11: Eugene Wei - Amusing Each Other to Death

[00:00] Welcome to Dialectic Episode 11 with Eugene Wei. [00:04] Eugene is best known for his incredible essays observing how technology and social media [00:10] has impacted culture and all of us. [00:13] A few of the most notable of these are statuses of service, invisible asymptotes, and TikTok and the sorting hat. [00:19] Eugene started his career at Amazon in some of the company's earliest days where he spent seven years [00:25] He then took a brief detour to go to film school, [00:27] And he spent many of the coming years focused on the intersection of technology and entertainment across Hulu, [00:33] a company he co-founded early in, [00:35] Flipboard, and Oculus. [00:37] Recently, Eugene has been focused on his own ideas, advising companies, angel investing, and of course, [00:44] Writing. [00:45] I don't know if there's anyone who has written more thoughtfully and critically about how social media works and how it's affecting us than Eugene. [00:53] And so this conversation is about all of those things. [00:57] Entertainment, social media, community, and humanity, and how they're all evolving in the digital age. [01:04] In the conversation, I wanted to make sure to both hit on some of Eugene's most iconic ideas and essays and have him reflect on them and how they've evolved. [01:13] But I also wanted to talk about a handful of things he hasn't yet covered. And so... [01:18] I'd like to think we did a good job of mixing the two of them. I hope readers and non-readers alike of Eugene's will find this conversation really compelling. [01:26] I think Eugene's criticism and insights particularly about how

[01:31] the cultural decline of community [01:34] oftentimes linked to the decreasing friction that technology offers to be just profoundly relevant today. At times, parts of this conversation might seem pessimistic, but I think the key is that Eugene is asking many of the questions that we simply need answers to. We need to develop answers to. [01:52] And so there's definitely room for optimism. [01:54] I'm hopeful that listeners will be inspired to try to come up with better answers to how we can use technology to improve our lives, improve our lives. [02:03] culture and communities, and most importantly, maintain our humanity. [02:08] With that, here is Eugene. [02:10] Eugene Wei, we're here. [02:12] There's a... [02:14] An iconic opening at the beginning of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Mm-hmm. [02:19] where he compares George Orwell's 1984, which is often... [02:23] look forward to is this kind of fearful thing and aldous huxley's brave new world [02:28] He says... [02:29] What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book. [02:36] for there would be no one who wanted to read one. [02:39] Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. [02:48] Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. [02:56] As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny

[03:03] failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. [03:09] And so [03:10] We live in this era where entertainment is the North Star. [03:13] probably more than ever before. [03:16] And the bar for entertainment is continuing to increase. [03:18] We have digital forms of entertainment that are [03:21] kind of competing with each other, literally every possibility, from films to TikTok to sports to games. There's the classic Reed Hastings line that they're competing with sleep. [03:31] Politics is now entertainment. [03:33] News is entertainment. Social media has ceased to be about communication or connection. It's really just about entertainment. [03:40] And in a previous interview, you discussed the idea that part of everyone's business has to be entertainment now. [03:45] In one of your TikTok posts, you said the 2020 writers room is undefeated, affirming the notion that the most entertaining outcome. [03:52] is the most likely. [03:54] And so my first question [03:56] in media, in stories, and in products, what actually goes into capturing attention? And then beyond that, [04:04] Is this entertainment world, is amusement the final frontier and the only frontier, or is [04:10] Can attention and entertainment even... [04:12] be more productive than maybe Neil Postman is predicting at the time of the television era and now the... [04:18] social media era. [04:21] I think... [04:23] that [04:23] we maybe are even beyond [04:26] the world that Postman wrote about. [04:28] He was speaking specifically of the transition from print to TV, of course.

[04:34] and how TV turned politics and things like that into forms of entertainment. [04:40] uh, [04:41] He wasn't alive for the social media era. [04:44] And... [04:46] I'd argue that while the social media era evolved out of the TV era, it's different in some ways. [04:54] fundamental ways and [04:56] what we're doing to ourselves now. [05:00] I guess you could call it amusement, but a lot of times it doesn't feel even entertaining or amusing. [05:07] And part of it is just that [05:10] the social media companies... [05:13] They shifted. At first, they had these feeds, and they were reverse chronological... [05:20] And then the transition from social networking to social media was... [05:24] when you put an algorithm over the feed. [05:27] which naturally happens with any feed that, um, [05:31] You know, you go in, you start adding people, you start following things. [05:35] I have this problem with Substack now where people are like, oh, you should follow this Substack and that one. And I start following it and soon you're… [05:42] You're just like overwhelmed. You can't keep up. You're actually getting, you know, like 50 newsletters a day. I'm like, I can't sift through it. [05:49] Of course, the solution to that in modern times is always an algorithm that tries to sift the signal from the noise. [05:57] And... [05:58] You know, that that was a huge shift. [06:01] you know, the term social media didn't exist when the internet

[06:04] first started, like, I... [06:06] started using internet when I was [06:08] you know, Mosaic came out when I was a senior in college or a junior in college. And so it [06:14] I've kind of grown up with it. And that term, I don't know when social media first started being used, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was around the time. [06:22] of the algorithm being put over the feet. [06:25] And so what happens? [06:27] is that [06:28] in an era of infinite information. [06:32] The most important thing, as you know, is distribution. [06:36] or, you know, in Marxist terms, what we might call circulation. [06:42] And all of us who are participating on social media were faced with the choice. [06:47] Like, do I? [06:49] do battle with the algorithm to try to get anybody, you know, any of my stuff to stick. [06:55] throughout this. And almost by definition, you know, the people who we see on social media are the ones who broke through. [07:02] in some way [07:04] But we started shaping ourselves around that. [07:07] So Postman would say, well, TV... [07:09] shape the way that politicians, you know, would... [07:13] win elections and the way they would speak to the public. [07:19] social media which is more participatory [07:22] shapes all of our behavior, [07:24] on a democratic basis. [07:26] And we're all kind of implicated in it also because we... [07:30] ourselves through our clicks, our likes.

[07:34] we determine who wins the game. So it's this strange thing where we complain about it. [07:42] And then we're also complicit in it. [07:45] And of course, there's some collective action problem where we can't all... [07:48] get ourselves off of it. [07:51] In that era, I would say a couple of things have become... [07:55] more apparent [07:57] I think there was a book called Trolling Ourselves the Dead. [08:01] But anyway, you know, something like trolling becomes a dominant tactic. [08:05] in the social media era. Evolutionarily fit in a way. [08:07] Yeah, just because of the way the algorithms work, the algorithms are hypersensitized to [08:14] Engagement [08:15] and have a hard time distinguishing between positive and negative engagement [08:20] I think trolling has always been a thing that had a small scope in human history, and then suddenly you could troll and get… [08:28] global scale to it and it's perfectly attuned to these algorithms. [08:35] The other thing is that, [08:37] Tick tock. [08:38] You know, whether it gets banned or not, whatever happens with it. [08:43] I think it's already made. [08:44] in [08:46] everlasting impact. [08:47] on the West just by forcing all of Western social media companies to adopt. [08:53] its algorithm. [08:55] You remember that Western social media began with the idea of a social graph. [09:00] You had to follow people to get stuff in your feed.

[09:04] And then over time, they started adding things. [09:06] from other people that you didn't follow into your feed, try to get a sense of your interests. [09:12] But TikTok came along and was just like, look, we don't even need a social graph. [09:16] We'll just watch you watch some short videos. [09:18] We'll figure out what you're into. [09:20] We're going to know you better than you are. Yeah. And we'll unconstrained the distribution. [09:24] So, [09:25] It used to be on Twitter, you know, if you had a viral tweet... [09:29] you could get a lot of likes and things, but not to the scale you can today in the For You feed. There's a point in one of your essays, you reference a viral tweet getting 1,000 or maybe even 10,000 likes. Yeah. [09:44] I realized I... [09:45] I totally take for granted how... [09:48] common that is now. It was crazy to reflect like a thousand tweets used to be, your classic fortune cookie tweet has like a thousand likes. And I'm like, it's not bigger. Yeah. And I realized that, well, Twitter used to be different. Yeah. Yeah. Because you were kind of limited by how many followers you had. You depended on them to get that viral. [10:06] tsunami going? [10:08] But TikTok's like, look, if there's a good TikTok, everybody should see it. There's no reason to... [10:13] constrain it [10:15] And they surpassed [10:17] Western social media in capturing attention and so [10:21] Everybody in the West did a kind of fast follow. [10:26] And I think it works in some cases, um, [10:30] I think in the case of [10:32] Twitter, you know, and I wrote about this, and I think a lot of people disagree with this, but I still think that.

[10:38] applying a TikTok-style algorithm to Twitter. [10:42] create some perverse incentives. [10:44] And we've seen a rise. That don't show up on TikTok? [10:47] Yeah. [10:48] I think because the mediums are different. [10:51] I think TikTok does a better job of capturing negative sentiment. [10:55] and [10:56] Twitter doesn't really have strong [10:59] Capturing it and using it in a positive way to improve the content or the algorithm rather than just showing it to you and blowing things up or whatever. [11:09] And I think it's important. It'll relate to some things we talk about later in terms of just [11:15] negativity, but... [11:17] You know, I think Western social media tends to their business models to really try to [11:21] to achieve kind of frictionless positivity. And that [11:26] It's the wrong type of incentive if you want to achieve [11:30] you know, the magic of old Twitter was... [11:33] that it had higher entropy for me [11:36] I would just meet interesting people on Twitter and encounter random things from someone who had, you know. [11:42] 10 followers. Yeah, structurally niche, but still relevant. Yeah. [11:45] And, you know, we meet up for coffee in the real world and some of them became my friends and everything. [11:50] And now when I look at the For You Feet, [11:53] I feel like it's all clickbait. [11:56] all the way down [11:58] You get this, any complex adaptive system, there's going to be overfitting. [12:03] to some degree, [12:04] Everyone is... [12:05] faced with this choice of how far do you want to sell out to get the algorithm to

[12:11] give you that distribution juice [12:14] Trolling is just... [12:15] one of those meta tactics that works really well. [12:19] You know, McLuhan would say... [12:21] Thank you. [12:22] All of this electronic... [12:24] you know, the internet, everything. It's kind of like our... [12:28] nervous system [12:29] just in [12:30] built out in the physical world [12:34] And Western social media companies are the ones who choose. [12:38] kind of how the synapses connect and fire [12:41] In these... [12:42] by setting up the algorithm. But these algorithms are also black boxes. [12:47] I don't really know how they work in a general sense, but... [12:51] you know [12:53] who's tuning them you know if like elon's like hey i want all my tweets to be seen by everybody that's [12:58] That's one way he's rewiring me. [13:01] kind of digital nervous system of humanity. And even, by the way, if they're open source or highly prescriptive or whatever, there is emergence on top of them and game theory and prisoners dilemmas and all the things that lead to all the things you were talking about. [13:14] So everything, once we had these algorithms and once they became more and more power law in nature, [13:21] you're just going to see a proliferation of all forms of clickbait. [13:24] The early forms of clickbait in the era where links weren't downvoted on Twitter [13:29] were just salacious headlines that people found misleading, but they worked. [13:34] When people talk about thirst traps on Instagram, that's just a form of... [13:39] Clickbait. [13:40] Tweetstorm. [13:41] That's a form of clickbait.

[13:43] You know how on YouTube... [13:45] all the thumbnails, like if you search for a product name, all the thumbnails look the same. It's like, [13:50] A big smiling face. Someone holding the product. Some crazy glam. Yeah, like a gradient. [13:56] Solid color background and the headline, you know, written in big font. [14:02] That's a form of clickbait. [14:03] Everyone is figuring out how to game [14:06] the algorithms, the, you know, [14:09] Even before social media, [14:11] when people would complain about why our recipe page is so long [14:15] on the web, right? That's just a form of gaming, the Google algorithm. [14:20] And these forums... [14:21] Look, a common argument about all this is that all of this we're just reacting to. It's a moral panic. [14:29] These things happened before. [14:31] And it's true. Like, we've seen versions of this before. [14:35] Quote tweeting, you know, quote tweet dunking and everything like that. My argument has always been that the first time I ever saw the quote tweet, [14:42] To me, the person I most associate with inventing the quote tweet, [14:47] He's actually from before Twitter. It's actually Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. [14:52] He would, you know, play a clip of something from Fox News or some, you know. [14:58] right-wing politicians saying something crazy, and then it would cut back. [15:02] to john stewart and he'd have this like [15:04] Horrified expression on his face, just like a reaction emoji face. [15:09] And... [15:10] You can certainly see the logic of why he thought it would work.

[15:14] It's like, look, [15:15] what's the saying, you know, the [15:18] best cure or disinfectant is exposure or sunlight. If I just bring this craziness to light, [15:25] Won't this? [15:26] cause people to come to their senses [15:28] Or at the minimum, it's a fun thing to laugh together at something. Of course, we know now that that was... [15:35] really naive and it doesn't work at all. And in fact, um, [15:40] There's a book that I just started... [15:43] This week that someone told me about called... [15:46] Civic solitude [15:48] by Robert Talese. [15:50] Thank you. [15:51] And he argues that... [15:53] maybe democracy [15:55] only functions well if we can maintain some distance from [15:59] The people we disagree with? [16:01] There's a question of whether this kind of [16:05] gladiatorial. [16:07] political [16:08] dunking on each other on Twitter really achieves anything. [16:12] I've sort of given up on it and don't really think it does anything. I think it feels... [16:17] good to dunk on somebody or to ratio somebody, but [16:21] if you really want to affect [16:23] change if you want the level of discourse to be [16:26] one that... [16:29] leads to some sort of [16:30] living with people you disagree with in some amount of harmony. [16:35] maybe this doesn't work. [16:37] like that uh yeah intrinsically as a medium there's a it's funny too you mention it in the in amusing ourselves to death postman's he's talking about the telegraph and they're talking about how now that maine and texas are connected and he's like great but like what what do they have to talk about yeah there's an element of that which is to say if we are going to be all connected

[16:56] the mediums for which [16:58] you're going to have to spend time right next to [17:00] people who disagree with you strongly, like they need to be pretty robust to be able to like hold all that dissonance. And it doesn't seem like we have much of that. [17:09] Yeah, there's a great... [17:10] Paul Ford, peace. [17:12] that I love from the pre, I think it was pre-social media era. [17:16] He was writing about the blog and web era. [17:20] Yeah. [17:21] I think the title of the piece is something like the web is a... [17:23] Customer service medium [17:26] But he came up with this great saying, he said, you know, the animating spirit of the web. [17:31] is, why wasn't I consulted? [17:35] Thank you. [17:36] And if you read the blog post from that era... [17:39] And even like I think back on blog posts I wrote, I was like, oh, that really was the... [17:44] The animating spirit of the web. [17:46] All the pieces... [17:48] It would be like, gosh, let me explain to you how this... [17:51] thing in the world works. And those are the pieces that would always go viral. [17:56] some sort of hidden insight. I think most people are still striving for that, even when they write. I mean, that's the spirit of social media, too, is like, hey, now I can be consulted. Now I can shout into the void at the middle of it. Yeah. [18:09] But [18:10] I would argue that [18:11] When we moved into the social media era... [18:14] and [18:15] away from the web era, just that the way that social media is set up [18:20] It's structurally adversarial. [18:23] And so I think the new animating spirit of this social media era is –

[18:28] more akin to something like [18:30] Can you believe those effing idiots? Yep. [18:33] Do you think that's as true today as it was in... [18:37] 2019 or 2021. [18:40] Maybe it is dissipated some now only in that, you know, you see a lot of [18:46] People have left. [18:47] Yeah, we have four different Twitters. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of people kind of. [18:51] realize that this is just being here being shouted at by people is not that pleasant and maybe i'll go somewhere where that's not happening [19:01] I'm not sure that's... [19:03] the right solution either. But, you know, so maybe the overall level of it [19:08] is lower. [19:10] But... [19:11] I think [19:12] It's kind of like a form of prisoner's dilemma. [19:15] If you were to go on Twitter, [19:17] Let's say you're in some tribe. You're in the liberal tribe or the tech right or I don't know what. [19:23] rationalist and [19:25] And you had some... [19:26] someone who disagreed with you kind of confront you [19:29] on something. [19:30] And maybe you actually even see [19:32] that they have a point. [19:34] You're faced with a choice. [19:36] Do you concede? [19:39] Or dunk. You know, like in Prisoner's Dilemma, it's cooperate and defect. I like to use the same initials. So I'm like concede or dunk. [19:48] And actually, I think it's just like the prisoner's dilemma where your optimal strategy is never to concede. It's always to dunk. Because if you concede...

[19:59] Your side's going to view you as a traitor, probably, and pile on you. And the other side will laugh at you for being weak and use you as an example of why you and your tribe are idiots. And so [20:12] It's like in the Tom Cruise in the movies, he's always like, everybody runs. Or it was that Minority Report, I guess. He's like, don't run. He's like, everybody runs. [20:20] It's the same. Everybody dunks. Your other choice is just to... [20:25] popped out yeah trump is literally the perfect embodiment of that like he he doesn't he doesn't even take the opportunity to be accused of everything he's just perpetually always dunking yeah i [20:35] I've seen a lot of people say, [20:37] that the way to deal with [20:40] being canceled is just to ignore it and just tweet through it. Just keep going. And [20:47] On the one hand, structurally and mathematically, I understand. [20:52] why people say that. That might be the optimal tactic in some way, but [20:57] Like, is that the... [20:58] incentive system we want in place. We're like, [21:00] people who realize they're wrong. [21:03] just [21:04] power through. I'm not sure [21:07] It's good. I was thinking back to this early... [21:10] When I worked at Amazon... [21:12] In the early days, Jeff wanted anyone in the company to rotate through customer service and answer some customer service emails. [21:20] And so I did my week rotation in customer service and [21:24] you know, we were [21:26] mostly just selling books in the U.S. at the time.

[21:30] And [21:32] Jeff said, you know, one of the great things about email is people are super honest and blunt. You would get the craziest, most unhinged emails. [21:42] If someone didn't get their book, like, you know, just like so angry, just like so upset and [21:48] On the one hand, he was right. He's like, look, I want Amazon to be the world's most customer-centered company. So if they tell you what they're upset about... [21:55] And they're honest about it. You don't have to guess. You can just solve the problem. [22:01] On the other hand, I also look back on that as a dark harbinger for... [22:05] What happens when we're all behind keyboards and kind of not face to face with each other and communicating via... [22:12] I kind of call this like the [22:13] You know the linguistics term synecdoche? Yes. Yeah. Like... [22:19] you refer to [22:20] something by [22:22] a part of it. So, you know, you refer to Achilles by his shield or his [22:28] his arm or [22:29] or whatever it is. [22:31] And I think of [22:33] All of social media is kind of a synecdochoic [22:37] communications medium, [22:38] Nobody loves being dunked on, like drive-by dunking from some random stranger, but [22:45] It's also that, you know, I go, I'm like, who has this person done to me? What do I know about them? [22:49] I have a weird username, usually an avatar that's not the person's face even. [22:56] Some random one-line bio on Twitter, you can't tell anything about who they are. You just don't even feel...

[23:03] Like they feel almost... [23:06] not fully human. [23:09] In the same way that all kind of [23:11] digital mediums flatten and reduce [23:14] people and things and [23:17] It encourages us to... [23:20] View [23:21] both them and ourselves in a distorted way. I don't know if you read Gia Tolentino's [23:27] essay collection, but she titled it Trick Mirror. [23:30] And I think it's such a great title because it really reflects how... [23:34] Social media is this... [23:36] because it's become such a dominant medium in our lives. [23:40] the reflexive nature, [23:43] of social media also means that [23:46] It is how we build our perceptions of each other and ourselves. [23:53] you know, particularly acute version of this might be dating apps. And when I talk to people who, [23:59] are swiping around on dating apps. You can't help but treat [24:03] how you do on dating apps as some judgment on my... Right, right. [24:07] your, you know, desirability in the dating marketplace, this kind of like weird, [24:13] You know, in this age of neoliberalism, everything's a marketplace. It's the marketplace of ideas. It's the dating marketplace. It's the, you know, like the gig economy. But so I always like to say social media or excuse me, identity is a projector in a mirror and social media, to your point, is such a. [24:29] profound part of the way our identity is showing up. We're collecting all this feedback on it all the time, but also

[24:36] Even in who I'm creating, the persona I'm creating on the dating app, the persona I'm creating on Twitter or whatever, that I'm shaping myself to. It really is fascinating to think about the ways that [24:46] even just our perceptions of ourselves are being warped by the fun house. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. [24:52] segue slightly... [24:54] We've talked a lot about Twitter, you've written a lot about Twitter, and I think that's obviously a... [24:59] platform of interest and critique and concern for both of us. [25:03] I think for a lot of people, frankly... [25:05] It was something they never totally engaged with. And now it's interesting. You brought up TikTok briefly. [25:11] One of my original questions was going to be, like, is social media broadly the ultimate realization of what Postman feared? I think maybe a better question might be. [25:21] at least in this entertainment world. [25:23] social media land is TikTok. [25:27] the peak form [25:29] or the peak medium... [25:30] of [25:31] This type of entertainment, obviously notwithstanding totally new paradigms around immersion, like [25:38] In some sense, listening to you talk about all the problems with Twitter, it almost feels like TikTok is one better in that way. [25:44] It's certainly evolutionarily more fit. It's more productive and successful from a... [25:48] Attention standpoint Mm-hmm [25:50] Like, have we have we reached the apex predator? [25:55] I... [25:56] Well, I think until there's some advance in, I don't know, [26:01] cyber technology or VR or something, probably in terms of a smartphone.

[26:07] TikTokus. [26:09] very close to some [26:11] most evolved form [26:13] of entertainment, you know, the length [26:16] of the videos, the density, [26:18] The [26:20] structure your average TikTok, [26:23] as a medium, we're pretty close to, I think, like, I can't imagine that, like, [26:28] Ha ha. [26:28] there's another form. And we've seen in this era that... [26:33] I think it was always going to be the case that... [26:36] A problem for Twitter was that it was textual. [26:40] And I think images are much more the dominant currency, you know. [26:45] Think about where Meta would be without Instagram now. It's crazy to think about it, but Instagram really... [26:52] I think in many ways keeps meta relevant because, um, [26:56] it's kind of been the de facto image circulation process. [26:59] medium. [27:00] TikTok came along and was short video, in many ways even more. [27:04] I mean, it's crazy to think that Instagram at some point [27:07] when they wanted to put videos in. It was very controversial internally. [27:11] Heh. [27:12] But, you know, it was funny. I was in China in 2010. [27:18] What year was it? [27:19] I went to the ByteDance offices. I don't know. It was 2016, 17, something like that. And [27:26] Fight Dance head. [27:28] Just. [27:29] I think. [27:30] bought musically. [27:32] But I was in China, I was asking all of the... [27:34] friends I had over there. Oh, like what what apps are you all using here?

[27:39] And everybody was talking about Douyin [27:41] which was kind of like the [27:44] musically knockoff, but then became [27:46] its own thing and would become kind of the model. This is before they had acquired TikTok. [27:51] It was right around then. And so it was before TikTok became big in the U.S., [27:55] But Douyin was huge in China. [27:58] I would just look on my friend's phones and so many of them told me, [28:03] oh my god, I had to delete this app off my phone. I was spending an hour and a half, two hours every night watching it before bed and [28:09] That's crazy when you think most people I know in China worked until 11 p.m. every night and would only have an hour at home before. [28:18] And I was like, really? You watch this for an hour and a half every night? [28:22] And what's crazy is digital crack in my pocket. Yeah. [28:25] And what's crazy is then like, you know, a year and a half later, everybody was saying the same about TikTok. It just it was like a lag period. So. [28:33] It's crazy but [28:34] TikTok kind of struck. [28:36] on. [28:37] This model. [28:39] and um so yeah i don't know it's a long way of saying i i [28:43] You're probably right. TikTok probably is about as... [28:47] advanced. [28:48] as we're going to get. And that's why I think it had a gravitational force that caused everybody... [28:56] to have to chase that and to conform to it. [28:58] and so even if you ban to talk [29:02] I think the kind of damage to... [29:04] the Western digital nervous system has already been done. One's also presumably the earlier point learned the,

[29:11] ideal evolutionary way forward, which is to [29:15] do this hyper-algorithmic [29:17] Revealed preference. [29:19] Almost to reference a much earlier post of yours, like disregarding some of the network is the thing kind of core methodology that used to power social, you used the language earlier, social networks in favor of social media. [29:33] It feels like you can't put that back in the bottle. [29:36] Yeah, that's hard. And that's just because in an era of infinite information, again, distribution is the only thing that matters. And you have to maintain that. [29:50] Power in the marketplace if you all have the same business model. [29:53] which all the companies do. [29:56] It's funny. Meta is... [29:59] in some ways amusing to me because... [30:02] I don't think Matt has ever really... [30:04] articulated with conviction what [30:07] their mission is as a company. [30:10] In a way, right, they are just... [30:13] a company that competes for attention [30:16] And that supersedes all other missions. That's a great point. And... [30:21] That's why they could say we're about connecting [30:25] you know, everybody together. [30:27] But... [30:28] Actually, if showing people a lot of entertaining videos is better, [30:33] But that's kind of what it's going to be, right? Like, I Instagram, like, I have none of my friends actually post any posts in the feed. So if stories didn't exist, I wouldn't even, you know, have any idea what was going on in my friends lives. So, well, the irony for Facebook.

[30:50] But if what you just said is true, I think the good news for them is that might be the ultimate mission. That might be the final mission. When AI has solved everything else, controlling what we all look at. [31:01] is probably still going to be economically. I want to talk a little bit about [31:06] how this all connects into status and the lines where status is still relevant. Speaking of meta, I want to kick off with this paragraph from an old post of yours that [31:16] I think is particularly poignant about the original Facebook news feed. You say, by merging all updates from all the accounts you followed into a single continuous service and having that serve as the default screen, [31:28] Facebook news feeds simultaneously increased efficiency of distribution of new posts and pitted all such posts against each other in what was effectively a single giant attention arena. [31:37] complete with live updating scoreboard on each post. It was as if the panopticon inverted itself overnight and, [31:44] As if a giant spotlight turned on and suddenly all of us performing on Facebook for approval. [31:49] realized we were all in the same auditorium on one large connected infinite stage singing karaoke to the same audience at the same time. [31:56] Obviously, so much of what we just discussed is inside of that. There's one other line where you say it's difficult to overstate what a momentous sea change it was. [32:05] for hundreds of millions and eventually billions of humans [32:08] who had grown up competing for status in small tribes, to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against every single person [32:15] They had ever met. [32:16] And inside of this obviously is the entertainment thing. It's obviously the gladiator arena thing, but I also think just,

[32:21] at a more kind of primal and fundamental level, it's saying, hey, we all now have [32:26] the ultimate propaganda machine in our pocket. [32:29] You've called social platforms a stack for distributing code to other people's brains and running it. It's a platform for programming society. [32:36] And so as much as I think there's all this adversarial stuff, [32:39] In some sense, to me, it almost feels a bit like we left aspects of the peak... [32:45] gladiator arena dunking stuff, as I mentioned earlier, in like 2018 to 2023, at least to a small degree, where it felt like everyone on the internet was having a conversation together. And now we have eight different versions of Twitter and TikTok's a little less like that. [32:59] Yeah. [33:00] Your most famous, probably, piece you ever wrote, Status as a Service. Mm-hmm. [33:04] argued that [33:06] social media platforms or social networks are kind of competing in three arenas. They're [33:10] There's utility, there is social status, and then there's entertainment. I can't help but wonder, we used to overlay status onto communication. Mm-hmm. [33:17] Now maybe we're overlaying status onto the entertainment thing. [33:21] There was some person on Twitter a while ago, Naval or someone like that, who was like, the best way to do Twitter is to never read Twitter and just tweet constantly. And it almost feels like in some ways that is like the defining... [33:33] attribute [33:34] Are we still playing status games? Are we all just using giant megaphones? How do you think about the status as a service framework in the updated version of the social world we're living in now, where it really just feels like performance and entertainment is the only thing? [33:50] Yeah, you know, I wrote status as a service before the TikTok algorithm became dominant.

[33:57] and [33:59] In a way, you're... [34:01] faced with that choice now. [34:03] If it's a power law algorithm that you're going to do battle with, [34:07] How much? [34:08] Are you willing to change who you are? [34:11] I think we've all had the experience of someone we know in real life. [34:16] Getting, you know, we give it various names, but Twitter brain is just one variant of this thing. [34:22] where you get addicted to [34:24] going viral and you just like seek that [34:27] rush over and over, but at the same time, you know that [34:31] You have to play a [34:33] caricature of yourself [34:35] in some ways. What do you know? I mean, does Elon know? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe some people aren't. [34:41] self-reflective enough to see what it's done to them. [34:45] But most of these people, if you meet them in the real world, will come off as more sane. Right. And then, you know, online, you're like, wow, this is so true. [34:53] just a bonkers thing. [34:56] I haven't been on social media as much in the past year and a half, and I think part of me was feeling... [35:02] a bit of that. It's like any book you read about cults will tell you that [35:07] initially a cult leader, [35:09] gathers followers, [35:11] And then eventually the followers lead the cult leader. [35:16] And you feel like you have to perform. [35:19] to that audience. In sum, you have to feed them. [35:22] way and that's why you know my fortune cookie tweet is just talking about that dynamic um and and

[35:28] In some ways, I think this is the... [35:31] thing. It's less about status games and more what I think about now is how [35:36] power law algorithms, [35:38] really create a homogeneity [35:41] really flatten things. Partially because [35:44] They're some of the most powerful selection algorithms in the history of the world, just in terms of sheer scale. [35:50] And the degree of the power law, you know [35:52] Nature has power laws, but... [35:54] There's no way they can work as quickly as digital power laws. Right, right. The fence loops are way longer. We know that. [36:01] the stronger the selection effect, the more you're going to have [36:04] this overfitting, [36:06] to the algorithm and you're going to get a flattening of people [36:09] You're going to get a flattening of... [36:11] culture, [36:12] I don't know if you've ever watched this Mark Fisher video on YouTube called "The Slow Cancellation of the Future." [36:19] I know the name, but I don't think I watch it. [36:21] I don't even know if he came up with the term, but he has a video where he talks about it. He's kind of like a culture theorist. [36:28] kind of like Marxist thinker. [36:31] He said somewhere around the year 2000, [36:34] it seemed like [36:36] culture stopped progressing. [36:39] Some people will argue that it's not true, but... [36:43] I think [36:45] at some level [36:46] There's a lot of truth to it. And there have been lots of... [36:50] related pieces to this you know when kyle chayka wrote about the airbnbification of design and [36:55] Power of all big music, movies, everything Marvel. Yeah, we look at... Yes, we look at...

[37:01] streaming TV shows now if you look at yeah what you can see at the cineplex and [37:08] There's some reduced... [37:10] heterogeneity [37:12] You know, I talked before about... [37:13] twitter how it seems less entropic than it used to be there's just some homogeneity that comes with [37:20] really powerful [37:21] power law algorithms [37:24] And [37:25] Sorry to interrupt. Does TikTok... [37:28] One observation I've had of TikTok, I spend less time in it these days, but early on, I was always impressed by the way that TikTok works. [37:35] relative to even Spotify or other algorithms, like, would let the weird niche through. Mm-hmm. [37:41] Maybe I was self-selecting to that. So could that propose that perhaps it's just a algorithmic quality problem or complexity problem? [37:49] Yeah, this is always the explore versus exploit challenge and algorithms. [37:55] I think ByteDance actually more than the Western social media companies. [37:59] understood this danger. I've talked to their product team in the past and some of the people who work there and [38:06] from a very early period. [38:09] they were like a huge problem of our algorithmic, you know, cause they had, um, [38:14] tohtail which was their at their first viral product which is yeah like also an algorithmic driven thing and even from that era they knew [38:22] if we just go down the full exploit path, people will just get oversaturated. People get sick of, [38:27] things. Same for TikTok. And exploit, just to clarify, is like classically the YouTube algorithm. Show me more of exactly what I like. Yeah, show me more of exactly the thing. Yeah, like, and, and, you know, like you start off, uh, like Ronnie Chang had a thing in his latest comedy special. It's just like, hey, you want to learn how to do the deadlift?

[38:42] And the next day you're like storming the Capitol with like a, you know, Buffalo helmet or something. [38:48] That's like the danger of the exploit. But for... [38:53] tick tock and bite dance it was more [38:55] Actually, we'll just lose users in the long run if we go full exploit. So you have to do explore and explore. [39:02] I think of this in, do you read any Byung-Chul Han? Yeah, I've read two-thirds of non-things. There's a New Yorker piece that made me laugh. I called him the internet's favorite philosopher. And I was like, oh, no. I started reading him at the start of the pandemic. And then I'm like, all right, he's already, you know, like jumped the shark. But he talks about something. And a lot of people talk about this. But, you know, like that one of the problems of, [39:28] Neoliberalism. [39:30] And the market in this era of life we live in, modernity, is the death of the other. [39:36] capital or other in philosophical terms. And that's just like, you know... [39:42] Byung Chauhan might refer to it as negativity, but it's like... [39:45] the encounter with fully formed [39:48] other beings with other thoughts, other ideas that push back on you, [39:53] and [39:54] If you think about what is the dominant ethos of tech design for the first 20 years, it's remove friction. [40:02] right it's removed the negativity like give give me more [40:06] of what I want. [40:08] when [40:09] Jeff Bezos said, hey, Amazon wants to be the world's most customer-centric company.

[40:13] What is that? It's like, what does the customer want? Just give that to them. Yeah, make them glide downhill. Yeah. You know, why did... [40:21] Facebook start off with a like button, but not a dislike button. Everything is about positivity. [40:27] And that's since Twitter, ironically, was a kind of a weird place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, like, you know, it was funny when threads... [40:36] first launched and they're like, "We're not going to have politics." They were trying to avoid some of that. But there's some irony there in that. That's a classic meta thing to [40:46] removed the negativity but [40:49] I think there's been a huge consequence to... [40:52] this world of giving us [40:54] whatever we want. And I feel at most [40:58] in that these days I feel like a consequence of my first 25 or so years online has been that [41:06] Silicon Valley keeps removing. [41:09] things [41:10] or displacing things in the physical world and then replacing them with a digital substitute. [41:16] that always feels lesser. [41:19] in some way. Or it's like a seeing like a state style sort of, or a Robert Moses style sort of like [41:25] highly top-down articulated [41:27] Yeah. Simulacrum of it that doesn't really capture its nuance. Yeah. It's like, you know. [41:32] in the place of real, [41:34] community [41:35] I give you likes on your Instagram posts in the place of, [41:40] Or LinkedIn. LinkedIn notifications. Yeah, exactly. A LinkedIn endorsement. In the place of...

[41:48] real companionship. [41:50] and love. [41:51] I give you... [41:52] an OnlyFans parasocial relationship or [41:56] digital pornography or an AI boyfriend or girlfriend or something like that. [42:02] Ah. [42:03] In fact, it's really funny. I was thinking back of the movie Her, which I haven't watched in a long time. [42:09] Have you seen Her by Spick Jones? [42:12] Yeah, I rewatched it pretty recently. Yeah, okay. [42:15] And it's a very interesting movie to watch more recently compared to when it came out. Oh, I'm sure. So you can clarify if my memory is wrong, but... [42:24] One of the things that actually is... [42:26] more... [42:28] Maybe... [42:30] profound in the movie, which is under remarked on and maybe didn't come true is the [42:36] Isn't there a point when his... [42:38] AI girlfriend, he's like, "Hey, wait, how many relationships are you in?" And she says, "I'm in like, you know, 6,000 other relationships." Yeah, at least. It's like, yeah, yeah. It totally breaks his heart. And she's like, "It doesn't take anything. You still have 100% of me." Yeah. [42:53] And he's really, I guess, like broken up about this for a little bit. Right. [42:58] At least that is... [43:01] a version of the other or pushback. It's just like, look, you're not going to get... [43:05] Everything. [43:07] It's not going to be ideal. Right. Like, you know, like, [43:09] Loving another person, a real person, someone with their own [43:14] wants and needs. Has trade-offs. Yeah, there's just like challenges to that, but these [43:18] AI companions and things today are really made to just follow orders. I had somebody telling me their kid was using one of these AI-splashed animals. What they realized is that when the kid...

[43:33] had to interact with other kids. Mm-hmm. [43:36] they [43:37] didn't get why the other kids would ever push like they were used to the animal the stuffed animal friend who just agreed with them all the time yeah and you you take what you're saying to the most extreme degree yeah it really begs the question of whether we're gonna have to articulate like new sets of artificial constraints or trade-offs my sense is my hope might be that [43:57] over time, the perfect girlfriend who never disagrees with you. [44:01] like actually gets boring dare i say it like there's something inside of human nature that causes you to yearn for the more complicated thing did you uh listen to the daily episode no the woman who fell in love with her um chat gpt voice she she made it into a [44:19] like a boyfriend. And she's married, but... [44:22] She had some, I had never heard this scenario before, but she had this fantasy of being cutqueened. [44:28] which is like she wanted her synthetic boyfriend to tell her about [44:32] like [44:32] other relationships he was having with women. Got it. [44:35] It was crazy because, you know, the woman let them use audio of her conversations with [44:40] the bot. And at some point, [44:44] It almost seemed like she loved this digital boyfriend more than... [44:47] anyone else. She had asked her [44:50] husband to do this fantasy and he was like, no, like what? I'm not doing that fantasy for you. Like it's [44:54] It's weird and [44:55] And so that so epitomizes tech- [45:00] To me, it's just like, oh, like, well, if you want that, we'll just give it to you. Yeah. Like, why would we stand...

[45:06] in your way and how [45:08] in doing so [45:10] There's actually a book I'm really enjoying called... [45:14] immediacy or the style of too late capitalism by Anna Kornblow. Hmm. [45:20] And she talks about how, you know, in this era... [45:23] It's just like... [45:24] take out the middleman, give me what I want, like as directly and as quickly as possible. [45:30] And, you know, of course, [45:32] there are benefits like like we always have to do this disclaimer anytime you say anything negative about the internet it's like well [45:38] disintermediation was great you know like people only know about me because i could blog and just publish it directly to the world and [45:44] And all of that, of course. I... [45:46] I wouldn't be here talking to you and you wouldn't be able to put out this podcast if that didn't happen. [45:53] On the other hand... [45:55] I think even acknowledging that we need... [45:59] We need better critiques. [46:01] of what this is all doing. [46:05] to us, to society. [46:07] and [46:09] I think we have to figure out how to [46:12] understand and this may be you know you and i've talked before about community and friction and [46:17] So, you know, I always say that social capital. [46:20] is better modeled as debt than equity. [46:23] Hmm, um... [46:25] whether or not debt was the first form of money is [46:28] Graeber theorizes, [46:31] I think it's pretty clear that [46:33] very many early economies

[46:36] operated prior to the mention of money on mutual [46:40] obligation [46:42] And mutual obligation is actually pretty productive. [46:45] Yeah, like, you know, [46:48] So some amount of removing friction has removed... [46:51] mutual obligation, [46:53] You know, I felt bad. I was just back in SF. [46:57] recently and I did my first Waymo ride and then I went down to LA and there are also Waymos there and I rode them some and you know [47:04] So many people I talk to are like, God, I love Waymo. Like, I do not want to talk. [47:09] to my driver, [47:11] I don't want to deal with another person. I just would rather just be alone in this car. Don't want to deal with the other. Yeah, yeah. Don't want to deal... [47:19] And [47:21] You know, the gig economy kind of, and especially during the pandemic, we lived kind of this like peak period. [47:26] version of that life. You know, I was in SF, which was pretty locked down. And [47:31] you know i couldn't even go to the grocery store they would have lines outside and ration with people so you you know [47:36] You're ordering things from Amazon. You're watching Netflix at home. [47:40] You're ordering meals delivered by DoorDash or Uber Eats and everything and having very minimal. [47:47] human interaction. [47:49] Thank you. [47:50] And [47:52] I think all of this... [47:54] is such a radical... [47:56] Re... [47:57] architecture [47:58] of like our social infrastructure. [48:01] that I wonder about the health of, you know, lowercase L liberal democracy downstream. Because I think all of this,

[48:09] is the foundation that makes our particular form of liberal democracy kind of work. [48:13] And by lowercase l, liberal democracy, I just mean [48:17] Can we get along with people we disagree with and just like live in some relative amount of peace? [48:23] And that's why, you know, civic solitude in the thesis, you know, resonates with me a little bit, this idea that. [48:29] maybe all being in the arena duking it out all the time or watching, you know, Fox News or whatever, you know, [48:35] And nobody watches MSNBC, but if that was the liberal equivalent, watching these echo chamber things. [48:41] uh, [48:42] isn't [48:44] really conducive to that. And I also think about... [48:48] You know, Hannah Arendt speaks about [48:50] the Vida Activa and the Vida Contempliva. She kind of separates these two. She's like, [48:55] Vida activa is this life of action that you lead in public. [49:00] of which the highest form is, [49:02] participating in [49:04] you know local politics and things you know you're acting and then there's the vita contempliva the private [49:09] life where you you formulate thoughts and ideas and [49:14] There's a bizarre... [49:16] way in which the internet has reversed those two [49:21] Oh, man. You know how people love saying this thing like, I'm going to... [49:25] I think it's healthy to think in public. I want to think, let me share, you know, like, [49:29] my notepad of ideas and [49:31] And Twitter, you look at a lot of these tweets, you're like, oh my God. [49:34] That's a thought you should have had in private. Like, why are you, why are you tweeting it out loud? It's, [49:38] It's nuts.

[49:40] I think they're tweeting it before they've actually thought about it. Yeah, that's like... [49:45] That is one of the consequences of this, like dopamine... [49:49] distribution things that we kind of act without thinking. So it's kind of like bypassing the Vida contempliva. And even worse than the Vida activa, this life of actual public action, [50:01] is diminished... [50:03] where it feels like tweeting is activism. Yep. Like, oh, like, I changed my avatar to a black square. I'm like, you know. [50:10] supporting Black Lives Matter or something. [50:13] And yeah, but Jung Cholhan and Baudrillard are having a tough, tough, I don't know about laugh grimace about that one. [50:21] So I... [50:23] I... [50:24] I think it's particularly challenging. [50:28] right now because I think most of our politicians don't [50:32] See that [50:33] a lot of the strife they deal with now, a lot of it is just downstream of [50:38] that ecosystem, [50:39] That if you rewire, [50:42] the way we communicate. [50:44] that fundamentally just changes the nature of how you have to govern and what [50:48] maybe the optimal governments. [50:50] governance size is. [50:53] On the other side of the [50:55] Again, the Gladiator Arena is something you're speaking towards now. [51:00] a sense of like [51:01] probably nihilism. I think in some sense, obviously, there's the [51:05] And we'll talk a little bit more about community and scenes and things like that later. [51:09] As much as there's a problem around confronting the other,

[51:12] I think there's also just like a growing... [51:14] growing sense of just like, are these games even worth playing? [51:17] in the [51:19] in the public online life. [51:21] What causes this feedback loop to run out? Is there a world where people... [51:27] eventually just opt out of if they're not performing on the tick tock [51:33] or the TikTok-ified Twitter, [51:35] Do they start to opt out of social media? Do we... [51:38] Are we just headed towards a world where most people passively consume and there's nothing else? [51:43] I think... [51:44] the nihilism comes from two things. You know, so like Marx would speak about the alienation of... [51:50] labor [51:51] What? [51:52] are the causes of that and [51:54] one [51:56] cause he identified it was the [51:59] private ownership of the means of production. [52:02] But in today's kind of attention economy, I would say the thing that [52:06] create some amount of burnout and alienation is the privatized ownership of the means of distribution [52:14] I mean, even the most... [52:17] famous, I don't know who has the most followers on Instagram, but if you think of your classic superstar influencer like Kylie Jenner or Selena Gomez or... [52:28] Even they... [52:29] using this platform, which owns that entire list. [52:33] They could get deplatformed and just lose access to all their followers on that particular platform. They're kind of still in the rat race. [52:40] Yeah, like everybody is like, hey, we're

[52:44] We're renting some time on this platform. [52:46] and trying to use it to the best of our ability. Also, the richest guy in the world bought one of the platforms to extend your metaphor. Yeah, yeah. [52:54] And maybe he's using it [52:56] The most... [52:58] you know, meaningful way possible, which is just to boost his own [53:01] share of attention. Yep. [53:04] and and that just speaks to the scarcity of attention and how much [53:08] the attention economy [53:10] almost puts it to us to like, if you don't capture attention, [53:14] you almost aren't relevant anymore. [53:17] Back to Facebook's mission. Yeah. If you think of the Democratic Party right now, one of their biggest challenges is... [53:24] They don't have anyone that can capture any attention. [53:27] And, you know, you can argue about, you know, like... [53:30] Postman with the TV era is like, oh, you know, you have your photogenic presidents and you're charismatic. [53:35] presidents like the Kennedys. [53:37] And so you could just say, hey, this is just a continued evolution now. Like who can... [53:41] be noisy on social media and well and the difference between postman and today is that at the very least [53:46] In Postman's era and the TV era, [53:48] you might not have performed as well because you weren't great on television, but you were still getting the spot. Now you're not even showing up. You're not even getting eyeballs at all to underperform. And that is a pretty radical... [54:00] like overcorrection beyond. Yeah, I mean, you could see both parties misread. [54:05] Because there was this thought that it would just be Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, like, and then, you know, the next generation of Bush, Clinton. Right. [54:12] And then who did we have come along? We had Obama and Trump just short-circuited.

[54:17] that like assumed lineage. Right. And why? Because it's like, oh, the internet, a true disruption from it. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, oh yes, Jeb Bush and, [54:28] Hillary Clinton, they just didn't do as well on social media. And Obama and Trump were much better at it. And [54:34] So, you know... [54:35] It's no coincidence that one of the most popular phrases in social media is, I feel seen. [54:42] That's all we all of us want. It's like... [54:45] recognition, but you know, like [54:47] the Thymos or Plato's version of the desire for recognition. [54:53] is now governed by [54:54] algorithms [54:56] And in a way, you know, like some of the success of LinkedIn is also just that for some class of workers. [55:02] If you're not in LinkedIn, you effectively [55:04] don't exist. Recruiters don't even know that you're in the world. And so everybody [55:10] feels compelled to be on these platforms this is part of the collective action problem it's like if you're well off yes you can get off of social media but [55:17] if you're managing your career or whatever in the world. I don't blame, you remember people would always have those moral panics over, [55:25] If you ask kids what they want to be, they want to be influencers. People used to say they want to be ashram. I really don't put much stock in. [55:33] that I was like people just react to the context in which they [55:37] Grow up. Bites. [55:39] Well, and maybe kids are onto something. Yeah. Maybe they realize that that's the last remaining scarcity. Right. I think they understood very early on. I mean, they look at their influencers that they follow, like, wow, these people have great lives. And they manage to, like...

[55:52] get out of this brutal rat race. And so this leads to the nihilism, which [55:57] is an interaction with the economy, which is just way more unequal and there's greater precarity. [56:02] So, you know, I'm Gen X. [56:05] In my generation, the cardinal sin was selling out. [56:09] It's like, oh my God, my favorite band, you know, did a Wendy's commercial or yeah, like [56:14] The music was used in a McDonald's commercial. [56:17] And in Gen Z, I feel like it's been flipped. It's like, get your bag is the saying. Get your coin or whatever. You know, sell out as soon as possible because – [56:26] you live in a precarious economy and you might not have health insurance, you might not have a job, you know, [56:32] you have a small window in which to do that. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, [56:36] The assumed fortune of the future and progress of the future is no longer, which is as a default thing, which is pretty amazing to think about in the context of American history. Yeah. I mean, maybe that still goes back 30 years, but the fact that it's totally taken as default by young people is pretty dramatic. Did you did you watch any of. [56:56] I guess, what was it called, like rejection talk? [57:00] It was when kids like not getting a little bit, a little bit of this. Yeah. For a while, I got a bunch of these and then I had, you know, nephews and nieces going through the college application process. And so. [57:12] I was here about this and... [57:14] you know, these kids are like, [57:15] posting their SAT scores, all their extracurriculars, the GPA. You're like, God, this looks like some superstar they couldn't get into.

[57:23] They can barely get into their backup school. Right. [57:28] So I think there is a nihilism that comes... [57:33] from late-stage capitalism, and there's an American form of it. [57:36] but I also recognize a form of it in China [57:40] Which also, I think, is, you know, we don't [57:42] think of it this way but china actually is like a hyper capitalist [57:47] especially in the tech sector, maybe even more capitalist economy. And [57:53] When I talked to my friends in Shanghai after the, I know if the [57:57] pandemic like [57:59] but also the CCP... [58:01] crack down on a lot of tech companies. [58:03] There was a commonality. [58:05] It was a lot of young people who... [58:07] had been sold this dream. [58:09] It's like work hard. [58:11] grind hard [58:12] you know, get... [58:13] hit these milestones in life. You follow the rules. You follow the rules. [58:17] Right. And what did they get? You know, most of them are like, I can't. [58:20] afford to live [58:22] In the city where the jobs are. Can't find a... I watched a Sundance talk about men outnumber women because of one child in, like, [58:30] There's nihilism around dating now. Yeah. Because you don't make enough money. Yeah. [58:36] people getting crushed on dating apps. [58:40] So I would talk to people in Shanghai and I was like, wow, what they're saying just sounds so similar to... [58:45] The nihilism I hear from young people in America, which leads to the whole get your bag thing. In China, they have the whole Tenping movement. It's just like the lie flat or lie down.

[58:55] Like, don't grind. Like, just, you know, kind of like... [58:58] lie down so you can think of it as like the opposite of lean in is like lie down [59:03] Bye. [59:05] I felt these came to a head when the whole weird social media reaction to Luigi. [59:12] and the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. [59:17] And there was [59:18] a lot of like finger wagging online it's just like how could people be celebrating [59:23] this and of course you know everybody always caveats with like oh it's just like a terrible thing like we shouldn't [59:28] be cheering this on. [59:30] Bye. [59:31] you know, like Jeff used to say at Amazon, complaining is not a strategy. [59:35] Like, [59:36] It's important to understand why. Like, why do people... [59:39] react this way right i think it's born of a nihilism that's just like [59:43] This whole late-stage capitalist thing is... [59:46] you know, is a false promise. Like, mostly... [59:51] leads to highly unequal outcomes where [59:54] I did grind hard and then we have AI coming, which will maybe take a lot of jobs and make this whole thing worse. [1:00:02] And [1:00:03] So, [1:00:05] Well, it's very Girardian in the scapegoat sense, too. It seems to be a measure of where we're heading. It's like the Luigi thing, in some sense, like that was so much. And the other thing about the Luigi thing was like it was such a, [1:00:16] scrambling politically. There's a tweet. Somebody said, there's something so poetically funny about the online left painting Luigi Mangione into a Marxist working class hero only for him to actually be a center-right biohacking, teal-loving tech bro. Right. Neither of which are totally true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, it almost like that's another...

[1:00:34] It might be easy for us otherwise to just draw it classically into the... [1:00:38] Hard left, hard right. [1:00:40] thing, but because that's not the case, maybe it's revealing in the ways of [1:00:43] of everything you're saying, which is just, it actually is just... [1:00:46] Well, this goes back to the point I was talking about earlier about this issue. [1:00:52] digital destruction. And look, some of this was happening. We can talk a little bit about community now. Some of this was happening. [1:00:59] even before the internet, you know, because Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, was... [1:01:03] I think I read that in the year 2000. It was around that time. [1:01:07] came out prior to [1:01:09] a lot of these things. But I would argue that [1:01:12] since Bowling Alone came out. [1:01:14] And I read it. There have been a bunch of things that just further exacerbated the problems he was pointing to already. So one was the. [1:01:24] huge rise in cable news. [1:01:26] I would say Fox News is probably the most... [1:01:30] disruptive, [1:01:32] Then we had the internet. [1:01:34] and the [1:01:36] Then we had the smartphone. [1:01:38] Then we had social media and then social media got big. [1:01:42] Then we had the pandemic. [1:01:45] And then we had remote work. [1:01:47] I think each of those things [1:01:49] further [1:01:50] kind of frayed the bonds of [1:01:54] community in the West. [1:01:56] and [1:01:57] reduced these communal meaning-making structures that we used to have. [1:02:03] to the point now where...

[1:02:06] I think it's going to be a real challenge to... [1:02:09] to kind of figure out how to reassemble it. [1:02:11] And what you see people trying to do, I think, who are trying to seek [1:02:16] some of our community is that they should look for it in anything that they can find. [1:02:21] I'll never forget going to my first SoulCycle class. My friend took me up in Marin County. [1:02:29] It's just a strange... [1:02:31] cultish feel of it. There were all these candles lit. It was dark. They were playing loud music. It was like [1:02:36] some crazy interrogation, [1:02:38] At some point, this woman next to me was crying. [1:02:42] Um, [1:02:44] I feel like this explains some of the cultish feel of America now. [1:02:49] So people are just seeking the... [1:02:51] you know, simulacrum of community in anything. And so businesses that do well, [1:02:58] try to play a little bit. [1:02:59] on this. [1:03:01] And, you know, I even look at... [1:03:03] You know more about the crypto world than I do, but... [1:03:07] Some of these DAOs and these meme coins [1:03:11] our weird fusion of everything modern. It's like this like [1:03:15] synthetic community... [1:03:17] but bonded around hyper speculation. [1:03:21] You know, maybe a parallel phrase to the Tom Cruise, you know, like everybody. [1:03:26] runs. [1:03:27] is that, you know, I don't know how many [1:03:29] crypto founders. [1:03:31] I met who were like, gosh, I hate when these meme coins, they pull the rug out on people.

[1:03:37] But then they end up doing it. Yes. You know, it's just like the other reaction for an nihilism. Yeah. It's like it's either lie down or get your bag. Yeah. [1:03:47] And I, there's this book, Speculative Communities, that [1:03:50] builds on Benedict Anderson's imagined communities. [1:03:54] And it talks about how [1:03:57] you know, the sequel to Homo economicus. [1:04:00] is homo speculons hmm [1:04:03] And it's just like, you know, when you deal with [1:04:05] this world of low trust institutions and an uncertain future [1:04:11] everyone becomes a speculator. Yep. And it's a set of behaviors. And then [1:04:15] I think it's further amplified by... [1:04:18] just the rise of [1:04:20] all forms of online speculation and it's not just meme coins [1:04:24] And not even just purely monetary speculation. Yeah. It's the rise of online gambling, sports gambling in particular. [1:04:31] It's like a really... [1:04:32] Dangerous. [1:04:34] trend. In some ways, [1:04:36] It was a crazy graph I saw at one point that was from a book about the casino economics. This is – [1:04:46] The Machine Zone book, right? Yes. Addiction by Design. Yeah, Addiction by Design. [1:04:51] But it was even a graph I saw after this. Anyway, Addiction to My Design, a great book that I read years ago. And I was like, wow, it's insane. But it basically said, you know, online. [1:05:00] or electronic slot machines were the number one [1:05:04] revenue source for all casinos. You could basically predict the casino's economics.

[1:05:09] by the square footage of electronic slot machines on their floors. And every year it would go up and [1:05:14] Electronic slot machines put more people into Gamblers Anonymous than any game in the history of the world. [1:05:21] And then miraculously... [1:05:23] one day. [1:05:24] the revenue from electronic slot machines flatlined [1:05:27] and even started going down. [1:05:30] And the reason was, [1:05:32] We moved the casino into your pocket. [1:05:35] it's the cell phone. Right, right. You know, the one thing where you're like, I don't have to fly to Las Vegas to get my fix. Right. Now, you know, every other podcast I hear that's about anything sports is a DraftKings or a FanDuel ad. [1:05:49] and [1:05:50] Uh... [1:05:52] Hey. [1:05:52] I definitely think it's a dangerous thing. By the way, I'm a huge critic of sports betting. I would argue, to take your point even further, all we do online is speculate. We speculate when we create TikTok videos to spin the wheel. You speculate when you use it. People aren't using dating apps to find a partner. They're taking the flyer on the upside. Yeah. [1:06:13] And so it's interesting. Like, I would suspect that as much as sports gambling and everything else has hit the... [1:06:21] the Vegas business. Yeah. I would suspect too, that part of it is that simply the psychology of speculating is getting serviced in all kinds of more ways. Yeah, for sure. I think that's part of a thesis of speculative communities, because I'm just partway into [1:06:36] but also in an economy with power law returns,

[1:06:40] you're going to be tempted to speculate. You're going to speculate, man. [1:06:44] And by the way, [1:06:45] Online dating marketplace, at least for men, is... [1:06:48] a power law like return thing where absolutely you're going to, [1:06:53] you're going to just naturally do higher risk taking [1:06:56] things in exchange for... I also think it's a power law in part because women are speculating. Women are trying to play to the top end of the power law. The numbers indicate it's something like 80% of women are [1:07:08] looking for 20% of men or something like this. Yeah, right. [1:07:11] So we've... [1:07:13] I mean, I guess this is... [1:07:15] something we should have expected by turning everything into a marketplace, like unfettered marketplace, and then introducing power law algorithms is you're going to create. [1:07:25] a whole group of speculators. And [1:07:28] this [1:07:30] I think manifests in, uh, [1:07:33] the feeling of just how crazy the world is. [1:07:37] has become: [1:07:38] And part of it is that everyone is... [1:07:41] trying to behave. [1:07:43] at the tail end of their behavioral spectrum just to win. And you kind of have to. I mean, the algorithm... That's why I don't love the... [1:07:53] the discourse around how every generation of kids, they're different in some intrinsic way. I think that's like a fundamental attribution error. We should just really look at the context into which they were introduced. They're just naturally responding to... [1:08:06] the incentives in their environment, [1:08:09] In many ways, I don't know if you've seen, there's a lot of discourse around NBA TV ratings going down.

[1:08:16] Although, biggest game, biggest regular season game in seven years, Lakers-Celtics. Just saying, yeah. Go Lakers. Yeah. [1:08:24] So and I think one thing is that we talked about everything being entertainment. [1:08:28] And, you know, Netflix competes with whatever, Fortnite or Sleep or, you know, every form of entertainment is... [1:08:35] in competition with each other and [1:08:38] Just many industries like the NBA, I think, [1:08:42] The game and everything was structured for just a different era. Yes. Yes. [1:08:47] And it's very hard for the NDBA to contemplate the types of drastic changes needed. [1:08:53] to change the format of a regular season game to be appealing. Well, what you're seeing in the NBA that you're seeing across everything else you just listed is that people are basically saying with their speculative orientation, it's only worth playing if I win big. And you could extrapolate that to the dating apps or to the literal game. But it's not, why would you trade meme coins? But also the NBA. Why do I care about the regular season? I just care about the NBA finals. I just care about, I only want the edge of the power line. It seems to be the recurring theme. [1:09:23] single regular season game is by definition meaningless. [1:09:27] And so then you're like, okay, [1:09:29] Why would I watch a full regular season game, which also in the scheme of things is mostly [1:09:33] meaningless. [1:09:35] I think one reason, I have a theory on this. [1:09:38] I read this book called Disordered Attention. [1:09:40] Which kind of gets at the fact that [1:09:42] you pretty much have to assume most of your consumers now have a phone in their hands and are constantly... Did you hear about this Netflix leak? Yeah, that article was great. I wanted to bring it up too because...

[1:09:55] Anyway, back to the NBA. [1:09:57] So, a lot of people are like, "Well, you should reduce the number of regular season games," [1:10:03] I think they should do, for sure. There are too many of them. Even the teams in their behavior are... [1:10:08] Show you that. [1:10:09] Most regular season games are meaningless because they'll rest their stars. [1:10:13] on any given night because they know that it's better to have them rested for the playoffs so the league's already kind of [1:10:19] implicitly telling you like yes this game and right now we're in tank season also where a bunch of teams like the 76ers and the raptors we're just doing crazy things to our friend him sam hinky yeah to uh to lose games you're like why would i watch this it's like like no one cares even the players don't care the team is trying to lose [1:10:37] But. [1:10:39] I... [1:10:40] I think the reason that the NFL [1:10:42] has held up so well. [1:10:44] is not just because they have so few games. [1:10:47] and not just because they happen on a consistent like time of a day of week though i think those things [1:10:53] matter for sure like the ritualistic nature the scarcity [1:10:57] Yes, that matters. [1:10:59] I think the NFL as an entertainment product works great if you have a phone in your hand. [1:11:06] Like there's not much gameplay. [1:11:08] Tons of breaks. There's like 90 plays a game. [1:11:11] If a play is meaningful, they'll replay it like three times. So you could just look up from your phone. [1:11:17] and see it again. [1:11:19] On any single play, a big thing could happen. Like a huge outcome. Like a touchdown could happen. It's like casino variance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Slot machine. High variance. Yeah.

[1:11:29] And so, [1:11:30] By the way, three-pointers in the NBA, a little bit more like the high-variants. Yes, exactly. You're so right. And then, by the way, [1:11:37] The last thing is that fantasy football is just a beautifully designed speculative game. Yes. So you layer that on top of the real game. [1:11:46] And I, you know, the last few years I watched the NFL, I cared more about my fantasy team than I did the actual team. [1:11:53] And [1:11:54] I know many people who are like that. Like I watch my nephew... [1:11:57] during Sundays and he's just on his phone [1:12:01] He has like three fantasy teams. He's just like on the Red Zone channel like an addict. And... [1:12:07] Fantasy baseball, fantasy battle, they just aren't. [1:12:10] You can make a case, actually, that there are two core games in American sports or – [1:12:15] things to do. There is playing fantasy football, for which football was the backdrop for, and there is, as Derek Thompson has said, [1:12:22] following the NBA drama, which the NBA is the backdrop for. Sure. And it turns out, to your point, that football just has the best product market fit across that articulation. Yeah, yeah. [1:12:32] And so football is just... [1:12:34] It's fun to watch. There's like a meta game that's fun to play. [1:12:38] And it works with the phone in your hand. And so that goes to the Netflix article you brought up. [1:12:43] In N Plus One, the piece about... [1:12:46] how Netflix shows are designed for you to not look at the screen. [1:12:50] And I was like, you know, I kind of intuitively felt this. [1:12:54] But then I decided to test it out. And I went and I just looked on Netflix. I was like, what's the top show on that day? Like, what was the top show? And it was this show called The Night Agent.

[1:13:04] Okay, I haven't seen it. So I turned on, it was like... [1:13:07] The Night Agent Season 2, I didn't watch Season 1, but I was like, hey, this is a good test of the thesis. Like, does it matter? [1:13:14] that I didn't even watch the season. And it turns out that it's true. I was looking at my phone. [1:13:21] And then kind of looking up [1:13:23] at the screen occasionally, [1:13:25] And I think it was like the start of the second episode. There's this entire scene... [1:13:29] where both characters are just... [1:13:32] recapping what they had just done in the previous episode, just like verbally saying it. [1:13:37] In a way that no one would say, because if you had watched the show, you had done those things in the show. You would not need to tell the other person that that's what you were doing. And look, every movie has expository dialogue dumps. We call them exposition dumps in the film world and TV world. [1:13:53] Some amount of that is inevitable, but Netflix takes it to the [1:13:56] extreme [1:13:58] And again, you go back to the algorithms and the flattening of culture. [1:14:03] Some people argue that culture is not, we have innovation in culture. [1:14:08] But I think there is some homogenization that has happened to kind of [1:14:13] traditional cultural products [1:14:15] that I've seen, [1:14:16] You see it in other fields. [1:14:18] What museum? [1:14:21] doesn't program at least one Instagram friendly [1:14:24] exhibition better be on the ground floor and bigger than everything else yeah it's going to be the kusama the hall of mirrors or the you know whatever the giant pumpkins and [1:14:33] and that might pay for your entire year in terms of just like ticket revenue. It's got back to attention, right? And so, yes, to the Baudrillardian point about the hyper-real,

[1:14:45] becoming more important than the real [1:14:48] Something about that is true. I think the art world is just one way that's reflected. [1:14:54] I don't know if you saw this, but I thought it fascinatingly. [1:14:57] NBA has been experimenting in the battle to try to fight their ratings. [1:15:03] slump. They've been experimenting with this NBA [1:15:07] live stream. [1:15:09] which does graphic overlays from the NBA, I think NBA Live or NBA 2K video game. [1:15:15] On the broadcast. Oh my God. [1:15:17] And I was looking at the graphic they used, and it was funny because they would draw, like in the game, [1:15:23] over players' heads, they'll draw the PlayStation button that you can use to pass the ball to them. But they were doing this on a live broadcast, which is weird because you can't actually... [1:15:32] Do it. [1:15:33] Not yet. But it was a classic case of this, you know... [1:15:40] this phenomenon that Baudrillard had said would just be [1:15:44] exacerbated and it's all come to pass. [1:15:48] I think every entertainment medium [1:15:50] is [1:15:51] Fighting. [1:15:52] this challenge. [1:15:53] of [1:15:55] You know, you had cited a thing I had written before that was from a talk I gave called The Programmable Society. [1:16:02] And in it, I was talking about [1:16:05] The last thing I worked at Amazon before I left in 2004 was Amazon Web Services. We were kind of like writing these memos for Jeff, and it was all about... [1:16:15] What are the primitives, the computing primitives that we release as services? And, you know, there was this whole vision of...

[1:16:21] allowing any programmer like single programmer to access the full suite [1:16:25] of compute services. [1:16:28] My talk on Programmable Society said, [1:16:30] If you looked at Twitter, Facebook... [1:16:32] Instagram, [1:16:34] um [1:16:36] All of these, these are also... [1:16:39] compute services. [1:16:40] are primitives. [1:16:42] These are just large-scale [1:16:45] platforms that allow you to tap into human brains. [1:16:49] and if you could figure out. [1:16:51] how to hack the system. [1:16:53] Um... [1:16:54] you would get access. [1:16:55] to just for free millions of people yes [1:16:59] for free. [1:17:00] And so those were also programming. [1:17:03] endpoints. [1:17:04] You know, I... [1:17:06] I look back on that now and I think, [1:17:09] You know, if you think about Mr. Beast, [1:17:11] I mean, Mr. Beast is kind of [1:17:14] kind of the apotheosis of battling... [1:17:18] algorithms. He's like the Highlander. There's one person who's just like, look, I'm just going to master... [1:17:24] battling these algorithms and finding that loophole. - Well, and that's how he relates to it too. I think he is an artist of the YouTube algorithm more than any other thing. [1:17:31] But, you know, in doing so, [1:17:34] You don't even like there's almost like this weird absence of ideology. It's just like, hey, look. [1:17:41] Whatever works for the algorithm is like what I'm going to lead. Like I couldn't tell you what Mr. Beast like. [1:17:47] politics are, he's just like, hey, [1:17:50] I'm going to lean into this. It's funny. People have been talking about having Stephen A. Smith run for –

[1:17:55] office. And I'm just like, [1:17:57] But that's the age we're in because he had already. Trump's our president. Yeah. Stephen A. Smith has already mastered. [1:18:06] a previous form of attention grabbing. And so, yes, I'd rather have him debate. [1:18:12] Trump and Joe Biden. If attention is the spice in the Dune universe. [1:18:19] You are just trying to find... [1:18:22] The people who can mine it. [1:18:23] most efficiently, [1:18:25] and exert their leverage on things that way. [1:18:30] I think it is a little bit dark to me that we... [1:18:33] have this. [1:18:35] onset of nihilism and this lack of [1:18:38] connection and these people kind of adrift and, um, [1:18:43] So, [1:18:43] I think in tech world, [1:18:45] People are... [1:18:47] Thank you. [1:18:48] very attuned to give high status to [1:18:51] books and writing. [1:18:53] less to, [1:18:54] TV, film, and images. [1:18:57] You said this, a similar thing, five, six years ago, and you've definitely been incrementally proven more right. [1:19:03] Yeah. To which video is taken more seriously. [1:19:06] Do you ever see that piece? I don't know who, maybe it's like, [1:19:10] Someone at the verge or someone said they tried emailing like their CEO. [1:19:15] in just like how it improved their life. No. [1:19:18] When I was at Amazon, Jeff Bezos was famous for like forwarding a customer service email with just a question mark. [1:19:25] to the head of the department if the customer complained about something. It was like the most terrifying email to get.

[1:19:31] but in general, [1:19:32] CEOs at companies are famous for writing very terse. [1:19:35] Emails back in the day when email is the dominant form, right? [1:19:38] communication. And so this reporter just tried. [1:19:42] replying kind of like very matter of fact no exclamation points just very like short like [1:19:48] And, um, [1:19:49] There's a great research paper that talks about how [1:19:52] words convey power better than images. Some of that may be a cultural inflection. But, you know, if your CEO were to forward an email and then put in, [1:20:00] A smiley face emoji? [1:20:02] versus just a question mark. [1:20:04] I do think the... [1:20:06] The one with just a question mark is going to come off as more strong. Yes. [1:20:10] code strong this is by the way my theory for why at high-end restaurants the menus are all text [1:20:16] and very bare. [1:20:18] But at some of the lowest end restaurants in like Japan or something, they have a binder with pictures. It's like, [1:20:24] in plastic and uh they may even have like the little plastic molded uh [1:20:29] thing of the dish. You're like, I actually love getting the pictures. I find it very useful. Yes. But at a high-end restaurant, you never know [1:20:37] like what the dish is going to look like you you don't get to litigate this yeah yeah you don't get to litigate like [1:20:42] You may look around at other people's dishes to see what they look like. But, you know, at a really high-end restaurant, it's a tasting menu anyway, so you have no choice. Yes. The only choice is whether you want to pay a lot or more. For wine. For like, you know, like a... [1:20:55] add-on, truffle shavings or something. [1:20:58] Silicon Valley varying to words and books and that, you know, books code as like,

[1:21:04] high intellectual matter. [1:21:06] But, you know, I'm into movies, TV shows. [1:21:10] they in some ways [1:21:12] even better reflect kind of the subconscious. [1:21:16] Thank you. [1:21:17] of America. So I think you can trace the decline [1:21:22] of American community through TV shows. [1:21:25] Specifically sitcoms [1:21:27] So, [1:21:28] So you look at post-World War II, you have these like 60s, 70s sitcoms, a lot of them about like, you know, like it's like All in the Family, Brady Bunch, Honeymooners. [1:21:37] tracing the atomic family. [1:21:40] and [1:21:41] depicting kind of a [1:21:43] fantasy of... [1:21:45] This is American life. Yeah, Americano. [1:21:49] trad wife type of, you know, like ideas. Yeah, yeah. [1:21:54] Then, you know, there were the sitcoms I... [1:21:57] "'Grew up with.' [1:21:58] I think in particular of Cheers and Night Court as... [1:22:01] I've never heard of Night Court. Okay. It was about a court, a group of people who all worked at a court. [1:22:08] And then Cheers, of course, about a bar. [1:22:11] Cheers may be the epitome of the idealized third place as defined in the Starbucks third place, but the theme song, a place where everybody knows your name. [1:22:22] And I [1:22:23] a family of people who would come together at this bar and like loved each other and took care of each other, shared their problems with each other. [1:22:30] Uh... [1:22:31] A place that, frankly, doesn't [1:22:33] I don't think exist in America anymore. But at the time, you're like, wow.

[1:22:37] Okay, there was this thought. Did it ever exist? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it did in some places in the world. Anyway, there was some sense that that was still possible. [1:22:46] Then you had shows later on that I watched earlier. [1:22:51] 90210. [1:22:53] Friends [1:22:55] Melrose plays, the O.C., [1:22:59] All of these shows are very interesting topics. [1:23:03] in that [1:23:05] your friends would just walk into your apartment [1:23:09] or your bedroom if you were in high school. - Kramer literally walking into the apartment. - There's no knocking, there's no door, like, it's like, do they have the key? [1:23:18] How does this work? [1:23:20] Of course, part of it is just narrative economy. [1:23:22] You don't want to have to detect [1:23:24] doorbell ringing and people opening the door. It's a waste of time. But [1:23:28] I think it's something else. I think that all of those shows [1:23:32] were [1:23:33] in some ways a fantasy... [1:23:35] about extending college life into adult life. - Yeah, totally. [1:23:41] I ask this question of people I meet all over the world. Look back on your life. What was the best time of your life? [1:23:48] and i personally look [1:23:50] This is just sampling bias for sure. It's just me asking random people. [1:23:54] But actually, I'll ask you, what was the best time of your life? [1:23:57] I'd like to say, like, I'm in it. Yeah, okay. I don't feel like it was college. Yeah. But I grew up with that as the default understanding. Yeah. Not that it's the best time, but it's certainly the most fun in life.

[1:24:10] Yeah. [1:24:10] I... [1:24:11] More people in America will say college than anywhere else. Of course, it differs by socioeconomic class. Like I think, [1:24:17] I also live in New York. I'm single. I live in New York. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pursuing the college. I'm doing it. Right. A lot of tech people. [1:24:25] you know who become really well off that i know of course like they're like right now it's the best time because i have like money and income i can do it like [1:24:31] Bye. [1:24:32] For most people in the West, a lot of people will say college. [1:24:37] Bye-bye. [1:24:38] Theory on this is just that [1:24:40] College is the only healthy social life that many people in the West ever experience, like communal life. [1:24:48] And, you know, [1:24:49] it's kind of like, you know, college is this weirdly socialist environment. Like, [1:24:52] You can have money, but like everybody's got the same dorm room and everybody has to go to the same classes. And, you know, you eat at the same cafeteria for the most part. [1:25:01] But you get all this free time to just default program. You can opt into things. You have a lot of social time. You're always like around people who want to do different things and, you know, [1:25:11] It's the perfect combination of lack of obligation and ability to like have connection. Yeah. [1:25:17] Yeah, and to like focus on your passion and... [1:25:20] So I think these TV shows... [1:25:23] you know, Seinfeld, it's like a dorm. It's like dorm life. That's why Kramer could just burst in. It was just like my classmates would just come into my room when I was studying. You know, you would just leave your door open or unlock. You would just come in and [1:25:36] friends for some weird fantasy that they could afford this gigantic

[1:25:40] apartments across the hall from each other but that was also like a dorm [1:25:45] And even a show like The Office was like an extension of Cheers. It was... [1:25:49] The office is the place. [1:25:51] of you know your friends like you might not be able to stand some of them but they were yeah the irony is that when that show was on that was not a dream like granted maybe like you're right but like knowing your co-workers and hanging out with them and every day was very common in a way that a 21 year old watching that now might actually find it alien which is pretty remarkable [1:26:12] So I think the dark turn for me... [1:26:15] then came with the show The Sopranos. [1:26:19] which was like just... You know when it started in 99? [1:26:22] something like that let's see i was on the amazon video team so 98 i joined the team i think the first season was like around [1:26:30] 98. [1:26:32] I remember some video editor on the video team telling me, oh my God, you got to watch The Sopranos. I subscribed to HBO just to watch it. [1:26:41] Here is a show where... [1:26:44] Tony Soprano, the main character, [1:26:47] Theoretically, [1:26:49] was living the American dream. He, top of his profession, granted, he was a mob boss, [1:26:55] But top of his profession, [1:26:56] has a wife, [1:26:58] two children, lives in a McMansion, [1:27:00] in New Jersey. [1:27:03] And he's absolutely miserable. [1:27:06] His closest relationship is to his therapist.

[1:27:11] and [1:27:12] I think this was like a harbinger of just like the rot at the heart of American life. You know, first of all, I... [1:27:20] Being in the suburbs, just being isolated from your neighbors, just like this cocoon. [1:27:25] His daughter is the kind of, you know, your classic Lisa Simpson, a little more what we would say is like a woke. [1:27:31] girl now and then his son is kind of this like [1:27:36] deadbeat [1:27:37] His wife likes the money, but it's always kind of like haranguing him. And he's always stressed out. [1:27:42] And anxious over his... [1:27:44] place at the top, like holding on to his job. [1:27:47] He's. [1:27:48] He has no kind of [1:27:51] meaning making institutions for him. And so he turns to the thing that we [1:27:55] turn to in late-stage capitalism to cope with our mental issues, which is paid therapy. [1:28:01] Like we pay someone to listen to our problems. [1:28:04] It epitomizes this kind of what is broken, right? [1:28:10] Are these, I'm going to stop you for a second, because maybe I'm playing where we're going a little bit, but. [1:28:15] With all of these examples, and especially this one, [1:28:19] Are these revealing or are they prophetic? [1:28:21] Yeah, you know, maybe a little bit of both. [1:28:24] I think [1:28:26] the anxieties of the sopranos. [1:28:30] One of the reasons the show resonated was that even if you weren't a mob boss or something, you're kind of like, okay, yeah, this guy has family problems and [1:28:37] It's kind of like, you know, how like the CW shows about vampires and things, they still have like, you know, the usual high school problems. Like, who do I ask the prom and things? You're like.

[1:28:46] the show that's like about something else, but it's really about, [1:28:49] Like all... [1:28:51] All gangster movies to me are x-rays of the economy of the country that they're in. And what are the [1:28:58] economic anxieties that result from [1:29:01] the rules of that. [1:29:02] system they exist in. You look at a movie like Goodfellas, [1:29:07] And Ray Liotta's like, for as long as I can remember... [1:29:10] wanted to be a good fella. You know, he really is... [1:29:15] He is the middle class American trying to live a better life, trying to ascend higher. And at the end of the movie, you know, he ends up in witness protection and [1:29:24] It's a nightmare for him because he's in the bathrobe. [1:29:27] getting the newspaper from his townhouse porch. [1:29:32] And which is funny because Tony Soprano [1:29:35] in the opening credits of The Sopranos, is in his bathrobe going out to get the newspaper from... [1:29:40] end of his driveway. [1:29:42] There's something about like [1:29:44] Like, is this all that was promised? Like, why, if I have... [1:29:48] this, do I feel empty inside? Do I feel like I have not? [1:29:53] So, The Sopranos was this, and then... [1:29:56] After that, the two shows I think most reflect kind of an even – [1:30:01] further evolution of [1:30:04] Late-stage capitalism are succession and industry. [1:30:08] Thank you. [1:30:09] Both shows I loved on HBO, coincidentally. [1:30:13] And both [1:30:15] are about these people who in some ways have won,

[1:30:19] Thank you. [1:30:20] the late stage capitalist game because they're [1:30:22] rich. They're making so much money [1:30:25] and they're all deeply alone. [1:30:28] you know, the end of succession is just really these people who are worth tens of millions of dollars. And they're estranged, even like the siblings are estranged from each other. [1:30:35] We talk about Joe Henrich and the weirdest people in the world a lot, and he's just like, look, [1:30:39] Western individualism is responsible for the most financially prosperous people in the history of the world. [1:30:46] And part of it is this individual striving. [1:30:49] Also, [1:30:50] there's something dark about individualism taken to its logical extent, minus community in this kind of like, um, [1:30:58] you know, secular, [1:31:00] modern world where you're just grinding and [1:31:04] you're trying to win at this kind of like casino economic industry especially is that yeah succession is a little different because obviously they're they're whatever their inheritance right industry is exactly about this problem yeah [1:31:16] Yeah. [1:31:17] I went back to watch the first... [1:31:19] the pilot of industry. [1:31:21] And I had forgotten it was directed by Lena Dunham. [1:31:25] But, you know, it's all the... [1:31:27] kids interviewing to go work at that firm. And one of them says something like, you know, like my heroes are Margaret Thatcher and [1:31:34] I can't remember who he said you know like this show signals from the very beginning that it's exactly about neoliberalism yes and what the issues of that are and I like that it kind of [1:31:44] goes over the top and leans into it, just kind of underlined or like, look, [1:31:47] This is...

[1:31:50] you will have people you love [1:31:53] But the... [1:31:54] The fact that you all interact in a marketplace means that your relationships are all transactional. [1:32:00] And you will never truly be close. [1:32:03] to anyone in that world. There's the one, the guy who likes the girl. Do you watch Industry? Yeah, yeah, yeah. [1:32:10] You just knew in the last season. There's no way they will end up together. Even though they love each other. But there's no hope because he's poor. He came from... [1:32:21] Laurie and you know for her [1:32:23] Her reputation is everything. The priorities are clear, in a sense. Yeah. Yes. And she needs a rich husband to... [1:32:30] provide for that. [1:32:33] Thank you. [1:32:33] We sometimes think, [1:32:36] well-functioning liberal democracy is [1:32:39] Thank you. [1:32:41] upstream of [1:32:42] a lot of these conditions, but I think it's actually downstream a lot of these conditions. [1:32:46] when you remove those conditions. [1:32:48] becomes very hard to [1:32:50] you can have these rituals. [1:32:52] That. [1:32:53] kind of play act at forms of community, but... [1:32:57] You actually need real... [1:32:59] Community. [1:33:00] to make these things work um and that's why i think [1:33:04] That's one problem of this kind of gerontocratic... [1:33:09] governance that we have in America. I think they are [1:33:13] They're so far removed. [1:33:15] from the... [1:33:17] online social information infrastructure.

[1:33:20] Yeah, and that's, by the way, the actual lived experience of a 25-year-old in the world they live in, which is largely a digital one. Yeah, and that's why I think both parties have been in a weirdly weakened – like, they're both strong and weak. They're strong in that there's still just a duopoly of parties in the U.S., and it's very hard to break that. [1:33:38] But they're both weak in that they've been hijacked by kind of outsider candidates repeatedly. [1:33:43] It is interesting that we talked about this a little earlier. [1:33:46] read the election, but it is interesting that one of the seeming responses to this kind of nihilistic late-stage capitalism thing is, [1:33:53] is this [1:33:55] emphasis on earnestness and... [1:33:58] more [1:33:59] uninhibited sort of like you can just do things high agency, uh, [1:34:04] uh, [1:34:05] Obviously, the political right has certainly leaned into this notion that, like, [1:34:10] Looking backwards doesn't matter. [1:34:12] I don't know if that's shaped sort of like the speculative stuff or something else. If you were to imagine the TV show that... [1:34:19] encapsulates 2025 or 20 or beyond. Do you think it's deeper, deeper into the succession industry hole? Or do you think we're going somewhere else? [1:34:28] "Ahhh." [1:34:30] I don't know. There haven't been... [1:34:33] I think there haven't been great shows to capture... [1:34:38] what it means to be terminally online yet. [1:34:42] I mean, I think there are some movies that sort of... [1:34:45] scratch at the edges of it [1:34:48] I saw this movie last year called Red Rooms. [1:34:50] I don't know it.

[1:34:52] And, uh... [1:34:54] Ostensibly, it's about someone who's obsessed with a trial of a serial killer. [1:34:59] This person goes and attends the trial every day. [1:35:02] This person trades crypto. [1:35:05] is online all day. [1:35:08] Place online poker. [1:35:10] is [1:35:11] on the spectrum. [1:35:12] I say all these things, and I think most people would say, oh, it's like... [1:35:17] some young man. [1:35:18] And it's actually this woman. [1:35:20] and she's actually like a Instagram influencer model. [1:35:24] Hmm. [1:35:25] And she's attending the serial killer trial. You know, ostensibly the movie is about like she's trying to she believes the killer is innocent and is trying to find evidence to. [1:35:34] Get him acquitted. [1:35:36] But I think what it's most about and what it's best about is capturing the feeling of being terminally online. [1:35:43] to be fully captured by conspiracy theories, to mostly interact with people. [1:35:49] through [1:35:51] terminals and prompts. That's a really hard thing to fake attunement to. [1:35:55] Yeah, yeah. If the writer or director wasn't. Right. And I think it's a lot about the dangers of. . . [1:36:01] Like what happens if you're terminally online? What kind of distortions? [1:36:06] It makes two... [1:36:07] and how easy it is to just get sucked into... [1:36:11] conspiracy theories and [1:36:14] to really feel and you know this this contributes a lot i think to cult like the cult like feel [1:36:20] of American society now.

[1:36:22] Thank you. [1:36:23] I also think [1:36:25] You know, we... [1:36:28] we do in the transition from college to adulthood. [1:36:32] You often are, you know... [1:36:35] in need of some mentor? [1:36:38] And it works differently for you. [1:36:42] You know, we used to have young men who would have to go out into the military or the draft. You know, they have these, like, authoritative male figures, and, like, there's negatives to that, too. But, um... [1:36:52] Thank you. [1:36:53] i think a lot of judd apatow movies [1:36:55] I don't think [1:36:56] I don't know if he knew that that's what his movies were about, but I think his movies were about this... [1:37:02] trend of prolonged adolescence. [1:37:05] people coming out into the world being quite ready for adulthood but then you know [1:37:10] All the Judd Apatow protagonists, it's like Seth Rogen or James Franco. Even Ball Rod. Yeah. They're smoking pot. They're... [1:37:20] playing PlayStation. They haven't, you know, they're like [1:37:23] into their late 20s and still haven't gotten into a [1:37:26] relationship and you know you see the data and we have just this version of [1:37:31] This thing, and this, I think, opens the door, like the internet to... [1:37:37] Thank you. [1:37:38] you know, um, [1:37:40] up-and-coming cult leaders to come in. [1:37:43] I think of Jordan Peterson as really a... [1:37:48] kind of like substitute father. [1:37:50] For a lot of young men, even his aesthetic is...

[1:37:53] Right. [1:37:54] you know, make your bed stand up straight. [1:37:56] Like the things that, you know, like a military, you know, general might tell you. But I'm finally being told to do so by someone I respect. And that is the... [1:38:06] Yeah, it's through a screen or whatever else, but it's, yeah. Yeah, like the whole, you know, I think like, [1:38:12] the Rogaine. [1:38:13] Chris Williams and even Huberty. Yeah, like so many of these. [1:38:17] Have filled this void? Yes. [1:38:20] And again, I always think these things, the harbingers, come together. [1:38:24] Earlier so you can go back pre-internet and [1:38:27] I think for me, I didn't watch her show growing up, but I think... [1:38:32] Oprah was the first. [1:38:34] to do this for a particular subset of America. Right, right, right. You know, she had such a different [1:38:42] affect than traditional hosts. Like she was, um, [1:38:47] You know, if Tony Soprano is this... [1:38:49] person who had to go to therapy in a tv show she like acted out like therapy live in her show [1:38:55] She was very confessional. She was like, I battled weight problems. I, you know, sexually abused and I [1:39:02] And she would... [1:39:03] work these out. [1:39:05] for her audience in a way live. And it was very powerful for [1:39:10] Not audience. Yeah, the OG parasocial. [1:39:12] The OG parasocial thing. And then there was a period where I got really interested in why there were so many people like, you know, [1:39:18] Casey Neistat, all these [1:39:20] vloggers who had huge, like tens of millions of dollars. I was like, what is going on? So I went and watched...

[1:39:25] For a week I was just like watching [1:39:27] a lot of their videos. And I was like, oh, I get it. [1:39:31] This is Oprah for [1:39:32] Casey's like, yeah, I think for a lot of, it was like Casey's your older brother. David Dobrik's the cool friend group you wish you were in. Yeah, they were like, hey. [1:39:41] Parents don't understand you. Your peers bully you. Your teachers don't understand you. But I'm like you. Look, I made it okay. Like I'm not any special, but I made it. [1:39:51] I'm here for you. They broadcast so frequently. It's like Oprah's on every day and these vloggers were on every day. [1:39:57] new episode every night. You just go home. You're like, this is my friend. [1:40:02] And yes, it's parasocial because they're not going to hang out with you or anything. But I think in some senses, like if these are the defaults, [1:40:10] or the alternative is nothing. It's probably not that bad. And in some cases, like, [1:40:15] the delta between, I don't know, the good version and the bad version of this is really important for society. [1:40:21] Yeah, I'm of two minds on this because, of course, like... [1:40:26] "'Better than nothing, probably.' [1:40:28] But also in some cases, these things took away something that maybe was better. And then it's like, well, this is all that's left and it's better than nothing. We're like, well, we used to not have nothing. [1:40:37] I, you know, [1:40:38] All of this, I always say these things all probabilistically. You know, for some people... [1:40:42] it's good. And nothing's all bad or all good. But I think just in general, I'm left with this unease. [1:40:50] over how much we're given these synthetic substitutes for real connection. And part of it,

[1:40:56] It's always right. We're always complicit. [1:40:58] It's all of our own making. You're like, hey, [1:41:00] free world, you could, uh, [1:41:02] I don't know. Who posted the thing about the Sovereign Child or... [1:41:08] You know the book The Sovereign Individual? Yeah, yeah. Someone was passing around on Twitter or something this idea of the sovereign child. [1:41:16] I think that's the name of it. [1:41:18] And so that's the idea that you should let your kids do whatever you want. [1:41:21] to give them full agency in their lives. I saw something about Naval saying maybe kids should just be able to do whatever they want. [1:41:30] I think [1:41:31] First of all, I think that's crazy. [1:41:32] That's just absolutely crazy. [1:41:35] Bye. [1:41:36] reflects a little bit of this. [1:41:38] kind of, you know, libertarian. Well, and it might be in response to the sort of like ultra soccer mom, like saran wrap. You can't even like, I at least got to like leave the house and come back at six. Right. [1:41:50] And I... [1:41:52] I think when you're also... [1:41:55] A little bit lost in the world looking for a meeting. [1:41:58] You have this. [1:41:59] I think it is a Silicon Valley thing, or at least that's where I first encounter it, which is this... [1:42:05] Cult of self-optimization [1:42:07] you know, dosing out creatine, [1:42:11] measuring your sleep metrics on your eight sleep, [1:42:14] or aura ring. [1:42:16] People talk about their personal productivity stacks, [1:42:22] of note-taking software, [1:42:24] uh... [1:42:26] that i don't know you're probably like the peter atia like live forever zone two workout there's this um

[1:42:34] this thing that [1:42:35] you know, in the secular void gets filled in. It's like wearing, you know, blood glucose monitors and [1:42:41] I... [1:42:42] I think it's amusing because... [1:42:44] Thank you. [1:42:45] the show that kind of reflects a little bit of this [1:42:49] I don't know what you call it, like upper middle class... [1:42:52] existential [1:42:55] Cry for help is White Lotus. [1:42:58] Which is entirely a show about upper-class white people problems. Yes. You're just like, oh, we can afford to go to the Four Seasons, but we're all unhappy. [1:43:10] Even though we're all [1:43:12] Very well off. It was great. Did you watch the episode this week? [1:43:15] I did. There's a great scene in this week's episode where they, their three women are trying to leave the resort to have some fun and they go to like a normie resort. Yeah. She has like a meltdown. Yeah. That she's around the normies and it is an incredible scene. Yeah. She looks around and she's like, [1:43:30] It's also, you know, she looks around at all these old people and she's [1:43:34] confronted by the specter of death. Oh yeah. And that's part of the absence of the other [1:43:40] that Byung Chauhan talks about. Like part of the other is just like, [1:43:44] the realization you'll die someday or just like sickness or, or, [1:43:48] Any sort of negativity... [1:43:50] in the world and trying to smooth it all the way and, [1:43:53] The other thing I find funny is if you look at... [1:43:58] Hinduism, Buddhism. [1:44:00] as religions, you know, we in the West treat them as kind of open source software.

[1:44:06] And we borrow parts of it for our own mental wellness stack. It's like, well... [1:44:11] I'm not a Buddhist. I'm not Hindu, but [1:44:13] I love yoga. [1:44:15] I don't pay to go to a meditation retreat. [1:44:19] I think you can tell a lot about the society by looking at what the best sellers are in the self-help section. Mm-hmm. [1:44:25] It reminds me a lot of your, you have this bit, I think you were talking about community. [1:44:30] But you talk about like we want community or I would sub in any number of things, identity, meaning without the obligation. And that is inside of all of this. It's like I want the yoga without the other. [1:44:41] Thank you. [1:44:42] Yeah, I... [1:44:44] And I think part of it is the... [1:44:47] instant gratification, like... [1:44:50] multiple decades of design to remove friction [1:44:53] the instant gratification. [1:44:55] It is hard to... [1:44:57] put up with any of the shadow costs of the physical world. [1:45:03] Any moment now where I have like, [1:45:06] 20 seconds where I have to be standing in line at the grocery store or something, I'm tempted to look at my phone. [1:45:12] Like, why should I spend this 20 seconds? [1:45:15] Bored. Right. [1:45:17] The friction of just even getting out of the house and going to... [1:45:22] Speaking of that friction, we've talked about this. I'd be curious to revisit it. We've talked about the death of the scene. [1:45:30] which obviously is... [1:45:31] heavily tied to community thing inside some of this but I think the defining aspect of it in many ways is actually just when you don't have friction you don't have

[1:45:40] the level of niche or depth that you might otherwise get. And I think applies to both of the school world and the digital world. Mm hmm. [1:45:47] There's one thing you had said, "More than that, I expect every generation needs spaces of its own, places to try on and leave behind identities at low costs." [1:45:55] and on short finite time horizon that applies to social virtual spaces as much as it does to physical ones. [1:46:00] This like Galapagos Island style thing, New York music scene, the turn of the millennium, like all of these things. And the Internet, by definition, removes friction. [1:46:10] On top of that, you have this cultural trend we've been talking about, which is that people don't want to opt into – [1:46:15] don't want to have obligation to things or commit to things. [1:46:18] And now even people who might want that type of depth, is it even possible to exist? [1:46:26] Maybe... [1:46:27] or maybe a better version of the question is, is it possible that can exist digitally? [1:46:31] Maybe people are going to become Luddites again, but in lieu of that, like... [1:46:34] The problem is that the [1:46:37] tweet threaders are so good at finding any interesting niche anytime it becomes available, even if it's in a Discord server or whatever, or on the TikTok channel or whatever, like [1:46:47] It doesn't really seem possible to have that slow... [1:46:51] organic development. [1:46:54] Yeah, I... [1:46:55] Look, now I feel like maybe we've gone too far one direction. I'll go back. [1:47:00] other direction in one way in that the internet has been amazing in my life for [1:47:05] helping me make lots of [1:47:08] friends and find lots of communities that I wouldn't have otherwise. In fact, if you ask most people today,

[1:47:14] what the source is of like... [1:47:17] Life-changing communities they find me a lot of people would say online right so I I [1:47:22] I'm a beneficiary of that, and I don't discount that at all. I wouldn't want that removed. [1:47:27] from my life. [1:47:29] I think... [1:47:31] There are people who do create [1:47:33] Really great. [1:47:35] communities online. [1:47:37] My issue is more with... [1:47:39] the philosophy of design around a lot of these things. [1:47:44] And I think just community builders have to recognize that. [1:47:48] You can throw up a Discord. That doesn't make... [1:47:52] A community. [1:47:53] There's a lot more that goes into... [1:47:55] that [1:47:56] And in fact, I find the slack of fish slackification of workplaces that like, [1:48:01] Slack Zoom, [1:48:03] replacing, [1:48:04] going to an office. Yes, I [1:48:08] I understand every time I talk about this people are like [1:48:11] Well, my commute was horrible. I'm like, yes, I've been through some horrible commutes in my life and [1:48:16] I never would want to go back to that. [1:48:18] But I also think there's something really dark about it. [1:48:21] not ever meeting your coworkers except through Slack and Zoom. [1:48:25] the disembodying of people, you know, just only ever seeing them in a little window in your Zoom. [1:48:32] application window [1:48:34] In some ways the movie Oppenheimer to me [1:48:38] It's just a movie about how important it was to work together in person to accomplish something momentous.

[1:48:44] By the way, talk about friction. You made this point on some interview a few years ago, maybe Ben Thompson, about how one of the things Taylor Swift's amazing at is just introducing arbitrary friction to be a part of the group. And like in some sense, it is pretty – like go back to the Zoom commute thing. Yeah, it turns out either choose obligation and get meaning or opt out and don't get meaning. It's kind of correlated. Yeah. [1:49:08] I mean, it's not a coincidence that some of the strongest [1:49:13] institutions [1:49:15] in organizations and communities in the history of the world. [1:49:18] have some huge friction hurdle at the beginning. [1:49:22] I'm not saying everything should be like fraternity hazing rituals, but [1:49:27] When I was young, I wasn't raised religious, but that's nice. You have a sleepover at a friend's place and they are religious and they would. [1:49:34] dragged me along to church on Sunday morning if I slept over on a Saturday night. [1:49:39] And I was all just like, oh my gosh, this is so boring. [1:49:43] to sit here in church for [1:49:45] whatever hour and a half hour but [1:49:48] See you later. [1:49:49] Kind of the idea was not that it was meant to be. [1:49:52] entertainment or pleasurable. [1:49:55] It's that shared, like, oh my gosh, we're all coming together and suffering through this together that really made for many decades in American history, the church probably one of the most important. [1:50:08] social capital institution. You know, prior to [1:50:12] banks and credit reports.

[1:50:14] a lot of churches were the institution that facilitated money lending because [1:50:20] they were storehouses, a reputational credit. So... [1:50:25] In New York, you know, there's kind of the paid... [1:50:29] neoliberal version of. [1:50:31] which is these paid private clubs. [1:50:33] Right. [1:50:34] A lot of them are really nice places to go if you want to go have a drink or something. [1:50:40] I always feel like there's something also. [1:50:42] just dark that that's like the only marketplace solution. [1:50:46] You know, it's a hard problem. [1:50:50] I want to talk briefly about AI and... [1:50:52] and where we're going with some media stuff. [1:50:55] there's an idea that [1:50:58] or maybe a spectrum that I found really interesting in reviewing some of your writing [1:51:02] You talked about this book, The Most Human Human. [1:51:05] and conversational entropy and how actually like, really what it seemed to be getting at is this notion that like the most human or meaningful thing [1:51:12] often is being able to be unpredictable or high-entry. Mm-hmm. [1:51:16] And I think that's obviously... [1:51:18] embedded most people's instincts around where, at least for art and culture and films and things like this, like the really human stuff, the stuff AI is not going to come for her. [1:51:28] is going to be that. Maybe it's creativity, maybe it's entropy, whatever. And then meanwhile, you open your... [1:51:35] I think it's your first TikTok piece, by self-identifying as a cultural determinist. And then also acknowledging... [1:51:42] You say, it turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm, significantly responsive and accurate, can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance.

[1:51:50] Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted. And granted, in that context, you're talking about [1:51:54] The Chinese infiltrating the American... [1:51:56] But I'm curious, maybe [1:51:58] For what else this might be true? Is it possible that there's almost something like a bitter lesson around culture? [1:52:06] where we're holding on to this notion that maybe [1:52:08] we have to be weird or distinct or different or out there. And in fact, like the algorithm is just like what, what TikTok maybe showed us relative to a platform like Twitter is just like [1:52:19] No, you just need a better algorithm and a little bit more data. [1:52:22] And it turns out TikTok knows me. [1:52:24] Better than... [1:52:25] Certainly way better than any dating app. Definitely better than Twitter. Definitely better than Instagram. [1:52:30] The root of the question, I suppose, is there something to holding on to this notion of being the most human human by being weird, unpredictable, high entropy? Mm-hmm. [1:52:41] Yeah, there's... [1:52:43] Something about high entropy that codes as charisma, I think. Yeah. [1:52:48] And maybe that's just, you know, [1:52:50] a relic of the past, but I still think [1:52:53] It holds. [1:52:54] It's funny houses. [1:52:56] discourse is become circular in a way in that we start looking at large language models [1:53:02] and treating [1:53:05] you know, like my friends who have kids, [1:53:08] new kids like, oh, you know, he's my child, a stochastic parent or [1:53:14] our models become the metaphors by which we judge the thing. And then like previously it was the reverse.

[1:53:22] I think so. You know, this whole discourse around NPCs is related to this. This idea of just someone who is just programmatic and predictable. [1:53:32] in some way, [1:53:33] On the one hand, it's like, you know, you call someone an NPC, it's such a [1:53:37] Dark insult? [1:53:38] In some ways, it's always used really in a negative sense. It's like reducing people to... [1:53:44] almost removing their humanity or their worth. [1:53:48] On the other hand, every time I open Gmail and it exactly predicts what I was going to write back to an email, I'm like, wow. Am I the embassy? Yeah, like mathematically, a lot of what we do is predictable. [1:53:59] What I liked about The Most Human Human is they talk about computerized chess. [1:54:03] And they say, you know, like a lot of, I don't play chess, but a lot of the top players today will tell you a lot of it is you have to memorize the opening book. [1:54:12] You're memorizing the endgame book. [1:54:14] So, [1:54:15] In some configurations, there's just a playbook and you can memorize as much of it as possible. [1:54:21] and you should play the mathematically optimal set. [1:54:24] And in the most human-human [1:54:26] The author writes that [1:54:29] It's [1:54:29] Real chess is played where the opening book [1:54:32] and the endgame book don't meet. [1:54:35] That's when you really have to think on your own. [1:54:37] I think that all about a lot of arts and [1:54:40] everything today [1:54:41] Yes, I think large language models [1:54:44] will reveal the particular patterns [1:54:49] Thank you. [1:54:49] that have always occurred. [1:54:52] in art and human creativity. And codify them in many cases where we didn't necessarily... Yeah. At a scale that was just never possible before. So...

[1:55:01] Musicians have always sampled each other. [1:55:04] But now, there's just a more scalable way to do this. [1:55:09] I think in one way that like, [1:55:11] Spotify algorithm has changed music. I think music's particularly susceptible to mathematical analysis. [1:55:18] in some ways like a mathematical art form in some ways and so [1:55:22] It's just very legible to math-driven algorithms. [1:55:26] But, [1:55:27] On the other hand, I've been to some of these AI... [1:55:30] Film festivals? [1:55:32] And I would not choose those movies over going to see... [1:55:35] movies at Cannes or the Toronto Film Festival. [1:55:40] there's still going to be room, and maybe it just forces humans to be more. [1:55:45] you know, creative. [1:55:47] There's an amazing little bit about the Lee Seidel-Go match, what you said made me think of where he kind of gets crushed, but there are these two moves, one that... [1:55:59] AlphaGo makes, but one that Lee makes. [1:56:01] is him being more human in a way. It's this crazy, unthinkable move, and it's very much what you're saying. It's like when Kasparov played Big Blue, and he was like, finally realized that, oh my gosh, this machine is... [1:56:16] going to destroy me. And he... [1:56:18] starts one game by just making some crazy moves because he knows it's been shorter. Yeah. He's just like, I have to get, [1:56:25] it off of its book? [1:56:27] And go somewhere that it's never been. [1:56:30] And maybe large language models will push us to be...

[1:56:34] Finding. [1:56:35] That's a powerful metaphor. That is so. [1:56:37] I'm hopeful. I have a [1:56:39] handful of [1:56:40] kind of like lightning style things to close us up. You wrote an amazing piece years ago called Invisible Asymptotes. I have two questions on this note. One is, [1:56:50] Do you think we're hitting the invisible asymptote? This goes back to where we started the conversation. [1:56:55] on social networks as like a category. [1:56:59] Are we just kind of hitting, maybe this is related to TikTok being the apex predator and we've just kind of hit the end of things. [1:57:05] Do we just need some, I don't know, some more time and maybe some new... [1:57:09] computing devices or do we need [1:57:11] Have we hit an asymptote on how we actually think about what these things are? [1:57:15] that might need to be crossed. We're probably asymptoted on just the raw primitives. Like, we've discovered a lot of the primitives of social, the profile page, the [1:57:26] inbox, the avatar, like button, um, [1:57:31] Some of these forms have all pretty much been commodified. [1:57:36] I think all there combined we haven't. [1:57:39] hit on it. And that's partially because most of our social networks today have... [1:57:43] migrated to becoming social media companies, [1:57:46] Because social networks, it turns out, aren't [1:57:48] a great business and social media companies [1:57:52] our great business, [1:57:53] I always think of Snapchat as a classic example of [1:57:57] an app where the interface perfectly bifurcates [1:58:01] those two aspects. Talk about friction, by the way. Like,

[1:58:04] If you swipe one direction, you get social networking. [1:58:08] The other direction is like, how do we fund all of this? It's with like the most clickbaity video. [1:58:15] like horrific. [1:58:16] crap. In a sense, it's almost more honest, though, from heaven. He's like saying, I want to build a social network, but I'm going to fund it with the tab over here. Right, exactly. It makes it very crystal clear. So... [1:58:28] I think there is a genuine yearning for more... [1:58:32] connection and there's always you know the counter [1:58:35] the backlash to the you know the thing that will happen and so [1:58:40] I don't know how it will be funded. [1:58:42] economically it's always challenging in fact many people don't realize that we chat [1:58:47] which, [1:58:48] you could argue is now. [1:58:50] the last true biggest social network in the world. [1:58:55] Their economics mostly come from video games. Wow. Like more than 50% of Tencent's revenues are from their video game business. [1:59:03] So you might say that we will have [1:59:05] maybe a great social network [1:59:07] Again, but it has to be funded. [1:59:10] buy some other thing because just you know we haven't found a way to monetize [1:59:14] messaging. Mm-hmm. [1:59:15] Are there any personal asymptotes that you recognize in the [1:59:19] for yourself and maybe... [1:59:21] found ways to [1:59:22] Pass them. [1:59:24] Come to mind? [1:59:26] That's a good question. I think... [1:59:28] Since I'm very conscious of the context of the... [1:59:33] digital...

[1:59:34] world. [1:59:36] that we're in. You know, part of why I started... [1:59:40] I haven't written in a while. I haven't been on social media as much. [1:59:45] in recent years and part of it was trying to understand you know [1:59:50] how those [1:59:52] platforms themselves are an asymptote to [1:59:55] just life yeah and attention you know how do you manage [2:00:00] How do you gather back and take control of your attention? [2:00:03] It's a struggle. [2:00:05] For sure. [2:00:06] That's why I think things like [2:00:07] the sovereign child are crazy because... [2:00:10] I mean, if adults can't even manage their attention, I can't imagine a child. [2:00:15] dealing with this and um [2:00:18] This is why I just find all of social media to be... [2:00:23] in some ways terrifying. [2:00:25] Because. [2:00:27] They can code as so. [2:00:29] innocuous? [2:00:31] but the scale of them and the power of them is... [2:00:34] It's massive. [2:00:36] I think I will go back to writing more this year, partially because I think the community [2:00:40] I found through my writing is maybe... [2:00:43] the most durable and like authentic one. I'm sure. Um, [2:00:48] In a way, you could argue the open web failed. [2:00:52] There were things like trackback links. [2:00:55] blog rings, things like early attempts to build a decentralized version of [2:01:01] social on top of [2:01:03] the open blog sphere and

[2:01:06] In one way, it was a huge failure. [2:01:08] But in another way... [2:01:11] maybe that friction [2:01:12] That was always part of that, was part of its strength. Friction keeps coming up. [2:01:19] follow you loyally, they had to just check your blog all the time to see if you even wrote anything. [2:01:24] prior, like this is prior to the [2:01:26] even news feed. [2:01:28] RSS world you just have to just go back every day like I hope they wrote something new yes and if not you're like okay [2:01:34] You go away. But the people who came back were so loyal to you. This is the Taylor Swift thing. Yeah. Friction. Friction. I don't. Yeah. I don't understand. I'm still grappling with the whole sub stack thing because I don't know. [2:01:46] First of all, I find like Substack in some ways, it's like not... [2:01:49] entirely self-describing the following versus [2:01:53] No, it's like, yeah, it's a little bit confusing and there's an algorithm there. So it's always makes me wary. [2:01:59] But some people are finding community there. Yeah, I think [2:02:03] for me to break some asymptote [2:02:05] I'll have to go back to writing. [2:02:09] You have at least... [2:02:11] Points in your life, maybe on that last note, shown an ability to pursue a beginner's mind. I think you've done that a lot of times, but probably most notably you did it when you left Amazon and went to film school. Mm-hmm. [2:02:22] I guess a two part question. [2:02:24] where and how have you been enabled by having a beginner's mindset or finding one and two, [2:02:30] Is there anything really memorable all these years later that comes to mind about film school? [2:02:36] Oh, God.

[2:02:38] I don't think you finished, but... [2:02:40] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I finished editing school. So I left Amazon, I came to New York, and I was like, I want to try filmmaking. I didn't even know where to start. So I actually went to editing school at this place called the Edit Center. [2:02:51] in New York and I did that for two years before I then was like I want to write and direct and I went to UCLA for a year [2:02:57] before I got sucked into Hulu, [2:03:00] I think, you know, related to the status piece, [2:03:02] I wrote, one of the things about having a beginner's mindset is you really have to... [2:03:09] humble yourself, you know, [2:03:11] You can go from being a senior [2:03:14] exact [2:03:15] at some field [2:03:17] And then, you know, the first film set I worked at in New York was an ex-undergrad classmate's student film. Most people are not willing to do that. And I was like, oh, I was like a PA. I was going to Canal Street to buy, you know, props and, you know, making coffee and watering down streets for night shots and stuff. [2:03:35] But there's also something... [2:03:39] Very liberating. You know, I was thinking about one like... [2:03:42] Daniel Day-Lewis left acting and just went to cobble shoes for a while. There's actually something... [2:03:48] kind of comforting about this kind of ascetic beginner's life. [2:03:53] that kind of self-abnegation which [2:03:56] You know, again, in this weird techno optimized world today, you know, [2:04:00] people replicate some of these religious [2:04:03] rituals through [2:04:05] cold plunges and [2:04:07] other forms of

[2:04:09] Other forms of friction? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Self-imposed. [2:04:13] suffering or denial, [2:04:15] Fasting was really popular for a while, eventually. [2:04:19] will adopt all the rituals of Islam. [2:04:24] Rich tech people. [2:04:26] But I, you know, I think... [2:04:28] Yes, the first time being on a film set, there was a... [2:04:32] a shot in an alley in Tribeca and for nighttime shots you often [2:04:37] water the streets so that the lights will reflect off the street. Otherwise, it's just solid black and it's boring. [2:04:44] And it was the winter. It was so cold in New York. And they were like, oh, a friend has agreed to allow us to use their bathtub to get water. But it was like a five story walk up. [2:04:54] I'd carry these buckets up. Then I'd come down, like pour it. It would cover like just a fraction of the street. I was like, oh my God. [2:05:01] But good, yeah, like... [2:05:03] a film set being on a film set [2:05:05] learning how movies are made and the weird kind of processes and procedures. [2:05:10] was eye-opening to me because filmmaking is actually a much older field or craft than making apps. [2:05:17] or tech in general. You could see how certain processes had already hardened [2:05:22] they had found like the optimal way to do certain things and in tech i still don't think we know [2:05:28] what the optimal way is and in fact it's changing again with the advent of ai yeah the question is like how do you build a company who do you staff and [2:05:36] you know, people still have debates over, do you need product managers or what is product management or

[2:05:41] how do engineers work with designers and [2:05:45] And it just tells you how mature tech is as a field. And we've never come to a consensus. [2:05:51] But, you know, imagine... [2:05:54] I don't know, 50, 60 years down the line, maybe... [2:05:57] It will be like filmmaking and more. What could technologists learn from... [2:06:01] Filmmakers or storytellers broadly, you think. [2:06:05] Uh... [2:06:06] I don't know. You know, there's probably something around... [2:06:13] story itself and [2:06:17] kind of story tropes and archetypes, mythic archetypes that I think, I mean, I always think there's some [2:06:24] encoded wisdom because you've had the [2:06:28] opportunity to. [2:06:29] push things out into the world for so long and you've had longer to see what's what's lindy and [2:06:35] what genres stick around [2:06:37] So, huh. [2:06:38] I like that. Yeah, probably something. You have this amazing framing... [2:06:43] for why video and audio can be more effective for people than books like a book won't read itself like these other mediums keep going obviously we've kind of solved that with [2:06:53] audiobooks. Is there a, and you've also, as you mentioned earlier, just praised video generally as a medium that should be taken seriously. [2:07:01] Is there a book or text or idea in one of those? [2:07:05] that you most wish could be turned into a compelling... [2:07:08] video. [2:07:09] so that it would be more shareable or viral or known.

[2:07:14] Wow. [2:07:15] Because as someone who loves video so much, you also obviously, both your writing, [2:07:20] And obviously you consume a lot. You beat a lot of books too. Yeah. [2:07:24] I think [2:07:26] I don't know. I think some... [2:07:31] amount of [2:07:33] philosophy [2:07:35] He's very... [2:07:36] dense [2:07:38] I don't know, someone gave me [2:07:40] some Heidegger at one point. I was really interested in some of the films that had been made from his ideas. A lot of Terrence Malick films are about Heidegger. [2:07:48] Really? [2:07:49] I found Heidegger so hard to read. [2:07:52] impossible like some of the sentences and a lot of academic texts that I read I find very difficult [2:07:57] I think maybe with Gen.AI, [2:08:01] One thing we could do is... [2:08:04] At what point could we treat... [2:08:06] a book as an executable file that can be compiled by a gen AI thing? And could it generate some things that just make it, [2:08:17] somewhat easier for more people to comprehend. Again, this goes a little bit against the whole [2:08:23] idea of friction and maybe, you know, I need to just grapple. [2:08:27] And wrestle Heidegger to the mat. And that's the best way to really internalize his ideas. I don't know. If you haven't wrestled Heidegger, I don't know if many of us will. But I think, you know, when I watched Badlands by Malick or Tree of Life, you know, some of his great movies.

[2:08:44] They did help me. [2:08:45] understand some Heideggerian concepts in a way that I think [2:08:49] weren't as evident when I read the text. [2:08:52] So, philosophy is maybe... [2:08:54] I think you're right. One arena. [2:08:56] One of my favorite shorter pieces you wrote years ago is Compressed to Impress, talking about Bezos' sort of like mastery of... [2:09:02] precise language in the way he obviously like most classically famously day one. [2:09:08] And how much is sort of contextually inside of that? Are there any other... [2:09:13] Bezos-isms that when you think back on that you often come back to that you think are either just interesting examples or still useful? [2:09:22] Hmm. [2:09:24] "There are probably a lot. [2:09:27] One thing... [2:09:28] I think back on, that amuses me, [2:09:31] Now. [2:09:32] It was just something he said that turned out to be really prophetic. [2:09:36] I was at an all-hands meeting and someone asked, [2:09:40] What's... [2:09:41] the thing that would most change the trajectory of Amazon's business. [2:09:46] And this was in an era where [2:09:48] My only computer at the time, my work computer, was a desktop. Okay. And then eventually some people had laptops and you could bring it home to do work, but no... [2:09:57] No smartphones or anything. [2:10:00] And he said... [2:10:02] The thing that would most change our business is an instant-on computer. [2:10:07] where you hit the on button and it's just on. [2:10:10] reducing friction. [2:10:11] Our guy. And... [2:10:13] Get rid of friction. And that's essentially the thing I carry in my pocket all the time. That's hysterical. It's always on. And I just think that's funny because I don't think he saw that.

[2:10:24] smartphones were coming. It's like asking the customer, do you want a faster horse? Yeah. [2:10:28] Yeah. [2:10:29] But his instinct was right. Yeah, yeah. He's like – you have to remember, this is the era like I had a Windows computer at work and you would boot it up and go make coffee and get breakfast. I remember. Yeah, I was a kid. Yeah, yeah. [2:10:41] Three minutes to boot up and be ready. I can vibe code a whole program. Yeah. And so he's just like, yeah, it's too much friction. Like people can't shop on Amazon at home. Like most people didn't even want to turn on their. [2:10:55] work laptop. He's like, people can't even shop on Amazon for like half the day. [2:11:00] People were mostly shopping at Amazon from work because they had a computer that was already on. Dude is a Terminator for just getting friction out of the way to buying. Yeah. Left brain, right brain. This obviously ties into the AI stuff we were talking about. You studied English in industrial engineering. Like. [2:11:16] software and film. [2:11:18] where are you leaning intuition versus sort of hyper-rationality? How do you think about that? [2:11:22] that balance trying to take in as many of the left brain complex systems algorithmic we can solve this with data and science and engineering and method [2:11:32] versus [2:11:33] Again, maybe it's a redux of the human question. Yeah. [2:11:38] Yeah, I think... [2:11:40] I don't know, one thing I really struck with in all my, like, because I kind of grew up in Silicon Valley or just the tech industry. [2:11:49] It's striking to me [2:11:51] How many of the top CEOs of the biggest companies in the world were kind of like neurodivergent?

[2:11:59] And I really think it was a superpower. [2:12:02] in that era. [2:12:04] of tech. [2:12:05] because so many of the [2:12:08] huge [2:12:09] wins to be had. [2:12:11] or engineering problems to be solved. [2:12:15] I think if I were to guess... [2:12:18] for the next decade or two. [2:12:21] especially with AI starting to [2:12:25] seep in and kind of AI-assisted coding. [2:12:30] that may be some of the [2:12:32] Biggest. [2:12:33] Gains to be had will be different types of problems, not just raw engineering problems. [2:12:38] Maybe some of them will be human problems. And I think that's an area which... [2:12:44] tech, if you were to give them a report card has been [2:12:48] less than. [2:12:51] less than good at [2:12:53] It's a [2:12:54] crazy question because you know like my nephews ask me and like my friends who have kids what should my kids do now that [2:13:01] AI is coming. [2:13:02] And I was struck when I was in SF at how... [2:13:06] Many people... [2:13:08] I felt like they had a different vibe about them. [2:13:13] And I realized that what it was is I think [2:13:16] A lot of them believe that AGI is just around the corner. [2:13:20] And so there was a weird discounting of the present. They're just like, none of this matters. [2:13:24] once AGI comes, everything's... Yeah, it's like... [2:13:28] I don't even know if it's nihilism because it's just like, hey, like a lot of them are trying to make it happen.

[2:13:32] But a sense that once it happens, it's like an event horizon. Right. And what's happening in the near term is actually irrelevant. [2:13:40] Once that happens. And so I can't see beyond that. But, um... [2:13:45] The one thing I know is humans are... [2:13:48] slow to change human nature. [2:13:51] is the most fixed thing that I've encountered in my life. And this is why we can... [2:13:56] You know the E.O. Wilson quote, [2:14:00] Here's a quote, you know, like the chief problem of modernity is that we have godlike technology, medieval institutions, and paleolithic ideas. [2:14:08] emotions or something to that effect it's kind of one of his most like iconic quotes and [2:14:13] I always read that quote as a... [2:14:15] description of three cycles of change that operate on different time frames. Technology is just constantly [2:14:21] advancing, like whether we want HGI or not to come like, here it comes, it's like the incentives will push it. [2:14:28] Institutions. [2:14:29] move more slowly we've complained a lot about the government in this podcast but yeah like institutions are [2:14:35] have a kind of like stasis and bureaucracy that's just [2:14:38] It's hard to shift. But human nature, human nature has been the same since the times of the Greeks. [2:14:44] to now we can read a greek tragedy and understand exactly [2:14:48] why something happens. [2:14:50] We can read Shakespeare play and really understand Othello's jealousy or Hamlet and [2:14:58] I think human problems and... [2:15:00] trying to [2:15:01] you know, tackle those remains a

[2:15:04] a solid steady state target. Mm. [2:15:07] My final question. [2:15:09] Maybe a tiny bit of that. [2:15:11] in the tail end, at least to the extent... [2:15:13] stories are reflective of it [2:15:16] You love films more than almost anyone I know. It's a two-parter. [2:15:19] 1. [2:15:20] Why is film as a medium so important to you and meaningful to you? [2:15:24] Mm-hmm. [2:15:25] And... [2:15:27] maybe more selfishly [2:15:29] Is there a film that you think... [2:15:31] people today, or maybe more narrowly, people who've listened to and enjoyed this conversation, [2:15:37] would find meaningful. [2:15:39] Hmm. [2:15:41] Well, I think one thing is that [2:15:43] film to me [2:15:46] when done well, [2:15:49] Thank you. [2:15:50] occupies kind of what I guess [2:15:53] Thank you. [2:15:54] Lahan would call kind of like the symbolic realm [2:15:57] like things that really deal in it. [2:15:59] raw imagery [2:16:02] Speak to things. [2:16:03] Thank you. [2:16:04] in a way that's very different from text. [2:16:07] And in some ways, I think it's probably... [2:16:10] more subconscious and powerful, [2:16:12] So... [2:16:14] Thank you. [2:16:15] The one that just comes to mind since I just mentioned it before is Tree of Life is this movie by Malick that [2:16:22] is crazy. It begins... [2:16:25] There's parts that are set at the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang. [2:16:30] There's parts with [2:16:32] Dinosaurs. [2:16:34] And then it goes...

[2:16:36] to his childhood in Texas. You know, Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt play his parents. [2:16:42] And then later in his adult life, he's played as Sean Penn going through kind of [2:16:48] I don't know. [2:16:49] midlife crisis and then it goes all the way into the afterlife and [2:16:53] I think it's a movie that... [2:16:56] people who are struggling for meaning. [2:16:59] in their life today, which is a lot of people [2:17:02] well [2:17:03] relate to on some visceral level because it's about Malik. [2:17:09] Asking. [2:17:10] What is the meaning? [2:17:11] of life what was the meaning of my life [2:17:14] He's both [2:17:16] did a PhD in philosophy and is into Heidegger, but is also a Catholic. [2:17:21] He's like, "Oh, what did all this mean?" [2:17:24] Hmm, wow. [2:17:26] Does it happen? You know, is there some arc to the universe? And I think it's a good example of something that can only be told. [2:17:34] as a movie. [2:17:35] I had a friend who... [2:17:38] I think had a chance to maybe... [2:17:40] The Ineditor. [2:17:41] on that film. [2:17:43] and had read the script and was like, I don't even know what this is. You think you read it [2:17:50] on the page. [2:17:51] And I've since read the final working script, and it's actually... [2:17:56] I think, a great script to read. [2:17:58] But certainly... [2:17:59] You know, once you watch the movie, [2:18:01] You're like, okay, this is a very different way to express it. [2:18:05] that doesn't come through entirely in text.

[2:18:09] That's all I got. [2:18:10] Thank you. This was wonderful. Thanks. It was fun. Hey, before I leave you, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. You can also find full transcripts on my website at jacksondoll.com slash dialectic. And obviously everything's linked in the description. If you have notes, feedback, or guest ideas, you can email me at pod pod at jacksondoll.com. [2:18:33] See you next time.