Making the Case for the Future of Making the Case

“New directions in science are launched by new tools much more often than by new concepts. The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways. The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.

—Freeman Dyson

In the one or two “business meetings” we have per year, our conversations generally revolve around these fundamental questions:

• What should we do now with what we have learned?

• Who might benefit from knowing [X] or practicing [Y] with us?

• What do we want to learn next?

As recently as last week, we were asking these same questions. Admittedly, though, the context surrounding our inquiry has shifted dramatically. The questions land differently when AI is nearby, as it always seems to be now.

In this note, we are going to loosen our approach (as we do from time to time) in order to show you where these questions have led us and to preview some changes coming to Making the Case.

Fifteen years ago, when we started building things together, the path for creators seemed fairly clear. If a person or group amassed a body of knowledge, wisdom, or data, they might turn it into a curriculum, business, book, video, article, or speech. In retrospect, we followed this path almost exactly, working as teachers in K-12 institutions, professors at the undergraduate and graduate level, founders, writers, and lecturers.

All that to say, we experienced the last fifteen years as an era of “showing one’s work.” Blogs, a golden age of Twitter long since past, the beginning of podcasts, GitHub: there were so many ways to press record so as to package and share one’s thinking. So many ways to expose the fraying limits of one’s knowledge and say, “I’m stuck, can anyone help.” So much learning out loud that led to tangible professional outcomes (i.e., relationships, jobs, brand awareness, collective problem solving, collaboration at scale).

Lesser noted, but a clear second order consequence of all of the above, is that by simply participating in this creator economy, many people inadvertently documented huge swaths of their thinking, learning, and doing. Such learning can still feed the creation of a curriculum. Or a newsletter. Or a business. Or a book. Or just exist as a huge pile of bits and bytes gathering digital dust. But if we are being honest with ourselves — today, as learners and leaders of learning, given the state of emerging technology — we know that other options exist.

We know that AI at least suggests that we might approach our documented learning in a new way. That we might synthesize, package, create, or distribute new knowledge by engaging, in a different or more thorough way, with our prior knowledge.

When we launched Making the Case, we had a four year milestone in our mind as a checkpoint to see what it would become. Four years, for a monthly newsletter, has conveniently yielded around fifty issues. It is also a pretty good shelf life for a startup endeavor.

Having nearly reached our initial milestone, and having enjoyed the engagement from our 1000+ subscribers, we now want to preview what is to come.

• As of today (August 1, 2025) we’re putting monthly and annual renewals on pause while we spin up our next iteration.

• For subscribers with active annual subscriptions, we will continue to publish monthly essays. Depending on how recently an annual subscription renewed, many subscribers will have early access to what’s next (around February or March 2026).

• On January 1, 2026, we will write and share our final Making the Case edition in its current form.

• You will still continue to have access to the entire Making the Case archive after January 1, 2026.

We plan to continue to serve our audience by following the same operating principle for our partnership that we developed at our outset: Leaders lead the learning of others and lead by learning.

As writers, leading by learning means we have reached a point where we need to lean into the emerging technologies that are available to us and/or threatening to swallow what we do. Walking this creative-existential tightrope does not feel all that different from once trying to figure out how the emergence of the Internet might change the way we write and communicate and collaborate. Maybe we will build a conversational (AI) version of this newsletter to help you to generate your own cases. Maybe we will lead the learning of our own Generative AI agent using all of our writings (including this newsletter) to be able to produce a “Making the Case” newsletter with a different perspective. Maybe, maybe not.

What we know… Despite our very searchable and visible documentation of our learning, we have inevitably forgotten a lot. Like this article. Or this interview. Or this letter to the world at the dawn of the pandemic. It is not a strong suit of humans to remember everything, everywhere, all at once. Leaning on AI would mean we could bring more of our prior thinking to the forefront; unlike us, AI won’t forget something we wrote or experienced days, weeks, months, years, or decades ago.

You can argue that creators should leave their prior ramblings and drafts behind — burn the boats and move forward. Or you can argue that moments of good faith grappling, of minor ingenuity and discovery, are worth remembering and celebrating — let the sum of our prior experiences point the way forward. Your perspective on that debate will likely calibrate precisely with the future return on your investment in whatever this newsletter becomes.

Writing is thinking. Composing and playing your own music is thinking. Doing math is thinking. Competing in an athletic event is thinking. And all these activities are also: discovery, processing, play, and learning. As we dip our toes into the waters of AI, we are not looking to model replacements for any of that absolutely essential human activity; in fact, we believe that replacing that activity is the fastest and most direct way for humans to write themselves right out of the script.

Other ways to write ourselves out of the script: Forgetting that the person working the hardest learns the most. Forgetting that we learn best by doing. Forgetting that making thinking visible makes thinking.

The ultimate return on learning is the stamina and skill and encouragement that allow you to continue to learn. With us, we hope.