Missives
Keep track of what's happened since you were last here with the newsletters and the changelog.
June 5, 2026
Changelog
I finally finished Successful Prophets. An article that took essentially five years to write. It’s of no particular consequence to you, probably, but this was the article that got me writing again. Made me realise I could use my articles to think through ideas, and make it exciting to write.
What you will care about is, much like Mundane Cults, it shows just how vulnerable we all are to being collected into high-control groups like cults. That there’s nothing special about them, and nothing that especially protects you from them. In fact, the way we talk about cult leaders, like the way we talk about cults, actually leaves us more vulnerable.
I also republished the sister article, Folie à deux. This was the idea that started my thinking about cult leaders and successful prophets. Written during the height of the pandemic, I think you might be able to read the subtext. A time of widespread human craziness, and again very comprehensible if you look at what happens when people are isolated with just a couple of people to keep them company.
I think, after reading, the new era of digital gurus makes a great deal more sense, as do the more malevolent online communities surrounding them. If anything, it’s surprising that there aren’t more. It’s just the human machine at work. An article for another day, though. For now, I hope you enjoy these.
In other news, I’m writing a book chapter on making AI useful, so lots of marginalia about that, as I collect my thoughts and scattered notes. Worth a skim—the jagged edge of AI is less and less reassuringly far away. This is good for you in the short term—some clear ideas about how to make AI more productive for you. But bad in the long term, because the clear benefit of humans is in jobs that are more fragmentary, and we are getting better at chaining AI across fragments.
April 4, 2026
Changelog
I’ve been trying to write the most recent article, The Last Hiding Place of Incompetent Men since January. I distinctly remember teasing it in a podcast around then. It was hard. But it’s done.
I also transitioned from Sendy to Listmonk and consequently, the newsletter has been broken for a while. Forgive the subsequent pile up of articles, podcasts, and lectures.
January 9, 2026
Changelog
Happy new year. On top of my updates last December, I have two new articles out: one on Hydraulic Despotism, and one on three questions that seem important, but end up being irrelevant. Specifically, questions about consciousness, free-will, and nature vs nurture.
Relatedly, I have four more podcasts/lectures out. Three are the audio version of the irrelevant questions article: Consciousness, Free Will, and Nature vs Nurture. Then one more on Mundane Cults.
Looks like it wasn’t a passing fancy, so I guess I should launch it properly now.
It’s hosted at Substack for the free storage and bandwidth for now, but you don’t need to subscribe there. I’ll still include the links in the normal newsletter.
Speaking of, I will be restarting the newsletter! I think you can tell I needed the break.
December 1, 2025
Changelog
Since I quit writing weekly articles in July, and went back to monthly ones, I have been much more pleased with the quality of my work.
I wrote my ETHIC Stack up properly, rather than resorting to AI. I also used it to improve the ethical decision-making model [we developed at RMA Sandhurst. Now, altogether, this work forms the core of the Ethical Leadership module I run at Sandhurst.
I also re-wrote my motivation articles, because those two have become a core part of my leadership content at Sandhurst.
I’ve had another go at explaining why AI seems so familiar, and yet so alien to us, and this will also almost certainly become part of my teaching as I begin a project of integrating AI into the leadership programme at Sandhurst.
Just six months off forcing half-cooked articles out every week, and look how much has been done!
But the more exciting news is that I’m finally testing the waters with the podcast. I’ve got two now: Stress is Good and Men aren’t from Mars. I’ll share more when I’m ready to launch it properly, but it’s experimental for now. See what you think.
September 10, 2025
Changelog
The AI article and podcast I made to go along with my academic paper on the behavioural mechanisms of ethical behaviour were fun, but I promised I would re-write them myself. So I did. You can still find links to the AI stuff in the article, but the article is all me. Forgive my self-indulgence, writing about it even more. I get a bit obsessed sometimes.
July 10, 2025
Changelog
This week I sent a draft paper out for review. It’s a rather longwinded sketch of how I think we could approach ethics. It’s 45 pages or so long, but it was a lot of fun to write. I suspect most people will not want quite that level of detail though, so I made an AI podcast and a semi-AI explainer. People seem to quite like the AI summary stuff. You can find it all here.
However, the whole experience has made me realise that I’ve been pretty annoyed this last year. Since June, I’ve written an article a week, and most of them are shit.
I used to write an article a month, and I used to write them basically just for me—working an idea out for myself—and so it’s no surprise that I usually quite liked those articles.
But many people reasonably complained that they were impenetrable and infrequent. So I committed to an article a week instead, and I’d try to bridge the gap—try to write articles that were a little for me and a little for everyone else.
The result is that, for the most part, they do neither. Lots of strange fragmentary ‘series’ style posts, and unfinished and incomplete thinking. All useless to me, but also not very penetrable to others.
Then I wrote this 45-page paper, and I was obsessed with it. And I love it. And I don’t care that no one will read it.
So I’m going back to that, I think. Writing articles that are me being thoughtful for me. BUT. I will look to producing new forms of content for others, because I like teaching too. Rather than do two things badly, I will do both things well.
June 30, 2025
Changelog
I forgot to schedule last week’s newsletter, but the article has been up since Friday. Apologies. I won’t send it now, I’ll just stack the two this week.
It’s not a terrible thing, because I hate sending these three or more part articles. With this week’s newsletter, you’ll get all of my moral terrain thinking-articles together.