On Getting Stuck in Flavortown

2026.07.19

CLXI

[Meditating in Front of a TV; Stuck in Flavortown; You're Buying Beaches and Women, not Coronas; Under the Influence; The Heat Around the Corner...; The Utility of Competence Porn; The Library of Competence Porn; Be Inspired]

Thesis: The Media you consume has a powerful influence on your world view; if you’re intentional, you can leverage it to be inspired.

[Meditating in Front of a TV]

When consumed, media is a super powerful tool. It can comfort, it can inspire, it can distract, it can erode.

I found myself in front of a television last week and was awe struck by it's power to consume my attention.

Try as I might, I had a terrifically hard time looking away. It was like a fly trap that snapped out and ensnared me in spite of my ostensible disinterest in the subject it was televising.

Still, Media has it's utility.

Specifically, there is a particular kind of media that inspires me: Competence Porn. When I say Competence Porn, I mean some content (typically a film, a novel, a biography, a documentary, or a series) that follows one or more competent people as they complete complex & challenging tasks with low probability of success.

The film Heat is a great example of this, and I’ll list over a dozen later on.

Media has such a profound impact on our world views. If you’re going to consume media, you might as well consume stuff that you believe will have a positive impact on how you see the world & the outcome you’re after.

[Stuck in Flavortown]

Last week, I ended up in a room with a TV on at all times.

The conversation was lower frequency, and I was resolved to be reflecting while I wasn’t talking, rather than reading or coding or one of my usual outlets.

What I noticed happening, though, was how natural it was for my attention to be drawn toward the TV, even when I didn't want it to - even when I was actively trying not to focus on it.

Outside of social media, television programming has to be one of the most well optimized things to get anyone's attention.

Against my better judgement, I found myself invested in the trials of Chicago man vs a Kentucky woman as they cooked off in Guy Fieri's Flavortown.

From a high level, it’s pretty incredible that I would care about this programming just because it was on. But really, the show had a mix of things that might appeal to nearly everyone:

• Every contestant always has an emotional, heartwarming story

• The food looked delectable

• Guy Fieri is funny enough

• We all have a latent desire for recognition and reward that’s channeled through identifying with the contestants

• Of course the competition and drama and suspense keep us on the hook

As well see, I'm not inherently anti television, even if I think it's over reached; I'm in awe at the perfection of the medium as an attention trap.

I would be thinking to myself, "I'm going to reflect on this concept" and 6 minutes later realized I was totally invested in whether or not the woman from Kentucky was going to get her crumpets on the dish in time.

[You're Buying Beaches and Women, not Coronas]

This is without mentioning those damned commercials. So short, so efficient. So perfect, really: they do exactly what they need to do.

Nearly every single one was selling the outcome of their product or service, rather than the product or service:

• You aren't buying a corona, you're buying a great time in the sun, outside, probably at the beach, with beautiful women and handsome men

• You're not buying vitamins for your kids, you're buying the right to consider yourself a thoughtful and caring parent (the ads I'm thinking of were much more targeted at this than the health of the kids)

• You're not buying RAID, you're buying a wasp free party and the recognition of your friends and family for removing those pests

• Even the political campaign ads weren't asking you to vote for them, they were saying you DESERVED no state income tax or the state NEEDED a strong manufacturing base (you’ll get jobs and a better economy), and if you vote for me, you’ll get it!

This is incredible marketing, probably close to 'perfect' for this time and place and the medium. So well optimized it's shocking.

[Under the Influence]

All that said, not only is it near impossible to yank your attention away from a lot of modern Media, but when you do watch it, you’re sometimes subtly, often times overtly, effecting your world view.

If you consume what is marketed, then as a default, unless you’re actively guarding against it, you will be subtly influenced by the messaging whoever is doing the marketing wants you to believe.

If you consume a bunch of contents where the people with the money are always the villains, you’ll be pressured to believe that money is bad.

Loosely, I think a powerful world view is one that actually reflects cause and effect in the world. Meaning, if you do x or y or z, then a or b or c will happen.

If the media you consume illustrates such a powerful worldview, you’ll be more inspired to actually copy that world view and draw on it when you need to.

Of course, this world view should be ethically aligned, too, but we’re taking that as a prior, for now; in reality, it’s a concept that warrants it’s own post.

[The Heat Around the Corner...]

Last night, we watched part of Heat.

If you haven't seen it, Heat is, in my view, one of the 10 greatest films of all time. Both Al Pacino's character (a detective) and Robert De Niro's character (a crime boss) are not just incredibly well played, but are both insanely competent and capable and perfect foils* for one another.

Without spoiling anything, the film is a game of cat and mouse with each man perpetually out maneuvering the other and really, the world.

Okay, I will spoil the first 20 minutes, so don't read the next two text block if you care that much:

One of the first scenes is an almost perfectly executed heist on an armored car by De Niro's character, even perfectly predicting the LAPD's response time like clockwork. Then, when Al Pacino's character shows up on the scene to investigate, he's almost immediately able to see every single relevant detail that would give him insight into the crime and it's perpetrators, and wastes 0 time assigning someone to every single possible thread to collect information.

This is Competence Porn, one of the most enjoyable and useful sorts of films in my view.

_{*I've always thought which party was the foil was a matter of preference}

[The Utility of Competence Porn]

Surely, you've had a situation in which it feels like everything is going tits up.*

When that happens, whether it be a prod fire, or a customer getting angry at you, or receiving your 4th cease and desist letter, or just a generally overwhelming amount of small things all going wrong at once, I really think you have two primary options to respond:

1. Getting nervous, panicking, over reacting, shutting down

2. Taking a deep breath, calming down, assessing the situation, and proceeding with the actions that maximize your odds of winning

Competence porn can be helpful to push you toward the latter. You remember what some character or historical figure you really like would do, and then you do it.

This might sound incredibly childish and fantastical, but guess what? I don't care!

I don't think you should care, either.

When I was like 12 I would always ask myself "What would Paul Muad'Dib do?" if I was having a hard time with other kids or something. And guess what, it helps!

Now, if I wrote some code that's hitting a scaling constraint or a nasty edge case that needs to be immediately addressed, I ask myself what would Pham Nuwen do? Obviously cooly and calmly code his way out of it.

It's not cringe to be inspired. As a matter of fact, it's cringe NOT to be inspired.

Even now, as I was writing out those 2 options above, I was thinking about a Jocko Willink anecdote. I can't remember if it was from one of his books or an interview. Basically, he said that when deployed, the Marines were calm when nothing was happening and the Seals ran around like they had sticks up their ass checking everything, restlessly preparing. Then, when conflict did alive, the Marines would be more inclined to lose their cool while the Seals became incredibly calm: after all, the uncertainty was gone. Threat was identified. It's go time.

Am I a navy seal? HELL NO. I'm a dude who ships code and sells SaaS on the internet and lives in a hacker house.

But if given the choice, why would not want to be more like the seals?

_{*Had to link this because I found out a week or two ago that this was not exactly a very common phrase outside of certain circles}

[The Library of Competence Porn]

As promised, here is a library of some of my favorite Competence Porn:

• Heat: Both characters are insanely competent

• First 3 Foundation Books: Thousand year plans with nested plans, so much dialogue like: "My space ships have encircled your spaceships, you must surrender" "Well, actually, my men are already ON your spaceships. Your Fleet Captain surrendered 20 minutes ago!"

• James Bond: the earlier films are a bit 'goofy', but the Craig ones are pure high octane problem solving & quick thinking under pressure

• Mad Men: Don Draper's key redeeming quality is that he's competent

• Dune: A lot of the characters and factions are playing generational chess

• A Deepness in the Sky: thousand year long schemes, hacking, coups, and leveraging technology to get insane edges

• Julius Caesar's Journals from the Gallic Wars: 7 years of persistence before winning. 2 or 3 moments of sheer military genius. I have a canvas print of the surrender of Vercingetorix.

• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson: Moment after moment of intensity and focus, include changing the design of a rocket less than 24 hours before a launch & it working

• Dark Knight Trilogy: Most Nolan films are full of competence porn, but these 3 in particular are pretty awesome

• King Icahn: Schemes like the man sleeping in the middle of the day to show up late to a negotiation so he was fresh and awake as he drove them all the way to 3am deals while the counterparties were exhausted

• Mike Duncan’s Podcast on the French Revolution: A handful of the players were quite unstoppable, like Metternich & Lafyette & Talleyrand (so good that his name is literally a noun for an expert diplomat)

• The Killing by Kubrick: An insanely tight and enjoyable heist film

• WestWorld S1-3: Deteriorates over time, never watched s4, but there are some characters who are great at both planning and thinking on their feet

• Sicario: Matt Graves & Alejandro are both forces of nature. Sicario 2 is also good but I kind of feel like they leaned too hard into the best parts of the first one

• Cash McCall: A super efficient businessman does a buy out of a company partly to get with the owner's daughter

• Succession: This one is interesting because a lot of it is ironic and there is a laughable amount of cringe worthy incompetence, but some of the characters have moments of brilliance and others are outright sharks

• Conquest of the Useless: Five years of Herzog getting a 200 ton boat over a mountain in the Amazon. 'Should've failed' a number of times. Didn't.

If you consume any of the content there, let me know what you think.

I’m here every week yapping about tech or media or culture or the West - subscribe to never miss a beat.

[Be Inspired]

Media is so well optimized to grab your attention that it can be quite hard to look away from.

Not all media is created equal, though. Some locks you in and drags you into a world you don't really care to be in.

Other media can actually inspire.

It might be laughable to you to seek inspiration from fiction, but it's what humanity has been doing ever since we shared the first creation stories and myths.

It's not something to be ashamed of, nor is it something to be afraid to lean into.

In my last negotiation, which took ~11 days start to finish (the counter party might say it was only 3 hours), I actually treated it like a character in an Asimov book would, and I got quite a good outcome. And not just for myself: in all honesty, I think everybody did.

Live Deeply,