Jeff Holmes: belief

Transcript context

…If I go to events with people, which I do pretty often, even in COVID times, it used to be, I would go to hear new and daring ideas that I hadn’t heard before. That’s great, but I think, especially with Twitter, it’s very hard to hear new and daring ideas you haven’t heard before. So why are you listening to other people? The way they put things, the way they argue, the way they paint the bigger picture — you’re getting a lot more context for ideas you’re somewhat already familiar with, and that context is important. Or by studying other cultures, you’re getting context for understanding people or situations or places. That, at the margin, is what I’m trying to get more of, more context rather than new ideas. Realizing that’s more important than I thought, at least for me right now, has been, maybe, my biggest mental change. But almost by definition, it’s not a new idea. It’s like more context for context. I wonder if, sometimes, the reason why we don’t attract more listeners to the show is because there is a certain orientation that has to happen to appreciate Conversations with Tyler. If you get what you’re doing, it’s very easy, but I know from talking to people, if you just pull up a random episode and listen to it, I think a lot of people do not have that context to understand. Sure. It’s deeply bizarre. I think that’s another good example. Context is that which is scarce. There are ways you can write where your readers have that context, or ways you can podcast where they do, and then ways where they don’t. One thing with Twitter — Twitter itself pulls quotations out of context, but they encourage people to read pieces that are removed from the context of a blog or a particular magazine or newspaper, and that’s very much a mixed blessing. Context, arguably, has become a lot more scarce with social media. That, to me, means there’s high gains from being able to fill in those pieces. But if this is a podcast that people need context for, and I strongly suspect that it is, I think that’s what we need more of. If fewer people listen, I’m not going to say great, but I don’t want to explain everything from scratch. The first question, I think, ought to be jumping right in.…

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