The story you’ve been told about your aging brain is wrong. Strategic attention peaks in your late 50s. Innovative cognition in your early 60s. Integrative reasoning around 62. Meanwhile, AI keeps commoditizing the very capabilities younger workers were supposed to dominate — speed, information processing, rapid adaptation. The math has shifted. Human judgment, the thing…

AI transformation isn’t a strategy problem. It’s a leadership problem. And until CEOs and boards stop asking for an AI strategy and start asking for a change management strategy, most organizations are going to keep spinning their wheels. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Bo Breuklander, founder of…

You don’t roll out AI. It’s not an ERP system. And yet most organizations are still treating it like a procurement decision, reaching for governance frameworks and compliance checklists as if the real challenge is containment rather than comprehension. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Alec Crawford, founder…

People keep writing obituaries for organic content. And every time, communicators chase the paid shortcuts instead of doing the work. Now, as AI-generated content floods every platform, those who abandoned organic are realizing they have nothing to fall back on. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle sits down with Dorien Morin-van…

Everyone thinks they can name things. Toss some words around in a brainstorm, pick the one that sounds right, hope it passes trademark. But naming done right is storytelling compressed to its most essential form, and getting it wrong costs more than most organizations want to admit. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host…

What if sustainable growth isn’t about becoming the biggest player in the market? Agencies triple in size and lose their soul. They chase national footprints and abandon the community relationships that made them valuable. Meanwhile, regional firms with deep roots are building something holding companies can’t replicate. In this episode, host Dan Nestle sits down…

Does PR have Stockholm syndrome? We’re held captive by every disruption that promises to kill us—internet, social media, now AI—and what do we do? Fall in love with each threat, scramble to prove relevance, then wait for the next existential crisis. In this episode, Dan Nestle sits down with Barrie Cohen, founder of Barrie Cohen…

Authority-building has entered a new era—visibility hinges on context and credibility, and your expertise must be discoverable not just to humans but to machines. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host Dan Nestle explores these seismic changes with Stephanie Grober, Marketing and PR Director at the Horowitz Agency and a true trailblazer in legal…

**NotebookLM HAS TAKEN OVER THE TRENDING COMMUNICATOR. AGAIN.** Generative AI is shaking up the world of communications—and the debate is on. In this special takeover episode of The Trending Communicator, Abel and Iris weigh the promise and pitfalls of AI adoption for comms professionals. Is AI truly a strategic superpower, or does it risk eroding…

Companies love to talk about AI transformation. They’ve created policies, distributed tools, checked boxes. But behind closed doors, overwhelmed employees are phoning it in with AI slop, leaders can’t tell the difference, and the workforce is too exhausted to learn anything new. That’s not transformation. That’s theater. In this episode of The Trending Communicator, host…