What's the opposite of a lazy person? Whatever it is, I can't call myself that. I won't self-deprecate so I don't call myself lazy, either. But if there's a spectrum, I'm closer to lounge-on-the-couch than organize-a-5K. As a small-business owner, I'm always looking for ways to supercharge my work. Most of my clients don't have endless supplies of cash. I try to deliver as much as I can within their budget. What's more, I can't be an expert on everything. I will always have a few things I have to outsource to someone who is more knowledgeable than me. So when the hype of AI hit the consulting world, it should've been an easy decision for me to jump on board. Instead, I watched with a mix of curiosity and horror as it burrowed into every part of the american economy.

Rachel Kacenjar at Work in Progress Consulting saw this wave coming. Back in September, Work in Progress published an AI Policy for their work. Even a few months ago I wasn't sure I needed a policy for my business. I thought I could skate past AI like I had other fads: NFTs, Labubus (Labubi?), and blockchains. Harvard economist Jason Furman making news recently changed that for me. He calculated that 92% of GDP growth in america in the first half of 2025 was due to AI investments. No matter what happens to it in the future, that much money doesn't evaporate overnight. Except for NFTs—wow, what a tumble they had, huh?

I set out to write my own AI policy. I realized that I only really knew the edges of what I was trying to achieve. Would a blanket policy work for all the ways that AI is infiltrating our lives? Would clients care about the stance that I took against it? If AI reached a critical mass with my consultant colleagues, could I afford to be in open rebellion against it? As in everything I try to do, before I could take a stand on AI, I needed to seek to understand it.

@talentagencyguide Ethan Hawke says that he's "bored by Al," saying he prefers real human connection. He calls Al a "plagiarizing mechanism" and jokes that while he knows it's changing the world, he's in "open rebellion" against it. #ai #acting #theatre #actor #actress ♬ original sound - talentagencyguide

what is AI?

I knew before I started working on this essay that "AI" is not one thing. There's a lot of hype out there that takes advantage of this. The AI that people are using today is not the same version that executives sell to shareholders. Even within the umbrella of real-world AI lies many different models and functions. I created the summary below with guides from IBM and Sully Perella from Schellman.

Narrow or Weak AI. This is the type of AI we have now. Every type of AI that exists today fits within this broad category. This type of AI can perform tasks that someone asks it to. Someone has to write the instructions beforehand. Weak AI can't do new tasks based on what it already knows. Reactive Machine AI can perform the same task over and over but can't learn from what it's done. One example of Reactive Machine AI is Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing program. It can calculate the most probable chess move out of millions of options, but it is terrible at Jeopardy. (It was IBM’s Watson that played Jeopardy). Limited Memory AI can remember things it has said or done. Google's Gemini AI can hold on to conversation details for a while before forgetting them. It was also pretty full of self-loathing (relatable) before a software update fixed that (unrelatable).

Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This type of AI doesn't exist, but everyone with money wishes it did. This AI can go beyond Narrow AI to complete tasks that nobody programmed it to do. It learns and responds to stimuli; modifies its own code, more or less. Over time, it could have about the same cognition as a human.

Super AI. This is about as science fiction as we can get. Super AI combines human reasoning with lightning-fast processing time. It can learn, respond, and direct itself to do things based on what it learns. This is basically Skynet if you're a Terminator fan. It's the kind of dream for anyone who would get excited by a torment nexus.

everything people use today is Narrow AI

Within the umbrella of Weak AI is all the AI that we use today. But these distinctions are important to understanding the AI that’s around us.

Machine Learning. This is a type of AI trained to identify patterns in the data it receives. For most Machine Learning AI, it can learn over time the patterns that are legitimate and the ones that are not. My favorite example is the AI that can detect cancer tissue in scans earlier than humans can (more on that later).

Large Language Models (LLMs). This is a form of Machine Learning. Its speciality is interpreting and generating text. ChatGPT is the most famous example of an LLM. Its purpose is to mimic human speech and respond to what people say to it. It can translate languages and carry on a conversation. Others are the chatbots on every website and the autocomplete in emails and texts are LLMs. An LLM is what summarizes product reviews or scans PDFs without you needing it to. And the LLM Google Gemini is famous for suggesting that you glue your toppings to your pizza.

Generative AI (gen AI). This is the famous sibling, to be honest. Generative AI creates new images based on art and images it has scanned. It can create music based on styles and genres it trained on. And it can create new code based on the libraries of code it can already access. But it can’t invent new code and it doesn’t know how well it does at something. Sully Perella writes that this AI would learn how to be a chef by "reading books with favorite recipes.”

When people talk or write about AI today, it's likely that they mean one of these types. I find it important to know the difference between types of AI, what each can do, and what people are saying it can do. Now that I’ve parsed the differences in AI that I know of, I’ll share my misgivings with it.

AI is bad for the environment

Every form of AI today has similar environmental impacts. With every query, AI is running thousands of lines of code. AI software "lives" in data centers that house its programming. These data centers use a lot of energy to process these queries. It takes a lot of water to cool to processors so they don't overheat. This is draining the water supply in areas that don't have much to spare. Data centers have to choose between cooling with water and cooling with air conditioning. That makes their energy usage even worse. Michael Copley at NPR reports that one AI data center can use as much electricity as 100K households. Data centers now under construction will need the same amount of power as 2M households.

Data centers house more programs and services than AI alone. We've relied on them since the Internet exploded in the 1990s. But AI is driving a data center boom. AI-peddling companies need to build up a supply of processing power for the AI of the future. It's this future AI that is driving growth and investments. Power-hungry data centers keep cities from retiring their coal-burning power plants. It's behind the reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant (the one that had a partial meltdown in 1979).

AI is racist

We already know enough about the environmental impacts of AI. Like everything else, Black and brown communities feel that harm the most. But the impact of AI on BIPOC communities goes beyond pollution.

Large Language Models amplify the biases that their creators instill in them. Grok, another model, calling itself MechaHitler is an extreme example of this. But jokes about robot Nazis at a company led by a human one can hide larger issues at stake.

Covert racism touches everything. It's what leads white people to quote MLK, Jr. while avoiding "sketchy" neighborhoods. Unfortunately, AI has inherited the biases of the society that built them. Hofmann, Kalluri, Jurafsky, and King studied the covert racism of LLMs. These LLMs treat people worse when they speak in African-American English (AAE) dialect. The authors found that AI depicted these users as, “more criminal, more working class, less educated, less comprehensible and less trustworthy when they used AAE rather than Standardized American English (SAE).” They asked 5 popular LLMs to pass sentencing decisions on hypothetical alleged murderers. The "defendants" submitted a statement to each LLM written with either AAE or SAE. Each model gave AAE-using defendants harsher sentences than people who spoke SAE. What's more, AI is more likely to mistranscribe or misunderstand AAE speakers. My own experience with the AI transcriber otter.ai backs this up. It struggles to transcribe the non-white names it hears, even when we spell names the same way they sound.

LLMs work by training on work that someone has already written. Chances are, that source material holds racial biases the AI then amplifies. The study authors write:

“we found substantial evidence for the existence of covert racio-linguistic stereotypes in language models. Our experiments show that these stereotypes are similar to the archaic human stereotypes about African Americans that existed before the civil rights movement, are even more negative than the most negative experimentally recorded human stereotypes about African Americans, and are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the previously reported overt racial stereotypes in language models, indicating that they are a fundamentally different kind of bias. Finally, our analyses demonstrate that the detected stereotypes are inherently linked to AAE and its linguistic features.”

It's unfortunate that AI is somehow more biased than biased humans. But this AI is in software that's already in front of the public. It's integrated into features and decisions that are already in use. Even Machine Learning can be racist. Police arrested Robert Williams because of face recognition technology that falsely identified him. ICE now uses facial recognition software to decide if people on the street are citizens.

AI used in healthcare also shows significant bias. Insurance companies use algorithms to determine who should receive complex care. They wrote the algorithm to rank patients higher if the costs for their care were higher. But researchers found that Black patients were much sicker by the time they got complex care. Because Black patients spend less on healthcare, the algorithm didn't rank them high. Because of this, Black patients received complex care less often than white patients.

The problem in all these cases is not that AI is racist and humans are not. Instead, it's that AI is automatic and harder to correct. Most of us can't see or understand the code that makes up AI. We have to trust that coders will set aside the biases and prejudice they may not even know they have.

AI is dumb and it makes us dumber

The power of decisions is another factor in the capabilities of AI. Sci-fi author Ted Chiang wrote about decisions being at the very heart of good (and by extension, bad) art.

He writes that art is about creation, and the act of creation is about making decisions. A novel or painting is the result of many decisions. What will this tree look like when we're done with it? How will this character's story arc twist in creative ways? How do we present something to audiences that is both familiar and alien? Every work of art is a collection of these decisions. An AI is capable of mimicking that. But AI itself doesn't know whether what it creates is art. It takes us, our human minds, to find meaning in that art and decide if it's worthwhile.

But by that definition, generative AI can create art with input from a human user. Chiang tells the story of film director Bennet Miller. Miller created gallery-worthy art using the gen AI program called Dall-E 2. He would write descriptive prompts and view what Dall-E 2 geneated. He would then input more prompts to tweak the art until it satisfied him. But the 20 pieces of Dall-E 2 art he exhibited took more than 100K images to create. As Chiang writes, Miller's experience is one that OpenAI and other companies want us to have. But they can't sell the fact that it could take thousands of tries to create something worth having. They depict their software as easy to use, creating blockbusters with just a few prompts. But Chiang believes that even as a tool for artists, generative AI makes a whole lot of chaff for scant wheat. “The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.”

I fear that AI is doing more than making dumb art. It's making us dumber, too. When AI summarizes articles or books, it saves us the time by reading the whole thing. Reading a book isn't about the rote receipt of information. We can't even trust the information: AI makes up details and events that never happened. AI companies say they'll never be able to fix the problem of AI hallucination. LLMs and generative AI will always get facts wrong.

the risks of discernment

When we use AI to create something for us, we become the editors. I recently interviewed for a contract grant writer role with a small non-profit. With confidence, I assured the executive director that I would never use AI in my work with them. "Oh, you're right, I never use it," she replied. "Well, I have AI write all my emails, but then I tweak it to sound better." AI shifts our role away from imagination and decisons-making and closer to discernment. What makes something feel well-written to us? Is editing an essay made by autocomplete much different than writing it ourselves? LLMs take a prompt and create the most probable string of words as its answer. It can't make a turn of phrase except by accident. And it isn't creating new works of art as much as it is blending many sources of art. Generative AI doesn't create millions of ideas and chooses the one it likes the best. We have to do that.

How is this different from having an employee you assign tasks to? When I ask a human to do something, they are using their experience and knowledge to make decisions. I can give them feedback and they'll improve upon it. They might even improve on my work or take it in a direction I didn't expect. AI can mimic this, but it will never come up with something it hasn't seen already.

When we do use AI, there is some proof that it makes us worse at our jobs. Computer scientists using AI believed that it made them 20% faster than if they worked without it. Instead, they were spending 19% more time on a project with the help of AI. Paul Hsieh at Forbes wrote about another recent study published in the Lancet. They measured physicians' ability to detect polyps in a colonoscopy. When the doctors used AI, they detected slightly more polyps than doctors who weren't using it. But the difference between groups was slim: a less than 0.5% improvement. What's interesting is what happened after the physicians had gotten used to using AI. Physicians using AI that stopped using it suddenly got worse at detecting polyps. The study authors write, “continuous exposure to decision support systems such as AI might lead to the natural human tendency to over-rely on their recommendations.” While AI support might get better over time, we might be worse off if we ever choose not to use it.

AI will take our jobs (and it will be bad at them)

My theory is that AI is a long-term project to limit or even end the human workforce under the guise of saving money. Thousands of people have already lost their jobs to some form of AI. One expert believes that right now AI could replace less than a third of the workforce. But the level of investment in AI is so high that I can't imagine companies would be willing to stop there. The american economy boomed during the 400+ years of Black enslavement and exploitation. Free land plus free labor drove the engine of our economy for centuries. Incarcerated laborers fill shelves with goods they make in american sweatshops. What if those manufacturers could give their shareholders a better quarter? What if they could push their labor costs closer and closer to zero? Wouldn't they claim it was their duty to do so? Is any human life worth more than a shareholder's dividend?

Bookstore giant Powell's in Portland, OR came under fire for putting AI art on their store merch. Powell's apologized after the AI slop hit the news. But the employees' union gave a statement that clarified Powell's knew all along. "If Powell’s leadership is truly ‘committed to keeping Powell’s designs rooted in creativity and imagination,’ we hope in the future they will be more receptive to feedback from their many creative and imaginative employees—among them, an enormously talented in-house design team." Portland is a city full of artists. I always find a mural, graffiti, or other art to admire when I'm there. Even when those artists work for Powell's, executives still prefer a non-human touch. If that's not a world we want to live in, we need to say so.

I'm better than AI

My mind has spent a lot of time on that concept of discernment. As a consultant, creativity is my bread and butter. I make a lot of decisions in my daily work: how to design a project; how to guide a focus group I lead; how to pivot in a workshop. How is that different from rewriting an AI-drafted email? Or having an LLM give me a list of icebreakers to choose from? One could argue that the difference is so small that most people won't notice.

In the two weeks it took me to write this, a startup announced it invented the world's first AGI-capable model. Nobody knows whether this is true, but it's likely that that day will come sometime in the future. Will the AGI be more capable than us? Will autonomous AGI or Super AGI robots take over our homes? For now, I see AI as a tool—one that may have real benefits, but not at the level of ubiquity it now enjoys.

I was talking with a colleague about AI policies several weeks ago now. "It's pointless to write one," she said. "AI is changing so fast that as soon as you do it'll be obsolete." She may be right. I'm still planning to write one—by hand. I know what a unique experience it is to be human. I'm not ready to give that up yet.

I will share be the future/Future Emergent's AI Policy in a January blog post.

This week’s question comes to us anonymously:

How do you lovingly care for an aging parent who treated you like shit?

This question has been sitting in my inbox for almost two years. While I fear that I’ve waited too long to possibly help the person who asked it—for which I am sorry—I had to wait until I was ready to answer it. That day is today.

I’m currently on a flight to Lisbon to bury my father. The call came on Thursday morning, or rather there was a text. A text from my Aunt in Portugal telling me about funeral arrangements.

“Funeral arrangements for who?!”

There is a photo of my father somewhere (perhaps only in my memory of this point) where my father is sitting cross-legged on the floor of my parents’ first apartment in the United States. There’s a Christmas tree behind him (yes, this is a Christmas newsletter). The tree is foil or aluminum or whatever those old 70s trees were made of. A few feet away there’s a rotating color wheel that changed the tree different colors. He’s smiling. He’s got a 70s mustache that matches the tree. I have a vague memory of a thick white cableknit sweater. Philadelphia is cold.

My parents immigrated to the United States when I was two years old. They moved to Philadelphia because people in small towns tend to immigrate to the same place. A community is displaced, and then rebuilds itself in a new place. And folks immigrating from the small town my parents were from all immigrated to Philadelphia. I’m guessing someone was first, but since the history of the Portuguese in the New World doesn’t tend to reveal good things, I never went looking.

I’m guessing this photo would’ve been taken during their first Christmas here, which would’ve happened after they’d been here almost a year, since we immigrated in January. Although I’ve always been tentative about using the verb immigrated for myself. I was two. I’m an immigrant, but I never really immigrated. I was luggage. (I’m willfully omitting my younger brother from this story because although he is also an immigrant he voted for a man who kidnaps immigrants, and I am petty. I get to be petty today. I am erasing him.)

Going back to the photo, as I rotate the scene—which it occurs to me I’m doing for the first time right now, never having given it a thought—I’m picturing my mother with a camera in hand. Some form a cheap Kodak 135 instamatic with a rotating cube flash (I have a vague memory of it). I imagine that she’s smiling back at my father, and it occurs to me that they didn’t smile at each other too often. Certainly not recently. But this photo is possibly evidence that they once did. I wonder what their first year in a new country was like. I’m sure it was frightening at times, but this photo—which is now most likely lost—is evidence that maybe, just maybe, for a brief moment they might’ve smiled at each other more, and possibly even loved one another.

I’m currently on a flight to Lisbon to bury my father, who once bought a foil or aluminum or whatever it’s made of Christmas tree in Philadelphia and brought it home, to a shitty third floor walk-up, and set it up and then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it, smiling at my mother while she took his picture and I am so so so fucking mad that man is dead, but that man died a long long time ago. And I am even madder about that. I am so fucking angry at you for not staying that person for longer than that moment. That one fucking moment that I have to hold so close because you gave us so few of them.

And now I’m crying on a flight, and I am angry at myself because you do not deserve it. I want to put a stranger in the ground, but try as I might, you refuse to be that. Because there were moments that gave me hope. Moments that made me realize you were capable of more. I honestly tried so hard to get more of those moments out of you, and I hate you for withholding them.

(This is an eleven hour flight, and I’ve slipped into the second person. I pity my readers this week. You are well and truly fucked.)

Speaking of which; the last thing my father told me was to go fuck myself. This happened on the phone a few years ago, during a call with my mother. I heard her turn away from the phone and ask him if he wanted to say hello. I heard him reply in the background. Tell him to go fuck himself. And that was that.

Death does not make saints, and I have neither the desire nor the power for beatification tonight.

My father has died many times (although this current death seems particularly final). There is a particularly brutal death in the death of hope. The moment you realize that there won’t be a reconciliation, that the moment movies have taught us is possible, when an aging parent and a wayward offspring (they will always see me as wayward) come to an understanding, when the mistakes of the past are laid out for sifting through, and the clouds—both real and metaphorical—part, and they see you as you are and you see them as they are, and there’s a big cry. Followed by apologies, promises to do better, and possibly a shared tapioca at the home where that parent is living out their last days. And those movies generally end with the offspring and an underwritten but supportive spouse standing in front of a fresh grave so the offspring has someone to turn to and say “I’m glad I finally got to know him” before the credits roll and everyone immediately calls their mother.

That moment doesn’t happen in real life. There is only the brutal awareness that time is slipping away and any hope of reconciliation, any hope of asking about that Christmas photo slips away with it. And that is brutal, but generally how it happens. Life isn’t written according to the rules of magical realism. There is only time, and time begets death. And it’s on us to work those two ingredients into a life that matters. To live it in such a way that our life is filled with love, and to live it in such a way that we become intertwined with other lives that we can fill with love and they, in turn, replenish our own lives with love. And if we manage to do this close-to-right (because perfectly is impossible), death is earned in a way that what we leave behind weighs more than what we put in the ground.

Graves are heavy things when we end up burying hope along with bodies.

There is another memory, in another apartment (there were many apartments, we moved almost yearly), and there are three of us now. (I have little to say about my youngest brother as well.) I don’t remember what particular mistake this was atoning for, but my father told us all to get in the car. He drove us to Sears on Roosevelt Boulevard, which is long gone, and told us to pick out baseball equipment. We thought this was odd because he’d never shown an interest in baseball, and I’m not sure any of us had either at that point. But we picked out gloves, a couple of balls, and an aluminum bat. I also remember that we bought Baltimore Orioles caps, which sticks with me because I’m not sure why a department store in Philadelphia would’ve had these in stock, but we most likely chose them because there was a cartoon bird on the cap, and we liked cartoons. He then drove us out to a park where he attempted to play baseball with us, which none of us could do. And I remember as his rage grew with every errant throw, and every missed catch, and every whiff of the bat, and I remember a slap, and I remember all the baseball equipment ending up in a trash can on the way to the car. I remember a silent ride home. I can’t remember if he came home with us, or if he angrily dropped us off. Most likely it was the latter, because I’m playing the odds.

As time stretched away from the moment when that first Christmas photo was taken, home became less of a place where my parents would take smiling photos of each other and more of a place where he would stash the family he had grown to regret.

The baseball story is a recurring theme with my father. The big moment that was supposed to make up for a thousand little missed moments. The large gesture that, in his mind, made all the kicks and slaps—and later, punches—something that could be brushed under the table. And even then, the big moment ended with a return to form.

Children are not made for big moments. They cannot hold them. We didn’t want baseball equipment, we wanted him to smile when he looked at us. We wanted him—as stupidly cliché as it is—to tell us that he was proud of us. And since we’ve jumped into the cliché pool and we’re already wet—yes, I am flying to bury a man who never told me he loved me. But I say with with some amount of certainty, all children are born ready to love their parents. It takes a lot to push that away, and now that I’m a father myself I cannot imagine why someone would push away this amazing thing, this love, this thing that helps to keep me alive. And now I’m crying, not because of him but because I am thinking of my daughter, and how amazing it feels to hug her and tell her that I love her, and to know that she loves me back, and that we have a relationship of small moments. Moments that can be held in our hearts, but also moments that we know we don’t have to cherish like a lost half-century old photograph because our moments are abundant. I cannot wait to hug my daughter again, and to tell her I love her. But to do that I have to bury my father.

Sometimes, to raise our children we have to bury our fathers multiple times. And here I will finally begin to answer your question: How do you lovingly care for an aging parent who treated you like shit? And look, I’ll be straight up and tell you that I had no idea where this was going when I started, but it revealed itself. You loving care for an aging parent by protecting his grandchildren from his sins. You lovingly care for an aging parent by making sure that the way they treated you stops with you. You lovingly care for an aging parent by learning how to love others, and by letting them love you. You lovingly care for an aging parent by digging multiple graves, the first one for their sins, and the second one for their body. As my therapist likes to remind me, my father hurt me because most likely someone hurt him. And while that doesn’t make it ok, it does contain the key on how to stop a cycle that doubtlessly has been running full steam in my family for generations.

And that cycle is over, as least as far as one of three sons is concerned. (I fear it will continue for the other two.)

Which explains why I’m on this flight, getting closer to his body with every word I type. It’s not because I believe in closure. It’s because I need to prove to myself that the man who raised me didn’t break me. That even though he didn’t teach me the right thing, I have learned what the right thing is. And it took some fucking work, man. And I am putting him in the ground in the same cemetary where generations of my ancestors have been put in the ground. And somehow, I need to let these ghosts, all these wretched ghosts that are expecting me in their genetic haunting ground, know that I won’t be joining them. This is the last of our dead we’ll put in this ground. We are done. A new cycle is starting, a cycle of small moments. A cycle where a child’s love is rewarded, and appreciated, and returned in kind. A cycle where we hold each others’ hands, and laugh at each other’s jokes, and fill each other with joy. And love.

I was hoping to end this with the realization that, despite it all, I loved my father. And maybe I do, I’m still not sure. But I can say, without any doubt at all, that I wanted to. Man, I really wanted to. It was there for the taking. All he had to do was reach out. I’m truly sorry he didn’t.

I think I would’ve been a good son.

❤️‍🩹 Thank you for making it to the end. This one was hard, and holy shit… I bet there’s a part two for the flight back! Buckle up, because Mom’s on the ground is she’s gonna want some stage time!

🖐️ Got a question? Ask it! You too can get a feel-good reply like this one.

🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. They’ve lost so much more than most of us can even fathom.

🏳️‍⚧️ Please donate to Trans Lifeline, and for fuck sake, if there is a trans kid in your life please love them. They are so so so so ready to love you back.

Quitting Spotify might have almost beaten Luke, but I’ve fared a little better thanks to my brand new digital audio player

Before there was the iPod, there was the cheap MP3 player. I remember these devices from my teenagerhood. Small and with barely a UI to speak of, they had robust storage and could hold hundreds upon hundreds of songs. Of course, the design improvements of the iPod would put all these also-rans out of business—it turns out that being able to access any song on your device within three clicks of that scroll wheel was an incredible boon for those of us with huge music libraries. From there the chain of history is easy to link together. The iPod leads to the iPhone leading to no one ever needing to have a standalone music playing device because they’re all subscribing to services like Spotify.

Because I have a lot of friends who are working musicians, I have absolutely no love for Spotify. They pay artists peanuts and they also make the music sound like shit due all the compression necessary for streaming audio to your device over the internet. I listen to tons of music, and have especially been interested in the dungeon synth scene, a very small scene of very small artists. While almost all the music I want is available streaming, I’d rather buy the music on Bandcamp, knowing that a higher percentage of my money goes to the artist—especially from artists who I know won’t make much money from streaming.

Up until I bought a Digital Audio Player, those Bandcamp purchases were largely theoretical. Sure, I’d bought the album, but I never downloaded the audio files, instead opting to listen to my music either on the Bandcamp app or on Tidal. Because Tidal also offers its listeners basically all music ever recorded in human history, that meant I wasn’t listening to the music I bought. A digital audio player forces my hand—and I’ve found that I genuinely enjoy this experience of listening to music a lot more.

While there is a fascinating world of people buying and refurbishing old iPods, when I looked at the broad price range and options for the wide variety of DAPs, I wanted to try something new. While I don’t think any device on the market holds a candle to the classic iPod, design-wise, I am extremely happy with my Snowsky Fiio Echo Mini.

What attracted me to the Echo Mini was that it doesn’t have any features I didn’t want and also that it is adorable. If you’re looking into the world of DAPs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by choice. There are extremely expensive DAPs from companies like Sony that can also access the internet and download apps like the iPod Touch of yesteryear. But I don’t want any of that shit. I don’t even want Bluetooth. I want an object that plays MP3s that I listen to with my new wired in-ear monitors.

The Echo Mini is shaped like a tape deck and is even smaller than I expected when I grabbed it. For under a hundred dollars, this device can hold more music that I can reasonably listen to, even on my five hour Thanksgiving flight to Los Angeles. Because the Echo Mini has both onboard storage and a slot for a micro SD card, I have 256GB of storage and I’ve barely scratched the surface. The battery life is also remarkable, especially compared to my phone, which was previously my main music listening device. I haven’t had to charge it once since I bought it about a month ago.

Although the user experience leaves something to be desired—you’re forced to scroll through nested menus with multiple tiny buttons, reminding me of playing a Japanese RPG on the Playstation, complete menu hell—I love using this device. It slips right in my pocket and it frees me from the yoke of always looking for my phone when I’m out and about. Its clunky UI actually forces me to pick an album and stick with it, where having access to the entirety of all recorded music in history often gave me choice paralysis. It’s also revealed that if I make sure I have a couple of my comfort albums—how i’m feeling now, The Downward Spiral, a handful of Talking Heads albums—I don’t actually need to have access to every album ever. I appreciate the albums I have already bought so much more when I don’t have a choice but to listen to them.

But most of all—the music sounds amazing. I haven’t even dived into the alternate file formats like FLAC, and I’m already hearing new details in songs I’ve listened to over and over. Rosalia’s most recent album LUX sounds fantastic, surrounding me with the lushness of the orchestral compositions. Even pop music sounds a lot fuller. I was listening to the Dev Lemons album Surface Tension, and you can hear intonations from her deep in the mix that I simply cannot hear on streaming services.

After a month of using a DAP I can envision a future where I totally ditch streaming. Listening to albums purposefully, instead of just through the convenience of having literally everything available at all times, has allowed me to fall back in love with the music I have. I think there should be a little more friction in life, in general, but the friction of needing to actually buy an album was something I didn’t even realize I missed.

Why doesn’t China traditionally have cheese?

It’s a common question — why dairy never really took hold in much of East Asia. And so if you satiate your curiosity with a quick Google search, it’s a good bet the internet will deliver you up a clear, unambiguous answer: lactose intolerance.

According to the above map, China sits at 92% lactose intolerant.

So… case closed, right? If you’ve got a population of people that simply can’t digest dairy products, obviously they’re not exactly going to develop a cheese industry. It’s why China’s always been the land of tofu, after all. No milk, no yoghurt, no ice cream. Simple question, simple answer.

Of course, it’s always a bit unfortunate when an elegant explanation bumps into…

The Reality of Milk in China

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the real world in China (or elsewhere in Asia), you can clearly see the absurdity of the above explanation:

Like, Pizza is ubiquitous — especially for children. Stretchy cheese is practically the definition of meme food. And it almost goes without saying that milk tea is a modern national pastime.

And it’s not just China — throughout Asia we see similar patterns. A juice box of milk is one of the most classic accompaniments to Japanese curry. Korea has its corn cheese. Both should theoretically be 98% lactose intolerant give or take, if I’m reading the above map right.

I mean… Deep fried milk. Seafood Doria. Boba milk tea. Cream stew. Yunnan cheese. The list goes on and on. And that’s not even counting (both Inner and Outer) Mongolia or Tibet, where milk has been a traditional part of their diet for millennia. In mean shit, there’s even dairy in the Qimin Yaoshu…

If you read some western writers, they seem to hand wave away dairy consumption in modern Asia under the banner of ‘imperialism’: well, it was all from the Brits, you see…

And maybe there’s a certain element of truth to that, but it’s ignoring a hell of a lot of contradictory evidence — not to mention agency. Mixue — the ice cream slinging behemoth — isn’t one of the largest companies in China because of some kind of western conspiracy. I’d hazard it might just be because people in China like ice cream.

But what about Lactose Intolerance?

But then, this was the bit that confused both me and Steph.

Because the science behind the genetics of lactose intolerance really seems pretty robust. Sometime around the development of animal husbandry, certain populations of humans developed a mutation to the LCT gene, allowing them to digest lactose into adulthood. This describes roughly 30% of the world. The rest are ‘lactose intolerant’.

When I was growing up, I had a close friend that was lactose intolerant. If he ate any dairy, he’d get incredibly bad stomach aches, maybe even vomit it back out. So when he was around, we’d order cheese-less pizza and skip the ice cream for the Italian ice.

This clearly does not describe people in Asia.

I could try my best to parse some studies on the topic, but frankly I think the world is a little sick of us pseudo-intellectual YouTubers cherry picking academia. So instead of rationalizing our pre-existing beliefs, we decided to reach out to a proper expert: Dr. Jennifer Dubois, a professor of biochemistry at Montana State University. There, she runs the Dubois lab, which specializes in the microbiome.

(she’s also lactose intolerant herself)

A cut version of this interview is available in the above Youtube video, if you just want to zero in on the answer (it starts at 2:57). This is the complete conversation, edited for clarity.

Steph: So, let’s talk about lactose intolerance. I did a gene test, and it actually says I’m genetically lactose intolerant, but I drink milk all the time. What does it mean to be lactose intolerant?

Jennifer: Lactose intolerance is actually a really interesting genetic condition. A lot of people who have a metabolic disorder have a non-functional gene, but lactose intolerance is not that. There are only about 40 people on the entire planet who have a gene that’s non-functional for the degradation of lactose.

What Lactose is is two simple sugars linked together, and there’s a single enzyme called ‘lactase’ that pops them apart. If you lack the enzyme capable of doing that, you can’t digest lactose any further. But the genetic reason behind a lactose deficiency is that you just simply aren’t making the functional lactase product anymore. And that’s because lactose, the major sugar in milk, is baby food. If you’re an adult, you don’t have any real need for lactose itself — or I suppose at least as a, let’s say, pre-industrial mammal.

Steph: I see. People always say that if you’re lactose intolerant, it’ll cause some kind of discomfort. I suppose that could maybe be true for me if you squint? I get full pretty fast from drinking milk straight… or sometimes cheese, if I eat a lot of cheese. Is there any common diagnosis for lactose intolerance?

Jennifer: So lactose intolerance is sort of a spectrum. People can experience a little bit of discomfort, or they can experience a lot of it.

If you experience really significant lactose intolerance — enough to take you to a doctor — they’ll ask you to breathe into a tube. If you’re exhaling hydrogen gas (like the Hindenburg), that’s the easiest diagnostic for lactose intolerance.

The reason why someone who’s lactose intolerant would exhale hydrogen is that they’re not actually the ones digesting their lactose. Their microbiome is digesting their lactose — by fermentation. If you are one of those 30% of the people on the planet who can actually make functional lactase well into adulthood, you would not be exhaling hydrogen gas. But if you’re relying on your microbiome to do it for you, then you would probably be exhaling a lot of it, and that’s part of the reason for your discomfort.

Now, if you are a regular drinker of milk, despite being lactose intolerant, you probably have a very well-trained microbiome. Your microbiome is probably chock-full of microbes that are fermenting your lactose to make hydrogen gas. These are called lactobacilli. If you, like me, are a lactose-intolerant person who likes yogurt and you look at the cultures, you’ll see they say something like “L. acidophilus, L. casei, L. rhamnosus”. The L. is for the genus name Lactobacilli. These are lactose-consuming microbes that live in your GI tract, and they’re enjoying all that lactose that is causing you a problem.

Steph: So, that means our gut is making yogurt for us?

Jennifer: Your gut is making it for you. And that can cause a little bit of discomfort, or it can cause a lot of it.

Now, if you rarely ever drink milk, and one fine day you decide to go to an ice cream party, then you might experience some very bad clinical symptoms. Because it turns out it takes a while to build up a microbiome that has enough lactobacilli to do this work for you.

In fact, you’re probably going to feel sort of like you just ate a sweater! Because you’ve filled your GI tract with something that you can’t digest. And your microbiome can’t digest. So what happens is a bunch of water will rush into your GI tract, really inflate your intestines, and you might end up with a bit of diarrhea. And that’s when people end up with a clinical manifestation that might actually send them to the doctor.

Steph: So in Asia, in modern times, we here tend to have a lot of milk products around. So probably a lot of us who can’t really drink milk genetically, we start building up a tolerance or capability for it when we were young?

Jennifer: That’s right. And for somebody who’s from East Asia, by the time you’re five? 90% of East Asians are not making any functional lactase by the time they’re five. But you do have time to build up a microbiome that’s well-trained to work for you. And you get that training by what you eat.

Steph: For me, growing up in an urban area, I started drinking milk when I was very young. And I continued for basically my entire childhood, because milk is thought to be very nutritious.

Jennifer: Right, so the endogenous lactase production doesn’t shut off really until you’re well into childhood — again, maybe five or six years old is when it really starts to taper off. So, you maintain the capability for a while. And so there’s also a time when you can be slowly eased into building up this capability to digest.

Of course, if you are one of those 40 or so people on Earth who is born without a functional lactase at all, then you have to be supplemented with pill-form lactase. That’s what they would do for an infant with that sort of rare metabolic condition, but similar sorts of products are also available for more run-of-the-mill lactase deficiencies.

Steph: I see. So like, if I’m going to travel in France to eat a lot of cheese, do you think I could also take those kind of pills to help me digest?

Jennifer: You actually can! If you’re a regular dairy consumer but you’re off to a place that really celebrates dairy and you’re going to eat quite a lot, then supplementation usually works for most people.

If you look at the map of people who are more prone to lactose intolerance, you’ll see that it really is most prevalent in East Asia. It’s not prevalent at all in Northern Europe, and it’s in varying degrees prevalent in other parts of the world. There are regions of Africa, for example, where lots of people are very fine with lactase persistence well into adulthood.

You might start to think, is there a correlation between the historical use of dairy in the diet and the retention of lactase well into adulthood? And the answer would be yes! Lactase persistence started to emerge in human populations at the same time that humans started to herd dairy cows. This is an acquired skill. Actually, it’s the people who can drink lactose who are the mutants.

Because I mean, Lactose is baby food, so why would an adult mammal be able to drink baby food effectively for their entire life? It’s effectively a mutation. It arose they think somewhere in Central Europe and has arisen multiple times in human history. It confers a terrific advantage because when you can digest your own lactose, that means you can get a lot of calories. That’s why you see traditional dairy herding and the emergence of this lactase persistence occurring at about 20,000 years ago in human populations, both at the same time.

Steph: That makes a lot of sense because in East Asia, if you look at areas like Inner Mongolia or Tibet — cow herders — there’s actually no shortage of milk products.

Jennifer: Right. There are definitely examples where there are populations within a larger population that happen to be lactase persistent.

But there are also cases of populations where they aren’t lactase persistent, but consume dairy nevertheless. For example, in Africa, there are these Somali herdsmen. They’re completely lactose intolerant genetically, but they consume at least a half liter of milk every day as part of their diet, because that’s how they survive. These are an example of people who have adapted their microbiomes to consume lots and lots of lactose for them. They don’t get all the same nutritional benefit as somebody who is digesting all the lactose themselves because the microbiome is sort of taking a cut for their trouble. But they’re able to get the protein and the water, which is really significant in a milk-based diet. Even though they’re completely ‘intolerant’ from a genetic point of view.

Steph: So, when you said there are subgroups within a larger population that will have maybe higher capability of digesting dairy… I’m mostly familiar with China. Where we live in Yunnan, there’s lots of milk products — goat milk, cheese, etc — but these are often concentrated among ethnic groups that live in the most mountainous regions. Would you say that the reason for that is more genetic, from their diet, or where they live?

Jennifer: There is actually is a difference with respect to terroir and microbiome! Interestingly, where you live has an effect on the composition of your microbiome just as much as your diet — it’s unintuitive, and a very hot area of current research. But maybe we can circle back to that.

But with respect to human genetics, I think the best example would be the United Kingdom. It’s part of Europe, but they have close to 100% lactase persistence in that population because they’re islands, so they’re relatively isolated. They adopted dairy farming relatively homogeneously, and milk has been a broad part of the British diet. So, in that case, while all of Europe is not necessarily lactase persistent—places like Greece and Italy may have less lactase-persistent people—that subpopulation within Europe is highly persistent. So place can have an impact on your microbiome, but it also certainly has an impact on human genetics as well.

Steph: Got it. You’ve made me curious though — what’s the relationship between terroir and your microbiome? Can you tell me a bit why place would affect your microbiome?

Jennifer: It’s a super interesting question. When microbiomes first started to be sequenced — the very dirty secret about microbiomes is the way they’re sequenced is through stool. You look at what comes through a person and then you look at the ribosomal-encoding DNA — that’s like a little address for all the microbes that live inside of you.

When people started doing this sequencing globally, they were looking for dietary signatures. For example, vegetarians. They thought whether you’re in Southeast Asia or North America or wherever, that vegetarians would have certain commonalities because that’s a very important dietary distinction. And yet, what some of those early studies — what they called enterotyping, because they’re talking about your enteric tract — found was that these enterotypes had less to do with what people were eating and more to do with where they were from.

I don’t know if we’ve fully resolved why some of these particular species compositions are observed. Although we do know that certain things like lactobacilli are almost universal. Almost every person on earth is going to have some kind of lactose-digesting organism in them. Whether you have a huge army of them or just a small little friendly band might have more to do with what you eat.

But the global species composition might have a lot to do with where you are. People have speculated that it has to do with water, or maybe broader aspects of the food chain. But nutrition is a very, very difficult science to try and deconvolute what it is about what you eat and the phenotype that comes out. I think that’s why something like lactose intolerance gained a lot of attention because it’s one of the few things where people can point to a single gene that’s leading to an effect.

Steph: That actually reminds me of a traditional Chinese medicine practice here in China. Speaking of the terroir and how it affects your microbiome, if you are moving to a new place and feeling uncomfortable with the local diet, one traditional ‘solution’ is to bring a little rock from your hometown, put it in the water that you drink, and then just drink the water all the time. I’ve actually had a friend that did that. I don’t know how well that works, probably no evidence to support it. But I think it’s an interesting anecdote that links to what you were just talking about.

Jennifer: I think it reflects a beautiful idea.

An idea that I could grow broccoli in my garden or you could grow it in yours. They’re both broccoli, but the fact that mine is growing in a garden that’s fed by a certain mountain stream — I’m up here in Montana and the soil is volcanic — these things are going to make a difference in the kind of broccoli that I get out. The amount of sunlight, all kinds of different things. And so even though we might be growing the same plant, there are elements of its composition that are going to vary. And if that’s what I’m eating a lot of, that has a way of coloring the terroir, not just of the food, but of your fellow eaters that are inside of you. Because they as well start to get colored by the things that you’re eating.

But there’s a lot of research ahead of us. To deconvolute why that is and how it’s actually happening is really at the cutting edge of microbiome research.

Steph: And that happens to be your field of speciality?

Jennifer: It is a big part of what I do. So yeah, it’s very interesting for us. I think that now the scientific studies are fueling a lot of our understandings of how our body reacts to food. We used to have this very simple idea that if you’re lactose intolerant, you can’t consume dairy — and if you aren’t, you can.

But it’s not an on and off switch. It’s a spectrum. It can be a very extreme reaction or just something so very minor that you don’t even think about.

For example, I personally didn’t know that I was lactose intolerant until I had genes sequenced for a completely different reason. And then looking back, it sort of made some sense. My heritage is Central Asian — Iranian, Persian — and that’s not uncommon in that part of the world either.

Steph: I see. So, the effect for people who are genetically lactose intolerant but who can eat dairy and milk has a couple of different factors. The most important one is that they have a microbiome that can help them digest, would you say?

Jennifer: If you are lacking the ability to produce lactase, then yes, having a well-functioning microbiome that can do the work for you is very important. Part of that well-functioning microbiome, in terms of your comfort, is when you ferment the lactose, a downstream product is hydrogen gas.

And hydrogen gas is a gas! It’s going to literally bloat you up. But if you have a friend of that initial consumer who likes to eat the hydrogen, they can cooperate. This is how I imagine it might be working for those Somali herdsmen. They’re really punching above their weight, drinking almost a liter of milk a day. They probably have a very well-conditioned microbiome not only to break down the lactose but to take care of all the downstream metabolic products that come after… and they feel plenty fine.

Steph: So, in the microbiome, besides lactobacilli to help digest the dairy, they could also have something else there to help them mitigate the other consequences?

Jennifer: Correct.

Steph: So, for some people like me or a lot of other Chinese people who love milk tea but maybe feel a little full from it, we probably have a less effective microbiome to combat the consequent gas or other effects coming from dairy?

Jennifer: Yeah.

Now I should say that it’s extremely difficult to control for all the inputs that regulate your microbiome and how much of each bacteria might be present. Perhaps in the future we might be able to regulate it a bit better, but right now we don’t really know much about how to actually exert control. There’s a cottage industry out there that’s sprung up around prebiotics and probiotics, that claim to produce a microbiome composition that’s optimized for one purpose or the other.

But it’s hard. Because while you can train your microbiome, maybe you won’t get it perfect, right?

When it comes to your style of milk consumption however, if the consequence is feeling full? Maybe because you have a little bit of extra gas, or maybe a little extra water retained in your GI tract… that’s not the worst thing in the world. It would probably be clinical if you were vomiting or really showing something that took you to a doctor. Then they would probably say you should take lactase pills if you really have to have that milk tea.

Steph: So okay. I do have some friends that can’t really drink much milk. And I assume that lack of exposure when they were a kid, and now subsequently when they’re an adult, their gut is just really working in overdrive to try its best to handle all this dairy?

Jennifer: Yes, correct.

Steph: I see. So now I can introduce my friends who can’t drink milk to the lactase pills.

Jennifer: Yes. You can get them over the counter, and you can even put it in the drink itself if you don’t want to swallow it.

Steph: Oh, that’s an interesting idea. I wonder... just curious, do I just go get lactase pills, or do they come in specific forms as a treatment for people?

Jennifer: I think that you can get them over the counter. In other words, you wouldn’t necessarily have to have them prescribed. But since it’s a common enough problem, if you went to a gastroenterologist, they would certainly be able to give you lactase pills. Even if you went to a general practitioner, they’ve probably seen it often enough that they could help you out. Their first bit of counsel might be to quit drinking milk. They might say, “Lay off the milk, maybe have more yogurt.”

But I personally take Vitamin D because if you don’t drink milk — and this is something else that a lot of adults find out the hard way — we know that we don’t ‘like’ milk, so we just don’t drink it. We’re not really sure why we don’t like it… but then we discover, oh, we’re actually lactose intolerant!

So you’ve kind of avoided it for a while, maybe much of your life. Then in your adulthood, you might get early onset osteoporosis. That’s actually a big problem in areas of North America where we don’t get a lot of sun. Our major source of Vitamin D — and Vitamin D is what brings calcium into your bones — is dairy. So we’re not only not getting the calcium, we’re also not getting the Vitamin D. A lot of people are inadvertently, by rejecting milk, not getting those things.

Now in East Asia, if you live near a water source and you’re eating a lot of seafood, that might be a primary source of Vitamin D and calcium, particularly if you get any of the fishbones. So in that case, you might not become symptomatic in other ways that show basically your dietary choice is having different kinds of health consequences.

Steph: In China, there are actually areas that also have problems with Vitamin D deficiency because people don’t drink enough milk nor do they have seafood. So there is a problem. I think that’s also part of the reason why the government is trying to push more of this in people’s daily diet as a nutrition plan, so that they can get enough Vitamin D and other nutrition that comes from it.

Jennifer: It is really good for you and there are lots of benefits to drinking milk. That’s why genetic studies show that the natural selection pressure to retain that mutation that allows you to make lactase into adulthood is extremely strong. So once it came up, it really took hold in those regions because there’s a ton of benefits to being able to fully digest milk. Even though it’s baby food.

Steph: And it’s tasty!

Jennifer: And it’s tasty.

Steph: So that all makes sense. I do really appreciate your time and help today to help me — a genetically lactose intolerant Asian — learn why I can actually consume dairy. And most importantly, I learned about this pill, lactase. I’m going to bring it with me next time traveling to a dairy-heavy area so that I can eat all the things that I love.

Jennifer: Do that, they say it helps! Especially when you’re in France and all those happy cheese eaters are making fun of you.

Although I am very political person and a cranky man who will say what is on my mind, I’ve never gotten in trouble for political statements in the classroom, even though I talk about Trumpism all the time. I think there are a few reasons for this–being a man and being kind of scary in the classroom can help, but also I couch it in terms of analyzing America, not in terms of electoral politics. But there is one thing about contemporary America that I have utter and complete contempt for and routinely savage in the classroom, which is the manosphere, the biggest bunch of fucking morons to have ever existed on the planet. Oh boo hoo, you are 18 and no one wants to fuck you because you are an asshole or you just don’t know how to talk to people and it must be the fault of those bitches. Dude, fuck off. You think you are the first generation of men who isn’t having all the success dating you want? Christ……..some men need a good boxing of their ears.

Well, I was catching up on my London Review of Books issues (I am sure all of you read this religiously) and I read Emily Witt’s review of a couple of books on Andrew Tate and her summary of the sheer idiocy of the 2024 election and its rhetoric about men not only hit home but also made me think how future historians will talk about this awful, pathetic period of American men embracing fascism because women don’t want to be choked during sex and whatnot.

Last a​utumn, during a particularly enervating phase of the United States presidential election, it became clear that one of the themes of the campaign was going to be men. Never mind the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the demonisation of immigrants and the plans to put thousands of them in for-profit jails, the genocide in Gaza, climate change. The Democrats, according to the polls, had lost their appeal to men. We read about the voter gender gap. We read that the disparity was greatest between divorced women (who lean heavily Democratic) and divorced men (who tend to vote Republican). We read that Black men were no longer loyal to the Democratic Party, that they were going to vote for Trump or not at all. Men, men, men: their diminished career prospects, their loneliness crisis, their suicide rates. In the final stretch of the campaign, the Democrats made a desperate attempt to appeal to them. The film director Tyler Perry gave a speech about being a self-made billionaire; Michelle Obama gave a speech about the person bleeding out in the delivery room being your wife. Kamala Harris promised to ‘protect crypto’. It didn’t work.

Donald Trump was better at pandering to the mythology of the patriarchy. Men didn’t need to listen to a lady lawyer lecturing them about how to live their lives, nor did they need a social safety net. A real man didn’t care about the minimum hourly wage or Medicaid. He was an independent agent. His windfall was always just around the corner, with the right crypto investment, the right sports bet, the right meme stock. It was the sweepstake election, with Elon Musk handing a giant cardboard cheque for a million dollars to a real estate agent called Jason who homeschools his six children in Michigan. No, it was the podcast election. We read that the left needed more podcasts, more men offering hour after hour of meandering banter that made listeners feel as if they were hanging out with the bros. ‘Whatever happened to the strong silent type?’ a friend of mine grumbled. A few months later, we learned that Democratic Party operatives had proposed a project called ‘Speaking with American Men’ to study male ‘syntax, language and content’.

Among my friends, the sort of women J.D. Vance likes to mock as miserable losers, the male loneliness crisis became a bitter joke. We discussed possible cures: becoming a Deadhead, getting into cycling, poker nights. We made approving comments when we saw straight guys doing things together, like the time a group of dads showed up at someone’s Pilates class. There were movies and TV shows about the problems of contemporary manhood, some concerned (Adolescence), some satirical (Friendship). Mark Zuckerberg, whose male-to-male transition included bulking up, putting on an XL T-shirt and a gold chain, and becoming a fan of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is ‘culturally neutered’ and needs more ‘masculine energy’. He has proposed AI friends as one solution.

On the dark edge of all this has been the manosphere, the network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels. The manosphere is confusing, because it’s a place where one can find both benign advice about protein consumption and ideas that have led to mass shootings. Its theories of evolutionary biology, mostly concerning what women were ‘built’ to do, are reposted on social media by people such as Musk. It’s annoying to have to take it seriously, just as it’s annoying to have to take the Taliban’s gender theories seriously. But in recent years the manosphere has forced us to pay attention through acts of extreme violence, and many of its advocates and theories have been taken up by democratically elected governments.

Now, while I’m the type of guy who naturally will hate everything as I get older, largely because I always have hated most things, I was really genuinely determined to not be the old guy who hates everything the kids do because they are young. And I had good reason to think I could do that–since I have nothing but contempt for Boomers and basically think my own Gen X is somehow an even worse generation, you want to have hope in the kids. But then everything about the present turned into such an unredeemable shit show–social media, AI, endless superhero movies, the end of reading, the turning of the universities into capitalist service organizations, being told that everything I love has no value because it doesn’t lead to profit, etc. I mean, you wouldn’t think the future would be even worse than the present. But it is sure leaning that way and the manosphere makes me want to drink myself to death.

The post The Misogynist Idiocy of 2024 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

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This week’s question comes to us from Mike Jacobsen:

I love Radiohead. My wife, on the other hand, really hates them. We have come to an understanding that their music won’t be played in her presence. So my question is how do you convince your spouse of the virtues of Radiohead?

You don’t.

I’d encourage you to respect the understanding you claim to have reached with your wife, both in letter and in spirit. Cause right now you’re looking for a way to break that understanding. You’re using a ceasefire as an opportunity to find more ammunition, and I don’t want to help with that.

I will of course help you, but not in the way you were hoping to. Which is kinda the lingua franca of this newsletter. (Look at me, getting fancy!)

The bigger issue here is that you believe your spouse is wrong. That the virtues of Radiohead would just reveal themselves to her if she were to open her mind, or listen more carefully, or adjust her taste levels, or fix herself in some way as to make the undeniable virtues of their music obvious to her. Which is bullshit. She’s not wrong in not liking a band that you like, and you’re not wrong in liking a band that she doesn’t. You like different stuff, and not only is that okay, it’s necessary in a relationship. Part of being together is having things that you enjoy doing by yourself.

I get that you’re trying to share something you enjoy. That’s a nice thing to do. You love a thing. It’s brought you good feelings. And you want to share those good feelings with someone you care about. You want them to enjoy something as much as you do. That’s commendable. I’d encourage you to keep doing that. Everyone is looking for more things to enjoy, and we certainly need them. And I bet you’ve probably recommended a bunch of stuff to your spouse, and to your friends, and to your neighbors, that hit the mark and brought them joy. You should hold on to those victories, and use them as data to build that little recommendation engine in your heart. And I’d also encourage you to remember your original intent—wanting to bring joy to someone you care about. Because that’s the key.

Once your spouse says “yeah, Radiohead isn’t for me” that door is closed. You went in with good intention, which is commendable, but it didn’t work out. It happens. And because your original intent was to bring this person joy, you take the loss and move on. Doubling down and insisting that they’re wrong to not enjoy something is going to make someone feel bad. Which was the opposite of your original intent, yes? Yes.

Also, you’re making music a chore, which is a sin.

Let’s discuss one of the most violent phrases in the English language: “Did you read that book I gave you?” For the sake of transparency, I’ll admit to once having been one of these people. You come across a book, you decide someone would enjoy it, you give them a copy for their birthday, or Christmas, or just ‘cause. Then every time we see them we ask them if they’ve read it. What we’re really looking for is an award for having recommended the right book, or the right band, or the right TV show to someone. You’ve turned joy into a point accumulation exercise for yourself.

I was lucky enough that someone eventually told me that every time I asked them if they’d read the book I gave them it made them feel guilty for not having read it yet. I’d turned a gift into a chore and chores making horrible gifts.

I love recommending things to people. Music. Books. TV Shows. Movies. Restaurants. If I’m experiencing joy in something I want to spread it around and tell other people about it. And all those recommendations are made with good intention. I’ve also learned that once you make the original recommendation you need to back off. Either people will try something or they won’t. (Their lives might not be aligned with trying a new thing at the moment for a variety of reasons.) If they try it they might come back to you and tell you they enjoyed it, and that feels great. They might also enjoy it and not feel the need to report back, which is fine. Your joy should come from sharing a joyful thing, not from the validation that you were correct. But checking back in will always turn your recommendation into a chore, which no one wants.

Speaking of which, let me talk about male friendship for a second here. Because male loneliness epidemic, blah blah. Sure, maybe. But in the past few years I’ve been in situations where I make friends with someone, we get to the point where we exchange numbers and within twenty minutes of shaking hands, talking about getting together for a drink later, or whatever, they’ve sent me a link to a 45 minute YouTube video from anything to making your own beer (I don’t drink) to smelting your own knife (are knives smelted?) to the truth about vaccination (I’m deleting and blocking your number.) Then exactly 45 minutes later they’ll text “What did you think of the video I sent?” My dudes, do not do this. I have watched exactly two videos over three minutes on YouTube, and both of them were sent to me by friends I have known forever. (One was a Bobby Fingers video, one was a 6,7 explainer.) The male loneliness epidemic could be cured if men agreed not to share videos with one another for the first six months of a relationship.

Back to Radiohead. I’m going to do you a solid here, Mike. Because you asked a question about Radiohead and I usually listen to music while I write these newsletters, there was no way to really listen to anything except Radiohead while I wrote. I’m going to tell you something that might be crushing at first, but if you just sit with it for a little while you’ll realize what an incredibly lucky guy you are. Ready?

Your spouse is correct.

I started by listening to Kid A, which is ok. It’s passable. There are admittedly a few good songs on it. Then I dove into the deep end and put on A Moon-Shaped Pool, which is… not good, Mike. Honestly, it’s the kind of music you listen to if you’re sending other dudes 45-minute IPA explainer videos, or shit about the Roman Empire. I lasted maybe four songs. Then I retreated to Amnesiac, which I remember liking when it first came out. It’s better than A Moon-Shaped Pool, but I can’t stress this enough—almost everything is.

So if I were you, I would be very happy that your spouse knows what they like, what they don’t like, and is willing to communicate that to you clearly. I’d stop bugging her about this, because she is correct.

I am lucky enough that I live with someone who brings different musical tastes into the relationship. Our venn diagram is music we both like is fairly small, but it’s solid. Erika absolutely hates what she calls “sad white guy music,” which I enjoy. (Enjoy probably isn’t the right word. It’s more like I gravitate towards it sometimes because of a Catholic upbringing.) And while we haven’t come to a stated understanding that it won’t be played in her presence, if she’s close by and I’m putting on music I’ll try to put on something that I know we both enjoy because my goal is to create a shared space where we’re both comfortable. We have enough music that we both enjoy that I don’t feel like I’m being robbed of my “sad white guy music,” which I can put on when she’s off doing something else. And I’m sure she pulls out music I’m not crazy about when I’m not around.

We got here by a lot of trial and error. I’ll put something on, she’ll either like it or not, and we go from there. Sometimes she’ll put something on, and I’ll do the same. (Somehow, she likes the Mountain Goats more than I do, which I cannot explain.) Sometimes she’ll get me to like something I was originally closed off to, and we end up at a Lady Gaga concert having a blast. Which is something I wouldn’t have pictured if she hadn’t tried, and maybe twisted my arm a little bit. I’m ok with that.

So what I’m saying is go ahead and try. The gift is in the trying. But the gift is also in the letting go. Know when to let go. For every Radiohead you strike out with, there’s gonna be something you introduce each other to that hits the mark. And the sooner you move on from the misses, the sooner you get to the hits.

But the best gift of all is that I can now stop listening to Radiohead.

🙋 Got a question for me? Ask it! Unless it’s another question about Radiohead. I think we’re done there.

📣 The last Presenting w/Confidence workshop of 2025 is scheduled for December 11 & 12. Get your ticket, and treat yourself to two sessions of hanging out with amazing people like yourself.

🎅 Remember those cheap mesh stockings you got as a kid that were filled with candy and cheap toys? I made one filled with zines and stickers and other crap! Get yourself one!

💀 Don’t forget your Fuck AI sweater. When the bubble bursts you’re gonna make sure yours already looks a lit worn.

🦃 Thanksgiving reminder: you don’t owe your time to people who want your friends dead.

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