11: Eugene Wei - Amusing Each Other to Death

Welcome to Dialectic Episode 11 with Eugene Wei. Eugene is best known for his incredible essays observing how technology and social media has impacted culture and all of us. A few of the most notable of these are statuses of service, invisible asymptotes, and TikTok and the sorting hat. Eugene started his career at Amazon in some of the company's earliest days where he spent seven years. He then took a brief detour to go to film school and he spent many of the coming years focused on the intersection of technology and entertainment across Hulu, a company he co-founded Early, Flipboard, and Oculus. Recently, Eugene has been focused on his own ideas, advising companies, angel investing, and of course, writing. I don't know if there's anyone who has written more thoughtfully and critically about how social media works and how it's affecting us than Eugene. And so this conversation is about all of those things. Entertainment, social media, community, and humanity, and how they're all evolving in the digital age. In the conversation, I wanted to make sure to both hit on some of Eugene's most iconic ideas and essays and have him reflect on them and how they've evolved. But I also wanted to talk about a handful of things he hasn't yet covered. And so I'd like to think we did a good job of mixing the two of them. I hope readers and non-readers alike of Eugene's will find this conversation really compelling. I think Eugene's criticism and insights, particularly about how the cultural decline of community oftentimes linked to the decreasing friction that technology offers to be just profoundly relevant today. At times, parts of this conversation might seem pessimistic, but I think the key is that Eugene is asking many of the questions that we simply need answers to and we need to develop answers to. And so there's definitely room for optimism. I'm hopeful that listeners will be inspired to try to come up with better answers to how we can use technology to improve our lives, improve our culture and communities, and most importantly, maintain our humanity. With that, here is Eugene. Eugene Way, we're here. There's an iconic opening at the beginning of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he compares George Orwell's 1984, which is often...

looked forward to as this kind of fearful thing, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. He says, What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. And so we live in this era where entertainment is the North Star, probably more than ever before. And the bar for entertainment is continuing to increase. We have digital forms of entertainment that are kind of competing with each other, literally every possibility, from films to TikTok to sports to games. There's the classic Reed Hastings line that they're competing with sleep. Politics is now entertainment. News is entertainment. Social media has ceased to be about communication or connection. It's really just about entertainment. And in a previous interview, you discussed the idea that part of everyone's business has to be entertainment now. In one of your TikTok posts, you said the 2020 writer's room is undefeated, affirming the notion that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. And so my first question, in media, in stories and in products, what actually goes into capturing attention? And then beyond that, is this entertainment world, is amusement the final frontier and the only frontier? predicting at the time of the television era and now the social media era? I think that we maybe are even beyond the world that Postman wrote about. He was speaking specifically of the transition from print to TV, of course, and how TV turned politics and things like that into forms of entertainment. He wasn't alive for the social media era.

And I'd argue that while the social media era evolved out of the TV era, it's different in some fundamental ways. And what we're doing to ourselves now, I guess you could call it amusement, but a lot of times it doesn't feel even entertaining or amusing. And part of it is just that the social media companies... You know, they shifted. At first, they had these feeds and they were, you know, reverse chronological. And then the transition from social networking to social media was when you put an algorithm over the feed, which naturally happens with any feed that, you know, you go in, you start adding people, you start following things. You know, I have this problem with Substack now where, you know, people are like, oh, you should follow this Substack and that one. And, you know, I start following it and soon you're... You're just, like, overwhelmed. You can't keep up. You're just, like, getting, you know, like, 50 newsletters a day. Like, I can't sift through it. Of course, the solution to that in modern times is always an algorithm that tries to sift the signal from the noise. And, you know, that was a huge shift. You know, the term social media didn't exist when the Internet first started. Like, I started using Internet when I was, you know. Mosaic came out when I was a senior in college or a junior in college. And so it kind of grown up with it. And that term, I don't know when social media first started being used, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was around the time of the algorithm being put over the feet. And so what happens is that in an era of infinite information, the most important thing, as you know, is distribution. or, you know, in Marxist terms, what we might call circulation. And all of us who are participating on social media were faced with the choice. Like, do I do battle with the algorithm to try to get anybody, you know, any of my stuff to stick throughout this? And almost by definition, you know, the people who we see on social media are the ones who broke through in some way.

But we started shaping ourselves around that. So Postman would say, well, TV shaped the way that politicians would win elections and the way they would speak to the public. Social media, which is more participatory, shapes all of our behavior on a democratic basis. And we're all kind of implicated in it also because we ourselves, through our clicks, our likes, we determine who wins the game. So it's this strange thing where we complain about it and then we're also complicit in it. And of course, there's some collective action problem where we can't all get ourselves off of it. But in that era, I would say a couple things have become more apparent. I think there was a book called Trolling Ourselves at that. But anyway, you know, something like trolling becomes a dominant tactic in the social media. Evolutionarily fit in a way. Yeah, just because of the way the algorithms work. The algorithms are hypersensitized to engagement and have a hard time distinguishing between positive and negative engagement. I think trolling has always been a thing that, you know, had a small scope in human history. And then suddenly you could troll and get global scale to it. And it's perfectly attuned to these algorithms. The other thing is that TikTok, you know, whether it gets banned or not, whatever happens with it, I think it's already made an everlasting impact on the West just by forcing all of Western social media companies to adopt its algorithm. You remember that Western social media began with the idea of a social graph. You had to follow people to get stuff in your feed. And then over time, they started adding things from other people that you didn't follow into your feed, tried to get a sense of your interests. But TikTok came along and was just like, look, we don't even need a social graph. We'll just watch you, watch some short videos. We'll figure out what you're into. We're going to know you better than you are. Yeah. And we'll unconstrained the distribution.

It used to be on Twitter, you know, if you had a viral tweet, you could get a lot of likes and things, but not to the scale you can today in the For You feed. There's a point in one of your essays you reference like a viral tweet getting 1,000 or maybe even 10,000 likes. Yeah. And I realized I totally take for granted how common that is now. It was crazy to reflect like 1,000 tweets used to be. Your classic fortune cookie tweet has like a thousand likes. And I'm like, it's not bigger. Yeah. And I realized that, well, Twitter used to be different. Yeah, because you were kind of limited by how many followers you had. You depended on them to get that viral tsunami going. But TikTok's like, look, if there's a good TikTok, everybody should see it. There's no reason to constrain it. And they surpassed Western social media in capturing attention. And so everybody like, you know. in the West did a kind of fast follow. And I think it works in some cases. I think in the case of Twitter, you know, and I wrote about this, and I think a lot of people disagree with this, but I still think that applying a TikTok style algorithm to Twitter creates some perverse incentives. And we've seen a rise. That don't show up on TikTok? Yeah. I think because the mediums are different. I think TikTok does a better job of capturing negative sentiment. And Twitter doesn't really have strong mechanisms. Capturing it and using it in a positive way to improve the content or the algorithm rather than just showing it to you and blowing things up or whatever. Yeah. And I think it's important. It'll relate to some things we talk about later in terms of just negativity. You know, I think Western social media tends to their business models to really try to achieve kind of frictionless positivity. And that is the wrong type of incentive if you want to achieve, you know, the magic of old Twitter was that it had higher entropy for me. I would just meet like interesting people on Twitter and encounter random things from someone who had, you know, 10 followers. Yeah, structurally niche, but still relevant.

meet up for coffee in the real world, and some of them became my friends and everything. And now when I look at the 4U feed, I feel like it's all clickbait all the way down. You get this any complex adaptive system, there's going to be overfitting to some degree. Everyone is faced with this choice of how far do you want to sell out to get the algorithm to give you that distribution juice. Trolling is just... one of those meta tactics that works really well. So, you know, McLuhan would say, you know, all of this electronic, you know, the internet, everything, it's kind of like our nervous system just built out in the physical world. And Western social media companies are the ones who choose kind of how the synapses connect and fire in these. by setting up the algorithm, but these algorithms are also black boxes. I don't really know how they work in a general sense, but who's tuning them? If Elon's like, hey, I want all my tweets to be seen by everybody, that's one way he's rewiring the digital nervous system of humanity. And even, by the way, if they're open source or highly prescriptive or whatever, there is emergence on top of them and game theory and prisoner's dilemmas. lead to all the things you were talking about. So everything, once we had these algorithms and once they became more and more power law in nature, you're just going to see a proliferation of all forms of clickbait. The early forms of clickbait in the era where links weren't downvoted on Twitter were just salacious headlines that people found misleading, but they worked. When people talk about thirst traps on Instagram, that's just a form of clickbait. Tweetstorm. That's a form of clickbait. You know how on YouTube, all the thumbnails, like if you search for a product name, all the thumbnails look the same. It's like a big smiling face, someone holding the product. Some crazy glam. Yeah, like a gradient color, solid color background and the headline written in big font. That's a form of clickbait. Everyone is figuring out how to game the algorithms. Even before social media,

when people would complain about why are recipe pages so long on the web, right? That's just a form of gaming, the Google algorithm. And these forums, look, a common argument about all this is that, you know, all of this, we're just reacting to, it's a moral panic. These things happened before. And it's true. Like, we've seen versions of this before. Quote tweeting, you know, quote tweet dunking and everything like that. My argument has always been that, The first time I ever saw the quote tweet, and maybe the person I most associate with inventing the quote tweet, is actually from before Twitter. It's actually Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. He would play a clip of something from Fox News or some right-wing politician saying something crazy, and then it would cut back to Jon Stewart, and he'd have this horrified expression on his face, just like a reaction emoji face. You can certainly see the logic of why he thought it would work. It's like, look, what's the saying? The best cure or disinfectant is exposure or sunlight. If I just bring this craziness to light, won't this cause people to come to their senses? Or at the minimum, it's a fun thing to laugh together at something. Of course, we know now that that was really naive. It doesn't work at all. There's a book that I just started this week that someone told me about called Civic Solitude by Robert Talese. And he argues that maybe democracy only functions well if we can maintain some distance from the people we disagree with. You know, there's a question of whether this kind of gladiatorial political dunking on each other on Twitter really achieves anything. I've sort of given up on it and don't really think it does anything. I think it feels good to dunk on somebody or to ratio somebody. But if you really want to affect change, if you want the level of discourse to be one that leads to some sort of living with people you disagree with in some amount of harmony, maybe this doesn't work.

like that uh yeah intrinsically as a medium there's a it's funny too you mentioned it in the in amusing ourselves death postman's he's talking about the telegraph and they're talking about how now that maine and texas are connected and he's like great but like what what do they have to talk about yeah there's an element of that which is to say if we are going to be all connected the mediums for which you're gonna have to spend time right next to people who disagree with you strongly like they need to be pretty robust to be able to hold all that dissonance. And it doesn't seem like we have much of that. Yeah, there's a great Paul Ford piece that I love from the pre, I think it was pre-social media era. He was writing about the blog and web era. I think the title of the piece is something like the web is a customer service medium. But he came up with this great saying. He said, you know, the animating spirit of the web. is why wasn't I consulted? And if you read the blog posts from that era, and even like I think back of the blog posts I wrote, I was like, oh, that really was the animating spirit of the web. All the pieces would be like, gosh, let me explain to you how this thing in the world works. And those are the pieces that would always go viral. Some sort of hidden insight. think most people are still striving for that even when they write I mean that's the spirit of social media too is like hey I now I can be consulted now I can shout into the void yeah but I would argue that when we moved into the social media era and away from the web era just that the way that social media is set up it's structurally adversarial and so I think the new animating spirit of this social media era is more akin to something like, can you believe those effing idiots? Yep. Do you think that's as true today as it was in 2019 or 2021? I mean, maybe it is dissipated some now, only in that, you know, you see a lot of people have left. Yeah, we have four different twins. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot. And people kind of realize that this is just being here, being shouted at by...

People is not that pleasant and maybe I'll go somewhere where that's not happening. I'm not sure that's the right solution either. But, you know, so maybe the overall level of it is lower. But I think it's kind of like a form of prisoner's dilemma. If you were to go on Twitter, let's say you're in some tribe, you're in the liberal tribe or the tech right or I don't know what rationalist. And you had someone who disagreed with you kind of confront you on something. And maybe you actually even see that they have a point. You're faced with a choice. Do you concede or dunk? You know, like in Prisoner's Dilemma, it's cooperate and defect. I like to use the same initials. So I'm like, concede or dunk? And actually... I think it's just like the prisoner's dilemma where your optimal strategy is never to concede. It's always to dunk. Because if you concede, your side's going to view you as a traitor, probably, and pile on you. And the other side will laugh at you for being weak and use you as an example of why you and your tribe are idiots. And so it's like in the Tom Cruise in the movies, he's always like, everybody runs. Or it was that minority report, I guess. It was like, don't run. He's like, everybody runs. It's the same. Everybody dunks. Your other choice is just to opt out. Trump is literally the perfect embodiment of that. He doesn't even take the opportunity to be accused of everything. He's just perpetually always dunking. Yeah. I've seen a lot of people say that the way to deal with being canceled. is just to ignore it and just tweet through it. Just keep posting. Yeah, just keep going. And on the one hand, I'm like, okay, structurally and mathematically, I understand why people say that. That might be the optimal tactic in some way, but is that the incentive system we want in place where people who realize they're wrong just power through? I'm not sure it's good. I was thinking back to this early...

when i worked at amazon in the early days jeff wanted anyone in the company to rotate through customer service and answer some customer service emails and so i did my week rotation in customer service and you know we were mostly just selling books in the u.s at the time and jeff said you know one of the great things about email is people are super honest and blunt you would get the crazy, most unhinged emails if someone didn't get their book. Just so angry, so upset. On the one hand, he was right. He's like, look, I want Amazon to be the world's most customer-centered company. If they tell you what they're upset about and they're honest about it, you don't have to guess. You can just solve the problem. On the other hand, I also look back on that as a dark harbinger for What happens when we're all behind keyboards and kind of not face-to-face with each other and communicating via... I kind of call this like the... You know the linguistics term synecdoche? Yes. Yeah, like you refer to something by a part of it. So, you know, you refer to Achilles by his shield or his arm or whatever it is. And I think of all of... Social media is kind of a synecdochoic communications medium. You know, when nobody loves being dunked on, like drive-by dunking from some random stranger. But it's also that, you know, I go, I'm like, who is this person dunking me? What do I know about them? I have a weird username. Right, right. You know, usually an avatar that's not the person's face even. Some random, you know, one-line bio on Twitter. You can't tell anything about who they are. You just don't even feel. Like they feel almost not fully human. In the same way that all kind of digital mediums flatten and reduce people and things. And it encourages us to view both them and ourselves in a distorted way. I don't know if you read Gia Tolentino's essay collection, but she titled it Trick Mirror.

And I think it's such a great title because it really reflects how social media is this, because it's become such a dominant medium in our lives. The reflexive nature of social media also means that it is how we build our perceptions of each other and ourselves. You know, particularly a cute version of this might be dating apps. And when I talk to people who... are swiping around on dating apps. You can't help but treat how you do on dating apps as some judgment on like your, you know, desirability in the dating marketplace. This kind of like weird, you know, in this age of neoliberalism, everything's a marketplace. It's the marketplace of ideas. It's the dating marketplace. It's the, you know, like the gig economy. I always like to say identity is a projector in a mirror. And social media, to your point, is such a profound part of the way our identity is showing up. We're collecting all this feedback on it all the time. But also, even in who I'm creating, the persona I'm creating on the dating app, the persona I'm creating on Twitter or whatever, that I'm shaping myself to. It really is fascinating to think about the ways that even just our perceptions of ourselves are being warped by the funhouse. To segue slightly, we've talked a lot about Twitter, you've written a lot about Twitter, and I think that's obviously a platform of interest and critique and concern for both of us. I think for a lot of people, frankly, it was something they never totally engaged with. And now it's interesting, you brought up TikTok briefly. One of my original questions was going to be, is social media broadly the ultimate realization of what Postman feared? I think maybe a better question might be, at least in this entertainment social media land, is TikTok the peak form or the peak medium of this type of entertainment? Obviously, notwithstanding totally new paradigms around immersion. In some sense, listening to you talk about all the problems with Twitter, it almost feels like TikTok is one better in that way. It's certainly evolutionarily more fit. It's more productive and successful from a...

attention standpoint like have we have we reached the apex predator i well i think until there's some uh advance in i don't know cyber technology or vr or something probably in terms of a smartphone tiktok is very close to some most evolved form of entertainment you know the length of the videos, the density, the structure of your average TikTok. As a medium, we're pretty close to, I think. I can't imagine that there's another form. And we've seen in this era that I think it was always going to be the case that a problem for Twitter was that it was textual. And I think images are much more the dominant currency. Think about where Meta would be without Instagram now. It's crazy to think about it, but Instagram really, I think, in many ways keeps Meta relevant because it's kind of been the de facto image circulation medium. TikTok came along and was short video, in many ways even more. I mean, it's crazy to think that Instagram at some point, when they wanted to put videos in, it was very controversial internally. You know, it was funny. I was in China in 20... What year was it? I went to the ByteDance offices. I don't know. It was 2016, 17, something like that. And ByteDance had just, I think, bought Musical.ly. But I was in China. I was asking all the friends I had over there, oh, like, what apps are you all using here? And everybody was talking about Douyin. which, you know, was kind of like the musically knockoff, but then became its own thing and would become kind of the model. This was before they had acquired TikTok, or musically. It was right around then. And so it was before TikTok became big in the U.S., but Douyin was huge in China. And I would just look on my friend's phones, and so many of them told me, oh, my God, I had to delete this app off my phone. I was spending an hour and a half, two hours every night watching it before bed.

You know, that's crazy when you think like most people I know in China worked until, you know, 11 p.m. every night and they just like would only have an hour at home before. And I was like, really? You watch this for an hour and a half every night? And what's crazy is digital crack in my pocket. And what's crazy is then like, you know, a year and a half later, everybody was saying the same about TikTok. It just it was like a lag period. So it's crazy that TikTok kind of struck on this model. And so, yeah, I don't know. It's a long way of saying I'm probably right. TikTok probably is about as advanced as we're going to get. And that's why I think it had a gravitational force that caused everybody to have to chase that and to conform to it. And so even if you ban TikTok, I think the kind of damage to the Western digital nervous system has already been done. I want to also, presumably to your earlier point, learn the ideal evolutionary way forward, which is to do this hyper-algorithmic revealed preference. Almost to reference a much earlier post of yours, like disregarding some of the network is the thing kind of core methodology that you used to power social, you used the language earlier, social networks in favor of social media. It feels like you can't put that back in the bottle. Yeah. That's hard, and that's just because in an era of infinite information, again, distribution is the only thing that matters, and you have to maintain that power in the marketplace if you all have the same business model, which all the companies do. It's funny. Meta is in some ways amusing to me because I don't think Meta's ever really... articulated with conviction what their mission is as a company in a way right they are just a company that competes for attention right and that supersedes all other missions uh it's a great point and that's why you know they could say we're about connecting you know everybody together but actually if showing people a lot of entertaining videos is better

But that's kind of what it's going to be, right? Like on Instagram, none of my friends actually post any posts in the feed anymore. No, of course not. If stories didn't exist, I wouldn't even have any idea what was going on in my friends' lives. Well, the irony for Facebook, if what you just said is true, I think the good news for them is that might be the ultimate mission. That might be the final mission when AI has solved everything else, controlling what we all look at. It's 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 news feed. You say, by merging all updates from all the accounts you followed into a single continuous service and having that serve as the default screen. 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. It 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. And 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 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. 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. There's utility, there is social status, and then there's entertainment. I can't help but wonder, we used to overlay status onto communication. 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. Yeah, 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 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 ways. I mean, does Elon know? Yeah, I don't know. 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. And then online, you're like, wow, this is just a bonkers thing. And 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 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 they're 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. 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. And he said somewhere around the year 2000, It seems 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 Chayka wrote about the Airbnbification of design. Power of all big music, movies, everything Marvel. streaming tv shows now if you look at uh 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 on it these days, but early on, I was always impressed by the way that TikTok, relative to even Spotify or other algorithms, like would let the weird niche through. Maybe 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. I think ByteDance actually more than the Western social media companies understood this danger. I've talked to their product team in the past and some of the people who work there. From a very early period, they were a huge problem of our algorithmic because they had Totel, which was their first viral product, which was also an algorithmic-driven thing. Even from that era, they knew if we just go down the full exploit path, people will just get oversaturated and people get sick of things. Same for TikTok. And exploit, just to clarify, is like classically the YouTube algorithm. Show me more of exactly what I like. Yeah, show me more of exactly the thing. Yeah, like, and, 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. There's a New Yorker piece that made me laugh that 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 Chauhan 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. And 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. They were trying to avoid some of that. But there's some irony there in that. 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 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 a Robert Moses style sort of like highly top down articulated simulacrum of it that doesn't really capture its nuance. Yeah. It's like, you know, in the place of real community, I give you likes on your Instagram posts in the place of real or LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. A LinkedIn. What is it? Endorsement. Yeah. In the place of.

real companionship and love like gives you uh an only fans parasocial relationship or digital pornography or an ai boyfriend or girlfriend or something like that uh in fact it's really funny i was thinking back in the movie her which i haven't watched in a long time but uh have you seen her of course yeah i re-watched it pretty recently yeah okay And it's a very interesting movie to watch more recently compared to when it came out. Oh, I'm sure. So you can clarify if my memory is wrong, but one of the things that actually is more maybe profound in the movie, which is under-remarked on and maybe didn't come true, isn't there a point when his AI girlfriend, he's like, hey, wait, how many relationships are you in? And she says something like, I'm in like... you know, 6,000 other relationships. Yeah. It like totally breaks his heart. And she's like, it doesn't take anything. Yeah. You still have a hundred percent of me. Yeah. And, uh, he's really, I guess, like broken up about this for a little bit. Right. 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 like, you know, like, Loving another person, a real person, someone with their own wants and needs. Has trade-offs. Yeah, there's just challenges to that. But these AI companions and things today are really made to just follow orders. I had somebody telling me their kid was using one of these AI-suppressed animals. What they realized is that when the kid had to interact with other kids, didn't get why the other kids would ever push like they were used to the animal the stuffed animal friend who just agreed with them all the time yeah and you you take what you're saying to the most extreme degree yeah it really begs the question of whether we're gonna have to articulate like new sets of artificial constraints or trade-offs my sense is my hope might be that over time the perfect girlfriend who never disagrees with you like actually gets boring dare i say it like

There's something inside of human nature that causes you to yearn for the more complicated thing. Did you listen to the Daily episode? No. The woman who fell in love with her ChatGPT voice, she made it into a boyfriend. And 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 you know 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 it's weird and and so uh that that so epitomizes tech To me, it's just like, oh, like, well, if you want that, we'll just give it to you. Yeah. Like, why would we stand 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 of course, there are benefits. We always have to do this disclaimer. Anytime you say anything negative about the internet, it's like, well, disintermediation was great. People only know about me because I could blog and just publish it directly to the world 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... We need better critiques of what this is all doing to us, to society. I think we have to figure out how to understand. You and I have talked before about community and friction. I always say that social capital is better modeled as debt than equity. Whether or not debt was the first form of money is...

Graeber theorizes. I think it's pretty clear that very many early economies operated prior to the mention of money on mutual obligation. And mutual obligation is actually pretty productive. Yeah, like, you know, so some amount of removing friction has removed mutual obligation. You know, 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 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 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, you know, DoorDash or Uber Eats and everything and having very minimal human interaction. And 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 that. 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 nobody watches MSNBC. But like if that was like the liberal equivalent, like watching these kind of like echo chamber things isn't really conducive to that. And 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 local politics and things. 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 people love saying this thing, like, I think it's healthy to think in public. I want to think out loud. Let me share 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. 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's like... 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. Yep. Like, oh, like I changed my avatar to a black square. I'm like, you know, supporting Black Lives Matter or something. Yeah, but Byung-Chul Han and Baudrillard are having a tough, I don't know about laugh, grimace about that one. 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 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 nihilism comes from two things. You know, so like Marx would speak about the alienation of labor. What are the causes of that? And 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. Yeah. 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. And maybe he's using it the most meaningful way possible, which is just to boost his own. share of attention. 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. And, you know, you can argue about, you know, like...

And Postman with the TV era is 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? 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're not even showing up. You're not even getting eyeballs at all to underperform. And that is a pretty radical. like over correction beyond yeah i mean you could see both parties misread because there was this thought that it would just be bush clinton bush clinton like and then you know the next generation of bush clinton right and then who did we have come along we had obama and trump just short-circuited that like assumed yeah lineage right and why because very much the internet a true disruption from it yeah 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. That's all we 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. In a way, 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. 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. 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. You remember people would always have those moral panics over, If you ask kids what they want to be, they want to be influencers. People used to say they want to be astral. I really don't put much stock in that. People just react to the context in which they grow up. Maybe kids are on to something. Maybe they realize that that's the last remaining scarcity. I think they understood very early on. They look at their influencers and they follow like, wow, these people have great lives.

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 so 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. 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 have a small window in which to do that. Yeah, yeah. The assumed fortune of the future and progress of the future is no longer, which is a default thing, which is pretty amazing to think about in the context of American history. I mean, maybe that still goes back 30 years, but the fact that it's totally taken as default by young people is pretty dramatic. Did you watch any of, I guess, what was it called, like rejection talk? It was when kids streamed. Yeah, a little bit of this. For a while, I got a bunch of these, and then I had nephews and nieces going through the college application process. And so I would hear about this, and these kids are like, posting their sat scores all their extracurriculars the gpa you're like god this like looks like some superstar they couldn't get into any of the you know they can barely get into their like backup school right um so so 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 you know we don't think of it this way but china actually is okay 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 cracked down 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. Right. And what did they get? You know, most of them are like, I can't afford to live in the city where the jobs are. Can't find a, I watched a Sundance talk about the men outnumber women because of one child. And like, there's nihilism around dating now. Yeah. Because you're not, you don't make enough money. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. People like, people getting crushed on dating apps. But. you know so i would talk to people in shanghan 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 yeah in china they have the whole ten ping movement it's just like the the lie flat or lie down like don't grind like 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 i felt these came to a head when the whole um weird social media reaction to Luigi and the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO. 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, everyone 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 right i think it's born of a nihilism that's just like this whole late stage capitalist thing is uh you know is a false promise like like mostly leads to highly unequal outcomes where um i did grind hard and you know and then you know 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 a match 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 Mangione into a Marxist working class hero only for him to actually be a center right biohacking, teal loving tech bro. Right. Neither of which are totally true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like it almost like that's another.

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. Well, this this is goes back to the point I was talking about earlier about this digital destruction. And look, some of this was happening. 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. It 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. I 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 should look for it in anything that they can find. You 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, this woman next to me was crying. I feel like this explains some of the cultish feel of America now. So 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, you know, I even look at, you know, you know more about the crypto world than I do, but some of these, you know, DAOs and these meme coins are a weird fusion of everything modern. It's like this like synthetic community, but bonded around hyper speculation. 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, 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. You know, it's just like the other reaction for a nihilism. 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, The sequel to Homo economicus is Homo speculons. And it's just like when you deal with this world of low trust institutions and an uncertain future, everyone becomes a speculator. 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 too. It's the rise of online gambling, sports gambling in particular. It's like a really dangerous trend, you know, in some ways. It was a crazy graph I saw at one point that was from a book about the casino economics. This is the Machine Zone book, right? Yeah. 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 the casino's economics by the square footage of electronic slot machines on their floors. And every year it would go up and, you know, electronic slot machines put more people into Gamblers Anonymous than any game in the history of the world. And 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. The one thing where you're like, I don't have to fly to Las Vegas to get my fix. Now, you know, every other podcast I hear that's about anything sports is a DraftKings or a FanDuel ad. I definitely think it's a dangerous thing. By the way, I'm a huge critic of sports betting. I would argue, to take your point even further, all we do online is speculate. We speculate when we create TikTok videos to spin the wheel. You speculate when you use it. People aren't using dating apps to find a partner. They're taking the flyer on the upside. And so it's interesting. 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. Yeah, 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. 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 don't love the discourse around how every generation of kids, they're different in some intrinsic way. I think that's like a fundamental attribution error. We should just really look at the context into which they were introduced. They're just naturally responding to 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. Biggest game, biggest regular season game in seven years, Lakers-Celtics. Go Lakers. Yeah. 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. And 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 NDBA 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. Why do I care about the regular season? I just care about the NBA finals. I just care about... I only want the edge of the power line 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, OK, 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... Did you hear about this Netflix leak? 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 playoffs. 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, we're just doing crazy things to lose games. You're like, well, how would I watch this? It's like, no one cares. Even the players don't care. The team is trying to lose. 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 time and day of week. I think those things matter for sure, like 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. 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. 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. High variance. By the way, three-pointers in the NBA, a little bit more like the high variance. Yes, exactly. You're so right. And then, by the way, The last thing is that fantasy football is just a beautifully designed speculative game. Yes. So you layer that on top of the real game. And, 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. Fantasy baseball, fantasy battle, 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 is the backdrop for, and 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. And I went and I just looked on Netflix. I was like, what's the top show? That day, what was the top show? And it was this show called The Night Agent. Okay, I haven't seen it. 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. Does it 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 in a way that no one would say. Because if you had watched the show, you had done those things in the show. You would not need to tell the other person that that's what you were doing. And look, every movie has expository dialogue dumps. You know, 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. You know, some people argue that culture is not, you know, like we have innovation in culture. But I think there is some homogenization that has happened to kind of traditional cultural products that I've seen. You see it in other fields. What museum doesn't program at least one Instagram friendly? 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's going 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. The NBA has been experimenting, you know, in the 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. And 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, when I, the last thing I worked at Amazon before I left in 04 was Amazon Web Services. And, 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. My 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 look back on that now and I think, you know, if you think about Mr. Beast, I mean, Mr. Beast is kind of the apotheosis of battling algorithms. You know, it's like...

He's like the Highlander. Like there's one person who's just like, look, I'm just going to master battling these algorithms. And that's how he relates to it, too. I 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. Yes. For the algorithm is like what I'm going to lead. Like, I couldn't tell you what Mr. Beast like. politics ours i did like he's just like hey i'm gonna 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 like but that's the age we're in because he had already our president yeah yeah stephen a smith has already mastered a previous form of attention grabbing and so yes i'd rather have him debate trump and joe biden if attention If attention is 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. I think in tech world, people are very attuned to give high status to books and writing, less to TV, film, and images. You said this, a similar thing, 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 someone at The Verge or someone said. They tried emailing their CEO in just how it improved their life. 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. It 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 just very like short like and um 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 you know 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 the one with just a question mark is going to come off as more strong yes 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 show every picture yeah a binder with pictures it's like in plastic and uh they may even have like the little plastic molded uh thing of the dish you're like it's i actually love getting the pictures i find it very useful yes 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 to litigate it. Like, you may look around at other people's dishes to see what they look like. But, you know, at a really high-end restaurant, it's a tasting menu anyway, so you have no choice. Yes. Your only choice is whether you want to pay a lot or more. For wine. For, like, you know, like an add-on, truffle shavings or something. But Silicon Valley vary into words and books and that, you know, books code as, like, high intellectual matter. But, you know, 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, The Honeymooners, tracing 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.

grew up with i think in particular of cheers and night court as i don't even never heard of night court okay yeah it was about a court okay a few but 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 that you know like the starbucks third place but yes the theme song a place where everybody knows your name and a family of people who had 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. Kramer literally walking into your apartment. There's no knocking. 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 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. I don't know. I asked this question of people I meet all over the world. Look back on your life. What was the best time of your life? Personally, look, there's sampling bias for sure. It's just me asking random people. Actually, I'll ask you. What was the best time of your life? I'd like to say I'm in it. I don't feel like it was college. But I grew up with that as the default understanding. Not that it's the best time, but it's certainly the most fun. More people in America will say college than anywhere else. Of course, it differs by socioeconomic class.

i also live in new york i'm single i live in new york yeah yeah 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 it's the best time because i have like money and income i can do it like 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 healthy social life that many people in the West ever experience, 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 program. You can opt into things. You have a lot of. social time you're always like around people who want to do different things and it's the perfect combination of lack of obligation and uh 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 brennan maybe like you're right but like Knowing your coworkers and hanging out with them every day was very common in a way that a 21-year-old watching that now might actually find it alien, which is pretty remarkable. Yeah. So I think the dark turn for me then came with the show The Sopranos, which was like just – You know when it started, 99? Something like that? Let's see. I was on the Amazon video team, so 98 I joined the team. I think the first season was like around 98.

I remember some video editor on the video team telling me, oh, my God, you got to watch The Sopranos. I subscribed to HBO just to watch it. Here 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. And 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. 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 resonated was that even if you weren't a mob boss or something, you're kind of like, okay, yeah, this guy has family problems. It's kind of like, you know, how like the CW shows about vampires and things, they still have like, you know, the usual high school problems, like who do I ask the prom and things?

The show that's about something else, but it's really about... 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? You look at a movie like Goodfellas, and Ray Liotta's like, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a Goodfellas. He really is... He 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 like... Like, is this all that was promised? Like, why, if I have this, do I feel empty inside? Do I feel like I have not? 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. And 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 individual striving. Also, there's something dark about individualism taken to its logical extent, minus community in this kind of 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 they're, whatever, their inheritance. Industry is exactly about this problem. Yeah. I went back to watch the first, the pilot of Industry. And I had forgotten it was directed by Lena Dunham. But, you know, it's all the kids interviewing to go work at that firm. And one of them says something like, you know, like my heroes are Margaret Thatcher. I can't remember who he said, you know, like the 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 to underline. They're like, look, this is 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 there's the one um the guy who likes the girl and do you watch industry yeah yeah yeah right and you you just knew in the last season there's no way they will end up together episode even though they they they love each other but there's no there's no hope because he he's poor he came from uh lori and you know for her uh her reputation is everything the priorities are clear in a sense yes 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 of a lot of these conditions. When you remove those conditions, it becomes very hard to... You 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 like kind of gerontocratic governance that we have in America is just 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.

They're both strong and weak. They're strong in that there's still just a duopoly of parties in the U.S., and it's very hard to break that. But they're both weak in that they've been hijacked by outsider candidates repeatedly. It is interesting that one of the seeming responses to this nihilistic late-stage capitalism thing is this emphasis on earnestness and more... uninhibited, sort of like you can just do things, high agency. Obviously, the political right has certainly leaned into this notion that like looking backwards doesn't matter. I don't know if that's shaped sort of like the speculative stuff or something else. If you were to imagine the TV show that 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? I don't know. There haven't been great shows to capture what it means to be terminally online yet. I mean, I think there are some movies that sort of scratch at the edges of it. I saw this movie last year called Red Rooms. I don't know it. 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 trades crypto, is 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. And it's actually this woman. And she's actually like a... Instagram influencer model. And she's attending the serial killer trial. You know, ostensibly the movie is about like she's trying to, she believes the killer is innocent and is trying to find evidence to 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. So mostly interact with people through.

terminals and prompts that's a really hard thing to fake attunement to yeah yeah if the writer director wasn't yeah right and i think it's it's a lot about the dangers of like 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 and you know this this contributes a lot i think to cult like 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, like I think. You know, we used to have young men who would have to go out in the military or the draft. You know, they have these like authoritative male figures and like there's negatives to that too. But I think a lot of Judd Apatow movies were, I don't think, 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. People 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 that like the Internet to. you know um 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 like he even his aesthetic is right you know make your bed stand up straight like the things that you know like a military you know general might tell you um but i'm finally being told to do so by someone i respect and that is the it's yeah it's through a screen or whatever else but it's

Yeah, like the whole, you know, I think like the Rogan, Chris Williams, and even a little bit of, yeah. Yeah, like 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 right right right you know um she had such a different affect than traditional hosts like she was um 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 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 the og parasocial thing and then i there's a period where i got really interested in why there were so many people like you know casey nestad all these vloggers with huge like tens of millions i was like 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 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. New 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, like if these are the defaults or the alternative is nothing, it's probably not that bad. And in some cases, like 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. We're like, well, we used to not have nothing. I always say these things all probabilistically. 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. It's always, right? We're always complicit. It's 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. If someone was passing around on Twitter or something, this idea of the sovereign child, I think that's the name of it. And so that's 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. That'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 think when you're also 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. People talk about their, you know. personal productivity stacks, note-taking software, that, I don't know, you're probably like the Peter Atiyah, like live forever, zone two workout. There's this thing that, you know, in the secular void gets filled in. It's like wearing, you know, blood glucose monitors. And I think it's amusing because 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. Did you watch the episode this week? I did. There's a great scene in this week's episode where they're... 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 is 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 Byung Cho Han talks about. Like part of the other is just like the realization you'll die someday or just like sickness or Any sort of negativity in the world and trying to smooth it all away. And, you know, the other thing I find funny is if you look at Hinduism, Buddhism as religions, you know, we in the West treat them as kind of open source software. And we borrow parts of it for our own mental wellness stack. It's like, well, I'm not a Buddhist, I'm not Hindu, but I love yoga. I don't know, pay to go to a meditation retreat. I think you can 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. It 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.

Why should I spend this 20 seconds bored? The friction of just even getting out of the house and going to anything. Speaking of that friction, we've talked about this. I'd be curious to revisit it. We've talked about the death of the scene, 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. And 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, is it possible that can exist digitally? Maybe people are going to become Luddites again, but in lieu of that, like, 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, or on the TikTok channel or whatever, like, it doesn't really seem possible to have that slow, organic development. Yeah, I... Look, now I feel like maybe we've gone too far in one direction, and I'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, I think a lot of people would say online. 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. There's a lot more that goes into that. And in fact, I find the slackification of workplaces that like Slack, 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. 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, 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. By the way, talk about friction. You made this point on some interview a few years ago, maybe Ben Thompson, about how one of the things Taylor Swift's amazing at is just introducing arbitrary friction to be a part of the group. And like in some sense, it is pretty – like go back to the Zoom commute thing. Yeah, it turns out either choose obligation and get meaning or opt out and don't get meaning. Yeah. 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. I'm not saying everything should be like 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. And 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 what that 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 you know prior to banks and credit reports A lot of churches were the institution that facilitated money lending because they were storehouses of reputational credit. So in New York, you know, there's kind of the paid neoliberal version of 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 where we're going with some media stuff. There's an idea that, or maybe 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 I think that's obviously embedded in most people's instincts around where, at least for art and culture and films and things like this, like the really human stuff, the stuff AI is not going to come for is going to be that. Maybe 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 on to this notion that maybe.

We have to be weird or distinct or different or out there. And in fact, like the algorithm is just 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 on to this notion of being the most human human by being weird, unpredictable, high entropy? 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. But I still think it holds. It's funny how this discourse becomes 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. 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. It'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 NPC? 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, they 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. And 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. 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 the Spotify algorithm has changed music. I think music is particularly susceptible to mathematical analysis. It's like a mathematical art form in some ways. 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, that 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 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 disorder yeah he's just like i have to get it off of its book and go somewhere that it's never been uh and maybe you know large language models will push us to be finding that's a powerful one that is so i'm hopeful i have a handful of kind of like lightning style things to close us up you wrote an amazing

piece years ago called invisible asymptotes. I have two questions on this note. One is, 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 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, like button. Some 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 always think of Snapchat as a classic example of an app where the interface perfectly bifurcates those two aspects. Talk about friction, by the way. If 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. In a sense, it's almost like more honest though. Yeah. He's like saying, I want to build a social network and 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 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. 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 recognize for yourself and maybe found ways past them come to mind? That's a good question. I think since I'm very conscious of the context of the digital... world now we're in you know part part of why i started like i haven't written a while i haven't been on social media as much in recent years and part of it was trying to understand you know how those platforms themselves are an asymptote to just life yeah and attention you know 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 I just find all of social media to be in some ways terrifying 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, partially because I think the community I found through my writing is maybe the most durable and authentic one. I'm sure. In a way, 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 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 prior like this is prior to the even news feed

rss world you just have to just go back every day like i hope they wrote something new yes and if not you're like okay 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 substack thing because i don't know first of all i find like substack in some ways it's like not entirely self-describing the following versus The whole thing is a little blurry. It's a little bit confusing, and there's an algorithm there, so it always makes me wary. But some people are finding community there. Yeah, I think for me to break some asymptote, I'll have to go back to writing. You 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, God. I don't think you finished. 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 about it and 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. And I was like, oh, I was like a PA. I was going to Canal Street to buy, you know, props and, you know, making coffee and watering down streets for night shots. 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... Other forms of friction? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Self-imposed suffering or denial. Fasting was really popular for a while. Eventually, we'll 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 it. It would cover like just a fraction of the street. I 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? Or what is product management? Or how do 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 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. You 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 in the world for so long and you've had longer to see what's what's lindy and yeah what genres stick around so 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 Audio books? Is there a, and you've also, as you mentioned earlier, just praised 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 beat a lot of books too. Yeah. 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. 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. Again, 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 when I watched Badlands by Malick or Tree of Life, 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 i think you're right one arena one of my favorite shorter pieces you wrote years ago is compressed to impress talking about bezos is sort of like mastery of precise language in the way he obviously like most classically famously day one and how much is sort of contextually inside of that are there any other Bezos-isms that when you think back on that you often come back to, that you think are either just interesting examples or still useful? There 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. And then eventually some people had laptops and 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. Dude, send friction. Our guy. Just get rid of friction. And that's essentially the thing I carry in my pocket all the time. 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. But his instinct was right. Yeah, yeah. He's like...

You have to remember, this is the era where 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 three minutes to boot up and be ready. I could vibe code a whole program. Yeah. He's just like, yeah, it's too much friction. People can't shop on Amazon at home. Most people didn't even want to turn on their work laptop. He's like, people can't even shop on Amazon for 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. 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? How do you think about 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. I think if I were to guess for the next decade or two, especially with AI starting to seep in and... like 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 asked 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 believe that AGI is just around the corner. And so there was a weird discounting of the presence. They're just like, none of this matters. Once AGI comes, 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, 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. It'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 like whether we want agi or not to come like 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 like institutions are have a kind of like 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. I 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? Well, I think one thing is that film to me, when done well, It occupies 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. 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 i 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 like, oh, what did all this mean? 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 a friend who I think had a chance to maybe be an editor on that film.

and had read the script and was like, I don't even know what this is. You think you read it on the page. And I've since read the final working script, and it's actually, I think, a great script to read. But certainly, 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. That's all I got. Thank you. This is wonderful. Thanks. It was fun. Hey, before I leave you, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. You can also find full transcripts on my website at jacksondoll.com slash dialectic. And obviously everything's linked in the description. If you have notes, feedback, or guest ideas, you can email me at pod pod at jacksondoll.com. See you next time.