Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:15:24 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
And now there seems to be this threshold we were just talking about this morning, that if you breach the containment, if you breach this threshold, it literally feels like you have taken over the world's brain and just shoved everyone's eyes at your thing for a short period of time. The impact of those handful of things are so much bigger than the all the rest of them combined. So what you're playing for is really to be just one of these breakout things. Is that the right way to think about the timeline is that actually is all that matters is that you get one of those. So you should be living at the edge of the distribution as much as possible in what you're posting about writing about.
00:16:03 · Jeremy Giffon, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:16:03] S2: Everything is just downstream of technological change. So the reason podcast followed a normal distribution was because the technology delivering it was an RSS feed. And now it's an algorithm and it's clips and I mean even the method. I'm sure some obscene amount of your viewers watching or listening on YouTube, which is new. Even if you subscribe to a podcast on YouTube they're not gonna show you every single episode in chronological order. So I think this stuff is all just new, just downstream of technology. I don't think something has changed in the content or in the listeners, it's just how it's delivered. In that sense, maybe one world where the podcast world sort of lags behind the YouTube world is that the podcast world is still highly naive to serving content to the algorithm. You know, if you get deep into the Twitter group chats, especially now that they've posted the algorithm, there are all these very specific things that you can do around replies and likes and length and all these numbers that the algorithm is selecting for streamers and people on YouTube and so I certainly understand that. I think maybe the reason it feels a little bit random is because podcasts still like really aren't into the meat of understanding that we are recording this video for a LLM to review and decide what it wants to show people and then people will decide if they like it or not. That first filter we don't really think about but that is the case. [00:17:22] S0: Does that stress you out? Does that feel deeply dystopian?
00:17:24 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:17:24] S2: I hear a lot of lamentation over the death of books. People don't read anymore. And it's so interesting to me because I've read a lot of books, I like books, I've spent a good portion of my life reading books. I don't see the big crisis that everyone laments about with books. Mean, the attention span thing maybe is true, like it's certainly way harder for me to read a book just on a pure focus. But I feel like the sum total of the interviews that I listen to and the things that I read and all this stuff are great. I don't think I don't have an appetite for books just because they're harder to read. I think I'm like feeling nourished from the other sources. If you think about porn, it's like more obviously bad because people don't have sex and they watch porn and it's fairly straightforward that sex is better than porn. That seems like an obvious thing. People will hold that up right next to books and to me the book thing feels a little bit like a swan song for a technology that there will still be a place for. It was the best way we had of delivering information and now there's new ways and they're more compelling and more interesting. You have to caveat that of course with I'm very sensitive to language and the terms that we use terminally online, brain rot, we recognize these are terms of death and rotting and destruction and very negative nihilistic terms. You do have to balance that with we didn't pick neutral or positive terms for these activities and I don't think anyone ever would self conceive of reading a lot of books as being this like very negative thing. The counter argument would be that we have this deep sense that it is bad. Maybe like everything it's just less forgiving. If you're highly disciplined and motivated, the way that you can use new media is better than ever, but if you're not then it's just going to be worse than ever. It's just going to be really tough.
00:19:08 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jeremy Giffon
[00:19:08] S0: You mentioned the White House, I'm certainly this is the first White House that feels completely timeline native and reactive. [00:19:14] S2: Yes, I think it's the first modern administration for better for worse. [00:19:17] S0: What else does modern mean in that context other than timeline native?
00:19:20 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:19:20] S2: It's just highly reactive and reflective to the timeline. I think it's hyper aware, maybe in the same way that past administrations would be addicted to polling. I think it looks more at the timeline than polling. Polling is all about understanding the wants and desires of the media and the average person, but the timeline shifts back to a more Republican model which is that you're caring about a few 100,000 people who are influential. Ben Sasse, the former senator has this great notion that Washington is now mostly people who want to be TikTok and YouTube stars is like mostly what congressmen and senators want to be. He condemns it which is true from some very simple sense which is you would hope that congressmen and senators primarily interested in governance, but they're not. On the other hand, I think maybe a shift of this that I'm only just putting together now is polling drives governance whereas if you're only pulling the timeline, you can sort of think about it as this is why the people who do well in politics now are just optimized for content, they're basically content creators because the polling is the timeline. And that's interesting again because who is on the timeline? The readers is probably more of an accurate sample of the median people in the country, but the posters who are dictating what the timeline thinks of something is a really really small group. If the original vision for who voted was white male landowners, maybe the version of people who matter for policy now are the good posters. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it's certainly a very different group that I don't think correlates super tightly to any particular demographic trait necessarily.
00:20:58 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jeremy Giffon
[00:20:58] S0: You're friends with many or most of the great posters. What makes a great poster? [00:21:02] S2: It's not that dissimilar to writing, being a little bit tortured, having a bit of a messed up personal life, just in general. Like comics [00:21:11] S0: or something? [00:21:12] S2: Yeah. And maybe posting is a little bit like a writer mixed with a comedian or something like that. Certainly has the comedic element of you need to sort of have a riff that resonates and it's sort of this instant hit it's phrased in an interesting way. There's sort of like a blend of like comedy poetry and writing. [00:21:29] S0: You've used this funny phrase before that we're at peak guy. What does that mean?