Do you own the giga-stocks, or don't you?

Not "do you have a job." Not "do you make a good salary." Not "did you go to college." Not "are you a hard worker." Those used to be the markers, and for most of the 20th century they were close enough to the truth. Show up, work hard, earn a paycheck, save a little, retire okay. The bargain wasn't generous, but it was reliable enough that most working people could plan around it.

That bargain has been quietly broken for forty-five years. The SpaceX IPO is the moment it stops being deniable, because the math at the top has gotten so big that no amount of headline-number reassurance can paper over it anymore.

Let me put two numbers next to each other.

A bedside nurse on a hospital ward in upstate New York, three years into her career, earning $68,000 a year. A working professional. Educated, credentialed, skilled, exhausted, doing one of the hardest and most important jobs in the country. By any historical measure of working life, she is doing the things you're supposed to do.

Elon Musk, on the day SpaceX lists, holding equity worth somewhere between $735 billion and $1 trillion. Adding his Tesla stake on top of that, he is on track to become the first human being worth a trillion dollars. The SpaceX prospectus has him on a path that goes higher than that. His performance tranches vest in increments all the way up to a $7.5 trillion company valuation.

The nurse and Musk are not on the same gradient. They are not even running the same race. He is wealthy because of what he owns. She is comfortable because of what she earns. Those are two different machines, and only one of them compounds.

The divide is real. The math is unsparing. Pretending otherwise has helped nobody. What earning means now. What owning means now. Who was already inside the building before the IPO was announced. What governance looks like when one man holds 85% of the votes in a $2 trillion company. What the numbers look like for the people you and I actually know.

The wealth gate has moved. It used to be income. It is now ownership of the assets that compound. Understand which side of that line you're on, and stop measuring yourself by the wrong yardstick.

This is going to take a while. There's a lot to unpack, and shortcuts won't help.

Earning Versus Owning

The most important sentence in this whole post: earning and owning are not on the same gradient, and they haven't been for a long time.

A salary, even a good one, is a paycheck. You exchange your time for money. The money pays for your life right now, this month, this year. If you save aggressively, a portion goes into accounts that may grow. The rate at which they grow is determined by markets you don't control, and the absolute amounts you can save are bounded by what's left after housing, healthcare, food, transport, taxes, childcare, and everything else has been paid for. For most working professionals in this country, what's left isn't much, no matter how much they earn on paper.

A stake in a $2 trillion company is a different category of thing entirely. It generates wealth on its own, while you sleep, while you do nothing, while you are also drawing a salary somewhere else. Compound growth on a sufficiently large equity position produces, in absolute dollars, more money in a year than most workers will see in a lifetime. That isn't an opinion. It's arithmetic.

Imagine a typical compounding rate on equity of about 8% per year, give or take. On Musk's expected post-IPO stake of about $1 trillion, that's roughly $80 billion of wealth generated in a single year, without him doing anything. Eighty billion. From sitting still.

Compare that to the bedside nurse from the opening of this post. At $68,000 a year, working forty-five years from age twenty-two to age sixty-seven, without ever taking a year off, with no raises beyond inflation, she will earn about $3 million across her entire working life. Three million dollars. Across her entire life.

Musk's passively compounding stake will produce that much new wealth in approximately twenty minutes.

This isn't a defect of the nurse's choices. She made all the right choices. Education, credential, profession, work ethic, the lot. The system she's operating in just doesn't reward those choices the way it rewards what Musk is doing, and the gap between the two reward systems has become so wide that no amount of hustle on the working side can possibly close it.

This is what people mean, or what they should mean, when they say "the rich get richer." They don't mean the rich have more money. They mean the rich own the machines that produce money on their own, and the rest of us don't.

What "The People We Actually Know" Earn

One pattern I see constantly in this conversation: the use of national median wages to make the working middle class sound more comfortable than they actually are.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median wage for all US workers was about $49,500 in 2024. That number includes everybody. Lawyers, software engineers, hedge fund analysts, surgeons, professors. Half of all workers in this country earn under that figure. Many of them earn substantially under it.

Registered nurses have a national median of $93,600, which sounds great until you look at the distribution. The bottom 10% of RNs earn under $66,030. Nurses in their first year typically earn around $63,000. The headline number is being pulled upward by California specialty nurses, by metro hospital systems with strong unions, by nurse practitioners, by traveling nurses on premium contracts. The bedside RN you actually know, in a smaller city, three years in, is somewhere in the $55,000 to $75,000 range. The headline doesn't tell you that.

Licensed practical and vocational nurses, LPNs and LVNs, who do enormous amounts of the actual hands-on care in this country, have a national median of $62,340. Healthcare support occupations, which includes the home health aides, the personal care aides, the medical assistants, the people who do the bathing and the dressing and the carrying and the cleaning, have a median annual wage of $37,180. Thirty-seven thousand dollars.

Hold those numbers next to a $1 trillion Musk stake for a moment. The $37,180 healthcare aide doing some of the most physically and emotionally demanding work in the country earns, in a year, what Musk's stake generates in passive compound growth in roughly fourteen seconds.

I am being deliberately granular about this because the conversation always loses something when it stays at the level of averages. The actual people we know, the ones doing the work that keeps daily life functioning, are not earning $93,600 nurse-medians. They are earning $50,000s and $60,000s. The bottom of the healthcare workforce is earning $37,000. School support staff are earning less than that. Retail workers, food service workers, warehouse workers, the entire frontline of the consumer economy, are earning less than that. The Starbucks median we saw in the previous post was $14,674.

These are not unskilled people. These are not lazy people. These are people doing essential work for compensation that has, in real terms, gone almost nowhere for forty-five years, while the equity owners at the top of the same companies they work for have seen their wealth multiply.

That isn't an accident, and it isn't a failure of the workers. It is exactly what a system optimized for ownership instead of work was designed to produce.

Who Was Already Inside The Building

When SpaceX lists on June 12, the people getting rich are not the retail investors buying their first shares on day one. The people getting rich are the people who already owned the company at fractions of its IPO price, sometimes at less than one percent of it.

Look at the cap table.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, led a $900 million round into SpaceX in 2015. At an early-stage valuation. Eleven years later, that stake is worth, conservatively, something north of $120 billion. Eleven years of pure equity compounding, for an institution that already had more cash than it knew what to do with.

Fidelity is in. Founders Fund is in. Sequoia Capital is in. Andreessen Horowitz is in. T. Rowe Price is in. Baillie Gifford is in. Valor Equity Partners, whose CEO sits on the SpaceX board, holds 7.3% of the Class A shares pre-IPO. Various sovereign wealth funds are in. After the xAI merger in February 2026, Nvidia and the Qatar Investment Authority got positions too. BlackRock is reportedly in talks to anchor up to $10 billion of the IPO itself, meaning it will be sitting on the deal before the retail market opens.

Every one of these holders bought in at a valuation a small fraction of where SpaceX will list. By the time SPCX hits the Nasdaq at $1.75 trillion, every one of those positions has multiplied many times over. The compounding has happened, in the private market, where ordinary investors couldn't access it.

This is what private market capitalism looks like in 2026, and it is the most important wealth-flow story of our era. The big money is no longer made in the public markets where everyone can participate. It is made in the private markets, in the years before a company lists, when valuations are growing geometrically and only accredited investors and institutional capital can buy in. By the time a company hits the public market, the easy years of growth have largely been captured by the people who were already inside. Retail investors get to buy the stock at whatever price reflects all that prior growth, and from there their returns are bounded by what the company does next.

This is technically legal. It is also a structural mechanism for ensuring that the wealthiest investors capture the largest share of value creation, and that ordinary investors get to participate only at the back end of the curve, where returns are normalized.

There are real arguments for why private market regulation matters, why the SEC has rules about who can invest where, why "accredited investor" status is gatekept by net worth. Some of those arguments are about consumer protection. Many of them are not. The cumulative effect, whatever the intent, is a wealth-creation pipeline that funnels the largest returns to people who were already rich enough to access it.

The 30% Retail Allocation, And What It Actually Means

There is a counter-fact in the deal that cuts the other way. It's the one detail that gets cited every time someone argues that the wealth divide isn't really what it looks like, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

SpaceX has reportedly reserved up to 30% of the IPO shares for retail investors. Across seven countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea. This was first reported by Reuters in late March 2026, and subsequently confirmed by The Motley Fool, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Euronews, Benzinga, and The Bull. SpaceX's chief financial officer Bret Johnsen reportedly framed the decision to the company's 21-bank syndicate as a deliberate departure from standard practice, recognising long-time supporters of SpaceX and Musk personally. Distribution will run through platforms ordinary people actually use, including Robinhood and SoFi, alongside the retail arms of Bank of America, Morgan Stanley's E*Trade, UBS, and Citi.

That number, 30%, is roughly three times the typical retail allocation in a major US listing. Fidelity, which has tracked IPO allocations for decades, puts the historical institutional-to-retail split across all IPOs at 90/10. SpaceX is reportedly going 70/30. It is the largest deliberate opening of a mega-IPO to ordinary investors in the modern era.

So on the face of it, here's a working person's chance to get in on the trillion-dollar machine. The argument I've been making, that the wealth creation happened in private markets and retail gets left holding the bag, looks like it has just been weakened by the most important deal in the world.

Look closer, because that isn't actually what's happening.

Access is not the same as wealth creation. Retail investors buying SpaceX on June 12 are not getting in early. They are getting in at $1.75 trillion. The compounding from $50 billion to $1.75 trillion already happened, in the private market, between roughly 2015 and 2026. Alphabet captured it. Fidelity captured it. Sequoia, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, the sovereign wealth funds, Valor Equity Partners, all captured it. By the time you can click "buy" on the morning of the listing, more than 30x of equity growth has already been captured by the people who were inside the building before the doors opened.

A working lawyer and CPA named Chad Cummings put this more bluntly than I could, quoted in a Yahoo Finance piece this month. He said retail investors clicking "buy" on the morning SpaceX opens "are not 'early' — they are the exit strategy for the venture capital and private equity shares, not to mention shares held by Musk himself and other employees." That's not a fringe take. That's how the institutional world describes what's happening, when the cameras are off.

The valuation tells you who the deal is designed for. At $1.75 trillion, SpaceX is listing at roughly 93 times trailing sales, according to analysis in Investing.com. For comparison, the S&P 500 trades at about 3 times sales. Nvidia, the AI poster child everyone has heard of, trades at around 22 times sales. CNBC reported analysts as comparing the multiple unfavorably to a plate of dauphinoise potatoes, which I include for color and because the underlying point is correct. A deal priced at this multiple is not designed to deliver compound returns to the next generation of holders. It is designed to provide liquidity to the previous generation of holders.

Day-one pops do not equal generational wealth. If the stock pops 20 or 30 percent on its first day of trading, retail buyers who got their allocation will book a tidy short-term gain. That isn't nothing, and I won't pretend it is. But a $5,000 retail allocation that gains 30% in a week is $1,500. The Alphabet position that has gone from roughly $900 million in 2015 to a reported $120 billion at the IPO valuation has gained roughly $119 billion. Those two numbers are not on the same gradient. The retail story is a tip. The pre-IPO story is the meal.

Watch where the money flows after listing. Benzinga reported that ETF inclusion rules will trigger an estimated $27 billion of forced buying when SPCX gets added to major indices in the months after listing. That is the actual liquidity event. Index funds, pension funds, and ETFs are required by their mandates to buy any newly listed stock that hits inclusion thresholds, and they buy at whatever the market price happens to be. Retail's 30% is real, but it sits next to a wall of mandatory institutional buying that dwarfs it. The structural beneficiaries of the listing are the people who own the company before the doors open, and the institutional vehicles that have to buy it after. Retail sits between those two flows, contributing some price discovery and absorbing some of the float, while the real money moves around them.

The line here is specific. The 30% retail allocation is, in absolute terms, a good thing. It is more access than retail investors have ever had in a mega-IPO. Some people who participate will make money on it. If you have allocation through your broker and you want to take a small position knowingly, with money you can afford to have go to zero, do it eyes-open and good luck.

What it doesn't change is the deeper picture this whole series has been pointing at. The wealth machine of the modern American economy operates in private markets, on multi-year timescales, with access gated by accredited-investor rules, network membership, and institutional capital. When a company finally hits the public market, the largest gains have already been booked. Retail is invited at the end, not the beginning.

The 30% allocation isn't a contradiction of the divide. It's an illustration of it.

One Man, Half The Company, All The Votes

The SpaceX governance structure matters here, because it is the new norm and the regular norm is not coming back.

Elon Musk, per the S-1, holds around 50% of SpaceX equity outright. He controls 85.1% of the voting power, through a dual-class share structure in which the Class B shares he holds get ten votes each, versus one vote for the Class A shares that public investors will buy. The filing puts it explicitly. "Mr. Musk will have the power to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval, including election of all our directors."

Translation: even after going public, SpaceX is run as a sole proprietorship at the governance layer. Public investors are buying economic exposure to the company without any meaningful say in how it is run.

On top of his existing stake, Musk was granted, in January 2026, an additional performance package of 1 billion Class B shares. Those vest in fifteen tranches of 66,666,665 shares each, with each tranche unlocking when SpaceX hits the next $500 billion valuation milestone, all the way up to $7.5 trillion. They also require, as a vesting condition, that SpaceX "establish a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants."

Read those conditions back to yourself. $7.5 trillion. Mars colony. One million people. These are the numbers and conditions actually written into the public filing of a company about to be valued at $1.75 trillion on day one. This isn't speculative journalism. This is what the company is asking investors to accept as the structural rewards of its founder.

The Class B dual-class structure isn't unique to SpaceX. Meta has one. Alphabet has one. Many recent tech IPOs do. The structure exists because founders want to retain control after listing, and the markets have, by and large, accepted the deal. Public investors get to be along for the ride. They don't get to vote on the course.

This is, on its own, a structural concentration of wealth and power. One man, half the equity, 85% of the votes, on track to be worth a trillion dollars at minimum, with stock packages stacked behind that going into the multi-trillions. Whatever one thinks about Musk specifically, the architecture of his shareholding is the new model for how the largest companies in the world will be controlled.

What "Working Class" Means Now

One thing the political conversation in this country has been incapable of catching up to.

"Working class" has historically meant something specific. Manual labor. Hourly wages. Without a college degree. In factories or trades or transport or service. The shape of working-class life was strongly identified with a particular kind of job and a particular educational profile.

That definition is forty years out of date. The reality of working-class life in 2026, in the United States, includes the nurse making $68,000. It includes the schoolteacher making $58,000. It includes the small business owner doing $200,000 in annual revenue but taking home half of that and absorbing all the risk. It includes the IT support tech making $74,000. It includes the police officer, the firefighter, the social worker, the early-career attorney making $85,000 with $200,000 in student loans. It includes the graphic designer freelancing from home and never quite making it past month-to-month. It includes you, possibly, if you're reading this and feeling some of it land.

The dividing line is no longer manual versus white-collar. It is owner versus worker. If your wealth is overwhelmingly composed of what you earn, and what you can save, and modest equity through a 401(k), you are on the working side of the line. It doesn't matter what your job is called, what degree you have, what title sits on your business card. The new working class includes a vast swath of educated, professional, salaried people who used to think of themselves as middle class or even upper-middle class, and who increasingly cannot make the basic arithmetic of life add up the way their parents could.

About 62% of Americans report owning some stock, mostly through retirement accounts. That sounds reassuring until you look at the distribution. The top 10% of US households own roughly 93% of all stock market wealth. The bottom 50% owns about 1% of it. So while "I have a 401(k)" feels like ownership, the scale of that ownership for the median household is so small relative to the top that it functions more like a participation token than a meaningful stake.

This is what working class looks like now. The label has shifted. The conversation hasn't caught up.

Why This Matters

There are two honest things to say at this point, and they don't contradict each other.

The first is that this is not a problem you can fix at the kitchen table. The forces pushing the divide wider are macro. Tax policy. Share structures. Central bank decisions. Who gets to participate in private markets before companies list. What gets counted as income versus capital gains. How the SEC writes accredited investor rules. Whether Section 162(m) limits on deductible executive compensation actually constrain anything in practice. Pretending any of this can be solved with a personal finance hack is the kind of advice that mostly serves the person giving it, not the person hearing it. I am not going to do that.

The second thing is that knowing which game is being played is still better than not knowing. You can spend the next ten years working hard, saving prudently, earning a respectable income, doing everything you are supposed to do, and never close the gap, because you were running the salary race while the wealth race was happening somewhere else entirely. Understanding that isn't despair. It's clarity. It tells you what to push back on politically. It tells you what to advocate for. It tells you what to actually expect from the systems that govern your money, your retirement, your kids' futures.

It also stops you from blaming yourself for the gap that has been engineered into the system. There is a particular brand of personal responsibility discourse that takes the structural problems we've been describing and turns them back on the individual. "If only you had budgeted better." "If only you had bought Tesla in 2014." "If only you had taken more risk." That framing serves exactly one purpose, which is to keep the conversation focused on individual failings instead of on the architecture of who gets to own what, when, and how.

This is also why so much of the public conversation about the economy feels weirdly disconnected from how most people actually live. People are told the economy is strong because GDP is up. They are told wages are growing because some average number ticked higher. They are not told that the assets which produce real wealth are now concentrated more tightly than at any point on the record. They are not told that the largest single units of value creation are now privately held companies controlled by individual founders. They live the divide and get told it doesn't exist. After a while, that gap between what's said and what's true becomes its own kind of damage. It produces a politics of resentment that doesn't quite know what it's resentful of, because the actual mechanism has been kept out of the headlines.

The job of writing about this honestly is to name the mechanism. So.

The mechanism is asset ownership. The asset class is equity in the largest companies in the world. The gatekeeping is private markets, dual-class share structures, accredited investor rules, capital gains tax treatment, and the buyback machine that funnels corporate profits to the people who already own the equity. The result is a tiny fraction of the population accumulating wealth at a rate the rest of the population cannot mathematically catch.

That is the divide. Everything else is decoration.

Where To Start

A few things you can actually do here, even knowing the limits.

Own equity where you can. Through index funds. Through retirement accounts. Through whatever pre-tax vehicles your employer offers. It does not close the gap. It does keep you from being entirely on the wrong side of compound growth in public markets, which is meaningfully better than nothing. If your employer offers a 401(k) match and you aren't capturing the full match, fix that this week. That is the easiest free money most working professionals will ever encounter.

Read every headline number with one eye closed. When somebody quotes you GDP, ask about distribution. When somebody quotes you average wages, ask about median. When somebody quotes you a stock market high, ask who owns the stock. The questions don't change the answers. They stop you from being misled by the framing.

Be honest about your political agency, which is real but bounded. You cannot rewrite tax policy by yourself. You can vote for people who would. You can write to your elected officials with specifics. You can support organizations that do the actual policy work, like the Economic Policy Institute or the Institute for Policy Studies. You can be the person in the conversation who knows the actual numbers when somebody starts repeating the headline. None of these alone changes anything. All of them together is what social change has always looked like.

Stop measuring yourself by the wrong yardstick. If you are working hard and feel like you're falling behind despite doing everything right, you are not crazy and you are not failing. You are operating inside a system that has been carefully arranged, for forty-five years, to ensure that working hard and earning a good salary is no longer enough. Recognizing that is not defeatism. It's the precondition for any honest conversation about what to do next.

And know what the divide actually is, in this country, in 2026. It is not rich versus poor in the old sense. It is shareholders of the giga-companies versus everyone else. The bedside nurse and the freelance designer and the small business owner and the schoolteacher and the IT tech are all on the same side of that line, even though they used to think of themselves as different classes. We are now all the working class. The earlier we recognize that, and the earlier we stop letting outdated labels divide us, the sooner the conversation that might actually change something can begin.

That's the macro picture, in as much detail as I can fit into a piece you'll actually read. Whatever else AI does, whatever else the next decade brings, the divide is the through-line. Notice it. Name it accurately. Don't let anybody convince you the headline number is the whole story.

In the coming weeks, the practical other half. Five shorter pieces on the tool that's accelerating all of this, and how to work with it without getting burned. The world is what it is. There is still work to do inside it, and there is still a way to do that work well.

If either of these last two pieces have landed, or if any of it has made you angry, reply and tell me. I read every one.

Best

Jono

A single company is about to go public at a valuation between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion. One company. Not a country. Not a continent. A rocket-and-satellite-and-AI business that started in a Los Angeles warehouse in 2002 with one founder and $100 million of PayPal money.

That company, SpaceX, filed its IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on May 20, 2026. It plans to begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX as soon as June 12. The man who owns most of it, Elon Musk, holds around half the equity outright and controls 85.1% of the votes through a class of super-voting shares. Inside the company's own filing, his future stock awards vest in tranches all the way up to a $7.5 trillion valuation milestone. Polymarket and Kalshi, the prediction markets, both put his odds of becoming the world's first trillionaire before 2027 at over 70%.

Now hold that next to a number you'll still hear quoted on every business news segment, every week, as if it tells you something useful about the country. "GDP grew 2.4% last quarter." "The economy is strong." "The recovery continues."

Those numbers and that company are not telling the same story. They aren't even speaking the same language. And the longer we keep pretending they are, the more useful the lie becomes to the people it benefits.

What follows is the detail. What GDP actually is, what it measures, where it came from, why it became the headline number for everything, and why it has now stopped describing the world it was built for. Once you see what GDP measures and what it hides, the headline reads differently. Different questions surface, about the economy you and I and everyone we know actually live in.

Today's Advice

Stop using GDP as if it tells you something about people. It doesn't, and at this scale it actively hides what's happening. When someone quotes it to you, hear what they are leaving out, every single time.

This is going to take a minute. Stay with me.

What GDP Actually Measures

Gross Domestic Product is the total dollar value of everything produced inside a country in a year. Goods, services, the lot. It was developed in the 1930s by an economist named Simon Kuznets at the request of the US Congress, in the wake of the Great Depression. Congress wanted a single number that would tell them how big the economy was, how fast it was growing or shrinking, and whether their policies were working. Kuznets gave them one.

He also warned them, in the same report, that it was a terrible measure of how a country was actually doing. He wrote, almost in the same breath as he handed them the number, that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income."

He spent the next forty years of his career trying to get policymakers and the public to stop using it the way they were using it. They didn't listen. They had a single number now, and a single number is what political coverage and economic punditry love above all other things.

The number does exactly one thing, and it does it pretty well. It tells you the size of the pie. It says absolutely nothing about who eats it.

A country can have a soaring GDP and a population sliding backwards at the same time, and the headline number won't blink. A country can have all of its growth landing in the bank accounts of a few hundred families and GDP will report that as a strong year. A country can hollow out its middle class, export its manufacturing, watch its workers' real wages stagnate for forty years, and GDP will go up the entire time, because the dollar value of the things produced is still growing, regardless of who ends up holding those dollars.

In 2009, the French government commissioned a high-level commission to look at this exact problem. It was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics. The other members included Amartya Sen, also a Nobel laureate, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. They produced a report called Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up. The title is doing a lot of the work. Their conclusion, stated as plainly as economists ever state anything, was that GDP is "not wrong as such" but is "wrongly used," and that countries that continue to use it as a proxy for societal wellbeing will keep making policy decisions that look good on the headline number and feel disastrous on the ground.

That report came out seventeen years ago. The world's economists know about the GDP problem. The world's politicians and business reporters keep quoting it anyway. There is a reason for that, and it isn't an oversight.

The Split That Started In 1979

For thirty years after World War Two, something remarkable happened in the American economy. When the productivity of the typical American worker went up, the pay of that same worker went up roughly in step. The pie grew, and the slice grew with it.

This was so consistent, so reliable, that economists at the time treated it as a kind of natural law of capitalism. As workers got better at producing things, they got more money for producing them.

Then, starting in 1979, those two lines came apart. And they never went back.

The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that has tracked this for decades, publishes the numbers every year, and they don't move much because they don't have to. Between 1979 and 2019, productivity in the United States grew 59.7%. The pay of the median American worker, over the same forty years, grew 15.8%. Productivity grew 3.5 times faster than pay. If median compensation had simply kept pace with productivity over that period, EPI calculates, the typical worker would be making roughly $9 more per hour today than they actually do.

That gap, between what you produce and what you get paid, didn't open by accident. EPI is unsparing about this. They attribute the divergence to a specific era of policy choices, most of them clustering between 1979 and the early 1990s. The federal minimum wage was allowed to erode against inflation. Antitrust enforcement weakened. Unions were systematically undercut. Industries were deregulated. Globalization was pursued on terms set by capital, not labor. Tax rates at the top were slashed. Macroeconomic policy began to tolerate higher unemployment to keep inflation low. Wage theft enforcement collapsed.

You will sometimes hear this called the Reagan era. That's a defensible shorthand for the broader policy direction, though the inflection point itself predates Reagan's January 1981 inauguration by about eighteen months. The 1979 break is real and well-documented in the data. The decade that followed accelerated it. Bill Clinton's administration didn't reverse it. George W. Bush extended it. Obama largely held the line. Trump, in his first term, accelerated the part that benefits capital. Whoever happens to be in office, the trajectory has held for forty-five years.

So when GDP grew during that period, and it grew significantly, where did the gains actually land?

They landed in the hands of the people who own assets, particularly equity in publicly traded companies. They did not land in wages.

CEO Pay Tells The Same Story In One Number

If you want the wage divergence collapsed into a single comparison, this is the cleanest one I know. Between 1978 and 2023, realized CEO compensation at the top 350 US firms grew 1,085%. Median worker compensation, over the same period, grew 24%.

Read those numbers again. CEO pay grew more than a thousand percent. Worker pay grew a quarter of one percent for every year. Forty-five years of work.

The CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965 was 21 to 1. By 2023, the ratio at S&P 500 companies was 290 to 1, according to EPI. The AFL-CIO's 2024 Executive Paywatch report put the ratio at 268 to 1 using a slightly different methodology, and their 2025 report updated it to 285 to 1 for S&P 500 companies in 2024. The median S&P 500 employee, by AFL-CIO's calculation, would have to start working in the year 1740 to earn what the average S&P 500 CEO took home in a single year of 2024.

At some companies it is more grotesque than that. The Institute for Policy Studies, in its 2025 Executive Excess report, tracked the 100 lowest-paying companies in the S&P 500 specifically. The average CEO-to-worker ratio at those firms was 632 to 1 in 2024, up from 560 to 1 just five years earlier. Starbucks topped the list at 6,666 to 1. The Starbucks CEO took home $95.8 million in 2024. The median Starbucks employee earned $14,674. That isn't a number from a developing country. That's the United States. That's the company you got your coffee from this morning.

Tesla's board has proposed a pay package for Elon Musk valued at up to $1 trillion over the next ten years. One trillion dollars. To one person. For running a company.

CEO pay is, in itself, a relatively small slice of total national wealth. You could confiscate every dollar of S&P 500 executive compensation and it wouldn't close the bottom 50% gap. The reason it matters isn't the dollar volume. It's what the ratio reveals about who the entire system is now built to reward. The CEO pay number is the canary. Whatever it is doing, the broader divergence is doing more of.

One Company, Twenty-Eight Trillion Dollars

Now back to SpaceX, because the IPO sharpens all of this to a single point.

In its S-1 filing on May 20, the company stated, in its own words, that it has "identified the largest actionable total addressable market in human history." It then put a number on that market. $28.5 trillion. The breakdown, also in the filing: $370 billion in space-enabled solutions. $1.6 trillion in connectivity, anchored by Starlink. $2.4 trillion in AI data centers in orbit. $760 billion in future user subscriptions. $600 billion in digital advertising. $22.7 trillion in what the company calls "enterprise applications."

The total US gross domestic product, for all of 2024, was approximately $29 trillion. One company, in its IPO prospectus, has claimed an addressable market roughly the size of the entire American economy. Not as a long-shot aspiration. As the basis on which it is asking public investors to buy its shares.

Hold the IPO target ($1.75 to $2 trillion) next to a few real countries' annual economic output. Spain produces roughly $1.7 trillion of goods and services a year. Mexico produces about $1.85 trillion. The Netherlands produces around $1.2 trillion. Saudi Arabia produces just over $1.2 trillion. We have crossed into a place where a single private business, on its first trading day, will be worth more than the annual economic output of every G20 country except a handful at the top.

GDP was not built to measure this. It was designed in the 1930s by Simon Kuznets to compare national productive capacities in a world where the largest companies were a small fraction of the economies they sat inside. By 1953, at the peak of its postwar dominance, General Motors accounted for around 3% of US GDP. SpaceX, on its first trading day, will be worth roughly 6 to 7% of the entire US economy, all by itself.

When the largest single units of economic value stop being countries and start being privately controlled companies, you cannot describe what's happening with a country-level number. The unit of measurement is wrong. It would be like trying to measure ocean depth with a yardstick. You can put a number on what you can reach, but you are not measuring what you think you are measuring.

Where The Gains Actually Went

GDP doesn't tell you any of this.

US GDP has roughly tripled since 1989, in real terms. Over the same period, the share of US household wealth owned by the richest 1% rose from 22.8% to 30.8%. The bottom 50%, all 66 million households of them, ended 2024 holding 2.5% of total US wealth between them. The richest 0.1%, about 130,000 households, quintupled their wealth from $4.45 trillion to $22.48 trillion in those thirty-five years. The 905 billionaires the United States now contains hold a combined $7.8 trillion.

You can stack those numbers however you want. Top 10% owns 70% of everything. Top 1% owns 31%. Bottom 50% owns 2.5%. Pick the cut. The pattern is the same regardless. Wealth in this country has concentrated, at a pace and to a degree not seen in a century, while GDP marched cheerfully upward, telling the public a story of growth that was, in any real sense, only happening for the people at the top.

And we haven't even talked about where the money the workers didn't get went. That's the next part.

Stock Buybacks: A Trillion Dollars A Year

When a company has more profit than it knows what to do with, there are a few things it can do. Raise wages. Invest in research. Lower prices for customers. Hire more people. Build new facilities. Or, increasingly, it can use that money to buy its own shares back from the market, reducing the share count, mechanically increasing the value of every remaining share, and rewarding the people who already own them.

The fourth option, the buyback, used to carry real legal risk. The Securities and Exchange Commission treated it as potentially manipulative under its anti-fraud rules until November 1982, when SEC Rule 10b-18 was adopted and gave companies a safe harbor to repurchase their own shares without triggering manipulation liability, provided they followed certain conditions on timing, price, and volume. The timing of that change, alongside everything else we've talked about, is not a coincidence.

In 2024, S&P 500 companies spent $942.5 billion on stock buybacks. That was a record. In 2023, they spent $795.2 billion. In 2022, they hit $922.7 billion. In 2021, $881.7 billion. Three of the four most recent years, US public companies have spent close to a trillion dollars apiece buying back their own shares.

Apple, by itself, spent $104.2 billion on dividends and buybacks in 2024. Up 24% from the previous year. The combined buyback and dividend total returned to shareholders in 2024 was $1.572 trillion. Trillion. From the S&P 500 alone.

A trillion and a half dollars a year, every year, going directly to the people who own the equity, instead of to the people who do the work, instead of to research, instead of to lower prices, instead of to expanded operations. And every year, the GDP number ticks upward in a way that obscures completely where that money is actually flowing.

The buyback machine is the most efficient mechanism for upward wealth transfer ever invented. It is technically legal, technically efficient, and it has worked exactly as designed for forty-three years.

Why This Matters

There is an argument you'll hear at this point, usually from people who have been comfortable for a long time, that all of this concentration is a feature rather than a bug. That the rich getting richer is the price of dynamism. That as long as the absolute floor for the poorest is rising, the relative gap doesn't matter. That envy is unattractive and progress is unstoppable and on it goes.

There's a kernel of truth in it. Absolute poverty in the United States is, by most measures, lower than it was sixty years ago. The poor of 2026 have access to communications technology and medical capacity that the rich of 1960 could not have purchased at any price. That is real, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But the rest of the argument falls apart on contact with the data. The American floor has not actually risen for the median worker since 1979. The productivity-pay gap, the wealth-share data, the stock-ownership concentration, the buyback flows, all of it tells the same story. The poor are not appreciably better off in real terms than their parents were. The middle has fallen behind in any meaningful comparison. Healthcare costs, education costs, and housing costs have grown faster than wages for forty-five years, and any honest accounting of "you're better off now" has to grapple with that.

The deeper problem is this. When wealth concentrates this tightly, it stops being just wealth. It becomes political power, regulatory capture, control over the institutions that decide whose interests the economy serves next. A small number of people, owning a vastly disproportionate share of the country's productive capacity, will spend some of that capacity ensuring the rules don't change. That isn't conspiracy. It's just what people with power do, in every century, in every country. They preserve the conditions that made them powerful.

GDP keeps that conversation off the table. It says the country is doing fine. It doesn't ask who "the country" is.

This is what economists and politicians have actually been doing for forty years when they quote GDP at you. They are not lying, technically. They are pointing at a real number. But they are pointing at the one number, out of all the available numbers, that is structurally incapable of telling you the story you most need to hear. They are doing it on purpose, or out of habit, or because they were trained that way, or because the people who pay their salaries prefer the conversation that GDP enables. The motive varies. The effect is consistent.

A single number cannot describe a complex economy. The longer we pretend it can, the longer the people who benefit from the gap between the headline and the reality get to keep operating in the dark.

Where To Start

A few things you can actually do with all of this. Not to fix it on your own, because you can't. To see past the headline.

When someone quotes you GDP, ask the next question. What did median household income do over the same period? What did wages do compared to productivity? What did wealth concentration do? What did stock ownership do? Every single one of those follow-up numbers is publicly available. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes wage data. The Federal Reserve publishes the Distributional Financial Accounts, which break wealth ownership down by percentile in granular detail. The Economic Policy Institute publishes the wage-productivity gap every year. None of these require an economics degree to read. All of them tell a fuller story than the GDP headline ever will.

Learn the actual numbers. Top 1% owns 30.8% of US wealth. Bottom 50% owns 2.5%. Median full-time worker wage was about $49,500 in 2024. CEO-to-worker ratio at S&P 500 firms is around 285 to 1. Stock buybacks ran at $942 billion last year. These are not hard to memorize. They are easy to deploy in conversation. Most people you talk to about this will have never seen a single one of them.

Be skeptical of every "the economy is doing well" claim that doesn't say which economy and whose. Every claim of that shape is selecting one number and ignoring ten others. The habit to hold yourself to from here on is asking which number, and whose share, before you accept any sentence about how things are going.

And vote, and argue, and push back on this with full information. The structures that produced a $1.75 trillion private company alongside 66 million households scraping at 2.5% of national wealth are not natural laws. They were built by policy choices, mostly in the last forty-five years, mostly starting in 1979. Policy choices can be remade. They probably won't be remade quickly. They certainly won't be remade by any one person. But the conversation starts with people actually seeing what's happening, in plain numbers, without the GDP-headline blanket thrown over the top.

The era of one number describing the health of an economy is over. It probably should have ended decades ago, when Stiglitz's commission wrote its report. SpaceX is just the moment that made it impossible to keep pretending. A single company is about to be worth almost as much as the entire annual output of Spain. That isn't a statistic about a great company. It's a statistic about a system that has stopped distributing the fruits of growth in any recognizable way, and a measurement system that was built to hide exactly that.

Next, on Thursday, who actually ends up wealthy in a world built like this. And who doesn't.

More to come after that, on what to actually do with this picture. In your work. With the tools. Inside an economy shaped this way.

Best

Jono

This is the last post in the series, so I want to keep it tight.

Over the past five posts I've talked about the five types of AI users, the fake fight over AI slop, the Automation Trap, the bigger trap happening at scale, and the line between what AI can execute and what only you can understand. All of that was context.

This is the part where you do something with it.

Today's advice

Pick one of the three areas below. Start there. Get it working before you touch the other two. The businesses that get this right won't be the ones that used AI everywhere at once. They'll be the ones that put it in the right place first.

1. The conversations you have over and over

Every small business has them. The quoting process. The onboarding sequence. The FAQ answers you've typed out so many times you could do them in your sleep. The follow-up emails. The scheduling back-and-forth.

These are high-volume, low-variance conversations. The shape is the same every time. The details change, but the structure doesn't.

This is where AI fits most naturally. Not to replace you in the conversation, but to handle the first 80 percent so you can review, adjust, and send. The quoting email that used to take forty minutes now takes five, because the structure is already there and you're editing for accuracy, not writing from scratch.

The key is that you stay in charge of the output. AI drafts. You decide. Your name is still on it. Your standards still apply. But the hours you used to spend on the repetitive parts of these conversations are back in your week.

If you took nothing else from this series, this is the highest-return starting point for most small businesses.

2. The list you never get to

Every business owner I talk to has one. The blog posts you keep meaning to write. The newsletter you've been "about to start" for a year. The case studies you know would bring in referrals if you'd just put them together. The welcome email sequence that doesn't exist yet. The social content you post when you remember, which is never consistently.

This is the "I never have time for this" list. And the reason it matters is that everything on it compounds. A blog post works for you for years. A welcome sequence converts every new subscriber without you lifting a finger. Consistent social content builds familiarity. Case studies close deals you'll never know about because the prospect read one before they picked up the phone.

AI doesn't write these for you. AI gets you from a blank page to a 60 percent draft in a fraction of the time. You finish the other 40 percent. You add the voice, the specifics, the examples from your actual experience. The thing that was never going to happen without AI is now happening.

The trap I covered in Post 3 applies here: don't use the saved time to produce more volume of the same low-value work. Use it to produce the compounding assets your business has been missing.

3. The thinking partner you never had

This is the one most people miss, and for a small business owner it might be the most valuable of the three.

You don't have a board of directors. You probably don't have a business partner. You might not have anyone in your life who understands your business well enough to push back on your ideas with useful specifics.

AI can be that thinking partner.

Run your pricing past it. Not "what should I charge?" but "here's my pricing, here are my costs, here's what my competitors charge, what am I missing?" Run a proposal past it before you send it. Run a difficult client email past it and ask what's weak. Ask it to argue the other side of a decision you're about to make. Give it your business plan and ask it where the holes are.

The quality of what you get back depends entirely on the quality of what you put in. Give it real context about your business, your market, and your situation, and the responses are genuinely useful. Give it a vague question and you'll get a vague answer. That's not AI's fault. That's the input.

For a small business owner who's used to making every decision alone, this is a shift. Not a replacement for human advisors. But a tool that's available at 11pm on a Tuesday when you're staring at a proposal and you need someone to tell you what doesn't make sense.

Why this matters

The businesses that win the next two years won't be the ones that used the most AI. They'll be the ones that put it in the right places.

Pick the wrong places and you either waste money or gut the thing that makes you valuable. Pick the right places and you buy yourself back hours every week, and those hours go toward the work that actually grows the business.

That's the whole series. Five posts' worth of context, leading to this: start with one of the three. Get it working. Then come back for the next one.

Here's how to start

If you're new to AI, start with number three. The thinking partner. It's the lowest-risk, fastest-signal starting point. You're not producing anything for a customer yet. You're just getting used to what the tool can do when you give it real problems.

If you're already paying for an AI tool, pick number one or two depending on where your time actually goes. If your week disappears into repetitive conversations, start there. If your week disappears into "I'll get to it next week," start with the list.

If you're already building things with AI, you already know what to do. Help someone else get started. Send them this series if it's useful.

This has been a six-part series about where AI fits in a small business, and I hope it's been useful. If you've read this far, you've been generous with your time and I appreciate it.

I have one last question, and it's the simplest one of the series:

Which of the three are you going to start with?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every email. And if the series has changed how you're thinking about AI in your business, I'd like to hear that too.

Best

Jono

A few weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy sat down with Sequoia Capital's Stephanie Zhan at their AI Ascent 2026 event and talked about the shift happening in how software gets built. Karpathy is one of the people who helped build modern AI. He co-founded OpenAI, led AI at Tesla, and last year gave the industry the term "vibe coding." He's not a commentator. He builds things.

During the conversation, he quoted a line he'd seen online that he said he keeps coming back to every other day:

"You can outsource your thinking. You cannot outsource your understanding."

That one sentence is the answer to the question I've been hearing from a lot of you since this series started: so what should I actually do?

Today's advice

AI can execute. It can draft, build, research, write, calculate, and produce at a speed no human can match. What it cannot do is understand whether what it produced is right, appropriate, safe, on-target, or worth doing in the first place. That understanding is yours. It's also the most valuable thing your business sells, whether you've framed it that way or not.

The website test

Vervology develops websites. That's a business I know well. And the perception right now is that everyone can build a website with ChatGPT.

They're not wrong. You can.

But is it right? Is it secure? Where are you hosting it? How do you maintain it when something breaks? How do you fix it when the platform changes? Is it on brand? Does it convert visitors into customers? Does it block bad bots and allow the good ones? Is it structured so Google can read it properly? Does it comply with accessibility standards? Does it handle data the way the law requires?

Those questions are not about building the website. They're about understanding what a website needs to be. The building is the easy part now. The understanding of what to build, and whether what you built is actually correct, is where the value lives.

Every single person reading this has their own version of this.

If you're an accountant, your client can file their taxes with TurboTax. They can also miss a deduction that costs them thousands because the software didn't know to ask the right question about their situation. You would have.

If you're a contractor, your client can watch a YouTube video and renovate their own bathroom. They can also fail the inspection because they didn't know the code requirements in their county. You would have.

If you're a designer, your client can build a logo in Canva in twenty minutes. They can also end up looking like four other businesses in the same town because the tool doesn't know the local market. You would have.

The execution is outsourceable. The understanding is not. That's the line.

Map the journey before you pick the tool

This is something I come back to all the time, and it matters more now than it ever has.

Before you ask "what AI tool should I use?" ask a better question: what does my customer's journey look like from start to finish?

Where do they first hear about you? What makes them want to learn more? What do they experience when they land on your site? Is it easy for them to understand what you offer and why it matters? What's the next step you want them to take? How do you follow up? How do you deliver? How do you support them after the sale? And how do you bring them back?

When you map that out, the right AI use cases fall out of it naturally. You don't need someone to tell you which tool to buy. You need to understand your own customer journey well enough to see where the gaps are. AI fills gaps. It doesn't draw the map.

If you skip the map and go straight to tools, you'll buy things that don't fit anything. I see this constantly.

Own what's yours

This one runs through everything I write and everything I advise on because it's the single most important strategic decision a small business owner makes, and most don't think of it as a decision at all.

Your audience. Your customer list. Your email list. Your website. Your data. Your content. These are yours. No algorithm decides whether your email gets delivered. No platform change can wipe out your subscriber list overnight.

AI tools come and go. Platforms change their terms, their pricing, their algorithms, their entire business model. The things you own are what you build compound returns on. Everything else is rented.

When you're thinking about where AI fits in your business, start with the things you own and ask how AI can make them stronger. Not how AI can replace them. Not how AI can move them onto someone else's platform. How AI makes your owned assets more valuable.

That's the frame. That's the strategy. Tools serve the journey. The journey is yours. The understanding is yours. Everything else is execution, and execution is getting cheaper every day.

Why this matters

Karpathy was talking about software engineers. But the principle is universal.

The businesses that win the next few years will not be the ones that used the most AI. They'll be the ones whose owners understood their business well enough to direct AI toward the right problems. Not the flashiest problems. Not the most automated problems. The right ones.

For a small business, that understanding is your entire competitive advantage. The big companies are in an arms race to cut humans out (I covered this in the last post). Your move is the opposite. Keep the understanding in. Use AI to extend what you can do with it. Don't use AI to replace the thing that makes you worth hiring.

You can outsource your thinking. You cannot outsource your understanding.

Here's how to start

Two moves.

First, write down the five things you understand about your business, your market, or your customers that a new competitor with AI couldn't figure out in a weekend. That's your list of things that are not outsourceable. Protect them. Invest in them. Build your positioning around them.

Second, look at everything else you spend time on and ask: could AI do this part while I stay in charge of the outcome? If yes, that's where AI goes. Not in the understanding. In the execution underneath it.

The next post is the last in this series, and it gets specific. Three places to start putting AI to work in your business this week, without touching the things that make you valuable.

If you're reading this and thinking "I know what I understand about my business, but I've never written it down or built my positioning around it," hit reply and tell me what it is. I'll tell you whether you're sitting on something worth building around or whether you need to dig deeper.

Best

Jono

In February 2026, Block cut nearly half its workforce. Close to 4,000 people. CEO Jack Dorsey said AI had made many of those roles unnecessary, and that within a year, the majority of companies would reach the same conclusion.

He wasn't guessing. Over 100,000 tech workers were laid off in 2025 alone, with AI cited as a primary driver in more than half the cases. Salesforce replaced 4,000 customer support agents with AI. Goldman Sachs started piloting autonomous coding systems where one senior engineer does the work of a five-person team.

These are not small moves by small companies. These are massive organizations cutting tens of thousands of jobs because AI made it cheaper to do so.

And here's the part that should concern you, even if you've never worked at any of these companies and never will.

Today's advice

The AI layoff race happening at the top of the economy is a trap. The companies caught in it know it's a trap. They can't stop. Your job as a small business owner is to understand the dynamic so you can see what's coming downstream and position your business for it.

The trap, in plain terms

A recent paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University lays this out clearly (Hemenway Falk and Tsoukalas, The AI Layoff Trap, March 2026).

The mechanism is simple once you see it.

When a company replaces workers with AI, it saves money on every task those workers used to do. That's the upside, and it's real. But those workers were also customers. Not necessarily customers of the company that fired them, but customers of other companies. Their rent, their groceries, their subscriptions, their spending at local businesses. All of that spending power disappears when the income disappears.

Now here's where it becomes a trap. When one company automates, it captures all of the cost savings but only feels a small fraction of the demand loss. Most of that lost spending lands on other companies. So from the perspective of any single firm, automating is always the right move. The savings are yours. The damage is mostly someone else's problem.

Every company does this calculation. Every company reaches the same answer. Every company automates.

And collectively, they all end up worse off. The spending power they all depend on has been drained out of the economy. The paper calls this a demand externality: each company makes a rational decision that, when everyone makes the same decision at the same time, destroys the thing they all need.

The researchers tested every popular solution against this. Wages falling doesn't fix it. Universal basic income doesn't fix it (it raises the floor on living standards but doesn't change any company's incentive to automate). Retraining helps but doesn't close the gap. Companies can't agree among themselves to stop, because any company that holds back while the others automate just loses market share for nothing. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma, and the bars are real.

The only thing the paper found that actually corrects the incentive is a government tax on automation. That's a political solution, and politics is slow.

Why this matters to you

You're probably not running a company with 10,000 employees. You're not laying off 4,000 people to cut costs. So why does this matter?

Because you're downstream.

Block's 4,000 former employees were somebody's customers. They bought coffee. They paid rent. They hired contractors. They used local services. They spent money in the economy that your customers also spend money in.

When a regional employer automates a warehouse, Main Street feels it. When a tech company fires thousands of support staff, the restaurants and shops near their offices feel it. When an entire industry decides it needs fewer people, the ripple doesn't stop at the industry's borders.

This isn't hypothetical. This is already happening. And the paper's most uncomfortable finding is that better AI makes it worse, not better. Each company sees a market-share advantage in automating further than its competitors. But at the industry level, those advantages cancel out. Everyone automates more, nobody gains a relative edge, and the demand destruction accelerates. The researchers call this the Red Queen effect: running faster just to stay in the same place, except the ground is eroding underneath.

The opportunity sitting inside the problem

Now here's the reframe, and this is where Posts 1 through 3 of this series connect.

Big companies are trapped in a race to cut humans out. They can see the cliff. They can't stop running toward it. Every incentive pushes them to automate more, even though they know the collective outcome is bad.

You are not in that race.

A small business doesn't have 4,000 employees to cut. A small business has a handful of people, maybe just one, whose relationships and expertise are the business. The big company's move is to replace humans with AI. Your move is the opposite: use AI to make your humans more valuable.

The things big companies are cutting right now — real human service, specific expertise, local presence, personal relationships, follow-through — those are exactly what a small business does best. AI gives you the ability to compete on scale and efficiency. Your humans give you the ability to win on everything the big companies are abandoning.

And here's the part that compounds. As big companies cut and cut and the customer experience gets worse and more generic, the market for businesses that still feel human is going to grow. Not shrink. Grow. Every automated phone tree, every chatbot that can't actually solve the problem, every form letter that replaced a real conversation — each of those is an opportunity for a business that still puts a person on the other end.

What the spending picture means for your planning

There's a practical dimension to this beyond positioning.

If your customers are consumers, pay attention to which industries are automating near you. That's where local spending power will weaken first. A wave of layoffs at a major employer in your area isn't just a news story. It's a signal about what your revenue might look like in six months.

If your customers are other businesses, pay attention to whether they're caught in the trap. Their budgets are about to get squeezed. The businesses selling to companies in the middle of aggressive AI-driven cost-cutting need to be realistic about what those customers can afford going forward.

And inside your own business, use AI to do more with what you have. Not to cut the people who are your edge. To extend their reach, their hours, their ability to deliver.

Why this matters

I said in the first post of this series that there are five types of people when it comes to AI. Category four — the people who've decided AI is all hype — are in for a rude awakening. This post is the shape of that awakening.

AI isn't hype. It's real. And the economic consequences of how big companies are using it are going to touch every business, including yours, whether you use AI or not.

The businesses that come through this well won't be the ones that ignored it. They won't be the ones that copied the big-company playbook either. They'll be the ones that understood the dynamic, positioned themselves on the right side of it, and used AI to strengthen the things that make them hard to replace.

Here's how to start

Three things to do this week.

First, look at your customer base and ask: who employs my customers? If any of those employers are in industries automating aggressively right now, that's a signal. Not a reason to panic. A reason to diversify and plan.

Second, look at your own business and ask: what am I doing that a customer can't get from a chatbot or an automated system? That's your moat. Invest in it. Talk about it. Build your positioning around it.

Third, go back and read Post 3 in this series. The Automation Trap. Because the same discipline applies here: the hours AI gives you back should go toward strengthening your position, not toward becoming a higher-volume version of what's getting cheaper every month.

The next post gets into the clearest framework I've seen for how to think about all of this. One sentence from one of the people who helped build modern AI, and it changes the whole conversation.

If this post made you think differently about how the bigger economic picture affects your business, hit reply and tell me what you're seeing in your market. I'm paying attention to these patterns and I'd like to hear what's happening on your end.

Best

Jono

In 1955, a British civil servant noticed something odd inside the Royal Navy.

Between 1914 and 1928, the number of active Navy ships dropped by 67 percent. The number of sailors dropped by 31 percent. The number of desk officials managing them went up by 78 percent.

Less work. Fewer people doing it. More people managing the people doing it.

His name was Cyril Northcote Parkinson, and he spent years trying to explain it. What he found is the reason most small business owners using AI right now are about to walk straight into a trap.

Today's advice

When AI gives your business hours back, those hours are the most valuable thing you've ever had. Spend them on what grows the business, not on filling them with more of the work you just escaped.

Parkinson published his finding in The Economist in November 1955, and expanded it into a book two years later (Parkinson's Law, and Other Studies in Administration, Houghton Mifflin, 1957). The line that made him famous was this:

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

Give yourself two hours to write a quote and the quote takes two hours. Give yourself two weeks for the same quote and it takes two weeks. The work finds a way to fill the slot. More revisions. More second-guessing. More email back and forth. More meetings about the meeting. Not because the work needs it, but because the time was there.

That's not a flaw. That's how human attention works when there's no pressure on it.

And it is exactly the trap AI is about to set for every small business owner who isn't ready for it.

The Automation Trap

Here's how the trap looks from inside a small business.

You start using AI to do part of your work. Maybe it's drafting proposals. Maybe it's writing your social posts. Maybe it's answering the same client questions you've answered a thousand times. Whatever it is, the time savings are real. A task that used to take half a day takes an hour.

You feel great. You should feel great. That's a real win.

Then Monday rolls around and you fill those hours back up. With more proposals. More social posts. More email. More of the same work you just got faster at. The shape of your week looks identical. You're just doing more of the same volume.

Six months in, nothing about your business has actually changed. You're not earning more. You're not serving better clients. You're not building anything new. You just turned into a higher-volume version of what you already were.

That's the Automation Trap. The hours come back. The work expands to fill them. And you mistake activity for progress.

Why this is worse than it looks

The trap is worse than just lost time. It's lost positioning.

If your business is built on you doing the manual work, AI has already started undercutting you. Anyone with a credit card and an afternoon can produce passable proposals, passable social posts, passable answers to common questions. That's not a future problem, that's a now problem.

The thing that makes a small business hard to copy is everything that sits around the manual work. The judgement you bring to a client conversation. The relationships you've built over years. The specific expertise you've earned by doing this longer than the new entrants have been alive. The way you handle things when they go wrong.

None of that is on a tool's roadmap. All of it is what your customers actually pay for, even if neither of you have ever said it out loud.

The hours AI gives you back are your chance to invest in that side of the business. The side that competitors can't catch up to in a weekend. If you spend those hours on more manual output, you're racing toward the part of the business that's getting cheaper every month.

What to do with the saved time

When AI hands you back ten hours a week, treat it like found money. You wouldn't blow a windfall on the same monthly bills. Don't do it with hours either.

Spend them on the things that compound. Talking to your best customers about what they actually want next. Building the systems and processes that mean the business doesn't need you for every decision. Writing the content that brings people to you instead of the other way around. Mapping the customer journey from first contact to long-term relationship and finding the gaps. Working on the offers and pricing you've been meaning to revisit for two years.

Pick the work that makes the business worth more, not the work that makes this week look busier.

The owners who come out of the next two years in the strongest position are the ones who used the AI window to invest in their business, not the ones who used it to do more of what was already on their plate.

Why this matters

In the first two posts of this series I talked about the five types of AI users and the noise around "AI slop." Both were about how you relate to the tool.

This one is about what the tool does to your time, and what you do with that time decides whether AI is the best thing that ever happened to your business or a trap that left you exactly where you started, just a bit more tired.

Most business owners I talk to are halfway into the trap already. They've started using AI somewhere. They've felt the time savings. And the time has quietly disappeared into the same kind of work that produced it. Nothing wrong has happened. Nothing right has happened either.

That's the moment to stop and reset.

This post is the individual-business version of the trap. There's a bigger one running at the company level across the whole economy, and it changes what your customer base is going to look like over the next few years. I'll get into that in the next post.

Here's how to start

Three moves, in this order.

First, write down where you've already saved time with AI. Be specific. The proposals that take an hour instead of four. The newsletter that takes thirty minutes instead of three hours. Whatever it is. Get it on paper so you can see it.

Second, look at where those hours actually went. Not where you meant them to go. Where they went. If the honest answer is "I just did more of the same work," that's the trap, and now you can see it.

Third, pick one piece of higher-value work you've been putting off and put a real chunk of those reclaimed hours against it this week. Customer conversations. A pricing review. A new offer. The systems work that means the business runs without you needing to be in every detail. Pick one. Start.

Parkinson published his paper seventy years ago. The Navy bureaucracy he was studying is long gone. But the mechanism he spotted is the reason "I'm so much faster now with AI" doesn't automatically translate into a better business.

Faster isn't the goal. What you do with faster is the goal.

Stop competing with the machine on volume. Use the time it gives you to build the parts of your business no machine can touch.

If you've started saving real time with AI, hit reply with two things: one task you've already automated, and one piece of higher-value work you've been putting off. I'll send you back two or three concrete ways those reclaimed hours could move you toward the second one.

Best

Jono

Think about the last time you did your taxes.

If you used an accountant, they opened up their tax software, ran your numbers through a calculator, pulled data straight off your W2 into a templated form, and handed you back a finished return. You paid them for it. You thanked them. Nobody stood up in the lobby and shouted that it didn't count because they used software.

And yet, that is the exact line we've decided to draw around AI and content.

Today's advice

Bad content is bad content. The tool doesn't make it bad. The person using the tool does. And the bigger problem isn't AI at all. It's that we've spent twenty years training ourselves to accept slop from every direction, and now we're surprised when AI joins the pile.

The term "AI slop" is being thrown around hard right now, and most of the time it's being used to drive a wedge. On one side, the "natural" creators who supposedly do everything by hand. On the other, anyone who touched AI at any point in their process. It's a neat little us-versus-them, and it doesn't hold up the second you look at it.

The tool nobody complains about

Every profession has tools that used to be controversial and are now invisible.

Accountants use tax software. Architects use CAD. Designers use Photoshop. Musicians use production software that corrects pitch and timing. Writers use spellcheck and grammar checkers and autocomplete. Every one of these was loudly controversial when it first arrived. Every one of these got absorbed into the craft, and the argument moved on.

Right now we're in the loud part of that cycle with AI. It'll pass.

Where the real slop comes from

To be fair to the people using the term, they're pointing at something real. It's just not what they think it is.

AI didn't invent slop. We've been swimming in it for years.

TikTok killed the curated, professional look that Instagram spent a decade establishing. The lowest production value won, because the algorithm rewarded volume and speed over craft. Education systems have been redesigned around tests that a machine can grade, not around creativity, knowledge, or actual ability. Academic journals publish papers with no real peer review and no academic integrity behind them. News organisations replaced journalism with tweets and blog posts written by people who are not journalists, run by editors who barely edit, on websites that exist to serve the next click.

That is slop. And none of it required AI.

The real problem isn't that AI can produce slop. It's that we have spent two decades systematically rewarding the lowest common denominator across every field where standards used to mean something. AI is just the latest tool to enter that environment. Of course it's getting used to make more slop. The market for slop has never been bigger.

The standards problem

Now I'm going to head off the obvious response. I am not a media company. I am not running a newspaper. I am one person writing a newsletter. So I am not arguing that everyone needs an editorial board.

What I am arguing is that the standards have to live somewhere. If the platforms aren't enforcing them, and the institutions aren't enforcing them, and the audience isn't demanding them, then the only place left is you.

If you publish anything to your business audience, you are the editorial board. You are the standards. The decision about whether the work is good enough to put your name on lives with you. AI doesn't change that. It just makes the decision more important, because the volume of stuff being produced has gone up by orders of magnitude.

The test that matters

The question that matters when you look at any piece of content is: does it help the person reading it?

Not "was this written by a human?" Not "was this touched by AI?" Does it help.

If yes, the tool doesn't matter. If no, the tool doesn't matter either. It was bad before you asked the question.

Judging content by how it was made is like judging a meal by whether the chef used a stove or a grill. Who cares how it was made. The question is whether the meal is any good.

Why this matters

You're getting distracted by the wrong debate.

If you're a small business owner trying to figure out how AI fits into your work, the last thing you need is to be made to feel guilty about using a tool that can help you. That guilt is being manufactured, and it's being manufactured mostly by people who either haven't caught up yet, or who see their own positioning threatened.

But the bigger trap is the other side. If you decide the standards don't matter because the algorithm doesn't reward them, you become part of the slop pile. And once your business is in that pile, you compete on price and volume, not on quality. That race ends one way for a small business, and it isn't well.

The opportunity sitting in front of you right now is to be one of the few people in your space who still cares about the standard. AI gives you the leverage to produce more without dropping it. That combination, more output and the same care, is rarer than it sounds, and it's exactly what your customers can feel even when they can't articulate it.

In the first post of this series I talked about the five types of people when it comes to AI. This piece connects to it. The reason some people are so invested in the "AI slop" label is because admitting the tool is useful means admitting they need to learn something new. It's easier to build a wall. Don't build the wall. Don't lower your standard either.

Here's how to start

If you're a business owner, stop treating AI use as a moral question and start treating it as a craft question. The people using AI badly are producing bad work. The people using it well are producing better work than they used to. The tool is the same. The standard is the difference.

If you're making content yourself, remember that you're still the one with your name on it. AI didn't write your post. You wrote your post using AI. That distinction keeps the responsibility where it belongs. On you.

And if you're judging other people's content, apply the only test that has ever mattered. Did it help you? Did it teach you something? Did it make you think? If yes, who cares what tool they used. If no, who cares what tool they used.

Bad content is bad content. Good content is good content. The rest is noise.

If you've been holding back on AI because you didn't want to end up in the slop pile, hit reply and tell me what you've been hesitant to try. I'll tell you straight whether the concern is real or whether it's the noise getting in your way.

Best

Jono

You might have noticed something different. soapbox.news is now The Optimizing Chaos newsletter, living over at optimizingchaos.com.

Same voice. Same person writing it. A name that finally matches the job.

Because when I sit down with a small business owner, that's what the work actually is. Chaos everywhere you look. Too many tools. Too many platforms. Too much advice. Too many people selling the next shiny thing. My job is to help you make sense of it and turn it into something that actually works for your business.

Optimizing chaos. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Head over to optimizingchaos.com and you'll see what this is about. Behind-the-scenes builds. Pattern recognition. Tools and systems. Problems solved. That's the work. That's what's going in this newsletter going forward.

Speaking of chaos, let's talk about AI.

Today's advice

There are five types of people right now when it comes to AI and LLMs. Figure out which one you are, because where you sit on this list is going to matter a lot in the next twelve months.

One. You tried ChatGPT once. You asked it for the best Shepherd's Pie recipe, had a laugh, and that was that.

Two. You started paying the $20 a month. You're using it more seriously, asking better questions, and you know there's something here worth learning.

Three. You're spending $200+ a month and you're building things with it. This is where I sit.

Four. You've decided AI is all hype. It's a fad. It isn't intelligent. And it certainly isn't going to bother you or your business. You're happy to wait it out.

Five. You haven't touched it at all. Not for, not against. You just haven't gotten to it yet.

If you're in category four, I think you're in for a rude awakening, and sooner than you'd like. I've watched this story play out before. It's the same one businesses told themselves about the internet in 1998. A few of them are still around. Most aren't.

If you're in category five, you're in a great spot. You haven't formed an opinion yet. There's a whole world of possibilities sitting there waiting for you, and you get to walk into it without any of the baggage the rest of us picked up along the way.

Why this matters

I can already hear the pushback. "Jono, AI is overhyped. It can't really do that much."

So here's my answer.

This is what I've built in the last month, using AI as a working partner. Not as a gimmick. As an actual tool I use every day.

Five client websites.

Four more websites for my other businesses.

A full CRM with whiteboards, memory maps, and project management built in.

A CMS that schedules blog posts, social media posts, and runs the ad network for 315NY.

An online newsletter spam checker.

An online map generator that works for any point on the globe.

And a game called Haulage Tycoon, with realtime vehicle tracking, a full transport economy, and even an AI assistant built in to help you run your business inside the game.

That's one month of work. On top of running three businesses and starting a fourth.

Read that list again. One person. One month. All of it built and working.

Imagine what I'll have built by the end of the year. Then think about what's possible inside your business if you got into it instead of waiting it out.

This is why category four worries me. It isn't that AI is magic. It's that the gap between the people using it properly and the people pretending it doesn't exist is widening every week. And there comes a point where the gap is too big to close.

Here's how to start

If you're in category five, go and open Claude today. Not ChatGPT. Claude is the one you want, and you can take that from someone who's tried all of them. Don't ask it for a recipe. Ask it something that's been bothering you about your business. A real question. The kind of thing you'd normally chew on for weeks. See what comes back. It won't cost you anything.

If you're in category one or two, push it harder. Stop treating it like a search engine. It isn't one. Give it real context about your business, tell it what you're trying to figure out, and ask it to push back on you instead of agreeing with everything you say.

If you're in category four, I'd genuinely like to hear what's stopping you. I'm not going to try to talk you into anything. I just want to understand it.

And if you're already in category three, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Now I want to turn this around.

I have a question for you. And before you fire off the first thing that comes to mind, sit with it for a minute.

What is one business result you've always wanted but have never been able to achieve?

Whatever it is, I want to hear it.

Remember, I build things. I solve things.

Reply to this email and tell me the one thing. Let's see what we can do about it.

Best

Jono

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This is the last part of a three-part series this week on AI and your business.

On Monday, we talked about how AI extrapolates from existing work but doesn't actually create anything new. On Wednesday, we talked about why your brand is the one thing AI can't copy, and why that makes it your strongest asset right now.

Today, let's talk about the part most people skip. How to actually use AI well.

Because here's what I'm seeing. Most people are using one AI tool for everything. They open ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini and they throw every single task at it. Writing emails, brainstorming strategy, generating images, writing code, doing research, all in the same place with the same model.

That's like hiring one person and making them do every job in your company. It doesn't work in business, and it doesn't work with AI either.

Today's advice

Stop treating AI like one tool. Start treating it like a team. Your job is to become the project manager who knows which team member to assign to which task.

Let me explain why this matters and how to think about it.

You Wouldn't Send a Lawyer to Get the Mail

Think about how a well-run business works.

You don't send your $500-an-hour lawyer to pick up the mail. You don't ask your senior architect to update a spreadsheet. You don't hire a CFO to answer the phone. Everyone has a role. The work gets matched to the right person based on what the task actually requires.

AI works the same way now. There are different platforms, different models within those platforms, and different price points for each one. They're not all good at the same things. And the cost differences between them are real.

Let me give you a quick look at what I mean.

Claude by Anthropic has multiple models at different levels. Opus 4.6 is their top-tier model. It's built for deep thinking, complex strategy, long-form analysis, and nuanced writing. It's the senior consultant on the team. You bring it in for the hard stuff.

Then there's Sonnet 4.6, which is significantly cheaper to run through the API. And for most everyday tasks, it performs almost as well as Opus. That's your reliable mid-level team member who handles the bulk of the daily work without you needing to bring in the heavy hitter.

If you're using Opus to draft a quick email, you're overpaying for the task. That's your $500-an-hour lawyer picking up the mail.

ChatGPT's Codex from OpenAI is a coding agent. It's purpose-built for writing, reviewing, and shipping code. It can work across multiple projects at the same time, fix bugs, propose changes, and run tests. If you need software built or maintained, this is the specialist you bring in. You wouldn't ask your general-purpose AI to do what a dedicated coding agent can do better and faster.

Google's Gemini has become one of the strongest tools for visual content. Their image generation and editing models can create, blend, and edit images with natural language prompts. Need product mockups, social media visuals, or creative assets? Gemini is where I'd start. I use it for image generation in my own workflow and the quality keeps getting better.

And that's just three platforms. There are tools built specifically for video, for audio, for data analysis, for customer service automation, and the list keeps growing.

The point isn't that you need to use all of them. The point is that you need to know they exist and understand what they're each good at so you can match the tool to the task.

Think About It Like Instacart

Here's an analogy that might help.

Instacart is basically an AI agent that does your grocery shopping for you. You tell it what you want. It figures out where to get it, sends someone to pick it up, and delivers it to your door. You don't need to know the layout of the store. You don't need to drive there. You just need to know what you need and communicate it clearly.

That's the same skill set you need with AI.

You don't need to understand how the models work under the hood. You don't need to know what a token is or how neural networks process information. You need to know what task you're trying to accomplish, and which tool is the right one to hand it to.

The better you get at that, the more you get out of AI. And the less time and money you waste asking the wrong tool to do the wrong job.

The Real Skill Is Delegation

This is where the project manager mindset comes in.

A good project manager doesn't do all the work themselves. They understand the strengths of their team. They match people to tasks based on capability. They set clear expectations. They review the output. And they make the final call.

That's exactly what working with AI looks like now.

Your job is to know what needs to get done, decide which AI tool or model is best suited for it, give it clear direction, review what comes back, and put your judgment on it before it goes out the door.

The people who are getting the most out of AI right now aren't the ones who know the most about technology. They're the ones who are best at managing it. They treat their AI tools like team members. They build workflows. They know when to use the heavy hitter and when the everyday model will do just fine.

And they keep the final decision-making for themselves. Because that's still the part that matters most.

The Cost Side of This Is Real

I want to touch on something practical here because I think it matters for business owners.

These AI models don't all cost the same to run. The differences are significant. If you're a developer using the API, the price gap between a top-tier model and a mid-tier model can be the difference between spending thousands a month and spending hundreds.

But even if you're not a developer, this translates to the subscription plans and tools you're paying for. Are you paying for the most expensive plan when a cheaper one does what you need? Are you using a premium model for tasks that a lighter one handles just as well?

This is basic business thinking applied to a new category of tools. You wouldn't pay enterprise pricing for software you use casually. Same logic applies here.

Know what you're paying for. Know what you're getting. And make sure the cost matches the task.

Here's how to start

Take stock of what AI tools you're currently using. Write them down. Then next to each one, write down what you're actually using it for.

Now ask yourself: is this the right tool for this task? Could something else do it better, faster, or cheaper?

If you're using one AI for everything, start experimenting. Try a different platform for image generation. Try a different model for quick tasks versus deep thinking. See what happens when you match the tool to the job instead of forcing one tool to do it all.

You don't need to become an AI expert. You need to become a good manager of AI tools. Know your team. Assign the right work to the right member. Review the output. And keep the thinking and decision-making where it belongs. With you.

That's the skill that's going to separate the businesses that get real value from AI from the ones that are just using it to look busy.

If you missed the earlier parts of this series, here's the quick version. AI extrapolates from existing work, it doesn't create from scratch, so the human element still matters. Your brand is your best defense against the wave of sameness AI is creating. And now you know how to manage your AI tools like a team instead of throwing everything at one.

The businesses that figure this out are going to have a real edge. I think you can be one of them.

Best, Jono

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This is part two of a three-part series this week on AI and your business. On Monday, we talked about how AI extrapolates from existing work but doesn't actually create anything new. Today, I want to talk about what that means for you and your business specifically.

Think about the last time you chose one business over another.

Was it because their website had better copy? Was it because their blog showed up first in a search result? Or was it because you already knew them, trusted them, and felt like they understood you?

I'd bet it was the last one.

That's brand. And right now, it matters more than it ever has.

We're in the middle of a shift where AI can produce content, design, ads, and entire marketing campaigns in minutes. The tools are available to everyone. The cost to create is dropping to almost zero. And the quality of what AI puts out is getting better by the week.

So if everyone has access to the same tools and the same output, what's left that actually sets you apart?

You. Your story. Your values. The trust you've built by showing up and doing the work.

That's what we're talking about today.

Today's advice

Your brand is the one thing AI can't copy. Stop treating it as an afterthought and start treating it as your biggest competitive advantage.

The Sameness Problem

Here's what I'm seeing across almost every industry right now.

Businesses are using AI to write their website copy, their blog posts, their social captions, their emails. And on the surface, the output looks good. It's clean. It's professional. It checks the boxes.

But it all sounds the same.

Go look at five competitors in any space. Read their homepages. Read their about pages. I bet you can't tell one from another. The language is polished but generic. The messaging is safe but forgettable. There's no person behind it. No opinion. No story. Just words that could belong to any business in the category.

This is what happens when everyone uses the same tools to say the same things. You get a sea of sameness. And sameness is the opposite of brand.

The businesses that stand out right now are the ones that sound like actual people. They have a point of view. They share what they've learned. They're not afraid to say something that not everyone will agree with.

That's hard to fake. And it's impossible to generate with a prompt.

AI Can't Build Trust

Let me be specific about what I mean when I say brand.

I'm not talking about your logo or your fonts or your color scheme. I'm talking about the thing people feel when they hear your name. The reason they pick up the phone and call you instead of the other three options they found. The reason they refer you to a friend without being asked.

That comes from trust. And trust comes from experience. It comes from how you've treated people over time, what you've delivered, what you stand for, and how you show up when things get complicated.

AI can mimic a tone of voice. It can match patterns. It can study how you write and produce something that sounds close. But it can't replicate the relationship between you and your customers. It can't replicate the moment you went above and beyond for someone and they never forgot it. It can't replicate the fact that you've been doing this for years and people know what they're getting when they work with you.

Those things are built one interaction at a time. There's no shortcut.

Humans Still Buy From Humans

I spend a lot of my time thinking about search, content, and how businesses show up online. That's the work I do through Vervology. And one thing I keep coming back to is this.

At the end of the day, a person decides whether to buy from you. Not an algorithm. Not a chatbot. A person.

And people buy from people they trust.

I've seen businesses pour time and money into AI-generated content that technically does everything right. The keywords are there. The structure is there. The reading level is appropriate. But nobody reads it and thinks, "I want to work with these people." Because there's nothing in it that feels like it came from a real person with real experience and a real opinion.

Compare that to a business where the founder writes their own newsletter, shares their own perspective, and talks to their audience like a peer. That business might not have the most content. But the content they do have actually means something. And people feel the difference.

You don't need to out-produce your competitors. You need to out-human them.

What Your Brand Is Actually Made Of

So what are we really talking about when we talk about brand as a defense?

Your story. Not the polished elevator pitch version. The real one. How you started. What you learned the hard way. What drives the decisions you make today. People connect with people who've been through something real. That's not a marketing strategy. That's just how humans work.

Your values. What do you stand for? What won't you do? The businesses I respect most are the ones with clear lines. They don't chase every trend. They don't say yes to everything. They know who they are and they operate from that. Customers pick up on it, even if they can't put it into words.

Your consistency. This is the part nobody wants to hear because it's not exciting. But it's the most important piece. Showing up the same way, delivering the same quality, communicating with the same voice, over and over again. That's what builds the kind of trust that no ad campaign can buy.

I've talked about this before in different ways. Own your audience. Own your platform. Own the experience. This is the same idea, just applied to who you are as a business, not just what you build.

The Trap of Outsourcing Your Voice

Here's where I think a lot of businesses are getting into trouble right now.

They're handing their entire voice over to AI. Not using it as a tool. Handing it over completely. The blog, the newsletter, the social posts, the website copy, all of it generated without any real human input beyond a prompt.

And for a while, it might work. The content shows up. The posts go out on schedule. Things look busy.

But over time, the audience notices. The content doesn't have a perspective. It doesn't take a position. It doesn't feel like it was written by someone who actually cares about the topic. It's just content for the sake of content.

I use AI in my work. I'm not anti-tool. But there's a difference between using AI to speed up the things that don't need your personal fingerprint and using it to replace the things that do.

Anything that represents you to your audience needs you in it. Your thinking. Your experience. Your voice. If you take yourself out of your own brand, you don't really have a brand anymore. You have a content machine. And content machines are a commodity now.

Why this matters

We're moving into a period where the barrier to creating content is gone. Anyone can produce professional-looking material in seconds. That's not a theory. It's already happening.

So content alone doesn't set you apart anymore. What sets you apart is the person behind it.

Your story can't be copied because nobody else has lived it. Your values can't be generated because they come from decisions you've made. Your trust can't be replicated because it was earned over time with real people.

That's your defense. Not against AI as a concept, but against the wave of sameness that AI is creating across every market. The businesses that lean into who they are will stand out more than ever. The ones that don't will blend in with everything else.

Here's how to start

Ask yourself one question. If you removed your name and your logo from your website, could anyone tell it was your business?

If the answer is no, that's the gap.

Start putting yourself back in. Write something this week that only you could write. Share an opinion about your industry. Tell a story from your experience that relates to what your customers are going through. Talk about why you do things the way you do.

You don't need a brand overhaul. You need to show up as yourself in the places where your audience is paying attention.

And if you're using AI to help with your content, that's fine. Just make sure you're the one driving. Let it handle the grunt work. But keep your hands on the wheel when it comes to your message, your voice, and your values.

That's the stuff that can't be replicated. And right now, it's the most valuable thing your business has.

On Friday, I'll wrap up this series with the practical side. If AI is a tool and your brand is the differentiator, how do you actually manage all of these AI tools without wasting time and money? I'll walk you through how to think about it like a project manager running a team. See you then.

Best, Jono

I keep seeing the same take online right now. "Hollywood is dead. AI just replaced filmmakers. Did you see what these kids made?"

And usually there's a link to some 3-minute short film that a couple of 20-year-olds produced using AI tools. The visuals look cinematic. The production quality is real. And the reaction is always the same. If they can do this from a laptop, what do we even need studios for?

I get why people are excited. But I think the conversation is missing something pretty big.

Today's advice

AI is a pattern machine. It extrapolates from existing work. It doesn't create from scratch. And that difference matters more than most people are giving it credit for right now.

Let me explain what I mean.

Every AI tool out there, whether it's making video, writing copy, generating images, composing music, is doing the same thing under the hood. It's pulling from massive amounts of existing human work, finding patterns in that work, and predicting what comes next based on those patterns.

That's extrapolation. It's remixing and recombining things that already exist.

It's not sitting down with a blank page and a point of view and deciding, "I need to say this thing that nobody has said yet."

That's still a human thing. At least for now.

The Amateurs Are Getting All the Attention

Here's what I find interesting about the "Hollywood is dead" conversation.

All the focus is on the newcomers. Someone with no film background uses AI to produce a short that looks like it belongs in a theater, and the internet loses its mind. I get it. That's a compelling story. And the work is genuinely impressive for what it is.

But here's the question nobody seems to be asking.

What do you think the actual experts are doing right now?

The directors who have spent 20 years learning how to build tension in a scene. The editors who understand pacing at a level most people can't even articulate. The visual effects artists who have been pushing boundaries since before AI was part of the conversation.

They're not sitting around watching amateurs have all the fun. They're learning the same tools. And they're bringing something to those tools that the amateurs don't have yet. Decades of craft. Storytelling instincts. An understanding of what makes something land with an audience versus what just looks cool for three minutes.

When the experts start showing what they can do with AI, it's going to be a totally different conversation. The amateurs are making impressive demos. The professionals are going to make the work that actually changes things.

We just haven't seen it yet. Give it time.

What AI Is Actually Good At (and Where It Falls Short)

I want to be fair here because I use AI in my own work every day. I'm not anti-AI. I'm pro-understanding-what-it-actually-is.

AI is great at speed. It can generate a first draft, brainstorm ideas, research a topic, and produce variations faster than any human can. That's real value. I've seen it firsthand running Vervology. We use AI tools regularly, and they save us time on things that used to take hours.

But here's where it falls short. AI doesn't have a perspective. It doesn't have opinions formed by years of experience. It doesn't know your customers the way you do. It can't look at your business and say, "This is the story we need to tell right now, and here's why."

I see this in marketing all the time. Someone uses AI to write a blog post or a social media caption. It reads fine. Clean grammar. Logical structure. But it doesn't say anything. There's no point of view behind it. No lived experience informing the message. No reason for the reader to trust it over the hundred other AI-generated posts that sound exactly the same.

The output looks right. But there's nothing behind it.

This Isn't Just a Hollywood Problem

This same thing is playing out across every industry right now.

In design. In marketing. In content creation. In business strategy. The tools are getting better and more accessible, and that's great. But accessibility doesn't replace expertise. It just changes the playing field.

Think about it like this. When desktop publishing software came out, everyone could suddenly make flyers and brochures. Did that put graphic designers out of work? No. It just made the gap between amateur work and professional work more obvious. The people who understood design principles still produced better work. The tools just let them do it faster.

Same thing happened when website builders came along. Suddenly anyone could make a website. But the sites built by people who understood user experience, content strategy, and conversion paths still outperformed the ones that just looked okay on the surface.

AI is the same story, just moving faster and at a bigger scale.

So What Does This Mean for You?

If you're using AI in your business right now, and I think most of us should be, the question worth asking is this: am I using it to amplify what I already know, or am I using it to skip the thinking entirely?

There's a real difference.

Using AI to move faster on things you already understand? That's a multiplier. You're bringing the strategy, the experience, the judgment. AI handles the grunt work. That's a good setup.

Handing everything over to AI and hoping the output is good enough? That's where things start to look and sound like everyone else. And blending in has never been a winning strategy. Not in marketing. Not in content. Not in business.

The people who are going to come out ahead in all of this are the ones who treat AI like what it is. A tool. A fast, capable, increasingly impressive tool. But still a tool.

The thinking, the creativity, the point of view, that still has to come from you.

Here's how to start

Take an honest look at how you're using AI today. Are you using it to speed up work that you're still guiding and directing? Or are you using it as a shortcut to avoid doing the hard parts yourself?

If it's the first one, keep going. You're using it the right way.

If it's the second one, pull back a little. Bring more of your own thinking into the process. Use AI for the first draft, but make the final version yours. Use it to research and brainstorm, but make the strategic decisions yourself. Use it to produce more, but make sure what you're producing actually has something to say.

And the next time someone tells you Hollywood is dead because a couple of amateurs made a cool short film with AI, remember this.

The amateurs are just getting started. But so are the experts.

And the experts have a 20-year head start on the part that actually matters.

This is part one of a three-part series this week on AI and your business. On Wednesday, I'll talk about why your brand is the one thing AI can't copy, and why that makes it your best defense right now. Then on Friday, I'll get into the practical side of how to actually manage your AI tools like a team. See you Wednesday.

Best, Jono

SEO sounds simple enough at first. Pick some keywords, put them on your website, wait for Google to send you traffic.

Then you start peeling back the layers.

Turns out, SEO isn't one thing. It's about ten different disciplines crammed under one umbrella. Each one has its own tools, its own strategies, and its own learning curve. We're talking 10 major categories and 25 subcategories, all playing a role in whether or not your site shows up when someone searches for what you do.

That's usually when the panic sets in.

But here's the thing. You don't need to master all of it. You just need to understand what's out there so you can spend your time on the parts that actually move the needle for your business.

So today, we're breaking it all down. Every category. Every subcategory. What it means, why it matters, and where you should actually start.

Today's advice

Stop trying to "do SEO" all at once. Pick the 2-3 categories that matter most for your business and focus there.

Let me walk you through all ten categories so you know what you're actually looking at.

Technical SEO

This is the stuff happening behind the scenes. You might never see it, but Google sure does.

Site Structure is how your pages are organized. Think of it like the layout of a physical store. If everything's in the right place, people find what they need. If it's a mess, they leave. Same goes for Google.

Crawlability is whether Google can even access your pages in the first place. If something's blocking it from reading your site (and there are a bunch of things that can do this), nothing else you do is going to matter. You're invisible.

Core Web Vitals is Google's way of measuring how your site performs. Page load speed, visual stability, responsiveness, etc. And yes, Google uses it as a ranking factor.

But here's my honest take on this one: Core Web Vitals is a comparison benchmark, not a real-world test. Your actual internet connection or device speed has way more impact on how a site feels to use than these scores suggest. This is a Google invention that has made a lot of SEO consultants rich. Should you be aware of it? Sure. Should you lose sleep over it? Probably not. Focus on making your site fast and functional for real people, and you'll be fine.

Structured Data is code you add to help Google understand exactly what your content is about. Instead of making Google guess whether a page is a product listing, a service page, or a local business, you spell it out. This is how businesses get those rich results in Google – the ones with star ratings, pricing info, FAQ dropdowns, etc.

If your technical foundation is off, everything else you build on top of it is shaky.

On Page SEO

This is what most people think of when they hear "SEO." It's the work you do on each page of your site to help it rank.

Keyword Research is figuring out what your potential customers are actually typing into Google. Not what you think they're searching for. What they're really searching for. There's almost always a gap, and that gap is where you're losing people.

I talked about this recently – too many businesses write their websites based on what sounds good to them, not what their audience is actually looking for. If the words on your page don't match how people search, Google won't connect the two.

Search Intent is about understanding why someone is searching. Someone Googling "best CRM for small business" wants to compare options. Someone Googling "HubSpot login" already made their decision. If your page doesn't match the intent behind the search, it won't rank. Period.

Title Tags are the clickable headlines in search results. They're one of the first things Google looks at, and one of the first things a person sees before deciding whether or not to click. A weak title tag can kill an otherwise solid page.

Internal Linking is how you connect your own pages to each other. Every time you link from one page on your site to another, you're helping Google understand what's important and how everything relates. It also keeps visitors moving through your site instead of bouncing after one page.

Off-Page SEO

This is everything happening away from your website that still affects how you rank.

Link Building is getting other websites to link to yours. When a credible site links to your content, Google sees that as a vote of confidence. The more quality votes you get, the more authority your site builds over time. But you can't fake this or force it. It takes time, good content, and real relationships.

Digital PR is earning coverage and mentions from publications, journalists, and online media. Think of it as the modern version of getting your name in the paper – except it also sends trust signals to Google.

Brand Mentions are when people talk about your business online, even without linking to your site. Google is getting better at picking up on this. The more your name shows up in relevant conversations, the more Google connects your brand with your industry.

This is one of those categories where you don't have full control, and that's what makes it hard. You earn it over time. You don't just check a box.

Content SEO

This is where your content strategy and search strategy meet.

Topical Authority means becoming the go-to resource on a specific subject. Not by writing one blog post and hoping for the best, but by covering a topic from every angle. Google rewards depth. If you write one article about email marketing, that's fine. If you write fifteen covering every subtopic within it, Google starts seeing you as the authority.

Content Clusters are how you organize that depth. You build one main page around a broad topic (your "pillar"), then create supporting articles that go deeper on related subtopics and link them all together. It gives both Google and your readers a clear path to follow.

Programmatic SEO is using templates and data to create large numbers of pages at scale. Like a company that builds a unique landing page for every city they serve. This is more advanced, and most small businesses don't need to worry about it right now.

Local SEO

If you serve customers in a specific area, this is non-negotiable.

Google Business Profile is the listing that shows up when someone searches for your business or your category near them. Hours, location, reviews, photos – it's all there. And these results are hyper local and hyper specific. Someone searching "accountant near me" from two different zip codes can get completely different results.

If you haven't claimed your profile, that's step one. But just claiming it isn't enough. You need every piece of data up to date. Hours, services, photos, descriptions – all of it. You should be posting new content to your profile at minimum once a week. And every service or product you list should link to a specific landing page on your site. Not your homepage. Not a generic "services" page. A dedicated page for that specific thing. Generic doesn't cut it here.

Local Citations are mentions of your business name, address, and phone number across online directories and review sites. Yelp, BBB, industry-specific listings, etc. The key here is consistency. If your address shows up slightly different on three different sites, it confuses Google and can hurt your rankings.

E-commerce SEO

If you sell products online, this is your world.

Product Page SEO is making sure each product page is optimized for the terms people use when they're ready to buy. That means product titles, descriptions, images, and structured data all need attention. Most e-commerce sites have hundreds or thousands of these pages, and most of them are under-optimized.

Category Page SEO is about getting your collection pages to rank for broader terms. When someone searches "men's running shoes," they don't want to see one shoe. They want options. Your category pages are often the highest-traffic pages on an e-commerce site, and they deserve just as much work as your product pages.

International SEO

This only matters if you're targeting customers in multiple countries or languages.

Hreflang tags tell Google which version of your page is meant for which language and region. Without them, your French customers might see your English site, or your Canadian pages might compete with your US pages for the same keywords.

Geo Targeting makes sure the right content shows up in the right country. Country-specific domains, server locations, content localization – that kind of thing.

If you're running a local or national business, you can skip this one entirely. But if you sell internationally, this is worth paying attention to.

Enterprise SEO

This is SEO at scale. It mostly applies to large organizations managing thousands of pages.

Automation is building systems to handle SEO tasks across massive websites without doing everything by hand. Automated audits, templated meta tags, bulk redirects, and so on.

Governance is making sure everyone across a large team follows the same SEO standards. When multiple departments are publishing content, it's easy for one team to accidentally undo what another just spent months building.

Most small and mid-size businesses won't need to think about this. But if you're managing a site with hundreds of pages, some of these ideas start to matter.

AI SEO

This is the newest category, and it's changing the fastest.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is about making sure your content shows up in AI-generated answers – not just traditional search results. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Overview a question and it pulls from your content, that's GEO at work.

LLM Visibility is whether AI models can find and reference your content at all. It's still evolving, but the basics are the same things that have always worked: clear, well-structured content that actually helps people.

I saw this firsthand when Vervology's content started appearing in Google's AI Overviews. We didn't do anything special for it. We just answered the real questions our audience was asking, and Google's AI picked it up. You can do the same thing.

Analytics

None of the above matters if you can't see what's working.

Google Analytics tracks who visits your site, where they came from, what pages they viewed, and whether they took any action. It's important to have, but a word of caution here: Google Analytics is not the complete picture. The data you see is an extrapolation, not a perfect record of every visit. It's directional, not absolute. Use it to spot trends and patterns, but don't treat every number like gospel.

Search Console shows you which search queries bring people to your site, which pages Google has indexed, and where it's finding errors. It's the closest thing you have to a direct conversation with Google about how they see your site.

If you don't have both of these set up, that's your first move. Before anything else on this list.

Why this matters

You'll stop burning time on the wrong stuff.

Most business owners I work with feel like they should be "doing SEO" but have no idea where to start. So they either try to do everything at once, or they focus on whatever the last article they read told them to focus on.

That's how you end up spending three months building backlinks when your real problem is that Google can't even crawl half your pages. Or writing blog posts for months without realizing your title tags are garbage and nobody's clicking through from search results.

When you understand the full picture, you can make better decisions about where your effort goes. You don't need to check every box on the list. You need to check the right ones.

You'll set expectations that actually make sense.

I say this all the time: SEO isn't a one-time thing or a bolt-on plugin. It is a fundamental way of publishing content, and it is ongoing. It never stops.

Knowing how many moving parts are involved helps you plan for it, budget for it, and stop expecting overnight results. The businesses that win at SEO are the ones that stay consistent. They pick their lane, do the work, and keep showing up.

Here's how to start

Ask yourself one question: which 2-3 of these categories are most relevant to my business right now?

If you're a local business, start with Local SEO and On Page SEO. Get your Google Business Profile fully filled out and actively maintained, link every service to a dedicated landing page, make sure your site content matches the way real people search, and keep your pages fresh.

If you run an online store, start with E-commerce SEO and Technical SEO. Optimize your product and category pages, and make sure your site loads fast and Google can crawl it without issues.

If you're a service-based business that relies on content to attract leads, start with Content SEO and Analytics. Build topical authority around the subjects your audience cares about, measure what's working, and do more of that.

That's it. You don't need to master all ten categories to see results. You just need the right two or three working for you, and then you build from there.

SEO is a lot. No one's pretending otherwise. But it doesn't have to be overwhelming if you know where to focus.

And if you're not sure where to start, just ask. That's what I'm here for.

Best

Jono

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Hi {{ first name | reader }},

I get asked this question all the time.

"How do I generate more traffic to my website?"

And I always respond with a few questions of my own. Why do you want traffic? What type of traffic are you looking for? Where do you want them to go once they get there? And what do you want them to do when they arrive?

Most of the time, those questions haven't been thought through yet. And that's okay. It's a natural place to start. We all hear "you need more traffic" so often that it starts to feel like traffic is the goal. But traffic is really just the beginning.

Without a destination and an experience waiting on the other end, chasing traffic is like getting on a bus to nowhere. You're moving. You feel like something is happening. But when the ride stops, you're not any closer to where you actually want to be.

Let me break down how I think about this, because I think it might help.

Traffic Without a Plan

Here's what I see a lot. A business owner builds a website, and then the immediate next thought is: I need people to visit it. That's a fair instinct. But the focus tends to land entirely on getting eyeballs, without much thought about what happens next.

You could have thousands of people visit your site this month. But if the experience once they arrive doesn't give them a clear reason to stay, engage, or take the next step, those visits don't really translate into anything meaningful.

I've talked about this before. Traffic doesn't equal sales. The two are related, sure. But one doesn't automatically lead to the other.

What matters is the full picture. How people find you, what they experience when they get there, and whether that experience brings them back.

Building the Roads

So how do you actually drive people to your site? The quick answer is usually social media, and it falls into two categories.

Paid ads are the fastest route. You invest money and you see results quickly. Facebook, Google, Instagram, wherever your audience is. The challenge is that the moment you stop spending, the traffic stops too. It's like renting space on someone else's highway.

Organic content is the other path. It takes more time and consistency, but if you don't have a big ad budget, it's a great way to start building an audience. You're creating content that speaks to the people you want to reach, and over time, that builds momentum.

Both approaches work. But here's something I want you to keep in mind, and I think it's really important.

That audience you're building on social media? You're renting it. You don't own those followers. You don't own the platform. And you don't control the algorithm that decides who sees your content.

We've seen this play out over and over. Facebook slashed organic reach for business pages years ago. Instagram changes its algorithm regularly. TikTok's future in some markets is uncertain. Vine was massive, and then it was gone.

Any audience you build on someone else's platform can disappear. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the rules changed or the platform itself did.

That's why the conversation has to go deeper than just traffic.

Own the Road. Own the Bus. Own the Destination.

This is the shift I really want to talk about.

Instead of just driving traffic, think about what you actually own and control. Your website. Your email list. Your newsletter. Your customer database. These are yours. No algorithm decides whether your email gets delivered. No platform change can wipe out your subscriber list overnight.

But owning the destination is only part of it. Once people arrive, you need to give them an experience worth having.

Think about what that looks like for your business. Maybe it's content that helps them solve a problem. Maybe it's a clear path to understanding your services. Maybe it's a way to get a quick win, like a free resource or a helpful guide. Whatever it is, the experience is what turns a visitor into someone who sticks around.

And the best part? When you control that experience, you can keep improving it. You can bring people back. You can build something that compounds over time, rather than constantly chasing the next wave of visitors.

Here's how I think about the full picture: own the road, own the bus, own the destination, control the event, control the experience, and bring them back for more.

A Note on Platforms Like GoHighLevel

I want to touch on something here because I think it's relevant to this conversation.

A lot of people are hearing about platforms like GoHighLevel right now. It's positioned as a white-label, all-in-one marketing solution, and on the surface, it sounds great.

But here's something worth knowing. If you're a small business owner, you're actually not the ideal customer for GoHighLevel. The ideal customer is the small business advisor or consultant, the person who white-labels the platform and then sells it to businesses like yours as part of a consultancy package.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that model. But I think it's worth understanding what's happening. The consultant's goal is typically to sell you a short to medium-term engagement, and the lock-in is the platform. Your data, your workflows, your customer relationships, they all live inside a system you don't fully own.

I've always believed that you need to own your own data, your own audience, your own customer relationships. That includes the tools you use to manage them. When your business depends on a platform someone else controls, you're back to renting again. Different context, same problem.

Think About the Customer, Not the Tool

This is the part I keep coming back to. And I think it's where a lot of us can make a real shift.

Instead of asking "what tool should I use?" try asking "what does my customer's journey look like from start to finish?"

Where do they first hear about you? What makes them want to learn more? What do they experience when they visit your site? Is it easy for them to understand what you offer and why it matters? What's the next step you want them to take? How do you follow up? How do you deliver your service? How do you support them after the sale? And how do you bring them back?

When you map that out, the right tools become obvious. They serve the journey. They don't define it.

I know this can feel like a lot to think about. But you don't have to figure it all out at once. Start with the questions. Get clear on what the journey looks like right now, and where the gaps are. That alone puts you ahead of most.

The World Has Changed

One more thing. We're in a different place now than we were even a couple of years ago. The way people search, the way platforms work, the way AI is reshaping how businesses reach their audience, it's all shifting. What worked in 2023 isn't necessarily going to position you well heading into 2027.

And on the topic of tools and platforms, that industry is going through some big changes. The services and platform I now provide through Vervology look totally different from where things were a year ago. But that's a conversation for another day.

For now, here's what I'd leave you with.

Stop thinking about traffic as the answer. It's part of the equation, but it's not the whole thing. Focus on building something you own, creating an experience worth having, and giving people a reason to come back.

Own the road. Own the bus. Own the destination.

And whatever you do, don't get on the bus to nowhere.

Best

Jono

Hi {{ first name | reader }},

You just got handed the keys to a Ferrari.

Zero to sixty in 2.9 seconds. 710 horsepower. Top speed of 211 mph.

Question: What happens next?

Most people? They stall it at the first light. Or they punch the gas and lose control before they hit third gear. Some wrap it around a tree at the first corner.

A few learn to drive it properly. They practice. They study. They fail. They get better.

And then there are the pros: they know exactly when to brake, which line to take through the corner, how to position the car before the apex. They can push it to the limit lap after lap without breaking a sweat.

That's what using an LLM (AI) is like right now.

Everyone Has the Keys

ChatGPT launched. Claude appeared. Gemini showed up. Suddenly everyone has access to a supercar sitting in their driveway.

The barrier to entry? Zero.

Type words. Get words back. Simple.

But here's what nobody tells you: getting output from an LLM is easy. Getting good output? That takes skill.

Real skill.

The kind you can't pick up from a YouTube video or a blog post. The kind that comes from hours of practice, from understanding how these systems think, from knowing when to push and when to pull back.

The Amateur Hour Problem

I see it constantly. Someone sits down with Claude or GPT-4, types in a vague prompt, gets mediocre results, and declares AI is overhyped.

"I asked it to write a marketing email and it gave me garbage."

Sure it did. Because you asked it to write "a marketing email" the same way you'd tell a Ferrari to "go fast" without knowing which gear you're in.

The AI gave you exactly what you asked for. The problem? You didn't know what to ask for.

You didn't specify tone. You didn't provide context. You didn't give examples. You didn't iterate. You didn't refine.

You just mashed the gas pedal and wondered why you spun out.

What Skill Actually Looks Like

Professional LLM use isn't about knowing tricks. It's about understanding the machine.

You learn what works through repetition. You figure out when to be specific and when to leave room for creativity. You discover that context is everything. You realize that the first output is rarely the best output.

You start to see patterns. This type of prompt gets these types of results. That phrasing unlocks better reasoning. Adding examples changes everything.

You develop intuition. Not magic. Not hacks. Just pattern recognition built through experience.

Can you learn it? Absolutely.

Does it happen overnight? Not a chance.

The Productivity Multiplier

When you know how to drive the car, everything changes.

Tasks that took hours take minutes. Projects that seemed impossible become routine. The quality of your output shoots up while the time invested drops.

I run three different ventures (Vervology, 315ny, TallowSoap (coming soon)). Without LLMs, I'd need a team of 14 people. With them? I can do more with less because I've learned to drive the machine.

Writing. Research. Analysis. Code. Strategy. Customer service. Content creation.

All of it moves faster. All of it gets better.

But only because I've put in the hours. Only because I've learned what works and what doesn't. Only because I've crashed the car enough times to know where the limits are.

The Revolution Is Real

This isn't hype. This isn't a bubble. This is a fundamental shift in how work gets done.

LLMs are tools. Like spreadsheets. Like the internet. Like email.

Except they're more powerful. More flexible. More transformative.

They don't replace humans. They multiply human capability. They take the ceiling off what a person can accomplish.

But you have to learn to use them. Really use them. Not just dabble. Not just prompt and pray.

You have to practice. You have to fail. You have to get better.

And It's Fun

Here's the part people miss: driving a supercar is exhilarating.

When you nail a corner perfectly. When you feel the car respond exactly how you wanted. When you push it harder than you thought possible and it handles beautifully.

That's what it feels like when you get good with LLMs.

You ask a complex question and get a brilliant answer. You iterate on an idea and watch it evolve. You solve a problem in seconds that would have taken days.

It's satisfying. It's exciting. It's genuinely fun.

But you only get there if you learn to drive.

So What Now?

You've got the keys. The supercar is sitting there waiting.

What are you going to do with it?

Are you going to tap the gas nervously and complain it's too complicated?

Or are you going to learn to drive it properly?

The machine doesn't care. It'll sit there whether you use it or not.

But if you put in the time, if you develop the skill, if you learn to push it without crashing?

You'll never look back.

The future belongs to people who can drive fast without wrapping it around a tree.

Start practicing.

Jono

You see them everywhere. Headlines that sound like the writer is guessing. Articles titled "This Could Change Your Business" or "Why You Might Want to Try This Strategy."

Here's what kills me: if the writer is not confident enough to say it will happen, why would you believe it can happen?

When someone writes "This could help your business," they're telling you they don't know if it actually works. When they write "This might be the solution," they're admitting they're not confident in their own advice.

Compare that to "This will help your business." Now they're taking a stand. They're saying they believe in what they're about to share.

Which one would you click on? "5 Things That Could Improve Your Website" or "5 Things That Will Improve Your Website"?

The second one sounds like the writer has actually tested these things. Like they know what they're talking about.

But we keep falling for the hedge words. We click on articles full of "might" and "could" and "possibly." We read content from people who sound uncertain about their own advice.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

We can all agree that journalism standards have hit the floor. Editors nowadays care more about likes and follows than writing factual content. They craft these wishy-washy headlines because they know uncertain people click on uncertain promises.

The dirty secret? Most of these hedge titled articles have nothing to do with your success. The goal is to separate you from your money with a false hope of getting rich quick or some fake shortcut to success. They're selling you dreams wrapped in "might work" because they know if they promised it would work, you'd come back angry when it doesn't. Ultimately, you end up feeling the guilt for it not working.

Every time a writer uses hedge words, they're undermining their own authority. They're telling you they're not sure. They're positioning themselves as someone who has guesses, not answers.

And yet we keep reading.

The hedge protects them, not you. They get your click, your email, your money. You get another "strategy that could potentially maybe help if the stars align."

The next time you see a headline with "could" or "might," ask yourself: would you bet money on advice from someone who sounds that uncertain?

Stop clicking on hedged headlines. Demand solid knowledge-based content from the people you follow. Your time is worth more than maybes.

Jono

Hi {{ first name | reader }},

Consumption-based billing sounds fair. Pay for what you use, right? But without account limits, it’s a trap that can bleed your budget dry.

Unscrupulous vendors use this model to exploit businesses. You deserve transparency and control, not surprise invoices.

Here’s why unlimited consumption billing is a problem and how to choose vendors who won’t rip you off.

The Problem with Unlimited Consumption Billing

It’s unpredictable.

Without caps, your bill can skyrocket unexpectedly. A small business using a cloud service might budget $100 a month, only to get hit with a $1,000 invoice because of a usage spike. No warning, no control.

For example, a marketing agency I know ran an ad campaign that went viral. Their cloud provider charged them thousands for extra data usage. They had no way to predict or limit the cost.

It encourages vendor exploitation.

Some vendors design systems to maximize usage, knowing you’ll pay more. They might not optimize their services or alert you to overuse. It’s in their interest to let your costs balloon.

Think about it: Why would a vendor warn you about high usage if it means less revenue for them? Without limits, you’re at their mercy.

Why This Matters

It hurts your bottom line.

Unexpected costs can cripple small businesses. Cash flow is tight, and a surprise bill can force you to cut corners elsewhere or delay critical investments. You deserve predictable expenses to plan effectively.

It erodes trust.

When vendors don’t offer clear limits or warnings, it feels like they’re taking advantage of you. Customers notice this and flock to vendors who prioritize transparency and fairness.

How to Choose Better Vendors

Look for usage caps or alerts.

Choose vendors who let you set account limits or send alerts when you’re nearing a threshold. For instance, some cloud services allow you to cap data usage or receive notifications at 80% of your budget.

Prioritize flat-rate or tiered pricing.

Flat-rate or tiered plans offer predictability. A SaaS tool with a $50/month plan is easier to budget for than one that charges per API call with no upper limit.

Ask yourself: Can you afford a surprise $2,000 bill? If not, choose vendors who respect your financial boundaries.

Best,

Jono

Soapbox Download

Ok, got something more for you! I’m going to start to include helpful tools and guides in these Soapbox newsletters, which hopefully you will find useful. This one is how to publish smarter on the right platform.

Hi {{ first name | reader }},

There’s a lot of pressure these days to build a big team.

People act like if you’re not hiring, you’re not growing. But that’s just not true.

You don’t need a big team to build a big brand.

What you really need is something that helps you do more with what you already have.

Today’s advice

Focus on building better systems, not a bigger team.

When your business starts growing, it’s natural to have that moment of panic and think, I need help.

And yeah, sometimes you do. But more often than not, what’s really missing isn’t manpower. It’s structure.

Think about it. If you’re:

• Writing every email from scratch

• Re-explaining your process to every new client

• Forgetting to follow up until it’s too late

• Spending hours digging through your inbox to find the right file

…then adding more people won’t solve that. It just adds more hands to a disorganized workflow. And often, it creates more questions, more miscommunication, and more time spent managing the chaos.

The better path?

Start creating simple, repeatable systems. Like using templates for the emails you send over and over again. Or building a quick PDF or Notion page that walks new clients through what to expect. 

You can always hire later. But systems are what make that possible.

They’re what gives you the option to scale, without the constant scramble.

Why this matters

You’ll save time and reduce stress.

Strong systems create space for better decisions, faster execution, and more consistent results. When your day isn’t filled with constant task-switching or last-minute fixes, you’re able to plan ahead and respond to challenges with less panic. 

Businesses with solid internal systems are more resilient, more profitable, and easier to run because they’re not constantly in reactive mode. And on a personal level, you’ll feel less scattered and more in control, which makes everything a lot more sustainable.

You’ll build a business that doesn’t depend entirely on you.

A business that only works because you’re constantly holding it together isn’t built to last — it’s built to burn you out. Systems change that by creating a foundation that can function even if you’re not available 24/7.

 That makes it easier to bring in help down the road. Instead of everything resting on your shoulders, your business becomes something that runs with or without your constant input.

Here’s how to start

Choose one area of your business that feels chaotic.

It might be onboarding a new client, sending out invoices, managing your calendar, or following up with leads… anything that regularly causes stress or feels clunky. 

Write down the steps you usually take, just as they are now. You don’t need to fix it all at once. The goal is to spot patterns, identify bottlenecks, and start thinking about how to make that one area smoother. 

That’s how you build a big brand without a big operation behind it.

Best,

Jono

Hi {{ first name | reader }},

It’s easy to make assumptions about certain platforms.

We decide they’re not meant for someone like us, and we stop paying attention. Meanwhile, that very platform is pulling in millions of users every month and doing exactly what most businesses wish their marketing would do.

Today, we’re talking about a platform that’s been quietly making a comeback: Pinterest.

Today’s advice

Add Pinterest to your marketing toolbox.

Even though it’s been around for a while, Pinterest is becoming popular again thanks to Gen Z. It just hit 570 million monthly active users in the first quarter of this year, beating Wall Street expectations.

Most people think of Pinterest as a place for mood boards and meal plans, but it’s actually one of the few platforms people use with the intent to buy. 

That’s because, unlike other platforms, people on Pinterest aren’t just scrolling—they’re searching. They come looking for inspiration, products, and solutions, and they’re often ready to act. It’s more like a visual search engine than a social feed.

Even better: you don’t need to create separate content for Pinterest. You can repurpose what you’re already posting on Instagram, sync it up, and start building a presence without a ton of extra work.

Ruggable’s a great example of a brand that’s experienced huge growth using Pinterest.

Why this matters

You’ll show up where people are actively searching.

Pinterest isn’t like Instagram or TikTok, where your content disappears into the void after 24 hours. It honestly works more like a search engine than a social platform. 

Someone could find a pin you posted last month (or last year) just because they searched for something related to your business. If you want to show up when people are already looking for what you offer, this is the place to be.

You can share links without getting punished for it.

Most platforms these days bury posts that include links. But on Pinterest, every image is a clickable link. Each image you post can drive traffic directly to your website, no extra steps required.

No need to “link in bio” or bury it in the comments. Just send people straight to where you want them to go. 

Here’s how to start

Sync your Instagram content to Pinterest

If you’re already posting to Instagram, you’ve already got content that can work on Pinterest. You can manually upload posts or use a scheduling tool to cross-post automatically. Boom — no extra work for you!

Otherwise, start small. Think about what visuals you have…it could be photos of your work, graphics you use for your blog, product shots, etc. You can turn any of those into Pins. Just upload them to Pinterest, add a short caption, and include a link back to your website or lead form.

The goal is just to start showing up. Once you get in the habit, it’s easy to build momentum without adding a bunch of extra work to your plate.

Best,

Jono

Hi {{ first name | reader }},

Time is our biggest asset as entrepreneurs, and there never seems to be enough of it. 

I talk about this a lot because I honestly believe this is what’s getting in the way for a lot of people: spending too much time on the wrong things.

How you manage your time directly impacts your profits. So today I’m sharing the approach I’ve found that works best for managing my time. 

Today’s advice

Time block every hour of your day in your calendar.

If you’re not familiar with “time-blocking”, it’s exactly what it sounds like: you break your day into blocks of time and assign each one a specific task. 

But what I’ve found to really make a difference is that you do this for EVERY task, both work and personal. And you need to account for every hour of the day.

Here’s what this looks like for me: I just use Google Calendar so that I can add events for each block of time. That way, I can use color-coding to organize by type (client work, admin, personal, etc.). 

Every day includes certain blocks that are non-negotiable. For example, every morning I have an hour dedicated to responding to emails. That’s fixed. Other recurring blocks might include things like client calls, time for internal strategy, lunch, family time, etc. Once it’s in the calendar, you treat it like any other appointment.

It might sound simple, but it’s the best way I’ve found to give every day structure—and that’s what will drive results.

Example from Asana

Why this matters

You get more done by focusing on one thing at a time.

Most of us are constantly switching between tasks. You might check emails between meetings, jump from a client project to an invoice…it feels like you’re productive because you’re moving so fast. But you’re really just scattering your focus. 

Research shows that task switching can cut productivity by up to 40% (Source). That’s because your brain needs time to reset every time you jump between things. It drains your focus and your energy.

Time blocking forces you to do the opposite: You give one task your full attention for a set period of time.

And the more consistently you work this way, the faster and sharper you get.

You free up more mental energy.

Every time you stop to figure out what to do next, you’re using up mental bandwidth. When you do that dozens of times a day, that leads to decision fatigue. 

Soon enough, you might start procrastinating on hard things. You default to low-effort tasks, even if they’re not that important. By the end of the day, you’ve been busy, but you haven’t made real progress.

Time blocking helps prevent that. Everything’s already decided for you. That frees up your energy for higher-value thinking: creative work, solving problems, and calls with prospects.

The kind of work that actually needs your brain fully switched on.

Here’s how to start

Block out your calendar for next Monday.

Open up your calendar right now (it can be Google, Apple, or a physical planner—doesn’t matter) and take a look at next Monday.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Start with the recurring tasks.

Add blocks for the things you absolutely need to do every day.  Like your daily email time, client meetings, team check-ins, or your workout. 

2. Decide what other work is top-priority. 

Assign time blocks for specific work tasks that need to get done. Be as clear as possible: “Write client proposal,” “Follow up on leads,” “Prep presentation.” 

3. Estimate how long each task will take. Then round up.

If you think something will take 45 minutes, block an hour. Give yourself breathing room so you’re not scrambling or falling behind.

4. Add in your personal time.

Include meals, breaks, errands, family time, etc.. If it takes time, it goes on the calendar

5. Use color-coding if your tool allows it.

Group similar tasks by color (admin, client work, personal, creative, etc.). This gives you a quick visual overview of how your time is divided.

That’s it. One day, fully blocked. Once you try it, you’ll start to see where your time’s really going—and how much more control you actually have.

Best,

Jono

Hi {{ first name | reader }},

You don’t usually think about moving your website until you have to.

Things may be fine now, but at some point, you’ll likely want to switch providers, upgrade your platform, or take more control of how your site runs. That means transferring your website – your domain, files, hosting, and everything else – to a new setup.

So today, we’re breaking down what to check before you ever need to make a move.

Today’s advice

Get clear on who owns each part of your website.

It’s easy to assume your website is “yours.” But unless you’ve intentionally set things up that way, you might not have full control.

Here are a few common scenarios that I see:

• You built your site on Wix or Squarespace, and your domain/ hosting is managed separately through a company like GoDaddy.

• You hired someone years ago to set up your site, and you’re not sure where things are hosted or who has access.

• You’re paying a monthly fee for “maintenance,” but you don’t know what that includes, or whether you can access your accounts if needed.

Even if your website is running smoothly today, it’s worth understanding how it’s all set up and what would be involved if you ever needed to move it.

Do you have access to your accounts? Is everything under your name or business? Could you switch platforms or providers without losing anything important?

To be clear, the goal isn’t to manage all the technical pieces yourself. But you do need to know how things are structured, and whether you’d be able to make a clean transition if the time comes.

That’s why it’s important to work with a provider who handles the technical side and keeps things transparent – someone who gives you access, answers your questions, and looks out for your long-term interest.

Unfortunately, not everyone does. So it’s worth staying informed so you’re not caught off guard later.

Why this matters

You can make changes without losing control.

Clear ownership gives you the freedom to make decisions without getting stuck. If you ever want to change who you’re working with or switch platforms, you’ll have the access you need to take action quickly. You don’t have to rely on someone else to hand things over, and you won’t risk losing access to critical parts of your business.

This kind of flexibility gives you options. It lets you grow and evolve without the stress of starting from scratch or waiting on a third party to cooperate.

You avoid unnecessary downtime, costs, or surprises.

A lot can go wrong when you don’t have a clear view of how your website is set up. Domains can expire without warning. Hosting plans can renew with unexpected charges. Logins can get lost. And if something breaks (like a contact form or plugin), you might not know who to call or how to fix it.

I’ve seen business owners lose entire websites because no one had access to the original files. Or get locked out of their domain because it was registered under an old employee’s name, etc.

These things cost more to fix after the fact than they would have to prevent.

Having a clear, documented setup puts you in a stronger position.

Here’s how to start

Take some time to dig into how your website is set up.

This doesn’t need to be complicated – you’re just looking to understand what’s in place and who controls what.

If you’re working with a provider who manages your site, review your original agreement or service plan. Look for answers to questions like:

• Who owns the domain?

• What happens if I ever want to move my site?

• Do I have admin-level access, or can I get it if needed?

If you built the site yourself or are using a DIY platform, double-check that your domain, hosting, and platform logins are stored somewhere secure and tied to an email you control. Make sure no critical piece is floating out there under someone else’s account.

I know this technical stuff can feel overwhelming, but the goal is just to make sure you’re informed and in control.

If you have questions or need help figuring out your setup, just let me know. 

Best,

Jono