Knowledge Creators 🤝 Cool Stuff

The latest content + happenings from the creators we rep here at Smooth

• Ellie in Space nails it | Ellie’s recent video titled “Boeing's Starliner Disaster Was Even Worse Than We Thought…” is a prime example of editorial storytelling. With nearly 400K views and over 2K comments, it clearly hit home. She turns a high-stakes moment in spaceflight into a gripping, human story—balancing technical depth with real emotion. No gimmicks, just sharp reporting. A masterclass in creator journalism.

• The Wall Street Skinny ladies give us a lesson | Not gonna lie—the tariff news over the last two weeks has felt like a late-season episode of The O.C. Too many storylines for my pea brain to keep track of. Thankfully, Jen and Kristen from The Wall Street Skinny are doing the hard work for me and everyone else with their fantastic breakdowns of tariff news and what it really means for markets, from a 101 level introduction to a deep dive on the bond market’s role to an interview with investor Steve Eisman (the same Steve Eisman played by Steve Carell in The Big Short). Thank you for your service, Jen and Kristen. 🫡

Brand Campaigns Hot Off the Press 🗞️

Some of the fun partnerships our team’s been working on with creators + brands

Megan Tan x DJI | Have you ever seen an ad so beautifully shot? Megan is a masterful filmmaker and this partnership showcased how she uses DJI tech to make even the most normal day in the life look like a movie.

Uptin x Microsoft | Sometimes the best ads are all about location, location, location. Uptin nailed the placement of this Microsoft partnership—smack in the middle of the meatiest element of the story—in his recent video about Qatar’s economic future (watch to become the smartest person at your next group dinner).

Matt Wolfe x Adobe | Matt has found a content format that works so well for him—his AI news breakdowns are valuable, repeatable, and habit-forming. And they’re really well curated, which makes his recent partnership with Adobe flow so well. Adobe had AI news, Matt had a video perfect for covering it.

SonderingEmily x Dell | Sometimes the very best partnerships are simple: A creator who’s built trust with their viewers makes a niche recommendation specific to their audience’s needs and interests. That’s how Emily approached these tie-ins with Dell, and the simplicity spoke volumes.

Thoughts for the Road 🛣️

A little something we’ve been chatting about here at Smooth HQ

This newsletter wasn’t written by AI, but some in your inbox 100% are.

How does that make you feel? Does it unsettle you? Give you further faith in the onward march of human progress? Totally mean nothing to you? Sound so cool? Strike you as a new feeling you can’t quite classify yet?

Here at Smooth, we have a lot of conversations that go something like that. We talk about AI often, because we use AI often. So when Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent out this memo to his team cluing them in that reflexive AI usage should be the company’s baseline…it immediately got shared in Smooth’s Slack.

Lütke’s POV: Using AI to augment human work—as a thought partner, research helper, critic, tutor, programmer, etc.—is non-negotiable across all Shopify teams. The tech can 100X the amount of work Shopify teams can accomplish.

We’ve had some really interesting conversations about how to best use AI in our own work, and seeing top brass at a company like Shopify engage in similar thought provocation cements our thinking: There’s no replacement for human creativity, but AI can unlock efficiency across our business that we would have only dreamed of when we started Smooth a few years ago. It is an indispensable tool to, pardon my French, get sh*t done. And that’s what we’re in the business of doing.

So we’re actively embracing AI across the board. A few standout examples from the Smooth team:

• Our editorial team is (perhaps unsurprisingly) precious about human writing. But we are totally onboard with AI to help us avoid the dreaded blank page. We’ve used tools like Perplexity and Feedly to help us curate the most impactful stories across genres.

• For campaign reporting, we use AI to compile data and, when appropriate, glean some insights.

• We’re always on the lookout for new creators across the many niches of today’s internet—asking AI to find creators who meet certain criteria has unearthed some amazing talent.

Bottom line: AI is forcing new tech adoption at a pace we’ve really never seen before. We’re putting in the work to keep up by infusing conversations about AI—from helpful tools to ethical dilemmas—into everything we do.

How are you or your team using AI to your advantage? Share your own POV by hitting respond and telling us what’s up.