Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is David Marks, author of the new
Speaker 1: book Status and Culture. There's a subtitle which really kind
Speaker 1: of explains it how our desire for social rank creates taste, identity, art, fashion,
Speaker 1: and constant change. But David explained the theory a little
Speaker 1: bit more deeply. All right, hey, Bob, it's an honor
Speaker 1: to be here. I happy to explain this. So status,
Speaker 1: first of all, I think this word is used in
Speaker 1: many different ways, and I want to be really clear
Speaker 1: about what I mean. So status is often thought to
Speaker 1: be one upsmanship, luxury goods, trying to be better than
Speaker 1: your peers, and especially among you know, middle class people.
Speaker 1: If everyone owns a Toyota camera, buying in Mercedes Bens,
Speaker 1: that's all about status. What I am talking about is
Speaker 1: status in a broader sense of every single person is
Speaker 1: in a group. All those groups have some sort of hierarchy.
Speaker 1: There's also a hierarchy of hierarchies in society, and so
Speaker 1: different groups kind of battle it out, and your position
Speaker 1: in that hierarchy and your group's position determine quite a
Speaker 1: bit about your identity and the taste that you have
Speaker 1: and the preferences that you have. And so status can
Speaker 1: be everything from the desire for luxury goods to being
Speaker 1: marginalized and being outside of the status hierarchy and creating
Speaker 1: your own culture on the outside of it. It can
Speaker 1: be everything from uh, minorities being oppressed and um, you know,
Speaker 1: people fighting for dignity. So status is a much broader
Speaker 1: thing than simply just trying to outdo each other. But
Speaker 1: what I was looking at I was interested in how
Speaker 1: culture works. I think culture is often seen as this chaotic,
Speaker 1: irrational part of of our lives. And the more I
Speaker 1: looked at it, I did kind of see these patterns
Speaker 1: over time of how fashion changes, um spe s, if
Speaker 1: you look at music, how musical changes over time, how
Speaker 1: sounds and different genres rise and fall. And if you
Speaker 1: look at this, there are these laws almost like scientific laws,
Speaker 1: almost like gravity. And the more I looked at that,
Speaker 1: the more I found that status was the best way
Speaker 1: to explain those And so in writing a book about culture,
Speaker 1: you had to, you know, also look at how status
Speaker 1: works at a micro level to explain the macro patterns
Speaker 1: of culture. So happy to talk more about the specifics
Speaker 1: of that, but that's more or less how status and
Speaker 1: culture intertwined. Okay, can one say that in society at large,
Speaker 1: both in a specific country and in the world, that
Speaker 1: there is one status hierarchy, because you talk about many hierarchies,
Speaker 1: and certainly we live in a world that is all wired,
Speaker 1: but there are many little cultures. But is there one
Speaker 1: overwhelming status hierarchy in the world today? No, And they're
Speaker 1: also are not really concrete numbers on your status position.
Speaker 1: It's all vague, it's all perceived. Um. People have a
Speaker 1: general sense of the status that they have based on
Speaker 1: their treatment. And while there is not one single hierarchy,
Speaker 1: I do believe people are very concerned about the groups
Speaker 1: they associate with and how those groups are treated. And
Speaker 1: so if you think about sub cultures, subcultures seem like
Speaker 1: a great way to escape the main hierarchy of society
Speaker 1: that cares much more about money than probably anything else.
Speaker 1: And so you see, Okay, you can kind of go
Speaker 1: to this other group and get all this esteem from
Speaker 1: people like you who are interested in weird things. But
Speaker 1: many of those groups still care a lot about how
Speaker 1: their groups are treated and and do fight for more
Speaker 1: status for the things they are interested in. So if
Speaker 1: you're an in cell, for example, and you're on the
Speaker 1: internet talking with other in cells, the in cells are
Speaker 1: not happy being in cells. They're quite angry about it,
Speaker 1: and they they want their position to rise in society.
Speaker 1: And so UM it is. It's very abstract and it's
Speaker 1: very vague, but I do believe people are aware of
Speaker 1: both their position in their certain group, and that could
Speaker 1: be a school community, but also the group they associate
Speaker 1: most with, whether that is a subculture or a class
Speaker 1: or a specific ethnic group, how that how that group
Speaker 1: is treated in society. And so um we live in
Speaker 1: a world in which there are probably more status groups
Speaker 1: than ever before. But the idea that everybody has stopped
Speaker 1: jocking for position and is happy to be in their
Speaker 1: own small group, I think that's a little premature. Let's
Speaker 1: just talk about one concept, which um goes across all
Speaker 1: income levels, which is wealth breakdown, status relative to wealth
Speaker 1: and society today. So if you go back to a
Speaker 1: feudal era in in the feudal times, you have a
Speaker 1: status high key that's not based on wealth, and you
Speaker 1: have a king at the top, and you have aristocrats.
Speaker 1: And the reason that system fell apart is because the
Speaker 1: bourgeoisie are making so much money, but they don't have
Speaker 1: the titles, so they start buying the titles, and then
Speaker 1: the whole thing gets messed up, and then you have
Speaker 1: the French Revolution, and since that time, in a capitalist world,
Speaker 1: money is the main criteria in which we provide status.
Speaker 1: So somebody can be No. One, make a lot of
Speaker 1: money and then move up the status rankings really quickly.
Speaker 1: Now there's still a battle between new money and old money,
Speaker 1: often where old money knows how to be rich in
Speaker 1: the right way and they try to keep new money out.
Speaker 1: But over time that wealth is quite powerful. And money
Speaker 1: is not only something valuable in its own right. Because
Speaker 1: we live in a capitalist society, we we just value
Speaker 1: wealth itself. But it's a sign of intelligence, it's a
Speaker 1: sign of skill. It also is a way to purchase
Speaker 1: the benefits that you get from esteem otherwise, So if
Speaker 1: you're a very well respected person, maybe people treat you
Speaker 1: well and you get access to all these va ap
Speaker 1: events or places. But if you are rich, you can
Speaker 1: just buy your way into them. And so money is
Speaker 1: both a sign of status and the way we determine status,
Speaker 1: but it's also a way to purchase status. If if
Speaker 1: you're not respected, and so it's quite difficult to get
Speaker 1: around status as sorry, it's it's quite difficult to get
Speaker 1: around wealth as being the main determinant of status today.
Speaker 1: And so you know, if you look at all the
Speaker 1: different classes, obviously you know in the in the way
Speaker 1: I think about it is you've got new money, and
Speaker 1: you have old money, and you have the professional classes
Speaker 1: which have a bit of money but really want to
Speaker 1: make the status competition all about education and culture and
Speaker 1: knowledge and things like that. UM. And then people who
Speaker 1: were born without capital and and UM want to move
Speaker 1: up tend to really focus on economic capital and be
Speaker 1: seduced by the power of wealth because that that's their
Speaker 1: easiest ticket up. So UM, as much as status is
Speaker 1: a separate concept from wealth, we definitely live in a
Speaker 1: society which wealth is the main determinant. Okay, So in
Speaker 1: your book, it's really sort of three groups. You have
Speaker 1: the economic outcasts, the people with nose status who you
Speaker 1: referenced in this paradigm are looking for wealth. At the top,
Speaker 1: you have those with wealth new money, old money. Let's
Speaker 1: park that for a second. But in the middle, which
Speaker 1: you reference just now, you have a professional class and
Speaker 1: you have some people who are not professionals. But you
Speaker 1: have people who want to ascend to the upper class,
Speaker 1: the rich class, and you point out in your book
Speaker 1: in many ways that if you pretend or you're too
Speaker 1: much of a sick ethant, it'll work against that. So
Speaker 1: there is a principle of detachment, which is that everyone
Speaker 1: is signaling for status because you can't get status without
Speaker 1: getting it from other people, and you need to show
Speaker 1: that you have the reason forgetting that status. If you
Speaker 1: are already wealthy and famous, you have a reputation and
Speaker 1: you don't have to signal because people just know that
Speaker 1: you're important and treat you that way. So the act
Speaker 1: of signaling itself, when it's too obvious, is a low
Speaker 1: status act. So people need to be detached from the
Speaker 1: signaling process and be very subtle about it. And New
Speaker 1: money gets this wrong, which is that they have, you know,
Speaker 1: let's say a normal car. They go out and buy
Speaker 1: a Rolls Royce and it's so obvious that they're trying
Speaker 1: to signal that those signals fail and they just look
Speaker 1: like they must not have status because they're trying so
Speaker 1: hard to have it. So what is difficult about this
Speaker 1: whole thing is that status in general is a taboo.
Speaker 1: Talking about it is a taboo, and so you have
Speaker 1: to try right to get it without showing that you're
Speaker 1: trying to get it. Um. That being said, if you
Speaker 1: go onto Instagram and you look today at especially you know,
Speaker 1: people under let's say thirty, that taboo seems to be disappearing.
Speaker 1: There seems to be quite a lot of kids, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, sixteen year old kids who have made a
Speaker 1: fortune drop shipping or some kind of obscure gray market activity,
Speaker 1: and they're sitting on top of four binses and and
Speaker 1: talking about, you know, providing for their parents and all
Speaker 1: sorts of things. Um, that to me feels a bit uncouth.
Speaker 1: But that that may be changing. But traditionally, you know,
Speaker 1: and you know, in previous centuries, the idea was that
Speaker 1: you're you're not supposed to show off too much or
Speaker 1: it's too obvious that you don't have status to start with. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's just focus on social media for a second. If
Speaker 1: I'm on social media and I have a great number
Speaker 1: of followers, does that instantly give me status or does
Speaker 1: the same rule apply that it looks like I'm trying
Speaker 1: to get followers and therefore people rebel against that. So
Speaker 1: before I talked about status being quite vague and these
Speaker 1: tears that we're in are undefined and when one of
Speaker 1: the big developments of the Internet has been the ability
Speaker 1: to quantify your status position because on Twitter or Instagram
Speaker 1: or these platforms, you have a follower account, and yes,
Speaker 1: the numbers can be faked, but to get up into
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand or these big numbers, you need to be,
Speaker 1: you know, quite have a quite uh big following, in
Speaker 1: big presence, and be well known. And I don't think
Speaker 1: the numbers themselves signal that you're trying too hard. I
Speaker 1: think it's in the content or not. But you know,
Speaker 1: Instagram in particular, I remember being on it, let's say
Speaker 1: a decade ago, and it did seem to be mostly
Speaker 1: creative class people showing abstract photos. It was often called
Speaker 1: the happiest place on the Internet because it did seem
Speaker 1: to be not about status signaling at all. And then
Speaker 1: the next wave of people using it were more or
Speaker 1: less strivers who were trying to become influencers on their
Speaker 1: own and make influence their entire profession. And with that
Speaker 1: you started getting a real fetishization of that follower account.
Speaker 1: Because the more followers you have, you can then take
Speaker 1: that to a brand and turn that into actual payments
Speaker 1: for posts, So that status is directly related to some
Speaker 1: sort of economic outcome. So UM brands obviously don't look
Speaker 1: at those follower accounts and I think it's anything bad.
Speaker 1: And I don't think the culture of those strivers and
Speaker 1: the people who follow them, I don't think they necessarily
Speaker 1: see trying to get a lot of followers is bad.
Speaker 1: But it may be surprising to older people who grew
Speaker 1: up in a more detached world to see that and think, um, oh,
Speaker 1: is this is this okay? Now? Is it okay to
Speaker 1: so openly try to win followers and fame without necessarily
Speaker 1: doing it because you have talent, but just because you're
Speaker 1: really good at the influence game itself. Let's stay on
Speaker 1: the same point, but go a little bit deeper. If
Speaker 1: you speak to boomers and you get into social media,
Speaker 1: there are many people who are unfamiliar with the platforms,
Speaker 1: but certainly unfamiliar with those who are stars on the platform.
Speaker 1: So is this just a result of internet culture We're
Speaker 1: going to go this far or generational change, or are
Speaker 1: we going to have parallel status situations where the young
Speaker 1: people say, I don't care what the parents do. This
Speaker 1: is what we do. And the parents say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: we grew up in a different era prior to the
Speaker 1: Internet was more homogeneous. Yeah, it's it's difficult, and I
Speaker 1: think there is a real split at the moment they
Speaker 1: think about TikTok massively popular with teenagers. There are stars
Speaker 1: on TikTok that anyone who is not a teenager has
Speaker 1: never heard of. At the same time, those teenagers all
Speaker 1: know Brad Pitt and they all know Lady Gaga, and
Speaker 1: so there's kind of a two tier system in which
Speaker 1: there are stars that everybody knows and there's ones that
Speaker 1: are only on these platforms. And what I think about,
Speaker 1: let's say culture in the sixties or seventies, you may
Speaker 1: have someone who was subcultural. So you have the sex
Speaker 1: pistols who start out very subcultural, but they take over
Speaker 1: the music charts quite quickly, or you know, college rock
Speaker 1: in the eighties going into alternative in the nineties, they
Speaker 1: make that leap, and and so far these stars on
Speaker 1: TikTok and Instagram have not quite made the leap yet.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting that there's that difference. Now. I think
Speaker 1: it will happen. I think there will be more of
Speaker 1: a merger. And at the met Gala, you know, a
Speaker 1: couple of these TikTok stars are starting to show up,
Speaker 1: but they may be the people with the least amount
Speaker 1: of status at the met Gala, so it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: like they go on the same footing as a quote
Speaker 1: unquote real celebrity. But if teenagers are all looking at Instagram,
Speaker 1: they're all looking at TikTok, and TikTok becomes the dominant
Speaker 1: media that they're consuming, and the stars that own that
Speaker 1: are these specific people. And then especially if the uh
Speaker 1: real celebrities are more well known celebrities start going on
Speaker 1: to TikTok and start collaborating with these people. Um, it's
Speaker 1: quite possible to be a crossover, but you are right
Speaker 1: at the moment, there does seem to be a wall
Speaker 1: between these two worlds. And because you know, it depends
Speaker 1: on whether Hollywood movies and um big studio music and
Speaker 1: television continue to be as important as they are as
Speaker 1: the centralizing media and society that those former celebrities celebrities
Speaker 1: keep their position. If everything switches to TikTok, that's quite
Speaker 1: likely that we'll just live in a world where TikTok
Speaker 1: celebrities are the the most famous celebrities. But I think
Speaker 1: there is a difference in the sense that to be
Speaker 1: a Hollywood star, to be a big music star, there
Speaker 1: has to be some general sense of talents at a
Speaker 1: specific thing. You have to be an actor who can
Speaker 1: carry a movie. You have to be able to make
Speaker 1: a song that you know is on top forty radio.
Speaker 1: Maybe the quality that's not always the best, but there's
Speaker 1: some bar that have to pass. I do think many
Speaker 1: of the stars on these social media platforms are really
Speaker 1: good at hacking into what makes a social media video
Speaker 1: go viral and quite good at it, and those skills
Speaker 1: don't necessarily transfer out, and so that's one of the
Speaker 1: other barriers we're seeing why people can't make the switch.
Speaker 1: Because you can get very very good at doing a
Speaker 1: silly video with a silly face and be the number
Speaker 1: one star on TikTok for the year, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you can be a movie a movie star,
Speaker 1: or a music star. Let's go back to the met Gala.
Speaker 1: Certainly in the nineties, I was an award shows like
Speaker 1: the MTV Video Music Awards and all the peripheral people.
Speaker 1: They were lapping it up. Think you know, whether they
Speaker 1: be somebody on an MTV show for some other reason,
Speaker 1: they were there. Now, if someone's at the MET gala,
Speaker 1: they could just be kissing as saying I'm thrilled to
Speaker 1: be here. But if they were for whatever reason there,
Speaker 1: how would you tell them to act to increase their status?
Speaker 1: You're saying one of these TikTok stars or one of
Speaker 1: the peripheral celebrities. I don't I mean, this is probably
Speaker 1: my lack of cultural capital, but I don't know how
Speaker 1: you're supposed to act at the MET gala. And um,
Speaker 1: you know what I would say is they there does
Speaker 1: need to be a humility and there does need to
Speaker 1: be uh somewhat of an invitation of trying to get
Speaker 1: main celebrities into your world. It can't just be that
Speaker 1: you go into mainstream celebrity world, because you're not going
Speaker 1: to make that leap. They've got to come to you
Speaker 1: and to try to get your influence to reach gen
Speaker 1: z or you know, whatever it is their marketing goal.
Speaker 1: They're going to come to you and start working with you,
Speaker 1: and that's what's gonna bring you up. It's not going
Speaker 1: to be that you were nice two major celebrities, and
Speaker 1: this isn't a niceness game as you as you may know.
Speaker 1: So I think the hope would be more or less
Speaker 1: that you can just prove that the future of social
Speaker 1: media or the future of media itself is on these platforms,
Speaker 1: and if the major celebrities don't cross over to you,
Speaker 1: then they're going to be the ones who are irrelevant
Speaker 1: in five years. Okay, but let me just you know, extrapolate. Certainly,
Speaker 1: when we lived in the last century without the Internet
Speaker 1: exploding everything into a million stars, there were people just
Speaker 1: had charisma in were cool and they were stand offish
Speaker 1: and that drew people to them. Couldn't a social media
Speaker 1: star when intersecting with mainstream do the same thing like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm here reluctantly, I'm just checking out. I don't care
Speaker 1: about you, my dad work, as opposed to I mean,
Speaker 1: you talk about the people were saying I made some money,
Speaker 1: I got a Mercedes, I got this. Okay, this is
Speaker 1: kind of the This isn't a perfect example, but uh,
Speaker 1: Bezos's ex wife wants no publicity and is giving away
Speaker 1: all the money and that's giving her an amazing Mackenzie
Speaker 1: Beazos has an amazing status now whereas before, uh, she
Speaker 1: did not have this. That's right. And so go back
Speaker 1: to this idea of cool in the twentieth century, and
Speaker 1: cool was a form of detachment. It was a quiet rebellion,
Speaker 1: and that was what was so powerful about that emotion
Speaker 1: is the seeming detachment from social norms. And you know,
Speaker 1: if everyone else is after status, I don't care and
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna take a step back. And that really,
Speaker 1: that ethos really defined everything up until probably the end
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century with in gen X most definitely
Speaker 1: kind of grew up with that idea of cool as well.
Speaker 1: I think millennials, uh, it may have been a specific
Speaker 1: rebellion against the aesthetic because it wasn't theirs. And if
Speaker 1: they thought, you know, alternative music is trying so hard
Speaker 1: to be uncool. You know, the every singer and an
Speaker 1: alternative band is trying to pretend like they've never thought
Speaker 1: about singing before. Why can't we go back to having
Speaker 1: songs that are fun? Why can't we go back to
Speaker 1: singers that are singers? And you get a sense that
Speaker 1: millennials were fighting that version of cool. And then with
Speaker 1: the rise of online video, you have people talking to
Speaker 1: cameras directly being you know, emoting directly in front of
Speaker 1: the camera, showing to complete strangers their emotional breakdowns and
Speaker 1: crying and all of these things that are incredibly uncool,
Speaker 1: and that is what became really appealing is the idea
Speaker 1: of sharing these deep emotions with people in a way that, again,
Speaker 1: I think for for previous generations, would be quite surprising.
Speaker 1: So there has been a move away from this detachment
Speaker 1: on an aesthetic level, I think with millennials and now
Speaker 1: with gen z which it's just like show your success,
Speaker 1: don't be shy about it. When you go back to
Speaker 1: talking about Mackenzie Scott, they're at the same time is
Speaker 1: this professional class who have become billionaires from tech, and
Speaker 1: they're taking a lot of their professional class, upper middle
Speaker 1: class values with them. So they're not going to brag.
Speaker 1: They're going to give their money to sharity. There's there's
Speaker 1: been a lot of articles recently about how old money
Speaker 1: families are starting to give a lot of their money away.
Speaker 1: So there you're getting this kind of bifurcation of people
Speaker 1: who are previously wealthy or are suspicious of wealth itself.
Speaker 1: As soon as they get billions, they're going to give
Speaker 1: them away and that's going to be their path to
Speaker 1: some higher form of status. But then young people, Um,
Speaker 1: you don't want to stereotype so many young people, but
Speaker 1: the ones who are really rising up on these platforms
Speaker 1: seem to be unabashed le materialist, and that is the
Speaker 1: way they're showing to everybody their success. And honestly, I
Speaker 1: don't know how else you would do it. These days,
Speaker 1: everything is about money, and if you can show that
Speaker 1: you have luxury cars, that is an easy way to
Speaker 1: show that you're a success at gaming these platforms too. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, turn it into a business, which is not
Speaker 1: not always obvious that you can do. Okay, let's just
Speaker 1: go segue back to the old money new money. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Connecticut in the last century, and you
Speaker 1: knew who you know. You describe it very well in
Speaker 1: the book. You know, they're wearing topsiders, which your canvas shoes,
Speaker 1: leather shoes. Actually they're wearing chinos. They're driving around in
Speaker 1: an old Ford country squire. Okay, they inherited the money
Speaker 1: in most cases. Also, there were no billionaires. There was
Speaker 1: nobody that wealthy in America and Europe. Different. So now
Speaker 1: as a result of tech and lowering of taxes. We
Speaker 1: have these people who literally are billionaires have more money
Speaker 1: than the old money people ever had, even in real dollars.
Speaker 1: So is old money a lost paradigm? Does anybody even
Speaker 1: care about old money anymore other than the people who
Speaker 1: are old money. It's quite interesting because my argument is
Speaker 1: that true old money aesthetics of modesty and detachment and
Speaker 1: all the things we associate with that preppy style of
Speaker 1: New England, those that ethos is most definitely dead. And
Speaker 1: if you're a young person trying to think about moving
Speaker 1: up in the world, you don't think about that group
Speaker 1: as your model that I want to dress preppy and
Speaker 1: my dream is to have a trust fund that that is,
Speaker 1: I think in in something that is dead. At the
Speaker 1: same time, on TikTok, there is a hashtag that's quite
Speaker 1: popular that is hashtag old money, and it's a misunderstanding
Speaker 1: of old money, believing that old money is just even
Speaker 1: more ostentatious the new money. They have bigger boats and
Speaker 1: bigger houses, and dress even and even more crisp clothing,
Speaker 1: without knowing that true old money in New England used to,
Speaker 1: you know, intentionally wear dirty, choose to show off, how
Speaker 1: how much they didn't care about dressing well. So I
Speaker 1: think that the old true old money is dead. I
Speaker 1: don't know why anyone would aspire towards it. I think
Speaker 1: some of those principles exist within the men's fashion world,
Speaker 1: in particular, that you know, preppy style is still very popular,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't quite have the connotations that used to.
Speaker 1: And then with you know, any kind of old money
Speaker 1: fetishism that happens at the moment is just the complete
Speaker 1: misunderstanding of it. It's quite possible that we went through
Speaker 1: a boom where the billionaires made their fortunes just like
Speaker 1: the robber barons made their fortunes, and then their kids
Speaker 1: and their grandkids settle into a more old money pattern.
Speaker 1: The economy is so dynamic, though, and you believe it
Speaker 1: will continue to be that way that globally, I don't
Speaker 1: think that old money will ever be something that has
Speaker 1: the same position. Because the other thing I think about
Speaker 1: a lot is and that we don't necessarily think about
Speaker 1: in the US that much. But the Internet is globalizing
Speaker 1: the world, and the people who are participating in the
Speaker 1: Internet outside of the United States tend to mostly be
Speaker 1: the extreme new vote reach of all these places that
Speaker 1: we don't think about. So, you know, the all these
Speaker 1: oil rich nations, or you know people who just have
Speaker 1: some sort of construction fortune and Serbia or whatever. So
Speaker 1: these people are sending a lot of the paradigms for
Speaker 1: taste and style in their particular countries, which everyone is imitating.
Speaker 1: As and as the Internet gets more and more global,
Speaker 1: this new vote reache aesthetic will will you know, spread
Speaker 1: throughout the the world and become kind of the baseline
Speaker 1: grammar of how people behave on these social media platforms.
Speaker 1: So that that's even further punishing against kind of American
Speaker 1: old money detachment. The Internet is just not a good
Speaker 1: place for modesty and detachment to start with. So as
Speaker 1: much as an old money could develop as an economic
Speaker 1: class again if the economy settles down and you have
Speaker 1: less boom, uh, it's it was very much of a
Speaker 1: specific time and place where you know, people knew their
Speaker 1: neighbors and uh, you know, there was four channels on television,
Speaker 1: one of which was PBS, and that professional class really
Speaker 1: aspired towards going to an ivy League university, meeting all
Speaker 1: the old money people, stealing their style and aesthetic, and
Speaker 1: then going back and trying to do lots of things
Speaker 1: to impress them, uh, taste wise, for the rest of
Speaker 1: their life, and that that era is probably over. Okay,
Speaker 1: you talked about the professional class. These are the wealthy,
Speaker 1: and I remember a story in the New York Times
Speaker 1: about five years ago about concierge doctors and the people
Speaker 1: who thought that they were the movers and shakers upper class,
Speaker 1: the college professors, the lawyers, etcetera. They couldn't afford the
Speaker 1: conciergs doctors in New York. Okay, so what about all
Speaker 1: these people who believe, well, I went to a good college.
Speaker 1: I you know, I my kids go to good schools.
Speaker 1: Are they just thinking, well, I'm too low on the
Speaker 1: status ladder and I have to move up? Or am
Speaker 1: I satisfied where I am? What goes on there? What
Speaker 1: social psychology experiments have found is there's no level of
Speaker 1: status that is enough. The more you move up, the
Speaker 1: more you want, and even the people at the very
Speaker 1: top keep trying to push forward. So based on that,
Speaker 1: if you're very successful and you have all the material
Speaker 1: comfort that you need, but then you realize there's a
Speaker 1: new symbol of status that you don't have and you
Speaker 1: can't get access to. I believe that that that group
Speaker 1: will be disappointed or try to find new ways to
Speaker 1: move up and to afford those things. Um it has
Speaker 1: the amount, the sheer amount of money has distorted everything.
Speaker 1: And the degree to which just being a normal, successful
Speaker 1: professional person in New York and not being able to
Speaker 1: afford to buy an apartment or being priced out, um
Speaker 1: that that's also a sign of this. The other part
Speaker 1: of it is the degree to which the super duper rich,
Speaker 1: let's say, if you know, used to be first class,
Speaker 1: so you would think about first class, business class economy
Speaker 1: as your way of thinking about status groupings. Now there's
Speaker 1: private jets, or now there's the private terminal l a airport,
Speaker 1: and so things like having to walk to a gate,
Speaker 1: which used to be something everyone had to do. Maybe
Speaker 1: you got to go to the lounge, but you had
Speaker 1: to walk to your gate through the airport. Now that
Speaker 1: is a middle status activity. So this money has taken
Speaker 1: all these things that used to be normal and made
Speaker 1: people feel like their inferior. And it's probably not a
Speaker 1: good thing that's happened to the United States in particular.
Speaker 1: And I forgot who it was, but um, I believe
Speaker 1: it is maybe one of the Granddaughters of Disney saying,
Speaker 1: you know, the main the thing I realize, the big
Speaker 1: difference between being sort of rich and being ultra rich
Speaker 1: is private jets. Once you start taking private jets, you
Speaker 1: can't go back. And so there has been with this
Speaker 1: whole new group of status symbols that have made doctors
Speaker 1: and lawyers and professions that used to be seemed like
Speaker 1: the top of society, um, really take a step down relatively.
Speaker 1: And I don't think. I don't think that group looks
Speaker 1: at their material comforts and says, oh, we're good. I
Speaker 1: think they do resent it to a certain degree. Or um,
Speaker 1: I feel like they've got to work harder. Now, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about artists. From reading the book, it seems
Speaker 1: artists exists outside the sphere. Let's talk pre Internet, because
Speaker 1: another focus your book is post Internet. Is they exist
Speaker 1: outside the sphere, and then the professional intellectual classes to
Speaker 1: be hip become fans of those artists, and then ultimately
Speaker 1: the product is dumbed down for the public and consumed
Speaker 1: at mass. Go deeper what's going on there? Yes, So
Speaker 1: to understand how artists works, you have to understand the
Speaker 1: principle of convention, and we use the word convention all
Speaker 1: the time, and it has a very specific technical meaning
Speaker 1: within sociology and linguistics. But conventions are where people have
Speaker 1: a mutual expectation of certain behavior. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: the example using the book is black tie. If you
Speaker 1: get a invitation something that says formal, you know, you
Speaker 1: have to wear black tie. That is expected to view.
Speaker 1: And if you show up in black tie, people are happy.
Speaker 1: If you don't show up in black tie, you show
Speaker 1: up in shorts, people will be angry. And so these
Speaker 1: conventions form and they're kind of the backbone of culture.
Speaker 1: The the atomic form of culture is these conventions. And
Speaker 1: and art itself is full of conventions. If you think
Speaker 1: about what makes a hip hop song different than a
Speaker 1: than a rock song, it is you know, the use
Speaker 1: of beats or the use of instrumentation. These are all conventional.
Speaker 1: So what artists do is very intentionally break these conventions
Speaker 1: in the kind of aesthetic world. So if art is
Speaker 1: figure wative in the sense that um, every painting is
Speaker 1: showing real people, then a true artist of the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century says, I'm going to make art that is non figurative.
Speaker 1: That that um, I guess that would be the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to do something else. I'm gonna break
Speaker 1: that convention, and over time those inventions then become conventional,
Speaker 1: and then other people follow those patterns, and audiences themselves
Speaker 1: start to understand those conventions, and it changes and expands
Speaker 1: the way they can perceive art and the world. So
Speaker 1: artists have played a giant role in our perception and
Speaker 1: expanding it over time and the things we consider to
Speaker 1: be art to start with. So that if you think
Speaker 1: about that process, it's obvious that an artist, by breaking
Speaker 1: convention is going to make people angry, and any art
Speaker 1: that shows up and follows convention, it doesn't make people angry.
Speaker 1: We can be relatively suspicious of that. Is it true art?
Speaker 1: But also is it going to do anything for us?
Speaker 1: If if we like, you know, Trapp music, and we
Speaker 1: like that beat and an artist comes out with the
Speaker 1: exact same trap beat, then it doesn't expand the genre
Speaker 1: at all, It doesn't expand our understanding at all, and
Speaker 1: it's it just kind of tickles the things already in
Speaker 1: our brain. And So what I what I was thinking
Speaker 1: about with status, because I think it's been misunderstood a
Speaker 1: little bit in this sense. I don't think artists create
Speaker 1: art in order to get socioeconomic status. Maybe some of
Speaker 1: them do, and definitely, you know pop musicians, many of
Speaker 1: them do. But you can create art for the purest reason.
Speaker 1: You can believe simply that painting is wrong and the
Speaker 1: way it is now, and you need to make different
Speaker 1: kinds of painting. But the process in which those inventions
Speaker 1: become conventional has a lot to do with status, which
Speaker 1: is that first and foremost you have to get status
Speaker 1: from the art world itself for people to say this
Speaker 1: invention is not just some crazy idio idiosyncrency, it is
Speaker 1: actually very important and we should treat it as some
Speaker 1: sort of genius move. And once that happens in this person,
Speaker 1: this person, even as an artist, there are becomes uh
Speaker 1: perceived in a different way. People can have a sthetic
Speaker 1: experiences with it, and as that happens, then more and
Speaker 1: more people copy it, and then it kind of diffuses
Speaker 1: through society from there. So that is the classic model
Speaker 1: of avant garde art until let's say, maybe the seventies
Speaker 1: or eighties, and it probably does not describe a lot
Speaker 1: of what's going on now. And I think that's maybe
Speaker 1: one of art disappointments with art these days is that
Speaker 1: we don't feel like it's pushing our brains. If you
Speaker 1: see a Jeff Khon's sculpture and it's and the whole
Speaker 1: point of it is, you're going to fuse art and
Speaker 1: commerce together so much that you can't tell which is which.
Speaker 1: We already know that art and commerce are fused. There's
Speaker 1: nothing that we're learning from that in a way where
Speaker 1: if you take a John Cage uh performance and it
Speaker 1: was all created through random chance, that does change the
Speaker 1: way we think about performance in the sense of until
Speaker 1: that point, all music was created by the hand of
Speaker 1: somebody intentionally making it. And so these ideas push forward
Speaker 1: our perception of the world. And if people stopped doing that,
Speaker 1: then things get quite boring pretty quickly. Okay, let's stay
Speaker 1: with visual hard for a second. You say, in order
Speaker 1: to gain newfound status, it has to solve a problem.
Speaker 1: Expand on that, and why is that the case? So
Speaker 1: it has to solve a problem in the art world
Speaker 1: itself in the sense that, um, if you're if your
Speaker 1: procasso and art is two dimensional, and you start understanding
Speaker 1: that the world physically is more complicated, and you start
Speaker 1: thinking about how could you paint in three three dimensions,
Speaker 1: not just two, and everybody's trying to in some ways
Speaker 1: figure out where painting is going. And suddenly you do
Speaker 1: these Cubist paintings that that say, here is a way
Speaker 1: to do three dimensions on a two dimensional canvas. That
Speaker 1: is a solution, and the art world then says, oh,
Speaker 1: that is that's a genius solution. These people are great,
Speaker 1: and it maybe it starts with some more rebellious galerists
Speaker 1: or buyers, and then it spreads from there, and then
Speaker 1: obviously museums included in the history of art, and then
Speaker 1: from Cubism you get things like futurism, which you know
Speaker 1: takes the ideas of Cubism, but you know, adds from
Speaker 1: the third dimension to the fourth dimension as time into it.
Speaker 1: And so over over time you get these solutions, and
Speaker 1: then you get another group who, once those ideas become established,
Speaker 1: just trying to push the art form even further and
Speaker 1: has to find its own solutions, and over time you
Speaker 1: get this narrative of one artist showing up and then
Speaker 1: the next artist negating the person's style or taking it further,
Speaker 1: and then that person gets established and and onward, and
Speaker 1: your place in art history determines your overall status of
Speaker 1: your work. And you know, I I talked about Henri
Speaker 1: Rousseau in the book, who was a naive painter. Everyone
Speaker 1: made fun of him. He really wasn't um, you know,
Speaker 1: particularly sharp thinker, and a lot of his paintings aren't
Speaker 1: aren't maybe technically great, but he solved the problem for
Speaker 1: avant artists at the time because they were trying to
Speaker 1: figure out again how to push art beyond academic figurative work,
Speaker 1: and Rousseau, in his naive style, came up with these
Speaker 1: very dreamy canvases. And you can understand why, you know,
Speaker 1: surrealists or all these other artists being avant garde could
Speaker 1: look at that and say, if people can accept a
Speaker 1: russo they'll accept our work as well. And he solved
Speaker 1: a problem for them, and in his last two years
Speaker 1: of life was rewarded by them as being you know,
Speaker 1: a fellow compatriot. And then in writing the History of
Speaker 1: post Impressionism, they bring in Rousseau as one of the
Speaker 1: main artists and he's forever, you know, part of the canon,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that he if he had died two
Speaker 1: years earlier, he probably wouldn't have been so Um, this
Speaker 1: this art history, the way it's created, and the story.
Speaker 1: It comes down to a narrative, and I think this
Speaker 1: is this is important, and it kind of loops to
Speaker 1: to why today things feel that art is a little
Speaker 1: bit less interesting is because that narrative has become quite
Speaker 1: confused in a postmodern era where it's not clear the
Speaker 1: progression of this art came out and then this art
Speaker 1: came out, and then this art came out. And we
Speaker 1: used that quite a bit to understand our world and
Speaker 1: to understand the culture that we're in in any moment.
Speaker 1: And when you have too many things going on at
Speaker 1: once and nothing seems dominant, and nothing seems to be
Speaker 1: responding to the previous thing, it just gets hard for
Speaker 1: us to keep pays. Okay, let's talk about music. In
Speaker 1: the fifties, we had rock and roll. We can debate
Speaker 1: what the original song was, rocket eight eight or whatever.
Speaker 1: There was a huge burst of creativity which ultimately became static.
Speaker 1: Then in the early sixties you have the man you
Speaker 1: factured singers there might be a little roll rock and
Speaker 1: roll uh element to their music. The Beatles come a
Speaker 1: long and it's a revolution. I lived through this. You're
Speaker 1: not old enough too, but it was literally night and day.
Speaker 1: So if we look at the Beatles, the Beatles were
Speaker 1: cleaned up for general consumption, which fits with your theory.
Speaker 1: But they could have just been a novelty. Why did
Speaker 1: they continue to be at the forefront of the culture.
Speaker 1: So there's a great book on the Beatles that I
Speaker 1: recommend any Beatles fan reads, which is Ian McDonald's Revolution
Speaker 1: in the Head, and his idea is more or less
Speaker 1: that the Beatles very early they had written a lot
Speaker 1: of songs. I think they'd written something like a hundred
Speaker 1: songs before it Love Me Do and with especially Please
Speaker 1: Squeez Me, tried to do something unique in every song.
Speaker 1: They knew what the convention was, and they would break
Speaker 1: the convention a little bit, and they started getting rewarded
Speaker 1: for it. And John and Paul both wanted to kind
Speaker 1: of outdo each other and the rest of these other
Speaker 1: bands by always adding one non convinced an all bit
Speaker 1: into the songs. And because they were so successful, they
Speaker 1: just kept going in that direction and pushing and pushing
Speaker 1: and pushing, and that maybe just that was kind of
Speaker 1: a quirk of their genius, I think, but also because
Speaker 1: they were rewarded for it, never stopped doing it. They
Speaker 1: also because they were imitated so quickly, because the machine
Speaker 1: moved in to make a bunch of Beatles clones. I
Speaker 1: think they felt pressured to always be one step ahead
Speaker 1: as well. And so you know, if everybody's doing the
Speaker 1: kind of Liverpool sound and then they listen to Dylan,
Speaker 1: what would what would it be like to put it
Speaker 1: a little Dylan in this? Or you know there's an Indian, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, George find here's the guitar. Let's put guitar
Speaker 1: in this. No one said no, they said yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: So I think they personally, uh, they were they did
Speaker 1: not like to be imitated, and that imitation itself really
Speaker 1: pushed them forward, which I think is key. And even
Speaker 1: the Beatles haircut, I mean I think that you know
Speaker 1: the mop top up, uh, John and Paul hated it
Speaker 1: the first time they saw it on on Stu when
Speaker 1: he was the Bassis. And then they realized if they
Speaker 1: went back to the UK with that mop top from Germany,
Speaker 1: they would be the only band that had that look.
Speaker 1: Then they would feel kind of superior in their understanding
Speaker 1: of continental culture. And they got there and they were
Speaker 1: they were different, and and their their fans loved it,
Speaker 1: and then of course everybody else gets the mop top.
Speaker 1: So I think from the very beginning that they themselves
Speaker 1: were just obsessed with not novelty in the sense of
Speaker 1: they were obsessed with invention. And you know what's interesting
Speaker 1: about their music from the seventies or even you know,
Speaker 1: kind of let it be, is that the degree which
Speaker 1: they just go backwards and they really stopped trying to
Speaker 1: be innovative and they go back to just roots sound.
Speaker 1: And maybe that was at the time where people just
Speaker 1: felt like innovation itself and fashion itself was a little
Speaker 1: bit done. But at least through the sixties, you know
Speaker 1: that whole era was every single year there was the
Speaker 1: idea that you can keep pushing things forward, and you
Speaker 1: can see that across music, art and fashion. Okay, so
Speaker 1: is this something innate or if you look at history,
Speaker 1: can people adapt this formula to their advantage? I think
Speaker 1: the sixties was a very particular case, and in some
Speaker 1: ways it's quite damaging to us that we keep looking
Speaker 1: back to it and comparing ourselves to the sixties. I
Speaker 1: think that was at once in a lifetime sort of
Speaker 1: situation in terms of commerce and media and all these
Speaker 1: things coming together and then obviously the youth boom and
Speaker 1: the post war ethos and the economy changing, and also
Speaker 1: the economy was good, and people worried less about, you know,
Speaker 1: how to make money because everything seemed to make money.
Speaker 1: So all that came together to make this very revolutionary
Speaker 1: era that doesn't necessarily describe the seventies. The seventies had
Speaker 1: its own charms, doesn't describe the eighties. And now you know,
Speaker 1: we are living in a time of asis, but stasis
Speaker 1: is probably much more common. And it's only because we're
Speaker 1: still obsessed with Dylan and the Beatles and that whole
Speaker 1: sixties culture that we look back at it and say,
Speaker 1: why is our culture not like this now? But I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know if you can replicate it anymore.
Speaker 1: I think that it was just a specific time because
Speaker 1: you know, and and the point I'm trying to get
Speaker 1: at the book is not that artistic invention is over.
Speaker 1: That you know, there's probably still people out there doing
Speaker 1: really an interesting, genius level things. It's the genius is
Speaker 1: proven by your influence of society. When you create some
Speaker 1: idea and then it becomes conventional and then everyone else
Speaker 1: does it. That's when you become a genius. The Beatles
Speaker 1: were a genius band because everyone imitated the Beatles and
Speaker 1: all the pop music the year after they release something
Speaker 1: sounded like rip offs of the thing they had done.
Speaker 1: And today it's just very, very difficult for that that
Speaker 1: artist who has the potential to be genius to influence
Speaker 1: the whole market because things are too chaotic, or to
Speaker 1: think things are too static. So um, it's it is
Speaker 1: difficult just because we remember the sixties too well. And
Speaker 1: you know, you can watch Get Back and and you know, Spend.
Speaker 1: That was probably one of the most interesting cultural experiences
Speaker 1: I had in the last year's watching that rather than
Speaker 1: anything new. Okay, let's talk about the Beatles. They were experimenting.
Speaker 1: Other acts experimented. Why were the Beatles accepted and the
Speaker 1: other acts were not? So give me the example of
Speaker 1: another act. Okay, I mean you're probably not going to
Speaker 1: know these records. Uh, you know, there's Donovan had the
Speaker 1: two records in a box. What was it? Message from
Speaker 1: a flower to a guard Okay, and then of course
Speaker 1: these stones it did imitate Sergeant Pepper's with their Satanic
Speaker 1: Majesty's request. Odden's Nut Gone Flake, many people say was
Speaker 1: by the Small Aces was the first, uh concept album?
Speaker 1: But or you know, the who get more credit for
Speaker 1: doing like a rock opera. So how much does your
Speaker 1: inherent status affect whether people accept you? So if your first,
Speaker 1: but you don't have history, does that mean you probably
Speaker 1: won't make it? Yes, I mean the Beatles were relatively
Speaker 1: early on all these things. I mean I think Donovan,
Speaker 1: if you look at the timeline, he's probably lagging the
Speaker 1: Beatles on all of the records. Who did Harpsichord first?
Speaker 1: Probably the Beatles and then Donovan, although we'll have to
Speaker 1: go look at the look at the chronology. Um, you
Speaker 1: know the Stones, you know, the first Stones hit was
Speaker 1: written by the Beatles, and then yeah, Satanic Majesty's is
Speaker 1: is kind of a poor man's Starry de Peppers. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then you know the Stones really found their sound
Speaker 1: by getting far away from that. And and you know
Speaker 1: Exile is probably the marquee record rather than than trying
Speaker 1: to be a Beatles rip off. Uh. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: the Beatles were fast enough where even if maybe there
Speaker 1: was a concept record before Sergeant Pepper, the they were
Speaker 1: still the main band everyone was looking at just to
Speaker 1: set the direction of the market. And so somebody may
Speaker 1: be on the fringes doing it, but for them to
Speaker 1: do it meant everything. And you know, rock opera seems
Speaker 1: like almost a bit of a step backwards in the
Speaker 1: sense that all they're doing is fusing this kind of
Speaker 1: previous form with rock and trying to say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: rock is important because you can make an opera out
Speaker 1: of it. Um, you know, E l O was a
Speaker 1: bunch of kind of Beatles rip off ideas. Plus let's
Speaker 1: added a full orchestra, you know, to make it seem
Speaker 1: more serious. So I do think, um, the Beatles, because
Speaker 1: they were just far and away the you know, the
Speaker 1: Kings of em I like, they were just the at
Speaker 1: so superstar status. Anything they did legitimize any practice that
Speaker 1: they did. And that is one of the benefits of
Speaker 1: high status is any strange thing you do then suddenly
Speaker 1: becomes not strange, whereas if the small faces do it,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't take on that same cachet. Well, that's
Speaker 1: another point in your book that if you're at the
Speaker 1: very top, to signal that you have the status is
Speaker 1: to break convention by doing whatever you want. Let's say,
Speaker 1: if you're a billionaire and you show up at the
Speaker 1: black tie event and some tidied outfit people might say, well,
Speaker 1: maybe he's onto something, maybe he's breaking convention, and uh
Speaker 1: so tell us about the people at the top status level,
Speaker 1: which was all the beatles about feeling free, that other
Speaker 1: people envious the every their freedom and how it changes convention.
Speaker 1: So one of the benefits as you move up, and
Speaker 1: again it's good to remember that your status position comes
Speaker 1: with more and more benefits the more you move up.
Speaker 1: And one of the benefits you get his difference. And
Speaker 1: you think about if you're a boss, you can put
Speaker 1: your feet up on the desk and your subordinates come
Speaker 1: in and they have to deal with it. The subordinates
Speaker 1: can't put their feet on their desk when you walk in,
Speaker 1: So you get deference. Two, behave the way you want.
Speaker 1: At the same time, as you move up, you've got
Speaker 1: to demarcate yourself from people lower on the status hierarchy,
Speaker 1: and which means you have to do things differently. So
Speaker 1: you both have the power and the right to break convention,
Speaker 1: but you also have the responsibility to break convention in
Speaker 1: order to show that you're different. And so you know,
Speaker 1: if you show up at a black tie event in
Speaker 1: a loony tunes Tasmanian Devil, Cumberbun and your Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: People would just think it's a joke or they'll have
Speaker 1: fun with it. But you'r Elon Musk, and your status
Speaker 1: is not damaged. If you're somebody who almost didn't get
Speaker 1: invited and you show up that way, it's quite like
Speaker 1: you won't be invited back, and so that deference becomes
Speaker 1: a power. But then also if everybody's talking about the
Speaker 1: outrageous thing that Elon Musk war, then that only adds
Speaker 1: to his mystique and makes him more iconic. So, you know,
Speaker 1: going back to the Beatles again, I do think they
Speaker 1: were quite maybe it was unconscious and maybe it was
Speaker 1: conscious and many times, but they were quite sensitive about
Speaker 1: doing things that they had already done before and that
Speaker 1: other people were doing. And the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: Sergeant Peppers comes out, everyone else then starts making psychedelic records. Well,
Speaker 1: they didn't really want to go back to making psychedelic
Speaker 1: records because you know, it was just a trend to
Speaker 1: that point and they would have been repeating themselves. So
Speaker 1: they go, you know, one eight and do the White Album,
Speaker 1: which is you know, going back to the root their
Speaker 1: their roots and and roots music in general. So you
Speaker 1: know they had the right to make those changes. But
Speaker 1: I think they were also quite sensitive about if we
Speaker 1: make another psychedelic record, we're just gonna be another one
Speaker 1: of these middling bands that makes psychedelic records. Well, needless say,
Speaker 1: two members of the Beatles are dead, they're not going
Speaker 1: to reform. But the so called dinosaurs who still exist,
Speaker 1: Paul McCartney, uh, the Stones, the who they go out
Speaker 1: and play relatively faithful versions of their hits. Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: starting thirties, around thirty years ago, he started totally redoing
Speaker 1: his hits such that I remember going literally sitting in
Speaker 1: the front row and having no idea what the song was. Okay,
Speaker 1: and this is, if anything, he's pushed the envelope further.
Speaker 1: So what do I say? I say, I have to
Speaker 1: give this guy credit for pushing the envelope, but I
Speaker 1: don't want to go so is he gaining status or
Speaker 1: losing status? And then, you know, and no other time
Speaker 1: thinking about their people saying how greed he is and
Speaker 1: how great these shows are. And I'm saying and I've
Speaker 1: seen it and I don't get it at all, But
Speaker 1: are they doing that for status, and of course the
Speaker 1: other factor these people rage They're not gonna live forever,
Speaker 1: so people want to go for the last go round.
Speaker 1: But what is going on with Dylan as opposed to
Speaker 1: the other old acts. When you achieve success as an artist,
Speaker 1: you have a choice, which is either to repeat yourself
Speaker 1: forever and cash in because people will just want the
Speaker 1: thing you've done before, or to keep breaking your own forms.
Speaker 1: So if your inventions become conventional, and you're an artist
Speaker 1: who really believes in breaking convention, then you have this dilemma,
Speaker 1: should I break my own conventions or not? And most
Speaker 1: artists for financial reasons or they only had one invention
Speaker 1: in them basically stop and just repeat themselves forever. I
Speaker 1: think Dylan is quite interesting and fits into more of
Speaker 1: a model of Eric Satti or you know, all these
Speaker 1: past artistic geniuses of someone who as soon as they
Speaker 1: do something, hates it and moves forward. And you see
Speaker 1: that throughout his career and and you know, I was
Speaker 1: just talking about the Beatles being like this, but Dylan's
Speaker 1: even more so, which is um does folk than everybody
Speaker 1: that's folks. Okay, I'm doing folk, I'm doing rock, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make everybody angry. Then everyone's doing that, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know disappears, and you know, at some point he's
Speaker 1: making gospel records, are becoming born again Christian or whatever.
Speaker 1: So he is always on the edge of trying to
Speaker 1: break the conventions that he himself sets. And um, he
Speaker 1: is Dylan. He's got the status to pull that off.
Speaker 1: Whereas if you go see I don't know, Bad Company
Speaker 1: or some some you know band that had one hit
Speaker 1: in the seventies, everyone's there to see the hit. They're
Speaker 1: not there to see you experiment. You don't quite have
Speaker 1: that status. Um, there's the there's that joke on The
Speaker 1: Simpsons where uh, Homer goes to see Bachman Turner Overdrive
Speaker 1: and they're like, let's play some new materials, like get
Speaker 1: play taking care of Business, and then they start playing it.
Speaker 1: It's like get to the chorus and then they start
Speaker 1: playing the chorus. He says, get to work and working
Speaker 1: over time, you know. And so you know, that's what
Speaker 1: your audience wants. They just want the double encore of
Speaker 1: taking care of business. Then that's what you provide. That's
Speaker 1: that's at that point, it's just commerse. You're really outside
Speaker 1: of the realm of art. But you know, kudos to
Speaker 1: Dylan for trying to keep it artistic after all these years. Well,
Speaker 1: as I say, intellectually fantastic, but I'm experienced it enough
Speaker 1: to know it's not something palatable. So the people who
Speaker 1: are going, and they're going again and again, is that
Speaker 1: status why they're going? And to tell you, well, you
Speaker 1: just don't get it. I can't speak for every person,
Speaker 1: but they're Dylan fans who think you can't do wrong.
Speaker 1: And I mean again, that's that's Dylan status. Not everybody
Speaker 1: has that. Okay, let's talk about the modern era, the
Speaker 1: Internet era. Let's just focus on this century or they'll
Speaker 1: really start to get traction in the last century. But
Speaker 1: it was in this century we you know, high speed
Speaker 1: connections and things really started to develop. So prior to
Speaker 1: the year. Staying with music, if you wrote a great song,
Speaker 1: it would rise to the surface. Now there's so much
Speaker 1: in the channel. You can write a great song and
Speaker 1: it without either luck or marketing, it goes nowhere. So
Speaker 1: the other thing is in let's call it mainstream music.
Speaker 1: Mainstream has such a bad connotation. But I'm gonna stay
Speaker 1: with this, you know, because there's music made at home.
Speaker 1: There's always been in there's music purveyed to the masses
Speaker 1: with wanting to catch fire and have success. In that world,
Speaker 1: every three or four years we had a new sound. Okay,
Speaker 1: the hair bands were eliminated by the Seattle sound, and
Speaker 1: I could go on. Before the last twenty years it
Speaker 1: has been hip hop. We have not had a new
Speaker 1: sound with any strength, with any dominant. Why is that?
Speaker 1: Although I would argue that hip hop the sound has changed,
Speaker 1: that the beat has changed, the beat there was in
Speaker 1: the hip hop world has been pretty consistent about not
Speaker 1: getting stuck too much into convention in the long run,
Speaker 1: in the sense that you have beats that were drum machine,
Speaker 1: then you had beats that were sampler, then you had
Speaker 1: some live beats, then you had a mix. And now
Speaker 1: most hip hop is using trapp or drill beats that
Speaker 1: sound nothing like nineties hip hop. So hip hop itself
Speaker 1: has had enough innovation that I think it keeps it
Speaker 1: fresh and keeps it moving. The number of artists has changed, um,
Speaker 1: so that that is why I think hip hop is
Speaker 1: dominated itself. But you are right, which is that there
Speaker 1: has not been something that kind of knocks hip hop
Speaker 1: off the pedestal as being the main news form of sound. Now,
Speaker 1: you could argue that throughout the twentieth century, black artists
Speaker 1: were the innovators. White artists ripped them off, created the
Speaker 1: more palatable version that sold, which only pushed black artists
Speaker 1: to create new forms, which then were ripped off again.
Speaker 1: And so you can think about rock and roll, R
Speaker 1: and B to rock and roll, funk to disco, all
Speaker 1: that um and you know, uh dick he did. She
Speaker 1: wrote a book called sub Culture. His argument as the
Speaker 1: punk itself was white kids who were into reggae, but
Speaker 1: reggae got so into black nationalism and it could not
Speaker 1: be done by a white artist. That they made punk
Speaker 1: as a kind of their their own uh taking of
Speaker 1: the spirit, but putting, putting in their own direction. And
Speaker 1: so with the rise of hip hop and reggae, these
Speaker 1: were both forms that white artists were more or less
Speaker 1: excluded from. And eminem is a rare case. He's not
Speaker 1: he's not the rule. And so black artists were able
Speaker 1: to control their sound and their genre better. It has
Speaker 1: not been ripped off by white audiences to force them
Speaker 1: to make something else. So so that six tests and
Speaker 1: they're there control of it to Uh, at least an artistically,
Speaker 1: I think is meant that, um, where there's innovation, it's
Speaker 1: coming inside the hip hop world rather than outside of it,
Speaker 1: So that that maybe is one explanation for hip hop
Speaker 1: in general. Then there's just the broader question of why
Speaker 1: is there such stagnancy in the artists themselves? Why are
Speaker 1: you know we live in this world of incredible diversity,
Speaker 1: an incredible ah ability for anyone to create something on
Speaker 1: the computer, to put it, to distribute it, to get
Speaker 1: it out there. Why is it that we're really focused
Speaker 1: on this this set of artists that I almost call
Speaker 1: like a monopoly artists. I mean, Beyonce is a monopoly
Speaker 1: artist at this point in the sense of does anyone
Speaker 1: believe that she can be dislodged from the position that
Speaker 1: she's in. It's she's kind of too big to fail
Speaker 1: at this point. So, um, how do you why is
Speaker 1: it that these artists are not demoded and devo valu'd
Speaker 1: first of all, so you don't have a new generation
Speaker 1: of artists who are trying to take down Guns and
Speaker 1: Roses the way Nirvana. Did you know, Guns and Roses
Speaker 1: came to Nirvana and said open for us on our
Speaker 1: tour and Kurt I think, you know, Kirk Cobain was
Speaker 1: against some of the homophobic and racist things that Axel
Speaker 1: Rose said or didn't like guns roses or whatever, but
Speaker 1: rejected that and instead of grunge becoming kind of a
Speaker 1: offshoot of heavy metal, just completely replaced heavy metal. So
Speaker 1: you don't see that right now. You don't see people
Speaker 1: coming out and saying these top artists, um need to
Speaker 1: get buried and we need to move forward from there.
Speaker 1: The economics are such that you can be on the margins,
Speaker 1: make a really cool sound and have that sucked into
Speaker 1: a Kanye Drake song, and then that's financially the best
Speaker 1: thing for you to do and the way for you
Speaker 1: to move forward, rather than to say I'm going to
Speaker 1: take down Drake that you know, we're going to make
Speaker 1: a sound that completely makes every Drake albums ridiculous and
Speaker 1: we're going to do that instead, and then we're gonna
Speaker 1: shift the whole market. And so everyone is kind of
Speaker 1: working with the monopoly artists rather than trying to overtake them.
Speaker 1: And maybe the economics are just that they have to
Speaker 1: and maybe that the fact that the Internet has made
Speaker 1: it so hard to break through that the only way
Speaker 1: is to wait for one of these giant stars to
Speaker 1: kind of anoint you and to go forward. But those
Speaker 1: dynamics are making things feel stagnant. So even if there's
Speaker 1: some marginal cool idea on the sideline, like you know,
Speaker 1: drill or something, and it gets sucked into the mainstream,
Speaker 1: it doesn't take over the mainstream. It's just it's used
Speaker 1: at a certain moment and then the mainstream moves on. Okay,
Speaker 1: in your book, you delineate how it used to be
Speaker 1: an art and how it's not that way today, and
Speaker 1: I'd like you to talk a little bit about that. Specifically,
Speaker 1: you would say, Okay, you have a creative class that
Speaker 1: might watch the Bear on television, would be following the
Speaker 1: new acts. They would go to the shows of the
Speaker 1: new acts, and then the acts would grow because they
Speaker 1: would have status, other people want to emulate them, it's cool, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Whereas that really doesn't work anymore. Explain why. So it
Speaker 1: is not necessarily that the creative class always started every
Speaker 1: trend or that everything they liked became mainstream culture. There's
Speaker 1: certainly a lot of things that just stopped with the
Speaker 1: creative class or stopped with art, art school, kids. What
Speaker 1: has happened now is that it used to be that
Speaker 1: there's so few media channels, and those media channels were
Speaker 1: run by art school kids and creative class kids. So
Speaker 1: if you think about MTV and the eighties, these are
Speaker 1: probably a lot of n y U grads and they're
Speaker 1: personally into relatively underground or or indie things, and they're
Speaker 1: creating a whole network for young people across the country
Speaker 1: that's trying to pick up as many of those things
Speaker 1: as possible. So, yes, you have like head Banger's Ball,
Speaker 1: but it's you know, put it's like a heavy metal show,
Speaker 1: but it's put late at night so that normal people
Speaker 1: don't see it. But you know, you know MTV wraps.
Speaker 1: I think it was what Ted DeMier, one of the
Speaker 1: demmis you did that with five Freddie. You know, that
Speaker 1: was straight out of downtown arts appreciation of hip hop,
Speaker 1: and they put that on the air. Hip hop becomes
Speaker 1: this national phenomenon. But there's this real desire among the
Speaker 1: people who work there to take what they think is
Speaker 1: cool and kind of downtown New York and put it
Speaker 1: on TV and put it on and make it national.
Speaker 1: And today, not only are there too many media channels
Speaker 1: for one media channel to really do that. But there's
Speaker 1: also this omnivore culture in which people like high and low,
Speaker 1: they like mainstream in indie, and so the group of
Speaker 1: people who are the gatekeepers in a certain degree, I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe they're weaker gatekeepers, but still making the decisions on
Speaker 1: what to cover and what youth culture is going to
Speaker 1: to be and what people are going to see there.
Speaker 1: They are not necessarily able to number one, just only
Speaker 1: focus on indie culture because of the economics of it.
Speaker 1: But second is that there's some sort of principle where
Speaker 1: they just don't think they should focus on only the strange,
Speaker 1: marginal things. They need to review the big albums, they
Speaker 1: need to praise the big albums, they need to praise
Speaker 1: the big TV shows or talk about the big TV shows,
Speaker 1: and so you crowd out some of that space or
Speaker 1: some of that dialogue that used to go in some
Speaker 1: ways by it was a bias, but it was a
Speaker 1: bias towards the indie and the emerging and the underground,
Speaker 1: and that has been crowded out by the sense that
Speaker 1: we have to cover everything now. And so the creative
Speaker 1: class to use that term, or just people who are
Speaker 1: artistically minded did have a lot of power to shift
Speaker 1: taste towards their specific kind of strange, pisticated sounds or
Speaker 1: or ideas, and that group itself has taken a step
Speaker 1: back from that. So it's not you know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: necessary that mainstream consumers ever liked that that those things
Speaker 1: could they could just push it on mainstream consumers because
Speaker 1: they had the monopoly, And now they don't have the monopoly,
Speaker 1: and they themselves are not that interested in only being
Speaker 1: interested Sorry, they're not that interested only looking into things
Speaker 1: that are marginal. Because the other thing, too is there
Speaker 1: aren't things that are marginal the way that Downtown New
Speaker 1: York was. Uh, you know, you were in downtown New
Speaker 1: York and there's some new wave band or no wave
Speaker 1: band or something that you were particularly interested in that
Speaker 1: you could see getting big because a major label just
Speaker 1: signed them or something. I think that whole that whole
Speaker 1: system is also gone. So there's not an obvious source
Speaker 1: for where you're gonna pick things up and bring them
Speaker 1: bring them along. What about the concept of poptimism. He
Speaker 1: used to be the critic in his black leather jacket
Speaker 1: jeans boots would say it sucks, but now it's reversed,
Speaker 1: all people saying, oh, the mainstream is great and you're
Speaker 1: just too harsh on it. M what's going on there?
Speaker 1: So I think the original incarnation of optimism was a
Speaker 1: really important corrective because that black leather jacket critic who
Speaker 1: thinks everything sucks unless you sound like the Stooges, that
Speaker 1: was not helpful. And the idea that sounding like the
Speaker 1: Stooges was somehow innovative in makes no sense. So the
Speaker 1: the original poptimism idea came out of trying to correct
Speaker 1: the over emphasis on saying the Strokes are the most
Speaker 1: innovative band in America, where you look at how Missy
Speaker 1: Elliott is producing all these mainstream are R and B hits,
Speaker 1: and they're just so much more interesting that they're bringing
Speaker 1: in all these new influences, And so that bias was
Speaker 1: blinding people. And so the original poptimism is great. It's
Speaker 1: just saying there can be innovation across the spectrum. It
Speaker 1: can be in a Christina Christina Aguilera song. It doesn't
Speaker 1: to only be um the recycling of these rock cliches.
Speaker 1: We've now moved into what I would call an ultra poptimism,
Speaker 1: which is to say, the more things are popular, the
Speaker 1: better they must be because they mean so many things
Speaker 1: to different people. And if you think about art simply
Speaker 1: as a vehicle for meaning that or a vehicle for entertainment.
Speaker 1: And if more people like Taylor Swift than another artist,
Speaker 1: Taylor Swift must be more important, then you've kind of
Speaker 1: lost one of the main points of art. If I
Speaker 1: go back to the thing I was saying earlier, which
Speaker 1: is invention, which is to take a convention and break it.
Speaker 1: And the original poptimism was saying, there is invention happening
Speaker 1: in pop and we shouldn't ignore it, where now it's
Speaker 1: more invention itself is pretension and we shouldn't. We don't
Speaker 1: really need to worry about that. What's most important is
Speaker 1: that Taylor Swift has lots of fans, and so she
Speaker 1: must be important, and we need to take Taylor Swift very,
Speaker 1: very seriously. Now, Taylor Swift could be innovative, and that
Speaker 1: could be where innovation comes from, but there isn't. There's
Speaker 1: an incredible deference paid to these monopoly artists because uh,
Speaker 1: they are popular, and it's seen that that popularity itself
Speaker 1: is some is a virtue in a way that I
Speaker 1: think for older critics that definitely was not true, and
Speaker 1: and maybe there was a bias against anything popular, that
Speaker 1: anything popular must be conventional and wrong. And I do
Speaker 1: think poptimism moved us out of that. But uh, it
Speaker 1: has gone too far. Not not the same critics, but
Speaker 1: I think that ethos has maybe gone too far with
Speaker 1: other people. Okay, you know we were talking earlier about
Speaker 1: social media as opposed to mainstream media. Let's use a
Speaker 1: case of Beyonce. She comes out with new work. It's
Speaker 1: like God delivering tablets in the mainstream media. She is
Speaker 1: everywhere the josianas. All this information is now visible. All
Speaker 1: the statistics are right there for anybody to see. If
Speaker 1: you look at the Spotify top fifty, they the album
Speaker 1: comes out, everybody's listening. But the album fell very very fast.
Speaker 1: One could argue it was a stiff So is this
Speaker 1: the disconnection between old and new? What's going on here?
Speaker 1: I saw this also with two other things, which is
Speaker 1: Fiona Apples Fetch the Bolt Cutters got a ten on Pitchfork,
Speaker 1: and it's a great album and I still listen to it.
Speaker 1: But within about a month I didn't hear anyone talk
Speaker 1: about that record at all, it just completely fallen off
Speaker 1: the map. And maybe that's I don't talk to the
Speaker 1: right people, but it did seem like there was a
Speaker 1: burst of activity and interest in it, and then it
Speaker 1: just faded out. And then with don'ta the Kanye West
Speaker 1: album that also it's Uh, there was more hype for
Speaker 1: it and more interest in it. And I looked at
Speaker 1: Google searches and there are more Google searches for it
Speaker 1: before it came out, and then the day it dropped,
Speaker 1: there was a big spike, and then no one ever
Speaker 1: talked about it again. So the media spectacle of these
Speaker 1: albums is quite powerful, but the sense that you're going
Speaker 1: to spend time with it and absorb it and love
Speaker 1: it and make it part of your identity seems to
Speaker 1: be gone. And and that is one of the things
Speaker 1: that is really hurting culture at the moment. And the
Speaker 1: way we thought about culture in the twentieth century is
Speaker 1: that there's lots of entertainment. Every day, there's something new,
Speaker 1: there's a new meme to follow, there's a new album
Speaker 1: that has dropped, or there's something there's a new you know,
Speaker 1: five thousand new TikTok videos to watch. But culture was
Speaker 1: not just entertainment. It wasn't just consumption. It was people
Speaker 1: taking a piece of art, a film or an album,
Speaker 1: consuming it, reconsuming it and making it part of their
Speaker 1: identity and telling other people about it, and creating friendships
Speaker 1: based on the appreciation of these things, and having a
Speaker 1: group whose entire uh identity is based in the appreciation
Speaker 1: of these things. And so what you're seeing is one
Speaker 1: time consumption and then everyone moving on and not making
Speaker 1: it part of their identities. And this is this is
Speaker 1: the difference between viral culture and you know, twentieth century
Speaker 1: culture is the viral culture moves so fast that you
Speaker 1: have this big spurt and then everyone moves on. Um,
Speaker 1: there was this kind of meme I don't know, three
Speaker 1: weeks ago or something or a month ago about Amtrak
Speaker 1: just wrote trains, and so then everyone was just writing
Speaker 1: one word and literally twenty four hours later, if you
Speaker 1: made the same joke, it was just lame like that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was yesterday. And the speed of which that happens
Speaker 1: means these things can't carry on and they can't really
Speaker 1: be the way we think about culture. So culture is
Speaker 1: moving so fast it's kind of not fulfilling one of
Speaker 1: its basic needs or one of the things we looked
Speaker 1: to it for in the twentieth century, which is identity formation.
Speaker 1: And so if people were listening to Beyonce and say
Speaker 1: that was nice and not going back to it and
Speaker 1: not making her work part of the identity, then it's
Speaker 1: lost a huge amount of social value that he used
Speaker 1: to have. Well, let's stay on that topic. Uh Taylor Swift,
Speaker 1: and this is a very dicey subject for me. Um
Speaker 1: she appeared on the Grammys and saying unbelievably off key
Speaker 1: prior to Taylor Swift, if you did that, killed your
Speaker 1: career overnight. Certainly in the history of rock, there are
Speaker 1: a number of accident fell all the way to the bottom.
Speaker 1: Based on one act. Uh Billy Squire put out a
Speaker 1: video where he's dancing in pink on bent literally killed
Speaker 1: his career. Peter Frampton played to his younger demo with
Speaker 1: am and you couldn't sell records for years, maybe not
Speaker 1: even since, although he put out some good records. But
Speaker 1: you have somebody like Taylor Swift does this in front
Speaker 1: of worldwide audience, there's no effect. Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga
Speaker 1: had a number of hits, then had one stiff after another.
Speaker 1: She was a media darling. She's singing with Tony Bennett,
Speaker 1: She's doing all this stuff. But in the record world,
Speaker 1: no success, certainly no hits. Ultimately, she had another hit
Speaker 1: with Stars Born, but she didn't lose status whatsoever. People
Speaker 1: continue to go to her shows in the same number.
Speaker 1: This is something that never happened previously. They are too
Speaker 1: big to fail, is the conclusion I would take from it.
Speaker 1: But it's it's obviously because it transcends music. And you know,
Speaker 1: Taylor Swift, her fans, she can't do wrong. The Pitchfork
Speaker 1: writer who gave her album a mediocre, not even a mediocre.
Speaker 1: She got a good review in Pitchfork and it wasn't great,
Speaker 1: and so the fans all, you know, sent death threats
Speaker 1: to the writer. So these fan communities are huge. They're
Speaker 1: never going to you know, abandoned their stars because of
Speaker 1: one misstep. And then the celebrity compl ux is not
Speaker 1: going to abandon these people because they're they're gold and
Speaker 1: they're there. They make a lot of money from being celebrities.
Speaker 1: So once you get someone up there, you're not going
Speaker 1: to necessarily try to take them down. So that's a
Speaker 1: lot of it, I mean a lot of it's just
Speaker 1: that it's moved out of the realm of music. People
Speaker 1: are not looking at these people as contingent music stars
Speaker 1: who I like as long as they're providing the music
Speaker 1: that I like. They're being treated like royalty and and
Speaker 1: you know, celebrities and almost utility is like, you know,
Speaker 1: what would what would it be like to live in
Speaker 1: a world without Lady Gaga? Nobody can imagine it, So
Speaker 1: everyone just keeps him moving forward no matter what she does.
Speaker 1: Let's talked about moving pictures, visual entertainment. So we have
Speaker 1: a conventional cable world, conventional movie world. Netflix moves to
Speaker 1: streaming their streaming old sit arms. They air House of Cards.
Speaker 1: It's just the Sopranos. A little bit different for HBO
Speaker 1: because there were some shows before that. They air House
Speaker 1: of Cards. The whole paradigm shifts. He made for an
Speaker 1: adult audience, intelligent, not talking down to the audience. They
Speaker 1: continue to make work like this. Then the movie business,
Speaker 1: there's a few things to go on the movie business.
Speaker 1: They were playing for worldwide hits, etcetera. But suddenly that
Speaker 1: type of work becomes streaming television. It's not movies, and
Speaker 1: movies are these tent bowl hopeful blockbusters based on superhero characters.
Speaker 1: Now the latest thing is these streaming companies are cutting
Speaker 1: off the edges, even though they were built by these edges.
Speaker 1: And of course it's the completely left field that resonate,
Speaker 1: the Korean TV hits being the number one example of that.
Speaker 1: So what is happening now? So obviously, these platforms start
Speaker 1: with a relatively sophisticated consumer, because who's gonna, you know,
Speaker 1: purchase a Netflix description so early, and so you start
Speaker 1: with some tastes that are going to appeal to adults
Speaker 1: and cetificate sophisticated adults and people with education and in
Speaker 1: the professional creative classes. At some point you have to
Speaker 1: start making programming that's gonna appeal to everybody, and it's
Speaker 1: going to be less challenging. At the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: Netflix in particular has such an incredibly gigantic catalog, almost
Speaker 1: you know, too large sometimes where I feel like I
Speaker 1: spend a night just looking at what to watch on
Speaker 1: Netflix rather than actually watching anything on Netflix. But uh so,
Speaker 1: then they also have all these Korean dramas, and what's
Speaker 1: interesting is the degree in which these ramas were made
Speaker 1: for an audience that was not I mean, they were
Speaker 1: not made for Netflix's gigantic American audience as far as
Speaker 1: I know, they were just made for a Korean audience.
Speaker 1: But there's something actually innovative and interesting about them, even
Speaker 1: even if they're they're conventional for Korea, those conventions are
Speaker 1: not known to us, and we enjoy it. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you go back to Gotenham Style too. I saw
Speaker 1: the video for Gottenam Style recently. I hadn't seen it
Speaker 1: in a while, and I was just struck by It's
Speaker 1: so many inside jokes that you only know if you
Speaker 1: live in Korea, and yet that was such a big
Speaker 1: song because there was something about it that just felt
Speaker 1: fresh because we're not exposed to so many of those things,
Speaker 1: and even if we don't get at all, it just
Speaker 1: feels like something new. And so if your Choices are
Speaker 1: another reality show that follows the exact same conventions of
Speaker 1: every reality show just with a twist or this new
Speaker 1: thing that feels, uh, it's just like something you've never
Speaker 1: seen before, then you know people people still do want novelty,
Speaker 1: and that that that can't be denied. I think that
Speaker 1: they just want novelty that is not too not too different,
Speaker 1: not to pretends not to um difficult. I mean, these
Speaker 1: creative shows are often very melodramatic. It's not like they're
Speaker 1: you know, some higher form of avant garde art. But
Speaker 1: they're just different enough that people are willing to watch them.
Speaker 1: And then if they hear somebody say it's good, I'm
Speaker 1: sure that word of mouth has been really really important
Speaker 1: for them as well. Um, but it's interesting. It's interesting
Speaker 1: lesson that Netflix has tried to make things on the
Speaker 1: high end is trying to make things very some you know,
Speaker 1: really unintelligent programs as well, and then it's maybe stuff
Speaker 1: in the middle that's doing the best. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: this stagnation. Let me give you an approach it from
Speaker 1: a different angle. I am someone with musical talent. Used
Speaker 1: to be sixties and seventies. You have these acts predicated
Speaker 1: on something completely different. They this is what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1: We're gonna stick with it until it broke through. Great
Speaker 1: example being Roxy Music Queen not being a bad example either.
Speaker 1: They stuck it out, they stuck to their guns and
Speaker 1: it worked. Whereas today someone might say that's not gonna
Speaker 1: work at all. I just have to imitate what other
Speaker 1: people are doing. What advice would you have for those people.
Speaker 1: It does seem bleak if you're going to do something
Speaker 1: that is not immediately understood, and it does just seem
Speaker 1: like consumers of media have less patience than they used to.
Speaker 1: And I was thinking about as a kid, I saw
Speaker 1: Here Comes Your Man by the Pixies on MTV. I
Speaker 1: told my brother to get the record. He's older than me,
Speaker 1: and then and that record do a little is weird.
Speaker 1: I mean, as a nine year old or ten year old,
Speaker 1: that was a really strange record. I did not understand it.
Speaker 1: But after hearing at once and saying that was really strange,
Speaker 1: I don't understand it. I just listen to it again
Speaker 1: and listen to it again, and probably the tenth time
Speaker 1: did not understand that record and still listen to it.
Speaker 1: I just can't imagine anyone these days being surrounded by
Speaker 1: so many things they immediately understand that they're going to
Speaker 1: keep going back to something they don't, and nothing has
Speaker 1: the legitimacy to force you also to say you have
Speaker 1: to listen to this even if you don't get it
Speaker 1: the first time. UM. Maybe The Wire. I I felt
Speaker 1: like The Wire the first couple episodes were quite slow,
Speaker 1: and you had to really push through and then I
Speaker 1: got good. And but you had a million people telling
Speaker 1: you got to believe that The Wire is the greatest
Speaker 1: television show of all time. Keep going. And so for
Speaker 1: a new band, if you don't have a bunch of
Speaker 1: critics telling listeners, you may not get roxy music, but
Speaker 1: keep listening because you're gonna get it at some point.
Speaker 1: And you have so many other distractions, and you have
Speaker 1: so many other other um options, and on Spotify it's literally,
Speaker 1: you know, a million albums or click away. I don't
Speaker 1: know how you keep going. Uh So, the only advice
Speaker 1: I would give somebody is, you know, you would have
Speaker 1: to find the community that really believes in that sound
Speaker 1: and then hope that that community grows and that community
Speaker 1: becomes influential on the rest of society. But it's really difficult.
Speaker 1: And uh we we had so much cultural progress in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century because people were patient, and there's just
Speaker 1: no structure at the moment that makes us more patient.
Speaker 1: And we all we're all have this kind of take
Speaker 1: a step back from the Internet to regain our attention spans.
Speaker 1: And I've heard from so many people that when they
Speaker 1: watch a movie, they just look at the clock and
Speaker 1: say how many minutes left? Uh um. And I love
Speaker 1: reading books because it forces me to, you know, take
Speaker 1: a step back and and really push through on something.
Speaker 1: But it it takes discipline, and I don't remember having
Speaker 1: to have a sense of discipline as a nine year
Speaker 1: old listening to a bunch of weird records I didn't understand. Okay,
Speaker 1: and let's go back to the fast cycle on the internet,
Speaker 1: with memes and things being burned out so fast that
Speaker 1: there's no traction on new things. That is correct. I mean, so,
Speaker 1: as I said before, you have culture. You have things
Speaker 1: that feel like culture that happened every day, like a
Speaker 1: meme feels like a cultural moment. But you're not going
Speaker 1: to take that meme and make your identity about it,
Speaker 1: because number one, it's pretty silly to start with, it's
Speaker 1: pretty lowest common denominator to start with. But also because
Speaker 1: the whole point of a meme is to be in
Speaker 1: and out of it, to get in on it's first,
Speaker 1: you know, our or day, but then to not linger
Speaker 1: on it. And then that's not true for music or films.
Speaker 1: And the whole point of being into pulp fiction was
Speaker 1: that you watched it once and then you went around
Speaker 1: for years talking about how pulp Fiction was your favorite movie,
Speaker 1: so you know, and it's it feels silly comparing a
Speaker 1: meme to a motion picture. I mean, these are also
Speaker 1: just different things. But if if we are entertained on
Speaker 1: a daily basis through ten memes, you know, ten great
Speaker 1: tweets for videos, you can get through the day entertained.
Speaker 1: You don't need much more than that. And that also
Speaker 1: crowds out the time you may have used, you know,
Speaker 1: reading a book or watching a film, or if it's
Speaker 1: just a TV show that's you know, set up the
Speaker 1: thirty minute episodes that are basically created so that when
Speaker 1: you reach the end of the thirty minutes, you just
Speaker 1: want to watch the next one and you binge watch it. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe that TV show is something you you put as
Speaker 1: your identity, but it's much more likely you just go
Speaker 1: to a friend and say, oh, you gotta watch the show.
Speaker 1: It's great, and then you don't really think about it again.
Speaker 1: So the it's the overabundance and the speed of all
Speaker 1: of this culture means we're less likely to bring it
Speaker 1: into our identities and think about it as an authentic
Speaker 1: part of our lives. And that was so critical for culture,
Speaker 1: and that's what gives culture the weight to make it
Speaker 1: seem like a important, iconic, historic event. That's the reason
Speaker 1: Nirvana is not just a bunch of great albums. It
Speaker 1: was some sort of social movement where everyone started dressing
Speaker 1: in a different way and everybody had different values and uh,
Speaker 1: you know believe that corporate music sucks, and were shirts
Speaker 1: that said loser. And you know, it wasn't just the shirt,
Speaker 1: it was a whole ethos. I don't think any culture
Speaker 1: at the moment is quite changing our values or making
Speaker 1: people associate themselves with some sort of new movement in
Speaker 1: the way that culture used to. You live in Japan,
Speaker 1: how come I studied Japanese in college. Um I had
Speaker 1: spent two summers here, which was weird. I had studied Japanese,
Speaker 1: I did East Asian Studies at Harvard College and spent
Speaker 1: two summers in Tokyo. Discovered Japanese consumer is him and
Speaker 1: especially street fashion, which at the time, you know, this
Speaker 1: this idea of waiting three hours to buy a T
Speaker 1: shirt and then you know, for seventy dollars and then
Speaker 1: reselling the T shirt a year later for three that
Speaker 1: has now become a global phenomenon at the time is
Speaker 1: really Japan only. I ended up writing my senior thesis
Speaker 1: about that the whole world and how to market that
Speaker 1: kind of scarce good that it really isn't scarce, it's
Speaker 1: kind of fake scarcity. I came back to get a
Speaker 1: master's degree in UH consumer behavior marketing, wanting to look
Speaker 1: more into this, like why did Japanese consumers respond to
Speaker 1: this kind of marketing, and ended up studying the pop
Speaker 1: music world instead, because there weren't very good numbers in
Speaker 1: the fashion world, but the pop music world. There had
Speaker 1: been the stream of research in the seventies where people
Speaker 1: looked at the billboard charts and tried to figure out
Speaker 1: whether the industrial organization of the music industry, what the
Speaker 1: concentration of companies, whether that had an effect on the
Speaker 1: innovation in the marketplace. And there's all these different papers
Speaker 1: from the seventies and eighties about this. They're quite interesting.
Speaker 1: And I took that research and applied it to Japan
Speaker 1: to show that these artists, these artists management companies, many
Speaker 1: of whom are associated with organized crime UH and just
Speaker 1: have basically this octopus like grip on the entertainment complex
Speaker 1: and they make it where you really can't have new
Speaker 1: artists come out or the only new artists can come
Speaker 1: out of these companies. And so that that link between
Speaker 1: monopoly in the market and innovation was something I was
Speaker 1: quite interested in. And then I've just been in Japan
Speaker 1: since then because it's it's a great place to live
Speaker 1: and and for a while it was, you know, interesting
Speaker 1: to be here because it's not the United States, But
Speaker 1: these days it feels like a calmer alternative to the
Speaker 1: United States. Okay, Uh, there's a lot of people who
Speaker 1: say that the Japanese or racist. As an Anglo in Japan,
Speaker 1: do you feel that, um, Japan is very very focused
Speaker 1: on doing things the right way, and if you're an outsider,
Speaker 1: you don't know how to do things the right way
Speaker 1: and you're judge pretty harshly. There is a big difference though,
Speaker 1: in being a Western, especially male, especially white person, you're
Speaker 1: exempt from any of those things and you are treated
Speaker 1: relatively well. Um, if you are a Chinese immigrant, if
Speaker 1: you're an Indonesian immigrant, and you may look to a
Speaker 1: Japanese person like your Japanese and they won't know necessarily
Speaker 1: that you're an immigrant. The expectation on you is to
Speaker 1: perform perfectly like a Japanese person, and there is quite
Speaker 1: a lot of a marginalization of those communities, and it
Speaker 1: can be a much harder experience. So I can't I
Speaker 1: can't extrapolate my personal experience as a white male from
Speaker 1: the United States who learned Japanese and say that all
Speaker 1: foreigners are treated this way. I think for me in particular,
Speaker 1: it has been fine. I'm from Princical Florida, and I
Speaker 1: didn't feel like I was, uh, the same as everybody
Speaker 1: in princecal Florida. I'm pretty used to not feeling the
Speaker 1: same as people. But um, I think Japan also, in
Speaker 1: the last even five years, has really globalized where Tokyo
Speaker 1: and in particular, Uh, there's Englishman news everywhere, and there
Speaker 1: are lots and lots of people from all over the world,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's more of an international city than
Speaker 1: it's ever been. And so personally this isn't a problem
Speaker 1: for me, but I can't speak for everybody. And I
Speaker 1: see a wedding ring, Are you married to an American?
Speaker 1: Are you married to a Japanese person? Japanese? So how
Speaker 1: did you meet this Japanese person? Uh? We were both
Speaker 1: making music into music Okay, you wrote this book, you
Speaker 1: wrote a previous book. Is this how you make your
Speaker 1: living or you have to do other things? Okay, how
Speaker 1: do you make your life? I have to do I
Speaker 1: have to do many other things. So you may be
Speaker 1: surprised that writing a book about the history of men's
Speaker 1: fashion in Japan is not a career. So yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean my I've been writing for a really long time
Speaker 1: and quite passionate about it, but I do a lot
Speaker 1: of work in marketing and communications and branding and those areas. Okay,
Speaker 1: what motivated you to write this book? What expectations do
Speaker 1: you have of it? And how do you feel about
Speaker 1: some of the negative reviews. It's not like they're negative,
Speaker 1: but they want to argue with your theories. Is that jealousy? Well?
Speaker 1: And how do you metabolize all that? What motivated me was,
Speaker 1: I again have believed there are these principles or laws
Speaker 1: or however you want to explain them that guide culture
Speaker 1: and cultural change. And I've always been frustrated that there
Speaker 1: was not a single book you could just pick up
Speaker 1: and understand and and read and say this is what
Speaker 1: how people behave and this is why culture changes. And
Speaker 1: so I've been obsessed with that topic for twenty years,
Speaker 1: the interplay between consumers and media and brands and artists
Speaker 1: and how all these things work together. And I just
Speaker 1: wanted to put all of the theories that already exist,
Speaker 1: take them, synthesize them, and give them to someone in
Speaker 1: a digestible format. And that's where it came from. And
Speaker 1: I am very open to the idea that there are
Speaker 1: mistakes and that there are things that need to be adjusted.
Speaker 1: And for me, in some ways, we can't even have
Speaker 1: that discussion until you start with something. You need to
Speaker 1: start with. Here is the model that I think exists.
Speaker 1: And then there are critiques of saying, actually you miss this,
Speaker 1: or this effect maybe less than you think it is,
Speaker 1: or things have changed. So I agree with all that.
Speaker 1: I am very open to criticism in general. I'm very
Speaker 1: open to good faith criticism. I think what is always
Speaker 1: disappointing with um this kind of criticism. And and again,
Speaker 1: you know, my first book was about Japanese fashion and
Speaker 1: so niche that no one was going to say anything
Speaker 1: mean about it. They were just going to ignore it
Speaker 1: if they didn't have anything nice to say. So when
Speaker 1: you write a book big and called cultural culture, sorry
Speaker 1: called status and culture. You're just opening yourself up for attacks.
Speaker 1: So this is my fault. I I have no one
Speaker 1: to blame about myself, but so many of the critiques
Speaker 1: are in bad faith in that you have the classic
Speaker 1: critique of you did not write the book that I
Speaker 1: thought you should have written, and the critique it as
Speaker 1: if you should have read it that way, that this
Speaker 1: book is not a book about how rich people today live,
Speaker 1: which is not a book about you have. The critiques
Speaker 1: of this book is fine, but it didn't reference my book,
Speaker 1: and therefore it's suspect. I've gotten that from a pretty
Speaker 1: distinguished economists, which was quite annoying. And then you get
Speaker 1: things where there's just a disagreement. Um. Virginia Apostural, who
Speaker 1: I respect quite a quite a lot, just reviewed it
Speaker 1: for then the Wall Street Journal, and we just don't
Speaker 1: agree on, you know, the nature of aesthetics. She believes
Speaker 1: so much of aesthetics are about pleasure and joy. I
Speaker 1: totally agree. People love culture. The reason the culture proliferates
Speaker 1: this because we love it. I just I'm trying to
Speaker 1: look at why do we love certain aesthetics at all?
Speaker 1: Why do the Beatles hate the mop top? And then put,
Speaker 1: you know, then wear the mop top, and then everybody
Speaker 1: loves the mop top. You have to look at how
Speaker 1: aesthetics change over time, and status is the force that
Speaker 1: changes them. It doesn't mean that people are always status
Speaker 1: seeking everything they do, but status is this invisible grammar
Speaker 1: behind culture that we have to look at. So I
Speaker 1: think some of the critiques are are fine and fair.
Speaker 1: What's annoying just about how how this process works is
Speaker 1: that you're a very whiny author if somebody critiques you,
Speaker 1: and then you go on and say, well, you're wrong
Speaker 1: because of these things, and so you have to be,
Speaker 1: you know, pull light and mannered about the whole thing.
Speaker 1: But I think some of the critiques are just an
Speaker 1: invitation to dialogue. I mean, I would love to answer
Speaker 1: the criticisms because they're not gotcha, like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I never consider this. I feel like I answer these
Speaker 1: in the book and people may not quite get the nuances.
Speaker 1: So for me, it's just it's frustrating because I want
Speaker 1: to speak with these people in that a conversation, but
Speaker 1: that's not the way it works. It's kind of forever.
Speaker 1: The New York Times says this, and that's what The
Speaker 1: New York Times said, but at the same time, you know,
Speaker 1: the revenge of authors and publishers is then we just
Speaker 1: edit out all the negative things from the review and
Speaker 1: then write fascinating Times and put it on the back
Speaker 1: of a book, so you know, authors laugh last maybe Okay.
Speaker 1: What most people don't know is the book business is
Speaker 1: really provincial. No, it's not not modernized in many ways.
Speaker 1: But what I really saying. You see the number one
Speaker 1: best seller, well, let's make it better number five. It
Speaker 1: is amazing how few books the books actually sell absolutely
Speaker 1: so has the book had more or less impact than
Speaker 1: you wanted it to have in terms of which relevantive
Speaker 1: positive or negative? It's still too early because it's only
Speaker 1: been out for a couple of weeks. Um the book
Speaker 1: needs to be read, is the problem. So a lot
Speaker 1: of nonfiction books literally will be one single idea. There's
Speaker 1: this theory of the minimally counterintuitive idea that these are sticky,
Speaker 1: that if things are too intuitive, it's not interesting. If
Speaker 1: things are too counterintuitive, they're not interesting. But if you
Speaker 1: have this minimally counterintuitive idea, like if I wrote a
Speaker 1: book that said, did you know that your gut bacteria
Speaker 1: determines your personality? You'd be like, well, that's I didn't
Speaker 1: think that, but okay, I'll read a book about it.
Speaker 1: But that book will then basically take that idea and
Speaker 1: you know, extrapolate it out for three under pages triple space.
Speaker 1: That's what a normal nonfiction book does. And so when
Speaker 1: you read about or hear about it, you basically the
Speaker 1: main idea and you can go to a cocktail party
Speaker 1: and say, oh, I just read this book about got
Speaker 1: bacteria determining your personality. Uh my, I did not follow
Speaker 1: the rules of this provincial book market. I wrote a
Speaker 1: book that has way too many things in it. And
Speaker 1: when I'm trying to again, I'm trying to make a
Speaker 1: field manual slash handbook for people to understand how status works,
Speaker 1: how culture works, and take those lessons with them. And
Speaker 1: the way it's summarized often doesn't quite explain my position
Speaker 1: or it simplifies it too much. And so what I'm
Speaker 1: hoping is people read it and they start using the
Speaker 1: language of the book to describe things. And again, even
Speaker 1: if people disagree with it and they have to clarify
Speaker 1: their position using the language of the book, I feel
Speaker 1: like that would be a great success, but it's going
Speaker 1: to take a little bit more time. It's not I
Speaker 1: didn't play the game the way I was supposed to do,
Speaker 1: in which I noticed in in hindsight. Um, I just
Speaker 1: I wrote the book that I thought needed to exist,
Speaker 1: and we'll see what happens. Okay, let's pull the lens
Speaker 1: way back. Can one say that music, even movies and
Speaker 1: TV have been eclipsed by politics because we all have
Speaker 1: a hand in it and are affected and we can
Speaker 1: take a side and we can argue about it. Or
Speaker 1: does politics just is that become the main dominant force
Speaker 1: in culture or is it just a constant on the side.
Speaker 1: I think in American culture, politics is everything, and and
Speaker 1: cultural politics is often used as a dismissive term that
Speaker 1: that's just cultural politics. But culture has become political because,
Speaker 1: especially in a world of mass culture and these huge
Speaker 1: cultural markets, who makes the money from the matters, and
Speaker 1: the ideas in the hit movies and books matter, and
Speaker 1: people are quite sensitive about it, and appropriation matters. You know,
Speaker 1: if if a marginalized group creates these forms out of
Speaker 1: their marginalization, and then the majority culture steals those ideas
Speaker 1: and profits from them, that is a political issue. Status
Speaker 1: comes with privileges. Status determines the quality of your life,
Speaker 1: and status determines how resources are distributed across society. So
Speaker 1: if culture plays a role in who gets status, which
Speaker 1: it does, then people really focus on culture and they
Speaker 1: think about it, and so it's inevitable the culture becomes
Speaker 1: political in this era. And also when you get to
Speaker 1: the dominant form of culture on the sophisticated side, being omnivorism,
Speaker 1: which says high and low are both equally valid, you
Speaker 1: stop having kind of avant garde battles between uh, abstract
Speaker 1: expressionism is the final form of art, no pop art
Speaker 1: is it's you know, successor you stop battling about the
Speaker 1: form of art and the ideas and you start focusing
Speaker 1: more on, well, everything is kind of equally good. So
Speaker 1: the only thing that we're against is these provincial people
Speaker 1: who do not believe that everything is good. So so
Speaker 1: you have cosmopolitanism of believing that everything is good take
Speaker 1: over so much that the only thing to be against
Speaker 1: is anti cosmopolitanism, and so the entire cultural marketplace becomes
Speaker 1: a battle between kind of this pro omnivorism versus very
Speaker 1: parochial or provincial. My culture is the only right culture,
Speaker 1: and that just splits across political lines in the United States.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's that is a very blue, red state
Speaker 1: type divide, and it's it's just inevitable that culture has
Speaker 1: gone that direction. So um, I don't know what we
Speaker 1: can do about that, but as long as somebody is
Speaker 1: reviewing culture with those questions in mind. And then you
Speaker 1: also get to this, this artist has done a genius
Speaker 1: invention of these forms. But as a person there they
Speaker 1: believe in bad politics, and I don't want money going
Speaker 1: to them. What's very difficult for them to uh for
Speaker 1: people to support that at this moment. Well, let me clarify,
Speaker 1: how about Washington, D C. Trump people focusing on that
Speaker 1: for their identity or common at least Biden somebody on
Speaker 1: the other side. To what degree is that usurpd cultural
Speaker 1: power from the traditional music, movies, and television. I mean,
Speaker 1: I I've heard you talk about this, and I know
Speaker 1: you agree with that, and I agree with you. I
Speaker 1: think that that is the dominant form of identity creation
Speaker 1: at the moment. And but that but that again, I
Speaker 1: think these two things are related, which is if America
Speaker 1: is a struggle between this state ethos and a red
Speaker 1: state ethos, and that is playing out in politics and economics,
Speaker 1: and in all of these questions, it is bleeding into culture.
Speaker 1: But because culture is set up as omnivore versus anti omnivore,
Speaker 1: and blue is the omnivore side and anti omnivore is
Speaker 1: the red side, then that just makes it where all
Speaker 1: appreciation of art has to be filtered through the lens
Speaker 1: of those politics. Okay, so let's assume you're in the
Speaker 1: lower status group. Do people ever accept their status or
Speaker 1: they always saying, God, I want more status. So what's
Speaker 1: really important in any hierarchy for it to function is
Speaker 1: what's called status integrity. So there's the people at the
Speaker 1: bottom look up and they say, it makes sense why
Speaker 1: those people up there or have the status that they do.
Speaker 1: And if they believe in that integrity, they'll stay in
Speaker 1: the group even if they're low status. They'll believe my
Speaker 1: group will be successful, and the success of that group
Speaker 1: will be good for me, even if I'm at the
Speaker 1: bottom of it. Often, where people don't believe in that,
Speaker 1: and they understand that they could be higher status in
Speaker 1: any different group, they will leave. And so the rise
Speaker 1: of some cultures in the twentieth century is a lot
Speaker 1: of people saying I don't agree with these people at
Speaker 1: the top being the top. I'm going to leave and
Speaker 1: be a surfer or a biker or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: because those communities except me and I can be valued
Speaker 1: and esteemed for these interests and these values I already have.
Speaker 1: They are different than the mainstream. UM. I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot of political turmoil in the United States at
Speaker 1: the moment in that the United States has ceased to
Speaker 1: feel like one status group that we're all in. And
Speaker 1: I think in particular, people who support Trump, they believe
Speaker 1: that their group should be at the top, and they
Speaker 1: don't believe that these these these coastal elites should have
Speaker 1: the status that they have, and that causes a lot
Speaker 1: of resentment and causes them to want ill things to
Speaker 1: happen to people on the coast. And uh, that is
Speaker 1: that lack of integrity has made these two groups split.
Speaker 1: And they you know, they do not accept that feeling
Speaker 1: of being in a lower status tier, whether they are
Speaker 1: or not, is all perceived. And at the moment they
Speaker 1: turn on the television, these people who support Trump turn
Speaker 1: on the television, they don't see themselves, they don't see
Speaker 1: their values, UM, and they're quite resentful about it, and
Speaker 1: it makes it makes a lot of sense. But you know,
Speaker 1: we do live in a world in which you're able
Speaker 1: to move to other groups as quickly as possible. But
Speaker 1: that splintering then makes it where there isn't really a
Speaker 1: mainstream core, or the mainstream core becomes one group and
Speaker 1: then the other group is simply trying to battle back
Speaker 1: and forth of taking back power. And in my lifetime,
Speaker 1: I've never seen soul much income inequality the American dream.
Speaker 1: You work hard, you can make it. You can work
Speaker 1: for the rest of your fucking life hard, You're not
Speaker 1: gonna have as much money you z Elon Musk. So
Speaker 1: to what you spoke earlier about the French Revolution, are
Speaker 1: we pushing towards some cataclysmic event that will reworder status
Speaker 1: as a result of income inequality? And maybe what we
Speaker 1: were just referencing the political differences, Um, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: I mean, I if you look at the trump Is
Speaker 1: movement as a backlash against the order, they are trying
Speaker 1: to restore some bizarro you know, twentieth century, nine fifties
Speaker 1: version of America that doesn't exist, in which you know
Speaker 1: a lot of people that move it would have not
Speaker 1: been particularly high status at that time either, but they
Speaker 1: felt like they it's better than where they are now. Um,
Speaker 1: so that group is incredibly reactionary. It does not seem
Speaker 1: like they want a revolution in a French Revolution since
Speaker 1: and I don't get a sense that there is a
Speaker 1: group like the bourgeoisie that's going to have a French
Speaker 1: Revolution and there's not an empowered group of proletariat that's
Speaker 1: going to overtake things in a Mark Marxist revolution either.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I mean, this is this is
Speaker 1: probably beyond my pay grade, but it just does not
Speaker 1: seem like we're headed towards an actual reversal of what
Speaker 1: creates status in society. And because that's what these revolutions
Speaker 1: always are, there an attempt to change why the people
Speaker 1: at the highest levels have the status that they do.
Speaker 1: And so the French Revolution is saying it should not
Speaker 1: be about aristocracy at all, that you know, personal achievements
Speaker 1: should be the reason that people move to the top,
Speaker 1: and that idea is stuck with us even after the
Speaker 1: French Revolution, and you know, Marxist revolution is trying to
Speaker 1: say that capital itself should not be the reason people
Speaker 1: at the top. But I don't know. I don't I
Speaker 1: don't see any major tempt at at gigantic revolutionary status reversal.
Speaker 1: And looking into the future, we can certainly see changes.
Speaker 1: You know, the Internet era as opposed to the prior era,
Speaker 1: the fascination with devices in the first decade of this century,
Speaker 1: the triumph of software, the go go now the backlash.
Speaker 1: Are we going to be staying? What will this stagnancy
Speaker 1: in culture continue? Will it have to be a once
Speaker 1: in a lifetime event to change it? You know, what
Speaker 1: do you think is going to come down the pike?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, one thing I do is
Speaker 1: do think and then talking to friends is people who
Speaker 1: are the most sophisticated cultural consumers and most interested in culture.
Speaker 1: We're on the internet early because the internet promised you
Speaker 1: the ability to have better distribution for the things you
Speaker 1: create and find people who have the same interest. So
Speaker 1: you have all these people into marginal things. You go online,
Speaker 1: suddenly there are all there's thousands of people interested in
Speaker 1: this and you can get new information. You can trade tapes.
Speaker 1: One of the earliest things I did on the Internet
Speaker 1: and the nineties was trade bootleg tapes with people. So
Speaker 1: you join a mailing list and then trade bootlegs back
Speaker 1: and forth. So my understanding of the Internet was that
Speaker 1: it was the thing for people with niche tastes and
Speaker 1: that was incredible and useful. And the Internet in the
Speaker 1: last decade has become mass culture is dominated by lowest combinator,
Speaker 1: lowest common dominator aesthetics. I mean cases, if you open
Speaker 1: TikTok and you haven't quite put in your personal preferences,
Speaker 1: as in you say I'm not interested in this, it
Speaker 1: sends you often very sexually provocative videos, but it just
Speaker 1: sends you things that make you want to close the
Speaker 1: app because they're not They're not really set up for
Speaker 1: for people who are used to the Internet being niche
Speaker 1: artistic things. So these platforms are based on the aesthetics
Speaker 1: of mass culture, and that original group of people on
Speaker 1: the Internet are quite disappointed with it, and and a
Speaker 1: lot of this idea of cultural stasis it comes from
Speaker 1: cultural elites. It does not come from you know, eighteen
Speaker 1: year old kids are not saying, oh wow, the culture stuck.
Speaker 1: They're fine, they're on TikTok, they're having a good time.
Speaker 1: So that group is disappointed with the direction the Internet
Speaker 1: has gone. And either the Internet splinters a little bit
Speaker 1: where you start getting these social media platforms only for
Speaker 1: that group that really have barriers to injury, so they
Speaker 1: don't become mass platforms. But that's not a particularly good
Speaker 1: business model because the business model of all these platforms
Speaker 1: is scale. So if your Instagram and you only have
Speaker 1: creative costs people, well that doesn't work. You've got to
Speaker 1: have everybody. You've got to bring everyone's mom on. So
Speaker 1: uh if if the money is made in lowest common
Speaker 1: denominator taste in order to get as many people as possible,
Speaker 1: the Internet is not home two people with niche taste
Speaker 1: because there isn't a way to escape it, to say, oh, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,
Speaker 1: these are all platforms only for the masses. I'm over
Speaker 1: here the way that I think there used to be
Speaker 1: with with magazines. We all still care about our success
Speaker 1: on these platforms. We were told, especially if you're creating things,
Speaker 1: you have to market yourself on this platform so people
Speaker 1: can't escape it. So either you get a movement offline
Speaker 1: and that people return to their cultural experiences being offline.
Speaker 1: And what's nice about online is you can show that
Speaker 1: you've done this thing offline, so there was an article
Speaker 1: in The Atlantic recently, um where you know, restaurant reservations
Speaker 1: are the hot new thing, and they're hot because it's scarce.
Speaker 1: It's real life, it's physical. You could only certain amount
Speaker 1: of people every night. You can go to this restaurant.
Speaker 1: At the same time, you can use Instagram to show
Speaker 1: that you've been to that restaurant. So using online to
Speaker 1: show your offline exploits, I think is one direction. This
Speaker 1: is going to go quickly, but I could see a
Speaker 1: growing cultural movement of just offline activity. You had to
Speaker 1: be there, and that's that is going to be where
Speaker 1: the real status is because that's the way it used
Speaker 1: to work other otherwise. I think these communities that are
Speaker 1: interested in niche artistic culture, I mean, there's lots of niche,
Speaker 1: weird things that aren't artistic, but the kind of people
Speaker 1: doing the invention that moves culture forward, there has to
Speaker 1: be spaces for them to experiment and be rewarded for it.
Speaker 1: And the current state of the Internet is not there.
Speaker 1: It may have been there maybe twenty years ago, but
Speaker 1: it's not there now, and so there will be some
Speaker 1: sort of new movement or exodus. But that also presumes
Speaker 1: that people who are eighteen right now want to do
Speaker 1: cultural invention the way that my generation wanted to or
Speaker 1: you know, I was listening to a lot of weird music,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to make weird music. But I don't
Speaker 1: know if eighteen year old kids are listening to weird
Speaker 1: things and want to make weird things. Okay, just going
Speaker 1: back one step, you talked about people watching movies and
Speaker 1: constantly looking at a clock. I resonate with that. That
Speaker 1: is me. If I'm watching with my girlfriend, I can
Speaker 1: watch anything. If I'm watching alone, it's a real pain
Speaker 1: to sit through it. If it's fantastic, that's not usually
Speaker 1: the issue. But there's very little that's fantastic. What is
Speaker 1: really going on? Why am I looking at the clock
Speaker 1: or stopping? You know, there are probably scientific studies on this,
Speaker 1: but I think it seems like our our attention spans
Speaker 1: are shorter, just in the sense of sitting there for
Speaker 1: an hour not checking your phone has become quite difficult,
Speaker 1: and you know, sitting through anything for two hours straight
Speaker 1: has become difficult. I feel like if I'm in a
Speaker 1: movie theater, I can get very into it. When I
Speaker 1: was watching Dune or something I was in, but at
Speaker 1: home you're just so distractive by the things around you,
Speaker 1: and you know you can stop, and so if you
Speaker 1: know you can stop, you stop. So I think that's
Speaker 1: one of them. The other is, you know, the model.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the exact business model is anymore,
Speaker 1: but it used to be you're gonna make ten movies
Speaker 1: in a year. You're you have no idea what's going
Speaker 1: to hit, and so you give ten people, uh, you say,
Speaker 1: go off and do these things. And one of them
Speaker 1: is David Lynch. And David Lynch makes a really weird
Speaker 1: movie with your money and you don't make any money
Speaker 1: from it, but you there's a David Lynch movie in
Speaker 1: the world, And the question is whether studios or everybody.
Speaker 1: Because it's so data driven, they got smarter and they thought,
Speaker 1: I'm not this David Lynch movie is definitely not going
Speaker 1: to be a hit. You know, just because Elephant Man
Speaker 1: was a hit doesn't mean Wild and Heart is going
Speaker 1: to be hit. So you don't give new David Lynch's movies.
Speaker 1: But then the question is are there a bunch of
Speaker 1: David lynch Is out there that we're just they're not
Speaker 1: getting funding. I don't know about that. I think the
Speaker 1: next generation is a lot more savvy and a lot
Speaker 1: less artistic minded in that really classic Aumant Guard way,
Speaker 1: And so you have a lot you have fewer creations
Speaker 1: that are probably from that world, you have the studio
Speaker 1: funding fewer of them, and then you have less patients
Speaker 1: from it, and then it comes out and of course
Speaker 1: it's not a hit because no one's gonna watch that
Speaker 1: kind of thing anyway. So the whole ecosystem is just
Speaker 1: not set up for some sort of movie that is
Speaker 1: I've never seen anything like it before. I have to
Speaker 1: turn away. And also we're we can turn away, and
Speaker 1: if the first ten minutes you don't like it, um,
Speaker 1: you will turn turn away. I mean, I can't imagine
Speaker 1: someone watching a Razorhead right now and being gripped by
Speaker 1: and say, I gotta, I gotta keep watching this thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's so slow. You have to really
Speaker 1: be disciplined to keep going. But if you're at an
Speaker 1: indie theater and it's nineteen and I don't know when
Speaker 1: it is, it's a late night theater, and you you
Speaker 1: go and it's the only culture you have in your city,
Speaker 1: You're gonna sit there and watch it, okay, And how
Speaker 1: much of it is the form has changed. Yes, so
Speaker 1: I can get bites online that are brief, and that's
Speaker 1: the new format and relevant of attention span is just
Speaker 1: more rewarding. I'm gonna want to get into science and dopamine,
Speaker 1: but is what people are looking for generally speaking different.
Speaker 1: It has most definitely conditioned us to want things very
Speaker 1: very quickly. I know that when a YouTube video hits
Speaker 1: about ninety seconds and goes beyond that, I think this
Speaker 1: is the longest video that's ever existed, and I fade out.
Speaker 1: So it's very strange. It's it's very strange that ninety
Speaker 1: seconds is about all we're willing to give us something.
Speaker 1: But also you know, you're often recommended it or it
Speaker 1: pops up on your feed, and you're not bought in.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're not in a place where you're going
Speaker 1: to sit there and say, I'm gonna watch a thirty
Speaker 1: minute movie. You're just trying to kill time for five minutes,
Speaker 1: and this is gonna be ninety seconds of it. So
Speaker 1: you really don't want anything that's ninety seconds. But we
Speaker 1: consider that time to be cultural consumption in a way
Speaker 1: that I think before, if you watch the film, you
Speaker 1: were going to sit, sit down at seven pm and
Speaker 1: pop pop the you know, VC pop the cassette into
Speaker 1: the VCR and watch a movie. Where today we're just
Speaker 1: thinking about our entertainment time. It's filling it with just
Speaker 1: what comes up, not by being intentional, um it's different
Speaker 1: by person by person, but the fact that so many
Speaker 1: people have reported that they can't get through long things,
Speaker 1: it does seem to be a plague of our times. Well, thanks, David,
Speaker 1: I think we've come to the end of the feeling
Speaker 1: we've known. This has been fascinating. You and me could
Speaker 1: express opinions and go over these issues for days, but
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be today. So and Nanny event thanks
Speaker 1: so much for taking this time with me. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for having me. It's an honored to talk
Speaker 1: to you. I've been a big fan of the newsletter
Speaker 1: for a long time. Until next time. This is Bob
Speaker 1: Leftstax