WHY ME?

Some people take one look at me and assume I came into advertising the easy way, through a side door marked SPAWN OF CHIAT/DAY FOUNDER. NO HAIRCUT OR SWEATY ALL-NIGHTERS REQUIRED.

Yes, I grew up with access to a world-class creative brain at the dinner table.

Most kids got homework help. I got Guy Day.

Tales about typography, stubborn clients, and why a headline shouldn't wear Paco Rabanne if the visual's doing the lifting.

Having Guy Day for a father opened doors.

It also meant people had opinions about what I deserved before I'd done a damn thing.

My dad believed in the sheer intellect of tenacity. That it beats talent the same way a pickup truck beats a Styrofoam convenience store ice chest.

Modesty was table stakes. Daylight was underrated. Peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches arrived quartered and relieved of their crusts, proper Midwestern engineering at its finest.

My dad taught me never to confuse intoxication with inspiration. Show up early. Run toward flames. Fix shit, even if the problem started three states away.

Spend time with clients when you aren't trying to sell them something, which at first felt suspiciously like friendship.

Later, Dad taught me how to manage creative people. Mostly by spotting the odd duck in the corner who hadn't been picked for kickball, handing them a helmet and making damn sure they knew I had their back.

Hire talented people. Push them. Protect their best work. Own the mistakes.

And maybe his most radical advice of all:

Have a fucking life.

Ride the Ferris wheel at night. Marry well and mean it. Be decent, even if it costs you.

I spent forty-some years putting those lessons to work.

And discovering just how much trouble a little decency could get you into.

I worked at agencies big enough to have security badges and small enough that everybody knew who was stealing people's lunches.

BBDO. Saatchi. GSD&M. Barnhart. Amelie. McGarrah Jessee.

And a few places where the org chart would have consisted largely of arrows pointing to the same three people.

I started as a copywriter. Eventually, they put me in charge of other copywriters.

The titles got longer. The job stayed the same:

Find something worth saying. Make it hard to ignore. Protect it until it gets out the door alive, ten fingers, ten toes.

Through all of it, I never stopped being a writer.

You name it, I've probably written about it.

Trucks. SUVs. Fast food. Beer. Groceries. Software. Tourism. Magazines. Animal adoption. Automated voice assistants. Mortuaries. Organic tampons.

Some of it was even requested.

I wrote headlines. Manifestos. Brand stories. Campaigns. Films. Things that made people laugh. Things that made people uncomfortable. Occasionally, things that did both.

My favorite assignments involved finding that one peculiar place a brand could own that nobody else in the category had the brains or balls to occupy.

Central Market needed a different way to talk about food.

CHEW WITH YOUR MIND OPEN.

I helped put Land Rover in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, an unexpected address for something built to collect passport stamps.

At McGarrah Jessee alone, we hauled 236 pieces of metal back to the office, were named Southwest Agency of the Year and eventually landed a profile in Communication Arts.

I appreciated the recognition.

Did being at the top of the org chart give me job security?

Fuck no.

Which is one reason I came to care more about what the work actually did than about somebody handing us shiny shit for doing it.

Work that moved products. Helped save a small-town brewery. Built rabid fan bases. Appeared in textbooks. Got animals adopted.

I reminded people to buckle up. Their dogs were counting on them.

Helped people talk about addiction. Got lifesaving NARCAN into more hands.

Sent record numbers of slack-jawed visitors to Wyoming.

Occasionally, I talked a large corporation out of doing the same boring shit it did last year.

And I made mistakes. Some were expensive.

I spent decades scaring the conformity out of myself.

And helping other people do the same.

Eventually, I started writing things that didn't come with a client brief.

Books.

Five of them, so far.

Books about advertising, creativity, careers, stupidity, and the lies we tell ourselves instead of doing something about them.

Writing a book is a different kind of torture from writing advertising.

Nobody interrupts to ask if the logo could be bigger.

But there's nobody else to blame when the writing stinks.

I loved it.

I still do.

Then artificial intelligence reared its pointy little head.

A machine that could generate plausible mediocrity at warp speed.

After forty years fighting predictable thinking, I suddenly had an opponent capable of manufacturing it around the clock.

Naturally, that brought out my suspicious side.

I spent more than 4,000 hours arguing with AI. Rejecting answers. Demanding better ones. Trying to make predictive machinery considerably less predictable.

And somewhere in all that arguing, an uncomfortable question emerged.

How much of the predictable thinking was coming from the machine?

I had forty years of experience.

Forty years of habits, too.

Turns out, we both needed pushing.

Along the way, I developed The Harder Loop, a method for forcing more original thinking out of AI without surrendering the wheel.

I wrote CHAIOS. Two hundred eighteen pages about what happened when I stopped accepting reasonable answers and started demanding something worth a damn.

Then I turned the whole mess into MAN BITES AI, a theatrical argument between a man, a machine, and the increasingly endangered art of giving a fuck.

Because I don't believe artificial intelligence is going to save creativity.

And I don't believe it's necessarily going to destroy it.

That part is still up to us.