Jim Prosser

@jimprosser.bsky.social

1938 Followers 827 Following

Pretty good cook, middling guitar player. Founder and Principal, Tamalpais Strategies. | Marin County, CA | https://tamstrat.com

LinkedIn post by a general partner at a16z bemoaning the increasing pace of AI-generated email pitches he's receiving.
Screenshot of an X post by Brian Armstrong quote-tweeting an interview of Jamie Dimon saying Brian Armstrong is "full of shit", with a fake promotional image for the TV show Heated Rivalry above it where the characters are swapped for Armstrong and Dimon
Escalator up to second level of the Marin County Civic Center, a key shoot location for the movie Gattaca
Enter the Stock Stans The most engaged retail investors don’t function like, sound like, or behave like “shareholders.” They’re more like online fandoms. This shift is behavioral and cultural. I’m calling them Stock Stans. These are individual investors whose relationship to a stock is identity, not just investment. They build their thesis around it, argue about it online, create content evangelizing it, recruit their friends into it, and treat attacks on the company like personal affronts. Think Taylor Swift’s Swifties or BTS’s ARMY, but with brokerage accounts. Organized, vocal, fiercely protective, and loyal through the rough patches in a way fair-weather followers never are. “Bang-up job, Jim, you discovered meme stocks five years late,” you say. But while Stock Stans are certainly involved in meme-y tickers, what’s novel now is every major stock now has them. Costco (~30% retail ownership) shareholders treat the stock the way they treat their Costco membership: as a lifestyle
Jensen Huang walked onto the floor of San Jose’s SAP Center yesterday and held a capacity crowd’s attention for over two hours, no teleprompter, announcing $1 trillion in projected chip orders through 2027, a new rack architecture called Kyber, a prototype data center designed for space, and a live robotics demo starring Olaf from Frozen. He closed with singing robots and an animated lobster performing a campfire song.1 If you’re a communicator looking for actionable takeaways from all this, I can save you some time. Here’s one version of a playbook: Be the CEO of the most important company in the world for the most important technology in the world right now. Have cool jackets or some other signature piece of clothing. Double your revenue estimates once or twice a year. If you can be Jensen Huang and Nvidia, I highly recommend it. It seems to be going great and really fun. But most of us and our executives can’t be Jensen and Nvidia, sadly.
Ever since ChatGPT 3.5 set off an explosion of LLMs and other AI technology, communications agencies have been trying to figure out not just the consequences for their clients, but for their own businesses. Namely: what do we sell now? They needed new offerings to fit the new world. Enter “generative engine optimization”—GEO—positioned as the successor to search engine optimization (SEO), the roughly 30-year-old practice of reverse-engineering search ranking signals to make an organization appear more prominently in results. GEO claims to do the same thing for LLMs that SEO did for search. But it can’t. The people selling it should know it can’t. But they’re selling it anyway. And the only things getting optimized are their invoices.
A Forward Deployed Context Engineer in comms does three things. The unglamorous foundation is capturing the tacit knowledge. That means interviewing senior team members to codify the frameworks they use but have never written down. It means building a relationship intelligence layer—not a media list with email addresses, but the qualitative intelligence about every journalist, analyst, and stakeholder the team interacts with that actually makes outreach effective. It means documenting editing patterns, voice standards, crisis playbooks. All the institutional knowledge that currently lives in people’s heads and evaporates when they leave. Then comes building the context layer. Once the knowledge is captured, it needs to be structured so AI tools can actually use it. This is where the technical fluency matters. Meeting transcripts become queryable archives. Editorial standards become automated quality checks. Stakeholder intelligence becomes contextual input for outreach drafting. With
The Tomorrowland Effect Walt Disney’s original Tomorrowland was compelling because it was a narrative about the future first and an engineering project second. Walt worked with scientists and engineers, but what made it resonate was the storytelling, making you feel something about what was coming, not just showing you a spec sheet. The Citrini piece is a high-quality markets version of Tomorrowland: speculative fiction with financial fluency, built by people familiar with constructing market narratives. The Shumer piece is the gift shop version: mass-produced, shiny enough to catch the eye, but not something you’d put on a shelf. Yet both move the same audience to the same action, and that’s actually the more concerning case. If only the Citrini piece had moved markets, you could chalk it up to the quality of the analysis. But when a clearly-AI-generated blog post produces a comparable reaction, you’re seeing something structural: the audience is grading the narrative, not the prem
Salesforce's Marc Benioff in a suit sits amidst flames with a coffee cup with the Salesforce logo. He casually states, "THIS IS FINE."
Threads post screenshot: So people of other races and cultures that never heard of this band don’t count?  You do realize being a fan of a top 40 band of white men is “garden variety“ right?
X post from @sourceryy paraphrasing/quoting an interview with Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev: Robinhood CEO @vladtenev says AI lacks public support because everyday investors are shut out of the upside, and can’t invest in any of the significant AI companies: “Aside from Google— OpenAI, Anthropic, all the startups, they’re basically out of reach for normal people.”
Sunset-lit San Francisco hillside with winding Lombard Street, flanked by homes and a cable car crossing at the bottom.
According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 71% of global consumers agreed with the statement “I trust companies less than I did a year ago.” That’s a straight-up crisis. Similarly, the Citizen Brands 2025 study found that 56% of consumers believe brands spend too much time talking about their values, up from 47% just a year earlier. More damning: 68% doubt the truth behind those claims. University of Adelaide research found that consumers are “becoming more uncertain of brand communication due to misinformation, deep fakes, misleading claims, and perceived hypocrisy.” A majority of young people believe a brand is hiding something if it avoids certain topics. Let me translate that from consultant-speak: people think companies are full of shit. This tracks with lived experience. If a friend tells you they “got sold a story” about something, are they speaking in a flattering way? So yes, storytelling matters, but there’s something wrong with the stories, obviously. It’s not that a
The constraint for comms people building things is no longer getting engineering help. The greatest constraint is, quite honestly, that the profession’s use of AI is an inch deep and a mile wide. We’re not thinking about AI as a tool for creating things—interactive experiences, internal tools, games, prototypes—that are themselves a form of communication, the ultimate way of showing rather than telling.2 This is a new surface. And I mean that in the same way you’d talk about media relations or executive comms as distinct surfaces, each with their own logic and possibilities. A press release describes something. A tool demonstrates it. Those are different things.
Photo of the front of Sweetwater in Mill Valley, where flowers have been placed
Curt Cignetti burning down CFB blue bloods to send a message
An orca saying “I want you to put the word out there that we back up.”
The "Dr. Manhattan on the moon" meme. It is 2010. Lane Kiffin is the most loathed man in college football. It is 2025. Lane Kiffin is the most loathed man in college football. It is 2040. Lane Kiffin is the most loathed man in college football.
The traditional solutions - fact-checking, media literacy, content moderation - assume we're dealing with a content problem when we're actually facing an infrastructure problem. You can't fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can't educate your way around algorithms optimized for polarization. You can't moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable. Recognizing this as a market structure problem rather than an information problem changes everything. Instead of focusing on individual bad actors or specific false claims, you start thinking about the underlying systems that make manipulation both profitable and scalable.
A new company will be created to operate TikTok, with U.S. investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest, the report said. The company would also have an American-dominated board, with one member designated by the U.S. government.
Charles James Kirk, 31, died on Wednesday from a gunshot to the neck at a Utah Valley University campus event just as he was trying to deflect a question about mass shootings by suggesting they were largely a function of gang violence. He died with a net worth of $12 million, which he made by espousing horrific and bigoted views in the name of advancing Christian nationalism. The foundation of his empire was the group he cofounded and led, Turning Point USA, which is a key youth-recruitment arm of the MAGA movement. Kirk was able to launch Turning Point at the age of 18 because he received money from Tea Party member Bill Montgomery, right-wing donor Foster Feiss, and his own father, also a prolific right-wing donor. He was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct. He had children, as do many vile people.
Taylor Swift on stage in the cafeteria at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA.
"Meta is the Washington Commanders of tech companies. They massively overpay for okay-ish AI scientists and then civilians think those are the best AI scientists in the world because they are paid so much." An Al startup founder
Scene out in front of the Silver Peso bar, Larkspur, CA. A lonely man stands out front under a glowing neon sign.
Soviet propaganda-style artwork of a woman with glasses defiantly gripping a red emdash in her closed fist in the air. Below it in Russian is the caption "Emdashers of the world, unite!"
Upward-angled photo of Marin County Civic Center, looking up from ground level toward the massive skylight above.
Block Inc. investor relations boilerplate. Key sentence: “TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs.”
Anakin/Padme meme with Anakin saying, "We're going to bring manufacturing back to America." Padme repeats, "Using human labor and not just robots, right?"