The defense against slop and brainrot

What I am doing to prevent myself from stagnating and rotting.

Johannes Vermeer - "The Lacemaker"

I used to type The Great Gatsby word for word, page after page, at my desk when I couldn't write a single original sentence. The idea came from Hunter S. Thompson, who re-typed Fitzgerald and Hemingway just to feel world-class prose move under his fingers. It felt ridiculous. I questioned if I was wasting my time. But by the final page, something had shifted—I could sense how clean sentences snap into place, the way a pianist's fingers know where middle C lives without looking.

That grinding, repetitive friction built something no language model can download into you: muscle memory for excellence.

This is the resistance training nobody talks about anymore. The more the world automates, the more value accrues to people who continue to condition their fundamental capabilities. It's like watching a gym empty out because everyone discovered protein powder—meanwhile, the few who keep showing up, deadlifting and squatting, get exponentially stronger.

Our brains are designed to prefer shortcuts, and AI has become the ultimate shortcut dealer. GPT drafts emails while you sip coffee. Midjourney generates logos in thirty seconds. TikTok explains Stoicism in eleven slides of pastel text. The temptation is obvious: outsource the friction, save time.

But time saved is not always strength gained.

When friction disappears, so does a hidden form of conditioning. Consider what happens when you remove resistance from any training: your muscles atrophy. The same principle applies to mental capabilities. Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn't do, a pattern your neurons didn't carve deeper.

No, really. This is on a scientific level. Consider this passage from the book, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle:

“The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here’s why. Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin’s vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”

It makes me think of the quote by Vladimir Horowitz: "If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip practice for three days, the world notices."

More than half of American adults now read below a sixth-grade level. Let that sink in. Half the population struggles with the cognitive equivalent of a basic push-up. How do you think they'll fare when AI-generated content floods their feeds looking authoritative but hollow? A population that skims headlines will drown in what we now call "AI slop"—the endless stream of plausible-sounding nonsense that passes casual filters.

The game has shifted. Your parents can't tell the difference between AI video and reality. My local bagel shop uses AI-generated images when an iPhone photo would work better. Anyone can look capable; fewer people can be capable.

That makes the old, slow disciplines worth your life.

Real athletes understand something most people miss: boring fundamentals create explosive performance when it counts. While amateurs chase fancy techniques, professionals drill basic movements until they become involuntary. Kobe Bryant was obsessed with the basics. The best writers still study sentence structure and write in the margins.

This is my training regimen for an automated world, a recipe for anti-slop and anti-brainrot:

Every morning, I write 2,000-3,000 words. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, so whenever someone asks me why I’m a good storyteller/presenter or how I can write 10 taglines in under 10 seconds, it’s because I put in the work. I write to think out loud, to process my life, to flip over every stone in my head. It's mental calisthenics. Some days it's garbage. But after years of this discipline, I can think clearly under pressure, find the through-line in complex problems, and translate abstract concepts into clear language.

I read fifty pages of actual books daily. Not summaries, not highlights, not audio at 2x speed. I read slowly enough to see the worlds authors paint behind my eyelids. Books lengthen your attention span the way running lengthens your calves: gradually, painfully, permanently. When everyone else's focus fragments, mine compounds.

I lift weights five days a week, focusing on the fundamentals: deadlifts, squats, push-ups, pull-ups, and kettlebells. After my Achilles surgery forced me back to basics, I rediscovered something profound—timeless movements that have conditioned human bodies for centuries work better than any trend or tool.

On weekends, I walk ten miles through the city with a camera, paying attention to beauty that algorithms can't generate. I also meet friends for long dinners, where we actually listen to each other instead of performing for screens. These practices resist optimization because they're already optimized for what matters: human connection, aesthetic appreciation, and present-moment awareness.

After years of this seemingly inefficient approach, I've noticed that if you can think well, AI becomes a multiplier. If you can't, AI just amplifies your mistakes.

The people who built strong foundational capabilities—who can read deeply, think critically, create originally—use these tools as extensions of their existing strength. They prompt with precision because they understand the underlying principles. They edit AI outputs because they recognize quality from their own hard-earned pattern library.

The people who skipped the fundamentals become dependent on tools they don't understand, producing work they can't evaluate, making decisions based on outputs they can't verify.

This is why I constantly tell designers to go to the library. Go to the museum. Look at timeless works. So much of life is pattern recognition and simulation. The richer the archive of materials you can reference, the more that shows up in your work.

Social media was level one of this challenge, and it absolutely fucking cooked society. AI is level two in this maze—the three-headed sphinx whispering promises and threats simultaneously. Many who surrendered their focus in round one will surrender their critical thinking in round two.

Scarcity drives value. Focused thought is becoming scarce.

Will most people choose the slow lane of human conditioning over the fast lane of automated existence? Probably not. But that's exactly what makes it valuable.

The hard habits follow compound interest rules. Writing every morning doesn't make you a better writer immediately—it builds a thinking apparatus that serves you for decades. Reading deeply doesn't give you instant expertise—it creates neural pathways for processing complex information. Physical training doesn't just build muscle—it builds discipline that transfers to everything else.

These inputs don't scale as fast as GPUs, but their outputs compound quietly in the background of your life.

When I close my eyes now, I can feel how sentences want to flow together, the same way my fingers found their way around Gatsby after months of conditioning. That muscle memory, built through deliberate friction, has become my competitive advantage in a world racing toward the effortless.

The resistance training nobody talks about isn't happening in gyms—it's happening in the space between stimulus and response, in the choice between easy and excellent, in the daily decision to build strength instead of just borrowing it.

The few who commit to this conditioning will find themselves uniquely equipped to navigate whatever comes next. Not because they avoided the future, but because they trained for it.

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