Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am Francis Styrer. And I'm Daisy Alioto. And who are we speaking to today, Daisy? Today, we're speaking with Jose Mejia. 0:15 He's the co-founder of Scene Infrastructure Company, which is a company building software for in-person events and community. Maybe that's not how he would describe it. That's how I would describe it. Okay. 0:29 And they go by SIC for short, S-I-C. And he- They build infrastructure for scenes, obviously. Yeah. E- exactly. And despite being anti-scene, I am pro-infrastructure. Mm. 0:41 Um, he's also a man about town, a beverage aficionado. I'm gonna definitely ask him what beverages he's been into lately. Uh-huh. And- I, I'm pretty sure Diet Coke... 0:50 I was reading his tweets, as I do when we, when we, whenever we have somebody on- Yeah... and he was tweeting about replacing his second coffee of the day with two Diet Cokes, which I feel that. 0:58 Oh, I definitely liked that tweet, and I think that's an amazing idea. Um- Anyway, he's here. Say hi. Let him in. Let's open up the pit. [upbeat music] Beard looks great. 1:15 How long have you had the white patch? The beard looks great? Yeah. When did that emerge? Uh, the white patch emerged, I don't know, like, three years ago. Uh, and it's- Does it get whiter every time you shave it? 1:25 Um, it gets whiter every time... No, ac- it actually doesn't. It's been actually super consistent, which is very interesting. Does it get whiter every time you do a fundraising round? [laughs] Yes, exactly. 1:35 [laughs] That is... Actually, three, three years ago is kind of, uh, right on the nose, so you're spot on. Mm. Did I ever tell you, I don't know if I've ever talked about this on the pod, that I, um... 1:47 The stress of raising my pre-seed round gave me shingles, and- Jesus... nobody believed me, 'cause they were like, "That is a disease for elderly people." And I was like, "Yes, also people going through a lot of stress." 1:57 Well, raising, raising money ages you three, you know, three times as fast. I gotta be honest, I actually don't know what the symptoms of shingles are. Would you mind sharing? 2:04 [laughs] Um, you just get, like, a weird, painful rash. Got it. Mm-hmm. Where was this localized for you? It's, it's, it's actually, whatever causes it is related to what causes shingles. Uh, not shingles, chicken pox. 2:15 Mm. It was, like- Oh... my lower back. It was- Classic case. So, so you, you had a stress tramp stamp, basically. [laughs] 100% had a stress tramp stamp. Yeah. That's amazing. I know. 2:25 I've actually been thinking a lot about tramp stamps recently. Um- Hm... I feel like a couple people have written the- Well, it seems that it's like-... the tramp stamp trend piece... 2:32 you're cooking a dirt prop with that. Mm-hmm. [laughs] Oh, my God. Thank you for pointing that out. [laughs] That is a good dirt prop. Okay. Yeah. Well, let's do it on the spot. Tramp stamp, what are you getting? 2:42 This is tough, 'cause I either want it to mean something or I want it to mean absolutely nothing, and I'm not sure which one is the better option. Which stance you wanna take live on mic? Yeah. Yeah. 2:51 Do you wanna come off as earnest or above the whole mess? You know what? There's this, there's, um... I think that for me, the optimal tramp stamp would actually be, like, a super girly ribbon. Mm-hmm. 3:02 Because I think it would just throw people off even more. Like, "Oh, you have a tramp stamp- Yes... and it's a, it's a bow?" Yeah. That's the, that's the, that's the angle I'm going for. That's a Bad Bunny. Like- 100%... 3:12 he would get, like, a really girly tramp stamp. That- Absolutely. Actually- But what would it say? Oh, you would just get a bow. It would just be a bow. Okay. 3:18 And actually, now you're making me think that I should get a Puerto Rican flag. That would also be a really good tramp stamp for me. That would be an incredible tramp stamp for you. [laughs] I might get my signature. 3:27 Just a big ego move. Just my, my sig- [laughs] signature. Wait, what did we... In your, in our little, like, viral clip about email sign-offs, what was yours? Mine was, uh, it was, "Best," at the time. 3:38 I thought it was, "Cheers." Oh, it might've been, "Cheers." These days- What have you got- Um, whenever... Unless it's not appropriate- What if I just said, "Cheers," Francis?... "Cheers." "Cheers" would be... No. 3:45 [laughs] No, well, what, what I would do is, my, my current favorite email sign-off, um, is, "Talk soon," comma. Mm-hmm. So, "Talk soon" I think would be a good one. Mm, mm. Nobody's gonna ask me. 3:55 I'm the only tramp on this podcast. We're, we're waiting for you to tell us. Okay. Well, I would get, "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info." [laughs] Okay. 4:06 [laughs] Um, that's a great segue into the Anthropic AirMail situation. [laughs] Yes. I've died to talk about this with Jose. [laughs] Did you see Telia Kai's heater with Dee's Lake? Yeah. Yeah, I did read that. Yeah. 4:19 She went full, she went full negative. Um, I don't agree with everything in there, but she got some good dunks in. Can I... 4:25 For, for the li- for the listeners' sake who might not have read it, I- I'll read a little excerpt from it here. Um, this is, this is from near the end. Maybe she's at her much, most vitriolic here. 4:37 Um, "You don't know, or you can't live with the nakedness of what you do all day, so instead you try to claw back some of that sexiness, courtesy of whatever lessons you've gotten summarized for you from some errant Wharton deck with a minor in corporate Memphis, because God fucking damn it, it can't just be about the money, and pooning your enemies, and draining the world of all aspects of that annoying, frustrating connection we can't reverse." 4:54 I believe it's pronounced pooning. [laughs] Oh, I've always pronounced it poon, poon, poon. [laughs] No. No. That's, we have to- Okay... we have to get into that later. It's definitely pooning, but pooning is incredible. 5:03 Okay. Well, [laughs] anyways, anyways, okay. Anyways, she's, she's, she's just taking it- I'm covering my face. Sh- this, now I'm embarrassed. 5:11 I, okay, I, I have ever- Well, I have to cover my face now so Tom doesn't clip these, because he always catches me making the weirdest- Weirdo... impressions. 5:17 So My pronunciation of that comes from me reading it in my head as a fourth grader playing RuneScape. [laughs] Um, so for 20-some years. 5:25 [laughs] Were you, were you aware of the connotation that you were introducing to the phrase by calling it pooning instead of pwning? [laughs] Um, no. I mean, it's, it's, like, pre-consciousness almost at this point. 5:35 You know what I mean? Got it. Your front- your frontal lobe hadn't developed yet. I've never said it out loud. Pwn. [laughs] I guess I've said pwned. 5:40 I- I had to, I had to explain to my, like, relatively offline best friend, who's, like, by the way, our age, that gooning doesn't mean, like, goofing around anymore. 5:50 [laughs] 'Cause she was like- No, it means being a fan of the Arsenal... we all went to a wedding together. So her husband stayed behind, 'cause it was, like, their kid's first day at a new school. 5:59 So we go, we drive up to Maine for a wedding. 6:01 It's me, my husband, my best friendAnd she's like s- texting the group chat that I started for us that's just like, "Yeah, so if we need to kill time, we can all just goon around." 6:11 And I was like, "Okay, I'll address, I'll address this with her later." [laughs] So she said it again in person. I was like, "I need to tell you something." And she's like, "I've been saying that kind of a lot." 6:22 [laughs] Nice. There's nothing like gooning with the gang in Maine before a wedding. I mean- Yeah... what could be better? Yeah. 6:27 So, uh, Anthropic, what they did, uh, the Airmail store in the West Village, I believe- Mm-hmm... they were giving away caps, gooning caps. Yes, exactly. [laughs] Thinking caps. They said thinking. They're thinking caps. 6:39 Um, I'm just trying to be exact here. Yeah. You could goon while wearing... I mean, if you were the type of person who goons mentally, you could wear the thinking cap- Uh-huh. [laughs]... from Anthropic and goon. 6:46 That's a great Twitter handle. Yeah, absolutely. The Mental Gooner. [laughs] The Mental Gooner. [laughs] Um- Newsletter is the OnlyFans of the mind. 6:56 I love that Airmail's kind of been written out of this whole narrative because, like, the reason I'm not as negative- You mean the narrative of, like, people, um- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... detracting from this being... 7:03 Like, there's the people who say, "Wow, this is so cool. This is the best branding I've ever seen." Anti-slop stance, et cetera. No, everyone's calling it a Claude pop-up or Anthropic pop-up. Yeah. It's like a collab. 7:13 No, it is. Yeah. So- Yeah, but I think- Airmail is the creator... Cypher's gone. Are they? They're the infra. No, I think, like, the reason I'm- They kind of are... 7:21 I'm not full negative like Delia 'cause I actually think I would prefer media companies to do these types of collaborations than just license their content in perpetuity. Like, your cafe is not your- Mm... core business. 7:32 It's part of the moat around your business- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... that advertises it, like the Monocle Cafe. So, like, if you 7:39 are going to do something with an AI company, and everyone probably is going to have to because these are the companies that have marketing spend right now, it's better to do a coffee pop-up than be like, "Here's all our content." 7:50 Mm-hmm. That's my take. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. I... Like, are you reputation laundering them? Maybe. But- See, see the thing that's interesting to me about that is that I don't think they are. 8:01 And that gets back to what you said about people sort of writing Airmail out of narrative, is that Airmail is in a weird way this infrastructure bit that if you don't know what Airmail is, you don't care. 8:12 You're just going there to get Claude gear, right? Yeah. And most of the people who are paying attention to it are paying attention to it because they want access to the Claude gear so that they can flex it online. 8:21 Whereas Airmail, to me, is sort of like sits there as this weird little platform that unless you're in media or care about media, you probably don't know [laughs] what Airmail is. 8:28 You're like, "Oh, that weird store that I've walked by a million times in the West Village." And it makes me think about, um... 8:33 I'm gonna date myself, but, like, one of my first real jobs was, um, working at coolhunting.com. And, uh- Wow... we were, we were one of the first few sites to do branded content before branded content was called that. 8:45 And we did a pop-up with Gap one time for their 50th anniversary where we actually ran a holiday store, um, near Columbus Circle. 8:53 And, um, it was, it was interesting to me because Cool Hunting was genuinely at the time, like, one of the sites that everyone that I knew checked for information about, like, cool design stuff and what to buy. 9:03 And, like, there was a little bit more parity between the brands. 9:06 Um, whereas nowadays I feel like Claude can just kinda, like, or Anthropic can just, like, steamroll its way into a partnership with something that seems cool, interesting. Like, they could have done this with Monocle. 9:15 It would've had the exact same cultural impact- Yeah... and no one would've cared that it was Monocle and not Airmail, and that's, that to me is sort of the interesting shift that's taking place. I don't know. 9:22 But I think this is, like, a little bit the bias of which side of the internet you sit on 'cause I actually know a ton of people that know what Airmail is and would not know what Claude is. Sure. No, of course. That- Mm. 9:32 That to me is sort of the, the perimeter- Though we're not the people lining up though... 9:34 which is on the, on the, on the, on the other side, yeah, there's people who care about Airmail and have no idea what the hell Claude is and have never used it. 9:39 I have two ideas in response to this, neither of which I'm gonna do because by the time I would be able to pull it together it would be, like, everyone's moved on. 9:47 I think it would be funny to do a dive bar one and give out hats that say, "Drinking." 9:52 I suggested Charlene's 'cause that's a big watering hole for the, uh, the Brooklyn media and literati, or two hats that say, "Linking" and- Mm... do it with, like, another one of the, um, [clicks tongue] 10:06 immediate infrastructure companies. Maybe even Beehiiv itself. Part of a construction company. Mm-hmm. Like a building- A construction company. [laughs] Yeah. I mean, I do think, like- Do you... 10:14 Wait, do you think that these people, these, these, you know, alleged people who know what Airmail is and don't know what Claude is, I'm assuming they would know what ChatGPT is, what OpenAI is. 10:25 Yeah, but they know it as, like, a bogeyman. Mm. Mm-hmm. Like- And as a generic, though. I... That's what I'm getting at. They would know it as a generic. Yeah, as a generic. Like, I mean, I don't really even... 10:34 I, I think very few people actually have a mental model for the distinctions between these. Yeah. I will say that- LLMs... my, in my personal usage of AI, I, like, could not... 10:47 I, like, tried to use ChatGPT for functions like, like, like, the main thing I... My favorite thing to use it for is when I'm writing something and it's too long and I've got like 1,800 words and I need to cut 600. 10:57 I'll be like... It, it has, like, a style guide I've made and stuff, and, like, some of the best pieces I've written. And I'll say, "Point out where I could cut 600 words. 11:05 Like, give me places where you think I could stand to lose," right? Something like that. And I tried to do that sort of function with ChatGPT, and I, I just, I didn't like it. It didn't work for me. 11:14 And, and then when I start... When I switched to Claude and tried using that, which was actually about a year ago, then now it's, like, part of my, you know- Mm... 11:21 o- not necessarily every single day, but, like, m- most days of my work week I'm using it for these kind of... 11:26 Or, like, if I'm researching for a podcast and I've, like, exhausted all my sources and questions, I'm like, "There's gotta be a few more." Then I'll, like, put in, like, "Here's what I have so far. 11:34 Here are some past..." Uh, this is for the other podcast I do, Creative Spotlight. "Here's some past transcripts and question documents that w- worked really well. Can you find any more questions?" 11:42 And it, and it always comes up with a few, right? But my point of saying this is, like, I am susceptible to Claude branding, right? 11:49 I think the, like, the interface, maybe it's the colors, maybe it's, you know, the tone of voice it uses, whatever, like, it worked on me, um, in a way that, like, I... It... 11:56 ChatGPT could not onboard me into becoming a regular AI user. Um, but Claude could. Yeah. The branding worked on me. Not that I'm like, you know, fawning over going to the Airmail pop-up-But it worked. 12:09 I recently crashed out so hard at ChatGPT that it did send me a suicide hotline. [laughs] What? [laughs] What happened? That's insane. [laughs] Um, I don't really wanna get into it, but... [laughs] Okay. 12:21 You just did, obviously. [laughs] Yeah, you, you kinda broached it, and y- you know I don't know how to let things go, so... Well, you know, it's so cheeky. It's like, "Can you do this?" 12:28 And it's like, "Yeah," and then it doesn't do it. And then it's like, "Do you want me to do this?" And I was like, "No, I want you to kill yourself." And then it was like- Oh, okay... "Don't do that." That's insane. 12:37 Got it. That I did that? So basically- Yeah. [laughs] No, it's not a human. That's the thing. Like, everyone's like, "Oh, if you're not polite to it, you're a sociopath." No. 12:47 Basically, ChatGPT was trying to express its, uh, brat fetish to you, and it wanted you- [laughs]... to put it in its place. 12:53 And when you did, it f- finally decided to tell you that you have to be really careful with your mental health. Yeah. [laughs] Sam Altman's somewhere pooning over my- [laughs] Goddammit. I, oh, God. [laughs] Funny... 13:04 my dom things. I, I'm like, I, I don't know. Maybe I am a secret psychopath, or maybe I just don't like to be lied to by an interface. Who can say? Okay. Jose, you went to an Addison Rae Iconic Magazines pop-up. 13:20 That was great. I, I- Was that not your photo? It, no, that is my photo, but, um, suggesting that I went to it- What the fuck is Iconic Magazines?... is doing, doing a lot... Wait, what do you mean? 13:28 You don't know what Iconic Magazines is? No. What? Oh, you mean the... Is it the store? The store. The store. Okay, sorry. I thought- Yeah, I was talking about this two weeks ago on the pod. 13:36 [laughs] No, I do know what that is. I know- Okay. It's like Casa and Iconic. I was gonna read where- No, Casa and Iconic are the big ones. Yes. 13:41 So I thought you were talking about a magazine called Iconic Magazine, and I was like, "I don't know what that is." No, so- So Addison Rae did a pop-up in the store Everyone reads it, by the way, Daisy, except for you. 13:49 Yeah, except for you. [laughs] It's not for you. Nice try. Suicide hotline phone number incoming. [laughs] No, I, um, I didn't go to it. 13:56 I was wandering around Nolita because it was 80 degrees in October, and why should I be in front of a computer if that's happening? 14:02 Um, and I saw just, like, a gaggle of people waiting to get into Iconic, and I'm like, "This makes no sense what's happening right now." 14:10 [laughs] And then next thing I know, Addison Rae jumps out of a G-Wagon, goes into Iconic, and starts hanging out of the, uh, coffee window on, on Mulberry Street. Um, and it was, frankly, a beautiful moment. 14:23 Um, she posed- It's a beautiful photo. And so you've got somebody, like- No, it's great... posing. Yeah, like posing in the front. [laughs] It was so good. Producer Tom, you should clip this and, and put the photo in. 14:30 [laughs] Um, but yeah, there was a legit, like, maybe 100 people waiting to do whatever it is that she was there to do, and I think it was her birthday 'cause people sang- Mm-hmm... 14:39 happy birthday to her when she got out of the G-Wagon. Um, I personally would love to throw a birthday party at- Yeah, October 6th... Iconic Magazines. 2000. So... I think we can make that happen for you. 14:48 Addison beat me to it. Oh, this was yesterday. Yeah. Was this fresh, fresh juice? The, oh, yeah. I took a screenshot of this tweet- Fresh juice... 14:53 and it does say it was six hours ago when I took the screenshot, and that was yesterday, so for some reason- This Instagram of the moment... I thought it was, like, two weeks ago. 14:58 Were you drinking two Diet Cokes at the time? I was not having two Diet Cokes. I was trying to decide if I should go have, uh, tacos at Santo Taco, which is delicious- Mm... and down the street. 15:07 Um- I still have not tried that... and I... It's so good. Um, it's- What beverages have you been into lately? [laughs] Ooh, this is a good question. I know. Um... This is not a dirt prompt. This is the Jose prompt. 15:18 So yeah, I mean, nonstop Diet Cokes have become a thing. I was recently at a conference where there was free Diet Coke in, like, every fridge, and I just railed them. Mm. Um, I really got my, uh, what's his name? 15:30 Not Charlie Munger, the other guy. Oh, Warren Buffett? Yeah. Isn't Warren Buffett notorious for, like, mainlining Diet Coke all the time? That would, I mean- Mm. I, it probably explains the game. 15:40 Explains a lot about the picture on your website. It's why he... Yeah, exactly. 15:42 Uh, what I highly recommend that people do is a thing that I call the goofball, uh, aperitivo, which is, um, a Montenegro and an iced Americano at precisely 4:30. Oof. Um, it fully resets your day. You can keep working. 15:55 You could go out. It just, it, it gets you right. So goofball Amer- uh, spritz, goofball aperitivo is, is the way to go. You know, it's an amazing flavor combo. I drink the, I drink the 7.8-ounce Diet Cokes. 16:06 I don't really like the larger ones. They don't taste as good. Don't, they don't get as cold. But I, I, um, alternate between two types [laughs] of gum all day. 16:13 I've got some, you know, typical mint gum and some bubble gum. And so I'll drink one of these Diet Cokes in about two sips, and then I'll put in a stick of the bubble gum. Okay. Incredible flavor combination. 16:25 Interesting. This, this actually might be more messed up than me telling ChatGPT- [laughs] It's absolutely nuts... to kill itself. It's absolutely nuts. You're, you're basically, like, you have invented 16:38 bubble gum flavored Coke from first principles- It's, well, it's-... is what you're saying. I mean, you could say it's a cigarette replacement. Yeah, I was gonna- That bubble gum? 16:46 I was gonna ask you what your- Like, the sweet flavor profile bubble gum, not mint. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's this. Tried it. Yeah. Yeah. Tried it like some sort of pervert. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. 16:56 I was actually gonna ask what, what it is that you're trying to, like, sort of, uh, block out of your mind by chewing that much gum and drinking that much Diet Coke. It's, I mean, uh, no- Noices... 17:04 I think it's more to focus. I was never a gum guy until about a year ago, and I started. I'll chew like 10 sticks a day. I'll just be sat at my desk and like- He's mewing. I can't- [laughs] It's, it's full-on mewing... 17:15 we've, we've discussed this on the pod. I can't do it. I chew it, like, too hard. It actually changes my jawline temporarily. You don't, you don't want a big, beautiful, strong jawline? 17:24 I have a big, beautiful, strong jawline. That's true. But if you push it to extremes- Like, I don't want it to be square. That's fair. All right. If it was even, fine, but it gets... 17:31 [laughs] It beefs up one side first, and then I look- [laughs]... even more asymmetrical. I'm like, "I can't do this right now." 17:37 [laughs] Like, until the beauty standard swings back to, like, Cubist painting, I need to keep my head down and a low profile. So... Fair point. Fair point. Um, we, let's talk about Scene infrastructure company. 17:48 What infrastructure- Let's talk about it... are you building for which scenes? 17:52 Um, we're trying to build basically what we call, like, Shopify for the experience economy, and that's, that's the language that, um, has landed with what we call, um, real people who are- [laughs] Uber for Events wasn't hitting? 18:05 In, in crypto, yeah, we tried Uber for Events, and everyone just looked at us, uh, funny. 18:09 But no, like, the, the real vision ultimately is, like, as someone who grew up in New York City, as someone who grew up kind of bouncing around between lots of different subcultures and communities, like-Um, I started to think about what, what kinds of tools would be necessary for continuing to be able to make money from gathering people together for a variety of reasons, and it's not just ticketing, it's RCPs, it's bookings for, like, yoga classes. 18:35 It's, like, anyone who wants to, um, fight against the oncoming onslaught of AI eating everything digital, and, uh- If you came to our clone party, you used Mash to RSVP. Exactly. Mm-hmm. 18:46 Um, and I think what's fun about our approach is that we're not trying to be, like, the cool company in your face that is the middleman between you and your audience. 18:53 It's very much driven to be, like, a Shopify/Stripe-esque thing in the background that just makes your life easier and gives you better access to data about who comes to your events, what other things do they go to, how can you better serve them, how can you better reach them. 19:05 And so the, the vision is, like, instead of there being one cool new ticketing company or one cool new events company, there's thousands of them all running on the same infrastructure. 19:15 So that's what makes this different from Partiful, the Palantir of events? Correct. Exactly. Uh, although someone recently called us Palantir for Vibes- [laughs]... 19:24 um, and that was a really interesting take on what we're trying to do, because, you know, in a lot of ways- Was, meant as a compliment? They meant it as a compliment, and I, and I kind of took it as one, right? 19:33 Because the, the thing that is interesting about what we're doing is that right now, I can't tell how you socialize in aggregate across all the different platforms that you might buy tickets- Mm... 19:44 or RCP to things to, right? So, like, I have a really broken view of you that's based on, like, I don't know, work events on Luma and Eventbrite, and fun friend stuff on Partiful, and, like, you know, tickets to 19:57 shows on, like, Dice or Resident Advisor or whatever the case may be. Yeah. 20:01 Um, if we pull off what we're trying to do, we can actually build, like, a really great profile of, like, all those things, 'cause they all ladder back down to the same account. 20:09 Um, and hopefully help you find more interesting opportunities to socialize and more interesting things to belong to, because we can finally understand that, like, oh, you like crypto events and hardcore shows, but also, like, wine tastings, right? 20:22 So how do we kind of build things around you that allow you to find more things like that, that make you happy and feel fulfilled? 20:28 But your challenge then is, is, like, ultimately long-term landing clients like Resident Advisor, like Dice, and having them use your infrastructure to connect all these other things, right? 20:38 Or, or the venues going directly through us- Mm... and no longer needing Resident Advisor- Yes... or Dice, which is where we're actually having a ton of success, right? 20:45 So a lot of folks that are working with us are excited because they're cutting out the middleman, they're capturing more of the fees and economics for themselves. 20:52 You know, it's, there's people who are, like, making $3,000 to $5,000 more per month using us than using a different ticketing provider. 'Cause you're after, like, your Nowaday's, et cetera. Your Now- Yeah... 21:01 your Metal graphs. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and at the end of the day, like, when I buy access to something, I'd much rather be paying or feel like I'm paying the person who's actually producing that experience for me- Mm-hmm... 21:11 not, like, some random middleman who's, like, trying to get me to sign up for their newsletter so they can show me the other 10,000 events at the other places, half of which I can't go to, uh, because they're trying to trade against that in order to, like, keep those clients happy. 21:24 Dude, the Dice lock-in is crazy. Like- [laughs]... me and my friends would've killed that little rhombus with hammers, I can tell you that much. [laughs] I was just, um- [laughs]... 21:33 uh, real, real world ticket buying experience, so World Cup coming up, right? And then- Mm-hmm... two weeks ago- Allegedly, I don't think it's gonna happen, I'm sorry. Okay, well it's gonna happen. 21:40 I think they're gonna have to pull it. There's, there's no, uh, I... There's no way. Trump likes money and trophies too much. They're gonna do this thing. No, I think they're gonna do it in Canada and Mexico. 21:49 There's- I think they're gonna cut out-... 0% chance. Anyway, all this aside- I will take that bet. Kalshi, if you're listening. All this aside- Yeah, p- Polymarket bet... 21:56 so, so I, I bring this up 'cause I got this email this morning where a few weeks ago, it's like if you have a Visa card, you can sign up in a lottery for the opportunity to maybe buy tickets. And so I got that- Mm-hmm... 22:06 this morning, and it's like, so now, um, on Thursday at 11:00 AM, I have the opportunity to log in and try to buy tickets. And it's also, these are so expensive. It's the most expensive World Cup ever. Mm-hmm. 22:17 I wrote down tickets for the final at MetLife, um, cheapest possible tickets, category four, $2,030. Category one, which is, you know, the most expensive available one there, $6,730. Um, these will go up. 22:31 Uh, I think I read that you can buy up to 40 ti- like I'll have the opportunity to buy up to 40 tickets maximum- Mm-hmm... four from each match I'm going to. Um- Mm-hmm... 22:41 and then, uh, I think like a couple months later, FIFA opens up their official resale thing- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... 22:48 which is fully, you can charge as much as you want, and I'm pretty sure FIFA takes a 15% fee on both sides from the buyer and the seller. So this is like an insane, you know, the- FIFA's in their Taylor Swift era. 23:01 They really are. You're basically trading, you're trading meme coins is what you're doing- Yeah... it seems to me. Yeah. I know, and I'm, and I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, man, if the, if, if the- What's the ticker? 23:08 ... credit card can take it, maybe I should buy 40 tickets and then resell them and be a horrible person, you know? We should just pool funds together. We can do this. That's what credit cards are for, actually. Yeah. 23:17 We can, we can, we can do this as a team. I can... Yeah, we get multiple cr- we could probably make a 4X, 5X, 6X profit here. 23:22 I think what's amazing about that is like, on the one hand, it sounds, uh, devious and nefarious. 23:27 On the other hand, what I hear there are a few things that I, I love and wanna bring to the world, which is, um, you're getting access because you have a Visa card. 23:36 It would be awesome if there were other ways for you to get access, such as proving that you are, like, a diehard fan of soccer or whatever the case may be, right? 23:45 And so I think that one of the things that we've baked into what we're building is different ways of basically showing that you deserve to get, like, first crack at something before someone else by, like, your loyalty, your past history. 23:55 You've gone to a ton of events at this place. You should absolutely be the first one to buy tickets, et cetera. 24:00 And so, like, rewarding people for going deep with the things that they care about is something that I think is really exciting. 24:06 Um, and then the other thing for- What if I'm just a diehard fan for the financialization of all culture? Uh, then have I got a product for you. [laughs] Is it called Bitcoin? It's called Bitcoin, exactly. 24:18 I mean, are you more of a Kalshi person or a Polymarket person? 'Cause I, I just have, like, the Polymarket news in my head from today.I mean, I don't know. It feels like- I'm actually gonna use that... 24:26 Call, Call She's sort of like A24. [laughs] Fair. No, maybe Polymarket is A24 and Call She is, like, neon. [laughs] They're coming up, you know? They're, they're, they're coming up. 24:41 They're making, they're making their ways. Um- Yeah. But yeah, the other thing about the sort of resell stuff is, um, most places that resell- And I love their cereal. I love their cereal. It's good cereal. 24:52 Most places that resell tickets don't actually drive any revenue back to, like, the original venue or artist. Mm-hmm. And um, the fact that FIFA's like, "Fuck all you guys, we're gonna take a cut," is just good business. 25:06 Yeah. And I think that, like, a tiny little nightclub should be able to do the same thing. 25:10 I think that a creator who, like, runs a, a regular meetup with their fans should be able to, like, make a little bit of extra money if someone can't come to the meetup and resells their ticket. 25:18 Um, these are things that are just, like, somehow only allowed if you are, uh, the biggest player in the space, and I think that equalizing access to those kinds of tools is really exciting. There's, um, we had... 25:29 Around, around this time last year, we had Ben Leventhal on. Yeah. You know, former- Yeah... uh, Blackbird founder. 25:34 Which it's like it sound like what I'm understanding, my understanding of Blackbird compared to my understanding of, of what you're describing is, like, what Blackbird is trying to do is sort of a similar thing in that these are both, like- Mm-hmm... 25:44 on, you know, on chain technologies of... That track, kind of, a person's behavior. But that one is more specifically for restaurants and more visible. Mm-hmm. It is itself the storefront. 25:53 Whereas this is, like, the underlying technology, and then every venue gets to be their own Blackbird, as it were. Yeah, 100%. That's, that's like, basically it. 26:02 The vision is if you sell access to something in person, you should be able to do it directly, and we can power it and make it super simple. 26:08 And we can give you better a- information about who you're selling to, where they go, why they keep coming back, and how to reward them and keep them coming back time and time again. Um, this... Something... 26:18 I'm gonna read another little excerpt here from Emily S- Siegel. Is... That's her name, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, K-Hole Emily, um, Nemesis Emily. This is from her dispatch a few days ago, October 4th. 26:29 Uh, bear with me a second. Emily in Berlin is what it's called. "Of course, in 2025 Berlin, the pendulum has swung incredibly towards repression and state violence. 26:37 It seems bizarre to even think about the digital freedom version of Berlin, but there's nonetheless something relevant about it as we think about autonomous strategy being this double entendre. 26:45 What we mean is that we're referring to autonomous technologies from agentic AI to DAOs that take on a life of their own and can do things on their own. 26:53 And we're also talking about how to be autonomous, how to launch independent projects, how to have intellectual autonomy, and in a certain way, how to be a freak in these times that don't really seem to reward freakiness. 27:03 If you listen to the advice being given out all day, every day on social media about how to be successful now, it's all basically telling you that you have to be an attention-hogging Chad, making more and more content all the time, and that this is some sort of gold rush moment where attention is king. 27:16 But we keep asking ourselves what the endgame of that really is. To be more specific, the attention economy is zero-sum. 27:21 Like, sure, people could become marginally more addicted to their phones or even greatly more addicted, and the overall pie of attention could increase." 27:27 But, this is the last bit, "If absolutely everyone is jockeying for that attention even more intensely than they are now, what's the economic outcome? 27:35 Is it just more fake assets, casino tokens, trading TikTok dollars for failing American dollars? What's really going to happen?" Um- Emily gets it. Yeah. 27:47 She always brings it back to economics, which is what so many people who have smart cultural criticism can't do. Mm-hmm. It's like they can't take the step of being like, who pays for this? Why and how? Yep. 28:00 And she had this great tweet, um, like, couple months ago, I think around the time where I was... Published my Future of Media is a Bank piece, where she said, like, if you... Like, if you're indie... 28:15 If you're a media company that doesn't make money or doesn't have a strategy to make money, it's, it's, it's not indie media. It's basically just, like, a side project. 28:22 I think I'm paraphrasing poorly, but she's kind of like, even, even indie media has to have some sort of economic strategy and- Yep... it's weird to talk about it as if that isn't the case. It might be different. 28:39 But the attention... Thinking about attention as a market of supply and demand is very intuitive to me. Mm-hmm. And she's basically saying, like, 28:51 demand could increase if people are on their phones more, but demand will hit the ceiling before supply does because I think, as I said before, like, uh, attention is biologically curated. Like, we are... 29:06 Our brain is limited in how much we can pay attention to. Um, AI can create more, so it can flood the supply of that market more than we can increase our attention. 29:18 We can use AI to extend our attention, but that attention's only valuable if AI is also empowered to pay for things. Mm-hmm. 29:25 So, or to reward the stuff that it, quote, "pays attention to," which by the way, is not the same as biological human attention. 29:33 Which is gonna be at some point probably a VC meta-narrative, and then I'll hate myself for even- [laughs]... um, saying this phrase. 29:40 But, like, one, [laughs] one thing that I think is a good example of this, and I know, Jose, you're gonna have thoughts, is, you know, Avi Schiffman pays a million dollars to buy out the New York City subway system. 29:52 MrFriend.com. He says it's the most expensive campaign of all time. Whatever. 29:57 Actually, like, a million dollars, that's a lot if it's 50% of the runway that you have left, and kind of goofball, like, uh, you-wish-you-were-Don-Draper shit. 30:06 But, like, it's actually not that much money in the grand scheme of things. Mm-hmm. So it's like- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... surprising more people don't do this. Um, buys it out. 30:14 Now it's getting increased attention because people are vandalizing it. But I saw the most cucked tweet of all time yesterday, guys. I'm still thinking about it. 30:22 Somebody had, like, torn the corner off one of the Friend ads in the subway. [laughs] And somebody, not Avi, to his credit, posts it and is like-Do you get a discount if this happens? 30:32 Yeah, man, you get a fucking discount. 30:34 You can go talk to the manager of the Subway and be like, "Somebody ripped the corner of my ad," and they will pay you a pro rata for, you know, how many- The, the, the amount of the ad has been ripped off [laughs]... 30:44 inches were in that poster. Yeah, like, you're gonna get $500 back. Like, are... Be so serious, dude. Like- Outfront Media, by the way, for anybody- Yeah... looking to buy ads on the MTA. 30:56 I- I'm going to Mayor Eric Adams himself. I'm gonna find him at the club at 3:00 AM- That pisses me... and I demand a refund on my ad campaign. Yeah. 31:06 Um- He would literally be like, um, he'd be like, "I had a friend once. She lived in the Bronx." Like- Yeah. My, my shorty in the Bronx said- [laughs]... 31:14 uh, "You can't get back what's already been given," uh, and then he would just walk away. [laughs] He's like, "You know, a great man once said, 'My medallion is reckless,' and these red medallions- [laughs]... 31:25 they are reckless." [laughs] Like I said- Um-... New York is the San Francisco of the United States. Oh, God. Uh, that was one of my things yesterday. There was a bunch of, um, tech folks talking about how the rise of AI 31:43 ad campaigns in New York City, eh, indicates that, um- San Franciscoization... New York City is becoming... Yeah. Yes, exactly, and I- I, ugh, it set me off. Um, 31:54 I think the thing that's sort of the thing for me right now that's interesting is like, um, first of all, E- E- Emily's bit there about attention is really astute, as Daisy already observed. I think that, um, 32:07 largely, a lot of what we're building is focused on the idea that I think that attention is kind of a dead scene, and that there are other forms of capturing and recognizing value from the interactions between people and content or experiences that are gonna have to arise in order for, um, people to avoid becoming, like, just weird pod humans who are fully, like, attached to, like, 25 screens. 32:30 Mm-hmm. Um, and I think where, where that gets interesting is, like, to me, the, the friend ads are an indicator of, um, both how much, uh... what tactics work these days, right? 32:43 So, like, intentional rage baiting by having, like, this, like, ad that frankly, as a former design studio owner, those, those ads are designed to be vandalized, right? Yeah. Like, the- 100%... 32:53 that, that amount of neg- that amount of negative space [laughs] is not- Mm-hmm... unintentional. Mm-hmm. 32:57 Um, and so I think anyone who's built an ad campaign, anyone who's worked in media, anyone who, um, you know, knows the sort of mechanics of negotiating with someone like an Outfront knows, like, what the goal is. 33:08 Um, and it worked, right? They've accomplished, I think, their goal. Um, we're talking about it. People have been talking about it for weeks. 33:14 They'll keep talking about it for a while until the next, like, weird spectacle happens. Um, but I think that at the, at the sort of furthest edges of this, what is most interesting to me is, like, 33:25 there's also an upper bound, I think, on how much this rage bait approach will work in terms of, like, mass communications. 33:33 Um, and I'm interested to see what the sort of, like, pendulum swing away from that w- ends up looking like. Yeah. I think... I can't remember if I brought this up, Francis, before. 33:43 Like, I was talking to Seb, who runs Isolari, which are those little pocket books. You did, yeah. [laughs] Yeah, they put out one with, um, like, the Ethereum Foundation and... 33:54 Anyway, um, they're really cool, but he was talking about the re-nationalization of youth culture, where it's like, as people retreat from the Internet, style gets geographically specific again. Mm-hmm. 34:07 Um, and when it's youth culture, like, I think a lot of it's related to, or it used to be related to, like, protest culture and, um, music and skateboarding and things that we consider, you know, youthful. 34:20 Which because on the Internet, like, adults and young people have all gotten dumped into the same algorithm, have kind of, like, been obliterated by just the infantilization of everyone and everything. 34:34 I think there's, like, this viral tweet where somebody, some guy is like, "The thing you need to understand to, like, understand anything that's going on in America right now is that everyone is 12." Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. 34:42 [laughs] Like, I'm 12. You're 12. Like, why am I- [laughs] Why do I throw fits at ChatGPT, right? Like, if I was- You're 12... 34:48 gonna psychoanalyze myself, no, I've spent a lot of time being in control of my emotions around circumstances that I can't control. And when I have the opportunity to let it out in a safe space, which is 35:03 talking to a machine, that's when my shadow self comes out, which is, the shadow self is very angry. The shadow self, like, feels like I don't have a lot of e-agency. 35:14 And, like, if I feel that way having my own company that's funded at least through the end of the year [laughs] 35:20 and, uh, and I'm the only person on my board, like, how do people feel that are stuck in jobs- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm... that they don't like or, you know, the purgatory of having a green ring on your LinkedIn photo? Mm-hmm. 35:34 Um, I don't know. I think, like... Where was I going with this? [laughs] Sorry. I don't know, but, uh, let me- No, but I have a question. Oh, yeah. I have a follow-up question. I'm just curious. 35:44 Where, um, do you remember the last time you didn't feel that way? Um, do I remember the last time I didn't feel that way? I don't know. I think it's been at least 10 years. Like, for me- Mm-hmm... 35:57 it's, it didn't start with, uh... I don't think it really started with Trump being elected the first time, but that, like, definitely didn't help. Mm-hmm. 36:09 I do feel like when Roe was overturned, I definitely feel like something in me just died and just didn't come back. Mm-hmm. But it's more than political. I think it's the betrayal of... 36:24 I was, like, a pretty patriotic kid. Mm-hmm. And I think I did have a, a liberal view of American exceptionalism. Mm-hmm. My husband's actually very similar. I think this is why we get along. 36:37 Like, he was like-We were both in student government, right? We both were like people who... 36:44 I actually did never watch West Wing, but we had kind of this Aaron Sorkin view of like political communication, which is like everyone's fundamentally rational. 36:52 You've just got to tell it to them in a way that they can understand. Um, and I realize that's like a very privileged view because a lot of people in America did not- Mm-hmm... grow up with that. 37:03 But I think it's just the betrayal of realizing that like your fellow Americans are so fucking stupid. Um, and there's no way to communicate with some of them. Mm-hmm. The distorted reality of that, I think it's worse. 37:19 It, it's so much bigger and worse than just like Trump for that reason. And like a lot of that started with the Tea Party. 37:25 I think people who are older feel like it started with Reagan, but there's just a decline, a general decline of cultural and media literacy and consensus reality. 37:36 I think the anger is towards the lack of consensus reality more than it is towards, um, a particular political party or cause. Which is also, I mean, all a result of the rise in, of, of social media, right? Yeah. 37:49 And like the increasing everybody has a smartphone, everybody's on these things, the death of institution, media institutions, that kind of thing, right? Like- Yeah... it's kind of... 37:57 I mean, it's two sides of the same coin, right? Like this, that's the means of distribution of this fragmentation and like, you know. Well, but I wouldn't have a career if it wasn't for social media. Mm-hmm. 38:06 And like my first... Well, my second, but my first real like internship was at the NPR social media desk. 38:13 You know, you could, you could say it's a double-edged sword or you could say it's a two-sided [laughs] a two-sided black mirror. Okay. It's terrible. 38:19 But- I thought you, I thought you were gonna say two-sided marketplace and then I was gonna shoot myself. No. [laughs] Well, like Andy Carvin- I'll shoot myself anyway. Do you guys know who Andy Carvin is? No. 38:28 He worked for the NPR social media desk. He kind of like... 38:33 He, he was like one of the first people to understand this strategy of like news orgs kind of like platforming citizen journalism, especially around the Arab Spring. 38:41 And I think we'll look back and see that there was like this kind of brief golden age when everyone had a smartphone, and so we actually had like a more complete picture of reality before AI video really was introduced and caught on and like that was like muddled. 38:58 'Cause we didn't have like a complete picture of reality when, you know, the Vietnam War was just being reported on by like TV news and you're like, "Okay, Walter Cronkite." 39:08 Like, I think we can all agree, like even if you're pro-media institution, that was a very skewed view of the world. So there's a brief period where everyone has a cellphone. Maybe 2010 to 2020. Yeah. 39:18 And like you could really show this is what's happening, and you could do that sort of digital forensics and stitch stuff together to be like, actually, this, this rubber bullet, you know, was fired before the police officer was shoved, and da, da, da, da. 39:31 Sure. And then all of a sudden it's like you get that... We had that for like, what, eight to 10 years and then like boom, never trust a video again. Yeah. 39:40 I think the other thing too is how people realized that you could use social media and weaponize it, which I think is like... The thing I'm thinking of is a book I read recently. 39:52 It's way too complicated for me to try to explain what the book is about. Infinite Jest? We've all been there. [laughs] What's it called? No, um- Infinite Jest. It is, it is, uh, 40:03 it is, it is, it is a book about, um, a group of four weird underground musicians that I've always been interested in who it turns out were secretly bankrolling, um, this author named James Mason, who's like a major figure in the white nationalism movement. 40:17 Oh. Mm. And so it's like these cats from like the industrial goth world who are like, "We're not racist, we're just into edgy stuff," and it turns out that they were like sending this guy commissary money. 40:26 He wrote this book called Siege, which is like really famous in sort of like neo-Nazi circles. 40:30 Anyway, what the book made me realize was, um, and what it did a good job of framing up is people forget how much, um, political violence and blowing shit up was literally like a weekly occurrence in this country for like 15 to 20 years. 40:45 And I think in a lot of ways, what I think about when I think of the current media landscape is how that, that battle kind of shifted online because people realized that they could wage the same kind of tactics from the comfort of their basement. 40:57 And in a lot of ways, um, I think what we're going to have to reckon with is, um, when you basically go from everyone have to do, doing, do that work like boots on the ground style to basically now having like psychological drone warfare via the use of AI tools, um, what that does to further fragment and further disorient people and further alienate people, um, because we're, we're... 41:23 Some might say that we're already at peak like... We're at peak like n- zero consensus about reality, uh, but we're gonna achieve escape velocity and break through to like some really weird places very, very soon. Yeah. 41:34 Right. And I guess for me, I agree, first of all. Like, how do you create media and culture for those weird places? Um, or for people who are looking for 41:52 some sort of consensus bubble? Mm-hmm. Because I, I think what might separate me from 42:04 people who are further to the left of me, and this is not to punch left, is like, I do feel like I'm in consensus reality with some people who are more center, even rightward than me. We just like disagree, 42:21 but- It's like Barry Weiss. No. [laughs] Not Barry Weiss. 42:26 Well, w- w- no, what, what you're saying, yeah, what you're saying is like this, like th- this consensus of like fact versus consensus of like, like strongly held belief and how like, like you're, you're right now framing yourself as existing in this like vaguely center bubble- Sure... 42:42 um, where you can have disagreements on a thing, but you agree that the thing exists. No, I'm in this, I'm in a center-Left bubble, maybe even a left bubble. 42:51 But I can see through the clear part of the bubble enough- Hm... to be like, "Okay, we, we agree on the reality. We disagree on, like, what should happen." Yeah. 42:59 But the problem is, like, I think Democrats were like, "Okay, cool. 43:04 We agree on the reality, so we're gonna do all our outreach to these people and try to form an electoral coalition with the reality agreers," like, underestimating how much they disagree on, like, what should happen. 43:18 Yeah. And like, that's actually, like, where the Democrats got fucked. So you know, I, 43:27 I don't really know, like, what the answer is, 'cause I'm like, my vision of the future is, like, I'm kind of joking, but, like, Scandinavian socialism in a free and liberated New England plus New York with, like- I think the, the answer-... 43:39 strong trading terms with liberated California. The answer is an a- I like this And Puerto Rico, obviously... the answer is an active building of consensus reality among, like, fragmented groups, right? 43:48 And like d- in IRL rather than URL. But like connect it, you know, using URL as a connector, but it's like people talking to other people in the real world and, like, having that exchange that establishes- Okay, Jubilee. 44:00 Yeah. Th- there's been three. [laughs] No, no, no, but I'm serious. 44:02 Not in like a Jubi- not at all in a Jubilee way, but just like, like that kind of thing and, like, groups, different groups building consense- consensus reality between, between each other. 44:11 I don't- There's a, there's a great thing I saw yesterday about a woman who I think is called, um, they call her MAGA Granny. Um- Yeah... 44:19 and she, like, literally decide- she's 72, I think, and she literally decided, like, "I'm gonna go to Portland, Oregon, and see this war-torn cityscape [laughs] that Trump- Hm... has been talking about." 44:32 And she's actually been, like, meeting, to use her language, Antifa people, and has realized that they're all just, like, normal people. Yeah. 44:40 And they're actually quite nice and that there is no centralized organization. It's just, like, people who don't like fascism, and she's probably getting a little bit of a crash course in what fascism actually is. 44:50 Um, but she was interviewed by, I think, like, the, The Oregonian, or, um- Hm... and she expressed, um, remorse for participating in, um, the attack on the Capitol. She was like, "No, I, like, I talk to these people. 45:07 We have very similar problems with the government. 45:09 I now feel bad about what I did because now, like, they're being accused of doing terrible things and they're not, and I actually kinda did something that I now feel bad about." 45:17 And so I think to your point, there is this... 45:20 It's so cheesy, but I think there is something to be said about if you even sort of remove the sort of left-right construct, right, and sort of just say there's a bubble within which if you're willing to kind of peek through the concentric layers of your bubble into other people's bubbles, you can sort of start to see where there's just a little bit of overlap and build bridges. 45:38 Um, some people are always gonna be, like, fully outside at the edges where they believe things that are just fundamentally untrue that they probably made up. 45:46 Um, but I think that there is, there is value in figuring out how to, um, 45:54 thin out the, the barriers that exist between the people who are kind of in that zone where you can kind of understand at the very least where other people are coming from. Yeah. 46:02 I think there's, like, that's kind of the touch grass coalition, but the problem is, like, uh, there's a lot of people who are, like, really nice and can coexist with their neighbors if they disagree and- Mm-hmm... 46:14 like, they have a nice neighborly community or church that's split between Democrats and Republicans. But the problem is, like, the way that people vote. 46:23 Like, people are really good at touching grass and coexisting, but, like, Americans vote like it's American Idol. Like- Hm... 46:31 I think people genuinely think they're being polled on their, their, their happiness with the leadership at that snapshot of time. Yeah. 46:39 And they have no ability, they have no theory of mind for, like, what four years of an alternative looks like. 46:46 I think there's a lot of people who went into the voting booth and because of some sort of deficiency in their long-term thinking genuinely were like, "I'm unhappy with Biden, so I'm gonna vote for Trump." Yeah. 46:57 They do not think about it as voting for Trump for the next four years. And I'm not trying to say- Mm-hmm... like, I don't even think it's, like, an IQ thing. 47:06 These are obviously functional people with jobs and driver's licenses. I just think, like, there's something missing in, like, civics and- Yeah. Yeah, for sure... 47:16 it's that, like, the two-party system sucks so much that people are just like- Yeah... "I'm gonna go fill out my happiness poll at this moment- Mm-hmm... in time." 47:26 And they're just, like, don't really understand what it means for that to now be the government. Voting, voting is kind of like, um, 47:35 when you go to Salt and Straw and 95% of the flavors are horrors against humanity- Yes... that you don't wanna have, and you're trying to find the one that you can stomach. That's kind of, kind of the vibe. 47:47 Well, I think that's how smart people vote, right? Sure. Like, I think lesser evil voting gets knocked really hard, but I think, like, smart people do lesser evil voting. Mm-hmm. Um, people who are, like, 48:04 y- you know, intelligent but feel, like, aggrieved, they do aggrieved voting. [laughs] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But, 48:14 like, there's other ways to show that you're aggrieved than signing up for four years of chaos in hopes that, like, you're gonna come out of it slightly better. Like what? 48:23 Like, but, like, what, to them, what are the options available that they would see? [lips smack] Um, protest that doesn't involve, like, shitting on the floor of the American Capitol. 48:32 [laughs] Getting involved in local politics. I actually think getting involved in local politics is, like, the best touch grass that you can do. 48:38 Which I think, I think now that, I mean, that's the kind of thing that we're seeing more and more with your Graham Platteners, um, of Maine. Yeah. 48:45 Like, these kind of post Zoran, like, you know, younger, more, like, candidates who are-Speaking less in terms of like, "I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican," and speaking more like specific issues. 48:56 'Cause to me, like that's such a problem with it all, is that like Democrat and Republican are these... and, and, and other words and concepts like that are these containers for, for, for other containers of meaning. 49:06 And it's this like matryoshka doll of meaning that gets so abstracted and that people don't... 49:11 Like you, you know, it's too much to engage with fully to think of like what's the choice between this candidate and this candidate, so you have these like shortcuts of meaning that help you make these decisions which are so, um, e- like almost like personalized and misunderstood between people. 49:27 And so that I think is a big thing. 49:29 A big reason why is around why Graham Plattner is successful is 'cause they're, they're speaking in terms of specific issues as opposed to these like abstracted concepts of like party loyalty and like 49:40 political fantasy, right? They're speaking to- [laughs]... specifics. And I think that is like one of the big things that makes it hard for the aggrieved voter or the lesser evil voter. 49:48 Like, and the lesser evil voter too, it's like when you are constantly voting for the lesser evil and it's, you know, and, [laughs] and, and getting the same results, right? It's like I can see being frustrated. 49:59 So I think to me, like that's, that's, I think, one of the major problems I see is the like container of meaning con- has other containers of mean... 50:09 the matryoshka of like not necessarily connected to material reality meaning. So what, what you're saying is that Anthropic should start sponsoring voting lines where you can chat to Claude about your ballot- [laughs]... 50:24 and then get a hat after you vote, right? I got my voting cap. Pokémon Claude to the polls. [laughs] I... Sorry for like turning this into a political podcast, but I think- It's okay... 50:35 when we had Trevor on, we kind of had a similar- Vote... line of inquiry. I honestly think that like healthcare is the only true coalition, um- Mm-hmm... issue that can unite Americans. Yeah. Not even housing. 50:48 Maybe housing in like 10 years, but right now there's too much boomer wealth tied up in, um, owning property, so I don't think it works. I think healthcare is like the only issue you can break through on. 50:58 I think you're right. I agree. Yeah. Everyone still thinks of housing as a, um, 3D bank account basically. Yeah. Um, or too many people with power still think of it that way. 51:07 Um, I s- to bring it back [laughs] to events, there's one other thing I wrote down from this New York Times article from, uh, when was this from? It's "When Did Everything Become So Intentional?" 51:18 This is from September 29th. Um, so- Yeah, they brought back their own language column, which I'm actually really excited about. So this is, this... Two, two not that long quotes. Um, one, "People seem to love..." 51:30 Okay, "Ms. Vanko, 36, said she had noticed an emphasis on intentionality not only in dating and relationships but also in other elements of social life. 'People seem to love a themed event these days. 51:40 We are here, we have an agenda, we're going to follow it,' she said of intentional gatherings in New York, which tend to be centered on an activity like running or a goal like making friends in your 30s. 51:50 It's more organized fun versus fun that happens on its own." 51:53 And then the other quote, "Yushin Sun, a psychologist in Seattle, said she found 'both myself and my patients using the word,' but could not recall any research papers or theory on the subject from her schooling. 52:05 'I think the word intentional might have come from the consumer and a general public who are tired of what's going on and tired of being pushed forward by external forces,' said Dr. Sun." Hmm. 52:17 So I think going back to something we were saying a little while ago, at the beginning of the, the kind of political thread we went down of like 52:24 being, you know, all of this being distributed by social media apps and such, I think like this intentionality is this like, 52:32 is almost like a synonym for touching grass here, where it's like doing the thing, like feeling like I have agency and this isn't just something I have to do because everyone's doing it and I saw it online. 52:41 Which I haven't [laughs] brought it up, but the entire last 20 minutes I've been thinking of Eddington, um, which, you know, like the... one of the... 52:49 There's a lot, there's a lot in there that, that is resonant, but one thing I, I come back to a lot is like when the teens are organizing their Black Lives Matter protest, and it's like, like the speed at which a small town gets exposed to this like larger cultural event and then they like participate it in their own way. 53:04 Um, and it's like, and like that's such a movie about how like, about how these phos- forces on the phone are like guiding our actions and like, you know, removing any intentionality. 53:16 Intentionality is like, it's almost like people feel like it's a way to put gates around their attention. But I think those- Mm... 53:22 gates are just so permeable because even when I am like, I sit at my desk, I'm like, "I'm going to lock in," like 53:32 the speed at which that's derailed by simply picking up my phone where people do text me about work is like, it's a joke. Um, and I still get a lot done in the day, so... A- and I'm pretty distracted. Yeah. I don't know. 53:48 It- it's... I'm very interested. I think there's like all these blogs and threads about like trying to figure out how other people work. I don't even know how you would externalize it. 53:55 'Cause like am I just getting s- distracted for like a shorter amount of time? I don't even know how much time is passing. I don't know. 54:01 I think of all this, I think what you're saying is interesting, but I think that ultimately, uh, the- He's like, "You're wrong"... the int- [laughs] No. 54:10 Well, it- it's not that you're wrong, I just think that, I think we ha- we don't have good language for this stuff. Mm. And I think that we default to sort of, um, really interesting linguistic crutches. 54:19 I think at the end of the day, the idea that there's some sort of mythical past where people were not distracted when they were doing- [laughs]... their work is ridiculous, right? 54:27 I think a better way to think of it is that there are, um, I don't know, the same way that like, I don't know why this is the metaphor, but like the Hudson River flows both ways. 54:38 It's like sometimes you're moving towards the goal, sometimes you're taking a step back, and that weird little like side trip to go read an article really quickly might be the seed of the idea that you need to get the next thing done, right? 54:49 Mm-hmm. I think that allowing ourselves to be a lot more, um, free-flowing and less constricted around like how we simply exist and, uh, how we do the things that are necessary to like 55:04 earn an income to survive, um, w- it's, it's a holdover from, I think, this really mechanistic like factory thinking where no human being is perfectly productive all the time. 55:16 Um, and the sort of like productivity porn around like, "10 hacks to make yourself lock in," it's like that stuff is so ridiculous. It's like, no, like, uh, I need, 55:28 I need 15 minutes to go like check whether or not someone's posted something funny on Instagram. [laughs] Like it's- Mm... it's a necessary part of the process. 55:36 Um, at least those are the lies I tell myself to allow myself to feel better about- Load-bearing leisure... how distracted I can get. Exact- load-bearing [laughs] leisure. There you go. 55:45 On that note, this has been Tasteland. Load-bearing leisure. This is it. Load-bearing leisure. Thanks for coming in. Could we need more of it? [laughs] See you next week. Cheers. 55:57 [outro music]
