---
title: 'The New Rules of Social Media in the Age of AI'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=ceRZVxO8KF8'
video_id: 'ceRZVxO8KF8'
date: 2026-08-05
duration_sec: 1320
---

# The New Rules of Social Media in the Age of AI

> Source: [The New Rules of Social Media in the Age of AI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ceRZVxO8KF8)

## Summary

The video discusses the changing landscape of social media in the age of AI, presenting five key shifts: flashbang brain (short-term memory loss), becoming the gold standard, the explosivity factor, the stealing economy, and formats and surfaces. The creator shares strategies for adapting content to these trends, emphasizing email capture, quality, and platform selection.

### Key Points

- **Flashbang Brain** [00:40] — People's short-term memory is shot; they can't recall videos watched minutes ago. Assumption: every viewer is new, so each video must stand alone and drive to a CTA (lead magnet) to capture emails.
- **Become the Gold Standard** [05:27] — Aim to be the best in your category by being interesting, valuable, non-obvious, clear, and polished. This mindset shifts from 'least effort' to 'best effort' to stand out in abundant supply.
- **Explosivity Factor** [09:45] — The Kumar Method example: an elderly accountant grew to 1M followers in 5 days. Such explosive growth is atypical; focus on compounding reps and durability (Lindy effect) rather than chasing viral anomalies.
- **Stealing Economy** [13:17] — Content theft is rampant. Treat it as a creativity tax. To protect yourself, create content that's hard to replicate: real-life, expensive to produce, or N-of-one concepts. Avoid copying others; be original.
- **Differentiation in AI Era** [16:09] — Differentiate via visual style, originality, or tactical implementability. Remix formats from outside your niche (e.g., using productivity storytelling in beauty). Use tools like Sand Castles Collections for inspiration.
- **Formats and Surfaces** [18:37] — Platforms are diverging. Instagram is currently king for lead gen (ManyChat ecosystem). Content types at risk from AI: short-form text > image > short-form video > long-form text > mid/long-form YouTube > live streams. YouTube is hardest to replicate but hardest to start.

### Conclusion

To win in the AI era, focus on capturing emails via lead magnets, aim for gold-standard quality, accept explosive growth as an exception, protect originality, and prioritize platforms and formats that are harder to replicate, like YouTube long-form.

## Transcript

different in the age of AI. For brands, for creators, for anyone that's using content to build a business. We are entering the next generation of personal branding and audience building, and the rules are being completely rewritten.
creating a bunch of new ways to win that this because I spend all day on the cutting edge of content, marketing, and followers, I've done billions of views, and I'm starting to see trends and
patterns that are not obvious to the average person, but are going to create massive opportunities over the next 12 months. So, in this video, I'm going to media shifts and really rules that are being rewritten as content changes
one, I'll break down the strategy and the exact tactics for how you can shift your content to take advantage. All right, the first big social media shift that I'm seeing is what I call flashbang brain. And this one is really important
social media recently and you've watched short-form videos, you'll know exactly what I'm about to say. People's short-term memory and their ability to retain what they just watched is absolutely shot. For example, can you
name even one short-form video that you saw in the last day on Instagram, TikTok, or any other platform? Probably not. I call this phenomenon flashbang brain. It's literally as if after every video you watch, a flashbang goes off
and clears your memory completely. Now, I'm not here in this video to talk about if social media is good or bad for society. That's not my department. Is social media the greatest marketing vehicle ever invented? Yes. Is social
media the greatest opportunity for someone with zero advantages to be able to reach millions of people for free? Yes. So, whether you care about the flashbangification of society or not, I'm just here to play the ball as it
lies and figure out how to win based on the conditions in the field in front of me. And to me, winning is figuring out how to use content to grow a personal knowing that this is happening and the people literally cannot remember what
they watched 5 minutes ago, How do you take advantage of this flashbangification effect that's going on? Here's how I think about it. There people have when they watch stuff on social media. They have super short-term
remember the last 30 seconds of what I saw while I'm on that same video, and then super long-term facial recognition. Over the long term, your brain builds this like facial mosaic, where if I've seen dozens of your videos, I can kind
don't remember your name. Everything in the middle, assume zero memory and zero recall. So, to me, this means a few things. For one, you have to assume every new viewer has never seen you before. They have no context on you, no
context on your niche, your business, no priors, nothing. And so, you have to approach storytelling as if this one video is the first and last time they might ever come across your stuff. Now, second, and this is a big one, you want
to be a lot more conscious at trying to convert a viewer down your funnel and into a CTA for some lead magnet on every single video. And this doesn't mean means using a lead magnet to capture their email and ramp them to another
platform. Before, I was so focused on the medium term, like, how many videos could I get them to watch over a month on a single topic? And like, out of every 10, maybe one or two I would try to drive them to a lead magnet. But, I
their medium-term memory is so shot. So, now for me, I view every video like an individual marketing agent. Overall, of course I want to accrue trust to the long-term mosaic, but my number one goal
is to use each individual video to get as many people to give me their email in exchange for a lead magnet CTA or product that I can. Because I need to ramp them off this dopamine battlefield, the feeds, into a slower medium that I
control more of, their email. You just can't count on them watching multiple episodes of a series. You can't even count on them remembering you from one about it, this is actually kind of freeing because it means you can now
approach every single video on its own as one entity around a topic with the goal of driving someone to a CTA. And you can measure how effectively that one example, let's say I have a product based around storytelling. I'm going to
make a video on storytelling. I'm going to assume they don't know me, they don't goal is to come up with something so good on storytelling, so tantalizing and captivating that they want to comment the word storytelling to get more of
approach creates a much more elevated bar for how you attack your content to maximize content product alignment. Now, to be clear, and I want to say this again, nine times out of 10, or maybe even 99 times out of 100, when I say
drive the video to conversion, I'm not talking about asking for a sale. I'm still giving them net additional information via lead magnet, but I'm trying to get as many emails in exchange for that lead magnet as I can. And like
I said, I'm doing that because I want to get them from the chaos of the feed into the relative calmness of the email inbox. Now, this is the strategy I'm on Instagram right now, and it is absolutely crushing. I've gone from like
3,000 to 33,000 followers in like 50 days, millions of views, and most importantly, tens of thousands of emails. I literally only care about email conversion and getting someone from the video off to a platform that I
as efficiently as possible on every single video. If you want to learn to drive to conversion, I've got links below. All right, social media rule number two, and this is really a macro mindset shift, is to become the gold
standard. And let me explain what I mean by this. Everybody watching this wants personal brand or business. And a lot of people that I've talked to are starting to get afraid of what that might look like in the future as AI content starts
content, I view everything through one single principle, become the gold standard. The gold standard means you're putting out the absolute best content in your category. And by best, I mean the following things. Number one, you're
interesting and valuable for your core audience. Number two, you are sharing non-obvious. Number three, you're delivering things in super clear language that everyone can understand. And number four, you are packaging the
visuals and the format with as much polish as you possibly can. This doesn't mean crazy edits, it means you're executing as high of a level of quality as you can for whatever format you choose. In a sea of infinite supply, the
consistently over time are the ones that set the standard for their category. My of my three channels, my tech short-form, my marketing short-form, or my marketing long-form, is that I want to be the gold standard in that
category. I want to be the absolute best with every video I make. The best clarity, the best visuals, everything the best. The aim, mindset-wise, is to be so much better than the competition that when a viewer sees your video, they
can't help but actually lock in and wipe that memory problem away and really needs to be. Now, to get there, I have to hold myself to an insanely high standard every single day and show up trying to improve and get a little bit
better with each rep. That is what it takes to set the standard. Now, if you mindset, it's kind of like the saying of shooting for the stars and hitting for the moon. You pretty much can't lose when you're reaching for that level of
beginner hearing me say this, and you're looking at the skill gap between where you are today and where the standard should be, you're probably thinking, can actually use. Like, this is way too theoretical." But just remember, even I
earliest videos I posted. Look at how bad these are. There was a day where I didn't know any of this. So, this is the really important part. Aiming to be the gold standard is more of a mindset than a destination. You just want to train
yourself to believe that you can attack the content with such a high standard for quality that you're not willing to accept anything less. And when you do better, a lot faster. Most people's mindset is, I want to do the least to
have established credibility and traction and systems built, but in a sea of abundant supply, doing the least to get the most will not work anymore. I prefer the mindset of, I want to be the best to get the most. And so, if you can
shift your mind in to try to be the gold standard in your micro niche, you're point on the micro niches term that I keep saying, let me just explain that. grow a business is that you want to own the minimum sized category that would
align with the offer you're selling. Content, audience, product alignment is algorithms is getting so good that it will be able to find whoever you want it to find over a long enough time horizon if you stay consistent. So, your focus
amount of views, and instead, to stay super specifically relevant from a topic perspective for the niche you're trying to target. And this means the following. First, ask yourself, what product or offer am I trying to sell? Second, what
is the outcome my buyer wants most? Ideally, the product you're selling third, every time you make a piece of content, ask yourself, will this, if they watch it, help them get one step closer toward achieving the outcome they
want? If yes, make it. And if no, don't make it. This should be the filtering you use to help decide what you talk about and who you talk about it for. Ironically, I think the more competitive things get, the more of these micro
niches will open up because the algorithm targeting is getting so good that these new pockets of reaching 100,000 or 500,000 people become you have to do is really hone in on what outcome you're trying to drive with your
product, and then stay super disciplined in making content that will add value for the buyer to get that outcome. And that will work even in the era of AI. All right, social trend number three is what I call the explosivity factor. If
last few weeks, you've probably seen this account, the Kumar method. Long story short, Kumar is an elderly retired Indian accountant who went from zero to a million followers in just five days off five videos, mostly because of the
juxtaposition of what you thought he'd be like based on how he looks and how the videos actually are. It is an absolute masterclass for whoever his son behind the scenes, I'm assuming, maybe it was him. So, kudos to you if that was
content, masterful job. Now, if you want to read my thoughts breaking down exactly why he was able to grow so fast and the principles that you could apply in any niche, I actually wrote a post about it in Content Department. I'll
takeaway for me here, and kind of like the new rule that this proves we're in for social media, is that we've entered this era of explosive growth or the era of explosivity. Where essentially the right content strategy, if engineered
correctly, can literally reach hundreds of millions of people in just a week. There is no limit for how fast you can grow and how much attention you can get moments. But, I will say the takeaway from this example is a very sharp
double-edged sword. Because so many people see this and they get jealous, they get bummed out, they start comparing their slower growth, or even fast relatively, to nothing close to the five-day rocket ship that was Kumar. In
this era, the outlier anomalies like Kumar are by definition very atypical. certainly not going to be able to unlock these types of results. And that is completely okay, but you have to accept it. The entire content game is just
about compounding reps and increasing your durability over time. And truly, the only thing that makes you lose is when you stop posting. So, if you see get inspired, awesome. But, if it makes you jealous or sad or bummed and you
stop posting, then that is a huge loss that is causing you to fail. I like to lens of this thing called the Lindy effect. And this is a concept from business and science. It states that the life expectancy in the future of
non-perishable things like ideas or books or businesses is proportional to something has been alive for a long it will be alive or survive for a much longer time. So, for example,
around for 86 years. That has a higher 86 years than something like Dave's Hot please, if you're a Dave's Hot Chicken fan, don't come for me in the comments.
and so of course Dave's has the chance to go the distance. But this is just to say in principle, longevity and durability are a great predictor of future success. It's the same thing with content. You don't really want to burn
so bright, so hot, so fast. Cuz chances are if this same thing happened to you wouldn't have the ego discipline to be able to handle when things started would make you freak out, and then you would end up quitting. You also likely
to even do anything with that traffic in the first place. So, as cool as it looks, it's actually not as great as it seems. So, just realize that these explosive moments in this era of infinite AI will keep happening at an
increasing rate, but don't let those detract you from being motivated to keep going if you don't have the same results. These are the exception, not expectations to them. But of course, if you want to understand the exact
ingredients that Kumar used and apply some of those for yourself, I've linked media trend number four in the AI era is called the stealing economy. And this observation and what to do about it. We have clearly entered the stealing
don't know what happened, but all of a sudden all these little twerps will just thumbnail, the title, the script. Sometimes they even download the exact video with your face, re-upload it,
just try to engagement farm on that. It's happened to me more times than I list personally of all the people that have ripped my stuff word for word. and his team for being the greatest re-purposers of my content. Appreciate
you for your service. All jokes aside, the stealing economy is something that keep happening. The truth is, it is very frustrating for people that spend all their time coming up with original ideas to just have their stuff stolen, 90% of
attribution. It happens, I get it, it's going to keep happening. So, what do we do about it? Here's my take. First off, this is just a creativity tax that you have to pay in order to play the game. To have the right to reach millions this
freely and this easily, there are some costs and this is one of those taxes. going to happen and move on. I will say though, and I'm speaking directly, if you're someone that just straight copies people's content, A, you're a scumbag
and B, what do you really think is going to happen? Taking their content, getting people to a service that you don't have the expertise to execute on? It's just So, if you're stealing people's content and you think that's the best way to
best way to grow. Back to the people that are actually making the original ideas, here's the thing. Over time, as people steal more and more, you're going is harder and harder to steal. And that means these three things. Number one,
more in real life content or sets that are just harder to replicate. Number if someone wanted to steal and they wanted to replicate the full thing, regenerate with AI, it would just cost so many credits and so much time and
compute that they'd be prohibited from doing that. Number three is more outside experience. You want to try to come up with these N of one concepts that people just can't rip and steal because it doesn't make sense for their background
there's a massive difference between studying what's working for people, extracting the principles and formats, and then fully remix and applying them for yourself. That is the gold standard for how to research and figure out
what's working that is very different from straight-up stealing word-for-word the entire video, the entire script. I'll just say this, the dumbest thing to do in an era where anyone can copy and steal is for you to copy and steal.
derivative of a derivative. You don't want to do that. Maybe eventually there'll be some sort of cryptographic fingerprinting, some digital mark where we can automatically tie back ideas to the original creator. For now, it's the
always going to be originality. All right, social media trend number five is how you actually differentiate your personal brand in this AI era. A lot of differentiate as more and more supply comes online?" I actually made a video
era of personal branding. I'll link it below if you want to check it out. There your personal brand to cut through in any category. Number one is with visual differentiation, number two is with more originality, and number three is by
being more tactically implementable, or of course, a combination of all three. more and more derivative clones as I just talked about and so you want to try to bias towards one of those three areas to try to be one of the best in your
differentiate. Now, the smartest thing you can start doing right now to try to categories is what I call people that spend time studying the competitors in their own niche. But like
gnarly culture where it's a race to the bottom. Everyone's saying the same thing about the same topic. The alpha and the better way is to remix inspiration from over. For example, if you're in the cooking niche, what are all the formats
using that you could bring over and adapt to cooking? Or if you're in the beauty niche, how are all the top people in productivity explaining their Could you take some of those storytelling structures and apply it to
pretty cool feature in Sand Castles called Collections where we're hand curating all the best examples of formats, visual hooks, signature series, and editing styles or visual layouts across every niche. So, these are like
little hand-picked visual libraries that give you a bunch of exposure to that you might not have seen. There are over 100 different collections on Sand updating and adding new stuff every week. If you're Sand Castles user, you
get access to all those collections included with your membership. And even linked one of the collections below that you can check out for free. Also, we good called global search. If you go to the videos tab in the filters pane, you
can click that little globe icon which lets you search across millions of the And what I like to do is search by keyword. So, you could take a format word ranking and then set the time date for last 3 months, sort by views, and
that'll give you the best examples across all different niches of ranking also do this by topics. You could search for a specific word like backpacking and then see how are all the people executing across different formats for
my niche? So, this is just another way to get exposure to formats from other niches that you can transposition over without having to scroll. But the point is remixing formats from outside your niche is the highest ROI. That's where
inside, you should start looking outside last shift and new rule for social media is what I call formats and surfaces. It is super clear there's a bigger divergence happening, a split across
social media platforms. Instagram is now very different from TikTok which is very different from YouTube. They're all diverging. The highest value want to both because of the maturity of the
algorithm, but also the robust ManyChat comment to click ecosystem where you can actually get people from content to leads and sales pages. If you're going platform should be Instagram for most people. The second highest will be
LinkedIn just based on the average value of the average user, but the video product is much newer and the link ecosystem does not work the same way as Tok unless you're building a consumer commodity product or you're just yapping
to a crew personal brand depth in whatever niche you're talking about. And form is very different from short form. I would say Facebook is up there with your demo. Not everybody is playing on Facebook. So when it comes to platforms,
media world. Right now Instagram is king. Now on the content type side, the actual types of content you can make, this is how I see it playing out. AI is going to come like a wave across the lowest easiest replicate formats across
from left to right across the screen. So starting from the left, short form text is most at risk. Then image, then short form entertainment videos, then short form education videos, then long form text, then medium form YouTube videos
like this, then long form YouTube videos like podcasts, and then finally live streams. To be clear, you can still win with all of these right now. AI content is actually not as mature or far ahead as many people in the AI bubble would
clear that the supply is going to continue to rise from left to right on competed on quality, it's that you're going to lose because of dilution. The supply just drowns you out. So the goal, if you want staying power, is to try to
be as far on the right of the spectrum as possible. YouTube with mid form and long form is by far the easiest to protect. Now I will say YouTube is incredibly hard to start from scratch. We had a pilot academy and it's clear
couple years on YouTube can really grow with the right information, but if you've never ever started on YouTube, it is a big bear to be your first content is this. If you're starting with content, start with short form video and
sprint for 3 to 6 months to build your content fundamentals. Then after 6 months, you can decide to add on YouTube or swap from shorts to longs, but now a lot easier to tackle. This is the guidance I tell pretty much everyone in
the content world. Shorts are by far easier, but YouTube is king by far for lead gen and sales. If you're interested in learning how I run my YouTube system, actually put together a deep dive of the most non-obvious YouTube principles that
nobody talks about. It's basically like a 45-minute Bible for the most important it below if you're interested. All right, guys, that is all I've got for absolute best to give you the non-obvious, most interesting stuff to
help you grow your personal brand and eventually monetize, turn the views into that, whether you're a business owner, marketer, or creator, you can probably valuable channels you could possibly watch. So, please make sure to like,
stuff I have in the description. I'm just giving a lot of stuff away cuz I really want to help as many people grow as possible. All right, we will see you as possible. All right, we will see you guys on the next one. Peace.