11. Eugene Wei - Amusing Each Other to Death

![[11-Eugene Wei.png]] *Dialectic Episode 11: Amusing Each Other to Death was published on March 17, 2025 and is available on [Spotify](https://spoti.fi/4hiGwRZ), [Apple Podcasts](https://apple.co/4iu2gLA), and [YouTube](https://bit.ly/DLCTYT11).* <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/0ZIJQTsqViS69NzxKejV0R?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/11-eugene-wei-amusing-each-other-to-death/id1780282402?i=1000699445353"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zhg3b4dafcE?si=3Q4QzfkcJd76gGDx" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Eugene Wei ([Website](https://www.eugenewei.com/), [X](https://x.com/eugenewei)) is a writer, product thinker, and cultural observer best known for his essays on technology, media, and social networks, including *[Status as a Service](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service)*, *[Invisible asymptotes](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes)*, and *[TikTok and the Sorting Hat](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat). Eugene spent seven years at Amazon in its early days before following a brief detour to pursue filmmaking at UCLA. He then led product, design, editorial, and marketing teams at Hulu, co-founded Erly, and worked at Flipboard and Oculus. Today, he works on his own ideas at the intersection of media and technology while advising and angel investing. This conversation explores the evolving landscape of entertainment, social media, community, and humanity in our digital age—topics Eugene has examined deeply. We revisit some of Eugene’s greatest hits on how platforms like Twitter and TikTok shape society and also get into fresh ideas he's yet to share publicly. We start by discussing how today's social media world compares to the television-centric world that Neil Postman lamented in *[Amusing Ourselves to Death](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034.Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=T05cSlG9Qq&rank=1)*, and how entertainment-maximizing, adversarial, algorithmic social platforms might lead us to ["Amusing Each Other to Death."](https://x.com/eugenewei/status/1149425646403293184) Eugene unpacks TikTok's profound impact on our "digital nervous system," differentiating between social networks and social media—highlighting the latter's emphasis on frictionless positivity rather than meaningful connection. Amid rising nihilism among young people, Eugene analyzes how cultural and economic structures contribute to lost hope, exploring social media’s role in exacerbating these trends. We discuss power laws influencing tech, media, sports, and finance, and how that drives pervasive speculation across culture. Then, he traces these themes through American television, from 1960s-1990s sitcoms to shows like The Sopranos, Succession, and Industry, revealing how they reflect the erosion of community and purpose in late-stage capitalism. Throughout, Eugene offers nuanced observations on how technology's removal of friction has paradoxically weakened our sense of meaning and connection. We wrap up with how AI might shape media and creativity, what elements of humanity may be valued in the future, learnings from Bezos and film school, and a movie recommendation for anyone trying to make sense of it all. # Timestamps - (02:10): Amusing Each Other to Death and "Frictionless Positivity": Neil Postman, TV vs. Social Media, TikTok's Impact - (14:35): Dunking, Quote Tweets, and Proximity to the Other - (19:09): Prisoner's Dilemma of Twitter: Concede or Dunk - (24:52): Is TikTok the Final Form of Social Media? - (31:02): Status Games in the Algorithm Era - (39:02): Technology's Reduction of Friction & Avoiding Confrontation with the Other - (48:45): The Internet's Reversal of Vita Activa and Vita Contempliva - (50:53): Growing Nihilism Toward Online Status Games: If You Don't Capture Attention, You Aren't Relevant Anymore - (55:54): Late State Capitalism's Disappointment, Gen Z Nihilism in US and China, Luigi Mangione, Death of Community - (1:03:01): Speculation Culture and Playing to the Power Law - (1:08:08): NBA, NFL, Netflix, Power Laws, and Distraction-Friendly Viewing - (1:15:55): Playing for Attention: the Only Goal - (1:18:43): Video and Image vs. Text - (1:20:57): The Subconscious of American Culture and the Decline of Community According - (1:32:31): Terminally Online Culture, Role Models, Evolving Search for Meaning - (1:45:23): Friction and the Internet's Impact on Communities - (1:50:50): AI, "The Most Human Human" and Creativity - (1:56:38): Lighting section: Invisible Asymptotes for Social Media and Eugene, and Writing - (2:02:08): Beginner's Mindset, Film School, What Technologists Could Learn from Filmmakers - (2:06:40): What Idea from a Book Would Be Most Compelling to "Transmute" into an Audiovisual Medium? - (2:08:56): Bezos and Removing Friction - (2:11:09): Left Brain vs. Right Brain, Engineering Problems vs. Human Problems - (2:15:07): Why Film is Meaningful and a Recommendation # Links & References - [Amusing Ourselves to Death](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034.Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=T05cSlG9Qq&rank=1) - Neil Postman - [Trolling Ourselves to Death: Democracy in the Age of Social Media](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/149062237-trolling-ourselves-to-death) - Jason Hannan - [TikTok and the Sorting Hat](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/8/3/tiktok-and-the-sorting-hat) - [How to Blow Up a Timeline](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2023/7/6/how-to-blow-up-a-timeline) - [Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217984420-civic-solitude?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=UcvaMVeUIM&rank=1) - Robert B. Talisse - [The Web Is a Customer Service Medium](https://www.ftrain.com/wwic) - Paul Ford - [Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43126457-trick-mirror) - Jia Tolentino - [The network's the thing](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2015/9/1/when-the-network-is-mature) - [Status as a Service](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service) - [Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future](https://youtu.be/aCgkLICTskQ?si=7s-mI7aCqYSVxYW6) - [The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-internets-new-favorite-philosopher) - Kyle Chayka - [The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36709664-the-expulsion-of-the-other?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ZHz13hahWH&rank=1) - Byung-Chul Han - [Her (2013)](https://letterboxd.com/film/her/) - Spike Jonze - [Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138378661-immediacy?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=olHMBv8afa&rank=1) - Anna Kornbluh - [The Human Condition](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127227.The_Human_Condition?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=WEuCcU2GcO&rank=2) - Hannah Arendt - [Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/478.Bowling_Alone?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=U7F2Fphv5t&rank=1) - Robert D. Putnam - [Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57331807-speculative-communities?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=yRB9Gy6jFf&rank=1) - Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou - [Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/399136.Imagined_Communities?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=wNmbmfMTxy&rank=1) - Benedict Anderson - [Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-design?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=t3sFDtwjwj&rank=1) - Natasha Dow Schüll - [Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199780022-disordered-attention?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jhblL6w87K&rank=1) - Claire Bishop - [Casual Viewing](https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/) (Netflix Article) - Will Tavlin - [The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51710349-the-weirdest-people-in-the-world?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=OsoGpuLGVS&rank=1) - Joseph Henrich - [‎Red Rooms (2023)](https://letterboxd.com/film/red-rooms/) - [Naval Ravikant and Aaron Stupple — How to Raise a Sovereign Child, A Freedom-Maximizing Approach to Parenting ](https://x.com/tferriss/status/1880653497701445848) - Tim Ferriss Show - [The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8884400-the-most-human-human) - Brian Christian - [Lee Sedol and AlphaGo](https://x.com/jacksondahl/status/1685330283737022464) - [Invisible asymptotes](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2018/5/21/invisible-asymptotes) - [Compress to impress](https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2017/5/11/jpeg-your-ideas) - [‎The Tree of Life (2011)](https://letterboxd.com/film/the-tree-of-life-2011/) # Transcript **Jackson:** Welcome to Dialectic, Episode 11, with Eugene Wei. Eugene is best known for his incredible essays observing how technology and social media have impacted culture and all of us. A few of the most notable of these are *Status as a Service*, *Invisible Asymptotes*, and *TikTok and the Sorting Hat*. Eugene started his career at Amazon in some of the company's earliest days, where he spent seven years. He then took a brief detour to go to film school, and he spent many of the coming years focused on the intersection of technology and entertainment across Hulu, a company he co-founded, Erly, Flipboard, and Oculus. Recently, Eugene has been focused on his own ideas, advising companies, angel investing, and of course, writing. I don't know if there's anyone who has written more thoughtfully and critically about how social media works and how it's affecting us than Eugene. And so this conversation is about all of those things: entertainment, social media, community, and humanity, and how they are all evolving in the digital age. In the conversation, I wanted to make sure to both hit on some of Eugene's most iconic ideas and essays and have him reflect on them and how they've evolved. But I also wanted to talk about a handful of things he hasn't yet covered. And so I'd like to think we did a good job of mixing the two of them. I hope readers and non-readers alike of Eugene's will find this conversation really compelling. I think Eugene's criticism and insights, particularly about how the cultural decline of community, oftentimes linked to the decreasing friction that technology offers, to be just profoundly relevant today. At times, parts of this conversation might seem pessimistic, but I think the key is that Eugene is asking many of the questions that we simply need answers to. We need to develop answers to. And so there's definitely room for optimism. I'm hopeful that listeners will be inspired to try to come up with better answers to how we can use technology to improve our lives, improve our culture and communities, and most importantly, maintain our humanity. With that, here is Eugene. ## [00:02:10] Amusing Each Other to Death and "Frictionless Positivity": Neil Postman, TV vs. Social Media, TikTok's Impact **Jackson:** Eugene Wei, we're here. There's an iconic opening at the beginning of Neil Postman's *Amusing Ourselves to Death*, where he compares George Orwell's *1984*, and Aldous Huxley's *Brave New World*. He says what Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. As Huxley remarked in *Brave New World Revisited*, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. And so, we live in this era where entertainment is the North Star, probably more than ever before. The bar for entertainment is continuing to increase. We have digital forms of entertainment that are competing with each other: literally every possibility, from films to TikTok to sports to games. There's the classic Reed Hastings line that they're competing with sleep. Politics is now entertainment. News is entertainment. Social media has ceased to be about communication or connection; it's really just about entertainment. In a previous interview, you discussed the idea that part of everyone's business has to be entertainment. In one of your TikTok posts, you said the 2020 writers' room is undefeated, affirming the notion that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. My first question— in media, in stories, and in products, what actually goes into capturing attention? And beyond that, is this entertainment world, is amusement the final frontier and the only frontier? Or can attention and entertainment be more productive than maybe Neil Postman is predicting at the time of the television era and now the social media era? **Eugene:** We may be beyond the world that Postman wrote about. He was speaking specifically of the transition from print to TV, and how TV turned politics into a form of entertainment. He wasn't alive for the social media era. I'd argue that while the social media era evolved out of the TV era, it's different in some fundamental ways. What we're doing to ourselves now, I guess you could call it amusement, but a lot of times it doesn't feel entertaining or amusing. Part of it is just that the social media companies shifted. At first, they had these reverse chronological feeds. Then the transition from social networking to social media was when you put an algorithm over the feed. That naturally happens with any feed. You go in, you start adding people, you start following things. I have this problem with Substack now, where you know, people say, "Oh, you should follow this Substack," and that one. You start following it, and soon you're overwhelmed. You can't keep up. You're getting 50 newsletters a day, and you can't sift through it. Of course, the solution to that in modern times is always an algorithm that tries to sift the signal from the noise. That was a huge shift. The term "social media" didn't exist when the Internet first started. I started using the Internet when Mosaic came out, when I was a senior or junior in college. I've grown up with it, and that term. I don't know when social media first started being used, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was around the time of the algorithm being put over the feed. So what happens is that, in an era of infinite information, the most important thing is distribution, or, in Marxist terms, what we might call circulation. All of us who are participating on social media are faced with the choice: Do I do battle with the algorithm to try to get anybody to see any of my stuff? Almost by definition, the people who we see on social media are the ones who broke through in some way. But we started shaping ourselves around that. Postman would say TV shaped the way that politicians would win elections and the way they would speak to the public. Social media, which is more participatory, shapes all of our behavior on a democratic basis. We're all kind of implicated in it also, because we ourselves, through our clicks and likes, determine who wins the game. So it's this strange thing where we complain about it, and then we're also complicit in it. Of course, there's some collective action problem where we can't all get ourselves off of it. But in that era, a couple of things have become more apparent. I think there was a book called *Trolling Ourselves to Death.* Something like trolling becomes a dominant tactic in the social media world. **Jackson:** Evolutionarily fit, in a way. **Eugene:** It's just because of the way the algorithms work. The algorithms are hypersensitized to engagement and have a hard time distinguishing between positive and negative engagement. I think trolling has always been a thing that had a small scope in human history, and then suddenly you could troll and get global scale to it. It's perfectly attuned to these algorithms. The other thing is that TikTok, whether it gets banned or not, whatever happens with it, I think it's already made an everlasting impact on the West just by forcing all of Western social media companies to adopt its algorithm. You remember that Western social media began with the idea of a social graph. You had to follow people to get stuff in your feed. And then over time, they started adding things from other people that you didn't follow into your feed, trying to get a sense of your interests. But TikTok came along and was just like, "We don't even need a social graph. We'll just watch you watch some short videos. We'll figure out what you're into." **Jackson:** We're going to know you better than you are. **Eugene:** Yeah, and we'll unconstrain the distribution. So it used to be on Twitter, if you had a viral tweet, you could get a lot of likes and things, but not to the scale you can today in the For You feed. **Jackson:** In one of your essays, you reference a viral tweet getting 1,000 or maybe even 10,000 likes. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** And I realized I totally take for granted how common that is now. It was crazy to reflect: a thousand tweets used to be your classic fortune cookie tweet. It has like a thousand likes. And I'm like, "Is that bigger?" **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** And I realized, well, Twitter needs to be different. **Eugene:** Yeah, because you were kind of limited by how many followers you had. You depended on them to get that viral tsunami going. But TikTok's like, "Look, if there's a good TikTok, everybody should see it." There's no reason to constrain it. And they surpassed Western social media in capturing attention. And so everybody in the West did a kind of fast follow. I think it works in some cases. I think in the case of Twitter, and I wrote about this, and I think a lot of people disagree with this, but I still think that applying a TikTok style algorithm to Twitter creates some perverse incentives, and we've seen a rise. **Jackson:** Don't show up on TikTok. **Eugene:** Yeah, I think because the mediums are different. I think TikTok does a better job of capturing negative sentiment, and Twitter doesn't really have strong capture. **Jackson:** Capturing it and identifying, like using it in a positive way to improve the content or the algorithm rather than just showing it to you and blowing things up or whatever. **Eugene:** Yeah. And I think it's important. It'll relate to some things we talk about later in terms of just negativity. But I think Western social media tends to their business models to really try to achieve kind of frictionless positivity. And that is the wrong type of incentive if you want to achieve -- you know, the magic of old Twitter was that it had higher entropy for me. I would just meet like interesting people on Twitter and encounter random things from someone who had, you know, 10 followers. **Jackson:** Yeah, structurally niche, but still relevant. **Eugene:** We meet up for coffee in the real world, and some of them became my friends. Now, when I look at the "For You" feed, I feel like it's all clickbait, all the way down. In any complex adaptive system, there's going to be overfitting to some degree. Everyone is faced with this choice of how far do you want to sell out to get the algorithm to give you that distribution juice? Trolling is just one of those meta-tactics that works really well. McLuhan would say all of this electronic media—the Internet, everything—is kind of like our nervous system, just built out in the physical world. Western social media companies are the ones who choose how the synapses connect and fire in these by setting up the algorithm. But these algorithms are also black boxes. I don't really know how they work in a general sense, but who's tuning them? If Elon's like, "Hey, I want all my tweets to be seen by everybody," that's one way he's rewiring the digital nervous system of humanity. **Jackson:** Even if they're open source or highly prescriptive, there is emergence on top of them, along with game theory, prisoner's dilemmas, and all the things you were talking about. **Eugene:** Once we had these algorithms, and once they became more power-law in nature, you're just going to see a proliferation of all forms of clickbait. The early forms of clickbait, in the era where links weren't downvoted on Twitter, were just salacious headlines that people found misleading, but they worked. When people talk about thirst traps on Instagram, that's just a form of clickbait. A tweetstorm? That's a form of clickbait. You know how on YouTube, all the thumbnails look the same if you search for a product name? It's like a big smiling face, someone holding the product, some crazy claim, a gradient color, a solid color background, and the headline written in big font. That's a form of clickbait. Everyone is figuring out how to game the algorithms. Even before social media, people would complain about why recipe pages are so long on the web. That's just a form of gaming the Google SEO algorithm. **Jackson:** Yep. **Eugene:** A common argument about all this is that we're just reacting to a moral panic, and these things happened before. It's true; we've seen versions of this before. ## [00:14:35] Dunking, Quote Tweets, and Proximity to the Other **Eugene:** Quote tweeting, quote tweet dunking, and everything like that. My argument has always been that the first time I ever saw the quote tweet—and maybe the person I most associate with inventing the quote tweet—is actually from before Twitter. It's actually Jon Stewart on *The Daily Show*. He would play a clip of something from Fox News or some right-wing politician saying something crazy, and then it would cut back to Jon Stewart, and he'd have this horrified expression on his face, just like a reaction emoji face. You can certainly see the logic of why he thought it would work. It's like, "What's the saying? The best cure or disinfectant is exposure or sunlight." If I just bring this craziness to light, won't this cause people to come to their senses? **Jackson:** Or at the minimum, it's a fun thing to laugh together at something. **Eugene:** Of course, we know now that that was really naive, and it doesn't work at all. In fact, there's a book that I just started this week that someone told me about called *Civic Solitude* by Robert Talisse. He argues that maybe democracy only functions well if we can maintain some distance from the people we disagree with. There's a question of whether this kind of gladiatorial political dunking on each other on Twitter really achieves anything. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** I've sort of given up on it and don't really think it does anything. I think it feels good to dunk on somebody or to ratio somebody. But if you really want to affect change, if you want the level of discourse to be one that leads to some sort of living with people you disagree with in some amount of harmony, maybe this doesn't work like that. **Jackson:** Intrinsically as a medium. It's funny too, you mention it in *Amusing Ourselves to Death*. Postman's talking about the telegraph and how now that Maine and Texas are connected, and he's like, "Great, but what do they have to talk about?" **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** There's an element of that, which is to say, if we are going to be all connected, the mediums for which you're going to have to spend time right next to people who disagree with you strongly need to be pretty robust to be able to hold all that dissonance. It doesn't seem like we have much of that. **Eugene:** There's a great Paul Ford piece that I love from the pre-social media era. He was writing about the blog and web era. I think the title of the piece is something like, "The Web is a Customer Service Medium." But he came up with this great saying: "The animating spirit of the web is, 'Why wasn't I consulted?'" If you read the blog posts from that era, and even I think back on blog posts I wrote, that really was the animating spirit of the web. All the pieces would be like, "Gosh, let me explain to you how this thing in the world works." Those are the pieces that would always go viral: some sort of hidden insight. I think most people are still striving for that even when they write. **Jackson:** That's the spirit of social media too is like, "Hey, now I can be consulted. Now I can shout into the void at the minimum." **Eugene:** But I would argue that when we moved into the social media era and away from the web era, just that the way that social media is set up, it's structurally adversarial. And so I think the new animating spirit of this social media era is more akin to something like, "Can you believe those effing idiots?" **Jackson:** Do you think that's as true today as it was in 2019 or 2021? **Eugene:** Maybe it is dissipated some now, only in that you see a lot of people have left. We have four different Twitters. People kind of realize that this is just, being here, being shouted at by people is not that pleasant, and maybe I'll go somewhere where that's not happening. I'm not sure that's the right solution either. So maybe the overall level of it is lower. But ## [00:19:11] Prisoner's Dilemma of Twitter: Concede or Dunk **Eugene:** I think it's kind of like a form of Prisoner's Dilemma. If you were to go on Twitter, let's say you're in some tribe. You're in the liberal tribe, or the tech right, or I don't know what rationalist. And you had some someone who disagreed with you kind of confront you on something, and maybe you actually even see that they have a point. You're faced with a choice. Do you concede or dunk? You know, like in Prisoner's Dilemma, it's cooperate and defect. I like to use the same initials. So I'm like, concede or dunk. And actually, I think it's just like the Prisoner's Dilemma, where your optimal strategy is never to concede. It's always to dunk. Because if you concede, your side's going to view you as a traitor, probably, and pile on you. And the other side will laugh at you for being weak and, you know, use you as an example of why you're in your tribe are idiots. It's like, you know, in the Tom Cruise in the movies, he's always like, "Everybody runs." They're like or is that *Minority Report*? I guess he's just like, "Don't run." He's like, "Everybody runs." It's the same, you know, everybody dunks. Your other choice is just to opt out. **Jackson:** Trump is the perfect embodiment of that. He doesn't take the opportunity to be accused of everything. He's just perpetually always dunking. **Eugene:** I've seen a lot of people say that the way to deal with being canceled is just to ignore it and just tweet through it. Just keep going. On the one hand, I understand structurally and mathematically why people say that might be the optimal tactic. But is that the incentive system we want in place, where people who realize they're wrong just power through? I'm not sure it's good. I was thinking back to when I worked at Amazon in the early days. Jeff wanted anyone in the company to rotate through customer service and answer customer service emails. So I did my week rotation in customer service. We were mostly just selling books in the US at the time. Jeff said one of the great things about email is people are super honest and blunt. You would get the craziest, most unhinged emails if someone didn't get their book. They'd be so angry, just so upset. On the one hand, he was right. He said, "I want Amazon to be the world's most customer-centric company. So if they tell you what they're upset about and they're honest about it, you don't have to guess. You can just solve the problem." On the other hand, I also look back on that as a dark harbinger for what happens when we're all behind keyboards, not face-to-face with each other, and communicating via--I call this the linguistics term "synecdoche." **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** It's like you refer to something by a part of it. You refer to Achilles by his shield or his arm. I think of all of social media as this synecdochoic communications medium. Nobody loves being dunked on, like drive-by dunking from some random stranger. But also, who is this person dunking me? What do I know about them? I have a weird username, usually an avatar that's not the person's face even, some random one-line bio on Twitter. You can't tell anything about who they are. You don't even feel--they feel almost not fully human, in the same way that all digital mediums flatten and reduce people and things. It encourages us to view both them and ourselves in a distorted way. I don't know if you read Jia Tolentino's essay collection, but she titled it *Trick Mirror*. I think it's a great title because it really reflects how social media has become such a dominant media in our lives. The reflexive nature of social media also means that it is how we build our perceptions of each other and ourselves. A particularly acute version of this might be dating apps. When I talk to people who are swiping around on dating apps, you can't help but treat how you do on dating apps as some judgment on your desirability in the dating marketplace. It's kind of like this weird -- in this age of neoliberalism, everything's a marketplace: the marketplace of ideas, it's the dating marketplace, it's the gig economy. **Jackson:** Identity is a projector and a mirror, and social media is such a profound part of the way our identity shows up. We're collecting all this feedback on it all the time. Even in creating the persona I'm creating on the dating app, or on Twitter, I'm shaping myself to it. It really is fascinating to think about the ways that even just our perceptions of ourselves are being warped by the funhouse. ## [00:24:52] Is TikTok the Final Form of Social Media? **Jackson:** To segue slightly, we've talked a lot about Twitter. You've written a lot about Twitter. Obviously, it's a platform of interest, critique, and concern for both of us. I think for a lot of people, frankly, it was something they never totally engaged with. Now it's interesting, you brought up TikTok briefly. One of my original questions was going to be, is social media broadly the ultimate realization of what Postman feared? Maybe a better question might be, at least in this entertainment social media land, is TikTok the peak form or the peak medium of this type of entertainment? Obviously, notwithstanding totally new paradigms around immersion. In some sense, listening to you talk about all the problems with Twitter, it almost feels like TikTok is one better in that way. It's certainly evolutionarily more fit. It's more productive and successful from an attention standpoint. Have we reached the apex predator? **Eugene:** Well, I think until there's some advance in cyber technology or VR or something, probably in terms of a smartphone, TikTok is very close to some most evolved form of entertainment. You know, the length of the videos, the density, the structure of your average TikTok as a medium. We're pretty close. I can't imagine that there's another form. And we've seen in this era that--I think it was always going to be the case--that a problem for Twitter was that it was textual. I think images are much more the dominant currency. Think about where Meta would be without Instagram now. It's crazy to think about it, but Instagram really keeps Meta relevant because it's kind of been the de facto image circulation medium. TikTok came along and was short video, in many ways even more. I mean, it's crazy to think that Instagram, at some point, when they wanted to put videos in, it was very controversial internally. But I was in China in 20--what year was it?--I went to the ByteDance offices. I don't know, it was 2016, 17, something like that. And ByteDance had just bought Musical.ly. But I was in China. I was asking all the friends I had over there, "What apps are you all using here?" And everybody was talking about Douyin, which was kind of like the Musical.ly knockoff, but then became its own thing and would become kind of the model. **Jackson:** This was before they had acquired TikTok or Musical.ly. **Eugene:** It was right around then. And so it was before TikTok became big in the US, but Douyin was huge in China. And I would just look on my friends' phones. So many of them told me, "Oh my God, I had to delete this app off my phone. I was spending an hour and a half, two hours every night watching it before bed." You know, that's crazy when you think most people I know in China worked until, you know, 11:00 PM every night, and they would only have an hour at home before. And I was like, really? You watch this for an hour and a half every night? **Jackson:** It's digital crack in my pocket. **Eugene:** What's crazy is that a year and a half later, everybody was saying the same about TikTok. There was just a lag period. It's crazy that TikTok struck on this model. I don't know. It's a long way of saying I think you're probably right. TikTok probably is about as advanced as we're going to get, and that's why I think it had a gravitational force that caused everybody to have to chase that and conform to it. Even if you ban TikTok, the damage to the western digital nervous system has already been done. **Jackson:** One has also, presumably to your earlier point, learned the ideal evolutionary way forward: to do this hyper-algorithmic, revealed preference. Almost to reference a much earlier post of yours, disregarding some of the network as the core methodology that used to power social. You used the language earlier: social networks in favor of social media. **Eugene:** Mm-hm. **Jackson:** It feels like you can't put that back in the bottle. **Eugene:** Yeah, that's hard, and that's just because in an era of infinite information, distribution is the only thing that matters. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** You have to maintain that power in the marketplace if you all have the same business model, which all the companies do. It's funny. Meta is in some ways amusing to me, because I don't think Meta has ever really articulated with conviction what their mission is as a company. **Jackson:** It's a great point. **Eugene:** In a way, they are just a company that competes for attention, and that supersedes all other missions. That's why they could say, "We're about connecting everybody together," but actually, if showing people a lot of entertaining videos is better, that's kind of what it's going to be. On my Instagram feed, none of my friends actually post any posts anymore. If stories didn't exist, I wouldn't even have any idea what was going on in my friend's lives. **Jackson:** Well, the irony for Facebook, if what you just said is true, is that might be the ultimate mission. That might be the final mission. When AI has solved everything else, controlling what we all look at is probably still going to be ## [00:31:02] Status Games in the Algorithm Era **Jackson:** economically valuable. I want to talk a little bit about how this all connects into status and where status is still relevant. Speaking of Meta, I want to kick off with this paragraph from an old post of yours that I think is particularly poignant about the original Facebook News Feed. You say: "By merging all updates from all the accounts you followed into a single continuous service and having that serve as the default screen, Facebook News Feed simultaneously increased efficiency of distribution of new posts and pitted all such posts against each other in what was effectively a single giant attention arena, complete with live updating scoreboard on each post. It was as if the Panopticon inverted itself overnight, as if a giant spotlight turned on, and suddenly all of us performing on Facebook for approval realized we were all in the same auditorium on one large, connected, infinite stage, singing karaoke to the same audience at the same time." Obviously, so much of what we just discussed is inside of that. There's one other line where you say: "It's difficult to overstate what a momentous sea change it was for hundreds of millions and eventually billions of humans who had grown up competing for status in small tribes to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against every single person they had ever met." Inside of this, obviously, is the entertainment thing. It's obviously the gladiator arena thing. But I also think, just at a more primal and fundamental level, it's saying, "Hey, we all now have the ultimate propaganda machine in our pocket." You've called social platforms "a stack for distributing code to other people's brains and running it." It's a platform for programming society. As much as I think there's all this adversarial stuff, in some sense, it almost feels a bit like we left aspects of the peak gladiator arena dunking stuff [as I mentioned earlier] in, like, 2018 to 2023, at least to a small degree. It felt like everyone on the internet was having a conversation together, and now we have eight different versions of Twitter. TikTok's a little less like that. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Your most famous piece you ever wrote, "Status as a Service," argued that social media platforms or social networks are kind of competing in three arenas: utility, social status, and entertainment. I can't help but wonder, we used to overlay status onto communication. Now, maybe we're overlaying status onto the entertainment thing. There was someone on Twitter a while ago—Naval or someone like that—who said the best way to do Twitter is to never read Twitter and just tweet constantly. It almost feels like, in some ways, that is the defining attribute. Are we still playing status games? Are we all just using giant megaphones? How do you think about the "Status as a Service" framework in the updated version of the social world we're living in now, where it really just feels like performance and entertainment is the only thing? **Eugene:** I wrote "Status as a Service" before the TikTok algorithm became dominant. In a way, you're faced with that choice now. If it's a power law algorithm that you're going to do battle with, how much are you willing to change who you are? I think we've all had the experience of someone we know in real life getting what we give various names—"Twitter brain" is just one variant of this thing. You get addicted to going viral, and you seek that rush over and over. But at the same time, you know that you have to play a caricature of yourself, in some ways. **Jackson:** Do you know? I mean, does Elon know at this point? **Eugene:** I don't know. Maybe some people aren't self-reflective enough to see what it's done to them. Most of these people, if you meet them in the real world, will come off as more sane. Then online, you're like, "Wow, this is a bonkers thing." I haven't been on social media as much in the past year and a half, and I think part of me was feeling a bit of that. Any book you read about cults will tell you that initially a cult leader gathers followers, and then eventually the followers lead the cult leader. You feel like you have to perform to that audience in some way. You have to feed them. That's why my fortune cookie tweet is just talking about that dynamic. In some ways, I think this is less about status games. What I think about now is how power law algorithms really create a homogeneity, really flatten things. Partially because there's some of the most powerful selection algorithms in the history of the world, just in terms of sheer scale and the degree of the power law. Nature has power laws, but there's no way they can work as quickly as digital power laws. **Jackson:** Right. The feedback loops are way longer. **Eugene:** We know that the stronger the selection effect, the more you're going to have this overfitting to the algorithm. You're going to get a flattening of people. You're going to get a flattening of culture. I don't know if you've ever watched this Mark Fisher video on YouTube called "The Slow Cancellation of the Future." **Jackson:** I know the name, but I don't think I've watched it. **Eugene:** I don't even know if he came up with the term, but he has a video where he talks about it. He was a cultural theorist, a kind of Marxist thinker. He said somewhere around the year 2000, it seemed like culture stopped progressing. Some people will argue that it's not true, but I think at some level there's a lot of truth to it. There have been lots of related pieces to this, you know, when Kyle Chayka wrote about the Airbnb-ification of design and power law. **Jackson:** Of all big music, movies, everything Marvel. **Eugene:** Yes. We look at streaming TV shows now. If you look at what you can see at the Cineplex, there's some reduced heterogeneity. I talked before about Twitter, how it seems less entropic than it used to be. There's just some homogeneity that comes with really powerful power law algorithms. **Jackson:** Sorry to interrupt. Does TikTok... One observation I've had of TikTok -- I spend less time in it these days -- but early on, I was always impressed by the way that TikTok, relative to even Spotify or other algorithms, would let the weird niche through. Maybe I was self-selecting to that. Could that propose that perhaps it's just a algorithmic quality problem, or a complexity problem? **Eugene:** Yeah, this is always the "explore versus exploit" challenge in algorithms. I think ByteDance, actually more than the Western social media companies, understood this danger. I've talked to their product team in the past, and some of the people who work there. From a very early period, they were like, "A huge problem of our algorithmic..." because they had Toutiao, which was their first viral product, also an algorithmic-driven thing. Even from that era, they knew if we just go down the full exploit path, people will just get oversaturated. People get sick of things. Same for TikTok. **Jackson:** And exploit, just to clarify, is classically the YouTube algorithm: show me more of exactly what I... **Eugene:** Show me more of exactly that thing. Ronnie Chang had a thing in his latest comedy special where it's just like, "Hey, you want to learn how to do the deadlift?" And the next thing, you're storming the Capitol with a buffalo helmet or something. That's the danger of the exploit. But for TikTok and ByteDance, it was more, "Actually, we'll just lose users in the long run if we go full exploit." So you have to do explore. Do ## [00:39:04] Technology's Reduction of Friction & Avoiding Confrontation with the Other **Eugene:** you read any Byung-Chul Han? **Jackson:** Yeah, I've read two-thirds of *Non-Things*. **Eugene:** There's a *New Yorker* piece that made me laugh that called him the Internet's favorite philosopher. I was like, "Oh no." I started reading him at the start of the pandemic, and then I was like, "All right, he's already jumped the shark." But he talks about something, and a lot of people talk about this, but that one of the problems of neoliberalism and the market in this era of life we live in, modernity, is the death of the Other—capital O Other—in philosophical terms. Young-Chul Han might refer to it as negativity, but it's the encounter with fully-formed other beings, with other thoughts, other ideas that push back on you. If you think about what the dominant ethos of tech design was for the first 20 years, it's "remove friction." **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** It's removed the negativity. Give me more of what I want. When Jeff Bezos said, "Hey, Amazon wants to be the world's most customer-centric company," what is that? It's like, what does the customer want? Just give that to them. **Jackson:** Make them glide downhill. **Eugene:** Yeah. You know, why did Facebook start off with a Like button but not a Dislike button? Everything is about... **Jackson:** Yep. **Eugene:** Positivity. **Jackson:** In that sense, Twitter, ironically, was kind of a weird place. **Eugene:** Yeah. It was funny when Threads first launched, and they were like, "We're not going to have politics." They were trying to avoid some of that. But it's a classic Meta thing to remove the negativity. I think there's been a huge consequence to this world of giving us whatever we want. I feel it most in that these days. I feel like a consequence of my first 25 or so years online has been that Silicon Valley keeps removing things or displacing things in the physical world and then replacing them with a digital substitute that always feels lesser in some way. **Jackson:** Or it's like a *Seeing Like a State*-style or a Robert Moses-style, highly top-down articulated simulacrum of it that doesn't really capture its nuance. **Eugene:** Yeah. It's like, in the place of real community, I give you likes on your Instagram post. In the place of real... **Jackson:** Or LinkedIn notifications. **Eugene:** Yeah, exactly. A LinkedIn endorsement. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Eugene:** In the place of real companionship and love, I give you an OnlyFans parasocial relationship, or digital pornography, or an AI boyfriend or girlfriend, or something like that. In fact, it's really funny. I was thinking back on the movie *Her*, which I haven't watched in a long time. Have you seen *Her* by Spike Jonze? **Jackson:** Yeah, I rewatched it pretty recently. **Eugene:** Yeah. Okay. **Jackson:** It's a very interesting movie to watch more recently compared to when it came out. **Eugene:** Oh, I'm sure. So you can clarify if my memory is wrong, but one of the things that is actually more profound in the movie, which is under-remarked on and maybe didn't come true, is... Isn't there a point when his AI girlfriend, he's like, "Hey, wait, how many relationships are you in?" And she says something like, "I'm in like 6,000 other relationships at least." It totally breaks his heart. **Jackson:** She's like, "It doesn't take anything." **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** "You still have 100% of me." **Eugene:** He's really broken up about this for a little bit, but at least that is a version of the other, or pushback. It's just, look, you're not going to get everything. It's not going to be ideal. Loving another person, a real person, someone with their own wants and needs, has trade-offs. There's just challenges to that. But these AI companions and things today are really made to just follow orders. **Jackson:** I had somebody telling me that there was a kid using their kid was using one of these AI plushed animals. What they realized is that when the kid had to interact with other kids, they didn't get why the other kids would ever push. They were used to the stuffed animal friend who just agreed with them all the time. You take what you're saying to the most extreme degree. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** It really begs the question of whether we're going to have to articulate new sets of artificial constraints or trade-offs. My sense is, my hope might be that over time the perfect girlfriend who never disagrees with you actually gets boring. Dare I say it? There's something inside of human nature that causes you to yearn for the more complicated thing. **Eugene:** Did you listen to the Daily episode? **Jackson:** No. **Eugene:** The woman who fell in love with her chat GPT voice, she made it into a boyfriend. She's married, but she had some. I had never heard this scenario before, but she had this fantasy of being cuckqueened, which is like she wanted her synthetic boyfriend to tell her about other relationships he was having with women. **Jackson:** Got it. **Eugene:** It was crazy because, you know, the woman let them use audio of her conversations with the bot. At some point, it almost seemed like she loved this digital boyfriend more than anyone else. She had asked her husband to do this fantasy, and he was like, "No, I'm not doing that fantasy for you." It's weird. And so that epitomizes tech to me. It's just like, oh, well, if you want that, we'll just give it to you. Why would we stand in your way? There's actually a book I'm really enjoying called *Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism* by Anna Kornbluh. She talks about how, in this era, it's just like, take out the middleman, give me what I want as directly and as quickly as possible. Of course, there are benefits. We always have to do this disclaimer anytime you say anything negative about the internet. It's like, well, disintermediation was great. People only know about me because I could blog and just publish it directly to the world and all of that. Of course, I wouldn't be here talking to you, and you wouldn't be able to put out this podcast if that didn't happen. On the other hand, I think even acknowledging that, we need better critiques of what this is all doing to us, to society. I think we have to figure out how to understand. And this maybe, you know, you and I've talked before about community and friction. I always say that social capital is better modeled as debt than equity. Whether or not debt was the first form of money, as Graeber theorizes, I think it's pretty clear that very many early economies operated prior to the invention of money on mutual obligation. **Jackson:** And mutual obligation is actually pretty productive. **Eugene:** Some amount of removing friction has removed mutual obligation. I felt bad. I was just back in SF recently, and I did my first Waymo ride. Then I went down to LA, and there were also Waymos there, and I rode them some. So many people I talked to were like, "God, I love Waymo. I do not want to talk to my driver. I don't want to deal with another person. I just would rather just be alone in this car." **Jackson:** I want to deal with the other. **Eugene:** Yeah, the gig economy, especially during the pandemic, we lived this peak version of that life. I was in San Francisco, which was pretty locked down. I couldn't even go to the grocery store; they would have lines outside and ration people. So you're ordering things from Amazon, watching Netflix at home, ordering meals delivered by Doordash or Uber Eats, and having very minimal human interaction. I think all of this is such a radical re-architecture of our social infrastructure that I wonder about the health of lowercase "l" liberal democracy downstream. I think all of this is the foundation that makes our particular form of liberal democracy work. By lowercase "l" liberal democracy, I just mean, can we get along with people we disagree with and live in some relative amount of peace? That's why civic solitude, in the thesis, resonates with me a little bit, this idea that maybe all being in the arena, duking it out all the time, or watching Fox News or whatever -- nobody watches MSNBC, but if that was the liberal equivalent -- watching these echo chamber things isn't really conducive to ## [00:48:45] The Internet's Reversal of Vita Activa and Vita Contempliva **Eugene:** that. I also think about how Hannah Arendt speaks about the *vita activa* and the *vita contemplativa*. She separates these two. *Vita activa* is this life of action that you lead in public, of which the highest form is participating in local politics and things. Then there's the *vita contemplativa*, the private life where you formulate thoughts and ideas. There's a bizarre way in which the internet has reversed those two. **Jackson:** Oh, man. **Eugene:** People love saying, "I think it's healthy to think in public. Let me share my notepad of ideas." On Twitter, you look at a lot of these tweets, you're like, "Oh my God, that's a thought you should have had in private." Why are you tweeting it out loud? It's nuts. **Jackson:** And I think they're tweeting it before they've actually even thought about it. **Eugene:** That is one of the consequences of this dopamine distribution. We act without thinking. It's bypassing the *vita contemplativa*. Even worse, the *vita activa*, this life of actual public action, is diminished, where it feels like tweeting is activism. **Jackson:** Yep. **Eugene:** Like, "I changed my avatar to a black square. I'm supporting Black Lives Matter," or something. **Jackson:** Byung-Chul Han and Baudrillard are having a tough grimace about that one. **Eugene:** It's particularly challenging right now, because I think most of our politicians don't see that a lot of the strife they deal with now is downstream of that ecosystem. If you rewire the way we communicate, that fundamentally changes the nature of how you have to govern and what the optimal governance looks like. **Jackson:** Size is ## [00:50:53] Growing Nihilism Toward Online Status Games: If You Don't Capture Attention, You Aren't Relevant Anymore **Jackson:** on the other side of the gladiator arena. You're speaking towards a sense of broadly nihilism. Obviously, there's the problem of confronting the other. But I think there's also a growing sense of, "Are these games even worth playing in the public online life?" What causes this feedback loop to run out? Is there a world where people eventually just opt out? If they're not performing on TikTok or Twitter, do they start to opt out of social media? Are we just headed towards a world where most people passively consume, and there's nothing else? **Eugene:** The nihilism comes from two things. Marx spoke about the alienation of labor. One cause he identified was the private ownership of the means of production. But in today's attention economy, the thing that creates burnout and alienation is the privatized ownership of the means of distribution. Even the most famous influencers, like Kylie Jenner or Selena Gomez, are using this platform, which owns that entire list. They could get de-platformed and lose access to all their followers on that particular platform. **Jackson:** They're kind of still in the rat race. **Eugene:** Everybody is renting some time on this platform and trying to use it to the best of their ability. **Jackson:** Also, the richest guy in the world bought one of the platforms. **Eugene:** Right, and maybe he's using it in the most meaningful way possible, which is just to boost his own share of attention. **Jackson:** Yep. **Eugene:** That just speaks to the scarcity of attention. The attention economy almost puts it to us that if you don't capture attention, you aren't relevant anymore. **Jackson:** Back to Facebook's mission. **Eugene:** If you think of the Democratic Party right now, one of their biggest challenges is they don't have anyone that can capture any attention. You can argue about Postman with the TV era; he's like, "Oh, you know, you have your photogenic presidents and your charismatic presidents like the Kennedys." So you could just say this is just a continued evolution. Now, who can be noisy on social media? **Jackson:** The difference between Postman and today is that, at the very least in Postman's era, you might not have performed as well because you weren't great on television, but you were still getting the spot. Now, you're not even showing up. You're not even getting eyeballs at all to underperform, and that is a pretty radical over-correction. **Eugene:** Both parties misread because there was this thought that it would just be Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, and then the next generation of Bush, Clinton. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** And then who did we have come along? We had Obama and Trump, just short-circuiting that assumed lineage. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** And why? **Jackson:** Because they very much mirrored the internet. A true disruption. **Eugene:** Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton just didn't do as well on social media. Obama and Trump were much better at it. So, it's no coincidence that one of the most popular phrases in social media is, "I feel seen." **Jackson:** That's all any of us want. **Eugene:** It's recognition, but the *thymos*, or Plato's version of the desire for recognition, is now governed by algorithms. In a way, some of the success of LinkedIn is also just that for some class of workers, if you're not on LinkedIn, you effectively don't exist. Recruiters don't even know that you're in the world. And so everybody feels compelled to be on these platforms. This is part of the collective action problem. If you're well off, yes, you can get off of social media. But if you're managing your career or whatever in the world, I don't blame you. Remember, people would always have those moral panics over how, if you ask kids what they want to be, they want to be influencers. People used to say they want to be astronauts. I really don't put much stock in that. People just react to the context in which they grow up. **Jackson:** Maybe kids are onto something. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Maybe they realize that that's the last remaining scarcity. **Eugene:** Right. I think they understood very early on. They look at their influencers, and they follow like, "Wow, these people have great lives, and they managed to get out of this brutal rat ## [00:55:54] Late State Capitalism's Dispapointment, Gen Z Nihilism in US and China, Luigi Mangione, Death of Community **Eugene:** race." And so this leads to the nihilism, which is an interaction with the economy, which is just way more unequal, and there's greater precarity. So, you know, I'm Gen X. In my generation, the cardinal sin was selling out. It's like, "Oh my god, my favorite band did a Wendy's commercial," or the music was used in a McDonald's commercial. And in Gen Z, I feel like it's been flipped. "Get your bag" is the saying. Get your coins, whatever. You know, sell out as soon as possible because you live in a precarious economy, and you might not have health insurance, you might not have a job. You have a small window in which to do that. **Jackson:** The assumed fortune of the future, and progress of the future, is no longer which is, as a default thing, pretty amazing to think about in the context of American history. **Eugene:** Maybe that still goes back 30 years. **Jackson:** But the fact that it's totally taken as default by young people is pretty dramatic. **Eugene:** Did you watch any of, I guess, what was it called? Like, Rejection Talk? It was when kids like not. **Jackson:** Yeah, a little bit. A little bit of this. **Eugene:** Yep. For a while, I got a bunch of these, and then I had, you know, nephews and nieces going through the college application process. I would hear about this, and these kids are posting their SAT scores, all their extracurriculars, the GPA. You're like, "God, this looks like some superstar," and they couldn't get into any of the, you know, they can barely get into their backup school. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** So I think there is a nihilism that comes from late-stage capitalism, and there's an American form of it. But I also recognize a form of it in China, which also, I think is -- you know, we don't think of it this way, but China actually is a hyper-capitalist, especially in the tech sector, maybe even more capitalist economy. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** When I talked to my friends in Shanghai after the kind of the pandemic, but also the CCP crackdown on a lot of tech companies, there was a commonality. It was a lot of young people who had been sold this dream. It's like, work hard, grind hard, you know, hit these milestones in life, and you'll be set. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** And what did they get? Most of them are like, "I can't afford to live in the city where the jobs are." **Jackson:** I watched a Sundance talk about that men outnumber women because of one child, and there's nihilism around dating now because you're not you don't make enough money. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** It's like. **Eugene:** People getting crushed on dating apps. I would talk to people in Shanghai, and I was like, "Wow, what they're saying sounds so similar to the nihilism I hear from young people in America," which leads to the whole "get your bag" thing. In China, they have the whole "tang ping" movement. It's just like the "lie flat" or "lie down." Don't grind. You can think of it as the opposite of "lean in." I felt these came to a head with the social media reaction to Luigi and the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO. **Jackson:** Yep. **Eugene:** There was a lot of finger-wagging online. People asked, "How could people be celebrating this?" Of course, everyone always caveats with, "Oh, it's just a terrible thing. We shouldn't be cheering this on." But as Jeff used to say at Amazon, "Complaining is not a strategy." It's important to understand why people react this way. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** I think it's born of a nihilism that says this whole late-stage capitalist thing is a false promise. It mostly leads to highly unequal outcomes. I did grind hard, and now we have AI coming, which will maybe take a lot of jobs and make this whole thing worse. **Jackson:** It's very Girardian in the scapegoat sense, too. It seems to be a measure of where we're heading. The Luigi thing was so much. The other thing about the Luigi thing was that it was such a scrambling politically. There was a tweet where somebody said, "There's something so poetically funny about the online left painting Luigi Mangioni into a Marxist working-class hero, only for him to actually be a center-right, biohacking, teal-loving tech bro." **Eugene:** Right. **Jackson:** Neither of which are totally true. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** But it almost seems like that's another. It might be easy for us otherwise to just draw it classically into the hard left, hard right thing, but because that's not the case, maybe it's revealing in the ways of everything you're saying, which is it actually is just. **Eugene:** This goes back to the point I was making earlier about digital destruction. Some of this was happening even before the Internet. Putnam's book *Bowling Alone*, I think I read that around 2000, came out prior to a lot of these things. But I would argue that since *Bowling Alone* came out, a bunch of things have further exacerbated the problems he was pointing to. One was the huge rise in cable news. I would say Fox News is probably the most disruptive. Then we had the Internet, the smartphone, and social media. Then social media got big, then we had the pandemic and remote work. I think each of those things further frayed the bonds of community in the West and reduced these communal meaning-making structures that we used to have. It's to the point now where I think it's going to be a real challenge to figure out how to reassemble it. What you see people doing, I think, who are trying to seek some form of community, is that they just look for it in anything that they can find. I'll never forget going to my first SoulCycle class. My friend took me up in Marin County. It had this strange, cultish feel. There were all these candles lit. It was dark. They were playing loud music. It was like some crazy interrogation. At some point, this woman next to me was crying. I feel like this explains some of the cultish feel of America now. People are just seeking the simulacrum of community in anything. Businesses that do well try to play a little bit on this. ## [01:03:02] Speculation Culture and Playing to the Power Law **Eugene:** Even in the crypto world, some of these DAOs and meme coins are a weird fusion of everything modern. It's like this synthetic community bonded around hyper-speculation. Maybe a parallel phrase to the Tom Cruise "everybody runs" is that—I don't know how many crypto founders I met who are like, "Gosh, I hate when these meme coins pull the rug out on people." But then they end up doing it. **Jackson:** The other reaction is nihilism. It's either lie down or get your bag and be a trader. **Eugene:** There's this book, *Speculative Communities*, that builds on Benedict Anderson's *Imagined Communities*. It talks about how the sequel to *homo economicus* is *homo speculans*. When you deal with this world of low-trust institutions and an uncertain future, everyone becomes a speculator. It's a set of behaviors. I think it's further amplified by the rise of all forms of online speculation. It's not just meme coins. **Jackson:** It's not even just purely monetary speculation, too. **Eugene:** It's the rise of online gambling, sports gambling in particular. It's a really dangerous trend. There was a crazy graph I saw at one point that was from a book about casino economics. **Jackson:** This is *The Machine Zone* book, right? *Addiction by Design*. **Eugene:** *Addiction by Design* is a great book that I read years ago. It basically said that online or electronic slot machines were the number one revenue source for all casinos. You could predict a casino's economics by the square footage of electronic slot machines on their floors, and every year it would go up. Electronic slot machines put more people into Gamblers Anonymous than any game in the history of the world. Then, miraculously, one day, the revenue from electronic slot machines flatlined and even started going down. The reason was we moved the casino into your pocket: it's the cell phone. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** The one thing where you're like, "I don't have to fly to Las Vegas to get my fix." Now, every other podcast I hear that's about anything sports is a DraftKings or a FanDuel ad. I definitely think it's a dangerous thing. **Jackson:** I'm a huge critic of sports betting. I would argue to take your point even further: all we do online is speculate. We speculate when we create TikTok videos to spin the wheel. You speculate when you use it. People aren't using dating apps to find a partner. They're taking the flyer on the upside. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** I would suspect that as much as sports gambling and everything else has hit the Vegas business, the psychology of speculating is getting serviced in all kinds of more ways. **Eugene:** Yeah, for sure. I think that's part of the thesis of speculative communities, which I'm just partway into. Also, in an economy with power law returns, you are going to be tempted to speculate. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** The online dating marketplace, at least for men, is a power law-like return thing where absolutely you're going to just naturally do higher risk-taking things. **Jackson:** I also think it's a power law in part because women are speculating. Women are trying to play to the top end of the power law. The numbers indicate it's something like 80% of women are looking for 20% of men. **Eugene:** Right. So, I mean, I guess this is something we should have expected by turning everything into a marketplace, an unfettered marketplace, and then introducing power law algorithms. You're going to create a whole group of speculators. I think this manifests in the feeling of just how crazy the world has become. Part of it is that everyone is trying to behave at the tail end of their behavioral spectrum just to win. And you kind of have to. That's why I don't love the discourse around how every generation of kids is different in some intrinsic way. I think that's a fundamental attribution error. We should really look at the context into which they were introduced. They're just naturally responding to the incentives in their environment. ## [01:08:09] NBA, NFL, Netflix, Power Laws, and Distraction-Friendly Viewing **Eugene:** In many ways, I don't know if you've seen, there's a lot of discourse around NBA TV ratings going down. **Jackson:** Biggest regular season game in seven years, Lakers Celtics, just saying. Go Lakers. **Eugene:** Yeah. One thing is that everything is entertainment. Netflix competes with Fortnite or sleep. Every form of entertainment is in competition with each other. Many industries, like the NBA, the game and everything was structured for just a different era. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** It's very hard for the NBA to contemplate the types of drastic changes needed to change the format of a regular season game to be appealing. **Jackson:** What you're seeing in the NBA, and across everything else you listed, is that people are basically saying, with their speculative orientation, "It's only worth playing if I win big." You could extrapolate that to dating apps, or to literal gambling. It's like, "Why would you trade meme coins, but also the NBA? Why do I care about the regular season? I just care about the NBA Finals." I only want the edge of the power law. It seems to be this recurring theme. **Eugene:** Structurally in the NBA, any single possession of any single regular season game is, by definition, meaningless. So then you're like, "Okay, why would I watch a full regular season game?" which, in the scheme of things, is mostly meaningless. I think one reason -- I have a theory on this. I read this book called *Disordered Attention*, which kind of gets at the fact that you pretty much have to assume most of your consumers now have a phone in their hands and are constantly... **Jackson:** Did you hear about this Netflix statistic? **Eugene:** That Netflix leak? That article was great. I wanted to bring it up too. Anyway, back to the NBA. A lot of people suggest reducing the number of regular season games, which I think they should do, for sure. There are too many of them. Even the teams, in their behavior, show you that most regular season games are meaningless, because they'll rest their stars on any given night. They know that it's better to have them rested for the playoffs. So the league's already kind of implicitly telling you, "Yes, this game..." And right now, we're in tank season also, where a bunch of teams, like the 76ers and the Raptors, are just doing crazy things... **Jackson:** Thanks to our friend, Sam Hinkie. **Eugene:** ...to lose games. You're just like, "Why would I watch this?" No one cares. Even the players don't care; the team is trying to lose. But I think the reason that the NFL has held up so well is not just because they have so few games, and not just because they happen on a consistent time of day of week, though I think those things matter, for sure. The ritualistic nature, the scarcity -- yes, that matters. I think the NFL, as an entertainment product, works great if you have a phone in your hand. There's not much gameplay. There are tons of breaks. There's like 90 plays a game. If a play is meaningful, they'll replay it like three times, so you could just look up from your phone and see it again. On any single play, a big thing could happen, like a huge outcome. A touchdown could happen. **Jackson:** It'd be like casino variance. **Eugene:** Yeah, a slot machine high variance. **Jackson:** In the NBA, it is a little bit more like the high variance stuff. **Eugene:** Exactly. **Jackson:** So, right. **Eugene:** And then the last thing is that fantasy football is just a beautifully designed speculative game. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** So, you layer that on top of the real game. The last few years I watched the NFL, I cared more about my fantasy team than I did the actual team, and I know many people who are like that. I watch my nephew during Sundays, and he's just on his phone. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** He has like three fantasy teams. He is just on the Red Zone Channel, like an addict. Fantasy baseball and fantasy basketball just aren't as well designed. **Jackson:** You make a case, actually, that there are two core games in American sports, or things to do. There's playing fantasy football, for which football is the backdrop, and there is, as Derek Thompson has said, following the NBA drama, for which the NBA is the backdrop. **Eugene:** Sure. **Jackson:** And it turns out, to your point, that football just has the best product-market fit across that articulation. **Eugene:** Football is fun to watch. There's a meta game that's fun to play, and it works with the phone in your hand. That goes to the Netflix article you brought up in N+1, the piece about how Netflix shows are designed for you to not look at the screen. I intuitively felt this, but then I decided to test it out. I looked on Netflix, and the top show that day was *The Night Agent*. I hadn't seen it, so I turned on season two. I didn't watch season one, but I thought, "Hey, this is a good test of the thesis. Does it matter that I didn't even watch the first season?" It turns out that it's true. I was looking at my phone and then kind of looking up at the screen occasionally. I think it was the start of the second episode. There's this entire scene where both characters are just recapping what they had just done in the previous episode, verbally saying it in a way that no one would. Because if you had watched the show and you had done those things in the show, you would not need to tell the other person that that's what you were doing. Every movie has expository dialogue dumps. Some amount of that is inevitable, but Netflix takes it to the extreme. Again, you go back to the algorithms and the flattening of culture. Some people argue that we have innovation in culture, but I think there is some homogenization that has happened to traditional cultural products. You see it in other fields. What museum doesn't program at least one Instagram-friendly exhibition? **Jackson:** It better be on the ground floor and bigger than everything else. **Eugene:** Yeah, it's going to be the Kusama Hall of Mirrors or the giant pumpkins. That might pay for your entire year in terms of ticket revenue. We go back to attention, right? To the Baudrillardian point about the hyperreal becoming more important than the real, something about that is true. I think the art world is just one way that's reflected. I don't know if you saw this, but I thought it fascinating: the NBA has been experimenting, in the battle to fight their ratings slump. They've been experimenting with this NBA live stream, which does graphic overlays from the NBA Live or NBA 2K video game on the broadcast. **Jackson:** Oh my God. **Eugene:** I was looking at the graphic they used, and it was funny because they would draw—like in the game, over players' heads, they'll draw the PlayStation button that you can use to pass the ball to them. But they were doing this on a live broadcast, which is weird because you can't actually do it. **Jackson:** Not yet. **Eugene:** But it was a classic case of this phenomenon that Baudrillard said would be exacerbated, and it's all come to pass. I think every entertainment medium is fighting this challenge. You had cited a ## [01:15:57] Playing for Attention: the Only Goal **Eugene:** thing I had written before that was from a talk I gave called "The Programmable Society." In it, I was talking about when I was at Amazon. The last thing I worked at Amazon before I left in '04 was Amazon Web Services. We were writing these memos for Jeff, and it was all about what are the primitives, the computing primitives, that we would release as services. There was this whole vision of allowing any programmer, like a single programmer, to access the full suite of compute services. My talk on Programmable Society said, if you looked at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all of these, these are also compute services or primitives. These are just large-scale platforms that allow you to tap into human brains. And if you could figure out how to hack the system, you would get access to just millions of people for free. And so those were also programming endpoints. You know, I look back on that now, and I think, if you think about Mr. Beast, I view Mr. Beast as kind of the apotheosis of battling algorithms. He's like the Highlander; there's one person who's just like, "Look, I'm just going to master battling these algorithms." **Jackson:** And that's how he relates to it, too. I think he is an artist of the YouTube algorithm more than any other thing. **Eugene:** But you know, in doing so, there's almost like this weird absence of ideology. It's just like, "Hey, look, whatever works for the algorithm is what I'm going to lean into." **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** I couldn't tell you what Mr. Beast's politics are. He's just like, "Hey, I'm going to lean into this." It's funny, people have been talking about having Stephen A. Smith run for office, and I'm just like, why? In what world? But that's the age we're in because he had already... **Jackson:** Trump's our president. **Eugene:** Yeah. Stephen A. Smith has already mastered a previous form of attention-grabbing. **Jackson:** Much rather have him debate Trump than Joe Biden. **Eugene:** If attention is the spice in the Dune universe, you are just trying to find the people who can mine it most efficiently and exert their leverage on things that way. But I think it is a little bit dark to me that we have this onset of nihilism and this lack of connection and these people kind of adrift. ## [01:18:43] Video and Image vs. Text **Eugene:** So, I think in tech world, people are very attuned to give high status to books and writing, less to TV, film, and images. **Jackson:** You've said a similar thing about five, six years ago, and you've definitely been incrementally proven more right. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Video is taken more seriously. **Eugene:** Do you ever see that piece? I don't know who, maybe it was like someone at The Verge or someone said, um, they tried emailing like their CEO in just like how it improved their life. **Jackson:** No. **Eugene:** When I was at Amazon, Jeff Bezos was famous for forwarding a customer service email with just a question mark to the head of the department. If the customer complained about something, it was like the most terrifying email to get. But in general, CEOs at companies are famous for writing very terse emails. Back in the day, when email was the dominant form of communication. And so this reporter just tried replying kind of like very matter-of-fact, no exclamation points, just very like short like. And, um, there's a great research paper that talks about how words convey power better than images. Some of that may be a cultural inflection. But, you know, if your CEO were to forward an email and then put in a smiley face emoji versus just a question mark, I do think the one with just a question mark is going to come off as more strong. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** Code strong. This is my theory for why at high-end restaurants, the menus are all text and very bare. But at some of the lowest-end restaurants in Japan, they... **Jackson:** Show every picture. **Eugene:** Yeah, a binder with pictures. It's in plastic. They may even have the little plastic molded thing of the dish. I actually love getting the pictures. I find it very useful. But at a high-end restaurant, you never know what the dish is going to look like. **Jackson:** You don't get to litigate this. **Eugene:** You may look around at other people's dishes, but at a really high-end restaurant, it's a tasting menu anyway, so you have no choice. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** The only choice is whether you want to pay a lot or more for add-on truffle shavings or ## [01:20:57] The Subconscious of American Culture and the Decline of Community According **Eugene:** something. Silicon Valley is very into words and books, and books code as high intellectual matter. But I'm into movies, TV shows. I think they in some ways even better reflect the subconscious of America. I think you can trace the decline of American community through TV shows, specifically sitcoms. You look at post World War II, you have these like 60s, 70s sitcoms. A lot of them about like, you know, *All in the Family*, *Brady Bunch*, *The Honeymooners*. Tracing the atomic family and depicting a fantasy of a high functioning... **Jackson:** This is American life. **Eugene:** Yeah, Americana, trad wife type of ideas. Then there were the sitcoms I grew up with. I think in particular of *Cheers* and *Night Court*. **Jackson:** I don't even, never heard of *Night Court*. **Eugene:** Okay. It was about a court, a group of people who all worked at a court. **Jackson:** Okay. **Eugene:** And then *Cheers*, of course, about a bar. *Cheers* is maybe the epitome of the idealized third place that's defined in the Starbucks third place. But the theme song, a place where everybody knows your name, and a family of people who would come together at this bar and loved each other, and took care of each other, and shared their problems with each other. A place that frankly doesn't, I don't think exists in America anymore, but at the time you're like, wow, okay, there was this thought. **Jackson:** Did it ever exist? **Eugene:** I think it did in some places in the world. Anyway, there was some sense that that was still possible. Then you had shows later on that I watched, *90210*, *Seinfeld*, *Friends*, *Melrose Place*, *The OC*. All of these shows are very interesting in that your friends would just walk into your apartment or your bedroom if you were in high school. **Jackson:** Kramer literally walking into the apartment. **Eugene:** There's no knocking. There's no, like, it's like, do they have the key? How does this work? Of course, part of it is just narrative economy. You don't want to have to depict doorbell ringing and people opening the door. It's a waste of time. But I think it's something else. I think that all of those shows were, in some ways a fantasy about extending college life into adult life. **Jackson:** Yeah, totally. **Eugene:** I don't know. I asked this question of people I meet all over the world. What was, you know, look back on your life, what was the best time of your life? Personally, look, this is sampling bias for sure. It's just me asking random people. But actually, I'll ask you, what was the best time of your life? **Jackson:** I'd like to say like I'm in it. **Eugene:** Yeah. Okay. **Jackson:** I don't feel like it was college. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** But I grew up with that as the default understanding. Not that it's the best time, but it's certainly the most fun. **Eugene:** More people in America will say college than anywhere else. Of course, it differs by socioeconomic class. **Jackson:** I also live in New York. I'm single. I live in New York. I'm pursuing the college, I'm doing it. **Eugene:** Right. **Eugene:** A lot of tech people who become really well off are like, "Right now is the best time because I have money and income. I can do it." For most people in the West, a lot of people will say college. My theory on this is just that college is the only healthy social life that many people in the West ever experience. Like communal life. College is this weirdly socialist environment. You can have money, but everybody's kind of got the same dorm room, and everybody has to go to the same classes. You eat at the same cafeteria for the most part, but you get all this free time. **Jackson:** Default programming, and you can opt into things. **Eugene:** You have a lot of social time. You're always around people who want to do different things. **Jackson:** It's the perfect combination of lack of obligation and ability to have connection. **Eugene:** Yeah, and to focus on your passion. So, I think these TV shows, you know, Seinfeld, it's like a dorm. It's like dorm life. That's why Kramer could just burst in. It was just like my classmates would just come into my room when I was studying. You know, you would just leave your door open or unlocked, and people would just come in. And Friends, some for some weird fantasy that they could afford this gigantic apartments across the hall from each other, but that was also like a dorm. Even a show like The Office was like an extension of Cheers. It was the office as the place of your friends, like, you might not be able to stand some of them. **Jackson:** The irony is that when that show was on, that was not a dream. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Granted, maybe like you're right, but knowing your co-workers and hanging out with them every day was very common. In a way that a 21-year-old watching that now might actually find it alien, which is pretty remarkable. **Eugene:** Yeah. So, I think the dark turn for me then came with the show, The Sopranos. **Jackson:** When did you -- you know when it started? 99, something like that? **Eugene:** Let's see. I was on the Amazon video team. So, 98, I joined the team. I think the first season was like around 98. I remember some video editor on the video team telling me, "Oh my God, you got to watch The Sopranos. I subscribed to HBO just to watch it." Here is a show where Tony Soprano, the main character, theoretically was living the American dream. He was top of his profession, granted, he was a mob boss. He has a wife, two children, lives in a McMansion in New Jersey, and he's absolutely miserable. His closest relationship is to his therapist. And I think this was like a harbinger of just like the rot at the heart of American life. You know, first of all, being in the suburbs, just being isolated from your neighbors, just like this cocoon. His daughter is the kind of, you know, your classic Lisa Simpson, a little more what we would say is like a woke girl now. And then, his son is kind of this like deadbeat. His wife likes the money but is always kind of like haranguing him, and he's always stressed out and anxious over his place at the top, like holding on to his job. He has no kind of meaning-making institutions for him. And so, he turns to the thing that we turn to in late-stage capitalism to cope with our mental issues, which is paid therapy. Like, we pay someone to listen to our problems. It epitomizes this kind of like, what is broken? **Jackson:** Are these -- I'm going to stop you for a second because maybe I'm pointing where we're going a little bit, but with all of these examples, and especially this one, are these revealing or are they prophetic? **Eugene:** Maybe a little bit of both, I think. One of the reasons *The Sopranos* resonated was that even if you weren't a mob boss, you could relate to the family problems. It's like those CW shows about vampires that still have the usual high school problems. The show is about something else, but it's really about the thing. All gangster movies to me are x-rays of the economy of the country they're in, and the economic anxieties that result from the rules of that system. You look at a movie like *Goodfellas,* and Ray Liotta says, "For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a good fella." He really is the middle-class American trying to live a better life, trying to ascend higher. At the end of the movie, he ends up in witness protection, and it's a nightmare for him because he's in the bathrobe getting the newspaper from his townhouse porch. It's funny because Tony Soprano, in the opening credits of *The Sopranos,* is in his bathrobe going out to get the newspaper from the end of his driveway. There's something about asking, "Is this all that was promised? Why, if I have this, do I feel empty inside?" After that, the two shows I think most reflect an even further evolution of late-stage capitalism are *Succession* and *Industry*, both shows I loved on HBO, coincidentally. Both are about these people who, in some ways, have won the late-stage capitalist game because they're rich. They're making so much money, and they're all deeply alone. The end of *Succession* is just these people who are worth tens of millions of dollars, and they're estranged—even the siblings are estranged from each other. We talk about Joe Henrich and *The Weirdest People in the World* a lot, and he's just like, "Look, Western individualism is responsible for the most financially prosperous people in the history of the world." Part of it is this individual striving. Also, there's something dark about individualism taken to its logical extent, minus community, in this kind of secular, modern world where you're just grinding. You're trying to win at this kind of casino economics game. **Jackson:** *Succession* is a little different because, obviously, they have their inheritance. *Industry* is exactly about this problem. **Eugene:** I went back to watch the pilot of *Industry*, and I had forgotten that Lena Dunham directed it. The kids are interviewing to go work at that firm, and one of them says something like, "My heroes are Margaret Thatcher." This show signals from the very beginning that it's exactly about neoliberalism. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** And what the issues of that are. I like that it kind of goes over the top and leans into it just to underline it. They're like, "Look, you will have people you love, but the fact that you all interact in a marketplace means that your relationships are all transactional. You will never truly be close to anyone in that world." There's the one guy who likes the girl. You just knew in the last season there's no way they will end up together, even though they love each other. But there's no hope because he's poor; he came from lower. And, you know, for her, her reputation is everything. **Jackson:** The priorities are clear, in a sense. Yes. **Eugene:** She needs a rich husband to provide for that. ## [01:32:34] Terminally Online Culture, Role Models, Evolving Search for Meaning **Eugene:** We sometimes think a well-functioning liberal democracy is upstream of a lot of these conditions, but I think it's actually downstream. When you remove those conditions, it becomes very hard. You can have rituals that play-act at forms of community, but you actually need real community to make these things work. That's one problem with this gerontocratic governance that we have in America. I think they are so far removed from the online social information infrastructure. **Jackson:** And thus, the actual lived experience of a 25-year-old in the world they live in, which is largely a digital one. **Eugene:** Both parties have been in a weirdly weakened state. They're strong in that there's still just a duopoly of parties in the US, but they're weak in that they've been hijacked by outsider candidates repeatedly. **Jackson:** It is interesting that one of the seeming responses to this kind of nihilistic, late-stage capitalism thing is this emphasis on earnestness and a more uninhibited, high-agency "you can just do things" attitude. The political right has certainly leaned into this notion that looking backwards doesn't matter. I don't know if that shaped the speculative stuff or something else. If you were to imagine the TV show that encapsulates 2025 or beyond, do you think it's deeper into the *Succession* industry hole, or do you think we're going somewhere else? **Eugene:** I don't know. There haven't been great shows to capture what it means to be terminally online yet. I think there are some movies that scratch at the edges of it. I saw this movie last year called *Red Rooms*. **Jackson:** I don't know it. **Eugene:** Ostensibly, it's about someone who's obsessed with the trial of a serial killer. This person goes and attends the trial every day. This person trades crypto, is online all day, plays online poker, and is on the spectrum. I say all these things, and I think most people would say, "Oh, it's some young man." It's actually this woman, and she's an Instagram influencer model. She's attending the serial killer trial. Ostensibly, the movie is about how she's trying to find evidence to get the killer acquitted because she believes he is innocent. But I think what it's best about is capturing the feeling of being terminally online: to be fully captured by conspiracy theories, to mostly interact with people through terminals and prompts. **Jackson:** That's a really hard thing to fake attunement to. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** If the writer or director wasn't. **Eugene:** It's a lot about the dangers of what happens if you're terminally online, what kind of distortions it makes, and how easy it is to get sucked into conspiracy theories. This contributes a lot to the cult-like feel of American society now. In the transition from college to adulthood, you often are in need of some mentor. It works differently for everyone. I think we used to have young men who would have to go out into the military or the draft, and they had these authoritative male figures. There are negatives to that, too. But I think a lot of Judd Apatow movies were about this trend of prolonged adolescence. People coming out into the world not being quite ready for adulthood. All the Judd Apatow protagonists, like Seth Rogen or James Franco, are smoking pot and playing PlayStation. They're into their late 20s, and they still haven't gotten into a relationship. You see the data, and we have this version of this thing. This opens the door, like the internet, to up-and-coming cult leaders. I think of Jordan Peterson as really a kind of substitute father for a lot of young men. Even his aesthetic is like a military general might tell you: make your bed, stand up straight. **Jackson:** But I'm finally being told to do so by someone I respect. And that is the... **Eugene:** It's... **Jackson:** Yeah, it's through a screen or whatever else, but it's... **Eugene:** The whole Rogan, Chris Williamson, even Aubrey Marcus thing. So many of these have filled this void. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** Again, I always think these things, the harbingers come earlier. So, you can go back pre-internet. I didn't watch her show growing up, but I think Oprah was the first to do this for a particular subset of America. **Jackson:** Right, right, right. **Eugene:** She had such a different affect than traditional hosts. If Tony Soprano was this person who had to go to therapy in a TV show, she acted out like therapy live in her show. She was very confessional. She was like, "I battled weight problems. I was sexually abused." She would work these out for her audience in a way, live. And it was very powerful for that audience. **Jackson:** Yeah, the OG parasocial dynamic. **Eugene:** The OG parasocial thing. Then there was a period where I got really interested in why there were so many people like Casey Neistat, all these vloggers with huge, like tens of millions. I was like, "What is going on?" So I went and watched for a week. I was just watching a lot of their videos, and I was like, "Oh, I get it. This is Oprah for grade school kids." **Jackson:** I think for a lot of it was like, Casey's your older brother. David Dobrik's the cool friend group you wish you were in. **Eugene:** They were like, "Hey, parents don't understand you. Your peers bully you. Your teachers don't understand you. But I'm like you. Look, I made it, okay? I'm not any special, but I made it. I'm here for you." They broadcast so frequently. Oprah was on every day, and these vloggers were on every day. New episode every night. You just go home, you're like, "This is my friend." And yes, it's parasocial because they're not going to hang out with you or anything. **Jackson:** If these are the defaults, or the alternative is nothing, it's probably not that bad. In some cases, the delta between the good version and the bad version is really important for society. **Eugene:** I'm of two minds on this because, of course, it's better than nothing, probably. But also, in some cases, these things took away something that maybe was better. And then it's like, well, this is all that's left, and it's better than nothing. But we used to have something. I always say these things probabilistically. For some people, it's good. Nothing's all bad or all good. But I think just in general, I'm left with this unease over how much we're given these synthetic substitutes for real connection. Part of it is always that we're complicit. It's of our own making. You're like, "Hey, free world, you could..." Do you remember — I don't know who posted the thing about the sovereign child, or the book, *The Sovereign Individual*? Someone was passing it around on Twitter or something, this idea of a sovereign child. I think that's the name of it. It's about this idea that you should let your kids do whatever you want, like give them full agency in their lives. **Jackson:** I saw something about Naval saying maybe kids should just be able to do whatever they want. **Eugene:** Maybe that's it. First of all, I think that's crazy. That's just absolutely crazy. But it reflects a little bit of this kind of libertarian ideal. **Jackson:** It might be in response to the sort of ultra-soccer mom, Saran Wrap approach, where you can't even leave the house. At least I got to leave the house and come back at 6:00. **Eugene:** Right. I think when you're also a little bit lost in the world, looking for meaning, you have this — and I think it is a Silicon Valley thing, or at least that's where I first encounter it — which is this cult of self-optimization. You know, dosing out creatine, measuring your sleep metrics on your Eight Sleep or Oura Ring. People talk about their personal productivity stacks of note-taking software. Or the Peter Attia-like, "Live Forever, Zone Two" workout. There's this thing that fills in the secular void. It's like wearing blood glucose monitors. I think it's amusing because the show that reflects a little bit of this — I don't know what you call it, like upper-middle-class existential cry for help — is *White Lotus*, which is entirely a show about upper-class white people's problems. **Jackson:** Yes. **Eugene:** You're just like, "Oh, we can afford to go to the Four Seasons, but we're all unhappy, even though we're all very well off." **Jackson:** Did you watch the episode this week? **Eugene:** I did. **Jackson:** There's a great scene in this week's episode where three women are trying to leave the resort to have some fun, and they go to a "normie" resort, and she has a meltdown that she's around the normies. It was an incredible scene. **Eugene:** She looks around at all these old people, and she's confronted by the specter of death. **Jackson:** Oh, yeah. **Eugene:** And that's part of the absence of the other that Byung-Chul Han talks about. Part of the "other" is just the realization that you'll die someday, or just sickness, or any sort of negativity in the world. We are trying to smooth it all away. The other thing I find funny is, if you look at Hinduism and Buddhism as religions, we in the West treat them as kind of open-source software. We borrow parts of it for our own mental wellness stack. It's like, "Well, I'm not a Buddhist, I'm not Hindu, but I love yoga." And, you know, I'll pay to go to a meditation retreat. I think you can tell a lot about a society by looking at what the bestsellers are in the self-help section. **Jackson:** It reminds me a lot of your bit about community. We want community, or I would sub in any number of things -- identity, meaning -- without the obligation. That is inside of all of this. It's like, "I want the yoga without the other commitments." **Eugene:** Yeah, and I think part of it is the instant gratification. Like multiple decades of design to remove friction. The instant gratification. It is hard to put up with any of the shadow costs of the physical world. Any moment now where I have 20 seconds where I have to be standing in line at the grocery store or something, I'm tempted to look at my phone. Why should I spend this 20 seconds bored? The friction of just even getting out of the house... **Jackson:** Speaking ## [01:45:23] Friction and the Internet's Impact on Communities **Jackson:** of that friction, we've talked about this. I'd be curious to revisit it -- the death of the scene. Which obviously is heavily tied to community, but I think the defining aspect of it in many ways is actually just when you don't have friction, you don't have the level of niche or depth that you might otherwise get. And I think it applies to both the physical world and the digital world. There's one thing you had said: "More than that, I suspect every generation needs spaces of its own, places to try on and leave behind identities at low costs and on short finite time horizons." That applies to social virtual spaces as much as it does to physical ones. This Galapagos Island-style thing, or the New York music scene at the turn of the millennium. The internet, by definition, removes friction. On top of that, you have this cultural trend we've been talking about, which is that people don't want to opt into or have obligation to things or commit to things. Now, even people who might want that type of depth, is it even possible to exist? Maybe. Or maybe a better version of the question is, is it possible that can exist digitally? Maybe people are going to become Luddites again, but in lieu of that, the problem is that the tweet threaders are so good at finding any interesting niche anytime it becomes available, even if it's in a Discord server or whatever. It doesn't really seem possible to have that slow organic development. **Eugene:** Yeah, I look now. Now I feel like maybe we've gone too far one direction, and I'll go back the other direction in one way in that the internet has been amazing in my life for helping me make lots of friends and find lots of communities that I wouldn't have otherwise. In fact, if you ask most people today what the source is of life-changing communities they found, I think a lot of people would say online. So I am a beneficiary of that, and I don't discount that at all. I wouldn't want that removed from my life. I think there are people who do create really great communities online. My issue is more with the philosophy of design around a lot of these things. I think just community builders have to recognize that you can throw up a discord, and that doesn't make a community. There's a lot more that goes into that. In fact, I find the slackification of workplaces, the idea that Slack, Zoom replacing going to an office. Yes. Like, I understand every time I talk about this, people are like, "Well, it was my commute was horrible." I get that, I've been through some horrible commutes in my life, and I never would want to go back to that. But I also think there's something really dark about not ever meeting your coworkers except through Slack and Zoom. The disembodying of people, you know, just only ever seeing them in a little window in your Zoom application window. In some ways, the movie *Oppenheimer* to me is just a movie about how important it was to work together in person to accomplish something momentous. **Jackson:** Talk about friction. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** You made this point in some interview a few years ago, maybe with Ben Thompson, about how one of the things Taylor Swift's amazing at is just introducing arbitrary friction to be a part of the group. Go back to the Zoom commute thing. It turns out you either choose obligation and get meaning, or opt out and don't get meaning. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** It's kind of correlated. **Eugene:** It's not a coincidence that some of the strongest institutions, organizations, and communities in the history of the world have some huge friction hurdle at the beginning. I'm not saying everything should be like fraternity hazing rituals. When I was young, I wasn't raised religious, but sometimes you have a sleepover at a friend's place, and they are religious. They would drag me along to church on Sunday morning if I slept over on a Saturday night. It was always like, "Oh my gosh, this is so boring," to sit here in church for whatever hour and a half hour. But the idea was not that it was meant to be entertainment or pleasurable. It's that shared, "Oh my gosh, we're all coming together and suffering through this together" feeling. That really made the church, for many decades in American history, probably one of the most important social capital institutions. You know, prior to banks and credit reports, a lot of churches were the institution that facilitated money lending. **Jackson:** Wow. **Eugene:** Because they were storehouses of reputational credit. In New York, there's the paid neoliberal version of community, which is these paid private clubs. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** A lot of them are really nice places to go if you want to go have a drink or something. But I always feel like there's something also just dark that that's the only marketplace solution. It's a hard problem. ## [01:50:50] AI, "The Most Human Human" and Creativity **Jackson:** I want to talk briefly about AI and where we're going with some media stuff. There's an idea, or maybe a spectrum, that I found really interesting in reviewing some of your writing. You talked about this book, *The Most Human Human*, and conversational entropy, and how really what it seemed to be getting at is this notion that the most human or meaningful thing often is being able to be unpredictable or high entropy. I think that's obviously embedded in most people's instincts around where, at least for art and culture and films, the really human stuff that AI is not going to come for is going to be that. Maybe it's creativity, maybe it's entropy, whatever. And then meanwhile, you open your first TikTok piece by self-identifying as a cultural determinist. And then also acknowledging, you say, "It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm, significantly responsive and accurate, can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted." Granted, in that context, you're talking about the Chinese infiltrating the American veil. But I'm curious, maybe, for what else this might be true. Is it possible that there's almost something like a bitter lesson around culture, where we're holding on to this notion that maybe we have to be weird or distinct or different or out there? And in fact, the algorithms just need-- what TikTok maybe showed us, relative to a platform like Twitter, is just you just need a better algorithm and a little bit more data. It turns out TikTok knows me better than--certainly way better than any dating app, definitely better than Twitter, definitely better than Instagram. The root of the question, I suppose: Is there something to holding on to this notion of being the most human human by being weird, unpredictable, high entropy? **Eugene:** There's something about high entropy that codes as charisma, I think. Maybe that's just a relic of the past, but I still think it holds. It's funny how this discourse has become circular in a way. We start looking at large language models and treating them, you know, like my friends who have kids, new kids like, "Oh, you know, is my child a stochastic parrot?" Our models become the metaphors by which we judge the thing, and then like previously, it was the reverse. I think so. This whole discourse around NPCs is related to this. It's this idea of just someone who is just programmatic and predictable in some way. On the one hand, you call someone an NPC, and it's such a dark insult. It's always used really in a negative sense. It's like reducing people to almost removing their humanity or their worth. On the other hand, every time I open Gmail and it exactly predicts what I was going to write back to an email, I'm like, "Wow, am I an NPC?" Mathematically, a lot of what we do is predictable. What I liked about *The Most Human Human* is they talk about computerized chess. They say, you know, like a lot of... I don't play chess, but a lot of the top players, they will tell you a lot of it is you have to memorize the opening book and you're memorizing the end game book. So in some configurations, there's just a playbook, and you can memorize as much of it as possible and you should play the mathematically optimal set. In *The Most Human Human*, the author writes that it's real chess is played where the opening book and the end game book don't meet. That's when you really have to think on your own. I think that's true about a lot of art and everything today. Large language models will reveal the particular patterns that have always occurred in art and human creativity and codify them. **Jackson:** In many cases where we didn't necessarily. **Eugene:** At a scale that was just never possible before. So musicians have always sampled each other. But now, there's just a more scalable way to do this. I think in one way that the Spotify algorithm has changed music: I think music's particularly susceptible to mathematical analysis, it's like a mathematical art form in some ways. And so it's just very legible to math driven algorithms. But on the other hand, I've been to some of these AI film festivals, and I would not choose those movies over going to see movies at Cannes or the Toronto Film Festival. There's still going to be room, and maybe it just forces humans to be more creative. **Jackson:** There's a amazing little bit about the Lee Sedol Go match that what you said made me think of, where he kind of gets crushed. But there are these two moves, one that AlphaGo makes, but one that Lee makes that is him being more human in a way. It's this crazy, unthinkable move, and it's very much what you're saying. **Eugene:** It's like when Kasparov played Big Blue, right? And he was like, finally realized that, "Oh my gosh, this machine is gonna destroy me." And he starts one game by just making some crazy moves because he knows it's been trained to create disorder. Yeah, he's just like, I have to get it off of its book and go somewhere that it's never been. Maybe large language models will push us to be finding... **Jackson:** That's a powerful metaphor. **Eugene:** That is. So I'm hopeful. ## [01:56:38] Lighting section: Invisible Asymptotes for Social Media and Eugene, and Writing **Jackson:** I have a handful of lightning-style questions to close us out. You wrote an amazing piece years ago called "Invisible Asymptotes." I have two questions on this note. One is, do you think we're hitting the invisible asymptote? This goes back to where we started the conversation on social networks as a category. Are we just kind of hitting-- maybe this is related to TikTok being the apex predator--and we've just kind of hit the end of things? Do we just need some more time and maybe some new computing devices? Or have we hit an asymptote on how we actually think about what these things are that might need to be crossed? **Eugene:** We're probably asymptoted on just the raw primitives. We've discovered a lot of the primitives of social: the profile page, the inbox, the avatar, the like button. Some of these forms have all pretty much been commodified. I think how they're combined, we haven't hit on it. That's partially because most of our social networks today have migrated to becoming social media companies. Social networks, it turns out, aren't a great business, and social media companies are a great business. I always think of Snapchat as a classic example of an app where the interface perfectly bifurcates those two aspects. **Jackson:** Talk about friction, by the way. **Eugene:** If you swipe one direction, you get social networking. The other direction is like, how do we fund all of this? It's with the most clickbaity video, horrific crap. **Jackson:** In a sense, it's almost more honest, though, from Evan. **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** He's saying, "I want to build a social network, and I'm going to fund it with the tab over here." **Eugene:** Right, exactly. It makes it very crystal clear. I think there is a genuine yearning for more connection. There's always the counter-backlash to the thing that will happen. I don't know how it will be funded. Economically, it's always challenging. Many people don't realize that WeChat, which you could argue is now the last true biggest social network in the world, their economics mostly come from video games. **Jackson:** Wow. **Eugene:** More than 50% of Tencent's revenues are from their video game business. So you might say that we will have maybe a great social network again, but it has to be funded by some other thing, because we haven't found a way to monetize messaging. **Jackson:** Are there any personal asymptotes that you recognized for yourself and maybe found ways past them? **Eugene:** Huh. **Jackson:** Come to mind? **Eugene:** That's a good question. Since I'm very conscious of the context of the digital world that we're in, part of why I started-- I haven't written in a while, I haven't been on social media as much in recent years--part of it was trying to understand how those platforms themselves are an asymptote to life. Yeah, and attention. How do you manage? How do you gather back and take control of your attention? It's a struggle, for sure. That's why I think things like the sovereign child are crazy. I mean, if adults can't even manage their attention, I can't imagine a child dealing with this. This is why I just find all of social media to be, in some ways, terrifying. **Jackson:** Right. **Eugene:** They can code as so innocuous, but the scale and the power of them is massive. I think I will go back to writing more this year, partially because I think the community I found through my writing is maybe the most durable and authentic one. You could argue the open web failed. There were things like trackback links, blog rings -- early attempts to build a decentralized version of social on top of the open blogosphere. In one way, it was a huge failure. But in another way, maybe that friction was part of its strength. Your readers who followed you loyally had to just check your blog all the time to see if you even wrote anything. This is prior to the newsfeed RSS world. You just had to go back every day and hope they wrote something new. And if not, you'd go away. But the people who came back were so loyal to you. **Jackson:** This is the brand thing. Friction. **Eugene:** I'm still grappling with the whole Substack thing. I don't know. First of all, I find Substack, in some ways, not entirely self-describing. The following versus notes thing is a little bit confusing, and there's an algorithm there, so it always makes me wary. But some people are finding community there. I think, for me to break some asymptote, I'll have to go back to writing. ## [02:02:08] Beginner's Mindset, Film School, What Technologists Could Learn from Filmmakers **Jackson:** You have, at least at points in your life, shown an ability to pursue a beginner's mind. I think you've done that a lot of times, but probably most notably when you left Amazon and went to film school. I guess, a two-part question: Where and how have you been enabled by having a beginner's mindset or finding one? And two, is there anything really memorable all these years later that comes to mind about film school? Granted, I don't think you finished. **Eugene:** Well, I finished editing school. I left Amazon, came to New York, and I wanted to try filmmaking, but I didn't even know where to start. So, I went to editing school at this place called The Edit Center in New York, and I did that for two years. Before I then wanted to write and direct, I went to UCLA for a year before I got sucked into Hulu. I think, related to the status piece I wrote, one of the things about having a beginner's mindset is you really have to humble yourself. You can go from being a senior exec at some field, and then, the first film set I worked at in New York was an ex-undergrad classmate's student film. **Jackson:** Most people are not willing to do that. **Eugene:** I was a PA going to Canal Street to buy props, making coffee, and watering down streets for night shots. But there's also something very liberating. I always think about when Daniel Day-Lewis left acting and just went to cobble shoes for a while. There's something kind of comforting about this kind of ascetic beginner's life, that kind of self-abnegation. In this weird, techno-optimized world today, people replicate some of these religious rituals through cold plunges and other forms of self... **Jackson:** Other forms of friction. **Eugene:** Self-imposed suffering or denial. Fasting was really popular for a while. Eventually, we'll adopt all the rituals of Islam. But, the first time being on a film set, there was a shot in an alley in Tribeca. For nighttime shots, you often water the streets so that the lights will reflect. Otherwise, it's just solid black and it's boring. It was winter, and it was so cold in New York. A friend agreed to allow us to use their bathtub to get water, but it was a five-story walk-up. I'd carry these buckets up, come down, and pour. It would cover just a fraction of the street. But being on a film set, learning how movies are made and the weird processes and procedures was eye-opening. Filmmaking is actually a much older field or craft than making apps or tech in general. You could see how certain processes had already hardened. They had found the optimal way to do certain things. In tech, I still don't think we know what the optimal way is. In fact, it's changing again with the advent of AI. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Eugene:** The question is, how do you build a company? Who do you staff? People still have debates over whether you need product managers, or what product management is, or how engineers work with designers. It just tells you how immature tech is as a field. We've never come to a consensus, but imagine 50 or 60 years down the line. Maybe it will be more like filmmaking. **Jackson:** What could technologists learn from filmmakers or storytellers broadly? **Eugene:** There's probably something around story itself, story tropes, archetypes, and mythic archetypes. I always think there's some encoded wisdom because you've had the opportunity to push things out in the world for so long and you've had longer to see what's Lindy. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Eugene:** What genres stick around? ## [02:06:41] What Idea from a book would be most compelling to "transmute" into an audiovisual medium? **Jackson:** You have this amazing framing for why video and audio can be more effective for people than books: a book won't read itself, while these other mediums keep going. Obviously, we've kind of solved that with audiobooks. You've also praised video generally as a medium that should be taken seriously. Is there a book, text, or idea that you most wish could be turned into a compelling video so that it would be more shareable, viral, or known? **Eugene:** Wow. **Jackson:** Because as someone who loves video so much, you also obviously consume a lot. Both your writing, and you read a lot of books too. **Eugene:** Some amount of philosophy is very dense. Someone gave me some Heidegger at one point. I was really interested in some of the films that had been made from his ideas, like a lot of Terrence Malick films are about Heidegger. **Jackson:** Really? **Eugene:** But I found Heidegger so hard to read, just impossible. I find a lot of academic texts very difficult. Maybe with Gen AI, one thing we could do is treat a book as an executable file that can be compiled and generate things that just make it somewhat easier for more people to comprehend. This goes a little bit against the whole idea of friction, and maybe I need to just grapple and wrestle Heidegger to the mat, and that's the best way to really internalize his ideas. **Jackson:** I don't know if you haven't wrestled Heidegger. I don't know if many of us will. **Eugene:** When I watched *Badlands* by Malick, or *Tree of Life*--some of his great movies--they did help me understand some Heideggerian concepts in a way that weren't as evident when I read the text. So, philosophy is maybe one arena. ## [02:08:56] Bezos and Removing Friction **Jackson:** One of my favorite shorter pieces you wrote years ago is "Compress to Impress," talking about Bezos's mastery of precise language, and the way he obviously, most famously, uses "Day One," and how much is contextually inside of that. Are there any other Bezos-isms that you often come back to that you think are either just interesting examples or still useful? **Eugene:** There are probably a lot. One thing I think back on that amuses me now was just something he said that turned out to be really prophetic. It was at an all-hands meeting, and someone asked, "What's the thing that would most change the trajectory of Amazon's business?" This was in an era where my only computer at the time, my work computer, was a desktop. **Jackson:** Okay. **Eugene:** And then, eventually, some people had laptops, and you could bring it home to do work, but no smartphones or anything. And he said the thing that would most change our business is an instant-on computer where you hit the on button, and it's just on, reducing friction. **Jackson:** Our guy. Get rid of friction. **Eugene:** And that's essentially the thing I carry in my pocket all the time. **Jackson:** That's hysterical. **Eugene:** It's always on. And I just think that's funny because I don't think he saw that smartphones were coming. **Jackson:** It's like asking the customer, "Do you want a faster horse?" **Eugene:** Yeah. **Jackson:** But his instinct was right. **Eugene:** He's like--and this is, you have to remember, this is the era, like, I had a Windows computer at work, and you would boot it up and go make coffee and get breakfast. **Jackson:** Now I could vibe code a whole program. **Eugene:** And so he's just like, "Yeah, it's too much friction. People can't shop on Amazon at home." Most people didn't even want to turn on their work laptop. He's like, "People can't even shop on Amazon for, like, half the day." People were mostly shopping at Amazon from work because they had a computer that was already on. **Jackson:** He's a Terminator for just getting friction out of the way to buying. ## [02:11:09] Left Brain vs. Right Brain, Engineering Problems vs. Human Problems **Jackson:** Left brain, right brain: this obviously ties into the AI stuff we were talking about. You studied English and industrial engineering, like software and film. Where are you leaning: intuition versus hyper-rationality? How do you think about that balance? Trying to take in as many of the left-brain complex systems, algorithmic, "we can solve this with data and science and engineering and method," versus--again, maybe it's a redux of the human question. **Eugene:** It's striking to me how many of the top CEOs of the biggest companies in the world were neurodivergent. I really think it was a superpower in that era of tech because so many of the huge wins to be had were engineering problems. If I were to guess for the next decade or two, especially with AI starting to seep in and AI-assisted coding, maybe some of the biggest gains to be had will be different types of problems, not just raw engineering problems. Maybe some of them will be human problems. I think that's an area which tech, if you were to give them a report card, has been less than good at. It's a crazy question because my nephews ask me, and my friends who have kids ask, "What should my kids do now that AI is coming?" I was struck when I was in SF at how many people felt like they had a different vibe about them. I realized that what it was is I think a lot of them believed that AGI is just around the corner. And so there was a weird discounting of the present. They're just like, none of this matters. Once AGI comes, everything... Yeah, it's like, I don't even know if it's nihilism because it's just like, hey, like a lot of them are trying to make it happen. But it's a sense that once it happens, it's like an event horizon. What's happening in the near term is actually irrelevant once that happens. I can't see beyond that. But the one thing I know is humans are slow to change. Human nature is the most fixed thing that I've encountered in my life. This is why we can read, you know, the E.O. Wilson quote: "The chief problem of modernity is that we have godlike technology, medieval institutions, and Paleolithic emotions." It's one of his most iconic quotes. I always read that quote as a description of three cycles of change that operate on different time frames. Technology is constantly advancing. Whether we want AGI or not to come, the incentives will push it. Institutions move more slowly. We've complained a lot about the government in this podcast, but institutions have a kind of stasis and bureaucracy that's just hard to shift. But human nature? Human nature has been the same since the times of the Greeks to now. We can read a Greek tragedy and understand exactly why something happens. We can read a Shakespeare play and really understand Othello's jealousy, or Hamlet. I think human problems, and trying to tackle those, remains a solid, steady-state target. ## [02:15:07] Why Film is Meaningful and a Recommendation **Jackson:** My final question, maybe a tiny bit of that in the tail end, at least to the extent stories are reflective of it. You love films more than almost anyone I know. It's a two-parter. One, why is film as a medium so important to you and meaningful to you? And maybe more selfishly, is there a film that you think people today, or maybe more narrowly, people who've listened to and enjoyed this conversation, would find meaningful? **Eugene:** Film, when done well, occupies what I guess Lahan would call the symbolic realm. Things that really deal in raw imagery speak to things in a way that's very different from text. In some ways, it's probably more subconscious and powerful. The one that just comes to mind, since I mentioned it before, is *Tree of Life*, this movie by Malik that is crazy. It begins with parts that are set at the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang. There are parts with dinosaurs. Then it goes to his childhood in Texas. Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt play his parents. Later, in his adult life, he's played by Sean Penn, going through a kind of midlife crisis. Then it goes all the way into the afterlife. I think it's a movie that people who are struggling for meaning in their life today, which is a lot of people, will relate to on some visceral level. It's about Malik asking, "What is the meaning of life? What was the meaning of my life?" He's both a PhD in philosophy, who is into Heidegger, but is also a Catholic. He's asking, "What did all this mean? Is there some arc to the universe?" I think it's a good example of something that can only be told as a movie. I had a friend who I think had a chance to maybe be an editor on that film. He had read the script and said, "I don't even know what this is. This is incomprehensible." You think you read it on the page. I've since read the final working script and it's actually, I think, a great script to read. But certainly, once you watch the movie, you realize this is a very different way to express it, that doesn't come through entirely in text. **Jackson:** That's all I got. Thank you. This was wonderful. **Eugene:** Thanks. It was fun. **Jackson:** Before I leave you, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a rating and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. You can also find full transcripts on my website at jacksondahl.com/dialectic. Obviously, everything's linked in the description. If you have notes, feedback, or guest ideas, you can email me at [email protected]. See you next time.