As automated tools make our work easier, they also make the reality of brain rot a major concern as we may start forgetting to do the things that were previously essential in our work. Some would suggest that we have seen this before. Most of us who haven’t spent time on a farm don’t know how to skin a chicken or milk a cow anymore. Many younger people have already lost the ability to read a map or write in cursive. Thanks to automation in cars, many next-generation drivers will never need to learn how to parallel park.

You may look at some of these shifts and see them as great modern conveniences. After all, who ever loved parallel parking? Or you may see these as lost arts worth mourning. I do still love a good map, personally. Either way, this is going to be a tension we all experience in our lives with greater frequency. The question of what skills to retain and which ones to give up will soon be a daily decision for us all—if it hasn’t become one already.

In the span of a few days, you can see a perfect compilation of the biggest problem facing Meta right now: a deep lack of trust that prevents any effort, even a seemingly positive one, from being received that way. In time (if it hasn’t happened already), I suspect Meta/Facebook will be studied by academics and top business institutions alike for how completely they have destroyed trust, reputation and goodwill that they did enjoy at one time (back in the early days when they were Facebook). None of that makes it easier to live through right now for those most directly affected, but at least there’s hope future leaders can learn from their missteps and perhaps do better.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Bookshop.org

This question of value and what sort of markup is reasonable when thinking about buying or selling anything was a big theme that came up this week. Also this week, big advertising holding company, WPP, reported not just a drop in revenue but also lower margins, sparking some major introspection from industry insiders:

“What drove the decline? Reduced scope of work, fee pressure, or outright budget cuts? The answer determines whether WPP has a cyclical problem or a structural one.

Scope reductions are cyclical: clients buying less of the same thing. Budget cuts are cyclical: economies contract, marketing contracts with them. Fee pressure is structural: clients paying less for the same thing. That is a different animal entirely. It doesn’t respond to patience or strategy decks. Winning accounts while revenue drops is the diagnostic signature of a business defending share by cutting price. Every account won on tighter terms resets the floor for the next pitch … The harder task, the one WPP’s leadership avoided for a decade, is rebuilding a reason for clients to pay full price.”

So in one story, a popup market illustrates a growing shift where “more consumers are separating what a product actually does from the story and packaging built around it.” In another, service-based businesses like ad agencies where the days of clients blindly paying markups for questionable value added (such as entire field of media buying) are widely reported to be numbered.

The bottom line is, consumer mistrust will likely continue to squeeze margins as anyone aiming to sell anything at a premium will need to work harder to prove they are worth the price they hope to get.

It seems to be having an impact too. This week I also read a story about the iconic fashion looks of older people:

“Old people just look cool. Cooler than the rest of us, for sure. And everything they wear looks cooler by default. Everyone knows it: Fashion brands rake in platitudes every time they cast a senior model and garments associated with the elderly uniformly shape the canon of good clothes. What is the science here? It’s simply that everything, from clothing to cars to people, looks better with some life in it. Everything is cooler with age; a life well lived and all that. That’s partially why old folks make things look cool by default. That’s reality. They are real. (The juxtaposition between the elderly and hip new clothes also helps.) Also, they have a sense of ease that whippersnappers lack. Confidence comes with age (or so they tell me).”

Combined with the idea I shared from a previous week’s newsletter about the shift from men of a certain age talking about “hotspan” versus healthspan where the new focus is “staying hot into your 60s,” there is something fascinating happening here around the current conversation about age. Being older is now cool. Hopefully it stays that way when I get to my 60s too.

This past weekend, I visited two dozen embassies here in DC as part of the Passport DC event. All opened their doors and illustrated the power of something that seems to otherwise be vanishing in our world (and particularly in DC): good diplomacy. A part of this is the modern role of royalty. In many countries, the current royals are not conquerors or self-promoters. Instead, they are cultural ambassadors and positive forces in the world.

Royalty’s relevance today lies not in ceremony or indulgence but in impact. King Bhumibol of Thailand spent 70 years engineering over 4,000 developmental projects for his country’s poorest communities. King Abdullah II has kept Jordan stable and been a force for female empowerment alongside his wife Queen Rania. Queen Mary of Denmark went from an Australian commoner to a queen fighting loneliness, domestic violence, and maternal health inequality. India’s young Maharaja of Jaipur, Padmanabh Singh, uses his global visibility to champion Rajasthani artisans and was recently a viral hit at this past week’s Met Gala. Even the often criticized King Charles was credited by the British Tabloids for his “masterclass in diplomacy” on a recent visit to the US.

The world could use more royals doing work like this. The powerful lesson here may be that a title and tradition can serve as a force for good if it can be separated from the corrupting influence of political power. We definitely don’t need more Kings (or aspiring Kings) if they follow their worst impulses. But maybe not all modern royalty are bad.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Bookshop.org

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Beyond this one moment, the brand has been investing heavily over the past three years to integrate AI into their operations, even signing a multi-year contract with OpenAI to embed AI engineers into their own teams. At this point, you may be wondering what makes this so significant. Lots of companies must be trying to do this, right? Here are a few reasons this stood out for me and why Customers Bank’s plan to become “AI-native” may be a blueprint for others to follow:

1. Customer Alignment – as a bank positioned to be for entrepreneurs, acting as an early adopter within a highly regulated industry not only makes sense, but it adds authenticity to their brand positioning. Entrepreneurial customers should love banking with a partner who thinks as they do.
2. Long-Term Focus – in a world where every company seems ready to unnecessarily insert “AI” into every conversation (from AI-enabled water bottles, to self-driving strollers), a brand that seems focused on the longer term stands out as more strategic and therefore more credible.

1. Thoughtful Human Integration – while this may be short-lived, for now Customers Bank seems to be investing in helping their people use AI to handle repetitive admin work and provide them with AI masterclass training so they can do better work.
2. Partnership Co-Branding – by embedding engineers from AI leader OpenAI, they are ensuring efforts will be based on the latest product releases and also put themselves in a place where they can be an early enterprise customer of the latest innovations as they happen.
3. Unexpected Theater – the last element of this successful strategy hinges on the brand (and Sidhu himself) being willing to insert themselves unexpectedly into spaces that generally only tech CEOs are venturing right now, such as digital clones.

This latest sponsorship idea from Vaseline certainly qualifies. For the 2026 London Marathon, the brand showed up as the “Official Nipple Protector” for the event, focused on the nipple chafing commonly experienced by 92% of marathon runners. In addition to supporting the existing use of their petroleum jelly product as a preventative solution to this problem, they also created multiple “Nip Stops” throughout the 26-mile route to offer ongoing support throughout the race. The idea has been so popular, they are rolling it out across other events across Europe as well.

The campaign has been getting lots of media attention, and one of the best analysis I read about the strategy suggested a few reasons why it worked so well, including: the brand’s ability to talk about an uncomfortable or taboo topic on a body part most male runners hate having in the first place, how it integrated actual product use into the campaign and how it’s an idea that has long-term potential and global relevance since this is a recurring issue that is relevant at any long distance running event across the world.

“Oranges are gleefully antisocial. Juice sprays across the table and runs down wrists to spoil shirtsleeves. Pith gathers under fingernails. Segments explode in the mouth. … Even today, the potential for social embarrassment from eating orange remains. … I have felt a kinship with the orange’s story ever since I discovered that its origins parallel my own: ancestral roots in China that venture towards the equator, and then traverse the long roads from east to west to reach Europe. I decided I would retread the history of the orange, to discover what role it has played in different lands across time.”

This book is a mix of personal memoir, citrus poetry and forgotten history. All together, the result is a deeply relatable exploration of identity from an author who explores growing up queer in a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish household in the north of Ireland. Named the Best Food Memoir of the Year by Table magazine, Foreign Fruit is also my pick for the Non-Obvious Book of the Week.

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Bookshop.org

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

This week in the Washington Post, writer Megan McArdle tested the writing analysis capabilities from multiple AI platforms to discover that most are quite good now and were able to correctly identify a writer of a single piece of content after only reading a short passage from an article (a minimum of 1,441 words long for ChatGPT and just 1,132 words for Claude). Obviously, this mainly applies to those who have actively published their writing online, but the implications are interesting for the future of personal identification and the idea of online anonymity itself.

What happens in a digital future where every sentence anyone posts online can be traced back to them? The small upside may be a reduction in the idiocy that anonymous commenting can allow … but it would come with a much heavier cost. Without the shielding of online anonymity, there is less protection for underprivileged or otherwise silenced voices to reveal government corruption or act as whistleblowers against other abuses of power.

“Every company has to be on top and ahead with AI. But it’s particularly crucial for Apple, whose brand is built on three pillars: simplicity, humanity, and creativity. It should have led into the AI era. Instead, Siri is an idiot in a classroom filled with geniuses. And there appears to be little if any plan to fix things any time soon. The honest assessment: Cook is a superb operator and a competent strategist who has been a mediocre product visionary.”

Conversely, this lack of product vision and caution-led approach (particularly when it comes to privacy) is being held up by other critics as Cook’s biggest achievement. Indeed, Cook’s greatest legacy may be how he took a brand that was legendary because of a visionary founder … and managed to make it ordinary and every day without killing it. Apple products were once luxurious, fashionable, beautiful, high-end, game-changing status symbols sought after by tech-obsessed early adopters. A decade and a half later as Cook leaves his mark, Apple makes every day, mostly average products following innovative ideas pioneered by competitors, and benefit primarily from trapping consumers into loyalty through the notoriously closed ecosystem they themselves created and their continually profitable app store monopoly.

Now that John Ternus (often described as a “product guy“) is set to take over in September, the big question the industry is wondering is whether Apple will continue to maintain its current success as a fast follower or whether we may see a return to new and bolder bets when the company goes under new leadership.

Last Week Tonight recently dedicated a segment to exposing the problems with prediction markets, a feature in The Walrus explored how they’re turning geopolitical events into money-making schemes, and Forbes briefly experimented with its own non-monetary prediction market to collect reader perspectives on mass shootings — a move that triggered immediate backlash.

That Forbes experiment reveals why these markets can be problematic. To make an event “bettable,” you have to reduce it to a binary outcome — did a word get mentioned or not, did a thing happen or not. All the nuance, context, and human meaning of the event get stripped away in the process. That’s the real issue with prediction markets and the risk it presents to human thinking.

While AI at least attempts to summarize even complicated ideas, prediction markets usually aim to eliminate it in favor of quick answers. There’s a real difference between crowdsourcing wisdom and crowdsourcing odds because one tries to make sense of the world while the other just tries to profit from it. When the substance of geopolitical events and their human significance get reduced to the most basic elements such as whether a single word is mentioned or not, then the value of understanding gets replaced by triviality.