The Leo Babauta conversation we almost didn't publish

Sam Illingworth promised Slow AI would be free. Then his truth changed.

On July 1st of last year, Dr Sam Illingworth [https://substack.com/profile/253722705-dr-sam-illingworth] published the first post of Slow AI from his desk in Edinburgh and put a line in it that said he would never charge for the work. He was a tenured full professor with a PhD in atmospheric physics, a decade of public engagement behind him, a science & poetry blog that had peaked at a quarter-million views a year, and a past life as an award-winning playwright. He didn’t need this to pay for anything. What he wanted was simple. He wanted to give people honest, accessible information about AI at the exact moment the digital divide was about to widen. The problem with that opening promise was that he was about to spend twelve months learning everything he didn’t know about marketing, pricing, and what a paywall actually does for a creator’s ecosystem. His friend Mia Kiraki 🎭 [https://substack.com/profile/362428399-mia-kiraki] of Robot Stole My Homework, who he’d met through Substack, kept teasing him about it. He didn’t know what B2B meant until about six months before we recorded this episode . And the more he sat with that line in his first post, the less right it felt. “I think having the confidence to be able to realize that your truth can change with you as you evolve, that’s quite difficult to square.” Those were Sam’s words on the show. He said them about the day he decided to start charging for Slow AI. The irony is that the moment he changed his mind was the moment Slow AI started becoming what it is now. The part most people already know is the growth. Sixteen thousand subscribers in under a year. Just under three hundred of them paid at £100 a year. Paid members get access to a monthly webinar curriculum that ends in an accredited continuing professional development certificate, the kind you can write off as a tax expense or stack as actual credits. He runs a Slow AI Live every Monday with his friend from Exploring ChatGPT [https://substack.com/profile/119184925-exploring-chatgpt]. He just crossed a thousand followers on TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@theslowai], where he does investigative AI journalism. He’s also the author of Gen AI in Higher Education. So we had him on Sacred Business Stories this week to walk back through how he built it. The part most people don’t hear is what he had to change his mind about along the way. The arc starts long before Slow AI. PhD in atmospheric physics. Then years on the intersection of science and theater. Then a decade of using poetry to platform the voices of marginalized people in science. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, he saw the next problem coming. AI was going to widen the divide between those who had access and those who didn’t, and there weren’t many academic voices speaking about it in a way regular people could use. That was the gap Slow AI was built into. The decision to charge came after a hard internal conversation. What would a paid product even look like? Should it exist at all? He kept circling back to something he’d learned years earlier as a working poet. He used to do school workshops and talks for free until another poet told him that doing free work was taking paid work away from the people who needed it to be their living. Free, done by the people who didn’t need to charge, dilutes the field for everyone else. “There is more than enough room for everybody to succeed in everything.” That’s the line he kept coming back to. Once he stopped treating charging as the opposite of generosity, he found the structure that worked. £100 for the year. £25 for the month. He set the annual rate to filter for subscribers who’d stay locked in for the full curriculum, not subscribers cycling out at month two. Two things stood out from the conversation. The first was the line he said about evolving. “Your truth can change with you as you evolve.” That’s a pricing story on the surface. There’s a wider permission slip underneath. Most people who start a publication put something in writing on day one and feel locked in by it. They build a brand around the version of themselves who wrote that first sentence. Sam’s experience says you’re allowed to write a line in July, learn for nine months, and rewrite it. The product gets more clear and refined. The audience gets established. The first promise was a messy first draft in a sense. The second was a daily practice he described for staying connected at sixteen thousand subscribers. Two habits, every day. One restack of someone outside his usual bubble, because the Substack feed mostly shows you the people you already engage with and the algorithm needs to be pushed back against. One thank-you note to a creator whose work he wants to platform. He’s honest that this got harder past five thousand subscribers and harder again past ten. The practice is still there, deliberate, against the grain of what the algorithm wants to feed him. The shift Sam made between the first post and the sixteen-thousandth subscriber is worth bringing attention to. He stopped treating service and money as opposites. He realized that charging was a way of not diluting service for everyone else who had to make a living from this. The audience that locked in for a year at £100 was the most invested audience he’d ever built. Which reframes one of the most stubborn beliefs in the creator economy. That authenticity and strategy pull in opposite directions. Sam’s twelve months say they pull in the same one. Again, in my opinion, the most strategic thing he did was charge fairly. The most authentic thing he did was change his mind in public. You can find Sam at Slow AI on Substack, on TikTok at @theslowai [https://www.tiktok.com/@theslowai], and at samillingworth.com [https://samillingworth.com]. He speaks to academics, educators, and working professionals who want to make informed decisions about AI without being sold the latest prompt-engineering hack. If that’s you, the curriculum is built for you. Watch the full replay. I think you’ll love getting to know Sam. Thank you Sue Reid [https://substack.com/profile/121378676-sue-reid], Rachel Connor [https://substack.com/profile/43692040-rachel-connor], Des Kennedy [https://substack.com/profile/345899347-des-kennedy], Michele Gill [https://substack.com/profile/3160747-michele-gill], Claire Machado [https://substack.com/profile/168845660-claire-machado], and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories Episode 44 [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories] with Dr Sam Illingworth [https://substack.com/profile/253722705-dr-sam-illingworth] and Carolina Wilke [https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke]! Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com [https://sacredbusiness.com/your-slug] on May 27th, 2026. You can find the canonical version [https://www.sacredbusiness.com/slow-ai-sam-illingworth], along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there [https://sacredbusiness.com]. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Why Most Creators Don't Know About This Until It's Too Late

This week we talked with Matt Brown [https://substack.com/profile/420828413-matt-brown], and here’s the thing… we allowed ourselves to go a bit off-script. Matt runs a boutique email performance agency. He helps entrepreneurs make sure their emails actually land in inboxes instead of spam. It sounds dry. But oh so important. Most first-time creators don’t think about deliverability until they have a problem. They build an audience, they send emails, and suddenly half their emails are landing in promotions or they’re getting spam complaints they don’t understand. By then, the damage is harder to undo. Matt is the person you call when that happens. I’ve called him. When we were moving our list from ActiveCampaign over to Kit and connecting it with Substack, when we needed to understand what was actually happening with our email health, and that’s when I reached out. What makes Matt different is that he can explain something genuinely technical and boring and make it clear. He doesn’t overcomplicate it. He doesn’t hide behind jargon. He just says: here’s what’s happening, here’s why it matters, here’s what you do about it. What We Talked About We went deep on how email performance actually works. Not the copywriting part. Not the psychology. The mechanics. The infrastructure. The stuff that determines whether your best email ever written lands where people can see it or disappears into the void. We talked about: * Why your sender reputation matters more than most people realize * What happens when you import a list incorrectly (and how to catch it) * How to keep your email health strong as you scale * What to look for if your deliverability starts dropping * Why the platforms you choose (ActiveCampaign, Kit, Substack, whatever) have different capabilities for protecting that health The conversation was technical. But it was also practical. Matt has built his entire business around the reality that most founders and creators don’t know this stuff exists until they need it. Why You Should Listen If you’re building an audience and you send email, this is relevant. Not because you need to become an email infrastructure expert. But because you need to understand the baseline. You need to know when something’s off before it becomes a crisis. Matt also has a gift for making complex things sound simple. That’s rare. And if you ever hit a deliverability wall, you’ll want to know who to call. He’s building at deliverabilitynow.com [https://deliverabilitynow.com]. Subscribe to his newsletter. It’s good. Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Billy Broas: Marketing is an argument, not a fight

So, Billy Broas [https://substack.com/profile/18366571-billy-broas] was on Sacred Business Stories [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories] with us this week. For context, Billy is the guy who supported the creation our messaging foundation for Sacred Business Flow back when we were too close to it to see it ourselves. Author of Simple Marketing for Smart People. Creator of the Five Lightbulbs framework, which we still apply almost daily. He just launched a new Substack called Fractal Faith, and the conversation we had with him went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Most marketing conversations stay in tactics. This one started in tactics for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear marketers willing to go. Billy uses a metaphor early on about fish, water, and what we’ve all been swimming in without realizing. I’d heard him use the metaphor before, but the way he applied it to the entire marketing industry stopped me. Where he takes it from there is the part I want you to hear from him directly. He also names a single question, near the end, that he says will tell you whether your marketing is crossing a line or not. One question. He gives it to you in a simple sentence you can sit with for yourself. Carolina said something in this conversation I had almost forgotten about her. She confessed she rejected marketing entirely for the first three years of her previous business. Why she changed her mind, and what she heard from Billy that supported her own growth, is a pretty nice moment in the episode. And there’s a story Billy tells about leaving his energy industry job at twenty-nine, expecting his side business to take off. What actually happened next, and the phrase he uses to describe that in-between place, is worth pressing play for if you are feeling stalled out right now. Another fun surprise connection was hearing about Brian Clark [https://substack.com/profile/18025426-brian-clark]’s influence on Billy’s journey, after just having him on the show a few weeks ago. The whole thing runs about fifty-five minutes. If you’ve ever caught yourself avoiding marketing because something about it felt off, or you’ve quietly wondered whether there’s a way to do this work without giving up your dignity or theirs, this is the conversation for you. For more from billy, check out his new substack at Fractal Faith and marketingisanargument.com [https://www.marketingisanargument.com/] Phil (& Carolina) Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Thank you Josh Woll [https://substack.com/profile/121213711-josh-woll], Prof. Barbara Bernier [https://substack.com/profile/2398139-prof-barbara-bernier], Marvin L Mitchell [https://substack.com/profile/293792476-marvin-l-mitchell], and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories] with Billy Broas [https://substack.com/profile/18366571-billy-broas] and Carolina Wilke [https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke]! This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com [https://sacredbusiness.com/billy-bross-marketing-is-an-argument] on May 5, 2026. You can find the canonical version [https://sacredbusiness.com/billy-bross-marketing-is-an-argument], along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work there. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Leo Babauta conversation we almost didn't publish

So here’s what happened. We sat down with Leo Babauta [https://substack.com/profile/240519-leo-babauta] last week. About twenty-five minutes came through in the replay. The first fifteen didn’t. Substack swallowed the opening. Honestly, I was pretty gutted, and I sat with the recording for a few days wondering whether to share the replay at all. Then I caught myself. This was a conversation about beginning before you’re ready and shipping the imperfect thing. And I was about to scrap it because the recording wasn’t perfect lol. Honestly, Leo’s been someone I’ve considered a friend for years now. So here it is. Imperfect, missing the opening, but still some great food for thought, as Leo is one of the wisest dudes I know. I listen to what this guy has to say, and you should too. A few things from this conversation I think are worth drawing attention to: There’s a moment where Leo names a particular trap AI is setting for ambitious people, and and interesting framing. He calls Claude his “best cheerleader.” Why he frames that as a problem is the part you should check out. Carolina asked him about fear and resistance. He answered with a sewing project he’s been working on for years. (Yes, sewing.) Where he took that, and how he tied it back to his own Substack, was also a great moment worth watching. And toward the end, he answered a question about growth in a way you might not quite expect from someone who’s built the audience he has. The line started with “growth is a loaded topic for a lot of people.” The whole thing runs about twenty-seven minutes. If you’ve ever caught yourself opening twelve tabs because Claude told you all twelve ideas were brilliant, this one’s for you. Phil (& Carolina) Thank you Josh Woll [https://substack.com/profile/121213711-josh-woll], Noelle Richards [https://substack.com/profile/350223153-noelle-richards], Rebecca Weston [https://substack.com/profile/132718831-rebecca-weston], Inge van de Graaf [https://substack.com/profile/324346859-inge-van-de-graaf], Claire Machado [https://substack.com/profile/168845660-claire-machado], and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories with Leo Babauta [https://substack.com/profile/240519-leo-babauta] and Carolina Wilke [https://substack.com/profile/262727079-carolina-wilke]! Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

On Boredom, AI, and Closing the Loop of Wonder w/ Mia Kiraki

We had Mia Kiraki 🎭 [https://substack.com/profile/362428399-mia-kiraki] on Sacred Business Stories [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/s/sacred-business-stories] this week. She writes a Substack called Robots Ate My Homework. Half Armenian, half Romanian. Film studies in London, two master’s degrees, a decade in B2B content marketing, a content agency built with her husband, and now one of the most interesting voices on AI on Substack. Her tagline says it. AI with brains, taste, and an unreasonable amount of depth. And then, somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, she turned a question back on me. I don’t want to set it up too much. The full exchange is on the feed and it’s worth hearing in her voice. What I’ll say is this. The question pulled at a habit I’d already been quietly questioning. The moment that followed left Carolina and me looking at each other across the call. The line that closed it landed in one short phrase I haven’t been able to put down since. That’s one of three or four moments in this conversation that really made me go “woah”. Among the others. She doesn’t write tutorials. Her brain, in her own words, is 99% on the creative side, and her code “fights back” when she vibe-codes. So when AI shows up and the rest of the field is racing to explain it, she’s doing something else entirely. She lets the trend sit. Watches what people say about it for a week or two. Then connects it to a book or a film or a note she jotted down on a different day. The newsletter that comes out of that process sits on three pillars I think most people writing about AI right now are missing. I won’t spoil them. They’re worth hearing her name. She also said the thing substack writers don’t usually like to admit on a podcast. She started Substack as an outreach engine. The first posts were about her product. Then something shifted and she stopped pitching. When I asked her how she made the call, her answer was a single sentence and one of the cleaner reframes of “strategy” I’ve heard in a while. Carolina caught it before I did. And on connection, which is the thing most people on Substack are quietly anxious about, her advice was almost embarrassingly simple. The kind of simple you only earn after ten years. The conversation runs about thirty minutes. If any of the above is making you curious, watch the the full episode above. Mia’s publication is Robots Ate My Homework. Both worth your time. And if you’re wondering what her question was, you’ll have to listen. Helping you get clear, get seen, and get paid by aligning who you are with how you show up, all while building a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside. Get full access to Sacred Business Flow at love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe [https://love.sacredbusinessflow.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]