31: Ryan Holiday - Conspiracy, Manipulation & other Pastimes: Difference between revisions

So it's a variance reduction model, that you know that you're going to have a job if you do your job, but you don't actually have to test yourself based on whether or not people are dying for your content.

Yeah, If you live in some small town, you might think, ‘Oh, this person is a certified financial advisor. They know more about money than me.’ Which might be true, but they would not be-if they were really good at managing money, they would not be running a Charles Schwab office in, you know, Toledo or something, right? So,  

it's like, you just, oh, the people who are writing for this outlet or that outlet are in it, unless, I mean, there's obviously exceptions, like Malcolm Gladwell writes for The New Yorker, but has is also an entrepreneurial creator in other ways. But, you know, you just realize, Oh, you're it's sort of like the survivorship bias. Like all the good people have been all the fundamentally talented people have been siphoned off

and work for them so that I really, I don't know that I hold exactly that take on. There's a selection bias. I think that there's an aspect of People merging with these venerable structures. There is power from an institutional perspective that hasn't been completely lost and frittered I'm not quite sure whether the millennials still pay attention. But that came from Harper's, that came from the Atlantic that came from the New Yorker. However, what I'm very curious about is at what point do the super vital people start going back into the institutional structures? Like I will see things happen on the Joe Rogan program? Yeah. And unless there's an angle to take somebody down, it doesn't filter back into what is this thing I call the gated institutional narrative, because it's mostly an idea that certain organs only talk to each other and themselves. Right. And that the power of that conversation to stay focused on it could be completely irrelevant and wrong things or misleading things are terrible things, but it still has a measure of coherence that the world Wild West LAX, and I'm questioning what happens when the interesting stuff is incoherent. And the other stuff has a coherence, even if

it's meaningless. Yeah, George trout wrote this book called within the context of no context. And he started talking about he was a New Yorker writer. He wrote this like 30 years ago, but sort of talking about exactly we're talking about is that, like, sort of the job of these old institutions was to provide context to imprimatur a stamp of approval. But now there's these new media outlets this new wild west where that's gone. Yeah, it is interesting. It's like the Elan musk episode of Rogan is newsworthy, but the other episodes of treach still millions more people than, you know, an episode of Lena Dunham's girls, one is covered and the other isn't right. But these empty shells are are really he calls them empty shells that like these outlets are empty shells that that there is this significance and meaning equity in them that was built over hundreds of years. In some cases, the Atlantic is, you know, dates before the Civil War. So even if the business model is changing the credibility might have been reduced, still mean something to people because it's been around for so long. Like a great example of this is like Forbes, is this economic business model is the exact same outlet as the Huffington Post, right? Like it's run by contributors, most of whom are not paid, most of whom are not edited. And yet, you see something written by for like, you see an article from Forbes calm, it feels like it's from the media brand Forbes, which states the early 1900s, right. But it's actually written by some random person who may be, you know, conflicted or not qualified or wet. So these empty shelves matter a great deal. And we because so much advertising has been put behind them and exposure. One of the examples I like to use is like, okay, you you're driving through la you See a billboard for you know, a new movie. It'll have the laurel leaves, you know, around the award that it's one. Well, you know, there used to be like a handful of film festivals and now there's a million film festivals. And so you're driving and you see the Laura leaves and you go, Oh, this is an award winning movie. But that might have been, you know, the Sacramento Film Festival or a non exist

nt Film Festival. You know, you've already got the Charles Schwab Office of Toledo, Ohi

really angry. Is that ever gonna give us I'm from Sacrament

, okay, or I feel like you just plugged in a sec. There's no such t

ing as bad press. Yeah, but but you know what I mean? So like, like, our mind is looking for these symbols. Yeah, tell us like this is the important narrative. This has been vetted. And in fact, most of that has fallen away. And, and so we're, I think we have trouble integrating what's even

eal and not real. So if all of our minds are now Really the product of random, not randomly, but eclectically chosen inputs, and we can't count on a cannon so that there is a less shared context. What would be the art that would be appropriate to this time that we could look back and say, Hey, do you remember how we sh

red that? I mean, like, what is the art we're creating now th

t matters? are we are we unreachable by art? effectively? Because w

're too atomized. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, is there a Is there a painting that could come out that would, Jen that would genuinely pierce the cultural

onsciousness like remember when Gangnam Style came down? Yeah, that was so weird. Yeah,

nto weddings. And but we also like the first thing was just your jaw was dropping. What am I watching? It didn't even make sense. It's like I'm sort of

 

 

d, Now hear this. Well, what's interesting is that was like the first video to do a billion views. Right? Okay. And now there are videos that have done a billion views that you and I have never heard of, you know, like, which is very strange to think about. I remember the other day I, someone had recommended this book, it's a, the book is a man called oath, which is this interesting little novel. There's actually really good, but he's like, Hey, you should check out this book. And it recently come out and I pulled it up and it had 18,000 reviews on Amazon. And I'd never heard of it. So not like I hadn't read it, but like, I'd never heard of it. I've never seen it written about anywhere. It had won no awards. It had not been made into a movie. And, and so you realize, yeah, things can be flat out cultural phenomenons. But having No cultural impact whatsoever because they are filtered out of whatever that dominant media narrative is, right? I, I yeah, I mean, I even see this with with my with my own books, right like I've sold, my books are sold millions of copies have been reviewed, like twice in newspapers really. And they were almost all from the to book because that was a media centric book. So my book that's got the most media connections got the most attention, but actually sold the fewest