The Insider - November 2025

Hi everyone,

Welcome to the November edition of the Insider.

I took a few months off from writing this monthly letter to welcome our first child (more on that in the Something Personal section), but I’m returning to a regular publishing cadence going forward.

I’m also experimenting with something new, and I’d love to hear what you think. In addition to the written Insider edition that lands in your inbox, I am including an audio file of me reading this newsletter out loud.

This is no AI voice clone; it’s me, sitting at my desk today, reading this month’s Insider. My intention here is to deepen the humanity and connection between us, while giving busy subscribers a chance to experience the content in alternative formats. You’ll notice in the audio recording that I add a bit of nuance and color. Consider it a Director’s Cut of the Insider.

The Insider - November 2025 (Original Audio Narration by Banks)

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I’d also love to hear from you. Just reply to this email and send me an update about what you’re up to, what you’re learning these days, and your favorite article or book you’ve read recently.

On embodied knowing

Watching your new neighbor across the street cut down a leafy, old tree is enough to radicalize a man. Which is what happened to me one Saturday morning last month, as I watched a beautiful tree—a true ancestor of the block—be methodically chopped from its crown to its roots. The amputations of each branch fell in thuds to the street below, the sound of the chainsaw slicing into the weekend silence. The tree’s leafy canopy was soon replaced with sky, and the house behind stood naked and maybe even a little embarrassed by the arboreal crimes committed on her lawn.

Reading about deforestation in the news would have had no such effect on me. Nor would hearing about the loss of a beloved tree through the grapevine. It was the watching of it that made such an impression. This is the shift from intellectual knowing at a distance to embodied knowing up close, and it can go in both directions. It tempers strong beliefs, like when religious fundamentalist parents come around to accept their LGBT children. And it inspires lifelong devotions—Frances Perkins witnessed women jumping to their deaths in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, and then dedicated her life to advocating for workers' rights.

Our embodied knowing—this power of proximity and witness—is one of our most powerful tools for action and change. Those who understand this power know to seek it out: they put themselves in proximity to beauty and suffering. They also reject the popular idea that personal growth somehow happens by downloading more and more information into our brains. The next frontier in our becoming does not require more intellectual knowledge. It requires encounter.

On sticking to your guns

Those looking for examples of the overreach of woke culture might read this article about the self-destruction of the Sierra Club with a measure of schadenfreude. The environmental organization, founded in 1892, is currently in freefall after embracing a social justice agenda and putting up with years of internal dissent and mismanagement. Since 2019, it has lost 60% of its four million members and supporters.

The Sierra Club is not alone. There are many such stories of organizations losing sight of their north star and falling victim to the scope creep of intersectionality. “Palestine is an environmental issue from our standpoint,” Erica Dodt, the president of the Progressive Workers’ Union, which includes Sierra Club employees, said. “People are a huge part of our environment.”

But it is a mistake to place the blame solely on a creeping social justice agenda or some out-to-lunch union. Such a diagnosis ignores the importance of strong, disciplined leadership that acts as a ballast during turbulent times. A central part of any leader’s job is to ward off any distractions, attacks, or opportunities that could lure an organization to stray from its core work and lose sight of its raison d’être.

This requires power. Leaders need to build and preserve and wield their power. For many, this is an uncomfortable thought; the idea of power these days is a Rorschach test for one’s worldview. Amidst glaring examples of the consolidation and abuse of power in our politics, it’s easy to conclude that power is corrupting. And yet every leader must have a perspective on power—how they’ll harness it, how they’ll share it, how they’ll ensure they don’t lose it, and how they’ll use it to unite people to pursue a collective north star. Power alone won't guarantee effective leadership, but its absence is the first sign of ineffective leadership.

Should we work together?

These days, I’m building a small business obsessed with the craft of writing and producing exceptional newsletters. It started with one newsletter in 2022 and has grown to 12 clients, a full-time General Manager who runs the business, a vetted group of talented writers and journalists, and an experienced magazine editor.

We’re in the business of telling ambitious, substantive stories in the inbox. For a timber company, we conducted in-depth research into the history of teak wood and its ethically complex supply chain. For an organization building the future of responsible tech, we reported on the recent trend of AI companions fueling delusions.

We write the newsletter for Obvious Ventures, a VC fund that is exploring the frontier of generative science, and we run The Epicenter, an inbox-centric media publication focused on climate resilience and adaptation in the era of increasing natural disasters. We’re helping brands launch their own Substack platforms, and we ghostwrite for executives, too: helping them refine and publish their ideas to their audience.

Amidst so much mass-produced AI content, we’re finding the market is hungry for its opposite: the craftsmanship that comes from the slow, human artistry of researching, writing, and publishing stories that matter. If you’re looking to tell such stories and resonate with your audience in 2026, I’d love to hear from you.

What I’m reading

• A visual timeline in The Economist offers a brief history of liberalism’s origins—the people, ideas, and world events that shaped the philosophy that has influenced governments and political thought for centuries. The Economist.
• Will AI atrophy our critical thinking skills? I’ve heard it everywhere. This fabulous article in The Atlantic traces the history of technological adoption to make a different point: With AI, “Expertise shifts from producing the first draft to editing it, from speed to judgment.” The Atlantic.
• An article in Noema makes the case that the West has lost the art of building sacred spaces. Spiritual architecture is in decline, and with it, a loss of our understanding of what makes something divine and enchanting. Noema.
• How to remember everything you read. I loved this reminder on the importance of active, slow reading. The more we believe we can just download content into our brains, the faster we’ll forget everything we have just consumed. Polymath Investor.
• Why did America, starting in the mid-sixties, just stop building new cities? This article in Arena Magazine considers the ambitious project to build California’s next big city of culture, industry, and manufacturing. Arena Magazine. Pair with this gorgeous photographic essay of what manufacturing looks like in America today.

Something personal

Lisa and I welcomed Emilio Rafael (named after his great grandparents) into the world on September 5th, born in the same hospital where I was born, 38 years ago. His first gusty cry led to tears of my own at the hospital bedside. Our son!

The opening of our hearts had begun long before Emilio arrived on that Friday afternoon, but in his first two months, what I’ve noticed the most has been the continued opening—an opening to a new love, a new perspective on this interwoven world, a new tenderness in being a father to him and a son to my own parents.

And to experience the tenderness of Emilio’s life—the throb of his tiny heart, the arms-up morning stretches, the blinking eyes and breaking smile after a too-short nap—all of it is to be re-opened to the marvel of our co-aliveness, where this moment is shared by multiple generations and species, from grandparents and cousins to the robin perched outside Emilio’s window, a being also throbbing with life who happens to occupy this same sliver of time, just a few feet away.

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Signed,

Banks