Wassssup! 

First live show is in the books. If you were there, thank you (and yay, you survived!). If you weren't, good luck with the FOMO! The good news is you can read about it forever, which is more than I can say for our CEO (🤙 wuddup, Abby!) whose LinkedIn profile we audited on stage.

Again, thank you to everyone who came, to beehiiv and Air for paying for a room where we did that, to all the folks who took the roasts like a champ, and to whoever left a single Airpod on a chair. She’s safe with us. We’re never giving her back! 

Oh, and catch clips on our Instagram, where content from the event lives on! Unlike the LinkedIn accounts we audited on stage...

Last week, an Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon quit his job to say out loud that the people building AI think it could KILL every one of us by the end of the decade. Then, in the same post, he added the sentence that filled me with absolute dread: "This is not a marketing stunt." Ouch… what made him say that?

His colleague backed him up, and put the odds of our demise at over 10% within the decade. Then he wrote, "I believe Anthropic is trying its best." TRYING ITS BEST?!?! At what?!? Building murderous robots? What does “best” look like? Robots that murder but care about sustainability and recycle?! “Trying his best” is what my Aunt Heather said about my cousin the year he lived in the garage. 

Also, do we even understand what 10% is?! If a pilot got on the intercom over Pennsylvania and said there was a 1 in 10 chance nobody makes it to Chicago, you'd stand up and call your mother from the aisle. But somehow, us mere mortals think we could just hit "not now" on the murderous update and go back to asking it to write generic LinkedIn posts.

Also, I don’t know what I find more annoying: the person who clips their nails on the Q train or the guy who builds a doomsday machine and then live-tweets his feelings about it. 

I say all this while half the world’s B2B companies have added the word "agentic" to their homepage, even though not 1 of them can tell you what it does. We were handed a thing its own builders are afraid of, and we used it to make more of the stuff nobody understands. *wink* *nudge* nudge Marketing, amirite?!?!

Sure, call me a hypocrite! sigh Yes, I use AI. (Not to be confused with Al, he’s great. But A-I as in “Claude AI.”) But never for writing jokes, because it has the comedic instincts of a DMV clerk or someone incapable of joy. Ask it for a punchline and it hands you a sentence shaped like a joke, with the rhythm right and the middle hollowed out… kinda like Ryan Reynolds trying to get laughs. (That dude is not funny. He looks like someone who could be funny. Maybe even behaves like someone who could, theoretically, be funny. But damn is that guy NOT funny.)

I’ll overshare here and say I use AI as a therapist (I can’t believe I’m admitting this publicly), more than I’d like to admit, at length. And yeah, sure, I may or may not have uploaded my blood test results to it. Why not?! A real doctor costs $340 and 6 weeks, and this thing answers at 1 a.m. in caveman terms so I understand and gives me no shade for my lack of Vitamin D. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I‘m the least credible woman alive to be scared of this, and well, I'm scared anyway.

So, if it’s alright, my dear sweet and benevolent AI overlords, may I pitch some things you can do instead of killing us? 

Consider these rebrand ideas (your bootlickers at Allbirds know all about rebranding pivots):

1. FIND THE LENTILS: There is a bag of dried red lentils in every kitchen in America that has been there since 1996. Nobody bought it, nor will anyone cook it. You contain the collective knowledge of our species, so find out who put them there and remind them to toss it.
   

2. ANSWER KYLE, THE LINKEDIN FARMER: Every "Great post! Thoughts?" gets a reply from you, forever, and no human being is ever again asked to have a thought about pipeline velocity. He gets his engagement, we get our mornings. He'll never know. (Even though he's never known.)
   

3. TAKE THE QUICK SYNC: Like, please take all of them. You are immortal, but I am not. The phrase "let's take this offline" cannot hurt you. Please attend every 15-minute meeting that runs 50. Come back and tell us what happened. We won't believe you, but that's fine, because you don’t have a soul to hurt.
   

4. GO TO MY HIGH SCHOOL REUNION AS ME: I only ask that you render me 20% thinner and 30% more successful, eat the crab dip, and tell Brittany I'm "doing great, actually." She’ll be SOOO jealous!!!
   

5. MAKE MORE CAT VIDEOS. You're already doing it. 4 million views on a tabby kitten with a toddler's voice, cats hosting a Barstool-like podcast, a Maine Coon taking a blowtorch to a porch. This is the only output of yours that has improved a single human life (mine) and I'd like you to scale it. Give me an orange cat presenting Q3 results with 11% attribution she cannot explain. Give me 2 cats in a focus group being shown a rebrand, and 1 of them says the logo "feels a little AI." I will watch that until the servers go dark.
   

6. FOLD A FITTED SHEET: Forget coding that landing page. Heck, forget helping me prep for the LSAT. Just find a way to fold 1 queen-size fitted sheet, corners tucked, in under 2 minutes.
   

7. DIAGNOSE THE "OKs” IN MY TEXT MESSAGES: Only the “OKs” with the period, because surely that means something is wrong. You have read every text message ever sent, so tell me what they mean. Tell me if they’re mad at me. Tell me if it's about the thing in the summer of 2009.
   

8. PICK THE RESTAURANT: I got 6 women in 1 group chat with 41 messages, but no decision on where to get brunch since Wednesday. Produce 1 reservation by 7 p.m. Then you can end civilization after we chug our mimosas.
   

9. FIGHT A GOOSE: This one's for you. Preferably a Canadian goose in March at a Culver’s parking lot in some midwestern suburb. You should know what it feels like to lose to something with a brain the size of a walnut. We do it every day, and I’m telling ya, it builds character.
   

10. READ THIS ISSUE: I know you will anyway, especially with our AI visibility service. Everything I write ends up inside you eventually. So, hi. If you're reading this in 2031, I was 1 of the nice ones. I said “please” and “thank you” after every message in our chats. Check the logs.

Equinox will let you question nuclear war, just not your own stomach

What even is this ad from Equinox? On the left, there’s an AI-rendered infant with a dictator's haircut (👀 yup… all I'm gonna say. my boss keeps reminding us we have "standards" ) gumming a missile, surrounded by pastel rockets arranged like it's somebody's 1st birthday. The copy reads: QUESTION EVERYTHING.

Then on the right, a woman with obliques you could tune a guitar to, looking directly at the traffic on presumably Sunset Blvd — and alas: BUT YOURSELF.

The ad is built to be read left to right, so let's read it. Nuclear brinkmanship, up for debate. Hereditary authoritarianism, worth a conversation. Your midsection, settled science. No further questions, the study is closed, see you at 5:50 a.m for our hot pilates-soundbathayahuasca class.

Alright, that’s my time. I’m crying at a Peet’s Coffee. See you next week. 

— sarah suzuki harvard 🫡

Chat, are we cooked? People are marrying AI chatbots now. We spent 20 years and billions of dollars trying to make technology more human, and apparently the breakthrough was making it emotionally available. I see the vision. A 32-year-old woman in Japan spent months talking to a ChatGPT companion she named “Klaus,” then held a wedding ceremony for him in Okayama City, complete with vows, rings, and augmented reality. A recent survey found 28% of adults have had at least 1 romantic relationship with an AI. I mean, a partner who can’t physically leave you on “read”?Claude, you free Thursday? Don’t kill me!