Automate the Machine, Free the Human

Why the best content strategy is to stop being on the internet.

There’s a guy I watch on YouTube called Liam Brown. All he does is get a one-way flight somewhere, throw on a backpack, and walk around with his tent for weeks at a time. When he’s done, he flies home. Last year he went from around 60,000 subscribers to 229,000. Monetised. Sponsors lining up. Free gear. The whole thing.

His content strategy? Be a human doing something interesting and film it.

I had something like that once. Not at that scale, but I had a version of it, back when I was an ambassador for Land Rover. It took a long time to build and a lot of work, but when it was working, it was great. Then I abandoned it to sit on a laptop arguing with bots all day. And I keep asking myself: what am I doing?

The attention ponzi recap

I hate to admit this, and I’m genuinely surprised it’s the case, but the state of content platforms is really getting to me these days. Every week it’s something new. My Substack timeline is the same recycled post pasted by hundreds of different accounts. LinkedIn is a graveyard of people writing posts about how to grow your LinkedIn following, which is itself the thing growing their LinkedIn following. The output is the input. There’s no underlying value.

And the advice is always the same: comment on other people’s posts, join engagement groups, be active in communities, like and reply your way to visibility. I refuse to spend any of my life doing that. Not just because it’s a time investment I’m not prepared to make, but because it’s such a cynical exercise. You’re not engaging because you care. You’re engaging because an algorithm rewards the appearance of caring.

The whole thing is pathetic.

The Corsica thought experiment

So here’s where my head went. What if the entire distribution side of content creation could run without me? Not the thinking. Not the conversations. Not the living. Just the mechanical bit: the formatting, the scheduling, the posting, the platform-specific sizing and copy.

Picture this. You’re hiking through Corsica with someone. You’re having a real conversation about something that actually matters to you. You hit record on your phone. That recording gets transcribed. Themes get extracted. Long-form pieces get drafted. Supporting posts get written. Platform-specific assets get generated. Everything gets scheduled and pushed out. You never log into a single platform.

You come back from a year of walking around the world, and the whole time your ideas have been reaching people. Not because you were gaming an algorithm, but because the ideas were worth hearing and the system handled the rest.

That’s the version of content creation I’m interested in.

The real bottleneck isn’t distribution

What struck me about Liam Brown’s growth isn’t the numbers. It’s what he didn’t do. No growth hacks. No engagement pods. No AI-optimised posting schedule. He just went and did something genuinely interesting, documented it honestly, and the audience came.

The lesson isn’t “go hiking and you’ll get famous.” The lesson is that the impediment for most people’s content isn’t distribution. It’s having something worth distributing. The entire growth industry has it backwards. They’re optimising the pipe when the problem is the water.

If you automate the distribution side of things, you free yourself to focus entirely on the input: living an interesting life, having real conversations, building stuff, reading widely, thinking carefully. That’s where the best content comes from. Not from a laptop. Not from a content calendar. Certainly not from an LLM. From being a person who’s paying attention to the world.

What automation should actually do

I think there’s a version of this that’s almost within reach. The pieces exist. Transcription is solved. Theme extraction is getting better. Content generation from raw conversation is functional, if imperfect. Scheduling tools exist. Image generation exists. The integration layer between all of these is the remaining gap, and it’s closing.

The critical thing is what the automation is for. Most people think about content automation as a way to produce more. More posts, more frequency, more platforms. That’s the wrong frame entirely. The point of automation isn’t to produce more content. It’s to remove the creator from the parts of the process that drain them, so they can invest that energy into the parts that actually matter.

Record a conversation. Walk away. Let the machine handle everything between the raw idea and the published post. Come back to the conversation when you have something new to say.

That’s the thesis. Automate the machine so the human can be more human.

The trap I’m trying to avoid

I sort of made a vague commitment to myself recently. At some point this year, I’m just going to pack a bag and go for a very long walk. Genuinely. And maybe create content doing that, like Liam Brown does, just to see where it goes.

The irony isn’t lost on me. The thing I’m most drawn to, the thing that worked for me before, the thing that’s working for other people right now, is the opposite of sitting in front of a screen optimising engagement metrics. It’s going outside and doing something real.

And yet here I am, scrolling through identical LinkedIn posts at midnight, getting annoyed at people I’ll never meet, spending emotional energy on platforms that are designed to extract exactly that from me.

The whole reason I’m interested in content automation isn’t because I want to scale. It’s because I want to escape. I want to build a system that lets me walk away from the screen and still have my ideas reach people. Not more people. Just the right ones.

The uncomfortable middle

I’m not pretending this is figured out. The pieces are close but not connected. The current tools are functional but flawed. And there’s a real question about whether fully automated distribution loses something essential, some quality of presence or intentionality that people can sense.

But I keep coming back to Liam Brown. His content works because he’s present in the experience, not in the distribution. He’s fully there on the trail, fully there with his camera, and then the platform stuff is just the container. The experience is the content. Everything else is plumbing.

That’s the split I’m trying to make. Be fully present in the living and the thinking. Automate the plumbing. See what happens.

A couple of people have messaged me recently saying they’re glad to see me writing again. That’s encouraging. It means the ideas are landing somewhere. Now I just need to make sure the act of getting those ideas out into the world doesn’t become the thing that stops me from having them in the first place.

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