Thoughts — Essays by Nicole Cathcart
Thoughts · Featured
AI & Marketing · April 9, 2026 · 11 min read
The New Moat Is Taste
Production capacity is gone as a filter. What replaces it is something you cannot automate. AI did not create a content crisis, it exposed one. The new moat is taste, and the skill is teaching the system to operate with yours.
Read the essay →"The old filter was production capacity. That filter is gone. The new moat is taste, and taste is the one thing your competitor with the same AI stack does not automatically have."
— Nicole Cathcart
Filter
- 02
Leadership · February 3, 2026 · 10 min read
The Case for Curiosity
The most underrated leadership skill in an age of AI is curiosity. As AI accelerates change and collapses certainty, the leaders who thrive are the ones most willing to ask better questions.
Read essay →
- 03
AI & Work · January 14, 2026 · 9 min read
Grief Is the Honest Response
The most honest response to AI right now isn't optimism or panic. It's grief. Not grief as despair or resistance, but grief as a stage of accepting a massive systemic change.
Read essay →
- 04
Behavioral Science · November 5, 2025 · 5 min read
Your Customers Aren't Irrational, Just Predictably Human
The brands that win don't just guess what people want, they understand how people actually behave. At the intersection of psychology and economics lies a science too many companies still overlook.
Read essay →
- 05
Strategy · October 8, 2025 · 6 min read
The Market Doesn't Reward Better. It Rewards Bolder.
Why the brands that win are not the clearest, the nicest, or the most complete, but the ones willing to choose, exclude, and commit.
Read essay →