We are dead smack in the middle of an AI Witch Hunt right now.
Have you seen what’s happening?
Last month, LinkedIn added their “Seems like AI Slop” button.
A few weeks before that, Substack announced the Pangram AI detection partnership (I’m happy to say that Pangram confirms my newsletter is in fact 100% “Fully Human-Written”).
And just this last week, in response to EU AI regulations, Anthropic has introduced an invisible “Scarlet Letter” watermark, on anything AI written or touched by their LLM.
(OpenAI is reportedly following suit.)
Which brings me to the first of 3 Wild-Ass Warnings from my Return to Real Vermont Farm Mastermind Experience this past week:
Warning #1 | Write Your AI Policy Now Before You Get Cancelled.
The reason so many have a distaste toward AI-writing isn’t necessarily because that writing is “worse” per se. It’s that there is a break in the “social contract” between writer and reader.
This article by Giles Crouch, PhD-c sums it up well:1
“When we read something that was written using AI (LLMs), and is pasted into an email, a blog post or other social media, especially with the more obvious “tells” we teach each other about (a form of socialization of a technology via culture), we don’t feel that the “author” really cares two wits [sic] about us. They may have written a prompt very cleverly, or terribly and copy/pasted a machine output. The human receiver feels the author is lazy, uncaring and is breaking a social contract. We tend to get a tad grumpy when people break social contracts.”
And Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer Company, makes the same point in his company’s internal AI policy:2
“LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.”
Breaking this social contract with your audience is a breach of trust.
And I’ve been banging this drum for the last 2+ years dating all the way back to [Issue #001] of this publication, when I decided to take a stand on this and write everything in this newsletter myself (which comes at a great personal cost in terms of time, effort, and energy every single week…)
As Cantrill puts it in the AI Policy above, LLM use may be viewed as a dietary choice. In the same way that we have vegans, we will very likely have AI purists who insist that not only do they themselves not engage with AI in their work, but that everyone else must follow the same standard (with shaming as an attempted enforcement tactic).
For most of us, this is not only impractical but, to extend the metaphor, also unhealthy (or at least unhealthy for our business).
So what’s the solution?
The answer is disclosure.
You don’t have to write a weekly newsletter personally yourself like I do each week (though I would advocate you consider that, IF you want to build a loyal following and IF you actually have something worth sharing…)
But what I would urge you to consider at a minimum is crafting an AI policy to transparently explain how you create your work.
What this means in practice is crafting a written “AI Disclosure Policy.”
How to do that, and what you should say exactly, were subjects we explored in detail during many of our meals and breakout conversations at the mastermind this past week, and ones that I will likely be writing about in more detail in the coming weeks and months…
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Before we get to Warning #2 on our list…
First, for context: I decided to cap this year’s Vermont Farm Mastermind at 20 attendees (despite receiving more than 2x the number of applications to attend…)
One of the reasons for that, is I wanted to create a VERY unique environment that taps into the three core advantagesthat I discuss in my upcoming book, Return to Real.
(More on the book – and the pre-order opportunity opening THIS week – in a moment…)
BTW – Before I forget, if you’d like to get on the waitlist for my next Return to Real Mastermind, here’s the priority waitlist. The event is already 50% pre-sold out. If Vermont is difficult for you to get to, this next one is being held in an urban setting in a much easier destination to reach. Details coming. Getting onto the waitlist is the first step. :-).
This brings us to…
Warning #2 | Membership Is Officially Dead.
The last thing we want is (yet) another monthly recurring charge on our credit card.
A decade ago we were sold the idea of “Cutting the Cord” — getting rid of our cable bill, to replace what we were watching with “Streaming Services” at a fraction of the price.
You may remember the hundreds of articles published on the topic like this one here:
Fast forward to today, and we’re now paying (on average) more than what we were paying back then for cable, but the charges are now spread across (in some cases) over a dozen different service providers.
And it’s not just streaming services we’re sick of paying a monthly subscription for.
It’s everything.
Substack, for example, offers journalists a path to monetize their work by charging something like $8/month for their work. The problem is that consumers only have a tolerance for (at most) four or five of these subscriptions at a time before they start canceling or cutting back.
There simply aren’t enough consumers to make this model work. It’s part of the “Void to Avoid in the Middle” I warn about in [Issue #090] 95% of What You Sell Is About to Become Free.
The modern “Cut the Cord” equivalent is with all the SaaS tools we use to run our businesses, which are being (in part) replaced by subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, and the like.
(Which, for a minute, are subsidized by all the VC money going into those services. The honeymoon period we’re in right now will NOT last forever.)
And what about monthly memberships?
Pretty much everyone knows by now at least somebody whose $47/month membership is dying (or perhaps is already dead…)
And the reason for that, is nobody wants yet another $47/month charge on their credit card.
But one thing people are absolutely craving right now is… community.
The problem is that community is not necessarily something that consumers are willing to pay for… At least not outright.
(And therein lies the opportunity.)
The old adage that “people come for the content and stay for the community” is a tired old trope that AI has effectively made obsolete.
You used to be able to sell information through a course. Bring students together in a group, and build a community around this model.
That no longer works the way it once did.
So what’s the solution??
One answer is offering…. “Community-as-a-Service.”
(Not to be confused with Community Service.)
Community-as-a-Service is where you bundle access to community as something customers get access to when and only when they become a paying client of yours for a product or service that you offer.
For example:
One member in our mastermind group runs a successful marketing agency. Every year they host a series of events. The events are free to attend but they’re only open to paying clients. If you’re not a client, you cannot buy a ticket to attend.
When this company started incorporating this into their model, they reduced their monthly client churn by 40% and improved their annualized client retention by 28.4%. This equates to a 66.7% increase in lifetime customer value (!)
To make these numbers real:
Let’s say you have 100 customers paying $1,000 a month. If you cut your monthly churn by 40% (from say 5% to 3%) and thus improve annualized retention by 28%, the average customer stays 33 months instead of 20. That one change alone to your business will add $1.3 million in revenue from the customers you already have.
Yeah. This is a BIG DEAL.
Another member in our group who has a successful residential real estate agency, grew his business from nothing to 12.6% market share in his local market in just a few years by hosting in-person live events for all his firm’s residential real estate buyers and sellers.
Once again, a free benefit for being a customer.
He is also building a community of clients who are not paying for the events or community per se but are getting accessto that community as a service for being a client.
Now of course to be able to incorporate this strategy into your business, you need to charge enough for what you sell to leave enough margin to be able to deliver community as a benefit, because community has a cost.
But from a client retention standpoint (not to mention a source of repeat and referral business) they may be the most valuable marketing dollars you invest in your business.
Which brings us to…
Warning #3 | You’re Now Competing with 14-Year Olds.
Both of my two boys played a big role in making our Vermont Farm mastermind a success.
In the photograph above, Henry and Bradley are both co-leading our farm tour and answering questions from members in the group.
I had multiple proud papa moments this week as members came up to me privately (and in several cases publicly) to express how impressed they were with these two young men.
My older son, Henry, who is entering high school next year, participated in the Mastermind as a full participant for the first time.
At 14 years old he has built his own business doing retail arbitrage (think: finding items for sale at deep discount in obscure places, and reselling them online for a profit). He makes more money doing this than several other businesses in the room.
He is among the AI-Native generation, and at 14 years old is already beginning to build out AI agents to source both buyers and sellers of these products online to hunt down market inefficiencies and identify “risk free arbitrage” opportunities.
At the end of the last day of the Mastermind, I went around the room and asked everyone, “What’s your biggest takeaway?”
When it was Henry’s turn to share, his takeaway came from the Category of One deep dive session I led at the event.
His biggest takeaway was a quote from my friend Sally Hogshead:
“Different is better than better, but only is best.”
And he came to the conclusion that the ONLY business worth building right now, is one that is truly a Category of One.
In the room, we had multiple multi-million dollar businesses:
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Marketing Agency
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Residential Real Estate
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Book Publisher
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Large In-Person Events Business
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Parkinson’s Clinic
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Boutique Fitness Business
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Retirement Planning
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Destination Airbnb Property
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Temp Staffing Agency
And many others…
Every single business in the room was in the room in part to figure out how to establish (or re-establish) itself as a Category of One in its market.
Every single business has tremendous opportunity to do that.
But at the same time…
Every single business is facing real challenges and threats.
It is true that there are a million ways to make a million dollars.
But it’s also true that with AI, it’s never been easier to get into the game.
You are now officially competing with millions of smart, hungry AI-native teenagers and twenty-somethings who, like Henry, are disrupting industries left and right…
Being in the right room, with the right people, who are truly at the cutting edge and actually doing this, has never been more important.
Kind. Generous. And Real. Yes.
But also Smart. Strategic. And Hungry.
Because after the last week, I’ve never been more convinced that doing things the same way you’ve been doing them in your business…
Is a direct path to the dinosaur business graveyard.
The AI Asteroid has already made contact with planet Earth.
The dust cloud is forming as we speak…
And many business owners are beginning to choke on the smoke in the atmosphere.
Will you go extinct like the Jurassic Giants of yesteryear?
Or will you be among the nimble mammals who figure out how to inherit the Earth of tomorrow?
I know what group I want to be part of.
You?
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Okay. I will leave you with that thought for today.
Stay tuned, because THIS WEEK, after nearly TWO YEARS in the making…
We begin opening pre-orders for my long-awaited book which dives into the solutions to the warnings of today’s issue:
RETURN TO REAL: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything.
I will be beginning with a VERY special “Founders Circle” opportunity for those who want to be SIGNIFICANT supporters of this work by making a BULK purchase of the book, to giveaway and share with your community.
And for those who do that, I have a VERY SPECIAL offer I will be making that has HUGE value attached to it.
It will be limited.
It will be exclusive.
It will be first-come, first-served.
And if you’d like to find out what it is, you must get your name on this special priority notification list here:
The wait is almost over.
Remember to hug the ones you love.
I wish you all my best.
Ryan :-)
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Giles Crouch, “Why We Dislike AI Writing,” The Digital Anthropologist, June 1, 2026, https://gilescrouch.substack.com/p/why-we-dislike-ai-writing.
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Bryan Cantrill, “RFD 576: Using LLMs at Oxide,” Oxide Computer Company, accessed August 16, 2026, https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576.
