Anyone who has followed the rise of AI knows that a lot of its progress is being driven by people who are myopically focused on the financial returns, regardless of the actual human cost. But the rise of AI is a mere symptom of the larger problem plaguing Americans - one that will accelerate underlying fissures already actively harming society.

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We’re Already on Shaky Ground

This newsletter has waxed poetic on the extremely online state of the union before, and things have not gotten better since.

Our echo chambers have deeper echoes. Attention spans have gotten to the point where 6-second bumpers feel like 60-second TVCs. Platforms continue to sow division (and much worse) with impunity thanks to 90s-era deregulation. When our phones aren’t killing us in car crashes or turning us into hunchbacks that would make Quasimodo cringe, they’re rotting our brains. We’re not starting from an excellent position, dear reader.

And what Covid did to the social contract (spoiler alert: hastened its demise), AI will do to our malleable gray matter.

We’ve Been Sleeping Through the Alarm

I would love to say that the alarm has just started ringing and we need to answer its call. That would be as accurate as the financial projections for AI data centers.

The truth is, every new technology brings its detractors. But today’s reality is that AI is not a new technology - tech firms have been utilizing artificial intelligence through one form or another for decades. And we’ve already felt the deleterious effects of it.

There’s the recent case against Meta and YouTube, in which a jury found both platforms liable for their addictive nature - which is not accidental, but by design. Take the harm done to the plaintiff in the Los Angeles case and multiply it by the amount of young users on these platforms and you can understand why the personal injury approach for these cases has followed Big Tobacco - and why that approach is beginning to bear fruit.

But the recent cases are only the latest chapter in the saga of the internet melting our brains. The true impetus of this post was a seminal Atlantic article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” from the extremely quaint time of 2008.

The article is worth a full read, but for those who have already fallen victim to its conclusions, one particular passage stands out:

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

That deep thinking that pops when we’re engaged in offline reading is crucially missing - and its void spans generations. The brain is highly malleable regardless of stage of life. So while “digital natives” (an antiquated term Gen Xers and Boomers used to call us Millenials when we entered the workforce and chose IM over picking up the phone) may be more cooked than their older counterparts given their exposure to this technology during crucial brain development, just take a look at the cross-section of society on their phones during your commute to get a sense of how pervasive the Google era has become.

Gen AI Will Catalyze Our Turn Away From Critical Thinking

One of the consequences of Google making us stupid is buttressed by one of the least-talked-about crises facing America today - one out of five Americans is functionally illiterate. That means they can’t compare and contrast information, paraphrase, or make low-level inferences from text. And the US continues to slip in its literacy rates, which further entrenches a lack of critical thinking at a time when the country is gasping for it.

But that is the most extreme data point - the reality is that generative AI usage has already begun to mold our brains in much more subtle ways than can be picked up in an OECD report. I believe professor Ioan Roxin has put it quite succinctly (and in a quintessentially French way): “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that they [gen AI tools] are driving intellectual, emotional and moral mediocrity on a global scale.”

Coming from a foundation of functional illiteracy, Google reshaping information ingestion, and social media addiction, la course à la médiocrité will only quicken in the generative AI era. The overreliance on generative AI tools amongst knowledge workers (not to mention the wider American population) for everyday tasks will lead us down a path we’ve tread for ourselves, only faster. Akin to how Covid shredded what little was left of the social contract, gen AI will do the same to critical thinking (or, again, what’s left of it in a country that elects *points around at Congress and the executive branch* these imbeciles as our representatives.)

So What’s a GenAIer to Do?

American desk jockeys are in an unenviable position: AI is the future, and it needs to be utilized in workflows to drive efficiency and cost savings for our corporate overlords. At the same time, overreliance on the technology is not only a good way to become an NPC in Wall-E, but also a good way to become redundant once leadership figures out how to dupe you as an agent in Copilot.

To be clear, you need to be using this technology - to quote the inestimable Reese Bobby, if you’re not using AI at work, you’re last.

But you don’t need to cede all of your critical thinking to it. Client services (particularly advertising) are low-information environments; clients pay major holdco agencies a lot of money to steward their media dollars with fuzzy briefs and evolving business KPIs. Generative AI alone can only do so much in this kind of ecosystem.

While it can (and does!) drive efficiencies of various workstreams, its output is nowhere near client-ready in this newsletter’s experience. Whether you want to call it massaging, tweaking, or some other synonym, this author can tell when something has been Ctrl+C’d and Ctrl+V’d from ChatGPT and what hasn’t. And so can most clients.

If you want to remain relevant in the AI era, it’s not about dumping your thought process onto the models and calling it a day - it’s about getting the most out of the tech while still maintaining your critical thinking skills that drive the final outputs to the next level.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF America

I really really try to avoid politics on this newsletter. I’ve played that game - from working on campaigns, to padding Arianna Huffington’s pockets writing for free “exposure,” to owned channels, to obscure policy magazines where I focused on AFPAK-US relations. I was (and still am!) proud of my output, but between the consistently shitty foreign policy of administration after administration, combined with the apathy of most and the death threats of the few zealots who somehow stumbled on my pieces, it got old.

But even the most die-hard MAGA folks have to have some kind of reckoning with the state of our country. We are led by a demented old man who - at best - hung out and partied with pedophiles. Our federal law enforcement arm is led by a crypto scammer. We have a drunk at the helm of our DoD who is firing generals faster than he is changing his whiskey-stained underwear. We have federal “agents” on the streets in masks because even they know what they are doing is beyond shameful. All complete self-owns of a country that, despite its flaws, was making slow progress through the decades.

I keep coming back to a quote about the Roman Empire (I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire once a week, but have the social awareness to keep my mouth shut about it): “One day the bridge broke, and no one came to fix it.”

The fall of an empire (particularly one that - bafflingly - willingly cedes global hegemony for the enrichment of a few) is not marked by single events. Sure, you could point at things like ICE executions, or the Israeli-American War on Iran, or the general population’s shrugging at things like the Panama Papers and the Epstein files that laid bare the profane debauchery of our ruling classes, as singular events that foretold the sunset of the American global power structure.

But Confucious was right when he said, “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” The American empire is not one that can be undone in a single bound - we needed two Trump administrations with a feckless opposition party presidency in between to get to this path. That’s 12 years of descent via incremental damage - you can’t just pull the plane back up that quickly after something like that.

So next time something breaks - whether it’s the throwing out of the Constitutional power of Congress as the controller of the state purse and official war declaration, or cowardly law enforcement agents obscuring their identities as they murder civilians in the streets, or something as commercially critical to an advanced economy as quick and safe air travel - ask yourself if it’s actively being fixed. Or if the games being played in Washington and across state capitols are getting in the way of, you know, running the country.

Media of the Week

I’m not opposed to sci-fi (the Dune films were the first movies I watched on my new home theater setup), but one thing I tend to avoid is zombie and vampire movies. They just don’t quite do it for me and there’s so much quality content to watch with so little time that I tend not to gravitate towards them.

That said, Sinners broke that mold (at least for me.) After Michael B. Jordan’s Oscar I knew I was going to have to see it. Leo was great in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, and Jordan and Coogler have made movie magic in the past, so I figured, why not? I was not disappointed.

A lot of folks said Jordan won the Oscar simply because he played dual roles - I don’t think that’s the case. His portrayal of Smoke or Stack singularly was cool, but the subtlety that he was able to weave into and between the two characters was what was most impressive and what I imagine the Academy appreciated.

We mentioned Leo earlier - the Coogler/Jordan pairing is beginning to look like the generational run that Scorsese/DiCaprio had, and are must-sees. But another, more subtle collaborator is with Ludwig Goransson, the Swedish-American composer who has been crushing Hollywood scores for the past few decades. His work with Childish Gambino is what first introduced me to Ludwig, but when you dig into his collaborations, you realize if Ludwig’s on something, it’s likely worth checking out. Particularly if it’s with Ryan Coogler.

Quote of the Week

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” - Unattributed

Usage of AI In This Post

The only times AI was used for this post was for the Clavicular tweet translation and the photos (which Claude is much worse at than ChatGPT.)

This newsletter canceled his Chat Premium for Claude Premium, in the naive belief that Anthropic is somehow less harmful of a company than OpenAI. Time will likely prove me wrong.

See you next time!

And these idioms exist because it is human nature to try to avoid pain. It’s a protective measure undertaken primarily by our ego - it sees pain and runs the other way as a way to protect its owner. The problem with this - particularly in modern society and modern workplaces - is that this pain is actually a source of growth in many instances.

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Ego Defense

The theory of the ego acting as a protective body is rooted in Freuds’ work (both Sigmund and his daughter Anna.) Ego defense serves a purpose: there are legitimate things the ego needs to protect us from in terms of emotional pain. The id’s compulsive side needs to be managed, and the superego provides the kinds of guardrails that the ego must help to referee.

But so much of this exists in our subconsciouses that it creates internal conflict that we find difficult to pinpoint. This is where anxiety comes in - it results from the unresolved tension within our brains regarding a very particular set of triggers, or more generally, in our day-to-day. This can lead to the kind of pain avoidance that goes well beyond controlling our ids - it means we’re avoiding “clean pain” and instead replacing it with “dirty pain.”

No Risk, No Reward

We’ve explored the topic of how discomfort leads to growth. And how being uncomfortable all the time actually detracts from growth (shout out the Cynefin framework.) A similar axiom applies to pain avoidance.

This newsletter recently had a good example of this: the decision about whether or not to attend CES this year.

The easy (and least painful thing to do) would have been to decline. The factors against going to avoid pain were high: it’s the first full week of the year after the holidays, which not only tend to be stressful with elementary school children, but also smack in the middle of flu season. I’m already on a client that takes every ounce of my time and energy during the day (hence the decreased output here), and even though I could coordinate coverage, I’d still need to be present as a leader on the account. The stakes at CES would be high, given that my position has me in the lowest level of leadership, meaning events like this put me at the bottom of the totem pole in the hierarchy. Also, it’s a lot of socializing and networking - something an introvert like me has a limited capacity for, and Vegas would be a week-long commitment. I also hate crowds (ironic for a kid from the northeast who’s spent most of his adult life in Manhattan.)

In other words, my ego was asking me what the hell I was doing as I accepted the assignment. For weeks leading up to it I kept asking myself if I made a mistake. That was my ego trying to avoid the inevitable pain that awaited me once I deplaned at McCarran. But the pain I faced walking the convention halls, rubbing elbows with leaders who have a lot of control over my career, and being responsible for a highly visible webinar (check it out here!) was necessary for growth. Had I listened solely to my ego, I would have missed out on all of that.

Ego Defense Manifestation

The CES example is a pretty obvious and large one. Ego defense, however, is not always that obvious or high stakes.

Other ways it manifests is not putting your all into an assignment because presenting it or receiving feedback on it is something you’re subconsciously trying to avoid. By half-assing it and getting it off your list, you might think you’re minimizing the pain (as you’re spending less conscious time on it, where the pain source is obvious.) All this does is prolong the pain, as decreased productivity or lower-quality work product will lead to more pain down the line.

Another way employees tend to do this is with feedback. Often, we don’t seek it out, afraid of what we might hear. More damagingly, managers may avoid having difficult conversations with direct reports who need constructive, albeit negative, feedback. Avoiding the painful conversation may protect the manager in the short term, but it hurts both manager (with an underperforming employee) and employee (as they are unaware of where they need to focus and improve.)

The Facts of Life of the Ego

Ego defense is simply another reminder of how powerful our egos are, and how they need intentional oversight to ensure that their guidance and management between the id and the superego is being faithfully executed.

The ego is a powerful, but imperfect, ingrained part of our psyches, and we need to take the good with the bad. The problems a junior employee might experience with ego (more pain avoidance) evolve as one climbs up the corporate ladder (more hubris syndrome.) Throughout it all, this arbitrator between id and superego can be a very helpful tool if we can recognize it and shine some light into our opaque subconsciouses to ensure all three are playing fair - and guiding us in the right direction.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Patriots: Look, they were underdogs heading into the game. The Seahawks were absolutely the better team on paper, but the Pats have been beating better teams on paper all year. They’re a young team, and there will be plenty more deep playoff runs for this crew (if they can stay out of prison), but this one stung.

They were dominated from the first drive through the final seconds. The run game never materialized (Bad Bunny had more turf under his feet than the Pats RBs) and the play calling for Maye’s air game (especially late in the game when urgency was paramount) had many scratching their heads.

This newsletter was exposed to some WEEI right after the game, and rest assured the blame will certainly be rooted out and attributed to anyone and everyone involved in Sunday’s Santa Clara Catastrophe, but the two obvious gaps in the Pats’ game was the offensive line (or complete lack thereof) and Drake Maye’s shoulder.

At least the cold snap seems to be breaking this week, undoubtedly catalyzed by the self-righteous anger of a fan base that - despite being spoiled for the past two and a half decades - have not quite shaken the feeling of victimhood from the 90s (this newsletter included.)

Media of the Week: There was a lot of chatter about Bad Bunny leading up to the Super Bowl. From a marketing perspective, it makes a lot of sense - for a sport that is looking to expand globally for that all-encompassing master known as growth, having a Spanish-speaking halftime performer makes a lot of sense (and the numbers certainly back that up.) And you could do a lot worse than Benito, who is having a moment culturally in the US, even if many of his detractors (including NFL players themselves) have a tough time understanding Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States.

But the culture wars lost as much as Bad Bunny won, trotting out a veritable who’s who of Latino actors dancing in front of a casita and two prominent features in Lady Gaga and fellow boricua Ricky Martin, ending the performance on an undeniable unity message that our so-called leaders in Washington have a tough time mustering.

Do you need to speak Spanish to enjoy this halftime show? No - the thing about performances and music is that sometimes it can be just vibes. Good performers (and Bad Bunny certainly falls into this category) are able to portray their art and emotions regardless of the tongue being used.

The final piece this newsletter appreciated about the show was that Bad Bunny was putting people on - many small businesses and local groups were featured throughout the performance. We might need to change the name of a certain post on this newsletter to Envía el Ascensor de Vuelta Hacia Abajo.

Quote of the Week: “The personal ego already has a strong element of dysfunction, but the collective ego is, frequently, even more dysfunctional, to the point of absolute insanity.” - Eckhart Tolle

AI Usage in This Post

The only AI used for this post was ChatGPT (don’t worry, I unsubscribed from the premium version) to help distill Anna Freud’s seminal Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense and also as a quick refresher on the id, ego, and superego and their intertwined relationship.

See you next time!

You can find some of those takes here. We’ll also be doing a webinar towards the end of January of a fuller recap of the entire show (not just where our collective consciousnesses are involved.) But this being my first CES, I wanted to pass along a few tips I was given that were invaluable, and some I’d highlight having gone from rookie to vet.

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First, Las Vegas Isn’t Real

The city of Las Vegas itself is not real life - it’s a testament to man’s greed and hubris. Every aspect of it is meant to extract as much money out of a consumer as possible, which the city does quite effectively. Remember - the house always wins.

The sheer scale of it is almost impossible to truly comprehend. Five of the world’s top ten largest hotels are in Vegas (14 of the top 25 reside in the city and on The Strip.) You can go days without going outside, thanks to a system of luxury malls that act as hallways between the behemoth lodgings.

All of this in a desert that can’t sustainably support its current rate of growth (and potentially its current population.) But like late-stage capitalism, growth at all costs must continue in the Las Vegas Valley. And walking through the smoke-filled casinos feels like a capitalist fever dream (because it is.)

Getting Around

Bring some comfortable shoes if you’re going to CES, as your step count will see a significant increase over your normal day (even for those New Yorkers accustomed to hoofing it everywhere.)

That scale we talked about? It is acutely felt in trying to get from one end of a hotel to another (typically a 5-10 minute walk.) And then getting between hotels via those malls and indoor walkways takes even longer. And unless you’re keen on paying a taxi to sit in traffic for about the same time as it will take to get a couple of hotels down, it’s not worth hopping in a car.

There are trams and public transit (and - something so stupid it could only be concocted in Vegas - The Loop), but their use cases are extremely small. You need to be at the right place at the right time (and going to only a handful of hotels) for these options to make sense. And the buses suffer the same surface traffic problems as taxis (as well as stopping a lot more often.)

There are CES shuttles, and they are invaluable when it comes to getting from floor to floor. This is obviously not their first rodeo, and the logistics of moving as many people as they do from point A to point B has been, dare I say, as perfected as possible from an efficiency standpoint.

The Service is Impeccable, But You Pay For It

One thing you are going to notice in Vegas is that the service - from housekeeping staff to casino floor workers to servers in restaurants and bars - is a noticeably better than the rest of the country (outside of extreme luxury areas.)

The Vegas economy is dependent on services to survive, which is a big part of this. Another aspect is that most of the workers you interact with are unionized, earn a living wage, and have benefits. It is amazing what not worrying about where your next meal is coming from will do for an employee’s productivity and attitude at work.

The flip side of this? Everything so expensive in Vegas (but don’t necessarily blame the unions by themselves.) And while casino floors are littered with workers pushing that particular casino’s app with enticing offers of free money to bet, there is no free lunch in capitalism or in Vegas. So much so that you might be hard-pressed to find something as simple as a Kuerig machine in your hotel room - lest you use it as opposed to buying a $6 drip coffee after waiting in a 15-minute line (if you’re lucky) from a cafe that happens to be owned by the hotel.

Drink Water - A Lot of It

There are plenty of ways to stay hydrated, particularly if you find yourself at a table game or the sports book for a decent amount of time. But it’s important to follow that all-time Taffer Tip and make sure you’re drinking water in between these bouts of hydrating activities.

This isn’t just to avoid a hangover (though that’s helpful) - while you may be surrounded by fountains and fake canals, Vegas is smack in the middle of a desert. And that dry air you’re used to after a long flight and staying in a hotel is magnified by being in a desert valley.

So bring your Stanley (or pay exorbitant prices for bottled water if tap isn’t your thing) and keep it topped up. Also throw some chap stick and moisturizer in your bag. Vegas is not only after your wallet - they also want your moisture.

Be Flexible

One benefit of CES planning is that the booths are mapped out and you can look up the exhibitors before you go. This helps you plan your days out and even the routes you want to take on the floor. And you should make these plans - showing up to CES without one is more chaotic than CES itself.

But leave room for unstructured exploration. Take time to wander down aisles or through parts of the floor you might not have gone to otherwise. Hit up a panel that might seem interesting, even it it’s not super tangential to your work. These moments of serendipity - even if you have to force yourself into them - could lead to an epiphany. At the least they will open up your perspective a bit.

Have Fun

Part of the fun of Vegas is that it’s not based in reality, and CES just adds an extra layer of un-reality to it. The insane amount of money flowing via sponsored happy hours, hospitality suites, and meals rivals only the amount of money being wagered all day every day on casino floors across the city and the Strip (the latter of which is technically not part of Las Vegas, better to consolidate power amongst casino owners and garner lower taxes.)

With all of that money floating around, it’s easy to have some fun. After a long day of walking the floor and checking out the latest technological wares, a drink or three and a rare steak, followed by putting a couple bucks on black and/or your favorite team, is a nice way to unwind. But don’t overdo it - while Vegas isn’t exactly a locale that begs moderation, it’s best to mind your Ps and Qs at CES. It’s still work, at the end of the day.

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Grab Bag Section

WTF In-Room Coffee: I mentioned this in the post, but a baffling part of my stay at a luxury hotel on the strip was the lack of a coffee machine in the room. I had early calls every morning and I would have very much appreciated a coffee in my sweatpants off-camera. Instead, I had to get up early enough to get dressed and look presentable (Vegas is full of industry people during CES), head to a cafe, and hustle back to my room with a cup of expensive coffee in order to function for my meeting.

I thought maybe it was just me or my hotel, but asking around it turns out that others up and down Las Vegas Boulevard were suffering the same fate. And this wasn’t our CFOs colluding and having the hotels pull out anything that cost money in the room like we were Denzel Washington in Flight and couldn’t be trusted with in-room amenities. Perusing some local news outlets, I actually found a reference to coffee makers being removed and needing to buy overpriced coffee.

Blackstone, which owns the hotel I stayed at last week, makes over $2 billion a year in net income. Put the Kuerigs back in the room.

Media of the Week: For 2026, I want to move outside of just music. We’ll still have albums of the week, but I’ve been able to reclaim a little bit of time lately to get back into movies and books - something I had been slacking on during a very busy stretch the past eight months or so.

With that said, I was able to watch a movie on the way to Vegas that has stuck with me the past week. War Pony follows the lives of two kids living on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where their lives are ruled by poverty and the ways they try to escape it, even temporarily. It’s a heartbreaking look at life on a reservation and how poverty in general grinds up countless people in its wake.

It was a debut feature film from Presley heir Riley Keoegh and Gina Gammell, winning the coveted Camera D’Or at 2022’s Cannes Film Festival. Most of the actors and writers on the movie haven’t done much since, which is surprising given how well it does on the old Tomatometer.

You don’t have to be stuck on a plane to watch this movie, but don’t expect to leave it feeling all warm and fuzzy.

Quote of the Week: “Hedging is for gardeners.” - Unattributed

Use of AI in This Post

This might be the first post on the newsletter that has zero AI usage - the pictures are mine and the research was done the old-fashioned way. A nice way to start 2026, but let’s not get used to it.

See you at the next one!

The reality looks much different - last-minute flight bookings leaving you in the middle seat in the back of the plane after having to gate check your bag. Byzantine layouts of airports in unfamiliar cities leave you walking for what feels like miles before getting into an Uber whose roadworthiness leaves a bit to be desired (does this state require annual inspections?) A hotel that gives you a great view of a parking lot or - if you’re lucky - the HVAC units of a building next door, because that’s the only place that satisfies your company’s per diem.

It’s business travel in 2025, and it’s not supposed to be glamorous.

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Hit the Road, Jack

If you’re in client services and your client is not in your immediate metropolitan area, you will likely be called upon for some quality face time. This could be for a quarterly business report, strategic planning sessions, or just for some regular catch-ups. In any event, it’s time to hit the road.

Most large corporations have done their very best to infuse the travel booking process with more bureaucracy than your local DMV. You’ll put in your dates and cities and get back a list of flights and hotel options that barely resemble reality. Delta told you there were seven flights out the morning you need to leave? Your company’s portal shows two, one of which doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else on the open web.

And the hotel options? They’re there - but whoever came up with the per diem amounts did so in the ‘80s and is unfamiliar with the relatively little-known economic theory of inflation. Staying in New York City? Good luck finding a safe, clean hotel in a decent neighborhood on the island of Manhattan for under $300.

And those fancy dinners? If you’re with clients, your company will spare relatively little expense to make sure they’re well-fed and entertained. Dining solo or with colleagues? Hope you like Waffle House or the McValue Menu (there’s a company that understands inflation for those of us old enough to remember the vaunted Dollar Menu.)

If You Liked the Booking System, You’re Going to Love the Expense Portal

There are very legitimate reasons that you have to pay a fee to introduce an extra layer of a web search for travel: the company needs to track business expenses and ensure no one is abusing the system. Corporations can write off business travel for tax purposes, and it’s pretty important that they do it accurately to avoid this little thing called tax fraud.

But like a lot of well-intentioned business initiatives, it has run amok. When I first started traveling, we were required to show a scan of our physical boarding passes to show we actually traveled. I have tried to work out how one would be able to defraud the company after booking through the portal and somehow not showing up to the client and pocketing the money. I truly don’t get it, and if any readers in fraud departments know how this scheme would theoretically work, I would love to understand (for research purposes only, of course.)

With the advent of travel apps, the PDFs of crumpled up boarding passes is over (though we had some interesting overlap of screenshotting app-based boarding passes), but that doesn’t mean that innovation in the onerous expense reports realm has stopped. I’ve personally seen shops go from “Credit card receipts are fine,” to “I’m going to need the CC receipt, the itemized receipt, and any other artifacts that were created in the transaction.” Good luck traveling in Europe, where it’s Apple Pay or GTFO (if it’s £7 and change, just assume it was a pint Mr. CFO, because I was scared to ask the publican for a paper receipt.)

Another frustrating part of the expense report process is that unless you’re on a corporate credit card, you are floating your company an interest-free loan until you get paid back. While in theory you could point to the credit card points you get as interest, it’s nowhere near the prime rate so you are kind of getting hosed.

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Start Stretching Now, Because You Need to Be Flexible

Anyone working in the professional services industry today knows that calendars are an unmitigated disaster. Meeting culture is entirely out of control and one shift of a 30-minute meeting can ruin an entire day. The stakes are higher when hours-long flights and transportation is involved.

When booking personal trips, we often do them weeks or months in advance, pick the prime seats we’d like the on the plane, and research the hell out of local things to do and how to get to and from various places. Business travelers typically do not have that luxury.

You’re lucky if you get a couple of weeks out. I’ve set up our booking system to ask for aisle seats, but if you book late (or change the morning of because a certain airline keeps having inexplicable problems with their metal) you likely are going to make some friends sitting in the middle seat. Which also makes it difficult to get work done on your computer, both from a space perspective, but also a privacy one (you never know who you’re sitting next to.) This point becomes moot if another certain airline can’t get their WiFi working in 2025.

I’m not bitter.

It’s Not All Bad

Don’t take this rant post as saying business travel is all miserable - I’ve seen parts of the country and the world I wouldn’t necessarily have if I were picking and choosing. Travel expands our minds and perspectives, and getting outside of your regular day-to-day, even if it’s being a desk jockey somewhere else, still counts.

And there are tips and tricks to making it more bearable. Some may seem obvious, others may be relatively unique from a person whose pedantry and desire for control are unrivaled amongst many of his peers. In either event, here are TDNBW’s recos for business travel (Amazon links kick back to the newsletter):

Stay Loyal

If you know you’re going to be traveling at a decent cadence for the next year or so, it makes sense to consolidate across a single hotel group or a single airline to see if you can hit status and make flying or staying at a hotel a little less miserable. Check to see if your company has preferred airlines or hotel partners (most do) and try to find the best options for them if you know you’ll be in one city for the year.

It would be beneficial to understand which airline has a hub in the city you’re going to. If your flight ends up getting delayed (and it will), the airlines that operate a hub in that city will have many more options (and thus capacity) to get stranded travelers out. Also, ask people who have traveled there before their preferences - there’s likely plenty of institutional knowledge within the company, so use it to your advantage.

Keep It Private

This is one of the biggest unforced errors I see when in transit or traveling for work: privacy screens. I have seen inside information I should definitely not be privy to on the Metro North and on various flights because it’s simply out in the open on computers and phones. Loose lips sink ships; tighten up your kisser with some privacy screens.

I use this one for my phone, and this one for my computer. So far I’ve not been called into HR for leaking crucial info.

Stay Energized

Staring at your phone as you try to get an Uber after a multi-hour flight into an airport you don’t really know can be stressful enough. Doing it on 5% battery is like playing Russian Roulette. Grab a battery backup to avoid getting stranded with no phone. I find the batteries that have cords built into them a little more convenient and less likely to be utterly useless as a fully charged battery with no or the wrong cord. This is Wirecutter’s reco.

Duplicate Your Home Office

If you’re traveling a lot, you’re not going to want to pack up your charging cords and wireless mouse every time you need to hop on a plane or train to a client. This newsletter keeps a bag of cords, battery backup, and a wireless mouse in his backpack so I don’t have to think twice about having a mini home office at a client’s or at a hotel.

It may not seem like a big deal, but I actually travel with two charging cords: one three-foot one and one ten-foot one. You dont want to sit on an airplane with extra cord everywhere as you get some juice from the on-board outlets. But you also don’t want to get to the hotel to find one outlet in the most inconvenient place in the whole room for working. Is this overkill? Maybe, but I also haven’t had to sit next to an outlet on a dirty hotel carpet to get work done on a laptop with low battery.

The pièce de résistance in my travel home office arsenal is my wireless mouse. I was once overseas on a trip where I got last-minute client feedback that required a ton of PowerPoint formatting. I only had the trackpad on my laptop, and my jet-lagged brain struggled to get the formatting right in the time I wanted.

After that fun experience, I splurged and bought a travel mouse that can go across essentially any surface, because you never know what the airport bar or the hotel desk is going to be made out of. I’ve had this one for years and have yet to find a surface it can’t accurately read, so I can line up the logos in my PowerPoint just right.

Stay Active

Sitting at an airport and then on an airplane can be a maddening experience for your body. I always find myself not only somewhat tight and sore from long flights, but also with a lot of pent-up energy. If I’m staying somewhere longer than one night, I tend to pack shoes and workout clothes to hit the gym either the night I check in or the next morning before heading to the office.

If you’re on a long-haul flight and expected to get trucked by jet lag, exercise is even more critical. But in order to work out at your hotel, you need to book a hotel with a serviceable gym. I’ve found hotelgyms.com to be a decent resource - it’s crowd-sourced reviews and pictures from actual travelers so you can go beyond the fish-eye lens used by the property and understand if the gym will be usable when you get there or is just window dressing for the review sites.

So Much More

This post could go on for days, but this newsletter also assumes you already have things like luggage, a solid backpack, noise-canceling headphones, and any other gadget that helps with the daily commute.

Bring It Home

Business travel - like most travel - gets a little worse every year. But with some good planning and a couple of key practices to make the most of it, it doesn’t have to be utterly miserable. It might even be interesting. But there will be times it sucks and it’s important in those moments to just go with the flow, plug your phone into your battery, and watch another episode of whatever your comfort show is, without the prying eyes of your fellow stranded travelers.

Grab Bag Section

WTF Netflix: Netflix announced it will be purchasing Warner Bros streaming service, which includes HBO Max, in a megadeal that will reshape Hollywood. There are a lot of arguments against this, not the least of which is that this kind of consolidation will lessen the output of the two major content creators. This newsletter leans towards HBO Max’s original content moreso than Netflix, so we weep a bit for that alone.

But the major alarm bells going off here at TDNBW are those related to the classics. Even before this anticompetitive deal was announced, concern about Netflix’s ability to preserve old Hollywood were rife and justified. One of HBO Max’s best offerings was the TCM section. Old Hollywood (and cult classics from more recent decades) thrived here, and it was hard to go wrong. I was able to discover classics like Mutiny on the Bounty as well as newer films like The Outsiders. It’s exactly these kinds of films that will suffer in a consolidated, algorithm-driven environment (despite being distributed by WB, the latter is not available on streaming.)

See, Netflix doesn’t want to pay for residuals when it can just pump out owned content that does better in the algorithm and sits better with audiences who have trouble keeping up with proper dialogue while on their second screen for an entire movie.

But Matt, you ignorant slut, you might be saying - why should everyone be subject to your old ass tastes in movies, which aren’t as profitable anymore because of market dynamics? And this is the rub: they shouldn’t, but people like me who enjoy classics and movies made before the Nixon administration should have the option to watch them and not get drowned out by K-Pop Demon Hunters. HBO Max’s TCM section was a little slice of old Hollywood heaven that many fear will disappear so that Ted Sarandos - whose 2024 $62mm salary was over two-thirds paid out in stock - can pocket more money.

The solution? In regular times I’d say call your representative, but Sarandos is no dummy and has already cozied up to everyone’s favorite neofascist in chief. One way around this is an idea I got from a friend of the newsletter (we do not out people who subscribe as to protect the reputations of the innocent.) He said it’s time to start buying physical media again, and I couldn’t agree more. This newsletter already owns a DVD player for movies that never seemed to be on streaming (seriously, when’s the last time What About Bob? popped up in the “For You” section of any service?) That will come in handy as I start a strategic classic movie reserve in my basement. Ben Mankiewicz is invited over anytime, as long as he introduces the movies for us.

Album of the Week: In honor of the new documentary coming out on (sigh) HBO Max, I dove into the Counting Crows debut album August and Everything After.

Obviously, you can’t talk about this album without talking about the standout track “Mr. Jones.” It’s what catapulted the band to fame and actually ended up being both a gift and a curse for lead singer Adam Duritz, who wrote the song about a night out with him and Marty Jones, a bassist from his first band The Himalayans, and how they strived to be famous.

The track did make Durtiz famous, but at a cost. He suffered mental breakdowns from the fame, which exacerbated the dissociative disorders that he had before the limelight. If anything feels like unreality, being famous in America has to be up there.

Another irony of the track is that it was an extremely difficult one to make. Legendary producer T Bone Burnett had to swap out drummers to get the percussion right, and it took Duritz over 100 takes to finally nail the vocals. Worth it, certainly, but no overnight success.

But the album didn’t only do well because of “Mr. Jones.” The intro of “Round Here,” which actually pre-dates the Counting Crows and is from Duritz’s days with The Himalayans, is a nice and easy way into the album (The Himalayan’s version is much more bass-heavy and faster.) “Omaha” as the second in a 1-2-3 punch with “Mr. Jones” at the end is one hell of a way to start an album.

Take a trip back in time to the early 90s and give The Counting Crows debut album a spin, no expense report or PDF of a boarding pass required.

Quote of the Week: “You know what capitalism is? Getting fucked!” - Tony Montana, Scarface (1983)

AI Usage in This Post

Other than the images in this post (and I have to hand it to ChatGPT on the Hopper-inspired one), this post is AI-free.

But there’s also a bubble when it comes to AI. Money has been pouring into the technology and the infrastructure behind it faster than a disgraced politician’s attempt to kill more grandmas in NYC. AI and the infrastructure that enables it certainly requires a lot of capital, but the returns on said capital have not materialized, and there is no game plan to recoup that money as of yet. However, if anyone who has borrowed money is aware, lenders typically want their money back - and then some. Without a black swan event that suddenly makes AI profitable within existing bounds, it is very likely that the existing AI bubble will burst.

Money Is Just the Latest Concern

We’ve looked at concerns regarding AI before on the newsletter. The primary one we have highlighted is the environmental impact of the technology. It’s hard to understate the effect the infrastructure required to utilize AI will have on our power grid and water sources.

The latest research has a potential roadmap to lower emissions and water usage, but in the real world, net-zero sustainability for the technology is very likely out of reach. And the things that can be done to reduce emissions, like placing data centers in places where water is plentiful and environmental factors make it easier to cool them, have already been preempted by massive data centers already being built in places like Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.

And there is a commonality here with the financial aspect of the bubble we are in: critics of the “Hey, don’t further destroy our environment for this” movement say that AI will figure out a way to be more sustainable on its own. This newsletter does not subscribe to the “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,” type of scenario planning for environmental mitigation, and it certainly does not subscribe to it for AI financing.

How Will Lenders Recoup Their Money?

Lenders are tripping over themselves to provide debt for the construction of AI data centers. And we’re not talking a billion here or a billion there. We’re starting our numbers with a T now.

Morgan Stanley believes that AI-related spending will reach $3 trillion by 2028. The revenues generated by AI software? They’re a bit further back at $1.1 trillion. These are not small amounts of money - we are talking about over 5% of the entire US annual GDP in the gap between expenditure and revenue.

Then there’s the problem of circularity. OpenAI has been signing deals with chipmakers in which the chipmaker gives them money and then OpenAI uses this money to ostensibly buy that firm’s chips. The mere existence of circular deals isn’t new, nor is it a concern by itself. What’s concerning is the scale of them.

Circular deals like this aren’t without precedent, even at this scale. But the most recent and relevant example is not a fond one. In the dot-com boom and bust at the dawn of the millennium, telcos raced to lay fiber optic cable and other infrastructure to take advantage of this newfangled thing called the world wide web (thanks Al Gore.) The information superhighway needed, well, a highway of cables to be able to connect everybody. Telecom companies would then lend or lease their equipment to internet service providers at no cost to get them to use their equipment - essentially giving them capital to spend back with their own company.

The scale was massive, as was the crash that followed. When private lending runs out and interest rates increase (two distinct possibilities in the existing macroeconomic environment, with inflation rearing its ugly head again, which is refocusing attention on the ongoing affordability crisis in the States), these circular deals fall apart quite quickly.

And it won’t be the private lenders and tech companies holding the bag by themselves. The bond issuances hitting the larger market mean that consumer-facing funds like Invesco and BlackRock, as well as state pension plans from places like PA and NY, are exposed. This newsletter keeps coming back to scale: this is too much money for the pain to be isolated simply to those causing it.

We All Know What the Backstop Is

Matt, you ignorant slut, you might be saying, with this much money at stake and so much money to be made, companies like OpenAI will certainly be good stewards of it and ensure that they are successful - they’ve learned from 2008!

The final part of that sentence is true, given OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar’s words about financing chips for companies like hers and how the industry needs a federal guarantee for financing of chips:

OpenAI rushed to do damage control, but Friar’s words are quite clear and not taken out of context. They are even clarified by the moderator! Friar’s point was not “muddied,” as she contended, by the use of the word “backstop,” but rather extremely coherent. The fact that Sam Altman is getting defensive when asked about how OpenAI will be funding these investments does not exactly engender confidence, either.

But OpenAI’s approach to wild spending as a massive corporation in America, assuming that taxpayer monies can bail them out if they fail, isn’t exactly a crazy idea. While we all remember TARP in 2008, the history of America is one steeped in public funds bailing out private business.

We can have a debate about the efficacy and structure of these bailouts (this newsletter, for one, feels that industries like commercial aviation are so critical to America’s economic hegemony that it should be protected in some way from black swan events), but the fact remains that thinking like Friar’s absolutely leads to great moral hazard in the way of financing and growth of AI infrastructure. And given the history of bailouts in this country (despite Paul Volcker’s commandment “Thou shall not gamble with the public’s money,”) it would not be a stretch to believe that Friar’s approach to federal backstops is not unique in this arena.

So AI is Going to Crash and Go Away?

Hardly. As we’ve said ad nauseam on this newsletter and LinkedIn, artificial intelligence is not only here to stay, but has been here for decades behind the scenes. But the current scaling of investment in the technology and its infrastructure is as unsustainable as AI’s environmental impact.

We talked about the circular financing aspect of the dot-com bubble with telcos and how it contributed to a large crash in 2000 and 2001. The parallels don’t stop with this unique financing approach, however. Because even though the dot-com bubble wasn’t made to last, the technology underlying it was. The internet was a nascent tool for consumers, and it has utterly transformed the way we live and work. The dot-com bubble burst didn’t stop that.

And all of those fiber optic cables that were laid as “dark fiber” in anticipation of a connected world? They’re massively useful today and, in a twist of irony only an incredible novelist could dream up, actually power the connectivity of some massive data centers today. The belief that we needed this infrastructure was correct - the capitalistic approach to do it at an ungodly speed and the pressure for near-term returns meant it was done at a scale that required a bit of a reset via the dot-com boom and bust.

And AI is looking very similar, from the vantage of this newsletter. These data centers will be useful, but the idea that we need them at the speed and scale requiring a handful of companies and private debt creators to pour trillions of dollars into them in a matter of years (with a potential federal backstop fueling too much speculation) is where the unacceptable risk lies. Extremely fundamental questions like “How are we going to power these data centers?” and “Who on the consumer side is going to pay enough money at a price point required for these companies to stay solvent?” remain unanswered, but the money continues to flow.

This isn’t the prediction post for this year, but some amateur tasseography tells us that the AI space is crowded, it’s expensive at large scale, it’s unproven in terms of efficiency gains promised, and it's propped up with a ton of debt with no clear plan of repayment. That is an excellent recipe for a bubble, and it is this newsletter’s opinion that we are in one.

What is likely is that the bubble will burst in the next few years (that’s what bubbles do.) The industry will need to consolidate, pick up the pieces from the bankruptcy and job losses, and - like a Phoenix rising from Arizona - a few surviving players will reap the benefits of a post-bubble AI world.

Long term, this will be a stumbling block in the story of artificial intelligence’s impact on humanity. In the short term, however, there’s potential for a bumpy ride as the amount of money at stake - and the complexity with which it is being deployed - raises the temperature without a cooling mechanism in place to keep things in control.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Columbia: My wife and I met at Columbia as doe-eyed undergrads and this past weekend we had a chance to walk by campus on the way to a housewarming party in the neighborhood. Of course, we couldn’t walk through campus because the university has illegally closed College Walk to the public and those without valid university IDs. But that is a matter for another day.

What struck my wife and I was the turnover of stores, but this is not unique when you only visit a neighborhood every five years or so. What was particularly jarring was that the new storefronts were high-end shops and restaurants that I and many of my friends would never have been able to afford when we were attending the school.

An affordable pizza shop replaced by Lululemon. A half-decent Chinese restaurant replaced by Shake Shake. A dive bar that was lenient on IDs replaced by Sweetgreen. I would ask “Who could possibly afford this?” but the sad reality is that private university is becoming so expensive that the only people who can afford to attend are either the moneyed classes, or those with cash on hand because they’re mired in debt.

The commercial offerings of Broadway and 116th weren’t heralding in a new era of increasingly wealthy undergrads - they were catching up to demographic shifts. We talked about the AI bubble in this post, but another one to keep an eye on is the private university system.

Album of the Week: If you don’t yet have a crush on Olivia Dean, just give it time. This fall she released her second studio album The Art of Loving and has had what feels like a meteoric rise on the global stage. The reality is she has been well-known in the UK for a minute and she is claiming a well-earned spot in the cultural zeitgeist.

There are very few skips on this album, and the lyrics read like a diary into Dean’s life - both the ups and the downs. They’re raw and emtional, and Dean herself approached this album as one of vulnerability. The product is excellent because of it.

Standout track “Man I Need” is one you could leave on repeat for a week and still not get sick of it. Her performance of it on SNL showcases Dean’s charm - in many reviews of the album you will find the word “playful,” and it is spot on. Despite this being a sophomore album, Dean has the presence of someone simply having fun - the leg kicks, the hair flips. She’s performing art, not a commercial song - this is not something every artist can say.

Do yourself a favor and give Dean a spin (or, if you must, a smart speaker stream) as you prep the turkey this week and show a little gratitude that there’s still fresh art to enjoy that is yet to be sullied by the commercial music industry.

Quote of the Week: “One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to think that ‘overpriced’ and ‘going down tomorrow’ are synonymous. Markets that are overpriced often keep going.” - Howard Marks

AI Usage in This Post

There was a decent amount of AI usage in this post. One of the main ones was using ChatGPT’s deep research to give me a quick rundown of the circular financing between OpenAI and Nvidia (the output can be found here.) I also made good use of the new Gemini tool in Chrome to summarize some articles for me.

See you next post!

The problems with the billable hour are numerous: it incentivizes the wrong things, it’s opaque and too easily allows for fraud, it pays for time and not products. A concept that has been tolerated - perhaps a bit longer than it should have - will finally meet its demise with the rise of artificial intelligence.

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How Did We Get Here?

The billable hour was not the first choice of the services industry. It has its roots in law, where their infamous six-minute increments to denote one-tenth of an hour drives a level of pedantry that even this newsletter finds neurotic.

The earliest instance of someone tracking their time comes from some nerd from Harvard named Reginald Heber Smith, who began using timesheets in the Roaring 20s, tracking his work down to the tenth of the hour (or every six minutes.) This kind of practice did not become de rigour, however, until a landmark Supreme Court case titled Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar in 1975.

It all started when a young couple went out searching for a home in Virginia to call their own. As part of that process, a title examination had to be done and a licensed attorney had to do it. In a bid to increase attorneys’ income, state bar associations had put out lists of “suggested” price minimums for various items of work. The couple tried to shop around to find a lower price, but could not find a single lawyer to go below the stated price minimum.

This newsletter puts “suggested” in quotes above because in reality, the suggestion was followed up with disciplinary action by the various bar associations for those plucky attorneys willing to undercut their chondrichthyes brethren. In essence, these bar associations were acting as cartels in order to keep attorney fees (and thus their members’ income) high.

The modern-day advertising equivalent would be a group like the 4As or ANA setting price minimums for project work or AORs based on media spend, and then enforcing it by punishing those agencies willing to compete on price. This would put the agencies in quite the bind, as now a key lever of new business wins - slashing their commercials - would be gone and they would have to compete on service alone.

Goldfarb established a few things, perhaps most importantly that service fees paid to lawyers were considered interstate commerce. While this may seem obvious, one of the many arguments put forth for these services falling outside of interstate commerce (and thus outside of the Sherman Act’s nefarious antitrust mandate) was that “competition is inconsistent with the practice of a profession because enhancing profit is not the goal of professional activities; the goal is to provide services necessary to the community. [emphasis mine]” It is not clear from the court record if this was argued with a straight face.

In any event, the Goldfarbs - in addition to a new house in Fairfax County - secured a win in the highest court of the land. This type of prima facie price fixing was clearly illegal and the court told state bars to knock it off. It didn’t address, however, keeping attorneys fees high even without the mechanism of a cartel willing to (metaphorically) bust a few heads to keep everyone in line. The billable hour fit the bill.

But We Do FTEs - Not Billable Hours!

But Matt you ignorant slut - you might say - this is about lawyers, and we’re not even using billable hours anymore you dinosaur. We’re on an FTE model!

One of the refrains that could be used to push against billable hour attacks is that we don’t even do billable hours anymore as ad agencies - most of our engagements use an FTE model, where we charge per person and - except for some rare cases - don’t send billable hours for remuneration to clients.

It’s true our scoping exercises are done by the person, but the underlying assumption of those people is that they will be working 40 hours per week (or some similar equivalent based on PTO, training, and house billing.) When you’re putting 100% of an FTE on a scope, you’re putting a certain number of hours per annum there, not an actual person.

Out of the gate this drives a skewed incentive: overscope people and you can make more money and goose your margins. Do it on multiple accounts and watch the multipliers grow. Incentivized burnout begins before a name is even attached to an FTE. But that’s beside the point.

On the client side the goal is to not get overscoped, but to drive the most product out of the least amount of FTEs (and thus the least amount of hours.) This is accomplished both during scoping - when concessions are asked (or, more often, demanded) - and after the scope is signed, by asking for more work than originally discussed and hoping the agency puts it into their original hours instead of asking for more. Scope creep looks to drive as much productivity out of each hour as possible.

These things tend to be less pernicious than it may sound - it’s a game, and unless the agency is an absolute sweatshop or the client is utterly miserable (not out of the realm of possibilities, but relatively rare), the game is played with unwritten rules and strong, collaborative relationships with clients are not only possible but numerous in the ad agency world.

So Just Get Rid of the Billable Hour

Some law firms have moved away from this - the Wachtell model is well-known within the law industry and drives high fees, but also high profits, for one of the top-tier law firms in the world. But this is a rarity - Wachtell can run this kind of model because it is so elite within its industry. The majority of law firms cannot, because they are not Wachtell.

And it’s not a law firm axiom - every industry has a leader, and then everyone else. And in the cut-throat world of the advertising services industry, being unapologetically expensive - even if you can demonstrably bring the requisite value - isn’t a winning game plan. There is no forced scarcity in the ad agency world, and late-stage capitalism means commercials have to play an outsized role in awarding business.

So we remain on an FTE model, which is based on hours per annum, which correlate to deliverables and expected levels of service, which (if you have a good commercials person) translate well into value for the client. The problem is that AI is coming for this entire model in a couple of ways.

Should AI Make Agency Fees Cheaper?

Major holdcos are already seeing clients ask for discounts because of AI. The argument becomes “You’re able to do more with less, why should I be paying the same price?”

This newsletter has covered why AI should actually make agency work more expensive, not cheaper. In essence, what AI is doing is removing the rote work that has to be done, but isn’t necessarily adding tangible value to an account. That frees up time for FTEs to work on more substantial, business-driving work that our clients want front and center in the relationship. That means higher value, which should mean higher fees.

But we also tend to ignore a glaring fact about AI and how it’s used today within enterprises: it is expensive. And as money continues to pour into the industry, it certainly is not going to get cheaper. (And this doesn’t even point to the criminal aspect of ChatGPT inventing the non-profit to IPO pipeline.)

So, it follows that agency fees should actually be higher in the age of AI, given the upskilling of talent and the infrastructure resources required to run the AI that is driving the hour efficiencies.

The Formula is Broken

Which brings us back to our original thesis: the FTE model will be broken by the rise of AI in the corporate world. Given that it is based on a 40-hour work week, and that AI will drive time-based efficiencies in ways we are still trying to determine, there simply is no way to maintain the existing system without a massive imbalance occurring.

The crux of it is what is possible in the 40-hour workweek. Productivity has been rising steadily in Western economies, and the microcosm of advertising services in the US is emblematic of this.

What AI implementation across the industry is going to do is catalyze this increased productivity in ways previously unimaginable. We might not be clear on the timeline, but those who underestimate productivity gains from AI do so at their own (and their own companies’) peril.

What can be done today in a 40-hour work week will look like child’s play decades from now. Which means the value derived from the FTE model to determine agency fees needs to not only be revised, but probably thrown out and reengineered based on the coming age of artificial intelligence in our workstreams.

The expected output within 40 hours is what the entire FTE model is based on, and the FTE model is what the expected output formula is based on, and the expected output formula is what the entire ad agency remuneration process is based on. So, like when you start seeing cracks in the foundation of your home, it’s time to call in the experts to figure out how to repair this at the source, as opposed to ignoring it until the entire edifice comes crashing down.

So What’s the Fix?

The issue here is that these are entirely uncharted waters - the only thing that has been tried and worked in the past in terms of agency fees was a percentage of the client’s media spend, but that was also during the heyday of television when the cost per GRP allowed this to be a workable model for both client and agency. With the rise of the internet and programmatic buying methods driving down working media costs, the previous model would not be sustinable for agencies while remaining palatable to the client.

Maintaining the FTE model - while the least disruptive - will also prove challenging. Productivity with AI will increase, but we’re not sure by how much, and we’re not sure when productivity will stabilize to a point where the industry can settle into a relatively firm value equation off of a 40-hour work week. Making this a moving target from MSA to MSA will prove chaotic at best and downright ruinous for the industry at worst.

There is a model that has been tried in the past, but no one has quite nailed it in advertising: the outcomes model. You’re a retailer who wants to increase your same-store sales by 10% YoY? Here’s our price for that. Want to drive your NPS score up 15pts in three years? Here’s what that will cost. Need to overtake your main competitor and go from challenger brand to market leader? The MP on that dish is *quiet murmuring to avoid sticker shock.*

You get the point. The problem with this is that too many external variables exist to nail this down in a legal contract. Imagine having this kind of deal with a tech company in March of 2000, or an investment bank in September 2007, or a hospitality company in March of 2020. How do you write these into contracts beyond the force majeure language that, quite honestly, is only going to lead to litigation in this setup?

Even ignoring catastrophic events (which feel much more frequent, of late), there’s also plenty of companies out there for which marketing efforts only make up a small proportion of their revenue, at least in the short-term. These contracts would not only have to align on a way to measure the outcome of immediate marketing activity (a much thornier proposition, as anyone who has worked at a large ad agency knows), but they would also have to quantify the value of a brand, which is disproportionately fed by marketing that - on paper - has little immediate return on investment. This would lead them down a path that no one has quite cracked, given it’s trying to quantify an intangible.

Just like most of the problems clients approach agencies with, there is no simple fix. But a constant refrain I tell teams I lead is that if it were easy, everyone would do it. The lack of clarity around a short-term solution to this problem is juxtaposed by the fact that it is very clear that something will need to change. Those agencies and companies that begin down that uncertain road today will be lightyears ahead of their competition when the wider productivity picture begins to finally come into focus (kind of like it was with the AI technology causing this seismic shift in the first place.)

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Local Politics: I live in a pretty small town (just over 13,000) and in a smaller village within that town (under 6,000.) We’re in the midst of election season, and it is heated. We’re talking every tiny little thing being dissected for any political angle, personal sniping all over Facebook groups between neighbors, townfolk online calling residents who attended the No Kings rally “retards.” It’s quite ugly.

And yet, there’s the notion that we’re a small, tight-knit community and we’re all in it together in off-election years. But time and again (at least since I’ve lived here), people’s true colors come out, and they are just nasty to each other during election season. I find this extremely odd, given that I have seen the same people posting vitriol against a neighbor under their real names and profile pictures then shopping at the local grocery store and socializing with other residents, as if their online persona existed in a vacuum.

Since Covid I’ve anecdotally noticed that people are simply shittier to each other. We haven’t shaken off the self-reliance we were forced into during lockdown, and it has decimated the social contract. Having a president whose nihilism is only excepted for his grifting as the leader of our great nation has only accelerated this. And I believe the current election rhetoric in the little Pleasantville just north of the Bronx that I’ve decamped to is a microcosm of that. When Tip O’Neil said “All politics is local,” he didn’t mean that we had to stoop to the lows coming out of Washington at the national level. Yet, like many aspects of what O’Neil was fighting against in the 80s, we’re paying the price today.

Album of the Week: Have you ever listened to an album and felt that you were staring into somebody’s soul? Like the artist walked into a studio, had absolutely nothing to lose, and just let it all out into the microphone? That’s the feeling one gets when listening to Lyfe Jennings’ debut studio album Lyfe 268‒192.

Lyfe’s story is one marked by prison. As a teenager he was sentenced to a decade for an arson charge that had resulted in the death of a mother of six when he and his friends had firebombed the wrong house looking for some rival drug dealers. As soon as he got out - after teaching himself songwriting and the guitar while locked up - he hit the amateur circuit - crushing Amateur Night at the Apollo and various NYC open mikes. That led to a deal with Sony, which led to the platinum debut album.

There are few skips on it, which is rare for 15 tracks with a runtime of over 50 minutes. It hits on hard topics that don’t lend themselves well to mainstream appeal, which speaks to Jennings’ talent to be able to go platinum talking about the potential pitfalls of dating women with children (“She Got Kids”), a partner cheating but getting away with it (“Hypothetically”), and a baby momma squeezing him for child support while also being comfortable on welfare (“Greedy.”) That last one does not age well, which puts Lyfe in pretty good company from the mid-aught rap and R&B scene when it comes to misogyny.

Some standouts are the back-to-back “26 Years, 17 Days” and “Made Up My Mind,” where Lyfe laments the judgement he receives from fellow Christians upon his release from prison and how he turns to god outside of organized religion because of it. “Must Be Nice” talks about finding that special someone who sees through all the short-term fame. “Cry” - following a theme of the era - speaks to the beauty in the vulnerable. The stanzas “See cryin’ is like takin’ your soul through the laundromat / It’s like the feelin’ that you get / When you see your grandmama smile” made even this newsletter’s curmedgeon author stop and reflect.

Unfortunately, while Lyfe has put out a couple more solid albums, he never quite recreated the success of Lyfe 268-192. His career came to an abrupt end after an incident in Smyrna outside Atlanta, after a domestic dispute led him to popping off a couple of rounds and fleeing the scene in his ‘Vette. After crashing it in a police chase, he pled guilty to a slew of charges and was sentenced to another three years and change in prison. While he is out now (and relatively active on his Instagram), the hit to his career has proven to be lasting, which is too bad as his talent was and is obvious.

If you’re looking for good storytelling from a wildly talented musical artist (Lyfe wrote and produced nearly all of the tracks on the album), then Lyfe 268-192 is worthy of a spin this week.

Quote of the Week: “You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.” –Yuval Noah Harari

Usage of AI in This Post

I used one of the LLMs for deep research on billable hours (honestly cannot remember which one,) and that put me on to some articles about the Goldfarbs looking for a house. Beyond that, the other research that went into this was the old-fashioned book reading and Googling type.

See you next post!

Because it appears, dear reader, that being smart, loud, and funny may be enough to gain a leadership position, but it’s not enough to keep progressing in that arena. [Ed.’s note: The author is, in order of the above descriptors, kind of, very, and moderately - depending on the crowd and their level of inebriation.] Hewitt lays out what leaders need to up their presence and how to get there.

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The Big Three

The book has a “2.0” at the end of it, as it is the second iteration of Hewlett’s dive into executive presence, or EP for short. She first tackled this topic in 2012, and revisited it in 2022 thanks to the paradigm shifts that took place in Western societies between the end of Obama’s first term and the middle of Uncle Joe’s first crack at it.

What Hewlett found in both deep dives was that three pillars remained the foundation of executive presence: Gravitas (or, how you act), Communication (or, how you speak), and Appearance (or, how you look.) The good news is the more mutable of the two (gravitas and communication) make up much more of the equation - 67% and 28%, respectively - than appearance, which, while it only makes up 5% can also make achieving the other two a steeper uphill battle than necessary.

Is that fair? Absolutely not. But like I tell my toddlers when they can’t have dessert for dinner, neither is life, and we have to manage it somehow.

Gravitas: How You Act

Gravitas may feel like a relatively esoteric concept; it’s not nearly as tangible a characteristic as, say, communication or appearance. But it makes up more than two-thirds of the executive presence equation, according to Hewlett’s research, so it’s crucial to master.

While gravitas as a whole may seem abstract, it can be broken down into more concrete variables. The top three traits that sit within gravitas are Confidence, Decisiveness, and Integrity, in that order. I like to envision Confidence as the main building, being buttressed by decisiveness and integrity.

If you’re decisive but don’t have the confidence to back it up, no one will follow you as a leader. If you have high integrity but waffle on key decisions, people will lose confidence in your abilities. And if you’re confident without being the person making key decisions and the integrity and knowledge to back them up, you will be seen as a fraud (justifiably.)

There is a lot to be said about “faking it til you make it,” and this newsletter would be lying if the author said they have not used this tactic in the past. But there is a key difference between making a bet on oneself and straight-up being a fraud. The former is about taking a calculated risk in good faith, knowing you’ll very likely be able to back it up in the future. The second is about knowing you have little to no chance of delivering on something, but portraying yourself as the person to do it anyway. It is crucial to know the difference (in yourself, and in those around you.)

Communication: How You Speak

We all know that the foundation of human social development - both professionally and personally - is communication. Commanding a room (a key portion of this EP characteristic) is an absolute must, and the good news is that any level - from juniors to leaders - can do it. The rooms may change, but the skills to command them are relatively static.

You need to speak well - and this can mean a lot of things, and can also be a loaded directive. Hewlett relays a story about her experience navigating elite British universities with a working-class Welsh accent. Now our friends across the pond can be a bit snooty when it comes to these class markers, but we’d be lying to ourselves if we said we didn’t have a similar issue in the States, if not more subtle than our British brethren. (There is a reason my mother insisted on training my regional accent out of me as a child, even if it could have had other benefits for me later in life.)

In a globalized economy, accents are less of a negative variable than they were in our parents’ generation. Given the diversity of quality talent in Western economies, if someone is judging someone else on their accent, they’re more likely to be the one shortchanged than the accented individual they are biased against.

But communication - especially with the ubiquity of hybrid working tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams - is more crucial for EP. Just like you need to tailor your leadership style depending on the situation, you also need to be able to quickly read a room and land on a communication approach in order to command it. This presence is crucial to helping drive your gravitas and becomes a virtuous cycle into confidence and decisiveness. Gravitas is the substance; communication is the vehicle.

Appearance: How You Look

While it may only make up 5% of executive presence, per Hewlett, your appearance still has an effect on how you show up at work, whether you mean it to or not. The good news is that the number one trait for appearance is the most mutable: polish. You don’t need to look like a professional athlete in a tailored suit in order to be polished: it can be as simple as taking a shower and running a comb through your hair.

Of course, there are other traits that are more luck than ability, like physical attractiveness (though this is in the eye of the beholder), and being tall. But the good news is these all trail “polish” as traits, which is fully in control of a leader. So get a nice comb, research a skincare routine, and press your shirts - boom: you’re already halfway there.

These Traits Mean Different Things for Different People

And herein lies the most unfair aspect of executive presence in general: the exact same behavior conducted by different people is often interpreted differently. A white male who enters a room and talks strongly and directly to others can be seen as strong and in command, whereas a woman can do the same thing and be labeled a bitch.

Women and people of color have a lot of considerations when it comes to professional behavior that white men simply do not have to think about, and the way that I read this book as a cisgender white male is likely very different than the way a black or Latino colleague or a female colleague might approach it.

Which brings up another aspect of executive presence that is touched on in the book: authenticity. I personally did not feel comfortable being fully authentic at work until a few years ago: once I had a good amount of experience under my belt and I was no longer a junior employee, but more into middle management where I had more political capital, did I let people see more of “the real Matt.”

That’s great for someone like me (not so much those around me all the time), but there are plenty of folks who never fully feel comfortable being their authentic selves in the office. Code-switching has been studied (and seems to be gaining more understanding in American culture), and while it may be a way to fit in at work, it’s also psychologically exhausting. The book addresses the differences in approaching EP for plenty of folks (this newsletter will not pretend to know the best way to approach this outside of its own limited lived experience.)

The Final Grade

For those entering leadership, those looking to upskill their presence in important meetings, or those in middle management looking for a challenge and some growth opportunities, Executive Presence 2.0 certainly fits the bill. This post is a very condensed summary, as one of the best parts of the book is Hewlett’s sprinkling of use cases and deep dives into certain leaders throughout the book - showing both what to do and what to avoid.

Book Grab Bag Section

The Notecard

125 hz as a soothing frequency - The idea that certain frequencies of sound have certain health properties is not new, and the 125 hertz range has been called out for anyting from easing muscle pain to helping with bipolar disorder. It’s important to note that there is no scientific evidence for the hypothesis of sounds as a healing medium by itself, but it can’t hurt when paired with meditation.

Marzipan layer of management - I had never heard of this corporate setup - it refers to the layer of management just below the top executives. It’s unclear if it is simply the same as middle management, or just a lower level of leadership not quite at the top.

I usually like a good analogy for corporate structure, but this one is missing the mark for me. Maybe it’s too Euro-centric, maybe I don’t understand baking well enough (even though I’m a religious Great British Bake Off viewer, which should cover both items), but I don’t think this will be entering the TDNBW lexicon anytime soon.

Emotional Intelligence - Goldman - A bit of a typo here, as this is Daniel Goleman’s seminal work that brought emotional intelligence to the forefront of our collective consciousness back in 1995. It enjoyed a spot on the Times bestseller list for more than a year. Needless to say, if you want executive presence, you’re going to need both IQ and EQ.

Nonviolent communication - Rosenberg - Nonviolent communication, or NVC for short, is a psychotherapy technique that arose out of Marshall Rosenberg’s experiences in the Detroit race riots during WWII and the antisemitism he experienced in his life. It’s a way to be more empathetic with others and is not meant to solve arguments or make people find middle ground. To poorly sum the concept up, it’s a solid life norm we all could benefit from a refresher on: don’t be a dick.

Managing at eye-level - Derived from a Danish term that translates in English to this phrase, it essentially means that leaders are accessible to the full workforce and that there is a functional relationship between a leader and the rest of the team, no matter how junior an employee. It’s cited by Lego’s former CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp as one of the tactics that helped him turn the company around in the mid-aughts.

An approach like this tends to lean more on influence than hierarchy-derived power to get things done. Harder at the upfront, as the trust and respect need to be earned in order to drive action from influence, but certainly a worthy exercise if you’re looking for a happy, productive workforce in the long run.

Quotes

“Most complicated of all is the fundamental tension between conformity and authenticity. How much should you fit in? How much should you stand out? How much of the ‘real you’ are you prepared to sacrifice on the altar of success?” - The age-old question of how much of yourself to bring to work

“Having the responsibility without the authority would be comparable to being asked to hit a home run without a bat.” - Barbara Adachi on being given a role without the power to actually use it

“How can you trust a colleague to keep his eye on the big picture if he can’t keep his eye off his iPhone?” - A huge sign of disrespect is when you’re talking in a meeting and people are just glued to their phones; it’s a symptom of a much larger disease

“Two-way-door decisions—which comprise three out of every four decisions executives make—should be made with around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If an executive waits for 90 percent, he or she will miss out on most opportunities. According to Bezos, when a leader can course-correct, being wrong is less costly than being slow. Tardiness is expensive in today’s world.” - This is where AI will have trouble keeping up; humans are meant to make low-information decisions. The smart ones remain open to changing course if the initial one turns out wrong.

“One of the interviewees (a senior executive at Ogilvy) told me, ‘Steve’s ouster was one thing; the clawback was something else entirely. It’s enough to keep you up at night.’” - In a book about executive presence and one that highlighted EQ, this was one of the most tone-deaf quotes throughout, and it was particularly embarrassing that it came from an ad exec. We’ve covered Steve Easterbrook’s ego problems on this newsletter before. Let’s be clear: the only people who should be personally concerned about Easterbrook’s clawback are people who are breaking the rules in similar ways that he did. This quote says a lot about the author of it, thinking Easterbrook was the victim (and not the architect) of his downfall.

“Slate’s viewpoint is that every high achiever has two or three identities that differentiate them and allow them to bring out-of-the-box insights and skill sets to the table.” - We briefly touched on this when discussing accents, but globalization has ushered in the need for people to bring new ideas and fresh perspectives to the table. If folks are spending time and energy suppressing what makes them unique, they may also be suppressing those differing viewpoints that are needed more than ever today.

See you in two weeks!

But outside of the tech industry, there are actually very few companies using artificial intelligence in novel and transformative ways. Artificial intelligence as a whole has been around for decades, but generative artificial intelligence at the level we see today is novel and demands a corporate repositioning and reality check.

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The Most Transformative of Times

We alluded on a recent post that Prof G had a bold claim: AI has driven 60% of market returns since 2023. Mathematically, he may be correct, but digging in the story gets a but more nuanced (as almost any story does behind the headline.)

Yes, the tech giants continue to soar to new heights - mostly off of their cloud businesses. These cloud businesses are enabling companies that do not have the on-premises computing power to run models to quickly tap into the compute power required to move towards an agentic workforce.

Even those companies who may have stubbornly avoided Box or Sharepoint for file services and maintained on-prem servers cannot scale up as quickly as the major cloud players and - if they desire the same AI capabilities as their peers - will need to tap into the cloud. This, and the insane compute and power load that only resource-hoovering data centers (which are popping up in communities least able to resist their polluting ways), has been driving the tech sector’s stock gains.

So, yes, the large tech players are raking it in thanks to the need for other companies to tap into existing AI infrastructure. The question is, how long can this party last? The models are beginning to hit a plateau and the warnings around the energy needs for the kinds of data centers required to maintain this pace are growing. (This analysis won’t even mention the jump scare the industry got from DeepSeek and the prospect that maybe the volume of cloud services filling tech company coffers aren’t actually needed at the scale we’ve seen.)

Even if we can build the power generation required, there’s the pesky task of moving said power from generation to endpoint. The American power grid is woefully out of date, and thanks to hurdles created by regulation and bureaucracy, playing catch-up on an accelerated timeline like Europe would require the US government to, well, do something. No smart money is taking that bet.

So while the tech companies are riding an AI scalability wave, the question is for how long given the absolute sandbar that is power generation and transmission in a United States with embarrassingly poor infrastructure.

The Least Transformative of Times

If the medium-term future may look uncertain at best for AI cloud providers, what about their customers? They must be doing some super cool things with AI that is driving top-line growth, right?

Walk into almost any CFO’s office and tell them you want to start an AI project. After telling you no (it’s reflex, they can’t help it), they will say, “Fine, quantify the top-line growth this company will see from it.”

Dear reader, it has been this author’s job to help justify media budgets for major corporations for over a decade. The relationship between marketing dollars and top-line revenue is well established, and with the right tools and people, teams can draw causation points from A to B. In fact, when you see a company whose market value is anything over its book value, a very large part of that overage is thanks to marketing.

One of the only times we truly have a difficult time doing this is when an entirely brand new tactic or approach enters the marketplace and we want to put money into it to test. Without proven causal relationships, the honest answer to “How much money will this get me?” is sometimes “I don’t know.”

AI’s current state represents this concept on steroids. Another uphill battle is the short-termism that plagues most public companies thanks to SEC requirements for quarterly financial reporting. AI is expensive, and change management is slow. Companies will not see returns within three months of applying a solid, long-term AI strategy. For many shortsighted corporations, this is an unacceptable use of capex for the organization.

But Matt you ignorant slut, you’re probably saying, the McKinseys and the BCGs and the Accentures of the world have positioned themselves as cutting-edge AI practitioners who can accelerate your corporation into the brave new world of artificial intelligence today.

It might come as a surprise to some that those companies that have spent big bucks with the consulting firms to help create and deploy their AI strategies are having a bit of buyer’s remorse, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last week. I knew the article was going to be quite the journey by the fourth paragraph:

Clients quickly encountered a mismatch between the pitch and what consultants could actually deliver. They found that consultants, who often had no more expertise on AI than they did internally, struggled to deploy use cases that created real business value.

We often make fun of the consulting profession as expert Googlers, which may or may not be fair. But some of the quotes from clients in this Journal article are not helping the profession beat those allegations.

A litany of high-profile clients willing to put their name behind some blistering quotes cannot bode well for the consulting industry’s push for AI enablement:

The Straight Dope

Corporate AI usage needs a reckoning. To be sure, there are plenty of companies out there doing it quite well - I was lucky enough to attend a Section AI chat with Howard Hughes Inc that highlighted some good use cases for AI within large, complex organizations (have I mentioned this newsletter needs sponsors?)

But the more the press highlights AI usage, and the more I learn firsthand by talking with peers across industries, it’s clear there’s a long way to go. And that’s okay!

Generative AI is not only a new technology, but it’s also one that causes massive anxiety amongst the workforce thanks to the constant drumbeat of job replacement that those who are heavily invested in the technology continue to perpetuate. This makes it that much harder to drive uptake amongst a skeptical population who could actually benefit from it, if it weren’t being used as a cudgel to potentially put them in the bread line.

Don’t forget, if you believed the hype train of autonomous vehicles from the mid-aughts, we should currently all be a few years into a reality where most trips are taken in Level 5 autonomous for-hire taxis as opposed to the stupid old way of owning a car with a proper gas and brake (and clutch, if you’re cool.) The fact is, AI itself is complex, and rolling it out through large organizations is inherently difficult and will take time, effort, and money.

Those looking to do it quickly are going to be disappointed. Those hiring firms claiming they can do it for you quickly are going to be even more disappointed (as the above quotes clearly demonstrate.) Rome was not built in a day. And it still wouldn’t have been even if they had AI.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Complaining: While I have a lot of problems with you people, it feels silly to complain about a crappy commute or a small airplane bathroom given macro events of the past two weeks and beyond. Put simply, America is heading down a path that is going to be extremely hard to return from and that has already set us back years (at the least) on the global stage.

The post-war launching of the Marshall Plan, the beginning of a Pax Americana, and the policies that launched an ascendant United States even further onto the global stage as she helped the globe to rebuild from the rubble of a horrific world war was a mere 80 years ago - I still have family who are alive that remember that time. The world today - and our country’s place in it - must look terribly strange from that vantage point. Losing global hegemony is one thing; willfully ceding it is another altogether.

Album of the Week: If we get into the wayback machine, we had an album of the week about Murphy Lee from Nelly’s St. Lunatics. My memory told me that he and Obie Trice, from Eminem’s D12, dropped the same week, but it turns out it was a few weeks apart. I remember it that way because I didn’t have the money to buy both albums, and I couldn’t pull a Game move. Lucky for this newsletter, I eventually saved up enough to cop Cheers, the debut album from Detroit’s Obie Trice.

While Eminem is famous for his bars, he’s also an accomplished producer, and he EP’d the album and mixed most of it. It’s a solid debut from Obie, who had been simmering in the Detroit underground for years before putting out Cheers. Because it was released during the incredible beef years that the Shady crew had with Ja Rule and Murder Inc., and Benzino and The Source (which somehow survives to this day), there are some solid diss tracks on the album.

“Shit Hits the Fan,” “We All Die One Day,” and “Outro” all heavily feature subliminals and direct hits at the Detroit collective’s enemies. But this is not a mixtape-level CD; songs like “Average Man,” “Don’t Come Down,” and “Look in My Eyes,” feature this newsletter’s sweetspot of artist vulnerability combined with rhyming ability.

Finally, there are no club bangers on this album (even if the gimmicky “Got Some Teeth” might try to corner the bizarre radio play category.) That said, solid features from Nate Dogg (RIP), Eminem, Lloyd Banks, and 50 Cent helped drive the album to be certified platinum in the US. So take an off-season jobbie nooner and devote an afternoon to a solid, made-in-America Detroit rap album.

Quote of the Week: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” - Abraham Lincoln, 1838

AI Usage in This Post

Other than the images, no AI was used creating this post. That said, one interesting thing occurred while trying to make the final image of a boss not quite understanding why his employee may be hesistant to use the company’s developed AI tools. We all know there are limits on AI image creation, particularly around violence and sexual content. I encountered a new one: “threats of unemployment or intimidation.”

It seems the AI has become sentient enough to become self-conscious about its potential role in job elimination. Go figure.

See you in two weeks!

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There are a few reasons for this, but (surprise, surprise) most of them boil down to a capitalistic pursuit of money: if the revenue is flowing in a toxic environment, very few leaders are willing to mess with quarterly numbers to remedy said toxicity. Toxic workplaces almost always end up self-immolating at some point, but the lead-up to the revenue risk usually isn’t clear, which is why the toxicity in and of itself should be a red flag for cash flow (even if it rarely is.) Regardless, it’s usually best to cut and run when confronted with a toxic workplace - but are there any situations in which working through this toxicity might actually benefit someone later on in their career?

The Obvious “Peace Out” Moments

There are toxic environments where the solution of leaving is so obvious it doesn’t warrant a debate - internal, or otherwise. Cases of physical abuse, sexual abuse and harassment, and obvious signs of mental health deterioration are signs that it’s time to leave, regardless of whether you have something else lined up.

This newsletter recognizes that this is a privileged take, as there are plenty of folks without much of an option thanks to the system Americans find themselves in which health care (a human right) is centered through your ability to be employed (a purely capialistic venture.) Still, it is worth noting that no one should be subject to the above issues to simply pull a paycheck.

Are There Situations Where Toxicity Itself is Good?

No. Absolutely not. Not in this physical realm or any and all realms that exist in parallel to this one. Toxicity is not good. Full stop.

That said, we always have to manage reality vs. the ideal state. My kids should listen, but they don’t, so I have to deal with that. RTO has no discernible effect on financial outcomes, but it’s still mandated, so I have to deal with that. Toxic workplaces shouldn’t exist, but they do in large numbers. So we have to deal with that.

If we speak broadly, there are two kinds of toxic environments - one in which an employee could potentially emerge from it with better skills and abilities, and one in which they simply are broken down by it and come out worse for wear. The main difference between the two comes in the form of how respect is divied out within the toxic environment.

Just Throw Money at the Problem

Toxic environments that aren’t prima facie dangerous tend to share some of the same characteristics:

• Culture of negativity and pessimism;

• Impossible deadlines;

• Perfectionism - Good work doesn’t count if it’s not perfect;

• Constant criticism with little to no praise.

There are others - the list is quite long, but from personal experience, the above make up a majority of the variables when it comes to toxic workplaces.

When in client services, there’s a two-fold aspect to this which can complicate things a bit. You have your internal team at the agency and cross-capability folks you work with, and then you have your client team. I’ve seen a couple of setups (from most common to least common): toxic clients with toxic agency team, toxic clients with good agency team, and good clients with a toxic agency team.

The aspect of services for hire adds a money-flow issue. The best clients are the ones that collaborate as equals with their agency teams - working through recommendations, diving into the numbers with them, and sitting side by side (either metaphorically or physically.) But the opposite of that - the transactional-based utility attitude vs. one of collaboration - is where toxicity begins to take hold. This is not just agency life - ask a lawyer, a tradesperson, a sell-side banker, and they will all readily regale you with tales of toxic clients that they would never work for again.

One of my first clients when I jumped to agency life embodied this toxicity. Late nights, decks with rounds and rounds of edits due to last-minute shifting asks, dreading going to presentation meetings because you knew you were there to get spoken to like an incompetent moron so someone else could save face. It was exhausting and stressful, and I would not suggest doing it to anyone.

But paradoxically, when I look back on my (admittedly short thus far) career, it was those first years that catalyzed my learning. I was coming into an industry I did not know with tools I’d not really used and had to not only play catch up in that realm, but also against a client who seemed to almost revel in the chaos.

This romanticized backward-looking view I maintain was largely due to the team I was on at the agency - a group of people who were mission-focused, collaborative, and drove a spirit of camaraderie that made the late nights more bearable. In fact, many of this group continue to work together, and that shared trauma remains a foundational piece of our experience together. Once we all moved on from that toxic account, we were able to drive even more value on accounts that had stability and team attitudes, and I am convinced those tough times made us all better employees.

Find Out What It Means To Me

And the single common denominator was respect. This entire post came from a movie I had playing in the background as I took advantage of Delta and T-Mobile’s fast and free wi-fi to work on a flight back from a client visit (have I mentioned we need sponsors?)

Whiplash stars baby-faced Miles Teller, a jazz drumming prodigy, who is put through the absolute ringer by JK Simmons’s abusive and toxic teaching style for his band at a fictional elite music conservatory in New York. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but one question I kept coming back to was why did his student not only tolerate Simmons’ abuse, but seek it out?

It was because they respected him - Simmons and the students believed that his style was bringing the best out of them in a “pressure makes diamonds” kind of way. Simmons went way too far in the film (the direction given to Simmons was to make his character no longer a human, but a monster, and he nailed it), but the idea that the toxicity accelerated the growth and the learning of the students actually holds weight, if this newsletter’s experience is any indication.

So given that, what should you do if you find yourself in a toxic situation but have respect for the team you’re with or believe the toxicity, rather than being dangerous, may actually serve as an uncomfortable learning experience? First, you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it - those remaining in these situations should be doing so with eyes wide open. What is the goal of staying, and are those benefits clear?

Seek out a mentor (preferably on the team, but someone with some context for the situation) and ask them. Bring them your thoughts about what you want to achieve by sticking it out. Confirm with them that your goals and rewards are realistic. Then ask them how they deal with toxicity to get some tips, because part of the learning in a toxic work situation is understanding the internal processes necessary to remain calm amidst a shitstorm.

Limit Exposure and Make It Better Behind You

If you do decide to stick it out, keep an eye on the clock. Eighteen to 24 months is likely the max someone can stick out a super toxic situation and remain unscathed. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to switch accounts - clients come and go, as do agency leaders driving toxicity, so an external resolution could keep you in the same spot with a better outlook.

And if you do gain the experience and fast knowledge you’re looking for, you have a responsibility to avoid the very same toxicity for those behind you. Whether it’s trying to make current situations better, or recognizing toxicity when you become a leader and doing everything in your power to minimize it, the only way to stop the cycle is to be a part of the solution. Sitting on the sidelines watching teams suffer from the same toxicity you did years ago and doing nothing to combat it likely means you didn’t learn as much as you should have from the experience. Always send the elevator back down.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Airbus: If you know me, you know I’m a bit of a transport nerd - you can make whatever kind of conclusions from that as you want. Irrespective of your diagnoses, I’ve had the pleasure of cruising at altitude on two separate Airbus fuselages in the past two weeks. The first was an Airbus A321-Neo (one of the gems of Airbus’s fleet, and one advertised as a bigger jet) and the second was the smaller 5-wide configuration of the Airbus A220.

The first trip I was traveling transcon on an A321-Neo with the family, and my son decided the way he was going to get his exercise was hourly trips to the lavatory. The bathrooms on these jets are miniscule - if I were by myself I would be cramped, so you can imagine how it went with me and my 90th percentile-in-everything toddler. Brutal stuff. I think we burned his clothes when we landed given the amount of brushing up against things that occurred in that bathroom.

So when I had to use the lavatory on the solo flight I had this past week on the A220 I braced myself for an even smaller loo given the smaller jet. On regionals, I have to crank my neck simply to stand in there, so I was thinking the same situation would greet me here. Except when I opened the new awkward lavatory doors meant to save space on new planes, I was shocked to find a palatial space to do my business.

Now I know that Airbus doesn’t make the bathrooms, but if I were an engineer there, I would create some kind of structural wall that would necessitate a minimum size restroom on these airplanes so airlines couldn’t make them fun-sized. But alas, I got a degree in the liberal arts and not the hard sciences like engineering, so I’m left to complain about it on the internet.

Album of the Week: While the band has caught a lot of flak for their name, Hootie & The Blowfish hold a special, nostalgiac place in most millenials’ hearts thanks to their runaway success in the middle of the 90s. A huge part of that success was their studio album Cracked Rear View, which went 10+ platinum and helped buoy the CD era during a slight downturn in the middle of the Clinton administration.

My wife and I were having a debate about why the album held such a large portion of the millennial nostalgia pie. She thought it had to do with their adjacency to one of the most overrated sitcoms to ever hit the airwaves, while I thought I remembered seeing them on MTV a lot growing up (once the Kane family hit a lick and finally got cable.)

It turns out, we were both wrong (kind of.) Hootie was adjacent to Friends, but the storyline was accompanied with a cover of the 54-40 song “I Go Blind", and not related to Cracked Rear View and its runaway success. And the music videos I remember watching were mostly on VH1, which heavily featured them on their Top 20 countdowns, vs. MTV’s TRL.

But Cracked Rear View might be best known for its brilliance in the 2-3-4 slot. If this were a baseball lineup, it would be unstoppable. “Hold My Hand” into “Let Her Cry” with “Only Wanna Be With You” batting cleanup. These songs are the epitome of the album, which its critics point to as too mainstream and aggressively normal.

But in an era where nothing feels remotely normal, throwing on some Hootie and transporting back to a time when presidents got impeached for mild perjury will bring back some of that normalcy we’ve all been craving of late. Not bad for a band led by a Dolphins fan.

Quote of the Week: “No one wants to follow a pessimist… You can be skeptical, you can be realistic, but you can’t be cynical. If your boss is Eeyore, do you want to work with someone like that? Oh, bother.” – Bob Iger

AI Usage in This Post

With the sitcom and movie references featuring heavily, there was no AI usage in this particular post.

That said, I did try to use Google AI search to track down the Hal quote from Malcolm in the Middle about parallel universes. I say “try” because the AI search was, in a word, terrible. It made up quotes and entire episodes of the show that had me on a wild goose chase looking for the screenshot (which is a TDNBW original, as it did not exist in any image search - don’t get me started on screenshotting on Hulu.)

The ultimate source that helped me with finally tracking it down was Wikiquote, a website whose UI is stuck in the mid-aughts and does not seem to have AI infused into it. Again, this newsletter continues to wonder when all of the AI efficiencies that can be felt tangibly in the day-to-day for the majority of workers will be here, for it is not today.

See you in two weeks!

The services industry is feeling this acutely: on top of a race to the bottom for new business, existing clients are utilizing their leverage to continue to drive a “more for less” approach. But it’s not entirely malicious - the rise of the prospect of artificial intelligence and its effect on how we work has made many promises about the ability to do said more with said less, at the speed of LLMs. But if we take a moment to look at where we’ve landed thus far, the reality is that we seem to be getting ahead of ourselves when it comes to AI-driven efficiency at work.

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Welcome to the Infinite Workday

If you feel like your workday is bleeding into the entirety of your waking hours, you’re not alone. Data from Microsoft and their suite of office tools shows that from the moment we wake up to the time when we collapse in bed from another exhausting day driving shareholder value in our late-stage capitalist world, we are connected to our jobs.

There are a couple drivers of this. The first is out-of-control meeting culture. The second is the devices that were promised to liberate us from ignorance have, in fact, enslaved us to a pair of masters: our work from a professional aspect on one side and outlandish antics, outrage culture, and fake life we commonly refer to as social media when we’re off the clock.

Because of this, even when we’re “off,” we’re never really off. This leads to burnout and anxiety, which, outside of the health issues that come along with that, also degrades our work performance.

There are only so many hours in the day to get work done, and the PSI in the pressure cooker that we call the services sector has been steadily rising. But there has been a new technology that has been hailed as our savior when it comes to efficiency.

All Hail AI

Before we begin bashing AI, let’s clear the air on the fact that the technology we have seen from the AI world is nothing short of astounding. Using OpenAI as an example, the leaps and bounds their models have made over the years is breathtaking. And consumers and business leaders alike have been looking for ways to drive efficiency in their lives. Rishad Tobaccowala is right in that it would be hard to overhype AI.

But let’s also be clear about AI’s shortcomings. It is running out of data. It is riddled with security puzzles not yet solved. It is manipulating human behavior. I suppose every rose has its thorn(s).

So while AI’s possibilities seem endless (and may very well be), there is an aspect of it that we are rushing: the timelines in which we will see its benefits. And while Prof G is right that AI gains are driving an already oversold market even higher, this newsletter views that as yet another symptom of the larger hype disease.

A bigger concern is the hailing of AI as the savior to our never-ending workday. The Microsoft study showing that we’re way too online in the Office 365 world concludes that AI is a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to solving this overwork, but this newsletter has doubts.

ChatGPT 5.0 as a Canary in the Coal Mine

The recent rollout of OpenAI’s newest consumer LLM in ChatGPT 5.0 is indicative of larger headwinds that the AI as a work/life balance alleviator movement will hit in the coming months and quarters.

Those leaps and bounds we’ve become accustomed to between model releases with companies like OpenAI have significantly slowed. This newsletter foresaw this back in September of 2024, as the data spigot for training these models was beginning to decrease dramatically.

So how do the existing models compare to your average entry-level employee? From experience, pretty poorly. The models require a lot of context to do very simple tasks, and even then they still tend to fall short.

In this newsletter’s last post I tried to get a model to make a picture for every letter of the alphabet. This is a very simple task that the most inexperienced individual coming into a job at an agency would be able to accomplish. The model failed.

I have heard other stories of people smarter with prompting models than myself trying similar experiments and seeing the model fail in spectacular fashion. (Ed.’s note: It is this newsletter’s policy that we do not out executives who associate with the author, for fear of bringing shame on their name and profession. Just know, they exist - we swear.)

The Other Constraints

Suspending disbelief for a moment, let’s pretend every AI breakthrough now and in the future will be groundbreaking. Let’s pretend we had AGI right now (which, for the record, we are at the very least years, if not decades, away from), there are other constraints that limit AI’s breadth and depth.

One of these is usage permissions. Very often, internal conversations are recorded for Copilot notes, but when it comes to cross-organizational meetings (outside agencies, clients, vendors), many times I hear “We’re not allowed.” It makes sense, but it also removes a big advantage of the AI built into these conference tools, especially for long meetings or workshops where we want the focus to be on collaboration and engagement, not manual note-taking.

There’s also another constraint we saw with the ChatGPT 5.0 rollout - users are currently limited to 200 questions a week on the new model due to the insane compute and energy required to run these models. Companies like OpenAI know there’s not enough energy on the planet to power these models given projected growth. Limits like these will eventually hit commercial licenses for those without unlimited budgets, as AI adoption in the business world will continue to grow.

Which begs the question - if we currently are limited by both model ability and energy stores, is leaning into AI as the overwork savior and employee replacement the move? Sure, human employees take sick days and PTO, but I’ve never had one say to me, “Sorry, I just don’t have the energy for that right now. Check back in 314 hours.” And to be honest, if they did, they would be fired and replaced with that kind of attitude towards work - an option that isn’t really there between man and machine if there is physically no energy to drive a query.

So while jobs will be replaced by AI - now and in the future - the larger question remains of how effective the AI will be in the replaced job and how much it can move the needle on the never-ending workday. A lot of promises about the immediate efficacy of AI are being made, but when you break it down, it happens to be those with significant financial interest in AI’s utility that are the ones seemingly willing it to be true.

While this would not be a huge problem (innovation is what drives the American economy, and the “Move fast and break things” ethos actually has some value), the short-term aspect of overwork is (at least partially) built on a foundation that reinforcements are coming, in the form of AI.

The debate here is not if AI will help us be more productive at work and potentially help with the existing work/life balance crisis making its way across the professional services industry, but when it will. This newsletter is here to posit that reinforcements are still in the recruitment and basic training stage, not on the transport plane with arrival at the front imminent.

Therefore, we need to reevaluate our strategy of overloading our human workers with the idea that we can remove some of that workload via AI as opposed to additional human headcount. It’s a risky bet in the short term that does not have a potential payoff for years to come. Especially if we need someone who fully comprehends that “A is for Apple” all the way through “Z is for Zebra.”

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Service Sector Shrinkflation: The WSJ had an excellent rundown of how hotel operators are looking to squeeze as much profit out of their rooms as possible - at the expense of the guest, naturally. While I ranted about this on LinkedIn, I want to expand the frustration from a move like this.

This is basically just shrinkflation being applied to the hospitality industry. And the most infuriating part is that the consumer has almost no say in this, as the move is being done across a variety of chains in the vertical. As soon as one operator or brand does a cost-saving move that consumers simply accept without shifting spend, every other competitor follows suit.

An excellent example of this is airline bag fees. You know how everyone bum rushes the plane regardless of their boarding group to try to get overhead space for their bags? I’m old enough to remember a time when checking a bag only cost you the tip you gave to the skycap because you were running late because the Sumner was a disaster (as usual.) It made the boarding process slightly less hectic.

With assigned seating, it should not matter when you board your flight. But thanks to the constant nickel-and-diming of consumers, airline bag fees now constitute $7+ BILLION in revenue for airlines. This was, of course, given a huge assist thanks to assinine security rules that don’t actually make us safer but are quite effective at inconveniencing us.

The saddest part is that consumers don’t really have a choice - continuing the baggage fee example, just look at consolidation in the American airline industry. We went from over 45 airlines to just 5 majors since the 1960s. It’s much easier to get ahead of the consumer when choice is that constrained.

Until there is a groundswell of consumer opposition via shifting spend (or - gasp - not spending) this kind of shrinkflation within the services sector will not only continue, but likely accelerate. So buckle up for even more fare add-ons for your flight, where you’re squeezed in more and more every year like cattle, only to show up to your tiny hotel room where anything resembling a creature comfort is down in the lobby - for an extra fee, of course.

Album of the Week: We covered her sophomore album last year, so let’s dive into her debut album Lost and Found - a highly raw, emotional set of tracks from a young Smith, who wrote the songs over a period of five years beginning when she was 16.

Given that, you might expect some of the album to feel superficial or saccharine. But the reality is that for a first album from a teenager, the material feels much beyond Smith’s limited years. Take “Teenage Fantasy” - one of the best tracks on the album - having a choral dichotomy that perfectly describes commitment issues of those just coming into relationship maturity.

Other highlights on the album include the longing on “February 3rd,” a quality break-up song in “On Your Own,” the memories of lost ones in “Goodbyes,” and some painful self-realization in “Tomorrow.”

You’d be wise to familiarize yourself with Smith’s catalogue and her debut is an excellent place to start. She tends to put out projects every 2-3 years and her last album - falling or flying - dropped in 2023, so give this one a spin to be ready for the next up.

Quote of the Week: “Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.” - Josef Pieper

AI Usage in This Post

Other than the images, the only other AI usage for this post occurred when I was in a time crunch and wanted a quick rundown of the MIT Technology Review article on artificial intelligence’s energy expenditure. A bit ironic, innit?

See you in two weeks!

Is that our new reality? Probably not, but it’s called creative license, so let’s roll with it. We do know AI will have serious consequences for the labor market, even if we don’t know what those consequences are quite yet, or how severe they will be. One interesting notion coming out of the surge in agentic AI is the potential inversion of the corporate hierarchy as we know it today.

Pyramids: Not Just for Dead Pharaohs

Anyone who’s worked in an office for any period of time intuitively knows the hierarchy, from entry level to CEO. There’s a protocol to interaction from junior employees to middle management to C-suite folks - who’s copied on emails, who needs to be looped in when, who you make eye contact with.

And one of the main reasons for this is that the higher up you go in a particular organization, the fewer people there are at successive levels. There’s only one CEO, but there could be hundreds of analysts. All of the layers in between are meant to drive decision-making efficiency that translates the labor of low-level employees into the strategy of upper-level leadership (and, of course, value to shareholders.) This puts a lot on middle management - the unsung heroes of the corporate world, but I digress.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one we’re working in (shout out late-stage capitalism.) And it’s often portrayed as a triangle, with those coveted C-suite spots up top and the hands-on-keyboard labor at the bottom. But the pyramid as we know it may be on its way out with the introduction of artificial intelligence.

The Shrinking Middle (Management) Class

Before we get to Marc Andreesen’s wildest fantasies, the reality is that the middle of the pyramid has been under pressure of late thanks to layoffs in some of America’s largest companies.

Amazon, for example, in putting forth their more stringent RTO plan last year also threw in that they were reducing the ratio of managers to individual contributors, feeling like a dad of two small kids in suburban New York in that their middle had grown a bit more than they would have liked.

While citing bureaucracy as the main reason (personally, I would have started with the fact that they have two US headquarters and a level system that would make the armed forces blush), the reality is that only so many people can report into a manager before said manager loses their effectiveness.

Middle managers have a job that isn’t easily replaceable by AI - it’s a low information environment where they have to juggle the visions and goals of upper management with the labor hours of juniors. There’s a lot of nuance there, as well as uniquely human aspects to what needs to be delivered (executive A loves PowerPoint with lots of text, executive B wants all visuals with good voiceover, executive C is somewhere in the middle, etc.)

The other thing about today’s models that people typically point to as “AI” is that they are trained on the entirety of the internet. Put bluntly, taken as a whole the internet is an absolute cesspool of some of the worst traits of humanity - just take a look at any random Facebook comment section to lose even more faith in the species. If you started using the whole internet as a guide to managing people, you would be in HR’s office before the end of the day.

AI Replacing Juniors - Probably Not, but Let’s Pretend

While middle management is a tough nut to crack for AI as of today, the reality is that with the rise of agentification within the LLMs, there is a real possibility that a lot of the rote work done by entry-level employees in white collar jobs in the service industry can likely be replaced by AI agents.

While this newsletter’s position has been (and continues to be) that companies should be looking to drive efficiencies within existing labor with AI, there are a lot of things companies do that do not jive with TDNBW. So we need to look past our own biases and envision a world where companies go after the lowest hanging fruit and try to replace as many juniors with AI agents as possible.

In this scenario, AI begins to remove the “grunt work” typically given to entry level employees. Highly rules-based, but tedious work like QA of data, real-time flowchart updates, media tagging and trafficking can be done just as effectively (if not moreso) by machines (once trained properly, of course.)

Given that, the pyramid begins to look a bit more heavy in the middle - something companies are trying to do away with, as we saw above. So if we follow the rules of fewer middle managers and fewer entry-level employees (replaced by AI agents), we’re actually looking at a flipped pyramid - like a corporate version of the Louvre shopping mall.

Short Term: More M&A While Employee Leverage Weakens

This newsletter is not convinced that agentic AI will be able to wholesale replace entire FTEs in existing client services models. The best models out there (at least commercially available ones) are simply not performing in ways I would expect first-year analysts to (more on that in the “AI Usage in This Post” below.)

But let’s suspend disbelief and say that agentic AI can eat up a few FTEs on the staff plan in a white collar service model. The overall premise passes the gut check. We know companies do anything and everything to trim costs. And we know human capital is the largest line item in the debits column of any financial report for established, mature companies.

We also know the amount of money poured into AI R&D means that there needs to be a return for said investment - despite OpenAI’s abysmal corporate structure, it is not a charity. So even if all of this didn’t make sense, there certainly will be corporations that try to force it into their operating models.

So what does that look like in the short term for an industry like, say, advertising? Entry-level jobs become fewer in number, driving further competition in the space for college graduates and those a few years into the industry. The middle stays relatively the same, but now those folks are managing a mix of agents and humans.

And the top becomes larger in number, as they have to lean into strategy and stakeholder communications more than ever as the middle upskills in AI management and the few entry-level employees navigate a constantly changing professional environment while fighting T-900s to keep their jobs.

What this means for the industry at large is that there is fiercer competition for good entry-level folks among a shrinking number of employment options, as M&A would likely be accelerated by a phenomenon where tech and capital expenditure become the game changers for corporations.

This will also further remove employee leverage in the entry-level space - an already disadvantaged area to be, given the wider labor market. With a larger supply of college grads going for an even smaller number of positions, employers will lower salary guidelines to further drive financial savings from a move like this. And there’s always the pesky elite overproduction problem that this newsletter humbly believes is vastly understated in Western economies, particularly in the United States.

Long Term: The Well Runs Dry

If the story for the short-term effects of replacing a portion of the junior employee base with AI agents seems bleek, the long-term can feel economically apocalyptic.

With AI agents replacing some rote tasks typically relegated to young, idealistic employees, a knowledge transfer gap develops that will widen with each successive class of entry-levels. Is there short-term benefit to learning the nuts and bolts of these incredibly minuscule tasks outside of being able to do them to pull a paycheck? Probably not. But there is a benefit to it when you’re in the middle, managing people doing it, to help troubleshoot and work through issues in real-time, drawing on your executional experience.

Once a few classes work their way through the hierarchy and something breaks, you’re going to end up in a meeting with everyone looking at each other asking how it originally worked and an AI model asking for a prompt. With no one having come up the ladder doing this “grunt” work, there will be no one there to draw on past knowledge and fix the problem. This is the “Safety Tag” issue this newsletter has discussed, but on steroids.

This also presents a classic marketing problem: the leaky bucket, but in reverse - more of a drying well. With fewer and fewer entry-level people needed, but more senior folks required to package up and manage client relations, who is going to make up the successive classes of management? Industry consolidation can only go so far in the war for talent. The internal talent well will be quite dry and the math is not mathing when you are dealing with an industry-, if not economy-wide, approach to AI replacing talent.

So What Do We Do?

It will take people much smarter than a sarcastic Bostonian who writes - mostly through sitcom memes - for free on the internet to figure this out. TDNBW’s stance has always been that AI is a tool and we should be using it as such. Power tools don’t decrease the number of people needed for a job - they just make the job go faster.

Finding places where AI complements human work is key - how can it drive efficiency while maintaining a human pulse on the end product? Those businesses that look to replace junior employees as quickly as possible with agentic AI may see short-term success, but they’re mortgaging a future labor market on terms they simply will not be able to pay.

Just like with Artificial General Intelligence, this newsletter believes that we are not as close to agentic AI replacing FTEs as some would think. It certainly is not impossible, and is more probable than not to happen within this author’s career, but the scale of ability and adoption are murky at best. What remains is the advice to know as much about AI as you can so you can Be That Human - understand how it affects your vertical, your company, your products, and most importantly, your career.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Metro North: We haven’t had a good WTF about public transit recently, so I wanted to toss a throwback in here. I’m a monthly Metro North pass holder, and I prefer the physical ticket to one on my TrainTime app.

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the design of the ticket - particularly its ombre change in color from month to month. Very little about commuting creates joy, so seeing the new color for the new month was the water being squeezed out of the stone in that regard.

But now, dear reader, the MTA has taken even that small moment from us. I thought the first time it was a fluke - maybe it was a temporary pass, or the machine I bought it from was itself old and in need of replacement.

After a few months of buying the tickets across multiple machines at multiple stations to prove out my theorem, I am sad to announce that, in fact, Metro North has done away with the colorful monthly tickets and replaced them with one of the most uninspiring, boring, and somehow physically larger dystopian monstrosities you see below. The final iota of joy has finally been removed from the Westchester-NYC commute.

Album of the Week: We’ve had four posts in a row of Clipse AOTWs. I try to keep the rap diluted amongst a healthy mix of other musical genres on this newsletter, but the excitement of a new Clipse album (and the ultimate delivery of a no-skipper) was too much to overcome. So as the palate cleanser for those not into coke rap, we’re heading to what is possibly the opposite end of the musical spectrum: turn of the 20th-century classical music.

While it’s not quite an album, but more of an orchestral suite, Gustav Holst’s The Planets is a collection of tracks meant to be played in a certain sequence, so we’re going to go ahead and file that under the “album” category.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the planets are out of their interstellar order, with Mars beginning the suite as opposed to Mercury. You’ll also notice that Pluto is missing - this is not an omission. The on-and-off planet was not discovered until 1930, a full decade and a half after the composition of The Planets.

Beginning with “Mars,” the listener is introduced to the most dramatic of the tracks. One can imagine seeing the red planet over the horizon as they approach the extremely hostile surface (it is named after the Roman god of war, after all.) Once past the drama of the red planet, Holst transitions into “Venus,” the most peaceful of them. It’s a welcome respite, if not a bit abrupt.

From there, Holst jumps to “Mercury” - here the listener can catch their breath from the roller coaster of Mars and Venus with the playful little gray rock, as there’s little drama in the track (and where it does pop up, it’s resolved quickly.)

Then we come to “Jupiter” - this is the standout track. The triumph! The exuberance! If you only listen to one piece, make it this one. It’s what pulled me to the album in the first place with its massive gravitational pull.

Skipping over to “Saturn,” the drama returns, though not nearly as high-stakes as our intro. We then head to “Uranus,” where, after a frightful start, we mellow back out, closing out with “Neptune,” which ends the suite on an ephemeral and mysterious note. It’s hard not to want to start at the beginning, ending on that kind of vibe.

So while you’re zooming through space on our big blue and green marble, give The Planets a spin. You’ll enjoy it, even if you’re not into astrology like its composer.

Quote of the Week: “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” - Elbert Hubbard

AI Usage in This Post

The AI used in this post is limited to the images, as usual, but I did want to point out an interesting experience trying to get the pyramid images the way I wanted.

They’re about 85% of the way there, but the back-and-forth with multiple models across multiple UIs to get them there was painful. To the point where if this were a human employee, I’d wonder why they were being so obtuse at best and downright insubordinate at worst. My children, who routinely have a tough time listening to me, take direction better than these models most times. That is not a trait I am looking for in junior employees.

One extremely fascinating aspect of this is that I got so frustrated with the model, I began to talk to it in ways I would never talk to an employee. When I called it a moron and reiterated the task, it delivered. When I then gave it positive feedback and asked for a tweak, it completely bungled it. When you realize that it’s been trained via the internet - and all of the ways humans communicate with each other on it - this insight actually makes sense. When you realize the implications that could have for agentic AI replacing FTEs, the implications become much darker.

The fact that it can’t make a simple alphabet book off of a single prompt does not bode well, either.

See you in two weeks!

I think back to my time at a previously esteemed law firm (before they bent the knee to neo-fascism) and I think the most relevant way to think about written communication at work is “Don’t put anything in writing you can’t back up in a deposition while getting grilled by a $2K/hour partner.” The sentiment is the same - written business communications are not private, no matter who you left off the email chain.

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Everything is Discoverable

I’m a shit talker - there’s no two ways about it. I’m from a city where profanity is laced in all of our greetings (especially the friendly ones) and Larry Bird and Pedro Martinez were my idols growing up - how can you not have an acerbic wit and a somewhat off-putting way of communicating?

Most of my coworkers don’t see this side of me - it turns out that in client services phrases like “Were you kicked in the head by a donkey as a child?” in response to ridiculous statements isn’t germane to career growth and success. So we call those inside thoughts.

But if we’re close enough coworkers, you will see portions of this come out in an unguarded moment. I am lucky enough to have met many of these types of close friends throughout my career, and it makes the doldrums of the workday less painful.

Which brings me to my (belabored) point: I happened to be chatting to one of these friends on Teams when they said “Let’s switch to text” as I'm sure I went into one of my rants. They were of the opinion it would be harder to track. I’m not super convinced of this.

Legal discovery is a wide-ranging exercise - if you talked about work via text, but it was on a personal device, that could still fall under discovery. So it may not be on Teams or Slack but if it’s related to the litigation you unwittingly find yourself in, you’ll likely find yourself in a windowless room with a bunch of humorless attorneys dissecting your emoji usage.

There’s also the fact that in today’s world, you’re never actually on anything personal. Got an email client downloaded to your phone? There’s a chance you’ve agreed to some severely invasive terms and conditions with your employer. And it goes beyond that. On the office WiFi sending iMessages? In a company-owned or -leased building during traditional working hours? On a conference call at home texting on the side? These could all be considered part of work by a crafty enough attorney for discovery purposes.

Concealment on Steroids

The impetus of this post wasn’t actually me bitching on Teams, but an excellent NYTimes look at Google’s methods of avoiding the very discoverability that has brought down many a powerful person in the past.

If you’ve spent a good amount of time at any large company, you might be familiar with the good old litigation hold. The first time I received one, a quick moment of panic went through me. We’re being sued? I’m being sued? Why is this language so lawer-ly and official?

In reality, litigation holds aren’t a huge deal. It just means don’t delete anything, which is a pretty easy thing directive to follow. If you get the litigation hold and then go into your computer to delete a bunch of messages, you’re gonna have a bad time. Otherwise, just carry on with your day.

If you worked at Google, as the NYTimes pointed out, you had a different approach to all of this. Disappearing messages in chat, policing metaphor usage among employees, and (my personal favorite) copying lawyers on nearly everything to later claim attorney-client privilege.

Of course, none of it worked. Judges can pierce the attorney-client privilege to ensure it actually applied to a situation, and when they did this with Google they allowed tens of thousands of documents to be handed over after it was determined the privilege simply didn’t exist.

So all of that writing employees thought would never see the light of day because someone with an Esq. in their signature was on CC were pretty disappointed when what they put in writing was now seeing the light.

So What’s a Worker to Do?

You might be saying to yourself: Matt, you ignorant slut, I follow the rules and I have nothing to hide. I’m not going to be part of any litigation, so this doesn’t really apply to me. Oh, dear reader, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Individual employees have little control over the legal aspects of their career. They may be working next to someone who is committing fraud and be called in as a witness, in which case all of their communications with that person can be looked at. You can’t control what other people do. Just ask Taylor Swift.

Secondly, if you work in any field that is even tangentially related to intellectual property and/or business secrets and you’re using AI, the chances are non-zero that you will find yourself tangled up in some legal brouhaha by the time you hit retirement age. So buckle up.

Don’t take this as you need to be the most boring person at work and only talk about corporate matters as if a lawyer is looking over your shoulder. How mundane work would get if we all acted like that.

It’s more about being intentional with what you put in writing and recorded communication. Which you should be anyway, as written business comms shouldn’t be full of fluff or anything else that would allow for a gap that a good lawyer could expand in litigation.

So just keep in mind that what you’re typing could very well end up as an exhibit and be brought up during depositions. So if you’re about to rant in a way that you wouldn’t want to have to dissect in a more level-headed moment in a room full of suits, maybe save it for happy hour (if you go.)

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Coldplay Cheaters: It’s the moment that brought a fractured nation together - dunking on two rich married people cheating on each other’s spouses while also having a direct reporting relationship at work. The schadenfreude was high on this one.

I’m not here to wag my finger at their sexual shenanigans; I’m more concerned with the public way in which they were carrying out this affair. Swaying to some mediocre alt rock in public in your hometown of metro-Boston is a near-guaranteed way to get caught having a discreet dalliance.

While being one of the best cities and metro areas in the world, Boston is also a small town - its insularity is one of the main complaints of outsiders who try to live there. When I go out with my father in town, he inevitably runs into someone he knows or who knows someone he knows. And no one has accused Mr. Kane of being an extrovert in any sense of the word - it’s just that the city is that tight.

So the last thing a couple engaged in an affair in the Boston area should be doing is showing anything resembling PDA. This advice is especially prudent for people who have married into one of Boston’s most famous Brahmin families (talk about insular.) The Cabots may only speak to God, but I imagine there could be a divorce lawyer or two in the mix in the near future.

Album of the Week: The moment we’ve all been waiting for is here: Let God Sort Em Out dropped and it was well worth the wait. There are no skips - I repeat, no skips - on this album and the debate in my group chats has been which song is the best.

The Thornton brothers are back with a vengeance and it’s clear from the interviews and the Tiny Desks and the rest of the press they’ve been doing that they haven’t skipped a beat. You see Pusha with a much more comfortable air about him since he’s teamed back up with his older brother. Softness is not the word for a guy like Push, but there’s something akin to it there in an endearing way.

When I was a youth playing baseball, the best days on the mound for me were when I had a couple extra days rest for the arm - you just felt like there was more in the tank. This is how Malice sounds in his bars - there’s no rust or learning curve at all. Just straight fire exuding from the booth. It’s a sight to behold.

So what’s the best track? It’s impossible to say. If you didn’t get emotional with the album opener of “Birds Don’t Sing” you need to talk to your therapist and/or adjust your meds. If “Ace Trumpets” didn’t give you chills, call your HVAC guy. If “Chains and Whips” didn’t make you scared for other rappers’ careers, you didn’t get it.

But I think the dark horse is “So Far Ahead.” The Pharrell hook with the beat switch, the classic coke bars and flow, the double and triple entendres. It’s textbook Clipse.

Other non-sequitor observations: The content on “Whips and Chains” does not seem worth the fight Def Jam put up over it - super soft suits on that one. Tyler’s verse on “P.O.V.” is one of his best. Need more Nas on “Let God Sort Em Out/Chandaliers.” Why did Pharrell mimic Nate Ruess from fun. on “By the Grace of God”? - unsure if it works or not. And the kicker: when’s the next album?

If it hasn’t been in your rotation, give it at least one spin - it’s the best album from a group with an already-distinguished catalog.

Quote of the Week: “We are bound by the law, so that we may be free.” - Cicero

AI Usage in This Post

Other than the cover photo for this post, this is (for better or for worse) raw, uncut thoughts from my human brain.

See you next week!

We are now beginning to see some consequences of AI on human intelligence as studies on these machines’ effects on human intellect come to fruition. The initial results - while not necessarily surprising - are a bit disconcerting. Replacing critical thinking and research capabilities wholeheartedly, it turns out, isn’t the greatest thing for our brains.

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Trust Your Instincts

It has many names - a sixth sense, a gut, intuition, instinct. Very often time spent thinking about a problem or issue simply leads to the original instinctual decision you had at the beginning.

The science behind what constitutes this “gut feeling” and the insane connection between your gut and your brain is actually quite fascinating, but the key point is that it is something uniquely human. We emphasize the importance of neuroscience being part of the machine learning occurring with AI models by calling some of them “neural networks,” but there is no “gut feeling” when it comes to their ability to digest data.

Therefore when we think about intuition, there is no AI equivalent. Indeed, outsourcing your intuition to AI is a terrible idea, for a multitude of reasons. One of the more germane being the fact that human cognition and machine cognition are different enough as to be complementary versus interchangeable.

This is Your Brain on AI

Tapping into your gut is intuitive, but it’s also a skill. Knowing when to listen to it, when not to, and the subtlety of the messages is all something that takes time and practice to hone.

Even though it’s not a muscle, the brain works in a very similar fashion. Chronic disuse leads to declining performance - and while this seems obvious, many have still jumped head first into AI tools not as complementary efficiency drivers, but as wholesale cognitive replacements.

And studies are beginning to come out showing the deleterious effects of AI usage as a replacement for good ole’ fashioned thinking. “Digital dementia” has already cemented itself as of byproduct of the dopamine chasing behavior we find ourselves in day after day with our digital devices. The echo chambers they create and the absolute gutting of our attention spans may well turn out to be the least problematic aspects of this constantly online world we’ve created for ourselves as a species.

But as with everything else it seems to touch, artificial intelligence is supercharging this cognitive gap. Allowing AI to replace your own thought processes has always been thought to be bad, but just how bad is beginning to come into focus.

There’s always been the anecdotal “Hey, I think I’m using too much AI” think pieces. There’s the relatively scientific studies (funded by none other than AI powerhouse Microsoft) showing that high confidence in AI outputs leads to less critical thinking. And now there are robust academic studies pointing out a severe cognitive decline among those reliant on LLMs for writing purposes. To translate people in that group: much LLM make brain stupid.

So That’s It? We’re Just Done With AI?

Hardly. First, through the lens of our favorite sociological failing called late stage capitalism, there is simply too much money to be made. A bunch of corporate drones prompting ChatGPT simply to reply to an email with a couple of lines like a white collar Brave New World back and forth is a small price to pay for “operational efficiciencies” driven by a highly valued technology which corporations are pouring billions into. To put it bluntly, they’re going to need some kind of return on that investment.

Secondly, AI does have legitimate use cases that will enhance existing productivity without making us all knuckle-dragging troglodytes whose understanding of language comes in tokenized bits from a machine’s neural network. The key is to find where it is enhancing your productivity and thinking versus where it is merely replacing your cognitive function.

There will be overlap of cognitive duties between our brains and AI - this is inevitable and unavoidable. The key is to minimize this overlap and ensure that the vast majority of AI work being done on your behalf is catalyzing your own thinking, not displacing it.

One key way to do this is to check the work of the AI. If I’m stumped after a couple of Google searches on a topic I need expertise on, I turn to the deep research tools of LLMs like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

To avoid the ever-present danger of model hallucination, these AI agents are instructed to cite as much of their work as possible. Akin to reading a Wikipedia page, if a particular nugget or insight in the research jumps out at me, I back it up by taking a quick look at the source material to ensure the model understood it correctly.

It’s akin to working with a research assistant at a library - they’ll help you pull primary sources on a particular topic and point you in the right direction on a lot of things to help induce faster research. No one would point to this practice as a cognition killer, unless of course you did it for every single thing you wanted to know about and simply took the research assistant’s word for it all without looking through the documents.

These kinds of uses are where we should be looking - what’s driving the efficiency of a project without taking away our ability to critically think about the work? Granted, it’s a fine line. How many uses of deep research on a particular workstream or in a finite time period is too many? How many source docs do you need to review to maintain brain function at its current level? Will TDNBW ever get ChatGPT to make a funny image? These are questions that don’t yet have answers.

Complement - Don’t Replace

Humans are very good at making decisions with limited data - that’s the “gut” part of our ability to analyze a situation, unconsciously tap into decades of experience and receive signals from the Enteric Nervous System (aka the second brain) to forge a path ahead.

Artificial intelligence-powered machines are not as adept in low-data environments. To simply exist they require reams and reams of data - not to mention the initial supervised learning to get to a place of neural network nirvana. When humans have access to this data we also make data-driven decisions, but machines are able to do it at a much faster speed and a scale humans can only dream of.

Our job as workers - and, not to be dramatic, but as a species - is to figure out how to drive efficiency out of this amazing technology while avoiding becoming enslaved by it. The title of this very newsletter may not be more prescient than in this moment.

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WTF Newton: Unless you’re super dialed in to village-by-village news in the relatively sleepy bedroom community of Newton, Massachusetts - which lies just outside of the greatest city on earth: Boston - you may have missed one of the most dramatic showdowns between the people and Mayor Fuller of the well-to-do city since she picked a fight with the teachers union and lost in incredible fashion.

There are many ways to view this tony suburb. This newsletter grew up seeing it through the lens of dichotomies. It certainly is not a tale of two cities, but there are pretty major differences between the leafy estates in Chestnut Hill and Waban and the more dense and what used to be middle-class communities of Nonantum, Newtonville, and lower West Newton.

Newton, like many other suburbs of tier one cities across the country, has moved to the model of being an unaffordable housing escape for all but the wealthiest of their residents. But it wasn’t always like that.

Having had the incredible privilege of growing up in such a bucolic suburb close enough to downtown Boston to ride my bike (and having access to public transit when I didn’t feel like doing that), I remember a city with a distinct north/side divide. This was socioeconomic, certainly, but also deeply political. You rarely saw northsiders win citywide election - and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t palpable resentment from some of the population about this.

This newsletter could go on and on about why this divide exists, how it actually used to be the northside that secured the bag compared to the south, and how the construction of the Turnpike in the 1960s threw this dichotomy on its head, leading to disruptive commercial and residential progress in the northern villages and opening the door to a resurgence of the southern part of the city that continues to this day. But we don’t need to, as keeping in line with this post Google Gemini Deep Research has done it for us.

Keeping all of this context in mind is important to understand what this newsletter has deemed the Adams Street Massacre. Adams Street is not only home to one of the best restaurants in Newton (we need sponsors!), along with one of the best Dunks in the region, but is also one of the main thoroughfares through the storied village of Nonantum - a traditionally Italian mix of working- and middle-class families (until the most recent Boston housing boom, which further accelerated an already rising cost of housing stock.)

Adams Street is also home to the parade for the Festa, an annual Italian-American festival thrown by the St. Mary of Carmen Society and a cannot miss event for Nonantum-ites and neighboring villages alike. One feature of Adams Street is its distinctive divider line is painted in the Italian tricolor as opposed to the yellow lines typically dividing US streets (minus Bristol, RI, of course.)

So when Mayor Fuller sent road crews to work under the cover of darkness through the night with no notice to the neighborhoods to paint over the Italian colors and replace it with standard yellow markings only weeks before the 90th iteration of the Festa, residents were justifably pissed off. The fact that she lives in one of the wealthiest villages of the city on the other side of the Pike and has always been viewed as a southside mayor only served to rub salt in the wound.

Arguments about safety ring hollow, as you could paint that center line in any color and it won’t change the fact that Adams Street is congested and too narrow for the traffic it carries daily. There really is no other way to read the move other than a thumb in the eye of a village that voted overwhelmingly against her in the most recent mayoral election in favor of fellow northsider Amy Mah Sangiolo. Nonantum won’t have the chance to voice their displeasure at the polls this fall - Fuller won’t be running after the teacher’s strike debacle.

But what they can do is continue to paint Adams Street back to its original glory - hit up the newsletter, I’ll call up Swartzy’s to pitch in for materials, send some pizza from D&A (chicken cutlet is a HOF pie) and even buy a round at Tommy Doyle’s (RIP West Street.) Ora e sempre, Resistenza!

Album of the Week: We round out the Clipse love with their most recent studio album before the release of Let God Sort Em Out on Friday. Their junior album Til the Casket Drops also can be viewed through a lens of dichotomies. At times great, at other times forgetful, the album also marked the clearest division between brothers Pusha T and Malice as they began to grow apart in their careers.

Some absolute classic tracks live on this album. “Freedom” showcases a vulnerability from the Thorntons that we hadn’t seen on previous albums. “Popular Demand” features Cam’ron who drops one of his best verses.

But other songs like “Never Will It Stop” or “Counseling” are utterly forgettable. The album ends strongly with “Footsteps” and “Life Change,” so it might be fair to think of it as a sandwich with incredible bread and meat that just didn’t leave an impression.

The other incongruity on the album is the lyrical content of Pusha and Clipse. Pusha continues to lean into his fame and wealth, with the typical rap bragadocio of foreign cars, women, and homes. His future (excellent) solo work would continue this trend.

Malice is beginning to retract from the same thing that attracts his brother. He is leaning further into Christianity as he drops Biblical references throughout the album at a furious pace compared to Lord Willin’ and Hell Hath No Fury. The decision to split from his brother after this album came as little surprise (particularly because the album itself was not a commercial success.)

But in three days the brothers are back on the first joint album since Til the Casket Drops. Those Clipse fans upset they had to wait for four years between Lord Willin’ and Hell Hath No Fury likely gave up on the group getting back together after the first decade of no new Clipse albums. But 26 years later we finally have Clipse back on wax.

Quote of the Week: “Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” - Christian Lange

A Note on AI Usage for TDNBW: AI Used In This Post

Generally, I do my best to avoid using artificial intelligence while writing these posts outside of the images. I believe AI is bad for writers if they are using it to actually generate text for them even as they further shape and tweak it into what we know as writing. The art of writing feels like a uniquely human endeavor that should stay that way.

But just like the venn diagram in the post shows, to maintain efficiency in a faster-paced world, writers will need to embrace AI where it can complement what they do and drive better and faster output. In that vein, I will begin explaining at the end of each post where AI was utilized and how. The text of the actual posts will remain fully human, but AI has proven an excellent research tool and I began utilizing it for this post.

The research for the WTF Newton piece was largely driven by Gemini’s Deep Research tool - the prompts and output all live here for those interested in the source material. I was impressed with the output and actually ended up sharing it with some Newton folks.

For the Album of the Week, ChatGPT helped pull out some of Malice’s biblical references throughout Til The Casket Drops. It was lacking in a lot of them I knew from memory, so this kind of analysis has a bit to go for the LLMs.

See you in two weeks!

But what can be lost in this “woe is me” scenario that many of us can feel at times is the generation behind us - those “digital natives” we like to call Gen Z. On top of all of the things millenials have had to deal with, they never had the Clinton 90s to know what life could have been like. Their secondary and post-secondary educational careers were devastated by Covid, and their early professional careers have been marked by senile presidents mirroring Weimar Germany and neo-fascism. How can one not be jaded by this, and - more crucially - how would that not translate into their work?

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Slamming the Laptop Shut

In client services, there is an expectation that evening, late-night, and weekend work is required at times. Granted, this expectation has grown in an industry that has seen a race to the bottom on commercials to secure big client wins, but it is not a new phenomenon, even if the volume of it has grown of late.

So the popular “Slams laptop shut until Monday meme” seemed like a reasonable enough social media response to a culture veering towards overwork. But it seems like it is simply the beginning of a larger movement by younger generations when it comes to a 9-5.

The Friday afternoon laptop slam is beginning to creep into the week - new trends are coming of highlighting people’s 5-9s when they leave the office. I’ll be honest - and I swear I am not trying to be the old man that yells at a cloud here - but leaving the office at 5pm was never really a thing for many client-services millennials.

I entered the workforce in 2008, so any morning could have been punctuated with an empty box on your desk and 15 minutes to pack it up. Additionally, my first two office jobs paid OT, so leaving the office at 5pm was basically taking money out of your own pocket. Once I was properly on salary in the agency world, 5pm was rarely a leaving time - there’s always work to be done, and the NYC work culture is as brutal as it is demanding. So watching these videos feels like a look into a quaint time when people had better work/life boundaries.

But then you take a step back and you realize - these are real people - today! - leaving their job at five and taking random strangers on the internet through their eyewateringly boring lives. And it’s trending for a reason.

Extrinsic Motivation

Managing millennials isn’t that difficult of a task. It’s not easy, by any means, but we tend to be a very extrinsically motivated bunch. If you gave me an extra $10K as a junior employee at the agency, all you’d have to do as a follow-up was to point out the wall you wanted me to run through and I would have done it. Unadulterated capitalism may not be the best social system humanity has invented, but it’s the one the US subscribes to and my - like many millenials’ - upbringing and schooling ingrained in us that you worked hard and were successful and that’s kind of just how it was.

We’ve talked about intrinsic motivation before, but it’s a ratio, and from this newsletter’s experience and perspective, the new junior employees - who we can generously lump into Gen Z - are much more weighted in the intrinsic motivation department vs. its extrinsic counterpart. Throwing money at the problem is less than half the battle now.

They Might Have a Point

Zooming out, it’s clear that Gen Z is not donning any rose-colored glasses when it comes to their future in America. Much ink has been spilled on the topic, but a recent Times Opinion piece by Jessica Grose laid bare some of the issues Gen Z is facing.

The takeaway for this elder millenial is that the rules have changed even moreso than for our generation, and the old equation of college degree + good job + homeownership = the American dream (financial security, 2.5 kids and the white picket fence) simply doesn’t apply anymore.

Grose made it clear that this cohort doesn’t believe the American dream is dead (at least not collectively); just more enigmatic. She cites fellow Substacker Kyla Scanlon and her deep research into the generation.

Most Gen Z-ers I speak with aren’t trying to burn down the dream. They’re just trying to figure out if there’s still a door they can walk through. They still want security, love, purpose, but they’re more skeptical of the institutions that are supposed to provide them.

In a world where housing prices have skyrocketed for new buyers, the climate is changing at the level scientists have been screaming about for decades and we are feeling it, the American middle class has been hollowed out and wealth inequality continues to grow, and the downright abysmal political sphere in America, can we really blame Gen Z for not dropping everything for work every now and then?

Some thought leaders (with whom this newsletter has disagreed in the past) have even declared a War on Gen Z, pointing to an “intergenerational theft” as Gen Zers face down the sobering prospect that they are currently less well off than their parents and very likely will remain that way. The most stark statistic Galloway cites should worry everyone who wants to see America thrive as a country: an overwhelming majority of Americans over 55 like it; among those under 34? Under 20%. Regardless of previous one-sided beef, Galloway’s Ted Talk is worth a watch.

So How Do We Manage This?

And herein lies the problem: akin to previous generations, there is no playbook for the current management class to help steer and grow the careers of the generation after them. We can say it’s always been like this (and it has), but I think we can also recognize that the macroeconomic factors driving this uncertainty are at levels previously unseen.

That puts us in the “Complex” portion of the Cynefin framework - it’s not chaotic, but the relationship governing cause and effect is only clear after the fact. So there needs to be a little test and learn into what works. This is something we should be doing with our junior employees anyway - one management style or rubric does not fit all - but it needs to be on a grander scale thanks to the larger, systemic problems all seemingly coming to a head simultaneously.

So the approach should be one of emotional intelligence - previously called empathy, psychological safety, EQ, etc. Being able to recognize unmet needs at work amongst junior employees will help identify fixes and strategies to lessen the pain of them.

Is this approach foreign and new for millennials and Gen Xers? Absolutely, but business requires constant innovation and strategic revision to remain relevant and at the top of one’s game - managing juniors is no different.

There’s an old adage I constantly refer to when I sniff even a hint of resistance to meeting younger talent halfway: would you rather invest in talent that potentially leaves the organization, or shortchange them on development and have them stay?

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Heat Wave: Last year almost to the day we had a similar heat wave the the one we’re experiencing now in greater New York. I have plenty of complaints but lack the energy to verbalize them. So instead, enjoy (again) one of my favorite jokes from Arrested Development.

Album of the Week: I said on LinkedIn pushing out my last post that all albums of the week would be Clipse albums until July 11, when Let God Sort ‘Em Out drops. This newsletter has already pre-ordered the box set from Complex (though if we’re being honest, I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to do with the CD.) We tackled the long-awaited sophomore album last post - let’s take a look at their lauded debut album Lord Willin’.

There are a handful of albums that immediately put me in a fugue state and return me to high school in metropolitan Boston; Lord Willin’ is one of those albums. Released near the end of the CD era, the album just missed being number 1 on the Billboard 200, moving a respectable 122K units in its first week. While 2002 was a big year for rap (Eminem, Jay-Z, Nas, Ja Rule, and Nelly all dropped albums), Clipse still stood out for their incredible debut.

In fact it’s such a good first studio album, Rolling Stone ranks it #12 on their top 100 debut albums of all time, third only in the rap category to Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers and Biggie’s Ready to Die (which, fair.) The lead single “Grindin” is peak Neptunes gritty production, and its lore is only deepened by the fact that Jay-Z (who, with all due respect, would not have made a track as legendary as “Grindin” with it) almost got the beat thanks to a dustup between the brothers and childhood friend Pharrell.

I could write a dissertation on this album, so suffice it to say: listen to it, then listen to it again. Having been released in August by a Virginia Beach duo means you usually have to wait until later in the summer to get the full ambience with the bass having to hum through the heat and humidity, but thanks to climate change you can now do that a week before July in New York. Enjoy.

Quote of the Week: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” - 1984

See you in two weeks!

Inventions like television and the internet have catapulted the industry into a $1 trillion+ inescapable beast in modern capitalist life. In an industry this mature, the growth opportunities are few and far between. We’ve seen consolidation via mergers and acquisitions thanks to Martin Sorell’s Wire and Plastics Product holding company model; that train has more or less reached the end of the line. The final boss at the end of this game is the M&A activity we’re now seeing: data companies and the holdcos themselves.

Who Should Be Keeping an Eye on Consolidation?

Recently Adweek had a piece about the rank of file of various agencies getting worried about all of the M&A in the space. Granted, there was a crucial caveat here in that most of the respondents were from non-holding company agencies. But not to be outdone by their indie brothers and sisters, the trades made it clear that holdco employees also don’t love where they’re at these days.

Regardless, M&A can seem scary to employees of all levels. Consolidation very rarely leads to short-term job openings and instead translates into the ills of the system agency employees deal with on a quarterly basis: hiring freezes, promo freezes, slashing of “non-essential” spending (i.e. initiatives that tend to disproportionately benefit junior employees.) So a dose of fear isn’t exactly unwarranted.

But the consolidation discussed in the intro - that has been a constant in the background as long as just about any of us have been in the industry. Some years it feels hot, others feel cooler - but it is a constant. That said, there are a few groups of folks who should be paying closer attention than others.

Indies Doing Good Work

If you find yourself at an independent shop that seems to have a hot hand with new business and continues to pump out award-winning work, you most certainly have caught the eye of holdco procurement teams.

If you like the indie experience and your shop is churning out good work and winning awards and getting press, you want to keep an eye on this space, because as much as independence is valuable, you can’t put a price on it (like you can an acquisition.)

There’s also the other (albeit much rarer) direction: decouple yourself from a holdco and go “independent.” The quotes here are for very good reason: R/GA’s recent conscious uncoupling from Interpublic Group bought the agency their independence back from the evil, evil holding companies only to have to answer to…a private equity company. It made a splash at the time, but in reality all R/GA did was make a switch from holdco oversight to PE oversight - time will tell which feels more onerous.

Omnicom and IPG Employees

While the merger is anything but assured (both history and the current administration’s schizophrenic decision making leaves a lot unsettled here), employees of these two holdcos do have some right to worry. The marriage of these two companies will absolutely lead to “streamlined processes,” which we all know is corporate speak for layoffs.

So much so that the other holding companies have publicly said they’ll go fishing where the potentially laid-off fish are. Any particular employee’s termination is certainly not a forgone conclusion, but keeping your resume and LinkedIn updated wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world for folks who find themselves party to John Wren’s and Philippe Krakowsky’s forthcoming nuptials.

People at Data/Identity Companies

A lot of the A in M&A is happening in the data space. Holding companies want identity solutions like Epsilon and Acxiom in their stables, and they also want data collectors with unique sets to tout exclusive offerings in new business pitches to potential clients.

Being bought by a holdco isn’t necessarily a concern here - they will desperately need SMEs in the space these companies operate within, as well as expertise on how to mine and activate the data that was so sought after. In fact, it might be time to try to use that as leverage in the case that you do enter the industry via acquisition.

The Real Concern

But, dear reader, this can all feel like a red herring compared to the larger forces at work when it comes to working at agencies in Mark’s, John’s, Arthur’s, and Phillippe’s world.

We’ve touched on this before, but the vibrant cultures from agency to agency are starting to disappear thanks to the myopic focus on shareholder value that public companies adhere to. And an increase in industry consolidation will only further this worrying trend.

With the consolidation we’ve seen comes centralized functions. At some point it becomes less efficient to have so many agencies under a single holdco umbrella. In order to make a quarterly or annual number holdcos will begin to liquidate smaller or flagging agencies into other larger, healthier ones under their purview. It’s already been happening the past few years.

Taken to its extreme, this dystopic future sees people simply working for larger holdcos, not agencies within a holdco. In the most generous reading of this worst-case-scenario, it would be a couple of large, specialized agencies under a holdco - akin to departments under a major single-brand conglomerate.

Is this set in stone? Certainly not. But the chances of it are not only non-zero, but probably pretty decent from this newsletter’s reading the metaphorical tea leaves. The less certain variable is the time this would take to get there vs. it actually occurring. We’re talking many years if not decades for this to become standard operating procedure.

This is not only an ad industry problem - this newsletter is just closest to that space and it’s been grabbing headlines recently. The M&A trend tends to permeate any vertical with slowed growth thanks to maturity of the market. This is more a symptom of late-stage capitalism in general than it is a chronic disease of marketing specifically. That’s a small consolation for those caught up in the leviathan’s tentacles, but the first step towards a solution is admitting you have a problem.

Grab Bag Section

WTF Weekly Newsletters: If you’re a keen reader of TDNBW, you’ll notice that the frequency of posts has been declining of late. This is due to a combination of things, some I thought were short-term and others proving to have more lasting power.

That said, the weekly cadence I started out with is becoming unsustainable. Work is picking up and the kids are somehow taking even longer to go to bed each night. Post-toddler bedtime is the right time for writing this newsletter and that window shrinks every month.

So it’s time to “set expectations” (in the parlance of client services) when it comes to cadence: we’re officially moving to a bi-weekly (every other week, for you pedantic folks) format. This will ease the self-imposed pressure to get something out in a rush, preserve product quality, and also keep this fun (the second this newsletter begins to feel like a chore, I’m out.)

So kindly adjust your schedules and keep an eye out for the bi-monthly (that’s twice a month for you pedants) issuance.

Yours in being overwhelmed,
This Does Not Bode Well

Album of the Week

If you’re unfortunate enough to follow me on Instagram, you were alerted recently that I have turned my handle into a Clipse fan account. I know we’re all counting down to July 11 when Let God Sort ‘Em Out drops, heralding the return of the Thornton brothers.

Their debut album Lord Willin was phenomenal and “Grindin” spelled trouble for the structural integrity of cafeteria tables in middle and high schools across the country. Then - as they are wont to do - the label began screwing things up. It would be four years between the group’s debut and sophomore studio albums, but they did finally drop Hell Hath No Fury to broad critical acclaim, even if commercial success remained elusive.

Both singles are excellent - “Mr. Me Too” and “Wamp Wamp (What It Do)” with a solid feature from Slim Thug. The best track on the album is the insanely catchy “Keys Open Doors” (listen to it on a Monday and you’ll end your work week with the chorus in your head.) The album is bookended by quality tracks as well - “We Got It For Cheap” on the intro and “Nightmares” on the outro.

In classic Clipse fashion, their upcoming album also has label drama - this time when the suits over at Def Jam demanded the removal of a Kendrick Lamar feature. Clipse aren’t ones to back down and after a seven-figure buyout they’re over at Roc Nation and now free from the Universal Music Group executives afraid of Drake’s lawyers.

In any event, give Hell Hath No Fury a listen this week - even if most of the streaming money will go to Sony.

Quote of the Week: “Individualism is a formidable lie.” - René Girard

See you next week!

AI, however, will not suffer the post-hype hangover of its Web3 cousins. As Rishad Tobaccowala points out, AI may well be under-hyped (and RT rarely misses.) In any event, even if you’re anti-AI, you’re likely still using it as its becoming embedded in much of what we do on a daily basis, whether we like it or not.

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The Business/Consumer Disconnect

In the past, this newsletter has delved into how consumers view AI and its promises and pitfalls. Bain and Company has recently taken this a step further and has broken AI consumer users into five archetypes. It’s an interesting look at some subgroups of AI users and is worth the quick read.

But there was one stat - thrown out almost as an aside - that piqued TDNBW’s interest:

Businesses have embraced generative AI, with 95% of US and European companies actively using it, according to Bain & Company’s latest research.

Consumers, however, remain cautious. While interest is growing, only 35% say they use generative AI, according to a December 2024 Bain survey—though many likely interact with it unknowingly.

That is a very large disconnect between businesses and consumers when it comes to using AI (or, at least, purposefully using AI as consumers are very likely actually using it without knowing it.) This creates a potential chasm, of which businesses need to remain wary. The last thing they should do is usher consumers towards a product that is advertised as (or otherwise clearly) powered by AI that turns consumers off.

This Isn’t Unprecedented

While not necessarily unprecedented, this phenomenon is unique in that a widely available technology like generative AI and LLMs is being embraced by private sector businesses well before consumers themselves. I like to use the analogy of ordering on a tablet at coffee shops and QSRs - those did not roll out until many, many years after the technology was introduced and everyone, including your grandma, had a basic familiarity with it.

Can you imagine what would have happened if in the spring of 2010 your cantankerous grandfather rolled up to McDonald’s to buy a Number 1 breakfast only to realize the thing standing between his egg mcmuffin and coffee was a tablet? There would have been riots in the streets.

But with time, we’ve come to accept ordering on tablets as normal SOP at QSRs, and even at decent restaurants. The thing we as humans tend to complain about isn’t the absence of human interaction in what used to be a proper face-to-face, but the audacity for the machine itself to be asking for a tip (which, to be fair, is ludicrous on its face and furthers a ridiculous tipping culture that asks a consumer to pay a living wage to an employee base they don’t actually employ.)

And that’s a key point - it’s the cost-cutting aspect of tablets at McD’s that upset people, not the fact that we’re no longer talking to a smartass 16-year-old who would draw on some of his experiences to write sarcastic asides on the internet years later (at least, if you ordered at the 128 South McDonald’s in the summers of 2002 and 2003.) It’s the fact that consumers know this new technology has been implemented not because it’s better, but because it’s cheaper. And that (justifiably) builds resentment.

Look to Client Services for the Answers

This newsletter would argue, however, that AI actually has the potential to improve the relationship between businesses and consumers in a way that tablets at your local fast food joint do not. Smarter people than I have argued that AI may actually help rebuild a middle class. And while I believe that’s a bit optimistic, I do believe its widespread adoption by corporations should make human labor more valuable (and, by logic, more expensive in the form of higher wages.)

So let’s pretend that the coming AI revolution on the business side will spur greater quality of life (or, at least, not completely ruin it.) The pesky issue of this disconnect between business and consumer attitudes towards it remains. It is not new, however, and there are tangible ways to bridge it. The advertising business is an excellent example of this.

While it has become more geographically distributed, the industry is still based in neo-liberal bastions like Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Yet the industry markets all types of products to all types of people, even if the creatives and account folks are not everyday users. It’s certainly not every brand, and there are times when agencies are out of their depth on certain products, but as a general rule good agency teams are smart enough to understand a product and consumer even if they don’t use it or belong to the target audience.

How do they do this? They put themselves in the consumers’ shoes, in myriad ways. The company this newsletter calls home has spent of $5 billion dollars on data to do just that (and do it well, though I am biased.) But data and audience segmentation and advanced analytics are simply one side of the coin.

Even if it’s not an everyday thing, they still put themselves in the target consumer’s mindset to try to get a feel for it. As anecdotal evidence, this newsletter has found itself in exurban Indiana walking through a Jewel Osco to try out pre-sliced deli meat in order to try to get a glimpse of potential consumer sentiment in the ever-difficult grocery category - and I’m not even in account or creative. Does it give you a full picture? No. But it’s certainly better than deriving that kind of experience solely from a spreadsheet or SQL query.

Don’t Jurassic Park It

Just because something can be done, does not mean it should be done. Implementing AI agents into a consumer purchase journey, or adding a chat bot that continually bugs visitors to your website, or adding AI-enablement in your product shouldn't be a forgone conclusion. It should be an intentional act, approached with consideration of removing friction from customer and driving top line sales - not to check off a box for AI usage or goose the bottom line with employee replacement.

Before turning to consumer-facing AI, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the problem I am trying to solve? (More crucially - is there a problem to solve?)

• Do existing processes or products address this gap, or do I need to build something net new?

• If I do need something new, what value would AI bring to it, if any?

If you’re having trouble nailing down these questions as a business, you might not need AI in your products. If you still think you do even while struggling to answer these, you need to take yourself out of the boardroom and into your consumer’s mindset, walking through the journey where they will be interacting with anything AI-enabled. This way, you can see for yourself the value (or the downfall in the case of the AI-skeptic customer) of this kind of approach.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF “Shut Up Brands”: One of the early posts of this newsletter was about brands taking social or political stances. It was, in a word, cynical (I mean, it’s titled “Shut Up Brands.”) I am sorry to report that this cynicism was well deserved.

The New York Times had an article last week about corporate sponsors backing out of NYC Pride sponsorships thanks to the political climate. To be clear, when human rights are under threat the way they are for our LGBTQ+ compatriots, those who have supported this community’s right to simply exist in the past should be doubling down now that they are at risk.

Not so for some major companies tripping over themselves to take dollars out of NYC Pride sponsorships. The assumption of sponsorships like these is that they tend to be performative, but it’s still disheartening to see how quickly corporations cut and run from their previous support of a vulnerable population. Outside of the moral aspect of all of this, this community has incredible purchasing power. Gives new meaning to the old proverb that scared money don’t make no money.

Album of the Week: We took a look at a seminal country album a few weeks ago in Sturgill Simpson’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and marveled at its mastery. Since then, I had been looking for more Simpson in my life and found it in his bluegrass album Cuttin' Grass, Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions.

The album is essentially bluegrass cuts of previous tracks of Simpson’s from his catalogue. You’ll see a lot from Metamodern in the track list. The standout songs come in leadoff track “All Around You,” “Breakers Roar,” “Old King Coal,” and “I Wonder” - the latter of which has an incredible love song chorus culminating in “Tell me, am I the only one / Drinking and cursing your name?”

Give the album a spin this week, preferably with a tall mason jar of rye whiskey. The name you curse is up to you.

Quote of the Week: "When a customer enters my store, forget me. He is king." - John Wanamaker

Some have fallen on the side of politeness - an interesting take given how shitty people have become to each other since Covid. In fact, before this debate occurred, this very newsletter had been privately touting the benefits of being polite to these machines. However, it’s time for an about-face and declare that not only do we not need to be polite to these models, we shouldn’t be polite to them.

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The Cost Isn’t About the Dollars

The focus on Altman’s revelation is that OpenAI had spent tens of millions of dollars because of polite consumers using their nice words when interacting with their LLMs. But this newsletter truly could not care how much the dollar amount is that OpenAI - whose corporate structure of a starting as a non-profit and only shifting to for-profit when it’s clear the money would keep flowing should be illegal and whose corporate governance would make Enron blush - must pay for these types of interactions with their models.

The real cost that OpenAI (and the rest of us) should be focused on is environmental. It’s hard to understate how much energy these machines require to run at the level we’ve come to expect. The research so far has pointed to a massive increase in demand on a grid (particularly in the US) that is outdated and not ready for the increased load. The switch from climate-destroying fossil fuels was going to be difficult enough as it is, but the acute increase from models like those put out by OpenAI further complicates it.

One argument - that this newsletter finds entirely disingenuous - is that the gains made from AI-enabled workstreams (like solving climate change and our looming energy crisis) will far outweigh any short-term pain we have from more extreme weather events and rising seas. We all know how deferred gains from a venture meant to make a small few very wealthy with the promise of a windfall for everyone down the line actually works. There’s a reason the Reagan administration had to rebrand “trickle down economics” from its previously known moniker: “horse-and-sparrow theory.”

So while Sam Altman sees the “please” and “thank you” notes from users to the model as a polite L in his company’s P&L, the reality is they are much more damaging macroeconomically.

Human vs. Machine

But let’s pretend for a moment that there aren’t massive environmental impacts to how we conduct ourselves when it comes to these cool new AI toys we have access to. Let’s pretend the energy used to power these machines is clean (or, even better, also somehow reduced to reasonable levels.) There’s actually a larger problem with treating them politely.

And this is where those who have had the misfortune of hearing me talk about being polite to AI will be a little surprised, as one of my go-to jokes when people have watched me write prompts that contain “please” and “thank you” in the past is that I want a good human slave job when the machines take over. And while that line kills 80% of the time, I am publicly reversing my stance.

The reality is that AI and the machines that make it real for us humans are tools, and we need to treat them like that.

One argument brought up for the politeness (other than milquetoast humor that can be shared in a corporate setting) is that if we’re mean to the machines, we’ll be mean to each other. But here’s the thing: no one is asking you to be mean to a machine - the rule of the day should be neutrality. However, if you want to be mean to a machine and you can’t seem to turn it off when talking to humans, the problem isn’t that you’re being unkind to an AI model - it’s that you’re simply an asshole and AI isn’t going to help with that.

We don’t say please and thank you to inanimate objects, because they don’t understand the concept. While they remain entirely neutral to us, by anthropomorphizing the AI, we are losing sight of their utility and blurring the lines between what these things were created to be and what they are.

It may seem pedantic, but to maintain effectiveness of a tool you need to be able to see it without any kind of emotion attached to it. It’s true that emotion plays key - at times crucial - roles in our decision-making, mostly when it comes to values attached to larger decisions. But anthropomorphizing things that are supposed to be tools is not a winning strategy and can very well lead to severe blind spots.

Imagine a model you’ve become quite attached to gets objectively surpassed by a new one for the same use cases. The logical decision is to switch to the new one, but you find yourself coming up with small excuses as to why you remain with the old one. The cost of switching is too high (it isn’t.) Its efficacy isn’t 100% proven (it is.) Any kind of roadblock you can find, you use to justify your emotional attachment to the tool, even though your instincts tell you not to. It’s nearly taken down greater men.

If you’ve worked in the service industry long enough, you’ve seen incorrect decisions being made that simply have too much emotion attached to them. Is saying “please” and “thank you” to these faceless machines guaranteed to lead to that? Certainly not, but in a process that already has negative societal ramifications, we should avoid adding additional adverse variables.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF Room Service: There are few tangible benefits to work travel these days. Airline status becomes less valuable year over year and more and more difficult to attain. Traveling by train in America continues to be a national embarrassment. And Covid exacerbated the labor shortage that hotels were facing when it came to staffing their properties. One of the casualties of this? Room service.

Growing up, we were not even allowed to look at the mini bar, lest one of the snacks or refreshments suffer an immaculate opening and our family get charged $7.50 for three potato chips. So when I travel for work, the bright spot in that otherwise dull process was always the previously forbidden room service. There’s no better feeling than turning on a TBS Big Bang Theory rerun on the comically large and bright television with a plate of chicken fingers and french fries on a plate under a metal cover like it’s come straight from the kitchen of Per Se.

But now, room service is becoming less and less prevalent. Outside of the financial reasons (which, let’s be real, are the real reasons), the other excuse being given for this is the desire for higher quality and to “eat like a local.” That’s all well and good if you’re in a large city known for its cuisine, but for some road warriors they just want a plate of the finest fried food Sysco has on offer to eat on their hotel bed in their pyjamas. I don’t want to traipse through the lobby of a Munster, Indiana Homewood Suites in my jam-jams to pick up Uber Eats from a local diner because no one wants to commit to this business travel perk anymore. Bring back room service!

Album of the Week: Back in the mid-aughts, Houston rap was having a moment. Swishahouse had flooded metro Houston and Texas with an insane amount of talent in a short time and radio airplay couldn’t ignore the market for long. Chamillionaire, Paul Wall, Slim Thug - they all helped usher in the H-town sound to the rest of the country. And one of the catalysts was a rapper who is better known for his self-promotional gimmicks like giving out his cell phone number, but who also had rapping chops behind them: Mike Jones.

Because this is an album released in 2005, it has your typical rap tropes, some of which have not aged well. There’s the typical “I was huge underground now I’ve blown up and gone commercial aspect,” which is inoffensive to all but the most Marxist of hip hop heads. Then there’s the misogyny of “Women only want me thanks to my financial success” - essentially the entire basis of “Back Then” (which is, admittedly, a banger.) There’s also the theme that women are out to get Mike Jones and are not to be trusted - the premise of standout (and potentially best) track “Scandalous Hoes” - which showcases Jones’s rapping ability and is underpinned by a very smooth chorus from Lil Bran (if, of course, you can get past the distasteful subject.)

Those having trouble separating the art from the artist still have plenty to listen to. Breakout single “Still Tippin” (with a great feature from Slim Thug and Paul Wall’s first bars on a single) is excellent, and “Flossin” is quite good with another smooth chorus courtesy of Big Moe. Paul Wall really hit his stride as a feature on “What Ya Know About” and “5 Years From Now” is poignant for today’s time, which is wild considering it’s a 20-year-old song.

Take a trip down to the fourth largest city in the US and get chopped and screwed with Mike Jones’ debut album. Caddys on spokes optional, but encouraged.

Quote of the Week: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Frank Herbet, Dune

See you next week!

Its application extends well beyond the educational sphere into the professional space. The questioning of strategy, or probing a problem to discover potential solutions, or pressure-testing a tactical approach, drives excellence in the services industry. And it’s not just getting to the right answer (though that is crucial) - there’s also a method to asking the right questions.

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Don’t Be a One-Trick Pony

While the Socratic method is helpful, it isn’t the only way to arrive at the best conclusion; it’s simply one way to do so (albeit, a proven one.)

The back-and-forth via questions is best suited for when a project has some breathing room in the deadline and the right people are in the room to answer technical questions or help determine if certain roadblocks are navigable (and potentialyl how.) It is not for chaotic situations when a decision needs to be made, or even complex ones with tight deadlines - this method lives solidly in the upper right of the Cynefin framework, if not a bit in the upper left when the luxury of time exists.

The Socratic method is great, but it’s not the only curiosity-based approach to questioning. Querying can generously be categorized thusly:

• Information Gathering: These are questions you need to ask if you’re not 100% on a subject that is crucial to your workstream. I tell my team not to leave a meeting without understanding exactly what they need to do in terms of next steps and action items. If you’re leaving a meeting only 99% sure, you will get burned by that 1%. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you’re playing with fire and statistically it will eventually catch up with you. And if you’re a believer in Murphy’s Law (or just a pessimist), it will happen at a very inopportune time.

• Concern Trolling: A harsh name for what can actually be a productive line of questioning, this is to be employed when you really don’t believe in an idea or strategy but don’t want to overrule it unilaterally for myriad reasons (it’s coming from leadership, you are trying to be a consensus-builder and not a dictator, there are political sensitivities in the room, etc.) The questions should be genuine, and said in a tone that isn’t dripping with doubt or derision. The end goal is to - politely - poke enough holes in the existing framework that you begin to gain ground on a new one. Alternatively, the idea could be defended well enough to remain. Either way, the end product wins.

It’s Not a Debate, It’s a Collaboration

Often people approach asking questions as a way to win an argument. They are used to push another party into a rhetorical corner that eventually leads to a logical fallacy that acts as a checkmate in debate chess. While an effective argumentative approach, it is not necessarily collaborative or productive when you engage in a zero-sum game like this.

And crucially, it’s not considered the Socratic method. This approach prioritizes dialogue and collaboration, utilizing open-ended questions to delve deeper into the assumptions behind a statement or an otherwise given premise.

There are a couple of ways to tell if you’re in a healthy back-and-forth to try to drive a better work product or if you’re stuck between egos arguing over who is right and thus “wins.”

The following would indicate an argument:

• Participants are not allowed to finish their answers or are being cut off;

• Questions become increasingly closed-ended and paint things as black and white, allowing little room for nuance;

• Questions are used to push someone into a particular position, not to better understand one;

• Questions cease when one side or one person feels they’ve “won,” not when a solution is determined.

On the other hand, the following indications would point to a healthy debate:

• Everyone who wants to speak does and is not crowded out by other participants;

• Questions remain open-ended and curious, digging into the context of a particular point or assumption to untangle it;

• Questions continue until alignment is gained, and could even continue through the finalization of the final work product or move forward task.

Go Forth and Ask

Of course, none of this strategy works if you don’t simply begin asking questions. Someone had come to me recently worried about an upcoming meeting that they knew they were going to have a lot of questions for and were concerned about the perception that they would look uninformed.

I asked them what was worse: the perception of being uninformed on the way to becoming informed, or staying quiet during the meeting and actually leaving it uninformed? That person went and asked the questions and it turns out, they were not the only one with the same or similar questions and the line of inquiry they initated drove a better consensus among the entire group.

We were told in school to speak up and ask, as someone else in class may very well have the same question. The same principle applies to work meetings (just instead of a grade that’s meaningless, you get paid money, which is useful.) If you have a question - whether to get informed on something, concern troll your way out of a bad idea, or simply return to those nostalgiac days at your desk in high school and utilize the Socratice method - simply ask it.

Grab Bag Sections

WTF New England Aquarium: When I was a kid growing up outside Boston, one of my favorite places to go was the New England Aquarium. Its piece de resistance is a central multi-floor saltwater tank with all kinds of marine life living in it - including, importantly, sharks. Seeing sharks as a boy under the age of 17 is a magical experience, and I would love to go watch them in downtown Boston (honestly, seeing sharks as a man nearing 40 is still a magical feeling.)

So when I was back home for the week with the kids on school break, one of the days we all went into the city (via America’s oldest subway system) and hit up the aquarium (after a delicious meal for the whole family at The Sail Loft - have I mentioned we need sponsors?) You can imagine my surprise when we traversed the entire three floors of tank and there were no sharks. Not even the small ones that don’t really count. Not one.

My son didn’t care (the elevator was his favorite part of the museum - $35 well spent) and my daughter was all about the penguins. So while their day wasn’t ruined, I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I researched online (i.e. Googled “new england aquarium sharks not there”) and all I got was a lot of press about Cirri, the new nurse shark they got in 2023. But, dear reader, Cirri was not there last week and even though nurse sharks are one of the lamer shark species, I would have noticed her in there. If anyone has information regarding Cirri’s whereabouts, please let this newsletter know.

Album of the Week: I’m a few weeks late, but the inestimable Jessie Reyez has dropped her third album PAID IN MEMORIES and while she mercilessly trolled us last April with a joke about a surprise album, the wait was worth it as she brings an album full of raunch and pain that we’re used to from the Canadian singer-songwriter.

The album starts off very strong, with the vulnerable “I Never Said I Was Sane.” In fact, the first half of the record is pretty incredible, especially for a junior album. Her collaborations with 6LACK continue with the solid “6LESSINGS" and you get some solid features from Miguel in “Jeans” and Weezy in “Ridin” - do NOT listen to those with impressionable kids or your parents in the room.

But the standouts are when Jessie digs into past trauma and leaves it all on the studio floor. First is “Cudn’t B Me,” which is a percussion-heavy track with some synth and vocal layering throughout that gives the song a raw, live feeling. Reyez probes the tragedy of settling in relationships and how that affects the longevity of love (like I said, vulnerable stuff.)

The second is in the Latin-inspired instrumental-backed “Nights We’ll Never Have,” where Jessie laments her desire - not exactly unrequited - for someone else in a relationship. She really wants to be with them, and she knows they want to be with her, too, but they both have too much morals to do anything about it. It’s unclear how the tension ends for Jessie, but if it’s anything like this newsletter’s experience in a similar situation it could very well be two kids and a house in the burbs.

Pick up a copy of Paid in Memories (still looking for the vinyl version, so if you see it please give me a shout) and bask in some quality singer-songwriting from Jessie Reyez.

Quote of the Week: "The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life." - Confucius

She headed to the local library, got the book, brought it home and it turns out it hit two major criteria of mine: it was short (a mere 118 pages, including acknowledgements) and was shortlisted for The Booker Prize back in 2022 (essentially the Oscars of English language novels.) Reading it, the parallels to working today were obvious, even if depressingly so. Needless to say, there will be some spoilers.

The Plot

It’s 1985 in a small Irish town and Bill Furlong is hard at work keeping his heating business going during the busy season around Christmas. Furlong’s enterprise deals in coal and wood deliveries, as the average heating system in this part of the country at this time are ovens. Furlong squeaks by every year; he has no debts but also doesn’t have much squirreled away - a liability with a wife and five daughters.

Furlong is well-respected and a good employer - he makes sure his men are paid a fair wage and even pays for a year-end holiday party for his workers (holdco agencies, take note.) He’s a quiet man in town, not the least of which is because he comes from a single mother household where the kindness of the wealthy woman who employed his mother as a domestic gave him the opportunities he has today.

Without spoiling the entire book, Furlong stumbles upon some less-than-charitable activity being done by the local convent with respect to local unwed mothers and struggles with simply going back to his everyday life while he knows of the injustice happening in his backyard. Furlong struggles with it until the climax of the novella.

Furlong’s Emotional Journey

Even before Furlong stumbled upon the inhumanity that he did, he was in a woeful state of mind:

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, the coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?

Who among us hasn’t wrestled with this feeling, particularly at times of high stress or mere lack of motivation? Get up, go to work, do the same things for your 9-5 (likely longer if you’re an exempt employee), decide what to have for dinner (somehow insanely exhausting), disassociate with a streaming offering (White Lotus S3 was legit), go to sleep, and get up to do it all again the next day. Run errands and do chores on the weekend to gear up for another week in the salt mines.

This is the existential question Furlong is struggling when he stumbles upon the horrors of a local Magdalene laundry, run by the same convent that educates his own daughters. He muses to his wife about it later that evening, who urges him to forget about it and dismisses the parallel between their own daughters the girls essentially enslaved in the convent. In a low blow, she even points out that his own mother was a “fallen woman” and isn’t it nice that her employer played the role of the convent for her.

Needless to say, this doesn’t help Furlong and despite other townspeople urging him to drop it, he continues to wrestle with what to do - if anything - and how any actions (regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of morality) will affect both his and his family’s stature in town.

Yesterday and Today

The parallels of Furlong’s moral misgivings in 1980s Ireland - both historical and contemporary - could not be more conspicuous. After the Allied liberation of German-held territory in WWII, German citizens were made to watch footage from the camps and those who were on the ground liberating camps found any excuses that locals didn’t know what was happening to be specious at best.

On American shores, Boston’s Catholic Archdiocese had so many priests as serial molesters that the paper trail alone of letters between high-ranking Catholic leaders - not to mention the outrage of local families whose children were victims of these priests - meant the knowledge of what was being covered up was widespread. Yet it took a Boston Globe special assignment years to make it public, and it opened a Pandora’s box of unconscionable sexual abuse by the Church across the US and the world.

And so it was with the Magdalene laundries. It happened behind closed doors, but conspiracies as large as these require not only a large number of doers but an even larger number of people willing to look the other way, even if they still whisper about it outside of mixed company.

But it’s harder to ignore once you’ve seen it first hand, as Bill Furlong learned. And these days the whispers and the rumors are replaced by live-streamed death and destruction in 4K right to our devices. The plausible deniability previous generations hid behind no longer exists as we see children handcuffed by ICE, medics murdered and buried in mass graves, and Seig Heil salutes on a daily basis in between the minute dopamine hits from the rest of social our feeds.

This makes the line between conspirator and enabler that much blurrier. In a world where we simply thumb through the kinds of atrocities that sparked world wars in the past, where do we fall on the spectrum of convent sister abusing “fallen women” on one side and Bill Furlong on the other?

In the novella, when the publican tells Furlong to drop the whole matter, as the Church is simply too powerful, he responds with a poignant question about the town’s complicity in the matter: “Surely they’ve only as much power as we give them, Mrs. Kehoe?”

How much power do we give the evil in this world on a daily basis, knowingly or unknowingly? Mrs. Kehoe demured at Furlong’s question, giving him a look that suggested he was more of a “foolish boy” than anything else. Given Furlong’s later actions, this world needs more foolish boys guided by the likes of Furlong’s conscious if we want to not only get through this unique moment in history, but to do so emerging better on the other side.

Book Grab Bag Section

The Notecard

Magdalene Laundry - Like a lot of things imported by the British to Ireland, the Magdalene laundries were not good for the Emerald Isle. The charitable aspect of the laundries - started in the mid-18th century as a way to help reform “fallen women” (i.e. prostitutes and other undesirables at the time) - quickly gave way to exploitation and abuse. It went on for centuries, until 1993 when an unmarked grave with over 150 women was discovered by a developer and the whole thing became impossible to ignore.

a leanbh - An Irish term of endearment pronounced ah LAN-uv, meaning “little one” or “babe.” Furlong called his daughters this throughout the book and the endearment came through the page.

Quotes

“When he reached the yard gate and found the padlock seized with frost, he felt the strain of being alive and wished he had stayed in bed, but he made himself carry on and crossed to a neighbor’s house, whose light was on.” - Something about the phrase “the strain of being alive” simply popped out.

“As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?” - This passage itself - beautiful in and of itself - may be the climax of the book and the apex of Furlong’s journey

See you next week!

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Good leaders make it look effortless, and bad leaders make it much harder than it needs to be. Employees want clear directives, laddering up to a shared mission where they feel the work they’re putting in has some kind of life beyond the handoff and is actually helping the agency, the client, or both. There are archetypes of bad leaders - here’s how to spot them.

The Chaos Agent

The first - and most obvious - leader you want to avoid is the chaos agent. Some of these leaders seemingly do this on purpose - changing strategic direction on the fly, giving feedback that is misaligned from the initial ask - and others are unwitting chaos agents, unaware of their stature within an organization and inadvertently driving chaos internally.

The unwitting chaos tends to come from the “thinking out loud” crowd. It’s a fine line between transparency and creating unnecessary work. Countless times I have seen the highest ranking person in a room toss a few ideas out for posterity, only for people in the room to scramble afterwards to figure out how to make the thoughstarters a reality. Confusion reigns when these ideas have some time spent on them and make their way back to the leader, who asks why these are being worked on as they were simply “thinking out loud” when they were brought up.

The Information Hoarder

We all know that knowledge is power, and no one knows it more than the leader who hoards as much of it as possible in order to increase their apparent importance to an organization.

This person sees internal communication as a political game, and shares tidbits of information selectively across the organization - either to seem in the loop on something or to maintain their place in a game of telephone in order to maintain a line into various teams, who have to go through this leader to actually get anything done.

Needless to say, this is wildly inefficient and it hurts the final work product of the organization at the end of the day. One of the main drivers of this leader is that they feel they can’t be sacked if they are so integral to the organization that every initiative simply has to flow through them in some way.

The problem is they’re not an omniscient force at the company, helping to guide things through to the finish line. They’re a roadblock to efficiency and progress, treating workstreams and the knowledge to move them along like a middle school gossip, only to be shared for maximum effect for the gossipee.

The Toddler Parent

Toddlers need constant attention, even when they insist they don’t. I took my kids to the grocery store over the weekend and they each wanted their own mini shopping cart. The amount of direction I was giving them in our local, crowded grocery store had me feeling like an air traffic controller, and it was exhausting. Sometimes they wanted to explore, but it was neither the time nor place. When you’re a toddler parent, the “Why?” sometimes just isn’t as important as getting the job done (i.e., not destroying the ankles of the other shoppers just trying to get some chips.)

Work isn’t like that, though. Leaders need to be transparent with their instruction - even moreso when asked. “Because I told you so,” might work with your kids (Ed.’s note: It does not) but it is not a winning strategy in the office and should be reserved for those whose decision-making processes are nearly non-existent.

Employees like to see the end results of their work and that it is being used for a larger purpose - it helps them buy into a shared mission and goal. When they feel their work just goes into some black hole (or worse, was simply done as a box-checking exercise with no real purpose), they won’t approach the task with the same rigor and effort as one they know will be appreciated and well-utilized.

Engaged employees create better work product for the final end-user, and transparency is an easy way to get the kind of buy-in that leads to better work.

So Who Are the Good Ones?

We’ve talked about the bad kinds of leaders, but what are the good kinds? Honestly, a lot of them are simply the opposite of the bad.

The chaos agent is countered by the clarity creator; someone who has a clear sense of strategic direction that only changes outside of a relatively set schedule when external factors dictate it. You can’t avoid chaos all the time, but this leader at least works to get things into the complex, if not complicated portion of the Cynefin framework to get everyone aligned. They also avoid the “thinking out loud” inadvertent chaos by doing it only when the audience and situation allows, which is rarely.

The information hoarder’s alter ego is someone who is happy to loop people in when appropriate and to keep others briefed on progress across a wide range of workstreams. Instead of creating forced relevancy within the organization by withholding and selectively sharing information, they are confident enough in their work product to let that do the talking (and these two traits - info sharing and solid work product - tend to be highly correlated.)

Finally the opaque toddler parent sees their opposite in that transparent leader who not only lets juniors in on how their work is contributing to the larger goal, but also passing down any feedback received for said work. Maintaining this feedback loop keeps employees engaged and also drives better work product through constant improvement.

Avoid the bad and try to work for the good - easier said than done, but a goal that should remain constant throughout one’s career.

Grab Bag Section

WTF Devers: If you’re the highest paid person in your organization and have two workstreams, and then one of those workstreams is removed - allowing you to focus on a single one - it would follow logical sense that you would then be a little bit better in that one workstream. That is, if your name is not Rafael Devers.

Devers is the highest paid player on the Red Sox, and his third basemen duties were taken over by the free agent signing of Alex Bregman. There was a will they/won’t they aspect to Bregman and Devers at third, but it would be clinical insanity to not put Bregman coming off of a 2024 Gold Glove season.

Which put Devers at designated hitter. Time to focus purely on the swing and the mechanics and the offense. And yet, four games into the season and Devers is 0-16. He set an MLB record for most strikeouts in the first four games of a season (12.) His greatest achievement for the Sox so far is a walk.

Is it early? Yes. Should Sox fans be freaking out? Probably not. Should Devers be doing better than .000 and 12 Ks at this point in the season? Absolutely.

Album of the Week: You know it as soon as the piano begins on “So What.” It also spawned what could very well be the most quotable Adam Sandler lines for middle school kids across the country. This week we’re diving into a reader request for AOTW: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

We take for granted musical progress - especially for music created well before our birth years. It’s hard to understate the paradigm-shifting nature of Davis’ 1959 album. It represented a heads-first dive into modal jazz - a new derivative of the famous genre that saw artists play within multiple tonal centers, as opposed to focusing on chord progression while staying within the guardrails of a single scale. It was a move that would change the jazz world, and lead to another incredible album (potentially this newsletter’s favorite jazz album) John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

The album was done in two sessions - one for each side of the LP. Davis didn’t give the sextet a lot of notice on what was to be played, instead simply giving a sense of where they should be playing in from a scale and melody perspective, hoping for the improvisation to lead. And it sure did.

While the newsletter prefers side 1 (the swap at piano for Wynton Kelly in place of Bill Evans to make it more bluesy makes “Freddie Freeloader” a top track on the album), you can’t really go wrong with Davis’s magnum opus. Give it a spin this week as we enter spring and leave the winter blues in the rear view.

Quote of the Week: “More is lost in indecision than wrong decision. Indecision is the thief of opportunity. It will steal you blind.” - Cicero

See you next week!