Author: admin

I can’t remember the saying but you’ve heard it before…

Something something all work and no play makes you blah blah.

It’s true. We’ve gotten to that point where we’re trying to just posture and pretend to the masses that we’re being so productive and business-like that we have to hustle and grind to be seen as successful.

And if the AI bros can sell you some stupid AI tool that let’s you believe that you’re being more productive, when in actual fact you’re becoming dumber, while making yourself even busier because “But I can do so much more!” then well, I don’t know what to tell you…

But you’ve been scammed.

And so the one thing you shouldn’t forget it is to just have fun in life.

Play is important. Disconnecting from this wild online space is important.

My current situation, while managing to reach over and grab the ol’ computer to send this is: Pinned down between two dogs while we’re watching a movie.

I’m dog sitting for some friends who just so happen to be stuck in a warmer place than England (Lucky shits)

But the point is to just have a break from being chronically online.

I’m having a break by doing some friends a solid and spending time with dogs because I’m a massive animal lover.

The whole online space is mentally and physically exhausting because it feels like your whole life has to be on display.

And if you want to see how I’m currently monitoring the situation. You can go and stalk the only social media platform I’m active on and that’s twitter…

I’ve posted a few pics of me and the pooches over there and well, the couch is kinda under some sort of doggo-lockdown.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

I wanted to write about this but my man Chuck Wendig put it out there before me.

So grab a glass of water or whatever and have a quick read of his words below…

“I wanna talk about Cameron’s The Terminator and Carpenter’s The Thing, but first, let’s get it out of the way —

If you know anything at all about me in this Current Era, it is that I am vehemently opposed to generative AI. I do not use it. I will not use it. It does not exist for me in any form — the only “use” I had of it recently was writing my Vital Cat Update, which copied from Google’s search engine AI off its main search page. Otherwise, I don’t touch the stuff. I don’t even know how to access it. I couldn’t tell you how to use Chat GPT or Claude or any of that. My copy of Word is one with Copilot not inside it, and I had to change my subscription to get there. I turn off Apple Intelligence in every instance I can. I am against AI because it steals our work, which it then uses to steal our jobs, which it further uses to steal our water and our electricity.

Which is to say, it is here to steal our future.

So, I’m against it! It sucks moist open ass.

But there’s a delightful (read: not at all delightful!!) new perniciousness afoot, and that requires us to talk a little about the novel Shy Girl, by an author who I won’t even name because whatever she did or did not do, I do not think directing theoretical harassment toward said author is really valuable, nor is it the point. The problem isn’t one book. The problem is the whole system.

To keep it as brief as I can, what happened was, to my understanding:

Shy Girl was a self-published novel. A horror novel. It came out a year or so ago, on its own, I think? It did well enough, I guess, though I don’t know that it set the world on fire — but somehow a publisher, Hachette, picked it up for traditional publication and it was to come out soon. Ten months ago, there appeared to be accusations that the book read like it was written by generative AI in whole or in part. Those conversations continued and appeared to boil over right around now-ish, and the current narrative is that the author did not herself use generative AI, but employed an editor who made changes to the book using generative AI, changes that the author did not — review? Did not catch? I don’t know for sure.

Certainly some aspect of this may be wrong, or new details may come out, and if you have corrective details, please sling ’em in the comments below.

That is the situation currently.

To switch tracks a bit, though you’ll soon see (or already can predict) where this is going: I’ve in the last several months seen an uncomfortable number of instances, usually on Threads, where someone will look at a photograph or a video or a piece or art or graphic design and they will assert, with dogmatic certainty, that is AI.

And sometimes, it is, or appears to be.

And other times, it definitely isn’t.

I’ve seen people look at a beautiful, very real but also very-processed photo, and say with their whole chest, that shit is AI, and sometimes that’s started a small little avalanche of people asserting similarly. And in more than one instance, I’ve seen the creator come back and post how that photo predates the current generation of gen-AI — it’s just a photo that looks either really good because of Lightroom or really overprocessed because someone wanted a slick HDR effect, or whatever.

This has also happened with writing.

It started with the emdash.

It was asserted, with Great Authority, that emdash use was a strong signifier of a piece of writing being AI.

The artbarf robots, they said, love that little emdash sumbitch so much, so so much, that they just can’t help themselves.

Needless to say, that made my bowels go to ice water because —

Holy shit, I love the emdash, too.

In fact, most Current Era writers I know love love love a fucking emdash.

But instead of making me sympathetic toward the artbarf robots — “Aww, it loves the same things I do!” — it only made me hate the artbarf robots more, because the reason the piece-of-shit AI loves an emdash is because it stole all our work, and all our work features a lot of goddamn emdashes.

It doesn’t use emdashes.

We use emdashes, and it stole our work and then mimics us.

Emdashes and all.

So now, with Shy Girl, what do I see?

I see some folks putting forth the “signs” that told them that Shy Girl was very obviously AI-written, and those signs include a number of stylistic choices.

And when I say stylistic choices, they are not choices that generative AI made, because generative AI doesn’t make choices. It just eats and regurgitates.

We make choices, as authors. Narrative ones, stylistic ones, and so forth.

But this list of signs and symptoms and AI portents included stylistic choices that I myself absolutely one hundred percent make. Same as the emdash. I’ve seen people say that AI loves metaphors, AI loves certain kinds of repetition, it loves adjectives no wait it loves adverbs no wait it loves alliteration no wait–

Of course, again, as with choices, AI doesn’t love a fucking thing, because AI isn’t alive, it isn’t intelligent, it isn’t aware. The key word is always artificial. It fakes it. It fakes choices. It fakes preferences. It fakes love. And it is able to fake it because it stole those choices and preferences from us.

I saw The Terminator last night on the big screen. I’ve seen it before, obviously — seen it many, many times. Seen all of them! Even the stinky ones. But I think this was my first seeing that one on the big screen. (It’s of course excellent, if occasionally a little corny and showing its age.)

But one place where it isn’t showing its age is how it still issues a sharp warning about AI — it’s long been held as a kind of bellwether for that particular threat, right? It’s an early iteration of the Torment Nexus meme. That warning has told us, hey, AI is going to get smart, get mean, it’s going to inhabit robots who want to kill us, it’s going to tangle itself up in our systems and decide that we’re a threat and drop a batch of nukes on our heads.

But I think one of the warnings in the movie(s) didn’t really register for me back then, but it damn sure registers now —

What happens in the movie? The AI is going to pretend to be us, and it’s going to be get harder and harder to tell the difference. It’s going to wear our faces. Only dogs will be able to sniff it out. It can steal our voices — so when we call home to talk to Mom, maybe the Mom we think we’re talking to us actually dead, and it’s a soulless Cyberdene drone on the other end there.

That makes me think of John Carpenter’s The Thing, because it, too, understands that same threat, but worse — it understands the fear of being amongst your people except one of those people isn’t your people. Ohhh, no. It’s an Impostor, an alien being clothed in the raiment of your friend’s flesh, and soon you’ll be paranoid about who is alien and who is human, and you’ll have to work very hard to find a way to figure out just who is who — all that without accidentally killing a friend, or failing to kill the thing that wants to eat your face and then wear it.

Sound familiar?

The AI — artistically! — is us.

It steals our artistic skin.

It wears it, pretends to be us.

And it gets harder and harder to tell what’s us, and what’s it.

I’ve long said that one of the threats of AI is that it damages the fidelity of our information. Of truth and reality itself! It’s not just that it pumps out misinformation and disinformation — digital illusion and virtual legerdemain! — but rather that its mere existence makes it harder and harder to tell what is truth and what is fiction.

And we’re seeing that now with Shy Girl.

We’re seeing it with photos and videos and artwork.

People are right to hate AI — and the pernicious, insidious presence of AI has made them like the men trapped in that Antarctic base.

They are paranoid that it’s everywhere.

Because, ostensibly, it is. Or they (they being the techbros who are really the man behind the wizard curtain) want it to be. And it has a deleterious, corrosive effect on all that we do and all that we see. It’s like Paramount taking over CBS, or Musk taking over Twitter — it doesn’t matter that it becomes successful, it just matters that they ruin the ability to disseminate good information. To ruin truth.

So, what the fuck do we do about all this?

I have no idea. I mean, the obvious thing on the face of it is to keep your own garden free of it. Pledge to use no AI. In all the ways you can avoid it? Avoid it. But that won’t stop someone in the future telling you you’re using it. Or even using an AI detector — which is itself AI! — from “detecting” it. And it won’t stop others from assuring you that this photo or that video or this logo is AI, even when it’s not. That certainty has been ruined.

More to the point, I don’t know what this means for writers, for readers, and for publishing at large. Ideally, publishing gets ahead of this problem and tries to get commitments from writers to not use AI — but therein lies a rub, too, wherein a “no AI” contract looks like a “morality clause.” Without clear definitions, if enough people were to accuse you and your book of being AI — whether at the authorial level, the editorial level, or in some aspect of publishing — they can get it tanked whether or not AI has ever even chastely kissed the work in question. And it doesn’t inspire confidence when a publisher like Hachette published Shy Girl… when already the accusations of AI were afoot. Did they do their due diligence? I don’t know. Maybe! But given the lack of editorial oversight… ennnh, maybe not.

Do I think AI should be published? I do not. I think using AI at any of those levels is not only problematic for the reasons listed above, it also takes opportunity from an Actual Human doing the Actual Work of Being Human. A contract given to some slopwrangler is a contract not given to an actual writer. A fake book will take the place of a real one. It’s stupid fucking robots all the way down when it should be humans.

So, this is a snarled nightmare tangle — one where the existence of AI en masse is becoming its own problem, regardless of whether it’s presence in a single instance of art of writing. We’re just going to have to do our best going forward. We must pledge not to use it — but also try to be very, very cautious kicking other people under the tires of this bus without knowing for absolute sure what we’re accusing someone of doing. As AI gets better, the environment in which it exists is only going to get noisier and more confusing. And we can’t just stick a copper wire into the blood of the book to make it transform into the monster, revealing its True Self.

We just gotta do our best. Be vigilant, be cautious.

And don’t use the AI slop-shitting artbarf techbro bullshit.

SIGH.

I do not care for this era of writing and publishing, lemme tell you.

The faster we pop this bubble, the better off we will all be.

Good luck, friends!

And fuck off, robots.”

Now go give Chuck’s Website a little lovin’ and go buy his books before he dies…

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Isaac Asimov is spinning in his grave so fast you could power a small city with the kinetic energy…

The man who gave us the Three Laws of Robotics, which is unironically the foundational ethical framework for artificial intelligence, is watching humanity turn his careful philosophical constructions into a joke.

For those who skipped science fiction class, here’s what Asimov originally proposed and it’s the TL;DR version…

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey orders given by human beings, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection doesn’t conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Fairly clean and logical. Designed to prevent exactly the kind of shit show across the board we’re seeing now.

But Asimov never anticipated the most dangerous element in the AI equation which is human cowardice.

He assumed humans would take responsibility for their creations. He assumed we’d maintain accountability for the tools we built and deployed. He assumed we wouldn’t hide behind artificial intelligence like children hiding behind their mother’s skirt when the consequences of their actions came calling.

He was wrong.

Now we need a Fourth Law, and it should be carved into every piece of AI software ever created.

We’ve hit the FAFO era of AI and a lot of us called this long ago…

“Any human who uses artificial intelligence must take full responsibility for its outputs and cannot claim ignorance, automation, or algorithmic decision-making as a defense for the consequences of their choices.”

Cause right now, we’ve got executives blaming AI for biased hiring decisions. Marketers claiming their AI generated content “just happened” to be racist. Financial advisors pretending their algorithmic trading systems made independent decisions that wiped out their clients’ portfolios.

“The AI did it” has become the new “the dog ate my homework,” except now it’s being used by grown adults to dodge accountability for decisions that affect real people’s lives.

And in the latest bit of internet marketing drama. Frank Kern Vs Chris Haddad and Alex Cattoni and if you’ve seen any of it on the old Facebook, you know it’s a shit show and Frank and his milquetoast video response for justification is just stupid. Where he goes and tries to justify what happened because “Mah AI did it”

This is exactly the opposite of what Asimov envisioned. His robots were designed to protect humans from harm. Our AI is being used to protect humans from responsibility.

Every time someone says “the algorithm made that decision,” they’re admitting they built or deployed a system they don’t understand and can’t control. Every time someone blames AI for their fuckup, they’re proving they shouldn’t have been trusted with the technology in the first place.

Asimov wrote stories about robots developing consciousness and wrestling with moral dilemmas. He never wrote about humans losing consciousness and abandoning moral responsibility entirely.

The real danger isn’t AI becoming too human. It’s humans becoming too artificial. Automated decision makers who’ve programmed themselves to avoid accountability the same way their algorithms avoid liability.

We don’t need smarter AI. (It’s not really that smart tbh) We need braver humans. People who understand that every algorithm is a reflection of human choices. Every automated system is an extension of human values. Every AI output is the result of human input.

The Fourth Law shouldn’t just apply to AI systems. It should be tattooed on the forehead of every person who thinks technology can absolve them of moral responsibility.

You built it. You deployed it. You’re responsible for it. Which is a pretty solid outlook if it does end up backfiring on you and in this case with the IM drama, it has in great fashion.

It’s weird how Asimov understood this. Too bad we forgot though.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

A dead poet in Los Angeles figured this out 40 years ago…

I need to tell you something and you’re probably not gonna like it.

Your writing voice.

The one you’ve been carefully cultivating, polishing, workshopping, and deploying like a proud parent who puts their kids drawings on the fridge until they fade away…

It’s fake.

Not bad. Fake. There’s a difference. And that difference is the reason your work feels “fine” but never feels like a punch.

Let me explain.

There’s a guy named Jack Grapes. Been teaching something called Method Writing out of Los Angeles for over four decades. Poet. Playwright. Teacher. Not famous in the way the internet means famous. Famous in the way that matters, as in, people walk into his classroom writing one way and walk out writing like their fingers are finally connected to their actual nervous system instead of some ghost operated meat puppet version of themselves.

And the core of everything he teaches comes down to one idea.

One…

You have two voices. A surface voice and a deep voice.

And you, yes you, the person reading this on your phone while pretending to listen to someone in a meeting or whatever, have been writing in the surface voice for so long you don’t even know you’re doing it.

Here’s what I mean.

The surface voice is the one that sounds like Writing. Capital W. It’s the voice that shows up when you sit down at the keyboard and suddenly you’re producing sentences that are grammatically sound, structurally reasonable, and completely, utterly dead.

It’s the voice that says “the autumn leaves danced in the crisp morning air” and thinks it just did something.

It didn’t.

It performed. It put on the writer costume. It did an impression of what a writer sounds like based on every book you’ve read and every workshop instructor who told you to “show don’t tell” without ever explaining what that means at the level of the sentence.

The surface voice is competent.

The surface voice is safe.

The surface voice will get you a B+ in any writing class in America/Europe and a lifetime of people saying your work is “really good!” in that voice people use when they felt absolutely nothing but still want to be supportive.

Now…

The deep voice is the underneath thing.

It’s what happens when you stop trying to write well and start trying to write true. True like a bell is true when it rings clean. Not “true” like memoir. True like the sentence vibrates at the frequency of actual human experience instead of someone describing human experience from a safe professional distance.

The surface voice describes the fire.

The deep voice IS the fire.

And the reader can tell the difference instantly. Instinctively. In their body. The deep voice is what makes someone stop mid sentence and feel their chest tighten. It’s the thing that makes a paragraph unforgettable. Not because it was clever, but because it was real.

So why doesn’t everybody just write in the deep voice?

Because it’s terrifying.

The surface voice is armour. Pretty, polished, workshop approved armour. The deep voice requires you to stop hiding behind craft and start revealing something honest and raw and specific in a way that makes you feel skinless.

That cringe you feel? That “oh god this is too much, this doesn’t sound like a real writer” feeling?

That’s how you know you’re getting close.

Now look, I can sit here and tell you about this all day. I can rant and swear and wave my arms around like the caffeinated word goblin that I am.

But there’s a difference between hearing about the deep voice and actually learning to access it.

Jack Grapes spent forty years developing exercises for this. Ways to exhaust the surface voice. To tire out the performing part of your brain until it shuts up and the real thing starts leaking through like groundwater through a crack in the floor.

All I’m saying is that you need to pick up a copy of his book/s – Method Writing: The First Four Concepts (Which is all you really need) and just drown yourself in it for a few months.

It sucks that there’s no kindle version of it, but physical is just so much better in this case. If you want to tighten up your writing and voice. This is in my opinion, the holy grail of writing development.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

As I’m closing out on a week long water fast. I thought I’d re-share something that tips the scales in your favour if you use it ethically.

One of my favourite films wrapped in biblical lessons which a lot of people seem to overlook…

We’re gonna talk about the 1995 film Se7en.

The one where Morgan Freeman out acts gravity itself, Brad Pitt’s jawline does most of the heavy lifting, and Kevin Spacey plays a serial killer who treats the Ten Commandments like a Pinterest mood board made of human suffering.

And that ending…

That gut hollowing, soul scraping, what’s-in-the-goddamn-box finale that still makes me want to shower in steel wool.

The thing is. I’ve been beating this drum for years, in different shapes, wearing different hats, probably while drunk on at least two of those occasions.

It’s basically marketing is sin-jujitsu.

You take the audience’s worst, most feral, most lizard-brain-in-a-business-suit impulses and you don’t fight them. You redirect them. You use their own momentum against them like some kind of capitalist aikido instructor who also maybe needs therapy and even if you get through all of this and don’t use it, being aware of it will make you realise you’re having this used on you to buy and become addicted to some of the most mundane things.

Let’s get going.

LUST

You’re not just a shoe salesman. You need to think to yourself and know that you’re selling longing in leather form. You’re not hawking perfume. You’re bottling the throat closing sense memory of someone’s ex, the neck, the collarbone, the whole olfactory crime scene. You’re selling want. Raw, undignified, lip biting want. Everything in this world is a re-frame. You hear it all the time, but if you can re-frame an idea or an emotional response. That’s pure power.

But people forget that lust isn’t really about sex. That’s the amateur reading. Lust is about the gap. The howling, electric space between what someone has right now and what they’re convinced they need so badly their teeth itch. Your job is to widen that gap. Tease it open. “Click to reveal.” “Unlock the secret.” Leave them trembling at the edge of the BUY NOW button like it’s a cliff and they’re already leaning.

GLUTTONY

Feed them until they rupture.

More content. More deals. More more more MORE. Autoplay the next video before their pupils even refocus. “Suggested for you.” “Based on your recent activity.” “People who bought this also bought a tiny shard of their own disappearing free will.”

See, gluttony isn’t about satisfaction, satisfaction is the enemy of gluttony. Gluttony is about the ritual of consumption itself. The mechanical act of shovelling. Cram their cart. Stuff their notification tray like a Thanksgiving turkey made of dopamine and regret. Watch them chew through subscription after subscription like a starved rat gnawing through your abdomen while somebody heats the bucket. (Google “rat torture” if you want nightmares. Or don’t. I’m not your dad)

The point: Never let them feel full. Full people stop buying.

GREED

“LIMITED STOCK.” Countdown timers ticking like bombs strapped to their wallets. “Only 3 left!” There are three thousand left. You know it. I know it. The algorithm knows it. Nobody cares.

People always think that greed and money go hand in hand, but those people are wrong. Greed is about panic. It’s the cold sweat certainty that someone else, some faceless, luckier, less deserving someone else, is about to snatch YOUR thing. Your treasure. Your precious. (Look at how wild and deranged people get on Black Friday as an example)

Turn your buyers into dragons. Sad, hoarding, credit card wielding dragons sitting on a mountain of plastic trinkets and limited edition bullshit. “Exclusive access.” “VIP tier.” “You deserve this.”

They don’t deserve it. But, and here’s the secret, fuck it, neither do you, neither do I, none of us deserve anything, we’re all just meat puppets on a rock hurtling through space. So sell the trinket.

SLOTH

One click purchase. Pre filled forms. “Skip the tutorial.” “We remembered your card so you don’t have to.” How thoughtful. How convenient. How utterly, terrifyingly efficient.

Sloth is often linked to laziness. Don’t mistake it for that. Sloth is impatience turned into a weapon. It’s the understanding that every single micro decision you force a human being to make is a tiny off ramp where they might wake up from the purchasing trance and think, “Wait, do I actually need a fourth identical hoodie?”

You cannot allow that moment of clarity.

Reduce every decision to a reflex. Autofill their lives. “Subscribe and never think again.” Make the path from desire to purchase so frictionless it’s like greasing a waterslide with bacon fat. They’ll thank you. They’ll love you for it. They’ll whisper your brand name with gratitude while their decision making muscles atrophy into warm pudding.

Think of the “Netflix effect” every single person and their pet goat has a low ticket recurring offer that a lot of people forget about and ending up being billed until they die. Nobody really notices $9.99 every month. Obviously there’s layers to it. So use the information wisely.

WRATH

Hot take incoming, strap in…

Outrage is glue.

The stickiest, most industrial strength emotional adhesive on the market. Pick a side. Any side. Doesn’t really matter which. Now make your audience furious at the other side. “Don’t let THEM win.” “They want to take this from you.” “Are you going to just SIT there?”

Wrath doesn’t have to be about conflict. Conflict is just one of the many delivery mechanisms. Wrath is tied to loyalty. You unite your tribe against a common enemy. Real, imagined, slightly exaggerated, doesn’t matter and suddenly you’re not a brand. You’re a banner. A flag they’ll march behind into the trenches of a culture war fought entirely in comment sections.

Sell pitchforks. Sell torches. Market share isn’t a pie chart. We’re at war, and your customers are the soldiers who showed up voluntarily and brought their own weapons.

Terrifying? Sure. Effective? Obscenely.

(Look at political sides and the current war/s going on. People are being played like a fiddle and deep down they don’t even know why they love it. It’s because they can choose a side and flaunt it loudly on the internet…)

ENVY

Stage the perfect life. But, and this is the key, make it look effortless. Curated imperfection. A strategically messy bun. A latte held just so. “Oh this old thing?” This old thing cost four hundred dollars and was photographed nine times before we picked the one that looked most casual. (Even though I believe the influencer lifestyle is dying, you can’t go wrong emulating it, even if it makes your skin crawl)

“Look what THEY have. Look how they LIVE.”

I always thought that Envy was about wanting. Wanting is too clean a word. Envy is comparison as self harm. It’s scrolling through someone else’s highlight reel at 2 AM and feeling your own life curdle like milk in August. Filter everything. Retouch everything. User generated content, which, let’s be honest, is just free labour and it turns your followers into unpaid billboards who are also somehow stalking each other.

Make their neighbour’s grass literally greener. Digitally. With what might as well be spray paint… (Kevin Trudeau was a master at this, even though he went to the dark side…)

PRIDE

“You’re not like other people.” “You’re special.” “Be legendary.” “Treat yourself, king.” “Treat yourself, queen.” “Treat yourself, gender nonspecific royalty of consumerism.”

Pride does not equal confidence. Confidence is quiet. Confidence doesn’t need a gold plated USB cable. Pride. The sin variety, the marketing variety, is our own built in narcissism with a price attached to it. It’s selling people their own reflection, but polished, retouched, pixel perfect, and mounted in a frame that costs extra.

Premium memberships. Titanium credit cards. “Because you’re worth it.” Four words that have separated more people from more money than any casino ever built.

If you think you’re selling a product, you’re wrong. You’re selling them themselves. Except it’s the version of themselves they wish they were. The shinier, better, more worthy version that only exists on the other side of a transaction.

And they’ll pay. Oh, they’ll pay…

So there it is.

Seven sins. Seven levers. Seven ways to reach into the screaming machinery of human psychology and pull.

Now. Am I telling you to DO all of this? To gleefully manipulate people like some kind of dopamine puppeteer?

No. Maybe. It’s complicated.

What I’m telling you is…

This is how it works. This is the machinery. These are the gears. Whether you use this knowledge for good, for evil, or for selling artisanal hot sauce on Etsy that’s between you and whatever deity or void you report to.

But you should understand the machine.

Because if you don’t, someone else will use it on you.

Now go write something. And maybe watch Se7en again. With the lights off. Like an adult.

Stephen Walker.

I swear the 90s had some of the most twisted and eye opening films of all time…

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

So it’s not a secret that I’ve been unwinding myself from doing client work for the last few years.

Frankly, I’ve just been so bored of people flip flopping into different “things” and then when the things that were working get changed and said clients lose money…

Guess who they come back to, to make them whole again?

Yours truly.

Are they bad people? No. They’re just people at the end of the day and people often get bored of what works.

That being said. Today was a fun day. I had to sift through so many discord messages in a group that I’m part of for us who trade the markets to make money.

So besides doing my private writing work and creative stuff (Clientless) I got back into trading a little while ago and it’s been good fun, but like anything when there’s money involved. There’s also a multitude of emotions involved too. Good old human psychology eh?

If there was a way to turn off emotions completely when there’s large sums of money involved, this world would probably be a little bit better because humans would probably distribute and not let greed, power and corruption run its course.

Sadly, the world is primarily run on those 3 things.

Anyways. I’m just going off on a tangent.

Long story long.

In this space you can “buy money at a discount” or use OPM (Other people’s money) to in turn make more money. I mean there’s nothing sexy to sell in the trading space except for the fact, that if you have the patience and discipline and psychology to handle it all. You can make a lot of money quickly. Downside to it, you can lose a lot of it quickly too and more often than not. 97% of people do.

The issue today was that there were so many messages about people wanting to uproot their jobs/businesses and go full time into trading, which honestly should be the goal for anyone who gets into it.

Although they’ve refused to look at the nuance.

Things can and will go wrong. Look at all the wars and wild shit going on in the world. The markets are massively volatile. Those same companies I’ve just mentioned are tightening up rules and if you don’t stick to them. You won’t get paid and worst case scenario you could also get booted off of their platform.

So in today’s world no matter what it is we’re doing. The most important thing we need to do is learn to control our emotions…

…and unless you’re a naturally born sociopath. It’s going to take a lot of work.

But the main lesson here is to diversify, especially when there’s money involved. The only thing the marketing guru’s out there had right was:

“You need multiple sources of income!”

And so that is where I was today in those discord messages. Telling people to diversify while mastering their emotions. With everything going on in the world…

The last thing you want to happen to you, is to get caught with your pants down and have everything stripped away and/or having to start from scratch again.

(Been there done that)

I know you might be a visual artist, writer, musician or someone wanting to break free from a job…

But if you don’t do those two things pronto. It’s just going to get harder and harder to do so in the future.

(Especially cause Scam Altman and Elon Musk want everyone to bend to their weird dystopian agenda)

I want you to win. I want everyone to win and if that means I have to drill those two things into your head for the next 12 months I will.

But I’m already working on it cause I’ve got a little something something I’m cooking up for the group.

So sit down and think about it. How can you diversify and what is truly screwing with your own psychology.

If you can nail those two things. You’ll be ahead of the 97% of people who lose it all.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I’m on day 5 of a 7 day water fast and I’m pretty sure I’m just about to hit peak enlightenment and while it’s fresh in my mind. You can click this super long and obnoxious link to take you to a book I recommend to everyone, even if you’re not in the trading game.

If you’re not diggin’ these tasty little emails anymore you can hit the unsubscribe button right here >>> unsubscribe

Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Which also sounds gross by design…

But it’s the ability to actually think.

While everyone else is outsourcing their brains to ChatGPT or the LLM of their choice, you’re going to be the one they pay premium rates to, to fix their fuckups.

“AI” is taking over everything, and the masses are celebrating like they just discovered fire. They’re letting algorithms write their emails, create their content, make their decisions, and do their thinking for them. The lies to themselves are that they’re being efficient.

When grounded in reality, they’re actually making themselves obsolete.

The thing is. Most of us are cool with maybe working 40-50 hours a week.

Yet these clowns are making themselves output more work (albeit very shitty work and low quality I might add…) and are almost doubling their output in hours but the results are subpar at best…

It’s a level of delusion humanity has not witnessed before and the scary thing is they can’t even see it themselves.

The smart ones understand what AI really is a fancy pattern recogniser that regurgitates what it’s been fed. It’s autocomplete on steroids, not actual intelligence. It can mimic human thinking, but it can’t replace human thinking. There’s a difference, and that difference is about to become extremely fucking valuable.

While everyone else is getting lazy, you need to get smarter. While they’re atrophying their cognitive muscles, you need to be strengthening yours. Because the day is coming and it’s coming fast and they’re going to realise they fucked up.

When their AI generated content sounds like everyone else’s AI generated content. When their automated systems make expensive mistakes. When their pattern matching algorithms fail to account for nuance, context, or basic human psychology. When they need someone who can actually think through complex problems instead of just prompting their way to mediocrity.

That’s when they’re going to come crawling to you.

And you’re going to charge them premium rates to fix their laziness.

Think of it as intellectual arbitrage. While the market is flooded with people who can operate AI tools, there’s going to be a scarcity of people who can actually think without them.

Supply and demand, baby.

It’s basic economics.

The executive who let AI write his strategy presentations is going to pay you consultant rates to figure out why his company is failing. The marketer who automated all her campaigns is going to hire you at premium prices to understand why her audience stopped responding. The entrepreneur who built his entire business on AI generated content is going to beg you to help him create something that actually resonates with human beings.

Which honestly blows my mind, but it’s already happening and I get people in my inbox daily asking me to fix their shit.

So the moral of the story is to become everyone’s premium option…

But you have to start commoditising your thinking ability now. You can’t wait until everyone else realises they fucked up. By then, it’ll be too late to develop the cognitive skills they’ll be willing to pay for.

Read books that challenge you. Solve problems that require creative thinking. Practice articulating complex ideas in simple terms. Develop expertise in areas that require genuine human insight, not just data processing and all of that prompting bullshit.

The future belongs to people who can think, not people who can prompt.

Think about it.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield didn’t fuck around when they had a job to do.

They showed up, handled business, and got results.

There was no endless planning meetings or motivational podcasts.

And I don’t even think vision boards or manifestation journals were the rage back in 1994 either…

They just had cold professional execution.

Tarantino’s characters approach their work in such a beautifully efficient way.

They don’t overthink it which is one of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of his films. They don’t second guess themselves into paralysis.

They have a job, they do the job, they move on to the next job and it looks so seamless.

“I’m gonna get medieval on your ass”

When something needs to get done, you don’t negotiate with it or try to reason with it. There’s no gentler or sustainable approach, I mean that’s for pussies.

You get medieval on its ass.

Jules treats every situation like it’s just another day at the office, even when that office happens to be a blood splattered apartment. He’s got his routine, his professionalism, his unwavering focus on the task at hand. He quotes Ezekiel not because he’s particularly religious, but because ritual and ceremony help him stay centered while doing difficult work, which kind of makes sense.

Vincent might be a heroin addict with questionable judgment, but when he’s working, he’s working. No distractions. No excuses. He shows up ready to handle whatever needs handling, even if it means cleaning up brain matter from the back of a car.

The Wolf appears when everything’s gone to shit and applies surgical problem solving to the shit show they so happened to get themselves roped into. He doesn’t panic. He doesn’t blame. He assesses the situation, creates a plan, and executes it with military precision. “Let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks quite yet” is basically the most practical project management advice ever given.

And this is where all of the magic happens. Execution beats strategy every time. You can have the most beautiful business plan in the world, but if you can’t pull the trigger when it matters, you’re just another dreamer.

Butch doesn’t spend three months researching the perfect boxing gloves before his fight. He trains, he fights, he handles the consequences. Mia doesn’t workshop her dance moves before getting on the floor with Vincent. She just dances.

Stop overthinking. Stop planning the plan to make a plan. Stop waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect strategy or the perfect set of circumstances.

Handle your business.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I’ve been informed that there are a whole bunch of people who haven’t seen this master piece and so I’d suggest you to do so if you haven’t.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

“If my answers frighten you, then you should cease asking scary questions.” – Pulp Fiction

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You think you’re trying, but you’re probably not.

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(how’s that for a harsh truth?)

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Instead, you’re:

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Thinking about trying.

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Watching videos about trying.

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Imagining yourself trying, and then jumping to conclusions about whether or not trying is even worth it.

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Or, maybe you’re one of the rare few who actually kind of tried:

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You put in a bit of effort, saw lukewarm results, and decided to either:

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Stop trying
Try something else instead
Or just keep simulating trying in your mind instead of actually doing it in reality, because failing in your head is less painful than failing in real life.

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Whew.

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I know this message isn’t winning me any friends…

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But if the truth hurts, then pain is our ally.

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And maybe trying to avoid pain is the whole problem.

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Maybe the pain of trying and failing and getting up and trying again even though our nose is bloody and our legs are wobbly and our friends and family are wondering if we’ve lost our mind and we’re starting to wonder the same thing because what if after all this work it still doesn’t work out, but fxck — what if it does…

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…Is just the price of admission?

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Trying, really trying, is actually quite simple.

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All you do is show up every day and work on the same thing, for as many hours as you can, with the full force of your focus, for 1-3 years, without quitting or jumping to something new.

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Do that, and your chances of success are surprisingly high.

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But first, you need to understand what trying isn’t:

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Creating 10 pieces of content and then disappearing is not trying.

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Working out once or twice a week and wondering why you’re still not in shape is not trying.

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Doing a month of cold outreach before giving up or switching strategies is not trying.

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Going on four dates before deciding “there are no good ones out there” is not trying.

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Failing at one business and quitting rather than pivoting, iterating, and re-launching is not trying.

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Doing just enough activity to feel like you’re trying even though you’re not going as hard as you know you can is not trying.

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So no, you’re probably not trying. Not yet.

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And that’s the good news.

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Because imagine what will happen when you do…

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• T

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P.S. I’m closing applications for one on one coaching tomorrow.

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​If you’re interested, here’s where you can get the details and apply today.​

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“Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming. It’s easier to raise $1,000,000 than it is $100,000. It’s easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s. – Tim Ferriss

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​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

Crazy thing is you’re building something.

You’re creating content and growing your audience, hell. Like many of us. You’re trying to make a living from your ideas and work.

But then…

Some miserable piece of shit crawls out from the internets sewers to tell you that you’re either a fraud, scammer or worse.

Welcome to the internet. Where broken people tend to get together and tear down anyone who dares try.

The thing is, fundamentally they’re incredibly unhappy with their own lives, so they make it their life mission to drag everyone else down to their level of misery.

They see someone building something and I mean it could be anything, which indirectly reminds them of their own inaction, cowardice and their failure to create anything meaningful. So they attack cause it’s so much easier to tear down than to build up.

These aren’t successful people taking time out of their busy lives to critique your work. These are basement dwellers whose greatest achievement is reaching level 50 in whatever video game is currently consuming their existence.

(Don’t get me wrong. I like a little video game action here and there…)

They have no audience, no business, no creative output of their own and on the surface they’re just consumers who moonlight as critics.

They target creators because creators represent everything they’re not.

They’re not brave enough to put themselves out there, disciplined enough to create consistently, resilient enough to handle criticism and keep going anyway. Cause we know how hard and exhausting it can be most of the time. It’s something they’ll never fathom.

The troll’s psychology is simple. If they can’t build, they’ll destroy. If they can’t create, they’ll criticise. If they can’t succeed, they’ll make sure everyone else fails too.

They hide behind fake profiles and anonymous usernames because they’re cowards. They punch up at people who are actually doing something while contributing absolutely nothing themselves. They mistake cynicism for intelligence and cruelty for honesty.

Every minute they spend attacking you is a minute they’re not spending building their own thing. Every nasty comment is proof that they’d rather be a spectator than a player. Every attempt to tear you down is an admission that they’ve given up on themselves. Which all in all is pretty damn sad if you look at it from an empathetic lens.

Don’t let broken people break your momentum. Don’t let people who’ve never built anything convince you to stop building.

Best thing to do is block them and delete their comments cause if you interact with their negativity, it’ll slowly bleed into your own output.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you want a write up about the pathology of a troll with a little more depth you should definitely check out this Medium article. It’s an oldie but a goldie and don’t let those damn trolls win when they start to show up.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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In 2011, my young company, EGTBasketball, was running a business model I call:

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“What Would Kobe Do?”

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Answer: Everything.

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Product launches. Affiliates. Paid ads. SEO. VSLs. Emails. Content. Five offers. Four funnels. Three traffic sources.

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Maximum effort. Zero scale.

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And it was working, kind of:

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We were generating revenue, but swung wildly between 0-30k per month because I was always chasing the next sale rather than building a machine that generated sales on command.

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And so I lived in chronic anxiety:

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Never knowing how much cash would be coming in, always fighting to stay afloat, terrified my business would sink the moment I stopped to rest.

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I knew I badly needed to simplify and focus on one core strategy…

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And my mind fought a constant tug of war between offers and business models, churning through options until the tension tied my mind in knots and paralyzed my decision making.

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I wasn’t lacking knowledge or ability, I was lacking clarity:

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I was too close to the problem to see the solution, as though I was trying to read a label from inside the bottle.

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That’s when I met Paul Reddick.

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Paul is a grizzled marketing veteran who had been quietly running a multi-7-figure business selling a program for baseball pitchers.

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I’d heard of him in an obscure audio interview (Podcasts weren’t a thing back then), dug his contact details out of some back-alley website, and begged him to coach me.

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Within an hour, Paul had cut through the entire tangled mess I’d created and laid out the perfect business model for my skill set, offer, and avatar.

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Within 6 months, my business looked like this:

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Run paid ads to an opt-in page
Send daily emails
To sell the core EGT program (plus upsells)

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My workday shrank from 10 hours to 3.

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My revenue grew to 50k/month, perfectly stable.

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Within a year, we cracked 100k/mo, and then pushed smoothly beyond it.

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It was as though I’d been caught in a street fight, nose bloody, legs wobbling, struggling to survive, before Paul emerged from the shadows and knocked my opponent out cold with a single strike.

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That’s the power of coaching:

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A skilled coach — who has already won the battles you’re currently fighting — can step in and create a path to victory almost instantly.

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Even today, 15 years and 8 figures later, I continue to work with three different coaches across multiple domains of life.

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And I personally coach a small handful of founders who are serious about scaling to 7 or 8 figures this year.

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If you’re interested, I just opened applications for the first time in 12 months.

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I only have three spots available, and I’ll only be accepting applications until Friday.

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So if your business is currently generating at least 20k/mo, and you think this might be a good fit:

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​Here’s where you can get the details and apply now.​

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Working with Paul Reddick transformed my business.

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And that business transformed my life.

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It would be an honor to do the same for you.

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• T

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​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

If you run a profitable business, and you want to scale to 7 or 8 figures this year, I have an invitation for you.

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Here’s the the backstory:

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Ever since I built Elite Guard Training to 8 figures in lifetime revenue, I’ve received dozens of requests from founders who wanted one on one coaching.

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And I’ve always declined.

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I made plenty of money from my own business, and had plenty of work to do on that business.

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Coaching always felt like a distraction, so I refused to do it (at any price).

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Then, around 2020, I began to remove myself from Elite Guard Training.

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I started working more “for fun” than for profit, doing creative work I felt inspired to do, rather than work I felt required to do.

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And, somewhere along the way, I started doing what I swore I’d never do:

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I started coaching.

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Not as my primary business, but casually, with a small handful of clients.

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And I quickly realized:

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I like it.

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Actually, I really like it…

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And, more importantly:

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I’m damn good at it.

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My strange, hybrid-background of…

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15 years in business
Scaling EGT to 8 figures in lifetime revenue (and 7+ figures per year for nearly a decade)
A decade of intensive training in meditation, Taoist qigong, plant medicine, and depth psychology

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…Turned out to be the exact blend of inner and outer expertise that lends itself perfectly to one on one coaching.

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I realized I could cut through any problem a founder was facing, see into their mind and business like an x-ray, radically clarify their strategy, and engineer clean plans of attack within minutes.

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Ben went from 60k/mo to 120k/mo within 4 months (and we had tripled his business within 6 months).

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Andy & Ethan had been stuck at 0 for a year and a half — within 8 months of working together they hit 30k/mo and growing.

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Mason cracked 40M in total revenue, his brother Colton cracked 3M, and Adan did 100k in profit after a single call.

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(more results here, and more on the way)

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So that’s the backstory.

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Here’s the punchline:

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For the first time in 12 months, I’m accepting new applications for one on one coaching.

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I only have three spots available, and I’m only accepting applications until Friday.

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So if your business is currently generating at least 20k/mo, and you think this might be a good fit:

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​Here’s where you can get the details and apply now.​

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If I feel I can help you, I’ll reach out personally with more details.

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If not, I’ll let you know, and I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction.

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Either way:

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I look forward to, hopefully, helping you build the business that changes your life.

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• T

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​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

“The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have.” – Naval Ravikant

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In late 2014, I made a power move.

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It was expensive, risky, and unheard of in the industry at the time.

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But it had the potential to turn my young basketball training company into a juggernaut.

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So I closed my eyes, wrote a check, and shot my shot.

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What happened next is still one of the biggest mindf*cks of my career.

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Here’s the story:

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In an attempt to increase the “credibility” of my training programs…

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(which had all been created by me — a 6’1” white kid from Canada who got hurt before he could play a single game of college basketball)

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…I signed NBA All Star Bradley Beal to produce a jump shooting program for my brand:

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Everyone I spoke to — friends, advisors, even my own email list — said:

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“An NBA player in your videos? Holy sh*t nobody has ever done that. This is going to be enormous.”

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Excitement grew as we rolled through our pre-launch campaign, and my expectations began running wild.

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Could this be our biggest launch ever?

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Could it double our biggest launch ever?

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What’s even the ceiling on this thing?

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Finally, with hype at a fever pitch, I set the program live.

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Then I logged into our shopping cart and immediately started hitting refresh.

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But instead of the tidal wave I was expecting, I saw…

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Droplets.

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One at a time, slowly, sales trickled in.

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Slowly? Trickled?

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That is not what I expected — or, what I paid for.

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Shaken, I frantically started stress-testing our funnel to see if something was broken.

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But everything was running fine.

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Fine?

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By the end of the launch, I’d just barely broken even on the giant check I wrote Brad…

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Not to mention the full-stack video team I’d flown in to shoot & edit the program, and every other contractor, developer, and agent who contributed to this giant waste of time.

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It was an expensive lesson to learn, but I learned it loud and clear:

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Authority and credibility are not nearly as important as relatability.

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Sales of my own programs dwarfed Brad’s by several zeroes, because what I lacked in authority I made up for by deeply understanding the experience my customers were having.

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I knew the pain of being stuck on the bench, watching players who don’t work as hard as I do get the playing time I wanted … sitting on the back of the bus after a 2 point game with a knot in my throat … rushing to my room because I’m ashamed to tell my parents how the game went … collapsing on my bed, close to tears, wondering if all the work I was putting in would ever pay off.

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And so when they looked at me, they saw a version of themselves:

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Someone who had been through exactly what they were going through, and had found a way to the other side.

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But when they saw Brad, they saw a mirage:

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Something they wanted badly to attain, but was so far away they couldn’t wrap their mind around it.

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The same is true in the online space today:

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Founders often think they need Hormozi’s numbers or Huberman’s scientific background to be successful.

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And yes, if you want to sell 100M worth of books in 3 days or grow a science podcast to 10M subs, you’re gonna need clout.

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But for every Hormozi and Huberman, there are literally thousands more founders quietly growing 7 & 8 figure businesses simply by being relatable:

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Understanding the experience your customer is having.

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Speaking to them about it in their language.

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And helping them solve their problems from the level they’re at, rather than shouting down at them from above.

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So if you feel overwhelmed, under-qualified, and silently a little depressed every time you watch a Hormozi video, remember:

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You don’t need to be Hormozi to be successful.

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Credibility creates logical trust, but relatability creates emotional trust.

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And emotional trust creates customers.

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• T

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P.S. I just opened applications for one on one coaching for the first time in over a year.

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A few important notes:

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I’m only accepting applications until end of next week, before we shut the doors again.
It’s expensive, and your revenue must be at least 20k/mo to apply.
I’m only accepting 3 new clients (this is full one on one mentorship, and my commitment level is very high).

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​If you think this might be a good fit, here’s where you can check it out today.​

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​Unsubscribe | Update your profile | 5-420 Erb St. W, Suite 433, Waterloo, ON N2L6K6

And what can we do about it?

I had to try really hard to not do the whole RE: RE: RE: No, Seriously, Why Does Everything Suck Now type of subject line…

You know me better than that.

I may or may not have also had a shower beer while thinking up and typing this on my phone.

I hear you though. I feel you in my bones like a low grade fever that won’t commit to being a real illness or whatever.

And my favourite topic is boredom…

…and I need you to lean in close for this because I’m only going to say it once before I get distracted by a thumbnail of a man reacting to something.

Boredom isn’t the absence of stimulation. That’s the lie they sold you. Boredom right now, in this particular historical moment, is the overflow of it.

People play it off as if we’re starving. But we’re actually drowning in high fructose content slurry pumped directly into our face by ones and zeros that were specifically, surgically, engineered to make you feel like you almost had a good time.

Almost. Always almost.

It’s like going to vegas and It’s basically a dopamine slot machine that only pays out in IOUs.

But there’s always a sinister undertone.

This is also where my kind of cold, clear eyed narrator voice kicks in and says pay attention, this part matters. The machine doesn’t want you satisfied.

Satisfied people close their laptops. Satisfied people go for walks and call their friends and cook something that smells good. The machine needs you hovering. Twitching. Scrolling past the thing you actually wanted to find, because if you find it, you stop.

So what do we actually do? Because “just log off, man” is advice that lands with all the practical utility of telling someone to simply not be sad or can you not just stop being depressed?

Here’s what you gotta do. You go coarse grain when everything is fine grain. You pick the long thing, the book with the heft to it, the film that takes its time like it owns the place, the conversation that has no agenda and no endpoint. You make your brain work for its dinner instead of letting it snack on content pellets all day like a lab rat with a PhD in self destruction. (Did I just reference the Universe 25 Experiment? Yes I did. Enjoy that rabbit hole)

You have to make something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be shared. The act of making… Of putting your hands on something and pushing it into a shape that didn’t exist before is the single best middle finger you can raise at the boredom machine, because the machine cannot make.

It can only remix and repackage and serve it back to you with a little notification bell.

Final thing… The uncomfortable, bracing thing that tastes bad going down but works, you have to tolerate the gap. The gap between wanting something and having it. The gap where you sit in the slightly uncomfortable silence and don’t immediately reach for the phone. That gap is not the enemy. That gap is where your actual brain lives. It’s dusty in there. It smells like an old library and a little bit like anxiety.

But it’s yours.

The boredom was never the problem, it was more of a light symptom. The problem is you’ve been taught to be afraid of your own mind at rest.

Stop being afraid of it. Feed it something real. See what it does.

You’d be surprised what you brain meat can push out into the world.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/theescapehatch

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

That you show up every time and read my emails and reply and just interact.

I’ve had so many great conversations and also views on the topics and ideas I write about and share with you, that doing this is what keeps me going.

I genuinely appreciate you taking a little sliver of time out your day to spend some time with me and again for that I am grateful.

We all know the world is not in a great place right now and a lot of people are being affected by it all, but the best thing we can do is stay positive and optimistic that things will change.

I love a little bit of a soap box rant on the things I’m passionate about/against and so are you…

And as long as we continue to show up to the best of our abilities, I think things will work out.

You’re the best c̶u̶l̶t̶ group of people I know.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Here’s a little social media “game” for us folks who still require those platforms to feed into our own platforms…

After all.

Our audience/clients/customer numbers aren’t going to increase themselves magically (I mean I wish they did) but we still have to do some work and well, it’s time to make things fun again.

We know that everyone with a ChatGPT subscription is now an expert on whatever topic is floating around and is running hot off the social media presses.

(Minster of foreign affairs and war time policy anyone?)

What you seem them do is input their vague surface level info to the Masjine and out it churns some splooge of the lowest calibre.

At first I got annoyed at it, cause you had people who have never really written anything longer than a 140 character tweet, to now (on the surface it looks good) emulated pulizter prize levels writing.

What I’ve been doing very sneakily over on the old bird app is inserting myself into the niche conversations happening there in the market I’m operating in.

I’ve been come a topical conversation whore. Some people call me a reply guy which is cool. What they don’t know is that I’m slowly turning people into my way of thinking because I’m neatly challenging these slop pushers with logic and reasoning, while also being human.

It’s a wild concept. Imagine sounding more human than those peddling trash.

Yes you need to know what you’re talking about and you don’t even have to know that much anymore because the bar is so low. Yet all you need to do is engage with people who genuinely looking to either educate themselves or make an informed opinion without being misled.

Who would’ve thought that in 2026. Taking a few minutes out of your day could win people to your side when there’s way too much noise and not enough signal out there.

Have conversations. Point people in the right direction. Show them that you stand for something and slowly but surely they’ll find themselves in your world and they’ll wonder “Where have you been all my life!”

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I’m working as fast as I can to polish up and re-write a lot of the topics I’m going to be covering in The Escape Hatch. I’m also working on creating a structure you can follow if you really just want to run with the ideas in there. I don’t have a deadline for when it’ll be done, so I’ll end up drip feeding content there to keep you going until I share a “road map”

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

The world is systematically dumbing itself down to feed the dopamine starved masses, and we’re all complicit in this intellectual race to the bottom of the barrel…

Everything is getting shorter, simpler, more digestible.

Books become audiobooks become podcast summaries become TikTok highlights become tweet

sized nuggets of “wisdom” that fit perfectly between ads for teeth whitening kits and crypto scams.

(Crypto scams have been WILD on Twitter, especially more so since all of this war shit has gotten more legs etc)

We’ve taken complex ideas and pureed them into baby food for adults who can’t be bothered to chew.

Netflix adds speed controls because sitting through a 90 minute movie is apparently too fucking demanding.

News becomes headlines. Headlines become notifications. Notifications become emotional reactions to things that may or may not have actually happened.

The algorithms are optimising for engagement and hell to us going deep on ideas and thoughts and going for enlightenment.

This is all junk food for the brain, designed to keep you clicking, scrolling, consuming and best of all…

Never thinking, never questioning, never sitting still long enough to form an original thought.

Dumbification is destroying you…

1. Your attention span is dying. You used to be able to read books. Now you struggle through long emails. Your brain has been rewired to expect constant stimulation, making deep work feel like torture instead of flow.
2. You’re losing critical thinking skills. When everything is pre-digested and spoon fed, you stop learning how to analyse, synthesise, and form your own conclusions. You become a consumer of other people’s thoughts instead of a creator of your own.
3. Your tolerance for difficulty is evaporating. The moment something requires effort. Like real cognitive effort, you bail. You’re training yourself to quit when things get challenging, which means you’ll never develop expertise in anything that matters.

But listen up. You can undumb yourself starting today…

1. Read actual fucking books again. Not summaries. Not highlights. Complete books by people who spent years thinking about complex problems. Start with one chapter a day and build your attention span back up like a muscle.
2. Embrace boredom. Stop filling every empty moment with content. Sit in silence. Let your mind wander. Some of your best ideas are hiding behind the compulsive need to check your phone every thirty seconds.
3. Seek out difficult material. Find writers, thinkers, and creators who challenge you instead of validating what you already believe. Read things that make you uncomfortable. Engage with ideas that don’t fit neatly into your existing worldview.

The dumbification isn’t inevitable.

Dumbification only happens when you pick easy choices over the ones that make you marinate in your own brain meat for more than 15 minutes…

Stop choosing easy, it’s that simple.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Do the thing. Click the link. Join the group…

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

“Who wrote the software running in your head? Are you sure you actually want it there?” – Elon Musk

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The voice in your head is right:

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You’re not where you should be, right now.

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In fact, you’re way behind where you should be.

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The matrix must have slipped you the blue pill, ‘cause now you’re behind 99% of people, and if that doesn’t drive you into an anxiety-induced monk mode, you might be destined for modern slavery forever.

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Now, be honest…

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Deep down, you suspect I’m joking.

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But that little bastard in the back of your mind still kind of believes me, and he’s actually pretty riled up right now.

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So let’s try to calm him down with a little story-time and a warm cup of reality.

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Here goes…

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The other day, I had a coaching call with a 19 year old founder who is running a $20k per month agency.

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Impressive, right?

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He didn’t think so.

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“I just feel like I’m so far behind where I should be,” he says.

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“Everyone I look up to was ahead of me, at my age.”

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I black out for a moment before drooling a response:

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“Huh?”

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“You coached Ben Bader. He was making way more money than me at 19.”

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“Bro, Ben would have been the first to tell you he was ripping bongs in his dorm room at 19. He joked about that all the time. You’re years ahead of where he was.”

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His eyes go wide.

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“Oh… Well, what about you, then?”

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“I hadn’t even made my first dollar, at your age.”

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When we finally untangled the mess of false ideas in his head, we realized:

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Not only is he not behind…

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He’s actually ahead of everyone I’ve ever worked with, everyone I’ve ever met, and damn near everyone I’ve ever heard of.

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If entrepreneurship was a racetrack, he’d be lapping us all.

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And yet, he still believed he was behind.

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That’s how insidious this idea is:

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It tricks even the best among us into thinking that if we don’t have a Lambo by the time we graduate high school, we’re failing.

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Meanwhile, most successful entrepreneurs don’t break through until their late 20s, at the earliest, and more often their 30s and 40s.

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Don’t believe me? Check the scoreboard:

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LinkedIn was launched by a 36 year old.

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Red Bull was launched by a 41 year old.

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Adidas was launched by a 49 year old.

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Starbucks, a 51 year old.

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The list goes on (and on, and on), because those aren’t the exceptions, they’re the rule.

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And, most of the exceptions you see online — the 20 year old, Lambo-driving info-bros — are:

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Exceptionally rare
Usually exaggerating
Often secretly broke, because they have big top-line revenue but almost no profit.

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(not all of them, of course — but the percentage is so high it would shock you)

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Now, I’m all for having a sense of urgency.

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And don’t mistake this message as a reason to wait around for Mercury to align with Saturn so you can finally write your first Tweet.

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But when that sense of urgency cannibalizes your creative energy and fills your head with anxiety and overwhelm, it’s time to pluck the Zyn out of that little bastard’s mouth and tell him to shut him the fxck up so you can finally think clearly again.

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Bottom line:

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The voice in your head is wrong.

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But more importantly:

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It’s not even yours.

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It’s the voice of someone who made a post once that snuck a false idea past your filters when you had your guard down.

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And now it’s time to put your guard back up.

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Take back your mind.

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And get back to work.

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• T

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P.S. Balance the message in the email with this one (starts at 1:08:52)

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I had an interesting conversation with a fellow creator today, who sadly got sucked into the world of generative AI.

They were lied to by some of our favourite marketing tech bros.

The lie was that generative AI would help you grow your audience indirectly because you’d be able to create more, which in turn would give you the chance to publish more content and thus you’d have fans/customers/clients flock to you.

And we all know that’s bs on the front end.

So much so, that this person decided to bin off their 20 super fans on their current Twitter account.

To then go and make a new account and re-brand everything using every AI tool available to increase their output of work.

How do you think it all turned out over the last year?

Not good. Not good at all.

What they forgot to mention previously was those 20 super fans were buying all of their work (Prints, stickers, buttons, badges etc)

They were just thrown to the curb like an old box of toys you grew out of as a kid.

The guru’s in general are still pushing the ideology of having massive amounts of followers = the most optimal way to be profitable, especially if you’re an artist and that shit is just wrong.

It’s just that it’s so easy to sell the bigger numbers and the lifestyle that surrounds it.

On top of that. Our brains are so fried from the constant dopamine addiction we put ourselves through when we go down a scroll hole of doom, that if we aren’t building the same lifestyles the big names are doing. Well, then we’re doing it wrong.

Their new account had a lot more followers, but those weren’t super fans. They were similar people sucked into the AI cult and in that short period of time of creating the new account they had less than 10 sales, where previously they were averaging about 10-20 sales a month off of their super fans.

Size truly doesn’t matter when it comes to this whole online game. It’s all about quality and the relationships you build.

Another thing you can do is just close your eyes and visualise yourself standing in a room in front of say 20 people, hell, you’ve probably been to parties with more people than that.

Don’t let the vanity metrics fool you.

Having a tight knit group of super fans is far better overall having ALL of the numbers with no connection.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Stop over socialising. Seriously.

Every coffee meetup, networking event, and “quick catch up” is stealing time from your actual work.

We get deluded into thinking that we’re building relationships. Although what we’re doing is just masturbating our social anxiety while our creative projects die of neglect.

Most socialising is just procrastination. You tell yourself you’re “putting yourself out there” when you’re really avoiding the hard, lonely work of creating something that matters.

Your best ideas don’t come from brainstorming sessions with acquaintances over overpriced lattes.

They come from solitude. From boredom. From having enough quiet space in your head for genuine thoughts to emerge instead of just recycling whatever bullshit you heard at last week’s mixer.

Hemingway wrote alone. Virginia Woolf wrote alone. Every great creative work was born in isolation, not in some co-working space surrounded by people pretending to hustle.

Say no to most social invitations. Guard your alone time like it’s your most valuable asset.

And no. I’m not advocating becoming a complete shut out to the world.

Just saying no to 99% of everything will put you ahead.

Social media platforms and the influencer/gurus are all liars. They promote this picture perfect set up online but behind closed doors they’re truly dying to switch off.

So start doing it before it’s too late.

Stephen Walker.

https://stphnwlkr.com/TheEscapeHatch

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

There’s this Hemingway quote that shows up on every basic bitch’s Instagram story next to a picture of a typewriter they’ve never touched and a whiskey glass they bought off of Amazon.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Everyone quotes it. Nobody fucking does it.

And I get why. Because right now, writing one true sentence feels like juggling live grenades while the thought police take notes.

The world has made it crystal clear what happens when you say the honest thing.

The thing that doesn’t fit inside this week’s approved vocabulary list. (Feels like something straight out of 1984 tbh)

And you see it all the time now. You get reported by professional victims. Flagged by the bots designed by cowards.

Deplatformed by tech overlords who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag.

Dogpiled by strangers who didn’t read past your first sentence but have PhD level opinions about what you “really meant.”

Your name ends up on some blacklist you didn’t apply for. Some soulless AI in a server farm decides your words are “problematic,” and suddenly you’re shouting into the perpetual nothingness that used to be your audience.

And what usually happens? You fucking soften. You hedge like a nervous politician.

You add more disclaimers than a pharmaceutical commercial. You run every sentence through an internal focus group of “what if Karen from accounting gets offended” and what emerges is this pathetic, beige, room temperature slop that says nothing, offends nobody, and dies quietly between a sponsored post for protein powder and someone’s avocado toast.

[deep breath]

And you call that writing.

It’s not writing. I’d call it intellectual masturbation for people too scared to climax.

Hemingway knew something every frightened creative needs tattooed on their forehead right now.

Writing was never supposed to be safe.

The moment you sit down to say something genuinely true.

I mean structurally, uncomfortably, dangerously true about this fucked up world we’re living in, you’re committing an act of rebellion.

I mean look at all of this Epstein files bullshit and the unlimited amounts of conspiracy theories that are bleeding out onto the internet now.

He said write hard and clear about what hurts.

Not write soft and vague about what’s comfortable. Not write whatever today’s mob will tolerate. Not write what the algorithm jerks off to.

Hard. Clear. What actually fucking hurts.

He also said every writer needs a built in, shockproof shit detector. Yours should be going off right now like a smoke alarm in a meth lab.

You start to feel it every time you scroll through the sanitised wasteland of social media.

Every time you read something and think “that’s not even half the truth, but nobody’s got the balls to say so.”

Every time you write something real, feel its weight, then delete it because you’re terrified of the consequences.

That detector is screaming. You’re just pretending you can’t hear it because facing the truth feels scarier than living the lie.

Here’s what Papa Hemingway understood in his bones, what he proved every time he put words on paper…

The cost of not writing the true thing will destroy you faster than writing it ever could.

Not your follower count. Not your brand partnerships. Not your precious reputation.

You. The part of you that actually matters. The machinery inside that makes your words worth reading instead of just worth scrolling past.

Every time you pull a punch, you teach your soul to flinch. Every time you swap the real word for the safe word, the real word gets harder to find.

I sure as shit don’t want to lose the sentence. And I also don’t want to lose the instinct to write sentences worth losing followers over.

(Cause we’re not going to make everyone happy. I mean that’s boring anyways)

And once that instinct dies. Once you’ve trained yourself to self censor before you even know what you want to say, you’re not a writer anymore.

You’re a content producer. You’re elevator music in blog form.

Hemingway didn’t write to be liked. He wrote to be true. And the truth was frequently ugly, uncomfortable, and completely unwelcome at polite dinner parties.

He wrote about war without making it romantic. He wrote about love without making it pretty. He wrote about the long, quiet ways people destroy themselves, and he did it in short, brutal sentences because truth doesn’t need decorations or sparkles.

That’s what’s missing right now. Not more content. Not more takes. Not more sanitised wisdom that’s been focus grouped into meaninglessness.

The world is missing writers with the balls to write the true sentence.

The one sitting in your chest like a tumour. The one you keep almost saying. The one you’ve typed and deleted six times because you know, you it’s going to cost you something.

Write that sentence.

Hemingway would’ve hit send and told anyone who didn’t like it to kiss his ass.

So should you.

And even if you don’t write as much. Paint, write the song or have the conversations…

Stephen Walker.

P.S. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” He said that too. Notice he didn’t mention checking whether your blood was brand safe first.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Franz Kafka

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It’s 7 am in Mexico City.

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I’m sitting in the only good coffee shop that opens this early, wrestling with the blank page.

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This doesn’t happen often.

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I’ve been writing these emails for over 15 years, so usually the words flow pretty easily.

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But today I have something important to tell you, and I’m not quite sure how to say it.

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For context:

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We’ve had a huge flow of new subscribers join us over the past week.
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(if that’s you, welcome — if you’ve been here a while, you’ll want to see this too)

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So I should probably take a moment to tell you exactly who I am and what I do…
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…And make it simple, clear, and compelling enough to keep you reading.

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The problem is, the simple answer would be a lie.

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Sitting around the campfire at our retreat last summer, a long-time attendee put it this way:

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“When friends ask me what we do here, I never know what to say.

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We build businesses, but it’s not just about business.

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We go deep on self-development and spirituality, but it’s not about that either.

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We talk about training the mind, life strategy, relationships, communication, human potential — basically everything.

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What we do here isn’t about any single topic.

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But when we bring it all together…

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This is, hands down, the best place in the world.”

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Moments later, as the fire began to die down…

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Long-time coaching client Mason Vranes turned to me and said:

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“That’s your greatest strength… and biggest weakness.”

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Mason’s business, FundLaunch, just passed 40M in revenue, and he’s well on his way to a 100M exit before he turns 30.

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So he knows the rules of the game:

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Niche down.

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Speak to one “avatar.”

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Keep making your offer more specific until it clicks.

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Then, hit the gas and scale it as hard and fast as it’ll go.

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No doubt, that approach works:

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It’s how my first business, EGTBasketball, cracked 8 figures in lifetime sales, and held the top spot in the basketball training industry for nearly a decade.

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So I know it would be better for business if I crammed what I offer into a neat little box…

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But every time I try, we lose what makes our work so uniquely powerful.

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Since you’re here, I’m guessing you feel the same way:

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There isn’t a single word that fully describes who you are or what you’re looking for, so being forced down a one-dimensional path feels like cutting off a piece of yourself.

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The problem is, every available path feels one-dimensional.

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Business gurus tell you spirituality is make-believe.

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(sit down, shut up, work 12 hours a day, cut out all your friends, and when money doesn’t fill the emptiness inside, go make more money)

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Spiritual teachers tell you ambition is ego.

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(sit down, be peaceful, love everyone, wave these crystals at the chick with dreadlocks sitting across from you in the sharing circle so she likes your “vibes”)

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Self-improvers tell you… well, a whole lot of sh*t.

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(sit down, stop fapping, start maxxing, join my Skool community to farm that good aura so you can finally get ahead of 99% of people and escape the matrix so fast it feels illegal)

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But that’s the internet, and it’s the only one we’ve got.

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So you keep trying to fit yourself into systems built by simpler people with simpler goals…

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But no matter how much content you consume, and how much progress you make….

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It still feels like something essential hasn’t clicked yet.

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That’s where our work begins.

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I spent my 20s searching for a deeper path, as I scaled my first business while travelling to over 40 countries, training intensively in Taoist meditation and Amazonian plant medicine, and obsessively studying human potential.

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I’ve spent my 30s, so far, in a “creative retirement”, writing, teaching, running retreats, and privately coaching 6, 7, and 8 figure founders.

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I haven’t seen it all yet, but I’ve seen a hell of a lot.

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And here’s the good news:

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The most successful individuals I’ve worked with aren’t sacrificing parts of themselves to achieve their goals.

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They’re not choosing between money and spirituality, outer achievement and inner mastery, ambition and relationships, or success and freedom.

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They’re integrating all of it, because that’s what mastery is.

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If that’s the game you’re playing, welcome.

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You may have just found exactly what you’ve been looking for.

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• T

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P.S. Over our next few emails, we’ll talk more about this integrated approach to business, life strategy, and self-mastery.

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In the meantime, here’s where I recommend going deeper.​

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”― Robert A. Heinlein

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