It is with some trepidation that we approach today’s topic. Nevertheless, given our throughline of the science of the mind in this podcast, the founders feel strongly that we need to address the pervasive cultural trend of psychotherapeutic practices. Psychotherapy is often taken for granted in many modern societies, and it’s often incorrectly seen as synonymous with psychology. What’s more, it’s also infiltrating culture, technology and art. 

We imagine that even the most open-minded and skeptical listeners with the sharpest skills for intellectualizing may have a reflexive resistance to the thesis of this episode: [that] many of the foundations of talk therapy are either severely outdated, predominantly pseudoscientific, or simply incorrect. Just like we did with Dr. Bruce Hood in our conversation about self and identity, we’re going to entertain the idea that certain concepts we take for granted are far from settled fact. 

We’ll challenge our listeners to consider that psychotherapy is neither a legitimate science nor a medicinal practice validated with demonstrable success. In taking a deep dive into the history of psychology, we’ll see that it began as something more at the intersection of armchair philosophy and modern shamanism rather than as a medical practice emerging from rigorous science. We’ll cover the “speciation” of different approaches to the mind, ranging from therapeutic practices to empirical sciences, each with their own evolutionary trajectories. We’ll look at the modern infrastructure supporting these disciplines, with their respective economics of knowledge production. And we’ll discuss perverse incentives to medicalize otherwise normal travails of the human experience for the purposes of selling new drugs, building academic careers, or writing sensational, empty popular science articles in the era of clickbait journalism chasing programmatic ad revenue. 

This is going to be hard. The benefits of therapy are touted everywhere in modern culture. Therapy is presented to us as a normal part of life by our friends, popular TV shows, celebrities, esteemed news organizations such as the New York Times, and even our doctors. Yet, just as we wouldn’t go in for a new experimental brain surgery without learning as much about it as we can, we shouldn’t blindly adopt new therapies claiming to fix something as poorly understood as the “self” or the human mind without first thoroughly examining the claims, methods, and outcomes. If our goal in using psychotherapy is to be a good friend, family member, partner, lover, co-worker, and citizen, or if it’s to generally improve our mental well-being, then we would argue that it is absolutely critical to understand what psychotherapy can and cannot do.

To be clear, we aren’t saying that mental health isn’t important. In fact, we think it’s very important, and that’s why it’s also important to understand the fact and fiction surrounding the most popular approaches to mental health. But we’re going to go beyond just focusing on the ways in which psychology has gone wrong, and also suggest a revised framework for understanding ourselves in the modern world. This framework will build upon other related ideas we’ve discussed, including “The Science of the Self and Identity” with Dr. Bruce Hood and “Cognitive technologies for communication” with Dr. Judy Fan, and we’ll continue to flesh it out across future interviews. 

Today we’re talking with Dr. Maciej Zatonski. Dr. Zatonski is a surgeon and researcher known for debunking unscientific therapies and claims in clinical medicine. He is the founder of the Polish Skeptics Club and a leader in the public understanding of science in Poland. He has been honored by the Polish Academy of Sciences for his work to purge the medical curriculum of obsolete and bogus therapies. 

When OSCILLATIONS got its start a couple of years ago, almost nobody knew what an influencer was, much less understood that an economy was emerging around them. Now influencers are called creators, and the value of creator networks is increasingly recognized in media and tech. Funds like Index Ventures and Lerrer-Hippeau are actively investing in the creator economy, the tools that power it, and the media brands that bring creators together to replace dinosaur networks struggling to maintain a hold in a world where cable has been cut. 

Recently, we had the opportunity to chat with one of these forward-thinking investors at Index Ventures, Rex Woodbury. Rex is himself an influencer, and he’s had his pulse on cutting-edge trends at the intersection of culture and technology for years. He writes about these trends in his newsletter on Substack, the Digital Native, which we highly recommend - and which we’ve linked in the show notes. The thing about Rex and his colleagues is that they aren’t your typical venture capitalists chasing buzzwords and timing the hype cycles. This new wave of “creator economy” investors often draw inspiration from the innovations of the Italian Renaissance and the salons of the Belle Epoque. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve talked at length about cultural movements like these in previous episodes.

Indeed, today you’ll hear a lot of similar themes as in our last interview with Joe Marchese. But you’ll notice that Rex has a more sanguine position about the creator economy. We discuss how creators are changing art and culture, as well as the role that investment capital can play in supporting creators. This is a really important topic, because in order to build a better world, we need to understand how capital is allocated. If we want a future that isn't just powered by profit and doesn’t just offer convenience, but is also beautiful and inspiring, then we need more investors looking at art and culture. And if the 21st century is poised for another Renaissance - another global movement in the arts and sciences - it’s not going to be underwritten by wealthy merchant families or industrialist robber barons. It's going to be funded by venture capitalists. Let’s dive in and see what that world could look like. We give you: Rex Woodbury. 

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills

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A central throughline at OSCILLATIONS is humans’ coevolution with technology. In our interview with Dr. Judy Fan, we talked about how human inventions like drawing and writing serve as cognitive technologies that allow us to jointly attend to the same ideas across space and time. These ancient cognitive technologies paved the way for our inventions of modern technologies, which are now having a disproportionate effect on our collective attention. Building upon these ideas, in our last interview with Tim Hwang, we learned about how one modern technology in particular, programmatic ad markets, determine what we’re exposed to, how we create content, and even the ways we converge - or fail to converge - on shared values. 

Today we’re going to dig deeper into the relationship between attention and values. We’re searching for something that’s harder to grasp than the broken mechanisms of the digital ad economy. We’re going to reflect on the concept of “value” in both an economic and a social sense. 

Today we’re talking to Joe Marchese…  For an investor, Joe has some contrarian ideas about curation, attention, and the mass amateurization of content. These ideas will be the focus of our conversation today. Let’s dive in.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills

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In our last episode, we talked about cognitive technologies, or behaviors that shape our capacities to think, communicate, and imagine. Cultural artifacts like language, visual drawings, math, and art are cognitive technologies because they allow us to link our minds together and invent new ideas that go beyond what any one mind could do on its own. They allow us to stabilize and share ideas across space and time to build increasingly complex tools, systems, and societies.

Today, humans are at a point in society where we’re creating things that we don't understand. A few decades ago, it was said we’d reached a point where no one individual could understand things we were starting to build, such as how computers work. Instead, it took a group of specialized experts to jointly piece together new technologies we were inventing. In the past few years, with increasingly complex artificial intelligence technologies, we’ve crossed another threshold: we’ve built things that nobody can fully understand - not even groups of experts. 

Unlocking this Pandora's box has created a positive feedback loop: In order to coordinate the collective interactions of new, complicated technologies, we must develop even more complicated systems. Ironically, many of the technologies are intended to simplify our lives - to allow us to more easily connect with one another, manage our finances, and order our groceries. But the speed at which new technologies are evolving in fact further complicates our lives. This is one of the major paradoxes of the 21st Century. (“Hashtag disruption!”)

Today we’re talking with Tim Hwang about one of the most pervasive examples of these technologies. It’s the one that underlies the entire business model of the internet. And it’s having a profound effect on human behavior at a global scale. We’re talking about programmatic advertising. 

Tim is a writer, researcher, and currently the general counsel at Substack. He’s the author of The Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about the online advertising bubble that we’ll be discussing today. He’s also a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a board member of Meedan, a non-profit that builds software and programmatic initiatives to strengthen journalism, digital literacy, and accessibility of information. Previously he’s served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google, as well as the director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, a $27M philanthropic fund and research effort working to advance the development of machine learning in the public interest.

The ideas we’ll cover are a bit jargonized and technical, but their implications are extremely broad and important. Tim believes we’re in danger of another economic collapse, perhaps even orders of magnitude larger than the 2008 mortgage crisis. 

Given the technical nature of the topic, we’re going to first review the main arguments in Tim’s book and then ask him to connect his ideas to the themes we think about at Oscillations. We encourage our listeners to read The Subprime Attention Crisis, since there’s a lot of information that we won’t be able to cover in our conversation today. 

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills

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In the modern world, technology is all around us. It’s hard to imagine a life without our phones, our cars, and our apps. When we think about what technology is, we typically think about physical inventions, like lightbulbs, steam engines, and laptops, along with the algorithms these machines run on. Most people would agree that technology, broadly speaking, refers to the tools we invent to solve problems and simplify things. Moreover, many would also acknowledge that these tools often create new problems and complicate things. For example, the internet has given us unprecedented access to information... but it has also accelerated the spread of misinformation. This means that we have to invent new technologies to manage the old ones. Within this cycle, we culturally co-evolve with our technologies.

When we think about technologies as culture-shaping tools with which we co-evolve generally, rather than hardware and software specifically, it becomes clear that many things can count as “technologies.” 

Those of you who’ve listened to previous podcasts know that my research focuses on language evolution. When I was making the transition from academia to tech, I had to give a talk as part of the interview process at Google. So I gave my dissertation talk, and in it I described language as the “original technology” that defined homo sapiens. My interviewers found this very strange. They were used to thinking about technology in terms of the products they were building. 

Fundamentally, however, language is a technology - and it’s one that set humans off on their current evolutionary trajectory. 

At Oscillations, we focus on technology, art, culture, and the science of the mind. All of these things come together in what psychology Professor Judy Fan, Director of the Cognitive Tools Lab at UC San Diego, calls “cognitive technologies.” Cognitive technologies are behaviors that shape our capacities to think, communicate, and imagine. I met Professor Fan earlier this year at a month-long conference called the “Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute,” or “DISI” for  short. As the name implies, every summer the institute brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on some aspect of intelligence. There are cognitive scientists, like Judy and myself, philosophers, biologists, neuroscientists, artificial intelligence researchers, political scientists, and even writers and artists. DISI also puts out a fantastic podcast called the Many Minds podcast, which you should definitely check out if you’re into the science of the mind.

Today we’re talking with Professor Fan about some of her recent research, which integrates methods from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and AI, to investigate how humans learn and link their minds together. This research has implications for understanding our cultural co-evolution with technology, our strategies for establishing common ground, and our predisposition to create art.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills

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Grace is a way of making others feel at ease. Like hospitality, good manners, cultivating a sense of fashion, and putting your best foot forward when it counts, grace is an ongoing effort and cultivated habit of making the world less stressful and more pleasing for those around us.

For these reasons, grace is something like a virtue or a paramount “first principle” of social interaction. In this sense, grace is a courtesy; a respect for others. Grace reflects an awareness of being situated in something larger than ourselves, whether that’s a relationship, a community, or a society. 

Yet grace is overlooked. In my own lifetime, it seems to have eroded considerably. I remember fondly back to my childhood, a time when nobody received calls after 7pm - a social convention that respected family and personal time and recognized a need to collect oneself, move at a slower pace, and wind down for the day. I remember a time when politicians showed at least some deference to decorum, especially a head of state. I even grew up in a small town in the foothills of Berkshires where vestigial organs of a bygone etiquette would make the occasional appearance: antique ideas that children might refer to their parents and grandparents by “sir” and “maam,” that one ought to ask to be excused from the table, or that any plateware left behind by a guest ought not be returned to them empty.

Grace is an outward orientation, and as such it’s a bit anemic in a modern culture with such inward-oriented messaging that encourages us to prioritize our own happiness, our own boundaries, our self care, our self expression, our feelings, our self-reliance, and our independence. 

To try and understand what grace is and where it fits into modern life, we’re speaking today with Sarah Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and dance critic at the Washington Post. I read her book “The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life” years ago and it’s had a lasting impact on me. It takes the reader on a search for grace, occasionally looking at some pretty surprising and educative examples. It’s not only a pleasure to read, it’s an inspirational call to action. 

At OSCILLATIONS we’re all about the inspirational and the visionary - the imagining of new, more creative and beautiful worlds. The book gently encourages us to imagine a world where we are generally better to each other and collectively contributing to a sort of beautification project. For most of us, life is hard enough without having to suffer through its trials surrounded by slumped shoulders, shuffling feet, and morose dispositions. I came away from the book with a strong desire to fashion myself into a graceful person as a matter of virtue and civic responsibility. Let’s just say it’s a work in progress. 

We couldn’t be more honored and excited to speak with Sarah about grace, culture, art, dance, civics, and science. And so with that, we bring you Sarah Kaufman.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills

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Art and entertainment play a central role in culture, shaping our preferences, attitudes, and values, and creating a sense of shared cultural identity. In the 21st century, new technological platforms have not only changed the way we consume art and entertainment, but they’ve also led to new genres of content and paved new pathways for creators. There’s been an explosion of new forms of expression, communication, storytelling, and connecting with others around the world.

At OSCILLATIONS, we’re interested in understanding these cultural changes and how we can leverage them to amplify creative expression and cross-cultural collaborations. On this front, there’s perhaps no better role model to look to than Brad Haugen, President of Westbrook Media at Westbrook. 

We’ve all seen Will Smith and his family’s incredible adaptation to the new ways of doing media and entertainment in the digital and social technology age. Westbrook exemplifies several emerging trends, where celebrities are leveraging their brands in new, socially progressive ways. They’re working to reach younger audiences, who engage with content very differently. They’re partnering with other organizations in the Smith Family circle to make and promote socially impactful investments in startups. And they’re experimenting with categorically new kinds of storytelling at a time when Hollywood—and our increasingly interconnected world, more broadly—is undergoing rapid transitions and associated growing pains. 

Westbrook’s mission is to empower artists to tell stories that connect the world. If you’ve read the OSCILLATIONS manifesto or listened to us read it on the first three episodes of our podcast, you might have noticed the alignment. At OSCILLATIONS, we’re all about empowering artists to guide the future of some of the most exciting—but also potentially scary—creative technologies that will be coming out in the next decade or two. 

One of the reasons we’re so excited to talk with Brad is that he himself is a talented visual artist. You can see his paintings on his Instagram profile, and more recently showcased at art galleries. It’s extraordinarily rare to find such dedicated, technically proficient, and talented artists working on the business and entrepreneurial side of any industry. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to get Brad’s thoughts on how entertainment is changing, how the attention economy can be used for social good, and how artists might tangibly shape the future by spreading their art and ideas in a rapidly changing world.

"Art is the signature of civilizations." -Beverly Sills

Join the movement from the very beginning. If you believe that #thefutureiscreative, support us with a like, a follow, and a share.

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