rant · moment 9 of 17
Needing to Be Near the Thing: Frozen Yogurt Lines and Taylor Swift's Marketing
from Influencer Poison, Trump’s Lifeguard & The Migrant Summer | The Tim Dillon Show #506 · #506
4 min
He describes the compulsive need of influencer-culture people to be near viral things (like hour-long frozen yogurt lines), then pivots to how Taylor Swift fans praise her marketing/business savvy over her music as emblematic of a culture built on scams.
- Tim describes people with a pulsating energy who need to be near the thing they saw, identifying this as something you're supposed to outgrow by 17.
- Lines outside frozen yogurt places in New York are insane because younger people wait an hour for mediocre frozen yogurt just because they saw it.
- If you don't outgrow needing to get the thing you just saw, if your life doesn't acquire depth as you get older, it's a sad thing.
- Influencers are people who stand in line for seven months to get a pancake, and this type of person is being created by the culture.
- Tim takes restaurant photos occasionally but doesn't make documentaries about French toast because that's where the behavior becomes grotesque.
- Every single thing in culture is now about marketing, driving society in a grotesque direction.
- Taylor Swift fans told Tim she's so good at marketing, and that's become the primary way people evaluate her rather than her actual music.
- People know they're being scammed by marketing and they like it, admiring the techniques used to shove products down their throats.
- When discussing Taylor Swift, people describe her as a good marketer and businesswoman first, and her music second—that's the era we're in.
- There is a backlash emerging against this marketing-obsessed culture.