Other Life

John David Ebert is a cultural critic and the author of 26 books, including Art After Metaphysics, The New Media Invasion, The Age of Catastrophe and Dead Celebrities, Living Icons.This is a warm-up for an 8-week course on Carl Jung, starting on February 20th.✦ Get our Carl Jung reading list at otherlife.co/jung✦ John David Ebert on Twitter: @johndavidebert

Dryden Brown is building a new kind of city, from the cloud, in a style he calls hero-futurism.✦ bluebookcities.com✦ @drydenwtbrown✦ https://www.drydenbrown.org/

Get the free, expertly curated reading list at otherlife.co/straussThis is probably the single best podcast on the main ideas of Leo Strauss. A warmup for Michael's 8-week online course that starts on January 23. Signup to be notified when the full course opens: https://otherlife.co/straussMichael Millerman received his PhD from the University of Toronto. He's taught and published extensively on Leo Strauss. Michael's website: michaelmillerman.ca

I discuss my theory of reality forking with two tech entrepreneurs who specialize in community business models.✦ Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg) is CEO of product studio Late Checkout✦ Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) is co-founder of On DeckWe discuss:- How society got to a place where it lost its collective sense-making abilities.- Why calibrating what is real is harder than ever.- Signs that your community is working and what makes it flourish. 

What percentage of my net worth is in crypto? Is the future of academia on Youtube, or where? Would I cut ties with Patreon? Do I consider myself uncensorable? What is the value of my brand? Where is it heading? Why am I launching a social token? Where do I locate myself in relation to other professionals becoming indie creators, like journalists going to Substack?✦ Every week I send my best ideas & links to ~5k galaxy brains just like you: otherlife.co/newsletter✦ Working on your own intellectual projects? Check out IndieThinkers.org

Tom Kaczynski is a successful indie thinker in a most challenging niche: Philosophy comics. Over 10 years, Tom K. has built an impressive little empire as an independent illustrator, teacher, and publisher. In this podcast, he teaches us how he did it.➡️  Tom's Cartoon Dialectics: https://uncivilizedbooks.com/shop/cartoon-dialectics/➡️  Tom's Blog: http://www.transatlantis.net/blog/➡️  Tom's column at The Comics Journal: http://www.tcj.com/category/columns/event-horizon/➡️. Uncivilized Books: http://uncivilizedbooks.com✦ If you're working on your own independent intellectual project, check out IndieThinkers.org (where I first met Tom!)

After all the scams of the 2017 ICO craze, there's a new wave of genuine creators and communities creating serious value with social currencies. Bradley Miles is the CEO of a startup called Roll, which facilitates this process for creators.➡️  https://tryroll.com/➡️  Bradley on Twitter: @Bradley_Miles_A few weeks ago I started talking with Bradley, who is one of the founders of a startup called Roll. What they're doing is they're trying to make it super easy for creators and communities to create their own social tokens on the blockchain, on Ethereum.  It's interesting because this was a practice that became somewhat notorious a few years ago in what's known as the ICO craze, the initial coin offerings of around 2017. There were basically just a lot of scammers. There were a lot of people who would launch a token, and would hype it up, get a bunch of people to buy into it, and then just sell it and basically profit off of the people that got in on it.But now there's this new wave of genuine creators and durable communities that are using social tokens. And they're creating real value, and they're working and they're sustaining. And many of them are trading on the open market, for sometimes very good amounts of US dollars. And it just seems to me like a very real way in which creators and communities are generating real value and wealth potentially, in the long run, for themselves, in this autonomous bootstrapped way. So obviously I'm just super interested in that.I'm definitely still thinking about how I might do it because I don't want to do anything like this unless I have a clear model in my mind of how it works and what I'm trying to do. So I'm still researching and thinking, but I think I'm going to launch a social currency for my community and I'm quite excited by it. I think there could be real upside and I want to take it seriously and try my best shot at making something really interesting and valuable for everyone who listens to or participates in my various projects . And I've been talking with Bradley quite a lot over the past few weeks. Thinking about it and strategizing and yeah... He's super cool, I think he's super legit. And I think he really believes in the project and he has also investors that I know and trust like Balaji Srinivasan.I figured I'd have him on the podcast so he could share what he's doing and we can introduce the idea to the audience of the podcast and my broader community. So I'd love to hear what you think.

Kenny Rowe is an Urbit engineer. He's been working on blockchain projects since 2014, ranging from MakerDao to MetaCartel Ventures. Kenny is a member of the Dalten Collective, a for-profit membership organization rooted in Urbit.✦ The Dalten Collective on Urbit: dalten.org✦ Join Urbit with Tlon's new hosting service: tlon.io✦ Get in touch: otherlife.co/contact

Johannes Niederhauser is a PhD researcher on Heidegger, specializing in technology and human existence. In this discussion, he navigates the influence of technology on consciousness and the unique philosophical insights of Deleuze and Heidegger. They explore the clash between creative freedom and oppressive systems, advocating for personal agency through philosophical engagement. Niederhauser also highlights education as a space for 'serious play,' fostering authentic learning experiences that transcend traditional metrics of success.

Neo-China arrives from the future, as a networked and monetized video platform called Superpeer. Anirudh Pai explains why he believes education will merge with the influencer economy, in the form of paid video-calling. Other topics include George Orwell, Africa, and Reed's Law (the lesser known cousin of Metcalfe's Law).✦ Anirudh's newsletter: electricsheep.substack.com✦ Anirudh's podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conservative-curious/id1517105543On where the truth takes placeThink about it like this, the most interesting conversations always happen after class. What if there was a way to bring that online and make it also shared? People don't really want everything layered over with a veneer of political correctness. A lot of people just want the truth, and the truth is often found, not in classrooms, but in the bar, two miles away where everyone gets together, just as it is in Davos...  What the West will learn from video culture in ChinaThe consumer culture in China is radically different than anywhere else in the world. And that's namely through video. People have been doing this way longer than in the West and influencer culture, you can say, started and became popular in China.And that's because of the array of platforms that many of these influencers had. And when we think about an influencer, it's not really just somebody who's an Instagram model. All of us have specific knowledge in one domain. And they found ways to monetize that through all these different platforms. So you can look at Youku, which is like the Chinese YouTube, they might have these private WeChat groups and they might do live streaming events with this group and they're essentially living in video. So their entire day is just hopping from different video platforms to one another. They monetize through that. And for a lot of people, that's their job. That is what they do. And that's a very respectable career.One example of that I always remember is Sina Weibo, which is what people call the Twitter of China. To give you an idea of how early China was on their shift, in 2018 Sina Weibo did about $35 million, paying out creators with about, I think, 2 million paid subscribers overall.And the way they made money was, they had a 70/30 revenue share, but that's pretty crazy still. That people have been doing this in the East way longer than in the West.On Reed's Law and Superpeer's vision for networked videoSo a network effect is where the marginal benefit to each user increases as another user gets added, like Facebook, but what many people don't know is Reed's law, which is that the utility of these very massive networks scale exponentially with the network as well. So what that means is, when you have a big Facebook group, people split off into microcosms, right? And so it's like almost a Petri dish where some groups come together, others go around, and they're still finding their fit. But we have these various Schelling points where people come together and that's really the reason behind the Superpeer brand approach, which is... You might have these massive communities, thousands and thousands of people, but look at how many of those people talk. It's not actually very many, right? How many of your friends on Facebook do you interact with on the daily? Probably less than 10%, right? It's not a big sum by any means. And so when you want to design something like this, one thing you have to wonder is, how can we, from top to bottom, create the best experience and make it very easy for people to connect with one another, even inside networks, and make these communities that have thousands of people even more engaged by letting various members come together in these smaller groups and create those bonds? That, I think, nobody else is doing.