Groove Theory #14 - Jmail

Last Saturday, I was tired. I'd got back from a conference in Barcelona at 2am the day before, battling a cough and cold. Pottering around the house, mixing chores and scrolling, I saw something on Twitter that gave me pause. It was an incredible example of a key concept I'd taught in Barcelona. So, I whizzed up a few lines and shared it on LinkedIn.

A few hours later, I checked back. It already had 70,000 impressions. Wut.

The post was about two software developers who rebuilt the Epstein email dump as Jmail - a Gmail clone. Same layout, same search bar, same feeling of checking your inbox on a Monday morning. Except it's 2011, you're logged in as Jeffrey Epstein, and you're reading correspondence with Larry Summers.

The Tension

Stalin supposedly said "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."

In a world of mass numbers, everything gets blurred. Our brains can't process scale. We glaze over.

The Epstein files are the same. 23,000 pages of PDFs. Damning evidence, public interest, (hopefully) real consequences. But who's actually reading it? How do you get anyone to care about page 8,437?

You can't. Not in that format.

Most of us weren't going to plough through thousands of pages. But we might spend an hour in an interface we've used every day for a decade.

Step Into It

Your report sits unopened. Your data-heavy presentation gets a polite nod and zero follow-up. Your project - the one you poured months into - lands with an inaudible thud.

The problem isn't the quality of your work. It's that you're asking people to care about something overwhelming in a format designed to be ignored.

A 47-slide deck. A 23-page white paper. A comprehensive analysis document.

All of these scream "this will take effort." And effort is a scarce resource.

How do you make someone care about your 23,000 pages?

The Groove: Modality

Modality → Choose the vessel. Turn expertise into repeatable formats that land across platforms.

In Barcelona, I ran a full-day workshop for 30 experiential marketing and event execs. We took them to the year 2032, where they had to build a live experience concept for a breakthrough tech company.

One of the key elements we asked them to apply? Old Oak, New Wine.

The Old Oak is something familiar and trusted - Gmail's interface, a deck of playing cards, a coffee shop conversation. The Oak carries trust. We know how to navigate it without thinking.

The New Wine is new information, ideas, or approaches. The Wine needs discovery, but it can't demand we also learn a new container.

When you pour New Wine into Old Oak, the combination makes the unfamiliar feel instantly navigable.

Jmail nails this. Gmail isn't just familiar - it's muscle memory. We know how to search, thread conversations, scan subject lines. That cognitive ease lets us focus entirely on the content, not the interface.

Software developers Riley Walz and Luke Igel built the whole thing in five hours.

As the US Congress's OCR system was broken (Steve Bannon kept coming back as "Steve Banno"), they rebuilt all the PDFs into a database using Google’s Gemini AI.

But Jmail wasn't vibe coded using AI agents - it took real developer skill. Threaded conversations, grouping emails, making the search actually work - they did all that themselves.

The Gmail format did more than make things readable. It revealed patterns invisible in PDFs. You can watch Epstein get worse at typing as he switches from desktop to iPad in the early 2010s. They even repurposed Gmail's starring feature - users flag important emails, creating a community-ranked inbox.

But not every Old Oak works for every New Wine. The oak shapes how we receive the wine.

Marshall McLuhan had it right: "The medium is the message." Gmail works for private correspondence because emails feel like investigation. That same archive as a Wikipedia page loses all tension. The format isn't decoration - it's half the message.

Modality is one of the five elements of Groove Theory. Learn more >

The Release

Your ideas deserve better containers.

Not every brilliant insight needs to live in a slide deck. Not every methodology belongs in a PDF. Not every framework should be a framework.

The question isn't just "what do I want to say?" It's "what vessel makes people actually want to receive it?"

Format innovation isn't about novelty. It's about noticing which familiar structures your audience already trusts, then using those structures to deliver what they don't know they need.

The oak creates the invitation. The wine delivers the transformation.

Here's why I believe this matters so much: AI just changed the speed of format innovation. What used to require a development team and six months took Riley and Luke five hours. They're skilled developers, but the tools let them move from idea to launch in a single night.

The bottleneck isn't technical anymore. It's taste. Can you spot which familiar format would unlock your unfamiliar idea? That's the creative judgment AI can't replace.

Format innovation used to be reserved for teams with resources. Now it's available to anyone willing to think differently about containers.

What familiar container could unlock your unfamiliar idea? You may surprise yourself.

Thanks for reading,
Howard

Extended Mix - Old Oak, New Wine

• "Old Oak, New Wine" comes from Derek Thompson's writing on innovation and culture - the idea that breakthrough ideas often succeed by inhabiting familiar formats. Hit book 'Hit Makers' is well worth checking out.
• Raymond Loewy's MAYA principle (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) is the design version of this - push innovation to the edge of what people can accept, but no further. Loewy redesigned everything from the Coca-Cola bottle to Air Force One, always making the new feel inevitable rather than jarring.
• Dishoom (Groove Theory #9) did this brilliantly - they poured the Bombay cafe concept into restaurants, cookbooks, and vinyl records. Each format revealed different facets of the same world.