Episode #451: Narrative as Infrastructure: Why Culture Now Runs on Memes

In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, I, Stewart Alsop, sit down with Trent Gillham—also known as Drunk Plato—for a far-reaching conversation on the shifting tides of technology, memetics, and media. Trent shares insights from building Meme Deck (find it at memedeck.xyz or follow @memedeckapp on X), exploring how social capital, narrative creation, and open-source AI models are reshaping not just the tools we use, but the very structure of belief and influence in the information age. We touch on everything from the collapse of legacy media, to hyperstition and meme warfare, to the metaphysics of blockchain as the only trustable memory in an unmoored future. You can find Trent in twitter as @AidenSolaran.

Check out this GPT we trained on the conversation!

Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction to Trent Gillham and Meme Deck, early thoughts on AI’s rapid pace, and the shift from training models to building applications around them.

05:00 – Discussion on the collapse of the foundational model economy, investor disillusionment, GPU narratives, and how AI infrastructure became a kind of financial bubble.

10:00 – The function of markets as belief systems, blowouts when inflated narratives hit reality, and how meme-based value systems are becoming indistinguishable from traditional finance.

15:00 – The role of hyperstition in creation, comparing modern tech founders to early 20th-century inventors, and how visual proof fuels belief and innovation.

20:00 – Reflections on the intelligence community’s influence in tech history, Facebook’s early funding, and how soft influence guides the development of digital tools and platforms.

25:00 – Weaponization of social media, GameStop as a memetic uprising, the idea of memetic tools leaking from government influence into public hands.

30:00 – Meme Deck’s vision for community-led narrative creation, the shift from centralized media to decentralized, viral, culturally fragmented storytelling.

35:00 – The sophistication gap in modern media, remix culture, the idea of decks as mini subreddits or content clusters, and incentivizing content creation with tokens.

40:00 – Good vs bad meme coins, community-first approaches, how decentralized storytelling builds real value through shared ownership and long-term engagement.

45:00 – Memes as narratives vs manipulative psyops, blockchain as the only trustable historical record in a world of mutable data and shifting truths.

50:00 – Technical challenges and future plans for Meme Deck, data storage on-chain, reputation as a layer of trust, and AI’s need for immutable data sources.

55:00 – Final reflections on encoding culture, long-term value of on-chain media, and Trent’s vision for turning podcast conversations into instant, storyboarded, memetic content.

Key Insights

1. The real value in AI isn’t in building models—it’s in building tools that people can use: Trent emphasized that the current wave of AI innovation is less about creating foundational models, which have become commoditized, and more about creating interfaces and experiences that make those models useful. Training base models is increasingly seen as a sunk cost, and the real opportunity lies in designing products that bring creative and cultural capabilities directly to users.
2. Markets operate as belief machines, and the narratives they run on are increasingly memetic: He described financial markets not just as economic systems, but as mechanisms for harvesting collective belief—what he called “hyperstition.” This dynamic explains the cycles of hype and crash, where inflated visions event