George Kao breaks down why a viral video hit 7 million views in a week: not charisma or flashy ideas, but grounded personal stories from lived experience. He points to a 40-minute video about an MIT neurosurgeon who became unemployed as an example, and argues that mining stories from work, relationships, and family is harder for others or AI to copy.
Questions this episode answers
7 million views
"MIT Neurosurgeon Unemployed"
About 40 minutes long
Chapters
Recently I saw a video that got 7 million views within one week. Now you might imagine, oh, must be really entertaining, right? Must be really good looking person, you know, doing some great dance or brilliant. Just the ideas were mind blowing. Neither was true. Now, I'm not saying the person was ugly, but the person is, I think most people objectively would say average, average looking person and certainly not charismatic, at least not in the way that we typically think. So you can look for that video if you go to YouTube and search MIT Neurosurgeon Unemployed and then watch the video. It's 40 minutes long. I think it's 35 minutes longer than it has to be because the story and the key idea could have been said in five minutes. I'm going to try to keep this video shorter. I don't want to spoil it for you. You should go and watch, see the video for yourself. But the key lesson that I learned from that is now charisma no longer matters. Great ideas no longer matter. How good looking you are, no longer matters how good of a dancer you are, no longer matters. If you're trying to convey transformation information, you know what matters now? And this is the same thing that's always mattered, it's to look into your life's experiences and find the most interesting stories from, from your life, from your work, from your relationships, from your spiritual practice, from your family experiences, from, from your, yeah, just your lived experience. Go and mind for the most interesting stories from your lived experience, the most unique stories, also the ones that impacted you the most. Okay? And tell those stories on, in your content, in your writing, in your videos, in your social media posts. Because that is what people are looking for. Because that is increasingly going to be what's unique. That, guess what, not only do handsome and pretty influencers, none of us can compete with people who, you know, look and are more, look better than us. They're more charismatic than us, or even more brilliant than us. They can think, think of ideas and frame ideas that just sound amazing. And I know I often feel like I'm the stupidest of my peers, but I'm just very consistent. I just keep showing up day after day after day, you know, and that's my strength. And I also, I observe because I show up a lot. I observe what seems to be working and what seems not to be working. And I'm telling you right now what's working now. And I think what's going to work in the future are stories of grounded, unique, worthwhile experiences. And all of us have them. We just seem to live our lives, and we forget about these, these experiences. We forget about stories, the things that impact you, things that have a positive or negative impact on you. Okay. Tell those stories, because those are the stories that, you know, no one else can compete with you on your own grounded experience. The one, the stuff that impacts you is probably going to be the stuff that's interesting for your audience as well. And also, you can't compete with AI, artificial intelligence going forward. That's going to be, you know, prettier, prettier than any of us, more well spoken than any of us, more entertaining than any of us. But what AI can compete with you on your lived experience? So I hope this is helpful. And thanks for, thanks for watching.
