In 2013, Her showed us a man falling in love with his AI operating system. We watched it as science fiction—a little unsettling, but safely distant. That was 13 years ago. Today, people are using AI for therapy. For companionship. For the kind of emotional support we used to get only from other humans.
The Great Inversion: When Articulation Becomes the Bottleneck
25 years ago, Linus Torvalds said: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." In 2026, Zerodha's CTO flipped it: "Code is cheap. Show me the talk." The great flip happened in just 25 years.
2025, or What Happened When the Reservoir Ran Dry
When I started this newsletter (back in 2024), I had the confidence of someone who'd never run out of ideas. By this year, the reservoir had run dry. But I kept writing anyway. Here's what I learned from writing 51 newsletters in 2025: → AI dominated my output (31%) when I planned to write about policy → Being right about content marketing's comeback didn't prevent months of struggle → The newsletter became less about expertise, more about documenting uncertainty → Writing became thinking in public The biggest lesson? Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. And that applies to career too.
The AI Revolution’s First Casualties: Why Your Entry-Level Job Disappeared
If you're a recent graduate struggling to land that first role, you're not imagining things. A new paper examining millions of American workers reveals something stark: since ChatGPT went mainstream in late 2022, employment for workers aged 22-25 in AI-exposed occupations has plummeted 13% relative to their older colleagues. The traditional career ladder assumed you started at the bottom and climbed up. AI just removed the bottom rungs entirely.
The Great Inversion: How AI Flipped Copyright Inside Out
In 2020, my manager rejected a candidate for plagiarism. In 2024, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion for using pirated books to train Claude, even though a judge ruled the actual training was "fair use."
Why CORE Traits Matter More Than Skills in the AI era
We posit it's because of CORE traits: 4 unchanging human qualities that will outlast every technical skill you'll ever learn. It's not nepotism, favoritism, or flattery. It's CORE traits that don't show up on resumes. And in the AI era, these traits matter more than ever
Welcome to the World Where Everyone is a Writer and Nobody Reads
Writing that actually moves us requires precisely what AI eliminates: the messy human struggle. George Saunders calls this your "iconic space": the place from which you write stories only you could write. I ask my readers: what will you write that only you can write?
Why Retrieval Practice Beats Endless Study
The ability to pull information from memory in a challenging environment > Constant reading, reviewing and preparing tonnes of notes.
The End of Pretend Work: When AI Exposes What Was Never There
For decades, white-collar work consisted of generating impressive-looking documents that few people read carefully and even fewer verified. This work felt productive. It kept people busy. It generated revenue. It filled time. This is why I call AI a white-collar revolution. It’s doing what the industrial revolution did to many blue collar jobs of its time. It changed what constituted value and forced people to add value in new ways.
From SEO to AEO: How to Make Your Brand Appear in AI Search Results
Understanding the fundamental shift from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
Musings by Madhav 