Hierarchy, Stop Letting Idiots Rent Space in Your Head
I gave up watching mainstream television news years ago and suffered a terrible consequence. I stopped being angry about things I couldn't do anything about. It was devastating. I could eat breakfast without discovering that civilisation was due to collapse before lunch. I could have a coffee without a man in a suit explaining that markets were terrified. I could go outside without knowing what some politician I'd never met had said about another politician I'd never met. Somehow I carried on.
Anton Kreil is savage about mainstream media and I understand why. The modern news business has a fairly obvious problem. Nobody makes much money telling you everything is basically all right. Calm is commercial dog shit. Nobody clicks on Normal Tuesday Continues As Expected. Nobody stays glued to the television because a reporter announces that nothing particularly frightening has happened in Wolverhampton. The machine needs drama, outrage, fear and conflict because frightened people keep checking the cage to see whether the tiger has escaped.
So everything becomes a crisis. House prices are surging. House prices are collapsing. Inflation is exploding. Markets are plunging. Britain is facing chaos. Europe is facing chaos. America is facing chaos. The weather is facing chaos. Christmas is facing chaos. Apparently Christmas has been facing imminent destruction every November since about 1973 and the bastard still turns up.
The financial news is especially entertaining. The stock market falls two per cent and a presenter appears looking like somebody has just shot the family dog. Billions wiped off markets. Wiped off. What a fantastic phrase. You can almost picture a giant accountant standing over the FTSE with a wet cloth. Then markets rise the following week and billions have been added. Where were they. Did somebody find them behind the sofa.
Then comes the explanation. Markets fell amid concerns about interest rates. Markets rose amid optimism about interest rates. Markets were mixed amid uncertainty about interest rates. That's not financial analysis. That's a horoscope for people with Bloomberg terminals.
The really clever part is that they explain everything after it happens. Market falls, here's why. Oil rises, here's why. Pound falls, here's why. If these people understand the machinery this well, you'd think at least one of them might mention it before the fucking thing happens. I can explain why a horse lost after the race as well. Apparently it didn't run fast enough.
I don't think journalists gather every morning in a secret underground bunker and discuss how to keep Derek from Doncaster poor. That's childish. The reality is much more boring. Media companies need attention. Fear gets attention. Anger gets attention. Conflict gets attention. Therefore the sausage machine gets loaded with fear, anger and conflict and starts pumping out Cumberland Outrage twenty four hours a day.
The result is a peculiar form of information obesity. People consume news constantly and somehow understand less. Breakfast news, phone notifications, websites, podcasts, social media, evening news, then another quick look before bed to check whether China has invaded Taiwan during dinner. Their brain spends the entire day being pelted with information like a skip full of tennis balls has been emptied through the window.
Most of it changes absolutely nothing about their life.
That's the question I started asking. What am I going to do differently because I know this.
If the answer is nothing, why am I renting the story a room in my head.
I don't need to know what every politician said today. Most politicians talk for a living. Asking them not to produce words would be like asking a Labrador not to investigate a sausage. Tomorrow they'll produce some more. There'll be another outrage, another response, another demand for an apology, another interview about the apology, then three professional opinion havers will sit around a table discussing what the apology means for ordinary families.
Meanwhile ordinary families are making dinner.
The same filtering applies to people I listen to. Kreil calls this choosing the right role models. I wouldn't even call them role models because I'm nearly fifty, not twelve. I don't need a poster above my bed. I need people who know something useful.
Fame doesn't qualify somebody.
Neither does money.
Neither does having fourteen million followers.
A monkey falling off a garden chair can get fourteen million views. I'm not asking it about asset allocation.
Social media has created an entire industry around confusing visibility with competence. Some twenty four year old with teeth like a bathroom showroom rents a Lamborghini for the afternoon, photographs himself beside it and announces that the nine to five is a trap.
Then he sells a course.
Of course he fucking does.
There's always a course.
The Lamborghini isn't transport. It's fishing bait.
You are the fish.
The photograph says look how successful I am. The caption says I escaped the matrix. The video says anybody can do this. The link says £997.
And apparently the secret to becoming financially independent is giving £997 to a man who needs strangers on Instagram to give him £997.
That's an interesting business model.
There is usually a watch involved as well. Big watch, tight trousers, Dubai skyline. Sometimes the man is sitting on the bonnet of the Lamborghini because nothing demonstrates financial intelligence like treating a rented supercar as patio furniture.
Then come the slogans. Multiple income streams. Passive income. Mindset. Abundance. Escape the matrix. Build while they sleep.
Who the fuck are they.
There's always a mysterious they.
Perhaps they're the same people threatening Christmas.
The internet is full of people selling maps to places they've never been. That's why I care about track records. If someone talks about building businesses, I want to know what they've built. If they talk about investing, I want to know whether they've actually invested through ugly markets rather than discovering equities eighteen months ago. If they talk about risk, I want to know whether they've ever lost enough money to feel their arse tighten.
Scars are useful.
Not because failure automatically makes somebody wise. Some people fail because they're idiots and then become experienced idiots. But someone who has actually done something tends to talk differently from somebody who has merely read about it.
The bullshit content drops.
That's what I want.
I also don't automatically want advice from somebody simply because they've succeeded. Successful at what.
That's important.
Someone can be astonishingly good at climbing a ladder that's leaning against a building I don't want to enter. A senior corporate executive might know exactly how to survive thirty years inside a multinational company. Politics, promotions, committees, networking, presentations, pensions. Fine. If I don't want that life, why would I copy the recipe.
That's like asking a champion greyhound how to become a dolphin.
Wrong fucking race.
Parents do this. Friends do it. Colleagues do it. Usually with good intentions. Get something secure. Don't take the risk. Think about your pension. Buy the house. Stay where you are. Don't throw away a good job.
They're giving directions to their destination.
That's fine.
I just might not be going there.
If I'm driving to Glasgow and a lovely bloke gives me perfect directions to Norwich, following them because he's lovely doesn't make the directions useful.
That's the hierarchy Kreil is talking about as I understand it. Who gets influence. Who gets access to the control room. Who gets to move the furniture around inside my head.
I'm quite protective of that space.
I don't want Rupert Murdoch living in there. I don't want politicians living in there. I don't want influencers living in there. I certainly don't want some bastard called CryptoBrad living in there telling me that Bitcoin is about to go parabolic because he's drawn three triangles on a chart.
Rent is expensive.
They can all fuck off.
What I want is useful information from people who have earned my attention. Books. Research. Data. People with genuine experience. People who can explain something complicated without turning it into a motivational poster. People who occasionally say I don't know, which is one of the strongest indicators I've found that somebody might actually know something.
Experts know where the holes are.
Bullshitters wallpaper over them.
The strange thing is that cutting down the amount of information coming in hasn't made me feel disconnected. It has made the useful information easier to see. If somebody throws one tennis ball at me, I can catch it. If somebody reverses a cement mixer full of them over my head, I'm just standing underneath a pile of balls wondering what happened.
That's modern media.
More information isn't automatically more knowledge.
Sometimes it's just more shit to shovel.
And I don't particularly want to spend whatever time I've got left on this planet shovelling other people's shit.
That's perhaps the savage little truth underneath Principle Five. Attention is part of freedom. If somebody can decide what I'm frightened about this morning, what I'm angry about this afternoon and what I'm arguing about tonight, they've got their hand on a surprisingly important part of my life.
They don't even have to charge me.
I'll provide the time for free.
Fuck that.
The television can shout at somebody else. The newspaper can announce another crisis. The influencer can photograph his rented Lamborghini. CryptoBrad can draw another triangle.
I'm off for a shit.
If civilisation collapses before I've finished it, I'm sure somebody will tell me.