On The News

2025.11.30

CXXVIII

[The Time I Wasn’t Invited to a Party; Rage Baiting; A Snowman in a Dessert; Human Filters; The Lindy Effect (Again); Creating > Consuming; Your Personal Garden]

Thesis: Because news & social media are optimized for emotional reactions, they are an inefficient way to collect valuable information.

[The Time I Wasn’t Invited to a Party]

I very rarely consume "the news" and greatly limit my interactions with social media.

I've had an aversion to both for 6 or so years, now.

It started when I was 16 and wasn't invited to a party.

I saw posts about the party on Snapchat from multiple friends. It made me emotional and jealous and envious and sad and I felt left out.

What I noticed that night was that I still kept wanting to see more of the party. I wanted more information that would make me feel negatively.

Feeling negative seems like an absurd thing to want, but we behave that way all the time! The issue is compounded by the fact that social media and the news award the generation of negative emotions more than they award sharing information.

Just like reading about some upsetting event has low utility unless it actually causes you to take action, by waiting for the next post about the party I wasn’t at, I realized I was only losing…

I was losing myself in a place that I wasn’t.

That night, I decided to play guitar and journal and read, instead of sitting on my phone waiting for the next hit.

I chose to create instead of consume, and that's almost always more fulfilling.

Now, I rarely if ever watch or read or listen to the news, and I tightly control my social media use.*

Yet, I’m still able to gather important information AND fill my time with a lot more meaningful things.

_{*My aversion to news is so great that the ancestor to my current startup, BirdDog, was an attempt to spare me from reading the news.}

[Rage Baiting]

Traditional news outlets are optimized to appeal to a specific persona. Social media feeds are the natural conclusion: they’re optimized for a specific person.

Neither is really optimized to give you meaningful information. Rather, they are both optimized to give you an emotional state and keep you coming back for more.

What post gets more comments, the one that was super informational and helpful, or the one where everyone is either saying "I completely disagree with this post" or "I can't believe anyone agrees with this post”?

The two posts I saw on LinkedIn with the most comments this week were:

• A post that started by saying women shouldn't do business as clickbait, and then pivoted to saying that women should run all businesses instead

• A post saying that sending calendly links was disrespectful

I, like everyone else, had an emotional reaction to both posts. I also wasted 5 minutes looking at both comment sections. You know what I learned?

Absolutely nothing!

The crazy part is that it works. My co founder & I’s most performant posts are almost always the ones with the hottest takes.

As we'll see with a sampling from the Wall Street Journal below, "real" news is not much different.

[A Snowman in a Dessert]

Even the vast majority of "real news" has the shelf life of a snowman in a dessert. The "most important" thing this week will be forgotten about next week.

Let’s review some of this mornings headlines from the WSJ, a very reputable news outlet, to see if they have any impact on the average person:

1. "Trump's Focus on Drug War Means Big Business for Defense Startups"

2. "They Found Relatives on 23andMe - And Asked a Cut of the Inheritance"

3. "Is America Heading for a Debt Crisis? Look Abroad for Answers"

4. "Data Centers Are a 'Gold Rush' for Construction Workers"

5. "Russia Gains the Upper Hand in the Drone Battle, Once Ukraine's Forte"

6. "America Loves a $13 Lunch Bowl. Don't Bet Against It."

1, 4, and 6 are FOMO pieces to try to get you to invest in Defense, Construction, and Fast Food. While there may be some valuable info in there if you’re actively investing, you need to be very cautious. he WSJ is not rewarded for you making money off of it’s information, it’s rewarded for you feeling like you will make money.

2 makes you feel righteous indignation, or excitement around an opportunity, depending on your code of ethics (or net worth).

(Assuming you are pro Ukraine) 5 gives you a sense of fear and curiosity.

3, too, gives you fear and curiosity.

The most critical question to ask: If you read any of these articles, would they have an impact on your life?

Think clearly here... I am NOT asking if the outcome of the Ukraine / Russia War will have an impact on your life, nor am I asking if America being in a debt crisis might have an impact on your life. I'm asking if reading these articles will actually materially change any of your behaviors or the outcomes of the events?

The truth is, 999/1000, you reading the article will not change your behavior or the outcome of the event.

Separating the impact of the underlying event and the consequence of you knowing more about it is very, very important.

[Human Filters]

I think the most generalizable and efficient way to get good information is to talk to other people.

On one level, if something they read about is important enough for them to tell you, and you have a good gauge for their own biases, you can learn quite a lot by hearing it from their perspective.

More importantly, when you are trying to deeply understand a space, you’ll get more valuable information much more quickly by listening to the experience of other people in the space.

For the last 2 years, my cofounder Jack & I have been hearing from sales people that a category of data (3rd party intent) does not get real results.

This has been so valuable to inform how we build our own product, and to stop us from copying the wrong things from the current “winners".

Now, over the last 6 months or so, the notion that this data is bad has started to dominate the discourse. So much so that the largest seller of this data type is publishing opinion pieces saying that it is not a sufficient on it's own and needs to be paired with other data and tactics, too.

No news outlet or social channel could have helped us see this coming better than talking to sales people every day over two years. We didn’t predict the future, we just listened to the people who would decide the future.

Really good investors do this too, actually talk to people at companies or in industries they’re tracking to see what is really going on. They have their "sources."

[The Lindy Effect (Again)]

Just like people are a good filter of information, so is time. Remember the Lindy Effect:

In english: the longer something has been around, the longer it is likely to still be around.

No wonder that the vast majority of news or social posts won’t be relevant even one week from the day you first saw them.

Less than 10% of the movies I’ve seen in the last 5 years came out in the last 5 years. The same goes for my reading. I rarely, if ever, read a book that is less than 5 years old.

“Old” books and movies are the polar opposite of news and social media: rather than being recent and unfiltered, they’ve already made it through the sands of time and are still ‘relevant.’

[Creating > Consuming]

All that being said… you don’t HAVE to consume. You can create, too.

If you free up your time from doom scrolling and buying into the rage bait, you’ll have more time for craft and creation. Some things that I like:

• Writing

• Reading

• Journalling

• Exercising

• Talking with people who I like

• Coding

You might like none of those things… but I know there is something you find fulfilling.

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[Your Personal Garden]

Your brain is very, very sensitive to the information you feed it.

If you give it low shelf life content designed to get an emotional rise out of you, it will be hard to not have sharp emotional responses to these things.

Most news, unfortunately, is like that.

I’m not advocating to live under a rock entirely, I’m sure there is some utility to awareness. However, I think in general, most of us live too much in the flow of rapid, low calorie information, and not enough outside of it.

If you are intentional and methodical about what you consume, look far and wide to find the right information, and leverage time and human filters, you will be doing yourself a favor and making emotional stability more natural and less alien.

And, a lot of the time, you'll find creating things more fulfilling than consuming them.

Live Deeply,