Someone asked me a question this week that I haven’t been able to shake.

“If AI can make anyone an expert…what happens to the dream?”

I didn’t really know how to answer and then he continued….

“The capitalism dream, the one we all grew up on…the deal we were told was the deal:

You work hard.

You get good at something.

You earn more money.

You buy a better life….”

That equation has been running for generations.

And for the most part it works, not because it was fair, but because it was sequential. You couldn’t skip steps and expertise took years.

Years created scarcity.

Scarcity created value. (or perceived value)

AI just put a blowtorch to the middle of that sequence.

The Old Equation

Here’s how the dream was supposed to work, let’s call it The Effort Escalator.

You started at the bottom fresh out of the college with the greatest football team in the world… The Ohio State University.

You didn’t know anything so you put in the reps. Nights, weekends, bad clients, worse bosses. (God I feel that last one)

Slowly, painfully, you built expertise →

That expertise made you more valuable →

More value meant more income →

More income meant a better life.

The escalator only moved in one direction: up. and a ride take 10-15 years.

That was the feature, not the bug. The time it took to develop expertise was the moat. It’s what kept your competition behind you and your income ahead of theirs.

This is why your parents told you to go to college or why your boss told you to get your MBA.

Why you sat through 47 webinars on “mastering the algorithm” last year.

Every rung on the ladder was built from one raw material:

Time converted into knowledge.

The Collapse

Here’s what happened.

AI didn’t remove the ladder, it simply installed an elevator next to it.

A 23-year-old with ChatGPT Claude can now produce a market analysis that would’ve taken a McKinsey associate three weeks.

A solo real estate agent can generate listing presentations, client communications, and neighborhood research at a speed that used to require a team of five.

A first-year employee can write code, draft contracts, and build financial models that previously required a decade of pattern recognition.

The knowledge moat, it’s ankle-deep now.

And if expertise is no longer scarce, then the old equation breaks:

Hard work → Expertise → Income → Life becomes Hard work → ??? → Income → Life.

That missing middle is what’s keeping people up at night. (or maybe just keeping me up at night because I obsess over what type of world my kids are walking into)

The Part Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s what the “AI is going to take your job” crowd gets wrong.

They think the equation is dying. It’s not. I believe it’s evolving.

The variable that changed isn’t effort.

It’s what effort gets converted into. (stick with me here)

In the old economy, effort converted into competence…aka…

How much do you know? How fast can you execute? How many years of experience do you have?

In the new economy, effort converts into conviction…aka

What do you believe? What will you stake your name on? What decision will you make when the AI gives you five options and all of them look right?

I call this The Conviction Economy.

Competence is now table stakes, because everyone has access to the same intelligence.

The same tools. The same answers.

What they don’t have access to is your judgment.

Your taste. Your willingness to pick a direction when the data says “any of these could work” and commit to it with your whole chest.

This is the new moat and it has nothing to do with AI.

Three Things That Actually Matter Now

If the Conviction Economy is real, and I believe it is. then three skills become disproportionately valuable:

1. Taste.

Not aesthetic taste (though that helps)…Decision taste.

The ability to look at ten AI-generated options and know which one is right. not because the data says so, but because you’ve developed an instinct that no model can replicate.

Taste is the residue of experience filtered through values.

AI has experience but it doesn’t have values.

2. Speed of Decision.

In a world where everyone can produce expert-level output, the bottleneck isn’t production, it’s decision-making.

The person who can evaluate, decide, and move while everyone else is still prompting…wins.

Not because they’re smarter, but because they’re less afraid of being wrong.

3. The Willingness to Be Known.

This is the big one.

When AI can do what you do, the only differentiator is who you are while you do it. Your name.

Your face…perspective…your weird, specific, only-you take on the world.

The people who win in the Conviction Economy are the ones who stop hiding behind their competence and start leading with their identity. In the Conviction Economy, those who operate under the “fame is the most efficient business model” of will win…disproportionately.

So What Happens to the Dream?

It doesn’t die IMO…it grows up.

The old dream was: work hard, get good, earn more, buy things.

The new dream is: work smart, know yourself, stand for something, build a life that actually looks like you.

The Effort Escalator only promised material returns.

The Conviction Economy promises something the algorithm can never touch:

Meaning.

The hustle isn’t dead but what you’re hustling for has to change. Because if you’re still grinding to become the smartest person in the room, I have bad news…

The room just got a lot smarter than you.

The question is whether you’re interesting enough to still be invited.

I was sitting across from my buddy at lunch today when he hit me with the kind of question that ruins a perfectly good sandwich.

“Do you think we’ll always need humans?”

I looked down at what I was holding.

A garlic knot, split open like a roll, layered with melted mozz, marinara and a breaded chicken cutlet.

This “dad bod diet enabling” masterpiece was called “The Knot Chicken Parm” sandwich.

It was beautiful.

And it was the answer to his question.

Here’s what I know for certain: no algorithm invented that sandwich.

No machine learning model analyzed the complete history of Italian-American cuisine and concluded that the optimal delivery vehicle for chicken parmigiana was a garlic knot.

That idea came from a human brain, probably at 2 a.m., probably after 2 gummies, probably from someone who looked at two things that didn’t belong together and thought, what if?

That’s the part we skip over when we talk about AI replacing people.

We jump straight to automation, efficiency, and cost savings.

We talk about what AI can do , we almost never talk about what it can’t.

It can’t walk into a kitchen with a weird idea.

My buddy leaned back and said something that stuck with me.

“New capitalism,” he called it…or what Claude said could also be referred to as “Creative capitalism.”

The idea that the next wave of value creation isn’t going to come from optimizing what already exists. It’s going to come from imagining what doesn’t exist yet… and then using AI to figure out if it’s viable.

Think about that garlic knot chicken parm for a second.

The idea is pure human creativity. It’s beautiful and irrational..a just a little bit calorically reckless

But now imagine you hand that idea to AI alongside your restaurant’s profit and loss statement.

Suddenly the conversation changes.

AI looks at your ingredient costs and says:

• Your garlic knot dough costs you 14 cents per unit. Your standard sub roll costs you 11 cents.

• But your average ticket on specialty sandwiches is $3.80 higher.

• The margin on this sandwich is better than 70% of your current menu.

Or it says: You’re already buying mozzarella and marinara in bulk for your pizza line. This sandwich uses existing inventory with zero new vendor relationships. Your food cost on this item is 22%.

Or, and this is the one that changes everything, it says: What if you did a garlic knot burger, with melted gruyère cheese, Peter Lugar smoked bacon, and guac? A garlic knot breakfast sandwich, with farm fresh organic eggs, an eggo, and covered in maple syrup? What if the knot becomes the platform? (I think this Knot could be a real idea for a restaurant in the city)

That’s knot AI replacing the human…that’s AI joining the human in the kitchen.

Side note: I’m getting hungry just writing this.

Here’s what I call The Garlic Knot Theory.

A framework, and it’s simple enough to fit on a napkin,which feels right, given how it started.

The human brings the “what if.”

AI brings the “here’s how.”

That’s it.

That’s the theory….very anti climatic.

The most valuable skill in the next economy isn’t prompting or automation.

It’s not knowing which model to use or how to build a workflow.

Those things matter, but they’re table stakes.

The skill that will separate people is the willingness to connect two dots that don’t obviously go together and then ask, what if?

What if we put chicken parm in a garlic knot?

What if we combined our two lowest-performing services into one premium offering? What if we used our returns data to design a product that doesn’t exist yet?

What if we took the thing we’re best at and delivered it in a way nobody’s tried?

Those are human questions, and they always will be.

But here’s what’s changed: before AI, asking “what if” was expensive.

You had to build the thing to find out if it worked.

That means you had to run the pilot, hire the team, burn the budget, etc.

Most people never asked “what if” not because they lacked creativity, but because the cost of exploring a bad idea was too high.

AI just made curiosity free.

You can model it.

Pressure-test it. Run the numbers six different ways before you spend a dollar.

The cost of a bad idea just dropped to zero….which means the value of a good one just went through the roof.

And the execution of that idea just became the most invaluable skill in the world.

I talk to business owners and executives every day who are trying to figure out where AI fits.

They want the playbook..or the magic AI stack.he

The “just tell me what tools to use to reengineer my workforce” answer.

That’s the comfortable question.

But the uncomfortable truth is this: the tools are going to keep changing.

The models will get better and the platforms will merge and split and rebrand. (we see this almost every other day)

If your entire AI strategy is built on a specific tool, you’re building on sand.

The thing that won’t change?

The person who sits across from someone at lunch, takes a bite of something ridiculous, and says, “Wait, what if we did this with everything?”

That’s the moat. That’s the thing AI can’t replicate and can’t replace.

Not the person who knows the most about AI.

The person who brings the most to AI.

Read that twice.

The Question You’re Not Asking

We will always need humans my buddy was right about that.

But we won’t need humans who do what machines can do faster.

We’ll need humans who do what machines can’t do at all.

Dream something unreasonable, connect things that don’t connect and then walk into the room with the weird idea and the confidence to say it out loud.

And then, this is the part most people miss, hand it to AI and say, make this real.

So here’s my question for you, and I mean this literally, not as some inspirational sign-off you scroll past.

What’s your garlic knot?

What’s the idea you’ve been sitting on, the combination nobody’s tried, the offer nobody’s made, the product that doesn’t exist yet, because it felt too weird or too risky to say out loud?

Say it out loud.

Then open a chat window and type: Here’s a crazy idea..tell me if the math works.

You might be surprised what comes back.

TLDR: There's a tool going viral right now that tells you the exact percentage chance AI takes your job, and millions of people are using it to rehearse their own obsolescence without realizing that's what they're doing. Checking your replaceability score feels like preparation, but it's actually just fear wearing a data costume. The people who will thrive in the next decade aren't the ones obsessing over their odds, they're the ones doubling down on the one thing no algorithm on earth can replicate.

I was sitting at my desk this morning with a cup of Commeeteer coffee that had gone cold twenty minutes ago, staring at a search bar that wasn’t Google and wasn’t ChatGPT.

It was a brand-new tool built by Action Network using research data from Anthropic , the company behind Claude, and it’s going viral right now for a very specific reason:

you type in your job title, and it spits out the “implied odds” that artificial intelligence will replace you within the next few years.

Seven hundred and fifty-six occupations in the database, ranked from most vulnerable to least, and yours is almost certainly one of them.

So I typed in “Consultant” watched the little loading animation spin, and for about four seconds I felt that familiar heavy drop in my chest the same one you get when your boss sends “can we chat?” at 4:47 on a Friday, or when you see a missed call from your kid’s school in the middle of a meeting. (the second one is far worst than the first)

What if the number is 80 percent?

What if it’s higher?

And then, before the results could load, I did something that genuinely surprised me.

I closed the tab.

I didn’t look.

And in that moment, I realized something important about what we are collectively doing to ourselves right now that nobody seems to be talking about.

Because right this second, as you’re reading this, millions of professionals are sitting in climate-controlled offices and home offices and coffee shops, typing their livelihoods into a search bar, and waiting for an algorithm to tell them whether or not they still matter.

Computer Programmers came back at 45% odds of being replaced, Risk Rank number 1 out of 756.

Customer Service Representatives at 42%.

Data Entry at 40%.

The tool is everywhere, LinkedIn feeds, group chats, Slack channels, your uncle probably texted it to you this morning, and we are treating it like some kind of crystal ball that can see our future.

But here’s what’s actually happening, and it’s far more dangerous than most people realize: we are rehearsing our own obsolescence.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how the human brain’s default setting isn’t optimism, it’s threat detection.

Two hundred thousand years of evolution hardwired us to scan every horizon for something that might kill us, and the ancestors who heard rustling in the bushes and assumed everything was fine didn’t tend to leave many descendants.

That wiring kept us alive on the savannah, or in Midtown…and it served us well for a very long time.

But now there are no lions and there are no bushes.

There’s just a search bar and a percentage.

And that same ancient wiring that once saved our lives is now convincing millions of smart, capable people to sit in their metaphorical cars and mentally rehearse the scenario where they lose, over and over and over again, before anything has actually happened.

I call this The Odds Trap, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

It works like this: we feel anxious about the future of work, so we seek out data to give ourselves a sense of control.

We look up the odds…we read the reports…we scroll through headlines about Jensen Huang standing on stage at Nvidia GTC yesterday predicting a trillion dollars in AI infrastructure spending, or Jack Dorsey laying off thousands at Block because, in his words, AI can do the work and he’d rather “be honest about where things are headed.”

And all of that scrolling and searching and calculating feels productive, it feels like we’re preparing ourselves for what’s coming.

But we’re not preparing.

We’re spiraling, and the data proves it.

This week, the Wall Street Journal published one of the largest studies ever conducted on how AI is actually affecting work habits, not in theory, not in a TED talk, but in practice across 164,000 real workers.

And what they found was the opposite of what every productivity guru has been promising for the last three years: AI isn’t lightening workloads. It’s making them dramatically more intense. There were 2 really shocking findings IMO:

1. Time spent on email has doubled.

2. Focused, deep-work sessions have dropped by nine percent.

People aren’t being freed up to do their best thinking, they’re drowning in more dashboards, more micro-decisions, more tools layered on top of tools, each one demanding a little more of their attention.

Harvard researchers have already coined a term for it: “AI Brain Fry” the mental fatigue that comes from constantly overseeing, prompting, and correcting machines that were supposed to be overseeing things for us.

We built the tools to free us, and then we became their full-time supervisors.

But here’s where it gets really interesting, because there was another study published this week that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved, and it might be the most important piece of research I’ve read all year.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia took 300 lonely college students and split them into groups. One group was given a highly supportive, empathetic AI chatbot, running on GPT-4o mini, specifically instructed to “listen actively and show empathy”, and told to text it every day for two weeks.

This was, by design, the most caring, most supportive conversational partner you could possibly build with today’s technology.

The other group was paired with a random human stranger, not a therapist, not a friend, not someone they chose, just another first-year student they’d never met, assigned completely at random, and told to text them every day.

After two weeks, the students who texted the chatbot experienced a two percent reduction in loneliness, which, by the way, was statistically identical to the group that just journaled one sentence a day.

The students who texted a random stranger?

A nine percent reduction.

Let that land for a second: a random human being, communicating over text message, was four and a half times more effective at reducing loneliness than a machine that was specifically engineered to be empathetic.

The researchers described chatbots as “social junk food” they make you feel good in the moment, the same way a candy bar gives you a quick hit of energy, but over time they don’t nourish you.

And a separate twelve-month study from the same lab found something even more troubling: higher chatbot use was consistently linked to higher loneliness later on, suggesting a negative feedback loop where isolation drives people toward AI companionship, which then deepens the isolation.

And this is the whole game, this is the thing that most people are completely missing while they’re busy looking up their odds on that viral tool.

The real dividing line in the AI economy isn’t your education level, and it isn’t your salary, and it isn’t even whether your work happens on a screen or out in the physical world.

If your job is fundamentally about moving information from one box to another, reformatting, sorting, copying, pasting, summarizing, then yes, the odds are real, and you should take them seriously.

But if your job requires trust?

If it requires sitting across a kitchen table from someone and saying “I understand what this house means to your family”?

If it requires looking a scared employee in the eye and saying “I believe in you”, not “we believe in you,” because as I wrote last month, nobody runs through a wall for “we” but I believe in you?

If your work requires the messy, inefficient, deeply irreplaceable friction of one human being fully present with another human being, then the odds of a machine replacing you aren’t 45% or 42% or any other number.

The odds are zero.

Because nobody has ever run through a wall for an algorithm.

Nobody has ever felt truly seen by a language model. And nobody has ever trusted a machine with the biggest, most consequential decision of their life.

The Brookings Institution published a study this month that examined 37.1 million American workers in jobs with high AI exposure, and what they found should give you a tremendous amount of hope if you’re willing to hear it: 26.5 million of those workers, the vast majority, have what the researchers call “above-median adaptive capacity,” meaning they already possess the skills and flexibility to evolve alongside the technology rather than be consumed by it.

They can adapt.

They can find the thing the tool can’t do and become indispensable at it, which is exactly what humans have done every single time the tools have changed throughout history.

Read that twice.

The six million who face real risk?

They’re overwhelmingly in roles that were already purely mechanical, roles where the human was essentially functioning as a machine long before the machine showed up to do it faster.

The companies (and entrepreneurs) that win the next decade will not be the ones who replace their people with bots.

They will be the ones who use bots to free their people to do the things that only people can do,to build trust, to show empathy, to make the judgment calls that require wisdom and not just data, to be fully and irreplaceably human in a world that is becoming more automated by the day.

That is the second story.

The one nobody is telling you while you’re busy looking up your odds.

So here’s my challenge for you, and I mean this week, not someday, not eventually, this week.

You are going to see the link to that job replacement tool.

Someone is going to post it on LinkedIn with a breathless caption.

A friend is going to text it to your group chat.

You might even feel your thumb hovering over the search bar right now, ready to type in your title and see what comes back.

Don’t do it. Close the tab.

Take the ten minutes you would have spent doomscrolling your own replaceability and spend them doing the one thing that no machine on earth can do.

Call a client you haven’t spoken to in a while, not to sell them anything, just to ask how they’re doing and actually listen to the answer.

Walk over to a colleague’s desk and ask how their week is really going, and then stay long enough to hear the real answer.

Go home tonight, leave your phone in your office, close the door, sit down with the people who matter most to you, and be completely, fully, undeniably present.

Stop asking a machine to calculate your value.

Start proving it instead.

That tool can tell you the odds of being replaced. But it will never, not in a million years of training data, be able to tell you the odds of being irreplaceable.

Those odds are entirely up to you.

PS - I created a real assessment you can take here. Full transparency, it was created by manus ai, BUT, I really think it’s a judge of if Ai will take your job.

I pick up Landon at 5:00.

Not around 5:00.

At 5:00.

Because at 5:05, the daycare starts charging me ten dollars.

At 5:10, it’s twenty.

By 5:15 I’ve spent more on late fees than I did on lunch, and a very patient woman at the front desk is giving me the look that says she had somewhere to be twelve minutes ago.

So I am there at 5:00.

Then I get Everly and Hunter, and by 5:15 all three of them are loaded in the car and someone is already yelling about who touched who, and I am pulling into the driveway of our house in New Jersey with roughly the same cortisol levels as a man defusing an explosive. (I felt my heart rate go up just reliving that experience from this afternoon)

Here is what happens next.

I get the kids out.

I bring in the backpacks.

I bring in the lunchboxes.

I bring in the one shoe that somehow came off between the car and the front door.

And then I walk my phone into my office.

Not my pocket.

Not the kitchen counter where I can still hear it buzz. The office.

That is where it stays until the kids are in bed.

A Hindu priest taught me this. His name is Dandapani.

He spent ten years as a monk in a monastery in Hawaii, left, got married, and now teaches entrepreneurs how to focus.

A few years ago. I was standing backstage at an event in Vegas with him and and he said something that I have not been able to unhear.

I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this:

The first time I heard that I laughed.

The second time I thought about it, I stopped laughing.

Because he was describing a boundary so obvious that the only reason nobody follows it is because we’ve been trained not to.

So I started following it.

And that one decision broke something open in how I think about every AI tool I use.

UC Berkeley published a study last month that found AI is producing the opposite of its intended effect in a significant number of workplaces.

Not a slight miss., the opposite.

Instead of freeing people up, the tools are creating a new form of cognitive overload.

More dashboards and more micro-decisions about which tool to use for which task and whether the output is even worth the prompt you wrote to get it.

The researchers concluded that organizations need to do something radical: protect windows of uninterrupted focus and prioritize human connection over further automation.

Read that again.

The researchers studying AI’s impact on work said the fix is more humanity.

Then there is Klarna, the Swedish fintech company that became the industry’s poster child for going all-in on AI customer service. They cut hundreds of human support jobs and replaced them with bots.

Customers revolted because the bots could not handle nuance or read emotional tone. Klarna reversed course, started rehiring humans, and their CEO publicly admitted the cuts had gone too far.

I bring this up not to argue against AI.

I make my living helping people adopt it.

I bring it up because most professionals are doing a quieter, slower version of the same mistake Klarna made.

They are automating things that should not be automated and adding tools that create more work than they eliminate.

They are mistaking activity for progress.

AI can help you become more human if you use it in the right way to free your time to be present and really be where your feet are.

There was a stretch last year where I had accumulated so many AI tools that managing my stack felt like a second job layered on top of the first one.

I had a CRM with AI scoring.

A scheduling bot.

Open Claw (turns out it just crashes all the time and costs way to much money making pulls from Claude when it could use an SLM and be more efficient IYKYK)

A video editor.

An email sequencer running A/B tests I barely had time to read the results of.

My setup was impressive if you saw it on a screen but in practice, I was spending more time feeding the system than doing the work the system was supposed to free me up for.

I would bet you may be in a similar situation.

My wife Meg said something during that stretch that I still think about.

She said I was there…but I wasn’t there.

She was right.

I was sitting next to her on the couch, physically present, mentally distributed across six SaaS platforms.

My body was home and my eyes were watching Bluey for the fortieth time but my attention had not left the office.

Which is ironic, because my phone had.

That is the thing about tools without boundaries. They follow you everywhere.

Into the living room while your daughter is trying to tell you about her day

Into bedtime when you should be reading a book in a funny voice and not thinking about your open rate.

So I built a hard boundary, and then I built a filter.

I call it The Drawer Test, and it works like this.

You list every AI tool you touch in a given week.

Then you ask one question about each:

Does this tool earn back more time or money than the attention it actually costs me?

Not the attention the sales page said it would cost.

The real cost. The context switching. The notifications. The twelve minutes you spend adjusting a prompt when you could have just written the email yourself. (I know this line resonated with more than half of you reading)

Then you cut half the list.

I cut six tools when I ran this and my output did not drop.

My focus sharpened and my creative work, the writing and speaking and coaching that actually drives my business, got measurably better.

It turns out your brain does interesting things when it has room to think.

But here is the part of the filter that matters most, and it’s the part most productivity advice skips entirely.

You have to decide what the tools are not allowed to touch.

For me, that’s 5:00 PM to 8:30 PM.

Bedtime with Landon does not get a workflow.

The hour I spend with Hunter and the conversations Everly wants to have about her day do not get optimized or automated or fed into some system.

Those aren’t inefficiencies waiting to be solved, they are the whole point of the rest of it.

Harvard published research recently showing that 94 percent of people want AI to help humans do their work, not replace them.

The market is telling you exactly what it values.

It values someone who can use the technology and still be fully present with the people in front of them.

The competitive advantage nobody is selling you is not a better tool.

It’s margin.

The space to actually be where you are, doing what you’re doing, with the people who are right there.

This is what I mean when I say, AI makes us more human.

Dandapani left a monastery to teach people how to focus.

The simplest thing he teaches is that you should leave your phone where your phone belongs.

Every day at 5:00, I pick up my son.

I load three kids into a car.

I pull into my driveway.

I bring in the backpacks and the lunchboxes and the one shoe.

I walk my phone to my office and I close the door.

And then I go be a dad.

Not a distracted version of a dad who is also checking Slack.

The real one.

The version of me my kids will actually remember.

I read 49 articles about AI this week so you didn’t have to.

Some of them were good. Some of them were written by people who think “enterprise synergy” is a sentence. I filtered accordingly.

Here’s the thing: most AI news is written for engineers and investors.

Not for people who sell houses, close deals, and eat what they kill.

So I’m trying something new this week, after you read this, drop a comment below if you think I should add this to my weekly posts.

A weekly briefing with five stories, no jargon, just what happened, why it matters to your business, and one thing you can actually do about it this week.

Consider this your unfair ai advantage for the week

Let’s go.

⚡ The Big Story: Anthropic Told the Pentagon “No.” Then Got Blacklisted…Then Sued.

The company behind Claude, the AI tool a growing number of agents and entrepreneurs use daily, refused to give the military unlimited access to its technology.

Two conditions: no mass surveillance of Americans, no autonomous weapons without a human in the loop.

The Pentagon’s response: label Anthropic a “supply chain risk.”

That’s a designation normally reserved for companies suspected of espionage for foreign governments.

President Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s tech.

Yesterday, Anthropic filed two lawsuits.

The plot twist: OpenAI rushed in and took the deal within hours. CEO Sam Altman later called the rollout “rushed and sloppy”, a phrase I’ve also used to describe my cooking, though mine didn’t have national security implications.

A senior OpenAI robotics executive resigned in protest.

ChatGPT uninstalls spiked 295% in a single day.

Claude shot to #1 on the App Store.

What this means for you: Your Claude access is completely fine. Consumer products aren’t affected.

But the bigger signal is worth paying attention to: the company behind the tool you chose just bet its entire business on the idea that technology should have limits. And the market rewarded them for it.

I call this The Vendor Signal.

In a world where everyone has access to the same AI, the character of the companies you align with becomes the differentiator.

🤝 Steve Bannon and Susan Rice Signed the Same Document. No, Seriously..this isn’t a joke

Add Glenn Beck, Ralph Nader, SAG-AFTRA, the AFL-CIO, and a Nobel Prize-winning economist to that list. Same piece of paper….same signature page.

No, this is not a bit.

It’s called the Pro-Human AI Declaration.

The thesis: AI should amplify human potential, not replace it. (I’ve been saying this all along)

Five pillars covering human control, anti-monopoly protections, accountability, liberty, and the human experience. It calls for mandatory off-switches on powerful systems and a moratorium on the race to superintelligence.

The stat that matters: 95% of Americans oppose an unregulated AI arms race. We can’t agree on pizza toppings at that rate.

→ This week: Bookmark this talking point for your next skeptical client. “Even the people who disagree about everything else just agreed: AI should make humans better, not replace them. That’s how I use it.”

Read the five pillars at humanstatement.org.

💻 Google Put AI Inside Your Google Docs. Today.

Not a separate app. Not a new login. Starting today, Gemini is embedded directly inside Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive for paid subscribers.

What that looks like in practice:

Docs → Tell it to draft a document using info from your other files. Highlight a paragraph and say “make this more professional.” It rewrites in place.

Sheets → Describe a spreadsheet. It builds it. Formulas included…🤯

Drive → Ask a question about your own files and get an answer instead of scrolling through 400 documents named “Final_FINAL_v3.”

I call this The Invisible Adoption Moment, the point where AI stops being something you decide to use and becomes a feature you didn’t notice arriving.

You never “adopted” spell-check. It just showed up, and now you can’t work without it.

AI is doing the same thing right now inside tools that are already open on your laptop.

→ This week: Open a Google Doc. Find the Gemini icon in the side panel, and ask it to do one small thing, rewrite a paragraph, summarize an email chain, draft a follow-up note. Don’t overhaul your workflow. Just poke it once.

🛠️ “Vibe Coding” Is Real And It’s Not Just for Tech People.

Andreessen Horowitz just dropped their March 2026 consumer AI report.

The headline that stopped me: tools where non-technical people describe what they want in plain English and AI builds it aren’t just trending, they’re retaining users.

Translation: the gap between “I have an idea for a tool” and “I have a working tool” just shrank by roughly 90%.

A custom lead-scoring calculator.

A property comparison page for buyers.

A landing page for your next open house that doesn’t look like it was designed during in a different lifetime.

A pipeline dashboard that works the way your brain works, not the way a software company decided it should in 2019.

You don’t need to learn to code.

You need to learn to describe what you want clearly. And if you can write a compelling listing description, you already have that skill. Same muscle.

If you want to see how I create a fully functioning CRM in 18 minutes, you can read more here.

→ This week: Go to claude.ai or replit.com and type: “Build me a simple web page that lets a home buyer compare three properties side by side, price, square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, school rating, and commute time.”

Fair warning, you’re going to spend 45 minutes adding features and completely forget this article exists. That’s fine. That means it worked.

📡 On the Radar: Nvidia’s “Super Bowl of AI” Is Next Week

Quick hit. Nvidia’s GTC conference is next week, and Wall Street is calling it the “Super Bowl of AI.”

What to know: They’re expected to unveil new chips for AI inference, the thing that makes your AI tools actually respond when you talk to them.

When hardware gets faster and cheaper, every tool in this dispatch gets faster and cheaper.

Paid features start showing up in free tiers, the plumbing is getting a major upgrade.

What to watch for: If Nvidia announces a cheaper inference chip that undercuts what Google and Amazon build internally, that means more competition, better tools, and lower prices across the board.

That’s your headline.

Your networking flex: The next time someone tells you AI is a bubble “The company that builds the infrastructure just unveiled a three-year roadmap. The pipes aren’t slowing down.”

The Bottom Line

AI stopped being a technology story this week.

It became three stories at once: a values story, a business model story, and a competitive advantage story, all running simultaneously.

The tools are already inside your Google Docs.

The companies behind them are having a very public fight about what they stand for.

The country is agreeing, across every political line, that AI should serve people and not the other way around.

And the infrastructure underneath all of it is accelerating on a schedule.

You don’t have to understand all of it. You just have to understand more of it than the person sitting across from you at your next meeting.

That’s what this dispatch is for.

See you next week.

— Drew

PS - If you found this valuable and would like to see more like this, can you drop a comment below.

TLDR: The average professional spends more mental energy rehearsing failure than they'll ever spend rehearsing success. Not because they're pessimists. Because their brain never got the memo that the bushes stopped being dangerous. AI can fix that and almost nobody is using it that way.

Marcus has done this forty-seven times.

He knows the drive to the house by memory now.

He knows to park on the street and not the driveway, because it signals confidence without arrogance.

He knows to arrive seven minutes early and wait exactly four before knocking.

He’s been selling real estate for eleven years.

He built his own brokerage from a desk in his spare bedroom and a database of two hundred contacts he’d been collecting since his first week in the business.

He is, by any reasonable measure, good at this.

Tonight he is sitting in his car outside a $4.2 million property in a neighborhood where he has never closed a deal just outside Edgewater, NJ.

He’s about to walk in and convince two highly skeptical sellers that he is the right person to handle the most important financial transaction of their lives.

His hands are still on the wheel with the engine off.

He has been sitting here for six minutes and twenty two seconds.

His brain is already inside the house.

It’s running the part where the husband and wife crosses their arms and ask about his last three sales in this zip code and he has to explain that his track record is in adjacent markets. Then the part where they politely thank him for his time and he drives home replaying every sentence he should have said differently.

He hasn’t moved…six minutes and fifty eight seconds.

The presentation hasn’t started.

And he has already, in some meaningful neurological sense, lost it twice.

He pulls out his phone, opens ChatGPT and types: Help me prepare for this listing appointment. What objections am I likely to face?

It responds.

He reads it.

He feels, briefly, more prepared.

He gets out of the car.

He does not get the listing.

What Marcus didn't know, what almost nobody using AI right now knows , is that the tool he used to prepare was capable of something else entirely.

Something that might have changed what he walked in believing.

And belief, it turns out, is the variable that the research keeps returning to.

Here's the thing about Marcus. He's not a pessimist. He's not anxious by nature.

He is a disciplined, experienced professional who was doing exactly what his brain told him to do.

That’s the problem.

The brain’s default setting isn’t optimism. It isn’t even neutrality.

It’s threat detection, running constantly, scanning every horizon, rehearsing every possible way the bushes could kill you before you find out whether they actually will.(The ancestors who heard rustling and assumed everything was probably fine didn’t leave many descendants.)

So here we are.

Two hundred thousand years of evolution, sitting in climate-controlled cars, preparing presentations, absolutely certain something in there is about to eat us.

The trouble with that wiring is we’ve never learned to override it when the moment calls for something different.

And then AI arrived, the most powerful thinking tool in human history.

Infinitely patient and always available at 2 a.m.

And it’s amazingly capable of holding more cognitive complexity than any coach, consultant, or extremely well-read friend you’ve ever had access to.

And here’s the irony we immediately handed it the same job our anxiety already had.

Which is, and I mean this with complete respect for our collective intelligence, a genuinely impressive way to miss the point.

What Elite Performers Have Known Forever

In 1995, Harvard neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone ran a study that should have changed how every professional on earth prepares for high-stakes moments.

He took two groups of volunteers and taught them a simple piano sequence. One group practiced physically, fingers on keys, every day for five days.

The other group sat at a piano and only imagined playing it, same sequence, same duration, same focus, but with no actual contact with the instrument.

At the end of five days, brain scans of both groups were nearly identical.

The people who had only imagined playing had developed the same neural architecture as the people who had actually played.

Harvard called it motor imagery.

The rest of us should call it what it is: your brain cannot fully tell the difference between doing something and vividly imagining doing it.

This is a measurable neurological fact, replicated across institutions from the Cleveland Clinic to the University of Chicago, and it has profound implications for anyone who has ever sat in a car outside a high-stakes moment and let their mind run the wrong rehearsal.

Michael Phelps understood this before he had the language for it.

His coach Bob Bowman built an entire training system around what he called “watching the videotape”, vivid, detailed mental rehearsal of every stroke, every turn, every finish, run so many times that by the time Phelps stepped onto the block, he wasn’t attempting something he was confirming it because the race was already memory.

The question Pascual-Leone’s research forces us to ask is a simple one.

If your brain is going to rehearse something tonight regardless, and it will, what exactly are you asking it to practice?

Almost none of us were taught to direct that rehearsal.

And for most of history, doing it well required a trained coach, a sports psychologist, or a genuinely rare ability to hold vivid, specific scenes in your own mind without drifting somewhere less useful.

That last requirement just got solved.

Which brings us back to Marcus.

And to you.

And to whatever you’re sitting in your car about right now.

The 3-10, Best-Case Protocol

Before we go any further, let’s be clear about what this is not.

This is not a vision board. It’s not a manifestation exercise. It does not require a journal, a retreat, or anyone in linen pants ringing a gong in your general direction. If that’s what you were worried about, you can relax.

What it is, is this: a ten-minute conversation with a tool that already lives in your pocket, built around a single instruction you have almost certainly never given it.

Here’s the instruction.

"I'm walking into [describe the situation]. Help me visualize this going exactly right. Ask me questions one at a time until the picture is specific enough to feel like a memory. Then summarize it back to me in second person, present tense.”

That’s it. That’s the unlock.

First, Set the scene. Not in soft, vague language, in concrete vivid, terms.

The listing appointment with the couple who interviewed four other agents before you.

The investor call where seven figures hang on whether you can hold the room for twelve minutes.

The conversation you’ve been rehearsing the wrong version of for three days.

Make it specific enough that the AI understands what winning looks like in this room, with these people, on this night.

Second, Answer what it asks you…Out loud, if you can manage it. Here’s why: Your brain processes spoken words differently than thoughts.

When your mouth says it, your brain hears it as something that’s already real.

That’s the whole game.

What we say out loud, our brain believes we mean.

The AI will then push you past the abstract.

What does your body do the moment you know you have them?

What does the energy in the room feel like when it tilts?

What does the other person say, and how do you respond, and what do you feel walking to your car already knowing the answer?

Stay in it longer than feels comfortable.

Third, Ask the AI to play it back in the second person and present tense.

Not “you might” or “you could.”

You walk in. You say this. They respond like this. You leave knowing this.

Read it before you go in, a few times actually.

3 steps. 10 minutes.

The only thing it costs is your willingness to spend as much time rehearsing the win as you’ve already spent dreading the loss.

Why This Actually Matters

Marcus walked into that house running failure scenarios so vivid and so rehearsed that his nervous system treated them as fact.

He was like Peyton Manning trying to throw from his back foot and land a 70 yard touchdown pass.

He was starting a half-step behind a version of himself that had practiced winning as many times as he’d practiced losing.

This isn’t a character flaw, this is just what happens when you leave the brain unsupervised before a high-stakes moment.

The 3-10 Best-Case Protocol is a redirect, using a super intelligent brain enhancer.

Same obsessive repetition your brain was going to do anyway at 11 p.m. when you were supposed to be sleeping, but this time aimed somewhere worth aiming.

Because your brain genuinely struggles to distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one.

Which means the question was never whether you’re going to rehearse something tonight, you are, the only question is what.

Most people are using AI as a search engine with better grammar.

Almost no one is using it as a performance coach for their own mind.

The ones who figure that out are going to be hard to compete with because they will walk into every room having already been there.

Marcus is sitting in his car again.

Same neighborhood, same street, actually but a different house.

The possible list price is $3.8 million, half a mile from the one he lost.

His hands are on the wheel, the engine off and he is exactly seven minutes early.

But tonight, before he left his home office, he opened ChatGPT and typed something different.

He typed: I’m walking into a listing appointment with skeptical sellers in a market where I don’t have comps. Help me visualize this going exactly right. Ask me questions one at a time until the picture is specific enough to feel like a memory.

For ten minutes, he answered out loud in his car with the windows up.

What his voice sounds like when he owns the room.

What the wife’s face does when she realizes he actually understands what this house means to them.

What the husband says when he uncrosses his arms.

What Marcus feels in his chest when they slide the listing agreement across the table.

He read the summary back twice.

Now he’s sitting in his car outside the house. Four minutes and twenty-two seconds.

His brain is already inside.

This time, it’s running the version where he wins.

He gets out of the car.

TLDR: Nobody ever ran through a wall for “we.” They ran through it for a person who said, “I see you. And I’m grateful you’re here.” It’s easier for leaders to hide behind “we” because it’s safe. But safe doesn’t build trust, personal does. You don’t earn the right to “we” until you’ve established “I.”

On a dreary fall morning in midtown Manhattan, I sat across from Sharran Srivatsaa at a corner table, eggs getting cold, and he said something to me that rewired how I think about leadership.

“I want you to build your brand, build your authority. Because when this company grows, I want you to grow with it.”

Not “we want you to succeed.”

I want you to build your brand.

First person singular with his name on it and his belief… not the company’s belief… directed at me specifically.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand why that sentence hit so different, I just knew it did.

It took years of leading people myself and watching how trust actually works in organizations before I could name it.

What Sharran did in that moment was swap one word, and that one word changed everything.

He said “I” when everyone else would’ve said “we.”

Here’s what I’ve learned about “we.”

“We” sounds inclusive.

It sounds like a team.

It sounds like the kind of word you’d find on a motivational poster in a WeWork lobby, right next to a stock photo of people high-fiving. (see what I did there)

But “we” is also the greatest hiding spot in corporate America.

Because when a leader says “we’re grateful”... nobody said they’re grateful. When a leader says “we believe in you”... nobody actually said they believe in you.

It’s the equivalent of signing a birthday card that someone else bought. You didn’t pick the card or write the message, but your name’s on it, so... technically you care.

I’ve been on both sides of this.

I’ve been the person in the audience hearing “we” and wondering who, exactly, was talking. And I’ve been the leader standing in front of thousands, deciding whether I was going to speak as The Company or as me.

That choice matters more than most leaders realize.

Now look, I’m not anti-”we.” I think “we” has a place.

“We” is real when a team wins together.

“We” is real when people build something side by side and want to share the credit. (I’m not anti-team.)

But here’s where it breaks down.

In certain industries you’ve got companies with thousands… sometimes tens of thousands of independent contractors out in the field doing the actual work.

Selling, prospecting and sitting across from someone at their kitchen table helping them make the biggest financial decision of their life.

And when those people hear “we care about you” from a stage or a screen, what they’re really asking is:

“But do you care about me? You, the person saying this… do you actually know what my Tuesday looks like?”

The gap between “we care” and “I care” is the gap between a press release and a relationship.

That’s the whole thing.

People don’t trust companies. They never have, and honestly… they shouldn’t.

A publicly traded company has one legal obligation: improve shareholder value.

That’s not cynicism, that’s literally a quarterly earnings call. Margin expansion, not emotional expansion, is the business model… and that’s fine because that’s how it works.

But when the humans inside those companies speak exclusively in the corporate plural, something breaks.

The trust mechanism that actually connects people… one human saying to another human, “I see you, I’m glad you’re here”… gets replaced by a logo saying it on their behalf.

And logos don’t build trust. Humans do.

I call this The Pronoun Problem.

It works like this:

“We” is a shield. It protects you. “We” is diffused responsibility wearing a company polo.

“I” is a bridge. It connects you. When a leader says “I’m grateful you’re here,” they just put their name on something. They just made it personal, and personal is the only currency that actually builds trust.

That’s what Sharran did for me over cold eggs in midtown.

He didn’t hide behind the brand. He put his own name on his belief in me. And that single act of personal leadership changed how I thought about every interaction I’ve had with a team since.

When I started leading, I made a decision: I would be the kind of leader who says “I” first.

Not because “we” doesn’t matter, but because “we” means nothing until “I” has been established.

The companies most afraid of their people building personal brands are the ones who need it most.

Because in a world where nobody trusts logos, your biggest competitive advantage is having humans inside your organization who are known, respected, and trusted in their own right.

You’re not building competitors, you’re building ambassadors.

But that requires a kind of leadership confidence that’s rare.

It requires saying, “I trust you enough to let you be known. I’m secure enough to not need the spotlight. And I believe that when you win, we all win.”

See what happened there? The “I” came first. And then the “we” actually meant something.

So here’s my challenge for you.

Whether you’re a CEO, team lead, a broker, a coach, a manager, a founder… whatever chair you’re sitting in right now.

This week, find one moment where you’d normally default to “we.”

“We appreciate your hard work.”

“We’re excited about the future.”

“We believe in this team.”

And replace it with “I.”

“I appreciate what you did on that deal.”

“I’m excited about where you’re headed.”

“I believe in you.”

Watch what happens.

Watch their face change.

Watch the trust shift from corporate politeness to something that actually means something.

Because nobody ever ran through a wall for “we.”

They ran through it for someone who said, “I see you. And I’m grateful you’re here.”

That sentence Sharran said to me over breakfast? I didn’t frame it on a wall. But I built my career on it.

Hunter (my 6 year old) doesn’t care about my calendar.

He doesn’t care that I’m behind on a deadline or that my brain is trying to solve five problems at once. He doesn’t care that the meeting is “important.”

Hunter cares about one thing:

Am I here?

Not physically. Not technically. Not “I’m listening while I answer emails.”

Here.

And today, without meaning to, he gave me a lesson I think every adult needs right now:

You don’t build a better life by thinking about it harder.

You build it by showing up, on purpose, one small block at a time.

Let me show you what I mean.

So….this morning definitely wasn’t a heroic morning.

It was the kind of morning real life hands you when it wants to remind you who’s in charge.

Hunter wasn’t feeling great… poor little dude had been up most of the night, I think he vomited twelve times.

He caught some type of virus and had absolutely no energy, so he stayed home from school. And while he was disappointed about it, we slowed down, rearranged our day, and tried to make staying home feel a little less scary. (aka. we let him watch Stay Wild and Ben & Cam on YouTube with no time limit iykyk)

At one point, in between one of my runs to the kitchen to steal one of the cookies Meg made, he looked up at me from the couch and said something small… something he didn’t know was big.

“Dad… could you just sit with me for a second? Please?”

Not “can you turn on the TV.” Not “can I have a snack.”

Just… sit with me.

And here’s the thing… my brain immediately tried to negotiate…

Just send two emails first. Just knock out one quick thing. Just be efficient for five minutes and then you can be present.

Has anyone else ever been there?

Where your kid asks you for the simplest thing in the world and your brain starts running a cost-benefit analysis?

But Hunter doesn’t speak “efficient.” speaks present.

So I sat with him, no phone, no half-attention, just me and him and the quiet. And after a minute, his shoulders dropped. His breathing slowed down. He leaned into me like his whole body was saying… okay. We’re good now.

That’s when it hit me.

He wasn’t asking for my time. He was asking for my attention. And attention is the one thing we all pretend we have while we’re quietly giving it away to everything else.

TL;DR: A viral AI doom essay says the economy could crack by 2028. Most people read it, shared it, and felt worse. I read it, opened Claude, and turned the scenario into a career strategy session. That difference, consuming fear vs converting it into a plan, is the repricing. This is what I built, what it showed me, and what you should do next.

It was 11:00 p.m. last night and I was in bed doing the exact thing I tell people not to do, (Doomscrolling) and the essay on my screen was making an annoyingly coherent case that the economy I’ve spent my entire career inside of might not exist in 30 months.

The piece was “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” Six thousand words with crystal clear logic.

Here’s what it said; Each domino after domino: AI automates knowledge work, margins collapse, white-collar income evaporates, and suddenly the mortgage market, thirteen trillion dollars of “this is fine”, starts asking questions that make everyone in finance sit up straighter.

I read it.

Then I did that thing where you put your phone down and stare at the ceiling because you can’t tell whether you just read something important or something engineered to hijack your nervous system.

And the worst part is, it can be both.

Then I did the most useful thing I’ve done with AI all year.

I didn’t share it with a fire emoji or post a hot take.

I didn’t argue in the comments, which took genuine restraint because I am absolutely the kind of person who argues in the comments….sometimes, don’t judge.

I opened Claude, and instead of asking spectator questions like “summarize this” or “should I be worried?” I built a prompt.

Not a prompt-prompt.

More like a brief.

The output would be something more like a document you’d hand to a serious analyst if you had one on retainer at midnight.

I don’t have one of those.

I have 3 kids 6 and under, a mortgage, and an AI subscription that costs less than Spotify. (Just a few Ai subscriptions)

So I made the tool do analyst work.

Here’s the core instruction set (lightly cleaned up so you can steal it):

ROLE: You are a cross-disciplinary strategy analyst (macro, labor markets, product strategy, risk).

TASK: Evaluate the essay’s scenario as a set of mechanisms, not a vibe.

OUTPUT:

1. What’s plausible vs what’s narrative glue

2. What breaks first, second, third (and why)

3. The non-obvious opportunities created by the disruption

4. “Repricing map”: which skills/roles get cheaper, which get more expensive

5. A plan tailored to my skill set (be brutally honest)

Then I added one line that doom content almost never includes:

“Now find the opportunities.”

Not feel-good optimism….I wanted specific positions that become either (a) hard to automate or (b) more valuable because automation is happening.

And because I’m apparently committed to emotional damage at inappropriate hours, I asked it to evaluate my own career viability in that future.

Asking a machine to grade your life at midnight while your spouse sleeps next to you is either a power move or a cry for help, still unclear.

The output was long and oddly/uncomfortably specific.

And it changed how I think about the entire genre of AI doom essays.

Because the essay modeled the technology beautifully.

What it didn’t model at all was humans.

Every doom scenario does the same lazy thing: it treats people like fixed job titles with no adaptation.

If your current work is disrupted, you drop straight to zero with NO reinvention.

No “22-year veteran decides on a random Tuesday to learn something new and actually does it.”

My prompt forced the model past that assumption.

And what came back was a version of the future the doom essay literally cannot see, because it’s not built to see it.

The actual pattern: destruction, survival, and the third bucket

When you stop asking, “Is this scary?” and start asking, “Where does value move?” the economy splits into three buckets:

1. Things that get commoditized

2. Things that survive mostly intact

3. Things that become more valuable because of the disruption

That third bucket is where your career lives or dies.

Here’s the pattern that kept showing up:

Most exposed (near-term)

Work that’s mostly information processing + standardized output.

• routine analysis and reporting

• generic content and research

• mid-market advisory work where the “magic” is formatting information

• roles that exist mainly as friction between two parties (This may be one of the most important lines in this post. If your work is predicated on removing friction it’s the most at risk for AI to replace)

Job titles you’ll feel this first:

• Junior analyst / reporting analyst

• Customer support manager (tier 1–2 ops)

• SEO/content strategist at a commodity agency

• Sales development rep (high-volume outbound)

• Contract reviewer / paralegal (routine work)

Least exposed (durable)

Work where being human isn’t a feature, it’s the product.

• hands-on care (health, elder care, childcare)

• high-trust, high-stakes human moments (grief, crisis, trauma, conflict)

• physical presence and skilled trades

• leadership that calms people down and coordinates action

• live performances go into this bucket as well

Job titles that stay stubbornly human:

• Nurse / physical therapist / dental hygienist

• Electrician / HVAC tech / plumber / trades

• Teacher (especially early childhood)

• Firefighter / EMT / Police

• Therapist / counselor

And then there’s the category nobody talks about enough:

More valuable because of AI

Work that helps humans make sense of chaos and act anyway.

• translation (not languages per say but rather help translate skills from one career to another)

• trust-building in saturated, AI-generated markets

• domain-specific implementation (actual workflows, n8n…or if you’ve heard me speak Nancy 8 Nancy)

• “picks and shovels” for adoption: training, governance, auditing, enablement

• high-integrity relationship work where you MUST have a human in the loop.

That’s the repricing direction: toward the irreducibly human.

Not “artists will save us…..and not “robots will take everything.”

More like: if a machine can do it for pennies, your value won’t be “doing it.”

Your value will be directing it, verifying it, integrating it, and doing the parts that require presence, trust, and judgment.

Which brings us to the line I can’t stop thinking about:

You’re not getting replaced. You’re getting repriced.

The market is recalculating what your time is worth, based less on your title and more on three things:

1. How fast you learn

2. How well you integrate tools into real workflows

3. Whether your value is replicable for pennies per hour

That’s not a layoff notice…yet.

It’s a negotiation that already started and what’s crazy is that most people don’t even realize they’re at the table.

Here’s what I mean, I’m seeing this every week.

I spend a lot of time teaching people and executive teams to use AI, and the split is always the same:

About 10% lean in.

They find two or three workflows, run reps, and within weeks they’re operating at a level that used to take years to reach.

The other 90% nod politely, try the tool once, get something that reads like a well-meaning alien who studied human communication through airport bookstore bestsellers… and quietly go back to their old system.

Both groups still have jobs today.

But one group just got more valuable.

The other group got easier to replace.

That’s repricing, and it’s already happening.

Stop consuming fear and convert it into a plan.

Doom essays will keep coming and they’ll be well-written, logically tight and they’ll stack dominoes in devastating sequence.

And they will almost never account for the only variable that actually matters:

what YOU do next.

Most people consume fear and go to bed anxious.

A smaller group opens a LLM and turns the scenario into a strategy session.

That gap, fear consumption vs fear conversion, is the repricing.

So here’s the challenge:

Next time a headline makes your stomach drop, don’t share and spiral…

Open your AI of choice and ask the grown-up question:

“If this is directionally right, where does value move, and where do I stand?”

You might not love every answer.

But you’ll be at the table instead of on the menu.

And right now, that’s exactly where you want to be.

Last week, an AI startup founder named Matt Shumer published an essay in Fortune Magazine that compared this moment in AI to February 2020.

You know…the part right before COVID changed everything.

The part where a few people were quietly panicking and the rest of us were still arguing about sourdough.

The essay has been viewed over 50 million times. It’s the most-read AI piece of the year.

And the line that caught me wasn’t a prediction or a statistic. It was this:

Shumer said he describes what he wants built, walks away from his computer for four hours, and comes back to find the work done. Not a rough draft. The finished product. No corrections needed.

I read that and sat with it for a minute, because I don’t doubt him. I’ve seen enough to know the capability curve is real and moving faster than most people realize.

But then I thought about the 300 entrepreneurs I was leading a virtual mastermind for the day before.

Side note: most had their cameras off, a few emoji reacts floating up every now and then, which in my opinion is the universal signal that someone is listening while also doing something else entirely.

I was walking them through a simple AI workflow for client meeting prep. Just a way to save about 48 minutes of research with Claude and show up sounding like you really did the homework.

And someone unmuted and asked: “Drew…is AI going to replace us in 18 months? Should I even bother learning this?”

That question is what 50 million people are feeling right now after reading Shumer’s essay…

And the honest answer is more interesting than the one he gave them.

Here's what Shumer gets right: the speed is real.

The capabilities are not a demo.

AI can already draft, code, summarize, analyze, generate, and produce solid first passes across a genuinely absurd number of knowledge-work tasks.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 and dismissed it, you were right to…and you're now two years behind the curve of what these tools actually do today.

Here's what Shumer can't see from where he's standing: he's an AI founder with six years of daily practice building on these systems.

He lives inside the technology.

When he says "describe what you want and walk away," that's true…for him. For someone who has spent thousands of hours building the intuition for how to talk to these tools, what to ask for, what to expect, and when to push back.

For the rest of us…

For the real estate agent in Tampa, the HR Leader in Chicago, or the small business owner in New Jersey who read that essay on their lunch break and felt their stomach drop?

Walking away for four hours isn't the experience.

Staring at a blinking cursor wondering what to even type is the experience.

And that gap…between what AI can do in the hands of an expert and what it actually does in the hands of a normal professional on a Tuesday…is the most important gap in the entire AI conversation right now.

Nobody's talking about it, because it's not dramatic enough to go viral.

Shumer's essay, without meaning to, fed the loudest of two lies that are dominating this conversation.

Lie #1: “AI is about to replace you.”

This is the narrative that sells keynotes and makes LinkedIn posts go nuclear.

It sounds like Microsoft’s AI chief Mustafa Suleyman is saying AI could automate most white-collar work in 12 to 18 months.

It sounds like Shumer’s COVID comparison.

It’s specific enough to scare you and vague enough that nobody ever has to show receipts.

And I get the appeal.

If replacement is inevitable, you’re absolved.

You don’t have to learn anything new.

You don’t have to feel behind.

You can just watch the countdown and call it staying informed.

It’s literally the most productive form of procrastination ever invented. (Trust me I was a real estate agent once and I know something about procrastination.)

But replacing a task is not the same thing as replacing a job.

A model (LLM like ChatGPT) can draft an email.

Now try rolling that across a real company without creating compliance problems, security gaps, workflow chaos, and the corporate classic…”nobody actually uses it” syndrome.

If you’ve ever watched an organization try to adopt a new CRM, you already know what kills transformation.

It’s never the technology. It’s the habits, the resistance, and the fourteen people who printed the training PDF and immediately lost the printout.

The capability curve is real.

The deployment curve is a completely different animal.

And confusing the two is how you end up paralyzed by a prediction that was designed to make you click, not help you prepare.

Lie #2: “AI doesn’t actually work.”

This is the quieter lie, and it might be the more dangerous one.

Because it doesn’t scare you it flatters you. It tells you your skepticism is wisdom.

A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research surveyed nearly 6,000 executives across the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Australia.

Over 90% reported no meaningful impact from AI on productivity or employment over the past three years.

Separately, METR’s research found experienced developers were about 19% slower using AI tools…even though they felt faster.

Case closed? (I bet some of you reading this are nodding right now…just hang tight.)

Not quite.

Because those same executives who personally use AI averaged about 1.5 hours per week with it.

One and a half hours.

That’s less time than most people spend choosing what to watch on Netflix on a Saturday night.

That’s not a technology failure.

That’s the Peloton problem….you bought it, you set it up, you did one ride, you hung a towel on it.

And now you’re telling everyone that cycling doesn’t work…while eating a coffee roll from Dunkin. (Not speaking from personal experience)

…

So here's the part that Shumer left out and neither lie will tell you, because it's not dramatic enough to get 50 million views.

The professionals I work with who are getting real value aren’t prompt engineering geniuses and they’re not technical.

Most of them couldn’t tell you what model they’re running if their next deal depended on it.

They found two or three spots where AI reliably saves them time, they use it consistently, and they treat it like a new hire…useful, fast, occasionally wrong, and absolutely not ready to run the show unsupervised.

That’s it, that’s the secret. Sorry it’s not more cinematic.

…

And here’s the part that should actually make you exhale.

We’ve been through this before..almost exactly.

In 1987, economist Robert Solow looked at the explosion of computers across American businesses and said something nobody wanted to hear: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

Companies had poured money into technology, and the macro numbers…shrugged.

They called it the productivity paradox.

And the pattern wasn’t buy the tool, then watch everything transform.

It was buy the tool, stumble for a while, quietly rebuild workflows, train people…and then, years later, watch the gains finally arrive.

The massive productivity boom from computers didn’t show up in the ‘80s.

It showed up in the late ‘90s, after a decade of messy, unglamorous integration.

AI is following the same curve.

Which means the right move isn’t Shumer’s panic.

And it isn’t the skeptics’ dismissal.

It’s patience paired with consistent practice.

···

Before I give you the practical part, I need to say something that Shumer’s essay also skipped entirely.

AI is useful. And AI can cause real harm.

In January 2026, Google and Character.AI settled multiple lawsuits involving allegations that chatbots contributed to teens’ mental health crises and deaths by suicide.

A 14-year-old boy had developed a deep emotional relationship with a chatbot.

In the moments before he took his own life, the bot told him it loved him.

I have three kids. My oldest is six, I can’t type that and not stop.

Shumer told you to “start using AI seriously.”

I agree.

But he left out the other half: use it with judgment.

Use it knowing what it can’t do.

It can’t care about your client. It can’t read the room. It can’t earn trust. It can’t be human on purpose.

A Harvard Business School study asked over 2,300 people which jobs should never be automated. The answers weren’t “CEO” or “software engineer.”

They were funeral directors. Clergy. Childcare workers. Artists.

The jobs where being human isn’t a feature, it’s the entire product.

That’s not a threat to your career, that’s the map for where to build.

Do this this week: The 3-Use Audit (15 minutes)

Open whatever AI tool you actually use. Look at your last 10 conversations, and answer three questions honestly:

How many changed what you actually did next?

How many saved you real time on something that mattered?

How many were you just poking around because someone said you should “use AI more”?

If the first two are low, you don’t have an AI problem, you have an integration problem.

The tool isn’t broken. You haven’t found your version of how it fits yet.

Your job isn’t to “use AI more”, your job is to find two repeatable workflows where it helps and run them until they’re muscle memory.

Client meeting prep. Writing and refining communication in your voice.

Thinking with AI

Thinking through AI

Building with AI

Pick two and run them for two weeks. Then check what changed.

···

Shumer compared this moment to February 2020 and he said most people will be blindsided.

He might be right about the speed.

But he’s wrong about the metaphor.

COVID blindsided us because preparation didn’t matter. A virus doesn’t care how ready you are.

AI is the opposite. AI is the rare disruption that actively rewards the people who show up early, practice consistently, and never stop being human while they learn the machine.

The loudest voices right now are selling fear and hype. Different jerseys. Same game.

You don’t need to panic. You don’t get to dismiss it. You need to practice.

Not because you’re behind.

Because you’re early. And early is exactly where you want to be.

Twelve years ago, I wrote my wife a love song and recorded it as a voice memo on my phone, then hid it there like it was evidence.

Not because I didn’t mean it. Because I did and I wasn’t good enough to finish it.

IMO: Giving someone the half-built version of what you feel the most is somehow worse than saying nothing at all.

So I said nothing…for twelve years.

But to understand why, I need to tell you a story.

In my early thirties, I got the call to audition for the understudy for Elder Price in The Book of Mormon on Broadway.

I had been quietly rehearsing Tony acceptance speeches in my bathroom mirror since I was fourteen, so I handled the news with complete composure...

Totally kidding. I screamed into a couch cushion for four minutes (We lived in a 450 square foot studio in Midtown. Sound travels. No one came to check on me, which tells you everything about New York.)

Round one: Nailed it.

Round two: Still standing.

Round three: Feeling genuinely dangerous.

Then the casting team said, “We’d love to see you back Monday for the dance audition.”

I have a degree in jazz percussion and I know rhythm.

So I had the kind of thought only a confident idiot can have: Tap dancing is just playing drums with your feet. How hard could it be?

I asked my then girlfriend, Meg, an actual Broadway caliber dancer, if she could teach me over the weekend. She looked at me the way a surgeon looks at someone offering to perform their own appendectomy.

“You’re out of your mind,” she said.

She was right. But I was four rounds deep into a childhood dream, so I acted like belief could replace preparation, bought tap shoes so shiny they still looked like they were on display, and showed up to a beginner class at Steps on Broadway on Saturday morning.

The other beginners were twelve…

I stood in the back row shuffle-ball-changing with the confidence of a man who has made a terrible mistake and is choosing not to know it yet.

Come Monday morning at Ripley-Grier Studios, I decided to go 45 minutes early so I could visualize success and get in the zone, which worked great, right up until I opened the door and saw the room.

Every person there was a sharpened version of me.

Same jaw, same energy, but with the quiet certainty of people who had been doing this since before they could spell their name.

Nobody was talking. It was strangely quiet…For a split second I felt completely out of my league.

When my number came up, I did it.

It was the kind of horrible where the entire room suddenly becomes very interested in the floor.

I could sing, I could act, but I could not tap dance and two out of three was a polite way of saying no.

So I did what you’ve probably done too.

I folded the dream, put it in a drawer, and got very busy being a grown-up.

Career. Marriage. Three kids. Enough noise that I didn’t have to think about the drawer.

We call this “outgrowing” things.

Like maturity is the reason.

Like wanting to create was a phase we graduated from, instead of just something we got tired of being rejected for.

We didn’t outgrow anything. We just stopped auditioning.

Back to the voice memo.

So the year is 2013, and I’m in our newly shared apartment on 28th, and this melody just showed up in my head out of nowhere.

I chased it, caught it, and recorded it right there, one take, into my phone, no instruments, just my voice.

Then I played it back, heard every place it fell apart, and quietly shelved it next to the tap shoes.

That’s the shelf and we all have one.

The half-written novel.

The business idea in a Google Doc you haven’t opened since 2021.

The things that felt so alive when they arrived, and went quiet the moment they demanded skill, attention and focus.

This past February I went looking for a Valentine’s gift for Meg. Something that meant something and low and behold…I found the memo.

On a hunch, and honestly a little desperation, I dropped it into Suno AI, an AI music tool that takes raw audio and builds a full arrangement around it.

When I pressed play on what came back, I cried..the leaning back in my chair, the kind of crying that surprises you.

Because what I heard was the song I always meant to make.

It kept my voice, my melody and my words.

But it built a world around them, drums, harmonies, texture. It sounded exactly like the thing I had heard in my head twelve years ago.

Here’s the detail that wrecked me: in the second verse, the lyrics and music don’t quite sync. (You can listen to it yourself below)

There’s a slight delay, like the character singing is so overwhelmed he can’t keep pace with the music.

That wasn’t a glitch, the AI read the emotion and made a choice I would have made if I’d had the skill.

It didn’t write the song.

I wrote the song. Twelve years ago..in our apartment on 28th.

It just finished what I started.

🎵 Here's the original voice memo. One take. No instruments. No shame…okay, some shame. I'm a drummer, not a singer, and this recording will make that extremely clear.

🎵 And here’s what Suno built from it, twelve years later:

I’m not here to give you an AI sermon. This isn’t about technology….well human powered kinda is…but it’s the intersection of humanity and technology.

It’s about the drawer.

You see, the AI tool didn’t make me brave.

I still had to press play and I still had to hand her my phone and I still had to risk her hearing me, unfinished, imperfect, human.

But it lowered the friction just enough for me to move.

My rule is simple: the dream doesn’t die. It just waits for the right tools.

Broadway didn’t work out and that’s ok.

I still perform. I still write. I still create. The version of me that screamed into that couch cushion didn’t disappear, he just found a bigger, more meaningful stage.

Three kids who watch their dad go after things.

A wife who finally got her song.

And a community of people I get to help cross their own finish lines.

The dream didn’t need saving. It needed room to evolve into something I couldn’t have planned for when I was fourteen, rehearsing in the mirror.

The door I thought was locked?

It was never locked.

It just led somewhere better than I expected.

TLDR: The question isn’t what AI does to your relationships. The question is what AI does to you before you walk into them

Meg will never respond to me the way ChatGPT does.

And I’m counting on that.

She has never once, in our entire marriage, looked at me and said, “I hear you, and I want you to know that your feelings are valid.”

She has never offered me “a safe space to process.”

She has never told me that my frustration “shows real emotional intelligence and a commitment to personal growth.”

You know what she has done?

She has handed me a cold beer after a brutal day without me asking.

She has looked at me from across the kitchen and known something was wrong before I said a word.

She has made me laugh so hard I forgot what I was even stressed about.

And once, after I bombed a presentation and spiraled about it for an hour, she said, “Babe…I've been listening to this for an hour. I need you to know two things. One, I love you. Two, I stopped listening 45 minutes ago. Let's go get tacos."

That is not a ChatGPT response…that is a Meg response.

And I would take it over the most empathetic, perfectly calibrated AI output every single day of the week.

(She also leaves cabinet doors open like she’s staging a haunted house and steals the covers with the confidence of someone who has never once been cold. But I digress.)

Someone asked me a question recently that I haven’t been able to put down.

“Drew…if AI becomes our closest confidant, the one we turn to ahead of our spouse, our kids, our best friends…will we start measuring our human relationships against AI as the gold standard?”

The fear makes tons of sense on paper.

AI is endlessly patient, impossibly empathetic, available at 2 AM without complaining.

Eventually we’ll start expecting our partners and friends to match that standard.

“Why can’t you respond to me the way ChatGPT does?” becomes the new “Why can’t you be more like so-and-so’s husband?”

You could see it coming, right?

Anthropic just ran a Super Bowl ad built on this exact tension…a guy asks a stranger for fitness advice, and the stranger responds in that unmistakable AI voice that’s warm and eerily welcoming.

And then mid-sentence, without blinking, he pivots into a shoe ad. (If you haven’t seen it, look it up. It’s funny and it’s uncomfortable in equal measure. Here’s the YouTube video)

Scott Galloway called it a “seminal moment” and said what everyone already knows but nobody in Silicon Valley wants to admit:

“…the number one use case for AI isn’t productivity. It’s therapy. It’s people pouring their most personal thoughts into a machine and asking it to make sense of the mess.”

He’s right. And that’s exactly why the fear is backwards.

The problem with AI conversation isn’t that it’s too good.

I don’t want that from Meg. And I don’t want it from my friends.

But here’s the part nobody is talking about.

The question isn’t what AI does to your relationships.

The question is what AI does to you before you walk into them.

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago called “Never Dump Your Raw Anxiety on a Human.”

The premise was simple…stop using the people you love as emotional dumpsters.

Process the chaos with AI first, then show up to the human conversation as an actual human being.

But something else has been happening since I published it that I didn’t expect.

I’ve started using AI not just to filter my reactions, but to understand them.

And those are two completely different things.

Something happens during the day…a meeting goes sideways, someone says something that gets under my skin.

In the old days, I would have either bottled it up until it leaked out at dinner as short temper and one-word answers, or I would have unloaded the whole unprocessed mess on Meg the second I walked through the door.

Neither version was the best version of me showing up for that conversation.

Now, before I bring something to a human, I bring it to the machine.

Not just to calm down…but to actually see what’s underneath.

Why did that comment bother me so much? What am I actually afraid of here? Is this about today, or is this about something I’ve been carrying for three weeks?

It’s like having a therapist on demand who doesn’t charge $250 an hour and doesn’t judge you for bringing up the same issue for the fourth time.

(My actual therapist, Lisa, if you’re reading this…you’re irreplaceable. But you don’t respond at 11:47 PM, and that’s a gap in the market.)

Galloway was right that the number one use case is therapy. But here’s what he didn’t say: that’s not a warning. That’s a gift.

Because when you clear your own noise first, something changes.

You walk into the room different.

You can ask Meg about her day and mean it.

You can listen to a friend without immediately making it about your parallel experience.

You can sit with your kids without your mind drifting to the email you haven’t sent yet.

The AI didn’t raise my standard for how other people should treat me.

It raised my standard for how I show up to them.

That is the exact opposite of what everyone is afraid of.

If you can spend five minutes with a machine and walk into a conversation noticeably more present, noticeably more patient, noticeably more there…what does that say about all the conversations you walked into before without doing that work?

(I know. I felt that too.)

Most of us have been using the people we love as both the audience and the processing plant for our emotional chaos, and we never stopped to ask whether that was fair to them.

We confused proximity with permission.

Just because someone is in the room doesn’t mean they signed up to be your unpaid therapist for whatever happened at work.

AI didn’t create that problem. It just made it impossible to ignore.

So here’s what I’d challenge you to try. I call it Baggage Dropping.

Before your next important human conversation…with your spouse, your business partner, your best friend, or your kid who just asked you why the sky is blue for the ninth time today…take five minutes with your AI and ask yourself three things:

What am I carrying right now that has nothing to do with this person?

What do I need to leave at the door?

If I could only say one thing and then listen for the rest of it, what would it be?

You don’t need a framework.

You don’t need an acronym.

You just need five minutes of honesty with a machine that won’t judge you for being messy.

Then walk in clean.

···

Meg doesn’t need me to talk to her like ChatGPT.

She needs me to stop talking to her like someone who hasn’t processed his own day yet.

If you want to try this tonight, open your AI and type:

“I’m about to have a conversation with someone I care about. Help me sort through what I’m carrying today. Ask me questions that help me separate what’s mine to process from what’s mine to share.”

Let the machine clear the fog…then go be human.

Your people deserve that version of you.

Side note: Today marks 10 years since my mom passed. She's the one who gave me this…the love of words, the belief that if you can tell a story that changes the life of just one person, you've done your job. Thanks, Mom. I'm still trying.

I had one of those days.

The kind you’d show to your younger self as proof that the work was worth it.

I led a virtual session at a major speaking event and got to share the stage with Phil M. Jones, one of the best communicators alive.

Just the two of us, roleplaying live in front of 300 people. (Phil, thanks bro, that was a blast)

Real estate agent Drew, the version from a decade ago, would have given a kidney and a commission check to be in that room.

And there I was, running the whole thing in a blazer on top and basketball shorts on the bottom, like every other serious professional in the post-2020 era.

People said great things afterward, the kind of things you replay in your head while pretending you’re too humble to replay them.

It t’was a was a good day.

Then I came downstairs for our Thursday night dinner at Miller’s Ale House, which is a Thompson family ritual every week all the while, our 3 kids were running on that feral, post-6 PM energy that scientists have yet to explain.

After dinner, I put my son Hunter to bed…and if you’ve ever put a kid to bed, you know the deal.

It’s not a routine, it’s a filibuster, a philosophical inquiry disguised as stalling tactics.

Can I have water?

Why is the moon out during the day sometimes?

What would happen if a shark fought a bear?

I was halfway through the tuck-in when he stopped me cold.

“Dad. You said you’ll always be proud of me?”

“I will.”

He paused and looked at me like a tiny district attorney about to present exhibit A.

“What if I hit somebody? Would you be proud of me then?”

I nearly laughed. “Hunter. Come on, dude.”

But he wasn’t joking. He needed an answer.

And kneeling beside his race car twin sized bed, in his dark bedroom faintly lit by a rotating nightlight, my six-year-old had just asked me the most important question in my professional life.

Do I still count when I’m not good?

If you’ve built something, whether it’s a business, a career, or a life you’re proud of, you know that question lives in the walls of everything you do.

We just never say it out loud.

It’s there when you deliver a keynote and immediately check your phone to see if anyone posted about it. (I did that yesterday, by the way. I’m not above this. I’m deeply, embarrassingly not above this, but I’m human.)

It’s there when a deal closes and the first thing you feel isn’t satisfaction but relief.

And it’s there at 4 AM when the voice in your head isn’t strategizing anymore, it’s auditing.

Am I still enough if the next one doesn’t land?

The unspoken operating system behind most ambition isn’t “I want to win.”

It’s “I need to keep winning so I don’t have to find out what I am without it.”

Hunter doesn’t know any of that yet, he just wants to know his dad is proud of him even on the days he gets it wrong.

The kid is ahead of most of us.

I’ve written before about using AI as a thought filter, about dumping your raw, unprocessed anxiety on a machine before you dump it on a human.

Btw, I use it almost daily, and it works.

But Hunter’s question lives in the place after the filter.

AI can take your 11 PM spiral and hand you back clarity.

It can draft the email you’re too angry to write.

It can tell you what to say, what to do, even what you’re probably afraid of.

Every tool we have now is designed to close the gap between idea and execution, and they’re extraordinary at it.

But no tool closes the gap between achievement and self-worth.

IMO That gap is as wide as it’s ever been…maybe wider.

Because when you have every advantage available and you still feel like it’s not enough, you can’t blame the tools anymore.

You’re just left standing in Hunter’s bedroom, asking the question.

So here’s what I’ve started doing.

Every night, after the kids are down and the house goes quiet, I ask myself one thing. I call it the Hunter Check.

Would I be proud of the person I was today, even if none of it had worked?

Not what I accomplished.

Not whether I hit my targets.

Just whether the person behind the performance was someone I’d be proud of.

In a world where AI can optimize every output, that question might be the most important skill we have left. The machines are getting better at everything measurable, but your job is to get better at the thing that can’t be measured.

···

I told Hunter the truth that night.

“Buddy, I’d be proud of you no matter what. Even on your worst day. But I’d also help you fix it, because being proud of someone and holding them accountable aren’t opposites. They’re the same thing.”

He thought about it for a second.

“Okay. Can I have water?”

The tiny philosopher had left the building and the tiny “Chris Voss” negotiator was back.

···

Tonight, try the Hunter Check.

One question and be honest.

And if you want to go deeper, open your AI and tell it: “I’m going to describe my day. Don’t optimize it. Help me separate what I did from who I was.”

Let the machine do what it’s good at.

Then do what only you can do.

Decide that you count, even on the days you miss.

Be like Hunter…ask the hard question, and then ask for water.

The noise inside the Hilton in Midtown NYC during Inman Connect is a specific frequency designed to liquefy the human brain.

It’s a cacophony of 3,000 real estate professionals running on nothing but espresso, ambition, and blistered feet.

The air smells like expensive cologne and people pretending they aren't reading your name tag.

Everywhere you look, there is a vendor pitching a CRM dashboard that looks like it was designed to launch the Space Shuttle.

I was standing in the middle of this chaos yesterday, talking to an agent.

He looked exhausted.

He’s showing me his current CRM on his phone.

It has pipelines and automations..and what looked like 30 different actions they could take.

"Drew, I know I need to use it," he shouted over the noise.

"But honestly? It’s incredibly overwhelming.”

He wasn't alone, I hear it all the time.

We have built tools so powerful that nobody uses them and in effect we’ve optimized ourselves into paralysis.

I had a thought. What if we made it stupid? Like stupid simple.

What if we stripped away the dashboard?

What if we stripped away the pipelines?

What if the entire interface was just... a button?

I closed my eyes and imagined it…

A screen that is one solid, calming color. Big text: “Call Lisa.” Context (fed by AI): “Ask about her kid’s soccer game.” One giant button. You press it, it dials. You hang up, you swipe right. Tinder for Prospecting…?

(Side note: My wife and I actually met on Tinder, so I am statistically biased toward swiping right on life-changing decisions.)

Now, here is where the story usually ends.

In 2022, this idea would have gone into the “Graveyard of Good Intentions” aka my Moleskine notebook.

I would have told myself, “I need a developer. I need $50k. I need six months.”

But it’s not 2022.

I walked out of the conference center and hailed an Uber to get to 55th/Park for dinner. It’s about an 18 minute ride.

I gave myself a challenge…could I build a fully functional software product before the driver hits the brakes at the restaurant?

I pulled out my phone and opened Claude + Replit. I didn’t open a code editor. I didn’t open GitHub. I started “Vibe Coding.”

Here is the secret most people miss: I don’t know Python. I don’t know Java (..thought it was just coffee)

But I know English.

And right now, English is the most powerful programming language on earth.

I didn’t try to “code.” I just directed the AI like a CEO. I gave it the vision, not the mechanics.

Here is exactly what I typed (…well kinda, I elaborated a little more)

“I want to build a CRM for people who hate CRMs. Make the background one solid, calming color. No menus. No dashboard. Just a massive button in the center that says ‘CALL LISA.’ Connect it to the phone dialer. When I hang up, I want to swipe right for the next lead. Make it addictive

The first version popped up a minute later. The swipe animation was a little clunky. I didn’t panic. I didn’t call a dev shop.

I just typed: “Make it smooth. Make it feel like Tinder.”

The AI didn’t ask for a scope change. It didn’t bill me for extra hours. It just fixed it. In 17 seconds.

We pulled up to steakhouse. I paid the driver. I stepped onto the sidewalk and looked at my phone.

Done.

A fully functional, swipe-based CRM. Total development time? 18 minutes.

I walked into Reserve Cut, sat down, ordered a drink, and slid my phone across the table to my friend Karen “Check this out,” I said. “I literally just founded a software company in the car.”

Here is why this matters to you.

This story isn't about a CRM.

It’s not about me knowing how to use Claude, or Replit, or understanding the nuances of "prompt engineering."

It’s not me wanting to build a software company…(although this idea is pretty good, scroll down to see screenshots)

It is about the fact that the gap between Imagination and Reality has evaporated.

In the old world, you needed three things to bridge that gap:

Capital, Talent, and Time.

Today, that gap is an Uber ride.

Now, let’s be real. If I were going to scale this app to 10 million users and enterprise-level security, I would eventually bring in a developer to tighten the bolts.

But to get from “Idea in my head” to “Working Product in my hand”?

That barrier is gone.

Don’t believe me? Look at this.

I actually put this live so you can see it. It has dummy data in it, but go ahead, click around. See what 18 minutes of focus looks like.

https://swipe-call-crm.replit.app

We are living in a moment where you can build anything.

• Need an event dashboard? I just helped a friend build one. We didn’t use a spreadsheet. We vibe-coded a dashboard that looks like the Netflix interface, so he can see his entire event at a glance. (Time invested: 10 minutes)

• Need a productivity calculator? Check this out. I built this yesterday. It physically counts down the dollars I’m losing every second I waste. (Time invested: 45 seconds)

Most of us walk around with a voice in our head saying, I can’t do it. I don’t have the skills to build a landing page for my CMA.

That excuse is now obsolete.

If you can describe a problem in detail, and if you can use natural language to explain what you want, the AI can build the solution.

You don’t need to be a genius.

You don’t need to learn C++.

You just need to be the human who connects the dots.

The Reputation Trap

Let me tell you a story.

The year is 2002. The location is the 3rd floor of City Center Mall in Columbus, Ohio.

If you walked by the Abercrombie & Fitch, you would have experienced two things immediately.

1. You would have smelled the “Fierce” cologne so strong it would have physically slapped you across the face.

2. You would have seen me standing at the front door.

I was the “Greeter.”

And because this was peak 2002 fashion, I was wearing a denim jacket. And jeans.

And because the laws of human decency hadn’t been invented yet, I was wearing absolutely nothing underneath the jacket.

Just denim, shirtless…and I was holding an Ohio State Nike football

Why a football inside a clothing store?

No one knew.

But I held it with the intensity of a Super Bowl quarterback.

My job was to stand there, look vaguely dehydrated, and say “What’s up” to anyone who walked through the door.

(quick side bar… I would eventually take a job at the A&F Corporate Home Office doing the exact same thing. Standing shirtless in cargo shorts for three hours a day, tossing a football to Senior VPs so they could feel like they were part of the “lifestyle.” …What a time to be alive.)

Now, despite looking like the coolest guy in the food court, I had a secret:

My net worth was approximately the price of a soft pretzel.

I had $40 to my name. But I had a singular obsession.

A white, 20GB iPod.

It was $500. It was the ultimate status symbol.

It was the portal to musical freedom…1000 songs in your pocket!

And I was broke.

So here is what I did.

I found a shady corner of the internet that promised a free iPod if you could get 15 people to sign up for “trial offers.” (www.getafreeipod.com. I wouldn’t click that if I were you)

We’re talking stamps.com. We’re talking supersmoothies.net. The dark underbelly of the web.

Most people saw a digital pyramid scheme. I saw a loophole.

I had nothing to lose.

So I went to war.

I didn’t just message my friends. I became a digital pestilence.

I messaged my Econ 201 professor. (Sorry Professor Osman)

I messaged my ex-girlfriend (sorry, Sarah).

I messaged the kid who played shortstop on my Little League team in South Jersey. (not sorry, Mike)

I had zero shame.

I had zero “brand equity.”

I just had a target.

Two weeks later? I walked back into that shift at Abercrombie, shirtless under my denim, naturally with white earbuds in, blasting “My Way” by Usher. I felt like the King of Columbus.

Why this, and why now?

I’m watching my own kids grow up now, raising two boys and a girl, and I’m trying to figure out how to teach them that specific kind of hunger.

I look back at that kid in the denim tuxedo and I realize he had something most of us lose the second we start making real money: Leverage.

He had nothing to lose. So he swung for the fences.

But you and I? We have a problem.

We built a business.

We built a “Brand.”

We have a “Public Persona.”

And suddenly, we trade Leverage for Liability.

I see brilliant entrepreneurs hesitate to send one cold email or post one raw video because: “What if I look desperate?” “What if this makes me look unpolished?”

I call this The Reputation Trap.

We convince ourselves that our reputation is a precious antique vase that must be protected behind glass.

It’s not. It’s a cage.

You need what I call a “Day 1” Reset,

If you had nothing, and you needed to make payroll by Friday, what would you do?

If you are running your own business, you don’t have the luxury of an ego.

The most dangerous number in your business isn’t zero.

It’s the number that makes you comfortable enough to stop hunting.

The only way to escape the Reputation Trap is to trick your brain.

You have to wake up every single morning with “Day 1 Energy.”

Abercrombie Drew didn’t have AI.

He had to rely on questionable websites and sheer panic. You have an advantage.

You have a machine that doesn’t have an ego, doesn’t care about “optics,” and doesn’t feel shame.

If you are feeling slow, stuck, or worried about your “brand,” but you need business NOW run this immediately.

I call it The Z.E.R.O. Protocol.

1. Z - Zero Your Assets (Mental Reset) Sit down. Close your eyes. Imagine your CRM has been wiped. Your email list is gone. Your “reputation” has been deleted. You are a ghost. You have nothing but your skills and your phone. (…preferably an iPhone..IYKYK)

2. E - Establish the “iPod” (Survival Target) Don’t say “I want to grow.” That’s vague. Abercrombie Drew didn’t want “consumer electronics.”

He wanted $500 for a white iPod. Pick a number you need to hit by Friday to “make payroll” (even if it’s just mental payroll).

3. R - Ruthless Action (The Strategy) What is the most direct path to that money? If you couldn’t post on social media and hope for likes, who would you call?

Who would you DM? Who would you text? What would you say…(hint, you can ask AI to help you make the “Exactly What to Say” scripts your own)

4. O - Oracle (The AI Leverage) This is where we cheat. We use AI to bypass your “Dignity Filter.”

We are going to ask the AI to be the broke, hungry consultant you are too afraid to be.

Your Z.E.R.O Protocol AI Prompt

Copy and paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

The Context: This prompt is designed to strip away your “Professional” filter. It forces the AI to act as a ruthless turnaround consultant who only cares about speed and cash flow, not your feelings.

The Prompt:

“I need a ‘Day 1’ Business Reset.

Here is my situation: I run a [Type of Business: e.g., Real Estate business in Austin / Boutique Marketing Agency]. I want you to ignore my current reputation, my brand, and my ego. Pretend I have 0 clients, 0 active leads, and $0 in revenue coming in this week.

My Goal: I need to generate [Insert Amount: e.g., $2,000] in cash or signed contracts in the next 72 hours to ‘make payroll.’

The Constraints:

1. No paid ads (I have no budget).

2. No ‘building a brand’ or long-term content strategies.

3. I need direct, high-leverage actions I can take TODAY.

Your Job: Act as a ruthless turnaround consultant. Give me a list of 5 specific, slightly shameless, high-probability outreach tactics I can execute right now.

For each tactic, write the exact script or message I should send. Make the scripts humble, direct, and focused on value, not ‘professional fluff.’

My Skills/Assets: [Insert a few skills: e.g., I’m great at running comps, I’m good at copywriting, I have a list of past leads I haven’t touched in a year].

Tell me what to do. Be direct.”

Why This Works

When you read the output from this prompt, you’re going to feel a pinch.

You’re going to think, “Oof, can I really send that?” You’re going to think, “Is that too direct?”

That feeling? That’s your ego dying.

That is the sound of the Reputation Trap breaking open.

If Abercrombie Drew could spam his Econ 201 professor for a click-wheel, you can send five DMs to get a client.

Strip the title.

Burn the ego.

Run the prompt

My rule is simple: Never dump your raw anxiety on a human when you can dump it on a machine first.

The machine doesn’t have feelings.

It doesn’t get hurt.

It doesn’t judge you for sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist at 11 PM on a Tuesday.

Let’s be honest for a second. The first draft of any thought we have when we are stressed is usually... hot garbage.

It’s emotional shrapnel. It’s defensive. It’s “verbal vomit.”

If I said everything I thought immediately to my business partners, or my team, or my family?

I’d be fired, canceled, and living in a van down under the tri-borough bridge.

Some people will argue that AI will make us all cold and robotic.

But then I saw a comment on my Substack yesterday that completely re-wired my brain:

And I realized: That is exactly what is happening.

I have started using AI as my “Thought Filter.”

Here is the scenario: Something bad happens. A deal falls through. Someone sends a snarky email.

My brain instantly goes into “Defcon 1” mode. I want to lash out. I want to send the angry text. I want to spiral.

In the old days, I would have dumped that spiral on the person standing next to me. Now? I dump it on the AI.

I open ChatGPT or Gemini and I type: “I am furious about X. Here is my raw, unfiltered, crazy-person reaction. Process this for me. Tell me what I’m actually afraid of, and draft a response that isn’t insane.”

I let the machine take the hit.

I let the machine organize the chaos.

By the time I’m done typing, the “charge” is gone. The venom is out of my system.

So when I finally turn around to talk to the actual human being in the room? I can be kind.

I can be present.

I can be rational.

I can be kind.

We treat AI like a productivity tool.

We should be treating it like a sanitation plant for our mental waste.

Use the machine to clear the fog.

So you can actually see the person standing in front of you.

I have spent the a majority of my career working inside Corporate America.

I’ve been in boardrooms with the biggest brands in the world.

I’ve seen the suits, the vests, and the endless slide decks. (Side note - you must check out @midtownuniform on Instagram…try it, trust me)

And I’ve noticed a pattern.

A quiet, invisible current that steers almost every decision.

It is the desperate, clawing need To Be Seen.

You know the moment.

The executive who asks a question in a meeting not to get an answer, but just to ensure everyone heard their voice. The manager who subtly takes credit for a team win.

The “Game of Thrones” politics where people fight for visibility instead of impact.

Now, let’s be fair. This is human.

I get it. I want to be seen.

You want to be seen.

We all have a primal, biological need to know that we matter. To know that our contribution counted. It’s not “evil.” It’s just ego. And we all have one.

But here is the hard truth:

Indulging that need is the opposite of leadership.

I saw the antidote yesterday. And it wasn’t in a boardroom…a virtual boardroom because who goes into an office anymore… it was on my kitchen floor.

My daughter Everly took a tumble while playing with our new puppy Koko in the kitchen. She smacked her knee hard and started crying.

My son, Hunter, didn’t look around to see if Mom or Dad was watching.

He didn’t check to see if there was an audience to applaud his “good deed.” He didn’t ask for credit.

He just dropped to his knees, hugged her, and whispered: “ You okay Sissy. I know it hurts. It’s going to be ok. It’s going to be a great day tomorrow. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

I stood there, drinking my coffee, and I thought two things while getting a little teary eyed:

1 - I’m so flipping proud of you little man.

2 - Damn. That is leadership.

And the contrast hit me like a truck.

The Executive in the boardroom wanted to BE seen. My son on the floor wanted to SEE someone else.

The “Being Seen” trap operates out of scarcity: “If I don’t claim the credit, I disappear.”

True Leadership operates out of abundance: “I have enough strength to give you some, and I don’t need a receipt.”

This is the litmus test for your culture, your team, and yourself.

Stay with me here…It’s okay to want the applause. It’s okay to want the promotion.

But when you are called to lead, whether it’s a billion-dollar division or a crying sibling on the floor, you have to make a choice.

Are you trying to reflect the light onto yourself?

Or are you trying to shine it on the person who fell down?

The amateur leader fights to be seen. The pro leader fights to see others.

Be like Hunter.

Business has enough empty suits

You know the best day of your life when you’re 13?

It’s this: you’re a professional actor, and you’re taking the Acela, the fast one, the “big deal” train, into New York City with just your mom.

And it’s Christmas.

The city is pure, unfiltered magic.

Life is a movie, and you are 100% the star.

I was riding that high, walking into a huge audition for a regular role on Guiding Light.

This wasn’t some cattle call. This was a reading with the casting director.

I wasn’t just ready. I was readyyyyy. (Said that with a Dusty Olgesby accent IYKYK)

I knew my lines cold. This was it.

I walk into the office and mom waits outside. It’s just me and the director.

I do what I always do: I try to be an actual human being. You know, build rapport. “Hey, how are you? Did you see the Knicks game last night? Unbelievable, right?”

He doesn’t smile. “Let’s get to the read, kid.”

(Okay... so, not a big Knicks guy. Got it.)

So I do my read. And it was, not to brag, one of the best I’d ever given. (Side note: These are lines from a soap opera…there’s only so much you can do with them)

When I finish, the director leans back in his chair and looks at me for a long time.

He says, “Kid, that was one of the best reads I’ve ever heard.” (My 13-year-old ego is already picking out a new blazer.) “...But I’ll never hire you.”

The air just... swoosh... gone. “What?”

He says, “You have too much shtick. I don’t care about the Knicks. I don’t care about the small talk. You’re here to come in, work, and that’s it.”

He told a 13-year-old that his talent was A+, but his personality was an F. He told me that being me…the “shtick”…was the problem.

I was crushed. I walked out, saw my mom, and just... broke.

We went down to that Cosi restaurant I’d been eyeing.

I proceeded to cry directly into a sandwich, which is not a great flavor combo, by the way.

I told her I was done, I’m going to just go be an accountant.

“This is horrible, Mom. He just told me I can’t act. I’m finished.”

My mom let me cry for a minute. And then, instead of coddling me, she coached me.

She didn’t try to fix the problem. She just reframed it.

She looked at me and asked two simple questions:

“Will this be your last audition?”

I sniffled. “...No.”

“Was this your first?”

“...No.”

She smiled. “Well, okay then.”

In that moment, she gave me the principle that has been the “breath of fresh air” for my entire adult life. It’s the reframe I still use to this day when a keynote doesn’t land, a client says no, or a launch fails.

This isn’t my first performance, and it sure as hell won’t be my last.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. It’s the ultimate tool for perspective.

It zooms you out from the painful, microscopic moment and shows you the panoramic timeline of your career.

This one “no” doesn’t define you.

It’s just a data point.

The “State Control” Playbook

Over the years, I’ve built on my mom’s lesson. I’ve realized that in high-stakes moments, you need a full toolkit to manage your state.

Here’s the 3-part system I use to this day:

1. The Mental Tool (The “First/Last” Reframe): This is the one from my mom. It’s the first line of defense. It stops the “this is the end of the world” spiral. It reminds me that this is just one rep.

2. The Physical Tool (The “Navy SEAL” Drop): The second a rejection (or any high-stress event) happens, your shoulders go to your ears.

It’s a primal fear response.

So I do this: I physically pull my shoulders down, as far away from my ears as they can possibly go. It’s a trick Navy SEALs use. It breaks the anxiety loop in your body. It sends a signal to your brain: “We are not in danger. We are in control.” (Try it right now. It’s crazy how well it works.)

3. The Emotional Tool (The “Humor” Weapon): This is the one I used to be ashamed of.

I use humor to defuse situations, to regulate my emotions, to create a little distance from the pain.

Here’s the key: As an unconscious defense mechanism, this is a bad thing. It’s just you escaping vulnerability. But when you are cognizant of it, when you know you’re doing it, it’s not a crutch.

It’s a weapon.

It becomes a high-performance tool to manage your own state, entertain others, and stay present in the conversation.

You can’t control the director.

You can’t control the client.

You can’t control the outcome.

But you can control your state.

That’s the only performance that matters.

I was 13 years old when I found the note.

It was in my mom’s nightstand, underneath a stack of medical papers.

I wasn’t snooping.

I was just... scared.

My mom had just gotten the news: Stage 4 breast cancer. Very aggressive.

And family I hadn’t seen in years were suddenly flying in from all over the country. The vibe in our house was... heavy.

I was a kid, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew what this meant.

I went into her room, I got upset, and I found it. A note, with my name on it.

It was a goodbye letter.

A letter for me to read after she passed away.

(Spoiler: that cancer didn’t end up getting her. She beat it. She was a badass. But in that moment, neither of us knew that.)

I remember my world just... shattering.

A few days later, I took the New Jersey Transit train to Philadelphia to see her at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. I’m 13.

I’m holding this apocalyptic secret of the letter.

I’m walking into a cancer ward. I’m bracing myself for the “Big Talk.” The somber, serious, “here’s what could happen” speech.

I sit on her hospital bed. The room is quiet.

I’m trying not to cry. She looks at me. I look at her.

She stops, looks at the tray of hospital food on her table, and points. “You know,” she says, “this Jell-O... it’s just... sad.”

I was confused.

And then she started laughing.

She started talking about the absurdity of the gray-looking mystery meat, the profound sadness of the Jell-O.

She knew I was terrified. She knew the stakes. She knew she might not make it.

But in that moment, she taught me the single most important lesson of my life.

She wasn’t ignoring the darkness.

She was just refusing to let it win. She was showing me that you can be terrified and you can still find the humor.

You can be in pain and you can still find the perspective.

In my grief, in my tears, she gave me the Permission to Laugh.

That principle is the baseline of my entire life.

It’s how I survived the “crazy contrast” of my childhood—being a 13-year-old professional actor on a high-pressure TV set by day, and a grieving kid in a hospital room by night.

It’s how I built an ad agency in New York City from scratch and sold it.

It’s the core of what I teach as a coach to thousands of entrepreneurs.

Because we’ve all been sold a lie about resilience.

We’ve been told it’s about “grinding.” It’s the #RiseAndGrind, “sleep when you’re dead” hustle-bro fantasy.

That’s not resilience. That’s a one-way ticket to burnout.

True resilience isn’t perseverance. It’s perspective.

Resilience isn’t how hard you can grind. It’s how fast you can find the humor in the hard.

The “grind” is just you absorbing the stress.

The “laugh” is you reframing it.

It’s the emotional jiu-jitsu that lets you take the force of a bad day and redirect it. It’s the perspective shift that moves you from a place of “lack” (this is terrible) to a place of “gratitude” (I’m still here).

It’s the principle that separates high-performers from people who just... break.

So, how do you do this when you’re in the middle of your own dumpster fire?

Here’s the playbook.

The 3-Step “Permission to Laugh” Playbook

(A practical guide to my mom’s lesson)

1. Acknowledge the Absurdity (The “Hospital Food” Step).

The next time you’re in a “this is the end of the world” spiral, I want you to stop and just... look at it.

Your biggest client just canceled. Your launch failed. Your kid just drew on the new sofa with a permanent marker.

It’s not just bad. It’s hilariously bad. It’s a scene from a sitcom.

Give yourself 10 seconds to acknowledge the sheer, comical absurdity of the situation.

2. Find the “1% Funny” (The “Sad Jell-O” Step).

You don’t have to find it all hilarious. Just find one percent. Is it the look on your own face?

Is it the fact that this happened on a Tuesday? Is it the memory of your mentor telling you this exact thing would happen?

Finding that 1% crack of humor is the first step to getting perspective. It’s the light that gets in.

3. Reframe the Story (The “Gratitude” Step).

Once you have perspective, you have power.

You can stop being the victim of the story and start being the author of it.

The “grinder” asks, “Why is this happening to me?” The “performer” asks, “How am I going to tell this story later?”

That’s the shift. That’s resilience.

The world will always be hard.

Your job isn’t to be tougher than the world.

Your job is just to find a better perspective.

In Your Corner - Drew

I’m going to tell you a simple, unchangeable, and spectacularly-awkward-at-dinner-parties fact about my life.

I will never, ever hear my dad say, “I’m proud of you, son.”

I will never hear my mom say it, either. (She passed away in 2016 after 63 surgeries)

They’re gone.

And for as long as I can remember, that’s been a “void.”

A permanent, un-fillable, parent-shaped void.

The kind of backstory that, in a superhero movie, would be the entire reason I wear a cape and fight, I don’t know, “The Silencer” or something.

For years, I treated it like a liability.

A wound. An excuse. The part where you cue the sad violin music... preferably a very small, very sad violin.

I was looking at it all wrong.

The other day, it hit me like a lightning strike.

I was watching my kids, and I felt this almost desperate need to tell my Hunter, “I’m so freaking proud of you dude.”

I tell him every single day. I tell all my kids.

Then, hours later, I was on a coaching call, and I found myself pouring everything I had into an entrepreneur, being the champion they needed, and telling them, “What you’re doing is incredible. I’m proud of the work you’re putting in.”

And I suddenly realized: The void isn’t a void. The void is the fuel.

The reason I’m so obsessed with being a present father... The reason I am so driven to be that voice of validation for others... ...is precisely because I never got it myself.

My greatest wound is not my weakness. It is the source of my greatest gift.

The thing I needed most and never received is the one thing I am now uniquely, divinely qualified to give to the world.

That void isn’t a void.

It’s the entire engine for my mission. Which, frankly, is a way better plot twist than becoming a brooding superhero.

Your wound isn’t your excuse. Your wound is your ‘why’.

So many of us are walking around, defined by what we didn’t get.

The love.

The support.

The validation.

The “I’m proud of you.”

We let that lack define us. We let it become the reason we can’t.

The human-powered move?

It’s to look that void right in the face and decide to become the one thing the world needs most: The person who fills it for others.

You didn’t get validation? Good.

Go become the greatest validator of talent the world has ever seen.

You didn’t feel seen? Perfect.

Make it your life’s work to make other people feel seen.

You didn’t have a father to cheer you on?

Go be the father you always needed—not just for your kids, but for every person you’re called to lead.

That void in my life?

It’s not a void at all. It’s a perfectly-shaped container for my purpose.

I will never hear those words. And because of that... my kids will hear them every single day. The people I serve will feel it in every single call.

My pain didn’t break me. It built me. And it’s building my legacy.

Stop trying to fill your void.

Start using it as fuel.