I could be doing something soothing right now.

Doom-scrolling real estate listings like I’m one inspirational walk away from a new zip code. Watching prestige television where everyone murmurs, stares out windows, and calls it character development. Aggressively clearing my inbox, knowing full well it will repopulate like bacteria in a petri dish by Tuesday.

Normal avoidance. Low effort. No consequences.

Instead, I’m here. Writing. On purpose.

Clear-headed. Over-caffeinated. Fully aware that this is how I now spend Sundays: choosing irritation over entertainment.

This is the trade I’ve made. Leisure for scrutiny. Comfort for clarity. Noise for attention. I don’t watch the circus from the cheap seats anymore. I walk up to the ring, point at the wiring, and explain where the money actually goes.

This is ADOTAT Unfiltered.

A weekly unsanitized audit of media, marketing, and the narratives powerful people repeat until they sound like gravity. No handlers. No brand babysitters. No copy shaved down until it fits a corporate mouthfeel. Just pattern recognition from someone who’s read too many decks and knows exactly where the slide transitions are hiding the truth.

I could be numbing out. Everyone else is. Instead, I’m here pulling at threads the industry would prefer remain decorative.

You’re still reading. Which means you’re either curious, irritated, or quietly relieved someone else is saying it first.

Either way, you’re in the room now.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.

Gadflies, Whistleblowers, and Other Inconveniences

Terry Kawaja called me a gadfly.

An Adtech God said publicly I was an enormous pain in the ass.

Allison Schiff of Adexchanger reportedly said I was making her job difficult.

I’m going to say this plainly.

Because notice what no one said. No one said the reporting was wrong. No one said the facts didn’t hold up. No one accused ADOTAT of fabricating anything. The criticism was about discomfort, friction, and inconvenience.

That’s not a failure mode. That’s a signal.

This isn’t a personality issue. It’s a perception problem. And perception is exactly what ADOTAT is built to sharpen.

Not to flood you with headlines.

Not to regurgitate press releases with better verbs.

Not to make you feel plugged in.

It exists to help you see what most industries quietly train people not to notice. The framing. The incentives. The way narratives appear fully formed and somehow identical across “independent” outlets within days of each other.

Most people in adtech aren’t liars. They’re conditioned. Conditioned to read fast, accept the framing, and move on. Conditioned to treat repetition as validation and consensus as truth. Over time, that conditioning dulls perception. Things stop looking strange even when they absolutely should.

Here’s the first lesson I try to teach, whether people like it or not.

Truth spreads unevenly. It stumbles. It leaks. It shows up early in odd places and late in respectable ones. Narratives, on the other hand, launch in formation. Press releases, “studies,” panels, synchronized LinkedIn optimism. That’s not organic agreement. That’s choreography.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Section after section walks readers through:

This isn’t commentary for sport. It’s instruction. And let’s be honest about something people dance around. This is the same analytical work I do for clients who pay me $1,200 an hour. Really. Same lens. Same questions. Same refusal to accept surface explanations. The difference is that here, I’m teaching people how to think instead of handing them a memo.

That’s the part that makes some people nervous.

Because once people learn how to see, they stop being easy to manage.

None of this is new wisdom.

Chazal, meaning our sages, warned that bribery blinds the wise. Not the foolish. The wise. That detail matters. Intelligence does not protect you from distorted perception. Incentives do the blinding.

Once something benefits you, your vision changes even if your ethics don’t.

That idea is deeply uncomfortable. Which is usually how you know it’s true.

Descartes argued that doubt is not destruction but discipline. Doubt is how you clean the lens. Without it, certainty hardens into laziness and familiarity masquerades as truth.

Jean-Paul Sartre pushed the knife in further. He argued that people often choose comforting narratives because truth demands responsibility. Bad faith isn’t ignorance. It’s the decision to stop looking so you don’t have to act on what you see. I’m an Orthodox Jew and I disagree with Sartre about plenty, but on this point he was brutally correct.

Dostoevsky captured the same tension in The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan sees the system clearly and refuses to accept it. Alyosha sees the same facts and chooses responsibility instead of abstraction.

Same reality.

Different training of the eye.

That’s the dividing line.

Once your eyes are trained, jargon stops working. Access stops impressing you. Consensus starts looking suspicious. Silence gets loud.

“Everyone knows” becomes a red flag, not a comfort.

You become inconvenient.

You become difficult.

You become, apparently, a gadfly.

Fine. I’ll take it.

Gadflies don’t exist to be liked.

They exist to keep the animal awake while it’s still walking.