🪞 The Mirror Has No Feelings. You Do.

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Hey Reader,

I have been on a compounding series of calls lately that have left me staring at the ceiling. Not because they were bad. Because I keep watching the same loop on repeat and I cannot tell anymore if people are processing or just performing. I shall point you to the recent two part series about change & maturity.

I can't believe I'm back here talking about this... again. 🙈 The topic is always AI. The fear is always "what does this mean for me." And somewhere in the middle someone mentions natural resources or stolen IP or the tech bros and the conversation ping pongs so wildly that I eventually just sit back and observe.

I leave comments. They go largely unengaged. I can't get a word in edgewise on the verbal discussion.

People are not looking for examination. They are looking for validation. And I understand that impulse completely. I just do not have time for it anymore.

Because what nobody wants to say out loud is this:

Your fear of AI is not about AI. It is about what AI is revealing about you.

AI does not have an ego. It does not have feelings. It does not have a stake in how you feel about yourself. It is a tool that reproduces exactly what you give it and reflects back exactly what you are working with.

And what a lot of people are discovering, in the most uncomfortable possible way, is that what they are working with is less original than they thought.

The mediocrity that used to be defensible is no longer defensible. And that is not AI's fault.

Nothing has ever been original. Every idea is an evolution of what came before. Every creative work is derivative of something. The most celebrated artists and thinkers in human history were standing on the shoulders of everything that preceded them. That is not a flaw. That is how human creativity actually works.

So when people say AI is stealing their original thought, what they are really saying is that they are uncomfortable having access to higher quality source material. That discomfort is not a creativity problem. It is an ego problem.

And the ego problem lives on all sides of this conversation. The tech bros who think they built the Messiah have enormous ego problems. The boss babes who spent years commodifying female friendship through masterminds and memberships and girl boss communities, charging women to feel seen in rooms that were always more grift than genuine, they have ego problems too. A grift is a grift regardless of the gender of the person running it.

AI has simply turned up the lights.

I had to stand in that bright room too. During Covid I ran a high ticket program that slowly became a commodification of connection. When it felt gross I shut it down. It cost money and social proof. But it forced me back to my actual originality and everything I have built since has been stronger for it.

The mirror does not care about your feelings. But you should.

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A New York Times opinion piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom (🎁 gift link) has been circulating in every group chat and LinkedIn thread I have been in, and I want to address it directly because I think it is both completely right and being used as permission to stop thinking.

McMillan Cottom's argument is sharp and I agree with most of it. The girl boss industrial complex promised women a ladder and delivered a treadmill. Celebrity influencers hawking AI tools for six figure brand deals while women's jobs are being structurally eliminated is not feminism. It is salesmanship wearing a feminist costume. Witherspoon's timing was, as McMillan Cottom implies and as I will say more plainly, laughably bad. You do not tell people the house is on fire and then try to sell them a fire extinguisher with a paid partnership hashtag.

But here is where I part ways with how people are using this piece.

McMillan Cottom is making a structural argument about power and who gets left behind. She is right. And the women in my calls are using it as a reason to reject the tools entirely, which is exactly the response that ensures they get left behind.

AI is the new digital divide.

I say this as someone who has been studying the digital divide since graduate school, since the days when it was about who had access to the internet and who had the hardware to use it. And do you know who scooped up the toys first back then? The same people who are scooping them up now. While women remained analog, by choice or by circumstance, the infrastructure of the next economy was being built without them.

I am so tired of watching this pattern repeat.

Rejecting the tools is not resistance. It is the same problem people have with capitalism. You can hate the system and still have to operate within it while you work to change it. You can know that the tech bros are extracting value from your labor and your creativity and still decide that you are not going to unilaterally disarm while they build the next generation of infrastructure.

Aren't you sick and tired of always coming in last?

The digital divide did not close because women refused to use computers. It closed because enough women decided to learn the tools, use them on their own terms, and build things the boys had not thought to build. That is the only version of this that has ever worked.

And I will say one more uncomfortable thing. Some of what I see in these conversations is not actually about ethics or the environment or IP. Some of it is grief. Grief for a creative economy where the barriers to entry were high enough that getting in meant something. Where being a good writer or designer or strategist was a protected category. Where your skill set was a moat.

That moat is gone. And instead of asking what to build now that it is gone, some people are standing at the edge of it insisting it should still be there.

It should not. It was never as protective as it felt. And the energy you are spending grieving it is energy you could be using to build what comes next.

Or, genuinely and without sarcasm: if you are being called to go fully off grid and homestead, I hope you mean it. That is a legitimate choice. But it is the only legitimate version of opting out. Everything else is just performing resistance while using the WiFi.

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I want you to use the tools, including the ones that make you uncomfortable, not because the tech bros told you to, but because the highest version of what you are trying to build deserves the best possible infrastructure underneath it. Delegating tedious overhead to a capable tool is not laziness. It is the opposite of laziness. It frees your most human, most irreplaceable energy for the work only you can do.

The people who are not afraid of this moment are not the ones who have it figured out. They are the ones who were already doing the work and can therefore see the tools clearly for what they are: an upgrade, not a replacement.

The people who are most afraid are not afraid of the technology. They are afraid of the clarity.

I use AI every day and I am not afraid or ashamed to say it. These LLMs have been in my world since I was getting my masters degree to become a librarian, long before the tech bros rebranded them into something more marketable. So when you are freaking out about tools you cannot even name because you are too afraid to learn them in depth, there is something worth examining in that fear. Not because I am judging you for having it. But because you do not get to opt out of this era, and the gap between the people who are engaging and the people who are not is widening faster than you think.

The people who will be impossible to replace in this next era are not the ones who avoided the tools. They are the ones who used the tools AND did the deeper work of knowing who they are, what they actually think, and how to show up with enough specificity and earned authority that no prompt can replicate them.

That is not a spiritual concept. It is a marketing strategy.

The creative reps you log, the consistency you build, the point of view you develop and defend in public over time, that is what makes you distinguishable from the lazy AI output flooding every channel right now. And lazy AI output is very, very distinguishable if you know what you are looking for. Your audience knows too, even if they cannot name it yet.

The mirror has no feelings.

You do.

Use them.

👉 Check out the Dojo, below...

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🥋 Build the Reps. Own the Room.

The Creator Economy Dojo is where we do exactly what this article is asking of you.

Not a course you consume and forget. A working room where you log the reps, develop the point of view, and build the kind of body of work that compounds over time and cannot be replicated by someone who skipped the deeper work.

Consistency, messaging, ecosystem, and the creative muscle that makes you genuinely irreplaceable in your industry.

Founding member spots are still open at $197/month. I am closing them mid-summer.

👉 Join the Creator Economy Dojo or click, below, to try it out in June's workshop... a continuation of the Claude for Creators series.

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Let's Hang Out Guess what? I'm a featured story in the new edition of the Triple Diamond print magazine! You get to hear all my spicy takes on "coloring all the way to the edge." The theme of this issue is all about changing perceptions and I've been having quite the field day surfing the waves of change lately. My goal in my marketing is to demonstrate for others how to do this even when it's hard. So if you need to fill your gumption gas tank... I've got you. You can order your copy here.

Participate + Join In: You're going to be feeling like this GIF when you get yourself some sweet ass automation tools! This newsletter is created in Kit and they just released their AI workflow plugins. I was working on my email marketing optimization to build some new strategy to increase my open & click rates. I started doing it manually, then got access to the MCP and completed the analysis in less than an hour... and that included time to batch about 2 months of sales emails on top of it. Get it here.​

🗞️ Gossip From the Creator Trenches

😺 Not Everything Extraordinary Is Fake

There is a creator out there who is essentially a living anime character dropped into the Austrian Alps with a magical cat familiar, and I need you to go watch him immediately. When I see people in the comments insisting he must be AI generated, it tells me something very specific about where they are right now. Cynicism dressed up as media literacy is still just cynicism. And for the record, it is excellent data. I will not be collaborating with someone who has trained themselves out of being able to recognize genuine joy. Some creators are just that extraordinary. Let them be.
🔗 Stop being so cynical​

📲 The Era You Are Waiting to End Has Already Ended

Agentic AI interface is a term worth learning right now because it describes the thing that is already reshaping how people find information, discover businesses, and make decisions, and it has very little to do with your Facebook strategy. Who controls media distribution controls everything. That is not an abstract tech concept. It is the reason you found out about the last restaurant that opened near you, the last news story that changed how you thought about something, the last creator you decided to trust. That infrastructure is shifting and the people who understand how it works now are the ones who will know how to show up inside it.
🔗 The shift is already here​

💩 Slop Has a Source and It Is Always Human

AI did not invent low quality output. It just made it faster and cheaper to produce at scale. The thesis circulating in this carousel is worth sitting with: the fish stinks from the head. Humans are in charge of AI, which means humans are responsible for what it produces, and the quick and easy promises from low priced grifts are about to become the most obvious fingerprints of where the slop originated. The benefit that consumer level AI is actually giving us, underneath all the noise and fear and legitimate concern, is the gift of accountability. Slop is slop. And now everyone can see it.
🔗 How sloppy is the world already​