Any Given Sunday

The Amateur Hour

This week I’ve been thinking about the value of being bad at things — of being an amateur again.

Shifty — has become possibly my favourite documentary — Adam Curtis calls AI “a ghost that haunts us.” It’s not just a metaphor; it’s a diagnosis. We’ve built systems that seem to know everything, able to regurgitate our past with greater accuracy than we can ourselves. Now we hover between fear and awe, wondering what’s left for us to do.

Callum Chace, in Surviving AI, argues that the future depends on how we relate to these tools. Do we hand over our curiosity, or relearn how to think like amateurs — open, naïve, unashamed to fail?

Being an amateur is hard. The majority of us strive to avoid it. It’s humiliating, even. It means starting again when the world expects you to be an expert. I know because I’m trying it — on three fronts. I’ve left, perhaps only temporarily, the comfort of Apple and moved to Nothing. I’ve left Flodesk and moved to Rumicat for my newsletters, and I’m starting something new.

Firstly, I swapped my iPhone for a Nothing Phone, and it’s like switching banks back in 2007. Nothing works as expected. Every tap reminds me how deeply I’ve been trained to expect frictionless perfection. And oh my god, it's painful.

But that friction is the point. Apple made things invisible; Nothing makes things visible again. It reintroduces resistance — and resistance is how we stay awake. But it’s hard. I’m in digital cold turkey, struggling to unlearn iOS after twenty years of addiction.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes that modern life has become a “smooth surface” — no pause, no friction — and that this smoothness is killing thought. The amateur stumbles. They get things wrong. And in doing so, they stay alive. And today, that feels critical. Discomfort is critical. Tenerife seems attractive, but the Orkney Isles feel like they’re calling.

That’s what I’ve always loved about Bowie, Björk, and Prince. They were never afraid to unlearn themselves — to shed a skin just as it started to fit. Bowie reinvented his identity more times than most people change phones. Björk keeps collapsing genres like a child with Lego and a sledgehammer. Prince recorded entire albums on a whim, often on instruments he’d barely mastered. They all understood that to stay creative, you must remain, in some vital way, an amateur — curious, unfinished, vulnerable.

Business culture hates that idea. We worship expertise and optimisation. Yet the best ideas I’ve seen come from people doing something for the first time — people too naïve to know what’s impossible. We’ve become so risk-averse, so controlling, so certain we “know how it all works” — that we can hack or gamify the system — perhaps because deep down we know we have no control at all, especially over politics.

I’m feeling that first-hand again. I’m starting a new business in a completely new space, and in the process of asking people to invest or support, I can sense the discomfort. They have to imagine me in a world they don’t associate me with — and I have to accept being seen as a beginner again. It’s humbling. But it’s also the point. There’s energy in that uncertainty — in not knowing the script, in not being sure if you’re even in the right play. That’s where invention hides.

That’s the quiet optimism in Curtis’s films. They’re messy, instinctive, gloriously contradictory — amateur in the best sense. They remind us that imagination doesn’t come from mastery; it comes from not knowing.

Maybe that’s what growing older should mean now: not clinging to what we’ve learned, but deliberately unlearning it. Switching systems. Switching habits. Choosing friction. Perhaps that’s what it has always meant, but it feels more urgent now than ever.

The anthropologist David Graeber once said that “the hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make — and… could just as easily make differently.” The amateur knows this instinctively. The expert forgets.

If AI is our ghost — our past — perhaps our amateur self is the one who can finally bring us back to life: imperfectly, playfully, human again.

Commercial Break

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Legend

🧁 = (cupcake) Treat brain – easy to consume

🦪 = (oyster) More challenging – not for everyone

Reading

🧁

Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up — Abigail Shrier. Journalist Abigail Shrier digs into why so many young people aren’t “growing up” by conventional metrics. (thx to Dan at Heights)

🧁

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators — Ronan Farrow. A deeply reported investigation of power, silence, and the hidden engine of abuse.

Music

🚀

The Supporting Act — We’ve just announced the grantees from our partnership with Will Smith and our emerging artist fund. Twenty talented musicians have received €5,000 each in unrestricted grants. If you'd like to show your support you can here.

🧁

Friko – Where We’ve Been, Where We Go from Here — The Chicago duo’s debut album blends orchestral indie-rock and raw emotion. Think early Arcade Fire if they’d grown up on Elliott Smith and Tchaikovsky.

🧁

The Streets - I am, of course, a massive contradiction — some might say full of shit. I flit between believing any artist hogging a stage at 70 needs to step aside and then feeling a strong need to indulge in nostalgia. With Mike Skinner and The Streets coming back, I’m firmly in the “need” camp. I missed them the first time, perhaps the same way millions “missed” Oasis, and I can’t wait for more tour dates.

💩

Lily Allen - I never, ever talk negatively about something creative, however I feel the need to share how much I despise Lily Allen’s new album. It feels so off — like a daytime soap opera desperate for attention. In her own words, it’s “not even truthful” — just clickbait. I don’t get the hype (or perhaps I do — I’m just disappointed again). Explain it to me, please?

Podcasts

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The Skewer — In the same vein as Adam Curtis’s documentaries, this satirical audio-collage is the podcast evolution of Not the Nine O’Clock News.

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The Comedian’s Comedian – Episode 487 featuring Alan Davies — Not brand new, but a veteran show that reveals craft, humour and creative vulnerability. And Alan Davies story is quite remarkable.

TV & Film

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The Ballad of a Small Player — Tilda Swinton gives another unusual performance; Colin Farrell plays a charlatan alcoholic. Gorgeous art-direction and a surprise love story.

🦪

Vermiglio — Set in a remote Alpine village during WWII, this turns a simple love story into a portrait of survival, beauty, guilt. Every frame feels painted — slow, luminous, human. Think Call Me by Your Name meets Cold War, in snow.

Finally, Sam Lessin writes incredbily well about business, tech and Ai. I thought this was brilliant: https://x.com/lessin/status/1979894983093104646

As always, thanks for reading to the end. Any suggestions or comments? Email me: damian@bradfield.wtf

That’s it. Amen.

Damian

This newsletter was created via Nalden’s new platform, Rumicat. 🎆