Ordinary Astronauts

This week we’ve got an interview that blew my mind, a truly mind-expanding conversation with Michael Mignano. Mike co-founded Anchor in 2015 and grew it into the world’s largest podcast hosting platform, it was acquired by Spotify in 2019 and he went on to become Head of Talk at Spotify. Recently he left and has been angel investing and is on a tear writing fantastic essays about the future of content distribution technology.

In this conversation we cover:

• Why recommendation media—entertaining content from strangers—is replacing social media—content from friends and family.
• What strategic motivations platforms like Meta have for making this shift
• How it affects creators
• Where traditional “social media” type content for friends and family is moving
• What could happen when AI content generation keeps getting better
• What role there is in this for Snapchat and Twitter, who are both struggling

This episode goes quite deep on the topic and I learned a ton from it. We’re going to have to have Mike back on the show once some time has passed to check in on these trends and see how it’s going!

To go deeper on these topics, read Mike’s essay published in Every on the End of Social Media: https://every.to/p/the-end-of-social-media?sid=9593

Three topics:

1. Productivity is Emotion Regulation. Dan has been tweeting "____ is emotion regulation" a lot lately. What does that mean? It means a lot of the things we do are actually ineffectual, indirect attempts at regulating an emotion. Also, it means doing that thing well is only possible when our emotions are under control. Speaking of which...
2. The Science of Exposure Therapy. Last week Dan wrote an article about exposure therapy, and we get into the details here. There is more to it, apparently, than the old cliche "face your fears" implies!
3. The Infinite Article. Nathan wrote about how AI might be bringing us closer to a world where each of us doesn't just read content recommended to us by machines, but we might actually read content written by machines.

Three topics:

1. Is Apple Stuck? The Apple event this week was full of sustaining innovations—nothing revolutionary. It feels like radical new products are a thing of the distant past. Why?
2. Creative Extravagance. Some people say focus is key, that you can't do anything great unless you ruthlessly say no. But what if that's just not true? Dan's latest article makes a case based on nature (and the writing of Annie Dillard) for creative extravagance. Sometimes it's better to just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
3. Book Review: Slouching Towards Utopia. A new book got published this week that tells a grand narrative about the 20th century, and helps explain why it feels like progress generally is faltering in the past decade or so. It's called "Slouching Towards Utopia" and it's well worth reading. Dan and Nathan discuss, and somehow end up in a debate over the role of the market and what degree of government intervention is most prudent.

This week we've got something special!

Loyal listeners may recall an episode we recorded a few weeks ago where we discussed Nathan's review of a new bestselling book called Slouching Towards Utopia. If you liked that, you're in luck, because this week we talk to the author himself, Brad DeLong!!

This was a super wide-ranging conversation, which should be fascinating to anyone interested in economic history, progress, and technology. Enjoy!

Three topics:

1. Controversy! How hard should we work? This week a startup with a cute soup dumpling logo tweeted a tweet that got them in trouble, about how you have to work hard if you want to work there. We discuss why people didn’t like it, and finally for once and all end the debate about how hard people should work. (Ha!)
2. Crying CEO gets NYT trend piece! A few episodes ago we talked about the crying CEO meme and why people didn’t like it. This week, the NYT covered it as a broader societal trend, where bosses “are racing to show they are not just empty suits.” What did they get right? What is the story missing? What can you do as a normal human being to avoid the madness? We get to the bottom of it.
3. The surprisingly tricky art of stopping trying to do things that don’t work. This week Dan wrote an article about how he noticed a pattern in his life, where he would beat himself up for not doing a thing (like inbox zero) and then go right back to trying to accomplish it in the same way as before. This hardly ever works, it’s usually much better to change your approach instead. In this segment we discuss how to actually do that.