September 12, 2026 | Read online
I was on a call last week with two people I know really well. One of them runs a billion dollar company. The other is a senior executive with an impressive history/background in start-ups. They wanted to talk about starting a podcast.
So we started brainstorming topics, and about ten minutes in it stopped being a brainstorm.
They started telling me what they were actually dealing with. The pace, the pressure to have an AI answer for everything, the feeling that no matter how much they read or how many tools they try, they're behind. I told them what I was dealing with too, and it was the same list.
At some point I said that we should call the podcast "Sales Therapy" and do it live because I think a lot of people need it right now.
And that's when it clicked for me, because it wasn't the first one. I've had about a dozen of these conversations in the past two weeks. Founders, CROs, reps, HR leaders, friends and more. All in different industries, at different levels, and every one of them landed in the same place.
We're all exhausted and feel like we're headed toward something we can't stop, specifically related to AI. Somewhere in the middle of each conversation the same question came out - what the fuck are we doing?
Not "how do I use AI better." Why. And, to what end.
I didn't have a great answer for them, and I'm not sure I have one for myself right now either.
Here's what pushed me over the edge this week. You all probably heard by now that Anthropic's head of alignment science, one of the people whose actual job is to keep this stuff safe, said publicly that he thinks there's a greater than 10% chance AI kills all of us within the next decade. In the same week, a researcher who worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI quit and said neither company is acting responsibly. You can read the coverage here and here.
Read that again. That's not a critic or a politician talking. That's the guy inside the building.
If a plane had a 10% chance of going down, nobody would board it. We're treating this like a productivity tool. It's being talked about by the people building it like it's nuclear.
THE PART I DON'T TALK ABOUT MUCH
I've struggled with AI for a while, and not for the reasons you'd expect from a sales trainer.
My wife is an environmental scientist (go follow her on Linkedin by the way. She's awesome and the work she's doing matters more than ever). She spends her days on climate and sustainability work with communities that are dealing with the real consequences of all this. The impact data centers are having on the environment is not up for debate in our house. The International Energy Agency reported that data center electricity use jumped 17% last year, with AI-focused centers growing even faster, and the whole thing is on track to double by 2030 (IEA, April 2026).
So every time I open Claude or ChatGPT, there's a little voice in the back of my head.
The way I've tried to justify it is simple. If I'm going to use it, I have to use it for good, and the good has to outweigh the harm by a lot. That was the deal I made with myself.
That deal is getting harder to keep.
And the other side of it is real too. If I don't use it, somebody who does is going to pass me. That's true for me, it's true for you, and it's true for every person I talked to over the past two weeks. None of us asked for this. We got thrown into it and told to keep up.
I love what AI has let me do. I've built things in the last year I could never have built on my own. So I'm not walking away from it.
And it's bigger than what it does for me. A few weeks ago Moderna and Merck announced their personalized melanoma vaccine passed a Phase 3 trial, a custom shot built for each patient's tumor that cut the risk of the cancer coming back (CNN). That doesn't happen without the same computing power that's chewing through the grid. I'm holding both of those things at the same time and I'm not going to pretend it's comfortable.
Here's what I actually think is going on, and it's the thing that scares me. I still think we're in the efficiency phase of AI. It makes what we already do faster and cheaper. The results phase is next, where it doesn't help you do the work, it does the work for you. When that arrives, a lot of the roles we're all frantically trying to protect won't need a human in them at all.
That, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me.
WHERE THE HOPE IS
I don't want this to be a doomsday newsletter, so let me tell you where I actually see light.
The same tools that are flattening jobs are also collapsing the cost of starting something. U.S. business applications hit 5.6 million in 2025, up 24% since ChatGPT launched, and Census data shows the pace is still climbing this summer (PYMNTS citing Citadel Securities and Census Bureau data, Census Bureau, July 2026). Startups are launching with smaller teams because one person with the right skills can now do what used to take five or ten.
I personally believe the future is entrepreneurship. Not everybody becoming a founder of a billion dollar company, but people with specific skills who know how to run agents and plug themselves into different businesses and different scenarios. That's the job of the future as far as I can tell.
It's why I'm teaching my daughter how to build right now, at 15. I want her to know how to generate her own income and be financially independent before she ever needs to be, so her future doesn't depend on a college degree holding its value or on a company that keeps her right up until the day AI can do her job.
It's also why I've been working on the Future Founder Project. The idea is simple. I want to get the book and the tools into the hands of kids who want to start something, and give them a path.
If you know a kid who has that spark (yours, a niece, a neighbor), have them submit the form and we'll send them the books to get started. If you want to sponsor a kid who can't afford it, you can do that too. This is the most useful thing I can think of to do with whatever time we've got in the efficiency phase.
WHAT WE CAN CONTROL
When my daughter was about six or seven, we came up with something together that I've talked about a lot since. E-A-T. Effort, Attitude, and how we Treat people.
Those are the only three things you fully control. Not the market, not the model releases, not what some lab decides to ship next quarter. Your effort, your attitude, and how you treat the people around you.
We still do a secret handshake every morning before she leaves for school. It's a reminder for both of us that the noise is the noise, and the work is the work.
You can't out-learn a technology that's improving weekly. You can show up with real effort, keep your attitude in a place where you're still curious instead of scared, and treat the people in your life well while everything else shakes out.
I keep a poker chip in my pocket with E-A-T on it. It's a physical reminder to get back to what I control when my head starts spinning. If you want one, reply to this email with your mailing address and I'll send you one. No catch. I want you to have it.
And about that Sales Therapy idea. I wasn't kidding. I'm thinking about hosting a live one, where a group of us get on and talk honestly about what this is doing to us and how we're handling it. No slides, no pitch. If you'd show up for that, reply and tell me. If enough of you do, I'll run it.
AND ONE THING WE SHOULD ALL DO
Focusing on what you control includes the one lever most of us never pull.
If the people building this technology are telling us it might be an existential risk, then it needs to be regulated like one, and it needs to happen fast. Right now Congress is treating AI like a tech policy issue that can wait behind everything else in the economy. It can't.
You don't need to be an expert to say that. You need to be a constituent. Congressional staff track what people call and write about, and the issues that light up the phones are the ones that get in front of the member.
Here's how to do it in five minutes:
- Go to actonai.org. Pick the issue that matters to you, enter your location, and it connects you to your representatives with a message you can edit.
- If you'd rather go direct, find your House member at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative and your senators at senate.gov.
- Keep the message short and personal. Who you are, where you live, what you do, and that you want them to prioritize AI safety regulation now, before the results phase gets here.
- If you want to see what's actually moving in Congress before you write, Legisletter's AI regulation tracker lists every bill and vote.
If a few thousand people who read this do that, it registers. That's not complaining. That's doing something.
I'm going to keep using AI, keep teaching my daughter to build, and keep trying to make the good outweigh the harm. I'm also going to keep asking the question those dozen people asked me, because I think it deserves a better answer than "because everyone else is."
Effort, attitude, and how you treat people. Everything else, we'll figure out together.
#MakeItHappen
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