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

Okay, so The Hills is this sort of fake reality show that started in Laguna Beach; it was a reality show, and then they all move to LA. It’s this mid-early aughts reality show about young people moving to LA, and it created all these big brands and personalities that dominated the tabloids for a really long time. And then this year, they came out with the 10-year anniversary. The show had ended, they [had all gone] on, some of them are successful, some are not successful. This [had been] a show about them in their early 20s, and now they're in the early 30s, and they revisited it. And my wife and I were watching it, and I loved it; you would not think I would like it, but I loved it. What I found over and over again This is what I think the sort of Zeitgeist is, is these characters who basically are fake people, but sometimes have real emotions. They the word they kept talking about over and over again was like how anxious they were and how tired they were. And and these are obviously all sort of tail and millennials right and and it would be peak Millennials are at peak millennials. Yes. And and it struck me that there was probably something illustrated there about the sort of millennial mind of for the millennials that what their 20s was, from the teens to the end of their 20s was like the Warner Act, the financial crisis, an economic recovery that they didn't really benefit from, and then walking in now to becoming a parent. You know, becoming an adult maybe but but starting to get serious about life but without the comfort or security That would suit some of those anxiety. So I thought it was, to me one of the feelings of the age is kind of an anxiety or an unease about things like

together with exhaustion  

With exhaustion. Yes. Because we're, you know, we're on our phones all the time, we're consuming more information than ever. We have more information about what other people aredoing-I think the exhaustion is from social media in the sense of like, it's keeping up with the Joneses times like 1000, you know, because  

I don't even want to call it, "We are on our phones". We have merged Yes, with our phones. And so if I think about the phone as a portal, the idea is that I turn this slab towards me and then I suddenly go into some in, like, right now, I don't know whether you and I are being attacked on social media.  

Sure, we probably are. just a percent what percentage of it is attack and what percentage of it is complimentary?  

Right? Yeah, but the point that is that is this parallel world taking place at all times. And then we have now merged with it so that we there isn't a way that is

our phones, or the idea that it's a separate world is like, right now, there are people simultaneously watching thousands of hours of video or audio that both of us have produced. So we're having this conversation, which is obviously not live, but other people are watching a very different conversation with us at this moment. That's right. And that is strange if you think about it. And yeah, some of those people are hating that conversation so that people are loving that conversation. It's a one of the one of the weird things I get all the time we're talking about Tim Ferriss is not going to go like people go, Oh, I just, they're like I loved you on the Tim Ferriss podcast or whatever is like I did that interview in 2014. But to them, it's new. So like that the portal, different people are entering the portal at different times. And whereas I think something is old, if you've never seen it before, I

I was trying to talk to my son who's 14, about the old days- like, What? What was it like?-and I had to explain to him how important the clock was-when you didn't have cell phones in everyone's pocket-you had to be very precise and careful where you were going to meet someone. On what street corner at exactly what time; and that [there were] these things that were broadcast live, like the news. Synchronized behavior-we were willing to be synced because we didn't have an ability to be independent. And that now, we've gotten this ability to do everything on demand. We're surprised that no one carries our [inaudible].

Ryan Holiday  22:44

I was actually just like my I have a three-year-old, so I was thinking, ‘What’s the-[from] when I was a kid, what's the technology story that I will tell them that will blow their mind?’ And I was thinking about this last night because I got to my friend's truck. It An older truck. And we had an older version of that when I was growing up. But we had this Toyota pickup truck when I was a kid. And it didn't have a clock in it. It was a cheap old truck. And I remember that whenever like on the way to school to see if we were late, or you know what time it was, we'd have to turn it to, like ksdk. I grew up in Northern California turning to KPK, because every 15 minutes, they said, you're listening to KPK. It's 945 and traffic like, so we'd have to turn on the radio and hope we were close to, but would know that in a minimum of, you know, 14 minutes and 32 seconds, we would be getting the time. Right. And so it was it was it's weird, because yes, things were more synchronized. But also, you could exist in a bubble detached from time also, because not everyone was trying you were you were genuinel