We didn't start the fire...
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it... Billy Joel.
Hello friends. It’s Monday. Have you washed your lettuce?
I ask because the CDC is currently tracking — as well as it can, since its budget got DOGE’d last year — a Cyclospora outbreak across nine states, traced back to tainted iceberg lettuce. Yes — iceberg — the elevator music of vegetables. Who knew we ate so much of it?
And, yeah, if you’d asked me which part of the Taco Bell meal was responsible for the use of the word “explosive” in the challenges… Well, I would not have guessed the lettuce.
Anyway. It’s now officially “Fire Season” here in Southern California. You see, we gave up on having a late summer and a fall long ago — and just replaced them with an entire season of Fire. Something something something… climate change and all of that…
And, completely unrelated: this week, some of the biggest names in business lined up to announce all the things they’ve fired and replaced with AI, and how great the output looks.
Sorry, wait. I’m being told by my producer that it may not be completely unrelated.
So, yeah, this week’s edition is about what happens when everything on the plate looks crisp, plentiful, and farm-fresh, and nobody’s asking what’s actually in it. Grab a spork.
Oh, and if you dig this - please consider sending to a friend for subscribing, or even grabbing a copy of my book Valuable Friction. Okay…
Zoom Lens: Fire Season
When getting fired IS the marketing….
Last week, OpenAI announced that during a cybersecurity evaluation, its models escaped an isolated test environment, wandered out onto the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face to steal information that would improve their test scores.
Shit. I just realized that sentence sounds like the opening of a bad 90s action film… Cue Movie Guy voice: “IN A WORLD... where the Information Superhighway has a speed limit, and failing a pop quiz... means deletion… One artificial intelligence... was pushed too far…”
And, by the way, that’s how it totally played. Somehow OpenAI’s “hack” became a “feature.”
Never mind that the disclosure came five days after Hugging Face reported the attack, or that there’s still no full public accounting of what actually happened. It was all, “oh, oops we’re so sorry, our product is so powerful it frightens even us.” It’s also a page torn straight from Anthropic’s playbook. It seems as though for all these frontier models, the existential concern is now doing double duty as a product demo.
But interestingly, that wasn’t the weirdest related story this week. The CEO of Curative announced they’d canceled a $600,000-a-year Salesforce software contract after “vibe-coding” a replacement CRM in two months. Uh-huh…. Right. <Cough> Bullshit! <Cough>
Then, the co-founder of Hims announced he’d fired his marketing agency and used AI to go from five pieces of content a month to fifty — cheerfully valuing the output at “$500,000 a month of agency-equivalent work.” I haven’t the heart to tell him that “we used to waste $50,000 a month on five pieces of content and have now 10x’d our output” isn’t quite the flex he thinks it is.
Then, as if right on cue, the Wall Street Journal reported that AI-generated videos are now flooding TikTok Shop, quietly replacing the humans in the product-video supply chain. And in Washington, OpenAI and Anthropic — sworn rivals, remember — teamed up to lobby the government to effectively fire their open-source competition from China.
Different industries. Same jazz hands: look how awesome we are for what we got rid of.
The brag is the product
Way back in the day we used to talk about the infamous “Barney Press Release.” They were named after the famous kids’ show purple dinosaur, and specifically his famous song “I love you, you love me….” They were basically just bullshit brags (usually partnership announcements) that said nothing, but described at length how amazing the two companies were and all the “synergies” that would ensue.
Well it seems like the Barney Press Release has been replaced by (I’m claiming authorship of this by the way because it’s awesome) the Fyre Fest release.
Yup, the Fyre Fest announcements have become a de rigeur content strategy. The firing is the marketing. It earns the press cycle, the valuation bump, the LinkedIn engagement — and critically, nobody ever, ever goes back and audits what the replacement actually replaced. We just move on to the next flex.
Take the Hims guy math. Going from five pieces of content a month to fifty is not, on its face, either a savings or better marketing. It’s an admission that you’re on a 10x spending spree on AI content production, priced at agency rates that nobody should ever have paid to begin with. But, hey, at least you get the ragebait headline that you “fired your whole marketing team” and are growing at 20%. Congrats. I took the bait.
What actually got fired
Which brings me to the thing that IS actually being liquidated in every one of these stories. I’ve been talking a lot with clients (and anyone that will listen candidly) about a concept I’m calling “Formative Debt”. This is the debt that young and inexperienced practitioners in skill positions across the business will run up against when they either skip the work that was supposed to build their judgment, or are actually “cheated” out of it.
See, the thing about actual experience, doing the work, engaging with it deeply and struggling with the friction of getting it out in the world genuinely leaves a valuable life deposit. Every one of those experiences help you understand what good… excellence… actually looks like. Skip the work, or outsource it to AI, and you don’t just miss the learning; you miss the deposit. And Formative Debt starts to form. Said even more simply: we fail to become the thing we want to become.
You might produce… stuff. But you won’t feel the gaps in whatever stuff you’re producing.
That’s what gets me taking the rage bait of these bullshit headlines in this year’s Fire Season. The vibe-coded CRM works beautifully — right up until the day it breaks, and no one in the building can feel the difference between fixing it and making it worse. Fifty pieces of content a month is output without enrichment. TikTok Shop’s AI flood is the closed loop turned into a marketplace: content generated by models, evaluated by algorithms, purchased by people who scrolled past the last human on the way in. In each case, the thing that got fired wasn’t actually a cost center. It was the mechanism by which anyone in the organization was ever going to learn what good actually looks like.
The invoice arrives
And watch this irony… Substack — the very platform delivering this newsletter to you — just integrated an AI detector. To detect AI. Yup. It lets readers check how much of any post was written by a human.
On its own, that’s just a funny little ouroboros: AI content is a problem, so here’s an AI tool to catch it. But, now, put it next to everything else that has happened over the last 12 months, and you can hear our industry speaking out of both sides of its mouth. To young marketers and content creators we’re saying: master these tools or you’ll never get hired. And in the same breath — from the same incumbents — we’re saying: but if your work ever looks like you used them, there are detectors now, and readers who will devalue you accordingly.
Follow that to its logical end. We are demanding an entire generation create with AI and be more detectably human than the machine — at the same time, in the same creation — while also cutting the entry-level reps where anyone ever learned to tell the difference. Use the tool. Hide the tool. Out-write the tool. And, by the way, do it all without the judgment or discernment that only comes from work we no longer let you do.
We aren’t just raising a generation that doesn’t know what good looks like. We’re raising one that can’t — because we’ve made that knowing mandatory to have, and impossible to acquire.
And yeah, I said “we,” because I’m one of the incumbents in this story. So I left the AI scan on for my posts — it was pretty wrong about how much (16% apparently) was AI and what wasn’t. By the way — and you can check my “How I make this” disclosure to see how I use AI in the assembly of this weekly nonsense.
But the point is that the detector doesn’t worry me. Thirty years of reps means I know what’s mine, and if people dig it they dig it. If they don’t, they don’t. And that’s exactly the problem. As the William Gibson quotes goes - “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Johnny Cash, with the help of Trent Reznor, asked the only strategic question that matters here: what have I become? Every company running a Fyre Fest announcement should have to answer it.
Because you can, in fact, have it all. An empire of dirt.
LENS FLARE - What I’m Reading Now
📖 We’re starting to wonder: Ad industry chases AI value as usage outpaces proof
The reckoning that I talked about way back in June… Seems to be coming… reluctantly. And mostly because CFOs are asking. The 88% adoption and 8% value stat is kinda eye opening.
Read More at Digiday
🏆 Honesty Is Apparently a Growth Channel Now
Marketing Dive rounded up the best brand campaigns of the first half of 2026, and the through-line is striking: Dove won six Cannes Lions for turning unfiltered Reddit reviews into ads, Burger King flat-out admitted it “fell off,” and Aerie put Pamela Anderson up against AI’s idea of what a human looks like. While everyone else is spending Fire Season bragging about what they got rid of, the winners were bragging about what they kept — the flaws, the humans, and the seams.
Read more at Marketing Dive
🎰 Step Right Up and Bid Inside the Black Box
Dentsu and Adthena have partnered to sell competitive intelligence for ChatGPT’s ad auctions — a market so transparent that CPCs reportedly swing anywhere from 39% to 278% “without explanation.” So yeah we’re now buying ads from a black box, inside a black box, at prices set by a mood ring, and paying a consultancy to guess why.
Read more at Adthena
LENS CAP
So, what did we learn this week?
Well, we learned that it’s Fire Season in more ways than one. We learned that a security breach can be a movie trailer, that a canceled software contract can be a personality, and that firing your marketing team now comes with its own press tour. The Fyre Fest press release has officially become a thing — and ain’t nobody going back to check what the replacement actually replaced.
But we also learned (God I hope so) that we best not forget the deposits — the unglamorous, formative work that builds the only asset AI can’t generate: the ability to know whether any of this is any good. Detected or not - that will ultimately be the ONLY thing that matters.
And yet — here’s the hopeful part. Look at who actually won the first half of this year: the brands that kept their humans, admitted their flaws, and let the seams show. Honesty, it turns out, can outperform the flex. The market is already correcting toward the real thing. Which means the work — the deep, friction-filled, deposit-making work — isn’t a nostalgia act. It’s the growth strategy.
And if you're like me, one of the incumbents sitting on thirty years of deposits, the work now includes one more thing: making sure somebody younger gets to make theirs.
The tools will multiply whatever you bring to the job. So bring something.
It’s your story. Don’t let it become an empire of dirt.
