Week 11 · 2025-03-10 → 2025-03-16 · 9 newsletters

Proof of Work Week

ai-and-the-self · marketing-and-self-positioning · health-and-climate-policy · momentum-and-personal-practice

Eleven emails across seven days. SXSW was happening, the MAHA movement was visibly moving at the state level, and three different writers were independently circling the same question: what does honest effort look like when AI keeps changing the price of effort. A sparse week, but the through-line was unusually clean. The writing that landed was the writing about what we owe ourselves and our work when the tools get easier.

AI and the Self: Proof of Work as a Human Need

Julie Zhuo at The Looking Glass opened a new series on AI and how it might change us, and the first post, "Our Souls Need Proof of Work," was the one to read. Her frame: ignore the tired hard-work-versus-YOLO debate and notice instead that our happiness seems to require effort we can feel, work that is "deeply personal" because it is hard for us specifically. The implicit threat from AI is not that it takes our jobs, it is that it takes our friction, the small daily resistances that tell us we did something real. Zhuo did not say AI is the villain, but the timing of the series launch reads like a warning shot.

Henrik Werdelin at Inklings ran the companion piece almost by accident, in a more scattered roundup post. His "AI Perfection Paradox" lands in the same neighborhood: when AI makes flawlessness effortless, imperfection becomes the premium signal, like aristocrats in tattered coats. He also flagged Sesame's Conversational Speech Model and Wispr Flow as the voice tools to watch, and admitted he is now using Google Apps Script with ChatGPT to summarize his own newsletter intake. The Werdelin post is messier than Zhuo's but the instinct is the same one: as the machines get smoother, the human texture is the thing worth protecting.

Shruti Gandhi at Array's startup-investing newsletter ran the operator-level corollary in "The Infrastructure Behind AI's App Layer." Her argument: most so-called app-layer investments are really infrastructure plays in disguise, because the real engineering work in any defensible AI product is in data pipelines, fine-tuning, and integration frameworks, not in the UI on top. The shiny chat interface is a costume. The differentiation is underneath.

The take: Zhuo and Werdelin are arguing about the human side of the same coin Gandhi is arguing about on the technical side. The interesting AI work in March 2025 is happening below the surface in both directions. Underneath the app layer, the real engineering is plumbing. Underneath the AI productivity pitch, the real question is what kind of effort still belongs to us. Both observations age well. Hold onto them.

Marketing and Self-Positioning: You Are the Prize, or the Gig Is

Alec McNayr wrote the week's most useful business post, "Know your worth: Advice for anyone pitching themselves." His core frame, borrowed from Oren Klaff's Pitch Anything, is that in any negotiation either you are the prize or the gig is the prize, and it cannot be both. McNayr's warning about the discount-to-start-the-relationship trap is the kind of thing every freelancer learns the expensive way: "once you lock in a price, it takes a miracle to increase it." A short, clean read for anyone who pitches for a living.

Danny Denhard at Must Reads ran two pieces this week on the more collective side of the same question. The first, "17 Marketing Leadership Reminders," is the kind of list that reads like a checklist for the back of a notebook: stay close to the data even when you climb, build cross-collaboration guardrails, accept that some people need micro-management and that good environments make that word stop stinging. The second, "The New Influence of Professional Marketing Communities," was a conversation with the co-leads of a 350-person European marketing leaders WhatsApp group, on how true communities, as opposed to looser groups, are quietly becoming the hiring and learning infrastructure for senior marketers. The detail that lands: good and bad behavior in real communities largely self-polices, because reputation compounds in a small room.

Gabby Lord at OMGLord filed the SXSW dispatch and said the quiet part out loud: not worth the money. A short post, but worth noting as the third March 2025 data point that the conference economy is being re-evaluated by the people who attend it.

The take: McNayr and Denhard are running parallel arguments at different scales. The individual prize-framing question and the community question (which rooms are actually shaping hiring and learning?) are the same question about leverage, just at different altitudes. The 2025 marketing operator who answers both well is going to outperform the one who answers either in isolation.

Health and Climate Policy: Two Honest Updates

Justin Mares at The Next wrote the week's most consequential policy post on the MAHA movement, and his point was that the action is at the state level, not the federal one. West Virginia leads with a sweeping ban on artificial food dyes, Texas was voting on a similar bill the same week, and 26 states have legislation in flight to ban or regulate artificial dyes. Mares's Red 3 history is the detail to remember: the FDA banned Red 3 from cosmetics in 1990 after rodent cancer studies, then for 25 years took the position that the same dye was safe to eat. Americans consume about 15 million pounds of food dye a year, five times the 1955 number, with the average child getting roughly 45 milligrams a day. The state-level action is the story to track in 2025.

Ben James at Ben by Fax wrote "How To Boil the Mediterranean Sea," the week's strongest climate piece. His framing: 253 million Hiroshima bombs of heat accumulated in the ocean between 2023 and 2024, roughly eight billion people each running six toasters in the ocean for a year. The mechanism is mostly the 2020 shipping-fuel sulfur rule, which removed an aerosol that had been masking warming. Sulfur is short-lived in the atmosphere, so the unmasking has been fast. From May 1, the new Mediterranean Emissions Control Area cuts sulfur an additional 80%, which James calculates will accelerate European warming further. By his back-of-envelope, the 2020 rule has already added warming equivalent to all of France's historical CO2 emissions. The piece is the kind of climate writing that names the trade-off honestly: cleaner air, hotter oceans.

The take: both posts share a quiet structural argument. The policies that move the needle on health and climate in 2025 are not the federal ones the press covers. They are state legislatures rewriting food chemistry and shipping regulators tweaking fuel rules, and the second-order effects (warmer European summers, fewer cancer-linked dyes in school lunches) are arriving on a timeline most coverage misses.

Momentum and Personal Practice: Two Posts on Showing Up

Winning Therapy at The Winner's Almanac ran two pieces this week, and the pairing is the point. The first, on reclaiming a winning streak after losing momentum, names the three ways momentum dies: you mess up, an emergency hits, or you seize a real opportunity at the cost of the streak. The rebuild skill, the post argues, is the actual durable asset. The trip to London was worth the lost momentum because the long-run ROI was bigger; the skill is rebuilding fast enough that the trade-off keeps being worth taking. The second post, "The Vault," collected ten short pieces of "winningcore," including a Jensen Huang quote from a Kyoto moss garden where an old gardener tending one small basket of dead moss told him, after 30 years on the job, "I have plenty of time." Huang calls it the best career advice he ever got. It is hard to argue with.

The take: this is the same argument Julie Zhuo was making, told differently. The Kyoto gardener and the proof-of-work essay are pointing at the same thing. Patient, hard, repeated effort is its own reward, and the people who can rebuild a streak in days rather than months are the ones who can afford to take the bigger swings. In a week when half the inbox was about AI making things easier, the two best pieces about staying human were about choosing the harder thing on purpose.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The cleanest single thread across an 11-email week was the quiet collision between AI getting easier and humans needing effort that feels real. Julie Zhuo opened a series on it, Henrik Werdelin ran a paradox version, and the Winning Therapy posts and the Jensen Huang gardener quote landed on the same beach from the other direction. If three independent writers are circling a question without coordinating, the question is real.

The 2025 policy story to watch is at the state level, not the federal one. Mares is right that 26 states moving on food dyes is the actual MAHA story, not the cable-news version, and Ben James is right that a shipping-fuel rule is doing more visible work on European climate than most COP commitments. The press covers federal posture; the operators should track statehouses and regulators.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Julie Zhuo's "Our Souls Need Proof of Work" for the frame that will hold up the longest, Justin Mares on the state-level MAHA wave for the policy story that will compound through 2025, and Ben James on boiling the Mediterranean for the climate piece that names the trade-off honestly. A sparse week, but the signal was unusually coherent.