Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:08:32 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:08:32] S0: It's probably a good excuse to talk about this joint notion of posting a billion dollar PDF is just the ultimate form of that or something. And the furnace that is the timeline of predominantly x. That's where I get my timeline. There's other places as well. But it seems like these notions have taken over people's desires and attention. Everyone wants to ultimately have a spot on that timeline. It's a strange phenomenon. There's like five or six sub components of the timeline that I wanna ask you about, But maybe to start just how you're thinking about this strange modern phenomenon.
00:09:07 · Jeremy Giffon
[00:09:07] S2: I think it's downstream of technological change. I think the technological change is really the uni feed. What people don't appreciate about X is that everyone gets served the same 500 tweets per day. There's hundreds of millions of daily active users and the thing that people who don't post don't realize is just the poster to lurker ratio on these things is enormous. It's really hard to feel the impact unless you're actually getting onto the feed and seeing all the people that you didn't know were reading X all day commenting on your thing. I'm always surprised like when I post a good tweet whoever texts me about it, it could be someone I know well and had no idea that they read Twitter all day but everyone reads Twitter all day. So the uni feed I think is sort of the technological catalyst for this phenomenon. It is X by the way. It's interesting how X, it's sort of the Lindy social network. It probably is never gonna reach the scale of the others, but it just fills this vital role and it's interesting to me how it's however long in, I'm probably almost twenty years now and it's still more important than ever, sort of the same source of truth almost for the whole world. And what that means is that everyone is reading the same thing. It's the global newspaper in the same way that people would talk about the latest article in the journal thirty years ago, now it's the latest tweet or the latest essay on X. What that creates is that all the most important people in the world at least when it comes to capital markets and politics and journalism, entrepreneurship, they're reading their daily paper every morning. These things really form opinion and they price securities and they dictate where capital flows and they certainly write policy. There's this idea that another great filter perhaps is that your institution will only survive if it's timeline native and what that means is that it is both reactive to and reflexive to the timeline.
00:10:49 · Jeremy Giffon
Reactive meaning that is constantly monitoring the timeline and reflexive in that its actions then affect the timeline which it then sort of reads and reacts to and you can think of the White House is obviously like this, venture capital is like this, public equities are like this, there's this idea of what is the story and what's interesting, one of the things I get emails about the most is a comment I made somewhere about how like posting is the last great meritocracy. I get emails about that because people are like that really clicked in my head and I start posting and posting changes your life if you're good at it, that's still true today, maybe more true than ever. And it is sort of a meritocracy in a weird way. Now there's the algorithms and AI and all the stuff. In some ways it's a lot more meritocratic than it used to be like everything it's been lotteryified. In the old times you had to grind away and build this huge following and then by virtue of having a big following you could post a really inane tweet and it would be very popular but that doesn't happen anymore now. You can literally be like a new account and just write a good post and then the algorithm selects you and it'll display you in front of 500,000,000 people. You have the global newspaper that everyone reads, that everyone finds highly influential, there's also this meta thing where it's like the newspaper if you could see all the influential people reacting to the articles in the newspaper and then by virtue of reacting to it making the thing more important. And anyone can post to it. Gets dictated from the timeline how much venture rounds are done on the timeline, how much businesses are built on the timeline. Increasingly everything will just become timeline native. TPBN is a great example of this. When we're recording this, every other day someone writes some sort of pornographic fanfic about AI and it moves the public markets dramatically. When there's uncertainty people are just looking for what is the story, what is the most compelling story and the way that it works on the timeline is it's not this well considered book that comes out that everyone talks about for a year. It's what is the thing that sounds smart, feels good, it has to be entertaining, maybe that's another change is a good post has to be very entertaining because people are on the timeline to be entertained.
00:12:55 · Jeremy Giffon
They can lie to themselves and say they're on it for other reasons but it's just to be entertained. That's obviously what the algorithms are selecting for. There's this idea that the most entertaining, novel, somewhat interesting, somewhat correct thing is going to set the actions and the consensus for everyone on a day to day basis and this translates into their actions.
00:13:17 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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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.