7: Toby Shorin - The Shapes of Culture

Toby Shoren. We're live. How are you? I'm great. I'm great. Thank you, Jackson. I was going to 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. I'm very happy that you're doing this, that you're here in San Francisco. It's delightful to see you, as always. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this interview. You are a prolific person. You are certainly a prolific writer. I don't know if there are many people who have energized me with their ideas more in the last few years, which is saying a lot. Thank you. But you have a very, very kind of wide aperture 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 of years. And so with that all in mind, I'd like to kind of... cover a through line or a theme that I think has maybe been an arc of your writing and ideas publicly. It's certainly not holistic. There are lots of different ways we can take this, and I'm sure we'll talk about some of your other ideas and more specificity in the future. But for today's sake, I think it's safe to say you're a cultural anthropologist, 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 have initially said until some of your more recent writing that it was just kind of a clear shot from individual to collective. But now my observation, at least, has been that you've started to move back and forth between individual and collective in interesting ways. Interesting. I'm already very pleased with this theme, and I want to know where you see that. I might learn something new about my own thinking today, and I feel like I already am.

Cool. Well, we're going to do a little bit 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 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 line in one of your pieces on authenticity, which really was a commentary on the death of authenticity, the post-2010s sort of era of... hipsterism and millennials wanting to be their own person and not be defined by some kind of collective societal idea. There's a line in there where you reference the romantic movement. And so I'll read that back to you. The origin of the modern authenticity drive is the 19th century romantic movement. The romantics thought intensely felt emotion was at the heart of beauty and therefore they value 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 read 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? Wow. Amazing. Amazing question. Amazing question. Yeah. So 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. I've been reading a lot more about romanticism. I even have this book here, The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis. And I have been reading more romantic poets. I read Faust this year. I read some Shelley. I read some Blake. And I have come to a bigger appreciation of how...

The romanticists 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 responds to the idea that we are too rational, that science has given us a lot, but it has somehow divested the world of meaning. People who say those things are basically rehashing the romantic critique of the Enlightenment. The romantics were very direct in their appraisal of that, and they were super clear about what they were doing. They were saying, we need to create a secularized, naturalized faith alternative, and they basically based it on a naturalized version of the... fall from grace narrative um we once had this like perfect harmony with nature and uh we were we were living in our fully enchanted world but along came science and like disenchanted it um and here here's where we arrive mise en scene in this fallen state now how do we get back to nature how do we get back to that um sense of our self and our role in the cosmos well we can do that through our sentiments our feelings of contact with nature and the the powerful emotions that they give us that sense of awe and um the sublime 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 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 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 psychological sense, the Jungian sense, were inside one of those kind of romantic narratives. And yeah, although in that piece, I kind of spoke about like leaving that ironic framing 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 will definitely be with us for a long time. Yeah, it's funny how much of that first part of that sounds like the narratives today. Exactly. Exactly. It's very humbling. I don't know if it's a pendulum. It's funny. At my last interview, I was talking to Chris Peck about his pendulum theory of culture. And I'm not sure if it's a pendulum or a cycle. But it's definitely one of the two. The repetition is happening. I kind of think they happen. all at the same time. It's almost like the Pace Slayer's Diagram, where there is a swing back and forth between sincerity and irony, perhaps, but then on a deeper cycle, there are these long-term versions of romantic narratives or progress narratives or what have you that draw from these super deep aquifers of moral sources. And those come in and out of fashion, but draw on that the same sensibilities, in a way. So do you think it's my right to assume that the romantic ideal is very much about the. 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. Yeah, 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 develop a felt sense of our place in the cosmos, in our society, and in ourselves. So that could happen in many ways. It can happen through the cultivation of the individual to become a unique self and understand one's role in the secular world. It can come through spiritual cultivation of mystical states. It could come through psychological and emotional development and understanding one's life in a kind of narrative sensibility.

It can come through, yeah, becoming a unique, like, creative artist. This is very close to the, you know, the vision that people had and the original romantics had of the role of the artist in society as, like, kind of leading the way and synthesizing the ideas and the zeitgeist into, like, the spiritual direction for man or something. But, yeah, in every case, the individual person is 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 okay we'll come back to individuality but the next place i want to go one of your most famous collaborations and informed the language it 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 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 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 rants. 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 it is it's crazy to hear that red back only five years yeah do you still believe in the power of the squad 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 Rai wrote this with, we are still meeting weekly. The people who this, like... Man. Doing this piece really galvanized the other internet. It was an inflection point for other internet because it really solidified the us-ness of it.

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, wag me and bags go up and stuff is long over. And I think that's because it is somehow the, the underlying 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. 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 three 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, maybe a way to think about it. 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 it's 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. Yeah, it can be really personal. And yeah, I guess you're pointing out something that it's almost like the, you know, 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 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 to find their formal boundaries. Like, are you quarantining with X rules or Y rules? But I think because of the economic situation today, that is just as true as ever. We have people out here plotting. Just for people's context who are less familiar with you, what is, was, will be other internet? Other internet was a... and is and will be a research collective, a group chat that uses the dilapidated software Keybase acquired by Zoom, a group chat that eventually started working for crypto protocols. Where did it start? Publishing influential essays in the crypto world, going on squad retreats, getting big grants. Traveling around to different parts of just making waves in different parts of the social world, in the art world economy, in the world of academic people who write about blockchains, in the blockchain world itself, in the people who aspire to use DAOs and regenerative economics for good. Other Internet kind of held together all of those different parties. Everyone could agree that Other Internet was like... kind of on onto something onto a way of using crypto that that would better the world and um yeah there was it was a whole moment i think when i met you i asked is other internet a friend group a blog a dow and i think you said something along the lines of yes yes exactly soon other internet will be a book actually we are doing an anthology of our collected writings that will have not just all of the famous pieces, but all sorts of 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 whole era now that we're kind of out of that era and transitioning into another era.

Like, what is the meaning of that organization? And why did it capture the energy in the way it did? And what narratives were alive at that time? It's been a process of, like, working through our own, like, emotional journey through those times. Yeah, in some sense, maybe reckoning with what it means to have been an individual part of that kind of atomic collective a little bit. 100%. I think this was a good... I really want to hit on squads because I think it's an interesting pit stop between the kind of extreme end of the individual and how wide can you take the collective all the way to things like movements. Just before we move on, has anything materially changed since you guys wrote that piece where it either feels the world has changed or the role for a squad has changed or do you think it's as evergreen as it ever was? I guess one difference is that that piece came at a kind of transition moment where like high Twitter was just starting to break down and devolve and or 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. Now everything is inside to some sort of WhatsApp group or Telegram group or Discord group. That was starting to be true at the time, but it's fully true now. And not all of those things are squads. Like, they are CozyWeb or Parlor Spaces. 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. And yeah, it's powerful and very internet native thing too. Definitely. All right. Going wider. You have written about a few different ways, new types of collectivism might show up, including actually before squad wealth with a piece called headless brands. But I think maybe the most iconic piece you wrote,

During this era of your life, I think a lot of people would say is this piece life after lifestyle. And in that essay, you and talk, 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 20th sense. 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 where we might be going. There is a extreme contrast to this moral source in the vein of what we talked about with romanticism and this idea that every person is going to find their own direct source of meaning. What does it feel like maybe even just a couple of years removed? I think we'll talk more about it, but you're talking about teetering on something. between the secular and the sacred, perhaps. This notion that actually collectives, that brands, that companies, that movements might actually shape people more than people might shape themselves. Does it feel like you nailed something as it was beginning to happen? Does it feel actually that the chessboard has changed? Everything is playing out exactly as I imagined, basically.

I think if you just look at what Brian Johnson is doing, you can see quite clearly that people are very comfortable having people tell them what to do and how to believe and how to be. That's not the only example. It's just the one with the most obvious cult leader. Is Brian Johnson a cult leader? I'm comfortable saying that he is. I think he would be too, so I don't have any issue saying that. Before going further, I should specify that or maybe clarify that romanticist religions do exist, like psychology, like the psychological worldview, for instance, could be considered a secularized romanticist faith system. Romanticism doesn't necessarily mean everyone decides their values for themselves. 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. Everyone wants to be an artist. Like that's how that works. 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. Let's skip back to what you are. I'll skip slightly ahead and then maybe we can circle the whole idea. But you go on to point at something that along the secular to sacred point is more explicitly pointing at something like a new religion. You call Brian Johnson a cult leader. There are two ideas here. One, you say, a great example of this, I think from back then, you say EA or effective altruism. Bitcoin and Ethereum is a sort of headless brand because it is a philanthropic approach. It attracts wealth by design. And its network effects are growing. With its focus on existential AI risk as a chief cause area, EA even has an eschatology, a theory of the end of the world. As far as newly designed cultures go, EA is the closest thing we have to a new religion. And then finally, I have occasionally been asked why I'm obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous meanings that structure our relationships. They are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is.

With the cultural production service economy and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the ingredients for social transformation, not to say upheaval, are in place. We are transitioning out of the era of lifestyle and into an era where the production of culture is valued both subjectively and financially on its own terms. From an era where brands are designed to sell products to an era where brands are designed to be culture, to transform lives, to instill beliefs. Part of my initial question was frankly like, has this happened, as you expected it would, it seems to be, your view seems to be absolutely in full force. Maybe one way to take this would be, how should we look at what's happening in front of us? 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 pick your favorite person. We are turning into we are developing new religions, new cult, but it's organized around glorious leaders. Yeah. OK. Yeah. A lot to a lot to dig into there. Well, so first of all, I think that everyone likes to talk about how. People in the tech or brand world like to name things after economies, right? We have the direct-to-consumer economy or the cultural economy, the AI economy. Well, I think we're entering the sophistry economy. Also the economy economy. Yeah, there's the economy economy. But yeah, I think we're fully entering into the sophistry economy. What does that mean? I don't know that. You know, sophist is like a fake philosopher who leads you down the happy path into a... ridiculous lifestyle, perhaps, and deceives you with rhetoric. Socrates beat these guys up every day dialectically in the Agora. We need Socrates to come and show these motherfuckers up. I think it's part of the effect of the media environment that 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 um there is a great power to organizing around these these generals or these um you know fiefdom owners um venkat called it like the internet of beefs and i i like that so yeah people People marshal these ideas 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 going to be like this big new sort of religion in our lifetime. And capital R religion, capital R religion. I've more thought that I had made a prediction like with the other Internet. crew that there would be a kind of savior figure type new kind of profit figure to show up and hey maybe brian 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 two or three hundred 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're still alive. hmm yeah 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 five ten year time horizons and these things tend to right i do think that this things have sped up and like cultural 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. Do great headless brands require a glorious individual at the beginning, almost paradoxically, combining the individual and the collective? They potentially do. I think they potentially do. Is Bitcoin? Yes. Ethereum probably to some degree. Mormonism. Effective altruism, I'm not so sure. Eliezer? 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 a weird mashup, but I'm pretty sure that that will be going after he dies. 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 totally which is the primary way i think people misinterpret a lot of people yeah um is it where does just like the lowercase b capitalism brand sit today in 2025 is it over for brands uh well i would say that the i i'm hesitant to talk about this too much because 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 Talk for Lifestyle and my more recent FWB Fest Talk, Body Futurism, is like the shift to practices because the retailer can facilitate the run clubs or the chess clubs 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 we're at an interesting point here in this arc 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 after life 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 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 it parts in the piece like brands aren't taking it far enough. Granted, that's not for you, brand marketing person. There's one line where you say, but I keep ending up in 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 re-granting programs that are now so popular are just like software platforms. They outsource your own agency to some imagined future actors. I keep asking people to get more specific about the culture they'd like to see. What do you think it would be good if there was more of? And finally, I won't pull punches. Tech founders and DTC 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. Exactly. So you go off. Maybe to me, at least my read was that you went off alone a little bit. especially as someone who had been so richly a part of a texture of other internet 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 was the rabbit that sort of took you down the new hole? How did this begin? Maybe it was cynicism coming out of life after lifestyle. Maybe it was cynicism around crypto. Maybe it was just seeing that this might actually come not from technology and capitalism or the worlds you had been in.

Yeah, there were a lot of influences pushing me in the direction I ended up going. And I think one of the biggest one of the biggest influences is my buddy Aaron Z. Lewis, who 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 I think saw that everything. was a kind of faith 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 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 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 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 form 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 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 learned something new, but all these health and wellness founders started reaching out to me, like a Rob event from other shit. He was like, that's exactly what we're doing. 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, because of the same kinds of cultural formation dynamics that I described in the past around aesthetics or lifestyles or what have you, the same media environments were giving rise to many movements around these health and wellness practices. And so it became really clear, oh, like the acculturation, like the cultural dimensions that like almost automatically want to get built onto any one of these mimetic movements, that's happening for these actual practices too. And these practices in the communities forming around them, that's where this life after lifestyle thesis is playing out in the most robust way. Why? Do they have a stronger moral core than an e-commerce brand? It's a little bit of a facetious question. Well, for one, when the basis is a practice, you can fulfill the moral premise in a way that the brand could never fulfill for you. This gets back to what I was saying about how the retailer... has more power in the brand ecosystem now because the brand doesn't actually fulfill its practice by selling you a shoe, but the retailer who runs a run club on the side of Nike versus an actual run club. Yeah, exactly. An actual run club or like Bussol in LA is like a store that's doing this. Because they can facilitate that, like they can, the premise, 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 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 breath work, whatever it is, 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 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 ritual and so forth. That's even without like having them attached to their original faith system, which, yeah. It gets fuzzy. So, okay, so you've led me right here. 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. And you gave a talk two years after lifestyle this past year in Idlewild at FTV on body futurism. 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 you discussed in this talk, and if people are curious, I would recommend they watch it. But you say, first and foremost, a return to the body as the basic political unit, which has obviously individualism implied inside of it. But then you go on to say tired political bodies, geriatric institutional bodies, abstracted social media bodies, decomposed, physical individual bodies bodies are the foundation of what is real and of relationships to one another it is the phenomenological experience of institutions as defective domineering and extractive that drives one back to what one can control and so it's obviously quite different in texture that to the romantic individualism we were talking about but yet we have like a pretty dramatic the individual idea here at least

An individual foundation. Is that right? 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. Absolutely. You're you're I noticed this watching the two talks, by the way, life after lifestyle. I mean, obviously, I think maybe you were more mature as a speaker, but is much more kind of like reading. You gave this in a pastoral way. I would say. Thank you. Yeah. And if I get to youth pastory in here, please tell me to calm down. But when I'm speaking in that mode, I'm not just commenting on the moral sources. I'm inside them. I'm being in them. I'm living them. And I'm trying to DJ them a bit and promote them. How do I talk about this in a way that is that? Because I kind of want to do that now. When you get back to the body, like there is something true about the romantic ethos here, which is that there is something true about the world and about ourselves that we can learn from getting really into our bodies and becoming highly attuned to the fine emotional, physiological, phenomenal sensations. that we have and when we do that and get really good at it whole arenas of uh wisdom and agency 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 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 and two yeah what is

In fact, the political side, okay. So the spiritual hunch comes from this realization that each of these big moral sources, which is attached to a major cultural movement or many cultural movements, there is a 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 physiological sensation that inspires the Baroque crenulations on, like, Gothic cathedrals and Rococo and stuff. And also the... The the striving of our culture, the, you know, musky and like we can go to space literally, but also just that entrepreneurial striving and never being satisfied with what is transformation of beyond the status quo. Is that going going beyond Nietzsche was doing this, too. 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. Is that is that inside the thing? Part of what I feel like I'm hearing is that the thing that makes humans so unique is our desire to almost change ourselves. That would be go beyond ourselves. I think 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 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. The question is, with the new stuff, is what is the kind of sensation at the core that 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 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 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 this is a hypothesis that i have I would already want to warn away the people who think that you can turn authentic relating practices or circling into a religious system. Those people out there, and if they're listening to this, they know who they are. That's wrong. But the whole thing about California art movements being all about perceptual art and the immersive art spaces and immersive performances and stuff. or James Turrell art being so popular these days, I think there's something about the dissolution of boundaries and the psychedelic experience that will have something to do with the new culture, the new faith system that emerges out of all of this. It's just a hunch, and as you can see, I don't have a lot of good words for it. Is Brian Johnson a body... oriented version of the will yes yes he is brian 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's doing the nietzsche playbook he he like lays out the table of values and he's like we're going to overturn this you think that it's okay to die well i don't think that and i'm going to be a moral innovator and flip that over 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 and imaginaries. But that is very much encoded in the will. Yeah. And so you're pointing at another separate thing that originates in the body but might go somewhere. Yes. Yes. Thank you for pointing out the different levels here. Like there is a zeitgeist turn towards the body that I think is going to maybe be like a 20, 30 year zeitgeist cycle or pendulum. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, back to the pendulum swing. There is a temporary zeitgeist there. And in that zeitgeist, the grounds will be laid for much bigger things to happen in the same way that when there was a body-oriented zeitgeist in the 60s and 70s with the hippies and Esalen got started, that laid the seeds for what's happening now. And whatever's happening now will lay the seeds for some future thing. This 200, 300-year timeline, I think, is just still getting started. Just still figuring out what it is. Will it be some sort of synthesis of the pan America's indigenous 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 so all of the above, but it's not really clear what that will be yet. That is one of the big things that I want to figure out. And I want to also figure out what's distinct about what's happening now from the 60s and 70s. I'm not super literate about that era, but that's something I want to know. And this is where this whole project I'm on does kind of border on comparative religious studies. Right. 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, I might be forcing this a little bit, but I saw a little bit of 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 ideas like that, headless brands, crypto, AI, whatever. And maybe now we're seeing like, I'm trying to put words around the Brian Johnson thing's clear. Let's not overflow. Just longevity seems pretty clear. And you're perhaps pointing it and saying, hey, longevity is one way this new body-oriented individualism will go collective. But there might be other ones too. And those are hazy, but we're starting to see them show up.

Yeah, there totally are. Another one is the cultural complex around generational trauma, trauma healing, ancestral trauma. And like it also operates in this kind of like decolonial cultural coordinates. Like there's also something big and body focus happening there. That might be the future of the left. Hmm. 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. Ooh, potentially. I'm not sure I would say that because that might get even more complicated. I would say that a big difference from like 10 or 15 years ago is 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 right that is how that is inside of everything 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 whatever these like highly online cultural figures over the last decade i think now it's going to be important for people to have consistent positions about whether they're idealists whether they're dualists whether they're interaction dualists whether they're 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 motivate a new uh kind of battleground where like body versus mind is one of those debates that you can that are possible to have especially is what the way we talk about mind

We have new minds impending. New minds impending, for sure. And that's exactly why that becomes a battleground. Do AIs have minds or not? You could even make a case that implicit in Brian Johnson's ideas is some notion that the body is the most human thing and mind is increasingly becoming... That's absolutely what he thinks. Or it's certainly implied. It's only... And his notion of life is one of bare survival, where the fact that you are living in and of itself is what makes it worthy to keep living. Right. Before we zoom out again, the kind of culmination of 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, but from this body-oriented place. And you wrote a piece, 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, four new forms of sort of collective thought around this type of thing. Two of them are places, two of them are spaces. Do you want to just, 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? As an example for campus, it could be. as an edge as beraldo or whatever yeah so in in this piece that just came out um i yeah i am talking about four different kind of collective forms and one of them is um campuses as you alluded to there's also centers parlors and practices campuses are kind of new senses of place and yeah edge as well 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 offices and our friends school 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 think they basically can be the new churches of this generation. And most of the centers in at least the research you've done and what you've gone to are pretty body practice oriented, right? Definitely are. Yeah. 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 the city is called The Center. And it's like a cool co-working 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... Campus is a network of centers? Yeah, campus is kind of a network of centers. And there's another place here called Manning's that's like a little bit more civic focused, but also a very cool center. Then there are our parlors. Parlors are kind of cozy web spaces. I'm only giving these... Cozy web? Cozy web is like Venkatesh Rao's term for the movement away from the clear net and into 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 you're... home parlor where you hold court and like hash out intellectual discourse, like is like, um, an example would be, this is like a influencers discord. Yeah. It's like an influencers discord. So new models is one that I'm in that I like a lot. And, but, but, and Josh Citarella like has his own Catherine D like runs hers. Um, those are all examples of parlors. And 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 the place. It could be. And my collaborator, 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 a online practice network, a parlor for clinicians and like palliative care professionals and health care workers who needed them. kind of sense of community and belonging to restore themselves. And then finally, there's practices, and we've kind of been talking about practices and what they are. They're actual body practices that people do. Maybe to touch on the individualism point for a second, I don't think that body practices, although they're something that people individually do, 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. 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 level of discourse that's possible between you even if you learned in london and i learned in los angeles in some sense practices might be the most clear through line or are 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. Am I overreaching here? No. Practices feel very much as almost as a form of the... the atomic unit of this new type of thinking. I think they are. And you can work out and go take as big and have teachers who come in and go out practice. That's exactly. I'm sure there are some people who've, who've maybe been a little lost by some of the vagities 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 an individualistic collectivist thing well i think you're really right to point to the individual collectivist thing because as we live in a post in a romantic culture individual versus collective is one of the key tensions that we feel all the time and so um Even though right now there is a strong yearning for collectivism, at the same time, you see A16Z making their website look like Ayn Rand designed it. You see that there is also a strong pull towards the great man ethos. All of that's happening at once. These tensions exist in both parts in our culture. and they exist inside religion by the way 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 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 partly collective thing and it's partly a very private thing. But you asked another question that in the same breath that I think was really interesting. And like I wanted to want to respond to also. What was it? I mean, are you ultimately just pointing at a secular form of religion? OK, 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 and you could say the same thing about scientism and 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 got to do this psychology research project because this is what i've been thinking about the whole time or whatever it may be those moments are heightened moments they're couched and we have this whole language to understand them and like render them into secular terms but we also do like exegesis on them like 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 think that we are always living in this in a non-secular way. The worldview of materialism has been very seductive in convincing us that that's not true. 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 experience 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? 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. 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 use of mind altering drugs. Anyone who does a lot of meditation will figure that out very quickly. So, you know, these these things are just features of our world. Another kind of theme that is 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, between mind and body is also about like content and form. Social spirit and social body. And the social spirit is like the content of our culture. It's these moral underpinnings and... aspirations and the language world that they live inside that help us render these 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 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 little bit more about that. Like the actual, the kind of hardware, as it were, it's not really hardware, maybe the firmware of how we organize. Yeah, social body and social spirit and like 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 that goes to portugal and squad wealth more than anything else you've ever written by the way is not toby the anthropologist yeah It is something else. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And perhaps that is what you tease that with body futurism as well. And you're getting at so much of this. These aren't all different ideas. 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 more clear sense of what it is that I'm trying to do with all this stuff. I didn't really sense it when I started writing, but I have a much bigger sense of it now. And the question is, what is the shape of belief in our time? What is the shape of culture in our time? And I'm pretty sure it's going to take me my entire life to answer that question. And I'm not really going to be able to answer it fully. But that's what... I can't help but do that. Zooming out a bit, much of your work in life, or at the very least, much of your work and your early ideas are around the idea of codifying or even forming language that helps us to interrogate this stuff. So I'm curious what role Christopher Alexander has had on your life and work. Yeah. To be honest, I hadn't really engaged with his work seriously until more recently. Certainly, pattern language is something I was floating around in the discourse a lot. His work influenced Aaron Lewis a lot and other people around me like Keir Kretler quite a bit. But I think I only really understood his work a lot last year when I read The Nature of Order, which is one of his big books. 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. 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 justice or like retribution. The whole principle of them, and I'm not super literate about this, but the whole principle of them seems to be we can actually do justice in a way that 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 figure out how to do one-on-one interactions or small group interactions from a place of really embodied understanding, and you can have more enlivening, healing, 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. 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 mentioned more than once, at least in certain contexts, that some of your work is simply describing the state of things, giving people language for it. And then other times you're more prescriptive. And so I'm curious, like, is the role of the anthropologist or the philosopher to simply observe and perceive?

and critique the nature of the world? Or is it explicitly to offer a path? And maybe to what degree do you, maybe depending on the context or where you are in your learning, internalize one or both of those roles? 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, you know, how... How to do what, how to talk about things and also encourage certain elements of them and discourage other elements of them. And frankly, my experience has been at times you were certainly just, it's the point you made about how this brands. Yeah. Uh, and at other times I think you are to the squad ball point, like much, much more prescriptive of sort of a way of being. Yeah. I think I'm still discovering like what I'm doing there. 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, OK, 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. And it it helps me see, OK, 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. The line between the observer and the practitioner is thin. It potentially is. it's hard because part of my skill set 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 many people seem to think about

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 spent this conversation talking about as like we should just trust tradition and what's Lindy. Don't tamper with them. Even religion itself, obviously. You seem to have an alternative view, which is you might just describe as being pro-social innovation or literally progressive. Yeah. 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 are poor and immigrant populations. whose churches and mutual aid networks deep, most deeply express the ethos of the 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. Yeah, it does. Yeah. In some, 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. Yeah. 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 in, coin new language for innovation here yep and and i think that 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 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 big systems of belief were designed before democracy and the spiritual implications of democracy have not yet really been worked out. 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 like feeling of bondedness and trust and obligation that you get from those older faiths? It's not yet clear.

It's clear that you can have a deep culture of creative being in this kind of romanticist culture that we have today. But it didn't produce a new faith along the lines of Christianity. So where does that get us? And that's why I think I've started thinking a lot more about form. Because 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 going to work, what's going to 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 five person experimental church where we sing hymns that like we kind of made up to, you know, other ship the immersive, the kind of commercial immersive sauna project. And like, I think both of them are rad. 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 can like hold space for real community to form and bond and like keep going and create the strong social ties that people are really craving. And. Yeah, I had this new thought recently that 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 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 feet, 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 system a parlor 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 right and that's where that 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 brian johnson it's worth critiquing longevity culture it's worth going to peoplehood you know and the the postal cycle project and saying like look this thing's kind of garbage and like we can just throw this out the window because it didn't work but this other thing over here this is really great It's worth doing that. It's also worth separating the form and the values. Yeah. 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? Yeah. And part of what you're doing is not ignoring that piece, but also saying let's evaluate the forms. Yes. The forms and the values are related because the forms can or cannot fulfill the values. They subtend the values. They make it possible to live the values. Right. And also the values can can be wrong. Yeah, I think it's important to develop a critical language for this new kind of media, which is playing with these social institutions as a media form. Yes, I think. And I want to get way more designers 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 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 this 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 an A-B test with CRM tools. Yeah, for sure. And the idea of, by the way, you got at this a little bit with that quote I read from the end of Life After Lifestyle where you're talking about maybe our current set of software founders not being equipped for this, is that like starting a meditation practice space with no expertise there.

might have some consequences 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 yourself and and playing with that i i really am i 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 yeah exactly i really enjoyed um i really enjoyed like the foster writing circle thing that like It's a writing group. It's a group. It's kind of a Tao 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. There was an individualist part of it. There was a collective part of it. Then we came back and we read some stuff out. And then it was closed with like a little bit of a sermon. 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 we haven't had. that all of the innovation has been on the screen, okay, we'll just move off the screen and innovate with the stuff that is in the real world. And that's totally possible to do. We haven't talked much about crypto. Okay, let's talk about crypto. We should talk a little bit about crypto. Let's talk about crypto. And I'm specifically interested in really one part of it, which is I'm probably making some assumptions here, but you wrote a piece. in early 2024 called Crypto's Three Body Problem. And right after that, you basically left crypto. Me saying you left crypto is already succumbing to some of the challenges that maybe the world of crypto creates and the insular nature of it and the tribal nature of it and so on. But there's a line in a podcast you did about it where I think you were quoting a friend of yours where you said, crypto is a very good technology at giving retail exactly what it wants.

Who said that? I think it was your friend Dante, maybe? Oh, wow, that's Dante. That's really funny. Nice one, Dante. You also, this week, last week, Trump launched a meme coin. I wrote a thread about it, including referencing your post. You wrote a tweet around the same time where you said, people say, don't hate the player, hate the game, but I'm the player hating type. Excuse me. Maybe the place to kick off. And I don't think we need to spend a ton of time on this, but I'd like to read a bit from that three body problem. Go for it. 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 normalist 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 broadly as an idea, which is something that has been unbelievably energizing and life-giving. inspiring led to all kinds of interesting relationships unbelievable intellectual expansion i don't know exactly where you sit and i'm probably still working out where i sit i'm still involved in crypto in certain ways but clearly there's complexity here i don't think the complexity is over even though the regulatory regime has changed and i'm curious how you are now sitting on the other side of a year or so of a world you were very immersed in yeah um yeah 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 had his sentence commuted. I think that's great. It's really not clear what's going to happen now. I think part of, when I left crypto, I was more anticipating a, like a democratic regime for a long time.

The Democrats and the big banks are kind of allied. And one of my last crypto projects was doing market research for Interchain Foundation. And I looked a lot at like stable coins, 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 U.S. because Trump's coalition did not seem to include the big banks and the big banks really want to kill crypto and replace it with their own solution. But I felt that it was kind of above my pay grade to work on that. I care more about privacy and financial censorship than I... which are crypto's core offerings than I did when I worked in crypto. Because I think at that time I was so much more focused on like, what else can crypto enable, culturally speaking? But now I do see its role more in that light because I am concerned about financial censorship coming in places that implement central bank digital currencies. I also think that there is an unfulfilled premise of crypto. in terms of community currencies and alternative credit systems and simply enabling that for big communities, at least in the US. Elsewhere, you have a lot of people using stablecoins. I would still like to see that kind of financial sovereignty or financial independence from the state, but there hasn't been a huge reason to adopt it in the US yet. you know, 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 really my focus right now. 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. Definitely. It's really empowering. Even the notion of what a future religion, like organizational thing might look like. I think what's so interesting about it is that it creates, the way it moves value around basically literalizes some of the things that I'm already good at seeing in the cultural economy. 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 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 right right it makes it less opaque or more uh explicit yeah it makes it more explicit and culture is 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 yeah um 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 fangton 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 bubble mentality feels like from the inside, and that is invaluable. 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 described social algorithms that can be adopted by others as a much more broad definition of protocol. Yeah, well, they're another kind of emergent form.

And I think the Ethereum Foundation and Summer Protocols 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. Brian Johnson blueprint. Brian Johnson, Huberman's protocols. 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. 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, OK, well, that's super. That was super clear. I would also say that to me, at least my interpretation is protocols are only collective, really. Well, what makes them only collective? Like you could follow Brian Johnson's protocol, but there's no personalization there. Practice almost inherently presumes there is personal individualism put into the thing, even if it can be shared. Or at the very least, it's sitting more in the middle of the hyper-individual, hyper-collective. It's somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. It may be. That was the source of the debate that I had with Mati about it, because Mati, who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background... was describing how she thinks and she's embedded in this whole spiritual world in upstate new york she's like oh well people are too wishy-washy with how they use practice and 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 protocols or practices because some people may want to take it into a weird wandering dilettante-ish path that 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 overprotocolize your life and find it hard to break out of your bonds of community. 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, new institutions. 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 think that this whole effort to build new institutions that, you know, has been going on for like the last five or 10 years where new institutions has really been a big theme. both in the crypto world, in the art world, in the political world. Everyone's wanted to build new institutions, but I think that an institution, what I realized, is something that is institutionalized. And I really experienced that with other internet when we tried to adopt the shape of a more formal research institute. And like raise money from foundations and become like a kind of organization of that shape. It killed the sauce. And we realized, oh, well, the squad was actually like the shape that we needed all along. The squad isn't really an institution. It's just a little blob. So that was a personal teaching moment for a learning moment for me. But in a bigger sense, I also saw that. The most credible efforts to redesign new institutions or redesign institutions are more like reform efforts, like what the progress studies people are doing. And those are efforts that take a lot of money. New forms might teach us in some way how to reform institutions, though, right? They potentially could. And the reason I like new forms and I'm encouraging people to experiment with forms is because... Part of the issue with the older institutions, besides just they are old and they may not have the best talent involved, is that the underlying forms of those institutions are somewhat unsuited to our times. Maybe the four-year university isn't actually the thing it's most suited to this moment. Maybe civic associations or neighborhood associations are never really going to capture.

how to get people involved with local democracy, but something else could. But that something else is an experiment. Value isn't necessarily wrong, but the form could be outdated. Yeah, the form can be really outdated. So I think people ought to be experimenting and just play with that. I like that a lot. A question about writing, especially given that you've written extensively alone and extensively collaboratively. There's an amazing quote from a friend of yours. You say, Venkat once told me that writing anything over 3,000 words forces you to contend with your personal demons. I can confirm this to be true. Oh, yeah. You've written a lot more than 3,000 words in many pieces. It's someone who prepped for this interview. What is that experience of trying to do all the stuff we've discussed, be educational, create change, observe culturally, but also you're not doing that as a robot. You're doing that as Toby. That's the process of figuring out who I am, basically. Yeah, it's not for the faint of heart, I would say. My partner said something to me about what she appreciates about me that I really appreciated. She said that... of anyone that she knows i'm the person who's 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 values I endorse, the versions of it that are not quite right, the way people interpret my ideas, how I want them to be interpreted. I feel like I'm just trying to figure out who am I and how to be in this world as, frankly, a weird character who doesn't really feel super at home in any of these places.

I have a foot or a finger in, and writing is one of the only ways I have to process that and really think it through in a long-term way. If the stuff I write down is to any respect true, how do I think about that? If this stuff is true, how do I relate to it? Those are really hard questions to answer, especially with all this new faith-type stuff. You're implicated. I am. What are you least cynical about? Love is real. I love you, Jackson. I love you too. Yeah. Friendship is one of the greatest forces on the planet, and everything is worth it for love, basically. That's a great answer. 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. Well, to me, it's partly a search for the truth, and it's partly a search for what makes me feel most alive and most connected to this world. It's a very individualistic and it is a very romanticist way of putting it. And that is how I feel. I think that's something that many people in the modern era relate to in a similar way. And it gives way to so many of these questions. We're all trying to sort of connect that into answering the big questions or being on the same page or being able to see each other in that thing. In some sense, so much of maybe what it means to be human combined some of those answers you just gave, which is seeking connectivity on the sacred stuff. What was spirituality to you? Hmm. There's a line in a book written by a guy who's dying of cancer. And I think there are, I'll say that there are much more.

tangible versions of this but i always like this definition he says what is 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 i like reaching reaching deep i think that's why you toil and you try you move through the vague 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. Thank you. 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 this was a pleasure. Thanks, Jackson.