Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:16:03 · Jeremy Giffon, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:16:03] S2: Everything is just downstream of technological change. So the reason podcast followed a normal distribution was because the technology delivering it was an RSS feed. And now it's an algorithm and it's clips and I mean even the method. I'm sure some obscene amount of your viewers watching or listening on YouTube, which is new. Even if you subscribe to a podcast on YouTube they're not gonna show you every single episode in chronological order. So I think this stuff is all just new, just downstream of technology. I don't think something has changed in the content or in the listeners, it's just how it's delivered. In that sense, maybe one world where the podcast world sort of lags behind the YouTube world is that the podcast world is still highly naive to serving content to the algorithm. You know, if you get deep into the Twitter group chats, especially now that they've posted the algorithm, there are all these very specific things that you can do around replies and likes and length and all these numbers that the algorithm is selecting for streamers and people on YouTube and so I certainly understand that. I think maybe the reason it feels a little bit random is because podcasts still like really aren't into the meat of understanding that we are recording this video for a LLM to review and decide what it wants to show people and then people will decide if they like it or not. That first filter we don't really think about but that is the case. [00:17:22] S0: Does that stress you out? Does that feel deeply dystopian?
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.