Pushing Back on Slop Content

On Writing, AI, Integrity, and an Update on My Plans for 2026

A few minutes ago, I opened an email from some guy trying to sell me on an “AI Content Research Team” to feed me topics and scripts written in MY STYLE so I can publish EVERY DAY.

I pay for premium Grok. I’ve fed it my books and tried to train it to write in MY STYLE.

Integrity would prevent me from having AI write an essay or a book that I’d call my own, but there are all kinds of little writing projects and writing busywork that need to get done when you have several social media profiles and businesses.

To date, I can’t get Grok to produce anything that sounds remotely like me. The attempts always read like a woman at the New York Times tried to imagine how I would write and what I would say, and then put her essay through Grammarly and accepted all of its suggestions.

But then, I don’t write slop content.

Writing is a thinking process for me. When I start writing a book or an essay, I don’t know how it’s going to end. I don’t know what I’m going to say. When I begin, I’m usually responding to something emotionally, but my thoughts are incomplete. The ideas have to be worked out until I’m satisfied that I am making a coherent point.

Often, I write myself out of a position. It’s frustrating to spend 3 or 4 hours writing only to end up with something I can’t publish or some point that has to be completely reframed. But that’s what I think it means to be a good writer and an honest thinker.

You have to be able to say, “I sound like I’m full of shit” and scrap it or start over.

Last week, I started a rant on TikTok-style content and our individual responsibility for creating a hideous Idiocracy. It was tentatively titled “Digital Derelicte.” I got into the weeds with it, and it turned into a commentary on what is popular vs. what is best—possibly framed as aristos vs. demos. At that point, it escaped the scope of a piece about the pressure many of us feel to create stupid, ugly content for Instagram, so I scrapped it.

But I’m still thinking about what is popular vs. what is best, so here we are.

There was a big newsletter marketing trend that took off in the mid 2010s. That trend launched millions of copywriting careers—because almost no one successful or famous is going to sit down and write a daily newsletter. However, if you happen to be successful or famous, you can make a lot of money through email marketing.

Now, you know—or at least I hope you know—that guys like Andrew Tate and Alex Jones aren’t writing you a letter every day. They aren’t even writers, by trade. They pay ghostwriters to do that.

There are good, professional writers who do write their own emails every day or every few days. Certain subjects lend themselves to daily updates, such as sports, politics, and even fitness. Anything that involves sharing or reacting to daily news.

Other subjects don’t lend themselves to daily updates. What could you write about philosophy or virtue that would have any value if you had to churn something out every day? It would all be slop info content, like “3 Things Aristotle Said About Friendship” or “Argue Like Socrates Using This One Simple Trick.”

Then you’d reformat it and repost it to X as a thread or script it out for YouTube.

We don’t need people to write slop content like that anymore. AI can produce that. And people can go to AI for information about anything that interests them.

Two Ways Forward

There are two ways I see things going right now, and which way you choose as a creator probably depends on what kind of audience you want. As a consumer, the content you create a market for influences the culture you have to live in, and the culture that influences you—so think about that.

Retards buy a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of retards. If you want to sell the equivalent of Doritos, then follow all of the trends that flow from TikTok and use AI to produce as much daily slop content as you can for low agency people of low-to-average intelligence. Imagine what content would look like in Idiocracy, and then try to do that, but make it even dumber and trashier. Use the shit out of stickers, movie clips, and green screen effects. Talk into your phone like you just snorted a line of meth and you have to explain something to a hobo. Have AI write your newsletters, threads, and carousels, and produce all of the images for you. Slop the hogs.

The other way is to double down on quality, and hopefully attract a smaller audience of people who you’d actually want to have a conversation with. People are doing this, and if you don’t see it, your feeds are curated for the hog content.

If there’s a silver lining for humans in the AI boom—assuming it doesn’t kill us all—it is that AI may force humans to do what only humans can do, which is be human. AI can crank out derivative garbage faster than you can, but your human authenticity is in your effort and also in your understanding of the world beyond language. Do real things well and capture them beautifully. Write about things that only you can write about, in a way that only you can. Make original art. Do your best and most thoughtful work, because you can’t compete with AI when it comes to speed and volume.

My Plans for 2026

That second direction is the one I’ll be taking this year. I figured I’d take a moment to give you all an update on my current projects.

A New Book

I’m 2 chapters into a book on the topic of virtue. I don’t know how long it will take to complete it, but that will be the main focus of my writing this year. I suspect a lot of Substack articles and notes will be related to this project.

Substack

I’m going to double down on Substack. Moving my mailing list to Substack last year was a great decision. It made me feel like a writer again. Substack is where people go to read long-form writing, and, from what I have observed, it is one of the best platforms for serious thought and discussion. Because of the book and what I explained above about my process, I’ll probably continue to average a couple of posts a month, but I plan to use the notes for things I would have posted on X.

X

I get no traction on X. It seems to favor arguing about the “issue of the day,” and I made a decision years ago that I don’t want to spend my energy creating content that won’t be relevant in a week. I’m glad X exists, but it also seems to make a lot of people crazy and distort their perception of reality and public opinion. I’m deprioritizing it.

Videography and Filmmaking

I’m working as a photographer and videographer now—with a focus on fitness, strength sports, and martial arts. Hire me! It flows naturally from what I’ve been writing and speaking about over the past 15 years, and I have always been an artist first.

I am also uniquely qualified to film heroic training montages. As ideas present themselves, I’d also like to move into producing scenes and mini-docs.

I’m using my Instagram as my portfolio and sketchbook as I teach myself this craft. Let other people make forgettable video trash. I refuse to do it. I want to make images and films that are beautiful and express the ideas I write about in a different format.

The Order of Fire

A big part of my life is devoted to creating and promoting Solar Idealism and Solar Culture. My men’s group for Solar Idealists, The Order of Fire, is beginning its 4th year. We have three major ritual events planned in 2026, and we will be publishing the third volume of our journal, PH2T3R, in March or April. We are deprioritizing Instagram for The Order this year and prioritizing YouTube. I have planned a series of interviews with a member who is an anthropologist to talk about masculine archetypes. We’ll start that sometime in the first quarter.

As always, we’re looking for more of the right guys, so if you read my Substack and enjoyed my book Fire in the Dark, I encourage you to apply.

I hope you’re all having a great year so far.

Stay Solar ऋत