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.