Part 2: No Human Is Prey

Mainstream Marketing Tactics Use the same Grooming Tactics We See in The Epstein Files. Here's What to Do About It, in Six Commitments

If you’ve ever been inside an online course launch and felt something was off — the countdown timer, the shame-based emails, the escalating pressure that felt less like marketing and more like something being done to you — this essay is for you. If you’ve been running those launches yourself, flinching the whole time, unable to name what’s wrong with it — this essay is especially for you. My previous essay, “Lovers, Leaders, and The Ways of Superior Men,” showed that the grooming mechanism the Epstein files exposed — the engineering of compliance below the level of conscious choice — didn’t stay in Epstein’s circle or Deepak Chopra’s meditation empire. It is baked into the online marketing formulas most entrepreneurs were taught to use. The most common response I got was: OK, I see it now. So what do I do instead? This essay is the answer.

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No human is prey. That conviction — something older and less negotiable than an opinion or a political position — is why the Epstein files have landed the way they have, not as another news cycle but as a reckoning. Women are looking at the beauty standards they internalized and realizing those standards were shaped by men who trafficked children. Those of us who are entrepreneurs are looking at the launch formulas we were taught — the countdown timers, the shame-based email sequences, the manufactured urgency, the free webinars that were really sixty-minute sales pitches — and recognizing the same mechanism underneath. The engineering of compliance below the level of conscious choice, is grooming, and it is in everything.

But it goes further than beauty standards and online marketing formulas. The generational conditioning we received — magazine after magazine, billboard after billboard, commercial after commercial, fashion show after fashion show, launch after launch, spiritual teaching after spiritual teaching — morphed into social norms so normalized they became ambient and invisible. It became what we believed about ourselves: that our bodies are wrong, that our faces need fixing, that we take up too much space or not enough, that our worth is conditional on our willingness to be smaller, softer, more compliant. It became the belief that any hesitation to sell, buy, or comply is a character flaw, that our discomfort with the hard sell means we're not cut out for business, that our inner voice saying something is wrong here is the voice of our own inadequacy rather than a signal that something is, in fact, empirically, externally and materially wrong. That conditioning —grooming — didn't just shape our businesses or our buying decisions. It shaped our sense of who we are, what we deserve, and what we're allowed to want. Not just in the trafficking of some of us. In the marketing to all of us. In the spiritual teaching. In the business formulas we were handed as best practices. In the mirror.

One of my former clients, Simone Writer, said something to me many years ago that I’m obviously still thinking about: “Women are in an abusive relationship with our culture”. I think she’s right, and I think grooming is the mechanism by which that abusive relationship is maintained. Grooming, in the way I use the word, means extraction made easy — the process by which a system engineers the conditions so that benefit flows in one direction and consequences flow in the other. The predator gets the money, the compliance, the sex, the labor, the attention. The target gets the shame, the self-doubt, the debt, the regret, the silence. Grooming is what makes that asymmetry feel normal — through the conditioning of targets into compliance, the recruitment of participants who replicate the conditioning without seeing it, and the desensitization of everyone, so that the coercion becomes so ambient, so thoroughly woven into the texture of daily life, that nobody can see it happening even while it is happening to them.

And the point of it — the function grooming serves — is extraction and impunity. Extraction: the ability to take value from other people, whether that value is money, labor, attention, sex, or compliance. Impunity: the power to do it without consequence. That combination requires that certain bodies be marked as acceptable targets, low-consequence targets, bodies that can be exploited without meaningful repercussion because the culture has already decided they are available for use. Women’s bodies. Children’s bodies. Queer bodies. Poor bodies. Black and brown bodies. The bodies of anyone positioned at the receiving end of a power disparity the culture has already normalized.

The online marketing formulas are part of this grooming, and they operate on two levels that need to be named separately because they do different kinds of damage. The first is cultural output — the campaigns, the imagery, the beauty standards, the body politics, the representation choices that marketing puts into the world. This is the conditioning medium. It shapes what we think about ourselves — what kind of body we’re allowed to have, what kind of ambition we’re allowed to carry, what we dare to ask for, what we dare to defend ourselves against, and how much space we believe we’re entitled to take up. The second is selling tactics — the triggers, the sequences, the shame-based copy, the manufactured urgency, the fake scarcity, the reciprocity traps. This is the compliance mechanism: it engineers the yes before the question is asked. Both are grooming. Both condition people into the receiver position. Both recruit participants who carry the mechanism forward believing they are doing something else entirely.

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Robert Cialdini, the social psychologist who mapped reciprocity as one of six core principles of persuasion,² wrote his book to help people resist exploitative persuasion. He wanted readers to recognize when someone was triggering these automatic sequences in them — and to push back, to argue, to boycott, to unsubscribe. He was, in his own framing, arming the public against what he called “compliance professionals” who abuse our deep programming toward fairness and cooperation in order to construct asymmetrical transactions.

The online marketing world read his book and drew the opposite conclusion. Jeff Walker took Cialdini’s six principles and embedded them into his Product Launch Formula as “mental triggers.”³ — psychological levers to be pulled in a specific sequence in order to compel people to buy. Walker’s own language is revealing: he wrote that these triggers are “always working just below our consciousness” and “exert enormous influence over how we act,” which is to say he was describing, with evident satisfaction, a system for producing compliance by operating below the level of conscious choice. That is not persuasion, because persuasion respects the other person’s capacity to evaluate and decide. What Walker built is the engineering of consent — the systematic override of deliberation, packaged and sold as a business model.

His formula became the foundation of most online marketing, including the business models of virtually every significant women’s empowerment brand I spent a decade studying — Tony Robbins, Marie Forleo, Gabrielle Bernstein, Mastin Kipp, who thanked Walker by name in the acknowledgments of his book for having “inspired a generation to LAUNCH.”⁴ And the personnel overlap between this marketing world and the pickup artistry world is not a metaphor or a loose analogy. Eben Pagan published a foundational pickup artist text under the pseudonym David DeAngelo,⁵ a book whose core premise was that women’s sexual responses could be engineered through psychological triggers and whose signature phrase was “attraction is not a choice.” He then pivoted to teaching the same trigger architecture as online marketing strategy under his real name, as a core member of a group of internet marketers called the Syndicate — alongside Walker, Frank Kern, and others who built the distribution infrastructure of the online course industry. The same man — Eben Pagan — the same mechanism, the same word — trigger — applied first to engineering a woman’s sexual compliance and then to engineering a consumer’s purchasing compliance, with no intellectual retooling required, because the mechanism was already identical.

I wrote about Walker’s formula in 2016,⁶ and I asked a question then that I still think cuts through everything: where does the benefit flow? Walker illustrates the authority trigger with a story from his teenage years in which his friend grabbed a flashlight from a car floor during a traffic jam, jumped out, and started directing traffic. Other drivers, seeing the beam, assumed he had authority and made way, and Walker and his friends drove right out. The moral, as Walker told it, was that it doesn’t take very much to create authority. What struck me about the story was the distribution of benefit — Walker’s friend didn’t solve the traffic jam for everyone. He manufactured the appearance of authority in order to advance his own car at the expense of the people who followed his instructions. The drivers who cooperated gained nothing. The person signaling authority gained everything. And Walker offered this story not as a cautionary tale but as an aspiration — because in a system designed to produce impunity, the ability to extract compliance from other people without consequence is not a bug. It is the product.

But here is where the desensitization does its work. You have read that story, and it probably sounded clever. It probably sounded like hustle, like resourcefulness, like a smart kid gaming the system. That response — the flicker of admiration, the impulse to laugh rather than recoil — is the desensitization in action. We have been so thoroughly conditioned to admire the person who engineers compliance and to overlook the people whose compliance is engineered that a story about manufacturing false authority to exploit other people’s trust registers as a fun anecdote about entrepreneurial instinct. The grooming is in what we’ve been taught to find normal. It is in what we’ve been taught not to see.

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Here is where the analysis has to get precise, because without this distinction it leads to a dead stop — the recognition that the tools are contaminated followed by the conclusion that the only ethical response is to stop using them, which means stopping selling, which means ceding the market to whoever is willing to use those tools without flinching.

A countdown timer is not inherently wrong. Neither is a lead magnet, a sales page, a professional photoshoot, a webinar, an email sequence, or having nice things.