Around 2010, I worked for a company where one project was to increase the social profile of our company. We hired a marketing company to help us improve how our CTO, CEO, CFO, all the C-level folks looked to the public. Pretty much, throwing money to make these people get famous, so the company to could make money from all the news.

A year later, CFO was on talk shows discussing his new book, which was a NYT best seller. The book was garbage and full of content scraped from a dozen other “thought leaders”.

The thought leader circlejerk where hundreds of them have ghost writers write their shit, all of them tell the same 10 stories, all of them quote each other, all of them end up as NYT best sellers because some thought leader friend wanted to do the same so they inflate the sales.