11: Eugene Wei - Amusing Each Other to Death

30:55That might be the final mission. When AI has solved everything else, controlling what we all look at is probably still going to be economically. I want to talk a little bit about 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 I think is particularly poignant about the original Facebook newsfeed. 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, Facebook newsfeed 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, complete with live updating scoreboard on each post.

31:40It was as if the panopticon inverted itself overnight, as if a giant spotlight turned on and suddenly all of us performing on Facebook for approval realized we were all in the same auditorium on one large connected infinite stage singing karaoke to the same audience at the same time. 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 for hundreds of millions and eventually billions of humans who had grown up competing for status in small tribes to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against every single person they had ever met.

32:16And inside of this obviously is the entertainment thing. It's obviously the gladiator arena thing. But I also think just at a more kind of primal and fundamental level, it's saying, hey, we all now have the ultimate propaganda machine in our pocket. 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 and so as much as i think there's all this adversarial stuff in some sense to me it almost feels a bit like we left aspects of the peak gladiator arena dunking stuff as i mentioned earlier in like 2018 to 2023 at least 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 yeah your most famous probably piece you ever wrote status as a service, argued that social media platforms or social networks are kind of competing in three arenas.

33:09There's utility, there is social status, and then there's entertainment. I can't help but wonder, we used to overlay status onto communication. Now maybe we're overlaying status onto the entertainment thing. There was some person on Twitter a while ago, Naval or someone like that. It 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 attribute. 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?

33:50Yeah. You know, I wrote status as a service before the TikTok algorithm became dominant. and in a way you're faced with that choice now if it's a power law algorithm that you're going to do battle with how much are you willing to change who you are i think we've all had the experience of someone we know in real life getting you know we we give it various names but twitter brain is just one variant of this thing where you get addicted to going viral and you just like seek that rush over and over but at the same time you know that you have to play a caricature of yourself in some way do you know i mean does elon know at this point yeah i don't know like and maybe some people aren't self-reflective enough to see what it's done to them 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.

34:53Just a bonkers thing. And, you know, I haven't been on social media as much in the past year and a half. And I think part of me was feeling a bit of that. It's like, you know, any book you read about cults will tell you that initially a cult leader gathers followers and then eventually the followers lead the cult leader. and you feel like you have to perform to that audience in some way. And that's why my fortune cookie tweet is just talking about that dynamic. And in some ways, I think this is the thing. It's less about status games and more what I think about now is how power law algorithms really create a homogeneity, really flatten things, partially because there's some of the most powerful selection algorithms in the history of the world just in terms of sheer scale and the degree of the power law.

35:51You know, nature has power laws, but there's no way they can work as quickly as digital power laws. We know that the stronger the selection effect, the more you're going to have this overfitting to the algorithm. And you're going to get a flattening of people. You're going to get a flattening of culture. I don't know if you've ever watched this Mark Fisher video on YouTube called The Slow Cancellation of the Future. I know the name, but I don't think I watched it. 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, kind of like Marxist thinker.

36:30And he said somewhere around the year 2000, it seemed like culture stopped progressing. some people will argue that it's not true but I think at some level there's a lot of truth to it and there have been lots of related pieces to this you know when Kyle Chaker wrote about the Airbnb-ification of design and power love all big music movies everything Marvel we look at yes we look at streaming TV shows now if you look at yeah what you can see at the cineplex there's some reduced heterogeneity you know i talked before about twitter how it seems less entropic than it used to be there's just some homogeneity that comes with really powerful power law algorithms and do you sorry to interrupt does tiktok 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, relative to even Spotify or other algorithms, would let the weird niche through?

37:41Maybe I was self-selecting to that. So could that propose that perhaps it's just a algorithmic quality problem or complexity problem? Yeah, this is always the explore versus exploit challenge and algorithms. And I think ByteDance, actually more than the Western social media companies, understood this danger. if you talk you know i've talked to their product team in the past and some of the people who work there and uh from a very early period they were like a huge problem of our algorithmic you know because they had um totel which was their at their first viral product which was yeah like also an algorithmic driven thing and even from that era they knew if we just go down the full exploit path people will just get oversaturated people get sick of things same for tick tock And exploit, just to clarify, is like classically the YouTube algorithm.

38:32Show me more of exactly what I like. Yeah, show me more of exactly the thing. And, you know, like you start off, 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? And the next thing you're like storming the Capitol with like a, you know, buffalo helmet or something. That's like the danger of the exploit. But for TikTok and ByteDance, it was more, actually, we'll just lose users in the long run if we go full exploit. So you have to do exploring. I think of this in, do you read any Byung Chul Han? Yeah, I've read two thirds of non-things.

39:08There'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 neoliberalism and the market in this era of life we live in, modernity, is the death of the other. Capital other in philosophical terms. And that's just like, you know, Byung Chau Han might refer to it as negativity. but it's like the encounter with fully formed other beings, with other thoughts, other ideas that push back on you.

39:53And if you think about what is the dominant ethos of tech design for the first 20 years, it's remove friction. Right. It's remove the negativity. Like, give me more of what I want. When Jeff Bezos said, hey, Amazon wants to be the world's most customer-centric company, 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 Facebook start off with a like button, but not a dislike button? Everything is about positivity. 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 first launched and they're like, we're not going to have politics.

40:38They were trying to avoid some of that. but there's some irony there that's like classic meta thing to remove the negativity. But I think there's been a huge consequence to this world of giving us whatever we want. And I feel it most in that these days, I feel like a consequence of my first 25 or so years online has been that um silicon valley keeps removing things or displacing things in the physical world and then replacing them with a digital substitute that always feels lesser in some way or it's like a seeing like a state style sort of or a robert moses style sort of like highly top-down articulated yeah simulacrum of it that doesn't really capture its nuance Yeah.

41:31It's like, you know, in the place of real community, I give you likes on your Instagram post in the place of real. Or LinkedIn. LinkedIn notifications. Yeah, exactly. A LinkedIn, what is it? Endorsement. In the place of real companionship and love, like if you an OnlyFans parasocial relationship or digital pornography or an AI boyfriend or girlfriend or something like that. In fact, it's really funny. I was thinking back of the movie Her, which I haven't watched in a long time. But have you seen Her by Spick Jones? Yeah, I rewatched it pretty recently. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And it's a very interesting movie to watch more recently compared to when it came out.

42:19Oh, I'm sure. So you can clarify if my memory is wrong. But one of the things that actually is more maybe profound in the movie, which is under remarked on and maybe didn't come true, is the... Isn't there a point when his AI girlfriend, he's like, hey, wait, how many relationships are you in? and she said something like, I'm in like, you know, 6 ,000 other relationships. Yeah, at least. It's like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It like totally breaks his heart. And she's like, it doesn't take anything. Yeah. You still have 100 % of me. Yeah. And he's really, I guess, like broken up about this for a little bit.

42:57Right. But at least that is a version of the other or pushback. It's just like, look, you're not going to get everything. It's not going to be ideal. Like, you know, like loving another person, a real person, someone with their own wants and needs. Has trade-offs. Yeah, there's just like challenges to that. But these AI companions and things today are really made to just follow orders. I had somebody telling me that there was a kid using, their kid was using one of these AI-plushed animals. What they realized is that when the kid had to interact with other kids, they didn't get why the other kids would ever push.

43:40They were used to the stuffed animal friend who just agreed with them all the time. And you take what you're saying to the most extreme degree. It really begs the question of whether we're going to have to articulate new sets of artificial constraints or trade-offs. My sense is, my hope might be that over time, the perfect girlfriend who never disagrees with you actually gets boring. Dare I say it? There's something inside of human nature that causes you to yearn for the more complicated thing. Did you listen to the Daily episode? No. The woman who fell in love with her ChatGPT voice, she made it into a boyfriend.

44:21And she's married, but she had some... I had never heard this scenario before, but she had this fantasy of being cut-queened, which is like she wanted her synthetic boyfriend to tell her about other relationships she was having with women. Got it. It was crazy because, you know, the woman let them use audio of her conversations with the bod. And at some point, it almost seemed like she loved this digital boyfriend more than anyone else. Like she had asked her husband to do this fantasy. And he was like, no, like what? I'm not doing that fantasy for you. Like it's weird. And so that so epitomizes tech to me.

45:01It's just like, oh, like, well, if you want that, we'll just give it to you. Yeah. Like, why would we stand in your way? And how in doing so, there's actually a book I'm really enjoying called Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornblow. And she talks about how, you know, in this era, it's just like, take out the middleman, give me what I want, like as directly and as quickly as possible. And, you know, of course, there are benefits like, like, we always have to do this disclaimer. Anytime you say anything negative about the internet, it's like, well, disintermediation was great.

45:40You know, like people only know about me because I could blog and just publish it directly to the world and, and all of that. Of course, I wouldn't be here talking to you and you wouldn't be able to put out this podcast if that didn't happen. On the other hand, I think even acknowledging that we need better critiques of what this is all doing to us, to society. And I think we have to figure out how to understand. And this may be, you know, you and I have talked before about community and friction. And so, you know, I always say that social capital is better modeled as debt than equity. You know, whether or not debt was the first form of money, as Graeber theorizes, I think it's pretty clear that very many early economies operated prior to the mention of money on mutual obligation.

46:43and mutual obligation is actually pretty productive yeah like you know so some amount of removing friction has removed mutual obligation you know i i felt bad i was just back in sf recently and i did my first waymo ride and then i went down to la and there were also waymos there and i rode them some and you know so many people i talked to were like god i love waymo like i do not want to talk to my driver i don't want to like deal with like another person i just like would rather just be alone in this car don't want to deal with the other yeah yeah don't want to deal and you know the gig economy kind of and especially during the pandemic we lived kind of this like peak version of that life you know i i was in sf which was pretty locked down and you know i couldn't even go to the grocery store they would have lines outside and ration with people so you you know You're ordering things from Amazon, you're watching Netflix at home, you're ordering meals delivered by DoorDash or Uber Eats and everything and having very minimal human interaction.

47:51and i think all of this is such a radical re-architecture of like our social infrastructure that i wonder about the health of you know lowercase l liberal democracy downstream of because i think all of this is the foundation that makes our particular form of liberal democracy kind of work. And by lowercase L, liberal democracy, I just mean, can we get along with people we disagree with and just like live in some relative amount of peace? And that's why, you know, civic solitude and the thesis, you know, resonates with me a little bit, this idea that maybe all being in the arena, duking it out all the time or watching, you know, Fox News or whatever, you know, like, and nobody watches MSNBC, but like, if that was like the liberal equivalent.

48:38Watching these kind of like echo chamber things isn't really conducive to that. I also think about, you know, Hannah Arendt speaks about the Vida Activa and the Vida Contempliva. She kind of separates these two. She's like, Vida Activa is this life of action that you lead in public, of which the highest form is participating in, you know, local politics and things, you know, acting. And then there's the Vida contempliva, the private life where you formulate thoughts and ideas. And there's a bizarre way in which the internet has reversed those two. Oh, man. You know how like people love saying this thing, like I think it's healthy to think in public.

49:27I want to think out. Let me share, you know, like my notepad of ideas. And Twitter, you look at a lot of these tweets, you're like, oh my God, that's a thought you should have had in private. Like, why are you tweeting it out loud? It's nuts. I think they're tweeting it before they've actually thought about it. Yeah, that is one of the consequences of this like dopamine distribution thing is that we kind of act without thinking. So it's kind of like bypassing the Vita contempliva. And even worse than the Vita activa, this life of actual public action is diminished where it feels like tweeting is activism.

50:05Yep. Like, oh, like, I changed my avatar to a black square. I'm, like, you know, supporting Black Lives Matter or something. Yeah, but Pyong Chulhan and Baudrillard are having a tough, tough, I don't know about laugh, grimace about that one. So I think it's particularly challenging right now Because I think most of our politicians don't see that a lot of the strife they deal with now, a lot of it is just downstream of that ecosystem. That if you rewire the way we communicate, that fundamentally just changes the nature of how you have to govern and what maybe the optimal governance size is. on the other side of the again the gladiator arena is something you're speaking towards a sense of like broadly nihilism i think in some sense obviously there's the and we'll talk a little bit more about community and scenes and things like that later as much as there's a problem around confronting the other i think there's also just like a growing growing sense of just like are these games even worth playing in the in the public online life what causes this like feedback loop to run out like is is there a world where people eventually just opt out of if they're not performing on the tiktok or the tiktokified twitter do they start to opt out of social media do we are we just headed towards a world where most people passively consume and there's nothing else i think the uh nihilism comes from two things you know so like marx would speak about the alienation of labor, what are the causes of that?

51:54And one cause he identified was the private ownership of the means of production. But in today's kind of attention economy, I would say the thing that creates some amount of burnout and alienation is the privatized ownership of the means of distribution. I mean, even the most 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, even they are using this platform, which owns that entire list. 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.

52:40Yeah. Like everybody is like, hey, we're renting some time on this platform 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. And maybe he's using it the most, you know, meaningful way possible, which is just to boost his own share of attention. Yep. And that just speaks to the scarcity of attention and how much the attention economy almost puts it to us to, like, if you don't capture attention, you almost aren't relevant anymore. Back to Facebook's mission. Yeah. If you think of the Democratic Party right now, one of their biggest challenges is they don't have anyone that can capture any attention.

53:27and you know you can argue about you know like postman with the tv era he's like oh you know you have your photogenic presidents and your charismatic presidents like the kennedys and so you could just say hey this is just a continued evolution now like who can be noisy on social media and well and the difference between postman and today is that at the very least in postman's era in the tv era you might not have performed as well because you weren't great on television but you were still getting the spot now you don't you're not even showing up you're not even getting eyeballs at all to underperform.

53:58And that is a pretty radical overcorrection beyond that. Yeah. I mean, you can see both parties misread because there was this thought that it would just be Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, and then the next generation of Bush, Clinton. Right. And then who did we have come along? We had Obama and Trump just short-circuited that assumed lineage. And why? Because - Very much near the internet. A true disruption from - Yeah. You're like, oh, yes, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, they just didn't do as well on social media. And Obama and Trump were much better at it. And so, you know, it's no coincidence that one of the most popular phrases in social media is I feel seen.

54:42That's all we want. want. It's like recognition, but you know, like the Thymus or Plato's version of the desire for recognition is now governed by algorithms. And in a way, you know, like some of the success of LinkedIn is also just that for some class of workers, if you're not in LinkedIn, you effectively don't exist. Like recruiters don't even know that you're in the world. And so everybody 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 if you're managing your career or whatever in the world, I don't blame.

55:22You remember people would always have those moral panics over how if you ask kids what they want to be, they want to be influencers. Like, oh, people used to say they want to be astral. I really don't put much stock in that. I just like people just react to the context in which they grow up. But when 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 managed to like get out of this brutal rat race. And so this leads to the nihilism, which is an interaction with the economy, which is just way more unequal and there's greater precarity.

56:02so you know i'm gen x in my generation the cardinal sin was selling out it's like oh my god my favorite band you know did a wendy's commercial or yeah like the music was used in a mcdonald's commercial 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 you live in a precarious economy and you might not have health insurance you might not have a job you know uh you have a small window in which to do that yeah yeah the 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 as default by young people is pretty dramatic did you did you watch any of um uh i guess what was it called like rejection talk it was when kids like not getting yeah a little bit a little bit of this yeah okay 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 i would hear about this and you know these kids are like posting their sat scores all their extracurriculars the gpa you're like this like looks like some superstar they couldn't get into any of the you know they can barely get into their backup school.

57:28So I think there is a nihilism that comes from late-stage capitalism, and there's an American form of it. But I also recognize a form of it in China, which also I think is, we don't think of it this way, but China actually is a hyper-capitalist, especially in the tech sector, maybe even more capitalist economy. And when I talked to my friends in Shanghai after the pandemic, but also the CCP crackdown on a lot of tech companies, there was a commonality. It was a lot of young people who had been sold this dream. It's like work hard, grind hard, hit these milestones in life. You follow the rules.

58:17And what did they get? But most of them are like, I can't afford to live in the city where the jobs are. I watched a Sundance talk about men outnumber women because of one child. And there's nihilism around dating now. Because you don't make enough money. Yeah. People getting crushed on dating apps. So I would talk to people in Shanghai and I was like, wow, what they're saying just sounds so similar to the nihilism I hear from young people in America. which leads to the whole get your bag thing. In China, they have the whole tanping movement. It's just like the lie flat or lie down. Like don't grind.

58:57Like just, you know, kind of like lie down. So you can think of it as like the opposite of lean in is like lie down. But I felt these came to a head when the whole weird social media reaction to Luigi and the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO. Yep. and there was a lot of like finger wagging online. It's just like, how could people be celebrating this? And of course, you know, everybody was always caveats with like, oh, it's just like a terrible thing. Like we shouldn't be cheering this on. But, you know, like Jeff used to say at Amazon, complaining is not a strategy. Like it's important to understand why, like why do people react this way?

59:40Right. I think it's born of a nihilism that's just like this whole late stage capitalist thing is a false promise. Like mostly leads to highly unequal outcomes where I did grind hard and then we have AI coming, which will maybe take a lot of jobs and make this whole thing worse. And so... Well, it's very Girardian in the scapegoat sense too. It seems to be much 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 scrambling politically there's a tweet somebody said there's something so poetically funny about the online left painting luigi mangioni 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 but like that it almost like that's another no it might be easy for us otherwise to just draw it classically into the hard left hard right thing But because that's not the case, maybe it's revealing in the ways of everything you're saying, which is, it actually is just.

1:00:46Well, this, this is goes back to the point I was talking about earlier about this digital destruction. And look, some of this was happening. Like we can talk a little bit about community now. Some of this was happening even before the internet, you know, because Putnam's book Bowling Alone was, I think I read that in the year 2000. It was around that time. Came out prior to a lot of these things. But I would argue that since Bowling Alone came out 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 huge rise in cable news.

1:01:27I would say Fox News is probably the most disruptive. Then we had the Internet and then we had the smartphone. Then we had social media, and then social media got big. Then we had the pandemic, and then we had remote work. I think each of those things further kind of frayed the bonds of community in the West and reduced these communal meaning-making structures that we used to have to the point now where I think it's going to be a real challenge to kind of figure out how to reassemble it. And what you see people trying to do, I think, who are trying to seek some of our community is that they just look for it in anything that they can find.

1:02:21You know, I remember, I'll never forget going to my first SoulCycle class. My friend took me up in like Marin County. Right. And just the strange cultish feel of it. there were all these candles lit it was dark they were playing loud music it was like some crazy interrogation at some point the this woman next to me was crying um I feel like this explains some of the cultish feel of America now. is that people are just seeking the simulacrum of community in anything. And so businesses that do well try to play a little bit on this. And I even look at, you know, you know more about the crypto world than I do, but some of these DAOs and these meme coins are a weird fusion of everything modern.

1:03:13it's like this like synthetic community but bonded around hyper speculation uh you know maybe a parallel phrase to the tom cruise you know like everybody runs is that you know i don't know how many crypto founders i met who are like gosh i you know i hate when these meme coins like they pull the rug out on people and like but then they end up doing it yes you know it's just like the other reaction for a nihilism yeah it's like it's either lie down or get your bag yeah yeah yeah and i there's this book speculative communities that builds on benedict anderson's imagined communities and it talks about how you know the the sequel to homo economicus is homo speculons and it's just like you know when you deal with this world of low trust institutions and an uncertain future everyone becomes a speculator yep and it's a set of behaviors and then i think it's further amplified by just the rise of all forms of online speculation and it's not just meme coins and not even just purely monetary speculation yeah it's the rise of online gambling sports gambling in particular it's like a really dangerous uh trend you know in some ways uh it was a crazy graph i saw at one point that was from a book about the casino economics.

1:04:45This is the Machine Zone book, right? Addiction by Design. Yeah, Addiction by Design. But it was even a graph I saw after this. Anyway, Addiction by Design, a great book that I read years ago and I was like, wow, it's insane. But it basically said, you know, online or electronic slot machines were the number one revenue source for all casinos. You could basically predict a casino's economics by the square footage of electronic slot machines on their floors. And every year it would go up and electronic slot machines put more people into Gamblers Anonymous than any game in the history of the world.

1:05:21And then miraculously, one day, the revenue from electronic slot machines flatlined and even started going down. And the reason was we moved the casino into your pocket. It's the cell phone. Right, right, right. 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.

1:05:51And I definitely think it's a dangerous thing. by the way i i'm a i'm a huge critic of sports betting like yeah i would argue to to take your point even further like 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 they're they're taking the flyer on the upside yeah and so it's interesting like i i would suspect that as much as sports gambling and everything else has hit the the vegas business I would suspect, too, that part of it is that simply the psychology of speculating is getting serviced in all kinds of more ways.

1:06:30Yeah, for sure. I think that's part of the thesis of speculative communities, which I'm just partway into. But also, in an economy with power law returns, you're going to be tempted to speculate. You're going to speculate. And by the way, online dating marketplace, at least for men, is a power law return thing where absolutely you're going to just naturally do higher risk-taking things. 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 looking for 20 % of men or something like this.

1:07:11Right. So we've, I mean, I guess this is 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 a whole group of speculators. And this, I think, manifests in the feeling of just how crazy the world has become. And part of it is that everyone is trying to behave 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 discourse around how, you know, every generation of kids, you know, like they're different in some intrinsic way.

1:07:58I 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 the incentives in their environment. In many ways, I don't know if you've seen, there's a lot of discourse around NBA TV ratings going down. Mm-hmm. Although, biggest game, biggest regular season game in seven years, Lakers-Celtics. Just saying, yeah. Go Lakers. Yeah. So, and I think one thing is that we talked about everything being entertainment. And, you know, Netflix competes with whatever, Fortnite or Sleep or, you know, every form of entertainment is in competition with each other.

1:08:36And just many industries like the NBA, I think the game and everything was structured for just a different era. Yes. And it's very hard for the NBA to contemplate the types of drastic changes needed 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 gambling. It's not why would you trade meme coins, but also the NBA.

1:09:12Why 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 law seems to be the recurring theme. Just structurally in the NBA, any single possession of any single regular season game is by definition meaningless. And so then you're like, okay, why would I watch a full regular season game, which also in the scheme of things is mostly meaningless. I think one reason, I have a theory on this. I read this book called Disordered Attention, which kind of gets at the fact that you pretty much have to assume most of your consumers now have a phone in their hands and are constantly.

1:09:48Did you hear about this Netflix statistic? Yes. This Netflix leaked. Yeah. That article was great. I wanted to bring it up too because anyway, back to the NBA. so a lot of people are like well you should reduce the number of regular season games which i think they should do for sure there are too many of them even the teams in their behavior show you that most regular season games are meaningless because they'll rest their stars on any given night because they know that it's better to have them rested for the playoff so the league's already kind of 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 were just doing crazy things to our friend him Sam Hinckley yeah to uh to lose games you're like well how would I watch this is like like no one cares even the players don't care the team is trying to lose but I I think the reason that the NFL has held up so well is not just because they have so few games and not just because they happen on a consistent like time of and day of week though I think those things matter for sure.

1:10:54Like the ritualistic nature, the scarcity. Yes, that matters. I think the NFL as an entertainment product works great if you have a phone in your hand. Like there's not much gameplay. Tons of breaks. There's like 90 plays a game. If a play is meaningful, they'll replay it like three times. And so you could just look up from your phone and see it again 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 um and so by the way three pointers in the nba a little bit more like the high variance yes exactly so right and then by the way the last thing is that fantasy football is just a beautifully designed speculative game.

1:11:42Yes. So you layer that on top of the real game. 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. And I know many people who are like that. Like I watch my nephew during Sundays and he's just on his phone. Yes. And he has like three fantasy teams. He's just like on the Red Zone channel like an addict. And fantasy baseball, fantasy basketball, they just aren't as well designed. You can make a case, actually, that there are two core games in American sports or things to do. There is playing fantasy football, for which football was the backdrop for.

1:12:20And there is, as Derek Thompson has said, 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. And so football is just, yeah, it's fun to watch. There's like a meta game that's fun to play. and it works with the phone in your hand. And so that goes to the Netflix article you brought up in N Plus One, the piece about how Netflix shows are designed for you to not look at the screen. And I was like, you know, I kind of intuitively felt this, but then I decided to test it out.

1:12:56And 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 the show called The Night Agent. Okay, I haven't seen it. Yeah. So I turned on, it was like, The Night Agent season two, I didn't watch season one, but I was like, hey, this is a good test of the thesis. It doesn't matter that I didn't even watch the season. And it turns out that it's true. I was looking at my phone and then kind of looking up at the screen occasionally. And I think it was like the start of the second episode. There's this entire scene where both characters are just recapping what they had just done in the previous episode, just like verbally saying it.

1:13:37in a way that no one would say, because if you had watched the show and 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. Some amount of that is inevitable, but Netflix takes it to the extreme. And again, you go back to the algorithms and the flattening of culture. Some people argue that culture is not, We have innovation and culture, but I think there is some homogenization that has happened to traditional cultural products that I've seen.

1:14:16You see it in other fields. What museum doesn't program at least one Instagram-friendly exhibition? It better be on the ground floor and bigger than everything else. Yeah, it's going to be the Kusama Hall of Mirrors or the, you know, whatever, the giant pumpkins. And that might pay for your entire year in terms of just like ticket revenue. It goes back to attention, right? And so, yes, to the Baudrillardian point about the hyper real becoming more important than the real, something about that is true. I think the art world is just one way that's reflected. I don't know if you saw this, but I thought it fascinating.

1:14:57The NBA has been experimenting, you know, in a battle to try to, like, fight their ratings slump. They've been experimenting with this NBA live stream, which does graphic overlays from the NBA, I think NBA live or NBA 2K video game on the broadcast. Oh, my God. And I was looking at the graphic they used. And it was funny because they would draw like in the game 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 do it. Not yet. But it was a classic case of this phenomenon that Baudrillard had said would just be exacerbated.

1:15:46And it's all come to pass. I think every entertainment medium is fighting this challenge of, you know, you had cited a thing I had written before that was from a talk I gave called The Programmable Society. and in it I was talking about, you know, the last thing I worked at Amazon before I left in 2004 was Amazon Web Services. You know, we were kind of like writing these memos for Jeff and it was all about what are the primitives, the computing primitives that we would release as services and, you know, there was this whole vision of allowing any programmer, like single programmer, to access the full suite of compute services.

1:16:27My talk on Programmable Society said if you looked at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all of these, these are also compute services or primitives. These are just large scale platforms that allow you to tap into human brains. And if you could figure out how to hack the system, you would get access to just millions of people. Yes, for free. and so those were also programming endpoints you know i i i look back on that now and i think you know if you think about mr beast i view mr beast is kind of kind of the apotheosis of battling algorithms to you know like it's like he's like the highlander like there's there's one person who's just like look i'm just gonna master battling these algorithms and finding that's how he relates to it too.

1:17:27I think he is an artist of the YouTube algorithm more than any other thing. Yeah. But, you know, in doing so, you don't even, like there's almost like this weird absence of ideology. It's just like, hey, look, whatever works for the algorithm is like what I'm going to lean. Like I couldn't tell you what Mr. Beast's like politics are. He's just like, hey, I'm going to lean into this. It's funny. People have been talking about having Stephen A. Smith run for office. And I'm just like, why, in what world? But that's the age we're in because he had already... Trump's our president. Yeah. Stephen A.

1:18:04Smith has already mastered a previous form of attention grabbing. And so... Yes. I'd rather have him debate Trump than Joe Biden. Yeah. If attention, if attention is the, like the spice in the Dune universe, you are just trying to find the people who can mine it most efficiently and exert their leverage on things that way. But I think it is a little bit dark to me that we have this onset of nihilism and this lack of connection and these people kind of adrift. And so I think in tech world, people are very attuned to give high status to books and writing less to tv film and images you've you said this a similar thing about five six years ago and you've definitely been incrementally proven more right yeah which video is taken more seriously do you ever see that piece i don't know who maybe it's like uh someone at the verge or someone said um they tried emailing like their ceo for just like how it improved their life no when i was at Amazon, Jeff Bezos was famous for forwarding a customer service email with just a question mark to the head of the department if the customer complained about something.

1:19:28It was the most terrifying email to get. But in general, CEOs at companies are famous for writing very terse emails. Back in the day when email was the dominant form of communication. And so this reporter just tried replying, kind of like very matter of fact, no exclamation points, It's just very short. And there's a great research paper that talks about how words convey power better than images. Some of that may be a cultural inflection. But if your CEO were to forward an email and then put in a smiley face emoji versus just a question mark, I do think the one with just a question mark is going to come off as more strong.

1:20:09Yes. Code strong. This is, by the way, my theory for why at high-end restaurants, the menus are all text and very bare. But at some of the lowest-end restaurants in like Japan or something, they have a binder with pictures. It's like in plastic. And they may even have like the little plastic molded thing of the dish. You're like, I actually love getting the pictures. I find it very useful. But at a high-end restaurant, you never know like what the dish is going to look like. You don't get to litigate this. Yeah, yeah. You don't get too literate. You may look around at other people's dishes to see what they look like.

1:20:45But at a really high-end restaurant, it's a tasting menu anyway, so you have no choice. The only choice is whether you want to pay a lot or more for an add-on, truffle shavings or something. But Silicon Valley, very into words and books and that books code as high intellectual matter. But I'm into movies, TV shows. I think they, in some ways, even better reflect kind of the subconscious of America. So I think you can trace the decline of American community through TV shows, specifically sitcoms. 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.

1:21:38tracing the atomic family and depicting kind of a fantasy of like a high function. This is American life. Yeah, Americana, trad wife type of, you know, like ideas. Yeah, yeah. Then, you know, there were the sitcoms I grew up with. I think in particular of Cheers and Night Court as... I haven't even, never heard of Night Court. Okay. Yeah. It was about a court. Okay. A group of people who all worked at a court. And then Cheers, of course, about a bar. Cheers may be the epitome of the idealized third place. That's defined in the Starbucks third place. But the theme song, a place where everybody knows your name.

1:22:22And a family of people who would come together at this bar and loved each other and took care of each other. Shared their problems with each other. A place that, frankly, doesn't, I don't think, exist in America anymore. But at the time, you're like, wow, 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. Then you had shows later on that I watched, 90210, Seinfeld, Friends, Melrose Place, The O.C. all of these shows are very interesting in that your friends would just walk into your apartment or your bedroom if you were in high school.

1:23:12Kramer literally walking into your apartment. There's no knocking. There's no door. It's like, do they have the key? How does this work? Of course, part of it is just narrative economy. You don't want to have to detect doorbell ringing and people opening the door. It's just a waste of time. But I think it's something else. I think that all of those shows were in some ways a fantasy about extending college life into adult life. Totally. Like, I don't know. Like, I asked this question of people I meet all over the world. What was, you know, look back on your life. What was the best time of your life?

1:23:48And I personally, look, this is just sampling bias for sure. It's just me asking random people. But actually, I'll ask you. What was the best time of your life? 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 only the most fun yeah yeah more people in America will say college than anywhere else of course it differs by socioeconomic class like I think I also live in New York I'm single I live in New York yeah I'm pursuing the college I'm doing it right a lot of tech people you know who become really well off that I know, of course, like they're like, right now is the best times I have like money and income I can do it.

1:24:31Like, but for most people in the West, like a lot of people will say college. And my theory on this is just that college is the only, uh, healthy social life that many people in the West ever experienced, like communal life. And it's kind of like, you know, college is this weirdly socialist environment. Like 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, but you get all this free time to just... Default programming. You can opt into things. You have a lot of social time.

1:25:08You're always, like, around people who want to do different things. It's the perfect combination of lack of obligation and ability to, like, have connection. Yeah, yeah. And to, like, focus on your passion. And so I think these TV shows, 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 uh friends you know some for some weird fantasy that they could afford this gigantic apartments across the hall from each other but that was also like a dorm and even a show like the office was like an extension of cheers it was the office as the place 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 yeah in a way that a 21 year old watching that now might actually find it alien which is pretty remarkable yeah so i think the dark turn for me then came with the show um the sopranos which was like just when did you know when it started 99 let's see i was on the amazon video team so 98 i joined the team i think the first season was like around 98 i remember some video editor on the video team telling me oh my god you had to watch the sopranos i subscribed to hbo just to watch it.

1:26:41Here is a show where Tony Soprano, the main character, theoretically was living the American dream. Top of his profession, granted he was a mob boss, but top of his profession has a wife, two children, lives in a McMansion in New Jersey, and he's absolutely miserable. his closest relationship is to his therapist. And I think this was like a harbinger of just like the rot at the heart of American life. You know, first of all, like being in the suburbs, just being isolated from your neighbors, just like this cocoon. His daughter is the kind of, you know, your classic Lisa Simpson, a little more what we would say is like a woke girl now.

1:27:33And then his son is kind of this like deadbeat. His wife likes the money, but it's always kind of like haranguing him. And he's always stressed out and anxious over his place at the top, like holding on to his job. He has no kind of meaning making institutions for him. And so he turns to the thing that we turn to in late stage capitalism to cope with our mental issues, which is paid therapy. Like we pay someone to listen to our problems. I kind of it epitomizes this kind of like what what is broken are these yeah I'm going to stop you for a second because maybe I'm pointing where we're going a little bit but with all of these examples and especially this one are these revealing or are they prophetic yeah you know maybe a little bit of both I think the anxieties of the Sopranos one of the reasons the show resonate 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 it's kind of like you know how like real like the 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 fake you're like the show that's like about something else but it's really about like all all gangster movies to me are x-rays of the economy of the country that they're in and what are the economic anxieties that result from the rules of that system they exist in.

1:29:05You look at a movie like Goodfellas, and Ray Liotta's like, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a Goodfell. He really is the middle-class American trying to live a better life, trying to ascend higher. And at the end of the movie, he ends up in witness protection. And it's a nightmare for him because he's in the bathrobe getting the newspaper from his townhouse porch. And which is funny because Tony Soprano, in the opening credits of The Sopranos, is in his bathrobe going out to get the newspaper from the end of his driveway. There's something about, is this all that was promised? Why, if I have this, do I feel empty inside?

1:29:51Do I feel like I have no? So The Sopranos was this. And then after that, the two shows I think most reflect kind of an even further evolution of late stage capitalism are Succession and Industry. both shows I loved on HBO coincidentally and both are about these people who in some ways have won the late stage capitalist game because they're rich they're making so much money and they're all deeply alone 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 you know we talk about Joe Henrich and the weirdest people in the world a lot.

1:30:38And he's just like, look, Western individualism is responsible for the most financially prosperous people in the history of the world. And part of it is this like individual striving. Also, there's something dark about individualism taken to its logical extent, minus community in this kind of like, you know, secular modern world where you're just grinding, you're trying to win at this kind of like casino economics game. Industry especially is that. Succession is a little different because obviously their inheritance. Industry is exactly about this problem. Yeah. I went back to watch the first pilot of Industry and I had forgotten it was directed by Lena Dunham.

1:31:25But you know it's all the kids interviewing to go work at that firm and one of them says something like my heroes are Margaret Thatcher and I can't remember who he said you know like this show signals from the very beginning and it's exactly about neoliberalism yes and what the issues of that are and I like that it kind of goes over the top and leans into it just kind of underline they're like look this is uh you will have people you love but the the fact that you all interact in a marketplace means that your relationships are all transactional and you will never truly be close to anyone in that world.

1:32:05There's the one, the guy who likes the girl. Do you watch him in the street? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just knew in the last season, there's no way they will end up together. Brutal episode. Even though they love each other, but there's no hope because he's poor. He came from lower. And for her, her reputation is everything. The priorities are clear in a sense. Yeah, and she needs a rich husband to provide for that. We sometimes think a well-functioning liberal democracy is upstream of a lot of these conditions, but I think it's actually downstream a lot of these conditions. When you remove those conditions, it becomes very hard to...

1:32:50You can have these rituals that kind of play act at forms of community, but you actually need real community to make these things work. And that's why I think that's one problem of this kind of gerontocratic governance that we have in America is I think they're so far removed from the online social information infrastructure. And thus, 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.

1:33:36Right. And it's very hard to break that. But they're both weak in that they've been hijacked by kind of outsider candidates repeatedly. It is interesting that, we talked about this a little, read the election, but it is interesting that one of the seeming responses to this kind of nihilistic late-stage capitalism thing is this emphasis on earnestness and more uninhibited sort of like you can just do things high agency uh obviously the the political right has certainly leaned into this notion that like looking backwards doesn't matter i don't know if that's a that's shaped sort of like the speculative stuff or something else if you were to imagine the tv show that 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 uh i don't know there haven't been i think there haven't been great shows to capture what it means to be terminally online yet i think i mean i think there are some movies that's sort of scratch at the edges of it i saw this movie last year called red rooms i don't know and uh ostensibly it's about someone who's obsessed with a trial of a serial killer this person goes and attends the trial every day this person um trades crypto is uh online all day plays online poker is on the spectrum i say all these things and i think most people would say oh, it's like some young man.

1:35:18And it's actually this woman. And she's actually like a Instagram influencer model. And she's attending this 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 get him acquitted. But I think what it's most about and what it's best about is capturing the feeling of being terminally online, to be fully captured by conspiracy theories to mostly interact with people through terminals and prompts. That's a really hard thing to fake attunement to. Yeah, yeah. If the writer or director wasn't, yeah. Right, and I think it's a lot about the dangers of what happens if you're terminally online, what kind of distortions it makes to, and how easy it is to just get sucked into conspiracy theories and to really feel.

1:36:15And, you know, this contributes a lot, I think, to the cult-like feel of American society now. I also think, you know, we do in the transition from college to adulthood, you often are, you know, in need of some mentor. And it works differently for you. I think we used to have young men who would have to go out in the military or the draft. They have these authoritative male figures, and there's negatives to that too. But I think a lot of Judd Apatow movies were... I don't know if he knew that that's what his movies were about, but I think his movies were about this trend of prolonged adolescence.

1:37:05People coming out into the world, being quite ready for adulthood, But then, you know, just, you know, all the Judd Apatow protagonists, it's like Seth Rogen or James Franco. They're, you know, they're smoking pot. They're playing PlayStation. They haven't, you know, they're like into their late 20s. They still haven't gotten into a relationship. And, you know, you see the data and we have just this version of this thing. And this, I think, opens the door, like the internet to, you know, up and coming cult leaders to come in. You know, like I think of Jordan Peterson as really a kind of substitute father for a lot of young men.

1:37:51Like even his aesthetic is, you know, make your bed, stand up straight. 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 it's through a screen or whatever else but it's yeah like the whole you know I think like the Rogan Chris Williamson so many of these have filled this void yes and again I always think these things the harbingers come earlier so you can go back pre-internet I think for me I didn't watch her show growing up, but I think Oprah was the first to do this for a particular subset of America.

1:38:38Right, right, right. You know, she had such a different affect than traditional hosts. Like she was, you know, if Tony Soprano was this person who had to go to therapy in a TV show, she like acted out like therapy live in her show. She was very confessional. She was like, I battled weight problems. I, you know, was sexually abused. And I, and she would work these out for her audience in a way live. And it was very powerful for that audience. Yeah, the OG parasocial dynamic in a sense. 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, Casey Nestat, all these vloggers who had huge, like tens of millions of dollars.

1:39:23Like, what is going on? So I went and watched for a week. I was just like watching a lot of their videos. And I was like, oh, I get it. This is Oprah for great school kids. 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, 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. I'm here for you. They broadcast so frequently. It's like Oprah was on every day, and these vloggers were on every day.

1:39:57New episode every night. You just go home. You're like, this is my friend. And yes, it's parasocial because they're not going to hang out with you or anything. But I think in some senses, if these are the defaults or the alternative is nothing, it's probably not that bad. And in some cases, the delta between, I don't know, the good version and the bad version of this is really important for society. Yeah, I'm always like, I'm of two minds on this because, of course, like better than nothing, probably. 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.

1:40:35We're like, well, we used to not have nothing. You know, all of this, I always say these things all probabilistically, you know, for some people. It's good and nothing's all bad or all good. But I think just in general, I'm left with this unease over how much we're given these synthetic substitutes for real connection. And part of it is always, right? We're always complicit. It's all of our own making. You're like, hey, free world. You could, I don't know, who posted the thing about the sovereign child or, you know, the book, The Sovereign Individual? Yeah, yeah. And someone was passing around on Twitter or something, this idea of the sovereign child.

1:41:16I think that's the name of it it's about the idea that you should let your kids do whatever you want 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 yeah first of all I think that's crazy it's just absolutely crazy but reflects a little bit of this kind of you know libertarian 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 and i i think when you're also um a little bit lost in the world looking for meaning you have this and i think it is a silicon valley thing or at least that's where i first encounter it which is this cult of self-optimization you know dosing out creatine measuring your sleep metrics on your eight sleep or aura ring uh people talk about their you know personal productivity stacks note-taking software uh that i don't know you're probably like the peter atiyah like live forever zone two workout there's this um this thing that you know in the secular void gets filled in it's like wearing you know blood glucose monitors and i i think it's amusing because um the show that kind of reflects a little bit of this i don't know what you call it like upper middle class existential cry for help is white lotus which is entirely a show about you know kind of like upper class white people problems yes you're just like oh like we can afford to go to the four seasons, but we're all unhappy, even though we're all very well off.

1:43:13It was great. Did you watch the episode this week? I did. There's a great scene in this week's episode where three women are trying to leave the resort to have some fun, and they go to, like, a normie resort, and she has, like, a meltdown. Yeah. That she's around the normies, and it's an incredible scene. She looks around, and she's like... It's also, you know, she looks around at all these old people, and she's confronted by the specter of death. oh yeah and that's part of the absence of the other that byang jo han talks about like part of the other is just like the realization you'll die someday or just like sickness or any any sort of negativity in the world and trying to smooth it all away and you know the the other thing i find funny is if you look at um hinduism buddhism as religions you know we in the west treat them is kind of open source software and we borrow parts of it for our own mental wellness stack.

1:44:10It's like, well, I'm not a Buddhist. I'm not Hindu, but I love yoga. And I don't pay to go to a meditation retreat. I think you could tell a lot about the society by looking at what the best sellers are in the self-help section. It reminds me a lot of your, you have this bit, I think you were talking about community, 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 commitments. Yeah. And I think part of it is the instant gratification, like multiple decades of design to remove friction, the instant gratification.

1:44:55It is hard to put up with any of the shadow costs of the physical world. Right. Any moment now where I have like 20 seconds where I have to be standing in line at the grocery store or something, I'm tempted to look at my phone. Like, why should I spend this 20 seconds bored? Right. The friction of just even getting out of the house and going to anything. Speaking of that friction, like we've talked about this. I'd be curious to revisit it. We've talked about the death of the scene, which obviously is heavily tied to the community thing. It's tied to 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 the level of niche or depth that you might otherwise get.

1:45:43And that I think applies to both the physical world and the digital world. There's one thing you had said. More than that, I suspect every generation needs spaces of its own, places to try on and leave behind identities at low costs and on short, finite time horizons. that applies to social virtual spaces as much as it does to physical ones 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 on top of that you have this cultural trend we've been talking about which is that people don't want to opt into or don't want to have obligation to things or commit to things now even people who might want that type of depth is it even possible to exist maybe or maybe a better version of the question is it possible that can exist digitally maybe people are going to become luddites again but in lieu of that like the the problem is that the tweet threaders are so good at finding any interesting niche anytime it becomes available even if it's in a discord server or whatever that or on or on the tiktok channel or whatever like it doesn't really seem possible to have that slow organic development Yeah, I feel like maybe we've gone too far one direction.

1:46:59I'll go back other direction in one way in that the internet has been amazing in my life for helping me make lots of friends and find lots of communities that I wouldn't have otherwise. In fact, if you ask most people today what the source is of life-changing communities they find, I mean, a lot of people would say online. Right. And so I am a beneficiary of that and I don't discount that at all. I wouldn't want that removed from my life. I think there are people who do create really great communities online. My issue is more with the philosophy of design around a lot of these things. And I think just community builders have to recognize that you can throw up a discord and that doesn't make a community.

1:47:53There's a lot more that goes into that. And in fact, I find the slackification of workplaces that like Slack of Zoom replacing, you know, going to an office. Yes. Like I understand every time I talk about this, people are like, well, it was my commute was horrible. And like, yes, I've been through some horrible commutes in my life and I never would want to go back to that. But I also think there's something really dark about not ever meeting your coworkers except through Slack and Zoom. the disembodying of people you know just only ever seeing them in a little window in your zoom application window in some ways the movie Oppenheimer to me is just a movie about how important it was to work together in person to accomplish something momentous like I don't think by the way talk about friction yeah 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.

1:48:56And like in some sense, it is pretty direct. 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. I mean, it's not a coincidence that some of the strongest institutions and organizations and communities in the history of the world have some huge friction hurdle at the beginning. Right. I'm not saying everything should be like, you know, fraternity hazing rituals, but when I was young, I wasn't raised religious. But sometimes you have a sleepover at a friend's place and they are religious and they would drag me along to church on Sunday morning if I slept over on a Saturday night.

1:49:39And I was always like, oh, my gosh, this is so boring to sit here in church for whatever, hour and a half, hour. But, you know, kind of the idea was not that it was meant to be entertainment or pleasurable. It's that, you know, shared like, oh, my gosh, we're all coming together and suffering through this together. That really made, you know, for many decades in American history, the church probably one of the most important social capital institutions. Prior to banks and credit reports, a lot of churches were the institution that facilitated money lending because they were storehouses of reputational credit.

1:50:23So in New York, there's kind of the paid neoliberal version of a community, which is these paid private clubs. Right. like a lot of them are really nice places to go if you want to go have a drink or something but i always feel like there's something also just dark that that's like the only marketplace solution you know it's a hard problem i want to talk briefly about ai and and where we're going with some media stuff there's an idea that or maybe a a spectrum that i found really interesting in reviewing some of your writing you talked about this book the most human human 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 often is being able to be unpredictable or high entry and and i think that's obviously embedded most people's instincts around where at least for art and culture and films and and things like this like the the really human stuff the stuff ai is not going to come for is going to be that.

1:51:29Maybe it's creativity, maybe it's entropy, whatever. And then meanwhile, you open your, I think it's your first TikTok piece by self-identifying as a cultural determinist. And then also acknowledging, you say, it turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm, significantly responsive and accurate, can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted. And granted, in that context, you're talking about the Chinese infiltrating the American veil. but I'm curious maybe for what else this might be true. Is it possible that there's almost something like a bitter lesson around culture where we're holding onto this notion that maybe we have to be weird or distinct or different or out there?

1:52:13And in fact, like the algorithm is just neat. Like what TikTok maybe showed us relative to a platform like Twitter is just like, no, you just need a better algorithm and a little bit more data. And it turns out TikTok knows me better than, certainly way better than any dating app, definitely better than Twitter, definitely better than Instagram. The root of the question, I suppose, is there something to holding onto this notion of being the most human human by being weird, unpredictable, high entropy? Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's something about high entropy that codes as charisma, I think. And maybe that's just, you know, a relic of the past.

1:52:51But I still think it holds. it's funny how this discourse has become circular in a way in that we start looking at large language models and treating you know like my friends who have kids new kids like oh you know he's my child a stochastic parent or our models become the metaphors by which we judge the thing and then like previously it was the reverse 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 in some way. On the one hand, it's like, you know, you call someone an NPC, it's such a dark insult in some ways.

1:53:39It's always used really in a negative sense. It's like reducing people to almost removing their humanity or their worth. 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 mbc yeah like mathematically a lot of what we do is predictable what i liked about the most human human is they talk about computerized chess 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 and you're memorizing the end game book So in some configurations, there's just a playbook, and you can memorize as much of it as possible, and you should play the mathematically optimal set.

1:54:24And in The Most Human Human, the author writes that it's real chess is played where the opening book and the end game book don't meet. That's when you really have to think on your own. I think that all about a lot of art and everything today. Yes, I think large language models will reveal the particular patterns that have always occurred in art and human creativity. And codify them in many cases where we didn't miss. Yeah, at a scale that was just never possible before. So musicians have always sampled each other. But now there's just a more scalable way to do this. I think in one way that like the Spotify algorithm has changed music.

1:55:15I think music's particularly susceptible to mathematical analysis. It's like a mathematical art form in some ways. And so it's just very legible to math driven algorithms. But on the other hand, I've been to some of these AI film festivals. and I would not choose those movies over going to see movies at Cannes or the Toronto Film Festival. There's still going to be room and maybe it just forces humans to be more creative. 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 AlphaGo makes, but one that Lee makes.

1:56:01that 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 going to destroy me. And he starts one game by just making some crazy moves because he knows it's been trained. Yeah, he's just like, I have to get it off of its book and go somewhere that it's never been. and maybe, you know, large language models will push us to be finding what that is. So I'm hopeful. I have a handful of kind of like lightning style things to close this up.

1:56:43You wrote an amazing piece years ago called Invisible Asymptotes. I have two questions on this note. One is, do you think we're hitting the invisible asymptote, this goes back to where we started the conversation, on social networks as like a category? are 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 do we just need some i don't know some more time and maybe some new computing devices or do we need have we hit an asymptote on how we actually think about what these things are 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 inbox, the avatar, the like button.

1:57:31Some of these forms have all pretty much been commodified. I think all they're combined, we haven't hit on it. And that's partially because most of our social networks today have migrated to becoming social media companies because social networks, it turns out, aren't a great business. And social media companies are a great business. I also think of Snapchat as a classic example of an app where the interface perfectly bifurcates those two aspects. Talk about friction, by the way. Like you swipe one direction, you get social networking. The other direction is like, how do we fund all of this? It's with like the most clickbaity video, like horrific crap.

1:58:17In a sense, it's almost more honest though. Yeah. 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 I think there is a genuine yearning for more connection. And there's always, you know, the counter, the backlash to the, you know, the thing that will happen. And so I don't know how it will be funded. Economically, it's always challenging. In fact, many people don't realize that WeChat, which you could argue is now the last true biggest social network in the world, their economics mostly come from video games.

1:58:58Wow. Like more than 50 % of Tencent's revenues are from their video game business. So you might say that we will have maybe a great social network again, but it has to be funded by some other thing because we haven't found a way to monetize messaging. Are there any personal asymptotes that you recognized for yourself and maybe found ways past them come to mind? That's a good question. I think, you know, since I'm very conscious of the context of the digital world that we're in, you know, part of why I started, like I haven't written in a while. I haven't been on social media as much in recent years.

1:59:46and part of it was trying to understand, you know. how those platforms themselves are an asymptote to life. Yeah. And attention. How do you manage, how do you gather back and take control of your attention? It's a struggle for sure. That's why I think things like the sovereign child are crazy because, I mean, if adults can't even manage their attention, I can't imagine a child dealing with this. And this is why, you know, I just find all of social media to be in some ways terrifying. Right. Because they can code as so innocuous. But the scale of them and the power of them is massive. I think I will go back to writing more this year.

2:00:38partially because I think the community I found through my writing is maybe the most durable and like authentic one. I'm sure. In a way, you know, you could argue the open web failed. There were things like trackback links, blog rings, things like early attempts to build a decentralized version of social on top of the open blogosphere. And in one way, it was a huge failure. But in another way, maybe that friction that was always part of that was part of its strength. You know, friction keeps coming up. You know, like your readers who follow you loyally, they had to just check your blog all the time to see if you even wrote anything.

2:01:24This is prior to the even news feed RSS world. You just have to just go back every day. You're like, oh, I hope they wrote something new. And if not, you're like, okay, you go away. but the people who came back were so loyal to you this is the thing yeah friction 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 first of all i find like sub stack in some ways it's like not entirely self-describing the following versus no it's like the whole thing is yeah it's a little bit confusing and and there's an algorithm there so it always makes me wary but you know some people are finding community there Yeah, I think for me to break some asymptote, I'll have to go back to writing.

2:02:09You have at least at 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. I guess a two-part question, where and how have you been enabled by having a beginner's mindset or finding one? And two, is there anything really memorable all these years later that comes to mind about film school? Oh, gosh. I don't think you finished, but. 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.

2:02:46I didn't even know where to start. So I actually went to editing school at this place called the Edit Center 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 before I got sucked into Hulu. I think, you know, related to the status piece I wrote, one of the things about having a beginner's mindset is you really have to humble yourself. You know, you can go from being a senior, you know, exec at some field. 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.

2:03:26And 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. But there's also something very liberating. You know, I always think about when, like, Daniel Day-Lewis left acting and just went to cobble shoes for a while. There's actually something kind of comforting about this kind of ascetic beginner's life. that kind of self-abnegation, which, you know, again, in this weird techno-optimized world today, you know, people replicate some of these religious rituals through cold plunges and other forms of self-imposed suffering or denial.

2:04:15Fasting was really popular for a while. eventually will adopt all the rituals of Islam as rich type people. But I think, yes, the first time being on a film set, there was a shot in an alley in Tribeca. And for nighttime shots, you often water the streets so that the lights will reflect off the street. Otherwise, it's just solid black and it's boring. 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. I'd carry these buckets up. And I'd come down, like pour, and it would cover like just a fraction of the street.

2:05:00I was like, oh my God. But good, yeah. Like a film set, being on a film set, learning how movies are made and the weird kind of processes and procedures was eye-opening to me. because filmmaking is actually a much older field or craft than making apps or tech in general. You could see how certain processes had already hardened. They had found the optimal way to do certain things. In tech, I still don't think we know what the optimal way is. In fact, it's changing again with the advent of AI. The question is, how do you build a company? Who do you staff? People still have debates over, do you need product managers?

2:05:39or what is product management or how did engineers work with designers? And it just tells you how mature tech is as a field. And we've never come to a consensus. But, you know, imagine, I don't know, 50, 60 years down the line, maybe it will be like filmmaking and more. What could technologists learn from filmmakers or storytellers broadly, you think? I don't know. There's probably something around story itself and kind of story tropes and archetypes, mythic archetypes that I think... I mean, I always think there's some encoded wisdom because you've had the opportunity to push things out into the world for so long and you've had longer to see what's Lindy and what genres stick around.

2:06:37so i like that yeah probably something you have this amazing framing 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 audiobooks is there a and you've also as you mentioned earlier just praise to video generally as a medium that should be taken seriously is there a book or text or idea in one of those that you most wish could be turned into a compelling video so that it would be more shareable or viral or known wow because as someone who loves video so much you also obviously both your writing and obviously you consume a lot you You beat a lot of books too.

2:07:23Yeah. I think, I don't know. I think some amount of philosophy is very dense. I don't know. Someone gave me 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. Really? I found Heidegger so hard to read. Just impossible. Like some of the sentences. And a lot of academic texts that I read, I find very difficult. I think maybe with Gen AI, one thing we could do is at what point could we treat 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 somewhat easier for more people to comprehend?

2:08:20Again, this goes a little bit against the whole idea of friction and maybe I need to just grapple 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, they did help me understand some Heideggerian concepts in a way that I think weren't as evident when I read the text. So philosophy is maybe one arena. One of my favorite shorter pieces you wrote years ago is Compressed to Impress, talking about Bezos' mastery of precise language in the way he, obviously, most classically famously, day one, and how much is contextually inside of that.

2:09:11Are there any other Bezosisms that, when you think back on, that you often come back to, that you think are either just interesting examples or still useful?

2:09:25there are probably a lot one thing i think back on that amuses me now it was just something he said that turned out to be really prophetic it was at an all-hands meeting and someone asked what's the thing that would most change the trajectory of amazon's business and this was in an era where my only computer at the time, my work computer was a desktop. Okay. And then eventually some people had laptops. You could bring it home to do work, but no smartphones or anything. And he said, the thing that would most change our business is an instant on computer where you hit the on button and it's just on.

2:10:10Do send friction, our guy. Just 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 smartphones were coming. It's like asking the customer, do you want a faster horse? Yeah. Yeah. 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. Because it took like three minutes to boot up and like be ready. Now I can vibe code a whole program.

2:10:46Yeah. Yeah. 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 work laptop. He's like, people can't even shop on Amazon for like half the day. 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 software and film, where are you leaning intuition versus sort of hyper rationality?

2:11:21How do you think about that, 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 versus again, maybe it's a redux of the human question. Yeah, I think, 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. It's striking to me how many of the top CEOs of the biggest companies in the world were kind of like neurodivergent. And I really think it was a superpower in that era of tech because so many of the huge wins to be had were engineering problems to be solved.

2:12:15I think if I were to guess for the next decade or two, especially with AI starting to seep in and kind of AI-assisted coding, that maybe some of the biggest gains to be had will be different types of problems, not just raw engineering problems. Maybe some of them will be human problems. And I think that's an area which tech, if you were to give them a report card, has been less than good at. It's a crazy question because, you know, like my nephews ask me and like my friends who have kids, they're just like, what should my kids do now that AI is coming? and I was struck when I was in SF at how many people, I felt like they had a different vibe about them and I realized that what it was is I think a lot of them believed that AGI is just around the corner and so there was a weird discounting of the present.

2:13:23They're just like, none of this matters. Once AGI comes and everything's, yeah, it's like, I don't even know if it's nihilism because it's just like, hey, a lot of them are trying to make it happen. But a sense that once it happens, it's like an event horizon. And what's happening in the near term is actually irrelevant once that happens. And so I can't see beyond that. But the one thing I know is humans are slow to change. Human nature is the most fixed thing that I've encountered in my life. And this is why we can read, you know, the E.O. Wilson quote, his quote, you know, like the chief problem of modernity is that we have godlike technology, medieval institutions, and paleolithic emotions, something to that effect.

2:14:10It's kind of one of his most like iconic quotes. And I always read that quote as a description of three cycles of change that operate on different timeframes. Technology is just constantly advancing. Whether we want AGI or not to come, people are trying to make it, it's just like the incentives will push it. Institutions move more slowly. We've complained a lot about the government in this podcast, but yeah, institutions have a kind of stasis and bureaucracy that's just, it's hard to shift. But human nature, human nature has been the same since the times of the Greeks to now. We can read a Greek tragedy and understand exactly why something happens We can read Shakespeare play and really understand Othello's jealousy or Hamlet.

2:14:57I think human problems and trying to tackle those remains a solid steady state target. My final question, maybe a tiny bit of that in the tail end, at least to the extent stories are reflective of it. You love films more than almost anyone I know. It's a two-parter. One, why is film as a medium so important to you and meaningful to you? And maybe more selfishly, is there a film that you think people today, or maybe more narrowly, people who've listened to and enjoyed this conversation would find meaningful? hmm well i think one thing is that film to me when done well

2:15:51occupies kind of what i guess lahan would call kind of like the symbolic realm like things that really deal in raw imagery speak to things in a way that's very different from text And in some ways, I think it's probably more subconscious and powerful. So, you know, the one that just comes to mind, since I just mentioned it before, is Tree of Life is this movie by Malick that is crazy. It begins, there's parts that are set at the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang. There's parts with dinosaurs. and then it goes to his childhood in Texas. You know, Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt play his parents and then later in his adult life, he's played as Sean Penn going through kind of, I don't know, midlife crisis and then it goes all the way into the afterlife.

2:16:53I think it's a movie that people who are struggling for meaning in their life today, which is a lot of people, will relate to on some visceral level because it's about Malik asking, what is the meaning of life? What was the meaning of my life? You know, he's both did a PhD in philosophy and is into Heidegger, but is also a Catholic. He's, you know, he's like, oh, what did all this mean? What 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 as a movie I had I had a friend who I think had a chance to maybe be an editor on that film and had read the script and was like this I don't even know what this is it's incomprehensible I think you read it on the page and I I've since read the final working script and it's actually I think a great script to read but certainly, you know, once you watch the movie, you're like, okay, this is a very different way to express it that doesn't come through entirely in text.

2:18:09That's all I got. 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, P-O-D, at jacksondoll.com. See you next time.