Ryan Daniel Moran argues that people act to maximize entertainment, which explains phenomena like the spread of fake news and why more entertaining political candidates prevail. He predicts Joseph R. Biden will likely lose in November (2020) because he is less entertaining and suggests that large institutions are crumbling, leading people to form insulated, personalized social and thought "bubbles" and customize their lives over the next decades.
Chapters
My goal for the day is to make sense of the entire world. Now, let me give you a filter through which to see the world that I think will explain a lot of what is going on. And I predict that you will be able to use this filter as a way to see the world moving forward. Here it is. Human beings always do what is most entertaining for them. This is almost always true. So if we look at something like the news and we see all of the fake news that is happening, why does fake news spread? Because it's entertaining, because it confirms our existing suspicions. Because it's more fun to think that we're right than to question the story. If you look at presidential elections, try to tell me one example of someone who lost, but they were the more entertaining candidate. We know what it looked like in the last election. Who was more interesting, Barack Obama or John McCain? Who was more entertaining? Who was more interesting between the two? Who was more interesting or entertaining between George W. Bush and Al Gore? Now, human beings will always prioritize what is most entertaining, which is also why, no matter what the polls say, I'm of the opinion that Biden doesn't stand a chance in November. But I'm kind of secretly pulling for Biden because in a way, I'm curious what happens when all of the people who thinks that the world is going to hell in a handbasket no longer have someone to point to and say, this is why the world's messed up moving forward. As a result of this time, human beings are going to start creating their own social bubbles and their own thought bubbles and their own news bubbles. So what we see right now is we see the breaking of all things that are big. All big things are crumbling right now. Big things like trust in government, trust in police departments, trust in big institutions, trust in religions. The things that we put on a big stage in order to make life feel normal and regulated are now crumbling. And so what you're going to see now is you're going to see human beings go to where it is small. You're going to see where people are focused in their individual bubbles. Now, a bubble does not mean closed minded. A bubble means insulated, it means protected. It means that people are going to have their circle and they're not going to go outside of that circle as much as they did in the past. I mean, you even see people moving away from social media, right? So for example, if you look at religions, somebody who is not active in religion, somebody who doesn't have a background in religion, will say, aren't they all like talking about the same thing? Aren't they all after, like, the same things? I mean, can't we find, like, a web that ties all this together? But a religious person will say, absolutely not. My religion is different in this way and this way and this way and this way and this way. That religion is wrong because of this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this. So in the religion is a good way of seeing that we naturally go into these bubbles, that even if we identify with a big idea, we actually isolate ourselves into these. These pockets, into these bubbles. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. This is actually a very interesting thing. This is. This is a very interesting change in society. Because what you're going to end up seeing is you're going to end up seeing people who have very different lives than people who are in the same city as them. And I mean very different lives. I mean, you. You are going to be able to customize your life however you want, and that is going to be the world over the next 20 to 40 years. And so what you can do now is start being very aware and very conscious of the thoughts you want to think, of the things that you want to see, of the beliefs that you want to have, of the media that you consume, because you're going to get to define the rules however it is that you want.
