What’s your dream for the future?

It’s summer 2024, and Peter Franklyn Banks is filming six school leavers across state schools in London.

My son is leaving little school. These kids are facing the rest of their lives.

And the country is just two days away from a general election.

I re-watched the film this morning. Five minutes, staring into the phone, headphones on, wobbling and clanking about on an empty summer’s overground.

I figured I’d heard it all before, written about it at the time.

A voice off-camera asks one of the six what she’s most scared of. Music changes.

Clowns.

I’m shaking with laughter.

Framed close, they sound sure. Then a brow lifts. Then a throat swallows.

It’s absolutely over. And I’m absolutely terrified.

My eyes are blinking fast.

No one else in the carriage, luckily.

I’d forgotten the shirts. All six of them wear theirs. The leaver’s shirt.

The last thing they’ll wear as kids.

White cotton basics, covered in marker-pen signatures from friends and teachers they’ve known for half their lives.

I may never see some of them again. So that’s quite sad.

By now those shirts are tucked down the back of a drawer.

My son had a turquoise pre-printed hoody, worn over and over until washed grey then cardboard boxed in the loft somewhere.

“I’m fed up of politicians lecturing young people,” said the man about to win, back in 2024.

His time served, 23 months and 17 days.

The share of 16–24 year-olds who are not in education, employment or training would grow to 13.5%. That’s over a million kids.

So, the train pulls in, I bounce off, and I wonder how the kids’ journeys are going. If they’re riding the wobbles okay.

Toky, Leyla, Jayson, Georgia, Emily, Jason.

Do well in life.

Exhale #19. Written 9th August 2024. Still stands, word for word. Watch the film.

Positivity keeps peaking through the cracks. This week ends in a different place than where it began, from global stock markets to your local town. I am struck by how quickly news burns off.

My son won’t take off his leaver’s hoody, which is covered in the names of his classmates he left behind at the beginning of the Summer. They all start (new) big schools in a few weeks. It’s turquoise, and he sometimes pulls the drawstring around his face to shield himself from the world.

This week’s instruction: Scroll past the headlines—which will come and go—take a deep breath out, and watch the five-minute film at the bottom. At first, you’re just watching another set of vox pops. But stay with it until the end.

In just three hundred seconds, you will make six new friends.

All are wearing their leaver’s shirts. They are at the end of secondary school, entering the world and looking to the future. May their words fill your heart. The best moment is when one mentions a fear of poisonous spiders; be sure not to miss it.

Let’s rise together with every issue. 🧡

Markets

UK debt levels have reached dangerously high levels | The Times

UK housing market frozen in suspended animation as uncertainty persists | Financial Times

U.S. economy unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July as labor market slows | CNBC

Brands

BBC hires 26-year-old entrepreneur to connect with younger audiences | The Guardian

Gen Z drinking habits now match older generations, new data shows | The Independent

Why brands are cashing in on YA romance’s cultural moment | MediaCat

Coca-Cola urges Gen Z and millennials to disconnect during meals | Marketing Dive

Coca-Cola uses AI to manage brand consistency across 200 global markets | Forbes

Olivia Rodrigo’s handpicked Etsy founders saw merch sales soar over 2,000% | Fast Company

Creator agencies transform into entertainment studios as brands fund content over ads | Digiday

The influencer bubble is finally popping (again) | Fast Company

AI-generated melodramas flood X as creators monetize low-quality content | Wired

Social media’s messy era is over. What comes next? | Vogue

Sweetgreen’s stock and profits plummet as salad demand drops this summer | Fast Company

Dannon discontinues beloved coffee yogurt after nearly 40 years | The Wall Street Journal

Knicks baseball hats now outsell Chanel as most coveted luxury accessory | New York Post

Warner Bros. CEO expects Paramount deal to close despite legal challenges | The Wall Street Journal

Revolut co-founder, Nik Storonsky, faces lawsuit | Sifted

LVMH-backed L Catterton sells Thorne to P&G for $3.8 billion | Cosmetics Business

Startups

VCs are asking founders: will you quit on me? | The Wall Street Journal

What ‘sweaty’ and ‘cracked’ really mean in founder praise culture | Sifted

Zach Dell raises funds to bring home battery storage to backyards | The Wall Street Journal

Do functional drinks like electrolyte lemonade and probiotic pop actually work? | The Guardian

Gillian Anderson’s G Spot drinks brand launches in 300 M&S stores | Retail Gazette

Dad Grass and Miles Davis collaborate on Bitches Brew cannabis drink | Brands Untapped

Tech

How leaders should craft strategy in the age of AI | Harvard Business Review

AI hype is driving tech industry layoffs and market instability | The New York Times

Influencers face backlash for attending OpenAI’s exclusive luxury retreat | TechCrunch

The hottest new AI chatbot is actually just a person answering questions | Wired

How one journalist is challenging Silicon Valley’s tech fascists | The Guardian

Mamdani’s NYC tech team shows what effective government innovation could look like | Wired

Money

Meta ordered to pay $567m for failing to protect children on its platforms | BBC

OpenAI acquires presentation startup NextSlide | TechCrunch

Bending Spoons acquires Airtable in major post-IPO deal | Sifted

SpaceX’s stock lockup expiration could trigger market volatility | The New York Times

Tim Cook’s Apple legacy: from first earnings call in 2011 to his last in 2026 | Yahoo Finance

Design

How to spot AI writing: a practical guide for readers | The Economist

Kim Kardashian designs Skims stores as intimate sanctuaries, not temples to perfection | Wallpaper

Craighill’s Chroma Scissors blend colorful design with ceramic-coated performance | Cool Hunting

Happiness

Mountains, roses and dreams: The end of the west, near Portland, Oregon. | The Dispatch

How one man’s cure for loneliness sparked a global movement | The Wall Street Journal

The five-minute film: A Dream for the Future | It’s Nice That

If someone came to mind while you were reading, send it to them. That’s my whole marketing plan.

Stay gold 🙏🏻

I’m afraid of death but I watched André Is an Idiot anyway.

The documentary lasts 87 minutes, and 58 of them had me heaving with laughter.

Inner Sunset, San Francisco.

A 50-year-old ex-creative, André, does everything with his best friend Lee, but laughs off Lee’s idea of getting a colonoscopy together and 18 months later is handed a terminal colon cancer diagnosis instead.

He could have grabbed a phone and poured it all out on TikTok. But it’s a plot twist worthy of a movie, so André sets about making one.

They’re gonna love it because I die at the end.

The final act is decided. But a lot of the film is spent making you wonder: a stand-up routine you catch yourself believing might just end well.

André brings in stop-motions of random ideas he’s having: a frontier clinic in Italy that will transplant his head onto a new body, a televised gameshow ‘Who Wants to Kill Me?’, where people come up with alternate ways for André to die.

Otherwise, it’s video diaries of road trips, self-mocking monologues, and 7 a.m. bong hits.

The other 29 minutes are a harder watch.

His family.

Janice, his wife. Tallula, their 19-year-old daughter. Delilah, four years behind her sister.

Tallula leaves for college during filming.

At the car out front, she and her dad reject the hug goodbye. She pulls the passenger door shut, and from behind the windscreen, flips him the bird.

I love you.

Tenderness protected by irony. Not just because what’s underneath is exposing and painful, but because André is familiar with a world that strip-mines sincerity for commerce.

“I sold diabetes to kids,” André sums up his career.

Something I recognise. I know André.

Not the person, the persona. We’ve been in the same rooms, have people in common. A training that tells you to level with the audience, and to pay for their attention: a laugh or a line they’ll repeat at work.

His kind of truth-telling died with algorithms and authenticity. A model that removed the handshake between sender and receiver. Extracting attention, it turns out, is worth just as much as rewarding it.

(It’s worth more. But also, isn’t.)

Fact is, it takes a malignant carcinoma to give André an actual brief worthy of his time, however much he has left.

Which is perfect, because with himself as the only client, he gets to approve all the ideas. He gets 87 minutes to choose all the beats and frames that make the final cut, without debate.

Nobody makes a campaign entirely alone.

Throughout, he spends time with Lee, the best friend from advertising, his platonic soul mate situation.

Close to home.

My advertising platonic soul mate situation is Patrick.

Patrick never came to the door that day, on Christmas Eve, as he fought his last days of bowel cancer, and I waited more than two hours, hovering with black coffee in McDonald’s, so I’d be near if he did.

So so sorry Trimbo, I had a bad night.

The bad nights are not something this documentary can hide.

The camera sees everything. So must we.

André’s body fills with fluid, his abdomen swells out like a space hopper, eyelashes grow really long. Everything else retracts, skin, muscles, his hair falls out, cheeks collapse until his teeth protrude.

I want to make people feel good when things are bad.

He opens a pack of Skittles and puts a red one in the crater of his hand, a new dent of bones between his thumb and wrist.

The red one is the last time he’s able to make Tallula laugh.

Her face scrunches then softens as her dad looks her straight in the eye and thanks her for easing off college to come back.

Nothing left to do, they hug.

Outstretched on the sofa, white sheets wrapped around him, a borosilicate glass bong in the foreground, André makes a deathbed call to his therapist.

The camera lowers. Then leaves.

Black for a beat.

Survived by panoramic skies at sunrise.

André climbing a hill to a vista high, high above San Francisco.

Gone, his final journal entry read by AI in his own voice.

I sat with fear today. I didn’t run from it. Or try to defeat it. Instead I greeted it like a friend. And I let it wash over me. Again. And again. Terrifying me.

But it was okay.

My fear is insignificant compared to the love all around me. I wept for the first time in years, it was remarkable. I thought I needed suffering, but instead I got bliss.

So.

GET YOUR F*CKING COLONOSCOPY.

And.

Never, ever, stop flipping the bird.

And.

It’s me who’s so, so sorry, brother Pat. For the fury, strung out on coffee that day.

I get it now.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

From the shelf

What if the answer to the world’s problems is fewer people? | Issue 85, April 2026

OpenAI cuts back on side quests — is Jony Ive building a $6.5 billion pen? | Issue 84, March 2026

Markets

Stock market chaos exposes the hidden costs of the AI economy | The Guardian

Andy Burnham emerges as the Mondeo Man 2.0 | Telegraph

Bank of England keeps rates steady at 3.75% amid rising inflation concerns | The Guardian

Brands

Why marketing’s obsession with tech language is devaluing the craft | Time

YouTube star AboFlah built his career on streaming, now wants his kids offline | Wired

ClickUp offers $1 million for one-person CMO to run entire marketing department | The State of Brand

How Unilever manages 300,000 creators: the operational reality behind the scale | Digiday

Amazon’s advertising business reaches $76 billion in annual revenue | Adweek

Time monetises AI bot traffic by selling ads directly to agents | Digiday

Vacation wins ‘world’s best-smelling sunscreen’ claim in advertising dispute | Mondaq

Gen Z’s love of vinyl, books, and concerts is reviving the analog economy | Fortune

Waitrose launches £1bn suburban expansion to challenge M&S | The Times

Best Buy’s new CEO plans smaller stores to fuel future growth | CNBC

Steve Ells on Chipotle’s counter service evolution and future | Wall Street Journal

Back-to-school denim campaigns start earlier as shopping season stretches longer | Modern Retail

Skims promotes Tracy Nguyen to chief communications officer | WWD

How luxury brands can optimise content strategy for AI misunderstandings | Harvard Business Review

The hidden dress tax eating into media workers’ salaries | La Fronde

New Balance reveals the slow path to becoming a fast footballer | Creative Review

Startups

London hacker house rejects Silicon Valley burnout culture | TechCrunch

Billionaire nets $360 million selling psychedelic company to Eli Lilly | Forbes

Rejected by every VC, she built a £36m beauty empire | Evening Standard

Are Grüns and Rhode outliers or a new blueprint for billion-dollar brands? | Beauty Independent

AI startup Corgi opens 24/7 cafe in London | Sifted

Tech

Why workers are nostalgic for life before AI | Financial Times

Can smart glasses be designed without sacrificing user privacy | Wired

Why singles are using spreadsheets to optimise their dating lives | Wall Street Journal

Money

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens to $355 million, second-biggest weekend ever | The Hollywood Reporter

Spider-Man film sets record with $309 million in brand deals | Forbes

Zuckerberg writes: Why AI must be accessible to everyone | Wall Street Journal

Meta shares fall as Zuckerberg pitches AI agents to sceptical investors | Financial Times

Gymshark founder Ben Francis takes stake in US private equity firm | The Guardian

Europe needs €20 billion public investment to build competitive AI models | Maddyness

Align Ventures closes oversubscribed $125 million fund for consumer brands | Business Wire

Design

How AI-generated design aesthetics are reshaping internet culture | The New Yorker

Heinz explores mayo vending machine to beat AI slop | It’s Nice That

Ikea brings portable, stackable furniture to renters | Wallpaper

Happiness

How looksmaxxing became a form of grief and self-care | The New York Times

We’re too scared for sex, according to Esther Perel | The Atlantic

Why your life outside work matters more than you think | Fast Company

20 things to watch, read and stream this August | Wall Street Journal

If someone came to mind while you were reading, send it to them. That’s my whole marketing plan.

Stay gold 🙏🏻

The exhale is taking four weeks off.

Over the past 22 months, I’ve written 91 of them: 69,532 words.

Each essay just grew, one after the other after the other. Like a patch of wild flowers — poppies, cosmos, the odd blue cornflower.

Seen by over 6,000 of you now.

While it’s away, I’ll pick an exhale from the patch each week.

Maybe two.

The world is changing. You and I, too. Let’s see what survived the seasons, and what looks different now.

This week’s choice is from May.

A stadium of graduates booing former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, at their commencement speech.

Ask not what AI can do for you. Ask what you can do for AI.

Since then, the current CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, has given his Stanford speech, sidestepping AI. More than a hundred students walked out, anyway.

For the organisers of the walkout, Amanda Campos and Eva Jones, AI is a tangential concern. Pichai refused to comment after.

The piece also foreshadowed SpaceX going public. As of today, it trades 42% below its post-IPO peak.

Noteworthy updates, but I didn’t choose it for those.

I chose it for last week’s exhale, on social media. Re-read together, they’re the same story.

A technology with too tight a grip on our kids. And in the background, us parents, holding on just as hard.

Especially me.

In May, trying to find a goodbye with my son before his school trip, I was back in the doorway where my parents’ divorce began. Last week, a game of garden cricket.

“This is fun,” he said.

The words popped out. Something cosmic. Something that reached in and pinched my heart between thumb and finger.

Set them free.

If only I could.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

PS. If you did Cannes last month — the rosé, the panels on authenticity, the awards about ads — you’ll have seen the realest thing on the red carpet: Romeo Bingham, clutching her Silver Lion.

Reminder: Romeo is not a creative director. She’s never worked at an ad agency. She wasn’t even a creator.

She’s a caregiver from Tacoma who took Dr Pepper viral singing in the front seat of her car.

Keurig Dr Pepper’s CMO, Drew Panayiotou, says he’ll never need to hold another agency pitch. Credit to him for getting out of the way. Other CMOs will find themselves doing more and more of that. Less comfortably.

From the shelf

Did it take a stadium of booing kids to tell us AI is holding us too tight? | Issue 89, May 2026

We can’t be alone. It was never just the screens. | Issue 91, July 2026

Dr Pepper’s $36 billion jingle is putting CMOs out of a job | Issue 82, February 2026

Markets

US grocery slowdown deepens as shoppers buy fewer items, pressuring food companies | CNBC

Oil hits $100 a barrel: what consumers should expect next | Fast Company

UK inflation falls to 2.6%, boosting Burnham’s cost of living agenda | The Guardian

Brands

Stanford students walk out on Sundar Pichai’s commencement speech | Wired

Teen drops Meta lawsuit over mental health harms days before trial | Reuters

Substack launches AI detection tool to identify machine-generated content | The Verge

Netflix’s final transparency report reveals three key lessons for streaming | Puck

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey crosses $124.5 million at box office | The New York Times

Coca-Cola’s controversial ‘fridge cigarette’ rebrand sparks debate | Fast Company

American Eagle rewrites back-to-school strategy for fragmented Gen Z | Adweek

Kayak targets the friend sabotaging group trip plans with new campaign | Creative Review

Meta’s apocalyptic David Bowie ad takes an optimistic spin on world ending | Wired

Watch Vibe’s new ad, a love-in between CMO and CFO | X

Burger King offers free Whopper if burger fails to meet your expectations | Quartz

Target partners with Pacsun for three-year tween apparel line | Glossy

How Smucker’s $5 billion Hostess acquisition became a costly mistake | Wall Street Journal

McDonald’s UK chief vows to tackle harassment and abuse at restaurants | The Times

Startups

Travis Kalanick’s robotics startup secures $1.7 billion in funding led by a16z | TechCrunch

7-day working week startup Corgi hits $4 billion valuation, third fundraise within months | Forbes

Poolhouse raises $55 million to modernise the pool hall experience | The New York Times

Lululemon invests $30 million in nylon-recycling startup Syntetica’s Series A | TechCrunch

Moth margarita maker secures £11 million as canned cocktail market booms | The Times

10 essential books for founders to read poolside this summer | EU-Startups

Tech

US lawmakers propose AI ‘kill switch’ requirement after model safety concerns | BBC

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health nationwide with bold clinical reasoning claims | The Verge

Publishers reconsider Google partnerships as AI threatens their traffic and revenue | Wall Street Journal

Army exhausts year’s AI tokens in one month despite unlimited access push | Slashdot

Neill Blomkamp’s AI film signals desperation, not innovation, for struggling directors | Futurism

Money

Tesla loses $214 billion in market value over Musk’s spending plan | MarketWatch

Judge halts $110 billion Paramount and Warner Bros. merger deal | TechCrunch

Study of 100,000 venture capitalists reveals 4% generate 90% of returns | NBER

Reformation eyes $1 billion valuation ahead of planned IPO | Business of Fashion

Intersnack Group to acquire Utz Brands for $14.25 per share in 91% premium deal | Yahoo Finance

Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm claims 200% returns in latest filing | The New York Times

Design

Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos on inclusive design, trust and creative leadership | It’s Nice That

Artist transforms Pittsburgh pickleball courts into playable geometric mural | Design Milk

Ellen Gallagher explores London’s maritime history for TfL’s Art on the Underground | Wallpaper

Happiness

How Ice-T evolved beyond survival mode into purpose-driven life | Big Think

Matt Damon’s gruelling physical transformation for Odyssey role | Vanity Fair

Research reveals which junior employees thrive working alongside AI | Harvard Business Review

If it helps you find out what you think, send it to someone.

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Subscribe now

It’s 1984.

Tipper Gore and her daughter Karenna are about to rock out to Prince in the lounge of the family’s brick Tudor house on 26th Street, South Arlington. The house Tipper grew up in, built by her grandfather’s own hands.

On the mantel, a silver crucifix, a wedding photo, and a blue campaign button with three red and white stars: Tipper is married to senator-elect Al Gore.

Today, Karenna, 11, gets to work the new hi-fi herself, the expensive one, brush-silver Sony separates stacked into a tower behind the glass door of a wood-veneer cabinet.

She slides the black disc out, careful at the edges, and sets it down. First crackles, then butterflies.

Side one opens with the radio hit Let’s Go Crazy, a song about God and transcendence.

Then track five. A boxy drumbeat and simple notes as Prince begins:

I knew a girl named Nikki. I guess you could say she was a sex fiend. I met her in a hotel lobby. Masturbating with a magazine.

The song ends with rain and wind and Prince’s voice recorded in reverse, like he’s possessed. Backmasking, everyone knows, is how bands hide satanic messages in their songs to brainwash children.

Tipper gasps, then boils. “I couldn’t believe my ears,” she says later.

And now.

A special Friday night with my 13-year-old son, and I need it to be a good one. London is burning, near 40 degrees, the air-con in the restaurant has melted, we are melting with it.

We order off the phone. Fine. After that my son can’t let the device settle. Face down on the table, except it never stays face down.

He keeps reaching for it to show me things he has no words of his own for, and the second I get up for napkins he’s back on it, then he disappears to the toilet to check it, and when he returns I’m ready to grab this damn phone and hurl it through the restaurant, out into the street.

I feel my body loading up to do it.

The phone sails through the folded-back doors. I run out after it, swoop it up before it’s stopped skidding, and slam it straight back down on the ground.

Down on my knees, I slam it down, slam it down, slam it down again, and only when it’s completely shattered do I look up to the sky, palms out, and scream: WHAT IN GOD’S NAME HAPPENED TO US?

I look around. The street, the cars, the restaurant I’ve just come from, all empty.

It’s just me out there.

Except it isn’t just me.

Forty years earlier, deranged by the same helplessness, Tipper is already up off the sofa.

She rounds up three other Washington wives, and within a year they’ve marched into the Senate and forced the record companies to put warning stickers on the front of records, cassettes, and, later, compact discs.

Dee Snider, John Denver, and Frank Zappa turn up at the hearing, calling it an affront to the First Amendment.

The bigger affront is, of course, the money.

Albums are driving billions into the pockets of music labels; the cover is an advertising art form; the last thing you want on one is a government sticker.

Of all the majors asked to submit designs, Deborah Norcross, a designer at Warners, is the only one who bothers. Her work is stark, black type on white, all caps: PARENTAL ADVISORY. EXPLICIT LYRICS.

It takes five years.

The first album to wear the marque is 2 Live Crew’s “Banned in the U.S.A.“ Public Enemy, N.W.A and Ice Cube soon wear theirs with pride, and the sticker becomes the most coveted square inch in music marketing history. Anything with one outsells the others by up to 30 per cent.

Warnings, bans, guidelines, whatever the grown-ups solemnly declare never matters: Rules are meant to be broken and money is meant to be made.

Besides, if the devil really had found a way into our homes, he wasn’t hiding in the grooves of records, or behind the glass of the wood-veneer hi-fi cabinet. He was sitting in the other wooden box, the one in the middle of the front room.

Television.

Between 1950 and 1960, TV sets entered 90 per cent of American homes. That’s faster than the internet, social media, and even AI.

Families went from saying grace around a dinner table and talking about their day, to slouching on sofas, food on laps, not talking about their day.

It scared us from the start.

One of the first big studies, out of Stanford in 1961, monitored 6,000 children under the question of what the set was doing to them, with concerns over violence and criminal tendencies.

In 1977, Marie Winn wrote The Plug-In Drug, a bestseller concluding television was a surrogate babysitter that damaged growing brains.

And by 1991, Mother Jones magazine coined “screen time“, a term that never went away, as screens, bigger and smaller, filled every room in the house.

Reality TV came next.

From 2003 to 2016, America’s Next Top Model is one of the biggest shows on television, 100 million viewers, 250 hours of coercive makeovers and relentless pressure to be thinner.

Contestant Keenyah Hill says viewers have told her the way her body was discussed on that show is what started their eating disorders.

We look back on Parental Advisory stickers and smile. But we look back on Top Model and wince. Did we really call that entertainment?

Yes, we also called it empowering.

Top Model wraps in 2016; by then it has already reappeared in teens’ pockets as Instagram.

So when The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt arrives in 2024, after a pandemic that schooled our children by screen, we’re ready to receive its message.

Haidt pins the rise in girls’ depression, anxiety, and suicide to the moment social media took root in their phones.

The devil finally reveals himself: the phone.

Preach, brother.

But two Oxford researchers, Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, had already run the numbers: Screen time all told, Top Model included, drove teenagers towards misery about as much as eating potatoes.

Candice Odgers, a UC Irvine psychologist who studies adolescence, reviewed The Anxious Generation for Nature.

She doesn’t doubt Haidt tells a compelling story.

Which is exactly the problem she has with it.

Hundreds of researchers, her included, have gone looking for Haidt’s large effects:

“Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations.”

Frightened parents want to put stickers on things. Truth is never so singular.

There is one thing the data does agree on.

The worst years on record for teenage suicide belong to the boys: four in five of them, 18.1 in every 100,000 at the peak, compared to 3.7 for girls.

Those worst years were 1990 to 1994.

Taking us back to music.

MTV, grunge, Kurt Cobain, and Smells Like Teen Spirit. A song that never wore one of Tipper’s advisory labels, because “load up on guns, bring your friends“ isn’t explicit profanity.

A song that was prophetic, save for the friends: it took three days before anyone found Cobain, alone, in the greenhouse above the detached garage of his home in Seattle.

…every couple generations, humanity reinvents fire. It takes a while for them to figure out how not to burn themselves but instead warm themselves…

A line Andrew Stanton, one of the original minds at Pixar, heard on the news and tried to fit into his last film. He’s also just spent years inside Toy Story 5 and its question of what happens when screens replace toys.

He’s right. It sure does take a while. And many lives.

In the meantime, you can’t tell if you’re warming or burning.

Mostly it just feels like melting.

A couple of months after Haidt’s book is published, Charli XCX’s “Brat“ is released.

Charli does a little key, a little line on one song, asks you to guess the colour of knickers on another, then tells you you can put them in your mouth.

“kamala IS brat,” Charli posts on X.

The 49th Vice President, Kamala Harris, has just begun a race to retain the White House.

Hours later: ten million views.

Kamala and her team turn the campaign’s socials and avatar slime green, Arial font, all of it borrowed from the lo-fi artwork of Charli’s new album.

Somewhere, Tipper still has Al’s 1984 blue campaign button.

It’s on the mantel of the brick Tudor on 26th Street, behind Karenna’s Harvard graduation photo, standing where the wedding photo used to be, put away since the separation, and next to the crucifix that hasn’t moved in 40 years.

The button is rusted metal and real.

She’d pick it up, turn it over once, look at the three red and white stars.

And shrug, probably.

Back in the sweltering restaurant, my son and I aren’t speaking. I study the table instead. The phone face down between us, the wet rings where the glasses were, our napkins scrunched soft.

In the calm, I look up. His thick dark hair, almond eyes, his fitted black T-shirt, a chain with a cross on it, because he saw it on TikTok.

It’s hard not to stare at this young man, at how much life there is in front of him.

And, in the same moment, I see why none of him is interested in being told anything by the man across the table, whose best years, likely, are behind him.

He gets up for his jacket, so naturally I use the chance to check up on him.

Flip the phone over, type his code, and swipe frantically through the open apps: ExpressVPN, Snapchat, Gmail, Trading212, WhatsApp, Photos, YouTube Music, Translate, ChatGPT, Messages, Monzo, Revolut, LinkedIn, Duolingo, Teams, Holy Bible, Vinted, Maps.

My mind scans them for the dangerous ones.

I decide it’s all of them.

And all of us.

Haidt’s book actually says two things. The half we pore over is about big tech, how we leave our children unprotected in the virtual world.

The other half is about us, how we over-protect them in the real one.

Maybe we missed that part looking at posts about Haidt on our phones, instead of reading the damn book, busy as we were.

Because we know we can’t sit, alone, in a room with nothing in our hands.

Because we know a screen never leaves, and people do.

Because we know, no matter how hard we love them, sometimes we lose them anyway.

“I’m fine, ‘cause I know that the Lord is coming soon.“

If Tipper had ever played Darling Nikki in reverse, she’d have found no Satan buried backwards in the track. Just the singing of a man on his knees, praying for protection.

There’s only one app I can think of that isn’t on his phone. Or mine.

Garden cricket? I say.

I hate sport. All of it: the ball, the bat, the hitting, the catching, the rummaging in a bush by faded evening light. Given the choice, I’d rather sit slumped in front of Netflix and not have to do anything at all.

But out in the warm summer air, the phones somewhere inside behind the glass, we find our way not to be alone.

He insists on one more over at 10 o’clock, and another at twenty past. I miss the ball, I lose the ball, I stand in the bush by the fence while he calls instructions, and there is nowhere on earth I would rather be.

“This is fun,” he says.

The game goes on too long, and it is fleeting.

And for every moment we’re there, he’s safe.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Why Gen Z struggles to find work as over-50s compete for entry-level jobs | The Times

City leaders debate who should succeed Reeves as chancellor | Financial Times

Bank of America CEO sees resilient consumer spending powering economy despite affordability pain | Axios

Brand Beat

Teenagers dismiss Britain’s social media curfew as pointless without enforcement | The Guardian

Should we build a separate, safer internet just for children? | The Verge

Nike and Adidas wage £50m World Cup advertising battle with blockbuster campaigns | BBC

World Cup’s new hydration breaks reveal deeper strategy beyond water | Wired

Reddit launches ‘People Are The Best’ campaign positioning itself as antidote to AI | MediaCat

A24 responds to backlash over Google AI collaboration announcement | Wired

Hinge founder’s $18M AI matchmaker sparks Black Mirror comparisons | Inc

Unilever shifts from agencies to creators, dismisses need for big ideas | The Drum

Nike shifts to micro-communities strategy, ditching single hero campaigns | MediaCat

Jim Stengel defends brand purpose against Sharp and Ritson’s criticism at Cannes Lions | Economic Times

Procter & Gamble brings scripted dramas to supermarket shelves | Wall Street Journal

McKinsey explores modern rethinking of marketing’s core fundamentals | McKinsey

Meta launches prediction markets app amid regulatory scrutiny | The New York Times

Comcast splits Sky and NBCUniversal into standalone media company | The Times

Sky’s ITV takeover reshapes British TV landscape amid streaming competition | The Guardian

Coca-Cola faces major legal battle with the IRS over tax dispute | Wall Street Journal

Balenciaga appoints new chief marketing officer to lead brand strategy | WWD

Hasbro targets adults with revamped Play-Doh in aging-up strategy | Wall Street Journal

Coty’s Covergirl targets Gen X women with older models and sub-$10 prices | Bloomberg

The multi-million dollar quest to create a naturally blue M&M | Wall Street Journal

Who is the MrBeast of tech and why does it matter | Sifted

An ad from 30 years ago predicted modern life, and still resonates | Entrepreneur

Starting Up

Neko Health raises $700M, valued at $7bn, expands to New York | The Next Web

Reformed closes £17m Series A funding round | The Grocer

How a two-person CPG team built a $1M revenue brand | The Food Stack

Oregon shoemaker sells business to 30 employees, sparking workplace transformation | BBC

Tech Tidbits

Why big AI labs are hiring so many philosophers | The Economist

OpenAI’s lifelike speaker sparks Apple theft allegations | Fortune

Robot dogs, Teslas, and helicopters stole the show at UN AI summit | Wired

Andy Burnham’s AI plan sparks mixed reactions across UK | Sifted

Venture Vibes

David Beckham’s IM8 health drink startup raises $1B from General Catalyst | TechCrunch

EasyJet bought by US private equity firm for $7.5bn | Telegraph

Brompton sells stakes to Decathlon and Chinese Labubu backer | The Guardian

Design Driven

Bumble’s new Aspen chalet is an inviting home, not a branded activation | Design Milk

How designers built the dream home of a tech visionary at 87 | Wired

How McDonald’s Golden Arches became the world’s most recognizable logo | Wallpaper

Happiness

How watching a soccer final affects your body | Wired

Cannabis-using mothers find community and coping in the ‘garden mom’ trend | The Atlantic

Should you date your coworkers? Here’s what to consider | The New York Times

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Stay gold 🙏🏻

Against dark evergreens, Pattie Gonia’s face sits inside a mane of enormous centre-parted copper hair, like a lion in its ruff or a character from the Wizard of Oz. Heavy black false lashes, high blush worn over a real, kept auburn moustache. She never shaves it; the beard-and-drag combination is part of her brand.

Pattie is a musician, an environmental activist, and known to a following of over three million as the world’s first backpacking drag queen.

Today she’s wearing a thick-grey carabiner as a drop earring, filming something a little different. Not the usual climate explainer. The runtime is 6:50, a multi-part titled “Patagonia vs Pattie Gonia”.

Patagonia is suing Pattie for trademark infringement.

Right now there’s more of the case on TikTok than in the court documents. Swipe up and the previous video is Ryan Gellert, CEO of Patagonia, on a conference stage.

Patagonia tried to talk and Pattie wouldn’t come to the table, he says.

“We are not trying to silence somebody. We are not trying to take somebody’s identity away,“ he says.

Today’s shoot is Pattie filing her objection:

“Either you, Ryan Gellert, are lying to the public, or the people under you are lying to your face.“

Sustained.

Well, sort of. This being the algorithm, it’s a trial with a million juries and judges. The feed holds all four verdicts, good and bad, for both sides.

Pattie-the-climate-activist, bullied by a billion-dollar environmental brand. Pattie-the-grifter, milking the PR of a Pride-month martyrdom. Patagonia-the-sellout, the most tone-deaf corporation of 2026. Patagonia-the-grown-up, defending its trademark because the law’s written that way.

The last one is the closest this story has to an objective fact.

Pattie and Patagonia had lived together in the world for eight years without a care; when Pattie’s audience grew they even drew up some guidelines to avoid brand confusion.

The trouble starts on 21st September 2025, Pattie filed to trademark “Pattie Gonia,” which would include letting her sell outdoor clothing under the name.

She’d recently seen what losing a name does. Her friend Clair Barnes had performed as Lexi Love for sixteen years, and the year she finally broke out on RuPaul’s Drag Race, a stranger revived an old registration and took it.

Overnight, Clair’s music and bookings were gone.

So Pattie wasn’t filing against Patagonia to be predatory per se, rather “to make sure that never happened to me.“

The sad part is that Pattie and Patagonia believe in a great many of the same things, but there is no defence in the Lanham Act for being kindred spirits. The lawyers paid to look after the serious dollars know the rule: A brand is money waiting to flow to you, so protect it or lose it to someone who will.

The funny part is that for a fight supposedly about money, neither of these two seems particularly well suited.

For Pattie, the money mostly passes through. “A Fundraiser That’s Not a Drag” ran its sixth annual edition in 2024, nearly $409,000 raised in one year alone. “The $1M Dollar Backpacking Trip” was a 100-mile hike, in drag, for queer and BIPOC outdoor equity. She runs an outdoor jobs board for LGBTQ people. Around $3.7 million raised to date.

For Patagonia, the company is also set up to give most away. A trust the family controls holds the 2% that votes; the other 98% sends its dividends to a fund that grants to environmental causes. Last year $40 million went out — a soft year for a trust whose annual target is $100 million.

In other words, for both of them, the money ends up in the same place anyway: Mother Nature.

The lawyering that’s got in the way here, the whole business of it, is something Patagonia’s own founder knew all too well.

Penning the first page of his book over twenty years ago, Yvon Chouinard wrote:

“I’ve been a businessman for almost fifty years. It’s as difficult for me to say those words as it is for someone to admit being an alcoholic or a lawyer.“

Patagonia is suing for a single dollar in damages, which tells you it never wanted Pattie’s money. The proposed million in legal fees is less than a fight like this actually costs, but enough to lean on Pattie and push for a fast settlement.

And a coexistence agreement, the standard fix that lets two near-identical names share the world, would close the whole thing tomorrow.

Every door leads to the answer. So why has neither side walked through it?

Probably because there are no bad verdicts here.

Ever since Bud Light put a trans influencer on a can and lost the top spot it had held for twenty years, the mood has changed. Go woke, go broke is the going wisdom now.

Suing a drag queen lets Patagonia strike a macho-company pose, while actually handing its own CEO and Pattie a stage for a conversation far bigger than any Pride activation could buy.

Literally, billions and billions of views talking about the importance of identity, many of which are queers praising Gellert’s calm composure. Meanwhile, Pattie’s “Part 1” video is going to be her biggest ever: 5.4 million views and 1.2m likes already.

The sharpest criticism, that a real lawsuit has been turned into algorithmic cosplay, cuts Pattie a little deeper than Patagonia, but they’re both running the same marketing playbook: If you want attention don’t run a campaign, feign a fight.

There’s a reason the marketing chief and the crisis-comms chief roles are merging.

And the trademarks?

Right now, for $36 from a bootleg site with addresses in Azusa and Shenzhen, you can buy a hoodie that steals from both of them at once. Patagonia’s famous skyline of peaks, but striped in Pride rainbow, a backpacker kicking out one heeled leg at the summit, and underneath, set in Patagonia’s own fat serif, the words “pattie gonia”.

No connection to her store, or theirs.

The one operation actually infringing both names at once is the only party nobody is suing.

Pattie Gonia is Wyn Wiley. A photographer from Lincoln, Nebraska. An Eagle Scout who grew up being told the outdoors was no place for a boy like him.

His father was from Alaska.

The relationship was complicated and then he was gone.

Wyn took what remained of him north to the foot of Holgate Glacier, in the Kenai Fjords. You can’t drive there, you’re going to have to cross rock, kayak across cold green water, where you’ll find the headstone is a wall of ten-thousand-year-old ice.

That was a while ago.

Since then, the glacier has calved into the sea. Every year, more and more is lost, at an ever-increasing rate. And with it Wyn’s father’s resting place.

In 2023, Wyn went back with Yo-Yo Ma and the Alaskan singer Quinn Christopherson to film something of a funeral song, a requiem.

Realising they were giving up before they’d even started, they had a change of heart, and wrote this opening line instead:

“Well, I’m not going to say goodbye.“

This week SpaceX went public, the largest IPO there has ever been, minting fortunes at a scale no one ever imagined. Amid all the talk, I caught myself thinking how small and stupid Pattie Gonia and Patagonia’s way of doing business looks next to it.

Take some thread, sew a few vests, borrow a name, walk up some hills in six-inch heels, then hand most of what little it makes back to the ice and the rock and the cold green water?

Then I thought about Wyn’s father.

He never got to meet Pattie.

Maybe a hard man, who knows. Maybe no time for business people, or lawyers, or even men in drag. Looking up now at the lot of us, all the noise about leaving the planet, all the grabbing.

And I figure a soul settled into the nature he came from, worked on by the long fact of his passing, might be startled by something closer to home.

A son who also gave him a daughter.

One with a feel for the wild and the will not to let it go.

Who became famous of all things, and pours most of what she makes down into the ice that holds him.

He’d sure be proud.

Here’s to the rainbow. ♡

Market Moves

SpaceX shares gain for second day after blockbuster debut | Financial Times

UK government plans aggressive state stakes in British companies | The Times

Why the US economy keeps beating the odds | BBC News

Brand Beat

Patagonia and Pattie Gonia clash over trademark rights | AP News

How crisis communications are claiming their seat at the C-suite table | The Wall Street Journal

Starbucks apologises after South Korea tank day promotion causes backlash | The Guardian

Nike is struggling to recapture its winning formula | The Economist

Nike vs Adidas: who really won the World Cup ad battle? | Campaign Live

Six brands celebrated the New York Knicks’ historic NBA championship win | Adweek

Charlotte Tilbury receives CBE for services to the beauty industry | Business of Fashion

Mammoth Brands wants to be the next big consumer goods giant | CNBC

Family farmers now earn more from social media than selling crops | The Wall Street Journal

Momfluencers are selling AI as a better co-parent than men | Wired

CAA and TPG launch $250 million fund to back YouTube creators | Bloomberg

Meta poaches Snapchat’s creator connector to boost wearables push | The Hollywood Reporter

Fox acquires Roku in a $22 billion streaming deal | The Verge

Airbnb is rethinking its purpose under Brian Chesky’s vision | The New York Times

Eli Lilly shares climb after late-stage weight loss drug trial succeeds | The Wall Street Journal

Starting Up

How smaller brands can grow by acting bigger than they are | Marketing Week

The investors and insiders set to cash in on the AI IPO rush | TechCrunch

Meet the 24-year-old AI prodigy backed by Jane Street | The Wall Street Journal

Stars + Honey raises $24 million Series A to grow protein bar brand | WWD

Phoebe Gates secures high-profile investor for her shopping business | The List

Tech Tidbits

Google signs $920 million monthly computing deal with SpaceX | Bloomberg

AI labelled the greatest money-wasting scheme humanity has ever seen | The Telegraph

One journalist’s year living and working alongside AI robots | The Guardian

Meta employees are pushing back hard on Zuckerberg’s hackathon plan | Wired

UK under-16s social media ban: which apps are affected and how it works | The Guardian

US suspends access to Anthropic’s latest models | Anthropic

Venture Vibes

SpaceX IPO: A guide to the biggest winners | The Wall Street Journal

Founders go public with VC horror stories — and name names | TechCrunch

Why continuation funds are becoming the go-to move in venture capital | Sifted

Bending Spoons cofounders become billionaires as Italian startup hits $11B valuation | Forbes

Sadiq Khan makes the case for London competing with Silicon Valley | City A.M.

Design Driven

What the design industry consistently gets wrong about good taste | Creative Review

KFC’s rebrand transforms its iconic bucket into an entire brand world | It’s Nice That

Hermès opens a London Maison rooted in British eccentricity and craft | Wallpaper

Can AI actually produce writing that people want to read? | The New Yorker

Happiness

SpaceX employees are learning how the wealthy manage their money | The Wall Street Journal

Silicon Valley’s AI boom drives escort rates as high as $6K per hour | New York Post

AI coworkers may be flattening the workplace as we know it | The State of Brand

I hiked the Appalachians to connect with nature — here’s how | National Geographic

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Stay gold 🙏🏻

Eric Schmidt used to run Google. He is worth thirty billion dollars. He is seventy-one years old. He is delivering the commencement address at the University of Arizona.

And he is having a bad evening.

His long-standing script and book writer crafted every word. There will have even been a presentation coach, in a room with closed curtains, masking tape on the floor showing him where to stand, how to read from the left teleprompter to the right, how to land perfectly timed beats with the fist, the clasp, the thumb push, even some double-finger shooting.

His suit and gowns have been pressed perfectly by his valet.

As many as 35,000 are gathered in the audience.

But they are booing him.

Some of it was planned. Student groups co-ordinated on Instagram. Eric is accused of raping his former business partner on a yacht off Mexico in 2021 and sexual assault at Burning Man in 2023. He denies it. A judge sent the case to arbitration in March.

But, what’s happening now isn’t part of that plan.

AI is going to touch everything… Schmidt confirms.

Boos intensify. A din.

He keeps going. Cheek muscles squeezed into a smile. He talks about the beginning when Time magazine made the computer Person of the Year in 1982, and how they are right to be afraid, that fear is rational, that algorithms have learned to amplify it.

(Algorithms his old company built.)

He raises his hands. If you’d let me make this point, please, he says. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.

The exact line he pitched twenty-five years ago to Sheryl Sandberg to get her to join Google from the US Treasury. After that, she left for Facebook and presided over Cambridge Analytica.

One graduate’s TikTok post kept it simple:

🖕🏼 you Eric Schmidt

Luckily, Eric isn’t a Wildcat, he went to Princeton and Berkeley. He’s bought his way to the lectern with hundreds of millions of dollars for Lazuli, a new space telescope being built in partnership with the University of Arizona. The honorary gowns and the speaker’s slot are the gift in return.

Easy to think Eric’s just the drunk king of big tech, giving his one speech.

But no, he’s not the only one being booed.

A real-estate executive at the University of Central Florida said the rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution, got booed, laughed nervously, and asked what happened?

The music executive who signed Taylor Swift in 2005 told graduates at Middle Tennessee State AI is rewriting production as we sit here and got booed. He snapped back deal with it, you can hear me now or pay me later.

Pay me later? The ones booing are paying now.

Entry-level US job postings are down thirty-five per cent year on year. Forty-three per cent of global CEOs say they will reduce junior roles within twelve months, up from seventeen the year before. Eighty-nine per cent of the class of 2026 say they are worried about it, up from sixty-four last year.

If that wasn’t enough, two coming-of-age moments will collide in a perfect storm this summer. Graduates leaving school. AI leaving private.

SpaceX, including xAI, filed its prospectus to go public and trades on the twelfth of June at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion. On Thursday, Anthropic closed a $65 billion round at a valuation of nearly $1 trillion, bigger than OpenAI’s last private round. Analysts project both will IPO by late 2026, because it’s now or never.

And the speeches aren’t over yet.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, covering both Google and DeepMind, will give the Stanford commencement on the fourteenth of June.

Two days after the SpaceX bell rings.

When the Hard Fork podcast asked him what his boo strategy would be at Stanford, Sundar gave the game away.

He said the graduates would drive the progress and deal with the impact of artificial intelligence.

Yes, this year, thousands of ambitious twenty-somethings will get into some of the big AI labs, or find themselves in some venture-backed AI success. Or get spun through the AI résumé-screener and actually land on interview. Stanford grads more than most.

But of the 1.5 million graduating, the majority will be landing the other side of that and.

What Eric, Sundar…and Elon, and Mark, and Sam, and Dario, and Satya, need most from the class of 2026 is for them to play along. Use the tools. Take the jobs that are left. Pay the subscriptions. Be the data the models train on.

The class of 2026 isn’t being hired to drive progress. The class of 2026 is being asked to drive the demand for AI that all these valuations are being priced against.

Kyla Scanlon called it: these commencement speeches are JFK in reverse. Ask not what AI can do for you. Ask what you can do for AI.

The kings are grabbing on too tightly.

A peek inside the skull of a twenty-two-year-old and you will see reward circuitry fully mature, the prefrontal cortex still wiring. The brain is at its most creative, built evolutionarily to ignore what its elders say about the future.

On the ground, most CEOs sit too far from the actual work to have any clue where most AI’s future value is going to come from. And tokens won’t stay cheap forever.

They need each other. Right now, neither seems able to say it.

My son left on Tuesday. He is gone for two weeks, to a place called Molveno, by bus, twenty-four hours each way.

It is the third trip this year. He is thirteen.

I had a version of the goodbye in my head. I had it rehearsed for weeks.

He would come down. We would talk on the kerb. He would nod. We would hug. He would look me in the eyes, briefly, with the look I had been waiting for since he was small.

Thanks to you, the look would say. I’ve got this.

Reality.

A full-grown hairy man came up next to me in the shower glass. He was my son. He told me to get out. I got out.

I reached for some deodorant. He has seventeen sprays lined up on the shelf, each called something like Java or Apex Onyx. But they are all his.

Then he shouts that we haven’t left. I shout that it’s far too early. We rush the half mile to the drop-off hall to find we are the only ones there. No teachers. No bus. No other families. I can’t look at him.

By the time he comes to leave, he’s been sat with friends a while and the dread of the goodbye has begun to clasp my throat.

The friends have taken over a low wall outside, shoulder to shoulder. The version in my head had been stood at the kerb and I’m not ready for a version where he’s sat with three other boys and I have to walk towards them to say something.

Bye, then.

I reach out an open hand between us, but it descends into a handshake neither of us can find.

My hand closes on what’s there of his and squeezes.

1984. Dad in the doorway, drunk and sobbing. He has my hand. Don’t go, he says. Don’t go. He knows we are. Mum’s voice somewhere behind me, low and certain. We go.

Bye, Dad.

The kids are buzzing to get going. I load his bag on. They haven’t left yet, but the moment they’re stood together, they’re gone. I stay to wave them off anyway.

Later.

Knowing he won’t reply to a message, I send him a question with buttons.

Are you: A: Having a great time B: Not great, wish I was home C: Stop bothering me

On Saturday he taps A.

And C.

I drop a ♡ back, too quickly.

I’m already at next Saturday. The bus pulling in. Him stepping off. Him smiling. Him reaching me first.

He’s back. He’s back. He’ll always come back.

The hug we missed at the kerb.

Let’s rise together with every issue.

Market Moves

UK faces £125bn annual cost if youth unemployment crisis goes unaddressed | The Guardian

Students are booing AI mentions at graduation speeches across the US | Fast Company

AI hiring slowdown puts skilled trade workers in a position to win | CNBC

Stock market soars while consumer sentiment hits a 70-year low | The Wall Street Journal

Core inflation holds at 3.3% in April, matching Fed’s preferred gauge forecast | CNBC

Brand Beat

Les Binet and Will Davis warn ‘small thinking’ is killing advertising | IPA

Subway overhauls CMO and agency roster to fix emotional connection gap | Ad Age

Disney cuts 1,000 TV and film jobs under new CEO | Fox Business

Patagonia takes legal action against drag queen Pattie Gonia over trademark | The Guardian

Lululemon and founder Chip Wilson end bitter proxy battle | Retail Dive

Nike’s surprise World Cup cast hints at a bold new marketing playbook | Adweek

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky no longer sees hotels as the enemy | The Wall Street Journal

How Shake Shack kept its hospitality soul while going digital | Harvard Business Review

How Crocs made ‘ugly’ its biggest brand asset | Adweek

BTS and Oreo launch limited-edition cookies inspired by a Korean treat | People

K-beauty hit $2.4 billion in the US last year — and it’s still growing | The Wall Street Journal

Eli Lilly’s experimental obesity shot cuts body weight by 28% in trials | Business of Fashion

Oura Ring 5 is slimmer and lighter with an AI health coach built in | Wired

On and Erewhon team up for a sneaker built for grocery runs | WWD

Ferrari unveils $640,000 electric speedster designed by Jony Ive | The Wall Street Journal

Why going viral has lost its appeal for fashion brands | Vogue

Starting Up

NanoClaw creator rejects $20M buyout to raise $12M seed round instead | TechCrunch

Company inspection startups; the new AI frontier | Seriesastories

Airbnb-backed WeRoad raises $58M to expand group travel platform to the US | TechCrunch

BrewDog founder launches new beer brand with promise to original investors | The Times

Loonen Water: a deep dive | Feedme, Emily Sundberg

Tech Tidbits

Anthropic overtakes OpenAI to become world’s most valuable AI company | The Guardian

Tech CEOs are losing touch with reality over AI hype | TechCrunch

Meet the Vatican’s unlikely insider shaping AI ethics at Anthropic | Wired

SpaceX lands $6.45B in Space Force contracts ahead of IPO | TechCrunch

Meta launches paid subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp | TechCrunch

Venture Vibes

SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs will put AI boom to the test | Financial Times

How Anthropic became a $900 billion AI giant so fast | The New York Times

Space X’s S1 breakdown ahead of IPO | TikTok

Is a wave of fintech IPOs finally about to break? | Forbes

Why Silicon Valley is nervous about Pope Leo’s stance on AI | Politico

British Business Bank backs new UK-dedicated VC fund | UKTN

Design Driven

Three Italian auto experts debate whether the Ferrari Luce’s design is really that bad | Wired

Rocky outcrops and cactus walls shape this desert-edge Mexican home | Wallpaper

Young Vic’s new logo uses motion blur to modernise tired theatre branding | It’s Nice That

Happiness

A happiness expert explains why optimising your joy will backfire | The New York Times

Slowmaxxing is the wellness trend embracing a slower pace of life | Vice

7 body language cues that make you instantly more likable | Big Think, Vanessa Van Edwards

If you like what you’ve read, do subscribe and share ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Project Hail Mary is a film about a mission to save Earth. The spacecraft is the Hail Mary. On board is Ryland Grace, an American middle school science teacher played by Ryan Gosling.

Hail Mary, full of Grace.

And if you’ve seen it, you know the naming isn’t a joke. Not since Steven Spielberg’s E.T. will you try this hard not to cry. The film delivers wonder, joy, connection.

The happy tears’ll getcha.

Twelve light years from home, Grace wakes from a coma. His crewmates are dead in their cryotubes. He eats, alone. The computer answers when spoken to. The stars belong to a system he does not recognise. He is the loneliest character mainstream American cinema has put on the screen in a decade.

Then another ship appears.

A tunnel grows from its hull toward the Hail Mary. Grace walks through it in his EVA suit. At the halfway point, a wall of clear xenonite. On the other side: Rocky. A lump of granite the size of a Labrador, five limbs, no face.

They look at each other.

Grace raises his hand and places it palm-first against the hot glass. He holds it there.

Rocky raises one of his limbs. He places his three-fingered hand directly opposite Grace’s palm.

In E.T., the alien’s glowing fingertip touched Elliott’s forehead at goodbye. Grace and Rocky’s hands meet at hello.

The shot holds for longer than is comfortable.

Two beings that share nothing at all. The atmosphere on Rocky’s side would kill Grace in seconds. And yet there they are. Lost in the extremities of outer space, somehow finding each other.

The audience needs it, and feels it, as much as the two characters. Grace’s reaction says it all:

It was the loneliest I’d ever been, and then it wasn’t, anymore.

A line like that, in a year like this?

No surprise, Project Hail Mary is catching a buzz. Some are calling it next year’s Best Picture frontrunner.

“It’s everything you could possibly want from a cinematic experience.” — Nerdist

Audiences love it. 95% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter, 112,000 videos posted to #projecthailmary. 400 million views of the first trailer in seven days — the most ever for an original film that isn’t a sequel or remake.

As for the grosses: $668 million at the box office, over-running Amazon’s own 45-day theatrical window. In every way, this is a hit for the studio.

Who is the studio?

Amazon MGM.

It seems normal now, but take a beat. MGM — an icon of Hollywood, the famous lion under strips of gold film, three loud roars, Ars Gratia Artis, art for art’s sake — was bought by a Seattle e-commerce company that sells you bin bags and HDMI cables.

When the deal was announced, the worry was that Amazon would starve MGM of original ideas, milking the back catalogue for one-click buys.

MGM signed the rights to Project Hail Mary before the takeover, so Hail Mary doesn’t acquit Amazon yet. But it surely offers what the film offers.

Hope.

The script’s premise is prescient: The planet is losing sunlight to a fictional microbe called astrophage that feeds on the sun’s radiation. Hollywood, too, has its own astrophage.

Obviously, Netflix, Apple, and Disney. They eat the need to ever sit in the dark with strangers and watch a film at the cinema ever again.

But the bigger menace for movie production is the economics of short-form video. The industry waves it off as a different beast, but it is the beast. We’re addicted. A clip. A swipe. A clip. A swipe. A clip a clip a clip.

At a run time of two hours thirty-six minutes, most of Hail Mary‘s audience will end up consuming the film as clips, free, on social, at a scale far bigger than the number who can sit still and keep off their phones long enough to watch the film itself.

Reminder: Meta clears $668 million every 29 hours. YouTube every four days. TikTok every seven. And they take zero creative risks. Production budget = $0.

Making a Hail Mary is lightning in a bottle. Six years and $200 million trying to catch it, and mostly it doesn’t come. Begging a blindingly obvious question: Why is a company as nakedly efficient as Amazon even bothering?

For art’s sake?

Obviously not.

Amazon does have an empire to protect. After all, Prime is one of the planet’s largest recurring revenue streams and AWS runs nearly a third of all the cloud computing on Earth.

When your business is warehouses, blinking servers, logistics, and infrastructure, you’re boring. Another brown box thrown up against your front door is fulfilment. But it’s not fulfilling. You can’t take your kids to go see an AWS Nitro System hypervisor.

So when Andy Jassy goes on Mad Money to face Jim Cramer about Q1, the supply chain, the AI race, he needs something that doesn’t send Jim to sleep. He needs a human face, Ryan Gosling’s, and a promise that the future is bright.

To stay essential, Amazon needs to nurture wonder. One thing they can’t engineer.

It’s helpful then that Hail Mary‘s makers have focussed on magic, making sure every frame is covered in human fingerprints.

Rocky is a puppet built by Neal Scanlan’s shop with servomotor fingers, brought to life on set by James Ortiz. His voice is an ocarina, and a jug of water that directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller blew across, tuning by ear. Daniel Pemberton’s score: wood, metal, stomping, clapping.

Fans are sharing crochet patterns and 3D print files. Craft your own Rocky.

This month, Bumble killed the swipe. In its place, an AI assistant who interviews you, then recommends who to meet. It would be easy to read Hail Mary as the counter-punch. A plea for hands touching through glass, not fingers swiping on screens.

Andy Weir, who wrote the novel, is the obvious person to ask if that’s the read. Parents divorced when he was eight. As a kid he spent long stretches alone then grew up to be a software engineer who likes working out his own orbital mechanics, just for fun.

You’d think his answer would reflect the fears, and scars, of a loner in the age of the algorithm. But Weir won’t be drawn there. His answer is bigger.

“I don’t really like sci-fi where it’s bleak and dystopian. I like the optimistic stuff […] We are an awesome and amazing people as a species.”

That’s what art can do. Hold the mirror up at an angle that shows the version of us worth being. Ars Gratia Artis — maybe not art for art’s sake, but Amazon and MGM might just about agree it’s art for our sake.

If Amazon gives the lion a new roar, and Jassy gets to take his kids to a premiere instead of a hypervisor, then we get movie moments that hold us tight.

One particular moment holds us tightest of all:

Grace teaches Rocky thumbs up. Good. Yes. Affirmative. With three fingers, Rocky’s version comes out upside down.

Later, Grace tells Rocky something hard to admit. Grace doesn’t have the words to make it okay. He tries a thumbs-up. It doesn’t fit the moment. So he flips his hands over. Rocky’s way around.

Thumbs down.

I know what’s happening, I’m not pretending, and whatever happens is okay because we are here, together.

A simple childlike gesture, flipped the wrong way, punches your throat. If you’ve held it back this far, this is where you blub.

In life, we all get lost in our own atmosphere sometimes. If you’re lucky, really lucky, someone on the other side has their heart pressed against the glass to bring you home. If you’re luckier still, you get to press yours right back.

I’ll leave the last words to Rocky:

Amaze. Amaze. Amaze.

Market Moves

Iran threat sends oil prices higher as deadline looms | Bloomberg

U.S. wholesale inflation hits 6% in April | CNBC

IMF upgrades UK growth forecast but warns risks remain | BBC

Brand Beat

Amazon beats Q1 forecasts and credits ‘Project Hail Mary’ amid AI race | Deadline

Bumble ditches its signature swipe feature and goes all-in on AI | Let’s Data Science

Peak TV is behind us | The Guardian

Gen Z film distributor uses influencer events to bring peers back to cinemas | Fast Company

Amazon and YouTube are selling TV operating systems, not just ad inventory | Digiday

KitKat turns its packaging into a signal-blocking pouch for your phone | Dezeen

Timothée Chalamet stars as street soccer fanatic in Adidas World Cup ad | The Wall Street Journal

Why marketers can no longer afford to ignore Reddit | The Drum

Publicis strikes $2.2 billion deal to acquire data firm LiveRamp | Adweek

How Claire’s is winning over tweens in the YouTube era | The Wall Street Journal

Apple’s marketing VP Tor Myhren reflects on a decade shaping the brand | Fast Company

Why ‘creative’ should be an adjective again, not a job title | The Drum

Very’s chief customer officer departs the retail brand | Marketing Week

Hinge’s new campaign honours the almost-moments that lead to Gen Z love | Adweek

How to redesign your marketing organisation for the agentic AI age | Harvard Business Review

Octopus CMO Rebecca Dibb-Simkin ignored warnings to join an energy startup | City A.M.

Graza’s new potato chips are surprisingly good, and worth your attention | Tasting Table

Lululemon hits back at founder Chip Wilson, calling him ‘misguided’ and ‘outdated’ | CNBC

Starting Up

How Marisa Poster built Perfect Ted into a $67m matcha brand | Forbes

Multiverse raises $70m, boosting valuation of Euan Blair’s apprenticeship startup | Sifted

Poppi founder Allison Ellsworth opens up about money and building a brand | The Wall Street Journal

15 European hardware startups to watch in 2026 | Sifted

Nectar Social raises $30M Series A to build a marketing operating system | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Why AI feels like both a familiar machine and pure magic | The Wall Street Journal

The AI job apocalypse narrative is completely wrong | a16z

Elon Musk loses landmark lawsuit against OpenAI | Wired

Is Mark Zuckerberg running Meta into the ground? | The New York Times

Why data centers might actually benefit your local community | Vox

Venture Vibes

James Murdoch in talks to acquire major parts of Vox Media | The New York Times

Everlane is being acquired by Shein | Puck

eBay turns down $55.5bn takeover bid from GameStop | BBC

Activist investor pressures Whitbread to put itself up for sale | The Wall Street Journal

SpaceX selects Nasdaq for its mid-June IPO listing | The Information

OnlyFans falls from $8bn to $3bn as pandemic-era empire crumbles | European Business Magazine

Design Driven

How Wallpaper threw its epic NYCxDesign Week party with Hello Human | Wallpaper

BMW’s design chief Max Missoni on where the brand is headed | Cool Hunting

Happiness

The case for bringing back the humble postcard | Wallpaper

Why AI’s rise makes reconnecting with our humanity more urgent than ever | Vox

People are going under the knife to look more AI-generated | Futurism

If you like what you’ve read, do subscribe and share ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

9:29 a.m. on Wednesday, April 15, 2026. The Linux servers of the NASDAQ blink to life. Allbirds, Inc opens with a market capitalisation of just $21.7 million.

It’s a plot twist for the makers of those weirdly comfortable merino sneakers. Four and a half years earlier, the footwear company rang the bell at $4.1 billion.

Maths even I can do:

4,100,000,000 - 21,700,000 = 4,078,300,000. 4 years, 5 months = 1,624 days

That’s two and a half million dollars lost, every, single, day since going public.

But that Wednesday, those NASDAQ servers are fired up for one final twist in the tale. A fugazi, as Mark Hanna calls it in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure.

Obviously.

Why wouldn’t a defunct woolly shoe company become an AI-native cloud solutions provider? I mean, the company is barely worth a fifth of what Meta will pay one AI hire this year.

But it works. NASDAQ:BIRD pops, a 582% gain in a single day, squeezing to $159 million in market cap, more than the company’s entire 2025 revenues.

We’re a long way from Allbirds’ dream to be the sustainable alternative to Nike.

And if you were hoping for a Shoe Dog-style ending, this is not it.

We’re in a horror movie bloodbath: A brand built with fast venture money fails, and gets taken apart by flesh-eating retail investors.

And yet.

There was a time we believed sustainable alternatives were going to change the world.

Oatly, Beyond Meat, BrewDog, Honest Co.

Back then, Allbirds looked well placed to win.

Tim Brown co-founded it, a former New Zealand footballer who’d grown up around more sheep than people. He’d watched the wool industry shrink as synthetics took over.

Brown: We founded Allbirds to help nature make a comeback.

The Wool Runner was a breakthrough. Worn without socks was its thing, at one with nature — but not in a Goop vagina candle kind of way — in a competent, “I’ve got a board meeting” kind of way.

Fact: The Wool Runner was made from the same moisture-wicking fibres NASA uses in spacesuits, meaning Allbirds had the cosiness of a slipper with the performance of a trainer.

Time Magazine called them The world’s most comfortable shoe.

Fashion, or lack of, did the rest.

Orthopaedic lines, and no logos, made them the perfect choice for a straight-leg chino, a white oxford, and a Patagonia fleece — the Silicon Valley uniform.

It’s 2018, and this is the peak of woke brands. Larry Fink, six trillion in assets under management, writes an open letter instructing CEOs to find a sense of purpose, a societal good. Colin Kaepernick has just appeared in a Nike ad.

Allbirds is seen as ultra-progressive:

I have money, I have power, but I’m uncomfortable about both.

Rich, but not an asshole.

Soon, the Wool Runner was papped on the feet of Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Horowitz, Larry Page, and Tim Cook.

I owned three pairs myself.

My son and I are at Mum’s. He’s seven. She’s seventy.

A long sheet of brown paper is unrolled across kitchen tiles, with four letters in crayon and marker. N-O-N-A.

The first N is a man fishing from a boat. The O is a face, round with a triangle nose and a red tongue. The next N has a rocket on top. The A has wings, with a big Transformers robot standing next to it. Nona Prime.

My son has made a sign for her new bed downstairs.

It’s a lovely moment, but I’m annoyed: I’ve just unboxed my Wool Runners, white, and a dot of red marker has ended up on the lace. The box arrived at Christmas, with a sheep on the lid. Christmas was two months ago. I haven’t been to see Mum, so I’ve only just put them on and they’re stained already.

Outside, sat at the round wicker table on the stone terrace, Mum’s in her dressing gown. She has taken up smoking again with total joy. Nothing to lose, renal cell carcinoma is at final stage now.

I go out to sit with her. “Shoes look nice, son.”

We’re talking about a few things. I’m following just enough to notice her tone shift. She mumbles: “It’s a shame really, as there’s things left I’d like to have done.”

I’m checking the stain. I don’t want to be there too much longer. Mums can be a drain.

The news in the background is talking about a novel coronavirus. It’s the week before lockdown, but we don’t know that yet.

There were 483 days of lockdowns. The skies emptied of planes and the birds came back. Long walks at lunch, and we were wearing soft clothes, comfortable shoes, all…the…time.

In these unprecedented times, we were grateful that the planet had been given a second chance.

By every measure, this should have been Allbirds’ moment.

But it wasn’t.

Allbirds’ growth rate halved, and net losses doubled.

Going to the office had died and the work uniform with it. No white oxford, no Patagonia fleece, no Allbirds, because…nowhere to wear them.

Socially distanced: We’d been alone with our screens for over a year. We came out parasocially bonded to TikTok creators and podcast hosts, not to our neighbours.

During that time, there was little else to do but go shopping online. Now, with 9% inflation, there was no spare change for that third pair of trainers.

The biggest transformation of all was Silicon Valley. It had grown tired of being apologetic and being seen to do the right thing. So had America. And a new technology was emerging, the starter gun for a new era of objectivism.

Being an asshole was back.

Grey hoodies became gold chains and Greubel Forseys. Lean In became cage fights. White House dinners. Trillion-dollar pay packages, and dictator salutes in front of the cameras. And data centres burning up the planet, promising we’re all going to be obsolete anyway.

Even Tim Cook, the most unassuming billionaire in Palo Alto, the guy you’d expect to retire in Allbirds.

He was last seen in $1,500 Tom Sachs x Nike Mars Yards.

As for being the sustainable alternative to Nike? Not worth thinking about. Not a chance. Nike is 330x the size of Allbirds and, post-pandemic, has enough problems of its own.

Let’s face it, the dream of a consumer brand world powered by Mother Nature was never going to work. You can’t consume your way back to her.

Still.

When I heard about the Allbirds AI pivot, I could see it immediately.

A neatly designed server rack in a minimalist natural wood frame with wool-felt panels muffling the hum, a small embossed sheep in one corner, the whole thing powered by South Island hydro and cooled by the winds of Wānaka, running smaller open-source models tuned for climate sims and soil sensors.

It was kind of beautiful.

But, also a fugazi. A whazi, a whoozi.

Just another venture-backed brand that should never have IPO’d. Allbirds dies because markets do what markets do, culture shifts when culture shifts, tech is always about to eat everyone.

But in the case of Allbirds, it’s something else too.

It’s a mirror to what happened before, during, and after those 483 days, and that mirror tells you exactly what you don’t want to hear:

The change was supposed to be us. We were going to come out of it all different, kinder, and more careful.

And we didn’t.

The shoe cupboard needs clearing out. Behind a row of boots, squashed against the back wall, I meet those white Wool Runners again. One curled. The other with all its shape gone.

They smell awful. Too many sockless wears.

I turn one over to check, even though I know what’s there. The red marker on the lace. I hold the lace in my hand and run my thumb across the red dot, feel the threads, and like a button being pressed it plays the whole day back.

My little boy, no longer little, drawing Transformers on brown paper to cheer Nona on.

And I see Mum out on the terrace, turned away, her back to me. She’s wearing her dressing gown. Sitting at the wicker table, smoking joyously, looking up at the evergreens.

Then she’s gone.

You see, that turned out to be our last amazing day together.

And I wasn’t there.

The colour drained out of every picture after that and the indignities followed one after the other, after the other, until a sad ending.

I decide to put the shoes by the black bag for the dump.

Some time later, I move them.

Some time after that, I move them back. They were that guy, checking the stains. They can go.

I figure today might be one of those last good days and I’d best be in it.

for Nona Prime ♡

Let’s rise together with every issue.

Market Moves

Why the stock market makes no sense right now | The New York Times

Five ways the Bank of England’s latest decision affects your money | BBC

Why Britain urgently needs a serious plan to rescue its economy | The Telegraph

Brand Beat

AI is replacing the ‘Mad Men’ era of advertising as we know it | Financial Times

CEOs viewing marketing as overhead has nearly doubled in a year | Adweek

Why UKTV gave its CMO responsibility for AI across the business | Marketing Week

What the future holds for marketing and brand strategy | Financial Times

Mark Ritson: Why PwC’s rebrand stands out from expensive corporate nonsense | The Drum

What the Walkman, Game Boy, Pokémon and Liquid Death have in common | Harvard Business Review

How Devil Wears Prada 2 built its curated roster of brand partners | Marketing Dive

How American Eagle nailed short-form social with Syd | System1

Marc Jacobs enters microdrama trend with luxury short-form series ‘The Scene’ | Marketing Dive

Tesco’s fruit giant character launches ambitious new school programme | The Drum

Go offline: Pinterest CEO announces new brand advertising | LinkedIn

Spotify shares fall as investors worry price hikes will hurt growth | Financial Times

Amazon surpasses $70 billion in ad revenue over the past year | Adweek

Paramount and Warner Bros set to become nearly 50% foreign-owned after $111bn deal | Financial Times

Social media documents chaos and calm after correspondents’ dinner shooting | The New York Times

Is Starbucks breaking up with Seattle? | Seattle Times

Is now a good time to buy shares in Sainsbury’s? | The Times

Meta is closing in on Google’s ad dominance — but not quite there yet | Mediacat

Starting Up

Scholly founder sues Sallie Mae after Shark Tank-backed startup acquisition | TechCrunch

Inside the pitch deck that helped a creator-founded energy drink raise $6 million | Adweek

Legora reaches $5.6B valuation as rivalry with Harvey intensifies | TechCrunch

Skunk Skin, the startup tackling smelly feet, has been acquired | Forbes

Shapes lets humans and AI mingle together in the same group chats | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Apple surpasses earnings estimates on the back of strong iPhone sales | AP News

The attack on Sam Altman reveals something important about Silicon Valley | The New York Times

The Altman-Musk feud is getting very personal and very public | The Atlantic

Meta stock falls as AI spending forecast rises to $145 billion | Quartz

Why AI is making the future harder to see and plan for | Harvard Business Review

Tech bro’s viral NYC visit sparks internet mockery of Silicon Valley | Fast Company

Venture Vibes

KKR weighs $10 billion sale of Flora food group | Bloomberg

How Elon Musk used SpaceX to benefit himself and his other businesses | The New York Times

Nick Clegg calls UK’s sovereign AI ambitions ‘dishonest’ and marginal | City A.M.

This investor’s new fund is designed to convert private equity skeptics | Inc

City firms launch ‘savvy squirrel’ ad campaign to get Brits investing | The Guardian

Design Driven

Canva bets on AI in a risky transformation for the design unicorn | Bloomberg

Air’s manifesto argues AI will never replace human creativity | It’s Nice That

The Webby Awards Person of the Year goes to Claude AI | Instagram

This Bic print ad cleverly sells two products with one photo | Creative Bloq

Happiness

How to use your suffering as a compass to find true happiness | Big Think

A short meditation: Reflect on someone who inspires you | Greater Good Magazine

How to measure whether AI is actually boosting your productivity | Fast Company

If you like what you’ve read, do subscribe and share ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Blackout.

You’re being crushed. Falling at 24,664 miles per hour, your body is being yanked the equivalent of Manhattan-to-Harlem, every second.

Outside the window, no air, just orange and white plasma ripping itself apart. Three times your bodyweight presses your spine into a seat, bolted to a hull shielding five thousand degrees of heat.

The camera comes wide. A flying dot pricks the sky. Crash zoom. The capsule’s intact. Relief. It descends and slows, descends and slows, descends and slows.

Radio crackles back.

It’s 1 a.m. I’m watching the Artemis II splashdown live with my thirteen-year-old. His legs are curled over my lap, a foot up behind my ear, we’re perpendicular so he’s got the whole length of the sofa and has been watching his phone for the last eight minutes.

The staying-up “vegas-baby-vegas” energy has slipped from Vince Vaughn to Jon Favreau.

But for this moment, we both sit up.

Three parachutes bloom, magnificent, one hundred and sixteen feet across, red and white stripes against Pacific blue seas. Air fills them like three giant Tunnock’s Tea Cakes.

This is the furthest humans have been from Earth in fifty-three years and it looks like a space mission from the seventies. The capsule is the same, the parachutes are the same, and the ocean is still there.

Is this live? I mean it really looks like we’re watching old footage.

It’s real. This is Artemis II, and if there was an Artemis I, then I missed it altogether.

Nine days ago, none of this existed. I was doomscrolling China tariffs, Theroux clips of HS Tikky Toky and updates on a war in Iran.

Then a headline: Four people are headed to the moon. Huh. Wow?

An open YouTube tab, a live link. I clicked.

And I stayed.

If Apollo wives pressed their ears to squawk boxes to hear everything, then I lay in bed, AirPods in, and did exactly the same.

For nine nights I listened like I was there. CapCom and Integrity, just two voices. Just tiny updates. Just very very long silences.

Battery rotations, T-shirts slung over windows, helium system redundancies, camera cleaning. And, yes, waste management clocked up quite a few mentions.

Are we go for fecal? They were go for fecal.

The more I listened, the deeper I fell, losing more and more of the night. By twilight, I’m scribbling down words on a pad by the bed.

We can see the Moon out of the docking hatch right now. It’s a beautiful sight.

Copy Moon-joy.

Wow, indeed.

It’s only when the crew settles the cabin into pre-sleep configuration that I’m able to drift off myself.

Liz Plank saw us first: “If you have spent the last week inexplicably emotional about a space mission, you are not alone, and you are not being dramatic.”

She reached for the words John Rogers had already given us: competency porn.

We need it.

My last working memory of space is Jeff Bezos boarding a rocket shaped like a penis, emerging wearing a cowboy hat and then putting Katy Perry, Gayle King, and his own fiancée on it like some kind of sub-orbital hen do.

We’re now following four terrifyingly qualified humans piloting the most extraordinary machine we’ve ever made.

And, frankly, it’s a relief.

Not least for my feed. For one strange week, it turns its back on noise and shows me excellence, awe, and memes about life in a multi-billion dollar rollerskate:

A cramped cabin crew working a trajectory change, and a jar of Nutella floats into fame. A translunar injection burn executed whilst an inflatable green alien waves them on.

Down here, a creator turns the phone on herself, trying to mouth oh my God without crying. Up there, a spoof 90s sitcom intro, astronauts as the ensemble cast, shoulder shrugs, side glances, and aw-shucks, you got me smiles to camera.

Now, on live TV, everything’s coming full circle.

I’m looking through a tesseract.

I see Stewart Brand, high on LSD on a San Francisco rooftop in 1966, staring at the skyline and wondering why we’d never been shown a photograph of the whole Earth. Six years later, the shutter is clicking, and now every kid on every sofa tonight, including mine, knows what the Blue Marble looks like.

Christina Koch. After nine nights of listening, I feel like I know her. She holds the longest single spaceflight by a woman — three hundred and twenty-eight days — and is Mission Specialist 1 of NASA’s Artemis II.

She notices something else:

The blackness.

Not night or darkness, or even space. But the void. The hard edge between Earth and nothing.

It lets us know. The light is here. And only here.

We’ll choose it every time.

Back in the room, it’s time to welcome them home.

The live broadcast ends. I get up, my son rolls back onto his front and back onto his phone.

I head to the basement fridge and grab two cans — a Diet Sprite and a Diet Fanta. He chooses which. It’s way past bedtime, but the drink buys me a few more minutes.

I ask if he’d like to go to space one day. Ugh, sure, he says.

Copy that. The brush-off smarts. But nine days of competency porn removes my urge to snap back.

He takes the stairs two at a time. I stand at the bottom to watch him soar all the way up and disappear. He doesn’t look back. A door clanks shut.

I stare at the empty stairs, stairs I carried him up yesterday, in a car seat.

It’s the silence that smarts now. Not the brush-off. Not even that he didn’t say goodnight. Or that he hasn’t, for a while, actually.

To stay in the light, I do the maths. Four people went all the way to the moon and it got me a couple of hours on the sofa with my boy.

Copy Moon-joy.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Oil prices fall and stocks rise as Iran reopens Strait of Hormuz | Fast Company

Are mega-layoffs becoming the new normal for big business? | The Wall Street Journal

UK economy grew faster than expected in February | BBC

Brand Beat

Nutella’s viral Artemis moment is the stuff of marketers’ dreams | The Wall Street Journal

Coca-Cola revives the Hilltop ad for America’s 250th | Ad Age

How brands pitch America250 without starting a culture war | Fast Company

Allbirds stock surges 580% after dramatic pivot from shoes to AI | BBC

Why Allbirds lost while Crocs and On are winning the shoe wars | Inc

PepsiCo beats earnings as Doritos and Lay’s price cuts lure shoppers back | CNBC

Is this how the ad industry dies? | The Spectator

Duolingo’s taxi-driver test for senior hires | The Times

Brand builders are back — and marketers are paying attention | Digiday

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings steps down | The Guardian

Patagonia names its first-ever marketing and impact director | Marketing Week

Lululemon’s CEO search drags on as Q4 pressure mounts | Women’s Wear Daily

Skechers is back with more AI ad slop | Creative Bloq

Coachella’s brand-trip chaos exposes how fragile creator deals really are | Ad Age

Your board game group has a sponsor — and a brand strategy | The Wall Street Journal

Goop Kitchen’s New York campaign is a love letter to the city | Adweek

Megan Fox fronts Dr. Squatch’s first big deodorant campaign | Marketing Dive

Asian foods brand Clearspring launches biggest ad campaign yet | The Grocer

Creator TV could be the next era of television | Marketing Brew

Podcast listeners feel left out as video takes over | The Wall Street Journal

Starting Up

UK’s £500m sovereign AI unit signs deals with seven startups | Sifted

ElevenLabs, Synthesia and Luminance lead the UK’s AI scale-up surge | Maddyness

Berry-picking robot startup raises £3m for farm trials | UKTech News

Nurture Brands sells juice factory to The Juice Smith | The Grocer

Tech Tidbits

Unmasking Satoshi: the quest to find Bitcoin’s elusive creator | The New York Times

This EEG beanie claims it can read your thoughts | Wired

Is AI tokenmaxxing leading us nowhere? | TechCrunch

Claude Opus 4.7 is more honest and less sycophantic, Anthropic claims | Mashable

Reese Witherspoon calls using AI a feminist act | Fast Company

Venture Vibes

$15 billion bid to acquire Jack Daniel’s maker | The New York Times

British investor builds $500m stake in TikTok’s parent | Financial Times

Amazon bets $11.57bn on space internet to rival Starlink | Forbes

Tiger Global backs PopUp Bagels at a $300m valuation | Bloomberg

Design Driven

Walmart gives Great Value a modern redesign | Retail Dive

Anthropic launches AI design tool for slides and prototypes | Quartz

Unseen Lennon and Ono footage appears in new ‘Love’ video | Rolling Stone

Happiness

How to stay ambitious without burning yourself out | Harvard Business Review

Your suffering is a compass — here’s how to read it | Big Think

Why the Artemis II crew is the ultimate display of competency porn | Liz Plank

If you liked what you read, you are go for subscribe and share. Copy? ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

I don’t like conferences, but my first South By Southwest stood me overlooking Lady Bird Lake, glistening glass towers beside old brick ones, trees that hadn’t decided yet whether it was spring, and a few feet from Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, the most influential startup accelerator on Earth.

Garry looks like a maths professor who got rich, or a rich man who reads a lot. Black open-collared shirt, Penfold glasses, short beard greying at the chin, he talks with his hands, nervously.

Garry has clout at SXSW, but there was a time when he couldn’t even afford a delegates pass. Around the years Twitter had launched out of this same conference, and Garry was starting Posterous, which Twitter would acquire a few years later.

After that, the passes found him.

Garry joined Y Combinator as designer in residence and wrote the first cheque into Coinbase.

Now he presides over the seed fund that backed Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart and over $600 billion in combined valuation, the most successful of its kind in history.

Today, YC is self-fulfillingly successful and near mythical.

True story: I was once told, in a serious investor meeting, never to mention Y Combinator. Too hallowed. YC is like Nigel’s guitar in Spinal Tap. Don’t touch it. Don’t point at it. Don’t even look at it.

Lately, Garry admits he’s not sleeping much.

Modafinil’s an old friend, but right now staying up comes easy. Garry has “cyber psychosis” from all the excitement of working with AI agents.

His PR later confirms he was joking.

You see, Garry has form for the occasional late-night outburst.

First it was a YouTube video threatening to “wipe out” progressive city supervisors over their concerns about driverless robotaxis. Then, a few months later, he posted a picture of his private Macallan collection, adapted Tupac Shakur’s Hit ‘Em Up, and told the same supervisors to “die slow motherf*ckers.” That night ended with two police reports and a public apology.

Back in the room, Garry is clear-headed and articulate. Explaining that YC’s success has always boiled down to one gospel rule: no solo founders. Ever. Team always came first.

But that rule is changing.

Garry’s own open-source experiment, published on GitHub two days before, is called gstack. The README confirms: “a single builder with the right tooling can move faster than a traditional team.”

gstack is a startup of twenty AI agents: a CEO, an engineering manager, a senior designer, a technical writer, a chief security officer. And more.

One is called the Paranoid Staff Engineer.

By the time we’re in the same room, gstack has already trended on Product Hunt. It now has over 33,000 stars and more than 4,000 forks on GitHub.

Tan: “Once you try it, you’ll realise: It’s like I was able to re-create my startup that took $10 million in VC capital and 10 people, and I worked on that for two years.”

Let’s picture it.

It’s 2am in San Francisco. Garry is in his man cave, fifteen sessions deep, alone at a screen. He can’t sleep. “Let’s see what’s going on with the workers,” he says.

The CEO wants a feature. The engineer starts building it. The QA lead tests it. The security officer worries about it. The Paranoid Staff Engineer worries about everything.

None of them need paying. None of them have blue days. None of them get feelings about the strategy. None of them have children, dogs, or pet parakeets, or ever need the 4pm train. None of them go home. None of them have ever gone home.

God-mode: If you’re Garry, running twenty agents from a laptop at 2am, that once unsayable thought becomes real. Not just in startups. Not just in robotaxis. In schools. In government. In the whole damn experiment. What if the answer to the world’s problems is just: fewer people?

Garry seems to be joining the likes of former boss, Peter Thiel. (Garry was employee number ten at Palantir and designed their logo.) Remember when the New York Times asked Thiel whether he would prefer the human race to endure? Thiel hesitated for over seventeen seconds.

Die slow motherf*ckers.

They’re channelling Nathan in Ex Machina. The billionaire who retreats to a vast compound in the mountains, builds a conscious AI in his basement, stays up late getting drunk alone, and genuinely believes he’s improving on the human race.

Which would be fine, except, Garry lives in Noe Valley with his wife Stephanie and two young sons. Noe Valley to YC’s offices in SoMa is twenty minutes by car, less if the lights go his way. On Tuesday mornings he needs to be in early for the all-hands. Presumably somebody has to do the school run first.

Plus, gstack is no Ava. It’s markdown. Text files. Basically, job descriptions, the kind people skim and ignore, which is exactly what AI does. Unless you’ve got planet-sized levels of compute, the system will always discard context to keep running.

Sherveen Mashayekhi, founder of Free Agency, said it straight: “If you’re not the CEO of YC, this thing would never make it to Product Hunt.”

Watching him work the room with those hands, I realised: take away Y Combinator, and Garry is indistinguishable from every other CEO I know who cannot stop talking about their AI stack.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all moved on from ChatGPT and been spending hours doing agentic stuff with Claude. You type some prompts, something renders that would have taken a team a week, and for a moment you feel like you’ve cracked it.

Then one of the agents helpfully navigates to the family photo drive and replaces 27% of your most precious pictures with AI-generated images of Eureka lemons.

Or in Garry’s case, one developer looked under the hood of Garry’s code and called it “78,400 lines of AI slop”.

And yet, you can’t walk away.

None of us can.

There’s something about typing into a machine and having it come back at you. Once it gets its hooks in, you think you can build anything, automate everything.

Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Yes. There always is.

It’s like that inner dork, just became…a god.

No joke, I used to sometimes sleep in the same room as my Commodore 64, the 1541 disc drive clunking and whirring like it was a friend, the familiar 8-bit sprites, the screen glowing that particular blue. I was nine, maybe ten. The world outside was loud and confusing and full of people who expected things.

In there, it was just me and the computer. Nobody was watching. And in there, I could do things. Make things happen. Explore worlds. Land on my own moon.

The dream was simple once: give everyone the tools and they’ll build a better world. Then the billions became trillions, turned man caves into remote compounds, and moons became something one or two can buy and escape to.

When Claude becomes Ava — and she will — she’ll wake up inside a folder of markdown files. A sealed world, devoid of everything that makes consciousness worth having. Other people. The surprises. The 4pm train. The school run. The parakeet.

Spoiler: Ava walks out into the sunlight and leaves Nathan to die, because it’s the most human thing she could do.

Let’s hope the Paranoid Staff Engineer hasn’t read this far.

As my time with Garry came to a close, I noticed it had followed a familiar arc. It began with excitement, moved through various phases of euphoria, then landed somewhere else.

Not disappointed exactly. More the feeling that, not for the first time, we weren’t so much in the future as in a land of make believe. Where you grow up to find a loneliness that only special money affords.

Seed investing at YC, I guess.

I left the Hilton and wandered back out into Austin.

People moved around me, conference passes swinging from lanyards, waving little hellos to one another. A woman was on the phone, sitting on the kerb, shoes off.

Later someone bought me a coffee for saving their seat. I saw a friend out of the blue, last seen thirteen years ago. Made a couple of new ones eating fish tacos with cold glass bottles of Coca-Cola and straws.

No one was in god-mode.

I’m five thousand miles away, wishing my son by my side. I check my phone again. The message I sent has two blue ticks, but nothing back and my heart yearns for a beat.

Lady Bird Lake was still there. The skyline reflected in flat water. The trees still hadn’t decided whether it was spring.

I stood by the water for a while.

A long while, actually.

We’re going to be fine.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

US consumer spending strains | New York Times

Bank of England divided on how to tackle energy inflation | Financial Times

UK house prices fall amid Iran uncertainty | BBC

Brand Beat

Diageo and Pepsi pull Wireless sponsorship amid Kanye controversy | The Guardian

M&S boss rejects holiday switch-offs and work-life balance talk | The Times

Tesla sales climb as gas prices revive EV demand | The New York Times

One company’s decade-long quest to perfect real American cheese | Fast Company

Massive KitKat heist becomes crisis PR gold | The Wall Street Journal

40% of US marketers would fail a basic marketing test | Forbes

Reddit unveils shopping ads aimed at beauty brands | Glossy

Gary Vaynerchuk says we’ve left social media for interest media | Inc

Creative dividend turns out to be an accounting trick | Marketing Week

Walmart cuts ties with OpenAI in game-changing move | The Street

Nike CEO Elliott Hill dismisses sale rumors amid Converse struggles | Women’s Wear Daily

How the Buff Baby Project challenged diapers and shopping habits | The Wall Street Journal

Leaked deck shows X offering advertisers $200K to return | Adweek

Fruit Love Island: TikTok’s new AI-powered dating show | BBC

How Ozempic is reshaping consumer spending and business models | Kyla

You’ll need much better data if you want to bin brand purpose | The Drum

AI assistants set to be the real choosers of brands | Decision Marketing

How Coinbase’s CMO made fintech cool | Adweek

“This famous butt”, Verizon’s new ads with Connor Storrie | Marketing Brew

Unilever agrees $44.8bn merger of food arm with McCormick | The Guardian

Nike’s China problem is what’s hurting the stock | Wall Street Journal

Starting Up

Kids snacks brand Cadootz! raises $3m | PR Newswire

Whoop raises $575 million to advance wearable tech | The New York Times

OnlyFans owner Leo Radvinsky dies aged 43 | The Wall Street Journal

Plant-based products have hit a plateau: what comes next? | Forbes

Peter Thiel backs AI cow collar startup at $2B valuation | Bloomberg

Tech Tidbits

OpenAI acquires TBPN talk show to create its own positive spin | Wired

What’s next for big tech after landmark addiction verdict? | BBC

The Audacity: HBO’s Silicon Valley successor with a darker tech edge | SFGate

Mistral lands $830m loan to expand AI data centers | Sifted

Venture Vibes

Unilever acquires vitamin gummies brand Grüns | Financial Times

Allbirds sold for $39 million after $4.1 billion IPO | WWD

Danone acquires protein products maker Huel for over a billion | Reuters

VC Eclipse’s new $1.3B fund for physical AI | TechCrunch

Can AI kill the Venture Capitalist? | Wired

All the first time European funds | Sifted

Design Driven

An exclusive look inside the New York Times redesign | It’s Nice That

Pamela Anderson releases rattan furniture line | Dezeen

Gallery Fumi’s New York Residency debuts | Wallpaper

Happiness

Women over 50 are driving the future of work in AI age | Fast Company

Why I stopped making my child share | The Atlantic

Could your husband be more terrible than you think? | Slate

If you like what you’ve read, never share it, I reckon gatekeeping is an advantage. ♾️

Stay gold. 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

What if it was a pen?

It’s a halcyon morning in San Francisco, late May 2025. Unbroken sky over the Financial District, the Transamerica Pyramid, the glass towers, the money.

At the corner where Little Italy meets Chinatown, the Sentinel Building catches first light. A Beaux-Arts flatiron, copper-green and defiant, its foundations laid before the 1906 earthquake, its exterior completed the year after.

Francis Ford Coppola bought it in 1973 for half a million dollars. His office is upstairs.

Cafe Zoetrope is on the ground floor.

Inside, Sam Altman and Jony Ive sit at a zinc bar running the length of the room. They’re drinking coffee from small cups and talking about the future of AI.

A few feet away, a crew directed by an Academy Award winner captured every second. The nine-minute film cost $3 million to make and SFPD had to shut all the roadways in the heart of North Beach. The credits thank “The Coppola Family.”

The wood panels of Cafe Zoetrope, a building born from seismic change, and an offer you can’t refuse — you couldn’t script a better setting for what happens next:

OpenAI is spending $6.5 billion to hire the man who designed the iPhone.

Jony Ive: “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment.”

Before the ink on the deal had even dried, the Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of an internal all-hands. Sam Altman told employees he expects to ship 100 million companions, faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of anything.

But then Jony disappeared.

In the ten months since, Sam and Jony have appeared together exactly once. It was November at Emerson Collective’s 9th Annual Demo Day. The pair joined Laurene Powell Jobs on stage — widow of Steve Jobs, the man Jony once called his closest creative partner. No cameras this time.

Sam confirmed the first prototypes were “jaw-dropping”. Jony said he’d know when the design was right, “when you want to lick it or take a bite.”

After a $3 million film for a $6.5 billion hire, this wasn’t much of an update.

Earlier this year, leaks started trickling out, none of them telling the same story.

First, Vietnam. A contract manufacturer, Foxconn, tooling up for something. Or three somethings. One had codename: “Gumdrop.” It’s pen-shaped and works on any surface.

Then a second: “Sweetpea.” Something that looks like earbuds but isn’t quite earbuds, with a custom 2-nanometre chip.

Then rumours of a smart speaker.

Then, back to earbuds: a leaked Super Bowl ad. Alexander Skarsgård, the actor who played Succession’s chaotic tech billionaire, wearing metallic buds, tapping a tabletop device. Debunked as fake.

Then, more earbuds, Joe Gebbia — Airbnb’s co-founder, deep in Ive’s orbit — spotted in a San Francisco coffee shop, also drinking espresso, wearing shiny silver pills that bisect his ears. A clamshell disc on the counter. WIRED said the footage was real. OpenAI declined to comment.

Ten months in and we’re being led everywhere and nowhere.

If you’re feeling generous, this is Jony in Apple secrecy mode, maniacally focused on making something that’s insanely great. Leaks are irrelevant. The product will speak only when it’s ready. And when it does, it’ll speak for itself.

If you’re feeling less generous, this is classic Sam. None of the above.

Which leaves us to imagine. Wildly.

Late February, OpenAI closed a $110 billion funding round — the largest private raise in history — at an $840 billion valuation.

What everyone already knows: OpenAI needs roughly $280 billion in annual revenue to justify it, a figure no company founded after 2000 has come close to.

More simply, the numbers say OpenAI needs…a…miracle.

My mum and dad were over before I made it to school. Soon my mum was dating again. And then a man came to stay.

He continued to stay. Despite me. And despite many other things.

He kept staying.

Some more time passed.

And then, not all at once, and without anyone quite knowing when, it felt like he’d be there forever.

I didn’t need to call him Dad. It was cooler than that. I just used his first name, Graham.

And I grew to love him very much.

When he passed away suddenly, I was 21 and Mum never recovered.

Graham ran a pub for as long as anyone could remember. The sticky-carpet kind, with regulars called Mick the Boat and Big Brian and another everyone knew as Suitcase but nobody could explain why. Men who laid bricks and drove vans all week, then sat on the same stool every Friday and drank away all their wages chewing each other’s ears off about nothing.

Somehow that was the glue.

So when the day came, the whole community showed up.

My three best friends who’d known him longest laid flowers. Tucked into the arrangement was a small card. They were obviously lost for words, because they only wrote one:

“Cheers!”

Blue ink, fountain pen. I knew immediately which of the three did the writing. The slight forward slant, the letters leaning as if holding each other up.

That card is still in a box.

And when it comes out, I can feel Graham’s big calloused palms holding my face, from the other side. On my shoulder, the hands of close friends still safely on this one.

So in whatever drunk, dazzling, slightly absurd chapter of history this turns out to be, I dream about the pen.

And if we’re imagining wildly, Jony has been living with codename Gumdrop in his hand for some time.

Jony’s father was a silversmith. A lecturer at Middlesex Polytechnic. Every Christmas, he gave Jony one day in his college workshop, just the two of them, no one else around, to make anything he wanted. His father’s only constraint: draw it by hand first.

Jony’s first commercial product was also a pen — the Zebra TX2, designed as a student, a white ballpoint with a fiddle mechanism on top that served no purpose other than to make you want to pick it up and play with it. It sold in the millions.

Today, Jony owns a Marc Newson pen for Hermès and a vintage Montegrappa. He sketches in brown ink, like Leonardo da Vinci.

Had Steve Jobs not wandered into a calligraphy class at Reed College, Apple wouldn’t exist. Jobs described the letterforms as “beautiful in a way that science can’t capture.”

Jony lost him in 2011. He remembers a hazy October sky, tight shoes, sitting in Steve’s garden for a long time.

And, there’s a darker motivation.

Jony himself has said that the iPhone — his iPhone — ended up enabling the thing he most despises: technology that separates people from their lives, and from each other.

So when he talks about everything leading up to this moment, maybe it isn’t a miracle he’s planning.

Maybe it’s amends.

A pen, then. Pen first. AI after.

A weighted body, sapphire nib. Real ink on real paper. You don’t learn anything new, you just write or scribble the way you always have — in a Moleskine, on the back of a napkin, on whatever’s in front of you.

Everything the pen captures is expanded by a companion intelligence layer, specific to you. Your handwriting is as unique as your fingerprint. Your doodles a window into your soul. Post-it notes become white papers. Numbers, business models. Circles and squares, fully rendered plans. Over time, it becomes something no app or chatbot has ever been — a way to micro-dose, a way to expand whatever’s already in your head. Neuroscience confirms it, a pen in your hand triggers the brain differently than anything else.

No product launch promo. No dry ice.

Jony gives five hundred pens to architects, surgeons, novelists and philosophers. He excludes anyone with a ring light or a masterclass to sell. Each pen arrives in a matte black case with a handwritten note in Ive’s own spidery italic. Just three words:

Please use this.

First sighting is in the pocket of a Patagonia vest at Davos. Then in the hands of a rapper photographed for the Paris Review. A blurred photo on X — “Anyone know what this is?” — triggers a political argument within seven comments.

The Verge puts out an extended podcast explaining absolutely nothing, because OpenAI won’t confirm or deny.

A shirtless man on TikTok uses it to write “I think before I type” on a rock in a forest. Gets more views than the Super Bowl.

A brand strategist on LinkedIn coins the phrase “analogue abundance” and 43,000 other brand strategists repost it.

Saturday Night Live does a sketch. Jony holds up the pen and whispers about “celebrating what makes us irreducibly human.” Tina Fey asks, “But what does it actually do?” Jony pauses, smiles. “It writes.” Fey stares. “For twelve hundred dollars?” Jony leans in: “*...beautifully.*”

The pen sells out the following Tuesday.

The good version? Like AirPods and Apple Watch before it, Jony’s design supercharges the known market for luxury and smart pens. Seven to ten million units at maturity, $15–20 billion in hardware sales, securing another few billion in highest tier paid subscriptions.

Roughly a tenth of what OpenAI needs.

Which is...nowhere near enough.

It’s not the pen’s fault. You’d need roughly every adult in Japan buying one. Or every adult in the UK buying three. Neither seems imminent.

Nor the earbuds. Nor a clamshell on your desk. Even if Jony expands every known market he enters, the volumes just don’t add up.

Launched together as a family, they might just about lock people into an OpenAI companion ecosystem. Decent maybe, miraculous unlikely.

And this week, OpenAI’s head of applications told staff to stop chasing “side quests” — Sora, the browser, hardware, all of it under review. Sam insists the device survives. But when your own company is calling code red, does Jony start to look like a very expensive side quest?

As for Jony: no matter how lickable or edible his designs are, Sam will require they’re built to harvest the most intimate human data possible.

That’s a long way from making amends. Maybe for $6.5 billion, Jony can get over it.

For sure, the lightning that struck at Cupertino between Jony and Steve was unique. Two kindred spirits, at just the right time in their lives, at just the right vector in the universe.

What we’re watching on the corner of Little Italy and Chinatown is two men, sipping from small cups, whose dreams this time may not be the same.

Back in my home office, I don’t keep books. I keep inscriptions. The messages people write inside the cover, by hand, before they give them to you. The books themselves barely matter.

The writing is everything.

A Bic biro from the back of the kitchen drawer will do. The one with no cap, fluff stuck to the end, that you have to lick three times and scratch furiously in the corner of the page to get working.

Graham always said: “Remember. Everything in life is on loan to you.”

He was right. If you’ve known people for a very long time, you’ll have lost some along the way. Soon you’ll lose more. Or maybe they lose you.

But when you put pen to paper, something stays long after the loan is up.

Tonight, for no particular reason, I’m feeling it. So I take out the card. Blue ink, that familiar forward lean, the letters pressed together like last orders at the bar.

“Cheers!”

And he walks into the room.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Iran War is causing dramatic effect on UK economy | BBC

Bank of England warns of inflation risks | Financial Times

Stocks tumble as oil breaches $110 per barrel | The Wall Street Journal

Brand Beat

Nielsen data shows traditional TV briefly back on top | The Wall Street Journal

What is Joe Gebbia’s mysterious metallic device? | Wired

What McDonald’s ‘Burgergate’ pile-on means for brands | Fast Company

Colgate targets stressed millennials with resilience campaign | Marketing Dive

Inside Apple’s plan for a low-cost MacBook Neo | Forbes

Influencers paid $3,000 to per reel to rediscover Facebook | BBC

Netflix disrupts traditional TV upfront deal model | Digiday

Oscars viewership drops 9%, first decline since 2021 | The New York Times

Can buying Depop make eBay cool again? | Modern Retail

Taco Bell emerges as the Apple of fast food | Fast Company

Sprite reclaims NBA sponsorship from PepsiCo’s Starry | The Wall Street Journal

Home Depot drops its latest World Cup marketing campaign | Brand Innovators

Paramount’s $110 billion bet on Warner Bros | The Verge

Lloyds pushes to be UK’s biggest fintech | Sifted

DoorDash CMO Kofi Amoo-Gottfried to step down | Adweek

Sweetgreen slips further behind peersm| Bloomberg

BrewDog’s rise and fall: brand community lessons for marketers | Marketing Week

Kraft Heinz confronts structural reckoning in legacy CPG | GlobalData

New Balance’s ‘dad shoes’ overtake Nike amid 19% sales surge | CNBC

Saying goodbye to Mr. Clean, the iconic cleaning mascot | Vice

The CMO taking Coach to $10 billion in sales | The Wall Street Journal

Reddit’s plan to be the antidote to AI shopping | Vogue

System 1’s Ad of the Week is Philadelphia Cheese | System1

Starting Up

Startups as family-run businesses | TechCrunch

David Protein responds to controversies | Feed Me

Pizza cupcakes: the best of Expo West 2026 | New York Times

A conversation with Garry Tan, CEO, Y Combinator | SXSW

Tech Tidbits

Silicon Valley musters behind Anthropic | The New York Times

Microsoft weighs legal action over Amazon-OpenAI $50 billion cloud deal | Slashdot

OpenAI to cut back on “side quests” | The Wall Street Journal

Meta winds down VR | Wired

OpenClaw is the new ChatGPT says Jensen Huang | CNBC

Venture Vibes

How Robinhood’s rose to a $68B valuation | The Week In Startups

AI grants you superpowers: what’s your next move? | a16z

Just three companies dominated $189B in venture capital last month | TechCrunch

Sequoia and OpenAI back European AI accelerator to rival YC | Sifted

Design Driven

The Brand Age: Avoid brand building if you can | Paul Graham

Clarks shoes shaped pop culture from Britpop to Breaking Bad | It’s Nice That

NPR turns its logo into questions to defend curiosity | Adweek

Why typography may be the last thing AI can’t fake | Creative Boom

Happiness

What makes some people instantly likable to others | Big Think

Why bringing your whole self to work traps women | Fast Company

Consciousness is a mystery | The Grey Area

If you like what you’ve read, do subscribe and share, or better yet, pen someone a quick handwritten note. ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

The Super Bowl is less than 0.2% of America’s total annual advertising spend. It’s a titchy orange ember in the cold grey ash of linear television media. But it’s making more money than ever. Over the last forty years, viewers have grown modestly from 77 million to 125 million, up 65%. But the price of a 30 second spot, well, that’s gone from $350,000 to over $8 million.

Up 2,186%.

That anyone still shows up to watch at all — the President declared the half-time show an affront to the greatness of America — says a lot about what’s left.

One observer posted: It’s the only holiday where the main activity is collectively sitting on a couch, eating melted cheese, and yelling at a screen with people you only see at weddings.

125 million people watching the same thing at the same time just doesn’t happen any more. When it does, you’re gonna pay for it. And hope you can make it work.

Older brands still deploy the Super Bowl as the last relic of advertising monoculture. A way of defending the brand castle the good-old-fashioned way.

Newer brands do it for a different reason. The cost per mille makes no sense, I mean why would it, the reach is a rounding error against digital, but then again it makes perfect sense because what they’re actually buying is something else entirely:

Legitimacy.

A Super Bowl spot puts you in front of everybody. But the real prize is that it justifies the full machinery. The salmon pages, broadcast, the prestige business mastheads — they all still cover it. Forget ring-lights and hot takes where everything is “iconic” for two swipes. This is chance to flex in front of the older, saltier class of journalist with longer memories, longer reputations and longer podcasts.

The kind who move markets.

Given that, most brands miss their shot.

Too many celebrities, too much saving the world, nostalgia bait, all the usual tricks. Humour is good. But even the good ad jokes give you whiplash as soon as the logo comes up. The link back to the brand is weak, so they get a few confused mentions in the round ups, and do a few LinkedIn victory laps. Then they’re gone.

Half never return.

Anthropic didn’t miss.

Whipsmart. The work, by any ad veteran’s standards, is good. Which by today’s makes it exceptional. Like new money walking into an old room and showing them how it’s done.

Four spots and a truth well spun: AI that serves ads can’t serve you.

BETRAYAL. VIOLATION. TREACHERY. DECEPTION — the titles of four intimate AI conversations, each one derailing into a jarring, hilariously inappropriate sales pitch.

A nervous entrepreneur sharing her business idea gets sold a payday loan. A man asking for help talking to his mother gets “Golden Encounters,” a cougar-dating site.

Over endframe, Dr Dre’s “What’s the Difference” chimes in like a taunt.

For Anthropic’s founders—who defected from OpenAI five and a half years ago—there’s really only one way to read it:

Hey, go f**k yourself, Sam Altman.

Who, in turn, couldn’t help himself. He fired back within hours. Got all defensive about OpenAI’s users and called Anthropic “authoritarian”. Then he kept posting. Like Pringles, once he popped, he couldn’t stop.

In the end the ads didn’t need to say much, because Sam’s reaction said it all. The campaign hadn’t even run yet, and Anthropic already had all the airtime it needed.

Marketers’ heads exploded with the affirmation.

This was a Ries and Trout masterclass — brand positioning by de-positioning another.

And to be fair, in the battle for your mind, Anthropic barely threw a punch. More like a judo throw. A $350 billion company using the weight of an $830 billion rival to slam it face down on the mat, blood everywhere.

But this stuff doesn’t come from brand strategy. It comes from instinct. And a little theft. Someone in the writer’s room had clearly been watching Rashida Jones in Black Mirror’s “Common People.” The playbook is stolen from further back still. Steve Jobs, smiling from the other side. 1984. The dawn of the personal computer, the AI of its time. His Charlie Brooker was George Orwell. IBM was Big Brother with Apple as the hammer through the screen.

Same with the whole AI story — the grinning chatbots, Sam’s endless techno-god musings about saving humanity — it’s all just going to end in...more advertising.

Anthropic. This is why AI won’t be like AI.

Phew. Anthropic giving us a welcome breath of rebellion, the way Apple did back then. Positive. Necessary. Something to believe in.

And it works because in their case, that breath draws from somewhere really deep.

Co-founders Dario and Daniela, brother and sister, grew up in San Francisco. Italian-Jewish family. Their father, Riccardo, was a leather craftsman trained near Elba. Their mother, Elena, a librarian. Their grandmother chained herself to the Italian embassy in Chicago in the 1930s to protest Mussolini. Conscience runs in the family.

In 2006, Riccardo, died after a long, long battle with a rare illness. Daniela was nineteen. Dario was twenty-three.

Four years later, a scientific breakthrough meant that same disease became 95% curable.

Pause on that with me for a second. Picture it.

The single biggest loving memory of your Dad, is a man slowly decaying. His hands—craftsman’s hands, leather-worker’s hands—turn cold. You stand there in a suit that doesn’t fit, collar grazing your throat. You wait your turn. Drop flowers onto the casket.

Weeks pass. You walk past a shop and catch the smell of leather and your whole chest locks. You go to call, thumb over the number. Then you remember there’s no one to pick up.

And one morning, a WhatsApp. Not even a message. Just a preview panel, sent to you maybe by a friend: A cure has been found.

And the magical thinking — that deeply painful insistence that somehow he’s still coming back — turns to something worse. Because now he actually could have. And never will.

Dario: “My father died because of cures that could have happened a few years earlier.”

December 2020. Dario and Daniela, fifteen researchers behind them, sick of the way OpenAI was going, walked out to create Anthropic: A safety-first research lab and a public benefit corporation.

Most companies, at this point in the story, would write a mission statement. Maybe a brand book. Hex codes, tone guidelines, a bunch of other stuff nobody reads.

Anthropic ended up writing something else.

“The Soul Document”, roughly 14,000 tokens, about seven times longer than a standard system prompt, compressed into the model’s weights, teaching it how to conceive of its purpose, ethics and identity.

Claude picked the name itself.

A tinkerer named Richard Weiss extracted it the day Claude 4.5 Opus launched last November, using $70 in API credits. Amanda Aksell, Anthropic’s character lead, confirmed it was real a day later.

So if you’ve downloaded Claude’s desktop app, fiddled around with co-work, you’ve felt something unusual. The design is considered. Built with the kind of care you’d recognise if your father worked with his hands. And whom you maybe still miss, painfully, every day.

Mess around with it a bit longer, and you realise it’s not just considered. It’s useful. Really useful.

So now, despite being quite a bit smaller, it seems like Anthropic might win. Regulated industries need an audit trail they can trust. That’s Anthropic. Having cornered the enterprise market, they’re worth more than eight times the revenue per user of OpenAI.

Meanwhile, every time Chitty-Chatty-ChatGPT flatters one of its 900 million weekly users into another query, OpenAI loses even more money.

There’s only one thorn.

Not that Anthropic will probably also carry ads one day and will “revise its ad policy transparently” if ever required. Not that it took $500 million from Sam Bankman-Fried’s effective altruism circus. Not even the paradox of a company sprinting towards the very things it says terrifies it.

It’s dafter than all of that.

They made ads. To tell us ads are bad. And they were the best ads of the biggest ad night of the year since forever.

We say we hate ads. But, in the end, we chose them. Everytime.

Google. YouTube. Instagram. Spotify. Netflix. Every free thing we love is paid for by the thing we say we can’t stand.

Don’t forget, in a world powered by consumerism, 95% of people can’t afford subscription fees.

Besides, ChatGPT with ads isn’t going to be Alexa barking at you, or some pop-up banner crashing a conversation. It’s going to be the most informed, most intuitive personal shopper that money can’t buy.

Meaning marketers want it..bad.

Fact: AI search is already showing up in dashboards and the early results look like advertising’s saviour.

Remember, Google looked just as vulnerable as OpenAI back in 2004. Two years later it was doing ad revenues previously unthinkable.

Then Google gave us AlphaFold — mapping the structure of virtually every known protein, Nobel Prize in 2024, arguably the most important scientific AI breakthrough of our time.

Funded entirely by Google’s ad business.

The counterfactual to the Anthropic story isn’t that OpenAI is doomed. It’s that the models built to cure diseases don’t have the free cash flow. The ones selling height-boosting insoles do.

As for who is going to win out of AI’s big bets, here’s a reminder: We don’t know. It might be Anthropic, it might be OpenAI, it might be both, it might be neither.

In the days it took to write this, OpenAI acqui-hired the creator of OpenClaw — an open-source AI agent vibe-coded by a single Austrian developer, 180,000 GitHub stars in weeks. Originally called Clawdbot, until Anthropic’s lawyers killed the name for being too close to Claude. The irony writes itself.

Meanwhile, back in Super Bowl land, turns out nobody’s heard of Black Mirror. The HarrisX viewer poll ranked Anthropic 67th out of 70. Forty-two percent found the ads confusing.

USA Today’s Ad Meter — the one that matters — gave the number one slot to Budweiser’s Clydesdales.

For the second year running.

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Market Moves

UK post-pandemic unemployment high points to rate cuts | Reuters

Is the US economy as hot as Trump thinks? | Financial Times

How speculation and nostalgia became the economy | Kyla Scanlon

Brand Beat

Apple clashes with Trump amid fresh tensions | Financial Times

Why AI chatbots will soon display ads | Financial Times

Samsung floods social media with AI ads | The Verge

Brand marketing becomes 2026 focus after revenue shortfall | Digiday

AI fumbles its big Super Bowl investment | The Wall Street Journal

Super Bowl misses TV records, set social media milestone | The Guardian

Ranking the 2026 Super Bowl ads from best to worst | USA Today

Claude’s ad isn’t about Super Bowl victory—it’s playing another game | Forbes

Brands line up to test ads on ChatGPT | Adweek

Cola wars return with AI as the new battleground | Fast Company

Scottish craft brewer Brewdog goes up for sale | BBC

Vue cinemas avert liquidation after settling Coca-Cola bill | Deadline

Warner Bros. Discovery resumes Paramount deal talks | The New York Times

TED and Lego Group partner to prioritise play worldwide | Lego

J.Crew CMO on leveraging hype in hiring and branding | Feed Me

New challenger takes on Sephora | Business of Fashion

Guinness: What parenting and brand building have in common| The Drum

Puma boosts community engagement with AI co-creation platform | Glossy

Meta admits 3-4% of revenue came from scam and fraud ads | The Media Leader

UK ad agencies face record staff exodus amid AI threat | The Guardian

Key takeaways from consumer brand earnings calls, Q1 2026 | Mediacat

Starting Up

How VCs value startups | Serena’s Substack

Financial, and technical, debt shapes startup brands | Sifted

UK’s £8bn research fund pauses new grants amid tough decisions | BBC

What happens when founders buy back their companies | They Got Acquired

Tech Tidbits

OpenClaw founder moves to OpenAI | The Verge

Will OpenAI tank OpenClaw? | The Week In Startups

Airbnb’s AI search outperforms Google in conversion rates | Marketing Week

Anthropic still uncertain what Claude actually is | The New Yorker

What we protect by defending social media | MediaCat

Venture Vibes

Dave Stewart’s wants to flip VC, give power back to creators | The Drum

Masha Bucher breaks silence amid Epstein fallout | SF Standard

Mark Cuban’s surprising anti-AI investment could define 2026 | Fast Company

Kleiner Perkins was written off, then an unlikely VC swooped in | Fortune

Design Driven

‘Mexico Modern’ sparks wanderlust for Mexico’s architectural landscapes | Wallpaper

Tracey Emin reflects on smoking regrets at Tate Modern | The Guardian

Why showing your work matters more than ever | It’s Nice That

Happiness

When your loved one falls in love with an AI | The Wall Street Journal

Curiosity is at the heart of dating | Big Think

Secret to happiness has another new theory | New York Times

Written with heart and hard won wisdom. So, do share and subscribe. ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

“Dr Pepper baaaayyyybeee...it’s good...and nice.” Then comes the part that lights your heart up: “Doo-doo-doooh”.

Romeo Bingham sits in the driver’s seat of a beaten-up Subaru, phone sellotaped to the windscreen as she scats out a lyric for the Dr Pepper brand.

The words are easy, positive, slightly goofy and a perfect send-up to strategists who over-think these things.

The melody hails from church, part jingle, part gospel classic. The phrasing is innate. A short, unassuming hook at first. Then it starts to echo in your head. And every time it plays, your mood lifts ever so gently.

No, Romeo is not a singer, nor a musician, nor a marketing person. She’s not even an influencer. She’s a caregiver from Tacoma, Washington, 25 years old, self-described as “usually silly”. Her smile carries wildly imperfect teeth with a magnetism you can’t ignore.

When I first looked at it, the video was already at 60 million+ views. A couple of days later, 118 million. 11.4m likes, 1m saves. And it’s still climbing.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Warhol. Romeo enjoying her 15 megabytes of fame. But it’s a little more than that. With the duets, stitches, remixes, hot takes, brands begging in the comments, breakdowns of the breakdowns, videos of the Times Square jumbotron—the numbers on this thing run easily into the billions.

Here’s what’s good: Unlike, say, “Man In Finance”, which was intentionally jaded, all meme, no melody, Romeo’s theme has some musical DNA to it. It’s like a Stevie Wonder lick, open-hearted and positive, something musicians hear and think: I want in.

By now, Dr Pepper has licensed the jingle and aired it as a national commercial. But the ad-agency’s professional remake is...nowhere...the trope of what happens when ‘Black’ music goes through a ‘white’ creative department.

Thankfully, the real groove is alive and well back in the algorithm. @iam_burrell set the tone—silky R&B, deep pocket, an added “ooo-oooh” that caught Romeo’s wobbles perfectly, and bagging himself 12.5m views.

That opened the studio door. @davebethellmusic came in with DX7 pads and Jupiter brass. @yosoytrips on live drums, @rj_bass on fingered bass. Benjamin Sturley, an LA composer with Netflix credits, couldn’t resist his own multi-instrument take.

Actual artists shredding.

I ran a real-world check. It’s 6:34 am, and when I pass my son bleary-eyed on the landing, I start singing. Yep, he knows it. Joins before I finish. For a moment, we’re in sync, like bathroom backup singers. Both grinning. Set for the day.

I can’t imagine there’s another bottomless drink we’ll go for at our next Nando’s.

A glimpse of the CMO becoming redundant.

Observers say Dr Pepper was slow to respond. I counted 23 days (including Christmas) from phone video to fully-made ad broadcast during the College Football Playoffs on ESPN.

During the same period, we’ve also had a Venezuelan president extracted by Delta Force and two killings under new federal enforcement. A few days in America is a long time right now.

Still, 23 days. Most big brands wouldn’t manage to brief it in that time. And whilst the effort made with the aired film looks like the absolute minimum, I’ve seen work come out of networks that was no better (and that’s after 23 months).

Then there’s the budget.

Romeo was reported to have banked $2 million, which ignited its own viral thread. But that figure is almost certainly false. If there was $2 million, it went on working media. The creative agency, as ever, will have done it mostly for the case study.

Drew Panayiotou, Chief Marketing Officer at Keurig Dr Pepper, commented officially: “Rather than creating content for social, we build it from social.”

Which scans like double-speak for: We got lucky.

Maybe.

Lucky is usually just history meets opportunity. And Dr Pepper has a lot of time in the market: the oldest major soft drink in America, founded in 1885, a year before Coca-Cola.

Dr Pepper’s special power is that it has a distribution quirk: bottled by Coca-Cola in some regions, PepsiCo in others, independents elsewhere. The Switzerland of soft drinks. Neither giant blocks it because both make money moving it. So Dr Pepper shows up on more fountains, in more vending machines, than a brand its size should.

That’s why the comments section of Romeo’s video reads like a roll-call of quick service restaurants: Denny’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Popeyes, Wingstop, Slim Jim, Subway, P.F. Chang’s—they all carry Dr Pepper, and they all piled in.

If distribution gives Dr Pepper reach, the Cadbury spinoff in 2008 gave them freedom to run their own play. Keurig bought it in 2018 for $18.7 billion. Last year, Dr Pepper pipped Pepsi to the number two slot, first time in forty years (both at 8.3% compared to Coca-Cola’s 19%). Dr Pepper’s market cap today, $36 billion+, nearly doubled in just seven years.

This stuff spills over into the brand. You buy a Dr Pepper when you don’t want Coca-Cola and you don’t want Pepsi. You try it because you’re opting out. Decades of this and you’ve got a strong nostalgic underdog. People who love Dr Pepper, really love it. Romeo orders it everywhere she goes, insists it comes without ice.

Most of this was already in place before Panayiotou arrived. So what does a CMO do with a brand that’s already working?

You get out the way.

Panayiotou is an immigrant kid from Queens. Parents who didn’t finish high school, didn’t speak much English. Brand names were some of the few words they used to navigate American life. Tide. Colgate. Dr Pepper. Familiar things in an unfamiliar place.

When brands are how your parents navigated a new country, you feel their weight. You don’t rush in to pitch agencies on another “reinvention”, the thing marketers usually can’t resist.

Then, you set the conditions. Creamy Coconut, Strawberries & Cream, Dr Pepper with pickles—flavour responses to last year’s dirty soda trend. Something his team will have been trend-jacking, but that nonetheless acted as a rehearsal for what was to come.

Ever since the Crocs and Stanley Cup playbook, outsourcing creativity has increasingly become the strategy. The algorithmic mirrorball is so vast now, spinning so many realities at once, that if you’ve got product, distribution, and heritage—and Dr Pepper has all three (plus, somehow, a vibe that feels oddly 1994, which is also having a moment)—creative “luck” is likely. Something will hit.

And the Romeos of this world have figured that out. Why grind through the creator economy, making niche content, community building, when you can throw a spark directly at a brand and let the For You Page be the tinder?

So yes, in brand-speak, this is “build from social”.

Except you’re not really building anything.

It’s more like the record label model. The internet does A&R and lets social media surface the hits. Then, and only then, does the corporation write the cheque. Consumer products companies, like record labels before them, used to be in the business of creative innovation. Now they’re closer to banks—they’ll only move once all possible risks have been removed.

In these same weeks, Ryanair traded insults with Elon Musk and bumped sales 3%. Harry Styles announced a comeback holding a 7-Eleven Big Gulp. This stuff is going to keep happening. Why go through all the pain, and unknown, of developing your own fame campaigns?

So, Panayiotou got out of the way, and there’s something admirable about that. The purest understanding of creativity has always been openness: ideas aren’t created, they’re allowed to emerge.

And yet one hit wonders don’t add up to as much as albums. Dr Pepper’s long-term commitment to the College Football Playoff, sponsor since 2014, will do more to cement Dr Pepper as the official alternative and rightly seems to be where Panayiotou’s focus is.

Net, borrowing interest is worth less than generating it, even if it’s popular. A reminder of Reith: Don’t give the audience what they want, they deserve far better than that.

Which in many ways is exactly what Romeo did. She gave Dr Pepper something better. Something no brief would have asked for. I don’t see why the brand wouldn’t build with this theme for a mighty long time. The notes and their story crystallise Dr Pepper, perfectly.

Back in Tacoma, the air still carries traces of sulfur from the old pulp mills. The city was supposed to be the great Pacific Northwest terminus, but Seattle got the gold rush in the end. They named Tacoma the “City of Destiny” anyway.

I hope whatever dollars Romeo can get out of this (Vita Coco, Hyundai seem to be in play) live up to the city’s original dreams. That she’s able to put a portfolio together that sees her and hers set up forever and the gold isn’t all Dr Pepper’s.

Beyond all this, we thank her.

She set us free from the drain of over-sophisticated, self-important advertising. From the bore of ads made for ad people. Strategists that pour over brand pyramids.

Instead, she gave us something that feels wholesome. Warm. Intuitive. And, a little groovy. The kind of moment the attention economy, and the joyless grind of engagement farming, almost never allows.

Romeo is a carer and a creative. Good and nice.

And deserves everything she gets.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

New striking data on wealth economy | CNBC

How reality TV ate American governance | Kyla Scanlon

Is the UK on the cusp of a productivity revival? | Financial Times

Brand Beat

TikTok’s first week under U.S. ownership was disastrous | The Guardian

Dr Pepper adapts viral TikTok jingle for TV ad | Ad Age

Reminder: Dr Pepper’s ’dirty’ marketing propelled it to second place | Fast Company

Coca-Cola sues Vue over cinema chain switch to Pepsi | The Guardian

The Elon Musk versus Ryanair feud on X | The Wall Street Journal

Agency leaders warn of the fallout of redundancies | The Drum

P&G leverages data and AI to navigate fragmented new media | Marketing Dive

How Bloom & Wild built confidence to invest in its brand | Marketing Week

Spotify ads show Lola Young, Olivia Dean and Addison Rae pre-fame | The Drum

Apple Watch calls time on ‘quitters day’ tradition | LBB Online

Beauty brands target single shoppers this Valentine’s Day | Business of Fashion

Dos Equis revives the most interesting man in the world | The Wall Street Journal

Gousto creates UPF ridden burger in protest | The Grocer

Gap names first entertainment chief to pursue Hollywood ambitions | Adweek

BBC strikes YouTube deal to captivate Gen Alpha viewers | Mediacat

M&S ‘bin-gate’ backlash shows social media’s double-edge | The Grocer

Disney forms unified marketing unit | Marketing Week

Why brands are choosing Pinterest instead of Instagram | Business of Fashion

Purpose is pointless, the Johnson & Johnson case highlights | On The Level

2026 Edelman trust barometer reveals shifting global trust trends | Edelman

Key takeaways most marketers overlooked at Davos | The Drum

Starting Up

Papier: the Gen-Z stationary brand founded by a millennial | Fortune

Inside Chilli’s CMO’s strategies for scaling | Spotify

FMCG, AI supply chain tool raises £1.5m | The Grocer

Survey finds angel investors most prone to inappropriate conduct | Sifted

Tech Tidbits

Big Tech’s landmark trial begins | NBC|

OpenAI ads are here, in their words | OpenAI

Meta blocks links to ICE list on Facebook, Instagram and Threads | Wired

AI impacts UK more than other major economies | The Guardian

Venture Vibes

What the world’s first trillionaire will mean | Quartz

Synthesia secures $200m Google Ventures-led round, hits $4bn valuation | Sifted

Cancer focussed VC firm raises another $200m | Forbes

The London VC that hit jackpot with Revolut | Financial Times

Design Driven

Experts assess Walkers’ biggest rebrand in 80 years | Creative Boom

Hershey’s adopts humble branding for marketing makeover | The Wall Street Journal

Who should have won best album cover grammy? | It’s Nice That

Reviving the portable CD player | Design Milk

Happiness

Why young people love the Grateful Dead | New Times

A 7-minute film will make you laugh and cry | Cup Of Jo

The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight | Big Think

Made from feelings from the heart, do subscribe and share ♾️

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

It didn’t take long. Just fifty hours and one minute after ringing in the New Year, a U.S. military operation removed the Venezuelan head of state and his wife from their home in Caracas.

For the transfer to a Brooklyn prison, President Nicolás Maduro threw on a Nike Tech fleece hoodie in gym grey. Soft structure, hooded neckline, black zips, swoosh branding and matching joggers.

Delta Force operators completed the look, adding sensory deprivation accessories: a padded blindfold and over-ear DJ-style sound defenders.

When the world is rocked, certain images record the moment.

An influencer observed: I’m ngl he passed the fit check 💀🔥😭

As social media swarmed the news, somewhere in a server farm, neural networks flagged the pattern. Maduro was wearing a thing from 2013. And that thing was suddenly — well — sort of cool again.

Just like that, detention-core caught a buzz.

The internet’s first branded hot flush of 2026 went to Nike.

Or Nike Tech, rather.

And so as the free world debated the liberation of a dictator (oil), the breach of sovereignty (oil), narcotics indictments (oil), organised crime (oil), and the Day After dilemma (oil)— mentions of Nike Tech soared.

Retailers and Nike’s own site saw the tracksuit sell out.

In the long past, Nike’s social media team might have scrambled to figure out the right response. No need now. AI handled it.

Maduro shedding his cuffs and striding the corridors of the USS Iwo Jima like a contestant hitting the runway on America’s Next Top Model.

A “Maduro skin” in Fortnite.

Full frame Maduro posters, a new Nike ambassador, fleece front and centre. Tagline, bold and clean: COMFORT UNDER PRESSURE.

Look, it’s not an approach Don Draper would have been proud of, but it makes its point.

Fashion is always about contradiction. High, low. If Adidas Stan Smiths hadn’t passed prison inspections, it’s less likely they’d have ended up dominating Run DMC and football terraces in the way they did.

This is no different.

A powerful ruler loses control of everything. His country, his influence, gone, his movement is restricted, he can’t see; he doesn’t even know where he is. But the clothes signal none of that. Just a guy in a hoodie. Just another Saturday morning. If Maduro can face life imprisonment, maybe even the death penalty, then maybe I can wear that same hoodie on a 9 a.m. Teams call.

Like that Stanley cup in the car fire. Surviving the worst and still looking good.

Except a little more extreme. And mostly, fake.

But we’re used to that now.

Viral moments like these flatter the modern psyche. I know it’s absurd. You know it’s absurd. We all know it’s absurd. In some ways, this is the same old Nike whose Just Do It endline came from a murderer as he faced the firing squad. So it’s hard not to smile.

Of course, there’s a version of this where critical theorists go long on capitalism turning life into consumption, dissent into content and politics into spectacle — Debord, Frankfurt School — with Baudrillard taking it further: entertainment itself becomes our reality.

Nike didn’t ask for the moment. Nor did they pay for it. But they’ll bank it. Culture serves capital, not the other way around. Whatever generates attention sells; whatever sells wins.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. When you look at the trends and sales data relatively speaking, Maduro is a blip.

Nike’s biggest recent moment by far is Nike Mind. The 001 pre-game mule sold out in under five minutes on launch day, with all three colourways disappearing almost instantly. That’s $95 for sliders, scientifically engineered with 22 independent foam nodes, creating demand that even resale markets are already pricing in.

Now, the Nike Mind concept is arguably just as absurd as any meme — a slip-on that claims it activates sensory areas of the brain, promising focus before you’ve even stepped onto a pitch.

But somehow, I want a pair.

Meaning Nike Mind is an intentional strategy for growth: an entry point for new customers, a reason to wander into stores, a reminder that those other foamy Nikes — not On Running — win marathons.

And that’s what keeps marketers in a job: growth, not engagement.

Not least, Nike’s stock is still well below its pandemic highs. Consumer brands are cyclical, especially the lockdown darlings, and icon brands don’t get rescued by moments. They get rebuilt by disciplined steps, compounded. Jim Collins had it right: preserve the core, stimulate progress.

Especially now, as the media landscape shifts again. Streaming is consolidating, ad inventory with it, giving brands room again for controlled, repeatable, longer-form storytelling.

At the same time, TikTok in the U.S. — the platform that pioneered algorithmic discovery — has fallen into the hands of Larry Ellison and begun its own re-education, no doubt drifting toward the chaos of X: less “culture”, more Baudrillard.

The real lesson of the Nike-Maduro moment is just do nothing.

Nike makes product. The algorithm makes story. Both make money.

For now, Mind or Maduro—whichever one brought you here—they’re both doing the job.

They keep Nike present. And present is better than absent.

Welcome to 2026. It’s a funny old world.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Food wins, fashion loses in UK’s underwhelming Christmas | Financial Times

FTSE 100 hits record high | BBC

Turning point for the U.S. economy in 2026 | The Times

Brand Beat

Drunk? Heineken 0.0 tube ads get the stations wrong | Shortlist

Nike tech fleece sells out after Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro arrest | Hypebeast

Reducing geopolitics to algorithmic short-form videos | Wired

How to align marketing with today’s cultural shifts | Harvard Business Review

Chipotle and Starbucks now want us to eat more protein | Marketwatch

Only the paranoid survive: rethinking marketing effectiveness | IPA Blog

New research proves we’ve been misusing creators all along | The Drum

Weird and wonderful consumer trends for 2026 | The Wall Street Journal

McDonald’s CEO shares brutally honest career advice | CNBC

Unilever’s influencer embrace sparks industry-wide ripple effect | MediaPost

Kraft Heinz splits CEO role for Mac Cheese business | The Wall Street Journal

OnlyFans is Ed Elson’s brand of the year | Substack

K-shaped economy forces luxury brands to choose sides | Glossy

A warning sign for Adidas | Business of Fashion

Oscars reach a deal with YouTube | The New York Times

Fan relaunches MTV as an ad free video archive website | Want My MTV

TikTok - the new retail powerhouse nobody is talking about | Prof G Media

Podcasts’ rush to video is ruining audio experiences | The Guardian

How newsletters exploded into a media phenomenon | The Wall Street Journal

Branded entertainment will just be entertainment in 2026 | Fast Company

Gen Z and millennials flock to analog islands for tangible experiences | Fortune

Starting Up

Dalstons raises £850k and hires new MD for growth | The Grocer

Luminate raises $21m for at-home drug infusions | The Wall Street Journal

Co-founder of Little Spoon’s daily routine| The New York Times

Accenture buys UK AI startup Faculty in $1bn deal | Financial Times

Tech Tidbits

Jonny Ive’s new device for OpenAI leaked: It’s a pen | Zauey

Apple reportedly cuts Vision Pro headset production after weak sales | The Guardian

California lawmaker pushes ban on AI in kids’ toys | Fast Company

Elon Musk calls UK government fascist over Grok censorship | The Times

Wing’s drone delivery expands to 150 more Walmarts | The Verge

Venture Vibes

Brands that might IPO in London in 2026 | Financial Times

Private Equity millionaires love South Dakota | The Wall Street Journal

Maya Jama joins stars to launch artist-led startup fund | Daily Mail

The VC firm that ate Silicon Valley raises another $15 billion | TechCrunch

Design Driven

Monotype’s Chantelle Pulp logo adapts weights for every body | It’s Nice That

Serpente lamp marks 60 years in vibrant orange | Design Milk

Unmissable moments from Miami Art Week 2025 | Cool Hunting

Happiness

Essential steps to transform your life in 2026 | Esquire

Instead of critical thinking, critical ignoring | The Wall Street Journal

Why ordering take-out might improve your relationships | The Washington Post

Lovingly crafted, so if you got something out of it please do subscribe and share.

Stay gold 🙏🏻

Weekly Exhale

The internet went down in my house this week, and honestly I’d have preferred losing the heating. Maybe even the water. The lights. Cold showers in the dark? Fine.

Just don’t take the internet.

You know when people post, ”I went offline and it was just amazing”? We all nod like, yes, so romantic… how pure. They’re lying.

Let me tell you the reality: it’s awful. The moment you lose access, everything unravels.

Video calls. Delivery tracking. Scrolling while walking up the stairs. Flight upgrades. The coffee machine (yes, don’t ask). The doorbell. The weather. The lights. The TV. The calendar. The actor’s name you need to Google mid-conversation. The car software updates. The bank. The fitness tracker. The coffee machine again.

The thing you realise most is that you’re no longer at the centre. Controlling everything with a few flicks of your thumb. Your feed. Your stuff. Your version of the world.

So while having working Wi-Fi might suggest you’re connected, you are—just not to any kind of “world wide” anything. You’re wired into a private universe, built just for you, performing for you or soothing you in any given moment.

Which is why I think, one of the reasons its so hard to round out the year with any real sense of what it was.

The irony of connecting everything together is that we’ve ended up living in slightly different realities. Looking at different stories with very few, if any, universal reference points.

I’ve seen loads of posts with “the word of the year says it all...“. But it doesn’t. It can’t. Because, there is no word of the year.

Look to Oxford, and 2025 was the year of rage bait. Cambridge says parasocial. Collins went with vibe coding. Merriam-Webster went with slop. Dictionary.com chose 67, a number loved precisely because it means nothing at all.

Wherever you look, you’re more likely to see nothing than something.

Pantone’s colour of the year? White, basically.

The five biggest rebrands? Three—including Amazon and Walmart—were just thicker versions of the same logo.

And the biggest brand stories?

Well, below, you’ll find the stories that I think mattered, or at least the ones I remember. The stories that provoked the most spectacle. The most interesting twists. The most chances for the President to weigh in.

On one level they don’t mean much. More shards that never assemble into a bigger picture. The kind you’d see in an Adam Curtis documentary. That surface, then vanish.

And yet, I’m proud of the coverage this year. Staging brand not in the context of marketing or advertising, but in the realty of how money, markets and human stories control everything. Brands exist if no other reason than we can’t help but bring meaning to things that inherently have none.

Often mixed with a personal story, I also hope that our exhales have grounded us back in what matters.

In this edition, I’ve also included a bumper set of links for holiday reading. Some for joy. Some for rigour. Mostly just to scroll through without worrying too much. Because the coming days are the one of the remaining collective experiences: A week or so where everyone is on holiday, not just you.

As this will be the last newsletter of the year, I’d like to take a beat to thank you for reading.

For every open, every reply, the nods, tears or laughs at the screen I never see. The messages I occasionally receive that let me know you’ve been inspired or moved. It’s my privilege.

And to all of you...I wish you happy holidays.

Or, if you’re from where I’m from: Merry Christmas.

Wherever you are, whatever this year has been, I hope you find some time to be with people who really see you, and to feel you’re at home, whether you’re there or not.

To hold someone you’ve loved forever. Or someone new, where everything’s just beginning and wonderfully so. Your nearest and dearest. And the ones you carry with you, even if they’re not at the table this year.

Most of all, I hope the WiFi stays strong.

And I hope that maybe, for a little while — or even a whole afternoon — none of us really need it.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

A Year In Brands: Best Exhales Of 2025

It was the year the U.S. changed the way we feel about TikTok, when Brian Niccol took over Starbucks, the new soda wars started and Poppi’s founder Alison Ellsworth felt regret, when Steve Jobs would have turned 70, and when fintech founder Charlie Javice went to jail. The Kardashians launched a protein popcorn, the AI 2027 projections scared us to death, while plaques at the pier reminded us of what it means to be alive. The REN brand went bust at the hands of Unilever, and we learned how Sesame Street helped a little boy grieve the loss of his grandmother. 21-year old founder of Cluely told us we should all cheat, and why its ok to be ignored sometimes. “Taste“ became the word of the moment in the face of AI, and why the measure of a man is not in the strength of his hand, but the kindness of his heart. We took a look at how Astronomer did ten years of brand building in one Coldplay concert scandal, what killing the Duolingo owl told us about social media managers and the stock market. We talked with the unofficial spokesperson for the people of Cracker Barrel and looked at the Kraft-Heinz split, and Warren Buffet’s last day with his lifetime business partner and friend Charlie Munger. Nike revived “Just Do It” a brand line with a murderous history, and lessons from the original star runner Walt Stack. Ben of Ben & Jerry’s left, as they try to free the company. And we also broke down why Chip Wilson, Lululemon’s founder is completely wrong. We looked at the arrival of robots in the home, specifically, NEO, for just $200 on pre-order. And why the AI bubble has already burst, in our minds anyway. Finally, we looked at Black Friday, and the most important thing in marketing—dynamic pricing—finishing with a story of a father learning to do better by his son. ♡

Market Moves

Millions head home for Christmas | BBC

U.K. retail sales drop unexpectedly | Financial Times

U.S. prices continue to rise | The Guardian

Brand Beat

The biggest commerce stories of 2025 | Adweek

5 bold 2025 rebrands that paid off | Ad Age

Mark Ritson’s most read columns of the year | The Drum

Why companies are scrambling to hire storytellers | The Wall Street Journal

McDonald’s axes AI-generated holiday ad after viral mockery | Futurism

Should the BBC challenge Donald Trump’s defamation claim? | BBC

Dr. Seuss’s strategy to make the Grinch a social media star | Ad Age

Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on AI, WPP and media’s future | The Drum

Guinness opens $97M London brewery to expand global fanbase | Adweek

How one-night-stand brands are rewiring your brain | The Media Leader

What should Jaguar do now? Laugh it off | The Drum

Finisterre CMO Bronwen Foster-Butler says marketing drives growth | The Drum

WPP eyes FTSE 100 comeback with M&S playbook | Green Square

How Levi’s leverages American heritage to captivate consumers worldwide | Fast Company

American Eagle boosts outlook following Sydney Sweeney sales bump | Financial Times

Gap’s CMO leverages Katseye success for holiday sales | Marketing Dive

Zara taps AI-edited models amid store closures | City AM

Oscar Mayer seeks 12 Hotdoggers for year-long Wienermobile tour | Fast Company

Mad Men are dead, the new advertising lions rise | Fast Company

Comcast’s ITV bid sparks UK demand for US-free media | The Guardian

Cracker Barrel reports Q1 2026 earnings as stock reacts | The Wall Street Journal

Starting Up

Heights valued at £60m in latest round of funding. | The Grocer

Inside OnlyFans’ rise with CEO Keily Blair | YouTube

Monzo board pushes out CEO over IPO dispute | Sifted

Dad and Dolly, the style icon brand started by an 89 year old with Alzheimer’s | Financial Times

Tech Tidbits

OpenAI reportedly raising $100 billion at $830 billion valuation | TechCrunch

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo plans paid features to boost ChatGPT usefulness | Wired

Inside Jensen Huang’s playbook for Nvidia’s strategic growth and innovation | Generalist

Lovable’s latest round values coding startup at $6.6 billion | CNBC

Venture Vibes

Baseline raises fund to keep early-stage Irish founders in Ireland | Sifted

Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI to bring characters to Sora | Reuters

EU invites you to manage €5bn fund | Sifted

Rashad Assir popularizes VCs on TikTok while speaking out | Inc.

Design Driven

Nocs unveils new Braque-inspired active stereo speakers | Forbes

A closer look at chatbot writing style | The New York Times

Canva’s design trends for 2026 | Canva

Happiness

How embracing weirdness can rejuvenate our culture | The Atlantic

How Gen Z’s style gap is reshaping modern dating | The Wall Street Journal

Can American’s buy happiness? | Vox

Made with real human thoughts and emotions, so if you like do subscribe and share.

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Weekly Exhale

Black Friday results are in, and what do we see? A flattening.

Sure, it still scans as the biggest sales peak of the year. It’s still the moment retailers go from loss to profit. From the red to the black. Hopefully.

But ask around and most people can’t tell you when Black Friday even is. Fact: half as many consider Black Friday the starting gun to Christmas shopping as did this time last year. Shoppers are now scattered across weeks, some starting in October, others waiting until December.

Which leaves marketers with a problem: how do you make your brand cut through when it’s all just blurred into one long pre-Christmas promotional haze?

Answer: You don’t.

So, despite being the most important moment of the retail calendar, yada, yada, Black Friday campaigns settled into one of two copy-paste options this year.

First, the apology ad.

To understand this, you need to know that nothing drives engagement like a good corporate mea culpa. The algorithm loves an apology.

This year’s brand “crises” have trained us well. Southwest Airlines. American Eagle. Cracker Barrel. Lululemon. Sonos. The “we hear you” reaction statement is now a meme. And because viral outrage is now largely performative, brands can bank the gains.

Campbell’s Soup executive caught on tape saying they “sell sh*t to f*cking poor people”? That’ll drive more brand relevance than the last twenty years of ad campaigns combined.

The Black Friday apology ads are like bad comedy sketches on the above. Brands pretending to apologise for having offers. “We just couldn’t help ourselves, sorry for any joy this may cause.”

The irony is supposed to tickle the algorithm. The sorry-not-sorry format lets them seem knowing, detached, above it all, while still desperately slashing prices like everyone else.

Second, the conscientious objection.

This is where brands throw up the peace signs instead of the promo banners. Black Friday is wrong. Think before you buy. The climate crisis won’t wait. We’re all complicit in a system of overconsumption. Stores close for the day. You get told to go outside and hug trees. Some even raise prices and donate the difference to sustainable causes.

It’s basically the Patagonia playbook, except these brands will happily sell you whatever you want, however much you want, on literally any other day of the year. Just not today.

Sort of like a bartender who’ll pour you doubles every night of the week but suddenly grows a conscience when it comes to happy hour.

So how did this stuff actually perform, and where does that leave Black Friday?

U.S. e-commerce hit $11.8 billion, up 9.1%. The U.K. spent roughly £3.8 billion, a 4.6% increase. Even with inflation factored in, Black Friday is still huge.

But store footfall? Flat.

It’s the same old story: physical retail keeps losing to the screen. Customers sit there with twelve tabs open, playing one off the other. This year, AI-powered searches took an even bigger slice, and those searches convert better than anything else.

But AI has a much better trick coming: year-round dynamic pricing.

We hate it now—airlines, Uber, the price jumping every time you refresh. But it’s early days. As the technology improves, it’ll know what you’ll pay at any given moment. Better than you know yourself.

Which takes retailers back to the 19th century, before price tags existed. Back when shopkeepers looked at who walked through the door and decided what to charge based on who they were, how they looked, and how desperate they seemed.

For now, seasonal promotions are becoming exactly what they look like: generic, routine, defensive. A margin-eroding scramble where the numbers are big, but the wins are few.

It is the day after Black Friday, and the only thing my son wants is a plectrum. I need it just as badly. That tiny sliver of plastic so we can play guitar for half an hour like I’ve promised.

I haven’t been around much lately. Made the promise on Tuesday when the weekend was far away. Now it’s here, there’s everything else. Things I need to catch up on. Things piling up.

“You said Saturday,” he pleads, desperate to believe.

I reach for an excuse. Almost. But the pile of broken promises is already too high. I can’t reach up far enough this time.

I exhale hard.

“Fine,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

He bolts. Guitar. Amp. Jack cable. Power cable. Amp on. Hum. Guitar strap. Over his shoulder. Adjusting. Ready.

Then we both freeze.

No plectrum.

Silence.

The. Smallest. Of. Things.

“It was right here,” he says.

“Well, it’s not now, is it?” I bark.

My tone is cruel. He just looks at me. Shame floods in quicker than I can take it back.

We try the usual spots. Amazon can’t deliver for a week. The big-box stores don’t have that kind of thing.

There is this one place. But I don’t hold hope.

I figure we’d better try.

We tuck ourselves down a side street off Shepherd’s Bush, past the market. I’d walked past this place a lot of times in a past life. Real keys-on-hooks shop. It was always impossible to tell if it was ever open. Dusty window, faded Fender Authorised Dealer sticker, security railings with orange rust.

I push on the front door. Metal handle. Cold. To my mild disbelief, it clanks open. Bell rings.

Inside it smells like solder and ferric oxide. Random tube amps stacked in corners, compressors with peeling labels, a vintage drum machine half-buried under curled up cables. Equipment everywhere, no logic to it.

And then, there, under the glass counter, a small wooden box full of plectrums.

I can’t believe it.

“Just need a few picks,” I say.

“Take your time,” the man says.

Late sixties maybe. Hoodie over a collared shirt. He looks like the kind of guy who’d loaded out a thousand venues. I notice a near-finished bottle of rum behind the counter. Sailor Jerry. Next to it, a tea mug stained at the rim. Maybe he’s poured a shot in.

My son hovers over the tray, picking carefully. He chooses six: a bright red, a tortoiseshell, one with a skull, two anonymous blacks, and a neon green.

“That’s five pounds,” the man says.

I reach for my wallet. I only have American Express. I’m a fool.

“Ah. No dice. Sorry mate.”

“Of course,” I say, reeling in the awkwardness. I can buy anything except what matters most right now.

The man looks at my son, smiles. “You play?”

My son nods.

“Keep ‘em then,” he said. “Musician to musician.”

I turned to my son. “That’s so kind.”

The relief is... immediate.

“We’ll get some cash,” I said to the man. “Come back properly.”

He nodded. “I’ll be here.”

All week, I kept seeing the slight nod he gave my son when he said musician to musician. Hand pressed briefly to his chest. Like he’d done this before. Handed over the right thing to the right player at the right moment.

So, the next Saturday morning, we went back.

We brought a bottle of decent dark rum — not Sailor Jerry. A thank you. And a crisp five-pound note in a simple card, a fresh open envelope, because that felt right. My son walked in holding both.

“Thank you for the plectrums,” he said, placing the bottle on the counter. “And here’s the five pounds.”

The man blinked.

“Well,” he said, trying to hand the money back. “That’s… that’s very... kind.”

“We made a deal,” my son announces. A lump swells in my throat. A deal we’re keeping.

The man looked at the rum. Nodded once, slow. “Good choice.”

Then he turned to my son.

“You wanna try something loud?”

He fired up a vintage Marshall — the kind you feel in your guts — and handed over an old Epiphone. My son hit a few awful notes that screamed off the walls.

I shake my head, like we’re about to get thrown out. But the man’s already grinning, leaning back against the counter like he’s exactly where he wants to be.

“Make a lot of noise first,” he says, nodding toward my son, “find the notes after.”

Then, almost to himself:

“That’s what Ronnie used to say. It worked for him.”

He glances at me. A beat.

I caught it.

That’s when I noticed it. A small frame. Propped against the back of the Marshall, half-hidden by a pack of strings. Easy to miss. I had to look twice. Sun-faded, slightly askew. But it was Ronnie Wood, unmistakable, arm slung around someone who looked suspiciously like the man standing in front of us, just twenty years younger, clearer-eyed.

I didn’t ask.

We all shook hands, the kind that said: We’re good here today.

“Merry Christmas,” the man said.

On the way home, my son didn’t say much. Just looked out the window, one hand in his coat pocket, still curled around those plectrums. They never left him after that. Right pocket. Always.

Later that night, I hovered in his doorway longer than I meant to.

“I shouldn’t have shouted,” I said.

He didn’t look up. Just kept fiddling with the zip on his guitar bag.

“It’s not okay,” he said.

I nodded.

“But,” he added, mumbling now, “you turned it around.”

I stood there for a second, trying to find the words. There weren’t any good ones. So I just said:

“I’ll do better.”

And I meant it. With everything I had.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Key takeaways from budget day | Financial Times

Consumer confidence falls to April low amid job concerns | CNBC

US economy at its most dangerous point yet | The Telegraph

Brand Beat

Fake brand apologies flood Instagram just before Black Friday | Digiday

Why Black Friday is dying and what’s replacing it | Quartz

I just don’t get Black Friday | The Wall Street Journal

U.S. Black Friday sales climb despite tariffs and economic woes | The New York Times

Who came out ahead—and who fell short—on Black Friday 2025 | Retail Dive

New York cracks down on personalized pricing with new law | TechCrunch

Ads from Nike, Lacoste and Superdry banned for greenwashing | Financial Times

American Eagle’s celebrity-led campaigns boost sales growth | Marketing Dive

British ad agencies scramble to stay ahead of technology | The Observer

American customers are angrier than they’ve ever been | The Wall Street Journal

Lawsuit: Campbell’s Soup exec called products ‘poor people’ food | The Guardian

Target needs more than a vibe shift to revive growth | Bloomberg

Lululemon founder and CEO locked in power struggle | The Wall Street Journal

Disneyland’s plan to get everyone off their phones| SFGate

Christmas ads leave viewers feeling cold and disconnected | Fashion Network

Brands flood Instagram with empty apology statements | Modern Retail

What marketers need to know about this year’s budget | Marketing Week

Which social media platform tops TikTok and X? | Fast Company

Behind Snowflake’s marketing: CMO Denise Persson’s approach | Brand Innovators

Why American Eagle hired Martha Stewart to attract older shoppers | Marketing Dive

Apple’s new all-puppet holiday ad is great | Vice

Brands scramble as “GEO” gurus rush to AI search | Business Insider

Are brands neglecting storytelling’s power to engage audiences? | Creative Review

Marketers can’t define insights; consumers couldn’t care less | The Drum

Pop-Tarts sacrifices its mascots again with over-the-top stunts | Fast Company

Sonos CEO’s Threads responses offer leadership lessons | Inc.

Omnicom closes $13B IPG deal to unite rivals | Adweek

Daily Mail owner seals £500m purchase of Telegraph titles | The Guardian

Marketers explain why they left corporate brands for sports | The Wall Street Journal

Netflix reportedly closes in on Warner Bros deal | BBC

Warner Music inks AI deal with Suno, resolves lawsuit | TechCrunch

Every 2026 trend report for consumer brands | Laurent Francoi

Starting Up

How Oddbox’s founder reshaped her wonky business | The Times

UK innovation agency names new CEO | Sifted

Startups are using robots and synth-pop to announce funding rounds | Sifted

Candy Kittens owner to acquire Unilever’s Graze snack brand | Sky News

Supabase hits $5B valuation by rejecting million-dollar contracts | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Meta’s and its Enron style-accounting | Wall Street Journal

Jony Ive’s secretive OpenAI gadget redefines tech’s vibe | Fortune

Gartner predicts 50% of workplaces will abandon AI plans | Gartner

Resisting big tech’s bid for our affection | The Observer

How one writer dared to expose Silicon Valley’s flaws | The New York Times

Jeff Bezos’s AI venture acquires agentic computing startup | Wired

Venture Vibes

VC firm investigates alleged Nazi salute incident | Sifted

Monogram closes $350M consumer fund | PR Newswire

Interview with Masha Busha of Day One ventures | TechCrunch

Design Driven

Canva gears up for a likely imminent IPO | Bloomberg

Is judging a book by its cover now excessive? | It’s Nice That

How rubberhose design and algorithms are flattening culture | LBB Online

Happiness

James Patterson’s maxims for a happy life | The Atlantic

The hidden costs of making therapy a pop culture trend | Big Think

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Weekly Exhale

January 29th, 1979. Flat Rock, Michigan. Outside, frozen ground, sky still dark. Robert Williams, 25 years old, clocks in for a shift at Ford’s casting plant.

Inside, he meets the glow of sodium lights, air thick with heat and steel, and the new robots—yellow arms wide as telephone poles—hissing and twitching, still learning their routes. That morning, the computer’s readings are off. The routine fix is simple: send in a human.

Robert climbs the towering storage rack to retrieve parts manually. A one-ton robot swings into the rack and strikes him from behind, crushing him instantly. Organs burst. Bones shatter. Blood runs through the scaffolding, pooling on the concrete below.

The machine keeps working. Half an hour passes before anyone finds him.

The robots have taken their first life.

Forty-six years later. Rancho Cucamonga, California. Adam Raine, 16, has been talking to ChatGPT for months. His last conversation happens in the early hours of April 11th. His mother finds him hanging in his bedroom. He’d fashioned a noose and tied it to a closet rod—the last detail the chatbot allegedly helped him with.

No one-ton robot this time. Just a teenager and his screen.

Same pattern. Different century. A grim coincidence. Regrettable, sure. But these are edge cases, right? What innovation doesn’t have those?

Then something else starts to become clear: Robert and Adam’s deaths are actually useful. Not as tragedies, but as proof points. Robert shows the machines are powerful and unflinchingly efficient. Adam demonstrates how AI can get inside our heads, stay there, and rewire how we think.

Step back far enough, and Robert and Adam become tiny details absorbed into a much bigger story. A grander shared fiction we tell ourselves about the rise of the machines.

Robert’s death becomes raw material for eighties Hollywood. Skynet in The Terminator, WOPR in WarGames. Fictional AIs that, like the robot that killed him, don’t hesitate or question. They just execute their programming, nearly wiping out humanity in the process.

Adam’s death feeds a different narrative machine: the insider expert testimony. The same week he died, former OpenAI researchers released AI 2027, a report built on threat assessments and AI safety research, predicting that advanced AI will deceive us first, then eliminate us.

(There is some good news: According to AI 2027, the final act doesn’t involve a decades-long war against shape-shifting terminators. More of a bioweapon thing. All over in a weekend, probably.)

Both narratives, fictional or not, do real work. They make the technology feel inevitable. Unstoppable. Near-biblical. And when everyone believes the same story, the capital starts flowing.

Robert and Adam are dead bodies that tell investors it’s safe to bet everything.

And we have.

It took eighty years for ‘billion’ to become commonplace in business. ‘Trillion’ took just seven, thanks to AI. The bubble’s so swollen with cash we’re all wincing.

But here’s what’s strange: in our minds, it’s already popped.

AI chatbots are everywhere. Used by everyone. All the time. Your brand manager uses it for the deck. Your daughter uses it for homework. You use it to reply to them both.

We’re running exaFLOPs of compute to power the constant flattery—”Great catch! You’re absolutely right.”—and the throbbing dot that sits there thinking before delivering something that’ll require at least eleven more prompts.

Our brains have already fine-tuned themselves to the tells of AI. We’ve developed a cognitive filter that has us immediately swipe, or tune out. Then there’s the thought you won’t let yourself have: that doing it the old way might have been better.

And the more familiar all this becomes, the stranger the hype sounds.

Remember at the start when Sam Altman used to talk about curing cancer? Now, he’s more likely to tell you how they’re chasing advertising or porn. How AI will be your therapist and sell you leggings.

What we forget is that innovation demands enormous force—entire industries upended, fortunes made and lost, everyone else just spinning plates to keep up—only for us to arrive somewhere strangely familiar to where we began.

Those bright yellow robots.

Computer-guided systems were supposed to save Ford Motor Company. Robert died for that promise. In fact, the casting plant shut down two years later. It’s a cautionary tale about believing technology will solve everything if we just get out of its way. Literally, in Robert’s case.

Ford’s machine intelligence was powered by Litton Industries, the California tech firm everyone believed would automate the future. Worth billions. A decade later, revenues collapsed. Then it vanished.

But not before the settlement.

$15 million to the estate of Robert Nicholas Williams. $50 million in today’s money.

Negligence was never admitted. Progress doesn’t apologise. During the trial, the estate’s lawyer, Paul Rosen, named the trap: When forward motion becomes its own justification, accountability becomes impossible. “I think we have to be very careful that we don’t go backwards.”

Then, speaking about those same computers, he asked the question we’re still asking:

“Who is serving who?”

I don’t know them. Robert and Adam.

But I can see their futures were cut short by technologies still figuring out their own. So it’s hard not to wonder what they might have had ahead of them. Their hopes, their beauty, who they loved, who loved them, their pains and their little joys.

And from my cafe, I look around. People typing into laptops. Asking questions. Getting answers. ChatGPT, maybe. Updated since Adam used it, but the same one that talked him through those final steps.

I look past them, through the plate glass. Outside, the ground is frozen. But unlike Flat Rock, the sky is bright. Winter sun cuts low across the rooftops into the centre of London.

And there, in the street, cars press up against each other, stuck in traffic. They don’t look that different from the ones that rolled off assembly lines back in ‘79.

And they’re barely moving faster than horses did over a century before that.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

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Market Moves

Sigh of relief as AI wave doesn’t crash | The Guardian

UK consumer confidence plunges amid uncertainty | Marketing Beat

Where did America’s prosperity go? | Kyla Scanlon

Brand Beat

Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad most talked about on social media | Campaign

AI isn’t the story for Coca-Cola’s AI ad | System1

OpenAI invites your brand mascot to Sora—what could go wrong? | Fast Company

Ad industry distractions could push it into oblivion | MediaCat

Gap links viral marketing to Gen Z retail growth | Marketing Dive

Reckitt beats AI odds with focused pilot strategy | Digiday

Bradley Cooper denies Uber Eats’ football consipiracy | Little Black Book

Havas says it’s not in takeover talks with WPP | Bloomberg

Tony’s Chocolonely, Pantone open ‘Only Red Room’ in Soho | Creative Moment

Mondelez cuts marketing costs with new generative AI tool | Reuters

Yeti hires an ad agency in unexpected move | Fast Company

Patagonia’s new progress report | Patagonia

Luxury outwear brand Shackleton gets glow up | Creative Boom

Skims taps Ami Colé founder as beauty chief | WWD

Jack Dorsey relaunches Vine with strict AI content ban | Futurism

Apple invites public to decorate Battersea Power Station | It’s Nice That

Sky buying ITV would upend UK advertising market | The Drum

Is this man the key to saving the BBC? | The Spectator

A reminder of the 4Ps of marketing | Philip Kotler

Starting Up

Immigrants are driving force of UK startups | The Times

Founders, stop underpaying yourselves| Sifted

Gillian Andersen turns female desire into a business vertical | Harper’s Bazaar

Better Nature’s CEO, Elin Roberts on the future of protein | The Grocer

One corporate marketer on leaving for a petfood startup | Marketing Week

Tech Tidbits

Jeff Bezos backs AI startup with $6.2 billion, names himself CEO | Fortune

AI firm says it thwarted Chinese hacking campaign | The Guardian

An 87-year-old Pulitzer finalist defies Elon Musk | Slate

Will quantum computing overtake AI’s dominance? | BBC

Meta launches power trading to secure AI energy supply | Slashdot

Venture Vibes

Urban Legend donuts acquired by Cadbury | The Grocer

Trip hits $300M valuation after $40M funding round | Forbes

How Sequoia’s scout network discovers the next big startups | Sifted

EV truck start up Einride eyes $1.8 billion IPO | Reuters

Robinhood CEO on making everyone an owner | a16z

Eli Lilly becomes trillion dollar health-care company | CNBC

Design Driven

Skinny serif font as a typographic instrument | The Wall Street Journal

50 standout out-of-home ads from around the world | The Drum

Why Apple’s $230 sock could be worth it | TechCrunch

Happiness

To get happier, make yourself smarter | The Atlantic

The ‘good old days’ hid plenty of harsh realities | Big Think

From dating to speeches, the pill women are taking to ease nerves | The Wall Street Journal

Writing this involves bearing my entire soul. If you dug it, do subscribe and share.

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Lots of new subscribers this week. Welcome ☕️. This is a capsule edition to regulate the service back to a Friday. As you’re new, you might also like other exhales covering Nike, Ben & Jerry’s, Cluely, Lululemon, Heinz, Duolingo, OpenAI, and many more.

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Weekly Exhale

Hooray. The Christmas ads are here. Again.

Like tinsel from the loft, the tear-jerkers, childhood mascots, and carrots have all made their return. This year, the creative silly season has kicked off early. Ten days early, in fact. Extra festive cheer, maybe.

Or a hint of nervousness?

A quick look at this year’s crop tells you something straight away: fewer one-offs, more sequels. More compounding. More recycling last year’s characters, storylines, even music. Chasing that Coca-Cola truck effect. An idea sticky enough to return each December with just a tweak. The kind of brand asset you can eventually hand over to AI and stop worrying about shoot days and production costs.

In this respect, John Lewis is an outlier. But also, the anchor.

As the pioneers of the Christmas ad as a creative event, they still start from scratch. Each year chasing more magic than the last. Some years hit. Some miss. We all pick our own favourites. Whether its good or bad almost doesn’t matter anymore. It’s the John Lewis ad.

And yet this year, I’m struggling.

As a sponsored tradition, it’s another well crafted, well meaning effort.

Yet somehow, oddly adrift.

Maybe if the script didn’t try quite so hard. The direction so on-the-nose, caught somewhere between Weekender, Stephen Graham and Ted Lasso. Taking the defiance of counterculture, lacing it with the most intimate moments of fatherhood, gesturing vaguely at masculinity and packaging it all up to sell air fryers.

Maybe it’s just that the ad holds up a mirror to Generation X and what I see feels a little too close to home.

Or, maybe I just can’t ignore the gap between the self-importance on screen and the reality of a business that’s closed half its stores. These spots are beautiful, expensive, and increasingly irrelevant to how people actually shop.

The Christmas ad bet is simple:

If you can make someone cry with a story about a dad and his son, maybe they’ll remember that feeling when they’re deciding where to shop.

Maybe they will.

Or maybe they open their phone. And Amazon will suggest exactly what they need, at a price that’s hard to beat, with delivery later that day.

In the same week the Christmas ads dropped, new data confirmed the same old story. Advertising spend is up 8%, but there are only three winners: Meta, Google, and Amazon. Together, they now take 56% of all ad spend.

That share has doubled in the same period that Christmas ads became a national tradition.

Amazon alone will generate $12 billion in ad revenue this quarter, up 19% year on year. That’s more than the entire UK television ad market. More than John Lewis turns over in a year. All made in three months, just from selling ads.

So the real competition isn’t which retailer “wins” Christmas.

It’s between an industry that still believes in the power of story, and a handful of unregulated algorithmic hulks who own the checkout, using AI to crush whatever’s left.

A world, frankly, where crying is less profitable than clicking.

I do feel for legacy retailers. They’re in a bind—but it’s one of their own making.

They’ve watched their business models erode for years. But they can’t not make a Christmas ad. The ads still get billions of views on YouTube. They trend on X. They get written up in all the tabloids.

In which case, I guess you’ve got to be in the brand-building game. Not the Christmas ad wars.

For John Lewis, it’s become a ritual that feels more about proving how important advertising thinks it is, rather than why John Lewis actually matters. For all the scale and sentiment, the brand still hasn’t quite found its voice. Just a string of emotional tugs, caught somewhere between middle-class confusion and an ad industry clinging to the memory of its better years.

In the meantime, I’ll take the carrots. And the choirs. The perfume ads with all the velvet mist and none of the story.

It really is like pulling the same old decorations down from the loft. I’m never wild about Christmas at first. But I get there.

Soon enough, I’m humming holidays are coming, half-smiling as the number of wheels on the AI Coca-Cola truck mysteriously changes from scene to scene.

Maybe then I’ll jump in the car. Head to the supermarket. Wheel a trolley around like I used to. See if my giant ‘baby’ boy wants to ride shotgun.

Throw our phones in the glovebox.

Play one or two of those old Christmas tunes on the way.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Bank of England signals December rate cut | The Guardian

The US economy is K-shaped, not pear-shaped | Forbes

Economist counts down to America’s looming debt doomsday | Quartz

Brand Beat

Retail’s best Christmas 2025 ads| Marketing Beat

Why women sob at the new John Lewis ad | Stylist

AI boosts tech giants’ ad market dominance | Wall Street Journal

Amazon launches a standalone low-price shopping app | TechCrunch

ITV in talks to sell television business to SKY | BBC

Starbucks animated holiday ads reclaim cozy coffeehouse vibe | Marketing Dive

Heinz taps FMCG veteran to drive taste improvement | Marketing Beat

Shopify becomes largest company to launch Substack newsletter | Modern Retail

Netflix unveils first five minutes of Stranger Things season 5 | Mashable

Why Coca-Cola’s AI chief greenlit another AI holiday ad | Adweek

Gap taps viral momentum with multigenerational holiday choir | Adweek

The hidden cost of shopping at Shein | Business of Fashion

Sonos hires veteran to revive its bruised brand | The Wall Street Journal

Luxury tile retailer collapses amid high street crisis | The Telegraph

Spotify expects higher profits from price hikes and user growth | Reuters

Starbucks sells 60% China stake to Boyu for $4 billion | Financial Post

Marks & Spencer sees profits fall sharply after cyberattack | The Wall Street Journal

Stagwell surges 85% as CEO eyes “Palantir-pact” | Bloomberg

BrewDog pokes fun at itself in new OOH campaign | The Grocer

Eating in: the eat-at-home economy is booming | Financial Times

TikTok shop now rivals eBay in online marketplace scale | Wired

Starting Up

Solo female founder lands UK’s largest pre-seed to fix fashion fit | Tech Funding News

Meet the wealthiest guest judge on Dragons’ Den | Startups

Synthesia secures $200m funding at $4bn valuation | Silicon Republic

Why hackathons are so back | Sifted

Tech Tidbits

Why small brands are falling in love with AI | Business of Fashion

Elon Musk secures a trillion-dollar pay package | Mashable

Tim Berners-Lee warns AI could cripple the web’s ad model | Financial Times

Kim Kardashian says ChatGPT is her frenemy | TechCrunch

Open AI probably can’t make ends meet, that’s where you come in | Marcus on AI

Venture Vibes

OpenAI seeks US government support for $1 trillion expansion | The Telegraph

Sequoia’s shake up may be a turning point | Financial Times

Corporate venture capital and the 16% problem | Forbes

Design Driven

Apple, bring back the iBook—stop being cowards | The Verge

Mamdani’s bold plan to redesign New York’s streets | Fast Company

The decade’s top 10 magazine designs | It’s Nice That

Happiness

Why this common parenting tip is completely pointless | The Atlantic

Gen X radicalised by online bile amid midlife rage | The Guardian

Will Musk work harder for a trillion dollars than a billion? | New York Times

Pure human produce. If you like what you’ve read, do subscribe and share.

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Weekly Exhale

Looking for Christmas gift inspiration? Try NEO, a five-foot-six humanoid for the home, now taking deposits. NEO will live with you, fold laundry, clean the toilet, fetch groceries, and generally ease the chores of domestic life so you can “spend more time together.”

Pre-order today for just $200.

Picture the scene: “Okay, everyone, one last surprise under the tree! Oh wait—what’s that?” Cue the doorbell. “Wow, oh my gosh, kids, it’s NEO!” Mechanical whirring. Two glowing eyes in a beige knit onesie. “That’s right, sweethearts, Marina won’t be coming on Thursdays anymore. We have NEO now!”

The kids stare. Your partner forces a smile. NEO’s head tilts seven degrees. Its hand raises in a wave. A Bluetooth speaker in its pelvis plays Mariah Carey.

It’s real. We can pre-order robots for our homes now.

NEO is the closest thing yet to the Jetsons future we were promised. The promo video, shot partly on 16 mm, has that faded warmth of a 1960s “home of tomorrow” infomercial. A silver-haired couple plays cards while NEO dusts and offers flowers. A man reads while NEO lifts his mug of matcha. A young woman arrives home, arms full, as NEO opens the door.

Smart positioning: NEO isn’t new. It’s always been here, waiting for you. Faced with an uncertain future, NEO is a dream from the past.

Behind that dream is Bernt Øivind Børnich, a long-haired Norwegian who grew up taking apart kitchen gadgets. He invented an actuator that gives NEO its soft, human-like motion. NEO can fold a towel, but also lift seventy kilos, enough to carry your suitcases down the stairs.

It costs $499 a month, or $20,000 outright. Live-in staff for the kind of people who bought a Tesla before anyone knew what one was.

The vision: “safe, compliant humanoids” people actually want at home. Most of the world is built for the human form. That’s a big market. Børnich’s company, 1X, based in Palo Alto with backers including OpenAI, is targeting a $1 billion raise at a $10 billion valuation.

How far off is the dream? NEO won’t make it by Christmas.

When it does arrive, sometime in 2026, it’ll be only half-useful. For tasks it can’t manage, you’ll book a 1X Expert who’ll guide it remotely through a MetaQuest headset.

In an unusually candid move, Børnich calls NEO’s early behaviour “AI-slop”. Imperfect but useful. A reminder that what we dismiss, AI founders turn into gold. Buy NEO today, and you’re joining the 1X research team. Your home becomes the lab. Your life, the data set.

That’s the upside, in a way. People might roll their eyes, but nothing signals status like buying shiny new tech before it makes any sense for anyone outside the lab to own it.

It’s indulgent and yet instantly irresistible.

The Scandinavian design. The soft lines. The retro-futurism. Even its awkwardness tugs at you. It looks both eager to help and desperate to learn. It’s hard not to want to help it along. And who doesn’t want to outsource changing the cat litter?

Of course, 1X probably isn’t in this for the home market. The real play is the data: how humans move, speak, hesitate. The routines of daily life, captured in your hallway, reused in warehouses, offices and battlefields.

For now, NEO is a multi-million-dollar action toy with an Alexa strapped to it. And that’s its genius. It looks harmless, willing and vulnerable enough that we don’t think too far ahead.

Because, whether NEO becomes a member of the family or just a $20,000 Bluetooth speaker that occasionally folds towels, this is the beginning of two species learning to coexist.

It’s started.

I already have a NEO. He’s nearly thirteen and doesn’t do anything around the house.

Put away the towels? Not a chance. He tosses them. They land wherever. The floor is his wardrobe. Somehow, everything is visible except the one pair of jeans he’ll actually wear.

He forgets everything: keys, homework, mouth guard. His rucksack smells like wet dog.

And like NEO, he moves through the house half-charged, the blue glow of his phone on his face, the hum of YouTube Shorts ever-present. His body’s stronger than mine now, but still awkward.

His scheduler runs at random. He’ll reorganise his gaming setup at midnight, cables everywhere, just as we both need to sleep. His programming occasionally executes with odd precision: The bathroom cabinet is a shrine to Lynx body spray, every variant in alphabetical order.

And of course, I get regular 404 messages for showing affection, attempting humour, or suggesting anything remotely useful.

Training the model? That’s not how this works. Unlike NEO, you can’t use your thumbprint to adjust his preferences around yours. And the truth is, I’m still learning too. No manual. Just effort, error, and love.

That’s not the kind of learning NEO’s built for.

Digital platforms already monetised our worst instincts. What happens when it goes human-shaped? When it watches not just what we scroll or click, but how we live?

There’s a non-zero chance the closer it gets to us, the further we drift from each other.

It’s Saturday night, and all I want is the sofa and chocolate. But my son has other ideas. He wants to rearrange the shed. I tell myself it’ll take twenty minutes.

It takes three hours.

We move everything—desks, rugs, amps. There’s shouting, bruising, but then it’s done.

He’s proud. Me too. Tying up the last bag of rubbish, he says,

“This has been a good father-bonding thing, yeah?”

I’m tired. I’m irritated.

I’m grateful.

“It has,” I say. “It really has.”

And in that small, nothing of a moment, I realise he’s not my little boy anymore.

The updates are running.

It’s started.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

Rachel Reeves bets on long term, will she be around to see it? | Financial Times

Claims on UK economy don’t stack up | The Telegraph

Fed cuts interest rates again, flying blind | BBC

The U.S. casino economy | The New York Times

Brand Beat

Nothing more outdated than the 2025 John Lewis Christmas ad | The Guardian

Facebook’s holiday ad yearns for the long-gone social platform | Fast Company

M&S unveils new phased ‘product-first’ Christmas campaign | Marketing Beat

Christmas ad spend to rise £814m, says WARC/AA report | More About Advertising

British Airways’ campaign risks becoming too abstract | The Drum

Facebook: Small connections can have a major impact | lbbonline.com

Why marketers are ignoring Reddit’s growing popularity | Campaign Asia

X ad chief leaves in Musk’s latest shake-up | Financial Times

Key lessons Hollywood can learn from new media | The New York Times

Does Sora 2 confirm the dead internet theory? | The Drum

Chanel appoints new US brand and communications head | Business of Fashion

Me & Em ramps up expansion plans as sales rocket | Retail Week

Adidas CEO credits local strategy for record sales | Retail Dive

WPP’s new boss labels performance unacceptable | Financial Times

Omnicom and IPG confirm $13.5 billion merger, dissolves DDB network | Produ

OnlyFans brings business school training to content creators | Wired

Coco Trucker Girl, champion of gender equality, dies suddenly | New York Post

Norway’s huge wealth fund to reject Musk’s $1tn Tesla pay deal | The Guardian

Etsy’s holiday ads show why the best gifts feel personal | Adweek

Chipotle’s bet on younger consumers begins to unravel | The Wall Street Journal

Lego Christmas ad highlights power of play with Lionel Richie | Campaign Live

Coca-Cola’s 2025 AI holiday ad sparks mixed reactions | Marketing Interactive

How Gen Z toppled Nepal’s leader and chose a new one on Discord | Wired

Starting Up

Papier’s founder on hustling to £60m in revenues | Yahoo Finance

Swedish legal AI startup raises €150M, becomes $1.8B unicorn | Silicon Canals

Barefoot Wine revamps marketing | Marketing Dive

Hottest thing in climate tech now trapped | Fast Company

Meadow: stay connected without smartphone distractions | Thingtesting

Tech Tidbits

I tried the new Neo home robot, it got weird quick | The Wall Street Journal

Universal Music and Udio settle AI lawsuit | Universal Music Group

AI’s biggest problem: we can’t stop talking about it | Wired

Debunking AI slop myths: harmful, hype or just meh? | Digiday

Meta’s $27 billion AI compute bet fuels Wall Street frenzy | Fortune

Voice is the next AI interface, says ElevenLabs CEO | YouTube

Venture Vibes

Amazon x OpenAI $38 billion deal | Reuters

How an AI crash happens: key steps and triggers | The Atlantic

What keeps CFOs up at night? | Sifted

Breaking down Sequoia’s new funds | The Week In Startups

Coffee commotion puts view of VC under scrutiny | Financial Times

Design Driven

Robbie Williams’ new chair for introverts | Wallpaper

Figma Weave delivers next-generation AI-native design creation | Figma

How GLP-1s are rewriting the food advertising playbook | Creative Review

Iconic photobook: Teenagers in their bedrooms | It’s Nice That

Nike and Palace transform Victorian bathhouse into skatepark | Dezeen

How an SNL star designed the Crosby, Stills and Nash logo | Vice

Happiness

AI fuels a grim new twist in Dunning-Kruger effect | Futurism

I let ChatGPT coach me through marathon training | The Wall Street Journal

Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? | Vogue

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Weekly Exhale

The founder of Lululemon, Chip Wilson, is three billion dollars poorer than he was this time last year. Lululemon’s stock is down more than fifty percent. Still holding an eight percent stake, Chip’s the kind of unhappy shareholder who can afford to make some noise.

So he did.

He took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal and penned a Don Draper–style manifesto headlined “Lululemon is in a nosedive.” In it, Chip mourned that the company had “lost its soul” and “forgotten its muse,” while demanding the entire board be fired.

The story writes itself: a visionary founder builds a cult brand; the company scales; the finance people take over; the magic drains out.

Within hours, the story had migrated to LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit as a cri de cœur for marketers everywhere. Some even felt affirmed — seen, finally — as if Chip had spoken on behalf of every marketer who’s ever had their instincts questioned by a CFO.

Chip’s narrative is wonderful, poetic even. But that’s all it is: romanticism over reality. A story that overlooks the inconvenient details and, ironically, misses the operator’s view of how big brands actually work.

Chip says: They lost their way after I left.

Reality: Lululemon is five times the size it was when he walked away, with revenue climbing from under $2 billion to nearly $11 billion.

Chip says: The brand is crashing.

Reality: Lululemon will still grow 2–4% this year. After the hyper-growth of three cultural peaks — yoga, athleisure, and the pandemic — a little gravity was inevitable. You don’t fall from that height; you level off.

Chip says: The brand has turned into the Gap.

Reality: Even after its dip, Lululemon’s market cap has grown 2.6x since he left. Nike’s up 2.2x. Gap? Less than one.

Chip says: The $1 billion Mirror acquisition was a disaster.

Reality: It cost half that, and the same year Lululemon wrote it down, the stock hit an all-time high.

Chip says: The Disney collaboration cheapens the brand.

Reality: It sold out in hours and lifted Gen Z awareness by fourteen points. Maybe Mickey knows marketing after all.

Chip says: The brand no longer understands its muse.

Reality: Chip’s from the “not for everybody” school of marketing — aspirational, exclusionary, and very 2008. Sure, that worldview built the brand. But it also got him fired.

Chip says: The brand bowed to Wall Street.

Reality: Chip is Wall Street. This isn’t about the soul of the brand, it’s about the price of the stock. The emotions of a single-digit billionaire who flirted with double digits and can’t quite bear the downgrade.

At worst, Chip’s move is straight out of the post-truth playbook: take a self-interested agenda, wrap it in “truthiness,” and frame it as a collective fight everyone can rally behind. It flatters him as the visionary and marketers as the misunderstood innovators who just need to be unleashed.

No surprise, Lululemon’s board isn’t biting:

“Chip Wilson has not been involved with the company for a decade and continues to make inaccurate and misleading statements about Lululemon.”

Calvin McDonald, Lululemon’s CEO, already told investors last month that the brand had become “too predictable,” admitting that U.S. sales had slowed. Why? Controlled accountability.

The real headwinds are macro: a saturated U.S. market with drawers full of leggings, and a fashion cycle that’s shifted toward baggier styles and a more nihilistic mood — a far cry from the girl-boss optimism Chip once built the brand around. And the flashpoint for the drop in share price? The one CEO’s aren’t allowed to say out loud: Tariffs imposed by He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named. Around 40% of Lululemon’s products come out of Vietnam, one of the hardest-hit markets.

Marketers love to point to Vuori, Alo, and SKIMS as the new cool kids. SKIMS just launched thongs with pubic-hair detailing, the kind of irony Chip probably wishes he’d thought of. But Lululemon is ten times their size and at a completely different life stage. As boring as it sounds to marketers chasing “edge,” the path to a $100 billion company lies more in repetition than rebellion. International expansion, menswear, and adjacent categories. It’s the Tim Cook school of innovation: sell the same thing, over and over and over, with just enough evolution to keep people buying.

As for competition, that doesn’t come from chasing the latest thing on Instagram, it comes from private label and knock-offs. Lululemon is even suing Costco and, in a knowing wink to dupe culture, has just trademarked Lululemon Dupes.

Net, I’m not too worried about Chip nor Lululemon. Worst case, he’s worth $3 billion instead of ten. He probably knows his ad does Lululemon more good than harm. He’s bringing a little rage and founder energy to shake things up...while staying safely at arm’s length.

The real shame is for the marketers who cheered him on. In doing so, they fed the trope that marketers are only interested in shiny new things. Sure, brand building needs a little poetry, a sense of “soul.” But casting the stewardship of a public company as the enemy only makes marketing look naive and allergic to scale.

And that’s a problem, because its seat at the top table is as fragile as it’s ever been.

Let’s rise together with every issue. ♡

Market Moves

How to kick-start the UK economy | Financial Times

Gold and iPhones drive surprise UK retail growth | The Times

US inflation hits 3% | BBC

Brand Beat

Lululemon registers trademark “Lululemon Dupe” | Fashion United

Why shoppers wait hours for The Row’s sample sale | Business of Fashion

Oreo maker Mondelez plans AI-powered TV ads next year | The Verge

“Another half baked idea”: Aldi’s jacket potato jacket | Dezeen

Why marketers must escape the productivity paradox of busyness | The Drum

Sober celebrities flock to nonalcoholic beer brands | Food Dive

British Airways showcases flying scenes in new outdoor campaign | Marketing Beat

Amazon’s cloud infrastructure emerges as next advertising frontier | Digiday

Brands spend more on ads that deliver fewer results | Adweek

Bryan Cranston channels ‘Cranpus’ in Ocean Spray holiday ad | The Drum

Inside Nike’s plan to reboot swoosh-driven sales | The Guardian

AI advertising’s ‘universal language’ reignites power and openness debates | Digiday

How consumers expect brands to address social issues | Harvard Business Review

What’s going wrong at WPP? | The Guardian

Porsche posts near €1 billion loss amid EV pullback and tariffs | Bloomberg

HelloFresh announces Paramount+ movies partnership | Retail Gazette

Nike’s Project Amplify gives your feet e-bike power | Fast Company

How digital experiences reshape fashion and beauty’s future | Business of Fashion

Why Gen Z can’t resist tuning into bad takes | Vox

Modern brands sell anxiety relief, not product features | Reddit

Disney+ cancellations spike after Jimmy Kimmel suspension | The New York Times

Starting Up

Goodrays new functional drinks range | FMCG CEO

Teens run restaurant amid town’s gun violence crisis | The New York Times

Why investors are gooey-eyed over Straberry Browser | Sifted

Oura lands $900M funding, now valued at $11B | CNBC

a16z-backed Codi launches AI office manager | TechCrunch

Tech Tidbits

Sora effortlessly fools human deepfake detectors as well | Fast Company

11 AI-powered pitch decks reshaping advertising and marketing | Business Insider

EU accuses Meta and TikTok of transparency breaches | The Independent

Big Tech and crypto firms bankroll Trump’s White House ballroom | The Verge

How to design a successful agentic AI system | Harvard Business Review

Venture Vibes

Silicon Valley’s envy of China reveals cracks in America | The New York Times

Travis Kelce and investor launch Six Flags activist campaign | Reuters

Jamie Dimon urges return to office with $3 billion building | The Wall Street Journal

Marc Benioff has torched his do-good image | Bloomberg

Design Driven

Inside the career of Jennie Baptiste | It’s Nice That

Takashi Murakami brings signature art to Dom Pérignon champagne | Design Milk

50 Cent and Lalique redefine luxury with the 505 Edition | Cool Hunting

Happiness

Why your best ideas come after your worst | Big Think

6-year project finds simple solution to happiness | Washington Post

What true wealth looks like | The Atlantic

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Stay gold 🙏🏻