Welcome to Touchgrass, a miniseries where I chat with.
Creatives about. Staying sane while being
chronically online. I'm your host Lauren Meisner,
and Touchgrass is a miniseries brought to you by.
Britta, where we explore the. Implications of being
chronically online with the creatives who can't escape it.
One thing that keeps coming up in these conversations is how
important small grounding routines are offline.
And for me, one of those routines is drinking enough
water, whether I'm refilling. A water bottle.
For a long walk or taking a break scrolling my For You page,
Britta makes it easy for me to stay hydrated and grounded with
pure, fresh tasting filtered water straight from any tap.
Thank you to Britta for supporting independent media and
helping us. Take better care of ourselves.
One refill at a time. Today I'm chatting with Eugene
Healy, a global grand strategist, keynote speaker, and
online creator who grew his following from zero to 400,000
in under a year. Eugene and I chat about his
career journey from academia to marketing, the power of creating
opinion based content online, dealing with criticism, and my
favorite topic, Vanderpump Rules.
Welcome, Eugene to Touch Grass. Hello, thank you for having.
Me, I'm so excited to be chatting with you today.
I feel like we've been Internet friends for maybe like 6 months.
Yeah. And it's so nice to finally meet
in person. Yeah, it's nice to touch grass.
Yeah, no, we are fully outside, so if you hear any loud noises,
there's nothing we can do. It's ambiance.
Yeah, it's part of the experience.
Exactly. OK, so I start every episode by
asking most of our guests. Do you consider yourself
chronically online? Yes, yeah.
Unfortunately, the job necessitates that I'm basically
fully plugged into the matrix. Like when people ask me if I've
missed a trend, if I have, they're always like, really
unhappy. Like I don't know if a reporter
asked me for a quote about like, recession indicators.
So I just find that I basically always have to be plugged into
LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, sub stack.
Most legacy media is garbage and six months downstream of what's
happening Internet anyway days digital.
I actually read quite a lot. Yeah, they're good.
Yeah. So that's what I'm finding.
I'm finding basically that I have to spend a huge amount of
time collecting information about what's going on online so
I can develop a perspective on it, and that's kind of how my
content is scaffolded. Yes.
OK, so then how would you actually describe the style of
content that you make? My platform is really about
culture and society, analyzed through the lens of brand.
I think it's really driven through my ideology, which is
that, I mean, I'm a brand strategist by background, but I
think brands are pretty boring. Like I don't find brands
interesting. I find people interesting.
I find culture and I find society interesting, and I find
brands interesting in as much as they can tap into or channel the
things that society is missing. I think if you ever find a brand
that has any kind of meteoric success, it's not that they
created a culture, it's that they were able to effectively
tap into that particular cultural well, really well
through the lens of their brand. So the content I make is really
about, you know, why do we feel the way that we feel?
Why does something that might be trending in the algorithm
reflect a deeper cultural trend or a way that we feel about
something? And then how is society shifting
or culture shifting as a result? And then how do brands need to
adapt to be part of that culture and to be part of that
conversation? Tell me then, how you got to
where you are. Give me a little rundown on your
career. So I am just over 10 years now
into my career as basically both a strategist and a lecturer.
I started my brand strategy career about the same time that
I started my teaching career. So I was a tutor at the
University of Melbourne starting in 2015, then made my way up to
a sessional lecturing position. And then at the same time I was
also working at a brand strategy consultancy.
First as like an intern, literally like doing like the
coffee ordering like that, that job like the yeah, like girl in
the big city. And then working my way up to
senior strategist and eventually strategy director.
And now like, I guess like I, I hit a wall in both parts of my
career where if I wanted to go any further in my agency, I was
going to effectively the agency was going to have to grow.
And if I wanted to go any further in my teaching career, I
was going to have to do a PhD, which I had basically 0 interest
in. And so I decided that I was
going to start making content as a way of creating a portfolio of
my thinking. Because the strategy work that I
did was like corporate strategy was really like heavy duty
strategy was a lot of strategy that was like, how does this
business structurally make money?
And then how do they externalize that as a position?
So I kind of crossed over into management consultancy a little
bit. So I couldn't show any of my
work basically. So that was effectively, I
thought the content was going to be like a living portfolio of
thinking and that would maybe give me some leverage to think
about what I wanted to do next. And then it just ended up that
the content was so successful that I ended up being able to
build my own consultancy off it, a keynote speaking business.
And I'm building a course that's going to be releasing in the
next couple months as well about sort of the new fundamentals of
brand building. So yeah, it's all kind of, but
it's all scaffolded from organic content.
Like haven't spent a single cent on paid.
How are you managing both? Like do you have a strategy
behind this? Not at the beginning.
And that's why I came real close to burning out last year.
And I didn't learn about what burnout is.
I thought I was just something that happened to weak willed
people until a much stronger willed mentor of mine burnt out
and then said that it was a problem with your amygdala when
you have too many decisions to make and your body goes into
permanent fight or flight. And I was like that actually
that is currently happening to me.
So I now have a system in place. I have a, I have a content team
and I just turned down about 80% of strategy projects.
I think like now I'm at this point in my career where I can
pick and choose basically across keynote speaking, the content
that I make and the paid partnerships that I do.
And then also the strategy projects.
Basically like my whole business and my whole life has been
structured to never do anything that I don't want to do like
that. I think that was what I decided
I wanted this turn in my career to be That's.
The Dream. Yeah, exactly.
And so, like, I had to be diversified.
I have to be diversified across all of these different bits
because otherwise, eventually, if one thing takes over too
much, I'm going to have to start doing things that I, you don't
want to. Yeah.
That I prefer to say no to. I love saying no.
I really like saying. No, Oh my God, I need to get
better at saying. No, and I hate when people say
no to me so. I mean, fair enough.
Isn't that how it noises? OK, so I want to talk about your
content creation a little bit more because I want to know what
it feels like to be so famous. You don't really feel?
You don't really feel it. Do you feel famous?
No, but you are. You're you're a host of an
empire of an empire of a growing empire.
Thank you so much. That's so nice.
I mean, I'm sure this happens to you every once in a while.
When people come up to me in person, I'm like, that's crazy.
But that's what I mean, right? Like it doesn't the fame doesn't
feel like anything. What like 500,000 like
conceptually it's a big number, but you're never going to see
them all. You know I'm not playing Rod
Laver Arena, right? Like I think it only is really
felt when like, I don't know, last week I was in Berlin and I
was walking down the street and I just got off like a 24 hour
flight and then someone came up to me and was like, Hey, I
really like your content. Like how's it feel?
Honestly, being famous, particularly for this 95% good.
Like I, I kind of like it opens a bunch of doors for you.
And also people are exceptionally nice all the time.
Like it's not a bad thing for people coming up to you
basically once every couple of days and giving you a really
nice compliment. But what I will say, actually,
the 5% is when people are weird about approaching me, just say
hi. So the worst part of being
famous is when people throw you conspiratorial glances from
across the room. Like they just do a little like
that. And then maybe they whisper to
their friends and they don't just say hi.
It's much better for both of us. I guess because you are building
your platform off of being like smart, right?
So it's like a positive reinforcement for you, but it's
also a positive association for others.
Like you're helping them do their jobs better.
You're in like this very interesting niche.
Yeah, it's like I think the job is less about me being smart and
it's more about making other people feel smart.
I think that's what I learned from not only my strategy
career, but also my education career.
So like both of these things have kind of come together and
where I'm at now, strategy, brand strategy in particular,
it's not an output, it's just a plan of action effectively or
brand strategy specifically, which is brand is just the sum
total associations of an entity. So brand strategy is defining
what you want those associations to be.
And so the only way that you're going to make your brand
strategy effective is whether people in the organization
actually believe in it. And so you have to not only get
them to believe that you're smart, but that they're smart
for following the advice as well.
And so that I think is, is really the key.
And like what I, what I try to do for the content is combine, I
guess, the intellectual rigor that I learned in academia with
platform logic, which is this incredibly frenetic pace that we
have to like be on, on the Internet.
And so I still make my videos 2 minutes or less where possible,
unless you really earn it. I talk fast enough that people
won't watch me on two times speed.
That's like a really important principle, which means I have to
do like, a lot of tags. So a lot of people ask me if I
did the videos off the cuff. Absolutely fucking not.
Are you kidding me? And yeah.
And making sure that all of the stuff is really shareable, like
making sure it's an insight, like delivering an insight every
15 seconds. That's like a learning principle
that I have in my head. Or delivering a joke every 15
seconds to like, make the content feel fun to engage with
and make the content the kind of thing that you want to start a
conversation from. And how did you learn these
principles? Was it through your work, like
through your previous lives and career, or was it really just
like being tapped into culture and tapped into online?
I think at the end of the day, like what I'm selling is me.
It's my like as yes, there's a bunch of information sources
that I pull from the fundamental.
This is just like the way that I see the world.
It's influenced, yeah, by my career, but I would say also is
just influenced by my environment, the conversations
that I have with people that I mate increasingly now, the
conversations that I have on the road because I travel a lot for
work. But ultimately this is just like
the way that I see the world. And that's what makes the
content distinctive as a, it's my opinion, yes.
And no one, no one else is ever going to be able to have this
opinion. Yeah, I wanted to talk to you
about that. So I mean, we, we get this a
lot. We get a lot of pushback because
I truly believe for we us covering Internet culture, pop
culture, you know, opinion, opinion is part of reporting on
that. I believe commentary, all of
that requires, I mean, they're social disciplines, right?
And so people want to hear your opinion on that.
And sometimes we get pushed back from audience members or people
who come across our content. They say like, I just want to
hear the T between two creators or whatever.
Like I don't want to hear your opinion.
Stop inserting your bias. But I saw somewhere, I read
somewhere in an interview that you said what you think is
different about your content is that you do insert opinion.
Can you tell me about that? OK, media literacy one O 1.
There's no such thing as objective news.
Everybody has an agenda. In fact, I would say the problem
with a lot of legacy media is that it presents itself as
objective when clearly it has a quite significant bias, which is
more often than not to raise the status of elites, right?
Once you understand this, once you understand that under the
appearance of objectivity that everyone is trying to sell you
an agenda, you will realize that the Age of the City Morning
Herald is as partisan as the Herald Sun or the Telegraph.
Often it's actually worse, because it's pretending like
it's not. At least at least Murdoch papers
wear their shit on their sleeves, right?
Right. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know where they stand.
It's not a great stance, but you know.
Yeah. So I think like what?
OK, what do we have? Yes, there are, there are maybe
some outlets like Ground News, if you're familiar with Ground
News, which is an aggregator that places news reporting and
it shows how all of the different news sites to the left
and right are reporting on the news.
But even then, like they're making a decision on what they
consider to be leftist media versus what they consider to be
centrist or conservative media, right?
So the idea of objectivity in media is bullshit.
Like we can just let that one go.
And then I think, you know, also like reporting on things is a
commodity. Like why would anyone go to me
from my first of my job is not as a reporter, right?
Like my jobs as an analyst. And I would say like in an era
where effectively the median, which is to say, you know,
technology, AI is able to deliver composites of opinions,
the only thing that is really valuable is subjectivity.
Yeah. OK.
No, I like that a lot in our chat for our newsletter.
Well, in your chat with Annabelle, actually, technically
our newsletter hit follow, you admitted that managing, quote,
the dissociative effects of turning oneself into a brand has
been quite a learning curve for you.
Can you talk to me about the mental health implications of
going viral, like starting this and going viral so quickly, and
what it feels like to commodify yourself?
I think it's interesting because in some way I think I'm just a
more significant dramatic version of something that I
really believe that we all feel, which is that we're all the
brand versions of ourselves. When I mean like to turn myself
in a brand into a brand, what I mean is like to start to look at
yourself as an entity and then to manage that entity from the
outside. So as I said before, if a brand
is the sum total associations of an entity, to brand something is
to engage in active management and manipulation of those
associations. That's dissociative by design.
And I think like we all face that and that like social media.
I've been trying to develop a thesis on this for a while, and
I'm coming closer and closer to it.
Increasingly, I'm starting to think of social as this kind of
it's like a God that we burst from our collective unconscious.
Like it explains why it took off so quickly.
Like the platform itself, by the way, the platform itself is just
a marketplace where we are able to complete the transaction of
the personal turning into the professional.
But we all have the camera inside our head.
I think like even this, like we talk about like Gen.
Z or Gen. Alpha, like that.
They're not posting as much, like they're certainly not
expressing themselves as much on social media, but that doesn't
mean that they don't face the invisible camera.
In fact, they face it more. That's why it's so constraining
on their self-expression, hence why they post less.
If anything, they view themselves like brands more than
anybody else. And so they're governed by the
rules of this God, if you like. And I feel like that's what I, I
experienced that very quickly. So I had to dissociate
relatively quickly and I had to put guardrails around it.
I think probably I was able to take advantage of it in that
when I was building out my own brand strategy, my personal
brand strategy, which I did emergently start to use the
comments, the nice ones anyway, as a way of understanding what
people think of you and how you want people to think of you.
So one of my brand codes now is intentional ambiguity.
And what I found is that people online couldn't figure out my
age, my sexuality, where I live, my ethnicity, anything.
And what that allows me to do is it allows me to wade into
complex topics like race or class, how they intersect
marketing and brand. And people can't dismiss the
argument based on what I look like because I can't figure out
what I actually am. So they have to engage with the
idea. That's so interesting.
So every now and then you face a situation where you can see this
stuff like that. Get ready to hear what in this
career, Get ready to hear exactly what people think of
you, but figure out how to turn it into your advantage.
OK. Yeah.
No, that's actually a great, it's a really interesting
strategy. I feel like it's actually quite
opposite to what a lot of creators do.
But I also recognize you're not trying to necessarily be, you
know, like a lifestyle creator. You're not trying to get an
audience to develop like a para social relationship with you.
No, exactly. And I'm this other creator, Oren
John, who's, you know, even more famous than me.
I think he's got like a million followers.
We've chatted a bunch of times. He actually, I was watching his
green screen content in, you know, June 2024 and I was like,
oh, there's a market for this. And that's when I started
creating and he talks about how this the difference between
creator and influencer. An influencer is selling a is
Kim Kardashian, right? Like selling a lifestyle that's
aspirational that you know, effectively, you know, to use
like the Marlboro Manor, like the Lacanian mirror stage thing,
like you see yourself in the mirrored in this influencer.
And so you buy on the basis of that mirroring the parasocial is
a huge part of that as well. A creator is someone that's more
based on selling their perspective and selling and you
know, and you may say thought leadership as well, and you're
on a spectrum to what extent you are one versus the other.
I'm basically like 100 zero creator to influencer.
Orrin's probably like 7030. It's really determined by like,
what's the relationship that you want to have with the audience
and on what basis? Like I like to keep my private
life private. So I find I find, you know, all
that stuff that I was talking about, the invisible camera,
like I find that really oppressive.
The idea of having to capture experiences.
I already disassociate enough without having to think about
how I'm going to capture things. And this job is already is
challenging. I don't have to take videos of
what it is that I'm seeing, but I have to think about that.
And then everything just becomes a content problem.
That's actually probably been the more difficult thing to deal
with. Is like everything becomes
content. Yeah, tell me about that.
When you make content about culture and society, where I
live in society. So every time that you're out
there interacting with the world, you're finding pieces of
things to talk about. And the problem when you have an
algorithm that demands A ferocious amount of content
perspective from you is that, you know, you are actively
incentivized to continue to find nice new, like interesting
points of view on things. And so it's not as bad now.
But when I first got started, I was having situations where my
friends are being like, you know, we had a conversation two
weeks ago and now that's the video that's got 400,000 views.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Like, I think that's kind of a bad friend move.
And I think, yeah, that that's, there's something quite
chronically online about that experience is that I think like,
if you're not careful as as a person or as an influencer, real
life becomes the screen. And the screen becomes real
life, whether or not you're posting again, the camera is
internalized. Posting just makes it obvious
and external. But what you have is a situation
with the real life becomes subordinated to how you
document, categorize and talk about and reproduce that
experience online. So the online world becomes the
real world. And this just becomes something,
it becomes The Cave. This is what Baudrillard would
say he was like. Reality has become The Cave,
like. And and that that was a really,
really difficult thing for me to work through.
Like now fortunately, what I have as a team.
So now I have a system in place that's planned out six weeks in
advance, and so I'm not in a situation anymore where I'm
constantly having to create frenetically for the algorithm
we have, like planning that allows me to think freely and
make stuff when I want to make stuff.
Oh that's so good. Unfortunately we're not there
yet because we do record a daily podcast that requires us to be
in the moment. Although this will be pre.
Recorded if it's news, right? Yeah, exactly.
I know it's hard. OK, so I wanted to talk to you
about how you describe yourself as an observer participant in
culture. I feel like that ties in really
nicely to what you were just saying.
I'm in the game, you know like and I I think marketing is one
of the lamest professions of them all like below data analyst
I'm serious I'm. Why?
What do you mean by that? Expand.
We work near creativity, but we don't, we're not creatives, you
know, OK. And I think there's something
about the desire to be in proximity to something, but not
willing to take the leap. Like, you know, you can respect
creativity and all that. But like, I find so much
marketing is like, oh, that's a really cool piece of art.
How can I make money off it? And I think that like, for me
personally, like there's nothing uncooler than that.
And so I guess like what I try to do is figure out ways not
just to capture culture, but to participate in it as well and to
to like be an active some sometimes try and be an active
contributor to it. Funnily enough, I make a point
of never making content about the things that are really close
in my life, like subcultures, for instance, any subculture
that I'm a part of. I don't make any content about
that just because like I really want to keep that for me.
And I want to keep that subculture for itself as well,
rather than mining it for content.
But that I think, yeah, there's a, there's sort of like a a bit
of a gonzo element to it as well.
Like I'm still young enough, right, to participate in a lot
of like what's happening in culture.
And again, it goes to that, the subjective gaze as well.
Like, I don't want to report on it.
You know, I feel like a lot of youth reporting is really bad
because even people that are sympathetic to youth, they still
report on it. Like, you know, they're like
1800s colonial explorers, like bounding through the Amazon that
have just discovered like a pygmy tribe, you know, I'm.
Actually dead that analogy is. Crazy, you know, and they're
just then they they overlay effectively, you know, you
overlay this like in that instance, like western colonial
centric point of view on like the savage.
But we still do that. Like the amount of arguments
that I have to have with people about like Gen.
Z have a different work culture. What culture, what work culture
would you have if you faced the same economic, cultural,
political, economic context? Do you think that they came out
of the fucking womb this way? Totally.
Like they're influenced by the things that you created.
You made the society that they're an occupant of.
They're responding in a perfectly rational way.
Who set that system up? Yeah, no, 100%.
I actually am so similar to what you said that I just made me
reflect on myself. I'm so similar where I protect
my, the subcultures that I'm part of as well.
Like Bravo. I will never talk about Bravo.
When we get an opportunity to interview a Bravo star, of
course I'm going to take it because like, why would I not
want to meet one of my idols? But like I don't want to start a
podcast about housewives. Like, I don't want to cover that
because it's sacred to me. Someone was telling me about
Vanderpump Rules the other day. They were just, they were
explaining it to me and terms that I would understand.
They were like, you've got to watch no season 2 through 5 and
then season. I don't watch a lot of
television. I don't watch a lot of reality
television outside Survivor. My God, come on Eugene.
Very pop rules. Survivor.
It's a class I used to watch a lot of Come Dine With Me.
Oh my God, these are not real. Yeah, and then and then like, I
don't know, Australian dashcam car crash compilations.
Those are my big three. I'll watch The Departed in 79
YouTube Shorts clips out of order.
Not YouTube Shorts. Yeah, yeah.
But like, that's my, my media. That's fucking shocking.
I just find that there's a lot of really bad media right now
that does a lot of showing and telling, and I just don't have a
lot of, like, I don't have any patience for media that isn't
like, don't give me. I saw no other choice a couple
of weeks ago. That was fucking amazing.
What is that? I don't even know what.
That is by Park Chen Work, who directed Old Boy and the
Handmaiden. And just like South Korea's
other Otter, it's very difficult to explain what it is because it
crosses across so many different genres.
The basic premise is middle-aged man loses his job at a paper
factory, and in order to get another one, he decides that
he's going to murder all of the other candidates for the role.
Oh my God. He has no other choice.
It's the only way and it's genre bends between drama, some of the
like Korean, the way that these Korean directors structure the
comedy, the like the way that they pull on this tension of
like something is really the situation is really absurd and
that's what makes it funny. But also there's a lot of
jeopardy in the scene. And so there's you're holding
all of this tension in your body and you can't help but laugh to
get it out of you. I just honestly like, I think
it'll probably be my movie of the year.
Oh my God. OK, well, I feel like I need to
watch it now because you really just gave an amazing review.
A glowing review. Well, I'm going to give you a
glowing review of Vanderpump Rules, OK?
It's literally, I actually think as somebody who is very
interested in society and culture, it's like an
anthropological study. Like you have to freaking watch
it. I am not even joking.
It's like literally OK. Do you watch Jersey Shore?
Did you ever watch Jersey Shore? It's the same thing.
It is like they tapped into this incredibly niche subculture in
the US like this. It literally only exists in this
one tiny part of the country and they put it on display for us.
It's like that. And it's like servers in LA in
this very specific time frame before Instagram where like they
didn't even know what reality TV was and everything is authentic.
Oh my God, please, you have to watch.
Yeah, yeah. A portrait of America's
sickness. We love it.
I love it. OK before I let you go I need to
talk to you about 1. I feel like theme in your
content that is going viral at the specific moment because I
keep getting served all of your videos about it.
Post luxury status symbols. Tell me about that.
So a year ago I made this video where I was basically
identifying like why luxury is in so much trouble right now.
The basic premise is that luxury abandoned its status in market
for scale. So it used to have a ultimately
all brands have to have a source of truth and luxury used to be
based on craft like that craft and scarcity.
Those things are not synonymous with scale, with wanting to
scale up literally like, you know, you can't make craft goods
at up. To be honest, there's not enough
artisans to make that that product.
So they traded it for hype and effectively what they ended up
doing along with something that was not necessarily their fault,
which is this extraordinary proliferation of images that
gradually just began to flatten the entire world into
two-dimensional algorithmic wallpaper.
Physical visual items stopped becoming status symbols.
You can see we have even items that are themselves physically
scarce or culturally abundant. It's not hard to see a picture
of a Birkin anymore, you know, in the same way it's not hard to
see a picture of a Lamborghini. You know, like, in the same way
like we're completely overloaded with like open your phone.
You see like a perfect 10 on TikTok, and then you scroll
three more times and you see another perfect 10.
You're like that. That must just be the world.
So increasingly my thesis is that the status has moved into
more coded elements that are behavioral rather than just
visual. And so I've begun documenting
these six key post luxury status symbols.
And what was interesting was that I started the Series A year
ago. I made six videos and I've come
back to them this year. This time I've actually had the
time to write sub stacks about them.
So to give a little bit more depth and research to, you know,
what is necessarily a hot take when you're doing it on short
form. And so much of that stuff
actually became it's more true now than it was a year ago.
So I think like all of this conversation about going analog,
you know, was this time last year I was talking about
connected privacy. And now the analog conversation
has become like the defining conversation, if you like, of
like this part of the year, everyone deciding about going
analog, which I think is a little bit of like everyone is
framing it as like, hey, it's this great movement going
offline. I'm like, no, it's not.
It's a privilege. That's what makes it a status
symbol, as a status symbol because it's inaccessible to the
majority of the population. And So what we have here is a
situation where those who have the capital, financial,
cultural, social can retreat into private spaces away from
algorithmic detection. The rest of us, either we rely
on visibility. We rely on visibility for
influence in our careers. We rely on visibility for
influence in our fucking social lives.
We rely on visibility in our romantic lives.
Like we have to have, you know, we have to have a Hinge profile,
right? Yeah, Yeah.
Unless you have significant social capital, you need that,
that you can meet people in person.
I was just having a conversation with with Cliff at the Commons,
the founder of the Commons, who was telling me people at the
Commons Health Club are coming there looking for love.
Oh my God. And of course they would,
because it makes sense. It's a bunch of people in the
same aspirational economic segment as them that also
happened to be disgustingly good looking.
Right. And really into fitness.
And really into fitness, of course.
So you've so, but that's the thing, right?
These people, it's pay to play. You have to pay, you pay to
access that. And so you're able to access
this offline community experience.
What we have is a situation where the third space, for the
most part, Australia is not that bad.
Like, you know, like we still have fed Square and, and we, you
know, we still have decent social infrastructure.
Go look around the world like third spaces have effectively
been destroyed and everything now is paid to play.
So I think what we have is a situation where going offline is
the status symbol that only some people can afford.
But it is a behavior. And I think what is interesting
is this analog, if you like, is the aesthetic layer that
underlies the behavior. So, so going analog, you can see
it the the aesthetics of analog are the CDs and touching grass
and this and like candle lit dinners.
But it's it's an aesthetic, right.
And I think there's that, that there's the irony, of course, of
like going offline performatively online.
But that, yeah, again, analog is just the aesthetic
representation of what the actual status symbol is, which
is to be able to evade the algorithm and the need for
visibility because you already have enough influence to be
invisible without missing out. So then what's your take on
creators who like Becca Bloom, who seemingly are so wealthy and
would have that standing in society, like trying to be
influencers? First off, like I think we can
all acknowledge that it's a fake it to make it.
She's clearly not as rich as she wants to be, which is in many
ways, it's like the most pathetic thing.
But like, that is. But that is America, right?
America is faggot. You make it.
It's making content about, hey, I'm a private chef for these
famous people, even though you're not.
And then becoming a private chef as a result of it.
Probably the, the most interesting thing for me with
Becca Bloom was that she was really well respected in the
beginning because what we had was a caricature that we could
engage with in a fictitious manner, which is, Oh my God,
like, yeah, this person. Yeah.
Rich people who are rich. Right, Right.
And so there was something about, like us engaging with
this avatar of desire, this person that's performing for us
and consuming it as a performance.
Now, of course, she's facing all of this criticism.
And I think the interesting thing, the criticism is because
people have realized that this is an actual person.
And not only that, but that all of this supposed wealth has not
freed her from the algorithmic grasp, the need to constantly
perform for this audience, visible or invisible.
And so now we approach her with not only the sense of disgust,
but the sense of pity. Right.
And as soon as someone becomes pitiable online, they become a
target for ridicule. Yeah, 100%.
Like, that's, I think, the sort of the interesting thing about
where she's at. Like Nara, Smith doesn't face
that same level of criticism because she looks fucking dialed
in. Yeah.
OK. Well, the last question that I
have for you today is how do you touch grass?
I really like going for walks around my neighborhood, like
long walks where I'll do 1 in the morning, one after lunch and
then one after dinner. And I go around the neighborhood
and I have like a bunch of favorite gardens that I like to
look at. Usually.
I find like nature can be a little bit grotesque to be
honest with you. I'm a city boy by heart, but
there's something about watching like birds and insects sort of
fussing around and like a really well kept garden that I really
love. I read a lot of fantasies, so
Ursula Guinn is my favorite author.
And I ride my bike. I try to commute everywhere by
bike. Like, you know, I really wish
there was this study that came out that found that Australian
motorists actually think of cyclists as less than human.
What they, they, they tested this thing where they actually
found that they look at them as slightly subhuman.
They're not quite human. There's a literal dehumanization
going on. Oh my God, I wish more people
would give it a go. It's like an amazing, like I'm
not talking about the ideological thing.
Like putting all of that stuff aside, environment, etcetera.
It's an amazing way of getting around.
It's so liberating to make your way through traffic, to ride, to
feel this constant sense of movement and you're moving fast
as well and you can go so far, and particularly in a city like
Melbourne and the inner suburbs, we've got shit load of bike
lanes. I find it's just like the
perfect way of me either entering my compression zone for
work or decompressing after work and like filtering out all of
the processing and stuff as well.
And you know, having a couple brushes with death like every
month and like, you know, getting into throw like the
cycle's attitude. Like I never use the word
fuckwit, but when I'm on a bike you call a lot of people
fuckwit. Oh my God.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you for having me. Centennial world podcast network
operates on gadigal land we would like to acknowledge the
gadigal of the eora nation, the traditional custodians of this
land and pay our. Respects to elders both.
Past and present.