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Nothing cracks me up more than watching someone try to psychoanalyse you out of your own position, then immediately fold like a cheap suit the moment you push back.

You post something with clear reasoning. You explain your stance. You lay out exactly why you believe what you believe. Then some armchair social media psychologist shows up in your reply like they just discovered Freud, ready to explain to you why you’re wrong about your own thoughts.

“Actually, what you’re really saying is…” No, what I’m really saying is exactly what I fucking said.

“I think you’re just projecting because…” I think you’re just desperate to sound smart by diagnosing strangers on the internet.

“Have you considered that maybe you feel this way because…” Have you considered that maybe I feel this way because I have a functioning brain and came to a reasoned conclusion?

These people love playing therapist until someone turns the analytical lens back on them. They’ll spend paragraphs dissecting your motivations, questioning your reasoning, and explaining why you’re clearly suffering from some cognitive bias or emotional hangup.

But the second you call out their bullshit? The second you point out that maybe their need to constantly correct and analyse others says something about their own insecurities?

“Thank you for pointing that out. I won’t make that mistake again and will keep my comments to myself or people who are interested to hear them.”

Suddenly they’re all humble and reflective. Suddenly they realise that maybe, just maybe, unsolicited psychological analysis isn’t welcome. Suddenly they understand that not every opinion needs their expert commentary.

Where was all that self awareness when they were trying to explain to you why you don’t actually believe what you clearly stated you believe?

It’s the intellectual equivalent of being a tough guy until someone actually steps up to fight.

All that confidence evaporates the moment they encounter someone who won’t just accept their amateur psychology session lying down.

The best part is how they frame their retreat as some kind of enlightened realisation, like they’re taking the high road by shutting up. “I’ll keep my comments to myself” sounds so noble, so mature, so evolved.

What it really means is:

“I can’t handle having my own behaviuor scrutinised the way I was scrutinising yours, so I’m going to act like I’m being considerate while actually just running away from the confrontation I started.”

Here’s a wild and radical idea…

Maybe people are capable of understanding their own positions. Maybe when someone explains their reasoning clearly, you don’t need to dig deeper for hidden psychological motivations. Maybe not every disagreement is an opportunity to practice your internet psychology degree.

And if you’re going to dish out analysis, learn to take it. If you’re going to question other people’s reasoning, be prepared to have your own reasoning questioned. If you’re going to play therapist, don’t cry when someone turns the session around on you.

The internet doesn’t need more amateur psychologists. It needs more people who can engage with ideas without trying to psychoanalyse the person behind them.

Save the couch sessions for people who actually asked for them.

And with all that being said.

Pick up this absolute gem and never lose an argument again

Stephen Walker.

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

I recently discovered I’m a polymath, and suddenly my entire life kinda makes a little more sense.

Not the scattered, unfocused, “jack of all trades, master of none” bullshit I’ve been telling myself for years. An actual polymath. Someone whose brain is wired to excel across multiple unrelated disciplines, to see connections others miss, to get bored with specialisation and crave intellectual diversity. Which probably goes hand in hand with the variety of topics I write about in my emails, and how I somehow tie them together in one way or the other…

Crazy thing is for over a decade…

I thought something was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I just pick one thing and stick with it? Why did I get restless after mastering a skill? Why was I constantly jumping between interests that had nothing to do with each other?

Turns out, that’s how a polymath and their brains work.

While everyone else is told to “find their niche” and “become an expert in one area,” polymaths are over here connecting dots across completely different fields, synthesising knowledge in ways that create breakthrough insights, and getting labelled as unfocused because we refuse to limit ourselves to one domain.

The world needs specialists, sure. But it also desperately needs people who can think across boundaries, who can apply principles from one field to solve problems in another, who can see the bigger picture that emerges when you zoom out far enough.

And so when I have a little catch up with a friend of mine whose well versed and educated in all of this neurological / brain fuckery stuff.

They asked a few questions:

Do you get genuinely excited about learning things that have nothing to do with your “main” area of expertise?

Not just casually interested but genuinely excited. The kind of excitement where you lose track of time researching Byzantine history even though you’re supposedly a marketing consultant, or you find yourself deep in quantum physics videos when you’re actually a graphic designer.

Do you see patterns and connections between completely unrelated fields that others seem to miss?

You read about game theory and immediately see how it applies to parenting. You learn about jazz improvisation and realise it’s the same principle your favourite entrepreneur uses to build businesses. Your brain naturally builds bridges between islands of knowledge and you wake up with more ideas than what you did just before you went to sleep.

Do you get bored once you’ve achieved competency in something, even if you’re not yet an “expert”?

You learn enough about photography to take decent photos, then suddenly you’re interested in learning Portuguese. You get good enough at coding to build functional websites, then you pivot to studying behavioural psychology. Mastery feels less important than exploration.

Do people tell you that you “know a little bit about everything” or ask how you know so much about random topics?

Your conversations jump from cryptocurrency to medieval architecture to cognitive bias research, and people either find it fascinating or completely overwhelming. You’re the person others come to when they need information about something obscure.

Need to figure out the best time of the year to do some underwater basket weaving? I gotchu…

Do you feel like traditional career advice doesn’t apply to you because you can’t imagine doing just one thing forever?

“Find your passion” makes you laugh because you have seventeen passions. “Become an expert” feels limiting. “Stay in your lane” sounds like a death sentence. You’d rather be a generalist who can contribute across multiple domains than a specialist trapped in one.

If you answered yes to most of these, congratulations… You’re probably a polymath. And that means you need to stop apologising for your diverse interests and lean into them some more.

The future belongs to people who can think across disciplines, especially with the way AI is being force fed into our lives.

Nobody learns and studies anything outside of this massive wall of technological bullshit been directly drip fed into our brain meat via social media.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Peter Hollins wrote a pretty insightful book on being a Polymath and if you’re like me who will obviously go down these rabbit holes. Pick it up and be welcomed into polymath club. It’s not as fun as fight club, but hey. This is brain stuff.

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

“I don’t know where we’re going, but I know exactly how to get there.” – Boyd Varty

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Random thought…

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You know how, when people use words like universe and energy, they usually sound like they sell crystals out of a van?

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I agree.

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But you know who else uses those words?

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Scientists.

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Not sure what my point is, but hopefully I’ll find one somewhere in this email.

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On to business…

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Last time we spoke, I shared a story about a friend who took his e-com business from 45k/mo to 3M/mo in less than a year.

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But what I didn’t share is this:

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He never would have stumbled into that business unless he’d built the wrong business first.

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True story:
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Six months before he partnered with that e-com company, he began building an info business.

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He built a funnel, launched an offer, even wrote a damn book.

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Then — and here’s where it gets really interesting — he dove head first into learning Meta ads.

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The whole process was a bit of a bitch, but it did two very important things:

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It made him realize that he actually kind of hates running info businesses.
It made him very, very good at Meta ads.

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So good that he started experimenting with running Meta ads for his buddy’s e-com business, just for giggles.

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Next thing he knew, the e-com business exploded and he was signing partnership papers.

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Bye bye info business he hated, hello rocket ship to the moon.

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The point (I actually have one this time) is:

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If he’d farted around waiting for lightning to strike and the Muse to come knock on his window and tell him he was destined for e-com, none of this ever would have happened.

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It was the info business that led him to learning Meta ads, that led him to the e-com company, that led him to, very possibly, an 8-figure exit and generational wealth a few years from now.

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Too often, fear of taking the wrong path is what prevents us from finding the right one.

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And so we stay frozen in paralysis, tying our mind in knots, terrified of taking a wrong turn…

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…Not realizing that the wrong turn is the very side-street where the chick with dreadlocks is parked, selling crystals that manifest an energy of universal abundance.

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And if we cover our nose and keep walking, that side-street might just open up into the path we’ve been looking for all along.

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That’s the beautiful thing about business:

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You’re allowed to take as many wrong turns as needed.

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And it only takes one right turn to make it all worth it.

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• T

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P.S. Yesterday, I released a new masterclass-length YouTube video on:

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​A 2500 Year-Old Map Of Human Potential​

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This is one of the most uniquely powerful tools I’ve ever studied, and can help you answer questions about yourself you may not even know you had.

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Give it a watch or listen this weekend.

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I’m taking the weekend off to binge Mayor of Kingstown and catch up on the books that have been giving me dirty looks from my bookshelf.

No content creation. No strategic networking. No optimising my morning routine with kale and room temperature water or measuring my productivity metrics and all of that bullshit that doesn’t matter…

Just Jeremy Renner dealing with small town corruption and whatever wisdom is hiding between the pages I’ve been too “busy” to read.

You don’t have to be always on 24/7. The hustle culture gurus who tell you that weekends are for closers can fuck right off.

Your brain needs downtime. Your soul needs entertainment that serves no purpose other than enjoyment.

You’re not being lazy if you rest and if you have a day or two of binge watching, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure and lastly…

Reading fiction isn’t a waste of time. It’s fun stuff. You don’t have to be fully sucked into personal development books and business biographies etc.

Do the fun stuff or you will burn out.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. I watched the first episode of Mayor of Kingstown and I’m pretty annoyed that series went right under my radar. Check out the trailer and see if it’s something you can dig.

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

Strap in. Buckle your seatbelts. Duct tape your frontal lobe to the dashboard because we’re going on a RIDE through the screaming neon hellscape of advertising, and I promise you, you’re not gonna like what you find when we get there.

So.

I’m on Twitter today. The hell bird site. The dumpster fire that Elon turned into a dumpster fire INSIDE another dumpster fire, like some kind of flaming garbage matryoshka doll. And somebody, some absolute walnut posts that ads don’t work anymore.

Ads don’t work anymore.

ADS DON’T WORK ANYMORE.

Let me just sit with that for a second. Let me marinate in the sheer audacity of that statement like a steak soaking in its own wrong juices.

Now, on that particular platform, you’ve got two options when you encounter a take this catastrophically stupid.

Option A: it’s rage bait, carefully engineered to make your blood pressure spike so the algorithm gets its little dopamine cookie.

Option B: this person has the critical thinking skills of a concussed goldfish.

I almost always go with Option B.

Because here’s the thing. HERE’S THE GODDAMN THING. [Deep breath]

Ads work. Ads have always worked. Ads will work long after the sun swallows this rock and cockroaches are buying branded survival gear from each other. Ads work like gravity works. Quietly and constantly. WHETHER YOU BELIEVE IN THEM OR NOT.

And this is why…

You see a Nike ad. You, the big smart genius with your big smart genius brain, you look at that swoosh and those impossibly attractive humans running through rain slicked streets at golden hour and you think… “Pfft. I’m not some rube. I know that a pair of overpriced shoes isn’t going to make me faster. I am IMMUNE to this sorcery.”

You scroll past a BMW ad all sleek lines and mountain roads and that fetishistic close up of the gear shift like it’s automotive pornography and you smugly tell yourself… “I don’t need a German land yacht to feel successful, THANK you very much.”

You see a skincare ad and you snort. You literally snort. Because you KNOW that no cream on this or any other planet is going to Ctrl+Z the relentless meat decay of aging.

And you feel so smart. So bulletproof. So gloriously above it all.

But…

YOU ARE LOOKING AT IT ALL WRONG.

Here’s where I need you to lean in. Get close to the screen. Closer. No, CLOSER. I want to see your pores.

They’re not selling you shoes. They’re not selling you cars. They’re not selling you age defying face goop/jizz. They are selling you a STORY. They are selling you a reflection in a mirror that doesn’t exist yet. They are selling you the beautiful, shimmering, intoxicating idea of who you could become if you just JUST opened your wallet and let the moths fly out toward the light.

Now you might be sitting there thinking, “Okay, Captain Obvious called and he wants his epaulettes back.”

And yeah. Fine. Maybe you know this. You’re HERE, after all, reading this unhinged wall of text instead of doing something productive with your life. You’re not like THOSE smart people. The ones who read one marketing thread and think they’ve achieved enlightenment. No. You’re a BETTER breed of smart person. You’ve chosen to wade into THIS particular swamp. Congratulations. Your taste in content is as impeccable as it is questionable.

ANYWHO.

Let’s crack this egg open and see what kind of monster crawls out…

BMW.

What does BMW sell? WHAT DOES BMW SELL?

They sell the idea that you are a person of REFINED TASTE. A person who appreciates PRECISION ENGINEERING. A person who has clawed their way up the success ladder far enough to afford a car that costs more than some people’s houses. The car that sleek, overengineered, turn-signal-allergic Teutonic bullet, is just the physical manifestation of an identity you want to crawl inside and zip up like a skin suit.

You’re buying a CHARACTER in a story you’re writing about yourself. Chapter One: I Have Arrived. Chapter Two: I Have Arrived In Something German.

(And for the LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY, for the love of every god, goddess, deity, spirit animal, and cosmic force that has ever existed or been invented, if you buy a BMW, LEARN TO USE THE TURN SIGNAL. It’s RIGHT THERE. It’s a LEVER. You push it UP or DOWN. Toddlers could do it. TODDLERS. The engineers at BMW put it there FOR A REASON and that reason is so the rest of us don’t have to develop psychic powers to figure out what the hell you’re doing on the highway)

[Blatant Pitch to go join my little group-y group because social media platforms are ass and I’ll be sending out tidied up words and stuff there cause my google docs is starting to look like a warzone]

I’ll finish the other section of this email tomorrow cause I’m about to pass out from sleep deprivation.

Stephen Walker.

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

This week has been pile on city, and I’m watching people I used to respect turn into schoolyard bullies with blue checkmarks and LinkedIn profiles.

Everyone’s got a take. Everyone’s got an opinion. Everyone’s got their pitchforks sharpened and ready to go after whoever’s been designated as today’s main character.

It’s like the entire internet decided to cosplay as a medieval mob, except instead of torches they’re wielding half baked we’re inclusive posts and righteously indignant selfies to “press the issue” or funnel people into their offers…

And the worst part? Half these people aren’t even genuinely outraged. They’re just desperate for engagement because they can’t figure out how to actually market themselves, so they’ve turned moral grandstanding into their personal brand strategy.

I mean I guess I can say that I’ve seen it all, but then shit like this happens and they’re just out crawling over the internet yet again. Then I get a gentle reminder that the social media world is filled with garbage humans in spaces that used to be genuinely great.

“Yaaasss Queen” responses in the comments have become the new currency of social media validation.

People aren’t taking stands because they believe in something…

The stands are there because it gets them likes, shares, and that sweet dopamine hit of feeling morally superior to someone else, while still preaching moral superiority and inclusivity lol.

It’s honestly just virtue signalling used as a marketing tactic and it’s going to be in one of their next $997 influencer courses [Barf]

We’re in 2026, and somehow people have gotten worse at being human, not better.

You’d think after everything we’ve been through. Pandemics, economic chaos, political insanity, that we’d have learned some basic lessons about empathy, nuance, and not being complete assholes to each other online.

But no. Instead, we’ve gotten more tribal, more performative, more eager to destroy someone’s life over a poorly worded tweet, post or an out-of-context video clip.

The pile-on mentality has become so normalised that people genuinely think they’re doing good work when they join the mob.

It’s like the movie Bloodsport except it’s for all of these scumbags on social media.

On top of that. Everyone’s got their pet GPT writing their outrage takes now, so even the moral indignation isn’t authentic anymore. It’s algorithmically optimised virtue signalling, perfectly crafted to maximise engagement while saying absolutely nothing meaningful at all.

The wild thing is. Most of these people would never have the balls to say this shit to someone’s face. But put them behind a screen with an audience of fellow bullies cheering them on, and suddenly they’re warriors for truth and justice.

The internet has turned everyone into the worst version of themselves, and social media algorithms reward the worst behaviour. The more outrageous your take, the more engagement you get. The more you participate in pile-ons, the more the platform shows your content to other people who love a good public shaming.

Never would I have seen people gamify cruelty…

Oh? You’re an activist because of what you’re doing? (blow me)

Maybe it’s time to log off and remember what it feels like to be a decent human being without an audience.

Maybe it’s time to stop treating other people’s mistakes as content opportunities.

Maybe it’s time to realise that the person you’re dunking on for internet points is an actual human being with feelings and a life that extends beyond whatever dumb thing they said online.

But who am I kidding? Next week there’ll be a new target, a new pile-on, a new opportunity for everyone to perform their moral superiority for the cheap seats.

2026 and we’re still just apes with smartphones throwing shit at each other for sport.

People need to be better. Or at least try to be.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. This isn’t being pointed directly at anyone specifically but if you’ve been in the space the last week or so, you may know what’s going on…

P.P.S. Haven’t used a good P.P.S. in a minute so click this link and join the escape hatch cause once I’ve finished up these files, I’m letting them fly…

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

I spent another day unpacking old notebooks out of boxes.

Went through an old diary that had notes from the time I was balls deep in the studying of Søren Kierkegaard.

The quick skinny on the dude: “Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.” via our lads at Wikipedia.

Anyways.

I’d recommend you pick up some of his work regardless of what it is you’re doing in life. The Concept Of Anxiety is a great read.

But it leads me on to the next few points.

Kierkegaard understood something about human suffering that most philosophers missed.

Real pain isn’t in the big and dramatic moments. It’s in the quiet desperation of our mundane and ordinary life. Remember the last time you were struggling to hold it all together and you put on a brave smile while pretending everything is fine?

I know he spent the majority of his life going toe to toe with anxiety, depression and what he called “The sickness unto death” (another excellent read btw) like you were a husk of a person. You’re alive but not really living. I’m sure if he was around today, watching people scroll through Instagram while their souls slowly disintegrated, he’d have some choice words…

1) Stop trying to be like everyone else because it’s killing you.

He called it “The Crowd” and he saw it as the greatest threat to human authenticity.

Today’s version is social media lifestyle porn and the non stop pressure to optimise your life according to other people’s metrics and…

If you’re not apart of their clique. You are quickly banished.

You’re not supposed to have the same morning routine as some productivity guru. You’re not supposed to want the same things as the friends you went to school with and you’re definitely not supposed to live according to some random template some shitweasel designed.

You feel the highest form of anxiety when you compare your life to others. It’s your soul telling you that you’ve been living someone’s life instead of your own.

Becoming yourself is one of the hardest and most important type of work you could ever do. Screw success and being admired. Those things come later on. You need to become yourself.

2) The only honest response is to embrace the absurdity.

He understood that life doesn’t make any form of rational sense. You can’t logic your way out of existential anxiety. There aren’t any pills or potions that you can ingest to optimise meaning. You for sure as hell can’t productivity hack your way to happiness.

Most people spend their lives trying to add everything up and to find some system or strat that’ll finally make life feel manageable. Kierkegaard would tell you to stop that shit.

We look at uncertainty as problem to solve. Where it’s really just has having to accept the human condition as it is.

He called it “The leap of faith” but it wasn’t necessarily religious at all. It’s recognising that at some point, you have to choose to live without having all the answers. You have to act without knowing if you’re making the right choice and you have to commit to something even though you can’t prove it’s worthwhile.

3) Despair is your gift, so you best not waste it.

I found this one the hardest to swallow. He saw despair as a necessary stage of human development. Yeah we might want to avoid it but that’s the part we need to power through. Don’t avoid it and don’t medicate through it. It’s something that has to be experienced fully and learned from.

Authenticity emerges when your psyche starts to clean house.

Most people try to escape despair by staying busy, staying distracted and staying numb. (Which is very easy to do in the scroll hole side of the internet now…) But you have to sit with it. Let it teach you what isn’t working. Let it burn away the false dreams and borrowed ambitions that were never really yours anyway.

If you embrace despair it’ll end all the pretending, pretending will then fall to the way side and that’s when you’ll start to live.

I’m fairly certain he never promised that life would get easier if you followed his advice. He did promise that it would get more real and if you’re tired of performing “happiness” while dying inside then I’m sure that’s worth hearing eh?

We can take a break from trying to hold it all together and let ourselves fall apart. The great thing is that we can then build something true from the pieces.

Sit with it and think about it…

Stephen Walker.

P.S. Don’t forget to grab one of his books and have a little deep dive.

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

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.

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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.

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

“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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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