The Flywheel Effect of Structured Learning
Why deliberate learning compounds differently from everything else we consume.
It's always been about the story.
Four ideas occupy most of my thinking right now. Not trends. Not predictions. Working frameworks — built from decades inside the craft — or what storytelling becomes when the tools change everything, authenticity becomes everything, and the most valuable consumer in the market is the one brands keep ignoring.
Storytelling
New tools. Same truth.
Most of what AI is generating right now is technically impressive and narratively empty. It can produce. It cannot yet mean. That gap is widening, not closing, as the volume of generated material accelerates.
This is where I work. Building the frameworks, tools, and systems — Applied Intelligence™ and StoryEngine1™ — that give organisations the structural ability to tell better stories at scale, with or without AI in the room.
The Presence Economy
We are experiencing the synthetic expansion of our world, and with it, the rediscovery of presence.
When everything can be generated, presence becomes the scarcest thing in the world.
The Presence Economy is the growing premium on lived, embodied, shared human experience in an increasingly synthetic world. The concert that can't be streamed the same way. The room where something actually happened. The moment that couldn't have been prompted.
AI is building the world that makes presence valuable. Story is what fills it.
The Epilogue Economy™
Your best customer is over fifty-five.
Your storytelling doesn't know that yet.
The fastest growing consumer segment in the world is over fifty-five.
They have more disposable income, more brand loyalty, more time, and more purchasing power than any other cohort. They are not slowing down. They are not stepping back. They are actively working, spending, travelling, building, and reinventing — and they are doing it largely without you.
Because your storytelling wasn't built for them. Your campaigns skew younger. Your casting skews younger. Your assumptions about who has desires, ambitions, and money skew younger.
That is not a creative problem. It is a commercial one.
The Epilogue Economy™ is the framework for closing that gap — and for the brands willing to tell that story first.
AI and Creativity
The future of creativity does not belong to those who can make more, but to those who can mean more.
AI is the most disruptive creative tool since the printing press. It is also the most misunderstood. The conversation is dominated by people who are either afraid of it or uncritical of it — and neither position is particularly useful.
This is where I sit with it. Not as a technologist. Not as a skeptic. As a practitioner with decades of creative judgment, trying to work out what actually changes, what doesn't, and what it means to make something worth making in an age when making anything is almost free.
Human agency. Value judgment. The irreducible role of meaning in creative work. That's what this is about.
Stories in motion
Client work and personal experiments.
All of it AI-generated. None of it accidental.
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Selected field notes on Substack
The last 6 posts, pulled straight from Some Assembly Required.
What an Agent Does When It Doesn’t Know What To Do. Or Shouldn’t Do.
This is the second article in a series about designing agents.
The Purpose of an Agent Is What It Does
We keep using AI to automate old processes.
Taylor Swift Taught Me How To Write Better System and Agent Prompts
The first system prompt I ever wrote for a client had four adjectives before the verb.
I bought a book last week. Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford’s inquiry into the value of work—hand to tool to material, the kind of competence you can’t fake because the motorcycle either starts or it doesn’t.
I have been using ChatChat to build a canonical record of how I work, and the relationship between the end product and the thinking that got me there.
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"The most interesting work of the next twenty years will not be done by the people the system was designed for. It will be done by the people quietly making something of what comes next."