She has a deep and varied background in PR, from a brief stint at Epic Records on the brink of the Great Recession to her last day job as global head of communications for powerhouse agency 72andSunny. We called up Elizabeth to talk about the ebbs and flows of running your own shop, why generalists are the best experts, and the importance of knowing what you don’t know.

Three Point Four Media: What does The Good Advice Company do? It does not feel like a traditional PR shop to me.

Elizabeth Rosenberg: It’s not. There’s a few things. I work with executives on their personal brands, and that is very much a collaborative effort with people who want to show up in an authentic way. I do very high-level PR strategy and marketing consulting, mostly with creative agencies. I have a lot of agencies that keep me on retainer to pick my brain, because I’m a good outside resource who is tapped into so many different industries. I bring them a new perspective of how to see things. That’s my favorite stuff to do, to be honest. I also help people in times of crisis.

Old fashioned crisis PR?

Yes, but now it’s so much less about “how do we spin this,” and so much more about accountability and honesty. How do we get in front of the story before somebody else hijacks the narrative?

What is the output of the work you do with executives on their personal brands? Is it an internal messaging exercise, or is it more thought leadership and helping them land interviews?

It can be a little bit of both. It’s very foundational to how they show up internally and externally. I don’t think everybody needs to be a content creator or a thought leader.

The story everybody thinks they should be telling is never the story that’s interesting. We always want to tell the one that we think “everybody’s gonna love,” when really there is a human story that everyone is going to respond to and rally behind in a much more authentic and human way. I think part of my job is giving people permission to be themselves, which I love.

You have “strategic advisor” listed on your site. What does that mean in practice?

That’s where people call me and they’re like, “Oh my God, this just happened. What do we do?” I work with high-level executives, so it’s really having another opinion and another voice that can look at your stuff from the outside, because sometimes they’re just too close to it.

People get too close to their own story, and then they can’t tell it.

Us included!

How much “traditional PR work” do you do?

PR is evolving so quickly. If by “traditional” you mean “what it looked like 10 years ago,” probably 10%.

That dovetails nicely into my next question: how much has your definition and your idea of PR changed over the years?

I have always been a little bit of a renegade when it comes to how I do PR, even when I was at 72andSunny. The thing I loved about working there was everyone was so game to try something new. We hosted the first ever Teen Vogue Summit. We had Hillary Clinton speaking to all these young women, and it was something that traditionally would not have been considered “PR.” But we got great PR out of it and amazing relationships. It’s all about extending the network.

How do I look at PR now? I like to do PR workshops with clients first. It’s funny because clients will say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah—we don’t need to learn about PR. We just need somebody to do it.” I have to tell them, “We’re doing it backwards. That actually is not going to serve you.”

I sit down with clients, go over their budget, and then help them understand how their entire ecosystem touches PR. What do we like? What don’t we like? What do we want to do? What don’t we want to do? What is pay-for-play, and what’s not? You most likely do not have time or money to get all the things done. So strategically, let’s figure out what makes the most sense based on your goals.

So many PR and comms shops work on a retainer model because you can’t charge someone specifically to land them in The New York Times. That just doesn’t work.

Right! The agencies that are pay-for-play guarantee to get you 10 placements for x amount of money. Then clients are like, “But I don’t want to be on this blog. It doesn’t serve me.” The expectations clients have when working with a PR agency doing media relations are unrealistic. You can’t see the story before it goes live. You can’t edit the headline. That’s not how it works.

That is why the workshops I do with clients are so fundamental. I help them understand what PR looks like today. Everybody skips that really important step of understanding what they’re asking for and what works for their company, and just goes towards, “I need PR.”

You have a wide-ranging background. You are, like us here at Three Point Four, a generalist. Generalists are the best. How has working in different industries shaped your work?

Every industry fundamentally works very similarly. Everyone thinks their industry is so different, but when it comes to storytelling it’s not.

I have always been very clued in on the business behind every client I work with. When I was in the ad world, I would listen to all of the holding company earnings calls. Everyone would ask me, “What are you doing?” I was like, “Don’t you want to know what’s going on in the industry? I can tell you right now there’s going to be layoffs in six months.” It’s important to understand how clients make money.

You wrote about how burnout landed you in the emergency room. How did that change your work?

When I published that, part of it was very scary because it felt like I was very weak. Are people not going to work with me knowing that I crashed and burned? That story went very viral. It was terrifying, but also a relief to get that story out and know it was also making an impact on others so they didn’t feel alone in their own burnout. It led to the really authentic storytelling work I am now doing, because everything that I do for my clients I have tried on myself first.

How has AI changed your approach to work?

If I think about the amount of time I spent over the years cutting down creative award entries to 250 words? AI is amazing for that.

I’m an English major. I write with em dashes and grammatically do things correctly that are now coming across as if it was written by AI—and that kills me a little bit inside. Six months ago, I was really leaning into using it as a thought partner, and I don’t as much anymore. I feel like it dumbs down my creativity in a weird way. It gives me AI ideas versus something that feels more innately mine.

It is very helpful when it comes to taking all the information I have and bucketing it into an ecosystem a client can work with.

Like collating the information?

Exactly. It’s also helpful when something needs to be optimized for an LLM. I’m really honest with my clients as to how I use AI and how I don’t. A lot of the work I do is retainer-based or a project based on hours. It could take me four hours to do something, but using AI it could take me 30 minutes.

Why did you decide to go out on your own?

I really loved my job at 72andSunny. I had been doing the same thing for a while. I’m a very voracious learner. I wanted to do something new.

When did you start Good Advice Company?

I quit my job a week-and-a-half before the world closed down. I started taking clients in June 2020, and launched officially that September.

How was that transition for you, was it seamless?

It was. I’m so grateful because all the people I worked with over the years had gone to different agencies. In the first three years of your business it’s all from old people you used to work with. Then you have to start looking at things differently.

I had learned so much about how to be a better entrepreneur the second time around. This time, I actually knew how to set up the business properly.

If you are going to go out on your own, know what you don’t know. Hire the people to do the things that you do not know how to do. Do not use AI for your contracts, hire a lawyer to do that. Get a good contract. Ensure that your accountant has you set up on everything properly. Set up your business with experts in their field.

What did you do the first time around?

It was 2008. It wasn’t an intentional “I’m going to be a consultant.” Within a short period of time I was laid off and fired from a job. Very humbling. It was horrific at the time, but the best thing that ever happened to me. There’s a lot intellectually and emotionally that goes on with you that helps change your trajectory.

I got laid off in 2012, and it was finally what I needed to go freelance.

Okay, take the leap! [Laughs] I didn’t have a choice. There weren’t any jobs. I was looking for work, and then people started asking if I was open to freelancing. That just snowballed.

What sort of advice would you give to someone who wants to do their own thing?

My number one piece of advice right now is don’t quit your job.

Why?

Financially, it doesn’t make a ton of sense right now. Insurance-wise, it is really complicated in our country. Think of it like scales. Have your job at 90% and your side hustle at 10%. When you get to this place where your side hustle is making enough money for you to sustain and it’s more enjoyable than your job—that is when you take the leap.

I think AI is giving people a false sense of security and confidence with business plans that don’t make any sense financially in the economy that we’re in. It’s really hard. It is not easy to do this. People don’t understand you can have really great months and really slow months. You have to be financially creative with how you run your business, but then you can take a Tuesday off and go to lunch with your kid or get a haircut.

You have to have the stomach for it. It took me a long time to get used to the ebbs and flows, and realize it’s okay that I’m typically not as busy at the end of July.

Yes! And know that that rest is a necessary evil for you to catch up on all of the life admin and business admin that you’ve been putting off. Know that the downtime also gives you a chance to recharge, get outside, exercise, do something that creatively fulfills you, see friends and family, do some R&D to evolve your business, but most importantly, rest.

Until a couple months ago.

For a variety of reasons that are not worth getting into, we moved the meeting from 9 to 9:30. A small change, but a good one. There’s a bit more time before to do stuff: work, workout, prepare for the day, pretend to prepare for the day by reading the internet, watch Mortal Kombat 2 (wouldn’t recommend!), stare into space and contemplate the meaning of life. You know. Important stuff.

Is there a point here? Not really. There never is. But it has been a refreshing change. Rejuvenating, even. Getting out of a rut can be as little as moving something 30 minutes.

***
An article

Cool: “If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.”

Double cool: “A blackout caused by lost transformers, he warned, could last 18 months or longer.”

Christopher Cox goes long on how relatively simple it would be to send America back to the pre-electricity era. The worst of Taylor Swift’s Eras. Turns out that our entire electrical grid is held together by bespoke, $14 million transformers that weight 800,000 pounds and take years to build. This is great.

Palette cleanse: Scott Alexander on SF house parties made me laugh.

***

A run

I have taken some downtime since my mid-July triumphant not getting lost in a triathlon experience. This was always the plan. It’s important to have a plan. I do think this is probably the worst shape I have been in in quite some time. Also part of the plan, I suppose, or at least the inevitable conclusion of following the plan. I usually do not follow plans. But I also usually get injured. What I’m saying is that I went for a five-mile run last week and it nearly killed me. Temperature 72, feels like 77, emotionally feels like 1000. But we survived. No time like the present to start building again.

***

A project

We recently completed a white paper. It’s always funny: you send these things out to the client and never know what is going to come back edit wise. Sometimes it’s a tremendous amount of work. Sometimes it’s barely anything at all. There is not rhyme or reason to it. I thought this was going to be the former; instead, it was the latter. Big win for the TPF Boyz.

***

A workspace

Chatted with Julie Holstein’s excellent Ward 6 newsletter about where and how I work. Local news, a growth industry!

***

A movie

Recommended by Loop friend Molly Young. I wanted this to be better, but also enjoyed it. Pattinson is in the Got Rich Young, Do The Projects I Want Want Hall of Fame. (GOAT: Daniel Radcliffe.)

I also recently watched The Dink, which is a movie I both would, and would not, recommend. It’s extremely stupid.

***

A Q&A

We got a bit of inbound business last week. “Request for writing services” the subject line read. The email laid out the needs of the project in detail. It was right in our wheelhouse: articles for a webinar in the healthcare space. Inbound business, as everyone knows, is the best business.

Noah looped me in on the thread while he was on vacation. Wow, doing biz dev on vacation? Against company policy! April followed up again. There was a sense of urgency. “Does this seem legit to you?” Noah asked. Dear reader, a cursory Google search showed that it was very much not legit. A sampling: How to Scam a Commercial Artist, a post from r/phishing, and a PSA from r/freelancewriting, all of which traced back to our new potential client “April Castillo.”

In hindsight, there were red flags: “April” wrote in a font that felt like something a child would use for a school project and they specified in their first email “I prefer email correspondence for easy understanding because of my partial deafness.” I tell you all this in case April reaches out to you requesting your writing or design services.

What a thrill! I thought phishing was reserved for preying on the elderly. Turns out it’s for writers and artists, too.

Onto the links!

A new website

Another TPF website refresh. Check it out. Tell us what you think! Same old Three Point Four, we just got the website back from the tailor.

***

An article

As someone who has done quite a bit of stunt journalism—I once slept in an altitude tent in my Brooklyn apartment for two months, sadly the publication died in 2012 so I cannot share the link—I thoroughly enjoyed Willy Staley’s piece about eating like RFK for a week.

It turns out a breakfast of ground beef with a pile of kimchi and a fried egg is, frankly, invigorating. But lunch, by virtue of having to take place near the Times Building in Midtown Manhattan, allowed me to really spread my wings: I found my way to the skirt steak from a Spanish restaurant, which could be secured off menu—and, mercifully, to go. I would drag my jar of kimchi, plastic trays of fermented banchan and a wedge of Roquefort to a shared lounge area and hope the staff of T Magazine across the way didn’t notice my grotesque feeding ritual; at times I hoped someone would ask what I was doing, just so I could explain that I’m not normally like this. They never did.

***

A recipe

This is my new go-to salmon recipe. The grapefruit does a ton of heavy lifting. It’s okay if it gets a little burnt under the broiler—that’s the point. Bonus: the recipe only calls for one tablespoon of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice so I like to drink the rest while I’m cooking (with mezcal if I’m feeling spicy).

[leans in to whisper] I’ve never actually made the full recipe. I just make the salmon and serve it with whatever veg or rice or carb I have handy.

***

A video

Roughly 40% of my YouTube consumption is old late night music performances. Recently stumbled on this 2014 Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks Letterman spot. It’s extremely funny to hear Letterman utter the phrase, “their current album entitled Wig Out at Jagbags.” David Letterman is an American treasure.

***

A tomato

Can’t stop thinking about this rubber ducky looking tomato I saw at the market last weekend. I was told very sternly by the farmer that it was off limits and not available for purchase.

***

A run

Lots of relaxed, muggy miles on the bridle path in Central Park last week solo and with old friends. Even made time to grab bagels and smoked fish at Barney Greengrass after. Whatta town!

***

An interview

We met Delany at Bar Pisellino in the West Village and sipped cortados while a window unit dripped on us from above and a TikToker filmed an unhinged dance video next to our table. We talked about how his editorial background shapes his work, how positioning is just pitching, and why you should always take the call.

Three Point Four Media: What does Alex Delany do?

Alex Delany: At this point, more than a couple things—and it depends on the day. DJ slash throw events. Sound consulting for bars, restaurants, and hotels. Which means helping hospitality businesses to make sure they’re playing the right music, doing the right playlists, buying the right speakers, making sure their room sounds balanced. What else is on this list? [Laughs] Consult on the more consumable side of the business. So, doing wine lists for people, seasonal cocktail lists, helping from a bar and drink perspective, making sure that they’re serving the right thing at the right price. For instance, I just did a by-the-glass list for a hotel in New York that was desperately in need of some cool wines.

And then social media partnerships, because they always help pay the bills.

It sounds like the food and beverage consulting is not that much different from your work at BA.

It’s not that much different. It’s just delivering my taste in a different way.

Let’s go back to the beginning. We have similar Condé Nast origin stories: We both got our start in the production department and then weaseled our way into editorial. How’d you do it?

My last summer at college I interned at Details in the graphic design department. After I graduated, there was a production manager job opening at Bon Appétit, and I admittedly had no idea what that was. It was in the art department. I thought for sure I’d be designing magazine pages. I got the job, and I was not designing magazine pages.

But you were in the building!

I was in the building.

When I got the production job at Vanity Fair, my thinking was “this isn’t a writing or editing gig, but it’s in the building.”

Exactly. It wasn’t the job I wanted, but I was super happy going to the office. I was 21, had just moved to New York City, and these were the coolest people I’d ever met. The BA crew at that time was so fun, they were so knowledgeable, and I was obsessed with food and bars. I had this wealth of knowledge at my fingertips. Going to work every day was truly a delight. Sitting in front of a computer at 11:55 before the magazine has to go out at midnight with my head in my hands making sure I had the right hi-res photo files? I just wasn’t cut out for it.

But, I had this reputation of knowing about craft beer. Which is funny, because this was 2014 when you couldn’t kick a can and have it not hit a craft beer bar in New York. No one on staff really knew anything about craft beer, so I was asked a couple times to write about beer for the magazine and the website. And then I started writing about other stuff.

Were you still in the production department?

Yeah, I would stop doing production work at like eight or nine and start writing. I was also much better at the writing than I was at the production stuff. Finally they asked me if I wanted a job as an assistant editor on the website. This is kind of hard to believe because it was in the not-so-distant past, but the web team only had five people including me. In addition to doing all my low-totem pole editing responsibilities I ran the Instagram account. I was wearing all these hats, and a couple years later I was offered an associate editor role with the magazine.

That’s around the time BA’s video content took off. I was asked to go to Chicago and record a video because another editor couldn’t. It was successful, and they asked me to do more video stuff which eventually landed me a gig leading the magazine’s drinks coverage.

When did you leave?

Late 2021.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to do their own thing?

First off, have three times as much money in the bank as you think you need. It’s really about setting it all up before you before you make the jump. Have your finances straightened out. Have legitimate clients that are not promises. I got burned by two people immediately upon leaving, which was rough waters there for a bit—but a very good lesson.

In my experience, it takes a lot longer than you think it’s going to take to get a certain reputation and credibility based on your own talent and skills that is not just based on the name of where you used to work, especially if you are leaving an institution like Bon Appétit. When I was leaving BA, Chris Black gave me this advice: “Make sure you stay relevant in the eyes of the public, if you’re leaving a journalism thing where your name is constantly being put out there.” At first, I didn’t really understand it. But two years later I was like, wait a minute he’s 100% right.

Shedding the credibility of the name that you worked for or the people that you were associated with and just being you is a lot harder. Having a buoy that keeps you in the orbit of credibility that is not just your own is very important.

Has throwing parties and events kind of served as that vs. having a byline?

Yes, and it’s an interesting parallel because when you hear Bon Appétit it’s instant credibility. I’ll use Public Records, where I throw a regular party, as an example. If you are someone who likes music in New York, it’s an institution. It means a ton to music people. For me to do a party there where I DJ and also curate the wine and food, it’s instant credibility. Also, there are people who work there and DJ there who are, quite honestly, much better DJs than me and more tasteful in terms of music. It’s like working at a magazine with an editor that’s better than you or a writer that’s better than you. It’s another way where you can learn, and I feel like I’m always learning.

Those parties have to be really good for your consulting work

Absolutely. I have to remind myself I am not doing a wine list for me. I have very specific taste, but I have to consider the taste of the general public. Which is why I love it, it puts me outside my own head. It’s this ecosystem where all of the work informs other work that I’m doing, which I think is really important to anyone in a creative field. This is something I always thought when I was at BA. The more I know about architecture, interior design, art, music, or finance, the better food journalist I will become because I understand all of these different aspects that shape the thing I’m covering.

How do you feel your editorial background informs everything you do now? You’re using the same muscles.

To me, the pitching process was always something I dreaded, but it’s ultimately what makes me good at what I do now. I can tell a person the thesis of an event, the identity of a cocktail program, or the reason we are pouring these wines. It’s like telling an editor the crux of a piece.

Positioning is just pitching, and people with editorial backgrounds are better at it than other people in creative services.

100%. Learning how to make something fit and make sense, and do it very succinctly.

Is most of your work inbound?

Social media stuff is through my agent. I would say everything else is 75% inbound, 25% chasing either clients I’ve worked with, other clients I’m interested in, or having an idea for a project and pitching it around.

Noah and I have tried cold calling before, and it didn’t work. Now it’s all word of mouth.

You have to be within a certain degree of separation. Cold calling is hard as hell and it makes you feel like shit.

And it’s ineffective. We’re not selling software.

It’s a waste of time. You’re selling a specific thing that most people don’t need. That’s what I always tell people: Most people don’t need what I’m selling. There’s nothing more valuable than word of mouth if you’re in any kind of creative field. If you’re delivering good work to someone it’s just a matter of time until someone asks, “Hey who did this?”

If you know the person in between, or you know two people in between, always write the email or take a 10-minute call. It’s never not worth the effort. My rule is always reach out.

In an effort to keep all of our various Three Point Four Media projects straight, I have developed a system in my email where each new thing gets its own mailbox. An email comes in, it gets addressed and either deleted or drag+dropped into the appropriate place. I find this effective. Your milage may vary.

Projects graduate from general inbox to having their own folder for various reasons. There’s no standard rubric. But it’s always a nice moment when something we’re working on gets elevated out of gen-pop and into the status of this is important enough that it requires its own mailbox (read: there will be a lot of emails about this thing).

That happened earlier this week. We signed a new client after a rather rushed courtship—the best kind, imo—and it’s going to be a fair amount of work—also the best kind—so a new mailbox it is. Very exciting. It’s the little things, you know?

***

An article

An incredible as-told-to story from Abdou Sebushishe, a physician and a senior global-health adviser with the International Medical Corps, who is treating Ebola patients at Bunia General Hospital in Democratic Republic of the Congo:

If there are not many critical patients, we can see up to six patients in one hour. But when there are more critical patients we sometimes see only two. We go out, refresh, and then go back after one or two hours of rest.

Before we leave the red zone, we write the status of the patient. In Bunia, we have a Plexiglas divider where we hang what we’ve written. The clinician on the other side can quickly copy the notes before we discard them in the red zone. (In Beni, we go to a designated area within the E.T.C. where we can talk to clinicians who are on the other side—the green side. We dictate to them each patient’s instructions.) Once we finish that, we doff our P.P.E. under supervision. Someone receives us with a bottle of water and biscuits. And then we go sit down, recover for a few minutes, and we start discussing each patient again.

***

A phrase

I enjoyed this entire Johnny Knoxville profile (sorry, Profile) from former The Loop Q&A participant Molly Young, but at one point she describes Mr. Jackass as being “polite to the point of inefficiency,” and, damn, that is just so good.

***

A project

We talked about this a little bit in the intro but this is a funny business. Sometimes things take forever, and sometimes someone emails you one day and you have a contract for a not insignificant amount of work that could lead to more down the road a few days later. There’s probably a lesson there I should learn for the next time I’m harassing Bill because someone hasn’t gotten back to us.

Anyway, more to come about the project soon. This trailer is completely unrelated but the movie looks like a lot of fun.

***

A race

The Litchfield Hills Triathlon was lovely. I finished without getting lost, which was a nice experience.

The results: 11th in the swim, 7th on the bike, 7th on the run, 38th in T1, 29th in T2. 6th overall, which was a shocking 22 minutes out of 1st and 11 out of 2nd. We’ll call it a success.

The guy who finished two spots behind me said he saw a bear on the run course. Glad I didn’t know that until we were done.

***

An interview

At the end of 2024, Clint retired from one career and set out on another. After some consulting and many conversations, he landed at AI transformation company ScrumLaunch where he’s vice president of strategy & implementation.

On a recent Tuesday, we talked about pivoting from the pros, selling yourself when the patterns don’t match, and what locker rooms teach you about AI transformation. Then we both went our separate ways to watch Spain play France. Some things never change.

Three Point Four Media: Pro athlete is a job that requires being present and focused. But you also know it’s going to end at some point and you’ll still be a relatively young person who can have a whole separate career. How did you balance those tensions when you were playing?

Clint Irwin: It started with my parents and their approach to sports, academics, and other interests. It was very important for them and for me to be “well-rounded.” My dad was a promising athlete, and his career ended in high school because of injuries. I had this perspective that sports were great and I could be great at them, but they weren’t going to last forever. Even if you make it professionally and you get to LeBron status where you’re still playing at 40 or Tom Brady at 43, your career is finite. For me, I wanted to craft a life outside of sports, and I was always encouraged to find other things that I was interested in.

In college, I was a student-athlete and tried to balance my academic pursuits with sports. I never felt like I was one or the other. I tried to keep it very balanced. Even as my pro soccer career started, my second year I was for lack of a better term forced to find another job because I wasn’t making enough money. I was playing soccer. I was doing some coaching. I was working at a startup.

From a mental health side of things, to have something that wasn’t sports was important for me. These other interests outside of the game were seemingly completely unrelated, but they helped me keep things in perspective. It can be pretty jarring if your whole identity is tied up into this one thing.

On one hand, professional athletes are some of the most overscheduled people on the planet. On the other, there’s so much downtime where you don’t really have anything to do.

That’s definitely true. When I started my pro career, it was very much “being an athlete is your job” and you didn’t do anything outside of that. But we’ve seen how athletes are becoming investors, influencers, and more. No one is surprised now if you have a photo shoot for two hours after training or if a guy flies from London to Paris to do an advertisement. The expectations are loosened about how “focused” you have to be.

I always thought that was a false dilemma. There are only so many hours that you can actually put into practicing and physically developing yourself before you hit diminishing returns. As long as you keep things in balance, it can be helpful. As long as I’m performing, what’s the problem?

When and why did you decide to get an MBA?

In undergrad, I majored in political science and I minored in philosophy. My initial career track was law school-oriented, but I realized I didn’t want to follow that path. If I wanted to enter the business world, I needed some credentials and experience.

I ultimately decided to do it online through Indiana University. The Major League Soccer Players Association has a partnership with Kelley School of Business. They do a great job integrating athletes in. I think it’s important for athletes to be in those cohorts because we have a unique perspective. It was so interesting to share it with people from Fortune 100 companies, and hear about their experiences at Chevrolet, Eli Lilly, and all over the country.

I did the program at an inflection point where AI is starting to be involved in people’s lives. I could see my classmates using it or leaning on it for discussions and in various assignments. We talked a lot about when it was okay to use and when it wasn’t. Professors had wildly different opinions. I felt like it is going to be everywhere, so we should learn to use it.

I found a tremendous amount of value in the business courses because I hadn’t really done a whole lot of that. I can’t say I’m an expert in managerial accounting, but I’ve been exposed to the practice.

What was your job search like?

I met with more than 100 people in my year of job searching. A lot of people want to talk to an athlete or recently ex-athlete because they want to be able to tell their friends. It’s a good entry point. The challenge is that people can understand my discipline, high performance culture, and the intangible things that athletes bring, but they couldn’t really pinpoint where they would position me in a job. Especially in more corporate roles, they didn’t know how to pattern match my experience to what normally comes across their desks in a resume.

I found the most traction with people who were ex-athletes themselves or who had success hiring athletes. It was a long process. I went about a year without something full time.

I get it. My resume is weird. I played professional soccer for nearly 15 years, and now I’m auditioning for a role where I have no work experience. If you’re a hiring manager, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work out, right? I realized pretty quickly that there are some people who are just not going to get this. I could spend a lot of time trying to convince them, but it’s not going to work out. I’m better off spending my time with someone who can be helpful or gets where I am.

We have a similar issue where selling ourselves to potential clients who used to be journalists or have journalism experience is so much easier than people who have never done it. Bill and I think a lot about the language we use. “We’ll create a magazine-style feature” makes no sense to someone who has never done that before. It took us a long time to learn that lesson.

You started working full time at ScrumLaunch in March. What’s your day-to-day look like now?

We are an AI transformation agency. My role is primarily new business development, but I also do some project management. It ends up looking a little bit like management consulting plus an AI solution. I’m the liaison between the business problem that companies are trying to solve and our technical engineers who are using their tools and software to solve the business problem. The job changes week-by-week based on who’s out there on CNBC talking about the AI industry. It’s amazing how quickly these talking points enter into the conversations I’m having and the solutions people are requesting.

I’ve found it’s a lot like my experience in soccer, particularly in locker rooms. I always had to figure out how to connect with a 23-year old rookie from Ghana and also the 32-year old American who’s been in the league for 10 years? You have to be flexible, but you also have to figure out what people care about and what drives them.

You still need that layer of building trust with the decision makers. Whatever business becomes in the future, we are going to need the people who can talk cross-functionally across teams and build consensus and trust between various parties. If you can figure out ways to get humans to work together successfully, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll have a job somewhere.

A locker room does feel like very good practice for that kind of communication.

These problems I’m solving now are the same structural problems that I would be trying to solve in a locker room, right? Engineers are basically soccer players who can’t speak corporate. The corporate arm is the technical director who’s trying to figure out why the players won’t go and clap for the home fans after every game. I’m in the middle, trying to explain both sides to each other.

Greetings from smoky and spooky Michigan, where your friends at Three Point Four Media are grinding through the smoke and avoiding Taco Bell. We are currently in pitch deck land—its own kind of haze—building out decks for our clients and ourselves. Here’s how our pitch deck process usually goes:

• I put a bunch of slide-by-slide thinking into a Google Doc

• Noah trims things to make it more succinct and orderly, and adds some ideas

• I revise it to make it a pitch deck not an ideas memo, and move 95% of our thinking to the presentation notes

• We design and ship it

The thinking is essential. I realize how hilariously stupid and obvious that sounds, but it really is! It helps you figure out what is useful, what is superfluous, and what you’re actually going to say. You have to put that down first before you can synthesize everything into three bullet points that convinces someone to give you money. When we were reporters, we sent ideas memos. You can’t put that much copy in a pitch deck, no one is going to read it.

Keep it short. Keep it simple. You want some mystery and intrigue, you can talk over everything else.

An article

Defector went behind-the-scenes with Tour de France photographers, who have to cover a lot of ground to get the perfect shot and also navigate road closures and mountain passes. Cyclists: Hate writers, love photographers.

“Cyclists, more than any other sport I’ve seen, hate the media,” Williams said. “All you do is write about them, and you have to really get to know them as people before they trust you.” Most riders don’t want to do press at all, and a handful of teams, most notably NetCompany-Ineos, treat us with undisguised hostility. But riders love the photographers. “Cyclists are deeply vain people,” Williams said, “and we take photos of them that make them look cool. They even want crash photos because they look baller.”

***

A project

New piece for Acumen America exploring how they are preparing for the looming Medicaid work requirements: When Medicaid rules change, how can we ensure those who qualify aren’t left behind?

***

A recipe

I make Alison Roman’s blueberry cornmeal tart as soon as local farmers throw up the WE HAVE BLUEBERRIES bat signal. I made it twice last week, and I will make it again this weekend. Not to be that guy, but: It comes together quickly and it’s a very easy and straightforward recipe. It’s extremely good leftover, but there are rarely leftovers.

***

A run

My current obsession is closing the loop on the map. I can cross streets, but I can’t do an out-and-back. I went on a lovely run this week through four different Ann Arbor nature areas. There is something weirdly satisfying about the map when it’s a clean loop.

***

A Q&A

Excellent interview with The New Information’s Dave Yun last week.

Three Point Four Media: How do you describe New Information?

David Yun: We are truly a design-led studio. I come from a background of loving the art world. Like a lot of designers, I was inspired by music posters and album covers growing up, but seeing art in museums was a constant thread throughout my childhood. I remember going to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, wandering into a Tom Friedman show, and loving the artwork but also taking home this beautiful program and thinking, “What is this thing? Who made it?” That program made me feel like I was participating in his work. I wanted to find ways to bring this kind of participation with art into my own creative practice.

I also think about how to hold creativity and commerce in balance. It’s funny. Last year, we had a really amazing person come and work with us. She helped transform some of our communications, and kept saying, “log line, log line, log line.” We’re designers. We didn’t know what a “log line” was. We’re not really in the sales or marketing territory for our business, so I’m constantly learning how to be a better salesperson.

Pearl Jam used to sell posters at their concerts, a different one for each show. Now, of course, they are collectors items. You can go on eBay and get one from their 1998 tour for $800, but initially they were something you could take home with you for $25.

It’s the memory of the experience that’s really incredible. It’s really exciting what a piece of ephemera can hold.

Just to be clear, that’s where my career started maybe 25 years ago and it has evolved since. What’s really fun is working with younger designers who take so much pleasure in making every single thing. I love to enable them. I’m not a design director or creative director who wants to own every design achievement. I truly celebrate the work that my designers do with me. It’s a collaborative process, and I’m very hands-on, but I don’t need to claim authorship of everything that comes out of our studio. I’m free floating and managing a lot of different projects, but I’m not on the ground doing all the design work all the time.

It feels rewarding to watch young designers as they start to form pragmatic skills as the ideas start to click. That first time they make something, it gets printed, and delivered into the world is exhilarating. Those moments inspire an infectious enthusiasm that I love to share with them.

Was that pulling back an intentional choice or did it happen naturally?

Even when I was at 2x4, I began to realize that I was getting better at coordinating, visioning, and crafting the ideas. There are designers who really just want to make and there are designers who want to facilitate the making. I was on a team with an art director and a senior designer, and suddenly I was managing all the projects. I liked it, and they liked it.

When I left, it made a lot of sense to me to keep facilitating even though at first I was making everything on my own. I had some incredible projects. I partnered with Cory Arcangel to make an exhibition catalog for his solo show in Denmark. Cory and I worked closely together with the photographer Sacha Maric on making the book. I love working with people who are creative, collaborative, trusting, and inspiring. That was an early moment where I thought that leading my own studio could work.

That makes a lot of sense to me. When I was freelance writing, I was doing all the work myself. Now, at Three Point Four Media, it’s a lot more about managing, being a good collaborator, and finding the right people to work with on a specific project.

At work, one of the things that I’ve been focused on is cultivating an environment where my designers feel nurtured. That sounds kind of touchy-feely, but I want them to feel like they have the space to make great work. I set up the parameters and the definition around a project so they can understand the expectations. They can come to me when they have questions or need direction, but talented people need space to create great work.

How do you balance between making physical products and digital ones?

I wasn’t originally trained as a graphic designer. I studied anthropology and music, and had a great love for design. I graduated from college right after the dot com crash in 2000, and there were no jobs. A friend had landed a job in New York making websites and I joined him. It was such a small business that I was doing front-end design, programming the sites, and setting up web servers. I was learning everything about it. Meanwhile, I was starting to realize how much I liked typography and emulating seminal studios like Designers Republic or Pentagram.

My sister is an artist and she suggested I go to grad school. She told me Yale had a good design program. I started looking into it, and I realized it was everything I fantasized about. I worked on my portfolio for an entire year.

I had been doing digital at the website company, and then at Yale I shifted to thinking more about type and book design.

That period cemented the idea of seeing design through the lens of bookmaking. In the studio, we talk all the time about how every design project is essentially a book project. Every project has some level of system: a cover, a sequence, and a storytelling element. It’s very important to me that each New Info designer works on one book when they’re here. I want them to really get into the weeds of a system and learn how to make a system come alive through very basic components that are static but also moving in time.

I really don’t think so differently about something that’s going online versus going to print. In the studio we ask ourselves how does a book become a screen, or how does a book become a website, and vice versa.

How is AI entering your workflow?

I’m playing with a lot of different methods at different levels. Because my role is so managerial and administrative, I use it for framing out complex proposals. For example, I just had a call with a client. They wanted a set of communication tools. It’s all pretty complex. I need to work with my developer, my strategist, and my designers to understand how much time everything is going to take. It’s really helpful to throw all of those considerations into my AI tool and have it structure the process. I usually end up rewriting a lot of the proposal but that initial scaffolding is useful.

We use AI in the studio, too. Last week, one of our designers was trying to figure out an animation, and he was like, “Oh, did you want something like this, Dave?” He showed me a fully baked animated website that he made in 15 minutes by using Claude . It was incredible, and he could tweak it so easily. We also use Photoshop’s AI tools. It’s a scrappy way of removing a person from an image or silly stuff like that. We haven’t gone deep into cloud design yet, but it’s intriguing. I think it could help us workshop ideas. A lot of what we make is design systems, and we’re always very curious about how a system is going to play out.

With that said, AI is currently changing our entire world culture and economy. I’m concerned about the embedded power structures, and the ways in which inequities are built into the code itself.

It’s become undeniable in the last few months that this thing is useful in a way that it wasn’t a year ago, and I don’t particularly see it slowing down anytime soon. It’s a little frightening.

A few years ago, I worked on a show with the Ford Foundation Gallery. It was called What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI and it was organized by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan. The show gathered together a wide variety of artists who were asking questions about AI, not just asking about where it was going but who was in control. Who is writing the scripts and how is the structure of AI creating inequities or imbalance of power?

Three years ago, they were anticipating these urgent questions that really need to be answered today. I like to be around artists because they’re always imagining and asking: “Why this?” “Why now?” and “What are we doing?”

Back next week.

I mean, almost. July emotionally, if not actually. The summer solstice has come and gone. These are facts. If nothing else, we are all about facts at Three Point Four Media. Hard truths, obvious answers. We are not picky.

In other news, the World Cup has been fun. Recent TPF Q&A participant Neil Buethe predicted this turn to excitement, but it really is impossible to kill. The games are high scoring, the tourists loving our giant houses and endless refills and whatever this is, the whole thing coming together nicely.

Perhaps a problem vis-a-vis FIFA being garbage, but what are you going to do?

Finally, I guess we spell it differently now.

An article

A tour de force profile of SBF, who remains the same person he’s always been.

Often when we are talking on the phone, Bankman-Fried confesses, he is on his tablet playing the game, just as he was on his computer half-playing Storybook Brawl virtually until the moment he was arrested at his Bahamas apartment complex in December 2022.

An exceptional story about an exceptional person. The highest of recommendations.

***

An academic paper

We begin:

Of all the monsters who fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than were-wolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest.

What a start! In that way that one does, I stumbled onto “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering” the other day. A seminal paper from Frederick P. Brooks Jr. who won a Turing Award and managed development at IBM. An argument for why human-led software development will continue to exist in the world of AI, and might be even more important than before.

The world is a complicated place.

***

A coffee shop

Powerhouse Arts is “Brooklyn’s Batcave Reborn as Gotham’s Art Factory.” Inside the lobby is the aptly named Turbine Cafe, a lovely space for sitting. They have excellent yet comically small breakfast burritos from some local proprietor and very solid coffee. Getting there is not easy, a confusing maze of occasionally signed alleys, but what are you going to do? Then I wandered around the art exhibition upstairs. I did not buy anything. Will I be back? Maybe. Will I tell people I went to a cafe inside the giant industrial space that’s visible from many parts of my neighborhood? Absolutely.

***

A project

We are heads down on a bunch of stuff right now. Being busy is good. So is sleeping. Make time for both.

***

A triathlon

The 2026 Wyckoff/Franklin Lakes Triathlon. Kona for people who want to drive from Brooklyn in the morning, race a sprint tri, and be back by 9:05 a.m. An enjoyable experience. About two and a half minutes faster than my time in a similar length race a couple years ago. If you squint, I came in second because one person I lost to was actually a team of three doing a relay and the person who finished second beat me by 21 seconds but I got lost on the bike course, which cost me 90 seconds. I even had a map on my bike computer, which I ignored. I need a coach specifically for directions.

***

A Q&A

Another one next week.

Dan Frommer stays ahead of media trends. He was Business Insider’s second employee—“There, I did a bit of everything: Reporting (5,700 posts)”—before serving as technology editor of Quartz and editor in chief of Recode. In 2019, he went out on his own, launching The New Consumer, a newsletter dedicated to spending money and consumer trends. It’s great. You should subscribe. 

Given Dan’s propensity to see the future, we called him up to talk about working for himself, the usefulness of AI, partnering with a VC fund, being a two-newsletter family (his wife Lauren Sherman writes the exceptional Line Sheet), and using sushi lunches as a pricing metric. 

Three Point Four Media: How has New Consumer changed since you started? How has what you pictured changed?

Dan Frommer: When I started, I had almost accidentally moved to Paris. My wife's job sent us there for three months in the beginning of 2019. I decided I would do the New Consumer for at least those three months. Basically the first day enough people joined as paying members that it became my job.The vision has always been trying to figure out how consumers are spending their time and their money through the lens of two things. The first is gathering as much data about consumer spending and sentiment, and putting together trend forecasting. That has grown. If one thing has changed dramatically since when I started, it's that I'm now in the business of data. 

The other lens is always looking at innovative brands that seem to have figured something out about what people want. If you look at the homepage, the brands that I chose to reflect that concept of the new consumer were Amazon, Instagram, Warby Parker, Sweetgreen, and Gimlet. All of those except one still exist, so that's pretty good. Amazon, Instagram, Warby Parker, and Sweetgreen have grown so much since then. They are essential to the lives of their customers. They figured something out. 

There are also things that have grown from essentially nothing to become huge consumer successes. TikTok Shop keeps getting bigger and more essential to people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.

You started Consumer Trends reports. Why?

In 2020 I started working with a venture fund in New York called Coefficient Capital. We were huge fans of the internet stock analyst turned VC Mary Meeker. She would put out these essential 200- or 300-slide decks once a year on internet trends. The minute they came out, everyone dropped what they were doing and started reading the Mary Meeker deck. We wanted to do something in that vein but focused on the consumer.

We've now done 14 Consumer Trends reports, and it's become the biggest thing I do. People love them. They are an easy-to-read, but in-depth view of what's going on with the consumer through a bunch of different topics. We try to make a research product that is, dare I say, fun to read. People can flip through in a few minutes and learn something. I can also go and present at conferences or to companies or venture capital summits. That’s the biggest new thing that I did not anticipate having as part of my business. 

I do a little consulting as well: deep dive tear downs with brands or helping investors try to find investment targets. Things like that are interesting and fun for me. They use the skills I've built in 20 years as a journalist, but also the bizarre brain I’ve developed in 30 some years on the internet and really studying the consumer now for most of my life.

Are your signups pretty steady? Do you see a bump when you release a report?  

The reports definitely help. This is going to be music to the ears of every publicist out there, but coverage helps too. Getting other journalists to link to you, going on podcasts and speaking, and just being out there really helps. But the best and the most rewarding part is that good work is what drives signups. If I'm publishing great stuff reliably, then business is good and I'm happy. When I'm not, it’s the opposite.

Distribution, as I say, wins championships. I launched an experiment earlier this year where I'm mirroring my site on Substack. The thinking there was that I don't see Substack as a publishing platform so much as a social network. It’s a place where people are reading in-depth text articles. If I can use Substack the way that we used to use Twitter or we still use LinkedIn to reach readers who wouldn’t have found me otherwise, it’s a worthwhile investment. 

I have 500-plus free subscribers for minimal effort, and I’m not even playing the game the way Substack wants you to by doing video and live chat. I’d like to try those at some point, and we’ll see what happens there. I'll probably continue trying this experiment for a year and see if it's worth it. I'm trying to figure out how it fits into the tool set of an indie publisher right now.

Substack’s investors and founders would like to hear you say that it's more of a social network than a publishing platform.

Totally. I'm slightly trolling when I say that, but it’s kind of true, too. I still love Twitter and Instagram, but people are using the Substack app. I see it in my metrics. I would be really reluctant to make it my main website because there's not enough control. Ultimately, Substack’s long-term goals are not aligned with mine. But I think it’s a good test.

You charge $20 a month or $200 a year. How did you decide on that price point? It’s higher than many newsletters, but I always think people should be charging more. 

Pricing is tricky. It’s very hard to test. You can't dramatically raise the price very quickly, and it looks bad if you dramatically lower the price. When I started, there were a bunch of publications charging $100 a year that I could tell could charge more and wished they were charging more. The way I thought about it was that if you were a reader of mine and worked in one of the industries I covered, you might take me out to a sushi lunch and spend $200.

I figured, let's price this around a good sushi lunch in New York and see how we do. People certainly have no trouble expensing sushi lunches in New York, so hopefully that will apply to newsletter subscriptions. I kept the price the same because I think it works pretty well. 

What I'm thinking about now is a much higher price tier now that I have five years of proprietary data and research. The archives are something I'm not doing much with right now. How I can build a combination of information and access to me, and perhaps to each other, that would justify a higher price tag for people. I still see large research firms charging $5,000 for one PDF. There's certainly a value to what I'm doing that could justify a much higher price tag, but I’m still figuring out the right product mixes. People are a little too quick to sell their time as part of a bundle. Your time doesn't scale. 

In the Brxnd keynote, you mentioned using Claude to format some charts. How do you use AI in your day to day?

That was six months ago, and it's changed a lot. I use it every day. I want to understand how it works, what it's good for and what it's not, and there's no better way than to give it real world stuff to do. Also, I found it very helpful for a number of different things. As a one person business operator, sometimes it’s helpful to walk through a thought process or strategy with someone. Ideally that would be a peer or mentor, but ChatGPT and Claude are both very good, too. 

I write a long survey three times a year now, and ChatGPT was very helpful with thinking through how to keep different parts of the survey consistent in terms of how I was asking questions or how I was providing responses. I’ve also used it for thinking about the higher price tier: What are reasonable offerings at different price points? It can search through hundreds of other products out there and summarize their value propositions. 

It's still wrong a lot of the time, and I don't ever fully rely on it to do my work for me. But it has become a useful and interesting partner in the work that I do.

You are a two-newsletter family. Lauren's newsletter is amazing, and makes me incredibly tired. She’s constantly running all over the world reporting. Do you two talk about this new world of media? 

We met at work 20 years ago, and we started dating a couple years later. It’s been such a blessing to have each other as peers. At various points, we've worked for bigger companies or smaller companies, and helped each other navigate our careers. It’s also little things — I used to copy edit all of her work before she submitted it, and she is my number one go-to for ‘is this story interesting?’ 

I'm in awe of both the volume and the quality of the work she's been able to do. Puck is a really exciting company and model. I’m a big fan, and I hope it works. It’s been cool to watch it grow.

Bigger picture, how sustainable is the newsletter boomlet? There are a lot of big names launching newsletters now, some of their own volition and some that feel forced because they lost their traditional media job and newsletters are sexy right now. I don’t know how long that latter category is going to last. It’s not like a podcast where you can show up and talk.

It's really hard, and it's a lot of work. Running a successful newsletter is different and requires more skills than simply filing 700 word articles to an editor at a publication. A lot of the elements of what have fueled the newsletter boom will continue indefinitely: things like a closer relationship between individual writer and reader, and the ability to transact directly. 

But a lot of people will start newsletters and burn out quickly. While some people may get support from friends in the early days, ultimately the sweet spot is getting professionals to purchase subscriptions that they can expense. Anyone who has a job should be expensing a bunch of newsletters and media. Your boss will be grateful that you are learning and getting smarter and better at your job. 

There are a few existential questions about newsletters. Will Apple and Google, which are the main gatekeepers of email software, start to apply some algorithm or gating function that makes it harder for newsletters to be read? Do AI summaries neuter the voice and uniqueness of individual writers to a point where the joy of reading news disappears? Do people still know how to read because everything is dictated to them? 

For the foreseeable future, there's still a lot of room left. You see a lot of talented people going into this field and succeeding. I think the job grows to be a little more multimedia. There’s certainly an audio/visual component that I think a lot of the best people are taking advantage of. I try to do speaking events because it really suits my work well. It can be a nice income stream for a day or two of work, and it builds close, direct connections with readers and executives. The job is more than just writing a newsletter, but I would bet on that more than I would bet on mid- to big-media.

It all felt a bit much. It was foreign! As a recovering reporter and former assistant, I was used to taking relevant notes and doing my job. I always knew my marching orders. So while I was taken aback by the minor nanny state because a bunch of adults (not me!) couldn’t meet a deadline or take their own notes, I kept reminding myself: “This is a new workplace and industry. They do things differently here. This is their process.” I got used to agency life.

One of the reasons Three Point Four Media has had success is because we don’t overthink this stuff (except, apparently, in our newsletter). We have ideas about how things should be run—and we’ll speak up when necessary—but we’re not militant about it. We let the project dictate the process. We move fast and strategically. We meet our clients where they are, and they like working with us us precisely because we’re not like everyone else.

Onto the links.

A documentary

Friend-of-the-newsletter Andrew Helms worked as a producer on Rafa, the fantastic new Netflix series about the Spanish tennis legend. Check it out. He talked to Noah last fall about life in the wide world of streaming documentaries:

It’s nice to work with people. I found writing to be pretty isolating and lonely. It’s nice that on these projects, it’s collaborative, and you get to work with a team of editors and producers to try to shape a story.

***

A project

We’re currently working with a client on an essay that will appear in a book this fall. Interviews, reporting, writing, editing. All of it! Back to our roots.

***

A concert

I saw Kevin Morby at Saint Andrews Hall in Detroit last week. His partner Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee), who is very pregnant with their indie rock nepo baby, came out to sing a tune with him. They looked very happy.

Morby’s new record, Little Wide Open, is fantastic. I hadn’t listened to his solo music much until six or eight weeks ago, despite seeing both of his bands (Woods, The Babies) multiple times circa 2010-2012. The Kansas City songwriter is an avowed Dylan acolyte (a recent Pitchfork profile described him as “Dylan-pilled”), but the reason I like Little Wide Open so much is because he was blatantly trying to make a Tom Petty record. The entire thesis is basically: Imagine if an elder millennial who came up in early aughts Brooklyn indie used the same musical language and emotional register of Wildflowers.

***

A TV show

Noah tapped in with our friends this week with a very nice piece and wholehearted recommendation of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.

In an era of Ambient TV, Dinkins is something more powerful. It’s a comedy, yes, but it’s television that forces you to pay attention. Dinkins is not subtle; It is, after all, a Tracy Morgan experience. But the jokes unspool in surprising and varied ways, delivered across multiple senses.

***

A perfect cutlet

I’ve been doing some recipe testing for [redacted forthcoming cookbook] this spring, and I have finally achieved nirvana via cooking a perfect chicken cutlet in the comfort of my own home without setting off the smoke alarm.

***

A bike ride

We are back out riding Ann Arbor’s gravel roads. I truly miss my road bike, but it is increasingly unsafe around here. Gravel riding has everything I love about road riding (time and space for the mind to wander, low-level suffering, sun, open roads) with far fewer motorists. I’ve been throwing in five-minute surges on my solo rides lately just to wake the body up and feel alive.

***

A Q&A

We called up Jeff to talk about how he went from flipping hot dogs at Detroit Pistons games to writing for the NBA, what it takes to cut it in media, how many pairs of shoes are under his desk, and the dumbest thing he’s ever done running.

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Let’s start at the top. How did you make your way from serving hot dogs at The Palace to the NBA, and then on to a long career at Runner’s World?

[Laughs] It’s an interesting path I took, right? I was a high school kid who needed a job, and one of my cousins worked the concessions for the Pistons. He got me an after-school job working games. We’d shut down the stands at the end of the third quarter, and go sneak a few minutes of the fourth quarter before we cleaned up.

I interned in the Pistons’ broadcasting department in college. That internship turned into a full-time job when I graduated. After a couple years, I took a chance and moved to New York without a job. Slept on couches for a couple months. Something opened up at the league, and I worked as a writer at the NBA for five years.

You can’t overstate the importance of connections. Having anybody put in a good word for you and get you out of the stack, especially with everything being filtered through digital tools now, helps.

What is the difference between runner-in-chief and editor-in-chief? Is there a distinction?

My technical title here is Director of Product Testing. I work within Hearst’s Enthusiast Group, which is Runner’s World, Bicycling, Popular Mechanics, Bestproducts.com, and Biography.com. We don’t have a true editor-in-chief. We have an editorial director over the whole Enthusiast Group, and he turns us loose to make everything happen within our content silos.

I oversee all the product testing. But having been around for so long I know a lot about the business in a whole lot of different areas in the industry, and I touch a lot of what happens here within Runner’s World.

When you started at Runner’s World in 2007, the editor-in-chief was looking at the entire magazine before it went to print. Are you still fairly involved in print and the website, or do you trust the folks who work under you to do that?

There’s a lot of trust here. We don’t think of ourselves as a magazine anymore. There are a lot of different avenues and ways that we reach different people. We think about the content we’re creating and for what channel and what distribution means. We’re down to four print issues a year. It’s still a premium product. I hope there’s never a day we don’t have print, but it’s changed. But every day is fun. Every single day, I get fired up to come to work.

I find myself going to Runner’s World for shoe reviews, training ideas, and to send friends with achilles issues an old story about eccentric heel raises. What is consistently the most popular stuff on the site?

We’re a service title. We are here to help answer questions and help solve your problems. That’s what is always going to work. I love to entertain and inspire people. People come to us for that, but the number one reason you come to Runner’s World is “I just started running and don’t know what the heck I’m doing” or “something hurts, and I need to figure out how to make it stop hurting.”

The content that has always led the way is our training and injury prevention advice and gear reviews. We have this saying inside that my boss is actually the reader. They’re telling us what they want to know. Time and again, that is that service-based content.

What do you make of our current running boom?

I’m a little bit jealous, to be honest, because I grew up in the dark days of running. You didn’t have all the internet resources that we have now. We didn’t have run clubs. Now, there are so many opportunities and so many ways you can get involved. It’s not the same pre-work loop around your neighborhood that a bunch of us used to do. There’s so much opportunity to find a spot in this sport.

Running shoes are a very specific and very personal recommendation. How do you and your team balance that in product reviews?

We test. One thing I will never give up is actually putting things to use. We have 300 runners that we work with on our wear testing program to test shoes. For every model of shoe we test, we probably get 10 pairs.

Our testers go out and run for about a month in the shoes. The first run out might stink, but they’re going to keep using it, and they’re going to find out why they like it, how it worked, and how it compared to other things they’ve tested. On the front end, we try to make sure that we’re putting them in the right shoe that’s going to work for them. They have to come here to our office and try it on, just like if they went into a shoe store.

We have trail runners. We have people trying to qualify for the Olympic marathon trials. We have slower runners. They all give us info on how they use a shoe. When all that comes back in, our staff makes sense of it and then we get in the shoes ourselves so we can understand what these testers are saying.

Your job is to test shoes. If you’re doing an important workout, do you reach for your favorite shoe or do you use it as an opportunity to test something?

I’ll grab a shoe out of a box and race in something I’ve never worn before.

A marathon?

Yeah! I ran Philadelphia last year. We had just gotten in the new Mizuno Hyperwarp Pro. I had never worn it before. That morning, I slipped it on and told my wife and daughter to bring a second pair of shoes for me down to the seven-mile mark by our hotel in case. By the time I got to mile seven, I knew they’d work just fine. Last week, I ran a 5k in a pair of shoes I’d never laced up before and ripped it.

But I’m a little more durable than a lot of people. I’ve run in 98 pairs of shoes this year so far. [Ed note: Since we spoke, Jeff is up to 107… and counting.]

What’s your favorite shoe right now?

It’s impossible to answer. The shoe of the year last year is still, I think, the best shoe that you can buy: the Adizero Evo SL from Adidas.

That’s the team-issued shoe here at Three Point Four Media.

It does everything. It feels good. It’s not overly soft. It’s not overly hard. It’s bouncy enough. It’s a home run.

How much stuff do you have in your office? When I wrote about health and fitness, I had to tell publicists to stop sending stuff to my house.

You don’t want to see my desk. I’ve actually expanded to three desks here. I probably have 150 pairs of shoes under my desks.

What advice would you give to a young writer or fitness enthusiast who wants to get into the fitness media space?

You have to do it because you love it. Don’t be afraid of change. Don’t be afraid of the challenges that face the media industry. If you read the headlines and talk to people that have been in the media industry, it’s tough, it’s hard, it’s chased a lot of people away. The business has been totally turned upside down. I look at it as a challenge and an opportunity to rethink what we’re doing. If we try to do the same thing we’ve always done, we’re going to lose.

What are we in it for? For Runner’s World, that’s an easy answer. I’m here to genuinely help people. How we do that changes a little bit, but that’s still what I want to do every single day. If you can get into it for the right reasons and find the passion for what you want to do, you can have some fun and you can be good at it.

It’s also really hard to find good help. It’s really hard to find people who are passionate about what they do and are good at doing it. There are a lot of people that want jobs. The people who are the best in this business are the ones who want to be here. Because there are plenty of other jobs where you are going to make more money and have a more secure livelihood. If you want to come into media and journalism, understand you are going to take your lumps, there are going to be a lot of tough days, but even with the challenges of AI and whatever else is next, it creates opportunity if you’re open to it.

Last question: What is the dumbest thing you’ve done in your running career?

Probably a beer mile in Boston at midnight after a party. We were in dress clothes and raced down Boylston Street and a back alley past people standing out in front of a bar smoking cigarettes asking if we lost bets. The next day was rough.

Please leave a message for Three Point Four Media after the beep.

Two articles

The Average Guys Outsmarting Wall Street on Prediction Markets

How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency

A fun pair of pieces published two days apart.

***

An event

Emmett Shine is one of the main reasons all the millennial companies look like they do. This is not shade; this is fact. In addition to having an exceptional personal website URL, Emily Sundberg writes Feed Me, a daily newsletter “where the dealmakers and strivers get their gossip.” I personally would not go that far but I do not write headlines and I also subscribe to Feed Me so perhaps I am striving to be a striver.

Anyway. On Wednesday, I went to hear the two of them chat. I enjoyed it. Listening is an underrated skill.

***

A project

We have been toying around with the idea of starting something. This is vague and unformed right now. Claude, however, wrote us a business plan. Everything good starts with a business plan.

Related: This is cool.

***

A swim

I continue to improve at swimming, which is fun. Before last month, I had never been in the 1:3x per 100 yards consistently. These times are not good, but they are better, and that’s not nothing. You could even argue that it’s something. I also purchased a new Speedo, which might have something to do with the progress. We’ll see how slightly better times in a 25-yard pool translate to the open water in a few weeks. I also started occasionally putting swim workouts on my watch. In theory, the watch helps with pacing by vibrating but I don’t know what any of the buzzing means and I’m too stubborn to look it up so I just keep swimming while my watch has a fit on my wrist. Good times.

***

A Q&A

Okay, bye bye.

For a few years, a small part of Neil Buethe’s job was to call up and yell at me. Or perhaps, more accurately, have a frank exchange of ideas. Neil was chief communications officer at the U.S. Soccer Federation, an organization he joined in 2003. I was covering the United States men’s national team. We always had productive conversations. We can certainly agree that clickbait headlines are no one’s friend.

Last year, Neil stepped away from his full-time role at the federation—although he’s still an advisor to the president—to launch 18th and Prairie, a soccer-focused boutique communications, media, and content agency. He works with federations, teams, and companies to help navigate the fractured and confusing American soccer ecosystem.

I called up Neil to talk about the importance of relationships in comms work, why Alexi Lalas might be the best journalist in American soccer, and why America isn’t ready for this summer’s World Cup (in a good way).

But we started, as one does, in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Three Point Four Media: Your first job was at the Baraboo News Republic. How did you end up there?

Neil Buethe: I had interned at US Soccer in Chicago, and I was looking for a full-time gig. I was in Wisconsin and dropped off my resume at the Portage Daily Register up north. I guess all the small newspapers were connected somehow because the editors in Baraboo reached out, I interviewed, and I got the job. I lived in Madison and drove 30-40 minutes every day. Baraboo is the smallest city with a daily newspaper, and they needed content.

I was there for about 10 months, and I wrote two stories a day. I learned so much from everyone who worked there, many of them who still do: how to find stories, how to present ideas, how to write, how to make things relevant. I covered so many random topics. All these deer were getting sick and the venison wasn’t safe to eat, so they made huge piles of deer and burned them. That was big. I covered the highway expansion and pollution from a World War II ammunition plant. I really appreciated my time being there, and I became a much better writer.

One of my first jobs was writing eight posts a day for a New York City media blog. It was rough, but you learn a lot quickly.

I covered the county board and the sheriff, and interviewed candidates for governor when they came through Baraboo. You learn to ask good questions and build strong, meaningful relationships. Before I left, I went to tell the sheriff I took a job with US Soccer. He sat me down and made a point to tell me how much he appreciated the work I had done and that he felt I always tried to do it fairly. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot throughout my career, especially when I moved to the PR side of things.

Covering someone fairly and writing what they want to hear are not the same thing. It’s always nice to work with PR and comms people who understand that distinction.

As a comms person, you have to manage up with your bosses at times. Sometimes you have to tell them that they need to take a little bit of the bad with the good because the bad is accurate or fair. They shouldn’t want a puff piece, necessarily. They should want an authentic story. It’s my job to provide the journalist with as much context and insight as I possibly can, so when they do write the story, it’s balanced.

The best journalists are the ones that you can have tough conversations with. I’m not going to agree with everything you write, but I’m going to respect what you do. Did I agree with everything Grant Wahl wrote? No. But we could have a back and forth. To me, that’s the trademark of someone who is legit, knows what they are doing, and is professional.

A journalist should want to get the story right. And part of that is knowing what US Soccer is saying. Gather all the string and then weave it into a story. Decide what is spin and what is truth.

For sure, although I never use the word spin. I’m not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. I’m trying to provide the context you need to understand the issue or story. If I felt like you were wrong about something, I’d explain why.

Alexi Lalas loves to stir the pot. He plays a character on TV. He likes to say controversial things at times. But I will tell you this: Alexi Lalas would call me more than any other media member out there, asking me about something that was going on. We would have a debate about it. I would give him the context from the US soccer side and he would give me his two cents. Sometimes he would agree and other times he’d say he didn’t believe me. But he would always take the time to understand our side before he went on a rant. People are always surprised when I say Alexi was probably one of the most, if not the most, professional people in soccer media.

Alexi is very good at his job. There’s a reason he’s one of the most famous male soccer players in America. Switching gears a bit: this sounds more antagonistic than it’s meant to be, but did you intend to stay at US Soccer for 22 years?

If you would have told me back in 2003 that I would be there for 22 years, I would have been incredibly surprised. I had a few different opportunities to go to other places. I had really good conversations with Real Salt Lake when they first started, which was only a couple of years into my time at US Soccer. I talked to the Seattle Sounders a couple times about joining them.

Whenever those opportunities came up, I’d take a step back and compare them to the opportunity I had with US Soccer. I was so lucky. I got to do so many different things over the course of my time with them. I started doing basic comms work and launching a website, which we didn’t have in 2003. Then I moved into the youth national team role. I got connected to so many amazing coaches, like Thomas Rongen and Sigi Schmid, and players who went on to the full national team. My relationships with those players were built when they were 15, 16, 17 years old, and I still have those relationships today. I also got to start our content division from scratch. We were trying things, seeing what worked and what didn’t. Eventually, I was overseeing the whole department, which was a new challenge, and working with Jurgen Klinsmann and his pedigree.

But yeah, I never thought I would be there that long. I knew I wanted to transition at some point in the last few years. The World Cup this year was a marker for me. What US Soccer is doing is unbelievable right now: the growth of the organization, the building of the National Training Center, and the revenue that’s coming in. There’s still so much opportunity, but I also knew for myself I wanted to be challenged in a different way again.

Tell me about 18th and Prairie.

Right now, I’m still an advisor to US Soccer, helping president Cindy Parlow Cone with all her communications. But I was curious about starting my own agency. When I started thinking about it more seriously, I realized pretty quickly that doing it before the World Cup was going to be better than after the World Cup. A lot of brands, federations, and teams were looking for help in the lead up to the World Cup. They were curious about how to navigate the media landscape in the United States, specifically in the soccer space. I was able to provide helpful insight. I was doing it on my own at first, then realized I should start something more formal so I launched 18th and Prairie.

I’ve been working with EA Sports, the German DFB, and Capelli Sport, which has Cape Verde in the World Cup. There’s so much opportunity in the future: the Olympics in ‘28, the Women’s World Cup in ’31, and maybe some other big events and tournaments.

How much of a catalyst do you think this summer’s World Cup will be? I keep hearing people refer to it as a transformative moment for the sport, but I don’t know. I think the sport is already here.

I go back to 1994 being such a pivotal moment in my life. My dad and his friend took me and my friend to a game in Chicago. My dad didn’t know anything about the sport. But now those people like me who were impacted by ’94 or have been impacted by soccer over the past 30 years are dads and moms, and editors at newspapers or producers at TV stations. They understand how amazing the sport is. Their kids have grown up with it in a different way. The impact of the World Cup will be phenomenal on the kids who really care about the sport. It has an opportunity to bring all those casual fans into the tent, too. Soccer is part of the fabric of American life now, and the World Cup will bring even more excitement and awareness, and drive people who have been flirting with the sport to get more into it. I don’t think America is ready for the World Cup, and the impact it’s actually going to have. It feels quiet right now, but it’s going to get loud real quick.

I’ve always felt like what MLS needs is more time. It needs kids who go to games to grow up and become fans and bring their kids. You can’t really fast-forward that process although you can, to your point, enlarge the tent.

And it’s not just Major League Soccer, and the job they do, which is amazing, especially their in-game experience. I love NWSL and USL and how many markets they are in. I love going to Madison Forward games. I’ve been a season ticket holder since day one. They’re talking about bringing a USL team to Green Bay, and I’ve been having conversations with them. That’s so exciting. USL is in all these communities across the United States. There are kids that get to go to those games and experience a sport in a way you and I never had the opportunity. That matters too, right? Because it’s your team, your local sport experience.

I love the Packers because they were in my backyard, and I used to go to the games. I don’t have a relationship with any other sports team like I do with the Packers. We’re building soccer teams in all these communities, and that’s amazing.

Longtime readers know the Three Point Four Media origin story by now: a couple of freelance journalists put their heads together to help brands big and small tell their story. We don’t list “ideation” as a service on our site or in our capabilities deck, but I’m starting to think we should. We’re very good at it. Back when we were freelance journalists, ideas were our currency, our single most important stream of revenue. The best freelance writers aren’t necessarily the people writing glossy cover stories—though they are obviously very good at their jobs—but the kind of guys like your friends at Three Point Four who can constantly and consistently pump out good ideas and (this is crucial!) work to improve those ideas collaboratively with editors. I’ve been really happy and grateful to be back in that space the past month for our clients.

Onto the links.

An article

At this point, my monthly installments in this newsletter are a long-running bit about my attempt to be both bored and more focused. Loved this David Epstein piece in The Atlantic about focusing on one thing at a time. This bit resonated with me:

Simon believed that technology now delivers so much information that it exceeds our capacity to attend to it. “The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of ‘the more information the better,’” he said. How would we live and work if we prioritized the principle that attention is scarce? For one thing, we wouldn’t check email ­77 times a ­day—the average in one of Mark’s ­studies.

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A project

New work for Dr. Steve Klein in Stat News, exploring the risks of using AI in addiction medicine.

What troubled me most was the possibility that patients might mistake simulated empathy for genuine human connection. For me, the art of medicine requires the ability to connect authentically with my patients. That connection is bidirectional, intentional, and therapeutic. With AI, we risk losing that connection.

Read the whole thing here: Using AI in addiction medicine could be particularly risky

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A concert

Destroyer’s Dan Bejar played The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor on a short solo tour that came through Ontario and Michigan. I’d seen Destroyer with the full band before, but it was a treat to see Bejar in a small club with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a hilariously large mug of beer. He played a setlist that spanned his entire career. He did a funny little bow after each song. He played a song called “Cue Synthesizer”… unplugged. To quote friend-of-the-newsletter and Pitchfork deputy director in a post-concert text exchange:

Seeing Bejar in a small room like this, there’s something kind of melancholy about it to me because the feeling I have is that I’m watching a megawatt famous songwriter like Dylan do a tiny little underplay.

Anyway, Bejar is special. Go listen to 2011’s Kaputt today, which Bejar once described as his attempt to “make a record that sounds like you put it on at the salon or a dinner party, something that people wouldn’t instantly request to be taken off.”

***

A video of Paul Thomas Anderson talking about martinis

No clue when this is from or where it was filmed but I was just made aware of it and it’s terrific.

***

A run

We got the band back together in Brooklyn last week. A very nice workout through Red Hook and along the Brooklyn waterfront: 4x3 minutes hard with 3 minutes walk/jog rest. I almost got hit by a truck. I really like running this loop when I’m in town because it looks kind of like you’re giving Strava the middle finger. We finished at an Italian spot where we bought huge sandwiches.

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Some advice from our lawyer!

Max Zidel will tell you that one line in a contract can mean you’re “screwed” if a project goes sideways. A good lawyer can help you figure this out, and Max is a very good lawyer. After nearly a decade at a big New York law firm and armed with a background in creative writing, art history, and theater, Max went out on his own and launched Studio Legal with Cece Xie. The pair started Studio Legal because they felt they could help artists and creative businesses navigate a rapidly changing digital landscape. They represent artists, galleries, designers, writers, photographers, creative agencies of all kinds, content creators, foundations and non-profits, collectors, brands, your good friends at Three Point Four Media, and more.

We called up Max to talk about what creatives overlook in contracts, how to protect yourself from massive financial liabilities, that one time he went to a world-renowned clown school, and when to not overlawyer things.

Three Point Four Media: Tell me about the time you went to a famous French clown school.

Max Zidel: [Laughs] When I was in university, I took an elective class that was literally called “performance.” This class, it turned out, was a clowning and mask class. It was probably one of the best classes I took. But years later when I was transitioning out of being a corporate lawyer and launching Studio Legal, I realized “I need to do something I love that will get me out of what I’ve been doing for the past seven years.”

My friend who is a working actress told me she always wanted to do a seminar at École Philippe Gaulier, the famous clown school. I went to study with Philippe Gaulier for a week in France with my friend, and it was incredible.

Are you clowning on the weekends now, or was it just a palate cleanser after years as a corporate attorney?

It turned out to be a palate cleanser. In my wildest dreams, there was a part of me that thought this would be the beginning of a new career in... something.

Well, it was the beginning of a new career! And I do think I actually use lessons from it all the time. If things weren’t going well when you were onstage, they would always tell us, “Sell tickets! You’re not selling tickets!” So you always had to reinvent yourself to make things more interesting to the audience. I think about that all the time, because so many things in life, especially in this industry, are about getting people engaged. How do you get people to want to work with you and get excited, and not just view it as a transaction for whatever you’re doing in the creative world?

How does your background working at a huge New York law firm and your background in creative writing and theater inform the way you work with clients at Studio Legal?

If we’re talking about creative work, we talk about creative work; that’s where the work begins. I genuinely feel connected to what my clients are doing. The big law part couldn’t be more useful when you actually have to solve problems and get in front of the other side, because the other side is often armed with very, very successful big law lawyers.

I was recently on a case with an artist client where they found their work being used in a massive company’s advertising campaign without their permission. I had to get on a video call with the lawyers in an attempt to settle the case, and there was a genuine shock in their eyes when we got on the call and they realized, “Oh my God, this artist has, like, an actual lawyer.”

Things escalated very quickly in a good way, and we reached a resolution quickly. It was so cordial. I realized in that moment, having worked at a big law firm and knowing what to say, what to do, and how Fortune 500 companies think about things, actually got us to the end much quicker and ended up with a much better settlement for the client.

How is AI changing the way you write contracts?

It depends on which side of the deal you’re on. One side might care about whether the other side is using AI to make creative work. When I represent creatives, I don’t worry about that because I want them to have as much leeway as they need to do whatever they want to do. Especially on the commercial side, if our clients want to get to the end faster using AI tools, I have no problem with that (though I have massive issues with AI on an ethical and societal level, especially its impact on creative industries—but that’s a separate conversation).

Sometimes we have to come up with language now in contracts that says something like, “not only does work have to be cleared and it has to be done by you, it has to be solely done by you, and original in all respects.” For some work, it’s important to not have AI involvement, like if you’re doing visual design for a bespoke collaborative product where you don’t want anybody to think it’s AI. You want it to be associated with this specific person.

AI is fundamentally changing law in many ways, which is that obviously people are using it to get legal advice and to draft contracts. I find a lot of the stuff now that we’re getting involved with was sloppily made by AI. Sometimes a new client will share their LLC operating agreement with us, and I won’t recognize at all how this template was generated, why it looks like this, why it says what it says, and it’s often erroneous in a lot of parts that make things very complicated.

I would love for more people to be able to use freely accessible AI tools to get legal help, but I cannot say that I’m very impressed with where they’re at right now.

Noah and I spun up an LLC with LegalZoom when we started Three Point Four. What are some important steps for people forming an entity?

This is a great question. The first step is always, am I going to make a corporation or am I going to make an LLC? That’s something you often want to talk with an accountant about. Forming an entity is pretty easy. I encourage people to use LegalZoom and other platforms. Forming an entity is often not a good use of lawyer time in terms of costs.

The biggest thing people starting a company with more than one person miss is step number two: The operating agreement. This is your bible for what happens if you want to do x, y, or z. For example, if someone wants to leave the relationship, what happens? It’s crazy, but one of the most common disputes I work on is where one co-founder or creative partner is in dispute with another.

By the way, the ones from LegalZoom and these other platforms, they don’t usually work for a more than one-person organization.

I was just thinking, “Huh, I wonder what our operating agreement from LegalZoom looks like.”

Hopefully you’ll never need to worry about it!

What are some key terms or clauses in contracts freelancers or studios usually overlook or aren’t careful about?

Limitations on liabilities and indemnities are the most overlooked in my experience. If you’re working on a project where there’s the capacity for something big to go wrong it’s important.

A limitation of liability basically says: no matter what happens if I was wrong and you were to try and recover from me for that mistake, the most you can get from me is x dollars, which is typically based on the fee that you actually paid me. This is important, because sometimes you get creatives who are charging a very low fee because they want to get involved with something, and then it comes back to bite them later.

Indemnity is the other way around. It’s the responsibility of the person who is giving indemnity to pay if something goes wrong. For example, when creative businesses get hired to do something, a big company might use a standard procurement agreement, and that will have the creative business or creative indemnifying them for things that go wrong. Meaning, if something goes wrong related to the work, they have to pay. So when you look at a contract, you don’t want to gloss over that, because that is financial responsibility for you.

You don’t have to overlawyer this. If you read that indemnity, and think, “None of these things could ever possibly happen, all I’m doing is writing copy,” it’s okay, it doesn’t really matter. I’m not trying to be a stickler about things that don’t matter. But if you’re dealing with production, a physical thing, or something with a lot of moving pieces, you might want to look at the indemnity section to say, “I don’t ever want to be on the hook for those things. Let’s take it down a notch.”

We’ve done a lot of work for big clients—Google, The North Face, Nike, Dropbox—and I feel like all the contracts we get from big clients are boilerplate and more or less the same. Am I being naive? The one thing I always push back on is the portfolio exemption, which allows us to share work on our website, or payment terms.

There is no such thing as a nonnegotiable contract. There are contracts that are pretty nonnegotiable because of leverage or industry norms. For example, you’re dealing with a huge company, they’re already paying you a good fee, and they genuinely won’t negotiate any of the main terms for that fee. It’s still worth trying. But most of the time, if there’s something unreasonable, that doesn’t reflect the deal, or that isn’t fair, for example, from a portfolio point of view, you can change those things if you know what to ask for.

If your agreement doesn’t reflect the deal or it’s missing key pieces, that’s a problem. Sometimes, when you actually get on the phone with the client and you ask why the contract specifies payment will only be made three days after the work is approved, all of a sudden the client remembers they had agreed some percentage was going to be paid up front. Those things absolutely need to be in there. A huge part of my job is actually expanding on and improving critical commercial terms the parties never actually discussed.

And the portfolio usage piece you mentioned is an important commercial term, because built into your fee is this ability to share work. We are always adding that in.

Don’t be afraid to push back where you think it’s okay to push back?

Be clever. You have to know your counterparty. A huge part of our job as lawyers, especially in these industries, is knowing what’s appropriate to ask for. It’s silly for us to send a very extensive redline. That’s not client-friendly lawyering. We need to always think about what are the three things we actually need to ask for?

So we have it pretty easy as writers and strategists, huh?

Writing and strategy is definitely a pretty low risk, because you’re not dealing with physical things. You don’t have really much clearance to do. Event producers, you really need to think about this stuff. Ad campaigns, where you’re taking on all the commercial production and dealing with multiple creatives and licensing terms, you have to figure that out from the start.

What we end up dealing with most is scope creep. But we’ve been adding this clause you gave us that basically says if we end up doing anything beyond what we’ve agreed to, we will have a conversation about what that costs.

You nailed it, scope creep is a big one in your field. And it’s important, because you can end up doing so many iterations when the client doesn’t know what they want. I love that clause you’re talking about. That’s a good example of how Studio Legal has taken lessons from things we’ve done over the past seven years and keep improving it all the time. Every year, I add a word or take out a few things. I am always thinking about how to adjust that clause. That’s something else I love about what we do too: Every matter I work on, I feel like I’m learning and constantly able to improve things for our clients.

Before we started Three Point Four Media, we were both freelance journalists. At the beginning, we assumed that since we were responsible enough to run our own small businesses, which is what freelancing is, it wouldn’t be that hard to do it together. That has, more or less, been true for the last eight years.

It’s never been more true than since the beginning of this year. By accident and design, each of us is working on a couple projects that don’t really involve the other person. We still talk in the mornings, consult, and keep each other in the loop, but I’m doing 95 percent of the work on two projects and he’s doing the same on two others.

I guess what I’m saying is find a business partner you can work, or not work, with.

An article

Neil Hacker goes deep on “the world’s most complex machine,” ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography technology. The fact that we can make semiconductors is astonishing.

To make them, a droplet of liquid tin is released into a chamber and hit with a single pulse of light, which melts and flattens it. As the droplet continues to fall, a second, more powerful pulse vaporizes the tin, creating an extremely hot plasma that emits light at the narrow wavelengths needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. The light beam is then concentrated by reflecting it across a series of slightly concave mirrors so flawless that, if scaled to the size of Germany, their imperfections would be measured in millimeters. Engineers need to use mirrors, rather than the glass lenses used in standard lithography, as almost all solid materials absorb light at such short wavelengths.

The chips are three nanometers, or roughly 25,000 times thinner than a human hair.

***

A video

We’ve talked about ultra runner David Roche and his YouTube channel before in this space. He and his wife, Megan, are turning David into a lab for high-performance. His latest efforts are focused on high-carbs, eating 120-180 grams of carbs per hour while running. This is nuts. It also seems to be working. (Marathoners and triathletes are also into the high-carb revolution.) We can talk about the shoes, but it’s increasingly clear that carbs are vital as well.

What I like about David’s videos are he both explains how he’s adjusting his training and thinking about nutrition, and also provides guidelines for more normal endurance athletes. I’ve been trying to hit 75-90 grams of carbs an hour on runs or rides of over an hour. When I do it right, it really helps. Gels, man.

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A project

We paid our taxes. This always feels like a win for some reason. Look, we’re a real business!

Bill spent our refund check on University of Michigan basketball team championship apparel. It’s only fair since Michigan’s tax rate is so much lower than New York’s.

***

A coffee shop

High Beam on Court Street opened in recent weeks. Does this neighborhood with one million coffee shops (there is literally another coffee shop in the photo of this coffee shop*) need another one? Of course; one shouldn’t have to walk more than three blocks between third or fourth-wave coffee shops. This company started in Red Hook, although I have never been to that one, which is surprising given the amount of time I spend in Red Hook and the number of coffee shops I experience.

Lovely spot. Clean and minimalish but not in an Apple Store way. A great backyard for when it gets a little warmer. The second time we went, we couldn’t get in because a man was blocking the door with a stroller and his dog. But you can’t fault the establishment for the patrons.

* Assuming you count Dunkin’ Donuts as a coffee shop, which you should.

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A run

This is a silly slightly-more-than-12-mile route that I would not recommend. The new park on the East River is quite nice but otherwise Houston Street is impossible to run across, the west side and financial district are a mess of construction, and the Manhattan Bridge is unchattable due to constant subway traffic. We did pass the same group of dudes going back and forth on the bridge. We all nodded at each other the second time. Slow game recognize slow game.

It did successfully serve its purpose of being a run, so there’s that.

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A Colby!

In The Blink of an Eye, which he wrote and stars Kate McKinnon, Rashida Jones, and Daveed Diggs, recently won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance. He’s on tap to direct The Comedy Hour with Tim Heidecker and Tatiana Maslany attached. Colby also writes Hollyweird, a newsletter that’s part journal, part advice column, and part demystification of Hollywood’s inscrutability. It’s excellent.

We talked about the correct number of projects to be doing at one time, when to say no, and the Medicis. It always comes back to the The House of Medici.

Three Point Four Media: Hollyweird is very informative and helpful in explaining what seems like a confusing business. Back in the day, I wrote a couple pieces about the finances of freelancing. I hope they were helpful for other people, but I was surprised by how helpful the exercise of viewing my life/job/work through a wider lens was for me.

Colby Day: It’s very reassuring to be like, “Oh, it is this hard for everyone. Is this normal, right?” Doubly so in an ecosystem where you don’t ever get to know what anyone else is doing, except for the part that is most shiny and successful.

Whenever anyone asked me about freelancing, I’d always tell them one key to success was to treat it like a job and not an art project. Hollyweird has a similar point of view. You show your effort in a way that is truthful without being obnoxious.

That’s the perpetual artist problem. For better or worse, it is a numbers game. It’s easy to divorce the math from that equation a little bit. But it is still a math problem. And opportunities are one of the inputs to that, right? The more opportunities you create for yourself, the more statistical likelihood of success you have. That can mean living within an ecosystem where you are juggling 35 things at once. That’s good for the business, maybe bad for the art. For me, there’s a push-pull about what’s the livable amount of things that I can juggle. The number has to be high for it to be a sustainable career.

As your career has progressed, has that number gotten higher as you’ve gotten better at time management? Or lower because your success rate is higher?

One of the first things my manager told me is “What you have to consider with any opportunity is do you need this money? If the answer is yes, you have to pursue the opportunity.” The first three years I was living in LA, I said yes to everything. That’s why I started to write year-end reviews. I had so many plates spinning, and none of them were moving forward. I spread myself so thin that I didn’t have the bandwidth to pick the thing I cared about and push it ahead. Once I got the second job in Hollywood, I tried to recalibrate. I was able to raise the threshold for saying yes and give myself a bit more bandwidth to very actively focus on a project while also having a handful of less high-touch projects in the works.

Getting to the point where you can say no is very freeing. Saying no is a wonderful feeling.

The advice I give people early in their careers is that I have never regretted saying no, even when it meant I had to get a different job or quit a job. Every no I’ve ever delivered, I have felt relieved afterwards. But the first equation in a career is “Do I need it?” If you need it, there’s no no.

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I talked to The Black List’s Franklin Leonard a few weeks ago. In The Blink of an Eye appeared on the list in 2016. That’s a long time ago! And also maybe not? Time in Hollywood is strange.

It’s crazy that it was 10 years and also that feels totally right. The script was the first thing I had when I moved to LA that was really popular. I had a lot of meetings about it. Every meeting was, “This is really cool. Good luck.” It was brutal. After a few months of that, I had a meeting where someone said they weren’t going to do the movie, but they did vote for it for The Black List. It never crossed my mind that it could appear there even though I grew up reading all those scripts. I credit my manager and agent for sending it to everybody they knew. The Black List is a combination of movies that are definitely going to get made and movies that probably aren’t. Mine was in the latter category.

So many meetings ended with people saying come back when you find a director or money or actors. I was 25. How was I supposed to do that? It took a very long time to find the partner who thought we could make it and make it at a price point that wasn’t Interstellar. We went through three or four different combinations of potential directors and producers between 2016 and 2020. Andrew Stanton read it and got in touch, and all of a sudden the stars aligned. There aren’t many people like him who can command that level of studio attention with that level of creative freedom. He also really cared about my script and what I wanted the film to be. With Andrew, we had a path to do it that wasn’t there before.

Are you getting paid for all these fits and starts?

Here’s the issue with getting paid: The moment you get paid, you lose all agency. Early on, I had a couple of people offer to option the script. I felt like if I said yes, I would give up control of what happens. It could become a totally different movie. I asked if they could guarantee that I would be the only writer, and everyone said, “No, of course not.” So I said no. It was a lot of money to say no to, but it was a project that really needed an advocate. I didn’t believe that I’d found the partner who wanted to make the movie that I thought it should be. It was sweat equity for a very long time. There’s a trend in media to defer the development of the material onto the artist. I was in a meeting with a very senior person at a studio. They asked me who I could get to direct the film. Why is that my job? That’s your job. There’s a feeling that once the artist has everything in line and mostly guaranteed, then they sign on.

That’s risk-adverse, which isn’t surprising.

We have a system that was built by carnival guys in the 1920s who wanted to have a bigger circus than their rival. It’s become a business run by guys who have consulted for McKinsey. The business was started out by weird egomaniacs who loved entertainment, and now it’s run by weird egomaniacs who love spreadsheets. Doing less is preferred by a big business. In the current system, the onus is to make less than you used to make, which doesn’t compute with taking risks or trying things.

Now you’re on to The Comedy Hour, which will be your director debut. There’s a story about it in Deadline and actors attached, but how real does it feel? When do you breathe a sigh of relief that it’s actually going to happen?

A movie is only real once the audience is seeing it. It’s a really complicated puzzle to go get money for any movie, and especially for your first movie. We’re looking to close up the rest of the money that we need. It seems pretty likely that we’ll succeed but also: it’s Hollywood. I have to operate within the Hollywood ecosystem of “This is definitely happening. I will will it into existence. I am telling everyone that this is the date that it’s happening. They need to get on board and we’re going to go do it,” and also pursue a second, third, or fourth job at the same time, so that if it gets delayed and doesn’t happen when we hope it will, I can go do that other job.

I’m splitting my focus on prep for a movie that we want to go make this year, and also what else can I write that will pay my rent and keep me insured under the guild health insurance? The whole business pivots on the ambition to go make the thing and practicality of at any point, some rich person might stop me.

The rich people can enable you. The rich people can stop you.

We used to have Medicis. There are a couple Medicis left in the world, and we’re all hat in hand going to talk to them. If you have any billionaire readers, artists would love it if they ponied up a tiny bit to the rest of us to go make cathedrals.

A billion dollars is so much money. One of your bios reads, “He prides himself on writing generous stories that trust their audiences.” That’s a lovely sentiment, and seems very accurate.

I think audiences get it. I think they’re smart. They’ve watched movies their whole lives. There’s this weird trend of what if they’re not paying attention? That’s a race to the bottom and self-defeating. If you demand that people focus, they will either focus or not, and that self-selects who the audience is. I’d like to hope that the audience wants to watch the movie that they’re watching.

That reminds me of the cable industry destroying the bundle to try to compete with Netflix. They didn’t consider the inevitable outcome of sacrificing the cable bundle. There’s a parallel where if you don’t trust your audience not to be on their phones, they are going to be on their phones and eventually they stop watching movies completely.

There’s this tail chasing thing about trying to make more of what people want. I think people don’t know what they want. We don’t know what people want. It’s a losing battle to presume we could guess. That feels like a slippery slope. You should make what you want to make.

One of the best pieces of advice I received as a young reporter was to shut my mouth. Let your subject talk. Don’t interrupt. Whatever you do, let the silence hang. This is an especially effective way to get good quotes. People say stuff when they’re nervous or trying to fill silence. They say what they’re actually trying to say at the end of a long windup.

So much of our work at Three Point Four Media is driven by a business goal (we need to say x about y) that I sometimes let the strategy get in the way. My creative services brain overrides my journalist brain, and I interrupt with questions about those specific business goals rather than letting the client talk. Lately, I’ve been trying to employ the reporter’s approach to client interviews and what do you know? The work is better. Listen! You might hear something good.

Onto the links.

An article

We are very familiar with the product naming and subsequent arcane legal process here at Three Point Four Media. (Email us, and we’ll tell you all about the excellent naming project we worked on for The North Face.) Which is why this Cut piece about brand naming resonated. It really is an art! One we’re good at.

“This is what I tell people: Just because it’s creative, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”

Noah tells me this regularly.

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A project

Our client The Grad Team is off to the annual The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers conference in New Orleans next week. We designed their booth and put together a geofenced and geotagged ad campaign for the conference. New frontiers here at Three Point Four.

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A song

Anytime someone, usually my mother, asks me to describe Kurt Vile the only thing I can think of is it’s a vibe, man. Totally useless and trite, but also 100% accurate. Kurt’s new single is a vibe, man.

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A run

Quick altitude camp in Mexico City last week. Running intervals at roughly 7,400 feet is unpleasant, but I am just putting in the #work to keep up with Noah whenever I’m in Brooklyn for official Three Point Four business.

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Speaking of former journalists, please enjoy this Q&A. We’ll have another interview for you next week.