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[rock music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am one of your co-hosts, Francis Sierra.

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And I'm your other co-host, Daisy Alioto. Mm-hmm. Um, okay. Before we start today, we do wanna do a call for listener questions.

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We're gonna do a mail bag episode, maybe two if we get a lot of questions, um, over the holidays. So by Thursday, December 19th- Mm-hmm... if you could email tastelandpod@gmail.com.

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We'll put that in the show notes as well. Um, email us any questions. Voice notes are accepted, too. We might even play it if it's a good one.

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Um, but yeah, if you want to ask us a question, we're gonna do a mail bag episode. Um, hit us up by December 19th, tastelandpod@gmail.com. And I would characterize these broadly as, like, questions about the culture.

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Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If you, if you, if you're a listener, you know what we talk about, so you know, culture, media things- Mm-hmm... things we've been reading, anything you need the Tasteland take on. Sentence.

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The signature Tasteland take, right, Daisy? Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. Mm-hmm. Tasteland. [laughs] And if you're anything like me, that voicemail is not gonna be... Or yeah, it's not gonna be under 10 minutes.

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[laughs] Mm-hmm. I did... I actually did a voice memo, um, bingo for my friends of things that I, like, repeatedly say in voice memos that I leave for them.

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Well, there's no, but there's no, like, iMessages voice note wrapped to, to wrap that up for you, is there? No. I mean, that would be very funny to have. Mm-hmm. I think they should do that.

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Um, but I have, like, certain phrases that I say. Yeah. Like, I say, "I hope you know," a lot. I say, "To be clear." Mm-hmm. Um, not, but not in, like, an Obama inflection. Let me be clear.

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I'll stop in the middle of the sentence and be like, "Well, whatever." Mm-hmm. Um, that's life. You're one of, you're one of only two people I know who is, like, a serial voice noter. I never do it.

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Uh, this is really only something that started in the last two years. Mm-hmm. I think it's because I have, um, text fatigue. Yeah. Um- See, I love text. I love sending five really long texts right after. I, I love it.

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Yeah, and I don't mind that at all, but I think at one point I just made the calculus that this will be easier to say. Mm-hmm. So, okay, so I was- Just riff it out... here's something that we can talk about. I was...

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[laughs] Uh, Teddy Brown, who was on our podcast on our... to talk about his zin article for New York Times, um, in an act of, uh, circling back, asked me to comment for his gift guide article for The New York Times.

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Not an act of circling back. [laughs] Um, I was like, well, it's not nepotism 'cause we're not related. Mm-hmm. Um, s- and maybe networkism. Networkism. We can talk about whether or that's a thing. Um,

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I- That's his life... I responded to his questions in a voice memo. Oh. And then these are the notes that ended his New York Times style section piece on gifts. And I ended up with a kicker- Yeah...

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which was, "Just don't read them if you don't like them." [laughs] And, um, but I think I do, when I'm, when I'm leaving a voicemail, I do speak in complete sentences. Um- Mm-hmm... so I think that helped him. Yeah.

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Well, I think for me, I like wr- doing the text because I... I shouldn't say this as, you know, we go into another hour of podcasting. Say it. I feel like I, I'm smarter, uh, as a writer.

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I sound more stupider when, uh- More stupider?... when I talk. Mm. Yeah, that was, well, that was... I hammed it up to get there. Yeah. Okay. But you know what I mean. Um, anyways, who are we talking to?

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You'll, you'll talk pretty someday. That was... [laughs] Okay. Who are we talking to? Uh, we're talking to Trevor McFredries. He is a serial founder. Uh, he's also a DJ and musician.

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I would say he's a true renaissance man. Um, if you remember Lil Miquela, who was kind of like the first digital influencer, that was Trevor.

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Uh, Friends With Benefits, AKA FWB Fest, the place I gave my base economy keynote earlier this year- Famously... which led to us having a conversation about festivals.

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Trevor was also very big in getting FWB off the ground. Um, I'm interested to hear from him what he's working on now because I've, I know a few things.

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He's working on a bunch of stuff in parallel, some of it public, some of it secret, so we'll see what we can find out from him.

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Did you listen to, um, him and I think his girlfriend h- have this musical duo called Soft, uh, which- Yes. Soft... did you listen to, to the trance remix of Right Back to It by MJ Lenderman and Waxahatchee?

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I actually did listen to that, and I actually have one of their songs on my favorite songs of 2024 list. Let me pull it up. Nice. 'Cause- I, I did listen to that song, like, five times in a row earlier.

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I have Heroes So Sexy on my favorite songs of 2024 list. But I don't... Is that, um, MJ Lenderman trance remix on Spotify or just SoundCloud?

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'Cause that, I think I only- Um, it's on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and I should... It is- Yeah... Waxahatchee featuring MJ Lenderman. I misspoke there. Oh my God, sorry. Apologies. I kind of...

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I almost, [sighs] I almost bought it, um, 'cause I switched to Apple Music- Mm-hmm... uh, formally. Actually, I, I finally canceled my Spotify subscription a couple weeks ago. Okay.

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So now with Apple M- you know, I don't know if you can even do that with Spot- like, Spotify Did you cancel before the Wrapped? 'Cause you know it was gonna be embarrassing for you. No. No, I know.

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I, I, I've been, I've been slowly doing, making the transition over the past couple months. But so I have both wrapped. Did you see my tweet about the Wrapped? N- uh, no. Okay.

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So do you wanna guess what my top band of 2024 was? Uh, MJ Lenderman? No. Third Eye Blind. Third Eye Blind. I don't even...

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You know, Third Eye Blind is one of those bands where, like, obviously I know Third Eye B- I don't, I couldn't name a single song by Third Eye Blind. I don't know the references. Um, I, I don't know. I feel like you,

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uh- Well, let's... Okay. N- name one Third Eye Blind song. [laughs] Graduation. Okay. Um-Well, now I'm-- [chuckles] now I can't name- Well, okay-... a single Third Eye Blind song... I'll say, I'll say this.

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So my, across my Spotify and my Apple Wrapped, um, there was one song that topped them both because I was listening to it a lot when- Oh, it's called Graduate... I made the switch. Graduate? Okay.

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That's embarrassing for me. When I made the switch.

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'Cause the way I listen to music is, like, most of what gets logged on those apps is, like, while I'm doing work, and I'll listen to, like, one song or one album just on loop. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

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Um, and so across the two platforms, I listened to Note to Self by Jimmy Stack featuring Empress Of.

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I listened to it, I think, four hundred and seventy-five times, and this is just since, like, I think just since August. That's wild, Francis. Yeah. My other top artists of twenty-twenty-four were...

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Do you know who Bruiser Wolf is? Uh, n-no. It's, like, a rapper? I don't know. Do you know what Bruiser Brigade is? It's, like, Danny Brown's- Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. They're out of Detroit.

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Okay, so Bruiser Wolf is in that collective. Um, I listened to his twenty f- twenty-four album a lot.

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In preparing for this episode, um, while listening to a podcast Trevor had done recently, I scrolled back through his entire... Oh, he's here. We'll just let him in. What's up? Hello, hello. How are we? I don't know.

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Not much going on in the world, so. Not much at all. Another quiet news week. I know. I mean, I guess it's the end of the year. We can all ease into the holidays and move on with our lives. Um, I do...

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So maybe this is jumping too right into it, but- [chuckles]... something I saw on Twitter yesterday, I was like... Uh, what, you didn't retweet it, but it was next to a tweet of yours.

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Um, and so- Oh, so you're just gonna affiliate w- him with it? Well, I, I am. No, but I, I, I thought he would have something interesting to say about it. Um- Mm... maybe you did retweet it, I don't know.

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Anyways, the tweet was, um, "I think we'll look back on creator payouts as a big mistake for X." Mm. And then there's a couple of screenshots of tweets introducing, like, you know, big threads.

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One is this, one is like, "Here's the story of Marc Andreessen. This guy was twenty-two, and then he sold his fr-" Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the other is, "The full shocking story of the Octua meme coin." Um,

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so I don't know. I thought that would be an interesting place to start. Do you think... 'Cause you're, you're a big tweeter, serial tweeter.

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Do you, do we think creator payouts are a significant contributor to the way Twitter has changed since Elon took over? I, I, I think it will be on the list of, like, goofs, but I don't think it would be at the top.

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Like, I, I do think the blue check mark thing was a pretty serious fiasco. Like, you know, effectively ruined the status games that you could, that could be played here. The Eli Lilly gate.

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Eli Lilly gate [chuckles] yeah, totally. And I, I, and I do think that, like, a lot of value accrued to that blue check at some point, and now maybe is, like, w-where they probably could have,

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I, I guess, um, uh, where they probably could have extracted the most value, it's probably become, like, net negative now. Like, a lot of coastal elites see it as being, like, you know, alt-right.

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It's an alt-right bumper sticker or something. Yeah. Um- Not getting the blue check as, like, a sign of protest. Yeah. And people actively saying like, "I didn't pay for this.

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I, I, you know, I, I don't know how it got here." Like, that's interesting. Um, the scarlet letter online.

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Um, but yeah, I, I think the, the, the thread thing, I'm not a huge fan of alt social in general kind of incentivizing content that keeps people on the page.

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I think what's interesting about YouTube is that they started in an era where the kind of gamification stuff w-maybe were a little more nascent, and also because watch time required kind of, like,

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narrative and captivating characters, it seems to have, like, bred a different type of creator. And also it's who you elevate and, you know, put on.

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I think, you know, you've watched TikTok, whatever, w-with Charli D'Amelio and... What was the other one? Um, Baby...

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All the early kind of TikTokers where they were really elevating, like, young women that were dancing and doing stuff, I think.

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And they kind of defined a character, and now that's become, like, just pure marketing with, like, TikTok Shop and, you know, everyone kind of gaming to spam their apps or whatever.

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I think a, a lot of these things, to me it was like spam killed MySpace and a lot of the other social networks. It feels like marketing. Well, that's...

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No, that's, that's interesting because I was thinking too, I hadn't articulated it like that, but, like, I was thinking about all the different...

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how all these different platforms have it, and I was thinking that only YouTube seems to have, like, any integrity kind of in the way they do the creator share. And I think it's, you, you hit on it.

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It's because, right, like, it's, it requires you to watch it for a long time, and it's less of a like...

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Like, the other ones are all about lowest common denominator, get as many eyes on it as possible, and then that's how you generate the value.

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Whereas YouTube, it's like you can have less, and it's just, like, the longer viewership. Um, yeah. Yeah. Empty calories. Yeah. I don't know.

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I always think about, like, the, there was a, uh, old television exec that belief system was based kind of around, like, making the most inoffensive content is what kept people on the network.

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Like, whatever wouldn't have you change the channel. And I do kind of see...

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W-where I like the internet, I think, originally was kind of like the shock and kind of like, [chuckles] uh, I guess the, the, the, you know, the rotten dotcomification of, like, getting people to engage with stuff, and that could be my own millennial brain rot, but I'm kind of more drawn to, to that.

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Like, the kooky Vine era that became King Bach doing, like, performative social justice stuff. I much prefer, you know, kids falling off of stacked milk crates than I do, I don't know, threads about Marc Andreessen.

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Well, I also think, like, I mean, this is pretty obvious and maybe not even worth commenting on, but we're also t-have to talk about the difference between video and text and that, like, with link sharing or platforms that came up to encourage link sharing, you're forcing people to change the channel because all of the information is not contained in the tweet.

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And in YouTube, it's like, well, all the information is contained in the video. That's why it's a video. And so you can keep people in the, quote, "channel."

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And I think Elon came in and was like, "Oh, the best way to prevent people from leaving the platform or changing the channel is, um, you know, force them to contain all of the information in the tweet."

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But that-Did nothing to account for the quality of that information or how people were using it up until that point Yeah, quite silly. It's pretty short-sighted. Totally. But I'm so- Well, the other... Oh, go ahead.

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No, no, I'm, I'm curious what your experience on X or Twitter is these days. Like, I still feel kind of trapped inside the arena. But I'm, I, I don't, I don't...

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I suppose the quality's gotten worse, but it's been kind of this slow boil. So I'm aware it's not as good as it used to be, but I can't tell how severe it is.

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I, I've always been more of like a, I feel like a lurker than a, a big prolific tweeter.

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Like, most of for-- I have like a public account now that I only made when I started, like, needing to be on Twitter in, like, a work way, whereas before I was just such a, like, private account consumer and, like, in group chats and stuff.

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So for me, like, from that perspective, I was never seeking out, like, such active discussion, right? So like I was always more just, like, watching, watching and scrolling and, you know, brain rot, et cetera.

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Um, but I think, I will say that I think the last-- I mean, obviously the election is, like, always, like, a big Twitter event, and you're just so much to, so much to scroll through. You can scroll for hours.

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Um, but I think that the last week with the Brian Thompson, like the day he was killed, and then like the day yesterday that Luigi Mangione was, you know, arrested, that has felt like such a vintage Twitter thing with, like, an absolute storm of takes with just so many people having so much to say, so little and so much.

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Um,

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to, to me, like, like, this past week it's like, oh, this is the same Twi- as Twitter has always been really, maybe with slightly different seasonings or flavors, you know, you get on the far right, whatever kind of thing.

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But like this past week it's like, oh, it could've been four years ago and who- it's the same Twitter as it was then.

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I think in the past though, you would've seen breaking news announcements about each development and what was going on before you would see the takes and the memes, and now it's like I get all the takes and the memes immediately and actually have to dig for the source material.

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But somebody compared yesterday on Twitter to, like, when a bird gets into the classroom, it's just like, you know, total distraction, drop everything that you're doing, like, we are going to watch this bird.

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And do you think older people feel that way? I mean, one of the interesting things is this kid is like Gen Z, handsome, you know, whatever.

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I, I have multiple group chats where, like, friends of friends knew him or knew his family. Mm-hmm. Do you think that...

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I mean, if you're 50, do you feel like this, is this, is this bird in the classroom or is this just like another... This is the Boston Marathon bomber where it's like a news thing, but not a social thing.

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I think that actually if you're 50, you're interested in it not as much in from a memetic perspective, but because this might be idealistic.

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I think healthcare is an issue that people become radicalized to through either experience or age in the United States.

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And actually, like, I think what has made this story resonate across age groups is, you know, there's the young really online people who are, like, interested in,

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you know, digging into his Goodreads and, like, talking about political realignment and teapot and where does this guy fit in, and like, we all know who, like, Lindy Man is.

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But then there's people who are like my mom who are like, "Okay, somebody took a very, very, very extreme step to make a statement about the healthcare industry.

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I'm obviously gonna follow this story because I have lived, you know, almost seventy years in this country knowing how broken it is."

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Which I mean, okay, we said Francis w- and I were like, "Let's, we wanna talk about the response, the response. We not wanna get that political."

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But Trevor, I feel like I've seen you do- It's inevitably gonna be political. I feel like I've seen you do some takes to this effect where it's like I...

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My husband's reading a book right now about ACT UP, the ACT UP movement, and how effective it was in getting treatment for AIDS and recognition of it.

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I'm, like, go through periods where I really believe that, um, that there, there actually cannot be a unified class movement in the United States, that it would have to be around healthcare specifically, and this kid coming from a very privileged background, I think supports that.

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But that obviously goes against people who are like true Marxists thinkers on the left where it's like it has to be class, it has to be class, and it's like maybe it could only ever be healthcare.

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Maybe that's the one issue that we could ever align around.

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I mean, like, we could, I can get political, and I don't know if you guys want to, but I think, like, what's interesting is it, it, it's not novel to express the fact that, like, the left is seemingly allergic to power, right?

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Like, when you create this, this, these ideas of oppressors versus like, uh, uh, the oppressed, you don't wanna become the oppressor, and so the idea of kind of creating real change, which means like, uh, attaining power is repulsive.

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Um, a- a- and I think that paired with the kind of academic

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theater kid-ification of like left-wing politics means you effectively have all these people LARPing, uh, historical ways of being progressive or left-wing.

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And so, you know, like, I often think about the Black Lives Matter movement or, or like y- you know, um, the pink pussy hats a- and the lack of like real policy that came from that, like Nancy Pelosi kneeling in a Da- African dashiki or whatever, and then, like, the lack of real substantive change.

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Uh, and, and then I think about, you know, interfacing with circles on the right where it's like, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll be in like libertarian tech circles, and they're actively weaponizing capital to create real power.

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You know, like, you know, who's had a better two decades than Peter Thiel, right?

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Like, you know, you could also actively trade against all the dominant takes on like left-wing Twitter or, or kind of like mainstream like MSNBC wine mom Twitter for the last ten years and like have an incredible portfolio.

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You, you bet against Elon, you can bet against Bitcoin, you can bet against-So many of these players.

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Uh, and so, and so all that is to say, like I think healthcare is interesting because for me, because I did see like those Ben Shapiro YouTube comments where it does seem this kind of like populist right and populist left can't agree something is really broken here.

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Whether you're, you know, one side wants, uh, you know, Singapore, you- and the other side- The valid claim denied. Yeah. Yeah. And I, yeah, the other one's like pure free market.

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The, the other side wants like, you know, single payer. I, I think what's interesting now is it may force people to sort of pick apart this thing, and healthcare is so dense.

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Even when I get into it with friends, like D.I. Wallach, who's an investor in the space, like it's so dense that I'm still confused as to who's at fault. Seems like insurance companies, but could it be providers?

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Could it be other folks in the chain? I don't know. Right.

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And like after the election, I was talking with my friends about how, you know, populism, and this comes back to your point about power, populism requires an enemy. It requires a shared enemy.

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And I think we should have Nick Susie on as well because, uh, Nick Susie just did a great presentation about Drake, but also a, a larger piece, which you probably saw Trevor, about like how like the way to get attention is to start a war or a feud in some way.

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And like, if you look at the way that attention is directed, it's always towards some sort of like us versus them thing, whether in entertainment with like Drake and Kendrick, um, Taylor Swift and Kanye at one point, um, or politics, who's more comfortable with an us versus them rhetoric.

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Sure. Um, but obviously the left is not willing to do a style of populism that is anti-immigrant, insider, outsider. In the past, they would have done the enemy as rich people, but now they can't because- Mm-hmm...

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so many rich people are Democrats and part of their donor base. And it's like there's no, if there's no enemy, there can be no populism, [lips smack] and the enemy can't be like who...

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I mean, there was sort of like a gesture at that this election cycle, but it just wasn't coherent. Like, it can't just be like the enemy is Donald Trump and people vote for him.

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Well, wait, I wanna, I wanna reference another Trevor tweet from like right after the election. Oh.

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Um, it was just, you were refer- you were like, quote, tweeting the map that showed like the rightward versus leftward swing of counties.

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And, and so you, you wrote like, "The spectrum isn't left versus right as much as change versus status quo.

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Change candidates on ei- on either side would've looked very different, in my opinion," which is exactly what I was thinking.

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Like, like, [chuckles] like scrolling back through your Twitter last night, trying to come up with questions for this and then like thinking about this as well, um, that like hit a nerve for me. I like stopped on that.

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I was like, "This is so, feels so relevant to this like, you know, Luigi conversation," where it's like, you know, it-- the p- the people in Ben Shapiro's comments versus like the people on Twitter gleefully making like, you know, Luigi is our leftist hero meme, whatever.

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It's like neither of those things are true. He's neither the leftist or the right hero, but it's like he's this like represents change even- Right...

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if it's chaotic and like, you know, murder, whatever, but it's like it's change. And like what you were just saying a second ago where it's like, you know, are the healthcare insurers at fault?

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Like where is the root of like the shittiness of healthcare in this country? Like, it don't, it doesn't really matter for like the response to this, like where the actual root is.

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It more just matters that like people are obs...

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I literally before, twenty minutes before we got on this call, I like checked my mail, and I had gotten like a physical a couple weeks ago, and like part of, part of it was denied, and I'm gonna have to pay for it, right?

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So it's like, I don't know, now I'm kinda rambling here, but I think that that it's not left versus right as much as it is change versus status quo feels very relevant to this. Totally.

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And I think the trap for, for Dems is there's effectively this like neoliberal tunnel vision where like, you know, they've got this data-driven regime.

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And I, I often think about that Bezos quote where he's like, uh, it's something like, you know, "I find that when the anecdotal evidence and the data doesn't line up, like I, I, I go with the anecdotes because there's something, there's something wrong how you're measuring it."

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It's something like that, you know? And I, and I, I find that to be true.

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I think that like one of the disorienting things about living in this moment is every day there are like studies that support other sides of po- of positions, whether it's diet or life extension or whatever, whatever it is.

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And so I think one of the challenging pieces for me is that you interface with a lot of like senior Democratic officials who, like I've been lucky in that like I've been pulled into campaigns and asked to comment on things, and they're like, "Hey, little Mikayla Kai, you're good at digital, social.

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How do you think about this?" And you get in the rooms, and it's clear like they have no interest in changing.

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It's like it's, it's, it's pretty grifty top to bottom, and they're just kind of, you know, they're, they're talking to, to your face about how this is, you know, the end of democracy, and then they're just finding ways to weasel money to their buddies and ad agencies or whatever it is.

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And so that was pretty, you know, like definitely black pilled me.

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But I think what's interesting is that you can feel that there's this kind of like black pill via osmosis, that people on both sides are pretty frustrated.

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And what's been interesting, I think, on the right is you've had Donald Trump as a release valve. Yeah. Someone who would just look you in the face and be like, "Yeah, this is fucked up."

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And I often think when I talk to Dems, I'm kind of like rambling now, but like being like spergy tech boy, having girlfriends who would be like, "This happened at work today." Like, "Oh, here's how you fix it."

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And they'd be like, "I don't want you to fix it." And you know, and it took me going to therapy for them to be like, "They just want you to acknowledge that that's bad." Mm.

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[chuckles] And, and, and then like when I talk with all these senior elites, they're like, "Well, no, no, no. We, we, we're giving forty-five thousand dollars to buy a house."

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And you're like, "No, no, no, but they want you to acknowledge that life is tough- Mm... and they can't afford to buy a home, and they're cruising into their forties and living in a one-bedroom apartment with two kids.

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You can't just pretend that this policy will solve everything, that you're doing something. Like hear them, feel them, see them. These kinda soft things that don't fit in spreadsheets are very hard for this- Mm...

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coastal elite set that call the shots. Yeah. Rebecca at Vox had a tweet that was like,

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uh, again, I feel like we're sort of like two kinds of people, um, styleAnalysis, which is something that I have sort of been tracking. But basically she was saying, "Okay, there's no right and left."

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It's like, have you been black pilled or not black pilled? Mm. Um, which is compelling to me, um, as a, a framework for analysis, um, if you had to pick one. [chuckles] I like that a lot. I mean, I feel it's,

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it's been interesting watching friends from the Bryan Thompson, who by the way, when you said Bryan Thompson, I was like, "The guy? Oh, no." Who's Bryan Thompson? The subway. And we- Yeah. Oh, the blind guy?

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And I'm like... But then I was like, oh, the healthcare CEO, because it ha- he has been kind of dehumanized in this moment. Yes.

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Like it's been all Luigi, and then it's just like this guy who, from what I understand, grew up in Iowa, I think, the University of Iowa, which is where I'm from, and is probably is not probably dissimilar to a lot of my peers that I grew up with, was just like a guy who wanted to work hard and found a job and climbed the ranks.

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Um, but all I have to say, I- it's been interesting in some of my group chats where it's like some friends are like, "I can't believe the discourse. This is heartbreaking. This guy's a father with kids." Mm-hmm.

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And then the flip side of that is friends being like, "I can't believe this doesn't happen more often." Like, "You guys don't feel like this is the, the, the logical outcome of this situation?" And, and they didn't.

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And so I don't know, there is a disconnect somewhere, and it could be black pilled versus not black pilled, if you like that framing. I also think like I...

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I was talking about this with my family, like I sort of subscribe to the Hannah Arendt theory of violence, which is like it can only be judged in retrospect whether something was justified based on

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the change that it possibly makes. Like, um, you know, it's sort of like a John Brown thing, right? Like if...

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I obviously don't condone violence or murder, but if something like this did lead to change in the health insurance industry, 10 or 20 years from now it will be seen as justifiable violence.

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This, I do believe that. Um, but you can't like, just because our cultural discourse moves so fast right now, you can't speed run that historical context.

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It doesn't matter if you've, like in the past you have read three newspaper articles about it, now we've all read 2,000 posts. Having read more posts or consumed more about it, that's...

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People confuse that with the passage of time. For sure. And that still doesn't mean that we can situate it in historical context until truly that time has passed.

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Well, it's like- And I think that's something that we lose on a platform like Twitter. Mm-hmm.

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It moves so fast, and it's like neither, neither one of these people is really a person, they're just like vessels for meaning, whether it's like- Mm-hmm...

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I, I, you know, how many hundreds of tweets have I read, how many like 7, 12, 20, like, you know, newsletter issues have I read in the past three days or whatever.

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It's like, that's just so much meaning like that's like [chuckles] crammed into my head that I'm not sure like what to think of it, to where it's like, uh, now we're just discussing like the response to the response really r- more than just the thing, and like that's almost what's become more interesting is like, I don't know, not the thing itself, but the response.

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And I don't know. I, I'm just [chuckles] kind of like losing myself even talking about it. Like, it's like- Well, yeah, I mean, it's been interesting for me to like...

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So I, I guess a while back, like I guess the emergence of like Red Scare and even my friends with like new models and some of these things, like it became clear to me that there were just kind of new status games being played where it was like easy to co-opt aesthetics, and like having to like read the literature to engage presented like an interesting obstacle where you could create new boundaries to define who was in the in club and who was not.

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Hegelian e-girls? Hegelian e-girls. Like not for nothing, that was like an emergent property that I think stemmed from this stuff. Yeah. And I don't think like Teapots entirely dissimilar.

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Like you found these like new arenas where you could spout off about accelerationism or whatever it is. Like having VCs quote Nick Land is like bizarre to me, but I think it's like an emergent property of these things.

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And so- Yeah... what's intriguing is that like, you know, I'm on TikTok now, and I think, you know, I've s- you've seen kind of like the end game of what was like

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Joshua Citarella's like Politigram, like 13-year-olds reading about Max- Famously going to be on the podcast next week. Let's go. Um- By famously, I mean I'm just telling you that for the first time. Yeah, yeah.

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No, like little kids reading Max Stirner or whatever, calling themselves like Neo-Comenius or whatever.

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Like what you have now on TikTok is a bunch of kids spouting kind of like the most obvious shit in like pseudo-academic terms, and people being like, "Snap, snap, snap. Yes, this."

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And like to me it feels totally insane, but like

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that to me actually has created a situation where a lot of these people are able to then abstract the humans in this thing and turn them into like these academic figures that allow them to like, you know, uh, uh, es-

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talk about ideas that, you know, reinforce their, the way they see the world instead of thinking about it like truly.

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That's like, I never thought about when I was like, you know, in, when I was like 15 or whatever in, in English class and we read about like in, we read about existentialism for the first time, and I'm like, "Oh, this is like, I've been looking for my philosophical worldview, like existentialism.

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This is it." And like that was the thing that you look, you know, at 15 I was like, like 2010 or whatever, right?

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So it's like it never really occurred to me, like obviously, you know, I've read like Josh, Josh, seen his graphs and sort of all this stuff.

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It never really occurred to me that it's like instead of discovering existentialism on, in English class, they're discovering like all these much more niche things that you can just dive so deeply into on the internet.

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So- I mean, it's amazing. I was watching like, um, re-watching The Sopranos from that like gray angle of like AJ becoming like eco-terrorist. Like getting on the internet and getting like pilled.

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That show's just so good. It has so much staying power, but I feel like that's happening at scale in a big way now.

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[chuckles] My friend texted me when we were like three minutes into recording this like, "What is Teapot?" And I wanted to be like, "Don't worry about it, kitten." But I was like, "I'm on..."

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I was like, "I'm literally on a podcast, the podcast right now. Like, I'll t- I'll talk to you after about this." But I'm like, "Oh, God. How do I even explain this?"

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Actually, Trevor, like yourWe talk about status games a lot. You've influenced my thinking on it, but I realized we didn't really define it for people listening to the podcast.

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Could you, can you explain like what you mean by that? Yeah. I mean, I guess it's funny, I've never like properly tried... But like effectively in, in all kind of like

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social life, there are hierarchies and there are games that we play to like move up and down those hierarchies.

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And I think of those as being like games where you're trying to kind of either increase your status or, you know, maybe move laterally.

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But, um, I think what's been interesting about the internet is that it's allowed people to kind of like hack sociology and hack psychology.

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And a, a lot of app creators have figured out that that's how tribes like to spend their times- Mm... is like playing status games.

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And so you create different platforms that enable different types of achievements, and then people come in, do their status game TikTok dances.

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One thing I, I can take it back to, there's like one more, uh, Luigi Mangione angle I wanna talk about.

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So the writer Catherine D had written a short piece for The Spectator yesterday, um, about, you know, his digital footprint and what to make of it. And there's a couple...

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I'll read, I'll like read a couple short excerpts from it. So one, Mangione's worldview, to the extent we can piece it together, wasn't pinned to a standard left/right axis, as we already discussed.

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The closest thing we have is that he seemed convinced that technology and modernity had led us astray. And then she gets to, whatever the case, we are at the dawn of a new era.

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We have argued endlessly over left versus right radicalization, but this case nudges us to think along a different axis between faith in technology's promise and despair at its hollowing of the human spirit.

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Beneath the endless streams, apps, and feeds, something essential is slipping away.

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Which the point here that to talk about is she says, um, "My sense is that we've arrived at the beginning of the real culture war, techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism.

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In this world, may we all become techno-realists." Interesting. That's interesting to me, I think, I guess because we are so in it, and I felt like that's been the la... Like I felt like twenty sixteen

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was, was the moment that culture war kicked off because it was like, hey, technology brought us Obama, it brought us Facebook, it brought us Google, indexing the world information, don't be evil.

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In twenty sixteen it brought us Donald Trump. Like that was, that was the consensus, is that this thing has now been a psy, a psyop.

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It's been, it's been controlled by Russians and billionaires, and you watch the narrative shift.

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And much of my experience in technology over the last eight years has been like trying to get people excited about a techno-optimist vision that like I was raised in via Wired magazine and Kevin Kelly or whatever else.

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And so I, I think, I mean, even like Ted Kaczynski, like, like obviously I think that's probably the angle she's taking, is that him reading Uncle Ted a- and, and espousing the same kind of like,

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you know, w- uh, desire for the agrarian age or whatever. Uh, um, but I, I think that's, that to me feels a little lazy. I don't know. I think there's, there's more interesting threads being pulled on than that.

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I'm curious what you guys read into that.

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I mean, this guy's a programmer who seems to have had a really painful injury and experiences with drugs that basically accelerated his view that like technology is not the solution to a certain type of despair. Sure.

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And I think a tech- technology can be the solution to some types of despair. It could also be the source of despair. Um, but that

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seems to be, to me, like looking at the people he engaged with on Twitter, who I would put in the techno-optimist category, that seems to be like

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the real, the crux of the motive as like I understand it, which is like, you can believe all of these things and you can study computer science and read all of these thinkers, and then one day, like see a tweet also that's like, you can just do things, and that doesn't become applying to YC, it becomes buying a gun.

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[chuckles] And that act feels more meaningful and real than like a fleet of Waymos, period. Sure. A fleet of Waymos, that's a self-driving car. That has been the example of changing the world forever. Sure.

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But you know what else changes the world? Shooting somebody. Yeah. It's, it's, it's interesting.

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To me, there seems to be this kind of like cosmic pendulum, you know, like I, I, I don't wanna call it like the invisible- Ooh, cosmic pendulum. That's a great name for something. [chuckles] Yeah.

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My, my new liquid drumming bass duo. [chuckles] Um, uh, but I think... You know, I don't wanna call it like an invisible hand or kind of like a cosmic market force, but like

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there was this kind of like trendy nineties Dawkins atheist kind of like extremely material view of the world that kind of like fedora Reddit brained a lot of young men. Oh, like Richard Dawkins? Yeah. Yeah.

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Is that his name? Totally, yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, this kind of atheist view. Mm-hmm. And I think as technology's accelerated, you've, you, and, and you've kind of cruised deeper.

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Like, I found God again, God again by building an AI. Like at some point you get deep enough where you're like, we're definitely not computers, we're, we're radios, you know? Mm-hmm. And like

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if you were to smash the radio, you'd think this thing created the sound, but it doesn't create the sound, it receives the sound. And I, and I think that like, uh, people like Luigi and the teapot world

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stare down this barrel, and they either like retreat into this like, "That sounds like nonsense, I'm gonna double down on kind of this Dawkins-esque worldview," and i- a- and/or kind of accept that there is a higher thing and that they're merely like a small player in that thing.

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And so I think all it is to say, this idea that like

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i- the tech community as being this monolith of math and science, I think they're gonna be forced to become like magic and God people because effectively what AI is oftentimes is casting spells.Like a prompt is [mumbles]

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and then you hope a thing comes back, and seven out of ten times it does. Like, we're gonna have to accept that there will be kind of AI-born, you know, bio advances where we don't know how they work.

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Like you're taking this pill and it cures a thing, and we don't know, but the, the God above gave us this spell and it works, so we keep putting leeches on it or whatever it is.

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Like, I think the return to magic is gonna be real, and it's gonna, it's, it's gonna soften the edges on a lot of these things and make it more palatable to the EQ set.

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Where do you think network spirituality fits into all of this? Well, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. That's like a generation of I think of like really observant young people, like the Ramelia set.

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Like they, they, they've, they've been able to identify that there are like voices and spirits in the machines. Mm-hmm. And that they're important and that you should acknowledge them.

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And like even the kind of macho I see more and more of like we made the rocks talk, like, you know, with think about like transistors and chips, like you've, you've turned silicon into thinking machines. Like

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that's fucking wild. That's, that's spiritual. That's like voodoo.

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And I think that like there's gonna be a return to that kind of thinking, and I think it'll make it more palatable and easier for people to accept techno-optimism that's rooted in kind of like a, a humanist and like spiritual world, not- I'm, I'm reminded of like the last few days, there was a few articles I read, and I'm probably gonna like confuse which ideas I got from which ones, but I didn't read...

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There was like the Casey Newton, uh, piece about like AI. He was making some case for AI, and then Edward Ongweso Jr. made the, in his Substack, had this long piece like kind of disputing every part of that.

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And I think maybe he wrapped it up in this way, or it was then [chuckles] what I read in Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day newsletter kind of wrapping up the two, where it's like the point is that AI, it's, it's not that like AI is, is like terrible and evil, or that it's like good and positive, but it's like, it's that it's all of these things at once, and it's like, I don't know.

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So like thinking about techno-optimism versus techno-pessimism, it's like I don't... Like the... H-how can you be one or the other really when it just is the reality? You can't put... There's so much toothpaste.

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There's tubes and tube, there's liters, gallons of toothpaste out of the tube. The tube is o-- We can't put it back in, right? So I don't know.

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I, I haven't really delved much into like thinking about it in this like magical sense that you're talking about, but, but, but I like that.

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I think like, well, 'cause for me too, where I land on that is like AI as a term, right? Is like so meaningless to me.

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Like I, you know, like I'm not such a techy person where I understand exactly how LLMs work and all that, but like I think of AI as basically meaning a term that just means like a computer that's really fast and good at pattern matching, and like, you know, it's not so different from like a computer ten years ago.

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It's just that this one's faster, and AI just means fast computer. Yeah. It's interesting.

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Like, um, I don't know if you want to interrogate like AI and like what it means, but like I think you could describe like an intelligent human as someone who effectively is like really good and fast at pattern matching, right?

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Mm-hmm. Like effectively that's learning. You're like hearing someone point at your... Your little brother is pointing at your mom and saying, "Mom," and you're going, "Oh, if I point at her and say mom, she responds."

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I'm gonna like double down on that pattern and get attention or whatever it is.

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Um, all that is to say like I think that's like, yeah, that's like been the most obvious like take for a long time, for as long as I can remember, is that like these things are, are, are, are neutral and effectively how you use them can define whether they're good or bad.

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I think what's, what's interesting to me is like how we're gonna interrogate the definition of like progressivism. Um, and I think that...

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Like I, I see technology explicitly as like doing more with less or the same, right? Like that's just, you know... I-it-it-it's enabling more. And progressivism for me was always about doing more for people. Mm-hmm.

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And I think what's interesting is like that became doing more for people who have less than others. Man, that makes sense too.

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And it slowly shifted into be like doing more for those who have a certain identity- Mm-hmm...that are aligned with. And I was like, interesting. I guess that makes sense. The catchall, it's easier.

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And then at some point I was like, actually, I don't like that at all. I'm not interested in that.

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I'm interested in, in helping people explicitly, and if that means helping people that have less e-more so, I'm, I'm for that also. And I think as

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those things diverge, when it became about helping a certain identity, it became clear that like doing more with less may actually mean that you impact those people with a certain identity, and those things started to kind of have a certain point of dissonance.

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And if they return to like doing more for people, I think technology and progressivism begin to align again. But otherwise, uh, you see it fragmenting, and it may have already fragmented beyond repair.

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I mean, this is kind of a leftist- My issue as somebody who is interested in technology and using it to fulfill like what I...

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things that I think are important, support things that I think are important, um, and like direct capital around them, I totally agree that we're entering an age of humanism and technology by necessity.

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My issue is the people who have capital and power right now in Silicon Valley were not selected for their skills as humanists, and their companies and the way things were funded were not optimized towards humanism.

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And so we're stuck with

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this group of leaders and people and founders who were good at what they were selected for, which was building unicorns and scaling, and in some instances, like, you know, being on the spectrum in a way that would allow them to ignore a type of humanism that might have made those companies smaller.

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But they... I, I think the issue is like

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I'm not really interested in those people refashioning themselves as humanists because I don't think you can have-People pivoting to writing threads about humanism that think, like, books can be replaced by ChatGPT.

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But there is no pipeline empowering, selecting, directing capital towards people that have the skill sets that were ignored during, like, you know, the Zerp era, whatever you wanna call it. Zerp is a bit of a myth.

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We've covered that on this podcast. But like, you could say, like, broadly the last two decades. Like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg was the person to build Facebook.

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Is Mark Zuckerberg the person to be the voice of, like, post-AI tech humanism? Like, probably not. He's a family man, he's a nice guy, but, like, he wasn't selected to do that. It's interesting, right?

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And I think this is exactly, like, the, the kind of thing we're gonna need to figure out how to discuss with, like, the accurate language because I think if you were to describe Elon Musk, it'd be someone who cares deeply about

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humans and not very much about people, right? Mm-hmm. Like, and I was...

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I would, I would say like, you know, Larry and Sergey to a lesser extent, and Elon maybe more so than Larry and Sergey, like, are exactly the same way. Like, they're, they're thinking very much about humanity broadly.

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Mm-hmm. Elon wants to create plan Bs and save the environment, but if that requires crushing the janitor who, you know, got something wrong, like, he'll absolutely crush the janitor, right? Mm-hmm.

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He'll crush anyone to get to this thing. And I think that is where we've had this divergence, and I, and I think it's, it's gonna be interesting. I mean, that, that was to me is kind of like tech optimism 101.

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It was just like th-th-this utilitarian vision of doing what's required to help the great... to do the, to do the greater good. And- Everything is a trolley problem. I mean, everything is a trolley problem. Yeah.

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And as I'm able to atomize it and kind of give everyone a voice via these things, you've now humanized those people on the tracks. Mm-hmm. And it creates a lot of icky feels for people.

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And I think that's the challenge, is that, like, if you're Elon, if you're Mark, you're at a certain elevation where you're like, "How could you possibly dislike me?

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I'm the, I'm the person who has done the single most for humanity in the last two decades." You could argue that Elon Musk single-handedly has done more than anyone in the last two decades. Mm-hmm.

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And you'd be, "Well, how could you possibly dislike me? The thing you talk about the most is climate change, that's me." You know what I mean? Like, a-and so I don't know.

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I, I think we're gonna have to figure out language, and if we want some of these very...

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these people who are goal-oriented, and when given the right boundaries can do impressive things, I think a lot of them feel bait-and-switched in that, like, in the Obama era, they were heroes because the boundaries and the conditions they were given, they met and surpassed, and Amazon made it really easy to get anything you want.

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Like- Mm-hmm... how in-- what an incredible premise to someone in fucking Oregon Trail. To, like, push a button and it's all at your, at your disposal. And so I think there...

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the idea of becoming a villain is quite easy because you're like, "What do you mean? Like, I did this all for you and you turned on me? Fuck you guys." Mm-hmm. "Actually, if you think I missed, then fuck you, I am that."

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Mm-hmm. And so I think if instead we're able to, like, you know, say, "Actually, we... the boundaries we gave you were close, but directionally a little bit off.

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Here's what we actually are looking for," you would see a Patrick Collison or whatever, like, achieve those things.

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And maybe this return to kind of like, um, being excited about these people or, like, bringing them into the tent instead of saying, "Fuck you, scapegoat. We're good."

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Well, I wanna s-uh, bring up another, another tweet of yours from two months ago.

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Um, which- This is great where somebody starts citing your tweets too 'Cause I, I did go back and I, I l- I read every tweet of yours in twenty twenty-four. I will admit that. No. Stop. Don't admit that. Yeah, I did.

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God bless you. Uh, you know- I did not do that for the record That's, that's, that's my cross to bear.

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That's, that's what- You're reading them in real time, Daisy, come on But, um, okay, anyways, the tweet was, "There's this weird thing happening where social has incentivized selling picks and shovels, but there's no gold rush, just people selling courses on how to sell courses."

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Which I think is a bit of what we're talking about here, but more on like the everyday internet user level, not the Elon and the, and the Zuckerberg, but like the other people.

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Um, and that to me speaks to, like, kind of this, a bit of a logical conclusion of, like, that, like, what they were selected for [clears throat] fifteen years ago to, like, build these companies.

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This is what trickles down, where it's like, it's about making money on the internet. It's about this, like, the internet casino. Obviously, this tracks to, like, crypto too. Um, I don't know.

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Curious for you to expand more on, like, kinda what you were getting at in that tweet. I think what I struggle with is, again, like, you know, I think, like, Julian from New Mouth calls it, like, autism creep. Mm-hmm.

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Like, effectively this worldview of very concrete, discrete systems and the game being to, like, win that system has created, like, some kind of perverse outcomes. Meaning that, you know, I'm thirty-eight years old.

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I came up on the internet, but also was aware of kind of like a softer spiritual goal of actualization. Mm-hmm. Meaning that, like, I wanted to be an artist. Mm-hmm.

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And I wanted to create things, and I wanted those things to, like, make the world a better place, and there's something soft and, and, and special about that.

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And when I discovered Myspace, I realized I could write JavaScript that would make people auto-friend me or whatever, you know?

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And so it was like, cool, I can get lots of friends here, in which case I can have lots of influence, and the things that I make can impact people at a greater scale. Awesome. Mm-hmm.

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Um, I can build a blog, I can build a brand, I can read Cialdini and other people and kind of like l-learn to hack human psychology such that they can pay attention to me, and then I can do great things.

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And what's interesting is that people in my generation started, like, recognizing that, building personal brands, and then recognizing they needed something to do with that attention.

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So they became photographers, fashion bloggers- Mm-hmm...

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you know, DJs, things that have really low barriers to becoming good.And what's interesting now is like if you interface with young Hype House TikTokers, you're like amazing, like... Or MrBeast, like you won this game.

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Like you're the best at creating YouTube thumbnails and capturing attention. Like what do you wanna do with that? Mm. They're like, "I, I wanna win the game." I'm like, "No, I won the game."

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You know, like, yeah, but like, but the actual game, the meta game, was like doing shit that like helps the world. Now you capture all this attention like...

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And when you talk to them, they're like, "I'm gonna create a fund. Why would I do anything? Like I can just sell attention- Mm... and I can like invest, and I can get rich. Like I don't need to do anything."

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And so that to me is like the, you know, the, the, th- the champions of this current way of existing on the internet.

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And the trickle-down of that is all these people that are just like effectively selling courses to the gold rush, which is a... The... it... There is no actual goal.

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Like the, the gold rush is winning this game, not living and actualizing and doing things that matter outside of a bank account or a follower count or these things that you can measure with numbers on a screen. And so

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it's probably why I tweeted it, because it's, it's not as concrete as I'd like it to be, but it does feel frustrating that there isn't a kind of higher calling to capturing all this attention, even if it was like getting laid.

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Yeah. Like when I meet band dudes that were like, "I just wanna go to banks, I wanna get laid," I'm like, it feels more fucking noble than like- It's offensive... selling shapewear on TikTok shop.

304
00:50:02.638 --> 00:50:13.008
Well, so I, I just read this like MIT Press book called Content by this media theorist person, Kate Eichhorn, and she was talking about this idea of content capital, which maybe, maybe you've talked about this before, but I hadn't heard the term before.

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But basically, kind of the way I paraphr- pa- paraphrased it is it's like it's your reach, it's your following, it's your, um...

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I think kind of the logical clu- conclusion to it is it's your ability with your presence on the internet to like affect some material thing, and it's like your...

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maybe it's like your ability to convert it to social capital, financial capital, all, all the other types of capital, right?

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Um, but the way you're talking about that is like these people who are like producing content capital purely for the sake of producing more content capital, and then there's this other great line in the book that's just, "Content begets content," right?

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Mm. Which is like kind of... I mean, that's what [chuckles] this podcast is, is we talk about other content. Anyways, but, um, I don't know.

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To me, that's what that is, is it's just this like endless wheel of content that begets more content, that begets maybe financial capital, and just like to, to no end. Like there's no...

311
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That's the p- there's no end to it.

312
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And that, yeah, and I think that to me feels okay, like narratives and stories and the way they manifest, but I guess the stories, and maybe this is me being romantic, and, and maybe it's because these are the ones that have persisted throughout time, but like if the story is the Bible or like, you know, hymnals were kind of by slaves or whatev- like, if these stories that were passed on are meaningful, I'm interested in like content begetting more content, but the empty calories of it all, and I think that's like the challenge for me is that like we haven't created great systems for like measuring

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sustenance, you know? Like it, it's, it's just... it's empty calories constantly, and I think that's what's frustrating.

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And I, I guess some part of me is, is struggling with like is it, am I just old, and my like axes for understanding like the, the, the, the kind of like quality of these things is like antiquated?

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Or should I be actively helping young people and being like, "No, like you can make things that matter. Like they don't need to be disposable." Right.

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Like your Oura Ring is not going to tell you how well you are in terms of like how meaningful you feel like your life is. People realize they're missing some component of wellness, but there's no,

317
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there's no like way to measure that outside of spirituality, which is how we end up with like more wellness content as a solution to the problem that was created.

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And I just wanna jump real fast back, 'cause I really like this distinction between people who are focused on humans and people that are focused on people, and I think like we need actually more creators and people in the media industry who like understand the distinction and like can do both.

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Because a very... Like if you're too far left on the spectrum, you're very focused on people, you miss the human aspect which does require accumulating power and capital in order to have the influence to serve people.

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But then you have like from the founder perspective, think about somebody like Bill Gates, whose career is sort of bifurcated between the human era, which is create Microsoft, um, good for humanity,

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bad for a lot of individual people, arguably, and then you have the people area, era, where you eradicate malaria, and it's like two chapters.

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But what if they had to be the same chapter, and what if the people who got capital and were privileged in culture but also were privileged in the world of Silicon Valley were the people that were the best of keeping an eye on both at the same time?

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This has never occurred before. And I feel like that's sort of what we're talking about here. But like also correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know. Yeah, I think it's a really tough one, right? Like

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you could argue that like Steve Jobs was that character- Mm... or this...

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and like, you know, it's kind of a product of this kind of like hippie California thing, and I always think about him getting pitched the idea of like streaming music, and he was like, "That's bullshit.

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People should own their media." Mm-hmm. You know? And I think there's kind of a humanist quality in what Steve Jobs did that prevented slop.

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And I think as you've moved away from Steve, you see like Apple Vision Pros emerge, where you're like, interesting technically, what value does it add to the human experience? Mm.

328
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And there are constantly things where I'm like, "Steve would've killed that." Again, could be romantic, I'm looking backwards. And I don't know, I think one of the challenges...

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Like I lived in France for a bit, and it was interesting because it was so people-focused, right? Like- Mm...

330
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everyone I engaged with, it was funny 'cause like you talk to friends and, you know, they'd be like, "Taylor Swift is flying private, disgusting." And I'd be like, "But you would if you could."

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They'd be like, "Absolutely not. I would never." And you're like, "Really?"Oh, and they fucking wouldn't French people? Yeah, like my French homies, like young people. They were like, "Absolutely not.

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It's disgusting that you Americans would even consider doing that." And you're like, "Oh." They have better trains than us, so. They have better trains, for sure.

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But what, what, what also was intriguing is because they're so fixated on the people piece, they lose sight of the kind of like humanity piece, and we'd have these arguments about like Teslas, and they'd be like, "Yes,

334
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man, uh, the, the..." You know, like, [chuckles] "The rivers are being poisoned in Africa 'cause they're pulling the lithium out of the ground."

335
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And you're like, "I understand that, but like ecology and climate change are two different things." Like climate change is like impending doom that kills all of us.

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Ecology poisons this river and fucks over like a tribe of Africans. That sucks, for sure.

337
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But again, like utilitarian tech hat on, you'd be like, "Well, we gotta save humanity, and if we poison a thousand people, that sucks, but it's humanity." And they're kind of incapable of seeing the other way.

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And so I think, I, I don't know.

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It's, it's been fun to kinda have that dialectic, um, for my Hegelian e-girls, but I, I, I, I'm, I'm not sure where I land on like how we split the difference or if it just is this kind of cosmic pendulum of like you push hard in one direction, and then the universe pushes you harder in the other direction, and you have these sweet spots where we have fifty years of no conflict, and now as the pendulum swings back, you know, war with China,

340
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Ukraine, Syria.

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One-- So, uh, one other thing I found while preparing for this is when, when you were on The Context pod a couple months ago, and you were talking about this idea how there's no finality on the internet, and that is what I was thinking about as we were talking about this.

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And I think the human scale versus the people scale. I think the people scale is about finality and like if you're owning your media, that media can, you know... A, a, a record can be destroyed, whatever.

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If you're streaming, that can't be destroyed. Like whatever, the service could be destroyed, whatever, but it's this endlessness, et cetera.

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Um, [lips smack] and then when I think too about like d-doing actions on the scale of humanity and like saving humanity, one thing...

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Like y- you know, eventually on, on every scale, cellular scale up to species scale, things die, right?

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And so I think like this idea of doing things on the human scale and like E-Elon Musk working to, you know, help the, save the environment or whatever, it's like you're just pushing that, right?

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And this idea of like building on Mars, it's like th- that human scale tries to ignore a f- a, a fina... That humanity scale tries to ignore a finality, I think, which is like good 'cause you shouldn't- Death...

348
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like accept death, right? But like you also actually kind of have to. And I don't know. Maybe this is too much.

349
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[chuckles] We're kind of probably wrapping up the pod here, but, but I'm thinking about that a lot where like the way we're talking about huma-humanity scale seems to ignore this idea of finality that's, you know, part of the people scale and part of every from the cellular scale up, right?

350
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Well, I was talking to my friend this week.

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Sorry to jump in, but like, uh, she's a professor, a creative writing professor, and she says like, you know, the first thing she tells her students or what she feels like she's ultimately teaching her students is like, "You are going to die, and everyone that you love will die."

352
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And I think the starting point of the humanity is, is to accept and cope with death, and that's a big part of humanism, that if you believe the ultimate project is to defeat death, you are at odds.

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And maybe they can meet in the middle around some sort of spirituality, which is like what part of life continues? Um, but to accept human death does feel at like the core of all art.

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And for instance, I don't know if you read any of my tweets. You might just read Trevor's, but I did tweet today that, um, all- I read all your tweets, Daisy. Okay. All media is future lost media.

355
00:58:11.936 --> 00:58:17.956
Um, but I would say all technology is future lost technology. Yeah. What was the song you were tweeting that about?

356
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Um, somebody found like some emo CD in a store that they really liked, and there was just like no record of the band on the internet anywhere. Oh, whoa. Yeah. What a blessing. [chuckles] Right?

357
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No, I'm sure- Sorry that can't be me. [chuckles] Um, yeah. No, that's interesting. I, I, I often think about like... I don't know.

358
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Like you hang so many founder circles, and like effectively you've got a bunch of sickos who are like, who actively believe they can

359
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beat death, either via like bronze statue that exists in the square indefinitely or like a planet they colonize being named after them or, or whatever- Well, that's even just like what being a VC-funded company is about, right?

360
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It's like that, that beating the odds to grow. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, but like even the silly ones, you know, like, "I wanna build a generational life insurance company," and you're like, "What?

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Like you wanna do this your whole life?" Like it is kinda... Uh, but like ev-- like they have to believe it, and that's why they get funded, and that's why they do well. Um, but it's, it's...

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Again, I think there's kind of like a tension there that I think is important, and I think actually as I've gotten older, like I'm really thankful that like Rashida T- uh, you know, Tlaib or like Ben Shapiro exist because I think you need these people pulling at other ends of the spectrum, and I think it's like

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lazy and kind of like, uh, you know, counterproductive to suggest that like any people should go away on either side. Mm-hmm. And I, I think I'm, uh, I'm really thankful that there are

364
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Brian Johns of the world trying to beat death. And maybe on the flip side of that, while it kind of like breaks my heart, I think there are... It's, it's

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compelling and important that there are people that are actively trying to, you know, have the right to die. And

366
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that tension, I think, i- is probably important in humanity and creates a conflict that gives this fucking bizarre thing meaning. Right.

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I mean, I happen to believe the whole point of life is love, and that's probably why I will never be rich, but that's okay. I think that's the perfect place to end it. Uh, this has been Tastes Like- No. No.

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[chuckles] Yeah, let's end it. Thanks for coming on, Trevor. Thanks, Trevor. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. [upbeat music] It tastes just like it costs. Honey.

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It tastes just like it costs