the same way I would read a book. So storytelling has always come naturally to me—everything happening around me was always a story.

I also have a narrator in my head, too. I met someone recently who does not have one, and it freaked me out! So you had always written but it took a while for you to accept that your job was writing.

When I started freelancing, I didn’t call myself a writer. Then I asked a friend of mine for advice—he’d been through a major career shift—and he said, “Well, the first thing you have to do is start calling yourself a writer, because no one’s going to employ you until you do.”

It can feel like such a lofty title.

Up until that point, I was just writing for me. Whenever I introduced myself as a writer, people asked me if they may have read something I’d written, and I had to reply, “Well, nothing, but I’m still a writer.” A lot of what I’ve written hasn’t seen the light of day. So it felt really presumptuous to call myself a writer when there are certain ideas attached to that—expectations I was afraid I couldn’t live up to.

Journaling as a career

I can totally understand this. I feel strange calling myself a novelist when my novel hasn’t been published, but calling myself that forces me to step up and believe in myself. How did you go from freelance writing to becoming a journaling coach?

When my freelance work was wrapping up, I was asking myself a lot of questions, catalyzed by world events of the past two years: How did we end up here? How have we descended into such violence and lack of compassion, lack of humanity? What did we lose that made us so disconnected?

I think tech has a lot to do with that, especially social networks. It’s created all these pockets in this vast online universe where we can supposedly find like-minded people, but all it’s doing is creating more division. Instead of working in tech, I wanted to spend my life exploring what it is to be human.

My theory is that the more deeply connected we are to ourselves, the more deeply we can connect to one another. We have to take more responsibility for ourselves before we can think about taking responsibility for the collective. For me personally, journaling has been the best way to do that. There are other ways—I’m not saying journaling is the cure-all—but it’s what I know how to do. It’s the contribution I can make.

How long have you been journaling?

Just over 10 years, I think. It started as a form of self-interrogation because I wanted to understand myself better.

I have also used tools like meditation and breathwork, but I found they keep me inside myself. They aren’t for externalizing and examining. Putting it on the page is like getting a box of puzzle pieces, dumping it out, then sorting through everything so I can more clearly see the picture.

You’ve said that we’re all good writers. Why do you believe that?

For me, the most important aspect of being a writer is having your own voice. It’s not about skill, it’s not about vocabulary. It’s: how clearly and simply can you articulate what it is that you’re trying to say? As soon as we start overthinking it, we’ve already lost it.

When a friend of mine lost her mum, she wrote a really lengthy caption about who her mum had been and what her mum had been to her. It was so beautiful because she felt so strongly and clearly about her mum—she knew exactly what she wanted to say.

That’s what I think makes a good writer—when we tap into what we feel most strongly about and what we have the most clarity about. It doesn’t matter who challenges us on it. That’s how we feel.

Journaling feels like a way to let go of that overthinking. There are no expectations.

Yes, in theory. But one of the reasons I started this is because people are so uncomfortable about journaling. They find it really daunting to sit with themselves, express themselves, and see themselves mirrored back on a page.

It’s the easiest self-care practice to avoid, even harder than meditation and breathwork. We can numb and self-soothe with other practices, but we can’t avoid ourselves on the page. Writing is literally black and white.

The actor Dax Shepard did a podcast episode a few years back on breaking his sobriety, because that’s a cornerstone of his brand and identity. He said looking back, the first sign that he was relapsing was that he stopped his daily journaling practice. This had been his personal accountability tool, but at some point he thought he didn’t need it anymore. He stopped holding himself accountable.

Getting started with journaling and growing in your practice

How do you help people get started?

The very first tool I use is freewriting, because it helps build that muscle of writing without thinking. The idea is to take the judgment and the criticism and the thinking out of the writing process. Every single thing that comes into your brain—put it straight on the page and don’t stop.

A lot of people feel pressure to write something meaningful or profound. I’m like, “It doesn’t have to be remotely profound. It can be the most mundane stream of consciousness. You can talk about your breakfast. You can talk about how you slept. You can talk about the fact that your foot’s falling asleep right now.” Observe the sounds happening around you.

The amazing thing is that usually, when you’re in that flow of just talking about absolutely nothing without overthinking, something meaningful does filter through. Something that was buried suddenly surfaces, and then you can write through that.

How do you help people progress from there?

If I’m working one-on-one with people, we usually talk through a situation they’re in or a goal they’re working towards, and I use very prescriptive prompts. This is where I rely on my intuition to know which questions are going to take us a little bit deeper into surfacing whatever might be holding them back from answers.

I emphasize that I don’t have any answers for anyone. We all have our own answers. What I do is provide the questions and hold the space to help you dig deeper into those answers.

What are some prompts that you use to get people started?

I’ll share one of my favorites. I tell a story about my best friend who went on a date and got stood up. She was telling her best friend about it, and her best friend was like, “Why are you even surprised? You’re not pretty. He wouldn’t have found you attractive. You’re boring, you’re not a good conversationalist.”

People are shocked when I say that, “What a shit friend,” they say. And I say, “What if I told you that was actually her talking to herself?” The things we say to ourselves, we would never, ever say to another person. Why is it that we have different standards for talking to ourselves versus our friends?

Then the prompt is: think about a situation you’re in right now and write about it in the encouraging and supportive voice of your best friend or someone who really loves you. What would they tell you?

That’s often a very emotional practice for people. We realize that the compassion and support that we don’t show ourselves usually was there all along and is easy to access when we’re thinking about it through someone else’s lens.

Do you have a special notebook or pen that you like?

I like soft, paper-bound notebooks that I can just throw into a coat pocket. My journals get really beat up because I use them constantly. Moleskine do these great skinny, paper-bound ones that you can buy in packs of three.

I don’t buy myself nice journals, but for the last couple of Christmases and birthdays, a good friend of mine has been buying me these Louis Vuitton notebooks. The pages are monogrammed and so beautiful.

For pens, I always use the Pentel EnerGel. They come in lots of different colors and you can buy refills for them. I really like the burgundy one—I sort of switch between black, brown, and burgundy.

People looking for analog experiences and community

How do you feel being an entrepreneur in this space in 2026? To many people, what you’re doing might look really risky—and brave.

It feels early, but I’m used to feeling like this. When I first moved to Berlin eight years ago and was talking about founder mental health, no one was talking about it here yet, though it was a big conversation in Silicon Valley.

I feel like that’s happening again now. I can see how important journaling is going to be as a tool. Fortunately, when I really believe in something, I find it easy to commit to. But there’s a lot for me to learn as well.

You must also get good feedback from the workshops you’ve been doing.

Bringing these communities together has been so meaningful. Afterwards, people always stay for an hour and a half or so and talk to the people they were journaling with—people they’ve never met before.

I’ve been doing some informal writing groups to stay accountable, and the same thing happens. People stay, talk about what they’re writing, and it naturally becomes a support group. People are craving this.

Exactly. That’s where it’s going. People are going to crave more cultural spaces where there’s no screens, where you can’t replicate the experience on a screen.

A lot of people are not rejecting tech per se, but trying to look beyond it. I think what we’re going to find when we look beyond it—it’s going to be a homecoming. We’re going to come back to ourselves.

This is one of the reasons why I’ve started this journaling initiative. I think we will see a return to analog, and when we do, being able speak for ourselves from a place of connection is going to be an incredibly important tool to have.

✨ Meera’s recommended prompts

• When was the last time you screamed? If the urge has been heavy lately, I invite you to do it on the page. Take a freewriting approach to releasing any tension you’ve been internalising. Don’t worry whether it’s valid, what anyone else thinks, or how it sounds—we’re going for pure catharsis here, so let loose. And for goodness sake, don’t mind your language. Just unleash; stop when you run out of steam.

• How was your 2026? We’re going to fast-forward to a rearview. They say hindsight is 20/20—today, let’s make it 2026. Start by dating your page [today’s date], 2027 and then reflect on this year as if it already happened. What does your best 2026 look like? What are the challenges you can anticipate—and how would you approach them accordingly? This practice is a great shortcut to clarity we didn’t know we already had.

• Reflect on the events of the past week. As you do so, observe your voice. Is it neutral? Or is it critical? If you observe an inner critic, be curious. Is it yours? Is it true? As you go about your day, put some distance between yourself and the voice every time it comes up. Make witnessing it a daily practice; note your observations regularly and see if your experience changes with your lens.

For more, check out Meera’s IG.

Thank you for reading! Do any of you have journaling practices? Favorite prompts? Anyone prefer a computer for journaling? Message me on LinkedIn.

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One of my long-term “investment theses” is what I call writing-first practitioners: individuals who use consistent public writing to sharpen their thinking, build networks, and attract opportunity.

AI makes content creation trivially easy (have you looked at your LinkedIn feed recently?). But the discipline and original thinking required to write well will only increase this archetype’s competitive edge. It’s hard to fake.

Wealth manager Jan Voss started posting his takes on LinkedIn in 2023 and grew from a few thousand to 20,000 followers. Now he runs Cape May, a wealth management firm for single family offices in Germany, and his newsletter is core to how he builds his brand and wins clients.

We talked about what it takes to make writing work for your business—and how words and insights can help you punch above the Goldman Sachs and JPMorgans of the world.

• You don’t have to invent a framework to own it. Jan’s most impactful pieces have been about an investing framework he didn’t create, but by writing about it consistently, he’s become synonymous with it.

• Transparency can be a powerful competitive tool. By sharing knowledge openly, you give potential clients a ruler to measure their existing advisors against. You might just come out ahead.

• You don't need to write a magnum opus. Share a Bloomberg article with your take. As long as it's your opinion and view, people will listen.

• Build on rented land, then move. Start on LinkedIn or X to build an audience, then migrate them to a platform you control and where your posts have staying power.

Q: How did you start writing?

I’ve always read a lot, but my first attempts at writing were in 2021-2022 when I started posting articles on LinkedIn that I found interesting.

Then in 2023, I made the move from being a head of family office into self-employment. I knew that when I was trying to reach and work with clients, I would need materials. I could prepare materials in advance and let them sit in a drawer, or scramble to prepare everything ad hoc before meetings—neither felt efficient. Good ideas need time to ripen.

So I figured—why not just write about what our clients find interesting, what I find interesting, and share it with the public on LinkedIn? Luckily in 2023, the LinkedIn algorithm still really liked that. I saw explosive growth in my follower numbers—from 1,500-2,000 followers to almost 20,000. People wanted to hear what I had to say.

But the LinkedIn algorithm, like any social media algorithm, changes. 2023 was a very good year, 2024 was a very bad year. I started to realize I was hitting limits there.

The issue is that social media is so fast-paced and there’s so much content, so stuff that I wrote more than two weeks ago is essentially gone forever. Even my most loyal readers don’t see everything I post on LinkedIn. So I needed a place where I could start writing long-form content, where these posts have staying power.

That’s when, in the beginning of 2024, I decided to turn this into a newsletter, and it’s slowly evolved ever since.

Q: How many subscribers do you have? Or are numbers even your focus?

Right now I’m at about 2,200, which compared to other newsletters may feel small. But this is a niche publication, since we focus on affluent investors with net worths in the millions, and when I look into the subscriber list, some of the most famous, well-known investors and individuals in Berlin and elsewhere are on there.

I think the underlying metrics—how much AUM [assets under management] is reading this newsletter, or how many people are taking the time to read this newsletter again and again—have a bit more depth than just the subscriber figure.

Q: How has long-form writing and the writing you did on LinkedIn helped you push your thinking forward as an investor and wealth manager?

One thing that’s been very interesting is—and this is probably some sort of selection bias—the people we work with really like this idea that they can take the time and sit down and read one of these posts to understand something better.

I call it “Finance 201” as opposed to “Finance 101.” There are a lot of sources out there about “how should I buy my first ETF?” But when you evolve past that—“How do I optimize my ETF portfolio? Should I invest into private equity? How do I build the perfect venture capital portfolio?”—there are very few resources. And the banks and GPs that have this knowledge are not very willing to share it publicly unless you work with them.

Being willing to share this knowledge has resonated well. We don’t want to be gatekeepers to the secrets of investing.

There are probably some people out there who take these recommendations and don’t reach out to us because it’s enough for them. But a much larger group reaches out saying, “I’m not going to put this into action myself. Can you help me?”

Q: I felt this kind of gatekeeping behavior in venture capital as well, when actually the benefits you get from transparency can be far more beneficial for your brand.

It also provides people with a benchmark: How do I work with a wealth manager? When should you not work with a wealth manager? People use our insights as the ruler with which they measure their existing relationships. And very often, we come out well in this comparison against many of the banks.

Q: What themes or individual pieces have really resonated—things that people reference time and time again?

It’s definitely the Aspirational Investor Framework.

To preface a little: Today, when you go to a bank for help managing your wealth, they ask, “How are you feeling today— Conservative, moderate, aggressive? Do you want private equity or not?” And they give you a model portfolio. That’s a good approach—we do this too. But if you’re not a pension fund or insurance company, it’s hard to think about how this translates to you, the human behind the portfolio.

When I started out, I didn’t just want to focus on these very stiff asset allocation models. I wanted to find something more approachable. And I found the Aspirational Investor Framework, which is not my invention—although funnily enough, some people think so—but was invented by the former chief investment officer of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management.

He was focused on “goals-based investing”—not just “How much do you want to invest in hedge funds?” but “What are you trying to achieve with all of your investments? How much of a safety buffer do you need? How much money do you need for retirement?” And he then translated this into a portfolio for clients.

I’ve written about this many times on LinkedIn and in the newsletter, and somehow this has been my most lasting impact on this German wealth scene. I meet clients who hadn’t met me before but who have read about the framework and implemented it.

There’s a group of entrepreneurs here, all with high double-digit net worths who meet up once a quarter to show each other their portfolios and discuss what’s going well, what’s not. Because of my writing, they’ve also made it one of their steps to outline their portfolios according to this Aspirational Investor Framework.

It’s starting to propagate itself without my involvement—people tell their friends about it.

Q: That’s when you know a story or a narrative is powerful—when other people tell other people about it. What’s your writing process? How much time do you spend per week on the newsletter?

It depends on the week. Writing the newsletter, getting it polished, and turning it into a longer LinkedIn post—probably takes a maximum of four hours on a good week.

But a friend pointed out to me: “Maybe the process takes you four hours, but you’re probably spending half of your time reading articles anyway, or listening to podcasts at the gym.” That’s probably true. It’s a bit hard to measure.

Q: Do you use AI in your writing at all?

Very little so far, but I am trying to use it more. I don’t want to get to the point where I use it to write newsletters. People want to read human thought. They want to know what we think and how we’ve applied things in practice.

But I want to use it to refine the process—maybe using it as a writing coach, checking if I’m missing anything, helping me think about how I can use this content elsewhere, such as reusing it as a white paper. That’s one of my to-dos for this year.

Q: Many people ask me how to get started writing. What would you recommend?

I often see people get started, spend a week writing the perfect LinkedIn post, get like three likes, and give up. But writing is tough in the beginning, and it takes time to build an audience. Just like with anything in life—whether it’s going to the gym or getting into a new hobby—you just need to commit to it for a certain amount of time and stick with it.

One thing I’ve learned is that it has to be the right balance of quantity and quality. You don’t need to write massive blog posts. In the end, people value your original thought. It can be as simple as sharing an article on LinkedIn with your take. This is what I was doing back in 2023—taking Bloomberg articles and sharing my spin. Do I agree with it? Why do I think this one transaction might set precedent for something else? That really helped me build a brand.

Get started on any of these platforms—whether it’s LinkedIn or X—and start building a following there. Once you have an audience, try to bring them onto another platform where people are more captive to you, whether it’s Beehiiv, Substack, or any of these other tools.

Q: It’s so cool to see how far you’ve come in not a very long period of time!

Three years to overnight success, right? It really has helped with brand building and thought leadership. It’s cool when I walk into a conference and somebody says to me, “I love your newsletter,” and I have no idea who that person is.

I’m always surprised when people reach out to us saying, “I don’t need what Goldman or JPMorgan are saying, I like what you have to say.” We’re punching above our weight. Now we need to make sure that we can satisfy the expectations we’ve set by putting ourselves out on the internet.

📚 Jan’s reading list:

Finance and investment

• Matt Levine (Money Stuff)—“The absolute star. He’s made a living out of taking very complex financial matters and turning them into something people enjoy reading daily.”

• Road to Carry (penewsletter.com)—A private equity newsletter that finds the sweet spot between entertainment and business. “His last issue was about how a PE fund did a roll-up in bail bonds in the US—a business model I didn’t even know existed.”

• Sven Lorenz (Undervalued Shares)—“An icon in the value investing community.”

Writing

• Snow Leopard: How Legendary Writers Create A Category Of One—One of Jan’s two go-to recommendations for anyone asking how to get started with writing.

• The Art and Business of Online Writing: How to Beat the Game of Capturing and Keeping Attention—His second recommendation for aspiring writers. On finding an audience, building a process, and what to focus on.

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Know a writing-first practitioner I should talk to? Do you consider yourself one? Reach out to me on LinkedIn.

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🧱 AI is a powerful tool without a defined use case. Use ChatGPT…but to do what? Creatives are finding out. They're poking at AI, asking what it can really do—and whether we should be afraid.

🎭 One of them is renowned theater director Natalia Korczakowska, who is artistic director of STUDIO teatrgaleria, one of the most important experimental theatre spaces in Poland.

⚪️ Her work, AlphaGo_Lee. Theory of Sacrifice, developed in collaboration with Google DeepMind, reconstructs the 2016 match between DeepMind’s AlphaGo program and Korean Go champion Lee Sedol. AI had already long bested the best chess players at the time, but Go was a far harder problem. AlphaGo’s victory represented a historic moment that once again shifted the balance between human and machine. Natalia talked to me about the inspiration behind the piece and her views on AI.

Takeaways from our conversation:

• The blank page is the point, not a pain point. Go is art because because two players create something from an empty board, and Natalia argues that struggle is where magic happens. When AI does it for you, you lose the friction that drives creativity.

• We need new definitions of evil for the AI age. Natalia used Gemini to help craft the play’s final monologue—a journalist trying to define evil after witnessing AlphaGo’s victory. The AI suggested “efficiency” as the new face of evil.

• Theatre can disarm dangerous tools. Natalia treats the stage as a laboratory for examining technologies that are risky in real life.

The match as spectacle

Q: How did you come across the AlphaGo match and why did you want to explore it through art?

One of the topics in my work is control and power. My fear is that these tools can be used to censor art and to control it. Art needs to be free to exist—creativity itself is, by definition, crossing borders and norms. I was looking for a performative way to analyze that.

Every time people talk about the history of AI, the AlphaGo match is the Holy Grail moment for the industry. I had an intuition that if I reconstructed this particular match in theater, it would be a metaphor for much more than just the game.

For me, this game was like a public execution of the image of the hero in a tragic sense, executed before the eyes of the crowd. A similar structure exists in Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle. These things fascinate me.

[DeepMind CEO] Demis Hassabis was a chess player before he started working on AI, and, through Parmy Olson’s book Supremacy, I learned that [Google co-founders] Sergey Brin and Larry Page used to play Go at Stanford. Then there was this brilliant idea for AI to beat the brightest human mind in a huge media spectacle as a demonstration of power in the AI market. The event was watched by 200 million people, and was organized at the Four Seasons hotel in Seoul, which is basically a temple for the richest people in the world.

For Page, it was an opportunity to get back into China. [Google] had been thrown out because they didn’t agree to cooperate with the government on censorship, and they desperately wanted back in.

In Demis Hassabis, I see a figure reminiscent of Odysseus in Greek tragedy, a diplomat who creates this kind of mega-spectacle, which is the symbolic execution of human intelligence. It echoes what James Lovelock wrote in his book Novacene; before this match we were in the Anthropocene, and after, we entered the Novacene—an epoch in which we humans are no longer the strongest intelligence on Earth, and we need to give up and let AI lead us, trusting the big tech companies.

As a leader of STUDIO teatrgaleria in Warsaw, I feel the crisis of the art market. The institutions that used to be places for art to flourish are very corrupt. It’s hard to find something truly powerful in the modern art market, and the audience is looking for other forms of art. Just as the street art and digital art was a way for art to free itself from institutions, for me, Go is similar—living outside institutions. I was obsessed both with Go itself and the whole political spectacle happening in the background.

AI's double edge

Q: You talked about AI as something that can exercise power, control, and censorship—how does this happen in practice?

AI is a technology, a tool. You can use it in a good way or a bad way.

In theater, there’s hope that digital art in general, including AI, can serve the way electricity did in the 1930s when Bertolt Brecht, the experimental German artist and playwright, changed theater. When electricity was introduced, Brecht accidentally directed the light towards the backstage, so the machinery became visible. Then he directed it toward the actor, and the actor became this shining, not-realistic person. That’s when he had the brilliant idea of the “alienation effect,” which changed our work as directors and artists from creating an imitation of reality to creating something which is art. Theater is no longer a mirror of reality but a critical part of reality.

My hope is that digital arts, including AI, can be this kind of game changer, because they can open our perspective. But there are negative things, too. AI makes it possible to generate a lot of bullshit—a lot of fake art that pretends to be art, a lot of imitation. It’s difficult to see authentic art in a trashy field of pieces that pretend to be art but aren’t. It creates confusion and crisis.

Second, AI makes it easier to censor artists if they’re saying things that contradict your political narrative. Censorship is a huge danger for us. It always was, and now it’s coming back.

One of your questions was about how my Polish background is crucial here. My father, who was a songwriter, used to tell me about the censorship during the Communist regime and how they tried to deal with it. Now, I see censorship coming back.

Q: Censorship with AI potentially creates an environment where art cannot thrive, right?

Yes, exactly. Aldous Huxley described art as sensory concerts in Brave New World—not really art, just something designed to bring you pleasure. If you read statistics about how using ChatGPT transforms the human brain, you can see another danger: people will not need art anymore because they’ll be satisfied with pretentious fakes.

I experienced it in Tokyo—I went to one of those immersive experiences, teamLab. They tell you it’s an art gallery, but it’s not. It’s just like a theme park.

The blank page problem

Q: I wanted to ask you specifically about Fabula, the experimental AI screenwriting tool that DeepMind built. I’ve also tried to work with similar tools and have had positive and frustrating experiences.

I wanted to meet and talk with the DeepMind engineers who created the AlphaGo program—or at least those who witnessed its development. Piotr Mirowski helped me with that, for which I am very grateful, as it allowed me to evaluate the program in a more realistic and honest way.

Even though the play was already finished, he asked me if I wanted to test Fabula, so, we conducted some tests during a rehearsal open to the audience at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, but none of it was included in the final play. Everything I know about the tool is from sessions with him when we worked on things together.

My observations are these: First, it’s impressive. I appreciate the engineers’ efforts. But the problem is they fed the program books about writing that are not current anymore. Theater needs to reflect the reality here and now. I think this is why they decided not to let the tool be accessible to everybody yet.

Another observation: it’s very strange that you don’t start your writing process from an empty page anymore. The empty page is a pain, but at the same time, it stimulates your creativity. It’s like how for children, being bored is the best way to become creative. You sit in front of the empty page and feel an existential crisis. You need to use all your intuition, and that’s magic.

Similarly, Lee Sedol said that the Go game is an art form because two players start from an empty board, and everything arises from nothing. It’s the creation of art between two players. In chess, you don’t start with nothing—you start with two armies that control each other. But in programs like Fabula, the empty page is eliminated. The feeling you get is that everything was already written, and you can just make changes. You enter a prompt and get a comprehensive draft of a play with scenes, characters, the answers, and the questions you want to ask the audience. You can change things through the process, but you don’t start from nothing.

Q: Tech startups always look for the pain point. But why is the blank page the pain point? It shouldn’t be the enemy.

Yes, exactly. When I traveled to Seoul, I met with KAIST Professor Chihyung Jeon, who was a witness of the match. His essay “The Alpha Human versus the Korean: Figuring the Human through Technoscientific Networks,” was one of my inspirations. My entire play is told by the AlphaHumans—starting in 2030 and reconstructing the mythological events that started a new religion.

It took Lee Sedol ten years to digest what happened at the Four Seasons. In a recent lecture at Seoul National University, he said that Go used to be a creative act between two players based on intuition. But now all players study AI moves, memorize them, and repeat them on the board.

It’s inspiring and dystopian. It’s like the King Midas story: you touch everything and it changes to gold, but then you touch your food and it changes to gold too, and you touch your daughter and she changes to gold. So you die of hunger, lonely.

Who sees whom

Q: Tell me about the structure of your piece. You also play with how the action is shown to the audience.

In my play, the audience is divided into a VIP and a regular audience. Only VIPs can see the game close-up, and the main audience can only see through screens.

The VIP audience represents those who were in the game room at the Four Seasons—big tech chiefs and their families. The main audience represents those in the ballrooms, where sportscasters gave commentary to swarms of journalists—English-speaking and Korean-speaking, and the 200 million watching on screens. That’s the structure of power: who sees whom, who controls whom.

Redefining evil

Q: What does this match tell us about the future of humanity?

The reconstruction of the match wasn’t merely about the game of Go, but about everything. AI experts estimate a 30% risk of human extinction caused by AI. It’s like they’re entering your home, putting a gun to your child’s head, and playing Russian roulette.

I had an amazing two-hour chat with the chief of the Chess Forum in New York City after entering thinking to buy a Go game for myself. He told me that to this day, on Wall Street, they test if someone has the potential to become a big manager by playing games with them. In American companies, they play chess; in Japanese ones, they play Go. In his opinion, the AlphaGo match was testing tools for the real world.

My play starts with the match in Seoul and ends with a scene where a character inspired by Peter Thiel is interrogated by a journalist, and we realize this is all about testing tools to sell them for real war. The truth is they use the same system of algorithms to create autonomous weapons already used in Gaza.

At the end of the play, the journalist watches AI’s victory on the screen at the airport, with big tech companies celebrating. We can read her thoughts as she waits for her flight, trying to put this intense, emotional, exhausting experience together into a new idea of evil.

Q: And you worked on that moment with Google Gemini?

Yes, that’s the main example of how I’ve used AI as a creative tool for writing.

I described the scene: the journalist, a modern version of Hannah Arendt, coming back from the match and looking for a new definition of evil. Hannah Arendt created the idea of “banality of evil” by observing the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. I started feeding Gemini different inspirations: the legend of the Grand Inquisitor from the Brothers Karamazov, The Society of the Spectacle by Debord, Discipline and Punish by Foucault.

I got some material, worked on it, gave it back, and went back and forth like that. I loved it. The system suggested the idea of “efficiency” as the new definition of evil in the digital age. I love the perversion of working with AI to create a new definition of evil; we need to change our definitions given these tools.

But to do this, you need to create the character based on Hannah Arendt and know her books. You need to know all the other books I mentioned—classic books that are critiques of power structures—and guide the AI precisely to get what you want.

And I didn’t copy and paste what I got—I wrote it. Gemini, in this context, was like a perfect digestion tool. It read a lot of stuff and concepts and digested it, which sped things up.

But it was so inspiring. I remember very well the moment I was considering whether to take on AI as the topic of my play. I had this feeling of exhaustion: “Oh my god, you middle-aged woman, you need to learn all these new tools. Why?” But I went through the Driving Innovation with Generative AI course at MIT, all these books, travels, entering DeepMind, testing tools, Seoul…everything. At the end, I had this moment of awe. For me, the final monologue is precisely that.

Q: Do you really feel that the ideas you got from working with Gemini are really new? Do you think it pushed you?

Yes, absolutely. To understand AI and our new epoch, we need new definitions of basic philosophical questions. One of the most basic is the definition of evil. Should we keep the old definition, or should we redefine it so we can better understand what’s happening and where the dangers are?

Q: Do you think you’ll use AI in the future? You had this experience with Gemini where you had a specific goal—redefining evil while working on a play about AI, so the tool fit perfectly. Would you try to recreate this process?

It’s very hard to answer because it’s all very fresh, and I need to digest the experience properly. I had a lot of doubt when I started using it, but I’m very happy that I did. I treat theater and playwriting as a space to play with tools that are dangerous in reality, but when you put them on stage, you can disarm them.

Want to deepen your study? Here is a compilation of some of the resources that informed Natalia’s work:

📚 Books: Supremacy by Parmy Olson | Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence by James Lovelock | The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord | Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault | The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (specifically the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter) | Brave New World by Aldous Huxley | Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

✍️ Essay: “The Alpha Human versus the Korean: Figuring the Human through Technoscientific Networks” by Professor Chihyung Jeon (KAIST)

📖 Course: Driving Innovation with Generative AI (MIT)

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Greetings from a dive bar in New York City that hosts non-stop Broadway sing-alongs from 4 p.m. into the wee hours! For this newsletter’s last edition, I am sharing some reflections on tech, media, and the micro, alongside images of some favorite memories from the past 12 months.

Reflection 1: Writing is still hard—and AI can’t fix this

This year reminded me again that good writers are hard to find, and poor writing is often more a problem of logic than anything else. Generative AI text-generation tools may be able to help with the simple generation of prose, but given that they are probability machines, they cannot solve the logic issue.

I recently edited an article that opened with a hypothetical anecdote about a company firing one of its software vendors. The descriptive and gripping anecdote was precisely the kind of spice needed to make an article about software sales compelling. But it didn’t work.

I finally realised it was because the anecdote was written from the point of view of the customer, while the article was written for software vendors. Once this misalignment was fixed, it flowed. AI did not—and could not—have caught this.

The good news is that this means the arbitrage still exists for what I call “content-edge individuals”—people who use writing to build an edge in their industry. I’ve profiled a few of those individuals here, such as investor Sarah Drinkwater and founder David Jarvis.

What I’m watching ahead:

AI will make content-edge individuals more valuable, not less. In venture, AI is commoditizing data processing and pattern recognition. When everyone has those capabilities, your personal network and the access it provides become the real differentiator. Not only does writing help you clarify thinking, it helps you build your network.

Reflection 2: More media fragmentation; find your tribe

Commoditized news and journalism financed by digital advertising are taking their last breaths. We’ll continue to see a bifurcation between large, general news outlets (I believe only 4-5 large ones will eventually survive in English) and niche publications run by journalists, but also commentators, creators, and influencers.

This makes media relations a lot more difficult for all but the biggest companies, so I have been counseling founders and investors to leverage those niche communities through collaboration.

One caveat: production quality matters. Many of these smaller outlets don’t have the polish of traditional media. I’ve seen VC tie-ups with emerging creators where the poor production—bad lighting, rough audio—actually hurt the VC’s brand. My advice: if you’re partnering with a newer publication, offer to cover production costs. A good studio and proper equipment benefit both sides.

What I’m watching ahead:

As traditional media fragments, companies will have to deliver their message themselves. That makes me bullish on LinkedIn despite the slop. Substack still feels creative, but watch for it to turn corporate as comms teams discover it. Nike already launched on Substack earlier this year.

Also, if you want to make some money, become a B2B software influencer on YouTube in 2026. YouTube videos are strong feeders for citations in LLMs, so companies want to place their stories there. Plus, few traditional media outlets cover B2B SaaS from a product angle anymore.

Reflection 3: Good times continue

I had lunch with GW this week, who works in the energy industry and has attended a few data center conferences this year. He described a two-day blowout that included a golf tournament, a boat party…and only six hours of actual content. How can I get a ticket?

The debt financing these blowouts and buildouts has started to raise alarm bells, but the party is likely to continue for a while because there’s demand and revenue to justify loans. Whether these are good assets is a question for later.

Meanwhile, the real signal for AI’s value isn’t infrastructure—it’s usability. And usability doesn’t depend on billions in data center spend. It also doesn’t depend on models that are that much better than they are now. It starts with individuals: people figuring out how to make these tools actually work for them, day to day.

Prediction

Natural language was supposed to democratize AI, but prompting is still counterintuitive, and most people don’t have the skills to work with agents. When do we get truly intuitive and simple ways for people to automate their work? I mean as simple as buttons.

Reflection 4: Where the real story is

I have over-indexed on interviews with women in this publication for obvious reasons. This focus has revealed an important but overlooked trend: more women, even those who might not have seen themselves as entrepreneurs, using AI to scale themselves and their businesses.

Since I started working in venture in 2018, people have been talking about how the tools to build a business were cheaper than ever. Now, I feel like the cost of building has been truly leveled with tools like Claude Code and Loveable. Will we see any VCs with “women vibecoding” theses? I wish!

The interviews here have also given me something else: inspiration. Creatives like games translator Lucile Danilov are advocating for themselves in a world that has devalued creativity and quality. These are the stories I want to continue to follow in 2026.

Thank you to everyone who sent me comments and thoughts—I love hearing from you. Gratitude to Thomas, James, Éanna, Anisah, Olly, Kim, Anais, Matt, and all the others who looked at drafts or helped me brainstorm.

I will pick back up again in early January after some much-needed rest!

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UK graduates are facing the toughest job market since 2018. Desperate US job seekers are applying to flag traffic in the hot sun.

AI has taken a lot of the blame for the tough jobs market as tools like ChatGPT have turned job applications into a volume game. The number of applications on LinkedIn has risen 45% on year—or a shocking 11,000 applications per minute. 42% of respondents to a recent survey blamed AI directly for their loss of trust in hiring.

As usual, I went looking for the writing angle…and found Kathryn Hall. She is a board member of the British Association of CV Writers—an organisation that tests and certifies writers of the document we all hate updating—and a career coach and CV writer herself. Kathryn has spent three decades in HR and retail management and set up her own coaching business in 2019. Since then, she’s reviewed hundreds of CVs.

The Takeaway:

• We’d like to blame our applications disappearing into the void on some AI conspiracy—bots scanning our CVs and spitting them back out. But “there is no bot,” Kathryn says. We’re still writing for humans.

• This matters beyond CVs. Slop is everywhere. But the end reader—whether it’s a recruiter, a client, or your newsletter subscriber—can tell when something was written for them versus at them. Clarity, specificity, and a voice that sounds like you put you at the top of the pile.

One of the questions that keeps coming up from my readers is: What about writing CVs? Despite all the tech in the world, this document endures. This is how I came to the BACVW and to you. How did you start your business after many years in HR?

When I had my little boy, I decided to take a career break because I didn’t want to put him into nursery full-time. My husband is self-employed too, so it would have meant juggling childcare from Sunday night to Saturday morning. But when he was about three, I wanted to go back to work, but not full-time employment.

A couple of people I knew were looking for roles. I thought, “Let’s try the CV thing.” I helped them, they got jobs, and I thought, “Maybe I could do this.” That was how the business started. I haven’t looked back since.

How are you seeing AI impact your job, CVs, and LinkedIn?

I am starting to see CVs coming through that are AI-created, and I can spot them from a mile away: the sentence formation, the use of obvious words like “spearheaded” and “championed.” They’re bland. They don’t tell the story.

That said, there’s no reason why you can’t use AI to help form a sentence. But you’ve got to make sure it’s got your stance.

Sometimes clients have forgotten what they’ve done, and they’ve never put it into their CV. We’re talking through things, and they go, “Oh, actually, I’ve got this example.” AI can’t catch that.

Why do you think the CV format has been so lasting, even with the rise of LinkedIn and digital technology?

It gives that snapshot, that initial overview to help recruiters—whether internal or agency—get an understanding. That’s why it’s been lasting.

I say to clients: it’s not about putting everything into your document. It’s about making sure what’s in there is the right level.

That first page is that golden nugget. The personal profile is the elevator pitch that says: who are you? What value can you bring to my business? It draws the recruiter to look at the next section, key skills, in which I recommend you should include an example of where you’ve demonstrated competence. This particularly helps if you have relevant experience, but it was more than 10 years ago.

By doing that, you’ve said on the first two-thirds of the first page: this is me, this is what I’ve done, and this is what I can deliver for this particular role. It’s about how you can jump out of the pile when they’ve potentially got 100-plus applications.

That’s so true. At the business school, I remember thinking: how can this top school be telling us to use this really boring CV format? [Note: Download INSEAD’s template here.] But it was exactly as you said—elevator pitch at the top, then relevant experience. They also pushed us to find a metric to quantify every accomplishment we had.

Most people don’t like selling themselves. I’m not suggesting being big and boastful—that’s not most people. But by using metrics, you can show the value you’ve added. Think about it in terms of “so what”, how have you made a difference? That’s where my career coaching comes in as well to help people arrive at those metrics.

Someone could set a career coach-esque tool in ChatGPT to get to some of those details, then feed that into your CV. But I wonder if it would catch if people are selling themselves short or what they’ve forgotten, as you’ve said.

I always recommend that people regularly track their achievements. You can do it on the Notes app on your phone, a Word document, in Excel, or in a journal.

It also helps you in your performance reviews at work. When you’re asked, “What have you delivered?”, you’ve got the examples. You can also use it to create a reflection post on LinkedIn for what you’ve done in the past month.

It’s cross-purposing it, rather than seeing your CV as one thing and internal processes as a different thing.

What’s your most controversial opinion about CVs?

There’s this whole thing about putting stuff in white font behind text because it will get picked up by a system—that doesn’t work. The majority of applicant tracking systems in the UK are used purely as what I call a ‘locker.’ When you apply for a role, it creates a little record for you with your CV so the recruiting manager can look at it.

That’s what the systems were when I was in HR, and they still are. They don’t scan your CV. There’s no bot that reads it. When you create your CV, it’s about creating it for a human.

Why is LinkedIn also important, alongside the CV?

Since COVID and cost-of-living pressures, a lot of organisations and their internal recruiters would rather do their own search on LinkedIn Recruiter rather than going to an agency that could charge up to 40% in fees. So it’s important to have a fully completed profile.

When you set up your profile, LinkedIn will just pull your job title and current company as your headline. That doesn’t add any value. You’ve got 220 characters for your headline, where you can show added value. The About section is another elevator pitch that helps put you in context.

What do you think about the future for CV writers?

I think people want help from CV writers because they realize the recruitment market is complicated. If you’re not sure about your finances, you go to an accountant. If your printer’s broken, you see an IT specialist. If you don’t know how to put all your experience onto paper, you talk to someone who can help unpick it and find those golden nuggets that really help say who this individual is and what value they can bring.

Often, the job is not just about creating the document; it’s about giving confidence back to somebody. You flip the little imposter gremlin. I tell clients: you haven’t got an imposter gremlin now; you’ve got Kathryn on your shoulder with little pom-poms, cheerleading away.

Why do you think recruiting is so complicated right now?

You see all the negative narratives across social media, but it’s hard to pinpoint one thing. Recruiters have a hard job, especially external recruiters—they’re often stuck between the candidate and the business. If they’re not getting feedback from the business, it’s difficult to give candidates feedback.

I talked to a recruiter a couple of weeks ago who said, “We had 100 people for one role, and 75 of them weren’t suitable because they didn’t have the experience, right to work, or qualifications.” That’s where CVs can get missed.

You can find jobs on all the major platforms, from Indeed to LinkedIn Jobs, but always apply directly from the company page, then follow up the next day. By phoning up to say, “Can I check you’ve received my CV? When’s the closing date?”—and then following up after the closing date, you’re pushing yourself a bit more above the rest. You’re showing that you’re keen. Also, you own your data.

Any final thoughts on AI and CVs?

AI isn’t going to go away. When I first started in HR, we didn’t have systems. If we wanted to advertise a role, we had to create it and fax it to the local newspapers before a certain time on a certain day to get it into that week’s edition.

Systems have evolved. AI is just another system that’s going to do things differently. It’s about how you adapt to it—not seeing it as this big white elephant in the room. It’s about how you can embrace it without feeling like it’s going to take over your life.

CVs and career documents are about you. There’s a limit to how much that tool can help because it doesn’t have insight into you. If you use a CV writer, they will ask you the right questions to get this information there.

That personal experience still can’t be copied by a machine.

Your pathway is your pathway. You want it to be different from somebody else. Even if you’ve got similar job titles, you’re going to have different upbringings, different education, different experiences at work, different projects. It’s about pulling all of that lovely stuff into your document to say: this is what value I can bring to a business. And having that confidence to shout about it—in an honest, ethical way, so that you feel comfortable with what’s out there.

📚 Reading this week

• Write to escape your default setting

• Hiring platform CEO says talent acquisition is in an ‘AI doom loop’

• Pinterest is calling glamoretti, poetcore and scent stacking as trends for 2026

• Important piece from former Eleanot.es interviewee about how “shame—one of the deepest and most embodied human emotions—cannot be read or encoded by machines.”

• If you haven’t read that New Yorker piece about AI writing this week, you should.

🇺🇸 Will be in New York City from next week! Next week’s edition will include my takeaways and reflections from the year. Also putting on my end of year to-do after my chat with Kathryn…update my LinkedIn!

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I’m interested in how technology is changing both writing and the traditional vehicles for writing—not least of all, the book.

My curiosity led me to Irish-Egyptian entrepreneur and author Nadim Sadek. His background reads like a novel: raised across Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Caribbean, he studied philosophy and psychology before building a market research company that sold to WPP. He then bought an island off the coast of Ireland, which became the base for a whiskey, food and music brand.

In the latest chapter of his life, he runs Shimmr AI, a company that drives book sales with automated, AI-powered advertising. The company says that only 5% of publishers’ catalogs are visibly marketed. With AI, even deep backlist titles—say, a niche book on salmon fishing in Sweden (more on this later)—can be matched to their ideal readers. Over the past year, Shimmr delivered roughly 120,000 ads.

• Key takeaways from our conversation:

  • With AI, creative ideas can be expressed across infinite forms: books, songs, videos, sculptures. Publishers become property shepherds, not gatekeepers. Creators will concentrate on what you’re expressing rather than how it’s expressed.

  • Our feelings—not our reasoning—are our greatest strength in an AI world.

Our conversation, condensed for clarity and brevity below.

Tell me about Shimmr.

Advertising is essentially three things: identifying the best selling strategy, creating creative assets, and deploying them to audiences. We wondered whether AI could do all three things, and it turns out our technology does it incredibly well.

The core of what we do is something we call “ProductDNA”—the absolute core, the unique fingerprint of a product. Not just functionally, but psychologically.

What’s an example and what do you mean psychologically?

If you’re trying to sell a book about salmon fishing in Sweden, you might think it’s about fishing, about Sweden, about nature. But when you dig into the psychological themes, you discover it’s actually about melancholy, depression, and cruelty.

The creative assets we generate are very emotive because they’re so true to the book and psychologically based. Our media deployments are very efficient—we only show ads to people predisposed to themes of melancholy, depression, and cruelty. They see it and think, “Oh my God, this is just the book for me.”

And this helps sell more books?

We’re seeing metrics that are 12 times better at driving to e-commerce than traditional advertising benchmarks. Over the last two years, we’ve evolved from just doing images with captions to now generating our own music and videos [for ads].

Why did you start with publishing?
Publishing checks all the boxes we need, and any industry that’s right for us needs to meet four criteria:

First, a very large catalog of SKUs [stock keeping units]—these products can never generate enough cash individually to justify a traditional advertising campaign. Second, these SKUs have discoverability challenges. Third, the products need psychological or narrative depth. Fourth, you need a preponderance of e-commerce so you can drive transactions and get a feedback loop.

Where does social media fit into the future of advertising? I know that’s where Shimmr is currently connecting readers to books.

I’m not sure I have the crystal ball, but what I’m increasingly certain about is that we’re moving into a world of multimodal interactivity. We need to stop thinking about traditional channels and start thinking about audiences being matched with content wherever it’s most suitable.

Everything is a property—whether it’s a Disney character, the New York Times, or you, Eleanor. We’re all properties that need to be developed and husbanded and sometimes monetized. We deal with properties across multiple touchpoints constantly.

What does that look like practically?

Think about our relationship. We’re talking on Zoom right now, but we could just as easily be on WhatsApp video. We’ll probably email. We might meet at some stage. You’ll write about me somewhere, I’ll read it, I’ll share it on LinkedIn. The property of “Nadim Sadek being interviewed by Eleanor Warnock” becomes a multimodal interactive thing.

I love that you use the word “properties” instead of “brands.” There’s something physical about it, like journeying through different places and expressions.

I’m migrating that way myself. I was at a lawyers’ conference in Manhattan recently, and I was really struck by the LA entertainment lawyers. They didn’t talk about anything other than properties.

If you brought them a book, or a film, or a photograph, they thought: What’s the prequel? What’s the sequel? How big is this property? How can we stretch it? What’s the franchise?

That’s such a different mindset from what many artists, who identify themselves so closely with one medium, think. It’s different from how publishers are organized as well.

It is. And I think it’s the mindset publishers need to adopt. Publishers become the gatherers and discoverers of all the beautiful new thinking that’s going to be at the core of whatever properties we enjoy multimodally. It doesn’t matter if it becomes a movie or a song or a magazine or a sculpture.

Taylor Swift is the perfect example of this. The live concert, the merch, the gossip, the music itself; she’s completely multimodal. But what happens to physical stores, for example?

AI can make bookshops smarter. It ensures correct stock because it knows a certain customer is coming. It can create virtual shelves, digital recommendations when you enter, based not just on your past purchases but on your psychological predisposition.

Plus, bookshops have coffee shops, events, readings. They’re cultural hubs in communities. That function becomes more important, not less.

Do you think there’s still value in the handmade, the artisanal?

Absolutely. Look at vinyl. The younger generation is rediscovering it. It’s inefficient, it’s awkward, it requires equipment. But there’s romance and craft in it.

Everything that’s inefficient about human craft will have a premium put on it. What’s more romantic than a handwritten note? It shows time, care, personal investment. As these things become rarer, they become more valuable.

I want to dig more into the discovery point. With AI generating infinite content, how do we find what’s good?

Discovery is becoming a massive difficulty. The solution is communities of curators. I trust you as a tastemaker. I follow people whose judgment I respect. Creating and consuming become the same thing. The people who read me are the people I’m reading.

It’s circular, relationship-based discovery. It returns us to pre-mass-media models when communities shared recommendations, but with global scale and AI-enhanced precision.

So it’s more human in some ways, even though it’s AI-powered?

Yes. The technology enables the human connections. That’s the paradox.

What’s your most controversial opinion about AI?

I invite people to view AI as what I call “the Panthropic”—the beguiling, liberating, mesmerising repository and distillation of all human accomplishment, available at our fingertips. I sometimes ask: Is AI the most creative thing humans have ever done?

I’m trying to wrestle people away from getting stuck in the copyright debates, the concerns about the em-dashes and all that. That’s all part of what I call the terrible twos of AI criticism.

What has your experience with AI taught you about humans?

It’s reminded me that our feelings are our biggest strength and value. We need to re-legitimize navigating through feelings instead of trying to make everything analytical.

I had a meeting recently where I realized that the whole world economy—this subservience to exploitation that we all submit to—is unsustainable. It isn’t a future. AI is forcing us to confront what makes us uniquely valuable, and that’s not our ability to compute and analyze. It’s our ability to feel, to create, to connect emotionally.

That’s a big shift from how we’ve organized society.

It is. But I think that’s the conversation we need to be having. Not whether AI will take our jobs, but what kind of society we want to build when the analytical work is handled for us. Do we want to keep optimizing for efficiency and exploitation? Or do we want to orient ourselves around creativity, around the things that make us human?

What would you say to a creative right now—an illustrator, writer, musician—who’s really afraid of this world?

If you’ve dedicated yourself to learning how to express your creativity in one particular craft, you’re right to feel threatened. You’re right to feel insecure. But I don’t think AI will become the crafter. What AI is going to do is help you identify, develop, and shepherd a creative idea through to some sort of fruition and expression. The expressions are going to become much more free-flowing.

So the barrier to trying new forms of expression comes down?

Exactly. What I would say to those artists is: Feel liberated by the opportunity to have multimodal interactivity in the future. Concentrate on what you’re expressing rather than how it’s expressed. It’s going to be much more about the subject rather than the object. We’ll commune with creators in terms of what they are bringing to our attention, rather than the form that it comes in.

I have a daughter who’s a musician and she’s unbelievable with lyrics. She just tells stories the way I tell stories, but she uses a different craft. I’ve never shown her my attempts at song lyrics because I’ve always been so horrified by them.

But now I feel emboldened to try writing a song based on little daydreams or observations. They could be three verses, five verses. With AI, I can finally explore that.

📚 Future Book conference

Instead of my usual reading links, I’m sharing some notes from The Bookseller’s FutureBook 2025 Conference this week. (Shimmr took home the startup of the year award at the event!)

• Publishing giant Pan Macmillan has been running roundtables of authors, illustrators, agents and others to talk AI. Global AI Lead Sara Lloyd said AI (she called out Gemini specifically) has been used operationally, from digital marketing to team brainstorms. Read how Pan Mac is thinking about AI.

• Hachette-owned commercial fiction publisher Bookouture has the final say on titles and covers and will change them post-publishing based on how the title performs…interesting! Managing director Jenny Geras said she would never publish AI-written books not for moral or ethical reasons but because she would “find it boring.” Preach.

• Favorite fact of the conference I learned: Harper Collins has set up a train line in Italy to help reduce the carbon footprint of deliveries.

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Writing can be an edge in any industry—from investing to neuroscience. You just need interesting ideas to share…and the courage to press publish.

When people ask me how I found the courage, my answer is usually that I was forced to develop it as a journalist. Dealing with trolls on Japanese Twitter at the age of 22 will give you a thick skin.

One of the people who exemplifies the same courage is Anisah Osman Britton. She was already a successful founder when she began writing publicly about tech through op-eds and journalism and is now a sought-after commentator and presenter. Anisah was awarded an MBE in 2023 for services to diversity in tech and is a Forbes 30 under 30 honouree.

• Why this matters: Anisah is the rare person who can write code and write compellingly about tech—and we need more of this combination if we want to hold the industry to account.

• Her story shows how writing, both on LinkedIn and through traditional media, can open doors. Read to the end for her recommendations on how to get started.

Our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, below.

Have you always loved writing?

Yes, always. I’ve written from a really young age. At college I wrote essays, short stories and plays. Then I turned 18 and didn’t do anything with it. It didn’t seem like a legitimate path to take as a career as an ‘academic’ student. All the writing I did after I finished school was in my journal.

How did your tech career start and your writing career start again?

I fell into tech accidentally after wanting to be lots of different things including a pilot and an actor. I ended up running 23 Code Street, a women’s coding school, here and in India. Me and my marketing manager [from 23 Code Street] were at every tech event for a few years—every stage, every panel. The editor of the Evening Standard was at one of the events and asked me if I wanted to write. I said I would need a good editor—I hadn’t written in a long time. But that’s how it came about. An article in 2019 for the Evening Standard that was my first big commission.

After that, people wanted me on stage, wanted to talk to me more. I wrote pieces in media and started writing for Sifted, initially writing op-eds before running the Startup Life newsletter. It made me more visible and more credible.

What was this fateful piece for the Evening Standard about?

It was about how to plug the digital skills gap. When I took a look at it this morning, I realized that my view of tech hasn’t really changed—which is quite nice to see. It’s just the industry around me has changed.

I have a core belief that innovation has to be built to serve everyone. That’s why I started the coding school, and the focus was on coding as the core skill to make innovation serve everyone. Now I’m focused on whose stories we tell and why. The mission has stayed the same, but the way I’m trying to achieve it has changed.

Let’s back up. How were you going to achieve that mission of innovation with the coding school?

Teaching people to code was a small part of achieving that mission. The main part was getting more people who understood how products were built.

In a previous role I had, we worked with big corporates and innovative startups—we were the bridge between them. The C-suite from the corporate side were always men who tended to have more technical understanding, and they were the ones who spoke up in meetings.

My goal was to achieve more variety of thought around the table. If you could understand how products were built, you could sit at the table and decide the direction of products and markets. I often found women lacked the confidence to have those conversations without a deep understanding [of the tech], whereas men didn’t feel like they needed to have a deep understanding to have an opinion.

You’ve shifted from teaching code to writing about tech. How does writing serve that same mission?

Let me zoom out for a minute. Storytelling in tech has always existed to simplify the innovation for those outside the industry—the end consumer. A good example is Apple. Their storytelling and marketing campaigns enabled people to see what they could do with the product, not just what the product does.

I think we’re now seeing the opposite happen, where storytelling is used to create hype and deceive those who aren’t technical—whether that’s consumers, investors, or even journalists. There’s an idea that what exists now is too technical for normal people to understand. This is bullshit. I’m annoyed with how the narrative is being manipulated.

Take crypto, for example. A certain group of people told a story, people jumped in, and then they got the rug pulled out from underneath them. Now with AI, companies are doing similar things.

Personalities also play a big part in tech and that’s down to their storytelling. Very few people are investigating what they say and sometimes what they say is inflammatory because they know it will bring them attention. But we all know having a personal brand is now a big differentiator when it comes to hiring or raising.

My role is to demystify what tech is today and foster conversations—on stages and in my writing—about tech. I want to base those conversations in what is tangible, what is actual fact, not hype.

Is there any place for hype?

Hype has always existed in tech. I will watch every Apple developer conference, every Google one because I buy into the hype. But now, we’re seeing more and more people try to sell a dream to build a dream without being honest about what exists.

This goes hand in hand with it being cheaper to build a business and the democratization of open media. This democratization has almost gone too far the other way—people know how to game the system. There’s deception in, I’d say, 80% of the conversations I’m hearing.

It seems to me there’s also a disconnect between people building the tools and those writing about them. Technical people aren’t often the ones writing.

Technical people aren’t often writing publicly. They’re used to academic writing—explain everything, back it up with sources. But we’re seeing that change with more technical people on stages and podcasts.

AI might plug a gap in being able to simplify some of that language. I’ve seen some technical influencers online asking ChatGPT to create a simplified version. But we still need stronger personalities to come out. We’re not seeing much of that in Europe, but more in the US.

Tell me about your newsletter, Brown Bodies, which is in a totally different area to tech.

I wanted to write something that reflected the conversations I was having with friends. The combination of love and sex as a topic was so underrepresented, especially for South Asian communities. I wanted to create a space to have those conversations and flex my writing and interview skills in a different industry.

Substack was such a lovely way to start something new. You have a community, you see different types of writing, it feels a bit more forgiving. Up until then my audience had been tech. With Brown Bodies, I could just be Anisah. I also liked that Substack has the option of podcast and voice note functionality too, though I haven’t used them yet.

Do you use AI tools in your own writing?

I love this question. I don’t use any AI tools in my own writing. Anything that I write for media is always entirely my own voice which I think is my USP.

I do use ChatGPT for other things, though, such as my work for Unlock VC. We built a GPT trained on our documentation. I can feed it ideas, paragraphs, or notes I’ve written on the tube and pull it into the next newsletter. Out of the four of us, three are part-time, so it’s about leveraging myself to be able to do more, while still representing what we do well.

I also use Perplexity for research and Gamma to pull together pitches for work.

What has writing unlocked for you?

Writing enables me to be the most honest version of myself. Every piece of writing that I do, including in media, feels very truly me. It’s given me the power to tell the stories that I want to be read and seen.

The other thing is journaling. It clarifies what I want and what I believe and what I think—I bang on about this. Writing has become a key part of my career. It’s opened a lot of doors—through publications or LinkedIn. It’s given me access to people who might not have found me otherwise, had I just focused on speaking.

How can someone get started with writing?

Don’t get decision paralysis—just choose one platform to start writing on. Choose a theme or industry you want to write about. Go for quality over quantity, even if it’s one piece a month or every quarter.

Most importantly though is write the way you speak: personality in your writing will help you cut through the AI noise. If you want to write for publications, I suggest starting with niche media like newsletters in your field or pitching in spicy op eds. Also, do your research. Use tools to help you.

Finally, don’t worry if in six months time you read back and it sounds shit. That’s the point. You’re meant to get better.

📚 Reading this week

• The only writing tip you will ever need.

• Nominations for Japan’s buzzwords of the year include “chappī,” a nickname for ChatGPT, and “nuikatsu,” the practice of taking your stuffed toys out with you. (And if a certain OS reads this far in the newsletter he is going to make fun of me for Labubu nuikatsu.)

• Half of UK novelists believe AI is likely to replace their work entirely.

• “Start with why — not AI.” How the NYT is using AI in the newsroom.

• “Ideally, you go into a story not knowing what you think yet, not having a preconceived idea of what the story’s going to be. If you do, then you’re not truly learning the story.” (h/t Harper’s Bazaar’s A Closer Read)

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🇫🇮 This week, I visited Finland, a gaming powerhouse known for companies like Supercell and Rovio. The latter’s Angry Birds holds a Guinness World Record for topping the App Store in 67 countries simultaneously.

🐷 Games don’t go international by accident. They require translation and localization—adaptation for different cultural contexts. Simple enough for a mobile game about flinging appendage-less birds at green pigs. Far harder for games rich with characters and dialogue.

🌍 I have seen a lot of excitement about tech’s potential in localization. Imagine launching your app in dozens of markets with one click or one prompt. But as usual, it’s not that simple.

🎮 This week, I spoke with Lucile Danilov, a freelance games translator (English to French) and localization consultant, about the limits of tech in game localization and how long-undervalued game translators are asserting their worth.

Why it’s important:

• The challenges facing game translators—wage compression, the “exploitation of passion,” and the invisibility of their work—mirror struggles across other industries like journalism.

• Their organized pushback offers a blueprint: refuse exploitative rates, demand credit, and advocate publicly for quality.

How are localization and translation different in games than in other industries?

There’s so much I didn’t know before I joined the localization subbranch of the games industry, though I had worked at that point for 12 years in games [in other roles].

On my first day, I was like, “Okay! I’m going to play the game and then translate it!” And my colleague was like, “What do you mean? Of course, you’re not going to play the game. Here’s an Excel file.”

When you do a translation, say for a tourism website, you can see exactly what the content is going to look like. [In games, translators] usually receive Excel files with thousands of words with no context as to whether these words appear as part of the interface or part of the narrative.

English in particular is a high-context language, so if you get a word like “fire,” does it mean firing a weapon? Campfire? Firing someone? You need to constantly talk to developers to know exactly where that string appears and how to translate it.

How do you collaborate with developers to understand the context?

Once the translation process begins, there’s a lot of back and forth between the translators and the developers through the query sheet process—a giant document that conveys all the questions.

I’m currently working on a project that is about 20,000 words — not that big for a game. It’s the equivalent of about two weeks’ worth of work for a regular translator, but the query sheet for that project has over 1,000 questions. Not because the translators are incompetent or don’t understand the text. It’s because of the lack of context that I was talking about earlier.

Tech has been part of translation for a long time, through computer-assisted translation tools, but how have recent developments in AI impacted the job?

As you said, tech is something that’s impacted our profession since way before generative AI came into the picture. There is a practice called MTPE, Machine Translation Post-Editing. You get a draft translation that is produced by something like Google Translate or DeepL, or more recently, Claude or ChatGPT, and your job is to simply polish it and send it back for a fraction of the price that it would cost to translate.

This looks like an attractive proposition for translation buyers. But the reality is that many times, it’s just unusable, especially in the case of games or applications that are extremely context-dependent or that require a high degree of creativity that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with.

The main issue we’re facing as an industry is a push for MTPE to become prevalent across all domains of localization. Beyond the financial impact that this has on translators, it’s also a threat to the quality of the final product. If translators are not paid the correct price for their work, it’s not going to be interesting, it’s not going to be immersive, it’s not going to be good. I have a hard stance against this because I have seen it destroy careers.

I have a personal beef with AI companies and the way they have taken intellectual property from so many people without any credit or compensation. I don’t see how it has become so ubiquitous, and how people just accept it as the new standard. Why are judicial systems not protecting authors, artists, and so on? Why has the internet become a free-for-all?

How are people in your industry pushing back?

In the localization industry, people are pushing back by simply refusing the kind of work that is being offered by the biggest agencies on the planet.

Don’t quote me on exact numbers, but basically, two or three mega corporations are now controlling most of the localization market in Europe, enforcing MTPE across the board and offering slave wages for it. Recently, one company was paying five euros an hour for linguistic testing. These are companies that make millions.

Translators and testers are treated extremely badly. The conditions are like linguistic sweatshops. There is no thought for quality; you have to work as fast as possible and produce something that is barely passable.

What does this do to pay and wages?

Localization uses a different kind of pricing than many other fields, where sometimes you’re paid by project or per page. In localization, we’re usually paid by word, and more specifically, source words. So let’s say you have a document that is 2,000 English words. Depending on the agency and stuff, you can be paid anywhere between five to 15 cents. With MTPE, that can be two to three cents.

Some texts are pretty straightforward to translate, for example, a description of a castle. Sometimes you will have marketing text or a press release that requires a very high degree of creativity. All of this is paid at the same rate, so you will lose a lot more time on some text and you will gain some on others.

German, French, and most languages aside from Asian ones are longer than English, so you’re being paid to translate 2,000 English words, but in French, it may end up being 2,600 or 2,700 words.

And I guess these companies can pay these prices because there are people who are willing to work for these wages?

The game localization industry, in particular, is suffering from the exploitation of passion. A lot of young people love video games. I was one of those people once upon a time. I would do anything to work on games and accepted even the worst rate. I started in London being paid six pounds an hour.

We’re at a point where people are begging to volunteer on some projects because they want any opportunity to get their foot in the door in hopes of building a career.

I have the advantage of having a network and experience, so I can rely on that to get reliable work. But someone who is trying to start in localization in 2025—I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but it’s definitely a Sisyphean endeavor. The same goes for many creative industries.

I advise newcomers to the field that instead of looking at agencies that are going to exploit them anyway, they might as well work on their own projects, even if it’s unpaid, and do something else on the side, until they have some kind of recognition. Then they can work with reputable entities.

That’s similar to how I have approached my creative writing. I’ve had full-time or part-time roles on the side to support me as I build up credibility.

Does that mean you enjoy your day job, or is it supplementary income?

That’s a good question, and I’ve thought a lot about it. I’ve concluded that I need to feel like I am tapping into meaning in at least one part of my life, even if that’s not what’s written at the top of my LinkedIn. If I do a well-paying role that I know is not 100% my passion, I can feel fulfilled as long as I’m able to feed my passion somewhere else.

I’m happy that you can find a happy medium, because I see a lot of people struggling.

I am in a privileged position, which is why I try and use my voice to speak out where others cannot for fear of biting the hand that feeds them.

Continuing with how you’ve supported people in the industry, I love the sample translation test you have on your website for prospective translators.

It was the very first thing I wrote, and it really resonated with people.

When you try to get into the industry, it’s very nebulous. I kept receiving tests from agencies, and they were all so widely different that I didn’t know what to expect. I was like, “It’s such a shame that people cannot prepare for this.”

People have said they passed an agency test thanks to the mock test. It’s been amazing.

Why isn’t there pressure from gamers for higher-quality translation or localization?

This is a conundrum. Many gamers, not all, think that translation should be word-for-word, so any machine translation is good enough. They don’t realize sometimes that the games they are enjoying so much are, in part, thanks to the work of translators. They think those words appear like magic on the screen.

The reason they think it appears magically is because, for a very long time, translators were not credited in the game credits. Those mega corps I was talking about earlier, or developers themselves, were not putting the translators in the credits so they could claim they did everything themselves.

When [translation] started being subcontracted to agencies, they started baking in clauses in the contract that said, “You will not be credited because this is our client’s policy.” It was a take-it-or-leave-it kind of deal. You had to accept that your name would not appear, and you could not talk about the project even after release.

When I joined the industry in 2019, I was appalled that this was the status quo. So, along with a couple of colleagues, we started a movement called #translatorsinthecredits. We started calling out the game developers, the game publishers, and the agencies that were not crediting the translators, and getting a few allies in the press to report on the topic. In the last three or four years, we managed to bring down the giants, remove those clauses from their contracts, and get people properly credited.

This has been amazing because people need to be able to mention they worked on a game for their credibility and their career. Part of the reason I’m able to mention a title like Mouthwashing [that I worked on] is that we have removed those clauses.

What makes you optimistic about localization?

Localization specialists who work in games are gamers. I have been a gamer since the age of four. We are very involved in gaming communities, and we want what’s best for games. We love games as much as players do.

This makes me so optimistic, because I can see translation communities being more and more vocal about unethical practices in localization in general: MTPE, the lack of credits, the lack of remuneration, and everything. Just a few years ago, almost nobody was talking about this.

Now, thanks to people talking on social media and associations like the International Game Developers Association, we’re spreading the word and making newcomers aware that the status quo does not apply anymore. You don’t have to be pressured into accepting a miserable wage and getting no credit for your hard work.

But beyond localization, the problem is that currently, the games industry is going through a very, very rough phase. There have been thousands of layoffs worldwide for a variety of reasons. AI is one of them, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a major factor.

Yes, I also see this in tech right now. People are blaming the difficult job market on AI, but it’s also a rebound from overhiring and other factors.

In localization in particular, however, I think AI has a much bigger impact than in some other fields, because localization is not seen as a profit enabler.

It is easy to see localization not just as outsourceable, but outsourceable to some less-than-ethical providers who can pretend that they did an okay enough job to cover this or that market and call it a day.

What are you working on now?

I continue to fight for translators in the credits. We have created a game translator edition for the Game Awards because many of the games that are nominated do not credit their translators. We use the event to bring awareness to the cause.

📚 Reading this week.

• Lucile on the human cost of AI.

• A musing on TikTok videos as modern sonnets. (h/t )

• I want to print this out and read it daily: in an AI world, discernment is a valuable skill. (h/t )

• How companies are dealing with a deluge of machine-written applications: the return of in-person assessments, interviews earlier in the process, and advertising jobs in targeted communities.

• A highlight of my Helsinki trip was visiting modernist architect Alvar Aalto’s house, a gorgeous example of mixing work and private spaces in a home. Take a peek.

Thank you for reading! Next week, we have an interview with an entrepreneur who is changing the way that we market books with AI (and also happens to own an island).

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🇮🇹 Last weekend, I attended a gala in a palazzo in Venice, hosted by an organization that’s been around since the First Crusade. As we danced beneath centuries-old paintings, my Campari-addled brain wandered to a question: what art created in the past few decades will still be around in a hundred years? Will the future Italian elite boogie next to Beeple?

⬜️ If we’re to believe cultural critic W. David Marx, not much. In his new book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, out next week, David argues that the past 25 years have seen a dramatic decline in creative innovation. Weaving through a sprawling cast—from Taylor Swift and Psy to Elizabeth Holmes and Mr. Beast—he makes the case that culture has become “a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering—but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.”

🎨 I’ve known David since my time in Japan, and I was especially eager to hear his perspective on tech’s role in culture. This edition will be longer than usual, but the conversation is worth it. Here’s our talk, condensed for brevity and clarity.

The book is named for a Taylor Swift song, and I think she, more than anyone you mention, embodies your hypothesis about culture over the last 25 years. Talk me through that.

I mean this in a non-pejorative way, but I think Taylor Swift does represent where culture has been in the last 25 years: entertainment, rather than mind-altering art. You can throw it on and take value from it. It immediately hits you with the hook.

She’s done something that culture in the past tried not to do, which is to repeat itself. The music writer Jaime Brooks pointed out that “Shake It Off” is just an imitation of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”…If you listen to “Blank Space,” it leans on Lorde’s “Royals” quite a bit.

Culture doesn’t even have to be artistically minded, but it was always something new — a new sound, a new feeling that really marked the era. Taylor Swift has created a business based on looking at what was successful and replicating that, rather than trying to be a forward trend.

If you go back to the Beatles’ catalog, they were obsessed with always twisting the convention a little bit. Taylor Swift is really good at creating works that fit existing conventions, then marketing those and meeting her audience where they are.

A lot of the book centers around musicians who embody this marriage of entertainment and profit. Did you feel like you were writing about a lot of music?

Absolutely. Growing up in the 90s, music was central to everything; the clothes that you wore were based on the kind of music you listened to. MTV was the center of youth culture.

In the last 25 years, music has lost its center of culture. And yet, if you were to describe the main characters of the last quarter century, you would hit musicians: Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Kanye. And you can’t talk about the diversification of global culture without talking about K-pop.

Music embodies a phenomenon that’s beyond just the music itself…Taylor Swift’s innovation is in the lore of Taylor Swift — you dig through the hints to figure out who the ex-boyfriends are…there’s the celebrity angle, the experience of going to see a live show, your speculation about their future careers, the books, the fashion brands…

Paris Hilton made some music. While that wasn’t how she showed up, she strikes me as a pop star. We just didn’t even need her to make music; she could go off and do the same thing Britney was doing. Britney dominated pop culture for a couple of years, not because she was releasing music, but because she was hitting paparazzi cars with an umbrella and had a shaved head.

Similarly, I’m a huge Blackpink fan, but I think most of their music is bad. Instead, I love all the things around them, which seems like a new kind of fandom.

It feels more Japanese, like being a fan of Johnny’s acts; the music is not the point. It’s the whole phenomenon, and the whole investment in being a fan.

The stereotype of a music fan used to be a scrawny, white indie guy. If a new album came out, you would sometimes hate it, even though it was your favorite artist. You would have these big debates about whether it was good or bad.

The model in Japan has been more: if you’re a great fan, you buy it. There’s no real value judgment about whether it’s good or not. “Stan” culture is much closer to that.

Then, in the American model, [stan culture] becomes very defensive and very aggressive — we’re going to destroy anyone who says anything otherwise. I was shocked when the new Taylor Swift album came out, which was not universally loved. The New Yorker had a headline that said, “Taylor Swift might not be capable of making a bad record…”. I thought that was so incredible, because no one in 1984 would have written that Bob Dylan is incapable of making a bad album.

I’m a Dylan fan, and he has had some clunkers.

Not only are fans taking that perspective on the music, but critics also have accepted the idea of someone like Taylor Swift. It’s an automatic assumption that whatever she does will be incredible, which is a new kind of thought about pop culture.

I appreciated that in the book, you describe how these changes in how we value culture actually happened before the internet was as widespread as it is now. I also believe that a lot of the current polarization has its roots far before the spread of social media, for example.

That’s a really important point to me, and was only notable to me in writing a history of this period rather than an analysis.

These trends are catalyzed and exploded by the internet, but they start beforehand. I think the actual century begins as a backlash against the rise of liberal inclusivity and neoliberal economics and its alliance with center-left politics. What polite society believed in the ‘90s moved from a parochial, more or less center-right, patriarchal, conservative church-bound view of society to a more “the healthier thing is to let people be who they are.” Meritocracy, education, and all these liberal upper-middle-class values became established as polite society values, and there was much more tolerance and excitement about being inclusive.

Once that became established as the new hegemony of politics and the economy, transgression became more anchored to right-wing values. It’s this transgressive, liberating act to go off and say a racial slur. That really starts with Vice magazine and Gavin McInnes, and then it continues, obviously, through 4chan and the current President of the United States.

On the other side, center-left politics did not solve everything, and economic inequality became much worse. So on the left, you have stronger movement also against liberal ideas towards identity politics. Then identity politics swallows culture as well.

Francis Fukuyama’s book Liberalism and Its Discontents is exactly about this process. We have the same thesis, which is more or less that the 21st century is best explained as a backlash against centrist liberalism that established itself as the new hegemony. Culture follows that same direction, and that starts before smartphones ever enter the picture or the internet is used by anyone other than a professional class of people on desktop computers.

How does that manifest itself in a trend like poptimism, another theme in the book?

There’s still this raging debate within music criticism about poptimism…But I really do believe that, whether you call it poptimism or a pro-pop ideology, it’s anchored to ideals of liberal inclusivity.

If you had gone to college in the ‘90s, as many of these critics have done, and they were in literature departments or cultural studies departments, they would have read Pierre Bourdieu and learned this Kantian ideal of art: that art is this detached thing in your brain…that there’s this hierarchy of high and low, and that is a tool of class suppression.

So it makes sense that if you then are told, “Radiohead is good because you listen to it in your head, but hip hop is bad because it’s just dance music,” you would say, “That’s very unfair, because people are getting this incredible value of going to the club and listening to the songs and…wait, there’s a lot of real innovative beat making in hip hop.”

Poptimism came from an obvious and good place, which is to say, if we’re applying this destruction of hierarchies to our entire understanding of global culture, it needs to happen within criticism as well. We need to take pop music seriously…to take Ashlee Simpson as seriously as Radiohead.

So when Addison Rae came out with an album this year, all the reviews said things like, “Her best lyrics are her dumbest lyrics.” “She’s the best when she realizes that she’s just an ingredient.” Long story short, poptimism came out of an ideological place, but it morphed to create a new set of standards for judging art.

Let’s go back to what you said about the internet accelerating these trends.

Social norms are held in place by punishment. If you’re a celebrity and you do something outrageous — let’s say this is the 1990s, you get removed from mass media. You’re gone, and that’s it.

The internet allows you to move around social norms, because it’s an unregulated space. Hardcore pornography, even if it’s allowed in society, is not in the middle of a city; you have to go to a certain store to buy it. And now the internet allows anybody, anywhere, to access hardcore pornography.

When the [Paris Hilton] sex tape came out, a leaked tape that her ex-boyfriend very aggressively and disgustingly tried to monetize, how was it sold? It wouldn’t be sold in a pre-internet era at all. Maybe it’d be put on a videotape, and there would be third-hand reports of it. When it was put on the internet, the clips leaked to video sites, and anyone could see them.

Technology always creates a new unregulated area where social norms can’t be enforced. At the very beginning, this was celebrated because social norms were seen as the way that conservatives crushed human liberation…And then misogyny and racism and anti semitism flourished on the internet, and there was no way to punish it except to cancel people.

All these canceled stars aren’t really canceled. They’re just living in this alternative economy, and they’re still connecting with their fans. The quantification of culture, global distribution speed…the internet had a big role in all those things, but I think the norm-breaking part of the internet is something that people think about less.

But the internet imposed other norms — clicks and likes.

Popularity was still the key [in the past], but there was enough ambiguity that critics and gatekeepers could say, “This is popular but terrible, and this is really good, and people need to see it, and so we’ll amplify it.”

Once you get to an objective and pseudo-democratic model — the people have spoken, and they want to see this attractive young woman who’s not wearing very much do a video and not this art video — then it’s very hard to make the same argument to gatekeep.

Second, if your business model is based on being paid by the number of clicks or the number of impressions, you’re going to maximize your content strategy for that. So, as you’re doing the gatekeeping, even if you still put your thumb on the scale for things that represent your taste as an editor, you can’t completely discount the other things.

The interesting long-term consequence of the internet is that we felt that if you give tools to more people to create, destroy barriers and expand distribution, you will only have positive outcomes. I think the outcomes have mostly been negative, and that when you destroy all the other criteria because criteria are elitist, you move to a model in which the most raw mob mentality wins out and/or whatever makes the most money wins.

There will still be a winner, there will still be a narrative, it’s just that it will probably be based on a set of values that are less productive and ideal for society.

Let’s talk about your take on AI in the book. You say that even before generative AI tools, we already had too much content, and challenge the idea that it’s something really new from that perspective.

This was written before Sora, in the Suno age, when there was a lot of bad music being created. I don’t know if I worry about Suno’s bad music against the other one. But with Sora, when anyone in the world can hit a button and make anything, and it looks pretty much like the thing that you want it to look like, video becomes massively and totally devalued. You will never want to watch anything again.

If you go to someone’s house and they put out their IKEA plates, and you don’t say, “How did you create this plate? This is incredible.” But if you went to a Japanese ryokan and they had something much more crafty, you would look at the bottom, see the name, and admire it.

I thought the worst that could happen was we would be a little bored, but I think human experience and human labor are going to be massively revalued, and you’re going to want to see things in real life, because everything on a screen is possibly fake.

If you had to write a chapter going into 2026, what would you add?

I think people are bored with putting the internet more into their lives. Culture is moving back to small spaces, private clubs, restaurants, and real experiences. Purely digital things have become devalued — the NFT seems like the peak of that.

The smartphone is no longer a status symbol. It’s a social obligation machine and a time-wasting machine put together.

Tech is no longer solving these easy problems. There was a time when you’d think, “I wish I knew where I was, and I wish I knew how to get where I want to go.” And then someone built a map that constantly refreshed with all the world’s geographic information, constantly updated—and that was incredibly helpful. But once that exists, there isn’t another set of problems we all share where we think, “I wish they could solve this.” We’ve really hit the maximum of what consumer tech can do to help your daily efficiency.

In general, the shine has worn off of technology, and there’s just this already a move away from it, and away from AI that I’m actually quite optimistic about. People are rediscovering that there’s just more value in tactile, analog experiences.

Next steps:

📚 Check out David’s other books: Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style and Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change.

🏙️ For the City Boys and City Girls: David also recently translated a fully English edition of the iconic Japanese magazine, Popeye.

🎄 Send me your favorite cultural moments of the last 25 years. My vote is for low culture moment is the Merry Chrystler girl, high culture is In The Mood For Love.

Thank you all for reading! Next week, look out for an interview with a games industry insider on how tech is changing gaming and localization. And if you’re not subscribed, come along:

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When ChatGPT was released in 2022, I was an editor at the FT-backed Sifted, and I remember the exhilarating feeling of using the very tools we were reporting about. Three years later, journalists are still just scratching the surface of how these tools can enhance reporting.

This week, I had the pleasure of getting the perspective of The Times’s technology business editor, Katie Prescott. Her book on controversial British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, who died in a yacht accident last year after being acquitted of fraud charges, is out next week. We discussed how she used tech in the time-crunched writing process and what developments in tech mean for the future of her profession.

• Key takeaways: Katie’s tool of choice, Google NotebookLM, can be a game-changer for projects — like writing a book! — where you’re dealing with lots of information and accuracy is key. But it still takes an expert to correctly analyze and interpret findings: this is the journalist edge.

EW: Tell me about why AI is so relevant for your upcoming book about entrepreneur Mike Lynch?

KP: In the last phase of his life, after he sold his business Autonomy to HP and was accused of fraud, Lynch started a fund called Invoke and invested in AI businesses. He was very early to legal AI — I think he saw how much money he was spending on lawyers and realized that a lot of that work could be automated — AI in healthcare, with Sophia Genetics, and also in finance. So it felt appropriate that I was using AI to sift through documents for the book.

EW: How exactly did you use AI in the process?

The challenge I had was this extraordinary volume of information. [Lynch] was involved in three major trials…On top of that, the Financial Reporting Council, the British accountancy watchdog, also looked over Autonomy’s accounts and produced an enormous report.

I don’t think you could have shoved it into an AI engine and understood what was going on. I needed to read through [the documents], particularly when it came to Mike Lynch, because he died before I wrote the book, and I had planned to interview him.

What AI allowed me to do — and I use Google NotebookLM — was to essentially create my own mini LLMs for each trial and interrogate them. That was incredibly useful for fact-checking, but also to find little nuggets of information or testimony that I wouldn’t have found if I printed them all out and read through.

It wasn’t like using a chatbot where you’re afraid of hallucinations. I could check that something was accurate and where it was coming from.

I also uploaded all of the transcripts of the earnings calls at Autonomy from when it listed [in London] in 2000 up until it sold to HP in 2011. That was helpful in terms of tracking the progression of the company and seeing, for example, points during the financial crisis when it was facing challenges — what were [Lynch’s] arguments about that?

EW: So you were able to connect disparate threads you might not otherwise have been able to connect and fact-check.

KP: Yes, and also find testimony from people that I might not have read because I thought they were more of a bit part.

When I was fact-checking the book, I could put numbers in. For example, one of the numbers was that Autonomy’s quarterly revenue rose by £200 million. But it didn’t, it was £200 million.

You couldn’t have done it cold. You needed to understand the story across the documents and who the people were, but once you got there, it was a game-changer.

EW: If your book were to be used as a textbook in business schools, what do you think the takeaways would be?

KP: The HP-Autonomy case is already a Harvard Business School case — on how not to do due diligence. HP did 18 days of due diligence for an $11 billion purchase. There was noise in the market that they should have listened to, but they were in a rush to buy the company.

Autonomy wasn’t a failing business by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that Mike Lynch was trying to flatter the numbers and make them look better than they were. His team used various techniques, like selling hardware as well as software and not telling the market.

I think there’s also something about founder CEOs. Lynch ran the company from an inner circle of people who he was very close to, and who could not say no to him, or did not say no to him. I think that when you get to a certain scale as a company, there is an argument for having a professional chief executive at the helm.

They always describe [Autonomy] as being run like a startup. It wore that as a badge of honor because it means you’re quick and reactive and creative, but that can also have repercussions.

EW: Lynch was definitely ahead of his time in recognizing the applications of AI in business. When you speak to business leaders now, what don’t they get about this technology?

KP: I think there is a lot of fear among chief executives and in boardrooms that they are missing something, but I think the wisest people are cooling their jets and watching how [AI] develops.

I spoke to Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the boss of Klarna. They’re slimming down their workforce by basically half. Not by firing people, but by natural attrition, and he’s expecting [the business] to grow just as much. His inbox is full of execs asking, “How are you doing that?” There’s desperation and a lot of FOMO, but it’s probably unjustified. Apart from the obvious examples of customer service, for example, and Copilot…I’m not seeing any absolutely, oh-my-god transformational thing going on.

EW: What isn’t being talked about with respect to AI?

KP: I don’t think we are thinking enough about the copyright issue. The Getty Images and Stability AI court case hearing was published today. [Note: Getty largely lost the case.] That comes with a cost. I think we all need to be mindful about giving too much power to these incredibly wealthy companies that have market valuations of more than the UK’s GDP.

Recognizing that and thinking about the impact on society — spinning back to that copyright point — making sure they pay their fair share while they’re reaping hay in this AI revolution.

I think we’re almost in danger of deifying these people.

EW: So are we in an era where tech defines the age, versus politics?

KP: Tech is defining politics. Look at how our governments treat tech leaders. Wasn’t it extraordinary that Trump brought the US tech guys on his state visit?

EW: What about journalism going forward? What does this new technology mean for the profession?

KP: I’m so excited about it, I can’t tell you.

The way I used it for my book, I used it similarly in a court case recently. It was another fraud case with [luxury property developer] Nick Candy accusing someone called Robert Bonnier of basically conning him into investing in a social media company.

I put all of the testimony into NotebookLM. I literally asked it: “Find me the most interesting bits of testimony.” It found that Bonnier’s wife used to collect champagne corks, and [a story about how] she hired a private jet to fly her handbag to Dubai from Jakarta.

I think in terms of helping journalists process large volumes of data — journalists who often aren’t very good at doing things like that and who are very time poor — it is invaluable. You still need the skills to understand the information, process it, assess it, and check it. It’s not like that’s going to be taken away from you.

EW: Right, it’s still fundamentally about judgment and expertise.

KP: I was at Bletchley Park at the AI Summit, the year after ChatGPT came out. I sat outside and did some radio hits, and someone said to me, “AI is never going to be able to put a red dress on and crawl the halls of power.” It’s true. What you want journalism for is someone who’s making sense of this all, putting it together and speaking to people about what’s going on.

Journalism cuts through the PR and gets to the truth of things. Back to the copyright point, these engines are being fed by people and human-written information. So we need to make sure we don’t lose the value of that.

📖 Next steps:

→ Experiment with NotebookLM (it’s free). Start with The Economist’s World Ahead notebook to see it in action.

→ Pre-order Katie’s book, The Curious Case of Mike Lynch, out next week.

→ Share your experience: What AI tools are you using for research or writing? Hit reply and let me know.

✨ Reading this week

• “How do you change your destiny?…You change your destiny with knowledge. How do you gain knowledge? You read the news.” Great interview in the Guardian with former journalist and commentator Wang Jian.

• What AI means for the business of journalism (h/t )

• What is quality work in the era of AI? Thoughtful musings by will bring you back to those halcyon Ghibli days.

• Best take on the AI bubble debate I’ve read, quoted this in so many conversations this week. From .

Thank you all for reading! If you haven’t subscribed yet, join us.

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