Hi there! I’m thrilled to bring you this week’s creator conversation with friend and colleague, Abby Ross. You’ll see the option to now watch or listen included ;)

Personally, we’re getting ready for our first high school graduation this week 😱 Getting this cued before the insanity starts. Enjoy-

In this episode I catch up with Abby Ross, currently the CEO of two companies in the philanthropic and climate preparedness space. Before this she was the co-founder and CPO of ThinkCERCA and then CEO of Curriki.

Follow Abby’s work:

Her two companies - The Resiliency Company, ForGood.org

LinkedIn - @abigailross

Her recommendations from the talk:

Spencer Glendon - Probable Futures

David Brooks book - How To Know A Person

Earlier this week, I posted on LinkedIn about my lack of interest in going back and looking for another full time job. Partially driven by LinkedIn pushing recruiters in my face, and partially by being asked over and over again — I took brief inventory of my past 7 employment experiences (and why they majorly let me down) and made a carousel out of it. Part of me worried it was going to be perceived as complaining, though of course that was not at all my intention.

I saw another post recently (top) that helped frame what it was I was trying to illuminate myself. Jamine Bina is a marketer who was looking at this through a brand lens. But the core of it struck a chord with me because it was the same sentiment at the root of where I was coming from.

The correlation between how hard someone works and how much value they get in return is rapidly deteriorating for a lot of people. History (our families and education systems) have largely taught us that work was the path to wealth, security, and meaning. Put in the work, and you'll reap the reward. Save some, be smart, and you'll be living the American dream.

I think it's fair to say most are not experiencing it that way right now. Instead we watch as:

Crypto speculation creates millionaires overnight. And medical situations put families into bankruptcy just as fast.

Falling into the right company at the right time can yield someone equity worth a fortune—while someone working equally hard or harder comes up with a goose egg.

Having the right connection can put investor money in the hand of someone with literally nothing more than an idea and a smile... while someone else with a true game changer who's been sacrificing for years can't get their vision into the light of day.

I suppose it's been this way to varying degrees over generations. Speculation is nothing new, but it sure seems to be accelerating along with our technology and culture. How convenient that I found a report aligning with almost the exact same window of time I've been on the planet.

From 1979 to 2025, US productivity grew 90.2%. During this same span, typical worker compensation increased 33%. Productivity grew 3.5x the rate of traditional pay, which would be $16.40 more per hour today if it had grown at the same rate.¹

When we slightly adjust the bracket by a single year and look at 1978 to 2024, CEO comp grew at 1,094% compared to 24% for typical workers.²

I got curious and did some research on the Gilded Age titans like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and JP Morgan. It turns out that while their wealth relative to the US GDP was actually higher in their time, the substantial difference was in how long it took to accumulate their first billion.

Vanderbilt - 50+ years across 2 industries (and stock manipulation)
Rockefeller - 46 years
Carnegie - 20 years ³

Bill Gates - 12 years
Elon Musk - 10 years
Larry & Sergey - 6 years
Zuckerberg - 4 years
Bezos - 4 years ⁴
Matthew Gallagher (Medvi) - 18ish months ⁵

A few other dimensions that have been rapidly changing for consideration:

There was $9k of Rockefeller's personal wealth backing each Standard Oil worker in 1913. Today, there is $4.2M of Jensen Huang's personal wealth for each Nvidia worker. That's over 15x scale of fortune to labor in the course of a few generations (while adjusting for inflation during that same time) ⁶

Also, in 1975 the S&P 500 consisted of 83% tangible goods and 17% intangible. In 2025, that dynamic had swung to just 8% tangible and 92% intangible. Wtf is going on? ⁷

I hope asking questions like this doesn't make me anticapitalist or anti-entrepreneur. It’s just helpful in putting evidence to something that feels very off for a lot of people in a real way today. And on some days, it puts me all in on the reality this is a simulation or puppet show.

Been watching playoffs or MLB lately? (Go Cubs Go!) It's impossible to have ESPN or sports of any kind on right now without seeing at least a few betting app commercials at every break. And SportsCenter even now has its own betting segments and personalities during regular airtime. The normalization of gambling at home is nearly done.

But it's not hard to see why. It creates the crypto-moment opportunity for sports fans who don't know how to set up a ledger or wallet. It paints the picture of another escape hatch that you can be lucky enough to find since the stocks, equity, and crypto haven't worked out yet. And it fits so nicely now into the feeds of our scroll to the bottom.

To say that this has happened fast as well would be an understatement. In May of 2018, the supreme court voted 6-3 to kill the federal law that prevented states from legalizing it themselves. (PASPA was originally passed in '92 when major sports were concerned about the integrity of their games). The legal sports betting handle was $6.6B that year. (handle is the fancy term for amount legally wagered)

Online gambling has exploded 25x in the past seven years to $166B+ in 2025 (and 95% is mobile based) ⁸

The product is literally and willfully engineered for bad outcomes. Product UX, marketing, and push notifications encourage parlays and "same-game parlays" which have the worst odds possible.

More than half of men 18-49 have an active sports book account. This is the same demographic that mental health research identifies as most disengaged, most AI-anxious, and most financially fragile.

This doesn't even address the rise of prediction and futures trading apps like Kalshi and Polymarket, where you can bet on invest in death markets, nuclear detonations, pop culture insanity, and financial collapse.

The correlation between the rise of these apps and markets and the chasm growing between effort and result can't be a coincidence. The anxiety that in order to succeed you have to have a windfall event is real. And there will naturally be segment of humanity that continues leaning into it. I probably would have myself if I hadn't been through the past 5 years I've experienced. (At some point, I'm going to write about what "my number" was. And how I dgaf anymore.)

I have a long way to go separating the two for myself. I'm a born workaholic and achiever. My worth has 100% been tied to my material role or output for the majority if my life. At 46, I could not be more disappointed with the lack of receipts and identity crash as a result.

But it's a reset button.

Contentment is a phase I've been growing through for a little while, and it's helped a ton. Not in terms of resigning myself to outcomes I don't want, but to re-evaluating what I truly need to be Ok in this life. What I can do with the things and time that I do control. Living in this moment and choosing the next. Fuzzy stuff.

When the goal is simply providing as much value as you can to people, and being able to take good care of your own as a result, I'd like to think that it short circuits the system and creates opportunities (or miracles) that contradict the the normal mode. Or simulation. Or whatever tf this is.

Let's go start creating our own.

-Justin

I’ve been (happily) paying $5/mo for this color palette tool for I don’t know how many years. It was started by one guy (Fabrizio) and he’s been improving it and making it more useful and delightful ever since. If you could use something to ideate, generate, check contrast, apply to examples, export, etc. - this is it!