Friends, sorry for the long delay writing you. I hope you all had a safe, meaningful holiday. I spent much of December in Europe, traveling through France and Spain with Tara (my wife).

But I’m back, I’m refreshed, and I’m excited to start writing again. Here’s what’s on my mind:

Instagram has an authenticity problem.

The average person can no longer tell the difference between a photo or video created by artificial intelligence and a photo or video created by a real person.

For creators like us, that’s either a tremendous problem or a massive opportunity.

The value of a single video is now zero.

Just like AI came for the written word, dropping the value of a paragraph to zero overnight, so AI has come for video, dropping the value of a 30-second video to zero.

Some people are taking serious advantage. They’re building AI channels on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok that pump out content 24/7, growing an audience in the millions, views in the billions, and revenue in the hundreds of thousands.

And the game is relatively new, so there’s opportunity here. As Felix Dennis told us:

“New or rapidly developing industries, whether glamorous or not, very often provide more opportunities to get rich than established sectors. The three reasons for this are availability of risk capital, ignorance and the power of a rising tide.”

But I also think it’s a short-term game for one simple reason: anyone can make them. Anyone can prompt funny animal videos. Funny baby stand-up videos (have you seen these? They’re hilarious). Insane stunts and visual effects videos. And this AI slop is going to flood the internet.

As a creator or entrepreneur, you have to ask the question: when anyone can do it, why should you?

Make content only you can make.

For me, this is the only answer. You have to find a way to make content only you can make. That means:

1) Making content that captures your unique point of view.

2) Making content that is multivariate, meaning AI can’t output it in a single (or series) of prompts.

3) Making content that requires stacking skills on top of one another.

For example, Tara and I will be releasing our vertical rom-com series in the early part of 2026. It consists of eight episodes, about 90 seconds each, shot vertical so you can watch on your phone.

Now, Tara and I wrote the whole series, and it comes from our unique point of view. We used our taste, sense of humor, and judgment about what kind of story to tell with the resources we had. It really is a story that can come only from us.

Then, once the script was written, we produced all the episodes. That’s a multivariate undertaking that incorporates all these skills:

1. Casting

2. Acting

3. Directing

4. Producing (hiring the director of photography, managing the budget, schedule, etc.)

5. Editing

6. Graphic design

7. Social media distribution

And each one of these steps includes the most important human component: making choices based on your taste and judgment.

I edited the entire series myself, and that involves literally hundreds of decisions that impact the feel of the project. From shot choices to performance choices to rewriting the scene because it’s not working right, to decisions about when to cut and how to cut… it’s all instinct and it’s all unique. You could give this same footage to 100 different people and not get two cuts that are the same.

Then there’s the whole distribution and marketing side of things. We have Tara’s YouTube channel that we’ve been growing and are planning to drop the episodes there, and then create an individual channel for the show on Instagram.

But there’s no exact science for this and no “right” answer. It’s all judgment and trial and error. And that’s the kind of work that will NOT be eaten by AI.

If your work is under uncertain conditions, with plenty of judgment decisions with no clear right or wrong answer, you’re in a great place to future-proof against AI eating your lunch.

And if you’re in the opposite spot… well, I suggest you learn how to use AI to do what you do now, so that you can spend time figuring out that stuff only YOU can do.

Thanks for reading.

-Thomas

P.S. Happy New Year! I hope you had a restful, joyful holiday season!