๐ฅ No Golden Eggs This Quarter
Hey Reader,
I have been side-eyeing a lot of the creator discourse lately. There is a tremendous amount of Eeyore-ing happening in the name of thought leadership and creative expression right now. Everything is terrible. The algorithms ruined everything. AI ruined everything. Social media ruined everything. Everyone sounds the same. Nothing works anymore.
And listen... I'm not out here waving pompoms for the current state of the internet. AI has only made mediocrity louder. I've been shouting that for over a year, and I'll keep shouting it until someone gently escorts me away from the microphone.
But I listened to an episode of NPR's TED Radio Hour this week called "How the creator economy is making you talk like the internet," featuring linguist Adam Aleksic, and it gave me a slightly different way to think about what's happening. Aleksic studies how algorithms are changing language... not just which words trend, but how creators talk faster to hold attention, which words we emphasize, the euphemisms we invent to dodge moderation, and the memes and aesthetics that become recognizable enough for algorithms to start distributing them further. Creators notice what works... so they do more of it. Then other creators copy it. And guess what? Audiences get used to it. (That's YOU, btw, the audience.) The algorithm gets more evidence that this is what people want and eventually, an adaptation to a distribution system becomes part of the culture itself.
Which sounds ominous as fuck. And it can be. But my immediate reaction wasn't welp, guess originality is dead. It was...
Then make something else.
This is the part of the AI conversation everyone keeps missing. The internet has gotten extraordinarily good at producing and distributing things it already recognizes and AI has made producing recognizable things astonishingly cheap. It'll give you 100 perfectly adequate hooks, 100 perfectly adequate LinkedIn posts, 100 perfectly adequate podcast concepts, 100 perfectly adequate variations on whatever everyone else is already doing... before you've finished your morning coffee.
Adequate is rapidly becoming a commodity. And you know what happens when something becomes abundant? The scarce thing gets more valuable.
AI didn't make originality worthless. It made 'adequate' the free product... which means 'original' is the only thing left worth paying for.
I'll give you a list of all the skills that are more valuable: being interesting, being specific, having taste, developing a point of view, mastering the craft, and your weird little collection of lived experiences, references, opinions, skills, mistakes, fascinations, contradictions, and "I don't know why, but I can't stop thinking about this" moments. This is one of the reasons I care so much about originality at Sasquatch Media Grounds.
Here's what I mean by originality... and what I don't. I don't mean every idea has to be brilliant. Spoiler: mine aren't, yours aren't... actually nobody's are. Some ideas should be lovingly thanked for their service and sent straight to the compost bin. That's part of making things.
And this is where creators have gotten their panties twisted into an absolute wad: there is this obsession with finding The Idea. The Golden Egg. You know the ones... the perfect podcast concept, the perfect way to explain yourself, the perfect hook, the perfect business strategy, the idea so undeniably original and brilliant that once you find it, everything else will finally become easy.
I regret to inform you that the Department of Creativity is not issuing Golden Eggs this quarter.
You have to make shit. Some of it will be good. Some will be mediocre. Some will make you wonder six months later why nobody confiscated your Wi-Fi password. And every once in a while, you'll make something really fucking good. But you can't skip the mediocre stuff to get there, because originality isn't something you start with.
Originality is often what emerges after you've participated long enough to develop a point of view. You try things so you can discover what you hate, and what you're surprisingly good at. You learn which ideas sound great in your head and collapse the second they meet another human being. You develop taste, technical skill, and discernment... and you learn to edit, edit, edit (Tim Gunn would be so proud). You get more interesting because you've actually done things. This is craft.
And you don't get better at your craft by thinking very sophisticated thoughts about it. You don't get better by endlessly critiquing everybody else's. You don't get better by waiting until you're positive your idea is worthy of being made. You make the fucking thing. And then you make another. And another.
This is something I've realized is foundational to what we're building at Sasquatch Media Grounds: we don't protect people from making mediocre work. We protect the conditions required for people to keep making work long enough to become exceptional. That's different.
I want creators to have room to experiment. To make something that doesn't perform. To discover mid-idea that they were wrong, change their minds, and try the weird version anyway. To develop enough tolerance for uncertainty that one disappointing result doesn't become proof the entire creative practice was a mistake. Because if algorithms are getting better at recognizing patterns (and AI is getting better at reproducing them) our job isn't to get better at predicting which pattern wins. It's to get better at making things worth noticing.
Which brings me to one tiny piece of woo before I send you back into the wilderness. At the beginning of this year, everybody was talking about the Year of the Fire Horse like it was going to be MORE! FASTER! BIGGER! GO! GO! GO! And I said... I don't think that's the assignment. Anybody can get on the horse when the adrenaline is pumping. The real challenge of a Fire Horse year is learning how to stay on the fucking horse. Think: systems & foundations. Not white-knuckling every decision. You need recovery & pacing and the ability to continue after the dopamine wears off.
I also predicted that around this point in the year, we'd start seeing who burned through all their Mario mushrooms trying to race to the top. **gestures broadly at LinkedIn**
There are turtles in the road, my friends. You're going to get knocked around. You're going to make mediocre shit. You're going to have ideas that don't work. You're going to watch someone else make something less interesting than yours and get 400 times the attention. There is no Golden Egg that exempts you from any of this. So stop trying to find it.
Make your shit. Develop your craft. Get more interesting. And stay on the fucking horse.
๐ซ Check out what happened for the studio last week, below... โคต๏ธ
๐ Holy Crap, That Went Fast
I am officially filing for my B Corp audit, y'all. ๐ Sasquatch Media Grounds just got featured in B Lab's "Meet the Level 2026 Cohort" piece, spotlighting 14 women-of-color-led businesses in the B Corp community this year... and somehow that's the thing that made it real. B Corp isn't a vibe or a marketing sticker... it's an actual certification that means a company gets independently scored on how it treats its workers, its community, and the planet, not just how much money it makes.
Getting into the Level program has been my on-ramp to that audit, and now here I am, actually doing the thing instead of just talking about doing the thing. We're in genuinely good company in this year's cohort โ coffee roasters, textile makers, farmers, and yes, one boutique media studio training underrepresented creators in the Pacific Northwest. ๐
Go read the whole lineup... it's a good reminder that impact doesn't have to look like one thing.
You can join me at BLD PNW on October 8th in Portland. Tickets here.โ
๐๏ธ Gossip from the creator trenches...
๐ง๐ปโโ๏ธ Get Yourself Together, Man
After all that yelling in this week's newsletter, some Fire Horse tools felt overdue. This creator keeps popping up in my feed, and if you've been around long enough, you know how much somatic therapy has changed my life. These are quick, physical resets... not more thinking, just getting back into your body and back into the present. That might be exactly what you need right now.
โDon't just watch, actually try this โโ
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๐ Busted, Sort Of
Anthropic is rolling out an invisible watermark in Claude-generated text. No hidden character, nothing that identifies you. Instead, Claude subtly shifts how it picks between equally good words, creating a pattern that can later signal it was involved. That doesn't mean Claude authored the finished piece, though... which raises real questions for anyone using AI as an editor, collaborator, or thinking partner.
โIt's actually not that dramatic โโ
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๐ฃ The Original Brand Strategy
I don't love Sasquatch purely because I'm mildly obsessed with cryptids. I love the symbolism: a mythical being people swear exists and keep talking about, even though it's never actually been in the room. DUDE. That is exactly the vibe we're building with our media assets. That kind of lore is potent, and this sighting map is a fun rabbit hole... maybe you're closer to Sasquatch's influence than you realize.
โI wonder if Mothman ever gets jealous โโ
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Let's Hang Out
I released a 90-minute Astrology and Tarot forecast covering July through December 2026 for $47. The second half of this year has a lot going on energetically and I had an absolute blast recording this. Several of you grabbed it immediately which tells me we are onto something here. This is my first experiment in bringing readings back in a sustainable way and it will not be available forever.
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Participate + Join In
You Don't Have a Production Problem. You have an architecture problem. My free white paper breaks down what creator studios actually sell, what most creators actually need, and why those two things are rarely the same. Includes a self-audit to find out if you are ready to launch or ready to build. ๐ Download the white paper for FREE.
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