The Death of the Thought Leader

The creator economy hit $250 billion in 2024. Goldman Sachs says it'll double to $480 billion by 2027. That's a lot of money chasing a lot of creators.

But here's what the market reports don't tell you: most of that value is concentrated in attention, not intelligence. Brand deals. Sponsorships. Affiliate links. It's the economics of eyeballs, not ideas.

Meanwhile, the people with genuinely original thinking—the professors, the consultants, the operators who've built and broken things—are sitting on goldmines they don't know how to monetize.

I call these people thought owners.

A thought leader tells you what's happening. A thought owner tells you WHY it's happening—because they've developed their own framework through years of hard-won experience.

Dan Martell didn't just read about buying back your time. He built companies, nearly destroyed himself, and forged a system through his own suffering.

Alex Hormozi doesn't regurgitate marketing tactics. He built a $100M acquisition machine and reverse-engineered the playbook.

The difference isn't followers. It's intellectual property that actually belongs to them.

Here's where it gets interesting—and urgent.

Harvard Business School researchers found that AI creates what they call a "jagged technological frontier." Some knowledge work is instantly commoditized by AI. Other work—seemingly similar in complexity—remains outside AI's capability.

Guess which category "regurgitating other people's insights" falls into?

Microsoft's WorkLab just published research showing that LLMs are becoming commoditized. Their conclusion? "The models themselves will become table stakes—a basic infrastructure instead of a true source of competitive advantage."

In plain English: when everybody can hit the same LLM and get the same answer, the only differentiation is your original thinking.

A Harvard Business School analysis found that generative AI is lowering the cost of expertise. Knowledge that took years to acquire can now be accessed by anyone with a ChatGPT subscription. If expertise becomes cheap and ubiquitous, it's no longer a differentiator—it becomes a commodity.

This is an extinction-level event for news-anchor creators. And a massive opportunity for thought owners.

Let me tell you how I found my model.

I'm listening to Lenny's podcast, and this guy Matthew Dicks is on talking about storytelling. I'd read his book years ago. Good stuff. But hearing him talk, I'm like—this guy has something real. An actual system. Decades of teaching. Original IP.

So I go to his website, scroll to the bottom, and see an 860 area code.

That's my area code.

Turns out the guy lives 40 minutes from me in Connecticut. I cold-email him: "Let's get lunch. I own a campus called District with a barbecue restaurant. You like barbecue?"

He goes, "I did an event at District once."

I said, "When? We do 100 events a year. I own the place."

Silence.

So we meet. We become friends. And I realize: Matt has this unbelievable gift—he can teach anyone to tell better stories—but he's charging $1,500 an hour for coaching. That model doesn't scale. He can't help everyone he wants to help.

So we started building AI-powered tools that capture his methodology. Not generic ChatGPT prompts—enterprise-grade systems fine-tuned on his actual frameworks.

I showed him some stories it generated. He said, "These are amazing."

He can't tell them from his own.

Now we're licensing that intelligence to major companies. Taking Matt's 20+ years of thought ownership and turning it into products that scale infinitely.

That's commercializing intelligence.

After doing this a dozen times—with authors, scientists, consultants, operators—I've found a pattern.

Let me give you the numbers that keep me up at night.

84% of creators are already using AI tools for content creation. The cost of running prompts through top-tier LLMs dropped 200x in the past year.

That means every news-anchor creator—every person whose value is "I synthesize information well"—is about to compete against free.

Meanwhile, individual creators account for 58.7% of the creator economy market. Most of them are dramatically under-monetized.

I met someone at a conference with 300,000 email subscribers running a pay-what-you-want model for $10-20/month. That's maybe $50K/year on an audience that could easily support a seven-figure business.

The gap isn't distribution. It's productized intelligence.

The future of the creator economy isn't more courses. It's not more coaching. It's not more content.

It's helping thought owners commercialize their intelligence at scale.

That means:

• Identifying people with genuine original IP (not just big audiences)
• Building products that capture their unique frameworks
• Creating distribution mechanisms that don't require them to trade time for money
• Licensing that intelligence to enterprises who need it

When someone tells me they want to be a "thought leader," I ask them: What do you own?

Not what have you learned. Not what have you synthesized. What framework, system, or insight exists in your head that doesn't exist anywhere else?

If you can't answer that, you're a news anchor. And AI is coming for your job.

But if you can? If you've spent years developing a unique way of seeing the world?

You're sitting on an asset most people don't even know they have. And the technology finally exists to turn that asset into something that scales.

I'm not interested in helping people become influencers. I'm interested in helping people who've earned their insights turn those insights into generational wealth.

The thought leaders had their moment.

The thought owners are next.