There is a lot of noise around the purchase of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Beyond the rumours and chatter about why Mark Walter is selling, who is the money behind Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, and what the deal means for sporting team valuations generally, I am wondering what it might mean for the NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement, which, while not expiring until 2030, the players can opt out of in 2028.

Players participate in the economics of the league, sharing in revenue from media rights, ticket sales, sponsorship, licensing and merchandise, and other related streams. But they don't share in the growth in value of the teams they help make valuable. And that feels like a future pressure point in the relationship between players and owners.

The league will say, and not without reason, that caps, tax thresholds, and aprons protect competitive balance. Nobody wants an NBA version of the Los Angeles Dodgers, also owned, at least for now, by Mark Walter, where the deepest pockets can simply keep adding the best players. But if the system limits what stars can earn, and in some cases, like with Victor Wembanyama and Jalen Brunson, nudges them into taking less to hold a team together, while owners get the savings as well as the full benefit when franchise values spike, then the economics start to look a little uneven. Not illegal, and not even unfair under current rules, but uneven.

I wonder whether franchise appreciation has now become so significant that the NBPA will eventually look to bring some part of it into the economic bargain. I don't know if that means players will push for actual team equity. That feels complicated. But some kind of player participation when teams are sold or when there is some major transaction or liquidity event feels at least reasonable, even inevitable, to be put on the table.

Maybe I'm missing something, and I'm ready to be challenged on it. But if players are central to value creation, then it's not crazy to ask why they're cut out when that value is ultimately realised.

Neil Jacobs, who spent fourteen years at Four Seasons, four at Starwood Capital and thirteen running Six Senses, recently described the difference between hospitality operators and private equity:

“Hotel people are fundamentally caregivers. We spend our lives looking after people. PE guys don’t care about stuff like that.”

It reminded me of a conversation with the managing partner of a private equity group that had overseen the acquisition and merger of two of Australia’s largest restaurant groups, combining an acclaimed fine dining operator with one of the country’s biggest mass market hospitality businesses. It was shortly after the pandemic and my own return to Australia following seven years at Noma. Restaurants were reopening, and I asked whether he was still in love with them. Without looking up from his phone, he said, “I don’t think I was ever in love with restaurants.”

It told me everything. He had never loved restaurants, and I’m not sure he ever really understood them. Or perhaps he understood them only as something to optimise, strip of cost, package and flip.

Their thesis itself was always difficult to understand. It combined two very different groups across cuisines, markets and price points, from casual through to fine dining, without any obvious reason they belonged together. Other than in fast food, portfolio strategies like that have rarely worked at scale in restaurants and hospitality. In Australia, the only one that readily comes to mind is Merivale, and that was built from the ground up over decades. The private equity firm’s investment would eventually fail, described by the country’s leading broadsheet as “disastrous”, with the partner leaving and ownership eventually passing to its primary lender.

Restaurants don’t make sense. They rely on people doing more than the numbers will ever justify, often for very little return, because they care about feeding people and looking after them. Guests see the price of the meal, but rarely the economics behind it. If people saw the balance sheet of a restaurant they loved, most would probably tell the owner to do something else.

That is the irrational part private equity struggles with.

It is also why we love restaurants.

When a studio turns a piece of internet culture into a successful film, what exactly has it acquired?

That is the question raised in a recent article in The State of Brand, which argues that the success of Backrooms, the horror film directed by Kane Parsons and released by A24, has broken Hollywood’s traditional approach to intellectual property. Its headline makes the claim plainly: “Backrooms Made $370 Million Because Nobody Owns It.”

The article was prompted by a copyright complaint submitted to the online marketplace Redbubble on behalf of A24, which resulted in the removal of an artist’s Backrooms-inspired wallpaper design. Parsons responded directly, writing, “I’m looking into this. Should not be happening.” A24 later withdrew the claim and said it did not own the yellow wallpaper, the original post or the community works that followed. “Backrooms is one part of an infinitely bigger ecosystem,” the studio said, adding that other creators “have every right to tell their own version of the story.”

Parsons was right to intervene, and A24 was right to reverse the decision. But neither action supports the article’s broader conclusion. The Backrooms phenomenon does not show that ownership no longer matters. It shows why media companies need to distinguish between owning an adaptation and trying to own the culture from which an idea emerged.

To understand why that matters, it probably helps to begin with how Backrooms came into being, because its origins are as fragmented as what has grown around it.

For those who have not been paying attention, the Backrooms (as opposed to Backrooms, the movie) began seven years ago when an anonymous user posted a photograph of an empty, yellow-lit interior to 4chan as part of a thread seeking images that felt unsettling. Another anonymous user responded with a short piece of fiction about accidentally slipping out of reality and finding yourself trapped in an endless maze of damp carpet, fluorescent lights and segmented rooms. The image and description spread, and people began adding their own levels, creatures, rules and stories. Parsons was one of them. His 2022 short film and the series that followed gave the idea a particular mythology, visual language and narrative structure, eventually leading A24 to finance a feature adaptation. Produced for a reported US$10 million, the film has since grossed more than US$384 million worldwide.

Unlike a film adapted from a book, graphic novel, toy, video game or other clearly defined piece of intellectual property, there was never one authorised version of Backrooms waiting to be acquired. There was a broad premise embraced by a community and surrounded by many separate creative works. Those individual works matter when people declare the whole thing ownerless. The idea of an endless liminal space is one thing. Parsons’ short film, other artists’ illustrations and A24’s feature film are something else. Each creator can have a legitimate claim over what they contributed without being able to claim the whole territory.

(As an aside, there is some irony in writing this while acting for a client and explaining to a rights holder that having their intellectual property featured in a work does not automatically entitle them to ownership of the work itself. But that is a subject for another conversation)

This does not require a lengthy legal argument, and it is not entirely different from the way studios have always acquired adaptation rights. Warner Bros did not acquire Harry Potter when it made the films. It acquired the right to adapt the novels for film and television, along with a range of associated rights connected to those adaptations. The books and underlying literary work remained J.K. Rowling’s. The difference with Backrooms is that there was no single author, clearly defined work or rights holder sitting at the centre of the property. A24 should be able to protect the film it financed, including its footage, performances, music, new characters and distinctive production elements, just as Warner Bros can protect what it created for its Harry Potter adaptations. What it should not be able to do is extend that ownership across the broader premise and culture that existed before they became involved.

To be fair, the article later makes much the same distinction, arguing that A24 should own its version rather than the wider world and describing the studio’s corrected position as the right one. On that point, there is little disagreement. The difference is in what follows. Accepting that A24 does not own the broader culture around Backrooms is not the same as concluding that ownership matters less, or that the film succeeded because nobody owns the underlying world.

That distinction is especially important now because the argument that media’s traditional “gatekeepers" should exercise less control is increasingly becoming entangled with a different proposition: that creative ownership itself is outdated, obstructive or contrary to the public interest. Studios, publishers and record labels have often used their position unfairly, and creators have good reason to question systems that concentrated rights and revenues in the hands of a small number of companies. But reducing the power of an intermediary is not the same as reducing the rights of the person who made the work.

The failure of studios, publishers and labels to use their power fairly is an argument for changing how that power is exercised. It is not an argument that the work itself should cease to have an owner. Copyright can protect a large company, but it also protects the individual creator negotiating with one. For many writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and, increasingly, creators, ownership is not an expression of institutional power. It is one of the few forms of leverage they have.

That also matters against the backdrop of generative AI, where technology companies have built products using vast quantities of creative work without consent, credit or compensation. Much of the argument in defence of that use rests on the idea that creative material, once made publicly available, becomes more like raw input than authored work. The language is different, but the assumption is just the same: that because the work can be accessed, it can be used; that corporate muscle removes the need for consent; and that technological capability and creative possibility are justification enough.

As with Napster’s theft of music, or Google and Meta’s use of news and journalism to fuel their own products and algorithms, the creative industries have not received anything close to the public support and solidarity that might be expected if another sector’s work were taken and repurposed at comparable scale. Perhaps that is because audiences experience creative work as culture. Books, films, television shows and songs can feel as though they belong to us once they enter our lives, even though their continued creation depends on the people who make them being able to earn a living from their work. This is why the article’s celebration of an ownerless creative world needs scrutiny.

That same scrutiny should also apply when people talk about the decline of the old media and entertainment system while showing little concern about what will take its place. For all the criticism directed at studios, publishers and record labels, some of it mistaken, those companies still commission work, pay advances and royalties, finance production, support development and accept much of the commercial risk. The largest technology platforms and AI companies increasingly want the benefit of creative work without taking on any of those responsibilities. They are not removing the gate so much as moving it, while arguing that much of what sits behind it should be available to them for free.

To be clear, none of this weakens the case for allowing many versions of the Backrooms to coexist. It simply makes the specifics more important. A broad idea should not become the permanent property of the company that produces its most successful adaptation. Nor should the works created around that idea lose their claims to ownership simply because they emerged outside the traditional model or industry. Ownership should attach to the work that was made, not expand to cover an entire culture, an aesthetic or a shared imagination.

As noted earlier, the claim that Backrooms made $370 million because nobody owns it is also too convenient.

Of course, the open nature of the property contributed to its success. By the time the film arrived, years of forum discussions and fan-created mythology had introduced the idea to people around the world and built an entire community around it. That community established the language of the world, debated what belonged in it and developed the fandom that would ordinarily need to be built through marketing and promotion before release. But the film did not succeed simply because of that. It also succeeded because Parsons had made a version people cared about, because producers recognised his talent, because a company was prepared to finance a feature, and because the film was marketed and distributed at a scale few independent creators could achieve on their own. A community can create awareness and interest, but it does not follow that every adaptation will satisfy either.

Parsons has spoken about approaching the film with the knowledge that audiences would examine its smallest creative decisions and produce “a billion theory videos” around them. He wanted the work to withstand that attention. That focus and dedication are why his version became the one A24 chose to back.

Despite the article’s suggestion, the film’s success does not prove that studios have become unnecessary. It simply shows that the point at which they enter the process, and the role they play once they do, is changing.

The idea that fans are active participants in culture rather than passive consumers has shaped media discussion for decades, and the evidence for it is now well established. The internet and social media have made that participation more visible, but the underlying behaviour is not new. What has changed is that these activities can now build their own audiences and commercial value, often before a traditional media company becomes involved. In some cases, as with Backrooms, the audience has already established the world, developed its creative conventions and identified the people best placed to take it forward.

None of this makes films, shows or the companies behind them irrelevant, but the path towards them has changed, particularly for younger audiences who often first encounter their work through clips and social media. The cultural challenge for media companies is not that people have stopped caring about professionally produced entertainment. It is that the industry no longer controls the full sequence through which culture and cultural value are created.

Decisions about financing, production and distribution still sit with media companies. But by the time those decisions are made, audiences may already have decided that an idea matters, established what it means and developed expectations about who should be allowed to participate in it.

That should change how a company behaves when it enters one of these communities. It should begin with an understanding of what existed before it arrived, what has been created by whom, and which parts of the culture need to remain open for the property to retain the energy that made it attractive in the first place. A studio that begins issuing broad takedown notices may not only alienate the audience. It may damage the creative system on which the property depends.

It is worth noting that there is no evidence A24 deliberately set out to control the wider Backrooms culture. The complaint may have been automated, mistaken or submitted by an authorised third party, and the company corrected it quickly once Parsons became involved. But the incident still shows how easily rights-enforcement systems can overreach.

The article proposes “stewardship over ownership” as the answer. Stewardship matters, but ownership still does too. Films are expensive to make, and the companies financing them need to know what they can distribute, license and sell. Creators also need to be able to protect what they have made. A collaborative creative culture does not remove that need or diminish the value of the work that has been funded, developed and produced. It simply requires the boundaries to be drawn more carefully.

That becomes more difficult when people start describing fandom as a “co-production engine,” with every remix a “free marketing impression” and every community a source of storylines, talent and audience insight. There is an obvious commercial appeal in that, but building alongside a community cannot mean arriving after the creative work and audience development have already happened, taking what appears useful and calling it collaboration. It also cannot be used as an excuse for others to copy and exploit the specific work that a studio has paid to make,

Backrooms also should not be treated as a model for every franchise. Something that emerged anonymously online is not the same as adapting a novel by an identifiable author or building from a licensed character. Different kinds of intellectual property will continue to require different kinds of control.

The article is also too quick to suggest that generative technology will make “unusual talent” less important, suggesting “the next Parsons will not need the unusual part”. Cheaper tools may make more creation possible for more people, but they do not make talent less important. Parsons himself has said that, if he could, he would make generative AI disappear. What distinguished him was never simply access to the tools.

To be clear, I am not a lawyer, but I have spent enough of my career working in and around media and entertainment, alongside some of the best lawyers in the industry, to know that disputes have a habit of becoming more complicated once money is involved. If reports of studio staff trawling Reddit and YouTube for the next idea are to be believed, those companies will need to understand what they can own, what they need to license and where they need to participate without attempting to control.

A24 acquired the right to make Backrooms. It did not acquire everything that made Backrooms possible.

Most major sports have been built around the idea that the live game sits at the centre of fandom. Broadcast rights sell access to it, sponsorship sells association with it, and tickets, memberships and merchandise depend on loyalty to the team or competition around it. But for a growing share of younger fans, neither the full game nor the team holds that place.

Recent research suggests younger sports fans are reshaping how sport is consumed and “increasingly turning to highlights, clips and social media to follow the games they care about, as fragmented sports streaming changes how audiences consume live sport”. The report found that 51% of people aged 25 to 34, and 47% of those aged 18 to 24, said highlights were replacing live games for them.

Fans are still watching, talking and spending. But for many, the clips, podcasts and social accounts that once sat around the game are becoming enough on their own.

At the same time, live rights have never been more expensive. The NBA’s agreements with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon are worth roughly US$76 billion over eleven years. The NFL’s current packages are worth more than US$110 billion, while Paramount is paying more than US$1 billion a year for the UFC. The same bet is being made in Australia. This month, the NRL announced a seven-year agreement with Nine, Foxtel and Sky NZ worth A$5.3 billion, the largest media deal in Australian sporting history, covering the seasons from 2028 to 2034.

There is good reason to keep paying. Live sport remains one of the few things that can gather a large audience at a fixed time, which gives broadcasters something valuable to sell to advertisers and streaming platforms a way to win and hold subscribers. The people signing these deals have seen the same changes in fan behaviour. The harder question is whether the economics will hold for the full life of the agreements. Each one assumes that the live game will remain central to fandom and that enough people will keep paying for access to it, even as subscriptions multiply and shorter forms of coverage become enough for some fans. The shift may not show up in next season’s ratings, but it matters across a contract that runs to 2034.

The same feeds that are changing how younger fans watch are also changing how they follow. WSC Sports found that 31% of Gen Z audiences felt more connected to an individual athlete, against 27% who felt closer to a team. And while the gap is small, it cuts against the way the business has traditionally worked. As Ashley Hover of the Premier League put it: “The younger the fan, the more they are into players. The mind-shift has already happened.”

The World Cup also showed how quickly that attachment can form. Erling Haaland gained more than 31 million Instagram followers during the five-week tournament. Vozinha, the Cabo Verde goalkeeper, started the tournament with around 50,000 followers and finished with more than 29 million. Nothing a club does moves at that speed. It benefits and shares in the attention while the player is there, but much of that audience has attached itself to the player and will go with them.

Athletes are turning that attention into media businesses of their own. LeBron James co-founded SpringHill, a studio producing film, television and digital content. Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart launched The Roommates Show, while Cristiano Ronaldo’s YouTube channel gained close to 20 million subscribers in its first day. Deloitte found that social media users follow almost twice as many creators as brands, which helps explain why athlete-led content now carries so much weight over anything a team produces. The athlete is the intellectual property.

American Express even built a product around exactly this. Under its NBA Jersey Assurance program, cardholders can replace a jersey if the player whose name is on it is traded or signs elsewhere within a year of purchase. They can choose the same player’s jersey from their new team or one belonging to a different player on the original team. The program is designed for a fan who may follow the player or stay with the team, and that choice matters well beyond jersey sales. The strength of a club’s relationship with its fans helps set the value of its commercial rights. But if part of that relationship can vanish in a trade window, so too can the value.

Fantasy sport, video games and betting contribute to and reinforce both shifts by putting individual athletes at the centre of each. A fantasy roster draws from clubs across a league, NBA 2K’s MyTEAM lets users assemble a lineup of favourite players, and betting breaks the match into points lines, player props and individual performances. These products can deepen engagement considerably. Oliver Wyman found that 54% of Gen Z said fantasy increased their engagement with sport. However, each fan’s engagement is spread across their personal collection of players and outcomes from several games. They can follow a fantasy score live, see a prop bet settled in minutes and catch the decisive moments in clips without watching any match in full. Increasingly, this has become a complete experience for fans who will not spend two hours with one team or broadcast.

The leagues understand this and are building around it. Major League Baseball’s Creator Class brings online creators to its biggest events, while NBCUniversal’s Creator Collective gave YouTubers and other social creators access to the athlete village at the last Winter Olympics. Leagues and clubs are also giving athletes more support to make their own content, on the reasonable assumption that some of the attention will flow back to the sport. And much of it does. Athlete and creator content can introduce new audiences to the game, give casual fans a reason to return and offer existing supporters more ways in. But some of it will stay with the player, the creator or the platform. A good clip may lead someone to the next match, but it may also be all they wanted. No one can yet say which outcome will dominate over the life of the current rights deals, and the long-term value of those broadcast, sponsorship, and merchandise deals depends heavily on the answer.

Broadcast negotiations make the tension easiest to see, but it runs through the whole business. The commercial model assumes that the league or club owns the relationship with the fan. Clubs are responding by putting individual players at the centre of their own content, which makes sense. It gives fans what they want and keeps the club in the conversation. But it can also accelerate the very shift it is meant to manage, growing the player's audience faster than their own.

The live event and the team are not going anywhere, and both will keep mattering. They just cannot be assumed to sit at the centre of every fan’s relationship with sport. For decades, the industry has known how to make money from a fan who watches the game and follows the team. It is still working out what an audience is worth when the attention is there, and the loyalty sits somewhere else.

Australian television keeps finding new ways to commission the same shows.

Last week, broadcaster Seven announced that it had picked up I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! for 2027, almost immediately after Ten announced it was “resting” the show. And yesterday, Ten announced the return of Australian Ninja Warrior, only three years after the format was dropped by Nine.

It turns out the hottest new format in Australian television is the one that another network dropped.

What was once an isolated bit of network opportunism has become a commissioning strategy in its own right: take an ageing format, give it a polish and a new network address. The Voice spent nine seasons on Nine before moving to Seven. Idol was dropped by Ten and eventually revived by Seven. Dancing with the Stars went Seven–Ten–Seven. Australian Survivor has appeared on Nine, Seven and Ten. And Big Brother has now completed the full commercial loop: Ten to Nine to Seven and back to Ten.

Australian primetime is well and truly in its recycling phase.

There are, of course, sound commercial reasons to lean on proven formats. And to be fair, it isn’t unique to television. Hollywood has spent years reviving, rebooting and remaking familiar properties, often to diminishing returns (looking at you, Masters of the Universe). Many would say this commissioning conservatism is simply risk management by broadcasters already under pressure from softening advertising markets, audiences fragmenting across other platforms and media, and sports rights soaking up ever larger chunks of programming budgets.

In such a climate, recognisable titles are considered more reliable. They come with built-in awareness and are easier to promote, easier to sell to advertisers and easier to explain to audiences. In a business with so little certainty, established brands offer at least the appearance of it.

But when does a risk-management strategy simply become a risk, especially when broadcasters keep returning to the same small pool of familiar bets, often recycling them only months after another network has already decided that the numbers, costs or strategy no longer stack up?

The cumulative effect is a television landscape that feels increasingly familiar, and that familiarity is arriving at exactly the wrong moment.

Viewers are no longer choosing simply between Seven, Nine and Ten. They are choosing between free-to-air television and everything else: streamers, YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, gaming and an almost limitless supply of on-demand entertainment. The competition is no longer simply for ratings. It is for time and attention. If broadcasters respond to that competition by making their schedules feel increasingly familiar, they may be giving audiences fewer reasons to stay. The risk-management strategy becomes a retention problem. And that is the deeper concern.

When every commission feels high-stakes, caution is understandable. But caution can quickly become self-reinforcing: the more money that flows towards known properties, returning franchises and rebooted formats, the less room there is to develop a new generation of ideas. Fewer new shows mean fewer chances to discover what audiences might respond to next. And when new hits fail to emerge, audiences drift elsewhere, leaving broadcasters even more desperate to hold on to those who remain, and even more inclined to retreat to what they perceive as safe bets, no matter how old those bets may be.

When that happens, the consequences extend beyond the programs themselves. They also reach into the production sector.

To be clear, a revived format is still local production. It employs crews, producers, editors and talent, and generates real economic activity. That should not be dismissed. Nor is this a criticism of the production companies continuing to sell broadcasters the formats they want. Why wouldn’t they? They have shareholders to report to, employees to look after, and businesses to sustain. They are responding to the market in front of them, even if all of them would welcome more opportunities to create and develop something new. But a busy production sector is not necessarily the same as a vibrant one. When commissioning keeps circling through the same established franchises, there are fewer opportunities for companies of all sizes to develop ideas, test formats, and build the next generation of programs.

The issue is not where those companies come from, or whether they are majors or independents. It is whether the industry has enough space to create, launch and grow something new. That distinction matters at a time when streamers have not yet become the broad and consistent engine of local production many hoped they would be, or that the industry increasingly needs them to become. Despite drawing significant audiences and subscription revenue from the Australian market, with much of that value flowing offshore, they are still not commissioning local work at the scale or breadth required to fill the gap.

The pressure, therefore, falls across the entire system. Commercial broadcasters are commissioning cautiously, streamers are investing selectively, and production companies across the sector are competing for fewer opportunities to develop and launch new work. The lack of experimentation becomes more than a programming problem. It becomes a question about the future of the industry itself.

None of this is to say original ideas do not exist. There are exceptions. The Floor (Talpa Studios) showed that audiences will still embrace a new format. The Summit (Endemol Shine Australia), developed and commissioned here before being sold internationally, showed that local broadcasters and producers can still create formats with global potential.

What is more striking, however, is where the willingness to experiment increasingly appears to sit.

The ABC has become one of the few broadcasters prepared to regularly commission programs that feel genuinely different. Not every format is Australian-created, and not every experiment succeeds, but that is not the point. Through shows such as The Assembly (Helium Pictures) and The Piano (Eureka/Fremantle), along with a broader slate of factual, entertainment and hybrid ideas, the public broadcaster increasingly looks like the industry’s creative risk-taker, while the commercial networks whose survival depends on attracting mass audiences keep circling the same ageing franchises.

Why is the public broadcaster increasingly becoming the place where less conventional programming ideas are tested? Part of the answer is structural. The ABC has a different mandate. It does not need every program to deliver an advertiser-friendly mass audience, and it has more room to define success through public value, distinctiveness and underserved audiences. Commercial networks do not have that luxury. Their decisions must survive more immediate financial scrutiny.

But that only makes the long-term question more urgent. If commercial broadcasters cannot afford to take creative risks, and global streamers are not yet investing broadly or consistently enough to fill the gap, who develops the programs, companies and intellectual property that might sustain the Australian industry in five or ten years?

Every long-running hit that now feels safe — MasterChef Australia, The Block, MAFS — was once an untested bet. At some point, somebody backed each of them before there was an audience, a ratings history or a proven local franchise to point to. Every format that now feels like a safe bet was once the risky one.

That is how franchises are created. It is also how production companies grow, creative teams develop, and intellectual property is built. There will always be a place for established formats. Familiarity has value. Brands matter. A well-executed revival can still become a genuine hit.

The issue is balance.

A healthy television ecosystem needs proven franchises, returning favourites and genuine new bets. It needs room for ideas that may not arrive with immediate recognition but could become the formats every network wants five years from now. New ideas need time to find an audience, even in a market where time itself may be running out.

It also needs enough breadth of commissioning for different companies to grow, enough experimentation for new talent to emerge and enough Australian-owned ideas for the industry to create value rather than simply execute somebody else’s. Television cannot renew itself solely by cycling through yesterday’s programs between networks. Nor can broadcasters expect audiences to rediscover the habit of free-to-air viewing if schedules increasingly feel like variations on things they have already seen.

Reheating an established format may protect next year’s schedule. But if it comes at the expense of creating what follows, it may also weaken the medium’s future and narrow the industry that must produce it.

At some point, it becomes hard to tell whether the industry is managing risk or simply refusing to take one. And when that happens, the only thing getting greenlit in Australian television is someone else’s cancellation.

I have never trusted AI companies when they call for regulation, and not because regulation is a bad idea. Actually, the opposite.

The thought resurfaced while watching Max Tegmark, the MIT physicist, tell The Economist that artificial intelligence is less regulated than a sandwich shop. It is a good line, and an absurd state of affairs: detailed rules govern how a lunch counter operates, while far fewer directly govern a technology whose own leaders warn could upend economies, remake labour markets and even threaten our collective survival.

If those things are not a strong case for regulation, then I am not sure what is.

But it also raises a more immediate problem. Governments move slowly, and in certain countries, the companies waiting to be regulated are also busy sidling up to the people who would write the rules.

So what should those companies do in the meantime?

Regulation matters because the public should not have to rely on corporate judgment alone. But many of the choices now being handed to governments require no new laws. A company that believes a model is too dangerous to release can delay it. One that says content owners and artists “need to benefit” from AI can negotiate licences. It can publish more about how its systems are trained and evaluated, and make independent testing a condition of release.

None of these things needs legislation. Even so, it would not be enough.

Markets rarely reward restraint. Slowing down lets competitors catch up. Licensing costs more than taking the material and litigating later. Transparency exposes weaknesses rivals can exploit. Those pressures are precisely why standards need to be enforceable. But they do not excuse companies in the meantime.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, made the point in a New York Times essay titled “Don’t Let A.I. Companies off the Hook.” Much of what we know about frontier models is disclosed voluntarily, he wrote, and as they grow more powerful, “corporate incentives to provide this level of transparency might change.” He is right. Those incentives are already at work, shaping which models are released, what gets disclosed and how the technology is used.

Tristan Harris, the former Google design ethicist best known to many from The Social Dilemma, puts it plainly: “When we invent a new technology, we uncover a new class of responsibility.” Companies do not need to wait for legislation to recognise the responsibility created by what they build.

Which brings me to Sam Altman.

Before the United States Senate in 2023, Altman warned that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” and added that companies bear their own responsibility “no matter what Congress does.” Less than a year later, OpenAI disbanded the Superalignment team it had established to address risks it said could include human extinction. If the stakes are really that high, the decision is hard to explain away. Whether Altman is sincere is impossible to know. For what it is worth, I do not believe he is. But sincerity is almost beside the point. His warnings have made him more important to the same governments expected to regulate him, even as OpenAI races to stay in front. The more dangerous the technology is said to be, the more indispensable its builders appear.

Regulation can also serve the companies already ahead. The largest firms can absorb complex rules more easily than smaller rivals, so measures intended to make AI safer may also protect the incumbents. Governments still need their expertise, but expertise is not neutrality. These companies have a considerable stake in the rules they help write. The absence of regulation gives them more room to choose, not less responsibility for the choices. Legal uncertainty does not stop them from seeking permission; it simply lets them argue that they should not have to.

Tegmark is right that it is strange for a sandwich shop to face clearer rules than the businesses building the most consequential technology of the age. Governments should correct that, and quickly. But calling for rules cannot become an alibi for everything done before they arrive, and a willingness to be regulated is not evidence of responsibility when the conduct points elsewhere.

Governments must own the delay.

The companies own the choices they make during it.

Charli D’Amelio was fifteen when a dance video made her the most followed person on TikTok. She now has over 200 million followers and subscribers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. She is twenty-two now, and this month, answering questions from fans, she said something that ought to have registered more widely than it did.

Her mental health, she said, “keeps declining” as she adjusts to adult responsibilities without mentors or much in the way of guidance. Then: “The age keeps going up, but the number of therapy sessions keeps going up too.”

Hers is the job most young people now say they want. Morning Consult found that 57% of Gen Z would become an influencer given the chance, a number that has barely moved since 2019. D’Amelio reached the summit of that ambition faster and higher than almost anyone. This is her report from the top.

The age at which she got there matters too. D’Amelio did not become famous after she had worked out who she was. She became famous while she was still working it out.

Many of the biggest creators begin in their teens or early twenties, when identity, independence and self-worth are still being formed. Most young people get to test versions of themselves in relative privacy. Creators do it in public, with an audience and an algorithm scoring the result.

I have been having versions of this conversation with clients and partners for months.

The creator economy talks about itself almost entirely through market-size headlines, somewhere between $250 billion and half a trillion, depending on who is counting and what they include. Then there are the homegrown millionaires and billionaires, and the kid who started filming in a bedroom and now runs a real business.

All of it is true and worth celebrating. And creators have, of course, signed up for this. It is a life they have chosen.

But “you chose this” cannot be the answer to every consequence of the work. Most signed up to make things, build an audience and perhaps a business. They also found themselves in a workplace with no walls, no fixed hours, no off-season and almost none of the protections available to other kinds of talent.

It is also a life we almost always talk about through the creators who have crossed over into the mainstream: Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, Charli D’Amelio and Emma Chamberlain, with their enormous audiences, expanding businesses and bank balances.

Donaldson has spoken about periods when the pressure left him in tears. “If my mental health was a priority, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am,” he said last year. It is a fairly bleak admission from the most successful creator in the world. Not that the work became healthier once he made it, but that being willing to put his mental health second may be part of how he made it.

Yet for every creator who becomes a household name, there are hundreds of thousands of others making content every day, trying to build an audience and make the economics work, without ever breaking through, let alone reaching the point where any of it looks glamorous.

The trade-off gets far less attention.

Start with the structural difference. Actors finish a shoot and go home. Musicians come off tour. Athletes get an off-season. However blurred the line between the work and the person, it exists, and it can be defended. Creators have no real equivalent because the creator is the product. Their life is the content, whether lived authentically or through a persona built for the camera and now requiring constant maintenance. Stepping away does not pause the business. It starves it.

Did nobody watch The Truman Show?

Nor is there much of a safety net when things go wrong. There is no HR department or union, and often no sick leave or maternity leave in any meaningful sense.

Creators are in a working relationship with the platforms, but they are not employed by them. The platforms can determine their reach, income and workload while carrying almost none of the obligations of an employer.

One creator interviewed by The Guardian said three months was the longest maternity break she had seen in the industry. The shortest was three days.

As another creator told the newspaper: “You can’t pause the internet.”

The system they are feeding is not patient either. Algorithms change without notice or explanation. AI tools are trained on creators’ own work and increasingly deployed against them. Audiences have more content and more distractions available than at any point in history, and loyalty to match.

Then there is the connection itself, the thing that makes creators valuable in the first place.

Direct access to an audience is the real advantage creators hold over almost every other kind of talent. It also means that every measure of success and failure is visible, all the time. Views, watch time, likes, follows and comments, both kind and cruel.

As a feedback loop for optimising content, it is unmatched. The problem is when the same feedback loop starts shaping how someone values themselves.

The research, still thin, points the same way. A study late last year by Creators 4 Mental Health and Lupiani Insights & Strategies found that 65% of creators obsess over content performance and 58% feel their self-worth declines when content underperforms. 43% said the work left them feeling isolated, despite being connected to an audience all day. One in ten reported suicidal thoughts related to their work, roughly double the rate of the broader American population.

The study also found that those who had been creating for five years or more reported the highest levels of burnout, anxiety over performance and financial instability. D’Amelio has been doing it for seven years, almost a third of her life.

Amanda Yarnell, who runs the Centre for Health Communication at Harvard’s Chan School, described the creator economy as being in a mental health crisis.

“The relentless combination of financial instability, algorithm-driven performance tracking, and the pressure to produce continuous, engaging content pushes creators into extreme states of isolation and exhaustion,” she said.

There is also a reason creators say so little about any of this.

Cornell researchers Brooke Erin Duffy and Rosie Nguyen published a study this month in New Media & Society on why creator burnout so often goes unsaid. They found that the work is framed as a dream job, creators feel indebted to the platforms and audiences they depend on, and speaking up risks backlash from both.

One fear came up repeatedly in their interviews: that taking a break would be punished by the algorithm. And when burnout follows, the problem is handed back to the individual to solve. Post less. Set boundaries. Take a break. Practise self-care.

All sensible advice, though none of it changes the platform conditions, creating the pressure in the first place.

So, the people best placed to describe the problem have every incentive to keep quiet about it. That is why D’Amelio talking openly about therapy sessions matters.

My own vantage is narrower but consistent.

I have clients who have built impressive businesses from what they created online, and clients who have built equally impressive businesses with no social presence at all. And I have clients in between, trying to build an audience without letting it decide how they value themselves or what they make.

That last group has the hardest brief because opting out keeps getting more expensive. A following is now part of the commercial equation almost everywhere. No audience can mean no brand deal, no publishing deal and no signing. I wrote about this earlier in the week.

In an attention economy, no attention makes for a harder path. Not an impossible one, but harder. And the brands doing the buying trade their interest in who is in, who is out and who can move the needle, until someone else can move it further.

To be clear, brands did not create all these conditions, but they are not passive in them either. They reward constant visibility, relentless output and the ability to remain relevant in real time. If they want access to the trust creators have built with their audiences, perhaps they also have some responsibility for the conditions under which that trust is produced. At the very least, they should stop treating the person behind the audience as an endlessly renewable media asset. It also means valuing the creative talent, respecting the work and recognising that “collaboration” has too often become the word used when a brand does not want to say “unpaid”.

None of this is new. Fame has always carried a price, and popularity has always been a market. What social media changed is the scale, the age of entry and the ability to clock off.

And still, we count the value of the sector constantly, in ever larger numbers, and rarely ask what it costs the people producing it.

recently wrote about trying to get a cookbook published. She and her partner, Jason Botterill, of restaurant TAROCCO in Berkeley, had spent the better part of a year developing the concept, drawing on four decades of combined restaurant experience. This wasn’t going to be a traditional restaurant cookbook, which they felt was “too boring”. It was a lifestyle cookbook, “aesthetically inspired by Barcelona’s skate culture” — side note, I love this. The agents they spoke to were positive, but when the conversation turned to what publishers were actually looking for, the answer was always the same: no one would look at the proposal unless she had 100,000 followers. After hearing it enough times, she found herself telling people that “cookbooks are only for influencers now and that culinary literature is dead.”

What she describes isn’t new. It isn’t unique to cookbooks, or to culinary writing, or even to publishing. I have heard versions of the same thing from record labels and film and television executives. One producer told me a project now needs its lead cast to have a collective following of seven million people to get greenlit. Why seven million rather than six, or eight? I have no idea. And whether that’s a hard rule or even true matters less than the signal it sends: the people signing off on a project no longer trust their own ability to build an audience, so they outsource the risk before committing.

Back to publishing. I think about this a lot, not least because I’ve spent twenty years working in and around the industry. Over that time, I’ve worked on everything from brand licences to author agreements, with first-time and established writers, and with some of the best-known independent and major publishing houses. In the last eighteen months, I’ve negotiated five book deals on behalf of clients. During this time, I have watched social following shape the size and structure of a deal. I have not yet watched it kill one outright. A different deal, perhaps, but never no deal.

All of this raises a real question: what voices do we lose if getting published depends on already having an audience?

Authors with real expertise who have spent their careers doing the work rather than posting about it, first-time writers whose stories don’t compress into a six-second hook. But what's actually at stake is diversity of stories, of experiences, and of opinions. Lose that, and publishing ends up printing a narrower range of the same kind of person. If the price of entry is an audience built before the book exists, publishing starts selecting for people who can run a content operation alongside their actual subject, not necessarily those with the most to say.

Writing a book is hard, especially when it isn’t your day job. Doing that while also building a following through engagement bait and algorithm-friendly video is close to impossible. I am old enough to remember when authors just had to be authors, and publishers existed to develop the work, shepherd it through production, and market it so the right book found the right reader. The economics reflected that division of labour. Authors received advances and royalties. Publishers took the larger share because they were doing a lot of work and carrying the risk.

But that equation is shifting.

Publishers still want authors. They just want them to arrive with the audience already built. Maybe that’s because marketing budgets are shrinking. Maybe it reflects a fragmented, digital and social-first market that’s genuinely harder for them to crack. Maybe some of them no longer know how to build demand themselves. Whatever the reason, if authors are now expected to supply both the work and the audience, the commercial model needs to evolve. Those are two assets being brought to the table, and that should mean higher advances and better royalties, which, to be fair, is happening for in-demand authors, or those caught in a bidding war. But if a publisher is spending less on marketing because the author is doing that work themselves, those savings shouldn’t simply flow to the bottom line. It should also mean giving a meaningful share of marketing dollars to the author for content creation, activations, and promotions. Authors cannot keep being asked to do more, in more markets, without proper support, at their own expense and without the model changing.

There are models worth looking at elsewhere.

In music, P&D deals generally recognise that the artist is bringing a finished record and carrying more of the creative and financial risk, so the partner provides distribution and selected services for a smaller cut, while the artist retains more ownership and control. In media, creator-led partnerships like those being built by FOX Creator Studios combine a creator’s existing audience and ideas with studio funding, production, and distribution. Neither is a perfect template for publishing, but both prove that rights, risk, and reward can be rebalanced once creative talent is asked to turn up with considerably more than a manuscript.

Everything should be on the table in an industry where the goalposts are moving, sometimes without touching the commercial model underneath them.

Beyond lost voices and ensuring authors are fairly compensated, there’s one more thing worth remembering: followers don’t necessarily translate into sales.

We have all seen authors, musicians, and chefs with tens or hundreds of millions of followers who can’t convert that reach into anything close to equivalent sales. Sometimes the work doesn’t hold up. Sometimes reach doesn’t reflect a relationship. Publishers and labels routinely mistake followers for fandom, and not all audiences are equal. A small community that actually cares is worth more than a large passive one, and that’s before you factor in the bots.

At the end of the day, the industry needs to worry less about who clicked follow and more about who actually cares. Right now, its focus on followers is closing on-ramps for exciting new voices. Soon enough, it may open off-ramps for the established ones who already have the work, the audience, and the marketing engine, and realise they no longer need the gatekeeper at all.

Taste is one of those words marketers use as if everyone agrees on what it means.

We do not.

A panel discussion this week about brands having taste left me wondering whether the word is sometimes doing two jobs at once: describing judgment, while also drawing a line between the people who supposedly have it and those, by implication, who do not. That becomes uncomfortable quite quickly.

So where does taste sit?

With the creator, deciding what belongs and what does not? Or the beholder, deciding whether it works? Or with the community around both, reinforcing what counts and dismissing what does not?

Taste is shaped by context, culture and timing. Two people can stand beside one another looking at the same rainbow and experience it differently. That does not make one of them wrong. The risk for brands is mistaking shared references for universal truth, or confusing taste with agreement among people who already share the same life experiences and cultural codes. That is not necessarily taste. A room full of people can agree on what good taste looks like and still only be describing themselves.

Taste may begin with conviction, but it only becomes meaningful when the work meets the world. The creator can have taste without being understood, while the audience can find value the creator never intended.

For brands, perhaps the focus should be simpler: forget about taste.

Just be true to what you believe and put it into the world.

A recent piece by asked whether we have reached peak pop-up.

Published earlier this week, it is a great read, with contributions from chefs including Brooks Headley and , and is well worth your time. You can read it here.

As for the question itself, here in Australia, the answer often feels like yes.

Not a week passes without another visiting chef, four-hands dinner, one-night-only collaboration, takeover, residency, or dinner between old friends.

I should say upfront: I know a thing or two about them. I have helped build residencies in Sydney, Tulum, and Kyoto, dinner series in places like Milan and New York, and supported chefs and clients in their own projects around the world.

I have seen what they can do for restaurants, diners, and partners.

I have also seen how much work they take. The visas. The flights. The freight. The months of research and development. The host restaurant, or even the building of one where there wasn’t one before. The government negotiations. The sponsor needs. The press. The expectations. The acclaim and even criticism. And the creeping suspicion, usually around 11.47pm the night before first service, that everyone involved may have slightly lost their minds.

And still, they matter.

They matter first because restaurants are made of people, and those people need more than rosters, prep lists, and Saturday night service to keep going. An event can be a jolt. A shared project and experience. A reason to look up from the day-to-day and remember that hospitality is not only a business of repetition, but of discovery.

The projects I have been part of were enormous undertakings. They took the effort of hundreds of people, all pushing, pulling, and occasionally dragging the thing in the same direction. But that is also part of what made them special. They brought those same people together, not in some corporate off-site sense, but in the rarer sense of doing something genuinely difficult together and coming out the other side changed by it.

And for many workers, especially in a country as geographically remote as Australia (or Denmark), dinners and dining events like these can mean cooking in another kitchen, standing inside another food culture, experiencing it firsthand. That can be more than a perk. It can be the kind of thing that keeps someone connected to a restaurant and an industry that asks a lot and often gives too little back.

Restaurants also need to keep moving, and these types of events give them a reason to. The best events are not tourism with tweezers. They are an exchange: cross-border, cross-cultural, sometimes just cross-town. A visiting chef brings ingredients, techniques, ideas, inspiration, and stories. The host does too. Somewhere in the middle, everyone gets pushed a little.

There is also the matter of staying relevant. The media environment around food has changed. Fewer traditional critics, more influencers and creators, newsletters, podcasts, booking platforms, and algorithms. Diners are curious but increasingly restless, often more drawn to what is new than what remains special. Even the places we love can quietly slip from view without a reason to bring them back into the conversation. Events give chefs and restaurants something to say, something for the media to write about, something that brings a favourite place back into the feed without requiring a new opening, a renovation, or a crisis.

And then there is the awards game, because of course there is. The rules around major rankings are usually clear that voters should judge the restaurant itself, not a version of it experienced elsewhere. Fair enough. But nobody in the industry is naïve about what really happens. These events put chefs in front of international media, peers, and voters who might otherwise have little reason to reach their home market. These dinners and events do not sit within the rules. But they are still part of a game that bends their spirit a little. Or a lot, if you are one of the restaurants that cannot afford to play—much like the restaurants that cannot afford to fly in plane loads of voters from international markets, but we will leave that to another post.

The economics matter too. Rent is up, wages are up, and food and energy costs are up. Margins were never generous. So, if a credit card company, hotel group, alcohol brand, or destination partners want to underwrite an event, that matters. Properly structured, these things can even generate new revenue streams in a sector that badly needs it.

Which brings it back to the diner. A major event can make a city feel bigger for a night. It can bring a chef we have admired from a distance into reach, give regulars a reason to return, and curious diners a reason to come for the first time. It can also make a local audience see their own dining culture differently, because for a moment, it is being seen through someone else’s lens. That is not a small thing. But it is also not a cheap one. These dinners sit at the expensive end of the market, sometimes well past it. For most people, they are not a casual decision. That is worth being honest about. The argument for events cannot rest entirely on access and discovery if the price point quietly undercuts both. The ones that justify the cost do so because they actually deliver, not just because they are difficult to book.

So yes, pop-ups matter.

The better question is whether all of them matter enough.

Compare them to live music. We do not question an artist for touring, marking an anniversary, or finding a reason to get back in front of an audience. Live performance is part of the work. Chefs are no different. If we see restaurants only as places that feed us, the whole thing can look indulgent. But if we believe restaurants are part of culture, events are part of the work too.

But live music also offers a caution. This year’s talk of “blue dot fever” makes visible what promoters and agents have always known. A map of unsold seats is not an argument against touring. It is an argument against confusing awareness with demand, or streaming numbers with ticket sales. Artists should tour. Maybe not all of them should be trying to tour stadiums.

The same applies here.

A well-judged dining event knows what it is. A poorly judged one often has little idea. And that is when trust starts to erode. Not through one bad night, but through enough of them. Diners start to hesitate. Media attention moves on. Sponsors pull back. The events do not disappear, but they start to lose impact. And that matters because the things that make great events possible are not guaranteed. Curious diners. Media that still cares. Engaged partners and sponsors. Those things exist because enough events have been good enough for people to keep believing in them. But that belief is not unconditional.

Maybe a month-long Australian winter residency from a deeply respected restaurant that is not well known locally beyond the most engaged dining audience needs more of a reason to exist. Maybe a one-night dinner priced at the pointy end of the market, from a chef whose name lives mostly inside elite food circles, needs to be honest about who it is for and what it is doing.

A sold-out dining room is not always the answer. Those rooms can sell out because the same committed diners and industry friends show up again. Those people matter. But if every event speaks only to the already converted, the category starts to feel smaller than it should. The point shouldn’t be just to sell every seat. It should be to create something worth the effort for everyone involved: the restaurant, the team, the guests, and the partners. Something with a reason to exist.

Maybe we have reached peak pop-up.

That does not mean there should be fewer of them. It means there should be better judgment around them. More care around the why, the where, the when, and the how.

Because when these events are good, they are still one of the most powerful things the restaurant world can do. They keep teams inspired. They help restaurants stay visible. They generate new sources of income and create real commercial value. They remind us that restaurants are not only rooms where food is served, but places where people and culture gather. And sometimes, for one night, one week, or maybe for one strange, exhausting, extraordinary ten weeks, they let that culture travel.

Design student, Asher Hyde, dropped this artwork after Game 4 of the NBA Western Conference Finals, the same night four Salesian Sisters turned up behind the San Antonio Spurs bench.

It spread fast, mostly online and via social, but also popping up for sale as t-shirts and posters, all emblazoned with the Nike Swoosh.

Even though it had nothing to do with Nike.

Which has set off the predictable debate about what counts.

The purist line: it's not an ad because it isn't from Nike. "Advertising isn't ideas in isolation"; it needs to be surprising and relevant, and "only the brand gets to decide what relevance means". "Good idea, no client, therefore not the work".

The counter: "UGC is one of the most powerful forms of advertising" precisely because "it feels discovered, not delivered". "People trust culture more than they trust campaigns". When fans remix and attach themselves to a brand unpaid, "the brand has moved past marketing and become something more...it becomes part of their identity. It crosses into belonging".

The harsh read: "it's far from good". "Too literal". "Chewed up and regurgitated". "Junior-level work dressed up in wordplay".

And the tidy middle: without client approval, it's not an ad, but "it's very nice Nike fan fiction".

All of them are partly right, which is usually the sign that an argument is asking the wrong question.

Of course, it isn't a Nike ad. Nobody briefed it, nobody approved it, nobody paid for it, and the Swoosh is an artist's liberty, not a credit. Fine.

But it is an ad for Nike?

Not in the sense that anyone signed off on it. Or paid for it. Setting that aside, the thing that actually counts is whether it moves how people feel about the brand, and this does. It runs on the equity Nike has already bought by aligning with Victor Wembanyama, one of the most exciting players in the league. Asher Hyde didn't invent that association. He borrowed it, and then he built on it for free. And the values read as Nike's because Nike spent years and a lot of money making them read that way.

That's the part the purist argument misses.

Relevance isn't only granted by the client at the point of approval. Sometimes the audience grants it, and the brand's job is to have built something worth borrowing, and to let it go.

I'll declare my bias.

I'm a die-hard San Antonio Spurs fan. I love it and have been turning over the VW/G.T. range ever since, which is more than the brand's own sanctioned work has managed of late. So by the test I trust, it worked.

Whether it was made in Photoshop or with AI is a separate question, and one for another day. I sure as hell (sorry, sisters) hope it was the former. Anyone who knows my view on the latter knows why.

Drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Though I may not respond for a while. I'm counting down the minutes until Game 6.
Go Spurs Go.

’ve spent twenty-odd years around people making things.

Musicians, film and television producers, chefs and restaurateurs.

I’ve learned that the hard part isn’t necessarily the making. It is the releasing, and the decision to let something go and share it with the world.

Today, our daughter, Annie Liebmann, does that for the first time.

Her song LOST is out now.

Written, performed, and co-produced by her, self-released ahead of this year’s Triple J Unearthed: High.

Watching her do it is a different thing entirely. We couldn’t be prouder of her.

A good day.

Spotify: https://bit.ly/4dx5vC8

Apple Music: http://bit.ly/4wi9lqj

There is a particular kind of AI talk that has nothing to do with building things and everything to do with announcing the end of them.

“Creativity is finished.”

“Hollywood is cooked.”

“Music is next.”

“Advertising doesn’t know what’s about to hit it.”

It is always total, always imminent, and always delivered with the satisfied tone of someone describing a demolition they do not have to clean up.

“AI is coming for all your jobs…every one of them. Modern-day movies are a bubble, and AI is going to pop it. Learn to prompt immediately. For those brave enough to embrace new technologies and not be lured by red carpets and dinner parties, the future is whatever you want it to be.”

(Yes, that’s taken from a real LinkedIn post. I couldn’t make that up if I tried.)

Click through to the profile, and the pattern is always the same. “AI” in the bio. A resumé of buzzwords and career stops that don’t add up to an understanding of anything they’re predicting. A feed full of pronouncements, buoyed by likes and eerily identical replies that never quite sound like a person who’s met another person: “This.” “So true.” “Game changer.” “We’re not ready.” And scroll back far enough, and you’ll find the same litany of earlier certainties still there: crypto, NFTs, the metaverse.

What makes this kind of evangelism grating isn’t the optimism. It’s the combination of ignorance, sweeping claims, and a total disinterest in the realities of what they’re talking about. Almost none of it connects to real work. Not the romance of creativity, let alone the craft itself. How work is really made. What it costs. What constraints exist. Where risk sits. Let alone the principle of rights and intellectual property.

The evangelist version of culture is always suspiciously simple. Everything becomes “content.” Everyone becomes a “creator.” Taste becomes personalisation. Craft becomes an efficiency and workflow issue. Everything gets described in ways that signal you’re reading someone who has never created anything.

The most revealing part is the tone of glee.

There is a strain of evangelism that reads as if the point is not to make new work but to settle a score with people who have spent time getting good at something. The contempt is casual. Actors are “overpaid.” Writers are “entitled.” Studios are “gatekeepers.” Unions are “mob-like.” Creative establishments become cartoon villains that can be defeated with a prompt.

It would also be naïve to ignore the psychological undercurrent. Some of the loudest doom rhetoric reads less like analysis and more like coping. “Everyone is replaceable” lands differently depending on whether you’ve spent a decade getting good at something. Declaring the end of the system is comforting if you never had to work within it. If the whole thing is about to collapse, evangelists don’t have to admit they struggled inside it. Except the struggle is often the point. The friction is where taste and judgement get built, and where the work becomes real. It’s where the joy is, too: not in the shortcut, but in finally getting good enough to surprise yourself.

(Let’s not forget Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, who made headlines for saying most people don’t enjoy making music because it’s hard.)

Look, I get it.

Industries deserve critique. Some are exclusionary. Some are rent-seeking. Some hide behind mythology and nostalgia. But the evangelist critique is rarely about power structures or incentives. It is about deletion. It is about the pleasure of imagining that you can bypass people whose skill you don’t share and skip the decade where you might have had to develop it.

A lot of this also depends on a studied amnesia about inputs. Tools like Higgsfield, Suno, ChatGPT, and Seedance didn’t arrive from nowhere. They are built on an enormous haul of other people’s creativity and work, much of it taken without consent, without credit, and without compensation.

Once you accept that as normal, the next step is easy.

And the loudest evangelists tend to be the least troubled with it, which aligns with their relationship and approach to making. Most of them have never built anything that had to find and hold an audience on its own terms. They’re less interested in making than in taking, and that taking always comes with a talent for moral gymnastics. They’ll call it "fair use”. They’ll insist these systems “learn” no differently than humans. They’ll insist it is “transformative.” They’ll argue regulation will “stifle innovation.” And they will wave away copyright as an outdated superstition right up until someone, or the very platform they’re using, takes their work. Then the outrage arrives instantly, as if property is only sacred when it belongs to them.

This is where the comparison to previous next-big-things becomes more than a cheap joke. Demis Hassabis has discussed how hype and grifting are starting to resemble the crypto cycle, with inflated claims and opportunists attached to the bubble. Cory Doctorow has pointed to the way tech keeps cycling through narratives that promise a new world, attract money, and then leave ordinary participants holding the bag.

Strip out the tokens and cartoon apes, and the AI evangelist’s behaviour is no different. Totalising predictions. Social proof as an argument. Scepticism is treated as ignorance. The insistence that if you don’t convert, you’ll be left behind. And underneath it, a conversion economy where many of the incentives are often undeclared. A surprising number of evangelists are attached, formally or informally, to the platforms they promote. Followers become leads, leads become referrals, and sooner or later someone is selling a course, consultancy, or an affiliate link. None of that is inherently disqualifying. It just changes how you should read the certainty. When the future is being sold that hard, it’s reasonable to ask who’s on commission.

Their hype reads like a sermon and runs like a pyramid scheme.

Call it taste-arbitrage: people who don’t create, but package proximity to the latest tool as expertise. They sell “how to prompt,” “how to automate,” “how to scale,” treating craft like a workflow problem and taste as something you can outsource. They thrive in the gap between hype and reality. While everyone else argues about rights, authorship, and what “replacement” even means, they sell frameworks to the anxious. Credibility is bought cheaply (early access, jargon, badges) and resold at a premium to people who don’t want to be the last one to adapt.

That is the structure. The top belongs to early adopters and insiders. Everyone arriving later buys certainty from people who confuse being loud with being right.

In every mania, the easiest money is made selling miracle cures and how-to guides. The branding and packaging may change, but the incentives stay the same.

There’s an irony the evangelists tend to miss. If your only skill is proclaiming that a tool will replace other people’s skills, you are not positioned at the top of the new order. You are positioned as a temporary distraction. When the cycle turns, the first thing to get replaced is the person who has nothing to offer beyond an ill-informed opinion and membership in a LinkedIn engagement pod. The grift carries built-in misfortune. It doesn’t reward expertise. It rewards attention until attention moves on. When it does, the “AI in bio” crowd becomes the “Open to Work” crowd, and they find they don’t have much that compounds. No body of work. No trust earned inside the industries they’ve been mocking. No relationships with the people who actually create things. Just a social feed that ages quickly, because the platforms and the tools keep changing, and the market learns, eventually, that predictions and misguided confidence are cheap.

None of this is an argument that creative industries are safe. Sadly, they are not. They were already under pressure from consolidation, from streaming economics that hollowed out the middle, from collapsing ad markets, from algorithmic distribution, from the slow erosion of careers that used to be viable without needing to achieve superstardom. AI fits into those incentives cleanly. The danger isn’t that a machine writes the next great film. The danger is that executives overestimate what the tools can do, and use that overestimation as cover for cost-cutting, while the work degrades in ways that are entirely predictable.

In fact, the real risk isn’t that AI will be better than human creativity. Maybe it will; maybe it won’t. The more immediate risk is that it doesn’t need to be better. It only needs to be good enough, cheap enough, and fast enough to satisfy a marketplace that has been trained, for years, to accept less. We have already lived through decades of pressure that rewarded volume over craft and efficiency over taste. That didn’t kill creativity, but it did narrow the space in which great work could be made. “Good enough” thrives in that environment, and once it becomes a baseline, it has a way of dragging expectations down with it.

Volume also has a cultural externality that rarely gets discussed. When passable work floods the zone, discovery doesn’t become democratic; it becomes chaotic. Signal-to-noise collapses. Gatekeeping doesn’t disappear; it migrates into opaque algorithms tuned for engagement. The more content there is, the more power accrues to whatever decides what surfaces. Tastemakers don’t vanish. They become harder to see and harder to argue with.

The serious version of disruption is quieter than the prophecy. It looks like more mediocre work at scale. A thickening of the middle and a shrinking of the professional base. People with real skill are being asked to compete with something that resembles skill, priced near zero. Or as many of the fanboys put it: “CGI used to cost millions of dollars. Now? It costs a few cents.” Platforms capture the upside. In the slipstream come the grifters. The creative community takes the hit again.

And it becomes, inevitably, an argument over definitions. What counts as originality? What counts as authorship? What counts as compensation? Who is allowed to say, with authority, what a “replacement” even means.

Because the evangelists are not simply predicting an end. They are lobbying for one. They want a world in which the hard parts of making things are treated as inefficiencies to be erased, and the people who do those hard parts are treated as legacy friction. They mistake a tool for a worldview and then ask everyone else to live inside it.

AI will improve. Jobs will change. Many will disappear altogether, especially in the middle of the creative economy. Some will be created.

That is the boring part, and it is all true. Denial won’t protect anyone.

The part worth watching is who benefits from the narrative while it is being sold, and what gets normalised while everyone is distracted by the promise of the future, or just the latest synthetic slap-fight doing the rounds: Brad vs. Tom. Mickey vs. Mario.

In the last decade, we have seen this enough times to recognise the playbook. The prophets are rarely the builders of anything that lasts. They are marketers of a moment.

AI may well endure. And yes, a lot of it will be genuinely useful.

The people declaring the end of culture, though, have a shorter shelf life.

They always do.

If you were twenty around then, it hit in the middle of a great run of indie songs like Where It’s At, 1979, The Distance, and Santa Monica.

For those who’ve never heard it (seriously?), it is a high-school breakup story told like a note being passed in class. The lyrics read like a “how to be popular” rulebook, but underneath the smarts and sneer is pure teenage betrayal.

Popular is a great song and it was everywhere. Heavy rotation on college radio, and Triple J if you were in Australia like I was. MTV, too.

And then the world did what it does too often. It moved on. Folded the corner of the page and didn’t come back.

For a while I filed Nada Surf away as one of those bands you only ever talk about in the past tense.

Until I didn’t.

Years later, I was working at Warner Music and they re-entered my life in the best possible way: a new album.

Let Go.

The origin story matters because it wasn’t a comeback in the usual sense. It was a band returning after Elektra refused to release their sophomore record, The Proximity Effect, and dropped them because it didn’t have another Popular.

Side note, they would find a home for that album on one or Elektra’s sister labels, which is both reassuring and completely insane. Major-label group nonsense, in its purest form.

Anyway, Let Go became the one that stuck.

It’s one of my favourite albums, full stop. Start to finish, I’ve played it more times than I’d like to count.

And then there’s Inside of Love, which I think is close to a perfect song. So perfect that I am sure it is what Natalie Portman was talking about when she told Zach Braff “this song will change your life” in Garden State.

It’s a love song, but not the Hollywood version. It’s about the loneliness that can exist inside closeness. The ache of standing right next to the thing and still feeling outside it.

Everything about it is perfect.

From there, my relationship with the band deepened the way these things do: song by song, until I realised I wasn’t a casual admirer anymore.

I was in.

Blizzard of ’77, Hi-Speed Soul, Looking Through, Hyperspace, Something I Should Do, Beautiful Beat, Killian’s Red, Blonde on Blonde, Always Love, So Much Love, The Way You Wear Your Head, Blankest Year.

The catalogue stretches, finding new angles on core themes: love, tenderness, distance, loss, self-correction, being human.

There’s light and dark.

Loudness and quiet.

Heaviness and play.

What I love about Nada Surf is how consistent they are at making songs that don’t sound the same. They’re not chasing relevance. They’re not trying to dominate the conversation. They just keep making music that holds up across different versions of ourselves. Different cities. Different jobs. Different relationships.

And seeing them live hits too.

I stood front of stage at Pumpehuset in Copenhagen seeing them live. And in a perfect overlap, I was lucky enough to meet Matthew and Daniel.

This is usually where meeting artists can get weird. But it wasn’t like that. It was easy. They were present. Kind. Actually engaged.

It made me understand why people say you should meet your heroes, provided you pick the right ones.

Matthew, especially, has shown a rare type of kindness. The detail I keep coming back to is small but it matters to me: a heart for one of my daughter’s first recordings posted on social media. It’s nothing, technically. It’s also not nothing. It’s a gesture with no obligation attached, from someone whose work has been part of my life for years.

Nada Surf has always had that quality. They make beautiful things that keep finding you.

I started with Popular because that’s where it began for me.

But the real story is everything that has followed. The records that got better and broader. The songs that stayed.

And, Inside of Love. Always.

Trust me. That one will change your life.

Payola was once the music industry’s dirty little secret.

Record labels funnelled cash to radio stations (sometimes via brown envelopes, sometimes through more creative perks) all to secure airtime for their artists. It wasn’t about what listeners wanted. It was about who could afford to play the game.

The scandal broke wide open bringing a flurry of hearings and the eventual criminalisation of the practice. Payola, we were told, was over.

But recent conversations raise a question already asked around the industry.

Is it back?

Over lunch yesterday I was venting to a friend in the industry about a recurring frustration: despite all the data Spotify has about me—what I listen to, like, download, add to playlists, as well as the artists I follow—it can’t seem to manage the one thing I actually want it to do: tell me when an artist I love has released new music.

“That’s easy,” they said…“That’s because the artist hasn’t paid to have Spotify tell you they have a new release”.

Spotify has long claimed to champion discovery, touting algorithmic playlists like Discover Weekly and Release Radar as tools for connecting listeners to music they may love.

And to be fair, the platform has delivered on some of that promise, including breaking artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish while giving independent musicians unprecedented access to global audiences in ways radio never could.

But what about connecting listeners to music and artists that they already love?

That is different story altogether.

To be clear, this isn’t anything new: It is a story that those within the music industry know all too well. However, it is a story that many fans and listeners may be surprised to hear, and one that needs revisiting given the ongoing challenges being faced by those in the creative community.

In 2021, Spotify introduced Discovery Mode, a program that allows artists and labels to boost their visibility in exchange for reduced royalties. It’s not a direct payment, but the logic is clear: sacrifice short-term revenue to (maybe) get on more playlists, where the real money might lie. In addition, Spotify now offers paid notifications to artists, allowing them to pay for alerts to be sent to their followers.

In the days or radio payola, labels were forced to use their financial muscle to dominate the airways. Today, Spotify, the self-proclaimed great equaliser of the industry, is recreating similar dynamics.

While the mechanics have evolved, the core problem hasn’t: artists are still being asked to pay to reach audiences who should, by all rights, be hearing from them already.

The industry is pitched “tools to empower artists”. But in reality, Discovery Mode wasn’t designed to enhance fandom; it was designed to gate-keep it. The growing disconnect between artists and fans isn’t a bug, but a feature in service of the platform.

Some might say that the market dynamics of programs like Discovery Mode might seem like a win-win. The platform gets paid, and artists get their music in front of more listeners. But that framing ignores the fundamental inequity at play. For major labels, the cost of participation is just another line item in the budget. They’ll pay what they need to maintain dominance. Independent labels and artists, meanwhile, are left in an impossible position: either participate in a system that squeezes their already slim margins, or risk not reaching your audience and fan community.

In a streaming economy that already undervalues artists and songwriters, should access to fans (especially your own fans) be something you must pay for?

Visibility is no longer something you earn through talent, hard work, or even luck. It’s something you rent.

Is it really payola?

Some would suggest this is just retail merchandising in a digital wrapper. After all, brands pay for premium shelf space in grocery stores, movie studios pay for prime billboard placements, and clothing companies shell out for the best spots in department stores. Why should music be different, especially in an era where attention is scarce, and competition is everywhere?

In my mind, those comparisons fall apart when you consider the context.

Spotify isn’t a marketplace. It is the primary gatekeeper to music discovery. They’ve replaced radio, music television, and record store assistants as the primary curator of what we listen to. In that role, they wield enormous power, especially with algorithms that shape our experience based on opaque factors outside of subscribers’ control. This isn’t about a musician’s “product” competing for space on a shelf. It is about paying a toll to access new fans and more importantly, the fans those musicians have already earned.

In a world where streaming is the dominant medium for music consumption, this distinction matters.

While Spotify isn’t breaking the law, they are breaking something arguably more important: the bond between artists and their fans.

If the system tilts toward those who can afford to pay, and those who are already popular, it becomes a closed loop. The most resourced players keep dominating, while new voices struggle to break through. For the creative community, this creates a cultural bottleneck, one where diversity and innovation are stifled in favour of whatever’s already big and what’s easiest to monetise.

In Australia, the music industry is already facing an existential crisis: struggling to break new artists in a near-exclusively digital economy where radio’s impact has declined; where music television no longer really exists; and the festival circuit is on life-support.

Artists and songwriters, meanwhile, are already grappling with the harsh realities of a streaming-led music economy—earning only fractions of digital cents per stream while facing growing competition from AI-generated fakes, bot-driven streams, and an influx of podcasts and audiobooks vying for attention on the same platforms.

In a pay to play environment, the stakes become even higher.

Australian artists and culture risks being drowned out in the global noise.

Popular artists from international markets become more popular, while local artists struggle to find and retain their own audience.

What more can be done?

I’ve written about it previously, but should the industry be lobbying for content quotas and prominence legislation, like what the local television and production communities have been pushing for when dealing with the likes of Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon? Should there be stronger subsidies, rebate and offset programs at to support the creation of Australian music for local and international audiences, again in keeping with programs secured by the local film and television industry?

Whether through regulation, government investment and support, or collective action, more needs to be done.

Because if we don’t act, the music industry will continue to repeat itself, remixing the same structures under a shinier, more algorithmic veneer. In doing so, it risks collapsing into an algorithmic echo chamber where only the loudest, most profitable voices are heard, and the rich diversity of our local music community is drowned out.

That’s not just an Australian problem. It’s a fundamental question for music everywhere.

From the archives and pre-Substack days.

Gather ’round, dear reader, and let me tell you about a show.

A show that threw out the rulebook, sidestepped convention, and paved the way for a new type of storytelling and entertainment.

Iconoclasts ran for six seasons with a pretty simple premise: each episode paired leading innovators and creative visionaries from different fields—actors, artists, designers, musicians, chefs, athletes, change-makers and activists—and followed them and their free-flowing conversation.

It wasn’t your typical interview format. Instead, the show aimed to capture these luminaries like Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Stipe, Eddie Vedder, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alice Waters, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Simon, Lorne Michaels, Norman Lear, Desmond Tutu, Richard Branson, Sean Penn, Tony Hawk, Venus Williams, Cate Blanchett, Tim Flannery, Fiona Apple, Jamie Oliver, Paul Smith, Chuck D, and many more, in genuine, intimate, unscripted exchanges, often as they reflected on their craft, their creative process, or shared interests and passions.

(Side note: there were also a few that have since fallen from grace and their Icon status—Mario Batali and James Franco come to mind—which is one of the more complicated and perhaps even uncomfortable aspects of the show’s legacy, coming with retrospective reassessment of certain individuals and even the very idea of icons and reverence for them in a world that increasingly demands transparency and accountability.)

But what made Iconoclasts stand out was the way it blurred the lines between celebrity culture and deeper cultural conversations.

The pairings were sometimes obvious (like Robert Redford with Paul Newman) and other times more unexpected (like Dave Chappelle with Maya Angelou), which added to the charm. It wasn’t about interviewing each other, but rather about exploring mutual interests, overlapping philosophies, or just diving into what made them tick.

As I’ve often described it, it felt like we were being allowed to eavesdrop on private conversations that we’d otherwise not be privy to.

Thanks to the podcast boom, we have countless opportunities to do that these days. But back then it was completely new and different.

It was deeply intimate yet aired for millions.

It was high-production yet stripped down in style.

It was also branded entertainment, yet the brand itself never appeared.

Iconoclasts was funded and produced by Grey Goose in partnership with RadicalMedia and Sundance Channel.

That kind of alchemy is genuinely hard to pull off, especially in today’s fragmented media landscape where the lines between advertising and content are smudged beyond recognition.

But it worked.

The team— including Jon Kamen, Andrew Fried, Frank Schema, Justin Wilkes, Joe Berlinger, Michael Hilliard, and Caroline Suh, amongst others—found a way to let the content breathe, to let it exist on its own terms.

Looking back, it was ahead of its time.

Ahead Of The Curve

Launching nearly twenty years ago, Iconoclasts landed well before “branded content” became a buzzword, before marketers had fully grasped the potential for storytelling to extend beyond a thirty-second spot.

In today’s world, where brands chase cultural currency by funding everything from podcasts to docu-series to Instagram Reels, it’s easy to forget just how bold a move it was for Grey Goose to bankroll a show that didn’t even feature product placement—no glass of vodka artfully perched in the frame, no bar-side logo drop.

It was content as brand-building in the purest sense.

The industry adage goes: “You don’t get fired for buying IBM.” In marketing, that translates to safe bets—traditional media buys, banner ads, predictable product integrations. These approaches rarely set the world on fire, but they also don’t require much in the way of bravery. If the campaign doesn’t deliver, there are agencies and dozens of people to share the blame, and the fallback data metrics are usually there to soften the blow.

But branded entertainment like Iconoclasts doesn’t come with a safety net.

When you fund a series, especially one that doesn’t overtly advertise your product—where the brand’s only presence is in the credits, and the content succeeds or fails on its own merit—you’re walking a much tighter rope.

The stakes are real.

Iconoclasts believed that the audience would connect the dots without overt cues, and that if the content was compelling enough, that if it was truly valuable to the audience, that it would stand on its own and the brand’s investment would be validated through sheer cultural impact and relevance.

And that’s why it was groundbreaking.

Borrowing from Rob Galluzzo, Iconoclasts wasn’t branded entertainment, it was entertainment on-brand.

That’s a distinction we don’t see often enough, even today.

In some ways, Iconoclasts anticipated today’s landscape of content funding and brand partnerships. It arrived long before terms like “content studio” or “native advertising” became commonplace. But where today’s branded content can sometimes feel algorithmically engineered or written by a brand’s communications team, Iconoclasts took an artisanal approach. It was made with a kind of reverence—for the subjects, for the stories, for the viewer—that’s often sacrificed in the name of metrics. In my mind, the show feels just as relevant today because it was about the exchange of ideas and not the business of selling products.

The show didn’t just have something to say; it had a point of view.

Blueprint for Bravery

As brands today look to play an even greater role in funding content, from film and TV to digital shorts and podcasts, the thinking and bravery behind Iconoclasts should be remembered.

It wasn’t just about being ahead of its time in terms of format; it was about setting a standard for what branded entertainment could aspire to.

The show trusted its audience enough to not force a logo into every scene. It respected their intelligence, banking on the fact that if you create content with meaning, even with purpose and impact, the brand connection will form naturally.

Yes, brands can activate and amplify their association, even their producer status, around the show—Iconoclasts benefited from a significant media and advertising campaign that ran in print, outdoor, television, and in-store—but let the show be the show.

It’s a model that still challenges the industry because it asks marketers to let go, even just a little, and allow storytelling to be the centrepiece.

In today’s market, where the pressure to deliver measurable results for every dollar spent is higher than ever, that kind of bravery is hard to come by. Yet, the appetite for authentic content has only grown. Viewers and consumers are savvier; they know when they’re being sold to, and they’re less forgiving of content that feels manufactured.

The legacy of Iconoclasts isn’t just the show itself; it’s what it stands for: a reminder that, sometimes, the most powerful brand play is one that whispers rather than shouts.

It dared to bet on the value of real stories, and it won by proving that not every branded moment needs a logo in the frame to leave a lasting mark.

“Make the logo bigger” they often say.

For those brave enough, how about take it out altogether.

From the archives and pre-Substack days.

We’ve all seen the argument in defence of AI companies using copyrighted works without compensation to train their LLMs.

The claim?

AI platforms aren’t reproducing those works. They’re simply using them to “inform” or “inspire” a creative process, much like a human might.

To bolster this, some point to examples like a reader in a library, whose own work isn’t tethered to royalties for the authors whose books they have read, or a film student who doesn’t owe directors or producers when their studies lead to an original project.

It’s a compelling analogy on the surface and perfect for hot takes on social media.

But the argument isn’t just flawed; it’s a false equivalency wrapped in convenience.

It’s a talking point designed to absolve AI companies (and their legion of sycophantic defenders) of responsibility while framing their actions as merely the next step in a long creative tradition.

Let me try and break this down; at least as I see it.

The Human-AI Scale is Not Comparable

First, humans and AI systems do not consume creative works in the same way. A human can read a novel, watch a television show or movie, or listen to a song, and while it might spark inspiration, they cannot instantly absorb every book, every screenplay, every melody ever created. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, operates on a scale no human ever could. It ingests billions of pieces of work—copyrighted or otherwise—at speed most of us will never comprehend, building a knowledge base that no single creator, or even all creators combined, could rival.

There’s nothing inspired about it.

Humans are bound by time, access, and attention. AI faces no such limits. It doesn’t skim a book; it processes every sentence. It doesn’t watch a film for its plot; it analyses every shot, script line, and score. The claim that this is equivalent to human inspiration trivialises the reality of what AI systems do when they train on copyrighted content.

AI isn’t inspired by a work…it’s inspired by all works.

The Payment Infrastructure is Already There—AI is Skipping It

When a human consumes creative works—whether reading a book, streaming a movie, or listening to music—there’s an economic exchange.

Libraries pay for books and recorded works. Schools and universities do the same.

Streaming platforms license music and films. Cinemas pay to exhibit. Theatres, arenas and stadiums pay for performances. Even ad-supported services like radio and television networks ensure creators receive royalties, however small.

In every scenario, the creator is compensated, directly or indirectly, for the use of their work.

AI companies, however, have built models by sidestepping this system entirely.

They’re not paying licensing fees to access the books, films, or music they train on. They’re not compensating creators for the value their works add to the AI’s capabilities. Instead, they’re mining the world’s reserve of copyrighted material without acknowledging or paying for the creativity, craft, and sheer labour that went into creating it.

AI is a Platform, Not a Human

There’s another key distinction: humans are end users.

AI companies are platforms and enablers, just like Spotify, Netflix, or a publishing house. Those platforms don’t get a free pass to use copyrighted works because they facilitate creativity; they pay licensing fees to use, distribute, and profit from those works.

AI platforms should be no different.

The idea that AI shouldn’t have to pay because “it’s like a human finding inspiration” conveniently ignores the fact that AI is not a person. It’s a technological product. And when a product derives its value from copyrighted works, the creators of those works deserve compensation. Artificial intelligence companies are creating tools designed to replace human labour and creativity in many cases, and they are monetising those tools. To claim that they don’t owe creators because “humans don’t pay for inspiration” is to obscure the scale and stakes of what’s happening.

Some might argue that AI’s “consumption” of creative works during training is fundamentally different because it doesn’t directly reproduce or distribute those works and it creates something new. The value, this argument goes, lies in the system’s emergent capabilities, not in the individual inputs it consumes.

But this conveniently ignores the fact that those emergent capabilities, which AI companies are all too happy to monetise (ChatGPT is charging up to $US200 per month) are undeniably fuelled by the creative labour of others.

The economic exchange doesn’t disappear just because the output looks different. It’s merely been displaced.

The Ethics of Fair Use and Compensation

Finally, there’s an ethical dimension to this debate. AI companies argue they’re democratising knowledge. But the reality is that they’re monetising it while bypassing the creators whose work fuels their success.

There’s a difference between fair use, which is by and large a US principle anyway, and exploitation, and AI has crossed that line by taking copyrighted material en masse without compensation.

If every other entity in the creative economy, from libraries to streaming services, understands the importance of compensating creators, why should AI be exempt?

Why We Need a New Standard

This is not about stifling innovation. It isn’t. It is about ensuring that innovation doesn’t come at the expense of those who make it possible. If AI companies want to use copyrighted works to train their models, they should pay for the privilege, just as every other platform, service, or user in the creative economy does.

Creativity doesn’t come from thin air. It’s the result of countless hours of human effort, skill, and imagination.

To argue that AI should get a free pass is not only a dismissal of creators but a dangerous precedent that undermines the very system that makes creativity sustainable.

There’s also a certain irony, if not outright hypocrisy, in AI companies refusing to respect or value the work of others while aggressively lobbying and lawyering up to protect their own intellectual property. Does the sanctity of IP only matter when it’s their code or models on the line, as opposed to the work of generations of writers, journalists, artists, producers, directors, actors and musicians that fueled their platforms and systems in the first place.

If we want to encourage innovation, human and machine alike, it starts with valuing the people who create.

Look, I get it: AI isn’t going anywhere, and honestly, I’m just as excited by all it can unlock for creativity in the industries that I work and am passionate for.

But can we just fast-forward to the point where the market, or more likely international courts, because let’s be honest, the US is unlikely to lead the charge, goes back to acknowledging the value in craft and creativity, and that artists and creators deserve to be paid for their work?

From the archives and pre-Substack days.

On last week’s Pivot, Scott Galloway said something that stuck: if you don’t build your business with somebody else, did it really happen?

His full point was a little less binary. One of the greatest joys in life, he argued, is raising a family. One of the greatest joys in professional life is building something with great people around you. That’s how he got to the question.

Galloway speaks in extremes. He’s provocative by design. It’s part of his schtick and, to his credit, it works.

Not because I agree with him entirely. The work, the clients, the outcomes…they’re all real, whether witnessed or not.

But the feeling does change.

I started Understory largely on my own. Not in a “lone wolf” way. More deliberate and practical. I wanted to stay close to the work. I didn’t want the immediate responsibility for other people’s livelihoods. Not so early, not so soon into my first run as a founder. I wanted space to explore and say yes to the things that interested me—specific industries, clients, work that mattered. I also wanted my clients to know exactly who they were dealing with. No handoffs. No layers. Just me, sitting alongside them and doing the work they hired me to do.

Solo felt like the right structure for that.

It still does.

And honestly, it’s worked—better than I could have expected.
Great clients, great partners, and work I’m genuinely proud of.

But people ask. “Are you hiring?” “Are you going to expand?” The questions come often enough that I’ve started to notice the assumption underneath them: that growth means headcount, that serious means scale, that solo is somehow provisional.

I’ve grappled with that. Not because I want to build a traditional agency. I don’t… at least not yet. But because of the expectation itself. As if a business designed as much for satisfaction and a professional life I want to live as it is for commercial success is somehow less legitimate.

It’s not how I measure it. But you hear it.

Still, his point landed on something I don’t talk about much: I miss camaraderie.

I miss having someone in the next room.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

And not a team in the org chart sense. Not staff. Just the small, everyday sense of shared momentum. Someone to debrief with, someone to throw an idea at before it hardens into a plan, someone who knows what the week has been like without needing the long version.

I had that at Warner Music.
At Fremantle. At Shine.
At Noma.

Not “work friends” in the polite sense. Real friendships, formed in the grind—the good and bad of it. The stakes were real. The work mattered, but so did the people in the room. You come out of those places with stories, sure, but more importantly you come out with people. And those people often stay.

Working solo, that disappears. You can still do excellent work. You can still have impact. But to Galloway’s point, there’s no witness, no co-conspirator, so wins feel quieter. Rough patches feel longer. You’re not isolated—there are calls, meetings, lunches. But it’s not the same as turning to someone in the moment and exchanging that “what the hell just happened” glance.

That’s the cost.

Not revenue. Not scale. Not some exit I’m not building toward.

Just doing it without company.

And for a long time, I’ve accepted that as the trade.

The obvious solution is the one everyone suggests: hire. Build a team. Scale it. Make it multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted, and all the rest. I know how it’s done. I’ve built great teams inside bigger companies.

The question is whether I want to.

Right now, I’m more interested in a different model and I’ve started to build it.

Not a traditional team. More a co-op of people I love working with. People whose work I respect, who inspire me, who are better than me at things I’m not built for. They do what they do. I do what I do. We stay independent, but together we can do great work. The math is the point. One plus one equals three.

It’s a bit like assembling the Avengers, if I can borrow the film metaphor without taking myself too seriously. Different strengths. Independent but connected. Better together, but not dependent.

People like Jeanine and Shannon.
Howie and Dan.
Afdhel.
Paul, Tommy, and Dawn.

It keeps evolving with every project and opportunity. But it brings some of that camaraderie back in a structure that preserves what each of us set out to protect. And to do some of our most exciting work. Together.

I’m just trying to build good things with good people, while staying close enough to the clients and work that matter the most to me.

Four years in, and what I’m learning is that there’s a real tension here, and it doesn’t resolve neatly. Independence gives you clarity and control. Shared build gives you a different kind of satisfaction.

So, here’s where I land.

Galloway’s provocation worked because it made me name what I do and don’t believe.

The work is real.

But the feeling of building something with other people—that does shift. And I’ve found a way to get some of that back without abandoning the model that got me here.

It works for now.

And if it stops working, I’ll change it. If it does, I’ll call it Understory 2.0.

Because I can.

On a spring afternoon in Sydney last year, a line stretched down the city’s historic Walsh Bay. It wasn’t for a gallery opening or the latest performance from the neighbouring Sydney Theatre Company or Bangarra Dance Theatre. It was a pop-up store dedicated to Olivia Rodrigo, timed to coincide with the artist’s sold-out run at Olympic Park. Inside, fans could browse exclusive merchandise inspired by her album GUTS, snap photos in immersive spaces, and (if they were American Express cardmembers) skip the queue and walk away with exclusive and limited edition merch. The shop would vanish a few days later. But for those who stood in line, that was part of the appeal and excitement.

How do I know?

Because I stood in that line for three hours with my 16-year-old daughter, just to be at the front of the queue when doors opened for the exclusive preview for cardmembers and friends of American Express, complete with a meet-and-greet for her with Rodrigo herself.

These short-lived, highly curated spaces, often open for less than a week, have become a calling card for American Express. In the past two years, the company has produced a series of branded pop-ups for some of music’s most globally recognised artists, including Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa, BLACKPINK, Billie Eilish, and Ed Sheeran.

While each event is unique, they appear to share a common strategy: create access, cultivate loyalty, and embed the brand inside cultural moments that matter most to their cardmembers, and perhaps just as importantly, to the next generation of them.

This isn’t traditional sponsorship.

These are experience-led activations, engineered to be lived, photographed, queued for, and shared. And for American Express, they’re just one part of a continued evolution and broader shift from financial services to immersive lifestyle brand.

That isn’t just marketing speak. It’s part of a considered strategy.

From Points To Presence

For years, American Express has been expanding its footprint in the experience economy.

Nowhere is that more evident than in food and dining, where the company has built an global framework of access: exclusive reservations at some of the world’s best restaurants, collaborations with many of the most acclaimed and exciting chefs, and short-run events and residencies from London to New York, Tokyo to Modena, and many more places in between.

(As many of you know, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the brand on many of these partnerships, activations, and experiences over the years, and now count them as a client of Understory)

The music pop-ups follow the same logic. A fan might not yet hold an AmEx card. They may be too young. But their parents do, and they’re often the ones enabling access. For others, the moment of connection comes later, when the brand isn’t just a name but a memory: of skipping the line, of being there with a friend, of feeling part of something.

For many young fans, these events are their first real encounter with American Express. But they’re not just promotional. They’re foundational. And they reflect how evolution of fandom, and the relationship between artist, brand, and audience, has changed. More collaborative, more designed, and, not surprisingly, more emotional.

The New Value of Experience

This embrace of “experiential” isn’t just another marketing trend. It’s an economic and cultural correction.

With changes in technology, and with more and more of our lives digitised, fragmented, and increasingly automated, moments of real-world connection are becoming disproportionately valuable. And there’s only going to be more demand for live entertainment and experiences.

Pop-ups like these are engineered friction. They require showing up, standing in line, being present. We live in a world of infinite scroll, which only makes the physicality and shared experience of these pop-ups feel so special. It happens once, and only there.

The experience economy isn’t just thriving because we’re becoming tired of digital. It is thriving because we’re increasingly seeing the limitation of digital and social. Connection doesn’t come from a stream, like, or share. It’s built through shared moments that mean something. And increasingly, it is brands that are creating and curating moments that stay with us.

A New Kind of Patronage

At the core of the strategy appears to be something straightforward: access.

Not just to things, but to experiences and the people and stories behind them.

For brands like American Express, the value isn’t just in what’s being sold. They’re a way to participate meaningfully (nope, not going to say authentically) in culture and cultural moments, and to be remembered for it.

For artists, these pop-ups offer a way to shape how their work is seen and experienced. It is direct-to-fan engagement, powered by a brand they know and trust, and a chance to bring the world of an album or tour to life offstage and in a more intimate setting than that perhaps shared with twenty-thousand people.

And for fans, it’s less about what they buy and more about what they take with them. A shared moment they were part of, and one they’ll remember for a long time to come.

It’s easy to dismiss these events as marketing stunts.

But do so and you’ll be missing the deeper point. In a world flooded with content and shaped by algorithms, the most valuable currency is experience.

American Express isn’t just creating activations. It’s curating access to cultural moments and experiences that matter, and to the brand that helped make them happen.

Not bad for a weekend pop-up store.

But then again, membership does have its privileges.

From the archives and pre-Substack days.

“You have got to decide at the end of the day, which side of this ledger you stand on.”

So said John Landgraf, the longtime C.E.O. of FX Networks, in an interview with and Lucas Shaw that touched on the perils of the algorithm and Silicon Valley’s influence over Hollywood.

His belief?

By betting on artists, “you get quality and output beyond your wildest dreams—things that you couldn’t in a million years imagine happening.”

Landgraf’s stance isn’t new, but it’s never been more pressing.

We’re living in what he calls a “giant financial and algorithmic machine.

And while he isn’t anti-data, his message is clear: it’s time for balance. Or, more aptly, a rebalancing—a moment for Hollywood and the wider creative world, from film and television to music and literature, to recognise that the current obsession with numbers and analytics (from viewers and hours viewed, streams, skip rates and completion rates) may be costing us something vital.

Because while data can predict behaviour, it can’t capture the intangible spark that artists bring—the magic of a risky idea, an original perspective, something wholly unpredictable.

Landgraf’s call to bet on artists is about leaning into the creative spark and trusting the messy, sometimes volatile process of creating something new.

It’s not that data is the enemy, or that it doesn’t have a place in this business—far from it.

For decades, the industry has relied on data, from ratings and box office figures to singles and album charts, readership and circulation, and even audience surveys. But what we now have is a level of real-time access, broken down into the most granular detail and hyper-analysed to an unprecedented degree.

And Landgraf is sounding an alarm: when the commercial side has encroaches too far, it threatens to define creativity entirely.

Sure, data and algorithms help avoid catastrophic failures (and fuel the dependable sequel machine). But they’re inherently backward-looking and designed to optimise based on what people have already liked. Which is why they’re fantastic at predicting what’s safe to make, but not so great at green lighting the ideas that break new ground.

Today’s reliance on data has shifted our tendency from “what if?” to “will it work?”—or, more bluntly, “will it make money?” or even more so, “will it not lose money?”

That’s the calculation driving much of our creative industries. But sometimes, as Landgraf reminds us, you have to “back your creative with his, her, their vision”.

Maybe that vision is a risk, maybe it’s unclear if it’ll resonate.

But that’s precisely the point.

Buyers, commissioners, editors—they all have a role that’s bigger than just approving what the data suggests. Landgraf’s call is for them to curate, to nurture, and to back projects that are uncertain and don’t look like safe bets.

Because audiences often connect most deeply not with the thing they know they want, but with the thing they didn’t see coming. Data can tell us what people have responded to, but it can’t tell us what will move them next.

And here’s the irony: in trying so hard to give audiences what they want, we risk depriving them of the very thing they love about art—the surprise, the awe, the moment when something entirely new unfolds onscreen or on the page.

The industry must rediscover those instincts, the willingness to take the occasional leap of faith.

Because while data might guide us to the probable, only creativity can take us somewhere we never expected to go.

From the archives and pre-Substack days.