Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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?
00:21:34 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:21:34] S2: I think we are a peak guy. It's hard to say where to start this. There's a pagan understanding of God as being like in and around you everywhere. Everything is animated. Everything is controlled and dictated by the gods. And then in the Renaissance you could say that God lives above the clouds but there's like a guy up there that you can talk to and then when we discover what's past the clouds we go okay well there's no guy up there and then we discover space and so basically you have to just keep going well okay maybe he's beyond space, maybe we don't know that it's a guy anymore that you could address and talk to, but it's this conceptual thing. God just sort of like moves farther and farther away and becomes more and more conceptual. But the idea is that ever since we've sort of become an atheist society, we've been looking for things to sort of look up to and worship. I think basically it's sort of trite now to say that like everyone has to worship or whatever. Think maybe like the more precise thing would be that there's always a role for a priest in society and we've been looking for new priests. I think we tried scientists as priests. The scientific project has fallen apart a little bit. This is widely discussed. The idea that we looked to physics as hopefully gonna provide us meaning, it hasn't. Physics has largely stalled since the war. We've moved beyond science as a source of meaning. There's this billionaire class that we sort of look to as the new source of meaning. On its surface it doesn't make a lot of sense that we would spend so much time caring about what billionaires think about whatever physics or theology or health or topics unrelated to occurring a billion dollars. The reason we do I think is this is our new priestly class which is we said okay the values that are important in our society are being successful at business and to be successful at business you generally have to be smart and hard working. These are the people that ascended to the highest realm of piety in our value system and so we're gonna listen to them. We're willing to like take scientific and medical advice from people who are either in the billionaire class or are adjacent to the billionaire class which is the poster class which is the new class I think. The Pete guy thing is this idea that there's basically been a lot of billionaire worship.
00:23:38 · Jeremy Giffon
Part of it is that they've gotten way less scarce. Billionaires have probably grown a 100 x in the last twenty years, probably more. We sort of look to them to provide us these answers and it has not been satisfying and so this notion that I want to catch every podcast with this billionaire and I'm gonna study his routines and habits and care about what he thinks about these things has sort of come to its full saturation. Money, I think we've just seen is not as powerful as maybe it once was or we think it is in so far as certainly our political landscape, we have not seen the donor class be nearly as successful as they maybe used to be or we thought they were. If you're a billionaire you're sort of quite limited on the things that you can do vis a vis like an African warlord or robber baron. There's these sort of like three forces of inflation driving down what it means to be a billionaire at all and then the evolution of power structures in society are also limiting. Andrew Carnegie could take up arms against his workers but now if you post the wrong thing as a billionaire you have to resign. There's a sense that this whole class has just become less important and then I also think just the media and podcast it's just saturated you get it you understand this thing but we don't want to take life advice, we don't want to hear about what's happening from the billionaire class anymore and so that whole set just feels very saturated. It feels unlikely that there's a marginal billionaire that I'm going to learn something very interesting from on a podcast and I don't think that was the case like six years ago and so the logical question is what is the next class as we sort of flail around looking for our next set of priests? I think it's the poster. I think you can see this because I think the billionaire class is a little bit deferential to the poster. One very clear way is the science class sort of inherited the priesthood after the actual priests then you can always look which class is subservient to the next to see who's next. The science class becomes subservient to the billionaire class. This is certainly the Epstein lesson which is all the scientists are clamoring around this sort of money and glamour. Now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class.