The quest for brain-on-fire

Peter Caputa made some great points yesterday on this LI post. He said:

“The old way of inbound marketing was about proving your own expertise.

…

This new way is about curating the expertise of your market.”

Yes! Stop proving, start curating.

What if?

• TEDx talks are commoditized and mass produced
• Even “real” TED speakers are smug and hard to watch
• Long, in-depth essays are rarely full of insight end-to-end; they are SEO plays
• People read web content even less than in 2022, let alone 2012 (per data Peter cites)
• TikTok-style short videos are now where most people seek “brain-on-fire”

Exceptions prove the rule, of course, but the point is that it’s getting harder to achieve brain-on-fire by reading web content by experts. Traditional expert-content is oversupplied and misaligned with our desire for equal exchanges.

Meanwhile, GPT lets us converse with collective essays of millions.

I think that’s where the brain-on-fire effect is now mostly relegated to – conversations:

• in public on social media, mostly in comment threads
• on conversation-based podcasts, especially when comments are enabled
• on personal newsletters, if replied to
• on cozy web discussions (Slack, Discord)
• in DMs and emails

And it happens between people who don’t necessarily need anything from one another – other than to exchange ideas.

It makes you think about where to take your message – and how.