One of my favorite pop culture developments in recent years is the famous person press tour.
If you write a new book or have a new movie or TV show coming out, you have to talk to every outlet imaginable to sell your project. There is so much content and so much competition for our attention these days that even uber-successful people are forced to make the hard sell.
That means going on every big podcast. Then there are the morning shows, probably some sports-pop culture outlets and even a GQ or Rolling Stone profile.
There is no mono-culture anymore, so you have to flood all available channels in order to get the word out.
Jerry Seinfeld has been on an all-out media blitz these past few weeks to promote his new movie on Netflix.1
My favorite interview was his appearance on the Blocks Podcast with fellow comedian Neal Brennan. The two comics are friends, so Seinfeld seemed comfortable enough to wax poetic on a number of different topics.
My finance brain was immediately drawn to their discussion about money. Jerry talked about how money culture changed forever in the 1980s:
SEINFELD: In the seventies, this is the tragic turn of American culture. And this was explained to me by Mario Joiner who cracked this puzzle that I could not figure out what the hell happened. That money became everything. What happened because it was not like that in the seventies. In the seventies, it’s how cool is your job? How cool is what you’re doing? If your job’s cooler than my job, you beat me.
BRENNAN: And no one said, how much are you making?
SEINFELD: Oh, you’re doing okay. You’re making this? Yeah. Who cares? And Mario Joiner explained this to me. He said the eighties was the
