Is an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, a search engine? Does it scour the internet for helpful information so that it can respond to user queries?

These questions were at the heart of a small kerfuffle on Bluesky last week between decorated speculative fiction writer Ann Leckie and a few prominent tech thinkers. Honestly, it bummed me out. But I found that the next morning, I had a lot to say about it. So I enlisted my dear husband, Sean, and I talked him through it.

This episode is different than the last 6 months or so of episodes. If you have the same taste in podcasts that I do, you'll recognize the format. I've been wanting to try it for a long time, and this was the perfect topic to give it a go. It's far more casual than the last 15+ episodes, but just as rigorous. If you like it, reach out on Bluesky, and let me know! Sean is already asking when we can do it again.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• Ann Leckie's original post
• Casey Newton's post
• Anil Dash's post (in response to someone agreeing with Leckie)
• Courtney Milan's post about the "card catalog effect"
• The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan with Quentin Fiore
• "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" by Emily W. Bender and Timnit Gebru

JOIN ME FOR SUMMER SEMINAR!

Summer Seminar is an intellectual oasis for creative thinkers and curious adventurers.

It combines speculative fiction, big questions, and practical application. For Summer 2025, we’re reading Sofia Samatar’s critically acclaimed novella The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain.

We’ll pair it with adventures in systems thinking and cultural analysis. And we’ll apply what we discover by reflecting on the systems we create and encounter in our own lives and work.

Summer Seminar is designed to fit into any schedule and explores critical thinking skills you can apply to any goal or challenge.

To learn more, visit whatworks.fyi/summer

"I have so many thoughts and not enough time to think them," I recently blurted out to my husband. For me, "thinking thoughts" means scribbling notes or writing messy paragraphs about whatever is on my mind. Of course, no one wants to read my scribbles or suffer through my unrefined musings. So once I've spent some time thinking thoughts, I have to figure out how to organize them. To structure them. To narrate them.

That's what today's episode is all about. Whether or not you're a writer, content creator, or other media maker, I know that thinking thoughts and figuring out how to share them is important to you—and essential to your work.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han
• Related: "Temporal Bandwidth" by Tara McMullin (EP 489)
• Related: "An Ode to Exceedingly Complex Systems" by Tara McMullin (EP 480)

NEW: The Return of Summer Seminar

Summer Seminar is an intellectual oasis for creative thinkers and curious adventurers.

It combines speculative fiction, big questions, and practical application. For Summer 2025, we’re reading Sofia Samatar’s critically acclaimed novella The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain.

We’ll pair it with adventures in systems thinking and cultural analysis. And we’ll apply what we discover by reflecting on the systems we create and encounter in our own lives and work.

Summer Seminar is designed to fit into any schedule and explores critical thinking skills you can apply to any goal or challenge.

To learn more, visit whatworks.fyi/summer

(Today's episode is a significant revision of a piece I previously wrote for premium subscribers in April 2024.)

• (00:00) - EP 494: How Structure Transforms Ideas

"No one is ever completely safe from the critical gaze of a culture steeped in the makeover ethos." —Micki McGee

I have a theory that you can measure the decline of any social media platform by the time it takes for its feed to become a firehose of unsolicited advice. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all sludge piles of advice now, but it took them years to devolve. TikTok took maybe 18 months. Substack Notes? Like 3 months. Threads? Instant.

Most of us (I think) can agree that the vapid posturing that occurs through posting advice on social media makes a platform less enjoyable. I don't open one of these apps in the hopes that I'll learn the one weird trick that can turn my frown upside down or give me six-pack abs. What we once loved about these platforms is how people shared their everyday descriptions of life, love, family, and curiosity. But much of that mutual exchange of experience has been ceded to the commercial interest of advice.

After all, we love advice. We also hate advice. We love it when someone can tell us what we should do next. And we also hate being told what we should do next. So what gives? Today, a description of why that is. But first, things are going to get awkward.

Footnotes:

• Read the written version of this episode.
• Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias
• "Signs of social awkwardness and 15 ways to overcome it" via BetterUp
• Self-Help, Inc by Micki McGee
• Self-Help, LLC - a special What Works series exploring the business and culture of self-help

• (00:00) - EP 493: Why We Just Can't Quit Advice Culture

Intractable challenges are often the result of a lack of imagination. That is, our solutions are constrained by existing systems and structures that likely created the problem in the first place. To dream up novel solutions that allow us to realize higher values, we need to build structures that enable and extend our imaginations.

And sure, I'm talking about macroeconomic, climate, and political challenges.

But I'm also talking about our day-to-day work and family lives.

Footnotes:

• Read the written version of this episode.
• "The WPA Federal Music Project in New Mexico" by Charles Cutter
• "The New Mexico Federal Music Project: Embodying the Regional Spirit of Roosevelt's New Deal" by Audra Bellmore and Amy S. Jackson
• Professor YouYoung Kang speaks about the Federal Music Project at Scripps College (YouTube)
• "Transcript: Mark Zuckerberg Announces Major Changes to Meta's Content Moderation Policies and Operations" by Justin Hendrix, TechPolicy.Press
• "Values Aren't Chains; They Are Wings" by Tara McMullin

Find more episodes and essays at whatworks.fyi.

Many of us (most?) have an inner voice that loves to remind us that "If there's time to lean, there's time to clean" or that "Coffee is for closers." We nag ourselves about being more productive, working more efficiently, or hustling for more money. Even if we value rest, care, and comfort, that voice can be hard to ignore.

Well, meet your Tiny Capitalist. Or rather, Tiny Capitalists: the Tiny Puritan, Tiny Manager, and Tiny Entrepreneur. Understanding the role they play helps us make better decisions about how we navigate the systems we exist in.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode
• "Is There a Tiny Puritan Living In Your Head? Tell Him to Get Lost." by Joy Marie Clarkson
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
• The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
• "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by Jonathan Edwards
• Clips from The Office, Severance, Office Space, Parks and Recreation

• (00:00) - Why Your Inner Critic Sounds Like a Bad Boss

Standardization is one of those ideas that, once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's a mental model that can explain, at least in part, many of our social, political, and personal challenges. Whether it's the clothes we wear, the language we use, the dates we go on, or the people we vote for, our choices are often unknowingly constrained by standardization.

In this episode, an update of an essay I originally released for premium subscribers back in November 2023, I explore the role that standardization has played in our economic development, our relationships, and even our identities.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode
• "Butt Stuff" on RadioLab
• Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
• "Generation Why?" by Zadie Smith, The New York Review
• "The Bizarre History of Women's Clothing Sizes" by Laura Stampler, Time

• (00:00) - EP 490: Standardize This

This episode is about the long term—the commitments, projects, and relationships we can work on when our "temporal bandwidth" widens. How we perceive time and our ability to do what's meaningful to us in time does have to be constrained by the urgency of now. There are ways to feel more grounded and create more possibilities at the same time.

Footnotes:

• Read the essay version of this episode.
• The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein
• On Freedom by Timothy Snyder
• Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs
• How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
• "Practicing the Future" by Tara McMullin
• "Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Stuff" by Tara McMullin
• "Busyness Decoded" by Tara McMullin

Find the What Works archives and subscribe to the newsletter at whatworks.fyi.

• (00:00) - Time Flies

Most of the work I do that's not this revolves around coaching, editing, and/or thinking with people who have meaningful ideas they want to better express to the world. In this work, the question I hear most often is about making sense of a complex idea—the kind of idea that contains many smaller, supporting ideas and stories and research. The sort of complex idea best expressed in a lengthy essay, a book, a podcast series, or a documentary.

How does one make a plan for tackling that kind of idea? How does one get started writing or designing that complex idea? How does one keep track of all the bits and bobs that go into a massive project like that?

From my perspective, three biases tend to trip us up when working on a project of this sort. I'll call them the linearity bias, the stick-with bias, and the waste-not bias. I'll explain how each gets in the way of big, messy projects—but first, I have to tell you about HONEYDEW.

Footnotes:

• Read this episode as an essay
• 12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson
• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
• Thunder and Lightning by Natalie Goldberg
• "Making What Can't Be Sold" by Tara McMullin

I work with people who want to turn their meaningful ideas into remarkable content. Whether you want feedback or thought partnership in a 90-minute strategy session or you've got a more hands-on project involved, I'd love to help. Click here to learn more about working with me.

• (00:00) - Honeydew (Or, 3 Biases That Derail Meaningful Ideas)

The tech industry has a central role in shaping our work, our communication, and even our identities. Its mythology is woven into the products and services we use on a daily basis. So understanding how the people leading the tech industry think—how they perceive their own stories and generate their own hype—is a solid step toward making sense of what can seem so nonsensical.

And there is one book I go back to over and over again when I need to make sense of our mythologies of disruption and failure, value and genius—and that's What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub.

In this episode, I share 3 ideas from that book that help me make sense of the headlines shaping politics, business, and work.

Footnotes:

• What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
• "Mark Zuckerberg" on In Bed With The Right

Find a text version of this episode at whatworks.fyi!

• (00:00) - Introduction

What does my new website, the TikTok "ban," and the ongoing purge of "woke" from government websites have in common?

The power to decide what content counts and what doesn't—and use that power to shape the knowledge and experiences of others.

In this episode, I continue to examine the state of The Website today. Amidst a backdrop of diffuse epistemic violence, the website is both an archive and a communication tool we can use to preserve the knowledge and ways of knowing we care about. In the second half of the episode, I share a piece I wrote last year on how artificial intelligence disrupts and deskills our critical thinking.

Footnotes:

• "Broken Links" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• "Knowledge Is Power: A Brief History" on Mental Floss
• Full text of the House bill "banning" TikTok
• "Multiple Ways of Knowing: Expanding How We Know" by Elissa Sloane Perry and Aja Couchois Duncan on Nonprofit Quarterly
• "Black Box Thinking" by Tara McMullin on What Works
• "Scientists Increasingly Cannot Explain How AI Works" by Chloe Xiang on Vice
• "Google is redesigning its search engine: it's AI all the way down" on The Verge
• "Hostile Epistemology" by C. Thi Nguyen
• "Microsoft Finds Relying on AI Kills Your Critical Thinking Skills" by AJ Dellinger on Gizmodo

Find a written version of this audio essay, subscribe free to the What Works newsletter, and learn more about working with me to turn your meaningful ideas into remarkable content at whatworks.fyi.

• (00:00) - EP 486: How Knowledge Really Does Become Power