The Synthetic Economy

There's something fundamentally wrong with the online education model presented to us today. I've recently made the difficult decision to exit certain digital spaces, and I want to share the deeper philosophical reasoning behind that choice.

I'm sitting here with a piece of paper in front of me, mapping out what I've been observing for years now. Having a front-row seat to this phenomenon has revealed patterns that, once seen, cannot be unseen.

I keep drawing it all in pictures and I feel as if I must try and communicate it here on this surprisingly refreshing platform.

At the top of this ecosystem sits what I'll call "the source", that rare 1% of marketers who have genuinely innovated ways to monetize knowledge online. These are the brilliant minds who've crafted entire business architectures that others emulate.

Below them? An expanding pyramid of imitators, each adding their own "flare" to the fundamental model.

But here's the curious part: almost no one in this pyramid ever publicly attributes their success to those above them.

Why is that? Why aren't people referring others to their mentors?

I've thought about this extensively, and I'm pretty sure I've figured out why:

If you're operating in this ecosystem and you openly admit, "I learned my entire approach from Mentor X," then what stops your potential clients from simply bypassing you and going straight to the source? Your entire value proposition collapses.

So instead, we get this peculiar code of silence. A structural inability to express gratitude that corrupts the entire system from within.

Dive deeper, and the picture gets even stranger.

The most financially successful people in this space aren't experts in anything tangible or craft-oriented. They're experts at marketing marketing to marketers.

Let me be painfully direct: They're showing you how they just marketed to you. They're selling you how they just sold to you. They're teaching you to fulfill the way they just fulfilled to you.

It's a hall of mirrors where the reflection itself becomes the product.

What emerges is what I call a "synthetic economy", a closed feedback loop generating tremendous financial activity while producing almost nothing of enduring value outside its own ecosystem.

When your "content" is essentially "how I did what I just did to you," we've entered a recursive loop that feels increasingly hollow the longer you stay within it.

I come from the world of soundproof rooms, analog knobs, and Pro Tools. I spent years becoming excellent at a tangible craft, music production, before I ever thought about teaching others.

What troubles me deeply about the synthetic economy is how it systematically devalues true expertise in favor of marketing prowess.

The person who's invested 10,000+ hours mastering their craft finds themselves earning pennies compared to someone who simply markets marketing strategies effectively.

This creates a perverse incentive structure where the path to online success isn't becoming better at your craft, but becoming better at appearing like you've mastered the craft of helping others master their craft.

Follow that sentence a few times and you'll feel the vertigo I'm describing.

The standard approach to building online education companies looks something like this:

1. Create a rigid "model" for how to market, sell, and fulfill

2. Teach that identical model to everyone, regardless of their expertise area

3. Have everyone implement the same tactics with minor variations

4. Watch as they compete against each other using identical approaches

When everyone has the same fulfillment mechanism, marketing strategy, and sales approach, there's no real reason for community members to help each other beyond surface-level engagement.

Why would the skool community “expert” genuinely help the email marketing “expert” when they're both essentially selling the same "get clients" program with different window dressing?

For the past several years, I've been building something fundamentally different, what I call a "guild" of experts. I shifted one of my companies (Kollege) into a free creative and living archive that will be completely free (Kollege.com).

The foundational principle is simple yet revolutionary: We center around mastery, not marketing models.

In practice, this means:

• Members openly attributed their success to others (I personally have paid many of my own clients for their expertise)

• Each expert develops flexible offers aligned with their unique mastery

• We encouraged a culture where members freely help each other without fear of "competition"

• The common bond is devotion to craft, not adherence to a marketing framework

When built this way, something remarkable happens: genuine referrals become natural, organic growth replaces expensive acquisition, and a flywheel effect emerges without anyone feeling exploited.

I want to practice what I preach by publicly attributing some of my own success to specific members of our community, people who have paid me, but whom I've also paid for their expertise:

• Charles Miller (owner of a branding studio called Platoon): I hired him to rebrand our entire company

• Ted Vaughn and Mark Miller (founders of Historic Agency): I paid them for agency strategy before they sold their company

• Joe Wu (founder of The Natural Method): I paid him for both YouTube strategy and pregnancy health consulting for my wife

• Jamie Stenhouse (Systems & Teams): I hired him to build out our processes and referral program

• Mark Stefanishyn: I paid him to help "build the world of my brain" through expert interviews

There are many more…but this isn't just a list of acknowledgments, it's a demonstration of what happens when you build a business ecosystem based on gratitude and mutual value exchange rather than one-way extraction.

There's a deeper question lurking beneath all of this: What kind of economic systems produce not just profits but human flourishing?

The synthetic economies of the online education world may generate impressive revenue figures, but they leave both creators and consumers spiritually malnourished.

They represent what philosopher Martin Buber might call "I-It" relationships, transactional exchanges where others become means rather than ends. The alternative, an economy of gratitude built on authentic expertise, offers the possibility of "I-Thou" relationships where genuine connection and mutual growth become possible.

At risk of venturing into less comfortable territory, I believe there's something deeper happening with attribution and mentorship.

Our relationship with mentors often mirrors our relationship with our first mentor, typically our father figure. When that relationship is damaged, we develop patterns of either never attributing success to authority figures or taking credit for everything ourselves.

My work has been calling me in a direction that feels increasingly at odds with most digital platforms. What began as spaces for meaningful connection have transformed into marketers marketing marketing to marketers, the endless pursuit of audience-building, and the relentless chase for monthly recurring revenue.

What I'm building now goes beyond just a community model. I'm developing what I call a "Creator-Centered Hedge Fund", though admittedly, it has little to do with hedging or traditional fund structures.

The concept is this: Instead of experts paying consulting fees that flow upward, we create a space where:

1. Experts contribute a percentage of their revenue (less than typical consulting fees)

2. Each expert receives equity in the collective fund

3. The fund grows as each business grows

4. Resources can be deployed strategically to help any member business

This aligns everyone's incentives toward collective growth rather than individual extraction. The more each expert helps others succeed, the more valuable their own equity stake becomes.

We stand at a philosophical crossroads in how we build knowledge economies.

One path leads toward increasingly synthetic loops of marketers marketing marketing to marketers, systems that generate wealth while producing little of enduring value. These are the digital environments I'm consciously stepping away from, despite their popularity and profitability.

The other path leads toward what might be called the Wisdom Economy, systems built on authentic expertise, open attribution, and the genuine exchange of value. This is where I'm directing my energy: toward deeper 1-1 advising, meaningful creative projects, and spaces that transcend digital noise.

The question isn't which path is more profitable in the short term. The question is which world we want to create through our economic activities, and which environments nurture our deeper purpose.

As we transition from the Information Age to what might be termed the Wisdom Age, the limitations of synthetic knowledge economies are becoming increasingly apparent.

I'm betting everything on the idea that entrepreneurs of depth, each with their own wisdom and expertise, creates an unstoppable force with zero real competition.

I'll go all in on that.

-b