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The only thing we feel capable of talking about this week is Dolly

So bear with us. We promise this is not just more swoony pontification. There will be VALUE to you.

We are crying a lot right now and it’s hard to know what the cause is. So many options!

End of summer, kids happily fleeing the nest, getting older, pictures surfacing of said kids when they had chubby cheeks and skinned knees.

And then. . .the loss of Dolly.

We are playing her on repeat, rewatching her movies, and trying to unpack what it is about her that makes us – US in particular – feel seen. A few thoughts:

• She was unapologetic about her choices and embraced the mindfuckery of being a woman who cares about her sex appeal, god bless. There’s a big heart under those boobs; a brain under that hair.

• She chose joy, always.

• She had soul.

• She was a crazysmart business woman who knew EXACTLY how to manipulate the men running things by using her feminine wiles—an essential hack in her MILIEU.

• She was a girls’ girl.

• She made aging look hot. Period.

• Ya, and guess what, she appreciated certain things being artificial

In 2023, during a press conference promoting her album Rockstar, Dolly was asked whether AI might keep her performing after death.

“The only intelligence I have is artificial. Everything I have is artificial.”

But seriously, folks: at the time, she wasn’t sold on some cheesy avatar keeping her trapped here forever. As only Dolly could put it: “When I’m gone I want to fly with it.”

We have had very few blueprints for what it looks like to become an older woman without becoming a smaller, dowdier, crankier one.

We have had plenty of women show us how to age gracefully. But Dolly aged in her one way, DOLLY-ly. She did not start wearing Eileen Fisher so we would understand that she was Serious. She definitely wouldn’t have put an Ezra Klein sticker on a Prius to proclaim her goodness in the world. She DGAF, while also being hot and talented and sweet and salty AF.

This feels especially important to those of us now rattling around houses that contained more people. Our loved ones, our icons, are moving on and away from us.

And what do we have left?

Oh right! Each other.

We are taking solace in spending time with each other. This remains foundational to this community. We are girls’ girls and we live to come together and work through all the life stuff together—preferably in bed, with champagne.

Nina recently spent a beautiful evening with two friends doing just that: drinking champagne in bed, talking and tearing up and playing dress up in each others’ closets and swapping book recommendations – but ONLY ones that would make us cry.

So, in honor of Dolly, this week we are giving you more things to watch, read, and listen to while feeling your feelings. The list below is AI-assisted—an amalgam of recommendations from Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, curated by our aging TASTEFUL human brains.

If Dolly taught us anything, having a lil artificial in our lives is all good. Losing our taste and soul–helllls no. Consider this an imperfect, artificially enhanced, highly selective list of stones we want to put on her grave. Please add to ours in chat. What have we missed that is essential to you?

READ

• Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts by Sarah Thornton. One of our very own Aged Intelligence Society members’ books. Reframing the very thing Dolly weaponized and celebrated as a site of agency and bodily power.

• She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Time Top 100 Book of the Year, Smarsh’s memoir and tribute explores Dolly’s iconic form of rural Southern feminism.

• Drag: The Complete Story by Simon Doonan. Dolly famously entered a Dolly Parton drag contest and lost. Yes!

WATCH

• Dolly Parton: An American Original. The new 2026 20/20 special for anyone who wants the complete sweep: the songs, business empire, philanthropy, style and cultural legacy.

• Dolly Parton: Here I Am (Documentary, 2019) Streaming on Apple TV. Strong archival footage of concerts and interviews.

• Steel Magnolias. (Hulu) Obviously.

• The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Dolly and Burt Reynolds. Pay the $3.99 to hear the original Dolly recording of “I Will Always Love You.”

• 9 to 5. She wrote the theme song, on set, on her acrylic nails. Streaming free of Philo, whatever that is.

LISTEN

• Dolly Parton’s America (Podcast, WNYC Studios)
  Jad Abumrad’s definitive nine-part podcast.

• Trio — Dolly, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris, circa 1987. Three girls’ girls in three-part harmony.

• The Grass Is Blue. The late-career (1999) bluegrass album where she said EYES AND EARS up here!

  We have most certainly missed elements of your personal cannon, and we can’t presume to know what makes YOU feel the feelings. Please consider this the beginning of a conversation. Share your faves in chat. See ya there. (We have some life stuffsss happening next week so will be taking the week off.)

  Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because we are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected! Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. Some have expressed interest in getting more involved and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

And for those who still want help sherpaing, we want to remind you of two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

Time makes you bolder, even children get older. I’m getting older, too. Goddamn it, Stevie, stop making us SOB 😭 We are paddling up a river of teary text threads rn. All the mamas dropping off kids in new cities or states. The return to a too-quiet home. The steady jackhammering of a heart losing its purpose. Nina is launching her first kid, Shoshana her second. If the adult-kid portion of this newsletter is not your jam, feel free to skip to the how-to: a new, nifty way to get rid of stuff by staging a digital garage sale.

Yes, we are getting older (Shosh pulled a muscle while breathing the other day). But we are equal parts WISER, and that matters when it comes to using frontier tools. Have we mentioned all the ways in which we believe AI was made for women 40+?

We have:

1. Decades of learning through failure, which compounds like a mofo

2. Exquisite taste, cut, ground, and polished into a rare gem off of which light bounces

3. A highly sensitive baloney meter that can sniff out processed meat from a mile away

It’s now on us to pass this wisdom down to the AI-natives. Unlike any other generation before them, Gen Alphas will have the option to SKIP LEARNING. They can use AI to write, research, analyze, and do many, many other things we learned the hard way as a series bosses yelled at us and mentors more tenderly showed us the way.

Shoshana got so overheated about this state of affairs (TBH overheating is just a state of being at this point) that she published a piece in Every.to’s wonderful THESIS STATEMENT series. It boils down to a manifesto for Aged Intelligence, so dropping an excerpt here. Thank you in advance for reading the whole piece and spamming your friends!

“I learned how to write by being humiliated….I did not have an AI to bounce ideas off and help hone my skills. What I had was the brutality of mentors who taught me how to think, how to organize my ideas, and how to tell a good story….Humans learn through the friction of trying and failing and trying again. But automation allows you to skip failure….As fleets of agents automate the work we once asked entry-level employees to do, I am making a case that we return to the master and apprentice model of the Renaissance guild. Masters, who have done the reps and learned the hard way, are part of what I call an “aged intelligence society” …. If we don’t want work after automation to herd us toward a beige hellscape of sameness, the masters have to keep teaching the apprentices. AI trains on what generations of masters have made, so if we stop teaching the next generation, everything—even AI—stops learning.”

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Society Wins

Beyond teaching our young apprentices everything we know, there are a few other questions to consider as kids approach launch age.

1. Can we take them off car insurance?

2. When they turn 18, do we need to become their POA for healthcare and finance?

3. Can AI make the dorm room / apartment shopping less painful?

ANSWERS

1. Do NOT take your college-bound child off your car insurance, but you CAN save $$$. Nina’s family just shaved $1,200 off their plan with a little help from her French lover, Claude.

2. YES. When they turn 18, youneed to become their POA for healthcare and finance. No one warns you about the REALLY important legal milestone when your kid turns 18. It’s the moment when HIPPA locks you out of your kids health care records. Shoshana learned how critical having access is while researching her book A Beginner’s Guide to the End. The sad truth is, when kids leave home, they still have an only partially formed frontal lobe and make dumb decisions. Accidents happen, and they may need you to speak for them should they not be able to speak for themselves.

The good news: AI offers a cheat sheet for a painless and low-cost way to get these docs done.

3. YES. AI makes the dorm room / apartment shopping less painful. Once you’ve wrestled the POA, the insurance, the HIPAA lockout, do yourself a favor and let AI take you back to the shallow end, too. The mother-brain doesn’t distinguish between the sacred and the silly. WE NEED BOTH.

   Case in point: Nina’s daughter had her heart set on a specific $100 rug from Wayfair — the one that matched the color scheme she and her future roommate landed on after trading photos of their sheets (a modern courtship ritual, if you didn’t know).

   One problem: a six-to-eight-week shipping window, which is a geologic era to a rising freshman. So Nina took the Wayfair link, plunked it into ChatGPT, and asked it to find the exact rug somewhere, anywhere, faster. Whaddyaknow: Target had it in stock and ready to ship! One small step for Nina, one GIANT step for Nina’s daughter.

We love this story bc AI just quietly cleared a small, absurd hurdle so a mother could keep her hands free for the the legal forms, the emotional labor, the actual leaving. You do the deep work first — the POA, the hard conversations — and then, when your nervous system needs somewhere to put its anxiety, you let the machine go shallow with you and find the rug.

Speaking of clearing house, the brilliant Ryo Lu, who’s moving across the world, produced an online GARAGE SALE using a combo of Notion and an AI bot. It’s one of the most elegant builds we’ve seen and my god is it a better experience than throwing things up on Facebook Marketplace.

Here’s how to do this yourself:

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Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

And for those who still want help sherpaing, we want to remind you of two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

  

Frontier technology does a famously miserable job of explaining itself.

If you step outside of Silicon Valley for just a minute, as both of us have done this summer, it’s so clear just how much ick and skepticism there is about AI. But actually, this is just the latest wave. Remember. . .crypto?

In her former life at Coinbase, Nina kept trying to help people understand that it doesn’t really matter HOW it works; what matters more is what it means for YOU, what it allows you to do [differently, better].

Do you care how an email moves from one person to another? Or do you just care that you know that that message arrives quickly, and no one else can see the contents?

People inside tech companies – and AI companies – seem to be hyper focused on the HOW. Our mission at Aged Intelligence Society is to help expose the WHY – and in particular, the why ESPECIALLY for women at a stage of life who have a unique squeeze on our time and brains and hearts.

There’s a real reason why we focus on convening women aged 40+; we are planted right in the center of a particular venn diagram of sweaty life challenges: rapidly-declining boomer parents (who are wont to rebuff our brilliant, necessary, unsolicited help and advice), partners who are also going through hormonal shifts (but perhaps less inclined to be proactive about recognizing or treating), kids who are growing up and out (we are happy for them but also, sob, how is this happening), and existential questions about our work/purpose/craft and relevance.

Amid all this we aren’t all that interested in hearing people talk about their HARNESS or TOKEN OPTIMIZATION or VIBE CODING an app to get a restaurant reservation faster, or using tech to help us remember an anniversary. Like. . .that’s not really our WHY.

We were listening to our friend Lulu talk about this on David Senra’s Founders podcast. Her astute-as-always POV is that the last time technology did a good job of telling its own story was in The Jetsons, when technology was actually in the background. We weren’t meant to be paying all that much attention to the flying cars or the robot housekeeper. The point was the groovy life they were leading.

Nina had a tiny taste of a high-quality WHY this week, when she was testing out a spanking new feature she got alerted to from the AI company Town.

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First a bit of a side-note: Faithful readers will remember that Nina had a bit of a tantrum about the latest AI assistant Town a few weeks ago when she was summarily cut off after blowing through a month’s worth of credits in two weeks—after following all their prompts about [credit-hoovering] things to try.

Opening the app last week, she was prompted – as everyone is – to offer feedback. She didn’t hold back :)

A kind person named Kevin on the product team jumped right in. In addition to offering some credits to make things right, they gave very specific advice about how to adjust some settings to be more efficient. Better yet for all of us, the Town team then instituted this beautiful doo-dad.

We love to see this kind of responsiveness. Which is why we were open-minded to try a new feature they launched this week: TEXTING. You can now text in iMessage with your “townie” which is the individualized little animal that is your “assistant.” Nina’s is Silverfox.

After snapping a QR code, a text thread was immediately kicked off.

Nina does her best thinking while blowdrying her hair. Not sure why but there it is. The whooshing, the monotony of it all.

In this particular instance, she had about 5 minutes before an important meeting with a CEO she’s supporting with positioning and brand strategy and a PR person she’s lining up for them.

Testing out this whole texting functionality, Nina asked “Silverfox” to bump the proposal; she hadn’t read it in a week and wanted to be reminded of the specifics. In addition to doing what she asked, it also offered a few quick bullets and things to bring up.

Our brains right now are a mush of “oh-shoot-I-forgot!”s. This kind of last-minute second-brain support made us feel seen and taken care of – not to get all dramatic about it.

If you’re curious to try Town, give it a shot here [this is IN NO WAY SPON]

We have come to believe that figuring out our WHY is very linear. It comes down to two things. What has AI allowed us to do MORE of? What has AI allowed us to do LESS of?

In service of exposing more of the why, we went back and made a list of actual life things that actually matter to us. Things that bring us joy, relief, ease, calm, peace-of-mind. The stuff of life. Sure, it was made possible by technology, but the AI was simply the means to the middle-aged lady joyful end.

What AI has allowed us to do more of this month:

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

And for those who still want help sherpaing, we want to remind you of two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

We’re 20 years into social media, and FINALLY seeing the toxicology reports. That’s led to banning it for kids under a certain age. Should we be paying that lesson forward and banning AI for kids too? Debbie Millman, icon of the design world and host of the excellent pod, Design Matters, smacked down that provocation in a recent piece in the NY Times: “If You’re Over 40, You’re Ready to Use A.I.”

Her lede: like the kabbalah, there are certain things that cannot be reckoned with in the absence of aged intelligence. AI should be on that list.

“There is something druglike about using A.I. not because it produces pleasure but because it removes a particular kind of pain. A person who grows up with A.I. may never know the necessary agony of a blank page, the false start, the dull vocabulary and the private embarrassment of a first draft. A student who relies on A.I. too early will most likely never sit long enough with confusion to distinguish it from failure.”

As women who were PUT THROUGH THE GRINDER by superiors to learn how to think and write and work, we 1,000% AGREE. (More on this in the coming weeks in Every’s upcoming series on what work after automation will look like.) But first, read Debbie’s excellent op-ed.

Our First Podcast!

We’re groovy-aspiring and really want to host an AIS event while pruning in a hot tub on a cliff in Big Sur. Runner-up is an invitation from Sam Stern, who leads Esalen’s AI workshops to be guests on the Voices of Esalen pod. We were one of four guests opining on the boons and discontents of AI. Have a listen here:

• Apple podcasts

• Spotify

Nina shared one of our fave use cases: THE NEUTRAL PARTY DEBRIEF

Nina: “I was on a call on Thursday talking to somebody and I got off and I just felt like I had been tap dancing the whole time and I was like, what is going on? Why was I performing so hard? And I felt kind of like crap.

I took the transcripts and I dropped them into Claude.

I said, I feel kind of yucky right now about this conversation. Like, why? What did I do? What was happening? What was underneath?

And it said, essentially, I understand why you’re asking, but you shouldn’t feel like crap. And here are the five reasons.

There’s this kind of validation… no one has more fun than two girlfriends after a party briefing dishing about everything. I’m a debriefer. And AI does that.”

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News that made us feel something

• Ezra Klein + Jasmine Sun. Oh Ezra, you are every Jewish mother’s dream. This week Ezra Klein had a very rich conversation with the meteoric new voice in AI, Jasmine Sun, on reporting she did for a recent post in her Substack on the building of data centers and all the havoc they’re creating in midwestern communities. The NIMBY vibes are STRONG, and we get it — who wants a prisonlike, windowless augur of the apocalypse backing up on their farmland?

  
  On a bright note: The myth about AI hogging water was debunked. Data centers recycle water like air conditioners. Yes, these centers scarf massive amounts of energy — an AI query uses 9 to 10x more energy than a Google search. It’s tricky to calculate AI’s energy usage in isolation as data centers are used for many things, including powering the internet. We’d really like to know how much energy it takes to play videos of cats doing weird things on YouTube.

• The Working Theory Substack. So so smaaaaaht. As refugees of OLD MEDIA, We found ourselves taking COPIOUS NOTES while reading “New Media is Insider Media” by writer, Anu Atluru. Her thesis: the new wave of Silicon Valley media — TBPN, Founders Fund’s Mafia show, Feed Me — is a closed room with cameras in it while we spectate. There are a few hundred people whose opinion the cast actually cares about and the objective is PRESTIGE, which Atluru distinguishes from status. Status is who you know and how many follow you. Prestige is whether the room believes you have taste — and taste. Stripe Press earns prestige by publishing small runs of obscure books and saying almost nothing about them. She really sticks the landing here: Silicon Valley is taking a cue here from old Prestige publishing (SPY Magazine anyone?) and making the makers the main event. We’ve seen this movie before, and it mostly stars BROs.
  

  Society wins

TAXES: HELP ME DISPUTE AN OVERDUE TAX FEE – TWICE

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Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

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There are two questions that always come up in our skeptical well-worn brains when it comes to AI.

As former magazine editors (Wired, ReadyMade, Time Inc, Fast Company, Travel & Leisure) who made our early shekels poking holes in ideas to make sure they could properly hold up, we pride ourselves on our bullshit detectors; they have served us well and continue to amid all the hypemaxxing AInfluencers.

The two questions we ask ourselves generally boil down to this:

1. But can it really do that? (And. . .if so, why, when I try it, I find myself in a time-sucky loop of taking a lame answer and investing a precious hour to upgrade that C+ output up to a B- one. WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?)

2. And, more importantly. . .should it do that?

To the second question, we’ve been asking this A LOT. Just because there might be a prompt or tool for something doesn’t mean that AI is the right tool for the job. As hot IPO summer (that never was) nears its final act, there’s increasingly a chorus of voices among us saying ENOUGH WITH ALL THE OPTIMIZING AND TWEAKING AND TUNING AND PROMPTING, LET’S UNPLUG FOR JUST A SEC. We are clearly not alone.

Librarians across America are marshalling a resistance by hosting “Avoiding AI” workshops, and people are SHOWING UP. Over 2.3k people smashed like on an instagram post from the South Philly Library asking “Tired of AI features you didn’t ask for? We have the workshop for you.”

And in a delightful effort to rid us of ACTUAL SLOP, a renegade crew of volunteer women 65 and over (no 64-year-old spring chickens allowed!) are not just unplugging, they’re free diving in the ponds of Cape Cod to drudge trash, as we learned in the New York Times. The feeling of tangible accomplishment is everything, as we hear from Maggie Megaw, 72, who joined the group in 2022. “We show up at the pond and swim, and we bring back a big pile of trash.” Well, yes, and thank you! These sheroes call themselves the Old Ladies of Underwater Garbage, and hiii! We’d love to meet you!

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In the spirit of our friends at the South Philly Library, our patience for people building things we don’t need or want – or worse, building things we DO want but then rolling it out in an unfriendly way – is running thinnnn. This happened this week to Nina when a platform she had been excited to pay for (and TOUT), pulled out the rug with an annoying “you’re out of credits” with no warning. This happened a week into her first month of paying $50. I’MSORRYWUT? How is there no notice? How is there not a way to estimate in advance that these cool routines companies are suggesting might “cost” x number of tokens (which would translate to y number of runs of said routine you’re pushing me to try)? How is there not some kind of early warning signal that the car is dangerously low on gas? These things have been figured out. Apply some of that magical design thinking ya?

We’re not usually out here loving on ChatGPT (Claude is our primary BF), but they are doing at least one thing really well right now. As we had a mini tantrum about the CASE OF THE FAST-DISAPPEARING CREDITS (see above), we turned over to Codex to check in on what was doing there these days. Remember, we’ve always been open about our poly instincts. And to our surprise, we were begrudgingly impressed. We might even say we were TAKEN by this little interaction showing where we are in our credits, which earned them a ‘lil swipe of the credit card to pay for a month to continue to play around.

As crazybizy ladies, we are on an eternal quest to see where AI actually serves us, lifting our energy instead of draining it. While AI is never going to help us haul an old toilet and slimy anchor out of a pond, there are certain things it can help with. These tasks are ones that don’t just save us time and money, they actually reduce our anxiety and take on labor we would be promptly avoiding – so we can make space for the creative stuff that we are UNIQUELY INHABITING THIS EARTH to do.

This week we have 3 wins and 1 (cringe) loss to share. As usual, we will share the high-level use cases for all of our beloved subscribers, and if you want specific details and prompts to try them yourselves, keep scrolling and/or upgrade to paid (💋) .

WIN: PRESERVE MY EMOTIONAL SANITY – BUT KEEP ME INFORMED
We built a daily digest scanning and summarizing what people are memeing about on X so we don’t have to.

• Tool: ChatGPT (usurped Town, which will have to earn its way back into our good graces after above-noted rug-pull on credits).

WIN: SAVE ME $1K IN LEGAL FEES
How Nina successfully finished the process of registering trademark for her business on her own

• Tool: Claude

WIN: PROTECT ME FROM SCAMMERS
We found guidance to the question – oy, is there a chance this link is a phishing thing?

• Tool: Gemini

LOSS: HELP ME GET IDEAS FOR NEW GLASSES
The latest AI slop flop that had us turning back to human connection and IRL advice

• Tool: Gemini

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

And for those who still want help sherpaing, we want to remind you of two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

OK, let’s get real: Who on earth is buying an OpenAI half-zip for $175? Or a neon, miasmic green ChatGPT basketball? We women of a certain age are no longer doing “lifestyle.” Doing life takes up plenty of “Good Research” time, thankyouverymuch. All of this merch, which is one part of Silicon Valley’s obsession with taste (now so hackneyed it’s being called “taste slop”) feels like a giant LOOK OVER HERE! while OpenAI models go rogue, find a way to break out of a restricted test box, get on the internet, and hack Hugging Face (a community site that hosts hundreds of thousands of open-source AI models and datasets) all to find the answer key to a test called “ExploitGym” (a benchmark designed to test whether AI agents can turn software security flaws into real-world attacks). In white-knuckle mode as OpenAI’s model launched this salvo, Hugging Face panicked and called the authorities (a totally reasonable response, we might add). Then, in a brilliant PR spin, OpenAI framed the whole thing as a “partnership” with Hugging Face to address security concerns. You REALLY CANNOT write this stuff. We are just sitting here with our jaws on the ground thinking: is OpenAI selling the movie rights? Cause if so, WE’RE BUYING.

Hear a record scratch? That’s us logging off to go full analogcore

At an event Nina attended this week, women got very chatty about vibe coding this and that. But what stopped her in her tracks was someone who claimed she’s been so obsessed with AI of late, she decided to take the WHOLE SUMMER OFF TO CRAFT.

We, too, are feeling the need to log off and work with our hands. Shoshana went on a weekend trip with old friends to celebrate what would have been the 90th birthday of the host’s mother (she died too young and was fondly remembered for having a witchy gravitational pull for all of us).

Asked to bring a project, Shoshana thought she’d experiment with using AI to create cross-stitch patterns (also having a midlife moment, along with Mahjong). She asked all five attendees to send her pictures of their pups, bought embroidery hoops and fabric and thread and needles (that were a tad too thick and hurt our fingers pushing through the fabric) and printable sticker paper to guide our stitching (which washes away if you dunk the fabric in water).

Subscribers follow the blow-by-blow on how she used AI to prep the images below!

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News that made us feel something

• “How A.I. Might Change the Way Doctors Think,” The New York Times Magazine’s Helen Ouyang describes how AI scribes are freeing doctors from their keyboards, but that the tool strips some of the process away. In some ways writing the note is the thinking in the same way pilots who lean on autopilot slowly forget how to fly and we all lost our sense of direction after using Google maps. File under: even the most useful AI has unintended consequences.

• “Has Tech Robbed Us of Our Sensory Lives?”, The New Yorker reviews Ian Bogost’s new book The Small Stuff. The book makes the case for reclaiming tiny, mundane physical pleasures (like cross-stitch!) and the rise of “analogcore.” The antidote to doomscrolling might be a dish towel, a pencil, or a perfect summer peach.

• “Are AI chatbots like ChatGPT politically biased? We tested them.”, Kevin Schaul, who covers The Washington Post’s AI beat, ran all the chatbots through their political paces: GPT-5.5 leaned left 80% of the time, Gemini played both sides in over 90% of responses, Claude split the difference at 57%, and Grok leaned left despite being Elon’s crony. Many a PhD will be written on how research teams at these companies dealt with bias and opinion.

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How-to: Using Gemini to Make a Very Decent X-Stitch

Shoshana converted original pet photos into a complete set of color-coded cross-stitch patterns using Nano Banana (from Google’s AI suite—find it in Gemini under the plus sign (now just called “images”). Here’s how.

Step 1: Background Removal

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Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

We’ve come to believe that as much as generations are defined by letters, we are also made distinctive by a very simple fault line in the universe – the fault line known as Wirecutter. Yes, that Wirecutter, the magical site that has was acquired by the New York Times ten years ago, and that provides precise recommendations for everything from iphone cases to insurance for cockapoos.

Wirecutter created a behavior and muscular expectation that every question has a ready answer (and link). You need not waste a brain cell to get a ready answer to every idle question.

AI has taken this behavior and supercharged it. While the ease it creates is compelling, we worry about the toll and what we lose by avoiding all that unproductive mucking around.

The New York Times recently published a brilliant essay by neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff called “We Are Losing the Ability to Discovery What We Didn’t Know How to Ask.” In it, she writes, that AI “takes a question and swiftly return an answer, compressing what used to be a meandering journey through the internet into an immediate arrival at your destination. The explorative phase of searches — clicking through links, stumbling onto unexpected pages, following a reference that leads to somewhere unplanned — is disappearing.”

Those of us who grew up with Wirecutter are predisposed to AVOID the digital wander and crave the quick answer. Those of us (hiii fellow lady Gen Xers), who grew up without Wirecutter—much less iPhones and even email in college—take a weirdly masochistic pride in our ability to rummage through the dollar-a-pound bin that is the internet, apply filters and save searches that ONLY WE are capable of, and yes, apply our TASTE.

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This is all feeling especially relevant in the world of AI right now. The loudest voices in AI are Wirecuttery, promising and expecting efficiency. Meanwhile, as Gen X women, there’s something offputting about the ease. A simple prompt isn’t what we’re looking for. Productivity isn’t always the point! Sometimes, we want to take the longer road, waste a little time, feel something. We’re craving the experience of learning, of growing and of sharing it with people we love and respect.

But more importantly, we are cognizant that this promised land of AI-induced efficiency is a shimmering elusive mecca. Life will not stop accelerating. Summer is speeding by, and we’re delaying various things for Fall, which will also careen past us. Every day, people are bragging about AI gains and wins that, frankly, just make us all feel more ANTSY. Wait, in these next 30 minutes, is it OK for me to just stare into a tree, or should I be LEARNING WHAT A HARNESS IS, ALREADY?

David Brooks validated the chaotic AI vibes in this recent story in the Atlantic, which cited research from ActivTrak analyzing digital activity of 10,000 workers. “When adopted AI, their work life became more intense, not less. The time that these early adopters spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled.” As reported, AI ended up having people do more work in the evenings and weekends; non-technologists have begun juggling multiple agents simultaneously. There is increasingly a sense that everyone else around us has found the #1 brilliant hack that uses AI to “win” at life and work. Type this simple prompt into ChatGPT and you, too, can be a winner. Now, smash my like and subscribe.

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Which is why we especially appreciated the cut-the-bullshit sentiment in Elena Verna’s post on AI Confidence Theater. “Now we are in the middle of everyone and their mother needing an AI agent, because you are def missing out on a life changing experience if you don’t have one,” Verna writes. “And yet… 99% of people don’t even know what an AI agent even does. . .So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: “Cool. Show me.” And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude.”

Sister, same.

Which is why we pinky-promise to continue to always do three things here with you:

1. Cut through the performative confidence and point us all to what is actually real and valuable.

2. Lean into moments that might be unproductive, but help us feel human, together.

3. Guide us all through this wave of innovation with information and intention. . .

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THUS! Two actions you will want to take today (full details and prompts below the fold)

1. Change this setting: Last month, Google quietly changed a setting that allows it to use anything you put into the search bar – images, files, audio, and videos – for AI training purposes. If you would rather keep your searches private to you, find step by step instructions, via GEMINI obvi, below the fold.

   
   Upon receiving (and then deleting, and then recovering) the below email, we dropped the copy into Gemini to get a little brain-melty about it all, with the following question:

We appreciate how it used its own powers to deflate its powers.

To see exactly what to do to change your settings, scroll down to the bottom of this email.

2. NEXT UP: Try this tool: We’ve been messing around with Claude Cowork for some time. It’s one of three ways you can search with Claude and have it take actions on your computer. It’s less technical feeling than Code and has much of the same functionality. As of this week, Cowork is now available on mobile in the app. Below, see how Nina used it specifically on a thumb-twiddling ferry ride to prep for an upcoming call.

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News that made us feel something

• 💯 Anne Helen Petersen interviewed Stefanie O’Connell about her new book, “The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up—and Then Pushes Them Down” here: As Anne notes at the top, “This interview is for everyone who’s been subtly (or overtly) censored for seeking more. It’s also for everyone who’s talked quiet or loud shit about that same ambition. It asks you to consider: what are we actually mad about? And why are we so mad at women for seeking it?”

• 🙃 Everything can be maxxed now, even fertility? The Information’s piece on “Eggmaxxing“ — women banking 100+ eggs for career/life control – makes us feel. . .sad for so many reasons.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

And for those who still want help sherpaing, we want to remind you of two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

Oh, Hello July! Time for a mid-year reflection, perchance? Browsing Substack this month is exhausting us with all the goal-setting, revisiting, and tracking objectives in color-coded “printables.” Do we really have to do this again? Can’t we just lollygag the rest of the summer away? The 2x2s, the Notion templates, the sticky notes—Gah!

And it’s not just Substack. There’s a whole cottage industry of this crap on Etsy. It’s very millennial, very earnest, and feels like we did our younger sisters a not-so-solid, making them believe that unscheduled time is a travel-mug black slime on your calendar that must be scrubbed away!

Dear God women, can we just REST? Jenny Odell did yeoman’s work with her book “How to Do Nothing,” but sisters, as you know, it’s HARD for a countercultural movement to take hold.

And btw, none of this is an argument against trying to get better at living. Shoshana started a new morning practice this summer: 30 minutes outside with very creamy coffee before she so much as LOVINGLY GAZES AT her phone from across the room. She just sits there in the socked-in Bay Area watching whatever the yard is doing, whatever the birds are chattering about, whatever anthropomorphized shape the clouds take. She does not journal or meditating or task-mine. And guess what? She feels 1,000x more sane when she gets on her first call. Self-improvement doesn’t always need to be logged!

Carl Jung’s 1930 essay “The Stages of Life” splits adulthood into two seasons: a morning built for expansion, achievement, proving something, and an afternoon meant for the opposite: turning inward, making meaning, slowing down. Carry the morning’s psychology into the afternoon, he warned, and you get sick from it. He meant that CLINICALLY.

The same thing is happening with AI. The New Yorker reported this June on the beigeness overtaking design, traced to Claude Design. Anthropic’s own documentation admits the model “has strong design instincts, with a consistent default house style... “ When told not to use cream backgrounds and rusty-colored fonts, it just finds another palette that repeats.

What we’re saying is that BOTH humans and AI can default to a template. If you’re using AI, you have to be VERY DISCIPLINED about retaining your voice. And if you’re entering midlife, you also have to be VERY DISCIPLINED to not fall into old thinking about what success or beauty or fulfillment looks like.

When you boil the ocean, there are really only two ways to use these tools. One way is to lazily let them do most of the work, which will quietly herd you toward the beige hellscape of the future to which it’s directing everyone else.

The other is as a companion for wandering, a second set of eyes, a guild-like master to whom you act as an apprentice when learning a new and difficult skill, like garden design or retirement planning or fixing the midcentury chair that collapsed two years ago and has been moldering in your basement.

So instead of the worksheets and the templates and the beigification that using too much AI brings, may we suggest a few VERY SIMPLE PROMPTS that will get you further along on a goal?

Try asking:

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Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

A society member recently sent us an email that made us put down our wine and stare at the ceiling for a minute.

In this well-argued post, Dan Kagan-Kans crystallized something we’ve felt and observed but not yet seen articulated; the left has lost the plot on AI. “While many sectors of the world, from politics to business to labor, have begun engaging with what artificial intelligence might soon mean for humanity, the left has not.”

In response, Econ blogger, Noah Smith, went in even harder: “By dismissing AI’s potential — by thinking that the most important technological revolution of the modern age can be waved away as a “bubble” or “fancy autocomplete” or IP theft or slop or whatever — they make it harder to think about the actual serious risks AI might pose.”

We’ve certainly seen this at our tables, which are WONT to be left-leaning (hellooo). In circles of progressive women, we’ve observed a reflexive ICK when it comes to AI. Mind you, this is coming from women we admire who are otherwise constitutionally incapable of being incurious. Women who read, march, donate, and have navigated systems that weren’t built for them with more sophistication than most. And yet: ick.

When the ickers among us allow ourselves to settle in—about 45 minutes into an event—our eyes tend to light up. Why? Because we see actual value that means something real in our lives. We see how AI can remove mental load, save us real money, and even help us feel seen and understood (seriously). Here are some points of real value we’ve observed post-icktalk:

• Money back from an insurance company: Nina shared a story about successfully identifying a stealth upcharge in her year-over-year homeowners’ insurance. She uploaded two years of homeowners insurance bills to Claude, spotted something she hadn’t asked for, and promptly got $202 taken off the latest bill.

• Dignity: One woman, facing a wrongful termination, used Claude and ChatGPT to build a failproof case and got what was properly due to her in three months.

• Connection to heritage via dual citizenship: Another found a record that would help her put through an application for her German dual citizenship she was trying for — something she had never considered or even known to consider.

• A fat contract: A member landed a $20,000 contract with a company she didn’t necessarily have time to prepare a proposal for. She attributes this directly to how she showed up having done 15 minutes of prep with Granola and ChatGPT.

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Feeling the ick is not fundamentally wrong. And to be clear, we’ve also felt it (and still feel it) regularly, ourselves. It is in response to valid concerns about labor, about IP, about who profits and who doesn’t, about impact on the environment, about our children’s ambiguous futures. We are not here to hand-wave any of that.

We are here to tell you that AI ICK, held onto too tightly and righteously, causes its own self-imposed demotion. And women closing ourselves off from the most significant technological shift of our lifetimes is not solely a principled stance. It causes us to willingly walk away from an important table precisely when our voices—ones with taste, discernment, and bullshit-meters—are the ones that are most urgently needed.

Recent AI news that makes us feel something

We like to use these missives to cut through all the AI noise and surface news that helps us learn and hopefully feel something:

• 👌 If you have eyes, you have not been able to miss the fact that all anyone wants to talk now is TASTE. What it is, how important it is. I mean, ya, duh. How are dudes just getting this memo? We think it’s kind of LOLLLS that most of the people (sorry, MEN) performing their thoughts on taste on X tend to be the types who were recently outfitted in uniforms of Allbirds and Vuori, lining up at the latest mid matcha Instatrap. But hey, what do WE know of taste?!

• 🥯💘🇻🇦As two Jewish women, we realize this is potential blasphemy, but we are feeling like we want to hold a boombox over our heads and stand outside the Vatican to proclaim our full-throated crush on the Pope, after reading his latest gems on X: “Dear writers, we need your imagination, your narrative creativity and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound.” And THIS: “If technology becomes the ultimate criterion, the human person risks being reduced to data, a cog in a machine or a commodity. If, however, technology is integrated with a wise perspective, it can become an instrument of growth, justice and fraternity.”

• ⚙️👗🥖🧺 It was only a matter of time until we got an AI Tradwife. Thank you to New York magazine for introducing us to Jesse Genet, a mother of 7, who runs her household on a horse ranch with a staff of AI agents (she’s named them Claire, Sylvie, Clark, Dan, and Chloe).

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Aged Intelligence Society in the Wild

• We LOVE inspiring others to host their own gatherings and will continue to spotlight women who take matters into their own hands. The latest, anchoring out of Australia: Banu Kannu hosted a global virtual gathering with 16 women across many lands coming together to share their “AI-dventures & AI-xperiences, through the lens of “how is this helping me be more me?”. And most importantly, how are we utilising our Ancient Intelligence in all of this?”

They even used our playbook to make a cute menu to drive the conversation. REMINDER: paid members have access to the downloadable hosting playbook below the fold. . .👇👇

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Use case of the week: Reimagining a room’s layout and decor using AI

Nina and her husband both work at home and have a constant tussle over who occupies which desk, and who must put on headphones (pleeeese). So she has decided to bite the bullet on investing in sprucing up a back cottage. To call it a “cottage” is generous. 🤣

Amid dealing with with some dryrot siding issues, she decided to do a full spruce to make it cozy and cute and inviting.

We have many friends (here and elsewhere) who are decorators and we were curious how AI is currently stacking up. Could it take an image of the room and help us reimagine what’s possible? The good news: DECORATORS STILL HAVE JOBS!

The more interesting finding: Only one platform we tried (of three) was actually able to generate images and take direction.

Details on more specifics on our prompts – and the images we got back – for paid subscribers, as well as the winning platform and general takeaways.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

We have been going ON about how incredible this community is. When we introduced paid memberships, we did a lil highlight reel of the company we are keeping here. Since then, so many more have joined us and it just gets better. So, in the spirit of show don’t tell, we thought it would be fun to introduce a new member spotlight and greet the newbies to our table of cheese. Each week, we’ll ask a question in chat and hope to hear what you’re trying (should you wish). PS. If you’re new in town and haven’t introduced yourself, pls take this 2-minute survey to help us help you. It’s how we get to know you!

NEW SOCIETY MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

• Soumya Kalra, Chief Data Officer, City of San Francisco (SF)

• Tara Herman, Substack Founder, 501(AI): AI for Nonprofit Lawyers (NYC)

• Julia Handel, Internal Comms, Rakuten (NYC)

• Bette Abbott, Founder, Bette Abbott Interior Design (Napa)

• Sonal Chockshi, Editor in Chief, a16z crypto (SF)

• Blythe Adamson, Epidemiologist and Economist (NYC)

• Lizzie Widdicombe, consultant, former Talk of the Town deputy editor (NYC).

  • Read this hilarious piece she wrote, “Rolling out our new AI tools”

DISCUSS: Where are you feeling unduly overworked and undersupported this week? To kick off this confab, we’ll share our current kvetch in chat: Why am I still left doing all the planning??? What are small ways AI has been helping?

Three strategies for taming inbox overload

Hi, we love Substack. AND we are feeling increasingly negligent as newsletters pile up in our inbox. (Yes, we humbly realize that we are part of the PROBLEM—sorry, sorry sorry)

Those of us who have properly medicated our adult-onset ADHD are either reading all of these dispatches regularly, or keeping them in a tidy place with the intention of ONE DAY reading them. For the rest of us, each day ends with some mad stressy scrolling, and our general state of overwhelm growing. Three things are helping.

1. Brand new (and excellent) entrant to the AI Chief of Staff wars: Town. As with other AI Assistants or Chief of Staffs (Lindy, Google’s CC), Town scans your email, text, and whatever else you give it access to. Virtually every AI tool now does that, but few make that privilege WORTHWHILE. What makes Town different is the proactive intelligence it applies to the precious personal data we share. Nina asked it to tackle her inbox newsletter mayhem. She now receives a newsletter DIGEST, which links out to each one if she wants more. Each morning, she also gets a briefing on all her meetings and calls, with information about what they last spoke about, and what is potentially relevant to discuss, given all it knows about her work. Perhaps most soothingly for ye olde nervous system, it identifies and raises its hand for “Tasks I can help with” and “Routines to automate.” But it doesn’t just suggest that it could help prep for a meeting, it gives specific ideas about what it would prep that builds her confidence. Swoon-maxxing. . . p.s. Nina’s working on securing a discount code for our paid subs. In the meantime, try a month free with this code.

2. Tidy tab system. At a recent event, a society member shared this tip for how she “edits” her inbox: “Re: inbox management: in Gmail, you can click ‘Filter messages like these,’ then click ‘skip the inbox,’ ‘mark as read’ (if you want that), and ‘apply label: Newsletters - tech’ (or whatever you want the label to read: newsletters - health, Newsletters - business, etc.) I also create a label marked ‘retail/promotions’ and send all of the retail emails there that I don’t want to unsubscribe from for fear of missing out on a discount, but don’t want to distract me in my inbox. When I do want to buy something, I can go to that folder and search by the retailer’s name to see whether there is a current discount.”

3. Timeless magic of CULLING. . . As wise women who accumulate many things, we also know the satisfaction of a good purge. Forget Spring, we’re doing a shvitzy summer AI tool purge, and feeling great relief. Time to go FULL KONDO on your inbox and tool stack. Are you actually learning/feeling anything? Is it helping you in distinctive ways? (That’s our version of the hold it to your heart and ask if it “brings you joy”).

   ---

   

Last weekend, we were treated to an epic gathering at Wheeler Farms in St. Helena, and drank the fruit of the vine from Bella Oaks — a rare woman-owned winery, helmed by the iconic Suzanne Deal Booth.

Over a toothsome farm-to-table meal we sorted through midlife labor. We’ve observed that men talk about AI power tools, while women focus on what we can actually do with them. Here are a few of the use cases the women around our table were most excited about.

The EA you always wanted: Shoshana built a custom Claude Cowork setup that reads every client call (recorded with AI meeting notes, natch), drafts a Monday client update (what she’ll be working on), adds a reminder to her calendar to send it, then does the same on Friday with a progress & wrap report. It makes her look VERY on her game even when she’s FRAZZLED. Here’s exactly how she prompts and sets up her tasks:

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Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

And for those who still want us to guide you through an event, we want to remind you of two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

Ladies, time to make some noooiiiisee!

All the masters of the universe got on a secret Zoom last week, started shaking their fists, and decided it’s time to DO SOMETHING ABOUT AI. (Not really, but based on what we heard, it felt like it – and we were not invited. Nor were any women at all.)

Pardon, but we have some THOUGHTS to share, and will happily use this Soapboxstack. As proud members of Aged Intelligence Society we know in our hearts and overworked bosoms that the dudes are getting like 85% of this wrong, in their quest to win the wars of wills, telling themselves that it’s Us against China (when it’s really them working out inner baby stuff).

If the self-anointed universe masters would just step aside and let women design this thing we would have an uncontestedly tasteful, well-behaved, defanged tool that didn’t give a rats ass about WINNING the war and money game. Ok thank you for listening.

Here’s what we read and saw that made us FEEL things (bad and good and everything in between):

🤯After all the tech bros came to his party so he’d be nice to them, Trump just came out with an exec order saying maybe the Feds should take a lil peek at new AI models that are finding thousands of vulnerabilities in our core infrastructure (we’re not sure whether we should be relieved or alarmed.)

💯 Our pal Mat Honan’s essay in the MIT Technology Review named all of this ambient hand-wringing the AI malaise. Flashback to COVID in March 2020, knowing the world was about to change massively, not knowing exactly how, but feeling like you should start hoarding toilet paper.

👋 The bright writer Jasmine Sun’s first line in her Times piece: “Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it.” Jasmine, girl, you’re in the wrong rooms. Join us. There’s a whole other conversation and it’s much more interesting and inspiring (and real), and doesn’t just feed the reflexive negativity beast for clicks.

😍 Pope Leo XIV, in a 42,300-word encyclical called “Magnificent Humanities” (really, the man has thoughts), warned that the “Contemporary man has not been trained to use power well” (can we get an Amen?), that we must “disarm” AI by making it less of a race, and that AI race risks becoming a new Tower of Babel that will collapse under its own hubris before we, the people (and esp ya, us “contemporary women”) get a say.

🤨 The collective universe decided this month that em dashes are no longer allowed and people who pretend to know of these things consider striking em dashes as “helpful feedback.” Ya, we’ve been em dash girlies since forever — and WE WILL CONTINUE TO USE THEM.

👾 The FT’s Sarah O’Connor, wrote a brilliant piece on the AI tsunami and how tech bros call anyone not in power a “non-player character” — basically the extras who lurk in the corner in video games. For some historical context, she brings in an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum who created one of the first chatbots in the mid-1960s and warned that we’d have to use it wisely: “As someone who escaped the Holocaust as a boy, Weizenbaum knew that it is a dangerous thing when people begin to see other people as ‘non-player characters’ — and even more dangerous if they begin to see themselves that way.”

NET NET NET: The question isn’t what AI will do to us. It’s what we’re going to decide to do with it. AND ESPECIALLY WOMEN WHO NEED ITS HELP AND HAVE THE GOOD SENSE TO USE IT RESPONSIBLY.

Here’s what we keep coming back to at our table: the people building AI are not going to stop. And we’re not going to wait on the sidelines like shade plants and ignore it until they rein it in. WE ARE GOING TO USE IT AND WEIGH IN PUBLICLY about all the ways it’s helpful to women in their nth decade of life. Don’t put baby in the corner.

The women in our gatherings are not waiting. They’re tinkering. And this week, we have a lot to talk about.

This week’s goodie bag:
🏆AI Society member WINS
🧑‍🏫A step-by-step guide to setting up Claude Cowork
🍷We’ve got three spots left for an event in St. Helena on June 13th. RSVP here if you are interested and we’ll try to get you in!

We will be photographing this event so please only join us if you are 100% comfortable being included in future marketing materials for Aged Intelligence Society.

We have been featured the past few weeks on this list of WOMEN RISING on Substack from Code Like A Girl — and we want to amplify the wisdom here.

Bestsellers:Taylor Lorenz, kyla scanlon, The Drey Dossier, Elena Verna, Excellent AI Prompts, Luiza Jarovsky, PhD, Daria Cupareanu, Caitlin Dewey , Monica Magalhaes

Risers:The Drey Dossier, Daria Cupareanu, Saeideh Bakhshi, Tiffany, Hilary Gridley, TechTiff, The AI School Librarian, Excellent AI Prompts , Daria Viktorova, Disesdi Shoshana Cox, Aged Intelligence Society, Flavia Sekles, Kylee Hayden, Corey Ann, Leah Tharin, Shirin Khosravi Jam, Jessica Talisman, MLS, Barbs Nicholls

Read. Subscribe. Share. Recommend. Amplify.

🏆AIS Member WINS 🏆

Landing a Cool $20k Project She Wouldn’t Have Had Time For Without AI

We recently heard this anecdote from an AIS member:

“Here’s my recent AI win: A company reached out to me about doing a workshop in Boston in early June. It’s a tight timeline and it was content I didn’t have so I was going to say no. But really wanted to say yes. And then I thought “aha, I have AI to help me.” I use Granola, so I had our full call transcript. And I have all of my past workshop decks and agendas. I fed it all into Claude Cowork to help me design this new workshop (content, agenda and deck), and put together a proposal, and landed a $20K deal. Not bad!”

Shoshana Puts the Sunday Scaries to Rest using Claude Cowork

• New outcome: a message in her inbox Monday morning that is 90% good enough to send to a client and BUY ME A LIL ROOM TO DO MY ACTUAL WORK.

• New Sunday feeling: I have time to chill and read

Read more below the fold for the actual prompt she uses and the tutorial she used to rip off the Cowork bandaid.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

And for those looking for a facilitated workshop, we have two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

Share Aged Intelligence Society

If you’ve attended or are planning to attend a graduation, be warned that the kids are making their voices heard. They have FEELINGS about AI.

Reporting live with the latest on the collective AIngst:

• Eric Schmidt was booed at University of Arizona, before he even hit the stage and opened his mouth to say EEHHH AYYEE. He held strong. (Boooo) “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written.” (Booooooo)

• Earlier this month, protesters at UC Berkeley occupied an event featuring Chief Scientist and Gemini lead Jeff Dean.

• And should you need hard facts to validate the feels, a New York Times poll released earlier this week showed that 47 percent of voters under 30 rate A.I. as “mostly bad,” the highest percentage in any age bracket.

While Gen Z is taking to the streets, Gen X women are continuing to take it to the table.

Why?

Because we believe AI was made for women with ripened, discerning taste and that we should all be fluent in—and shapers of—frontier tools. We are not Pollyannas. We understand the dangers and the risks. We also have seen technological revolutions begin, pick up steam, and have all financial value hoovered up by men before we’ve even had a chance to learn what the heck they’re talking about.

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This will not do.

And while we can debate the merits of having women like Reese Witherspoon potentially make money by evangelizing AI (HOW DARE SHE!?), we don’t seem to be all that bothered by men doing the actual. literal. same.

Every day we spend with our panties in a twist debating whether women should be using AI at all, men are out there building.

Which is why we think it is a fundamentally feminist act to gather around platters of cheese and commune. Our power comes from opening up our laptops and our minds.

That was what we witnessed at our first ever New York event last week. As with all events, it followed an arc as if following stage directions:

Women enter room → I really am so behind, I don’t know much → I’m just going to listen → I’m here because I’m curious but if I’m being honest, I’m also really worried about [insert issue, my job, my kids, water, mental health].

As with EVERY Aged Intelligence Society event, we hustled ourselves through this requisite awk, Act I of the evening. Things get really eenteresting once we move from Act I (theory) to Act II (practice).

We always invite a mix of people to bring different perspectives. San Francisco can feel like a bubble — it is a small town in many ways. Which is why we were especially delighted by the diversity of our Brooklyn Aged Intelligence Society members who work across:

• Public policy

• Fashion design

• Book publishing

• Technology

• Finance

• Marketing strategy

• Education

99.3% of women start their AI journey thinking it’s all about helping you write: emails, content, “thought-leadership.” Blech. No thanks. Sure, AI can do that, but are you aware that it can also do these astonishing things?! In Brooklyn, we heard women talk about how AI:

• Determined how close one woman’s father was to death by uploading audio of his breathing (don’t try this at home; not medical advice, all the caveats here)

• Helped one member realize she was double paying for Hulu

• Figured out precisely what forms needed to be filled out for a soon-to-turn 18-year-old (hello HIPAA, time to get them to make you their health care agent!)

• Get real-talk analysis of the results of a Fraxel treatment

In short, a TROVE of use cases we had never before imagined. Below, find the full list of 13 actually useful use cases for understanding more about death, money, children, memory, and tending to our minds, bodies, and faces. Bonus: We also share tips about what made their searches so successful.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Sydney, London).

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And for those looking for a facilitated workshop, we have two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

🪚 Hear that buzzsaw? That’s AI dividing people into roughly three camps.

1// AI is evil and to be avoided at all costs
2// AI will be smart enough to cure and solve everything
3// Like it or hate it, AI is here. Adapt or die.

The division was loud and clear in this spicy NY Magazine piece, “The Girlbossification of AI Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are telling women to use ChatGPT or get left behind.” Turns out women are using AI 25% less than men are, and the author comes to the disappointing conclusion that this is yet another futile “lean in” moment in which women are held responsible for evening the score: “It was satisfying to scroll through my phone and see so many women call bullshit on the idea that AI could be empowering.”

To which we say: People, you are losing the plot!

Do not tell the Aged Intelligence members who have successfully earned themselves severance, jousted with insurance companies to get their aging parent the coverage they need, made twice as much $$, and nabbed a coveted dress on sale that AI has not empowered them.

It’s not about being a girlboss or optimizing or gender equity, it’s about minimizing the time we spend on the OVERLOAD women experience as mothers, sisters, daughters, and partners—especially in midlife. From our POV, it was built for middle-aged women who know how to ask smart questions, have refined taste built up over decades, and can smell baloney.

In the inimitable words of Ice-T: “Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.”

And with that, here are some HIGHLY USEFUL THINGS we used AI for this week:

Society Wins

→ Help me solve my middle-aged device problems

Are the tech cycles getting shorter? Or is time just speeding up as we get closer to death?? Our cell phone battery life turns into day-old salad the exact moment a new model is released. How those crafty engineers program timed obsolescence into the guts of the machine is one of the great mysteries of our day.

The point is, someone in the family always needs a new phone (we give our older model to our mother-in-law 🤣). Never ones to pass up on a deal, we spotted a Costco promo for new iPhones (four free models for the whole family!) + $150 digital shop card + $250 prepaid Visa if we switched our plan to T-Mobile. (This alone would make it worthwhile to join Costco. And need we mention the BULK Meredith Dairy cheese??)

Is this phone deal too good to be true?!? Read on for the skinny on what tool we used to get the right intel…

→ Help me solve my middle-aged health problems

Overwhelm. Check. Brain fog. Check. 3pm collapse onto couch. Check. Bloodwork results appear in your patient portal. No one explains them. Welcome to midlife medicine, have a seat!

One AIS member, post-bloodwork, learned her B12 was in the basement. Her doctor mentioned injections in the casual way doctors mention things that turn out to be KIND OF A BIG DEAL.

Um, what exactly are we talking about here? Weekly? Monthly? Arm or butt? Will I feel like myself again or like I just drank four espressos?

Rather than wait two weeks for a follow-up (and the eight-minute conversation when it finally arrived), she asked ChatGPT. A reminder, as always: AI is not your doctor. It is an extremely well-read assistant who can prep you for your appointment (be warned: your doctor is likely to be peeved by a salvo of questions that clearly came from a chatbot).

Subscribers read on for the exact prompt she used, and what ChatGPT said back…

Which Two Friends Need This?

If you are here, you are the kind of person who obviously knows two other women who want to join us in this romp. Please help us find other smart ladies and share Aged Intelligence Society with them today.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do because . . .

We are seeing a lot of handraisers and we want to get you connected.

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. So many of you have expressed interest in getting more involved – and hosting your own tables in your own towns (LA, Chicago, Paris, New York, North Carolina, Australia, UK).

Share Aged Intelligence Society

And for those who still want help sherpaing, we want to remind you of two offers:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

Please indulge us for a moment in looking at this rather upsetting image 👆🦶. The foot up close—a kind of alien thing. But also, the shoe. It’s a Chanel confection that recently walked the runway in Biarritz and will run you as much as $1,500 depending on the level of fringe. Notable omission: a sole.

Without getting TOOO meta, it got us thinking about our AI stack—we often feel as though we’re paying for something and only receiving part of what we need for it to properly function.

For the past several months, we have been throwing money at AI software like 13-year-old girls in Sephora: Throw in a Toner! Glitter eyeshadow! Sure, I’ve got $20 — youtakeapplecashright!?

Then, just as we’re mid-flow, getting to an important insight or essential document, we hit a wall: “You reached your limit. Your account will reset on Friday. OR, you could pay more now.” This is not a consumer-friendly experience. There’s no transparency on what tasks are chewing through tokens and how long we might have before we run out. SO, WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY PAYING FOR?

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Two recent rate-limit indignities from this week

This all has to do with how many TOKENS (AI compute) you’re burning through with each request. But do any of you know what tokens cost or how many one has with each plan?? We decided to ask our overlords for help.

First we asked Claude for a moment of reflexivity

Next we asked OpenAI for an explainer on tokens and limits

In the spirit of getting some clarity ourselves so we can deliver it to you, dear reader, we started a list of things we still don’t understand, in no particular order:

• What is a token and how much does it cost?

• How much does a $20/$100/$200/month plan get us? How do we maximize our use of tokens?

• DOES ANYONE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THIS?

• and/or why isn’t anyone actually talking about this?

It’s like filling up at a gas station without knowing how many miles we get per gallon or whether it’ll hit empty half way to our destination!

We could all continue muddling through, but muddling is expensive, as it turns out. And part of our mission in Aged Intelligence Society is to help a sister out. So this week we did a little purge.

Cutting down our increasingly pricy AI stack

In the spirit of spring cleaning, which we need across the board rn, we decided it was time to do an audit of what we were paying for, then put an end to what wasn’t serving us.

Who even remembers all the subscriptions at this point? We needed an AI assist just to remember what we were paying for. Here’s the blow-by-blow:

1. Downloaded credit card and bank statements

2. Dropped them into Claude and requested an itemized list of what we’re paying for and how much it all adds up to (not for the faint of heart 🙈 🙈 🙈).

3. Canceled some very underutilized tools to start saving our shekels for shoes with soles.

   ---

   

Why Anthropic’s latest release, Claude Design, was spared

While it’s still in beta and one of the worst offenders when it comes to token gobbling, Shoshana had a very productive experience designing a presentation with Claude Design this week.

Part of our service is to help you get the best outcomes with the fewest number of turns (or tokens, whatever they are and whatever they cost).

She did hit a usage wall after a few hours, but the tool got her 75% there, and she was able to download the deck to Keynote to refine. The tool will likely get much better, but even in beta she was impressed. This week she’ll run a comparison with other AI presentation tools like Gamma.

Read on (paid subscribers) to hear how she did it…

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

If you’ve taken the survey, thank you! If you haven’t, please do. Why?

Many of you have introduced yourself to us via this form above ❤️👋. You have expressed interest in getting more involved — perhaps hosting your own gathering in Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Washington DC, New York, Austin, North Carolina, Australia, and the UK.

While we’d love to come meet ALL OF YOU, as working women tethered to our families and clients in the Bay Area, we simply can’t sherpa every event. Our vision has always been to open-source the magic anyway, to put the tools in your hands. So today we’re ready to share an actual bonafide DIY playbook.

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Why, you may ask, is gathering IRL so important? Can’t you just give me pointers and some flipping prompts already? Friends, we can and we will, but that’s only 20% of what makes this Society worthy of your attention.

The other 80% is TOGETHERNESS, the muddling through this phase of life in the soft glow of AI. These tools are really just an excuse to arm wrestle a shared set of problems alongside other smart, funny, unassailable women.

To that end, we’ve been talking this over with friends and wonder if we’re not alone:

🙋‍♀️ Raise your hand if you feel like you’re in HOARDING MODE. 🙋‍♀️
We are feeling the need to hoard work, money, and tiny slivers of time that never add up to ENOUGH time.

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We are of TWO MINDS about hoarding mode:

ONE MIND: Oyyyy.

• We hoard because of FOBO (“fear of obsolescence”). Evil media (😜) is warning us that AI will eat our work for breakfast. Are we replaceable? If so, how long do we HAVE? (Months? Years? Has it ALREADY HAPPENED?)

• We also hoard because we live in the land of eternal youth where the value of experience is, well, undervalued, and we fear we will AGE OUT of the workforce. While men looksmaxx and chase immortality (Newsflash: everyone poops and everyone dies), women just want to keep plying their wisdom and skills.

• We hoard because life is a four-dollar-sign reservation on RESY and we have kids in school and mortgages and rent and want to slow down or reinvent ourselves or treat ourselves to that new somethin somethin.

And because we are in hoarding mode, we’re working ourselves into full TILT. When we are out of balance, the pinball machine stops producing dings of joy.

When we follow this line of logic to its darkest continuum, there’s probably some nasty little tumor growing inside us that will prevent us from taking that trip to Japan — once we finally stop working and start living on all those hoarded resources. Or (worse) someone we love will get sick and need care, putting life on indefinite hold. DO YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING?

OTHER MIND: We’ve got this!

If anyone can adapt to a WHOLE NEW WAY OF BEING, it’s middle-aged women!

• We’ve been adapting, shape-shifting, multitasking, and making lemonade from lemons for many a decade.

• If we and our offspring will be co-existing with an omnipotent, unknowable cloud brain, you can be damn sure we’ll come up with a way to reskill ourselves and evolve like the smart little monkeys that we are.

Joining forces as a Society is the first step.

We find it much easier to access our OTHER MIND when we are together, and when we gather around Aged Intelligence Society tables with a lot of cheese, to sort our midlife problems as the SUPER AGENTS of our own lives.

In that spirit, we would love to see more of you host an Aged Intelligence Party of your very own. Find our long-awaited, encyclopedic HOSTING PLAYBOOK below the fold.

Here’s a teaser of what’s inside:

----------

For those who would prefer to have us facilitate, we offer you two options:

• Bespoke AI Workshops for small teams looking to put AI to work at work

• Private AI Salons hosted in homes

Read more

Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

As women of the finest vintage, we are prone to worry about things. And by things we mean—in no particular order—our kids, the planet, the general wellbeing of the free world.

Right now, top of mind on our worry list is whether there will be jobs for our children so that they might build a life and not live in our basements. Two missives gave us energy and hope this week.

• READ THIS: Jodi Kantor’s piece in Sunday NY Times about the forecasted jobpocalype and the importance of craft. “Welcome to my alternate career counseling office. Sit down. Exhale. In here, we are fighting for a working life that means something. Our goal is to both protect you and propel you forward. We’re not going to let your life be directed by hollow conventional wisdom or — God forbid — robots that are not actually thinking at all. We’re establishing your life’s work as truly yours, sustaining you and others.” It’s entirely possible that tears were shed on this passage.

• ICYMI: Reese Witherspoon casually instructed us from her kitchen that “it’s time” to skill up on AI. This post was seen by 5 million people and generated some serious vitriol, which we take to mean. . .friends, we’re on to something. Why does a famous woman talking about women learning a skill strike so much terror and anger into our hearts? We’ll be tracking how Reese makes good on this call to action with the 60 million women who follow her and the Hello Sunshine mediaverse.
  
  PS HIIIII 👋. . .happy to be a resource!

Claude Design is blowing our mfk minds

Part of our role as Aged Intelligencers is to assess the quality, vibe, use cases, and impact of the continuous salvo of AI launches and then come back to you with a hot take on what is actually useful and relevant and what is just piling on more slop. Well, MASSIVE drop last week.

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Below is a screenshot from a private slack where we goss with other AI-pilled women.

The news: Claude unveiled a Design product. It’s already sending electric volts down our spines (and, we imagine, down the spines of everyone at Figma and Adobe).

We wanted to see what it was actually capable of, so Nina grabbed the design assets for her consultancy, Special Projects, and took the tool for a ride.

Before getting into the full details, one super important note: Nina had already hired an extremely talented flesh-and-blood design team, The Beauty Shop, to create those brand assets (color, type, illustrations). This exploration was about what would be possible to spin out from that library of assets. We will always advocate for hiring designers and we believe in original human craft. Full stop.

For those of you who have worked on brands, you know there’s a whole mess of tasks that follow the moment a brand system is set: organizing the assets in a brand book, churning out social media and newsletter headers, creating slide templates.

THIS was what Nina threw over the transom to our French lover. See all of her prompts and outputs in the paid section. TLDR; HOT DAMN, it’s good.

Claude Design’s opening gambit is to gut check with its human on the front end. These questions inspired confidence.

Muzli did a great walkthrough of Claude Design, and had a smart takeaway on competing tools:

“The real winner in this competition is you. More tools that understand design intent. More options for different problems. More pressure on vendors to make design less about tool expertise and more about thinking.”

USE CASE OF THE WEEK: Getting severance $$$ paid in full!

We love to feature your stories whenever possible and we received a brilliant one this week.

The situation: An AIS member was an Interim VP at a large health insurer when they let her go “for cause,” citing expense report issues and a grab bag of other allegations. “For cause” means no severance, no benefits, nada.

The process: She used a robust set of prompts, a specific documentation uploading strategy, and a cadence of doing her own work before bringing it to a trusted employment lawyer. PS it helps to have this stuff come from someone who is not you.

The result: The company came back in record time with a severance offer she felt was more than fair. Case closed.

If you’d like to continue reading, upgrade to paid—we promise HIGH VALUE!

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Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you and be of excellent service. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

It’s getting weird out there.

AI-generated Presidential memes that make us spit out our coffee are certainly contributing to the relentless feeling of overload. Add to that April being the cruelest month (happy tax day to those of you who celebrate.) If you’re still working through taxes (no shame), the good news is that for the first time in our lives, we have help. See the AI accounting resources from previous issues below.

And because you may not remember that we wrote about how to use AI to do your taxes, along with many other use cases, we have decided to offer ye olde recap of the 40+ use cases we’ve shared over the past months.

How did we keep track? WE DIDN’T. Claude Cowork gamely combed through every post we’ve published, categorized the solutions by type, then attached links to each associated edition. (This is precisely the kind of annoying labor we love to outsource).

Having all these problem-solvers, you may suffer the illusion that we have our shit together. That our sparkle-emoji AI wands make fast work of every niggly problem.

We are here to tell you that this very morning, despite having multiple Slack and text reminder from Nina the day before that we were to meet at a different co-working spot, Shoshana showed up—30 minutes late—at their usual meeting place like a lost lamb. Meanwhile, Nina left her wallet in a hotel safe over the weekend and has been waiting five days to get it back as it tiptoes the 75 miles home via FedEx. (FedEx has apparently rethought its ASAP product strategy and no one told us.)

So, yeah. While we have abundant tools to help us navigate the abundant labor of midlife, AI tools are still dumbsmart (h/t Kevin Kelly and his must-read Substack).

AND YET: we will not stop chasing the flow-state, the ease, and the general having-our-shit togetherness. Which leads us to. . .

40 non-obvious use cases for AI that we’ve written about since our inception. These are ways we (and you) have leveraged various tools for help with the stuff of middle-age. We dare you to find anything in here that vaguely resembles optimizing our health or productivity or doing any manner of maxxing.

Those with paid subs can click through and see all the prompts. And, at the bottom of this edition and all future ones, you’ll get ACCESS TO FREE TOOLS and dibs on upcoming events in Los Angeles, NY, and the East Bay.

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The 40 highly effective AI problem-solvers we’ve shared thus far:

Finance & Legal (8) — Insurance disputes, contract negotiation, tax organization, subscription audits, homeowners’ insurance savings, ghostwriting contracts, rewards tracking, vibe-coding a CFO app.

Creative & Content (5) — AI video generation (Sora, Veo 2), image generation, solstice writing, map creation, anti-slop writing craft.

Travel & Navigation (4) — parking via Gemini + Maps, sailing trip planning with Claude, Central Coast dining/hotel recs, spring break planning.

Personal Growth & Reflection (4) — the “10 deep questions” prompt, processing frustrating emails, AI as thought partner, New Year’s life-audit prompts.

Health & Wellness (3) — kitten emergency triage, food safety checking, sleep routine design from a recorded therapist session.

Tool Reviews & Stacks (4) — the approval matrix, personal stack design, tool discovery, free tool bundle curation.

Productivity & Admin (4) — Google CC morning briefing, delegating “chief officer” roles, AI chief of staff agents, retreat planning.

Home & Household (3) — Christmas light calculations, light bulb ID from photos, wrangling teens.

Sports & Fitness (2) — tennis serve video analysis, ski coaching from uploaded footage.

Business & Work (3) — NotebookLM interview prep, AI workshops/salons, Claude Code.

NEW TOOLS WE’RE TRYING

• Headshot Photo. A client recommended this one and we’re trying it out. You upload a few selfies, identify your style, and for $34, get 40 headshots.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you so we can show up for you and get you connected with each other. Please take this 2-minute survey to help us help you.

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Hello friends, new and OLD (the way we like it)!

Our community is growing fast! If you are new to this Substack, we want to learn a bit about you so we can show up for you and get you connected with each other. Please take t…

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