The goal of a media diet is simple; To generate new mental models of the world, and to entertain.
A healthy media diet will generate non-consensus accurate predictions, and that is very valuable.
An example of something that can generate a whole new mental model road is this essay, which illustrates the problem with newsletters like substack. With this mental model, you can begin to understand the value of a bundled publishing platform. Which leads you to understand why newspapers and magazines are actually the right model for great writing and great journalism, and while the Internet has terrorized these types of institutions for years, eventually the tide will change. You also see the pattern in other media, where the cable bundle has turned into a ton of streaming services. So then you understand media as a cyclical business of bundling and unbundling.
What a media diet should not do is surface news, especially TV news. News is useless, cable news is harmful. The book Amusing Ourselves to Death is the authority on that. The thesis is that a media diet should be mostly text based. Most people can read much faster than they can listen, so it is a more efficient way to consume information.
Here are the main components of a rich media diet.
Twitter as Coffee & Tea
Twitter is a fundamental piece of a rich media diet because it is the most generative. Here are a few principles to make it good.
You should only follow around 150 people. Those people should only be tweeting once or twice a day. Any more than that, you aren't going to be able to keep up with the torrent of information coming at you.
Do not follow any news accounts. Why anyone would follow something like @CNN completely baffles me. Those accounts tweet constantly, and it will clutter your feed. If you actually wanna read CNN.com, which I would not recommend, you can just go to the website and in one snapshot see the whole constellation of headlines.
Do follow accounts with domain specific expertise, like @wrathofgnon (traditionalism)
Do not follow venture capitalists. The dispense advice stripped of its context and hawk their portfolio wares. As of when I originally wrote this, they are all hawking Clubhouse.
Follow entertaining people. These are sometimes stand ups and comedy writers, but mostly they tweet too much, so you have to be very selective. Obviously I recommend @TimJDillon.
Blogs and Newsletters as Vegetables
Blogs still exist. Some of them are good. RSS feeds are the best for monitoring blogs that post infrequently but have good content when they do.
Specifically, Marginal Revolution is important because Tyler Cowen has the most voracious media diet on the planet and if you read his blog, you are getting a pretty good filter applied to the whole internet. Marginal revolution posts frequently so I do not recommend putting them in an RSS feed. Just visit often.
Everyone has a newsletter. Most of them are useless because no one has something interesting to say weekly and so they usually devolve into just a linkfest. But because you already have a rich media diet and follow Tyler Cowen, you don’t need a curator.
Newspaper/Magazines as Carbs
Read a newspaper. Your basic options would be the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Financial Times. I favor the WSJ because the FT is a bit too removed from the US and because the NYT has become a completely leftist institution. The WSJ has stayed remarkably reasonable in today’s climate. You should avoid the opinion section. Nothing good comes from there.
A broadsheet is a seriously underrated piece of technology that laptops, tablets, and phones with backlist screens can not compete with.
Reading a newspaper regularly is important because of civic duty. We all bemoan the death of journalism but what are you doing about it?
The Browser is the website that I would recommend that surfaces the best long form journalism from newspapers and magazines that you do not subscribe to. The Browser is basically an RSS feed for long form journalism. There is nothing better than a New Yorker profile, an investigative piece of journalism, an engaging book review, or a great commentary on foreign affairs or the cultural landscape.
Great Books, Books & Primary Sources as Red Meat
There is a never ending onslaught of new books, 99% of which are useless. The reason there are so many books is that it's the easiest way to monetize a social media following (for a public intellectual). Be very careful about which books you choose to read out of this pile. The only real way to tell if the book will be a classic is to wait 50 years and see if it’s still in print (Lindy!).
Primary sources is an overlooked area of a media diet and does require domain specific expertise. I know how to read SEC filings, but I am not as good at reading research papers. Other types of primary sources can include legal filings, internal company memos, or letters to investors. For a football Xs and Os guy like myself, a playbook could be a great primary source.
If you can, read primary sources instead of regurgitations of those primary sources. Many times, you will find that you reach very different conclusions than whoever is regurgitating the primary source.
Entertainment (Youtube, Podcasts, Prestige TV, Classic Movies) as Dessert
As I alluded to earlier, forms of media other than text are, in my opinion, entertainment. Even if a podcast purports to be educational, its entertainment. My favorite podcasts change over time, but ones that have been in rotation a long time are Conversations with Tyler and the Great Debates.
Prestige TV are shows like The Wire, Sopranos, Marvelous Miss Maisel, etc.
Movies vs Classic Movies is just the same thing as the Books vs Great Books comparison. Do not be distracted by the constant stream of new movies. They are mostly trash. Let time do the work for you and watch old movies. If a new movie is good, you will get to it in 25 years (Lindy!).