With A Little Help From My Friends

Curated content will save you a lot of time, but it's imperative that you trust the curator, and sometimes it's a good idea to pay for that peace of mind.

With the holiday season in full swing, today’s feature column will be a little different, as it’s largely non-gambling, even though it looks at the topic of content curation through the gambling lens.

A little while back, Phil Galfond wrote a newsletter titled The True Cost of Free Content, and as always, Phil delivers (you can sub to Phil’s poker-centric newsletter here).

The newsletter post focuses on free vs. paid content and the value of time. Galfond writes, “The point is that many people are careful with their wallets while being extraordinarily reckless with their time.”

In his takeaways, Galfond makes what I consider to be the critical point:

I’m not telling you that free content sucks…

There is free content out there that can help you improve.

But can you correctly distinguish the good from the bad?

And could you have learned more in a fraction of the time by parting with a few dollars?

This is a terrific example of content curation, and the best way to explain it is through music, movies, and books.

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Finding the Gems in a Sea of Media

I used to watch hundreds of movies every year. Some were good, and some were bad. Some lived up to the hype, some were duds, and some were hidden gems. The blockbusters and the duds are easy to sort through as they receive lots of attention and are heavily discussed; the hidden gems are incredibly hard to find and take a lot of time.

I don’t have time to watch the hundreds of movies anymore, but when I watch a movie with my son, we often watch an older movie I’ve already seen. The reason is simple: I know it’s good, and I know what he likes. Because of this, my son thought movies had gone downhill, but as I explained, he is viewing a curated list as I know what movies to avoid.

He also watches new movies and is creating his own curated list that he recommends to me, and he is pretty spot on. He watches excellent (Nobody and Whiplash) and terrible (Cocaine Bear) films, and because he does, I get to avoid the modern garbage.

The same thing happens with music. If you watch YouTube reactors, they all say how great music was in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. But they are only getting the good; their subscribers and suggested content from streaming services give them a curated list of recommendations. They don’t have to listen to 12 grunge bands to find Nirvana or listen to an entire album to stumble upon the one good track. Those of us who lived during those eras know how much bad music was made. Every one-hit-wonder band has at least ten other songs that aren’t very good.

Books are an even more interesting example as they have been around far longer and were historically difficult to produce and hard to come by. The classics are the classics for a reason. They have been curated over hundreds and even thousands of years. The garbage didn’t make it to us. Marcus Aurelius and Sun Tzu did. The only things worth copying by hand or printing were the stories and ideas people thought were worthy of passing on.

In modern times, there are reviews and music charts. Still, if you are interested in the second tier, songs outside the Top 40, books not on bestseller lists or in niche categories, and films that aren’t heavily promoted, you need to put in a lot of time, energy, and money or you need someone curating those lists.

But you also need to trust that person’s opinion.