[upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehrer. And I'm Daisy Aliotto. And who are we speaking to today, Daisy? Today we're speaking with W. David Marx.
He's an American writer who lives and works in Tokyo, Japan, and he's been writing his newsletter, Culture & Owner's Manual, since 2022.
His most recent book, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change, was published in 2022, and his next book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century, will be published this November.
This was a good episode.
I think, um, uh, pulling back the curtain for the reader for a second, it was an interesting one in that we recorded it evening our time and right after David was waking up, um, which I was grateful for 'cause I'm, I'm, I'm a little tired by the end of the day.
But he, I... He really brought, he really brought the energy on this one. Tasteland after dark. Tasteland after dark. Um, no, I, I really, I mean, I really [chuckles] enjoyed this one.
I really like, I really like listening to David talk. [laughs] He's very smart. I'm excited to find out if there's a time of day when my vocal fry is worse. When it's worse? Yeah. To...
Do you wanna get some bad reviews, some one-star reviews on Apple Podcasts? No, I'm always just trying to optimize myself. Hmm. Uh, wouldn't that be enshittification? [laughs] I don't know. Enfryification?
[laughs] The... This is the, this is the problem. It's really, it's a paradox because it's worse when I'm relaxed. Mm.
So actually, the more I'm in an environment where I feel comfortable, the worse- Maybe you should record-... it is... in the subway. [laughs] Maybe I should record in the subway. Subway Tastes. Subway Tastes.
Yeah, exactly. We should have... Maybe we can have Kareem on the podcast. Yeah, I would happily. Um- It would just be a supercut of every take. A supercut of every take. He's ever said 100% too. [laughs] Okay.
So we wouldn't actually have him on. [laughs] We would just take his clips, clip every time he says that, and then put that together as, as the [laughs] That's the definition of clip farming. [laughs] Oh, right. Yeah.
Okay, clip farmers, get your tractors ready. Let's go talk to [laughs] David Marx. [upbeat music] Okay.
As, as a way into this, um, I wanna talk about something Daisy just wrote that we haven't talked about on the pod yet.
Daisy, your, your, your, uh, your piece in The New York Times about how there was no, was no, is no, could be still no song of the summer this summer. I would argue there's still no song of the summer.
Although Pitchfork, I mean, I don't wanna claim that they were influenced by me, but they did... Shortly after it came out, they did do their arguments for what they think the song of the summer is.
Well, they have to do that every year, Pitchfork, don't they? They do, but I feel like the framing was different this time. The framing was, like, that most people would think that there's no clear winner. Yeah.
It was less consensus than I think it has been in the past, but I don't know. David, did you see that, um, discourse? Uh, no. Although I was watching Andor,
and there's the scene where, like, she's in the wedding death dance marathon rave thing, and I was like, "You know what'd be a funny idea, is if people considered that to be the song of the summer."
And then Vanity Fair wrote a piece, like, "That's the song of the summer," or something like that. Um- Mm. Interesting... so that was one, that was one.
I mean, last year, I, I followed it last year because I think it was very clear that there wasn't one, and, and again, all the examples given were kind of pathetic, which was...
One of them was the East European techno parody, The State of Bass. Was that what it was called? Oh. Mm. Yeah. The- But wasn't last summer- Talk about a one-trick pony... like, Espresso? If... I mean- Yeah. Yeah.
It was definitely Espresso. Or was those a Brat Summer? I mean- Well, Brat, but that's like the album. Album. But I feel like the song was Espresso weirdly. Yeah. That's true.
But like Brat Summer, the more distance I get from it, I feel like was an actual thing. It wasn't just a marketing- Yeah... scheme. Like, the people really felt it.
And it did feel like that last moment before the end of the world, that, like, there's a chance that we may save ourselves from this, but we didn't.
But, like, in, in that moment, in that summer, it felt kind of exciting, like- It was part of that falling short... maybe we're not gonna do this again. Yeah. It was Kamala's- Exactly.
It was [laughs] Kamala's taking- Yeah.
We were, um, we were driving to Massachusetts for a wedding, and we stopped at this rest stop, and I, like, pointed to a parking spot, and I was like, "That's where I was when I found out Joe Biden dropped out of the race."
[laughs] And Brad just, like, looks out the window wistfully and goes, "That was such a good week." [laughs] Yeah. And it was like, it really was only a week. [laughs] A really, a week of, week of hope.
But, uh, it's so funny. I think my- It's not funny. Sorry... my personal... These are not the songs of the summer. Uh, but the thing I'll say about it, and then we can move on.
Um, my personal two songs of the summer that I've probably been listening to the most are, I think it's called The Field by Blood Orange, and there's, there's like six people- Mm... on it.
Caroline Polachek, um, what's-his-name from the Darudi column, Vinnie Riley. Um, and then the, the, uh, Ethel Cain song, Fuck Me Eyes, in a very similar way to American Teenager. Mm-hmm.
I, I've been listening to it a lot, like, if I, when I'm biking around, if I'm biking somewhere. It's a perfect, like, summer, going fast [laughs] song.
But, but these are not songs that you would hear coming out of a, a car driven by a- Right. It's a great song, but, like, uh, it's never gonna be, like, co-opted by marketing. Even, like, American Teenager wasn't.
It was on the Obama list, but it didn't- Yeah... I didn't see it. Mm-hmm. NNA marketing campaigns or accounts. A regular Born in the USA moment. I- Justin Bieber came in pretty hot with Daisies. Okay.
Well, there's some bi- [laughs] bias here at play. I'm saying, these are just the facts. It also was in that Pitchfork roundup. Um, we do actually have a piece coming out about whether there's a summer blockbuster.
Hmm.Um, I don't know. It's hard, like- I just saw Weapons. How was it? It was good. Um, I like Barbarian. I'm not a scary movie guy. I, I get too scared. Um- Yeah, me too- [laughs] But... Francis. It's okay. It... Yeah.
Thank you. But it... But I, I wanted to see it because Barbarian was really good. I thought it was like a fun movie that happens to have some scares in it, and I thought that was the same- Mm... here.
I think that Weapons, the, the f- the funny parts of Weapons are funnier than the scary parts are scary. Um, and there's only like maybe, maybe a handful of, of parts where I was truly, like, freaked out. Um,
but I don't know. Is it, is it a summer blockbuster? I'm reminded too, I, I...
So I, I just finished, as we record this, I just finished a Keith McNally memoir last night, and he had a line in there about he l- he loves movies, talks about movies a lot.
Um, and he wistfully notes how Star Wars, which he's, which he's never seen, but it wasn't until Star Wars came out that press started talking about, um, how much movies made at the box office- Mm... which felt,
you know, which is very funny 'cause I feel like in the past two years it's people saying stuff, like tweeting stuff, like, "Oh, it wasn't until people started being obsessed with A24 that, um, people started talk," every- that everybody started talking about how much money a film made.
Yeah. That's definitely not true. David, I wanna get you in here, and I know you're- Sure... just, like, waking up [laughs] and it- I... No, I'm fine.
I was just thinking my song of the summer was Carnival by Mer- Natalie Merchant, because I completely forgot that song existed for about 20 or 30 years or wh- whatever it was.
And so just to rediscover that, like, oh, I knew this song, and it was great, and then to listen to it again was, was really fun. But, uh, that doesn't count obviously.
I like to say that every song, every, every summer my s- recently my song of the summer has been Atlantic City, uh, by the Band, not the original Bruce Springsteen song. Mm-hmm.
So I, I think it's okay to have a, a vintage song of the summer.
Um- I think that's a really good one, David, and I've been experiencing a lot of, like, global coffee house aesthetic nostalgia, and Natalie Merchant I feel like is a bit of a poster child of that. I don't know the song.
I, maybe I, I probably know it by ear. You're- I don't know it by name. [laughs] You're probably a little young. I mean, I grew up- Yeah... on 10,000 Maniacs because my brother and sister are much older. Mm-hmm.
And so I was, like, into that when I was nine or something, like very precocious. And then, then as a high school kid with... And we had alternative radio for exactly 18 months in Pensacola- Mm...
and that was, like, a staple of, of that, uh, radio station. It was like just... That, that song hit the exact time we had a radio station. So- Mm-hmm... I knew that one, and then I guess, did she do Lilith Fair?
That was a big thing. I don't know. Being a performative male in 1990s, you had to know- [laughs]... a lot of Tori Amos and, uh, Natalie Merchant. Man, if they brought Lilith Fair back today, well,
I think it would, it would make Gamergate look like a- [laughs]... state fair. My peak performative male moment in high school, probably by s- senior year, senior year of high school, this is, this is...
I graduated c- high school in 2012, um, was, you know, I discovered Urban, Urban Outfitters. I grew up in rural Northern California, so, you know, I bought some...
I had, like, this Fair Isle patterned hoodie that I, I got from Urban Outfitters, um, in senior year. Everybody loved it. Urban Outfitters must hit so hard- I was wearing those-... if you grew up on a farm. Oh my God.
Mm-hmm, wearing those, some, and some Clarks, some l- kind of like oxblood Clarks. Um- Yeah. Francis is too Urban Outfitters as a city dweller, st- city kid is to Carhartt. [laughs] Hmm, true.
Uh, my Carhartt my dad gave me on the farm, so you know- Yeah... it's, I still have it. Lit- it's getting a little small on me now, you know, uh, some- Yeah... some 15, 16 years on, but, uh, and it's authentic.
I wouldn't wear Carhartt. I mean, now that they have, like, the WIP stuff, and I- Mm... I did an article with them. I got some, and I wear it, but- Oh, I saw that...
for a long time I would never wear it because it felt like stolen valor. Mm. Like, I should be on a, like a road crew- [laughs]... or otherwise- Yeah... I shouldn't wear it. Do people wear it in Tokyo?
You ever- Oh, yeah. Yeah... street spot it? Yeah. Everyone. Quite a few people wears it. Yeah. As a... Okay, as an aside, I've been, uh... I went to Blue & Green recently.
I've been considering buying a pair of Orslow jeans. Mm-hmm. Um, but I was talking to the, the guy at the shop there. They had the, their, these really big ones that's like the super dad fit.
Um, but we were talking about, about precisely this, how I was like, "Oh," I tried them on. I was like, "Oh, these are nice."
Like, I, I, you know, I like how they look, but, but I just, I feel like it's too late in, in the trend cycle of the big pant for me to buy into the big pant. Um- I disagree... I, I, uh...
Well, I, I was g- I was gonna say, so I, I really like them. It's like I could wear them, but I feel like walking around m- I just might feel a bit too much like a perfor- [laughs] like a performative male.
Whereas I tried... The Shuka I tried on, which was sort of a bell-bottom, um, that I felt like was, was just, just right, just weird enough, but I wasn't ready to, to shell out.
I think silhouette trend cycle moves kind of at a 20- 20th century pace. Hmm.
Like, it's, it's much slower, and you have that moment where you have to be the first one to wear the big pants, and then everyone's like, "Ooh, big pants." Yeah.
And then like six months later you don't even think they're big anymore. They, they don't look big. That, that happened to me in Tokyo. There was a... The big silhouette thing really did start here. Yeah.
And- I mean, how big can you go though before the cycle restarts? Yeah. But it just can't go back to skinny again because there's too many people who vote Republican that wear really skinny jeans. Yeah. Right?
So it's- I truly believe it can't go fully back to skinny. It can't go fully back.
So I mean, it can stabilize a little bit and, like, not look as intensely wide, but it's not gonna go back to, like, skin tight, uh- Are we talking women's jeans or men's jeans, or both? This is all men's.
I, I have- Okay... no authority to speak on behalf of women's fashion. Women still wear skin tight jeans. They never stopped. Yeah.
But men, it's like this weird thing where wearing the skinniest jeans means that you're Pete Hegseth or something. [laughs] Yeah. Right? And you work out in them with, with RFK. [laughs] Yeah.
Right.Well, David, I wonder if, like, we could force my Times piece in conversation with your- Sure... piece about what's going on with Labubu- Mm-hmm... where, um, you know- Only fads, a great turn of phrase...
only fads, right. Like, is the sort of lack of a consensus blockbuster or consensus song of the summer part of the only fads phenomenon? Mm. Also, you should probably explain only fads for our listeners.
There was an article by Amanda Mull, who's now at Bloomberg, who was at The Atlantic for a, a long time, who's great consumer culture reporter, and she was just looking at Labubus and Dubai chocolate and saying like, "Where did these come from?"
Mm. And I think for a lot of educated upper middle class, especially American consumers, these things just feel random. Like, they didn't come out of some community somewhere that's been doing it for a long time.
They, they do feel like, uh, they're very fast-moving and fads, and they're coming from places not traditionally in the cultural production network, in the sense of Dubai until now has not been, uh, a, a center for cultural production.
And, you know, whether Dubai chocolate's actually from Dubai or not is probably a whole debate. And Labubus, uh, are from...
They're a Hong Kong illustrator, but it's, uh, being sold through Pop Mart, which is a mainland China- Mm-hmm... retailer. So
some of it's going on, it's kind of things are coming out of, out of nowhere as in not the West. Mm. And the other part is that these just feel bizarre in the sense of like, why this thing now?
Uh, so these are fads, and I mean, I guess my number one point was like, we've always had fads, like in the '50s.
Like, if you ever read a history of the '50s, it's like the whole culture was fads except for you also had Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe and, you know, all this other stuff that stuck.
And so it feels like the difference now is that it's only fads, that fads... That the culture...
And to be a cultural person with media literacy means to be on the pulse of like this week we're talking about this, and next week we're gonna be talking about this, and like this kind of endless cycle of into fads- Right, you're on like the fad beat...
like we all know are fads. Like- Yeah... nobody has a film critic anymore, and they have like five fad reporters. Right. And so that's kind of where culture is.
So you have this monoculture of chasing micro-trend fads, and nothing really sticks obviously with that. And the, the... I had read Simon Reynolds' Retromania in, when it came out, like 2010 or '11.
I thought, like, this is the book that best defines the 21st century at the time because it was like, okay, yes, we're getting into retro, and things aren't really moving, and I was trying to figure out why that was happening.
And I think what I got to was status in culture, was fashions used to be the kind of thing, and some of it was we lack the meta knowledge to know how fashions worked, but it's like wide ties are in everybody.
And everyone said, "Well, of course I have to buy a wide tie." They didn't have any kind of knowledge that like, you know in two or three years you're gonna be wearing skinny ties again. Mm.
And so we weren't even having this trend mechanism discussion. Wait, wait, wait, wait. And so people would... Yeah. Sorry, can you go back? Like, what does it- Sure... mean to lack the meta knowledge? People...
Is it just like people didn't have insight into the supply chain of the sort of like turquoise sweater trickle down- Right... of their lives? Or say- Yeah, I think-... really... And sorry. I think...
So I think that's half of it, and then the second is there was a sense that everyone was doing it, therefore you had to do it. So there was less need to I need a break from the, the cycle.
There was less knowledge that the cycle worked the way it did. I mean- Mm... as much as... I think the tipping point's the least bad Gladwell book, but, like- [laughs]...
that book at least put on people's, like, radars that there was this thing called the trend cycle. Mm. For a lot of people that, that was still kind of obscure sociological knowledge.
So, you know, people didn't really know this stuff in the '60s.
So if you go back and watch a film from the '60s, like '65, '66, '67, the fashion in every single one of those movies is completely different because everyone is, like, legitimately adopting whatever style at the time as part of their identity.
So, like, they're going all in, and the whole society's going all in every year. And so you really get these big social wide ch- social changes.
So I think now it's like we live in a world where not only are we consuming these fads, but we know they're fads. Mm. So you can... We can be like, "Labubu, let's talk about Labubu," but I'm not actually gonna buy one.
I'm not gonna put it on my bag, and I'm certainly not gonna put it on my bag for more than two months or three months or something. And so then it just doesn't become kind of a society-wide aesthetic.
And the way we understand it at the time and the way we look back on it is like, well, that was superficial and stupid, and it was just, like, for fun. It wasn't meaningful. Like, the...
There was actually a confusion that fashion was meaningful in the 20th century- So is the contemporary-... but it's not now... um, is the contemporary category of a fad to...
Like, the condition of a fad is to know that it's a fad while you're participating? Yeah. I think that's- Interesting... I think that's right. So it's like you have the meta knowledge that I'm going to
lightly play with this thing, but I'm not... It's not me. Right. Don't, like, don't judge me on this.
And I think, like, you sort of get into this, but, like, Asia, Asian consumerism has sort of been optimized towards fads for a while.
Like, and I think that they're actually able to do that and coexist with, like, more of a meta intellectualism than, like, Americans are.
Like, I feel like even Americans that know their fads, like, are still getting one shotted by Stanley water bottles- [laughs]... and it's like, you've gotta stop. Like, what is it about... I don't know. Like,
I feel like because this stuff is originating in not the West, like K-pop stans are almost, like, inoculated from the type of things that Americans get incredibly, like, distracted by. And I just wonder...
I mean, I wonder why that is, but this is a theory that I'm sort of thinking aloud on. Well, I, I think that they're not self-conscious. They're just like, "Yeah, Labubu is just fun. It's great." Mm-hmm.
That, like, there's nothing... There's no hand-wringing I think was the word I used in the piece- Mm... about it. And the way that, that, that Amanda's piece is kind of like, what are we gonna do about this?
[laughs] It's like that's the- Yeah... that's the thing in the background, and that's how I'm thinking about it, too. Whereas I think people in Asia are just like, "Yeah, it's Labubu today.
It could be something else tomorrow. It's not a big deal." Uh, so you get more-What I call earnest consumption. Mm.
Uh, and I think the, the other thing about short video is a lot of people of our generation are aware that short video is where the world is, and we have to-- and we partake in it, and we get sucked into it, but, uh,
we don't like it, or we not earn- or like ironically, half ironically consuming it where there's just a lot of places where that is media. Media is short form video.
And so if you're watching these videos and people have Labubu, and then you're like, "I'm gonna get a Labubu, I'm gonna show it off on my short video," it's just an earnest consumption cycle.
And so it makes more sense that cultural production will move to where earnest consumption is happening, not this kind of hand-wringing, half ironic consumption. Mm. So that, that's kind of my sense of things.
And the other thing about Labubu that's I think actually the, the real sign of what's going on at the moment is there is a nexus of K-pop,
Greater China capital, Hong Kong in particular being kind of the creative, uh, powerhouse for mainland China.
Mainland China doesn't have quite the creative production yet, but they've got access to Hong Kong, which has developed a lot of it. Um, the French brands,
uh, the French like conglomerates are really leaning high, like deep into Asia and deep into K-pop.
When you go to like a Louis Vuitton menswear show and you hear people screaming, it's because there's like five hundred people, like K-pop fans lined up out-outside to see the K-pop stars.
Well, there's the, the- And then like Jay-Z and everyone's like-... R.O.Cion and then Lisa is like dating Lisa or whatever, who then I, I only learned this from- Yeah...
from your newsletter, part, part of how it blew up, how Labubu blew up was she put it on her Louis bag, right? Yeah.
So it's kind of like the French conglomerate plus K-pop and then K-pop kind of like legitimizes it for all of Asia and then mainland China money.
Anyway, that's like, to me, that's the new nexus of cultural production is that, is that group. Uh, and that really is a rival to the US as kind of the only place that pop culture can happen or- Yeah.
I guess another parallel I see is like because of Shein- Mm-hmm... Americans are able to participate in specifically fashion micro trends, um, for, with a very low barrier to entry because the clothes are so cheap. But
does getting, like participating in micro trends and getting like the cheap clothes and then making the video about it, like to close the loop, does that mean like Americans are more or less earnest about fads?
Or are we like we're less earnest, but we do more hand-wringing, so we have more of a, a fad?
There's both going on at the same time in the US, which is there's like the pundit class that's doing the hand-wringing but not judging, and it's like I'm, I'm half in, half out.
And then there's people just earnestly doing it. Like there... For every haul video, like every 10 haul videos, there was like an article about haul videos, right, or something.
Well, I think, wait, so something-- You had another newsletter, um, in March titled "The Age of the Double Sellout," and, and I wrote down a quote here that, that I'm looking at now, and I think it's like the flip side of this, right?
Like we're talking about like, um, um, consuming trends, right?
So what I wrote down is, "In the last three decades, youth culture has moved from a deep suspicion of commerce to a passionate defense of anti-anti-commerce to an entire generation of creatives who leverage the commercial market to do even more commerce."
And then another one from later in the, in the post, "The twenty-first century has been the age of the double sellout.
Creators who produce market-friendly content to achieve fame and then use that fame to pursue even more commerce for commerce's sake." So that's kind of the creator side of it and how we view creators as consumers.
But what we're talking about right now is sort of the consumer side of it, where it's like con-consumption for consumption's sake maybe is accelerated, um, and like, like you're saying, like the pundit class maybe will, will be hand-wringing and over intellectualizing.
But your average person who's just scrolling TikTok and sees Labubu or whatever and hits buy on TikTok shop, like that's just like a normal mode because this fast-paced- Right...
consumption from your phone, I want it, I buy it, I have it, it was cheap. I'll do the same again next week. That's just normalized. Yeah, absolutely.
And so I, yeah, so I think that in the US there are people who just, who are earnest consumers, but there's just this other layer of narrative that's the what are we gonna do about it or what does this mean kind of side.
And Asia probably has less of that. I don't wanna say that there's none of the media narrative about it, but I think, uh, the media analysis as part of the narrative, but in, in the US, the way we all consume it.
And that's my, my, my other point of the Labubu piece is I'm not going to ever buy one. It's just- [laughs]...
I can, [chuckles] I can say that right now, but I feel to be a media literate person, I had to know what they are. Yeah. And I was hearing about them, and people were talking about them, and it like you had...
I had to have a moment and stop and be like, "Okay, I gotta figure this out." And I, I- Would you like me to turn you into a Labubu, David? [laughs] I have an app for that. Do you have a filter? You have an app for that?
I sure do. Amazing. Yeah. Um- Wait. Okay. And another, and, oh, you go ahead. Yes.
Yeah, and then the, the, on the, the, to match it with the sellouts piece, I mean, the other part of this is, uh, I don't think there's the bias against seeing things that are popular. "Oh, that's just a cash grab.
Oh, I'm being manipulated because this is just commerce," the way that I think we were hypersensitive to that thirty years ago.
So the consumer themselves doesn't, can't even see through like, "Oh, this is just a, like [chuckles] we're being manipulated by a big company to buy a thing." Mm-hmm.
Um, I was gonna say, I just, so I just saw "Eddington" a week or two ago, and, um, we don't need to talk about the whole movie, but the one thing I thought it did or one thing I thought it did really well was how it depicts people on their phones and, and how we interact with our phone and what our phones do to us.
That style of like, well, it's online, and so now it's our duty to kind of interact with it, um, in a similar way is what's going on with Labubu, where it's like, "Oh, I saw it on the internet, and now, like, I have to consume it because that's the thing right now."
In the same way where you'll see, like, you know, that, that kind of like right-wing Twitter thing, like, uh, that meme that's like, "Oh, the current thing.
Liberals are all up, up in arms about the current thing," right? Like this is kind of a not cynical, just earnest way-I mean, I am on,
like, partially on right-wing Twitter against my consent, and I guess all of us are now Oh, yeah, yeah. [laughs] I was about to say But
I would say, like, people who don't consider themselves right wing, who, who consider themselves heterodox but I consider right wing, nobody loves doing current thing discourse more than tech people that live in San Francisco.
I think they're currently debating Roscoe right now. Mm, I saw that. Um, and the thing about it that's- On the program, everybody thinks this is worth more than $20.
I mean, also, like, to close the loop on, like, what you're saying is, like, obviously, um, protest movements and Labubu are very different, but everything is disseminated through the same apparatus now.
At the same speed. And so if you want to dismiss something, you call it a fad, right? Um, because you're able to fall back on the temporary nature of our media cycle, um, to dismiss whatever you want to dismiss.
You know ultimately it will go away, but just because- Mm-hmm... everything eventually dies down doesn't mean things are not, um, you know, worth paying attention to.
And that cynicism has definitely been propagated by this current thing, right-wing, uh, mentality. Uh, but they... The things that they debate are so-- Like, even the things that they debate are so boring.
[laughs] Um, it's like this weird echo chamber where, like, [clicks tongue] people just can't figure out the fundamentals.
It's a certain type of person that, like, think they would be, like, classics majors if they'd lived, like, 20 years ago, because they constantly have to be debating the fundamentals of art and education and aesthetics and architecture because they're so insecure with their own place in the world.
And I almost think at that point, the more dignified thing to do would be to argue over Labubu, because nobody wants to talk about brutalism, you know, with a 20-year-old kid in San Francisco. [laughs] Labubuism.
I don't know if this is something that you've, uh, a bit of victim of on your timeline, David. But, um, [clicks tongue] it's, it's... I guess it's pretty easy to ignore. Um, but I, I kinda thought, like- I'm trying.
It makes me feel- Yeah... bad is the thing I've just realized. I mean, I... So I, I have... Not, not to plug, not to be here to plug my book that's coming out in November- Oh, really? What's the title?...
but I wrote- We were getting there. [laughs] I wrote a, I wrote a 21st... [laughs] a history of the 21st century, a cultural history of the 21st century. Yeah. Now that the 21st century is over- Yeah...
uh, we can put a pin in it. Thank God. Close the book. That was... Um- It felt really long. Mm-hmm. Eh, but I guess, like, finishing the book radicalized me against- Mm... the present moment in a way. Mm-hmm.
Where before it was like I vaguely feel bad about all this. You radicalized yourself? I radicalized myself, and then I just had a friend read it, and he was like, "You've radicalized me.
I hate, I hate our time [laughs] so much." Um, and, uh, and so I've...
The, the, the tension here also is I'm supposed to be here as some sort of pundit, like, you know, explaining Labubu and, and what's going on, and at the same time it's like I don't wanna, I don't wanna have to think about these things at all.
I don't want the... Like, I don't wanna have debates with right-wing people who are in terrible bad faith- Yeah...
who either in bad faith or completely unaware that whatever position they have is just some sort of mechanistic anti-position to what they feel is, like, the liberal thing that oppresses them or whatever.
Just like I don't wanna do any of this. I don't wanna be online. I don't...
Um, but at the same time, I also know that being a Luddite is really boring in its own way, and then starting to be kind of this self-righteous guru who goes around being like, "Oh, you're still on the...
You still have apps? Oof," like, you know. "Uh, I, I got rid of them, and my... You know, everything's great now, and my blood sugar levels are better," or whatever. You know, so I don't wanna be that person.
So I'm trying to, like, [laughs] figure out, like, what do you do with this feeling? And so, you know, one of the, like, the early things I'm experimenting with is just, like, look at my phone less.
And so, and especially, like, don't get engaged with these. Yeah. We've, we've seen these cycles so much that you know how it's gonna go. You know that they don't mean anything.
And, uh, this is an incredibly weird parallel, but I used to watch Meet the Press a lot in, uh, their, like, the Iraq War times to be like, "Are people finally gonna turn on Bush?"
Like, I, I'm gonna every week watch and wait for that moment where it's like I think we've finally turned on Bush. And there was always some politician there who was gonna, uh, uh, defend the Iraq War position. Mm.
And whenever they opened their mouth and they had a Southern accent, I would just turn it off, 'cause it's like whatever you say is in bad faith.
[laughs] I know that you're not gonna say anything at all that has any meaning other than you're just a f- like, a, a hack who's there to say hack talking points. Yeah.
And so there's just so much at the moment where it's like you... This is all just so rote. Like, everyone's just doing these things because they, they have to.
And once you can see through it, it's, it's not just that it's, like, makes me feel bad, but it's boring. Yeah. Like, all of this is so boring 'cause it's so predictable. Yeah. Torture.
David, I think if you could time your book promotion tour for this, this new book with your, with your midlife crisis- Yeah. Oh, it's happening. [laughs]... this could really, this could really be exciting for you.
[laughs] But I, I guess the, that crisis is... So I wrote...
Th- my first book was about Japanese menswear, and I wrote it at a time in which Japanese menswear I felt like that was the end of the fad, but it's only gotten bigger. Mm. Mm.
But the main thing about that book, it's about people doing cool stuff that's still valued, and it's just like every page is like here's another person doing a cool thing.
And Status and Culture was more kind of objective and from behind... You know, here's the way things work, but I tried to talk about what's still in and things that I like that excite me.
And then-The, uh, this one, because it's about the 21st century, it was like I was forced to think about Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton or these things that until now it's like it's just ambient knowledge, and I had to think about them.
And I had to think about, um, you know, did, did Baby Gronk rizz up Livvy or whatever. Like I have to, you know, think about these things, which I don't enjoy. Said, said who?
Uh- You also have to hear, you have to watch the clips and hear these- Yeah... the- There, there's not a lot of... People have not been catching up with Baby Gronk. No. I need some more Baby Gronk news.
What's the latest with Baby Gronk? But the point is I don't like any of this. Yeah. On a, from a personal level, I don't like any of this, and I know that my readers are not gonna be like, "Oh, Baby Gronk. Cool.
I should look into this." [laughs] Like I know that they're gonna hate it too. And so it's, it's like writing...
It's torturous to write this thing that you know is negative, but at the same time it's like you can't understand what's going on unless you actually think about these things holistically. And so it's not like, uh...
It, it is somewhat middle- midlife crisis, which is... But it's also like 21st century, middle of 21st century crisis, which is are we gonna keep s- keep doing this? Yeah.
And, you know, Charlie Warzel just had this great piece in The Atlantic about AI too, and it was just like, are we gonna do this? Like, all this is insane- Yeah...
and no one's just stopping to say, "Are we going to do this next thing?" Mm-hmm. They just do it.
And I do feel like we're at an inflection point that I feel inside of me, that I hope other people feel, where it's like, you know we don't have to just keep on this treadmill if we all hate it.
I, I don't know how to get off. I, I, I do hate it, and I agree with you. I don't know how to get off.
Um, I, I, I did read too in one of your newsletters that you said you ha- you've been trying to spend less time online.
And like that's my first thought is like is it, is it just one of those things where we all try to spend less time online?
But it's, on the other side too, it's one of those things where it's like, oh, if we all stop using plastic straws, we can stop global warming, when we all know that's not true.
You know, the, the companies that are- Yeah... contributing the most to global warming have to stop doing the thing, and the companies that are, you know, building the platforms that
thrive on your Baby Gronks and your rizzlers, et cetera, have to stop producing the thing. That's child labor- Right?... essentially. [laughs] That too.
But no, but I mean, it's like it, it's, it's the machines themselves are, they're, are, are so profitable that nobody's- Right...
gonna turn them off, and it's so, it's, it's like reduced to this individual choice when it's also so, so hard to, to just tune out. Okay. I, I, I think that's a good point.
Uh, let me give you one counterpoint, which is if you think about straws, it's like this is a collective action problem where all of us have to do this thing or it doesn't ma- make any impact at all.
But that's not the way culture works, which is that culture- Mm-hmm... at the end of the day is still controlled by people with more social capital and cultural capital- Mm-hmm... at the top.
And so Facebook, Facebook is a great example. So the... Facebook is used by no one other than really [laughs] old people who can't tell the difference between AI and reality and,
like, emerging internet populations across the world, right? Yeah. They still make a ton of money somehow. I don't, I don't understand how this works, but it's like
the model is they've lost all of their savvy customers, but they can just pump money through this really broken system. Um, but Zuckerberg, every time he opens his mouth, people believe him a little bit less- Mm-hmm...
because he just hasn't had a hit in a while, and he seems like he's following...
There was a good article today also I think in New York Mag about him paying nine-figure salaries to people to get AI researchers is a sign of weakness. It's not a sign of strength, right? Mm-hmm.
So the, the point is that, yes, people aren't... Like Facebook makes a lot of money. We're not using it. How are we really making a difference?
It's like in the long run it will make a difference because his clout is disappearing as we move, and I think that's the point is that you can stop going to a club. Like a club can make a lot of money after it's uncool.
It actually probably will make most of its money in its uncool period- Yeah... not in its cool period, but we don't have to talk about it anymore, and it can kind of fade out.
And so, I mean, the number one problem with the 21st century in my opinion is not that bad things are happening, 'cause bad things have always happened, or bad taste is happening. There's always been bad taste.
Or that things with bad taste are popular. Like that's always happened. It's that the, the narrative has been captured away from people with good taste or good- Mm-hmm... or who care about innovation or whatever it is.
And so there's things happening that are good that feel like they're in isolation that aren't the, the, the banner for our era. They're just like on the margins the same way that bad things are on the margins.
And so the one thing is like we do have to retake control of the narrative, and we can do that by at least moving our mind share away from using the bad stuff and also talking about the bad stuff in this so- sort of ironic way of like, "I know the bad stuff.
Of course I know this. I wouldn't do it." Mm-hmm. "But like I... You can come to me 'cause I have this media literacy." I'm pivoting to fintech. Well- It's my plan... with your famous essay. Um- DeFi.
Did, did you, uh, since finishing writing the book, have you like greatly decreased your, your screen time or whatever other metric or way of saying that you've been immersing yourself in all the muck? Have you- No.
Have you like... [laughs] No? It's impossible. [laughs] Um, I, maybe like 15%. Yeah. I think there's like once in a while where I'll, I'll have like a good couple hours, be like, "I feel great. What's going on?"
It's like, "Oh, yeah, I don't know where my phone is." Yes. And it's like, "Oh, I just lost my..." Like my phone is somewhere and I don't know where it is, and that was like the best three hours of my day.
It's in the couch cushions. This happens- Yeah... to me once a week. And then I was at a... I had this conversation with somebody, which to me, like I keep bringing it up 'cause it's like the cipher for our era.
And we were discussing, uh, th- this kind of topic, and he said, "I can't wait until I'm rich enough not to have a smartphone." Yeah. And I was like, "That,
that's it," because what it means is that we all know we have to have this thing, and it's a responsibility to have the thing, but it's not fun anymore. Mm-hmm. And when the smartphone started, it was obviously fun.
Like I, I just read some, um, Popeye-Article I had to translate where the guy was like, "When I first got my iPhone, I just had fun going to the settings and changing the settings [chuckles] or whatever, because like the device itself is fun."
Yeah. Uh, and so like we've lost that, and we just feel like we have to have it. I have to have it on because there's gonna be a ping from work on Slack that I have to- Yeah... you know, look at or something.
So it's just responsibility. It's...
There's no pleasure in it, and everyone I know, the pleasure that they take is like in real life I was in a place and I was hanging out with friends and it was amazing, we weren't on our phones.
Uh, but then you have the anxiety and the FOMO of like maybe somebody's pinging me, and if I don't get back to them in 30 seconds, they're gonna get so angry because the expectation on response now is, you know, instant.
And so it just... I think there's a flip. I think there's been a shift, uh, that is not... You don't need to, uh, have the guru tell you to do this. It's just like naturally happened where it- Yeah...
the internet was exciting, the smartphone was exciting. That was where value was. That was where status value was, and now it's, I think, flipped a different direction, which is like not being on your phone.
You know that's more valuable, you know that it seems actually cooler, and you wish that you could succeed to a level in which you did not have to have a smartphone or be on social media. Mm-hmm.
I- I- I'm thinking of like a... Like part of my fear, right? Like working in a world where I, I write, I make my living by writing about what people do on the internet and the creator economy, right?
Like, I really feel like I have to be so plugged in and know what's happening on Twitter- Mm-hmm... know what's happening on Instagram, which I don't really, 'cause that's...
I, I, I like zero in a little bit more on specific people. But in that context, I'm like connecting to it to something my dad told me recently. He's, he moved to the US from Germany when he was... like 40 years ago.
And he said that when he goes back now, the German that he speaks is so old. Like, he doesn't have the new lingo. People like... It, it, it's like he's...
I mean, it's literally like he's from the middle of the 20th century, right? When he's talking to people. Yeah. Um, and, and I, I'm realizing that's kind of what my fear is.
That if I did like- He's a linguistic time capsule. He, he is.
That, that if I like, you know, deleted my Instagram, deleted my Twitter, not to mention the group chats I'm in on there, and that's like a part of my social life, whatever, that's another thing, but that I would lose some of the language and that like if I was to talk to somebody in six months, like it would be like seven years, right?
And I'd, I'd, I wouldn't have the lingo.
But even as I say that, I'm like, that literally doesn't matter because I have [chuckles] some of my best friends are, you know, have deleted Twitter and like are not on these apps and like don't know- Yeah...
the latest stupid reference, and it literally does not affect them. But I'm also thinking of somebody who like is a software engineer for a living and like does not have to traffic in any of these terms. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Does not have to talk about fucking Wabubu on a podcast, right? [chuckles] Like- Right... I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it, I...
There's a fear that, you know, not knowing who Baby Gronk is or the Rizzler or something is going to- Yeah... like, well, like, why would I listen to you if you can't even tell me about the Drip King?
[laughs] You know, and, and like- Yeah. Oh, God... the, the thing about this is like it's so funny too is it's unclear... I mean, okay, one problem is I live in Japan, and- Mm-hmm...
in, so my, my vision of what America's like is very distorted through social media. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
So I do wake up every day and I read Twitter and I read, uh, X, and I read Blue Sky, and I look at Instagram or whatever, and I get a sense of like these are the stories happening and these are the scandals. That's true.
Every time I interact with David on American soil, like he looks so confused, just like Paddington the Bear wandering around.
[laughs] But there's- [laughs] But there are these like this ambient knowledge of America that doesn't get to me sometimes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then I get really shocked.
And like the one that really hit me like 20 years ago was Larry the Cable Guy, because someone made a reference to Larry Cable Gu- Cable Guy, and I was like, "What are you talking about?" And they're like, "Who, who?"
You've been in Japan for 20 years? "Larry the Cable Guy is?" Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
And so but the point is, uh, I have this distorted view of the US through social media, but if I didn't have social media, I don't think I'd have a view at all. You know, it just- Do you, do you know about Times Square?
That's true. Yeah, but Times Square is a great example of- [laughs]... I only knew the narrative. [laughs] I only knew the backlash to the narrative. Yeah. I didn't even know...
I'd obviously never been there until, uh, maybe like two years ago or something. Yeah. I, like, missed that whole period. I don't know who these people are.
Um, but at the same time, my reading of Times Square is that it was never real- Yeah... in a sense. That was, that was its own industry. But it's like I don't, I can't judge that for myself. Yeah. Yeah. That's- Um-
I think whatever Uh, I- I... Speaking of Blue Sky, I was looking at your, your recent skeets over there, and I saw that you just read John Ganz's When the Clock Broke, which I- Mm-hmm... have not finished.
I have it and I, I've started but I've not finished. But, um, I was wondering in the same way that that like purports to map, you know, a line from the '80s up until now and this, this Trumpian moment, um,
does, does- Speaking of people who should fuck off... does your new book, which I'll, I'll, I'll read the full name. I don't, I don't know if we've said the full name.
The, the new book, out November 18th, I think, in the US. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century.
Um, does this do a similar thing in the context of kind of what we were talking about 15 minutes ago of like telling us, like, here's why,
here's why all this, you know, rizzing up, the Rizzler, Livvy Dunne, Baby Gronk, like, here's why this all happened, and here's a, a, a possible solution.
In a, in a similar way to how that maps up, here are all these bubbles of early Trumpianism, Trumpism- Yeah... and here's kind of how we end it. Yeah. I mean, I hope so.
I think he, he did an excellent book, and I think the book was particularly good if you knew these things as ambient knowledge, right? Mm-hmm.
So, like, you know Ross Perot, and you know, uh, David Duke, but you didn't quite connect that with Trumpism, and I think he did such a good job of especially finding quotes from- Mm...
that era where someone says something that's almost identical to something Trump has said now. Um, so it takes a bunch of history that was... I mean, with, with all cultural history and with all
narrative of art and culture, it always shifts because whatever the thing is at the moment, um-It has to be explained. It w- it, it, it had roots somewhere. Mm-hmm.
And so what you're always doing is, like, going back and finding, oh, there's the roots, and then uplifting them.
So someone like David Duke was a marginal figure, but I think if you, if Gans' narrative is now, like, the narrative, then okay, David Duke now is an important figure because it presages, like, what happened to Trump.
Who is the David Duke of blank space? Yeah, so, uh, well, I mean, it's funny- Or what? I don't know if it's a thing... it's, it's very clearly Gavin McInnes. [laughs] Um, and so, like, that one's easy.
I mean, so the ac- you know, one of the, the threads in the book is it's not a political book, but you can't separate culture from politics at the moment. And I was in New York 2001 to 2003.
I was there during 9/11, and I worked in downtown at this magazine called Tokion as an intern and then as a shop manager. Um, but I was there when Vice was really at its peak. And, like, Vice was not at just at its...
I think maybe it peaked later as a media entity, but it was at its peak of being, like, the central force of New York culture. Mm-hmm.
So, like, Ryan McGinley and Gavin were going around and, and you just got a sense that they were kind of, uh, they at least made themselves to be the heart of it.
And so when you go back and look at that culture, and when I was in it, I was like, Terry Richardson to me seems like a rapist, but hey, who am I?
You know, if everyone around me thinks this guy is, like, God's gift to feminism, then who am I to really, uh, have this crazy thought in my head?
Again, you know, that's Lilith Fair, [laughs] Lilith Fair me being like, "Terry Richardson doesn't seem good."
[laughs] Um, and then Gavin, all, everything he was writing and doing was like this seems crypto right-wing to me. Like, there seemed something really inherently not performative racist, but actually racist. Mm-hmm.
Or, uh, you know, uh, anti... I mean, obviously anti-PC, but, like, going beyond that. And so and everyone was just like, "Oh, it's all funny, ironic."
It's like when he's using the N word, it's like a, it's a crazy funny... Isn't that a cool transgressive joke that he's doing? It's like Jackass. So, um, for him to later found the Proud Boys, it was like, thank you.
Like, I, this- [laughs]... this, I knew this was coming. So, uh, so I think the book does a couple things in the kind of, let's say, the Gans model, which is, um, where does culture kind of fall apart?
And I like Filter World, and I think, like, to blame the algorithm is true. The algorithm hasn't helped, but that's like, I don't know, 2017.
And when you go back and look at the history, everything kind of broke immediately in the 21st century. It didn't take us to 2017 for things to break. And capitalism and is not good either, but it's not just capitalism.
And I think when you go back to the early tw- early 21st century, when you look at, like, the years 2000 to 2005, and you look at the critics that are called poptimism, and you look at what was going on at Vice, which is, like, performative anti-liberalism.
And you look at what poptimism was kind of like being an indie snob, uh, or being interested in avant-garde aesthetics is oppressive and, um, obviously Christina Aguilera is the greatest punk who's ever lived, like, this kind of crazy counterintuitive hyperbole.
You already had the seeds of, oh, this whole tw- 21st century is gonna be all about pop, and it's gonna be about performative anti-liberalism.
And so I mean that's, I think that is what the book is about in a sense, was that the '90s, and it was a very brief moment, but that indie liberal culture, progressive, Kurt Cobain, LGBTQ+ a- ally kind of world became actually seen as so mainstream or seen as so, um...
Either you saw it as, like, Nirvana's, like, a kid down the street likes Nirvana, so there's nothing cool about that.
Or it became Limp Bizkit and you're like, "I don't like the direction that it went," that you had to be against some of these things that were, I think, liberal dogma, which is, like,
being progressive and being, um, being progressive in, in a really classical liberal sense, and then, uh, also thinking that artistic innovation is good.
And so then you get kind of the like, "Ugh, Kid A is the worst Radiohead album because it's the most experimental," like that kind of thing. Um, and you get the, uh, kind of flowing into now.
So I, I think the archeology that I've done is more just looking at that era and saying, "Before, before technology and capitalism had a chance to ruin culture, like, we did it ourselves." Yeah.
The interesting thing about Trump is, like, people think he has no culture, but that's actually not true. Yeah. His culture is like the culture of the '80s. Like, he actually is somebody who
cares deeply about a certain type of culture. Mm-hmm. It's just an, like, a narcissistic refracting of what was popular when he was sort of, like, most pleased with himself.
And every normal person also I think has their own internal nostalgia cycle where they, the kind of culture that they ultimately settle on is, like,
whatever was popular when they were in whatever they consider their prime.
But most people have the, like, mental elasticity to start to incorporate contemporary things that they also like on top of the baseline stuff they identify with, and I think he just straight up doesn't have that ability.
He's very old. He is old. He is old. Very old, very addled. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but it is, like, the stuff that he goes to bat for, like the Broadway stuff- Mm... it's just, like, fascinating, um,
because it's like there's something else going on there other than a vacuum of culture. I think he's surrounded by people who have a profound lack of culture, but I think
it's not that he's uncultured, it's that he's just, um-A profoundly self-centered individual I, I mean, this is another good example of where the word culture really trips us up because
you're using it in some ways to mean high culture. That we- Mm-hmm... we say Trump doesn't have a sense of culture, he doesn't care about high culture, which obviously he doesn't.
But he has a, a deep interest in certain things. He has tastes for certain things. Exactly.
I think the well-done steak is not that he doesn't care about steak, it's that he loves well-done steaks, like, that's his taste. And, uh- Well, also, like- The same thing. Yeah... yeah.
Well, New York in the '80s, like, the relationship to high culture was not as entrenched, like, as it would be now. Like, that was sort of, like, not to like
paraphrase Nora Ephron, but like that was sort of the beginning of restaurants as culture. And like- Mm-hmm... yeah, maybe like going to a restaurant as kind of like going to a Broadway show. I think you can see, like,
aspects of that in his mentality.
Yeah, and y- people keep talking about culture is dead in the 21st century, and w- the important thing that I'm trying to say also is culture has been a huge part of the 21st century, right? Mm-hmm.
People have made so much money on culture. There's more billionaire cultural creators than ever before. There's billions of people who create culture on a daily basis for the first time.
The monopoly on only nerds can make culture is over. Um, that culture has driven politics insanely, um, that for both on the left and the right, like, there's all these outcomes that have happened because of culture.
And, um, that culture is... Sorry, I said... Oh, i- i- in terms of like pure entertainment, have we all been entertained over the last 25 years on a daily basis?
Like, there's been a lot of stuff that's happened, so there's been entertainment. I've been pretty entertained, yeah. [laughs] I would say so. Yeah, yeah.
I, um [laughs] like I also think, like, as you were speaking and saying like we left this, left behind this idea that only nerds can make culture, when you were saying like Zuckerberg, every time he opens his mouth, he's less convincing, we're also like weirdly at the point where we're leaving behind the idea that only nerds can make technology.
Mm-hmm. But I think in the short term, that's going to make the culture war a lot worse, 'cause everyone understands, like, nerds versus jocks- Mm... or like revenge of the literary nerds, or revenge of the tech nerds.
But when it's like open season on skillsets that have previously belonged to subcultures with their own norms, that's, I think, when things get really stochastic because, um,
you know, I don't wanna see, like, magazine people, um, maybe people don't wanna see magazine people, uh, making software.
Well, this, so wh- where this gets to for me is like the new learn to code is, is learn, learn to do marketing, right?
I think that, like, what the creator economy has done and what the lowering of barriers to any kind of cultural production or to, to making software, like you were saying, Daisy, what that's done is like it's forced everyone to be a marketer, to learn- Mm-hmm...
how to, to distribute an idea. And, you know, what's prized is not the, not the idea itself, not the, not the product, but, but the distribution of it, which then- Yep...
is i- inextric- in- inextricable from the product. Um, so I, I wonder though th- then that, like, backlash is to, uh, a sort of like... Le- um, I, I, I read this Knausgaard book, uh, this summer. Oh, wow.
It's the latest, I, okay- You read a Knausgaard?... hard to go, hard to go an episode of The Pod Save The People without bringing up Knausgaard.
But no, it's, it's one of his latest fiction ones, but there's this band in it that they don't have any tapes.
The only way you can see them is, like, by being invited to go see them on, like, once a year on some, like, random farm deep in the middle of nowhere Sweden. And I thought that was so cool, right?
And I think, like, that's then the next, like, double sellout or whatever is when everybody's a marketer, um, what's cool is when you do that.
But of course you can only do that if you can afford to pay your rent, um, through being a mar- [laughs] being a marketer.
Yeah, m- so s- but here's my question about, like, this, this is the one of the justifications for, like, everyone can, has to be a sellout now because things are so expensive, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.
And I do get that, like, New York used to be cheap and New York is expensive. So let's, let's just cut New York out of it 'cause New York is not the only place you can make things.
But, like, do people think healthcare was super affordable in 1993? Like, I, like no one's ever explained to me that, like, oh, you don't get it.
Like, in '93 when we had universal healthcare and, um, you know, I, I, like, I don't, I don't know what has changed.
I just think that one of the fundamental issues with society is that everyone's, like, mental level of what a middle class lifestyle is like is like a millionaire's lifestyle. Has fragmented, oh yeah.
Like a multi-millionaire's lifestyle. So, like, if you're on Instagram, no one flies economy in the entire- [laughs]... like, corpus of Instagram. There's never been a single photo of anyone in an economy seat.
I fly economy. Uh, other- Oh, but you don't post it. Yeah, yeah. True. [laughs] We all fly economy is the point. Everyone flies economy except that no one talks about it.
And so the, the, in the, like, mind share what flying on a plane is, it's like, "Look at my feet up. Oh, I just happened to be, hey, going to LA, and then here's my feet." Like, oh, I wonder why your feet are up.
I wonder what that's signaling. So, you know, if everything is, "Hey, I'm in Italy this weekend," um, then of course you can't afford the lifestyle.
But then the other part of this, and like b- before I get like preachy, is I don't know what the right size lifestyle is anymore. I don't know how to- Mm...
tell somebody, "Do this instead because this is what, what you should be paying for." But the idea that I've gotta sell out
because I, I, like, I just need to pay my bills, that part I understand, but then you get all of the, the, uh, George Clooney type people who it's like, oh, you couldn't pay- Yeah... your bills?
Or like The Rock or whoever, it's like they have to start their own product lines because, like, they can't pay healthcare.Like, what is, like, what is the reason why the people who have succeeded still feel like they have to do it?
Or like, uh, Amber Chamberlain, do you have to make a commodity coffee company? Mm-hmm. I keep picking on her, but, like, she's just an example of someone that's like, you gotta have your whole life in front of you.
Things are going really well. Louis Vuitton has, has brought you in as, like, one of...
You're, like, in the team, and you make videos, and you have revenue, and all these things are great, but, like, do you have to do it?
And my other problem with Addison Rae is, and, like, people [chuckles] really get angry when you, like, pick on Addison Rae, but it's kind of like it just felt like music was her stepping stone to another big, like- Mm...
marketing bonanza or something. It, it does not feel to me that it's, like, an earnest, like, "I really wanna make music, and therefore I'm doing this thing." It just felt like I've...
In order to be the Addison Rae marketing machine, the one thing that was missing was kind of, like, a big hit or something, so that I'm gonna go- Yeah... into the direction of music. Yeah.
So get Max Martin's people, and we'll get into a room, and we'll make some stuff, and we'll say, "Kick, kick drum, chew gum," or whatever- [scoffs]...
and every critic in America will be like, "There's no, no line has been written more deeply than kick, kick, drum, chew gum. This is, this is the smartest thing. It's, it's so smart how dumb it is.
It's so deep how superficial it is." Mm-hmm. "Uh, it's so earnest how cynical it is." Like, e- and every, uh, major publication will just, like- Pessimism never dies...
put you, put you on a platform for being a, a complete sellout. I have a theory. I do think contemporary celebrity is an extreme form of ego death and that people... human beings are not wired to
experience themselves as a product at scale. And I think with some of these celebrities, like, selling something other than themselves becomes, like, a way to take back control from the fact that you cannot un-celebrity.
Like, being a celebrity used to be a door that... a double-sided door. Now it's a one-way portal. Like, if you become famous, you cannot become unfamous. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's probably...
I mean, I wish there was, like, more writing about celebrity psychology. I think if you, like, did a study, you would find that, like, that's...
there's actually something profoundly traumatic about not being able to be unfamous, just like any other thing that could happen to somebody that's irreversible.
And so I just wonder if they, like, become marketers as a way to be like, "Okay, I will never truly own my identity again, but I can sell other things, um, [lips smack] that don't require me, my presence, my identity."
That's very smart. I mean, I would also say if you think of, like, Ashton Kutcher, what, what is he gonna do? I mean, he can be in... He's, uh, I, I- Oh, he's, he's a noted and respected venture capitalist.
That's what I'm saying. So it's like- So it's like, okay, so he's in "That '70s Show"- [laughs]... and he's in some films, and he's... and, like, that's kinda waning.
I think he's actually a, like, a very good actor, so this is not even a critique on that. Yeah. But it's much... He is status-wise a lot higher now being, like, the genius investor of all these companies.
Um, I just saw him. He's gonna be on the board of Soho House- Mm... 'cause it, you know- Yeah... got privatized or whatever. Right. But it's like these people have completely,
uh, found a second life that maybe is even more, uh, prestigious than just being an actor or having been, ha- have been, like, "I have been an actor," by being an entrepreneurial hero.
And that's another thread of the book is, like, this idea that entrepreneurs are heroes I think is a very 21st century idea, and- Yes. Yeah...
it is, um, especially to the degree of it doesn't really matter how you got the money.
Like, if you made neurotrophic pills that you claim have all these effects and people are stupid enough to buy them, that, that's good on you. You're an incredible marketer if you were able to make that happen.
There's no stigma, whereas I think for a long time it's like, yes, you're a gambler and you made a lot of money, but we're not gonna treat you like an actual wealthy person- Well, there's, uh-...
if you obviously made your money...
for example, yesterday as we record, Alex Hormozi, I don't, I don't know all the stuff about this, but from what I understand, he, he, he released a book, and he, he broke some record for most books sold in 24 hours.
But I think it was only because he offered the option to buy, like, a pack that was, like, $5,000 and included, like, 200 books you can redeem to give other people.
So you're not really buying the books, but people bought this, which is insane because what are you doing?
You're just, like, you're literally just, like, using your money to, to, to worship at the altar of Hormozi, which is just worshiping at the altar of, of this 21st century entrepreneurship.
Um, so I'm sure, you know, some people are gonna buy these books and, and read them and, and learn a lot for them. A lot... learn a lot from them. But, like, that's just so, that's just so insane.
It just has no appeal to me. Like- Yeah... I'd much rather go to my local bookstore and buy two books. Now I'm... Now maybe I'm getting preaching to the complaining, but, like, I, I don't know.
Like, that's just, like, the pure... It's such a pure distilled entrepreneurial worship that I do not understand.
Like, the, the scale is, is what people desire above all else, and there's, there's always more scale to go, to get at, right? The, the...
I, I think the f- one of the funniest terms to me in entrepreneurialism is, is total addressable market, right? 'Cause any entrepreneur, any startup founder, whatever, it's always, "This is our, our TAM," right?
"This is our total address- total addressable market." You're never gonna reach it, you know, but [laughs] it's, it's always there, and it...
you're always gonna be reaching for more of it, but you're never gonna reach it and, and it's kinda this, like, thing you can always struggle at. Um, but that's...
I'm, I guess I'm saying that as sort of an answer to, to what we're posing of, like, why does Ashton Kutcher then wanna go do that? Because his total adjust- adjustable market of consumers, just generally- Mm-hmm...
consumers for what? It doesn't matter. Well- Like, your, your- Right... total addressable market- Yeah... increases.
Attention is easier to extract than money, but people run out of attention before they run out of money. Mm-hmm.
I think that-Bottleneck is going to be the next thing that people try to like blow open with AI, um, perhaps even myself. You know, part of...
We talk about like the envy between the right and the left and who was anointed culture-wise and not, how much that's changing. You know, for a while it's like
culture, like media had cultural capital, tech had the money. Now it was like media had the attention, tech had the money. Now tech also wants the attention. Mm-hmm.
But everything, the amount of stuff that's being put into the world by AI is actually kind of like undercutting and creating almost like inflationary engagement. [lips smack] And so like the, this moment of
entrepreneurs being cool, like you talk about The Social Network as the most important, one of the most important movies of the 21st century so far, and I completely agree because it represents the moment at which
Facebook was able to capture both kind of like cultural capital, attention, and money. Yep. Clearly, like that's over.
And so what we're seeing right now in America is like not just the sort of Trump style smash and grab on
like real capital resources, but it's also a smash and grab on people's like attention, values, and like their relationship to the stuff that they like. Um, and that to me is like almost even more upsetting. Yeah.
I mean, look, this, the, the 21st century, it's really easy to do the knee-jerk like, you know, uh, late stage capitalism. Do- like late stage capitalism, everybody, and like you don't have to explain anymore.
But what late stage capitalism- Closing time. [laughs] Uh, late stage capitalism- That's about late stage capitalism. Aha. And it came out, that's pre-2000, right? That's like '90s. Well, you have to add, amend the book.
[laughs] '97 or something. Stop the presses. [laughs] Uh, late stage capitalism, it's not just that it's like this, some sort of nefarious conspiracy against us. The point is like it changes human incentives. Mm-hmm.
And it, one of the things that has been happening for a long time is that some sort of moral, [laughs] like morals and norms we've all decided should like just be thrown out the window.
And so obviously capitalism would like us to not have any morals and norms because it's just a lot easier to sell things.
And one of the things that on the l- the left for a long time in like avant-garde culture was like morals and norms are just the tools of, of middle class per, you know, um, parochial oppression, so we need to get rid of them.
And now everyone's trying to get rid of them, but we live in a world in which there is absolutely no value system- Mm-hmm... that can counteract capitalism. And then we're like, "What happened?"
Like, why is everything just a scam? It's like because scams are like the purest form- Of capitalism... of if you had a capitalism that didn't have any kind of punishment for breaking rules. And so like the, the...
One of the things about this book is just like, yes, if you erode all norms, because some of these norms were important for like aligning society to take action to do things that were good for society.
Like [laughs] that's the point of a norm is to say like, is the prisoner dilemma, uh, or if you think about a mafia omerta, like the point of the omerta is to say like our norm is if that nobody talks, we get this good outcome, which is that no one goes to prison.
And so we're going to enforce this by calling you a rat or murdering you if you, if you talk. And so there, there's a norm in place. And so the norms that we had in society like had points.
Like they weren't just there to because like we were oppressing people.
So if we had a norm against, if you make money off a scam, you're not allowed to be in polite society, versus if you make money from something that's social productive, you can be in polite society.
That was a pretty clear norm where, number one, it in- it encouraged younger people not to go into scams. Mm-hmm. And number two, it meant that, uh, society was like mobilizing its resources towards non-scams.
And now if you get rid of that and everybody's a scammer and everyone wants to be a scammer, you're like, "What happened?" Like, "Why is this happening?" It's like because there's no...
We- we've elevated the scammers [laughs] to the top of society, and there's no norm that's trying to get rid of them. So of course this is what happens. Well, like the free market also works better if people don't cheat.
Like- Mm-hmm... I don't know if you saw the article- In theory. [laughs] In theory.
Um, there's the article in The Economist that basically like the US is becoming more like China in the sense that like they had state-sponsored communism- Yep... and now we have state-sponsored capitalism.
It's like the opposite of the European system. Like in the European system, the state sponsors your welfare and basic needs and leaves the actual commerce to the free market. Now the US is like- Yeah...
sponsoring commerce and leaving people's basic needs to the free market. And it's, that's, that's crazy. That's also like not really what capitalism is supposed to be either.
Um, and so like a lot of these, like, like you're saying, late stage capitalism, the critique kind of needs to be updated because like what we're dealing with now is not the free market run amok.
It's state interference, um- It's feudalistic capitalism. But I gue- I guess- Yeah...
this is the, the thing too that is really, uh, giving a lot of people despair about this Trump moment, which is that the first Trump moment, it's like this is bad that he has power, but there's a sense that the system- That it still works...
of people with money, institutions, are going to fight back against it because they, they understand that this is bad for them in the long run, right?
And, and now it's kind of like you do not see that, and so it's, there, there's some sort of short-term thing they're trying to get out of him, but also they don't care about the long-term downstream.
So like the thing you're saying is, okay, if capitalism really is going to be like-Uh, successful, it needs to not be tied up in the state.
It needs to not have, like, the government picking winners and losers and, and all the things that free market people said in the past.
But nobody in these institutions is thinking about that because at the end of the day, a CEO is only the CEO because of shareholder capitalism and because if they do not raise shareholder value, they will lose their jobs.
So their number one goal at that very moment is to raise shareholder value, which at the moment means getting on Trump's good side because Trump can get an institution to go against you or can say something negative about you and make the share price drop.
So we're in a system in which the whole thing is captured by capitalism, but the, the short term idea is to go along with it even if you can see the bad consequences in the future.
But I don't know how to get out of that. I mean, it's, it's really, uh, just kind of despair driving because you... All the incentives, again, are aligned to make the people in power now have power until they don't.
Well, a lot of people in power- But nobody knows when they don't... are, are old. I, I think they don't expect to be around for the majority of the consequences. No need for long-term gains. AI.
And they know that their children will- And they know that their children will, but they think if they can make enough money and leave it to their children, they can insulate themselves from the consequences.
Do you really not think there's going to be an AI version of Trump that people consult? If so Trump dies, they make an AI version of him using... They have so much, so much material, so many voice recordings.
They could get- Tupac hologram V10... They... Yeah.
They've got the, the vo- the hologram AI Trump, and people are still like, you know, the way that people evoked Ronald Reagan, you know, Republicans who evoked Ronald Reagan in the 2000s or whatever.
They're gonna be like, "Here's the Trump hologram. He just endorsed me for mayor of Nebras- of, uh, uh, Des Moines or whatever." And so, you know, these people are never going [chuckles] away.
And then, and, like, this is the other interesting about the 21st century is as much as we're like everything shallow and now and it's about this moment, our heroes are still Bob Dylan, our heroes are still Miles Davis or, um, uh, you know, Kurt Cobain or whatever it is-
Mm-hmm... uh, because no one's been as cool, like, in this 21st century period, so we're still going back to them. And the thing about Trump is I think there's...
I, I do not think there's gonna be a period in which he is not seen as some sort of John the Baptist figure for Find Jesus, whatever, one of those, for, you know, for this whole group of, of people.
You're probably right. And I think we're gonna, we're gonna end the episode [laughs] on this bleak note. Don't end it. Give me- Wait, guys. All right... give me something positive. How- Something positive...
I can tell you something positive. Okay. AI JFK. AI JFK. What about AI, um- Just Mayor Quimby... AI LBJ? It's just really fun to say the acronym [laughs] with AI.
But the problem is people on the left will be like, "Well, we don't like AI holograms. We're about the moment. We- I don't even have a phone." You know, that's, it's gonna- Yeah.
There's got- obviously gonna be a major bifurcation in terms of- Right. At the end of the day, though-... this technology... there's still a boo-boo on Karl Marx's grave. Oh, my... Mm-hmm. There is.
That should be your cover photo. Oh, you already have a cover. But if, if, um, you know- The, the UK edition. I was gonna say [laughs] UK edition. Okay. Is... Oh, wait.
Is it, is it a, um, is it a Taylor Swift thing, Blank Space? Is that a Taylor Swift name? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And, like, and it's... It...
I mean, the book isn't, like, anti-Taylor Swift, but it's like she's clearly, like, in- the symbol of the 21st century- Yeah. Mm-hmm...
in the sense of it's very successful and a sense of what an incredible business- A great marketer as well. Yeah. Yeah. An incredible business person. Yeah. And that that's what's important. And, um,
there, you know, whether I, I would love someone to write a complete rebuttal of my book in some ways from the perspective of like, "No, it's good that the culture is just business now." But- Well, wait.
Re- really, really quick. Um, I haven't read it yet, but, but Kat D- 'Cause it's not out... wrote a good rebuttal to, to your Labubu piece, right? Yeah. That was on Firewires. Yeah.
Not your book I haven't read, but Kat D's. So I'm not gonna read it. Sorry, Kat. Um- I don't read Firewires. [laughs] What was... But she's saying that. And she...
And, and we're, we're kind of, uh, I'm forced myself to be in dialogue with her in the sense of like I forced myself into it.
But she had written a good piece a while back about the culture's not dead, it's just you're not, you're not noticing where it is. Yes. Mm-hmm. And that, that is an argument that I- That's true...
I disagree with, but I'm really sympathetic to, which is I want that to be true. Mm-hmm. And so she...
One of her examples was kind of like vaudevillian TikTok videos are a new format that didn't exist in the '90s, and that's like where cultural innovation is. It just...
When I watch vaudevillian TikTok videos, and, and to give you an example, it's where the people talk to each other 'cause they're playing different characters. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and it...
Like, they're okay, but they are not the vehicle for intense avant-garde experimentation the way that- Hmm... the 20th century got moved. So, like, I think that's the right attitude to go look for where...
You know, maybe it's not the novel, maybe it's not the film, maybe it's these new formats. Like, I love, I love that idea. I just don't know if those were the right things yet- Yeah... that are going to save us.
Um, but I think that's the thing too. It's like, you know, and I wasn't even trying to be that anti-Labubu.
I was just saying for me, for me personally, it's like I'm not interested in this, and like I'm not interested in fads.
And her perspective was, well, you could also from the same time be like, "This, this stuff is great. I love it. Like, I love learning about it." And I'm sure there are tons of people like that, and that's fine.
It's just for me it all comes down to not... And I don't wanna be the scold of your taste is good or your taste is bad. It's more the ecosystem has a bunch of things moving in it, and it has effects.
And in the 20th century, we loved the effects of the ecosystem. Yeah. And now we don't like the effects of the ecosystem. We're like, "Why is that true?" And it's because it's lacking other people doing things.
And so it's, it's not necessarily... Let's say in the '90s, um, New Kids on the Block were very popular, the same way the Backstreet Boys were popular, the same way that, uh, BTS is popular now.
It's just that New Kids on the Block was a marginal thing compared to other pop music and grunge and- Yeah... college rock, whatever was, was going on.
And so it's like today, it's like if it's only, if it's only New Kids on the Block, and then you're like, "Why is culture not innovative?" Then like, well, you've just answered your own question, right?
And so to me, it's not necessarily that we have to get rid of all this stuff or not enjoy it.
It's, uh, it's more that there has to be something else, and there's no institution, there's no natural mechanism that is moving us towards valuing cultural innovation and putting it into the narrative, and that's the thing that we have to work on, and that's what it is.
And that's where we'll end it. That's a more upbeat note. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century out November 18th.
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