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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3173 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 25, 2024

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Any of you guys own things purely because they are conversation starters (with rich people)? I thought expensive watches, designer clothes and supercars were the only ones.

Surprisingly, my friend owns a few JDM cars (worth 10-20k USD, nothing crazy) and is getting stopped all over town and appearing in Youtube videos with 1M+ subscriber youtubers. That seems like exceptional value for money. I'm on the edge of buying one myself. The people met along the way are probably worth more than 10-20k USD. This might be unique to my home city of Dubai though. I don't think common classic JDM's are the minor status symbol of the day in the US, any Tom, Dick and Harry can own one, and the upper classes have more "refined" tastes.

Among upper class people (including the nouveau-riche with a bare minimum of socialisation to upper class norms), anything that can be bought in a store is not an effective conversation starter. Admittedly Dubai is a magnet for rich people with no pretensions to class.

anything that can be bought in a store is not an effective conversation starter.

Well, it can be, if it’s something like “I just bought a very odd tasting jam from Daylesford last week”.

Being young + getting botox, boob job and some minor plastic surgery seems to be the way people do that here. Car is less invasive though.

You don’t need a ‘conversation starter’ to hang out with rich people. This is something I find very interesting. People assume it’s a rarified world, but in reality most rich people (not Musk-tier, although you can ‘associate’ with billionaires if you’re merely upper middle class and put a decent amount of effort into NYC/London/etc social climbing) are just happy to have someone to talk to, and showing up to not-particularly-cool-or-popular gallery openings, arts and culture events, wherever models and rich kids are partying and drinking now in said major city or bottle service clubs or, if you have a little more money, places like Aspen and St Barths at the appropriate time of year as @FiveHourMarathon said about ski bums is all sufficient.

What people don’t seem to understand is that you can be casual buddies with multiple bona fide billionaires and it will (most likely) make absolutely zero difference to your own socioeconomic status. I call this the “handshake meme”. A certain kind of popular fiction (Hollywood but also ‘hustle’ / influencer culture) suggests that the key ingredient in success is ‘who you know’, which is banal but sometimes true. But the same message is often extrapolated as suggesting that all you need to do is personally make casual acquaintances with wealthy and powerful people and this will somehow lead to wealth and power.

There are these ‘handshake guys’ everywhere now. You’ll be at a bar or a conference or something and there he is, some random hustle bro, coming up to shake the hand of the CEO or whoever you’re talking to, introducing himself, making some small talk, plugging his startup or whatever bullshit he’s doing. And it doesn’t work. They might like you, they might even go out drinking with you, but they are not going to give you a job or a few million or whatever else, unless it’s Peter Thiel maybe (and even then, plenty of his DR associates are still poor and unemployable, and maybe he’ll ask for a favor too).

Being friends with the super rich, unless you’re their childhood best friend or best bro from college, or you already run a successful grift (in, say, a specific type of government contracting) and know exactly what you want from them and know it’s plausible enough to sell them on, very rarely leads to wealth itself. You could have a half dozen billionaires in your Rolodex [on Linkedin] who see you as a great guy to go drinking with in Vegas and the second you ask one of them for a couple mil for your new startup idea or a nice job at their family business they’re gonna ghost. Tons of normal PMC journalists, academics, bankers, lawyers, accountants and so on who went to elite private schools are on first name terms with a substantial number of super rich people and yet derive no financial benefit from those relationships (often not for lack of desire to…). And these are by and large people who did graduate from prestigious colleges, mix in the right circles and have ‘good’ jobs!

If being friendly with the rich was sufficient to become rich oneself, Miami and Ibiza club promoters would all be billionaires. Social climbing is best and traditionally approached after a fortune is made, not before. Doing it before turns you into a grifter, and behind the glamour, the vast, vast majority of grifters fail.

Well I might be grade A delusional here but my justification for wanting to add more rich people to my collection is.. unlike those hustle bros and club promoters, I'm actually smart.

I'm employed because I knew my CEO from a hobby and called him up begging for a job. So it's been useful at the start of my career.

Maybe I won't make millions through networking alone, but I do believe in my heart it can get me far as a wage slave.

That's the disconnect. 2rafa is looking at it as a rich kid knowing it won't make you rich to know rich people. They won't get you to the top. But if you're just an average wagie, rich friends get you a long way up.

My brother just received a 30k € interest-free loan from his rich friend for one of his job projects and he didn't even ask, the guy just wanted to help a friend in difficulty. It may seem cold and utilitarian but I must say that, anecdotally, having rich friends that actually care about you can be life changing.

Purely? ...No. I'm skeptical that even your friend does. Anything acquired solely for its utility as a conversation starter underperforms, both as a conversation starter and in terms of opportunity cost. If you acquire things by virtue of special interest, they're going to provide more utility and you'll have more to say about them.

Conversation starters are useful, but I get plenty of mileage out of the fact that I rebuilt my glasses with K'nex the last time they broke. It just happens naturally. It does depend on which sorts of conversation you want to start of course. My interests are in engineering and building a less centralized society. If someone were taking interest in my car I would be doing my best to shut down and escape the conversation as quickly as possible- unless perhaps they're a mechanic going off about vehicle repair.

The dynamic you're seeing is a guy with more money than taste hanging out with a guy with more taste than money, to balance the books. The guy with a Ferrari or an AMG likes cars, and wants his cool car to say cool things about him, but everyone (including the man himself) kinda knows that he just bought an expensive car than any cheugy rich guy could buy. The guy who rices out his old WRX is the opposite: he clearly genuinely loves cars, knows something about them, not everyone can get that with money. They bask in each other's reflected glow: the ricer seems cooler when it gets approval from the Ferrari, the Ferrari seems less cheugy when it's understood in the same way as the ricer.

You see similar dynamics in the way PE guys traveling to Aspen will love ski bums, rich gumbies at the climbing gym love the setters who live out of their old Chevy Suburban, subscribers with a box at the Symphony Hall love a starving young artist, watch guys with a drawer full of Rolexes love the guy who collects cheap vintage Tissots and Vostoks. Hell, my fantasy if I ever really achieve my goals in finance is to take one of our rental units and have an Artist in Residence grant. That kind of thing has been around for decades, from an Austrian Nobleman Commissioning a Symphony in C to the ornamental hermit. It's about using another person, who has cache and taste, to make the things you buy with your money seem like more than just representations of your money, they become representations of your taste.

I've definitely seen this dynamic with watches. Guys with $15k Rolexes love to talk about my vintage Seamaster I bought for $50, or my indie brand watches. Which can be worth something in the corporate world I suppose. In general, seek to "participate" in rich people hobbies at a cheaper price point.

vintage Seamaster I bought for $50

WTF, how? Amazing find.

This was over a decade ago at this point, when those watches were less popular, and I got it second hand locally. It's also not in A+ condition.

If I wanted to hobnob with the rich, I'd either start paying dues at the local country club, or I'd enroll my children in their school districts.

What sports cars are you getting for $10-20k? Even a civic is more expensive than that now.

As conversation starters, I suggest jewelry and art. Art beautifies my home and reminds me of all the places I've been. (For anyone having a date over for drinks, talking about your art is an easy way to "win".)

But art wont get you stopped on the street. Jewelry will do that, and for men that primarily means watches. You cna spent $40k on a rolex, or whatever, and everyone will know what they're looking at. There are about a dozen brands below Rolex that the regular person won't know, but people in the know, know. (Many of them are actually better.) But once you go low enough, nobody cares. Most of the watch market is designed to look like a top brand without costing money -- you can buy a cheap "nice" watch for $40.

If it were me, I'd buy a Shinola, which has a very distinctive Detroit look, and is the closest we have to "Made In America". You can get one for a few hundred bucks, and nobody will turn their noses up at it. If money weren't a concern, I would get a MeisterSinger. And if money were really no object, I'd just get a Rolex, because nobody cares if a Patek Phillippe or Cartier is "better".

Clothing is probably the traditional answer for spending your money, but almost nobody is going to ask you about designer or expensive clothes. People only care if you dress well, which is a skill unto itself, and not quite a problem that can be solved by throwing money st it. (Though it helps!)

I can't give away the exact car name because that specific car has enough of a social media following to dox me (yes, the car itself), but it's nothing special. The fact it's nothing special and has a following is what's perplexing me. I literally was there when he bought the car, it's cheap. Anyone can buy the car. All of us, including him are majorly confused at this. There are 4-5 people taking pics on an average drive and people with millions of social media followers enquiring about it.

Shinola is an odd name for a watch company; before the stores opened I only knew it from the saying "doesn't know shit from Shinola" which refers to a brand of shoe polish that was discontinued around 1960.

The name "Shinola" was actually used by an earlier company, from whence the phrase "shit from shinola". The current Shinola in Detroit deliberately picked that name to acquire some of the gloss for marketing high-end manufacturing. It's part of a broader idea about restoring the glory of Detroit. Their watches are quite nice, stylistically, although they don't have the finer mechanics that watch afficianados care about. But they look nice, which is what most people care about. Technically, these watches are not "Made in America" as they source many components from abroad. But it's the closest America currently really has, and Shinola supposedly aims to eventually make everything in-house.

You cna spent $40k on a rolex, or whatever, and everyone will know what they're looking at. There are about a dozen brands below Rolex that the regular person won't know, but people in the know, know.

Not only that, but the watch nerds often have a pretty low opinion of Rolex as a choice, precisely because it's so strongly associated with people that have more money than taste. If you're going to spend $40K, A. Lange & Söhne carries more cultural cache with people that like watches. The only reason to select the Rolex is to make sure that people that don't care about watches know you spent a lot.

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