Fighting Sycophancy, One Prompt at a Time

A Triple Jump and Robots

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night? This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines. Ryan Howard [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanalberthoward/]is an MBA alum from HEC Paris with eight years in robotics behind him. He’s done what we used to call the triple jump: changed job, industry, and country in one move, from petroleum engineering in Alberta to operations to tech to robots. He wears a steel ring on his working hand. It’s a Canadian engineer’s tradition, an oath of good practice tied to a bridge that collapsed in Quebec in 1907 and killed 75 people. That ring is the frame for the whole conversation. What keeps Ryan up at night is integrity, scientific and economic, and his complaint is specific: the automation debate has quietly become a benefits-only debate. We spoke about this and many more things on leadership when you feel you’ve landed on a different planet. This was the last episode of this season, but more to come soon. If you have any thoughts, please hit reply and let me know! This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe [https://jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Something Else Runs Through Hormuz

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night? This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines. For eighty years, freedom of navigation looked like a feature of the physical world. You moved a ship through a strait; the strait stayed open. Then Iran closed Hormuz. The closure was not the surprise. The surprise was what came after: nothing. No coalition, no costly response, no credible plan to restore the status quo. The strait stayed closed because no one was willing or able to pay the price to reopen it. Olivier Chatain [https://olivierchatain.com/] is a professor of strategy at HEC Paris. He is my colleague with whom I created the HEC Paris lab on Business and Geopolitics. [https://campusofthefuture.hec.fr/en/eclairer-inspirer/hec-lab-business-and-geopolitics] His current research follows the freedom-of-navigation question into a place most people don’t look: the subsea fiber-optic cables that carry effectively all intercontinental data traffic. The legal regime is the same as for shipping. The chokepoints are the same: Bab el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca, the Suez approach. The exposure is the same. What changes is what happens when someone moves against the cables instead of the ships. A closed strait is like a tap. You can turn the shipping back on, which is what makes it useful as leverage. A cut cable is physical infrastructure that took years to lay and cannot be redeployed. Once you cut it, you have no leverage left. That asymmetry sounds like good news. But it is not: Cable threats are credible only as one-shot weapons, the kind a regime reaches for when it has concluded it has nothing left to lose. Iran spent six months proving it could survive the unthinkable. Now it knows. The implication for business: Every multinational moves data between continents. Few firms know which physical routes carry it, what their contracts actually guarantee, or what happens when latency drops because a cable on the other side of the world has been severed. Google and Meta have been laying their own cables for fifteen years, because the capturing attention is their key product, and drops in latency are fatal to it. Most other firms have not yet started asking the question. Once you realize this, the harder problem is corporate governance: cable resilience is an insurance policy with no upside and no P&L story. You are asking a board to authorize spending against an extreme event that, if it doesn’t arrive, makes you the person who wasted ten million euros on a contract no one used. This is what it looks like when the world stops underwriting common goods and starts charging for them, one chokepoint at a time. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe [https://jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Japan, as Requested

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night? This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines. Most images of Japan are not accidents: the samurai, the cherry blossoms, the geisha, the kawaii cuteness, or the pink everywhere. They are not exactly foreign impositions (at least not anymore). Increasingly, this is what Tokyo wants the world to see. Pierre-William Fregonese, a political scientist and lecturer at Kobe University, calls this self-orientalism: the moment a country stops resisting the stereotypes foreigners hold of it and starts producing them on demand. We talk about Cool Japan and its 2025 cabinet upgrade, Aratana Cool Japan: a strategy of asking the world what it expects from Japan, then delivering it. He has written two books on this feedback loop. L’Invention du rose [https://www.puf.com/linvention-du-rose] (PUF, 2023) is on the rise of pink as Japan’s color. Japonaises. Dans l’archipel de l’injustice [https://www.puf.com/japonaises-0] (PUF, 2026), co-written with Madoka Serizawa, looks at what this image does to the women who live inside it and are paying the price of the transformation. In February 2025, Prime Minister Ishiba handed Donald Trump a samurai helmet. It was theater, but it worked anyway. This is what happens when a country decides its identity is a product, and the world is the customer. This rebranding effort may be the most striking response of one country to global transactionalism pushed to the extreme we are witnessing. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe [https://jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Fighting Sycophancy, One Prompt at a Time

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night? This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines. Anastasia Buyalskaya [https://www.linkedin.com/in/anastasia-buyalskaya/] is a behavioral scientist and Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris. She spends most of her working life on a single question: why people make decisions they regret. Decisions that, on reflection, were suboptimal in ways they could have caught, if they had been paying attention to their own thinking. That ability of metacognition (or thinking about one’s own thinking), Anastasia argues, is the prerequisite for noticing bias at all, and she worries we’re losing it. WALL-E, she says, used to be funny. It’s getting harder to watch because it feels prescient. The mechanism she walks through is straightforward and worth tracing: Confirmation bias (the tendency to seek information that confirms what we already believe) was already one of the most consequential biases in the literature before the algorithmic age. Then news consumption became personalized. Then AI arrived, and the early evidence suggests it’s sycophantic by default. It tells you the question you just asked is a great question. It tells you you’re right. The cognitive scaffolding around modern decision-making is designed to confirm rather than challenge. So what do we do next? Train people to argue with the tools rather than be soothed by them. Get out of the house. Talk to strangers. Spend time in classrooms where disagreement is structured rather than algorithmically filtered. She makes the case for university not as credentialing but as one of the few remaining institutions where you can be in a room with people whose priors don’t match yours, and learn how to handle that without retreating. The moment I keep coming back to: it has rarely been more interesting to lead, and rarely been harder. Because uniting people across parallel realities is now the precondition for governing at all. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe [https://jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Run With the Machine. Even in the Louvre.

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night? This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines. Souheil Ben Slimane [https://www.matahafi.com/en] is a former mobile app developer who is now a licensed Paris tour guide. He builds his own museum tours for families, including a hand-illustrated booklet [https://louvreguide.com/treasure-hunt-for-kids], designed with his wife [https://jeremyghez.substack.com/p/paris-like-you-never-thought-about?r=8cgon] and another guide, that turns the Louvre into a deciphering game playable only in person, with him. ChatGPT, he says, does a hell of a good job describing artifacts. The famous ones, anyway: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace [https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/the-palace/a-stairway-to-victory]. On pure description, the machine wins. What it can’t do is be present. After COVID, the consensus inside his profession was that virtual tours and live-streamed visits would permanently reshape demand. The opposite happened. Bookings came back stronger, and the pattern shifted in a specific direction: visitors who used to book a single guide for several tours now book five different guides for five different tours. They want to meet locals. They also want to skip the line and see rooms without crowds. Human connection, but in low-density form. The booklet is the tell. Ben deliberately built a product that can’t be played without a human officiant: kids receive a coded letter from one of Napoleon’s officers, and only the guide holds the key to decipher it. Apps were cheaper, more scalable, easier to ship. He gave them up because they didn’t teach the kids anything. The deciphering only works if someone is standing there, with you. We also get into how children see the museum differently from adults (not as masterpieces but as birds, angels, things that haven’t been named yet) and what that says about the inner child every adult still drags into the Louvre. We close on AI, where Ben makes a distinction worth keeping: the future museum will have bots that decipher your emotions and adapt to you. They will be better than him on content. Not on presence. This is that conversation. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe [https://jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]