“KPMG report contained AI hallucinations on benefits of . . . AI”

This Financial Times headline from June sums up this weird time we’re living in — the volcano of corporate bullshit is oozing a new kind of AI slag, and lazy people still haven’t figured out how to cover their tracks.

This and several other FT scoops were based on inaccuracies flagged by AI detection platform GPTZero. Co-founder Edward Tian was a senior at Princeton University studying journalism and computer science when he built the first version of the company’s product. It was just weeks after ChatGPT had blown the world’s mind for the first time, and he foresaw the plagiarism these new tools would enable.

Three years and millions of users later, GPTZero was acquired by Superhuman (formerly Grammarly) in June, and Edward joined the Superhuman team.

In his first interview since the transition, Edward chatted to me about what he’s building after AI detection, the AI writing principles his team created for Superhuman, and why editing is such an important skill.

Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and brevity.

Tell me about your new role at Superhuman post-acquisition and what you’re building.

There are two things we’re already switching up. One is that we’re going to build beyond AI detection. We want to create the largest public database in the world for how AI is being used on the internet. We have a new site, istheinternetai.com, as a starting place for collecting what people are seeing. The same way that Wikipedia became a public source of information on the internet, can we be a resource journalists or everyday people can use to see how AI is showing up online? That’s our vision of an authenticity layer.

Two, we just launched an assignments product — creating assignments of the future, some with multiple steps to submit. We’re working with a professor in the UK, , on one where he asks students to create their own writing that’s essentially AI-proof.

We want to build products in education, for the equilibrium that teachers and students are navigating around the right amount of AI use — products that preserve critical thinking and have those education insights feed into the larger Superhuman product, the assist layer that follows you everywhere as you work.

How are you approaching AI and writing within Superhuman?

One of the first things is that we’re drafting an AI use and writing policy for the company. A lot of people think we’re against AI usage, which isn’t the case. And with our AI detection and monitoring, people assume there’s a lot of “this opinion piece is AI” callout energy, which also isn’t really the case.

We’ve worked with journalists in the past: a New York Times journalist on AI-generated biographies flooding Amazon, and three pieces in the FT about hallucinations. The idea is that those were worth calling out because they damaged information, versus [calling out] an opinion piece that happens to be AI-written. Calling out mediocre writing is a different problem. The hallucination cases — the McKinsey-style reports, say — are actually wrong. They pollute the information ecosystem, because now people search for the same things and LLMs return rotten information.

So we’re not against AI writing use — quite the opposite. Now that we’ve joined this larger company, we believe they should use AI in their writing. They’re an AI company, after all. But there should be some principles: AI is the first draft, not the final one. Editing is thinking. Quality over quantity — the reader deserves more effort than the time it takes them to read something. And longer is not better.

The last principle is basically the inverse-pyramid style of communication, taken from journalism — prioritize and highlight the most important information, because AI tends to generate more and more, and the critical points get lost in the noise.

We drafted these four principles, and the CEO said, “Great, send them to us; I’ll add you to the monthly email that goes to the whole company.” It’s not massively shaking things up, but it’s part of joining a larger AI company that’s obviously going to use AI — the question is what’s the right way to do it.

The distinction you’re drawing between calling out misinformation and calling out just bad writing is interesting. I’m more of an advocate for calling out writing when it’s bad, because that’s my specialism — I’m there to advocate for clear and eloquent communication.

To change the topic a bit, what do you see people in your peer group or younger struggling with when it comes to AI?

One thing we’ve realized is there’s definitely an overreliance on AI among people who finished university entirely after ChatGPT launched, compared to people before. I think that’s endemic in writing. If you take the tools away, there are more and more people who never really learned to write.

What we’ve realized is the actual skill worth preserving isn’t writing itself: it’s editing. That editing, revision, and thinking process — whether you’re editing your own first draft or the AI’s first draft — is what’s necessary for quality, and that’s what’s increasingly being lost.

My most impactful professor in college was John McPhee, a creative writing professor. I took his class in his last year teaching, when he was around 89 years old. I was the only computer science major in that class, so we talked a lot about technology and writing, and he was genuinely curious about whether AI could write in his style.

The big takeaway was that the core of the writing process is editing: a good editor changes everything. That’s tied to critical thinking: it’s never really about the first draft, even when you’re writing entirely on your own. One of his last books was called Draft No. 4 for exactly that reason. Now everyone thinks AI is going to generate the first draft, but what happens to the editing that gets you to the second, third, fourth draft?

As someone who was the lone computer science major in a writing class, how do you think we bridge that gap between tech and the humanities, especially with all the anxiety and mistrust around tech tools at the moment?

Just like when you first started writing your novel and went straight into Claude to see what was possible, it’s helpful to run these tools yourself and see what’s missing, because there’s always something missing. Whether it’s a year ago or now, these tools still aren’t fully producing great work, great summaries, great notes on their own — you still need good editorial and writing judgment. So maybe that’s the starting point.

Superhuman is trying to lean into being a writing-assistance company — Grammarly has always been the most popular assistive app for writing. You’re already doing the work. Can we assist you rather than do it for you? It’s philosophically quite different from doing the whole task for you or replacing your function.

It’s interesting to dig into Grammarly a bit — I’m a professional writer, but I’ve used Grammarly for years, and I’m not scared to say it’s great. But no one really thinks of it as an AI tool. They did such a good job of making it feel integrated and natural. How do you think they pulled that off?

I think their real sweet spot isn’t just the Silicon Valley early-adopter crowd — it’s outside that bubble too, people who’ve never really touched other AI tools. My dad uses Grammarly.

If a tool is good enough, it gets embedded in your workflow. You don’t have to consciously enable it or have someone tell you to go use it; it’s just organically there. There’s a lot of design work that goes into making a tool feel that natural.

I’ve been thinking about note-takers. A lot of these AI note-takers are evolving to be so naturally there that you stop thinking of them as AI replacing you. It’s less “bright billboard AI” — in your face — and more something that’s just there for you. That takes a lot of design and product thinking to get right. When you get there, it becomes more of an assist than a replacement.

Definitely. In keeping with that, I think that the way we interface with AI tools will change dramatically going forward and feel much more natural. My other question was — what did you get wrong early on about the impact of AI on writing or on work?

There were two camps early on. One thought that AI detection wouldn’t matter, because everyone would settle into using AI everywhere, all the time. That turned out not to be the case. I remember VC investors passing on us because they were so pro-AI that they assumed everyone would use it every day.

But it turns out that people want the truth. This is something we’ve thoroughly believed in as we’ve built out tools for monitoring AI on the internet.

The second thing is realizing it’s not binary. People used to think something was either entirely AI or entirely human, and more and more we’ve realized people are writing with AI and with themselves. Even our own classification system now has a mixed, third class, instead of the binary we always had before. I think most other AI detectors are still binary, but we added that class to represent the fact that this is changing, and people are writing with a combination of human and AI tools. That’s probably what most of the world will be doing in five to ten years, rather than everyone using AI or no one using it.

If you could go back to university now and start as a freshman again, would you study computer science, or would you pick something different?

I majored in computer science and minored in journalism. At this point, I’d probably flip it around. Everyone’s majoring in computer science now, and I wonder if the advantage is as large as it used to be — maybe it’s smaller than being a CS major pre-2020, pre-AI, because now you don’t need to be an extremely technical computer science or math major to work beyond just AI use. So I’d flip it — if I went back, I think I’d want to major in journalism and spend more time in the humanities, while still keeping that technical exposure.

If you’re London-based and want to talk to writers thinking about AI and creativity, join the next Founder-Writer Collective event with on September 30. Or come be part of the audience of the live podcast I’m recording on AI, branding, and the “great flattening” on October 1.

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The 11-year-old boy bites his lip. His hands are clammy with sweat. Finally, he opens his mouth. Out spills the question that’s rattled around in his head for a week.

“What’s a flame?”

His teacher raises her eyebrows and stares down at him over her thick glasses. In this pause, his eyes grow even wider with curiosity.

“It’s oxidation.”

The response pops the bubble of excitement in his chest. This is the person he respected for her endless knowledge — for knowing why the sky is blue and how mountains are formed. How could she answer the mystery of fire with another mystery?

That boy was Alan Alda, the American actor, and it took him more than 65 years to get the answer that he wanted.

After an Emmy-winning, 11-season run on M*A*S*H, Alda started hosting the show Scientific American Frontiers in the 1990s. As he interviewed hundreds of scientists, he became the boy in the classroom again. Except this time, he bombarded the experts with questions until they explained things in a way that he could understand.

“The real person behind the scientist in the white lab coat could emerge,” he wrote later. “Suddenly, both young people and adults could see that scientists were like them, with a natural way of speaking and even a sense of humor.”

These conversations convinced him that scientists needed to be good communicators, and in 2009, he helped found the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York, built around an improv-heavy curriculum. Then, in 2012, Alda announced the Flame Challenge, proof that the television show and school had been an elaborate ruse to avenge his curious younger self.

Six thousand 11-year-olds chose the best explanation of a candle’s glow: a video that includes a naked man being tortured by fire, LEGO atoms boxing, and cupcakes. You can watch it if your interest has been sparked.

I tell you this story today because I feel that the tech industry might benefit from being subjected to a similar trial. How do we know whether to trust tales about agents building their own civilizations? Would someone please explain how AI is going to kill all of us? A news report about the Flame Challenge featured Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has literally made it his career to explain stuff like stars and galaxies to the public. Who is the Neil deGrasse Tyson of tech?

It’s also not just the big AI companies. A founder reached out to me this week for a phone call. He wanted my take on a product that (I think??) had to do with being able to license my content to AI companies and preserve my authorship (again, I think?). I took one look at the website and told him I couldn’t speak to him until he got further along: it was gobbledygook, all cryptographic attestation and procurement-grade deployment. If your own ideal customer can’t understand what you’re selling, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Maybe the real test for anything trying to explain the future to the rest of us is whether or not it would withstand the Flame Challenge. Or whether it leaves your audience standing like Alda did all those decades ago, confused by another mystery.

In the debate over AI and writing, both sides love to reach for the same analogy: the camera’s impact on art. Two heavyweights entered the fray on that very question in the past two weeks.

This month, Yellowface author R.F. Kuang argued that the camera “expanded creative options” by giving artists a new way to express their perspective and human experience, and that AI doesn’t pass that test.

Good artistic developments just keep adding to the toolbox of the ways you can do that, but AI-created art bypasses that entirely. You never even ask the question: ‘What am I observing? How do I feel about this? What do I want to put on the page?’

Tech book publisher Tim O’Reilly disagrees. AI, he argues, is a medium, like painting or sculpture. Once writers get better with it, we’ll really see its true power.

If AI is a medium, the idea that you can’t write with it will someday seem as odd as the idea that you can’t make a good portrait or landscape with a camera, only with paint or pen and ink.

If you’d like to debate questions like these, join me on Monday for a meetup of writers in London as part of the Founder-Writer Collective with .

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I’ve been a science fiction fan since my grandfather brought me the entire Dune series at a yard sale. I loved them so much that I stored them in a huge, silver box separate from all my other books.

I see the genre’s spaceships and robots as accessories to an extended metaphor about the absurdity and beauty of our species. So it always seemed strange to me that the tech industry is so eager to bring those imaginary worlds to life as described.

A recent article by academic Ali Rıza Taşkale finally put a finger on my unease. Sci-fi, he argued in Aeon, has been looted by Silicon Valley. The Musks and Zuckerbergs have selectively adopted tales of lone heroes and futuristic aesthetics, leaving aside more complicated narratives about collective struggle and societal collapse.

Ali joined me this week to talk more about his research and how we can reclaim sci-fi.

I reached out because what you described in your article aligns with what I see in my day job working with founders and venture capitalists on their narrative. I see a lot of people manipulating stories in the service of building their own mythology and justifying their own methods.

Thank you. I expected this response from science-fiction readers and academics. But it also came from people like you, which surprised me in a good way.

Maybe this is because people are more aware of how tech companies use these narratives, and the balance of public opinion is again tipping into widespread skepticism about big tech companies. What caused you to see this link and write this essay?

I’ve been a science-fiction fan my whole life. I’ve watched these films since I was a child. Blade Runner is still one of my favorites, and I love 2049 too.

In October 2025, I finished a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at Roskilde University in Denmark. The project examined the relationship between speculative finance and speculative fiction. Finance is built on abstractions you cannot see or touch, and I wanted to know whether fiction could make those abstractions legible.

While I was finishing the project, I kept noticing what was happening in American tech. One day, this actually happened: I was swimming when it clicked. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg: they do not just talk about science fiction; they build it. The fiction is being materialized. The Aeon essay came out of that. What I have done is develop it into a framework and test it against specific cases.

How do you think the way these industries — finance and tech — use stories is different from companies or leaders in the past?

There is a real difference, and it is the difference between legitimation and materialization.

Earlier elites used stories to justify decisions they had already made: manifest destiny, the Cold War, the space race. The story sold the policy. This generation is doing something else. They are building what the novel describes. Palantir is named after the seeing-stones in The Lord of the Rings. Musk constantly cites Asimov’s Foundation. Meta is named after the metaverse, a word Neal Stephenson coined in Snow Crash, a novel that is itself a satire of corporate America.

What makes this moment different is that the people who were science fiction’s ideal readers now hold real financial and political power, especially under Trump. They can therefore loot the genre for product names, mission architecture, and, most importantly, pricing.

What do you mean about pricing?

This is the argument of my forthcoming book, Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film. Speculative vocabulary is the mechanism that makes speculative infrastructure financially legible. It is how you put a number on something that does not yet exist.

Read SpaceX’s IPO prospectus. It is a piece of materialized science fiction: the references are there, and so are the AI-generated images. That is not decoration or a creative flourish. It is doing valuation work. It gives investors a story they can price.

There is a second part of this that often gets missed. If the story sets the price, someone has to carry the risk when it does not come true. That risk does not sit with the founder. It sits with the public: in subsidies, procurement contracts, land, power for data centers, and the labor of the people who make them run. The upside is private. The downside is shared.

What are the science fiction narratives that tech ignores?

The collective ones. These men see themselves as lone visionaries saving the world, so they choose the stories that flatter them.

Think about Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Why does no one in tech ever cite it? That is not an accident. It is a novel about an anarchist society built deliberately against frontier individualism, against the idea of one genius, one hero, one rocket, one escape.

Le Guin has also written stories that challenge binary notions of gender, something which I think would make many tech leaders uncomfortable. In your article, you cite a Peter Thiel essay that contends that the extension of the franchise to women is one of the reasons that he believes capitalism and democracy can no longer coexist. Do you think Thiel hasn’t read Le Guin?

I think he has read enough, and that is exactly my point. In her latest book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Jill Lepore at Harvard argues that these men misread science fiction. I disagree. I think they understand these books perfectly well. They are looting them, not misreading them.

Look at the Banks example. Musk keeps recommending the Culture novels as the best picture of an AI future. SpaceX’s drone ships are named after Culture starships. Neuralink’s whole premise comes from Banks’s neural lace. Then, in a recent interview with The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes pointed out that Banks was a socialist and Musk disputed it. He said he was not sure he agreed.

That is not a man who missed the politics. That is a man who saw the politics and decided they were not there. They take the aesthetics and leave the economics on the shelf.

Iain Banks was Scottish, but a lot of the other authors we’re talking about are American. These narratives of venturing, voyaging, and overcoming feel very American to me.

Silicon Valley draws on a very narrow slice of the genre: mid-century Anglo-American Golden Age science fiction, plus a little cyberpunk with the critique surgically removed. The recurring themes are white fear, the frontier, the lone genius, and the founder as hero. Corporate capitalism is also central because much American science fiction imagines corporate power as either utopia or dystopia. Blade Runner is the obvious case.

I don’t want the tech world to loot any more great literature, but it’s almost a shame, given the richness of science fiction outside of the U.S.

We should keep reminding people that science fiction was never only white and American. Afrofuturism treats the future as reclamation and diasporic memory, not as an empty frontier waiting for a flag. There are Chinese futurisms: Liu Cixin is the most famous example, but Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide and Hao Jingfang’s ‘Folding Beijing’ are closer to what I mean. Regina Kanyu Wang is a Chinese writer and scholar doing important work on co-futures alongside Indigenous futurisms and Afrofuturism. Then there is solarpunk, which is still emerging: international, small-scale, repair-minded, ecological, and explicitly post-frontier.

The word to watch is ‘the future’. What gets called the future in a tech pitch is one narrow, linear dialect within a much larger and more contested vocabulary. The industry is enclosing it.

What do you think people like myself, or people working in tech, should take from the fact that tech leaders are being very selective in what they take from science fiction?

Three things.

First, understand how the references work, but do not stop at cultural criticism. The names came from novels, but the companies carrying them now generate enormous wealth and increasingly govern public life. Palantir is not just a Tolkien reference; it is a company embedded in policing, immigration enforcement, and defense procurement. DOGE was the clearest case of all: a piece of speculative governance installed inside the state. That is the part that matters.

Second, hold them to their own sources. Gibson warned about cyberspace decades ago. Banks wrote the economics into the Culture series. Keep saying it: you cite these writers, and they are telling you something different. Take the references back.

Third — and I am still working out how to say this — the answer is not hope instead of fear. We are not living in nice times, and a nicer story will not help. The answer is to put back the part where people have to work things out together: labor, negotiation, failure, and repair. Keep those things inside the frame instead of resolving everything into either a launch or a collapse.

If you want one practical test, it is this: when you read a founder’s story, ask who does the work in that future and what happens if it fails. If the answers are ‘nobody’ and ‘nothing’, you are not looking at a vision. You are looking at a valuation.

That is also why journalists matter here. People need somewhere to put forward their own accounts of the future, and there is not much of a forum for that right now. This is not really about tech; it is about who gets to author the future. The future is contested, and it has not yet been written. If we do not take part in that contest, someone else will fill the space.

If this interview has inspired you to re-examine the books that Silicon Valley loves to cite, here is list of the works mentioned:

• The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (Palantir is named after the seeing-stones)

• The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov (cited by Musk)

• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (coined “metaverse,” source of Meta’s name)

• The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

• The Culture series, Iain Banks (referenced for SpaceX’s drone ship names and Neuralink’s “neural lace” concept)

• Waste Tide, Chen Qiufan

• The Remembrance of Earth's Past series, Liu Cixin

• “Folding Beijing” (short story), Hao Jingfang

As a little extra, my favorite sci-fi writer is Ray Bradbury. Start with his short stories ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ and ‘The Veldt.’

If you’ve seen any science fiction shenanigans or want to share your favorites, reply to this email.

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Everyone is squeezing in the last summer holiday, myself included. I’ll be at a Jackson Hole, WY wedding — dress code “black tie Western.” If anyone has tips for how to satisfy this requirement without looking like a clown, please reply to this email.

With my mind full of travel, it’s fitting that this week’s guest should be on a long journey of his own. Nishad Sanzagiri was a consultant in London until he landed a book deal. For most, that means a long date with a desk. For Nishad, it meant moving back to his home country of India a year ago to write a literary travelogue. He’s been on the road since.

A few things resonated for me in our conversation:

• First, I’m a lot like Nishad: if I have an idea for an article or a post in my head, I can’t write anything else until I’ve cleared that idea. I’ve accepted that I need to lean into it in order to move to the next thing.

• Second, I found myself nodding when Nishad talked about some of his more personal newsletter writing resonating more than others. This is the advice I give every founder: don’t shy away from the personal and the emotion. You’re writing for humans, after all.

I hope Nishad’s story and his gorgeous photos inspire you to take that once-in-a-lifetime trip.

What’s your relationship with writing? Did you like to write as a child?

It still feels weird calling myself a writer, but I always did write. It comes with being an only child as well. I used to journal quite a lot and write down everything from small anecdotes about my day to big things that happened, and in high school in Oman, I started a school newspaper. But more than anything, I was a reader.

It’s so interesting that you said it feels weird calling yourself a writer. So many people say this, even those who make their living from writing.

I never felt there was anything wrong with saying, “I was a consultant,” or “I worked in comms.” But there is huge baggage that comes with that word, “writer.” I have gotten better at it, but even now, when someone asks, “Are you a writer?” I almost feel like I’m overstating something, or that I should be more humble about it.

What do you tell people that you’re doing now when you’re traveling?

I tell them that I’m writing a book, or I over-explain and say, “I’m on a sabbatical, and I’m writing this specific book.” I worry that anytime anyone assumes that you’re a writer, they think that is the only thing you do. I don’t want to be boxed in as, “Oh, this is it, now all I’m going to do is write books.” Obviously I’d love to write books, but I also did enjoy my consulting years and journalism.

Those are all professions with a real respect for finding the right words. What did they teach you that you still use? What did they teach you about your own voice?

When it comes to my own writing, I don’t mind the fluff, and a lot of the time it’s a sort of stream of consciousness coming out. Whereas in corporate language, or in journalism, one of the best skills is getting to the crux of things and explaining something in the fewest words.

In my last job in strategic communications, I worked a lot in the narrative development space with CEOs, heads of corporate affairs, or heads of comms. Before writing a CEO speech, for example, you work out what their voice is and what it is that they want to get across. That helped me hone the skill of finding the right choice of words, and at the same time it made me realize that I wanted an avenue to develop my own voice. I kept thinking, “If I had to say the same message as the CEO, how would I explain it?” And that’s sort of how I started my Substack while I was working.

Why did you name your newsletter Infinity Inklings?

I’ve moved, I’ve changed careers quite often, and I’ve dabbled in different things. I came across the phrase “expert generalist,” and it caught my eye. It’s almost like this whole jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none sort of concept.

My initial thought with my Substack was a place to be able to write everything and anything, almost like a public journal. That’s where the whole infinity side came in.

The inklings referred to little tidbits. When I started the newsletter, I had a habit, and I still do to an extent, of always keeping a little pocket notebook with me. Whenever I thought of anything or came across any news, I would jot it down. I would even cut things out of magazines or newspapers that I found and stick them in there. That would then be the inspiration for whatever I was writing that week.

Did you always buy the same little notebook?

I went through phases. Initially I had those tiny Moleskines and Leuchtturms. Then there was another one which was lined on one side and plain on the other. That was quite good when I wanted to draw or paint.

Let’s talk about the book.

The book is narrative nonfiction about the religious diversity across India. It will cover India’s sacred geography — everything from Hinduism to Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It’s part travelogue of my visits across the length and breadth of the country, part collection of interesting stories from these places. The places I’ve chosen are not that well known, even for people in India.

At a point in time when religious fundamentalism is on the rise, and there is such calcification of identity, I wanted to show how much diversity is out there. That is our inheritance.

I’m hoping most people will read it end to end. But because it’s a collection of short stories, you don’t need to. You can dip in and out of specific chapters, a decision my publisher and I took given dwindling attention spans.

How has it been to write on the road?

Initially, there were certain parts of the journey where I was writing a lot — I could do a whole series of pieces about Ladakh or Kashmir or something like that. Then there was a stretch where even writing for the book felt tedious, let alone Substack.

I remember reading your piece about writer’s block.

I’ve learned to embrace the inspiration when it strikes. I’ve also noticed that I’m good at writing when I’m on the move — in a train carriage, or when I’m sitting in a bus, or stuck in traffic. It’s about making sure I can capture it when something comes — either by taking a voice note or scribbling my thoughts down in a notebook.

Is there anything else that you’ve learned about how to get yourself in the mood to write or your creative process?

For a while I felt frustrated because there have been a lot of times when I’ve churned out a random newsletter piece or op-ed when I should have been writing a chapter of the book.

I tried to deal with it by thinking, “Okay, even if I thought of an idea for an article, I’m not going to write it.” But then I realized that I could not move on, that the idea kept festering there. So I was like, “No, if it’s come to me, let it come. I’ll do the chapter later.”

What has going back to India shown you about yourself?

Travel brings out so many different emotions and feelings. It holds a mirror to you. And especially for someone like me, who always identified as Indian, was born in India, spent my first seven years there, but who has lived outside of the country for most of my life — first in the Middle East, then here in the UK — going back was quite an interesting return.

There are so many preconceptions that you have when you’re traveling across India. Sometimes you fall into the trap of “I want the more authentic experience,” the trap of defining authenticity as something cheap and devoid of luxuries.

I realized I didn’t need to do that. When we talk about India’s diversity, it’s not just in languages and customs and religions. You also have amazing cafés with faster internet than in London. I’m a sucker for coffee, and I realized that it’s okay to go to a place that is gentrified and sit there and write. I came to terms with the fact that I was not doing a disservice to my country by paying the equivalent of three pounds for a coffee.

A part of me has always felt most at home at a cute café, no matter where I travel. When I’m in India, I sit at an independent café, and the words just flow. I can focus on a chapter and drink black coffee. It feels like I could be anywhere in the world in one of those cafés. It’s almost like the most clinical setting that you can get.

When I was in Panama earlier this year, I had a full day of writing, and I did exactly that. I found a third-wave café — with delicious Panamanian coffee — and sat and wrote. I crushed the final chapter of my book. Changing the topic, do you use AI in your writing?

Not substantially in the writing itself, but quite a lot in my research. So much of my work is also going to new places, so sometimes I’ll ask AI to create a primer with sources and citations that helps me prepare. I have used it in transcribing interviews and even my own thoughts. Sometimes I’ll use it for line editing — “I’m stuck at this sentence; is there another way of explaining this better?”

For some of the op-eds that I’ve written where I’ve had to edit down a longer piece I’ve written, I’ll say, “I need this to be 900 words; what can I delete out, and what is the overall skeleton structure that would make the most sense for a reader?” That sometimes has been quite useful.

Personally, I do think more people should use it as long as they use it wisely and cross-check their work.

And what has writing brought you? What has it given to you — both the Substack and maybe the work on the book?

It’s helped me slow down. It’s taught me a lot about myself. It’s therapy — even writing an op-ed.

I published a piece about The Odyssey, asking who decided the gods are white. I linked it with India, where most of the gods worshipped by people who are overwhelmingly brown are still fair. Where does that come from? This came from a debate I had with a friend, and so writing about it later was my way of trying to get closure on that discussion. That’s what I mean when I say sometimes even a nonfiction piece feels like therapy in that sense.

Has anything surprised you with what has resonated with your readers?

The emotional ones. There was one where I talked about how grateful I am to my parents and how much I love them. We take physical journeys, and we take emotional ones. And sometimes the stories of the emotional journeys are the ones that resonate most.

Some of my favorite travel writing, Nishad included:

• As a bit of a drifter myself, I keep coming back to Nishad’s piece about having a lifetime of “situationships with cities.”

• L'Usage du monde (The Way of the World) by Nicolas Bouvier recounts the Swiss writer’s early 1950s trip in a Fiat 500 Topolino from Europe to Afghanistan: “We denied ourselves every luxury except one: that of being slow.”

• The Shadow of the Sun collects Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński's dispatches as Poland's lone correspondent in Africa, from the 1950s onward: violence, kindness, heat, the highs and the lows. Though his legacy has been questioned, you can’t deny the prose is gripping.

See you all next week with more stories.

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Recently, I was summoned to a Mayfair pub to receive a special delivery. When I arrived, my friend extracted a large zip-lock bag from his backpack. Inside was a slim, green volume — one of only a few in the world, he told me, hence the makeshift stain-resistant packaging. The cover was embossed with three mysterious letters: “DTV.”

I was holding in my hands an account of the life of the late Sequoia Capital founder, Donald “Don” Thomas Valentine, and the firm’s beginnings, written by former Sequoia partner (and ex-journalist) Sir Michael Moritz after DTV’s death in 2019. Sequoia’s track record includes companies like Apple, Cisco, Google, and Instagram.

I’m obsessed with how businesses create their own mythology, and this short book — less than 100 pages — is one of the most interesting examples I’ve seen. Moritz and the firm put immense care into the story, which traces the parallel fates of Valentine, Sequoia, and the US tech industry, and the physical product. The spine is cloth-bound; the paper is hefty. My bookmaker friend estimates that printing 100 copies of these bad boys could cost as much as $3400.

Unlike many of the clamorous myth-making activities from Silicon Valley tech investors and companies — magazine shoots, manifestos, and elaborately produced podcasts — DTV was never meant for wide distribution. The scarcity of the book adds to the Sequoia legend, and it’s what gives it authenticity. Reading it, you feel like you're watching Moritz process his own grief, using his skill as a writer to build his mentor a lasting memorial in ink. It was not the first time that Moritz has penned a piece of Silicon Valley lore, either; when he was a reporter at Time Magazine in the early 1980s, he wrote the definitive account of Apple’s early days with Steve Jobs’s blessing.

The writing in DTV is efficient but warm. Moritz talks about being interviewed by Valentine, a meeting that included a tea ceremony and an original Apple pen. He reveals that Sequoia green is not just a nod to the color of the tree’s leaves. It was also the shade of pen that Valentine loved to write memos on, his favorite form of communication. He never signed his name to them, which caused some unfortunate confusion when people not in the know threw them out…

While the book paints Valentine as a brilliant company-picker, it doesn’t suggest he was a particularly easy person — a more honest depiction than most Silicon Valley eulogies might allow. Moritz describes him as someone who “took satisfaction in not being considered part of a group,” and a lifelong pessimist who was “not prone to imagine what might be possible if everything went right.” He could also be a tough customer to his founders, in some cases telling them he wanted his money back.

There are interesting details about Sequoia’s early investments, but not enough to interest the casual reader. This is something for the industry fanatics like me. What we can all take from this small book’s existence, however, is hope for the future for printed media. Even an industry as obsessed with disruption and speed as venture capital still turns to the old, physical medium of the book to cement legacy.

I wonder what Valentine would have thought of the tech industry’s current excesses — of founders taking tens of millions off the table before an exit, kombucha on tap in the office. What founders would he think worthy of a biography? And who would be worthy of writing them?

• I said the book was a scarce commodity, but the internet has done its job, and a scan is available on Slideshare. Supposedly you can even get your hands on a physical copy if you visit Mike Moritz’s hotel in Tuscany…

• If you’re interested in reading more of Michael Moritz’s writing, he published a memoir earlier this year about how his Jewish parents escaped from Nazi Germany.

• Speaking of company lore, check out “Billion Dollar PDFs”, a compilation of memos, white papers, essays, or presentations that “introduced a new mental model, and changed how billions of dollars of capital flowed.” Sequoia’s “RIP Good Times” deck, written to guide portfolio companies during the 2008 crisis, made the list. It’s a classic I come back to every few years.

Have a good weekend. Read something hearty.

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Everyone wants to create content. That includes the AI founder I spoke to this week who was convinced that publishing a 10,000-word manifesto would change his fledgling company’s fortunes. On the other hand, most people will tell you that no one pays for content.

Hayashi Aki is proof they’re both half right. She's a Tokyo-based ex-journalist whom companies hire to get things out of their own CEOs: the good and the bad, the stuff ChatGPT can’t tell you.

She started her career at the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's second-largest paper by circulation, then worked at some of the most interesting media brands in Japan in recent years: the Huffington Post, Forbes Japan, and business app NewsPicks. (Some of you might remember NewsPicks because its parent company bought Quartz in 2018.) She now runs Brand Journalism, working with about 15 companies on PR strategy, media relations, and owned media.

Her view is that content is still king, which means my AI founder isn’t wrong to want his manifesto. He just might need more help getting there than he thinks.

• Aki doesn’t mind being disliked. She asks CEOs hard questions to draw out the interesting stories that become content their employees want to read. A reporter’s job isn’t flattery.

• AI makes turning conversation into copy easy, so writers’ roles are moving upstream. Aki says more of her clients now ask her for strategic advice. Since AI offers infinite plausible business options, she says they want a neutral, objective advisor to help them pick a direction.

• Media is now about people rather than institutions. CEOs can now announce their own news on YouTube, which breaks down the traditional systems of news distribution. Outlets that only sell information will struggle; the ones that survive will think of themselves as content makers.

Tell me about your experience at the Asahi Shimbun. What did journalism teach you that you took into your future career?

I started as a regional reporter. I was on the social affairs side: crime, court cases, all sorts. But I wasn’t optimistic about the future of media, so in 2013, in my fifth year as a reporter, when the paper set up a new-business division and held an open call internally, I put my hand up.

In the new business department, I researched foreign media and was involved in a project called “Asahi Jibunshi” — a personal-history service where an Asahi reporter would interview an ordinary person, and we would edit it into a book. The bespoke edition cost over a million yen, and we took orders from a great many customers.

Then I was told to come back to reporting for a while, and became a reporter on the economics desk, covering Japanese electronics companies, including Toshiba.

Looking back, what I was writing then wasn’t really true. Every single day I was writing pieces that passed judgment on the management failures of big companies — and yet, in the same position, I might well have made the same call. I felt I had no right to write those stories when I had never run a business myself.

Then you moved to the Huffington Post — did you get your taste of business there?

Huffington Post Japan was in its fifth year, and its survival was in question; there was a real anxiety that we had to get into the black that year. I ran the advertising business, built around sponsored content; I went out and sold, reported, and wrote the branded articles myself. In brand journalism, the New York Times’ T Brand Studio was one of my benchmarks.

We turned a profit within a year, but in the end I fell out with the newsroom. The better the branded business did, the more advertising articles there were, and I could feel the newsroom pushing back, saying that the journalism was being “dirtied.” And I pushed back against their pushback. Looking back, I was immature.

That was exactly when Forbes Japan tapped me on the shoulder, and I took on growing BrandVoice, Forbes’ native advertising and content platform, and the web editorial team.

What did Forbes Japan do differently in terms of sponsored content?

Forbes Japan flies the flag of positive journalism, and it has decided what it will not do: no scandal stories, no kicking a company when it’s down over its losses. Some business magazines sell on headlines built to provoke: “plunge into the red,” “downfall.” There are all sorts of views on how economic journalism should be done, but respect for business is fundamental to me, so I felt very much at home there.

A positive approach also means the magazine and the site fill up with forward-looking content, and business leaders come to see it as a title they want to appear in, which makes life much easier on the commercial side. The other distinctive thing about Forbes was projects like “30 UNDER 30 JAPAN,” which picks 30 people under 30 who will lead the next generation in Japan, and the entrepreneur rankings: editorial and the business side would launch them together, then tie advertising packages to them and make them into something interesting. It was exciting.

And then NewsPicks came calling…

NewsPicks approached me, and when I found out they were launching NewsPicks for Business, for corporate clients, I was intrigued — it was a completely different media business from advertising — so I moved. You sell to a company: if it has 10,000 employees, all 10,000 get it, and you take on the whole thing, from the internal newsletter to talent-development content, building it together with the client and pitching it to people inside a large corporation.

For example, if you worked at Company A, inside the NewsPicks app there would be a tab only Company A employees could see, with internal news coming through and curation done for the inside audience. I ended up knowing internal information about big companies that NewsPicks’ own reporters didn’t know. By the end, the NewsPicks for Business editorial team had swelled to about 30 people, and we launched a print magazine aimed at in-house innovators.

Why would a CEO talk to you rather than to someone inside the company? Didn’t you find that hard?

Say a CEO is putting out his New Year’s message internally through NewsPicks. If someone inside writes it up, a certain amount of deference creeps in, or it just becomes something that sounds nice. But if an outsider reports it, you get last year’s failures, the pain, their own regrets. Really deep material. I ask a lot of questions people would rather not be asked. But often you don’t get an essential answer unless you ask the unpleasant thing. I don’t mind being disliked. The result is a message that actually reaches employees.

Reporting also isn’t just assembling what someone said. It’s the things they didn’t say: what they wanted to express but couldn’t put into words, the surrounding context, the moments where the CEO says yes but inwardly means no. Putting all of that into language that anyone can understand is the reporter’s job. If you build a piece only out of what was said, it’s paper-thin. But if you read what’s underneath and write it up, it becomes a translation: this is what I was trying to say. That’s what people are most pleased by. And I came to think that’s an enormously important thing in running an organization, in management.

How has it been since going independent?

There’s a woman I’m close to who lives in the building next door. She was a snowboarder, then a first-class cabin attendant at JAL, then went independent. When I was leaving NewsPicks, she said to me: “Aki, from now on you’re only allowed to do the things you want to do.” Until then I’d only been thinking about what I “should” do: that to achieve something I had to do this, and I had to do that, and the things I wanted to do could wait.

Building a company and scaling it takes enormous energy — managing people, raising money. I don’t really want to do that anymore. The happiest I ever am is sitting alone writing with music on.

What are you doing now?

I’m working with about 15 companies at the moment: PR strategy for some, media relations for others, helping some launch owned media, and sometimes making the content for that owned media itself — newsletters, CEO messages. Editorial in service of business and management.

How do you use AI in your process?

I record the audio and transcribe it — exactly what we’re doing here — and then I give the transcript direction. This is the purpose, this is the kind of piece, roughly this headline, this feel; a straight Q&A, or narrative prose with quotes. Fact-based, obviously, is the premise. Specify all that and what comes back is a reasonably solid draft with very little hallucination. Then I polish it and breathe soul into it by hand.

That’s much the same as me when I’m writing up an interview like this. I put the recording into Claude and ask it to tidy it up, and then do the editing afterwards to get the flow correct and make it the right length, and make sure the speaker’s intentions are punchy and clear.

Of course, there’s a lot I can’t put into AI because I have to protect client information, so I’m strict about governance there. But using AI has taken me from maybe one piece a night to 10. Turning what you’ve reported into a serviceable draft is a solved problem. Clients themselves will be able to do that before long, so what will be asked of me from here is the more upstream work — everything before the writing, and drawing the story out of the person — plus the desk-editing on the copy and the risk management.

In fact, business leaders are asking me about strategy more and more. Will you help us think of a name for the new service? Could you start with the website? It often begins with helping on a press release, but as you write, you arrive at the point where the value of the product has to be much clearer, or there’s no news value in it.

I do feel that even when I’ve done media relations or content work for clients, they have come to trust me enough that they also ask for strategic advice, similar to what you’re saying.

It’s about trust. AI hands you infinite options: plausible-sounding phrases, plausible-sounding copy, piles of it. But in the end, a human has to make the call. Do we put 10 million yen into this or not? Do we go with this word or that one, this name? Website or brochure? In the end, a person decides.

Quite a few people are anxious about that final call. What they want is an objective stamp of approval. I’ve been a reporter all along, so that’s the role people ask of me. A reporter’s eye is the reader’s eye — you can’t help thinking about the person on the receiving end, ordinary people, and how they’ll take it. Will this be ignored when it goes out? Will people dislike it? Or will it land warmly?

If you went in-house at a company, do you think you might lose the objectivity your clients value?

If you become one with the company, if it becomes your own concern, objectivity fades. Our site, my business card, our brand are all completely black — like a judge’s black robes, meaning we can’t be stained the color of anyone.

A lot of your work revolves around asking questions. You sit down with CEOs and draw things out of them to create content that their employees or other people want to read. How do you ask good questions?

I want to stand in the other person’s shoes and use my imagination as far as I possibly can, because unless someone believes you really understand, they won’t talk to you. That’s why I left the newspaper and why I started a company — you can’t know how a manager feels without running something yourself, however small. The difficulty of keeping a company going, how brutal the end of the quarter is: I don’t want to know that as information, I want to know it as sensation, in my body.

I also use the phrase “by the way” (ちなみに) a great deal. “By the way, what did you do this weekend?” “By the way, what did it feel like when those brutal results came out?” And they think, “This one’s at least trying to understand” — and something honest slips out.

Of everything you’ve reported, what has stayed with you most?

Panasonic used to have a B2B arm called CNS, now called Panasonic Connect. I got to interview its president, Higuchi Yasuyuki, who had previously been president and chairman of Microsoft Japan, for Forbes.

I asked him what makes him angry, and the piece was read enormously widely. What makes him furious is behavior that lacks respect — a compliance breach, or treating a customer as though they don’t matter. And appointments where you think, why is this person in this position? — because the organization then heads off in a strange direction. But replace them decisively, and the staff’s reaction tells you it was the right call. It’s painful, but what matters is imagining how things feel to employees at gut level.

What Higuchi was really talking about, in the end, was sensitivity. To change an organization, your executives have to be sensitive enough to feel it. “Tone at the top” — you create the tone from the top down.

What’s your outlook for media?

Content is king, still. The value of a new format, or of content that scratches at people’s hearts, doesn’t change. If anything it goes up, precisely because there is so much information around.

Take THE FIRST TAKE, the YouTube show that films artists singing in a single take against a white background with one microphone — it became hugely popular. You can see them being nervous. The producer who made it also made “Himitsu no PRIME,” the show that plays in taxis where a rabbit puppet interviews well-known people, and I got to interview him. It made me think there are still plenty of content formats out there that nobody has seen yet.

There’s a fascinating company I’m handling PR for at the moment whose CEO is a huge influencer — hundreds of thousands of followers, and a lot of fans on YouTube. He simply announces it all first himself: “I’ve started this project with this person,” “We’ll ship within six months.” With a CEO like that, even a dedicated beat reporter can’t keep up. It’s already out on YouTube, and his followers outnumber the outlet’s readers, so it reaches people before any outlet can report it.

Media is becoming about people rather than organizations. Which means the systems that news distribution rests on — the press clubs, the press releases — are breaking down and being remade. Outlets that are only selling information are going to struggle. The ones that survive will be the ones that think of themselves as content makers, and that think now is their chance.

Thank you for reading this week! For those of you based in London, I’m co-hosting an event with about collaboration in writing, featuring some of my newsletter guests. Join us for some IRL fun on August 20th.

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In this newsletter, I've talked about how companies can stand out with great content, a distinctive voice…or simply by sounding human. (The bar is on the floor, isn't it?) The missing piece is how your brand feels in the real world. What emotion do your events or your community evoke? On this question, Verna Vuoripuro is holding the bar high.

A former journalist, Verna now leads communications, community, and growth at Illusian, the founder office behind Supercell, Wolt, Zalando, and others. As a trusted advisor to some of Europe's most prominent founders, she's learned how to design thoughtful experiences that make people feel seen, not sold to.

We talked about what her journalism background taught her about audiences, why she still writes a column, and why her benchmark for Illusian’s brand isn't another investment firm — it's a legendary Swedish luxury hotel.

• Audience-first, always. Wrong question: “What do I want to say?” Right question: “Does this bring value to my audience?”

• Ruthless curation wins. Verna’s job is to create a magic mix where everyone in the room feels like they needed to be there. It doesn't matter how fancy the room is; it matters who's in it, she says.

• Benchmark against hospitality, not industry. Stop measuring your events and community experiences against other companies. Verna’s north star is Stockholm’s Ett Hem hotel. A cup of tea at the right time is better than a branded mug any day.

Talk me through your career. You made the jump from journalism to comms — why did you decide to do that? How have you thought about your career?

I began as a music critic at 15 when music magazines were still a thing. It turns out you can only have such strong opinions as a teenager — I could never do that job now. I covered local news during high school and ended up at Helsingin Sanomat at 19. I started working as a news editor there at 21 and stayed for six years. Those were my formative years, and I still miss the adrenaline.

A lot of people who became journalists were drawn to the industry since they were young. What made you leave the industry?

I’m a realist, and I knew that, sadly, journalism might not be a long-term career. So I did my master’s in business while I was still at the newspaper. My thesis was about how ISIS, the terrorist organization, builds brand and community through narrative.

With the degree, I wanted to see more of the world, and that’s how I ended up at [technology consultancy] Reaktor. I led their global comms for a few years, and then I moved on to Illusian.

What did you bring from journalism into these roles?

The most important thing I took from my journalism background is audience-centricity. Whether it’s a piece of content, a community activation, a product, or a service, the question for me is always: does this bring value to my audience? Work with the audience first, and the rest will follow.

I think a lot of executives think of their own motives first: “What do I want to get out to the world? What’s the cool feature of my product I want to showcase?” They should flip it around and think, “What does the audience get out of this?” That will eventually help you spread the word about your product, but it has to come from the audience value first.

What about your role at Illusian? Supporting successful tech entrepreneurs is a whole other audience.

Illusian is the investment company of 20 European unicorn and decacorn founders and operators across six countries. We do joint venture investments and philanthropic projects. We’ve invested €600 million into venture over our lifespan, both direct and fund investments. Our direct investments include Linear, Nexos, n8n, and Gradium. We also provide our founders wealth management and financial admin, like a traditional family office.

I joined four years ago as the first hire in this role, to lead comms and community. If I had to sum it up, I’d say I’m responsible for how Illusian shows up to all our different audiences and stakeholders — whether it’s a nonprofit, a portfolio company, or a wealth-management client — making sure it’s all aligned with our brand and that the experience matches who we are.

Can you give a concrete example of what that work looks like?

For example, designing the service model of what we do — what these first-generation tech entrepreneurs need, figuring out the offering, how we bring these founders in to support our portfolio companies. We have to design that system so we don’t waste anyone’s time, but so that the founders and portfolio companies get real value from us, instead of us doing stuff for the sake of doing something.

A part I love that’s not public at all is doing reputation management for the founders. Their companies look after them as CEO or founder, but they also have their private persona. Figuring out how to protect that is exciting to me because of my journalism background.

When people reach a certain level of success, there’s both the narrative of them as the person attached to the company, and their personal one — their legacy, what they stand for. You see far more people in the US thinking thoughtfully about how to craft that personal narrative than in Europe.

I think Europe is going to see more and more founders doing their second, third, or even fourth big business, and that’s when they start to think about who they are versus their company, because a founder’s personality is often very tied to the company’s brand. Startups are personal in that way, so once you start thinking about your next venture, you suddenly wake up to: “Who am I, actually?”

What do you think founders or leaders get wrong about storytelling?

I’ve had countless times in my career when leaders have come to me and said, “I want to become a thought leader.” I ask, “What do you want to talk about?” and they say something like, “Digitalization in healthcare.” That’s a very general theme, not a topic, let alone a point of view.

A lot of people want to become a thought leader without a single thought. You cannot write or speak well if you haven’t thought about something well — and most people skip that part. But it’s unique ideas and critical takes, solid, rational expertise, that make the message stick.

In my opinion, and I’m happy to say this on the record, there are some people who don’t have many original thoughts. Then there are people who are genuinely visionary. But I think you also need to give leaders space to bring those thoughts out. How do you help leaders do that? Find the time and the courage?

It takes a lot of time to get people comfortable and relaxed. Then suddenly, even the people you thought didn’t have many original thoughts turn out to have the hardest takes. When you make them feel interesting, they relax and start talking more. Usually it’s in settings where you’re not trying to create a narrative — you start with a simple question like, “What pissed you off today?”

A lot of leaders are afraid to speak their mind, which is understandable. That’s where audience-centricity comes in — if you know your audience, if you know the specific group of people or companies you want to appeal to, you don’t have to think about a message that appeals to everyone — because a message for everyone ends up appealing to no one.

Your role also includes a lot of the community side. What have you learned through that?

Community is all about ruthless curation. It doesn’t matter how fancy the room is; it matters who’s in it. Not in the sense of who’s most prestigious or gathering the most like-minded tech bros in a room, but making sure you have a great mix of people so that everyone you meet in a community you think, “Oh, I really needed to talk to you,” even if you didn’t realize it beforehand.

Then, of course, you have to execute it well. I’m a big believer in craft and attention to detail, but none of it matters if the right people aren’t there. At Illusian, I’m very proud of how we bring together people from so many corners of the ecosystem. Not just founders, NGO leaders, academics, politicians — people who usually don’t have a reason to interact. That’s where the biggest results come from. It takes so much planning, but it has to look like none of it is planned.

You mentioned craft — tell me about your philosophy of craft.

I’m a huge fan of Will Guidara, the author of Unreasonable Hospitality, who used to run the restaurant Eleven Madison Park. Unreasonable hospitality is how I approach everything we do. Most people won’t notice the tiniest details, but the ones who do really appreciate it.

I have a huge passion for hosting and luxury experiences, and I think we can learn a lot from that even in the tech world. For instance, for Illusian’s community, I haven’t used another VC fund as a benchmark; I’ve used a hotel in Stockholm called Ett Hem.

I am a hotel junkie, and I love Ett Hem. I stayed there alone just to experience it.

Ett Hem is such a great benchmark for companies. It’s not about extravagance or being the flashiest source of luxury; it’s about thinking about the human being. When you walk in, do you want a cup of tea? How do we make sure you can be yourself, be vulnerable, let your guard down? And then everything just works. It feels casual, but there’s a huge operation going on behind the scenes that you don’t notice. That’s the magic.

If you extrapolate this to a founder offsite, for example, think about what the founder actually wants when they walk into their room at an offsite. It’s not swag and brochures. It’s mosquito repellent and sunscreen.

We’ve talked a lot about making people feel human and helping them let their guard down. In the age of AI, do you think people are hungrier for those experiences? Does AI make it harder to provide them?

I think no matter what era, people want to feel seen and heard. If you can somehow engineer that into a community, you can win.

Storytelling and narrative are things we need more of in the age of AI, because people use it for sense-making, and now more than ever, we need to make sense of what’s going on. So I think a lot more businesses and communities will be built narrative-first. You’ve seen all the news about comms people being some of the most important hires at a startup, and I think it’s true. Look at the vibe-coding companies, for instance. Lovable is winning because it built narrative and brand first. Of course, the product is great too, but they couldn’t have done it on the product alone.

Switching gears, I want to ask you about your column in Helsingin Sanomat. A lot of people aren’t brave enough to write publicly while they have a high-profile job such as yours, and I love that you keep doing it. How did that come about?

I think I had a story idea and messaged one of the editorial people and asked if they wanted to publish it. Somehow I ended up writing one, then another, and now it’s been going on for a year. It keeps my writing and thinking sharp — having strong opinions. I think it benefits Illusian too.

At least in Finland, a lot of journalists have only ever been journalists. If you really want to understand how the business world works, how tech works, you have to be in it. My column is a kind of briefing from that weird world that’s everyday for us but definitely isn’t for a lot of people.

Even though I’ve worked in tech a couple of times now — I’ve probably spent about as much time in journalism as in tech — I still feel like an observer in the world of tech. I call myself the bullshit sniffer. I go in and ask, “That doesn’t make sense to me. Can you explain it to me?”

It’s tricky because this is also such an inward-looking community. It can feel really weird to be that kind of observer. I’ve sometimes tried to become more of an insider, to lose that journalistic part of me a little — but I think, and I hope, that I’ve learned it’s actually a strength.

One country that excels in curating outstanding physical experiences is Japan, where I’m currently visiting on a literary side quest. A few of my favorites for attention to detail and care:

• I left Tokyo in 2018, and the bartenders at my neighborhood cocktail bar still remember that I prefer room-temperature water over iced. For a similarly A+ cocktail experience, try These.

• Shibuya café Chatei Hato has a collection of dozens of unique ceramic cups. You never know which one your coffee will arrive in.

• Developers go to great lengths to make sure existing shrines are respected when new buildings go up. Often that means moving the shrine to the roof, but this shrine was cleverly fitted into the ground floor of this high-rise. I love that someone painted some clouds so that the gods can feel the sky.

  

  See you next week!

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One of the best things I’ve read about AI writing recently is this piece by The Economist writer .

He captured something that I struggle with: how to justify my hostility towards AI-generated writing. I can argue that it’s excruciating to read, but one day, machine-generated prose may be indistinguishable from our own. Does that mean it will be okay to use it then?

I reached out to Archie, and he kindly offered to speak to me about how he sees the debate from his position covering economics and politics—including what looks like AI writing creeping into policy papers. I came away thinking that:

• Norms and etiquette around AI will keep shifting until we resolve the gaps between people who can recognize AI text and those who can’t and between people using AI and those who aren’t.

• AI writing feels ick, especially in high-stakes writing like policy papers about a country’s future, because its use suggests the writer hasn’t fully developed the ideas behind their writing. Why should people follow lukewarm ideas?

Read on for our conversation and, at the end, some artistic work by yours truly.

How did you start thinking about the AI and writing topic?

These AI models often produce text that people find very appealing if you’re not someone who spends a lot of time staring at AI output. But if you spend a lot of time staring at AI output, you see it as slop. I struggle to read it, and I’m a massive booster of using AI in many parts of my job, which is very writing-heavy.

Where were you seeing AI slop seeping into society?

In some of the policy papers that I was reading. The Labour Party claims to be in a battle of ideas, so everyone wants to have ideas, and ideas mean long essays. That creates massive incentives toward AI use, because you can put out a chunky piece of writing that looks like a very material policy proposal, even if it didn’t take you very long to write.

I put some things through Pangram, and it came back saying a large majority was AI-written or assisted.

I guess some people would argue that creating these proposals quickly to help the population understand the policies being proposed is a good thing, and not everyone is a great writer or likes writing.

It’s true that if you’re a writer, it’s very easy to assume that writing is enjoyable for everyone. And for a lot of people, it’s absolute hell — including us writers.

But many of these policy papers are saying, “These are substantial changes the country should follow.” Those ideas are shaped, to a degree we don’t know, but which is possibly quite substantial, by writing. Any writer will know that your ideas only really get stress-tested if you write them. You can get away with sloppier thinking if you dump some rough notes into an LLM. So I feel queasy about someone then trying to get the country to follow them on those ideas.

Politicians have a responsibility to put forward robust policy ideas and to express them in a way that is easy to understand and digestible. They have a responsibility for both content and expression.

Right now, I think there is a sort of implicit contract with a reader. You are quite selfishly demanding their time, and there’s lots of text in this world. Don’t make it any longer than you have to. Make it digestible.

I write about quite dry economics-y topics, and I think a lot about trying to make it funny and interesting. For instance, I did a piece in The Economist a couple of weeks ago on the Paul Krugman versus Luis Garicano and Philippe Aghion dispute over which purchasing-power-adjusted GDP measure to use to compare the US to Europe. The debate gets to the high-stakes question of: “Was Europe stagnating or not?” But at some level, it’s a debate about an incredibly abstruse technical measurement. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get an analogy about the World Cup in my article, finding a few snarkier asides to slip in, and so on. All of us writers have an obligation to our readers to make ourselves digestible. And LLMs certainly aren’t doing that.

AI makes it easier to do wrong by your readers and waste their time, because you can, for instance, now produce a long policy paper — let’s say 20,000 words long. You can dump this tome on the discourse, and because norms have not caught up, a lot of people will go, “Wow, this is a really intellectually important intervention.” Five years ago, this might have taken a team weeks to produce; now you can produce it in a matter of minutes or hours.

How else have you seen that asymmetry of norms appear?

Right now there’s a very binary AI-good/AI-bad axis. For instance, some of the responses I received on social media when I was airing some of these grievances about AI writing were: “Isn’t it ironic that you’re outsourcing your own LLM detection to an LLM?”

There are lots of things that AI is better at than humans, including detecting AI because it’s a quintessential machine learning classification task. So it makes sense to me to use AI when it’s better than humans. That’s one case where we’re still groping towards a sense of where the right boundaries are.

I think the other one is that people don’t have a well-calibrated sense of how easy or difficult some things are, which I think means that people who spend a lot of time using AI tools are getting over-credited.

Yes! I made a demo of a little tool and showed it to some non-AI users who were very impressed, when in reality, it was a one-shot thing I made on Fable 5 that didn’t have real functionality.

We’re still in a world where, if you have a great chart to go with your prose, people think, “Wow, this guy really did the work.” People are calibrated to a time when that was all very laborious relative to now. Data is something I try to do very distinctively, and it’s now a lot cheaper — for lack of a better word. So I think that the prestige and value of data journalism will shift in the next couple of years.

But there’s an upside, which is that AI unlocks very cool and interesting use cases. I fed The Economist leader archive since 2000 to LLMs to score the accuracy of our predictions. I could have done this in the past, hired dozens of researchers, had them all manually grade things with a rubric and graded each other, but it would have cost thousands of pounds and could have been a disaster. The fact that I can do this so easily now is a total unlock.

But even if we can create analysis faster, humans can only consume so much analysis. I’ve edited someone who would record himself talking, use a prompt to turn that into an article, and send it to me for review, when it would have been more time-efficient for both of us had he sent me three bullet points to read and review. What happens when the tools are faster than the timescale we humans live on?

I can make these quite forceful moral pronouncements about AI writing in the context of the society we live in and the norms that we live by, which have evolved over centuries. But potentially this is such a shift that the ways in which we digest and produce information might change more fundamentally.

I don’t think the answer to that is, “Great, I’m fine to dump a bunch of AI slop on the world,” but imagine a world where AI prose gets indistinguishable, at least to the human eye, from human prose, and doesn’t have all the unpleasant tells. I think this is highly likely in the next few years. LLMs could be even better at pulling out the important ideas from a chunk of text and synthesizing how it connects to other things. Do we end up in a world where everything we read and consume is not just written by LLMs but mediated through tiered layers of LLMs?

Somehow I don’t think this world is where we’ll fully end up. I work for a news organization that declares proudly that humans do our work. I think there’ll still be people who want to believe a thoughtful person has worked through something.

Do you think human writing will always have some kind of edge?

I feel very confident that AI will eventually get to a stage where the absolute writing clangers, the really awful constructions, disappear. But I would like to think and hope that a really good human writer will have an edge, and that in a world where we are deluged with mediocre text, some people will be more discerning about saying, “I want to read something really good, because there’s all this stuff out there.”

But maybe the edge will not be in the text; it will be in some combination of thinking, or having a clear set of views, knowing non-public information, or a bit of all of the above.

I also feel that there will be norms for individuals and norms for organizations. An organization might want to draw harder lines, similar to how, as you mentioned, The Economist is very firm in standing by human-created content.

We have a public AI policy that says humans produce all our journalism, but we do use AI for certain things. We have a summary button at the top of the articles. We use AI tools a little bit in video translation. If you’re presenting a TikTok-style clip about your article, which we sometimes do, and you slip up verbally, a producer can correct this with AI. Obviously we’re drawing a boundary, and I think it’s a pretty good boundary.

On the other hand, nothing is theoretically stopping me from churning out AI-written articles on my Substack. But that would be very embarrassing, given what I’ve said on the issue.

I feel like in the rest of the economy, it will come down to how this thing works and what level of human involvement is needed beyond prompting. So I’m quite interested in how something like management consulting as an industry shakes out.

Like whether AI will ever win against PowerPoint! At Every, we tried to automate slide making with AI, and it’s still very hard. We made a plugin for a client that costs $62 to run and involves 24 skills strung together. It’s a bit better than one-shotting it, but definitely out of the ability of most organizations.

I think the goal with AI use here is more plainly utilitarian: Are you giving good business strategy advice or not? There are strong market incentives operating in this kind of industry, and perhaps consultants will be willing to tolerate a little bit of slop aesthetic if they can get the core thing they want, which is “How do I do the work for my client at a fraction of the price?” There hasn’t been a big price war in the industry yet, and I’m interested to see how this will end up.

Was there anything on your AI writing graph that surprised you?

It was actually greener than I expected, in the sense of green representing when it’s okay to use AI.

If you’re trying to either persuade the country to follow your policy ideas or simply persuade readers to agree with you, you owe it to them to make sure you’re tight in your thinking yourself, and that requires a more hands-on approach to the writing than LLMs currently offer.

Archie has also proposed a rubric for determining what we should let AI write, based on how mechanical or ideas-led the writing is and what step in the writing process we’re talking about.

I filled the rubric based on my vibes; similar to Archie’s version, there is a lot of green. Today is not the day I will die for artisanally crafted admin emails.

Where I differ from him is in fact-checking, where I still feel nervous about AI. Frontier models have gotten much more accurate (so accurate that my colleagues at Every laughed at me for bringing up the topic of hallucinations recently), but when my neck is on the line, I can never be too sure. I think this paranoia is linked to my journalism/comms background—cue stress dreams about getting someone’s name wrong.

When writing an article or essay, I use AI to create a list of facts that I can then check manually. I have a fact-checking skill in Claude, which is basically:

Extract every verifiable factual claim from this article. Include:

Names, dates, locations, titles, organizations

Statistics, quotes, events, or assertions presented as fact

Any statement that could be independently confirmed or refuted

Format the output as a numbered list of direct quotes or paraphrased claims with their original context (e.g., paragraph or line number). Exclude opinions, analysis, or hypotheticals.

Feel free to steal my skill, and please send me your own AI writing rubrics! Have a great weekend ☀️

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✨ If you are in London on July 6th, join me for an event on writing hot takes.

As more journalists get axed or jump ship for six-figure “chief storyteller” jobs, I’m telling more companies to focus on their own content (“owned media”) instead of hitting their heads against the wall trying to land traditional coverage (“earned media”). AI has strengthened my argument; one recent audit found that 60% of materials cited in LLMs come from owned media.

But hold up. When was the last time you shared an article published by a company? If content boosts shareholder value, can it be cool?

Paul Abrahams might have the answer. He previously spent 15 years at the Financial Times and is now chief communications officer at Europe’s largest media group, RELX, where he built a content engine before AI made it cool. A FTSE-100 company, RELX rarely makes the headlines (largely by design), but you’re probably familiar with some of its subsidiaries, like data analytics company LexisNexis and academic publisher Elsevier.

Paul shared the team’s process, the tech tools they love, and what he’s stolen from Netflix and Hollywood on the way.

• Process is the difference between content that dies in approvals and content that sees the light of day. RELX publishes 70 stories a year as a huge company because the team has a tight workflow, the right tech, and good writers. Showing reviewers a live story instead of a Word doc speeds up sign-off. And there is always just one final approver.

• Owned content is about internal comms, too. Paul’s team used employee surveys to identify low-scoring areas, then created storytelling campaigns around those topics, driving employee engagement +21 points, advocacy +22, eNPS up 42%.

• AI is a co-pilot for comms teams now. LLMs built employee personas from 20,000 verbatim survey comments and helped draft pitches for journalists. Tools like Second Nature help media-train execs with green/amber/red scoring.

Tell me about RELX. Many of my readers might not know it.

We’re the UK’s largest TMT group by quite a margin and the largest quoted media group in Europe, but I joke that my job is to make sure that nobody’s ever heard of RELX.

Despite wanting to make sure no one has heard of you, you run a big owned content operation. How did you get the inspiration for the kind of content that you are running now?

About eight years ago, I was reading a story on the BBC website about Swedish serial killers. Elements came in and out as you scrolled through; it felt immersive. At the bottom, it said, “Powered by Shorthand.”

I thought we could use Shorthand’s immersive, no-code storytelling tech in a corporate setting. The first story we did got three times more reads than we normally got with our own media. The second story got 17 times.

We had our first story in 2018. Last year, we did 70, and we got about 1.1 million reads, meaning people who have looked at the story. We can also measure how far down the story they get. We have links at the bottom — “If you like this story, you might like these” — and about 10% of our traffic is collected through that.

What kind of content are you writing?

The stories fall into two buckets: some are aimed at our employees and potential employees, and some are about the business itself. We use first-rate writers, and the idea is to produce pieces of journalism that people want to read.

How do you get 70 stories through in a year? I’ve worked with organizations where everyone has to weigh in on each piece, and it slows things to a crawl.

Somebody told me a large European corporate spent over a million euros on an owned-media strategy, and because so many people had inputted into the content, the outcome was unpalatable, and the project died. So the process is really important. A bit dull, but that’s what gets 70 stories through.

Around October, we ask every business and department what their priorities are and what stories they’d like next year. We build a quarterly calendar, and for each story we agree on the voices — no more than three or four: someone from the business, some customers. We pay above the industry average for writers because good writers come back, and very often we don’t have to edit the copy at all.

We brief the writer, set up the interviews, and let them run on their own. They send a synopsis first — a check-in to make sure they’re not heading the wrong way. Then we build it in Shorthand and show reviewers the live story, not a Word document, and ask, “Are there any showstoppers?” Because it’s not a Word doc, it’s much harder for them to start rewriting. There’s just one final approver.

Whenever you want sign-off on something, it’s always better to ask “Is there anything wrong” instead of “Review this entire document.”

Each of these steps is a hard lesson, where something’s gone wrong, and we had to insert something into the process.

Then we publish the story, amplify it through social media, and then we measure and adjust.

Interesting that social media is such a big channel for you.

Don’t underinvest in social media. In the beginning, everyone in the team was responsible for posting on a different social platform— somebody did Facebook, somebody did LinkedIn — and eventually we hired somebody as a social media manager. At one point, Twitter was incredibly effective. One could say it’s a dangerous environment for corporates, but it was very cheap, and we were able to target people who read specific publications. We would get 20,000 reads. An average FT story gets about 10,000 reads.

After the change of ownership at Twitter, they stopped taking our money, so we pivoted to LinkedIn. It’s a slower burn, but it still works.

How do you monitor the performance of stories?

We monitor each story. If a story performs well, we might double down on promotion; if not, we adjust the headlines and imagery. We were inspired by what Netflix was doing.

You mean like their dynamic titles?

You look at each tile for about three seconds, and after a minute, if you haven’t clicked, you go off to Amazon Prime. One of the things they found is that having a single person in the image — preferably famous, but we’re not Netflix — people are much more likely to click.

Do you have to use AI images, or do you use illustrators?

We use Midjourney.

That’s what we use at my company, Every, and we have really cool images. Tell me about some of the content you do on internal topics. How do you keep those engaging?

We have company-wide employee opinion surveys every three years, and smaller surveys every year. James Weekly, our head of internal comms, came up with an approach where we identify the areas the company had scored low in — that could be by specific job, or by geography, or on a particular topic like work-life balance — and then put storytelling campaigns together around those particular areas to try and get the scores up. We identify the managers who had scored highest on those particular topics, then go off and interview them.

So we were able to ask the people who were scoring highest on, say, what to do about your team’s work-life balance for their best practices. We’ve featured over 3,000 people over the eight years, up and down the organization — people we would never have known.

What is the process for creating those stories?

James has taken, I think, around 20,000 verbatim comments, which were sitting in a spreadsheet. We ran them through an LLM and created five personas. Then we run the content against the personas and ask if it lands.

The results over the past eight years have been amazing. Employee engagement is up 21 points, advocacy is up 22 points, our employee Net Promoter Score is up 42%, and referrals — when we hire people who’ve been referred — have also risen.

How has the owned content game changed since you started? I feel like many companies are leaning more into it because it’s hard to land coverage in traditional media.

The irony is that the owned-media strategy — because the LLMs are picking up owned media so much — kind of lucked out. When we first started eight years ago, we had no idea. It was in response to the problem that we couldn’t get anyone to write about us.

I think there’s a geographical difference. In the US, owned has become very important, and you see some amazing salaries being offered for content. In the UK, the heads of comms and corporate affairs directors are generally five years behind.

A lot of it comes down to the fact that CEOs have differing desires to be high- or low-profile, and they have different stakeholder groups they’re trying to reach. If you’re Marks & Spencer and you’ve got a cybersecurity incident, you’re going to be in a very different position than us. If you’re British Gas or Centrica, big CEO interviews in the Times or the Financial Times become important. Our CEO has not done an on-the-record interview in 15 years, and never will. That just isn’t an option in a B2C company.

A lot of comms directors are still very focused on media and often have CEOs who love to be famous, but I caution whether that is always the right strategy.

Owned content is not expensive. We pay journalists for about 25 stories every year and then pay the Shorthand license. In nominal terms, my budget is the same as it was 14 years ago when I joined the company. So we had to be clever about how we allocate our capital.

Have you used AI for the other parts of your comms job?

We have a storytelling system using Hollywood screenwriting techniques — there are 10 elements, including the hero, the inciting incident, the call to action, the dreadful alternative, the series of hurdles, the transformation. We used that to architect a story about LexisNexis Legal, and how they pivoted in six months with ChatGPT to getting a product out. We then took those 10 elements and asked four LLMs to write a 1,000-word story. Three of them were not bad.

And the fourth one?

Claude just hallucinated quotes and characters.

Sad!

We took those stories and asked the AI to turn them into a pitch for this particular journalist. It got 95% there, and then we were able to personalize it because we’d met the journalist before.

Then we took that messaging and created a briefing document for the person who was going to do the interview.

There’s a pitching tool called Second Nature that is perfect for media training. As you speak, it shows green, amber, or red based on whether or not the answers are too long or too short, whether or not the message is being delivered, if there is too much jargon...One of the more stressful parts of our job is telling people who’ve just signed big bonuses that they’re not brilliant at public speaking. Now you can just show them the output, and say, “You scored 68, and you need to get to 80, and here’s what we need to do to adjust.”

This is very cool.

Then you can record the actual interview, run the transcript against the original messaging, and work out where the delta is between what you were looking to deliver and what you actually delivered. And when the eventual article appears, you can also run that against your original messaging.

I think we’re all feeling a bit anxious about our jobs with AI. How have you gone through the emotional journey of balancing that anxiety with understanding how it might really change your job in a positive way?

If you’re on a very large team where you have a very narrow role, there may be some of those roles that AI can do. I was chatting with a corporate affairs director of a large company last week, and she was talking about taking out 20% of their internal communicators. Some of the corporate affairs teams are huge.

I think it’s easier for a small team like us, where the roles are extremely flexible, and people can do multiple things. We encourage that, encourage people to put their hand up and say, “I want to do that.” I think the benefits are around productivity and quality. People think their status comes from the size of their team or the size of their budget, but your status comes from the value you’re providing the organization.

I’m curious about what owned content my readers would rate. Here are a few of my own favorites:

• Atomico’s annual multimedia bonanza, the State of European Tech report, is excellent and not just because I worked on it. You know you’ve won when other VCs are using your graphs in their fundraising decks…

• My colleague shared a cool example in Every’s Slack this week: a toolkit of prompts and free AI tools for marketers created by marketing and sales automation company ActiveCampaign.

• First Round Review, from the US VC First Round, has the glossy visuals and depth of WIRED. I’ve shared their interview with Lenny Rachitsky many times.

One other small update:

• I joined on his new podcast, Taste-Bench, to talk about taste, AI and writing. Listen on Spotify or watch on YouTube.

Currently on the Eurostar heading straight to the burning heart of Paris…see you all soon.

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Confession: I’ve been wanting to talk to an archeologist for a while for this newsletter. I’m fascinated by the communications challenge they face: they’ve got to explain to the public why very, very old stuff is important. They’ve also got a huge advantage: they see how humans have told stories since our earliest days. Might one have some ancient tips I could use?

The universe delivered when Portuguese archaeologist and science communicator Sara Cura commented on one of my articles. I reached out, and we had an inspiring, vulnerable discussion about podcasts, politics, and the past. If you think it’s hard explaining B2B SaaS to someone, try explaining deep time…

• Fill the space, or someone else will. Rigorous, careful people like scientists tend to be quiet by nature, but if you don’t talk about your discipline, ideologues will fill the silence. Just look at archaeological pseudoscience and the political coopting of history…

• Context or die! Whether it’s 400,000-year-old fire or any expert subject, people won’t connect to dates or data if we don’t connect it to their lives.

• Remember that technology has always been a duality. The spear fed and the spear killed. We shouldn’t forget this lens when it comes to AI, either.

Our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity, below.

Tell me about your career — how did you get into archaeology and science communications?

In my little village in central Portugal there was an association of amateurs doing research, collecting artifacts, and making small exhibitions. I started as a volunteer around 12 or 13 years old. I loved history, but I also loved going into the field, being close to nature, and getting a profound knowledge of the territory. I realized this was my calling.

When I moved to Lisbon to study, I already had a big advantage over my colleagues, and I already knew what I wanted to study deeply: prehistory. I find deep history and human evolution thrilling. After I finished my studies, including my masters, I had a long career as a researcher, teacher, and working in a museum.

How did you start working in communications?

Our professional lives go side by side with our personal lives — it’s a story of a career, but it’s also a story of a personal history. I had a serious alcohol addiction that nearly destroyed my life. I spent eight months in a recovery center, decided to give up my permanent position and to have nothing to do with archaeology anymore. The profession was mingled with all the pain.

I started working as a science manager in the school of communication, and then went back to university to study science communication. The second I started that masters program, I realized I couldn’t fool myself. I loved science communication, and I loved doing it with archeology.

During my masters, I started a prehistory-themed podcast. I was lucky because they had a studio at school and I could record with the help of a professional team. Two years after starting, my podcast won the award for best science podcast in Portugal.

I tried being an independent freelancer in science communication in archaeology for two years, but I realized there isn’t yet space in Portugal to do this full time. There’s a lack of resources, a lack of money to pay for my services. In the research world, most people don’t think about paying a professional to do it because there is always a lack of funding in projects. Some do value the relevance, but don’t have budget.

Nevertheless even with a very small budget I got a couple paid collaborations going on. This will change in the future. Now I do this as a side job, including the podcast, and I am starting a permanent position as a science manager again.

How is archaeological communication and science communication different from communication in other disciplines?

No matter if it’s physics or archeology, we’re trying to tell people stories about our work, make it relevant to their lives, and get support for our work. Also, we want to give tools to people.

In the archeology I do, we don’t have written texts. We have objects. We excavate these objects, analyze them, interpret them, and then try to tell a story about them. We have to have a lot of imagination, but we also have constraints: what does our data allow us to say?

That creates an interesting tension. We have to tell engaging stories because people will absorb content if it resonates with their emotions. But we also have to stick to rationality, what the data allows us to say. In a polarized world, where people overreact and react on their most basic emotions, this rationality can be a good thing.

What about the challenges that you face in communications?

For me, working on prehistory, one of the biggest challenges is communicating deep time. It’s very difficult for a lay audience to grasp what one million years, two million years is. People usually can only imagine as far as the Pharaohs, roughly 5,000 or 6,000 years ago.

It’s a challenge we share with paleontology. Although for paleontology, Hollywood is a big help. Dinosaurs are in people’s minds, so they are less difficult to grasp.

How can you help people understand timescales that are totally beyond us?

Don’t just give a date, a number, but make it relevant for the present and the future. That’s one of the things archeology sometimes fails at: our communication stays in the past.

Let’s talk about the example of humans and fire, hundreds of thousands of years ago. How would you explain to me why this story is important today?

We’re pretty sure people were making fire around 400,000 years ago. I’d start like this: fire is responsible for the body you have now. Because if you have fire, you start cooking food, and if you start cooking food, it’s easier to digest and it feeds your brain’s high energy demands. So your gut gets smaller, and your jaws get smaller, and your brain develops more. It has a direct connection to you today.

And then I’d say it shaped the way we engage with each other. Fire gave us extra hours of light at the end of the day, where you couldn’t do much more than talk. We started having language, then we developed narrative, and then storytelling and fiction. We came up with myths in prehistory. When we were painting all those wonderful caves in France and making art, we already had important fictions and myths.

What was the importance of those stories and myths?

They do one very basic thing that we still absolutely need today: deal with uncertainty. We are vulnerable beings. All biology is conservative, but human beings are conservative in the sense that we always seek comfort and security. Myth and religion help us deal with the things we can’t explain and find some comfort. We’re still the same.

What else can archaeology help us understand about ourselves today?

If you look deep into our history — into human evolution, and also into historic times — using the methods of archeology, we very soon realize that we are all a beautiful, wonderful mix.

There’s no such thing as race. There’s no such thing as a pure, original nation. In the deep past, different species of humans were interbreeding. It shows you that racism is absolutely bogus.

But the past is always manipulated by political systems. The Portuguese dictatorship constructed a mythical past for the Portuguese that never existed, based on archeological finds and historical buildings. Nazism created a fictional Aryan race, and they went as far back as prehistory to prove it.

Political appropriations of the work we do is one of the reasons we should engage much more in communication. If we don’t fill the space with the rigor and seriousness of our work, other people will fill it and say all kinds of crazy things.

How do we push back against that kind of ideology, especially now that we see so much pushback against scientific ideas?

The best way to deal is just to talk. Go to social media and tell your truth. Engage more, because people want to hear from archeologists — they love archeology.

People have misconceptions about our field — that we excavate dinosaurs, that we work like Indiana Jones, the caveman — but these misconceptions are doors. Behind the misconception lies an interest. You can engage with that interest and say, “Here’s the way it really works.”

To fight these ideologies, we have to be more present. If we don’t occupy the space we still have, they will occupy it. But it’s a lot of work, because, for one thing, we’re sometimes not technically prepared to do this communication work. We’re often more rigorous, more discreet, so being loud is not really our nature. But staying silent is not the best solution.

I see so many people around me who are smart — serious researchers, serious professionals — and they’re also timid about speaking or writing in public. You’re so right: the loud voices are often the voices of ideologues. They get heard.

Someone will fill the space. At university researchers should learn basic communication techniques, and we have to have professional support. That’s where the role of the science communicator comes in — a kind of broker who prepares, helps, and supports the scientists.

Scientists are doing very important, serious work, and then they tell their story online and get attacked. I understand why people don’t want to do that. But you can learn how to deal with it and to communicate in a way that you’re not so exposed to those attacks. And remember that communication is not only about social media — you can reach people in different ways, sometimes more transformational and profound ways.

How can someone start?

Start with a sentence — the essential message, the one sentence that says it all. Then you go from that sentence all the way to more complicated things.

And it’s not only to communicate with lay audiences. We all need to know a bit of communication to succeed among peers. You go to congresses and hear about important science, and the talk is so boring, because it’s not crafted in a way that’s clear, understandable, and objective. These are basic skills that are useful in every part of the work.

I want to come back to technology. AI is a huge debate today, and you said that you have limits to think the technology should be used for, while also being an adopter. What can the past teach us about technology?

I think human evolution is the most fascinating story there is to tell, because it’s a tale of survival. We survived because we came up with tools, with technology, but also because we were very socially developed — our social bonds were very strong. An original combination of technology and care.

It’s always a duality. You come up with a spear, the spear hunts the animal and you feed the group, but the spear can also kill another human being. So it’s about human choices. I do believe there are many dangers in technology nowadays — this is not new — but the overall thing is still very much motivated by care.

That’s a fundamental insight.

You have people coming up with technologies for warfare, of course, I’m not going to deny that. But there’s such a big quantity of scientists and scholars who come up with technology to find solutions for health problems, for climate change, to increase food security, to help with mobility and so forth and sometimes we don’t talk about that so much. We tend to focus more on the negative, the disruptive and dangerous. But the story of the human species is a story of care, of protecting each other. We can be violent, but ultimately we need each other to survive.

Is there a place in your own work where you feel that tension — where the tool starts to cost us something?

Visual elements are absolutely crucial in archeology, and the work of illustrators goes hand in hand with our work. Imagine someone looking at ruins — they can’t make the reconstruction in their own minds.

I’m an early adopter of AI, but I am completely against illustrations made by AI in archaeology. It breaks my heart to see colleagues asking ChatGPT to do it rather than a real illustrator. It’s a fascinating process: the scientist says, “How can you make a drawing of this?” They work to create a reconstruction beyond what the data can tell you, but still within the limits. It’s incredible.

Sara’s recommendations for prehistoric sites in Portugal

• Côa Valley rock engravings. “They were discovered in the late 90s and were supposed to be submerged by the construction of a dam. It mobilized the whole Portuguese society, and we saved them. There’s a beautiful museum now where you can learn the whole history of the engravings of the hunter-gatherers. It’s absolutely marvelous.”

  

• Gruta da Figueira Brava. “This cave in front of the sea tells a beautiful story. We have this idea that Neanderthals were big meat eaters, but this cave shows that human species and Neanderthals, when they were in a territory where fish was widely available, were fishing too. It challenges the idea that fish consumption was very specific to our own species — that Neanderthals didn’t have the resources to capture this kind of food, and that this food, specifically the fatty acids in fish, was important for our higher intelligence.”

Further learning, reading, and listening

• Follow Sara’s Substack and her podcast

• For more of a discussion about technology and care, Sara recommends UK philosopher Tom Chatfield’s Wise Animals

See you next week! If you’re not signed up yet, subscribe below.

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I write to think, but I also write to attract opportunity. There’s nothing more exciting than getting a DM from a kindred spirit who has read your words and wants to collaborate or just chat over coffee. Those conversations then lead to the next piece…and on and on.

When Takuro Nuruki, the London-based founder of travel magazine Polaris, talked to me about the publication as a “space,” a “vehicle,” and a “think tank,” I knew he saw writing and publications like I do. The Japanese-English journal, on its third proper issue, has pulled a group of collaborators into its orbit, and it feeds the strategic design studio he runs alongside it.

Polaris tells stories from the world’s “borderlands,” providing “a crucial perspective needed in an intolerant era.” Reading it, there’s a sense of wandering — like catching a warm gust of air, or the rustle of leaves in a forest somewhere. The stories are ordinary but powerful; they never resolve into a tidy narrative. And they’re held to an exacting standard of design.

We talked about what prisons taught him about design, the difference between UK and Japanese design thinking, and why he likes to be a hands-off editor-in-chief.

1. A magazine is a space. It’s more than a pile of paper, it’s a place for stories and collaborations to happen. A magazine is also a magnet. Takuro describes Polaris as a kind of magazine think tank, where the publication brings in opportunities for new projects and work.

2. Use an acupuncture needle to have impact. Instead of looking for a huge solution to a huge problem, find the small place where you can intervene for maximum impact.

3. Quality creates deeper communication. High-quality design and editorial is the catalyst for deeper communication, and what separates a project from being dismissed as just another hobby project. Polaris, for example, is printed by a top-tier independent printer in Tokyo and the gorgeous layout and graphics jump off a bookstore shelf.

Our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity below.

How did you start making Polaris?

My bachelor’s was in journalism, but I switched to advertising and worked at the Japanese advertising agency, Hakuhodo. Then one day, I came across an event held by a professor about the Institute of Innovation, a kind of design school, but not for designers, started by Japanese art university Musashino.

My job title at Hakuhodo was “strategic planner,” but the professor told me my job description should be “strategic designer.” In Europe or America, that’s a real title, but in my mind, a designer was a graphic designer. In Japan, design is about styling. It’s very surface-level, about aesthetics. In the US and the UK, it’s more strategic, more about human-centered design.

I started my master’s at Musashino. In my studies, I was asking questions like, “What’s the value of a paper magazine in modern society?” and “What’s the alternative value of travel?”

Why those topics?

My dream was to be a novelist. I like traveling. I like magazines. I didn’t mean travel in the “Instagrammable” sense — but travel being about encountering something new, touching someone’s life, seeing a different perspective.

I’m Japanese — Japan is geographically and culturally an isolated country, so travel means a lot. Travel isn’t just about physical moving. Travel means changing myself.

With Polaris, we travel to borderland areas, listen to people’s ordinary narratives, and try to interpret them and find value. There aren’t many media doing this. It’s not storytelling, it’s not dramatic. It’s not about entertainment.

How did you come to the UK?

The first [Polaris] was only in Japanese, and it was like a zine. An RCA professor came to my university, saw it, and said he wanted to distribute it in the UK. I thought, “Let’s do a bilingual magazine.”

The professor’s name is Judah Armani, and he runs a music label in prison called InHouse Records. His talk was so inspirational that I wanted to study with him or do some project with him, so I emailed him and traveled to Brighton.

What do prisons have to do with design? What did you learn from Judah?

Judah thought the work experience programs meant to prevent reoffending weren’t designed effectively. So he did music education as a volunteer in UK prisons and tried to understand prisoners through music.

He saw that it wasn’t a lack of education or work experience that was causing repeat offenses. When prisoners are released, they try to do something new in the community, but they experience discrimination, and they end up in their former community — that’s the main driver of reoffending.

So he created the music label to give a new community and new sense of belonging to prisoners and ex-inmates. After their release, ex-inmates belong to the music label as artists. I thought this was such a creative project when I saw it, and that’s why I moved to the UK. I enrolled at the RCA for an M.A. in Service Design in 2022.

Do you consider yourself a designer now?

I don’t think so. I don’t have design skills, I don’t have graphic skills. “Marketing” is maybe too commercial. And I don’t think I’m an editor — I know many professional editors, and I don’t have an editorial practice. A CEO, or a representative, and that’s enough for me.

Today I had a meeting with a Japanese media outlet. They were like, “Oh, you’re a design agency,” and I was like, “Not really.” They see us as design people, and I don’t like it — design sometimes creates a boundary.

I think I’m good at making context — behind the art, behind the objects. So I’d probably call myself a strategic planner. A strategist, if needed.

So you continued Polaris when you came to the UK for your studies?

I continued the magazine, and it became kind of like an artist collective. Now we have six or seven core members. We’re also always open to open submissions. We have eight chapters in the latest issue, but half of them are from open submissions.

You write in both Japanese and English, which is rare.

There are people arguing that the design industry in Europe and America should think more carefully and take in different ways of thinking — from Asia, the Global South, South America. They frame it as “decolonization.” I don’t like that word. To me it sounds like it will invite discrimination again. But this magazine is very much about putting Asian and Japanese design thinking next to European design thinking.

This paper magazine isn’t really profitable. But when people see it in the bookstores, in some gallery, they DM me, and say, “Let’s do a project.” So we do exhibitions, conferences, also some research projects with enterprises and the social sector. We’re kind of a magazine think tank. I’m also running a marketing studio.

You talked about magazines as something that can have impact and change society. Why do you think that?

We’re collecting people’s very fragmented, ordinary narratives. We can get new perspectives and new insights from that. Big media — digital media, or a commercial magazine — can’t do that, because they need profit, they need big money, they need scalability. Only an independent magazine can meet people physically and try to find something new in their ordinary lives.

If this were a novel, we’d need a plot. We’d need the narrative, something linear. But a magazine has chapters. If you’re interested in all the chapters, go deep. Just one chapter, that’s fine. Some people might like the front cover and just display it on a shelf. That’s enough. A magazine has all these alternatives. Artists and designers can join, and I can create something complex.

For me, a paper magazine is a space, a vehicle — many people, diverse people, people with different backgrounds can join.

But you still have a theme for each edition…how do you arrive at this?

Many magazines have a very linear decision-making system. The editor-in-chief says, “This is the core theme, now let’s look for contributors.”

We are the complete opposite. We collect open submissions, and we travel and meet people. If we collect three or four pieces of content, then we have a meeting and come up with a tentative theme. After we collect all the chapters, we change the theme again. We aren’t really committed to one thing in particular, but rather we focus on how we can use this medium as a space to collect many people’s voices.

This approach really resonates for me. I feel like a lot of media collects stories from their desks. We need more media that goes to the gemba — talking to real people and going to real places to gather precious insights that no machine can copy. You said you wanted to be a novelist when you were younger — you write for the magazine too?

I edited all the chapters, and I wrote two or three chapters in the latest issue. But my dream in this project is “autonomous design.” I don’t really like being an editor-in-chief — “This is my media, I’m the head person.” I don’t really like that.

It’s funny — I feel like many editors and writers now are being pushed to be a star — to build their brand, have their newsletter, their podcast. And it’s interesting that you’re saying, “No, I want it to be equal. I want this to be a space, a group.”

I want to see something different. I want to make friends — that’s my passion. That’s the reason I moved to the UK.

But that doesn’t mean that the quality of the design and the quality of the content aren’t really high. I don’t want to make a “zine.” If I’m going to make something, I’m going to do it well. And if you publish some ordinary stories in a low-quality fashion, people are just going to think, “Oh, this is just someone’s hobby.” But we’re serious.

Do you use AI for writing or for the magazine? Or for your design studio?

I use AI, but not for writing. For example, when we do large-scale interviews — 30 people, 40 people — we use Gemini for a very rough synthesis. 50% of the answer is very wrong, and 50% might be correct, but AI gives us a starting point and saves us long meetings.

The important thing with AI is that only people who have experience can make that judgment about what’s correct.

You talked about a movement toward having more varied perspectives on design — from South America, Asia, Africa. What do you think is the Japanese perspective that you bring, living in the UK? How have you felt different — seeing things in a different way than designers here?

Japanese culture, Japanese design, finds value in things more than human, like nature. UK design culture is more about industrial design, commercial innovation. They’re trying to hack people’s behavior — like cognitive science. But the Japanese focus, my focus, is not only about humans. It’s the relationship between human and others — human and human, human and nature, human and community, human and society.

The UK, the US design industry often talks about problems — what’s the solution?

We talk a lot about pain points. I definitely feel that when we talk about design in tech.

There are many pain points, but as a designer, we can’t change everything. Let’s be honest. We’re just humans. The most important capability of the designer is to find the intervention point — like an acupuncture needle. A small intervention, a critical impact that is big. That’s the thing I learned from Japanese design culture.

The prison project is the same, and that’s the reason I really like that project. And the magazine is also this — a small-scale project, but a critical intervention. An acupuncture needle.

Why do you think people are interested in zines and magazines now? I have so many friends in Japan selling zines at the Literary Flea Market.

In Japan, zines are getting more and more popular. People don’t have a space to raise their voices on social media. People are tired of algorithms, and they are looking for new places.

But I think it’s our responsibility to be well designed, to collaborate with a lot of people — that’s really important. Zines don’t really have this sense of responsibility — you’re just doing what you like.

Substack is kind of like the zine of the UK. Everyone’s like, “I started a Substack, I started this newsletter,” but often it is amateur.

We’re also going to start a Substack. But the important thing is, first we have the magazine. The magazine is a symbol, a showcase.

It attracts people, like a magnet.

Yes, it’s a magnet. Many zines or newsletters are just communicating in one direction. But this magazine is physical, high-quality. That’s important. This works as a catalyst to deep communication, whereas online communication is can be superficial.

• Find stockists for Polaris magazine around the world or order a copy online on their website.

• I’m running the inaugural Founder-Writer Collective event this Tuesday with in London. The event is closed to registrations given how many sign-ups we’ve had, but follow our Luma calendar so you can get updates about the next event.

Thank you for reading! Enjoy the rest of your weekend. 🌻

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Happy June! I spent the last two weeks tracing the vestiges of the Silk Road through Uzbekistan and hit the ground running the day after my return at SXSW London. So this edition is a grab bag: stories from my trip that inspired how I’m thinking about writing and narrative, plus some thoughts from the conference.

Fun announcement: Journalist and kindred wordsmith spirit and I found the most uncool spot at SXSW—the LinkedIn lounge—to hatch the coolest of plans. We’re starting the Founder-Writer Collective to bring together founders who write and writers who build in London. Our first event will be on June 16 — stay tuned for details. And check out Alys’s always excellent UK 2.0 newsletter.

The highlight of my SXSW was leading an hour-long discussion on AI and writing with 25 people from advertising, content, consulting and television. Takeaways:

• Generational friction is real. One attendee who runs her own communications firm shared that her younger staff are resistant to using AI when in her view, the case for tech — it would help them take on more work and increase revenue — was clear. She’s struggling to make the case for AI to them.

  • An early-career attendee said that she often had imposter syndrome about her own abilities after being pushed to use AI by her bosses. Could she really achieve the same level of output with her brain alone?

• People are thinking hard about their edge over AI. One attendee said he’s giving staff at his consultancy coaching on topics like public speaking and how to sell their ideas because he sees that as their “moat” against AI. Another writer said they believe their moat is getting decisions made with others. Another attendee said that understanding culture and dialects is his differentiator.

• Hacking your own brand guidelines can reveal lazy AI use. One Googler shared that Google’s guidelines for UX writing discourages using periods or punctuation. So his internal AI tell is when someone shares punctuated text!

• Receipts = less anxiety, more honest conversations. One young woman about to start her career told me after the session that she felt less anxious about AI after hearing about concrete ways in which people were using it.

  • Another person who works in television said that she started using AI after hearing about it at SXSW last year and deciding it wasn’t as scary as it seems.

  • This supports my view that showing our receipts and having more forums for tech and creatives to come together fosters healthier conversations about what AI is and isn’t helpful for and deescalates the emotion around it.

Uzbek embroidery and imperfection

In Uzbekistan, you cannot throw a stone without hitting a suzani. Originally sewn by women as part of their dowry, these large works of embroidery are still being made today for use as wall decorations, pillow covers, and clothing. Suzani masters deliberately leave a mistake in each work: an unsymmetrical flower, the wrong color thread, lines unconnected. The goal is twofold. First, to show that they are not trying to imitate God’s perfection and second, that our lives are still not finished.

We have a complicated relationship with perfection. We worship perfection, yet we find too much of it off-putting. When I interviewed Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video company Synthesia, on stage at SXSW, he mentioned how the avatars that the company produces need to have some imperfections or human viewers find them creepy. Some people are now leaving spelling mistakes in their work to prove it’s not AI-generated, but that feels like a losing game.

The suzanis I saw made me wonder if there is a smarter way to deliberately incorporate imperfections in creative work, one that’s not defined in opposition to an enemy and instead in relation to humility or spirituality. Maybe the more interesting imperfection is a strange metaphor or word, something only a human mind would reach for.

How to kill 5% of the world and come back a hero

When Uzbekistan gained independence in 1991, its leaders decided that the fledgling country needed a hero to unite its diverse inhabitants. They settled on conqueror Amir Temur, who lived from the 1320s to 1405.

Let’s look at his hero creds. The good: he built a vast empire stretching from parts of modern-day Turkey to India and the frontier of China and used his riches to build schools and mosques. The not so good: he destroyed cities that defied him, killed roughly 5% of the world’s population at the time, and still managed to curse nations more than 500 years after his death. Nonetheless, he has been resurrected as a hero, and there are now giant statues of him in Tashkent, Samarkand, and his birthplace, Shahrisabz.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with an early editor of Wired who said the publication succeeded because they had a clear hero: the tech geek. Readers adored the publication for pulling pale nerds out of their basements and giving them god-like cover treatment. Even better had they constructed Timur-sized monuments! (Or are tech bros saving that for their next chapter???).

A great exercise in telling the story of any community — a country, a publication, even a company — is to ask yourself who your hero is. Do you have an answer?

Thank you for reading! We’ll be back next week with an interview with a talented communicator of ancient times. In the meantime, enjoy some of the absolutely insane stories about Timur that will make you shaketh in your boots.

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If we are to believe Google, the vibes really got going around 2015.

In the middle of the last decade, the ’v word’ came to mean more than a physical place or the specific energy of a person. It became a diffuse atmosphere — summer vibes — or something performed — hot girl summer vibes. Now, we’ve even allowed this ephemerality to replace hard-coded foundations. With AI-powered vibe coding, technical novices don’t even need code to create their own apps.

Vibes float in the air like a virus or a perfume — impossible to avoid. The LinkedIn feed. The collection of bestselling books on display at the bookstore. When something we’ve never wanted sparks FOMO in us, as my investor friend confided to me:

“We hear investor A or investor B is considering a deal, and though nothing about the company in question has changed, suddenly we think, ‘Maybe we should take a look…’”

Vibes reveal the consensus, but they also cause us to see credibility where there is no proof — an investment that might be better to skip. They cause us to see a trend when there is no line.

I’ve worked in tech and VC, where the vibes seem to be permanently stuck on 11, partially because the manipulation of perception is the only way you raise capital.

This is also why I’ve always been skeptical of vibes. Instead of being swayed by what’s outside, I’ve been trying to trust what’s inside: my own emotions. Spending time training and giving weight to my emotional responses helps me be a better writer, editor, and thinker. Because good writing trusts its gut.

Enjoyment and tradwriting

Emotions can be immediate and specific. That’s why they are such a good litmus test of the diffuse and approximate nature of vibes. Envy at someone else’s accomplishment. Anxiety about the future of my industry. Frustration when there’s no customer service number to call. What are all these telling us?

The emotion I’ve been trying hardest to listen to lately is enjoyment — because in an era when everyone is competing for attention and survival, enjoyment is the first thing we sacrifice.

I was using my second boyfriend Claude frequently for editing help—Is the thesis of the piece clear? How can I tighten this paragraph? But I was finding that I didn’t even remember what I edited. I had a vague sense of always being pressed for time, and felt none of the satisfaction that comes with a job well done.

So I’ve returned to what I call “tradwriting.” Like flipping a switch, enjoyment returned.

I find pleasure when I untangle someone’s mangled prose, or suggest the perfect kicker to an opinion piece, all mined from my own brain. Which, on a good day, gives me much quicker results to these kinds of writing puzzles than AI.

I am in a privileged position to be able to focus on enjoyment in my career. That is why I guard it even more closely.

Enjoyment is also a clue about where we're headed because of what it says about human motivation. I don’t enjoy the kind of tinkering that a lot of the more advanced AI tools currently require to work. So to anyone who tries to convince me again why every yoga studio and independent bakery owner will vibe code their own inventory analysis tool, bringing an AI revolution to small businesses, I respond: “No, because that’s not what they enjoy. They enjoy teaching movement. Or making a great croissant.”

A small anti-vibes guide

I have a handful of principles that I use to stay honest with my gut when the vibes are pointing my brain in many different directions. Good writing and good work come from that honesty.

• Trust your emotional response to the world around you and to what you’re making. If something moves you, that’s a signal. If something bores you, that’s also a signal. And if your own writing bores you, it’s not good enough yet. That’s the hardest one to admit, which is why I’ve gotten so much from working with a writing coach and enrolling in a fiction-writing course. They hold me accountable for going the extra 10%.

• Be wary of opinions, including your own, that contradict how something made you feel. Don’t let vibes overwrite your gut. This is a twist on some sound advice from the jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia. He writes, “You can feel your response to music…long before you formulate an analytical or verbal interpretation of it. This is the ultimate aesthetic reality…Nobody falls in love with anything because of a reason.”

• Get bored on purpose. Vibes sneak in when you’re trying to fill all your empty time with input. Boredom is a chance for your mind to clear itself and new ideas to emerge. (There is even research that boredom makes us more creative.)

• Like what you like. It doesn’t have to be cool. Some of the best writers in the world are writing about deeply unfashionable things with total conviction, and that conviction is what makes them a pleasure to read. The most interesting conversations don’t happen on the bandwagon.

• When you can’t tell whether you really care about something or just feel like you should, write something else. The thing you’re avoiding is usually the thing worth writing. This week, I started writing an essay that I thought sounded smart but I kept coming back to this idea of emotions. That’s what I needed to write.

The vibes are telling you what to feel. Listen to what your gut tells you. Then create great things.

Thank you for reading! I’ll be off for a few weeks as I travel to a land-locked central Asian country. If you missed it and want to read more of my writing, I published a piece this week in Every on why humans are still better at asking good questions than AI and how good questions can surface the best stories. It includes my second favorite Werner Herzog story after that time he got shot on camera and brushed it off (“It’s not significant.”).

It feels right that Eight Words or Fewer, a book about micropitches, undercuts its own rule in the title…by half.

The slender thesis is the baby of Emma Ketterer and her husband, Adam, B2B tech branding and positioning specialists who argue that the difference between a brand and its rivals should be distillable into a tight, memorable tagline. At a moment when people are using AI to produce so much content that CEOs are begging their staff to be concise, it’s a refreshing take.

Emma cut her teeth at legendary B2B agency Velocity Partners, before stints leading content for pharma clients at an agency and in-house at Philips. She’s now global lead editor at Celonis, one of Europe’s most valuable private companies. She kindly agreed to chat about what she thinks B2B brands are doing wrong, her favorite taglines, and why AI writing still falls short.

• B2B brands should be less worried about being boring and more worried about grabbing audience attention. That’s why you need to be able to distill yourself into a micropitch.

• Ketterer’s Law states that copy will spill into whatever word count you set. Commit yourself to concision.

• The fear that “everything’s been said” is wrong. Strong opinions are getting rarer, and an original take is more valuable now, not less. So write that LinkedIn post or that book you’ve been meaning to!

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What’s the core problem that you were seeking to address with this book?

A lot of B2B companies do a good job of figuring out what they stand for and how they’re different from competitors. They have good answers to the big questions: What problem do we solve, what are we enabling for our customers, what does the future look like? Then they capture that in long form, whether that’s through positioning docs, slide decks or whatever — but when it comes to distilling all of that down to one, memorable message, these positioning exercises fall short.

In a lot of places I’ve worked, we get 99% of the way there. Adam had the same experience, so that’s how the book came about.

If you look at how B2B business communications has changed, why do you think that distillation has become a problem now?

I think there was a time when the challenge in B2B was to not sound boring. You’d try to stand out by having an exciting voice or even sounding like a B2C brand.

But being able to stand out now is so difficult because everyone’s saturated with messages all day, every day. You’d be lucky to even have the opportunity to bore your audience. If you’ve bored a reader, then you’ve done a great job — they’ve stuck with you long enough to be tired of your content. 99% of brands don’t have that opportunity. Someone’s scrolling past you, and you’ve got one second to wow them. So boredom is so far down on the list of problems.

You need distillation because you’ve got a few seconds to make that first impression, and that’s only going to get harder over time.

You’ve made me think that we’re in an era of maximizing things. Looksmaxxing or Londonmaxxing, using AI to create a whole document instead of three bullet points. So running the other way and saying, “How can I shape this down into the single most compelling thing” becomes a differentiator.

Exactly.

What do a lot of B2B tech brands get wrong about their positioning and the way they talk?

There’s a tendency to become too introspective. A lot of material might work well within the team that created it, but sometimes that work gets lost when you have to communicate it across a business and have everybody else communicate it well in the right places, on the right channels, for the right audiences.

Tech is complicated. It’s easy to create messaging that everyone internally — people who are hands-on with the product — can grasp. Things that might seem commonsensical or intuitive to you may not be to a cold audience.

That connecting thread between the foundational work and making sure it’s being executed in the real world — I think that’s sometimes also what’s missing.

Who do you think does this distilling really well?

I’m a big fan of Entrepreneur First and their tagline: “Found, don’t follow.” It says, “If you want to found a company, create the dream team, move fast, get to Silicon Valley, then these are the guys for you.” You don’t want to move slowly. You don’t want to go the traditional route.

I’m also a Stripe fangirl. I go to their marketing and try to steal whatever inspiration I can because they always nail it. Their mission statement, “Increasing the GDP of the Internet,” is such a fun, creative line. You have to unpack it for a second to understand it, but it’s such a compelling line that you make that effort to understand.

Speaking of Stripe, the founder of Every, the company I work for, interviewed someone from Stripe on our podcast, and one of the first things he said was to reference that tagline. That’s the ultimate comms success — when the people interviewing you parrot back the line.

That’s the goal. When you have that micro pitch, if you nail it, it’s what people repeat. When someone asks, “Hey, what does X company do?” they default to your line.

Does it have to be eight words? Is this a challenge or a hard and fast rule?

If you set it as a soft limit, things tend to expand. There’s a famous observation called Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. We’ve created an equivalent we’re calling Ketterer’s Law: Copy will spill into whatever word count you set as a limit.

With eight words or fewer, you’ve got enough room to get in the key ingredients. But there’s zero chance of being waffly at that length.

There have been some interesting studies on how many words people can remember when they see them for the first time. Eight words or fewer seems to be this magic sweet spot.

Do you use AI in your work at all? If so, how?

I use it for research a lot. Sometimes, if I’m going to interview somebody, I ask it to give me a download on the person. Sometimes I chuck a bunch of notes and ask it to summarize them.

For actual writing, I’ve tried — I really have. What I find AI really misses comes down to conviction. It doesn’t do a great job of having a unique perspective that it seems to feel strongly about. It might be authoritative in the tone it’s written in, but I don’t feel like this person really believes what they’re saying. I do when a human writes something. As much as I’ve tried to get it to ghostwrite for me, it doesn’t quite nail it. It doesn’t feel like an argument I would actually make.

Outside of writing specifically, I’m experimenting with a few things. One is refining and accelerating the early stages of the positioning process — that point where you’ve gathered input from a wide range of parties in a wide range of formats, and want to condense that down into consolidated notes, see where the synchronicity — or discord — occurs, and whether a pattern is emerging that can be mapped to whatever framework you’re working with. I’m also experimenting with using AI for content strategy and review — looking at things like persona fit, regional fit, industry fit, and so on.

How do you see the shortcomings of AI?

I read an article in State of Brand about the “great flattening” of writing. It’s so true. LLMs are giving everybody the statistical average of everything that’s been written. They’re making everybody sound like everybody else. You get this dulling of tone.

AI is so new, relatively speaking, and the fact that we’re already recognizing this gives me a bit of hope. People already see the shortcomings. I can only hope that people who actually write for a living and love it and want to protect it will defend that for as long as possible.

If you really strongly believe in something, then the writing part is kind of half done because you already know how you feel. You already know what you want to say. You already know what your point of view is, and how strongly you feel about it, and that comes out in how you write it. You can’t be dull if you believe in something strongly. AI doesn’t literally have feelings yet.

I loved getting the book in the mail. I read it in bed, highlighted stuff. It seems like the kind of thing I can keep on my desk and go back to and be inspired by. Why did you decide to do it as a book versus a series of LinkedIn posts, a video, or something else?

When we started writing it, we weren’t sure what it was going to become. It just turned out to be the length it is. We considered doing a long-page scroll, but it’s nice to have something physical in your hands.

Print to me is still really precious. There’s so much being said about B2B marketing online, so it’s nice to break away and have a physical format. We saw it as almost a pocket or field guide. Something you can always come back to, highlight, annotate.

Tell me about the process of writing the book.

We have two little kids, so we put them to bed, then depending on how much energy the two of us have, we hash out these things in conversation. One of us writes something, then the next day the other one comes back to it, reads what the other person wrote, and tweaks it.

Every sentence in that book has been written by both of us, so we’ve had to find a tone of voice that represents us both. End to end was probably about six months of doing that — revisiting, rethinking, trying to get something we both love and feel is coming from us, but is also this middle ground between our two tones of voice.

It’s like you have a couple’s style guide. That’s the most romantic thing ever.

Or cringiest! I’m not sure which.

What’s been the response to the book?

The feedback has been really positive, and it’s encouraged us to try and write more things down.

It’s intimidating sometimes when you’re scrolling a social media feed or looking at blogs. You go on LinkedIn, and a million people are talking about AI and marketing. You think, “Everything’s been said already. How can I have a unique take on this?” But you can. It’s surprising how many organic ideas you really can have.

With this flattening, real strong opinions are becoming rarer. The idea we wrote about is something that doesn’t seem to have been covered before. We’re already talking about what we might write next.

Here are a few things I highlighted in Emma and Adam’s book:

• “Good writing is good manners and good business.”

• “If you can only be clear or clever, be clear.”

• “Never use a verbose Latinate term when a lean Germanic word will do nicely.”

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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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