Data Commoditizes, Perspective Compounds
The Setup
If you read Part 1, you know how it ended: my father-in-law, a retired accountant who spent years hand-transcribing horse racing records into Excel, saw his data transformed by AI into an interactive dashboard that surfaced patterns he didn’t know were hiding in his own work. The technology disappeared. What was left was a person feeling seen. And then his next instinct: “Boy, people would pay money for this kind of stuff. We should build a website!” I loved that reaction. It’s the reasonable one. You have something valuable, you gate it, you charge for access. That’s been the playbook forever. And it’s the instinct I want to work through today, because I think it reveals something most of us are doing with our own expertise right now without realizing it. It’s an instinct of an era that may be “bygone” sooner than we would like.
My Approach + AI Role
This isn’t about AI doing a specific task. It’s about what my father-in-law’s paywall instinct taught me when I thought about it afterward. His spreadsheet took years to build. Meticulous data, carefully transcribed from physical record books. That effort is real. But the assembly of the data, the raw collection and organization of those records… is exactly the kind of work AI compresses fastest. Someone with an afternoon and an AI agent could approximate the data layer. Not the love behind it. Not the judgment about what to capture. But the spreadsheet itself? That’s reproducible now. So what’s actually worth protecting?
What Actually Happened
I started thinking about this through something I’d already lived through without naming it: my degree in Music Business (yes, I have a degree in music. Orch dorks, unite!) I used to buy CDs. I was paying for access to music. The label controlled the gate, and $16.99 was the price of admission. Then Napster showed up. The industry spent years trying to rebuild the wall with lawsuits and copy protection (a whole semester’s course dedicated to this). It didn’t work. iTunes didn’t try to rebuild it, Steve Jobs built a different wall. 99 cents for convenience. You weren’t paying for the music anymore. You were paying for the friction to go away. And that cool white iPod classic with scroll wheel. Then Spotify came along and asked me to pay monthly for music I don’t own. That sounded absurd. But I tried the free tier. For a while I kept both systems running. Still buying a few songs on iTunes, still streaming on Spotify. Two identities coexisting uncomfortably: “I own my music” and “I access music.” Then one day I realized I hadn’t bought a song in months. Behavior shifted before my awareness caught up. When I finally switched to Apple Music (I know, how dare I), the feeling of “loss” helped reveal what was I actually paying Spotify for. Not access to songs. Those are infinite and effectively free. I was paying for someone (or something) to tell me which 30 songs to listen to this week. I was paying for curation. Most would argue algorithm, but I see it more of it as a perspective. I’d gone from paying for the data to paying for the “so what.” And I barely noticed the transition happening.
The Real Insight
That same shift is happening right now in every knowledge profession. And most of us are responding the way my father-in-law did, with the paywall instinct. Protect the information. Gate the data. Build a castle. Defend the library of “I know things you don’t.” That’s the professional equivalent of the music/CD industry. And it’s the layer AI compresses fastest. The thing worth investing in is the perspective layer: knowing which data matters, why it matters, and what to do about it. That’s built through years of sustained attention. The curation and judgment that comes from caring deeply about something specific for a long time. AI doesn’t shortcut that. It compounds it. My father-in-law’s real asset was never the spreadsheet. It was knowing which races to transcribe, which patterns to look for, which questions to ask of decades of records. AI didn’t replace that. It revealed it. When AI makes the “what” cheap, the “so what” becomes the only thing worth paying for.
Try This If…
Look at the last week of your work. How much time did you spend assembling information vs. interpreting it? Gathering data vs. making judgment calls about what the data means? That ratio is about to shift dramatically. The assembly part is being compressed. The interpretation part… that’s where your value is compounding whether you realize it or not. What’s your spreadsheet? The thing you’ve invested years building that you’re quietly wondering if AI makes obsolete? The data part might be. The perspective part, that’s the moat (thanks YouTube videos for teaching me that word).
Systems Lens
There’s a version of this playing out everywhere and nobody has built the commercial infrastructure for it yet. Or not one I could easily find. Streaming solved music access beautifully. It built a whole economy around curation at scale. But it never figured out how to properly value the human judgment underneath. The artists, the taste-makers, the people whose perspective created the thing worth curating in the first place. The labor is the product, and that layer doesn’t scale the way access does. Professional services, media, education, consulting… they’re all entering the same transition. The access layer is collapsing. The perspective layer is becoming the scarce resource. And we don’t yet have the pricing models, career structures, or organizational designs built for a world where perspective is the primary unit of value. That’s the frontier. And I don’t think it gets solved by people who set out to “build a perspective moat.” I think about how I first learned Photoshop. No end goal. Just playing. Same thing when I was learning to DJ in college. I grew up a Suzuki violin kid… technically proficient, sure, but really I was someone who knew how to read sheet music and replicate sounds. Ask me to improvise? No clue. DJing was the opposite. No sheet music. Just intuition, what sounds good together, the thrill of blending genres that weren’t supposed to touch. Plus gear and tools. I love tools. And buttons, and things that light up. Right now I’m on a roll creating interactive HTMLs for no particular reason other than it’s fun to articulate what’s in my head in ways I couldn’t before, and watch it make sense to other people. That’s the thing. Perspective doesn’t compound because you decided to invest in it strategically. It compounds because you kept paying attention to something for the sheer love of paying attention to it. My father-in-law didn’t build that spreadsheet to create a moat. He built it because the history of the sport matters to him. The moat is a side effect. Maybe that’s the real answer to “what’s worth protecting.” Not the data. Not even the perspective, exactly. But the curiosity that built the perspective in the first place. I’m not quite sure how I landed here, but sounds like some deep reflection work is ahead for all of us.