I Didn't Know What I Was Writing About
Why I moved my writing off Substack, and what happens when you stop reading your work as individual essays and start reading it as data.
The journal
Some Assembly Required
An unfinished magazine of ideas. 116 essays and 157,524 words since April 2024.
By theme
Aging & the Epilogue Economy 38 essays The largest, richest audience in the market, and the experience companies keep showing the door. Future of work & hiring 35 essays What happens to careers, hiring and apprenticeship when the machine does the first draft. Brand & marketing strategy 35 essays How brands earn attention and trust when everyone has the same tools. AI adoption & belief 33 essays Why organizations buy AI and then wait for something to happen. Taste & creative judgment 24 essays Judgment as the work itself, and taste as the thing that stops confident mediocrity. Identity & reinvention 24 essays Who you are when the title, the age or the tools change. Learning & habits 17 essays How fluency actually gets built, one structured hour at a time. Prompting & tools practice 17 essays Notes from the workbench: prompts, workflows and the tools themselves. Data & insight 17 essays What the numbers can and can’t tell you: signals, measurement, synthetic audiences, and turning data into a call worth making. Agents & systems design 15 essays Designing AI systems backward from what they should change. Culture & society 15 essays Observations on how people live, meet and decide. Friction & agency 15 essays Which effort to remove, which to protect, and who gets to choose. Storytelling craft 14 essays The craft underneath everything else. Presence & the analog 13 essays Records, bookstores, long walks and rooms where something actually happened. AI filmmaking & video 11 essays Making film with machines, and why film craft matters more because of it.
By date
202645
Spaceships, Flying Cars, and HAL
Hollywood predicted all three. Only one showed up.
We Optimized the Wrong Thing: People Need the Inconvenience
Why friction, effort, and a little difficulty might be exactly what we've been designing out of our lives.
An Algorithm Walks Into a Bar: My thoughts on FirstDate.
Singapore's new dating pilot treats matching as the problem. What has gone missing are the rooms where people practiced meeting, failing and becoming good company.
Do You Believe in This Thing or Not?
Every company has the same AI. Very few have decided whether they believe in it.
AI is taking over the status meeting. The hours left over belong to long, side-by-side conversations, like a walk through a park in Bucharest with a man I'd met an hour earlier.
I wasn’t wrong about measuring Return on Inference. I was too early.
Before you measure what AI gives you, measure whether people are using it enough to become fluent.
I built this website by pressing approve, over and over. AI is turning operators into governors who authorize work they don't fully understand.
The Flywheel Effect of Structured Learning
Why deliberate learning compounds differently from everything else we consume.
What an Agent Does When It Doesn’t Know What To Do. Or Shouldn’t Do.
Left alone, an agent fills every gap with a confident guess. Fallbacks, escalation and restraint have to be designed in, and they only hold where people can say they're not sure yet.
The Purpose of an Agent Is What It Does
Stafford Beer's rule applied to agents: design backward from the consequence you need. Automating the old process mostly rebuilds the org chart in software.
Taylor Swift Taught Me How To Write Better System and Agent Prompts
Taylor Swift says details shouldn't be strictly decorative. The same rule makes better system prompts: every sentence has to change what the agent does, so delete and test.
A failed search in a bookstore ended in a book I never meant to buy. Being predicted and being encountered are different experiences, and algorithms only offer the first.
Option A is the obvious answer and Option B is its mirror. The work worth paying for questions the brief itself, and AI is making A and B nearly free.
Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens Was Right. I Just Wasn’t Old Enough to Hear It.
A line from Justified, heard again at 62. Aging is accumulation and synthesis, and an economy obsessed with youth is undervaluing perspective just as information gets cheap.
Write, summarize, generate: the verbs people use with AI decide what it gets used for. Diagnostic and adversarial verbs produce better questions.
I am who I remember myself to be: What happens when the archive remembers something else?
Identity depends on what memory keeps and what it lets go. An AI that can retrieve everything may threaten reinvention and forgiveness more than privacy.
Intelligence is getting cheap to deploy. Deciding what to spend it on becomes the new discipline of leadership, as capital allocation once was.
Bradbury, Proust and a sleepless night. AI should take the friction out of production and leave the hard part, working out what the thing should be.
What the Hell Is an .md File, Anyway?
Opening PowerPoint decides the shape of your thinking before you've done any. A plain-text source layer keeps the thinking intact, so it can be rendered for any audience.
AI closes the gap between junior and senior output while the gap in judgment stays open. Use it as scaffolding, or the pipeline of experienced people runs dry.
Reading Bank of Singapore's longevity report. AI pushes human value to the judgment-heavy ends of work, which turns experienced people from a cost into a scarce asset.
Ageism Awareness Isn’t the Finish Line. It’s the Starting Gun. But Then What?
Ageism can now be measured, which makes it a design problem. Audit the hiring funnel by age, retire the word overqualified and check what your AI screener is filtering out.
My Conversation with Ram: Why "I Am the Loop" Changed How I Work with AI
Notes from my podcast conversation with Ram, built around one idea: I am the loop, not the human in the loop.
The Token, the Stack, and the Body: What AI Actually Costs an Operator of One.
Running AI as a company of one has three costs. The tokens are the cheapest. The always-on tool stack and the physical toll of constant learning cost far more.
Work is moving to a 40/20/40 split, with judgment at both ends and the machine in the middle. Feeling like the bottleneck is correct: you are what stops confident mediocrity.
The Brief Used to Go to a Photographer. Now It Goes to a Pipeline.
Why mastering AI creative production now requires thinking like a systems architect
The Presence Economy Is the Next Great Brand Frontier
Why the most important thing a brand can do right now can’t be generated, automated, or scaled
What AI Is Teaching Us About Being Human: The Presence Economy — Part I
Young designers use AI as a safe place to rehearse before they face people. As generated content floods everything, being there in person becomes how trust gets earned.
Thom Yorke Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud. The Creative Industry Should Be Taking Notes.
Thom Yorke's Ivors speech, read through Radiohead's catalogue. The industry's risk-averse habits fail young talent who should be experimenting and veterans whose late work it undervalues.
Is This Really Creative? What a talk at Campaign360 taught me about the wrong question.
Every new tool has made creativity move rather than vanish. AI collapses the gap between imagining a thing and making it, so the value shifts to meaning.
My recent AI video moved like a shark, but sounded like a goldfish.
On presence, production, and the day I became a Foley artist.
I stopped writing and went quiet to rethink how I work. Here's why — and where it's headed.
A filmmaking masterclass changed how I work. From scene prompter to director, and a hybrid model for brand micro-drama: shoot less, build more.
Oh, The Places We Will Go: Why I Might Be Wrong About AI and Young Talent
I worried AI would kill creative apprenticeship. I now think the advantage lies in pairing AI-native young talent with veterans who have calibrated judgment.
It's Just Like Paris. How I tamed my Impostor Syndrome.
Calling the feeling of being new impostor syndrome turns it into a condition. A Paris Metro map taught me to read the same feeling as the start of an adventure.
Notes from My Workshop at Spikes Asia: The Experience Gap in AI Filmmaking
A show of hands at Spikes Asia: most people learning AI filmmaking have never been on a set. The craft they're missing is what makes the tools useful.
A small film about turning an IKEA bag into a bucket hat. Cheap, frequent story experiments are becoming a real capability for brands, and they make craft matter more.
Brands aren't short of ideas. They're short of engines. This is where the Story Engine came from, and how it connects strategy, narrative and production.
AI Didn’t Kill Cinematography. It Made It Mandatory.
Generated footage looks impressive and feels flat. Camera movement, lens logic and color continuity now have to be specified up front, which makes the cinematographer's thinking essential.
AI video doesn't make production free. It moves the cost from matter to meaning, into iteration and judgment that nobody is pricing.
Why Agency Scriptwriters Should Experiment with AI Filmmaking
Most scripts fail in transmission, long before the shoot. Rough AI visualization lets a writer test whether tone and rhythm survive before anyone else reads the page.
Do Not Underestimate Your Place in History Right Now
Earlier technologies changed how things reached us. This one takes part in how we think, and history will judge us on whether we stayed awake while it did.
If AI Becomes a Verb, What Kind of Verb Will It Be?
AI will become a verb. Whether it ends up a utility verb, a cultural verb or a creative verb decides whether speed, visibility or judgment wins.
AI only seems human because work culture taught us to prize fluency and speed over judgment. The real choice is between a cheap version of humanity and the full one.
Bad Work Is Fine. Public Bad Work Is Not.
Slop isn't new. What's new is that first drafts now go straight to the public, and taste depends on knowing what to keep in the drawer.
202561
I’ve Lived Through More Than One End of the World.
What repeated cycles of technological disruption have taught me about survival, judgment, and hope.
On reclaiming meaning, momentum, and attention in a world that keeps asking for more.
Why I’m Giving Away One of the Most Valuable Things I Use
The Explorer, the Settler, and the Future of Work in the Age of AI
AI amplifies two temperaments: the people who push into new territory and the people who make it livable. Organizations need both, working side by side.
Why I’m Taking the Cannes Lions Creative MBA (Even Though I’ve Been Critical of Cannes)
I've been hard on Cannes for years. I enrolled anyway, to see how creative excellence is being redefined and how learning gets built to last.
Teach Them What Good Looks Like
A question at a Google workshop: how do juniors build judgment without thirty years of experience? Teach them standards, because most organizations only teach them metrics.
The One Where I say Some Things
My time on The Generalists Podcast
To Question Is to Answer: The Missing Skill in the Age of AI
AI reflects the thinking you bring to it. The book started from that idea: the quality of your questions matters more than the craft of your prompts.
Agencies are buying agentic systems before their people can use a chatbot well. The fix is fluency and a permission structure set by leadership, not another tool.
GenAI: The Generation We Choose
Generation AI is a mindset, open to anyone at any age. The divide that matters next is between people who think with AI and people who don't.
Messy, Honest, Human: The Strategic Power of Reddit
Anonymity, friction and a total lack of polish make Reddit the most honest research tool a strategist has. It runs the Five Whys at the scale of a culture.
AI Leadership: Are We Starting from X When We Need Y?
The fear that AI will kill junior talent is Theory X wearing new clothes. Leaders who build AI systems on trust will grow people; leaders who build on control will lose them.
You Can’t Just Be An [insert job role here] Anymore.
AI has dissolved the walls between specialist roles. Frameworks are what let people cross from one discipline to the next without getting lost.
Ghosts in My Notebooks, 0 to 1 thinking, and how I have moved past these.
Most of my ideas used to die as fragments in notebooks. Now I use AI to push each one far enough to judge whether it deserves to live.
"I focus on making a better product." - Severine Vauleon, during the IAA talk on Sustainability.
At an IAA Singapore session on sustainability, one line stuck. Sustainability belongs in the product, and advertising should be honest about its own emissions.
We Gave Everyone the Same Tools.
Now Everything Tastes Like Beige. Creativity was never about the tools.
Authentic Memories, Human Responses: A Lesson for Brands from Blade Runner 2049
And how I use Google's Flow to test and learn.
Brief the Problem, Not the Solution.
Why most creative briefs fail to spark creativity and what to do about it.
Let Go. Hold On. Get Trained. Move Forward.
How to build an AI-first creative culture without losing your soul.
Breaking Down the Levi’s Spot: How I Used Flow/Veo 3 to Prototype an Idea.
A step-by-step look at prototyping an unofficial Levi's film with Gemini, JSON prompts, Veo 3 and CapCut. Generative video as a previz sketchbook.
The Epilogue Economy Wasn’t a Theory. It Was a Forecast.
Two years ago, I wrote about it. This week, UBS and e27 confirmed it.
The Quiet Genius of Gemini and NotebookLM
A week working only in Google's tools for a coaching client. Gemini and NotebookLM win by quietly respecting how people think over time.
Time & Materials in a Man & Machine World
AI broke time-and-materials pricing, because the hours no longer equal the work. Consultancies need to price thinking instead, through something like a subscription to Creative Capital Units.
When Did “Good Enough” Become Good Enough?
A reflection on AI, apathy, and the quiet collapse of creative standards
The Leadership Gap No One Talks About
How COVID Broke the Agency Leadership Apprentice System, and What Agencies Should Do Now
Experience is the Missing Layer in Modern Teams.
Rethinking Talent Strategy in the Age of Speed and AI
Screen Tests: How Hollywood’s AIs Predicted, Shaped, and Misunderstood the Future
From HAL to Her, Hollywood got AI metaphorically right and literally wrong. It arrived as invisible infrastructure we default to, and we're handing it our intimacy.
But Everything Important Happens When We’re Awake.
The next creative reset must be emotional, not just operational.
The Agency AI Solution You’re Waiting For Is Already Outdated.
What If We Stopped Treating AI Like a Plugin?
Explainer Mode Is Lazy Marketing
Why Telling Us How It Works Isn’t the Same as Telling Us Why It Matters
Meet the Synths: How Synthetic Audiences, Powered by AI, Help Us Navigate Change
In a world that’s obsessed with chasing the new, we often overlook those who are quietly, powerfully, becoming someone new.
Labor data shows Baby Boomers returning to work. Meaning drives them as much as money, and later life looks more like reinvention than retirement.
Artificial Intelligence Gave Us Answers. Applied Intelligence Tells Us Which Ones Matter.
In a world flooded with outputs, the thing that matters is knowing what’s worth acting on.
Mic Drop: Brands Don’t Just Need a Voice. They Need a Presence.
Why Podcasting Should Be on Every CMO’s Radar
Dents, Stickers, Stories: The Beauty of What We Carry
In a world obsessed with the new, Rimowa reminds me that the things and people with the most scars often carry the richest stories.
What Miles Davis, Sir John Hegarty, and the Epilogue Economy All Know About Creative Maturity
Miles Davis said it takes a long time to sound like yourself. Creative voice and confidence come with age, and people over 50 are the most underused leadership asset in the business.
IMF Report - Not a Burden, a Growth Market: Rethinking Aging Through the Lens of Opportunity
The IMF's World Economic Outlook makes the case that aging is a growth story. Life stage matters more than age, and the creative industry is missing it.
Transitions: What CMOs Are Missing About These Moments That Matter
Why Transitions Are One of the Most Overlooked Insights in Modern Strategy.
Loneliness Is Not a Personal Flaw. It’s a Design Flaw.
In the age of AI, automation, and aging, the most human need is still to feel seen.
After the We: The Person Left With a Life Built for Two
Widowhood is when "we" becomes "me" and, eventually, a new "us." Brands built for couples rarely know how to design for one.
The Mid-career Majority Is Already Using AI. You Just Didn’t Notice
A Generation report shows older workers are quietly teaching themselves AI. They're a pragmatic bridge generation, and hiring bias still looks straight past them.
Generation Jones, my own cohort, proves generational labels are lazy shortcuts. Marketers should target the transitions people are living through instead.
The Relevance Gap: What Happens When Your Team Is Too Young for Your Market
A team decades younger than its customers is guessing. Intergenerational teams are risk management and a positioning advantage.
The AI Ambition Gap: Older Workers Are Ready, but Left Waiting
Older workers want AI training and employers aren't offering it. That's an organizational blind spot, because experienced people bring the judgment that makes AI learning stick.
Prototyping at the Speed of Thought: Why I’m Exploring VIBE Coding
Ahead of a hackathon: vibe coding lets strategists and creatives turn an idea into a working prototype through conversation. It raises the resolution of the early idea.
The $96 Trillion Wake-Up Call: The Epilogue Economy in Focus
By 2050 the 50+ cohort will dominate global consumer spending, yet it gets a sliver of marketing attention. Brands and agencies are leaving the biggest market on the table.
“We Just Decided To”: On Rituals, Responsibility, and Rewatching The Newsroom
My annual rituals tell me what I value. This year one line from The Newsroom reminded me that standards are a decision anyone can simply make.
Signals in the Epilogue Economy #01
Retirement Is Overrated. Reinvention Is Inevitable.
More Poet than Peasant: A Reflection on Labels, Culture, and L’Oréal
L'Oréal turned me down as more Poet than Peasant. The label is hierarchical, out of step with the company's own values, and wrong about what leadership is.
Are We Human, or Are We Prompting?
The Killers asked the question first. Formulaic prompting turns us into performers for the machine, and the machine starts training us back.
Neal Moore beat me to it. Thoughts on that GenX Career Breakdown article.
Neal Moore answered the New York Times piece on Gen X careers before I could. A pointer to his response, and why I saw AI as my way through.
The Game We Think We’re Playing: AI, Creativity, and the Illusion of Control
“If you want to get the English interested in a war, you have to tell them it’s a game”. - Orwell
Why I’m Polite to Something That Doesn’t Care
I Say Thank You to AI. It’s Not Weird, It’s Strategic.
What Would I Think? Building a Cognitive Twin with AI
When AI moves from being a tool to becoming a container for how you think, you don’t just outsource tasks—you encode judgment.
The Power of Optimism and Generosity: A Personal Perspective
I stopped doing optimism and generosity by halves and started giving away my time and AI know-how freely. It turns out to be a very selfish virtue.
Read My Book. Or just buy it and put in on your shelf. Up to you.
To Question Is to Answer is out. Ten things it isn't, and the one thing it is: a field guide to asking AI better questions.
Wabi-Sabi in the Age of AI Perfection
AI's polished outputs are predictions, not truths. Japanese aesthetics and years behind a camera suggest the flaws are where the meaning gets made.
I Never Wanted to Get Political. But Here We Are.
WPP quietly dropped diversity from its annual report. Agencies and brands outside the US should decide where they stand on DEI before someone decides for them.
Navigating Well-being in the Epilogue Economy: The Mental Fitness Challenge
Reinventing yourself after 60 carries a psychological cost nobody budgets for. Ignoring the mental well-being of older professionals wastes the very experience organizations need.
“I’ll write a book,” I said. “How hard could that be?”
What writing my first book actually taught me, from punctuation rules to watching Grammarly sand my voice flat.
202410
The Epilogue Economy in 2025: Why Gen X's Milestone Will Reshape Business Strategy
Gen X turns 60 in 2025, digitally fluent and analog-trained. Organizations have about a year to build talent, knowledge and marketing strategies around them.
In my 1-1 sessions, I ask one question, and I am always surprised by the answer.
When did you last read your competitor's annual report? Almost nobody has, and generative AI now makes it easy to read a whole sector at once.
Leveraging the Wisdom of The Epilogue Economy for Sustainability and CSR
Older professionals have lived through technological, economic and climate shifts. That makes them valuable to sustainability work as talent, as consumers, and as role models.
My (continued) advice to those over 50. Strategies for Continuous Growth and Relevance
Fifty is the new mid-career. My playbook for staying relevant past it: structured learning, becoming an expert generalist, pruning your network, and protecting real conversation.
The Epilogue Economy: Unlocking the Power of Older Professionals to Connect with the Aging Consumer
The 50+ market is huge and underserved because the teams building for it are too young to understand it. Older professionals belong in the room as strategic partners.
On moving, anniversaries, and avoiding conflicts.
I moved apartments days before our wedding anniversary and ran it like a film production. It taught me the client lessons I thought I already knew.
The Epilogue Economy: How Harnessing the Wisdom of Older Professionals Can Transform Your Business
Mentorship, knowledge transfer and reverse mentoring turn experienced people into the source of an organization's resilience. Fractional work gives them new ways in.
The Epilogue Economy: Unveiling the Power and Potential of the Aging Workforce
Clients keep asking for an adult in the room. The Epilogue Economy has two sides, older consumers and older workers, and seasoned professionals supply the steadiness organizations lack.
What I’ve Learned at Sixty Years Old.
On the eve of turning 60, the lessons I'd hand anyone: on money, marriage, kindness, curiosity, listening, and starting a company at 59.
The Epilogue Economy: Tapping into the Wealth and Wisdom of the Aging Consumer
Epilogues in books and films set up the sequel. People over 50 are writing theirs, and most brands haven't noticed the market or the talent in it.