Agalia Tan

It's like Charlie Munger once said about mental models: “All this stuff is really quite obvious and yet most people don’t really know it in a way where they can use it.”

Poynter stresses that he’s not an expert; he’s just a normal guy running with a flag through a public park who stumbled upon a bizarre niche that allows him to live the life he’s always dreamed. But his — which is to say, the entire internet’s — brand of advice-giving and morality policing is remarkably black-and-white. This, obviously, is the... See more

AD: One thing I clocked early on about all this AI stuff is the language around it. When we talk about Google, we say, “I Googled something.” I’m the one doing the Googling. But with ChatGPT, we say, “ChatGPT did it.” We gave it agency pretty quickly. I think that’s really hard to claw back. Most people don’t even realize they’re giving it soul.

As a strategist, if you want rare insight, you need to have access to rare perspectives and those come from people, not publications or posts on social media.

Since platforms reward those whose content gets saved, creators forgo shame, regularly rounding off content with a “Save this for later!”. But what do we get in return? A digital junk drawer that can weigh us down in the same capacity as physical clutter. There are other architectural features of the digital experience that contribute to this, such... See more

what if it really is “not that deep”?

The companies thinking furthest ahead are already prototyping for this world:

• Commerce will be conversational, not navigational.


• Brand interactions will be proactive, not reactive.


• The frontline of loyalty will be invisible.

In the ambient future, brands will compete not for screen real estate, but for mental bandwidth and emotional resonance.