Why I Will Never Charge For Content

The internet is full of people who got rich telling you how to get rich.

I'm not one of them.

I run two companies. Neither makes a dollar from content. I have no course. No paid community. No newsletter behind a paywall.

No "free webinar" that's actually a 90-minute sales pitch. No lead magnet designed to harvest your email so I can sell you something later.

Everything I publish is free. Everything I will ever publish will be free.

This is not a phase. This is a permanent decision, and this article is the explanation.

The Grift Has a Structure

You've seen it enough times to recognize the pattern — you just haven't named it yet.

The VC content machine.

A venture capitalist posts on X: "your startup just sold for $10M — what would you do?"

It looks like curiosity. It feels like inspiration. It is neither.

It's designed to make you dream. To make you believe the venture path is realistic. To feed the VC's deal flow.

According to Harvard Business School research, nearly 70% of venture capital deals come from the investor's personal network — and X is now a primary tool for building that network.

When a VC posts "inspirational founder" content, they are not educating you. They are sourcing inventory.

You are the deal flow.

The math they never share: 90% of startups fail. Even at Y Combinator — the best accelerator on earth, with a 1% acceptance rate and the most elite founder network in existence — 55% of resolved startups shut down. Another 20% become zombies.

The unicorn exits that VCs actually need to make their fund work? Just 8% of all YC exits.

But those are the stories they tweet about. The other 92% don't make good content.

The financial influencer pipeline.

In 2022, the SEC and DOJ charged eight social media "stock-picking gurus" with running a $114 million pump-and-dump scheme.

They had a combined 1.5 million followers on X. They promoted themselves as expert traders, hyped stocks to their audiences, and dumped their positions while their followers were still buying.

The same year, the SEC fined Kim Kardashian $1.26 million for promoting crypto to her 330 million Instagram followers without disclosing she was paid to do it.

These are the cases that got caught.

The legal version of this — the version that doesn't get prosecuted — is everywhere. A fund manager tweets "stack sats" while his company is structured to survive the crash that his followers are not.

The recursive course seller.

A creator launches a $997 course on how to build a business. What is the creator's actual business? Selling the course. The business the course teaches you to build is a course business. It's a closed loop that exists to sustain itself.

The information inside — the frameworks, the templates, the "proven playbooks" — is now available instantly from AI.

The only thing left that has value is the creator's audience. And that audience only exists because new people haven't yet realized they're the product.

The Saylor blueprint.

Michael Saylor's company Strategy holds 717,131 Bitcoin — acquired for $54.5 billion at an average cost of roughly $76,000 per coin. Bitcoin currently trades around $68,000.

That's approximately $5.7 billion in unrealized losses. The stock is down nearly 80% from its peak.

While Saylor tweets "stack sats" to retail investors, his company holds $6 billion in convertible debt with maturities spread between 2027 and 2032, $2.25 billion in cash reserves for dividend payments, and 717,131 unencumbered Bitcoin — meaning none of it is pledged as collateral.

This week, Saylor said publicly that Strategy can survive Bitcoin falling to $8,000.

His followers are not structured to survive anything.

Every retail buyer who listens to "stack sats" pushes the price closer to his breakeven. That's not advice. That's a position.

These aren't isolated bad actors. This is the dominant business model of the internet: create content that appears to help people while the actual function of that content is to serve the creator's financial position.

Most people have been so marinated in it that they've stopped noticing.

I notice. And I refuse to participate.

The Information Economy Is Over

The entire creator economy was built on a single premise: "I know something you don't. Pay me to learn it."

That worked when information was scarce, hard to organize, and hard to apply.

Want to learn Facebook Ads? Buy my course. Want to build a SaaS? Join my community. Want my stock picks? Subscribe to my premium newsletter.

AI destroyed this premise. Not gradually. Completely.

Every framework in those courses, every template, every playbook — all of it is now available instantly, for free, from systems that don't sleep, don't gatekeep, and don't charge.

The information layer of the economy has been commoditized to zero.

This is not a trend. It is a permanent structural shift. Information will never be scarce again.

The creators still selling information products are coasting on brand loyalty built between 2020 and 2023.

Their audiences haven't fully realized they no longer need the product.

But new audiences aren't converting. The numbers are declining. The smart creators feel it in their gut. The rest will find out on their balance sheets.

The age of "pay me to tell you what I know" is ending.

What replaces it is the question that matters.

What Replaces It

I'm 27 years old. I wasted three years on the venture capital path.

That's a third of my adult life. Gone. On a model that was broken before I started.

I watched people I respect — people smarter than me, people who worked harder than me — burn five years, seven years, and end up with nothing.

Or end up with something that looked like success from the outside and felt like failure on the inside.

Raised $50M. Landed enterprise clients. Secured backing from first-tier Silicon Valley firms. From the outside, they won.

From the inside, a small group of people know they failed catastrophically.

I'm one of them.

I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because it's the part no one publishes. The VC tweets the exit. The founder tweets the funding round.

Nobody tweets the three a.m. call where you realize the unit economics will never work and you've spent four years of your life pretending they might.

I started writing about this in 2022. One tweet a day. What I tried. What failed. What worked. What I'd never do again.

Not theory. Not frameworks. The real thing, published as it happened.

I got serious about distribution six months ago. Three million views in two weeks.

The content worked because it offered something AI cannot generate: lived stakes.

AI can produce a flawless guide to starting a business. AI cannot say "I made this specific mistake and here is what it cost me." AI does not have skin in the game. AI has not lost three years to a broken model and come out the other side with something to say about it.

This is the only content that will hold value as information becomes free — proof of work from someone who actually did the thing.

Not someone who read about the thing. Not someone who teaches the thing.

Someone who did it, paid the price, and is still here.

That is what I publish. That is what will always be free.

"But How Do You Actually Make Money?"

Not from you reading this.

The people who find my work and stay tend to be high-agency, values-aligned, and building real things. That's not an accident — it's the filter working.

Free content with no ulterior motive attracts a fundamentally different audience than content designed to convert.

The best clients, partners, and opportunities I've ever had came through publishing — not through funnels.

I didn't optimize for them. I didn't design a conversion path. They showed up because the work was honest and they could tell.

I'm not going to over-explain the mechanics. The point is simple: when you stop trying to extract value from your audience, you attract people who create value.

The downstream economics of that are better than any course launch or paid community could ever produce.

You don't need to believe me. Watch what happens.

Why This Matters Beyond Me

This is not really an article about my content strategy.

It's about a structural change in how trust works online.

We are entering a period where AI can produce unlimited content that is polished, persuasive, and indistinguishable from human expertise.

Every piece of advice, every framework, every guide — AI will produce it faster, cheaper, and more convincingly than any creator can.

The only thing AI cannot fake is cost.

Real decisions. Real stakes. Real consequences borne by a real person with a name and a reputation and something to lose.

The creators who survive the next decade will not be the ones with the best information.

They will be the ones who paid the highest price for what they know — and are willing to share it without a meter running.

That's not a content strategy. That's a trust architecture.

And it cannot be automated, gamed, or copied.

The Line

I will make enemies online. People who sell $997 courses don't appreciate being called out.

VCs who use content as deal-flow marketing would rather I stayed quiet. Financial influencers who are net long on the positions they promote to you — they'd prefer no one did the math.

That's fine.

They monetize their audiences. I don't.

They post to sell. I don't.

People can judge for themselves.

Like me or hate me, I'll be here for a while.

Everything stays free. Everything stays honest.

Go build something real.

P.S. — Full transparency: I receive bi-weekly payments from X for content performance. That money goes into a separate account I don't touch. It offsets hosting, editing, and production costs — the infrastructure that keeps everything free. I don't profit from any social media platform. The funds stay invested in making the work better for you.