Hey, It’s Lucy,
In today’s issue:
What Spirit Airlines’ overnight shutter signals for big tech
Women won’t be “left behind” in AI if ethical concerns are addressed
How to grow your newsletter income without ads
Evidence the AI job apocalypse is overhyped?
The sudden shutdown of Spirit Airlines this weekend actually wasn’t so sudden if you look at the budget airline’s financial track record over the last decade. It’s also a prime example of why dissent in business decision-making is becoming more rare in the age of AI.
This week on the HyperFix breakdown, tech founder and former military analyst Chris Pordon talks about why AI accelerates the existing human tendency toward groupthink and why the “yes man” approach is killing business decisions. He’s built a system that institutionalizes dissent as its core principle: three agents (a Strategist, a Skeptic, and a Synthesizer) that argue against each other and produce a structured decision brief with a confidence score and explicit owned risks.
And even though the interview took place before Spirit Airlines’ shutdown, it sheds light on how even popular, established brands can tank with a $3 billion loss. It reminds me of some AI companies that are hemorrhaging profit while banking on future gains. The more we use AI to create echo chambers, the poorer the decisions we make.
And in Spirit Airline’s case, misguided predictions resulted in 17,000 people losing their jobs, thousands of travel plans disrupted, and one less budget-friendly solution for air travel.
Specifically, here’s where Spirit Airlines got it wrong:
The board groupthink problem. In 2024, the Corporate Governance Institute specifically called out that Spirit’s board was “fed somewhat by groupthink and anchored to remedies that worked in the past” and simply didn’t grasp the scale of change happening around them.
Avoiding hard decisions. Analysts said that even in its first bankruptcy filing, Spirit hadn’t done enough to reconfigure the airline and had avoided hard decisions. That pattern repeated itself right to the end.
Over-optimistic planning. According to Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth, the reorganization plan “was too optimistic from the start,” because it relied on union concessions, and projected fuel prices that turned out to be wildly off.
Their market was disappearing and they kept going. Spirit themselves acknowledged in a bankruptcy filing that legacy carriers had adopted basic economy tiers that took a huge cut of the competition, yet they kept doubling down on the same model.
In our interview this week, Chris argues that companies and leaders (especially those who are relying on AI) need a structural mechanism to force the uncomfortable questions. Spirit’s reorganization plan was described by analysts as “too optimistic from the start,” which is exactly the kind of consensus thinking that a tool like Tenth Man is designed to stress-test. What sacred cows are you betting on in your industry? Listen to how you can stress test and “red team” those ideas in this week’s episode here.
🧠 THIS WEEK’S FIX: Women are concerned about AI
Can we officially ban the “you’re-going-to-get-left-behind” messaging that more celebrities and public figures seem to be broadcasting each day when it comes to AI? I think we need to talk about the real risk of alienating your audience — and especially a specific subset of people (women) when it comes to AI. Motivational speaker and author Mel Robbins became the latest public figure to jump on the left behind bandwagon and the internet has come out with pitchforks.
It’s no surprise that women are slower to adopt AI than their male counterparts. Harvard Business Review reported that women are adopting AI at a 25 percent lower rate than men due to ethical concerns.
How about we address those concerns before employing scarcity tactics? I do believe that we need to bring women into the space (as well as all minorities) for the main reason that AI reflects the values, ideas, and needs of its users. Instead of telling women they are going to be left behind, how about giving women platforms and spaces to address the ethics and environmental issues that are giving them hesitation?
Can you actually make money with your newsletter without ads? In this interview, Ethan Brooks of Austin Business Review discusses how service businesses can monetize newsletters when they operate on a hyper-local level.
Big media operators like Morning Brew and Axios can’t easily break into local markets, which gives local service providers a unique marketing opportunity. Think: events listings, community happenings, and resources/learning opportunities. Austin Business Review is a great example. They feature business events in Austin and spotlight founders who are creating innovative businesses. While the newsletter generates income from membership and content sponsorships, it also serves as a marketing engine for Ethan’s services of providing ghostwriting and content strategy for businesses.
The newsletter is essentially a lead-generation tool for his actual business. Founders find the newsletter, like it, and then hire him to help with their own content. He mentions experimenting with a “blended model” where businesses pay a percentage to be the exclusive partner for the spotlight category in the newsletter, with an affiliate fee on the back end. The newsletter also offers a paid subscription tier in addition to its free model.
The bigger picture He frames the whole newsletter as a small-audience, high-trust, high-buying-power play. He doesn’t need massive readership, only the right readers, who are founders willing to pay for content services.
🔥 EXTRA HYPE
X wants your ad dollars and is betting on their new ad platform
New game pits humans against AI models
How Claude would manage a $50,000 portfolio
China blocks Meta’s acquisition of Manus
Musk and Altman head to court over the fate of OpenAI
8 prompts to turn Claude into your personal trainer
Evidence the AI job apocalypse is overhyped?
📨 P.S. If you are building a newsletter and want to eliminate the weekly scramble, that is exactly what we help our customers do.
And if this sparked something, forward it to an AI-curious friend.