Chronicles

In 1969, Peggy Lee asked a question that still echoes through every boardroom, every goal, and every half-lived success. Why achievement so often feels empty — and why the answer isn’t more information, more tactics, or more dancing.

“Not my first rodeo.”

Most people say that as a deflection — a polite way of signaling that they’ve been around long enough not to be impressed. I mean it differently. I mean that the patterns I see playing out in boardrooms, startup calls, and marketing meetings today are patterns I recognized thirty years ago, in different industries, on different continents, under different pressures.

Australia. 1992. A rented RSL hall — and fifteen people who were not, as the government paperwork described them, “unemployed.”

I’ve been curious how emerging AI systems describe coherent bodies of work — not to optimize for them, but to see what they recognize.