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Transcript
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SPEAKER 1
Yesterday, I got an email from some agency, which was like, we like your podcast, we want to send some guests to your podcast, and here is the people who I want. The person's name was written, and there were views. Like, person's name, 15 million views, all over YouTube.
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So they wanted me to say, oh, this is a very popular man, you should call him. And... I looked those people up and those guests were all astrologers. Like, the people who are paying attention, who go to the podcast and say, let's do this, then you get this, and you get this,
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and this will happen in your house. I've talked about this about today's video on the main channel. So, these are influencer agencies. Like, you know, Salman Rushdie will have an agent. That agent's job is to reach out to people and organize interviews when Salman Rushdie needs to promote a book.

Dynamics of the Baba Economy

It's a mix of influencer culture, marketing agencies, and the attention economy.

If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club.

Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture.

Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popularity, but we don’t apply it to our political condition and how the same dynamics sustain demagoguery closer to home. Add to that the fact that there are numerous smaller demagogues in the making at any given point of time, building their tiny toxic empires on social media platforms.

Some amount of media literacy might put us on a path that leads out of this morass but it seems a distant dream in a country where people bathe in excrement in order to get rid of diseases.

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