W. David Marx

W. David Marx is the author of the new book: "Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change." He posits the dearth of quality new music comes down to status. We discuss this and other implications of status in society. Put your thinking cap on!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is David Marks, author of the new
book Status and Culture. There's a subtitle which really kind
of explains it how our desire for social rank creates taste, identity, art, fashion,
and constant change. But David explained the theory a little

(00:32):
bit more deeply. All right, hey, Bob, it's an honor
to be here. I happy to explain this. So status,
first of all, I think this word is used in
many different ways, and I want to be really clear
about what I mean. So status is often thought to
be one upsmanship, luxury goods, trying to be better than
your peers, and especially among you know, middle class people.

(00:54):
If everyone owns a Toyota camera, buying in Mercedes Bens,
that's all about status. What I am talking about is
status in a broader sense of every single person is
in a group. All those groups have some sort of hierarchy.
There's also a hierarchy of hierarchies in society, and so
different groups kind of battle it out, and your position
in that hierarchy and your group's position determine quite a

(01:16):
bit about your identity and the taste that you have
and the preferences that you have. And so status can
be everything from the desire for luxury goods to being
marginalized and being outside of the status hierarchy and creating
your own culture on the outside of it. It can
be everything from uh, minorities being oppressed and um, you know,

(01:39):
people fighting for dignity. So status is a much broader
thing than simply just trying to outdo each other. But
what I was looking at I was interested in how
culture works. I think culture is often seen as this chaotic,
irrational part of of our lives. And the more I
looked at it, I did kind of see these patterns
over time of how fashion changes, um spe s, if

(02:00):
you look at music, how musical changes over time, how
sounds and different genres rise and fall. And if you
look at this, there are these laws almost like scientific laws,
almost like gravity. And the more I looked at that,
the more I found that status was the best way
to explain those And so in writing a book about culture,
you had to, you know, also look at how status

(02:22):
works at a micro level to explain the macro patterns
of culture. So happy to talk more about the specifics
of that, but that's more or less how status and
culture intertwined. Okay, can one say that in society at large,
both in a specific country and in the world, that
there is one status hierarchy, because you talk about many hierarchies,

(02:46):
and certainly we live in a world that is all wired,
but there are many little cultures. But is there one
overwhelming status hierarchy in the world today? No, And they're
also are not really concrete numbers on your status position.
It's all vague, it's all perceived. Um. People have a

(03:07):
general sense of the status that they have based on
their treatment. And while there is not one single hierarchy,
I do believe people are very concerned about the groups
they associate with and how those groups are treated. And
so if you think about sub cultures, subcultures seem like
a great way to escape the main hierarchy of society

(03:28):
that cares much more about money than probably anything else.
And so you see, Okay, you can kind of go
to this other group and get all this esteem from
people like you who are interested in weird things. But
many of those groups still care a lot about how
their groups are treated and and do fight for more
status for the things they are interested in. So if
you're an in cell, for example, and you're on the

(03:50):
internet talking with other in cells, the in cells are
not happy being in cells. They're quite angry about it,
and they they want their position to rise in society.
And so UM it is. It's very abstract and it's
very vague, but I do believe people are aware of
both their position in their certain group, and that could

(04:10):
be a school community, but also the group they associate
most with, whether that is a subculture or a class
or a specific ethnic group, how that how that group
is treated in society. And so um we live in
a world in which there are probably more status groups
than ever before. But the idea that everybody has stopped

(04:33):
jocking for position and is happy to be in their
own small group, I think that's a little premature. Let's
just talk about one concept, which um goes across all
income levels, which is wealth breakdown, status relative to wealth
and society today. So if you go back to a

(04:55):
feudal era in in the feudal times, you have a
status high key that's not based on wealth, and you
have a king at the top, and you have aristocrats.
And the reason that system fell apart is because the
bourgeoisie are making so much money, but they don't have
the titles, so they start buying the titles, and then
the whole thing gets messed up, and then you have
the French Revolution, and since that time, in a capitalist world,

(05:18):
money is the main criteria in which we provide status.
So somebody can be No. One, make a lot of
money and then move up the status rankings really quickly.
Now there's still a battle between new money and old money,
often where old money knows how to be rich in
the right way and they try to keep new money out.

(05:39):
But over time that wealth is quite powerful. And money
is not only something valuable in its own right. Because
we live in a capitalist society, we we just value
wealth itself. But it's a sign of intelligence, it's a
sign of skill. It also is a way to purchase
the benefits that you get from esteem otherwise, So if

(06:02):
you're a very well respected person, maybe people treat you
well and you get access to all these va ap
events or places. But if you are rich, you can
just buy your way into them. And so money is
both a sign of status and the way we determine status,
but it's also a way to purchase status. If if
you're not respected, and so it's quite difficult to get

(06:25):
around status as sorry, it's it's quite difficult to get
around wealth as being the main determinant of status today.
And so you know, if you look at all the
different classes, obviously you know in the in the way
I think about it is you've got new money, and
you have old money, and you have the professional classes
which have a bit of money but really want to

(06:47):
make the status competition all about education and culture and
knowledge and things like that. UM. And then people who
were born without capital and and UM want to move
up tend to really focus on economic capital and be
seduced by the power of wealth because that that's their

(07:07):
easiest ticket up. So UM, as much as status is
a separate concept from wealth, we definitely live in a
society which wealth is the main determinant. Okay, So in
your book, it's really sort of three groups. You have
the economic outcasts, the people with nose status who you
referenced in this paradigm are looking for wealth. At the top,

(07:29):
you have those with wealth new money, old money. Let's
park that for a second. But in the middle, which
you reference just now, you have a professional class and
you have some people who are not professionals. But you
have people who want to ascend to the upper class,
the rich class, and you point out in your book

(07:53):
in many ways that if you pretend or you're too
much of a sick ethant, it'll work against that. So
there is a principle of detachment, which is that everyone
is signaling for status because you can't get status without
getting it from other people, and you need to show
that you have the reason forgetting that status. If you

(08:16):
are already wealthy and famous, you have a reputation and
you don't have to signal because people just know that
you're important and treat you that way. So the act
of signaling itself, when it's too obvious, is a low
status act. So people need to be detached from the
signaling process and be very subtle about it. And New
money gets this wrong, which is that they have, you know,

(08:39):
let's say a normal car. They go out and buy
a Rolls Royce and it's so obvious that they're trying
to signal that those signals fail and they just look
like they must not have status because they're trying so
hard to have it. So what is difficult about this
whole thing is that status in general is a taboo.
Talking about it is a taboo, and so you have

(08:59):
to try right to get it without showing that you're
trying to get it. Um. That being said, if you
go onto Instagram and you look today at especially you know,
people under let's say thirty, that taboo seems to be disappearing.
There seems to be quite a lot of kids, Um,
you know, sixteen year old kids who have made a
fortune drop shipping or some kind of obscure gray market activity,

(09:22):
and they're sitting on top of four binses and and
talking about, you know, providing for their parents and all
sorts of things. Um, that to me feels a bit uncouth.
But that that may be changing. But traditionally, you know,
and you know, in previous centuries, the idea was that
you're you're not supposed to show off too much or
it's too obvious that you don't have status to start with. Okay,

(09:45):
let's just focus on social media for a second. If
I'm on social media and I have a great number
of followers, does that instantly give me status or does
the same rule apply that it looks like I'm trying
to get followers and therefore people rebel against that. So
before I talked about status being quite vague and these

(10:09):
tears that we're in are undefined and when one of
the big developments of the Internet has been the ability
to quantify your status position because on Twitter or Instagram
or these platforms, you have a follower account, and yes,
the numbers can be faked, but to get up into
a hundred thousand or these big numbers, you need to be,
you know, quite have a quite uh big following, in

(10:31):
big presence, and be well known. And I don't think
the numbers themselves signal that you're trying too hard. I
think it's in the content or not. But you know,
Instagram in particular, I remember being on it, let's say
a decade ago, and it did seem to be mostly
creative class people showing abstract photos. It was often called

(10:52):
the happiest place on the Internet because it did seem
to be not about status signaling at all. And then
the next wave of people using it were more or
less strivers who were trying to become influencers on their
own and make influence their entire profession. And with that
you started getting a real fetishization of that follower account.

(11:14):
Because the more followers you have, you can then take
that to a brand and turn that into actual payments
for posts, So that status is directly related to some
sort of economic outcome. So UM brands obviously don't look
at those follower accounts and I think it's anything bad.
And I don't think the culture of those strivers and

(11:37):
the people who follow them, I don't think they necessarily
see trying to get a lot of followers is bad.
But it may be surprising to older people who grew
up in a more detached world to see that and think, um, oh,
is this is this okay? Now? Is it okay to
so openly try to win followers and fame without necessarily
doing it because you have talent, but just because you're

(11:59):
really good at the influence game itself. Let's stay on
the same point, but go a little bit deeper. If
you speak to boomers and you get into social media,
there are many people who are unfamiliar with the platforms,
but certainly unfamiliar with those who are stars on the platform.

(12:21):
So is this just a result of internet culture We're
going to go this far or generational change, or are
we going to have parallel status situations where the young
people say, I don't care what the parents do. This
is what we do. And the parents say, well, you know,
we grew up in a different era prior to the
Internet was more homogeneous. Yeah, it's it's difficult, and I

(12:45):
think there is a real split at the moment they
think about TikTok massively popular with teenagers. There are stars
on TikTok that anyone who is not a teenager has
never heard of. At the same time, those teenagers all
know Brad Pitt and they all know Lady Gaga, and
so there's kind of a two tier system in which
there are stars that everybody knows and there's ones that
are only on these platforms. And what I think about,

(13:08):
let's say culture in the sixties or seventies, you may
have someone who was subcultural. So you have the sex
pistols who start out very subcultural, but they take over
the music charts quite quickly, or you know, college rock
in the eighties going into alternative in the nineties, they
make that leap, and and so far these stars on
TikTok and Instagram have not quite made the leap yet.

(13:31):
And it's interesting that there's that difference. Now. I think
it will happen. I think there will be more of
a merger. And at the met Gala, you know, a
couple of these TikTok stars are starting to show up,
but they may be the people with the least amount
of status at the met Gala, so it's not necessarily
like they go on the same footing as a quote
unquote real celebrity. But if teenagers are all looking at Instagram,

(13:53):
they're all looking at TikTok, and TikTok becomes the dominant
media that they're consuming, and the stars that own that
are these specific people. And then especially if the uh
real celebrities are more well known celebrities start going on
to TikTok and start collaborating with these people. Um, it's
quite possible to be a crossover, but you are right

(14:15):
at the moment, there does seem to be a wall
between these two worlds. And because you know, it depends
on whether Hollywood movies and um big studio music and
television continue to be as important as they are as
the centralizing media and society that those former celebrities celebrities

(14:37):
keep their position. If everything switches to TikTok, that's quite
likely that we'll just live in a world where TikTok
celebrities are the the most famous celebrities. But I think
there is a difference in the sense that to be
a Hollywood star, to be a big music star, there
has to be some general sense of talents at a

(15:00):
specific thing. You have to be an actor who can
carry a movie. You have to be able to make
a song that you know is on top forty radio.
Maybe the quality that's not always the best, but there's
some bar that have to pass. I do think many
of the stars on these social media platforms are really
good at hacking into what makes a social media video

(15:22):
go viral and quite good at it, and those skills
don't necessarily transfer out, and so that's one of the
other barriers we're seeing why people can't make the switch.
Because you can get very very good at doing a
silly video with a silly face and be the number
one star on TikTok for the year, but it doesn't
mean that you can be a movie a movie star,
or a music star. Let's go back to the met Gala.

(15:42):
Certainly in the nineties, I was an award shows like
the MTV Video Music Awards and all the peripheral people.
They were lapping it up. Think you know, whether they
be somebody on an MTV show for some other reason,
they were there. Now, if someone's at the MET gala,

(16:04):
they could just be kissing as saying I'm thrilled to
be here. But if they were for whatever reason there,
how would you tell them to act to increase their status?
You're saying one of these TikTok stars or one of
the peripheral celebrities. I don't I mean, this is probably

(16:25):
my lack of cultural capital, but I don't know how
you're supposed to act at the MET gala. And um,
you know what I would say is they there does
need to be a humility and there does need to
be uh somewhat of an invitation of trying to get
main celebrities into your world. It can't just be that
you go into mainstream celebrity world, because you're not going

(16:49):
to make that leap. They've got to come to you
and to try to get your influence to reach gen
z or you know, whatever it is their marketing goal.
They're going to come to you and start working with you,
and that's what's gonna bring you up. It's not going
to be that you were nice two major celebrities, and
this isn't a niceness game as you as you may know.

(17:09):
So I think the hope would be more or less
that you can just prove that the future of social
media or the future of media itself is on these platforms,
and if the major celebrities don't cross over to you,
then they're going to be the ones who are irrelevant
in five years. Okay, but let me just you know, extrapolate. Certainly,

(17:30):
when we lived in the last century without the Internet
exploding everything into a million stars, there were people just
had charisma in were cool and they were stand offish
and that drew people to them. Couldn't a social media
star when intersecting with mainstream do the same thing like, well,

(17:53):
I'm here reluctantly, I'm just checking out. I don't care
about you, my dad work, as opposed to I mean,
you talk about the people were saying I made some money,
I got a Mercedes, I got this. Okay, this is
kind of the This isn't a perfect example, but uh,
Bezos's ex wife wants no publicity and is giving away

(18:17):
all the money and that's giving her an amazing Mackenzie
Beazos has an amazing status now whereas before, uh, she
did not have this. That's right. And so go back
to this idea of cool in the twentieth century, and
cool was a form of detachment. It was a quiet rebellion,

(18:38):
and that was what was so powerful about that emotion
is the seeming detachment from social norms. And you know,
if everyone else is after status, I don't care and
I'm just gonna take a step back. And that really,
that ethos really defined everything up until probably the end
of the twentieth century with in gen X most definitely

(19:01):
kind of grew up with that idea of cool as well.
I think millennials, uh, it may have been a specific
rebellion against the aesthetic because it wasn't theirs. And if
they thought, you know, alternative music is trying so hard
to be uncool. You know, the every singer and an
alternative band is trying to pretend like they've never thought
about singing before. Why can't we go back to having

(19:25):
songs that are fun? Why can't we go back to
singers that are singers? And you get a sense that
millennials were fighting that version of cool. And then with
the rise of online video, you have people talking to
cameras directly being you know, emoting directly in front of
the camera, showing to complete strangers their emotional breakdowns and

(19:47):
crying and all of these things that are incredibly uncool,
and that is what became really appealing is the idea
of sharing these deep emotions with people in a way that, again,
I think for for previous generations, would be quite surprising.
So there has been a move away from this detachment
on an aesthetic level, I think with millennials and now

(20:08):
with gen z which it's just like show your success,
don't be shy about it. When you go back to
talking about Mackenzie Scott, they're at the same time is
this professional class who have become billionaires from tech, and
they're taking a lot of their professional class, upper middle
class values with them. So they're not going to brag.
They're going to give their money to sharity. There's there's

(20:29):
been a lot of articles recently about how old money
families are starting to give a lot of their money away.
So there you're getting this kind of bifurcation of people
who are previously wealthy or are suspicious of wealth itself.
As soon as they get billions, they're going to give
them away and that's going to be their path to
some higher form of status. But then young people, Um,

(20:50):
you don't want to stereotype so many young people, but
the ones who are really rising up on these platforms
seem to be unabashed le materialist, and that is the
way they're showing to everybody their success. And honestly, I
don't know how else you would do it. These days,
everything is about money, and if you can show that
you have luxury cars, that is an easy way to

(21:11):
show that you're a success at gaming these platforms too. Uh,
you know, turn it into a business, which is not
not always obvious that you can do. Okay, let's just
go segue back to the old money new money. I
grew up in Connecticut in the last century, and you

(21:32):
knew who you know. You describe it very well in
the book. You know, they're wearing topsiders, which your canvas shoes,
leather shoes. Actually they're wearing chinos. They're driving around in
an old Ford country squire. Okay, they inherited the money
in most cases. Also, there were no billionaires. There was

(21:52):
nobody that wealthy in America and Europe. Different. So now
as a result of tech and lowering of taxes. We
have these people who literally are billionaires have more money
than the old money people ever had, even in real dollars.
So is old money a lost paradigm? Does anybody even

(22:18):
care about old money anymore other than the people who
are old money. It's quite interesting because my argument is
that true old money aesthetics of modesty and detachment and
all the things we associate with that preppy style of
New England, those that ethos is most definitely dead. And

(22:40):
if you're a young person trying to think about moving
up in the world, you don't think about that group
as your model that I want to dress preppy and
my dream is to have a trust fund that that is,
I think in in something that is dead. At the
same time, on TikTok, there is a hashtag that's quite
popular that is hashtag old money, and it's a misunderstanding

(23:04):
of old money, believing that old money is just even
more ostentatious the new money. They have bigger boats and
bigger houses, and dress even and even more crisp clothing,
without knowing that true old money in New England used to,
you know, intentionally wear dirty, choose to show off, how
how much they didn't care about dressing well. So I

(23:26):
think that the old true old money is dead. I
don't know why anyone would aspire towards it. I think
some of those principles exist within the men's fashion world,
in particular, that you know, preppy style is still very popular,
but it doesn't quite have the connotations that used to.
And then with you know, any kind of old money

(23:47):
fetishism that happens at the moment is just the complete
misunderstanding of it. It's quite possible that we went through
a boom where the billionaires made their fortunes just like
the robber barons made their fortunes, and then their kids
and their grandkids settle into a more old money pattern.
The economy is so dynamic, though, and you believe it
will continue to be that way that globally, I don't

(24:09):
think that old money will ever be something that has
the same position. Because the other thing I think about
a lot is and that we don't necessarily think about
in the US that much. But the Internet is globalizing
the world, and the people who are participating in the
Internet outside of the United States tend to mostly be

(24:31):
the extreme new vote reach of all these places that
we don't think about. So, you know, the all these
oil rich nations, or you know people who just have
some sort of construction fortune and Serbia or whatever. So
these people are sending a lot of the paradigms for
taste and style in their particular countries, which everyone is imitating.

(24:52):
As and as the Internet gets more and more global,
this new vote reache aesthetic will will you know, spread
throughout the the world and become kind of the baseline
grammar of how people behave on these social media platforms.
So that that's even further punishing against kind of American
old money detachment. The Internet is just not a good

(25:12):
place for modesty and detachment to start with. So as
much as an old money could develop as an economic
class again if the economy settles down and you have
less boom, uh, it's it was very much of a
specific time and place where you know, people knew their
neighbors and uh, you know, there was four channels on television,

(25:34):
one of which was PBS, and that professional class really
aspired towards going to an ivy League university, meeting all
the old money people, stealing their style and aesthetic, and
then going back and trying to do lots of things
to impress them, uh, taste wise, for the rest of
their life, and that that era is probably over. Okay,

(26:00):
you talked about the professional class. These are the wealthy,
and I remember a story in the New York Times
about five years ago about concierge doctors and the people
who thought that they were the movers and shakers upper class,
the college professors, the lawyers, etcetera. They couldn't afford the

(26:23):
conciergs doctors in New York. Okay, so what about all
these people who believe, well, I went to a good college.
I you know, I my kids go to good schools.
Are they just thinking, well, I'm too low on the
status ladder and I have to move up? Or am

(26:43):
I satisfied where I am? What goes on there? What
social psychology experiments have found is there's no level of
status that is enough. The more you move up, the
more you want, and even the people at the very
top keep trying to push forward. So based on that,

(27:05):
if you're very successful and you have all the material
comfort that you need, but then you realize there's a
new symbol of status that you don't have and you
can't get access to. I believe that that that group
will be disappointed or try to find new ways to
move up and to afford those things. Um it has

(27:29):
the amount, the sheer amount of money has distorted everything.
And the degree to which just being a normal, successful
professional person in New York and not being able to
afford to buy an apartment or being priced out, um
that that's also a sign of this. The other part
of it is the degree to which the super duper rich,

(27:51):
let's say, if you know, used to be first class,
so you would think about first class, business class economy
as your way of thinking about status groupings. Now there's
private jets, or now there's the private terminal l a airport,
and so things like having to walk to a gate,

(28:15):
which used to be something everyone had to do. Maybe
you got to go to the lounge, but you had
to walk to your gate through the airport. Now that
is a middle status activity. So this money has taken
all these things that used to be normal and made
people feel like their inferior. And it's probably not a

(28:35):
good thing that's happened to the United States in particular.
And I forgot who it was, but um, I believe
it is maybe one of the Granddaughters of Disney saying,
you know, the main the thing I realize, the big
difference between being sort of rich and being ultra rich
is private jets. Once you start taking private jets, you
can't go back. And so there has been with this

(28:58):
whole new group of status symbols that have made doctors
and lawyers and professions that used to be seemed like
the top of society, um, really take a step down relatively.
And I don't think. I don't think that group looks
at their material comforts and says, oh, we're good. I
think they do resent it to a certain degree. Or um,

(29:19):
I feel like they've got to work harder. Now, Okay,
let's talk about artists. From reading the book, it seems
artists exists outside the sphere. Let's talk pre Internet, because
another focus your book is post Internet. Is they exist
outside the sphere, and then the professional intellectual classes to

(29:42):
be hip become fans of those artists, and then ultimately
the product is dumbed down for the public and consumed
at mass. Go deeper what's going on there? Yes, So
to understand how artists works, you have to understand the
principle of convention, and we use the word convention all

(30:02):
the time, and it has a very specific technical meaning
within sociology and linguistics. But conventions are where people have
a mutual expectation of certain behavior. And so, you know,
the example using the book is black tie. If you
get a invitation something that says formal, you know, you
have to wear black tie. That is expected to view.

(30:23):
And if you show up in black tie, people are happy.
If you don't show up in black tie, you show
up in shorts, people will be angry. And so these
conventions form and they're kind of the backbone of culture.
The the atomic form of culture is these conventions. And
and art itself is full of conventions. If you think
about what makes a hip hop song different than a
than a rock song, it is you know, the use

(30:46):
of beats or the use of instrumentation. These are all conventional.
So what artists do is very intentionally break these conventions
in the kind of aesthetic world. So if art is
figure wative in the sense that um, every painting is
showing real people, then a true artist of the nineteenth

(31:07):
century says, I'm going to make art that is non figurative.
That that um, I guess that would be the twentieth century.
But I'm going to do something else. I'm gonna break
that convention, and over time those inventions then become conventional,
and then other people follow those patterns, and audiences themselves
start to understand those conventions, and it changes and expands

(31:29):
the way they can perceive art and the world. So
artists have played a giant role in our perception and
expanding it over time and the things we consider to
be art to start with. So that if you think
about that process, it's obvious that an artist, by breaking
convention is going to make people angry, and any art
that shows up and follows convention, it doesn't make people angry.

(31:51):
We can be relatively suspicious of that. Is it true art?
But also is it going to do anything for us?
If if we like, you know, Trapp music, and we
like that beat and an artist comes out with the
exact same trap beat, then it doesn't expand the genre
at all, It doesn't expand our understanding at all, and
it's it just kind of tickles the things already in

(32:13):
our brain. And So what I what I was thinking
about with status, because I think it's been misunderstood a
little bit in this sense. I don't think artists create
art in order to get socioeconomic status. Maybe some of
them do, and definitely, you know pop musicians, many of
them do. But you can create art for the purest reason.
You can believe simply that painting is wrong and the

(32:34):
way it is now, and you need to make different
kinds of painting. But the process in which those inventions
become conventional has a lot to do with status, which
is that first and foremost you have to get status
from the art world itself for people to say this
invention is not just some crazy idio idiosyncrency, it is
actually very important and we should treat it as some

(32:56):
sort of genius move. And once that happens in this person,
this person, even as an artist, there are becomes uh
perceived in a different way. People can have a sthetic
experiences with it, and as that happens, then more and
more people copy it, and then it kind of diffuses
through society from there. So that is the classic model
of avant garde art until let's say, maybe the seventies

(33:18):
or eighties, and it probably does not describe a lot
of what's going on now. And I think that's maybe
one of art disappointments with art these days is that
we don't feel like it's pushing our brains. If you
see a Jeff Khon's sculpture and it's and the whole
point of it is, you're going to fuse art and
commerce together so much that you can't tell which is which.
We already know that art and commerce are fused. There's

(33:40):
nothing that we're learning from that in a way where
if you take a John Cage uh performance and it
was all created through random chance, that does change the
way we think about performance in the sense of until
that point, all music was created by the hand of
somebody intentionally making it. And so these ideas push forward

(34:02):
our perception of the world. And if people stopped doing that,
then things get quite boring pretty quickly. Okay, let's stay
with visual hard for a second. You say, in order
to gain newfound status, it has to solve a problem.
Expand on that, and why is that the case? So
it has to solve a problem in the art world

(34:25):
itself in the sense that, um, if you're if your
procasso and art is two dimensional, and you start understanding
that the world physically is more complicated, and you start
thinking about how could you paint in three three dimensions,

(34:46):
not just two, and everybody's trying to in some ways
figure out where painting is going. And suddenly you do
these Cubist paintings that that say, here is a way
to do three dimensions on a two dimensional canvas. That
is a solution, and the art world then says, oh,
that is that's a genius solution. These people are great,

(35:08):
and it maybe it starts with some more rebellious galerists
or buyers, and then it spreads from there, and then
obviously museums included in the history of art, and then
from Cubism you get things like futurism, which you know
takes the ideas of Cubism, but you know, adds from
the third dimension to the fourth dimension as time into it.
And so over over time you get these solutions, and

(35:28):
then you get another group who, once those ideas become established,
just trying to push the art form even further and
has to find its own solutions, and over time you
get this narrative of one artist showing up and then
the next artist negating the person's style or taking it further,
and then that person gets established and and onward, and

(35:49):
your place in art history determines your overall status of
your work. And you know, I I talked about Henri
Rousseau in the book, who was a naive painter. Everyone
made fun of him. He really wasn't um, you know,
particularly sharp thinker, and a lot of his paintings aren't
aren't maybe technically great, but he solved the problem for

(36:11):
avant artists at the time because they were trying to
figure out again how to push art beyond academic figurative work,
and Rousseau, in his naive style, came up with these
very dreamy canvases. And you can understand why, you know,
surrealists or all these other artists being avant garde could
look at that and say, if people can accept a

(36:31):
russo they'll accept our work as well. And he solved
a problem for them, and in his last two years
of life was rewarded by them as being you know,
a fellow compatriot. And then in writing the History of
post Impressionism, they bring in Rousseau as one of the
main artists and he's forever, you know, part of the canon,
despite the fact that he if he had died two

(36:51):
years earlier, he probably wouldn't have been so Um, this
this art history, the way it's created, and the story.
It comes down to a narrative, and I think this
is this is important, and it kind of loops to
to why today things feel that art is a little
bit less interesting is because that narrative has become quite
confused in a postmodern era where it's not clear the

(37:13):
progression of this art came out and then this art
came out, and then this art came out. And we
used that quite a bit to understand our world and
to understand the culture that we're in in any moment.
And when you have too many things going on at
once and nothing seems dominant, and nothing seems to be
responding to the previous thing, it just gets hard for
us to keep pays. Okay, let's talk about music. In

(37:35):
the fifties, we had rock and roll. We can debate
what the original song was, rocket eight eight or whatever.
There was a huge burst of creativity which ultimately became static.
Then in the early sixties you have the man you
factured singers there might be a little roll rock and

(37:55):
roll uh element to their music. The Beatles come a
long and it's a revolution. I lived through this. You're
not old enough too, but it was literally night and day.
So if we look at the Beatles, the Beatles were
cleaned up for general consumption, which fits with your theory.
But they could have just been a novelty. Why did

(38:19):
they continue to be at the forefront of the culture.
So there's a great book on the Beatles that I
recommend any Beatles fan reads, which is Ian McDonald's Revolution
in the Head, and his idea is more or less
that the Beatles very early they had written a lot
of songs. I think they'd written something like a hundred
songs before it Love Me Do and with especially Please

(38:41):
Squeez Me, tried to do something unique in every song.
They knew what the convention was, and they would break
the convention a little bit, and they started getting rewarded
for it. And John and Paul both wanted to kind
of outdo each other and the rest of these other
bands by always adding one non convinced an all bit
into the songs. And because they were so successful, they

(39:03):
just kept going in that direction and pushing and pushing
and pushing, and that maybe just that was kind of
a quirk of their genius, I think, but also because
they were rewarded for it, never stopped doing it. They
also because they were imitated so quickly, because the machine
moved in to make a bunch of Beatles clones. I
think they felt pressured to always be one step ahead

(39:25):
as well. And so you know, if everybody's doing the
kind of Liverpool sound and then they listen to Dylan,
what would what would it be like to put it
a little Dylan in this? Or you know there's an Indian, uh,
you know, George find here's the guitar. Let's put guitar
in this. No one said no, they said yeah, absolutely.
So I think they personally, uh, they were they did

(39:50):
not like to be imitated, and that imitation itself really
pushed them forward, which I think is key. And even
the Beatles haircut, I mean I think that you know
the mop top up, uh, John and Paul hated it
the first time they saw it on on Stu when
he was the Bassis. And then they realized if they
went back to the UK with that mop top from Germany,

(40:11):
they would be the only band that had that look.
Then they would feel kind of superior in their understanding
of continental culture. And they got there and they were
they were different, and and their their fans loved it,
and then of course everybody else gets the mop top.
So I think from the very beginning that they themselves
were just obsessed with not novelty in the sense of

(40:34):
they were obsessed with invention. And you know what's interesting
about their music from the seventies or even you know,
kind of let it be, is that the degree which
they just go backwards and they really stopped trying to
be innovative and they go back to just roots sound.
And maybe that was at the time where people just
felt like innovation itself and fashion itself was a little
bit done. But at least through the sixties, you know

(40:55):
that whole era was every single year there was the
idea that you can keep pushing things forward, and you
can see that across music, art and fashion. Okay, so
is this something innate or if you look at history,
can people adapt this formula to their advantage? I think

(41:15):
the sixties was a very particular case, and in some
ways it's quite damaging to us that we keep looking
back to it and comparing ourselves to the sixties. I
think that was at once in a lifetime sort of
situation in terms of commerce and media and all these
things coming together and then obviously the youth boom and

(41:37):
the post war ethos and the economy changing, and also
the economy was good, and people worried less about, you know,
how to make money because everything seemed to make money.
So all that came together to make this very revolutionary
era that doesn't necessarily describe the seventies. The seventies had
its own charms, doesn't describe the eighties. And now you know,

(41:58):
we are living in a time of asis, but stasis
is probably much more common. And it's only because we're
still obsessed with Dylan and the Beatles and that whole
sixties culture that we look back at it and say,
why is our culture not like this now? But I
don't I don't know if you can replicate it anymore.
I think that it was just a specific time because

(42:20):
you know, and and the point I'm trying to get
at the book is not that artistic invention is over.
That you know, there's probably still people out there doing
really an interesting, genius level things. It's the genius is
proven by your influence of society. When you create some
idea and then it becomes conventional and then everyone else
does it. That's when you become a genius. The Beatles

(42:42):
were a genius band because everyone imitated the Beatles and
all the pop music the year after they release something
sounded like rip offs of the thing they had done.
And today it's just very, very difficult for that that
artist who has the potential to be genius to influence
the whole market because things are too chaotic, or to
think things are too static. So um, it's it is

(43:05):
difficult just because we remember the sixties too well. And
you know, you can watch Get Back and and you know, Spend.
That was probably one of the most interesting cultural experiences
I had in the last year's watching that rather than
anything new. Okay, let's talk about the Beatles. They were experimenting.

(43:27):
Other acts experimented. Why were the Beatles accepted and the
other acts were not? So give me the example of
another act. Okay, I mean you're probably not going to
know these records. Uh, you know, there's Donovan had the
two records in a box. What was it? Message from
a flower to a guard Okay, and then of course

(43:49):
these stones it did imitate Sergeant Pepper's with their Satanic
Majesty's request. Odden's Nut Gone Flake, many people say was
by the Small Aces was the first, uh concept album?
But or you know, the who get more credit for
doing like a rock opera. So how much does your

(44:12):
inherent status affect whether people accept you? So if your first,
but you don't have history, does that mean you probably
won't make it? Yes, I mean the Beatles were relatively
early on all these things. I mean I think Donovan,
if you look at the timeline, he's probably lagging the

(44:33):
Beatles on all of the records. Who did Harpsichord first?
Probably the Beatles and then Donovan, although we'll have to
go look at the look at the chronology. Um, you
know the Stones, you know, the first Stones hit was
written by the Beatles, and then yeah, Satanic Majesty's is
is kind of a poor man's Starry de Peppers. Uh.
And then you know the Stones really found their sound

(44:53):
by getting far away from that. And and you know
Exile is probably the marquee record rather than than trying
to be a Beatles rip off. Uh. Yeah, I think
the Beatles were fast enough where even if maybe there
was a concept record before Sergeant Pepper, the they were
still the main band everyone was looking at just to

(45:14):
set the direction of the market. And so somebody may
be on the fringes doing it, but for them to
do it meant everything. And you know, rock opera seems
like almost a bit of a step backwards in the
sense that all they're doing is fusing this kind of
previous form with rock and trying to say, like, oh,
rock is important because you can make an opera out

(45:36):
of it. Um, you know, E l O was a
bunch of kind of Beatles rip off ideas. Plus let's
added a full orchestra, you know, to make it seem
more serious. So I do think, um, the Beatles, because
they were just far and away the you know, the

(45:56):
Kings of em I like, they were just the at
so superstar status. Anything they did legitimize any practice that
they did. And that is one of the benefits of
high status is any strange thing you do then suddenly
becomes not strange, whereas if the small faces do it,
it just doesn't take on that same cachet. Well, that's

(46:23):
another point in your book that if you're at the
very top, to signal that you have the status is
to break convention by doing whatever you want. Let's say,
if you're a billionaire and you show up at the
black tie event and some tidied outfit people might say, well,
maybe he's onto something, maybe he's breaking convention, and uh

(46:49):
so tell us about the people at the top status level,
which was all the beatles about feeling free, that other
people envious the every their freedom and how it changes convention.
So one of the benefits as you move up, and
again it's good to remember that your status position comes

(47:10):
with more and more benefits the more you move up.
And one of the benefits you get his difference. And
you think about if you're a boss, you can put
your feet up on the desk and your subordinates come
in and they have to deal with it. The subordinates
can't put their feet on their desk when you walk in,
So you get deference. Two, behave the way you want.

(47:30):
At the same time, as you move up, you've got
to demarcate yourself from people lower on the status hierarchy,
and which means you have to do things differently. So
you both have the power and the right to break convention,
but you also have the responsibility to break convention in
order to show that you're different. And so you know,
if you show up at a black tie event in

(47:52):
a loony tunes Tasmanian Devil, Cumberbun and your Elon Musk.
People would just think it's a joke or they'll have
fun with it. But you'r Elon Musk, and your status
is not damaged. If you're somebody who almost didn't get
invited and you show up that way, it's quite like
you won't be invited back, and so that deference becomes
a power. But then also if everybody's talking about the

(48:15):
outrageous thing that Elon Musk war, then that only adds
to his mystique and makes him more iconic. So, you know,
going back to the Beatles again, I do think they
were quite maybe it was unconscious and maybe it was
conscious and many times, but they were quite sensitive about
doing things that they had already done before and that
other people were doing. And the fact that you know,

(48:36):
Sergeant Peppers comes out, everyone else then starts making psychedelic records. Well,
they didn't really want to go back to making psychedelic
records because you know, it was just a trend to
that point and they would have been repeating themselves. So
they go, you know, one eight and do the White Album,
which is you know, going back to the root their
their roots and and roots music in general. So you
know they had the right to make those changes. But

(48:58):
I think they were also quite sensitive about if we
make another psychedelic record, we're just gonna be another one
of these middling bands that makes psychedelic records. Well, needless say,
two members of the Beatles are dead, they're not going
to reform. But the so called dinosaurs who still exist,
Paul McCartney, uh, the Stones, the who they go out

(49:20):
and play relatively faithful versions of their hits. Bob Dylan
starting thirties, around thirty years ago, he started totally redoing
his hits such that I remember going literally sitting in
the front row and having no idea what the song was. Okay,

(49:42):
and this is, if anything, he's pushed the envelope further.
So what do I say? I say, I have to
give this guy credit for pushing the envelope, but I
don't want to go so is he gaining status or
losing status? And then, you know, and no other time
thinking about their people saying how greed he is and

(50:03):
how great these shows are. And I'm saying and I've
seen it and I don't get it at all, But
are they doing that for status, and of course the
other factor these people rage They're not gonna live forever,
so people want to go for the last go round.
But what is going on with Dylan as opposed to
the other old acts. When you achieve success as an artist,

(50:26):
you have a choice, which is either to repeat yourself
forever and cash in because people will just want the
thing you've done before, or to keep breaking your own forms.
So if your inventions become conventional, and you're an artist
who really believes in breaking convention, then you have this dilemma,
should I break my own conventions or not? And most

(50:46):
artists for financial reasons or they only had one invention
in them basically stop and just repeat themselves forever. I
think Dylan is quite interesting and fits into more of
a model of Eric Satti or you know, all these
past artistic geniuses of someone who as soon as they
do something, hates it and moves forward. And you see
that throughout his career and and you know, I was

(51:08):
just talking about the Beatles being like this, but Dylan's
even more so, which is um does folk than everybody
that's folks. Okay, I'm doing folk, I'm doing rock, and
I'm gonna make everybody angry. Then everyone's doing that, and uh,
you know disappears, and you know, at some point he's
making gospel records, are becoming born again Christian or whatever.
So he is always on the edge of trying to
break the conventions that he himself sets. And um, he

(51:32):
is Dylan. He's got the status to pull that off.
Whereas if you go see I don't know, Bad Company
or some some you know band that had one hit
in the seventies, everyone's there to see the hit. They're
not there to see you experiment. You don't quite have
that status. Um, there's the there's that joke on The
Simpsons where uh, Homer goes to see Bachman Turner Overdrive

(51:55):
and they're like, let's play some new materials, like get
play taking care of Business, and then they start playing it.
It's like get to the chorus and then they start
playing the chorus. He says, get to work and working
over time, you know. And so you know, that's what
your audience wants. They just want the double encore of
taking care of business. Then that's what you provide. That's
that's at that point, it's just commerse. You're really outside

(52:17):
of the realm of art. But you know, kudos to
Dylan for trying to keep it artistic after all these years. Well,
as I say, intellectually fantastic, but I'm experienced it enough
to know it's not something palatable. So the people who
are going, and they're going again and again, is that
status why they're going? And to tell you, well, you

(52:38):
just don't get it. I can't speak for every person,
but they're Dylan fans who think you can't do wrong.
And I mean again, that's that's Dylan status. Not everybody
has that. Okay, let's talk about the modern era, the
Internet era. Let's just focus on this century or they'll
really start to get traction in the last century. But
it was in this century we you know, high speed

(53:00):
connections and things really started to develop. So prior to
the year. Staying with music, if you wrote a great song,
it would rise to the surface. Now there's so much
in the channel. You can write a great song and
it without either luck or marketing, it goes nowhere. So

(53:22):
the other thing is in let's call it mainstream music.
Mainstream has such a bad connotation. But I'm gonna stay
with this, you know, because there's music made at home.
There's always been in there's music purveyed to the masses
with wanting to catch fire and have success. In that world,
every three or four years we had a new sound. Okay,

(53:45):
the hair bands were eliminated by the Seattle sound, and
I could go on. Before the last twenty years it
has been hip hop. We have not had a new
sound with any strength, with any dominant. Why is that?
Although I would argue that hip hop the sound has changed,

(54:06):
that the beat has changed, the beat there was in
the hip hop world has been pretty consistent about not
getting stuck too much into convention in the long run,
in the sense that you have beats that were drum machine,
then you had beats that were sampler, then you had
some live beats, then you had a mix. And now
most hip hop is using trapp or drill beats that

(54:28):
sound nothing like nineties hip hop. So hip hop itself
has had enough innovation that I think it keeps it
fresh and keeps it moving. The number of artists has changed, um,
so that that is why I think hip hop is
dominated itself. But you are right, which is that there
has not been something that kind of knocks hip hop

(54:49):
off the pedestal as being the main news form of sound. Now,
you could argue that throughout the twentieth century, black artists
were the innovators. White artists ripped them off, created the
more palatable version that sold, which only pushed black artists
to create new forms, which then were ripped off again.

(55:09):
And so you can think about rock and roll, R
and B to rock and roll, funk to disco, all
that um and you know, uh dick he did. She
wrote a book called sub Culture. His argument as the
punk itself was white kids who were into reggae, but
reggae got so into black nationalism and it could not
be done by a white artist. That they made punk

(55:30):
as a kind of their their own uh taking of
the spirit, but putting, putting in their own direction. And
so with the rise of hip hop and reggae, these
were both forms that white artists were more or less
excluded from. And eminem is a rare case. He's not
he's not the rule. And so black artists were able
to control their sound and their genre better. It has

(55:54):
not been ripped off by white audiences to force them
to make something else. So so that six tests and
they're there control of it to Uh, at least an artistically,
I think is meant that, um, where there's innovation, it's
coming inside the hip hop world rather than outside of it,
So that that maybe is one explanation for hip hop

(56:16):
in general. Then there's just the broader question of why
is there such stagnancy in the artists themselves? Why are
you know we live in this world of incredible diversity,
an incredible ah ability for anyone to create something on
the computer, to put it, to distribute it, to get
it out there. Why is it that we're really focused

(56:38):
on this this set of artists that I almost call
like a monopoly artists. I mean, Beyonce is a monopoly
artist at this point in the sense of does anyone
believe that she can be dislodged from the position that
she's in. It's she's kind of too big to fail
at this point. So, um, how do you why is
it that these artists are not demoded and devo valu'd

(57:00):
first of all, so you don't have a new generation
of artists who are trying to take down Guns and
Roses the way Nirvana. Did you know, Guns and Roses
came to Nirvana and said open for us on our
tour and Kurt I think, you know, Kirk Cobain was
against some of the homophobic and racist things that Axel
Rose said or didn't like guns roses or whatever, but

(57:22):
rejected that and instead of grunge becoming kind of a
offshoot of heavy metal, just completely replaced heavy metal. So
you don't see that right now. You don't see people
coming out and saying these top artists, um need to
get buried and we need to move forward from there.
The economics are such that you can be on the margins,
make a really cool sound and have that sucked into

(57:47):
a Kanye Drake song, and then that's financially the best
thing for you to do and the way for you
to move forward, rather than to say I'm going to
take down Drake that you know, we're going to make
a sound that completely makes every Drake albums ridiculous and
we're going to do that instead, and then we're gonna
shift the whole market. And so everyone is kind of
working with the monopoly artists rather than trying to overtake them.

(58:10):
And maybe the economics are just that they have to
and maybe that the fact that the Internet has made
it so hard to break through that the only way
is to wait for one of these giant stars to
kind of anoint you and to go forward. But those
dynamics are making things feel stagnant. So even if there's
some marginal cool idea on the sideline, like you know,

(58:31):
drill or something, and it gets sucked into the mainstream,
it doesn't take over the mainstream. It's just it's used
at a certain moment and then the mainstream moves on. Okay,
in your book, you delineate how it used to be
an art and how it's not that way today, and
I'd like you to talk a little bit about that. Specifically,
you would say, Okay, you have a creative class that

(58:54):
might watch the Bear on television, would be following the
new acts. They would go to the shows of the
new acts, and then the acts would grow because they
would have status, other people want to emulate them, it's cool, etcetera.
Whereas that really doesn't work anymore. Explain why. So it

(59:20):
is not necessarily that the creative class always started every
trend or that everything they liked became mainstream culture. There's
certainly a lot of things that just stopped with the
creative class or stopped with art, art school, kids. What
has happened now is that it used to be that

(59:41):
there's so few media channels, and those media channels were
run by art school kids and creative class kids. So
if you think about MTV and the eighties, these are
probably a lot of n y U grads and they're
personally into relatively underground or or indie things, and they're
creating a whole network for young people across the country
that's trying to pick up as many of those things

(01:00:03):
as possible. So, yes, you have like head Banger's Ball,
but it's you know, put it's like a heavy metal show,
but it's put late at night so that normal people
don't see it. But you know, you know MTV wraps.
I think it was what Ted DeMier, one of the
demmis you did that with five Freddie. You know, that
was straight out of downtown arts appreciation of hip hop,

(01:00:23):
and they put that on the air. Hip hop becomes
this national phenomenon. But there's this real desire among the
people who work there to take what they think is
cool and kind of downtown New York and put it
on TV and put it on and make it national.
And today, not only are there too many media channels
for one media channel to really do that. But there's

(01:00:46):
also this omnivore culture in which people like high and low,
they like mainstream in indie, and so the group of
people who are the gatekeepers in a certain degree, I mean,
maybe they're weaker gatekeepers, but still making the decisions on
what to cover and what youth culture is going to
to be and what people are going to see there.

(01:01:08):
They are not necessarily able to number one, just only
focus on indie culture because of the economics of it.
But second is that there's some sort of principle where
they just don't think they should focus on only the strange,
marginal things. They need to review the big albums, they
need to praise the big albums, they need to praise
the big TV shows or talk about the big TV shows,

(01:01:29):
and so you crowd out some of that space or
some of that dialogue that used to go in some
ways by it was a bias, but it was a
bias towards the indie and the emerging and the underground,
and that has been crowded out by the sense that
we have to cover everything now. And so the creative
class to use that term, or just people who are

(01:01:52):
artistically minded did have a lot of power to shift
taste towards their specific kind of strange, pisticated sounds or
or ideas, and that group itself has taken a step
back from that. So it's not you know, it wasn't
necessary that mainstream consumers ever liked that that those things
could they could just push it on mainstream consumers because

(01:02:14):
they had the monopoly, And now they don't have the monopoly,
and they themselves are not that interested in only being
interested Sorry, they're not that interested only looking into things
that are marginal. Because the other thing, too is there
aren't things that are marginal the way that Downtown New
York was. Uh, you know, you were in downtown New

(01:02:35):
York and there's some new wave band or no wave
band or something that you were particularly interested in that
you could see getting big because a major label just
signed them or something. I think that whole that whole
system is also gone. So there's not an obvious source
for where you're gonna pick things up and bring them
bring them along. What about the concept of poptimism. He
used to be the critic in his black leather jacket

(01:02:57):
jeans boots would say it sucks, but now it's reversed,
all people saying, oh, the mainstream is great and you're
just too harsh on it. M what's going on there?
So I think the original incarnation of optimism was a
really important corrective because that black leather jacket critic who

(01:03:19):
thinks everything sucks unless you sound like the Stooges, that
was not helpful. And the idea that sounding like the
Stooges was somehow innovative in makes no sense. So the
the original poptimism idea came out of trying to correct
the over emphasis on saying the Strokes are the most

(01:03:39):
innovative band in America, where you look at how Missy
Elliott is producing all these mainstream are R and B hits,
and they're just so much more interesting that they're bringing
in all these new influences, And so that bias was
blinding people. And so the original poptimism is great. It's
just saying there can be innovation across the spectrum. It
can be in a Christina Christina Aguilera song. It doesn't

(01:04:00):
to only be um the recycling of these rock cliches.
We've now moved into what I would call an ultra poptimism,
which is to say, the more things are popular, the
better they must be because they mean so many things
to different people. And if you think about art simply
as a vehicle for meaning that or a vehicle for entertainment.

(01:04:21):
And if more people like Taylor Swift than another artist,
Taylor Swift must be more important, then you've kind of
lost one of the main points of art. If I
go back to the thing I was saying earlier, which
is invention, which is to take a convention and break it.
And the original poptimism was saying, there is invention happening
in pop and we shouldn't ignore it, where now it's

(01:04:42):
more invention itself is pretension and we shouldn't. We don't
really need to worry about that. What's most important is
that Taylor Swift has lots of fans, and so she
must be important, and we need to take Taylor Swift very,
very seriously. Now, Taylor Swift could be innovative, and that
could be where innovation comes from, but there isn't. There's
an incredible deference paid to these monopoly artists because uh,

(01:05:07):
they are popular, and it's seen that that popularity itself
is some is a virtue in a way that I
think for older critics that definitely was not true, and
and maybe there was a bias against anything popular, that
anything popular must be conventional and wrong. And I do
think poptimism moved us out of that. But uh, it

(01:05:30):
has gone too far. Not not the same critics, but
I think that ethos has maybe gone too far with
other people. Okay, you know we were talking earlier about
social media as opposed to mainstream media. Let's use a
case of Beyonce. She comes out with new work. It's
like God delivering tablets in the mainstream media. She is
everywhere the josianas. All this information is now visible. All

(01:05:56):
the statistics are right there for anybody to see. If
you look at the Spotify top fifty, they the album
comes out, everybody's listening. But the album fell very very fast.
One could argue it was a stiff So is this
the disconnection between old and new? What's going on here?

(01:06:20):
I saw this also with two other things, which is
Fiona Apples Fetch the Bolt Cutters got a ten on Pitchfork,
and it's a great album and I still listen to it.
But within about a month I didn't hear anyone talk
about that record at all, it just completely fallen off
the map. And maybe that's I don't talk to the
right people, but it did seem like there was a
burst of activity and interest in it, and then it

(01:06:41):
just faded out. And then with don'ta the Kanye West
album that also it's Uh, there was more hype for
it and more interest in it. And I looked at
Google searches and there are more Google searches for it
before it came out, and then the day it dropped,
there was a big spike, and then no one ever
talked about it again. So the media spectacle of these

(01:07:03):
albums is quite powerful, but the sense that you're going
to spend time with it and absorb it and love
it and make it part of your identity seems to
be gone. And and that is one of the things
that is really hurting culture at the moment. And the
way we thought about culture in the twentieth century is
that there's lots of entertainment. Every day, there's something new,

(01:07:24):
there's a new meme to follow, there's a new album
that has dropped, or there's something there's a new you know,
five thousand new TikTok videos to watch. But culture was
not just entertainment. It wasn't just consumption. It was people
taking a piece of art, a film or an album,
consuming it, reconsuming it and making it part of their

(01:07:46):
identity and telling other people about it, and creating friendships
based on the appreciation of these things, and having a
group whose entire uh identity is based in the appreciation
of these things. And so what you're seeing is one
time consumption and then everyone moving on and not making

(01:08:06):
it part of their identities. And this is this is
the difference between viral culture and you know, twentieth century
culture is the viral culture moves so fast that you
have this big spurt and then everyone moves on. Um,
there was this kind of meme I don't know, three
weeks ago or something or a month ago about Amtrak
just wrote trains, and so then everyone was just writing

(01:08:28):
one word and literally twenty four hours later, if you
made the same joke, it was just lame like that, Yeah,
that was yesterday. And the speed of which that happens
means these things can't carry on and they can't really
be the way we think about culture. So culture is
moving so fast it's kind of not fulfilling one of
its basic needs or one of the things we looked

(01:08:50):
to it for in the twentieth century, which is identity formation.
And so if people were listening to Beyonce and say
that was nice and not going back to it and
not making her work part of the identity, then it's
lost a huge amount of social value that he used
to have. Well, let's stay on that topic. Uh Taylor Swift,
and this is a very dicey subject for me. Um

(01:09:13):
she appeared on the Grammys and saying unbelievably off key
prior to Taylor Swift, if you did that, killed your
career overnight. Certainly in the history of rock, there are
a number of accident fell all the way to the bottom.
Based on one act. Uh Billy Squire put out a
video where he's dancing in pink on bent literally killed

(01:09:36):
his career. Peter Frampton played to his younger demo with
am and you couldn't sell records for years, maybe not
even since, although he put out some good records. But
you have somebody like Taylor Swift does this in front
of worldwide audience, there's no effect. Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga

(01:09:56):
had a number of hits, then had one stiff after another.
She was a media darling. She's singing with Tony Bennett,
She's doing all this stuff. But in the record world,
no success, certainly no hits. Ultimately, she had another hit
with Stars Born, but she didn't lose status whatsoever. People

(01:10:18):
continue to go to her shows in the same number.
This is something that never happened previously. They are too
big to fail, is the conclusion I would take from it.
But it's it's obviously because it transcends music. And you know,
Taylor Swift, her fans, she can't do wrong. The Pitchfork
writer who gave her album a mediocre, not even a mediocre.

(01:10:42):
She got a good review in Pitchfork and it wasn't great,
and so the fans all, you know, sent death threats
to the writer. So these fan communities are huge. They're
never going to you know, abandoned their stars because of
one misstep. And then the celebrity compl ux is not
going to abandon these people because they're they're gold and

(01:11:05):
they're there. They make a lot of money from being celebrities.
So once you get someone up there, you're not going
to necessarily try to take them down. So that's a
lot of it, I mean a lot of it's just
that it's moved out of the realm of music. People
are not looking at these people as contingent music stars
who I like as long as they're providing the music

(01:11:25):
that I like. They're being treated like royalty and and
you know, celebrities and almost utility is like, you know,
what would what would it be like to live in
a world without Lady Gaga? Nobody can imagine it, So
everyone just keeps him moving forward no matter what she does.

(01:11:47):
Let's talked about moving pictures, visual entertainment. So we have
a conventional cable world, conventional movie world. Netflix moves to
streaming their streaming old sit arms. They air House of Cards.
It's just the Sopranos. A little bit different for HBO
because there were some shows before that. They air House

(01:12:10):
of Cards. The whole paradigm shifts. He made for an
adult audience, intelligent, not talking down to the audience. They
continue to make work like this. Then the movie business,
there's a few things to go on the movie business.
They were playing for worldwide hits, etcetera. But suddenly that

(01:12:35):
type of work becomes streaming television. It's not movies, and
movies are these tent bowl hopeful blockbusters based on superhero characters.
Now the latest thing is these streaming companies are cutting
off the edges, even though they were built by these edges.

(01:12:56):
And of course it's the completely left field that resonate,
the Korean TV hits being the number one example of that.
So what is happening now? So obviously, these platforms start
with a relatively sophisticated consumer, because who's gonna, you know,

(01:13:18):
purchase a Netflix description so early, and so you start
with some tastes that are going to appeal to adults
and cetificate sophisticated adults and people with education and in
the professional creative classes. At some point you have to
start making programming that's gonna appeal to everybody, and it's
going to be less challenging. At the same time, you know,

(01:13:39):
Netflix in particular has such an incredibly gigantic catalog, almost
you know, too large sometimes where I feel like I
spend a night just looking at what to watch on
Netflix rather than actually watching anything on Netflix. But uh so,
then they also have all these Korean dramas, and what's
interesting is the degree in which these ramas were made

(01:14:02):
for an audience that was not I mean, they were
not made for Netflix's gigantic American audience as far as
I know, they were just made for a Korean audience.
But there's something actually innovative and interesting about them, even
even if they're they're conventional for Korea, those conventions are
not known to us, and we enjoy it. And you know,
if you go back to Gotenham Style too. I saw

(01:14:22):
the video for Gottenam Style recently. I hadn't seen it
in a while, and I was just struck by It's
so many inside jokes that you only know if you
live in Korea, and yet that was such a big
song because there was something about it that just felt
fresh because we're not exposed to so many of those things,
and even if we don't get at all, it just
feels like something new. And so if your Choices are

(01:14:47):
another reality show that follows the exact same conventions of
every reality show just with a twist or this new
thing that feels, uh, it's just like something you've never
seen before, then you know people people still do want novelty,
and that that that can't be denied. I think that
they just want novelty that is not too not too different,

(01:15:09):
not to pretends not to um difficult. I mean, these
creative shows are often very melodramatic. It's not like they're
you know, some higher form of avant garde art. But
they're just different enough that people are willing to watch them.
And then if they hear somebody say it's good, I'm
sure that word of mouth has been really really important
for them as well. Um, but it's interesting. It's interesting

(01:15:30):
lesson that Netflix has tried to make things on the
high end is trying to make things very some you know,
really unintelligent programs as well, and then it's maybe stuff
in the middle that's doing the best. Let's talk about
this stagnation. Let me give you an approach it from
a different angle. I am someone with musical talent. Used

(01:15:51):
to be sixties and seventies. You have these acts predicated
on something completely different. They this is what we're gonna do.
We're gonna stick with it until it broke through. Great
example being Roxy Music Queen not being a bad example either.
They stuck it out, they stuck to their guns and

(01:16:12):
it worked. Whereas today someone might say that's not gonna
work at all. I just have to imitate what other
people are doing. What advice would you have for those people.
It does seem bleak if you're going to do something

(01:16:33):
that is not immediately understood, and it does just seem
like consumers of media have less patience than they used to.
And I was thinking about as a kid, I saw
Here Comes Your Man by the Pixies on MTV. I
told my brother to get the record. He's older than me,
and then and that record do a little is weird.

(01:16:55):
I mean, as a nine year old or ten year old,
that was a really strange record. I did not understand it.
But after hearing at once and saying that was really strange,
I don't understand it. I just listen to it again
and listen to it again, and probably the tenth time
did not understand that record and still listen to it.
I just can't imagine anyone these days being surrounded by
so many things they immediately understand that they're going to

(01:17:16):
keep going back to something they don't, and nothing has
the legitimacy to force you also to say you have
to listen to this even if you don't get it
the first time. UM. Maybe The Wire. I I felt
like The Wire the first couple episodes were quite slow,
and you had to really push through and then I
got good. And but you had a million people telling
you got to believe that The Wire is the greatest
television show of all time. Keep going. And so for

(01:17:39):
a new band, if you don't have a bunch of
critics telling listeners, you may not get roxy music, but
keep listening because you're gonna get it at some point.
And you have so many other distractions, and you have
so many other other um options, and on Spotify it's literally,
you know, a million albums or click away. I don't
know how you keep going. Uh So, the only advice

(01:18:02):
I would give somebody is, you know, you would have
to find the community that really believes in that sound
and then hope that that community grows and that community
becomes influential on the rest of society. But it's really difficult.
And uh we we had so much cultural progress in
the twentieth century because people were patient, and there's just

(01:18:25):
no structure at the moment that makes us more patient.
And we all we're all have this kind of take
a step back from the Internet to regain our attention spans.
And I've heard from so many people that when they
watch a movie, they just look at the clock and
say how many minutes left? Uh um. And I love
reading books because it forces me to, you know, take

(01:18:46):
a step back and and really push through on something.
But it it takes discipline, and I don't remember having
to have a sense of discipline as a nine year
old listening to a bunch of weird records I didn't understand. Okay,
and let's go back to the fast cycle on the internet,
with memes and things being burned out so fast that

(01:19:10):
there's no traction on new things. That is correct. I mean, so,
as I said before, you have culture. You have things
that feel like culture that happened every day, like a
meme feels like a cultural moment. But you're not going
to take that meme and make your identity about it,
because number one, it's pretty silly to start with, it's
pretty lowest common denominator to start with. But also because

(01:19:32):
the whole point of a meme is to be in
and out of it, to get in on it's first,
you know, our or day, but then to not linger
on it. And then that's not true for music or films.
And the whole point of being into pulp fiction was
that you watched it once and then you went around
for years talking about how pulp Fiction was your favorite movie,

(01:19:53):
so you know, and it's it feels silly comparing a
meme to a motion picture. I mean, these are also
just different things. But if if we are entertained on
a daily basis through ten memes, you know, ten great
tweets for videos, you can get through the day entertained.
You don't need much more than that. And that also
crowds out the time you may have used, you know,

(01:20:15):
reading a book or watching a film, or if it's
just a TV show that's you know, set up the
thirty minute episodes that are basically created so that when
you reach the end of the thirty minutes, you just
want to watch the next one and you binge watch it. Um,
maybe that TV show is something you you put as
your identity, but it's much more likely you just go

(01:20:35):
to a friend and say, oh, you gotta watch the show.
It's great, and then you don't really think about it again.
So the it's the overabundance and the speed of all
of this culture means we're less likely to bring it
into our identities and think about it as an authentic
part of our lives. And that was so critical for culture,

(01:20:55):
and that's what gives culture the weight to make it
seem like a important, iconic, historic event. That's the reason
Nirvana is not just a bunch of great albums. It
was some sort of social movement where everyone started dressing
in a different way and everybody had different values and uh,

(01:21:18):
you know believe that corporate music sucks, and were shirts
that said loser. And you know, it wasn't just the shirt,
it was a whole ethos. I don't think any culture
at the moment is quite changing our values or making
people associate themselves with some sort of new movement in
the way that culture used to. You live in Japan,

(01:21:39):
how come I studied Japanese in college. Um I had
spent two summers here, which was weird. I had studied Japanese,
I did East Asian Studies at Harvard College and spent
two summers in Tokyo. Discovered Japanese consumer is him and

(01:22:00):
especially street fashion, which at the time, you know, this
this idea of waiting three hours to buy a T
shirt and then you know, for seventy dollars and then
reselling the T shirt a year later for three that
has now become a global phenomenon at the time is
really Japan only. I ended up writing my senior thesis
about that the whole world and how to market that

(01:22:23):
kind of scarce good that it really isn't scarce, it's
kind of fake scarcity. I came back to get a
master's degree in UH consumer behavior marketing, wanting to look
more into this, like why did Japanese consumers respond to
this kind of marketing, and ended up studying the pop
music world instead, because there weren't very good numbers in

(01:22:47):
the fashion world, but the pop music world. There had
been the stream of research in the seventies where people
looked at the billboard charts and tried to figure out
whether the industrial organization of the music industry, what the
concentration of companies, whether that had an effect on the
innovation in the marketplace. And there's all these different papers
from the seventies and eighties about this. They're quite interesting.

(01:23:07):
And I took that research and applied it to Japan
to show that these artists, these artists management companies, many
of whom are associated with organized crime UH and just
have basically this octopus like grip on the entertainment complex
and they make it where you really can't have new
artists come out or the only new artists can come
out of these companies. And so that that link between

(01:23:31):
monopoly in the market and innovation was something I was
quite interested in. And then I've just been in Japan
since then because it's it's a great place to live
and and for a while it was, you know, interesting
to be here because it's not the United States, But
these days it feels like a calmer alternative to the
United States. Okay, Uh, there's a lot of people who

(01:23:52):
say that the Japanese or racist. As an Anglo in Japan,
do you feel that, um, Japan is very very focused
on doing things the right way, and if you're an outsider,
you don't know how to do things the right way

(01:24:12):
and you're judge pretty harshly. There is a big difference though,
in being a Western, especially male, especially white person, you're
exempt from any of those things and you are treated
relatively well. Um, if you are a Chinese immigrant, if

(01:24:32):
you're an Indonesian immigrant, and you may look to a
Japanese person like your Japanese and they won't know necessarily
that you're an immigrant. The expectation on you is to
perform perfectly like a Japanese person, and there is quite
a lot of a marginalization of those communities, and it
can be a much harder experience. So I can't I

(01:24:53):
can't extrapolate my personal experience as a white male from
the United States who learned Japanese and say that all
foreigners are treated this way. I think for me in particular,
it has been fine. I'm from Princical Florida, and I
didn't feel like I was, uh, the same as everybody
in princecal Florida. I'm pretty used to not feeling the
same as people. But um, I think Japan also, in

(01:25:16):
the last even five years, has really globalized where Tokyo
and in particular, Uh, there's Englishman news everywhere, and there
are lots and lots of people from all over the world,
and it's just it's more of an international city than
it's ever been. And so personally this isn't a problem
for me, but I can't speak for everybody. And I

(01:25:37):
see a wedding ring, Are you married to an American?
Are you married to a Japanese person? Japanese? So how
did you meet this Japanese person? Uh? We were both
making music into music Okay, you wrote this book, you
wrote a previous book. Is this how you make your
living or you have to do other things? Okay, how

(01:26:00):
do you make your life? I have to do I
have to do many other things. So you may be
surprised that writing a book about the history of men's
fashion in Japan is not a career. So yeah, I
mean my I've been writing for a really long time
and quite passionate about it, but I do a lot
of work in marketing and communications and branding and those areas. Okay,

(01:26:23):
what motivated you to write this book? What expectations do
you have of it? And how do you feel about
some of the negative reviews. It's not like they're negative,
but they want to argue with your theories. Is that jealousy? Well?
And how do you metabolize all that? What motivated me was,

(01:26:48):
I again have believed there are these principles or laws
or however you want to explain them that guide culture
and cultural change. And I've always been frustrated that there
was not a single book you could just pick up
and understand and and read and say this is what
how people behave and this is why culture changes. And
so I've been obsessed with that topic for twenty years,

(01:27:12):
the interplay between consumers and media and brands and artists
and how all these things work together. And I just
wanted to put all of the theories that already exist,
take them, synthesize them, and give them to someone in
a digestible format. And that's where it came from. And
I am very open to the idea that there are

(01:27:33):
mistakes and that there are things that need to be adjusted.
And for me, in some ways, we can't even have
that discussion until you start with something. You need to
start with. Here is the model that I think exists.
And then there are critiques of saying, actually you miss this,
or this effect maybe less than you think it is,
or things have changed. So I agree with all that.

(01:27:54):
I am very open to criticism in general. I'm very
open to good faith criticism. I think what is always
disappointing with um this kind of criticism. And and again,
you know, my first book was about Japanese fashion and
so niche that no one was going to say anything
mean about it. They were just going to ignore it

(01:28:15):
if they didn't have anything nice to say. So when
you write a book big and called cultural culture, sorry
called status and culture. You're just opening yourself up for attacks.
So this is my fault. I I have no one
to blame about myself, but so many of the critiques
are in bad faith in that you have the classic

(01:28:35):
critique of you did not write the book that I
thought you should have written, and the critique it as
if you should have read it that way, that this
book is not a book about how rich people today live,
which is not a book about you have. The critiques
of this book is fine, but it didn't reference my book,
and therefore it's suspect. I've gotten that from a pretty
distinguished economists, which was quite annoying. And then you get

(01:28:59):
things where there's just a disagreement. Um. Virginia Apostural, who
I respect quite a quite a lot, just reviewed it
for then the Wall Street Journal, and we just don't
agree on, you know, the nature of aesthetics. She believes
so much of aesthetics are about pleasure and joy. I
totally agree. People love culture. The reason the culture proliferates

(01:29:20):
this because we love it. I just I'm trying to
look at why do we love certain aesthetics at all?
Why do the Beatles hate the mop top? And then put,
you know, then wear the mop top, and then everybody
loves the mop top. You have to look at how
aesthetics change over time, and status is the force that
changes them. It doesn't mean that people are always status
seeking everything they do, but status is this invisible grammar

(01:29:42):
behind culture that we have to look at. So I
think some of the critiques are are fine and fair.
What's annoying just about how how this process works is
that you're a very whiny author if somebody critiques you,
and then you go on and say, well, you're wrong
because of these things, and so you have to be,
you know, pull light and mannered about the whole thing.
But I think some of the critiques are just an

(01:30:04):
invitation to dialogue. I mean, I would love to answer
the criticisms because they're not gotcha, like, oh my gosh,
I never consider this. I feel like I answer these
in the book and people may not quite get the nuances.
So for me, it's just it's frustrating because I want
to speak with these people in that a conversation, but
that's not the way it works. It's kind of forever.
The New York Times says this, and that's what The

(01:30:26):
New York Times said, but at the same time, you know,
the revenge of authors and publishers is then we just
edit out all the negative things from the review and
then write fascinating Times and put it on the back
of a book, so you know, authors laugh last maybe Okay.
What most people don't know is the book business is
really provincial. No, it's not not modernized in many ways.

(01:30:51):
But what I really saying. You see the number one
best seller, well, let's make it better number five. It
is amazing how few books the books actually sell absolutely
so has the book had more or less impact than
you wanted it to have in terms of which relevantive
positive or negative? It's still too early because it's only

(01:31:14):
been out for a couple of weeks. Um the book
needs to be read, is the problem. So a lot
of nonfiction books literally will be one single idea. There's
this theory of the minimally counterintuitive idea that these are sticky,
that if things are too intuitive, it's not interesting. If
things are too counterintuitive, they're not interesting. But if you

(01:31:35):
have this minimally counterintuitive idea, like if I wrote a
book that said, did you know that your gut bacteria
determines your personality? You'd be like, well, that's I didn't
think that, but okay, I'll read a book about it.
But that book will then basically take that idea and
you know, extrapolate it out for three under pages triple space.
That's what a normal nonfiction book does. And so when

(01:31:56):
you read about or hear about it, you basically the
main idea and you can go to a cocktail party
and say, oh, I just read this book about got
bacteria determining your personality. Uh my, I did not follow
the rules of this provincial book market. I wrote a
book that has way too many things in it. And
when I'm trying to again, I'm trying to make a
field manual slash handbook for people to understand how status works,

(01:32:18):
how culture works, and take those lessons with them. And
the way it's summarized often doesn't quite explain my position
or it simplifies it too much. And so what I'm
hoping is people read it and they start using the
language of the book to describe things. And again, even
if people disagree with it and they have to clarify
their position using the language of the book, I feel

(01:32:39):
like that would be a great success, but it's going
to take a little bit more time. It's not I
didn't play the game the way I was supposed to do,
in which I noticed in in hindsight. Um, I just
I wrote the book that I thought needed to exist,
and we'll see what happens. Okay, let's pull the lens

(01:33:01):
way back. Can one say that music, even movies and
TV have been eclipsed by politics because we all have
a hand in it and are affected and we can
take a side and we can argue about it. Or
does politics just is that become the main dominant force

(01:33:25):
in culture or is it just a constant on the side.
I think in American culture, politics is everything, and and
cultural politics is often used as a dismissive term that
that's just cultural politics. But culture has become political because,
especially in a world of mass culture and these huge

(01:33:47):
cultural markets, who makes the money from the matters, and
the ideas in the hit movies and books matter, and
people are quite sensitive about it, and appropriation matters. You know,
if if a marginalized group creates these forms out of
their marginalization, and then the majority culture steals those ideas

(01:34:10):
and profits from them, that is a political issue. Status
comes with privileges. Status determines the quality of your life,
and status determines how resources are distributed across society. So
if culture plays a role in who gets status, which
it does, then people really focus on culture and they

(01:34:33):
think about it, and so it's inevitable the culture becomes
political in this era. And also when you get to
the dominant form of culture on the sophisticated side, being omnivorism,
which says high and low are both equally valid, you
stop having kind of avant garde battles between uh, abstract

(01:34:55):
expressionism is the final form of art, no pop art
is it's you know, successor you stop battling about the
form of art and the ideas and you start focusing
more on, well, everything is kind of equally good. So
the only thing that we're against is these provincial people

(01:35:16):
who do not believe that everything is good. So so
you have cosmopolitanism of believing that everything is good take
over so much that the only thing to be against
is anti cosmopolitanism, and so the entire cultural marketplace becomes
a battle between kind of this pro omnivorism versus very

(01:35:40):
parochial or provincial. My culture is the only right culture,
and that just splits across political lines in the United States.
I mean, it's that is a very blue, red state
type divide, and it's it's just inevitable that culture has
gone that direction. So um, I don't know what we

(01:36:02):
can do about that, but as long as somebody is
reviewing culture with those questions in mind. And then you
also get to this, this artist has done a genius
invention of these forms. But as a person there they
believe in bad politics, and I don't want money going
to them. What's very difficult for them to uh for
people to support that at this moment. Well, let me clarify,

(01:36:25):
how about Washington, D C. Trump people focusing on that
for their identity or common at least Biden somebody on
the other side. To what degree is that usurpd cultural
power from the traditional music, movies, and television. I mean,
I I've heard you talk about this, and I know

(01:36:46):
you agree with that, and I agree with you. I
think that that is the dominant form of identity creation
at the moment. And but that but that again, I
think these two things are related, which is if America
is a struggle between this state ethos and a red
state ethos, and that is playing out in politics and economics,
and in all of these questions, it is bleeding into culture.

(01:37:09):
But because culture is set up as omnivore versus anti omnivore,
and blue is the omnivore side and anti omnivore is
the red side, then that just makes it where all
appreciation of art has to be filtered through the lens
of those politics. Okay, so let's assume you're in the

(01:37:29):
lower status group. Do people ever accept their status or
they always saying, God, I want more status. So what's
really important in any hierarchy for it to function is
what's called status integrity. So there's the people at the
bottom look up and they say, it makes sense why
those people up there or have the status that they do.

(01:37:51):
And if they believe in that integrity, they'll stay in
the group even if they're low status. They'll believe my
group will be successful, and the success of that group
will be good for me, even if I'm at the
bottom of it. Often, where people don't believe in that,
and they understand that they could be higher status in
any different group, they will leave. And so the rise

(01:38:12):
of some cultures in the twentieth century is a lot
of people saying I don't agree with these people at
the top being the top. I'm going to leave and
be a surfer or a biker or whatever it is,
because those communities except me and I can be valued
and esteemed for these interests and these values I already have.
They are different than the mainstream. UM. I think there's

(01:38:34):
a lot of political turmoil in the United States at
the moment in that the United States has ceased to
feel like one status group that we're all in. And
I think in particular, people who support Trump, they believe
that their group should be at the top, and they
don't believe that these these these coastal elites should have

(01:38:56):
the status that they have, and that causes a lot
of resentment and causes them to want ill things to
happen to people on the coast. And uh, that is
that lack of integrity has made these two groups split.
And they you know, they do not accept that feeling

(01:39:20):
of being in a lower status tier, whether they are
or not, is all perceived. And at the moment they
turn on the television, these people who support Trump turn
on the television, they don't see themselves, they don't see
their values, UM, and they're quite resentful about it, and
it makes it makes a lot of sense. But you know,
we do live in a world in which you're able

(01:39:42):
to move to other groups as quickly as possible. But
that splintering then makes it where there isn't really a
mainstream core, or the mainstream core becomes one group and
then the other group is simply trying to battle back
and forth of taking back power. And in my lifetime,
I've never seen soul much income inequality the American dream.

(01:40:02):
You work hard, you can make it. You can work
for the rest of your fucking life hard, You're not
gonna have as much money you z Elon Musk. So
to what you spoke earlier about the French Revolution, are
we pushing towards some cataclysmic event that will reworder status
as a result of income inequality? And maybe what we
were just referencing the political differences, Um, I don't think so.

(01:40:29):
I mean, I if you look at the trump Is
movement as a backlash against the order, they are trying
to restore some bizarro you know, twentieth century, nine fifties
version of America that doesn't exist, in which you know
a lot of people that move it would have not
been particularly high status at that time either, but they
felt like they it's better than where they are now. Um,

(01:40:55):
so that group is incredibly reactionary. It does not seem
like they want a revolution in a French Revolution since
and I don't get a sense that there is a
group like the bourgeoisie that's going to have a French
Revolution and there's not an empowered group of proletariat that's
going to overtake things in a Mark Marxist revolution either.
So I don't know. I mean, this is this is

(01:41:19):
probably beyond my pay grade, but it just does not
seem like we're headed towards an actual reversal of what
creates status in society. And because that's what these revolutions
always are, there an attempt to change why the people
at the highest levels have the status that they do.
And so the French Revolution is saying it should not

(01:41:39):
be about aristocracy at all, that you know, personal achievements
should be the reason that people move to the top,
and that idea is stuck with us even after the
French Revolution, and you know, Marxist revolution is trying to
say that capital itself should not be the reason people
at the top. But I don't know. I don't I
don't see any major tempt at at gigantic revolutionary status reversal.

(01:42:03):
And looking into the future, we can certainly see changes.
You know, the Internet era as opposed to the prior era,
the fascination with devices in the first decade of this century,
the triumph of software, the go go now the backlash.
Are we going to be staying? What will this stagnancy

(01:42:28):
in culture continue? Will it have to be a once
in a lifetime event to change it? You know, what
do you think is going to come down the pike?
I don't know. I mean, one thing I do is
do think and then talking to friends is people who
are the most sophisticated cultural consumers and most interested in culture.

(01:42:52):
We're on the internet early because the internet promised you
the ability to have better distribution for the things you
create and find people who have the same interest. So
you have all these people into marginal things. You go online,
suddenly there are all there's thousands of people interested in
this and you can get new information. You can trade tapes.
One of the earliest things I did on the Internet

(01:43:13):
and the nineties was trade bootleg tapes with people. So
you join a mailing list and then trade bootlegs back
and forth. So my understanding of the Internet was that
it was the thing for people with niche tastes and
that was incredible and useful. And the Internet in the
last decade has become mass culture is dominated by lowest combinator,

(01:43:34):
lowest common dominator aesthetics. I mean cases, if you open
TikTok and you haven't quite put in your personal preferences,
as in you say I'm not interested in this, it
sends you often very sexually provocative videos, but it just
sends you things that make you want to close the
app because they're not They're not really set up for
for people who are used to the Internet being niche

(01:43:58):
artistic things. So these platforms are based on the aesthetics
of mass culture, and that original group of people on
the Internet are quite disappointed with it, and and a
lot of this idea of cultural stasis it comes from
cultural elites. It does not come from you know, eighteen
year old kids are not saying, oh wow, the culture stuck.
They're fine, they're on TikTok, they're having a good time.

(01:44:20):
So that group is disappointed with the direction the Internet
has gone. And either the Internet splinters a little bit
where you start getting these social media platforms only for
that group that really have barriers to injury, so they
don't become mass platforms. But that's not a particularly good
business model because the business model of all these platforms
is scale. So if your Instagram and you only have

(01:44:42):
creative costs people, well that doesn't work. You've got to
have everybody. You've got to bring everyone's mom on. So
uh if if the money is made in lowest common
denominator taste in order to get as many people as possible,
the Internet is not home two people with niche taste
because there isn't a way to escape it, to say, oh, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,

(01:45:05):
these are all platforms only for the masses. I'm over
here the way that I think there used to be
with with magazines. We all still care about our success
on these platforms. We were told, especially if you're creating things,
you have to market yourself on this platform so people
can't escape it. So either you get a movement offline
and that people return to their cultural experiences being offline.

(01:45:29):
And what's nice about online is you can show that
you've done this thing offline, so there was an article
in The Atlantic recently, um where you know, restaurant reservations
are the hot new thing, and they're hot because it's scarce.
It's real life, it's physical. You could only certain amount
of people every night. You can go to this restaurant.
At the same time, you can use Instagram to show

(01:45:50):
that you've been to that restaurant. So using online to
show your offline exploits, I think is one direction. This
is going to go quickly, but I could see a
growing cultural movement of just offline activity. You had to
be there, and that's that is going to be where
the real status is because that's the way it used
to work other otherwise. I think these communities that are

(01:46:12):
interested in niche artistic culture, I mean, there's lots of niche,
weird things that aren't artistic, but the kind of people
doing the invention that moves culture forward, there has to
be spaces for them to experiment and be rewarded for it.
And the current state of the Internet is not there.
It may have been there maybe twenty years ago, but

(01:46:32):
it's not there now, and so there will be some
sort of new movement or exodus. But that also presumes
that people who are eighteen right now want to do
cultural invention the way that my generation wanted to or
you know, I was listening to a lot of weird music,
and I wanted to make weird music. But I don't
know if eighteen year old kids are listening to weird
things and want to make weird things. Okay, just going

(01:46:54):
back one step, you talked about people watching movies and
constantly looking at a clock. I resonate with that. That
is me. If I'm watching with my girlfriend, I can
watch anything. If I'm watching alone, it's a real pain
to sit through it. If it's fantastic, that's not usually
the issue. But there's very little that's fantastic. What is

(01:47:18):
really going on? Why am I looking at the clock
or stopping? You know, there are probably scientific studies on this,
but I think it seems like our our attention spans
are shorter, just in the sense of sitting there for
an hour not checking your phone has become quite difficult,

(01:47:38):
and you know, sitting through anything for two hours straight
has become difficult. I feel like if I'm in a
movie theater, I can get very into it. When I
was watching Dune or something I was in, but at
home you're just so distractive by the things around you,
and you know you can stop, and so if you
know you can stop, you stop. So I think that's
one of them. The other is, you know, the model.

(01:48:00):
I don't know what the exact business model is anymore,
but it used to be you're gonna make ten movies
in a year. You're you have no idea what's going
to hit, and so you give ten people, uh, you say,
go off and do these things. And one of them
is David Lynch. And David Lynch makes a really weird

(01:48:20):
movie with your money and you don't make any money
from it, but you there's a David Lynch movie in
the world, And the question is whether studios or everybody.
Because it's so data driven, they got smarter and they thought,
I'm not this David Lynch movie is definitely not going
to be a hit. You know, just because Elephant Man
was a hit doesn't mean Wild and Heart is going
to be hit. So you don't give new David Lynch's movies.

(01:48:44):
But then the question is are there a bunch of
David lynch Is out there that we're just they're not
getting funding. I don't know about that. I think the
next generation is a lot more savvy and a lot
less artistic minded in that really classic Aumant Guard way,
And so you have a lot you have fewer creations
that are probably from that world, you have the studio
funding fewer of them, and then you have less patients

(01:49:06):
from it, and then it comes out and of course
it's not a hit because no one's gonna watch that
kind of thing anyway. So the whole ecosystem is just
not set up for some sort of movie that is
I've never seen anything like it before. I have to
turn away. And also we're we can turn away, and
if the first ten minutes you don't like it, um,
you will turn turn away. I mean, I can't imagine

(01:49:26):
someone watching a Razorhead right now and being gripped by
and say, I gotta, I gotta keep watching this thing.
I mean, it's it's so slow. You have to really
be disciplined to keep going. But if you're at an
indie theater and it's nineteen and I don't know when
it is, it's a late night theater, and you you
go and it's the only culture you have in your city,
You're gonna sit there and watch it, okay, And how

(01:49:48):
much of it is the form has changed. Yes, so
I can get bites online that are brief, and that's
the new format and relevant of attention span is just
more rewarding. I'm gonna want to get into science and dopamine,
but is what people are looking for generally speaking different.

(01:50:10):
It has most definitely conditioned us to want things very
very quickly. I know that when a YouTube video hits
about ninety seconds and goes beyond that, I think this
is the longest video that's ever existed, and I fade out.
So it's very strange. It's it's very strange that ninety
seconds is about all we're willing to give us something.
But also you know, you're often recommended it or it

(01:50:31):
pops up on your feed, and you're not bought in.
I mean, you're not in a place where you're going
to sit there and say, I'm gonna watch a thirty
minute movie. You're just trying to kill time for five minutes,
and this is gonna be ninety seconds of it. So
you really don't want anything that's ninety seconds. But we
consider that time to be cultural consumption in a way
that I think before, if you watch the film, you
were going to sit, sit down at seven pm and

(01:50:55):
pop pop the you know, VC pop the cassette into
the VCR and watch a movie. Where today we're just
thinking about our entertainment time. It's filling it with just
what comes up, not by being intentional, um it's different
by person by person, but the fact that so many
people have reported that they can't get through long things,

(01:51:16):
it does seem to be a plague of our times. Well, thanks, David,
I think we've come to the end of the feeling
we've known. This has been fascinating. You and me could
express opinions and go over these issues for days, but
it's not gonna be today. So and Nanny event thanks
so much for taking this time with me. Thank you
so much for having me. It's an honored to talk

(01:51:38):
to you. I've been a big fan of the newsletter
for a long time. Until next time. This is Bob
Leftstax