[00:00:00] Phillip: Welcome.
[00:00:03] Phillip: To Visions. I’m Phillip. We live in a world where a media company makes a perfume with top notes of curbside violets, middle notes of tobacco, and a base of upper lip sweat and hot metal. It sold out in under an hour, which is faster than most brands sell just about anything. And the company that made it publishes a newsletter about, well, culture, but it’s called DIRT. And for a century, publishers made words and printed them on a page or published them online, and brands made things. And advertising was the layer that sat between the two and brokered culture and commerce to you, the consumer. And the wall that separated editorial from commerce was considered so important that we staffed it, we funded it, and named awards after the people who defended it. Nobody has torn that wall down. It just stopped mattering because publishers have now built ladders over top of it, and they’ve started making things themselves. And the brands, they’ve walked the other way. They’ve gone around the wall, and they’ve started hiring writers. Today, we go to a recording from the Visions Summit at MoMA in June 2025. And that very month that we were on the stage, Nike launched a Substack with no swoosh in sight.
[00:01:30] Phillip: Within months, Shopify followed along with Madewell, Rare Beauty, Tory Burch, and Billboard. The brands, it turns out, are now media publishers, and the media publishers have become brands. Ben Dietz, who’s on the panel in this discussion, calls this parasocial media. A publisher or a person is in your inbox on a schedule, long enough that this relationship starts to mean something. And he’s joined by three people who live at different points along this same relationship. Casey Lewis, who writes the After School newsletter and had just finished guest editing a letter for American Eagle on Substack. And Daisy Alioto, who publishes DIRT and the perfume in a commemorative bouquet for the hundredth anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway. And Erica Chen, who buys media for Google and spends her days arguing that the scenic route is quicker. We say around here that what you buy is who you become. But before you buy anything, someone has to tell you that it’s worth wanting. That’s what media is for. And the question of who holds that job is being renegotiated in your inbox right now, one newsletter at a time.
[00:02:54] Ben: How’s everybody doing? All right. I was just saying to somebody upstairs, this is going to be very different than the last presentation, in as much as there are no slides, there is no direct agenda. This is going to be a very extemporaneous conversation, but it’s one that continues a chat that we had in March or April… March or April on stage that was subtitled “The Next Condé Nast Is Already in Your Inbox,” and it’s about the future of parasocial media. That is to say, media that is created by a publisher or a creator or an author or an entrepreneur or whatever, what have you, and speaks directly to an audience in a way that allows the audience to form a relationship, is direct, which is emotional, which is longstanding, which is consistent, and which is therefore meaningful, valuable, and — the thesis goes — monetizable. So I’m joined on stage here by three people who are experts in this space for various reasons. Immediately to my right is Casey Lewis. Casey writes the After School newsletter. Can we see by hands the number of subscribers to After School? Okay. By the end of this conversation, all of you will have your hands up the next time I ask who’s going to subscribe. Casey is an expert on Gen Z, as well as an on-air commentator for a number of different broadcast networks, a guest author for a brand publication for American Eagle, which just concluded yesterday, which we’ll talk about, as well as just one of the smartest and most interesting thinkers about what is happening in the space of young people and their media consumption, their brand behavior, and their outlook on life.
[00:04:43] Ben: Next to Casey is Erica Chen. Erica runs strategy for Media Futures Group, which is the group within WPP that looks after the media planning and buying for Google. So she has, you know, only a small job thinking about how this giant megalith of a company goes to market. Erica is one of the more interesting and provocative thinkers that I’ve ever met from that agency space, which is to take nothing away from the interesting and provocative agency thinkers that are in this room today, just everybody else, and has some really interesting thoughts about how the over-programmatizing of that media ecosystem can be changed and improved through an abrasive serendipity. And then lastly, we have Daisy Alioto. Daisy is the publisher and founder of DIRT, which is a multi-tentacled media company that now includes five publications — five publications, changes every day — but is also getting into some really interesting brand extensions into physical releases, into events, into commerce, as well as just trying to recapture the sort of portfolio approach to media company building. So anyway, welcome, guys. Thank you. I did a lot of talking just then. Daisy, I do wanna start with you because you— so yesterday, Daisy released through DIRT, in collaboration with a newsletter called Simple Magic, a skateboard perfume. Is that how you guys— that’s how you guys are calling it?
[00:06:21] Daisy: Skateboard inspired.
[00:06:22] Ben: Skateboard inspired.
[00:06:23] Daisy: Do you wanna know the notes? I’ll run you through it.
[00:06:24] Ben: Yeah, I do wanna know the notes.
[00:06:26] Daisy: Too. Top notes, curbside violets. Middle— That’s notes? I was—
[00:06:30] Ben: Gonna say that’s violets the flower, not violence.
[00:06:34] Daisy: Right. Yeah. Middle notes, tobacco. Okay. Base notes, upper lip sweat and hot metal. It sold out in under an hour.
[00:06:47] Ben: That was just exactly what I was gonna say. So I am a very regular consumer of Daisy’s content. So I opened the newsletter about an hour late, because I was catching up on a bunch of stuff, and immediately went to the site to try to buy this precious item and was sold out. And so I wrote her and I just said, “Hey, this is amazing. This is already sold out. You should immediately change it over to a pre-order and you should try to do more.” And she said, “Oh, we have another release later today, so I can’t worry about that right now.” And so yesterday you also put out a bouquet of flowers, right, to— inspired by Mrs. Dalloway.
[00:07:21] Daisy: Yes. So we did a centennial of Mrs. Dalloway commemorative bouquet with UrbanStems. And this was something that just— that I came up with. And I sort of— I mean, this is maybe getting into strategy stuff, but I adopted a multipronged approach with them, which was I cold-messaged somebody from their marketing team on LinkedIn. And then I went through a friend to their PR agency. And with that multipronged approach, got close enough to say, like, “Hey, it’s the hundred-year anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway. I think we should do this.” And they agreed after, like, one call, which is not always the experience with a mature brand with a lot of stakeholders like that, especially if they work across an agency and an internal team. So I give them a lot of credit for being spontaneous in that way, and response has been really positive.
[00:08:15] Ben: I think the reason that I wanted to start with those two examples was because it is emblematic of the interesting and evolutionary moment we are in with media, where both the larger systems of media companies are being disintermediated and broken apart in large respects. I mean, no shortage of headlines in that regard. But also, a new cavalcade of publishers are coming up into their own and are doing so on their own terms and through a bunch of different means that kind of ignore the rules of legacy publishing. Casey, you are, as I said, a real expert in the wider space of media consumption for Gen Z, but you also are somebody that I think most people who write newsletters or who talk to brands look at as a beacon of success and, and, and, I don’t know what, vision. Who else do you look at, that— that you’re inspired by, that’s doing interesting stuff in this kind of spare parasocial media space?
[00:09:26] Casey: I subscribe to so many newsletters. I will say yours is one of the first Substacks—
[00:09:30] Ben: Sorry, not mine. Yours—
[00:09:32] Casey: —is one of the first Substacks that I ever subscribed to. I think what Ben is doing— he did not tell me to say this, but what Ben is doing in content is fascinating. I will also say Daisy, because what she’s built with DIRT is just like the new Condé Nast. Like, what you guys are doing is fascinating. Erica, you don’t have a publication, but if you did, I would— No.
[00:09:50] Daisy: I’m a fan. Fan of that. Congrats on that. Really smart choice on your part.
[00:09:54] Casey: But I think there’s so many newsletters, and I, I think the ecosystem that Substack has built is fascinating, because you can go— I think the Substack app has its downsides. I don’t think that’s the future of media. But the discovery is very interesting. I think beehiiv— I almost said BuzzFeed… beehiiv is empowering people to do such interesting things. It reminds me of the blogs that I grew up with in the early 2010s. I started a blog on Blogger when I was in middle school in, like, 2006. So it feels like— I was in middle school in 2006, I was a senior. But— but I’ve been online so long, and what we’re seeing right now reminds me so much of when I was a kid, that sort of early, exciting, bloggy place on the Internet.
[00:10:40] Ben: So to Erica— your job, in a lot of sense— a lot of senses, is to make a map — shout out to the crew from— your name — to make a map of this new evolving space, and then to convince the folks at Google that as they go to market with their products, that they should be engaging with where the map is leading us to, not where they have been in the past or where everybody else is going, right? How do you deal with all of this, the proliferation of so many new interesting titles, but ones that operate at sort of— let’s call it subscale, to use a term I don’t particularly like?
[00:11:16] Erica: Yeah. I think— you talk about map, right? Let’s start there. When you talk about map, we all think about which route to take. And this is probably a little too nerdy, but I don’t know if everybody watches Fantastic Mr. Fox.
[00:11:34] Ben: Hands up, Fantastic Mr. Fox. Come on, come on. You remember that—
[00:11:39] Erica: —scene in the beginning when he asks his wife, “Are we going to take the scenic route or the shortcut?” And then she’s like, “Oh, let’s take the shortcut.” And then he goes, “Oh, but the scenic route is so nice.” And then she goes, “Oh, okay, let’s take the scenic route.” And then he goes, “It’s quicker anyway.” And to me, I think that larger scalable media is the shortcut that everybody is kind of looking at today, because we’re being asked to reduce the— to increase the ROI, which in a way you’re reducing, because the optimization of ROI is a process of reduction, right? You’re reducing a lot of things that are seemingly not the shortcut and ignoring the scenic route, but in the long run, the scenic route might actually be way more meaningful and get you to your ultimate goal quicker. This is a little too— maybe vague, but I think one thing I will say is, I try to tell my clients, and especially for all of you guys, I feel like if you’re already here, you’re already cool, right? Don’t need convincing— that subscribe to all three— but you might need to prove to your CFOs or people who are making decisions where to invest. The context I try to give to my clients is, think about this with a growth in mind versus the ROI. Because the best ROI does not necessarily give you growth, because growth comes in volumes, growth comes in future business. And this is what that is about. I think what you guys are doing is about building relationship, building a loyal fan base. And if a brand worked with someone like you, they can borrow that relationship and start engaging with the consumer in a longer run versus just a quick impression in two seconds and then gone away from their world.
[00:13:46] Phillip: In 1876, John Wanamaker opened a department store in Philadelphia and more or less invented what we know as modern advertising. He’s remembered now for a complaint that half the money that he spent on advertising was wasted. And as he says, the trouble was that he didn’t know which half. We’ve spent 150 years now treating that as the problem to solve for. As you’ve heard, the most brilliant minds of our generation are spent trying to get consumers to click on ads. And we’ve built a brilliant machine to solve it. In fact, we’ve taught computers to think, and we are interacting with those computers in order to solve this very problem. Every impression, every click, every dollar is now traced and put on a dashboard. And Erica Chen stands in the middle of this relationship, buying media for one of the companies who’s building this intelligence. And suggesting that maybe— Wanamaker’s wasted half is where that good stuff actually lives. Optimization is a process of reduction. What gets reduced first is everything that you’re not looking for, and it’s the serendipity. We don’t often think of taking the scenic route in advertising, but Wanamaker’s other invention, by the way, was the price tag. Before him, you had to haggle for a price. He printed the value on a card, he made it fixed. We’ve been trying to put a price tag on attention ever since. The newsletter writers in our panel, they’re making different bets, each one of them, and some relationships they see are worth more precisely because you can’t quite price them by audience, by attention, by influence. When we return, what happens when the newsletter reader isn’t a person at all? And stick around to the end because we have a code for you to join us at Vision Summit 2026.
[00:15:45] Ben: To— to that end, I think what is most interesting about these new media spaces is that they are catering to needs that are underserved, or to vernaculars that are underrepresented. Daisy, you— in our conversations about the way that you’re building DIRT across the series of verticals — Strung for tennis, Blank for literature, Prune for furniture and design—
[00:16:16] Daisy: You’re going for it. I love it.
[00:16:18] Ben: Yeah. Clone for aggregation and— and— and news, really. Like, at what point did you set out a map and say, “I wanna build for these sort of use cases or audiences”? Or to what extent did you just go, “Oh, that is cool. Like, I feel like I can build an audience”?
[00:16:37] Daisy: Yeah. I was gonna say, real quick, Erica and I took the scenic route the other day because we set a meeting, which was a phone call, but I misread as an in-person meeting. So I joined the Google Meet from outside her office and was like, “So, I’m actually outside your office right now.” And she was very game. She came down. But, you know, most people— I’m—
[00:16:59] Erica: —a stalker.
[00:16:59] Daisy: Most people, if they made that mistake, they would go home, but not me.
[00:17:03] Ben: Future media success is stalking.
[00:17:06] Daisy: Anyway, it’s a really good question. I think there’s, like, a fundamental strength in the structure of companies that look like an umbrella brand with distinct brands underneath them, whether it’s an LVMH or Condé Nast, or even sort of arguably what A24 has started to do with their various, like, subsidiaries into different mediums. And I think what lends that structure its strength is the ability to, a, world-build — which has, you know, kind of become a little bit of a meaningless term because I think it’s overused, but it’s true. Like, the more touch points you give somebody to interact with your brand — and I’m looking at this, like, volume, like, lore — the font kinda looks like Lord of the Rings. It’s like that map in the beginning of a fantasy book where people see all the places that the book is going to take them. The more touch points you give your audience, the richer that world is. And then also, like, there’s something about this structure that creates a flywheel effect between each of those brands where the whole can start to feel greater than the sum of its parts. And I think that’s where I really fell in love with that idea. I will also say, like, we’ve— we’ve had more success scaling horizontally than vertically, because every time we add another publication, I feel like we gain momentum. Whereas the playbook for fast growth for an individual publication right now feels very confusing and broken. So part of it is, like, what feels comfortable and exciting to me. Obviously, we don’t wanna grow too quickly and go over our front wheels, but respecting that balance, I think, has made the world of DIRT, or the dirtyverse, as we call it, so much richer. And, you know, there is a sense of, “Oh, are we doing too much for any one person to pay attention to?” But people’s attention is so fragmented anyway. I would rather people be a little bit aware of us at all times.
[00:19:10] Ben: Casey, one of the things that is interesting about you, right, is that you’ve extended into podcasting through a partnership with Day One Agency. You’ve extended into on-air commentary through a series of sort of television appearances and punditry. You have also just completed this run as the guest editor of the American Eagle Substack newsletter. Where should brands be active in this space? Like, what’s effective for them? Should they be creating podcasts? Should they be going on CNBC? Should they be, you know, obviously hiring you to do newsletters? But, like, what— where do you see working? What— where do you see the traction being gained?
[00:19:52] Casey: That was a teen dream of mine, to be American Eagle’s Substack editor.
[00:19:56] Ben: I mean, stands to reason.
[00:19:58] Casey: But, no, I— I think that we’re seeing a lot of movement of brands thinking that they should engage with Substack in one way or another. And I think that a lot of these agencies are hearing from their clients, you know, there’s just a lot of interest in Substack. And I think there is the understanding of what the— what it is, is a little murky sometimes. With American Eagle, their agency, Shadow— they’re amazing to work with, and it was very clear that the entire team, as well as our agency, understood the Substack ecosystem, but they also were approaching it very much as a, “This is a platform that we should experiment with,” versus a— I don’t— a lot of times when a brand is launching on a new platform, you really have to have the, like, six-month to year-long, like, investment, or you can think of it as an experiment. But an NBA player, Russell Westbrook, launched a— a beehiiv earlier this summer, and it got, like, write-ups. He did— he did a bunch of, like, tweets about it, and then he, like, launched the one, and then I kept waiting to see when the— the next one would come. And it was, like, the next Wednesday passed, the next Wednesday passed, the next Wednesday passed. And, like, I noticed these things, and I think that he did end up launching, you know— he followed it up with, like, a Monday letter, which— I think consistency is the most important thing. And, Ben, I think you get this too, where you send your newsletter on specific days. You miss here and there. We’re humans. But—
[00:21:26] Ben: Casey’s preaching up to me. I’ve missed a bunch lately.
[00:21:28] Casey: You’ve been busy. But I think when— when your audience knows to expect you, once— the second you build that, I— I think you really have to stay true to that, or else they’re never going to be used to— to reading, engaging with your content. So I’ve seen a lot of brands now launch on Substack, and it’s like, you can tell that they come out of the gate, like, really excited, and then they get that, like, one issue or that second issue, and then they’re like, “What the hell do we write about now?” And that’s a bad look, I think.
[00:21:57] Ben: Yeah, for sure. Erica, one of the things that— that we talked about prior was the idea of that kind of frequency and that kind of, you know, parasocial relationship being in people’s inboxes all the time as being a signal for how an agentic world will form for marketers and for consumers. Talk a little bit about that, please, if you would.
[00:22:22] Erica: Yeah. I mean, this is where another way for you guys to sell to your CFOs— if you wanted to do newsletters, like Casey was helping American Eagle— is that, I think we all have been reading, site traffic is down. Google search is not bringing as much traffic as it used to. Actually, that’s a misleading headline. There’s still gigantic traffic that’s being driven by Google search, but you don’t have to bury that headline with your CFO. You can scare them, right? We heard earlier when Phil talked about— fear works. This is a story where you can scare them and say, I think today, we’re relying— a lot of our commerce, e-commerce, rely on site traffic. Tomorrow, what happens when agents start shopping for consumers and agents start working for you to find consumers? If you’re nerdy like me, you watched the Google I/O— a big takeaway is that AI and agents are going to be integrated in people’s native world, in their emails, in their social— or not social, but in their devices and photos. So what the agents hypothetically are going to derive of the personal preference is going to come from the emails. So what’s a better time to start getting in their inboxes, and better yet, to have content that they want to share and plan and shop with their friends from your email? Because the more they have those behaviors, the agents are going to pick up, “Oh, this is their preference.” Therefore, you’re going to maintain your traffic organically and potentially build a cult following. ‘Cause I think cult following is something that is actually very reliable regardless of how the landscape and the platforms are going to shape up.
[00:24:22] Ben: Casey, to— to just return very quickly to— to what you said in light of— of Erica’s comment. The— the cliff for, let’s call it any corporation, brand, you know, corporate thinker coming into the space is like, “Okay, I know what I wanna say first. I’m gonna talk about my product release. I know what I say second. I’m gonna talk about my next product release.” But then they reach that cliff that you just described. What do you advise them to talk about, knowing that they can’t have a new thing twice a day like Daisy does?
[00:24:55] Casey: So I— I think any brand that’s launching on Substack or a podcast or anything like that, they have to figure out a way to have some personality. And that’s really hard for large brands who are uncomfortable having any sort of personality.
[00:25:08] Ben: They’re ruled by business affairs and— and, you know, mitigating risk.
[00:25:13] Casey: A 100%. But Substack and platforms like it— they give brands a chance to engage with a new audience in a different way than their typical marketing emails that are literally just to get you to shop their sale.
[00:25:28] Ben: Is that because they’re parasocial, and so you can have more sort of personality? Or is it just because the— the format allows for greater elasticity?
[00:25:35] Casey: I think with the traditional marketing emails, it’s because they’re so optimized for clicks that they have streamlined those channels so extreme— like, I get five emails from Gap a day. If Gap— do you—
[00:25:48] Ben: Do you talk about Gap a—
[00:25:50] Casey: I do. To be fair. But if— if Gap launched on Substack, I would immediately sign up, because I would expect to get something from them that I don’t get from their marketing emails. If I didn’t get that from the Substack, I would quickly unsubscribe. But if they were smart— I— I think it’s smart. I mean, this is the strategy that I had American Eagle do, so I’m biased here. But I think the best thing to do is to align yourself with writers or creators who have a point of view that the brands then feel they can align themselves with as well. It’s just like if you’re talking to a Fortune 500 company about their social media and you’re like, “You need to be funnier and more candid and more personable on TikTok.” And they’re like, “We’re Clorox. We don’t know how to be more personable on TikTok.” Then it’s like, well, align yourself with creators who— who are brand-safe, but who can flex their personality. And I think about Substack— podcast— Tumblr fifteen years ago is the same way. Yeah.
[00:26:46] Ben: Daisy, one— one thing that I’ve always admired about you is that you not only run this little media empire, which is growing into a much bigger media empire, but that you write, that you curate, that you collect, but also that you work across different formats, right? You and Francis, who is in the audience — shout out, Francis — have a great podcast called Tasteland, which interviews people from the space and kind of helps to dimensionalize what it is. How important is it that you’re existing across multiple different platforms, formats, media types, and so on and so forth, to— in the vision of how DIRT comes to market?
[00:27:27] Daisy: I think it’s really important because every new format is a new shot on goal, and you never know what’s going to take off. And part of the benefit of that horizontal scale is, like, one— one touch point that really catches fire could lift everything else in the ecosystem up, and also subsidize the things that are really important to us but maybe growing more slowly. I think about Defector, which is, you know, represented this Deadspin exodus. It was sports that didn’t wanna just be about sports. But as far as I know, their most successful franchise is the Normal Gossip podcast, the success of which has helped subsidize some of their other works. So I think you really never know. And, you know, to Erica’s point about, you know, “SEO is dead”— it’s not really dead, but that’s the scare headline. For those of us that never were really interested in mastering the sort of, like, gray-area trickery of SEO — which is really not what DIRT’s about — the death of the ad-supported web, which is sort of— I believe it was the Stratechery article recently that was talking about this, and then the rise, or the theorized rise from them, of the open agentic web is actually a huge opportunity for people with taste.
[00:28:45] Daisy: Because we can say not only do we reach maybe a smaller audience, but a very well-resourced and engaged audience— we reach the type of people who might have five different agents working on their behalf, trained on their taste, to go out and find the most interesting things across all of the categories that we’re talking about. And so I think that that’s a huge opportunity that I’ve sort of embraced telling people, you know, depending on what room I’m in — our total— total addressable market now includes agents. It includes the agents that have been trained to have the best taste. So our ceiling is not taste-makers, which has always been a smaller part of the general population. It’s also the technology that they will have working on their behalf. And I think that’s a really powerful message, because a lot of people haven’t caught up to that yet. But the people— and investors, especially— who are interested in it are really interested in proving out this theory.
[00:29:42] Ben: That’s fascinating, especially because it gives Erica an opportunity to tell us, as a last word here, what do you need publishers like Casey, Daisy, myself, anyone else in the audience who operates in this parasocial space to do to help you make the case?
[00:30:00] Erica: I think be more like Daisy. I think she’s gonna be successful. But I will— I know.
[00:30:05] Ben: I can’t. I’m never gonna wear a shawl that well. I’m sorry. I’m never going to.
[00:30:08] Erica: I— I wanted to piggyback real quick to end this with what Daisy was saying. Because yesterday, I was just in a conversation with the agency leaders that are running influencer agencies. And I said, your proposition as in creators-as-media is that the creators are the cure to the media fragmentation. Because when we as, like, media buyers— we’ll look at channel by channel, but the creators handle all of them, and they are very flexible and multi-formatted and ways of thinking that aligns your brand versus a channel.
[00:30:43] Ben: I— I love that— curative fragmentation through individual sort of curatorship and— and human connection. And taste. Yeah. And human connection. Well, we are out of time, but we could talk forever. If any of you wanna grab us as we go out, please do. We’re very sociable people. Casey, you are at afterschool.substack.com. Daisy, you are at dirt.fyi, along with many of the other subdomains. And Erica—
[00:31:10] Erica: Craigslist.
[00:31:14] Ben: That is too funny. Erica is an amazing LinkedIn follow, and I want to highlight a post she wrote about— in defense of serendipity — that is really worth thinking about, as in— in terms of how institutional buyers might be thinking about little moments of— of brilliance in media space. So thank you guys for your attention. Thank you guys very much.
[00:31:38] Phillip: In the years since we’ve taped this recording, most of the instincts of the panel have been proven right. Matthew Prince from Cloudflare sat at Cannes just a few weeks after this conversation and said that more than 50% of the traffic on the Internet that they observe is now agentic. And you have to look at Casey’s warning that— Casey’s brands that she advises, they come out of the gate hot. They hit a wall around issue two or three, and they have nothing more to say. And sure enough, in the year that has followed, we see the biggest wave of brand launches in Substack history, and many of these newsletters go dark within months. The brands that treat inboxes like influence, like a campaign, they’ve flamed out on schedule. But the ones that treat it like a true publication, that show up every week, whether or not there is an audience or anything to sell, they have really built something truly of value. One resale marketplace has traced a third of a million dollars in sales to a newsletter written under a pen name. And that brings us back to Wanamaker. The waste isn’t really waste. It’s a relationship.
[00:32:49] Phillip: And the relationship is forming before the transaction — the part of the process that doesn’t get inscribed on a price tag. Every era of media rediscovers this, and then we try to optimize it away again. We all need to bet that the rediscovery sticks this time, because the next reader, the next viewer, your next subscriber may be an agent with your preferences and your credit card, but that agent may not be able to be charmed by a billboard or out-of-home advertising. It can only learn what you have already shown it that you love and what you have already given your attention to. In the inbox, that’s where you’re showing it. That’s how you’re training it today. What you buy is who you become, but what you read is how you decide. Casey Lewis writes After School at afterschool.substack.com. Daisy Alioto publishes DIRT at dirt.fyi. Erica Chen is worth following on LinkedIn, especially her writing in defense of serendipity. And this conversation continues at Visions Summit, November 3, 2026 at MoMA, as we return for our fourth year. As promised, use code PARASOCIAL for 25% off your ticket to Visions at visions.futurecommerce.com.
