For Week Ending November 6, 2026

In this week’s news, scammers have taken more than $48 million from authors with fake film deals. Audible and ACX contracts hide arbitration clauses and a seven-year lock on second recordings. Grok and Claude now stamp invisible watermarks on your drafts. Plus Vellum's one-day AI reversal, a 1894 warning about the AI boom, and why Congress is about to go Millennial. But the best piece of news: we hit 7,000 subscribers.

Publishing News

Fake Film Deals and Book Clubs Cost Authors Tens of Millions

According to The Guardian’s October 29 investigation, writers are being bombarded daily with invitations from fake book groups and offers to publicise their work, get them agents, or land film and TV deals. For the scamming industry, aspiring authors can be a soft touch.

What Happened

The piece, which first appeared in The Dial, documents an explosion driven by generative AI. Scammers impersonate book clubs, agents, publishers, and production companies. They offer paid “contribution fees” for Zoom discussions, fake Netflix or Paramount adaptations that require taxes or transaction fees, and emails that name real agents or agencies. Other pitches include social-media management, website builds, Wikipedia pages, guaranteed proxy sales, and coverage in major papers. Operations run from call centres in the Philippines and Pakistan, with Nigerian third parties holding US bank accounts and PayPal receipts. Scammers use American-sounding names, AI-generated personalisation, and Excel lists of targets.

The largest documented case is PageTurner, a fictitious US-registered company that ran from 2017 to 2024 out of Cebu. According to the Department of Justice, more than 800 authors were defrauded of upwards of $48 million. Call-centre staff claimed to be intermediaries for agents, film studios, and streamers, then demanded fees. At least $42 million was laundered. One defendant pleaded guilty in May 2026; others await trial. Writer Beware logged hundreds of complaints about the scheme, and one author lost more than $600,000.

A New Zealand scam-buster forwarded a Karachi spreadsheet listing 403 targets. Pakistani operators run roughly 1,000 companies, some with up to 200 employees, paying about 50,000 Pakistani rupees a month plus commissions. Fake sites such as penguinwriters.com and amazonglobalpublishers.com outrank legitimate ones via paid search. WritersWeekly.com estimates at least 3,000 such sites. Amazon sued nearly 20 individuals and companies for impersonating its publishing services and won $36.4 million in February 2025. Individual losses reported to Writer Beware range from $55 to $350 for “spotlight packages”; one Danish author paid about $100,000 over more than a year, receiving only partial services such as an IngramSpark listing and a Times Square billboard.

Industry bodies confirm the volume. The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain reports “an explosion,” with at least a dozen weekly reports. Society of Authors chief executive Anna Ganley said her advisory team receives at least a dozen reports of scams each week and traces the spike to generative AI. The Authors Guild hears from scammed or nearly scammed authors every day. Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware has called the current wave the most prolific and aggressive she has chronicled.

Why Authors Care

Real literary agents, major publishers, and film studios almost never cold-email authors offering deals, and they never charge reading, representation, or “tax” fees up front. A production company reaching out directly is one of the least likely things that happens to a writer.

Unsolicited praise that claims intimate knowledge of your book, Gmail or look-alike domains, requests for money after a short exchange, and Zoom calls with cameras off are classic markers. Check the exact email domain against the real company’s site. Search the name plus “scam” or “Writer Beware.”

Do not reply to the initial email; a response can confirm your address is live. Forward suspicious messages to Writer Beware, the Authors Guild (scams@authorsguild.org), or the Society of Authors if you are a member.

If you already paid, document everything (emails, PayPal receipts, contracts), report to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov, your bank or PayPal, and the relevant consumer protection agency. Recovery is rare once money leaves the country, but the paper trail helps others.

Warn other writers in your groups and newsletters. The volume only continues because some people still pay. Legitimate opportunities come through your own queries, your agent, or established channels, not a sudden inbox invitation that asks for cash.

Sources:

Commentary

Jonathan: If you have written a book, published a book, thought about publishing a book, or whispered "I might publish a book" near your phone, these guys have found you.

Thomas: A year or two ago, I created a Scam Spotters board on AuthorMedia.social so authors could share the scams they're seeing with each other in real time. It's been very active. We can watch new scams emerge as they happen.

They all follow the same pattern. They identify what an author wants: a publishing deal, a movie deal, book clubs reading their book, more sales, or more followers. They promise the author that thing. Then they name a price the author is willing to pay to get it.

It's a simple scam, and it's all lies.

I built a Quill in my Quill system called Scam Spotter, and I include it in all of the Quill collections. If you've come to any of my Grok Bot webinars, you already have it for free to add to your Grok Bot. It checks your email for the fingerprints of scams that target authors and adds a little tag.

It won't delete the email. It won't even mark it as spam. It just adds a tag saying, "Hey, this might be a scam." In my experience, that little flicker of warning is all it takes to break the spell.

Grooming Gangs Cover-Up Hits #1 in the UK

According to Tommy Robinson’s post on X and the Amazon UK listing, The Grooming Gang Cover-Up by Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin became the overall #1 book on Amazon UK in early November 2026. The paperback also ranked #1 in Cultural & Ethnic Studies, Multicultural History, and Multicultural Studies. Robinson and McLoughlin present it as a record drawn from court transcripts, official inquiries, internal documents, and contemporary reporting. The book’s own site states it catalogs dozens of towns where more than 500 men have been jailed for related offenses over the past two decades.

What Happened

Amazon’s ranking tracks sales velocity on its own platform. It is not the Nielsen BookScan figure that feeds The Bookseller and the Sunday Times charts. Those official print rankings, in the same week, were still led by Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Splintered Harmony. Political titles almost never hold the absolute top spot on Amazon for long. Fiction, especially romantasy, moves more units in ordinary weeks. When a political book does take the overall #1, it usually means a concentrated group of buyers decided to purchase it at the same time.

This is the second Robinson title to do it. His previous book, Manifesto, also reached Amazon UK’s overall #1 in early October 2024. Boris Johnson’s Unleashed had done the same days earlier that month. The current title’s rapid climb, and the temporary stock issues reported by buyers, show that a measurable slice of the UK reading public is willing to pay for a book on a topic many institutions spent years treating as radioactive.

Official inquiries (the Jay Report, the Casey audit, and subsequent local reviews) already documented failures by police, councils, and other agencies to confront the pattern of group-based child sexual exploitation. The book’s argument is that those failures included active suppression of the facts. Customers who could buy the title directly on Amazon did so in sufficient volume to put it at the top of the platform’s own chart.

Why Authors Care

Direct platforms expose the gap between what gatekeepers will publish or promote and what customers will actually buy when the path is short. A subject that major houses and legacy media spent years declining to treat as a mainstream nonfiction story still generated enough Amazon velocity to claim the overall #1.

Authors tracking only the official BookScan charts will miss part of the market. Amazon rankings move faster and respond more sharply to concentrated online demand. The two lists are measuring different things.

Documented primary sources plus a motivated audience can move units even when institutional coverage is minimal or hostile. That does not make every such book accurate or well-written. It does show that the institutional filter and the customer filter are not identical.

For indie and small-press authors, the practical point is access. If the documentation exists and you can reach the readers who want it, the sales channel that does not require a trade-house gate can still produce a ranking that the official charts will not match.

The sales do not resolve the underlying factual disputes. They do show that a measurable number of UK buyers treated a book arguing for a long-running institutional cover-up as worth purchasing at the top of Amazon’s current ranking.

Sources:

Commentary

Jonathan: We've been tracking the grooming gangs story all along. People in the UK are buying the book, and it's rocketing up the Amazon UK rankings. This is not a Nielsen BookScan figure. This is Amazon's ranking. Not yet, anyway.

Thomas: Not yet. These numbers show leading indicators and lagging indicators. Nielsen BookScan is what many bestseller lists use as the source for the lists they curate, so this will be something to watch. The people who use the phrase "book ban" will find ways to malign, diminish, and ignore this book because it's misaligned with their political objectives.

We'll see if they ban it from bookstores, ignore it, or exclude it from lists even though it's eligible, as The New York Times does. The UK bestseller lists will release their numbers next week.

The Amazon list just shows sales. There's no curation. There's no editor saying, "I want to move this book up or down for editorial reasons," like The New York Times does. If they decide to exclude this book from the bestseller lists, that will tell you a lot about the industry.

Jonathan: There's also a misalignment with media coverage. Tommy Robinson is an extremely polarizing individual in the UK. I'm pretty sure he's been in prison a couple of times. He's been banned and censored several times for the what he's been doing.

Whatever you feel about him, there's a misalignment between what the UK media is reporting and what Amazon's UK sales figures are reporting. We're talking about a misalignment between the readers and the reporters.

Thomas: We talked in a previous episode about how something like 63,000 Brits have been arrested for things they've written. But I don't think any of them have been arrested for things they've written in books, because in their heads, it's different in the UK. "You can say whatever you want in a book, but if you say it online, it's hate speech."

It will be interesting, because I don't think the British want to be seen as burning books, even if they're arresting authors for things they write in a blog or newspaper.

In America, we see it all together. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, which is the clause that often gets overlooked, are all combined in the First Amendment.

The American First Amendment was built on English principles that were part of English common law and the British constitution, going back to the Magna Carta. But the British don't have it codified. They don't have a written constitution. They have a kind of oral-history constitution.

When people in the UK talk about the constitution, they talk about it like it's a real thing, but it's just 800 years of precedent, which they have to interpret carefully.

I Am Hosting Collection 3 of Grok Bot for Authors

Grok Bot for Authors Quill Collection 3: Social Media, Wed Nov 18, 2026, 4:00 PM Central, $37

On Wednesday, November 18 at 4:00 PM Central, we go live with Grok Bot for Authors Collection 3: Automate Social Media. You leave with kickoff prompts for more than a dozen quills that handle content calendars, X, Instagram, Meta Ads, Goodreads, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and the rest of the social stack the Novel Marketing way.

My free episode showed one Webmaster bot. This workshop builds the team, shows you how to connect the Patron Toolbox, and includes the live Q&A, the replay, and a written transcript. Tickets are $37.

Commentary

Thomas: The third Grok Bot collection webinar is all about using Grok Bot to automate your social media, both content creation and content repurposing: taking your book and turning it into social media posts, taking a blog post and turning it into social media posts, and automating much of that.

To learn more or register, go to AuthorMedia.com/GrokBot.

Novel Marketing Conference

The Novel Marketing Conference is hands-on book marketing for authors who want to sell more books while spending less time on marketing. It is not a typical writers conference. January 22–23, 2027 at the Fickett Center in Austin. Leave with a written plan, a writers group of seven similar authors, and interactive workshops.

A rare Super Ticket just came back — only 1 left — and it adds the Thursday Advertising Workshop so you get three full days. Only 8 Standard Tickets remain at NovelMarketingConference.com.

Commentary

Thomas: One of the people who had a Super Ticket had a medical emergency and asked nicely for a refund. As a standing practice, I don't refund tickets, but I made an exception in this case. So there is one Super Ticket for sale. These sold out quickly, and I expect this one to sell shortly.

The Super Ticket gets you in a day early for a small workshop where we work hands-on with you on your ads, reviewing them and coaching you on how to make them better.

Jonathan: Small workshop? It's eight hours long.

Thomas: I didn't say short. It's small in terms of people. It's an eight-hour, bring-your-laptop workshop where you work on your ads while our coaches look over your shoulder and help you. That's why we keep it small, and that's why it sells out so quickly.

We also have a handful of Standard Tickets and a handful of Gallery Tickets, which are cheaper. But there's only one Super Ticket, so act soon. You can get it at NovelMarketingConference.com.

Audible Locks Listeners into Individual Arbitration and a Class-Action Waiver

According to Audible’s updated Service Conditions of Use, last updated November 2, 2026, any dispute or claim arising from the terms or use of the Audible service is now subject to the dispute-resolution provisions in the Amazon.com Conditions of Use, including its arbitration agreement and class-action waiver. The email Audible sent listeners matches the page: a mandatory pre-arbitration procedure, individual arbitration rather than court before a judge or jury, small-claims court still available, Audible saying it will pay most of the cost, and New York law governing both the Conditions of Use and any dispute of any sort. Continued use after November 2, 2026, constitutes acceptance; if a listener disagrees, they must stop using the service and cancel membership.

What Happened

The Audible page states that the arbitration agreement in the Amazon.com Conditions of Use “continues to apply in full,” except that it is governed by the Federal Arbitration Act, federal arbitration law, and the laws of the State of New York. The Applicable Law section confirms that federal law and New York law (without regard to conflict-of-laws principles) govern the Conditions of Use and any dispute with Audible. The Agreement Changes section says Audible may change the terms without notice, and continued use is acceptance.

Amazon’s own Conditions of Use were updated effective August 14, 2026, reinstating binding individual arbitration and a class-action waiver after the company had dropped the clause in 2021 amid mass-arbitration costs. Reporting from Reuters, The Verge, PCMag, and ppc.land confirms the Amazon change: most disputes go to binding arbitration administered by JAMS rather than court; exceptions include small claims court where the claim qualifies, injunctive relief for IP issues, and disputes over compliance with the pre-arbitration steps. The pre-arbitration process requires contacting customer service, then submitting a Notice of Dispute and negotiating in good faith for 60 days. Arbitration is individual only; class or representative actions are waived. Amazon’s email to customers said it would pay most of the cost. No major news outlets have yet covered the specific Audible email or November 2 update beyond the terms page itself confirming the claims.

Why Authors Care

This is the consumer/listener Conditions of Use. It does not rewrite the separate ACX Account Holder Agreement that governs authors and narrators who publish through ACX.

The ACX Account Holder Agreement, last revised September 23, 2025, already requires individual binding arbitration for disputes with Audible (and between ACX participants), with a small-claims exception, informal good-faith discussions first, and AAA Commercial Arbitration Rules. The ACX help page on the update states that sections 13 and 14 introduced these rules so disputes with Audible are resolved through individual arbitration rather than court. Related agreements (Book Posting, Production Standard Terms) are governed by New York law and point to the Account Holder Agreement’s dispute-resolution process.

Authors should log into ACX and review the current Account Holder Agreement and any deal-specific terms rather than relying on the listener Conditions of Use. If a reader asks about the email, the plain-language answer is: most disputes must go through individual arbitration after a required pre-arbitration notice and 60-day negotiation period; class actions are waived; small claims remain available; continued use accepts the terms. Authors do not need to change their own ACX contracts because of this listener update, but the same individual-arbitration structure already applies on the ACX side.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: I want to give some context on how these terms and conditions are changing. It all goes back to Patreon persecuting conservatives.

Around 2019 or 2020, Patreon started an intense crackdown on conservative creators. One of those creators found a vulnerability in Patreon's terms of service. Patreon had a binding arbitration clause similar to the one Audible is now tweaking. It said Patreon got to pick the arbitrator, Patreon would pay the arbitrator, and you couldn't take Patreon to court.

So Patreon cancels a creator, and that creator goes to his hundreds of patrons and says, "I want all of you to individually take Patreon to binding arbitration."

Binding arbitration costs $10,000.00 per arbitrator, plus all the time and lawyer fees to sit through those meetings. When there are suddenly hundreds of simultaneous binding arbitrations, you're looking at millions of dollars in guaranteed losses. Even if Patreon wins every single one, it's still losing millions of dollars.

So Patreon went to a judge in California and said, "Judge, all this binding arbitration is going to kill us. Can you please let us bundle these into a class action so we can deal with them all at once?"

The judge said, "Who wrote your terms of service?"

"We did, Your Honor."

"Did the users get to negotiate on that terms of service?"

"No, Your Honor. We wrote it."

"So you want out of a contract you yourself wrote without any negotiation with the users. Is that right?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

"Get out of my courtroom."

After that, all the other tech companies realized binding arbitration is not the get-out-of-jail-free card they thought it was. It's potentially extremely expensive. If they agree to pay for all the arbitrators and a whole bunch of people want arbitration at once, they lose whether they win or lose, and it doesn't cost the users much.

I haven't looked at the details, but I suspect this has some kind of clause that lets them cluster similar cases together and force a small class action so they're not stuck doing 1,000 one-on-one binding arbitrations.

Jonathan: There's a small-claims exception, and most Audible users will fall into the small-claims category. As a listener, you're not going to get above that threshold.

Thomas: It's much easier to go to small claims court now with AI. You can get a $20.00 Claude subscription, install the legal counselor tool, and say, "Claude, help me fill out the forms to take Audible to small claims court." That's asymmetric in terms of legal power.

Jonathan: They're not even going to show up.

Thomas: This is not legal advice, and we're not going over it in great detail. If you're going to keep using ACX and Audible, look over the terms of service yourself, or at least have an AI you trust look them over.

ACX Locks You Out of a Second Audiobook for Seven Years

According to the ACX Book Posting Agreement (Version 3.1, last revised May 26, 2026), once you enter an ACX Audiobook Production Agreement with a producer, you will not produce or authorize the production of another audio recording of the Book in the Language for distribution in the Territory other than through ACX for the Initial Term. That Initial Term runs for 7 years from the date the completed audiobook is first made available for sale. The same restriction appears in the ACX Audiobook Production Standard Terms (also Version 3.1, May 26, 2026): the rights holder will neither produce nor sell, nor grant any third party the right to produce or sell, an audio version of the Book in the Language for distribution in the Territory during the exclusive production period granted to the producer.

This production-side lock sits on top of the distribution rights you grant Audible. Under the Book Posting Agreement Section 5, exclusive distribution gives Audible the exclusive right to distribute the specific Audiobook for that 7-year Initial Term (then auto-renewing 1-year periods unless notice is given). Non-exclusive distribution gives Audible a non-exclusive right for the same Initial Term, which means you may distribute that same recording elsewhere. Section 13 of the Book Posting Agreement is explicit about the difference between payment types: if you pay the producer a one-time production fee with no royalty share, you may choose exclusive or non-exclusive, and you may make a one-time request to switch after the audiobook has been on sale for at least 90 days by emailing info@acx.com. If you use royalty share (with or without a fee), you must grant exclusive distribution and cannot change to non-exclusive.

For audiobooks the author produced and uploaded themselves (DIY), the governing document is the Audiobook License and Distribution Agreement (also revised May 26, 2026). Under exclusive distribution it restricts distribution of “the Audiobook” (the specific recording you submitted) in any audio format in the Territory for the Initial Distribution Period of 7 years. Non-exclusive leaves you free to distribute that recording elsewhere. The production-side prohibition on authorizing another recording does not appear in the DIY license the way it does when a producer is engaged through ACX.

The language restriction is written as “in the Language” or “in the Language(s).” A recording in a different language falls outside the clause. ACX’s own audio submission requirements state that “Your submitted audiobook must be narrated by a human unless otherwise authorized” and that unauthorized use of text-to-speech, AI, or automated recordings in ACX titles is prohibited. ACX offers a separate Voice Replica program under its own agreement, but ordinary AI narration is not accepted for standard ACX titles.

If you are in breach of an ACX agreement, the Book Posting Agreement Section 11 allows Audible to withhold royalty payments on the applicable title until the breach is cured (or offset amounts owed). The Account Holder Agreement permits ACX to take action regarding accounts or content to protect the integrity of the service. Exact end dates and the version of the agreement that applies to a specific title are not published on the public help pages; only the account holder can see them.

Why Authors Care

A producer deal (royalty share or pay-for-production) adds a production exclusivity clause that blocks a second recording of the same book in the same language for the 7-year Initial Term, even if you paid the producer in full and later switch the original recording to non-exclusive.

Royalty-share deals require exclusive distribution and cannot be switched; pay-for-production deals allow a one-time switch after 90 days on sale.

DIY uploads primarily lock the specific file you submitted under exclusive terms; they do not impose the same “do not produce another recording” language found in the producer agreements.

A different language is outside the clause; AI narration is barred from ACX titles unless authorized.

What to Do This Week

Log into your ACX account, open the title under In Production or Completed Projects, and select View contract (or Review the contract). Note whether it is Royalty Share, Royalty Share Plus, Pay-for-Production, or DIY, and whether it is exclusive or non-exclusive. For the exact Initial Term end date and the version of the agreement that binds your title, email ACX support using the address listed in your Account Settings or info@acx.com. Before you commission a second human recording or an AI-voiced version, confirm in writing that the production exclusivity period has ended or does not apply. Do not assume a switch to non-exclusive or full payment of the producer removes the production lock.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: A technique I've advocated on this show is that if you play your cards right, you can have one version of your audiobook on Audible and a different version you share everywhere else. You can have your cake and eat it too in terms of Audible exclusivity.

But there's a huge catch, and you have to know how to do it correctly.

Jonathan: The producer agreement is most likely what covers a royalty share deal.

Thomas: So, if you produce your audiobook through ACX, you can't do the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too strategy. But if you produce the audiobook yourself and just upload the file to Audible, this clause doesn't apply, and you're not locked into seven years of exclusivity.

Going through ACX and working with an ACX narrator is what gets you into trouble with this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too strategy. If you find a narrator on your own, or reach out to someone like Jonathan and pay him directly, you can still have an AI version of your book on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever, plus the exclusive version on Audible.

That's our understanding of the Audible terms of service. Again, this is not legal advice. Read the clause yourself. Also, Audible reserves the right to change the terms any time it wants, and it can make you accept the change just by continuing to use the service, as we covered in the last segment.

Jonathan: And if you're locked into a seven-year contract, you're using the service.

I've always said royalty share is not the good deal it seems to be, because you lose control over your book for seven years and you split the royalties for seven years. Your advertising is killed, because the few profits ACX was giving you are now split in half with the narrator.

It's better to bite the bullet and pay the upfront cost. I designed Arsenal Audio to lower the upfront cost so you have a nice audiobook you own the rights to and can upload to whatever distributor you want. You don't have to go through this crap.

The Diderot Effect: The Back-Cover Picture That Turns One Book Into a Set

Little Golden Books have sold billions of copies with almost no advertising. Part of the reason is the Diderot Effect. Owning one thing makes people want the matching pieces.

In our latest episode on Novel Marketing, we show the simplest, most proven trigger sits in the back matter. Put a picture of your complete collection in the back of every book. Make sure it includes the book the reader is already holding. Seeing the books they do not own yet creates a sense of incompleteness. Little Golden Books have done this since the 1940s. With print on demand you can update your older books to show your newer ones.

This episode is for authors who want readers to finish the set. We also cover the production choice that decides whether readers finish buying your series, the one-sentence email that turns a limited-edition buyer into a collector, and how giving your readers a name builds a fandom.

Listen free or read the blog version on Author Media.

Commentary

Thomas: The Diderot Effect is a psychological phenomenon you've probably never heard of, which is why you need to listen to this new and thoroughly researched episode.

It's not about children's books, even though it works on children’s books.

I open with an example from a children's book to demonstrate the point visually.

The episode is on how to make readers want to read your whole collection, either everything you've ever written or every book in your series, using this subtle and incredibly powerful psychological phenomenon.

Once you understand how it works, you'll understand why Little Golden Books have sold billions with basically no marketing. They're the only publisher I know of that consistently uses this psychological trick. None of the other publishers know about it, and Golden Books is going to hate me for giving away their secret sauce.

Technology

Grok API Stamps Invisible AI Fingerprint on Every Text Starting Friday

According to the SpaceXSI Output Watermarking documentation, starting November 7, 2026, text responses from supported Grok models on the API will include an invisible statistical watermark by default. The page, last updated October 31, 2026, states that SpaceXSI (the branding used in the developer docs) is doing this to comply with the EU AI Act so it can later recognize text as model-generated. An X post by @XFreeze on October 31 first shared the change and listed the same models; the post also claimed every future Grok model will include watermarking from launch, a detail not stated in the docs themselves.

What Happened

The watermark is not visible text, hidden characters, or markup. The docs say it is applied while the model generates: it slightly shapes which tokens the model picks. Detection is statistical. SpaceXSI scores a passage and reports whether it is watermarked, not watermarked, or uncertain, with longer text giving a stronger signal. Access to the detection API is granted by application only through a Google form.

The change covers these models on by default: grok-4.7, grok-4.6, grok-4.5, grok-4.3, grok-4.20-reasoning, grok-4.20-non-reasoning, and grok-4.20-multi-agent. It applies to every text-generation endpoint, including the global https://api.x.ai and regional ones, and to both the Responses API and the Chat Completions API. It covers ordinary text responses, structured outputs, and tool-call arguments. Developers can check a response with the new `x-watermark` header; a value of true means that request’s output was generated with the watermark. The docs state there is no request parameter, no code change is required, and the watermark does not change response quality or speed.

Team admins can opt out per model in the SpaceXSI Console. Opting out requires confirming that an exception under applicable law applies and that the team is solely responsible for any marking or disclosure. Changes take effect on new requests within 5 minutes. Some models may be locked on for a team. Every opt-in and opt-out is recorded in the team’s audit log. The X post framed the opt-out the same way: available if a team believes a legal exception applies. Reporting on the change, including pieces from CryptoBriefing and others that cite the docs, states that consumer Grok products (the app and chatbot) are not affected by this update.

On Fiction Bench at bench.storyhacker.ai, Grok 4.7 is the only xAI model listed. It ranks 28th of 37 models with an overall score of 54.9 (Story 70.4, Intelligence 78.1, Prose quality 77.6, Human rating 935 from 115 votes). The other models named in the watermark list are not on the Fiction Bench leaderboard yet.

This follows similar moves by other labs. Anthropic has been rolling out an invisible text watermark based on a version of Google DeepMind’s SynthID-Text approach, also to meet the EU AI Act. Claude’s version is applied worldwide on supported models with no general opt-out; detection is limited to private preview for eligible organizations. OpenAI’s textGrain system, announced in early October 2026, is opt-in for API customers worldwide and is being added by default only for eligible ChatGPT and Codex users in the EU. Detection access for both is restricted.

Why Authors Care

Authors who draft or edit with Grok through the API, or through tools and bots built on the API, will have their outputs carry this statistical mark by default starting November 7 unless a team admin opts the model out and confirms a legal exception.

The mark is invisible to readers and adds nothing a human can see, but a detector with access can score a longer passage for it. Detection is not public; it requires an approved application. There is no public evidence that KDP, Audible, or major contests currently scan for this specific Grok watermark or for Claude’s SynthID-based mark. Platforms still rely primarily on author disclosure for AI-generated content.

Consumer Grok (the app and website chatbot) is not covered by this change according to reporting that cites the docs. Authors who want unmarked drafts for now can stay on the consumer product. Anyone running custom API tools should check the Console settings before November 7 and decide whether to opt out, understanding the legal confirmation required.

The practical risk is future-looking: if detection access expands or if platforms begin checking for these statistical fingerprints, a manuscript drafted heavily through an API tool could be scored as model-generated even after light editing. Longer continuous passages give a stronger signal. Authors who want to minimize that should prefer tools that allow opt-out, use the consumer interface, or plan heavy human revision that breaks statistical patterns.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: The more you edit the text, the more it breaks the statistical detection. These watermarks are pretty fragile.

As far as I know, Grok and Claude haven't released any public-facing tool that detects the watermark to tell whether text is AI-generated. As soon as you create that tool, someone can use it to make sure their text doesn't carry the watermark, the same way a cartel uses its own drug-sniffing dogs to make sure they don't bark at a particular truck. They check it against theirs first.

So in some ways, this is a useless EU regulation. In other ways, it may help the long-term cleanliness of AI. If the models can use the watermark to tell whether they're training on AI-generated text, it can help prevent model collapse as large language models train on text generated by large language models. Watermarking can help prevent that kind of natural distillation.

That's part of why I wonder why none of the AI companies have pushed back or even complained about this. It helps them. As regulations so often do, it helps the companies being regulated.

Regulation is not what you think. It benefits big companies at the expense of little companies, and it's a way for big government and big business to work together.

Claude Invisible Watermark Expands to Older Models

Claude Now Watermarks Mythos 5, Opus 4.7, and Sonnet 4.6 Text

According to the Claude Platform release notes for November 3, 2026, text generated by Claude Mythos 5, Claude Opus 4.7, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 now carries Anthropic’s text watermark on the platforms listed in the company’s support article. Anthropic’s Help Center describes the mark as an imperceptible pattern woven into word choice that adds no extra tokens or hidden characters, contains no user or organization information, and cannot be turned off by customers; on Sonnet 4.6, non-default temperature, top_p, or top_k may drop it, while The Decoder reports Opus 4.6 was delayed to November 16. None of Mythos 5, Opus 4.7, or Sonnet 4.6 appear yet on Fiction Bench, where Claude Opus 5.5 currently ranks second overall at 65.6 with a story score of 81.1. Authors who draft or lightly edit with these models may leave a statistical mark that private detectors can still see after copy-paste or light changes, though a full rewrite is more likely to clear it, and no platform has confirmed public detection use.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: In related news, Claude is extending its watermarking to cover the Mythos models and its older Opus and Sonnet models. It used to be only the newer Anthropic models that had the watermark, but now it goes as far back as Sonnet 4.6.

I used to run half of the patron tools on Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning. It was very inexpensive and very fast, and it could handle two million tokens of context, which made it great for things like reading a whole book and creating a summary of every character.

It's been replaced by much more expensive models. Everybody else's models cost more than that old Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning. I miss it so much.

Amazon Sets Black Friday for November 27

According to Amazon’s Black Friday 2026 FAQ, published October 29, 2026 by Jacquelyn Smith, Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30, with early deals already available in the Holiday Shop. The page says customers can expect deep discounts on tech, beauty, clothing, toys, and more, and it tells shoppers to use Alexa for Shopping to track prices, set deal alerts, and manage Prime or Audible memberships while checking Amazon’s Deals page and signing up for Prime. Authors should schedule price promotions and Kindle Countdown or Deal timing for the late-November peak, raise ad budgets ahead of higher CPC during the gift-card and new-Kindle rush, and prepare for post-holiday readers who arrive with fresh devices and Amazon gift cards.

Sources:

When is Black Friday 2026? Here’s everything you need to know (Amazon, October 29, 2026)

Commentary

Thomas: Many authors make a big deal about Black Friday, and I have a controversial take. You'll notice we don't cover Black Friday on Novel Marketing. I don't do a "here's what to do for Black Friday" episode, because for most authors, Black Friday is a trap.

Authors don't sell products that discount well from a Black Friday perspective. When somebody is saving $80.00 on new headphones or $100.00 on an Instant Pot, saving $4.00 on your novel doesn't excite them. But that $4.00 is your entire profit margin.

It's easy to give up all your profits in this window, or worse, waste money advertising on one of the most expensive weekends of the year to advertise, only to sell at a lower margin. There's no good reason for most authors to discount books for Black Friday.

If you're in the course business, write nonfiction, or have high-margin products, it can make sense. Say a course costs you $10,000.00 to create, each course sells for $500.00, your cost to deliver it is low, and you're trying to earn back the $10,000.00 you invested up front. That kind of product has margin. You can discount it, and there's still meat on the bone.

But there's so little meat on the bone for a novel that you're better off ignoring Black Friday.

Jonathan: Authors make too little money as it is, and much of that has to do with the fact that we're not very savvy business people. You can get sucked into something all the other business people are doing without understanding what they're doing. It's terrible to lose your entire profit margin.

Say you sell 5,000 books with no profit. Great, 5,000 copies of your book are out there. Maybe that's what you think success is. Maybe you think that's good read-through for the rest of your series. Except you discounted your box set, which was everything you've ever written, and removed your entire profit margin. Read-through means nothing to you now.

People are reading and enjoying your book without paying you for it. I see that as a mistake. Authors ought to be paid for their work.

Vellum Shipped Optional Automation, Then Killed It in One Day After AI Backlash

According to the Vellum blog post from November 4, Vellum 4.2 introduced Automation. It did not put AI writing inside the app. It let authors connect an external digital assistant they already use, such as Claude or ChatGPT, to Vellum over a local MCP connection so the assistant could drive repetitive publishing chores while the files stayed on the Mac.

The help page explained that the local connection kept files on the Mac. Requirements were a Vellum Press license, a compatible assistant running on the Mac, and macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. The update itself was free.

Vellum listed concrete examples: check that all photos in a book have accessibility descriptions; generate new Kindle epub files for every book in a folder; move the About the Author from the latest book into a shared template, reuse it across titles, then generate new Kindle epub and Print pdf files; reformat older books that used italics for text messages into Vellum’s Text Conversation feature, then generate new epubs; reformat an entire series. Early tester Stuart Bache of Vinci Books, which manages a catalog of thousands of titles, said it had been “revolutionary for our production department.”

That is the productivity angle. Longtime customers with dozens or hundreds of books, including translations, special editions, and box sets, already use assistants for the practical work of publishing: back-matter sweeps, consistent fixes across a series, and building box sets. Vellum built the connection for those chores, not for generating novels.

What Happened Next

According to Vellum’s November 5 post, about a day later Vellum 4.2.1 removed Automation entirely. The company said it underestimated how strongly many authors would object to Vellum working with AI assistants at all, even as an optional external connection. They read the emails, the Threads posts, and “a plethora of 🤮 emojis.”

They heard from authors who were fundamentally opposed and from others who were excited about the possibilities. The small team of three people who build the app, answer support, and read the feedback believe removing it is the best decision they can make. Authors update through Check for Updates. The original November 4 post was updated to note the removal.

The feature was optional. Nobody had to turn it on. Nothing in the app changed for authors who left it alone. Files stayed local. It still lasted roughly one day. Authors who wanted the tool for large catalogs lost it to the backlash against any AI-assistant connection.

Richard Lowe at The Writing King called the removal short-sighted. He argued Vellum caved to a mob, that the authors who asked for the feature lost a choice so people who were never going to use it could feel they had won something, and that a company which changes course every time a crowd appears is letting non-customers run the product.

Why Authors Care

Large-backlist authors lost an optional path for the repetitive work they already hand to assistants.
Keep master files and source documents portable so one tool cannot lock a series reformat or a back-matter sweep.
The precedent is clear: even an optional, local, external connection can be pulled in a day under AI opposition.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: Vellum shipped an optional automation integration and then killed it after one day of jihadi backlash.

Jonathan: I got two emails this week. The first introduced automation in Vellum 4.2. Automation lets you connect an external digital assistant. Whether you're using Grok Bot, Quills, Codex, or some other MCP, it gave your assistant a back door to interface with Vellum, so ChatGPT or Grok could handle the heavy lifting of formatting a novel through Vellum. That's great, because none of us like formatting.

Thomas: An author on our team was testing this. It normally takes him an hour to typeset a book in Vellum. Grok Bot did it for him in 10 minutes, fully automated, while he was doing something else. Grok Bot controlled Vellum to make the book look perfect.

Then there was a backlash. There's a vocal minority of anti-ai jihadis, whom we’ve called the Butlerian Jihadis, who think AI is evil. It's not enough for them not to use AI. Everyone else has to be stopped from using it too.

They say, "It's not enough for me to eat my steak rare. I must insist that you also eat your steak rare, whether you like it or not."

These are the kind of people who care very much about how high the grass is in their neighbor's yard. They are the very worst kind of people. You can find them on homeowners associations and sending angry emails to companies like Vellum saying, "Take this feature away from the people who are using it," a feature that harms them in no way.

Jonathan: You have to install it yourself, using AI, to even use it.

Then Vellum sent a second email saying that, due to the backlash, they removed automation from the update.

From the professional side of writing, among people who actually work at this, the response has been very negative. It will be the death of Vellum if they stay on that path.

All of us who are working are saying, "I like your program and what it has done for me. It has saved me time. Now you've removed the thing that would save me more time. Someone else is going to do it, and when they do, I'm going to them."

Thomas: Do you know who that someone else might be? I'm tempted. We have the technology.

Vellum, you have one week to put the MCP back in Vellum. If you don't, expect potential competition from Author Media.

I thought, "I could create a typesetting tool to compete with Vellum. I could make it work on Windows and Linux, and I could make it cheaper." I could totally go after them. The last thing in the world I need is yet another project.

But I looked at their email and saw they have a Bluesky account and a Threads account, and they're not on X. I thought, "These people are vulnerable."

Jonathan: They're in the wrong echo chamber.

Thomas: I could conquer them economically and create a tool that solves the same problem. It wouldn't be the only one. There's Atticus, and there's Deckle, but none of those integrate with AI. In fact, many of them loudly feature "no AI" in their marketing.

There's an opportunity here, because I see how much authors don't enjoy things like typesetting. Spending time in InDesign or Vellum fiddling with where the words go on the page is not enjoyable for most authors.

I reached out to Deckle, and they said, "No, we're not going to do any AI." I respect that. I understand wanting a pure word processor. And this is the wonderful thing about this new era: you can now create a word processor very easily.

It would mean I’d have to hire more people and grow my team. But Vellum is vulnerable. Somebody's going to create an MCP, because once you experience the joy of saying, "Grok Bot, add a page about my new book to my 30 previous books," it goes through all the books, creates the page in the first one, and recreates it in all the others so your back matter is perfect. Once you can do that with a single message to Grok Bot or Claude or whichever AI you're using, you never want to go back to doing it by hand.

Jonathan: I watched several videos recently on kitchen technology, like Instant Pots and pizza ovens. All the major appliance makers are racing toward one thing: pushing as few buttons as possible to make the best possible product, because that's what the customer wants.

If I can push my Grok button and it spits out a perfectly formatted novel that goes up everywhere, I'm going for that. I want to use my creativity for writing, not formatting. Nobody says, "This book was hand-formatted by the author." Who cares?

Thomas: Vellum’s pitch is that it's easy. They only give you eight or 10 fonts. The whole point of Vellum is that you're only allowed to make good decisions.

It's not like InDesign, where you can make a beautiful, unique snowflake and also make terrible decisions that make your book awful. Vellum has training wheels that force you to drive right down the middle of the road, which, frankly, is what people want for formatting, particularly for fiction.

If you're doing a textbook or nonfiction, there are many cool things you can do with typesetting to make your book easier to use: icons, visual elements, call-outs, and quotes. But for most readers, the whole point of a novel is that they don't want to think about the font. They want to think about the story, the characters, and the world you're creating. They want to get lost in the book. They want the book to disappear, so they want the normal font and the normal spacing.

Instead of just investing in building it, I should probably run a Kickstarter campaign to test the market and see if people want it and are willing to pay for it. This project would cost me a significant amount of money, not to mention ramping up customer support.

The other scary thing is that I could spend thousands of dollars developing this tool, and then Vellum adds back the MCP, which they've already built. It's literally a button press for them, and they'd totally pull the rug out from under me.

Jonathan: And that's what they should do. Just add the MCP back.

Thomas: They're Bluesky people, though. Bluesky people cave to social pressure. They have no backbone.

Jonathan: Here's the easiest use case. I have 14 or 15 books out now. Every time I release a new book, I want to update the back matter of all these books with links to the new book. Right now, I have to do that manually for each book.

I want to tell my little bot that does my grunt work, "Hey, dude, put this link to the new book in all my books. Give me the files, upload them to Amazon through my Amazon Quill, and I'm done." Then I can work on something else instead of spending all day updating and uploading each individual file.

Thomas: The beautiful thing is that they're not actually adding AI to Vellum. If I built this software, I wouldn't have to charge a subscription. I could make it a lifetime purchase, just like Vellum, because with the MCP, you bring your own AI. You're paying for Grok Bot or whatever, and the tokens you pay for yourself do all the work. It's just using Vellum as a tool.

This is the new approach. People aren't logging into WordPress to update their websites anymore. They're saying, "Grok Bot, go update my website," and Grok Bot logs in. Does that make your website worse? Your website is already computers. It's already algorithms. It's already AI. How is this different? It's a matter of who pays for the tokens.

Jonathan: No one has ever said, "This website was handcrafted by the author," and meant it was good.

Thomas: There's something to be said for a handcrafted HTML page you wrote yourself, but I haven't seen an author build that kind of page in 20 years. We all switched to content management systems 20 years ago and never looked back.

So I'm very tempted. I'll need to talk to some people. Once you start using AI and learn how to build things with it, the world of possibility opens up. I see $100,000.00 and million-dollar business opportunities almost weekly where I think, "With AI, I could do this."

I was with a group of friends, and one guy's friend plays some card game, a variant of Pokémon or something like it. He was irritated that he couldn't find matches in his town. So he worked with Claude to create a website that lists all the matches of this card game in town and where they are. It has a subscription, and it's bringing him $2,000.00 or $3,000.00 a month from a little project he vibe-coded as a side hustle. Now he's got recurring passive income.

There are so many examples like this. Meanwhile, you have people who are convinced AI is evil. They won't touch it, they're getting laid off, and they're saying, "What's going to happen? The world is ending."

One person looks out at the fields and says, "Look at all these opportunities. Look at all these ways I can bless people, make their lives better, and make money doing it." The other people look at the dark mountain and say, "The job I'm doing now is going to change, and I'm sad."

Jonathan: You don't even like the job you're doing. You complain about formatting when you do it. You complain about website stuff when you do it.

Thomas: We like Vellum. The one hour of work we're complaining about used to be five hours of work. Props to Vellum.

Jonathan: And you had to know how to do it, and you were working in Word.

Thomas: Or you were working with Calibre, which no one even knows how to pronounce, creating HTML files, with a different version for the print PDF than for the ebook. It was a big hassle. Vellum made this beautiful piece of software that only runs on Mac. It's simple and straightforward, and it turned a five-hour project into a one-hour project.

Now we have the technology to turn that one-hour project into a 10-minute project, and that will make people's lives legitimately better. If I could save an hour for 30,000 authors, that's an entire lifetime of human existence saved from typesetting.

Jonathan: Typesetting was horrible. I took a whole course from Smashwords on how to format in Word. Then I found out about Vellum.

Thomas: If you're interested in helping with this project, email me your resume, a link to your GitHub, and your software development experience. If you don't know how to email me, you're not involved enough in the Author Media community for me to be interested.

And I say this as someone who loves Vellum. I'm only doing this because I love authors more, and I love saving authors time more.

Jonathan: They saw an opportunity in the market and built a product for it, and it helped everyone. It made all our lives better. And it's only a three-person team. This is not a corporation. They're only on Bluesky and Threads, so they're getting only half of the feedback, and it's all the bad half. In their minds, people don't want this.

James Blatch of The Self Publishing Show put it in his email: "I can't believe they're doing this. Why would you not do this? This is the death knell for your company."

I hope they see all the love people have for Vellum and how excited we are for this MCP to make our lives easier, and that they reverse course again. Then all this goes away.

Thomas: I was in talks with them to come on the show and talk about the MCP. In fact, I was beta testing the MCP and got Grok Bot working with it. I think I was the very first person to get Grok Bot working with their MCP, because they piloted it for Claude to drive on your own computer.

They asked me to hold back, so I embargoed it. I've been sitting on the secret that Grok Bot can drive Vellum for the last two months. Finally, on announcement week, they pulled the rug out from under my feet.

Zeitgeist Report

AO3 Goes Dark for Weeks After Security Incident; Authors Bury AI Clone with 2,000 Takedowns in a Day

According to the Organization for Transformative Works, Archive of Our Own went dark around October 29 after the nonprofit detected evidence of a security incident. The volunteer-run, donation-funded archive that hosts more than 18 million works estimated two to four weeks of downtime, with hope of a sooner return in a degraded or possibly read-only state. Temporary pull-downs remain possible during recovery.

What Happened

In the October 30 update, OTW stated that no AO3 data has been deleted. Works, bookmarks, and kudos are safe. They do not currently believe the user database was stolen but cannot rule it out. That database may include username, email, IP address, and a hashed password. They recommend changing any reused passwords on other sites. AO3 does not collect real names. Donor data sits in a separate system and was not exposed.

As of early November, AO3 Status updates say restoration work is proceeding well and the original return-time estimate still holds. Some queued notification emails for subscriptions and kudos were released during restore work. Those emails are real, not a phishing sign. OTW is actively working so drafts are not deleted during the outage. No technical postmortem has been published.

The Hole It Left

Status-page posts drew millions of views within hours, according to TechCrunch. Fans hit the Wayback Machine hard enough that coverage noted Internet Archive strain. Others swapped Google Drive and EPUB libraries, Reddit megathreads, and Tumblr chapter posts.

NBC News framed the response as community mutual aid. An OTW spokesperson empathized and praised fans' creativity, humor, and memes. Wattpad, Tumblr, and Quinn publicly courted displaced readers.

OTW posted safety guidance on Tumblr: no official AO3 app, no public tester recruitment, and no private “help bring AO3 back” donation asks. Real donations go through otw.org/donate. Any site claiming live AO3 access or mirrors is lying.

The One-Day Clone

During the outage, ao3.life appeared. According to The Verge and 404 Media, a vibe-coded site used AI agents and virtual machines to scrape fanworks from drives and sources, then resold them as AI-generated audiobooks. The first three minutes were free. The rest cost money. The site claimed a 91 percent author and 9 percent site split and asked authors to email from their AO3-linked address to collect pay or request removal. The community warned that step was dangerous.

The creator, signed as Ganesh and described as a 17-year-old in India, said the site drew about 126,592 unique users in 24 hours, sold about 11 audiobooks, then received over 2,000 takedown requests in a single day. He shut it down with an apology that referred to the product as “AI Slop audiobooks.”

When a platform goes dark, scrapers and helpful clones move fast. Fanfic authors still know how to enforce consent at scale.

Why Authors Care

Single-platform risk: if your only copy of a draft or a longfic lives on one site, an outage or incident locks you out. Keep local and offsite backups.

Password hygiene: hashed passwords are not a free pass for reused passwords. Change them elsewhere if you reused your AO3 password.

Consent and scraping: free culture is not public domain for AI audiobook resale. The 2,000-takedown day is the story.

Fanfic as reader infrastructure: when AO3 vanishes, you see how large the unpaid reading economy is. That matters to anyone who writes speculative fiction for that audience.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: If you're using Archive of Our Own, you're out of luck. This goes back to my enduring advice for authors to be customers and pay for what you use. Free, volunteer-run platforms tend to be fragile because there's no money, and everyone puts in the least amount of work possible to keep the lights on because they have to feed their families some other way.

This is not a surprise, and you should never build your platform on a platform like this. It's okay to have an outpost there, to do some promotion or keep a copy there as well. But you don't want to depend fully on a volunteer-run platform for your connection with your readers.

The more of your platform you own, the better, because you never know when a company will pull a feature away with no warning.

Cloning things is more difficult than it looks. It must be done with fear and trembling, because a lot of work goes into it. But he's also tapping into very real demand. People want this site back. They want access to Archive of Our Own.

The Ghost of 1894

Ten trillion dollars. America plans to sink that much into data centers to power artificial intelligence. The bet equals nearly four percent of the entire economy. Analysts call it the biggest infrastructure boom since the railroads.

America last built something this big, this fast, on this much borrowed money in the 1880s. The bubble burst in 1893. Voters then fired the party in power in 1894, in numbers nobody has matched since.

Let's rewind.

America laid track in the 1880s like it had no tomorrow. Railroad barons borrowed the money for the buildout. They ran lines to towns that didn't exist yet.

The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went into receivership on February 20th, 1893. The Northern Pacific followed. Then the Union Pacific. Then the Santa Fe. Courts put a quarter of the nation's rail mileage into receivership by year's end.

More than fifteen thousand businesses failed. More than five hundred banks closed. Unemployment hit somewhere between seventeen and nineteen percent.

The Pullman Strike shut down most rail traffic in the North in the summer of 1894. President Cleveland sent in the Army. The strike broke. The union collapsed.

Voters took it out on the party in power that November. Grover Cleveland's Democrats lost a hundred and twenty-five House seats, still the biggest midterm loss in American history. The House seated a record class of a hundred seventy-eight first-term members. Republican William McKinley won the White House two years later, and his coalition ran the country for a generation.

Fast forward to 2026.

Data center developers have borrowed trillions of dollars. Residential electricity prices have climbed more than ten percent since 2024. Voters blamed the data centers, although the real cause of rising prices was often green new deal policies that made fossil fuels more expensive. Data centers and AI showed up on ballots forty-one times in ten states this year and lost all but one

The farmer of 1894 raged at the freight rate. The voter of 2026 rages at big tech. And somehow Democrats avoided being seen as the big tech party.

Voters fired the party in power again. Republicans lost both chambers of Congress. Both chambers have flipped in the same midterm only three times since World War II. At least a hundred forty-three House, Senate and governor's seats will get someone new. No election has cleared out more officeholders since FDR’s 1938 midterm. That was the election to keep America out of the war in Europe.

Here is one interesting difference. The anger of 1894 came after the crash. While the 2026 election might be what causes the crash. The railroads had already gone bankrupt when voters revolted. Crews still pour concrete for the data centers under construction. This electorate reacted not to the bill but to the possible future bill. It was a vibes election.

So, what does this mean for your books?

Watch what readers bought in the last panic. Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward in 1888. A man falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a planned utopia in the year 2000. The book sold several million copies, one of the best-selling novels of the century, and spawned political clubs. Ignatius Donnelly, a Populist politician, answered it two years later with Caesar's Column, a future where the rich feast, the poor slave, and the whole thing ends in a bloodbath.

One book promised someone could fix the system. The other warned what happens if nobody does. Readers bought both.

Historian Henry Littlefield argued in 1964 that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz told a coded story about the 1890s money fight. The yellow brick road stands for gold. Dorothy's shoes, silver in the book, stand for the silver movement. The Scarecrow plays the farmer. That tells you how deep that era's anger ran.

Key Facts

Fact	Figure	Source
Data center investment	About $10 trillion, near 4% of GDP	Stateline
Data center debt	At least $1.3 trillion raised	Forbes, Oct. 2
Power prices and ballots	Residential prices up 10%+ since 2024; AI on ballots 41 times in 10 states, won once	Forbes, Nov. 6
Panic of 1893 start	Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in receivership, Feb. 20, 1893	Wikipedia
Railroad failures	Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Santa Fe; a quarter of U.S. rail mileage in receivership in 1893	Wikipedia
Wider damage	15,000+ businesses failed, 500+ banks closed, unemployment about 17% to 19%	Wikipedia
1894 midterm	Democrats lost 125 House seats, the largest midterm loss on record	Dave Manuel
1894 freshman class	Record 178 first-term members (166 on opening day)	House Historian
2026 turnover	143+ House, Senate and governor seats replaced; only four elections since 1914 replaced more	Research brief
Both chambers flipping	Third time since WWII, after 1946 and 1994	Fortune
Looking Backward	1888; several million copies; spawned Bellamy clubs	Encyclopedia.com
Caesar's Column	1890, by Populist Ignatius Donnelly; ends in revolt	Encyclopedia.com
Oz allegory	Henry Littlefield, American Quarterly, 1964; Baum's intent still disputed	Wikipedia

Supplemental Facts

State-level unemployment in the 1890s depression: about 25% in Pennsylvania, 35% in New York and 43% in Michigan.
The Pullman Strike's ending: Cleveland got a federal court order, sent in the Army, and Eugene V. Debs went to prison.
The long hangover: Democrats didn't control any branch of the federal government again until 1910.
Third parties in 1894: The Populist Party won nine House seats.
The rhyme with 1896: McKinley's 1896 win followed the 1894 wave, and Republicans held power for about 36 years.
Bellamy's political legacy: Looking Backward inspired the short-lived Nationalist Party in the early 1890s.
Trump's approval this week: 38% in the NBC exit poll, the biggest single driver of the 2026 result.
The corruption vote: 90% of voters called corruption a crucial or major factor, and they backed Democrats 57 to 41 (HuffPost).
Comparing the booms: Analysts compare data centers and railroads by share of GDP, not raw dollars.

Commentary

Thomas: Everybody is analyzing this election with the myopic tunnel vision of a social-media-addicted goldfish, so I want to bring some historical context.

Jonathan: Let me give the overview first for our international audience. Every four years, we elect a president. That happened two years ago. Our midterm elections happen every two years, and that's where we vote for representatives, plus senators and governors whose terms are up. This was a big one because it's halfway through President Trump's administration, and it's the time to pass judgment on whether the administration is doing what you thought it would do.

The House of Representatives flipped blue, to the Democrats. The Senate flipped blue also. Most of the governor seats flipped blue. I think the only state that showed up red was Florida, which is the outlier because Ron DeSantis turned it from a blue state into a red state.

That's the summary. It was a huge deal. It was basically America telling Trump, "We hate what you did. You didn't emphasize the right stuff."

Thomas: That's how the mainstream media has interpreted it.

Historically, American presidents tend to win Congress when they win election, because the people who vote for the president also vote for congressmen of the same party. That has been the case more or less forever. And almost every time, two years later, the president loses Congress.

What makes this one notable is that the president lost both the House and the Senate. That has happened only two other times in the last 100 years, and those are notable elections. But the election this most resembles is the nation-shifting election of 1894. It was basically the same thing we're going through now.

There was a brand-new technology with a massive productivity improvement that was going to transform the entire economy. Big corporations went billions of dollars into debt to deploy it. It boosted technology, but it hurt rural people. I'm talking, of course, about the railroads.

In the 1870s and 1880s, there was a railroad mania. Railroad companies built as fast as they could, because if you were the first railroad to reach a town, you had a monopoly on all traffic to that town. There was a huge incentive to build as fast as possible and to borrow as much money as possible to do it.

When the railroads went into receivership, that led to a run on the banks and a ripple through the entire economy. If you remember the bank run scene in It's a Wonderful Life, this was the peak of bank runs. People were afraid their bank had loaned money to the railroads and was out of money, and that if they didn't get their money out quickly, the bank would close.

That fear killed the banks because of how fractional reserve banking works. No bank has all the money sitting in a box. Banks have to loan it out, which means they can't pay everyone who wants their money back at once.

Jonathan: These are the Monopoly railroads. These are the ones they chose.

Thomas: They are. In fact, the game Monopoly was created the same decade. Around the same time, the farmers were very unhappy with the railroads charging them high monopoly prices, and a big union strike hit the railroads. President Cleveland, a Democrat, sent in the Army to break up the strike violently, and the Republicans swept the House in the next election.

For context, the current flip from Republicans to Democrats is somewhere between 25 and 50 seats. They're still counting.

California and some other places are also still counting. But even in the worst case of 50 seats, that's nothing compared to the more than 100 seats we saw in 1894.

We see a concern over AI very similar to the concern over railroads back then, but with one big difference. In 1894, the voter backlash came after the bubble burst.

The railroad bubble bursting didn't mean trains stopped running. The union strikes did that, but only temporarily, and the president got the railroads running again. The bankruptcies meant that everyone who had lent money to and invested in the railroad companies lost out. They thought, "This new technology is going to change the world. We can move cattle, goods, people, and oil across the country quickly." All of that was true. But it being true doesn't mean building a second railroad to Cincinnati is a good use of funds, or that Cincinnati even needs a railroad, or needs one built this quickly.

You can do things fast, good, or cheap. Pick two.

If you're building fast and the railroad needs to be high quality, you're spending a lot of money, and you're competing with everyone else racing to build railroads.

It's the exact same technological situation we're seeing now with AI. The one difference is that AI hasn't caused an economic crash. So far, AI has made companies more profitable. It has created far more jobs than it has destroyed, and the jobs it has created have been working-class jobs. This is the best time ever to be an electrician.

That's a challenge if you're, say, trying to get your house rebuilt after a flood so you can move your family back home.

Since no one wants a data center in their backyard, they had to ship all the electricians to the middle of nowhere in Texas to build the data centers, so few are available for local jobs.

But the fear of AI may be causing a crash in the stock market. I don't know if you've noticed this week, but the market did not react well to what the Democrats have been saying about shutting down all the data centers, and the NASDAQ in particular took a huge hit.

Notable Books from the Railroad Era

But let's talk about authors, because some very notable books emerged from this era, and understanding them can give you insight into what to write moving forward.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward is a Rip Van Winkle-style book. I just bought it, because I want to do an episode about future shock. The man who falls asleep, wakes up in the next era, and is shocked by all the cultural change of the last 20 or 30 years is an enduring theme in American literature that authors have forgotten about.

It's a common American feeling, because America changes quickly. In other parts of the world, nothing really changes. In America, two years go by and you don't recognize your own town. That creates its own psychological pain that American readers grapple with in different ways.

So two entirely different books emerged at this time, one with an optimistic view of the future and one with a pessimistic view, and they both sold well. Probably to different readers, but maybe to both, because people are nervous about the future and want to see the boomer and doomer views of it. Or what kids now would call the white pill and the black pill. The white pill is the optimistic view, and the black pill is the pessimistic view.

But there's an even more famous book that captures the economic reality of this era, and you're all familiar with it. You've all seen the movie it inspired. That book is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Many people know The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a metaphor for economic realities, specifically the money fight of the 1890s. People in rural areas wanted to move to a silver standard, while people in the cities wanted to stay on the gold standard. The yellow brick road represents gold. I forget what Dorothy's shoes represent.

Jonathan: In the book, her shoes were silver. In the movie, they're ruby slippers, but in the book, they're silver, so they represent the silver movement. The yellow brick road goes to the Emerald City, where the guy is controlling everything from behind a curtain.

Thomas: The goal is not to reproduce The Wizard of Oz. The goal is to understand that we're in a moment where that kind of story, where you map current economic realities onto a fantasy world, can resonate with people on a deep, subconscious level.

People enjoyed The Wizard of Oz without understanding its political commentary. But because the commentary was good and true, or at least resonant, it kept its resonance for more than 100 years, even after the political causes behind it were forgotten.

The same is true of Mother Goose. Almost all of those rhymes are political, but we've forgotten the context. Some are about kings who've been dead for hundreds of years, and yet we still remember the poem that critiques a king's cabinet, or that one guy in his cabinet. That's another thing to look into. Mother Goose is surprisingly political, even though most children don't know it.

Jonathan: On both sides of the aisle, everyone hates gas prices right now. It's so expensive to fill your tank, and God help you if you use diesel. Everyone is paying the same price, and different people experience it differently.

I spent my time in the Marine Corps fighting Iran's proxy war. We fought their proxies. That's what we did. I'm more than happy to pay this higher price to have taken that place down for what they did.

But not everyone has that context. All they see is that the war caused higher gas prices, they can't afford it, and it's making everything else more expensive because everything runs on gas.

Thomas: And apparently no one remembers that for about 20 years, the Democrats' stated position was that it's important to make gas more expensive so we can save the planet. Gas is more expensive in Democrat states than in Republican states.

Jonathan: Attention span.

The point is that everyone is experiencing gas prices. It doesn't matter what the cause is. I have to buckle down to go to the gas station. "How much am I spending on gas today? How much can I get away with spending?"

Everyone is experiencing the same thing, and that's something you can portray in your novels right now. You can touch on a universal dissatisfaction, and that's important.

Thomas: I'm still stunned that the Democrats ran on lowering gas prices and nobody asked them how they planned to do it. In the whole political cycle, it was, "Gas is expensive. We all agree on that. What are you going to do to actually lower the price?" And they never had to give an answer other than ending the war.

Gas is expensive partly because of refining. The Democrats have shut down several refineries, but the oil price is actually pretty low.

Someone in the chat says regular is $5.49 at the California Costco. The last time I filled up at the Texas Costco, it was $3.29. That $2.00 to $2.50 difference is not the oil price, because Costco sources oil at the same price in California as the Texas refineries do. The difference is local taxes and refining infrastructure. California pays much higher taxes on gas, and I think one of its big refineries recently shut down.

Millennials Storm the Hill

Pelosi. Hoyer. McConnell. Durbin. Four leaders from both parties who ran Washington for a generation will leave Congress in January.

The millennials have stormed the gates and are seizing the positions of power. And to understand what is happening let’s go back in time to when the boomers seized power.

So plug in your Walkman, blow into your nintendo cartridge, and pour a glass of Crystal Pepsi. We are going back to 1992.”

Bill Clinton, the first Baby Boomer president took over from World War II veteran George HW Bush.

The turnover ran deeper in Congress. Sixty-five House members retired, a record at the time. Another nineteen more lost their primaries. The House swore in 109 new members in January 1993.

Of the the 121 freshmen heading to the House and Senate. Half of them had not yet turned 45. They came in younger than the new president.

Voters turned on Clinton's party two years later. But not on his generation.

Thirty-four House Democrats lost their seats in 1994. They were replaced by boomer republicans led by Newt Gingrich. Republicans took the House for the first time in 40 years and the Senate with it. Newt Gingrich led 73 Republican freshmen through the door, most of whom were boomers or Gen X.

Between 1992 and 1994 both parties replaced the majority of the GI Generation leaders with Boomers.

Now click on your airpods, put on some Crocs (it’s ok, they’re cool now) and pour a glass of Poppi. We are back in 2026.

Seventy-four House members saw which way the wind was blowing and withdrew before a single vote, the most since 1992. Then in the primaries, younger challengers knocked out long-serving Democrats.

Melat Kiros, 29, beat 15-term congresswoman Diana DeGette in Denver. Luke Bronin, 47, beat John Larson, a Connecticut incumbent of nearly three decades, by more than 20 points.

Seven House Democrats lost primaries, matching the most since 1992.

In Texas, Boomer Cornyn was replaced on the republican ballot by Gen X Paxton who was then replaced by Millennial Taloreco. That’s three generations all in one cycle. In typical Gen X fashion, the gen Xer never got a chance to actually take power.

2026 played out just like in 1994. Voters fired the party in power. Both chambers have flipped in the same midterm only three times since World War II: 1946, 1994 and 2026. And if we go back to 1946 that was the beginning of the GI Generation taking power.

Add it up. Congress started this session as the third-oldest in American history, with an average age near 59. Millennial members, born since the early 1980s, will grow from 75 to at least 97. The first member born in the 2000s takes a seat in January: Michael Alfonso, a 26-year-old Wisconsin Republican. The Senate adds James Talarico, 37, Abdul El-Sayed, 42, and two 45-year-olds, Democrat Annie Andrews and Republican Julia Letlow. Washington could swear in its biggest freshman class in 34 years, which takes us right back to 1992.

So 2026 delivered 1992's primaries and 1994's general election in a single year.

One piece stayed put. The 1992 handoff started at the top and flowed down. This one runs from the bottom up. The White House stays with the Boomers. The president turned 80 this summer.

I don’t know who each party will pick for their candidates, but I do know it won’t be a boomer. Trump will be the last Boomer to hold the white house.

So what does this mean for your books?

Millennials play the Hero role in turnings terms. They show up civic, team-minded and ready to build. A generation like that wants stories to match: crews instead of loners, duty instead of irony, victories the hero earns.

Our take: the brooding antihero belonged to the last era. The competent crew owns the next one. Write accordingly.

Key Facts

Fact	Figure	Source
Leaders retiring	Pelosi (86), Hoyer (87), McConnell (84), Durbin (81)	Roll Call
1992 presidential handoff	Clinton, 46, beat Bush, 68; first Boomer president	Cook Political Report
1992 House turnover	65 retired, 19 lost primaries, 24 lost the general	Brookings Vital Statistics
1992 new House members	109 seated in January 1993	CRS R41283
Broder's 1992 count	Half of 121 incoming freshmen under 45 and younger than Clinton	Seattle Times archive
1994 House losses	34 incumbents lost, all Democrats, including Speaker Foley and Rostenkowski	Wikipedia: 1994 House elections
1994 Republican freshmen	73	CRS R41283
2026 departures before November	74, the most since 1992	Pew Research Center
DeGette upset	Kiros, 29, beat the 15-term incumbent	NPR
Larson upset	Bronin, 47, won by 20+ points; Larson served nearly three decades	U.S. News
Democratic primary losses	7, tied with 2012 for the most since 1992	U.S. News
GOP primary losses	Massie, Cassidy, Cornyn to Trump-backed challengers; Crenshaw on loyalty	Washington Times; Fortune
Both chambers flipping	Third time since WWII, after 1946 and 1994	Fortune
Age of Congress	Third-oldest in history; average 58.9 at the session's start	NBC News
Millennial members	75 now, at least 97 in January	Future Caucus, 2024; Fast Company
First member born in the 2000s	Michael Alfonso, 26, R-Wisconsin	9News/AP
Millennial senators-elect	Talarico 37, El-Sayed 42, Andrews 45, Letlow 45	Fast Company
Freshman class	95+ expected, potentially the largest in 34 years	Akin Gump

Supplemental Facts

Congress in 1992: Broder put the average age of all senators and representatives below 53 (Seattle Times archive). The current Congress averaged 58.9 at its start.
1994's freshman casualties: 16 of the 34 Democrats who lost had served only one term (Wikipedia).
Who retired, by age: Retiring Democrats averaged 75 and retiring Republicans 62 in a February 2026 snapshot (Washington Post).
Durbin's start: He entered the House at 38, in 1983 (Roll Call).
The Texas Senate primary: Ken Paxton, 63, beat John Cornyn, 74, by roughly 27 points (Washington Times; Reuters via AOL).
The democratic socialist wing: DSA-endorsed House members grow from 2 to 8 (Ballotpedia).
Young voters: About 7 in 10 voters under 30 backed Democrats for the House (Time), but they made up only about 1 in 10 voters (Al Jazeera/AP).
Generation labels: Strauss and Howe date Millennials 1982 to 2004, so Kiros (born 1997) and Alfonso (born about 2000) count as Millennials. Pew and most news outlets call them Gen Z.
The 1946 rhyme: The other both-chambers flip of the postwar era seated the Hero generation's first wave, including John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, 14 years before Kennedy won the White House.

Commentary

Jonathan: Let's talk about the psychographics of the election now.

Thomas: In 1992, most of the new members coming into Congress with Bill Clinton were New Democrats, and most were Boomers. So first the Democrats got their bite at the apple and replaced their whole delegation with Boomers. Then in 1994, the Republicans replaced theirs with Boomers. Newt Gingrich was just barely not a Boomer, on a technicality. He's about one year too old.

Thomas: In the 2026 primaries, many of the younger challengers were Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, candidates running against older establishment Democrats. The younger, more radical socialists replaced the supposedly less radical, but definitely older and likely more corrupt, establishment candidates. So again, this is very much a mirror of 1992 and 1994.

In Texas, we went straight from a Boomer to a Millennial. I think part of the reason Florida was insulated from this generational turn and stayed Republican is that Florida has term limits.

The Republicans in power in Texas were mostly neocons who came into power with George W. Bush. People forget he was governor of Texas for a while, and during his governorship, all the statewide elected positions flipped from blue to red.

Texans elect most top government positions on statewide ballots: attorney general, lieutenant governor, governor, the railroad commission, the Texas Supreme Court. They all flipped red under Bush, and they all stayed neocons.

The zeitgeist and the culture changed, but these neocons held on to power and got more and more out of touch, not just with voters but with their own party. Democrats were able to run to the right of the establishment Republicans on some issues, because this neocon old guard was never forced to recycle.

In Florida, you're in for two, four, or six years, whatever the term limit is, and then you have to run for something else. You don't get people who've been there forever. Abbott was running for what I think was his fourth term. If he had been elected, he would have been governor for 16 years, which would have been a record.

Normally, we don't even re-elect our governors once. If you go to the statehouse, there are pictures of all our governors, and they all served four years. We say, "Get out. Get the next guy in. We don't need term limits. We're done with you." A few won re-election, but even then they served eight years at most. Abbott serving as long as he did is historic.

Jonathan: There has been historical animosity between Millennials and Boomers. I was labeled a Millennial and I hated it, because Millennials were tagged as lazy and terrible at customer service. When we all started getting jobs in the 2000s, getting a Millennial was the worst. Going to Starbucks was terrible because a Millennial would be the cashier or making your coffee.

Thomas: The number of think pieces hating on us that we grew up with was unbelievable.

Jonathan: It was ridiculous. The Boomers really hated us, and the Millennials hated the Boomers right back. You can see that in all the social media lately: Boomers hanging on to their houses, or selling their houses to corporations for cash and not letting their kids inherit any money, not setting their kids up for success, which is so stupid.

Biblically speaking, you're supposed to set your kids up for success. According to Proverbs, leaving your children an inheritance is part of being a good man.

There's a lot of cross-generational hatred here. Now the Millennials have taken power, and it's going to be a bloodbath on the Boomer policy side of things.

Thomas: Are taking power. What's interesting is that the Boomers still have the White House. They're losing the statehouses, the House, and the Senate, but Trump is a Boomer. He will be the last Boomer, though.

We don't know who the parties will pick, but neither party is considering a single Boomer. There's not one on the left being considered, with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders, and I don't think he plans to run again. He's too old, not in the sense that he's too old to get votes, but too old for the grueling job.

Jonathan: I think he's handing the baton off to AOC.

Thomas: On the right, there's not a single Boomer being discussed. The closest would be Pence. I think Pence would want to run, but he doesn't realize he's completely out of touch with where Republicans are.

Here's one issue where the Boomer cons are out of sync with the Millennial and Gen Z cons. I'm going to skip Gen X, as you do. Every Gen Xer in the chat is happy to get skipped. They're sitting there with their popcorn, happy to watch.

If you talk to a Boomer con about immigration, they see the problem as illegal immigration. "We have to stop the illegals from coming over." That's not how Millennial cons see it. They see the problem as replacement migration. The problem is not illegal immigration. It's H-1Bs and all the legal immigration.

In many neighborhoods, Millennials can't afford homes because foreigners with H-1B visas get more favorable loan terms and higher pay. That's definitely the case here in Austin. Many H-1Bs work at places like Apple and Indeed, making $200,000.00 to $300,000.00 a year, and $400,000.00 in some cases. Google, Facebook, and all these tech companies hire many H-1Bs, many of them Indians, and pay them more than citizens are able to get paid.

One person told me, "Every single Indian in my office owns two homes," the home they live in and another one. I know that's true, because I used to live next door to an H-1B, not from India but from China. He moved to a nicer, more expensive home, and now he's renting out the house next to us.

Jonathan: Which is just giving economic opportunity to noncitizens.

Thomas: Right. And he's here legally. So from the Millennial point of view, the issue is not illegal migration. I have friends who can't find houses to buy because they lost their jobs to H-1Bs who got those high-paying jobs. They can't get the high-paying job, they can't get the house, and they can't start the family, and they feel like the Boomers' boots are on their necks. They don't care about the party or about the issues the Boomers think are really important.

Another very different issue is Israel. Boomers really care about Israel, on both the left and the right. Boomer cons and Boomer libs both really like Israel, really want to support it, and see antisemitism as the greatest of all evils. What we're seeing among Gen Z is high hostility to Israel on both the left and the right, and the Boomers genuinely don't understand.

There's not much dialogue, because from what I can tell as a Millennial, Gen Zers don't even care to debate it. They're happy to wait for the Boomers to die off. That seems unfortunate, because we should probably talk about it. If we're going to change our position on our closest ally in the Middle East and see them as an enemy instead of a friend, can we discuss this major geopolitical shift?

But name-calling is all I'm seeing. The Boomers call the kids racists and antisemites, and the kids mostly ignore them.

Jonathan: It's a slur to say you're pro-Israel, so they say you're shilling for Israel.

Thomas: The word "Zionist" is now a slur when it used to be seen as positive. "Yankee" is another good example. The British used "Yankee" as a slur for Americans.

I realize this is a different breakdown of the election than you've probably heard. It's not instead of the other breakdowns. Many of those other analyses are right, including the ones about who's allowed to vote and about the issues.

It's very interesting to see how the left and right lose elections differently. When the left loses an election, there tend to be riots, violence, and protests. You're not seeing any of that. We on the right got shellacked, as Obama put it after he had a big shift in Congress. If you look at the discussion among people on the right, there's a lot of mourning and grief, particularly at first.

There was some FUD, particularly among Californians on the right who had moved to Texas. They're saying, "Here we go again." Once you retreat one time, you embrace a retreatist attitude where you feel very defeated. A routed army is really hard to rally. But the other thing you saw was a lot of thinking and debating about how to fix this. Lots of think pieces.

Jonathan: Let's bring this around to how you should write your books right now. What are people really looking for? An election is about winning and losing. In America, it's where people decide who wins and who loses based on the information they think they have.

So in your books, what is the impact of this generational shift in power? Millennials show up civic, team-minded, and ready to build. There's a positive message in a new generation coming in and getting rid of the crusty old guys who have been hanging on to power as long as possible.

That has been a popular story model for a long time: getting rid of the old king. Even on the villain side, a young prince kills his father to take his seat and begins a new era of villainy that is then fought against. People really like that kind of thing.

Thomas: The old king is out of touch. He doesn't understand, but his son does, so we have to get rid of the old king and install the son. You see that pattern in the Bible several times. There are several coups.

Jonathan: And Millennials are big on “the crew.” We're big on the squad. Yesterday, I texted Thomas and the guys to play Helldivers. When this group of Millennial guys gets on League of Legends, we say, "The clan is gathering." It's a call to come take our beating online.

Thomas: The kind of stories that resonated with Boomers were more about the solo hero, lik Rambo, Superman, one man against the machine.

Jonathan: The solo antihero. Batman. This is more of an X-Men team era, where everyone comes together to make something good.

Thomas: That's a good point. It's the Justice League as opposed to Superman. The Avengers as opposed to just Iron Man. We're all in this together.

Jonathan: When you look at your stories, you need to look at teams as the squad or the crew. That's what Millennials want. They want the team, people who work together and whom you can depend on.

When I put out the call for Helldivers, I expect it to be answered. They left me in the lurch last night, and I got my rear end kicked by bugs and squids because no one came.

Thomas: Simmy in the chat says, "And stories passed over Gen X completely." That's not true. The antihero era, which is coming to an end, was the story for Gen Xers.

Jonathan: Demolition Man is The Wizard of Oz for Gen Xers.

Thomas: Millennials have very high antihero fatigue, and I think Xers are starting to get it too, but they were the ones who most created and bought into antihero stories. That's why, during the little heyday Xers had in the last 15 years, there were lots of antihero movies, lots of movies that focused as much on the villain or the complicated hero, or asked whether the villain is really the hero. Those were meant for Gen Xers. I'm not sure how successful or enduringly popular they were.

Gen X is an interesting quagmire because Gen Xers hate being defined. They hate being put in a box, and even if you put them in a box they fit in, they'll leave it just to spite you.

Jonathan: It's popular in Millennial storytelling to have a Gen X mentor.

Thomas: That goes straight to the Strauss and Howe model, where one person from the Prophet generation mentors the hero, because Millennials are known as the Hero generation in Strauss and Howe's turnings model. It's also the great champion.

What you see in both political parties is that these young movements are often led by an elder. Who's the one figurehead the Democratic Socialists of America all rally behind?

Jonathan: Bernie Sanders.

Thomas: Who's ancient. He doesn't present as young. He presents as old.

Jonathan: He doesn't even try to present as young, so he never loses credibility by trying to be something he isn't.

Thomas: He's not saying, "How do you do, fellow kids?" He's saying, "How are you doing, my young Padawan? I will mentor you in my ways." He goes to AOC and says, "Have you heard the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise?"

You see the same thing on the right. Who's the hero of young Gen Z conservative men? It was either Charlie Kirk, who was doing a certain kind of mentoring, or Donald Trump.

Jonathan: Kirk was a Millennial.

Thomas: Kirk was a Millennial reaching out to Gen Z. With the loss of Charlie Kirk, you saw a huge shift among young men voting, which sent a very unfortunate signal that assassinations work. The assassination helped the left win the election, because by the numbers, the group that shifted most dramatically from right to left was young men.

Jonathan: Young men care about winning, and your model hasn't been winning. The war in Iran still hasn't been won, and you said it would be over in six weeks. Well, the vast majority of that war was won in six weeks.

Thomas: Everyone says they care about the war, but every president of my lifetime has bombed Muslims. Obama did it. Clinton did it. Both Bushes did it.

Jonathan: No, Americans need to win. Obama never started anything he had to win. The War on Terror could be 30 years long because we were always winning it.

It's the same reason al-Qaeda hated ISIS. Al-Qaeda refused to support ISIS because ISIS took the victory condition, the win con, of radical Islam and made it about holding land. You can't fight the Marines on land.

Thomas: It's hard to hold territory against an opponent who has air superiority.

Jonathan: Because they made the caliphate a physical thing with borders that had to be defended, they created a lose con. Al-Qaeda didn't have a lose con, because even if you die, you're a martyr, and any time you hit a soft target, you're winning. So Obama didn't have a war he had to win. He just had to not lose super hard.

Thomas: And he was very quiet about his bombings. He would drone somebody, or some country, and it would hardly be in the news. He wouldn't announce it.

Whereas Trump holds a press conference saying, "Baghdadi died like a dog." They publish the video, and it's a whole news cycle.

Jonathan: "I just got this Iranian guy. Watch the video." So the Iran war had a lose con: it wasn't over as quickly as they claimed it would be. When that happens, you lose credibility and trust, and the value of your word goes down. Young men want to win.

Thomas: I agree that young men want to win, but I think the reason people care is Israel. There are a bunch of real genocides happening in the world. The worst genocide of Muslims by far is the Uyghurs, who are being completely eliminated as a people by the Chinese Communist Party. They're not going to exist in 50 years.

Meanwhile, there are more people in the Gaza Strip now than when the war broke out, because they're so fertile.

Starting a war and then losing it doesn't mean there's a genocide because your combatants are dying, even if your combatants are technically children. A 17-year-old with an AK-47 is still a combatant.

But nobody cares about the Uyghurs. There's no one with the Uyghur flag in their bio on X. Nobody cares about the genocide in Sudan. Nobody cared about the genocide of the Armenians.

Jonathan: They do care about how expensive everything is. Groceries are expensive.

Thomas: They care about the stuff they buy. The narrative is that the war with Iran made your groceries expensive, when in reality, groceries are expensive because of poor fiscal policy in both parties. Everyone's running the money printer.

Jonathan: We're still absorbing the repercussions of the COVID era, when people were killing their herds.

Thomas: I hate to break it to everyone who voted for the Democrats with great optimism that they would lower prices, but there's no intention to lower prices. Deflation is seen as the worst possible outcome.

Jonathan: As soon as you get used to prices, they stay.

Thomas: If they see deflation as even a possibility, they go to the money printer and push the up button. They start doing quantitative easing, which is the technical term for making the money printer go brr. Prices are not going to go down.

Going back to the generational conflict, the heart of the price issue is not beef and eggs. Eggs actually got cheaper, but nobody seemed to care, because it's not really about food.

It's about the price of housing.

Boomers want their houses to be more expensive, because they own them and their houses store their value. Gen Z and Millennials want prices to drop. Those of you who are older, your kids want your house price to drop by half. Is your house worth $500,000.00? Your kids want it to be worth $250,000.00. Is it worth $250,000.00? Your kids want it to be worth $125,000.00. They're buyers, and you're sellers. That's the heart of the issue.

But it's almost impossible for young people to blame their parents, because they love their parents. So they look for a scapegoat. And what's the universal scapegoat for all societal problems when you don't want to address the actual problem, which is that your parents are eating you? You blame the Jews.

That's why both the left and the right are blaming the Jews. It's psychologically easier to blame the Jews for the fact that you can't afford a house than to blame your own parents.

Jonathan: People aren't having a problem blaming their parents, according to the chatter. There's all kinds of "I've cut off my parents. I've cut off my family. I'm not having anything to do with them."

Thomas: Which is so unfortunate. If you're a young person tempted to do that and you're a Christian, realize there's a commandment to honor your father and your mother.

Jonathan: It doesn't say only if they're good, and that sucks.

Thomas: And it's not really your place to judge your own parents.

Jonathan: Something that happens in martial arts schools applies here. You always bow to the mat before you go on, because that's where you learn. I get the crap beat out of me on that mat, but you always respect the mat, and you bow to it.

Last night, I had a horrible opponent who was better than me and way bigger. It hurt so bad. But I bowed to the mat. I bowed to him, shook his hand, and said, "Thank you for that horrible time where I did not win and didn't feel like much of a man," when everything I've based my life on, being a good fighter, wasn't applying in that moment.

In the same way, your father and mother gave you life, so we bow to the mat and say thank you. We render that honor. They may not be good people. They may not be smart people. They may have actively attacked and abused you. But they gave you life. And if you're in a place where you're not willing to say life is a good thing, you have other problems to deal with as well.

Thomas: And they sustained you. For most people, their parents were around at least when they were children, feeding them, sheltering them, providing for them, and making sacrifices. Even if they didn't do a good job, they made sacrifices.

You get a new perspective on your own parents once you have children. You realize that children can be evil. We have this perception that "When I was a child, I was an angel. It was all the other children who were evil." No, you were not an angel. Some of the bad things that happened to you were your own fault, from choices you made knowing they were wrong, even as a child.

Jonathan: My wife and I have a thing about this. You learn to tell different kinds of crying apart: the angry cry, the I'm-in-pain cry. We know the cry of "I'm suffering the consequences of my decisions."

Thomas: Along those lines, I've heard of young people who went no contact with their parents and then were upset to be cut out of the will.

The commandment about honoring your father and your mother is actually connected to inheritance. It says, "Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land your God gives you." Who has the land currently? Your parents. Who are you going to get it from? Your parents. The land passes from older generations to younger generations, so honoring your parents matters for inheriting the land.

Jonathan: The older generation needs to remember that too. If your children aren't going to benefit meaningfully from a relationship with you, and your personality isn't great, and you didn't do a great job, why would they stick around?

Thomas: On the flip side, for older people, and I know our audience skews older, it's important for younger people to take power from older people before the older people die.

Jonathan: The older people need to be passing it on.

Thomas: Right. A kingdom is more stable when a retired king can mentor the younger king. Odysseus's father, Laertes, is still alive at the end of the story. If you read the end of the book, Odysseus has a big battle, and Laertes is out in the field with the villagers. He'd been advising Odysseus the whole time. While Odysseus was gone, Laertes didn't retake the throne, but he was there as a trusted advisor. That's a stable arrangement.

The Boomers grabbed power very young, and they pushed out the older generation more brutally and more suddenly than earlier generations had.

When I was trying to draw the parallel with 1946, the other time Congress flipped to this degree, I asked whether that was also a generational transition. It was, to a lesser degree. That was the first election where the Greatest Generation got elected, but they didn't take full power for another 12 years. They took power slowly and had a much more collaborative relationship with the generation above them.

Whereas the Boomers said, "What do you know, old man?" Look at Boomer heroes like Luke Skywalker. He doesn't have much respect for Obi-Wan Kenobi or Yoda, and half the time he doesn't even follow their advice. That's very typical of the Boomer attitude.

Boomers often have the same attitude toward their children's generation: "These kids are too stupid to make decisions, with their avocado toast and their video games."

Jonathan: They actually said Obi-Wan Kenobi was from the Clone Wars, which was World War II.

Thomas: If you want to write a resonant story, it has to be in sync with the major historical events that are happening, because those events shape a people.

If you're older and writing for younger people, realize they are experiencing replacement migration. They are experiencing being a minority at school, which is not an experience you necessarily had growing up.

Most Boomers lived in a segregated world where, regardless of race, you weren't the minority in the school you grew up in. Almost all Gen Zers are a minority, because there is no majority. It's so diverse that there's no superseding culture other than a generic bureaucratic culture, which is no culture at all.

Jonathan: What this all means is that we're reverting to tribalism. We're building the teams again, the crews, the clans. Everything is coming back to "This is what we call ourselves. This is our flag."

That's where storytelling is going. You need to build the crew. If you want to do positive storytelling, you need good mentors who pass on power productively, and villains who don't. That's what everyone will resonate with.

Millennials don't automatically hate all Boomers. They hate them as an idea. But if a Boomer passes on power, or a house, or something like that, the Gen Zer or Millennial will say, "That's good." That's in alignment not just with their values but with common sense and universal values. The old should pass on power and the best opportunities they can to their offspring.

Thomas: And pass on power while you're still alive, legitimately, so they can use it to make poor decisions. There's a common Boomer thing: "I'll let my children make good decisions, but I won't let them make bad decisions."

Jonathan: There are conditions on the inheritance. That's actually a trope.

Thomas: By doing that, you rob them of the opportunity to learn and gain wisdom, especially if those conditions apply after you've died. It's the worst of both worlds.

The better solution is what we see in the Bible with the prodigal son. He was able to squander his inheritance, but his dad was still alive to restore him as a person. That's much better than squandering his inheritance after his father died, when his father isn't there to restore him.

If the father had said, "I'm going to put these conditions on you," the son would have squandered his inheritance more slowly, but he still wouldn't have been restored and gained wisdom. The best scenario for the story is that he squandered his inheritance but was still restored to wisdom, because you can always make more money if you have wisdom.

In fact, making money is surprisingly easy if you have wisdom, and holding on to money is surprisingly difficult if you're a fool.

Jonathan: Your money flies away. Like Black Friday.

Thomas: My children are trying to learn how money works, and the really little ones have no concept of it. My two-year-old is constantly coming up to me with coins she finds.

Coins have more or less lost their value. There's almost nowhere you can spend them, and no one really takes them because of inflation. But children love holding coins and exchanging them with each other. She'll come up to me holding a penny and say, "Coinies, coinies. Look what I found." It's so cute. And that penny is literally not worth the metal it's printed on.

Jonathan: When we talk about storytelling now, you have to understand that Millennials formed relationships at college and where they went to work. Many of my best friends are from the military. We were all in the military together, and we still talk. November 10 is the Marine Corps birthday, and you'll probably hear me being obnoxious from wherever you live.

Thomas: I'm surprised you haven't been talking about it this whole episode.

Jonathan: No one here cares. I'm not wasting it on them. But I'm going to get on a call with my guys, and we'll talk about the old days. Most of them are blue. Most of them are celebrating the shellacking the Republicans got. Most of them hate Trump. It doesn't matter. They're my guys. That's my crew. Those are the guys I served with.

I'm looking forward to it, and we all say, "Man, we should do this more often. Why don't we do this once a year?" Your crew matters.

Thomas: That's what everyone says at the conference: "We have to meet between conferences."

Jonathan: And then they never do. But when you form a tribe of people who accept you, love you, make you better, and hold you to a standard, and then you meet that standard, holy cow, that feels good. That's powerful, and that's where storytelling needs to go right now.

I think that's the biggest lesson we can pull out of the midterms. We need the crew. We need the squad. We need the team that's going to make the world a better place.

Thomas: And don't give up hope. The pendulum swings back and forth. As a people, we've lost our historical memory. Many of us can't remember when the Democrats were in favor of high gas prices, even though that was five minutes ago.

We have a very short time horizon behind us, but we feel like the future will always be the same. "This is the end. We'll never be in power again." That's not how this works. The pendulum always swings back. Every cause has a reaction, and every reaction has its own reaction.

Jonathan: But it does all go downhill eventually.

Thomas: The toilet bowl is circling. The arc of history does not bend up. It bends down. Medieval peasants had more free time than the typical office worker today. I wake up before my children wake up and come home after they've gone to sleep. Medieval peasants never worked that hard, and when they did work, their children were with them the whole time.

We tell ourselves it's better now than it's ever been. In some ways it is. I have a hot shower, and I enjoy that hot shower. Medieval peasants did not have a hot shower. I have better access to protein than they did. So there are positives and negatives. There's always something to be thankful for and always something to complain about.

You have a choice whether you're going to be thankful or complain, and you have a choice whether to give up hope. But giving up hope is a sin for Christians. The Bible says, "Do not lose heart," and that is a command. So do not lose heart. Don't do it.

Someone in the chat says, "We have deodorant." Also a plus. We've got it with microplastics and aluminum. Where do you think the Alzheimer's comes from?

Jonathan: Shut up, Thomas.

BBC Leaves the Murk In to Prove Blue Planet III Is Not AI

According to The Guardian, the producers of Blue Planet III are deliberately leaving cloudier, less polished camera shots in the finished series to prove the animals on screen are real and not AI-generated. Executive producer Elizabeth White told the paper that AI “makes us want to be even more authentic,” and that the creatures filmed in the deep ocean “are probably more remarkable than AI could imagine and it’s completely real.”

What Happened

In past Blue Planet shoots, White said, “the amount of plankton and things that are in the water in the sequences” would usually get a shot cut. The team “might have framed out a boat or a buoy or gone: ‘Oh, actually — the water conditions are not really good enough for this.’” Now those elements stay. White said the production is “really leaning into that authenticity” and expects to lean further into “the more organic, murkier and less polished footage” as AI keeps booming.

At a press screening, BBC specialist factual commissioning head Jack Bootle told journalists, “No gen AI was used in this series. Not a single frame. It’s all real photography.” The series was filmed over four years across five oceans. Innovations include a “stonefish” underwater CCTV camera developed by producer and director Yoland Bosiger that captured dolphins using sea sponges to block holes in coral and trap fish, a mini-dome camera to follow an octopus, a deep-sea selfie stick, leg-mounted scooters for diving footage, and lasers for deep-sea creatures. Other sequences show groupers communicating with another fish species, 200,000 crabs lining up in formation to feed, sea urchins using shells as sun hats, and penguin footage that echoes the iguana-versus-snakes sequence from Planet Earth II. David Attenborough, who turned 100 this year, narrates and was involved in the scripts. The series started Sunday, 1 November on BBC One and iPlayer, per Radio Times.

Not the Bee picked up the Guardian reporting on 30 October under the headline “BBC’s ‘Blue Planet III’ will have ‘less polished’ camera shots to prove they didn’t use AI,” with the tagline that AI has ruined a lot over the past five years and it is going to get worse.

Why Authors Care

Readers already treat machine-smooth prose the way the BBC now treats machine-smooth ocean footage: as the tell. The more polished the paragraph, the more some readers wonder whether a human wrote it.

Authors who leave rough edges on purpose (a sentence that runs long, a local detail that only someone who was there would notice, the occasional typo that survives a final pass) are building the same kind of receipt the BBC is building with plankton and buoys.

AI detectors and “human-made” labels exist, but they are imperfect and contested. The receipt that does not depend on a third-party tool is the work itself: the voice, the uneven energy, the specific choice that an average model would sand smooth.

This week: pick one chapter or short story and leave one deliberate human mark in it (an imperfect transition, a sentence that sounds like you at 1 a.m., a detail that does not serve the plot). Then decide whether your back matter or author page states, in plain language, that a human wrote the book. Do not wait for a platform to certify it.

Sources:

Commentary

Thomas: The BBC has taken a very interesting stance that may indicate where art is moving. This is the "typos prove you're human" story. It's time for the Zeitgeist Report, which you can find at ZeitgeistReport.com, our podcast that covers culture, politics, and how people and reader preferences are changing.

Jonathan: Leaving the murk in to prove the footage is real is such a weird solution. People can say whatever they want, no matter what.

And I don't know. I've seen some of those eyeless, way-too-many-teeth-having things in the Mariana Trench, and I think, "No, that's AI."

Thomas: There's an unnaturalness to unusual sea life, because as humans, we don't spend much time in the ocean, and when we do, we can't see very well. So when we get crystal-clear footage of the ocean, there's a bit of an uncanny valley.

I remember this with the Apple TV screensavers. There would be a shot of a bunch of fish, and I'd think, "Is that CG? Are those real fish? They seem awfully shiny. Are real fish really that shiny?"

So it's that uncanny valley of not quite knowing whether it's real, and this is an interesting approach: leaving the messiness and the sloppiness in to prove it's not slop. The reader version would be leaving the typos in to prove the writing is real.

I don't think this is a good long-term solution. It's an interesting experiment, but if you're sophisticated with AI, you can tell it, "Add a typo every 1,000 words," or "Randomly distribute 27 typos through this book to make it look human." You can handle that at the generation step.

AI can make gross, dirty-looking things. The reason people don't see AI make gross, dirty-looking things is that people tend to prompt for clean outputs. They want typo-free writing and clean, simple videos.

There's a slopcore song that went viral in France. Slopcore is a new genre of AI music that's blowing up online. In this French song, an AI character sings about how she wakes up, takes a selfie, and shares it online, and everyone says she's AI. She insists she isn't, but even her mom says she's AI.

As the song progresses, little flickers of errors make her look artificial, not human. At one point her eye color changes, and the reveal is that she is AI.

The song is incredibly catchy. It's gotten millions of streams on X, although for whatever reason I haven't seen it go viral on YouTube. On X, it's a bop, as the kids say.

In the song, she holds up her hand to prove she has five fingers and isn't AI, which I thought was funny, because that would have been strong proof in 2024, when AI couldn't handle fingers very well. Now it can handle fingers in video just fine and sync the mouth to the music just fine.

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