<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/7DNCJqiUIadiYoOpKDFO3E?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> *Dialectic Episode 7: Toby Shorin - The Shapes of Culture - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/7DNCJqiUIadiYoOpKDFO3E?si=b2843d0d51f0446f) and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/0OrVLIdk4Eg).* # Transcript **Toby** [00:00:03] I'm great. Thank you. **Jackson** [00:00:05] It's very good to be here with you. **Toby** [00:00:12] I'm very happy that you're doing this, that you're here in San Francisco. It's delightful to see you, as always. **Jackson** [00:00:18] I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this interview. You are a prolific person, certainly a prolific writer. I don't know if there are many people who have energized me with their ideas more in the last few years, which is saying a lot. **Toby** [00:00:39] Thank you. **Jackson** [00:00:40] But you also have a very wide aperture on what you've written about. One of the things we'll get to is, I think you notably had a pretty clear shift in the topics of your ideas pretty recently, the last couple of years. With that all in mind, I'd like to kind of cover a through line or a theme that I think has maybe been an arc of your writing and ideas publicly. It's certainly not holistic. There are lots of different ways we can take this, and I'm sure we'll talk about some of your other ideas and more specificity in the future. But for today's sake, I think it's safe to say you're a cultural anthropologist, specifically one for the internet era. Maybe one core through line is that you've interrogated sources of meaning and sources of morality. And how, as the pendulum swings, that changes for people today. So the through line for me, that really stood out as I was rereading much of your writing and some of your newer stuff, was the shift between individualism and collectivism. The ways that we make meaning as individuals, and then the ways that we make meaning as parts of collectives or people seeking something bigger than ourselves. I think I would have initially said, until some of your more recent writing, that it was just kind of a clear shot from individual to collective. But now my observation at least has been that you've started to move back and forth between individual and collective in interesting ways. **Toby** [00:02:12] Interesting. I'm already very pleased with this theme, and I want to know how you, where you see that. I might learn something new about my own thinking today. I feel like I already am. **Jackson** [00:02:26] Cool. Well, we're going to do a little bit of going through history. The first place to start, and I think maybe the first piece of writing at least that I read of yours, and that I think was really notable, is when you started to interrogate and investigate authenticity. This is around 2018. You wrote a couple of pieces on it specifically. There was a line in one of your pieces on authenticity, which really was a commentary on the death of authenticity, the post 2010s sort of era of hipsterism and millennials wanting to be their own person and not be defined by some kind of collective societal idea. There's a line in there where you reference the Romantic movement. And so I'll read that back to you. "The origin of the modern authenticity drive is the 19th century Romantic movement. The Romantics thought intensely felt emotion was at the heart of beauty, and therefore they valued the individual experience above all else. They rejected universal ethical frameworks and considered individual expression in the development of a unique self to be ethically valuable." And so I think it's clear that you were in some ways right about your observations on authenticity when you wrote that in 2018. I think it's only become more true. But I'm curious, maybe with the hindsight around it, what you think the Romantics got right, what you think they got wrong, and could we even see a backswing back towards authenticity? **Toby** [00:03:57] Wow, amazing question. When I wrote that, I actually really had not done enough background research on that yet. I actually really had no idea what I was talking about, but I kind of got it directionally. But now I've been reading a lot more about Romanticism. I even have this book here, *The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis*. And I have been reading more Romantic poets. I read *Faust* this year. I read some Shelley, I read some Blake. And I have come to a bigger appreciation of how the Romanticists, or the Romantics -- what's now called the Romantic movement -- were trying to solve the same kinds of questions that people have today. Anyone who responds to the idea that we are too rational, that science has given us a lot but it has somehow divested the world of meaning, are basically rehashing the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment. The Romantics were very direct in their appraisal of that, and they were super clear about what they were doing. They were saying, "We need to create a secularized, naturalized faith alternative." And they basically based it on a naturalized version of the Fall from Grace narrative: we once had this perfect harmony with nature, and we were living in our fully enchanted world, but along came science and disenchanted it. Here's where we arrive, mise en scène, in this fallen state. Now, how do we get back to nature? How do we get back to that sense of our self and our role in the cosmos? Well, we can do that through our sentiments, our feelings of contact with nature, and the powerful emotions that they give us -- that sense of awe and the sublime. And we can do that through art. Art is where human creativity comes in contact with the unconscious natural mind and synthesizes new ideas, like reason and nature, into a kind of synthetic whole. As you can see, Romanticism is still very much alive today in art movements. When we valorize artists, when we valorize Kanye, when we talk about the creator economy and being an artist -- being good in any sense -- we are living inside one of those Romantic worldviews. When we talk about individuation in a psychological sense, the Jungian sense, we're inside one of those kind of Romantic narratives. And although in that piece I kind of spoke about leaving that ironic framing of individualism, that heavily authenticity-focused thing, I think I've come to a much bigger appreciation of the way that those Romantic narratives still really structure our beliefs and behaviors and will definitely be with us for a long time. **Jackson** [00:07:43] Yeah, it's funny how much of that first part sounds like the narratives today. **Toby** [00:07:48] Exactly. It's very humbling. **Jackson** [00:07:52] I don't know if it's a pendulum. In my last interview, I was talking to **Toby** Paik about his pendulum theory of culture. I'm not sure that it's a pendulum or a cycle, but it's definitely one of the two. The repetition is happening. **Toby** [00:08:05] I kind of think they happen all at the same time. It's almost like the Pace Layers diagram, where there is a swing back and forth between sincerity and irony, perhaps. But then on a deeper cycle, there are these long-term versions of Romantic narratives, or progress narratives, or what have you, that draw from these super deep aquifers of moral sources. Those come in and out of fashion but draw on the same sensibilities in a way. **Jackson** [00:08:36] So, do you think it's right to assume that the Romantic ideal is very much about the idyllic sense that we are all truly unique, and there's something morally, ethically, maybe even spiritually profound in the individual? **Toby** [00:08:53] The basic romantic problem, or the basic spiritual problem for the Romantics, is that we have become alienated from ourselves, from society, from nature. The spiritual solution is to develop a felt sense of our place in the cosmos, in our society, and in ourselves. That could happen in many ways. It can happen through the cultivation of the individual to become a unique self and understand one's role in the secular world. It can come through spiritual cultivation of mystical states. It could come through psychological and emotional development and understanding one's life in a narrative sensibility. It can come through becoming a unique, creative artist. This is very close to the vision that people had in the original Romantics, the role of the artist in society as leading the way and synthesizing the ideas and the zeitgeist into the spiritual direction for man. But in every case, the individual person is the locus for what could then maybe become a social change. It is a little bit more focused on the individual as the fundamental unit. **Jackson** [00:10:11] Okay, we'll come back to individuality. But the next place I want to go, one of your most famous collaborations and forms of language, was the idea of Squad Wealth, a famous essay. To me, it seems like an interesting place to go from the individual because it's sort of the seed of something more collective that's still small. We'll go to scaled collectivity soon. But one of my favorite, I just took a short excerpt that I think gets at maybe the shift away from post-authenticity and why squads were so powerful as an idea then in 2020, I think when you wrote this. "Squads are woke to the empty neoliberal promises of gig economy employment and parasocial personal brands. Squads value self-determination not through individualism but through collective maintenance and care for one another. Squads value creative expression but celebrate the group rather than the individual authorship. For the squad, the autonomous is always collective." For those who haven't read this essay, by the way, it's just. **Toby** [00:11:11] It's just. **Jackson** [00:11:11] It's such a banger. You have some great work, but this one is almost like slam poetry or something. **Toby** [00:11:16] It is. It's crazy to hear that read back only five years. **Jackson** [00:11:21] Do you still believe in the power of the squad? **Toby** [00:11:22] 100%. The squad is with us right now. Squad energy is in the room. It really flows through my veins, honestly. First of all, the squad that I wrote this with, we are still meeting weekly. The people who this, like, man. Doing this piece really galvanized the other internet. It was an inflection point for other internet because it really solidified the us-ness of it. And those are still people who I'm talking with, who I'm collaborating with all the time. Those ties are really close. If you search the term "squad wealth" on Twitter, you still see people mentioning it, discovering it, and feeling just as galvanized as they were when it came out, even though that cultural moment of it being Defi Summer and, you know, WAGMI and bags go up and stuff is long over. And I think that's because the underlying moral dimension of it is still on point. People are still trying to get out of that paradigm. They're still trying to find a form of communion and collectivity that feels right, that feels good. **Jackson** [00:12:47] There's something. One of the things you guys do a great job of: I've always said that the best form of social media is the group text. There is some sense that there are almost three types of ways that people organize online. There is the individual moving through the web. There is all of these bigger movements and places and niche communities and things. And then there's the sort of, to go back to individual and collective, there's this sort of individual, it's still atomic, but it is the atomic collective, maybe, might be a way to think about it. **Toby** [00:13:26] Yeah. **Jackson** [00:13:28] It is a sense of being part of a collective that can still move quickly, like do the types of things that an individual can. Maybe one way to think about it is the type of identity a collective can have is usually pretty amorphous, but with a squad, it can be really refined. **Toby** [00:13:54] Yeah, it can be really personal. I guess you're pointing out something that it's almost like the scrappy startup appeal. It's also possible to have that in just like the friends who are scheming shit together form. These people are almost having to scheme more than ever. That was something that was alive when we wrote that as well, because the pandemic forced people to collectivize in those kind of pod-like ways and really hash out their shit, define their formal boundaries. Like, are you quarantining with X rules or Y rules? But I think because of the economic situation today, that is just as true as ever. **Jackson** [00:14:41] For people less familiar with you, what is, was, will be Other Internet? **Toby** [00:14:49] Other Internet was, is, and will be a research collective, a group chat that uses the dilapidated software Keybase acquired by Zoom. A group chat that eventually started working for crypto protocols. **Jackson** [00:15:10] Where? **Toby** [00:15:10] Where to start? Like publishing influential essays in the crypto world, going on squad retreats, getting big grants, and traveling around to different parts of, just making waves in different parts of the social world, in the art world economy, in the world of academic people who write about blockchains, in the blockchain world itself, in the people who aspired to use DAOs and regenerative economics for good. Other Internet kind of held together all of those different parties. Everyone could agree that Other Internet was onto something, onto a way of using crypto that would better the world. And yeah, there was, it was a whole moment. **Jackson** [00:16:00] When I met you, I asked, "Is Other Internet a friend group, a blog, a DAO?" And I think you said something along the lines of... **Toby** [00:16:09] "Yes, yes, exactly." Soon Other Internet will be a book. Actually, we are doing an anthology of our collected writings that will have not just all of the famous pieces, but all sorts of unpublished material too, and lesser-known deep cuts and some interviews with our friends and people who were in and around that. Nadia's in it, Kio wrote the introduction. It's been really interesting to reflect on that whole era now that we're kind of out of that era and transitioning into another era. Like what is the meaning of that organization, and why did it capture the energy in the way it did, and what narratives were alive at that time? It's been a process of working through our own emotional journey through those times. **Jackson** [00:16:58] In some sense, maybe reckoning with what it means to have been an individual part of that kind of atomic collective a little bit. **Toby** [00:17:42] 100%. I think this was a good, I really wanted to hit on squads because I think it's an interesting pit stop between the kind of extreme end of the individual and how wide can you take the collective all the way to things like movements. Just before we move on, has anything materially changed since you guys wrote that piece? Either the world has changed or the role for a squad has changed? Or do you think it's as evergreen as it ever was? I guess one difference is that that piece came at a kind of transition moment where high Twitter was just starting to break down and devolve. Or it already had been breaking down and devolving, but it hadn't really devolved to its current point. Now the default is private groups in a way. Now everything is inside some sort of WhatsApp group or Telegram group or Discord group. That was starting to be true at the time, but it's fully true now. Not all of those things are squads, like they are cozy web or parlor spaces. I'm not really sure what has meaningfully changed though. It still feels like a group chat of aligned and motivated people is still kind of the basic unit of getting shit done right now. **Jackson** [00:18:44] It's powerful. A very internet-native thing, too, definitely. All right, going wider, you have written about a few different ways new types of collectivism might show up, including, actually, before Squad Wealth, with a piece called Headless Brands. But I think maybe the most iconic piece you wrote during this era of your life, I think a lot of people would say, is this idea piece, Life After Lifestyle. In that essay, you and Tock reflected on this world where we watched authenticity die out. People align around the idea of brands and wanting to be a part of something by way of brand. Frankly, an evolution towards brands maybe even being something bigger than what they seem like they could be in the early 2010s. Effectively, you proposed a world where people could buy into something bigger than them, even if it meant literally buying. There are a couple of excerpts I want to read, and then we can talk about it. First, you say, "If people could unironically like brands now, maybe in the near future they would be comfortable opting into a culture premised on collectivity rather than individualism. Perhaps they would be okay letting someone convince them of what is good, of what a right way of life is." "Perhaps they would no longer feel the urge to become unique. Perhaps they would find home and belonging in sameness, or even," I thought, "faith." Obviously, some contrast to the romantic ideas there. And then you go on to say, "The realization that producing culture is about producing types of personhood is the central issue of this new cultural economy. Systems of belief are sticky. Compelling culture can be generational." "This is both the opportunity and the risk." And I think, in some ways, Life After Lifestyle, and the way you talked about it then, was a little bit of a cliffhanger for where we might be going. There is an extreme contrast to this moral source in the vein of what we talked about with romanticism and this idea that every person is going to find their own direct source of meaning. What does it feel like, maybe even just a couple of years removed? I think, and we'll talk more about it, but you're talking about teetering on something between the secular and the sacred, perhaps. This notion that actually collectives, that brands, that companies, that movements might actually shape people more than people might shape themselves. Does it feel like you nailed something as it was beginning to happen? Does it feel actually that the chessboard has changed? **Toby** [00:21:24] Everything is playing out exactly as I imagined, basically. If you look at what Brian Johnson is doing, you can see quite clearly that people are very comfortable having people tell them what to do, how to believe, and how to be. That's not the only example. It's just the one with the most obvious cult leader. Is Brian Johnson a cult leader? I'm comfortable saying that he is. I think he would be too, so I don't have any issue saying that. Before going further, I should specify or clarify that romanticist religions do exist. Psychology, for instance, could be considered a secularized romanticist faith system. Romanticism doesn't necessarily mean everyone decides their values for themselves. That would be existentialism or some kind of Nietzschean version of romanticism. But it's not that. How is it that you can have individualism celebrated, and everyone wants to be a creator, everyone wants to be an artist? That's how that works, is that it doesn't necessarily mean there's total diversity in terms of beliefs. People share these cultural coordinates. I thought that was worth clarifying. But let's get back to where what you were saying. **Jackson** [00:23:00] I'll skip slightly ahead, and then maybe we can circle the whole idea. But you go on to point at something that, along the secular to sacred point, is more explicitly pointing at something like a new religion. **Toby** [00:23:13] Yeah. **Jackson** [00:23:13] You called Brian Johnson a cult leader. There are two ideas here. One, you say—and I think this is from back then—"EA, or Effective Altruism, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, is a sort of headless brand because it is a philanthropic approach. It attracts wealth by design, and its network effects are growing with its focus on existential AI risk as a chief cause area. EA even has an eschatology, a theory of the end of the world. As far as newly designed cultures go, EA is the closest thing we have to a new religion." And then finally, "I have occasionally been asked why I'm obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous meanings that structure our relationships. They are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the ingredients for social transformation—not to say upheaval—are in place. We are transitioning out of the era of lifestyle and into an era where the production of culture is valued both subjectively and financially on its own terms, from an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs." Part of my initial question, frankly, is: has this happened as you expected it would? It seems to be. Your view seems to be absolutely in full force. Maybe one way to take this would be, how should we look at what's happening in front of us? Then maybe one critique I would have, or question I would have for you, is: as much as you are a brand person, and I think your interrogation of brands is really fascinating, I could say that it's actually been far less about brands and far more about people. But, put another way, our collectivism is organizing under heroes, under generals, where the armies—whether it's Brian Johnson or pick your favorite person—we are turning into, we are developing new religions, new cults, but it's organized around glorious leaders. **Toby** [00:25:07] Yeah, a lot to dig into there. First of all, I think that everyone likes to talk about how people in the tech or brand world like to name things after economies. Right, we have the direct-to-consumer economy, the cultural economy, the AI economy. Well, I think we're entering the sophistry economy also. **Jackson** [00:25:29] The economy economy. **Toby** [00:25:30] Yeah, there's the economy. There's the economy-economy. But I think we're fully entering into the sophistry economy. **Jackson** [00:25:36] What does that mean? **Toby** [00:25:37] A sophist is like a fake philosopher who leads you down the happy path into a ridiculous lifestyle, perhaps, and deceives you with rhetoric. Socrates beat these guys up every day, dialectically, in the agora. We need Socrates to come and show these motherfuckers up. But the effect of the media environment is that the power laws work in such favor of aggregating that kind of attention. Aggregating attention can so easily be shifted into other types of capital these days that there is great power to organizing around these generals or fiefdom owners. Venkat called it the Internet of Beefs, and I liked that. People marshal these ideas, they represent these ideas, and they move large cultural contingents. I think when I wrote this, I was more in the mindset of where a lot of people are, which was convinced that there's going to be this big new sort of religion in our lifetime. **Jackson** [00:27:30] Capital R Religion? **Toby** [00:27:30] Capital R Religion. I thought that I had made a prediction, like with the other Internet crew, that there would be a kind of savior figure, a new kind of prophet figure to show up. And maybe Brian Johnson counts if his cultural impact grows, and that prediction's right. But now that I've been engaging with a lot of this older material and just reading about cycles of history in general, I more believe that these changes will take two or three hundred years to play out in the fullest possible way. **Jackson** [00:28:04] Wow. **Toby** [00:28:04] The seeds of whatever new faith there may be are really just taking shape now. They're just starting to sprout or even get planted. That doesn't mean there won't be interesting changes in our lifetime. There will be a role for people who can synthesize the different kinds of cultural systems that have that potential to become a new kind of faith system, but those changes will probably be pretty nascent while we're still alive. **Jackson** [00:28:04] Another way to put it might be that one could have read *Life After Lifestyle* as the very, very initial seed of how to start a new religion. Maybe that's still true, but we're used to everything happening on five to ten-year time horizons, and these things tend not to. **Toby** [00:28:24] I do think that things have sped up. Culture moves a lot faster, so things might move faster. But I also think it takes a long time for long-term cultural developments to play out. There might need to be other big motivating factors, like a more real societal collapse, for instance. **Jackson** [00:28:43] Do great headless brands require a glorious individual at the beginning, almost paradoxically combining the individual and the collective? **Toby** [00:28:55] They potentially do. **Jackson** [00:28:57] Bitcoin, yes. Ethereum, probably to some degree. **Toby** [00:29:01] Mormonism. **Jackson** [00:29:02] Mormonism. Effective altruism? I'm not so sure. **Toby** [00:29:07] Effective altruism, Eliezer kind of came in a while after, and there was already this kind of effective charity movement. So that's a weird mashup. But I'm pretty sure that will be going after he dies. It seems probably true that there needs to be some kind of strong founder figure. I think where I'm at with headless brands these days is that it's more of an illustrative tool that shows some of the dynamics of the cultural economy these days, as opposed to a thing that people can go out and build. I think what we more described is more like a phenomenon as opposed to an entity that you can go and create yourself. **Jackson** [00:29:51] Which is the primary way I think people misinterpret a lot of people. **Toby** [00:29:54] Agency people. **Jackson** [00:29:55] Where does just the lowercase B capitalism brand sit today in 2025? Is it over for brands? **Toby** [00:30:05] I'm hesitant to talk about this too much because I don't want to be perceived as a brand person these days, but I will say that I think that the power is shifting more to the retailer. If you look at consumer goods, you can see that with run clubs where the retailer is the facilitator of practices. That's something else I've talked about in *Life After Lifestyle* and my more recent *FTB Fest* talk, *Body Futurism*. It's the shift to practices because the retailer can facilitate the run clubs or the chess clubs or whatever it may be. They aggregate cultural power, and so they can basically broker between the brand and the consumer. The brand has actually lost some power there, but that's fine because other entities serve the role of facilitating the practice of the lifestyle. **Jackson** [00:30:59] We're at an interesting point here in this arc. In my view, at least as long as I've known you, and a lot of the notable writing you've been doing, there's sort of this interesting shift. And there's the *Life After*, up to *Life After Lifestyle*, and then there's *Afterlife After Lifestyle*. Some things started to change. You've been doing different things. So I want to interrogate that a little bit and understand, is there a pattern here? Is it a total shift? Clearly, you weren't totally satisfied with the conclusions you had gotten to with *Life After Lifestyle*. And you even say at parts in the piece, "Brands aren't taking it far enough." Granted, that's not for you, brand marketing person. There's one line where you say, "But I keep ending up in a room with people who want to seed new isms into the world." And then you go on to say, "I find myself encouraging people to stay away from being meta. As enthusiastic as I am about tech wealth pouring into cultural initiatives, the regranting programs that are now so popular are just like software platforms. They outsource your own agency to some imagined future actors." "I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they'd like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of?" And finally, "I won't pull punches. Tech founders and D2C brand builders are not yet prepared to operate communities that are first and foremost spaces of moral influence." And so in some sense, at least what I'm reading here is you're sort of telling the world what maybe should happen or is going to happen, but you're also saying, frankly, the world I've been in and maybe my audience might not be the group to take us there. **Toby** [00:32:32] Exactly. **Jackson** [00:32:34] So you go off, maybe, to me at least, my read was that you went off alone a little bit, especially as someone who had been so richly a part of a texture of other internet and a certain community, and often crypto communities. And I'm curious specifically, before we get into the weeds of where you've actually gone, what was the rabbit that sort of took you down the new hole? How did this begin? Maybe it was cynicism coming out of *Life After Lifestyle*. Maybe it was cynicism around crypto. Maybe it was just seeing that this might actually come not from technology and capitalism or the worlds you had been in. **Toby** [00:33:10] There were a lot of influences pushing me in the direction that I ended up going. One of the biggest influences is my buddy Aaron Z. Lewis. I've talked about this stuff with him more than anyone else in the world, and he's been my closest thought partner. He saw that everything was a kind of faith, and he really analyzed the techno-religion before I understood it. I'm still learning to see the way that he sees. The way that he is with his community in Washington, D.C., where he runs a community garden and does all the stuff that I'm talking about, but in an extremely local way, without dominating people, purely in the ethos of service. That is one thing that really helped me see what I want things to feel like. So that has always been on my mind. Always part of our conversation was how to get people out of this disembodied digital space and into their physical world, into their physical communities, and into service there. I could see that very clearly because people would approach Other Internet often, especially at the peak of our crypto influence, asking, "How do I do this? How do I do the stuff that you're talking about?" They saw the moral imperative; they felt it. They could see that throughline in the work, and they wanted to know how to do it. It was just very clear there wasn't a good social vehicle for those people. There wasn't a good social forum for those people to give in the way that they wanted to give, to use technology in service of what is in front of them. Trying to figure out what is the form, what is the format for people to do that has been a question that's been with me for a while. Then after I published *Life After Lifestyle*, one of the other missing pieces came into the picture: all of these health and wellness founders started reaching out to me. That normally happens when I write something; a lot of people come out of the woodwork, and I learn something new. But all these health and wellness founders started reaching out to me. Like Robbie Bent from Othership, he was like, "That's exactly what we're doing." I understood then that part of where these new potential faith systems would come from, part of where their spark was happening, was more around health practices, mental health beliefs, and wellness communities. I could see that those things were because of the same kinds of cultural formation dynamics that I described in the past around aesthetics or lifestyles or what have you. Those same media environments were giving rise to many movements around these health and wellness practices. And so it became really clear, the acculturation, the cultural dimensions that almost automatically want to get built onto any one of these mimetic movements, that's happening for these actual practices too. These practices and the communities forming around them, that's where this *Life After Lifestyle* thesis is playing out in the most robust way. **Jackson** [00:37:00] Why do they have a stronger moral core than an e-commerce brand? It's a little bit of a facetious question. **Toby** [00:37:06] Well, for one, when the basis is a practice, you can fulfill the moral premise in a way that the brand could never fulfill for you. This gets back to what I was saying about how the retailer, when the retailer has more power in the brand ecosystem now because the brand doesn't actually fulfill its practice by selling you a shoe. **Jackson** [00:37:30] But-- **Toby** [00:37:30] But the retailer who runs a run club-- **Jackson** [00:37:34] --versus an actual run club. **Toby** [00:37:36] An actual run club or USAL in LA is a store that's doing this because they can facilitate that. They can. The premise, the moral premise of being outside, being active, being in nature, and using your body in nature, or whatever it may be, and the fulfillment that comes from that, it can actually be satisfied. So, and that's just a trite example. There are many other practices, from somatic trauma healing stuff that absolutely has a moral orientation to it, which we can get into, to more directly spiritually coded stuff, whether that is the more spiritual versions of yoga, Kundalini yoga perhaps, or transcendental meditation or breath work, whatever it is. These practices, even when they've been completely secularized or stripped from their original faith conditions, contain a kind of. They're doing something with your body, and they contain a kind of grain to them that is not fully moral by itself. But it really can be when you add in the discursive element and bring back in the elements of ritual and so forth. That's even without having them attached to the original faith system, which, yeah. **Jackson** [00:38:51] Yeah, or it gets fuzzy. So, okay, you've led me right here. You, I'm sure I'm skipping some steps, but one of the core places you got to in your new discovery, as you went down this path, was an emphasis on the body. You gave a talk two years after *Life After Lifestyle*, this past year in Idyllwild at FWB on body futurism. To me, this feels very much like a return, at least at first, to individualism. You've come back down out of the collective. A couple of ideas that you discussed in this talk, and if people are curious, I would recommend they watch it. But you say, first and foremost, a return to the body as the basic political unit, which has obviously individualism implied inside of it. But then you go on to say: tired political bodies, geriatric institutional bodies, abstracted social media bodies decomposed into physical, individual bodies. Bodies are the foundation of what is real and of relationships to one another. It is the phenomenological experience of institutions as defective, domineering, and extractive that drives one back to what one can control. And so it's obviously quite different in texture to the romantic individualism we were talking about. But yet we have a pretty dramatically individual idea here, at least an individual foundation. Is that right? **Toby** [00:40:23] Yeah. So in the same way, goodness. So body futurism is not one of my more analytical pieces. It's more like a squad wealth type of piece where I'm preaching a bit. **Jackson** [00:40:35] Absolutely. You're. I noticed this watching the two talks, by the way. *Life After Lifestyle*, I mean, obviously, I think maybe you were more mature as a speaker, but is much more kind of like reading. You gave this in a pastoral way, I would say. **Toby** [00:40:48] Thank you. If I get too youth-pastory in here, please tell me to calm down. But when I'm speaking in that mode, I'm not just commenting on the moral sources, I'm inside them. I'm being in them, I'm living them, and I'm trying to DJ them a bit and promote them. So, how do I talk about this in a way... Because I kind of want to do that now. When you get back to the body, there is something true about the romantic ethos here, which is that there's something true about the world and about ourselves that we can learn from getting really into our bodies and becoming highly attuned to the fine emotional, physiological, phenomenal sensations that we have. And when we do that, and get really good at it, whole arenas of wisdom, agency, and capability open up. But I also think that there is something potentially new, that is not just romanticism here. I'm not sure what it is yet, but that is a big hunch that I have about the future of spirituality in our culture. There's also the political dimension of this, which I think was pretty confused in the talk. I got the feedback that it was easily misunderstood, so it might be worth explaining that a little bit more. **Jackson** [00:42:35] I'm curious about both of those two things you just said. **Toby** [00:42:37] Yeah. **Jackson** [00:42:38] What... Can you give us a hint of what that hunch might be? And two, unpack the political side. **Toby** [00:42:45] Okay, so the spiritual hunch comes from this realization that each of these big moral sources, which is attached to a major cultural movement (or many cultural movements), there is a kind of physiological sensibility at the core of it. A big one for Western culture is the will, and that is what this philosopher, Oswald Spengler, who wrote about this, calls "the passion for the third dimension." It's like, we're not just in 2D space, we're in 3D. We're going off into infinity. And this is the physiological sensation that inspires the baroque crenellations on Gothic cathedrals and rococo and stuff. And also the striving of our culture, the Muskian, "we can go to space" literally, but also just that entrepreneurial striving and never being satisfied with what is. **Jackson** [00:43:50] The transformation of beyond the status quo, is that going... **Toby** [00:43:56] Going beyond. Nietzsche was doing this, too. But going beyond that movement in general, that's a kind of physiological orientation. **Jackson** [00:44:03] It's sort of distinctly human compared to animal idea in some sense, maybe? Is that inside the thing? Part of what I feel like I'm hearing is that the thing that makes humans so unique is our desire to almost change ourselves or go beyond ourselves. **Toby** [00:44:22] Going beyond ourselves is part of it. I don't think this is necessarily a comparison to animals. Different cultural movements, contingents, or civilizations have their own physiological sensations at the core of it that are really related to what they are and what they become. The question is, with this new stuff, what is the kind of sensation at the core that may become the seed of the next culture? I think we have to get really embodied. I want to motivate people to get really embodied to accelerate that process, find it, and figure out what it is. But I think there is something different than the Faustian striving, the will, the culture of the will in all of this California culture. There's something about psychedelics, something about polyamory, in fact. Something about dissolving boundaries or the movement of merger. There's something there, and this is just a hypothesis that I have. I would already want to warn away the people who think that you can turn authentic relating practices or circling into a religious system. Those people out there, if they're listening to this, they know who they are. That's wrong. But the whole thing about California art movements being all about perceptual art and immersive art spaces and immersive performances, or James Turrell's art being so popular these days -- I think there's something about the dissolution of boundaries and the psychedelic experience that will have something to do with the new culture, the new faith system that emerges out of all of this. It's just a hunch, and as you can see, I don't have a lot of good words for it yet. **Jackson** [00:46:30] Is Brian Johnson a body-oriented version of the will? **Toby** [00:46:37] Yes, he is. Brian Johnson is part of Faustian culture, and he himself is trying to do Nietzsche for today. Very clearly, he's trying to -- he's doing the Nietzsche playbook. He lays out the table of values, and he's like, "We're going to overturn this. You think that it's okay to die? Well, I don't think that. I'm going to be a moral innovator and flip that over." **Jackson** [00:46:57] Right. He's taking the pattern that has historically been done, but he's doing it from a new starting point: the body. You even say, I think at one point in that talk, "The body is replacing technology as the site of utopian imaginaries." But that is very much encoded in the will. And so you're pointing at another separate thing that originates in the body but might go somewhere else. **Toby** [00:47:20] Yes, thank you for pointing out the different levels here. There is a zeitgeist turned towards the body that I think is going to maybe be a 20-30 year zeitgeist cycle or pendulum swing. But yeah, back to the pendulum swing, there is a temporary zeitgeist there. And in that zeitgeist, the grounds will be laid for much bigger things to happen. In the same way that when there was a body-oriented zeitgeist in the 60s and 70s with the hippies and Esalen got started, that laid the seeds for what's happening now. Whatever's happening now will lay the seeds for some future thing. This 200-300 year timeline, I think, is just still getting started, just still figuring out what it is. Will it be some sort of synthesis of the Pan-America's indigenous, plant medicine syncretic thing that's emerging? I'm not sure. Will it be some other actual use of psychedelics, like being merged with CBT in the clinic? I'm not sure. Probably yes, and to all of the above, but it's not really clear what that will be yet. That is one of the big things that I want to figure out. And I want to also figure out what's distinct about what's happening now from the 60s and 70s. I'm not super literate about that era, but that's something I want to know. And this is where this whole project I'm on does kind of border on comparative religious studies type of stuff. **Jackson** [00:48:46] In some sense, one pattern I've seen is that you have identified shifts around the ways that individuals are feeling and their desire to tap into something more collective as a result. And so in some sense, I'm seeing a—I might be forcing this a little bit, but I saw a little bit of pattern around the post-authenticity, fallout cynicism of the first half of the 2010s into so many of the ideas around proto-religions, techno, momentum and missions, and ideas like that: headless brands, crypto, AI, whatever. And maybe now we're seeing—I'm trying to put words around the Bryan Johnson things. Longevity seems pretty clear. **Toby** [00:49:39] Yeah. **Jackson** [00:49:40] And you're perhaps pointing it and saying, hey, longevity is one way this new body-oriented individualism will go collective. But there might be other ones, too, and those are hazy, but we're starting to see them show up. **Toby** [00:49:52] Yeah, there totally are. Another one is the cultural complex around generational trauma, trauma healing, ancestral trauma. And it also operates in this kind of decolonial cultural coordinates. There's also something big and body-focused happening there that might be the future of the left. **Jackson** [00:50:13] But if you distill it all down, again, the difference from 10 years ago, 15 years ago, is the arbiter of truth here is not what the mind feels or thinks, but what the body feels. **Toby** [00:50:27] I'm not sure I would say that, because that might get even more complicated. I would say that a big difference from 10 or 15 years ago is the whole reason that I think I got down this route, starting from an authenticity perspective, is leaving alone the pendulum swing. There is a deeper sense of individualism that is tied to people's identity, that I think they are increasingly willing to give up in order to be told what's the right way to live the good life. That is inside everything that we've been discussing. But then, body versus mind is actually going to be one of the cultural battlegrounds I'd expect of the next decade, where I think, you know, I've been reading about Neoplatonism and getting more sharp about metaphysics because I think metaphysics is going to be in the zeitgeist in a big way. It will be important for people to have, just as it was important for people to have a take on Curtis Yarvin or Bronze Age Pervert or whatever, these highly online cultural figures over the last decade, I think now it's going to be important for people to have consistent positions about whether they're idealists, whether they're dualists, whether they're interaction dualists, whether they're complete materialists. Some of the body-focused developments that are happening in science, especially in the intersection of science and Buddhist theory of mind, are going to motivate a new kind of battleground where body versus mind is one of those debates that are possible to have. **Jackson** [00:52:13] Especially as what the way we talk about mind. We have new minds impending. **Toby** [00:52:19] New minds impending, for sure. And that's exactly why that becomes a battleground. Do AIs have minds or not? **Jackson** [00:52:29] You could even make a case that implicit in Brian Johnson's ideas is some notion that the body is the most human thing and mind is increasingly becoming... **Toby** [00:52:39] That's absolutely what he thinks. Or it's certainly implied. It's only his notion of life is one of bare survival, where the fact that you are living in and of itself is what makes it worthy to keep living. **Jackson** [00:52:51] Right. Before we zoom out again, the culmination of this pattern I've noticed is your most recent piece you just published a few days ago. It feels like another analysis on the ways that we're seeking collectivism but from this body-oriented place. You wrote a piece, "Prototyping Social Forms of Care." And in it, you discuss, at least as I understand them, four new forms of sort of collective thought around this type of thing. Two of them are places, two of them are spaces. Do you want to just, I normally don't like to do just summary conversation on podcasts, but do you want to just talk through those four zones and maybe, specifically for my interest, specific instances of each that you've experienced? **Toby** [00:53:37] Yeah. **Jackson** [00:53:38] As an example, for campus, it could be Edge Esmeralda or whatever. **Toby** [00:53:43] In this piece that just came out, I am talking about four different kinds of collective forms: campuses, centers, parlors, and practices. Campuses are kind of new senses of place. Edge Esmeralda at the Pop-Up City is one example, but we did another one in New York called Campus Complex, which is where I got the idea for the name. Shout out to Norman Yatu and Teal Process. That was tying together existing studio spaces, offices, and our friends' school startups, turning that into something that was accessible to fellows. We gave a small budget to some young artists, and they were able to access all of those places for a few weeks as a temporary fellowship. So, that's a kind of placemaking endeavor where you just turn a place into a totally different sense of place by giving it a kind of augmented identity. Centers is something I'm very interested in because I think that community wellness centers, community health centers, places that are community hubs but have a healing focus, will be one of the places where these body practices can intermingle and flourish. New kinds of faith ideas can sort themselves out. I think they basically can be the new churches of this generation. **Jackson** [00:55:07] And most of the centers, in at least the research you've done and what you've gone to, are pretty body practice-oriented, right? **Toby** [00:55:15] Definitely. There are a lot of things like this in and around everywhere. There are lots of wellness centers and wellness collectives where there are different classes and those sorts of things. But I think it's really key that they also serve as community hubs, and the spaces and the programming need to all be designed to facilitate that. One that I go to here in the city is called The Center, and it's a cool co-working space. They serve tea, and they also have a lot of classes. Just down the street from that, there's a place called The Commons, which is kind of affiliated with the San Francisco campus called The Neighborhood. **Jackson** [00:55:51] Campus is a network of centers. **Toby** [00:55:53] Yeah, campus is kind of a network of centers. And there's another place here called Manny's that's a little bit more civic-focused but also a very cool center. Then there are our parlors. Parlors are kind of cozy web spaces. Cozy web is Venkatesh Rao's term for the movement away from the clear net and into the rabbit holes and warrens of private discord servers, WhatsApps, telegrams, and squad chats. A parlor is kind of like somebody's internet parlor. You're an influencer, and your home parlor is where you hold court and hash out intellectual discourse. **Jackson** [00:56:37] This is like an influencer's discord. **Toby** [00:56:39] Yeah, it's like an influencer's discord. So, New Models is one that I'm in that I like a lot. Josh Citarella has his own. Catherine D. runs hers. Those are all examples of parlors. **Jackson** [00:56:54] Would it be right to say that a digital church would be another form of a parlor if it's not oriented around place? **Toby** [00:57:02] It could be. My collaborator Mati Engel, who is a chaplain and a theologian, used to be involved with this one called Labyrinth, which was not quite a church, but kind of like an online practice network, a parlor for clinicians and palliative care professionals and healthcare workers who needed that kind of sense of community and belonging to restore themselves. And then finally, there's practices. We've kind of been talking about practices and what they are. They're actual body practices that people do. Maybe to touch on the individualism point for a second, I don't think that body practices, although they're something that people individually do, also tie people together. When you know how to salsa and I know how to salsa and we meet at a salsa club, suddenly we can salsa together. Other things are like that. Prayer is like that, meditation is like that, yoga is like that. If you're doing Bikram yoga and somebody else is doing Bikram yoga, you have a kind of somatic connection. You have a level of discourse that's possible between you, even if you learned in London and I learned in Los Angeles. **Jackson** [00:58:13] In some sense, practices might be the most clear through line. Practices embody so many of the ideas we've talked about: they are deeply individualistic, they are deeply collective, or they can be both at the same time. They're obviously rooted in the body. In some sense, a practice could also be a headless brand in and of itself. I think meditation, or forms of meditation, might be this. Am I overreaching here? Practices feel very much almost as a form of the atomic unit of this new type of thinking. **Toby** [00:58:54] I think they are. **Jackson** [00:58:56] And you can work out and take as big and have teachers who come in and co-opt practice. **Toby** [00:59:01] That's exactly right. **Jackson** [00:59:03] I'm sure there are some people who've maybe been a little lost by some of the vagaries here. One person could listen to the conversation we've just had, or even read your writing, and say, "**Toby** basically has found a million different ways to call certain aspects of secular society things that are more religious." What does new religion look like? Is that the through line more so than this internal-external thing or individualistic-collectivist thing? **Toby** [00:59:35] Well, I think you're really right to point to the individual-collectivist thing. As we live in a post-romantic culture, individual versus collective is one of the key tensions that we feel all the time. Even though right now there is a strong yearning for collectivism, at the same time, you see a16z making their website look like Ayn Rand designed it. You see that there is also a strong pull towards the great man ethos. All of that's happening at once. These tensions exist in both parts in our culture. **Jackson** [01:00:11] And they exist inside religion, by the way. **Toby** [01:00:14] And they exist inside religion. But there are certain cultures that don't feel these tensions as strongly as we do. In Japan, it weighs much more heavily on the collective side, and individualism is kind of smushed. It's like that in a lot of places, and those places don't have a romantic culture. They have different cultural coordinates. I don't see it as much of attacking back and forth in my writing, but different pieces do have different emphasis. The cultivation of the self, your cultivation of your own moral workings out, is also partly a collective thing and it's partly a very private thing. But you asked another question in the same breath that I wanted to respond to also. What was it? **Jackson** [01:01:05] I mean, are you ultimately just pointing at a secular form of religion? **Toby** [01:01:08] Okay, society has never been secular. I think that's the starting place for understanding a lot. When you engage with this romanticist stuff, you can see how a lot of things in our world exist in a way that's very morally coded. If you were to analyze American culture as an outsider anthropologist, you would have to look at romanticism to understand what is the secular faith of our time. You could say the same thing about scientism and the religion of progress. How we behave is encoded in these moral systems. But also, mystical experience happens to people all the time. Not in any kind of occult way, but when people talk about having a moment of creative revelation or genius, that is a kind of mystical experience. Those things exist on a heightened plane. They happen almost outside of time. You can look back at your life and point to the moment that you realized, "I got to do this psychology research project because this is what I've been thinking about the whole time," or whatever it may be. Those moments are heightened moments. They're couched, and we have this whole language to understand them and render them into secular terms. But we also do exegesis on them, living inside a language world. We're always doing this kind of exegetical or hermeneutic activity about our direction, about finding ourselves, about what is right and wrong. I think that we are always living in a non-secular way, but the worldview of materialism has been very seductive in convincing us that that's not true. **Jackson** [01:03:33] I can't help but feel too that some part of the tension around what is secular and what is sacred is that so much of what is sacred is experienced as an individual. So, in trying to take that and make it collective, or share it, or relate to it, we start to get wrapped up—especially in a modern secular world—in, how do I explain this? Can I? Part of what is so profound, by the way, about practices is that they are a way to talk about or experience things that are more sacred, that are explicitly defined in a way that allows you to relate it to other people. **Toby** [01:04:16] Absolutely. Certain practices will really take you off your rocker. They can take you into very far-out regions of consciousness without the use of mind-altering drugs. Anyone who does a lot of meditation will figure that out very quickly. These things are just features of our world. Another theme that I've been tracking back and forth, also between—earlier we were talking about McLuhan—I feel like I've also been tracking back and forth between mind and body. It is also about content and form, social spirit and social body. The social spirit is the content of our culture. It's these moral underpinnings and aspirations and the language world that they live inside that help us render these experiences and talk about them and turn them into big cultural systems. **Toby** [01:05:27] The formal side is the structure: how we arrange the social body to stabilize our society. Something like Headless Brands is a little bit more about that, the kind of hardware, as it were. It's not really hardware, maybe the firmware, of how we organize social body and social spirit. The connection between the mind and body is where magic happens. I think that's also true on this level that I'm talking about now, where ultimately what I hope I can do with something like body futurism is bring the social body and the social spirit together. You can see what happens when squad wealth does that: the form and the spirit resonate, they vibrate together, and things rejigger. Everyone puts their squad on a plane and goes to Portugal. **Jackson** [01:06:29] Squad wealth, more than anything else you've ever written, is not **Toby** the anthropologist. It is something else, a feeling, versus an interesting insight. Squad wealth is an empath. Squad wealth is more like a call to arms. **Toby** [01:06:46] Yeah. **Jackson** [01:06:46] Perhaps that is what you teased out with body futurism as well. You're getting at so much of this. These aren't all different ideas. **Toby** [01:06:53] It's the same question. I really just have one big freaking question that is unfolding through me, and I no longer really feel responsible for it. Now I have a clearer sense of what it is that I'm trying to do with all this stuff. I didn't really sense it when I started writing, but I have a much bigger sense of it now. The question is: What is the shape of belief in our time? What is the shape of culture in our time? I'm pretty sure it's going to take me my entire life to answer that question, and I'm not really going to be able to answer it fully. But that's what I can't help but do. **Jackson** [01:07:35] Zooming out a bit, much of your work in life, or at the very least much of your work and your early ideas, are around the idea of codifying or even forming language that helps us to interrogate this stuff. So I'm curious what role **Toby**topher Alexander has had on your life and work. **Toby** [01:07:57] To be honest, I hadn't really engaged with his work seriously until more recently. Certainly, pattern language is something I was floating around in the discourse a lot. His work influenced Aaron Lewis a lot and other people around me, like Kier Kreutler, quite a bit. But I think I only really understood his work a lot last year when I read *The Nature of Order*, which is one of his big books. What I realized when I did that is he was trying to articulate something about how we can do architecture from an entirely phenomenological sensibility. We can do architecture merely by getting really attuned to what feels good, what feels alive, what feels right. And I thought that ethos is so good. I think that's so right, and is maybe a necessary counter to the experience of all of these dominating and extractive institutions that we find ourselves in. If **Toby**topher Alexander can figure out how to do that for architecture, for these big architectural projects that people live inside of and, you know, they walk through them and they totally structure our sense of space, then maybe you can do that for other kinds of complex social things as well. For instance, restorative justice systems are an attempt to find a phenomenological basis for how to do justice or retribution. The whole principle of them -- and I'm not super literate about this -- but the whole principle of them seems to be we can actually do justice in a way that repairs the whole community as opposed to just punishing and incarcerating someone. And that's really interesting. I know that it's possible to figure out how to do one-on-one interactions or small group interactions from a place of really embodied understanding. You can have more enlivening, healing, virtuous interactions that way. But I think what **Toby**topher Alexander seems to be pointing to is there's a way of doing that for much bigger themes as well. **Jackson** [01:10:17] **Toby**topher Alexander, obviously, his taxonomy, specifically the pattern language and providing language, was part of what enabled a lot of this. I've heard you mention more than once, at least in certain contexts, that some of your work is simply describing the state of things, giving people language for it, and then other times you're more prescriptive. Is the role of the anthropologist or the philosopher to simply observe and perceive and critique the nature of the world, or is it explicitly to offer a path? And maybe to what degree do you, maybe depending on the context or where you are in your learning, internalize one or both of those roles? **Toby** [01:11:02] I can't help but have takes about things. I think this has always been a big personal tension for me: how to talk about things and also encourage certain elements of them and discourage other elements of them. **Jackson** [01:11:22] And frankly, my experience has been at times you are certainly just -- it's the point you made about headless brands. **Toby** [01:11:28] Yeah. **Jackson** [01:11:30] And at other times, to the squad wealth point, you are much more prescriptive of a way of being. **Toby** [01:11:37] I think I'm still discovering what I'm doing there. As I go around and I research all of these different things and I dip my toes into this or that practice or this or that culture, I'm realizing there's probably not one thing out there that I'm actually going to wholeheartedly endorse. That's an interesting realization to have. It helps me see, okay, first of all, maybe that feeling that nothing is quite right is more a projection of my own homelessness. It makes me wonder, what would it look like if I did just kind of commit to whatever I thought was most virtuous? I'm scared of becoming one of these gurus myself. I don't want to become one of those. **Jackson** [01:12:32] The line between the observer and the practitioner is thin. **Toby** [01:12:37] It potentially is. And it's hard because part of my skill set also seems to be synthesizing. I can see in a really big way where things are going, and I can kind of put those pieces together, and that's for some reason really easy for me. So it's kind of on a meta level already, and I really have to work to get closer to what I think is good and just work for that. **Jackson** [01:13:07] Many people seem to think about domains like technology and business as forces for change and continuous progression. Yet they see social systems and values, and frankly so much of what we've spent this conversation talking about, as like, we should just trust tradition and what's Lindy, don't tamper with them. Even religion itself, obviously. You seem to have an alternative view, which is you might just describe as being pro-social innovation or literally progressive. Not to say not rooted in tradition, but definitely more of an openness. There's one specific articulation you have of this around new social forms that I think you were just getting at a little bit. You say, "Like the founders and organizers of the projects I mentioned here, I am interested in different ways of life, ways of life that are not normal or accessible to most Americans today. Even the wealthiest Americans find it hard to embed themselves in networks and lifestyles of care and mutual support. It's actually the most disadvantaged, our poor and immigrant populations whose churches and mutual aid networks most deeply express the ethos of community that more privileged Americans are now trying to recreate in the form of for-profit organizations." **Toby** [01:14:21] Yeah, it does. **Jackson** [01:14:23] Obviously, I think that paragraph holds the tension of that whole question. And so you could just say, "Oh, actually, don't complicate it. We have good systems. Poor people, religious people in America, they're already practicing it, it works." But yet, clearly on some level, you are trying to say not just what is happening in a way that works, but how can we equip and talk and coin new language for innovation here? **Toby** [01:14:42] Yep. I think that on the one hand, I definitely have an appreciation for what already exists, and I don't think that it needs to be disrupted. I think churches are great. They're Lindy. Let Lindy things be Lindy. Let them keep going. It's also clear, though, that those big systems of belief were designed before democracy. The spiritual implications of democracy have not yet really been worked out. So, can purely affiliation-based networks still produce the same kind of depth of feeling, depth of belief, and feeling of bondedness, trust, and obligation that you get from those older faiths? It's not yet clear. You can have a deep culture of creative being in this kind of romanticist culture that we have today, but it didn't produce a new faith along the lines of **Toby**tianity. So, where does that get us? That's why I've started thinking a lot more about form because we have a lot of the ingredients broken up into lots of little pieces. They kind of need to be combined into different forms to see what is going to work, what's going to stick. That's why I've been doing all this on-the-ground research. I want to see— I've been going to things ranging from my friend's five-person experimental church where we sing hymns that we kind of made up, to Other শিপ, the immersive, kind of commercial sauna project. I think both of them are rad. The question is, what things are going to stick? What things actually have staying power? Can they hold space for a real community to form and bond and keep going and create the strong social ties that people are really craving? I had this new thought recently that everyone knows about social media. We've tried so many different kinds of social media. Certain ones have really stuck, but there's also a long tail of weird niche social media projects. We know what it's like to be a founder of a social media company. Each one of those social media apps or platforms has a slightly different arrangement of things: different kind of algorithm, different kind of feed, different kind of UI. Those little details make a big difference in how it feels to use. Well, you can apply the same kind of designerly mentality to these other forms: social, physical spaces, wellness centers, spaces of practice, and combinations of practices that form a system—a parlor that's a little bit more like an app to begin with. When you start to apply that designerly mentality and think about designing social forms—and not just those forms, all kinds of forms—then you are actually experimenting with the forms of life that we are living inside of. **Jackson** [01:18:02] Right. **Toby** [01:18:03] That's where the critical side comes in. I think we also don't really have a great critical language for these forms of life. So it's worth critiquing Brian Johnson. It's worth critiquing longevity culture. It's worth going to Peoplehood, the post-SoulCycle project, and saying, "Look, this thing's kind of garbage. We can just throw this out the window because it didn't work." But this other thing over here, this is really great. It's worth doing that. **Jackson** [01:18:29] It's also worth separating the form and the values. **Toby** [01:18:32] Yeah. **Jackson** [01:18:33] So much of the discussion around a lot of this stuff, at least from my vantage point, especially around religion, of course, is about the values, right? **Toby** [01:18:40] Yeah. **Jackson** [01:18:40] Part of what you're doing is not ignoring that piece, but also saying, let's evaluate the forms. **Toby** [01:18:45] The forms and the values are related because the forms can or cannot fulfill the values. They subtend the values; they make it possible to live the values. Also, the values can be wrong. I think it's important to develop this critical language for this new kind of media, which is playing with these social institutions as a media form. I want to get way more designers, founders, and others playing with this media form because it is something that you can just do. You can just go out and start one of these wellness centers. You can fuck with it, play with it, like you would A/B test your social app. Figure out what holds community space, what is actually fun. You can start a sauna project in your backyard. I want to see a lot more of that. **Jackson** [01:19:41] This gets at secular and sacred. There's some sense that sacred things, you're not supposed to experiment with as much. Not obviously that a sauna in your backyard is necessarily that sacred. But as that line blurs, people are very happy to experiment and A/B test with CRM tools. **Toby** [01:19:59] Yeah, for sure. **Jackson** [01:20:00] And the idea of -- by the way, you got at this a little bit with that quote I read from "The End of Life After Lifestyle" where you're talking about maybe our current set of software founders not being equipped for this. Is that like, starting a meditation practice space with no expertise might have some consequences? **Toby** [01:20:19] It might, but maybe that's why you start with the sauna space. There are a lot of other places to start. You can start with just cultivating a practice for yourself and playing with that. **Jackson** [01:20:29] I really am. I find the idea that the practice is the atomic unit of so much of this stuff to be quite empowering, including even exploring what new forms can look like. What are the new containers we can hold for a certain type of practice? **Toby** [01:20:41] Exactly. I really enjoyed the Foster writing circle. It's a writing group. It's a group. It's kind of a DAO that holds writing circles. I got to know somebody who's in it. I showed up. You were there; I didn't expect to see you there. We just had a really nice hour where there was a little bit of an invocation of the theme. Then we went off and we wrote for 30 or 40 minutes. **Jackson** [01:21:08] There was an individualist part of it. There was a collective part of it. **Toby** [01:21:10] Then we came back and we read some stuff out, and then it was closed with a little bit of a sermon. That was a great form. I loved that. It was very simple, it was very effective. It was super nice to be part of, and I felt pretty held by it, even though it was my first time. If a lot of the innovation in software has already been done, but people are looking at all of our crumbling institutions and our lack of social life and lamenting that, it's pretty obvious that the next frontier for innovation can just be that stuff. If Peter Thiel is right and we haven't had -- all of the innovation has been on the screen -- okay, we'll just move off the screen and innovate with the stuff that is in the real world. That's totally possible to do. **Jackson** [01:21:56] We haven't talked much about crypto. **Toby** [01:21:59] Okay, let's talk about crypto. **Jackson** [01:22:00] We should talk a little bit about crypto. **Toby** [01:22:02] Let's talk about crypto. **Jackson** [01:22:03] I'm specifically interested in one part of it, which is: I'm probably making some assumptions here, but you wrote a piece in early 2024 called "Crypto's Three-Body Problem," and right after that, you basically left crypto. Me saying you left crypto is already succumbing to some of the challenges that maybe the world of crypto creates, and the insular nature of it and the tribal nature of it, and so on. But there's a line in a podcast you did about it where I think you were quoting a friend of yours where you said, "Crypto is a very good technology at giving retail exactly what it wants." **Toby** [01:22:42] Who said that? **Jackson** [01:22:43] I think it was your friend Dante, maybe. **Toby** [01:22:44] Oh wow, that's Dante. That's really funny. Nice one, Dante. **Jackson** [01:22:49] This week, last week, Trump launched a meme coin. I wrote a thread about it, including referencing your post. You wrote a tweet around the same time where you said, "People say, 'Don't hate the player, hate the game,' but I'm the player-hating type." Maybe the place to kick off, and I don't think we need to spend a ton of time on this, but I'd like to read a bit from that "Three-Body Problem" piece. "Regression to the code erodes social norms, and this consequence accounts in large part for what repulses people about crypto, from crypto. Even as protocols fulfill important social functions like affordable remittances and escapes from inflationary regimes, the space, quote-unquote, appears to outsiders as greedy and riddled with scams." "It is for this reason that crypto seems to stand apart from all prior human institutions, more than just lawless. It comes across as a normless zone where morality is suspended, even if the prevailing intention is to support the resiliency of all manner of social organizations." I think you and I probably feel similarly in some ways about crypto as, broadly, an idea, which is something that has been unbelievably energizing and life-giving, inspiring, led to all kinds of interesting relationships, unbelievable intellectual expansion. I don't know exactly where you sit, and I'm probably still working out where I sit. I'm still involved in crypto in certain ways, but clearly, there's complexity here. I don't think the complexity is over, even though the regulatory regime has changed. And I'm curious how you are now sitting on the other side of a year or so of a world that you were very immersed in. **Toby** [01:24:32] Well, who knows what's going to happen now that Trump launched a meme coin? I'm glad Ross got pardoned, and the Silk Road guy got his sentence commuted, or the Tornado Cash dude had his sentence commuted. I think that's great. It's really not clear what's going to happen now. I think part of when I left crypto, I was more anticipating a Democratic regime for a long time. The Democrats and the big banks are kind of allied. One of my last crypto projects was doing market research for the Interchain Foundation, and I looked a lot at stablecoins, interbank exchange, and CBDC projects for them. I realized that this stuff is a lot further along than crypto Twitter knows about. It's actually a huge blind spot for crypto Twitter. Those projects are likely to come online in the next decade. Who knows now what's going to happen in the US, because Trump's coalition did not seem to include the big banks? And the big banks really want to kill crypto and replace it with their own solution. **Jackson** [01:25:48] Right. **Toby** [01:25:50] I felt that it was kind of above my pay grade to work on that. I care more about privacy and financial censorship, which are crypto's core offerings, than I did when I worked in crypto. I think at that time, I was so much more focused on what else crypto can enable culturally speaking. But now I do see its role more in that light because I am concerned about financial censorship coming in places that implement central bank digital currencies. I also think that there is an unfulfilled premise of crypto in terms of community currencies, alternative credit systems, and simply enabling that for big communities. At least in the US; elsewhere, you have a lot of people using stablecoins. I would still like to see that kind of financial sovereignty or financial independence from the state. But there hasn't been a huge reason to adopt it in the US yet. If inflation continues, then the pressure will grow, and there's a possibility that somebody could successfully launch something like that in the US. I kind of now see that stuff as mostly above my pay grade. It's still possible that I could get pulled back into crypto for the right reasons or for the right project, but it's not really my focus right now. **Jackson** [01:27:21] On the expansive side or the generative side, what was so enamoring to you about crypto, at least at one time? Or maybe that core is still there in some sense? Crypto is inside a lot of these ideas around squad wealth and headless brands, and it's really empowering even the notion of what a future religion or organizational thing might look like. **Toby** [01:27:42] I think what's so interesting about it is that it literalizes some of the things that I'm already good at seeing in the cultural economy. It makes those things exactly equal. When you look at how the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace of memes shakes out who's on top, Pudgy Penguins or Milady, you can kind of see that in the stats. You can see that Milady has a shit ton of liquidity, for instance. And the cultural decisions they've made, the economic decisions they've made, all play into the same system. I think that's really interesting. Headless brands kind of gestured at that. Crypto is very interesting from a formal perspective, as a type of media, as a medium rather. It just makes it possible to see how culture moves and ebbs and flows in a really fascinating way. **Jackson** [01:28:50] Right, it makes it less opaque or more explicit. **Toby** [01:28:54] Yeah, it makes it more explicit. **Jackson** [01:28:56] Culture's normally this shadowy, amorphous thing. **Toby** [01:28:59] For sure. And, of course, then it starts making you think thoughts like, "Oh my goodness, what if we can design a culture that can be self-sustaining," and so forth. And we all know that didn't really work out. Crypto doesn't really give you anything automatically there. You kind of have to be a cult leader like Charlotte Fang to make that work. But it's very... I learned a lot from that from my time in crypto. And I also learned what bubble mentality feels like from the inside, and that is invaluable. **Jackson** [01:29:27] Why are you enamored with protocols? Or at least why have you spent so much time thinking about, writing about, and working on them, including, of course, crypto protocols? You described social algorithms that can be adopted by others as a much broader definition of protocol. **Toby** [01:29:43] Yeah, well, they're another kind of emergent form. I think the Ethereum Foundation and Summer of Protocols research program has been instrumental in pushing that. But also the adoption of health and wellness protocols, the taking up of the idea of protocols in that sphere, is interesting. **Jackson** [01:29:58] Like Brian Johnson's Blueprint, whatever. **Toby** [01:30:00] Brian Johnson, Huberman's protocols. When I was writing the Social Forms of Care piece, I was debating whether to talk about protocols or practices in that last section. I ran it by a bunch of people, got different opinions. I really like what Kate McAndrews in the other room said. She just said, "Well, protocols is just a masculinized form of practices." Given the opportunity to choose one or the other, it's pretty obvious what I would do. I was like, "Okay, well, that was super clear." **Jackson** [01:30:31] I would also say that, to me, at least my interpretation is, protocols are only collective. Really? **Toby** [01:30:36] Well, what makes them only collective? You could follow Brian Johnson's protocols. **Jackson** [01:30:39] You can follow a protocol, but there's no personalization there. Practice almost inherently presumes there is personal individualism put into the thing, even if it can be shared. Or at the very least, it's sitting more in the middle of the hyper-individual, hyper-collective. It's somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. **Toby** [01:30:59] It may be. That was the source of the debate that I had with Mati about it, because Mati, who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background, was describing how she thinks. She's embedded in this whole spiritual world in upstate New York. She's like, "Oh, well, people are too wishy-washy with how they use practice." And, "What about the sense of obligation that comes when that is implied by protocol?" I think that rigidity. Here is where the individual versus collective tension does come up again in this social form of protocols or practices. Some people may want to take it into a weird, wandering, dilettantish path. But then they may start down like 10 or so different spiritual paths and never get anywhere. On the other hand, you could really over-protocolize your life and find it hard to break out of your bonds of community. **Jackson** [01:31:53] You've arguably built one, but with other Internet. But what role do you think institutions should play? There's much discussion of lack of institutions, institutions failing, new institutions. **Toby** [01:32:06] Great question. Yes. I more or less don't think that you can build a new institution anymore. That is why I've gone backwards in the supply chain to social forms. **Jackson** [01:32:19] Wow. **Toby** [01:32:20] Social forms are more primitive, experimental than institutions. I think that this whole effort to build new institutions that has been going on for the last five or ten years, where new institutions has really been a big theme both in the crypto world, in the art world, in the political world. Everyone's wanted to build new institutions. But I think that an institution is something that is institutionalized. I really experienced that with other Internet. When we tried to adopt the shape of a more formal research institute, raise money from foundations, and become an organization of that shape, it killed the sauce. We realized, "Oh, well, the squad was actually the shape that we needed all along." The squad isn't really an institution; it's just a little blob. So that was a personal teaching moment, a learning moment for me. But in a bigger sense, I also saw that the most credible efforts to redesign new institutions are, or redesign institutions, are more like reform efforts, like what the progress studies people are doing. And those are efforts that take a lot of money. **Jackson** [01:33:46] New forms might teach us in some way how to reform institutions, though, right? **Toby** [01:33:50] They potentially could. The reason I like new forms and encourage people to experiment with forms is because part of the issue with the older institutions, besides just being old and maybe not having the best talent involved, is that the underlying forms of those institutions are somewhat unsuited to our times. Maybe the four-year university isn't actually the thing that's most suited to this moment. Maybe civic associations or neighborhood associations are never really going to capture how to get people involved with local democracy. But something else could. That something else is an experiment that needs to happen. **Jackson** [01:34:34] The value isn't necessarily wrong, but the form could be outdated. **Toby** [01:34:37] The form can be really outdated. So I think people ought to be experimenting and just playing with that. **Jackson** [01:34:45] I like that a lot. A question about writing, especially given that you've written extensively alone and extensively collaboratively. **Toby** [01:34:55] Yeah. **Jackson** [01:34:57] There's an amazing quote from a friend of yours. You say, "Venkat once told me that writing anything over 3,000 words forces you to contend with your personal demons. I can confirm this to be true." You've written a lot more than 3,000 words in many pieces. As someone who prepped for this interview, how do you -- what is that experience of trying to do all the stuff we've discussed: be educational, create change, observe culturally, but also you're not doing that as a robot, you're doing that as **Toby**? **Toby** [01:35:29] That's the process of figuring out who I am, basically. It's not for the faint of heart, I would say. My partner said something to me about what she appreciates about me that I really appreciated. She said that of anyone that she knows, I'm the person who's most committed to my truth. I really smiled bigly when I heard that because I feel it is true. This whole process has taught me that trying to figure out what it is that I'm about, trying to figure out how to walk this very fine line I'm walking between the tech community, the cultural sector, the values I endorse, the versions of it that are not quite right, the way people interpret my ideas, how I want them to be interpreted, I feel like I'm just trying to figure out who am I and how to be in this world as frankly a weird character who doesn't really feel super at home in any of these places that I have a foot or a finger in. Writing is one of the only ways I have to process that and really think it through in a long-term way. If the stuff I write down is to any respect true, well, how do I think about that? If this stuff is true, how do I relate to it? Those are really hard questions to answer, especially with this new faith-type stuff. **Jackson** [01:37:21] You're implicated. **Toby** [01:37:22] I am. **Jackson** [01:37:23] What are you least cynical about? **Toby** [01:37:32] Love is real. I love you, **Jackson**. **Jackson** [01:37:47] I love you too. That's a great answer. What does spirituality mean to you, someone who is obsessed with the forms of a lot of things that could be called or pointed towards spirituality? **Toby** [01:38:01] Well, to me, it is partly a search for the truth, and it's partly a search for what makes me feel most alive and most connected to this world. It's a very individualistic and a very romanticist way of putting it, and that is how I feel. **Jackson** [01:38:30] I think that's something that many people in the modern era relate to in a similar way. And it gives way to so many of these questions. We're all trying to sort of connect that into answering the big questions or being on the same page or being able to see each other in that. In some sense, so much of maybe what it means to be human, combined some of those answers you just gave, which is seeking connectivity on the sacred stuff. **Toby** [01:39:01] What's spirituality to you? **Jackson** [01:39:08] There's a line in a book written by a guy who's dying of cancer. There are much more tangible versions of this, but I always like this definition. He says, "What is," he's like, "I would never have related to being a spiritual person, but in my older age, as I'm dying, I think I am spiritual." "And what is spirituality but a willingness to reach deep?" I like that definition. **Toby** [01:39:39] I like reaching deep. **Jackson** [01:39:41] I think that's why you toil and you try. You move through the vague ideas, you try to make sense of it, you explore the forms, you have these hard conversations, and you sit in the ambiguity. And that's what I think we're all trying to do a little bit more of. I appreciate the way that you push me to reach deep, for sure. **Toby** [01:40:03] Thank you. **Jackson** [01:40:04] That's all I got for you today. There are a million more places we could take this, and maybe we'll do a part two, but this was a pleasure. **Toby** [01:40:11] Thanks, **Jackson**.