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Long Form = Long Term

CJ Chilvers
CJ Chilvers
— 2 min read

I’ve been writing a lot about AI lately for big tech companies. I don’t think any of it would surprise you anymore, except for the reverberations. Every Friday I see news releases about thousands being laid off in content-related business, while I hear nothing but great things about the economy from business leaders.

The difference between this current dip and previous dips will be the quiet cost-cutting. It’s already happening. If you own 100 content-based businesses and replace the staff of each with one editor and gen AI, your ad revenue may experience a 50% loss with the quality drop, but a near 100% savings in labor means your margins will explode. Then you start another 100 businesses.

This is way of the spreadsheet entrepreneur in 2024. It’s not a long-term plan, but that’s not interesting to them.

Establishing trust this year in your name will ensure you have income in 10 years. I don’t think even 1% of content creators will understand that message, but it’s their only hope and we should help spread that message far and wide.

What else is up?

  • Between meetings and writing, I’ve been learning how to find and fix up high-quality audio equipment and becoming a cheapskate audiophile. I’m having a great time! Remember why we do any of what we do: “leisure is the basis of culture.”  I’ll write more about the gear sometime, but this week I wrote about why I started this whole journey and why we don’t understand how good we had it with CDs. In fact, just in the past few weeks, I’ve picked up some $1.99 CDs at Goodwill that have recently sold for $30-$130 at auction. The vinyl resurgence has turned into a CD resurgence and there are several good reasons for it.

  • I listened to Cal Newport’s latest book, Slow Productivity, on a road trip to North Carolina this week. I’d sum up the book as David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology for people who didn’t read the whole book (or books). What’s perplexing is that Cal bashes GTD in the book, then bases most of his chapters on concepts well-covered by GTD. He also muses on the “fall” of Merlin Mann, who probably has more die-hard subscribers today than when he was “famous” as defined by the book. I still recommend Cal’s blog and podcast, but this book was just not for me.

  • Good health plan: “I work out to stay young physically and I write to stay young mentally.” — Scott Galloway

  • Good career plan: “Long-form content with long-term friends.” — Jason Levin


Thanks for reading! — CJ