Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:28:04 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jeremy Giffon
[00:28:04] S0: No one says that anymore. [00:28:05] S2: Yeah and it used to carry the same weight as billionaire but now millionaires both are relevant. When you say someone's a millionaire you're sort of just saying they're like a upper middle class well-to-do person with a house. It doesn't matter if they have $5,000,000 or $800,000, it's this looser class thing. As currency gets devalued both in terms of the literal sense and also in that sort of what you can do with it sense, time is fixed. The new scarcity is just like attention you can draw on the screen. [00:28:33] S0: If you think about the most interesting posters today, I'm not asking you to endorse them one way or the other, but just the people that you think are the most interesting, who comes to mind?
00:28:44 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:28:44] S2: The distinction to draw is the people that I want to get tweet notifications for because I actually think each one of their posts is really good and that's like a vanishingly small number. And then there are good posters who are just people who have really made something of themselves because of their prolificness. The other sort of problem with posting is like it still does reward prolificness, which I am still sternly against. I always think Twitter should be dictated by followers divided by posts, followers per post, but that's not how it works. It just rewards prolificness. I think there's this idea that the most important media property won't be watched, the most important author isn't read, the most important philosopher is not understood, the most important stock has no fundamentals. In a world of fiat currency, everything sort of becomes this weird fiat thing. Certainly it's true about philosophers, authors. Does anyone really read the books these authors write? I don't think so. I think a small amount of taste makers read the books and then other people look at books as sort of idols and if they're blessed by the right people then there's sort of this like memetic celebration of the thing and even podcast clips do a lot better than the podcast episode. I pride myself I can tell if a podcast or a blog essay or a book or something is good or not without having read it just by triangulating it. I know which one of your episodes do well without listening to them because I can sort of feel from the reception to some extent that is the thing. You can imagine a world where there's a few clips from a podcast but no one ever listens to the podcast. I don't actually think that would diminish the value of the property.
00:30:14 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:30:14] S0: It's like everything is being processed and packaged for catching attention, but taking the least amount of that person's time. I heard this interesting story about a publication that has x millions of followers or whatever, readers, however they describe it. And the person behind it told me like something like 95 of the readers are people that scroll through like the quote highlights on Instagram or something and whatever, there's still a reader. To me, it's all quite depressing that the world of posters and content has reoriented around this monolithic timeline, and they're all just feeding it what it wants, but that's the game you sort of have to play. And I'm curious, I know you went six months or something completely off of it. Like you just disappeared. What was that like? And is that a path that you would encourage people to give a try? This is my way of asking the freedom versus relevancy question.