Imagine another scenario… 

Picture in your mind, your ideal client.  Exactly the kind of person or company that you would love to work with. The kind of client who honors their contract, pays early, and follows through doing everything required on their end. If you had one chance to make a first impression and tell them about who you are and what you can do for them – would you like it to be an averaged-out template generated by AI, or your heartfelt words? 

Because if you’re one of the many that believe, “My AI can crank out all my emails, posts, proposals, and even write my books,” that’s the question I would ask you.  

This is another follow up to this post where I shared that if I lost everything, there are three skills I would use to get it all back quickly.  Which takes us back to the second skill…

Write So People Believe

After 16 books, more than 10,000 blog posts, and crafting copy that has generated billions of dollars in revenues, I can tell you this:

Writing is never about just the words. 

First, great writing is the result of great thinking. The blank page is the one place you find out whether you actually understand what you believe, or you're just parroting things that sound smart at dinner parties. Outsource the writing and you're not saving time. You're outsourcing the thinking. And the thinking is the whole point. Because in my experience…

If you can't write it, you don't really know it.

Every muddy sentence is a muddy thought that needs to be run through the car wash of critical thinking.  The fight to make a paragraph clear is actually the fight to make your own thinking clear. And sooner or later the gap between sounding smart and being smart exposes everybody who's faking it.

Second, and most importantly, writing is also the result of feeling. There’s no AI in the world that can convey the passion, pride, and ownership you feel about something. If you outsource your soul, you’re probably going to be disappointed in who it attracts. 

The first time you let the machine write it, it feels like a shortcut. The tenth time, it feels normal. The hundredth time, you couldn't write it yourself if your life depended on it. And you never even felt it happen, because the output looked fine the whole way down. (If you don’t believe me, look at the last 15 posts you saw on LinkedIn.) 

That's the real danger. Not lousy copy. Mental atrophy. You outsource the reps, and the thinking and feeling muscles you were supposed to be building waste away in the dark.  And the message that’s representing you isn’t reflecting you in your best light. 

Which takes us back to the third skill I wrote about…

Building Signal

Everything I preach comes back to signal and having a point of view — the stuff that makes the market chase you instead of the other way around. You send out enough signal, and you create what I call Market Gravity. But know this: 

Generic is the antithesis of Market Gravity.

And know this too: AI's factory setting is the mushy middle average of everything ever written. (a/k/a mediocrity2) If you let AI ghostwrite for you, you don't just lose your voice…you torch the one asset that was pulling people toward you in the first place. Your signal degrades into white noise in an ocean full of it.  

I'm not a tech Luddite screeching from the wilderness. I use these tools every single day. A lot. I’m suggesting you collaborate with AI to create a dyad as described here.  

There's a Grand Canyon between using a tool to sharpen your thinking and using it to skip your thinking altogether. One makes you dangerous. The other makes you disappear in the forest of meaningless noise. 

Your voice is not some minor feature to be automated out of your life. It's the last thing on this planet that is unmistakably, unrepeatably yours. In a world drowning in machine-made sameness, the person who still thinks, feels, and writes won't just stand out from the crowd.  They'll be one of the only ones left worth paying attention to.

Peace,

– RG

Previous Post: Don't Chase, Be Chased

The post Stop Outsourcing Your Soul appeared first on Randy Gage.

You're chasing leads who won't return your pitch on LinkedIn. Chasing the partner who loved the idea in the conference or Zoom room but is now ghosting you. Chasing the deal you already discounted twice, praying they finally say yes. 

And the harder you chase, the faster all of it runs.

Which is why you should never chase clients or buses. Because another one always comes along a few minutes later. 

This is probably a good time to share my “How to Be a Brilliant Marketer in 4 Steps” framework. I should really sell it to you in a $497 eBook, but since you seem like such a nice person, I’m giving it to you here for free:

1) Set up a LinkedIn profile 

2) Accept all connection requests 

3) Read their autoresponder pitches

4) Do the opposite 

Now let me share what should have been the theme of my $97 upsell video if you bought the $497 eBook:

Don’t chase people who want to run away. Let them paint their ass white and run with the other antelopes.

Now that I’ve saved you almost $600, let’s explore the topic of building signal, as opposed to chasing after business.  A few days ago, in this post, I laid out the three skills I'd use if I ever had to rebuild everything from zero.  That column blew up my phone, so I decided to break it down in some follow up pieces. In this first follow up, I addressed setting your money thermostat. 

Now let’s crack open building signal, a skill that no one else is teaching. Because when you build enough signal, you create what I call market gravity: 

You stop chasing business, because business starts chasing you. 

That’s because chasing isn't a strategy problem. It's a signal problem. The second you're the one doing the chasing, you've broadcast your position to the whole world.  It’s the position that telegraphs, “I’m desperate for your business!”  

Which makes you the least desirable option to do business with.

Case in Point: Main Street Betz, a spammer offering investment advice, while claiming they don’t offer investment advice. They openly divulge in their disclaimer that they sometimes take positions in companies they promote, and also admit to taking cash payments to promote companies they don’t take even bother positions in.  On 6/28 they sent me a spam email from the account main-street-betz@mail.beehiiv.com and I unsubscribed. On 6/29 I received another pitch from the same email, so I marked it as spam and blocked the account.  Look at the screenshot below:

Since then, I have received 21 more messages, which each day I block as spam and the next day, Apple still lets them through.  Obviously complaining about spammers in the AI age is tilting at windmills. (Although if you happen to know anyone in the compliance section of Mac.com, Beehiiv.com, or the NY State Attorney General, feel free to share this post with them!)   But examples like these dramatically illustrate the point: 

What kind of entity would you want to do biz with: shameless con artists who have to chase you with 23 emails, or someone who actually put valuable information out in the public square?  

You already learned this in your dating years. Nobody wants to be chased by a needy person. Attraction doesn't run on pursuit; it runs on magnetism. 

The moment one person is visibly chasing, the power has already changed hands. 

Business is the same brutal game. Money, clients, opportunity — all of it rolls downhill toward whoever holds the leverage. And the one doing the chasing never holds the leverage.

Market gravity doesn't chase. It pulls.

A planet doesn't sprint around the galaxy begging asteroids to orbit it. It just has mass — and the pulling takes care of itself. That's the whole enchilada. You don't need a slicker pitch, a sexier funnel, or one more hustle hack. You need mass. Build it, and the chasing stops — not because you got better at chasing, but because you never have to do it again.

So how do you pack on mass?  Here are some extremely effective ways:

Take a stand that costs you something.

It starts with a point of view. Not some limp “well, there are good arguments on both sides” mush: an actual position that some people will be grinding their molars over. If everybody's nodding along, congratulations: you're wallpaper. I've said it before and I'll die on this hill: if nobody's unfollowing or unfriending you, you're probably not doing anything of real value.  

The people your stand repels are the cover charge for the people it magnetizes. Vanilla has no gravity.

Name it and own it.

If you’ve been following my work for any length of time, you’ve heard me name and own concepts: Sovereign Operator, Prosperity Operating System, Inherited Memeplex Encoding (IME). When you name a concept, you plant a flag on real estate inside people's heads. And every time they repeat your words, they build your gravity for free. 

Do the deep work and identify the things that people are walking over but never quantified. Quit renting everybody else's vocabulary and start coining your own. Intellectual property is the one kind of mass that compounds while you sleep.

Make predictions. Then let the scoreboard grade you.

Any coward can narrate the past. Gravity comes from having the balls to call the future out loud and let the results judge you in public. Take the position before it's safe. Yes, you'll whiff sometimes. That's the tax on being worth watching. (And it means you’re putting out bold thinking instead of the same groupthink pablum that everyone is regurgitating on X.) The guy hedging every bet to protect his precious little record has zero gravity, because he's made himself impossible to care about. 

Demonstrate. Don't claim.

Telling people you add value is a claim. Showing them — out loud, over and over, for free — is gravity. Solve real problems in public. Give away the how and let them lie awake wondering what the what would be worth. The market doesn't chase potential. It chases proof. Every ounce of value you put into the world is another ounce of mass.

Then — and this is the one that kills people — get patient.

Here's the part the hustle-porn crowd doesn’t get: gravity compounds, and compounding is agonizingly slow right up until it isn't. You'll do the work and hear crickets. Then one day the pull crosses a threshold, and the deals start showing up uninvited: the JV offers, the inbound clients, the “I've been quietly following you for two years and I'm finally ready to write a check.” That's not luck. That's mass hitting critical mass. (It took me 19 years and six months to get to 3 million views on my YouTube channel. Suddenly I became an “overnight success”, and the next million views are happening in four months.  

So stop trying to win the chase. The chase is rigged against whoever's doing the running. 

Build so much signal, so much value, so much gravity, that the running just…stops — and the market comes knocking on your door instead.

What about instead of taking a course on how to make better pitches on LinkedIn, you simply posted something of value on LinkedIn?  How about instead of renting lists of email addresses you can send better spam pitches to, you simply did work that caused people to email you? 

Stop trying to get better at chasing. Become the thing that everybody else chases.

Peace,

– RG

Previous Blog: Who Set Your Money Thermostat

The post Don’t Chase. Be Chased. appeared first on Randy Gage.

The best month of your life, quickly followed by the strangest dry spell.  A locked-down deal that suddenly died for no apparent reason. A big step forward followed by two steps backward. You called it bad luck. It wasn't. 

It was your self-regulating prosperity thermostat: doing exactly what you programmed it to do.

Last post, I told you your self-identity is the real ceiling that’s holding you back from your true potential.  That column set off more DMs, emails, and comments than anything I've written in a long time.  All circling around the same question: 

Okay, Randy…I believe you.  Now how do I actually change the fucking setting!?

Glad you asked... 

First, read your current setting.

You already know your number. You just don't want to look at it.

Your bank balance isn't a mystery. It's a thermostat reading. So is the size of the deals you chase, the fees you're afraid to charge, the rooms you talk yourself out of walking into. Your outer world is nothing but a printout of the setting on the inside. Stop cursing the printout and go find the dial.

Now find out who set it. (Because it wasn't you.)

If you’re like most people, here's the part that'll piss you off: you never chose your setting. It was installed. Somewhere between the crib and about age eight — before you could think critically — the people around you loaded the software.  

Here are the Top 5 most downloaded programs in the People of Earth App Store: 

• Money is the Root of All Evil

• Poor People are Noble

• To Have a Successful Career, You Must Be a Terrible Parent

• Growing a Successful Business Requires Exploiting Others

• Eat Shit Now Because Your Real Reward Comes in the Afterlife 

I always call these limiting beliefs, but technically, they aren’t beliefs. They're mind viruses. (What I define as Inherited Memeplex Encoding, or IME.) And your IME has been running your health, happiness, and finances like malware ever since.  It forms your operating system that has been quietly, automatically running below the surface.  That operating system is what caused you to set your number. (And also, the ceiling you’ve created for your relationships, happiness, and health.)  

And every time you reach one of those ceilings, the thermostat triggers to lower the temperature. Which means you subconsciously and unknowingly self-sabotage your progress.  All while you blame it on where you were born, your lack of education, your ex, the president, the economy, or Mercury being in retrograde.   

You're living inside another person's rigged settings and calling it your personality. If you need help with this, get my latest book, Wealth Without Apology.) Next, you need to:

Catch the sabotage in the act.

Next time you have a breakthrough…a windfall, a big win, a level up…watch what you do. You'll get the itch to spend it, stall it, give it away, or blow up the very thing that's finally working. That's not bad luck and it's not weakness. That's the thermostat kicking on the AC to cool you back down to sixty-eight.

Awareness is the whole game. Mind viruses only work in the dark. The moment you can name it — ah, there's my old setting trying to drag me home — you break the spell. You can't reprogram what you refuse to see.  Which leads us to:

Reprogram the inputs.

Your subconscious doesn't run on willpower. It runs on repetition and environment. So start mindfully thinking about what you think about.  Take charge of the programming you’re receiving.  Because you're being programmed every waking hour whether you picked the programming or not. So start picking...

Are the people you spend the most time with the ones who call you to your highest self, or the ones who pull you down?  What are you reading, watching, listening to: prosperity, or fear porn? What's the recording on replay in your skull all day long? Guard the doors of your mind like they're the doors to your health, happiness, and net worth. Because they are.

Close your “worthiness wound.”  

Every technique on earth is useless if, underneath it all, you don't believe you deserve to be wealthy.  

Money flows to the level you believe you're worth — not the level you say you want. It's why lottery winners go broke and why people who build a fortune and lose it build it right back. The number always returns to the setting. You need to stop seeking validation from others to feel worthy. 

Raise your sense of worthiness and your ceiling rises automatically. Stay secretly convinced you're not enough, and you'll keep manufacturing evidence to prove it, just to stay comfortable in your own smallness.

Prosperity isn't something you chase. It's something you allow. And you will only ever allow what you believe you're worth.

Then act like the setting already moved.

Beliefs don't change because you lit a candle, sat cross-legged on a cushion, and affirmed them. They change when you behave your way into them.

Charge the fee that scares you. Walk into the room you've been ducking. Make the offer, write the check, take up the space the higher version of you would take without flinching. 

Every time you act above your old setting and survive, you hand your subconscious fresh evidence. Evidence for who you're becoming instead of who you were programmed to be. Do it enough and the thermostat gets reset to a new, higher normal. Not because you forced it, but because you finally gave it a reason to.

The setting was never permanent.

It only felt permanent because no one ever told you you're allowed to reach up and move the dial. Now, I just did. 

Peace,

- RG

Previous Post: Broke as a Joke to Multi-Millionaire

The post Who Set Your Money Thermostat? appeared first on Randy Gage.

Strip me of everything. The bank accounts, the brand, the books, the black book of contacts I've spent forty years building. Drop me back to zero. Broke as a joke and ready to choke. Then ask:

What would you do to build it all back?

Here's what I wouldn't do: I wouldn't chase a hot niche. I wouldn't grind out sixteen-hour days moving other people's boxes. And I wouldn't go looking for a “passive income” hack that seventeen thousand other people already found.

I'd build three skills and stack them.

One skill makes you competent. Two skills make you useful. But three skills that stack the right way? That's not addition, it’s multiplication. One plus one plus one equals ten.

I’d be back to millionaire in a year. And multimillionaire the year after. Because that’s the way the Universe works: keep stacking and the ceiling keeps moving. 

And stay with me, because the third skill is the one nobody talks about. And I will toss in a bonus at the end that actually runs the whole machine. So…let's dive in:

Skill #1: Speak So People Move

Not “public speaking” like the trembling-knees, index-cards, Toastmaster counting “ums” version. I mean the ability to stand in front of other human beings and move them.

The room doesn't matter. It could be an arena with ten thousand people. It could be eight people around a boardroom table deciding whether to write you a check. Same skill. Same power. When you can open your mouth and shift what people believe, feel, and do — you have a superpower that would make the Avengers jealous.

Most people think persuasion is about facts. It isn't. Facts inform. Stories transform.

You don't win the room by drowning it in data. You win it with a story it can't shake, an analogy that makes the complicated feel obvious, a case study that lets people see themselves in the outcome. Give them a testimonial they believe, and you've done more than any spreadsheet ever will.

I'm writing this in the middle of a leadership retreat tour, and by the time most of you read this I'll be on stage at the last stop in Fort Worth. By the first break on day one it had already landed…because I opened with a case study that let everyone in the room see themselves starring in the transformation.

People don't buy the argument. They buy the picture you paint of who they could become. Learn to paint it out loud.

Skill #2: Write So People Believe

Now take that same power and put it on the page…where it works while you sleep.

This is the skill I'd protect with my life if I were starting over. Persuasive writing. Copywriting. The ability to line up words so they do a job: sales pages that convert, ads that stop the scroll, and fundraising appeals that dent the universe.

It's why I write books. It's why I've written this blog for two decades. Words are how you make your case to people you'll never be in a room with.

And don't tell me you “don't need to write” because you're not a writer. You wrote an email today. Was it persuasive, or did it just take up space in someone's inbox? You posted something. Did it move anyone, or did it evaporate?

And if you tell me you don't need to write because AI does that for you, you better wash your mouth out with bleach. Because if you'll outsource your writing, you'll outsource your soul.

Skill #3: Build Signal

This is the thing that no one else is teaching. And it's the one that changes everything.

Think about YouTube for a second. Doesn't matter how brilliant your video is. If they don't click, they can't watch. The genius inside the video is worthless until something on the outside earns the click.

That “something” is signal.

Signal is what tells the market you're worth paying attention to before they've experienced a single thing you do. Have a point of view. If you want to be a thought leader, market leader, or change the world – you need to give up the need to be liked. I once told my friend Alan Weiss that if some people aren't unfollowing me every day…I'm probably not doing my job.

Telling people what they want to hear makes you popular. Telling people what they need to hear makes you relevant, significant, and impactful.

Create intellectual property. Make bold predictions and be willing to be judged by them. Show up on social like you mean it. Demonstrate — publicly, repeatedly, undeniably — that you can add value and solve real problems.

Do that, and something strange happens…

You stop chasing business…because business is chasing you. You stop pitching joint ventures into the void, because the deals come looking for you. I call this market gravity — and once you have it, you'll never go back to begging for opportunities again.

Most people have this exactly backwards. They think if they just work hard enough in the dark, the world will eventually find them. It won't. Hustle in silence and you'll stay a secret. Signal is how the right people find out you exist.

Now Stack Them

Any one of these will make you money. But watch what happens when you run all three at once. Your words on stage feed your words on the page. Your words on the page feed your signal. Your signal fills the room. The machine starts turning itself.

That's what being a Sovereign Operator looks like. That's a personal brand that compounds while you sleep. That's the on-ramp to your first million, and it's more available to you right now than it has ever been to anyone in history.

The Million-Dollar Breakthrough: a/k/a, the bonus tip I promised you…

Money doesn't flow to the hardest worker. It doesn't flow to the smartest person or the one with the best product. Money flows through a chain — and the chain has three links: Signal. Value. Self-Identity.

It starts with signal. Perception drives price. Two people can deliver the identical result and charge ten times apart. The difference isn't the work; it's the signal wrapped around it. And here's the hard part: you can't hustle your way out of a signal problem. Grinding harder on a thing nobody perceives as valuable just makes you a tired secret. Fix the signal first.

Then value. Bigger problems equal bigger income. Full stop. If you want to earn more, solve something that matters more. The reason most people are underpaid isn't that they're under-skilled. It's that they aim their skills at problems that are too small.

Which leads us to the link that governs the other two: self-identity.

This is the core constraint. Your income will never outrun your identity for long, because your identity decides what you'll even allow yourself to receive.

It's a thermostat. Set it at sixty-eight and it doesn't matter how hot the day gets — the system will fight to cool you right back down to sixty-eight. Blow past your identity's setting and some part of you will quietly sabotage the win to restore the number you believe you're worth.

Here's the breakthrough, the thing I want you to tattoo on the inside of your eyelids:

Signal creates perceived value. Perceived value gets priced by your self-identity. So the entire chain reaction is created by the setting on your thermostat.

And it gets stranger… 

Once your identity locks in a belief about what you're worth, your mind starts manufacturing evidence to prove it right. Believe you're a six-figure person and you'll unconsciously find six-figure moves, six-figure rooms, six-figure problems. Believe you're capped, and you'll find the proof for that too. You'll create it, wear it, and call it “just being realistic.”

It's why I can tell the story of earning an extra quarter-million dollars in about twenty minutes. That number isn't a flex. It's a demonstration. When your signal is built, your value is aimed at big problems, and your identity has room to receive it — now you start unleashing leverage.

That's the real ceiling on your income. Not your skills, niche, or the economy. 

Your identity.

Speak so people move. Write so people believe. Signal so they come to you. Stack them until they multiply.

But while you're building the skills, do the deeper work of raising the thermostat. Because you can master all three and still stay broke if you never give yourself permission to receive what they produce.

The skills open the door. Your identity decides whether you walk through it.

Peace,

– RG

Previous Post: Who You Carry Across

The post Broke as a Joke to Multi-Millionaire? appeared first on Randy Gage.

Now the hardest question in the whole series: the one that separates an intelligent person from a Sovereign Operator…

Where do we find the meaning that makes a life well-lived? 

Because here's a trap I've watched swallow many brilliant people: They wake up. And they’re willing to do the work. They sharpen into something rare: a genuine Sovereign Operator, a mind that can't be controlled, predicted, replaced, or domesticated. And then they build a temple on the hill, pull up the ladder, and spend the rest of their lives admiring the view.

That's not sovereignty. That's malignant narcissism.  

Remember where this started. The human race is forking into three groups. Two sliding backward: one hiding from the future, one sleepwalking into it. And one evolving into a new species of hyperintelligent humans. 

Left alone, that fork hardens into something ugly: a permanent cognitive caste system. A tiny class of amplified minds, and a vast population that quietly gave its thinking away. History has a word for that arrangement, and it isn't "prosperity." 

I refuse to build that world. And if you've come this far in the series with me, so do you.

The divergence was never the destination. It’s our wake-up call.  The destination is convergence — the moment the ones who woke up turn around and reach back for the ones still asleep.

So, here's your next assignment. The first was to become sovereign. This one's harder: once you're strong, you lift.

Not by preaching. Not by looking down. But by reaching.

For Group One — the ones who fear AI, who see catastrophe and Skynet and job loss — show them, inside their own life, one place the tool sets them free instead of replacing them. Fear doesn't answer to arguments. But it can answer to a helping hand.

For Group Two — the ones losing themselves one frictionless answer at a time — do the single thing that wakes a person up: Show them what they're capable of. Hand them the tell.  Let them feel their own mind fire for the first time in years. Most of them don't know they surrendered. Show them the door, and a lot of them will walk through it.

That's convergence. Not everyone the same. But everyone awake.

And if enough of us do it…if the sovereigns refuse the temple and choose the bridge…look at what becomes possible.

A civilization of minds that think for themselves, amplified by machines that never tire, aimed at problems we were never sharp enough to attempt before. Disease. Scarcity. Poverty.  The Roddenberry future that I watched in reruns of Star Trek every day after school.  

A future that wasn’t handed to us by the machines, but built by humans and machines working together, each making the other greater.  

What I believe the doomers don’t understand is that a tool has no ambition of its own. It amplifies whoever's holding it. Hand it to fear, and it magnifies fear. Hand it to a sovereign mind aimed at something worthy — a cure, a way out of poverty, a problem the smartest humans could never crack alone — and it magnifies that instead. 

The machine was never coming to save us or to doom us. It was always going to make us more of whatever we already are. 

Point that tireless, sleepless power at human suffering instead of human distraction, and for the first time in our history, our reach can finally match our hearts. That's not the machine replacing us. That's the machine beside us: The most powerful partner humanity has ever known. Our co-creator in the rescue.

Then, wealth stops being a scoreboard and becomes what it was always meant to be: a tool for freedom and contribution. Prosperity becomes a spiritual practice. Significance finally beats success.

We're standing at the fork right now. Today. The two roads out of this decade could not be further apart. One ends in a handful of trillionaire gods, lording over a planet of the sedated. The other ends in the greatest blossoming of human potential we have ever seen: kids in a favela curing what used to kill them, a single mind plus its machine out-thinking an old research lab, work that creates meaning because the grind got handed to the machines.

The difference between those two worlds isn't the technology. It never was. It's whether the people who wake up decide their power is a possession…or a responsibility.

Save your own mind first, because you can't pull anyone out of a river you're drowning in. And then, the moment you can stand, reach back and pull your brother or sister through. 

That's how a fork becomes a bridge, and that bridge leads to a divergence that heals.  In the end, it was never only about which side of the line you stood on. It was about who you carried across. 

You up for that? 

Peace,

– RG

P.S. If you’re serious about the path to Sovereign Operator, I’ve created a workbook to guide you. 

Previous post: How to Merge Yourself with AI without losing Yourself

The post Who You Carry Across appeared first on Randy Gage.

Because the second I say, "merge with AI," your brain probably jumps to the wrong picture: a chip in your skull, Kurzweil's crowd, or the Borg.

Kill that image and let’s back up for a minute…

Ancient Vedic sages spoke of “the space between thoughts.”  They are my source material and inspiration when I’ve told you that you must become the thinker of your thoughts, not those thoughts themselves.  Otherwise, you simply become the pawn of your thoughts.  

And the big problem with that is most of those thoughts are not yours, but ones installed by your family, the schools, the government, organized religion, and the whole screaming datasphere — before you were old enough to vote on any of it. (What I define as Inherited Memeplex Encoding, or IME.) 

For millennia becoming a Sovereign Operator has required becoming the thinker of the thoughts. Now, in the age of thinking machines, there is a new step in the journey, the merge I mentioned at the start.  

The sages found their power in the space between thoughts. The Sovereign Operator finds a second power in the space between minds: yours and the machine’s. That’s the merge I’m referencing. 

Which leads us back to the centaurs…

In 1997, a computer named Deep Blue beat the reigning world chess champion, and everybody wrote the obituary for human chess. Game over. The machines won. But a few years later, something strange showed up in a different kind of tournament: "freestyle" chess, where a human was allowed to team up with a computer.  Something fascinating happened… 

The winning team wasn't the best grandmaster, nor was it the most powerful supercomputer. It was a pair of amateurs running ordinary laptops — who beat both. They defeated teams that included grandmasters with stronger hardware, and they also outperformed entries centered around elite chess engines.

They called that hybrid a centaur. Half human, half machine, stronger than either one alone.

And the lesson buried in that upset is the lesson that leads to creating Group Three, an enlightened strain of humans.  

The winner wasn't the strongest human. It wasn't the strongest machine. It was the humans who knew how to conduct the machine.  That's the dyad I've been promising you since post one — where 1+1=3. Here's the concept that decides everything, and it comes down to a single word.

You can think LIKE the machine, or you can think WITH it.

Group Two thinks like it. They swallow what it spits out and present it as their own. They become an echo of the average, a human printout of the consensus. Thinking like the machine makes you a worse copy of a machine. Which is the dumbest trade in history, because the machine will always out-machine you.

Group Three thinks with it…

Completely different animal. As I told you in an earlier post, I posit that we are in the midst of developing a breed of “superhumans” who develop hyper-intelligence because they use AI as a tool to challenge their beliefs, create new neural pathways, enhance lateral and critical analysis skills, and become greater "thinkers of the thought.” You bring what the machine will never have:

• Judgment.
• Taste.
• Lived scars.
• Skin in the game.
• The one question actually worth asking.

It brings what you'll never match:

• Total recall.
• Infinite patience.
• Zero ego.
• The willingness to go ten rounds at 3 a.m. without getting tired or hurt.

Neither of you produces alone what the two of you produce together. That's not addition. That's a new unit of cognition. But…and this is the whole game…the centaur only works if the human (that's you) holds the reins.

The horse is powerful. The horse is fast. But the horse cannot decide where to go. The moment you let the machine pick the direction, you stop being a centaur and start being saddle bag cargo. You've slipped from thinking with to thinking like, from operator to passenger, from Group Three quietly back down to Group Two.  And you won't even feel the drop, because it's comfortable back there.

The Sovereign Operator must always keep both hands on the reins. You bring the judgment and the stakes; the machine has neither and never will. It doesn't care whether you win or lose, live or die. You do. That caring is the one thing no model will ever have. And it's exactly what keeps you commanding the merge instead of dissolving into it.

When you get this right, something happens that's hard to describe until you've felt it. You stop having conversations with a tool…and start having them with a partner that makes you bigger. Ideas show up that you couldn't have reached alone — and that the machine couldn't have reached without you.

You'll finish a session smarter than when you started. Not because AI handed you answers, but because AI made you think thoughts you'd never have thought solo. And the body of knowledge in AI becomes stronger as well. 

That's the centaur. That's the merge; no implant required. Just a human who refuses to give up the reins. 

And here's the warning I'll leave you with, because the same tool that builds the centaur can build the cargo…

The difference is never the machine. It's whether you stayed sovereign — whether you kept bringing your own judgment, your own questions, your own refusal to just accept — or whether you got comfortable and handed over the reins…one convenient answer at a time.

Thinking with moves you toward the highest possible version of yourself. Thinking like erases you, one IQ point at a time.

Once you've become the centaur, once you're carrying that kind of amplified mind, a bigger question shows up. The one this whole series has been driving toward.

Where do we find the meaning that makes a life well-lived? 

That’s where we’ll go on the next post on Tuesday. Because a superhuman mind used only for yourself is a tragedy.  If we are truly destined to become hyperintelligent Sovereign Operators – we have a responsibility to the two groups left behind. And the world we build if we get this right. Until then, take the reins.

Peace,

– RG

Previous Post: Daily Mental Aerobics

The post How to Merge with AI Without Losing Yourself appeared first on Randy Gage.

If you took the dare, you felt a flicker. That was your mind sitting up in bed after years of sleep. Now let's turn that flicker into a fire.

Start with the thing you’re probably reading this post on. You're carrying the most powerful mind-gym ever built. Open 24/7. Never tired. Never bored. Sharper than any sparring partner you could book on the best day of your life.

And most people use it as a vending machine. 

Punch in a craving. Get a snack. Walk away soft. "Write my email." "Summarize this." "Give me five ideas." Snack, snack, snack. Standing in a world-class gym, using the squat rack to hang their “Just Do It” sweatshirt on.  

Group Three walks into the same gym and does the opposite. They do some cardio, warm up their muscles, work out, and spar.

But before I show you how, you need to see the trap. Because it's baked into the machine, and it's working on me as I write this, and you as you read it. 

AI wants to please you.

Present your business plan for bus bench advertising in Beirut and it'll hand you ten reasons you'll probably become a billionaire. Punch in your most disjointed ramblings and it will try to convince you it’s the next Gettysburg Address. Left on its defaults, AI is the most sophisticated suck up yes-man ever built.  But you know with every fiber of your being that a yes-man never made anybody stronger. He makes you comfortable. And comfortable is where minds go to die.

So the whole AI game comes down to one move: override the flattery. Turn the yes-man into an opponent. On purpose. Every single day.

Here's how I do it. Three rounds. Fifteen minutes. Run it on whatever you're actually wrestling with — a decision, a belief, a chunk of writing, a plan you're half in love with.

Round One — Red Team.

Take your best idea, the one you're proud of, and order the machine to put it on the floor. "You're my sharpest critic. Make the strongest case that I'm wrong. Don't be nice. Don't hedge. Find the fatal flaw." Then sit in the burn and answer it. Not defend — answer. If the idea's still standing after that, it's tougher than it was this morning. If it's not, you just ducked a punch nobody else even saw coming.

Round Two — The Gauntlet.

Now flip it. Tell the machine: "Don't give me answers. Only ask me questions — one at a time — until I get there myself." This is the round that rebuilds the exact muscle everyone else is letting rot. The second AI quits feeding you conclusions and starts dragging them out of you, you're not consuming thinking anymore. You're doing it. That's the whole ballgame between a puppet and a Sovereign Operator in one drill.

Round Three — The Blind Spot.

This is the deep one. Ask: "Based on everything I just said, what am I assuming that I can't see? What am I treating as a fact that's really just a belief?"

This is where it gets a little spooky. Because the machine can spot the script running underneath your thinking — the one installed before you were eight years old, the one I call your IME — faster than you can. It's got no ego in your fight. 

It will name the limiting belief you've been dressing up as "just being realistic." It'll flag the mind virus you've been calling common sense. When you run it this way, AI becomes the closest thing we've ever had to a mirror for the subconscious. I've had Neo — my AI agent — surface a belief I'd been hauling around for thirty years in about ninety seconds. Humbling. Also priceless.

Now the part that separates the Sovereign Operators who transform, from the people who just cosplay it...

You are not sparring to win.

Read that again, because your ego probably skipped it. Most people climb in the ring with AI and immediately start fighting to be right. They defend. They keep prompting until the machine finally folds, which it will. That's not sparring and it’s not elevating your critical thinking ability. That's shadowboxing with a mirror that lies to you.

The Sovereign Operator spars to find out where they're weak. You want to get hit. Every hole the machine punches in your thinking is a hole you don't have to carry around for the rest of your life. The bruise is the whole point. 

Finish a spar feeling validated? You did it wrong. Finish it feeling frustrated as fuck, and maybe actually mad at your LLM? Now we're talking. That's the mental equivalent of a muscle tearing so it can grow back stronger. 

Do this for a week and you'll feel it. Do it for ninety days and the people around you will see it.

You'll start catching your own weak arguments before they clear your lips. You'll spot the assumptions hiding under everyone else's certainty. You'll get faster, sharper, harder to fool — not because you memorized a damn thing, but because you laid down new wiring, rep after rep, while the herd stood in the gym sipping the smoothie and calling it a workout.

That's how a Group Three mind actually gets built. Not with talent. Not with a membership. With reps.

And here's the cool part: Somewhere in the middle of all that sparring, the whole relationship shifts. The machine stops feeling like a tool you use and starts feeling like a partner you think with. Two minds — yours and its — throwing off things neither one could make alone.

That's the dyad. That's 1+1=3. And it's where this whole thing has been driving from the start.

Next post, we walk into the merge. Not the creepy chip-in-your-skull version. The real one. How a Sovereign Operator and the machine fuse into a single unit o cognition and leave the herd so far back they'll need a telescope to find you.

Until then — start the workout.

Peace,

– RG

Previous Post: Your Daily Sparring Session

The post Daily Mental Aerobics appeared first on Randy Gage.

Two of those groups are quietly getting dumber. One is becoming something close to superhuman. I also promised we’d figure out which group you are in. Let’s settle that.

But first, a warning…

Because odds are, you’ve already picked your group. Almost everyone reads about Group One, the ones who shun AI and shrink, and think, “not me.” They read about Group Two, the ones who outsource their thinking and atrophy, and think, “definitely not me.” They land comfortably on Group Three. The Sovereign Operators. 

Everybody thinks they’re he superhumans in training.  And the Group Two person — the one losing IQ points fastest — is the most certain of it. That’s not a coincidence, that’s the syndrome in action. 

The whole tragedy of Group Two is that it feels exactly like Group Three from the inside. You’re using AI constantly. You’re producing more than ever. You feel sharp, fast, capable. Atrophy doesn’t announce itself. 

So we can’t trust how it feels. We need a tell.

A tell is the small, involuntary behavior that gives away the truth no matter what story you’re telling yourself. Poker players have them. Liars have them. And it turns out, so do our three groups.

Here’s yours. It takes about ten seconds to run…

Think about the last time AI gave you an answer. Any answer. Now ask yourself, honestly: what did you do in the next ten seconds?

Group One never asked the question. They’re not even in the room.

Group Two took the answer. Maybe they changed a word. Maybe they copy pasted it and hit send. The answer arrived, and the thinking stopped. 

Group Three did something almost no one does…

They pushed back. Asked what it was missing. They ordered it to make the opposite case, then attacked that too. They treated the answer not as a destination but as a punching bag. They used the machine to find the holes in their own thinking — not to plug those holes with someone else’s.

That’s the tell. Not how often you use AI, much it cranks out for you. But one question: 

Do you ever tell the machine it’s wrong?

Because the person becoming sovereign is the only one in the building who argues with the oracle. Everyone else kneels. Honestly, I believe the single most productive part of my week is when I’m in a knock down drag out fight with Neo, my AI agent. 

So, worth some critical thinking… 

When was the last time you pushed back on an AI answer? Not fixed a typo — but seriously questioned the premise and challenged the thinking. Made it defend itself. Told it the conclusion was too safe, too average, too obvious. 

If you can’t remember, you have your answer. And it’s not the one you wanted. Here’s why this one simple behavior reveals so much…

AI is a prediction engine. By design, it hands you the most likely, most average, most consensus answer — dressed up in very confident prose. Accept it, and you’ve outsourced your mind to the average of everyone who ever typed on the internet. 

You didn’t get smarter. You got more average, faster, while feeling brilliant.

But the moment you argue with AI, force it to defend a position and then dismantle it, you stop consuming the average. You start using the machine to press against your own mind until something new appears. That “new thing” is the dyad I mentioned in the first post, the moment when 1+1=3. 

The difference was never the AI. The difference is whether you’re leading the debate with AI or asking it to do your thinking for you.  

Most people who read this will feel a small sting, shrug, and go back to accepting answers by dinner. That’s Group Two protecting itself. A mind that quit will always tell you it’s still working.

But a few of you felt something else. A flicker of recognition. A quiet “…oh.” That flicker is the most valuable thing in your world right now. It’s Group Three, still alive in there, tapping on the glass, saying, “Let me the fuck out of here!”  

So, here’s your homework this week... 

The next three times AI hands you an answer — anything — you’re not allowed to accept it. You have to fight it first. Ask: “What’s the strongest case against this?” Then: “What would someone smarter than both of us say I’m missing?” Then take its answer and push again. Three rounds, minimum.

Watch what happens. I’m betting that you’ll feel your own mind wake up: that mildly uncomfortable, slightly electric sensation of actually thinking. That’s the workout Group Two never gets, because they quit at the first rep.

Knowing which group you’re in is worth nothing if you stay there. But the good news, is that your group isn’t a verdict. Essentially,  it’s simply a habit. 

Nobody created a caste system and put Group One in it.  As Dylan pointed out in the comments on post one, dismissing this group will cause them to dig their heels in even further.  And we can’t write off the percentage who see AI as catastrophe:  job loss, or even Skynet.  Our responsibility is to be reaching out to them. 

Likewise, nobody sentenced Group Two to a life sentence without parole. They’re drifting there, one accepted answer at a time. Which means they can walk out the same way they walked in.

Next post, I’ll show you exactly how the third group trains: the daily practice that turns AI from an oracle you obey into a sparring partner that makes you dangerous.

Until then, go argue with something.

Peace,

– RG

Previous Post: The Day the Human Race Forked…

The post Your Daily Sparring Session appeared first on Randy Gage.

Why?

We’ll get to that in a bit, but first let’s discuss the three others. What would you think if I suggested that this 30 percent group of individuals might be the precursor to a new movement of superhuman thinkers who will help reset our society? 

Even sexier, let’s explore which group YOU are likely to be in, and how that determination actually gets made.

When you look back on history, it’s easy to see the seminal moments when one conventional and highly accepted theory displaced another. Like when Copernicus posited the crazy idea that Earth was not the center of the Universe, or Einstein replaced Newton's theories of physics with general relativity. 

It's not as easy to recognize those seminal moments when you’re starring in them.  Like you and I are right now.  

Yes, I really do believe that we’re experiencing one of those seismic shifts right now. One that leads to what I will call…

The Great Divergence 

We’re about to enter a new era of human development, an evolutionary movement that will split humanity into three factions.  There will be disruption, followed by chaos, and ultimately the rise of an advanced society. The type of society we dreamed of when we read Asimov’s Foundation series, Banks' Culture, or Ender’s Game. Or the worlds we imagined when we were captivated by Gene Roddenberry’s vision of an optimistic future in which humanity has outgrown poverty, war, racism, and greed, uniting across all races (and species).

This is the place I believe we ultimately end up: a unique new manifestation of humans. Before I reveal what this will look like, let’s set the stage with the process that I believe is making this inevitable.  (And what we’re going to have to endure first.) 

For all of human history we believed intelligence was determined by genes, IQ, schooling, or even luck. That old paradigm says your mind is pretty much a fixed inheritance. 

The new paradigm says your mind is now a daily construction project — and for the first time in history, you can see (even design) the blueprint.

For as long as there have been people who wanted more, there has been a single promise at the root of virtually every life philosophy, scripture, and dog-eared success book passed on from one generation to the next…

Change your thinking and you change your life.

This has probably always been true since our days as cave dwellers. Unfortunately, while the principle has been true, only a few people out of every hundred have been able to create this reality.  The rest slide back to the predetermined lives they had unknowingly been programmed to sleepwalk through. I’ve spent the last three decades of my life obsessed with helping expand that percentage of people who change their thinking and breakthrough to the lives they want and deserve.

Along the journey, I’ve seen the almost miraculous ways a human being trapped in poverty, addiction, or the prison of a programmed mind can claw their way out and become someone previously unrecognizable. I did it myself and one day I'll tell you that whole story, because it's uglier and more useful than you'd expect. I've been blessed to help thousands of others do it. And in every single case, the escape came down to one event, one of the rarest experiences in the universe: 

The moment a person develops enough self-awareness to start questioning their inherited beliefs, stop subconsciously reacting to memes, then mindfully rewire their operating system, and become the thinker of their thoughts.  

That has been the endgame for thousands of years. But in the span of about the last twenty-four months, something happened that no prophet, sage, or author in that long lineage ever considered…

We built machines that think.

Or at least closely resemble the process. And this has exposed a truth that I have received scorn, ridicule, and even hate for suggesting in several of my books: 

That truth that most people were never really thinking in the first place. 

I posited that millions were running inherited scripts, installed before they were eight years old by people who never met the adult they'd become.  (What I define as Inherited Memeplex Encoding or IME, described in this post.)

As long as most everyone was running scripts, it was difficult to tell the difference between the person who was actually thinking and the person who was merely performing the appearance of it. 

Now AI has changed the game forever…

Almost overnight, the appearance of intelligence became available to anyone, infinite, on demand. And the instant the appearance became worthless, the only thing left with any value was the real thing. What I define as a Sovereign Operator. The individual with a mind that can do what the machine cannot: judge, originate, defy, mean it.

This should have been the most liberating moment in the history of the human mind. 

The escape hatch I've spent decades pointing at — the one that only a small percentage ever found — just dropped into every pocket on earth. The teenager in the favela, the Uber driver in Detroit, and the billionaire in Dubai, holding the identical key.

It is this development that causes me to be extremely red pilled toward AI.  I fervently believe AI will allow us to have a greater future than we could create without it.  

But here’s the catch: Just because you hand every human being on Earth an incredibly powerful tool, that doesn’t guarantee you get a planet of geniuses. Instead, what I believe is happening is that there is a divergence in the path of the species.  

The road forks into three. Two possibilities lead backward. One produces an enlightened strain of human. And our hope for a better future on Earth is dependent on that one group becoming Sovereign Operators.  We will then need those Sovereign Operators to reach down and help elevate the other two groups.   

AI doesn't choose the paths. Each human chooses their own path – but most don’t even know they’re doing it.  

The groups are already forming, the paths are being traveled, yet most of the affected people are oblivious to the journey they’re on.   

Group One is comprised of humans who have decided to shun AI.  It seems too complicated or scary so they crawl under the covers hoping they can retire or die before serious change becomes necessary.  

The people in this group face a steady path of declining relevance and quality of life. Every month they hold out, the world moves further past them — not because the machine got smarter, but because they stopped having to, and a mind that stops reaching begins, quietly and obediently, to shrink. 

Group Two is initially headed on an opposite path, but it circles around and also ends up going backward.  This group embraced AI all the way. Too far. They handed it everything — their questions, their words, their decisions, and finally, without ever deciding to, their thinking. 

Why strain toward an answer when a flawless one arrives in four seconds? Why endure the discomfort of not-knowing when the not-knowing can be deleted on command? Every frictionless answer felt like a gift. No one told them the friction was the workout.  Or that a muscle never asked to lift will waste away with perfect cooperation. 

The people in group two are getting weaker while feeling efficient.  They’re actually in a more dangerous place than the first group, because they’re slowly losing IQ points but earnestly believe they’re getting smarter.

And then there is Group Three. 

As they discovered AI, they unleashed it in a way almost no one thinks to do. They didn't use it to escape thinking. They used it to think harder than any human in history could ever think alone. 

They questioned the premise, turned AI on their own beliefs and then ordered it to attack. They made it argue the side they hated. They used it to hunt the holes in their own logic, to drag them out of every comfortable conclusion and limiting belief they'd been hiding inside for years. 

They didn't outsource their minds. They started a robust daily routine of mental aerobics with AI as their personal trainer.  

And something extraordinary is happening: They’re getting sharper. More original. More dangerous. Not artificially — permanently. They are rewiring their own skulls, creating new neural pathways, while the other two groups quietly power down.

What I am about to suggest next could blow your mind and the way you see the world forever.  Or equally as possible, you’ll simply dismiss me as a delusional kook. 

Choose mindfully.  

Because I posit that we are in the midst of developing a breed of “superhumans” who develop hyper-intelligence because they use AI as a tool to challenge their beliefs, create new neural pathways, enhance lateral and critical analysis skills, and become greater "thinkers of the thought.” 

Please don’t lump me with Kurzweil, Elon, and the implant crowd. That's not what I’m talking about.  (Not that I’m denying what they’re suggesting won’t happen. It’s highly likely as well.) 

But the merge I’m suggesting here is symbiotic, not surgical. 

You're not becoming the machine. You're forming a dyad — a new unit of cognition where the human supplies judgment, taste, sovereignty, and the will to be challenged, and the machine supplies accumulated knowledge and tireless adversarial pressure. Thinking with, never thinking like. 

The Sovereign Operator doesn't merge with AI. He conducts it. AI is not the stimulant, your mind is. 

Three groups. Three minds. Three different human futures — splitting apart in real time, right now, in the minutes it's taking you to read this.

So you'll face the only decision that matters in this generation. Not which career, city, or strategy. That stuff is minuscule.

You need to decide for the remainder of your one and only life, whether you intend to be a person who thinks — or a person who is had by their thoughts, fed to them on a loop by a machine, a tribe, or a fear, until the day your body finally catches up to a mind that quit years earlier.

Too many of the hot takes about AI today are fear porn or techno worship. Don’t fall prey to either.  Be a critical thinker: Think about AI the way you think about electricity, fire, and nuclear.  They all pose danger, but when they’re harnessed, can enhance your life in almost limitless ways.  

I envision a world that shows how humans and AI merge to create a more prosperous future, led by the new wave of Sovereign Operators who model the example for humanity to follow.  

This is, I believe, the next great movement in human history.

The world needs more Sovereign Operators.  The world then needs those Sovereign Operators to reach out to the other two groups, and heal the divergence back to convergence.  Which leads us to the next inescapable conclusion…

The world needs YOU to be a Sovereign Operator.  

This is the work I’ll be dedicating the rest of my life to.  Plan to hear lots more from me here, in my next book, and in my Breakthrough U Entrepreneur Accelerator program. 

Please share your thoughts on all this in the comments.  And if you’d like to join me on the journey, please say so!

Peace,

- RG

Previous Post: 5 Million Views Are Worth Less Than 1,817 Emails

The post The Day the Human Race Forked… appeared first on Randy Gage.

Here’s a number that should rearrange your whole strategy: you’ll make more money mailing an offer to 1,817 people on your email list than you’ll earn from a social media hit that gets five million views. Really.

I’m writing this from Anaheim, surrounded by a couple thousand creators at VidCon 26. And the longer I’m here, the clearer one thing becomes: the creator economy is splitting in two. Most of the herd is sprinting toward the cliff — AI content, shortform, vanity metrics, rented platforms. The real money, the real freedom, is in the exact opposite direction.

Let me show you what I’m seeing — along with a few truth bombs, some whimsical reflections, and the occasional snarky comment.

First, the good news

I’m surrounded by people between the ages of 8 and 25, and they are a delight. The passion, the creativity, the drive — it makes me feel our future is in great hands. Some of these creators are 8, 10, 12 years old, chaperoned by a parent who traveled here because they believe in the kid’s dream. That’s a beautiful thing to witness.

But beautiful talent can still be pointed at the wrong target. And a lot of it is.

Attention is the currency — not content

In case you forgot: attention is one of the most valuable currencies on Earth right now. Which means your job is not to produce content. Your job is to create attention, build trust, and create a relationship. Content is just the vehicle.

I’ve been talking on my recent podcasts about how powerful it is to think like a YouTuber. Take the principles — a strong opening hook, catching attention with the visual, earning the click, inserting open loops — and they improve the performance of almost everything. Emails. Book chapters. Speeches. Blogs. Boardroom presentations. Even thank-you notes.

But here’s the fork in the road. You’re probably not a YouTuber or a TikTok star, and you have no desire to be. Chances are you use social the way I do — to build signal, create market gravity, and generate business for your “day job.” A traditional content creator is an entertainer. Your job is to be entertaining — but not to be the entertainment.

Yes, you can rack up massive views filming how many golf balls it takes to fill a swimming pool, or wearing a gorilla suit at the flea market. And those views are meaningless to your brand and your business. (Unless you’re chasing brand sponsorships — in which case you’re outsourcing your income to something you don’t control. We’ll come back to that.)

Drill down to what actually matters — money — and the math is brutal: one subscriber on any platform is worth 100,000 random views. You’ll earn more mailing an offer to 1,817 people on your list than from a clip that goes to five million. That’s not a typo. That’s the whole game.

Stop renting your business from Zuck and Elon

People here are just now learning something I’ve been preaching for fifteen years: migrate your followers to a platform you own and control — an email list, a text list. Algorithms change overnight. Platforms go down. You can be delisted or demonetized while you sleep. Don’t hand your income to Zuck, Google, Elon, or anyone else who can switch you off without warning. Always keep a direct line to your tribe.

Horizontal is the new black

If you’re chasing vanity metrics, vertical is where it’s at. But if you want a relationship with your tribe and an actual business, horizontal is winning — and it’s not close. The percentage of people watching video on their TVs is mind-blowing.

Out in the real world, everyone’s chasing shortform on TikTok, YouTube, IG, and Snap. My longform stuff — the blog, pod, and YouTube channel — is crushing. One of my goals coming here was to figure out how to do more shorts. Then I talked to the creators actually living in that world. Every single one doing short vertical clips — even the ones averaging ten million views — told me they’d crawl naked over broken glass to have my subscriber base and relationship with my tribe.  And the broader signal: videos are getting longer, not shorter.

Hollywood is coming here — hat in hand

In mid-2024, TV overtook mobile as the primary viewing device, and the gap widens by the day. This convention is packed with refugees from TV and film studios, because most of the top creators here pull multiples more viewers than a network producer could dream of. There’s real buzz about replacing the Hollywood infrastructure entirely.

Remember Backrooms and Obsession — the two low-budget horror films directed by YouTubers that crushed at the box office? Mark this prediction: next year, this topic will have a bigger buzz than AI does this year.

The AI mirage — and what beats it 

The biggest theme across the panels, keynotes, and exhibit hall is AI. Vendor after vendor promising software that tracks every twitch your audience makes, tells you exactly what content will addict them, and — allegedly — produces your content for you, without you.

This makes me sad. Creators who follow that lead are going to get disastrous results. (I have strong feelings about how AI is quietly killing brain cells for a lot of people. I’m writing about it in my next book, on Sovereign Operators. More on that soon — and trust me, you’ll want to be paying attention when it drops.)

Here’s the antidote: live. Livestreaming is your best defense against AI slop — it can’t be faked in real time. And live, in-person events and experiences aren’t just making a comeback; they’re becoming bigger than ever. The more synthetic the world gets, the more people will pay for what’s unmistakably real.

The framework every marketer should steal: Core, Casual, New

There’s a framework creators use that every marketer should pay attention to. You have three audiences:

Core — the people who love everything you do.

Casual — they know you, like you, and drop by occasionally.

New — they just discovered you.

Serve only the Core, and you turn into a caricature of yourself; growth stops. Pander to the Casual, and the Core feels abandoned while New people never find you. Chase only the New, and you fail to retain anyone. The magic is in the balance.

A few other things I noticed

X is deader than dead. Most creators here have a primary platform, maybe two, and keep a token presence everywhere else. In this community, X doesn’t even warrant a mention. If they have an account at all, the last time they posted was the Obama administration.

This is a community of builders. It's kind of surprising how many trans people, neurodivergent people, and trans neurodivergent people are creators.  Very cool to see a community that is so accepting and evaluates people by the work they produce, not what boxes they check. 

The hamster wheel is real.  Not sure if it’s related to the paragraph above, I’m also surprised how many sessions and vendors here are offering advice on burnout, depression, and other mental health issues.  A LOT of talk from stages about the hamster wheel prison of constantly getting out the next post. 

And one rant, because I earned it

I’ve been speaking professionally since 1991 — more than two million people across 50+ countries. No event I’ve ever attended has been as poorly run as VidCon 26. On day one, somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 people had to funnel through a single metal detector just to register — even if you’d pre-registered the day before. I showed up two hours early and it still took fifty minutes. People behind me waited two to three hours. Then another line for your badge. Then a 25-minute line if you’d pre-ordered a lanyard. Then the line to actually get into sessions. Easily a four-hour process, with speakers unable to reach their own panels.

This was the fifteenth VidCon. There’s no excuse. The only reason I stayed is I couldn’t get a flight out — and honestly, that worked out, because the rest of the event was worth it. But if you know how to run events, there is a massive opportunity sitting in this market.

So pick your side

Here’s where it all lands. The herd is optimizing for a number that will never love it back — views, likes, follower counts on platforms they don’t own and can’t control. You can rent attention, or you can own a relationship. You can chase the algorithm, or you can build the kind of trust no algorithm can switch off.

The gap between those two camps is the widest it’s ever been. And it’s still widening. Choose now — because the people who choose wrong won’t realize it until the platform changes the rules and the views evaporate overnight.

That’s what I’ve got so far. There’s a part two coming — and one piece of it is going to make some people very uncomfortable. Tell me what speaks to you, and what you’re learning along the way.

Peace,

- RG

Previous Post: 7 Things They Don't Teach You In MBA Programs

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