I listened to a podcast the other day where Alex Hormozi explained the reasoning for his content strategy.
If you don’t know who Hormozi is, he’s a guy who is currently smashing it all over social media by spending upwards of 70K per month on short-form video content while knocking out Guinness records for sales in his book launches.
I confess that I kinda like Alex. He’s a sharp guy.
But I’m not sure how well I trust my own judgment on this.
In the short talk I heard, he explained that his content strategy is built around psychological conditioning.
He wants to expose his audience to frequent and repeated reinforcement loops. Each piece of content should make you feel, think, or do something that feels rewarding. The more you see his stuff, and the more his stuff creates small behavior changes with a feeling of reward, the more you’ll be drawn to him.
I don’t know about you, but when someone tells me to my face that my responses to them are the target of a massive behavior-change campaign, I’m going to ask whether my beliefs and judgments about that person are legit.
Awhile back I read an odd book by an odd Romanian professor of magic who died under fittingly odd circumstances.
The core idea of this book is that our world doesn’t operate by the rules that we’re told. We are not a democratic, scientific, rational culture. We tell ourselves we are, but that’s part of the game.
In matter of fact we are ruled by magicians.
This is not as crazy as it sounds. As far back as the 1920s you had the propaganda people and the “PR” specialists claiming that democracy was too fragile to trust it to the opinions of the masses. People had to be told what to think, and the best way to tell ’em what to think is to bombard their minds with influential messages that give their opinions to them.
It happens — and this was the point of the odd Romanian professor — that these influential messages use symbols and images to bypass the conscious reasoning mind and work on the non-rational parts of the self.
Which, as I found fascinating, is the same way that magic worked in the ancient and Renaissance eras. Propaganda uses the same methods as honest-to-Joe magicians. Ain’t that a coincidence?
Now what do you think might be happening in the endless brawl of images that is the internet?
The architects of social media all admit that they’ve built machines for hijacking attention.
Forget about the words, the messages, the beliefs and ideas in the “content” you consume online.
What matters is how they make you feel, what images are left in your mind, and what you’re moved to say and do.
Knowingly or not, they’re all casting spells on you.
This is why I am so careful about what social media I consume, when and how I use it. It isn’t the conscious ideas that get you. It’s the symbols and images and habitual actions that affect you in unconsciously, in ways you never get a chance to notice.
More:
Gregory Bateson, a psychologist among other things, did a lot of research into the “double-bind” as a cause of schizophrenia.
A double-bind is when there is no winning move. Heads you lose, tails I win. Bateson’s work found that many cases of apparent mental illness were actually a coping strategy for dealing with a world that makes no sense. He didn’t live to see this diabolical internet piped into every smartphone, but it’s a fair leap to see the endless screech of “content” online as a major cause of thoughts and beliefs losing their grip on the real world of things.
LLMs (which I refuse to call “AI”) are making this far worse than it was even 5 or 10 years ago, and things were not exactly sparkling back then.
Anybody can cook up a story, complete with its own self-consistent internal logic, and believe it as sure as the sky is up and snow is white.
(But are they REALLY?)
Just ask those Flat Earth people or the Moon Landings Aren’t Real people.
When words and experiences fall entirely out of sync, you get the kind of cognitive meltdown found in schizophrenics.
People are confused about fitness, nutrition, and basic facts about health even though we have access to “more information” than ever. When you’re pulled in a dozen directions by invisible lures you don’t notice pulling you, that makes sense. When every move looks like a losing move, reality stops making sense.
I caution those with ears to listen to minimize your exposure to this nightmare.
First, it’s good cognitive and mental hygiene to keep yourself away from a howling abyss of demons.
Second, if you are working towards a goal for yourself, you need single-minded focus. Anything that robs you of that focus becomes your enemy.
Allowing “content” to worm its way into your mind can only create disorder, disharmony, and complete anarchy inside your mind.
A focused will concentrated on a single purpose will very likely succeed.
A divided will split between 3 goals or 300 goals can’t even get started.
I suspect much of the dysfunctions we’re seeing today, in health and fitness, and with emotional instability in general, are due to people getting sucked into this whirling chaos of new desires for every shiny object that turns up while scrolling the addiction machine.
Nobody can focus, because destroying your ability to concentrate is part of the deal. Allowing your attention to be someone else’s business plan is not how you get where you want to be.
If you want something, then want it and get after it. But I wonder how much anyone wants anything once they’re too deep in the Matrix.
Dr. Matt is trying his level best to help those who want to be helped.
For those who want eyes to see, I want to help you win.
On that note, I’ve got a community growing for the ones who want to win.
👉 Use this link to be part of it
Matt Perryman