Plain English with Derek Thompson - A Grand Unified Theory of Cultural Stagnation

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

One of my favorite theories about the modern world is the idea that culture is "stuck." Whether the decline of ornamentation in modern architecture, or the fact that every corporate logo looks the same now, or the fact that Gen Z's favorite television was all made in the 1990s and 2000s, or the sequel fetish in Hollywood, or the theory that old music is eating new music on Spotify, the evidence of cultural stagnation abounds. But is there one grand theory that explains all of it? The psychologist and writer Adam Mastroianni thinks so. He joins Derek to discuss. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Adam Mastroianni Producers: Devon Baroldi Links:https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-hidden-cause-of-cultural-stagnationhttps://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviancehttps://www.astralcodexten.com/p/whither-tartariahttps://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/america-innovation-film-science-business/620858/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/america-really-running-out-original-ideas/621055/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2025/11/blank-space-book-excerpt-culture/685037/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellany. I'm founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight. Which streamer is on the brink of collapse? And which executive is on the hot seat? Disney, Netflix, who's up, down, and who will never eat lunch in this town again?

Follow the town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today, stuck culture. There's a conspiracy theory that I want to tell you about. It's called the Tartaria theory. Imagine a post-apocalyptic world where people live in simple shacks, surrounded by the most beautiful abandoned buildings from centuries or even millennia ago. cathedrals, pyramids. The savages in this post-apocalyptic world

live in a state of strange delusion. They tell themselves, oh yeah, sure, I could build those beautiful, extravagant things, but they don't build beautiful, extravagant things. They build square huts. They've lost the will or the capacity to build the cathedrals and pyramids that their ancestors knew how to build

before the flood. What makes this my favorite conspiracy theory is that it's not really, at least, I think, a conspiracy theory. It's more like a joke. The people living in the square shacks are us. We dwell in the presence of awe-inspiring cathedrals, art deco skyscrapers, ancient pyramids, the Taj Mahal.

But all of our buildings look like boring squares and rectangles. You should think of the Tartaria conspiracy theory, therefore, as a kind of critique of the modern world. In any given city, the tallest, and most ambitious structures used to be expressive works of art. In many cities, they were churches or temples. Medieval cathedrals dripped with sculptures. Baroque palaces of the most important people

of past centuries overflowed with moldings and gilded bravada. But today, the tallest structures in almost every major city are neutral glass boxes. The living rooms of the ultra-rich all seem to belong to the same global hotel chain. The interior of every urban coffee shop looks exactly the same all over the world. If somebody asks you to name your favorite building

or architectural marvel in the world, what are the odds that you name something that was built in the last five years? Or 10 years? Or 50 years? Or 100 years? Architecture has lost its ornate grandeur and its variety and its devious.

The modern world is rich and boring. A recent essay by one of my favorite writers, the social psychologist Adam Astriani, puts the Tartaria conspiracy theory in a fun context. It's not just architecture that's lost its novelty, he says. It's culture. It's everything. In blockbuster movies, the share of top-grossing films that are prequels, sequels, or spinoffs has tripled in the last 25 years. In music, the highest-grossing tours are often by artists who were in their peak decades ago. and pop music, like new pop music, Taylor Swift, etc., feels like it's never really left the 1980s.

In the world of corporate marketing, check out the logo rebrands of Facebook, Google, Airbnb, Microsoft, Spotify, Balenciaga, San Laurent, Pinterest. They've all evolved from unique fonts to similar minimalist ones. In transportation, car designs are becoming more homogenous, and the share of cars that aren't white or silver or black has plummeted in the last 25 years. Another indication that the world is becoming more monochromatic is that when a British consortium of science museums analyze the colors of their artifacts over time, they found a steady uptick in black, gray, and white.

In science, there is a stupendous amount of evidence that it's harder for new ideas to drive growth. Now, I just named a lot of different categories, film and music and artifacts and science and architecture, transportation. And of course, across all these examples, I could think of counter examples. I'm sure you could too. But I don't think we should pretend that nothing is happening here. Clearly, something is happening. Culture implies change.

But across architecture and film and science and music and auto design and logos, mass culture seems to be slowing down, stagnating, converging. Culture is stuck. And today, with the help of Adam, we're going to figure out why. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Adam Astriani, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to be back.

So it seems like movies, music, architecture, branding, even science have all become, in your words, less deviant or less capable of producing ideas that meet a reasonable definition of novelty. Some people like to say culture is stuck. And I think what we should do is sometimes the way this conversation goes is that people have these huge theories for why all culture is stuck. And they try to apply those big theories in individual categories like film or television. I kind of want to go about this the opposite way. I want to talk about individual fields like film, music, science, and then as we discuss what's going on in those industries, we'll think, all right, are we hearing any ideas or explanations that are rhyming and resonating,

and then we'll try to sort of like construct our grand theories out of those individual pieces. First, you begin by pointing out that according to several measures, people, individuals, are less weird than they used to be. How so? So let's start with weird in a bad way, how people are less weird in a bad way. And this, I think, is where the data is clearest, the most comprehensive, and the most overlooked. And it comes from kids. They do these surveys every year of high school students about all the various naughty things that they could do.

And every year, they tell us they're doing less of them. They are drinking less. They're taking fewer illegal drugs. they're less likely to bring a gun to school, which I think is really interesting. They're more likely to wear their seatbelts. These trends, I mean, we don't have data going that far back. It begins in the 90s, but starting in the 90s, you can see a steady decline in all of these. I think we can agree, like bad forms of deviance, including teenage pregnancy,

which is something we don't have to rely on survey measures for because it's hard to hide the fact that you've had a child. That has been declining even longer, where we have. longer data disease. So compared to their parents and grandparents, kids today are kind of a bunch of goody-to-shoes. One thing you'd discuss here is the decline of cults, which I think is really interesting because I think most people assume that we live in a cultish moment with Q&ON, random internet theories. But the data, as best we can see, finds that cults peaked in the 1970s, 1980s right around the same time that serial killers peaked. In fact, if you look at the graphs of serial killings over time and cults over time, they are damn near the same graph. I'm not suggesting that one is

causing the other, but it's just an interesting thing to note. What do you think is going on with the rise and fall of cults in the last 50 years? I mean, it's part of a larger rise and fall of adult crime in general. So you can place those same graphs against the graph of violent crimes and property crimes, and you will find that those two have a peak in the 90s and decline since then. So whatever's going on that causes someone to leave their family and go join the cult compound might be the same thing that causes them to pick up a gun and shoot someone in a bar fight. So I think that thing, that X factor has disappeared at the same time. I can hold myself back if we don't want to get to theories yet, if we want to get more facts of the table first.

No, jump in with theories. Don't think of this as too organized a conversation. It's Thanksgiving week. We're passing around the stuffing and the cranberry. Yeah, we're looking for a way to scandalize Uncle Mike. Exactly. I mean, look, I think the same reason people are committing fewer crimes is the same reason that they're killing fewer people both in serial fashion or in cultic fashion.

I think life matters more in a literal sense in that when you ask people how much they would pay to decrease the risk of various bad things happening to them. And these studies have been done over years, people say higher amounts. year after year. They're more willing to pay more money to reduce their risks more and more as the years go on. And I think there's two reasons for that. One is they have more money in the first place, which makes sense, but this is increased faster than the increase in GDP per capita. So it's not just that our pocketbooks are thicker. I think the other reason is that the ambient risks of our lives have also decreased. That it used to be there were all kinds of things that could kill you

kind of in unsurprising ways. You know, you get an infection. We don't have a cure. You die in a car accident. We don't have seatbelts. Your government tells you that you must get on this boat and go to a foreign country and shoot at the enemies of the state. This happens every generation except for the last few.

And if you live in a world where there's all kinds of risks everywhere, then you're not that sensitive to the optional ones that you might incur in a daily basis, right? If I have just gotten back from shooting Nazis in Western Europe, do I care that much about the fact that I'm not wearing a seatbelt in the back of a pickup truck that's going 35 miles an hour down a road that's full of potholes? Like, it just hasn't occurred to me. Do I care that much about the fact that the cigarette that I'm smoking is maybe is going to take a few years off the end of my life? I mean, a Nazi might have taken a few years off the end of my life. I mean, I think about the fact that like both of my grandfathers died in their mid-60s, early 70s. And I was on track with their life expectancy for the same.

the year they were born, imagine knowing that you have a good chance that you will never draw a social security check, like how different the life would be that you live. When you realize that you live sort of in a land of milk and honey, at least compared to our ancestors, then you start to realize like, oh, you know, maybe I should wear my seatbelt. Maybe I shouldn't pickle my brain with alcohol. Maybe I shouldn't take this unknown pill at this party. Maybe I should play it safe instead. That's my grand theory. I think it's a really interesting grand theory, this idea that, you know, if you want to understand why society has become better behaved, more rule following, more risk averse, it had never occurred to me to tie all these things together in a bow and slap

the label of we value life more on it. But there's all sorts of ways in which I do find it an interestingly plausible idea. I want to throw another idea at you, which was really inspired by the fact that you included the rise and fall of serial killing and cultural stagnation in the same essay. It never would have occurred to me that these two things had anything to do with each other, except I did have a conversation two years ago with one of America's leading experts in the rise and fall of serial killing. And I said, you know, explain to me why serial killers peaked in the 1970s, 1980s, and then basically fell off a cliff. And he had answers that I think were incredibly resonant for our general conversation.

Number one, he said, you have a dramatic decline in victim supply as ordinary civilians became much more risk-averse. The 1960s through 1980s were an era of so-called latch-geek kids. You had more hitchhiking. You had a lot more, a lot less stranger danger. And at the extreme, hitchhiking and a lack of stranger danger and more just, you know, time outside did result in more crime. I think we've probably allowed that pendulum to swing too far, and now we're way too

afraid to allow our children to be outside for one millisecond, but there's no question that that was a part of it. So there, you're essentially talking about the rise of a risk aversion where people are valuing their life more. The other reason why he said, and serial killing seems to have declined, is that the surveillance state got better. If you go back and watch these documentaries or read these books about the most famous serial killers the 1960s, 1970s, you want to tear your hair out because these police departments have no ability to share data with each other. And as a result, you've got someone like Zodiac, you know, killing in like, you know, one part of the Bay Area and then driving across some district line and killing another part of the Bay Area. And there's the police departments have no idea how to talk to each other.

But now we all live because of screens, because of police tactics, because of the internet, because of everything else, in a kind of polite, soft panopticon where there's a greater expectation that our. behavior will be seen and monitored and calculated and accounted for. And in that world, you have less serial killing and more other kinds of deviance that might sort of flow through the internet, you know, people I'm doing weird stuff online. And so it's interesting to think, okay, what explains the kind of serial killing? It's risk aversion on the part of victims. And it's more surveillance on the part of police. Well, I think, I want to put a pin in those ideas. I think we're going to hear these themes come back and back and back as we talk about other areas of cultural stagnation. Any points do you want to make on serial

killing before we get into the meat of this episode, which is, you know, why is pop culture stuck, not why did serial killers go away in 1979? There's another, I think, really interesting piece of data that didn't make sense to put in this piece, and I've always wanted to talk about, but is that this survey question that the general social survey has asked people, I think going back to the 1960s, which is, is there any place within a mile of your home that you are afraid to walk alone at night? And since the 1960s, responses to that have been flat. Something like 50% of people say yes and 50% say, no, it hasn't changed over time, even while the actual risk of walking somewhere at night a mile from your home has not stayed the same. In the 90s, it was much more

dangerous to walk somewhere at night outside your home because the ambient crime rate is much higher than it is now. So if people are equally afraid, even as the threats go up and the threats come back down, that suggests that we have some kind of conservation of security sort of feeling going on, where no matter how dangerous or not dangerous things are, I assume within some sort of reasonable bounds, we feel the same amount of fear, which suggests that right now, because it is less risky to go walk around outside, at least in the United States, that we are more fearful of risks that are smaller to begin with. So the world that used to frighten us more, that went away and we stayed the same amount of frightened.

I am also so interested in this phenomenon because if you go back through Gallup and Pew Data, you see that sometime around the late 1990s, early 2000s, there was a very significant break in the relationship between rates of violent crime and perception of violent crime. And for most of the 21st century, violent crime has been declining, declining, there was a wave around the pandemic, but that's come down as well. And perceptions of violent crime basically haven't come down at all. Basically, we're almost stuck in the 1990s, 1980s in terms of our perception of violent crime, even as the actual rates of it have fallen.

I've always been fascinated in exactly what's going on there. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be able to solve every single sociological mystery that exists in the next 35 minutes, but maybe that's one for a future episode. So what I really want to get to talk to you about is this general sense that, as I put in the open, and as you talked about in your essay, culture is stuck, it's stagnating. You wrote a great piece about this called Pop Culture Has Become an oligopoly,

which really takes on this question in film and music and a bunch of other entertainment industries. Just walk me through your theory here that a cartel of superstars has essentially conquered culture. How did this happen? So we can lay out the facts first

that in books, movies, TV, music, and video games, you see a very similar trend that there used to be more players in the game. Now there are fewer and they control more of the game. So what happened there? I think here we could eventually work our way back to the rising value of a statistical life. And I think we could back this out of it. But I think there are more proximal explanations that could explain what's going on there. One is what I call invasion, which is, It is much easier for anyone to produce all the kinds of content that I just laid out. You can make a video game at home. You can write a book and self-publish it. You can make a movie on your iPhone. As it gets easier for entry-level consumers to produce the same things that used to only be able to be made by big companies, those big companies have to change strategy.

And so now, rather than make some kind of indie drama, they want to make another Avengers movie because that's the kind of a thing that only a large studio can make and a competitor who is at home in their bedroom can't make. I think it's one plausible reason why big players would change their strategy to just do the same thing over and over again. Let's make more Mario games. Let's publish another Daniel Steele novel because the one thing that an amateur cannot do is have these big IPs or these big names. I think that's one possibility. Another is, what I call innovation, which is that maybe

through a bunch of people exploring the possible space of content, they've actually found the ones that work really well. One way that I think about this is like, when the Da Vinci Code came out, I don't know if there had been a book like that before that had a plot that was so fast that every chapter ends on a cliffhanger,

that it's basically hacking the attention code for accessible literature. Now people do that all the time. And so the people who are best at doing, that can now conquer a big chunk of people's attention. It might be that in all these industries, we've finally found the formula that can work really well.

And so it is the best players who can just play that formula and dominate everybody else. That's why we see the same thing over and over again. That's why so many accessible books have that same kind of Da Vinci Code feel. That's why James Patterson is on the bestseller list every year, sometimes with multiple books. It might be that people always wanted a cinematic universe.

They just wanted more content. You see the original Star Wars, and you just want to live in that world for another 20 hours. And finally, companies realize that. And so now they make another 20 hours of Star Wars content. I think that's another possibility. And then a third one I'll throw in is proliferation, which is the more options there are, the harder it is to choose among them. And the more you have to rely on familiar cues to choose them. So now, when you sit down at Netflix and there's a thousand movies to choose from,

are you going to take a risk on the thing that you have no cues of quality for, some independent drama? Or are you going to find a movie it's like, oh, Tom Hanks is in this one? So, like, I'll watch another Tom Hanks movie and companies pick up on that signal and they produce a bunch more Tom Hanks movies because they realize that's what people want to see. Those are three theories. I don't have a strong theory of which of those is really doing it, but I know that you've got some. So let's talk about movies specifically. I know, ironically, I think I said in the open that we're going to focus on individual sectors and then do big theories and we've sort of done the opposite, but you know what?

That's totally fun. The big theory, they're too tempting. They're just way too tempting. So let's talk about Hollywood Blockbuster specifically because I've just done a lot of reporting here. And I think it's a unique story, but it's also an instructive story. So before 2000, only about a quarter of the top grossing movies were prequels, sequels, and spinoffs.

I mean, if you go back to, for example, 1996, I don't think any, maybe one of the top 10 movies in America was an adaptation of an existing IP. a ton of original stuff, Independence Day, Twister 1. Now the share of prequel, sequels, and spinoffs has tripled in the last 25 years. So what's that all about is a question that I've, that I've done a lot of reporting on. And basically, the answer that I've heard again and again from the people who know the best is that in the 1990s in early 2000s, the box office globalized around the same time that cable TV and streaming came around. So cable TV and streaming threaten Hollywood on one side,

and the global box office offers an opportunity to Hollywood on the other side. And studios respond to this very particular moment by focusing on hits that have worldwide appeal, which you can somewhat create a proxy for by saying movies that sell well in China and Russia and Brazil. And CGI and franchises are a much better export than Woody Allen, Aaron Sorkin, Nora Ephron-style films.

So the talk of the talk of, drama doesn't disappear. It just goes to cable and then to streaming, and blockbusters become a global franchise. The blockbuster film has become a global franchise. At the same time, you've got this rising cost of producing and marketing blockbusters. The cost of, I think, marketing a modern blockbuster is in tens of millions of dollars. It doesn't make any sense to make a small bet. If marketing that bet is already going to cost tens of millions of dollars, you might as well spent hundreds of millions of dollars on production. And as a result, because all these movies are so expensive,

film studios are placing their bets on projects that have what they call pre-awareness, or audiences know the characters by the time they see the trailers. And when you put all of this together, you create this enormous demand for big franchises where you're producing next iterative episodes in an ongoing empire, an ongoing universe, rather than entirely original dramas that people come to expect they'll watch. at home. And as a result, you have sort of, you know, moviegoers, us, consumers essentially saying,

I'm only going to go to the movies three times a year. I'm not going to waste this ticket on, you know, some indie drama that has no story I've ever heard of before. You're going to save it for the next iterative, you know, Marvel show. And then movies respond to that audience behavior by investing even more heavily in action-packed franchises. And so you sort of got both ends of this market driving the other. So here I see that in a weird way, like one way that I've summarized this picture is that in a weird way, as Hollywood got smarter, more sophisticated about the movie business, the movies got, I don't want to quite say dumber, but the movies got much more familiar. They got much less original. And now, I think we're in this weird place where

consumers don't expect to see original stuff in movie theaters, and therefore movie studios don't sink hundreds of millions of dollars into truly original stuff. We're just like in this new moment where like both sides of the market have come to understand the other. And that understanding essentially says everything that's released in movies should be incredibly familiar and everything that's released on streaming. Yes, sure, maybe I'll take a little bit more of a risk there. I wonder how that story about like how my reporting in Hollywood matches up with the

theories that you just identified. Yeah. I mean, one piece that I left out of the decline of deviance thing because it was just too long and sprawling already, but is, I think, the forgotten promise of the long tale. So in the midst of globalization and the internet, there is this theory that, okay, if you can reach anyone, anywhere on earth, the marginal cost of an additional customer is now basically zero, then we should see all of these idiosyncratic, like, content creators, although the term didn't exist at the time, spring into being to serve extremely

small slivers of consumers. And I think that has somewhat happened. I don't think the promise was totally reneged upon. However, what we forgot is that, well, if you can reach anybody anywhere, why wouldn't you want to reach everybody, everywhere? So now rather than like, oh, I could sell my niche indie drama to the very few people in every single country who want it, why not sell it to the entire theater going public of every country on earth where there's a movie theater? And so as the long tail, I think, has somewhat borne out, the short hump at the beginning actually grew so much more than anyone thought because we didn't realize there'd be so many people who are actually really interested in making a billion dollars selling something to everyone on Earth. I want to move on to music. Our mutual friend, Chris Dolariva, had this wonderful piece in Slow Boring where he points out that, you know, popular music today is by many accounts more homogenous with more repetitive lyrics than ever.

and one reason why old music seems to be eating new music is that private equity firms have been buying back catalogs, hundreds of millions of dollars for all the Elvis recordings, hundreds of millions of dollars for everything by Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan. And once they own these back catalogs, they're pouring money into biopics and reboots and samples to make use of that old music. So just quoting from Chris here, quote,

when you combine huge investments with digital platforms that make the past and present equally accessible, along with copyrights that will likely last more than a century, you get a situation where the handful of artists who struck it biggest in previous generations may cast an ever larger shadow over the future. End quote. So Adam, we've talked about some ways in which the decline of deviance is psychological, that we're becoming more risk-averse, that we're valuing life more. But this story and music also suggests that in some ways that a decline of deviance is structural too, that like private capital in the streaming system have teamed up to make old music a bigger part of the contemporary music landscape.

I wonder how you fold in Chris's reporting about how like this isn't just like a cultural story. This is like profoundly an economic and even financial story as well. Yeah, I think you can't, I mean, I think his point is great and really interesting. I think you also can't separate it from the preferences that consumers have. There's something very weird going on where, like, why is it that people are still listening to Creedens Clearwater, Bruce Springsteen, to the Beatles, to the Stones? It wasn't the case. This is something that my PhD advisor would point out to me in graduate school.

He was like, I never listened to my parents' music. I thought it was like lame and stupid. There weren't teenagers putting on Perry Como records and being like, yeah, they had listened to this. But now we do. I'm totally happy to listen to my parents and grandparents music. It's still really popular. And by the way, it's so much worse than that. Like, if you know anyone from Gen Z, they're still watching friends.

They're still watching The Office. Those shows debuted more than 20 years ago. So, like, I think for myself, I grew up, you know, I was born 1986, so I guess I'm 10 years old in 1996. The idea that I'm watching television shows from 1976, like, that I'm choosing to watch those things after school, I genuinely can't imagine it. But there is something, yes, not just about the private equity companies, but also about the landscape of streaming that makes the past and present equally accessible such that, like, it is just as easy for someone from Gen Z to watch Friends or the office as it is for them to, like, watch whatever new season of Love is blind. Yeah. I think it's, and it's super weird. Like, why do we still like that stuff? One possibility is, is that we actually haven't made better stuff.

That, like, we did a better job with it. You know, maybe Friends is just a better show. whatever, you know, four cameras, sitcoms they're putting on TV today. Another possibility is we don't have the same preference for new stuff, that there used to be a premium on consuming something that had been made in the time that you were living, for whatever reason, maybe it spoke to whatever experience you were having. Now we've lost that preference for some reason. Maybe, and again, not to make my theory of everything the only theory, but if you're living in a world that feels very risky and anything, you're just much more open, I think, to new and strange ideas.

I mean, you wrote this great post about reviewing the Vertigo years, about this crazy time in the 1910s when people are like, technology, it's changing too fast. Like, art, it's changing too fast. Who is saying that now? Who, like, who out there is to play about. Well, people are saying about technology from time to time, but they're definitely not saying it about art, right?

It's amazing to go back to the 1905. This is a book called The Vertigo Years, which is an amazing book about the first decade of the 20th century in Western Europe in particular. And it's like the reaction that people are having to modern art and to Stravinsky's The Right of Spring, like people are literally losing their minds. Like they're attending concerts

and like throwing their shoes and punching people because the music is too novel. And it's funny to think that 120 years ago, the debate in art was, how can we stop art from moving too fast? And now the more common debate is how can we get art moving at all? We're still stuck in the world that was built in,

you know, pop music still sounds like the 1980s. Gen Z is still watching TV shows from the 1990s. We're still only going to movies that are the next iteration of Marvel Comics that were written in the 1960s. It's just interesting that now the memetic critique of culture is that it's too stuck rather than, as 100 years ago, is moving too fast.

Last thoughts here before I get you on a subject that I know is near and dear to your heart. Just to add, I think, another representative quote, there's one from Susan Sontag in the 1960s, say, like, complaint, somewhat complaining, someone pointing out that forms of art succeed each other so quickly that the audience doesn't even know what's going on. I'm paraphrasing.

But so even in the 1960s, we have people who are paying close attention to art saying, things are changing so fast. Now when you look at art critics, their main critique is that things haven't changed or art changing very quickly. So a lot of these things, I think are difficult to tell if you aren't immersed in them, but the people who are most immersed

in them tell us that they feel bored. And so I think it's really telling that that particular critique appears to be a new one. So many of these complaints or even perceptions about how things change over time, I think, actually reveals psychological truths rather than cultural truths that, like, you look back and you find the same complaints in every previous generation. This one, as far as I can tell, appears to be new. And that's why I think it's worth taking especially seriously. Well, on the subject of what happened around 1970 that took us from a world with too much novelty

to a world with too much stagnation, this is absolutely a memetic concern in the world of science and technology. There's a famous 2020 paper called Our Ideas Getting Harder to Find, where a group of researchers from Stanford University and MIT essentially concluded that, yes, they are. They concluded that research productivity has declined in software, agriculture, medicine. A pair of Swiss researchers said, quote, scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the 1970s. Chicago scholar that I've spoken to very often named James Evans has found that as the number of scientific researchers has grown, progress has slowed in many scientific fields, perhaps because scientists are so overwhelmed by the glut of information

in their domain, they're clustering around the same safe subjects. Just to broaden out here, That's very similar maybe. If you're not a scientist listening to the show to you go on Netflix, you see that there's way too many things, way too many shows for you to have to choose from. They all look sort of self-same. They all look sort of boring. And so you just watch the same episode of television for the 19th time. Scientists do that too, overwhelmed by the glad of information.

They just write the latest riff on the last big science paper. Adam, you are a scientist. I am not. I wonder what you make of the idea that the trends that we're talking about, the sort of cultural stuckness that we're talking about is also a phenomenon in academia. I think it's the same thing. I think it's coming from the same places. I mean, I think about the fact that Cotoline Carrico, who won the Nobel Prize for her work on mRNA vaccines that helped save millions of lives in the pandemic, she had a really interesting life, but part of her scientific life was she left hungry

with basically nothing. You know, she sewed her $200 into the, into her daughter's teddy bear and showed up in a place where she knew basically no one, didn't speak the language fluently. That kind of person is just going to have different ideas than the kind of person who grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Your mom is a VP at Pfizer. Your dad is a tenured professor at, you know, some prestigious university. Like, you might still do great science. You're just probably not going to rock the boat because your boat has not been rocked your whole life. And you can see this that like the Karikos, I think, are much rarer for a lot of reasons.

There are fewer, like, highly credentialed refugees coming to the United States than there was in, say, the Cold War World War II. Another reason is we don't identify and promote them, that the scientific funding landscape has changed such that people are much less interested in rewarding new potential, like high risk, high reward ideas, although I think it's kind of the wrong framing, but like big, if true ideas. Now when there's a funding crunch or when you convene a big committee, they want the things. that they know is going to work. Like, why waste the money? That wasn't the way that we used to think about scientific funding. In large, we didn't think about it at all, really, pre-World War II. But even there was a brief period afterward where we all understood that this cannot be

the way that science works. We don't know what work is worth doing. Like, we can have some vague idea, but if we know how the experiment is going to work out, the experiment is not worth running. That idea, I think, has largely disappeared from our scientific landscape. And I think if you follow that thread back, I think you will again find this general lack of risk taking, which I think comes from the idea that like it is more worthwhile to keep things stable now than it ever has been before. And I think they can show up even subconsciously, even in people who might explicitly disagree. And I think we would feel differently if things were a little more dangerous, not that I want them to be.

It's interesting because I was at first trying to think, how could Adam's theory that we care more about being? being alive, possibly explain the slowdowns in science or the lack of risky bets that are being taken on behalf of scientists. And here's one way that I put it together and tell me if this makes sense to you. Now, you talk about the value of a human life going up or people's sense of the value of human life going up. It feels like the value of reputation has gone up to or that the, you know, that the the vulnerability of reputation

has become more salient to people. Like one bad tweet, one failed startup, one weird stunt, maybe can follow you around forever. And maybe there's this sense that the internet and modern institutions have turned social risk into something that feels like

a second mortality risk, right? How does the slowdown in science and in your mind fit with this idea, this grand explanation that we seem to care more about being alive and therefore act in a way that is risk averse in response to that care for being alive. Yeah, I think the increasing value of life doesn't just cash out in terms of I don't want to die, but I don't want to die a social death, that everything has to last me now, my eyes, my joints, my bones, but also my reputation.

And so if I'm planning on being around for a long time, and again, I think this operates mainly subconsciously. But if I'm planning on being around for a long time, that means I don't want to alienate people. I don't want to be weird. I don't want to stand out because I need to inhabit this body in this world for a considerable lifetime. And so it makes sense not just that I'm afraid of literally being crushed by an anvil, but I'm afraid that my career isn't going to work out, which eventually traces back to like, okay, well, then I need to get the right papers in the right places. In order to do that, I need to have the right ideas. In order to do that, I need to get good grades in high school. And it comes all the way back to the first thoughts you have as like a sentient

person in school being like, okay, I shouldn't take this cigarette that's being offered to me. And so I think a lot of those, a lot of that constraining of life is good. I think it's good for that kid not to take the cigarette. But the kid that's smoking on the playground might all turn into the scientist that is having a breakthrough in the lab. And I think it is ultimately that lack of a divergent life that constrains our divergent thinking. So I want to move to big picture theories that can span these subjects. I talked in the open about how brands and corporate logos are becoming more self-similar and how architecture is becoming more standard boxes and rectangles.

We talked about how movies are more. dominated by familiarity, how music is more dominated by older songs, how science has come to be dominated by a culture of risk aversion and stagnation. I wonder how much this has to do with the fact that in the last 25 years in particular, we've gotten very good at using technology to know what has already succeeded and what is likely to do. succeed. We become in a weird way almost cursed by the knowledge of likely success and existing success. And in these markets, music and movies and even science, you know, people being able to see, oh, that scientific paper got a lot of attention. So I need to remember that when I write

my science paper. Maybe this creates a culture that's naturally more imitative and more memetic. If you want to produce popular things, you know where to look for what's already popular, and then you make exactly that kind of thing. And maybe previous generations were more innocent and more naive in some way about the universe of popularity. They were in a weird way less good at guessing

what would be popular and therefore better at creating things that were truly novel. I guess I wonder if there's something about our ability to create like better and better marketplaces of attention has made it harder to like truly break out and like

forget what we know and make something that doesn't fit with like the grooves of popularity that we know have been dug already. There's something there that I think makes a lot of sense that basically the feedback cycles have been tightened and I'm sure you've had this experience if you talk to any journalist who worked

in the pre-internet days, they'll talk about not knowing how well a piece did, right? You could only measure like the number of letters that came in. You couldn't measure the clicks. You couldn't measure the amount of scrolling time. When you can, you're now subject, you're subject to that data. You want to do more of the articles that got a lot of clicks and fewer the articles that didn't. In our land before time, when we didn't have that ability, we could take more chances. I think that makes total sense. Some data, I think, that speaks against that being the genesis of this effect, is that a lot of these.

trends that we've been talking about happened before the internet as we know it today really existed. So some of these things began in the 80s, as far as we can tell, some in the 90s or early 2000s. So a lot of people reacting to this piece have been like, oh, it's the internet, it's the algorithms, it's the data. And I think all those things can speed these trends. But the transition from the 90s to the 2000s wasn't really the transition from pre-internet to post-internet. That happened from the 2000s to the 2010s. It wasn't until 2007 that a majority of Americans got high-speed internet at home. Instagram isn't until 2010.

So a lot of this very video forward algorithmic social media internet, I think happens toward the tail end of these trends. I think they began in motion earlier. And so I think they could speed them up, but it doesn't seem like they caused them. Maybe one way to think about what's going on here across categories is to think about what the exceptions to these rules are. So, for example, I don't use TikTok, but when I do... look over my wife's shoulder at her TikTok, which of course is molded to her preferences,

I often think like this is some of the strangest stuff I've ever seen. Like there's a way in which TikTok allows for the cultivation of all sorts of micro communities that might be large at scale. There might be like hundreds of thousands of people in those communities, but they're weird to each other. They're certainly not mainstream. People talk a lot about like, you know, the death of the mainstream, the fact that like aside from, you know, you know, one, Barbenheimer phenomenon every five years, and, like, the sport of the NFL, and maybe also Taylor Swift, there's, like, not a lot of other, like, cultural totems that, like, extend across the sort of entire cultural landscape. There must be some examples of industries

that are pushing against the trends that you're describing here. What would those be? Or what would some of those trends be? I think the internet is a good example that the internet's super weird. and it's almost optimized to produce the kind of content that can fit whatever algorithmic niche is not already being served. At the same time, if you look closely at some of the internet trends that look the weirdest, you often find that their roots are decades old. I mean, a lot of our memetic vocabulary is not new. It's drawing on things that were invented in the 80s. So like Nintendo characters show up a lot.

Pokemon, which is now like 30 or 40 years old. Even, you know, Pepe the Frog is a product of 2005, Angry Birds or 2010 or something like that. So when I was researching the piece, I realized, like, people are still making versions of that clip from some Hitler movie where Hitler is, like, angry about something and they just change the subtitles to be, like, angry about a new thing. That was, like, a trend 10 years ago. They're still doing it. So even while the Internet does appear to be serving up weird things for idiosyncratic communities. I think a lot of that well is drawing from from from pretty old IP. Other places, though, where I think we see different trends happening, I think if you look in fashion,

like literal clothing fashion, it is certainly the case that there's more change in the past 30 years from, you know, from 1990 to 1995 to 2025 than there is from, you know, say, 1865 to 1895 that, that like, it's not the case that I think there's just been this monotonic decrease over time, especially in cases where we have enough data to look back. You know, we don't have like numerical data of what people were wearing back then, but we can see the images. We can look at the descriptions and realize that like some of these changes have accelerated more recently, which is why I think this is more a trend of the fairly recent past where

there actually have not been that many generations of humans who have lived in a society that's as safe as the one that we're in. right my my parents generation barely missed being drafted to fight the vietnam war and i think that's kind of the first point at which oh most young men used to at their prime fighting age like have to go fight and that's been true for like most of human history wasn't true for me wasn't true for my dad thank goodness um but like we're kind of the first two generations where that's been the case um uh a lot of these dangers that people experience on an everyday basis um those have also uh decreased fairly recently.

So I think some of these counter trends basically draw the line around what seemed to be the bigger trend, which has happened in the past few decades. Just for fun, another piece of data, baby names used to be much more homogenous. That's something like, you know, 15 or 25 percent of baby names were the same name of the top five. And now baby names are way more idiosyncratic. I think part of that is more a desire to give your baby an actual unique identifier. Part of that, this is U.S. data. So part of that, I think, is immigration.

So if you're coming to the U.S. from Cambodia, you're probably less likely to call your kid Thomas than, say, an English immigrant was in the 1880s. And so it's hard to pull those things apart. But it's interesting because it does seem to be a legitimate desire to give your child some unique handle than there was before. And I'm not sure where that comes from. I did a lot of work on the history of baby names for my book, Hitmakers. Let me try to talk a little bit of baby names and fold that back into one of your favorite theories here. There's a lot of evidence that baby names as a fashion, as a trend, is a relatively novel phenomenon. If you go back to the earliest records of the first Europeans to settle in America, everybody in Jamestown was named Thomas or James and John.

Like basically, like, something like 70% of the men had, like, three names. And it's really only around the 19th, early, 20th century that you begin to see fashion cycles with names. And when I say fashion cycles with names, I mean, like, everyone knows that, like, you know, Olga was more popular decades ago than it is now. Or if you pay attention to women with prominent ends in the middle or toward the end of their name, Helen, Susan, Linda, there's a reason why you might in your head have a vision of these people being a, a certain age because names with ends in them were very popular in the 1940s to 1960s for babies, whereas names today for babies are much more popular or more popularly ending in A's, Ophelia, Isabella, Ila, Amelia, all very popular girl names. So baby names are fashion trends. And for baby female names in particular, those fashion trends have really, really sped up.

That basically parents want quite novel names for their baby girls in particular. And so, when a group of people happens to cluster around a name, like, say, Emily in the 1980s, 1990s, once a sort of microgeneration of parents realizes that in kindergarten classes, half the girls named Emily, they rebel, and they stop naming their children Emily, and they all decide to name their children something like, say, Madison, and then the exact same thing happens where there's too many Madisons, and so that fashion cycle has to end as well. And I was trying to think about this idea, which seems to me to be about the rise of individualism. this idea that we have to name our children something that is more unique than it used to be,

how the rise of individual, how the rise of individualism might coexist with your grand theory that essentially we're more afraid of dying. Because there is a funny way in which these are like the same idea, that there's sort of weird different ends of the spectrum of individualism, like caring more about the uniqueness of your baby's name. and that being an extension of you caring more about the uniqueness of your baby's identity might live comfortably alongside the idea that our care for being alive, our rising care for being alive,

makes us more risky in choosing a name for our child, but more risk-averse about our child once he or she is born, and more risk-averse about ourselves as we conduct ourselves and move through the world. And maybe I say, I wonder how you feel about my attempt to land that plane, of how the rising uniqueness of baby names might also explain the decline in cultural progress. It's certainly possible. I mean, it would make sense that if you have less tolerance for risk overall, but a stable or increasing desire for uniqueness,

you're probably going to look really hard for cases of riskless uniqueness. And your name would be one of them, that like no one's going to kill you because your name is Kayla. but and so you want to stand out without getting caught out. And so I think it would make sense. And so what are other cases in which you could try to stand out from other people without taking on any risk? Maybe certain fashion trends are this way, right? That you show your unique personality, but it doesn't really cost you anything.

Like no one's going to fire you for like look and fly. another one might be the way you present yourself online the kinds of things that you that you tweet or produce and so yeah it could totally be... You know something I just thought? This might be a bridge too far and sort of a coinage too clever

but baby names are the only market without prices or scarcity. Like they are a market. They have fashion cycles things become popular and less popular. But no baby name costs any money, and there's no scarcity of baby names. Your being Adam doesn't prevent me

from naming my child Adam. Yeah. In fact, I encourage it. Thank you. In markets without prices or scarcity, maybe we're more risk-seeking, but in markets with prices and scarcity, we're more risk-averse.

And culture, for the most part, pop culture is a market with prices and scarcity. You're choosing to buy songs, you're choosing to make songs, you're choosing to invest in films, your choice to invest $100 million in one film is a choice to not invest

$100 million in another film that's scarcity. And so there's a way in which the baby name exception actually proves the rule because baby names are the only marketplace with fashions

that have no prices or scarcity. So we'll seek risk there. It has no consequence to us from a price or scarcity standpoint. But in markets with prices and scarcity were more risk-averse. It's a fun idea to chew on. Yeah, I think it's totally possible.

I mean, because as soon as that baby comes out, we start worrying, like, will they get into a good college? Right? Right, that, like, before they appear, we want them to be maximally unique. After they appear, we want them to really fit into a successful mold. So, look, Adam, we've covered so much ground in the last 50 minutes. I want to find some way to land this plane that's reasonable. I am fundamentally interested in the question of why does it seem... like culture is stuck.

Why does it seem like across movies and music and architecture and corporate branding and science? Why does it seem like there is a sense of cultural stagnation? You've written several times about this now, and you have a large audience, and these essays all go viral. Surely, when an essay goes viral, the reactions to those essays go viral as well, what have been the smartest criticisms and feedback

that you've heard after you've published on this stuff? One thing that really surprised me, I think, was how much people focused on the second half of the essay, not the first. So the second half is all about, like, okay, good forms of deviance have gone away. And the reactions have been, oh, yeah, you know, like, we need to make more interesting movies and music. And I totally agree. And I especially care about the science angle. I think that, like, I don't think ideas are getting harder to find. I think brave people are getting harder to find.

However, I think the first part of the essay is documenting something miraculous, that if you had been a, a concerned parent in the 80s or 90s, and someone had told you, I have a way to cut a teenage weed use, drinking, illegal drugs, pregnancy in half. I'll make them basically go away some of these trends. They would have been like, we will pay you hundreds of billions of dollars to do this. We'll have a tick or tape parade if you could do this. And the solution was wait 30 years. That was it. And just like these things went away seemingly of their own accord. I don't think we discovered the kind of like educational intervention that makes students like not crack open a beer at a party.

I think it happened as a natural consequence of development. And I think we should feel really glad about that. Often, when there's any trend in cultured people, we focus on the downside of it. And the downsides are bad, and I want us to do something about them. The upsides are really good. There's less crime. People are less likely to kill each other. They're less likely to leave their failure behind and go to a cult.

They're less likely to be a serial killer. That's really good. Why did that not feel like anything? Like, why do people look at that and go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but they're making too many superhero movies. And I agree, but I'm also so glad to be alive and to not be murdered. That I think is awesome. Yeah, I do think it's a really profound point.

I had never thought to connect these ideas that the rise of rule following in society that is keeping us alive might be related to an oversupply of rule following in certain cultural markets that's keeping us from. healthier forms of deviance, more expressive forms of deviance. It's a really interesting idea, and I'd like to end on that final note, which is that maybe this just isn't a bad trend. Maybe a society that on net becomes more afraid of death and more afraid of risk,

both to our corporeal selves and to our reputation, that seeks out cheap ways to be individual, like having unique baby names, but is afraid of expensive ways, to stand out, like taking a big stand in a way that might cause reputational damage. Maybe overall, this is not the worst way for a society to evolve. It might be an almost inevitable way for a rich society to evolve, because as people get richer, maybe they have a different value of their life.

It's a really fascinating idea. It's a fascinating set of essays, and I'm really, really grateful that you came on to talk about it, because this is one of my favorite subjects in the world. So, Adam, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.