Crew wisdom (December 2025)

Every month I’m listing the smartest takes I picked up from the Salmon Crew private community. These are a shortlist of 1,700+ messages in December 2025 (I counted). The top of the chats, purely based on what stuck with me.

In no particular order, here we go.

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"Streaming didn't replace buying records, it replaced knowing the artist." r/showerthoughts

This is why r/showerthoughts is still one of the best places on the internet.

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“One little trick for when you can't be arsed to read 50 page reports and want AI to summarise them for you. Ask for the counter-intuitive findings. Usually good signal to noise ratio and avoids it just parroting back the "people who trust AI more are more likely to embrace it" (well DUH).”

A helluva good trick if you have more stuff to read than time you’ll ever live.

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“Porn is what you get when the act matters more than the intimacy. And now everything’s porn.” Ergo, anything we do where showing up matters more than showing off is anti-porn.”

Everything’s porn. Love the take, hate that it’s real. Wrote a follow up to this.

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“The tree goes deeper into its roots when there are heavy winds.”

Heard in a podcast. So much wisdom about human nature in it.

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“What kills creativity in an agency (again, for me) is when you have a big public pronouncement of your unique perspective or motivations… and then you copy the process from BBDO because your ECD prefers those templates.”

The gap between wordsmithed philosophies and everyday realities is a thing.

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“I actually encountered this first in sociology / psychology circles. Posited as a suggestion that maybe some of our “foundational” behavioural economics truths are actually just facts about California university students (the ones who ended up volunteering for much of that research), AKA a partial explanation for the reproducibility crisis in the social sciences.”

This low key blew my mind. Had never thought about it like this.

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“Not as tightly wired as smell, but music and song were primary transmission mechanisms for a long stretch of our history - and from personal experience I can still sing along to songs I haven't heard for decades cause they were once just part of me.”

Music and memorability, two things that are important to obsess with.

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“Clients want strategy / creativity thats more embedded and not limited to paid media deliverables, and certainly not limited to just the film based ones. Agencies are trapped by a preoccupation with the most familiar and creatively exciting deliverables - through their remuneration approaches, through laggards in senior positions, through awards systems, through lack of talent diversity, through human biases like fear or ego.”

Explain the incentives and I will explain the behaviour. Plus ça change.

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“I’ve come to the conclusion creative’s superpower is their inability to scale their thinking, they are just so extremely ‘first person perspective’ in how they experience the world that they see and notice tiny details that most people don’t and their highly subjective, borderline solipsistic, perspective is what makes them so good at crafting the individual assets - like they are locked into that one thing in a way normal people don’t do. But, it’s also their weakness because they just completely melt when you try and make them engage with systems thinking.”

This also exists to force simplicity in a process often has very little of it.

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“I have a working theory that American culture is shaped by personalities prone to addiction - not just to substances. To religion and consumption too. Buying shit gives you a dopamine hit that keeps you high when life is good, and brings you a high when life is bad. Related to this is our cultural inability to sit with discomfort for very long.”

One very reasonable take on the US consumer sentiment vs spending debate.

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“I’m not suggesting that we all have to have it all figured out, and that the only meaningful conversations provide frameworks or solutions (in fact, I’d say a lot of the best content creators guide conversation toward more interesting insights vs “this is definitively what we should do next”) but there’s a huge difference IMO between vulnerability that exposes cracks in the industry and a non-stop brain dump of things that are probably best taken to a therapist or at the very least, not published online.”

As someone who has drama dumped before, I 100% endorse this message.

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“My initial point about AI adoption is that people who are worried about it aren’t doomers or Luddites, because the scale of AI is unlike any other industrial revolution. We are still in the manufacturing consent stage, so these are concerns, not calls for immediate shutdowns. I also don’t like how pro-AI folks ignore the scale of this movement compared to something like the print revolution, which took centuries to be adopted by the public. And when it comes to people who dismiss AI immediately, the pro-AI side often makes comparisons that make others look dumb for not buying into the technology. I don’t like either side doing this.”

If your main counter-take to anything is “you don’t get it”, that’s cheating.

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“Insightful, spicy, and contrary feel like the seven dwarf names. I want to be Contrary. I nominate Joe to be Spicy. And Ben to be Insightful.”

This tickled my brain purely because I have a child obsessed with princesses.

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“[Loved] this quote from the novel Anxious People by a HNWI at her therapist: "I buy distance from other people. Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on aeroplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.””

Not sure how useful this is as an insight, but it’s definitely a fucking insight.

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“In my culture, it's believed that as one grows older, there are certain vices that should drop off naturally as a result of age. I'm also shocked that someone in his 40s - 50s still has the energy to participate in sex parties with 14-day streak. If we apply Sigmund Freud's Psychosexual theory, Diddy might be experiencing some of kind fixation in "id" state.”

Of course a group of strategists will have thoughts about the Diddy doc.

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