Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:25:40 · Jeremy Giffon, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
You can sort of see who society collectively chooses to be like, alright, this is the guy I want to listen to for two hours and base my life on. [00:25:47] S0: Subservient to the poster class evidenced how? Why do you say they're subservient to the posters? [00:25:53] S2: I was at this thing a while ago and it was a bunch of billionaire investors and they were all fighting over who could sit next to Tyler Cowen because he's the most interesting person there. [00:26:04] S0: Every room has a boss. [00:26:06] S2: Room has Yeah, a exactly. And I think there's very much something to that. It's sort of that simple. There's sort of this line of subservience. [00:26:13] S0: There's also this interesting point about it's just scarcity. Like always the billionaire inflation thing is the seed of their demise, that if there's so many billionaires, if Grant Cardone is a billionaire and so is Elon Musk or something, it just makes it so stupid. So we either need a new class at the top and it's not deco or centabillionaire. Who cares? We need to, like, reclassify the top 100 or something robber barons. It just seems like there's too many of them, no one care anymore. It seems much easier to get a billion dollars than it does to gain the real estate in people's minds or on the timeline that the top couple of posters can do.
00:26:51 · Jeremy Giffon, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:26:51] S2: If I could just have it by decree, it would be who is a liquid inflation adjusted billionaire. I think that number is probably hasn't changed a whole lot. I always find it so useful to take this retrospective historic frame. Net worth is like this a new idea. If you read like Pride and Prejudice, they're talking about how wealthy all the men are. Mr. Darcy is discussed as getting £10,000 a year from his estate. That's his wealth. It's his cash flow. There's not like a scene in Pride and Prejudice where they're like does he have a lot of margin loan against his estate or whatever and there's also not this idea of well okay his estate's worth whatever 200,000 because he would never sell his estate. It's not viewed as his assets so it's just like wholly conceptual points on a leaderboard truly because you can't spend it. I really think it's kind of crass to say but I think billionaires like a state of mind between like private markets and net worth as a concept and then inflation. Billionaires now something you can just be dubbed. I think you'll come to see billionaire as sort of this political label that's only tangentially related. You see this on the timeline a lot which is people get referred to as billionaire who are not rich at all but they have these traits and associations and so I think this term somewhere millionaire. [00:28:04] S0: No one says that anymore.