Learning about Robert Caro and his writing process. Damn, that man was a fucking dog. Use respect for him. One thing I noticed about him is that he would get really stuck and obsessed with situations that he just couldn’t make sense of. He saw Robert Moses, a man with no elected office, and yet he had so much control. His whole way of thinking about political power was just not applicable here. And he got curious about Moses then.

So he found almost a glitch in the Matrix, and he just could not accept the surface-level story or explanation the world had for him. So he went and dug deeper. And this is such a niche thing. I don’t think if you just sit there with a marketing mindset, you will conclude that, hey, this topic does not have enough TAM. But irony has a huge TAM, even if it is about something as niche as this, and we can see it in the sales this guy had for his book.

I have been obsessing over irony for the last few weeks. There are common actions or beliefs despite what might actually be true, and exposing that irony generates a lot of attention. And I just saw the repetition of it with what we saw Moses do. But I was severely lacking in my approach to doing it. Caro was willing to invest so much into the tiniest details that it just blows me out of the water. He would go through the next document, the next page, the next archive, the next conversation, the next interview, the next yearbook from high school. He did it all just to uncover a little bit more about the irony. He got a damn election officer to confess he lied under oath. Can you really do that if you just stay on the surface level? So irony happens because these surface-level explanations are cemented so well. Of course uncovering that irony is going to take a lot of effort, and you should be putting that effort in, especially me, since I say that I am an irony merchant, that I will reveal irony in culture or tech or whatever.

See, just staying at the surface level and parroting means you are providing no information. It is everything that is already known. What Robert did generates information. It is a piece of data that is going to shock the current system for sure. And I cannot stay at the surface level and expect to be like him.

Contradiction → obsession → investigation → resolution → piece of media

If you are making explainer videos, then that means you cannot just have a surface-level, regurgitated explanation. You have to uncover an intuitive and novel way to look at it that puts anybody into a flow state. That is the ideal.

Because no matter how obscure, if you generate a piece of information, in the sense Claude Shannon would describe it, it is going to shock the whole fucking system, and those things cannot stay hidden. Once they are discovered, they are going to spread like wildfire because the system is at stake. The best way to propagate your work is not to go out there and have the best hooks, or pretty animations, or whatever, but to have information that is going to shock the system entirely.

That’s why we see an obscure blog post on some random website bring down huge stocks. It does not matter. All that matters is whether you have created new information. Have you pushed the frontier of what people know? And is knowing that going to make them take an action?

I shall shut the fuck up until I have something that really changed my soul, or it is a new form of intuition for looking at a certain thing, or a new way of presenting an existing intuition. Let’s fucking disrupt the information systems of this world. I am going to break the world’s psyche by repeatedly breaking what they think they know. They are at the mercy of what I create.

I’m gonna keep tearing and resewing the epistemic fabric of this damn society.

But one thing we can learn from Shannon about making the hooks or start of movies is establishing the right mix of information and entropy at start. For example, if you are picking A ball at random from a box. If there are four red balls in that box, you have full information and zero entropy because whatever ball you pick is going to be red. If one of the four balls had different color, then you have median information and median entropy. You can deduce much. But if it’s like two two two ball of one color, two ball of other color, then it is. Lowest amount of information and lo highest amount of entropy because you just can’t know until the event has happened. So in movies they give us appropriate amount of information and entropy at start that they they will have setting up scenes like okay in start of. Social network. We see a nerdy guy talking with a girl really awkwardly and fucking up the conversation. But the conversation ends up with her saying that you are probably going to be a really successful computer person. So it’s like not a lot of information, but a lot of entropy that hey how is this weird guy going to change the world? And then we see him create Facebook. Same with YouTube thumbnails. I just saw thumbnail where the title was I’m a game developer since fourteen years and the GTA six leaks are not what you think. So he has given enough information that he knows about what he is talking about, but he has also invalidated our knowledge. So now we have enough information about him, but not enough information about the leaks. So there is high entropy and that entropy might. prompt us to watch it. So it is about manufacturing the right amount of entropy in someone by giving them limited knowledge so that they hop over to explore what you have to say even more. The Chernobyl series is also just that that how can a nuclear reactor of X type explode? The whole series we are grappling with that question and then we figure out the irony is that it was never the X type of reactor because of corruption it was Y and that resolves it all. That also means that during investigation we are going to find a lot of anomalies. That okay, it is supposed to be X, but it is actually Y, or not behaving like X. So how could that be? Then you keep digging and then you see surface level stories, you see anomalies. Then you understand the hidden mechanism. Then the previous model collapses and the new model takes place. That’s what happened in Chernobyl. That hey, how can this explode? Maybe our reading is wrong. Maybe the core is still closed and just the tank exploded, but nothing was fitting the description. And then they finally realize no fuck no the core is actually open. Then the how can the core be open? This is not the type to explode. Then you realize okay maybe in the backend something might have happened they. might have not operated it properly then you keep finding anomalies that okay they say it’s app operating normally or was operating like it should be as per rules but they were not doing that so there are a lot of anomalies that are going to come your way anomalies alongside irony are a really really strong signal and I want you to incorporate it into both the systems on in in this one also and the entropy also that keep hounding for anomalies also. When you have to invent a separate excuse for every anomaly, start questioning the model generating the excuses.

Like you can see the graph. You don’t want to sit at the edges or at the center of that curve. You want to be somewhere outside those.

Like you can have a YouTube title saying something crazy just happened, but that is such low amount of information and so much entropy that I just can’t connect to it. Why why should I bother listening to this? A lot of things are just going wrong anyways. But if that idle was something wrong is going inside the valuations industry, then I would be a bit worried because I I’m working in there and I have enough information but this thing is creating some type of entropy in my mind that hey what what the hell.