I Plagiarized 7 of My Friends With AI. They Should Be Flattered
The following experiment was not meant to offend or be taken overly serious in any way. I read a cool article and decided to have some fun while the house slept - and you get to find some new writers along the way. Sue me. Or don’t. Please don’t.
A surreal, high-resolution 3D render of a human silhouette made entirely of glowing cascading code and text strings. In the center of the chest, a single, brightly glowing floppy disk or microchip labeled "VOICE.md" in a clean sans-serif font. The background is a dark, moody void with subtle floating particles. Cinematic lighting, deep blues and electric whites, minimalist but powerful. 3:2 aspect ratio.
Ruben Hassid dropped a piece this week called “I Can Be You” and it rattled me in the best possible way.
His thesis is simple and brutal: **you’re just a text file.**Give an AI two hours of honest answers about how you think, write, and see the world, and it can sound exactly like you. Not “sort of” like you. Exactly like you. He lays out the whole process, the 100-question voice interview, the compression into a compact .md file, the moment you realize your entire creative identity fits inside 4,000 tokens.
And I sat there reading it thinking... yeah. He’s right. I already have one of those files. I call it Voice.md. My AI copilot Sam reads it at the top of every session. It’s how she knows to roast me, swear at PG-13 levels, and never use an em dash.
But here’s what Ruben’s piece made me want to prove: voice isn’t just your voice. It’s what makes every writer on this platform different from the one next to them. Same information, same tickers, same market, same macro backdrop. Completely different experience when you read their work.
So I did something a little unhinged. I took one paragraph, fed it through the collected voices of seven Substack writers I actually read, and let the AI rewrite it in each of their styles.
Is it plagiarism? Technically no. Is it a love letter? Absolutely.
Here’s the original paragraph:
“We are constantly told that more data leads to better decisions, but lately I am starting to wonder if the exact opposite is true. Every day we are flooded with charts, expert opinions, and breaking news, yet the most successful people I know seem to operate on a startlingly small amount of filtered information. The real skill is no longer gathering facts. The real skill is aggressively ignoring almost everything.”
Now let’s hear it seven different ways.
1. Vitalii Nechyporenko — Price Action Playbook
📈 Sharp, actionable market analysis blending price action, technicals, and market mechanics. Vitalii doesn’t waste your time with opinions. He gives you levels, structure, and context. His Weekly Playbook is the kind of thing you read on Sunday night so you’re not flying blind on Monday morning. If you care about where price reacts more than why some talking head thinks it should, this is your guy.
The paragraph, in Vitalii’s voice:
The consensus is that more data produces better decisions. That’s background noise. Most of what crosses the tape on any given day, the analyst upgrades, the macro hot takes, the “breaking” headlines, is noise you can generate in 30 seconds with any LLM. It adds nothing to your edge. The traders I watch who consistently perform aren’t consuming more. They’re filtering harder. They identify the key levels, the structure, how price reacts at those zones, and they ignore everything else. The skill is not in gathering information. The skill is in knowing what to cut. You’re only as good as the signals you actually trade.
2. Ryan LePiane — LP Options Academy
📚 Ryan is the options teacher you wish you had when you first started. He walks through strategies like the Short Put, the Iron Condor, the Iron Butterfly, step by step, with real examples from his own portfolio. No ego. No flex. Just “here’s how this works, here’s what can go wrong, and here’s what I personally do.” If you’ve ever wanted to sell premium but didn’t know where to start, this is your starting point.
The paragraph, in Ryan’s voice:
This week I want to talk about something a little different. Not a specific strategy, but something I think about constantly as a trader.
We’re told that more data leads to better decisions. And I get it, that sounds logical. But personally, I’ve found the opposite to be true. Every day we are flooded with charts, opinions, and breaking news. It can be overwhelming. And honestly? The most successful traders I know don’t consume more information than everyone else. They consume less. They have a framework, they stick to it, and they tune out the rest.
The real skill isn’t gathering more facts. The real skill is knowing what to ignore. I recommend building your own filter. Figure out what actually impacts your trades, and let go of everything else. It’s more flexible than you think, and it’ll change the way you approach each session.
Have thoughts on this? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
3. Tiger Capital Research — Tiger Capital Research
🐯 A Princetonian alpha trading team that compresses 24 hours of market signal into 5 minutes. Daily alpha ideas, regime reads, key moves across equities and crypto, weekly portfolio updates and research papers. They don’t write newsletters. They built a system. Information → Interpretation → Positioning → Execution. If you want institutional-grade signal without the institutional-grade price tag, Tiger is the stack.
The paragraph, in Tiger’s voice:
Thesis: More data ≠ better decisions. Inverse relationship observed.
The Signal:
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Daily information throughput for the average market participant has increased ~10x over the past decade
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Decision quality has not improved proportionally
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Highest-performing operators we track run on aggressively filtered inputs: 3 to 5 sources, regime-anchored, noise-eliminated
The Mechanical Truth: Information abundance creates selection cost. Selection cost degrades signal-to-noise. Degraded signal-to-noise produces consensus positioning, not alpha.
Desk View: The edge is no longer in data acquisition. It is in data rejection. Build the filter. Cut everything else.
Most investors need more content. We disagree. They need a system.
4. Emerging Value (Olivier) — Emerging Value
🌍 Deep-dive value investing across emerging markets, European hidden champions, and quality compounders. Olivier tracks a real portfolio with real money, covers everything from Polish microcaps to the Amazon of Africa, and he’s honest when things don’t work. His writing feels like getting investment letters from a well-traveled friend who happens to have a decade of EM experience. If your portfolio has never left the S&P 500, this is the Substack that will change that.
The paragraph, in Olivier’s voice:
Hello,
We are told that more data leads to better decisions. I used to believe this. I don’t anymore.
Every day, there are more charts, more opinions, more breaking news. It is overwhelming, and most of it is useless. I find that funny, actually. We have never had more information available, and yet the quality of decisions has not improved.
The best investors I know, the ones who actually compound over decades, they operate on very little. A few trusted sources. A clear framework. And a ruthless discipline to ignore the rest. Nothing else.
This is true in emerging markets especially. There is so much noise around EM, so many macro fears, currency panics, political headlines. The investors who do well are the ones who filter all of that out and focus on the business. The real skill is not gathering facts. The real skill is knowing what to throw away.
I stayed away from information overload for the same reason I stayed away from Jumia all those years. Sometimes the best decision is the one you don’t make.
5. OROLO Capital — OROLO Capital
🔮 Stock forecasts with geometric tools, 8+ years studying market, economic, and behavioral cycle theory. OROLO doesn’t think about markets the way you do. He thinks in 5-phase cycles, square root levels, and structural transitions. His work will make you question every “accumulation vs. distribution” chart you’ve ever seen. If you want to understand where you are in the cycle instead of guessing what happens next, start here.
The paragraph, in OROLO’s voice:
Hello Substackers.
Here’s something most people get wrong about information.
The conventional view is that more data leads to better decisions. That’s an oversimplification. And it’s one that traps people.
Every day the market produces an overwhelming amount of charts, expert opinions, and breaking news. And what happens? People consume all of it, and then they freeze. They stop trusting their own framework. They start chasing someone else’s narrative.
The most successful investors I’ve studied don’t operate this way. They work with a startlingly small amount of filtered information. They have a system. They know where they are in the cycle. And they ignore everything that doesn’t help them confirm or deny that position.
The edge isn’t in gathering more data. It’s in knowing what phase you’re in and cutting everything that doesn’t serve that understanding.
Once you see this, you can’t go back. You stop drowning in information. You start working with it instead of against it.
6. The VIX Queen — The VIX Queen
👑 25 years in the market game. Industry experience in ABS/MBS. VIX trader during the GFC. Macro swing trader. And she didn’t get here by being polite about it. VIX Queen writes “Under the Hood” deep dives that peel back the layers on everything from shadow consumer debt to oil benchmark flips to geopolitical risk pricing. She brings the receipts, the attitude, and the kind of perspective you only get from surviving three decades in boys’ club industries. If you want macro analysis with actual teeth, she’s your queen.
The paragraph, in VIX Queen’s voice:
Y’all know I’m not scared to say it, so here it is: more data does not make you smarter. It makes you slower.
Every single day we are buried under charts, “expert” opinions, and breaking news that isn’t breaking anything except your ability to think clearly. And I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I watched it happen in real time. The information explosion didn’t create better traders. It created more confused ones. More distracted ones. More “regard” traders chasing the last headline instead of reading the actual data underneath.
The sharpest people I know in this game? They’re not consuming more than everyone else. They consume almost nothing. They have their framework, they trust it, and they tell the rest of the noise to sit down and shut up. That’s the real skill. Not gathering facts. Aggressively ignoring almost everything. Building your filter is the single most important thing you can do as a trader, and nobody talks about it because it doesn’t sell subscriptions or get clicks.
But The VIX Queen doesn’t care about clicks. She cares about getting it right.
7. The Seaspiracy Observer 👁️ — The Seaspiracy Observer
🌊 This is the one that’s not about trading. And that’s exactly why it’s here. The Seaspiracy Observer is an ocean news platform with tens of thousands of subscribers, exposing the real cost of industrial fishing, deep-sea mining, and marine destruction. They don’t run ads. They don’t take corporate sponsors. Every investigation is reader-funded. Their writing is the kind that makes you set down your phone and stare at the wall for a minute because you just learned something you can’t unlearn. Sometimes the most important information filter isn’t about markets at all.
The paragraph, in Seaspiracy’s voice:
We know this can feel overwhelming. But it’s too important to ignore.
Every day, we are flooded with information. Charts, expert opinions, breaking news, a constant, unrelenting stream designed to make us feel like we’re staying informed. But here’s what nobody talks about: more data has not made us better at making decisions. It has made us worse.
The numbers tell a clear story. The volume of information available to the average person has increased exponentially over the past two decades. And yet, the quality of our collective decision-making has not improved. In many cases, it has deteriorated. We are drowning in data and starving for understanding.
The people who actually change things, the ones who show up and do the work, operate on a startlingly small amount of filtered, trusted information. They don’t try to consume everything. They build a filter. They find sources they trust. And they aggressively ignore the noise that exists only to distract them from what matters.
This isn’t just true in finance or media. It’s true in conservation, in science, in every domain where the stakes are real. The skill of the future is not gathering more facts. It’s having the discipline to ignore almost everything so you can act on what actually counts.
If you found this perspective valuable, consider what that means for the ocean stories you never see on your feed.
What You Just Witnessed
Same exact idea. Seven completely different experiences reading it.
Vitalii gave you the levels and told you to cut the noise. Ryan walked you through it like a patient teacher. Tiger compressed it into a research memo you could scan in 30 seconds. Olivier told you a story and made you feel something. OROLO made you question your entire framework. VIX Queen told the noise to sit down and shut up. And Seaspiracy made you realize this problem is way bigger than your portfolio.
None of them are wrong. All of them are memorable. That’s what voice does.
Ruben said it best: you’re just a text file. He’s right. But here’s the thing he proved without meaning to:
Everyone’s text file is different.
And that difference? That’s the whole game.
Voice is the reason you subscribe to one person over another when they’re covering the same damn ticker. It’s the reason some posts get shared and others get scrolled past. It’s not what you know. It’s how you make people feel what you know.
If you’re building your own Substack, your own brand, your own anything, stop trying to sound like everybody else. The information is identical. The delivery is everything.
If you want to learn how to build your own voice file, go read Ruben’s piece. And if you want to see what happens when seven completely different voice files hit the same paragraph, well, you just did.
Go follow these seven. And go read Ruben. You’ll thank me later.
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✍️ How to AI, Ruben Hassid (the piece that started this whole thing)