Theories — No. 02
Working frameworks
Not predictions. Arguments I keep testing against real work, plus data reports from what my own infrastructure collects and the business I ran. Each one earned by building, not borrowed.
How AI actually reshapes work
The cost of load-bearing writing is collapsing, so the bottleneck moves to operationalizing it. Software goes from metal to clay, businesses can finally own how they operate, and adoption climbs four distinct levels: process, the mech-suited individual, the connected organization, and system management.
The Retreat: the economics of attention
Digital ads have never cost more, or been worth less. Every impression decomposes into volume, attention, density, and legitimacy; fourteen channels parameterized over a decade show volume masking substrate decay everywhere the substrate can be manufactured. Published as a live interactive model.
How I model a consumer business
Every consumer business is two populations: customers you have and customers you haven't met yet. Model the base from cohort behavior first, buy the gap at a price the margin can absorb, give every channel three numbers, respect the CAC ceiling and the owned-channel band, and deliver the model through a daily cadence. Six years of running one, distilled.
Five months inside 226 brand inboxes
A DTC email panel snapshot from my own pipeline: 6,120 marketing emails, Feb–Jul 2026. Two-thirds carry an offer, half the discounts run 40% or deeper, weak offers shout the loudest, and the top tenth of senders own half the inbox. A bounded dataset, reported as exactly that.
Anatomy of a funnel contraction
Five years inside one DTC P&L, indexed. Flow email revenue fell 60% and it looked like a strategy failure; reconciling order, spend, session, and message-level data showed a structural CAC wall hit three times, a forced spend pullback, and every downstream channel starving in sequence while every efficiency metric improved.
The agency that works while I sleep
A field report on running a boutique agency with AI as named staff. The AI sees the email, calendar, drive, and task list, touches every channel, and works a night shift on a vetted library of playbooks and skills — PRs, blogs, call agendas, and campaign launches built overnight, approved by a human in the morning. Five clients, one operator, two shifts.