Empathy is difficult. I’m not you, I can’t imagine the path you’ve traveled, the stories you tell yourself and the pressures you’re under.
But real gratitude requires empathy. Everyone is under the circumstances. Everyone does the best they think they can with the options they think they have.
All of us know what something is worth to us, but we often don’t think much about how much it cost.
Once we understand this, it’s easier to embrace the kindness and opportunities that people offer us.
PS here’s my favorite Thanksgiving Day post. It’s every day if we let it. Sending good vibes and hugs to you and your family.
We hit 500% of our Kickstarter goal, and they’re now available to the public.
A lot of folks have answers for us about AI, but these decks are designed to help us with the questions. Not just questions about the systems at work, but about how we might use them.
The Infinite Adventure deck puts you into a fan-fiction world–from Alice in Wonderland to a noir mystery.
The Modern Divination deck has 49 modalities of soothsaying, including tarot, numerology and various ancient traditions.
And the Mentor Deck offers fifty different coaches, each trained on ideas from big thinkers through the ages.
In each case, I took the information that was already in Claude and created artifacts that run on your phone or laptop. The cards add an approachable, analog and tactile interaction that makes the entire experience sharable and compelling. Thanks to FX Nine for extra help on the Infinite and Modern decks.
Printed in the USA, the lead time for reprints is several months, so pre-holiday supplies are truly limited.
Every day, this blog is automatically echoed on my Linkedin channel. Over the last few years, the traffic to those posts on Linkedin is down more than 90%. Understandable. Platforms evolve, people shift their patterns and interests.
I recently did a manual post on Linkedin, though, and was amazed to discover that within minutes, it had 10 times as much traffic as a typical post does. I did another one about this leap and it did even better. It’s clear that the algorithm was changed.
Not to help me, not to help you, but to help the endless quest for more that most public companies wrestle with.
The seduction is clear. They’re sending a message: If you want us to bring you eyeballs, move in. Don’t link out.
Problem one: eyeballs don’t make change happen, people do.
Problem two: Don’t check into a motel that makes it hard to check out.
Enshittification is real. VCs and public markets push the companies they invest in to maximize profits. First, please the customers. Then, double cross them to please the advertisers. Finally, double cross both of them to please the stock price.
The alternative is to own your own stuff. To build an asset you control, and to guard your attention and trust carefully.
The best way to read blogs hasn’t changed in twenty years. RSS. It’s free and easy and it just works. It’s the most efficient way to get the information you’re looking for, and it’s under your control. There’s a quick explainer video at that link along with a reader that’s easy to use.
And, if you’re a creator of change, of brand, of content or of art, it’s worth considering whether you want to own the assets or just rent them.
As an experiment, this blog is now going to be shared via Zapier as a cut and paste to Linkedin. Perhaps that will help users who are trapped in their ecosystem be able to read it more easily. It’ll probably be stripped of links, which you can find here on the blog itself…
As always, the source of truth (and the latest posts with all typos fixed) is right here on the blog at seths dot blog.
Where we create our media and how we consume it are still up to us. It’s true, at some point, that the medium is the message.
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”
This is why sudden change rarely is, and why persistence and user feedback end up changing the systems that run our world.
Of course, a book with a title like this gives us pause–when we think of marketers, we don’t ordinarily think about Jerry, Phil, Bobby and the rest of the crew.
But that’s one reason why the insights are so profound.
Marketing isn’t hype or hustle or scamming. It’s not spam or manipulation either. We already have words for those things.
Marketing is the generous act of showing up with a true story that helps people get to where they’d like to go.
And the stories are at the heart of what we think of when we consider the Dead. The intentional choices. Choices about fans, tours, records, the radio and most of all, the community. Work that matters for people who care.
While it’s tempting to make every marketing lesson about Apple or Starbucks, it’s the lessons we learn from the Grateful Dead that are most applicable to a typical project. The smallest viable audience, the purple cow, the tribe and the persistence to build an actual brand, not just a logo.
The thing is, these aren’t marketing secrets. They’re marketing choices.
Instead of making average stuff for average people, the Grateful Dead decided to focus on the people who wanted to get on the bus.
The book is highly recommended. You can even listen to music while you’re reading it.
Also worth a read: Lose Your Mind, a useful take on creativity.
The other day, Tom Cruise gave a long acceptance speech.
But unlike every other speech of its kind, there were no notes. No rambling. No false starts. He did what he always does–he outworked everyone else. It must have taken weeks to write, rehearse and edit this performance. And then he intentionally added a layer of awards-show stiffness to make it seem real.
Beyond this, unlike most speeches of its kind, it’s all about the people in the room, not the winner.
It’s not that different from the extraordinary performance I linked to yesterday, from Dani Daortiz, the world’s greatest living card magician.
Dani practiced 100 hours for every minute of this apparently impromptu performance. And unlike the arrogance used to create tension by many magicians, Dani appears to be just as amazed as the others at the table.
Apparently, there’s always room for someone who is willing to work harder and be kinder than just about everyone else.
Most cultures are built around the idea of private property. Grain is harvested once a year and stored for months. If someone steals the grain (which is difficult to securely lock up), it threatens the livelihood of the farmer and the stability of the community. By the time Hammurabi codified Babylonian law around 1750 BCE, grain theft was already so universally recognized as a crime that the code specifies not just the crime itself, but elaborate provisions about liability in special cases.
On the other hand, by this time, folk stories about Nasruddin, the Sufi trickster, were widespread. A baker hauls a neighbor before the judge, saying that the man had stood outside the bakery each day, smelling the delicious odors of his breads and cakes without paying. The judge demanded that Nasruddin hand over some gold pieces. Shocked, the man did as he was told. The judge jangled the coins, let the baker hear the gold in exchange for the sniffed odors, then handed the pieces back.
Modern life is filled with bakery moments. Shepard Fairey artworks on the sides of buildings, music coming from the club down the street and hearing about the best play at football’s Superb Owl without paying to see the game.
Corporations don’t like this. The Cubs sued the Wrigley Rooftops to prevent people outside Wrigley Field from seeing a baseball game. The NFL doesn’t even like it if you type the name of their championship game. And since the invention of radio, ASCAP and BMI have worked hard to make sure pubs and stores don’t play songs in their venues without paying a license. Corporations get most of the benefits of copyright, not creators.
There’s another kind of theft worth understanding–this is the competition that happens when someone creates an alternative that prevents a future sale from happening. The inventors of desktop publishing stole decades of revenue from hand typesetters. The steam shovel stole job security for ditch diggers. And AI is clearly going to be making many tasks humans used to do obsolete.
When the web showed up, it first destroyed the DVD-ROM business I was building, then took a big chunk out of the almanacs, pop culture books and other detailed references that were my specialty.
[And of course, there’s the theft of trust and attention that happens all around us, every day. Attention is probably worth more than grain for many of us, and trust is priceless. Yet our culture seems to view this as a cost of being modern, not a fundamental problem.]
But the most confusing cases aren’t about spam or hustles, or even technology replacing labor – they’re about creators building on what came before. When a comedian steals a joke, is that okay? What if it’s not the whole joke, just the rhythm of it? What happens if the comedian works in a language that the original jokester doesn’t speak? Dani amplifies the style of Tamariz and Green. Is that okay?
Is David Mamet’s style of dialogue off limits to every playwright who will follow? What about Jill Greenberg’s style of photography lighting?
Is there a difference between someone intentionally using a bass guitar progression or a movie director’s style or a color palette vs. stumbling onto one without intent? Why?
Years ago, I was working with Harry Harrison (author of the story that led to the movie Soylent Green) on a science fiction computer game project. At the time, I had just published one I had created with Michael Crichton. Harrison told me that he wasn’t speaking to Crichton. “Why?” I asked, sure that a good story was about to follow. It turns out that Harry had worked for a year to write a techno-thriller about a virus that comes from space and starts killing people. A few days before he was to turn it in, The Andromeda Strain came out and was a big bestseller. Crichton had pre-stolen his idea!
As more and more of us build, spread, buy and sell ideas, we’re going to have find a shared understanding of theft. Lumping them all together makes the term almost meaningless, and diminishes the original protections on finite physical goods, which still matter.
The debate about AI training on copyrighted work is getting tangled up in the wrong question. Critics claim that because AI models were trained by reading millions of books, articles, and images, they’re committing theft at scale. But this confuses the input with the output, the learning with the creation. [N.B. The AI leaders have made a lot of dumb mistakes and selfish choices. Pirating books they should have purchased, wasting money and power, being careless or cavalier about mental health–these are all critical issues, and I’m not minimizing them. AI is changing our world, and they’re being cavalier and careless.]
Copyright has never existed to prohibit the act of reading, viewing, or learning from existing work. Every artist learns by studying what came before. Mamet watched countless plays. Greenberg studied other photographers’ lighting. The question isn’t whether AI learned from copyrighted material – it’s whether what AI helps create diminishes the incentive for humans to create.
If AI-generated content competes with and replaces human creativity to the point where people stop creating because they can’t make a living, then we have a problem. Not because of how the AI learned, but because we’ve broken the system that uses profit to encourage human creation.
The purpose of copyright isn’t to control every exposure to creative work – it’s to ensure we have enough creators. If someone uses AI trained on a million novels to produce something genuinely new, that’s not grain theft.
As usual, our culture and our technology makes everything more complex. Especially when the speed of change continues to accelerate.
Grain theft is immoral. Improving the culture is imperative. There’s always going to be tension between the two.
November 19, 2025
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