If Everything Is So Good, Why Does Everything Feel So Bad?
Maybe the data is capturing the wrong things.
Pod 171: Best/Worst of Times
This week, Brian, Troy, and AB dig into the paradox that by every economic metric things look fine, but something feels off. They unpack the “orality thesis” and what the shift from written to spoken culture means for how we think, communicate, and vote. On the media side, they map out what’s actually working right now: audience-first elite brands, B2B trojan horses like Hearst, expert creator newsletters, and the relentless pull of performance marketing, and AI-generated monkey content on YouTube. Plus: a report from the Swiss Alps.
Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack
BRIAN: The AI boogeyman
I suspect there are many causes of our grumpiness, but we need a villain. And I believe that villain will be Big Tech. AI will cement the power shift to giant tech platforms. In a world where capital + compute = productivity, Big Tech is in control.
Time’s new cover story, The People vs AI, and the roiling fights over data centers point to populism moving on from fights over identity issues to class warfare. Big Tech is a handy foil. It’s run by weird oligarchs angling to be trillionaires.
It would help if Big Tech had better messengers. Dario Amodei is a far better face of AI change than Sam Altman. Amodei is measured and at least presents as thoughtful. I tend to trust him more since he’s deeply technical and expresses uncertainty at a time when AI boosters confidently predict it will be more important than fire.
I found it disconcerting in his recent podcast blitz that the one question Amodei struggled to answer was his confidence this would all be beneficial to human autonomy and freedom.
Meta is on trial for social media addiction. The rewiring of our brains is apparent to most of us, and I don’t believe I’m alone in ruing a shortened attention span.
This opens a lane for non-algorithmic media. AB is more excited about the Indian YouTube channel that’s amassed 3 billion views on AI monkey videos that cost $60 to produce. Non-algorithmic media can serve as an antidote to all of that.
Troy: I think we have enough data now.
We are handing a very fraught world over to the next generation. At its heart is a crisis of purpose: the hollowing out of work as the primary engine of personal dignity and communal connection. I’m sure AI change will unlock a bunch of new jobs we haven’t imagined yet, and I’m sure it will take longer than the accelerationists think to fully ingest AI across the economy. But its rapid and escalating impact on the tech / dev world should alarm our dysfunctional policymakers.
Andrew Yang calls it “The Coming Fuckening,” cause he knows the internet likes words like that. But the hollowing out of the white-collar class should concern us deeply. History shows that every significant technological disruption follows the same jagged path: massive social upheaval followed by a belated, often painful government response.
The British Industrial Revolution mechanized production but left life expectancy stagnant for 70 years while skilled artisans were forced into cellar-dwelling factory misery. The Gilded Age delivered railroads and electricity but also created monopolistic trusts and extreme inequality that required nearly 40 years of labor strikes, muckraking, and the Great Depression to finally trigger the New Deal reforms.
In every previous cycle, the “market” didn’t resolve the transition alone. Institutional intervention did. The problem is that those corrections were rendered over decades and at a staggering human cost. This cycle feels bigger, faster, and more global. We should be pushing for coordinated responses—from AI taxation to social support structures to new liability frameworks—to get ahead of the crisis before helplessness becomes a permanent feature of the emergent social landscape.
ALSO ON THIS WEEKS POD…
1. The Orality Thesis
We are living through a “Great Regression” in how we think and communicate. Joe Weisenthal suggests we are moving back into an ancient oral culture—one that mimics pre-writing societies. In this world, communication is optimized for memorability, rhythm, and rhyme rather than abstract reasoning. It’s why Trump’s “Homeric epithets” (Low Energy Jeb, Sleepy Joe) travel in viral packets while nuance dies. We are moving from the solitary chamber of the writer to the performative gesture of the speaker, where “word maxxing” is replaced by the memeification of everything. Listen to Joe on Plain English.
2. The Enshittification of the Real
While the charts say the economy is growing, the “organism” feels sick. Brian notes that America has become the capital of global enshittification. Any trip to Europe is a reminder that we can’t even produce decent butter or fresh milk for a standard cafe. New York City, one of the wealthiest enclaves in history, is paralyzed by identity politics and “learned helplessness” while 20 people freeze to death on the streets. The system is optimized for process and liability management rather than the actual outcome of keeping people alive.
3. Clavicular and the Nihilism Crisis
The group chat was set on fire this week by the NYT profile of Clavicular, a “looksmaxxing” influencer who serves as a freakish avatar for a generation of men who feel the connection between effort and reward has been severed. When shame—once our social immune system—is disabled by algorithms that reward being hated, you get a “hatemaxxing” culture. As noted in The Atlantic, this is what it looks like when nothing matters.
4. The AI Wipeout
Andrew Yang is back with a warning: The End of the Office. The automation wave is predicted to kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12-18 months. As the stock market rewards headcount reduction, “sell anything that consists of people sitting at a desk looking at a computer” has become the investor’s mantra. We are on the precipice of a collapse in the “college premium” and a hollowing out of entry-level roles.
5. Stage 6: The Breakdown of World Order
Ray Dalio declares the post-1945 world order officially dead. We are in Stage 6 of the Big Cycle—great disorder, no rules, might is right. From the Munich Security Conference to the $38 trillion U.S. debt, the parallel to 1933 is unmistakable. The domestic rot (nihilism, algorithmic addiction) and the geopolitical rot (world order fracturing) are the same cycle viewed from different altitudes.
6. The Freedom.gov Pivot
In a major policy shift, the U.S. State Department is developing freedom.gov, an online portal designed to help internet users in Europe bypass local content restrictions. The administration views European regulations like the DSA as “censorship” targeting American voices. Historically used for authoritarian regimes like China, these circumvention tools are now being pointed at democratic allies in a “direct shot” at European law.
7. Media: The Front and the Slop
The institutional media world is finding its place as a “front” for better businesses. Hearst is a B2B data giant with a magazine habit; the NYT is a gaming company with a newsroom attached. Meanwhile, the “Banker Corner” reports on the Indian AI slop YouTube channel racking up 3 billion views with AI-generated monkeys. It’s a short-term attention arb, but it highlights a growing “disgust” with synthetic content that platforms will eventually have to address to protect advertiser trust.
8. Good Products
Queen of Chess (Netflix): A documentary on Hungarian grandmaster Judit Polgár, proving that genius is built through nine-hour days, not just born.
Secret Mall Apartment (Netflix): The wild true story of art students who built a 750-square-foot home inside a Rhode Island mall to protest the displacement of their community.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO) is a refreshing, character-driven Game of Thrones prequel that replaces dragons with a “lovable idiot” named Dunk. Per the Guardian… “this is the Game of Thrones we all need now”.