What’s With the Name?
Humanity

What’s With the Name?

I named it in 2020, talking with friends. Six years later, here's why it's a club.

Punit Dhillon
|

I came up with the name Mind Club in 2020, talking with friends while I was writing Catapult. It stayed off anything public for six years. Now it’s on three briefs, and the obvious question is: what’s with the name?

Short answer: it’s a club because the briefs are only half of it. The other half is the people reading them.

Where it came from

The idea back then was to focus on humanitarian causes we believed in. During the pandemic, that was a very important lens. Mind Club was the name I gave it.

The work carried on in the background while the name waited. Some things need time to marinate.

Over the past year, reading the people who study artificial intelligence and the presumed inevitability of AGI has made one problem hard to ignore: we’re severing language, facts and understanding from lived human experience. The public square is flooding with synthetic text that models consume, regurgitate and, more and more, act on without a human checking it. We’ve built magnificent engines for machine pattern recognition, and in doing so we risk outsourcing the act of thinking itself. The question I care about isn’t how fast machines can learn our patterns. It’s how we move from automated pattern recognition to learning from those patterns ourselves.

That’s what brought the name back. Putting it on the briefs now brings it full circle for me.

Why “Mind”

An AI system writes the briefs, and it reads more than any team I could hire. That’s the reason to use it. It’s also the risk, because a confident summary is easy to mistake for a correct one. The name is a reminder of where the thinking belongs: with you, not the software.

Why “Club”

A newsletter talks at you. A club expects you to talk back, so Mind Club gives you three ways to do it.

  • Ask a question. Send one about anything in a brief. One is picked each week and answered in the brief, with sources.
  • Correct it. Reply to any email when something’s wrong. Fixes are logged in public, with the date.
  • Check the record. The briefs make dated predictions with odds, and they’re graded in the open, misses first.

If the name made you think of Fight Club, that wasn’t the plan. It just happened. Different rules, though: here you’re supposed to talk about it.

The 2020 lens is still there, too. The Saturday brief, Global Citizen & Worldview Intelligence, gives the strongest case on each side of the week’s biggest stories, and it’s built to test your views, mine included. It’s the brief closest to where this started.

How the briefs are written and checked is in The Architecture of Signal. This piece is only about the name.

Read more deliberately. Scroll less. Talk back.

Sources

  • Punit Dhillon, “The Architecture of Signal,” punitdhillon.com, 10.01.2026.
  • Mind Club: Ask Mind Club, the corrections log, public calls and the Global Citizen & Worldview Intelligence description, punitdhillon.com/mindclub, as of 10.04.2026.

Mind Club is published by Torpedo Publishing LLC. Its briefs are generated by AI and are for information only; they are not investment, legal, tax or medical advice. The briefs, and the way to join, are at punitdhillon.com/mindclub.

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Humanity

What’s With the Name?

I named it in 2020, talking with friends. Six years later, here's why it's a club.

Punit Dhillon
|

I came up with the name Mind Club in 2020, talking with friends while I was writing Catapult. It stayed off anything public for six years. Now it’s on three briefs, and the obvious question is: what’s with the name?

Short answer: it’s a club because the briefs are only half of it. The other half is the people reading them.

Where it came from

The idea back then was to focus on humanitarian causes we believed in. During the pandemic, that was a very important lens. Mind Club was the name I gave it.

The work carried on in the background while the name waited. Some things need time to marinate.

Over the past year, reading the people who study artificial intelligence and the presumed inevitability of AGI has made one problem hard to ignore: we’re severing language, facts and understanding from lived human experience. The public square is flooding with synthetic text that models consume, regurgitate and, more and more, act on without a human checking it. We’ve built magnificent engines for machine pattern recognition, and in doing so we risk outsourcing the act of thinking itself. The question I care about isn’t how fast machines can learn our patterns. It’s how we move from automated pattern recognition to learning from those patterns ourselves.

That’s what brought the name back. Putting it on the briefs now brings it full circle for me.

Why “Mind”

An AI system writes the briefs, and it reads more than any team I could hire. That’s the reason to use it. It’s also the risk, because a confident summary is easy to mistake for a correct one. The name is a reminder of where the thinking belongs: with you, not the software.

Why “Club”

A newsletter talks at you. A club expects you to talk back, so Mind Club gives you three ways to do it.

  • Ask a question. Send one about anything in a brief. One is picked each week and answered in the brief, with sources.
  • Correct it. Reply to any email when something’s wrong. Fixes are logged in public, with the date.
  • Check the record. The briefs make dated predictions with odds, and they’re graded in the open, misses first.

If the name made you think of Fight Club, that wasn’t the plan. It just happened. Different rules, though: here you’re supposed to talk about it.

The 2020 lens is still there, too. The Saturday brief, Global Citizen & Worldview Intelligence, gives the strongest case on each side of the week’s biggest stories, and it’s built to test your views, mine included. It’s the brief closest to where this started.

How the briefs are written and checked is in The Architecture of Signal. This piece is only about the name.

Read more deliberately. Scroll less. Talk back.

Sources

  • Punit Dhillon, “The Architecture of Signal,” punitdhillon.com, 10.01.2026.
  • Mind Club: Ask Mind Club, the corrections log, public calls and the Global Citizen & Worldview Intelligence description, punitdhillon.com/mindclub, as of 10.04.2026.

Mind Club is published by Torpedo Publishing LLC. Its briefs are generated by AI and are for information only; they are not investment, legal, tax or medical advice. The briefs, and the way to join, are at punitdhillon.com/mindclub.