I just get so sick of hearing that Connor has a very white team without women… his team is predominantly queer and quite mixed.
This is from the SNL-night 🥰
I’m pretty sure the first guy is Donovan Tatum (CAA Commercial Agent) but he’s not that often photographed. Anyway: Donovan is out as gay.
Update: it’s Ryan Goodell who’s Connor’s legal representative at Yorn Levine.
Then we have Brad Pence (Atlas) who is one of Connor’s managers (out as gay)
Celiestine Au from CAA who is both female and POC. (update: also queer)
Brian Boone (twice 🤪) from CAA who is both POC and gay.
Nick Todisco (Atlas) another of his managers. Also out as gay.
Larissa Saenz (Shelter PR) who is his publicist.
Sam Bringardner (CAA Talent Agent)
&
Albert Lee (CAA Talent Agent and Literary Agent). POC.
Missing from the pic is Zach Grove from CAA.
Update: And Donovan Tatum (CAA Commercial Agent): Donovan is out as gay.
These are the people that are predominantly working for Connor’s career.
Then we of course have James (out gay) as his stylist but he is a contractor just like Anastasia is for Hudson.
And he has a few different groomers but they are also contractors
Those I’ve listed as gay are those that are open with it on social media and in magazines. A few more might be but that would be speculation. I just think it’s quite telling.
Here is a walkthrough of Hudson’s team in a similar manner
Looking at the world from a manager's perspective, you can productively model the pool of workers as being divided into a few basic groups, which are defined and characterized by their driving motivations.
Insert all the usual disclaimers for this sort of thing - this is the roughest type of rough typology. I pulled these categories out of my raw intuition, and possibly a few more would crop up with some additional thought. In reality, the boundaries of these categories are incredibly fuzzy, and almost every individual is actually going to be motivated by a complicated mix of all the relevant motivations; we're talking REALLY SIMPLE HEURISTICS here. Etc.
There have been other well-known worker typologies that share a lot in common with my thoughts here; this is mostly not novel, it's mostly meant to refine a few ideas for particular purposes.
Hustlers are motivated by concrete personal advantage. Most commonly, and most straightforwardly, they want money - as much of it as they can get. They may also be interested in fame, idiosyncratic perks, etc. They do whatever they have to do in order to get what they want.
No surprise: you see huge preponderances of these guys in fields that provide outsize concrete rewards, e.g. finance, the upper echelons of management, etc. But not every natural-born Hustler is in a position to enter a glitzy high-paying field, and in fact you find Hustlers all throughout society and all throughout the economy, finding or making hustles wherever they go.
Having Hustlers working for you is mostly pretty great. They get shit done. They can be induced to work incredibly hard - probably harder than anyone else, under most circumstances - and they'll shank their own mothers if the price is right. If you need anything really important from them, anything at all, it's just a matter of bribing them enough.
...they will also, of course, cheerfully shank you if the price is right. Hustlers aren't the only wellsprings of institutional politics and infighting, but they're the most dangerous ones; they're always potential rivals to everyone around them. Also, you need to keep the tangible rewards flowing in a steady stream in order to get anything out of them, or else they'll put most of their effort into jumping ship (one way or another).
Craftsmen are motivated by the desire to do good work in their chosen fields, for its own sake and for the sake of their treasured self-image as people who do good work.
As you'd expect, for the most part, they're excellent workers and should be prized. But they're not perfect workers. Common weaknesses and downsides include:
They tend to have their own ideas about How Things Should Get Done; they're often resistant to externally-imposed product/service requirements or process changes (and bad at implementing those things) (no matter how important or well-conceived they are), and they're very resistant to "just get it out the door, right now done is better than good."
Being driven chiefly by internal motivation is great, but sometimes it's useful to be able to push things along with external motivators, and Craftsmen are pretty resistant to those. They don't like working more or harder than they're naturally inclined to work, they mostly sneer at carrots, and sticks make them sad and unproductive.
It's important to note that, while noteworthy skill within a field correlates with having a Craftsman temperament and motivation suite - for obvious reasons - those things are not identical at all. Plenty of Craftsmen are bad at their jobs, or just average, and plenty of the best workers are most motivated by things other than the Excellence of the Work Itself.
Fanatics are a relatively rare and specialized group, whom you find mostly within a few specific sorts of culturally-valorized fields. They're motivated by a desire to be part of something Important and Good in a Broader Sense: to Save the World, or some smaller-bore version of that.
They make amazing front-line soldiers, in the sorts of institutions that have "front-line soldiers." They work super hard, and you don't even need to bribe them, you just need to keep them hopped up on inspiration.
The big problem with them is that they're mostly motivated by a feeling - the feeling of Being Righteous - and it's not easy to control where they get that feeling, in any kind of precise way. They're just as resistant to external motivators as Craftsmen are, or even more so, but they're also not being guided by an ideal of effective quality. (No, not even if their chosen cause is theoretically all about an ideal of effective quality, hem hem.) They will happily waste vast amounts of time and money doing useless things, or even counterproductive things, so long as they're engaged in tasks that hit the right psychological buttons for them. There's also a constant risk that a Fanatic will decide that his employer is unrighteous, or that one of his coworkers is unrighteous, and start an internal conflict; the risk scales in a more-than-linear fashion with the number of Fanatics you keep around.
The biggest group, unsurprisingly, is the Normies. In most fields, it is much the biggest group. Normies are motivated by the desire to be members in good standing of their communities, to have positive relationships with the people around them, and to live up to basic norms and expectations.
Managerial skills, in the traditional sense, are incredibly important with Normies. If you want them to do good work for you - and you should want that, as a manager, you've almost certainly got a whole bunch of them - not only do you have to keep them pointed in the right direction, you have to make sure that they're supporting each other. With Hustlers, you just have to throw money at them (and avoid their power plays); with Craftsmen, you just have to let them do their thing, and occasionally badger them into giving you what you need; with Fanatics, you just have to be inspirational; but with Normies, you have to lead, and construct a productive community. You have to set reasonable, achievable norms and expectations that will get you what you need.
This wouldn't be complete if I didn't talk about the Defectors. The Defectors are motivated by not working. They don't want to be there, they resent having to do their jobs, and their primary goal is to shirk as much as possible. They will, by default, put much more effort into shirking than into their assigned tasks.
Obviously, managers don't want to have to deal with them, for good reason. But they're out there, in large numbers - not always in the places and fields where you'd expect to find them - and learning to manage them is sometimes more viable than trying to get rid of them. ("Moving Heaven and Earth to find them jobs that will change their attitude" is often a good plan, although of course it's not always possible and not always worth it.)
Crucially, Defectors are not Normies. If you start with the assumption that the average baseline worker is lazy and sour, you will make some incredibly stupid decisions. There are some fields where, for structural reasons, you can expect that a very large number of your workers will be Defectors; this is a huge and complicated challenge, well beyond the scope of this post, and good luck to you if you have to handle it, but it's not the default.
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Once you have those categories in your head, and can play with them, a number of obvious-seeming ideas present themselves. Just a couple, for now:
Most high-level executives are Hustlers, or have strong Hustler tendencies, for obvious reasons. Most of the people around them are Hustlers, or have strong Hustler tendencies. This means that they tend to overweight the Hustler outlook, by a lot, when they try to model what their workers are like. More specifically, I'd wager that a lot of them intuitively divide the world into "good workers" ( = Hustlers) and "bad workers" ( = Defectors). This will lead to a heavy overreliance on tangible rewards, a systematic shortchanging of community-building, etc. Which is in fact just what we see.
In particular - crucially - Hustlers and Defectors are the only worker types who ever become more productive under heavy stress. Hustlers actually benefit from it, because it raises the stakes of the game that they're already playing. (If you succeed, you'll be king of the world! If you fail, you'll be shark food! Go go go!) Defectors suffer terribly from stress, of course, but they can sometimes be spooked into doing their jobs as opposed to doing nothing, and sometimes that's the best/easiest way to get something out of them. But stress is terrible for everyone else. Craftsmen lose their focus. Fanatics lose their hope. It's worst of all for Normies, because they take all their cues from the vibes around them; they're productive when they learn to associate work with comfort and happiness, and when you fill their working world with frantic desperation, you just put them in a permanent cringe state.
stop trying to pit your Normies against each other in competitions for status and rewards dear God what are you stupid
To some extent, you can control your institution by controlling what types of workers you have. But only to some extent. There are only so many Hustlers and Craftsmen to go around, and if you want them, you will have to (a) be able to identify them reliably on little information [HINT: you are probably very bad at this], and (b) provide them with what they want [tangible rewards / comfortable security and interesting work]. "We are going to employ only the good special people" is feasible if you're an outfit of four workers; at a dozen, it's already become a stretch; at a few hundred, uh, pfffffffft. If you want to operate at scale, you need to be able to make Normies do good work, there is no substitute for it.
For the idiot Anon who thought we were 'just bitching' here, a sober and very classy reminder this entire conversation about a certain spirits brand did not start out of the blue:
[Source: Ashley Hearn's IG account - posted January 5, 2026]
It's not rocket science to conclude the separation from SS was not exactly a walk in the park. Firing the only professional who honestly tried - with concrete results: that cocktail book was not planned and did not write by itself, I presume - is not just managerial blindness: it's plain business idiocy.
I wish Mrs. Hearn a smashing 2026. She deserves it and I liked her determination a lot. It's not easy to mean business, when there seemingly are no adults in that room.
FAFO, indeed. And rather sooner than later.
PS: a very interesting like for this quite telling post:
