7: Toby Shorin - The Shapes of Culture

Speaker A: Toby Shoren. We're live. How are you? Speaker B: I'm great. I'm great. Thank you, Jackson. Speaker A: It's really, this is, I, I was gonna say a long time coming, not a long time coming, but we had one head fake and it's very good to be here with you. Speaker B: I'm very happy that you're doing this, that you're here in San Francisco. It's delightful to see you as always. Speaker A: I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this interview. Uh, you are a prolific person.

You are certainly a prolific writer and I don't know if there are many people who have energized me with their ideas more in the last few years, uh, which is saying a lot. Speaker B: And thank you. Speaker A: But you are also, you, you have a very, very kind of wide aperture, um, on what you've written about. And one of the things we'll get to is I think you notably had a pretty clear shift in the topics of your ideas pretty recently, the last couple years. And so with that all in mind, I'd like to kind of COVID a through line or a theme that I think has maybe been an arc of your writing and ideas publicly.

Certainly not holistic. There are lots of different ways we can take this, and I'm sure we'll talk about some of your other ideas in more specificity in the future. But for today's sake, I think it's safe to say you're a cultural anthropologist. Uh, and specifically one for the internet era and maybe one core through line is that you've interrogated sources of meaning and sources of morality and how as the pendulum swings, that changes for people today. And so the through line for me that really stood out as I was rereading much of your writing and some of your newer stuff was the shift between individualism and collectivism and the ways that we make meaning as individuals.

And then the ways that we make meaning as parts of collectives or people seeking something bigger than ourselves. And I think I would've initially said until some of your more recent writing that it was just kind of a clear shot from individual to collective. But now my observation at least has been that you've started to move back and forth between individual and collective in interesting ways. Speaker B: Interesting. I, I'm already very, uh, pleased with this theme and I want to know how you, where you see that. Like I might learn something new about my own thinking today and I feel like I already am.

Cool. Speaker A: Well, we're gonna do a little bit of, of kind of going through history. The first place to start, and I think maybe the first piece of writing at least that I read of yours and that I, I think was really notable. Is when you started to interrogate and investigate authenticity. This is around 2018. You wrote a couple of pieces on it specifically, and there was a, a line in, in one of your pieces on authenticity, which really was a commentary on the death of authenticity, the post-2010s sort of era of hipsterism and millennials wanting to be their own person and not be defined by some kind of collective societal idea, there's a line in there where you reference the Romantic movement.

And so I'll read that back to you. The origin of the modern authenticity drive is the 19th century Romantic movement. The Romantics thought intensely felt emotion was at the heart of beauty, and therefore they valued the individual experience above all else. They rejected universal ethical frameworks and considered individual expression and the development of a unique self to be ethically valuable. And so I think it's clear that you were in some ways right about your observations on authenticity when you wrote that in 2018. I think it's only become more true, but I'm curious, maybe with the hindsight around it, what you think the Romantics got right, what you think they got wrong, and could we even see a backswing back towards authenticity?

Speaker B: Wow. Amazing, amazing question. Amazing question. Um, yeah, so I, I think when I wrote that, I actually really had not done enough background research on that yet. I actually really had no idea what I was talking about, but I kind of got it directionally. But now, um, I've been reading a lot more about romanticism. I even have this book here. The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis. Wow. And, um, I have been reading, um, more romantic poets. I read Faust this year. I read some Shelley, uh, I read some Blake, and I have come to a bigger appreciation of how the Romanticists were, or the Romantics, what's now called the Romantic movement.

These writers and thinkers were trying to solve the same kinds of questions that people have today. Anyone who, um, responds to the idea that we, um, are too rational, um, that, that science has given us a lot, um, but it has somehow divested the world of meaning are people who say those things are basically rehashing the romantic critique of of the Enlightenment. The Romantics were very direct in their appraisal of that, and they were super clear about what they were doing. They were saying, we need to create a secularized, naturalized faith alternative, and they basically based it on a naturalized version of the fall from grace narrative.

Speaker A: Hmm. Speaker B: Um, we, once had this like perfect harmony with nature and, uh, we were, we were living in a, in our fully enchanted world, but along came science and like disenchanted it. Um, and here, here's where we arrive, Misen Shin, in this fallen state. Mm. Now how do we get back to nature? How do we get back to that, um, sense of ourself and our role in the cosmos? Well, we can do that through our sentiments, our feelings of contact with nature and the, the powerful emotions that they give us, that sense of awe and, um, the sublime.

Um, and we can do that through art. And art is where like human creativity comes in contact with this. They didn't really use the idea of the unconscious back then, but comes in contact with the unconscious natural mind and, um, synthesizes new, uh, syn— synthesizes his ideas, like reason and nature into a kind of synthetic whole. As you can see, Romanticism is still very much alive today in art movements. And when we, when we valorize artists, when we valorize Kanye, when we, um, talk about the creator economy and like being an, an artist being good in any sense, like we are living inside one of those like romantic worldviews.

Um, when we talk about individuation in a, in a psychological sense, the Jungian sense, Um, we're inside one of those kind of romantic narratives and yeah, although in the, in that piece I kind of spoke about like leaving that ironic framing of, of individualism, that like heavily authenticity-focused thing. I think I've come to a much bigger appreciation of the way that those romantic narratives still really structure our beliefs and behaviors. And, um, will definitely be with us for, for a long time. Hmm. Yeah. Speaker A: It's funny how much of that first part of that sounds like the narratives today.

Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly. It's very humbling. I don't know if it's a pendulum. Speaker A: I was, it's funny. My last interview, I was talking to Chris Pack about his like pendulum theory of culture. And I'm not sure that it's a pendulum, if it's a pendulum or a cycle, but it's definitely one of the two. The repeat, the repetition is happening. Speaker B: I kind of think they happen. All at the same time. Mm-hmm. Like there is, it's almost like the Pace-Slayer diagram where there is a swing back and forth between sincerity and irony perhaps.

But then on a deeper cycle, there are these long-term versions of romantic narratives or, or, uh, progress narratives or, or what have you that draw from these super deep aquifers of moral sources. Mm-hmm. And those come in and out of fashion, but draw on that, the same sensibilities in a way. Speaker A: So it's, say, do you think it's, am I, am I right to assume that the romantic ideal is very much about the, uh, at least idyllic sense that we are all truly unique and there's something, there's something morally, ethically, maybe even spiritually profound in the individual.

Speaker B: Yeah. The, the basic romantic problem or the basic spiritual problem for the Romantics is that we have become alienated from ourselves, from society, from nature. And the spiritual solution is to, uh, develop a felt sense of our place in the cosmos, in our society, and in ourselves. So that could happen through, in many ways. It can happen through like the cultivation of the individual, um, to become like a unique self and understand one's role in, in the secular world. It can come through spiritual cultivation of mystical states. It could come through psychological in emotional development and understanding one's life in a kind of narrative sensibility.

It can come through, yeah, becoming a unique, like creative artist. This is very close to the, you know, the, the vision that people had in the, uh, the original Romantics had of the, the role of the artist in society is like kind of leading the way and synthesizing the ideas and the zeitgeist into, into like the, the spiritual direction for man or something. But yeah, in, in every case. The individual person is the, the kind of locus for what could then maybe become a social change, but it's, it is a little bit more focused on, on the individual as like the fundamental unit.

Hmm. Speaker A: Okay. We'll come back to individuality, but the next place I want to go, one of your most famous collaborations in, in Forms of Language that was created was the idea of Squad Wealth, a famous essay. And to me, it seems like an interesting place to go from the individual because it's sort of the seed of something more collective that's still small and not, we'll, we'll go to, to scaled collectivity soon. But one of my favorite kind of, I just took a short excerpt that I think gets it, it, it, it may be the shift away from the post-authenticity and why squads were so powerful as an idea then in 2020, I think when you wrote this, squads are woke to the empty neoliberal promises of big economy employment and parasocial personal brands.

Squads value self-determination, not through individualism, but through collective maintenance and care for one another. Squads value creative expression, but celebrate the group rather than the individual authorship. For the squad, the autonomous is always collective. For those who haven't read this essay, by the way, it's just, it's just, it's such a banger. Like you, you have some great work, but this one is almost like slam poetry or something. Speaker B: It's just, it's crazy to hear that read back. Speaker A: Only 5 years. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Do you still believe in the power of the squad?

Speaker B: 100%. The squad is with us right now. Squad energy is, is in the room. It really flows through my veins, honestly. First of all, the squad that I wrote this with, we are still meeting weekly. The, the people who this like Man, like this, this doing this piece like really galvanized like the other internet. It was an inflection point for other internet because it really solidified like the us-ness of it. And those are still people who I'm talking with, who I'm collaborating with all the time. Those ties are really close.

And if you look on Twitter and search the term Squad Wealth, you still see people are mentioned. You are still seeing people mention it and discovering it and feeling just as galvanized as they were when it came out, even though that cultural moment of it being, you know, DeFi summer and, you know, Wagmi and bags go up and stuff is long over. And I think that's 'cause it is somehow the, the underlying dim, dim moral dimension of it is still on point. Like people are still trying to get out of that paradigm.

Like they're still trying to find a form of communion and collectivity that like feels right, that feels good. Speaker A: Yeah, there's something, one of the things you guys do a great job of, I've always said that like the best form of social media is the group text. And there is some sense that there are almost 3 types of ways that people organize online. There is the individual moving through the web. There is the, all of these bigger movements and places and, um, niche communities and things. And then there's the sort of, to go back to individual and collective, there's the sort of individual.

Uh, it's still atomic, but it is the atomic collective maybe might be a way to think about it. Speaker B: Interesting. Speaker A: Um, and there's still clearly so much desire for that. Yeah, it is a, it is a, it is a sense of being part of a collective that can still move quickly, like do the types of things that an individual can and is still sort of associated with maybe, maybe one way to think about it is the the type of identity a collective can have is usually pretty amorphous, but with a squad, it can be really refined.

Speaker B: Yeah, it can be really personal. And yeah, I guess you're, you're pointing out something that it's almost like the, the, you know, the, the scrappy startup appeal is also, it's also possible to have that in just like the friends who are scheming shit together form. And yeah, I mean, just people are almost having to scheme more than ever. That was what something that was alive when we wrote that as well, because the pandemic forced people to collectivize in those kind of pod-like ways and really hash out their shit, define their formal boundaries.

Like, are you quarantining with X rules or Y rules? But I, I think because of the economic situation today, that is just as true. Speaker A: As ever, got people out here plotting and what is, yeah, just for con people's context who are less familiar with you, what is, was, will be Other Internet? Speaker B: Other Internet was a, and is, and, and will be a research collective. Um, a group chat that uses the dilapidated software Keybase acquired by Zoom. Uh, a group chat that. Eventually started, you know, working for crypto protocols.

Where, where to start? Like publishing, publishing influential essays in, in the crypto world, going on squad retreats, getting big grants and traveling around to different parts of, just making waves in different parts of the social world, in the art world economy, in the, in the world of academic people who write about blockchains in the blockchain world itself, in the people who aspire to use DAOs and regenerative economics for good. Other Internet kind of held together all of those different parties. Like everyone could agree that Other Internet was like kind of on, onto something, onto a way of using crypto that, that would better the world.

And Yeah, it was a whole moment. Speaker A: I think when I met you, I asked, is Other Internet a friend group, a blog, a DAO? And I think you said something along the lines of yes. Speaker A: I think when I met you, I asked, is Other Internet a friend group, a blog, a DAO? And I think you said something along the lines of yes. Speaker B: Yes, yes, exactly. Soon Other Internet will be a book. Actually, we are doing an anthology of our collected writings that will have not just all of the the famous pieces, but all sorts of like unpublished material too, and like lesser known deep cuts and some interviews with our friends and people who were in and around that.

Nadia's in it. Kia wrote the introduction, and it's been really interesting to reflect on that, that whole era. Now that we're kind of out of that era and transitioning into another era, like what is the meaning of that organization and why did it capture the energy in the way it did? And what narratives were alive at that time. We're all, it's been a process of like working through our own like emotional journey through, through that, those times. Yeah. Speaker A: Putting it together. In some sense, maybe reckoning with what it means to have been an individual part of that kind of atomic collective a little bit.

Speaker B: 100%. Speaker A: I, I think this was a good, I, I really wanted to hit on, on Squads cuz I think it's an interesting pit stop between the kind of extreme end of the individual and the how, how wide can you take the collective all the way to things like movements. Just before we move on, has anything materially changed since you guys wrote that piece that where it either feels the world has changed or what it, uh, the, the role for a squad has changed, or do you think it's as evergreen as it ever was?

Speaker B: I guess one difference is that, that, that piece came at a kind of transition moment where like high Twitter was just starting to break down and devolve and, or it already had been breaking down and devolving, but it hadn't really devolved to its current point. And now the default is private groups in a way. Mm-hmm. Um, now. Everything is inside to some sort of WhatsApp group or Telegram group or Discord group. And that was starting to be true at the time, but it's fully true now. And not all of those things are Squads, like they are CozyWeb or Parlor spaces.

Speaker A: Hmm. Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not really sure what has meaningfully changed though, like it still feels like a group chat of like aligned and motivated people is still kind of like the basic unit of getting shit done right now. Speaker A: And yeah, it's powerful and very internet native thing too. Speaker B: Definitely. Speaker A: All right. Going wider, you have written about a few different ways new types of collectivism might show up, including actually before Squad Wealth with a piece called Headless Brands. But I think maybe the most iconic piece you wrote during this era of your life, I think a lot of people would say, is this, uh, piece, Life After Lifestyle.

And in that essay, you and Toc, you reflected on this world where we watched authenticity die out, people align around the idea of brands and wanting to be a part of something by way of brand, and frankly, an evolution towards Brands maybe even being something bigger than what they seem like they could be in the early 2010s. Effectively, you proposed a world where people could buy into something bigger than them, even if it meant literally buying. There's a couple of excerpts I want to read and then we can talk about it.

First, you say, if people could unironically like brands now, maybe in the near future, they would be comfortable opting into a culture premised on collectivity rather than individualism. Perhaps they would be okay letting someone convince them of what is good, of what a right way of life is. Perhaps they would no longer feel the urge to become unique. Perhaps they would find home and belonging in sameness, or even, I thought, faith. Obviously some contrast to the romantic ideas there. And then you go on to say, the realization that producing culture is about producing types of personhood.

Is the central issue of this new cultural economy. Systems of belief are sticky, compelling. Culture can be generational. This is both the opportunity and the risk. And I think in some ways, Life After Lifestyle and the way you talked about it then was a little bit of a cliffhanger for where we might be going. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Speaker A: There is an extreme contrast to this moral source in the vein of what we talked about with Romanticism. And this idea that every person is going to find their own direct source of meaning.

Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: What does it feel like, maybe even just a couple years removed, I think, and we'll, we'll talk more about it, but you're, you're talking about teetering on something between the secular and the sacred, perhaps this notion that actually collectives, that brands, that companies, that movements might actually shape people more than people might shape themselves. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: Does it feel like you nailed something as it was beginning to happen? Does it feel actually that the chessboard has changed? Speaker B: Everything is playing out exactly as I imagined, uh, basically.

I think if you, you know, just look at, look at what Bryan Johnson is doing, you can see quite clearly that people are very comfortable having people tell them what to do and how to, how to believe. And how to be. That's not the only example. It's just the one with the most obvious cult leader. Speaker A: And, um, is Bryan Johnson a cult leader? Speaker B: I'm comfortable saying that he is. Yeah, I think he would be too. So I don't have any issues saying that. I should, before going further, like I should specify that, or, or maybe clarify that, um, like romanticist religions do exist, like psychology, like the, like the psychological worldview, uh, for instance, could be considered a secularized romanticist faith system.

Romanticism doesn't necessarily mean everyone decides their values for themself, like that would be existentialism or some kind of Nietzschean version of romanticism. But it's not that, like, how is it that you can have, you know, individualism celebrated and everyone like wants to be a creator or everyone wants to be an artist. Like that's how that works is that's, um, it, it doesn't necessarily mean there's total diversity in terms of beliefs. Like people share these cultural coordinates. So I thought that was worth clarifying. Speaker B: I'm comfortable saying that he is.

Yeah, I think he would be too. So I don't have any issues saying that. I should, before going further, like I should specify that, or, or maybe clarify that, um, like romanticist religions do exist, like psychology, like the, like the psychological worldview, uh, for instance, could be considered a secularized romanticist faith system. Romanticism doesn't necessarily mean everyone decides their values for themself, like that would be existentialism or some kind of Nietzschean version of romanticism. But it's not that, like, how is it that you can have, you know, individualism celebrated and everyone like wants to be a creator or everyone wants to be an artist.

Like that's how that works is that's, um, it, it doesn't necessarily mean there's total diversity in terms of beliefs. Like people share these cultural coordinates. So I thought that was worth clarifying. Speaker A: But, um, let's, let's get back to where, what you are I'll skip slightly ahead and then maybe we can, we can circle the whole, the whole idea, but you go on to point at something that along the secular, secular to sacred point, like is more explicitly pointing at something like a new religion. Yeah. You called Bryan Johnson cult leader.

There, there are two ideas here. One, you say a great example of this, I think from, from back then you say EA or effective altruism, like Bitcoin and Ethereum is a sort of headless brand because it is a philanthropic approach. It attracts wealth by design. Its network effects are growing. With its focus on existential AI risk as a chief cause area, EA even has an eschatology, a theory of the end of the world. As far as newly designed cultures go, EA is the closest thing we have to a new religion.

And then finally, I have occasionally been asked why I'm obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are the thing— are things made out of belief. They are amorphous meanings that structure our relationships. They are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the ingredients for social transformation, not to say upheaval, are in place. We are transitioning out of the era of lifestyle and into an era where the production of culture is valued both subjectively and financially on its own terms.

From an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs. Part of my initial question, frankly, like, has this happened? How, as, as you expected it would, it seems to be your, your view seems to be absolutely in full force. Maybe one way to take this would be how should we look at what's happening in front of us? And then maybe one critique I would have or question I would have for you is as much as you are a brand person, and I think your interrogation of brands is really fascinating.

I could say that it's actually been far less about brands and been far more about people. But put another way, our collectivism is organizing under heroes, under generals. We're the armies, whether it's Brian Johnson or, or, or pick your favorite person. We are turning into, we are developing new religions, new cult, but it's organized around glorious leaders. Speaker B: Yeah. Well, okay. Yeah. A lot to, a lot to dig into there. Wow. So first of all, I, I think that everyone likes to talk about how, um, people in, in the, the, you know, the tech or brand world like to name things after economies, right?

You know, we have the direct-to-consumer economy or the, the cultural economy, the, the AI economy. Well, I think we're entering the sophistry economy. Speaker A: Also the economy economy. Speaker B: Yeah, there's the economy economy. But I, yeah, I think we're fully entering into the sophistry economy. Speaker A: What does that mean? Speaker B: I don't know that term. You know, sophist is like a fake philosopher who, um, you know, leads you, leads you down the happy path into a ridiculous lifestyle perhaps. Um, and deceives you with rhetoric. You know, Socrates beat these guys up every day, uh, dialectically in the, in the agora.

We need Socrates to come and, and show these, show these motherfuckers up. But the, yeah, that's, um, I think it's part of the effect of the media environment that like the, the power laws work in such favor of aggregating that kind of attention and like aggregating attention can so easily be shifted into other types of capital these days that there is a great power to organizing around these, these generals or these, you know, fiefdom owners. Venkat called it like the internet of beefs and I, I liked that. So yeah, people, people marshal these ideas, they, and they represent these ideas and they do like move large cultural contingents.

I think when I wrote this, I was more in the mindset of, I think where a lot of people are, which was like convinced like, oh, there's gonna be like this big new sort of religion in our lifetime. And, um, capital R religion, capital R religion. I, I, I've more thought that I, I had made a prediction like with the other internet crew that there would be a kind of savior figure type new kind of prophet figure to show up. And hey, maybe Bryan Johnson counts if his cultural impact grows and that prediction's right.

But I think it's more that now that I've been engaging with a lot of this older material, I have, and just reading about cycles of history in general, I more believe that these changes will take like 200 or 300 years to play out in the fullest possible way. Wow. And that like the seeds of whatever new faith there may be are really just taking shape now. They're really just starting to sprout or even get planted now. And that doesn't mean there won't be interesting changes in our lifetime, and there will be a role for people who can synthesize the different kinds of cultural systems that have that potential to become a new kind of faith system.

But those changes will probably be pretty nascent while we are still alive. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. Speaker A: The, the, another way to put it might be that like one could have read Life After Lifestyle as the very, very kind of initial seed of how to start a new religion. And maybe that's still true, but we're used to everything happening on 5, 10-year time horizons and these things tend to not. Speaker B: I do think that this, things have sped up and like culture moves a lot faster, so things might move faster, but I also think it takes a long time for long-term cultural developments to play out.

And there might need to be other big motivating factors, like a more real societal collapse, for instance. Speaker A: Do great headless brands require a glorious individual at the beginning? Almost paradoxically combining the individual and the collective. Speaker B: They potentially do. I think they potentially do. Speaker A: Is Bitcoin? Yes. Ethereum, probably to some degree. Speaker B: Mormonism. Speaker A: Mormonism. Effective altruism. I'm not so sure. Eliezer? Speaker B: Yeah. Well, effective altruism, Eliezer kind of came in a while after and there was already this kind of effective charity movement.

So that's just like a weird mashup, but I'm pretty sure that like that will be going after he dies. It's, it seems probably true that there needs to be some kind of strong founder figure. And, and I think where I'm at with headless brands these days is like that. It's, it's more of like an illustrative tool that like shows some of the dynamics of like the cultural economy these days, as opposed to like a thing that people can go out and build. Like, I think what we more described is more like a phenomenon as opposed to like an entity that you can go and create yourself.

Speaker A: Totally. Which is the primary way I think people misinterpret it. Speaker B: A lot of people did misinterpret it that way. Speaker A: Yeah. Is it where, where does just like the lowercase b capitalism brand sit today in 2025? Is it over for brands? Speaker B: Well, I would say that the, I, I'm hesitant to talk about this too much 'cause I don't really want to be perceived as a brand person these days. But like, I will say that I think that the, the power is shifting more to the retailer.

If you look at like consumer goods, you can see that with Run Clubs where like The retailer is the facilitator of practices, and that's something else I've talked about in Life After Lifestyle and my more recent FBB Fest talk, Body Futurism, is like the shift to practices because the retailer can facilitate the run clubs or the chess clubs or, or whatever it may be. Like they aggregate cultural power and so they can basically broker between the brand and the consumer. So the brand has actually. Lost some power there, but that's, that's fine.

Um, because other entities like serve the role of facilitating that the practice of the lifestyle. Hmm. Speaker A: We're at an interesting point here in this arc. Okay. So in my view, at least as long as I've known you and a lot of the kind of notable writing you've been doing, there's sort of this interesting shift and there's the life after, up to Life After Lifestyle. And then there's Afterlife After Lifestyle. Some things started to change. You've been doing different things. And so I want to interrogate that a little bit and understand maybe is there, is this, is there a pattern here?

Is it a total shift? Clearly you weren't totally satisfied with the conclusions you had gotten to with Life After Lifestyle. And you even say at parts in the piece, like brands aren't taking it far enough. Granted, that's not for you, brand marketing person. There's, there's, there's, there's one line where you say, but I keep ending up in room with people who want to seed new isms into the world. And then you go on to say, I find myself encouraging people to stay away from being meta. As enthusiastic as I am about tech wealth pouring into cultural initiatives, the regranting programs that are now so popular are just like software platforms.

They outsource your own agency to some imagined future actors. I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they'd like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? And then finally, I won't pull punches. Tech founders and D2C brand builders are not yet prepared to operate communities that are first and foremost spaces of moral influence. And so in some sense, at least what I'm reading here is you're sort of telling the world what maybe should happen or is going to happen, but you're also saying, frankly, the world I've been in and maybe my audience might not be the group to take us there.

Speaker B: Exactly. Speaker A: So you go off, maybe I, to me at least, my read was that you went off alone a little bit, especially as someone who had been so richly a part of a texture of other internet in a certain community and often crypto communities. And I'm curious specifically before we get into the weeds of where you've actually gone, what, what was the rabbit that sort of took you down the new hole? How did this begin? Maybe it was cynicism coming out of Life After Lifestyle, maybe it was cynicism around crypto, maybe it was just seeing that this might actually come not from technology and capitalism or, or the worlds you had been in.

Speaker B: Yeah, there were a lot of influences pushing me in the direction that I ended up going. And I think one of the biggest, one of the biggest influences is my buddy Aaron Z. Lewis. Who, uh, I've talked about this stuff with him more than anyone else in the world. And he's, he's been my closest thought partner. He was, he, he I think saw the, that everything, it was a kind of faith and, and he really analyzed the techno religion before I understood it. And I'm still learning to see the way that he sees.

And the way that he is, the way that he is with his community in Washington, DC, where he runs a community garden and like does all the stuff that I'm talking about, but in an extremely local way without like control, without like dominating people, like just purely in the ethos of service. Like that is one thing that really helped me see. What I want things to feel like. So that is something that has like always been some, it's, it's always been on my mind and always part of our conversation was how to get people out of this like disembodied digital space and like into their physical world, into their physical communities and like into service there.

And, and I could see that very clearly because people would approach Other Internet often, especially at the peak of our crypto influence, asking us, asking me, how do I do this? Like, how do I do the stuff that you're talking about? Like they saw the moral imperative, like that was, they felt it, they could see that through line in the work and they wanted to know how to do it. And it was just very clear. There wasn't a good social vehicle for those people. There wasn't a good social forum for those people to like give in the way that they wanted to give to, you know, use technology in, in service of like what is in front of them basically.

So that trying to figure out what is, what is the form, what are, what is the format for people to do that has been a question that's been with me for, for a while. Then after I published Life After Lifestyle, like one of the other like missing pieces came into the picture, which was all of these health and wellness founders started reaching out to me. That normally happens when I write something is like a lot of people come out of the woodwork and I learn something new. But all these health and wellness founders started reaching out to me like, uh, Robbie Bent from Othership.

He was like, that's exactly what we're doing. Hmm. And I understood then that part of where these new potential faith systems would come from, part of where their spark was happening was more around health practices, mental health beliefs, wellness communities. I could see that those things were be— because of the same kinds of cultural formation dynamics that I described. In the past around aesthetics or lifestyles or what have you, those same media environments were giving rise to many movements around these health and wellness practices. And so it became really clear, oh, like the, the acculturation, like the, the cultural dimensions that like almost automatically want to get built onto any one of these memetic movements that's happening for these actual practices too.

And these, these practices and the communities forming around them, that's where this life after lifestyle thesis is playing out in the most robust way. Speaker A: Why do they have a stronger moral core than an e-commerce brand? It's a little bit of a facetious question, but yeah. Speaker B: Well, for, for one, when, when the basis is a practice, you can fulfill the moral premise in a way that the brand could never fulfill for you. That's, this gets back to what I was saying about how the retailer, when the retailer like has more power in the brand ecosystem now because the brand doesn't actually fulfill this practice by selling you a shoe, but the retailer who runs a run club on the side of Nike versus, uh, an actual run club.

Yeah, exactly. An actual run club or like USAL in LA is like a store that's doing this. Yeah. Because they can facilitate that. Like they can, the premise, the, the moral premise of, you know, being outside, being active, being in nature and like using your body in nature or whatever it may be. And the fulfillment that comes from that, it can actually be satisfied. So, and, and that's just a trite example. Like there are many other practices from like somatic trauma healing stuff that absolutely has a moral orientation to it, which we can get into, to more directly spiritually coded stuff, whether that is like the more spiritual versions of yoga, Kundalini yoga perhaps, or Transcendental Meditation or, or, or breathwork, whatever it is, the, these practices, even when they've been completely secularized or stripped from their original faith conditions, they contain a kind of, they're doing something with your body and they contain a, a kind of grain to them that is not, it's not fully moral by itself, but like it really can be when you like add in the discursive element and like bring back in the elements of, of ritual and so forth.

Hmm. That's even without like having them attached to their original faith system, which, yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. Where it gets fuzzy, but it, mm-hmm. Speaker B: So, okay. Speaker A: So you've, you've led me right here. You, I'm sure I'm skipping some steps, but one of the core places you got to in your new discovery as you went down this path was an emphasis on the body. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And you gave a talk. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Two years after Life After Lifestyle this past year. Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: In Idlewild at FJV on body futurism. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: And to me, this feels very much like a return, at least at first, to individualism. You've come back down out of the collective. A couple of ideas that were, you discussed in this talk, and if people are curious, I would recommend that they watch it. But you say first and foremost, a return to the body as the basic political unit. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: Um, which has obviously individualism. Implied inside of it, but then you go on to say, tired political bodies, geriatric institutional bodies, abstracted social media bodies decompose into physical individual bodies.

Bodies are the foundation of what is real and of relationships to one another. It is the phenomenological experience of institutions as defective, domineering, and extractive that drives one back to what one can control. And so it, it's, it's obviously quite different. In texture that to the romantic individualism we were talking about. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: But yet we have like a pretty dramatically individual idea here, at least, um, an individual foundation. Is that right? Speaker B: Hmm. Yeah. So in the same way, goodness. So Body Futurism is not one of my more analytical pieces.

It's more like Squad Wealth type of piece. Where I'm preaching a bit. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: But yet we have like a pretty dramatically individual idea here, at least, um, an individual foundation. Is that right? Speaker B: Hmm. Yeah. So in the same way, goodness. So Body Futurism is not one of my more analytical pieces. It's more like Squad Wealth type of piece. Where I'm preaching a bit. Speaker A: Absolutely. You're, you're, I, I noticed this watching the two talks, by the way, Life After Lifestyle. I mean, obviously I think maybe you were more mature as a speaker, but is much more kind of like reading.

You gave this in a, um, pastoral way, I would say. Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah. And, um, if I get too, uh, youth pastor-y in, in here, like, please tell me to calm down. But when I, when I'm speaking in that mode, like I'm kind of, I'm not just, uh, commenting on the moral sources, I'm inside them. I'm being in them, I'm living them, and I'm like trying to DJ them a bit and promote them. So how do I talk about this in a way that is that? 'Cause I kind of want to do that now.

When you get back to the body, like there, there is something true about the romantic ethos here, which is that there is something, uh, true about the world and about ourselves that we can learn from getting really into our bodies and becoming, uh, uh, highly attuned to the fine emotional, physiological, phenomenal sensations that we have. And when we do that and get really good at it, whole arenas of wisdom and agency and, and capability open up. And I, but I also think that there is something potentially new that is not just romanticism here, and I'm not sure what it is yet, but that is a big hunch that I have about the future of, the future of spirituality in our culture.

There's also the, the political dimension of this, which I, I think was pretty confused in the talk, or it was, I got the feedback that it was easily misunderstood. And so it might be worth kind of explaining that a little bit more. Yeah. Speaker A: I mean, I'm curious on both of those two things you just said. Yeah. What, what at least a, can you give us a hint of what that hunch might be? Speaker B: And two, yes. Speaker A: Yeah. What is, In fact, the political side. Speaker B: Okay.

So the spiritual hunch comes from this realization that each of these big moral sources, which is attached to a major like cultural movement or many cultural movements, there is a kind of, um, almost there is a physiological sensibility at the core to it. A big one for Western culture is the will. And that is what this philosopher Oswald Spengler, who wrote about this, calls the passion for the third dimension. It's like, oh, we're not just in 2D space, we're in 3D, we're going off into infinity. And this is the, this is the physiological sensation that inspires the, uh, Baroque crenulations on like Gothic cathedrals and Rococo and stuff.

And also the, um, The, the striving of our culture, the, you know, Muskian, like we can go to space literally, but also just that entrepreneurial striving and never being satisfied with what is. Speaker A: The transformation of beyond the status quo. Is that, or to— Speaker B: going, going beyond Nietzsche was doing this too. Mm-hmm. Um, but like, yeah, going beyond that movement in general, that's a kind of physiological orientation and it's sort of distinctly human compared to animal idea in some sense, maybe. Speaker A: The transformation of beyond the status quo.

Is that, or to— Speaker B: going, going beyond Nietzsche was doing this too. Mm-hmm. Um, but like, yeah, going beyond that movement in general, that's a kind of physiological orientation and it's sort of distinctly human compared to animal idea in some sense, maybe. Speaker A: Is that, is that inside the thing? Like part of what I feel like I'm hearing is that the thing that makes humans so unique is our desire to almost change ourselves. That would be, or go beyond ourselves. Speaker B: I think go, going beyond ourselves is like part of it.

I don't think this is necessarily comparison to animals, like different cultural movements or contingents or, or civilizations like have their own kind of physiological sensations at the core of it that are like really related to what they are and what they become. And the, the question is with this new, with the, with the new stuff is like, what is the, what is the kind of sensation at the core that like may become the seed of the next culture? And I think we have to get really embodied. I want to motivate people to get really embodied to like accelerate that process and find it and figure out what it is.

But I think there is something different than the Faustian striving, uh, the, the will, the culture of the will in all this like California culture. There's something, something about psychedelics, something about, um, polyamory, in fact, something about dissolving boundaries or like the movement of merger that is there's something there, and this is just a hypothesis that I have. I would already want to warn away the people who, um, are, who think that you can turn like authentic relating practices or circling into like a religious system. Those people out there and like if they're listening to this, they, they know who they are.

That's wrong. But that the whole, the, the whole thing about like California art movements being all about like perceptual art and like these immersive art spaces and like the immersive performances and stuff like, or, or James Turrell, uh, art being so popular these days. I think there's something about like the dissolution of boundaries and the psychedelic experience that is very, that will have something to do with the new culture that the new faith system that emerges out of, out of all of this. It's just a hunch and I, I, as you can see, I don't have a lot of good words for it.

Yeah. Speaker A: Is, is, is Bryan Johnson a body-oriented version of The Will? Speaker B: Yes. Yes, he is. Bryan Johnson is, is part of Faustian culture and he himself is like trying to do Nietzsche for today. Very clearly he's trying to, he, he's doing the Nietzsche playbook. He, he like lays out the table of values and he's like, we're gonna overturn this. You think that it's okay to die? Well, I don't think that, and I'm going to be a moral innovator and flip that over. Speaker A: Right. He's, he's, he's taking the pattern that has historically been done, but he's doing it from a new starting point.

The body, you even say, I think at one point in that talk, like, oh yeah, here it is. The body is replacing technology as the site of utopian imaginaries, but that is very much encoded in the will. Yeah. And so you're pointing at another separate thing that originates, originates in the body, but might go somewhere else. Speaker B: Yes. Yes. Thank you for pointing out the different levels here. Like there is a zeitgeist turned towards the body that I think is gonna maybe be like a 20, 30-year zeitgeist cycle or pendulum swing or whatever you wanna call it.

But yeah, yeah, back to the pendulum swing. There, there is a temporary zeitgeist there, but, and in that zeitgeist, the grounds will be laid for much bigger things to happen in the same way that when there was a body-oriented zeitgeist in the '60s and '70s with the hippies and Esalen got started, like that laid the seeds for what's happening now. And whatever's happening now will lay the seeds for some, some future thing. This 200, 300-year timeline I think is just still getting started, just still figuring out what it is. Will it be some sort of synthesis of the Pan-Americas indigenous, like plant medicine syncretic thing that's emerging?

I'm not sure. Will it be some other actual use of psychedelics, like being merged with CBT in the clinic? Like I'm not sure. Probably yes and to all of the above, but it's not really clear what that will be yet. That is one of the big things that I wanna figure out. And I wanna also figure out what's distinct about what's happening now from the '60s and '70s. I'm not super literate about that era, but like that's something I wanna know. And this is where this whole project I'm on, like does kind of border on like comparative religious studies type of stuff.

Speaker A: But, um, right. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: In some sense, one pattern I've seen is that you have identified shifts around the ways that individuals are feeling and their desire to tap into something more collective as a result. And so in some sense, I'm seeing a, I might be forcing this a little bit, but I saw a little bit of a pattern around the post-authenticity fallout cynicism in the first half of the 2010s into so many of the ideas around proto-religions, techno momentum and missions and, and ideas like that.

Uh, headless brands, crypto, AI, whatever. And maybe now we're, we're seeing like the, I'm, I'm trying to put words around the Bryan Johnson thing's clear. Longevity, or let's, let's not overfocus. Just longevity seems pretty clear. And you're perhaps pointing it and saying, hey, longevity is one way this new body, body-oriented individualism will go collective. Yeah. But there might be other ones too, and those are hazy, but we're starting to see them show up. Speaker B: Yeah, there totally are. Another one is the cultural complex around generational trauma, trauma healing, ancestral trauma, and like the, it, it also operates in this kind of like decolonial cultural coordinates.

Like there's also something big and body-focused happening there. That might be the future of the left. Hmm. Speaker A: Hmm. But if you, if you distill it all down again, the difference from 10 years ago, 15 years ago is the arbiter of truth here is not what the mind feels or thinks, but what the body feels. Speaker A: Hmm. But if you, if you distill it all down again, the difference from 10 years ago, 15 years ago is the arbiter of truth here is not what the mind feels or thinks, but what the body feels.

Speaker B: Ooh, potentially. Uh, oh, I'm not sure I would say that because that, that, that might get even more complicated. Okay. I, I would say that a big difference from like 10 or 15 years ago is the, the whole reason that I think I got down this route starting from authenticity perspective is leaving alone the pendulum swing. Like there is a deeper sense of individualism that like is tied to people's identity that I think that they are increasingly willing to give up in order to be told what's the right way to live the good life.

That is how— Speaker A: that is inside of everything we've discussed. Speaker B: That's inside of everything that we've been discussing. And, but then like body versus mind is actually going to be one of the cultural battlegrounds I'd expect of the next decade where I think, you know, I've been reading about Neoplatonism and like, uh, getting more, um, sharp about metaphysics because I think metaphysics is going to be in the zeitgeist in a big way and it will be important for people to have just as it was important for people to have a take on, you know, Curtis Yarvin or, you know, Bronze Age Pervert or, or, or whatever these like highly online cultural figures over the last decade.

I think now it's gonna be important for people to have consistent positions about whether they're idealists, whether they're dualists, whether they're interaction dualists, whether they're like complete materialists. And, and some of the body-focused developments that are happening in science, especially in the intersection of science and like Buddhist theory of mind are, uh, going to, yeah, motivate a new, uh, kind of battleground where like body versus mind is one of those debates that, that you can, that, that are possible to have. Speaker A: Especially as what the way we talk about mind, we, we have new minds, uh, impending arrival, new minds impending for sure.

Speaker B: And, and that, that's exactly why that becomes a battleground is like, Do, yeah. Do AIs have minds or not? Speaker A: Like that is, you could even make a case that implicit in Bryan Johnson's ideas is some notion that the body is the most human thing and mind is increasingly becoming, um, that's absolutely what he thinks. Speaker B: Or it's, it's certainly implied. It's, it's only, you know, his notion of life is one of bare survival where like the fact that you are living in and of itself is like what makes it worthy to keep living.

Right. Speaker A: Before we zoom out again, yeah, the kind of culmination of this, this pattern I've noticed is your most recent piece you just published a few days ago feels like another analysis on the ways that we're seeking collectivism. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: But from this body-oriented place. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: And you wrote a piece, Forms of Social Forms of Care, Prototyping Social Forms of Care, Prototyping Social Forms of Care. And in it you kind of discuss, at least as I understand them, 4 new forms of sort of collective thought around this type of thing.

Two of them are places, two of them are spaces. Do you want to just, I normally, I don't like to do just like summary conversation on podcasts, but do you want to just talk through those four zones and maybe specifically for my interest, specific instances of each that you've experienced? Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Speaker A: As an example for, for campus, it could be as an edge Esmeralda or, or whatever. Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Speaker A: As an example for, for campus, it could be as an edge Esmeralda or, or whatever.

Speaker B: Yeah. So in, in this piece that just came out, um, I, yeah, am talking about 4 different kind of collective forms and one of them is, um, campuses as you alluded to. There's also centers, parlors, and, and, uh, practices. Campuses are kind of new senses of, of place and yeah, Edge Esmeralda, the pop-up city is one, but we did another one in New York called Campus Complex, which is where I got the idea for the name. With Norm and Yatu, shout out to Teal Process. And that was like tying together existing studio spaces and, uh, offices and, um, our friends' cool startups and turning that into something that was accessible to fellows.

And then we gave like a small budget to some young artists and they were able to access all of those places for a few weeks as like a temporary fellowship. So that's a kind of placemaking endeavor where you just turn a place into a totally different sense of place by giving a kind of like augmented identity. Centers is something I'm very interested in because I think that community wellness centers, community health centers, places that are community hubs but have a healing focus will be one of the places where these body practices can intermingle and flourish and like new kinds of faith ideas can sort themselves out.

So I, I think they basically can be the new churches of this, this generation. Speaker A: In most of the centers in the, at least the, um, research you've done and what you've gone to are pretty body practice oriented, right? Speaker A: In most of the centers in the, at least the, um, research you've done and what you've gone to are pretty body practice oriented, right? Speaker B: Definitely are. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: And, and there are a lot of things like this in and around everywhere. There's lots of like wellness centers and wellness collectives where there's different classes and sort of those sorts of things.

But I think it's really key that they also serve as community hubs and the spaces and the programming need to all be designed to facilitate that. One that I go to here. In, in the city is called, um, The Center and it's like a cool coworking space and they serve tea and they also have, but they have a lot of classes there. Just down the street from that, there's a place called The Commons, which is kind of affiliated with the San Francisco campus called The Neighborhood. And they— Speaker A: Campus is a network of centers.

Speaker B: Yeah. Campus is kind of a network of centers. And, uh, there's another place here called Manny's that's like a little bit more civic focused. Um, but also a very cool center. Then there are our parlors. Uh, parlors are kind of cozy web spaces. I'm, I'm only giving these— what's cozy web? Cozy web is like Venkat's, Venkatesh Rao's term for the, um, the movement away from the clear net and into like the rabbit holes and warrens of private Discord servers and WhatsApps and Telegrams and Squad chats and so forth.

A parlor is kind of like somebody's internet parlor. You're an influencer and like your home parlor where you hold court and like hash out intellectual discourse, like is like, um, an example would be— Speaker A: this is like an influencer's Discord? Speaker B: Yeah, it's like an influencer's Discord. So New Models is one that I'm in that I like a lot. And, but, oh, but, and Josh Citarella like has his own. Catherine D like runs hers. Um, those are all examples of parlors. Speaker A: And this is, uh, is a, would it be right to say that a, um, like a digital church would be another form of a parlor if it's not oriented around a place.

Speaker B: It could be. And, and, um, my, uh, collaborator Mati Engels, or Mati Engel, who is a chaplain and a theologian, like used to be involved with this one called Labyrinth, which was a, not quite a church, but kind of like an online practice network, a parlor for clinicians and like palliative care professionals and healthcare workers who needed that kind of sense of community belonging to restore themselves. And then finally, there's practices and we've kind of been talking about practices and what they are, the actual body practices that people do.

I, I maybe to touch on the individualism point for a second. I don't think that body practices, although they're something that people individually do, they also tie people together because when you know how to salsa and I know how to salsa and we meet at a salsa club, suddenly we can salsa together. Um, and other things are like that. Prayerful prayer is like that. Meditation is like that. Um, yoga is like that. If you're doing Bikram yoga and somebody else is doing Bikram yoga, like you have a kind of somatic connection.

You have a, a level of discourse that's possible between you, even if you learned in London and I learned in Los Angeles. Speaker A: In some sense, practices might be the most clear through line or, or almost, um, practices embody so many of the ideas we've talked about, which is that they are deeply individualistic. They are deeply collective, or they can be both at the same time, I suppose. They're obviously rooted in the body and in some sense, a practice could also be a headless brand in and of itself. I think meditation or forms of meditation might be this.

Is, is, am I overreaching here? Speaker B: No. Speaker A: Like practices feel very much as almost as a form of the, um, the atomic unit of this new type of thinking. Speaker B: I think they are. Speaker A: And you can work out and go take as big and have teachers who come in and co-op practice. Speaker B: That's exactly, exactly. Speaker A: I'm sure there are some people who've, who've maybe been a little lost by some of the vaguedies here. Is it? What one person could listen to the conversation we've just had and say, Toby, or even read your writing and said, Toby basically has found a million different ways to call certain aspects of secular society things that are more religious.

Uh, what does new religion look like? Is that the through line more so than this internal external thing, or excuse me, individualistic collectivist thing? Speaker B: Well, I think you're really right to point to the individual collectivist thing because as we live in a post in, in a romantic culture, individual versus collective is one of the key tensions that we feel all the time. Mm-hmm. And so, um, even though right now there is like a strong yearning for collectivism, at the same time you see like, you, you, you see A16Z making their website look like Ayn Rand designed it.

Like you see that there is also a strong pull towards like the great man ethos and like all of that's happening at once. So these tensions, these tensions exist in both parts in our culture. Speaker B: Well, I think you're really right to point to the individual collectivist thing because as we live in a post in, in a romantic culture, individual versus collective is one of the key tensions that we feel all the time. Mm-hmm. And so, um, even though right now there is like a strong yearning for collectivism, at the same time you see like, you, you, you see A16Z making their website look like Ayn Rand designed it.

Like you see that there is also a strong pull towards like the great man ethos and like all of that's happening at once. So these tensions, these tensions exist in both parts in our culture. Speaker A: And, and they exist inside religion, by the way. Yeah. Speaker B: Yeah. And they exist inside religion, but there's certain cultures that like don't feel these tensions as strongly as we do. Like in Japan, it weighs much more heavily on the collective side and individualism is kind of smushed. And it's like that in a lot of places.

And, um, those places don't have like a romantic culture, they have different cultural coordinates. Speaker A: Mm-hmm. Speaker B: So I think you're right to, I don't see it as much of like attacking back and forth in my writing, but different pieces like do have different emphasis because the cultivation of the self, your cultivation of your own, like kind of like moral workings out is also, it's, it's partly collective thing and it's partly a very private thing. Mm-hmm. But you asked another question that in, in the same breath that I think was really interesting and like I wanted to, wanted to respond to also.

What was it? Speaker A: I mean, are you ultimately just pointing at a secular form of religion? Speaker B: Okay. Society has never been secular. That's, that's, I think that's the starting place for understanding a lot. When you, it really helps, I think, to engage with this like romanticist stuff. Um, because you can see how a lot of things on our, in, in our world kind of exist in a way that's like very morally coded. If you were just to analyze it as an outsider anthropologist, if you were to analyze American culture as an outsider anthropologist, you would have to look at Romanticism to understand what is the secular faith of our time.

Speaker A: Hmm. Speaker B: And you could say the same thing about scientism and, and the, the religion of progress. But how we behave is like encoded in these moral systems for one, but also mystical experience happens to people all the time. Like not in any kind of occult way, but when people talk about having a kind of moment of creative revelation or genius, that is the, that is a kind of mystical experience. Because those things, those things exist on a kind of heightened plane. Like they happen almost outside of time.

And you can look back at your life and point to the moment that you realize I gotta do this psychology research project because this is what I've been thinking about the whole time, or what, whatever it may be. Those moments are heightened moments. They're couched. The, and, and we have this whole language to understand them and like render them into secular terms. But we also do like exegesis on them, like living inside, living inside like a language world. We're always doing this kind of exegetical or hermeneutic activity about like our direction, about finding ourselves, like about what is right and wrong.

I, I, I think that we are always living in this, in, in a non-secular way, but the, the, the worldview of materialism has been very, uh, seductive in convincing us that that's not true. Speaker A: Yeah. I can't help but feel too that some part of the tension around what is secular and what is sacred is that so much of what is sacred is experienced as an individual. And so in trying to take that and make it collective or share it or relate to it, we start to get wrapped up, especially in a modern secular world.

We start to get wrapped up in how do I explain this? Can I, can, and, and part of what is so profound, by the way, about practices is that there are a way to talk about or experience things that are more sacred, that are explicitly defined in a way that allows you to relate it to other people. Speaker B: Absolutely. And I mean, certain practices will really take you off your rocker. Like they will, they can take you into very far out regions of consciousness without the, the use of mind-altering drugs.

Anyone who does a lot of meditation will figure that out very quickly. Mm-hmm. So, you know, these, these things are just features of, of our world. Hmm. Another kind of theme that is, you, you could say like I've been tracking back and forth also between earlier we were talking about like McLuhan and in a way I feel like I've also been tracking back and forth between, you know, be between mind and body is, is also about like content and form, social spirit and social body. And the, the, the social spirit is like the content of our culture.

It's, it's these moral underpinnings and aspirations and they, the language world that they live inside that help us render these, uh, experiences and, and talk about them and turn them into big cultural systems. Right. And then the formal side is the structure where, how we, uh, the, the, the actual media that we use to arrange ourselves, to arrange the social body, to stabilize our society. And, you know, something more like Headless Brands is a, is a little bit more about that. Like the, the actual, uh, the, the kind of hardware as it were.

It's not really hardware, maybe the firmware of Um, how we organize, yeah, social body and social spirit and like the, the connection between the mind and body is kind of where magic happens. And I think that's also true on this level that I'm talking now where ultimately what I hope I can do with something like a body futurism is like bring the, the, the social body and the social spirit together in a way. Yes. And like you can see what happens when, when Squad Wealth does that, it's like the, the, the form and the, the spirit resonate and they vibrate together and like things rejigger and everyone puts their squad on a plane and goes to Portugal and—

Speaker A: Squad Wealth, more than anything else you've ever written, by the way, is not Toby the anthropologist. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: It is something else. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: It is a feeling versus that was a really interesting insight, la la la. Squad Wealth is an impact. Squad Wealth is more like a call to arms. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And perhaps that is what you teased out with Body Futurism as well. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And you're getting at so much of this. These aren't all different ideas.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's the same, it's the same question. Like I'm just really have one big freaking question that is unfolding through me and I no longer really feel like responsible for it. Now I have a big, now I have a more clear sense of like what it is that I'm trying to do with all this stuff. Like I didn't really sense it when I. When I started writing, but I have a much bigger sense of it now. And the, the question does, is like, what is the shape of belief in our time?

What is the, the shape of, of culture in our time? And I'm pretty sure it's gonna take me my entire life to answer that question, and I'm not really gonna be able to answer it fully, but that's what I, I can't help but do that. Hmm. Speaker A: Zooming out a bit. Much of your work and life, or at the very least, much of your work and your early ideas are around the idea of codifying or even forming language that helps us to interrogate this stuff. So I'm curious what role Christopher Alexander has had on your life and work.

Speaker B: Yeah, to be honest, I haven't, I hadn't really engaged with his work seriously until more recently. Certainly pattern language is something I was floating around in the discourse a lot. His work influenced Aaron Lewis a lot and other people around me like Kia Keutler quite a bit. But I think he, I only really understood his work a lot last year when I read, uh, The Nature of Order, which is one of his big books. And what I realized when I did that is he was trying to articulate something about how we can do architecture from an entirely phenomenological sensibility.

We can do architecture merely by getting really attuned to what feels good, what feels alive, what feels right. And I thought that ethos is so good. I think that's so right. And is maybe a necessary counter to the experience of all of these kind of dominating and extractive institutions that we find ourselves in. And if Christopher Alexander can figure out how to do that for architecture, for these big architectural projects that people live inside of and, you know, they walk through them and they totally structure our sense of space, then maybe you can do that for other kinds of complex social things as well.

For instance, restorative justice systems are an attempt to find a phenomenological basis for how to do, uh, justice or like retribution. The whole principle of them, and, and I'm not super literate about this, but the whole principle of them seems to be we can actually do justice in a way that like repairs the whole community as opposed to just punishing and like incarcerating someone. And that's, that's really interesting. I know that it's possible to do for to like figure out how to do one-on-one interactions or small group interactions from a place of like really embodied understanding.

And you can have more enlivening, healing, um, virtuous interactions that way. But I think what Christopher Alexander seems to be pointing to is there's a way of doing that for much bigger themes as well. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Speaker B: Yeah, to be honest, I haven't, I hadn't really engaged with his work seriously until more recently. Certainly pattern language is something I was floating around in the discourse a lot. His work influenced Aaron Lewis a lot and other people around me like Kia Keutler quite a bit. But I think he, I only really understood his work a lot last year when I read, uh, The Nature of Order, which is one of his big books.

And what I realized when I did that is he was trying to articulate something about how we can do architecture from an entirely phenomenological sensibility. We can do architecture merely by getting really attuned to what feels good, what feels alive, what feels right. And I thought that ethos is so good. I think that's so right. And is maybe a necessary counter to the experience of all of these kind of dominating and extractive institutions that we find ourselves in. And if Christopher Alexander can figure out how to do that for architecture, for these big architectural projects that people live inside of and, you know, they walk through them and they totally structure our sense of space, then maybe you can do that for other kinds of complex social things as well.

For instance, restorative justice systems are an attempt to find a phenomenological basis for how to do, uh, justice or like retribution. The whole principle of them, and, and I'm not super literate about this, but the whole principle of them seems to be we can actually do justice in a way that like repairs the whole community as opposed to just punishing and like incarcerating someone. And that's, that's really interesting. I know that it's possible to do for to like figure out how to do one-on-one interactions or small group interactions from a place of like really embodied understanding.

And you can have more enlivening, healing, um, virtuous interactions that way. But I think what Christopher Alexander seems to be pointing to is there's a way of doing that for much bigger themes as well. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Speaker A: Christopher Alexander, obviously I think his taxonomy, specifically the pattern language and providing language was part of what enabled a lot of this. I've heard you mention more than once, at least in certain contexts, that, uh, some of your work is simply describing the state of things, giving people language for it. And then other times you're more prescriptive.

Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And so I'm curious, like, is the role of the anthropologer, uh, anthropologist, excuse me, or the philosopher. To simply observe and perceive and critique the nature of the world, or is it explicitly to offer a path? And maybe to what degree do you, maybe depending on the context or where you are in your learning, internalize one or both of those roles? Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I can't help but have a, you know, takes about things. I think this has always been a big personal tension for me.

Is how to do what, how to talk about things and also encourage certain elements of them and discourage other elements of them. Speaker A: And frankly, my experience has been at times you are certainly just, it's the point you made about headless brands. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And at other times I think you are to the Squadwolf point, like much, much more prescriptive of sort of a way of being. Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'm still discovering like what I'm doing there. Like, yeah, as I go around and I research all of these different things and I like dip my toes into this or that practice or this or that like culture, I'm realizing, okay, there's probably not one thing out there that I'm actually going to wholeheartedly endorse.

And like, that's an interesting realization to have. Um, mm-hmm. It, it helps me see, okay, first of all, maybe that feeling that nothing is quite right is more like a projection of my own homelessness. And it makes me wonder like, okay, what would it look like if I did just kind of like commit to whatever I thought was most virtuous? Yeah. I mean, I'm scared of becoming one of these gurus myself. I don't want to become one of those. Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'm still discovering like what I'm doing there.

Like, yeah, as I go around and I research all of these different things and I like dip my toes into this or that practice or this or that like culture, I'm realizing, okay, there's probably not one thing out there that I'm actually going to wholeheartedly endorse. And like, that's an interesting realization to have. Um, mm-hmm. It, it helps me see, okay, first of all, maybe that feeling that nothing is quite right is more like a projection of my own homelessness. And it makes me wonder like, okay, what would it look like if I did just kind of like commit to whatever I thought was most virtuous?

Yeah. I mean, I'm scared of becoming one of these gurus myself. I don't want to become one of those. Speaker A: The line between the observer. And the practitioner, right, is thin. Speaker B: Poten— it potentially is. And, and I'm, it's hard because part of my skillset also seems to be like synthesizing, like I can see in a really big way where things are going and like I can kind of put those pieces together and that's for some reason really easy for me. So it's kind of on a meta level already and I really have to work to like get closer to what I think is good and just like work for that.

Speaker A: Many people seem to think about, uh, or they think of domains like technology and business as forces for change and continuous progression. And yet they see social systems and values and frankly so much of what we've spent this conversation talking about as like, we should just trust tradition and what's Lindy. Don't tamper with them. Even religion itself, uh, obviously you seem to have an alternative view, which is you might just describe as being pro-social innovation or literally progressive. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Not to say not rooted in tradition, but definitely more of an openness.

There's one specific articulation you have of this around new social forms that I think you were just getting at a little bit. You say, like the founders and organizers of the projects I mentioned here, I am interested in different ways of life, ways of life that are not normal or accessible to most Americans today. Even the wealthiest Americans find it hard to embed themselves in networks and lifestyles of care and mutual support. It's actually the most disadvantaged, our poor and immigrant populations, whose churches and mutual aid networks most deeply express the ethos of community that more privileged Americans are now trying to recreate in the form of for-profit organizations.

Obviously, I think that paragraph holds the tension of that whole question. Speaker B: Yeah, it does. Yeah. Speaker A: And so you could just say, oh, actually don't complicate it. We have good systems, poor people, religious people in America. They're already practicing it. It works. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: But yet clearly on some level you are trying to say not just what is happening in a way that works, but how can we equip and talk and coin new language for innovation here? Speaker A: And so you could just say, oh, actually don't complicate it.

We have good systems, poor people, religious people in America. They're already practicing it. It works. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: But yet clearly on some level you are trying to say not just what is happening in a way that works, but how can we equip and talk and coin new language for innovation here? Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. And, and I think that. On, on the one hand, I have, I definitely have an appreciation for what already exists and I don't think that it needs to be disrupted. I, I think churches are great and they're Lindy and like, yeah, let Lindy things be Lindy.

Like let them keep going. It's also clear though that those systems, the, the big systems of belief were designed before democracy. And the spiritual implications of democracy have not yet really been worked out. Mm-hmm. So what does it look like? Can purely affiliation-based networks like still produce the same kind of depth of feeling and depth of belief and, and like feeling of bondedness and trust and obligation that you get from those older faiths? It, it's not yet clear. Speaker A: Mm-hmm. Speaker B: It's, it's clear that you can have like a deep culture of like creative being in this kind of romanticist culture that we have today.

But it didn't produce a new faith along the lines of Christianity. Um, so where, where does that get us? And that's why I think I've gone, I, I've started thinking a lot more about form because the, we have a lot of the ingredients broken up into lots of little pieces, but they kind of need to be combined into different forms to see what is gonna work, what's gonna stick. That's why I've been doing all this on-the-ground research. Like I want to see, I've been going to things ranging from my friend's 5-person experimental church where we sing hymns that like we kind of made up to, you know, Othership, the immersive, the, the kind of commercial immersive sauna project.

And like, I think both of them are rad and The question is what's, and there's a thousand things in between and outside of those bounds. What, what things are going to stick? Like what things actually have staying power, um, can like hold space for real community to form and bond and like keep going and create the strong social ties that, uh, people are really craving. And, um, yeah, I, I had this new thought recently that, um, everyone knows about Everyone knows about social media. We've tried so many different kinds of social media.

Certain ones have really stuck. And, but there's also a long tail of like weird niche social media projects. And, um, we know what it's like to be a founder of a social media company. Each one of those social media apps or platforms like has a slightly different arrangement of things, like different kind of algorithm, different kind of feed, different kind of UI. And those little details like make a big difference in how it feels to use. Well, you can apply the same kind of designerly mentality to these other forms. Social, physical spaces, wellness centers, like spaces of practice and, and combinations of practices that like form a, a system, a parlor.

That's, that's a little bit more like a, you know, an app to begin with. But when you start to apply that designerly mentality and think about designing social forms, and not just those forms, all kinds of forms. Designing social forms, then you are actually experimenting with the, the forms of life that we are living inside of. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: And that's where that the, the critical side comes in where I think we also don't really have a great critical language for these forms of life. So it's worth critiquing Bryan Johnson, it's worth critiquing Longevity Culture, it's worth going to Peoplehood, you know, and the, the Post-Soul Cycle project and saying like, look, this thing's kind of garbage and like we can just throw this out the window 'cause it didn't work.

But this other thing over here, this is really great. It's, it's worth doing that. Speaker A: Um, it's also worth separating the form and the values. Yeah. Well, so much of the discussion around a lot of this stuff, at least from my vantage point, especially around religion, of course, is about are the values right? Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: And part of what you're doing is not ignoring that piece, but also saying let's evaluate the forms. Speaker B: Yes. The forms and the values like are related cuz like the, the the forms can or cannot fulfill the values.

Like they, they subtend the values. They like make it possible to live the values. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: Um, and also the values can, can be wrong. Yeah. I, I think it's important to develop the critical language for this new kind of media, which is playing with these social institutions as a media form. Yes. Um, I think, and I want to get way more designers and, and founders and stuff playing with this media form. Because it is something that you can just do. You can just do things and you can just go out and start one of these wellness centers and like fuck with it, play with it.

Like, like you would, uh, you know, A/B test your social app and figure out like what holds community space, like what is actually fun. You can start a sauna project in your backyard. You know, you, you can just do that stuff. And that, I want to see a lot more of that. Speaker A: This, you know what this gets at a little bit is like secular and sacred. There's some sense that like sacred things you're not supposed to experiment as with as much with. Not obviously that a sauna in your backyard is necessarily that sacred, but as that line blurs, people, people are very happy to experiment and A/B test with, uh, you know, your CRM tools.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Speaker A: And the idea of, by the way, you, you got at this a little bit with that quote I read from the end of Life After Lifestyle, where you're talking about maybe our current set of software founders not being equipped for this. Is that like starting a meditation practice space with no expertise there might have some consequences. Speaker B: It might, but maybe that's why you start with the sauna space and like there's a lot of other places to start. You can start with just cultivating a practice for yourself and playing with that.

Speaker A: I really am. I find the idea that the practice is the atomic unit of so much of this stuff to be quite empowering, including even exploring what new forms can look like. What are the new containers we can hold for a certain type of practice? And so on. Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I really enjoyed, um, I really enjoyed like the Foster Writing Circle thing that like, it's a, it's a writing group. It's, it's a group. It's kind of a DAO that holds writing circles. And I got to know somebody who's in it.

I showed up, you were there. I didn't expect to see you there. And we just had a really nice hour where there was like a little bit of like an invocation of the theme. And then we went off and we wrote for like 30, 40 minutes. Speaker A: There was an individualist part of it. There was a collective part of it. Speaker B: Then we came back and we read some stuff out and then it was closed with like a little bit of a sermon. And that was a great form.

Like I loved that. It was very simple. It was very effective. It was super nice to be part of. And I felt like pretty held by it, even though it was my first time. And that, if a lot of the innovation software, like has already been done, but like people are looking at all of our kind of crumbling institutions and our lack of social life and like lamenting that it's pretty obvious that like the next frontier for innovation can just be that stuff. Like if Peter Thiel is right and, and we haven't had, uh, that, that all of the innovation has been on the screen.

Okay. We'll just like move off the screen and innovate with the stuff that is in the real world. And that's, that's totally possible to do. Hmm. Speaker A: There was an individualist part of it. There was a collective part of it. Speaker B: Then we came back and we read some stuff out and then it was closed with like a little bit of a sermon. And that was a great form. Like I loved that. It was very simple. It was very effective. It was super nice to be part of. And I felt like pretty held by it, even though it was my first time.

And that, if a lot of the innovation software, like has already been done, but like people are looking at all of our kind of crumbling institutions and our lack of social life and like lamenting that it's pretty obvious that like the next frontier for innovation can just be that stuff. Like if Peter Thiel is right and, and we haven't had, uh, that, that all of the innovation has been on the screen. Okay. We'll just like move off the screen and innovate with the stuff that is in the real world. And that's, that's totally possible to do.

Hmm. Speaker A: We haven't talked much about crypto. Speaker B: Okay, let's talk about crypto. Speaker A: We should talk a little bit about crypto. Speaker B: Let's talk about crypto. Speaker A: And I'm specifically interested in really one part of it, which is, I'm probably doing some, making some assumptions here, but you wrote a piece in early 2024 called Crypto's Three-Body Problem. Speaker B: Mm-hmm. Speaker A: And right after that, you basically left crypto. Me saying you left crypto is already succumbing to some of the challenges that maybe the world of crypto creates and the insular nature of it and the tribal nature of it and so on.

But there's a line in a podcast you did about it where I think you were quoting a friend of yours where you said crypto is a very good technology at giving retail exactly what it wants. Speaker B: Who said that? Speaker A: I think it was your friend Dante, maybe. Speaker B: Oh wow. That's Dante. That's really funny. Um, nice one, Dante. Speaker A: You also, this week, last week, Trump launched a meme coin. I, I wrote a thread about it, including referencing your post. You wrote a tweet around the same time where you said, people say don't hate the player, hate the game, but I'm the player-hating type.

Excuse me. Maybe the, maybe the place to kick off, and I don't think we need to spend a ton of time on this, but, uh, I, I'd like to read a bit from that Three Body Problem. Speaker B: Go for it. Speaker A: Um, Peace. Regression to the code erodes social norms, and this consequence accounts in large part for what repulses people about crypto— from crypto. Even as protocols fulfill important social functions like affordable remittances and escapes from inflationary regimes, the space, quote unquote, appears to outsiders as greedy and riddled with scams.

It is for this reason that crypto seems to stand apart from all prior human institutions. More than just lawless, it comes across as a normless zone where morality is suspended, even if the prevailing intention is to support the resiliency of all manner of social organizations. I think you and I probably feel similarly in some ways about crypto as a broadly as an idea, which is something that has been like unbelievably energizing and life-giving, inspiring, led to all kinds of interesting relationships, unbelievable intellectual expansion. I don't know exactly where you sit and I'm probably still working out where I sit.

I'm still involved in crypto in certain ways, but clearly there's complexity here. I don't think the complexity is over even though the regulatory regime has changed. And I'm curious how you are now sitting on the other side of a year or so of a world that you were very immersed in. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: Well, who knows what's going to happen now that Trump launched a meme coin and I'm glad Ross got pardoned and, you know, the Silk Road guy got his, or the Tornado Cash dude got his sentence commuted.

That, I think that's great. It's really not clear what's going to happen now. I think part of when I left crypto, I was more anticipating a, like a democratic regime for a long time. And, you know, the Democrats and the big banks were kind of allied and One of, one of my last crypto projects was doing market research for Interchain Foundation and I looked a lot at like stablecoins, interbank exchange, and CBDC projects for them. And I realized that this stuff is a lot further along than crypto Twitter knows about.

It's actually a huge blind spot for crypto Twitter. And those projects are likely to come online in the next decade. Who knows now what's going to happen in the, in the US because Trump's coalition did not seem to be include the big banks and the big banks were, you know, really want to kill crypto and replace it with their own solution. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: But I felt that it was kind of above my pay grade to like work on that. I care more about like privacy and financial censorship than I, which are crypto's core offerings, like, than, than I did when I worked in crypto.

'Cause I think at that time I was so much more focused on like, what else can crypto enable culturally speaking? But now I, I, I do see its role more in that light because I am concerned about financial censorship coming in places that implement central bank digital currencies. I also think that there is an unfulfilled premise of crypto in terms of community currencies and alternative credit systems and simply enabling that for big communities, at least in the US, you know, elsewhere you have a lot of people using stablecoins. I would still like to see that kind of financial sovereignty or financial independence, like from the state, but there hasn't been a huge reason to adopt it in the US yet.

If inflation continues, then like the pressure will grow and there's a possibility that somebody could successfully launch something like that in the US. I kind of now see that stuff as like mostly above my pay grade and it's still possible that I could like get pulled back into crypto for the right reasons or for the right project, but it's not it's not really my focus right now. Speaker A: Right. Speaker B: But I felt that it was kind of above my pay grade to like work on that. I care more about like privacy and financial censorship than I, which are crypto's core offerings, like, than, than I did when I worked in crypto.

'Cause I think at that time I was so much more focused on like, what else can crypto enable culturally speaking? But now I, I, I do see its role more in that light because I am concerned about financial censorship coming in places that implement central bank digital currencies. I also think that there is an unfulfilled premise of crypto in terms of community currencies and alternative credit systems and simply enabling that for big communities, at least in the US, you know, elsewhere you have a lot of people using stablecoins. I would still like to see that kind of financial sovereignty or financial independence, like from the state, but there hasn't been a huge reason to adopt it in the US yet.

If inflation continues, then like the pressure will grow and there's a possibility that somebody could successfully launch something like that in the US. I kind of now see that stuff as like mostly above my pay grade and it's still possible that I could like get pulled back into crypto for the right reasons or for the right project, but it's not it's not really my focus right now. Speaker A: On the expansive side or the generative side, what was so enamoring to you about crypto, at least at one time, or maybe that core is still there?

In some sense, crypto is inside a lot of these ideas around Squad Wealth and Headless Brands and stuff that's really empowering. Even the notion of what a future religion, like organizational thing might look like. Speaker B: I think what was so interesting about it is that it like it creates, um, the, the way it like moves value around basically literalizes some of the things that I'm already like good at seeing in the cultural economy. Speaker A: Mm-hmm. Speaker B: It makes those things like exactly equal. When you look at like how the marketplace of ideas or the marketplace of memes like shakes out who's on top, pudgy penguins or Milady, like you can kind of see that in the stats, like you can see that Milady has like a shit ton of liquidity, for instance.

And the, the like cultural decisions they've made, the economic decisions they've made, like all play into the same system. I, I think that's really interesting. And headless brands like kind of gestured at that. Like it just, crypto is very interesting from a formal perspective, like as a media as a type of media, as a medium rather, it, it just makes it possible to see like how culture moves and like ebbs and flows in, in a really fascinating way. Speaker A: Right, right. It makes it less opaque or more, uh, explicit.

Yeah. Speaker A: Right, right. It makes it less opaque or more, uh, explicit. Yeah. Speaker B: It makes it more explicit and culture's normally this shadowy, amorphous. For sure. And of course then it starts making you think thoughts like, oh my goodness, like what if we can design a culture that can be self-sustaining and so forth and you know, we all know that didn't really work out. Speaker A: Yeah. Speaker B: But because crypto doesn't really give you anything automatically there. Like you kind of have to be a cult leader, like, right.

You know, Charlotte Fang to make that work. Right. But it's very, I learned a lot from that, from my time in crypto. And I also learned what, like what bubble mentality feels like from the inside. And that is invaluable. Speaker A: Why are you enamored with protocols? Or at least why have you spent so much time thinking about, writing about, and working on them? Including of course crypto protocols, but you, you described, uh, social algorithms that can be adopted by others as like a much more broad definition of protocol. Speaker B: Yeah.

Well, they're another kind of emergent form. And I think the Ethereum Foundation and the Summer Protocol's research program has been instrumental in pushing that, but also the adoption of health and wellness protocols, like the taking up of the idea of protocols in that sphere is interesting. Speaker A: Brian Johnson blueprint, whatever. Speaker B: Brian Johnson, Huberman's protocols. Um, now, and when I was writing the social forms of care piece, I was debating whether to talk about protocols or practices in that last section. Right. And I ran it by a bunch of people, got different opinions, and I really like what Kate McAndrews in the other room said.

She just said, well, protocols is just a masculinized form of practices. And given the opportunity to choose one or the other, it's pretty obvious like which, what I would do. And I was like, okay, well that was super. That was super clear. Huh. Speaker A: I would, I would also say that to me, at least my interpretation is protocols are only collective really. Speaker B: Well, what makes them only collective? Like you could follow Brian Johnson's protocol, but there's no personalization there. Speaker A: Practice almost inherently presumes there is personal individualism put into the thing, even if it can be shared, or at the very least it's sitting more in the middle of the hyper-individual, hyper-collective.

It's somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. Speaker B: It, it may be, that was the source of the debate that I had with like Mati about it because Mati, who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background, was describing how she thinks, and she's embedded in this whole spiritual world in upstate New York. Right, right. She's like, oh, well, people are too wishy-washy with how they use practice. And like, what about the sense of obligation that comes when that is implied by protocol and I think that rigidity, yeah. Here is where the individual versus collective tension like does come up again in this social form of, of protocols or practices.

'Cause some people may want to take it into a weird wandering dilettantish path, uh, um, but then they may start down like 10 or different, 10 or so different spiritual paths and like never get anywhere. On the other hand, you could really over-protocolize your life and find it hard to break out of your bonds of community. Speaker A: You've arguably built one, but, uh, with Other Internet, but what do you, what role do you think institutions should play? There's much discussion of lack of institutions, institutions failing, new institutions. Speaker A: You've arguably built one, but, uh, with Other Internet, but what do you, what role do you think institutions should play?

There's much discussion of lack of institutions, institutions failing, new institutions. Speaker B: Great question. Yes. I more or less think that I more or less don't think that you can build a new institution anymore. And that is why I've gone backwards in the supply chain to social forms. Wow. Social forms are more primitive, experimental than institutions. I, I think that this whole effort to build new institutions that, you know, has been going on for like the last 5 or 10 years where new institutions has been really been a big theme, both in, in the crypto world, in the art world, in, political world, in the political world, educational world.

Yeah. Everyone's wanted to build new institutions, but I think that an institution, what I realize is something that is institutionalized. And I really experienced that with Other Internet when we tried to adopt the shape of like a more formal research institute and like raise money from foundations and, and become like a, a kind of organization of that shape, it killed the sauce. And we realized, oh, well, this, the squad was actually like the, the, the shape that we needed all the, all along. And the squad isn't really an institution, it's just a little blob.

So that, that was a personal teaching moment for, or learning moment for me. But in a bigger sense, I also saw that the most credible efforts to redesign new institutions are or redesign institutions are, are more like reform efforts, like what the progress studies people are doing. Um, and those are efforts that take a lot of money and, uh, new forms might teach us in some way how to reform institutions though, right? They, they potentially could. And the reason I like new forms and proto, I'm encouraging people to experiment with forms is because part of the issue with the older institutions which besides just they are old and they, they may not have the best talent involved, is that the underlying forms of those institutions are somewhat unsuited to our times.

Maybe, right, the 4-year university isn't actually the thing that's actually most suited to this moment. Maybe, um, you know, civic associations or, or neighborhood associations like are never really going to capture how to get people involved with, with you know, local democracy, but something else could, but that's something else is an experiment that needs to happen. Speaker A: The value isn't necessarily wrong, but the form could be outdated or— Speaker B: Yeah, the form can be really outdated. And so I think people ought to be experimenting and just playing with, with that.

Speaker A: I like that a lot. Um, a question about writing, especially given that you've written, uh, extensively alone and extensively and collaboratively. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Uh, there's an amazing quote, uh, you, you from a friend of yours. You say Venkat once told me that writing anything over 3,000 words forces you to contend with your personal demons. I can confirm this to be true. Speaker B: Oh yeah. Speaker A: You've written a lot more than 3,000 words in many pieces. Uh, as someone who prepped for this interview, how do you, yeah.

What is that experience of trying to do all this stuff we've discussed, be educational, create change, uh, observe culturally, but also You're not doing that as a robot, you're doing that as Toby. Speaker B: That's the, I don't know, that's the process of figuring out who I am basically. Yeah. It's, it's not for the faint of heart, I would say. My partner said something to me that. That about what she appreciates about me that I really appreciated. She said that of anyone that she knows, I'm the person who's like most committed to my truth.

And I really smiled bigly when I heard that because I feel it is true. And I think that this whole process is like, has taught me that, like trying to figure out what it is that I'm about, trying to figure out how to walk this very fine line I'm walking between like the tech community, the cultural sector, the, the, um, the values I endorse, the, the like versions of it that are not quite right, the way people interpret my ideas, like how I want it, them to be interpreted. I feel like I'm just trying to figure out like, who am I and like how to be in this world as like, frankly, a weird character who doesn't really yet feel super at home in any of these places that I have a, a foot or a finger in.

And writing is one of the only ways I have to like process that and like really think it through in a long-term way. Hmm. If, if the stuff I'm, if the stuff I write down is to any respect true, well, how do I think about that? What, what do I, if this stuff is true, how do I relate to it? Those are really hard questions to, to answer, especially with all this new faith type stuff. Speaker A: You're implicated. Speaker B: I am. Speaker A: What are you least cynical about?

Speaker B: Love it. Love is real. I love you, Jackson. Um, I, yeah, it's friendship is one of the greatest forces on the planet and, um, everything is worth it for love basically. Hmm. Speaker A: That's a great answer. Uh, what does spirituality mean to you? Someone who's obsessed with the forms of a lot of things that could be called or pointed towards spirituality. Speaker B: Well, it's just, to me, it is, it's partly a search for the truth and it's partly a search for what, um, makes me feel most alive and most connected to this world.

It's a very individualistic and it is a very romanticist way of putting it, and that is How, how I feel. Speaker A: I think that's something that many people in the modern era relate to in a similar way. And in what's give, gives way to so many of these questions, we're all trying to sort of connect that into answering the big questions or, or being on the same page or being able to see each other in that, in that thing, in some sense, so much of maybe what it means to be human, it combines some of those answers you just gave, which is seeking connectivity on the sacred stuff.

Speaker B: What, what's spirituality to you? Hmm. Speaker A: There's a line in a book written by a guy who's dying of cancer. And I think there are also, I'll say that there are much more tangible versions of this, but I always like this definition. He says, what is he? He's like, I, I would never have related to, to being a spiritual person, but in my older age and as I'm dying, I think I am spiritual. And what is spirituality but a willingness to reach deep? And I like that definition.

Speaker B: I like reaching, reaching deep. Speaker A: I think that's why you toil and you try and you move through the vague ideas and you try to make sense of it and you explore the forms and you have these hard conversations and you sit in the ambiguity. It's like, yeah. And that's what I think we're all trying to do a little bit more of. I appreciate the way that you push me to reach deep for sure. Speaker B: Thank you. Speaker A: That's all I got for you today. There's a million more places we could take this and maybe we'll do a part two, but yeah, this was a pleasure.

Speaker B: Thanks, Jackson.