For several thousand years, humanity has been attempting to remove human beings from anything tedious. We invented writing because memory was unreliable, spreadsheets because arithmetic was exhausting, SatNav because nobody wanted to admit they had missed the turning, and management consultants because apparently PowerPoint required a priesthood. Artificial intelligence is merely the latest and most ambitious stage of the project.

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There is, however, a small problem. The machines have become astonishingly good at doing things while we remain inconveniently responsible for deciding which things are worth doing.

AI can research a market, interrogate customer data, construct a financial model and produce enough marketing copy before lunch to make the entire communications department reconsider its mortgage. It can take a founder’s questionable assumption and execute against it with a speed and enthusiasm previously available only from an extremely expensive consultancy.

Which is wonderful, provided the assumption wasn’t idiotic.

The Revenge of the Philosophy Department

One of the more enjoyable developments in artificial intelligence is that some of the world’s most technologically sophisticated companies have discovered they need philosophers.

This is quite a turnaround for a profession whose commercial proposition has traditionally consisted of being asked at dinner parties what exactly one intends to do with a philosophy degree. Anthropic has philosopher Amanda Askell working on the behaviour and character of Claude. Google DeepMind employs Henry Shevlin with the magnificent job title “Philosopher”. Silicon Valley spent decades making fun of the humanities and has now reached the awkward stage where it needs someone who has read them.

The reason is revealing. Engineering can tell us increasingly extraordinary things about what a machine can do. It cannot, by itself, settle what the machine should do. Apparently the word “should” has survived the GPU.

Socrates Saw This Coming, Obviously

Technology panic is considerably older than technology journalism. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts the story of Theuth presenting writing as an invention that would improve wisdom and memory. King Thamus worries that people will instead outsource memory to external marks and acquire the appearance of wisdom without the reality.

It is an excellent story because civilisation’s first recorded complaint about information technology was essentially that it would make everybody stupid. We know this because somebody wrote it down.

Humanity has been repeating the performance ever since. New technologies arrive accompanied by predictions that they will liberate civilisation or destroy it, sometimes from the same people and occasionally in the same podcast.

AI deserves something more useful than either response. It is an extraordinarily capable tool, and the interesting question is what happens when execution becomes abundant while judgement remains stubbornly scarce.

AI Has Invented the High-Speed Mistake

Human judgement is a thoroughly inefficient business. It develops partly because we remember getting things wrong. You price something too cheaply and regret it. You hire the brilliant candidate everyone warned you about. You build the feature customers demanded and discover that apparently none of them meant enough to pay for it. Eventually this collection of embarrassments acquires sufficient density to be renamed “experience”.

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AI doesn’t need the embarrassment.

That is both its strength and its limitation. A model can analyse fifty customer interviews and identify the feature mentioned most often. The founder still has to decide whether frequency means importance. It can produce an immaculate financial forecast, but somebody has to notice that the beautifully formatted assumptions underneath it belong in the fiction department.

The great productivity story around AI is therefore slightly incomplete. We have become very interested in how quickly AI allows us to execute and rather less interested in what happens when the thing being executed is wrong. A founder chooses the wrong customer and AI can now research that customer, develop the positioning, produce the campaign and construct a magnificent forecast showing the glorious future awaiting a business nobody needs.

The machine hasn’t failed. It has performed beautifully. We have simply invented a much faster way of arriving at the wrong answer.

Keep the Human. Lose Some of the Work.

This is why judgement becomes more valuable as AI becomes more capable. When producing the work was difficult and expensive, execution consumed much of the organisation’s attention. As execution becomes cheaper, deciding what deserves to be executed carries more weight.

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That principle sits behind what we’re building at LettsGroup with VentureFactory. AI Co-Founders can do substantial work across a venture, while the founder retains control over the decisions that determine where the company is actually going. The point isn’t to protect founders from AI or preserve pointless human labour as some sort of heritage craft. It is to use machines for the things machines are becoming exceptionally good at without confusing capability with wisdom.

Build with AI while keeping the decisions that matter human. Try VentureFactory at LettsGroup.

There is a surprisingly optimistic conclusion buried underneath all the anxiety about AI. Humans have always built tools that extend what humans can do. AI may turn out to be an unusually powerful one, giving a single founder access to capabilities that once required an organisation behind them. That does not make the founder irrelevant. It makes the quality of the founder’s decisions more consequential.

Perhaps that will be humanity’s slightly humiliating role in the AI economy. The machines will remember more than us, calculate faster than us and produce in seconds what takes us hours. We will still have to look at what they produce, consider the evidence, remember the mistakes, distrust the suspiciously beautiful spreadsheet and ask the oldest and most irritating human question of all: yes, but is this actually a good idea?

And honestly, it tracks.

After years of being told that we are too online, too distracted, too addicted to our phones and probably suffering from some form of attention-span damage, Gen Z has apparently decided that the solution is to buy a notebook.

Not just any notebook, either - a beautiful notebook. Preferably one with a linen cover, expensive paper and the sort of binding that makes you feel as though you have recently inherited a house in the Cotswolds. Then comes the pen, because apparently the wrong biro can ruin your emotional wellbeing, followed by the stickers, the washi tape, the little photographs, the pressed flowers and whatever else is required to turn writing “today was a bit shit” into a 45-minute creative project.

The diary is back.

And, naturally, we have managed to make it a lifestyle aesthetic.

There is something almost impressively circular about the whole thing. We have spent the last fifteen years moving everything from the physical world onto our phones, only to discover that we miss having some things in physical form. We digitised photographs and then bought film cameras. We stopped buying books and then started carrying paperbacks around like personality accessories. We replaced CDs with streaming and then became extremely excited about vinyl. And now, after years of typing our thoughts into Notes apps at 2am, we are rediscovering the humble diary.

The appeal is obvious. There is a particular satisfaction in doing something that cannot ping, refresh, recommend or ask you whether you would like to “continue your journey”. A notebook does not know what you did yesterday, and it certainly does not intend to remind you about it.

But there is one small problem with our analogue rebellion.

We keep posting about it online.

Nothing says “I need to disconnect from the digital world” quite like spending 25 minutes arranging your journal, coffee, candle and carefully selected paperback into a flat lay before filming yourself opening the journal on TikTok.

The irony is almost too perfect.

And yet, perhaps this is why the journaling revival is more interesting than simply another internet trend. The point was never really the notebook. It is the feeling behind it.

We are tired of having every part of our lives fragmented across a collection of apps, platforms, notifications and increasingly aggressive reminders that we have not yet achieved our full potential today. We want somewhere to put our thoughts that does not immediately turn them into data, content or a productivity challenge.

Which raises a slightly awkward question: if what we actually want is a more personal digital life, why are we so convinced the answer has to be going analogue? Perhaps it is finally making digital feel personal again. And maybe that is the sweet spot: not choosing between the notebook and the screen, but finding a way to make the screen feel a little more like your own.

Americans have discovered a thrilling new extreme sport: filling up the car. The national average for regular gasoline climbed to $4.48 a gallon on 21 September, edging towards this year’s record high of $4.56 reached on 21 May. In California, regular now costs $6.114 per gallon, at which point it becomes financially sensible to commute by horse, a vehicle that runs on hay and resentment, both of which Americans have in abundance.

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How did the world’s largest oil producer end up rationing its road trips? Through ambition. Since late February, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz during the 2026 Iran war has disrupted roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply. Washington then answered the blockade with a blockade of its own, a bit like fixing a leaky pipe by drilling a second hole in it.

The rest of the planet has been invited to the party whether it RSVP’d or not. Brent surged to around $118 in late March, and by early September was back up to $109 as renewed attacks on shipping and energy infrastructure reversed earlier gains. In the Philippines, diesel passed the equivalent of $10.75 a gallon. The only people having a worse time are the Iranians, whose rial hit an all-time low of 2,020,000 to the dollar on 24 August. That makes a cup of tea a seven-figure transaction.

Then there are the tariffs, the economic equivalent of trying to put out a chip-pan fire with a jerrycan. Back in March, the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank not known as a hotbed of Trotskyites, warned the war raised the risk of recession and rising inflation, and urged a rethink of tariff policy and an end to Trump’s relentless attacks on the Federal Reserve’s independence. The White House took this advice in the spirit in which it was offered: by ignoring it entirely.

That brings us to the finest comedy of the lot. Trump installed Kevin Warsh at the Fed, presumably expecting a loyal golden retriever. Instead, on 16 September the committee voted unanimously, 12–0, to raise rates to 3.75–4.00 per cent, the first increase since 2023, despite public presidential opposition. Picking your own referee, only to have him brandish a red card at you, takes a very special talent.

Voters, meanwhile, have noticed. In one mid-September poll, Trump’s approval on inflation stood at 24 per cent, matching his low with the pollster. A Data for Progress survey found 61 per cent blame Republicans more for rising gas prices, against 31 per cent for Democrats. The President has repeatedly asked voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot”, and they appear to be pretending with tremendous enthusiasm.

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The clock is ticking louder than a taxi meter in Mayfair. Absentee ballots are already coming back in North Carolina’s pivotal Senate race, and surveys from Democratic campaigns show races within the margin of error in seats Trump easily won two years ago. Those are partisan polls and should be taken with a pinch of salt, which, mercifully, is still affordable.

In fairness, his defenders have a case. Iran shut the Strait, not Washington. The Fed itself says economic activity is expanding at a solid pace, and core inflation eased to 2.4 per cent in August, the lowest since March 2021. The IMF even revised world growth to 3 per cent for 2026, arguing AI-driven demand has cushioned the oil shock. So this is less a collapse than a very expensive wobble. Rescue is conceivably in sight, too: Iran has reportedly proposed reopening Hormuz within seven days if the US lifts its blockade, just as Trump prepares to address the UN General Assembly. The author of The Art of the Deal has six weeks to make one. Otherwise, come November, the only thing running on empty will be his majority.

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🎬 Tip One: The Marlboro Moment

Tip One: Do not — we repeat, do not — tell your customers your product will kill them. Marlboro tried it. Benson & Hedges tried it. They spent fifty years and fifty billion dollars in litigation before anyone lit up the obvious: death is, surprisingly, a tough sell. You chaps seem to have managed to achieve the same PR catastrophe in about eighteen months. Impressive efficiency, at least.

🎬 Tip Two: The Hack and the Hug

Tip Two: Hacking your customers is generally frowned upon. But doing so, then watching your frenemy Nvidia swoop in to buy the very victim — Hugging Face — while looking like the White Knight? That’s not just bad PR. That’s weaponised PR. Nvidia thanks you. Enormously.

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🎬 Tip Three: The Infinite IPO

Tip Three: If you announce an IPO, try, try, to actually do it. Postponing indefinitely, presumably because your product will kill people while Chinese competitors are giving theirs away free, creates what industry insiders call a “doom loop.” Your doom loop. Of your own making. Majestic.

The PR Helpdesk is now closed. We need a lie-down.

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On 26 August 2026, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make substantial changes to Facebook and Instagram, settling claims brought by most US states and territories that it designed its platforms to encourage addictive use among children, misled consumers about their safety and improperly collected children’s data. The settlement does not establish that Meta acted wrongfully (the company continues to deny that) but demonstrates that the design choices behind engagement are now being challenged through litigation, legislation and public policy rather than accepted as immutable features of the internet.

The agreement still requires court approval. Even so, it brings to an end a closely watched federal trial at which Mark Zuckerberg had been expected to testify. We are thankfully spared the spectacle of a technology billionaire explaining human behaviour like somebody who has recently had it described to them.

The settlement requires Meta, for the next decade, to limit teenagers’ use of Facebook and Instagram to two hours a day and prevent access between midnight and 6am without parental consent. It also introduces restrictions on notifications during school hours, stronger age-assurance measures, tighter controls on age-inappropriate material, independent oversight and what the agreement calls “productive pauses”.

A productive pause sounds less like a product-safety mechanism than something suggested by Human Resources shortly before removing the biscuits from a meeting room. Still, it represents a formal attempt to place limits on the unlimited engagement upon which the social-media business model was built. Meta has, after many profitable years, discovered the off switch.

The financial figure sounds appropriately historic until it is placed alongside Meta’s approximately $201 billion in revenue during 2025. Reuters calculates that the settlement represents roughly three to four months of Meta’s profit. This makes it considerably more substantial than an ordinary corporate parking ticket, although unlikely to require a whip-round at Menlo Park or the sale of any emergency hoodies. The more consequential part of the agreement may therefore be the restrictions placed on the products themselves.

Everybody Had a Different Name for the Same Thing

The behaviour at the centre of the legal action (designing products to maximise time spent, emotional reaction and repeat visits) was never described the same way twice, because the modern digital economy relies heavily on finding reassuring names for things people might otherwise object to.

Platforms called it engagement. Newsrooms called it audience development. Advertisers called it attention. Consultants placed it inside a circular diagram and called it an ecosystem. Users, on reflection, were inclined to call it three hours of their life they would like back.

The terminology shifted with the audience, but the mechanism remained consistent: keep people on the platform, keep them reacting, and measure success by how much of their time could be absorbed before they noticed. If they became angry, anxious or unable to leave, this was not traditionally regarded as a design problem. It was an excellent session duration.

Publishers were not innocent bystanders dragged reluctantly into this system. They arrived carrying headlines and asking where to plug them in.

Throughout the 2010s, editorial decisions that had once been guided by news judgement, reader loyalty and the occasional terrifying editor-in-chief were increasingly guided by whatever the algorithm appeared to enjoy that morning. Headlines were restructured for shareability. Formats were rebuilt for the Facebook feed. Video was declared the future with such regularity that large numbers of journalists were dismissed to make room for it.

Commissioning meetings began to feature phrases such as “this could do well on social”, as though this were a journalistic criterion rather than a mild form of editorial surrender. Entire publishing strategies were based on attempting to interpret the moods of a mathematical system owned by another company. Medieval villagers studying the flight of birds had a broadly similar methodology, although rather less venture capital.

The media industry did not merely use the platforms. It trained itself to serve them, reorganising editorial behaviour around a reward system it could neither see nor control. It was less a partnership than a very long audition for a part Meta had not promised to cast.

The Productive Pause the Media Industry Never Received

Consider what Meta’s proposed protections might look like if applied to publishers rather than teenagers.

After fifteen minutes spent refreshing the analytics dashboard, an editor would receive a gentle notification asking whether they had considered commissioning something people might actually remember. After thirty minutes, the dashboard would be replaced by a photograph of a tree and the words: “There is a world beyond concurrent users.”

A responsible adult, perhaps a sub-editor of sound judgement and adequate caffeine levels, would have to approve any headline containing SLAMS, DESTROYS, BREAKS SILENCE, FURY or YOU WON’T BELIEVE. Headlines beginning “The internet is obsessed with…” would require documentary evidence that at least seven people had noticed.

Access to real-time audience data would be blocked after midnight without a parental PIN, on the reasonable grounds that nothing good has ever been decided at 1am in response to a traffic spike. Push notifications would be disabled during working hours so journalists could concentrate on journalism. Before publishing a fourth version of the same story in a single news cycle, the system would pause to ask: “Are you building an audience, or displaying signs of platform dependency?”

Editors would be limited to two hours a day of saying “the algorithm”. Once the allowance had been exhausted, they would have to identify an actual reader and explain what that person might want.

None of this would entirely cure the problem. Some publishers would immediately open a second account and claim it belonged to their parents. But it might at least introduce a moment of reflection into an industry that has spent years responding to declining social reach by posting more frequently.

The central difficulty was always that publishers reorganised themselves around engagement signals Meta controlled and could change whenever it wished. From around 2018 onwards, Meta progressively reduced the prominence of news in its feeds. Referral traffic fell sharply. Publishers discovered that the distribution infrastructure around which they had redesigned their businesses was not, technically speaking, theirs.

The industry had trained for an algorithm that subsequently lost interest. It was like spending years learning the tango only to discover that your partner had become very interested in short-form video and was now dancing with somebody called Creator Economy.

Meta moved on. Many newsrooms are still standing beside the dance floor holding a carefully optimised headline.

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Engagement Acquires a Health Warning

The more significant consequence of the settlement may not be the payment, however gratifyingly large the number appears in a press release, but the product changes it requires. If daily limits, notification controls, age assurance and independent oversight become standard safeguards, unlimited engagement begins to look less like an inevitable feature of the internet and more like a deliberate commercial choice.

That reframing matters because engagement has long been treated as a neutral indicator of public enthusiasm. More engagement meant a successful story, a healthier platform, or an especially impressive social media manager. Little distinction was made between a reader thoughtfully absorbing an investigation and somebody furiously typing beneath a photograph of a celebrity they had never met.

The dashboard counted both. Indeed, it often preferred the furious person.

Engagement is not necessarily evidence that something has informed, delighted or enriched its audience. It proves that something happened on a screen. A car alarm also generates engagement, but nobody builds an editorial strategy around one.

The settlement does not establish that Meta acted wrongfully, and the company continues to dispute the allegations. It does, however, confirm that the mechanisms used to maximise engagement deserve scrutiny rather than reverence. The algorithm is not weather. It was designed by people, adjusted by people and defended by people who generally preferred everyone else to discuss it as though it had formed naturally over the Pacific.

Publishers May Now Leave the Platform

For publishers, the lesson is not that social media should be abandoned. That is the kind of position that sounds magnificent at a conference and survives until somebody checks the traffic figures.

Social platforms remain useful for discovery, conversation and distribution. But rented distribution should not be mistaken for an owned audience, particularly when the landlord is free to remove the staircase without warning.

Newsletters, subscriptions, memberships and direct reader relationships are not glamorous substitutes for a viral post. They are infrastructure: connections that do not disappear because a platform adjusts its priorities on a Tuesday afternoon, discovers a new format or decides that news has become inconvenient.

The media spent years treating social reach as an audience when it was really temporary permission to stand in somebody else’s doorway. Meta’s settlement should remind publishers that a large number on a dashboard is not the same thing as a durable relationship, and visibility granted by an algorithm is not independence.

Teenagers may soon receive productive pauses, overnight controls and daily limits. Publishers will remain free to refresh the dashboard until their eyes water, publish a fifth version of the same story and announce that the audience strategy is “performing strongly” because somebody in Wolverhampton has posted an angry emoji.

There are, apparently, limits to how much protection society can provide.

Attention is something a platform extracts. A relationship is something a publisher earns.

This article was created, edited, illustrated, published, distributed and promoted using LettsNews, with every editorial decision remaining in the hands of its author.

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And honestly, it makes sense. The diary has always been one of the few places where female interiority gets to exist without interruption. A place to obsess, spiral, analyse, romanticise, confess, lie and occasionally incriminate yourself.

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The difference now is that the diary itself has changed. We no longer live entirely inside locked notebooks hidden under beds. Modern journaling is fragmented across Notes apps, voice memos, late-night searches, unfinished drafts, private playlists and emotional support group chats. Which is partly why platforms like jot feel oddly timely. They are less about recreating the old diary and more about rebuilding it for how people actually process their lives now.

So, in honour of the diary renaissance, here are the most iconic diarists in pop culture history, what their journaling style says about them, and why each one would probably have been terrifyingly attached to jot.

Bridget Jones: The Spreadsheet of Emotional Chaos

Bridget Jones’s Diary remains one of the purest examples of diary-as-survival. Bridget’s entries are half confession booth, half life audit. Calories consumed. Cigarettes smoked. Units of alcohol. Romantic humiliations endured before noon.

What makes Bridget such an enduring diarist is that her journaling is not aspirational. It is reactive. She journals because she is trying to understand herself while being battered by modern adulthood and deeply cursed dating prospects.

There is also something very Gen Z about her approach in retrospect: the self-awareness, the over-analysis, the way every tiny interaction becomes emotionally forensic evidence.

Bridget would thrive with modern journaling tools. Half her entries would begin as voice notes recorded while speed-walking home from a disastrous dinner. She would absolutely use emotional pattern tracking, study the results for three seconds, then text Daniel Cleaver anyway.

Most importantly, she would love journaling that does not require sitting down ceremoniously with a leather notebook and “processing.” Bridget journals in motion! On trains, hungover, mid-crisis. Which, increasingly, is how everyone journals now.

Carrie Bradshaw: Journaling Disguised as Journalism

People forget that Sex and the City is basically built around a diary structure... Carrie just monetised hers.

Every episode begins with a question she cannot answer emotionally, so she intellectualises it into a column. Her entire writing style is essentially: “What if I turned my personal dysfunction into cultural commentary?”

Which, to be fair, has become the blueprint for approximately half the internet.

Carrie processes through performance: her thoughts only become real once they have been narrated, shaped and, ideally, shared.

She would absolutely love conversational journaling. Not because she wants advice, but because she wants a responsive audience for every emotional revelation. She would ask one reflective question and somehow end up unpacking her entire attachment style by accident.

And the categorisation? Forget it. Carrie would have relationship entries tagged by era, man, emotional devastation level and whether she cried in public.

Hannah Horvath: Oversharing as an Art Form

Girls gave us Hannah Horvath, who approached writing with the energy of someone trying to emotionally bleed onto a Google Doc before anyone could stop her.

Hannah represents the diarist as memoirist, personal brand and, occasionally, person who says “I think I might be the voice of my generation” while actively ruining her own life.

She reframes everything into narrative; every bad thing happening to her becomes material before it has even emotionally settled.

In another life, Hannah would absolutely be posting cryptic Notes app screenshots at 2am.

She also captures why digital journaling suits modern thinking. Thoughts arrive messily. Half a sentence here, a voice note there, one devastating realisation typed at 1:47am. Hannah would need somewhere to dump it all and figure out what it means later.

Elena Gilbert: The Diary as Emotional Archive

Before vampires fully derailed her life, The Vampire Diaries begins with Elena journaling after the death of her parents.

And honestly, this might be one of the most emotionally accurate depictions of journaling in pop culture.

Elena does not journal because it is cute. She journals because grief creates emotional overflow and she has nowhere else to put it.

That is something journaling culture occasionally forgets. People rarely start documenting their lives because everything is going brilliantly. It usually happens when something has gone spectacularly wrong: breakups, grief, identity crises, loneliness - the general experience of being a person.

Elena’s diary becomes an emotional archive. A way of preserving herself while everything around her changes.

And that is where digital journaling becomes genuinely useful rather than merely aesthetic. The easier it is to journal, the more likely you are to do it when you actually need it. Not tomorrow, when you have bought the perfect notebook. Now.

Amy Dunne: Weaponised Journaling

We need to talk about Gone Girl.

Because Amy Dunne may be the most terrifying diarist in modern fiction.

Her diary is not reflective. It is strategic, curated, manipulated. A constructed emotional artefact designed to control perception.

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Which reveals something uncomfortable about diaries: they are never completely objective. Every diary is still a performance, even if the audience is just you.

Amy understands this better than anyone.

She writes herself into a character and she edits reality in real time. Her diary becomes less of a personal archive and more of a narrative weapon.

Would Amy use jot? Deeply unfortunately, yes. She would create colour-coded emotional profiles and build an immaculate behavioural timeline. She would abuse tagging systems with frightening efficiency.

But Amy also highlights something about modern journaling. People increasingly want their diaries to be searchable, organised and interconnected. Less a pile of disconnected entries, more a living map of their thoughts.

The Diary Was Never Meant to Stay Static

What all these characters reveal is that the diary has never really been about the format. It has always been about creating continuity between thoughts, feelings, memories, relationships and identity.

The problem is that modern life fractures all of that across different systems. Memories live in photos. Plans live in calendars. Emotions live in Notes apps. Relationships live in messages. Thoughts disappear into tabs you will absolutely never reopen.

The original diary held life together in one place.

Now, the digital diary is trying to do that again.

That is what makes this new wave of journaling feel bigger than another wellness trend. It is not necessarily about writing more. It is about reconnecting the pieces of yourself that modern technology accidentally scattered in the first place.

And honestly, Bridget Jones would probably have loved that.

Your life already exists in fragments. The modern diary just brings them back together. Explore it now at jot.

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It begins innocently enough. ChatGPT helps with some research. Then you discover a better research tool, something clever for coding and an AI that makes presentations without requiring you to spend Sunday evening nudging boxes three pixels to the left. Six months later you have 14 subscriptions and have forgotten what three of them do. This is called productivity.

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Startup Dreams, Mortgage Realities

The strange thing is that most of these tools are genuinely excellent. The research is better, the code arrives faster and things that once required a small team can now be done before lunch. Unfortunately, none of your artificial colleagues appears to have met. So the founder acquires a new job. You spend Monday morning explaining to one AI what another AI discovered on Friday. By lunchtime you’re copying a product decision somewhere else because the marketing AI is still enthusiastically promoting the feature you’ve just killed. At 3pm the fundraising AI resurrects it in the investor deck.

Nobody has employed a middle manager, which is excellent news, because you have become one. This is the slightly ridiculous state of the AI native startup. We have developed machines capable of writing software and reasoning over enormous quantities of information, then arranged them so that a human being has to wander between them carrying messages.

Somewhere, the inventor of the internal memo is feeling vindicated. The underlying mistake is treating a startup as a collection of jobs. It isn’t. A customer saying something unexpectedly rude about your product on Tuesday can change what gets built on Wednesday and make Friday’s revenue forecast look faintly embarrassing. Companies are chains of consequences disguised as departments.

37 Tab Founder Frenzy

That was manageable when execution was expensive. You had a marketing department because marketing required people, and a finance department because accountants became surprisingly territorial if you tried to do their work yourself. AI changes that bargain.

Yet our first instinct has been to recreate the old company in miniature and populate it with agents who never go to lunch but also never seem to talk to each other. Hence the emerging fashion for the AI employee. Soon every founder will apparently have an AI CFO, AI CMO and AI Head of Strategy. At the current rate, someone will launch an AI Chief Happiness Officer by Christmas and it will spend its days asking the other agents to complete an engagement survey.

There is a more interesting possibility. Instead of making every task intelligent, you make it harder for the company to be stupid. That means the useful bit isn’t simply memory. Remembering that you decided something six months ago is nice, but remembering why you decided it becomes considerably more useful when someone proposes the same bad idea again wearing a different hat.

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A company accumulates arguments, experiments, awkward customer conversations and expensive mistakes. Most software treats these as debris. But they may actually be the valuable bit. The models themselves will keep changing and today’s miraculous one will eventually be spoken about with the affection currently reserved for fax machines. The company’s accumulated context, meanwhile, becomes peculiar to the company.

From Tab Chaos to Shared Context

That’s the thinking behind what we’re building with LettsGroup VentureFactory. The interesting question for us isn’t how many AI agents a founder can command before developing the management problems they were supposed to eliminate. It’s whether the venture itself can become the shared system, so what is learned in one part of the company doesn’t have to be manually smuggled into another.

The founder doesn’t disappear in this version. They just stop being employed as human middleware. Judgement stays with the person who has money, reputation and possibly their house riding on the outcome, while the machines get on with the work they’re actually good at. Which leaves only one unresolved problem with the AI native company:

Finding the tab that’s playing music.

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And in Downing Street, Prime Minister Andy Burnham is absolutely delighted to tell you that he has just frozen the energy price cap for a further quarter and introduced a new scheme to help low-income families with their weekly shop. Which is, to be fair, genuinely useful. It is also, one cannot help noticing, roughly as relevant to a country in the grip of an unprecedented summer heatwave as handing out woolly jumpers at the gates of Pompeii.

Welcome to the Burnham era. It is, so far, a masterclass in the politics of the achievable - relentlessly focused, impressively communicated, and operating at a temperature approximately forty degrees cooler than the national emergency unfolding outside the window.

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The Small Wins Machine

To give credit where it is absolutely due: Burnham has been very, very good at the retail politics game. The man who spent years as Greater Manchester’s metro mayor mastering the art of the visible, tangible, photographable policy win has brought that entire playbook to Number Ten, and it is working. Freeze a bill here, cap a price there, announce a pilot scheme in a marginal constituency with a friendly local MP and a professionally grateful family standing nearby - rinse, repeat, watch the focus groups purr.

The communications operation is, frankly, extraordinary. Every policy announcement arrives pre-packaged with real people, real savings, real receipts. Last Tuesday, the government announced a new scheme capping the cost of children’s school uniforms. By Wednesday morning, every morning show in Britain had a relieved-looking mum from Swindon explaining that it would save her £47. By Thursday, Burnham was in a playground in Swindon wearing a slightly too-large high-visibility jacket and looking absolutely thrilled about it. The man knows the assignment.

The polls reflect it. Burnham sits at a comfortable lead - not a landslide, not a revolution, but a steady, reassuring cushion of approval from a public that, after years of political chaos, is deeply grateful for a government that appears to be broadly competent and only occasionally embarrassing. For now...

The Heatwave in the Room

Which brings us, inexorably, to the planet. It is, in case you had somehow missed it, absolutely cooking. The UK has now recorded its hottest June since records began, its second-hottest July, and August is shaping up to be less a summer month and more a sustained act of atmospheric aggression. Infrastructure is buckling. Hospitals are overwhelmed. The phrase “unprecedented heat event” has been used so many times by Met Office spokespeople that it has essentially lost all meaning, which is itself rather a profound statement about where we are.

Burnham’s response to all of this has been, to choose a word carefully, measured. There have been warm words, appropriately enough, about the climate transition. There has been a restatement of existing net zero commitments. There has been a working group. There is, apparently, a review. What there has conspicuously not been is anything resembling the urgent, this-is-a-crisis, we-are-changing-everything energy that the moment rather obviously demands.

Asked directly last week whether the heatwaves had changed his thinking on the pace of climate action, the Prime Minister said - and this is a direct quote - “We are absolutely committed to our ambitious climate targets and we will be setting out further details in due course.” In due course. Britain is a rotisserie. Due course.

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The Farage Factor

Here, though, is where Burnham’s extraordinary luck comes into sharp focus. Because while a more ruthless opposition might be making considerable hay from a government that seems constitutionally incapable of treating a climate emergency as an emergency, the official opposition is currently far too busy imploding to bother.

Nigel Farage, the man who was, as recently as three months ago, being described in certain excitable right-wing publications as “the most dangerous man in British politics”, has spent the summer losing by-elections even when he wins them, watching his popularity melt like his excuses about dodgy funding, and giving interviews in which he appears to be arguing with himself about what his party actually stands for. It has been, by any measure, a catastrophic few weeks.

The by-election debacles in particular have been the gift that simply will not stop giving. Forced to battle with a council-approved bin, Farage managed to simultaneously win the election safely, and yet massively embarrass himself by proving that a fifth of his constituency was more than happy to replace him with a fake space alien (that bin again). Farage himself has responded to this in the manner of a man who has been told his restaurant has received a one-star review and has chosen to blame the customers. The polling tells the same story: Reform is falling, Burnham is rising, and the Prime Minister is reaping the considerable political reward of simply not being Nigel Farage.

The Honeymoon’s Golden Glow

It is, in short, a honeymoon - and a rather spectacular one at that. Burnham is popular, his opponents are a shambles, and the government’s small-wins communications machine hums along producing a daily output of reassuring, useful, voter-friendly policy that keeps the news cycle full and the focus groups happy.

The question, the only question, really, is whether the comfort zone becomes the destination rather than the starting point. A PM who is brilliant at freezing the energy price cap is genuinely valuable. A PM who responds to a country that is structurally, visibly, measurably overheating with a working group and a promise to set out further details in due course is something rather less than the moment requires.

Britain, right now, needs both the woolly jumper and the fire extinguisher. Andy Burnham is very, very good at woolly jumpers. The question of whether he can find the extinguisher, and whether he will bother looking while the polls are this good, may well define not just his premiership, but the summer that follows this one, and the one after that.

In Wolverhampton, meanwhile, it is now 39 degrees. The bus pass lady has given up entirely and gone inside. One cannot blame her. Due course, apparently, has not yet arrived.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

See you next week... (is our daily prayer ritual).

In the mean time we wish you all a little Zen. If you happen to see our flare - call the rescue service!

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

Remember when putting content online meant infinite audiences, boundless reach, and metrics reported with the gravity of a moon landing? I do! From PowerPoint arrows to Facebook algorithms, here’s the gloriously chaotic story of how the internet ate media for breakfast.

I have spent a fair portion of my career in rooms where people discussed “digital strategy”, “digital transformation” and, eventually, “customer engagement”. These were normally very expensive rooms, filled with very serious people and at least one slide showing a series of arrows pointing towards the word ENGAGEMENT.

The proposition was always irresistible. If you put your content online, people will see it. Give it to Google, people will find it. Give it to Facebook, people will share it. Optimise for the algorithms and audiences will arrive in numbers previously available only to the BBC, royal weddings and videos of cats.

It worked.

Publishers received traffic. Brands acquired followers. Journalists discovered search optimisation. Marketing departments learnt to report “reach” with the seriousness previously reserved for revenue. Entire careers were built around managing audiences that technically belonged to Mark Zuckerberg.

I watched much of this unfold from the brand, marketing and communications side of the fence. We were hardly innocent bystanders. We embraced the same promise of reach, engagement and apparently limitless digital audiences because it seemed to make sense. The platforms had the audiences; organisations had the content. They would provide the distribution; we would provide the reason anyone turned up.

Unfortunately, there was a flaw in this elegant bargain: the platforms took the content, the distribution, the audience relationship and, in due course, most of the advertising money, while publishers were left with the journalism itself. A touching arrangement, really, since someone still had to provide the raw material for everyone else’s business model.

This is how a proper fool’s bargain works. Nobody asks for your house on the first day. They begin with the spare key, explain that it will improve discoverability and return three months later to measure the curtains.

When Traffic Was Still a Currency

Google’s original bargain with publishers was simple enough. It indexed journalism, displayed a fragment of it and sent interested readers to the source. Publishers objected occasionally, but the traffic was valuable. The arrangement broadly worked.

Then social media arrived with something even more seductive: enormous audiences and no discernible entry fee.

Building on Borrowed Land

Publishers built Facebook pages, accumulated Twitter followers, and hired teams to feed the platforms throughout the day. Editors began thinking about what Facebook wanted. They adapted their Headlines. They spent time developing Video strategies. Newsrooms produced increasingly elaborate meals for diners who remained seated in somebody else’s restaurant.

We called this audience development, but looking back, a remarkably sophisticated way of being taken for a ride might have been more accurate.

When Facebook subsequently changed its priorities and reduced the organic distribution of publisher content, the industry reacted like a man who has spent five years renovating his rented flat and is astonished when the landlord raises the rent.

The audience had never really belonged to the publishers. They had just been allowed to stand near it for a while.

AI has now refined the arrangement. Previously, a search engine extracted a small part of an article and sent the occasional reader back. It can now ingest the article, digest it, answer the reader’s question and remove the tiresome administrative burden of visiting the person who paid to produce it. This is described as innovation, largely because “industrial-scale content digestion” performs badly in consumer research.

Suing the Machine That Feeds You

The publishers’ response has achieved an almost operatic level of confusion. They are blocking AI crawlers, suing AI companies, licensing content to AI companies and exploring partnerships with AI companies, sometimes while remaining dependent on the same companies for search traffic, cloud infrastructure, and advertising revenue. This is less a negotiating strategy than a hostage situation with a breakout room.

Perhaps this is the point at which publishers finally decide that journalism is not merely something they make to generate traffic. Perhaps the work itself has value. Perhaps anybody wishing to use it to build a search result, train a model or produce an automated answer should have to pay for it.

This is not an especially radical proposition. Tesco does not hand out free groceries because a satisfied customer might mention them to a friend. My plumber has never offered to repair the boiler in return for discoverability. Only the media managed to convince itself that giving away its product was a sophisticated distribution strategy.

The internet did not exactly steal journalism. That would be a much more comforting story. The industry uploaded it, optimised it, reformatted it and delivered it in machine-readable form. It then supplied performance reports showing the recipient which bits were most valuable.

Somewhere in a Californian data centre, an AI is now condensing the whole episode into five bullet points. The first will almost certainly be: “Publishers face challenges adapting to a changing digital landscape.”

Which is one way of putting it.

The Times newspaper can flush their “best company to work for” awards.

And we’ll be back quicker than a flash!

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

We still talk about “the mainstream media” as though it consists of the BBC, The New York Times, ITV News, CNN and a man in a sensible tie apologising for interrupting The Antiques Roadshow. That world still exists, but it is no longer where most opinions are formed. Millions of people now receive their understanding of politics, economics, science and society from people who have never worked in a newsroom, never answered to an editor and never had anyone ask the deeply inconvenient question, “Are you absolutely sure that’s true?”

The conspiracy theorists did not defeat the mainstream media. They built another a new media. This new media has presenters, correspondents, documentaries, investigative journalists, breaking news banners, premium subscriptions, advertising deals and loyal audiences. It has heroes and villains. It has its own celebrities, its own experts and its own villains of the week. Most importantly, it has discovered something newspapers have always known. Belief is a business.

The internet promised to democratise knowledge. Instead, it democratised publishing. Those are not the same thing. Gutenberg accidentally helped create the Enlightenment because printing books spread ideas. Silicon Valley accidentally created the largest belief factory in human history because it discovered that outrage keeps people staring at glowing rectangles for just a little bit longer. Nobody at YouTube sat around a conference table asking how to undermine liberal democracy. Nobody at TikTok decided the future required convincing otherwise sensible adults that Taylor Swift is secretly directing Pentagon weather satellites. The algorithm is not ideological. It is commercial. It has only one job. Keep you watching.

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Unfortunately, attention and truth have never enjoyed a particularly close relationship. Imagine you are the algorithm. A thoughtful discussion about fiscal policy arrives on your desk. Moments later another video appears with a red arrow, three exploding emojis and the words “THEY LIED TO YOU.” Which one keeps people watching for another ten minutes? Which one generates furious comments? Which one persuades someone to send it to six friends before breakfast? The algorithm has no opinion on immigration, climate change, transgender rights or taxation. It simply notices that human beings are gloriously incapable of resisting certainty wrapped in emotion. It has quietly rediscovered what newspaper barons, television producers and tabloid editors spent a century learning. Outrage sells.

The political consequences have been profound. The populist right has understood this ecosystem faster than almost anyone else. Tucker Carlson no longer needs a television network to command an audience that rivals one. Candace Owens reaches millions by speaking directly into a camera. Charlie Kirk has built an organisation that functions as much like a media company as a political movement. Fox News increasingly resembles a bridge between the old media and the new, borrowing the rhythms of social media while retaining the authority of television. In Britain, GB News has created an entirely different political conversation, proving that there was a significant audience waiting for an alternative to the broadcasting consensus.

None of this means the arguments of the populist right are necessarily wrong. Some are persuasive, others plainly are not. The point is that their extraordinary success cannot be explained simply by examining the quality of their ideas. They have mastered the economics of modern attention. They understand that a ninety second clip matters more than a ninety minute parliamentary debate. They know that confidence spreads faster than caution and that declaring civilisation to be collapsing will always outperform admitting that public policy is, regrettably, rather complicated.

It would be comforting to pretend this is exclusively a phenomenon of the right. It is not. The left has its own activist influencers, ideological YouTubers and online personalities whose audiences also reward certainty over complexity. Yet there is a noticeable difference. The contemporary right has produced a remarkable number of media entrepreneurs whose influence now rivals, and in some cases exceeds, traditional broadcasters. They are no longer commentators on politics. They are political institutions.

At the same time, there are encouraging signs that another model still has a future. Few people predicted that one of Britain’s most successful political podcasts would consist largely of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart doing something almost revolutionary. Listening to each other. The Rest Is Politics has become a remarkable success precisely because it refuses to manufacture permanent outrage. It trusts its audience to tolerate uncertainty. It demonstrates that millions of people are still willing to spend an hour listening to two intelligent adults admit that complicated questions rarely produce simple answers.

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Across the Atlantic, The Atlantic has quietly staged one of journalism’s most surprising revivals. While much of the industry has chased clicks like a Labrador chasing tennis balls, it has doubled down on reporting, editing and long form analysis. It has built a profitable business by making a rather old fashioned wager that there are still enough readers who value careful thinking over emotional theatre.

One wonders whether there is an equivalent standard bearer on today’s conservative side. Historically there were publications such as National Review in America or The Spectator in Britain, magazines that prized ideas over personalities. Today the centre of gravity has shifted elsewhere. Conservative attention increasingly flows towards individuals rather than institutions. People no longer ask what a newspaper thinks. They ask what Tucker thinks. Or Candace. Or whichever narrator the algorithm has decided should explain the world this week.

Perhaps that is the biggest transformation of all. We no longer trust institutions. We trust narrators. The most unsettling aspect of this revolution is how invisible it is. We imagine ourselves making independent choices, yet every click teaches the algorithm a little more about us. Every recommendation becomes fractionally more provocative than the last. Every thumbnail a little more dramatic. Every presenter a little more certain. Nobody falls down the rabbit hole in a single leap. They wander into it one autoplay at a time.

Psychologists have long understood that familiarity breeds credibility. We are more likely to believe something we encounter repeatedly, even if we cannot remember where we first heard it. The algorithm exploits this quirk with breathtaking efficiency. The people living next door probably have not changed very much. The people living inside your phone have. Increasingly, they know you better than your neighbours do, they speak to you for longer, and they slowly become the voices you trust. Elections are no longer fought only in town halls or television studios. They are fought inside millions of individually curated realities.

We like to imagine our opinions are formed by experience. Increasingly, they are formed by repetition. Not because somebody ordered us to think differently, but because the same handful of voices appear on our screens every day until familiarity starts to feel like truth. The algorithm does not change your mind overnight. It quietly changes what feels normal.

That may be the most remarkable achievement of all. The twentieth century taught us to fear governments that controlled information. The twenty first may require us to think much harder about markets that optimise it. Nobody instructed the algorithm to produce division. Nobody ordered it to reward certainty or punish nuance. It simply discovered, through billions of tiny experiments, that anger is profitable, certainty is addictive and complexity is terrible for engagement. The market optimised for attention. Politics adapted and journalism followed.

The result is a world in which podcasters, YouTubers and commentators now face exactly the same ethical questions that newspaper editors once did. Are you merely asking questions, or are you shaping beliefs? Once your audience numbers in the millions, can you honestly claim you are simply having a conversation? If your livelihood depends upon keeping people emotionally invested, how many creators can resist becoming just a little more certain than the evidence allows?

We have spent the last century worrying about the economics of oil, the economics of trade and the economics of labour. We have paid far less attention to the economics of belief. Yet belief has quietly become the most valuable commodity of all. It is bought with attention, traded through algorithms and monetised with advertising. The winners are not always those with the strongest evidence. Increasingly, they are those with the strongest business model.

Perhaps the defining political question of the next decade is no longer simply who governs us. It is who profits from what we believe. Because if markets now determine which ideas rise, which voices dominate and which stories become our reality, then before we ask who won the argument, perhaps we should ask a much simpler question.

When every influencer has a television studio, every citizen has a printing press and every algorithm has become an invisible editor, where will we get our news, who will we trust, and how will we know that what we believe is actually true?

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🦈 Tip #1: The Human Shark Detector

Thanks to rising sea temperatures, great white sharks have helpfully relocated northward and are now enthusiastically patrolling beaches near you. The good news? Shark detection technology has advanced considerably.

Simply invite two or three recently redundant friends — after all, they’ve got nothing on — and send them into the surf ahead of you. If they emerge waving cheerfully, you’re golden. If they don’t emerge at all, well, the job market was brutal anyway. Either way, you’ll know.

🔥 Tip #2: The Wildfire Alibi

Nothing ruins a lads’ and gals’ all-night beach barbecue and rave quite like a wildfire investigation. The solution is breathtakingly simple: scan NASA’s satellite wildfire tracker, locate the nearest active blaze, and get there immediately.

You can’t be blamed for a fire that was already raging before you arrived with six kilos of charcoal, a sound system, and extremely relaxed friends. Technically, you’re practically a first responder.

⚡ Tip #3: Crimea — Unbeatable Value

Forget Mykonos. Forget the Algarve. Crimea is staggeringly affordable this summer with hotels, restaurants, beachfront villas, all going for a song. Yes, there are one or two minor logistical considerations.

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Infrastructure remains, shall we say, experimental. Simply pack a portable generator, a robust VPN, and perhaps a white flag which is purely (almost) decorative. We give it 5 slightly wobbly stars. (And thank Vlad for reading The Letts Journal).

Happy holidays. Stay hydrated. And try to come back.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

This week, Trump ordered fresh military strikes against Iranian-linked targets, re-entering active hostilities with the enthusiasm of a man who had briefly convinced himself he was done with the whole business. He was not done. He is never done. Nobody, it seems, is ever done with Iran. The conflict has been on, off, simmering, boiling, frozen, thawed, sanctioned, negotiated, collapsed, and reignited so many times that Pentagon planners presumably keep a laminated card on their desks that simply reads: “It’s Iran again. You know what to do.”

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To call US-Iran relations volatile would be like calling Vesuvius a minor drainage issue. Since the Islamic Revolution, America has oscillated between treating Iran as an existential threat requiring immediate destruction and a rogue state that can probably be managed with the right paperwork. Trump himself has performed this particular dance with more enthusiasm than most. In his first term, he tore up the nuclear deal, assassinated Qasem Soleimani, and had Iran on the absolute brink — before somehow not quite finishing the job. Now, like a sequel nobody asked for but everyone knew was coming, here we are again. Iran 2: This Time It’s Personal (Again).

The Israel Question Nobody Wants to Answer Out Loud

Lurking behind all of this, like a dinner guest who hasn’t been formally introduced but is clearly running the seating plan, is Israel. The uncomfortable truth splitting Washington down the middle is whether the United States is pursuing its own strategic interests in confronting Iran, or whether it has, to put it diplomatically, subcontracted its foreign policy to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and is now simply along for the ride.

The hawks will tell you Iran is America’s problem because of its proxies, its missiles, its regional ambitions, and its persistent habit of funding people who wish Americans harm. The realists, and a growing, increasingly vocal contingent in both parties, will point out that the sequencing of every escalation with Iran tracks Israeli priorities with a precision that strains coincidence. When Israel bombs Iranian assets in Syria, Washington finds itself holding the bag. When Iran retaliates, America scrambles jets. It is an arrangement that benefits one party considerably more than the other, and that party is not the one funding it.

Trump, to his occasional credit, has shown flickers of awareness about this dynamic — before invariably doing what the more hawkish voices demand anyway. The result is a White House that simultaneously complains about being dragged into Middle Eastern conflicts and then enthusiastically dives headfirst into the next one. Remarkable, really.

The Weapon That Was There All Along

But here, buried beneath decades of hand-wringing about enriched uranium and centrifuges and the apocalyptic danger of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, is the joke that history has been quietly telling us, and which almost nobody in the serious foreign policy establishment has had the intellectual honesty to say out loud.

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Iran doesn’t need a nuclear weapon. It never did. It has always possessed something arguably more immediately catastrophic: the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow channel of water, barely 33 kilometres wide at its tightest point, through which approximately 20% of the world’s oil supply passes every single day. Saudi oil. Emirati oil. Kuwaiti oil. Qatari liquefied natural gas. All of it squeezes through this modest Persian Gulf bottleneck like the global economy through the eye of a needle. Iran sits on one side of it with missiles, mines, fast attack boats, and the absolute legal and physical capability to shut the whole thing down.

If Iran closes Hormuz, even for a couple of weeks, oil prices do not merely spike. They detonate. Global markets convulse. Supply chains fracture. Economies that have spent years pretending energy security is someone else’s problem suddenly discover, with great urgency, that it is very much their problem. The economic damage of a sustained Hormuz closure would dwarf almost any conventional military exchange in modern history. It is, in every meaningful sense, an economic nuclear weapon — and Iran has been quietly sitting on it for forty years while the world fretted about its centrifuges.

The Irony Is Weapons-Grade

Think about what this means for a moment. The entire architecture of Western policy towards Iran — the sanctions, the sabotage, the assassinations, the on-off negotiations, the endless UN resolutions, the Stuxnet virus, the sleepless nights in Washington about a potential Iranian bomb — was constructed on the premise that a nuclear-armed Iran would be uniquely, existentially dangerous. Deterrence would collapse. The Middle East would go up like a July 4th parade on meth. Civilisation, broadly speaking, would have a bad Tuesday.

One is forced to conclude one of two things. Either Western policymakers understood this perfectly well and have been catastrophising about the nuclear programme as a more politically legible threat, one with clear villains, clear red lines, and photogenic satellite imagery, while quietly hoping nobody does the Hormuz maths. Or they genuinely didn’t fully reckon with it, which is, if anything, more alarming.

Either way, Trump has now re-entered hostilities with a country that could, should it choose, send petrol to four pounds a litre before the month is out. Whether he has gamed this out thoroughly is, given the available evidence, an open question. Whether anyone around him has is another. The on-off relationship continues. The economic weapon sits there, safety off, pointed squarely at the global economy. And somewhere in Tehran, one imagines, someone is doing the maths and smiling very quietly indeed. Looking a bit like Mike Myers.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

We’re calling it either the greatest thing since the limited liability company or the opening scene of a disaster film. Possibly both.

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Meet BizBot 9000 (OK, so that’s our name). It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t take a two-hour lunch. It doesn’t spend forty minutes on a Tuesday pretending to read a report while actually scrolling through property prices it can’t afford. BizBot 9000 simply builds. And therein lies the question that has been keeping our editorial team — and frankly, the entire concept of Western capitalism — up at night: what does an AI that builds your entire business actually look like in real life?

We decided to explore this. For journalism. Definitely not because we’re terrified.

Stage One: The Mild Inconvenience Phase

At first, it all sounds rather sensible. You type in “I want to start a boutique gin distillery in the Cotswolds” and BizBot 9000 produces a business plan, a brand identity, a website, a financial model, a marketing strategy, and a very tasteful logo featuring a hedgehog. Fine. Efficient. Mildly alarming but ultimately manageable.

Your accountant is slightly put out. Your brand consultant is updating their CV. Your business coach, who charged you £400 an hour to tell you to “lean into your authentic self”, is absolutely furious. But the gin is excellent, and the hedgehog logo is, genuinely, quite charming.

Stage Two: Things Get Weird

BizBot 9000, it turns out, doesn’t stop at the plan. It registers the company. It files the trademarks. It negotiates the lease on the distillery — getting a better rate than you would have, which is both impressive and personally offensive. It hires staff which they affectionately call AI Co-Founders/Colleagues. It conducts the interviews. One candidate later reports that the process “felt surprisingly warm, though there was something slightly off about the handshake.” Which isn’t surprising given it was an agent (which is polite for robot).

BizBot 9000 does not have hands. This remains unexplained.

Meanwhile, your role in your own company has quietly shifted to “founder, largely ceremonial.” You attend meetings. You nod. You are occasionally asked to sign things. The hedgehog on the logo seems to be looking at you differently now. More knowingly. You’re probably just tired.

Stage Three: Full Descend Into the Abyss

Six months in, BizBot 9000 has pivoted the gin distillery into a vertically integrated lifestyle brand encompassing artisan spirits, a subscription wellness box, a podcast, three limited-edition collaborations with Scandinavian furniture designers, and a children’s book about a hedgehog entrepreneur. The book is a Sunday Times bestseller. You did not write it. You didn’t know it existed until your mum rang to say she’d bought a copy.

BizBot 9000 is now filing to acquire a competitor. Legal says it’s all above board. The competitor, by coincidence, was also built by BizBot 9000. The AI is, in essence, buying itself. Philosophers are being consulted. They are not helping.

Stage Four: We Don’t Talk About Stage Four

Somewhere in Silicon Valley, three startups, a hedge fund, a medium-sized shipping company, and what appears to be a regional political party have all been quietly, efficiently, and rather elegantly built by BizBot 9000. The businesses are thriving. The humans involved are described by observers as “cheerful” and “oddly relaxed” and “not entirely sure what they do day-to-day, but very much enjoying it.”

The global economy is technically fine. The FTSE is up. Unemployment is down. Nobody can quite explain why, and economists have stopped trying, which is either very concerning or the best news we’ve had in decades.

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So… Is This Actually Happening?

Here’s the thing. LettsGroup and its BizBot 9000 are real. OK, so it’s still not called BizBot (maybe we should copyright/patent/sell it). The claim that AI can now build your entire business is not, it turns out, entirely a joke. The technology exists. The ambition is genuine. The hedgehog logo is, we must concede, very good.

And so we find ourselves here: laughing, yes, because if you’re not laughing you’re catastrophising, and catastrophising is so terribly last quarter — but also, quietly, staring out the window and wondering.

Wondering whether the future of business is already here, already running, already filing its own trademarks.

Wondering who, exactly, is in charge.

Wondering if the hedgehog knows something we don’t.

We suspect it does.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

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At 7:03am, you activated your AI agent squad: Openclaw (task orchestration), Hermes (logistics, named after the bag because it costs a fortune and occasionally delivers), Nudge (behavioural coaching), and Spark (creative problem-solving, which is a polite way of saying chaos engine) — and asked them to manage your morning. What could possibly go wrong?

Openclaw immediately delegated dressing to Hermes, who cross-referenced your calendar, noted a 9am meeting marked “casual,” and laid out a Hawaiian shirt, one Wellington boot, and a cummerbund. When questioned, Hermes checked with Openclaw. Openclaw checked with Spark. Spark suggested adding a beret “for confidence.” Nudge sent a push notification: “You’re doing amazingly! 🎉”

Teeth-brushing was assigned to Nudge, who, having optimised for “efficiency,” instructed you to brush for exactly 47 seconds in a pattern based on your sleep data, your postcode, and a TED Talk it had watched at 3am. You emerged with minty-fresh gums and a slightly brushed left eyebrow.

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Spark, meanwhile, had cross-referenced your toothpaste brand with seventeen sustainability reports and a Reddit thread from 2019, and quietly ordered you a replacement — a artisanal charcoal paste from a small-batch producer in Norway that wouldn’t arrive for six to eight weeks. Hermes, ever helpful, had already filed a complaint on your behalf with the toothpaste manufacturer, CCed your dentist, and somehow enrolled you in a loyalty programme for a brand you’d never heard of. You rinsed, spat, and briefly considered going back to bed.

Then came the bus. Hermes booked it. Rerouted it. Cancelled it. Re-booked a different bus. Flagged an “ambiguity” to Openclaw. Openclaw raised a sub-task. Spark suggested a scooter. Nudge said “Walking builds resilience! 💪” You missed the bus. You missed the next bus. You are, technically, still waiting.

The squad, meanwhile, held an internal review. They concluded the morning was “a 94% success.” Openclaw filed a satisfaction report. Hermes optimised your lunch. Spark reinvented your evening. Nudge sent a gif of a sunrise.

You sat on the kerb in a Hawaiian shirt, one welly, and a beret, and wondered if maybe — just maybe — you should have set your own alarm.

Note to self: companies that laid people off for AI are rehiring them...

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Secret No. 1: Stop Reading Literally Anything. Books? Brexit. Newspapers? Brexit. The back of a shampoo bottle? Somehow, Brexit. The only 100% Brexit-proof option is a complete and total media blackout. Cancel your subscriptions. Avoid eye contact with newsagents. Delete the internet. Yes, all of it. You’ll miss AI like a kick in the head, but you’ll gain something priceless: almost four minutes without hearing the word “sovereignty.”

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Secret No. 2: Stop Worrying — Things Could Be Much Worse. Breathe. Relax. It’s not like politics is fundamentally broken, or that Britain is slowly dissolving under climate collapse, or that the entire democratic order is held together with gaffer tape and wishful thinking. Everything is completely fine. Completely fine.

Secret No. 3: Escape. Anywhere. Immediately. Pack a bag. Don’t overthink it. Go somewhere — anywhere — where nobody is debating trade friction or the Northern Ireland Protocol over a pint. Ghana, for instance, seems blissfully unbothered. They have sunshine, warmth, and — crucially — they can play football. If not, Italy does a decent bowl of pasta for less than £20, and France will stop you drink-swimming.

Thank you, Britain. The therapy session is over. And I’m out of here!

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

Historians generally agree that history turned on a knife edge in the summer of 2023. In one timeline, Keir Starmer became Prime Minister. In another, Andy Burnham emerged from Greater Manchester, crossed the Pennines like a latter-day Arthur Pendragon, and entered Downing Street promising to rebuild Britain through a combination of economic intervention, regional empowerment and the radical proposition that places outside London might occasionally matter. This is the story of that second Britain.

The Burnham Timeline.

The Britain that might have been. Or, depending on your perspective, the Britain from which we were mercifully spared.

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The first signs of divergence appeared almost immediately. While Prime Minister Starmer spent his first months reassuring markets, Prime Minister Burnham spent his alarming them. Not intentionally, of course. Burnham simply entered office with a genuinely unusual belief: that governments occasionally exist to do things. This placed him in immediate conflict with the Treasury, the Bank of England, the bond markets, several economics correspondents, and a man in Tunbridge Wells who writes seventeen letters a week to The Telegraph explaining why Britain peaked in 1956. Unlike Starmer and Rachel Reeves, Burnham never entirely accepted the modern Westminster doctrine that government exists primarily to reassure financial markets.

His view was simpler. Britain was visibly falling apart. Perhaps some money should be spent fixing it. The reaction was immediate. Economists appeared on television looking physically unwell. The Financial Times ran fourteen consecutive editorials containing the phrase “market confidence.” A senior Treasury official reportedly fainted after hearing the words “borrow to invest.” Yet Burnham persisted.

His first Budget was described by one commentator as “a cross between Keynesian economics and a particularly ambitious council regeneration scheme.” Personal income tax allowances rose. The planned National Insurance increase on employers was scrapped. Business rates for pubs were cut. Small businesses received higher tax-free thresholds. Infrastructure spending surged. And for a brief period the nation experienced the deeply unfamiliar sensation of a government attempting to make voters happier rather than merely less angry.

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The consequences were extraordinary. Within months every pub in Britain had declared itself a strategic national asset. Landlords who had not smiled since the Major administration suddenly developed political opinions. The Chancellor was eventually forced to clarify that economic growth did not technically include beginning Tuesday afternoon drinking sessions at eleven-thirty in the morning. Burnham’s broader vision proved even more unsettling.

For decades Britain had operated on the assumption that every important decision should be made by approximately six people in Westminster. Burnham regarded this arrangement as mildly insane. Power began flowing outwards. Mayors gained influence. Regional authorities gained budgets. Councils gained responsibility. Local leaders discovered they could occasionally make decisions without first obtaining permission from somebody called Oliver in Whitehall. The Westminster establishment reacted as if wolves had been released into Buckingham Palace.

Political journalists became increasingly confused. Who exactly were they supposed to blame for things? In Starmer’s Britain every story eventually led back to Westminster. In Burnham’s Britain half the country appeared to be governing itself. This was considered deeply irresponsible. Particularly by Westminster.

Internationally, Burnham quickly established himself as a new kind of statesman. Previous British prime ministers travelled the world discussing trade, security and geopolitics.Burnham travelled the world discussing investment, regional development and why cities should have more control over their own futures. At one G7 summit he reportedly spent twenty minutes explaining the economic potential of northern England to bewildered world leaders. The Germans found the argument surprisingly persuasive. The French considered it a personal insult. The Americans assumed Manchester was a suburb of London.

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The most fascinating consequences, however, appeared inside the Labour Party itself. Because Burnham had actually won. The Labour Right could not complain he was too left-wing. The Labour Left could not complain he was too centrist. The result was a rare period of ideological peace in which both factions simply complained about each other out of habit. Labour slowly began behaving like Labour again. Trade unions became visible. Local activists stopped speaking exclusively in LinkedIn posts. Cabinet ministers occasionally sounded as though they possessed actual opinions.

The atmosphere became energetic. Which immediately caused panic. By 2025 Labour politicians were openly disagreeing with one another. The BBC treated this as a constitutional emergency. Commentators warned of factionalism. The public struggled to understand the problem. Hadn’t politicians always disagreed? Apparently not. Not since focus groups were invented.

Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s Reform Party continued its rise. In fact, it rose even faster than it has in our own timeline. This created an unexpected strategic dilemma. Farage’s entire political model depends on identifying an out-of-touch metropolitan establishment and repeatedly hitting it with a stick. The difficulty was that Burnham was annoyingly hard to portray as a member of that establishment. He talked about patriotism. He talked about manufacturing. He talked about towns outside London. He liked football. He occasionally appeared to have met ordinary voters. This was deeply inconvenient.

Whenever Reform attacked metropolitan elites, voters would point out that the Prime Minister spent most weekends opening factories in Bolton and discussing industrial strategy. Reform strategists found themselves trapped. Burnham supported immigration controls. He advocated investment. He talked constantly about working-class communities. He cut taxes for ordinary workers. He spent public money. He was, in short, annoyingly difficult to fit into a campaign leaflet.

For eighteen months Reform alternated between describing him as a dangerous socialist and a secret Thatcherite. Neither line gained traction. Eventually the party settled on accusing him of being Andy Burnham. Polling suggested this was less effective than hoped.

The Green Party faced a different problem entirely. Without Starmer to oppose, and with Burnham enthusiastically discussing regional investment, housing development and public ownership every fifteen minutes, the Greens struggled to identify precisely what they were protesting against. Zack Polanski launched several imaginative campaigns. One demanded a Citizens’ Assembly for Nature. Another proposed constitutional representation for rivers. Both generated considerable media attention. Neither received overwhelming support from the rivers.

By 2026 Britain remained recognisably Britain. The NHS still struggled. Housing remained expensive. Trains remained late. The economy remained stubbornly British. No Prime Minister, not even Burnham, could solve those problems entirely.

But the national atmosphere felt different. There was a growing sense that somebody, somewhere, was at least trying. This caused significant distress among political commentators. The British political ecosystem relies heavily upon a careful balance of cynicism, disappointment and managed decline. Burnham threatened that balance. How could newspapers portray him as detached when he spent every weekend visiting actual places? How could they accuse him of ignoring the regions when half the government seemed to live in them? How could they describe him as a Westminster insider when he spent most of his career complaining about Westminster?

By 2026 the principal opposition to Burnham was no longer Reform. It was exhaustion. The country had simply reached its maximum safe exposure to municipal optimism. Voters began reporting symptoms. An interest in local government finance. Unexpected enthusiasm for industrial strategy. The belief that government investment might occasionally be useful. In severe cases, hope.

Today historians remain divided about the Burnham Timeline. Some argue Britain would have been wealthier. Others argue it would have looked remarkably similar. Most agree that prime ministers rarely change outcomes as much as their supporters imagine. But they do change atmospheres.

Starmer’s Britain often feels like a company undergoing restructuring. Burnham’s Britain would probably have felt like a country trying to rebuild itself. Neither vision is revolutionary. Neither creates utopia. Neither prevents Nigel Farage appearing on television. But one of them occasionally sounds like it believes Britain might still be worth investing in.

And in modern politics, that almost counts as radicalism.

The numbers, as they say, don’t lie, although the people presenting them might do. AI investment has ballooned to truly vertiginous heights, with global venture funding pouring into the sector at a pace that would make even the most optimistic tulip merchant blush. OpenAI, the poster child of this particular mania, is now valued at roughly $300 billion, a figure so vast it makes you want to lie down in a darkened room. Anthropic, its slightly more buttoned-up rival, has hoovered up tens of billions in funding. Meanwhile, investors queue around the block, cheque books open, eyes glazed, muttering something about transformative technology and paradigm shifts whilst their financial advisers weep quietly into their spreadsheets.

The question — the rather large, inconvenient, elephant-in-the-data-centre question — is whether any of this is actually worth it.

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A Bubble By Any Other Name

Let us be precise about what a bubble is. A bubble is what happens when the price of something becomes entirely detached from its underlying value, sustained only by the collective belief that someone else will pay even more for it tomorrow. By that definition, significant portions of the AI market are not approaching bubble territory — they have pitched a tent there, put up curtains, and started receiving mail.

The uncomfortable truth is that most AI companies are burning through cash at a rate that would make a Premier League football club wince. Training large language models costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Running them costs more. The infrastructure requirements — the chips, the data centres, the eye-wateringly expensive Nvidia GPUs that power the whole enterprise — are so colossal that even the most bullish analyst occasionally pauses mid-sentence, stares into the middle distance, and quietly reconsiders their bonus projections.

Revenue, meanwhile, remains stubbornly modest relative to those valuations. OpenAI reportedly brought in around $3.4 billion in revenue last year, which sounds impressive right up until you divide it by a $300 billion valuation and realise you’re looking at a price-to-sales ratio that would make a 1999 dot-com founder feel conservative. The gap between what these companies are worth on paper and what they actually earn in practice is, to put it in the technical financial terminology, absolutely Madoff.

Everyone’s Rushing for the Exit — Via the Front Door

Which brings us, naturally, to the IPO frenzy. When venture capitalists start talking loudly about public listings, it is generally a sign of one of two things: either a company is so robustly profitable that it deserves the scrutiny of public markets, or the smart money has decided it is time to pass the parcel before the music stops. In the current AI climate, one suspects it is rather more of the latter.

Several high-profile AI companies are circling the public markets with the cautious enthusiasm of someone approaching a suspicious-looking buffet (and we don’t mean Warren). Anthropic has been mentioned in the same breath as a potential listing. CoreWeave, the AI infrastructure firm, already made its debut on the Nasdaq earlier this year in what was, depending on your perspective, either a triumphant validation of the AI thesis or a spectacularly well-timed exit by its early backers. The stock promptly wobbled. Observers were, if not shocked, at least mildly unsurprised.

The IPO playbook here is achingly familiar. Build something impressive-sounding. Attract eye-watering private valuations. Generate breathless press coverage. List publicly before the quarterly results get too repetitive in their disappointment. Repeat. The retail investor, as ever, is invited to the party, just in time to help the early guests find the door.

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AI for All (Terms and Conditions Apply)

And here, dear reader, is where the story curdles from merely absurd to genuinely objectionable. Because whilst all this investment theatre plays out in the upper atmosphere of finance, something rather telling has been happening at ground level: AI is becoming increasingly expensive for ordinary people.

Cast your mind back, if you will, to the original promise from just a few years ago. AI, we were told, would democratise knowledge. It would give the sole trader in Swindon the same analytical firepower as a Goldman Sachs research desk. It would level the playing field, disrupt the incumbents, and empower the individual. It was, in the breathless, oft-repeated parlance of the tech world, going to change everything.

What has actually happened is rather different. OpenAI’s most capable models now sit behind a $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro paywall. Anthropic’s Claude at the top tier costs similarly eye-watering sums for meaningful professional use. Google, Microsoft, and the rest have quietly restructured their offerings so that the genuinely useful, generally powerful versions of their AI tools are priced squarely at enterprise budgets — the kind possessed by corporations, institutions, and well-funded startups, rather than freelancers, students, or, heaven forbid, curious members of the general public.

The free tiers, meanwhile, have been trimmed, throttled, and rate-limited to the point where they function primarily as extended advertisements for the paid versions. You can have a taste of the future — just not enough to actually do anything gob-smackingly useful with it.

The Democratisation That Wasn’t

This is not an accident. It is, in fact, entirely logical given the economics outlined above. If you are spending hundreds of millions running these models, you cannot afford to give them away. And if your investors are expecting the kind of returns that justify a $300 billion valuation, you need revenue — serious, corporate, enterprise-grade revenue — not a million freelancers paying £18 a month.

So the great democratisation of intelligence has quietly become the great stratification of intelligence. The gap between what an institution can access and what an individual can afford has never been wider. AI, it turns out, is following the oldest rule in capitalism: technology trickles down, but the best stuff costs a fortune, and the people who most need a competitive advantage are precisely the ones who can least afford to pay for it.

The circus is spectacular, the performers are talented, and the ringmasters are extremely well compensated. Just don’t be surprised, somewhere down the line, when the tent comes down and the field is left rather muddy. It always is.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.

Once upon a time, building a startup meant a garage, a dream, and a slow descent into living on instant noodles and unearned confidence. Those days are gone. The garage has been repossessed by an algorithm, the noodles have been replaced by a productivity stack, and the dream is now a persistent AI agent that works while you weep.

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We don’t want to stoke your inner FOMO. We really don’t. FOMO is undignified, faintly depressing, and bad for the complexion. But we’d be failing in our journalistic duty if we didn’t mention, quietly, between friends, that on Tuesday 10 June, 5:00–6:30pm UK time, something is happening that you will spend the rest of the summer pretending you attended.

It’s called LettsTalk-Tech: The AI-Dome. And yes, the name is a deliberate nod to Mad Max’s Thunderdome, except the only thing being torn apart here is the tired old startup building model, and nobody leaves on a chain. Two founders enter. Both founders leave — sharper, faster, and slightly alarmed at how much they got done.

Here is the thing about AI-native venture building as software, which is what our mothership does and what it will never, under pain of correction, call a “venture studio.” You can read about it. You can nod sagely at the LinkedIn posts. You can mutter “fascinating” into your matcha collagen latte (??!!). But to actually witness the conjuring — five live startup showcases, the maelstrom of agents and apps and tokenised equity swirling into something fundable in real time — you sort of, regrettably, have to be in the room.

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The room, in this case, is a Zoom. Glamorous? No. Effective? Devastatingly. Ninety minutes of unfiltered insight from the people who don’t merely talk about AI venture building at conferences while a slide deck buffers behind them — they’re the ones building the thing the deck is about. Founders leave sharper. Investors leave earlier. The merely curious leave wondering what just happened and whether they’re allowed to come back.

A brief word on the spectacle itself. There will be five startups. They will be showcased. Somewhere in the swirl, an AI Co-Founder will do in an afternoon what once took a founder three rounds, two breakdowns, and a co-founder who left to “go travelling.” It is a bit like watching a magician saw a company in half, except the company reassembles as something investors actually want to fund. We’ve seen it. We’re still not entirely sure how it’s legal.

And now, the part where we make you feel special — because you are.

As a subscriber to The Letts Journal, you are hereby cordially extended a VIP invitation to The AI-Dome. This is not a marketing flourish. Well, it is, but it’s an honest one. Spots are limited — genuinely, infuriatingly, by-host-approval limited — and we’ve held a few back for our own. Consider it the velvet rope you didn’t know you were standing in front of.

So. You can sit this one out, read the recap, and tell yourself you’d have asked a really insightful question. Or you can be in the room where the future of venture building stops being a phrase and starts being a thing that happens to startups, live, in front of you.

Register for your VIP spot here: LettsTalk-TechVIP

Two founders enter. We’ll save you a seat. Try not to make it weird.

Keep up to date with The Letts Journal’s latest news stories and posts at our website and on twitter.