EugeneWei

LubaHi everyone, welcome to The Luba Show, and happy new year. Happy 2026. I can't believe it's the new year, but I'm really, really excited. I hope you guys are having a great start. I did some holiday travel and came back with a massive cold, which you might hear, but that's okay. I'm recovering and just really excited to be back to posting, and I'm really excited for our guest today.Link

Today my conversation is with Eugene Wei, who became a recent friend here in New York. And every time I talk to Eugene, I just come back so nourished by our conversation, by his insights, by all the references he makes and how he connects the dots from a variety of different places that he's lived or that he's read from. He's just a very, very interesting human and one of the most interesting product thinkers in Silicon Valley. And I consider Eugene somewhat of a Renaissance man, who is incredibly well read. As I said, he's very passionate and interested in film. In fact, he had a stint in film school. But one of the most important things about Eugene is that he is such a kind, grounded and nice human, and that's really, really special.Link

In this conversation we cover a lot of ground. And actually, one note is we had this conversation a few months back. It happened around the start of the fall. I've been waiting to release it. And we talk about film, we talk about community, we talk about boredom, we talk about how the world has gotten more performative with time. We go to a lot of different places, and I hope you enjoy this conversation. Let me know what you think and if something comes up for you listening to it. And without further ado, Eugene Wei.Link

Okay, Eugene, welcome. It's so nice to have you here.Link

EugeneIt's good to be here. Cheers.Link

LubaYou're the first guest who asked for an alcoholic favorite drink. Or, I mean, you didn't ask.Link

EugeneGreat. That's not good.Link

LubaOkay, so we're drinking Chablis.Link

EugeneYou're going to think I'm a lush.Link

LubaAnd lemonade.Link

EugeneAnd lemonade. Well, and you said that we have to mark the end of summer. And it is the end of summer. It's actually fall. It's late. It's late for Chablis. I'm maybe just hanging on to it. Usually I just drink it in the spring or summer. I mean, it's just a fancy type of Chardonnay.Link

LubaAre you sad the summer's over?Link

EugeneI mean, past Labor Day, I always feel like it just psychologically marks the end of something, summer. I mean, weather-wise, it's still reasonably warm here, but it doesn't feel like summer. And part of summer is just psychological. You know, people finish their summer vacations, kids go back to school, American football season starts. All these things feel like they mark the beginning of fall, which is one of my favorite seasons. So it's good too.Link

LubaAnd you started your fall with going to the Toronto Film Festival. And you go to quite a few film festivals a year. How was the film festival? What were the highlights? Did it make you reflect on anything in your life, or maybe in culture broadly?Link

EugeneYeah, I always like Toronto because it's a big film festival. It has, you know, mainstream, Oscar-bait type movies, but it also has, you know, exotic, experimental short films. It has a nice balance of things. I feel like other film festivals weight more heavily towards a particular lane. Sundance is very indie, first-time-filmmaker focused. Cannes, to me, is the festival I think of as very foreign-language-film focused. I went to Cannes this year, and of all the films in competition, there were 20-something, I think only six or maybe seven were in English.Link

LubaWow.Link

EugeneSo that has that flavor, but Toronto, I think, has a mix because it's just huge. There are hundreds of movies at TIFF, so it's always good for me.Link

I feel like some people go on these silent meditation retreats. I think of TIFF as the closest form of that for me, because my phone is off most of the time I'm inside screenings. I have to just sit in the dark a lot with random people quietly. And, you know, I stack my schedule with four movies a day, five. I had one six-movie day on Sunday last week, which is crazy. You can only do that at TIFF. And when you spend that much time quietly staring at a screen with other people, it feels like a form of meditation. It's the most that I think I have my phone off for any stretch during the year. I should probably do it more often.Link

But I think there's something about the hyper-focus on the present with social media feeds and your phone. Everything's in the moment, present tense, and any break, you can just pick up your phone and it immediately just soaks up some of your attention. We start to live in this eternal present. I don't know. Fredric Jameson wrote about this in his book on kind of the postmodern era, how postmodernity is kind of the aesthetic of our current era. And I like going to the film festival because you'll see some bad movies, or you'll see some really long, you know, three-and-a-half-hour Turkish movie, and you feel, at times, just bored, or you feel the passage of time.Link

I think when I was younger, I felt much more of this. I'd have moments where I could feel time. You could feel the sensation of time passing. You could feel boredom. And we have, in the tech industry, really hammered away at every little crevice of boredom in the day, and we've soaked all that time up. And there's something about that I think is not super healthy. We need to feel time and feel time moving. So, yeah, I enjoy the festival for that.Link

And then I also think of these festivals... What's strange is, you know, moviegoing is going down in the public at large, due to things that you can probably guess: the rise of streaming, Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, social media, video games. There are so many other forms of entertainment. Many of them are more accessible to people. You can just flip your phone on in bed or be on your sofa, not have to leave the house. And yet film festivals, I think, have never been more popular. So among the people who do love movies, festivals are still a place where you can gather with other people who share your passion for the medium. And that happens with a lot of art forms. You know, I go with my friends who like opera to the opera, and pay a lot for tickets to see something, and most of the public has zero interest in that.Link

And so you tend to have that where an art form becomes more niche, no longer in the mainstream, but the people who love it really love it. And the optimal business model, actually, in those cases, is to maybe charge the people who love that art form more to keep it going. That tends to be how these things sustain. So you get this weird thing where the art form gets less popular broadly, but the prices go up. And film festivals, you know, they keep raising the prices on tickets, and it can be expensive to go to a festival. But in that moment, with all the filmgoers competing to see everything, it's a frenzy. Everybody's trying to get tickets to all these things, they sell out. And then the irony is, two weeks later, that same movie comes out in theaters, you can go see it for just regular price, and no one goes to see the movie.Link

So in a way, a festival is like this local maximum of concentrated passion for these movies. And it's always funny. There will be a movie at Sundance or TIFF that sells out instantly, and people are scalping tickets for, you know, $100 to try to get in, and then, yeah, you can see it at AMC two weeks later for $20 and no one will leave their home to go watch it. Do you go to film festivals, or...Link

LubaNo, I've never been to a film festival. And actually, no, that's wrong. I've been to Sundance very randomly. A ski trip once was organized during the Sundance festival. I only got to see one movie. It was very indie. I was very bored during that movie. And that was the extent of my foray into film festivals.Link

But there are so many interesting things that you've just said that I'd like to unpack, starting with this idea of feeling bored. Why do you think it's important to make time and space to feel time and to be bored?Link

EugeneI don't know for sure, but I think part of it is sometimes you need the space of boredom to actually think in. When you're always just absorbing tweets or photos on Instagram stories or whatever, you're mostly just absorbing content, the surface of it. And you don't really have space to think, because the moment you're bored with that thing, you just swipe and you go to something else. And so all the cycles of your brain are just consume, consume, consume. And I think we need time to take the things we've consumed and process them, roll them around in our head. And you need that distance. I think sometimes our noses are stuck to the screen, and we never achieve that kind of distance that allows you to get perspective, or to recombine things.Link

I also think... there's this crazy YouTube video called "The Slow Cancellation of the Future." It's a lecture by Mark Fisher for one of his classes, and he has this theory about how around the millennium, so around the year 2000, something happened, and culture started to freeze. He's like, if you play a song from that year and then a song from today, it's very similar.Link

LubaYes.Link

EugeneIt's very hard to tell which is from which. And he goes through the same exercise for movies, painting, other mediums, novels. But if you went from 2000 backwards in 20-year increments, to the '80s, the '60s, the '40s, he's like, it's very apparent what music is from which decade. And he's like, what happened? And I think one of the main things that he identifies is that the internet came about, and social media. When we wired up the world, we started to just be constantly bathed in other people's output, and that shifted us in those mediums to something that's more like pastiche and remixing and less original work.Link

I think that's part of the reason, and maybe the main reason, but I also think part of it is technological. There hasn't been some huge breakthrough in film, music, painting, writing, novels, technology-wise, so it's hard to generate innovation from that. You know, there's a theory that the camera obscura was what allowed this huge boom in really accurate perspective painting. And you certainly see things like the invention of sound and color shift film in big ways, and we may just have tapped out most of those advances.Link

LubaWell, maybe AI will introduce some novelty.Link

EugeneMaybe. Unclear what that is right now, because I feel like with AI, a lot of it is just regurgitating more remixing.Link

LubaYeah.Link

EugeneSo it maybe supercharges remixing, and that may be good or bad. But I think that some of this distance, this boredom, also may be necessary for just generating innovation in art. So maybe the way to counter this slow cancellation of the future is to go, like, you know... yeah, to do the Walden thing. Be away, turn your phone off. Just be alone with your thoughts. I don't know. You know, this will sound so like, "it's better in my generation," right? It'll sound very boomer to say that we need to sometimes turn off our phones and all of that. But I think there's something to that idea.Link

LubaYeah, I 100% agree with you. I think you need time and space to process your own ideas or even find your own voice, because we are constantly plugged into so many different inputs, and it's really hard to distinguish which are my own opinions, ideas, commentary, and which is just a remix of some influencer or some Twitter person, or even a friend who said something on the topic. And I think I was telling you a couple of weeks ago that last year, I even did a two-week detox from any consumption. It was social media, it was podcasts, it was even reading books, physical or audiobooks, to really reconnect with: what are my own thoughts? What do I even start thinking about? Because otherwise, I think it's just a mix of someone else's perspectives.Link

EugeneDid you feel like it helped?Link

LubaYeah, it definitely did. I really did feel like I found more of a footing of what naturally sprouts in my own mind, and it was also very grounding and peaceful to do that, because I think we're not primed for so much information, and we're constantly trying to catch up and trying to, you know, see what's happening in the tech world, what's happening in the world, what's happening amongst our friends, what's happening to, I don't know, the neighbor on Instagram, if we follow them. It's just too much, and it's important to have some quiet and boredom.Link

EugeneDid you ever see *Rear Window* by Hitchcock?Link

LubaI did not.Link

EugeneOh, okay. It stars Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, and it's a really good movie. I revisit it every few years. He has a broken leg, and he's in his apartment, and he has binoculars, and he can look across the courtyard from his apartment into his neighbors' homes. And the whole plot is really set in this one apartment complex. Grace Kelly is his girlfriend. She comes to, you know, look after him, and he starts to think that he sees... he's pretty sure that he's seen a couple start quarreling, and he thinks that the man has killed his wife or girlfriend or whatever. And it's funny to revisit that movie now in this era of social media, because in a way, all the windows in the apartment across the courtyard are like versions of an old news feed.Link

LubaHuh. Interesting. An old form of social media. How so?Link

EugeneIn that he's basically voyeuristically spying on every person's life. Today, we would just lurk on social media and see... stalk. He had to do it back then with binoculars, looking out the window. And in a way, you can read that movie as a little bit of a cautionary tale about, you know...Link

LubaWhat happens when you live the life of lurking?Link

EugeneYeah. There's something about, oh, you know, maybe you should mind your own business. But maybe not. It's not definitive, because they end up becoming amateur detectives and trying to solve this mystery.Link

I think it's very strange that we live in this weird version of *Rear Window* now. But what's different is his neighbors didn't know that they were being spied on by him, whereas we all know that the camera goes in both directions and we're all performing some version to each other. And even though we know that the other people are performing and that we're performing for them, it's still hard not to just take it all and feel like it is real. I feel like Baudrillard, when he would talk about the hyperreal... I wish he was alive now to see this era of social media and just see how true his ideas were. You know, he always thought that eventually these virtual versions of life would become more real to us than the real world. I see that in how many people relate to each other. There's so many people that I don't see ever in the real world, but I see so much of them virtually, it's hard not to reduce them to whatever stuff they put out into the world.Link

I don't know. You've been a creator before. Do you feel like you have, you know, the rise of this weird parasocial relationship, where some people are like... they've never met you?Link

LubaYeah, for sure. And I think part of it is because I had that really long chapter as a YouTuber, and I started feeling like I needed to keep my followers informed about what I do in my day-to-day life through IG stories or other stuff, and it felt very performative. And actually that was one of the ingredients of my creator burnout, because I didn't really want to feel like I always have to make a show out of my life, even though I don't think anyone actually cares that much. But, you know, the algorithm and everything makes you feel and think that you need to keep your audience engaged and kept up with your life.Link

But with this shift with social media... because I know you used to write every single day, right, on your blog. Has this changed your relationship with writing?Link

EugeneIt does. I mean, the thing that you were speaking about, feeling this need to... that form of audience capture, I think it's hard not to feel some version of that. And part of why I haven't written as much recently was I was trying to reevaluate my relationship with my public readership.Link

LubaAnd what has the relationship been? What is it like now? How are you thinking about it?Link

EugeneYou know, I used to just write about random things every day. It was more for myself. I felt like I didn't have that many readers. This is the...Link

LubaHow many readers have you had, or do you have now?Link

EugeneI don't even know. I know people don't believe me when I say this. I try not to look at the metrics on my website, because I feel like it can lead you to this weird engagement-maxing behavior, this pressure to just write things that your audience seems to click on. And so I wanted to, I think, get away from that a little bit. I didn't want to feel captured by my audience. But in recent years, there definitely was a shift towards writing more about tech or social media, because those pieces would go more viral, and the pieces got longer and longer, I think partially, for me, in response to the rise of microblogging, things like Twitter. I was like, what's my blog for? It should be something that's differentiated.Link

LubaWhy do you think it should be differentiated if you've always been writing for yourself?Link

EugeneI don't know if I felt that explicitly, but I felt like some topics deserve a longer treatment, more than you would get in a tweetstorm or something. I didn't want to write just to be able to generate a viral tweetstorm or something. I felt like I didn't have to do it professionally. I didn't care about that, but I wanted to engage with certain topics seriously. And in a way, I felt like I started writing longer and longer pieces because I wanted only readers who were willing to follow me deeper on certain things.Link

But I'd like to go back to writing more regularly, just as a practice. Writing is probably therapeutic for me in some way that I didn't realize, just grappling with your thoughts, kind of wrestling them into some form or shape. And I do miss, not the public engagement necessarily, but I miss the kind of community of readers that I used to meet out and about, or that would email me directly. You know, I feel like there's something nice about communicating with someone via email or direct message out of the view of the public eye, because a lot of public feedback on Twitter and things feels also performative. Some of it's not done in good faith, and I just didn't need that in my life.Link

There's this book that Alex Danco told me to read once called *Crowds and Power*, by Elias Canetti, and it's a very interesting book. He writes with this deep, crazy intellectual fervor, and one of the things he says is it's very comforting to join a mob or a crowd. He uses the example of going into the mosh pit at a concert, and he says the reason it's comforting is that performing a version of ourselves is exhausting. Like the idea of Luba that you have to perform on your podcast, on social media, even when you're out and about, takes energy, and it's kind of a low-grade emotional draining that's occurring at all times that you're out performing that. But when you join a crowd or a mob and you become nameless and faceless, you are relieved of that pressure of performing Luba. You can just be in the mosh pit. No one can see you. Nobody knows you. You're just bouncing around. And it comes with a sense of relief.Link

So when I hear creators talk about creator burnout, I think that's part of it. Now, I don't doubt that there are people who deeply love attention and adoration. There's probably even some form of deep narcissism, where those people are like, you know, there's no such thing as negative attention, I love performing this version of self. But I don't know. I feel like that's the exception, and that people sometimes want a break from it.Link

LubaYeah, I think performance is definitely exhausting. For me personally, I very much fell into a very common beginner creator mode of wanting to do what performed well, and kind of being in the niche where I felt like that's what my audience wanted me to do. And then at some point, that was not what I wanted to do anymore, and I wasn't really clever or smart or thoughtful about expanding my content and really showing them a different side of me.Link

And that's why, when I asked you about why does your blog need to be differentiated, I was coming from a place of, why not just write about whatever you are interested in? Even though, obviously, from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense to think about differentiation: whom is it for, what is it about? But from a human perspective, if you're just writing for yourself, I think it's important to have space for the topics and for your curiosities and interests to breathe and expand or change, and have that certain unpredictability, because then you don't need to perform as much. It's a blog of what Eugene is currently interested in.Link

EugeneDid you feel like, when you were on YouTube, you developed an intuition for what things would generate more views than other things?Link

LubaSomewhat. And I think my intuition was not as much intuition as the more intellectual, analytical part of my brain just looking at what's being searched and what hit from my previous videos, and keywords, and what is trending. I'm differentiating it because I wish it was more intuitive, because now I'm in the mode of trying to follow my intuition more, and what feels right and more authentic. But back then, I was very heady about what could drive views.Link

EugeneYeah, I'm always struck by talking to some creators. You know, I always remember the story of when YouTube changed its algorithm, and they've changed it many times, but to prefer longer content, how some creators just, almost like a sixth sense, felt it immediately. They're like, this video should have done this many thousands of views, and it didn't. Something changed. They were like shamans, you know, who were like, ooh, it's about to rain, just listening to the ground. They had this intuition. And I think that comes from just uploading so many videos, so many stats, you develop this sense. And I have to imagine that it is exhausting... algorithms shift all the time for a variety of reasons... to be combating the algorithms and fighting for attention, because that's really the lifeblood for many creators. That leads to monetization. And I definitely think it's a luxury to not have to think about that and to be free of that.Link

But at a film festival, for example, you know, you ask people, it's always a crapshoot. A lot of the movies at the bigger festivals have never played anywhere, so you don't actually know if it's any good. You buy the ticket, you take a risk based on the logline or the actors or the director, and you will see some really self-indulgent, terrible movies.Link

LubaHow did they make it to the festival?Link

EugeneWell, not for a big festival, for a much smaller festival, once I was on the screening committee, not for the final picks, but early screening of some submissions. And, you know, hundreds to thousands of submissions. And the truth is, a lot of it is unwatchable. And so, you know, you see a bad movie at a festival, you can only imagine what 10 or 100 other movies were rejected that were even less watchable than that.Link

I don't mind it so much. I think, you know, there are some movies which are not good, but they're at least interesting. Like, they're unwatchable, but interesting in the way they take... and, you know, art is hard. It's not a science, and tastes vary across populations. I enjoy the experience of being at a festival and seeing a lot of movies that take interesting formal risks and all of that. Different people have different levels of tolerance for that. If you're a person who only watches, you know, two movies a year, and you go to a festival and you sit through a few bad ones, I can imagine... Some of my friends have found that experience very distressing.Link

LubaI'm so tempted to ask you, what have you learned about B2B SaaS by going to a movie festival?Link

EugeneWell, I would say that it is interesting to see at a festival... to use a festival as kind of a barometer for what's going on with the film industry or the business generally. Will movies survive as an art form? You know, the golden era of Miramax and indie films, like *Shakespeare in Love* winning Best Picture and making $100 million, it's kind of gone now. And so people are like, what's the point of some of these indie films? What's the market for them? Sundance, you know, is moving from Park City. So next year, in January, it's the last Sundance in Park City.Link

LubaOh, it's going to be digital?Link

EugeneNo, it's moving to Boulder.Link

LubaOh.Link

EugeneBut part of the reason was, I think something Sundance has to grapple with is these first-time-filmmaker indie films. Is there a market for them? Most of the biggest buyers now are streamers. And even the studios that go to Sundance to try to buy these movies are taking fewer and fewer super-indie films into a theatrical run. People don't tend to leave the house to go see some of these indie films now. They go, you know, see superhero movies or horror movies or big blockbusters. But on the flip side, the streamers like Netflix and whatnot, often they look at these super-indie films and are like, well, this is also not going to move the needle on our subscriber base of, you know, 100 million people. It's not going to retain, it's not going to keep people from churning. It's not going to acquire new subscribers. So what is the purpose?Link

LubaYeah. But if some of them are unwatchable, is there a point for them to exist? Is there a market? Or are there a lot of movies that are deep and meaningful and interesting, and there's just a smaller market there?Link

EugeneI mean, there are still a lot of great indie films that I love. And the question is, what's the right economic model for them? There's definitely a kind of, like, Baumol's cost disease thing in film, where most of the functions that go into making a film tend to only rise in cost over time, maybe because there's a floor of salary set by unions, or that's just what people have always been paid. And we haven't yet had the thing in technology, at least on the Hollywood side, of, wow, here's this big technological advance that severely lowers the cost of one of the inputs of making movies. By the way, the same goes for TV shows. If you look at the cost per minute of a movie or TV show, it hasn't gone down. It's mostly gone up.Link

The exception, of course, is the world, you know, of indie creators at home just shooting stuff for YouTube. That's the area where they're like, well, I shot this myself on a phone or a little camera. I have no huge cast or crew costs. I'm not paying myself as the actor. I'm directing, editing everything. I'm a one-person show, and I release it on YouTube. And of course, the economics of that are very different. They don't have to justify a theatrical run. It's just like, look, if I hit some virality on YouTube, the ad revenue is enough to more than cover my costs. But the mainstream film and TV world doesn't really have that.Link

LubaSo what do you think is going to happen? What's going to happen to the indie film industry? How will the business model...Link

EugeneYeah, I mean, I think you will see a decline in the number of indie films made. It's just inevitable. There's not enough money to support that. And I think a lot of the filmmakers I talk to, and the people who have worked in indie film for a long time, are grappling with that. There are many great forms of art, by the way, in the world that aren't economically viable. I was just talking the other day with someone about short stories, short films. Often short stories and short films are some of the highest quality. When I was in undergrad, one of my majors was English, and in creative writing classes, they mostly teach you through short stories. And there's some amazing short stories, and the quality of the writing is better than in novels, but the novel is just a more viable economic commodity.Link

LubaWhich is interesting, because people are reading less, and they claim that the attention span is shorter. So I would have imagined that short stories would have more interest, or at least storytelling and writing for short video.Link

EugeneYeah. In that case, it's like, you know, people will pay $20 for a hardcover of a new novel, or in paperback, you know, $8 to $15. But if you were to ask them to pay 99 cents for a short story, they don't want to. There's no market for that.Link

In the same way that shifting to a streaming model really changed the music business, this shift to streaming, this kind of flat monthly fee, having that be the main upstream buyer, has really changed the economics of all of Hollywood. Because it's a flat monthly fee, you've capped the revenue, and that's how most people now pay for entertainment. In the old era, if you liked a movie and I got you to go out to see the movie, you might pay, I don't know, 10 to 15 bucks for a ticket. Every person who wanted to see the movie would pay that much. After they split some of the money with the theater, they still had a lot left over. If you really liked the movie, maybe you might buy it on DVD later for $20. And then they could also, you know, put that movie on airplanes, syndicate it to cable channels, sell it to HBO to run for a number of years. The whole business of Hollywood is built on windowing, moving that one movie through multiple windows and trying to charge the max that they can in each window for all the people who are interested in it.Link

But with streaming, there's just one window, really, and the revenue is super capped. Whether you watch 25 movies in a month and 10 TV shows in a month on Netflix, or I watch zero, you and I pay the same amount to Netflix, whatever it costs now, like 15 bucks a month or whatever. Whereas it used to be every time you and I consumed the movie, we turned some money over to the studio.Link

LubaWell, there's also something to be said for scarcity. It was a much more scarce world that we lived in, and now that there is so much overabundance of content, we view it as much less valuable.Link

EugeneYeah. That's definitely part of it. It's much harder to generate scarcity. And what's hard is, I think so many executives you meet in Hollywood and everything grew up in the scarcity business model, and they haven't really adopted the new mindset. All their tactics are the same that way.Link

And so I think, you know, when Netflix went to this kind of streaming model early on... what's ironic is that Netflix didn't have that much content for their streaming package in the beginning, so they set the price really low. That set, like, this price anchor for all of the streaming services to come later. That just really made all of streaming super unprofitable, and it just happened by chance. Some version of that is happening in AI too, where whatever product manager at OpenAI set the $20-per-month subscription price for using GPT artificially set the price anchor for all consumers, for all AI models, for a long time. And it may be that they just set the price too low. I don't know where inference costs and compute costs are going to move over time, but one little decision like that could be so consequential for the profitability of an entire sector. And it makes me think that the next time something like this happens, people just have to be much more thoughtful about trying to, you know, not set it too low.Link

But it's hard, right? Capitalist competition... When Disney+ came after Netflix got big, Disney was like, well, we have less content than Netflix, so we have to price even lower. Now they've realized their mistake, and they're jacking their prices up. But once...Link

LubaDo you think they should have priced higher initially?Link

EugeneProbably. I mean, they would not have grown as fast. And they really wanted to show that they could grow their subscriber count quickly. They did some really aggressive promotions. It's hard because, you know, the thing about pricing is, price is just what you're able to charge in the marketplace. And that's not all determined by you. It's contextual. It's like, what does the competition set their prices at? What are the price anchors or value propositions that consumers hold in their head? I mean, Disney could have come out and said, look, we're going to charge $30 a month for Disney+. We don't care. We have a lot less content than Netflix, but these are beloved children's franchises and other strong IP. But a lot of consumers would have been like, well, that's crazy, I pay $9.99 for Netflix, and there's more stuff here. So it may not be fair, but yes, pricing is not just in your control. Just like brands are shared between you and your customers. You can come out and say, our brand stands for X, but if the customer doesn't believe it, you can't just force it.Link

I think the film business is grappling with this big shift, and it'll take a new generation of executives and people who are less tied to scarcity tactics.Link

LubaDo you miss being a part of the day-to-day of the tech world right now, or are you happy that you took a step back for now? And how much do you think about it these days?Link

EugeneYeah. I mean, I'm still interested in it. It's a luxury to not feel like you have to be generating hot takes on everything that's happening, or tracking everything that's happening. It's nice when people bring up something and I'm like, oh, okay, I had no idea what they're talking about. Because...Link

LubaWhat was the last thing like that?Link

EugeneI don't know. There's a lot these days. I'm just not in the flow. I used to, you know, read Techmeme every day, read all the newsletters, just know everything that was happening. And now most days, I think I'm really behind on a lot of stories. And it's good because it creates more room for me to attend to other things that I care about.Link

I think there's also this... tech in particular. When I lived in Silicon Valley, I felt like there's almost this pressure to outdo everyone. I think the industry is built really around, you need to have opinions on everything, and you need to win arguments about everything. And so it can almost feel like this daily competition to have takes on everything really quickly, and then to defend those takes vigorously in the, I don't know, arena of social media. And it's nice not to have to have a take, or to be... I enjoy... like, I really, when I go back to the Bay Area, I enjoy meeting up with people. And, you know, I think there's this idea that the tech world, the Silicon Valley tech bro, is, I don't know, kind of a caveman of some sort, but actually, there are very many intellectual and thoughtful people, and they're reading a ton, and they're trying to keep up with a lot of things. But it can also be, I think, exhausting to just always feel like that's an arena where everybody is throwing takes around, testing takes. You talk to a VC, they're like, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? Do you think this business model works? And I think after 12 years in San Francisco, I was ready to not be in that all the time.Link

LubaYeah, for sure. I think it's pretty exhausting to always have to generate takes. And you do feel like if you step away, you're going to totally miss out. But then it's interesting, because whatever your mind is focused on in the moment, if you're in it, you're like, oh my god, so much stuff is happening, which it is. And then you take a step back and you realize that a lot of the things people pay attention to day to day is just a lot of noise, like just watching the news and being anchored to the news.Link

Where do you think that culture of having to have constant takes and consuming everything that's going on has originated in the Valley? Has that always been the case? Because you've seen a few different cycles.Link

EugeneWell, I mean, the rise of the internet and social media, of course, gave all of that a forum. That became the structure of the discourse, the frame around the discourse. But some amount of it always existed, in that if you are a VC, and you're kind of just a generalist, you're looking at making investment decisions on companies in a variety of fields. So part of the job is to have opinions on something that you may not be a deep expert in, but you have to make the call: are we going to invest in this company or not? And why? What's the thesis? And a lot of those decisions are made in a meeting with a bunch of people in a room, having to justify their decision.Link

So in part, it's not unique to tech. It's kind of the business world at large. Decisions are made all the time in meetings, and in meetings, what do you do? You advocate for your position. You come up with whatever data or arguments to support your decision. That's the way the decision is made. It's very different from, say, if you're a painter or a novelist. You just have to make the decision yourself. It's not a thing where you're arguing necessarily with somebody all the time. But that's kind of the medium in which decisions are made in the business world. So that generates, I think, that culture. It's very left-brain dominant. I think the business world, especially in the West, is kind of a left-brain type of culture, which, if you are good at that, is great.Link

There's this saying that I always heard about certain people, which is that they're good in the room, and it means someone who's super eloquent in the meeting room. When you're debating anything, any topic comes up, they can just speak eloquently. It doesn't mean they're right. It just means they're good at that specific, particular thing. And you see this with bureaucracies. You have certain people who are just very good in the room. They may not have the best judgment, but they sound like they have the best judgment, and they're also good at politics and politicking and all of those skills. And so the culture selects for those people, and they move up.Link

Just like, you know, if you look at interviewing and how companies do interviews, it's like, how accurate is the interview process? I think you can't avoid the fact that interviewing, the way that most companies do interviewing, selects for someone who's good at interviewing, and not always for someone who's going to be good at the job that they're interviewing for. And I've definitely encountered that in my career, where you hire someone who just blew everyone away on the interview loop, and then they start their job and they're not that good at it. We've gotten better, of course. We've refined, you know, for designers looking at their portfolio, for engineers doing coding exams and things. But, you know, all cultures kind of select for the thing that they select for, and sometimes we don't know what that is. There's that amount of that in tech. I find it still invigorating in doses. But yeah, it's nice to not have it around the clock.Link

LubaWhat has been interesting and curious to you in tech right now? What has been invigorating? What topics, which areas, which discourse?Link

EugeneI don't know. I mean, right now, so much is dominated by AI that I feel like everything revolves around it. And AI is actually... you know, if you take out all the debates about what is this going to do to jobs and the economy and everything, and you just look at the basic breakthroughs that we've achieved with large language models, it's pretty crazy.Link

LubaYeah, it's crazy, like, all the time. And it's crazy how quickly we get desensitized to the breakthroughs, because I just find myself now, you know, occasionally scrolling Twitter, and say Google released their new video model, and I'm like, okay, that's cool. But a year and a half ago, it would have been incredibly mind-blowing, and it still is, if you really take a look at it.Link

EugeneAll the time I ask language models random questions, and it just immediately starts writing an answer. And I'm like, how is this happening? It's crazy that just with some linear algebra and a whole huge corpus of training data, it could just write this sentence. So I still am not desensitized to it. I still find it awe-inspiring that it works. Of course, you know, it's also ridiculous when it generates a completely nonsensical or wrong answer, but... which happens less and less now, but still does.Link

LubaYeah, in different areas.Link

EugeneIt happens less. But I'm sure, like many people... it was like the first time I played with, I don't know which version it was, like GPT-2, or maybe the first one, I tried out a couple questions, and it generated responses, not as good as the ones now, but even back then, I had to go for a walk. I was at a friend's place in LA, and I remember I had to go for a walk on the beach. I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to change everything. I don't know how yet, but it was like a...Link

LubaSo you remember that moment when you were thinking that?Link

EugeneIt was one of the most mind-blowing things. It's like how some people talk about the first time you tried VR, or drugs, or, you know, you're just like, wow, this is here.Link

LubaHow do you think we're going to adapt socially? What are you concerned about? Because there are already so many challenges with meaning and purpose and community, and...Link

EugeneIt's hard in some ways. I think our popular philosophers today aren't as well versed in technology, and then our technologists are not good at preparing the world for the things they ship into the world.Link

LubaYeah, actually, on that topic, I was at a dinner yesterday with someone from... which generation are you? Gen...Link

EugeneI'm X.Link

LubaOkay, so whatever the generation is beyond X.Link

EugeneWait, older than Gen X? That would be, like, probably the boomers.Link

LubaYeah, probably the boomers. A very reputable VC in the space. And he was just talking about how it's probably the case that whoever is creating technology today, which is, you know, all of our peers, a lot of folks that we know, we don't really think about what are the implications of the things we create, ranging from, again, the B2B SaaS software that you make to some crazy AI language model. Like, how is this really changing the world? What are the implications? What would the dream world to live in be? We're all living in the moment of, okay, building cool shit and shipping it to customers and seeing how it works.Link

But it is true that technologists today aren't so thoughtful about the implications. But at the same time, it's so hard to be. It's like the Facebook thing, where Facebook was created with a specific need in mind at first, and now there are so many questions about, well, who's thinking about the loneliness epidemic, or who's thinking about the effect of social media on teenagers or kids? But is it really the responsibility of technologists to think about those topics broadly? Should this be a separate skill that they're adopting? That is a very interesting question.Link

EugeneYeah, it's hard to answer. I think tech has maybe done itself a disservice by not being as eloquent as it could be about preparing the world for what AI might do.Link

LubaSo like tech's own PR story. Tech hasn't owned its own voice. It's kind of been left to the broader media to tell the story.Link

EugeneYeah. My thought on this is that the last great tech kind of ambassador, communicator, was probably Steve Jobs. You know, for all his flaws, he came off as very human, like a humanist, and he could go on Oprah or things like that. And in his keynotes and everything, he had a very charismatic way of talking about the implications of some new Apple product. Even if, you know, you want to roll your eyes at, is this new iPod form factor really that revolutionary, the way he spoke, a lot of normal people, like non-techies in my family, would hear about it.Link

LubaYeah, and be excited.Link

EugeneAnd since then, I don't know. I'm curious, who do you think is the best tech ambassador to the public at large now?Link

LubaThat's a great question.Link

EugeneI would argue there isn't one.Link

LubaI would say so, that there isn't one, because the ones that come to mind, I think, are broadly not doing as good of a job as we wish they did.Link

EugeneWell, they're famous within tech, but not to the public at large.Link

LubaI would almost say that right now, the public tech ambassadors are the people who are tangentially related to tech, like podcasters, you know, the Lex Fridmans of the world.Link

EugeneOkay, yeah. Maybe. I just think that if you look at our most prominent tech CEOs, a lot of them have a really negative public image.Link

LubaYeah, unfortunately.Link

EugeneYeah. And they don't seem to really want to repair it, or be able to...Link

LubaI think Zuck started to really try to repair his public image. And I think whether it's a PR team or he himself, he's done a pretty good job with being more relatable, changing his style, changing his haircut, being more meme-y on his own Instagram account. So that was an interesting turnaround, but I don't know if that is a turnaround to us, you know, techies, or if it's been a public turnaround to the rest of the US and the world.Link

EugeneI think, well, I think people thought he was more relatable when he stopped trying to maybe be something that he wasn't.Link

LubaYeah.Link

EugeneBut I would still argue that Meta in general has a negative public valence still. I don't know, you'd have to look at some polls or something. I think that this idea of tech being run by a bunch of weird people on the spectrum is, you know, still very prominent. You see depictions in pop culture. I mean, how many movies I've seen in the past year have an Elon-like figure as the chief villain? It's become almost an archetype. And I think part of that is tech's fault for not owning the story, or having a voice.Link

LubaDo you feel like there were some people who could have had that voice, and they've either stepped back from that arena or didn't really own it as much as they should have?Link

EugeneI mean, I think there are some thoughtful, like, you know, people considered to have high EQ. But I think maybe the problem is that they don't run the tech companies that are most prominent in the public's day-to-day life. It's like B2B SaaS, or, you know, something like that, where...Link

LubaWho would you have wanted to be that public voice for tech?Link

EugeneThat I don't know. I feel like I'm not in that world enough now to even know for sure. But the thing is, tech is so dominant, prominent in the economy, they have no choice. They're going to be in the public eye regardless of whether they want to have that attention or not. And part of it is just, I think it's an important skill, only in that, you know, being a good storyteller is an important skill for a leader, period, whether it's communicating to your employees or to the public at large. There is value in it, even though we may consider it to be a soft skill and not, you know, as critical as engineering prowess.Link

LubaSo bottom line, you think that technologists, people who are building companies today, should definitely spend a major part of their role thinking about the storytelling, the implications of what they're building, the world that they are creating?Link

EugeneI mean, I don't know if they have to. I think many are just content to, you know, shift the world, and it doesn't matter how the public receives them. It won't matter ultimately, in the end. But I personally feel like this is part of being in a society, in the community of, you know, humankind or mankind, is trying to grapple with it.Link

I think it's also hard with some things like AI, where even the people in it don't really understand. Nobody knows for sure if AI is going to just leave us all unemployed, or whether that's a desirable outcome or not. I don't think we should be surprised if people are like, hey, this technology is going to take my job, I'm not that excited about it. You know, we tried before with the whole free trade thing, and it was just like, oh, you know, you'll just find a new job, just get re-educated. And people kind of realize now that that wasn't as easy as people thought.Link

And there are, of course, I think, also really extreme opinions in tech that say, look, it's just going to happen. AI is going to become the dominant intelligence, and it's going to leave people behind, and actually, it's more important to achieve that, and it doesn't matter what happens to the people left behind. Or there are other people... I was remembering that Boz memo from Meta that had leaked out that was just like, look, we believe that we should connect people all up, even if it causes some negative outcomes. So there is, I think, a part of tech that's very tech-maxing. It's like, we just got to let it rip, and then we'll just deal with the consequences later. But of course, you know, people who are affected are going to not be happy with that.Link

LubaWhich side are you on? Do you think we should let it rip, or do you think we should be spending more cycles being thoughtful about how it's going to rip?Link

EugeneWell, you know, I'm a humanist at heart, so I really believe in the flourishing of people, and I personally am not going to be excited if my life is severely affected to the negative side by technology. And I think there have been negative outcomes of a lot of technologies that have been shipped to the world. And some of it is inadvertent, but some of it, I think, could have been anticipated. And so I hope we continue to be thoughtful as an industry about... you know, I think you can easily get into this very defensive crouch and just be like, no, my technology, as long as it advances, it's a pure good thing. And when you get critiqued, you can just further dig in and become blind to just the obvious downsides of certain things.Link

There's always a balance. For example, you know, with self-driving cars. As someone who used to cycle a lot in the Bay Area, I'd feel way safer if it was all Waymos on the road instead of human drivers. And I think it's, you know, bad to just draw attention to an occasional accident of a self-driving car if they, in general, are much safer than human drivers. On the other side, you know, if you look at the debate over social media, I've had many arguments with people who, you know, work in that field, who are like, no, it's a good thing to have social media, period. And certainly there are benefits. A lot of my friends and everything have come through that, and a lot of attention on my writing has come through social media. But to argue that it's purely good, I think, is insane.Link

LubaYeah, absolutely.Link

EugeneAnd I'm dismayed when people just dig in so hard and are completely blind to some obvious downsides, I think, to these things. So finding that balance is hard. You have to be so open. You have to keep your mind open.Link

LubaWhat is your personal hygiene of technology and consumption right now?Link

EugeneI don't know if I'm good with that. I have been trying to be less online over the past year. Part of it was, I think Twitter is not as interesting to me anymore, so I'm on it a lot less, which is good. I'm trying to just spend more time in the real world instead of the virtual world, which has been good and bad. Like I said, I miss some things about writing and corresponding with readers and other writers, so I want to bring that back into my life. Dial down the social media stuff a lot. But still, you know, I like feeling this ambient awareness of my friends' lives, what's going on with them. It's good for that. But I think, you know, there's no substitute for spending time with people in the real world, for developing deeper relationships. I'd rather have fewer, deeper relationships. And technology seems to... you have to battle technology to achieve that.Link

I don't know. What's yours? After your detox, did you come back and say, okay, I'm cutting out a lot of this stuff for good? Or you're like, I'm bringing it back in small doses?Link

LubaYeah, I definitely have brought it back. I am spending less time on social media and consuming generally than I used to, and I think there were a few things that have changed my habits with social media. Not just the detox, but, you know, finding things that are exciting in the real world, and also working on my own negative self-talk related to comparison. Because I think inevitably, depending on what you consume, you start getting pulled by the voice of, oh, you know, maybe I should be posting something that's more status-y, or more of a flex. And you almost get both addicted to the scrolling because of those negative feelings, and have more of them. So it's kind of a weird relationship.Link

But yeah, I consume less now. I do actually want to get back to scrolling Twitter more, because I almost don't scroll it at all. And I feel like I am now losing touch with what is really happening in the technological world, week to week or day to day, and it is still one of the better sources to stay connected.Link

EugeneThere's, you know, body dysmorphia, but I also feel like there's just a general dysmorphia that comes from social...Link

LubaFor sure.Link

Eugene...and spending a lot of time on social media. There's this concept of the Umwelt, which I read about in this book by Ed Yong, which is a book entirely about how different animals sense the world. Umwelt, it's a German term, I think, and he basically uses it as a term to mean kind of a creature's perceptual field. So some creatures use only sonar and can't see light. Others have great hearing, but, you know, some have interesting senses of touch. And for the creatures that see, you have creatures that see differently than humans, that have eyes all over their body, and don't combine them into one stereoscopic image. Instead, they... and then they have, like... yeah, so the full variety. And he argues that, you know, if you look at an animal's perceptual field, their Umwelt, it kind of determines what kind of social structures they can arrange themselves into, among other things.Link

I think social media today is a deep part of humanity's Umwelt. I haven't fully unpacked all the ways in which it's been distorted by how the people who run social media companies structure that, but that basically is one of our senses now. And when you give over a huge part of your perceptual field to someone else's algorithm, you're kind of at the mercy of how they tune it, as to how you see. So, for example, an algorithm that's really focused on engagement, like most of them are now, is going to be kind of barbell in its shape of what it shows you. There are a gazillion tweets that they could show you every day in their feed, but they're not showing you all of them. They're choosing a very specific set to show you that fit some...Link

LubaIt's almost like they're crafting your perception of that specific person.Link

EugeneIt's like if you had two... you know, there are creatures that have only two different color cones, and so they only see with a more limited number of colors than humans, who have three. But then there are creatures that have four, and so they see... actually, like, birds see way more color than humans do, and we can't even imagine what it's like to see. Like, we see that spectrum from red to purple, but we can't see UV light, for example. What does it mean to see more gradations of color? I don't know. So I think that's part of it, is just we've let our Umwelts be tuned to detect crazy things, and so it just gets you worked up all the time. You know, you read too much of any social media, and it has an effect on you. And we used to not have that sense.Link

LubaSo your decision to step back from the digital world and spend more time in the real world, was it intentional, prompted by some event or some reflection, or was it just gradual?Link

EugeneA lot of it was the pandemic. I don't know, people had a variety of experiences in the pandemic. I was stuck in SF in my condo, which I was trying to sell, and then, of course, I couldn't sell it, because everyone left the city. And so I was just stuck there because I was paying my mortgage. I was like, all right, I got to sell this place, and I shouldn't be traveling the world and paying extra for housing. And it was also a period of my life where a lot of my friends had kids and moved to the burbs, so the pandemic was just very isolating for me. I know some people were home with their families or traveling the world, and they had really crazy social pandemics. But I also realized, okay, I'm at a point in my life where friends with kids, I'm just not going to see them a lot. They're just scattered in the burbs and they're busy, you know, raising their kids. And I was like, you know, to rebuild a social structure for myself post-pandemic was going to take more work. And in that work, I think a lot of it is just in the real world, seeing people more. There isn't really a substitute for that. So that's part of it.Link

And the other part was the pandemic was such a huge shift, taking most of our lives and shifting them online. It was a great experiment, actually. It's just like, what if we only lived through technology and only interacted through technology, like through Zoom, which was huge, Instagram, there was that brief Clubhouse spike. You know, everybody was just like, hey, I'm starving for human contact, but I have to use these tech platforms because I can't go outside. Use it to order food. We watch Netflix. And I have to say that after, you know, some period of deeply just living like that, I found it terribly empty. I was like, we are not ready to live our full lives that way. So moments like that help you to reflect on what effect these things have on you, whether they're working or where they don't work. And it's given me some thoughts on how, maybe if I get back into this tech thing, I want to try to build off of those learnings to develop something that's not as soul-sapping as social media.Link

LubaWhat is the thing that you think should exist in that realm?Link

EugeneI don't know, but I miss more of the peak social networking era, and not the social media era.Link

LubaWhich part of social networking?Link

EugeneJust meeting other interesting people on the internet, and then...Link

LubaWhen Twitter used to have a certain algorithm, and then used to have some of that.Link

EugeneIt was a mix. Part of it was... I don't think it was intentional or anything. It was just the way it worked. But even newsgroups in the very early days of the internet, pre-social media, you would go on to these topical newsgroups and find just random people who were super into whatever you were into, and develop relationships that way. Because I still, you know, some of my best friends I made through Twitter, today. I miss that era. I wish it were back again.Link

LubaDo you think it happens somewhere else that we don't know about, some corner of the internet?Link

EugeneMaybe. I'm not sure what that is. I don't know. Do you find that there's some area? Do people do this via LinkedIn, or, I don't know what they...Link

LubaI think some pockets of Instagram. I think on Twitter, there are still some pockets where it could happen, but you need to be pretty rigorous about what you consume or who you interact with. I wanted to say that you probably had that with your readership, Substack, right?Link

EugeneYes. Mostly just my blog. Which, you know, it's funny. The blogging era was so... the discovery tools for blogs, the distribution tools, were so bad.Link

LubaYeah. How did people find your blog?Link

EugeneI mean, people had to... pre-Twitter, I honestly don't know. I mean, Techmeme was probably one of the first.Link

LubaActually, I don't know what Techmeme is. What is Techmeme?Link

EugeneOh, my friend Gabe runs this site, which is like a news aggregator site. They aggregate... it's like Hacker News, but a little bit... they basically sort their front page. It's like the front page for all of tech. It's like, here's the big stories today. And then they also pull in... it's still around. It's still around, yeah, techmeme.com. And they pull in all the social media mentions from prominent technologists and reporters about each story. So you can find the story, and you can see what people are saying about it. And I had a few pieces that would end up on the Techmeme homepage.Link

LubaThat's cool. That must have felt big in the moment.Link

EugeneYeah, that was an early traffic driver. And then Twitter became really the primary way that things would go viral. But, you know, before that era, really, it was just so much harder to get something to go viral. The scale of it was much lower. In a way, it's good. You know, a blog, if you just write on your blog and you don't push it out via social media, you'll get fewer readers, but the ones who you do get are the dedicated ones. They made the effort to go find it and read it, and maybe some of that filtering is a good thing.Link

LubaHow are you thinking of getting back into writing?Link

EugeneI think I'll just quietly write and put some things out. And then...Link

LubaAre you worried about the perception, the fact that people expect you to write a certain thing?Link

EugeneMaybe I'll be less worried about that. And, you know, it's good to not worry about readership and all of those things. I think that can be constraining. So, and mostly, you know, you end up... People used to say, you know, you get the advice that you should write for one reader.Link

LubaRight, right.Link

EugeneBut maybe that one reader should just be yourself, which is very different from writing for an audience, another person, even one person out there. And it can feel a little self-indulgent, but...Link

LubaIs that how you used to write, or did you have a specific person?Link

EugeneIn the earlier days, for sure. I only had a blog because some of the devs at Amazon had them internally. They just gave us a server where we could just put our blogs on. And, I mean, no one read them except your coworkers, the few of us. So, you know, you would have five readers. You knew who they were, because they were the other people who also had their own, and we would read them. And it was good in a way, because we were working such long hours at Amazon, I think everybody needed an outlet. And so, yeah, in those days, you'd look at your stats, you're like, wow, no one's really reading this. So I kind of am writing just for myself.Link

LubaBut you seem kind of more excited talking about those days.Link

EugeneYeah, yeah, in some ways. I think just less performative pressure.Link

LubaWhat do you think the world would look like if we didn't have to perform for anyone?Link

EugeneThere's, you know, like all things, there's some healthy balance of, I think, having to perform. I'm not one of those, like, hermits...Link

LubaBring yourself fully all the time?Link

Eugene...like, who lives in the woods. Though, you know, I know there are a few people in the world who just prefer not to be around other people, and they're very happy just living in a cabin in the woods. But I'm an introvert who likes being around people. In that way, New York is actually good for me. You can just go home to your apartment, but, you know, there are a gazillion people just outside your doorstep.Link

And I think with my readership too, the nice thing about blogs for me, if I didn't look at my dashboard of metrics, is you would write something and then you were kind of detached from who would read it, how it would be received. You didn't really know. And some amount of that, I think, is good. Some amount of that obscuring, some amount of that veil, I want to keep.Link

LubaI have a friend who has been producing a weekly podcast for, I believe, five years now, and he has no idea how many people listen to the podcast, who the people are. He's explicitly not looking at any of the stats. And when I found out about it, I was shocked. I was like, there are metrics! Because we're so driven by engagement and viewership and commentary and knowing the ICP. And I think it takes a certain level of discipline to be like, yeah, it's there, but I'm just not going to look. I don't care, because I want to preserve that authenticity.Link

EugeneDo you feel like with podcasting, you feel very close to your listeners, or is there some level of remove? Because someone showed me once... someone who worked in podcasting once showed me some... I don't know where they got the data, but it was a chart of listens of all podcasts. And I was struck by the fact that it's so, so, so tail-spiky, you know, of a small number of podcasts get a huge number of listens, and then most podcasts get almost none.Link

LubaYeah. Well, I would say that podcasting specifically also doesn't really have as rich data sets as videos do on YouTube, let's say. But yeah, I guess people just kind of like yapping and putting it out into the void, and don't care as much.Link

EugeneYeah. That's why I think, you know, maybe there is... You're like, why would people do this podcast if no one was listening? It's the same as, why would you write? It's the same as when I used to write and no one read anything I wrote.Link

LubaWhat's your process for writing? Because obviously, as I found out when we met, you're famous for certain types of essays. And, you know, you have a way to think about frameworks in a certain way. Do you sit down and think of a framework first and then you write about it, or does it just kind of flow and come up naturally?Link

EugeneThe ones that I'm more known for, these, like, longer essays about tech, it's different writing those than just writing day to day.Link

LubaRight.Link

EugeneBecause I think...Link

LubaAnd were you in the mode of writing day to day when you wrote those long-form essays?Link

EugeneThe longer writing, I was usually trying to achieve some understanding for myself of something, of a certain topic, and so I couldn't just, you know, hit publish until I achieved that understanding. Now, part of that understanding is achieved through writing about it, and then seeing your thoughts on the page allows you to grapple with them. And eventually you achieve a breakthrough. And I would feel like, okay, I finally have enough understanding that there's an insight here that I can push. But I never knew when I would achieve it. It's just like, you just kept seeing little bits and pieces, and you would throw that scrap into that file folder and be like, okay, this is part of this argument, I don't know why. And then, I don't know, you would just sit and think about it and write about it enough, and then the breakthrough would come.Link

Whereas day-to-day writing, I think, is more just like what they say. You know, how do you write? You just show up and write. It's kind of...Link

LubaYeah, there's no waiting for inspiration or the muse. You just...Link

EugeneA little bit. It's tautological. It's like, how do you write? By writing. And I should do more of that. I think it's probably some form of therapy for me.Link

LubaDo you write at all right now, or...Link

EugeneI had some... I was doing consulting for a while. So for clients, you know, I would have to write memos and things, and I enjoy it. But that's still different, because there's something very instrumental about that.Link

LubaWhat was your inspiration for consulting? Why did you want to consult?Link

EugeneI don't know. I just had some people ask me about it, and I was like, okay, I'll give it a try and see if it takes. And it's good. I mean, it's a good way to make a living, and it's fun to kind of wrestle with different problems. Yeah. But that's different from writing for yourself and just processing what's going on.Link

I think there's just some amount of... I don't know. I've never gone to therapy or anything, but I realized throughout my life how many of my friends are going to therapy. And I think when I hear them talk about it, I was like, you know, writing doesn't serve entirely the purpose of therapy, but for me, it serves part of it. And that part might just be, it's useful for you to get your thoughts out...Link

LubaTo clear your head. Yeah, just every day. So technically, you have been going to therapy for all these years by just...Link

EugeneA version of it. I don't want to, you know, have a bunch of therapists jump on me for distorting what they do. But I think there's something to that idea of just doing a brain dump. I mean, my blog was called Remains of the Day, partially because I really like the novel, but partially because I would usually write at the end of the day, because I was busy at work during the day. And at the end of the day, I was like, okay, what other things are in my head that I didn't get out today? And it was usually personal stuff, movies I had seen, things that I just found interesting. And so those were the remains of the day that I put out.Link

And I think there's something valuable to... you know how, when you're in a relationship too, you both come home from work, and, how was your day?Link

LubaYeah. How was your day?Link

EugeneAnd there's something there, like that oral recitation. It's like, this is the account of what happened. This happened. And, you know, it's like you're Homer telling one chapter of *The Odyssey*.Link

LubaYeah.Link

EugeneIt's even framed in terms of, wow, you know, I had this coworker that I'm doing battle with, and this person, and this struggle. And we frame these stories in a very specific way. We give them a shape, and giving them shape is giving them meaning, and it's helping us make meaning out of these things.Link

And part of my thought is that we in the West have a decline of community, where some of these things would be told in the past. And then, you know, with the loneliness epidemic, the rise of individualism, maybe more and more people just don't have someone to talk to. And maybe the therapist is just, like, a paid person, so you have somebody to talk to about this stuff. But you used to talk to your pastor or your neighbors or your family or whoever about these things. And probably we just need an outlet. I mean, you know that whole meme that's like, guys would rather...Link

LubaGo to war than go to therapy.Link

EugeneYeah, yeah. I mean, you know, of course it's an exaggeration, but there's also some level of truth to it, in that, well, replace the therapy part with just talk to anybody.Link

LubaRight.Link

EugeneAnd maybe there's something weird about, like, okay, there's some imbalance where it used to be like you would talk to somebody.Link

LubaYeah. And with that change in the world, how have you been finding community, meaning, for yourself?Link

EugeneBuilding community? I don't know. I'm not necessarily an expert on it. But I try to, you know... I was on my friend Jackson's podcast, and we were talking about college, and I had this theory that so many sitcoms in the '80s and '90s...Link

Luba...are set in college, because it's like the best, most social, communal time.Link

EugeneWell, they were fantasies of extending that college life into adulthood, and how American community doesn't allow for that. So after college, people are like, wow, my social life takes a huge drop-off post-college. And so part of it is, how do you recreate some of that? It's actually not easy, because of the way American urban planning lays out. It's hard to have that level that you had at a campus, where everyone was in dorms, some people were rooming together, and you saw everybody at the cafeteria every day or at classes or something. But some amount of regular, you know, gatherings and things, if it means hosting or being the initiator... You know, every social group has some people who always initiate and organize. That's huge value. It's kind of like being a community organizer in politics.Link

LubaDo you find that people are struggling with overcoming the friction of going somewhere?Link

EugeneYeah, every little element contributes. I was just talking with someone the other day about how it's so ironic that in the era of the smartphone, people flake on things so much more than they used to. When I was a child, you know, you just had landlines. If you made plans with someone, you could not flake, because you couldn't reach them. You're like, they're just going to be waiting at the mall for you for hours. So you just never did. But the rise of things like flaking on things or ghosting came when we had this technology that allowed us to flake at the last minute and notify people.Link

There's something weird, I think, about that. Someone was joking at a meal the other day that Partiful should post people's flake scores. Do you, you know, go to events that you said you were going to go to, and you check in? But if you didn't, it'd count as a flake. And then you would see people with, like, you know, 70% flake scores. And so if they RSVP to your event, you can kind of know that they...Link

LubaYou can kind of mentally know that they're not going to make it.Link

EugeneAnd I think we've gotten too used to just not having friction in our lives. Like, going out is friction. You know, going out to a movie or going out to dinner on a Friday night with friends.Link

LubaIt's much easier to sit at home and watch Netflix.Link

EugeneYeah, yeah. That was always a shadow cost that existed in the world, but we didn't have alternatives, and now we do. And so it made those shadow costs much more stark in our mind. And we're like, oh my gosh, yeah, I could go to the movie theater and pay for parking, you know, spend the time commuting and deal with that hassle, or I could just watch whatever the latest Netflix show is that just dropped. And maybe it's not that great, but whatever. It's like, you know, that concept of satisficing. It's just enough... it's not really fulfilling, but it just kind of satisfies an itch. So I think, you know, we have to take on... especially with making friendships, building community, everything, actually, so much of it is about friction and accepting some amount of it in your life.Link

LubaI almost feel like this is something that should be taught to the new generation in school: how to communicate with people in the real world, how to see friction as an opportunity and as something that could be positive, because you grow. Because more and more we're moving to a world that is completely, as you said, frictionless. And there are so many expectations that come because of that notion that everything should come very easy, on a silver platter. You know, I deserve things to happen very quickly. And then, as a result, there is a level of disappointment when that's not the case, when you're faced with reality.Link

EugeneYeah. Friction, obligation, debt. There are very few strong communities that don't have a huge amount of that built in at the foundation or the base. Religious movements... So *The Testament of Ann Lee* is directed by Mona Fastvold. She's the partner of Brady Corbet. So they did *The Brutalist* last year together, and they co-wrote this one, but she directed, and it's about the founder of the Shakers, this religious movement in America that kind of spun out from the Quakers.Link

Part of it is, you know, like all stories about religious movements in America, about just the role of religion in the founding of America, our religious roots. But part of it is just generally about the types of sacrifices a movement like that asks you to make so that you are more loyal to that movement. And these kinds of purity tests and these sacrifices they ask you to make will cause some people to churn out, to leave. But the people who are left behind feel even more devoted.Link

LubaYeah, it's almost the same as your essays. You wanted to make them really, really long, so the dedicated readers...Link

EugenePart of it is that. But also, that movie, like many movies about this topic, all the time makes me think about: if religion is declining in America, what are the communal structures that are left behind? And I think we've stripped so many away.Link

Even take remote work, right? I, like many people, was just like, wow, great, I don't have to commute two hours a day, you know, on the highway. Get all this time back. I can use that to, you know, make a coffee in the morning, do yoga or whatever. You're like, this is so great. But we actually outsourced a lot of community and relationship building to workplaces, just the same way that our health insurance is attached to work. I think a lot of our social health was tied to work, because we just had to go to the office. And there was a lot that was negative about commuting, and a lot of inefficiency with commuting to the office, but some of my best friends are people I worked with. And so when you went to, hey, everybody, just be home in your sweatpants, on the one hand, you're like, wow, great, I have so much free time. But you end up so individualistic that you're just alone. And I think this is kind of a natural outcome of maximizing kind of Western individualism, but we need to find a better balance.Link

LubaYou just recently went to Interact. So obviously, a new, younger generation of people. Do you feel like the future is bright as far as community interaction goes?Link

EugeneWell, I don't know on community specifically, but I think the younger generation... I mean, every time I meet someone young, it's crazy how bright and, you know, connected they are, and how much more ahead they are of where I was at their age. So I always leave Interact thinking, wow, you know, the kids are all right. They're better than we were. And you meet all the time these young, super brilliant... you know, some of them have dropped out of college to pursue all these things, and they know all these people, and they're networked to all these powerful people, smart people. So from that perspective, great.Link

And I always think with things like social media and everything, it takes some amount of time to adjust, but people do eventually. They're like, okay, this is not that great for me, and why, and what's the way to counteract it? It's kind of like the narrative now about dating apps. I hear this from so many people who are like, I'm done with dating apps, I'm going to go meet someone in real life, go back to some old ways or adapt to new ways. And so people can... you can collectively fight back against these larger forces that are very powerful.Link

It's the same... I'm reminded, you know, this is maybe a hopeful way to end, which is, if you look at that book by Ed Yong about perceptual fields, it says that vision, the vision of birds and bees, existed long before flowers came along. And in a way, the flowers that exist are the flowers that were adapted to the vision of the birds and the bees that were essential for pollinating.Link

LubaSo the same as performing.Link

EugeneAnd so it always gives me a sense of hope in the agency of people, to know that, you know, where we direct our attention, what we choose to engage in, what our taste is, shapes what will be made. There's this period where I think these platforms won by causing us to be addicted and whatnot, just the same way, you know, cigarettes or soda just seemed like they would never stop growing. And eventually they did. People realized. It takes, sometimes, a while for you to step back and process it all. But it's good to think of this, that we collectively shape what types of things are put into the world for us, maybe not at first, but in the long run. So that gives me hope. You know, when people are like, oh, dating apps aren't working for me, or social media is making me feel sick, that realization is the first step towards changing.Link

LubaYeah, that's a very optimistic take. And as they say, whatever you put awareness to is what's going to blossom and grow. So you're right that people realizing that something is poisonous or toxic or negative in their own lives, and redirecting attention, is the first step to change. And on that note, are there any pockets of the internet or writing or music or film that you feel like are already flourishing after that realization?Link

EugeneThe micro-community of Letterboxd, for the most part, where I just follow a bunch of my friends who are into movies.Link

LubaHuh.Link

EugeneIt's just like a movie community. Letterboxd, yeah, without the E at the end. And it's just this micro-community of film lovers who use it as a way to log movies they've seen and to review them. And it's a little bit isolated from the social media and the clout chasing of that. And I think micro-communities are still great. That's like a beautiful part of the internet. It could be a subreddit that you're in, or a random Discord that you're in. It could be a group chat, which are super popular these days. But that's kind of where a lot more of my attention that used to go to social media goes now, to these small communities.Link

LubaAny secrets for how to keep up with all the group chats?Link

EugeneWell, you just have to be ruthless about, I think, muting some of the big ones that you get tossed into, which can just be overwhelming. There are certain ones I care about. I think also any group chat above, you know, like, two things. If they're above, you know, I don't know, five to seven people, or if the vast majority are people you've never met in real life, you have to realize that there's going to be something about it that simulates social media again, and not, like, the virtues of a real, sort of small, intimate group chat. I wish there were more metrics on group chats about, like, participation rate, so you could see, is this, like, a group chat just for one person to dominate, or is everyone participating? And I try to, you know, devote more attention to the ones where I'm participating and other people are participating. Because the rest, you know, it's just like a smaller form of Twitter, right? Like, that's not that interesting to me. I'm going to it for something else.Link

LubaMakes sense. Anything you're looking forward to in the fall, now that the summer is over?Link

EugeneFall in New York, I don't know. I always look forward to the weather, the smell of the air, walking around Central Park. You know, it's like a new season for the symphony and for Broadway and all the plays and all the arts. I feel like there's a calendar where it turns over. And, yeah, I don't know, it's my favorite season in New York. So I look forward to that.Link

LubaAwesome. Well, Eugene, thank you so much for having me for a conversation. This is really fun.Link

EugeneAnytime. Thank you.Link