Pundits are everywhere, though they are seldom for the public good. Pundits are talking heads usually on TV or the internet who claim expertise and deep knowledge of a field they have very little experience in being a practitioner of. While everybody is certainly entitled to their own opinion, it is inherently dishonest of these so-called experts to pass themselves off as such, indirectly claiming their opinion is the gospel. This is akin to false advertising in a way, nearly fraudulent to pass off expertise that one does not truly have. Worse yet, pundits have sprouted up in many facets of modern society.
One such example is in the realm of sports. Pundits such as Skip Bayless of Fox and Stephen A.Smith of ESPN provide commentary on sports they have little to no real-world expertise in. Both of whom hold the sincere beliefs that their lackluster amateur basketball careers translate into being an NBA insider. Their collective limited pool of expertise doesn’t stop them from pundit-ing on other sports they have never played, coached or been an agent for, such as the NFL, boxing, golf, tennis, etc. Further, they are serving as a beacon for other unqualified non-athletes to become not journalists merely reporting facts but pundits that attempt to sway the sports world with their misguided views.
Politics is another example of a realm where pundits run amok. Talking heads with dubious titles of senior analyst or political insider sit ion TV panels and spew often incorrect statements about our democracy, or proposing radicalized solutions about how to fix mundane problems. Coincidentally, these solutions always involve their own party having unchecked control of the government, to the extent of labeling the other side as the source of the problem. If these pundits, like John Oliver or Ben Shapiro of the liberal and conservative ideologies respectively, are so smart and have as much sway over the American public as they claim to, why not run for office?
Business is another field where the pundit yearns to remain supreme. History is littered with weak-willed CEO’s hurting their company’s interest long-term to appease Wall Street. However, I must concede that resisting the power of pundits is not easy. Brave and pioneering CEO’s like the late Jack Welch of General Electric (from his book Winning) have written about the need to resist caving to pundits. If General Electric for during the back-half of the 20th century is not immune to the pressure of pundits, then very few companies are safe from the scornful eyes of those who talk but have not accomplished.
Wall Street is an industry that is built on the backs of pundits. In his book Young Money, Kevin Roose follows several new hires who obtained entry-level jobs at several of Wall street’s most adored firms. All of these bright young employees work as an analyst. Being a pundit is literally their job, to study up on and make bold predictions about the market. However, as Andrew Hallam and Burton Malkiel touch on in their books Millionaire Teacher and A Random Walk Down Wall Street (respectively), these pundits are often wrong. While projections and vetting is of course necessary, to require such a large staff and grind these people 19+ hours per day as Roose describes in Young Money is a colossal waste of human capital. These entry-level analysts (read: pundits) hail from our nations top universities and sport degrees in difficult fields such as Economics and Finance. It takes a truly bright individual to achieve a stellar GPA in such difficult course-loads from Ivy League schools. These people are certainly smart enough to create the next great data-scraping algorithm, solve the climate crisis, engineer drought-resistant crops or perfect driverless cars, yet all they want to do is become pundits. Surely society would benefit more from a more constructive use of these top 5% brains.
Investing is a journey rife with pundits. Talking heads stand upon their televised soapboxes and proclaim to the masses the net hot stock, crypto, foreign bond or commodity to buy. However with a grain of scrutiny many of these claims seem hollow when one stops to realize that these people do not follow their own advice, case-in-point of Robert Kiyosaki and several of the talking heads on CNBC (a literal pundit channel that rolls 24/7). To be fair, not all of these pundits have reached the stardom that CNBC provides. Investing is unlike many other intellectual pursuits such as writing, science, engineering or art in the sense of true expertise is tangible. Framed another way by Malkiel in A Random Walk Down Wall Street he rhetorically asks of pundits (to paraphrase)“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?
So we as a society must ask ourselves why these pundits are so pervasive. The answer is partially one of incentives. In many fields, being a pundit pays far better than being a practitioner. Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith earn enormous salaries that dwarf the minimum pay of NFL or NBA players. The President of the United States earns $400,000 per year while the aforementioned Ben Shapiro or John Oliver can earn several times that amount with their TV appearances, podcasting, book sales, etc. Jim Cramer can almost assuredly make more hosting his hit TV show than he would trying to eek a percentage point or two above the S&P 500 (which seldom managers can do over the long term).
Another source of the pundit problem is the lack of accountability. Being a pundit is a profession where accuracy is not measured or if it is, it certainly is not held against the pundit as a job performance metric. Mel Kiper Jr is the face of NFL Draft coverage and is notoriously bad at making predictions about the futures of starry-eyed NFL prospects, yet he retains his job year after year. Wall Street firms can be and often are wrong about which blue-chip stock will spike in price or are totally blindsided when stable companies fail (despite all of their research). Political pundits are wrong quite often as well yet face no repercussions for their poor track record. However a lawyer that loses 7 out of 10 cases is soon unemployed, ditto for a mechanic that botches 7 out of 10 repairs. Being a pundit has no consequences for poor performance and therefore is not a real job.
Being a pundit has seemingly only one true metric for if one gets to stay employed or gain more attractive segments, and that is the ability to garner viewers. Accuracy, expertise and risk-taking are not measurements of success, or even prerequisites for the “job” of being a pundit. All that matters is if the talking head can get more eyeballs on the their employers channel when he is talking, relative to competing networks. After a while, a pundit can amass a cult-like following which then becomes portable; Skip Bayless, Colin Cowherd have switched networks and written books as their fanbase has followed, Ben Shapiro is a successful author and podcaster, John Oliver brought his comedic fans with him to HBO. There are countless more examples of often-wrong pundits not only staying employed but growing ever-larger audiences. Incompetence is not grounds for termination in the profession of being a pundit. In the wake of the #MeToo movements, seemingly the only way to remove a pundit is to unearth decades of misconduct (sadly only to be replaced by the next generation of pundits!)
Another cause of the proliferation of pundits is that it’s often the safe and/or easy path, where the risk-averse find a safe haven. For all the critiques an unathletic talking head from ESPN lobs onto an NFL quarterback, sitting in an air-conditioned studio is infinitely easier than being on the field. The entry-level Wall Street employees seek to become pundits because as Roose discusses in Young Money, it is the familiar and safe path, in many cases being outright expected or assumed that one will go down that road. However starting a new business is certainly more difficult than being a pundit because failure is the default option in being an entrepreneur. Ben Shapiro and John Oliver will likely never run for Senator because they indeed might lose the election, and that is far more dangerous for the pundit brand than staying a TV talking head. Such avoidance of failure and staying within the safety of a comfort zone and well-trodden path is the epitome of what Dr. Carol Dweck describes in her book Mindset as a fixed mindset. Pundits revel in the fixed mindset. .
With the advent of the internet and social media, being a pundit has become easier than ever. As I discuss in my book The Case Against Memes (I know, I know, shameless plug) a lower barrier of entry displaces the skill required of said field. Gone are the days where those on TV giving advice required not only real-world experience and a journalism or writing background to be a pundit. Now any amateur with a device and an internet connection can become a pundit. This has surely played a role in the spread of pundits across society.
To conclude, we as average citizens are not powerless. Many claim to dislike the Stephen A Smith’s, Ben Shapiro’s and Jim Cramer’s of the world, however we as a society keep watching them. Nothing will change if our words do not match our viewing, listening and reading habits. We must seek out information from sources with true expertise in the field. Eschew Skip Bayless in favor of Peyton Manning, forego abhor Oliver and Shapiro in favor of a long-serving senator, skip the CNBC talking head and instead listen to Peter Thiel. Thank you so much for reading and as always, feel free to angrily grind your pitchforks while you tell me how wrong I am.
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