www.personfamiliar.com/p/the-forwa...
03.03.2026 15:38
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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 layerβnot 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 peopleβs 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
NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The reason most AI implementations in comms disappoint isnβt the technology. Itβs the *context*, or lack thereof.
That's why the next essential comms hire is the Forward Deployed Context Engineer, a person who blends comms knowledge with a systems brain.
This is what a spine looks like. And at the same time, how is any other CEO in AI signing up for a military domestic surveillance program? Did we learn absolutely nothing from PRISM?
The Tomorrowland Effect Walt Disneyβs 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 youβd put on a shelf. Yet both move the same audience to the same action, and thatβs 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, youβre seeing something structural: the audience is grading the narrative, not the prem
NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Why are posts about AI from random Substacks and blogs moving markets more than AI products? It's a calibration gap between Narrative Consumers and Tool Users. (link in next post)
It's true, and I go into it eyes wide open. I do pay for the highest tier of Claude access, so there are some additional SLAs surrounding data privacy/not training on it that give me more confidence.
NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: Public trust in AI is already deteriorating. Execs' rhetorical focus on capital-H Humanity over real people isn't helping. I'm calling it Dr. Manhattan Syndromeβand the nuclear industry already showed us how it ends. (Link in next post)
Yeah, @obsidian.md Gang rise up. Seriously, though, Claude Code plus Obsidian is ridiculously powerful in ways no other productivity app's baked-in "assistant" can ever be. Has completely stopped my productivity app promiscuity. (For now.)
That's the one.
Rogen has quite a different recitation of this timeline in his book, including (crucially) that both he/his production company and Sony were warned by RAND researchers to harden their security systems well before the hacks likely took place.
If you've read Seth Rogen's book, you can't help but come away from this Michael Lynton excerpt feeling there's some serious retcon'ing going on. www.wsj.com/tech/cyberse...
Salesforce's Marc Benioff in a suit sits amidst flames with a coffee cup with the Salesforce logo. He casually states, "THIS IS FINE."
NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: The market isn't punishing SaaS companies for bad earnings, but for not having an answer to "What are you in five years?" But @zoink.bsky.social and @figma.com do. I analyze the many lows and a few highs of SaaS-pocalypse comms. (link in reply)
Threads post screenshot: So people of other races and cultures that never heard of this band donβt count? οΏΌ You do realize being a fan of a top 40 band of white men is βgarden varietyβ right?
Published the same bit over on Threads to see what it'd do and... well, that site's never beating the charges of Twitter for Midwits.
The ultimate litmus test of whether someone is an elder Millennial or just the garden variety kind: ask them who these guys are.
As a 40-something white guy rockist, I'm legally obligated to share MJ Lenderman solo-covering Warren Zevon www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmL...
Nvidia is a $3T company and one of the most widely held stocks in the world. Microsoft owns half of OpenAI. Amazon has billions in Anthropic, as does Google. Meta, AMD, TSMC, Broadcom, Arm β all public, all riding AI, all ludicrously profitable for retail.
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 canβt invest in any of the significant AI companies: βAside from Googleβ OpenAI, Anthropic, all the startups, theyβre basically out of reach for normal people.β
A take so bizarre it's borderline disqualifying for a CEO of a trading platform. The AI trade has been one of the most accessible investment themes ever. Retail investors have made fortunes on it. If anything, that should be catalyzing *more* public support for AI, not less.
Every generation gets the Harvard Facemash it deserves
personfamiliar.substack.com/p/the-start...
NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: I wrote about one of the sneakiest traps startup founders encounter with their comms: knowing when to steer away from the siren song of VC Twitter dopamine hits and toward deeper waters. Be Odysseus. (The Matt Damon version or whoever you have in mind.)
"Much can be accomplished by teamwork when no one is concerned about who gets credit." - John Wooden
"Fuck everybody else, that shit was all me." - Bill Belichick (probably)
Sunset-lit San Francisco hillside with winding Lombard Street, flanked by homes and a cable car crossing at the bottom.
No matter who wins on the field today, San Francisco won this week. Most beautiful city in America.
(h/t portra_papi on IG - go follow, heβs outstanding)
ME, TO MY 70-SOMETHING PARENTS: How do you watch so much cable news!? Iβd just be mad all the time!
[Proceeds to stare at political news on social media for multiple hours daily]
NEW PERSON FAMILIAR: J. Cole finally dropped "The Fall-Off" after an eight-year wait. I wrote about the very different ways he, Kendrick, and Drake cultivate attention β and the surprising applicability to tech comms. open.substack.com/pub/personf...
The Pat Spencer Threes Explosion
(is this anything?)
personfamiliar.substack.com/p/main-char...
According to the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 71% of global consumers agreed with the statement βI trust companies less than I did a year ago.β Thatβs 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 βbecoming more uncertain of brand communication due to misinformation, deep fakes, misleading claims, and perceived hypocrisy.β 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 βgot sold a storyβ about something, are they speaking in a flattering way? So yes, storytelling matters, but thereβs something wrong with the stories, obviously. Itβs not that a
Corporate storytelling and storytelling jobs are on the rise. I'm all for more importance placed on comms! But something about they *way* we're telling stories is wrong, because consumers don't trust them. I explore that and how to remedy it in my latest Person Familiar.
