Speaker A
I won't even use that most popular argument that these guys have never run a real business, yet are ready to dish out their little bits of advice for hours on end. It's funny that they couldn't care less what kind of business it is, how things are with the staff, what the market state is, or if there's even any potential there at all. Just a couple of introductory questions for the sake of decency. And then off they go, spewing their standard templates. The main thing is to pay for the breakdown and don't forget to put a deposit down for the next course. The main and obvious point about these business coaches is that none of them will ever take responsibility for their advice. But they will gladly take payment for it, and a hefty one at that. In reality, one could harp on about various Grebenkas and Sokolovskys for a very long time. There are people who have built entire social media channels just by generating this hate. But the sad part is that you can't defeat them. One disappears, and another one immediately pops up. This is also a market, and as long as there is demand, the circus will keep running. I’m not talking about outright fraudsters. There’s no point in even talking about them if someone is willing to pay 800,000 to some clown from TV to remove a curse. Go look for a green fence. Whoever the fool is here, they know it themselves. I’m talking about those who disguise their advice and mechanics as working methods, generously hand out seemingly adequate recommendations, promise to teach people how to make money, and tens of thousands of recipients bring them their cash in the hope that they’ll be helped to launch or grow a business. And, of course, it will all happen with total ease. They write down the action plan, follow all the recommendations, but for some reason, nothing happens at all. For the record, it must be said that there is a small, tiny percentage of those who succeed. But why don't the others? Are they not working hard enough, or are they doing something wrong? Or maybe this tiny percentage is actually the real effectiveness of these coaches, because effectiveness is far from the main criterion for selecting such recommendations. These fellows often talk about something that doesn't work at all. And sometimes it’s even harmful. Nowadays, the main criterion is just how good such advice sounds and how beautiful it looks. Let’s explain. Take a successful music producer who has been in the market for a long time. He’s experienced, he knows every trick in the book, but even he cannot produce exclusively hits. Moreover, he sometimes has failures, and entire albums just don't click. It’s the same situation with books and movies. Top actors, writers, an award-winning director, and a budget the size of an island nation. They filmed everything according to the rules of the current agenda, but nobody came to see it. And now the film studio is sitting there, counting its losses. And how did that happen? The problem is that success is too often completely random. And there is even proof of this. In 2006, they conducted an experiment to try and predict the behavior of the music market. They took 14,000 volunteers and gave them 48 songs by completely unknown bands. The goal was to ensure people were hearing these songs for the first time. The volunteers were then divided into two groups. The first group could see how often a track was downloaded, while the second could not. The experimenters wanted to test just how much society influences our behavior. And spoiler alert: it influences us a hell of a lot. The experiment was conducted eight times. That is, one group of volunteers would vote, then they would leave, and the next group would start voting. Roughly speaking, each song had eight attempts to become a hit from scratch. Indeed, good songs never failed, and those that were, well, frankly awful, never reached the top spots. However, all the others lived completely random lives. Meaning the same song could take first place in one case, and simply get lost in the next iteration. But the charts were most drastically reshaped when people could see the number of downloads. Then the gap between the leaders and the less popular songs became absolutely colossal. And that is the influence of one small download count. In the real world, the social pressure on us is much greater. It includes media, advertising, social networks, and our environment. In the end, by releasing the same set of tracks onto a hypothetical market eight times, different winners emerged each time. The authors concluded that quality is not the most important criterion for success. It’s more like a lottery, where the winner is whoever happens to get the first 10 downloads. Even a small initial lead turns into disproportionate success in the future. This is the so-called superstar theory from 1981. In short, the rich just keep getting richer. So, some business thesis by pure chance goes viral on social media and gets tons of reach. And people see this and think, "I want likes too, I'll push this idea as well." And they start filming this content. As a result, the snowball effect leads to this thesis becoming an undeniable baseline. Our social media feed is the same experiment, but with expanded capabilities, involving not 14,000 people, but several million. Not 14,000, but several million. Not X, but Y. How do we even unsee this now? And how do we stop noticing this in every single contrast? There are millions of participants, and the number of business ideas is not limited to forty-eight; it is infinite. You can comment, you can like, you can send it to friends, and all of this is governed by an algorithm that couldn't care less if the idea actually works or if it's just some trash generated by a neural network. He sees that people are reacting and goes, "Great, let's ramp it up." By the way, the music industry is a great example of how modern filtering systems work. A 2024 report showed that the number of audio streams is increasing, meaning the pie is growing year over year. Out of 200 million tracks available on various platforms, 93 million have been played fewer than 10 times. Another 47 million tracks have been played fewer than 100 times. At the very top, there are only 33 tracks, each with over a billion streams. So, out of all 200 million, only 33 tracks became successful, while no one even noticed the rest. I’m afraid to even imagine the incredible volume of AI-generated music being uploaded to these platforms right now. If there were 200 million tracks yesterday, tomorrow there will be 40 times that many. It is completely unclear how live musicians are supposed to work in such a field. That is the new reality. Choice is determined purely mathematically, based on numbers. The same mechanics apply to advice on how to conduct business. What about the wisdom of the crowd and all that? If a thesis has made it through such a massive filter of so many people, while others haven't, maybe it’s the most correct one. In 2021, a term appeared that provides a clue: "algorithmic monoculture." The idea is that if all market participants make decisions based on the same algorithm, the overall quality of those decisions drops. Even if such an algorithm makes an individual much smarter, the lack of alternative options makes the entire collective dumber. So, it turns out that variability and accessible diversity are incredibly important. In 2024, there was a study on the impact of AI on writing. They took three hundred people and had them write short stories for teenagers. Some of these people used AI, others wrote in the old-fashioned way, and then six hundred readers rated the resulting work. The work of authors with low creativity improved the most. For good authors, nothing changed. In the end, AI seemed to level the playing field, raising the average bar. The texts individually seemed to get better, but the similarity of the stories increased significantly. People are wr
