Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:31:04 · Jeremy Giffon, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:31:04] S2: I think my takeaway from that would simply be that one should not fool themselves that they are looking for anything other than entertainment in all the media that they consume. It is produced to be entertaining, it's selected to be entertaining, it's edited to be entertaining. The job to be done of what is on the screen is to entertain you. I think that is the big lesson. I'm not gonna tell people how much entertainment they should have in their life, but that is what it is fundamentally. Rolex or Nike can convince you that their thing is an investment or an asset versus a liability, then you'll spend way more money on it. Podcasts and posts and essays can convince you that what you're reading is useful for you and productive and anything other than watching TV all day. Whether I want to spend an hour a day on the timeline or eight hours a on the timeline is just about like how much do I want to be entertained. You don't really miss anything if you're not a complete hermit, you hear about what's important. Probably the most like enlightened way to consume this media is to not read it yourself, get the filtered takes from people around you at dinners and lunches and stuff and you just let them first of all expose themselves to the radiation and then come back and tell you what's interesting or not on there. [00:32:18] S0: Our friend Jesse thinks about it this way, he refuses any algorithm in his life including news which is just an algorithm. It's like how do you know what's going on? He said well people tell you.
00:32:18 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jeremy Giffon
[00:32:18] S0: Our friend Jesse thinks about it this way, he refuses any algorithm in his life including news which is just an algorithm. It's like how do you know what's going on? He said well people tell you. [00:32:27] S2: Yeah, that would be my takeaway. The freedom versus impact question. [00:32:32] S0: Do you believe that trade off's real?
00:32:35 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:32:35] S2: Yeah, I think it's real. One of the questions I'm interested in is classes of guys, archetypes, genres, whatever. There seems to have been this type of person that's largely gone extinct. Unfortunately, I think this is probably all just explained away by technology which is sort of a boring but maybe accurate explanation. The Theodore Roosevelts or the Andrew Carnegies of the world who are able to spend a lot of their time in leisure, a lot of time away from their business. Carnegie for example is arguably still the richest person or very close to the richest person that's ever lived. That's probably a technological thing. But I'm fascinated by this idea of is that necessarily true? Does the idea that you have to be working twenty two hours a day to get these sort of world changing outcomes, is that necessarily true? I think Larry Ellison is like the contemporary figure who sort of bucks this trend and he claims to have started Oracle very much with the intention of being able to disappear for two weeks to sail and still by all accounts sort of like drops in and drops out and Can you still be a player and not be jacked in twenty fourseven? I don't know the answer. It's unfathomable that the president of The United States could be off the grid for a month, probably impossible because of technology. But is that true in business? Is a lot of hard work performative? Maybe. In the case of Carnegie it's interesting because he was self conscious his whole life about joining this sort of society, maybe at the posters of his day. He knew that for him money wasn't gonna be enough and he wanted to be accepted into society and be well read and be amount of letters and do writing and stuff and in that sense there's nothing new under the sun. I firmly believe this to be true that the end state is just posting. The amount of billionaires and founders who turn to Twitter they accrue their wealth or start a podcast
00:34:19 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Jeremy Giffon
[00:34:19] S0: or buy a new business. [00:34:21] S2: Yeah, start a YouTube It sort of is the end state and I think one way that you could look at that is just that once you accrue wealth you want to accrue fame, the other way of looking at it would be that wealth is less valuable and you actually realize that the scarce asset is tension and influence and so you're almost hedging against the sort of rapidly devaluing nature of your money and then trying to switch to what is actually scarce.