Spaceships, Flying Cars, and HAL
Hollywood predicted all three. Only one showed up.
The journal · Theme
Presence & the analog
Records, bookstores, long walks and rooms where something actually happened. 13 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My recent AI video moved like a shark, but sounded like a goldfish.
On presence, production, and the day I became a Foley artist.
The Leadership Gap No One Talks About
How COVID Broke the Agency Leadership Apprentice System, and What Agencies Should Do Now
Mic Drop: Brands Don’t Just Need a Voice. They Need a Presence.
Why Podcasting Should Be on Every CMO’s Radar
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.
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.