Hey, it's Payton. 👋

It's the weekend, and these are the 5 dangerously interesting things I found this week, and exactly what to do with each one.

🟢 Steal it

🟡 Adapt it

🔴 Leave it be

The Odyssey gave Christopher Nolan the biggest global opening of his career: $264.1 million ($124.5M at home, $139.6M overseas) for a story whose ending has been public knowledge since roughly 800 BC.

Every person holding one of those tickets already knew how it ends.

(Unless you slept through AP Lit.)

🚨 SPOILER: Odysseus gets home.

Nolan bet one of the year's biggest movies on how it feels to watch a known ending arrive. Seems to have paid off.

🟢 Steal it. Some of the best stories ever told are ones people already know, but that are told in new imaginative ways (cough cough, Disney).

Once you can master the art of re-telling, you’ll never run out of content.

On July 15, China's new rules for humanlike AI took effect, and ByteDance and Alibaba pulled the companion agents people had spent time & tokens building.

Eight days earlier, OpenAI shipped GPT-Live, a voice model that listens while you talk and says "mhmm" so you know it's following along.

It’s the same technology, but two opposite bets on how human a machine should feel.

This is such a new frontier, nobody has settled this yet. The design space is wide open, and you get to decide, on purpose, where being unmistakably human fits into your life, and where machines go.

🟡 Adapt it. Find the one place in your work where a real person is the product (the welcome, the hard conversation, the prayer, the reply) and make it obviously human.

I pulled Magic Words by Jonah Berger off the shelf this week. There’s a famous copier study he writes about.

Imagine there is a line at the xerox machine (the what?) and you need to make copies. You’re in a rush so you ask,

"May I use the Xerox machine?"

Surprisingly it’s a 60% yes. Adding "because I'm in a rush" bumps you up yo a 94%.

Okay, but check this: A nonsense reason ("because I have to make copies") still got 93% yes.

just asking……

🫣Disclaimer: Those numbers applied to a five-page interruption. When the request grew to 20 pages, the nonsense reason fell all the way back to 24%, exactly the same as giving no reason. A legitimate reason reached 42%.

The point is if you want people to take action or give up something (even their place in line at the mythical xerox machine), you just gotta

🟡 Adapt it. Pick the ask your making this (CTA, subject line, a favor from a coworker) and price it before you write it.

Here is a good test: if your offer was absolutely free (no tap, or email submission, or swipe of the card) would people still pass it up? Pay attention to how easily people say yes or no and adjust the offer and price dials from there.

Beverage brand Recess quadrupled its community budget this year.

Twelve months ago, in-person events weren't what they used to be. I think most of the world is still has a covid hangover.

But now the money buys floating sound baths, run clubs, golf outings, yoga, pottery, dinners, and happy hours.

Screens were the cheap default and had a good run. Now with AI on the rise and screen time becoming the default, physical room is the premium channel.

Lucky for us, the church has spent two thousand years learning how to gather people. We may be late to every marketing trend, but we are very, very early to being in the room.

🟢 Steal it. Host one small non-pitch thing this month (a reader coffee, a walk, a workshop) and collect nothing but names and a next date. A free Luma page handles the invites and the list in about five minutes.

Apple spent about a decade and a reported $10 billion building a self-driving car, then killed the whole project in 2024.

But the custom AI silicon and the engineers behind it didn't die with the project. That work became the Neural Engine and the AI now running in your Mac and Apple's servers.

The "failure" became raw material.

If you've ever shipped something that flopped, it likely wasn’t a waster. The skill you built, the audience you found, the system you cracked, none of it evaporates.

It becomes the thing that comes next. Become a person (or business) where nothing is wasted.

🟢 Steal it. Go back to your most public "failed" project and write down what it actually built (a skill, an audience, a habit, a relationship). Point one of those parts at the thing you're making now.

Failing is good, and so are in-person events and very very old stories.

Until next time,

—Payton ✌️