Is DeepSeek Disruption or Opportunity?
Why I’ve Launched a Poetry Substack For Entrepreneurs
Excavating the Stories We Left Untold
History isn’t a straightforward retelling; it’s an excavation. Beneath the surface of every headline, every technological milestone, lie deeper truths—those rooted in the questions we didn’t ask and the choices we failed to make. These hinge moments shape who we are and who we might become. One of those moments is unfolding with the crisis surrounding Deep Seek. It’s a story of ambition and hype unraveling the threads of America’s AI innovation.
DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the tech industry. This Chinese AI startup has developed a chatbot model that rivals leading U.S. counterparts like ChatGPT but at what seems to be a fraction of the cost and energy consumption. This development has been likened to a "Sputnik moment," challenging the perceived dominance of American AI and prompting a reevaluation of our technological strategies.
The rapid ascent of DeepSeek has not only disrupted markets—leading to significant losses in major U.S. tech stocks—but has also exposed vulnerabilities in our approach to AI development.
This is a catalytic moment of introspection for entrepreneurs, corporate innovation leaders, and adventurous creatives. It compels us to question the foundations upon which we've built our technological ambitions and consider the broader cultural implications of our pursuit of progress. The DeepSeek phenomenon is not just a technological wake-up call; it's a cultural one that points to the need for a leadership glow-up.
Compute Power & Cultural Blind Spots
America’s visionaries and entrepreneurs — the people behind the tech— in arts, science, and business are at the forefront of identifying future trends and driving transformative change. They pose radical questions, generate groundbreaking ideas, and mobilize resources to bring innovation to life. However, alarming research indicates declining mental well-being among entrepreneurs and increasing unresolved grief and trauma within business innovation networks.
I suppose this is logical on some level. Entrepreneurs regularly face extreme pressures, financial instability, and isolation, leading to higher rates of stress, anxiety, loneliness, and burnout. Additionally, the cultural stigma around business failure still prevents many (if not most) from seeking necessary support, further exacerbating the emotional toll of building new things for a living.
DeepSeek didn’t just disrupt markets; it exposed something much more vulnerable. As Forbes noted yesterday, panic is spreading across industries as DeepSeek’s emergence disrupts global AI leadership—leadership America has long relied on to secure its creative and competitive edge. This isn't just about competition. It’s about a deeper vulnerability, a cultural blind spot. We are building entire business ecosystems on a technological monoculture that prioritizes speed and scalability over adaptability and creative depth.
This isn’t only a technology problem—it’s a story problem. For decades, America has wrapped its future in a narrative of technological dominance, telling ourselves that faster, smarter, and more automated would always mean better. We have optimized ourselves into a corner. DeepSeek manifests the blind spots and unintended consequences that often accompany unchecked ambitions—the kudzu of our innovation culture.
Like kudzu, which was introduced to heal but ended up suffocating ecosystems, generative AI promised to expand human creativity and productivity. Instead, we are now beginning to understand that it can also risk diminishing the resources that neuroscience and industrial psychology have demonstrated as essential to innovation: time, trust, and imagination.
Seduction Stories
Investors have been seduced by the myth that technology alone can drive progress. Even worse, we’ve conflated productivity and progress as one and the same.
DeepSeek’s emergence tells a different story, one we’ve left largely untold: that sustainable innovation cannot thrive in a monoculture. It requires ecosystems rich in a variety of thought, collaboration, and creativity.
This is a hinge moment for America’s entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, and artists. The year 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution. Since that founding moment, America’s explorers, innovators, and artists have continuously engaged in uncovering hidden wisdom and nurturing our sense of wonder. I still believe that some of our best days are ahead of us. And, just like in the past, they will look different from what we’ve seen. One thing that has remained constant about culture since the dawn of humanity is that it is always evolving. How we understand and engage our technological ambition will be shaped by the stories we tell about progress and possibility.
Emerging Story of Opportunity
Quantum Storytelling teaches us that history is a web of possibilities—paths constantly narrowing and expanding based on the stories we tell ourselves. Every moment is dense with potential. Yet, just as important as the narratives we promote are the ones we bury and the futures we discard without even realizing it.
DeepSeek crisis is an opportunity. I say this because it has forced us to confront a critical truth: the future of innovation is not about the endless scalability of “sameness.” It’s an opportunity for America to excavate—ideas, relationships, and the very foundations that sustain creative resilience in times of massive uncertainty and cultural change.
Creativity is more than the workings of an individual brain. The applied creativity of innovation is an ecosystem; ecosystems flourish not through domination but through variety, balance, and renewal. As a Culture Futurist, my work and writing often explore how America's innovation system—culture, commerce, and media—shapes business outcomes. But, that’s not the whole story. It’s how the story ends.
In addition to economic outcomes, the growing influence of generative AI and large language models has heightened my interest in the cultural context hidden in the language of American entrepreneurship and innovation.
Big Enough Language
Like researchers navigating scientific frontiers, entrepreneurs need a language expansive enough to convey the full complexity of their experiences—language that honors both the creative potential and human cost of building something new.
David Whyte’s story resonates deeply with me here. During his early career, he recounted how studying marine zoology in the Galapagos Islands revealed a similar limitation. The scientific language he relied on to describe animal behavior and habitat fell short of capturing the awe and interconnectedness he witnessed. Poetry gave him the words to express that experience.
Decades ago, when Whyte was invited to speak to a group of scientists and corporate leaders, one executive shared that the language corporations have is not large enough for the innovation territory that companies had already entered and were daily being forced to navigate. (And this was DECADES ago.) That territory, as Whyte saw it, was the evolving complexity of human relationships in the workplace. Structures were breaking apart, and creativity, trust, and adaptability were becoming essential to survival and growth.
His words gave shape to my own thoughts around the professional experiences in corporate healthcare, the arts, and academic research I’ve had over the past thirty years. As an entrepreneur and Culture Futurist, I’ve seen how narrow language—when solely focused on scalability, efficiency, and optimization—can limit the full creative potential of teams and organizations. It reduces innovation to a mechanical process, leaving no room for the depth of human experience that entrepreneurship requires. If we depend on generative AI’s Large Language Models to define that language alone, we risk suffocating creativity in favor of algorithmic sameness.
Through Culture Kudzu: Poetry for Entrepreneurs, I aim to expand beyond the typical language of entrepreneurship and innovation to reclaim a language large enough for the challenges we now face. I believe it is the language of POETRY. A language that holds space for wonder, failure, transformation, and resilience. A language resistant to the hyper short-term focus that drives most entrepreneurs today.
Time & Rewards
There is nothing inherently wrong with short-term wins in business. In fact, neuroscientists have found that they activate reward systems in the brain, releasing dopamine that motivates us to keep moving forward. These wins can be valuable for maintaining momentum. However, they cannot become our sole focus. When we rely too heavily on short-term rewards, we risk reinforcing a cycle of immediate gratification that blinds us to long-term opportunities and exposes us to unintended consequences, leaving deeper, transformative progress out of reach.
Consider social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Their designs encourage constant engagement through short bursts of validation—likes, comments, and shares—which trigger the brain's reward system. While this keeps users hooked, it can lead to negative outcomes like shorter attention spans, anxiety, and the erosion of meaningful social interaction. These mechanics drive engagement but can also lead to addictive behaviors and burnout, with creativity and deeper design sacrificed for short-term monetization.
Balancing ambition with long-term vision is crucial to avoid being trapped in cycles of reactive problem-solving. By recognizing both the benefits and risks of short-term wins, we can create systems that sustain motivation, shore up opportunities for creative resilience, and build futures that aren’t constrained by the unbalanced ambitions of techno-monocultures.
The legendary actress Helen Mirren aptly frames the challenge this way in reading lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses. (I recommend watching the short clip before reading further.) This is the story I invite you to join— a return to wonder.
The Threat In Monocultures of Creativity
The rapid rise of DeepSeek highlights the consequences of overreliance on a single technological model. America’s focus on resource-intensive AI systems has rendered it vulnerable to more efficient, adaptable competitors. This moment demands that we confront the risks of monocultures in innovation.
Introduced to America as a creative strategy to prevent soil erosion, the story of kudzu serves as a cautionary tale—strategy must always be linked to foresight. Without this connection, unintended consequences may arise. In the case of kudzu, it overtook ecosystems, monopolizing sunlight, water, and nutrients. What began as a solution turned into an invasive problem. Generative AI presents a similar challenge. While intended to enhance productivity and creativity, its dominance risks stifling the diverse thinking essential for long-term innovation.
Unbalanced ambition can suppress creative depth and resilience in business ecosystems. Under pressure to deliver quick results, teams often rely on AI-generated insights, reinforcing predictable patterns rather than encouraging exploratory thinking. Over time, if the team doesn’t also nurture its cognitive, emotional, and social creativity, the once liberating tool gradually undermines the team’s creative know-how, applied creative judgment, and collective ability to maintain the creative tension vital for asking the transformative questions upon which genuine breakthroughs depend.
DeepSeek’s success reminds us that innovation requires more than speed; it demands diversity of thought, strategic foresight, and a nuanced understanding of how AI has reframed the meaning of human resource stewardship.
Balance Is Essential
From microchips to moon landings, America has driven progress with relentless determination. However, given the immense reach of technology, unbalanced ambition can destabilize the foundations supporting the creativity that has been the source of our immense progress over time.
Today’s technological ambitions risk eroding the time and trust necessary for creative resilience. Generative AI, designed to enhance productivity, now monopolizes these resources, accelerating a culture of overwork and disconnection.
This is not about rejecting ambition. It’s about balancing bold vision with thoughtful stewardship. The rise of DeepSeek illustrates how focusing too narrowly on one path can leave systems brittle and vulnerable to disruption. Sustainable innovation requires environments where creative exploration and adaptability are valued as essential to fully realizing the promise of technology.
Imagine what could be possible if we applied the same level of ambition we put into building technology to cultivating creative ecosystems where creative trust and cultural foresight thrive. These ecosystems depend on leaders who can anticipate shifts, protect relational resources, and expand the language of leadership to move beyond optimization to exploration.
The rise of DeepSeeks open-source AI and the new questions it has posed about where the value in AI might reside presents a pivotal moment for artists, poets, and creatives to take the lead in At least some areas of the AI revolution. This isn’t just another opportunity to inspire tech entrepreneurs; it’s a once-in-a-generation chance for creative professionals to become industry leaders and visionaries.
From Being Tools to Leading with Tools
DeepSeek has disrupted the AI sector by offering high-performance technology that, at least from what we know right now, seems more accessible to all. Unlike proprietary models that have kept creatives on the sidelines or limited their role to content providers, this open-source moment creates new opportunities for interested artists and poets to be full partners, or even leaders, in developing culturally rich and emotionally resonant AI solutions.
This shift means that creatives no longer need to wait for a seat at the tech table. The tools are now in our hands.
In the past, tech companies often approached creatives to lend a human touch to their innovations after the fact, essentially using art and storytelling as a veneer for technology. With DeepSeek and others like it — if the current news cycles prove true— that dynamic is inverted. Creatives can drive product vision from the outset, crafting AI applications that prioritize emotional and social creativity and cultural nuance on their terms, potentially gaining significant market traction over more run-of-the-mill AI tech applications. That could lead to real, substantial, experimental capital being controlled by artists, poets, and creatives for the first time in modern history. Imagine never writing a grant application again because you could fund the idea yourself!
The oversaturation of purely functional AI has created a void for innovation that resonates on a deeper human level. Consumers and businesses alike crave experiences that feel personal, meaningful, and transformative. This demand positions artists, poets, and other creative thinkers as indispensable leaders in shaping AI’s next chapter. They have a unique understanding of how to provoke thought and tell stories in ways that machines and tech entrepreneurs alone cannot replicate. In the world of AI, as they say, knowledge is power, and a unique creative question is, at least right now, worth more than a number of “also ran” AI startups currently being funded at record levels by venture capital.
Reclaiming Wonder—A Strategy for Creative Resilience
With the ubiquity of technology exposed by the DeepSeek crisis, at least a part of America’s competitive advantage is shifting. Our creativity is becoming a defining currency in this new AI-driven economy. Creative entrepreneurs blending artistic and technological expertise stand poised to drive industry growth in ways we could scarcely imagine even two years ago when Chat GPT emerged into national awareness.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for artists and poets to redefine leadership in the digital age. No longer limited to passive contributors, artists, poets, and creatives can harness the power of open-source AI to shape culture and industry on their terms. DeepSeek has exposed new vulnerabilities of America’s tech monoculture, and America’s AI economy needs creative resilience. But we likely won’t get there by asking the same questions and doing things the same way all the time.
Ambition without reflection risks destabilizing creative ecosystems. Creativity, like nature, depends on balance. Scaling faster and optimizing processes can often drive short-term growth, but innovation stagnates without space for wonder and exploration.
Here’s what a balanced strategy for creative resilience might look like:
Encourage Diversity of Thought Intellectual monocultures form when organizations default to familiar ideas. Generative AI can reinforce these patterns, making it harder for unconventional perspectives to emerge. Leaders must cultivate environments where diverse viewpoints and experimentation are encouraged.
Protect Critical Resources Creativity requires time and trust. Continuous optimization monopolizes mental bandwidth, leading to cultural time poverty. Organizations must prioritize moments for reflection and exploration, recognizing that sustained innovation depends on these resources.
Invest in Strategic Foresight Foresight involves preparing for multiple possibilities by understanding how cultural and technological trends interact. Leaders who invest in scenario planning can better navigate uncertainty and build adaptable strategies.
At the heart of this strategy is wonder—the capacity to remain curious and open to possibility. Wonder sustains creativity by helping individuals and teams embrace uncertainty without losing their drive to innovate.
Poetry for Entrepreneurs - The People Behind the Pitch Decks
History is not a linear progression; it is an excavation of possibilities. The stories we tell—and those we leave untold—shape which futures become possible.
Today, I share with equal parts excitement and trepidation my new poetry substack feed — Culture Kudzu: Poetry for Entrepreneurs.
Culture Kudzu is a call to balance the language of American entrepreneurship. Creativity is not a mechanized pursuit of outcomes; it is a living ecosystem that requires nurturing. By excavating the human stories of innovation, we can cultivate futures rooted in curiosity and connection.
Culture Kudzu is a journey map of my own entrepreneur journeys over the years. I’ve always used poetry to explore the not-often-discussed human side of what it means to be an entrepreneur in America. The side that is often hidden. In 2025 and beyond, I want to share my struggles with others in the hope that we can build and grow a more resilient community of creative entrepreneurs.
Beneath the surface of investor pitch decks, startup spreadsheets, and “on-brand” messaging, we are real people navigating the messy, beautiful, and deeply human side of technology and the future of work. Culture Kudzu seeks to bring into the light the human side struggles, secrets, and salvation notes of entrepreneurs as people:
People trying to move through innovation grief and personal loss while under the pressure of continuous organizational growth.
People integrating artificial intelligence into their personal lives and professional dreams even as they wrestle with its unknowns.
People who know the feeling of sacrificing parts of themselves for validation from investors, markets, and the digital void.
People whose success can sometimes leave them feeling complicit in stifling the social ecosystems that sustain meaningful innovation.
Yet, through it all, we entrepreneurs continue seeking stronger connections to the spiritual technology that science frames as wonder, trust, freedom and joy. Our challenge is expanding the story of innovation to encompass the tangible creations we build and the human experience of entrepreneurship itself.
I've been an artist and poet since childhood in Breathitt County—my beloved home nestled in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Kentucky. In Culture Kudzu, I return to poetry to excavate language big enough for the future I envision from my mile-high perch as a Culture Futurist living in Denver, Colorado.
Culture Kudzu will be ALL POETRY—my own and, eventually, other entrepreneurs. The poetry will accompany my main Culture Futurist Substack, which focuses on uniting the best of culture, commerce, media, and brain science to advance American innovation.
Join me on this return to wonder. Subscribe to Culture Kudzu: Poetry for Entrepreneurs. Through poetry, I hope to build a different kind of entrepreneur community that can find new ways to guide and support each other. Through poetry, I invite you to join me in a return to wonder.
Before We Had Words to Name Flowers
Exploring the limitations of light in a shining city on a hill. Poem by Theo Edmonds (2021)
I feel myself (again) transforming Beyond the survival of cat scratch ferocity Water and wind soothe the hardness of me Unsteady, my mouth tries to sing Within this shaky song I feel the shape of forgotten music (salvation notes on my tongue) I recognize this music from a long-ago journey. A harmonized melody. Music only found in flowers that choose to open through crucible and stardust. No longer scared of my skin I begin opening myself too I sense gentleness finding it’s way to me. I remember this thing This thing coming toward me I remember it as beauty Beauty from a whispered universe that calls the uncomplicated sophistication of flowers, Home. On hot tin and mendacity That feral sky drifts further away Through roots and mud, Things long-shadowed Things shackled to limitation Transform into cool, wet seeds Turning through hot scorched earth (Reaching upward they begin shaping their own light.) Pressing through sacred toes further into earth, a curiosity synchronizes memory and desire. My only intention now Is tending to this wild, limitless garden (of who I am) Reclaiming those parts (that have always been within me) … before I followed others who wanted me to believe that we had words to name flowers.
My Other Places, Other Frames
My Culture Futurist Substack Site for Business, Innovation & Future of Work
Personal Website: Culture Futurist
About the Author
Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist® & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation®
©2025 Theo Edmonds | All Rights Reserved. This article contains proprietary intellectual property. Reproduction, distribution, or adaptation, in whole or in part, requires accurate attribution. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of any affiliated organization or institution.