Tag: communication

Categories
Business Storytelling

The Closed Laptop

The conference rooms all look the same after a while. Same long table. Same chairs that cost more than they should. Same window with the same view of the same parking lot baking in the same California sun. You stop seeing them. You develop a kind of practiced receptivity, a professional openness that is also, if you are honest, a professional distance. You have heard the story before. You know where you are in the presentation without looking at the slide number.

Until the day someone sits down across from you and closes their laptop and says: can I just tell you our story?

Fred Wilson, the venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, has spent forty years learning to tell the difference between founders who can build and founders who can make you believe. The skill he overweights now, he’ll tell you plainly, isn’t technical. It’s selling. Recruiting, fundraising, convincing customers, inspiring teams. “Actually being able to write code,” he said recently, “is probably not a big deal anymore.” What matters is whether you can cross the distance between your vision and someone else’s imagination and deposit something true and alive on the other side.

Most founders never figure this out. They build the deck instead. They pull the projector cable from the drawer — there is always a drawer, there is always a cable — and the room fills with blue light and bullet points and the comfortable geometry of a prepared presentation, and what never happens is the thing that needed to happen.

But there was this one morning.

He came in with his cofounder in the flat gray light that Silicon Valley gets in February, when the rain has stopped but the sky hasn’t decided what it wants to be. They were early. He set his bag down and sat directly across from me — not at the presenter’s angle, not with one eye already calculating the distance to the screen — directly across, the way you sit with someone you already know, or intend to. Neither of them reached for the cable in the drawer.

He looked at me with the particular steadiness of a person who has decided not to manage the moment.

Can I just tell you our story?

I want to be honest about what happened next, which is that I felt something shift before he said another word. Not a decision exactly. More like the precondition for a decision, the ground tilting slightly in a direction I hadn’t chosen. I was, in some way I couldn’t have defended rationally at the time, already with him. And I knew it, and I knew it was not an entirely reasonable response to a man who had been in the room for less than a minute, and I felt it anyway.

The laptop stayed closed for the next twenty minutes. No transitions. No bullet points. No hockey stick arcing toward a number reverse-engineered from a desired outcome. Just his voice and what he believed and the quality of attention you give a person when there is nothing else in the room to look at.

The deck came later. It was beautiful. By then it didn’t need to be anything except true.

Storytelling is not a skill in the way that financial modeling is a skill. It is older than that by such a margin that the comparison almost doesn’t make sense. What we are really talking about is the oldest technology human beings possess — a person in a room, a voice, an image made of nothing but words and the willingness to believe in them. It was doing its work around fires forty thousand years before the first conference room was built, and it has never once required a projector.

What the great storytellers understand, and what the best founders understand in the same unspoken way, is that a story is not a transfer of information. It is a transfer of inner states. When it works — when it really works — something that existed inside one person gets reconstructed inside another, and the listener emerges changed. Not persuaded. Not informed. Changed. These are different experiences, and only one of them makes a person willing to bet their career on something that doesn’t exist yet.

The deck puts glass between the teller and that possibility. The founder stands at the edge of the blue light pointing at things, and the room evaluates the things, and what never happens is the transfer. Everyone files out having formed opinions about the slides rather than beliefs about the person. Opinions and beliefs are not the same.

Wilson understands this even if he wouldn’t use these words. When he says the skill is selling, what he means underneath the selling is: can this person walk into a room and make other people inhabit their vision? Not convince them. Inhabit. The difference is the difference between reading about a place and being there. One of them changes how you act. The other one you forget on the drive home.

The projector cable is still in the drawer. Someone will pull it out next week, and the room will fill with blue light, and another founder will stand at the edge of it pointing at things, hoping that the right font and the right graph will do the work that only a human being, exposed and without props, can actually do.

It won’t. It never does.

The CEO who closed his laptop had been carrying a story he believed in, and he knew the story was the thing, not the packaging around it. He understood that the oldest container is also the most powerful one. His own voice. A room. Someone willing to listen.

I was ready to work with him before he said another word.

Categories
History Living Telephones

The Coiled Tether

Do you remember the physical weight of a conversation? It lived in the coiled, plastic spring of a landline telephone cord. We would stretch it across the kitchen, pacing over linoleum floors, the coil twisting around our fingers as we talked into the evening.

That cord was a literal tether. It confined us to a specific radius, but in doing so, it anchored us to the present moment. When you were on the phone, you were nowhere else. You were anchored to the wall, and by extension, to the person on the other end of the line.

There was also the sheer tactile satisfaction of the device itself—the heavy, contoured plastic of the receiver that fit perfectly between shoulder and ear, and the definitive, emphatic slam of hanging up on someone, a punctuation mark that the gentle tap of a touchscreen will never quite replicate.

Then came the subtle, sharp click on the line. Call waiting.

“We traded deep, uninterrupted connection for the anxiety of possibility.”

It was our first taste of modern conversational fragmentation.

Before call waiting, a busy signal was a polite “do not disturb” sign hung on the door of an ongoing dialogue. It meant you were occupied, engaged, entirely spoken for.

The click changed everything. It introduced a sudden, silent geometry to our relationships. When that secondary tone sounded, you were forced into a split-second hierarchy: do I stay with the person I am talking to, or do I chase the mystery of the unknown caller? The phrase, “Can you hold for a second?” became a small, culturally accepted betrayal of the present moment.

We traded deep, uninterrupted connection for the anxiety of possibility.

Eventually, the mystery of the ringing phone was solved altogether by a small, rectangular box with a glowing LCD screen: Caller ID.

For decades, a ringing phone was an invitation to a blind date. You picked up the receiver with a mix of anticipation and vulnerability. It could be a best friend, a wrong number, a telemarketer, or the person you’d been hoping would call all week. You answered with a universal greeting—a neutral, expectant “Hello?”—because you had no idea who was stepping into your home through the wire.

Caller ID gave us the power of the gatekeeper. It allowed us to screen, to prepare, to decide if we had the emotional bandwidth for the name flashing in digital text. We gained control, but we lost serendipity. We lost the unfiltered, genuine surprise of hearing a familiar voice when we least expected it. We stopped opening the door blindly and started looking through the peephole.

Today, we are entirely untethered. There are no coiled cords tying us to the kitchen wall. We carry our communication in our pockets, capable of ignoring texts, sending calls to voicemail, and managing our availability with unprecedented precision. Yet, for all this freedom and control, it often feels as though we are more disconnected than ever.

The good old days weren’t necessarily better because the technology was superior; they were beautiful because the limitations of the technology forced us to be human. The cord forced us to stay put. The lack of caller ID forced us to be open. The absence of call waiting forced us to finish the conversation we started.

Sometimes, looking back, I miss the simple, undeniable commitment of answering a ringing phone, twisting the cord around my index finger, and just listening.

Categories
Aging Citizens Band Radio History Living

The Static We Left Behind

There was a time when the airwaves crackled with a distinct, unpolished kind of magic. It wasn’t the curated broadcast of a corporate radio station, but the raw, spontaneous voices of strangers sharing the same lonely stretch of highway or suburban night. When I previously wrote about the rise and decline of CB radio, I didn’t fully anticipate how deeply the piece would resonate. The influx of emails, comments, and shared memories pointed to a singular, striking truth: we don’t just miss the hardware of the 1970s; we miss the serendipity of the connection it offered.

In the decades since the fiberglass whip antenna faded from the American automotive silhouette, our society has become infinitely more “connected.” We carry glass slabs in our pockets capable of reaching anyone, anywhere, in an instant. Yet, paradoxically, we often find ourselves feeling more profoundly isolated. The modern digital landscape is largely an algorithmic echo chamber, meticulously designed to feed us reflections of what we already know and who we already are.

CB radio, by contrast, was a geographic lottery. You turned the dial, adjusted the squelch, and were instantly thrust into a transient community composed entirely of whoever happened to be within your physical radius. It was messy, chaotic, occasionally absurd, and deeply human. It was a localized town square operating on a 27 MHz frequency.

“We traded the spontaneous for the scheduled. We swapped the local for the global… We traded the crackle of static for the endless, frictionless scroll of the feed.”

Reflecting on the quiet that eventually fell over Channel 19, it becomes clear that the decline of CB radio was more than just a technological shift—it was a cultural one. We traded the spontaneous for the scheduled. We swapped the local for the global, and the intimately anonymous for the hyper-public. We traded the crackle of static for the endless, frictionless scroll of the feed.

But the fundamental human impulse that fueled the CB craze never actually disappeared. The desire to reach out into the dark void and hear a human voice echo back—the spirit of “Breaker 1-9, is anyone out there?”—remains hardwired into our psychology. We see fragmented echoes of it today in late-night Reddit threads, in niche Discord servers, and in the fleeting, unscripted interactions of multiplayer gaming. We are all still, in our own ways, searching for a shared frequency.

Perhaps the true legacy of the CB radio isn’t a cautionary tale of obsolescence, but a gentle reminder. It reminds us that in our highly polished, curated digital world, there is still immense, undeniable value in the unscripted encounter. We haven’t lost the need to connect; we are simply navigating a world with too much noise and too few open channels.

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Writing

Notes for a Distant Shore

I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to control how people hear me. Most of us do. We want to be understood, neatly categorized, and told we make sense. But sitting down to actually write and sharing publicly requires dropping all of that. You just have to surrender.

Richard Rhodes nailed the feeling:

“To write is always to seal notes into bottles and cast them adrift at sea; you never know where your notes will drift and who will read them.”

You’re basically bottling up whatever is rattling around in your head on a Tuesday afternoon, tossing it into the digital ocean, and walking away. It’s vulnerable. Honestly, it’s a little reckless.

Once the bottle leaves your hand, you lose your voice. You can’t tap the reader on the shoulder to explain what a sentence really meant. The person who finds it brings their own weather to the shore. They might read a lifeline into a paragraph you barely thought about, or miss your main point entirely because they were distracted by the tide.

Forget about engagement metrics. The connections that actually matter rarely show up on a dashboard anyway. You write something, and it drifts. Maybe for years. Then someone stumbles over it exactly when they need it. You aren’t writing for a demographic; you’re writing for some random person walking the beach. True serendipity.

In the end, you just have to trust the water. Even if the bottle sinks, the act of throwing it is usually satisfying enough.

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life)

Categories
AI

Claude Shannon’s Mirror: Signal, Noise, and Secrets

We spend a great deal of our lives trying to be understood. We shout into the void, send texts across oceans, and build increasingly complex tools to bridge the gaps between our minds.

Yet, equally human is the desire to conceal—to keep our thoughts private, to mask our vulnerabilities, to hide our signals in the static.

It seems paradoxical that communication and secrecy would share the same architecture. But Claude Shannon, the somewhat eccentric yet brilliant father of information theory, saw past the paradox. He recognized that building a bridge and building a fortress require the exact same understanding of physics.

In Fortune’s Formula, William Poundstone captures this dual realization perfectly:

“Shannon later said that thinking about how to conceal messages with random noise motivated some of the insights of information theory. ‘A secrecy system is almost identical with a noisy communications system,’ he claimed. The two lines of inquiry ‘were so close together you couldn’t separate them.'”

When we try to communicate over a noisy channel—a noisy radio or a crowded room—we are fighting entropy. We want our signal to survive the chaos so we can be heard.

When we encrypt a message, however, we are deliberately weaponizing that same chaos. We wrap our signal in artificial noise so dense that only the intended recipient possesses the mathematical filter to extract it.

It is a profound symmetry: clarity and obscurity are merely two ends of the exact same thing.

Today, one of our most advanced AI models is named “Claude” in tribute to Shannon. These neural networks are, at their core, sophisticated engines for separating signal from noise. They ingest the vast, chaotic, and often contradictory static of human knowledge and attempt to synthesize clarity and connection from it. They are mathematical mirrors reflecting Shannon’s earliest theories back at us.

But Shannon’s realization reflects something deeper about the human condition, far beyond the realm of zeroes and ones. We are all walking communications systems, constantly modulating our signals. Every day, we navigate an overwhelming digital landscape filled with deafening static.

Sometimes we desperately want the noise to clear so our true selves can be seen. Other times, we retreat behind a wall of our own generated static—small talk, busyness, deflection, and carefully curated avatars—to protect our inner world from being decoded by those who haven’t earned the key.

Perhaps the real wisdom of information theory isn’t just in knowing how to efficiently transmit a message, but in recognizing the sheer necessity of the noise itself. Without the static, the signal holds no meaning. Without the capacity for secrecy and privacy, the choice to be vulnerable and communicate clearly wouldn’t be nearly as profound.

It seems that we are defined as much by what we choose to encrypt as by what we choose to broadcast. Mirror indeed.

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models

The Echo Effect: Why Prompt Repetition is AI’s Best Kept Secret

In our relentless pursuit of complexity, we often overlook the elegant simplicity of a fundamental human habit: repeating ourselves.

We build colossal architectures, weave intricate neural networks, and throw mountains of computational power at our artificial intelligence systems, hoping to squeeze out a few more drops of reasoning and logic. Yet, sometimes the most profound breakthroughs require no new code, no additional latency, and no extra training data.

Sometimes, you just have to say it twice.

In a fascinating December 2025 paper titled “Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLMs,” researchers Yaniv Leviathan, Matan Kalman, and Yossi Matias uncovered an almost absurdly simple “free lunch” in AI optimization.

Their premise is straightforward: when you aren’t using a heavy reasoning model, simply copying and pasting your input prompt multiple times significantly boosts the model’s performance.

“When not using reasoning, repeating the input prompt improves performance for popular models (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and Deepseek) without increasing the number of generated tokens or latency.”

The mechanics behind this are elegantly pragmatic.

By repeating the prompt, you are moving the heavy computational lifting to the parallelizable “pre-fill” stage of the model’s processing. The AI’s causal attention mechanism gets to process the same tokens again, allowing the later iterations of the prompt to attend to the earlier ones. It effectively acts as a hack to simulate bidirectional attention in a decoder-only architecture.

What’s even more telling is the paper’s observation on why this works so well.

The researchers noted that models trained with Reinforcement Learning (like OpenAI’s deep-thinking variants) naturally learn to “restate the problem” in their internal monologue. They figured out on their own what these researchers are suggesting we do manually: repeat the question to focus the mind.

Reading this paper, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel to the human condition and the nature of listening.

How often do we assume that because we have articulated a thought once, it has been fully absorbed? We fire off a single, dense instruction to a colleague, a partner, or a friend, and then marvel when the nuance is lost in translation.

We suffer from our own attention bottlenecks.

Like a non-reasoning LLM trying to parse a complex query in a single pass, we are constantly bombarded with a stream of tokens—emails, notifications, conversations, fleeting thoughts. To truly understand, to truly digest and synthesize information, we need the grace of repetition.

There is a strange poetry in the fact that to make our most advanced digital minds smarter, we have to talk to them the way we talk to a distracted child or a busy spouse. The “microscope effect” highlighted in the study—where repeating a prompt drastically improved extraction tasks—shows that the failure wasn’t in the model’s capacity to know, but in its capacity to focus. Repetition forces focus. It creates a resonant echo in the context window, a digital highlighter that screams, “This matters. Look here again.”

As we continue to navigate a world increasingly augmented by artificial intelligence, this paper serves as a humbling reminder. The bleeding edge of technology isn’t always found in the most complex equation; sometimes, it’s hidden in the most basic principles of communication.

Whether you’re prompting a billion-parameter language model or trying to connect with the human sitting across from you, the lesson is clear.

Clarity isn’t just about the words you choose. It’s about giving those words the space, the resonance, and the repetition they need to be truly understood.

Say it once to be heard; say it twice to be understood.

Categories
Living Writing

The Loop and the Pixel

There is a distinct muscle memory associated with the 1950s classroom. It smells of chalk dust and floor wax, but mostly, it feels like the cramping of a small hand wrapped around a pencil. We didn’t just learn to write; we were initiated into the discipline of the loop. The Palmer Method or Zaner-Bloser weren’t suggestions—they were rigorous architectures of communication. We made endless rows of O’s and l’s, tilting the paper just so, learning that language required flow, connectivity, and a certain deliberate grace.

Then, the world sped up.

By the 1990s, the loops began to unravel. As keyboards clattered their way into dominance, the efficiency of the printed letter—and eventually the typed pixel—took precedence over the artistry of the connected script. By 2010, the erasure was formalized; cursive was dropped from federal education standards (Common Core) to make room for “electronic literacy.” We traded the unique signature for the standardized font. We gained speed, certainly, but I often wonder what we lost in the translation.

“New Jersey this week joined a list of more than 20 states slanting in favor of bringing cursive instruction back to classrooms. Lessons on the looping letters were dropped from federal education standards in 2010, part of a shift toward focusing on electronic literacy.” — The New York Times

It seems the pendulum is swinging back. Proponents argue for its utility—the ability to read historical texts or a grandmother’s birthday card—but I believe the resurgence touches on something deeper.

In an increasingly digital world, cursive is an act of resistance. Typing is percussion; it is staccato and disconnected. Cursive is string; it is continuous and fluid. When we write in cursive, we are physically connecting thoughts, linking one letter to the next without lifting the pen. It forces the brain to slow down and the hand to dance.

As we stare into screens that demand our instant reaction, perhaps we are realizing that we crave the friction of pen on paper. We are bringing the loops back not because they are faster, but because they are human.

Categories
Uncategorized

The Power of the Handwritten Note

In an era dominated by digital communication, the handwritten note stands out as a powerful and increasingly rare form of expression. The simple act of putting pen to paper carries a weight and significance that makes it a potent tool for both personal and professional communication. We can all appreciate their enduring charm and delightfulness.

During my tenure at IBM years ago, one of the most delightful aspects of being a manager was the provision of personal stationery. This wasn’t just any paper; it was a statement of elegance and personal touch. Smaller in size, cream-colored, and boasting a luxurious texture, each sheet bore my name engraved on the letterhead, conspicuously lacking any IBM logo. This stationery was designed for a specific purpose: to maintain the long-held company tradition of writing personal notes to colleagues and associates.

The power of a handwritten note lies in its inherent personal touch. When someone takes the time to write by hand, they invest a part of themselves into the message. The unique curves and strokes of their handwriting, the choice of words, and even the occasional crossed-out phrase all contribute to a sense of authenticity and intimacy that cannot be replicated by typed text. This personal investment communicates to the recipient that they are truly valued and special.

Receiving such a note was always a delight. Many of us kept these notes in special file folders, occasionally taking a few minutes to flip through them, reliving important moments and feeling a renewed sense of appreciation. These tangible and physical mementos have a quality that digital messages simply cannot match.

As the years have passed, the custom of sending personal notes has faded, replaced by the convenience of digital communications. This shift has only served to enhance the impact of handwritten notes. Receiving a handwritten note today feels like discovering a treasure. Such a note stands out precisely because it isn’t instant, digital communication.

The act of writing by hand also benefits the sender. The slower pace of handwriting compared to typing allows for more thoughtful composition. It encourages the writer to choose their words carefully and reflect on their message.

As we’ve been grappling with the impact of AI tools on various aspects of our lives, handwritten notes also serve as a bastion of genuine human expression. The act of writing by hand removes the temptation to rely on AI-generated text for our most personal communications. When we put pen to paper, we directly confront our own thoughts and emotions, as we find our own words to express what we truly feel.

Moreover, handwritten notes also provide a level of privacy and intimacy. Unlike emails or text messages, which can be easily forwarded or shared, a handwritten note is meant for the eyes of the recipient alone. This exclusivity adds to the special and personal nature of the communication.

Whether expressing gratitude, offering condolences, or simply saying “hello”, the act of putting pen to paper creates a moment of pause in our hectic lives for both the sender and and recipient providing a moment to reflect, to connect, and to affect another person’s life in a delightful and meaningful way. Special creations for special people in our lives!

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models Claude

Make It Better

I came across a post on X this morning with some advice I immediately tried out. The advice – when working with an AI to help create writing or code – is to reply to the first pass the AI takes by asking it to “make it better”. The author suggested doing this multiple times.

I tried this out with Claude and enjoyed how it worked on just the first “make it better” pass. When I asked it to “make it better” it began by replying:

Certainly, I’ll refine the musing to make it more impactful and engaging. I’ll focus on enhancing the imagery, tightening the structure, and deepening the insights.

And indeed the second “better” pass that it wrote was even better. A fun experiment to try on your next use of an AI chatbot.

Categories
Language

Separated by a Common Language: “What do you do?”

I was recently reminded of the old adage that we are often separated by a common language!…

Over the weekend, I listened to an episode of Paul Miller’s podcast “The Pathless Path,” featuring Billy Oppenheimer. Billy works as assistant to Ryan Holiday and he shared valuable insights on extracting compelling stories from research, a skill he and Ryan have honed. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation!

During the discussion, Paul asked Billy about his time in Western Australia, prompting a delightful anecdote. Soon after arriving in Australia, Billy struck up a conversation with a stranger over drinks and asked the usual question: “What do you do?” The stranger’s response was both surprising and enlightening: “Oh, you’re American!” It turns out that asking someone about their occupation isn’t as common in Australia as it is in the US.

This story highlights the cultural nuances of communication and the importance of being aware of them. Sometimes, we must try and learn from our mistakes when our use of a common language doesn’t quite translate.

Bonus:

Billy publishes a weekly newsletter, “Six at 6,” every Sunday evening, featuring six fascinating stories. If you enjoy reading interesting stories, his newsletter is a treat!