Book

ON WHOSE
TERMS

The New Expert Economy and the Fight for What You Know
By Matt Cretzman
The world's expert knowledge is being extracted right now — with or without the expert's consent. Three extraction economies are running in parallel. Every expert is already inside one of them.

This book is about the only question that matters: on whose terms.

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Coming 2026
On Whose Terms — Book Cover
The Moment

The rules for the next economy are being
written right now.

The largest knowledge-worker displacement in modern history is already underway. It's no longer a forecast. It's in the headlines every week.

Most people haven't realized what just happened. The people whose expertise actually built this moment are mostly on the outside, watching.

78,000+
Tech layoffs in Q1 2026
47.9%
Directly attributed to AI
40%
Of workers now fear displacement
The Central Paradox

Three extraction economies are running in parallel.
Every expert is already inside one of them.

Whether they've consciously chosen or not.

01
The Quiet One
LLMs ingested the world's expert knowledge without consent, attribution, or payment.
Their terms. Zero price to the expert.
02
The Transactional One
Platforms pay experts an hourly rate to surrender their IP into training pipelines.
Their terms. Short cash for long asset loss.
03
The Expert-Owned One
The alternative most people don't yet know exists. You own the asset, the distribution, and the revenue.
Your terms.

This book makes the case for the third path — and tells you exactly how to walk it.

The Money Math / Chapter 4

Three extractions. Three very different paychecks.

Same expert knowledge. Same decades of methodology. Wildly different economics depending on which extraction economy it ends up in.

01 // SCRAPED
The LLM Economy
OpenAI · Anthropic · Meta · Google
Platform earns
$50B+/yr
Combined frontier-lab revenue. Built partly on millions of books ingested without consent or compensation.
Expert earns
$3,000
Per book. One time. Only if you filed a claim and won in the settlement. Legal remedy — not a business model.
What it gets you
A one-time check.
Your IP stays in the model. You don't earn again.
02 // RENTED
The Hourly Economy
Mercor · Surge · Scale AI
Platform earns
$500M ARR
Mercor alone. $10B valuation. Pays experts $1.5M/day and still profits — because the labs pay more for your judgment.
Expert earns
$85–$200/hr
Top rates go to doctors, lawyers, engineers. Only while you're clocked in. Your expertise trains the model that replaces you.
What it gets you
A short-term wage.
You work, you get paid, it ends. And the model keeps your contribution.
03 // PUBLISHED
The Expert-Owned Economy
Knowledge Delivery System · MCP
Platform earns
50/50 split
Platform handles infrastructure, distribution, and payments. The expert keeps the other half — forever.
Expert earns
Every use.
Set your own price per skill. Paid every time a subscriber adds one. Delivered inside Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot.
What it gets you
An annuity.
Your IP works 24/7, across every major AI tool, for as long as it's relevant.
— The Gap

Extractions 1 and 2 pay experts once.
Extraction 3 pays them every time their knowledge gets used.

One is a settlement. One is a wage. Only one is an asset.
The question this book asks — on whose terms — is really a question about which of the three you're already inside.

From ON WHOSE TERMS — The New Expert Economy and the Fight for What You Know
Sources: Anthropic $1.5B author settlement (~$3,000/book, Sept 2025) · Mercor $10B valuation, ~$500M ARR, $85–$200/hr expert rates (TechCrunch, Oct 2025) · Expert-owned economics reflect Skill Refinery's 50/50 revenue share model, the category example profiled in Chapter 10.
What It Is, What It Isn't

Honest scoping before you commit an evening.

It Is
A manifesto for experts deciding what happens to their IP next.
A playbook for institutions holding tribal knowledge that's about to walk out the door.
A short read — 160 pages, built to finish on a domestic flight.
A category-defining argument for the Knowledge Delivery System, told through real case studies.
It Isn't
An AI book. It's about the expert economy that AI enables.
A commentary on AI ethics in general. Tightly scoped.
A Skill Refinery sales brochure.
A memoir.
Neutral commentary. This book takes a position and defends it.
Who It's For

Two audiences. One question.

The Expert

You built the IP. Now decide what happens to it.

Coach, author, consultant, operator, institutional leader. You're the person asking how to turn what you know into leverage before AI commoditizes it. This book is written for you first.

The Institution

The knowledge is in your people. For now.

CHRO, COO, PE operator, founder. You're watching the double squeeze — retiring experts walking out one door, AI displacement coming in the other. Chapters 12 and 14 were written at you.

There's a third reader the book doesn't market to but never forgets: anyone sitting in a season where the ground under their feet has shifted and the next move isn't obvious yet. If that's you, the book was written with you in mind too.

The Author
Matt Cretzman
Matt Cretzman — Dallas, TX

I'm Matt Cretzman. I built Skill Refinery — the first Knowledge Delivery System. I coauthored The LinkedIn Advantage with Tony Jeary. I run a fractional CMO practice out of Dallas.

I didn't come to this thesis from a distance. I came to it from building the infrastructure that makes the third extraction real — extracting expert IP from authors, coaches, enterprises, and institutions, and delivering it back through the AI tools their people already use. This book is the argument I've been making from the inside.

I'm writing it because the rules for the next economy are being written right now, and the experts who built this moment deserve a version of those rules that doesn't treat their knowledge as free raw material.

More about Matt → Skill Refinery →
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