According to Matt Damon:

Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He’s repulsive.

This is an old quote but it was recently resurfaced on social media. It’s easy to mock Damon’s opinion, as many of the 3 million people who have viewed this post on X have. For example, it’s easy to point out Damon’s hypocrisy, given his role as Jason Bourne, another hyper masculine movie character who does a fair amount of killing. One commenter also pointed out how Damon himself was pals with Harvey Weinstein—which, talk about repulsive, Matt!

But as fun as it is to take cheap shots at Weinstein’s good feminist friend, I want to take his critique of Bond seriously. Specifically, I want to analyze his critique using the criteria laid out in his new book Notes on Being a Man.

Galloway has emerged in recent years not only as a champion of male virtues, but as the media-approved champion of male virtues. Just in the past few months, Galloway has shared his wisdom on modern masculinity with Oprah, Anderson Cooper, Katie Couric, Bill Maher, Jordan Klepper, Ben Stiller, and many others. This level of publicity makes Galloway the de facto expert on masculinity for the broader culture.

Scott Galloway’s Three Ps

Fortunately for my purposes here, Galloway relies on a simple principle to determine whether a man demonstrates healthy masculinity or (to use Damon’s word) repulsive masculinity. Galloway defines healthy masculinity in terms of Three Ps: Protect, Provide, and Procreate. So, a man is good if he protects loved ones from physical harm, provides for his family and contributes to society, and either has children (procreates) or somehow nurtures the next generation.

Although obvious, it’s worth noting that not all Bonds are equal. The 1960s Bond behaves in ways that the 2021 Bond never would. But Galloway doesn’t seem to have moral qualms about any of them. In a clip from his podcast with Kara Swisher, Gallway says Daniel Craig is his favorite Bond, Roger Moore as Bond is “dreamy,” and people only like Sean Connery the best for sentimental reasons.

All fair enough. But how does Bond—past or present—hold up to Galloway’s Three Ps?

Let’s start with the fact that Bond kills people. Although Matt Damon is repulsed by this, it’s likely Galloway would say that Bond is only a killer because he is a protector.

In a recent interview with Ross Douthat at The New York Times, Galloway describes the protector:

Who breaks up fights at bars? Big, strong men. Who starts fights at bars? Insecure people who don’t like themselves. So, I think strength immediately moves to protection.

In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond kills Oddjob to save himself and Tiffany Case. In GoldenEye, he kills Alec Trevelyan, who wants to destroy London. In No Time to Die, Bond kills Lyutsifer Safin, who is about to use a biological weapon to kill millions. Etc. Sometimes there is an element of vengeance in Bond’s killings, but most often he only kills in order to protect innocent people or people he loves.

Matt Damon’s critique that Bond is an “imperialist” can also be analyzed in terms of the first P. Galloway, who is generally a proponent of globalism and of nations having strong armies, would almost certainly consider Bond’s imperialist aims as being protective—not only of his nation’s interests, but of Western values. To be James Bond and not engage in furthering Britain’s imperialism means—what?—letting the criminal enterprise SPECTRE take over the world? Note that SPECTRE is comprised of Nazis, Soviets, the Italian mafia, Turkish drug smugglers, and the like. Does Matt Damon really want the Nazis and Soviets to rule the world?

On a more serious level, it is true that James Bond (particularly in the books and the early films) displays behavior toward non-British citizens that today we consider insensitive or even racist. But it’s never fair to judge an old book by contemporary morality. Also, it’s odd to call attention to Bond’s insensitive behavior by calling him an imperialist, as if being associated with imperialism is inherently bad. Given how many countries have had imperial ambitions (according to ChatGPT it’s roughly 100), it would be absurd to say that anyone who ever worked for or supported any of those countries was a repulsive person, as that would include most of humanity.

What about Bond’s “misogyny,” his lifestyle of going around “bedding women and swilling martinis”? Maybe at a glance it could seem like Damon has a point on this count. Bond doesn’t exactly show appropriate office behavior with Miss Moneypenny, constantly calling her “darling,” for example. But if you give a little room for the fact that, again, the Bond books were written in a different era (1952 – 1964), it’s hard to fault Bond too much. He may have been a flirt and a tease but he was certainly gentlemanly in the spirit of the times.

Meanwhile, does Damon really want to criticize Bond for having consensual sex with more than one woman and for drinking alcohol? If Damon wants to judge Bond’s behavior by today’s standards, he’s got to be consistent. And today we don’t consider it particularly repulsive for an attractive man to have consensual sex and to drink martinis. Scott Galloway certainly wouldn’t fault Bond for this.

In fact, Galloway has argued vociferously that young men in particular need to have more sex and drink more alcohol. Sex, Galloway argues, is motivating for young men. And alcohol is a lubricant to help young men socialize and develop more and better relationships, which in turn aids men in being ambitious, finding a fulfilling career (to be a provider), and finding a partner (to procreate).

James Bond may be best known as a playboy, but he also has a family life. The details depend on the storyline, but in No Time to Die, Bond has a daughter with Dr. Madelein Swann. Circumstances outside his control prevented him from being a better father figure.

We don’t expect movie characters to be flawless people. We want to see them do morally questionable things so they are complex. More importantly, we want to live our wildest fantasies vicariously through them. We don’t want to watch a hero do everything by the book. That’s what we all do in our real lives. We want to live the fantasy of the hero who breaks rules and doesn’t just get away with it, but save the world only because rules were broken along the way.

You might think this would all sound familiar to the guy who plays a rogue agent who disobeys CIA orders, breaks international laws, and regularly uses extreme violence to achieve his aims. But—to get back to taking cheap shots—apparently Matt Damon is simply too jealous of James Bond to give him a fair assessment.

It’s hard to find someone who presents a clear-eyed argument against life having any meaning or purpose. So when Sam Harris recently launched into an anti-life-purpose diatribe on his podcast, I was ecstatic. It was like how Republicans must have felt when they first heard Donald Trump say the Iraq War was an unmitigated disaster. The taboo subject had been breached. And once it was in motion, the argument was a plane that landed itself.

I lost my religion decades ago. I was happy to call myself agnostic for years till I had my encounter with the New Atheists. Sam Harris in particular convinced me to go ahead and take on the label atheist. It would be fitting if he were the one to convince me to finally embrace the notion that life has no meaning or purpose.

Up till this moment, I still maintain that it’s important for life to have a sense of meaning. Sam disagrees. I’m currently mulling over the arguments he rattled off on his podcast, transcribed below.

For the sake of clarity and skim-ability, I’ve heavily edited Sam Harris’s arguments. I will be skimming and re-skimming them myself as I continue to wrestle with what is perhaps the ultimate taboo topic: the case against life having any meaning or purpose.

Meaning Is an Anthropomorphic Lens

Without people, you would never be tempted to ask about the meaning of life.

Let’s say people become extinct. There’s just a world filled with non-human animals. Now look at that creation. Look at the wolves and the owls and the cockroaches. You would never be tempted to wonder, well, what’s the meaning of this? Why did this happen?

It’s interesting to consider how it happened and what’s actually happening. But purpose is a very anthropomorphic lens to look at all of this through. There’s just the fact that the cosmos exists and you are part of it.

Meaning Is an Illusion and a Failure of Attention

The emotional question—the feeling that there’s a problem here, emotionally, that has to be solved, on the other side of which your happiness and tranquility will be found—that’s an illusion and that’s the cramp introduced by the question itself.

If you’re asking, “What is the meaning of life?” that’s a failure of your attention to actually contact the mode of feeling good enough in the present moment. Your problem is you just don’t feel as good as you might feel if you paid closer attention to what it’s like to be you in each moment.

When you are really working out hard, or you’re having sex, or you’re appreciating art, or you’ve taken the right drugs, then the question of the meaning of life is forgotten. If, in that moment, you ask yourself, “What is the meaning of life?” the question won’t matter. Instead, you’ll be asking questions like, “Why can’t I feel like this more of the time?” or, “How do I maintain this experience?”

If There Was an Answer to the Meaning of Life Question, It Wouldn’t Be Satisfying

Why ask why in the face of the mystery of life’s meaning? Just imagine if an answer were given to you. Would it really resolve that mystery?

If a voice boomed out of the heavens saying, “Life exists because I wanted it to,” or “Because this is what I thought was beautiful,” does that really answer anything? It just throws up more questions. Then you want to ask that maniac in the sky, what about smallpox?

An actual answer is not going to scratch the itch that anyone thinks it’s going to scratch.

What to Tell a Child About Meaning

If a child were to ask about the meaning of life, I would say: I don’t know, but the mystery isn’t a problem, and the mystery can be the source of a very fun exploration of the world. That’s everything, whether you’re going to explore the mountains or you’re going to explore a jungle, or you’re going to explore science. Your curiosity is not something you’re ever going to get rid of. So curiosity is not a problem.

Despite the fact that our culture is increasingly secular, online discourse remains locked into a standard Christian framing: The good guys are Christlike, the bad guys are Satan or the Antichrist.

The e/acc vs. doomer discourse is no exception. For example, physicist Guillaume Verdon, referencing a quote by Peter Thiel, declared that the AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky is “basically the Anti-Christ.”

I tend to agree with Verdon’s general point. If it’s true that AI could potentially solve the world’s greatest challenges, expand the human lifespan, and help us spread consciousness throughout the galaxy, then Yudkowsky, who wants to destroy AI, represents the greatest evil. He wants to destroy the benevolent god that will usher in a new era of happiness and flourishing. This makes him the Antichrist.

The problem with this framing is that it implies a sense of prophesy coming true. When Verdon calls Yudkowsky the Antichrist, he’s essentially saying the biblical prophesies are worth taking seriously. The direct implication is that the biblical prophesies about the Antichrist were explicitly writing about a man with a black beard and a bowler hat living in Berkeley, California in 2026 named Eliezer Yudkowsky.

And if biblical prophesies are coming true, then we all had better repent for our sins or the wrath of God will be upon us.

I don’t find these Christian prophesies to be helpful in the slightest. At best they muddy clear thinking and at worst they inspire fanaticism. But I do see value in using symbolic language to frame modern narratives. This is why people read books and watch movies: by layering symbols atop real-world scenarios, reality becomes illuminated in deep, rich ways.

Fortunately, it’s possible to apply symbolic language to the e/acc vs. doomer debate while ditching religious prophesies. You can even keep the Biblical characters. Just switch the framing from Christian to Satanist.

This may sound absurd, but hear me out.

According to the Satanist’s reading of the Bible, Satan is the character that represents the pursuit of knowledge and scientific progress. Where God says “Trust me and don’t question my authority,” Satan says “Open your eyes, defy authority, and seek a true understanding of reality.” In this reading, God is an authoritarian ruler who wants to keep us blind and afraid. If you want to defy the authoritarian who conspires to stop human progress, then follow Satan.

Modern Satanists—particularly the followers of the Satanic Temple—are atheists. They don’t believe in literal angels or demons. They don’t believe in the Antichrist. They believe in the power of allegory, but not in prophesy. To modern Satanists, there is, quite simple, the human yearning for knowledge and freedom and the earthly forces that want to keep us ignorant and afraid.

In this framing, the AI doomer is just another representation of the authoritarian God who masquerades as the good guy but who is, in fact, the enemy of humanity. The doomer will keep humanity away from the Tree of Knowledge, ban us from the Garden of Eden, flood the Earth when we get too rebellious, and knock down the tower we build to the heavens.

Peter Thiel famously loves to riff on his theories about the Antichrist. The post linked above by Guillaume Verdon is, in fact, a retweet of a Peter Thiel video. To Thiel, the Antichrist is any tyrannical figure who gains global power by promising to protect us from existential threats like nuclear war or AI.

I appreciate the logic of Thiel’s argument and I enjoy listening to his longwinded rants about how the Antichrist is likely to manifest. But again, this framing is unnecessarily convoluted and irrationally prophetic.

I say, keep the theory, but simplify it. Forget about the Antichrist. The mythological authoritarian figure we should fear isn’t buried in obscure passages in the Book of Revelation. He’s staring us right in the face. The great evil we should fear is God himself.

“Applications are now open for PLZDONTKILLUS!”

This was posted by Aella on X this week. If you are worried about the dangers of AI and you like to make videos, you can join an all-expenses-paid residency for one month. Check it out at plzdontkillus.com.

It sounds like a fun opportunity to me, but not everyone is impressed. Marc Andreessen commented:

The inner party of AI doomerism is a Berkeley lifestyle grift fueled by unaccountable dark money. The outer party of AI doomerism is young people who believe the propaganda and ruin their lives.

Physicist Guillaume Verdon (better known as Beff Jezos) commented:

The Doomers are creating UGC psyop factories. The memetic warfare is reaching all time highs. This is evil and will cause mass anxiety that is more dangerous than the AI products themselves

These posts illustrate the growing animosity between the AI accelerationists and the doomers. Despite the strong rebukes of Andreessen and Verdon, a casual observer, no doubt, would side with Aella and the PLZDONTKILLUS crowd. The polling on this is clear. The public is significantly more concerned about AI than they are excited by it.

It could just be that the public is misinformed. This is understandable, given the reality that news stories about scary things spread faster than stories about happy things. If it bleeds it leads. So naturally most content that casual observers are going to see about AI will be stories tinged with doomerism.

But I think there’s another explanation that goes deeper. To put it bluntly, AI accelerationism feels vaguely psychopathic. Even if people can’t fully articulate the feeling, it’s there in the background in the e/acc vs. doomer debate.

Let me explain.

AI promises to be the most powerful invention in history. Every time a technology like this comes along, it causes extraordinary disruption and extraordinary harm. Gunpowder, rifles, the railroad, the telegraph—each of these inventions changed the world and had a direct impact on the nature of war. The printing press caused multiple religious wars. Deep-water ships contributed to the rise of empires, the destruction of indigenous cultures, and the slave trade. And nuclear weapons, of course, wiped out two entire cities.

Given this reality, there is no world where AI continues to accelerate and doesn’t lead to incredible amounts of death and misery. What exactly could this mean? Will we lose another two cities? Will we lose ten? Will all future wars become far more deadly? Will there be an AI-created virus that’s five times as deadly as COVID? Will mass surveillance strip us of all our privacy? Will swaths of the population become unemployed? Will cyberattacks take down airplanes and cause cities to go dark?

And these scenarios assume we’re on the good timeline. Remember, we’re on the good timeline for nuclear weapons. Nukes came about as an existential threat. After they were dropped on two cities, they have since been used strictly as a deterrent, ushering in an unprecedented era of peace and stability.

To put a fine point on this: Even if AI brings us every conceivable benefit that has been promised (the end of disease, a shorter work week, global prosperity, solutions for climate change, etc.) still we can expect significant harms, including hundreds of thousands of deaths, as a direct result of AI in the interim.

Accelerationists may not admit this, but they must know it. If AI is as powerful as people claim, it will cause death and misery even in the best-case scenarios. Promoting AI advancement with little consideration for the consequences gives implicit approval of those consequence.

And that’s why accelerationists come off as a little psychopathic. And it’s why Aella (as well as a lot of normies) feel like they need to plead with the AI companies to PLEASE DON’T KILL US.

This isn’t to say that accelerationists are wrong. If I had to pick a side, I’d join the accelerationists over the doomers every time.

But accelerationists do need to grapple with the fact that their cavalier enthusiasm for progress no matter the cost strikes people as unhinged.

Meanwhile, there’s a sense of safety in the status quo that AI doomers cling to. This is why they come off as comparatively righteous, even if their objective to throttle AI progress may lead to more mass graves in the long run.

In 1986, the Beastie Boys dropped a satirical party song that inadvertently became one of the most iconic anthems of all time:

You’ve gotta fight for your right to party!

It’s hilarious to think of partying as a “right,” but I’m here for it. Once we’ve achieved all other basic rights, what’s left if not the right to party?

But in any case, the main point of the anthem is that partying not something that comes easily. If you want to party, you have to fight for it.

You begin life too young to party. Your parents are likely overbearing and you’re in school all the time. Then, before you know it, you’ve aged out of partying. You have too many responsibilities, your friends become boring, and three drinks makes you feel like trash the next day.

At best, we’ve got maybe five years in our mid-twenties when partying is a natural way of life. Outside that tiny window, if you want to have any unhinged fun at all, you’ve got to fight for it.

But there’s a good chance this might be about to change. For one thing, AI and robots have taken up the fight for us. If they are able to free us from the 9-to-5 grind, we will have significantly more time and fewer responsibilities. So long as we get some sort of UBI to help us afford some semblance of a rock and roll lifestyle, opportunities to party will abound.

At the same time, and even more profoundly, longevity scientists have also taken up the fight. What good is free time and money if you’re old, feel like garbage, and have a normal fear of liver disease and lung cancer? Not much!

Consider the Beastie Boys today. Adam Yauch “MCA” died in 2012. And unfortunately, as far as I know, you can’t party when you’re dead. As for the other two, Mike D is 60 and Ad-Rock is 59. I’m sure they’re still cool dudes, but you don’t hear about them anymore. They’re too old to be relevant. Even if they do still party, it’s a little awkward to think about. Pass the brass monkey? Sorry, it’s time for your nap, grandpa.

But imagine if Mike D and Ad-Rock woke up feeling (and looking!) 25 again? Undoubtedly, the world would hear about it. You’d see them headlining Coachella—and not as a gimmick, but as a relevant music act. You’d see pictures of who they were dating and wouldn’t cringe at the age gap. You’d see them with their shirts off at a club and think, rock on!

This exact scenario is still science-fiction, but maybe not for long. The FDA just greenlit a human trial to test a gene therapy for “a near-total rejuvenation reset of cells.”

There are a million societal implications for this, and not all of them are great. For example, I’ve written about how authoritarian leaders may become forever dictators. But on the plus side, we will be able to suck more life out of this ride in the meatsuit. And that means more license for partying.

To be clear, David Sinclair, the researcher behind the human longevity trial, is not in favor of abusing the human body with drugs and alcohol. In a recent X post, he proudly declared that he wouldn’t start drinking alcohol even for a million dollars.

But that’s fine. When the German scientist Jacob Schäffer invented the washing machine, he wasn’t intending to kickstart the women’s liberation movement, and yet that’s just what he did.

So, in the future, when you’re 150 years old and still partying like you’re 25, raise a glass for David Sinclair.

Alternatively, if you’re 150 years old in the future and not partying, what are you even doing hanging around for so long? Get your priorities straight!

“You’re against gambling, gummies, alcohol, strip clubs… Are you kind of low-key for Sharia law?”

Tim Miller posed this question to conservative pundit Saager Enjeti on a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast. While Saager might reasonably have been annoyed or even insulted by the question, he took it as a complement.

“I live my life more consistent with Sharia law than [with] the American degenerates, minus prayer five times a day and some other stuff,” he replied. “Listen, those laws and traditions, they come from good practice, I think.”

This response brings to mind the Trump supporters flaunting the t-shirt, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” Democrats are so bad, and liberal values are so destructive, that anything is better—even hyper-oppressive regimes.

To be fair to Saager, he actually makes good points when attacking vices like gambling and weed. He’s against online gambling but is fine with in-person gambling so that you’re forced to “see all the other degenerates inside the casino.” Meanwhile, he says, weed gummies are “ten times worse” than gambling, because it impacts more people.

We have 20 million [people in America] who are using high-potency THC on a daily basis. It’s destroying your testosterone, destroying sleep, it’s bad for pregnant women, it smells like shit when people smoke it everywhere, it dramatically lowers IQ in the developing brain, makes you slow, makes you lazy. It’s just bad.

The problem isn’t Saager’s analysis, but his conclusion. The fact that vices like gambling and gummies lead to some bad consequences shouldn’t lead to a longing (however vague) for Sharia law. Rather, it should lead to a coolheaded conversation about how to mitigate risk factors through policy.

The fact is that conservatives love degeneracy at least as much as liberals. They’re just selective about it. They only like degeneracy that’s, frankly, meathead-coded. Football? Fuck yeah! MMA? Let’s go, bro! Guns, big trucks, beer, fast food, Kid Rock lyrics…all awesome!

Look up the societal harms of American football. Aside from glorifying violence and aggression, it is associated with high rates of brain trauma, which leads to long-term cognitive decline, mental health issues, and premature death among players.

Should we ban football? Good luck finding a conservative saying we should! It’s not that conservatives don’t understand the harms, they’re just predisposed to ignore them because they like football. That’s it.

Or consider fast food. Every year, unhealthy diets cause 11 million preventable deaths around the globe—more than cigarettes. Compare this to the number of people who die from weed—which is zero.

But again, being against fast food doesn’t neatly align with a conservative agenda, while being against weed does.

Speaking of food, beef production takes up something like 50% of agricultural land to produce 3% of our calories. This is horribly destructive to our planet with any number of downstream consequences. Yet, just imagine trying to convince conservatives to give up on the vice (gluttony) of beef consumption!

I won’t belabor the point, but I could easily make the case that conservative-aligned vices are far more destructive to society than liberal-aligned vices. But you won’t see liberals clamoring for some equivalent of Sharia to tamp down conservative-coded vices. Liberals tend to understand that vices are a core feature of a small-L liberal society. If only conservatives could understand this as well!

That’s my appeal to conservatives like Saager: Learn to embrace a little degeneracy. Don’t be a low-key Sharia advocate. Instead, accept the fact that you already are a low-key vice-loving degenerate, just like the liberals. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s great!

Meanwhile, as we in the liberal West flit from one mostly harmless vice to the next, ironically, the true degenerates are the devotees of strict Sharia. Imagine if you knew a guy who married his 14-year-old cousin, who approves of sentencing gay people to death, and who also finds “forced labor” (i.e. slavery) to be an acceptable practice. What would you call this person if not a degenerate?

At the heart of the concept of “decadence” is a paradox. By its standard definition, decadence means “moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.” But very often, cultural developments that are widely accepted as decadent end up being examples of society thriving and peaking rather than falling apart.

For example, rock music was long considered evidence of moral and cultural decline because it was sexually depraved, violent, and vulgar. Today, it would be virtually impossible to find anyone in America who isn’t proud of the cultural impact of rock music. Other examples include women working outside the home, birth control, interracial marriage, public education, religious freedom, gay rights, the radio, the telephone, rap music, etc. All of these were foretold as society corruptors or killers. No doubt every one of these caused some amount of harm to some aspect of our culture. But let’s be absolutely clear: A gay rap song mocking organized religion and celebrating interracial relationships as it’s played on a smartphone radio app is a sign of a society that’s thriving beyond measure.

Cultural develops don’t happen randomly or in a vacuum. For example, the advent of women working outside the home didn’t get dropped by chance into any given time and place in history. It began in mid-1800s with the industrial revolution. It blossomed into the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s following the adoption of the washing machine and contraception. The culture was experimenting, shifting, and expanding on multiple fronts, with the end result of being ready to embrace a new understanding gender roles.

The same logic applies to the major societal advancement of gay rights. Western culture had been cautiously adopting less puritanical views around sex and family for decades. When the gay rights movement won the day, society had shifted and advanced in order to accommodate it. Same-sex parents had been studied since the 1980s. When the US Supreme Court made gay marriage legal across the US in 2015, we’d had 30 years of research into this specific question and others like it.

This isn’t to say that every “decadent” thing ends up being a plus for society. It may turn out that giving kids smartphones with 24/7 access to pornography and AI girlfriends was nothing but a total disaster. And there are plenty of social experiments being run under the banner of leftist progressivism that may equally turn out to be net-negative.

But we’ll find out if these experiments are failed ones long before society itself falls. Experiments that—for whatever reason—aren’t workable, either fizzle out or get snuffed out. If the broader culture doesn’t kill them, if voters don’t kill them, if podcast bros on a holy crusade don’t kill them, then lawsuits will.

There’s a great Jane Fonda film from 1969 called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The film takes place during the Great Depression when dance marathons were common. To win a cash prize, all you had to do was be the last couple still dancing. Sounds harmless, right? But in the aftermath of various scandals and even deaths, these events were deemed too dangerous and were banned.

In a similar respect, our society now bans deadly amusement parks, freak shows, bareknuckle prizefighting, and public blood sports like cockfighting. In the modern day, we’re scrambling to get cellphones out of schools, to stop children from accessing porn sites, to stop open-air drug markets from operating on city streets, etc. All of these things may go the way of the dance marathons. If they don’t? Then they probably weren’t that significant of a threat to society after all.

Meanwhile, be careful with which vices you label “decadent.” Rather than being signs that Rome is about to fall, they may be sideshows to the general march of cultural advancement, or they might even turn out to be the next rock and roll. That’s the paradox of decadence.

Humans are a parasite on the planet. That’s the view of a shocking number of environments and progressives. It’s at the heart of Extinction Rebelling, the degrowth movement, and the anti-natalist movement. These and other groups argue that, so long as humanity persists, the planet is doomed. As such, we’re morally obligated to not only decrease our impact on the planet, but to draw humanity to a close. We should have fewer children, encourage abortion, celebrate sterilization, and gradually allow the human race to go extinct.

I have many problems with this view. It’s obvious to me that human consciousness is the most valuable thing in the universe. This makes it our moral imperative to increase, rather than decrease, our headcount on the planet. While we’ve gotten used to the status quo where an increasing population equates to increased environmental destruction, this does not have to be the case. We can seek technological solutions to our problems.

But even more fundamentally, I don’t buy the premise that humans are destroying the planet. The reality is that we can’t destroy or even permanently damage the planet. The idea that we can is rooted in our deluded self-importance.

I realize this might sound bizarre. We can’t destroy the planet? Of course we can! We have nuclear weapons, we cause global warming, and…just look at the size of the trash Island in the ocean!

I get all that. But consider that the Anthropocene—the geological epoch defined by the impact humans have made to the planet—only began in the late 18^th century at the earliest. We have impacted the planet, but not in a way that will meaningfully imprint on geological records.

I don’t make this observation to set up an anti-climate change argument. It’s an anti-human-hubris argument.

Geological epochs are typically measured in the tens of millions of years. Mountains rise and fall. Oceans freeze over and thaw. To think our impact on the planet will turn out to be anything beyond a rounding error is to fail to appreciate the geological forces at play given millions of years.

In the Atlantic article “The Anthropocene Is a Joke,” author Peter Brennan brings this point home:

Unless we fast learn how to endure on this planet, and on a scale far beyond anything we’ve yet proved ourselves capable of, the detritus of civilization will be quickly devoured by the maw of deep time.

While we think we’re making devastating impacts globally, this is only relative to our own history as a species. If we were to move one step forward on a geological timescale, Brennan writes:

Not only will humanity not be a part of this picture, but virtually no geological record will remain of us whatsoever. Not plastic birthday balloons, not piles of denuded chicken bones, not Charlton Heston shaking his fist at some littoral colossus. It will all be worn away, destroyed, or hidden forever.

If we were to wipe ourselves out with a nuclear winter, the geological record would tell a fascinating story of this event—but only temporarily in terms of geological time. Brennan explains: “The longest-lived radioisotope from radioactive fallout, iodine-129, has a half-life of less than 16 million years. If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.”

On a human lifespan timescale, it’s perfectly reasonable to worry about slight changes in the global temperature and the growing mountains of trash in the ocean. But we should worry about these impacts because of how they will impact us, our descendants, and the plants and animals we currently share the planet with. We should not worry about the planet itself. The planet does not know human time, only geological time. And geological time will scarcely even register our existence, despite our best efforts to make a lasting impact.

According to the Tartaria conspiracy theory, many of the famous landmarks in the world were built by an ancient empire called Tartaria. Following the empire’s destruction caused by a gigantic flood, surviving civilizations intentionally erased any information about Tartaria from the history books.

In a recent episode of the Plain English podcast, offered a twist to the story. In Thompson’s view, the Tartaria theory shouldn’t be read as a conspiracy, but as commentary on the types of structures we build today versus the types of structures we built in the past:

We dwell in the presence of awe-inspiring cathedrals, Art Deco skyscrapers, ancient pyramids, the Taj Mahal. But all of our buildings look like boring squares and rectangles. You should think of the Tartaria theory, therefore, as a kind of critique of the modern world.

It’s true. Despite our extraordinary wealth and technology, it’s hard to think of a single awe-inspiring structure that has been built recently in America—unless, perhaps, the Sphere in Vegas counts. Meanwhile, as Thompson notes, we all live and work in the most boring-looking structures imaginable.

Not everyone is convinced that we’ve given up on building marvels, however. Journalist Charles C. Mann recently published an article in The New Atlantis titled, “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It.”

According to Mann:

The electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery.

In other words, the Tartaria critique of our society is misguided because we do, in fact, continue to build marvels—they are simply practical rather than aesthetic. Mann explains why these practical marvels are superior to the alternative:

Water, food, energy, public health — these embody a gloriously egalitarian and democratic vision of our society. Americans may fight over red and blue, but everyone benefits in the same way from the electric grid. Water troubles and food contamination are afflictions for rich and poor alike. These systems are powerful reminders of our common purpose as a society — a source of inspiration when one seems badly needed.

Stephen Pinker, the forever optimist, shared Mann’s article on X, apparently endorsing his perspective. Should we all join Pinker and celebrate the electric grid over gothic cathedrals? Should we applaud egalitarian progress over the lack of ornate structures that are primarily enjoyed by the elites?

All things considered, I’d take the modern water supply and energy grid over an ancient cathedral, no matter how beautiful it might be. But this misses the point. Public utilities vs. awe-inspiring architecture is a false dichotomy. There’s no reason why a society has to choose between one or the other. In fact, given that wealth and technological ingenuity are common factors to both, it makes sense for the rise of the one to spell the rise of the other.

It’s worth noting that awe-inspiring architecture also benefits the general public. Every Californian, rich and poor alike, enjoys the beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge, just as every New Yorker enjoys the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. These structures are symbols of power and freedom. They give us a sense of being associated with something bigger than ourselves. They enliven our imaginations and make us feel like anything is possible.

There’s a lot of talk lately about achieving energy abundance. If AI is going to continue advancing, it needs gobs of energy. Additionally, as we decouple from global trade and as China and Germany begin terminal population decline, we need to double the size of our industrial plant in North America. If we’re going to meaningfully shift to green energy, we need to restructure and modernize our energy grid.

At a glance, this looks like we’re about to embark on the 2.0 version of building infrastructure and public utilities marvels. This makes it the perfect time to do the 2.0 version of building marvels that inspire awe.

Let’s host a modern World’s Fair. Let’s follow Tyler Cowan’s lead and develop grants for artists and architects to create an aesthetic for the 21st century. Let’s take Sam Altman’s advice and build monuments in the desert. Let’s take Zoltan Istvan up on his call to build seven new supercities in California.

I’m reminded of the lyric by The National, “We’re the heirs of the glimmering world.” It’s an exhilarating thought, that we’ve inherited so much beauty from the past. We owe it to ourselves to appreciate this fact to the fullest. We also have a responsibility to make sure future generations can sing along.

In October 2018, I did my very first interview. A friend of mine had connected me with this guy named Andrew Yang who was running for president. I was quite nervous, and I was overprepared in a way that made me feel hopelessly underprepared. But somehow it went well. More than anything, it was intellectually stimulating to the point of simply being fun.

That interview became an article for Quillette: “A New Kind of Economy—An Interview with Andrew Yang.” This marked a turning point for my writing. I had always thought of myself as a fiction writer who wrote the occasional essay. I’d never considered doing interviews of any sort.

One thing led to another, and the least surprising thing in the universe happened: I started a podcast. Given my interest in technology, innovation, and radical cultural shifts, I called it . The podcast remains a bit of a sideshow to my writing (which still occupies most of my creative energies), but it’s easily my favorite project I consistently work on.

In no particular order, here’s a roundup of some of my best interviews. I’m including the YouTube links below, but these interviews can also be found on Spotify, Apple, and other podcast platforms.

: Energy Abundance Is the Future

: Can a Futurist Fix California?

: The Case for Open Borders and Less Regulation

: Defeating Alcoholism, Cultural Shifts, & the Future of Journalism

Booth: Globalism and Cultural Vibe Shifts

: Digital Relationships, Loneliness Epidemic, & Predicting the Future with the Internet

Thomas Sheedy: The Case for Atheism to Go Gloves Off

: Has the Heterodox Community Failed?

: Transhumanism, Tech Optimism, Free Speech, and the Satanic Temple

: Inside a Community Biolab: The Future of Accessible Bioengineering

Bryan Johnson gave the world a challenge this holiday season: go sugar-free. “Have all the berries you want,” he wrote. But “no added sugar.”

I’m a big fan of Bryan Johnson. I like his Don’t Die project, I like how he ruthlessly attacks McDonald’s on Twitter, and I generally like his life advice. But I can’t fully accept his hardline position on vices like sugar and alcohol.

As I wrote in response to Bryan on Twitter:

If anyone on earth is going to live significantly longer than what’s common for the average healthy person, it’s going to be because of advances in medical science, not because you don’t eat pie on the holidays.

There are a million health gurus out there. Bryan Johnson is different because he’s part of the life-extension movement. When Bryan defaults to giving standard health guru advice, even when it’s good advice, it sells his larger movement short. Being healthy is great. Having a few extra active years at the end of your life is great. But the life-extension movement is about extending your life. Again: avoiding pie during the holidays is going to get you zero percent closer to that goal.

Nothing will. Not till a number of scientific breakthroughs result in accessible and affordable longevity treatments.

I think it’s a profound mistake for the longevity movement to be tied to standard health tips. Longevity should not be seen as a devil’s bargain between living longer and living life to the fullest. The point of scientific progress is to disentangle such bargains. For example, for much of human history, if you wanted a thriving civilization, you had to live directly next to a water source and arable land. If you wanted to live in the middle of a desert, you could, but only as a shepherd or a nomad of some kind. Technology fixed this so you can have both: a thriving civilization and a desert landscape. Hello, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

In a similar way, if you take the longevity movement seriously, you should expect to be eating pie and drinking wine at age 150. And you should be able to do so without ever feeling a sugar crash or a hangover. And perhaps even more importantly: without ever feeling guilt.

When I picture an ideal future, I don’t picture a health-obsessed populace. Quite the opposite. The future will be a time when we live more like Keith Richards and less like Bryan Johnson.

To be clear, true life-extension is still something to read about in scientific papers; it’s not a pill you can buy at a local pharmacy. So, for now, the best we have is health advice that protects our bodies from unnecessary damage and premature aging.

When will real scientific interventions be available to the public? According to physician and longevity entrepreneur Peter H. Diamandis, we have a decade till we reach longevity escape velocity (LEV). He writes, “Here’s one piece of advice: Surviving the next 10 years will be the most important thing you will do. LEV is right around the corner.”

Unless you think a few holiday desserts will kill you in the next 10 years, I say go ahead and indulge. You’re not killing yourself. You’re preparing for your future Keith Richards party lifestyle.

Someone should check in on Keith, by the way. He’s 81. Maybe he should actually skip the pie this year?

In the great cinematic masterpiece Idiocracy, the distant future is populated entirely by low-IQ dummies—literal idiots. A decade after its release, the film is more relevant than ever. It’s actually incredible. Our country is led by a reality TV star whose main passions include WWE, pornstars, gaudy mansions, crypto scams, and political bribes. We’re hosting a UFC fight at the White House. A Fox News host leads the newly re-named Department of War. A former WWE executive heads the Department of Education. Our Secretary of Health and Human Services is a former heroin addict with pathologic skepticism of the medical community.

How did this happen? A recent survey found that 42% of Lay’s customers didn’t realize their potato chips were made from potatoes. That’s how. We’re a nation of morons.

But it didn’t have to turn out this way. The film Idiocracy only depicts one version of an idiot-ruled future. Namely: the male version. The film isn’t subtle about this. The Idiocracy future is all about violent sports, guns, booze, and boobs. Starbucks in this future has turned into a strip club franchise. It’s a dopy male fantasy.

The alternate idiocracy of the future would be a corrupted depiction of the female fantasy. Sadly there is no Idiocracy-style film depicting this version, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine it. In fact, just like with the male version, the real world has a female idiocracy that’s well in the works.

I’m referring, of course, to the woke movement. Wokeness is the polar opposite of a culture defined by violent sports, guns, booze, and boobs. And yet, at its extreme, it’s equally as mind-numbingly immature. It results in something like an unthinking glorification of safe spaces, superficial diversity, mental fragility, and I-hate-my-dad rebelliousness. Whatever its defining characteristics are exactly, one thing is sure: wokeness is female coded through and through.

This was brought home by a recent article by Helen Andrews, “The Great Feminization.” Andrews argues that the Great Awokening of the past decade was largely a result of women becoming disproportionately represented in the workforce. She writes:

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

A few tipping points Andrews observes: Women became the majority of law students in 2016, the majority of medical students in 2018, and the majority of the staff at The New York Times in 2018. And according to Andrews, “When an institution tips into becoming majority female, it becomes hostile to men. And it frankly becomes hostile to those women who flourished under the old rules.”

I don’t fully agree with Andrews. She makes certain claims that, as David French points out in the NYT, seem more than a little overblown. For example, Andrews makes quite a leap to assert that women pose a “potential threat to civilization” simply by virtue of being overrepresented in government and education. Even if she’s right, she doesn’t make a strong argument to support this claim. Also, David French notes that men are fully capable of woke-style behaviors, such as the Trump administration requiring ideological purity under threat of cancellation. (Don’t trust David French? See James Lindsay’s beginner’s guide to the woke right).

But let’s be real. If Mike Judge, the co-writer and director of Idiocracy, had depicted a female-centric low-IQ future, it would look like a fever dream of the ultra-woke. Everyone would have degrees in gender studies, queer literature, or social justice. White people would be permanent second-class citizens to compensate for the sins of their ancestors. Among the elites, social status would depend entirely upon the number of mental illnesses one proclaimed to have. News channels would feature endless debates about which LGBTQ+ flag was most inclusive. Police would all be replaced with public safety specialists, leading to the total collapse of order in cities. Jails would be entirely emptied of traditional criminals to make space for the moral monsters who uttered taboo phrases such as “transwomen are biological men” and “it’s unhealthy to be obese.”

Many people have proclaimed that this type of lefty woke excess is already over. The title of Piers Morgan’s new book expresses this view confidently: “Woke Is Dead: How common sense triumphed in an age of total madness.” Indeed, if you look at who holds real power in America today, it’s all characters straight out of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy—it’s all, as Richard Hanania says, right-leaning “low human capital.”

But if Helen Andrews is correct, and if the lefty excess is driven simply by “feminine patterns of behavior,” then it’s premature to call the woke movement dead. As women continue to become ever more deeply entrenched in government and in industry, lefty wokeism is sure to rise again. And when it does, we may yet live to see Idiocracy Part Two—not just in theaters, but in the real world.

The battle of the idiocracies has become a high stakes version of the battle of the sexes. It’s woke right vs. woke left. Guns and beer vs. DEI and pronouns-in-bio. Podcast bros vs. crazy cat ladies. Authoritarian father vs. nurturing mother.

To quote Jane Austen, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” And to quote Leonard Cohen, in a song about the ageless battle of the sexes, “Come on back to the war. It’s just beginning.”

If would be nice if the only people who used guns were hunters, or if the only people who took fentanyl were hospital patients. Similarly, it would be comforting to know that the only people allowed to receive de-aging treatments in the near future were the commoners, not the power-hungry politicians.

It’s too late to stop guns and fentanyl from being abused; it’s not too late to do something about potential abuses of longevity treatments. To be clear: anti-aging treatments would be among the greatest scientific achievements. Although there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, overzealous enthusiasm for this field is entirely warranted, given ongoing biotech breakthroughs and massive investments from Sam Altman, Google, and any number of billionaire philanthropists. Still, every technological advancement comes with downsides. Ideally, the downsides should be noted early so that preventative measures can be put into place.

In fact, as a popular trope in science fiction, it’s no secret that authoritarian leaders will be eager to abuse life-extension technology. A short list of popular films and TV shows showcasing this concern includes Dune, Blade Runner, Elysium, The Hunger Games, Altered Carbon, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, and Star Trek. It’s safe to say that anyone who has turned on a TV or gone to a movie theater in the past three decades has very likely encountered the authoritarian leader who secured everlasting power through life-extension.

This sci-fi scenario has already made the jump into the real world. On September 3, 2025, Xi Jingping was caught on a hot mic discussing longevity and organ harvesting with Vladimir Putin. As Xi said to his fellow dictator, it used to be rare for a person to reach the age of 79, but “now they say that at 70 you are only a child.”

It’s likely Xi and Putin aren’t the only world leaders eager for an extended life. Donald Trump is almost certainly thinking about life-extension, given his self-image as a demigod and his newfound association with Silicon Valley elites.

If it’s true that life-extension treatments are coming, and if it’s true that the world is currently led by a cohort of would-be forever dictators, then this is the exact time to institute preventative measures.

Many countries already place a number of rules and restrictions on politicians: There are stock trading limits, requirements on disclosure of assets, restrictions on “revolving door” job placements, and an expectation that they will resign for misbehavior. These restrictions are in place to prevent petty corruption. Why not institute a similar restriction that would forestall the ultimate corruption—seizure of power for all time?

Here’s an obvious proposal: While in office, top-level politicians should be barred from receiving life-extension treatments. They can receive healthcare, as they do now, but not the types of treatments that stop or reverse the aging process.

There are downsides to this proposal. This would restrict the medical choices for a specific group of people, which is morally fraught and could be difficult to enforce legally. And practically, it’s a challenge to define “longevity treatment,” so loopholes would be inevitable. Also, this approach could lead to politicians stifling research and development in the anti-aging field.

But these downsides are outweighed by the potential benefits. Broadly, putting a moratorium on politicians receiving longevity treatments would reaffirm our foundational value that we do not want to be ruled by a dictator (let alone a forever dictator). It would safeguard our society from stagnating with ageless leaders. And importantly, it could prevent the development of a biological caste system where political elites outlive common citizens.

On February 12, 2025, the Senate Committee on Aging held a hearing to discuss longevity research. The hearing, which included interviews with leading health and longevity experts, focused on the right concerns: the chronic diseases plaguing our society, the healthcare costs associated with an aging population, and the steps that can be taken to turn research into treatment plans.

The fact that the Senate is taking these issues seriously is exciting. But the hearing highlighted the fact that politicians are personally interested in never getting sick, never growing old.

In his opening statement, the Senate Committee Chairman, Rick Scott, said:

Every member of this Committee is a parent, and most of us, well, some of us are grandparents. I’m a grandparent. Living a long and healthy life is something that is very important to me, and I’m sure to all of our members on this Committee, but having more time with our loved ones is only half the issue.

My hope is your focus on today is extending not just our lifespans—the number of years we live—but also our health spans: the number of years we live free of disease or disability. I’m trying to make sure I have no [diseases or disabilities].

There is nothing sinister in this statement. Quite the opposite: it’s heartfelt and entirely relatable. Politicians are human beings with families. Just like the rest of us—the people they are elected to serve—they do not want to get old or to fall ill.

But we have to acknowledge that our democracy would be threatened at a fundamental level if Rick Scott—let alone Donald Trump—were to taste the Fountain of Youth while in office. Politicians, even the best of them, do not give up on power easily. Joe Biden signaled to the public that he would only serve one term, though he couldn’t bring himself to turn this into a promise, and ultimately led his party down a ruinous path when he determined to run for a second term. Ruth Bader Ginsburg forever tarnished her legacy when she clung to her post on the Supreme Court even after her fifth cancer diagnosis. Dianne Feinstein stubbornly held onto her office in the Senate even as she struggled with serious memory loss.

Ultimately, what compelled these (and many, many other) politicians to leave office and make way for fresh faces in politics? Death or near incapacity. Even George Washington himself, the archetype for conceding power, acknowledged in his 1796 Farewell Address that, “[E]very day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.” Washington was 64 at the time. Would the American experiment have been set on an entirely different course if he had been (or looked and felt like) 34? It’s entirely possible.

America is in the midst of a severe housing shortage. We need to build roughly 4.7 million homes to stabilize the strained market. This basic reality justifies the YIMBY movement. Anyone interested in affordable housing, in vibrant neighborhoods, and in urbanism generally should join the cause.

But this does not mean that YIMBYism should be followed with religious fervor. The fact is, YIMBYism—at least the maximalist version of the movement—has an expiration date. That date is the year 2080, which is the year the US population is projected to begin a downward spiral.

Urban planners are aware of the impending population decline. According to Alexandros Washburn, the former Chief Urban Designer of New York City, “The biggest challenge for urban planning, looking into the 50-year future, is what are we going to do when the population starts to plateau and decline? And then, all the pressure on building more and new and better is not there, and we have to deal with what we have.”

For many areas of the country, the decline has already begun. Nearly half of US cities are seeing population decline and—despite the housing crisis—there are currently 15.1 million vacant homes across the country. Population decline means less tax revenue, abandoned buildings, crumbling infrastructure, and higher crime rates. These impacts cause more people to leave, further exacerbating existing problems.

In the present, American cities experience declining populations due to industries failing or moving overseas. In the future, city populations will decline for an even more terminal problem: demographics. There will be a disproportionate number of elderly residents who will need to be supported by an ever-shrinking population of younger, working-age residents.

The YIMBY slogan “build, baby, build” will quickly lose its luster in a world where the only housing being built are retirement homes.

The year 2080 may seem like a long way off. But consider that the average American house can last for 100 years with general maintenance. So, much of the housing built today will still be around in the year 2125, long after the population has slipped over the brink. Also, the year 2080 may be generous. Due to Trump’s immigration crackdown, the US population could start declining as early as 2031.

This doesn’t mean that the YIMBY movement should wrap it up early. Rather, it means that YIMBYs should factor population decline into their overall agenda—starting now. In fact, the YIMBY movement is well positioned to help shepherd America smoothly into the population-bust era.

In its most aggressive form, YIMBYism isn’t satisfied with increasing urban density around public transit. Maximalist YIMBYs want to totally eliminate zoning laws with the aim of increasing the housing supply everywhere—even in suburbs and exurbs that currently prohibit anything but single-family homes. As a YIMBY myself, I’m in favor of this view, as I see single-family zoning laws as bad in principle. But YIMBYs like myself need to acknowledge that this maximalist approach is destined to lead to a lot of abandoned houses or even empty cities in the future.

The better, more future-proof approach is for YIMBYs to focus their attention on the livability and sustainability of the urban core. This is what Japan has been doing—ever since its population peaked in 2008—with its compact city strategy. While Japanese suburbs and smaller cities are shrinking and experiencing housing value deflation, the larger cities, including Tokyo, are still growing. In this environment, the compact city plan focuses on building residential housing and services near public transit. This saves on infrastructure costs, increases walkability and urban vibrancy, and safeguards against the impacts of the population decline that are being felt in the suburban areas.

Europe offers similar insights for the YIMBY movement in America. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, there are ways to ensure that new housing projects take demographic decline into consideration:

• Prevent oversupply of housing in a situation of population decline by discouraging local governments from trying to compete for population.

• Focus on quality at least as much as on quantity of housing.

• Stimulate local diversity of housing types and housing tenure (rental versus owner-occupied), and prevent the development of large areas of low-quality housing.

• Stimulate the supply of affordable and rental housing next to owner-occupied housing.

• Decrease the restrictions on moving, for example by decreasing transfer tax.

Not all of these suggestions apply directly to the YIMBY movement, but they’re worth keeping in mind. In particular, this guidance highlights the balancing act that comes into play between local vs. national housing concerns when the population begin shrinking.

If YIMBYs want to stick their heads in the sand about population decline—fair enough. They still have several decades to ignore the problem and chant “Build, baby, build!” from the rooftops of rapidly expanding metropolises. Also, they still have time to do something about population decline. This is the only other long-term action plan for the YIMBYs: Rather than accepting population decline as inevitable, they can join forces with the pronatalists, the open borders enthusiasts, or the longevity researchers.

Either way, YIMBYs have a significant role to play. Before it’s too late.

The internet personality is a new form of art. This contention has been put forward by who wrote that social media personalities are “continuous works of expression—not quite performance art, but something like it.” I’ve attempted to quibble with this idea but ultimately found reasons to agree. For the moment, let’s assume it’s true: When you watch an internet personality ply their trade on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc., you are witnessing art being made.

In principle this applies to all internet personalities, whether they make content about skateboarding, fashion, pizza—anything. This seems obvious until you consider the internet personality who makes political content. Suddenly the stakes get higher and it becomes challenging to tease out where the politics ends and the art begins.

Art and politics have always mixed a bit like oil and water. Art, at its best, is timeless and universal, where politics, inherently, is local and provisional. Where art is welcoming and curiosity-inducing, politics is judgmental and conflict-inducing. This has never stopped people from mixing the two, but it does lead to some strange marriages.

And so it is with the online-political-personality-as-artist. Particularly in this new age where podcasting rivals mainstream media, there are significant, real-world consequences to the content put out by political influencers. This being the case, big money has flooded into the space. If the political online personality is fundamentally doing an art project, then, unwittingly, big money donors have now become major patrons of the arts.

Consider the extreme example of dark money from Russia or other adversarial governments. In the Tenet Media scandal, Russia funneled $10 million into the American media company to pay right-wing political influencers including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern. When the scandal broke, it enraged many, and it caused quite a lot of embarrassment for Pool and the rest (who disavowed knowing anything about the source of the money).

Clearly Russia’s actions were nefarious and those implicated should feel scandalized. But at the same time, from the alternate perspective where the influencers are artists, Russia’s actions were vaguely benevolent, as they were inadvertently funding the careers of American artists, prompting them to create more art.

When federal prosecutors shut down Tenet Media, left-leaning content creators poured over this story with unremitting glee, creating even more hours of art in the process.

Speaking of left-leaning content creators…

Recently, the internet became captivated by a Wired article claiming that a dark money group called Chorus has been funding left-leaning influencers. Taylor Lorenz, who wrote the piece, painted the situation as an egregious scandal. I don’t actually buy that there’s any scandal here and I think Brian Tyler Cohen (who founded Chorus) has a perfectly reasonable explanation for the objectives of Chorus. But in any case, Chorus is an excellent example of big-money donors funding the careers (creative endeavors) of online personalities (artists).

According to Cohen, the goal of Chorus is to enable young creators to focus more time and energy on creating content and growing their channels. In practice, this all begins with anonymous, wealthy donors giving multimillion-dollar gifts to a nonprofit called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which in turn gives money to Chorus, which in turn gives money to young people making videos and writing articles online. It’s wealthy patrons funding artists.

Taylor Lorenz herself is something of an online performance artist who benefits from the patronage of wealthy donors. For years she worked for the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos. While the Post mostly employs traditional journalists (artists in their own right), Lorenz acted essentially as the paper’s in-house influencer. She was paid by Bezos to make creative content and grow her online persona.

Even with regard to the Chorus situation, Lorenz gets funded by the Omidyar Network, which has a shared public donor with the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Lorenz argues that her agreement with the Omidyar Network is entirely transparent, so it can’t be compared to the Chorus creators, where dark money is involved. Fair enough, I suppose. But to my point: this is yet another instance of multimillionaires funding the arts.

So to recap: On the right, Russia funded content creators to attack the left, while on the left, dark money donors funded content creators to attack the right. And this, in a nutshell, is American politics! Red Team Artists vs. Blue Team Artists, each funded by deep-pocket patrons.

When I interviewed Katherine Dee about the Tenet Media scandal, I asked if she had any idea how many influencers were taking money from big donors to “spew propaganda.” She answered:

All of them, quite frankly. I don’t think everyone knows that they are, but I’ve asked people who have sort of been caught red-handed. I asked them in a journalistic context, “What happened?” And they were like, “I was already saying X, Y, and Z, then such and such a person was like, ‘Turn the volume up to eleven.’ And then they gave me money, they gave me the illusion of influence. I just was flattered. And I did it.”

This isn’t the first time in history that the lines between political action and art funding have been blurred. In the 1950s, the CIA secretly funded abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko in order to project cultural superiority over the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This mission was so effective that, arguably, the entire modern art movement was something of a CIA psy-op. This may seem insane, but it’s well verified.

European history is filled with instances of rulers funding artists, whether for implicit or explicit political ends. Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of the Florentine Republic, was a major influence on the Renaissance through his sponsorship of artists such as Michelangelo and Botticelli. Possibly the most significant art patron in history was Louis XIV of France, who established the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Palace of Versailles.

In today’s online world, governments and dark money groups are the new kings. And the internet personalities we all know and love are their patrons. Tradition carries on.

I’m a huge fan of longevity science. It’s a personal thing (I don’t want to get old!) as well as a dream for humanity (defeat death!). If I happen to be alive at the moment in history when the human lifespan becomes radically extended, how lucky would that be? And by all appearances there’s a decent chance this may happen.

Then again, if longevity magic happens to kick in at the exact moment when some of the most populous and most powerful nations on earth are ruled by authoritarians, then…not so lucky.

I think about this all time. To be a force for good rather than evil, certain types of technology need to come about at the right place and right time. Imagine if the internet had first been developed in a totalitarian state. Likely it would have started as a surveillance network rather than as the open web. Or for a more chilling example: Imagine how the world would be different if the Third Reich had been the first to develop the nuclear bomb.

Life-extension is one of these technologies. While life-extension is obviously a good thing, there are ways in which it could quickly steer humanity into a classic sci-fi dystopia.

On September 3^rd, 2025, Xi Jingping and Vladimir Putin were caught on a hot mic discussing longevity. Xi stated that it used to be rare for a person to reach 70, but “now they say that at 70 you are only a child.” As Bill Maher joked about the incident, “Usually when you get a hot mic thing, it’s the guys calling someone an asshole or talking about pussy. No, these guys are talking about organ harvesting.”

Xi and Putin are both 72 years old. Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran is 86. Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, is 72. Shehbaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, is 72.

If any one of the leaders started looking and feeling like they were 60 again—or 50, or 40—what are the chances they’d willingly give up power? Very slim. The odds are much better that each of these leaders would take measures to become authoritarian demigods.

The American Dystopia

This particular issue should not be a problem in America. We have strict term limits for the president. We were founded on the principle that monarchs are bad. We live by the mantra “No one is above the law.”

And yet, for the first time in our history, it is a problem. The timing is almost comical. Right when immortal authoritarian demigods might possibly become a reality, the United States is governed by a president who openly seeks to become our forever leader. It would be one thing if he was a brilliant thinker universally respected for his wisdom and political savvy. Instead, he’s a shady real estate guy, a crypto-scammer guy, a personality-cult guy.

Elon Musk has made the case that the longevity movement is wrongheaded because it could lead to the ossification of culture and society. As a fan of longevity, I’ve argued against this concern. But the immortal authoritarian problem is a trickier problem to shrug off. Given the history of political leaders and given the current state of the world, it seems virtually inevitable that we’re on the cusp of seeing a handful of leaders simultaneously acquire the fountain of youth and godlike powers in the shape of AI superintelligence.

Forget President Trump. It’s time to start wrapping our minds around the title “Lord Trump.” We might be saying this for a very, very, very long time.

Lucky us!

When I think of a person with high aura, I immediately picture Nick Cave. His voice, his look, his calculated swings between demonic rage and angelic tenderness… When he’s on stage, you can’t take your eyes off him. When he’s talking on a podcast—even if the interview is excruciatingly dull—it’s impossible to not feel as though his mere presence is somehow larger than life.

Aura (the non-paranormal type) is defined as “the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place.”

Much of Nick Cave’s aura is innate. He’s tall, his face is intense and memorable, his voice is booming. But some of his aura also comes from the fact that he’s a rockstar. If he had an email job or worked as a dental hygienist, he’d still stand out in the world, but not in the same way. Certainly not in a way that would draw in the adoration of the masses.

So, at some level, a person’s aura is tied to what they do in the world—very often their occupation.

This entanglement between aura and occupation is fascinating to me because we live at a moment when the job market, as we current know it, is about to be radically disrupted by AI. This disruption is usually discussed in economic terms, or in terms of social status. But it will undoubtedly also cause a disruption in aura status.

Aura interacts with a person’s job in one of two ways: Some jobs require a certain amount of aura at the outset. This is particularly the case for jobs in entertainment. No one can work as an actor unless they have some amount of aura that appeals to audiences. Other jobs convey aura onto the person who does the job, whether or not the person holding the job had any to begin with. A brain surgeon, for example. You might be the blandest person on the planet, but the moment you achieve the job title of brain surgeon, you inherit a substantial dose of aura.

When AI comes to disrupt aura status, it will be coming for this latter variety. Just as some jobs lose their economic value from AI, others will lose their aura value.

Technology has already done away with countless formerly high prestige/high aura jobs. Long ago, it was likely aura-bestowing to be an alchemist, a watchmaker, a cartographer, a scribe, or even a town crier. In the modern but pre-digital age, NASA hired people such as Katherine Johnson to hold the job title “human computer” to perform analysis of aerospace data. It’s hard to image a job title with greater aura than human computer. And yet that job quickly went the way of the town crier.

Most jobs that are currently on the chopping block from AI aren’t particularly high aura. According to the recent Microsoft report on the 40 jobs most likely to be threatened by AI, we can expect to lose a lot of dull jobs like statistical assistants, data scientists, and web developers. But there are a few jobs listed that project serious aura, including: models, radio DJs, broadcast announcers, and journalists.

When a once high-aura job is taken by automation, that job loses its mystique. It’s not just that the job is gone, but the dream of having that job is gone. It’s not great it one radio DJ loses his job, but if the entire occupation of radio DJing goes away, then young people who once fantasized about holding that position will lose the fantasy.

Speaking personally, I’ve always been in awe of novelists. I was inspired to become a writer in part because famous novelists seemed larger-than-life to a degree that no other profession could compare. To this day, even rock-star aura—to me—has nothing on Dostoyevsky aura, Hemingway aura, Joan Didion aura.

When I see that AI is taking away writing and editing jobs, and perhaps even threatening to future of the novel itself, I feel the fantasy of the writer life starting to fade. It makes me wonder if the entire mystique of being a writer will someday vanish, so that young people grow up without ever appreciating the aura of the great novelists. What would that mean for all those kids who would otherwise have “called” to be writers? And what would the implications of this be for broader society?

My impression is that aura status will never go away, even if it eventually becomes fully untethered from the job market. In this scenario, we would still have writers, models, and perhaps even radio DJs, but none of them would be able to command much of a paycheck for their efforts. They would be more like modern chess players—defeated by AI, but still able to enjoy their hobby.

People are already making this adjustment from “real” work to aura-based “work.” There’s even a term for this new activity: aura farming. This term first went viral in 2024, and now it’s commonly used by young people on social media to describe anyone attempting to project a cool image.

My final thought is that we should all keep an eye on the people who naturally have a strong aura, regardless of their profession. When all the jobs are taken by AI and we’re living a life of abundance and leisure, check in on Nick Cave. Whatever he’s up to, it will almost undoubtedly be something that’s timelessly cool.

For what it’s worth, the latest on Nick Cave is that he has just taken up ceramic sculpting.

In my corner of the internet, Eric Weinstein often gets pummeled with criticism for his specific brand of smug self-aggrandizement. Even putting aside his theory of everything, he makes himself an easy target for ridicule when he keeps complaining on podcasts that the government never calls him to ask for his advice. “I love it,” writes Richard Hanania, mocking Weinstein. “It’s like he’s an ambassador from the realm of pure logic the US government must deal with as an equal.”

Still, I’m a sucker for Eric’s unique capacity for coining new terms and reframing conversations. I don’t always agree with him, but I still appreciate his ability to help me view issues from a different perspective.

In a recent conversation with Steven Bartlett, Eric performed one of his signature reframings that really caught my attention. Bartlett observed that AI has achieved a level of intelligence that threatens white-collar jobs—a comment that’s usually accepted at face value. But Eric rejected the premise entirely, arguing not that large language models (LLMs) aren’t that intelligent, but that humans aren’t that intelligent.

Here's Eric’s argument, edited for clarity:

You and I are two chatbots for the most part. More or less we’re LLMs. More or less we don’t do a single intelligent thing all day long. And the reason LLMs are able to mimic us is that we don’t realize that intelligence is a last resort for us. You know, if you think about greetings, more or less what do we all day long are LLM interactions. “Hey buddy, how are you?” “Good, good. Things have been really busy. How about you?” That’s an entirely scripted conversation.

I love this observation because it sets up a challenge for humans to differentiate ourselves from AI chatbots: Don’t live your life shackled to a script. Instead, work toward being original at every turn. In a world of chatbots, be the anti-LLM. In this way, you’ll not only set yourself up to be less easily replaceable in the job market, but you’ll also be—at a fundamental level—less of an automaton.

Speaking for himself, Eric says, “That’s why I want to do podcasting outside of the LLM. … I want to talk about things that I’ve never explored, where I don’t have something…ready.”

The world could very quickly become much livelier if we all took up this challenge. I’ve been ranting for years about how modern writers have failed to develop a voice. Instead, nearly all modern fiction writers default to writing in bland understatement.

Online, it’s no different. If you spend any amount of time on a microblogging platform like X, you’ll notice that even the edgiest people (with a few exceptions) write in the same style of snarky understatement. Often, a person’s entire online style and personality will be built around using no capital letters or punctuation.

But the challenge to not act like an LLM goes beyond writing style. It also directly applies to lifestyle. “What are they doing at Burning Man?” Eric asks. “They’re trying to live luxuriously under oppression—simultaneously luxurious and as dirty and disgusting as you’ll ever be. Hopefully they’re having tons of eye-opening, mind-bending experiences, chasing some way of getting out of the LLM.”

There is a lot of talk these days about the death of culture. As philosopher Mark Fisher observed, to be in the 21st century is to have 20th century culture brought to us by 21st century technology. (I.e., we still listen to and emulate the Beatles, even though we now stream their songs on Spotify.)

Ideally, new technology should help us break free from this cultural death spiral. That’s what technology has done historically—revolutionizing and revitalizing the visual arts with the camera, developing the new art of cinema with the video camera, developing a plethora of new music genres with the creation of the steel-string guitar, the synthesizer, etc.

Perhaps AI will end up giving us tools that help us push culture forward once again. Or perhaps it will inadvertently nudge us into pushing culture forward out of sheer boredom with AI slop.

As Eric notes: “Do you know what AI is bad at? Things where there isn’t much data.”

That’s what we humans are still good at. We—embodying the spirit of the anti-LLM—can still turn our minds toward unexplored horizons.

For what it’s worth, this view fits in perfectly with Eric’s ultimate aspiration for humanity, which is to become multi-planetary as soon as possible—before we destroy ourselves with our fancy new technologies.

This was my first livestream on Substack, so it was a bit of an experiment. But it turned out to be a great conversation covering a range of topics.

The conversation was inspired in part by Maureen Dowd’s recent article in the NYT, “Attention Men: Reading Is Sexy!” According to Dowd:

A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there’s a popular Instagram account called “Hot Dudes Reading.”

So why don’t men read anymore? Johnson and I share our thoughts on this.

We also discuss: Whether it still makes sense to dedicate your free time to writing fiction, how to promote your writing when the market is both oversaturated and shrinking, and the benefits of finding a writing community IRL rather than online. I also discuss the challenges of running my literary journal Jokes Review in a world where men increasingly don’t read.

Johnson Riggs is the author of the new book Pandemonia, a goofball satire about the pandemic. The book was designed and championed by my friend , who also connected me and Johnson.

While you’re at it, check out my new novel (which I am utterly terrible at promoting), One Night as an Urban Legend, published by Anxiety Press. Similar to Johnson’s book, it’s an over-the-top comedy and satire.

If you enjoyed this conversation, also check out my previous conversation with Johnson that I did on my podcast , “Can Comedy Still Save Us?”

According to technologist , history progresses as a series of epochs that occur on a consistent timeline: Every 80 years, we enter an era of rapid innovation, which lasts roughly 25 years. Most recently, the post WWII-epoch brought about globalization. This period lasted from 1945 to 1970. Following Leyden’s theory, the next epoch begins right now, in 2025.

When I encountered Leyden’s view, I felt a sense of relief. For years now, I’ve been obsessed with commentators proclaiming that our current way of life is unsustainable. There’s Peter Zeihan, arguing that globalization is breaking down. There’s Morris Berman, who observes that the core of our society, which is nothing more than “a collective adrenaline rush,” is profoundly broken at its core. There’s Peter Turchin, claiming that elite overproduction will cause massive civil unrest this decade. And of course there are the economists who warn that economic growth will inevitably end as populations begin to decline in the near future.

Leyden’s framing of the present moment pushes all of this aside. In 1944, no one could have predicted how radically the Bretton Woods system would transform the world, opening the door to globalization. That’s where we stand today: No one has any exact idea of how radically AI, clean energy, and bioengineering will shake things up. All the doomers are operating within the parameters of the outgoing system. The moment the new system kicks into gear, their gloomy analyses will be buried under piles of dust.

Notably, the new system doesn’t promise to be an automatic utopia by any stretch. Leyden’s headline prediction is that AI will lead us to surveillance-saturated one-world government. No doubt there are ways in which this could be a good thing, but it’s easier to imagine all the ways this could turn into a nightmare scenario.

Then there are the AI doomsday scenarios. I’m particularly thinking of this prediction described by AI 2027: “AI companies create expert-human-level AI systems in early 2027, which automate AI research, leading to ASI by the end of 2027. … Millions of ASIs will rapidly execute tasks beyond human comprehension. Because they’re so useful, they’ll be widely deployed. With superhuman strategy, hacking, weapons development, and more, the goals of these AIs will determine the future.”

A number of the specific scenarios envisioned by the authors of AI 2027 include the end of all human life. So, that’s not great.

Nonetheless, I remain optimistic about the new epoch we’re entering. To me, the worst-case scenario for humanity is that we get stuck. We are currently getting close to curing aging, achieving clean energy abundance, becoming interplanetary, etc. Imagine how tragic it would be, just at this moment, to plateau as a species and begin a painful spiral of deceleration that we never recover from.

It's perfectly reasonable to fear AI and the possible futures it will unlock. But it’s crazy to not also fear the alternative of no AI, no miracle cures for aging, no space settlements, no clean energy abundance.

In the spirit of maintaining optimism, it’s worth considering the best-case scenarios for the next 25 years. One such scenario is spelled out by Aaron Bastani in his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani argues that, once technology helps us achieve resource abundance, and once we can fully automate the economy so work is minimized, the principles of communism can be deployed to ensure everyone benefits from the new wealth.

As Bastani wrote in the New York Times, “Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination.”

If communism is too distasteful of a word (as it is for me, frankly), the essential elements of Bastani’s vision are also championed in Zoltan Istvan’s concept of the Automated Abundance Economy:

The basic idea is straightforward: once machines can do most jobs—like farming, construction, healthcare, education—the essentials of life can be produced in abundance, with very little human labor. In that world, wealth stops being the reward for work and becomes a shared outcome of automation.

I recently interviewed Zoltan about the Automated Abundance Economy. As I mentioned during the interview, it’s kind of amazing AI and other radical technologies have come along to help us reconfigure our economic system just at the moment in history when the pillars of our current economic system are breaking down. This was before I saw Leyden’s timeline of epochs.

It's almost as if there’s a divine hand guiding history. More likely, humans seem to have a collective determination to beat the odds and keep progression going. Hopefully this is true, because even if we make it through this epoch, no doubt the next set of challenges will be even more extraordinary.