Smart as an AI edgelord, pure as a community potluck

Edition 161

Reminder tomorrow: Real Founders Don't Gamble at noon ET

"Be shrewd as snakes, gentle as doves." - Jesus

The founders I work with feel like the good guys in the room. They're holding the line against quick fix, take all the money and run extractive models. Regardless of one's belief in the state and future of the eternal soul, JC is pretty universally recognized as one of the good guys, so I thought it high time we consider the above.

Our theme these past couple of editions has been why good founders with good motives are so grossly underperforming their goals and expectations in this AI beleaguered, trustbroken market. With all odds against you and the systems you put your trust in (internet content, reliable capital markets, 2020 based selling strategies) capitulating like a house of cards... the path from surviving to thriving and not losing your ethical footing along the way is harder than its been in some time.

Unfamiliar (though not as hard as they look) decisions abut leader founders. And you've got to make choices that you've not had to make before.

Maybe it's what we talked about on Friday - firing the employee within.
Maybe—and here I am way out on the quivering limb—it's in the words of a first century itinerant preacher murdered by the state for insurrectionist behavior.

Let's find out...

AI guys got the sermon (well, half of it)

One might wonder why a guy famed for his sacrifice and love for humanity might send out his best crew with the instruction for reptilian shrewdness. The reference to snakes in the verse is intentional, a clear call out to the most famous Biblical snake, that garden guy that duped Eve.

"Be wise like the source of all sin and darkness." Seems a weird quote from JC.

So let's dig in a little bit - what kind of shrewdness are we talking about? Well, English is a poor language for this kind of thing, so when we go back to the original Greek something interesting happens. "Shrewdness" or "Wisdom" becomes "thinking well about your gut instinct/drive." There's a different word for intelligence or skill. That word could have been used but it wasn't. The wisdom of snakes is "knowing what you want and thinking well about how to get it."

The AI guys got this one down pat. They have rebuilt the economy to turn products that have no consumer financial flight path into a trillion dollar enrichment scheme that simultaneously makes them the arbiter of their own constraints (please let us regulate ourselves we're dangerous) and the bottleneck to the entire western economy.

They know what they want and they know how to get it.

And the message here is? You should, too. Founders are crashing against the rocks of this economy, seeing margins shrink, overhead (particularly software and marketing overhead) explode, and demand tighten as the extractive overlords take over the means of commerce. All while being enticed to believe that the solution is a well-trained AI mode that has absorbed all their thinking and can be a "thought partner" that feeds back your best ideas hybridized to the internets worst averages formatted into the most teeth-grinding verbal and visual formats ever devised.

More pseudo-political substacks will not solve for this.

Wiser founders will. Founders who can transform intent and ideas into smart, focused, disciplined systems. Founders who understand that deeper training, more incisive systems thinking, and not depending on the instincts honed in the corporate machine are required.

In real time, this looks like having to do less of what feels intuitive (keep posting, keep pitching, try to ride the storm or raise prices to solve for it) and more of what's counter to your training in our context. Maybe even counter to your inner-narrative as the good guys.

The good guys justify their experience of the down turn as some kind of moral high ground. They're losing clients or losing opportunities or shrinking margins because they aren't the bad guys. Bad guys make lots of money. Good guys suffer bravely.

And I get it.

Hypercapitalism, of the kind of we live in now, is a toxic swamp of extraction and if you are going to play in that arena (anyone who charges fees for services plays in that arena) you have to understand the blood sport that is presented to you and the shrewd thinking required to move through it.

Thinking well about your business means a few things -

• You cannot afford to let LLMs induce you into cognitive decline.
• You cannot outsource your strategic decisions to "improve my business using Seth Godin's best thinking."
• You must sharping your intellectual capacity to translate intent into action. That's shrewdness.

But they aren't the only thing.

What you have that they will never have

So when sending leaders out into the world, JC doesn't just stop at Eden-co-opting smarts. He goes on with another word that shows up strangely in the original language: Pure

"untainted as doves"

Jesus loves a throwback and so while we've already visited on Sunday School story, he draws attention to the probably second most recognized: Noah and his zoo boat. When they were ready to head out back on dry land, they sent out a dove cause it was "pure" in contrast to the previously destroyed dirty birds. (DM for a completely superfluous deep dive on the genetic purity testing of Biblical animals. Wild.)

If something was pure, it was untainted by the decay of the world. The kind of decay that causes global flooding. The dove, of course, proves its worthiness by bringing back signs of organic life. Not a lead funnel with smooth brained automated pipeline. But life. And generative surrounds to build something new.

So the direction here isn't "be good." The direction is "be untainted by the exact system that most shrewd people play in. Be a transport system that moves people to where good things grow."

Be worthy of the wounded public trust.

A high bar given the global decline in trust over the last 40 years. Trust isn't solved by brand or by messaging or by cool customer experiences or even how you use your data. Trust is solved by your ability to soften the fear, anxiety, doubt, and resistance of a market so warped by dysfunction that we're all begging to not get one more email, one more social post, one more generic offer of "help to get you an audience" and other such fallacies.

Know what you want and how to get it, just like the craven creatures who destroy what is good. Be untainted by the toxic zoo around you, unmarred by this era of systemic broken trust.

It's not hard to see that raising your leadership capacity to achieve these competing calls to action is not obvious or embedded in tactics. It represents a positional shift on how you see your self, how you design and craft your offer, and how you deliver that offer on repeat to a deeply engaged community of like-minded people.

The good news is we're not saving the world. And you don't have to learn it all at once. The merger of the the snake and the dove I call undivided wisdom. The foundation of an Undivided Leader.

Tomorrow at our Public Classroom (noon ET) I'm going to going further into this, delving into the wisdom/shrewdness required of good founders, alongside the systems that restore the public trust.

Even if you can't attend, I strongly encourage you to sign up, and get the recording. We'll be unpacking the application over the coming weeks.

Forward, forward — Nick