E52: Three Playbooks Dead, $1 Trillion Gone, and the Identity Crisis Nobody's Talking About

George gets honest about the reckoning. Three playbooks he followed for years — raise VC, build SaaS, sell consulting — are all dead. He walks through how AI collapsed each one and what it felt like to reach acceptance through the five stages of grief. Then: the market meltdown. Over a trillion dollars wiped from software stocks after Claude Cowork launched, and George is still holding index funds full of companies he doesn't believe in. A non-technical founder just built a full-stack app without knowing what Next.js is. Amazon fired 16,000 people at 4am. Tech companies are spending $700 billion on AI this year while laying off tens of thousands. And the question nobody's asking: if your job title disappears tomorrow, who are you? George and John break down why identity reconstruction might be the most important work you do this year.