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Why Writing Is Your Digital Identity, Proving Telepathy Exists and A Nipple-Saving Sponsorship | #512
Published 1 day ago • 7 min read
Dear Reader,
What does it take to turn your passion into a business (and is that even a good idea)? It's one of those questions with lots of conflicting answers. Next week I'll be in Chicago for the AMA Executive Marketing Summit and the day before I will be co-hosting a very fun (and very free) gathering to share advice and experiences among creatives and founders on monetizing your creativity. We have limited spots, so register here if you can join us. In the coming months, I'll be organizing free public events in other cities too so if you have a community that may want to co-host one of these in your hometown, let me know!
For stories this week, we will explore the dangerous new world of AI-enabled writing analysis and how it may effectively kill privacy online, a clever new sponsorship around an unexpected body part, and a regional bank creating a blueprint for how AI can be integrated into a business. In other stories, a new suitcase with interchangeable parts, a true history of the demise of the drive in theater, a dumb calculator and why the head of NASA wants to make Pluto an official planet again.
How AI Analyzing Your Writing Style Might Kill Online Anonymity
When we used to talk about your digital identity, it used to be the sorts of personal information that are easily quantified like your date of birth or past home addresses. In the early days of the web, when you didn't create a profile on a site, there was a way to remain mostly anonymous on the web. It was good for privacy, but also led to plenty of unchecked aggression and outright racism from people who could post anything without the consequence of being identified as the author.
This week in the Washington Post, writer Megan McArdle tested the writing analysis capabilities from multiple AI platforms to discover that most are quite good now and were able to correctly identify a writer of a single piece of content after only reading a short passage from an article (a minimum of 1,441 words long for ChatGPT and just 1,132 words for Claude). Obviously, this mainly applies to those who have actively published their writing online, but the implications are interesting for the future of personal identification and the idea of online anonymity itself.
What happens in a digital future where every sentence anyone posts online can be traced back to them? The small upside may be a reduction in the idiocy that anonymous commenting can allow ... but it would come with a much heavier cost. Without the shielding of online anonymity, there is less protection for underprivileged or otherwise silenced voices to reveal government corruption or act as whistleblowers against other abuses of power.
The Best Sports Sponsorship of the Year Is All About Saving Your Nipples?
Here's a metric that more marketers should use for judging a great sponsorship: it is something that no other brand could possibly do.
This latest sponsorship idea from Vaseline certainly qualifies. For the 2026 London Marathon, the brand showed up as the "Official Nipple Protector" for the event, focused on the nipple chafing commonly experienced by 92% of marathon runners. In addition to supporting the existing use of their petroleum jelly product as a preventative solution to this problem, they also created multiple "Nip Stops" throughout the 26 mile route to offer ongoing support throughout the race. The idea has been so popular, they are rolling it out across other events across Europe as well.
The campaign has been getting lots of media attention, and one of the best analysis I read about the strategy suggested a few reasons why it worked so well, including: the brand's ability to talk about an uncomfortable or taboo topic on a body part most male runners hate having in the first place, how it integrated actual product use into the campaign and how it's an idea that has long term potential and global relevance since this is a recurring issue that is relevant at any long distance running event across the world.
This Bank You Haven't Heard Of May Offer a Blueprint To Winning the AI Race
Customers Bank describes itself as "banking built for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs offering a wide range of banking products designed with entrepreneurs like you." It's a typical buzz-word laden corporate description, notable only for its hopefully SEO-friendly repetition of the audience they aim to serve in their mission statement. As a lesser-known bank meant for entrepreneurs, this week they got national attention when their CEO Sam Sidhu pulled off the risky stunt of using an AI clone to replace himself when presenting an earnings call with analysts.
Beyond this one moment, the brand has been investing heavily over the past three years to integrate AI into their operations, even signing a multi-year contract with OpenAI to embed AI engineers into their own teams. At this point, you may be wondering what makes this so significant. Lots of companies must be trying to do this, right? Here are a few reasons this stood out for me and why Customers Bank's plan to become "AI-native" may be a blueprint for others to follow:
Customer Alignment - as a bank positioned to be for entrepreneurs, acting as an early adopter within a highly regulated industry not only makes sense, but it adds authenticity to their brand positioning. Entrepreneurial customers should love banking with a partner who thinks as they do.
Long-Term Focus - in a world where every company seems ready to unnecessarily insert "AI" into every conversation (from AI enabled water bottles, to self-driving strollers), a brand that seems focused on the longer term stands out as more strategic and therefore more credible.
Thoughtful Human Integration - while this may be short-lived, for now Customers Bank seems to be investing in helping their people use AI to handle repetitive admin work and provide them with AI masterclass training so they can do better work.
Partnership Co-Branding - by embedding engineers from AI leader OpenAI, they are ensuring efforts will be based on the latest product releases and also put themselves in a place where they can be an early enterprise customer of the latest innovations as they happen.
Unexpected Theater - the last element of this successful strategy hinges on the brand (and Sidhu himself) being willing to insert themselves unexpectedly into spaces that generally only tech CEOs are venturing right now, such as digital clones.
The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week
The Telepathy Tapes
Can non-verbal people possess powers of telepathy? That's the first question that Season 1 of this addictive podcast aimed to explore (and the answer was a surprising yes). Documentary filmmaker Ky Dickens created this award-winning show and in the newly launched Season 2, she records conversations with "others who've also been dismissed, doubted, or mocked for the ways they claim to know, see, heal, or create." The question the entire series aims to explore is this: "what if only by listening to those who've been ignored, we could unlock the deepest mysteries of who we are, where we come from, and where we're going." This is an ideal podcast to get you thinking about human capability and a range of fascinating other themes that will keep you thinking long after the episode ends.
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week
Foreign Fruit
There is a shelf in my office stacked entirely with books about the history of the banana (and one about tulips). These sorts of books are surprisingly fertile topics, and continually remind me that one of the most fulfilling things about a book is how it can offer a deep window into something that we have become accustomed to ignoring on a daily basis. So when I first started reading Foreign Fruit, I was immediately intrigued. It is more than just an economic history of the world's most consumed fruit. The author uses the simple orange as a metaphor for her own journey:
"Oranges are gleefully antisocial. Juice sprays across the table and runs down wrists to spoil shirtsleeves. Pith gathers under fingernails. Segments explode in the mouth. ... Even today, the potential for social embarrassment from eating orange remains. ... I have felt a kinship with the orange's story ever since I discovered that its origins parallel my own: ancestral roots in China that venture towards the equator, and then traverse the long roads from east to west to reach Europe. I decided I would retread the history of the orange, to discover what role it has played in different lands across time."
This book is a mix of personal memoir, citrus poetry and forgotten history. All together, the result is a deeply relatable exploration of identity from an author who explores growing up queer in a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish household in the north of Ireland. Named the Best Food Memoir of the Year by Table magazine, Foreign Fruit is also my pick for the Non-Obvious Book of the Week.
Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.
Even More Non-Obvious Stories …
Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:
On this week's episode, I sit down with Under Armour founder Kevin Plank to talk about his plans for the brand, what it takes to be a returning CEO and what lessons he learned from leaving and later returning to the brand. This was the LIVE episode we filmed in front of a studio audience at SXSW this past March ... so check it out! Listen Now >>
Fascinating unusual stories + news curated by Rohit Bhargava.
Join over 25,000 readers of this Webby award winning newsletter where #1 WSJ bestselling author of ten books Rohit Bhargava curates stories on innovation, marketing, trends and the future. Be more interesting. Be more nonobvious.
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