Not everyone is feeling patriotic.1

Those whose pride has waned would point to the United States’ rank as 24th in the 2026 World Happiness Report. We’re 62nd globally in life expectancy, and our education system is lagging: We’re 28th in math, 12th in science, and 6th in reading. These are indisputable facts.

Those full of patriotic fervor would argue that our economic might is still peerless and opportunities are present here that exist nowhere else in the world — it’s why so many people from around the world want to live in America. And our military might has led to a global, free market, which has created prosperity across the world. The United States remains the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP, and GDP per capita is among the best in the world. These, too, are indisputable facts.

Why (I think) America is the greatest country on Earth

The United States Constitution is the oldest continuously operating written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world. The promise of the American experiment — a land where all people, regardless of race, creed, religion, or socioeconomic status are equal — is intact.

For me, America is an ideal we continually strive to reach. Progress, while falling short, does not mean failure. Growth should be celebrated. Acknowledging America’s shortcomings is not anti-patriotic; it’s an understanding that we’re not done with the work, and that we the people are not done forming a more perfect union.

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Too often, and to our national detriment, these concepts are viewed as mutually exclusive. One must either be critical of America (and therefore be not proud of it) or one must be unabashedly supportive (unwilling to acknowledge any shortcomings).

It’s a false binary.

To wit:

Over the last 100 years we’ve collapsed our national poverty rate. But we should still want to help people who are experiencing poverty. The number of people who own homes has drastically increased, yet housing costs are still exploding relative to income, putting home ownership out of reach for too many people (a problem that, if solved, would dramatically alter prosperity for many).

The graphic above proves America is a nation of conflicting truths, but truths nonetheless. In that vein, here are four conflicting truths I love about America.

The judicial system

The presumption of innocence and the requirement that the state carry the burden of proof is one of the most brilliant facets of American life. Our founders designed a judicial system biased towards letting a guilty person walk free — rather than send an innocent person to jail.

Even among modern judicial systems that presume innocence, American judicial fabric is special.

• The burden of proof on the state in America is uncommonly high — “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Few other democracies require the state to clear such a high bar.

• Jury trials by groups of peers are common in the U.S. It’s not so in other western democracies.

• The inquisitorial tradition of most of continental Europe, where an investigating judge actively builds the factual record pre-trial, is markedly different from what happens in America, where the state must present evidence to a jury in public.

• In the United States, illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible. Other countries have looser approaches to tainted evidence using discretionary balancing tests. The question about whether or not tainted evidence can be included in a trial is in the hands of the judge.

America also has the dubious distinction of the highest incarceration rates in the world. The majority of people who are released from prison relapse; the American judicial system’s ability to rehabilitate the guilty is left severely wanting.

For all its failings, our judicial system’s total bias towards the accused is real, rare, worth being proud of.

Free speech

It’s incredible that anyone in this country can burn an American flag without reprisal. No democracy on Earth protects speech as fiercely as the First Amendment does. Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia — they’ve all criminalized hate speech.

In America, you can march as a Klansman.2

You can protest a soldier’s funeral with hateful signs.3

For the most part, you can lie about people with impunity.4

America has enshrined the idea that the danger of a government empowered to define what acceptable speech is is far more dangerous than the risks of the speech itself. But free speech absolutism also allows disinformation, coordinated harassment, or hatred that doesn’t quiiiiite reach the legal limits of a threat to run rampant. We protect those who engage in hateful speech or expression more than any country on Earth — the downsides are apparent and obvious every day (just spend a little time in the comment section of any website).

But the rights enshrined in the First Amendment, including free speech, are radical — radical enough to be genuinely special.

Wealth creation

Consider this:

America is undoubtedly peerless at creating wealth. Measured at every decile of the income distribution, Americans at the bottom outpace their counterparts in France and the United Kingdom, and run approximately even with Germany. Even Mississippi — the lowest-income state in the union — exceeds the median disposable income of the United Kingdom and Japan.

The average American in the bottom income quintile also spends about 20% of household income on healthcare, a rate far higher than peer nations (which eats into disposable income). And Miles Corak’s intergenerational earnings elasticity (IGE) data shows that Americans have less upward mobility than Germans and Nordics. That’s a problem we have to solve — and we can acknowledge the need for an economic policy that drives more upward mobility with the knowledge that Americans are, generally, a rich and prosperous people.

Immigration

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” — Frmr. President Ronald Reagan

The United States is a melting pot like nowhere else in the world, and we’re better for it: The PISA gap5 between immigrant- and native-born kids in America is a few points. In France, it’s more than forty. By and large, by the second generation, immigrants’ kids are just, simply, American. Nearly 50% of Fortune 500 companies in 2025 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. The Congressional Budget Office recently found6 that immigrants will add $7 trillion to the economy by 2034.

The legal immigration process is also a mess.

The caps that govern legal immigration today are decades old and haven’t been updated for modern population growth, economic change, or labor demand — in large part because Congress hasn’t passed a comprehensive overhaul of the legal immigration system since 1986. The H-1B program — the main channel for skilled foreign workers — caps new visas at 85,000 a year and allocates them by random lottery (which is dumb and bad).

We assimilate immigrants better than anyone else on Earth and our multi-national society is part of what makes America America. It’s special. Yet somehow, we cannot, for the life of us, create a salient framework where a legal, skilled, fully-compliant applicant doesn’t have to wait a decade7 to gain permanent status.

America the beautiful

250 years into the American experiment, and I could not be more proud of the ideals our country stands for — even when we haven’t reached those ideals.

You may disagree, dear reader. You may have felt yourself feeling less than patriotic as our nation celebrated its 250th. That’s okay. My hope is that collectively, we can come together. America is more than a single politician, more than one failing, more than one statistic.

We live here. We should want to make it better. We should strive to improve and reach towards the American ideal. And we should want to be proud of it.

I am.

In service of a more perfect Union — always.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out her website to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

Much ink has been spilled about The Pitt, HBO’s hit medical drama and spiritual ER sequel as an example of competence porn.

Competence porn describes anything where ultra-high skilled people in extremely stressful situations handle themselves well. The Pitt, one of the most intense and, according to internet observers, accurate medical dramas, fits the bill.

I’ve been catching up on For All Mankind, an alternate-history show where the space race never ended, where NASA remained a stalwart fixture of American culture and the American psyche. It, too, is competence porn — manned space travel is, on balance, one of the most dangerous things a human being can do. The ability to solve problems on the fly, making science cool, and the operational rigor that would theoretically go into manned exploration and colonization of the moon and Mars is competence porn manifest.

And in an era where many leaders are, shall we say, not shining examples of professional competence — and I’m not naming names here, so think what you will of this statement — media depicting people being really good at really hard jobs is an emotional salve.

Though, it’s not just because so many people in positions of power and fame seem bumbling. AI drivel all over the internet and fast fashion clothing that falls apart after a few wears and every movie being IP crap rather than original stories and shrinkflation (give me back my full bag of chips) and every app getting new AI-powered updates that make them worse — it’s all the enshittification1 of everything.

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We, collectively (and perhaps subconsciously), crave quality. So, as I watched For All Mankind’s astronauts and cosmonauts tackle the unforgiving vacuum of space, I naturally thought of Dyson.

Space travel and hair clips are definitely the same

Dyson is a company that makes household appliances, most well known for its vacuums and hair dryers and stylers. A video of Dyson’s engineers talking about what went into the design of the company’s hair clips, along with the “Kinetic Endurance test” to show just how well the clips work, has made the rounds on Twitter recently.

The gist of the conversation was: Damn, they made the hell out of these hairclips.

So naturally, I bought them for my wife, and dear reader, they exceed the hype2. They are so well made. You can feel the craft and care. Dyson did not need to spend the engineering resources to make peerless hairclips, but they did. These hair clips too, are competence porn manifest — there are people at Dyson who decided to do a thing — and do it incredibly well.

Whole-assing → competence porn

In one of my earliest essays, There’s only one way to learn from failure, I wrote about living whole ass.

Ron Swanson, easily a top five sitcom character of all time, is played by Nick Offerman on the show Parks & Rec. His character became known for his brash one-liners.

“I’m a simple man. I like pretty, dark-haired women and breakfast food.”

“Any dog under fifty pounds is a cat and cats are useless.”

“Fishing relaxes me. It’s like yoga, except I still get to kill something.”

My personal favorite Swansonism is “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” In other words, caring about one thing and doing it well is better than being mediocre at multiple things.

The emergence of competence porn in our media is a corollary to living whole ass. As we see people in positions of power fail to wield that power with competency, we collectively yearn to see people do, well, not that. We want people to be competent. We want to see people live whole-ass — to commit to something and excel.

In my own professional corner of the world, I’ve worked with a lot of startups, which, in their early marketing and comms days, try to do a little bit of everything. ‘We have nothing going on,’ they think, ‘so we might as well throw some darts and see what hits.’ The spirit of experimentation is good, but in truth, it’s just the enshittification of comms and marketing.

They end up spreading themselves so thin that they’re unable to execute anything well enough to understand if it’s a meaningful experiment in the first place. You gotta get enough information to make a decision about whether or not something is working. And to get sufficient information, you need to do something well.

Concretely, the bad version of a startup just beginning its comms and marketing journey might look something like this:

• A blog, with customer case studies and product updates

• A newsletter from the founders

• Founder-led social

• Company social

• Media engagement

• Digital marketing

• Event marketing

Imagine you have one full time employee (or often, as is my case, only a part time freelancer as the lone comms/marketing person). There is no reasonable way to execute all of these workstreams well enough to know whether or not they are worthwhile.

It’d be much better to first assess company goals (not comms/marketing goals), pick two or three things from that list that you believe will contribute to company goals, whole-ass the hell out of them, and then decide: Did this work? Why or why not? Should we change how we execute a program or stop it all together?

It’s more than our jobs

I recently wrote that radical competency is a key for freelancers to stand out in a crowded industry. It’s a take I wholeheartedly stand by, but, after writing it (and thinking about this essay), I’ve come to the conclusion that people want radical competency in all aspects of their lives, the personal and the professional.

Quality. Radical competency. Competence porn. Living whole-ass. Making things well. These are all the same way of saying the same thing: Do a good job. Anything you do, do it well.

Professionally, for me, that’s communications. Personally, it means exacting a measure of care over the things I do. For you, reader? I don’t know. But I do know if we all care about how we show up in the world and care about what we do and what we make both big and small, the world’s enshittification will not last.

Dyson is proof of the road less traveled, of the value of aiming high and succeeding, of doing a few things — and doing them damn well.

Let us all be our best Dyson.

This is meant to be cathartic, punchy, and fun. If you get offended, don’t. It’s all in good fun (mostly). Have any takes of your own? Drop a comment.

An obsession with top tier legacy media: 🔥

Whenever I meet anyone in the “industry” — founder, CMO, comms flack — who is unduly obsessed with traditional legacy media (to the point they ignore everything else, like trade and new media), it’s a huge red flag. Practically speaking, trade press must be a critical component of most startups’ press strategy. A construction startup that refuses to talk to Constructive Dive, a defense tech startup who acts too good for DefenseOne, or a supply chain startup who thinks FreightWaves isn’t worth their time are all leaving proverbial money on the table. These are highly reputable outlets that reach key audiences, and they are worth investing time and energy in.

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And in the modern comms environment, legacy media has lost some of its value. This is not in dispute. Ignoring trade press and new media like influencers and YouTubers and Substackers and reporters-turned-newsletter-writers is an unconscionable error.

Branding defense tech as “cool” is offensive: 🔥🔥

I’m so done with defense tech companies branding themselves as “cool.” Once upon a time, a defense tech startup announced a new helmet that would supposedly give the wearer a head-up display (HUD) with information they needed. “It’s like Halo!” observers praised unintelligently.

Here’s the rub: Halo is a videogame. It is cool. I’ve spent many a night playing Halo 3. But you can play Halo in your pajamas. You can be surrounded by chips and soda and sink into a leather recliner surrounded by your best friends and build nothing but happy memories as you crush n00bs.

War is not cool.

America’s warfighters are at risk. 13 servicemembers have died since the conflict with Iran started. Here are their names:

1. Maj. John ‘Alex’ Klinner

2. Capt. Ariana G. Savino

3. Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons

4. Tech. Sgt. Ashley B. Pruitt

5. Capt. Seth R. Koval

6. Capt. Curtis J. Angst

7. Sgt. Declan Coady

8. Capt. Cody Khork

9. Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor

10. Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens

11. Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien

12. Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan

13. Sgt. Benjamin Pennington

Building technology for members of the Armed Forces — for America and her allies — is a responsibility. A big one. It should be treated and talked about with the gravity it deserves. Going for “cool” like you’re Apple selling a smartphone diminishes defense tech brands in the eyes of serious observers.

Saying “PR” as an abbreviation for press release is horrific: 🔥🔥🔥

Nothing gets my goat more than when people abbreviate “press release” to PR. Honestly, it gives imposter vibes.

PR means public relations. It has (insert Taylor Swift voice here) never, ever, ever 🎵 meant press release. You do not put a public relations on the wire. You do not write a public relations or pitch a public relations to reporter.

Press release is 12 letters. P-r-e-s-s-r-e-l-e-a-s-e. Just, for the love of God, write it out. Because if you abbreviate “press release” as PR, you will almost assuredly out yourself as someone who, very simply, doesn’t get it.

That’s all for this edition of Unpitchable. What did you think?? Did any of these hot takes get your blood boiling like mine is? Do you have takes of your own? Let me know in the comments.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out her website to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

The Praxis Forum is dead. Long live To Wit.

I’ll still be here on a semi-monthly-ish cadence with the same opinions you didn’t ask for about communications, technology, and the state of things.

With a better name.

To wit (conj.) — that is to say; namely.

It felt right. The publication has always been a vehicle for saying the quiet part loud — that is to say, making explicit what the industry would rather leave implicit. Shoutout to Gia (you can find her here) for suggestion.

You’ll find us at to-wit.co going forward. Nothing on your end to do. Unless you want to forward this to a friend or two to subscribe to. Or not. Your call.

Share To Wit

Wit intact, I remain,

Ian

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But at some point, every relationship was new. I didn’t know the industry (there’s a first time for everything!) and I didn’t know the personalities of the team I was working with. And invariably, I received effusive praise for work that I felt was, generally (and to quote Don Draper), “what the money was for.” I didn’t view it as exceptionally above-and-beyond.

I’m reluctant to attribute such praise to my own exceptional ability. I do believe I’m quite good at my job but I’m not arrogant enough to describe myself as a wunderkind. I also think it’s fair to say that I’m better at my job than most.

Comms is a crowded industry: For each reporter, there are six or seven comms flacks1. Standing out among the crowd isn’t easy. And while I firmly believe one should always strive for peerlessness, being what I call “radically competent” is the key to long-term success.

The concept of work in the Zone of Radical Competency is abstract; it represents work well done, which will vary depending on the job to do. The path to radical competency is anything but abstract (I’ll show you how to get there). And if your work consistently hits the Zone of Radical Competency, you’ll far exceed the vast majority of your peers.

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Be proactive

You’d be shocked at how many comms or marketing people wait for direction from a superior to do things. Sometimes, comms flacks are unwilling to propose big strategic swings (like a massive investment in video) unless their boss tells them: “Propose three big ideas.” I’ve heard horror stories of comms flacks and PR agencies not building media lists for an upcoming news moment until prompted.

At the risk of strawmanning, they’ll sometimes use organizational strictures — “I have to get approval!” — as a reason to avoid proactivity.

Reminder: You can just do things.

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And even if you really, truly, actually do not have the operational or tactical freedom to do things, you can still have ideas. You can share those ideas. You can aggressively advocate for those ideas to be executed. You can pair ideas with a path towards execution to demonstrate idea viability.

Being proactive can manifest itself tactically — little things like suggesting a Reddit AMA or training an up-and-coming executive to be a spokesperson can move the needle. Likewise, stepping back and raising your gaze, assessing the marketing/comms operation (even just your slice of it) from a strategic view and proposing a solution to solve problems can also create value.

Don’t let the work happen to you. Get in the driver’s seat. If you do, you’ll almost certainly hit the Zone of Radical Competency.

Ask questions

There are absolutely such things as dumb questions. But it’s imperative to be unafraid to ask them.

In my own world, where I spend time with a lot of engineers and technical leaders and CTOs, I ask a boatload of dumb questions. I’m no expert in the technical differences between RL and traditional deep learning techniques (I don’t have a PhD), and I’d rather hear about it from a CTO. Could I ask Claude? Absolutely. But the value of kicking the tires with a true, human expert affords understanding and perspective.

The knowledge I gain from asking dumb questions to smart people does four things:

1. I learn complicated topics quickly

2. I gain conversational fluency across technical domains

3. I obtain specific insights into technicalities that I wouldn’t otherwise know

4. I understand why someone thinks what they think about a technical topic

Curiosity is, in and of itself, a sign of a radically competent person. And knowledge empowers me to be more proactive, which is important2 to hit the Zone of Radical Competency.

Fight back

Radically competent people fight back. Most high-agency founders do not want a “yes person,” they want real counsel. This isn’t always true. Once upon a time, during a kickoff meeting with a client in my PR firm days, I pushed back on something only to be promptly fired on day one by that client3. However, in most of my experiences, healthy disagreement leads to healthy relationships.

So if you disagree with something, speak up. Have salient rationale. Stand by your opinion. Speak simply and directly and explain why you believe what you do. Even if the initiative is not strictly a comms one, it will likely impact how the brand is perceived. And as I wrote about this time last year, comms people play a key role in how businesses make decisions.

Two critical caveats:

• If you learn new information, change your opinion. Don’t be wishy-washy, but don’t be afraid to consider new inputs that might change the output

• Once a decision is made at the organizational level, get on board. The founders’ names are on the door. They make the ultimate call

Crush the competition

Excellence is the north star. Reconsider my beautiful graph.

I want to be in the far right zone, that of true experts. We all should want that professionally. Like the great Ron Swanson once said, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” Meaning, if I’m going to do something, I care about doing the thing well, because I want to be as far right on the x-axis as I can be.

But I also know I’m not going to have demonstrable expertise in everything I do all the time. But if I set that as a goal, I will, at worst, land in the Zone of Radical Competency. It’s a shoot-for-the-moon-land-among-the-stars type thing.

If you pair an effortful mindset with proactivity, a natural curiosity that leads you to ask questions, and a willingness to advocate for the ideas you believe in, you’ll likely be better than the vast majority of your peers.

And make no mistake — that matters. Yes, many PR people and comms flacks are friends and in communities and there’s a lot of work to go around, but the work is not infinite. The size of the pie may grow and change, but it is finite. If you want your slice, you need to stand out.

When so many comms flacks decidedly don’t get shit done, it’s a good reputation to cultivate. The Zone of Radical Competency is the way.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

Over the past few months, I’ve written about what our online communication habits are costing us, often in unseen, underappreciated, and acutely dangerous ways. I made the case that we should ban TikTok for geopolitical reasons, and dove deep into how short form video is destroying attention spans. I even went as far as to propose long-form journalism as an antidote, because for an alarming number of people, full-length books contain, somehow, depressingly, too many words to manage.

As a keen observer of politics, I’ve also been thinking about how our primary yet dubious methodologies for consumption of information via the internet — short form video and short form text — have impacted the American experiment and our collective psyche.

As I noodled on this topic and began to approach this essay, I thought, essentially, politics-by-short-form-text was the original sin; that we’re being governed by 240 character-length blurbs whose hyper-condensed nature is functionally mismatched with the breadth and complexity of public policy challenges is eroding our collective ability to grapple with those issues.

But amidst (another) war in the Middle East, collapsing geopolitical alliances, a weakening dollar, rampant government shutdowns over immigration enforcement, rising costs of higher education and housing, I realized the situation is far more dire. Our mode of communicating about politics has degraded further, to something more base than ultra-short-form text: Memes.

Memes: A brief history and a radical present

A meme is an image, video, piece of text, or gif that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations, intended to be humorous and referential. Back in my day, just after Y2K, we had a small-ish subset of defined memes1 with defined meanings. We had All Your Base Are Belong to Us and Numa Numa guy. And then the Dos Equis guy, for example, rose to prominence in the second generation of memes.

Nowadays, everything is memed — and it’s memed in near real-time. As a member of the terminally online community, I am embarrassingly up to speed on the latest memes. I am a guilty participant, sharing memes with friends about the New York Giants’ draft freak Arvelle Reece and really serious stuff, like the Trump vs Pope argument (that particular internet spat resulted in Trump posting-then-deleting an AI-generated meme of him as Jesus2).

But I’m just a regular guy that likes to laugh at funny stuff on the internet. The problem is that some of the largest and most prominent institutions on Earth also have begun to communicate via memes, and that’s — and hear me when I say this — actively destructive, especially in politics.

To wit, three examples.

One: The House Democrats sharing a Kendrick Lamar meme about the White House implying President Trump is a pedophile (a play on Lamar’s diss track implying the same claim about Drake).

Two: The White House, in the middle of war, making memes — which are meant to be humorous — about dropping bombs on another country.

A recent Politico Playbook headline was literally Trump world vibe check: Meme edition

Three: The Iranian Embassy posting an AI-generated meme video of Trump, mocking his handling of the Strait of Hormuz.

I would like to pause here for a moment to let the absurdity of the above sink in.

Still with me?

Both Republicans, Democrats, and America’s hostile adversaries are joking online about war, the death of civilians and soldiers, and having sex with children.

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Again, it bears repeating that I share memes about all sorts of inane topics. I understand the predilection to joke about the horrors, and I love when comedians use humor as a path for social commentary. Sometimes, the only way to avoid crying is to laugh.

But again, I’m just a guy. They’re just comedians. Their job is to make us laugh, not to decide whether or not to put soldiers in harm’s way, or whether or not we can have paid parental leave, or how many tax dollars we allocate to help people experiencing homelessness get back on their feet, or how much housing we build, or the myriad other very real responsibilities of federal, state, and local government institutions..

There are, sadly, nigh infinite examples of prominent public figures in politics and business from across the range of the political spectrum who now rely on memes as a central plank of their non-video-based communication strategies. When I worked in politics in the early 2010s, a politician posting a meme was risky, aberrant behavior — certainly not the communication style du jour

I’m not trying to be some stodgy old man yelling at clouds. I just don’t think we should have serious debates about the most fundamental, will-the-next-generation-live-better-than-the-generation-before, is-the-American-dream-still-alive type issues confronting our society via meme.

Policymakers need to propose solutions to societal problems, not make jokes.

But how did we get here? And can we return to the days where taking serious issues seriously mattered more than ratio’ing someone on Twitter?

All algorithms, all the time

Modernity is defined by, if nothing else, algorithmic curation. These days, there is so much more content to watch or read or buy. To commoditize this glut of stuff, companies use machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to recommend things specific to each user.

I wrote about this extensively in a previous essay, but here’s the pertinent bit:

Every major social media platform “recommends” content with posts from people you choose to follow. TikTok does it well; Twitter, not so much. Netflix has recommended shows that I never knew existed, then watched and loved (RIP Teenage Bounty Hunters).

When I buy an air purifier on Amazon, Amazon recommends that I buy five more air purifiers, for reasons that remain unclear. Hell, odds are that if you’re reading this, algorithmic recommendation engines played a role in surfacing this content to you.

If you think this is limited to our interactions online — “I can escape The Algorithm if I go outside” — you’d be wrong. Grocery stores maximize revenue by using AI to optimize what products go where and on what shelves.

Because these algorithms prioritize short-form everything to match our limited attention spans, then of course memes have become a popular way to get eyeballs on a post.

Which is cool when we’re talking about probiotic soda or shoes or whatever. It’s less cool when we’re, you know, talking about policies that dictate the direction of the United States and democracies around the world.

Every viral meme posted by a politician doesn’t capture the nuance of public policy — it adds to the pile of slop on the internet.

The death of expertise

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, distrust in scientists has grown by 15% points.3 Also, I’m loath to relitigate the role of experts throughout COVID.

The main takeaway? The idea of expertise has taken a hit. “I’ve done my own research,” feels like a defining phrase of modern times.

What does this have to do with memes, exactly?

My pet theory goes something like this: Trust in institutions and the experts who populate them across science, academia, politics, and business is down. Today, the general public is more willing to listen to people with whom we already agree with or are entertained by, than willing to be challenged by facts4. As a result, shitposting memes, something inherently incongruous with deep examination of real issues, has evolved into a common form of communication, because the people posting them oftentimes do not have demonstrable expertise, and therefore forms more appropriate forms of communication — long form writing, a nuanced discussion — are inaccessible to them.

Memes are the only thing that’s left.

And make no mistake — as far as disseminating a message goes, memes work (see the memes above, which each have millions of views, likes, and reshares).

But in the realm of public policy, memes are destroying our ability as a collective to meaningfully grapple with the most important issues confronting our society.

(Hint: That’s bad.)

Give Congress a pay raise

About 200-ish years ago, Joseph de Maistre, Lawyer and former Kingdom of Sardinia Minister Plenipotentiary to the Russian Empire5 wrote that “every country has the government it deserves.”

The pessimistic side of me wholeheartedly believes this. Most members of Congress are not the creme de la creme that you’d want making decisions (see: The death of expertise).

In the 119th Congress, the average age is 58 years old. There are 50 senators over the age of 65. I refuse to believe that this demographic, full of people racing towards retirement and social security, are ready to grapple with the economic implications of AI or manage the rising cost of housing and higher education or the geopolitical realities of the Indo-Pacific.

It’s farcical, at best. When was the last time you met a 70 year old in the wild and thought, “yeah, this person should be in charge of everything.”6

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But the incentives do not exist to get our best and brightest into public service. Members of Congress are paid $174k a year. It’s not dirt — that’s a good salary! — but if you want to earn more than that, you’re better off being a pilot. Or a dentist. Or a doctor. Or a lawyer. Or an architect. Or a financial manager.

Private companies learned a long time ago that compensation and benefits attract talent (there’s a reason why Meta is paying top AI execs a billion dollars each in total comp7). If we want to attract serious policymakers who will communicate with the general public about serious issues in a serious manner, one thing we can do is give ‘em a raise.

Hopefully that will breed some competition, at least. And ideally some people who can communicate in complete, coherent sentences without their remarks written down.

How do we reverse policy-by-meme?

The answer to that question is, quite simply, I don’t know.

I’ve been remiss in writing essays because the shit-post-ification of U.S. policy has been rattling around my brain like a ping pong ball for, quite literally, months. And then I came upon this tweet8:

“The downfall of society begins with the individual.”

It sure does.

So while I do not have any societally proscriptive recommendations, I can start with myself. I can give dense topics, like the war with Iran or AI’s potential white collar job apocalypse or the housing shortage, the due diligence they deserve. I can read. I can digest a myriad of opinions about solutions to these topics which I can use to formulate my own. In other words, I can, myself, try to be a reasonably informed observer about the world. And that means, when there is something I care about, I am going to engage with it — not just meme about it.

If the downfall of society begins with the individual, then so too can a society’s resurgence begin with each and every one of us.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

“I am a web developer!” I screech to no one, my office empty save the dozens upon dozens of books piled behind me and my desk and computer and my placard that says “Everything is Figureoutable.”

I am not a web developer.

But on February 24, thanks to my anxiety over timelines to identify and solidify a relationship with a contractor to do web development work for a startup I work with (it was taking a while), I decided: fuck it, I can do this.

I tried different tools specifically built for AI-powered Figma this-and-that or AI-powered Webflow so-and-so. They didn’t work for me (I’m not naming them because overt negativity doesn’t serve anyone). I struggled to move things from Figma to Canva in the way I wanted, and struggled with the templatized nature of AI-powered website development tools that prevented me from getting things exactly just so.1

I struggled because I am not a web developer.

So, I turned to Claude. I asked it an open-ended question, and we came up with a plan: Rather than create Webflow elements from scratch, I could use existing website elements, duplicate them, and then update them to align with the copy I’d developed and design I’d envisioned.

I am not a web developer, so I don’t know how to do that.

But after six hours of screenshotting my Webflow dashboard and settings and asking Claude stupid questions again and again and again and learning how combo classes work and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t know about Webflow before February 24, I had two website pages ready to go.

I am still not a website developer.

And as someone of exceedingly limited design acumen, I do not think AI-powered tools can enable me to replace web developers (let alone replace web developers wholesale).

But damn did it feel good.

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Claude at war

After reports that Claude was used during the operation in which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured, Secretary of War Hegseth said that Anthropic has until February 27 to enable the Pentagon to use Claude “without restrictions,” lest face punishment2 from the Department.

Charlie Bullock is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, and gives a pretty decent overview:

The other threat levied at Anthropic is to designate it a supply chain threat/national security risk. This is usually reserved for foreign companies who we know are doing sketchy stuff, but it would look something like this:

Imagine Microsoft and Palantir both use Claude to develop some of their products. Were Claude named a “supply chain threat,” then Microsoft and Palantir, both of whom do business with the Pentagon, would either need to stop using Claude across all their systems or stop working with the Pentagon (hint: they’ll stop using Claude).

I present this without comment:

As Sam Altman is wont to note, ChatGPT has more free users in Texas than Anthropic does as a whole, primarily because Anthropic has geared its GTM motion more towards enterprise use cases (vs consumer use cases — though they are obviously not mutually exclusive). Such a designation would cripple Anthropic.

Will they fold?3

I don’t know.

But given that Claude is the only model capable of running in classified networks thanks to its IL6 certifications — what Claude itself called, when I was researching why Claude was so important to the military, a “compliance and infrastructure moat” that would take other companies like OpenAI months if not years to replicate — it’s clear the Pentagon needs Anthropic.

Vibe checks

This week, Sam Altman, aforementioned CEO of OpenAI, made waves because he bemoaned the energy it takes to train a human. Or something.

It would take a dedicated 1,000+ word essay to unpack all the things wrong with that sentiment — both from a pure media training perspective and from a, I don’t know, ground-truth humanist perspective? — so I am not going to do that here.4

I will only say that for my purposes and the work I do, I pick my AI model based on vibes. I am not technical enough to parse the differences between Codex (OpenAI’s coding agent) and Claude Code, for example.

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Sam Altman continuously gives me bad vibes.5 I don’t use ChatGPT anymore.

Claude gives me good vibes.6 I am a paying Claude user. It enables me to be a better consultant — four years ago I could not have built two website pages for a startup.

This week, I did.

I anxiously await Friday. I want to see if Anthropic bends to Pentagon demands or maintains its safety-related guardrails. We can (and should) have AI-powered drone swarms. We need autonomous technologies on the battlefield to win the next war. And I want us to win, not China. This writer is a USA-number-one kind of guy. But I do not think we should cede all decision-making authority about the use of kinetics to machines. I actually think that is a very, very, very bad idea.

But mostly, I want to see if anyone building foundation models — technology with the power to upend society like no technology since the advent of the internet — will take a principled stand for what they have said they believe in. Leaders who maintain their convictions when it’s easy and when it’s hard are all too uncommon. I’d rather deal with someone I disagree with who chooses to stand firm than someone who changes what they think based on what direction the wind is blowing.

I am fortunate to work with principled tech leaders who have red lines and values, who choose to stick to those values. However, I fear they are the minority. I fear people who have tremendous power can be moved away from what they believe in and forsake their principles to accrue more power.

I’m curious which camp Dario falls into.

I’m curious if Claude will, after Friday, still give good vibes.

I do not need to regurgitate these arguments, nor the many takes across Twitter and Substack about the meritoriousness of Anthropic’s ads.

Instead, I want to focus on two mistakes OpenAI made that put them in this position in the first place — with advice on how to avoid them.

Error one: Loose lips sink ships

When you are an enterprise of OpenAI’s scale and prominence, you should expect everything to get leaked — everything. And that’s what happened.

• On November 29, 2025, plans for ChatGPT’s ads first leaked thanks to intrepid Android observers who found evidence of UI strings for sponsored content.

• On December 30, 2025, Redditors shared leaked mockups of ads in ChatGPT

• On January 16, OpenAI confirmed it would begin testing ads for certain ChatGPT users.

For those counting at home, that’s 48 days between the leak and anything official from OpenAI.

That’s 48 days that OpenAI ceded the narrative to… everyone else. That includes competitors, like Anthropic.

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As a communicator, it’s better to be on the front foot, playing offensive. Making a proactive argument about why something is good is easier than defending a decision from criticism. OpenAI put themselves on defense by being unable or not ready to engage publicly when the leak happened. As a communicator, you have to be ready for leaks before they happen. Sometimes that means saying nothing. But in a case like this, with ads — which are decidedly a hot button issue — it is mission-critical to have a plan baked and statements ready.

Error two: Defensive defense

OpenAI probably acknowledges the reality: People hate ads.3 Yes, ads allow things to be free, like ChatGPT, which democratizes access to those things. They are a billion studies you can look up to show you, intellectually, why ads are good, and the internet is replete with people pontificating about the value of ads.4

But emotionally? People don’t like ‘em.

If, like ChatGPT, you’ve spent a month and a half functionally silent after your plan to introduce a thing people don’t like into your product has leaked, the stakes are raised. When you finally do say something, the tone of what is said becomes as important as the content.

The tone becomes doubly important if, like ChatGPT, your CEO and CMO choose to communicate about ads not in the aggregate, but in response to a competitor’s ads dinging your choice. Now, let’s look at said CEO and CMO’s responses (warning, these tweets are long as hell).

First, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman:

Now, OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch:

They start their statements by directly addressing Anthropic’s ads.

From Atlman: “I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. . . I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad. . .”

From Rouch: “Here’s what’s not funny: Calling “ads” a betrayal when your business model is selling paid subscriptions to companies. . . . Real betrayal isn’t ads. It’s control.”

These statements are so defensive — dare I say whiny. It reminds me of a famous tweet from Internet Poet Laureate Dril:

The truth is, the ads are funny. Based, even. OpenAI got cooked by Anthropic. It is what it is.

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Instead of fighting back on Anthropic’s terms, OpenAI could have made a defensive comms moment positive by emphasizing solely the benefits ads provide. Focus on the good outcomes, not the mechanism that provides those outcomes. People don’t care how the sausage is made (ads), they just want tasty sausage (free stuff!).

Instead, they started their statements by complaining about the opposition. But no one cares! “It’s not fair” is not a winning argument.

In nearly every debate, there is a way to frame the same idea defensively or positively. Even when a company is being critiqued — rightly or wrongly — even when a company is playing defense, that does not automatically necessitate a defensive response.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes you should punch back. Sometimes directly tearing down an opponent is what’s called for. And sometimes, silence is the best answer.

In OpenAI’s case, they chose to be defensive about ads — something about which more than half of all Americans say: “they’re uncomfortable with companies using online behavior to personalize advertising.” Is that the hill to die on? Vociferously defending a thing that half of Americans hate?

Hint, dear reader: I think not.

It is not easy to be a happy warrior, to put on a smile in the face of attacks. But it very often represents the best path forward.

For Marty Supreme, he appeared on professional wrestler Cody Rhodes’ podcast, demonstrating an unbelievably deep knowledge about WWE history. Chalamet joined former NBA player Carmelo Anthony’s podcast where he showed off his New York Knicks acumen, and Anthony Edwards, current NBA superstar, proclaimed Chalamet “the white boy of the year.” During a panel to promote the Marty Supreme in Brazil, he danced to “Crank That Soulja Boy.”

There were rumors he was famed British rapper EsDeeKid, only to then appear in an EsDeeKid video and rap a verse about Marty Supreme — an incredible marketing stunt. Hell, he was the first person to stand on top of the Las Vegas Sphere.

This isn’t new for him. A year ago, in advance of musical biopic A Complete Unknown, where he portrays the titular Bob Dylan, Chalamet appeared on ESPN’s College Gameday and proved himself to the world as a true ball knower.

What’s the overlap between Bob Dylan and College football? Or, for that matter, what do a British rapper, the WWE, and various NBA stars have to do with a movie about a professional table tennis player in 1950s New York City?

On its face, not much at all. But Chalamet (and presumably, his team) have figured out something few other celebrities or founders have: Pure authenticity.

The two ingredients to authenticity

Friend and professional colleague astutely explains one of Chalamet’s best tricks: Focusing on the channel that best suits him. He’s an actor — that he radiates charisma in front of the camera should surprise no one, which is why he consistently favors video-centric promotional mediums. Chalamet, of course, marries his preferred medium with his preferred topics (the man loves sports).

Whenever I begin working with a startup, I always have Cameron’s advice in mind, and I always want to know, very simply: What do they like to talk about? With these two ingredients — topic(s) that make founders excited paired with mediums through which they excel — I’m confident I can craft a comms strategy that both supports the business (like Chalamet’s strategy aligns with promoting his movies) and gives founders their best chance to show the world what makes them unique.

Authenticity is not a new idea, and the path outlined above may seem simple. However, I often see founders make one of two mistakes that make executing the idea above next to impossible.

One: They see someone else’s version of authenticity and want to emulate that. One prime example founders look towards is Palantir founder Alex Karp and his brand of twitchy “truth telling” in the face of power. In the lead up to Palantir’s admission to the S&P 500 enrapture, he posted a super weird six minute video of him walking through the woods. Of course, it is obvious upon even the slightest interrogation that mimicry of someone else’s version of authenticity is, in fact, not authentic at all.

Two: They only want to talk about their company and what they’re doing and what they’re building. Navel gaze, navel gaze, navel gaze. Watch Chalamet’s interviews! Obviously he mentions the film he’s promoting when it comes up, but Marty Supreme is not the fulcrum of even the majority of the interviews he’s doing. He’s talking about stuff he likes — it’s naturally energizing for the audience because they can feel true, infectious excitement, and they want to engage with him. For Chalamet, that’s seeing his movie.

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Keller Cliffton, founder of Zipline, used to be a professional rock climber and excels on video. Last month, he did a video-first podcast in a bouldering gym during which he talked about and showed off his climbing abilities. Watch the video yourself — can you feel the authentic energy radiating off of Keller when he talks about climbing? Yes, the interview hits on his company (autonomous logistics via drone), but the central conceit — a rock climbing interview — works to help promote Zipline all the same. It’s the Chalamet model in action.

Another example is brought to you by Antony Brydon. Currently co-founder and CEO of BrightLoop, Antony used to be the CEO/founder of Directly, a “gig + AI software platform for customer service.” He’s a deep thinker and strong writer, so the written word is Brydon’s medium of choice. And the topic he is passionate about? Maintaining a resilient capitalistic economy during the rise of AI (which, given he was thinking about this back 2019, feels prescient). So he married his topic of interest and medium of strength, and wrote an opinion article in VentureBeat about just that.

Far be it for me to tell a founder what they’re excited about — whether it be economic systems or NBA basketball or rock climbing or real time strategy game StarCraft II, of which Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke is a fan (yet another example of a founder using their interests to help promote their organization). Whatever they are, we all have our interests, we all like weird, niche stuff.

It is, however, incumbent upon communications professionals to find out what makes founders pumped, what invigorates them intellectually, what gets them out of bed in the morning. Harnessing earnest, genuine interest through a medium in which a founder is already most effective is the best way to show the world who these people are and get their message across — authentically.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

And by Stuff, I mean goings-on in the world. As a communicator by trade, it is important that I know Stuff. Most Stuff that gets reported in the news ranges from kinda-not-great to soul crushingly bad, and the consistent consumption of Bad Stuff can weigh on the consciousness and make it hard to write. Here’s a smattering of the Bad Stuff that’s happened lately:

The Secretary of Defen– sorry, War. The Secretary of War1 reportedly ordered military strikes against boats carrying drugs. These strikes that have been described2 by the Former JAGs Working Group as “war crimes, murder, or both,” and a decision Jack Goldsmith, former United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel said3 has “no conceivable legal justification.” A recording of US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff was leaked in which he advised4 Russians on how to deal with Trump, which was rapidly followed by a deep expose5 that the Ukrainian peace plan in which Witkoff had a large hand in drafting had one central tenant: “borders matter less than the business.” Nine days prior to this report, Russian forces bombed a Ukrainian high rise, killing more than 30 civilians.

Many corners of the American Christian Institution have turned on empathy as a value worth upholding. Two National Guardsmen were shot outside the White House. Baby boomers are more likely than any other prior generation to run out of money during retirement — while US debt explodes and mandatory spending programs like Social Security remain on a fiscally unviable march towards an acrimonious death. AI and deepfakes are running rampant, empowering scammers during the holiday season, and this is to say nothing of the potential havoc they will wreak during elections.

All of this happened in the last seven days.6

It is exhausting.

I have been woefully remiss in writing essays because of the Stuff, and my simultaneous pursuit to escape the Stuff. For me, the escape is reading — I love diving into a good bit of fiction, enveloped by a world born of an author’s mind. If you want to join me in a brief respite from all the Stuff, here are, without further ado, the five best books I read in 2025, pitched to you in the length of a tweet.

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Katabasis by R.F. Kuang: 4.75/5

Katabasis is the new novel by Poppy War, Babel, and Yellowface author R. F. Kuang. A true master of genre, Katabasis is a story about two students who descend into hell to rescue their professor’s soul. It’s also a story about love and responsibility and what we owe each other — and what we owe ourselves. Anything Kuang writes is a must-read, and this is no exception.

Red Country (FIrst Law World #3) by Joe Abercrombie: 4.75/5

Red Country is one of the semi-standalone novels in Joe Abercrombie’s sprawling First Law Series. There is a primary trilogy and a sequel trilogy — in between the two, there are three standalone novels, the third of which is Red Country. No spoilers here, but Red Country brings back an OG character from the original trilogy, and the payoff of his long journey is sublime. There is a scene towards the end of this book where I felt the hairs on the nape of my neck stand on end. Truly awesome.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow: 4.75/5

I know I am six years late to reading The Ten Thousand Doors of January (much to the chagrin of my wife), but books have no expiration date. What started slow — admittedly, I didn’t love it in the beginning — became a sprawling, world-hopping exploration of family and the lengths we’ll go for the people we love. It’s never too late to read a great book.

Lightbringer by Pierce Brown: 4.5/5

Pierce Brown rocks. Lightbringer is the sixth book in the Red Rising saga and it delivers. I love the original Red Rising trilogy — it is an all-time favorite of mine, and I’ve read each book in the trilogy at least three times. When I originally picked up the fourth book, some years ago, I couldn’t get into it because Brown, for the first time, introduced POV shifts (rather than staying with one character the whole novel). When I finally got over that and continued my journey with Darrow and company (thanks to some friendly peer pressure from fellow Howlers), I read it with reckless abandon., I laughed, I cried, I felt furious, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck: 4.5/5

Another wife recommendation, A Short Stay in Hell is indeed short, coming in just a hair over 100 pages. However the stay in hell is anything but; this short story covers a longer period of time than any other book I’ve ever read and perhaps any book ever written. It is astoundingly bleak, which makes it perhaps not the best cure for Stuff, but it is so damn good I would be remiss in my book recommending duties if I did not include it in the list. My personal rankings of the 19 books I’ve read this year are what they are, and soul-crushing or no, A Short Stay in Hell made the cut.

I’ll add a brief honorable mention for A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine’s sprawling and sublime space opera. I’m in the throes of it now. I expect, had I finished it before writing this essay, Martine’s novel would have made the list — it’s a very non-traditional sci-fi book (dealing mostly about politics), the worldbuilding is one-of-a-kind and deft, and Martine has a discrete style of prose that enraptures (her use of parentheticals is a delight) — but alas, no unfinished books on the list!

Now that you know my five favorite books from 2025, tell me yours. What’d you read, what’d you love? Bonus points for fantasy and sci-fi novels. Comment below ⬇️

For me, the em dash is a writer’s best friend. It’s flexible, it’s easy to use (who even understands the rules to use a semicolon correctly?), and it feels right. You can just vibe with em dash, you know?

But to a large swath of the internet, it is a clearcut sign of AI-generated writing.

This argument is obviously bereft of any intellectual rigor. Many have explained why em dashes are not a telltale sign of AI writing, and I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of em dash defenders.

Professionally, I work in communications. I don’t know that I’d consider myself a writer writer, but I do write. I write essays here on Substack and I’ve written countless more words on behalf of CEOs, founders, and other executives I’ve worked with for the better part of a decade.

I do not use AI to produce external copy.1

However, I have been told multiple times, either directly or through a third party, that my predilection towards em dashes is obviously a sign of AI writing and I should stop using them.

To them I say simply: No.

Truthfully, despite the frothing hatred that burns like a thousand suns within me at the mere suggestion that em dashes are the progeny of AI, I’ll try to be measured and unpack why this line of thinking is incorrect.

Let’s start simply: The best case scenario for people who see em dashes and think, “Oh, AI obviously wrote that,” is they’ve never read good writing before. Kurt Vonnegut, Edgar Allen Poe, my nihilist GOAT Friedrich Nietzsche2, and many other great writers have used the em dash. Emily Dickinson was so fond of them that they are sometimes known as Dickinson’s Dashes. For those counting at home, Dickinson was writing about 160 years before the release of ChatGPT, so we can be reasonably confident that she didn’t use AI when she penned Because I could not stop for Death.

The worst case scenario, which is far more frightening, is that there are genuinely learned people who think that identifying AI-generated writing is as simple as seeing an em dash. This line of thinking is intellectual infantilism. It’s hauntingly imprecise. It’s so surface-level. It’s so blatantly wrong precisely because the em dash is an extremely popular piece of punctuation.

My blood pressure is rising just thinking about it.

One piece of punctuation being firmly indicative of AI writing implies that the piece of punctuation in question must have never — or at least, exceedingly rarely — been used by people without AI. If it was used by people readily, after all, its mere existence could not — definitionally — be seen as a clear-cut indication of AI writing.

We know — we KNOW!!! — that people have been using em dashes for two hundred fucking years. So how in the world could it possibly be a clear sign of AI writing?

Dear reader, it can’t.

And I know, I know — AI uses em dashes. Wanna know why? AI is trained on human writing that uses a lot of em dashes. ChatGPT has read the whole internet. Until recently, stuff on the internet was written by people. Therefore, ChatGPT learned, in both substance and style, from human writing. That included a lot of em dashes.

Rest assured, ChatGPT didn’t independently decide to use em dashes (it can’t decide anything because it can’t think for itself).

If ChatGPT was only trained on Herman Melville, every sentence would read like a run on. If it was trained on Hemmingway, it would hardly ever use compound sentences. If it was trained on Shakespeare, we’d all be confused.

And yet, despite the stupidity of all of this, the use-of-an-em-dash-as-sign-of-AI-writing is still a thing. I guess if someone out there thinks that em dashes are a clear sign of AI writing, fine. People are allowed to have opinions, even if there is no factual or intellectual or logical basis to them at all, in any way, shape, or form. It’s fine.3^,4

As for me?

You’ll have to pry the em dash from my cold, dead hands.

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In my last essay, I wrote about why the American government should ban TikTok. I largely focused on the substantial evidence that TikTok is a shill for the United States’ greatest geopolitical foe, China. It’s a foundational aspect of TikTok that differentiates it from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn et al.

Because TikTok is worse than the others doesn’t mean U.S.-based social media companies aren’t doing harm — they absolutely are. I’ve experienced the brainrot of scrolling mindlessly on social. Most of us have, and we probably don’t need formal studies to tell us that there are downsides of excessive social media use.

But several recent studies have shown that people addicted to short form videos demonstrate “higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, social anxiety, attention problems, and lower life satisfaction and sleep quality.” Kids addicted to short form videos do worse in school, are unable to focus, and are more likely to develop body dissatisfaction.1

This sadly holds true for social media use in general: Facebook leads to sharp increases in depression and anxiety, and social media generally has negative effects on the psychological health of its users. Another study found ties between social media use and worse objective memory performance.2

Rest assured, it will get worse!

Thanks to the introduction of dedicated social media feeds for AI-created content — Facebook has Vibes, OpenAI has Sora, AI images now saturate Pinterest — the internet is descending into AI-generated bullshit. It’s mass-produced engagement and rage bait. It’s slop with no heart, no soul. It does not exist for any purpose beyond consumption — that is where the value begins and ends.

In sum, the kids are idiots now.

Reading proficiency among fourth graders is at its lowest in two decades, indicative of Gen Alpha’s (people born between 2010 and 2025-ish) growing struggle with words.

Low literacy rates have a direct link to the social media disease mentioned above — it leads to a decline in attention span because it’s, at best, a few hundred characters worth of words. At worst, it’s a deluge of rapid fire, easily digestible clips. As a result, kids are generally less able or willing to engage with longer, more complex texts. To paraphrase Zoolander, kids suck at “learning to read good.”

This hurts my soul because I love reading. Gaze upon my bookshelf, which, since the time I took that picture 8 months ago, has continued to swell in size. That being said, I don’t think slamming kids with 100,000+ words is the answer if they can’t even get through a single tweet.

So let’s start smaller. Let’s bring long-form journalism back.

What I’m doing with this essay right here, along with many other writers on Substack, is technically long-form writing. But, like Tom Hardy once proclaimed, we mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bit bigger.

Essays won’t cut it — long-form journalism will.

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Much to society’s detriment, long-form journalism has been dying a slow death for years, if not decades. There are whole media brands, like Axios, that have made their bread and butter extolling the virtues of writing for ever-shrinking attention spans (Axios dubbed Smart Brevity, after all). Just days ago, they wrote about how US companies “must write shorter” to cut through the noise.3

That we all “must” write shorter is yet another symptom of the social media disease. It’s not just the kids who are unable to have a sustained attention span and consume long-form, complex information. In my favorite essay, Slide decks suck, I extoll the many vices of slide decks, one of which is the false perception that slide decks are short-form content. Even though that’s a gross oversimplification and technically inaccurate, it’s telling that short form content is what C-suite executives crave.

Even though long-form journalism is waning, proclamations of its death are premature. There are journalists writing extensive explorations of the world’s most fascinating and important people and interesting-but-underdiscussed happenings. Explorations of what one of America’s last serious statesmen saw as the GOP fundamentally changed, hidden crime rings you never knew existed, why one of the world’s most accomplished film directors does not fear death, and why Billy Crystal-esque quality knit sweaters are so hard to find are beautiful pieces of writing.

The great thing about long-form journalism is that there’s content that scratches everyone’s itch. I’m a sucker for a deep-dive profile. I love movies and technology design is a topic I find endlessly intellectually stimulating. I believe football (the American brand, aka the only kind that matters) is the best sport on Earth, so the myth surrounding the creation of the Patriots dynasty and Bill Belichick is one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. That Belichick has not shrouded himself in glory as the head football coach of the University of North Carolina and is now getting trolled by college students only enriches the profile. The article lives and breathes. How it reads and the messages it communicates change thanks to current events that have added color and context to my understanding of Belichick and his legacy.

No matter your interest, there are long-form articles that will enrapture you. They burrow into your mind and change and evolve along with your lived experiences and the experiences of the subject of the article. They teach you. They spur intellectual curiosity and evoke new cocktails of emotions. It’s a beautiful thing, really.

So let’s bring long-form journalism back. Read the articles. Subscribe to news outlets still publishing deep, interesting articles — yes, pay them. Advocate with your wallet. Share your favorite piece of long-form journalism on social media (we must use the tools of evil for our own designs) or post it in the comments here.

I’ll start with some of my favorite articles below.

Recommended reading

Profile pieces

• In GQ by Zach Baron: Inside Kevin Costner’s $38 Million Horizon Gamble

• In Fortune, by Jeremy Kahn: Satya Nadella has made Microsoft 10 times more valuable in his decade as CEO. Can he stay ahead in the AI age?

• In ESPN, by Wright Thompson: Caitlin Clark and Iowa find peace in the process

• In The Atlantic, by McKay Coppins: What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

• In Vanity Fair, by Antonio Garcia Martinez: How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus

• In Pirate Wires, by Mike Solana: The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey

• In The Ringer, by Justin Sayles, the aforementioned article on Bill Belichick: The River Finally Came for Bill Belichick

• In Variety, by Stephen Rodrick: Michael Mann Fulfills a 30-Year Journey Directing the Operatic, Thrilling ‘Ferrari’ — And Teases ‘Heat 2’: ‘I Don’t Think About Mortality. I’m Busy’

Other interesting articles

• In Scientific American by David A. Taylor: Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand

• In Fast Company, by Mark Wilson: Netflix’s head of design answers every question you ever had about Netflix

• In Pew, by Athena Chapekis, Samuel Bestvater, Emma Remy and Gonzalo Rivero: When Online Content Disappears

• In The Atlantic by Amanda Hull: Your Sweaters Are Garbage

Drop your favorites in the comments ⬇️

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

Despite a functional ban being signed into law more than six months ago, TikTok lives on. The Trump Administration has extended TikTok’s deadline to divest itself from Chinese parent company ByteDance or be banned in the U.S. multiple times, functionally rendering the Congressional TikTok ban moot.

Most recently, The Verge reported that Senator Ed Markey has language in a draft bill that will keep TikTok available for U.S. users “as long as it provides transparency into its content moderation and keeps US user data out of countries like China.”

Good luck with that.

Senator Markey misses the point entirely — the “ban TikTok” saga is years in the making and far more nuanced than protecting user data. Apropos of user privacy, here are a few facts:

1. The Chinese government has one of ByteDance’s (TikTok’s owner) three board seats, a move made in 2021 described as a decision “by the Chinese government to rein in [tech firms] and take control.”

2. Engineers in China access U.S. data.

3. TikTok officials in China dictate how and by whom U.S. user information is accessed, a policy in conflict with a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in front of the U.S. Senate.

4. The Chinese government’s laws — specifically, the 2017 National Intelligence Law — allows their government to compel TikTok to provide data on Americans to Chinese intelligence agencies.

Despite its flagrant abuses, the question whether to ban TikTok, like every other topic du jour in American politics, is not a one sided debate. The Atlantic Council notes that TikTok’s data collection practices on Americans are similar to those of American social media companies (e.g., Meta and Twitter) and could give authoritarian countries precedent to ban American apps.

Here’s the problem with those arguments. First, just because TikTok’s practices are not dissimilar to other American-based social media companies does not mean their practices are equally harmless — to equate them is to functionally ignore geopolitical realities.

Second, China has already banned a boatload of American tech companies: All of Google’s services (Gmail, YouTube, etc), Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, Netflix, a bunch of news outlets, Slack, Wikipedia, and more are all inaccessible to anyone living in or visiting China.

Oh, by the way, TikTok is banned in China, too (!!!). Yes, seriously (more on that in a bit).

As for those aforementioned geopolitical realities…

It isn’t (only) about access to data

The Atlantic Council is right on one front — China can access way more information about Americans through illicit means than they can through compelling TikTok to turn over user data.

It’s never been (primarily) about that.

It’s the fact that China is the United States’ number one geopolitical adversary by a mile, as well as China’s well-documented history of grey zone activities — “coercive actions that are shy of armed conflict but beyond normal diplomatic, economic, and other activities.” Look no further than the similarly well-documented examples of the Chinese government using information online to influence an adversarial populus’ behavior.

China has directly targeted Americans on social media who express views against those held by the Chinese government: They’ve used spamouflage networks — state-sponsored generative AI bots that pretend to be real people online to seed ideas beneficial to the Chinese government — to cause discord online in the U.S. during the COVID pandemic, they run aggressive anti-U.S. digital misinformation campaigns in Taiwan — the list goes on.

So why wouldn’t the Chinese government also use TikTok to sow narratives that are beneficial to the People’s Republic of China and harmful for the U.S. among its 170 million monthly American users?

Hint: They might.

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All social media platforms are not made equal

China’s own restrictive policies show us that they understand that social media can be used for the proverbial “good” or “bad” of a population.

Remember: The international version of TikTok is banned in China. The Chinese government only allows the Chinese-only Douyin, an app which is subject to strict censorship and built to favor educational and skills-related content.

Stay with me: The Chinese government banned TikTok because it’s full of brain rot memes, stupid people dancing, and anti-western content — that’s what they want international users to see. The Chinese government only allows Douyin because they want Chinese users to consume educational content that’s good for them.

That the Chinese government is putting its finger on the scale to show its geopolitical adversaries “bad” content and its own citizens “good” content is why equivocating Meta or Twitter with TikTok is to willfully ignore facts.

Yes, there is sufficient evidence that short form video is bad.

Yes, people addicted to short form videos have “higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, social anxiety, attention problems, and lower life satisfaction and sleep quality.”

Yes, kids addicted to short form videos do worse in school, are unable to focus as well as peers, and are more likely to develop body dissatisfaction.

Yes, this does (sadly) hold true for social media use in general.

If we agree that social media and short form video is nominally not great, and compare all the social media platforms who have that not-great-thing as a product (Meta, Twitter, and YouTube) who can be regulated aggressively by U.S. government agencies with the one other social media company in TikTok who is governed (by law!!!) by a Chinese government with a well-documented history of using social media to destabilize or otherwise create unrest amongst its adversaries — of which the U.S. is most certainly one — any reasonable observer can see one of these things is not like the other.

Banning TikTok is not just a matter of access to American’s information (though we should care about that too) or a matter of social media being addictive and bad for us (it is) — this is about enabling a near-peer adversary of the United States widespread and free access to influence the hearts and minds of Americans.

That is not something that any U.S. Administration or any politician should allow to continue.

It’s time to ban TikTok — for real.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

Number seven: Do real work

Let’s be real — consulting has a less-than-savory connotation. Say that you’re a “consultant” and many people will envision you as someone who passively joins calls, offers the occasional opinion, pontificates about strategy, and spouts aphorisms — but never actually gets their hands dirty.

But being fractional is no excuse for lack of execution. It’s one thing to point out that a startup’s website lacks customer testimonials; it’s another (read: better) if you work with the customer success and deployment teams to develop a strategy for interviewing customers and drafting testimonials, so you can build a system to get them live on the site. Identifying problems isn’t enough — you also need to get into the weeds and solve them.

This is real work. I’ve written about the importance of execution, because I’m surprised at how great a differentiator execution is for consultants. And when you become known for execution you’ll become increasingly indispensable and keep clients longer (which is good for recurring revenue!).

When ex-clients or colleagues in my network introduce me to a prospective client, the thematic throughline from dozens of introductions over years is this: I identify critical problems and kill them dead, executing at an extremely high level in a relatively small amount of time.

The startups I work with feel comfortable ingraining me internally as a member of the team and letting me loose to operate independently and solve hard problems. It’s a hard fought reputation I’ve earned over the years, and at the core was a ruthless focus on doing real work.

Number eight: A new lens on the ICP

Veteran consultants will tell you to have an ideal customer profile (ICP) based on your ideal industry, level of maturation, perfect marriage between needs and your services, things like that. Comms People describes ICPs like so:

If you want consistent work, better clients, and a more strategic consulting business, you need to start with an Ideal Client Profile (ICP). Most consultants skip this step and end up speaking to everyone, while resonating with no one. Your ICP brings clarity to who you’re for, sharpens your messaging, and makes prospecting faster and more effective. It informs how you package your services, what you charge, and what problems you solve. This isn’t just a marketing exercise. It’s the foundation for building a business, not just delivering a service.

I won’t dispute the importance of this — these are questions you ought to answer for yourself — but I’d like to offer a twist on the concept in the form of first identifying what matters to you. I care less about industry than I do feeling aligned with a startup’s mission. I care less about the programs I work on than I do having the ability to solve real problems. I care less about who I work with — a founder, a comms leader, or a new marketing hire — than I do liking the people I work with.

Blend your ICP with what intangible aspects of work matter most to you. Understand that your non-negotiables will evolve and change, but don’t lose sight of them. I’ve found myself working with startups that checked all my proverbial ICP boxes (the “right” industry, the “right” size, the “right” work) but I was still dissatisfied with the work because of less tangible, underlying factors that overshadowed it all.

True satisfaction lies beneath the demographic makeup of clients. It is a bit ephemeral, so think carefully about what it is about work that you really, actually, truly care about beyond and in addition to typical definitions of an ICP. For me, I want to feel inspired by the founding team and the technology’s potential (cue the “I want to go to war! I want a lightsaber!” feeling). I want to be fully embedded with the teams I work with and I want to be around people who want to run fast at the hard problems. And I want to be around people smarter than me so I can learn new things. Knowing your non-negotiables — whatever they are — will help you better determine which prospective clients are right for you.

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Number nine: The power of a small network

I am notoriously introverted and suck at networking, so thinking about building a large professional network fills me with existential dread — I’d rather lay down in traffic.

So against most conventional advice, I’ve kept a tight professional network — at first, for my mental sanity, but I later realized that this also helps with efficiency. Rather than spreading myself thin, I’ve built deep relationships with a small group of people who can refer clients to me, and it’s worked wonders. In many cases, these are genuine friends; in others, they are former colleagues who know me well enough to feel confident to refer businesses to me.

Side note: Do not fear the cold email. I’ve had random people and ex-colleagues who I haven’t spoken with in years reach out for advice about consulting; advice I’m always happy to give. Most people want to help. All you have to do is ask.

A small network is a superpower. You don’t need 500 people referring you clients — you need a handful of really good people. If you’re starting out consulting, build a list of people who can truly be of value add and invest time into developing those relationships. A tight, well-constructed network will be better for business development in the long run than a vast network of squishy acquaintances.

A bonus tip for the road: You don’t need a ton of tools

New freelancers always want to know which tools they should use: How should I manage my time tracking? What billing platform should I use? Which lead gen software is best?

From my mouth to God’s ears, there are countless platforms that exist — and I’ve never used any of them. As a consultant, the last thing I want to do is futz around across 48592734 different tools and apps and platforms and whatever else. It takes too much time, requires too much context switching, and generally annoys the hell out of me. I’m already eating the admin burden from my clients; I want to reduce admin for myself.

My long search for a salve to the use-eighty-billion-tools-and-apps problem availed itself in the form of my aforementioned secret weapon: Google Apps Scripts.

Google Apps Script is a “lightweight JavaScript-based scripting language that lets you automate tasks in Google Sheets, Docs, Gmail, and other Google services. It can be used to enhance Google Sheets functionality by automating repetitive tasks, fetching external data, or creating custom functions.”

Within Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, etc), you can use AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude to generate Google Apps Scripts to automate workflows you’re already executing.

Want to send emails when a milestone in a project is finished, create invoices, share weekly summaries, ping project status dashboards as PDFs, or monitor overall profitability of an engagement? You can quite literally automate all of this via Google Apps Scripts. The depth and breadth of Google Apps Scripts is stunning, it’s incredibly easy to use, and it comes with Google Workspace.

Here is code to automate a weekly update to a client.

// === CONFIGURATION ===
const CLIENT_EMAIL = "client@example.com"; // Replace with your client's email
const DOC_ID = "YOUR_GOOGLE_DOC_ID_HERE";  // Replace with your actual Doc ID

function sendWeeklyUpdate() {
  const doc = DocumentApp.openById(DOC_ID);
  const body = doc.getBody().getText();
  
  const now = new Date();
  const options = { year: 'numeric', month: 'long', day: 'numeric', timeZone: 'America/New_York' };
  const formattedDate = new Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US', options).format(now);
  const subject = `Comms Update: ${formattedDate}`;

  MailApp.sendEmail({
    to: CLIENT_EMAIL,
    subject: subject,
    body: body
  });
}

All I’d need to do is add a time trigger, fill in the placeholders, and tweak the script if I want any formatting (like bullet points). With ChatGPT or Claude providing detailed instructions, this takes just a few minutes to do. I already use Gmail for work — Google Apps Scripts enables me to automate business processes within tools I already use.

This isn’t a zero sum game

I wrote this three-part series (check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them) because I fundamentally believe there’s enough work to go around. I want comms and marketing freelancers of all stripes to be successful. Rather than languishing in a job you hate, I want any comms pros who are considering freelancing to be equipped with the knowledge to confidently make the leap. I want to help, because others have helped me.

If you found this series enlightening, I encourage you to check out some other advice-centric pieces on The Praxis Forum:

• Minimum viable messaging: Building messaging like products

• A better way to measure media

• Communications instructions for the new millennium

• Communications instructions for the new millennium (Part II)

If you have questions, reach out. DM me, email me (ian@aimcomms.xyz), send a carrier pigeon, whatever. I’m here to help.

And hey — thanks for reading.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

In Part 1, we touched on the financials — why your number one priority should be making money, how to decide if getting paid hourly or by retainer is right for you, and why freelancers should be wary of project-based work.

In Part 2, I’m diving deep into three topics that will help you get off on the right foot with new clients, a motion that’s critical to get right if you want to build a thriving consulting business.

In the first few months of an engagement with a new client, you are bound to come across several “startup costs." They are hidden opportunity costs that freelancers only incur when working with a new client: You’re learning what your client’s product does and how its technology works; you’re learning about their overall market and sales motions, too. You’re gleaning communications and work styles of team members and managing the flow of projects you’re responsible for. All of these startup costs make you slower and less effective as a freelancer because they result in additional cognitive load beyond the work for which you are paid.

As time passes and an engagement matures, you know how a client’s product, technology, and team works, you’ve developed an intimate understanding of their market, and the programs for which you’re responsible are well-organized. You’re more engrained in the team; faster and more effective, too. But you can only reach this happy place if the first few weeks and months go well.

Here’s how to make that happen (and don’t forget to read tips one, two, and three here!).

Number four: Don’t start with communications goals

It might seem sensible to start a new business call by asking about your clients’ communications needs. I, for one, have had countless kickoff calls with founders and Heads of Marketing alike who immediately jump into telling me what communications programs they want — earned media or social, blogs or events, sales collateral or digital ads.

Talking comms at the outset (almost) never goes well; it’s putting the cart before the horse because the comms program doesn’t matter without the context of the business goals.

If you, as a comms consultant, understand what the organization is trying to achieve from an overall business perspective, you’ll be able to better recommend communications programs that best fit those goals and how to execute them well.

Comms goals are often misaligned with business goals because the person you are talking to is not, despite their protestations, a comms expert. The classic example is the startup that wants a feature in the Wall Street Journal or their funding announcement in TechCrunch, but can’t articulate why those outlets are good for their business. I’ve talked to more than a few startups who want to use communications as a way to raise brand awareness among prospects, and then promptly ignore the outlets their prospects read because they don’t have the requisite amount of perceived cache.

I’d say it’s like a round peg in a square hole, but that’s too rude to pegs and holes. So start with business goals, go from there, and thank me later.

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Number five: Be flexible (and honest) with what you do

A lot of communications consultants have strict services that they provide. That might work for some freelancers, but it didn’t work for me.

Part of that is due to selection bias — I work with small startups and their needs are multiple. If I offer a narrow scope of services — say, only media relations — my opportunities are narrower (in that if a startup doesn’t want or need media, I have eliminated a business opportunity for myself).

The other piece of the puzzle, often underappreciated, is how truly variable communications skills are. Before I started freelancing, I never worked on anything that could be considered “marketing” — I was a PR person through and through.

I’m also a strong writer.1 So when a client needed sales collateral like one pagers, I was honest: I don't have experience writing content like this before, but writing is writing is writing, so I’m confident in my ability to modulate an existing skill for a new application. That kept happening: I was asked to do something, and I used my adjacent but indirect experience to execute at a high level. Eventually I developed acumen for programs and projects with which I originally had little or no experience, growing as a professional as a result.

On the flip side, if I can't do something, I own it. I like to tell startups I work with that I can “keep the lights on” when it comes to a company’s social posts, but sophisticated social strategies for brand profiles aren’t my forte. I can dive into an analytics dashboard to manage a paid ads program , albeit only at a basic level. I would rather spend my time — and I am more valuable — doing other things.

The sum is credibility: I pick up a proverbial shovel and dig, helping solve the problems and execute the projects that are reasonably within my skillset, and I’m honest about the things I can’t do. My flexibility, variability, and honesty helps engagements go well — especially in the first few months. Startups’ advantage over incumbents is speed, but with speed often comes change. When a client needs something new done, they can rely on me to flex with them as new priorities emerge.

Number six: Eat the admin burden

Oh, admin work, both the bane of a consultant’s existence and a necessary evil.

When you’re kicking off with a client, there are a few different admin things you can do to make the early days of an engagement go well:

1. It doesn’t matter if you use your contract2 or theirs. Obviously, read all legal documents carefully and get them into a place where you’re comfortable signing, but the entity that originates the contract isn’t really important.

2. Use whatever payroll system on whatever payment cadence they want. Getting paid monthly or semimonthly doesn’t matter. Submitting invoices on Fridays or on specific days every month to integrate with their payroll cadence doesn’t matter. Gusto or Ramp? Submitting invoices via email or payment portal? You guessed it — doesn’t matter.3

3. Use whatever chat and email systems the client wants. Regrettably, I’ve used Outlook and Teams in my day. I’ve used multiple computers and had three or four Gmail accounts at once.

When you do all three of these things, you are decidedly eating an administrative burden. It is kind of annoying to juggle a few emails, and yes, it can be a bit of a mental load to submit invoices for different clients on differing cadences.

However, the upshot is more than worthwhile: The tedium on your end removes friction from your relationship with the client, ultimately resulting in a healthier relationship and more work for you. You’ll have battles to pick with clients, but these tiny admin things? Don’t worry about ‘em.

Start strong and prosper

First impressions matter, and the initial weeks and months of an engagement with a client is make-or-break. If it goes well, you’ll be set up to not just obtain, but maintain long, fruitful relationships with clients. Build your comms program based on business goals, be upfront about what you can and can’t do, and make yourself easy to work with. If you do, you’ll succeed.

Agree? Disagree? Let me know 👇, and stay tuned for Part 3, where we’ll get into my secret tool for managing my entire consulting life.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

Among communicators, freelancing is becoming an increasingly viable option: Most PR firms’ retainers are too expensive for startups relative to the value they provide, and startups are more judicious about wantonly adding headcount in the first place. With demand comes supply, and more comms people are making the jump from full time, in-house jobs to freelancing, with delightful groups like Comms People, among other networks, cropping up to provide support and best practices.

I want to help those who are thinking about making the leap to consultancy and share all of my best advice and things I've learned. Over the next three essays, I’ll share 10 tips for comms consultants that will help your business grow.

Number one: Getting paid

When I first started out, the co-founder of my old PR firm Alex Hunter gave me some good advice: If you are trying to build a viable business, focus on making money.

Seems obvious, no?

The problem is, for many freelancers starting out, it’s easy to get caught up in how you’ll brand yourself, figuring out the types of clients you want to work with, hemming and hawing over the specific set of services you’ll provide, building the perfect website, and doing all of the other things except the main thing — finding work and earning money.

That’s not to say you should take on every single opportunity that comes your way. Whenever I’ve gotten a bad gut feeling about a prospective client and ignored the bad vibes because of the pay that comes with it, it’s almost never worked out.

When I first started out, B2B SaaS was my bread and butter — working on anything remotely approaching marketing was anathema for me. But I quickly learned that flexibility helps you make money, and I now do a lot of marketing-adjacent work, such as building up and organizing sales enablement libraries. I’ve essentially moved away from B2B SaaS (for now), and by affording myself the avenues to earn money in new ways with different types of organizations, I’ve developed skills I wouldn’t otherwise have learned — and I’ve built a thriving, diverse business in the process.

Number two: Payment mechanisms

One of the hottest debates among freelancers is whether to bill hourly or bill via retainer. I’m of the firm opinion that one is not better than the other, because each has its pros and cons that will impact how you work. For full transparency, I bill hourly, but worked exclusively via retainer for years at a PR firm, so I have experience with both.

Hourly rates

An hourly remit is as you’d expect — you get paid for the work you do.

The upshot is flexibility: If someone wants me to work on a media plan or sit in on an All Hands meeting, I get paid all the same (though as a trusted partner to my clients, I try to counsel against the latter as it’s not the best use of their money or my time). Startups’ needs change — if I’m hourly, the projects I execute can change along with their needs. It makes me easy to work with.

Pro tip: I know freelancers who charge different rates to different clients depending on the type of work — rote, administrative work at an hourly rate less than a high-level, creative and strategic remit, for example

The downside is income variability. Below is a snapshot of my income from December 2023 to September 2024 (dollar amounts removed). You can see a big dip in the winter, and again in the summer. It’s an annual trend for me, and other industries might have differing ebbs and flows, but there are ebbs and flows all the same.

The first time my income dropped 40% month over month I felt like someone dumped a bucket of cold water on me. I felt like I failed.

But the opposite is also true — look at that jump from January to February! I was on top of the world, and I knew nothing was going to slow me down (lo and behold, the summer lull did, in fact, slow me down). After a few years of swings in my income, I’ve learned to manage my emotions and my budget, but this is the reality and the downside of hourly billing.

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Retainers

Billing on retainer works like this: For a certain amount of money, you will provide an agreed upon set of services (a “scope of work,” or SOW). Those services typically have volumetric numbers over a period of time (e.g., I will write three blogs a month). The upside is certainty: You, a freelancer, know what you will get paid and the client knows what outputs or services they will receive.

The downside is inflexibility. If a client wants a deliverable or support outside of the retainer, you have three choices: 1) Do the thing, and risk “scope creep,” meaning increasingly taking tasks outside of the remit for which you are paid; 2) say no outright; or 3) renegotiate the scope to accommodate the request (such as offering one blog for a one page product overview the client wants).

Option 1 is dangerous. It’s called scope creep for a reason, and it’s very easy to end up doing a ton of work you aren’t getting paid for. This is all too common; remain vigilant. Option 2, saying no, is both viable and necessary, but the reality is that the more you flat out say no, the more tense your relationship with the client will become, which can ultimately impact your revenue. Option 3 definitely works, but the time spent negotiating changes is also time spent not doing work.

Number three: The curse of one-off projects

One-off projects — essentially, short term engagements to execute a limited remit — are tough. I almost always say no to them because there is a high degree of opportunity cost and the financials are suboptimal.

Diving deeper:

• The reason why SaaS became a thing is because it produces recurring revenue. Rather than paying $200 once for a piece of software (which we used to do in the olden times, anyone remember paying for Microsoft Word?), you pay $15/month into perpetuity.

• Not unlike retainers for freelancers, recurring revenue provides predictable, stable income and, in general, increases the viability of a business.

• Projects are not recurring revenue. They are one-time, “you get X dollars for doing Y things and then we part ways” engagements.

• Every time you work with a client, you spend time getting up to speed — getting to know the team, learning the underlying business mechanics, market opportunity, and technology, integrating yourself into company workflows, so on and et cetera. The “cost” of onboarding diminishes the longer you retain a client, and it’s magnified if you only work with a startup for one or two months.

All in all, projects kind of suck, but if you’re new to consulting, I would consider them. Not only do they allow you to do the most important thing — earn money — but there are other benefits, too. You’ll build a professional network as a freelancer, and there is no better business development engine than a former client who loves you. And honestly, there is something heartening and validating about getting paid early in your career as a consultant. Success is no guarantee, and every consultant is, more or less, on their own. Taking on a project, executing it well, and seeing a paid invoice land in your bank account builds confidence.

As your business matures and you eventually land long-term engagements that generate recurring revenue, you can be more scrutinous when it comes to which projects you take on. Ideally, you’ll be doing fewer projects over time because an increasing proportion of overall revenue will be recurring.

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Number four? Stay tuned…

Over the next two essays, I’ll explore how communications consultants can best onboard clients, how to build a suite of services, how to identify your ideal customer, and why you don’t need a glut of digital tools to be successful. Subscribe to follow along, and share with any fellow freelancers you know (or better yet, share this with anyone you know that might be thinking about freelancing!).

I’ll see you in your inbox soon.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

I expect this decline to continue because frankly, Google search kind of sucks now. The implementation of AI into their search results went poorly, to say the least.

I gotta tell you, I am not going to eat rocks or put glue on my pizza, and I’ve never seen a dog in the NBA (though I did love Air Bud). In the immortal words of legendary detective Benoit Blanc, it’s just dumb.

Beyond unreliable, insane, and downright stupid research results being served, a similarly large problem has emerged: If a business relies on search to find customers, those days are over now, writes 1:

The unwritten agreement we’ve had for the last 20 or so years was that if you wrote stuff that others found valuable, Google would crawl, reference, and serve back your site for people to visit. In fact, Google’s founding mission was to get people out of Google and to what they were looking for as fast as possible.

The reality now seems to be if you do the hard work to write something people find valuable, Google will crawl, reference, and serve them your info in a synthesized version, outside of your website, skipping the trip to your domain all together.

Wall Street is still bullish on Google’s search, however. Bank of America analysts wrote: “We continue to believe Google has data and distribution advantages and has closed the (large language model) performance gap.”

I’m less confident. Perhaps I’ve lost a bit of consumer trust as a result of Google telling me to eat rocks, or perhaps functionally losing all utility for businesses is a bad recipe for continued success. It may take a while for this giant to die, but die it will.

So what’s Google to do?

Congratulations Google, you're a car company now!

Recently, I spent a week in the Bay Area. It was the first time I took multiple Waymo rides — the Google-owned self-driving car company — over a sustained period of time, and I have to say, it’s amazing. Waymo delivers a genuinely sublime, futuristic experience in which I felt safer, had a better commute, and saved money. It’s hard not to feel awe struck by something that, even a decade ago, would have been seen as sci-fi levels of fancy, far removed from real life.

When I sent the video above to my group chat with my best friends, here’s what they said:

• “Do you feel safe?”

• “That’s a wild video”

• “Damn man, you’re braver than I am!”

• “So what happens if it just locks the doors and takes you to Mississippi?”

Like the death of Google Search, adoption of self-driving cars will be slow — but it’s going to happen. The technology, the consumer experience, the cost is just too good. It’s so damn cool. I’m convinced that in 10, 15 years, driving oneself will be a luxury.

Let’s break it down:

The average commute in the U.S. is 12 miles each day for an average of 21 work days a month, so let’s say the average person drives 250 miles a month to work. Owning a car costs about $1,000 a month, and it’s only getting more expensive. If Waymo gets its cost down to under $4 per mile, which is absolutely possible given the deflationary aspects of its business model (no gas, no people), it would be cheaper to Waymo every day to and from work than to own a car.

Does that scale even make sense for Google? The answer is a resounding yes.

Despite Google Search’s abject failings and decline in market share, the company’s 2024 revenue was $348.16 billion, an all time high. That’s a ton of cash.

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But, but but: Even just 25% of the personal car market would amount to ~$380 billion to $400 billion. If it’s cheaper and more effective for one out of every four people to take a Waymo instead of owning a car, Google will make more money than they quite literally ever have with all their other services combined.

As I anxiously await Waymo’s expected arrival in Washington DC in 2026, I’ll be the first to admit that mass adoption of self-driving cars in the next few years won’t happen immediately. Lots of people will be nervous, and anything so radically outside the norm requires time before mass adoption.

But hey, 10 years ago, the idea of self-driving cars seemed insane. If you told someone in the year 2001 that 24 years in the future we’d all be walking around with tiny, hyper advanced computers in our pocket that could quite literally connect nearly every human and digital experience on earth, they’d have you committed. Maybe I’m showing my age here, but I remember teachers telling me I wouldn’t have a calculator with me all the time (and now we have artificial intelligence in our pockets).

Picture a world where the nearly 500,000 car crashes in the U.S. a month are functionally reduced to 0. Think about every woman who will feel safe taking a ride home from the bar because there’s no driver knowing where they live or the long trips we’ll be able to take by car because we can nap while the car drives. Imagine everyone having the opportunity to read a (physical) book during a commute — a luxury only those in cities with robust public transportation can currently enjoy. Just think: No more haggling with mechanics, worrying about this certification or that license or whether or not your apartment building has parking.

Given that world, would you really be shocked if, in 10 more years, more of us are bopping around in Waymo’s than not?

I wouldn’t.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

During the past seven years, I’ve worked with companies that deploy autonomous vehicles, develop software for autonomous commercial aircraft, create clean energy systems, invent COVID-19 tests, move goods across the globe, help people save for retirement, cure diseases with novel technology, and protect organizations’ digital assets with white hat hackers.

Every tech company has a mission. Among the more than 10,000 startups founded each year1, many are disrupting and transforming. Of the 10% that succeed2, many are accelerating and democratizing.

But it’s not always enough. A scant few among the 10% truly make an impact on our lives and make our world a better place to live (remember when Clubhouse was valued at four billion dollars?3 Yeesh.)

Most companies I’ve worked with got my mental gears turning, but it wasn’t unusual if I had to squint a little bit to see the societal impact. Many were financially successful businesses — thriving even, with healthy AAR and unicorn status. Some even found a way to fundamentally upend a market or create a new one entirely4. During the early days of my tech communications career, that’s really what I cared about: Technology that was fascinating, scratching my mental itch. The cocktail of curiosity, awe, and excitement at novel technology isn’t easily supplanted in my Companies-I-Want-To-Work-With Hierarchy of Needs.

But with age has come introspection. When I die, I want to be proud of how I lived — a big piece of that is, professionally, how I spent my time. Did I devote my hours, in some small way, to improving things for you and I, dear reader?

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I still crave the intellectual invigoration technology can provide, but it’s no longer the number one factor through which I assess technology companies.

A friend and long-time operator-recently-turned-venture capitalist, Morgan Hitzig, wrote about how venture capital is a tremendous responsibility: “We’re on the front lines of deciding what businesses should be built and why — of what the next economy looks like.” When I read that, it crystallized the importance of genuine mission impact. I’m not writing million dollar checks myself, and I’m never the most important person in any room I’m in, but I am putting my own intellectual capital behind certain organizations.

I should feel compelled not only by their technology but also by their impact on the world around me — the world I share with my family and friends and people I’ll never meet and never know.

The change in my mindset manifested itself in my work slowly. If I’m being completely honest, I didn’t take any meaningful, direct action until very, very recently. In 2024, I wasn’t actively considering my “brand” nor did I resolve myself to exclusively work with companies whose mission will positively impact society with any level of explicit intention.

It just, kind of, happened. I think my desire to work with startups whose mission mattered was burbling away in my subconscious, and I marinated in opaque and ill-defined feelings before they solidified into action.

When I reflect on the companies I’ve worked with over the last few years, I know they matter. They’re delivering life-saving medical supplies in minutes, ensuring our Armed Forces are ready to maintain peace and mobilize for conflict, providing emergency response organizations with the information they need to protect people, helping people experiencing homelessness get back on their feet, and detecting novel pathogenic threats.

By comparison, the mission of a company building a chatbot feels … less. I have no doubt some of those businesses will thrive, and many will provide a ton of utility to some group of people. It’s just not the sort of thing that gets me out of bed anymore.

It’s easier to wake up at 5:45am to pitch a funding announcement for a startup5 or be at my desk for the fourteenth hour of a work day when I know that my role, and in turn, the company’s success means a better world for me, my friends, my family, and for society.

I consider it a genuine blessing that, as a comms-flack-turned-consultant-who-still-does-real-work (I promise I don’t simply pontificate on calls), I can pick and choose the organizations and people I work with. Being able to be picky is rare. I believe I’ve earned the position I find myself in today, but it’s never lost on me. I also know that my good fortune may not last. At the end of the day, I’ve got to put food on the table, and all money is green — if it came down to feeding my family versus feeding my personal ideals of mission and intellectual curiosity, the former takes precedence 100% of the time.

But today, I am able to fully embrace my good fortune. I work with founders I genuinely like. My small cohort of friends and professional acquaintances are brilliant people from whom I’m always learning. I’m having fun, and I swell with pride when I’m able to help companies who are helping the world. When I look at myself in the mirror, I believe that professionally, my efforts are time well spent.

That is priceless.

Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

Communications people are uniquely positioned to help organizations avoid saying and doing dumb stuff because we are trained to think about — and genuinely care about — perception and how company messaging is received. In fact, I wrote my maiden essay about how critical perception is to business success:

How a company, brand, and/or founder is perceived is their reality (reality being revenue, stock price, and/or the ability for a company to sell its products or services).

I try to avoid dunking on people, particularly in the professional realm. Everyone makes mistakes, and while I’m certainly not immune either, it is instructive to look at a few examples of screw ups from some of the largest technology companies on Earth. To make this fun, I picked examples of grievous, unforced errors that were tantamount to doing something dumb with no consideration for how the action/policy/statement would be perceived.

🧠 In November 2024, Microsoft launched Recall, a feature that continuously screenshots users’ computer screens. At launch, the feature was auto opt-in (meaning Recall was automatically turned on for all users). The data didn’t have great safeguards, and there weren’t a ton of protections if there were screenshots that captured passwords, sensitive financial information, or other data that, you know, you wouldn’t want to have a screenshot of. To Microsoft’s credit, they delayed the launch six months and fixed some of the privacy concerns (PC Mag has deets).

💬Slack was mired in controversy in May 2024 when it not only appeared to be using user messages (including DMs!) to train its AI, but because they automatically opted-in all users without notifying them. To make matters worse, opting out appears to be intentionally designed to be an onerous, overly manual, multi-step process to dissuade people from doing so by way of pure, unfiltered frustration (for those of us who’ve had to click 489,572 times to unsubscribe from an email, you know how annoying this is). Here’s the opt-out note from Slack:

Contact us to opt out. If you want to exclude your Customer Data from Slack global models, you can opt out. To opt out, please have your org, workspace owners or primary owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com with your workspace/org URL and the subject line ‘Slack global model opt-out request’. We will process your request and respond once the opt-out has been completed.

It’s as if the person who wrote this wanted users to hate them (comms pro tip: You don’t want your users to hate you).

🚺 In May 2024, OpenAI didn’t want to lose to Slack in a dumb-things-competition. When releasing its audio models, OpenAI had a voice model called “Sky” that sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson. For the uninitiated, there is a 2013 film called Her in which — spoiler alert, kinda — a man falls in love with an AI assistant who was voiced by, you guessed it, Scarlett Johansson. There were two problems:

First, OpenAI did not ask Scarlett Johansson for permission. And second, in case you thought “hey, what if this is all just one big coincidence?”, here’s what Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, tweeted the night before Sky was unveiled:

ScarJo sued OpenAI and they eventually removed the Sky voice (despite OpenAI’s protestations that it was, in fact, a complete coinkydink!).

Know this: Not all mistakes are made equal.

Sometimes, shit happens that’s outside of your control. That’s okay.

Some of the smartest people I know have deeply considered a decision and mistakes still happen. That’s okay too.

But Microsoft, Slack, and OpenAI made decisions seemingly without strategic consideration or care for how the choice would be perceived, which resulted in unforced errors that didn’t need to happen in the first place. That’s not okay.

The solution is a heavier dose of strategic communications involvement in business decisions.

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Make someone responsible for brand perception

The examples from Microsoft, Slack, and OpenAI’s weren’t strictly marketing or comms mistakes. Let’s unpack this a bit, using Microsoft’s botched Recall launch as an example.

Yes, communications leads would be involved in creating messaging and positioning for a product launch like Recall and yes, marketing teams would be ready to articulate product value to customers, and do all the usual things that marketing and communications people would do.

Here’s the rub: The business decision to automatically turn on Recall for all users without sufficient privacy protections is nominally outside of the auspices of what communications/marketing would usually own during a product announcement. And while we can’t know how involved communications was in that decision, we can say a functionally savvy someone responsible for brand perception would have said something like, “Hey guys. This is a super bad idea.” Because, lo and behold, it was a super bad idea.

So who is that savvy someone responsible for brand perception? In large organizations, it can be a brand marketer (or brand marketing team), but 1) those are relatively uncommon hires and 2) they are usually not senior enough to be foundationally involved in business decisions like those surrounding the Recall launch.

The answer? Communications pros, who are trained to consider perception, need a seat at the big kids table.

The tide is turning

We’re seeing two trends across the board that indicate the elevation of communications within organizations:

1. According to LinkedIn, there are more than 150,000 Chief Communications Officers in the U.S. today, a number that’s on the rise.1

2. Axios reports that 56% of comms pros report to the CEO, with only “37% laddering up to marketing, compared to 63%” in 2023. 2

More communications pros either in the C-Suite or reporting into the CEO mean proximity to business decisions, reducing the likelihood of unforced errors like those from Microsoft, Slack, or OpenAI. And in today’s climate, protecting perception is mission-critical.

Depending on where you land on the political spectrum, both the first and second Trump terms can be categorized by either a flurry of activity or chaos. But one thing is certain, and that is that uncertainty rules the current moment. Organizations are more scrutinized than ever, and the elevation of communications in organizations is necessary given the new world order. As I wrote and Axios validates, “corporate reputation directly impacts a company's success.”

Elevate communications right now

A startup can die from reputational damage. If a brand becomes toxic or makes a massive unforced error, a startup can lose customers, revenue, and perhaps even its existence entirely. An early communications hire engaging directly with the founders, whether they be a full-time hire, part-time consultant, or challenger agency who can work intimately with a small team, is required in order to navigate a business and political climate defined by uncertainty.

Communicators often talk about the upside of storytelling, like securing press hits, having social posts go viral, or building a brand that excites and awes, because it’s fun. But playing defense — protecting a brand against self-inflicted wounds in a chaotic world — is just as important as proactive storytelling.

My advice? Don’t wait to hire a CCO or integrate communications with the founders/CEO. Do it early. Then, you’ll have a voice in the room reminding you to stop the dumb shit before it starts.

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Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.

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Now, onto Vibe Communications.

Vibe Coding, a phrase coined by Andrej Karpathy (former Director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla) has been hot for a few months now. Here's a good explainer:

Vibe Coding is a prompt-driven approach to software development where you write software by describing what you want in natural language, and let AI generate the code.

Now, if you can communicate in plain English, you can ostensibly code the app of your dreams. Click-clack away on your keyboard, tell an AI what you want to build, ask it to generate code step-by-step, and with minimal effort, you are now a coder. With easily accessible tools like Claude and Cursor, you don’t need to spend time manually writing code, let alone build up years of the technical acumen that most senior developers have.

Mehul Gupta, a Data Scientist at DBS Bank, had this to say of Vibe Coding:

Vibe Coding works when you’re just testing an idea. Need a quick prototype? Perfect.

But, but, but: Want to build a production-level app via Vibe Coding? Gupta1 has a one word answer: “Oof.” The internet is rife with Vibe Coding gone awry, like this poor Twitter user who, in the period of 48 hours, swung from pure elation to the crushing reality of fucking around and finding out:

To wit:

Vibe Coding is a good way to start a project or test an idea, but when that idea matures and is ready to be deployed to real world users for mass consumption, Vibe-coded projects lack structure, aren’t properly optimized for production-level use, and are likely rife with security concerns.

For communications and PR pros, Vibe Coding’s benefits — as well as its structural breaking points — provide a roadmap for starting and growing a corporate communications program.

Vibe Communications: Good for startups

Early stage startups with no extant communications program can run into a trap: Thinking too hard. Much like a technology product evolves with feedback from its users, a communications program startups need feedback — which stories resonate with media and key audiences while serving overall communications goals — in order to add structure and rigor to a communications program.

Maybe it’s technical storytelling, showing how new technology was built through the lens of its engineers and technical leadership. Maybe it’s leveraging partners in cities across the country for hyper-local media engagement. Maybe it’s compelling thought leadership about the state of the industry. Maybe it’s all of them, or maybe it’s none. In lieu of feedback, there is no way to know what works.

Enter Vibe Communications.

The first time communicating externally programmatically can be scary for founders — they want all t’s crossed and i’s dotted, everything just so.

Then you end up here:

When a communications program is first starting at an early stage startup, it’s not efficient or operationally viable to apply the level of data-driven rigor that’s found in more mature enterprises because the feedback from users — media and key audiences — does not exist yet.

Vibe Communications, like Vibe Coding, can help get a communications program off the ground. It’s a comms program without a ton of rigor, structure, rules,consideration for edge cases or mass consumption. Instead, it’s optimized for speed and learning.

Here’s a four step playbook to execute Vibe Communications:

Step one: Build messaging

Messaging is the foundation of communication. Start by building a Minimum Viable Messaging framework, the communications equivalent of a minimum viable product. The first messaging framework doesn’t need to be perfect — like external communications strategies and tactics, company messaging will and should evolve as you collect and ensure that your company positions itself inline with its core audiences. Get the basics down:

• A three sentence summary of the startup

• Key differentiators

• How the technology works

• Who it’s meant to serve

• How it helps those audience(s)

Step two: Lock in “key media”

As part of building messaging, you should have a rough idea of the audiences that matter. The next step is to lock in the newsletters, the podcasts, the influencers, the vertical media outlets, the traditional online news outlets, the who-or-whatevers (heretofore referred to as “key media”) that help you reach key audiences. If your audience is the Department of Defense, you should care about DefenseScoop and Tectonic and the Crossing the Valley podcast. If your audience is the general population, you might think about NPR. If you care about the freight and logistics community, Freightwaves and Supply Chain Dive are critical. Whatever your industry, whoever your audience, find your key media outlets.

Step three: Tell (good) stories

Unless you have real news, spend time telling valuable stories to key media members that will be of genuine value and interest to their readers/listeners (remember, their audience is your audience too!). For 99% of startups, no key media member cares about a product pitch. “Hey, talk to this expert” pitches can work, but they aren’t the foundation of a media outreach strategy. The point, beyond efficacy, is to begin collecting feedback to more meaningfully understand what stories resonate and what stories don’t. That starts with good storytelling.

Step four: See what sticks

Yep — see what sticks. What stories do land? What coverage do you secure? What are podcasters and Substackers expressing interest in? What stories get no interest at all? Programmatically collate this feedback and optimize towards, quite obviously, the things that are working.

The reality is some pitches and stories will land and some won’t. Remember the wise word from ayahuasca enthusiast and NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers: R-E-L-A-X. Diligence pays dividends.

Growing beyond Vibe Communications

Like Vibe Coding, Vibe Communications will eventually cause problems. As a company grows, and as its market and brand solidifies, more intentionality — and discretion — will become necessary.

The larger enterprises that have reached this stage tend to fall into two communications buckets:

1. The first is focused on press releases, navel-gazing pitches, and product announcements — it’s the traditional approach: largely ineffective, and lacking in creativity.

2. The second bucket keeps the ethos of Vibe Communications — experimentation, learning, and quality storytelling with an aggressive focus on key audiences — but just with more rigor, structure, and formality.

Companies in bucket one end up with a glut of product and contract and other crappy announcements on their website, but to most people outside the company, it’s a meaningless series of motions. The companies in the second bucket win because they tend to index towards fewer, higher value opportunities. They hone and sharpen key messaging, explore emergent and creative opportunities to tell stories. They leverage a diverse group of charismatic spokespeople in creative ways. They build a recognizable brand.

Zipline, the world’s largest commercial autonomous delivery company, is executing at a higher level than most companies on the planet. They recently invited MKBHD to do a deep dive on their technology, they worked with Tim Stevens to do a profile on the company’s home delivery platform, and they saw co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn have an amazing Twitter thread go viral. Taken together, these three examples show how a larger, more mature company need not dive headfirst into stodgy, outmoded communications strategies.

Zipline isn’t churning out rote press releases every single week or focused on exclusively talking about what their new product is. Instead, they’re always experimenting, ideating creatively about what stories will resonate. Recently, Zipline has focused on telling stories about what autonomous drone delivery at scale means: An elderly person who can easily access their prescriptions without having to go to the pharmacy or working parents who can get a missing ingredient delivered right to their doorstep while cooking dinner. A year ago, Zipline focused on telling stories about how it built its ultra-precise home delivery system. In either case, Zipline shows how the ethos of Vibe Communications can scale in a larger organization — everything they do is so much better than just “Hey! Look! We’ve got a new drone!”

The big picture

Vibe Communications works when a communications program is starting out. I’ve done it before, and I will do it again. I also know that as organizations grow, structure and rigor become more vital to communications success.

But the best comms flacks I know never lose what makes Vibe Communications work — a communications shop optimized for speed and learning. Executing quickly, doubling down on effective storytelling, and killing darlings that aren’t working is the recipe for success.

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Shoutout to Emily Ann Hill for providing feedback and editing this essay. Check out Junetail Creative to see how Emily can help improve your writing and, for small businesses, develop an unforgettable brand experience.