[upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehr. And I'm Daisy Ajayo. Daisy, we're not talking to anybody else today, but we do have some news, don't we? We do.
This will be our last weekly episode. We're switching from a weekly to a monthly model. We're going to do these multi-interview episodes around a theme and weave these together into more of a narrative product. Yeah.
It feels like a better way to break through is to create fewer, better things. [laughs] Yeah. It was such like a minimalism rallying cry and, you know, when I was, like, first coming into the media industry.
But just the episodes will be longer, and we'll be able to go deeper into different topics that we've talked about on the podcast before, but, like, riffed on, and this time bring a little bit more research to them.
So hopefully it'll be something that is easier for people to pay dedicated attention to rather than- Mm-hmm... background. Not that it's not fun to be ambient noise, but- Appointment listening, we could call it. Right.
And you and I kind of came to the conclusion separately- Mm-hmm... which is a good indicator that we're reading the landscape and picking up on the same signals.
Frankly too, I mean, I like doing that level of research, and I think being able to apply that in a deeper way to multiple interviews that go into one thing... I'm just excited to make a new format, honestly. Yeah.
And for me, coming into it with all of the sort of context of what's going on with Dirt, like, we started Dirt, there was not a Substack universe as there is now. Mm-hmm. Dirt was a decently early adopter of Substack.
And so over the course of Dirt, the newsletter landscape has changed completely. It's much more crowded.
You and I, we've been doing this for two years, so we entered a podcast landscape that was already pretty crowded- Yeah... and has increasingly just fallen under the umbrella of streaming.
And there's many people who consume streams that are always on. So I feel a strong urge to distinguish Dirt from models that really rely on volume. And I think- Mm-hmm...
that there's Substackers who are not-- They are not thinking of their strategy as volume, but the platform itself- Incentivizes it... is thinking of their strategy, yeah, as volume.
And so I think the pendulum's really swinging back. For a while, like, Dirt was able to distinguish itself by being really consistent with the number of newsletters we put out a week and the quality of the ideas.
And now I feel a really strong urge to slow down and focus on what's working really well. And we went through this period of unbundling, and now we're almost, like, rebundling. One hundred percent.
So we're rebundling Tasteland. I'm- [laughs]... sort of rebundling Dirt. I'm really excited about Dirt Books, and that's... I've said before, it's the slowest format that we've ever done.
And so moving over towards that, I think has made everything else feel much faster and maybe unsustainably fast. Mm-hmm.
I also think part of what's contributing to you and I looking around and wanting to change the format is a sense of not really knowing where everyone is on social media.
I've been thinking about this, especially for the past couple weeks. There's been these bursts of people leaving Twitter. Mm. And I just never left. Yeah.
But [laughs] we do these, like, Instagram roundups on the Dirt page of, like, good tweets, and it's like there's not enough tweets to even round up.
I'm probably gonna send out a survey soon to our Dirt audience just to try to figure out where everyone is. But if you don't know where your audience is, then distribution's really hard.
And newsletter is still the most direct one-to-one. But if everyone is sending a newsletter, then how do you actually make sure that you're getting people's dedicated and focused attention?
So all of those things I think have contributed to what I am calling, I just thought of this two seconds ago, the Great Slow Down. [laughs] The Great Slow Down. We have a coin.
Wait, d- um, I, I wish I had my wallet and I could jingle some coins. We've got a coinage- Oh... the Great Slow Down. Guys, are we also introducing Joe into this? [laughs] Oh, we've... Yeah.
So- Joe, can we get an air horn after the Great Slow Down? [tape rewinding] So all of those things I think have contributed to what I am calling the Great Slow Down. [air horn] The Great Slow Down.
We have a c-c-c-coinage. [cash register dings] That's a coinage, baby. We've got a new editor, shout-out Joe. Joe has been editing The Desire Question and Creative Complaint over on the Dirt side.
And so if you notice a little bit different of a style, that's, that's why. That's Joe. [upbeat music] Okay. Well, wait.
Speaking of the Great Slow Down, a former guest of the pod, Teddy Brown, TM Brown to some, he wrote this essay called "Casino Sociale."
I don't know if it's supposed to be like a pun on Casino Royale, so I'm saying sociale. Yeah, who killed this excellent essay? I gotta know. Yeah, so it's, it's like a six-thousand-word essay. He was shopping it around.
I think he was almost placed, but it got... Anyways, it got killed. There's a couple bits I wanna read from this, so bear with me as I do one of my trademark long excerpts. So this is the intro graph.
"In Addiction by Design, Natasha D.
Schull's compelling history and analysis of slot machine gamblers in Las Vegas, she describes the machine zone, where players go into a cocooned hypnosis when they sit in front of a set of reels.
Slot machine gambling provided one person..." I need to pick a pronunciation. Schull. I'm gonna say Schull.
"Slot machine gambling provided one person Schull talked to a reliable mechanism for securing a zone of insulation from a human world she experiences as capricious, discontinuous, and insecure.
Rather than the prospect of winning enough money to feel secure, gambling itself became the belief system.
This continuity of machine gambling holds worldly contingencies in a kind of abeyance, granting her an otherwise elusive zone of certainty," Schull writes. "The promise was agency through risk.
The reality is grim dissociation. The casino economy has become a sort of inescapable cocoon where one discovers that the real comfort isn't in winning, but in the suspension of having to live in the world at all."
And I brought this up as we started talking about the Great Slow Down because I think, like, the Great Slow Down is a response to the same sort of thing, scrolling the feed forever and getting stuck in an Instagram reel doom scroll or, you know, having a, a million newsletters in your inbox and not doing any work 'cause you're just reading all the newsletters.
Or you're just, like, not sitting with your feelings. Like, I don't want to be a part of a media ecosystem where the act of opening my newsletter becomes...
Like, I want it to be a good experience for somebody, like opening a magazine, but, like- Yeah... I don't know.
We've talked about that, like, very physical experience of the magazine and the way that it smells and the paper. Like- Mm... that didn't feel like a dopamine hit.
But what the newsletter ecosystem has become does feel like a dopamine hit. And if you're trying to game the Substack algorithm, then you are in the casino. Yeah. You're a pit boss.
[laughs] No, Chris Best and, and Hamish McKenzie are the pit bosses in that sp-specific casino. I mean-Um, the magazine dopamine hit, like that gave me a very specific memory.
I might have brought this up on the podcast before. I was a Shonen Jump subscriber, which is like a manga magazine, and it was a dopamine hit.
Going down to the mailbox, opening that up and seeing this beefy magazine in there, like that was a dopamine hit because I was in sixth grade, and it's two thousand and six.
This is my like missive from the world that I can sit with, and I'm going to read cover to cover and probably multiple times and then like talk to my friends about it. Yeah, I don't know.
The great slowdown is the consumer purposefully choosing to move from the great abundant orgy of too much media into the desert where you only have like three options, right?
Not that it's so bad, but that's kind of what you're describing there, right?
Is like a consumer behavior where it's a desire for less, partially so you can sit with more and you're not just like consuming something and it goes right through you. Yeah, like fiber.
We're looking for a more fibrous media environment. I had this like tweet this week where I was thinking about like being strategic versus careerism. Mm. I think a lot of people confuse them.
To me, like if you have a strategy for your content, you're much less likely to wake up and be like, "I'm tired of doing this, so I'm just not going to do it anymore."
Whereas if there's like a strategy behind it, then it's like, "This strategy is no longer working for me, so I'm gonna pick a new strategy."
There's like an all or nothing trap where you just as easily could have come to me and said like, "I'm tired of doing the podcast weekly, so we're just not going to do the podcast anymore." Yeah.
Instead of saying like, "The strategy of a weekly podcast with one guest no longer fits me and my strategic goals, so let's pick a new strategy."
And I'm worried that some of these Substacks are just gonna flame out and go away- Mm... because there wasn't enough thought put into the establishment of the Substack or the- Yeah...
establishment of the podcast or the stream or whatever you wanna call it.
And so when it no longer feels right, rather than picking a new strategy, people are just going to burn out, and I think we have to like, let people pivot. Well, wait.
So something from friend of the pod, former guest Ben Dietz, in his Sick weekly newsletter, he linked this piece on friction, favorite topic of the pod, by Eugene Khan. I'm gonna quote from it.
"So if you're building something, add meaningful friction on purpose." There's three bullets. "Make contribution the price of membership.
Ask people to share something real, a story about their worst moment, their favorite artist and why, something that makes them vulnerable to semi-strange preferences to have actual answers.
Move past the yes, no ease of entry." He's talking about like a community here. "Second, create recurring moments that cause a little discomfort. Early calls, live critiques, in-person meetups when it's raining.
Friction becomes story fuel. Third, make engagement required effort. If something takes time to unpack, the people who invest that time leave as connective tissue."
And he ends here, "If you want stickiness, you need shared effort, shared risk, and shared memory. Those three bind faster than any loyalty program." Guys, we all need to be hazing our newsletter subscribers.
[laughs] Uh, you know, some do that.
But I think moving to like a monthly, like a higher effort version is like creating more friction in how we're producing the thing, and then thus also like more like good friction for the listener, right?
When there's something every week, yeah, you might listen to us as background noise, but as you're saying, when it's monthly, it becomes something that if you're gonna choose to engage with it at all, it's gonna be with a little bit more intention because it's less common.
Yeah. I like to think so. Also, I'm hoping to have like, more to say about each episode.
I think part of my issue in the times when Dirt has been the most prolific in putting out projects and stories is that we'll promote it once or twice, and then we just move on. Yeah.
We really worked for months on this awesome tennis scene with an-- like a really cool audio component, and it basically sold out within an hour, and now I don't know how to talk about it [laughs] and that's a problem.
I think it was a Tyler, the Creator quote about like, you just spent like a year making this album. Why would you just like make one Instagram post about it and move on?
Like you, you should be promoting that thing as long as you spent making it.
That can be hard to do, but I think like there's something in there about, especially on the internet and when you're promoting something, there's this assumption that like the people seeing your promotional content have seen all the posts you're making or all the, you know, touch points because you've seen them all and so you're like, "God, I'm doing too much.
This is like so repetitive." But most people aren't seeing any of them, and the people who are seeing some of them are probably only seeing some of them.
Well, sometimes people will try to gaslight you into thinking that you're over-promoting, but it's like you're actually seeing everything 'cause you're monitoring me because you're a fucking hater.
[laughs] Something that I did a couple weeks ago now as we speak, um, and I wanted to bring up at the pub, I never got a chance to, is I went and saw Jonathan Richman at Baby's All Right.
You're a mass hole, so I'm assuming you're a big Jonathan Richman head. I'm actually not. Not? How is that even possible? I don't know who that is. You don't know who Jonathan Richman... Are you kidding me?
Well, I might. Just tell me more. Okay. Um, he, you know, he-- probably his most famous role, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. If you're familiar with that band, perhaps. My favorite album by him is I, Jonathan.
I really recommend checking it out. He's got a great song in there. I think it's on that album. "I'm in love with Massachusetts." I do know that song. You know that song, exactly. It's him. But it's a great show.
It's at Baby's All Right, which is, you know, small intimate venue if you've never been. But it's just him, and he's like seventy-four years old.
It's him and his drummer, and he's just kind of like riffing, and it feels very improv. Like a DJ set almost in that he's got bits and pieces and he's weaving them together. Like, he's not like, "Here's one song.
Now we got another song. Here's this song." Like he's going through these songs, but there's this real like through line and these riffs and I don't know.
Uh, I guess th- all of this is just to say, if Jonathan Richman is coming to your city, listener, you have to go see him, and I did look it up, and later this year he's going to be in Arizona as well as I think San Francisco and also Big Sur.
I don't know if there's a music festival there or something. But Jonathan Richman, yeah, he's amazing. Listen to the I, Jonathan album too. "That Summer Feeling," one of my favorite songs. All right.
It's almost time for "That Summer Feeling," or I like to call it New Pornographers weather because I always listen to the New Pornographers when it starts getting warm.
See, now it's my turn to say that's a band I've never really listened to. Okay. Well, we both have homework.Okay. Well, speaking of, you just ran an essay competition and there was a winner. I read it this morning.
It was good. The lights are too bright, and there's nothing to look at. Nothing to look at. Yeah. It was hard to choose. I read almost 60 essays. I think we had five or six essays that were finalists.
There were certain themes throughout that I thought were really interesting. A couple essays referenced somebody's parents burying gold. The prompt was, like, just about wealth, health.
Yeah, the way that health and wealth are connected, and it was interesting to see the way different people interpreted that.
There were a lot of essays about code switching through in different environments, like, whether it was, like, working as a nanny or maybe being, like, a magazine writer covering luxury, like, when your own finances are really insecure.
There were a lot of interesting points about people who have, like, knowingly gone into debt because the experience they wanna have is basically realizing, like, I'm happier being in debt to do the thing that I wanna do than I would be otherwise.
Not in like the way of, like, I told my landlord to raise the rent so I could hustle harder. Yeah, [chuckles] exactly.
No, more just like, it's worth going into debt to go out to eat with your friends because the cost of not going out to eat with your friends is too high.
And this episode is sponsored by Resy and Amex, so- Which I actually think that that thread in modern life right now, the debt-fueled lifestyle, is not so different from this casino conversation that we're having. Hmm.
No, not at all. If you feel like your financial well-being is subject to forces beyond your control, then you might have a sense of kind of already being in the casino.
And even accruing debt, I think some people st- see it as a gamble as to whether they're ever actually going to have to pay it off.
I came really close to having the rest of my college debt paid off under the Biden administration, and then it wasn't. Yeah. And the fact that, like, I could get that close, it kinda like made the debt seem fake.
Like, I honestly, like, since that happened, I've been way looser about doing my monthly payment late 'cause I'm kinda like, none of this matters. I didn't stop paying it.
I think a lot of people just straight up stop 'cause they're like, "Come and get me." But it just made everything seem so much more fake. So I thought that was interesting.
But what I liked about the winning essay and, like, why I chose it was, uh, there was just such an interesting perspective on what it means to thrive.
In the case of this family, where there were, like, uh, one parent and two of the kids being neurodivergent, it was worth taking a pay cut and changing their lifestyle so that everyone could live at their own pace, essentially.
And the fluorescent lighting is sort of a metaphor in the essay for being forced into an environment that just doesn't fit you.
But what I liked about the essay is it doesn't go so far as to say, like, "Hey, we should all do what we want 'cause, like, being in school sucks or being in a job sucks."
It's very realistic about the trade-offs that have to happen if you decide you're going to organize your life around your own quirks, essentially, and what works for your own brain.
And very few people can do that and have a traditional career at the same time, so there's always that trade-off. But I just thought it was very well done, and it said a lot in a short amount of time.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Do you think you'll end up publishing any of the other ones that were really close? I don't think so this time, only because...
And I did encourage everyone to take their essays elsewhere and try to publish them elsewhere.
We're heading into a month-long collab, and then we're doing some Dirt five-year anniversary stuff, so my editorial calendar is actually, like, a little bit constrained right now in terms of just adding other stuff in.
But I hope those essays make it into the world because they were a lot of really good perspectives.
So speaking of an essay that almost didn't make it into the world but also had really good perspective, I'm gonna [chuckles] bring us back to Teddy's essay. Okay. There was one more bit I, I liked from it I want to pull.
He's talking about... So here's an example. The Nelk Boys, who I barely know th- who they are, but- Yeah, I don't know who that is. Jonathan Richman and the Nelk Boys? [chuckles] Jonathan Richman and the Nelk Boys.
No, the Nelk Boys are this duo of, like, 30 or-- year old or so comedians. They started off as, like, YouTube comedians doing pranks, right?
Like, the example he gave in the essay was this one of getting pulled over with a bunch of Coke in the trunk of your car and like, "Oh, I'm nervous 'cause I- my trunk's full of Coke."
And it- it's actually a cop, and the cop opens the trunk, and it's bottles of Coca-Cola, right? So it's like that kind of thing.
But then they somehow keep growing and get elevated, and famously they interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu. Oh. And they were so unqualified to do it, and they knew they were, and they were talking about it later.
They were, like, podcasting with Adam Friedland and Hasan Piker and talking about how, "Yeah, you guys are so stupid and unqualified to do this. Why did you do this?" So I'm just gonna read what Teddy wrote here.
So, "I like to call what the Nelk Boys, as well as influencers like Jake Paul and anti-woke comedian Andrew Schultz are doing vibes gambling." So that's the term here.
"It is not actually important whether these characters have cohesive, persistent views of the world, and in fact, attempting to present some sort of nuanced political equanimity is probably bad for their particular business model.
What is valuable to them is that they're able to align themselves with a given audience for long enough to reap the benefits.
They're investing in vibes futures, buying the vibe puts and vibe calls, and trading them based on a fickle market that moves as sentiment shift and new shit goes viral on TikTok.
When in the course of a year Tucker Carlson goes from speaking at Trump rallies during the campaign to openly criticizing the administration's decision to drop bombs on Iran or talking about Israel's influence on the American government, he is not going through some sort of political awakening, but rather looking out across the country and seeing which ways his audience is leaning."
So I really like this vibes gambling. It's sort of like referring to fair weather, integrity-less positions taken by, I'm gonna say influencers.
When I mean that, I just mean people who have influence, not necessarily like-You know, short form video creators. I just mean people who have influence. That rings true to me for sure.
I guess it's just like how many cycles can you survive that way before people kinda realize you're, you're full of shit? Well, this is the idea. I mean, you look at Gavin Newsom right now, right?
And he is clearly angling for a run for president. Yeah.
And as we speak, in the past couple weeks, first he had said like, "Oh yeah, Israel's an apartheid state," and then he was called out a week later, and he was like, "Oh no, it's not an apartheid state."
And like that's, I think, what this vibes gambling thing is really useful for. It's a way of referring to people who lack a consistent point of view.
And I don't know, like if in politics, I mean, you know, I've only been cogent for like five election cycles, I don't know. Look, I'm thirty-one years old.
I don't know if the, like in the twentieth century, before I was like aware, before I was born, et cetera, if a higher percentage of public figures were typically more consistent in their points of view, 'cause to me, it's just so normal, like this vibes gambling, if you will, is such like it's just how people seem to operate.
Right. And if you weren't consistent, like there weren't as many places to give an opinion, right?
So if a politician doesn't have a Twitter, then you hear from them in a stump speech where they are going to have more pressure to be consistent in their statements.
Maybe this is, goes back to the sort of like volume of information thing.
There's a sort of flooding the zone aspect to vibes gambling, where you say so much that the fact that you've changed your mind sorta gets lost in that deluge.
But I just wonder whether like some of these influencers are just trying to make it rich quick by pivoting the vibe, like riding that a few times back and forth, and by the time that they've lost credibility to be interesting to any sort of core audience, they will have accumulated enough wealth or audience so it doesn't really matter.
Oh, yeah. Exactly. Well, that is-- I feel like that's Trumpism in a nutshell, isn't it?
It one hundred percent is, but you know, maybe we live long enough to see the vibes gambler ride off into the sunset or maybe just be kicked out of the casino by the pit boss. Or in The Hague.
What-- Who can, who can really say? One other thing adjacent to this from, again, friend of the pod, Ben Dietz. If you're listening, hello, Ben. It was great to see you the other day. I'm gonna read an excerpt from this.
"I've been toying in the last day or so with the idea of outfluencers as a way to explain/express the movements of people and conversations away from typical scale-driven central gravity to a more free-floating, incentive-neutral set of conditions that prioritizes non-programmatized human interaction, spontaneity, non-qualified open participation, serendipity, and non-transactional benefit, serenity, kinda."
This is, this is typical Dietzian prose, by the way. I love this. "Outfluencer is a term that already exists, unsurprisingly, given its logical linguistic relationship to influencers.
It's used primarily, logically, by the outdoor industry, but to describe influencery behavior in nature.
I'm talking about something different, selective self-removal from big optimized systems to embark spontaneously on building or letting something be built small.
Not because it's inherently hard or inherently anti, but because it seems inherently emotionally logical right now." Which to me- It's part of the great slowdown. It's part of the great slowdown.
[laughs] The great slowdown itself is standing up from the vibes slot machine, stubbing out your cigarette, leaving your free drink that you tipped five dollars for- [laughs]...
you know, that watery vodka soda, leaving it a quarter full in the slot machine, and just walking out of the vibes casino, getting in your car, and driving out of Dodge.
Well, before we drive into the sunset, do you wanna talk about this trial verdict that came out yesterday against Meta? I do. Uh, listen, I promise this is the last excerpt I read on this episode.
This is like the lead of this article.
"A California jury on Wednesday found that Meta and Google were to blame for the depression and anxiety of a woman who compulsively used social media as a small child, awarding her six million dollars in a rare verdict holding Silicon Valley accountable for its role in fueling a youth mental health crisis.
While the financial punishment is minuscule for companies each worth trillions of dollars, the decision is still consequential.
It represents the first time a jury has found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers."
So this is significant on its own, but to me, like what's most interesting is like that it's acknowledging the role of like the endless feed and algorithm and how those are, you know, to quote this article, how those should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit.
I can't really envision a world where algorithms and endless feeds are banned, but I can remember a world before the endless feed, um, and it was much easier to log off.
Like to me, it's like, y- you know, people say like, "It's the phones," and maybe, but it's less the phones that have caused people to be like they are and society to be as it is.
It's less the phones and more the endless feed and algorithm. Yeah.
I mean, I think that the nuances are really important here, 'cause obviously the first thing is any of us, if you just looked at this on its face, any of us could then sue.
What is it about this particular person's distress that was unique? And where did the platforms fail us from a consumer protection perspective?
And I think a lot of it's in the fine print and the design, but I do see why it does feel like a quite a large precedent.
But not everyone who's used these platforms or even been distressed by these platforms would have the standing that this person had, I think because of their age and because of the specific like, I don't know.
What do, uh, what's your take on it? Do they all, do they owe us all money? Like- Yeah, 'cause they do, but it's like, uh, this is... Forgive this pun, but like I'm a functioning alcoholic, if you will. Are you?
Well, I'm, I'm employed, uh, but my employment is also very much tied to my usage of the internet, so I don't know. I am a functioning al-alcoholic. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I don't know.
The precedent this sets, I do struggle to see like where the line is then drawn. I suppose we'll see.
This has only just happened, but from what I understand is like the jurors found that Instagram and YouTube specifically made the...
defendant's existing depression and anxiety worse, and that both companies knew their products were doing this and didn't change anything, buried the proof and lied.
But yeah, it's like there are millions of people to whom that would surely apply to. I don't know.
Anyone under 18 with existing depression and anxiety that can prove that these platforms made it worse would have standing under this precedent.
And do you think you would prove that with like getting usage logs from the company that included like average daily consumption hours during a certain period, and perhaps also like an algorithmic understanding of like the categories of content that the person was consuming during that period?
I've seen Taylor Lorenz talk a lot about the hidden costs of KYC and age verification, which is like protections that you put in place on these platforms to prevent children from going astray, eventually get applied to everyone in the form of increased surveillance.
404 Media has also written a lot about this, like with age verification and Discord. 404 is great. Yeah.
So like, I guess the thing is like if you can pull the log to prove somebody's internet usage rises to the level of addiction, and you can analyze it for the negative signals within their usage or like signs of distress, then you can do that for anyone for anything, right?
Like you could do it for somebody to argue that they've been radicalized into being Antifa. Mm-hmm. And the government could use the same process to bring a domestic terrorism case against you. Yeah. So it's hard.
I mean, it's like this is a classic case where like wellbeing and freedom in a democratic society are frequently at odds.
But I do think even when there's like negative implications for the freedom of adults, that like it is worthy to try to isolate and create barriers around children specifically, and teens.
And clearly we haven't done a good enough job of that. Yeah. That's hard. And like I'm not a parent, so like I don't really have that much to say, but I think of my sister who is a parent. Their kids don't have phones.
They have, I think, no plans to give them phones until well into their teens. Maybe a doodlebug. A doodle... What's a doodlebug, Daisy? You know, it just has like five numbers in it, and it's like your parents. Oh, okay.
Oh my bad. It's called a jitterbug, and it's for senior citizens. [chuckles] Oh, yeah, probably. I think probably that.
My nieces do have like an iPad that they can use for certain things, and my sister and my brother-in-law had like tried to ban YouTube from the iPad, but they couldn't really do that because the older one of my nieces had to access YouTube for school.
So it's like you can't limit them. One thing as we speak, OpenAI has shut down Sora, its AI video generator. Yes. OpenAI has shut down. Breaking.
[mimicking trumpets] Uh, that's supposed to- [both chuckling] OpenAI sh- This guy's begging for sound effects. Good thing we have Joe. No, Joe opened the Pandora's box by adding sound effects in the last episode.
He really did. [news intro music] Breaking. One of the things I think about most often from our 86 or so weekly episodes is when we're talking about generative AI with David Rudnick in the fall of 2024.
David was talking about envisioning this dark future where everybody is, you know, watching their, watching their custom AI-generated entertainment that's totally specifically tailored to them, and nobody has anything to talk about because everybody has these distinct reference points, no common reference points, no great works of literature or film that they can discuss.
I can't think of anything more obviously of zero value than giving everyone in the world the ability to either see, but only for themselves, perfect media, or create flawlessly the media that they believe is perfect.
And J.Lo's movie is like kinda the same way. That's what I thought about when Sora came out, and this idea of this like gen AI video app where you're making stuff and sharing it.
To me, I was like, "This is never going to work." It doesn't even have to get to the extreme that David was talking about.
The only audience for that are bots, bots watching bots to monetize off bots, but there was never any revenue, I think, attached to Sora anyways. Right. Well, it's interesting who's allowed to do that too.
Like that guy that did that on Spotify, it's like one could say that he was just gaming the system as it's built. What's, what's that guy? He is having to pay a huge fine.
I can't remember if there's any jail time involved for like making AI-generated songs on Spotify and then like running up the listens with bots.
But it's like, okay, so that's- I don't, yeah, I don't think he did anything wrong... that's what Spotify does, but like the house always wins, right? You can't beat the house.
He tried to count cards, and sorry, pit boss, um, Daniel Eck won't, won't allow that. Uh, one pit boss died this week, the OnlyFans guy. Rest in peace. I would say not even pour one out. Rub one out.
[laughing] No, no, no. Do not. Um, but okay, the interesting details from this. Died of cancer. His personal net worth was around $4 billion at the time of death.
He only bought the company in 2018, so he did not found it, but he bought a majority stake, around 75%. Company was making around $2 million a year when he bought it, and, um, made an estimated $7 billion
in 2025, thanks to the changes he made. Uh, I think he's Ukrainian, and then he immigrated to the US when he was like 10 or something.
But he founded like a string of internet porn companies, like a cam site, another one, and then he bought this, and he bought it from this like brothers and father trio in the UK who had founded OnlyFans.
But yeah, I'm sure that him dying, like this shaggy beast loosed upon the world, I don't think will find itself at the end of any chain.
I'm sorry that he didn't get to enjoy his money, but I do think OnlyFans is kind of evil, so. I agree. Yeah. 43, so young. I did see... Now, this could be wrong.
I didn't verify that he did contribute a lot of money to cancer research. Um, but I think we should find ways of funding cancer research other than digitally pimping women the second they turn 18.
I think there are much better ways. I hope he gave his entire estimated $4 billion net worth at the time of death to cancer research. Me too.Yeah.
Did you want to tell me about a couple new magazines you saw before we sign off? Yeah. Well, The HTML Review is not new, but this is their newest issue, and this is by Maxwell Neely Cohen. Did you know about them before?
'Cause I didn't know about them until I discovered them on Twitter this week, and I really wanted to bring it up 'cause it's just, like, an exceptional website.
And, like, magazine as object, that's one reason I love magazine.
I was talking about when I would get Shonen Jumps in the mailbox earlier and how, like, having that object was so exciting, and I think, like, The HTML Review has such a unique and fun and tactile website.
Like, that's, to me, is such a great example of what a digital magazine canon should be. Yeah. Well, Maxwell's a homie, so I have known about it, and I just-- it continues to blow my mind. I think it's just incredible.
Thehtml.review. We're just saying go check it out, listener. Go check it out. The other one, a new magazine called Now Voyager that I bought, also pretty cool website, but pretty cool magazine.
The type is a little bit too small for me. But yeah, this is- [chuckles] Well, you should write them a letter. I should write them a letter. Hey, maybe they're listening.
No, I saw something about it on Twitter, and then I decided to buy a year subscription because I... Okay, this is my problem, where once I read Shonen Jump cover to cover as soon as I got it, m-multiple times.
Nowadays, I buy magazines, and then I read one story, and then I don't read them ever again. They stack up in a corner of my living room, and I love owning and purchasing these objects, but I really have a problem.
Th-this goes back to less is more. I hope I, I got-- I bought a year subscription to Now, to Now Voyager, and it's, it's a quality product. I like what I'm seeing.
Well, listener, we're gonna spend the next month working on our attention spans, and, uh, we hope you will too so that when we come back with our first two-hour episode, you'll be in a position to actually evaluate the effectiveness of our new format.
And this has been Tasteland. [outro music]