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The signature of an American president is one of the planet’s most powerful symbols. It can set your tax bill, your immigration status and who does or does not get aid from the world’s largest economy. Now, though, Donald Trumps distinctive signature is being scrutinized for a decidedly unpresidential reason. Two documents in Jeffrey Epstein ‘s 50th-birthday album purportedly include Trump’s signature one on a risque line drawing of a female body and one on a picture of Epstein holding up a novelty check bearing Trumps name. A House committee released the 2003 book on Monday, with some members insisting the multi-peaked black signatures are authentically Trump’s, one of the best-known autographs in the world. The White House says the president did not sign the letter or the check to Epstein, who was later exposed as a sex offender and died by suicide in prison in 2019. Its not my signature, Trump told reporters outside a restaurant in Washington on Tuesday night. And its not the way I speak. Also Tuesday, the president declared the Epstein matter a dead issue in a phone call with NBC News. The birthday book signatures matter in part because they are perceived as a measure of how close Trump was to Epstein before the president says he ended the friendship two decades ago. And they are part of a bipartisan push in Congress for the release of the so-called Epstein files after years of speculation and conspiracy theories stoked by Trump and many of his allies. The Justice Department in August began turning over records from the Epstein sex trafficking investigation to the House Oversight Committee. Signatures have a history of conferring authority. But now? By the standards of handwriting scholars, determining whether its truly Trump’s signature is difficult. By the standards of the U.S. political system, its impossible. Despite the obvious resemblance to Trumps other signatures, partisan loyalty is driving opinion. Tamara Plakins Thornton, professor emerita of history at the University at Buffalo and author of Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, said handwritten signatures have conferred authority and authenticity by consent since the printing press raised their popularity in the 19th century. We have a fondness for signatures as marks of the unique self, Thornton said. But of course its kind of baloney if you think about it. Its been a long time since (a signature) really could give that rock-solid proof. Authenticity is a very difficult thing to prove, said Tyler Feldman, owner of Inscriptagraphs, a memorabilia firm in Las Vegas. The multibillion-dollar memorabilia industry, he said, revolves around establishing an objects authenticity via science and analysis contracted to specialists. In the age of AI and deepfakes, there are so many fraud signatures out there, he added, whether he signed it or not, its too hard to say. Nonetheless, signatures have great value and a long history in American folklore. The signing pens themselves are status symbols of presidential access, shown off in lobbying and congressional offices around Washington as signs of clout. It is customary, for example, for presidents to sign legislation into law using multiple pens they then give out, often on camera, to stakeholders in turn. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did the same when she signed articles of impeachment against Trump in 2020 in what amounted to a power flex as the leader of a separate and equal branch of government. John Hancock, one of the nation’s founders, famously signed his name to the Declaration of Independence in a large and flamboyant style the better, legend has it, for the king of England to read without his spectacles. Now, one’s John Hancock is a nickname for one’s signature. If not proof, signatures point to stubborn political pain for Trump Even Trump can see from experience that he can’t just command the sizable swaths of his own base demanding a full accounting to let it go, especially after his allies stoked the call to release the Epstein files. He’s tried repeatedly to deflect attention to other matters and shame weaklings who persist in asking about Epstein. Trump has called the scandal a Democrat hoax that never ends and vowed to sue The Wall Street Journal, which first revealed the letter. Even the hoax characterization has changed in the face of questions of logic: Who would have forged his signature in 2003 and why? On Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt answered that it was all a Democratic and media narrative to drag on this bad story about him. She said the White House would support analyses of Trumps purported signature on the Epstein scrapbook. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who is leading a bipartisan push for a House vote to force the Justice Department to release its Epstein files, played down the letters relevance. I think the documents a distraction,” Massie said. I do think that it does bear on the credibility of the people who are trying to keep these documents from being released. Its sort of indicative of the things that might come out if we were to release all of the files. In other words: embarrassing, but not indictable. Trump understands the value of his utograph Trump was a celebrity before he was a politician, and his signature is an extension of his brand. He has long been fond of sending notes to people, always with his thick scrawl at the bottom. In December 2015, Trump was widely photographed signing the chest of a female supporter at a rally in Manassas, Virginia, rock star-style. Smiling, she then blew him a kiss, according to photos of the exchange. He understands the value of authenticity: As recently as June, Trump repeated his long-standing allegations that President Joe Biden’s White House relied on an autopen to sign presidential pardons, executive orders and other key documents, and said that cast doubt on their validity. Pressed by reporters, Trump acknowledged he had no such evidence, and Biden said any such suggestion was false. As president, Trump keeps Sharpie markers handy. When he went to the U.S. Open, on Sunday, he signed hats and tossed them to supporters in the crowd. Trump also enjoys the theatricality of signing documents, a way to demonstrate the power of the presidency. He frequently summons the press into the Oval Office while he completes executive orders. An aide lays the document on the desk in front of him, Trump scrawls his signature and then holds it up for the cameras. Seriously, is that a good signature? he asked during one such session on Aug. 25. Who can write like that? Nobody. Laurie Kellman, Associated Press Associated Press writers Chris Megerian and Matt Brown contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
Months ago, I warned about shadow AI: employees moving faster than their companies, using AI without permission or training, while managers pretended not to notice. The right response was never prohibition but education and better governance. That was only the first signal of something bigger: BYOA or BYOAI, bring your own algorithm or bring your own AI. Now the trend is visible everywhere: workers are embedding their own agents into daily workflows, while companies scramble to bolt on controls after the fact. The comparison with the old BYOD is misleadingthis is not about carrying a device, but about bringing in a cognitive layer that decides, infers, and learns alongside us. Now, recent evidence makes this gap even harder to ignore. The data backs it up: Microsofts Work Trend Index already noted in 2024 that three out of four employees were using AI, and that 78% of them were bringing it from home, without waiting for corporate tools. This isnt marginal: its the new normal in an overworked environment where AI becomes a cognitive shortcut. The 2025 report goes further, warning that todays workload pushes the limits of the human and that the real frontier organizations will be those that adopt humanagent collaboration as their default architecture. Governance, meanwhile, is still lagging behind.Even so, the soothing corporate narrative (well provide official access and train everyone soon) ignores an uncomfortable fact: BYOAI is not a fad, its an asymmetry of power. Half of all employees admit to using unapproved tools, and they wouldnt stop even if you banned them. The incentive is obvious: less friction, higher performance, and with it, better evaluations and opportunities. This shadow AI is the natural extension of shadow IT, but this time with qualitative consequences: an external model can leak data, yes, but it can also accumulate the organizations tacit knowledgeand walk out the door with the employee the day they leave. Sociology not technology The real shift is not technological, its sociological. Most users, the non-experts, will simply adopt whatever OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Anthropic, or others give them, using those models like cognitive appliances: plug and play, nothing more, and they will share all the data they generate with these companies, that will exploit them (a.k.a. monetize them) to oblivion. But a different type of professional is already emerging: the truly competent, AI-savvy users who build or assemble their own agents, feed them with their data, fine-tune them, run them on their own infrastructure, and treat them as part of their personal capital. This person no longer uses software: they work with their personal AI. Without it, their productivity, their method, and even their professional identity collapse. Telling them to abandon their agent to comply with a corporate list of approved tools is like telling a professional guitar player to play on a toy guitar. The result will always be worse. This reality forces companies to rethink incetives. If you want that caliber of talent, you cannot hope to blunt their edge with policy memos. Just as BYOD ended with corporate devices inside secure containers, BYOA will end with enclaves of trusted compute inside the corporate perimeter: spaces where a professionals personal agent can operate with model attestation, sealed weights, clearly defined data perimeters, transparent telemetry, and cryptographic limits. The goal is not to standardize agents, but to make their coexistence possiblesafe for the business, free for the professional. The prognosis My prognosis is clear: first of all, contracts will evolve too. Expect algorithmic clauses spelling out the use of personal agents: declaration of models and datasets, isolation requirements, audit rights over outputs that shape key decisions, and obligations of portability and deletion when employment ends. Alongside that, new perks will emerge: compute stipends, inference credits, subsidies for local hardware or edge nodes. Second, security and compliance will shift from the fantasy of eradicating shadow AI to the reality of managing it: explicit, inventoried, and auditable. Companies that get this sooner will capture the value. Those that dont will keep bleeding talent. Third, this will exacerbate the competition for talent, and management culture will also need to grow up. The manager who clings to tool uniformity will drive away exactly those employees who make AI a force multiplier. The metric that matters will not be obedience to corporate software lists, but performance that is verifiable and traceable. Do you have employees like this in your company? If so, protect them at all costs. If not, you should be worriedbecause the best talent doesnt even consider working with you. Leaders will have to learn to evaluate humanmachine outcomes, to decide when to delegate to the agent and when not to, and to design processes where hybrid teams are the default. Ignoring this is not cautionits a gift to your competitors. Denial is a waste of time This is why BYOA is not a discipline problem. Its the recognition that knowledge work is already mediated by agents. Denying it is a waste of time. Accepting it means more than licenses and bans: it requires redrawing trust, responsibility, and intellectual property in an economy where human capital literally arrives with its own algorithm under its arm. The organizations that understand this will stop asking whether they allow people to bring their AI, and start asking how to turn that fact into a strategic advantage. The rest will keep wondering why the best people dont want to, or simply cannot, work without theirs.
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E-Commerce
Forrest Gumps mama was right when she compared the human experience to a box of assorted chocolates. Its true: You never know what youre gonna get. And these days, the same could be said of my LinkedIn feed.The social networkonce a bland haven for professional connections and job listingshas morphed in the influencer age. Its the only place on Will Smiths internet where youll find entrepreneurial bros preaching hustle culture alongside weirdly inappropriate overshares, clearly fabricated business allegories, and, yes, some personal news related to a new job or promotion. Its no wonder multiple publications have crowned LinkedIn as social medias king of the cringe. (Theres at least one Instagram account dedicated to it, too.)And yet every day Im right there lurking. My M.O. is the same as on every other platform: Im more consumer than creator. You wont find me all up in the videos on TikTok (Suge Knight would approve) and I stopped tweeting around the time the Tesla guy took over. Yet for all of the eye-rolling that my LinkedIn feed provokes, Ive recently come to a humbling realization: the most relentless brand builders, humblebraggers, and engagement farmers seem to be the ones landing opportunities while Im busy scrolling in silence. In this personal season of unemployment, its made me consider rebelling against my natural low-key demeanor and consistently putting myself out thereespecially with the September surge upon us.For the uninitiated, the September surge is that burst of hiring activity between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, right before everything slows down for the holidays. Hiring managers want seats filled so teams can power through Q4 and hit the ground running post-New Years Day. For job seekers, its the golden window. Miss it, and odds are youll still be writing cover letters come January.Normally, I would just keep my head down and continue cold applying. Ive always believed my work and my rep speak for themselves. The irony, of course, is that I work in marketing. My entire career has been about making noise for other peoples brands. Meanwhile, my own? Silent. If hypocrisy could pay rent, Id be set.Thats not to say I havent done well for myself by overshooting goals and being generally dope at my job. But if giving my victories and expertise the silent treatment has taken me this far, I cant help but wonder if my failure to constantly take to the digital mountaintops and big myself up is keeping me out of sight, out of mind. And ultimately, out of a job.As much as I hate to admit it, I know whats at the root of this reluctance: that nagging fear of judgment. Would folks size up my wins? Think Im too proud, too arrogant, too braggy? Will people look down on me during a chapter of struggle? Judge the open-to-work banner on my photo? I know its B.S. as I type it out, but that doesnt make it any less real in my mind. And it certainly doesnt fit the attention economy, where volume often matters more than value.I must admit, taking up digital space has previously worked in my favor. When I announced that I was back on the job market after being laid off, I quickly got two separate offers to tackle short-term copywriting projects. One LinkedIn connection even hit me up about a gig off nothing more than a birthday notification.The September surge dovetails with the Great Lock In, another trend that kicks off toward the end of summer but instead focuses on personal development and accomplishing goals. This year, Im getting in on the Gen-Z popularized movement and stepping up my self-promo. Because the truth is, being your own publicist isnt optional anymore. Ive watched peers land jobs, speaking gigs, mentorships, and adjunct professor roles because they werent afraid to shout themselves out. Meanwhile, Im imagining the opportunities Ive let pass by because I didnt want to be that guy. No more. So this September, Im rewriting the script. Im gonna reflect and remind folks of my past and present wins, highlight interesting peers and developments related to my field, and simply ask for help landing my next role without overthinking. The goal isnt to go viral; its to stop being invisible. If youre LinkedIn shy, let this be your push to do the same. Just dont be cringe, yo.
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E-Commerce
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