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 · Theme
Data & insight
What the numbers can and can’t tell you: signals, measurement, synthetic audiences, and turning data into a call worth making. 17 essays, newest first.
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.
Do You Believe in This Thing or Not?
Every company has the same AI. Very few have decided whether they believe in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
The next creative reset must be emotional, not just operational.
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.
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.
Signals in the Epilogue Economy #01
Retirement Is Overrated. Reinvention Is Inevitable.
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.