Hey Must Readers, Welcome back. This month I wanted to go a step further and look at shifts that are going to dominate headlines and influence our activities for the next 6-12 months with a very strong read or watch to go with it. Why? We are operating in a low-trust, high-noise era, a time when the old playbooks for business, culture, and connection are being rewritten with AI and in some cases deliberately without AI anywhere near it.

This edition is a guide to better guardrails, better boundaries, and understand how these shifts will change our experiences with a lens on how to prepare to think about these shifts.

My Entertainment Recommendations

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This months Must Reads has 3 key themes: (i) Challenging Systems We Can’t Blindly Trust Anymore, (ii) Bodies, Boundaries, And Deciding To Be Human Again & (iii) Algorithms, Power, And Who Really Wins.

For the best reading & viewing experience read online as I go deeper this month and email providers may clip the length.

Publishers aren’t just selling stories, they’re aggressively engineering demand from carefully designed (original clickbait) covers and copycat designs to paid supermarket charts and influencer courting to manufacture bestsellers long before readers ever “choose” them. This is what normal looks like in book sales, but also a glimpse of the future of culture distribution, where discoverability is algorithmic, gamed and increasingly shaped by metadata, BookTok fans and AEO (aka GEO - generative engine optimisation) aimed at chatbots rather than the human buyer.

Over the next 12 months, expect more similar cover and blurb formulas, more pay-to-play positioning (both in physical retail and feeds), and a growing class of book influencers who act like ad networks with fandom as the creative wrapper.
The counter-force at play is the independents and “trusted humans” (booksellers, small clubs, niche creators) doubling down on genuine advocacy and curation as the only real defence against an industry optimised for tricking your attention, not earning your trust.

Word of mouth referrals still have incredible power, as do the major book charts (look at what books people buy at for the plane or train and you’ll notice one thing - a best seller), so when we fall into a system there is often always the other side, human recommendations (status is at play) and charts/best seller (that’s been gamed) like any ranking system → Read the story

Brands are quietly admitting that “authenticity” (any marketer reading this just was a little sick in mouth) isn't just a marketing (vibe) play, it’s a performance lever and older, life-scarred creators are becoming the premium inventory because they convert higher-spending, AI-skeptical audiences. Who knew buying from people who have been there, seen it and done it would be a funnel breaker 😛

We are moving towards a future where creator marketing looks more like long-term talent management meets brand publishing, with fewer one-and-done bursts and more story arcs built around real life milestones (fertility, caregiving, burnout, health).

There are trends that come and go and then there are shifts and this has been a shift that many are buying into, especially in beauty and lifestyle. Expect budgets to continue to rebalance from “spray-&-pray Gen Z on TikTok” to fewer, deeper deals with elder millennials and Gen X, with brands baking creators’ real narratives into product development, messaging, and always-on content. As consumers we will see this shift subtly.

You could predict this will ripple into org design too: more in-house creator leads, stricter criteria around “lived experience” in briefs, and measurement frameworks that track retention and community health, not just CPM and last-click sales but this will only last as long as Brands let social views, trends and social media perception guide their younger team members. → Read the story

Many haven’t got their head around non-alcoholic drinks aren’t a Dry January side quest anymore, it’s become a structural shift in how people want to and choose to socialise. Alcohol consumption continues to slide, but the demand for ritual, taste, and togetherness isn’t, so brands are learning you can keep the ceremony and remove the booze. The question many have is why does NA (non-alcohol) have higher prices? It's down to the cost of the science to strip out alcohol while keeping flavour, texture, and aroma intact, not just vibes ;-) 

This is where the future bit kicks in: falling wine sales are forcing producers to treat NA as their innovation lab, investing in tech like spinning cone columns and vacuum distillation to stay relevant.

Hospitality is catching up, too, with bottle shops and restaurants building NA-first spaces that feel as considered and premium as traditional wine service, not on the back of the menu or at the bottom on a ribbon. I saw an interesting stat that said there are now more cafes/coffee shops than pubs in Ireland…

Expect NA and zero-proof to move from token add-on to a core line item in many restaurants and expect cafes to explore longer opening hours promoting NA. We will see a noticeable step up in quality as stigma drops and competition continues to heat up. The centre of gravity shifts from “should we offer something NA?” to “how good is our NA experience compared to everyone else?” → Watch the video

Coaching Moment: I received a question from a subscriber (they hit reply to August’s newsletter) and they wanted to understand how social platforms & apps get them and when to send notifications?
Here is how I broke it down for them and in my coaching sessions.
The best apps understand you and your behaviour in timelines, this will only improve in the coming weeks, especially with AI.

Alex showcases how modern athletes are evolving into sophisticated entrepreneurs by balancing global performance with strategic brand ownership. This isn’t new but younger and more informed athletes like Alex Eala leverage digital self-awareness and cultural identity to build sustainable, independent (potential) empires rather than relying solely on traditional tour income which is never guaranteed outside the top 10. Expect this approach to further redefine professional sports as more players prioritise direct-to-consumer (DTC) business models and localised partnerships over standard sponsorship deals.

I predict more top athletes might forfeit traditional sponsorship with the likes of Adidas and Nike to ensure they have more freedom and time away from their advertising responsibilities. This represents a fundamental move toward the athlete-as-CEO, where off-court/pitch career management is as vital as the game itself.
→ Watch the video breakdown

Football/soccer superstar Kylian Mbappé moving from sponsored talent at Nike to equity-powered partner at On is showing that top athletes now want more! They want ownership, creative input and category-defining roles rather than just another Nike paycheque. This underlines a clear future shift where challenger brands buy more cultural relevance and product credibility by making stars co-architects of new categories (On Football, LightSpray “second skin” boots), while legacy players risk becoming nostalgic but strategically flat. Harry Kane led the way here in football with his Skechers deal away from Nike and others have done this across basketball.

Expect more elite athletes to front challenger brands, gain equity and lifetime-leaning deals, and more R&D money pushed into genuinely personalised performance products rather than generic endorsement noise we are used to seeing. For curious marketers and business leaders like you, this means rethinking athlete/creator relationships as joint ventures that should drive Q4–Q1 sales, stretch into culture beyond the sport (or your business line), and quietly teach fans (especially kids) to follow the player’s business move (to buy your new gear) as closely as their goals and trophies. Kids apparently support players as much or more than teams now…

Biometric “proof of human” is becoming the price of entry for dating apps, shifting trust from social cues and basic KYC (know your customer) to face and iris scans controlled by a handful of platforms and vendors.

It quietly normalises the most powerful surveillance tool in everyday life under the banner of “safety”, despite experts calling it security theatre and pointing to inevitable data breaches and misuse. One hack and they have access to things you’d never want bad actors to have.

We should expect more apps to roll out mandatory checks, not only because of bots and AI but more users are forced into a binary choice between convenience and privacy, and regulators testing early frameworks (like Utah’s digital identity law to claw back protections).

The real future signal here is that identity, not content, is becoming the core battleground, reshaping how products are designed, what data they decide they can hoover up, and how trust, liability and risk are distributed between users, platforms and the state/countries allowing these practices. → Read the story

We are seeing a return of the vlogger, the front facing camera being used to chat (now what the cool kids call “yapping”) about almost anything, it is a format that goes in cycles and currently is working well in ads and social ads. We want to go behind the scenes (you will have seen a tonne of BTS content by brands and startups leveraging this same sort of trend)

The issue is vlogging and yapping seems good because it's low effort and almost like it's off the cuff but let’s be honest, this isn’t the case and we are entering a space where marketing through affiliate links (people making money through promoting products when clicking a link) are being manipulated by many of the platforms to prove their worth in the age of less clicks.

While the web is being closed by AI (more paywalls, more content blocked to us without paying) we will see more curated UGC in feeds and promoted in ads. Expect a backlash against this type of content when its clearly an undisclosed ad. 

If you’d like an example of an ad that does this incredibly well and calls it out is sourmilk and their claude ad → Read my breakdown

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Here is a warning shot about how a tiny AI-native operator can quietly hijack legacy brands, flood the web with fabricated “human” voices (AI spin), and still skate past Google’s supposed safeguards for search rankings.

It shows the future of media continues being shaped less by publishers and more by whoever best games platform incentives: buy trusted domains, pump out AI slop, hide it behind fake profiles and proxy bylines, and arbitrage attention into ad revenue.

TBH this isn’t much more than some media brands do currently. We see this cycle play out and it will continue. How? More zombie (dead or dying brands) acquisitions, more “editorial frameworks” retrofitted as PR cover, and a growing gap between what readers think is (or cares what) journalism and what is actually automated content designed to please search algorithms, not humans.

For marketers and media operators, that means brand equity, trust, and distribution risk are now directly tied to how platforms choose to reward or finally punish this kind of scaled content abuse
→ Read the story

Cloud seeding by drones quietly turned clouds into 19 million gallons of extra snow is a signal that weather could become optimisable, not a fixed constraint.

This highlights a future where climate adaptation shifts from passive to proactive control, with private companies treating rainfall and snowpack like infrastructure you can dial up or down on demand. We will see ski and experience companies invest heavily into influencing the weather.

Expect more Western nations particularly in the US, utilities and agribusinesses to test drone‑based seeding, new fights over regulation and bans, and sharper scrutiny from conspiracy‑driven audiences every time there’s a flood or drought. For marketers and operators, this is a preview of a world where climate tech companies will need comms strategies more akin to nuclear and pharma: high‑stakes, science‑led, transparent and battle‑ready for politicised backlash. → Read the story

In our anytime anywhere world, a growing number of people are actively seeking slower, more intentional forms of connection, and that demand is strong enough to build a 15k person global ritual around handwritten letters. For someone who loved having a pen pal (in New York state I was based North of London), I can see this being picked up and businesses getting involved. It pointing to the future because it shows how “old” formats get reinvented as structured, screen-free experiences, moderated by local “Letter Keepers” (bookshops, cafés, stationery stores) that solve for safety and scale without killing the magic.

I predict more brands, publishers and community spaces try to package analogue rituals like this into their own products, memberships and events that promise calm, craft and human attention as a feature, not a by-product. It also hints at a shift in comms behaviour, where people start valuing fewer, higher-effort interactions over infinite low-friction messages (anything for less chat apps) opening the door for new business models in curated pen-pal networks, ‘slow social’ platforms and IRL–URL hybrid communities. → Read the story

Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering is my most recommended book in coaching, especially with founders and CEOs. Her follow up The Art Of Fighting is out and there’s been 3 podcasts I could have shared on it. The premise is combat isn’t a problem to be avoided, it’s a relational muscle: “healthy heat” is framed as the missing link between nice, surface-level teams and genuinely connected groups that can weather hard moments together.

This pod and her book argues that practising low‑stakes disagreement, naming and normalising “storms”, and creating shared rituals for heat (from hot‑take debates to Canlis’ “take it to the hooch” rule) is a quiet shift towards a future where combat (not conflict) becomes a core capability, not a personal failing.

In this business world the leaders who absorb this will start building explicit conflict rituals into offsites, debriefs and leadership meetings, redesigning culture away from toxic politeness and side groups chats, towards direct, in‑the‑room conversations will create a better atmosphere and culture for the business.

But expect knock‑on effects in how teams are trained (somatic work, de‑escalation and including this in facilitation, these are all muscles that need training and up-skilling), how performance is judged (ability to hold heat becomes a leadership marker), and how organisations structure gatherings, celebrations and “jackpot moments” so they don’t create the kind of permanent cracks this episode warns about. → Watch the video

Despite what people are suggesting YouTube believes the “mainstream” hasn’t died, they’re it’s moved into creator‑led, niche communities where visibility, shared understanding and active participation now decide what really breaks through.

The issue with this is like every social network and platform the algorithm decides by views and your habits what breaks through and is then shown in others feeds.

This shift marks a shift from top‑down media planning to bottom‑up cultural building, where YouTube and other digital platforms are the proving ground and validation layer for what people believe really matters. We will see more brands and rights‑holders designing for fan participation first (including remixes, explainers, creator collabs, fanfic universes, and even more video podcasts) and treat big media buys and adaptations as follow‑ons, not the main act.

Org charts and budgets will quietly tilt towards the community angle, embarrassing the creator and “explainer” and remix content. 
→ Read the report

Adam Grant argues AI cheating isn’t a tech problem, it’s a value(s) problem, you don’t fix it by locking down devices, you fix it by rebuilding students’ sense of identity and integrity.

I say this a lot especially about AI: cheater cheat, many look to jump to the end as soon as possible, this is baked into some people think, so expecting people not to go for the shortest of shortcut is the ultimate marshmallow test but is it something we should worry about more so with this generation?

It signals a move to a future where education is less about policing tools like ChatGPT and more about designing systems, assessments and cultures that assume AI exists and still demand personal ownership of the work. I suspect this might well be the future within the workplace but the policing element is far more passive aggressive and more performative. 

In a few months time, this pushes schools, universities and ed-tech platforms to rethink exams, grading and even curricula around moral identity, not just surveillance and proctoring.

For marketers and leaders, it predicts a broader shift: as AI eats the boring work, the real differentiator becomes whether people see themselves as the kind of person who does the right thing when no one’s watching in classrooms, in companies, and yes, in how people use tools like AI. → Read the story

Must Reads Video’s are often interesting videos to help you become more informed, often mid to long form so they are best enjoyed with a caffeinated drink of your choice:

Got any questions or comments on any of the Must Reads shared today, hit reply or email me on [email protected]