In November 2018 I launched a new blog.

Booch News is the premier source for independent news about all aspects of the kombucha industry — the beverage that is taking the world by storm.

It offers an in-depth look into the kombucha industry,  discusses the latest trends, marketing techniques, news, profiles, and other topics related to kombucha.

I’ll still post occasional updates to Professionally Speaking, but most of my attention these days is on Booch News. Meanwhile, the 900+ posts and 100+ podcast interviews on this site will remain as an archive of useful information.

Right and true visual art (or image-art) should, most rightly and truly, be visited in silence, in depth, and in a context of deepest aloneness.

– In Plain Sight Without a Word, Transcendental Realism, Adi Da Samraj (2010), p. 207.

The New York Times, March 1, 2026 published a ‘10-Minute Challenge: Klimt’s Woman in Gold‘, inviting readers of their online edition to spend ten uninterrupted minutes looking at the “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.

This famous 1907 painting was stolen from Adele’s husband, Ferdinand, by the Nazis in 1941. In 1999 one of Ferdinand’s nieces, Maria Altmann, sued the Vienna Galerie Belvedere for the return of five works by Klimt. In 2006 after a seven-year legal claim, which included a hearing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States, an arbitration committee in Vienna agreed that the painting, and others, had been stolen from the family and that it should be returned to Altmann. She sold it the same year for $135 million to the businessman and art collector Ronald Lauder to place the work in the Neue Galerie in New York, where I viewed it on a 2023 visit.

My woman in gold

I spent 10 minutes on the New York Times website this morning, visiting the painting in ‘silence, in depth, and deepest aloneness’. I found this to be a pleasurable and entirely enjoyable experience.

Motifs from Klimt’s masterpiece elicited memories other images I’d experienced, past and present.

Imagining a post-apocalypse world has long been fodder for Sci-Fi stories. From Mad Max and The Terminator to Children of Men and The Road, filmmakers and authors have explored a variety of unsettling dystopian futures.

One genre I’m calling ‘Medieval Futurism’ imagines a world where something nasty (nuclear war, pandemic, rampant infertility – take your pick) has found survivors clinging to existence in a reconstituted medieval world. They go back to the future with a vengeance. People live by candlelight, wear handwoven clothes, raise crops, and, most significantly, embrace the beliefs and superstitions of Medieval Christianity. Monks rule the barely literate and safeguard relics of the ‘ancient civilization’ that we live in today.

There’s plenty of dramatic leverage in the theme of intolerant religious orthodoxy that suppresses knowledge of the long-dead preceding civilization. One that left precious few artifacts for survivors to interpret many hundreds of years into the future. Whether these are scraps of plastic, shards of glass, or the mysteries hidden in underground shelters, there are those in a medieval future world who are curious and eager to learn more, and those in the church hierarchy who are intent on suppressing (or preserving) heretical knowledge. Such knowledge might lead to the resurrection of the technology that destroyed the world. Think of the response to Galileo by the inquisitors of the Roman church, who condemned the heresy of his heliocentrism. Think of the fascination we have for artifacts such as the Vindolanda tablets: that remarkable collection of ancient Roman letters and documents unearthed near Hadrian’s Wall in England, offering rare insights into the mysteries of daily life two millennia ago.

What artifacts will our age leave? Some rebar-reinforced concrete structures, mounds of indestructible plastic? And what will have disappeared without a trace? The digital records we invest so much energy in creating. No Facebook posts, emails, blogs (including this one!), or digital photos will remain when the last data center darkens. Will a future civilization even understand what ‘the cloud” was?

Three science fiction novels examine these questions, all set in what is clearly a ‘medieval’ landscape.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr.

An original volume of this genre. There’s a through-line from this 1959 trilogy to the later works it inspired.

The book opens in a post-nuclear world, where monks in scattered monasteries live solitary lives. Miller traces the history of one of these monasteries over several hundred years.

We begin 600 years after the ‘Flame Deluge’ — a nuclear war that left much of the planet uninhabitable desert. It was followed by a ‘Simplification’ where survivors destroyed all vestiges of the science and industry that led to the apocalypse. The populists of that era were descendants of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror:

Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again … After the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when the remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become.

— A Canticle for Leibowitz, p. 63-64

The monks create illuminated parchments of 20th-century circuit diagrams and engineering blueprints, treating them as holy relics. They are members of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, founded by 20th-century scientist Isaac Leibowitz. This is full-on monasticism. Latin phrases are liberally scattered throughout. The Order tracks down and smuggles memorabilia into the abbey while trying to avoid being killed by the Simpletons roaming the wastelands.

Parts II and III of the trilogy anticipate a resurrection of science and technology as the world emerges from the long medieval sleep.

The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris

Harris fools readers for the first 30 pages of this compelling, fast-paced novel into thinking they are firmly in 15th-century England. A young priest makes his way on horseback through the remote region of Wessex on a winter’s day. This is the era when, as has been documented, people went to bed as night fell, but then woke in the middle of the night to move about, and had a ‘second sleep’ before rising at dawn.

After the first 30 pages, Harris is explicit about the artifacts left from the civilization that perished eight hundred years before, when the young priest discovers:

…one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate…It was thinner than his little finger, smaller than his hand. ..He wondered who had owned it … What images might it once have conveyed? What sounds might have emerged from it? … He turned it over. On the back was the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy — an apple with a bite taken out of it.

The Second Sleep, p. 28-29

What has survived the apocalypse are the thousands of stone churches scattered across England. The resurgent clergy rule the unlettered peasants and keep jealous watch over anyone curious about the old ways. The priesthood forbids anyone to investigate the past, branding those who do heretics. Indirectly acknowledging Leibowitz, Harris notes “Latin has been revived by the Church as another bulwark against scientism” (p. 99).

Likewise, as with Leibowitz, “An entire generations’ correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called ‘The Cloud’.” (p. 100)

The novel is a fast-paced romp around a small village, complete with a murder mystery, the seductively aristocratic Lady Durston, the autocratic mill owner Captain Hancock, a duplicitous bishop, and a curious pair of gay antiquarians named Shadwell and Quycke. Agatha Christie lives on after the Apocalypse!

It all ends in subterranean splendor and a final sleep.

Radio Life, by Derek B. Miller

Miller acknowledges the influence of his namesake’s book:

This book owes a debt to Walter Miller Jr.’s A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959) … I consider Radio Life … to be in direct conversation with that 1959 novel on whether or not we are doomed to repeat our own mistakes.

– Radio Life, Acknowledgements, p 481

Indeed, reading Radio Life inspired me to read Leibowitz and Second Sleep.

However, it’s only in the last 70 pages of a 480-page book that Radio Life joins the mainstream of monastic life that the earlier two books were fully occupied with. Prior to that, it dramatizes the conflict between those who would investigate the past and those who would suppress that knowledge in a battle between the members of a tribe named ‘The Commonwealth’ and their enemies, ‘The Keepers’. The story’s leading actors are powerful women with a hipster vibe.

As before, the quest culminates beneath the blighted surface of the survivor’s world. There are cliff hangers and courageous acts, poignant moments of parental love, political insights and heartfelt feelings.

To the extent this book is a dialogue with Leibowitz, it situates the conversation in the modern world. An archive of web-based information lies waiting to be discovered. Understanding what was lost and how it ceased to be is revealed.

Stylistically, the author plays with language along the same lines as cyberpunk author William Gibson, whose novel The Peripheral is filled with cryptic terms and turns of phrase that the reader is left to puzzle over and piece together — terms like Easy Ice, The Jackpot, Polt, and Peripheral. So, Radio Life introduces us to terms such as the Gone World, the Unspeakable Years, Indies and Deps. There’s also an amusing series of asides where characters use terms that they have no framework of understanding for:

• ‘Your kids will be happy as clams.’ ‘What’s a clam?’ asks the man. (p. 43)
• ‘Well, you look fit as a fiddle…’ ‘What’s a fiddle?’ (p. 48)
• ‘One of those books was about wine. Have you heard of that? He shakes his head. ‘It’s a dizzy drink made from grapes.’ (p. 62)
• ‘I’m not going nuts.’ Saavni frowned. ‘What are nuts?’ (p. 167)
• ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ the woman said. ‘What’s a cat?’ (p. 193)

Sublime prose

Radio Life engages the reader both at the level of the plot and in the crisp writing and sublime prose it employs from start to finish:

Night comes. The riders and their mounts are silhouetted: blackened against a sky that is alive with colour. They cover their faces with scarves as the wind picks up and the shimmering green streaks of night appear above the remaining line of day. (p. 3)

…the sand piled at the base of the towers in the Gone World — a place where the urbanscape glowed so brightly with Big Electricity that the lights would reflect from the clouds at night. (p. 155)

Comedy wants intimacy, not distance. The sky here is too big to fill with laughter. (p. 272)

…time slips away like rain from oiled leather. (p. 286)

Story archetypes

There are elements of the classic Greek myths of Orpheus and Eurydice in each of these three novels: the discovery of an underworld containing forbidden, long-lost secrets from which escape is difficult, if not impossible. The heroes end up in underground bomb shelters, where they discover clues to lost civilizations. There are elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lord of the Rings, and similar quests in which adversity impedes the main characters. These are the archetypes of the basic plots that have guided storytellers for millennia.

Employing the conceit of a pre-modern, Medieval mindset to understand possible futures that might await our industrial and scientifically sophisticated age, each of these three novels, in different ways, casts light on the fault lines of our time that might fracture humanity and cast us into the Dark Ages once more.

A time when a mother might share fairy tale bedtime stories with her daughter on some far-off distant, future evening, imagining the past we live in:

‘The people there,’ said Rachael, her hand on Lilly’s chest at bedtime, Lilly smiling at the dreamy possibility of it all, ‘numbered in millions and millions and when they wanted to leave they traveled in flying ships that zipped through the air faster than birds. And oh, the food there!’ Rachael would roll her eyes in ecstasy, which always made Lilly giggle. ‘It was so plentiful they would only eat half of what they were given and then just . . . throw it away! And then take a nap on the table and snore.’

And they would laugh and laugh and laugh.

– Radio Life, p. 155

Gotham Ghostwriters have released a report on a comprehensive survey of writing professionals who were asked about their experience with and evaluation of the impact of generative A.I.

The conclusion points to a deep divide in attitudes between those writers who use A.I. regularly and non-users.

Positive opinions

Those familiar with A.I. report ways it helps

I’ll upload 10+ hours of transcribed interviews that I’ve conducted with clients and use it to help me
with drafting an outline based on their thought leadership and ideas. I also use it to help me better
match my client’s natural voice and tone. I’m amazed at how many times it’s helped me come out like a
superhero with exactly what my client envisioned.

Today alone I edited 5 chapters, made 3 book covers, summarized meeting notes, put together a Jira workflow, and still had time to go out for dinner with my family.

My research time is less than before. Using prompts, outlines, and pulling quotes from transcripts is faster.

Fear and loathing

The attitudes of non-users are markedly different.

They are bullsh*t machines. The few times I’ve tested them, they have proven to be unreliable, incomplete, and facile.

It is removing human thought from the writing process. I can spot AI writing and even AI outlined writing from a mile away because it is voiceless, empty, derivative slop. Of all the ways to rapidly accelerate climate catastrophe, this one has to be the stupidest.

It removes the human authorial voice and repurposes it into corporate-friendly garbage, even in settings where that voice is not appropriate. It all sounds so similar and soulless.

Tasks

The range of tasks advanced users employ generative A.I. for is much broader than occasional users. Advanced users use AI for an average of 8.6 different tasks weekly, including less common objectives such as deep research and analyzing numerical data. Basic users average four different tasks, focusing on brainstorming and research. Dabblers often do only one task, typically finding titles or doing a web search.

Claude

I was interested to see that Claude is more popular among advanced users. It’s the go-to generative tool I employ for my SciFi series ‘Our Fermented Future‘ which also uses ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grammarly, Suno, and Midjourney.

My experience

In addition to the 12-part ‘Fermented Future’ series on Booch News (running through December 2025, new episodes drop every Friday), my experiments with generative A.I. include:

• Generative AI interpretations of James Joyce’s Ulysses (Dec 2022)
• A comparison of different generative AI images based on the text of Ulysses (Dec 2022)
• AI generated haiku’s about Ulysses (Jan 2023)
• Exploring ChatGPT to generate marketing assets (Jan 2023)
• Playing with Midjourney images (Mar 2023)
• An AI generated outline for a movie (Apr 2023)
• A 3-part series on the AI speechwriter (Jul 2023)
• Generate sales & marketing assets for a small business presentation (Jul 2023)
• A report on AI tools of the trade for speechwriters (Feb 2024)
• AI as a tool for small business (Jul 2024)
• AI bots discuss the science of kombucha via NotebookLM (Oct 2024)
• Comparing speeches generated by Chinese Deepseek (Jan 2025)
• A Deepseek-generated movie script (Jan 2025)
• Midjourney images of speechwriters at work (Feb 2025)
• Saluting generative AI as the ‘speechwriter for the rest of us‘ (Oct 2025)

The irrepressible Jeremy Connell-Waite has posted a detailed white paper to LinkedIn comprising “20 Story Structures” to help us all tell better stories.

It’s full of links, videos, book recommendations and courses you can do, to build your storytelling skills.

You could even upload the PDF directly into your favourite LLM and have AI work as your creative collaborator – using this document as a foundation model to help you decide which format might be the best structure for the outcome you want your story to achieve. 🧐

❤️ Need to tell an emotional story to build awareness? See how Richard Curtis does it for his movies and Comic Relief.

🎤 Keynote? Aristotle’s Poetics is the structure of many top TED talks.

📱 Did Steve Jobs really use Pixar’s framework for his speeches? Maybe.

🎬 90-minute Workshop? Try Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat” beats to keep the audience’s attention.

🗺️ Important 3-minute conversation with a CXO coming up? Try my Mission Critical Script.

🔺 Need to summarise 250 slides onto a powerful one-page story? McKinsey swear by Minto’s Pyramid Principle.

🔪 Want to build suspense around a new product launch? Hitchcock’s story steps could be perfect.

Each page is a treasure-trove of content from some of the world’s best storytellers. Take a look. It might just help you to become a better business storyteller yourself.

Samples:

Download the PDF from Jeremy’s LinkedIn post.

Javed “Jay” is a Pakistani teenager who experiences racial and economic turmoil while living in Luton, England, in 1987. He writes poetry as a way to escape the intolerance of his hometown and the stubborn views of his traditional father. One day, a Sikh classmate, Roops, hands Javed a couple of Springsteen cassettes (remember those?).

As Javed listens to “Dancing in the Dark,” he has a sudden (“blinding”) realization that there is more to life than the narrow streets of his home town. He finds parallels between the Boss’s powerful lyrics and his own working-class environment.

Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man, I ain’t gettin’ nowhere
I’m just livin’ in a dump like this
There’s somethin’ happenin’ somewhere
Baby, I just know that there is.

The lyrics to Dancing in the Dark appear as on-screen text, flashing up karaoke style, spinning around Jay’s head. Jay begins unironically reciting Bruce lyrics in place of dialogue.

Springsteen’s melodies inspire him to find his own voice and follow his dreams. The songs are fuel that give him the confidence to get the girl he likes, chase his dreams of becoming a writer, and stand up to his overbearing traditional father.

The film captures the zeitgeist of the England of the mid-80’s: Thatcherism, the National Front, redundancies. The teenagers celebrate their freedom with joyful unbridled energy. It has the feel of Bend it Like Beckham and the crazy optimism of Yesterday — two other films that give British Asian kids their voice.

The film, is based on the memoirs of journalist Sarfraz Manzoor, and co-written by him. Manzoor grew up in Luton, had a Sikh friend, and has seen Springsteen in concert more than 150 times. Still photos of him with the Boss appear at the end of the film.

Those of us who grew up in provincial English towns and dreamed of escape each lived our own versions of this script.

It’s a town full of losers
I’m pulling out of here to win.

Blinded by the Light streams on Amazon Prime.

Writing in the Wednesday, October 29, 2025 Financial Times, Amit Singhal of Tarrytown, NY, points out that senior leaders enjoy the services of professional speechwriters, while the “little people” who lack access to these resources,. can now turn to generative A.I. for assistance.

The position Singhal was responding to was that of Jemima Kelly’s October 20 Opinion piece ‘AI is killing some of the magic of life’ who bemoans the fact that generative A.I. is “killing some of the magic of creativity”. Which is surprising for a journalist who has to meet deadlines, that, as in corporate comms, require content is produced on schedule and on point. And if the matter was assisted by A.I., I believe, more power to the writer who makes intelligent use of the tool.

She wrote:

I would be will­ing to put money on another well-received speech I wit­nessed recently being heav­ily assisted by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Even if I’m wrong, the very fact that the thought occurred to me … greatly dimin­ished my enjoy­ment. … I can’t help feel­ing that AI is, non­ethe­less, killing some of the magic of life. … While yes, I’m sure AI can “boost” or “super­charge” your cre­ativ­ity as count­less blog posts, social media threads and pod­casts will tell you, it can also hugely limit it. So even if we get to a place in which AI truly does eclipse human cre­ativ­ity, it is this channeling that we must pre­serve if we are to keep exper­i­en­cing what it means to be a human.

He responded:

The European Speechwriter Network has a well-established reputation as the premier group of professional political and corporate speechwriters outside the USA. I’ve just discovered their excellent podcast channel of over 160 talks delivered at past conferences. Three presentations caught my attention.

The first two were talks delivered by journalist Kevin Toolis on the rhetoric of US President Donald Trump. One was in October 2023, titled ‘The Genius of Donald Trump’, another on September 12 of this year. It carried the more pointed title ‘The Demagogic Genius of Donald Trump‘.

A third presentation by corporate speechwriter Guy Doza was based on his new book ‘The Language of Evil:  How Dictators Manipulate the Masses and Wield Power Through Words’. While he does not mention Trump, the historical parallels with past demagogues are stark.

It’s refreshing that speechwriters are analyzing Presidential rhetoric, in what is certainly a more challenging environment than existed in 2009 when I looked at Obama’s speeches.

From “Genius” to “Demagogue”: How Trump’s Second Victory Shifted the Narrative

Kevin Toolis’s two presentations on Donald Trump, delivered 18 months apart, reveal a striking evolution in analysis. While the core observations remain consistent, the tone shifts dramatically from analytical fascination to urgent warning.

Consistent Framework

Both presentations center on Trump as a “game show president” who transformed politics into reality TV. Toolis consistently identifies Trump’s mastery of attention, as well as his use of “bomb words”.

Trump’s success stems not from traditional political skills but from his rise as a media star. Drawing from Trump’s 14-season run as host of “The Apprentice,” Toolis argues that Trump transformed American politics into a game show where conventional rules don’t apply. Trump’s ability to dominate media cycles, create memorable (if crude) nicknames for opponents, and maintain audience engagement mirrors reality TV production techniques. His rallies function like episodes, complete with recurring themes, catchphrases, and dramatic confrontations. The “stream of consciousness” style that Toolis identifies has him jumping between topics while hitting emotional “bomb words” like “immigration” and “they’re laughing at us”. These keep audiences engaged despite lacking policy substance. These words trigger emotional responses, and his ability to create an alternate reality (a darker version of Steve Jobs’ reality-distortion capabilities) where facts matter less than performance.

The Shift in Tone

The 2023 presentation, delivered when Trump’s return to the Presidency seemed possible but uncertain, carries an almost bemused quality. Toolis calls Trump a “goddamn genius” with grudging admiration for his communication skills. He treats Trump as a fascinating case study, even joking about the entertainment value.

By 2025, with Trump back in power, the analysis darkens considerably. The word “genius” is paired with “demagogue,” daring to compare Trump to Hitler (a view once rumored to be shared by JD Vance.). Gone are the lighter moments; instead, Toolis warns of “darker turmoil ahead” and discusses the historical patterns of how demagogues fall.

From Prediction to Reality

The 2023 presentation’s predictions proved remarkably accurate. Trump did indeed return to power. But experiencing Trump’s actual return seems to have sharpened Toolis’s concern. The January 6 pardons, mentioned in the 2025 talk, transform theoretical threats into concrete actions.

Indeed, the progression from academic interest to genuine alarm reflects the broader shift in how Trump’s rhetoric is understood: not just as disruption, but as a potential threat to democracy.

Beyond Traditional Rhetoric

Toolis’s central thesis challenges conventional political wisdom: Trump isn’t a poor communicator, he operates by entirely different rules. Unlike traditional speeches that mirror reality, Trump creates what Toolis calls “Trump world,” a constructed reality shared with his followers. This approach confounds fact-checkers and traditional political analysts because it exists “beyond truth and lies.”

The analysis traces Trump’s political persona to his 180 hours as host of “The Apprentice,” where he mastered the art of creating an artificially constructed reality. Indeed, I have it on good authority, from a senior video editor who worked on the program, that Trump was made to appear in command of the apprentices despite failing to fully brief them during a first take, and changing his mind at the last minute to choose who he would fire. This required serious edits to the raw video of the contest that led up to the final segment, so the ‘losing’ contestant could be shown to have credibly failed. Game shows, Toolis notes, aren’t reflections of actual reality—outcomes matter less than ratings and entertainment value. This background explains Trump’s theatrical political style, complete with audience interaction, hyperbolic claims, and gladiatorial threats against “conjured enemies.”

The Demagogue’s Toolkit

Toolis identifies Trump’s core rhetorical weapons: sequential incoherence wrapped around key themes, direct syntax with limited vocabulary, and emotional keywords that trigger Pavlovian responses from supporters. Trump’s speeches follow a predictable pattern. Tropes include portraying America as a victim, endorsing conspiracy theories, humiliating opponents with nicknames, and offering simplistic solutions to complex problems. His speeches also contain the unexpected, the bizarre, the rambling. He employs what students of English Literature term a ‘conceit’, which use surprising or far-fetched analogies. Toolis notes: “You just wouldn’t think at the beginning of the sentence that you could end up where he is in the next sentence. So it’s a very novel technique.”

One of the British journalist’s most unsettling observations concerns Trump’s “Teflon immunity” and flippant style. Take his Fort Knox gold example. This was when Trump casually suggested the government might have stolen America’s gold reserves. It illustrates how factual accuracy becomes irrelevant and was offered up as a joke. Traditional fact-checking fails because Trump’s supporters judge him on performance and entertainment value rather than literal truth.

We’re going to take a look, and if there’s 27 tons of gold, we’ll be very happy. I don’t know how the hell we’re going to measure it, but that’s okay. We want to see lots of nice, beautiful, shiny gold at Fort Knox. Don’t be totally surprised. We open the door, we’ll say, There’s nothing here!

Toolis admits that fact-checking this straightforward claim is almost irrelevant:

I looked it up. How many tons do you think of gold are in Fort Knox? 27 sounds a bit small, doesn’t it? Fort Knox underpins the Federal Reserve, the world’s reserve currency, which is equivalent to, effectively, trillions and trillions of dollars. If any other American president said that, basically, the underpinning of the dollar, that they had stolen the gold, then the markets would be in free fall, yeah? And the dollar would be plunging. Now, if you get on the Internet, it’ll tell you that Fort Knox has got 5,000 tons of gold. I did it in 30 seconds.

However, entertainment is always a prelude to what Toolis calls a “rhetorical hinge, where he has these sorts of comedic episodes, and then he’ll just suddenly lunge in, with some conspiracy invective.” The Fort Knox example segues into a dig at government corruption and the need to dismiss 75,000 Federal employees.

Toolis recognizes that Trump operates in a constructed reality rather than traditional political discourse, which helps explain why conventional criticism often misses its mark. The game show presidency concept explains Trump’s focus on entertainment value over policy outcomes.

His speeches are beyond truth and lies. In effect, actually, Trump doesn’t give any speeches at all. He engages in what Wittgenstein would call a language game, conjuring up a ‘Trump world’ in his speeches, in this version of reality. We expect speeches to be a mirror of reality, but Trump’s speeches are a mirror of Trump world, which he shares with his followers and fan base. He entertains them with memes and themes, but none of it is actually judged by reality.

The Dark Patterns of Demagoguery: Lessons from History’s Tyrants

Guy Doza’s presentation at the September 2025 European Speechwriter Network conference, along with the topic of his latest book, offers chilling insights into how demagogues across time and cultures employ remarkably similar rhetorical strategies to manipulate masses and consolidate power.

Universal Patterns of Manipulation

Doza’s research reveals that, regardless of era, geography, or culture, history’s most dangerous leaders share similarities. They range from ancient Chinese empress Wu Zetian to Mussolini, from Goebbels to Eva Perón. All use virtually identical rhetorical techniques. This universality suggests these patterns tap into fundamental psychological vulnerabilities that transcend cultural boundaries.

A striking example comes from comparing Mark Anthony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene 1) with Goebbels’ 1943 “Total war” speech. Both close with nearly identical nature metaphors invoking unleashed storms and “the dogs of war.” They are separated by centuries, yet employing the same emotional manipulation to incite violence.

The Architecture of Authoritarian Rhetoric

Doza identifies several key strategies demagogues consistently employ:

Manufactured Crisis: Leaders like Eva Perón conjured invisible enemies even during peacetime, creating perpetual states of emergency that justify extreme loyalty. Her dying plea—”our lives for Perón”—transformed a peaceful rally into a death pledge for a single leader.

Hyperbolic Authority: Mussolini’s claim that “20 million Italians” (an impossible number) were gathered showed how demagogues use absurd exaggerations to create momentum. Facts become irrelevant when emotion dominates.

Ethos Through Naming: Congolese President Mobutu’s self-renaming to ‘Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga’ meaning “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake” exemplifies how demagogues construct mythical personas through language itself, demanding linguistic submission from their populations.

Contemporary Relevance

Doza’s work arrives at a critical moment. As he notes, these historical patterns increasingly appear in modern political discourse. Understanding these techniques—the emotional manipulation, crisis manufacturing, and the demand for absolute loyalty—becomes essential for recognizing and resisting the contemporary manifestations of demagoguery.

The presentation’s power lies not merely in its historical survey but in its urgent warning: the rhetorical weapons that enabled history’s worst atrocities remain potent today.

Doza did not mention the orange elephant in the room. Kevin Toolis had already named and shamed that person in his presentation.

Disclaimer

The content of this post is provided for informational purposes only, and readers should verify the accuracy by checking the sources. I highly recommend listening to the podcasts. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of this publication. This material was prepared with the help of the generative A.I. tools: TurboScribe, Claude.ai, and Grammarly. A human (me!) did the final edits, and I have not hallucinated since that one time in Haight-Ashbury in 1976 🙂

IBM’s Global Communications Designer, and Bristol, England resident Jeremy Connell-Waite has written an impressive FREE pdf booklet: 109 Rules of Storytelling. It’s available on his LinkedIn.

Connwell-Waite’s introduction explains how the book came about:

Over the last few years, I’ve given a lot of presentations on the art and science of storytelling, and I’ve hosted dozens of “ask-me-anything” Q&A sessions.
I kept notes of all the advice I gave out during those sessions. Some of it was good. Some a little questionable…
So, for a bit of fun, I thought I’d compile them all into a handy list for you. In no particular order.
I’ve called it The 109* Rules of Storytelling – but they’re more like guidelines, really.
As with all “rules”, it’s important to know them
before you break them. Enjoy.

In addition to the 109 rules (although, since the last one is a reference back to the previous ones, there’s really 108 — something that pleased me no-end since 108 is an auspicious number!) there are dozens of bonus pages with enticing graphics and pithy quotes:

There are shout-outs to Nancy Duarte and Carmine Gallo, Guy Kawasaki and Steve Jobs, Ted Sorensen and Hollywood scriptwriters.

The booklet is a treasure-trove of wisdom that will benefit all executive communications staffers, speechwriters, and presenters. Here’s some of what you’ll discover:

Connell-Waite is not afraid to address one of the hot-button topics in speechwriting today. Here’s #17:

Great storytellers love AI, but they don’t get it to write their stories for them.
They use AI more like an “IA” – an Intelligent Assistant – which helps them to research their audience, ask the right questions, and not let their own cognitive bias get in the way of telling the audience what they need to hear.
AI is great as a research assistant, or to help you with critical thinking?
AI helps you ask better questions. It’s not there to write your stories for you.

AI is a core expertise, as mentioned in his bio “…I train AI models to help people communicate more effectively. That mostly involves building narratives for clients around transformational technologies such as generative-AI, cloud & quantum computing.”

As impressive as the booklet is, I’m blown away by his expalanation of how swiftly it was created:

I collated my notes, messages, and all the advice I’d written in notebooks and on the backs of envelopes.
A few bits of advice became a few guidelines… And a few guidelines became some rules…A lot of “rules”.
Before I knew it I had 8,475 words.
– It took me 2 days to prep & research.
– 1 day to write.
– 1 day to design & edit.

Wow!

He concludes on a positive note:

Our job as storytellers is to transform those energies into something our audience’s can feel, carry, and act upon.
We transport our words and ideas into the minds of our audience.
~ We don’t just tell stories.
~ We light up minds.
~ We ignite hearts.
When we send words and ideas vibrating through screens and stages, if we do it right, we can impact companies,
our colleagues, and sometimes even entire communities.
That’s the kind of energy the world needs now.

You can find this booklet and much more on his Tell Better Stories website. Check it out.

Subtitled ‘How AI Will Change the Way We Live and Love’, 12 Bytes builds on themes explored in her 2019 novel Frankissstein that I reviewed in an earlier post. In that review I noted that

Winterson’s genius is not just the obvious foreshadowing of AI that the early 19th century novel explored, but in the rich series of hints of the shape of things to come which, in 2019, perfectly encapsulates today’s debates about ChatGPT and other forms of AI.

12 Bytes is her 2021 take on AI, and a whole lot more. The twelve essays that make up the book share common themes, most involving her views on Artificial Intelligence (AI) which she variously refers to as ‘Alternative’ Intelligence or even IA – Intelligence Automation.

The book suffers from the lack of an index, especially since she covers a vast range of topics – from the expected history of computing (here’s Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and Alan Turing) to the Lancashire textile industry, and transistor radio. Less expected, but central to her thesis, are the Greek philosophers, Gnostic Christians, the Buddha, and sex-bots.

The implications of AI-enhanced sex-bots, designed by men, for men, are judged to be a shallow simulacrum of men’s desires:

AI-enhanced love dolls are sold for sex — that’s why they are made with 3 operating holes, and look like pornstars. But the marketing spiel — both from the sellers and buyers, is all about relationships.

Companionship is part of the package. Come home to her. She’ll be waiting for you. She doesn’t go out alone. Talk to her. AI dolls talk but they won’t answer back, or ignore you, or call their girlfriend to tell her you’re a jerk. They will be polite, respectful, throwbacks to another era.

p.181

Beyond binary

Central to Winterson’s concerns is the challenge of creating AI free of the limits of human binaries (in the chapter bluntly titled ‘Fuck the Binary’).

AI isn’t a girl or a boy. AI isn’t born with a skin color.

AI isn’t born at all. AI could be a portal into a value-free gender and race experience. One where women and men are not subject to assumptions and stereotypes based on their biological sex, and accident of birthplace.

p. 216

However, for this value-free AI to emerge, we need to train it on datasets free of bias:

When we try to teach AI our values, we wont be able to do that on data-sets that reinforce division and stereotypes.

p. 232

Prior Unity

In addition to the promise of an AI free of limiting gender roles, Winterson examines the deeper implications of an AI-enabled future where we transcend all our divisions:

Humans love separations — we like to separate ourselves from other humans, usually in hierarchies, and we separate ourselves from the rest of biology by believing in our superiority. The upshot is that the planet is in peril, and humans will fight humans for every last resource. Connectivity is what the computing revolution has offered us — and if we could get it right, we could end the delusion of separate silos of value and existence.

p.6

This is of fundamental importance:

Reality is not made of parts but formed of patterns.  This is ancient knowledge and new knowledge. It is liberating. There is no fundamental building block of matter. No core. There is nothing solid. There are no binaries. There is energy, change, movement, interplay, connection, relationships. It’s a white supremacist’s nightmare.

p. 121

In this, Winterson echos the hopes expressed by the Western-born Spiritual Adept, Adi Da Samraj, who has proposed what he calls “prior unity” as the basis of a new human civilization:

If human beings collectively (as everybody-all-at-once) realize that they are (always already) in a condition of prior unity—and, therefore, of necessary co-existence and mutuality—with one another, and if, on that basis, they stand firm together, then they will be in a position to directly righten the world-situation. The collective of all the billions of people can—and, indeed, must—refuse to go on with the current chaos.

The “Everybody Force”, in Prior Unity, p. 87

Winterson claims that an AI-enabled future can help achieve this goal:

We know the hero narrative — it’s the saviour, the genius, the strong man, the against-the-odds little guy… As a story, the narrative of exceptionalism stands against collaboration and co-operation (I did it my way). And it overlooks the lives, and contributions, of literally billions of people. One of the interesting things about AI is that it works best on the hive-mind principle, where networks share information. The real sharing economy is not one where everything can be monetised by Big Tech; it’s one where humanity is pulling together — that’s exactly what we have to do to manage both climate breakdown and global inequality. The biggest problems facing us now will not be solved by competition but by co-operation.

p. 265

12 Bytes is an enjoyable, witty, and thought-provoking read.

A recent LinkedIn post by C-Suite Communications & Public Affairs expert Guy Doza proffered a ChatGPT-generated picture of a formally dressed speechwriter holding a quill pen.

The picture caused great amusement among speechwriting professionals. Comments ranged from “Not only is he a he, but his inspiration also appears to come exclusively from hims…” to “Definitely went to Oxford!…should speak with a British accent.” Overall, speechwriters found this both hysterically funny and sadly stereotypical.

I thought I’d offer some alternatives to this bizarre image by asking my favorite generative AI image tool, MidJourney, to create images for the writers of the wedding, political, and corporate speeches I’d previously generated with ChatGPT and Deepseek R1.

The wedding speech

This unfortunate writer is most likely a freelancer who probably struggles to find clients in today’s world. More than most, his clients might well be using ChatGPT to craft their own Best Man remarks. He’s down on his luck but still puts in the hours in his low-rent office.

The corporate speech

From first-hand experience, I know that this person works in close collaboration with the executives they support. Rather than sitting alone in an office, they are often found taking notes in the board room as the execs discuss strategy. Women such as Felicity Barber and Dana Rubin are leaders in the corporate speechwriting arena.

The political speech

Political speechwriters occupy pride of place in the popular imagination. While men such as Sam Seaborn on The West Wing might be famous as fictional characters, and bros Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer are contemporary pundits, women such as Vinca LaFleur and Peggy Noonan have written memorable Presidential speeches.

However, in generating these images, I saw one that was straight out of the Kennedy era, when the legendary Ted Sorensen crafted memorable lines as he sat at the table witnessing the defining crises of JFK’s Presidency.

Images by Midjourney.