Yes The World is Ending (As Consistently)

Hi everybody today, I'm going to talk aboutwhat happens when agency and trust both erode I'm also going to talk about what happens whenyou destroy the tools of creativity But first, a quick announcement. My first book comesout at the end of May, May 28th. It's called In This Economy, and it's meant to be aguide, a toolbox, really, on everything. Inflation, the labor market, commodities, how thestock market works, how the bond markets work, what are recessions, what is GDP, what issupply and demand, what is money? And I'm hoping that the book kind of addresses all ofthose things, provides the foundational knowledge that is important to interact with the economythat we oftentimes don't really talk about. We just throw these terms around and we're like,you'll figure it out. So I'm hoping that this book.

Will help people figure it out. If that soundsat all interesting, you can pre order it on Amazon. You can pre order it on penguinrighthouse.com. You can pre order it on Barnes and Nobles. There's also a Giveaway on Goodreads andthere is also an opportunity to purchase a [00:01:00] signed copy That will also haveMoo's little paw print on there as well. If any of that sounds interesting I'll have allthose links in the description box below Your support means the world to me. I'm a little bitnervous. I'm a little bit excited I've never put something so big into the world and it's like whoaSo, um, yeah, of course, if it sounds interesting at all, I highly recommend you check it out.And do let me know if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment, and Iwill happily answer it as best I can..

So let's talk about what happens when you destroythe tools of creativity. So, Apple released this ad about a week ago to highlight their new iPadPro with the M4 chip. And everybody was like, whoa, what is going on with this commercial?Because In my opinion, technology is great. I love technology. I think technology, the industrialrevolution is like where it's at, right? It's so important that we have a technology, but whatApple did in this video is they smushed all these musical instruments to show how skinny codedthe new [00:02:00] iPad pro with M4 chip was. And of course, you know, there's kind ofthis level of online backlash that came out, but the metaphor is interesting because. Applereleased an ad in 1984 that showed them cracking a TV open with a hammer. And once they crackedthat TV, then all the color exploded. This was.

Kind of the opposite. Once they smooshed all themusical instruments, signs of culture, and away, that's when, um, all the color went away.And you had this little flat screen just laying in place. Between the jaws of ahydraulic press. And so the backlash was intense. Apple actually ended up apologizing, but it waskind of this accidental metaphor that hit a little bit too close. And I think the thing is, as we allknow, we're in this age of tremendous uncertainty. Um, trust has evaporated, something thatI've talked a lot about. but agency, the individual expression of trust. So howyou and I go about in the world expressing our levels of trust has declined too. And it'sbecause of things [00:03:00] like that Apple ad. And of course, there's this, like I said, levelof online backlash that happened with Apple..

Where it's like, okay, buddy, like, youknow, You know, meat included. Go outside and touch some grass. But it's important totalk about because the metaphor is salient. So agency as a function of trust. There areall sorts of studies talking about how people don't trust each other anymore. It's actuallykind of tiring to hear about. We don't trust the government. We don't trust the media. Wedon't trust Wall Street. We don't trust the president or the military or each other.We don't trust each other. And of course, one could point a finger to bipartisanship, andpolarization, and city design, and car culture, and rage bait, and the algorithm, all asincentives for the reason of distrust. There's a study that was released by theHarvard Youth Poll that showed only one,.

The United Nations, of the eight institutions inour survey is more trusted today than in 2015. The level of trust for the UN has increasedby 17 percent over the decade. The remaining institutions Saw a steep decline. Trust inthe president has declined by [00:04:00] 60% since 2015. Trust in the Supreme Courtdeclined 55% trust among Wall Street is down 43% trust in the US military now at 36%. Thefederal government now at 17%, both declined. 38% trust in Congress is down 34%trust in the media is down 18%. Yikes! And trust is this, like, reallybig thing. It happens on a really large scale. It's a somewhat liquid expression ofconfidence that people have at institutions, systems, other people. Trust is everything.It's the foundation for public health and voter.

Turnout and policy preferences. But because we'veevolved into this strange low trust, high stakes, no action society, we've lost an element ofagency, or the individual expression of trust. And agency is sort of this formal term, like onethat could be, uh, it would fit uncomfortably well into a conversation that you might have around afire pit at Burning Man. What's your agency like, right? And it wades a little bit into the freewill debate, and determinism, and the idea that maybe everything is random anyway, [00:05:00]and we just kind of fit our internal models. to match the world and the outcomes around us.But for the purposes of our conversation today, agency or how people feel about their abilityto make decisions is an expression of trust in the world around them. And to be fair, we do seemto have an element of agency. There are studies.

Showing that people feel fine about their personalfinancial situation, but completely terrible about the national financial situation and showing thatpeople love their congressmen but hate Congress. If, uh, Fenner's paradox to be specific, a perfectpetri dish of individual expectations and national outcomes and the rather disastrous mismatchbetween the two. And we've seen an interesting amount of what seems to be the expression ofagencies, um, with the, the rise of things like quiet quitting or the great resignation, whichto be fair is probably more of an expression of economic strength than individual freedoms.Types of agency. But there are two main types of agency. There's the external locus of control, andthen there's the internal locus of control. Life happens to me would be [00:06:00] external., I happen to life, would be internal. We.

Clearly have both, right? For example, people arelikely to attribute wage increases to themselves, internal, but price inflation to policy, external,as Stephanie Stancheva of Harvard has documented. But at large, we increasingly, studies show,have this external locus of control that absolves us of responsibility and decisionmaking around our life. In her book iGen, Jean Twenge documents the shift of the youth overthe past 60 ish years to a more external locus of control. In her 2004 paper, she talksabout the alienation model, how the rise of individualistic values increased each generation.Egoist tendencies or blaming bad stuff on other people and crediting good things to yourself.There are all sorts of negative consequences to this, like higher rates of depression and anxiety.Everyone wants a God, and because of that,.

Everyone needs a devil. The devil has come inthe form of skepticism, the form of distrust, the immediate outrage at anything not immediatelyfamiliar, and God is nowhere to be found. There are very clear, visible [00:07:00]culprits to an external locus of control, like structural affordability. This is totallyan aside, but when you do videos, like, you get kind of warm, so I just, I changed out ofmy, my jacket. But, um, so there are very clear, visible culprits to an external locus of control.Like structural affordability problems and actual institutional failure, but they're alsodeep undercurrents of a lack of agency. And so my theory is that in order to evenbegin thinking about rebuilding trust, we have to think about rebuilding agency. . Andso it's not just polarization and bipartisanship.

Contributing to this. It's an economy that iscompletely divided at all angles. Um, it's this bifurcated economy that exists in a faux locality.Which is a word salad just in case you've been missing your daily greens, but theeconomy is totally split in half, right? There's the upcoming wave of generationalwealth transfer with one a lot of Millennials inheriting a large sum of money From their boomerparents and a lot not. It's the people sitting on a golden tooth thing The three percent mortgagerate while those who [00:08:00] are trying to buy a house right now are drying theirtears with different real estate pamphlets. It's a labor market that's great for those whohave a job but very difficult for those who are looking for one. It's the rise of trade schoolGen Z's, the tool belt generation as they say,.

And the deserved mini rebellion tothe cost of a college education. It's the stability in the hospital system.It's the 400 richest Americans holding wealth equivalent to about 17 percent of GDP, a 15percent increase from the 2 percent level in 1982. The bifurcation is dug deeper byan aging society that tends to vote in its own self interest, which you can't really blamethem for, and not to belabor an ancient point, but our two presidential candidates are ancient.End. But it's complicated, right? 25 percent of baby boomers have no retirement savings, but babyboomers are the richest retiring generation that we've ever had. Child care [00:09:00] costs areup 32 percent since 2019, fertility rates are low, and the older only getting older. So we kindof have this huge shifting of the curve in a.

Way that we're not replacing, uh, thatwhat that which needs to be replaced. And that creates a Portugal like situationwhich, as Palladium wrote, is nearly impossible to escape. As the country struggles with anaging population, brain drain, and youth drain, it also suffers from the impossibility ofvoting structural reforms into existence. There are people in the United States who mightas well be in entirely different universes. But there is a general consensus of a total declinein trust, a total eyebrow raised at everything. So we have this divided economy. We havepolarization. And we exist in what Simone Weil would call force. Force is definedas X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. It makes a corpse out ofhim. Somebody was here, and the next minute.

There [00:10:00] is nobody here at all. Thereare plenty of examples of force in modern life. The mind loop of the algorithm, the flashingadvertisements along subway trains and highways, politics as theatrics, theatrics as underfundedlast gasps of hope, The Smooshing of Instruments. It makes us little shells of ourselves.Force shows up in media headlines, too. If you have a negative word in your mediaheadline, the click through rate increases by 2. 3%. If you have a positive word, the clickthrough rate decreases by 1. 9%, which leads to things like how the briefing book covered, um,bad news bias and gasoline price coverage. Force is companies like Apollo making bets on deathand companies like Bank of America fostering cultures that result in death. The faux localityis something that I am incredibly wrapped up into..

It's the internet, um, where big problems are veryaccessible and very tangible and [00:11:00] very much all around us all the time. And itleads to a mindset where you're like, I kind of know what's happening. So I'm goingto tweet out my big opinion on the world. And everyone's like, Oh, I went to theart museum yesterday with my friend, Matt Bebb. It's funny because I always know this,right? I always am aware of an undercurrent of We've always been talking about the same things., but I went to the Reason and Emotion Exhibit, like I think it's the 17th centurymovement, reason versus emotion, right? And I was like, okay, we've always been talkingabout how there's a disconnect between feelings and reality. And, but I think with the internet,right, I think it looks something like this. Like.

You have the faux locality, you have national,you have local, the bigness of the universe getting shrunken down to the size of our palm.And it doesn't mean the problems are palm sizeable, even though people try to do that. It'sknowledge disguised as understanding information that is actionable, but not in a series ofquick, easy steps, which we don't like. We really love listicles for a reason. The internetis a campfire, certainly a tool of connection, a tool of beauty, [00:12:00] but it'salso extraordinarily overwhelming. So we engage with things in this hyper specificway. We, we enter into echo chambers, everyone does it. And when our personal tools, which we areonly really designed to address things in our true locality, fail us, we lose hope because we'relike, oh, You know, why can't I solve this huge.

Big problem that in my full locality seems totallysolvable or seems like totally addressable Um, but it's not because we're really we're meant to existin in communities that are small And that makes it all really big for example Things like the housingcrisis are fundamentally terrifying because there isn't really much anybody can do about thatLike you can start a construction company. You can vote for the right person. You canadvocate for the right policies But it's like whoa, this is a really big problem. That'sgoing to take a lot of collective effort to fix And, uh, so the thing is, we can pay attention.Contrary to popular belief, um, the attention spans are quite fine. We can tune in, and we do,possibly, to questionable media, like a lot of, um, the youth getting their news from social[00:13:00] media, of which I am a problem. The.

Problem is not that we can't pay attention.We can, but we have no motivation. We just don't care. And the issue here is similar towhat Paul highlights. Attention taken to the highest degree is the same thing as prayer.Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossiblethat little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.We are what we attend to. And so if we are circling the drain of media negativity andreality TVification of politics and remaining lost in the crevices of our faux locality whereour attention is harvested for ad dollars, it is no wonder that We are overwhelmed andfeel flattened in terms of responsibility. It is Jonathan Beller's attention theoryof value where exploitation of attention.

Is immensely profitable. Everyone is abusiness, as Mark Fisher highlights in Capitalist Realism. Even you, especially yourdata. So people get nostalgic. You're like, gosh, I really crave it when my data wasn't beingharvested to make Facebook a lot of money. No need to make a decision if you simply canblame it on the times. That's the natural reaction to a perceived [00:14:00] loss of agency. Itleaning into the idea that nothing should change, but everything should be different. That the pastwas the best possible version of itself, but we have to look forward. Like, it drives me, um.This is judgmental, but it drives me up a wall when people are like, Oh no, this era was the bestbecause we had this and we had that. Eyes on the road, buster. Get out of the rearview mirror.You're not going backwards. Go forwards. And so.

There's this tweet running for the days of theliteral Great Recession based on a single loss leading promotional item from Taco Bell comparingthe DoorDash price instead of the real price. 3. 69, it got 53, 000 likes, right? And soit makes sense because people are feeling the stress of inflation. But you have to lookforward. Nostalgia is escapism. Nostalgia is a pleading for the past for familiarity. So we dothat or we invent problems. There's a passage from the end of history that ties it together.Experience suggests that if men [00:15:00] cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause becausethat just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle againstthe just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in otherwords, out of a certain boredom, for they cannot.

Imagine living in a world without struggle.And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful andprosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity andagainst democracy. Struggling for the sake of struggle is a very applicable concept. And toreiterate, there are real problems with structural affordability and institutional failure, andtech people that got far too rich extracting far too much value from the world around them.You know, please listen to that. I'm not writing off the problems that we're facing. I'm notstupid. I live in the world, too. Um, and, and, but, you, like, looking out beyond, right? It'sall relative. Um, we absolutely have fundamental problems as a society. Money is in all thewrong places, as the defector highlighted..

But a lot of people bemoan the system that theyvery clearly benefit from. A struggle to struggle, um, which is fine, but they provide [00:16:00]no solutions to fix it. Or they do things that maybe are counterproductive. Withconcepts like financial nihilism, the opportunity cost is infinite wheneverything is at the tip of your fingers. Everyone wants everything, but no one wantsto decide. Noelle McAfee wrote The qualitative difference between public opinion formation andpublic will formation is that the former only calls on us to opine, to mouth our preferences.The latter calls on us to decide. If the public is considered merely as generators of public opinion,then we have the problem of our travel plans. Everyone wants everything and no one need decidewhat the right ends are or how to achieve them..

We will get a cacophy, a cacode, we willget a cacodophy, Cacophony. We will get a cacophony of competing claims. Disagreementwithout deliberation or choice. The bar needs to be raised for public discourse.Don't just tell me what you like, tell me what you want to do and what you are willing togive up. And tell me you are ready to do this. I was at NATO HQ a few weeks ago, and we talkedabout developing belief in the post truth society. It was a great visit because you're realizing thatpeople are thinking about how the [00:17:00] heck do you develop policy in a world wherenobody believes in anything? , how do you develop legislation around non belief? Andit's made doubly hard by things that Virginia Postrel described beautifully in her interviewwith Brink Lindsey on the permanent problem..

People want to feel smart andthey want to feel in control, but inevitably all these great technologicalwonders come from specialized knowledge. When there is something new that you can't see theimmediate positive effects of, you have to take somebody's word for it. You have to know whatyou want to do in a world in which progress can sometimes feel as backwards as smashinginstruments for the sake of another screen. You have to know what you want to doin a world where progress isn't always visible. You have to know what you wantto do in a world that harvests dopamine, demands attention, and isn't always beautiful.The only way that we battle force is through beauty and through empathy. All, like, all thewoo weaponization possible, right? Anne Carson.

Did a beautiful interview. It's Beautiful. In theParis Review where she talks about hesitation, she talks about how there was a space betweenthings like looking up the [00:18:00] definition of a word and actually understanding the word.But now we have, we don't have that moment of pause, that interval to reflect. She says, theinterval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brainon the way to thinking because you're not quite thinking yet. It's not that, it's on the way toknowing, so it's suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that. The only hesitationthat we have is loading time, the spinning wheel on our screen, , I want to talk about somethingthat I think is really beautiful, and it sort of fights the faux locality that I've been talkingabout. There is a children's TV show called Bluey,.

Which follows a family of anthropomorphic dogsand their life in Australia. The lineup includes Bluey, a six year old blue haired littlepuppy, and her family, her dad, Bandit, her mom, Chili, and her little sister, Bingo.Bluey is an Australian TV show that premiered in 2018. Created by Joe Brum, who wanted toportray what it was like for kids to see kids through an Australian version of PeppaPig. Brum has two little girls and wanted to create a show that draws in his reallife. The highs and lows of [00:19:00] being parents, being a family, being kids.The lessons, uh, are conveniently seemingly simple. of sharing and playing, but they're also,you know, riding bikes and cleaning the house. And it's about hunger parenting and infertility andhow hard it is to make adult friends and what it.

Means to belong or not to belong at all. Louie issuccessful because it is human, ironically enough. In one episode called Stick Bird, you can see thatBandit is visibly distressed. They're at the beach and he's just like, I can't, I can't do it today.And, um When Bingo Sandcastle gets knocked over, he says to her, he says, When you put somethingbeautiful into the world, it's no longer yours, really. And I've been thinking a lot aboutthat because I think there's so much truth to putting something beautiful into theworld and who it actually belongs to I've been thinking a lot about how thisshow resonates with both parents and kids, and what it means to actually create somethingbeautiful. Brum reminds me of the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson, who Brum saysthat he drew inspiration from. And talking about.

Retiring from Calvin and Hobbes, [00:20:00]Bill Watterson says, My approach was probably too crazy to sustain for a lifetime, but it letme draw the exact strip I wanted while it lasted. Joe Brum and Bill Watterson had managed tocultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexitiesof reality because ultimately that is our best chance at remaining human. They conveyedall these things that Lindsay Stonebridge has written about. Sometimes we canonly see ourselves through mirrors, and Bluey is that mirror for a lot of people.The kids see themselves reflected in the play, in the fun, in the stories, but it alsohelps them see their parents as people. Bluey is a form of beauty, one that you mightmiss if you're not looking closely enough,.

And it's one that's relatively rare as StephenNightingale wrote in the Paradise Notebooks, in the experience of beauty, we learn to tellthings alike, to move from the darkness of oneself to a sympathy, an open rapport, a longed forconscious union with the world. Beauty is a lucid and graceful assembly of forms that calls the mindclose to life and Our bodies close to the earth, and all of us closer to one another.I [00:21:00] think Bluey's one of the most beautiful things in the last half decade, andit's this lesson in humanity and decision making. And seeing people outside of the faux locality,um, is treating an audience as bigger than data points. It's, it's, uh, treating them as biggerthan a non thing, something to extract from. It's something to learn from. So yes, things area mess. They've always been a mess. Uh, they are.

Cracked, but the only way that they get uncrackedis through restoring agency. Thomas Merton once wrote, Many poets are not poets for the samereason that many religious men are not saints. They never succeed in being themselves. They neverget around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God.They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of theirindividual lives. They wear out. their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebodyelse's experiences or write somebody else's poem. We must make it so people can be themselves. Theway to rebuild trust comes through rebuilding agency and our very individualistic society.Jeffrey Hill says that [00:22:00] difficult poetry is the most democratic because youare doing your audience honor supposing that.

They're intelligent human beings. So much ofthe populist poetry of today treats people as if they are fools. And that particular aspect andaspect of forgetting of a tradition go together. Apple did destroy tradition too, seeminglyon accident. But people aren't fools. I think this is something that we tendto do a lot of where we're like, Like, all these dummies. People aren't stupid. Torebuild agency, we need to be transparent about the problems. I think that's huge.We are divided, obviously, economically and politically. We are surrounded by a force thatwants us to wither into skeletal memories of ourselves. There are incentives to crush things.We are divided. To bits. With our hydraulic press in the name of consumerism. And you have to fightall that. A lot of rallying cries here, right?.

Like, it's always the end of a piece. It's like,we gotta get it together. Uh, but the basic idea is that in order to re establish societal trust,we must re establish [00:23:00] motivation and care on the individual level. Work onmedia literacy. There was a tweet. That was so much of a lie. Um, it was talkingabout how coffee was excluded from the CPI. And the person had a massive misunderstandingof what CPI is and what was going on with measurement. But of course it got a lot ofinterest. It got a lot of tweets. People were like, look, they're lying. There's a reasonthings kind of suck and it's because they're lying to us. Sometimes things just kind of suck.Coffee is expensive because of a climate crisis, right? Coffee is expensive because we haveextracted a ton of value from the fields.

In which we have grown coffee over the pastseveral decades. And we have not re nourished those fields. It is not just people lyingto you. It's like stuff we gotta fix. It's like stuff we gotta work on. But it's mucheasier to say they're ha ha. Look, because that removes agency, right? Because if you can justsay, like, look, they removed it from CPI. You don't have to do any [00:24:00]work. You don't have to say, ah, okay, we should address the climate crisis. Oh, sure, weshould, like, Education is a toolkit, um, and we have forgotten that. I think, uh, the institutionsare a nightmare. Derek Thompson wrote on this, of course, very recently. And the world will neverbe perfect, but we have to believe in each other. Um, we have to create beauty and a true locality,give each other the tools to hack away at things.

One step at a time, not tweet things that aregood. We must decide with conviction. And finally, with things like Bluey, it's clear that there'sroom for transparency and for stories with a bit more humanness and a bit more beauty.So sorry that I got like a little, um, excited during this one. I just, I reallythink these topics are important. Um, and it's really important to look beyondthe inflammatory responses that seem, seem to be required of us with analgorithmic world where it's like, yes, I want you to react as angrily as possible.It's like, well, no. What's actually going on is actually, um, the most powerful thing.[00:25:00] you can understand. It's not just being reactionary to the world aroundyou. So, if you want to order the book, um,.

Please do so. I hope that you all are doingwell. I'll be back much more frequently, um, moving forward and thank you for being here.If you want to go ahead and hit like, subscribe, give it a rating, um, maybe even five starsor a like. I appreciate that. Thank you.

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