If You Can’t Build Trust, Acquire It

Companies are betting on narrative through niche media acquisitions to survive

How to Build a Content Engine That Compounds Your Authority

Your problem isn’t production; it’s the infrastructure

5 Things I've Learned About AEO for Brand Building

Spoiler: It's all about visibility

Beehiiv's new MCP, tech bros' obsession with taste, and AI-generated headlines

5x5: March 27, 2026

The Great AI Schism

What side of the divide are you on?

The Four Archetypes of Modern Storytelling

How different types of stories build authority, trust, and meaning

Anthropic joins Substack, nichecasting, and QuitGPT

5x5: March 6, 2026

The Newsletter Killed the Newsroom

First-person narratives have replaced institutional authority as the dominant voice of modern media

Are you building a media brand or a content farm?

The difference comes down to intent

AEO's unicorn, Facebook's creator renaissance, and Apple's F1 ecosystem

5x5: February 27, 2026

Why 2000s reality TV was so f*cked up

The origin story of the identity economy

You don’t need more content marketing; you need a communications strategy

What most brands get wrong about their content strategy

F1 on IMAX, Polymarket x Substack, and the end of white-collar work

5x5: February 20, 2026

3 Types of Brand Stories Your Founder-led Startup Needs

Build a powerful brand narrative across your product, founder, and vision stories.

DoorDash's social-native Super Bowl campaign, "narrative engineers," and the AI content economy

5x5: February 13, 2026

The End of Excess

From indulgence and spectacle to optimization and ideology, this year’s Super Bowl ads revealed a culture trading excess for control and asking brands to legitimize identity rather than invent it.

Story as a system

How to balance commercial and editorial content

State of Markets, Reset to Real, and Let Them Eat Lore

5x5: February 5, 2026

The Super Bowl Shuffle

An ad for the Big Game costs $8-10 million for a 30-second slot this year, but is it still worth it for brands to create one?

It’s no longer B2B or B2C; it’s B2H

The job of modern content is to drive trust and relationships at scale

The New Content Measurement Playbook

How to measure content in 2026

Salesforce x MrBeast, Substack TV, and OpenAI ads

5x5: January 23, 2026

The professionalization of the creator economy is here

The creator economy is growing up

How to be a content marketer in 2026

Spoiler alert: It's not creating more SEO content

The return of Gourmet Magazine, new media figures, and Apple’s new creator studio

5x5: January 16, 2026