Sensible Woo is the mind. Sasquatch Media Grounds is the muscle.
Hey Reader,
Happy No Kings Day! 💥 If you’re out there marching this weekend, good. Truly. Wear good shoes, bring water, and be safe. We need people showing up. 👟
But I’ve been sitting with something this week that I can’t quite shake, and it’s not just about politics. It’s about business. It’s about media. It’s about how we’re all moving through this moment and what it means to try to build anything meaningful while the world feels like it’s held together with duct tape and spite.
I came back from SXSW and dropped straight into a pile of proposals, overdue follow-ups, and studio work. (A good problem to have, to be clear.) Sasquatch is busy. The machine is moving. And yes, I’ll point you to my SXSW talk a little further down in this email because the replay is finally live and I’m very excited about that. 🎉
But alongside all of that momentum, I’ve also been watching the same broader pattern show up again and again in conversations with smart, capable people.
People are… not fully paying attention.
Not because they’re stupid, or because they’re bad, but because the volume of everything right now is overwhelming, and when that happens, most people don’t deepen their discernment. They reach for relief.
A shortcut.
A platform.
A cleaner, easier answer.
And one of the questions I keep getting lately is:
“Should I move to Substack?”
Short answer: hell no.
Not because Substack is inherently evil software. I’m not interested in flattening every tool into some cartoon villain, even though their primary investor went to the dark side. It’s because of what it represents. It’s another system that promises to reduce your effort by taking over your distribution. It gives you a little algorithm, a little built-in discovery, a little dopamine hit that whispers maybe you won’t have to work so hard to be seen.
But you don’t own that system. You don’t control how it changes. And you sure as hell don’t control who benefits from your dependency on it.
That’s the part I think people keep missing.
We are living through a moment where civil liberties, information channels, and public trust are all under pressure… and yet so many business owners are still looking for solutions that remove their agency in exchange for convenience.
That is not a small trade.
Your email list? You own that.
Your podcast feed? You own that.
Your website? You own that.
Yes, it takes more work.
But we need to be more honest about what kind of work we’re talking about here. Because “more work” in this case is not punishment. It’s leverage. And infrastructure. It’s the difference between renting your visibility and building something that can keep working for you when the internet gets weird (which, let’s be honest, is all the fucking time now).
And once I started seeing that pattern in business, I couldn’t unsee how much it mirrors everything else.
Marching is work. Staying informed is work. Becoming civically engaged in your actual community is work. And it’s not the kind of work that always feels glamorous or instantly rewarding. It’s the kind that asks something of you: time, energy, attention, and sometimes consequence. (Again… ask me how I know.)
The exact same measurement exists in your business.
We are long past the era where publishing alone makes you special. In 1999, sure. 🌟 Gold star. Today? Anyone can publish because the barriers are gone. The playing field is crowded, which means the stakes have changed.
And the stakes are not technical anymore... they’re personal.
Do you have the stamina to build a body of work?
Do you have the discernment to create something worth paying attention to?
Do you have the systems to support visibility when it starts showing up?
Because your content is not just “content.” It’s not a cute little marketing side quest.
It’s your distribution channel.
It’s your reputation.
It’s your access point to revenue.
And building that requires a full ecosystem: production, systems, distribution, monetization, promotion, original thought, human perspective. All of it.
You can do all of that yourself if you want to. You can also get help with the parts you’re not meant to carry alone. But what you cannot do anymore is pretend that publishing one cute little post and hoping for the best counts as a growth strategy.
It doesn’t.
And if you’ve been quietly craving more visibility, more recognition, more traction, more something… then there’s a deeper question sitting underneath all of that that I want you to chew on. I’m breaking that out in its own section below because it deserves its own spotlight.
It’s the question: Do you want to be famous?
Not in the cringe, influencer, ring-light-in-your-car way. I mean in the real way. The kind that asks whether you’re prepared to be known, trusted, referred, and chosen.
That’s where this all leads.
So if your nervous system is screaming for shortcuts right now, I want you to consider a different possibility:
Maybe what you need is not less responsibility.
⬇️
Maybe what you need is to become more capable of holding your own agency.
And if you want the fuller version of how I’m thinking about all of this, scroll down to get all the elements at play in my operating system right now. The most important thing is that you start engaging in community with people who operate at the same level as you.
👉 Check out the Dojo, below...
Gossip From the Creator Trenches...
🎨 Sora Got the Hook
Well well well… even Disney’s legal death star can’t force a perfect outcome. OpenAI quietly dumped Sora’s AI art arm, and I have thoughts. First, this reeks of overdue correction after the absurd overvaluation of anything attached to ChatGPT. Second, I think this is an early warning sign: the tech bros wanted mass adoption of AI-generated art… and the masses said, “ehhh, no thanks.” Even Disney trying to cozy up to it because they couldn’t beat it? Not looking so cute now. Welcome to Billionaire Theatre: Season 2.
🔗 Watch the unraveling
💀 Not So Fast, Bestie
A court did rule against Meta and Google in a case tied to mental health harms… and at first glance, it looked like a win. Cue the cheering, right? Not so fast. It turns out this case has been heavily backed by conservative legal machinery (including the Heritage Foundation + adjacent players), and the deeper implications are a lot uglier than the headlines suggest. We’re talking Trojan Horse territory: the kind of “protect the children” framing that can be used to justify identity verification, surveillance, and expanded control over who gets to speak, post, or exist online without being tracked. In other words… this is a perfect example of how easy it is to hand over your agency when you only grab the easy takeaway. And yes, the progressive left and mainstream media are just as guilty of not digging deeper before celebrating.
🔗 Check the fine print before you clap
📰 Your News Feed Is on Drugs
No, we are not surprised that Google’s AI-generated news headlines are mangling reality. But we should still be alarmed, because these headlines are fucked all the way up. And when public trust in news is already hanging by a thread, injecting AI misinformation directly into headlines is not a quirky bug. It’s a societal problem. This is your reminder that AI is already embedded in the tools you use every day, whether you invited it in or not. Which means media literacy is no longer optional. You have to fact-check your whole fucking environment now. Annoying? Yes. Necessary? Also yes.
🔗 Reality check yourself
🎤 The SXSW Replay Is Live
It’s up, baby. 🤓
My SXSW talk, Why Bold Creative Wins, is officially live… and I’m still riding a very real high from getting to close out the Futures track at Podcast Movement Evolutions.
If you’ve ever wanted the distilled version of what I’ve been saying in this newsletter for the last two years about media, attention, independent creators, and why your voice matters more than ever… this is the talk.
Also, major flowers to the media team because they somehow filtered out the absolute Hunger Games of podcast networking chaos happening in the room around the mainstage. I felt like I was yelling into the mic because I could barely hear myself think… but the final replay sounds fantastic.
Huge thanks to Podcast Movement and Sounds Profitable for having me on stage. I had a blast, and I already want to do it again.
👉 Watch the replay
And if you’re in the mood for a full creator economy nerd-out…
👉 Cue up the full watch party
🎤 Do You Want to Be Known?
Not famous. Known. Known for your ideas, your work, your point of view... known enough that the right people can find you, trust you, and eventually hand you money without needing seventeen touchpoints and a free PDF first.
That's what "more visibility" actually means. Not random eyeballs. It's about traction and momentum. Watching less interesting people get the opportunities while you publish into what feels like a very polite void? Yeah, we're fixing that.
Here's the part that stings: you don't become known by showing up with good intentions and a decent mic. You become known by building the capacity to hold attention once it arrives. And honestly? Most of you reading this aren't broke. You've just been operating like you are for so long it became a habit... and that habit has a ceiling you've been bumping your head on for a minute now.
The Creator Economy Dojo is where we fix that. Consistency, ecosystem, messaging, monetization, visibility that doesn't evaporate the second a platform gets weird. Because being visible without systems is just burnout in a cute outfit.
There are 6 founding spots left at $197/month. I'm closing this round by mid-summer.
👉 Join the Creator Economy Dojo
🔥 The Calm Before the Push
All planets are finally direct… which sounds like a green light, but it’s not a free-for-all.
This week sits in a very specific pocket of energy where forward motion is available, but the way you move matters more than how fast you move. We’re still in the final stretch of Mars in Pisces, which means your intuition, your capacity, and your nervous system are leading the charge… not hustle, not pressure, not urgency.
Translation: you don’t get to bulldoze your way into the next chapter.
This is the moment where you choose your direction on purpose… clean up what feels off… and stop carrying anything that you already know isn’t coming with you. Because once the pace picks up next week, it’s going to be a lot harder to pretend you didn’t know better.
✨ Tap into the full reading inside Woo Crew and get grounded before the momentum hits. ⤵️
Want the whole thing?
Join the Woo Crew for $7/month and get the full reading. Because the next chapter doesn’t need more from you… it needs a different version of you.
Let's Hang Out
Did you know... you can get my keynote with a full workshop day from The Grow Retreat? I spoke at this private retreat in January and we used romance tropes to help you find your connection to your audience. If they're not falling in love with you, what are doing? You can register here and check out a clip from the event replay. This retreat was amazing and I encourage you to try the virtual event or register for the in person version next year!
|
|
Participate + Join In
Did you know that you can borrow my brain for a la carte strategy? Yup. If you're stuck on a hamster wheel with your podcast, you might find a quick power hour is just what you need to move forward again.
 |
$197.00
Borrow My Brain: Talk Me Out of My Content Spiral, Mary
|
|
