The Death Of The Influencer (& The Future Of Creative Work)

0:00We are experiencing the death of the influencer, finally, because nobody really liked them to begin with. But the reason I'm saying this is because it seems like there isn't a day that goes by where I don't see a non-technical person like a mom in her 40s who clears a million dollar launch of a digital product. A super simple one. We're talking like a 30 day challenge, like the 30 day yapping I forget her name and she's not 40 years old, but she made so much money by just running a challenge where people talk to their phone. And so what they do is they create a waitlist for the product,

0:37like the challenge, and then they post validated content that does well on social media. And then they fill the waitlist that way. And then when they launch, they launch to the waitlist and on social media and people eat it up for good reason, because nobody relates to someone with millions of followers, which sucks for me, an out of touch luxury lifestyle or a body that is so far out of reach. They relate to someone who is in their shoes. I mean, even the yapping challenge, making so much money, it just goes to show that people see the opportunity in just expressing their raw thoughts on the internet, being taught by

1:11someone who isn't some massive celebrity and is just a person that they see themselves in someone who doesn't have a flashy lifestyle. So if you have a story to tell, no matter how boring, in other words, you have a story to tell, or you have a small skill worth learning that has impacted your life and can probably impact someone else's life in some minor way, or you just have knowledge or interests that improve your life and could improve someone else's life, then I beg of you to take advantage of the next 12 months. So let's start with the fact that just nobody wants to be an influencer anymore,

1:44which is surprising. And I saw this post the other Benjamin Antoine that said, "The world doesn't need more content creators. We need more original thinkers, more rebels, more counter-culturists, more people who can sit with something long enough to understand it before passing judgment. That's so rare these days and becoming more valuable by the hour." Now just a few years ago, and when I was a kid, everyone wanted to be a YouTuber. That is, everyone wanted to quit the job that put them in a box. For me, I just never wanted to work the job that would have put me in a box. And so I worked as hard as I could to avoid that. And instead,

2:18myself and others just wanted to pursue their interests full-time. And since YouTube was becoming a thing and I was raised in that era, it was an opportunity like it never was before. And so that was the dream. After school, I would go to the family computer so I could watch the latest vlog from the fitness influencers that I was following at the time. They were just sharing what they ate, what they did, their gym sessions. It was very raw and authentic. And they were my friends. And so I was lifting and training a nutrition, a passion of mine that's still a passion of mine to this day. They fundamentally

2:49altered the course of my life because I watched people on a screen. That's insane. I would have never learned that through school unless I went down that specific curriculum and education path or chose that as my major or what my degree was going to be in. So if I didn't do that, then how are you going to learn about it? Right? You have to self-educate in today's world because the traditional path of go to school, get a job, retire at 65 just pigeonholes you into something that could be valuable, but you learn nothing outside of that. And as I got older and got more into business, it was the same thing. I didn't

3:22learn from signing up for a college course. I learned by going on YouTube, following specific people on X or Instagram and just soaking up these little tactics and pieces of advice. Like I have barely read any business books. I definitely haven't even finished one and my business does quite well for itself. And I went to college for five years, part of that being marketing. And I have learned so much more about marketing by just doing it because I honestly, I don't, I'm 29 now, I'm 30 in two days. And so that means I was in

3:51school maybe 10 year, holy crap, 10 years ago. But I remember absolutely nothing. I have no idea what I learned in my marketing classes. I could tell you one thing because I just didn't care. I personally believe that social media has the potential to become a decentralized education system more so than it already is. So a place where you share your knowledge and interest from your own unique point of view. And those who resonate with your personality can come to you to learn from. That is what I mean when I say you are the niche. I think it's interesting when content strategist and creative directors are

4:25torn on that. Like, no, you are not the niche. You need to pick a niche. And it's not like you are the niche is my term by any means. But what I'm saying is that you and another person can talk about the same things, be in the exact same niche. But why are they going to follow or listen to you? Because you are you. I personally don't relate with a 40 year old mom's lifestyle. Is there something I can learn from them? Yes, absolutely. Maybe I will learn something from them. But I think it's an obvious fact that I, a very direct and logical and analytical person would relate

4:56with someone of the same nature. I'd much rather learn from the 40 year old dad. And the same goes for the moms. It's trending on Instagram right now. Maybe that just has become my algorithm as 40 year old moms. But it makes complete sense because I think many of the moms and dads and everyone else has become disillusioned with the traditional path. It just doesn't seem like the safe and secure path anymore like it ever

5:18was. And so now they're learning from each other. One person takes the lead. They learn AI content creation, could be gardening. And then the other moms who want to do the same thing follow them on social media until they are able to do something rather similar. So I don't think social media is just the decentralized education system. I think it's just the free market. I think it's the fact that anyone can become an entrepreneur and garner attention through social media these days. Not

5:43that everyone will, but the fact is everyone can. And that's where your opportunity lies. So I think the influencer era is over. But I also think that personal brands are no longer personal, which reminds me of another post that I saw that said you're an artist. You didn't sign up to be an influencer. No shit. But unless you plan to stay broke and mysterious online, you'd better learn the business of being seen and we'll understand exactly what that means in a second. But there are three types of creators on social media, influencers, personal brands and what we will call artisans, for lack of a better term. And the

6:17difference between them lies in what owns them to the influencer. Social media is their work. They are incentivized by attention itself. So the content must be optimized to be consumed and forgotten, a.k.a. cheap dopamine. This is highly entropic for the mind and ruins people's ability to think far more than AI does because at least the conversation with AI has a through line and potentially teaches you something useful or new. And now what I mean by highly entropic for the mind is that it causes more disorder and chaos in the mind. You go on social media and you're exposed to thousands of opinions. That has never

6:52been the case ever before in humanity and history. And so the antidote to highly entropic social media posts is the opposite. It's syntropic content. So long form YouTube videos, long form Substack articles, books, etc. You need to work those things into your day to heal your mind and your ability to pay attention. Now to the personal brand, social media exists to monetize. Every post is a funnel step toward a course, a template, or a program they started for the love of the game then realized they had to survive. So content is optimized for trust and conversion, which is a bit better than the influencer and frankly not a net negative on

7:29society because at least they have a product that is meant to educate or improve someone's life. But I think there is something more. And in comes the artisan. The artisan uses social media to subsidize a body of work. Think about James Clear or Jordan Peterson or other public intellectuals. They have a personal brand. Sure, you may even consider them an

7:48influencer. I suppose they need attention. Yes, just like anyone does when they need supporters of their work, but their sole goal is to get paid for doing what they love in a way that massively benefits those who support them. So it's the whole concept of you start creating to get paid, but then the end goal is to get paid to create. So these artisans, they have a book or public speaking gigs or research or a philosophy

8:14or just a body of work that outlives the algorithm. Even Alan Watts has a personal brand today. Go and look him up on YouTube. He has a personal brand, even though he is no longer with us. Same with Marcus Aurelius among most of the Stoics. I mean, Jesus has the biggest personal brand of all time. Social media is simply a vessel and an incredibly good one at that to attract people

8:36to the work that you see outlasting yourself. The ultimate goal with social media is to resist every temptation to optimize for anything other than the impact of your body of work. So your products, your writing, your videos, and most importantly, the ideas that live on in the reader's head and influence their behavior for the positive rippling softly throughout humanity. That does not mean that you ignore the need to garner attention and get paid for your work. It requires a shift to understand that when done well, attention and

9:09money are simply a byproduct of doing good work. Now in this second Renaissance that we're entering, I believe the future belongs to the artisan because it already did. The influencer and personal brand started for this reason, but got distracted with short term incentives. So if you have interests or knowledge or expertise that you can't stop talking about or thinking about, here is how you actually begin to take advantage of this opportunity. Now this is the most important part, but it's not very catchy. It doesn't really make much sense at first, but you have to think of

9:40the building blocks of what we're building here. What composes a body of work? It's ideas. Ideas are the most valuable resource. So we need to focus on quality of ideas and we need to build a mind that is a magnet for quality ideas. Because if you're creating content or you're writing books or you're creating videos, how are you going to do that effectively and consistently if you don't

10:03have a flow of ideas, if you don't have idea flow. So this section isn't about making $10,000 in five seconds. It's about setting the foundation. And the foundation is you and your behavior in your actions and living a creative lifestyle. Now the ultimate moat or the final competitive edge or advantage worth paying for, in my opinion, is an opinion. A perspective that only you can see because the

10:26uniqueness of your life experience created it. That may just be the last thing anyone else can replicate. Especially when anyone can generate 1500 nice sounding words in 10 seconds with AI. That is your edge and the incredible thing is that everyone has one. Everyone has an opinion. And I'm not saying that in a bad way. I'm saying it

10:45in a good way. That's what makes you unique. That's what we need to find. That's what we need to excavate. And the problem is that people don't know what their perspective or point of view or opinion is that makes them unique because they haven't made it tangible. They don't have a museum for it. They don't have an idea museum. You've consumed thousands of ideas by now. Books,

11:04podcasts, conversations, arguments with strangers. Those are what forge your perspective alongside a few life events that give you your own story. Each one added a connection in how you interpret reality. And that compounding is the only asset here. AI can't generate for someone else because they can only think what it's been told to think. Not just to other people. You can't see it. You can't point at your perspective. So you can't build on it. So you fall back on whatever's trending because that's the only thing you can clearly see. And worse, ideas evaporate within a day if you don't capture them. So it's no wonder you can't

11:38think of anything to write or post about. So let's fix this. So obviously you need a place to capture ideas. You can do this in whatever app you want. But I specifically use Eden and any ideas you capture inside of the library be the Chrome extension or the mobile app. It auto categorizes it and embeds it so you can search and find it later. So you don't really need to worry about just dropping an idea in and letting it be. So that's what I'm going to show you. But of course,

12:05Apple Notes, Notion, Obsidian, they're all fine. They all work. The habit matters more than the app. So this is what the library looks like in Eden, where you can paste a link to a post or you can just add an idea or a document. And I personally like to create research boards for creating content where I can just save ideas as I'm scrolling on social media or Instagram. And so these are kind of like a swipe file for the Eden social media. So I have a good starting point for the ideas that we come up with. But if you have no idea what to start about, we're not going to

12:35talk about strategy in this video. But we recently talked about where you answer a few questions, six questions, and then we search what's trending based on the topics you talk about. And we build out a strategy for you with your intellectual signature here all mapped out and your content pillars and topics based on what is working that you can click on and get ideas from. And then you can immediately take these ideas and put them in the planner. And then once you write them out, you can schedule them to go out on any platform like X, Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. And those who have used it so far have said that they finally

13:12have clarity on what to post about. And this is just a starting point, right? You don't need to let this direct your entire strategy. But if you just don't know where to start, it's a lot easier to just go into this because it would take an entire course for me to teach you how to do that. That's the beauty of software. But how do we actually start building this idea museum? Well, the secret of most creatives you love is that they keep a ruthless curation of notes, ideas, and sources of inspiration. So a swipe file, as marketers call it, you need somewhere to jot down ideas as soon as they come to mind because the

13:44idea that hit you in the shower is gone by lunch if you trust your memory. Now, don't overcomplicate this. I hate complex note taking systems because they never stick around. They never actually get kept up with because it's honestly a full-time job to keep up with a note taking system. So you just capture random thoughts, capture social posts that inspired you, write notes about videos that you're watching or podcasts that you're watching and anything else. You just need to start building the idea museum. It doesn't matter if there are bad ideas in it because the good ones will come to surface. Now, I personally like to save ideas

14:17to two types of boards. And what you can do here is just create a board, new board type, validated ideas, create that one and then create another one called favorite ideas. So validated ideas are posts that have gone viral or are just performing well. And then favorite ideas are the ideas that you love. And it's simple to just keep them organized in two spaces for now. And if it gets too complex, then you can start to reorganize it or you can just ask AI to do it for you. And so when you merge the two together, validated idea with a favorite idea from your own point of view, that's when you

14:54have a great and original social post. And now when I say original, I'm not talking about like, oh, I received a download from the divine and this idea that I had is just super unique and no one else can replicate it. That's not how things work. That's called insight. That's not an idea. That's not an original idea. It's an idea. But the

15:13definition is insight. They are different things. You are allowed to talk about an idea that someone else has had because it definitely is an original idea for them. I consider an original idea, an original take on an idea. That's what you're aiming for. So in short, idea capture, just capturing ideas is the simplest yet most fundamental habit for any creative. But you need a place to find ideas. So where do you actually find these ideas? So that leads to step two, which is to curate ideas based on idea density because most inputs are the same as everyone else's. They watch the same news, look at the same trends and write

15:51the same ideas as everyone else. That's why everything on social media sounds the same and AI is only contributing to this. So if you want ideas, nobody else has, you need sources. Nobody else is reading specifically. You need sources with high idea density by that. I mean books, articles, or accounts where almost every sentence is so good that you can't ignore it. Now I say get what I mean. I'm being hyperbolic. It's sources that you don't see all the time on social media. So older books, that's where you're going to find ideas that you can make fresh from your own take or your own perspective. And when

16:25structured in a way that will do well on social media, that's what makes your brand start to become unique. So old or little known books or books that just aren't a trend right now or specific creators who always post something worth thinking about. So in Eden, there's the discover feed where you can see what is trending. These are validated ideas, so to say, and then

16:46you can search specific creators content here. Like you can see mine and what is top liked or most restacked. But what I would do is go to lists and then you can create a list and add creators to it. So you essentially have like a curated feed that is a lot better to scroll through than social media with accounts that only you want to see. And as a side note, by the time this video is released, so will Eve and Eve is essentially the agent or AI that can run your entire creator business for you. So it can search across all ideas that are trending. It also has

17:19access to your library where you've saved all of your ideas. It understands what projects you're working on. You can set up routines so every morning it delivers you ideas or a weekly report. And inside of Eden, since it has the store feature, so you can build a digital product or have your email list on there. You can even do Instagram auto DM. All of this can be set up from one simple place. So if you've tried even before, one of our biggest pieces of feedback is that for a beginner, it's a bit overwhelming to get started in. You don't know what to do. And that's completely understandable when it's such a robust

17:51workspace. It's difficult to just pigeonhole people into one starting point because there's so many different starting points. What if you want to create a digital product or import your email list or start discovering posts? The agent that runs your entire creator business is the simple place to do that. And it helps you set everything up. Ideally, you come away with something you can post an idea, a digital product that you've started, or even an email list, and it will guide you through that entire process. So that's how you capture ideas. Now we need to learn how to stand out when everyone else is saying the

18:21same thing because people don't follow information. They follow perspectives. 10 people can talk about the same old topics, but one of them can say it in such a way that brings an entirely new meaning to it. And that's the person people follow. Most beginners think they need something new to say when they don't because people aren't on social media for new ideas. They're there to see what's already being talked about from a creator they like. I wrote a post in 2019 that had the hook how to get ahead of 99% of people. And then a few years later, I turned it into a video and that

18:52is the most popular video on my channel. And then Mark Manson made a video with the same title and then Alex Hormozi and then Tom Bilyeu and now you see it everywhere and now it's oversaturated. But nobody owns that topic. I don't own it. And they are all different videos. They just have a similar title. It's the packaging versus the content. And the packaging is what matters for attention and clicks. And then the content has to be good to keep people around. You don't build a brand off of YouTube titles or hooks. You build it off of the substance. So your best content will come from pairing two ideas. That's what Eve the

19:28agent does. Any idea you give it, it validates it against what's trending because we have a corpus of millions of social posts. We quite literally bring in over five million social posts a month. We don't keep them all because they're not all good. But all of the outliers and what's trending is in there. So now I just want to get you to the point of writing your first post in a practical way. Not with Eve, not with AI, not with any of this, just a system that you can use. So step one is to study what's already working. So I want you to pick three creators who aren't celebrities,

19:59but they also aren't nobodies because a celebrity just automatically gets millions of views and likes on every post. That's not a good judgment of a good idea. And you want to save these creators somewhere safe. So you can just paste the URL in the notes app or of course add them to a list like I showed you previously. And I said we're not going to use AI or even to do it, but you kind of need to do this part with Eden because you can't do it anywhere else or with normal AI. But you paste a prompt like this into Eden or Claude connected to Eden so it can see social media posts and manage

20:29your creator business. But the prompt is I talk about your topics, research midsize creators who are doing well in those topics, then reverse engineer their strategy from their best posts, put the posts on a swipe file board, each with a note explaining why that post did well for them. Then interview me for my own perspective and beliefs so we can start to formulate my own

20:49strategy. Now notice something important there. You aren't copying them. You're not even replicating them. You're taking the principles that work across everything that does well. And then you're formulating your own strategy in an informed way because if you don't do that, then it's not a strategy. So now step number two is to find your angle because we kind of have a strategy. We have ideas. We understand what's working because we've researched it. But now you need to learn how to ideate. So I want you to pick one idea that you've saved. And if you post it the way that it is, you're probably posting something that is

21:23someone else's or something that's probably been said a thousand times before. So you have to change the perspective and you do that by changing the angle by which you look at the idea. So you can try this by just writing five different angles for one idea. You can ask how would a thinker you love say this. So I can say how would Steven Kotler say this from a performance or focus perspective to how would I say this to my past self. Three, how can I redefine the idea itself for what is the common perspective on this idea and what do I disagree with. And five why does this matter to

21:58the everyday person. And there are thousands of angles you can look up. This is actually something you can use AI for is just give it the idea and then say give me a hundred different angles of this. True. That's too much but you can try it and you can start to understand what an angle looks like. So let's say you save the idea constraints make you more creative or creativity lies in the constraints when you disagree with it or take a disagreeable angle. You have something new like constraints don't make you creative. They make you decisive because the blank page is a decision

22:27problem disguised as an inspiration problem. And now you're posting something only you would have said and you can say it 11 ways this month without repeating yourself. So if you want help finding angles you can use this prompt that I'm going to throw on screen. You can screenshot it because it's a tad long and I don't want to read the entire thing but I've also included a document just like something you can click and then open and copy paste like a Google Doc or you can duplicate it to Eden. So it's easy to just ask in the chat. So that handles the ideas and content portion. It really does. You don't really need

22:59anything else to do well in content creation. If you still feel like you lack clarity I would recommend you rewatch that section. So now we need to learn how to monetize what that what is your life's work. That's what this is. Surprisingly fast with AI. So with the content side of things what we just talked about what that allows you to do is attract people to your work and eventually get paid. Now your life's work is an aesthetic sentence you can articulate to others. You create it through experimentation and iteration. So I want to get you to a first iteration fast. You

23:30have to understand this is a first iteration. It's not going to be perfect. That's just how things go when you're building your own thing. You really need to build an embarrassing version first that you may not see as embarrassing but a year later you're going to look back on and be like damn that was embarrassing. Now products the thing that you sell is exactly like content exactly what we just learned. I hope that clicks for you. The products that do best are based on what people are already signaling that they want plus a problem you solved in your own life. So in other words when you research content and see

24:00what's going viral that is the best market research you could ever do. So if I talk about focus productivity and psychology and notice a pattern in the post around how to focus for one hour a day on your side business and I see that those are going somewhat viral that's an opportunity. So I could create something like a low ticket paid product with a community attached to it and consider it a 30 day challenge like a focus challenge or a lock in challenge. And I think

24:25that's compelling for a first iteration right. 30 day challenge lock in on your side business and join other people that are doing the same thing. Maybe you can add a bonus like a little focus tracker or something like that. And the thing about this the thing that most people struggle with is when you create a product you aren't able to sell it because you don't have traffic. But if you base the product off of something that is already doing well on social media with content

24:50then having a product that is based off of that. When you create content about the product your content is that much more likely to do well simply because you chose a good angle for your product. Now I have another prompt for you because again this isn't a course and this prompt is actually very long. But essentially what it does is it helps you figure out what kind of product you want to create and then it helps you build it out and even create an email marketing sequence for it so you can sell it. And yes you need to either do this in Eden or connect Claude to Eden

25:22so that it can actually build out the product on your store and build out the email marketing sequence because Claude isn't going to handle your email list. So again link in the description for that prompt. So let's do a quick recap. Let's act like we're going to start your life's work in 30 days. Week one build your idea museum set up capture on your phone make your list of five creators and save one idea a day. Week two find three mid-size creators and reverse engineer their strategy write five angles on one idea a day and post the best ones. Week three keep posting and pay attention to which posts get

25:55the most replies and questions. Week four pick one question make a one-page guide that answers it and put it out as a free guide to collect emails then build a larger version with the product prompt that I have below. Then you just keep building for the next 12 months. So to end the influencer optimizes for attention the personal brand optimizes for conversions the artisan builds a body of work one idea in one project at a time and lets social media pay for it. Thank you for watching while you're still here like and subscribe it's just two buttons they're pretty easy to press takes like two seconds I would

26:29deeply appreciate it and yeah check out links in the description check out Eden I think it's the tool to use if you're starting any form of creator business and if you need help we have the Eden community alongside it built in Eden. So thank you for watching I'll see you in the next one bye