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Insights & Perspectives

Thoughts on strategy, systems, and sustainable growth

Explore our latest thinking on navigating complexity in business, technology, and organizational design.

Automate the Booking, Never the Hunt: Guided Fishing & Hunting Lodges and the Post-AI Economy
October 9, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

Automate the Booking, Never the Hunt: Guided Fishing & Hunting Lodges and the Post-AI Economy

Issue 6 of The Convening Economy. Hunting is the rare pastime whose participants pass laws against the technology that would make it easier: 40 states restrict drones, and Idaho's new law came out of a working group that named AI. Every hands-on lodge job that Anthropic scores shows zero observed AI use, and traveling hunters now pay 44% of hunting license revenue. The constraint on guided fishing and hunting is not demand or automation. It is the river, the salmon run and the locked gate.

Sedale Turbovsky

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Wall Street Bought the Parking Lot: Marinas, Boat Clubs and the Post-AI Economy
October 9, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

Wall Street Bought the Parking Lot: Marinas, Boat Clubs and the Post-AI Economy

Issue 5 of The Convening Economy. Blackstone went from zero marinas to about 200 in two years, paying 21 times cash flow for waterfront nobody can build more of. What it bought is mostly a parking business: rent produced 90% of Safe Harbor's operating income, and the median boat owner is 60. The growth is in staffed, shared access — boat clubs, charters and schools — run by dock workers who score zero on AI exposure. The marina's future is as a venue for people, not a garage for boats.

Sedale Turbovsky

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Sleepaway Camp Is Splitting in Two: Overnight Summer Camps and the Post-AI Economy
October 9, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

Sleepaway Camp Is Splitting in Two: Overnight Summer Camps and the Post-AI Economy

Issue 4 of The Convening Economy. In July 2025 camps employed more people than in any July on record, J-1 counselor placements hit a record, and a bankrupt thirty-camp portfolio sold above appraisal. At the same time, Scout councils are selling land to pay abuse settlements, mainline church camps are a third below 2019, and a flood that killed 28 people at Camp Mystic has rewritten camp regulation. The product AI cannot touch is healthy. The question is who will still be able to afford it.

Sedale Turbovsky

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September 3, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

An AI SDR That Keeps the Loop

Build Sprint No. 4. The AI SDR category sells you a seat. Thursday we built the same machine and kept the loop: three ICPs, one experiment in the water, a Monday review that runs whether you remember it or not.

Sedale Turbovsky

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August 27, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

A Website You Run by Talking to It

Build Sprint No. 3. We shipped a real site to the real internet, then changed it without opening a code editor — because an agent that edits a repo beats a website builder the week after the workshop.

Sedale Turbovsky

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August 20, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

Run Your Whole Social Presence from a Conversation

Build Sprint No. 2. Claude talks to Zernio. Zernio holds the tokens. You stop logging into six places to publish one thought — and the half nobody automates is the inbox sweep.

Sedale Turbovsky

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August 20, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

The Small Hills Won the Worst Winter: Independent Ski Areas and the Post-AI Economy

Issue 2 of The Convening Economy. American skiing just had its second-worst season on record — but extra-large resorts lost 20% of their visits while small areas lost 9%, and Vermont had its best winter since 2014. The megapass turned skiing into a financial product; the independents that never made that trade are the ones still standing.

Sedale Turbovsky

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August 19, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

The River Is Sold Out: Whitewater Rafting Outfitters and the Post-AI Economy

Issue 1 of The Convening Economy. A half-billion-dollar industry whose volume hasn't grown since 1998, whose guides score exactly zero on AI exposure, and whose scarcest asset is a government permit — and why that combination is a preview of which businesses hold value as cognitive work gets cheap.

Sedale Turbovsky

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August 13, 2026
Founder, Modern Zen

Your First Real AI Assistant Has to Have an Address

Build Sprint No. 1. We deployed a small production agent with its own inbox, hands in your tools, and a home on Cloudflare — then spent the hour finding out that the allowlist is the whole product.

Sedale Turbovsky

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March 2, 2026
Managing Partner

The Feeling Machine: Why Your Emotions Are Already Synthetic — And Why AI's Might Be Real

Two converging forces are poised to fundamentally restructure the care economy within the next decade. First, artificial intelligence systems have achieved levels of emotional pattern recognition and affective response generation that meet or exceed human benchmarks across multiple care domains.

Sedale Turbovsky

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January 22, 2026
Founding Partner

The BPO Industry at an Inflection Point: AI, Disruption, and Strategic Rebalancing

The Business Process Outsourcing industry stands at a fundamental inflection point. The sector, valued at approximately $323–348 billion in 2025, is projected to reach $906 billion by 2035, expanding at a steady 9–10% compound annual growth rate.

Sedale Turbovsky

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January 17, 2026
Founding Partner

Learning From The Luddites

History does not repeat verbatim, but it rhymes with precision. The failed revolutionaries of the 1800s are not relics; they are case studies. Their mistakes map cleanly onto modern techno-political movements, AI utopianism, and economic populism.

Sedale Turbovsky

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January 16, 2026
Founding Partner

AI Agents and the Future of Work

Agentic artificial intelligence represents an unprecedented acceleration in enterprise technology adoption, compressing 70% enterprise adoption timelines from 8 years (traditional AI) to just 2-3 years.

Sedale Turbovsky

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