The Great Content Reset

Something is shifting in how we communicate — and if you work in social impact, you can feel it.

AI can now generate more content in a day than most organizations produce in a year. Every platform is converging toward video. Algorithms reward volume, but audiences crave connection. And somewhere in the middle of all that, social impact leaders are trying to figure out how to show up authentically without burning out or blending in.

In this episode, Eric and Jonathan dig into what they're calling the great content reset — the collision of AI, shifting media formats, and a growing hunger for real human connection. They unpack where AI actually helps (and where it creates what Eric calls "AI slop"), why Derek Thompson argues that everything is becoming television, and the timeless communication truths that still hold no matter what the technology of the moment looks like.

If you're an executive director or communications leader trying to figure out your content strategy in 2026, this one's for you.

Episode Highlights

[00:00] The Great Content Reset

[01:03] The Google Ads Nightmare

[03:05] AI as Content Accelerant

[05:20] Quantity vs. Personality

[08:18] How We Use AI on This Show

[10:33] When AI Helps vs. Hurts

[14:16] Everything Is Television

[18:22] Should Every Org Create Content?

[20:06] The Return to In-Person

[23:13] Timeless Communication Truths

[26:41] The Value of Imperfection

Notable Quotes

Eric Ressler: "As the channels get noisier and noisier, you basically have to show up more and more — and that is really the only way to truly break through. But is that really going to be your strategy?" [00:00]

Jonathan Hicken: "I had this nightmare moment where it occurred to me — are people even planning what to do on a weekend by searching Google anymore? Are they just asking ChatGPT?" [01:03]

Eric Ressler: "If you are using AI to just pump out more and more content, and you're not at least heavily editing that content so that it feels like you, there's a weird kind of uncanny valley thing happening." [00:27]

Eric Ressler: "I think the idea of 'we do good work behind the scenes' — there is less and less viability in that model." [18:22]

Jonathan Hicken: "If every listener went out and created a podcast for their cause, what does that make the sector look like? Are we better for it?" [17:55]

Eric Ressler: "The more AI slop comes in and pollutes these channels, the more anything that feels different than that becomes important." [26:41]

Eric Ressler: "I often think I know something until I sit down and try to write a 1,500-word piece about it and realize I don't have it as figured out as I thought." [19:00]

Resources & Links

• Mike Nellis — The Endless Urgency of Digital Organizing (Designing Tomorrow Spotlight)
• Amanda Litman — Run for Something (Designing Tomorrow Spotlight)
• Derek Thompson — "Everything Is Television" (Derek Thompson's Substack)
• Why No One Cares About Your Content (And How to Fix It) (Designing Tomorrow, Season 1)

Full Transcript

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jonathan Hicken: Eric, over the last several months, I've been asking my team to put a lot more time and energy into Google Ads, and we're seeing some results, don't get me wrong. But over the winter break, I just had this nightmare moment where it occurred to me — are people even planning what to do on a weekend by searching Google anymore? Are they just asking ChatGPT to plan their weekend for them? If so, how do I get my results higher on ChatGPT? What does it look like to get into those results? My mind started spinning about how so many things are changing about content and algorithms and everything, and it made me feel like we are going through a great content reset.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, that certainly feels like where we're at right now.

Jonathan Hicken: So I want to spend today unpacking some of these major changes that you're seeing, particularly on the Cosmic side of things, the organizations you're working with, and how we as brands could be preparing for this great content reset.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, let's riff on it. I feel like we are in the middle of this very fluid media internet transition right now, and I don't know where it shakes out. AI is definitely a major lever in that, but it's not the only lever either. Where do you want to start?

Jonathan Hicken: Let's start with AI itself. Not all AI, but let's start there because we're all using it. We use it at Seymour Center. We use it in Designing Tomorrow. But for social impact leaders who are trying to think about how they're building a brand and putting themselves forward at a time where we've been hearing about how authenticity matters and individuals matter — what is the advice that you are giving to clients? How should I be preparing for this great content reset?

Eric Ressler: So to me, AI is kind of like an acceleration of an existing trend of lower and lower barriers to content production. Often these trends are driven by technological innovation. The common example is the printing press creating this democratization of information at a level where books no longer need to be hand scribed one letter at a time. Then you fast forward and you get to TV and radio and the internet and all these different modalities. I've even noticed this in production — making a brand video used to be a $250,000 investment. You needed a whole TV crew. And sometimes those videos still need to be made that way, but also everyone can just shoot themselves in a selfie iPhone video and post it on TikTok and get more views than those brand videos are getting right now.

So media is always changing, technology is always changing. Media and technology are two sides of the same coin. To me, AI is part of that. Now the ability to pump out large volumes of content essentially effortlessly is more possible than ever before. But the quality of that content and the resonance of that content is definitely not guaranteed.

I think what's different about AI is that it's not just a technology used by humans. It's becoming more and more a technology that acts on its own as we start to get into agentic AI and discussions of AI replacing the workforce and the potential bubble around all of that. My general takeaway is AI is a transformative technology. We just don't know what exactly it's going to transform and how it's going to transform culture yet.

Jonathan Hicken: I'm thinking about two interviews you did recently, one with Mike Nellis, one with Amanda Litman. The two messages that stick out to me — Mike said something like quantity is king, you've got to produce a lot of content to matter. But Amanda said people follow people, not brands. So what that tells me is one person has to produce a lot of content. Isn't there just this tug towards using AI because you need to be producing a lot?

Eric Ressler: So just for listeners, you're referencing Mike Nellis and Amanda Litman, two interviews we've had in our Spotlight series, which we'll link to in the show notes. Both definitely worth digging into. If we want to point to this volume play that Mike is pointing to, which I think is real to a degree — he comes a lot from the political space but also works with social impact orgs — as the channels get noisier and noisier, you basically have to show up more and more. And that is really the only way to truly break through. I don't think he means it's the only way, but it's the most sure way. Yeah, you could break through because you produce one viral video, but is that really going to be your strategy?

How many times do people come to us saying, "Hey, we need to make a viral video"? We know exactly — no, of course not. There's a certain amount of luck and perfect alignment with the zeitgeist for viral videos to come out. I've had posts on LinkedIn go LinkedIn viral, which is so nerdy to say that I'm almost ashamed it just came out of my mouth. But those posts don't move the needle as much as you think they do, and especially if there's no follow through and consistency after the fact.

So Mike's pointing to this consistency element, this quantity element, and Amanda's pointing to something related but different — that the era of brands influencing people as these faceless corporations that don't have strong human leaders at the forefront from a communication standpoint is basically over. People naturally want to follow people. People naturally connect with people. People naturally want to hear and get information from people over institutions. Good and bad things about that, but that's kind of where things are going.

Jonathan Hicken: I totally understand that, but in my seat as executive director, if I'm combining their advice — people need to follow a person, and I also need quantity — now it's all on me to produce a lot of content. And that is pulling me towards AI. As long as the AI sounds like me.

Eric Ressler: I see how you get there, and I don't even think that's necessarily the wrong assumption. Let's just open the kimono a little bit here. Do we use AI for the show? Yes, but we use it in very intentional ways. We don't use AI to write content for us. First of all, it's a podcast. Our podcast format, we have a few different flavors of content at this point, but we're just riffing on a conversation here. AI is not doing anything here.

Jonathan Hicken: In the room.

Eric Ressler: But before we prepped for this episode, we did use AI to figure out how we're going to frame this. And that helped us hone in on what we're going to focus on. There's a lot to wrestle with here. I do have concerns about some of the ethics of AI as an artist, as a creative person, especially as it relates to some of the pure forms of art like music and film where these companies have essentially just trained their models on human expression and created the ability for anyone to steal and repurpose that. That still makes me feel icky at some level. And also I'm a geek and a tech nerd, and I'm enthralled by the possibilities of the very real value that AI can have even today and even more so where it's going when used responsibly, when used in the right ways.

But what I'm noticing, and what I think everyone needs to be very aware of, is that if you are using AI to just pump out more and more content and you're not at least heavily editing that content so that it feels like you, there's a weird kind of uncanny valley thing happening for me. The more you use AI, the more it's easy to spot AI. I'm not talking about em dashes here. I'm talking about cadence of sentence structure and different little tells. I saw a post the other day of a printed book that had the ChatGPT "Would you like me to reformat this?" prompt still in it. It's just these cringe moments. Are we losing our humanity in the process, or is it becoming more intertwined with technology?

Jonathan Hicken: This is clearly very personal to you as a musician and a creative person. But how can an executive director or a marketing leader look at this great content reset and see this world of possibility in the form of AI and see the risk? How do we make decisions about how to make content or marketing or branding moves with AI right now?

Eric Ressler: I think it really depends where you're starting from. One way to use AI that I think is helpful and constructive and doesn't reduce the humanity of the work is as an editor or an executive producer or a riff partner. "Hey, I'm thinking about doing something like this. Ask me some questions, interview me, help me refine my thinking" — and then use that to draft a post or create a podcast outline or whatever the format is. So less as a creator and more as a sparring partner. That's how I use it mostly.

I think it can also be really good when you've created a draft of something to have it not edit it as an editor, but to review it for its strengths and weaknesses and ask it to put itself in the shoes of your target audience. What questions might they still have? To me, that's a good low-hanging-fruit way to use AI that isn't the same as just "Hey ChatGPT, make me five LinkedIn posts about social impact marketing in 2026."

You're coming at it more from a like, "I need to make more stuff. It needs to be about me and human. I don't have the capacity to do that on my own, so do I just go to AI?" I honestly think the answer is mostly no. I think AI shows up in the framing and idea generation or refining side of it, that sparring partner angle, and there's still a need for some human level of curation in that process.

To open the kimono again — we have human editors working on our work. We have Edith, who's awesome, shout out Edith, for editing. And she's doing creative work in this moment. When do I cut? When do I not cut, either out of the episode or between angles? AI can do that. We're on a system that does auto cutting, but it doesn't do as good of a job as Edith does still right now. Is that going to be true in two years or three years? This is all very fluid. But I think the idea of "I generate content, I feed it into the AI machine and I get it out to the masses" — I don't think that's got longevity unless the technology continues to improve in meaningful ways.

Jonathan Hicken: I want to take us over to another conversation about the great content reset, which has to do with an article that Derek Thompson wrote recently called "Everything Is Television."

Eric Ressler: Yeah, I think that was it.

Jonathan Hicken: Essentially his argument is that forms of media are converging into a single format and single distribution method. The perfect example is Netflix is now live streaming podcasts. If that is true, if everything is indeed becoming TV, how do social impact leaders need to think about their brand or their message or their strategy differently?

Eric Ressler: I should start by saying I don't fully buy Derek's argument. I believe there's truth to that. I think the headline is maybe slightly sensational in that it implies that all other forms of media are going extinct, which I just don't think is quite true. What I do think is true is that if you are running a social impact brand right now in 2026, you need something that is TV in your stack. You need some kind of raw, uncut, video-first content in your feeds.

For us at Cosmic, that's what the podcast is. I don't have other video content for Cosmic. I could do other video stuff. I could create motion graphics breakdowns on case studies or whatever. My hope and my goal, both from a marketing standpoint and in service to the sector and a way for me to think out loud through publishing, is I want to share my thinking on the sector and how this work should be done.

I've often thought about the question I try to answer in my work: how can and should design be applied to social impact for the greater good? That's what I spend every day thinking about. And the podcast has been my most meaningful channel to do that. You get Eric the most through the podcast, and that's true. Last year I also started rolling out newsletters that are a little bit different, more kind of podcast-esque, with voiceover recordings. And that's still a little bit more me than other stuff we put out, like guides or articles.

I think the reason we're all so attracted to this format is because it feels the most like getting to know someone in real life. It taps into our human psychology.

I think that gets taken to a further degree with short-form video platforms like TikTok, where there's this hacking of psychology. Full disclosure, I'm not an active TikTok user, so I might be out of touch on this. But TikTok and YouTube by extension have become this kind of amalgam of different types of media, hyper-optimized for attention. On TikTok, people know intuitively whether or not they're going to watch something after milliseconds. So it has this veneer of being very authentic, but also there's someone behind the curtain thinking very deeply about how to optimize for hacking human psychology. It's this weird amalgam of both things.

Jonathan Hicken: The point that Designing Tomorrow has felt for you like the most meaningful way to express your ideas — first of all, congratulations, you're doing a great job. But it makes me think, if every listener went out and created a Designing Tomorrow or created a podcast for their cause, what does that make the sector look like? Are we better for it?

Eric Ressler: It's a legit question. Creating is hard. It's vulnerable. Something I've struggled with as I've been more and more public in this work. What I would say is, does everyone need to create? No, not necessarily. But if you're going to be a social impact organization in 2026 and you're going to try to get your brand story out there and you need support and brand awareness, then you do need to create. Because the idea of "we do good work behind the scenes" — there is less and less viability in that model.

Publishing is incredible. Making stuff is great. I have a bias — I'm a creative person. The nature of that word means I like to make things from nothing or from raw ingredients, so it comes naturally to me. But you learn so much by putting yourself out there and creating. I've often said I think I know something until I sit down and try to write a 1,500-word piece about it and realize I don't have it as figured out as I thought. There's value even in creating even if you don't publish. But that feedback loop that happens, that conversation with your community — it's so valuable that it's worth doing.

Now, does the whole sector become both a broadcaster and a consumer? Yeah, I think that's basically what's happening.

Jonathan Hicken: Honestly, to answer my own question, yeah, I think it would be good for the sector if we all started producing stuff. Because then collectively we are bombarding the airwaves with content that is good for the collective wellbeing. So I do think that would be good for everybody, every listener, to create something similar to Designing Tomorrow.

Eric Ressler: For whatever reason, this reminds me of another thing that's been top of mind for me. So much has gone digital since the pandemic especially, and digital's definitely not going away. But there seems to be this very real, very visceral, and timely shift back to in-person right now — not just in a human way, but especially in a professional way. I think we are all yearning for that human connection and face-to-face conversation.

I think podcasts and this type of "everything is TV" conversation is the closest you can get to that digitally without actually doing something in person. A lot of times when you're thinking about this great content reset, I think part of that is things moving back more into in-person. Now, are events going to be the same as they were before? No. I think we need to get creative about how we do these convenings, these conferences, in a way that's not stuffy and rigid and where you don't actually get what you want out of it.

Jonathan Hicken: Isn't it interesting that so much of the workforce went remote during the pandemic, and some of us still really like that remote element of our jobs, yet we're also craving those in-person professional experiences — but not at the workplace. Isn't that interesting that we're hungry for that community, but not in the traditional format that we would normally get it? I'm not sure what that means. I'm just observing this contradiction.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, I think people are naturally craving human connection. They always are. And I think we've been taught through the psychology hacking of our devices that when I'm scared, when I'm bored, when I'm sad, I scroll my phone to get that. And I think everyone is realizing that's not it.

Not necessarily New Year's resolutions, but something I've been very cognizant of as I've been trying to reset some of my own behaviors — when I'm done with work, my phone goes away. And that hasn't been true for me for a while. I've been busy, I have excuses. But the shift in my consciousness and my experience spending time with my girls and my family by doing that — it's embarrassing how much in that moment I find myself instinctively reaching for my phone when I'm bored, when I'm frustrated, when something annoying happens. The phone becomes this almost adult pacifier.

I think this is relevant because so much of content generation and brand strategy is "how do we get our message out?" And I think we all need to be thinking about that really holistically, not just about whether we're doing Google Ads this year.

Jonathan Hicken: So look, the great content reset — we've got AI in front of us, we've got questions of in-person events, we've got everything becoming TV. But as I think about the history of how we communicate with each other as humans, from face-to-face to letters to radio to TV to the internet, something has to be fundamentally true about how we communicate. What are some of the fundamental truths of social impact communication that will never change no matter what the channel or technology?

Eric Ressler: We could do another episode on this one. Let's try and hit some of the heavy hitters. To me, there has to be some kind of crystallized vision of where you're going as an organization to be able to do this work well. If you don't have clarity around that, you don't know if a choice is a mistake or a distraction or aligned with your organization. The orgs I work with who are the most effective — there's crystal clarity on where they're going. This is who we're becoming, this is what we're working for, this is who we're fighting for. And everything can be filtered through that lens, including "this is the content we make and here's who it's for and here's why these channels make sense." You have to always have that truth or everything is just a guessing game — whack-a-mole and sporadic.

There are things about negative framing or curiosity-driven framing and the hook — we'll point back to some episodes that I did in season one where I went deep on all that stuff. I think that's a skill. You've got to just start and see what works, but there are actual skills in doing this work that are worth reading up on.

But more deeply, the goal should be — and this is a long-time goal for us on this show — the more real this can be, the better. The less this is about "let's create something polished, let's create something professional, let's create something based on some standard of what this should look like" — and the more real it is, I think the better it performs. That's been true in our experience. This show feels more and more like our dinner conversations today than it did in season two, by a long shot.

I mean, you're dropping F-bombs these days, which I'm here for. But those are some of the non-traditional things. I could give you tactics, but I really think that's where you should start.

Jonathan Hicken: Yeah, as an executive director, I'm thinking about a shifting landscape. And if I can root myself in something that I know is going to be reliable no matter where the industry or content goes during this great content reset, then I can feel confident knowing that I'm putting out something that's going to be effective for our mission.

Eric Ressler: To take it back to the top of the episode, I do think that the more AI slop comes in and pollutes these channels, the more anything that feels different than that becomes important. Whether that's a conversation on film between two human beings, or something kind of oddly related — I find myself listening to more and more live recordings of music versus studio recordings as AI starts to come into music, and appreciating the imperfection there. One of the reasons I've always liked going to see live music is because the show's an experience, it's different. One of the reasons I love jazz is because of the improvisation, the one-offness of it.

I think there's going to be a resurgence and a yearning towards the human imperfection of the human experience being more and more prized — the human factor in all of this work. This gets put under the authenticity lens. You even think about the trends around film photography and vinyl and owned media that's physical. This has been coming, and AI is just accelerating all of that.

Jonathan Hicken: Well, for all those executive directors and social impact leaders out there, this content reset is here. But stay with us through Designing Tomorrow this year. I think we're going to be helping unpack all of it along the way.

Eric Ressler: Yeah, this is fun. There's a lot more to unpack here that we'll do in future episodes. And listeners, if you're curious about showing up in 2026 on your content strategy, check the show notes — we'll be sure to put some tasty morsels in there for you.

Jonathan Hicken: Fantastic. Thank you, Eric.

Eric Ressler: Thanks, Jonathan. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to hit like and subscribe or leave us a comment. It really helps. And thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.