Gas, war stocks, AI and your copywriting career

A few days ago an article started making the rounds.

Most people saw it when it hit X. I caught it early, the day it dropped, because my VA shared it quietly before the algorithm picked it up. So by the time it went viral, I had already read it three times.

It was about Naval Ravikant. Writer of the almanack, one of my favorite money guys. He also founded AngelList, was an early investor in Twitter, Uber, Notion, and roughly 200 other companies that shaped the last decade of tech.

He went on his podcast and said this:

"Pure software is uninvestable. Full stop."

No hedge. No qualifier. Twenty years of deciding what's worth funding and he just told you most of what's getting funded today isn't.

I sat with that for a while. Because it doesn't just apply to software.

It applies to any skill-based income that got comfortable. Including ours(copywriting).

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Think about what it took to build a software company three years ago. Millions in funding. Engineering teams. Years of development. That's gone now. Two people and the right AI tools can replicate most of it in 90 days. Adobe paid $20 billion for Figma because building it was genuinely hard. Today somebody's doing it over the weekend. Salesforce, Workday, Atlassian, Asana, companies worth billions, are watching skeleton crew startups take their customers right from under them.

Apple just licensed Gemini from Google because Apple’s AI was hot garbage. The company whose whole identity was "we control everything and build everything in-house" just handed the foundation and perhaps the most important layer(AI) of their product to their biggest rival. Not a pivot. A panic move.

Now apply that same logic to copywriting.

The mid-tier writer is getting squeezed the same way the mid-tier software company is getting squeezed. Rates are compressing. Junior work is evaporating. AI doesn't replace the writer with a brand, a real voice, genuine relationships, and strategic depth. But it absolutely replaces the one who is just starting out or is just pretty good. The one who is coasting at his office job. This also doesn’t include the influx of desperate global south copywriters trying to make a dollar into Western marketers, further devaluing entry level copywriting.

The market is bifurcating. Commodity content on one end, pumped out for pennies by anyone with a ChatGPT account. Genuine voice, trust, and direct audience relationships on the other. The middle is collapsing and it is taking a lot of writers down with it.

It gets more expensive to reach the same reader every year. CPAs are climbing. The copywriting space is filling up with sharper, faster, more aggressive talent who got the memo earlier than most. The writers who build real distribution now, their own lists, their own audiences, their own reputation, will have pricing power when everyone else is racing to the bottom. The ones who wait will find the floor already crowded.

Naval's most bullish point wasn't about what's dying. It was about what's becoming possible. WhatsApp had 55 employees at their $19 billion exit. Instagram had 13 when Facebook paid $1 billion for them. The solo operator who owns their audience and their voice is now more durable than the agency with 50 writers and margins that depend on clients who are quietly testing AI alternatives.

The technical bottleneck is gone. The only thing standing between you and a real asset is whether you have something to say, the taste to know what good looks like, and the discipline to ship it and stick with it.

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Now zoom out for a second.

This is all happening inside an economy that is already squeezing the middle class from every direction at once.

Taxes, the ever increasing cost of living.

Gas just hit $5. Farm foreclosures are up 70% in the Midwest, 45% nationally. Those farms feed the trucks. The trucks feed the stores. The stores feed you. The cost of gas touches everything and we don’t know what the supply chain will look like in a few months.

A while ago, Trump insiders reportedly shorted oil positions right before the hormuz issue. Made millions. Legally ambiguous. Morally obvious. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating this.

Before that, The Melania coin dropped. I got in early, knowing full well it was likely a rugpull, and got out before it collapsed. Made a $15k return.

And before that, the Trump coin launches. Early wallets clean up. Regular people buy the top.

The point is, someone always makes life-changing money in these moments. That someone is rarely middle class.

I'm not loyal to any side. But I'm not blind either.

Trump is doing what every powerful person in history has done, positioning himself and his circle to win. His family and his legacy comes first. Every king, ruler, and president before him did the same thing in different clothes. War stocks popped during WWI. They popped during WWII. They're popping now. Lockheed doesn't care who started it. Raytheon doesn't care who's dying. The money moves before the bombs drop and the middle class is always the last to know and the first to pay.

You're not rich enough for nepotism to build strong walls around you and save you. Neither am I(yet). We don't have the insider text threads, the political access, or the offshore accounts.

What we have is skill, time, and the ability to see what's coming before we're forced to react to it.

This isn't FOMO. FOMO is emotional. This is just how the world has always worked.

Every war. Every inflation spike. Every tech disruption. The people at the top positioned before the news dropped. The people in the middle read about it afterward.

Maybe gas comes back down. Maybe the economy stabilizes and we go back to early 2000s prices. Maybe AI levels off and the copywriting market rebalances for newbies. Murphy's Law says it won't all go smoothly but let's be generous and say it does.

The rich will still get richer. Subscriber CPAs will still climb. The copywriters who built something real during the window will still have the audience, the reputation, and the pricing power to ride out whatever BS comes their way in the future. And the writers who sat on their asses, waited for things to settle will still be starting from zero, just in a more crowded room.

You have 18 months. Probably less than you think.

Fathi