David, how do you define the term soft power? Where does it come from? And what is the history of this idea? Yeah.

So the term soft power comes from the scholar Joseph Nye, who really used it in the context of international relations.

And so hard power is coercion and threat, and soft power is countries just liking other countries and doing things for those reasons.

And there's been a long debate whether soft power actually leads to geopolitical outcomes.

If you look at the Cold War, there is a case to be made that people in the Eastern Bloc started aspiring towards American pop culture, and maybe that helped create the feeling of wanting to liberate themselves from the communist regimes.

But I think for other countries, let's say Japan, which has really tried to focus on the soft power question, whether they've gotten better geopolitical outcomes because of interest in Japanese pop culture has been a big question that is still unanswered.

I think soft power colloquially, we definitely now mean it to just a country becoming cool, becoming a bigger presence on the map because it's offering something.

culture and is American culture bad now?

I think one of the things I'm trying to track in this conversation with you is, like, the rise of a country being considered cool by another country, which feels so subjective, although as you start to lay out these markers, like, you can actually look at American pop culture and see one country change its estimation of another.

Yeah, I mean, the other part of this that is hard to understand if you're under the age of 40 is just the incredible amount of propaganda, I mean, it felt like propaganda, looking back, that you got from MTV about America is the coolest country in the world, and the reason the Soviet Union collapsed is 'cause people wanted blue jeans and wanted to listen to Michael Jackson, and everybody wants to be American, and Americans effortlessly are the most stylish people on Earth.

And so, you know, especially when I went to Japan in '98 for the first time, everyone was dressed, you know, 100 times better than I'd e- ever seen in, in the United States.

I mean, everyone.

It's just, you walked on, down the streets, it's like, how is everyone dressed this well?

Here's David Marks, who was living there at the time.

Asian tourists were the first major boom.

So in the 2010s, people from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea start coming into Japan, and that really changes the city, and it makes it internationalize.

You know, h- how do you take the blank space argument, and then the potential way out of the blank space and layer it over what's been going on in the fashion world?

So there, there are two ways to see fashion, and I think this is the, the contradiction and this is the thing we're having to work through.

Which is, if you just look at the question, are more people engaged with fashion and designer fashion than anytime in history? The answer is absolutely yes.

Are there more brands operating than ever before in the history of the world? Yes.

Are there more material goods that let you express yourself the way you want to express yourself? Yes.

That is all going great.

There's no question about that.

So l- so let's see what happens.

used to work?

The Beatles are the most canonical example and maybe the most obvious.

If you look at the Beatles' career, they start in the early 60s doing a ripoff of American R&B music.

Then within a couple of years, they had added in all these new influences and by Sgt. Pepper's in 1967, so basically five years after their major debut, they are making a wild psychedelic concept album that brings in references to musical and 1920s brass, experimental tape loops.

All these different things and bringing it together and trying to maximize what an album could be.

And then immediately, because they were ripped off so much, went then to Roots Music.

and that all happened in this tiny tiny span of time and so if you look at the music charts you'll notice that every stylistic convention follows from what the beatles are doing and so everything kind of sounds different and then also if you just look at the 70s or 80s the 80s feels nothing like the 70s the late 80s feels nothing like the early 80s So those time periods just have their own sound and feel in a way that the 21st century, I think by the 2010s, everyone started noticing things are just not changing at the same rate.

I mean, how do you see her figuring into sort of all the themes and stuff we've been talking about?

used to work?

The Beatles are the most canonical example and maybe the most obvious.

If you look at the Beatles' career, they start in the early 60s doing a ripoff of American R&B music.

Then within a couple of years, they had added in all these new influences and by Sgt. Pepper's in 1967, so basically five years after their major debut, they are making a wild psychedelic concept album that brings in references to musical and 1920s brass, experimental tape loops.

all these different things and bringing it together and trying to maximize what an album could be and then immediately because they were ripped off so much went then to roots music And that all happened in this tiny, tiny span of time.

And so if you look at the music charts, you'll notice that every stylistic convention follows from what the Beatles are doing.

And so everything kind of sounds different.

So how do you think we get it back?

So when you say that the 21st century [laughing] is a blank space for culture, what on earth are you talking about?

Yeah, I mean, so if you think about culture in its broadest sense of just the way we live, obviously, the way we live has changed, and there's a lot of interesting things going on.

If you look at it in sheer pop cultural terms, uh, are there interesting things going on in pop culture? No question at all.

And so to say that culture's stagnating is-... more of a point about our expectations for cultural change, and the rate of cultural change, and the depth of cultural change.

When you go back and look at the '60s, and '70s, and '80s, you can chart the difference between these eras by the way people dress, and the way that songs sound, and the way that films look.

And so you get this sense that the culture is just creating and adding to the canon, that we have this canon of amazing cultural experiences, and it's constantly adding to it.

So when you get to the 21st century, the question, "Is culture changing?" Of course, it's changing.

I mean, how do you see her figuring into sort of all the themes and stuff we've been talking about?

Can you speak a bit about, um, how this happened? And, you know, I'm curious how kitsch and nostalgia folds into that because over the last two decades and a half, we have become increasingly nostalgic for past times and there's been, you know, the Stranger Things effect on all aspects of culture.

Yeah.

So, so in terms of commerce and culture, if you go back to the 20th century and you think about the avant-garde mindset, that you have a vanguard of people who are creating new forms of art that radically disrupt the expectations of art that are in people's brains, and they know that they're not going to be popular by doing this because people want what they expect.

And so there became an idea that obviously if you're the most radical avant-garde artist, you're not going to be commercially successful because the market is based off of lowest common denominator tastes, et cetera, et cetera.

And so there was always a distrust of the market and distrust of commerce if you were someone who cared a lot about artistic integrity and pushing art forward or alternative music or indie music or all, all these things.

And there was a flip in the 21st century where it's not simply greed, and I think this is what's really important.

It's not that we all got greedy and we only care about money.

Could you speak a bit about what this is?

I mean, you look at it the rise of the influencer to the the role social media plays in both politics and culture and everything else um which leads me i think to to my next question here which is what role has the internet writ large played in this kind of flattening um all-encompassing statistics, stream numbers, et cetera, view of the world? How has the internet kind of crushed all of this down into this lowest common denominator?

Yeah, and so with status and culture at the very end, I look at what are the system effects of the internet.

And one of them that's huge is just the internet makes everything knowable and everything available.

And knowledge and distribution of goods and the difficulty of acquiring goods was a huge way to imbue things with value before that we didn't necessarily notice.

And so the internet has devalued everything.

It's made signaling much more reliant on money.

Then you have all the quantification that you just talked about, which is that every video you see now has a view count on it in a way that that was not our experience before the internet, et cetera, et cetera.

I feel like all of this stuff is just there all the time and that's bad.

Young liberals are slowly but surely being replaced with a new breed of kid that isn't afraid to embrace conservatism.

I don't think necessarily that everything starts from there, but it s- it begins the idea that in the 21st century if you want to be transgressive, which is a big part of cool, that right wing supplies more fuel for that.

And so then you get to 4chan and, and these internet, anonymous internet sites where people are trying to be as transgressive as possible.

And where they end up is being, uh, often quite bigoted and, and anti-liberal.

And as that kind of, you know, snowballs into the broader culture, there, there's this sense, you know, with, with the ascendancy of woke to break the chains of this li- liberal oppression, that we have to be very conservative.

And so white men in particular have kind of re-embraced this transgressiveness as, as their call to power.

Help me understand the relationship between a guy like Charlie Kirk understanding kids today don't need to rebel to smoke weed, they actually need to rebel and tell their parents, like, "Guys, we're gonna go to church," and where this country is politically.

Culture is about conventional decision-making.