“Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?” Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! As one out of ten sampled Americans who claim Irish ancestry, I am pleased to report the corned beef is in the slow cooker with the potatoes and carrots. The Guinness is refrigerating. We’ll celebrate our heritage tonight in proper American fashion: commemorating a Saint who was not Irish over food that is not Irish with drinks that do not taste as they do in Ireland. He didn’t even cast out the snakes!!

Our lives are a collection of modified influences. Traditions sublimated by availability, innovation, and marketing (see my discussion on Thanksgiving). Have you ever seen an Irish jack-o’-lantern? Pumpkins are a New World plant. They used turnips back in the day, and haunt my nightmares.

But save Samhain for seven months from now. Saint Patrick’s Day has always been special for me. Made more special 25 years ago when I began properly dating the woman who became my wife. She claims Polish ancestry and they eat corned beef as well, so it works! Even if they drink Żywiec.

“That belongs in a museum!”

I collect menus. Ya know, I thought about opening this section talking about the Irish bar in Somerville where my future wife and I connected, and how it’s no longer there. But get to the point, am I right? How many restaurants have made a difference in your life that are no longer there? Eating is an ephemeral experience and nothing about it but the memory and the credit statement remains, unless you take a menu.

The people around me may roll their eyes when I ask for a keepsake, but where else can you find a confluence of anthropology, culinary art and economics, marketing, and graphic design? We navigate the course of our lives and courses on our table through a well-made menu, and we complain otherwise. From a poorly written chalkboard to the 21 pages of The Cheesecake Factory.

Think about it. At this moment a taco is made in precise fashion, with specific ingredients, and with contemporary cost. And when tariffs change the price of avocados, guess what needs to be updated: the menu! It is a fleeting glimpse of our present tense, and the opportunity to collect menus grows scarce. Most of the time I ask the server or host and I’m told it’s all online. A tabula rasa ready to reinvent the identity and worth of a restaurant’s product at a moment’s notice.

“Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”

I was an archaeology major in undergrad. I became an editor after that because the material culture of print means something to me as one artifact of our human expression. But we traded artifact for artifiction. Sure I can preach my truth to anyone with a web browser and this URL, but the slop clogging our channels might choke your attention before you even get a chance to consume (see last week’s newsletter).

Still, I am grateful. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I can go see the website of the Irish Bar where my wife and I began dating in March, 2001. It certainly beats the afterlife of that same website being used to advertise random gambling sites.

“Nazis. I hate these guys.”

Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in the summer of 1981. That was 45 years ago. And it’s set in 1936, which is 90 years ago. So fun fact: the first Indiana Jones movie is the midpoint between us living today and Dr Jones preventing Nazis from obtaining the Ark of the Covenant (or, if you want to be more historical: the March remilitarization of the Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles). So grateful that mobilized aggression is a thing of the past.

In Other News…

There’s good reason why we call a website’s organizing principles a “menu.” And we’re going to talk all about our user experience of that interface, in this week’s two-part episode of The Future Indicative, with our special guest, Alicia Clapper!!

The Future Indicative, Ep 7 Part 1

The Future Indicative, Ep 7 Part 2

As the Grail Knight said to Indy when he matched a simple cup to the humble means of a Jewish carpenter, at the end of the last great Indiana Jones movie: “You have chosen wisely.”

Cheers!

Alex Effgen

For The Future Indicative, Ep 7 Part 1

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome back to the Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 exploring UI/UX, we begin by talking about my fashion sense.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“For example, you’re buying a tie-dye t-shirt. I’m sure you have many of them. And you’re like, I love this color. I love the pattern that I’m seeing. It seems like it’s gonna fit. It’s checking all the boxes. I’m adding to cart, and then I see a message that says, “All t-shirts are made to order. Colors may vary.”

I think to myself, I don’t know. You know, I really like what I’m seeing. But now that I know that, before I’ve actually bought it, when I get it, I know to expect that.

And so that could alleviate return rates. Just being upfront and honest about what they’re about to receive, rather than trying to say, this is exactly what you’re going to get, knowing it’s a custom product. And then them being disappointed when it’s not.

So make them feel confident, make them feel certain, be upfront, honest with all that information, even if there’s a threat to conversion rate…it will still build that lifetime value as I keep saying.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Alicia Clapper, a Director of UX/Product Design. If the surname sounds familiar, last year I interviewed her husband, Tom Clapper, for my cybersecurity episode.

“...I’m married to a UI/UX director. The user experience, the user interface. And a lot of people don’t know what that is just by hearing it, but it’s how friendly things are to you, whether or not it’s a website, an app, software, whatever.”

At the time I mentioned needing to interview Tom’s wife to explore user experience. And I’m grateful to have an expert talk me through how we SPECIALIZE the UX in order to SELL online. Now let’s SECURE the UI in order to SCALE our business.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“Going back to our free shipping example, the stakeholders say we need to push this free shipping messaging on site but there’s really no place on the product detail page to put it, we don’t have the dev resources or engineering resources to put it in the checkout. These corners have to be cut due to resources and this timeline that they’ve created. So the reactive response is, Well, we could put it above the navigation and have it be on every page. At least everyone will see it.

But it’s not the best experience. It’s not going to be a lever that eases someone at the point where they’re going to add to cart and they’re going to convert.

So if it’s a conversion lever, it’s not going to work.

And that’s a good example of having to be reactive to a stress timeline, false sense of urgency, misalignment, all that are happening internally with internal deadlines that we’ve created for whatever reason.

My push would be to give more time to that situation. Give time for the resources because free shipping is a big value proposition when it comes to online shopping.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Definitely. I started Part 1 of this episode talking about the Sears catalogue and how we then collectively pivoted to online shopping. Obviously the consumer can still interface with a human ahead of the point of sale if they walk into any kind of brick and mortar. But according to the US Census, 16.4% of total sales in the third quarter of 2025 came from e-commerce. That’s $1.8 billion in that third quarter alone. We spend a lot of money online, but we also spend a lot of time online. Don’t we deserve that experience to be a positive one? Why would a business employ a poor interface, shattering our confidence and creating a terrible experience that only makes us want to burn the internet down?

ALICIA CLAPPER

“I think it’s mostly internal misalignment on what’s important, or a sense of false urgency when launching a product, or just trying to push an idea. Having teams rush into shipping something without a shared understanding. The UX is definitely compromised in that situation and becomes more reactive.

So, it’s a poor user experience basically.

If everybody over here says consumer first, but the people that are pushing it forward and pushing the product to site don’t find that valuable, there’s going to be friction, and UX becomes more reactive and doesn’t have that time to fully create the best experience.”

ALEX EFFGEN

I often ask the question: Who can benefit from this? Quite often these conversations confirm that you can’t make one product or service for every audience. But that could mean that the user experience can also be very specific. Who our consumer is defines not only what they buy, but how they prefer to buy it.

When social media went wide, D2C brands focused a lot on their acquisition channels to cast the widest net they could by throwing money into Facebook and those platforms. But the widest net doesn’t necessarily deliver the most valuable catch if you don’t have the right boat.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“When I used to work for a gym, I’d have to go out in the community and give out these free weeks. And like a really popular spot was right by the Metro. Because there’s a lot of people coming through there. This is a numbers game. I’m giving everybody a free week here who passes me.

And maybe I got one or two people come in out of like 100 free weeks that I just gave out.

But if I went and stood by the smoothie shop. And hit people as they were coming in and out of there. Their focus is probably more on health more than one of these hundred people from the Metro.

I could narrow down my focus a little bit more as to the quality of these leads, and try to get better quality leads, to then come into the gym and see if I could sell them on a membership, because I knew that they had that mindset that you would also have for joining a gym. And it’s trying to find that common thought train to bring people in.

And so what we’re doing by casting this huge net into Facebook, you are at the Metro. You are just bringing everybody who you can in, who may not be a good quality lead. But you’re thinking it’s a numbers game. This was very common among D2C brands when they’re first starting. And the focus was not on that user experience once they got to the site. And I think that’s just a big fail point.”

ALEX EFFGEN

They brought in a lot of people, but then could not convert once the experience required the business interface to deliver the goods. To land those customers you need to qualify them ahead of time answering these questions:

ALICIA CLAPPER

“How do we harness this person? And if they’re not a good quality lead, how do we turn them into one? It just wasn’t as much of a thought previously.”

ALEX EFFGEN

When a business identifies the need of a client, different parts of the business may have distinct answers to these questions that reflect the functions they serve. If proper UX reduces friction both internally and externally, then the business can balance those cross-functional departmental answers cohesively. Alicia, what teams do you work with the most?

ALICIA CLAPPER

“Mostly marketing, operations, and customer service. Marketing understands motivation and storytelling. Operations understands reliability and fulfillment. And then customer support understands the real pain points.

And so UX becomes truly effective when we can connect all of these insights into a cohesive experience.

A lot of our initiatives actually do come out of customer support because they’re the ones talking directly to the customer. They’re finding out what’s not working. What are these pain points? And that could bubble up to an experience that they’re having onsite or something that isn’t clear when they made their purchase. If there’s a difference between what they saw online and then what they got at home.

If I purchased a t-shirt online. And I got it home and it was tight and this became a repeated experience that customer service kept seeing. And they kept seeing returns based on size. UX could take that and say, we need to say, we need somewhere to say that this is a slim fit, because people are continuously ordering the wrong size and it’s too small.

So then we would also work with marketing: How do we now market this as a slim fit? Because we need that sort of information before people are buying. And then, even operations: how are they handling those returns? This big influx of returns that are coming in, how are they handling that? How’re we refulfilling them, or putting them in inventory or whatever the case may be. But even there, like, how is that inventory then relayed back to the website to indicate how many are in stock? So it’s sort of this big ecosystem that works off of each other and with that consumer experience in the forefront of how we guide our next steps.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Alicia’s made the case that proper alignment around consumer-first thinking allows the business to produce more and sell more. SCALE-ing not only becomes easier. It becomes self-generating.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“I had created this experience on a website that guided the user through choices to make before purchasing. And the experience did well. The conversion rate increased. It was proven to be a good experience and increase conversion. That’s a win-win for everybody.

And I thought to myself, where else on the site can I mimic this experience? Where can I guide users to find what they’re looking for? And I’ve just been thinking about it more and more because it was enjoyable to the user. They found what they were looking for. Did well for us. How do I capitalize on this experience? And so I think it’s trying to find opportunities on site or within the consumer journey that can give users that same feeling of clarity and trust and confidence without feeling unnecessary.

I don’t want to do that in a place where it seems more cumbersome. So it’s also where naturally would this make sense to do again, knowing that it did well here in this spot.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Online consumers still experience the human element through the choices applied to the digital interface. But at the dawn of AI, we all wonder how long will it last. As long as customers reward their confidence with loyalty, we should not need discuss AI/AX (for now).

ALICIA CLAPPER

“There’s always the question like will AI replace UX? And I stand by no, because they’re using AI to get to the website, but then what is the experience on the site? And having a human to paint that picture and create that experience and be able to speak human to human, I think is still valued for now.

AI can enhance what we’re doing, paint a different perspective, give ideas, but not fully take over what we’re doing.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Thank you for joining us on the Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. Our mission is to show what great experiences accomplish for your industry. As mentioned before, the views interfaced here are solely our own, but we love when you share, so send IndicateMarketing.com to those who’d appreciate it. Let’s explore how our humanity can help drive your business growth and market positioning. We appreciate your patronage, and continued support.

For The Future Indicative, Ep 7 Part 2

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is UI/UX.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“I wrote down exact definitions and then I was like, Well, they’re kind of loose. It’s funny because it also could mean something different depending on what industry you’re in or what organization you work for. They could think that your deliverables are gray boxes, and then they could also think that your deliverable is a full website.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Alicia Clapper, a Director of UX/Product Design. She’s an artist who puts her visual mind towards relieving the pain points produced by D2C, the primary method for selling a product on a company’s website: direct to the consumer.

She does this by examining the UI, or user interface, and how it impacts the UX, or user experience. And given how pervasive the former is on the latter in our digital society, it’s important to define them and decide where they sit in a proper business of any kind, whether or not you’re buying.

Once upon a time we went into stores to buy things that we brought home. Even when the Sears catalogue came in the mail anticipating the holiday season (we’re talking 20th century), kids then–who are adults now–would circle what they wanted and dog ear the pages.

Sears stopped mailing their catalogue in 1993, just in time for the internet to pick up where it left off. And we’ve been trying to buy things online ever since.

Not that it’s been easy. Websites almost seem to be in the business of complicating customer service. For the better part of the last 15 years, Alicia Clapper has tried to understand the consumer’s journey in the D2C world.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“Very simply, UI is the look and feel of a website: its buttons, colors, icons, layout. The nuts and bolts of it.

And then UX is the consumer journey. So how are people interacting with the UI. What are they feeling as they’re interacting with it? And the hope is that it’s easy and efficient and the consumer’s satisfied along this journey.

Though in business terms it connects what people need with what the business is trying to achieve. So as a consumer, I need a new couch. And as a business, I’m selling couches to make money.

That’s very general, and there’s a lot in between there. And I’d say it matters because if you have a good business idea, and people can’t understand it on the website, then it’s going to fail.”

ALEX EFFGEN

And that’s why I came to her to figure out the problems of UX, the solution of UI, and vice versa. When done right a good user interface creates transparent business intentions, and should steward a good user experience. For instance:

ALICIA CLAPPER

“Say you are about to offer free shipping, and you’ve never offered free shipping. And you are like, I’m going to put this on the website. I need my UX designer to find a place on the website that it should go.

And so, an example of bad UX would be, Hey, I’m going to put it at the top banner above the navigation. That way everyone will see it through any page on the site.

And you think the impressions alone, people will get that. And it’ll be a good value proposition to buy a product. But it’s pretty far from the Add to Cart button. It’s pretty far from that place where I’m going to be as a user on site—where I make the decision to buy this.

And if I put the free shipping pretty far away, and I don’t see it the whole time, that’s not something that is a value to me to make a purchase, cuz I didn’t see it, even though it’s on every page.

So good UX would be to move that free shipping messaging closer to the Add to Cart button on the product page itself. Again in the cart or mini cart, and then probably again even in checkout, to make sure that at that point where I’m about to give up my money, the risk is alleviated by seeing this free shipping—and even better free returns—but the free shipping takes away some of that risk of what I’m about to give up in order to get this product.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Alicia’s example presumes the company has a UX designer. It might even presume the company has a developer to modify the online store.

To be online and in business you need a strategy. Strategy requires organization, and I happen to have a framework right here. You spell the word business with the letter S three times. But I would argue it takes four of them for a business to be strategic:

SPECIALIZE: What is this?

SELL: Who needs this?

SECURE: What can disrupt this?

SCALE: How do we expand this?

If we want the UI to create a positive UX then where do we start? At the beginning and with everyone involved.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“It might seem silly to an extent, consumer-first needs need to be adopted cross functionally.

It’s not just something that’s important to me. It should be something that’s important to the growth team, and acquisition, and marketing, and ops, fulfillment, customer service. You know, if we just keep that as our guiding light, we’ll build those long-term customers. We’ll build that loyalty. We’ll build that repeat customer that will give us long-term gains, as opposed to those quick wins of trying to dupe somebody with a bad experience. Or like a clickbait type experience.

Teams need to treat UX as part of the decision-making infrastructure and not just as delivery.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Consumer-first needs being the guiding light to long-term customers. That sounds familiar…

“...for us, the important thing is just to stay true to our mission and the people who want that mission, who elect to buy into that mission, will do so naturally.”

Oh yeah! Matt Burriesci talked about the importance of sticking to the first principals of the Providence Athenæum in our Nonprofit episode. He was all about being fully committed to the products and services provided by his library. And the Athenæum was not only keeping their long-term members but increasing their visitors. So they must SPECIALIZE in a good user experience.

Alicia, what else promotes good UX?

ALICIA CLAPPER

“Along the same lines of consumer-first thinking—confidence definitely beats persuasion. Customers buy when they feel really certain about their choice, not when they’re being pressured to buy.

Say you clicked on that text message, you went to the website, the promo ends in two hours, and all of a sudden there’s this amount of pressure on you like, Oh, I have to pick. But you’re not feeling completely confident.

As much as a sense of urgency does cause people to buy, that could then lead to a higher return rate. If you weren’t feeling completely confident in your purchase, but you only had two hours left to get the deal, you made a purchase. You got it home and you thought, This doesn’t fit. Or, This is not the color I wanted. Or, I thought it was supposed to be a different fabric. You just didn’t have enough time to get that full picture, and confidence and clarity before you hit add to cart, check out, buy.

And so going back to creating clear, honest messaging. Predictable experiences and patterns across the site. All that definitely outweighs more aggressive sales tactics and approaches. Because users, they’re not buying when they’re excited, they’re buying when they’re no longer scared.

And so what are the things that are going to make people comfortable and certain and clear with what they’ve bought online, and what they’re going to get once it arrives at their home.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Wow. Let me repeat that.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“...they’re not buying when they’re excited, they’re buying when they’re no longer scared.”

ALEX EFFGEN

I once worked for a camera company. You could find the franchise in malls across America. And I would sell cameras when I wasn’t developing film. My manager had great sales numbers, and he was great at pressuring sales. While my approach was more academic. Learn the needs of the customer, match three cameras, explain their strengths and weaknesses, watch them walk if they were not ready to buy.

I’m sure I lost people to online purchases. I know my manager’s numbers were better than mine, and he wanted me to sell like him. But every month the sales report also came with a line item for returns. And his sense of urgency lead to a higher return rate, while my approach brought return customers. But was honesty the best policy?

ALICIA CLAPPER

“You can most clearly see it in the data. You can track all of those things: conversion, adoption, retention, support volume for customer service, even speed to market with new products. You know, that’s an internal efficiency.

There’s a lot of different key performance indicators that you can measure across many different functions within the company. Just surfacing those numbers you can’t deny that.

Products with strong UX do perform better, and easier to evolve long term when those consumer-first decisions are made early in the product lifecycle.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That kind of decision to go consumer first not only needs to be made early, but needs to be embraced by everyone.

ALICIA CLAPPER

“If we are saying that consumer-first mindset should be adopted by everyone that definitely needs to come from the top. People who are shaping priorities and objectives for the quarter or year: product leaders, engineer managers, executives. The cross-functional teams. Basically, anyone making decisions that would affect the long-term adoption of our customer.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Okay, so I have everyone buying in. But how does that help me SELL?

ALICIA CLAPPER

“Internally and externally just reduced friction. Between teams having a common understanding or a common library to pull from reduces friction, makes teams more efficient, therefore leads to higher productivity and potentially higher conversion in the projects that are being launched.

So I think it does streamline things in a way that you can see both internally and customer facing.

And customer facing measured in the data. You can track those conversion numbers, and add to carts, and time spent on site for customers just to see just how easy they are able to find what they’re looking for.

Better UX can increase conversion, but also create those repeat purchases, less returns, less customer service tickets. It spans very cross-functionally when it’s good and when it’s bad.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That’s why it’s called UX, user experience, rather than just CX, or customer experience, because efficiency, clarity, and honesty transcend the buyer and the seller.

Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of the Future Indicative’s episode on UI/UX. In Part 2 we’ll explore how the user experience becomes truly effective when all the functions of a business communicate.

And speaking of communicate, while opinions expressed are solely our own, we’ll gladly transcend this platform to connect with you on your preferred UI for a pleasant UX. You heard it here first! Feel free to share it so someone else can experience it as well.

On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.

“People. What a bunch of bastards.” Roy, The IT Crowd

Last week I caught fire with a LinkedIn comment. Over 3800 impressions with 2700 members reached. Got 12 reactions and it drove 18 profile views. I didn’t say it was a conflagration. Just a little bit of human reaction to a post about Claude suffering a “temporary service disruption” and James Hawkins noticing 14 coworkers suddenly not responding to any messages he sent to them. A bit of fun while we’re all re-adjusting our workflows to accommodate the machines.

My last post the week before did not get such attention. 178 impressions. Just over 100 members reached. It got 8 reactions but did not drive any profile views. This post was not a reaction to another member of the Matrix. Just an original thought that came out of my podcast (not hosted on LinkedIn).

Well, they call it an algorithm. And algorithms are known for their curves. Things go up and down. Sometimes you’re up, and sometimes you’re down. Just like yo-yos. In a strange twist my younger son, who prefers to live his life online, found one of my old Duncans, and began to play around with it.

“I like being weird. Weird is all I’ve got. That, and my sweet style.”

You’ve seen my headshot. I have a green beard. OF COURSE I spent a chunk of my lonely childhood learning how to walk the dog, shoot the moon, and rock the baby. I just did not think it would be inherited. My boy started as we all start: dropped it straight from his hand towards the floor. Sometimes it came back. Sometimes it didn’t. I watched his frustration rise. I offered to help.

“NO! I got this,” he protested. Merits for persistence. Demerits for stubborn defiance against subject matter experience. He asked to practice in front of the living room television, and noticed the Prime platform recommended The IT Crowd. He also inherited my love of British comedy.

“Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?”

For the uninitiated, The IT Crowd is a Channel 4 series, written and directed by Graham Linehan, and starring Chris O’Dowd, Richard Ayoade, and Katherine Parkinson as the primary members of a large London corporation’s IT department. The series is grounded in the logic of the business world undone by the illogical choices of the people working in that world, or worlds–as there is often a disconnect between those who troubleshoot the information technology and the business folk literally above them in their stratified building. The show is silly, farcical, and often accurate. I’m quoting from it in my subheadings.

The comedy disarmed my son’s stubbornness, enough to watch me wrap the yo-yo string around the outer knuckle of my middle finger and snap my wrist in a motion that rocketed the plastic wheel down to the ground, spin in place, and then return to my hand with the slight tug of that digit. I then sent it out parallel to the ground and pulled it back like Spider-Man slinging webs. It was enough demonstration to re-set his attention in the right direction. He improved drastically by the end of the next episode.

“The elders of the Internet know who I am?”

Two days later he returned from school and I noticed the yo-yo in his hand. “Still practicing?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Wait, did you bring that to school?”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Are you practicing at school?” It dawned on me this could cause trouble.

“Yes,” he repeated.

I needed to ask a question that prompted more details. “When and where are you practicing yo-yo at school?”

“At the end of class when I’m done with work.”

“And the…teachers…don’t have a problem with you doing it?” I had to be sure.

“Nope!”

He did not fill me with confidence, but I must assume the teachers are just happy he’s not fixed to a phone. It’s all fun and games until he shoots the moon at a glass beaker of acid. “What do the other kids think?”

“Oh, they all want one.”

Of course they do. Because trends are made by novelty establishing need only satisfied by experience and the value of accomplishment. Credit my lonely childhood.

“If you type ‘Google’ into Google, you can break the Internet.”

If only social media were as easy as learning to yo-yo. There’s a lot of things breaking the internet these days, and compromising its value. I’m not the only one to notice a decrease in impressions when posting on LinkedIn. Maybe you’ve experienced it as well. A few weeks back an estimable colleague posted a benchmarking seminar for financial services. It got 26 impressions and he supplicated Higher Powers in his reaction. I felt compelled to share my own impression of what’s transpiring. The Facebooking of LinkedIn. Between AI content dilating/diluting the feed, and an increase in overpersonalized sharing, I don’t see how LinkedIn remains an ecosystem for professionals to showcase their perspective for the benefit of other like-minded subscribers that are trying to become better professionals.

Of course, there are cheat codes. And me commenting on Claude suffering a “temporary service disruption” points towards what LinkedIn now rewards: commenting. All of us should take some good advice instead of going at it on our own and not getting any better with practice. But at some point, if you’re only chasing the algorithm, then you’re repeatedly raising your hand in class to hear yourself speak instead of sharing something insightful. Maybe take some time once you’re done with work and practice something else. Something meaningful. Who knows, maybe you’ll build your own trend.

In Related News…

It’s quaint to see trends develop between people. No SEO, GEO, keyword, hashtag, hoodwink bought and boosted for the hype while avoiding the insight. How we internet is changing, and I spoke to my friend, Alicia Clapper, an expert on the customer journey, on how it’s changing:

Recently I’ve seen people using AI search engines as a way to shop and as a starting point: to plug in what they’re looking for, specifics of what they need, and using that to search different brands.

And they’re not brand loyal. They’re just looking for a product that will suit their needs and using AI as a starting point to find that, which is interesting because it cuts through all of the marketing that any D2C company does and puts out there with ads or emails. You’re not seeing any of that. You’re getting directed to a specific product or a specific brand, and having a direct path to that website from this AI search engine.

So I found that as something interesting that people are doing. They are high intent. So typically, when they get to the recommended site from AI. They trust that. The bounce rate is lower, they’re more likely to trust that recommendation and shop from that site. It cuts through all the marketing efforts that are out there. And it’s just a new method for direct traffic.

The AI may now make the choice easy, but once you have the customer, what kind of journey does your online store make them take to the point of sale? Next week on The Future Indicative we talk about the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX), and it’s worth a listen.

If you want to learn a little bit about AI in search engines:

“AI Is Taking Over Your Search Engine. Here’s What It’s Doing and Why It Matters”

“New front door to the internet: Winning in the age of AI search”

And a few resources from next week’s episode include:

The Sears Catalogue

The Future Indicative: Nonprofit (Part 1)

The Future Indicative: Cybersecurity (Part 1)

US Census: sales totals in Q3 2025

Enjoy!

Alex Effgen

“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

Last week my older son turned seventeen. This month I’ve lived in my house for two decades. This year marks four centuries when a company of English fishermen took over the Native American settlement of Naumkeag–later rebranded Salem, Massachusetts.

2026 is a procession of anniversaries, where we return to commemorate a moment, or rather we note the moment when something turns, for the better or worse: Latin annus meaning “year” and versus, the past participle of vertere, meaning “to turn.”

We’ve discussed nostalgia. You can’t be nostalgic if you live in the now. But how narrow can we live without the context of our history? How selfish our perspective without a past? We live in time’s shadow. The author of our opening quote, Nathaniel Hawthorne, published the last of his complete historical romances in 1860, and thought his efforts infernal nonsense, but as his wife Sophia told her sister: “As usual, he thinks the book good for nothing...He has regularly despised each one of his books immediately upon finishing it.”

Haven’t we all.

“In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf—but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life...”

Hawthorne’s most famous work, The Scarlet Letter, begins with a stand-alone preface almost as famous. The Custom-House introduces the motives of the author and establishes his time and place. He lived in a very different Salem than I do. My Salem has a commercial life that swells every summer and explodes in the autumn, only to hibernate, germinate, and propagate a new crop of horror the next year. Tourism is our industry and unhistorical witches are our product and service.

That was not always the case, but Hawthorne helped that along with his next study of the romantic and tragic.

“But as for the old structure of our story…So much of mankind’s varied experience had passed there,—so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,—that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences.”

Past the witch museums and repopulated wharfs full of restaurants and broom boutiques, we have our House of Seven Gables. It was a book I had known before I bought my own Cape-style with two gables. We don’t tabulate prosperity by the total gables; just the total experiences saturated in the timber. A lot of happiness. A lot of sorrow. A lot of living. All better than the alternative.

Twenty years seems forever if I backdate 2006 to 1986. What happened in these last twenty years to make them fly by?

“Let me say outright, for once, that he is a sweet and lovely little boy, and worthy of all the love that I am capable of giving him.”

Children. Children take our life. Children take our health. Children take our sanity. But they also shine a youthful beam that dispels the shadows of our maturity (if we let them). Hawthorne illustrates this in a private record of the three weeks he spent alone with his 5-year old son in the summer of 1851, posthumously published as Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa in 2003, and a copy I borrowed from the Salem Public library anticipating the birth of my first born.

Unlike the standards of their day (speak when spoken to), the Hawthornes indulged their children. Treating them as equals rather than intimidating their instincts. It would influence my own parental aspirations. Years later, in his own writing, Julian Hawthorne, born in Salem like both of my boys, would note: “Children, brought up naturally and in freedom, not only have imagination, but live in a world of imagination more real to them than our reality.”

I count myself lucky. To have spent the last twenty of Salem’s 400 years raising young men as equals in a world of imagination–of nature and freedom–more real than our present reality. May we all commemorate what matters and treat everything else as infernal nonsense.

In Related News…

Speaking of anniversaries, holy cow does The Future Indicative have one to share this week!

The Future Indicative, Ep 6 Part 1

The Future Indicative, Ep 6 Part 2

Last week I mentioned talking to my friend Rob McIsaac about motorsports. Next month (March 6th and 7th), at Daytona International Speedway, Rob’s company, RPM Ventures NC, is commemorating the 50th anniversary of BMW’s win at the inaugural AMA Superbike race in 1976. RPM Ventures is bringing many of the winning BMW racers and engineers, as well as the original BMW R90S motorcycles in their Daytona Orange, back to the place where they crushed the competition.

Today’s episode of The Future Indicative will test its Four S of business on the racetrack, and Rob–as our historian and expert in all things vehicular–will take us on a ride around the industry of speed.

On your mark! Get set!

Alex Effgen

For The Future Indicative, Ep 6 Part 1

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome back to The Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 of our Motorsports episode, we’ll get curious how these lessons in marketing translate to new generations and their consumer preferences. A vehicle’s substance is important, but what about its style? I always think of very specific brands with very identifiable colors. British cars are always green. Italian cars are best red. With German cars, it’s that silver that strikes an identifiable chord, whether it’s a Beamer or a Mercedes-Benz.

ROB McISAAC

“There’s a reason for that. So in international racing at the turn of the last century, colors were assigned to countries because you wanted from a marketing standpoint to be able to tell who your guys were. And so it was very specific that Italian cars were red. British cars were green. French cars were blue. German cars were silver. And American cars were white.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Robert Phillips McIsaac, who puts the RPM in RPM Ventures NC. He’s also a BMW airhead, as you call them in the motorcycle community. And he’s challenging my assumptions on vehicular aesthetics.

ROB McISAAC

“If you ask the question, “What color should a Ferrari be?” We’ll say red, of course. “What color should a Triumph sports car be, or a Jaguar?” And the answer is, well, green, right? And in fact, British racing green isn’t even a color… So Jaguar green is very different than Lotus green, but it’s green. And the most popular automobile color in the United States, if you were to buy a new car today is…white.”

ALEX EFFGEN

In the first part, we learned that when BMW updated their motorcycles in 1974, they went wide with silver smoke—a combination of black and silver. But two years later, the three BMW superbikes that showed up at Daytona International Speedway 50 years ago weren’t silver smoke. They were a new color called Daytona Orange. And they rewrote the record books in this new hue.

ROB McISAAC

“There is an irony that the motorcycles that are painted Daytona Orange came to Daytona to compete in the very first AMA Superbike Race and crushed the competition.

Hans Muth was asked to come up with another color. And he was asked to come up with that color at a meeting that took place in Florida. And he was inspired by the Florida sunrise. And he was inspired by the fact that there was racing and high performance stuff at Daytona. And so he came up with this color that is a montage of orange and silver. Again, really incredibly expensive to produce. It was called Daytona Orange and he said, “Listen, it’s orange and I was in Daytona, so Daytona Orange.”

It was not necessarily a precursor to the fact that those motorcycles would show up at Daytona a year later as a racing team.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But what happens when a cigar is no longer fashionable? In Part 1, we learned how BMW SPECIALIZED its motorcycles both for the street and the speedway to make them SELL.

Capturing a market, and then keeping it, can be difficult enough within one generation. But in the 50 years since 1976, Boomers begot Gen X and Millennials, who begot Zoomers and Gen Alpha. How do you remain SPECIAL and SELL to a spectrum of age groups that have moved from cigars, to cigarettes, and now vaping?

ROB McISAAC

“The world is changing, and the rules and the formats constantly need to evolve to reflect the outcome that you’re trying to get to. One of the realities back in the 1960s was that gasoline was cheap and so nobody really cared what you ran. Gasoline has become much more expensive. And the rules have changed to force greater fuel efficiency. You don’t want to be perceived as being completely ungreen, which is why in many sports series, including Formula One, they are running hybrid cars now.

The demographics are also changing dramatically. I’m a younger member of the Baby Boom generation. And that is very different than my children who are Millennials or my grandchildren in terms of what their interests and perspectives are.

I think it’s fascinating that Ford chose to apply the Mustang name to one of their electric vehicles, which looks more like an SUV than a sports car. But the reality of it is that it’s a wonderful way of extending the brand Halo into a different space.

And of course, Mustang purists had a stroke when that happened, because that’s not a Mustang. But for a lot of younger people, when they look at the historic Mustang sports cars, they go, Well, that’s not a car I would ever buy. So how do you make that work? And that’s a really important notion for companies as they go forward.”

ALEX EFFGEN

At the end of Part 1, Rob mentioned that “history has this unfortunate aspect of repeating itself for those who don’t pay attention.”

And we’ve seen this happen in the past. Many motorcycle companies could not SECURE their legacies when the future came calling.

ROB McISAAC

“If you think about the motorcycling world, many of the British manufacturers were at the pinnacle of their game in the 1950s and 1960s. Iconic names like Norton and Triumph and BSA. And they all failed remarkably quickly.

And why? Well, they were not able to adjust and adapt to changing market conditions was one thing. And you also had the introduction of a whole new cast of characters who were rising from the ashes of Japanese manufacturing capabilities.

So after World War II, Japan was in ruins, but by the 1960s, you had companies like Honda, and Kawasaki, and Yamaha, and Suzuki all coming to market, finding ways in. And they were able to kill off the British manufacturers remarkably quickly.

Some of those British companies are back today. At least the brands are. You know, Triumph is a notable brand. They make terrific vehicles. It’s not the same company.

Royal Enfield is back. It’s an iconic brand. They’re no longer made in England. They’re made in India. They’ve got a really big market segment so the brand actually has some halo that brought back memories and was able to tie to something iconic. But the companies, to be clear, failed.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Brand can be eternal, but to avoid an afterlife in name only, brand must adapt to diverse conditions and diverse consumers across those conditions.

ROB McISAAC

“Today when you go to the dealership, in many instances you have a color wheel you can choose from and they’re going to build the car to your specs. You no longer are limited.

And I think that’s one response to creating not just just-in-time capabilities, but marketing that is much more oriented to the individual or at least two subsets of cohorts.

When I was in banking, I was surprised by the level of sophistication that existed in our marketing groups around creating different messages for different demographic cohorts. And it wasn’t just a generation as we defined them, but it was actually smaller decrements where it was generally 10-year windows that they looked at.

Because honestly, older Gen Xers look an awful lot like younger Baby Boomers. Younger Gen Xers look an awful lot like older Millennials.

These arbitrary lines are convenient when we’re writing news stories, but aren’t terribly helpful when you’re actually trying to do marketing.

And so having a lot of really good data can remarkably help you as you try and amplify the messages that you’re sending to the people that you want to send them to.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Good data may help define your markets, but it doesn’t mean you can provide a product to meet the needs of each consumer. An electric Mustang might be anathema to a Mustang purist. But can Ford afford to make a million type of Mustangs? No. They must think bimodal.

ROB McISAAC

“I’ve owned BMW sports cars for a very long time. And the ones that they make today, not that interesting to me. They’re bigger, they’re heavier, they’re more powerful, but that doesn’t make them better sports cars. That just makes them bigger and more powerful.

The electronics make them certainly safer for a novice, but uninteresting to somebody who actually enjoys driving a sports car.

The reality of it is they’re not building it for me. They’re building it for my kids. And so I need to think about what it is that I would find interesting if I were to buy a new car.

The same is true in the motorcycle world. When I look at a lot of the new motorcycles that are being built, it’s not terribly interesting. They’re bigger, they’re faster, they’re more powerful. They have all kinds of electronics.

But every once in a while, a manufacturer has come along with what some might view as a retro bike. Where it is stripped down, where it doesn’t have all the nannies and where it’s much more back to what I think of as historic motorcycling. And those are the kinds of things that I do find interesting.

Now for them, as any of those manufacturers, they have to think in a bimodal world.”

ALEX EFFGEN

We started this conversation talking about how BMW read the rule book, and had taken the rule book all the way to the edge in 1976. Fifty years later, the rules have changed, and will continue to change, based on the needs and values of each additional generation. If motorsports intend to contend for our attention, if they want to SCALE their sales with each succeeding generation, then how do they continue to race on Sunday and sell on Monday?

ROB McISAAC

“I suspect that in the future it’s going to be a much more interactive experience that people are going to require. If you’re sitting in the stands today, you probably have your smartphone or your tablet and you’re able to follow along and see things.

Well, maybe there’s more interactivity that will be involved in the future. Maybe people will be able to subscribe to become parts of teams and then they can listen in on things. I think there’s going to be more of that in the future and I think drawing people in is going to be key. I think it’s also going to be an interesting question of how do you turn this into marketing.

If younger cohorts, to the extent they get licenses at all, wait until later to get them, what are you going to do to attract them?

One of the things that has been anathema for traditional motorcycle manufacturers was the idea that we would do anything other than an internal combustion engine driven vehicle. But now many of them have moved to electric vehicles. And then that creates presumably access to a different type of person.

And once again points out that there isn’t a single point of light that you can follow. It’s a whole series of things that you have to be mindful of as you get ready for a future that’s really hard to predict.”

ALEX EFFGEN

The future may be hard to predict, but that’s why innovators keep rewriting the rule book.

ROB McISAAC

“If you don’t read the rule book, if you don’t stay on point, if you don’t understand what’s changing, you can continue to run the old kit, you’ll just wind up being in the back of the pack. And if you’re okay like that, then that’s fine. But that’s not necessarily a winning solution.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Thank you for joining us on The Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. Our mission is to show what great narratives accomplish for your industry. As mentioned before, the views expressed here are solely our own, but this vehicle has plenty of room for a roadtrip. Hike over to IndicateMarketing.com and hitch a ride. Let’s explore how our humanity can help drive your business growth and market positioning.

On behalf of the BMW 50th Anniversary Celebration at Daytona International Speedway, and Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. See you at the finish line.

For The Future Indicative, Ep 6 Part 2

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Motorsports.

ROB McISAAC

“The only reason that people go racing is for marketing. As they used to like to say in the motorcycle world and in the car world—race on Sunday, win on Sunday, sell on Monday.

Whether it’s NASCAR back in the 1960s, or sports car racing today, or motorcycle racing on either of those endpoints, the whole idea is to build your brand so that you can sell stuff.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Rob McIsaac, the CEO and President of RPM Ventures NC, an advisory services firm for insurance CIOs. Previously, Rob and I worked together at Novarica (see my first episode, titled Origin). He wrote the thought leadership; I managed their research, editing, and publication. About three years ago, he began RPM Ventures as the start to his “Third Act.” He described it as an expansion of his study on innovation ecosystems, in areas like Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts. As well as dipping into other things that were complementary to his former work, and not competitive with it.

But I did not know what these complementary things were. What began as a conversation on insurance technology and how CIOs endure disaster recovery and support business continuity, became something a whole lot more.

We both have interests outside the job. I am creatively invested in art, literature, and history. Rob is also interested in history, and that history includes cars, motorcycles, and their racing. It may be complementary to Rob’s work, but it is, in fact, incredibly competitive. And for Rob, his personal and professional interests go back to the same time and place.

ROB McISAAC

“My father was very much into fast cars, fast motorcycles, airplanes. As my mother said, “He had perfected the art of turning money into noise.” And as a young boy, I spent an awful lot of time with him.

I never was a racer on my own. But there were particular moments along the way that I think were galvanizing for me. I graduated from high school in 1975. My dad and I spent a lot of time motorcycling in that era. He bought a brand new BMW that year, so 1975 was kind of a seminal year.”

ALEX EFFGEN

One year later, BMW would make its mark in the world of motorcycle racing.

ROB McISAAC

“In the spring of 1976, BMW—which was not noted for racing—shows up at Daytona International Speedway with a trio of bikes like nobody has ever seen before. And they go on to win not only the Daytona race, but the championship for that season. And they didn’t just win. They crushed the competition, and they finished one, two, three for the season.”

And for me, these things very quickly—at the time—became commingled. I was involved obviously with BMW motorcycling at that point. My professional career in insurance started two years later at Prudential.

So in 1978, a few blocks away actually from where the BMW dealership was in North Jersey, I started working in insurance. And ironically, I suppose, going back and forth to work, I actually rode my BMW motorcycle to the Prudential headquarters office that I worked in.

And many of my ventures or adventures in that era, actually combined my interest in BMWs—not so much racing, but touring—and the funding mechanism that I had, which was Prudential.”

ALEX EFFGEN

We can talk to Rob later in the year about insurance and technology. But the story of BMW motorcycles can’t wait. Afterall, it’s been 50 years since the checkered flag.

ROB McISAAC

“While many Americans, in fact, many people don’t really know much about the story of BMW in 1976, there was a movie that came out recently called Ford vs Ferrari, which traces the Ford passion a decade earlier, in the 1960s, when they were going after high performance, they were using it as a marketing pitch. They wanted to buy Ferrari. They were unable to for a variety of reasons. They built their own car. They used a fascinating group of people to do it. Some of whom actually have a tie to the BMW team in 1976.

I think the engineering that’s required to build these things is fascinating because you’ve got to build something that has to meet very specific performance specs. That has to live for a particular period of time.

Cook Nielsen, who was the editor of Cycle magazine, had an opportunity to review what BMW introduced that year. And one of the all-time best quotes from racing came out when he said, “It appears that we have fallen well behind on our cheating.”

And of course, they weren’t really cheating. What they had done was they read the rule book, and they had taken the rule book all the way to the edge.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Taking the rule book all the way to the edge requires specialization. SPECIALIZE is the first turn for a business to be in business. I have argued that you need three more turns to cross the finish line:

SPECIALIZE: What is this?

SELL: Who needs this?

SECURE: What can disrupt this?

SCALE: How do we expand this?

Next month (March 2026), Rob McIsaac and RPM Ventures NC are going to Daytona International Speedway to commemorate the 50th anniversary of BMW’s win at the inaugural AMA Superbike race in 1976. RPM Ventures is bringing many of the winning BMW racers and engineers, as well as the original BMW R90S motorcycles in their Daytona Orange. Today’s episode of The Future Indicative will test its Four S of business on the track, using Rob as our historian and expert in all things vehicular.

At the top of this episode, you heard Rob mention “..the only reason that people go racing is for marketing.”

Race on Sunday, win on Sunday, sell on Monday.

ROB McISAAC

“In 1976, after BMW won that race at Daytona, they couldn’t keep motorcycles on the floor, the showroom floor, that looked like the ones that had just won those races because there was a halo effect. It’s all about building brand awareness, brand loyalty, getting people in showrooms.

General Motors never really sold that many Corvettes. What they used the Corvette to do was draw people into showrooms so that they could sell them minivans and station wagons and pickup trucks. You wanted to somehow be associated with the “bow tie,” in the case of Chevrolet.”

ALEX EFFGEN

BMW had a problem selling. And while measuring the results of your products and services can be tricky in a field like financial services, in racing…well, to quote Dom Toretto the first time he was Fast and Furious:

“...it don’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile; winning’s winning.”

So what did it take for BMW to win?

ROB McISAAC

“In the late 1960s, the motorcycle division almost failed. BMW as a company almost failed after World War II. The motorcycles that they built in the late ’40s and through the ’50s and ’60s were various derivatives of pre-war designs, but they were clearly not leap forward moments.

So you look at a BMW motorcycle from 1969 and it looks an awful lot like one from 1939. And BMW motorcycles of both eras, you could get any color you wanted, as long as it was black.

There were very small numbers that were other colors, but usually they were those other colors for a very specific purpose. The fleet colors were black.”

ALEX EFFGEN

So what changed?

ROB McISAAC

“In 1970, BMW had a major engineering update that was in part fueled by the West German government. The West German government wanted BMW to put their new factory in West Berlin to try and support the local economy and gave them incredible tax benefits to do that.

And two people became really important in that whole conversation. An American marketing executive wound up at BMW named Bob Lutz, and he helped to drive orientation towards performance in both the car and motorcycle divisions. And a gentleman named Hans Muth came along to do the design work on the motorcycles.

And for 1974, he came up with a color—we call it silver smoke—it’s a combination of black and silver, and then the shades of gray as those colors are morphed on top of each other. It’s a stunningly beautiful and incredibly expensive thing to do.

It turned out that it was a rousing success. It drew people into showrooms. In some cases, they were so expensive that people didn’t necessarily buy them, but they bought other stuff. They went to look at these silver smoke bikes, and then they bought something else. But they still sold a ton of them.”

ALEX EFFGEN

It took reinvestment, both in the performance of their product and the aesthetic of it, to turn the company around. Hans Muth gave Bob Lutz and BMW something to SELL. But to get the complete attention of the consumer, it took another engineer named Udo Giedel to take the R90S motorcycle and make it a superbike:

ROB McISAAC

“One way to think about it is, Hans designed a street bike and Udo designed a race bike based on the bones that Hans gave him.”

ALEX EFFGEN

And the rest is history…or is it?

ROB McISAAC

“Whether it’s in the insurance world, the motorsports world, our personal and professional lives, history has this unfortunate aspect of repeating itself for those who don’t pay attention.

For those who do learn from it, it’s possible to alter the arc of things. And I think it will be important for us to think about exactly where are we as we roll into 2026.

Are we in a recession or not? Are we going to be adversely impacted by tariffs or not? Are we going to be adversely impacted by changes in the H-1B rules or not? Are we headed back into a cold war? And maybe more frightening: Are we headed into a hot war?

We’re just unclear and uncertain what will happen as some of the norms that have defined how companies and countries have interacted for 80 years appear to be changing.

And I don’t mean to make it a political comment, I just mean it’s one of those things that is a reality that cannot be ignored. And I think that understanding some of those things and then thinking about how you would adjust and adapt to them is really important.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of The Future Indicative’s Motorsports episode. In Part 2, we’ll discuss how the racing world (and all of us, really) avoid repeating history as the world continues to head towards the future.

While opinions expressed are solely our own, it is neither a race nor competition to get them out there. Follow along if you like. You’re welcome to join the ride. To learn more about (and register for) the BMW 50th Anniversary Celebration at Daytona International Speedway (March 6th and 7th of 2026) please reach out to Indicate Marketing and we’ll send you the link.

I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.

“In general, though, the modern tendency was to feel rather than to think; so that men were now more highly esteemed for inventing new diversions than for preserving old facts or pushing back the frontier of cosmic mystery.” The Mound, by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop

“You have no idea how easy you have it. Back in my day…” said every older generation to every younger generation since the dawn of time. And sure, due to climate change winter snows were probably deeper for longer periods of time when walking to school. And some generation a thousand years ago dealt with barbarian invasion. Edgar the Peacemaker probably told his son Æthelred the Unready, “You have no idea how easy you have it…” but was conveniently not around when Swein Forkbeard of Denmark took over England in 1013.

English succession gets terribly complicated through 1066. And what one generation experiences cannot map against the trials and tribulations of the generation before or after without some kind of contextual adaptation. Case in point: last month my younger son had midterms. They were his first midterms. I asked how they were going, and when I wanted to know what was expected and how long they took, he was a bit indignant.

“They’re midterms. You had midterms.”

Uh, actually, no, not in high school. We had periodic exams in high school, pop quizzes, papers, and presentations, which eventually led to finals at the end of the year. But I did not have a week of concentrated exams in the middle of January, two hours for each subject, two subjects a day, releasing students from school early, presumably to prepare for the next day’s subjects on Chromebooks. For better or worse, my education was very much still built on the three Rs.

Reading

“Literature was all highly individual and analytical, so much so as to be wholly incomprehensible…” The Mound

While the three Rs date to an era before English (legere et scribere et numerare discitur) their foundation as corneRstones of education dates to the early 19th century when both England and America were establishing models of public instruction. You may recall from my last podcast on nonprofits that the first public high school in the US was founded in 1821, smack dab in the middle of the growing Athenæum movement. Matt Burriesci talked about the Providence Athenæum’s collection of useful and edifying books. We also talked about the possible theoretical role of AI at the Athenæum.

But what about the actual impact of AI in education?

’riting

“Art and intellect, it appeared, had reached very high levels in Tsath; but had become listless and decadent. The dominance of machinery had at one time broken up the growth of normal aesthetics, introducing a lifelessly geometrical tradition fatal to sound expression.” The Mound

The QWERTY keyboard took root in English-typing countries a hundred and fifty years ago. And with it marked the slow death of cursive, as well as legible handwriting. But in the ultimate “Back in my day…” Plato recounts Socrates telling Phaedrus in 360 BC that upon the invention of writing by the Egyptian god Thoth, Ammon warned that it would lead to the ruin of men:

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. Phaedrus, R Hackforth, transl., 1952

’rithmetic

“Science had been profound and accurate…Of late, however, it was falling into decay, as people found it increasingly useless to tax their minds by recalling its maddening infinitude of details and ramifications. It was thought more sensible to abandon the deepest speculations and to confine philosophy to conventional forms.” The Mound

Back in my day, we were allowed to use graphing calculators for math. The Texas Instruments TI-85 was cutting edge technology for plotting graphs and solving equations in (pre-)calculus. If Ammon was worried that writing would implant forgetfulness from a reliance on what was written, he had no idea what calculators would let us forget in arithmetic. Let alone Chromebooks. Thankfully, I can still chuckle when I hold a calculator upside down and look at “5318008” on its liquid crystal display.

The wisdom of Ammon is the secret to education: “...by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing…” We must teach, actually teach, regardless of whatever recent technology makes our learning “easier.”

In Related News…

Throughout this ramble I have sprinkled quotes from a lesser known work of Providence writer of the weird, fantastic, and horrific, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who depicted an encounter with an ancient race whose technology bestowed both divine power and regressive indolence. He composed The Mound ninety-six years ago, so we’ve collectively speculated on the decadence brought by technology not only in the Classical but industrial eras as well.

Next week, The Future Indicative talks to my friend Rob McIsaac about motorsports. It had not started as a conversation about motorsports. It had started about the impact of technology on insurance and financial services. But before we changed topic to what he’s incredibly commemorating at Daytona International Speedway next month, we got into the need for responsive business process when dealing with new technology:

McKinsey talked about artificial intelligence and its utilization in financial services broadly. And they focus on agentic AI. And that actually gets back to the question of business process. And the point that they made is that you cannot just apply agentic AI against existing business process, which is akin to putting lipstick on a pig.

Don’t just take the new technology implied against old process. What you get then is old process which magnifies the flaws that goes very fast and is very difficult to correct. Maybe what you need is new process. Maybe what you need is to fundamentally rethink how you’re going to do some of these things. Step back and reconsider your processes based on the capabilities of the technologies.

And that is really hard. It has some really significant challenges for the insurance industry, which has—irrespective of line of business that you talk about—long to extremely long liability tails, as distinct from retail businesses or banking. That’s an article that people should take note of, particularly as they consider how they want to invest finite resources in getting after the kinds of outcomes that they’re going to need in the near and long term.

And I would just capstone that by saying that it’s worth reading that article in the context of a Bill Gates quote from a book he published in 1995. The title of the book was The Road Ahead. And the quote is that “We always tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the near term, and underestimate the impact of new technology in the long term.”

And so it’s really important to think about where we’re going and how we’re going to get there, because we’re not gifted with unlimited resources and the economic pressures are going to build.

Seems relevant advice for business, education, and preventing ruin. Ammon would approve! Meanwhile, feel free to familiarize yourself with these resources ahead of our conversation next week:

RPM Ventures and Rob McIsaac’s “Third Act”

The BMW 50th Anniversary Celebration at Daytona International Speedway (6-7 March 2026)

Ford vs Ferrari

Cycle magazine

Winning’s Winning (The Fast and The Furious)

Racers, start your engines!

Alex Effgen

“If convictions don’t cost anything then they’re really just fashion. They’re not really conviction.” Barack Obama, WTF, Episode 1686

My wife likes True Crime. She also consumes Jane Austen, which I mentioned in another life, and I do worry how these genres intersect in her consciousness (probably Northanger Abbey and not The Staircase). Anyway, life’s all about murder and romance but recently she discovered a Netflix series called Unlocked: A Jail Experiment. It identifies as a docuseries set in Southern detention facilities (Arkansas in Season 1 and Arizona in Season 2), where inmates are given more autonomy and responsibility by having their cell doors unlocked.

So she’s graduated from means, motive, and opportunity to punishment and rehabilitation. While it’s cutting into my time watching Edwardian Farm on Tubi, I philosophically gravitate towards prison models that promote positive reinforcement and rehabilitation methods that attempt to avoid the unintended consequence of dependence. And she’s bingeing it, so who am I to purge. Will the jail experiment foster community and a nascent willingness to transcend their statistical recidivism? Or…are the inmates who society thinks they are: born wrong and therefore deprived of freedom to protect our security?

Actions Have Consequences

Documentaries are huge right now on all platforms. We’re no longer living in the era of Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies: either in documentary production or subject. Wiseman’s film explored the dehumanizing nature of institutions and was subject to government censorship. Nowadays documentaries are a cheap means of entertainment and transcend all genres including fiction, be it horror (Blair Witch), comedy (The Office), or both (C-SPAN). Judd Apatow wrote and directed The 40-Year-Old Virgin over twenty years ago. His IMDB is now littered with documentaries on George Carlin and Mel Brooks, as well as Stormy Daniels and the Parkland high school shooting.

Documentaries are all pretty great. Formulaic, but great. Both seasons of Unlocked introduce the inmates, their nicknames, their real crimes, their environment, and their jailors, including the sheriffs whose reputations are at stake treating convicts like citizens. The series establishes a dichotomy of impetuous youngsters and mindful oldheads all trying to improve their circumstances, and at times taking advantage of their limited freedoms.

Rights vs Privileges

But of course, somewhere in the middle of each season, the unscripted narrative casts doubts on the experiment. Perhaps the inmates have taken too much liberty by smuggling drugs into the pod by means of their gastrointestinal tracts, or talking back to a guard who–in interview–admits to doubts about the experiment’s potential. Oh so many times the sheriffs explain to camera that they’re not sure if this experiment will work.

Do I need to spoil the ending? No. Let’s just say both seasons the sheriffs need to lock everything back down and show the difference between rights and privileges. Rights are what we take for granted. Privileges are what get taken away by people in positions of authority who have the right to do it. And it’s great for ratings. Compelling drama.

Inmates Running the Asylum

In the very last episode of Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF, Maron interviews former president Barack Obama to realign his own emotional compass within the magnetic storm of media and politics driving everything crazy. Both Maron and Obama have served their terms mediating the polemics, each within their respective spheres of influence. And just like Solon (and many in between) both said, “We’re done. It’s up to you.” And reclaimed what they could of their lives to avoid further involvement.

Anyway, President Obama said the two sentences in that interview to make up the newsletter quote above: “If convictions don’t cost anything then they’re really just fashion. They’re not really conviction.” When the system has reached a point where criminals have the system’s authority to treat our rights as privileges, how do we turn fashion into conviction?

In Related News…

The Future Indicative is here to help answer my question!

The Future Indicative, Ep 5 Part 1

The Future Indicative, Ep 5 Part 2

We have Matt Burriesci to orient our listeners to nonprofits, and in particular, the Providence Athenæum. Among the many answers Matt provides to my questions, I found this one very relevant.

The Athenæum allows people to think for themselves. It allows people to critically engage with literature on their own terms and to set their own path. And that’s something that was very true from the founding, that this was an institution founded sort of on a rugged principle of self-improvement. We don’t prescribe a path for you. You come in and you find your own path. We are here to support that. We are here to support the individual pursuit of wisdom…We’re not here to reinforce whatever’s in your echo chamber. You’re here to experience different ideas and to engage with them on your own terms. And I think that’s something that’s very sorely lacking in our echo chambers and our information silos.

When we want to break from our chambers and silos, our pods and our prisons, the first place to look is in a book. Consider Denmark.

HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.
HAMLET: A goodly one, in which there are many confines,
wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’
th’ worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is
nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it
so. To me, it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Why, then, your ambition makes it one.
’Tis too narrow for your mind.
HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and
count myself a king of infinite space, were it not
that I have bad dreams.
GUILDENSTERN: Which dreams, indeed, are ambition,
for the very substance of the ambitious is merely
the shadow of a dream.

Sounds like Hamlet could have used a good book. Might I suggest Northanger Abbey?

Enjoy!

Alex Effgen

For The Future Indicative, Ep 5 Part 1

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome back to the Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 of our look at Nonprofits, the future has come calling, and these institutions of public beneficence must decide if they’ll accept the charges.

MATT BURRIESCI

“I heard Elon Musk talking recently, and he said that in the future, we won’t have video games or television or movies anymore. You’ll just tell AI, “I want to see a fourth season of Star Trek, the original season or whatever.” And it’ll just generate this content on demand for you.

Which is kind of frightening to think about…We’re not quite there yet but we’re approaching it within the next 5-10 years, I think, that will start to really impact society in a major way.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Matt Burriesci, who’s not only the Executive Director of the Providence Athenæum, but a fan of Star Trek. So am I. And as it’s relevant to the present topic, let’s nerd out for a minute and talk Trek while talking about AI.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, once said of his show, and I quote:

“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms.”

Roddenberry saw a future where differences are not something to fear but embrace. He thought the worst possible thing was for humanity “to look and talk and act and think alike.”

Perhaps that’s why Elon Musk’s prediction is troubling.

MATT BURRIESCI

“We had Simon Winchester here last year. And he was talking about how we are approaching a point in which we are going to outsource our thinking– our very thinking–our cognitive labor is going to be outsourced to a machine. And something about that Musk quote about show me a fourth season of Star Trek, the original series or whatever—how dull that is, how derivative. We’re just gonna be living in this simulacra of a simulacra, you know what I mean? It’s just going to go on forever. There’s going to be no new original thought. It’s as if all of human creation has stopped in a way, in a frightening way.”

ALEX EFFGEN

We are at a crossroads of creative differences and artificial similarities. But Star Trek explored this scenario as well. Not Original Series, but Next Generation, where they employ a technology called the holodeck.

The holodeck is a plot device where Star Trek characters can experience three-dimensional simulations that allow the cast to go to the Old West, or play the role of private detective in pulp fiction noir.

In episode 3 of the second season, Federation android Commander Data and Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge go to the holodeck to recreate a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Data, as Holmes, has already memorized all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, and solves the simulation within minutes of entering the holodeck. And so they must instruct the computer to create a unique Holmes mystery with an adversary who is capable of defeating Data.

Enter Professor James Moriarty.

MATT BURRIESCI

“I can’t remember that episode…off the top of my head, but I seem to recall that Moriarty basically becomes sentient and starts running roughshod over the Enterprise, right?”

ALEX EFFGEN

That’s right, Matt. The hologram Moriarty, now made sentient and therefore creative, challenges the Star Trek crew not only in this episode, but later in Season Six.

Before we go full nerd, all of this is fiction. Speculative science fiction. But this fiction allows us to explore meaning. Data, a sentient android, is already familiar with the books. Once fed into the holodeck the computer creates derivative simulations until given the right prompt to create something also with sentience. The last I checked our AIs do not experience feelings or sensations, and therefore cannot create anything–regardless of prompt–with sentience. But the impact AI is having on our society, its adoption on search engines and deliverable output, you kinda wish it was sentient. Or at least correctly employed.

MATT BURRIESCI

“In the nonprofit sector, I think that could have enormously positive impact in some ways, like particularly on back-end operations for nonprofits, which is traditionally where they struggle.

At the Athenæum, I don’t think we’re going to be making widespread adoption of this technology. Maybe in some sort of search function or something like that. But it’s so big, it’s kind of hard to wrap your head around it.

This is not just another widget or database. This is a paradigm shift. This is an Industrial Revolution that’s occurring, an Information Revolution that is going to reshape society in very fundamental ways.”

ALEX EFFGEN

In many ways we’re still adjusting to the digital chasm created by the internet, and now, at the dawn of yet another technological revolution, we all need to SECURE ourselves from the next disruption. In part one, Matt made the case that the “Republic required citizens to be both informed and virtuous…It believed that the best way to do that was through history.”

Can that history provide us sentient human beings the experience of feelings or sensations necessary to secure ourselves from the next technological disruption?

MATT BURRIESCI

“I wrote a book on the great books of the Western world and I do look at those books. I do look at them and say, I’ve got a problem. Is there an example that’s similar to this in history that could inform me on how I should proceed, and how I should not proceed? Mistakes that were made.

One of my favorite books is Plutarch’s Lives because when you read that book, it’s like, here’s this person who’s remembered as this great person, and here’s all the terrible mistakes they made in their life. And I like to look at that and sort of reflect upon that with some diligence because those lessons do translate. They do translate across time.”

ALEX EFFGEN

And how does that translate to the Athenæum?

MATT BURRIESCI

“This institution was here for the Civil War. It survived the Civil War. It has seen very, very bad times before. It has seen the flu pandemic. It’s been through two world wars. It’s been through the Cold War. It’s been through Vietnam, it’s social unrest. So, there’s a tendency to doomsay and think, Oh, my God, this is like the worst thing that’s ever happened and we’re in the soup and it’s never going to get better.

But the past provides you with a great deal of perspective on the current crisis that you may or may not be facing. However tough it is, trust me, it’s been worse in the past. And, I like to look back at old annual reports, especially from times of crisis and see how they dealt with it. And it’s funny, during the pandemic, I went back and I looked at annual reports from the Athenæum that were around during the influenza pandemic. And they were so nonchalant about it. It’s sort of frightening. They’re like, Well, you know, 40 people have died from the pestilence, but we need a new iron fence.

So, they were just back to business and sort of dealing with the problems of the institution as they were.”

ALEX EFFGEN

But what are the problems of a nonprofit institution? And what are their cause?

MATT BURRIESCI

“The main thing that disrupts nonprofits is internal misalignment around missions. Everybody needs to be on the same page inside an institution: the board, the staff, and the members to some extent—what’s the big goal? What are we doing? Why are we doing it?

I think people have a need to feel that they’re part of something larger than themselves. That the institution comes before individual egos and all that, and my ego is included in that. There’s things that I would love to do that would satisfy my own ego. I would love to stock the shelves exclusively with works that I love.

But that’s not necessarily what members want. It’s not why the institution exists. So the biggest thing to me that really disrupts, it’s internal misalignment around mission. And another thing I think that could be talked about is incentives–external incentives to do things that are maybe not in an institution’s best interest.

So you have to get everybody aligned around the same mission, resist external pressure to do things that might not be in the best interest of your institution, and then deal with the external events as they come.”

ALEX EFFGEN

What are external incentives that are not in the institution’s best interest?

MATT BURRIESCI

“You see this a lot from funders, especially in the ’90s. At that time there was a whole idea that all nonprofits had to be run like a business. So every foundation grant you would get would be like, What are your metrics? What’s your ROI? And all that. And nonprofits don’t really exist in that space.

You know, I remember being part of PEN/Faulkner, and one of our programs was sending writers into schools, and I could report to foundations. I could say, “We did X number of author visits and we distributed X number of books.”

But what’s the value of teaching a kid to love reading? What’s the value of that? I can’t measure that. It doesn’t work like that in the nonprofit sector.”

ALEX EFFGEN

So how does it work?

MATT BURRIESCI

“There was a big change in philanthropy, really led by the Gates Foundation and that revolution. That incorporated this idea that we needed a top-down incentive model, where foundations would set broad social agendas or social engineering sort of ideas and then institutions would follow those incentives.

One of the ways that that manifested in the ’90s anyway, there was a big emphasis to do education programs for nonprofits. So nonprofits would, for example, start to develop these massive educational programs that were adjacent to their missions, but not really core to their missions. And they were doing it to satisfy funders. But then when the funding dried up, then they had this enormous infrastructure to support without the money to support it. And so it’s that kind of thing that happens a lot in philanthropy. Philanthropy is great. Institutional philanthropy is great. I’m not knocking it.

But one of the things that I try to think about all the time is sometimes you have people approach you and say, “Well, this so-and-so foundation will give you a lot of money if you do X.”

And if X is not aligned with your mission, you shouldn’t do X, if that makes sense.”

ALEX EFFGEN

We’ve come back around to that first principle delivering the product that addresses the need of its members, and provides them value. But sometimes addressing need and providing value requires SCALE to overcome disruption.

MATT BURRIESCI

“The pandemic was enormously disruptive to nonprofit institutions in a lot of ways. When we introduced virtual programs as part of the pandemic, that was a big game changer for us. I did an interview with Ann Patchett during the height of the pandemic. And a thousand people from seven different countries tuned into this event, which for the Athenæum is bizarre. We were reaching people in France and then we thought, Oh, this is the future.

And then the pandemic ended and attendance at online seminars dropped off the face of the planet. There was no resuscitating them. Nobody wanted it. Everybody wanted to be in person again.”

ALEX EFFGEN

So then how do nonprofits, in particular the Athenæum, expand?

MATT BURRIESCI

“There are the traditional ways that you expand in a local market. Partnerships are a big part of that. We have very important partnerships with the Rhode Island Children’s Film Festival, with Providence Children’s Film Festival, with a veterans initiative that’s very important here, the Providence Clemente Veterans Initiative, with Rhode Island School of Design, with all sorts of people. We try to partner with everybody and sort of cross-pollinate as best as we can.

And then the most important thing we did here was letting people know they could come in the building. If you walk to the front of the Athenæum, it’s a little intimidating. You don’t know if you can go in there or if you need some card or something.

So we made a big push to put signage in the front that just says, Come in. We want you to come in. Come in. Come in. And that’s made a big difference. Our visitorship last year was 71,000…it’s a lot of people.”

ALEX EFFGEN

And how did you get that number?

MATT BURRIESCI

“Grow incrementally, and overtime the big things will take care themselves. If you grow your membership base over a series of years, all of a sudden you have access to a larger donor pool. And then you have access to other avenues of partnerships and things like that. That’ll happen naturally.

If you do moon shots all the time, you’re not going to get there. If you’re prudent and you live within your means and you also try to modernize your systems as best we can.

Growth is, to me, incremental. It’s not sudden, even though it feels like we’ve had rapid growth here at the institution. It’s really a snowball. It’s a snowball that got started rolling down a hill, and now it’s picking up steam.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Thank you for joining us on The Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. The views expressed here are solely our own, but nothing is siloed or secretive. Feel free to contact IndicateMarketing.com and tell us if you find this content useful and edifying. And speaking of useful and edifying, please visit www.provath.org or stop by in person and stand in awe. On behalf of the Providence Athenæum and Indicate Marketing, we appreciate your patronage, and continued support.

For The Future Indicative, Ep 5 Part 2

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Nonprofit.

MATT BURRIESCI

“I’ve been in the nonprofit sector my whole life. I founded my first nonprofit when I was 17. A nonprofit to me is a mission-driven organization that exists outside the normal wealth-producing mechanism of capitalism.

A nonprofit exists for the benefit of the classically liberal project, writ large. It exists to support the Republic, to fill in holes and gaps in the private and public arenas.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Matt Burriesci, Executive Director of the Providence Athenæum, an independent, member-supported library located in the capital of Rhode Island. Founded in 1836, this 501(c)(3) predates the establishment of public libraries in the United States, and is one of a handful of membership libraries–most founded in the 18th and 19th centuries–to provide a young technical and agrarian citizenship access to analogue information back when it did not drown us digitally. Nearly 200 years later and the inheritors of these member libraries lead very different lives, but do they have different needs and values? That is what we’re here to find out.

But first, let me say Happy New Year! The Future Indicative has reached its fifth episode analyzing human topics that straddle business and society, and will continue to cover the evergreen and the ephemeral in this year of anniversaries.

The colonies declared their independence 250 years ago, and as its e. pluribus unum continues to define itself amidst population growth, competing cultural priorities, and technological advancement, we must survey the spectrum of products and services that have developed in this melting pot and learn what we can of their success and failure. Promise and possibility.

In the late 1960s anthropologist Margaret Mead expressed concern that the contemporary form of family organization was failing, and that to avoid the inevitable counterrevolutions that would limit our freedoms and creative capacities, it would take all the constructive and creative imagination available to accomplish the social rearrangement.

While that’s still a work in progress, we have not yet lost the war thanks in part to institutions that were founded and grounded in principles that transcend EBITA, or Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Amortization. But if they’re not in it for the money, then what are they in it for?

MATT BURRIESCI

“The reason why I’ve dedicated my life to this sort of work is because I feel this work is important for everybody, for the Republic, and in all sorts of different ways.

We provide a service that doesn’t necessarily concentrate on maximizing wealth or anything like that. It just focuses on providing a service that we feel is important for all of society. I don’t want to overstate it, but it is a bit of like the glue that holds society together in a way.”

ALEX EFFGEN

In a letter dated 6 January 1816, former president Thomas Jefferson wrote to Charles Yancey, and I quote, “if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”

Twenty years later, the Providence Athenæum was founded and incorporated after a previous Providence Athenæum (est. in 1831) and the Providence Library Company (est. in 1753) could not agree on terms for a merger. Both organizations dissolved to form a new library, which included the collections of both earlier institutions. Member libraries were already a trend in many cities across the young Republic, as we see Athenæa incorporated in Boston and Salem (Massachusetts) in 1807 and 1810, Portsmouth (New Hampshire) in 1817, New Haven (Connecticut) in 1826, and Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1835. Even a far off port like San Francisco founded theirs in 1855, six years after the Gold Rush. But the question we continue to ask is why?

MATT BURRIESCI

“One thing I think about a lot at the Athenæum is why is it here in the first place? This institution did not need to exist. So why does it exist? What were the best intentions of its founders? What did they believe it was for? What’s the most charitable interpretation of those intentions and how does that sort of translate to our modern era?

The intention of the founders was to create a collection of useful and edifying books.

And we all know what useful means. They were technicians and farmers and people who really did need a repository of technical knowledge to be useful, to share knowledge. It was a database in some sense.

But that edifying word is kind of interesting. We might roll our eyes on it, but what it really means is productive to moral instruction.

And today we might think that’s a little patronizing or maybe even a little religious in orientation but that’s not really what they meant. What they meant was to provide examples of good character. To exemplify the Classical virtues: prudence, temperance, courage, justice, wisdom, because in their minds, it was widely believed that a Republic required citizens to be both informed and virtuous. Back then they believed that the best way to do that was through history. Not because history was unblemished, but because it was remarkably blemished. Because the point was to learn the lessons of the failures of others more than anything else.”

ALEX EFFGEN

To create a collection of useful and edifying books. Matt Burriesci identifies that as the first principle of the Providence Athenæum. And that first principle delivers the product that addresses the need of its members, and provides them value.

The Future Indicative podcast is built on four principles. Whether your business is nonprofit or for profit, there is no product without addressing these four principles:

SPECIALIZE: What is this?

SELL: Who needs this?

SECURE: What can disrupt this?

SCALE: How do we expand this?

The Athenæum’s first principle is SPECIALIZE: A collection of useful and edifying books that provide a repository of shared technical knowledge as well as examples of good character.

Matt also identified who needed these books in 1836: technicians and farmers. While the young Republic was incredibly literate due to its general religious requirements (think catechism and Sunday School), most libraries were reserved for institutions of higher education, exclusive to those receiving training in religion, law, or medicine. The first public high school in the US was 15 years old in 1836. To provide a trade- and agrarian-based society access to information required the commitment of like-minded members to congregate at the end of their work day at an athenæum, mechanics hall, or lyceum, and learn collectively from a paid lecturer, or independently from a printed volume.

While lectures and literacy still provide the primary lessons to our modern learning, our congregation is now rife with factions. And every fact gets questioned as fiction. If the need and value for an athenæum sold itself in 1836, how does Matt SELL it in 2026?

MATT BURRIESCI

“I’m a big believer in going where we need to go. That we just do what we do. And we don’t try to appeal to everyone. We don’t try to be all things to all people.

Because if you’re all things to all people, you’re nothing to nobody. We just stick to our core mission. We do what we do. And people seem to find us.”

ALEX EFFGEN

This sounds like the “People will come” speech delivered by James Earl Jones in the movie Field of Dreams. But this isn’t a ballpark in a cornfield. This is a library in the heart of a busy city. How do you get eyeballs on what you’re up to?

MATT BURRIESCI

“We don’t spend a ton on marketing. We could spend more, but we are still growing because people are experiencing the Athenæum and…and they see that we’re sincere in what we’re doing. And so they want to join us. They voluntarily join us.

I know that’s probably contrary to a lot of marketing thought, and I do have a background in marketing. But for us, the important thing is just to stay true to our mission and the people who want that mission, who elect to buy into that mission, will do so naturally.”

ALEX EFFGEN

It’s not necessarily contrary to marketing thought. In our episode on Marketing, you’ll remember that Megan Heuer defined great marketing as being “operationally excellent and emotionally resonant.” We discussed how marketing had to reinvest itself in the value of the product. Sincerity and authenticity were important components to amplify the value of that product, so staying true to the mission seems to be the cornerstone of Matt’s marketing. And it’s working, without the urgency impressed by digital competition.

MATT BURRIESCI

“The Athenæum allows people to think for themselves. It allows people to critically engage with literature on their own terms and to set their own path. And that’s something that was very true from the founding, that this was an institution founded sort of on a rugged principle of self-improvement. We don’t prescribe a path for you. You come in and you find your own path. We are here to support that. We are here to support the individual pursuit of wisdom.

And that takes many paths, you know what I mean? We’re not here to set that path for you. But we have a commitment to collecting and promoting…what we feel are enduring works of literature…even those that are produced in the present.

We’re not part of your algorithm. We’re not here to reinforce whatever’s in your echo chamber. You’re here to experience different ideas and to engage with them on your own terms. And I think that’s something that’s very sorely lacking in our echo chambers and our information silos.

So we try to curate that, and then allow people to sort of access it through whatever means they can, if that makes sense.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Individual pursuit of wisdom? While gathering with those who are like minded? This sounds like a trap, especially when you sit in one of their oversized leather-chairs and commune in their historical aesthetic while pondering over a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. Fun fact: back in the day Edgar Allan Poe frequented the Providence Athenæum!

MATT BURRIESCI

“This institution has been here for almost 200 years. It’s been through thick and thin. It’s been through all sorts of problems, but it remains and endures. And there’s something timeless about the place. And when you walk into the Athenæum—I always love seeing people when they walk in the Athenæum for the first time because they always look up and their mouths open. They can’t believe that an institution like this exists and exists in its current state.

What we’ve been doing is really been going on for thousands of years and that we’re just sort of an incarnation of it. We’re part of a very ancient tradition that manifests in this sort of romantic interior that we have, but it endures. It’s still there. It’s still growing. It’s still healthy. And if that’s true, that must mean people still want it.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of the Future Indicative’s Nonprofit episode. In Part 2, the 21st century has new technology to disrupt those useful and edifying books, and we’ll explore how the Athenæum SECURES their value for future generations, as well as expands to lands beyond Providence. To learn more about this unique institution please visit www.provath.org.

While opinions expressed are solely our own, we won’t limit your freedoms and creative capacities to learn from them. It will take all of our constructive and creative imagination to accomplish the social rearrangement, and that starts here with you. If you’ve heard something you like, then play it out loud in your private and public arenas, and tell people where you heard it. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?
-Robert Burns

Happy New Year! I hope you wrapped up 2025 with a ribbon and no regrets leading into 2026. I spent the last two weeks with family and friends, and friends that are family. We even had merry revelers participating in Jólabókaflóð stop by on Christmas Eve to give books and receive distilled beverages in place of wassail.

But it wasn’t all bourbon, books, and brotherhood of man. I had time to create and contemplate, both for myself and for Indicate Marketing. We’re now past the first quarter of the 21st century. Three-quarters to go. And if I want to make the most of what I’ve got left then I’ll need more than vitamins and venture capital. Quality, not quantity. That means I need some good New Year’s resolutions.

Less Inspection, More Introspection

“Judge not, that ye be not judged,” quoting Jesus via Matthew. Whatever your perspective (pro or con) on the poor, the meek, and the merciful, let us all consider ourselves overly critical of others without considering ourselves.

I blame social media, but I won’t blame social media. Enough with the blame! I want to observe the awful world and make it better by making myself better. To lead by example. To show, not tell. And while I’ve never been too tangled in the world wide web, I’ll let other flies get eaten by the SEO spiders, while I soar in the moment of myself. “Look at the birds of the air…”

More Construction, Less Obstruction

You’d think that the opposite of construction is destruction. Not true. As Elie Wiesel famously said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Well, in order to create we must destroy, but neither is possible when tied up in committee, bureaucracy, and red tape. And that’s just my neurological predisposition.

Last year (I’m talking 2024) a local calligraphy studio ran a holiday card contest. I saw the announcement after Thanksgiving, and began to conceive of a design, but I quickly talked myself out of the contest based on work, life, priorities…the details. I was spinning wheels with the car in park.

This past year (2025) I put my eye to the horizon and my foot on the throttle. They ran the contest. I saw the announcement after Thanksgiving, and spent time to reach my concept. I submitted the week before Christmas, and learned last week that I took second Honorable Mention! I was not sure how calligraphy in watercolor would turn out, and then reverse it by hand for the back of the card…but I did not sweat the details. You can judge for yourself.

Less Monologue, More Dialogue

Mind you, creativity only goes so far in a popularity contest. My wife posted about the holiday card on Facebook, and so began a grassroots effort to support my submission. I owe my success to her, and anybody else who voted for my design.

But whatever the vote, or reason behind it, people had the freedom of choice. And choice is a threatened species in the 21st century. We need to self-reflect, we need to self-express, but if this world is going to get any better it also needs to apply these choices with a healthy dose of listening.

Too many people want their own island, and modern technology lets each of us think we have it. But we don’t. That is the playground of poets…

It is a poet’s privilege and fate
To fall enamoured of the one Muse
Who variously haunts this island earth
-Robert Graves

…and the rest of us need to get along and save what’s left for the future instead of squander the present. Be introspective. Be creative. But connect your ears to your mouth and ask people what they need in order to learn what they value.

More Philanthropy, Less Misanthropy

I have a healthy number of memberships. The YMCA. The MFA. NARM. I also participate in charity when the opportunity presents itself for the benefit of those who need more than I want.

I want to support the missions of those that provide value beyond money. I want to hate the close-minded greed of others. But I can’t open minds with hate. My mom used to say you should not assume, because “to ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME.” In the first part of the first episode of The Future Indicative, Matthew Josefowicz explained how building relationships doesn’t start with your innate value but the inherent needs of others.

…if you’d asked people what they wanted, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to articulate that. So doing the research in your primary target, doing ground up research, in your primary target market, not making assumptions about what’s good for them or not trying to figure out what you want to build and why that’s good for them. But really starting from your target audience and saying, What is it that they need in the area that I’m prepared to fulfill?

I’m ready to ask that question in 2026. Our mission remains the same: to show what great narratives accomplish for your industry. With a back catalogue of creativity and conversations we now turn to asking what is your area of need? And how can I help?

Meanwhile the platform remains free. I’ve set up a subscription page for those willing and able to support this platform as a public service, but I intend to keep everything public. And if we continue to build community, who knows. Maybe I can offer tote bags like PBS. Wouldn’t that be a cup o’ kindness yet…

For auld lang syne.

In Related News…

Speaking of charities (and people named Matthew), The Future Indicative begins 2026 examining the world of nonprofits. Next week’s episode features Matt Burriesci, Executive Director of the Providence Athenæum. Matt has spent his whole career working with nonprofits, and advocates for their support as their services provide for our common wealth. At the end of 2025, Matt noted some troubling numbers.

I was reading the SMU DataArts Report from the Rhode Island Foundation that details the crisis in the cultural sector. You always have to be careful with statistics because very few of these studies are conducted with real statistical rigor. But in this case, I think it’s broadly accurate.

It reported that 70% of cultural institutions in Rhode Island ended fiscal year ’23 with a deficit which sort of comports with what’s happened all over the country. American Alliance of Museums and TCG both had reports saying that 70-80% of theaters and museums in the country entered fiscal year ’25 with a deficit, and we’re already halfway through ’26, which will end June 30th.

There’s a massive, massive crisis in the cultural sector. Sort of the largest in my lifetime, and I’ve lived through a lot of them. I started my career right after Mapplethorpe, and then the dot-com crash came, and then the great financial crisis, and then obviously COVID. And this is orders of magnitude worse than all of them.

If you’re looking for a resolution, support your local nonprofit! And if you want to get ahead of our conversation, then consider these sources:

EBITA

Letter from former president Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey (6 January 1816)

“People will come” speech from the movie Field of Dreams

Gene Roddenberry quotes

“Elementary, Dear Data,” from Star Trek: The Next Generation

Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter and the Great Books of the Western World, by Matt Burriesci

Plutarch’s Lives

PEN/Faulkner

The Gates Foundation

Providence Athenæum

Wassail!

Alex Effgen

You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough
Someday you say, you’ll have your fun, when you’re a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair
-Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)

Last week I received my Duolingo 2025 Year in Review.

• 33,430 total XP (whatever that means)

• 494 days in a row

• 2,029 minutes spent learning Latin, French, Spanish, and chess

I’m a top 4% learner on the app. Not that I’m bragging. I’ve had the time to improve my linguistic limits in 2025, as well as SPECIALIZE Indicate Marketing: committing to a weekly newsletter, and delivering a semi-regular podcast. I don’t know if it’s answered a need for you (yet) but it’s sure delivered value to me. The exhilarating tightrope walk of planning, learning, interviewing, editing, writing, scrambling, and then publishing something…thoughtful…and relevant to the week, but also evergreen. Like an uncut Christmas tree.

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

This is the time many of our apps look back at the year that was. Spotify’s Wrapped. Tidal’s Rewind. And a host of others, because imitation is not just a form of flattery but excellent business. I won’t yuk anyone’s yum. Nostalgia is the pleasure and sadness of what was and is no longer. It combines the Greek νόστος (nóstos), a Homeric word meaning “homecoming,” and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning “pain.” And Homer’s Odyssey is chock-full of nostalgia–confronting the impact and aftermath of the Trojan War–to such an extent that at one point Helen (of Troy) has to drug the wine of everyone present to forget the sorrows brought up by storytelling. So much for processing grief.

Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink

I don’t Spotify. I listen to WWOZ when I work. It’s a community jazz and heritage radio station out of New Orleans. And they celebrated their 45th anniversary last week on December 4. They played 7-inch New Orleans vinyl 45s to commemorate the occasion. To quote my son out of context, “That sounds like magic!” And it was. I love that humid historical gumbo of French, Spanish, African, Italian, and English. I love the food. I love the music. I love the people. I love the magic.

And like all magic it’s transient. Fleeting. Evanescent. But New Orleans finds a way to keep making it. New Orleans is a city underwater that refuses to leave. And it only closes for Ash Wednesday. I want my music curated by dedicated experts not algorithms. Again, no yuks to your yums. I’m sure the machines find music to suit your motives. But I want to be informed by another person’s experience. This one DJ plays often ends his weekly set of country, rhythm and blues with the same song. I was not familiar the first time I heard it. The opening verse leads this newsletter, and the lines of the chorus are the subheadings.

The years go by, as quickly as a wink

The song as broadcast on WWOZ is performed by Todd Snider, and the arrangement is his voice, an acoustic guitar, a backing vocal, and a little harmonica. It’s simple, unadorned, and feels like it was recorded in one take by a busker.

But simple is not the only way to play the song. A quick search on Apple Music (what have you) and you can find over fifteen different recordings, arranged in different genres. You want big band? Bluegrass? Zydeco? Ska? Doris freakin’ Day!?! The song is flexible enough to hang different verses with different implications based on the singer’s range and intentions (I link to Louis Prima up at the top to give you another taste) but they all boil down to one takeaway, and it’s the title and refrain.

To my ear, Snider’s version gets it right. Less is more. Nothing is promised. And we must appreciate this moment or else be haunted. Todd Snider just passed a month ago. Another artist lost too soon, and a reminder to take this time with serious levity. You can’t be nostalgic if you live in the now.

Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

I’ll be taking the rest of this year off. Enjoy your break from me. I’ll be back in 2026 inspired to interview, edit, write, scramble, and publish something thoughtful and relevant to both of us. I’m open to new creative outlets as I finally finished a series of three paintings I started last year, and could not find the right colors until a friend gave me some perspective a few weeks ago. One of the three paintings is featured here. A study from the Ipswich Old North Burying Ground.

In Related News…

BUT DON’T GO YET! The Future Indicative is here! My last podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business for 2025! Episode Four explores the possibilities of payments. Steve Estrada will close this year contemplating crypto and the community it can democratize. Thank you for listening!

The Future Indicative, Ep 4 Part 1

The Future Indicative, Ep 4 Part 2

Get busy living in 2026!

Alex Effgen

For The Future Indicative, Ep 4 Part 1

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome back to The Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 we’re getting comfortable with Crypto.

STEVE ESTRADA

“Crypto is at a space now where you would’ve looked at e-commerce 25 years ago. The idea of putting your credit card onto the internet to buy something, there were plenty of people who would say, “There’s no way I’m ever going to do that.” And I think that when you look at crypto now, people go, “I don’t even know what that is.”

In a couple of years, whether they know what it is or not, the likelihood is a lot of their financial transactions are going to be built on crypto rails.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Steve Estrada, an attorney looking to build community with crypto and democratized finance on the digital ledger. This democracy is built on access and opportunity. Transparency and transaction speed. And while decentralized finance (or DeFi) is gaining traction in emerging markets, it is the traditional finance player (or TradFi ) who is jumping into crypto ETFs, digital asset treasuries, crypto-backed loans, and a number of other offerings that never would have been contemplated even a few years ago.

Back in 1993, kinda before the internet, Sly Stallone starred in an action movie called Demolition Man. It was set in Los Angeles, 2032. And they had this plot point where Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars, and now all restaurants were Taco Bell. And it was played for laughs because Taco Bell was now fancy, with bougie food and fancy dress. They even had a piano player!

Less than two years later, a store called Amazon began to sell books online without a brick and mortar. Only books. And now the founder of that bookstore builds rocket ships, we have no more brick and mortar bookstores, and you know the rest. Taco Bell is now fancy.

But that’s not all? Before nationwide online gambling, DraftKings was a site for fantasy sports. And Netflix sent you scratched DVDs in the mail before completely changing the model of how entertainment gets distributed to your television, and recently buying Warner Brothers for as much as $83 billion. So maybe it’s not so far fetched for Steve to say:

STEVE ESTRADA

“I think that in a few years, call it maybe 2027, mainstream users are gonna look at crypto in 2025 the way that people looked at e-commerce in 2000. I think that there is a sense of inevitability.”

ALEX EFFGEN

But for that inevitability to happen this transparent, decentralized, digital currency needs to be SECURE.

Part 1 showcased what makes it special, and how it gets sold as a viable alternative to heritage finance. In Part 2, our security requires stability.

STEVE ESTRADA

“Stablecoins are tokens that are pegged to the US dollar or another fiat currency—the pound, the euro, what have you—or they’re pegged to another asset class. And by being pegged to something that is stable, or more stable, there’s far less value fluctuation. They’re far less volatile…They enable instant settlement, and cheaper cross border movement of value. And now that you’re starting to see legislation and clarity around how they’re going to be regulated with something like the GENIUS Act here in the US, the stable market has clear rules, which is accelerating that real world integration into payment structures and payment networks globally. So I don’t think there’s any surprise that the first crypto law to be signed into law in the US is focused on stablecoins.

There’s big players out there already: Circle and Tether, MasterCard, Visa–we have to get into stablecoins–JP Morgan, Stripe. Stripe just recently started accepting stablecoins for subscription payments.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Once you get big players to the table, the stakes become bigger. Your currency might be stable, but you still need to prevent market instability.

STEVE ESTRADA

“We’re talking about global finance. And we’re talking about a new interoperable way of handling global finance. And as finance becomes more digital, as everything is, we need to do our best to ensure that there isn’t another market crash, like 1929.

That crash was largely the product of opacity, excessive leverage, and a concentration of power.

When we talk about crypto regulation, it’s not the idea that there should be no regulation. It needs a different kind of regulation. A regulation that makes sense for the technology. There should be regulation that focuses on consumer protection, anti-money laundering, and market integrity. Those things still matter. Absolutely. But we need to embrace transparency where it improves market integrity, while building smart guardrails for a new system.

If regulations get it wrong and hamper this decentralized system, where people control their own assets, control the decisions that they make, if we hamper that, we just end up back in a scenario where control was concentrated in the hands of a few instead of the many.

And whether it’s finance or anything else, we’ve seen how that plays out over the course of history.”

ALEX EFFGEN

There’s another element of security we need to consider. In my Cybersecurity episode, Tom Clapper talked a bit about the “CIA triad” of cybersecurity. The first letter was C, for confidentiality.You don’t want people to see your legal documents, your medical records, etc. Well, that et cetera includes finance. If blockchain is a transparent open ledger, then do we need to expose our entire financial lives for this crypto democracy to exist? How will privacy be incorporated into a system that is transparent by nature?

STEVE ESTRADA

“Transparency has value but there has to be a layer of privacy to it. People aren’t going to be willing to put their whole life up on chain. And so how is privacy going to be built into this system?

The technology that is really driving it is something that’s known as zero-knowledge proofs or ZK proofs.

And what this technology does is it abstracts out a lot of the information and it allows you to prove something without revealing all the information behind it. And so, in a way, it can prove that you’re a citizen of this country without needing to reveal where you live, right? It validates information: the only piece of information that it needs to.

So if you’re going to scale privacy with features that satisfy compliance needs, that are needed for mainstream uses like retail, this idea of ZK proofs is really what’s going to be necessary for the whole industry to reach the level of mainstream adoption.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Steve, you’re moving from SECURE to SCALE already? Boy this industry really does move fast! But before we go, I want to pause on zero. That’s not the first time we’ve heard the word zero used for protection. Mr Tom Clapper mentioned:

TOM CLAPPER

“What zero trust says is if I exploit one single service or one single threat vector into your network, you then have to exploit the next one, the next one, the next one. You can’t just get in and then have unfettered access. You will have to do it over and over and over again.

And they do that by micro segmenting data and services. They’re all literally independent of themselves. So zero trust is coming. It’s very important because it makes it a lot harder to fully exploit something or somebody. And AI and machine learning will help make that a reality as well.”

ALEX EFFGEN

The power of zero! Tom said it was coming, and that AI and machine learning would help it along by removing the people from the processes. Steve has also noted the speed and savings of crypto lies in the removal of people from the processes. Seems like we’re missing a suspect from this interrogation. And its initials are A.I.

STEVE ESTRADA

“If you look at crypto and AI as these new ways of doing things, crypto adoption has been much slower than AI adoption.

And why is that? Crypto…You’re talking about people’s money. And people are a lot less willing to try something that they don’t fundamentally understand, or something that is new with their money.

And so because it feels much more conversational than transactional, that’s why you’re seeing things like ChatGPT and Agentic AI having this adoption curve that is much faster than you do with crypto.

Now, how do we ensure that those LLMs that are the foundation of this AI system, how do we make sure that we can audit it? That we know that these models are using true information?”

ALEX EFFGEN

Lord, between deep fakes and hallucinations and slop I have no idea. How do we keep AI and LLMs in check so we can keep human society in balance?

STEVE ESTRADA

“I think we need to look to blockchain for AI. The best way to ensure that the information that all these AI agents and all these systems are going to be built on top of these LLMs is true, and is transparent, and isn’t held by centralized gatekeepers who control our information and therefore in many ways can end up controlling our lives, is that it could run on blockchain.

And if we can run AI on blockchain as a public utility as opposed to a centralized economic model, I think that’s what allows AI to reach its full potential while giving us the best chance of de-risking all the potential negative applications. That’s how we avoid Skynet.”

ALEX EFFGEN

If we’re talking dystopia, then utopia must also be possible. In Part 1, Steve talked about scratching the surface of crypto adoption with a 10X increase in five years to 700 million digital asset owners. But how does crypto go from 700 million users to a billion users, to 5 billion users? Is it just privacy and ZK proofs that will help SCALE crypto?

STEVE ESTRADA

“You need that regulatory clarity. You need clear guidance for the builders, the software engineers, building this application layer, this composable application layer, that DeFi will run on. And you need consumer protection. You need stronger marketing. And you need a better UX, a UX that feels a greater level of comfort.

You’re starting to see that from the idea of a crypto wallet, which is a standalone application that you’ve downloaded to these smart wallets. You know you’re going to start to see entertainment products, financial products that people don’t even realize that they’re running on blockchain rails. And then you’re going to see a cross-border payment that was costing me $7 is now costing me $0.07.

So regulatory clarity, clear user experience, and a trusted privacy system that, again, most likely will be built on this ZK-proof technology. That’s how we get to expansion and mainstream use.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Regulation, UX, privacy…All that makes sense. Anything else we should know?

STEVE ESTRADA

“If you take some of the bigger, more well-known chains like Ethereum or Solana, how do we scale these systems? And in one way, it comes down to the concept of staking.

A lot of chains are built on this proof-of-stake concept. You have validators, right, people who have put up a stake, to run a validator node. And those validator nodes are how you prove the veracity of these transactions. And the more validators that you have in a network, the greater the network can be, the larger the network can be.

And so I’m going to stake my ETH, my SOL, my whatever the native token of that blockchain is, in order to prove that these transactions are correct. And if that is the case, you get rewards. You earn rewards for your efforts to validate.

Conversely, if you get it wrong, there’s a concept called slashing, where you lose your stake, right? So validators have a financial stake in getting this right.

Now, anyone can participate in this staking model. You can do so by having the computing power yourself to do it, or by delegating your stake. And so by staking my tokens, that leads to a larger, more secure, decentralized network. The overall community, the overall system, the overall ecosystem benefits from that.”

ALEX EFFGEN

We began this episode of Crypto talking about the significance and applications relevant to insurance in 2015. Ten years later and this normie’s head is spinning with staking, decentralized finance, prediction markets, ZK proofs, stablecoins, and digital asset treasuries. We stand still, and the world keeps turning. As it did for those who lived through the Industrial Revolution.

STEVE ESTRADA

“If we think about going back 150 years, the building of the railroads, laying telephone line, or running cable under the Atlantic for wire. We should understand that blockchain can be that digital infrastructure, and it can be done in a way where we all get to participate in it. It can become a public utility that we all have a say in.

I think one of the things that everyone’s concerned about is these massive AI data centers: the amount of energy, the amount of water that they are taking, the heat that they generate, and the cooling cost and what it means from an environmental perspective to run information systems in the way that the modern world is going to require.

It’s important to understand that you can distribute those energy needs across a decentralized infrastructure that everyone can participate and benefit from. It becomes a flywheel of creating the public infrastructure system that the digital world will run on, in this proof-of-stake system where you, the public, benefit from it. It is the democratization of information and utility in a way that hasn’t been available before.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Thank you for joining us on the Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. Our mission is to show what great narratives accomplish for your industry. As mentioned before, the views expressed here are solely our own, but we share them for public benefit. You can find a growing number of them at IndicateMarketing.com. Let’s explore how our humanity can help drive your business growth and market positioning. We appreciate your patronage, and continued support.

For The Future Indicative, Ep 4 Part 2

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Crypto.

STEVE ESTRADA

“I think that it’s important at the top, we should distinguish between blockchain and crypto.

Blockchain is an underlying technology. It’s a decentralized, digital ledger that records data securely over a network of computers. It’s an infrastructure product. Blockchain can be used for finance, AI, supply chain, healthcare, voting. You can build a lot on top of it.

Crypto is a financial application layer that’s built on top of that technology—that technology allows for transparent transactions and a programmable, decentralized model. And when you talk about decentralized finance, or DeFi, it enables transparent transactions. And it eliminates the reliance for these traditional intermediaries and gatekeepers.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Steve Estrada, an attorney who has spent the last 10 years living in the world of emerging technology. And what a decade it’s been….not just for him but for all of us.

While the first Bitcoin transaction took place almost 17 years ago, I didn’t learn about “cryptographic currency” until 2015, when I helped produce a report on its possible significance and applications relevant to insurance.

Ten years later and the applications of blockchain and crypto reach well beyond insurance into our everyday lives. But the future has not yet arrived for crypto the way it has for AI, and so I wanted to talk to someone in the industry about our perceptions and its possibilities.

If you watch The Weather Channel, then you’re familiar with the name Jim Cantore. Cantore is a meteorologist that The Weather Channel sends to severe weather events, and the audience witnesses first hand their impact as Jim stands against hurricane winds and high tides.

Let me tell you a little bit about Steve Estrada. Looking to apply his law degree to something different, Steve joined a plucky young workspace company called WeWork as their first IP Counsel. That was before the company claimed to be a lifestyle, and the future subject of documentaries.

Then at the start of the pandemic Steve joined a growing connected fitness company called Peloton, and was front row when the death of a fictional “Sex and the City” character led to a drop in the company’s very real stock.

A couple years after that he entered the world of crypto to help balance innovation with regulation in a rapidly changing Web3 landscape.

When I tell you that I think of Steve Estrada as the Jim Cantore of emerging tech, it’s because these three stops in his career are publicly disruptive highly visible industries. But Steve frames it differently.

STEVE ESTRADA

“I really like to focus on using technology in ways that actually bring us together, whether it’s WeWork in co-working space or Peloton streaming fitness content built around a community, or now in crypto and leveraging technology to create a sense of community.”

ALEX EFFGEN

I want to make a lawyer joke, but I know Steve incredibly well, and he’s earnest. He’s a lawyer who’s interested in the communities that develop in nascent tech verticals. And when it comes to crypto, he wants to think philosophically.

STEVE ESTRADA

“Philosophically, crypto can democratize finance. Anyone can participate in the risks and the rewards of global finance, in a way that was previously only available to institutional players. It brings yield-generating opportunities to people who previously may not have even been able to get a bank account.”

ALEX EFFGEN

But it’s not just philosophy.

STEVE ESTRADA

“From a practical and technology perspective, it’s just faster, cheaper, and more secure than traditional systems. Transactions can settle instantly on a 24-7 basis without cross-border constraints. And that can happen at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Now to be clear, I don’t crypto. But I know plenty of people who started as newbies and now have diverse portfolios of cryptocurrencies. I’m willing to accept the impression of crypto as a fringe market impacted by lazy reporting, a handful of bad actors, and a regulatory environment that has been conservative and hostile to what’s new. But that’s starting to change.

STEVE ESTRADA

“You’re really starting to see that from a numbers perspective. Just five years ago, 65 million people globally owned some form of digital asset. That number now in 2025 is 700 million. That’s over a 10x increase in a five-year period. You’re looking at an industry that has somewhere between 40 and 70 million active users every month. That’s a 10 million increase from just a year ago.

And so you think, Wow, that’s a huge increase. But 700 million people is still only a fraction of the population. We are just scratching the surface.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Let’s scratch that surface with a couple more S words. If every business must address my four S in business, how does crypto address:

SPECIALIZE: What is this?

SELL: Who needs this?

SECURE: What can disrupt this?

SCALE: How do we expand this?

These four categories turn disruption into industry. Steve’s provided us with the current definitions and components. He’s outlined the philosophy and practicality. And now he needs to explain prediction markets.

STEVE ESTRADA

“Prediction markets…these are platforms where people are buying and selling contracts tied to the outcome of future events. Whether it’s elections, sporting events, economic indicators, anything that hasn’t happened yet.

And they differ from gambling in the sense that they move on coordinated crowdsourcing and collective market dynamics of what people think is going to happen. They’re not based on fixed odds set by a centralized bookmaker.”

ALEX EFFGEN

It’s not gambling, but they sound like prop bets. Proposition bets are made regarding the occurrence or non-occurrence of an event not directly affecting a game’s outcome. The length of the National Anthem before the start of a game, or what team wins a coin toss are examples of common prop bets.

But prediction markets SPECIALIZE by not being centralized. And their value comes from crowdsourcing.

STEVE ESTRADA

“We’re starting to see that they’re more accurate barometers of what’s going to happen. A great example of this was the New Jersey governor’s election from a couple of weeks ago. The pundits in polling saw it as a neck-and-neck race between Mickie Sherrill and Jack Ciattarelli. They said Sherrill had maybe a 1% edge going in.

Meanwhile, if you were looking at the prediction markets, they were showing Sherrill as having an 80% chance of winning. Very different from what the pundits and experts were saying. In the end, she won by 13 points. A much larger margin than experts predicted. And that’s not a one-off.

You’re starting to see Google and Yahoo looking to integrate these prediction markets. DraftKings. I may not have the numbers exactly right, but the bigger ones out there are Polymarket and Kalshi. And a couple of months ago, Kalshi was looking at a $2 billion valuation. I think right now they’re looking, just a few months later, at a $10 billion valuation.

The technology in the industry allows for these platforms to dynamically move based on that crowdsourced information in a decentralized way that doesn’t rely on those centralized bookmakers. You’re able to do this on these decentralized rails, these platforms like Polymarket who are running decentralized platforms and putting up these scenarios. They’re not putting odds up, they’re putting scenarios up and people are buying and selling into these contracts and moving the odds based out of a decentralized model that doesn’t rely on a centralized actor to set the odds, set the market. The market moves itself.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Centralized vs decentralized came up a lot in our conversation. A centralized infrastructure comes with conventional safeguards of protocols and people. But conventional safeguards cost money, and they take time to process. Decentralizing reduces and removes these impediments, to attract the attention of new markets.

STEVE ESTRADA

“Instead of paying 3% to 5% or more for a transaction, that’s going to settle cross border three days from now, you’re paying in some cases as low as a 10th of a percent. And these transactions are settling instantaneously.

So if you’re a small business, that margin is huge for you. Going from 3% to 0.1%, that’s huge. You’re saving all those costs. Instead of those going to credit card fees, that’s money that for a small business makes a huge difference.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Decentralizing transactions removes the financial borders between countries. That means crypto provides value to emerging markets. Money sent from the US or EU to developing countries gets there faster without the high transaction costs. And Steve says that value not lost to intermediaries goes to the people who need it the most.

STEVE ESTRADA

“My wife is from England. When she moved here, she would not have been able to rent a car because she did not have a credit profile in the US. Someone in that situation who doesn’t have the credit profile because they haven’t lived here long enough to be able to rent a car.

What if they needed to get somewhere? If you look at where crypto is going, you’re starting to see companies offering crypto-backed credit cards. Someone coming from a developing country who moves to the US—maybe they couldn’t get a bank account—but by being online, being part of a Discord group, having a little bit of Bitcoin or ETH or SOL or what have you, they were able to get into DeFi and into the crypto world and starting to build assets.

Now you have some of these assets that you can then use as the collateral for a crypto-backed credit card. They can come here and almost instantaneously have access to a crypto-backed credit card built on an airdrop from a project that they were following on Discord. And now that person has the ability to go and rent that car.

And they didn’t need the traditional large-scale banking system to tell them yes or no, whether or not you have access to a car that gets you where you need to go. In an increasingly global world, something like that is a perfect example of the value that crypto brings to people who were debanked otherwise.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of The Future Indicative’s Crypto episode. In Part 2 we’ll explore the role AI can play in securing crypto (and vice versa). And how a combination of regulation, user experience, and privacy will help SCALE this decentralized product.

While opinions expressed are solely our own, like democratized finance anyone can participate in the risks and the rewards of further discussion. Let’s eliminate the reliance on traditional gatekeepers and share the wealth you find in this topic. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we value your time.

To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
-Satan, Paradise Lost: Book 1 (1674 version), lns 262-263

A year ago I attended MJBizCon. It was the 13th annual global cannabis business conference and tradeshow in Las Vegas. The 14th annual meeting starts today, and I am forced to reflect on the state of an industry growing stale from stalled momentum. But let us not consider the Las Vegas Convention Center half full or half empty. As they say in China, “机遇与挑战并存” (“opportunities and challenges coexist”). Let us consider the circumstances and evidence before we cast judgement.

A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

It was just over 18 months ago when I wrote my first article tied to President Biden’s public stand with the Justice Department to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug under federal law. Still controlled, just not lumped in with heavyweights like heroin and LSD. I had a personal and professional interest on the topic. One of my sons developed a severe epilepsy diagnosis ten years ago next month, and while it took a year to regulate his daily seizures with the right pharmaceuticals, one of the components that re-established balance was medically-approved state-regulated non-intoxicating cannabinoids.

Pediatric cases should require scrutiny, but the technology in place (or lack thereof) belabored the bureaucratic application for his approval and neurological stability. And it got me thinking about a baby industry growing beyond medical to recreational use state by state with 21st-century technology to inventory, extract, market, and distribute a product trying to catch up with socially “approved” industries like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. If we’re saving lives with cannabis then should we treat it like a Cheech & Chong sketch?

What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least

Following a comparison of cannabis rescheduling to online gambling, I then looked at cannabis supply chain (through the lens of Jaws), and self-identification in an industry determined to stay adolescent. All of these led to a press pass to attend (and represent) last year’s MJBizCon in my previous role as managing editor of the Datos Insights Banking & Payments Bulletin.

The second term of Donald Trump was one month away, but no one could foretell what might happen when two things would need to take place for any progress in American investment: federal rescheduling and SAFE banking.

What I said then remains the same today. Cannabis is still a Schedule I drug. Rescheduling could provide immediate tax relief through the elimination of IRS 280E tax restrictions. And what neither Biden nor Trump have delivered beyond public deliberating may finally get its day in court. The Supreme Court. As they determine this month to hear a constitutional challenge on federal cannabis prohibition.

Both SAFE (Secure and Fair Enforcement) and SAFER (Secure And Fair Enforcement Regulation) Banking Acts cannot get past Congress to provide protections for federally regulated financial institutions. Without a safe harbor for banks, credit unions, and other financial services providers to serve these state-licensed entities, financial institutions and payment providers won’t engage with the industry in the United States.

Mind you, these card networks and international banks can be used to purchase medical AND recreational cannabis in Canada. But their US absence leaves an industry expected to reach almost $45 billion domestically without digital transactions between the consumer and retailer to alleviate the handling of cash. I didn’t like coming home with Saturday night tips when I waited tables back in the day, and I’m not a $45-billion industry.

We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce

Rescheduling could offer short‑term operational benefits, and SAFER Banking could provide longer‑term structural improvements in capital access and payment processing. The question is whether we as a nation are mature enough to handle it. I’ve spent the last 10 years attending conferences for financial services and insurance. For reasons of socio-political advantage, those conferences remain white and male (mostly). MJBizCon and others like it are a spectrum of race, gender, and class. Walking the exhibit halls and attending the panels provide perspective to foster social justice and equity as much as SAFE banking.

And yet we backslide. As we confront new problems that come with social adoption, the impulse is to prohibit instead of educate. Re-criminalizing did wonders for alcohol consumption in 1919. Can’t wait to see what it could do in 2026 for cannabis.

In Other News…

Speaking of education, I wanted to learn about another new industry that can disrupt society as we know it: crypto. It’s more than just currency, and my guest to tell us all about it in next week’s episode of The Future Indicative is Steve Estrada. Steve joined the industry a couple years ago and has been exploring its potential to build community ever since. Steve is concerned about the barriers we build, and never get beyond, without embracing change and addressing its unintended consequences.

The last interesting thing that I’ve read is actually something that I’m reading right now. It’s a book called Notes on Being a Man, by Scott Galloway. It’s a book about the role of young men in society. There is a growing trend of teenagers to men in their early 20s—the greatest number out of the workforce in a very long time, a lower number of young men going to college, getting an education. Alarming rates of suicide or death by sadness–whether it’s alcohol or drugs or whatever. And it’s looking at what happened to young men in this country. Why are they falling to the wayside. And it’s not just about fair and equal gender roles, and women being in a different position than they were 30 years ago. It’s why are young men falling aside. And the results are suicide, or unemployment, or these incels. And as we both have young boys, it’s obviously a topic that’s really near and dear to our hearts.

One of the primary drivers is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs—whether through outsourcing or automation. You’re seeing a lot of those jobs that gave middle-class men an opportunity to have a middle-class lifestyle are gone. And you take that with rising housing costs and everything, there’s a lack of a future. Combine that with algorithms saying, You can have an online life. And disappearing into a phone as opposed to getting out into the world—getting young men to live life, get out there, go do things.

Forty percent of guys under 25 have never approached a woman and asked them out. And you gotta go do it. You gotta go do things and live life. And so how do we take these young men and reframe the idea of protector and provider in the modern society?

Provider means, if your wife is the better breadwinner, stepping into a role of provider in other ways. And a protector doesn’t just mean chivalrously protecting your partner. It’s protecting society: being a Little League coach, getting out there, being part of a community that is raising healthy young men in a modern society that has changed in a lot of ways.

I’m just getting into it, but it’s a problem that needs to be addressed. And it does have some parallels to what we’re going to talk about, because a lot of it has to do with technology and the world changing from traditional norms.

Can’t wait to share that next week. A few other resources from that episode include:

Jim Cantore’s Top Three Hurricanes

The Spectacular Rise and Fall of WeWork

Chris Noth Teams Up With Ryan Reynolds For Peloton Ad | THR News

Taco Bell Demolition Man 1993 Ad

Enjoy!

Alex Effgen

“For in Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America.” Benjamin Franklin to his daughter, Sarah Bache, January 1784

It’s Thanksgiving Week in America. I spent the weekend preparing the house (and family) for more family. No one wants to work the three days before travel, invasion, diplomacy, and gluttony. So instead of what you’ve come to expect, I’m providing my thanks for your time engaging Indicate Marketing with something more colorful. A bird of a different feather.

Ara macao

When I began this intellectual exercise I did not want to parrot what others have parroted from other parrots. Slop on the AI and it’s difficult to pierce the social white noise with what’s original. Every typed newsletter comes from me. Every produced podcast comes from me. I have not used AI for anything thus far under the banner of Indicate Marketing, and as God (or whatever) as my witness, I shall reward your time with humanity. Content will be built by humans for humans. And should there come a day when robots will make the lift lighter, they will be employed on the back end in robotic capacities, leaving us humans to think loftier thoughts.

Trochilus polytmus

Time is never on our side. It’s very easy to flit here and there, collecting what you can, burning calories along the way. Actions speak louder than words, but actions without purpose? Our mission is to show what great narratives accomplish for your products and services. As long as I keep that in mind, then I’ll never miss the mark (hamartia) providing catharsis for your business purification (Thank you, Aristotle).

Cyanocitta cristata

If the parrot talks too much, and the hummingbird flies too much, then what bird should we pattern ourselves after? The intelligent, imitative, innovative, self-starting, bad-tempered blue jay. Native to North America, they compete with squirrels for every acorn, and when provided an opportunity to collaborate, create new types of birds. The grue jay!?! Seriously!?!

Mark Twain shared an anecdote about blue jays in A Tramp Abroad, his best-selling book from its first edition in 1880 until his death thirty years later:

There’s more to a blue-jay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creature; and mind you, whatever a blue-jay feels, he can put into language. And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book-talk…

May Indicate Marketing be your blue jay of business. We’ve already got the color.

In Other News…

Everything about Thanksgiving is made up. Marketing to reinforce the American myth. The truth is out there, and so much more interesting. For your edutainment please consider:

“A historian explains how the Pilgrims took over Thanksgiving – and who has been erased,” by Prof Thomas Tweed

“The Plymouth Hero You Should Really Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving,” by John Hanc

A relation or iournall of the beginning and proceedings of the English plantation setled at Plimoth in New England, by certaine English aduenturers both merchants and others… by William Bradford

“Unsullied by Falsehood: Ben Franklin and the Turkey,” by Emily Sneff

All birds in this post were painted by me. A man’s gotta have his hobbies.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Alex Effgen

“Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.” Andrew Carnegie, The Empire of Business

A couple weeks back, Indicate Marketing made its first dollar. My friend, David O’Connell, hung up his own shingle to support commercial banking lenders, eponymously called O’Connell Lending Insights. David has past experience as a loan officer, underwriter, and credit analyst, and applies his subject matter expertise to data sets to help clients (lenders and their vendors) understand the highs, lows, dips, and turns of the commercial lending rollercoaster. David is very smart, and needed a template in which to pour his perspective that was audience friendly, user facile, and on brand to OLI. I was honored to put my efforts to the task, and when it helped net his next client, the check was in the mail (time worked plus surprise bonus).

Yes, we could have transacted business digitally. We both have online software to send the invoice and receive the payment, but I asked (and he enthusiastically approved) sending me a check, so I could preserve the moment in the photograph attached to this post. I needed the moment to matter.

But not be too revealing. My wife took a couple of pics to ensure my fingers carefully concealed OLI’s routing and account information at the bottom of the check. David was enthusiastic that I share the photo online, and I was eager to preserve our friendship by protecting his CIA: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Confidentiality

Thanks to the internet, we all live double lives. We have our physical life, and often we share that life with an online spirit: in commerce, communication, and connection. For better and worse we have extended the boundaries of our interactions across the globe, and that distance has exposed us to a final C: crime.

It takes another C to protect our identities. In The Incredibles, Elastigirl explains to her kids in the immediate emergency of rescuing Mr Incredible that “your identity is your most valuable possession.” They protect it by putting on masks to prevent identification and protect their confidentiality.

Of course, we find out in an earlier scene that her husband and their father, Mr Incredible, revealed his real identity to the bad guys through technology, therefore exposing them all to the central conflict of the movie, which concludes with their house and all of their physical property turned into a fiery wreck by the antagonist’s plane.

Like supers in The Incredibles we all wear masks in our physical lives, but if we don’t wear them online, then each of our lives (physical and online) are exposed to…well, not giant metal robots, but our potential ruin.

Integrity

Integrity (and a lack thereof) has been in the news a lot in recent times. The quality of our political integrity can have a direct impact on the condition of our data integrity. But in the absence of morality we have passwords, multi-factor authentication, and biometrics to prevent bad actors from acting bad.

Oxford’s earliest instance of the word integrity comes from around 1450, borrowed from Latin and meaning untouched. It is used to identify the Virgin Mary remaining…well…untouched:

When he was borne savyng / his moders integritee (When he was born saving his mother’s integrity)

And what are passwords, multi-factor authentication, and biometrics if not modern miracles keeping us chaste?

Availability

This past weekend my wife gave me a list of groceries to buy at our local big box store, and she downloaded an app on my phone for me to use their coupons. “How does this work?” I asked her. I am not a luddite; just intolerant of every app being different enough to make them all counter intuitive. “Just ask the clerk to do it. I’ve clipped all the relevant coupons. They can do the rest.”

I’m surprised that the Murphy in Murphy’s Law does not come from the earliest days of science. Dating to the 1940s, we’re less than a century from the concise expression: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” With my cart full of groceries, I opened the app and to my horror, instead of clipped coupons I had a message which said, “We’re Sorry. You have no clipped offers.”

I showed the clerk my phone and said, “I saw them when I entered the building. Do you have any idea where they are now?”

“Maybe you used them,” the clerk declared, looking at the impatient line behind me.

Not interested in fighting for a handful of savings, I snapped a screenshot of the message and saved the battle for my wife who lives to talk to managers. Wouldn’t you know it, the coupon screen reappeared once in the parking lot and the cell towers could triangulate my position.

“Think you just need to get on their WiFi” my wife suggested after the fact via text. Helpful. We live in a world where we must be connected to get the full benefits. And that connection is the very path that leaves us exposed to online risk. In this instance, my data was not available due to thick walls and bad customer service. These were passive impediments. There are many active contributors looking to brick up the consumer, the business, the industry. And we must all work together to watch our eggs. Wherever we put them.

In Related News…

I began with a quote from Juvenal: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers? And the answer is we do! This week’s episode of The Future Indicative features the topic of cybersecurity, with guest Tom Clapper, Director of Information Assurance at Redhorse Corporation. He outlines the need for proper cyber hygiene to protect our confidentiality, preserve our integrity, and promote availability. This is a very special afterschool episode that needs to be heard with your kids and their grandparents. For your collective peace of mind.

The Future Indicative, Ep 3 Part 1

The Future Indicative, Ep 3 Part 2

Enjoy!

Alex Effgen

For The Future Indicative, Ep 3 Part 1

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome back to The Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and as we continue to explore Cybersecurity in Part 2, we need to learn about the cost of security, and greater cost without it.

TOM CLAPPER

“We’ll use dollars because dollars get people’s attention relatively quickly. The financial and intellectual property theft in the US alone is a multi-billion dollar problem…Billions and billions of dollars just in this country, from everyday people, from companies. We’ve seen schools get hacked. The LAUSD is the biggest school system in the country. They had all of their data bricked up. So this applies to everybody to the tune of billions of dollars.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Tom Clapper, Director of Information Assurance at Redhorse Corporation and an expert at cybersecurity. Like you and me, his phone keeps him up way past his bedtime, but for very different reasons:

TOM CLAPPER

“My job is to protect usually against nation states and/or insider threats. And the thing that keeps me up most at night is your cell phone is usually the easiest target, the biggest threat vector all your finances, all your stuff, everything in your life is in there. And in that phone, you’ll also download something like TikTok. When you put TikTok on your phone, you give the government of China access to your camera, to your microphone, to geolocation, and to all the files on your phone.

Knowing what I know and what I know to do, if I really wanted to track somebody and figure out where you’re going and what you’re doing, I would exploit an app on your phone…because when you give all of that access, it’s very easy that I can turn on your microphone and record a conversation that you think you’re having in private, and your phone’s in your pocket.…And so when you look at the apps on your phone, ask yourself, Did I just give this thing access to everything?”

ALEX EFFGEN

In my Origin episode, I noted that disruption can be an external force–regulation, emerging technologies, a shift in your market’s priorities, and of course cyberhacking. But it also can be an internal force. And Tom has had to deal with both.

TOM CLAPPER

“When people ask me what my number one threat is day to day, it’s insider risk. It’s somebody that’s touching the keyboard, either does something out of ignorance or does something out of malice. Somebody getting into our network will take quite a bit of effort. Somebody already in the network doing something bad doesn’t take a lot.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Uh oh. We’re back to Tom’s M&Ms. And those M&Ms might be in dirty hands.

TOM CLAPPER

“Not everybody is doing the same level of cyber hygiene that they should. And when you start figuring out why not, a lot of times it’s a PM, or personality saying, No, I want unfettered access. Or, That slows me down. Or whatever number of reasons.

My whole career has been around engineers. Engineers inherently want unfettered access to everything. They would like to get to the root kernel within their operating system. They would like no boundaries.

So there’s a balance between how I keep you secure, and how I also don’t impede what it is you’re trying to do.

And the truth is, if you do this correctly, you do it in a way that your everyday users don’t even know it’s there because it’s not impeding them. It’s not slowing down their progress. But at the same time is across the board keeping all your verticals equally safe.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Tom mentioned that “not everybody is doing the same level of cyber hygiene that they should.” Growing up in the ’90s, safe sex was a PSA that our schools and communities emphasized to combat the AIDS epidemic. There was one commercial that explained if you had sex with one person, then you’ve really had sex with everyone they’ve ever had sex with. Well, the same can be said of your digital habits. How hygienic are you keeping them?

Hollywood learned first hand the impact of neglecting cyber hygiene. And Tom had a front-row seat for the show.

TOM CLAPPER

“Eight years ago, Sony had a big hack. The North Koreans hacked into Sony Studios, and stole movies that were still in post-production, and released details. They released emails, private emails that actors and agents had with the studio.

It was interesting to watch—because I lived in LA at the time—how studios started thinking about cyber. Previously, when you put everything on film, people aren’t stealing your stuff. But now that everything’s shot digitally, they hadn’t caught up with cyber yet.

Disney is one of the leaders of this. Especially with the Marvel stuff, too, they hold their stuff very close. And a lot of the networks that they hold it on are disconnected from the internet. And so it is interesting, the technologies caught up that then lagged with security. And film was one of those that sort of made me laugh a little bit that when they went digital, they didn’t think about the hacks, the way they did when everything was in film canisters in a closet somewhere.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Tom helps the US government try to keep all of us hygienic. No small task in times of disruption. For context, Tom and I had this conversation three weeks into the US federal government shutdown, in October 2025.

TOM CLAPPER

“The government not doing their own due diligence is a big disruption because a lot of threats are discovered through government channels, and then given out from government channels. Log4j was a big thing that happened a couple of years ago. The government knew about that before it was publicly acknowledged.

That trickles down to us and that’s important to us. And so the government shutdown right now is a problem to cybersecurity that most people don’t think of inherently, that actually makes us more vulnerable from a cyber perspective.

When CrowdStrike had a big problem a couple of years ago that shut down airports. When that disruption happens in our lives people start looking for workarounds. When we start to find a workaround, you usually end up going down a less safe/more risky path to get to whatever it is you’re trying to do.

Those things will disrupt because they create a bad habit and then people start doing things that they know from a cyber hygiene perspective aren’t the best. And it doesn’t sound like a lot, but the number of times I’ve seen big problems arise. When you start investigating what’s the root cause, the root cause is some sort of disruption up chain that then led to whatever problem you’re dealing with today.”

ALEX EFFGEN

So when we’re not causing our own problems we need to find ways to promote best practices against bad actors.

TOM CLAPPER

“A lot of people are like, Oh, I have my cell phone. You also probably have a smart speaker at home and you probably have a connected Nest for your thermostat. And people don’t think of those as threats in their house, but they are because they can be exploited.”

Our adversaries are going to keep trying, and they’ll keep using new and emerging threat vectors. So my answer is to just always be vigilant on how you respond to these things.

I said this at a conference once and people were like, ‘Yeah, but I don’t have nation state actors to worry about.’ Well, adversaries aren’t necessarily nation states. The average hacker trying to steal the money out of your bank account is a threat actor. It is something you should be worried about.”

ALEX EFFGEN

We should be worried about it. But that doesn’t mean we collectively feel like we can do anything about it. Afterall, we’re not all IT experts.

TOM CLAPPER

“A lot of Boomers won’t put virus scan and malware scan on their phone, because they don’t know how to download it. They don’t know the right one to go to. Even the app store a lot of times isn’t super user friendly. So making cyber tools and making cyber 101 easier to use and more digestible to people who inherently don’t know anything about it for me is the greatest way to expand it.

Apple and Sony and all these big phone companies should also start putting this stuff on the phone. They know that the phone is the number one threat vector to all people. And yet there’s not a lot of great things on the phone to keep us secure. And then once it’s usable or accessible, make it more intuitive. And I think you’ll see a much greater access and then adoption of those products.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Huh. Make it easier to find and simpler to use. It’s almost like there’s an opportunity to SPECIALIZE cybersecurity for a chance at SCALE.

TOM CLAPPER

“One of the things that I think would make cyber much more accessible to everyday people is making it more user friendly to people that aren’t the most technological.

I’m married to a UI/UX director. The user experience, the user interface. And a lot of people don’t know what that is just by hearing it, but it’s how friendly things are to you, whether or not it’s a website, an app, software, whatever.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Sounds like I need to interview Tom’s wife if we want to explore user experience. But for now let’s take this topic home. Tom, why should we actually care about cybersecurity?

TOM CLAPPER

“Our adversaries are taking advantage of the tools out there. They’re using AI. They’re using machine learning. They’re using a lot of different technologies to scale up. To make themselves more savvy—introduce different threat vectors on how to get into our stuff.”

Our adversaries are never going to stop coming for the thing they want. Whether it’s something to blackmail you, steal your money, hold your stuff hostage, it doesn’t matter. That’s the thing we should learn is it’s not going away.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Bad guys are going to be bad. Got it. If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and…yadda yadda yadda.

TOM CLAPPER

“For me, there first has to be a willingness to fund and invest technology that protects everyday people. Because cyber is still relatively in its infancy, the biggest cyber things are to protect big enterprise networks: to protect banks, to protect hospitals, to protect municipalities, things like that. But to protect my computer or my phone, there’s a billion little apps and somebody drowns in options and they don’t know what to find. So I think some education matters.

And then fundamentally we have to have a paradigm shift as users. We have to start understanding the threat. Once you start to realize you’re a constant target: Okay. How do I protect myself?

And right now I think those two things are missing in the average person. They don’t think of themselves as a target. And so I think there first has to be the willingness to fund and invest for personal users rather than big enterprise users, but then also the user base must start to adopt this shift in ideas.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Pretty sensible conclusions. Not bad for a Yankee fan.

Thank you for joining us on The Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. Our mission is to show what great narratives accomplish for your industry. As mentioned before, the views expressed here are solely our own, but we share them for our collective wellbeing. Please reach out to us at IndicateMarketing.com if you find them helpful. Let’s explore how our humanity can help drive your business growth and market positioning. We appreciate your patronage, and continued support.

For The Future Indicative, Ep 3 Part 2

Transcript

ALEX EFFGEN

Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Cybersecurity.

TOM CLAPPER

“Most everything we do today is in a digital format. Currency is digital. Our medical records are digital. Our legal documents are digital. So protecting these literally is how the world goes around: down to the level of retirees collecting social security checks to people running banks. Everything should be protected.”

ALEX EFFGEN

That was Tom Clapper, Director of Information Assurance at Redhorse Corporation, an IT consulting firm that works on data and technology with the US government. I’ve known Tom for…doing the math in my head but not wanting to age myself…over 25 years. Prior to Redhorse he worked as an Information Systems Security Manager at SpaceX and before that, Northrop Grumman. And despite being a fan of every sports team that I hate, he’s been an ally going back to his days with the armed forces.

I’m a diehard for Boston sports teams. Tom supports New York. We both grew up in Connecticut–the Mason/Dixon state between these two cities–and we got to choose our affiliations. Defending them…at times vigorously…against our rivals ever since.

In the digital age, our affiliations and rivalries can be promoted, publicized, and packaged as online products. Social media. Websites. Betting apps. And where there’s money to make, there’s money to take.

TOM CLAPPER

“I have a really good friend, who knows what I do for a living. And I get a phone call from him one day that says, ‘I need your help.’ And I said, ‘What’s going on?’ And his DraftKings…just a sports betting app. He went in to place a bet on a football game and there was no money in his account. And he was like, This isn’t real. There should be money in here. And then he looked at his bank account and there’d been large sums of money taken out.

And so he called me, and I told him, disconnect your phone—put it on airplane mode. Disconnect from the internet. Somebody had hacked his phone from him clicking on a link on Instagram, and started draining his finances. He’s a construction manager. He’s not a big finance guy. He’s somebody that runs a construction company.

And yet he lost thousands of dollars, and luckily his bank and DraftKings realized these were being shipped to offshore accounts, so it wasn’t him. But this can affect anybody.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Tom works with large corporations and government departments to protect them (and by extension us) from unauthorized access.

TOM CLAPPER

“Cybersecurity is the act of protecting computer systems’ network data from…people damaging your data, or theft of your data. Damage being things like when you see malware that bricks your data up and holds it hostage.

It uses technologies, processes, and different policies that ultimately keep safe our confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all of our digital resources. And that ‘CIA’ triad that you hear is a big thing: Confidentiality, you don’t want people to see your legal documents, your medical records.

The integrity, somebody hasn’t gone in and manipulated the data or your records. Then the availability is, when you need these things, you can access them.

And so when you see the people that hold data hostage or brick up people’s hard drives, that’s where the availability becomes a problem.”

ALEX EFFGEN

You would think protecting the confidentiality, the integrity, and the availability of data for corporations and the US government would require cutting-edge technology and security practices. And…it does. But Tom considers the health of the forest starting with the leaves on each tree.

TOM CLAPPER

“Do basic 101 cybersecurity. Things like unique usernames and passwords.

I hear a lot of people say, “Yeah, but I don’t do anything important.” Or, “My job’s not that important. Who cares?”

Most of us save our passwords for our bank accounts, for our stocks, for whatever you have—are saved in your laptop. Somebody steals your laptop, they also have access to all of that stuff. Basic protections like usernames and passwords. Update your virus definitions. Patch your software. Those are threat vectors—how people exploit and get inside of networks.

And then lastly, just don’t open hyperlinks you don’t know. This is a big problem for young people and seniors is, Hey, your tax return is at risk. Please click this link. And most people: ‘Oh no, I need my tax return.’ And click the link. And then you’ve just infected your computer or your phone or whatever.

If you get something like that, what I always tell people is go to that website. If the IRS sends you something, go to the IRS website and then find the link there.

Those basic one-on-one hygiene things would make the difference probably in—I’m going to pull this number out of the air—probably 60% to 70% of the breaches, the hacks, the things that happen are done through one of those things.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Seriously, Tom? The big idea we need to capture is that it takes a village to protect a network?

I have argued that you might spell the word business with the letter S three times, but it takes four of them for a business to be in business:

SPECIALIZE: What is this?

SELL: Who needs this?

SECURE: What can disrupt this?

SCALE: How do we expand this?

Every business must address these four categories, some sooner than others, but when it comes to cybersecurity, how do we SPECIALIZE, SELL, and SCALE what everyone must SECURE?

It starts by changing our collective mindset.

TOM CLAPPER

“Unless you are somebody who is 100% off-grid, which almost doesn’t exist, if you have any sort of technology, this stuff applies to you.”

ALEX EFFGEN

If we can’t put the genie back in the bottle, or the carbon back in the copy, then how do we SPECIALIZE the protection of our products and services?

TOM CLAPPER

“I’m going to give you a two-part answer. The first one is AI and machine learning as a tool to start protecting where we get humans out of the loop, so there’s not a human actually touching a keyboard. It’s software keeping this stuff safe, things like detecting hacks or intrusions, protecting against the intrusion once it happens, things like that.

The second, and for me, the bigger one is what is called zero trust. The average computer network right now is built like an M&M. Has a nice hard outer shell, but once you get inside, it’s just a squishy piece of chocolate.

What zero trust says is if I exploit one single service or one single threat vector into your network, you then have to exploit the next one, the next one, the next one. You can’t just get in and then have unfettered access. You will have to do it over and over and over again.

And they do that by micro segmenting data and services. They’re all literally independent of themselves. So zero trust is coming. It’s very important because it makes it a lot harder to fully exploit something or somebody. And AI and machine learning will help make that a reality as well.”

ALEX EFFGEN

When will they make that a reality?

TOM CLAPPER

“In the not-too-distant future, let’s say the next two-to-five years, zero trust will be a relatively common phrase the way AI is today.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Cultures change with practice and patience, as much as they change nowadays from program transformation, the process of formally changing a program to a different program with the same semantics as the original program–improving the construction, maintenance, and reliability of software iteratively. If everyone needs to do this, then it should be easy to SELL. Right?

TOM CLAPPER

“I’m starting to liken scams and cybersecurity schemes to cancer. Everybody knows somebody that’s been affected by cancer at this point in their lives. If you haven’t, you are very, very lucky.

But scams and cybercrimes are starting to become that. We all know somebody. And what we inherently do as humans and go, Man, that sucks for them. But that’s not going to happen to me.

And inevitably something will happen because there’s going to be a different threat vector that you didn’t see coming. You might say, Oh, I don’t ever click on hyperlinks and emails and I delete that stuff.

But you see an Instagram thing that you find amusing, and you click on that and then boom, your phone’s infected. And so the fact that this is starting to get into people’s lives, not just company lives….It affects everybody, either peripherally to somebody you know, or you directly.”

ALEX EFFGEN

It affected me directly. A year ago I was notified by my credit card company that there was suspicious activity. A number of charges local to Southern California while I slept in Northern Massachusetts. I was incredibly grateful that my card company notified me in time to suspend the card and cancel the charges. Covering my bases I contacted the monitoring service that I paid monthly to make sure they were aware of the compromise. They were not aware, nor did they seem terribly concerned.

TOM CLAPPER

“Anybody that ever has heard me speak on a panel or worked with me, they hear me use the phrase security theater. Security theater is where you believe you’re protecting yourself. And your monitoring service is a perfect example.

Monitoring services usually are out there to tell you if something new comes up in your name. But if somebody is exploiting your existing thing, they will rarely tell you. And so somebody could max out your credit cards, drain your bank account, all of that stuff. And they’re probably not telling you.

But I do think the average person thinks, Well, I have this credit monitoring thing, so I’m good. I’m safe. And the reality is they’re no more than security theater to you.”

ALEX EFFGEN

Well, at least I had that going for me.

Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of The Future Indicative’s Cybersecurity episode. In Part 2 we’ll cover the vulnerabilities outside and inside an organization, as well as how to make security more accessible and therefore more extensive.

While opinions expressed are solely our own, we’d gladly connect with you on zero trust, sports teams, or theatrical security for further discussion. This is a village and here is our network. Share the link with friends and family for their own best practices. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.