Everyone's faking being real

There's a new epidemic on social media and YouTube. It's called Performative Authenticity.
Check Hormozi's new videos. The camera on in random locations, vertical, no b-roll, no edit tricks, none of the yellow word-by-word captions he inflicted on the entire internet. Just a guy sitting down telling you he isn't selling you anything…. yet there's a link in the description….

The man who built the most copied editing style in creator history worked out that looking like he isn't trying is the better play, so the performative unscripted nature IS the packaging. The man does nothing by accident. Everything is deliberate.

Start looking and you'll see it everywhere. The "raw, unfiltered" podcast clip chosen out of a two hour episode, the founder's vulnerable LinkedIn post about the year he nearly lost everything going live at 8am Tuesday for maximum reach. Big names are shooting deliberately rubbish phone footage now because the glossy stuff stopped converting.

None of this is honest.

It's the weaponisation of being authentic, vulnerable and in the moment. (I blame Brené Brown for a lot of this lol)

Rough edges are a disarming device for attention. When something looks unpolished your guard drops, you stop watching like a customer and start listening like it's a bro telling you something, which is precisely the moment you get sold to.

So two things to take away on this merry Thursday.

Watching it: when something feels refreshingly real, check what it wants from you. There's normally a hidden ask, 3 split thumbnail tests and a ranked title.

Making it: don't chase this. Your audience can smell rehearsal in about 4 seconds, they've had a decade of practice, so the easy win is to make something genuinely good and be honest that you made it. Impossible to fake, which is the whole point. Use your unfair advantages.

Be unapologetic, life's so much better.

Bo

PS. Exactly the kind of thing we'll be pulling apart in The Engine Room, launching September. Waitlist at https://engineroommembers.com/ It's already filling up.