July 21, 2026
Technology can have both a positive and a negative effect on our lives, and most of us never stop to work out which one we’re getting. We adopt, we scroll, we outsource — and somewhere along the way we quietly hand over the one thing nobody should ever hold on our behalf: our own authority.
Here is my desire: the end of influencers.
Which may sound strange coming from someone who, to those looking from the outside in, might consider what I’m doing as trying to “influence” people. And that’s fair — in the literal sense, it’s true. But I’ll reiterate this as often as I need to: I am not an influencer. I don’t want anyone to blindly follow what I say because I believe in it. What I want is for people to listen, digest, research, consider — and then intuitively know whether it’s for them or not.
That’s the difference. An influencer wants your agreement. I want your discernment.
The Great Handover
For too long we’ve handed over our authority on almost everything:
Our health — to doctors, who see us for ten minutes and reach for a prescription pad. Our wealth — to financial advisers, who profit whether we do or not. Our love lives — to dating apps, where an algorithm decides who we’re compatible with. Our food — to labels and marketing departments. Our training — to whatever the fitness industry is selling this quarter.
None of these people or systems are inherently evil. Some doctors are brilliant. Some advisers genuinely care. But here’s what they all have in common: they are not you. They don’t live in your body. They don’t know how you feel when you wake up, what your gut tells you when something’s off, or what you’re actually capable of. And yet we treat their word as final and our own knowing as an afterthought.
We’ve been trained to do this. From school onwards, the message is consistent: the expert knows, you don’t. Sit down, take notes, don’t question. It’s efficient for institutions. It’s catastrophic for individuals.
What Technology Takes
And as technology becomes more entwined with our lives, we lose more than we gain — ultimately, cognition and knowing itself.
Easy example: before mobile phones, we had to remember people’s numbers. It required long-term memory, recall, effort. We’ve lost that. Not because our brains got worse, but because we stopped asking them to do the work. The capacity atrophied the same way a muscle does when you stop training it.
Now scale that up. We don’t navigate — we follow the blue line. We don’t sit with a question — we Google it before we’ve even finished forming the thought. We don’t decide what to think about the day’s events — we open an app and let a feed decide for us. Every one of these is a small handover. Individually, harmless. Collectively, they add up to a mind that’s forgotten how to work for itself.
AI will accelerate this dramatically. It will either become the greatest thinking tool humanity has ever had — or the final outsourcing of thought itself. Which one it becomes, for you, depends entirely on whether you kept your discernment sharp.
This Is Not Anti-Learning
Don’t get me wrong — I am not saying stop listening to people. Far from it. Listen, read, watch, and keep learning. Learn from people decades ahead of you. Seek out those who’ve done what you want to do. I’ve spent 34 years training drug-free, and I learned from hundreds of sources along the way.
But learn to use discernment with that newly acquired knowledge.
Discernment is the missing skill. It’s the filter between information and action. Without it, you’re a leaf in the wind — swayed by whoever spoke last, loudest, or with the best production values. With it, you become the final authority on your own life, using everyone else’s knowledge as input rather than instruction.
Here’s how it works in practice:
Listen fully. Don’t dismiss ideas because of who said them, and don’t accept them for the same reason. Take the idea on its own merits.
Digest slowly. The urgency is manufactured. Almost nothing needs deciding today. Sit with it. Sleep on it.
Research beyond the source. Who benefits if you believe this? Follow the money. In my world, the supplement industry is the masterclass in this — an entire multi-billion pound machine built on convincing you that you’re deficient, broken, and one purchase away from fixed.
Test it against your own experience. Your body, your results, your lived reality — these are data too. Better data, often, than any study designed by someone with something to sell.
Then decide. Not because I said so. Not because a doctor, a guru, or an algorithm said so. Because you weighed it and you know.
The Endgame
My genuine hope is that everything I put out makes itself redundant. That you take what’s useful, test it, keep what works, discard what doesn’t — and end up needing no influencer, no guru, and eventually not even me.
That’s what taking back your authority looks like. Not rejecting all outside knowledge, but restoring the correct order: information advises, you decide.
Train hard. Think deep. Live clean.
And above all — think for yourself.
