What I Will and Won't Do

Why This Document Exists

I've watched enough people I respected turn into people I don't recognize.

Not overnight. Gradually. One justified compromise at a time.

The pattern is always the same. Someone builds a platform on credibility. The audience grows. The monetization opportunities appear.

Each one seems reasonable in isolation. Then one day, 70% of their own followers are begging them to stop and they launch anyway because the incentive structure has fully captured them.

I don't think those people are fundamentally different from me. I think they faced incentives that are stronger than character, and they didn't have structural defenses in place before the incentives arrived.

This document is my structural defense. Not a brand exercise. A list of specific, verifiable commitments written down while the stakes are still low — so that if they get high and I start drifting, you'll see the gap between who I said I'd be and who I'm becoming. Before I do.

Values erode under enough incentive. Public commitments are harder to walk back.

The Short Version

I make money when the people I work with make money. Not before. Not instead. Not regardless.

Everything I publish is free. Everything I claim is verifiable. If I'm wrong, I'll say so publicly.

What I Will Do

Stay in the arena.

I run businesses. I take equity positions. I put my own money at risk.

I work directly with founders in rooms, on calls, making decisions that have real consequences. The day I stop operating and only do content is the day you should stop listening to me.

I cap my content time at 10 hours a week at most. Not because content isn't important — but because the cap forces me to stay in the arena.

If I'm spending 40 hours a week on content and zero on actual business decisions, the content will eventually disconnect from reality. And I won't notice because the audience metrics will feel like "results."

Publish my losses.

Not just wins. If something doesn't produce the outcomes I hoped for, you'll hear about it. If an equity position goes to zero, I'll write about what I got wrong. If I make a bad call, I'll document it publicly.

Every extractor I've watched follows the same pattern: share wins aggressively, bury losses quietly.

Over time, the audience develops an inflated picture of the person's track record. That distortion is what enables extraction. Publishing losses is the thing that's structurally incompatible with grifting — if you're transparent about your failures, the audience can accurately assess your judgment. Accurate assessment is the enemy of extraction.

Keep my economics aligned with yours.

My best revenue lines are the ones where I only profit if you profit. Equity positions. Outcome-based fees. Skin in the game.

I will never launch a financial vehicle where I profit from the raise rather than the outcome. I will never take a promote fee or sponsor fee that pays me regardless of what happens to the people who put money in.

If I ever launch something where I get paid regardless of whether it works for you — that's the red flag. Call it out.

My audience is never the customer.

The audience is the garden. The people who walk out of the garden ready to do real work with me — those are the customers.

No courses. No paid communities. No premium newsletters. No info products. No gated content. There is no funnel behind my tweets. The creator economy was built on "I know something you don't — pay me to learn it." AI has all the information now. That model is dying, and it should die.

My companies make money. My content nurtures the garden. Everything I publish stays free. The work behind it is where the real economics live.

Work with small numbers of people directly.

Dozens per year. Not hundreds. Not thousands. People I work with face to face, where they can see exactly what I do and how I do it.

You can grift 6 million podcast listeners who never interact with you. You cannot grift the people who are in the room with you, who see your real-time decisions and their real-world outcomes. I will never optimize for audience size over relationship depth.

What I Won't Do

Monetize access or influence.

No $1,000 dinners. No "inner circle" tiers. No "exclusive community" memberships. No pay-to-get-close-to-George products.

No speaking fees or sponsorships that could compromise what I say. If someone pays me, you'll know about it. If a payment could affect my objectivity on a topic, I won't take the money.

Access is not a product. It's a byproduct of doing real work together. If you're paying, it's for work we're doing together, not for the privilege of being nearby.

Perform conviction I don't have.

This is the subtlest form of drift and the hardest to catch. It starts when you notice that a certain type of take gets 10x the engagement. So you lean into it.

Then you start shading your actual opinion slightly in that direction because the engagement feels like validation. Then one day you're saying things publicly that you wouldn't say privately, and you're not sure when the gap opened.

I will tell you what I think, why I think it, and where I'm uncertain. If my opinion might be compromised by a financial interest, I'll disclose the interest every time — even if it makes the content less shareable.

The moment I catch myself performing conviction I don't have, I'll either correct publicly or stop posting until I figure out where the drift started.

Engagement is not a reason to say something. Conviction is. When they conflict, conviction wins.

Build a media empire.

I'm not trying to become a full-time commentator or "thought leader." Content supports the businesses. The businesses are the point.

If content-adjacent revenue — speaking, affiliates, sponsorships — ever exceeds what I make from actual operational work, something is wrong and I'll say so publicly.

I will resist the gravitational pull of "the content is working, do more of that and less of the hard stuff." Because the hard stuff is what keeps the content honest.

What Will Change (And What Won't)

The specific businesses I run will evolve. AI is moving fast.

What works in Jan 1, 2026 may not work in Jan 2, 2026. I killed my SaaS product in December. I'll probably kill other things too. That's not drift. That's reality.

What won't change is the structure underneath: I will always be operating, not just talking. My revenue will always be tied to outcomes for the people I serve.

Content will always support the businesses. Scale will always stay small enough for accountability.

When a business line changes, I'll document it: what changed, why, and how the new line maintains these commitments. No quiet pivots. No unexplained revenue shifts.

The businesses are the variable. The structure is the constant.

How to Hold Me to This

This document is dated and public. If I drift, you have the evidence.

If you work with me directly — in a cohort, as a client, as a collaborator — your explicit job includes telling me when I'm full of shit.

I'm giving you that permission now, while I mean it. Because the version of me that's drifting in three years won't ask for that feedback voluntarily.

I'll revisit this document every 90 days. If anything changes, I'll say what changed and why. If I remove a commitment, I'll explain the removal publicly. Every version is timestamped.

I can't guarantee through willpower that I'll never drift.

Willpower is a terrible defense against years of compounding incentives.

What I can do is make the honest path the easy path and the grift path the expensive path.

Public commitments I'd have to visibly break. Economics that only pay when my people win. Accountability structures that don't depend on my continued willingness to be honest.

And if the day comes where I start walking this back — I want you to hold this document up, point to the specific line I broke, and say: "You said you wouldn't do this."

That's not a punishment. That's a gift.

— George