Today is a good day. A few weeks ago, friend and fellow Stern MBA, Connor Adams, reached out with a brilliant idea to collaborate on an essay. I jumped at the chance and the following dispatch is the result.

Don’t skip this one. It has many insights that can only come from someone who works inside the media industry like Connor. Plus, it has graphs, because Connor is a more serious individual than I am. Guaranteed you will be happier (and smarter) for reading.

Please note that this post is too long for email, and will get cut off unless you click in to view it on your web browser. As usual, don’t forget to like and subscribe. There is a lot more great content coming soon.

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Introduction

I (Connor) was recently reading Ray Dalio’s How Countries Go Broke, a spiritual sequel to The Changing World Order, where Dalio organizes the history of various empires into succinct and identifiable cycles. The basic idea of these books is that, across centuries, the political and economic power of territories tends to concentrate, peak, fragment, and then decline. The Spanish empire of gold gave way to the Dutch shipbuilding empire, gave way to the British, who gave way to the Americans and so on and so on.

As someone who works in media, that framework reminded me of the entertainment landscape of today in a more narrative way than the typical lifecycle of an industry found in business textbooks. The giants and mediums I grew up with and saw as eternal are losing dominance, while insurgents rise alongside them. Being a movie star is no longer the equivalent of royalty. The dream of kids today is to be on YouTube rather than Comedy Central or CBS. There are countless other common anecdotes used to essentially say the same thing: what people watch now, and how they are watching, is different than what people watched then.

This piece proposes a simple idea: entertainment mediums behave like empires. They rise, peak, fragment, and flatten. The primary difference between geopolitical empire transitions and entertainment empire transitions is, of course, speed. What took centuries in geopolitics happens over decades, or less, in modern entertainment. Similarly, the entertainment hegemons of today don’t last for centuries and they often overlap rather than replace one another cleanly. Nonetheless, the dynamics that govern their trajectories still follow a distinct and recognizable pattern.

Furthermore, this paper proposes that we are living through another great cycle of transition. As the saying goes “history does not repeat itself… but it does rhyme.” Rather than frame this disruption as a novel event, our framework suggests that the current state of entertainment is a natural continuation of a long-established pattern among media empires. By laying out this pattern plainly, we aim to equip the media practitioner with a framework to better navigate the ever-changing landscape, as well as enlighten the regular consumer to the macro-shifts that are daily influencing their attention and behavior.

Scope and Limitations

A few caveats before we begin.

1. This framework focuses on entertainment mediums rather than information or communication systems. News media, social networks as information utilities, and messaging platforms all follow related patterns, but entertainment is our primary focus.

2. The timelines are approximate. This is not a scientific paper. The goal is to illustrate a pattern rather than pinpoint the exact day the radio empire fell like Rome on September 4th in 476 A.D.

3. The Y-axis on any chart accompanying this piece represents something like “attention capture” or “relative dominance.” Think of it as the attention landscape: the territory these empires occupy in the collective hours and moments and mindshare of audiences. Like geographic empires that demonstrated dominance through conquered lands, entertainment empires demonstrate dominance through collective and captured attention.

4. We are not including literature, music, or other various “entertainment mediums” like games or amusement parks so we can keep our focus on the mediums that have been both popular and recent.

5. Finally, there is an important distinction between entertainment empires and geopolitical ones. Geopolitical empires that fall rarely return. The British Empire will not reconstitute itself. Entertainment empires, by contrast, can flatten rather than collapse entirely. Radio still exists. Theatrical film still exists. They just no longer dominate. They do not always disappear like the Ottomans or Austro-Hungarian Empire.

6. Lastly, the utility of metaphors is that they frame our understanding in a focused, yet incomplete manner; so we realize that the metaphor of “entertainment mediums as empires” has natural limitations. What our framework tries to capture is the business-related dynamics and how that drives the palpable, but often unarticulated, fluctuations felt by consumers in the entertainment space. In acknowledging these limits, we aim to illuminate how structures of attention are quietly at work, without mistaking it for the whole terrain of cultural experience.

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The Seven-Stage Cycle

Each medium examined here follows a similar structural arc, which will look familiar to fans of Michael Porter. The stages are:

Stage 1: New channel appears. A breakthrough technology enables a new form of content creation or distribution. Radio waves. Recorded film. Broadcast signals. Internet protocols. The technology creates possibility, excitement, and a new way for artists to reach an audience.

Stage 2: Wider reach and audience migration. The new channel attracts audiences. Time and attention shifts. Advertisers and performers recognize the new channel and begin investing resources toward it. Audiences and fandoms of all sizes are born, with a shared identity shaped by shared habits and rituals.

Stage 3: Standards and formats form. Programming formats, runtime conventions, genres, and release cadences stabilize. The medium becomes predictable and repeatable. Playbooks emerge and professionalization begins.

Stage 4: Gatekeepers consolidate. A small number of players control access to distribution, audiences, or capital. Networks, studios, platforms, cable operators or talent become the chokepoints. Advertising inventory or subscriber relationships become scarce and valuable.

Stage 5: Peak financial power. The medium reaches maximum economic strength and attention capture. Margins are strong. Cultural relevance and economics reinforce each other. This is the empire at its height.

Stage 6: Economics break. Competition from newer mediums erodes margins. Cheaper alternatives pull attention away. The incumbent empire often tries to maintain prosperity rather than adapt, which accelerates the decline. Content costs rise while revenues fragment.

Stage 7: Talent migrates. Top creative talent, advertisers, and audiences move toward newer mediums. The previous empire settles into a supporting position. It persists but no longer sets the rules.

Before the Industrial Age: Oral Tradition and Literature

For most of human history, entertainment was bounded by factors like language, geography, and memory. Stories were told around fires by shaman or community elders, typically through the delivery system of religion. Even The Odyssey was retold orally for generations instead of being written down. Jesters or bards would sing in royal palaces while less fortunate performers danced in town squares. Eventually the printing press would enable literature to scale, but reading for mass amusement wasn’t commonplace until literacy, wealth, and affordability became the norm. It was theater that emerged as the first institutionalized entertainment form, with permanent venues and professional performers. But even then, theatrical reach was limited to those few who were financially and physically capable to attend.

It was the industrial revolution, and particularly the late 19th century, that changed everything. New technologies enabled entertainment to travel beyond the performer’s immediate presence. Every theatre, house, and campfire was like its own isolated village before—but this is where the first empire began to emerge. This is where our cycle begins.

And much like the scale of GDP per capita over the last few thousand years, the total attention capture of entertainment can look a bit like the below.

Radio

Stage 1: New channel appears. Radio emerged as the first scalable electronic medium. Voices and music could travel instantly across distance. For the first time, millions of people could experience the same entertainment simultaneously without being in the same room.

Stage 2: Wider reach and audience migration. National audiences formed around shared listening habits and moments. Families gathered around radio sets in the evening. Advertisers and performers recognized radio as the primary channel for reaching mass audiences at once.

Stage 3: Standards form. Programming formats stabilized: soap operas, variety shows, news broadcasts, sports commentary. Time slots became valuable. Personalities emerged. Radio became predictable enough that advertisers could buy with confidence that people would hear them.

Stage 4: Gatekeepers consolidate. Networks and station owners controlled access to airtime. NBC, CBS, and a handful of regional operators became the gatekeepers. Advertising inventory was scarce and valuable. If you wanted to reach America, you went through them.

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Stage 5: Peak financial power. Radio dominated mass attention and advertising economics through the 1930s and 1940s. By 1934, 60% of American households owned a radio. Theaters delayed their opening times until after the radio show “Amos ‘n’ Andy” ended. Margins were strong due to low distribution costs and limited competition. The radio empires seemed permanent.

Stage 6: Economics break. Television pulled attention away. Visual media offered something radio could not match. Advertising budgets shifted. Radio lost dominance but remained viable in narrower roles: cars, local markets, background listening.

Stage 7: Talent migrates. The biggest stars moved to television and film. Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, and others translated their radio success to visual mediums. Radio settled into a supporting position. It persists today, but it no longer commands the attention landscape and is mostly an afterthought.

Movies (Theatrical Film)

Stage 1: New channel appears. Film introduced recorded visual storytelling that could be distributed beyond live performance. A single production could play in thousands of theaters simultaneously. The magic of moving pictures captured the public imagination.

Stage 2: Wider reach and audience migration. Theaters spread rapidly across America and Europe. Going to the movies became a shared cultural ritual. Film became the dominant reference point for popular culture.

Stage 3: Standards form. Genres emerged: westerns, musicals, noir, comedy. Runtime conventions stabilized around 90 to 120 minutes. The star system developed, with studios cultivating recognizable faces. Production and release cycles became predictable.

Stage 4: Gatekeepers consolidate. The studio system concentrated power in a handful of major players: Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, RKO. Studios controlled production, distribution, and often exhibition. Getting a film made and seen required going through them.

Stage 5: Peak financial power. Theatrical film had a long peak with two strong points. The first was 1946, when 90 million Americans went to the movies every week, in a country of 120 million. The second came decades later: the blockbuster era that began with Jaws and Star Wars in the 1970s and extended through the franchise dominance of the 1990s and 2000s, supported by home video, cable licensing (helping the television cycle), and international distribution. At its height, film commanded both massive box office and downstream revenue streams that earlier eras never had.

Stage 6: Economics break. Television provided competition from the 1950s onward. Home video shifted consumption patterns and disaggregated it. Streaming services like Netflix eventually reduced theatrical attendance frequency, as did social media time spent. Production costs rose while theatrical exclusivity windows compressed.

Stage 7: Talent migrates. Today, top creative talent works across film, television, and streaming. The distinctions have blurred. Nicole Kidman does TV now. Theatrical film remains durable and culturally significant, but it no longer exclusively defines prestige or set the rules for visual storytelling.

Television

Stage 1: New channel appears. Television brought visual storytelling into the home through broadcast infrastructure. Entertainment came directly to the living room and activated more senses than radio.

Stage 2: Wider reach and audience migration. TV became the default leisure activity for American households by the 1960s. Advertising consolidated around the new medium. Soap Operas were now TV shows, not radio shows.

Stage 3: Standards form. Seasonal schedules emerged: fall premieres, May sweeps, summer reruns. Episode formats stabilized around 22 or 44 minutes to accommodate advertising. Ratings systems developed. Genres specialized.

Stage 4: Gatekeepers consolidate. Three networks dominated broadcast: ABC, CBS, NBC. Later, cable operators like Comcast and Time Warner controlled distribution. Companies like Turner, Capital Cities Viacom and others ruled the cable universe with CNN, MTV, ESPN and more. Channel scarcity defined power. If you wanted to reach mass audiences and dominate the culture, you needed a broadcast or cable deal.

Stage 5: Peak financial power. Broadcast and cable television achieved maximum economic strength through the combination of advertising revenue and subscription fees. The cable bundle represented the greatest business model in the history of entertainment…for a while. For examples, at its peak the ESPN brand had seven channels (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, ESPN Classic, ESPN Deportes, and the Longhorn Network,) even parodies in Dodgeball with the fake ESPN 8 “The Ocho”

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Stage 6: Economics break. On-demand viewing weakened scheduling power. Streaming services offered alternatives to the shackles of the cable bundle. Cord-cutting accelerated. Fragmentation increased and margins compressed. Traditional TV tried to maintain its position rather than cannibalize itself, which may have accelerated its decline. Also…social media, the thief of time.

Stage 7: Talent migrates. Writers, producers, and performers now move fluidly between traditional television and streaming. The Emmys include streaming content. Television persists, but linear TV no longer dominates the attention landscape the way it did in the 1990s.

Streaming

Streaming currently sits between stages 5 and 6. It has achieved scale but faces emerging economic pressures.

Stage 1: New channel appears. Internet delivery enabled on-demand video without schedules or physical distribution. Netflix, which began as a DVD-by-mail service, pivoted to streaming and demonstrated the model’s viability.

Stage 2: Wider reach and audience migration. Audiences shifted time away from linear television toward convenience and choice. Binge-watching became a behavior. People didn’t want to wait for a new show every week they had to watch on someone else’s schedule. House of Cards proved original streaming shows could stick in viewers’ brains and be taken seriously.

Stage 3: Standards form. Binge releases, global launches, algorithmic discovery, and original content strategies stabilized. Every major media company launched its own streaming service. Playbooks emerged for what works on streaming platforms.

Stage 4: Gatekeepers consolidate. Large platforms now control subscriber relationships, viewing data, and content capital. Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Max, and a handful of others dominate. Independent creators and smaller studios need these platforms to reach audiences at scale and writer/directors know this is the new empire in town.

Stage 5: Peak financial power. Streaming reached scale through aggressive subscriber growth, bundling strategies, and content investment. Showrunners were made into centi-millionaires and during the zero interest rate era, streamers bought shows and content with reckless abandon. Profits didn’t matter, growth did.

Stage 6: Economics break (emerging). Growth doesn’t matter, profits do. We are watching this stage unfold now. Content costs have risen dramatically while subscriber growth has slowed. The first quarter of Netflix subscriber decline in 2022 was a watershed moment for the streaming narrative. Password crackdowns suggest market saturation. Fragmentation across multiple services creates pricing pressure and subscriber fatigue. Profitability has become the focus after years of growth-at-all-costs.

Stage 7: Talent migrates (beginning). Creators are starting to seek ownership, flexibility, and alternative distribution alongside platform work. Some are returning to theatrical for prestige. Others are exploring direct-to-fan models. The next empire is already drawing talent.

Digital (Creator Economy)

Digital entertainment is currently at Stage 3, with standards still forming.

Stage 1: New channel appears. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch enabled individuals to publish and distribute content directly to consumers. Production and distribution collapsed into the same tools. Content could be made in a garage in Alabama and watched in a bedroom in Mumbai instantly. The old content of traditional media, like TV shows or movies, are clipped and used as material for the new medium.

Stage 2: Wider reach and audience migration. Harnessing the power of network effects, platforms encouraged consumers to also be creators. Audience time shifted toward creator-led and short-form content. Young audiences in particular gravitated toward creators rather than networks or studios they didn’t grow up with. Influencers became the commanding node of culture and advertisers reallocated their budgets accordingly.

Stage 3: Standards form (current stage). We are here now. Posting cadences, format conventions, monetization norms, and platform-specific playbooks are becoming legible. All media content is created with engagement and virality in mind. Repeatable creator businesses are emerging in spaces like streaming and podcast. Some creators, like Youtube’s Mr.Beast or podcasting’s Alex Cooper, have built operations that rival traditional media companies in both reach and revenue.

Stages 4-7: The rest is still unwritten.

Where will gatekeepers consolidate? Will the power law of entertainment return? Will it be the platforms themselves, talent agencies, or new intermediaries? What will peak financial power look like for the creator economy? When and how will the economics break? What comes after?

These questions remain open. The cycle suggests we will see consolidation, peak, and eventual disruption. While we are wary of attempting to “predict” the future, here is what the cycle might look like if it continues uninterrupted.

Observations and Omens

Platforms consolidate while paywalls and creator collectives steadily increase. The gatekeepers of any medium always enjoy the strongest pricing power and best margins when that medium is the primary channel of attention, with early examples being seen in Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube. In response, more writers, podcasters, and streamers are clustering into membership-based “creator collectives” and niche networks, using tools like Substack, Patreon, and OnlyFans to pool audiences and bargaining power behind shared paywalls. Keep in mind that the real gatekeepers are whoever owns the subscriber relationship, controls the data, and can profit from the flow of attention.

Margins erode as cheaper options appear. Modern platforms are already exploring this avenue, particularly with the use of artificial intelligence. LLM’s and video-generating models pose the possibility of cutting out the need for real-life creators, lowering the cost of production and revenue sharing in order to maximize their profits. Like all mediums, the content of the new is a literal repurposing of the old, with the AI models being trained generously on datasets mined from the old digital economy.

Talent migration accelerates decline. Talent migration accelerates decline. The canary in the coal mine for any entertainment empire is where the talent goes. Lucille Ball moved from radio to television. Adam Sandler left theatrical releases for Netflix. The same pattern is playing out now: athletes and celebrities are increasingly bypassing traditional media entirely in favor of YouTube channels and podcasts. LeBron James and Serena Williams have launched production companies focused on streaming and digital. Amy Poehler started a podcast. When the stars of one medium start building in the next, the transition is already underway.

Incumbents cannibalize themselves during transitions (or fail to and suffer). Media companies that launched streaming services did so at the cost of their own cable businesses. Those that refused to cannibalize themselves got cannibalized by others, just like the Chinese refused to explore sea travel and lost their dominance to the Europeans. Platforms that refuse to embrace new methods of eyeball capture will lose their advertising dollars to the ones that do. While Meta has made investments in mediums like VR, only time will tell if these investments will pay off.

No medium goes to zero (Mostly). Instagram will still exist. Netflix will still exist. Fox News will still exist. Some will get closer to zero than the others, but loss of dominance will not mean disappearance, particularly as the life cycles of these empires continue to accelerate and overlap.

What could it all mean?

Here is the simple takeaway.

The ebbs of entertainment and the flow of attention feel like they are changing because we are in the midst of another radical transition. The Streaming Empire is maturing and facing economic pressure, while the Digital Empire is rising to challenge it. This has happened before with radio, film, and television. Exactly which empire will succeed next is impossible to answer. However, the pattern is sure. Although every empire ends, attention will always find a new throne. It is vital to look at who will be the reigning empire in the next decade and be aware that no medium is the permanent power.

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Feathers For The Footnotes (Further Reading)

This piece draws on and is inspired by several thinkers and works you should check out:

• Ray Dalio’s writings on economic cycles and how countries go broke provided the initial framing analogy. “The Changing World Order” and “How Countries Go Broke”

• Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

• Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma

• Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors

• Seth Shapiro’s Television: Innovation, Disruption, and the World’s Most Powerful Medium (The Broadcast Age and the Rise of the Network)

• Fareed Zakaria’s Age of Revolutions

• Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel

• Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski’s Binge Times

• Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online

• James B. Stewart’s DisneyWar

About the Authors

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

Connor Adams works across business development, content and strategy, with a focus on sports, media, and entertainment. At Wheelhouse Sports, he helps build content and media businesses around athletes and creators—developing original IP, brand partnerships, and identifying new opportunities for growth and monetization. He is currently pursuing his MBA at NYU Stern with a focus on technology, strategy, and finance. He also contributes as a humor writer to publications like Points In Case, The Weekly Humorist and more.

It’s 13 degrees in New York City, but this newsletter is hot off the press.

In last week’s dispatch, we established that the modern market is increasingly becoming a competition that rewards relative performance over absolute performance. Success is no longer about how fast you can run, but how fast you can run compared to your peers.

In today’s dispatch, we are switching up the metaphor and laying out the hidden dynamics that undergird these outliers. I know you’re going to enjoy. Don’t forget to like and subscribe!

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In The Beginning…

In academic research, all of the fastest runners are called “star performers”—the remarkable individuals and outstanding companies that achieve massively disproportionate, right-tail earnings relative to their peers. These are the Mag Sevens, the Michael Jordans, Kendrick Lamars, Albert Einsteins, Warren Buffets, Serena Williams, or Mr. Beasts. Not just excellent operators, but undeniable winners.

Star performers exist anywhere that an objective, results-focused performance metric can be established. Just like the formation of actual astronomical stars, star performers are born within extremely unique conditions which, directly or indirectly, provide the materials necessary for their emergence. In astronomy, these environments are called stellar nurseries. These spaces provide two very key ingredients for the genesis of both firms and firmaments: chance and timing.

If Bill Gates hadn’t attended one of the only high schools in the 1960’s that had a computer, there would be no Bill Gates. If Paul McCartney hadn’t been looking for girls to flirt with and then wandered into a small church in Liverpool, he would never have met John Lennon. Many of the celebrity executives of today’s tech companies aren’t super savvy operators, but were actually average operators in an industry that was guaranteed to produce above-average profits with or without them. These serendipities don’t subtract from the achiever’s accomplishments; but it is vital to understand that, generally speaking, you can’t spell success without L-U-C-K.

Portable vs. Non-portable Stars

Say that a star salesperson earns their company 8 million dollars in sales annually. They then leave their company and join a competitor. How much did the first company lose? How much did the new company gain? Most people would calculate the obvious: minus 8 million from the old firm and plus 8 million to the new firm (give or take a little). But the reality is much more complicated.

Firstly, not all stars are created equal. According to the academic literature, there are portable stars and non-portable stars. Portable stars are those performers who can work their magic regardless of what team, company, or macro-environment they’re placed in. Non-portable stars are the operators who, if separated from the resources and support they are being given, regress to the mean.

Michael Jordan was a portable star—his best years on a team came from his time with Scottie Pippen, but even when transferred to a different team he still personally dominated the league. Wall Street, however, is full of non-portable stars, with countless equity analysts whose stellar results depend on their current firm’s proprietary systems, research culture, and products, such that their performance drops significantly once they move to a rival bank. These are oftentimes the individuals who have over-indexed on a single specialty or are too embedded in a specific niche. (Remember: diversify, diversify, diversify.)

If we return to the question of our salesperson, we can say that the value transfer is entirely dependent on what kind of star he or she is. If they are non-portable, then both the salesperson and the receiving firm have made a grave mistake.

Galactic Migration

When actual stars (the ones in space) leave their galaxies, there is a term for it. It’s called galactic migration—and the end result is a completely re-ordered star system. Similarly, studies show that the result of a star performer’s migration to a new company is a brand new firm with a brand new pecking order.

Just because that salesperson won’t be making the firm 8 million dollars doesn’t mean that the value is automatically forfeit. Studies show that the result of a star performer’s migration is often an increase in the effectiveness of other team members, who now enjoy access to the resources, attention, and opportunities that were previously given to their outstanding peer. The vacancy also provides motivation for others to step up their game and shine the brightest. Also, star migrations often hurt the receiving firm’s performance at first, as veterans resent the imported celebrity and the star needs time to adjust to their new ecosystem.

Whether or not the old firm can make up for the loss of the star can only be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but the moral is clear. Focusing too much on one star can produce blind spots to other areas of bright, shining value. In order to manage stars effectively, there needs to be constant care and evaluation of how resources are being distributed. If you’re receiving a star into a new environment, think long about how to make that transition smooth, and consider whether or not you’re willing to accommodate their needs.

However, there is nuance to this. While a star performer’s departure is often a boon in industries where performance is the primary driver of value, it is often a blight to industries where attention is paramount. WNBA star Caitlin Clark’s teammates might score more when she is not playing, but the game itself will still sell significantly less tickets. When gamer extraordinaire Ninja left the streaming platform Twitch, the number of views that his “competitors” were receiving took a massive nosedive. Ninja’s gravity was pulling eyeballs into the ecosystem that the less popular creators weren’t able to pull.

In these industries, it’s much better to play in the orbit of a larger star than risk a supernova. And just because you’re not the North Star doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the constellation.

A Theory of Relativity

Modern markets are just as much about optics as they are about objective reality. Remember, the key to mastering winner-takes-all markets is learning to think in relative, not absolute, terms.

When Meta announced that they had successfully hired engineers from Apple, the result was a small but noticeable drop in Meta’s stock price. Despite an obvious increase in overall talent, the market saw this transfer as a negative. Why? Because when talent transfers to a company that is regarded as better than the old company, it is more likely to be perceived as a positive for the new firm. But when the talent is transferring to a company that is regarded as lesser than the old company, the transfer is likely to be viewed as a negative.

From a qualitative and valuation perspective, Apple is a superior firm to Meta and the market has more confidence in Tim Cook’s ability to steward star performance than it does Mark Zuckerberg’s.

So even though the talent was being upgraded, it was perceived by the public as an expensive and risky purchase. The crowds are also wise enough to know that a receiving firm is going to temporarily dip in performance (see above), so the stock reacts in kind. Ostensibly, even the titans of industry are susceptible to the laws of relativity.

Conclusion

In the next newsletter we are going to dive deeper into the theory of managerial relativity and discuss how star status can be sabotaged, manufactured, or fast-tracked. We will also discuss the opposite side of “success brings more success” by exploring the psychology of underdogs and why we love a comeback. In the meantime, here are the takeaways from today’s dispatch:

• Don’t over-attribute success to individual genius; in most cases, “star performance” is the product of talent and a very specific environment.

• Be skeptical about poaching or hiring stars without understanding how portable their performance really is, and how much of their edge is embedded in their current firm’s systems, culture, and brand.

• Think in relative, not absolute, terms: your seat in the constellation often matters just as much as your raw skill, especially in winner-take-all markets.

As always, thanks for reading. Hit that heart button down below and make sure you’re signed up for the next one.

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Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)

• In 1609, Galileo made the first paintings ever of the moon and they are still stunning

• Carl Sagan’s classic cosmic calendar lesson

• Everybody is a Star by Sly & Family Stone

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

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Hey friends—Mercury’s Playbook is back. How is 2026 treating you?

I’m a week away from starting one of my final semesters. I begin with a course on the Business Drivers of Industry, along with a separate and very exciting project on Generational Balance. In the second half of the term, I’ll be Teacher’s Fellow for a Tech Product Management course that I accidentally aced. This is in addition to my job, personal life, and other writing endeavors. Busy? Yes. But I should have a lot of great insights to share.

Today’s dispatch is an illumination of a massive shift that has been taking place in economic markets for at least three decades, yet hardly anyone seems to be talking about it. If you aren’t subscribed, make sure you do so by using the button below—and don’t forget to share with your friends.

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A “Gentleman’s Agreement”

Once upon a time, in the early aughts, Silicon Valley brokered an informal agreement not to hire from one another’s companies. This became the basis of multiple anti-trust lawsuits, as well as one of my favorite emails of all time:

I’ve written before about the deleterious effects that these kinds of agreement have on workers, and thankfully these agreements seem to have dissolved. Last year Sam Altman accused Mark Zuckerberg of offering OpenAI employees over 100 million dollars as an incentive to switch companies. A few months later, OpenAI bought a startup run by Jony Ive for 6.5 billion dollars, and they have been poaching Apple employees ever since.

Similarly, OpenAI and Deepmind were allegedly hemorrhaging talent to Anthropic, while Deepmind was busy getting raided by Microsoft. Assuming that Altman was honest about Meta’s humongous pay packages, these engineers are getting higher salaries than Steph Curry, Lewis Hamilton, and Patrick Mahomes. Good for them, honestly.

Everything Is Relative

This level of pay may seem exorbitant (and to be sure, most engineers are not getting this much), but the phenomena has not appeared out of nowhere. In fact, it is rooted in a transformation that has been meticulously documented for decades. Economic markets, from labor to production, have slowly turned into competitions with increasingly unequal outcomes, where victors prosper and losers live off scraps. The technical term for this is winner-takes-all; and when winner-takes-all becomes the norm, then understanding who wins—and why they win—becomes a matter of life and death.

A New Kind of “Bear” Market

A winner-takes-all market is like that story about two friends who walk through the woods and encounter a hungry bear.

Immediately, one of the men reaches down to tie his shoes, which causes the other to chide him, saying, “Are you crazy? You can’t outrun a bear!”

The friend responds stoically, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you…”

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Indeed, famed economist Sherwin Rosen explained this (much more academically) in his seminal paper, The Economics of Superstars:

A winner-take-all market is one in which reward depends heavily on relative, not absolute, performance. A farmer’s pay depends mostly on the absolute amount of wheat he or she produces, and only a little on the amounts produced by other farmers. But a software developer’s pay depends largely on his or her performance ranking. In the market for personal income-tax software, for instance, the market reaches quick consensus on which among the hundreds of competing programs is the most comprehensive and user-friendly. Although the best program may be only slightly better than its nearest rival, their developers’ incomes may differ a thousand fold…

You can see this same growing inequality playing out in the eradication of the middle class, the widening disparity between average employee pay and CEO salaries, as well as the distribution of top university rankings, popular streamers, box office winners, and a plethora of other industries. Keeping to the AI theme: The Information reported that the annualized revenue of AI startups has doubled in the last seven months, yet 85% of that revenue went to just two companies—OpenAI and Anthropic. Apparently these two companies are the ones that stakeholders believe will outrun the bear.

But why is this transformation taking place? Here are the most recurring explanations, according to the literature:

Things just move faster than they used to. Operators are wiser than ever to economies of scale, network effects, productivity tools, and management methods. Everything is online and the marginal cost of duplicating intellectual property, digital products, and software is near zero, making it disproportionally easier to scale while maintaining profits. Early wins add up quickly and even a minor head start yields rapidly compounding returns. The window of time that competitors and copycats have to enter a market is always shrinking and the distance between “startup” to “monopoly” is shorter than ever.

Modern technology has dissolved barriers between local markets, which forces all competitors into a singular, public battle ground. Whether it’s the unknown Soundcloud rapper against Drake, the mom and pop retailer against Amazon Basics, or the baby-faced intern against the veteran project manager, there’s no telling where the opposition in your respective field may come from. Spotify, Amazon, Linkedin Jobs or other, the promise—and curse—is that everyone has access to everyone. Although it seems like these technologies expand our prospects, in reality, they make them smaller. The rewards then get accrued in fewer and fewer hands.

From an economic perspective, winner-takes-all markets consistently attract too many contestants, since the ever-increasing size of the potential prize invites larger-than-usual risks. When a certain industry is hyped beyond reason—like the AI industry is currently being hyped—it steals potential workers from otherwise suitable fields and creates a surplus of labor. To make matter worse, people are notoriously bad at discerning our own level of talent, which leads us to believe that we will most certainly be the ones who “take it all” even when we know the industry is over-saturated.

Since so much of the history regarding winner-takes-all markets is grounded in technology (remember rule no. 5 of understanding tech), it should come as no surprise that current U.S. policies have not caught up. Plus, it is no secret that the current administration’s agenda is overtly committed to benefiting the already-wealthy patrons and large corporations. Tax cuts and deregulatory policy have enlarged the after‑tax gains of winners, and those enlarged gains in turn finance the lobbying, campaign contributions, and agenda-setting institutions that keep those policies in place. In order to knock the momentum off of its course, alternative forms of evaluating and taxing wealth need to be considered, and a large resurgence in democratic and grassroot response needs to take place.

Conclusion & Takeaways

In summary, the rules that once dictated work, money, and meaning are changing at an accelerated rate—and people who want to avoid being bear food need to learn to think in terms of relative performance, not just absolute performance. That’s why the next dispatch will be dedicated entirely to the science behind “star performers” and the secrets of becoming one. In the meantime, consider the following advice:

• Know your risk tolerance and doublecheck your competitive set. Not every space is winner-takes-all and some spaces still reward consistent, reliable contributions. Think carefully about what type of games you want to play and soberly assess how fit you are to win.

• Don’t despise small beginnings. In a world where massive rewards hinge on small deltas, working on edge case advantages can sometimes yield incredible dividends. So sharpen those speaking skills, take that coding class, or start that Substack. (On second thought, scratch that last one) Do what you can to make yourself just a bit more dangerous.

• Diversify, diversify, diversify. The more your income, reputation, or sense of self hinge on a single platform, employer, or algorithm, the more likely you are to be tripped and gobbled. I’m mixing metaphors now, but never put all of your eggs in one basket. I’ve written before about the merits of being a generalist. Much of that advice applies here.

And remember… what you say “no” to is just as strategic as what you say “yes” to. There is no reason that you have to be in the same bear race as everybody else.

Thanks for reading this dispatch from Mercury’s Playbook. Don’t forget to heart it down below and let me know if you found it useful.

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Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)

• My tirade against the previously mentioned Gentleman’s Agreement.

• Nine Reasons Why Tech Markets Are Winner-Takes-All

• A brief musing on Dune, Chaos, and Walking Without Rhythm.

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

Well, friends, here we are. The earth once again reaches the end of its circuit, and unlike the runner who finishes their race and immediately retires, our planet will soon restart its cycle with the same untired vigor. In commemoration of the year’s completion, here is a recap of some of my favorite media from 2025. I plan on releasing a more personal “Best Of” list for achievements and reflections on the personal site. Be on the lookout! Regular programming for Mercury’s Playbook will resume soon.

Thank you to everyone who followed along with me for 2025. It’s such a joy to be a tiny part of your life. (Note: This post is too long for email, and will get cut off unless click in to view it on your web browser.)

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Books

In 2025, I read sixteen books, not including poetry books, lyricals, the two books that I quit before completing, and anything assigned for my graduate school studies. Here are my favorites.

1. The Odyssey by Homer

   

I found a copy of The Odyssey in a bin at a Salvation Army in Queens and purchased it for less than a dollar. It was easily my favorite read (and best purchase) of the year and it felt well overdue. Yes, The Lindy Effect is in full force. Despite being over two thousand years old, the Odyssey maintains that irrepressible sense of freshness that accompanies all genuine literature. Definitely worth reading before the Christopher Nolan fandom buys up all the copies.

2. Down and Out In Paris and London by George Orwell

   

I’m not sure that any book is capable of conferring class consciousness onto the reader, but if any book could, it might be this one. Written as a biography of Orwell’s time as a vagabond in between the World Wars, this book is not revolutionary, but it is honest, relatable, and optimistically sincere. It is all too easy to fall out of touch with the plight of the poor, but this book was a needed reminder of the poverty that still exists in the modern day, even if it was written decades ago.

3. New Teeth by Simon Rich

   

Simon Rich singlehandedly got me addicted to humor writing this year. New Teeth is a great gateway drug to the genre, as are any of his stories in the New Yorker Archive. You can read my brief review of the book here.

4. Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

Yet another book I have already reviewed. The serendipitous way in which the book fell into my hands biases me a little. Nonetheless, you will not find a sweeter, simpler book. It is a great read to help you slow down, forget time, and bask in the genial designs of existence.

5. Design For The Real World by Victor Papanek

   

This book is a staple in the world of design and the vision that the author puts forward is just as radiant today as the time when it was written. “Making things that people want, rather than making people want things” has become a mantra of mine ever since reading. Now if only there was a way to force all the Big Tech companies to read it…

Movies

According to my Letterboxd, I watched forty-two movies this year, twenty of which were in theatres, although I saw Sinners and One Battle After Another twice. I love movies, both high-brow and low-brow, but binging every single film in the Final Destination series in a single weekend might’ve been a low point for me spiritually. Here are my favorite films that were released this year.

1. One Battle After Another

   

Yeah, this is sort of like rooting for Tiger Woods in the 2000 season. It’s going to sweep the awards and it deserves to. This movie is packed with thrill, humor, heart, and social commentary. I love this movie. I dressed up as Bob for Halloween. If you haven’t seen it, you need to. It has a three hour run time, but I was still trying to get friends to see it with me for a third time last weekend.

2. Blue Moon

   

This movie is slept on. I am the only person I know who saw it. I wrote a review here, so won’t retrace all my steps; but definitely the most underrated film of 2025. Definitely a “if you know, you know” type of watch. Ethan Hawke gives an incredible performance and the script is tighter than my pants after Christmas Dinner.

3. Marty Supreme

I have a hard bias against movies that feature anti-heroes or amoral protagonists, and I was reluctant to go and watch this one; but Marty Supreme is such a well-done film that it swallows those sentiments. Part Catch Me If You Can, part Talented Mr. Ripley, the film has all the hallmarks you expect from a Safdie brother: style, music, suspense, and grit. One of those films you are aware is a classic even while you’re watching it.

4. Weapons

   

Revisionists are going to try and convince you that this film isn’t as good as you thought it was when you first watched it. Don’t listen to them. I think Weapons is the new standard for modern horror films and unlike Longlegs from 2024, it actually delivered on the promises it made during the marketing rollout. I wrote a review of the movie here, so check it out if you’re interested.

5. Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson, why do people ever doubt you? Others may have wearied of your style, but I have not!

The fact that Anderson is 56 years old and still able to make movies overflowing with child-like wonder is both astonishing and inspiring. While this isn’t topping his best works, it is far from his “worst.” And even his worst is better than most director’s best.

Food for thought: Four out of five of the films in my list are movies about fathers and their children. Does this say something about me or a larger trend in Hollywood? Hmm…

Best of Youtube

I have no social media, but I do watch Youtube, which can be a wellspring of information, entertainment, and inspiration. Here are the channels I watched the most consistently this year and that I think will revive your belief in the possibility of the internet. No order for this one.

Reysu - Productivity, Tech, Organization

Reysu is such a cool creator. While I normally roll my eyes at the so-called “productivity” gurus on the internet, this young man has a real knack for finding tools, strategies, and hacks to enable deep focus. Since I lean so hard towards Ludditism in my personal life, his videos are typically a good palate cleanse to my skepticism, and a reminder that one can be excited about technology, have a good relationship with their devices, and be more organized.

Lu and Chan - Lifestyle, New York City, Couples

Lucy and Chandler are dear friends of mine, which means I get the pleasure of knowing them para-socially and socially-socially. The answer is, yes, they are really that nice in real life. They went gangbusters this last year, doing everything from apartment tours in NYC to announcing their first child. I never miss a video of theirs and you won’t find a more funny, wholesome couple anywhere on the internet. Do subscribe.

VibeVilla - Hip-Hop, Reactions, Music

Most of my Youtube consumption is probably hip-hop related, but this year was the first time I’ve taken a dip into the “reaction” genre of videos. While I watch a lot of the big-names in the space on occasion, VibeVilla is by far my favorite and hasn’t quite blown up yet. Always sincere and never sensationalized, this channel feels like listening to an album or song with some super chill friends.

Jake Frew - Short Films, Creativity, Low-Tech

Jake Frew reminds me of the old days of Youtube. His channel is full of indie short films brimming with creativity and personality. And anyone who makes videos with titles like “Boring Is Beautiful” has an automatic fan in me. Jake has a penchant for analog and slow living, which doesn’t surprise me either. I truly wish more creators took his approach to fighting back against the algorithm and technological zeitgeist. Plus, his films are just stunning.

Chase & Bubba Cashman - Disabilities Advocacy, Inspirational, Family

Careful with this one. You will cry. This channel documents the journey of Bubba Cashman, a brave and beautiful young boy with spina bifida, and his father as they push against both the false stigmas and real limitations of his condition. Bubba’s father is so tender and patient, instilling confidence and resilience in Bubba every chance he gets. Bubba is even more patient and always full of life. The father-son duo are such a treasure and being able to see them interact is exactly what the internet was made for.

Essays/Online Reads

Not everything I read is a book. And while I wish I could read more contemporary writing, the truth is that the past is too full of old gems to simply ignore. Ergo, this list is some of my favorite reads of essays or works that I found online this year, regardless of when it was made. No order.

• Men At Arms (2024) by Steven Potter in Drift Magazine

I don’t know who the author is, but it’s a shame I can’t find more of his writing online. This piece gripped me immediately and I found myself for the next few days pondering a very similar friendship I had as a young child. A beautifully written piece that has become sort of aspirational for me. I highly recommend.

• The Reenchanted World (2025) by Karl Ove Knausgaard for Harpers Bazaar

Karl Ove is, perhaps, becoming my favorite living author. I just began his seminal work “My Struggle” this weekend. This piece he did for Harpers is a quiet and contemplative review of the modern state of technology, drawn out with such attentiveness that only Karl Ove can bring. It’s timely, relevant, and achingly thoughtful.

• A Visit (1997) by Steven Milhauser for the New Yorker

This is a classic and once-famous piece about a man who visits an old friend and discovers that he is married to a toad. I’ve never read any work of art that was so effortlessly telling a story that was so blatantly speaking about a subject other than what was being told. It’s fabulist, strange, visceral, and thought-provoking. A piece I will cherish and think on for many, many years.

• Gossage-Verbadian Papers by Woody Allen

Ugh, I know, but bear with me. This piece is hilarious and useless, just like any real comedy writing should be. Written as a correspondence between two old geezers that won’t let themselves lose, the wit in this piece is undeniable. I only wish I had more people who knew about it so I could reference it endlessly any time I play a board game.

• Safeway by John Updike

Due to my vocation as a business student, or perhaps some deeper dysfunction in my soul, I get great amusement from the genre of literature known as K-Mart Realism. Safeway is sort of a staple in that genre, and this piece is written in a way that it feels like it was speaking directly to me. On the surface it appears it’s about… nothing? But I feel like I know a few of the characters in real life.

Hip Hop Awards

Best Album

Let God Sort ‘Em Out by Clipse

Anyone who knows me knows that this has been my jam for the year. I knew it would be the album of the year before it came out and was not disappointed. It’s going to sweep at the Grammy’s. There are no real skips on the album, I saw Clipse perform live in Brooklyn, and these drug-dealer brothers turned rappers have set a new standard for the next era of rap. Read my breakdown of the luxury strategy they use in their marketing by clicking here.

Honorable Mention: Starline by Chance the Rapper

Admittedly, I haven’t listened to the album as much as other ones that I don’t rate as highly, but it’s important that I acknowledge how technical of an achievement this album was. Chance was fighting an uphill battle with this release and pulled it off in a major way. He raps with the best of them and the pro-black themes deserve real consideration.

Best Track

So Be It by Clipse

Pharell sampled a Saudi Arabian song and turned it into the hardest beat of the year. The rhyme schemes pulled off by both brothers is absolute genius and every other line is a straight quote. The final verse is a terrifying warning shot to one of the biggest stars on the planet. As a single, it told us all what to expect on the album and they delivered. Instant classic.

Honorable Mention: cLOUDs by J Cole

I’ve had a hard time taking Jermaine serious ever since he dropped out of the Kendrick-Drake beef in 2024, but cLOUDs reminds us why he was, once upon a time, considered part of the Big 3. He is mad talented and maybe, just maybe, he can get back in all of our good graces if he keeps rapping like this and finally drops his long-awaited album The Falloff.

Best Verse

J.I.D. on Bodies

No one rapped better this year than JID did on this song. The storytelling, the wordplay, the way he drops in, the way the rhythm speeds up as he raps and his voice gets clearer… Perfection. JID is hungry and on the top of his game. Interested to see what his moves are in the next two years.

Best Feature

Malice (Final Verse) on Community by JID

“My ghetto’s not your culture, people really die here.” Clipse went crazy on this track, but Malice’s verse has a sage-like quality that is impossible to shake off. This is the one people will continue talking about.

Honorable Mention: Kendrick Lamar on Chains and Whips by Clipse

Kendrick’s my number one, so of course he gets a mention. The “gen” scheme he plays is straight from battle rap culture and, while most rappers of his stature would simply write a throwaway and perform it, you can see him putting limitations on his craft to stay sharp. He is the GOAT of our generation, no questions. The verse is hard.

My Most Popular Writings

Between Substack and the personal blog I started up, I’ve written more words this year than any year in my entire life. I don’t do it for the metrics, but the metrics are indicators of something nonetheless. According to the numbers, here are the top five pieces of my writing according to popularity.

1. Decoding The Manosphere

My most read piece by far was the first piece I published in 2025, thanks to an inherently engaging topic and recommendations from friends like Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and others. The piece holds up well, I think, and its worth a re-read. I recently finished reading Scott Galloway’s book on masculinity, and may publish some thoughts that more directly address what he gets right and wrong.

2. Generalists vs Specialists [Part 1]

I loved working on this piece and, more than any other essay, was most useful in helping my figure out what type of content probably suits me best for Substack. I plan to lean more into some more of these organizational and managerial development type stuff on Mercury’s Playbook this year. Stay tuned.

3. To The Man (Or Woman) Who Stole My Shoes At Last Night’s Party

The title explains the topic. Posted on my personal blog, this piece is really special to me, on account that I’ve never had writing that attracted so much organic attention. My cohort at Stern got a hold of it and decided to share it with their friends and family. (Seriously, they were sending me snapshots from their parents and partners, etc…) They still bring it up at parties and it encourages me every single time. Thanks, guys. It means the world to me.

4. If It Weren’t For The Last Minute, Nothing Would Get Done

Was it the title that made this one popular? The brevity? The fact that people love productivity? I have no clue, but I’m glad that people liked it.

5. Bluey’s Secret

My first piece on Mercury’s Playbook, after I rebranded the old Substack. Pretty great principles, if I do say so myself. Well worth the read, if you haven’t already.

Conclusion

Thank you again, everyone, for the love and support. Stay tuned for more business-centric content here on Mercury’s Playbook and don’t forget to slide on over to my personal site for more informal and creative work. Have a wonderful holiday season and New Year!

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

Subscribe now

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Hey friends,

This week’s newsletter is a little different. Since it’s Halloween, I wrote you a short story based around the NYC tech scene and a billionaire’s eerie penthouse. I hope you enjoy this small dose of dark fiction—perfect for the season—and let me know what you think of this creative detour before we return to our more regular programming. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated and don’t forget to subscribe and share!

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In the elevator ride to the fiftieth floor, Alayna tied and untied the knot of her Red Riding Hood costume for the sixth, maybe seventh, time.

It was her first Halloween party with this new company, and after finally pulling herself away from the mirror in her Flatbush apartment and barreling through a subway full of Jokers, Demon Hunters, and life-sized Labubus, she was grateful to have a moment to decompress.

The party was in the CEO’s “apartment”—which was really a five-floor penthouse—on top of one of the most iconic buildings on Central Park South. A few years ago, after the purchase was announced, every news outlet in America had reported on the change in ownership:

“Tech CEO Bryce Granger Adds Apartment Overlooking Central Park To Expansive Real-Estate Portfolio”

The coverage was less about real estate and more about the explosive rise in Granger’s profile. Although well-known in Silicon Valley, Granger had managed to fly under the radar of public perception for most of his career. But with LLMs becoming as commonplace as coffee-makers—and the company he founded, Lupine Labs, being the number one provider of cloud-based infrastructure to Big Tech companies—Granger’s net worth had skyrocketed.

Of course, Alayna didn’t know any of this back then. She was only half sure that she understood it now. She had been an English major in undergrad and, to the immense frustration of her parents, went back to earn an MA in German Literature and Translation. Transformer models, neural networks, and data lakes weren’t exactly topics she stumbled across when interpreting Goethe.

But after graduation, while her friends became more established in their respective careers, Alayna became more and more desperate for a job. She had received multiple offers early on, but her success had made her overconfident. She turned them all down, convincing herself that the perfect offer would come. It never did—and eventually the offers stopped coming entirely.

“I don’t know. I’m going to reach the end of my savings soon. Plus—the pause on my student loan repayments is about to expire,” Alayna had bemoaned to her friend while facedown on the sofa.

“I’m telling you. I can get you that job at Lupine. They’re looking for a language nerd and you are, like, literally the only person I know that has studied phallusology,” Mina replied.

“It’s phil-ol-og-y,” Alayna shot back, making sure to over-annunciate the four syllables. “Phallusology sounds disgusting.”

Even with her head buried in the couch, Alayna could hear Mina giggling from the corner. Realizing that her friend had intentionally butchered the term, Alayna chucked a pillow in the direction of the laughter.

“Ha! Missed me!” Mina teased triumphantly.

Mina had a knack for pulling Alayna out of her funks. She was the only one of Alayna’s friends that wasn’t trying to be an artist and she had essentially networked her way into a job as HR at Lupine right out of business school.

“For real though. They need someone with a background in language to fine-tune a model they’re prototyping. The salary is insane, plus it comes with equity. I could put in a good word for you. You can get a job that actually uses your degree!”

“Mina, I’ve told you before. I don’t want to use my degree to make some AI slop machine. I want to work with real literature, with real books,” replied Alayna, with just a hint of intentional dramaticism.

“I know, I know. But maybe you’re thinking about it wrong. These models are the future. One day we won’t need translators because AI is going to do it for us. It will only become slop if shitty people do a shitty job. That’s why YOU should do it. You care.”

“AI can’t do what I do. Translation is more than just knowing languages and punctuation. You have to understand context, history, emotions. You have to know what the words feel like in your mouth. AI can’t do that.”

“Yeah, that’s what you say now, but things change. It’s just like the thing that turned you into a Germanophile— what was it? The Glutenberg machine? I bet a lot of people hated that when it was invented.”

Alayna lifted her head from the couch but paused before responding. She wasn’t sure whether Mina was baiting her by saying Glutenberg instead of Gutenberg, but either way, Mina’s words had struck a chord.

“The printing press did polarize people,” she said out loud but mostly to herself. “People thought that it would cheapen knowledge and make everyone stupider. In reality, it democratized knowledge and paved the path for modernity.”

Alayna would never admit it, but that moment was the turning point in her decision. Just a few days later she submitted a resume to Lupine Labs and asked Mina to pull some strings.

“But it is only temporary!” Alayna insisted. “Someone else is going to do it if I don’t, so I might as well pay bills until I can find something else. And I’m not going to let it turn me into some cringey girl boss – I’m keeping my soul, thank you very much.”

Indeed, Alayna’s costume was one of the small ways she asserted her individuality and resisted the milieu of corporate life. At least, that’s what she told herself. Dressing as a character from the Grimm Brothers—who were also philologists—was a small, secret nod to her true passion and a reminder that a little detour didn’t necessarily mean permanent derailment.

The elevator doors opened into a hallway that seemed more like a museum than a living space.

There were no visible decorations, furniture, or decor. Just massive white arches brooding over marble floors like stone trees in a terrible, monochrome forest. If not for the music and lights coming from the end of the hall, she would have turned around and gone home.

The rest of the first floor, however, was common enough—at least, common for a penthouse— and the party was relatively banal. As part of the HR team, Mina was busy playing adjunct event manager for the evening, buzzing around the different rooms and social circles.

“Parties are nightmares for HR employees,” Mina explained to Alayna over the blaring “Thriller” soundtrack. “Especially parties with alcohol. But the culture-setting and ego boost of partying at a billionaire’s penthouse outweighs the risks, I guess. Whatever— I’d rather be on Halloween duty than have to work through the Christmas party anyhow. And if something does happen, it’s not my funeral.”

Mina’s intermittent absence throughout the evening forced Alayna to make more small talk than she would have preferred, but after a while, she didn’t mind. Besides the few oddballs obsessed with talking about “the imminent singularity,” everyone seemed chill—friendly, even.

“Maybe the people here aren’t monsters after all,” Alayna thought to herself. Her contemplation was interrupted by Mina who came up behind her.

“Gaaawd, I swear, people have zero common sense. Apparently, one of the interns is here. This was supposed to be invite only—for hired staff. And if that’s not enough, now they’re getting a little too friendly with their married manager. Did people learn nothing from the Colplay fiasco? Now I have to find a way to tastefully intervene ASAP, but the DJ is threatening to stop playing unless he’s paid and I think I left the check upstairs.”

“I can get the check!” offered Alayna.

“Oh, are you sure? That would actually be so useful, but I don’t want you to miss the party.”

“I don’t mind!”

“Okay, great. It’s, like, on the third or fourth floor. Right outside the elevator on the hallway table where the mail goes. You can’t miss it!” shouted Mina, who was already seven paces away.

“Not exactly GPS coordinates, but I guess it will do,” thought Alayna.

To her dismay, there were no tables in the third floor hallway. There were no tables on the fourth floor either. Not wanting to go back empty handed, she decided to quickly check the fifth floor. Back in the elevator, she again retied the crimson strings beneath her chin.

The doors opened to a brightly lit room and Alayna took a step inside.

“Hello?” a voice sang from the opposite side of the room and startled Alayna. It was a man’s voice. When she turned around, Alayna saw that it was the CEO himself. She was a bit stunned, but managed to keep her composure.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” Alayna said. “I was looking for something for the party and when I didn’t find it, I wanted to check here. My bad.”

With that, Alayna turned around to get back in the elevator, but only in time to see it close in front of her. As the colored numbers on top of the door frame descended lower and lower, so did her heart. She was now stuck awkwardly on the wrong floor with her billionaire boss.

“Oopsies. That’ll take a moment to come back. What were you looking for? And, I apologize, but you work for me, right?” Granger asked while stepping a bit closer.

“Yes, I do. And, uh, it was the check for the DJ,” Alayna responded while swallowing her spit.

This was her first time meeting Granger and she was startled by how different he looked in person compared to podcasts. He was always strange-looking, but it was worse in person. He had thin, wiry lips and his clay-like skin made him look both impossibly old and strangely young at the same time. His head was just a bit too small for his body, and the enormous shoulder pads in the suits he wore exaggerated the disproportion. The way his expression had changed from welcoming to curious seemed unnatural. It reminded Alayna of the way an app refreshes, offering something in order to be accepted and hold attention.

“Sure,” said Granger. “I wonder if it didn’t get collected with some of the documents I had placed on my desk. I was just going to get those anyway. Let’s check.”

And with that, Granger unlocked a door leading to the next room and gestured for Alayna to enter. The room was dim and Alayna could only make out shapes on the other side.

“Are those sculptures?” she thought.

Noticing her hesitation, or perhaps impatient with her slowness, Granger explained.

“This is my collection room. I’m a collector. I just had a new piece arrive today, in fact. But with the party taking place, I didn’t have time to review the purchase agreement and letter of advice, which I’m eager to attend to. Come on in. It’s not everyday I get to inflict my hobby on someone new.”

Once inside the doorway, Alayna stood still, afraid to move lest she knock over one of the sculptures by fumbling around in the dark. Granger walked confidently to the corner and turned up the dimmer lights. To Alayna’s alarm, the shapes were not sculptures at all.

Instead, the room was full of every kind of macabre invention and torturous device imaginable. As she scanned the expansive open floor, she could see that every square foot contained a new horror from another century of ancient history. Guillotines and gurneys with leather binds; breaking wheels and rope pulleys; Judas Cradles and crucifixes; ovens with locks on the outside and Brazen Bulls with scorch marks; crude instruments with snagged edges casting ugly shadows on the penthouse wall. A sense of disgust flooded over her and it took all her focus not to vomit on the marble floor.

“They are, as I’m sure you guessed, instruments of death. Death and torture, to be exact. Some are used, but most aren’t. Or, at least, it’s impossible to know whether or not they’ve been used. I have commissioned a replica or two, but I prefer to buy the real thing. Also, I try to buy widely in a geographical sense. Diversity is a value for me, you will remember. Those dinner knives, for instance, came directly from a tribe of cannibals in South America. Dinner knives. Get it? Oh—and that seemingly innocuous bucket? It was used by the mafia once when one of their family members turned out to be an informant. They filled it with rats then placed it upside down on the informant’s stomach and heated it. With no other escape, the rats gnawed through their family member’s body to escape. Gruesome, isn’t it? But you have to admit that there is a certain poetry in killing a rat via actual rats. It’s destructive, sure, but it’s also creative. Schumpeter had a term for that. Nowadays, people bowdlerize those kinds of terms in order to make them more palatable. Take business strategy, for instance. I hate that term. There is no such thing as business strategy. All of it comes from the military. That’s right. The only thing that an executive knows about strategy comes from death— that’s why competition in the markets isn’t for everyone. And technological progress? You’re looking at it. Tech advancement has, and always will be, driven by people with political purposes when they have a vision for the future, which means the current reality has to die. In other words, people are only innovative when they have an impulse to be devastating. If you don’t have that killer instinct, you’ll never do anything great, don’t you agree? That’s why I come in here to ponder all my big decisions. I get all my best ideas right in this room. Now, where are those documents?”

At this point, Alayna no longer needed to vomit because she was almost entirely disassociated from her body and was quite sure that she had wandered into a dream. The surrealness of the situation— the penthouse with its view and the billionaire with his disgusting shop of horrors—had erased her sense of location entirely. Yet the sudden awareness that Granger was standing in front of her snapped her back to reality. He was holding an unopened envelope by his side and offering her a piece of paper with the other hand. It was the check.

Alayna, careful not to seem too hurried, reached for the check, but at the last second Granger pulled it back.

“Ah, but wait, I didn’t even show you my newest acquisition. It’s a real work of art. Very unique. It has all the hallmarks of traditional torment but with a twist. Let me show you.”

The apparatus, to Alayna’s eyes, was nothing short of an abomination. It had the appearance of a skeleton roughly five feet tall, fashioned in brownish copper, but with six bony arms extended and protruding from it’s back. At the end of each arm were eldritch-looking axes with sharpened blades.

Granger looked at the grotesque figure with indifference, but something in his eyes betrayed his admiration.

“Have you ever seen anything like it? Of course you haven’t. It’s made of copper, see? But the makers call it “The Iron Woodsman.” And you see those various buttons on it’s chest? The victim would be restrained while standing in front, but given one hand with which they were free to press a button. Each button causes an arm to swing one of the axes—but the victim has no idea which one! Sometimes nothing would happen at all. It’s very psychological. Stochastically induced dread is the worst type of dread, don’t you agree?”

With this last statement, Granger approached the Iron Woodsman and patted it on the head. Feeling queasy again at the sight of the billionaire and his heinous treasure, Alayna turned around. At that very moment, there was a faint pop, no louder than the opening of a soda can. Alayna spun just in time to see the bottom-most arm of the vile contraption spring violently upward and into Granger’s lower abdomen. She leapt across the room to come and aid, but the axe only traveled further along it’s terrible trajectory, ripping a hole from the bottom of Granger’s stomach to midway through his sternum. The angle of the axe lodged in his ribcage and the sturdiness of the statue held his body upright, even as the blood poured from the wound and the last of the light left his eyes. The card which he had been holding fell from his hand and glided towards Alayna.

For reasons she could never explain, Alayna reached down and picked it up. It was the purchase agreement and letter of advice. With trembling fingers, Alayna undid the seal and read aloud:

Dear valued customer,

Thank you for your purchase. We are grateful that there are still connoisseurs like yourself who appreciate the rich subtleties of technology such as “The Iron Woodsman.” Please note that this piece has been restored to full functionality and extreme caution should be exercised when moving or touching the product. As previously stated in our agreement, our company shall not be liable for any damages, losses, or defects arising after the product has been received. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us through your usual sales rep.

Happy Halloween!

Machen Refurbishment Co.

Alayna dropped the letter and screamed.

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Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)

• This piece was inspired by the short story “The Iron Maiden” by Arthur Machen. You can find it in his book “The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories.”

• The original “Little Red-Cap” by Brother’s Grimm is always a great read too (and short)!

• Mr. Friend is a Youtuber that cooks up CGI horror stories from his home. Some are legitimately scary, so be warned, but I really like seeing some of the mythological monsters he brings to life.

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day—hope you all had a lovely weekend.

I am excited to share this week’s dispatch with you all. When I came across Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology a few years ago, it completely changed the way I evaluate systems, media, and modern tech. The following is a brief adaptation of his work that I know you will find useful. If you have any feedback, I’d love to see you in the comments section—and don’t forget subscribe!

The Five Rules:

1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

2. Invention is the mother of necessity.

3. Technology comes in packages, big and small.

4. Policy regarding technology is rarely about technology.

5. The history of technology is, in fact, the history of mankind.

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#1: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

“Technical developments always have environmental, social, and human consequences that go far beyond the immediate purposes of the devices themselves.”

Arguments that make reductive statements about whether tech is good or bad or that it just depends on how people use it tend to end unfruitfully because these arguments ignore the importance of context when it comes to technology. The same tech that has a positive impact in one space can have massive “disbenefits” in another. Pesticides that preserve crops might boost the local economy of one region, but create chemically-induced health issues in another. Lifesaving medical breakthroughs might reduce infant mortality but then later lead to overpopulation, food insecurity, and other kinds of challenges in the same environment. It’s not about the technology being good or bad—it’s about the device’s effects.

In Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the ineffable Niels Bohr has a great quote that expresses this idea: “We have to make the politicians understand, this isn’t a new weapon, it is a new world.” In other words, the mere existence of the atom bomb had major consequences, regardless of whether or not it was ever going to be used (and, unfortunately, we know it was). Ergo, tech is never neutral. Rather than rush to label an individual technology, it’s better to ask concrete questions: What does this tech actually do in the present? What are the short-term versus long-term results? What are the utopian hopes versus the spotted actuality? What are the trade-offs? This alone allows for sober and strategic evaluation.

#2: Invention is the mother of necessity.

“Every technical innovation seems to require additional technical advances in order to make it fully effective.”

Self-driving vehicles have been one of the many promises of science fiction for decades. Nonetheless, the reality of autonomous driving is only beginning to be fully realized in China, San Francisco, or Austin— and most people think it’s because of the recent advances in artificial intelligence. However, this is only partially true. Self-driving vehicles require more than just advanced machine vision and AI, but also ultra-sophisticated sensors like LIDAR, ubiquitous high-speed connectivity like 5G, and powerful edge computing processes that can only be conducted through recent NVIDIA accelerators or V2X communication systems. Without these parallel advances taking place alongside the leaps in AI, the fundamental promise of autonomy could never be achieved in a safe or efficient manner.

In other words, one advancement in a technology always requires other tech to also advance; and in order to fully evaluate the effects of a technology, we need to keep in mind the knock-on consequences of all new advancements. Before the car, people used the horse-drawn carriage, and that technological advancement required the creation of new horse collars, the first suspension system, wider roads, and much more. Luxury giant Louis Vuitton got its first big break from becoming the go-to luggage-maker for trunks that could be transported on carriages, rather than on trains or boats. Every solution creates new problems, which in turn requires more invention.

#3: Technology comes in packages, big and small.

When one component changes, other parts of the system must undergo transformations so that the system might continue to function. Hence the parts of a system cannot be viewed in isolation but must be studied in terms of their interrelations with the other parts.

One of the engineers I worked with once quipped that after we plugged a water leak at Grand Central Station, a new river sprang up near the United Nations building, about ¾ of a mile west. Although I won’t confirm or deny the veracity of his statement, his joke definitely contains a truth regarding complex systems. The more interrelated a network of overlapping technologies becomes, the more difficult it becomes to isolate the effect of each technology. Messing with a system, especially one operating at a large scale, will always produce unexpected results, especially when you consider that all modern tech works in a stack.

This is happening most clearly with the data centers attached to the other end of seemingly innocuous AI chatbots—and the public is understandably worried about the footprint of such massive infrastructure projects. However, most people don’t realize that this is not a new development. All technology has required mind-boggling levels of packaging— even the kinds of digital tech we use on the daily. The internet, for instance, is not nearly as wireless as we like to assume, but is actually supported globally by a massive network of submarine cables, as well as over 11,000 satellites currently in orbit. The high-speed communication tool you carry around in your pocket is not a self-contained device, but is just a single node in a package that encompasses the highest heights and lowest depths of our planet.

#4: Policy regarding technology is rarely about technology.

“Technologically ‘sweet’ solutions do not always triumph over political and social forces. Many complicated sociocultural factors, especially human elements, are involved, even in what might seem to be ‘purely technical’ decisions.”

The creation, use, and abuse of technologies are mostly influenced by non-technical factors. Politics, power, and short-term incentives all play a role, which is why the most efficient devices or processes aren’t always applied. This can sound inherently negative, but it’s important to note that in a democracy, this is a good feature, not a bug. It’s a safeguard against technocracy. However, it does mean that we are sometimes left with less-than-ideal scenarios even when technological solutions exist for relevant problems. The Biden administration’s AI Executive Order and the EU’s AI Act are premier examples that even as AI systems become more sophisticated, their deployment remains bounded by concerns regarding social, political, and economic forces far beyond the technical details themselves.

Another great example in the United States is our annual tax returns. I was shocked to discover that many countries in Europe don’t require their citizens to file taxes, but instead send an estimated tax filing for each citizen to simply approve. This makes sense because the U.S. government clearly has an idea of each person’s income that they fact check returns against. So why has this not been implemented already, considering the sophistication of the tech and control methods in the IRS? Well, not to be reductive, but lobbying from major tax filing companies like TurboTax and Intuit have a lot to do with it. While these financial service companies appear to offer the best solution to a time-consuming task, it is actually their financial and political incentives that are helping perpetuate the problem of needing to file taxes in the first place.

#5: The history of technology is, in fact, the history of mankind

“Our students know that they live in a technological age, but any history that ignores the technological factor in societal development does little to enable them to comprehend how their world came into being”

I am a massive advocate for increasing the technological literacy of the general population. I think that knowing the effects of tech and media should be as normal as understanding the nutrient labels on the food we consume. A major portion of this could be accomplished if we simply put a larger emphasis on the history of technology— good instruction that teaches how trends, demographics, and developments in society are shaped by our tools. As Marshall Mcluhan used to say, “we shape our tools, then our tools shape us.”

Ultimately, the history of humanity is, in fact, synonymous with the history of technology. The most pivotal periods of human civilization are organized by which tools defined the time—by the level of sophistication or crudeness which we were capable of amplifying our bodies with. When we study history, we realize that none of the benefits of technical society are accidental, but have been forged through a milleniums-long process of invention, innovation, iteration, and creation. This cultivates a real wonder and humility regarding the tool-making capacity of humanity. Ideally, it would also instill a sense of responsibility. Modern people are now in the extremely unnatural position of having the power to design the total world in which we live. By doing so, we are determining the next chapter of our own history. A history which should be informed not just by predictions of what might be, but also guided by the wisdom of what has been learned before. Don’t you agree?

Thanks for reading, friend. I am cooking up a special Halloween dispatch for Mercury’s Playbook that you won’t want to miss, so make sure to subscribe!

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Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)

• My baby younger brother, , started a Substack and it’s brilliant. Subscribe for some awesome insight to the world of DoD, creativity, and universe-building.

• The Nobel Prize for Economics this year went to researchers/historians studying innovation-driven growth.

• Nassim Taleb’s latest on the World We Live In Now.

• Countries that use subtitling rather than dubbing for foreign TV content demonstrate significantly higher English proficiency.

• Recovering the Tech Critical Canon (2017) from L.M. Sacasas of which makes mention of Kranzberg’s Laws.

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

“Creativity,” I was told, “is knowing what to do when the rules run out.”

When the canvas is blank; when the engine fails; when the prompt returns void—creativity is the force that beckons you forward, putting a flashlight in one hand and a compass in the other.

But creativity is not just for when the rules run out. Creativity is greater than the rules, and it is just as liable to undo some as it is to make more of them. In all the world, there is nothing more dangerous to rules than creativity, just as there is nothing more disruptive to the status quo than imagination.

The concept of creativity is intimidating to some, as it conjures images of flinging paint, smithing words, or fiddling on an instrument. In other words, it is often associated with the arts, which is something that “non-creatives” feel vulnerable discussing. These people tend to talk about their lack of creativity in hushed and defeated tones, as though they were in a confessional vouchsafing some horrible, besetting sin or debilitating deficiency in their nature. This should not be.

Their low-grade sense of guilt is equal only to the rush of life which occurs when they are put in proximity to something generative. This is the first clue that these people are not as imaginatively bankrupt as they believe themselves to be. In my experience, creativity is like a strong wine—people respond considerably to even the tiniest taste.

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It’s not the quality of a creative act that people necessarily respond to—it is the freedom that is represented in the act. The bendings of our culture lean so heavily toward criticism, consumption, and conformity that even the smallest hint of the alternative constitutes a mini-revolution. People who slant away from the well-worn paths tend to inspire others without even being conscious of it. When someone begins doing what they want—as opposed to just doing what they’re told—it gives courage for others to do the same.

For this reason, individuals who benefit from the status quo are often, but not always, against imagination. They are so invested in the maintenance and preservation of the way things are that they aim to discredit anything that might provoke an awareness of the alternatives. Every dominant power, be it in a market or culture, has a natural incentive to suppress innovations that might disrupt their incumbency. Unless kept sufficiently distracted, a rogue daydreamer might disrupt a monopoly’s entire five year plan or interrupt a political strongman’s play for power.

In business, this is closely related to what is known as the Innovator’s Dilemma: the phenomena where, in order to compete with a new competitor, an historically dominant firm is forced to cannibalize its own business. The Innovator’s Dilemma is why startups can gain advantages over even the largest and most successful companies—because the bigger you are, the more you have to lose, and the more difficult it becomes to adapt to change.

When you’re a fledgling company (or a starving artist), you have the latitude to make pivots with minimal risk, whereas the large companies are too complex to even know what is at stake. Hungry operators know that someone else’s cash cow always makes for the tastiest cheeseburger, and startups that can leverage their creative freedom to transform the playing field are the ones that get to feast.

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Yet, truthfully, there are principles here that extend beyond the reaches of firms and markets. Innovation, revolution, rebellion—all are a little necessary, and all are a little more related than the capitalists, socialists, and anarchists might like to admit. They are all fundamentally expressions of creativity—the product of dreamers who don’t wait for the rules to run out, but who take a deliberate effort to think, and act, as though there are no rules. Not waiting for permission to be free, but choosing again and again “to defiantly insist on acting as if one is already free.”

Indeed, this is the very essence of agency, and this dispatch is a reminder that if you’re waiting for permission, you’ll be waiting forever.

So, as much as is up to you— don’t wait.

Delete the social media.
Pick up old hobbies.
Learn news skills.
Talk to strangers.
Reach out to old friends.
Take more vacation.
Start the 501c3.
Exit the group chat.
Buy fewer things.
Wear what makes you feel sexy.
Quit the job.
Pitch your proposal.
Attend the march.
Be loud about what’s right.
Have an unquenchable, indomitable thirst for life.

And don’t do it yourself, take others along. Let the way you live be an inspiration to the people who really know you. Be courageous. Be creative. Be rebellious. You don’t need permission—and you never will.

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Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)

• Awhile back, I wrote briefly about the concept of “F**k You Money” and why it’s hard for billionaires to be trustworthy. Think it is slightly related to Innovator’s Dilemma.

• How To Have A Creative Breakthrough by Van Neistat

• A Great Example of Inventiveness : An ice cream shop using neuroscience to make flavors from nostalgia.

• Give Yourself Permission To Be Creative by Ethan Hawke

• The Anarchist Cookbook I’m Waiting To Arrive In The Mail

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

How much does a dream cost?

How much would you pay for a dream? What price tag would you put on a fantasy?

In the trenches of quotidian life, there is no simple answer to these questions. In the world of luxury, however, dreams are more than mere abstractions—they are the pixie dust sprinkled over real objects with true, estimable value. Luxury clients don’t pay for things, they pay for transcendence, status, and the opportunity to be recognized as unique.

Indeed—of all the marketplaces and industries in the world, luxury is perhaps the most intriguing when it comes to consumer psychology, simply because it proves that utility and functionality are not the end-all-be-all of product appeal. It provides a rich study into one of humanity’s most fundamental desires—the need to feel special, superior, and set apart. When it comes to crafting desirable products, no one does it better than the luxury industry because luxury is product charged with meaning to the utmost degree.

For today’s dispatch, we are conducting a brief exploration into this exceptional world and highlighting the various ways that even non-luxury brands can infuse their own strategies with the magic of aspiration.

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Luxury Companies Vs. Luxury Strategies

Companies and creators who command dream-power can gain an incredible advantage in the marketplace, often achieving unbelievable margins, high pricing power, and mythical levels of notoriety.

LVMH or Hermes, for instance, need no introduction. LVMH is one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world with a market cap over $307 billion and its CEO, Bernard Arnault, has vacillated in and out of the “Most Wealthy Person” list for years. Apple is often cited as an example of a company that has successfully adopted a luxury-like positioning while simultaneously being one of the most ubiquitous brands on the planet. Decades ago, in order to differentiate itself from the likes of Microsoft and Dell, Apple decided that it wanted to be the sexy brand—“not like the other tech companies.” That’s why you’ll always find an Apple store on the same street as a Gucci, Chanel, or Rolex retailer, and why The Apple Watch first debuted in a 12 page spread of Vogue rather than Wired or Tech Crunch. The subconscious dream of an Apple owner is to be seen as someone with boundless creativity, superior taste, and the ability to navigate life with perfect convenience.

In his book on Big Tech, Scott Galloway sums up the five criteria of luxury from a more structural perspective, and it certainly does sound like Apple:

1. Having an iconic founder

2. Artisanship

3. Vertical Integration

4. Global Reach

5. Premium Price

The Anti-Laws of Marketing

The seminal text on this subject, however, is undoubtedly The Luxury Strategy by Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien, who distilled the tactics of verified luxury companies into twenty four anti-laws.

These anti-laws are principles of the luxury market that fly in the face of conventional wisdom. These are the rules (and risks) that luxury companies must submit to in order to enjoy their elevated status amongst a sea of logos.

According to Kapfere and Bastien, the key to luxury branding is explained in the first rule: “Forget about ‘positioning’, luxury is not comparative.”

When it comes to luxury, being unique is what counts, not any comparison with a competitor. Luxury is the expression of a taste, of a creative identity, of the intrinsic passion of a creator. Luxury makes the bold statement ‘this is what I am’, not ‘that depends’— which is what positioning implies.

Chanel has an identity, but not a position. Identity is not divisible, it is not negotiable— it simply is. Luxury is superlative and not comparative. It prefers to be faithful to an identity rather than always worrying about where it stands in relation to a competitor.

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In other words, luxury brands are princesses that float above the fray, they are not the players on the competitive field. Each decision is designed to reinforce the singularity of a luxury brand’s identity rather than try to “one-up” someone else. To compete with others would implicitly bestow a kind of equality on the competitor by suggesting that it might be comparable—and luxury brands are anti-egalitarian to the core.

In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of these anti-laws, I thought it would be useful to use an unlikely example: a pair of 50-year old ex-cocaine dealers that are the hip-hop community’s favored candidate for album of the year.

Meet Clipse

Now I’m ten times the E.B.I.T.D.A
If you let the money talk, who speaking up
I’m sleepwalking, y’all don’t dream enough
My third passport, I ain’t seen enough
If you can breathe up there, it ain’t steep enough
The scale don’t lie, you ain’t even us.

Hip-hop duo Clipse took the music industry by storm this year after releasing their first album in over 15 years. The two brothers, Pusha T and No Malice, are legends in their own right, but are also childhood best friends with Pharrell Williams, the producer-songwriter who is now the Creative Director at Louis Vuitton. The entire album was made in LVMH’s headquarters in France, and its obvious that the project was steeped in the luxury mindset. The rollout for the album was widely applauded by hip-hop fanatics and casual observers, yielding over 118,000 units in the first week.

These are phenomenal numbers for any musician in the modern age, but especially notable for artists that haven’t released in over a decade and who are purists that eschew the superficial, pop-influenced melodies of modern sound. With stage personas sometimes described as “villains with a conscience”, the two brothers became the first hip-hop act in history to perform at the Vatican, performing a heartwarming tribute to their late parents. Below are a few of the anti-laws they leveraged to defy comparison, establish their territory, and gain an audience with the pope. For a full list of the anti-laws, click here.

The role of advertising is not to sell

My homies that didn’t die was all in prison
Visits behind the glass, my mirror image
Skin is blemished-
Names was mentioned-
Explains the sentence-
The pain is endless.

Luxury brands don’t beg, barter, or bargain. Ever. Even in their advertising.

Instead, luxury brands take every visible opportunity to tell their story, elevate the customer, and add emotion to their brand universe. This is why Pusha T and No Malice were exceptionally picky regarding the interviews, performances, and covers they lent themselves to. Instead, they chose art-oriented or hip-hop-centric media that they knew would let them keep the album as the main conversation piece, give them time and space to talk in-depth about their art, and send out signals to the right fans that this project would be one of substance. This is part of creating scarcity which drives demand, not in musical supply, but in visibility and personal appearances.

Dominate the client

They don’t know what it is when I’m on it
But once they figure it out, I don’t want it
So far ahead, you n****s are behind.

“The right fans” that the Clipse wanted to send a message to were the hip-hop heads—individuals who admire MC’s that can still write with intense lyricism, structured flows, and who pay tribute to the long-standing traditions of the art form.

However, this does not mean that the album was made to pander to these fans’ demands. Rather, Clipse leveraged their reputation and legacy in the rap game to dominate the client, meaning they cultivated a relationship with the fans that is more akin to an “educator” than that of a provider of service. Like a high-end sommelier giving recommendations to a novice wine-drinker, Clipse were able to tell the listeners “this is the good stuff that you should want.” Afterall, who is able to know this better than the practitioners, the craftsmen, and the artists themselves? This is a tenuous and difficult relationship to establish, but it pays dividends when done successfully.

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Keep stars out of your advertising

All I see is 60-day stars and 20-year thousandaires
Not enough shoppin’, whole lot of browsingaires
My reinvention, I know you thinkin’ how’s it fair
You stream kings but you never fit a crowd in there
Get these fifty five hundred a hosting n****s out of here.

The wrong influencers can kill a luxury brand. Most celebrities and social media stars rise and fall in accordance with popular trends, but luxury needs to remain timeless. The Clipse team understood this clearly and actively avoided the people that every other hip-hop or RnB marketing team courts: Twitch streamers, Tik-tok stars, and podcast pundits.

If consumers perceive that an influencer or celebrity was courted by a luxury brand because the brand needed that influencer’s star status, it detracts from the overall dream-power of the product. Instead, luxury brands select celebrities to act as “ambassadors” (very different than influencers) only when brands are positive that the essence of the celebrity can be sufficiently subservient to the fashion house. Celebrities should be the one’s courting the brand and should be honored to represent the product, not the other way around.

(Note: Celebrities have become more common in luxury marketing today, mostly to their detriment. The luxury market has been suffering lately and many brands have desperately reached for a lifeline. This is a risky trade-off and luxury brands will need to find a way to recover the dream power lest they continue their downward spiral.)

Cultivate closeness to the arts for the initiate

Penne alla vodka, Panama fishin’ village
Visitin’ with papa, with choppers, all of you imposter
Simply just Ferrari window shoppers
The one that I just ordered look like it was built by NASA
Over half a mill’ we call focaccia, reachin’ for acacia
Never leavin’ home without my piece like I’m Mahatma
From the tribe of Judah, I’m Mufasa
Never turn the other cheek, you’ll die at the Oscars.

Luxury, whether it be clothing, cars, or hotels, is not art; but it increases in value by being associated with art. This is because, at its core, art and luxury exist in a domain that transcends mere utility and functionality, dipping into the glories of beauty, sensuality, and desire. From a luxury mindset, someone who thinks that art is synonymous with decoration probably doesn’t understand that luxury is also not about performance. They need to be taught that a used Birkin Bag does not sell for half a million dollars because it’s the best satchel for holding things, but because of the history, design, and meaning that is vested in the Birkin.

Clipse elevated their brand and signaled themselves as the taste-makers by constantly putting themselves into proximity of both luxury and art. For instance, famed sculptor KAWS did their album cover and merch, interviews were conducted in LVMH headquarters, and references to high-end brands and prestigious artists were abundant in every setting.

Do not relocate your factories

I reside in VA, ride in VA
Most likely when I die, I’m gon’ die in VA.

Place is paramount to brand stories. All cult followings (and most religions) have deep ties to geographical locations. Distribution, of course, can be global. But where the product originates can never be relocated. Can you imagine if Prada moved to Texas or if Armani was made in China? This is one reason why e-commerce brands that prize themselves on being too global or “of the internet” will always lack the classic feel of vintage fashion houses. Being a digital brand can become too modern— and it lacks location.

Even for Clipse, the importance of being born and raised in Virginia is paramount to their brand story. They have songs about Virginia, rep Virignia in music videos, talk about Virginia in lyrics, and express love for Virginia in interviews. Pusha T even married a woman named Virginia. The lesson? Every compelling brand story needs a specific soil.

Conclusion

The world of luxury, in many ways, is easily conflated with the worst of late capitalism and classism. But it also contains remarkable insight into the nature of desire, storytelling, and craftsmanship. While there is much to criticize about this industry, it is also a unique space where beautiful and dignifying design is favored above commodification or dehumanization; where relationship with customers is never outsourced or impersonal; and where mindless consumption is rejected in favor of taste, longevity, and tradition. Brands, social movements, and community-builders can learn from the luxury world and those that deploy these strategies will quickly punch above their weight class, do more with less, and discover exactly how valuable a dream can be.

Hope you enjoyed this dispatch of Mercury’s Playbook, continuing Hermes’ work of shepherding dreams and guiding merchants. See below for bonus links and don’t forget to subscribe!

Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)

• If you’re interested in learning more about the luxury world, the best place to start is through Acquired’s deep dive into Hermes and LVMH.

• If you have never listend to the Clipse and want to see what the fuss is about, I’d recommend starting with their Tiny Desk concert.

• Martin Scorsese made an ad for Chanel starring Timothy Chalamet last year and it still remains a favorite of mine.

• From a professional perspective, Tom Ford is one of my inspirations. His exit interview in 2023 GQ is an interesting retrospective into his life post-luxury fashion.

• , a Substack I read often, just wrote a great newsletter on the luxury e-commerce crisis. Can you see which anti-laws these companies violated?

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

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Attention

When it comes to the modern economy, pundits tend to agree on at least one thing: attention is the new currency—or, at least—that attention is one of the most essential and effective drivers of capital. Visibility is closely linked to profitability, and while there will always be brands that benefit from anonymity and playing background, there is little doubt that most companies benefit when in positions of notoriety and public influence.

If this is true, business professionals should be studying the mass movements of attention just as much as they do to the movement of stocks, prediction markets, and geopolitics. Indeed, attentional literacy is swiftly becoming one of the most defining skills of successful executives, politicians, and cultural innovators, which is why today’s dispatch is a breakdown of one of the most popular stories in modern culture. And while this story is having an outsized influence on future generations, here’s the kicker:

Unless you are the parent of young children, you might not even be aware that this show exists.

The Show

According to Nielson’s streaming charts, the most watched show of the first two quarters of 2025 was not Friends, Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Squid Game, White Lotus, or even Severance. Rather, the singularly most watched show of 2025 from January to June was the Australian-based cartoon Bluey—an animated series that follows a six-year-old Blue Heeler puppy, her little sister Bingo, and their parents Bandit and Chilli.

The show has amassed over 25 billion viewing minutes in just six months. That’s over 2.85 million years— just a little longer than our specific genus of human has even been on the planet. Although most shows in the top-watched category can run for thirty minutes to an hour, Bluey episodes rarely run for more than seven minutes, the licenses of which were purchased by Disney and now appear on their streaming platform. A full-length feature film is set to release in 2026 and Disney is rumored to be exploring various ways to incorporate the IP into theme parks.

While this cartoon has obviously mastered the art of capturing eyeball share, it is widely applauded for doing so without dipping into the common strategies of modern digital media. Bluey contains no action, no rage bait, no wild plots, no villains, no noisy gags, no slapstick comedy. Instead, Bluey is grounded in the emotional and familial drama that children encounter in real life, often broaching difficult topics in an elegant way. Topics like bullying, divorce, infertility, neurodiversity, social comparison, or learning how to play without friends.

Trust

The truth is— Bluey doesn’t just capture attention. It earns attention. When I asked some parents whether or not they let their children watch Bluey (they did) and why they like it, here was a response I received:

“Kids like it because its a fun show with imagination and funny dog sisters having fun and making inside jokes. Besides the above, I like it because it's vetted and wholesome and I know it won’t cause potential issues like [redacted show] which has body shaming and rudeness.”

The bottom line is ‘trust,’ and that’s a value that the creator of Bluey, Joe Brumm, pursued from the beginning for one simple reason—he wanted his own children to be able to watch the show. In fact, Brumm has repeatedly emphasized that his own children are the inspiration for the characters and situations depicted in each episode:

“Usually they’re related to something I’ve learned having kids, or my wife has experienced or just something I notice that my kids keep doing. An episode really wouldn’t start until I’d found a bit of truth like that… That’s why kids and adults see themselves reflected in it. You love your children to death and they change you completely.”

Knowing that Brumm’s familiarity with the target demographic is from firsthand experience and that his product is built first and foremost for his family is a vital insight. So much success really does boil down to experience, knowing your customer, and solving the things that matter most to them. Brumm’s skin in the game has acted as a true north for the Bluey project and has effectively preserved the beloved show from mission drift for several years.

Brumm’s integrity in this arena has become undeniable, especially after he published a letter in December 2024 explaining that he was going to be stepping away from the TV series:

“I always said I wouldn’t keep making the show if I thought I couldn’t make any new season as good as the last. This would have been the case for me with a potential season four, so I’ve decided to take a break from my involvement in the TV series… To walk away from it while it’s at such a height will seem crazy to some but, for now, I am finding it difficult to reach back genuinely into that four to six year old world and write authentically.”

While not every decision-maker in a company has the advantage of being a real-life user of their own product like Brumm, he was also wise enough to know that this was the source of his competitive advantage. Necessity is the mother of invention and more innovation would take place if companies were more versed in studying the needs of their consumers and being as dedicated as Brumm has been to providing value. When a creator or brand begins to rely on gimmicks, planned obsolescence, dark patterns, or other undesirable tactics, it is a sure sign that they have become disconnected from the needs of their base.

Storytelling

Although fresh and revitalized, Bluey is not necessarily the first children’s show to take a narrative, gentle approach to their programming. In many ways, it can be seen as a spiritual successor to a Bob Ross or—most especially— Mr. Rogers. The latter, whose hit show Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood debuted nationwide in 1968 and aired for more than three decades, also seemed to defy the common wisdom regarding attention spans by eschewing the violent or spectacular ‘bombardment’ of other shows in order to adopt a simple, story-telling approach.

In fact, in 1969, Mr. Rogers went to Washington DC when a proposal to cut $10 million of funding for educational non-profit broadcasting was being considered (that’s about $89 million in today’s money). In order to communicate the importance of his and his colleague’s work, he explains his approach as follows:

“I'm very much concerned, as I know you are, about what's being delivered to our children in this country. I've worked in the field of child development for six years now trying to understand the inner needs of children. We deal with such things as the inner drama of childhood. We don't have to bop somebody over the head to make drama on the screen…. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations — and we speak to it constructively.

More wit and one song later, Mr. Rogers was able to convince the notoriously hard-nosed Senator to award the full amount, which saved the newly formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting and paved the path for the development of PBS and NPR. For brands and companies, the lesson here is quite simple: story beats spectacle.

The concept of storytelling is not new to modern workplaces, but rage-bait, viral antics, and AI-generated slop remain all too common as instruments of attention-seeking. Firms that double down on elegant, simple storytelling have the opportunity to set themselves apart by sending out meaningful signals rather than noisy splash. When compared to other shows on Disney+ like Spiderman, Clone Wars, or Phineas and Ferb, then Bluey certainly might seem to lack flash and sizzle; but there is no question regarding who is capturing the most eyeballs.

Whether its six year olds or Senators, people are evolved to process, remember, and feel through stories, which makes narrative competence one of the most important abilities. Jyoti Guptara, author of Business Storytelling, puts it this way:

Versatile storytelling will save you time for the rest of your life as people receive, believe and remember your message… Mastering storytelling can make you more successful, but perhaps more importantly, it will help you reconnect your life and business with your humanity and make you happier.

And many, many others have emphasized the importance of storytelling in the contemporary era. Although syndicated television shows are inherently formatted in a narrativistic manner, one of the most advantageous activities for modern professionals is to sharpen this ancient and time-tested ability.

Double-Layered Marketplaces

The interplay of these factors results in what I believe is the real “secret sauce” of Bluey: a sustained, shared, and inter-demographic experience.

You read earlier that parents enjoy the show almost as much as children—and this is a key element in its success. Bluey operates in what I call a ‘double-layered’ marketplace, where approval for the product needs to be sustained by more than one party in order to remain viable. In any media space, parents can put on a show for their children to watch, but the children have the power to reject it if they find it distasteful. Similarly, children can love a specific show, but the parents can reject it if they find it inappropriate or annoying. This is not entirely indifferent from a dynamic we see in a number of other industries where the buyer is a distinctly different party than the end user.

B2B SaaS companies, for instance, have the trifficult job of creating a product that needs to work effectively for everyday workers, but also needs to ‘wow’ the upper managers and promise certain results. Educational material or corporate training curricula also exist in double-layered marketplaces because they are again created primarily for a user who is not necessarily the buyer, and needs to fulfill a function for one while simultaneously appeasing the other. Other looser examples might include dog food, insurance, and *wipes brow sheepishly* lingerie.

The key to winning in a double-layered marketplace is to create a shared experience for all demographics involved, which begins with identifying each layer, respecting their veto ability, and designing the product to be a unifying force between both layers. Bluey isn’t just a show that parents turn on and leave their kids to watch; but also a sit-down event for whole families to learn and enjoy together. Scenarios depicted in the show become examples that parents use to remind their kids of good behavior, while games that the animated children play become real life adventures for parents and kids to imitate during playtime. By enabling whole families to participate, reflect, and play together, the show is transformed from passive viewing into active connection-making.

Even a family’s language, one of the most powerful building blocks of culture, can be heavily influenced by Bluey. Scholars have made studies of the use of "invitational language” in the show, and some of the bespoke words from the show become common vernacular in any given household. An example is the word “trifficult”— a trademarked portmanteau of the words “tricky” and “difficult”– which I dropped into the first sentence of a paragraph above. Did you catch it?

Conclusion

The true genius of Bluey, and why it’s the first subject of Mercury’s Playbook, is not just in its storytelling, but in its quiet revolution against the media status quo—a subtle rebellion built on dignity, empathy, and creativity. In a world obsessed with spectacle and in an industry all too willing to pollute the mental health of children for profit, Bluey reminds us that transformative impact springs from intentional creativity, shared play, and imaginative design. It challenges us to rethink not just what we create, but pushes the limits on who can benefit from our innovations and how to maximize value across multiple spheres of participation. By conquering a double-layered marketplace, where value is produced through co-experience, mutual respect, and consistency, Bluey models a way forward for innovators: to make things that bind people together, encourage autonomy, and foster tender radicalism with lasting impact.

Feathers For The Footnotes (Bonus Links)

• Mr. Rogers’ emergency broadcast to explain “assassination” to children after JFK’s death. Relevant for this time.

• Anil Dash musing about how Steve Jobs’ might be approaching the current political-business climate differently than Tim Cook if he were still alive.

• The most creative short film I’ve seen in a long time from a content creator—reminds me of the early days of Youtube.

• My fake letter to the real thief who stole my shoes at a party last weekend.

About the Author

Bradley Andrews is a hopeful rabble-rouser on a mission to inspire the world. Stay in touch with what he’s doing outside of Mercury’s Playbook by subscribing to a weekly digest of his activity through micro.blog. This will send you writing, photos, and other curiosities that extend beyond the scope of this newsletter.

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