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Hey, this is Sharon Trivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And I have to tell you that the social media game is rigged. If you did not know that, I will explain exactly why. And it's especially true when these gurus make predictions. They say, oh, this is going to happen. That is going to happen. And they make all these predictions and because of that, it's ruining our feeds and is ruining our thinking and is ruining the important things that we think about in life. And I want to break down for you exactly how you think about all of this. What are the hot takes? How you can ride the trend jacking wave without actually spending a dollar and still growing your audience, growing your reach and growing your influen. This is a, in my opinion, a probably a pivotal episode that you're going to listen to. I break down for you why the social media game is rigged and how you can beat it all starting right now.
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One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and.
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The exact how to, how to grow your business, how to blow up your.
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Personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharan Srivatha and welcome to Business School.
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It's crazy to not agree that the social media game is totally rigged and we see it over and over. We are the insane consumers of all the social media. But the amount of time we see random people make predictions and follow through on those is insane. I'll give you an example. I'll give you the exact Gary Vee playbook. It's a masterclass in in selective memory. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, as most of you know, I actually have a ton of respect for him. I think he has the ability to put out more content, think about more ideas, whatever he says he does. But Gary Vaynerchuk has made hundreds of bold predictions. Some come true and many don't. But when he gets one right, he digs up an old clip and acts like a visionary genius, conveniently ignoring all the ones that flop. By the way, I'm not mad at him at all. I think this is fine. I think is great. I think a lot of people do this. And for a while I was really irritated by this. Like, I'll give you an example. Here's where he was right. He predicted TikTok's major rise in 2017, 20, 18, when most people just ignored it and said it was a dancing app. And he was right. But then he was wrong. He hyped this whole sonic boom where he was like, hey, that's like everybody. The. This audio trend sound prediction that everyone would have, that would have an in, you know, this unique audio trend. He tried it. Heck, I tried it. But it never took off. And then think about, talk about Clubhouse. Clubhouse never worked for Gary Vee because he had such a great content production team that he was never live on anything, which is why he started tea with Gary Vee and things like that that were live. But he, he said Clubhouse was the future in 2021 because it was Covid. No one was around. Like, everyone was in their offices. They needed distraction. They got on Clubhouse and then ghosted it when Clubhouse flopped and other things kind of took over. It's still around in some way. But here's the big idea, though. Social media rewards confidence and not accuracy at this time, confidence is insane, especially when it comes with big players, because you have influencers saying whatever they want. I. I know influencers will give you tax advice. I know influencers will give you financial advice who don't have any money. Like, I know them. I've actually worked with hundreds of influencers because they don't see me as a threat in their business. Because they know that, hey, Sean's never going to be me. I am never going to be them. I never want to be them. But I've seen behind the scenes, there's how much they have struggled. But the real winners aren't the ones who double down on bad takes. They're the ones who control the conversation without getting trapped by it. I'll say it again, the real winners aren't the ones who double down on bad takes. They're the ones who control the conversation without getting trapped by it. So while I was really mad that people would make all these predictions and then most of them would not come true, and that's why we play the rigged game. And they would just pick this cherry, pick the idea, the selective memory of what actually worked and show the clip as to how great they are and then get more people to follow them. Like, that used to bother me. But what I'm trying to tell you right now is that doesn't bother me anymore and it shouldn't bother you, too. And the reason is this. Just know that that is the rigged game. Just know that that is how they play. Just know that if they don't make predictions, they don't get views. Just know that if the, if the predictions, after predictions, after predictions being made, predictions are controversial, predictions are wild, predictions are crazy. And predictions involve two things. Right? Think about this for one second. When people make predictions, it involves two things. One, you have two sides of the aisle. The people that agree with it engage with it more, share it more because now it, it validates their identity. And people that don't agree with it now they are frustrated by it and they share it in groups and they share their frustration and they comment and engage negatively either way what happens, it crushes the algorithm positively for that creator. That's when I realized that these, that I'm not mad at this anymore. And I want you to realize that that's why we're playing a rig game. Because people are just are slaves to the algorithm and they want to do more for the algorithm because the algorithm will show more stuff. But sooner that rather than later we should all realize that good content and good content alone, good ideas and good ideas alone, helpful ideas and helpful ideas alone will win. And that's what I'm going to break down for you today, which is how to win the big rigged social media game. All right, so given that as a backdrop, I'll come back to you on how to do hot takes, etc. Right. The first one is there is this what I call. I got three big ideas for you. There's this idea called the. What I wrote down called the danger of the Digital Dogma. And I tried to give it a name so that I remember it not because it's fancy. Right. Here's what I mean. 60 to 70% of people don't ever change their opinions online, even when they're proven wrong. There's a great Leonardo da Vinci quote that says something like the greatest deception men suffer from is their own opinions. I always forget it. I think that's right. The greatest deception that men suffer from is from their own opinions. Now what does that mean? Once we say something, we feel like we can't backtrack, et cetera. So I'll give you a. I'll give you a couple crazy stories. So this may sound like basic kind of storytelling, but it's not. There's a, there's a theme behind this. So if you are old enough, you will probably remember how Blockbuster laughed at Net Netflix. Right? And so who's the punchline now? So in 2000ish timeframe, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million. Think about how crazy that is, right? I think they Than that, in like, you know, a day right now, Blockbuster CEO laughed in his face, calling it a niche business. And then 10 years later, 2010, Blockbuster was bankrupt and Netflix was worth over $12 billion or $13 billion. Today, Netflix is worth 260, $270 billion. And Blockbuster is just a meme. Say, I, I can't even find my Blockbuster card. And if I did, like, I would, you know, I would explain to my kids what it was. But here's a crazy lesson. Blockbuster's public arrogance locked them into a losing mindset. That's what this is, the public arrog problem. That's what happened. So the, the big tactical advice on this are you just gotta kind of, how do you manage hot takes? You gotta do the hot takes, right? But, but most importantly, be first, but stay open. This is, this might be the future, but maybe, or maybe not, this will happen. Like, you gotta be first, but stay open. And I'll give you the hot take tip that was probably worth the price of admission for this podcast. Make the prediction that you wanna make. And if in the future something happens that goes against a prediction, go back in your feed and just delete the old post. That's it. Right? Because what that says is you made a prediction, it went the other way, and you're retracting your position because when the data changes, you should probably change with it, right? So that's the kind of the big idea of this, this digital. The danger of this digital dogma, right? Here's, here's a kind of the, A second big idea. Smart people change their minds. Just let me explain that to you. Smart people change their minds. It is totally healthy to change your mind when presented with better data. There's a great. When I was in business school, I learned this quote. And at Goldman Sachs, they would say this quote all the time. And I remember the Chief Investment officer would say this quote all the time. And she would say, when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? I think that was a John Maynard Keynes quote. Who's that? The Keynesian kind of theory of economics. And like Jeff Bezos pivoted Amazon multiple times from books to now aws. I don't think you know this, but Amazon Web Services is an insanely significant part of their business. And so even the. I know this is going to trigger a lot of people, but check this out. Even Elon Musk flipped his position on AI multiple times and it saved him billions of dollars. Like, I. I'll. Let me see if I can walk through this. This timeline for you from in my head. So first, like, in 2013, 2014, like, 10 years ago, Musk Elon called AI the biggest existential threat to humanity, right? And then he demanded, like, super strict regulation for it. And then a year later, he was like, hey, we should make this all open source. Then he funded OpenAI, which later built ChatGPT. Now he's on this big fight with Sam Altman. And then in four, four years later, he quit OpenAI, called it a mistake, and started attacking AI again because, you know, he's like, you should keep that open source. But then he started Grok. And then, like last year, two years ago, he. He launched Xai, direct competitor to OpenAI. And then why? Because Elon publicly changed his stance multiple times, but each shift put him ahead of the market. Like, every single time he did this, he won. And so when the facts change, do you change your opinion? When the facts change, do you change your mind? I think that's important. So think about this, right? You want to talk to people, you want to listen to more podcasts. It's very easy online. Like, I hate this idea of followers, and I love this idea of, like, content being fed to me. In a lot of ways, I hate the idea of followers because we follow people a lot of times who have similar ideologies as we do. So it reinforces our dumb thinking and no one challenges it at all. So, like, for example, most Democrats follow other Democratic news, most Republicans follow other Republicans, and they get very, like, polarized. But if you followed the other side, maybe the Elon likers and the Elon haters, maybe the Trump likers and the Trump haters, maybe the Dem lighters and the Drum haters, maybe is GOP likers and the GOP haters, you'll get significantly better opinions, right? So instead of making bold claims, I would just say, like, ask, what do you think? Because if you. Otherwise you're in an echo chamber and you're not actually thinking through ideas. Use social media as a way to, like, curate your ideas and your thinking so you can have a much better argument. Like, if I am listening to something that I don't agree with, when someone else gives me another point of view, I think to myself, not that I'm mad. I'm like, huh? What good argument can I come up with that makes me, you know, better positioned to handle this in the future? That's when you get a lot more thoughtful about all of this, right? All Right. So here's section number three or big idea number three, which is social media is tool and is not your identity. I don't know how to tell you this. Social media is a tool, it's a vehicle, it is not your identity. It is very easy to say, hey, you know what, I'm just going to, I'm just going to digitize my identity. It's not that at all. You can, you're a human, you can always change your mind. It's no different than, you know, if, if you were overweight and you became, and you worked really hard and you manage your diet and exercise and you became super healthy. And because of that your identity changed and your personality changed and your mindset changed. Like social media is a tool, it's a vehicle. It is not your ident, it is to, it is to create like people. Don't people forget this? What is media? Everyone Like Facebook, Instagram, etc like you know what they did? They gave a platform for other people to launch media companies, right? And there's two. When it comes to a media company, there's two parts of the puzzle. Think about CNN or think about Fox News or whatever. When it comes to a media company, there's two actors. Actor number one are the people producing the media, the creators and actor number two are the consumers. Right? There's always going to be more consumers than there are creat. What is the job of the creator? The creator's job is to sell attention. That's it. Right? So when people, why are people posting content and not trying to monetize it? Like I've posted content, I think I, I just checked on Instagram, I have 4,000 pieces of content that I posted in the last like eight years or something, right? 4,000 pieces. That's crazy. And, and so the, the key there is what I am selling attention. And the way you sell attention is you sell attention through entertainment. You sell attention through education. You sell attention through personality. You sell attention through, through stirring the pot. When you sell attention now, you have attention that you can monetize. Now the monetization of that attention does not mean you have to sell a course or sell an ebook. The monetization of the tension is that you, you take your spotlight and point it on something. I'll give you, I'll give you the backdrop of this. I have more attention in the small, in the niche real estate industry than most people in my world. Like apart from a couple of personalities who don't do what I do, I have more attention in the real estate world than every single person in the real estate industry. Right? And I say that like Ryan sir had more attention than me but he sells real estate. Like I don't, I don't do that. But for the non person not selling real estate, I have more attention than almost every single person because I have nothing to sell. So what I do is I am the media company. I have this attention, I give people a lot of this. I don't sell anything and I just take my spotlight and I spotlight on to real and I don't. And the way I do that is by wearing a real T shirt. That's all I do, a real sweatshirt. Now when I do that, what happens is real gets attention. And because of that attention we built a billion plus dollar company in two and a half years. No one could have done that. You could not. There's not enough ads that you could have bought to do that. Regardless of what anybody says at any point in time, it doesn't matter. Right. The truth is I just, I was a lightning rod for the attention. I gave everything away for free. We operationalizing generosity and I pointed that attention towards one thing. Tomorrow if you know I have type 1 diabetes, tomorrow I can start creating content based our ideas and, and, and, and sell attention based on this epidemic of, of you know, type 1 diabetes which most people don't understand which is when your pancre. And then I can point the Spotlight on type 1 diabetes. My daughter and her friends run this company called 100Unicorns.com. The 100Unicorns.com builds unicorn and rainbow products. I can create content and then point my spotlight onto them. I can just point my spotlight onto all of these things. And that is what attention is all about. The idea like when people say you're a media company, nobody explains what that is. Being a media company is selling attention. And when take that attention and you do it in a goodwill oriented way and you could point that attention to the right places that help people. That's when you win. I'll give you this great definition of selling. Selling is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that is good for them. And then taking them to make, getting them to take emotional. Getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. Say it again. Selling is getting somebody to intellectually commit to a future result that is good for them and then getting them to emotionally commit to taking action to achieve that result. Right. And so all I'm doing is pointing attention in different flavors. Pointing the spotlight in different flavors and that's what people do. Social media is not a tool. It's a vehicle for attention, not your identity. And if the average like consumer spends two and a half per hours a day on social media, it reinforces their own biases. So you're not, you are not your thoughts, you're just an observer of your thoughts, right? That's what's really, really important. So I'll give you a crazy example. So I remember this many years ago, like probably a couple of years ago, Mr. Beast paid for like a thousand blind people to get sight restoration surgery. I think like helping them cure blindness in some way. Twitter went crazy. Twitter exploded. Some people praised him and then others accused him of like getting, you know, doing charity for views. And he didn't play do much. He did it, you know, he clearly if you know Mr. Beast, he, he wants to create the best videos and bring, bring, he's not money hungry and he just let the conversation play out engaging just enough to keep the debate going. If the controversy isn't bad for you, you just got to position yourself, right? And Mr. Beast just did that and he's the number one creator in the world. You may also remember this idea, the Ice Bucket Challenge, right? I did the ice Bucket Challenge. I, maybe you did too. This is what originally happened. The ALS did this ice Bucket Challenge. It went viral. I think it was like 10 years ago, summer of 2014, 2014, 2015, it raised more than like 200 and 200, $250 million around the world for ALS research, which alone contributed with the US alone contributing to like half of that, I think. So I remember this. Celebrities like, you know, Bill Gates and Zuck and Bieber all took part in this like dumping ice buckets on themselves challenge. So here's the main controversy if you don't remember it. While many people praise the challenge raising awareness for funds on like this deadly disease, some crazy critics argued that it turned als, which is a serious life altering condition, into a social media fad. But they couldn't see past that. Every single time, no matter what you do, no matter how kind you are, no matter how generous you are, no matter how good intentioned you are, you are going to get the opposite side of things because people are just weird and they don't believe you. And social media has given people a platform to always talk at it from the other side. Like there is like no good deeds goes unpunished in our world. So this whole like, you know, while many phrases. Challenge. Right. So what exactly happened? The nature of the challenge led to discussion, discussions and thinking about like all whether all these participants are more interested in personal exposure than truly addressing the issue. Like I will tell you right now, I don't remember I did the Ice Bucket Challenge. I did it because my friend tagged me and I felt this social pressure to do the challenge. But me doing the challenge and dropping the link raised more money for ALS. ALS never, ever said, oh my gosh, we've raised $250 million, 100 times more than what they have ever raised in the past. My data may be wrong, but way more right. That's why it won. That's why this is really crazy. Viral charity campaigns like mobilize massive support and financial contributions, but you're also going to get scrutiny at some point. You just have to realize you got to take the good with the bad, right? So what I'm trying to tell you is you got to be intentional and use social media not as a. You're. I would suggest not using it as a digital diary, right? And, and you can use it as a digital diary, but then you're going to get hate, you're going to get pushed and if that's okay with you, that's okay with you. But social media, the lightning rod for anything polarizing. So the more you could detach it from, quote, your brand and your identity and evolve it more as a media company, as a spotlight. Think about yourself as a news anchor on cnn. You are a famous news anchor on cnn. I'm just using cnn, BBC, Fox News. Please do. Again, I'll say CNN and all, all my right wing friends will get, you know, will. And then when I say, if I say Fox News, then all my left wing, all my CNN friends will get mad and then they'll stop watching. Like that's how crazy this world is, right? But if you're the anchor, right, if you're the anchor, your job is not, it's not about your identity. It's about, is about, you know, harnessing and capturing this lightning in a bottle that is its attention and then taking this attention and then showcasing it on whatever you need to do to monetize that attention. It is a business model. A media company is a business model. The sooner you realize it, the easier it is for you to play the rig game. And that's why this is super important. So this brings me to the, the bonus hot take. I literally, this was the main reason why I want to record this episode is like the right way to do hot takes. And let me explain exactly how this work. So posts that get shared get like 4x to 5x More recent posts that get just like our comments. Right? We know this sharing is virality, not likes or comments. If people like the more shareable your stuff is, the more viral it will be. People don't just share facts, they share opinions. They spark conversation. Like that's what they want. You want to create your stuff for shareability. That's what it is. So here's like the. I wrote down like a winning, like, hot take formula. How do you do a hot take? So first, number one, you got to be first. If some, if a piece of news comes out, you do a green screen or whatever and you say, hey, here's the first thing. I saw this. This is crazy. This is what I think. What do you think? Right? So the early opinions get shared the most because people see your post before they read the news. And if a big event happens, you just. If you just react right away. So as soon as a big event happens, you pick up the news and you react and you're like one of the first 10 people to react. You will get the notoriety in all of this. That is the most important thing. Number two, you got to just give them your angle. Don't just repeat what the others say. Just add your perspective. You're like, hey, such and such a thing happened. Here's what I think. Here's my perspective. So you're giving a little bit of color and perspective. By the way, you'd be amazed as how much your perspective shapes the thinking going forward and shapes their mindset. Number three, I would waffle, but I would do it smartly. So I call it waffle smartly. And you could always say, hey, which is probably the truth. You have no idea. You could say, this might happen, or maybe this will happen. This might happen, or maybe this will happen. What you're doing is you're exploring the opinions and then figuring out what exactly happens and doesn't happen. Number four, you gotta ask for opinions at the end of your post. Don't end with, you know, hey, this is what's gonna happen. Like these. That way you're staking your claim in the ground. Instead, you say, hey, this is news. This may happen. And that may happen. Curious. What do you think? And that sparks more discussion. That doesn't let them know that you're being a total, you know, bulldozing jerk. Ask them what their opinion is. Right? And last but not least, you just got to trend Jack pretty smartly. If it's a risky topic like politics or scandals, just soften your take, right? The more Charged it is. You don't have to. You don't. You can just soften your take. But still be the first to report, still be the first to waffle smartly, still be the first to give your angle, still be the first to ask for opinions. But you got to trend jack smartly. Just because something is trending doesn't mean you jump on the trend. Like I've seen people who will just say, oh, use this audio. Like think about this for a second. If you really used like a trending audio to grow your account, please understand you have a crap account, right? That means they followed you because of your trending audio. Like you don't want. You. You really think that? I understand if you have trending audio and you're a musician, but if you're, if you, if you do underwater basket weaving or you're a real estate agent or you're a mortgage loan broker or you coach or consultant, do you really want. Just because you added a piece of trending audio for people to follow you? Like that is the dumbest thing in the world. So trend jack smartly, right? Use the right content, use the right hooks. I will tell you the best way to trend jack right now is not to create your own content, is to do green screen content. The more if you did this, by the way, I will tell you right now if you just, you know, watch the alerts, did trend jack content that was important and that happened in your space and you were the first one to drop it. Every morning, every week for the like the next four weeks, I'm stalking 30 days of trend jacking content and you just did green screens every day. You will destroy it. Like your account will grow so fast it is insane. And that's what's super important here. So net net, all I'm suggesting is this hot takes are literally a strategy. You just got to do them well. They're not a risk because if you actually make a hot take on something, you can always go back and delete it. Number two, shares and shares alone get you virality. There's nothing else that drives virality more than shares. So anything that you could provide that is a this or that, that's polarizing or what have you will generate more virality. And nobody gets boxed into bad takes anymore. So make whatever claim you want because that's where the world is and that's how we've, you know that the, you know that it's rigged. Let the bad takes be out there. Tell them what you think. Waffle smartly because it will help you get more traction, it'll help you organize your thoughts better, and it'll help you win more because now you're actually giving your audience a multiple point of view to work through. I really wanted to get you this to for you to realize that social media is a rigged game. And when you make something polarizing, when you are out there doing these hot takes, when you make a prediction, two things happen. Number one, the people who agree with you will share it and support you, etc, and you'll get more virality. The people who don't agree with you will be mad and will engage with it, which will get you more virality. And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter because you can always go back and delete if deleted. If your predictions don't come true, and if they do come true, you can take that and then showcase people that you're the smartest person in the world. Right? Yeah. My point is the social media game is rigged and you just need to know why it's rigged and how it's rigged so that you can win. I hope that was helpful now. Hey, by the way, if you like this, could you please do me a favor? Could you screenshot this episode and just post it on social and tag me and that way I can make more like this for you. I really have no idea. Sitting in my car, sitting, sitting at home, thinking about like what would be interesting and important to you. I really think a lot about this and I want to give you stuff that you don't see otherwise. I want to give you stuff that behind the scenes that you don't actually get anywhere else. So please, please, please, if you like this, can you please screenshot this and tag me? That way I can more. I can make more like this for you.
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