🆕 Never Post! Any Rigid Idea About Yourself Is a Prison

Friends! What light through yonder window breaks? 'Tis Never Post!

In this episode, contributing producer Youngna Park looks at why people talk *like that* on LinkedIn. Mike talks with psychotherapist Kurt White about how the internet may help us become ourselves. ALSO: The people united will never be defeated.

Listen here on the website, wherever you get pods, and if you're a member: in your private feed. Enjoy! Or don't! You're your own person!

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Intro

• Elon Musk’s X Sues Twitch for Alleged Advertising Boycott
• Elon Musk's X sues Twitch in lawsuit alleging advertisers conspired to boycott the platform
• Twitch appears to have settled with X
• Meta blocks livestreaming by teenagers on Instagram
• Online Safety Act: explainer
• The UK’s Controversial Online Safety Act Is Now Law
• A deepfakes bill is flying through Congress. Critics say it’s flawed.
• Fake Social Media Posts Can Tank The Stock Market Now
• New York introduces data collection tax and digital advertising tax … again
• Confirmed: Microsoft stops new data centres worldwide

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The Ultimate Platform of Capitalism

Youngna Park

• Website
• Making it Work newsletter

Melanie Ehrenkranz

• Laid Off substack

Sara M. Watson

• Website

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Brick by Brick

Kurt White

• Unravelling podcast
• LinkedIn

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

Your business in this world
Your nakedness and terror

Your sanctity remains
the crucial battle

Dearly beyond
We are scattered here today

amongst commodities

This town isn’t big enough
for trust

Excerpt of The Concept of Dread by Pam Rehm

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure, and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 04/08/2025 at 09:07AM eastern, and we have a life defining show for you this week. First, researcher, product consultant, and contributing producer, Young Na Park tackles, finally on Neverpost, LinkedIn, and how it is people construct and advertise themselves on the business brain site, and what has been called the last truly weird social network. Then I chat with clinical psychotherapist, social worker, and cohost of Unraveling over at the Brattleboro Institute, Kurt White, about how the Internet helps us become ourselves, and if he, in his professional estimation, thinks that is a good thing.

And also, the people united will never be defeated. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have six stories for you this week. Way back in November, Elon Musk sued Amazon owned streaming platform Twitch over alleged conspiracy to boycott advertising on his social platform x as part of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media aka Garm, which has since disbanded because of the lawsuit. DMR news reported that the lawsuit cites a Garm document suggesting Twitch executives endorsed the coalition's brand safety standards, which x claims unfairly excluded the platform, end quote.

According to Business Insider, the suit named Mars, CVS Health, Danish Multinational Energy Concern, Unilever, and Twitch amongst others. At the end of last year, Unilever settled and on Monday this week, so did Twitch. A motion was filed in the Northern District Of Texas, ex's preferred venue for litigation, ordering a stay action in the suit, citing both parties entering into a memorandum of understanding. Pursuant to which they will contemplate dismissal by January of next year pending satisfaction of certain conditions. Wonder what those conditions could be.

As Meta continues its rollout of teen accounts in The US, UK, Australia, and Canada, they have, as of this week, added an additional restriction beyond parentally controlled time limits and the blurring of suspected nudity in private messages. Minors will now be blocked from streaming live on Instagram without parental permission. The Guardian reports that the announcement comes quote as The UK implements the online safety act end quote, which in its own words is aimed requiring platforms to quote prevent children from accessing harmful and age inappropriate content and provide parents and children with clear and accessible ways to report problems online when they do arise, end quote. Critics of the bill say among other things that it requires or allows platforms to scan private messages to ensure compliance, a massive privacy concern given it implies the defeat of end to end encryption in personal communications. A similar concern is popping up around the US senate's take it down act, which aims to reduce the prevalence of non consensual intimate imagery, most notably pornographic deepfakes.

Critics of the bill say its non specific provisions could lead to undue burden and abuse. Platforms must review material within forty eight hours and there are no penalties for false claims. No process is outlined for appeals and it is not entirely clear what counts as non consensual intimate imagery leading to questions on whether say the president may use the law to remove constitutionally protected free speech critical of him. Trump has said he would. I'm gonna use that bill for myself too, if you don't mind, the Washington Post reports Trump saying, because nobody gets treated online worse than I do, end quote.

Posts. Move markets. Amidst global turmoil around The US Admin's trade policy, a post reading, Hassett colon, Trump is considering a ninety day pause in tariffs for all countries except China, made tanking markets reverse course on Monday for a few minutes. The problem, it was unsourced and as of later that afternoon debunked by the White House itself calling it quote fake news. Don't believe everything you read on the internet, I guess.

Minnesota state democrats have proposed a law taxing social media platforms for collecting data on users. Under the bill, the Minnesota reformer reports, if a social media company has fewer than 100,000 monthly consumers from Minnesota, it wouldn't be taxed. If the social media company has between 500,001 Minnesota consumers, the tax per month would be $40,000 plus 25¢ times the number of consumers over 500,000, end quote. This echoes a similar law that has been passed around the New York State Senate for several years now and recently reintroduced in January of twenty twenty five. Oregon, Washington, West Virginia, and others have also put forth similar legislation.

And finally, Microsoft has canceled construction or leases of data centers around the world. Pivot to AI has compiled a list including plans halted in The US, Europe, Indonesia, The UK, and Australia. Much of this processing power was set to be put towards the development of AI technology about which the company has been increasingly cautious. Perhaps surprising given their $13,000,000 investment in OpenAI and their ownership of 49% of its equity. In show news this week, we got nominated for a Webby.

Woah. If you're not familiar, they're sort of like the Emmys of the Internet, maybe the MTV VMAs. Either way, our x o x o live episode was nominated for best live podcast recording, which I mean, not to toot my own horn, but it was a good show. We need you, please, to go vote for us. Please.

I'm gonna say it one more time. Please. We're gonna put a link in the show notes. Just go give it a click. You sign in.

It's fast. I promise. Just you can search for never post. It's probably the easiest way to get to us. Click on our show art to give us a vote.

It would mean the world to us. Also contributing producer Tory Dominguez Peek's episode about AI powered recreations of deceased loved ones, which we called to BRB or not to BRB, was an honoree as a finalist in the category for best individual episode of a podcast. Just like of all of them out there last year, which is amazing, and I think extremely well deserved. Tory's work on that episode was amazing. There's no voting needed for that one, once you

are an honoree, you are just an honoree. But extremely exciting nonetheless, congrats to Tori who's working on some new segments for us right now. So hopefully, you're gonna get to hear more of her work very soon. Okay. That is the show news I have for you this week.

Go vote for us for a Webby right now, and then listen to the rest of this episode. Next, Yungna Park on self narratizing on LinkedIn, then me and Kurt on the internet making you who you are question mark. But first, in our interstitials this week, field recordings from the hands off demonstration on April 5 in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

As a technology consultant, I spend a fair amount of time on LinkedIn, either looking to connect with people, trying to generate work, or responding to messages from other people. I use it mostly to research potential clients, individuals, companies, and also use it to do a fair amount of sleuthing. Who knows who? Do I know anyone who has worked with someone? Who is this person who wants to meet for a coffee?

What is this company my friend mentioned, and are they making something I should know about? I've been on LinkedIn as long as I can remember. It feels like an important part of appearing professional, especially because I work in the tech industry. But recently, I started to notice that of all the places I spend time on Internet, the place that increasingly leaves me feeling the absolute worst is LinkedIn. And when I say worst, I mean envy, jealousy, despair, annoyance.

I wanted to know why LinkedIn was making me feel this way. Is it the collective desperation of people searching for employment? Is it the blatant celebration of capitalism in a country with so little social infrastructure? Is it watching people completely renaritivize their lives in service of some middle manager job using language full of platitudes? I

feel like what you described is sometimes how people talk about, like, Instagram. You log on and it's like FOMO. You see all these people, like, living their best lives and you, depending on where you're at, might feel jealousy.

This is Melanie Ehrencrantz, a technology reporter and creator of Laid Off, a substack and Discord community for people who've been affected by layoffs.

The way you talk about LinkedIn, it feels like it aligns with, like, this like, how our self worth is also really tied up in work and, like, productivity and, you know, having something to show for it in, like, tangible terms. And I'm curious if you feel like your self worth and your job are tied up, and LinkedIn is maybe, like, a toxic place to hang out if that's the case.

I generally feel like I have completely disconnected my self worth from my work for the better after many, many years of being extremely tied up in my identity. But when I go on there, I think I see a lot of people trying to perform at being very enthusiastic about work or looking for work or doing work that does not read as necessarily very genuine. And I think I just really feel for that effort that it requires to do that when it's unclear that they'll get any reward from it.

That reality is that in 2025, work is more precarious than ever. There are unprecedented numbers of layoffs. The economy is tanking, and there's wide scale anxiety and anticipation about AI. And still, LinkedIn is the largest professional social networking site on the planet. As of January, in The US alone, there are a 70,000,000 employed people, but an estimated 250,000,000 LinkedIn users.

That's 80,000,000 more users than employed people. But I believe LinkedIn is also shifting as a product in ways that amplify how precarious our work lives feel by evolving the platform to make us more and more reliant on it. The combination of the shape of the product, its focus on work, and the way we use it has created a perfect storm. To unpack what LinkedIn is at this moment, I talked to Sarah Watson, a technology analyst and researcher. When did she think that the way that people post on LinkedIn started to shift, and how has the shape of the product changed as we know it?

I can think of a couple key moments, x and Twitter being one of them as we kind of collectively decided to abandon and leave. Mhmm. And I think that started to change how much people were posting on LinkedIn because that it was the default Mhmm. When you all of a sudden kind of lost another audience that you might have been cultivating over an extended period of time. So I think that kind of shifted pushing to share shorter bits that feel like tweets.

Right? But I also think over the past couple of years, there's been a real shift in the engagement metrics, and therefore behaviors around how to game the LinkedIn system. And also as more people have awareness of the role of algorithms in populating our feeds, in working through engagement. And so, those jump out to me as a couple key moments.

What do you think LinkedIn is really pushing you to try to do? Like, what is the medium of LinkedIn?

Yeah. The shower thought I had before we jumped on this call was LinkedIn is the ultimate platform of capitalism. I think Twitter, Instagram, those have kind of more cultural aspirations at least. Like, what's the zeitgeist? What's the aesthetic?

What's the micro trend niche, that's surfacing on those platforms? And I think about those more as as culture. Obviously, there is culture coming out of the way that people use LinkedIn, but I think it's the most pure form of a platform that is a vehicle for capitalism.

And if it is a vehicle for capitalism, maybe people don't know to what degree they're actually opting in to participating in that. In my mind, it creates different types of users, which, like on another platform, might be consistent with types like a momfluencer, a chronic selfie poster, someone who never posts but replies to everyone else. I feel like LinkedIn has its own set of types with their own language of self awareness and self promotion. I was curious if Sarah were to identify these, if her categories would overlap with mine.

The top ones that come out for me is like the influencer, thought leader as one, the like ultimate networker amplifier,

which

I think is actually a very important role socially. Like, there are people who repost a lot, and I see that as like a service role that they're playing within their networks as amplifier, as supporter. And I think those those folks are actually really important. There's the self promoter, the humble bragger, the extended metaphor that's like super cringe is a certain type of poster.

Give me like an example of that one.

Yeah. So this is well, I so I pulled the polar is another one. Mhmm. I pulled my LinkedIn folks in anticipation of this conversation and only got one reply because it wasn't apparently engaging enough of a post. But I did get one good answer which was I was sentenced to five years of hard time in a Russian gulag where I was forced to do manual labor 23 a day.

Here's what it taught me about product management. That is the, like, extended metaphor cringe post.

There's, like, find and follow your passion people.

Like Oh, yes.

Who got their job, and now they're, like, telling you how the thing to do is to follow your passion.

Yeah. The the advice givers. Yes. For sure. And that that feels in alignment with the thought leader, but I think there are two separate it's it's like the life coach version and then there's the, like, hot take counter argument perspective person.

LinkedIn user, Srikanth Kumba, comments.

I can suggest an equation that has the potential to impact the future. E equals m c squared plus a I. This equation combines Einstein's famous equation e equals m c squared, which relates energy e to mass m and the speed of light c with the addition of a I, artificial intelligence.

When you think about the typologies that you've come up with and those largely overlap with the ones that I thought of, then how do you think that interacts with, like, what LinkedIn is actually trying to get you to do?

Their business model is getting you on their engagement ads, but it's also premium. And for all the folks who are using it actually as part of their jobs, recruiters, marketers, all range of people who are, like, there to actually do business.

I mean, this might be a conspiracy, but, like, I wonder if they actually want you to find a job on LinkedIn sometimes because when I think about it from, like, what behavior do you wanna optimize? You wanna optimize interaction. You want people to subscribe to premium, which is a real premium price tag. But the more they help job seekers actually find jobs, those people don't need premium as much because they don't need the full suite of functionality or tools that might be offered to someone that is like that.

Mhmm.

I mean, I think they've gotta have a model of, you know, there is the person like you, the archetype of or the user type who is going in and out when they're job searching and they're gonna pay for it when they need it. And Mhmm. But, you know, you're gonna be hopping between jobs. They know you're not a recurring revenue in the way that a recruiter would be. Mhmm.

But, you know, I think ultimately, because there it is such a complex ecosystem now, there are many different use cases. And so to lump it all together is is is kind of hard.

Yeah. When I see some of the posts of the typologies that we were talking about, sometimes my question is, like, who is this for?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I'm a little bit like like, there's a type of post that I don't think we've talked about, which is, like, when someone announces that they have a new role. Yeah. They seem to list out, like, I'm so excited to, like, launch brand campaigns and growth hack my way with this new company. And I'm like, I'm not sure who you're talking to or if this is, like, what you've been taught that you need to say, like, not directly taught, but

Yeah. Gleaned. Well, I also, out of sheer curiosity, asked Claude to not typologize posters, but types of posts. So Claude would would call this the corporate cheerleader. If use of praise of employer, team, or product, The purpose is to signal loyalty and team spirit.

Here's an example. Blown away by what our incredible team accomplished this quarter. So proud to work at my company that truly values innovation. Yes. And I think that one is specifically for, like, who's gonna engage with that?

It's all of your coworkers. Right? Right. And all your new coworkers if you're announcing a new job.

As you can hear, Sarah used Claude to do this type of LinkedIn categorization and largely came up with a very similar set of the ones I'd had in my head. What about the language people are using on LinkedIn made it prime fodder for categorization? And what does that say about how people talk and use LinkedIn? Is it because the way we talk about work is so predictable? We've adopted rote ways of describing our relationship to our jobs, which makes a large language model the perfect tool for summing up our behavior.

There's something about the, like, regurgitation that feels so compelling about asking LLMs to categorize LinkedIn posts. Because I said, categorize the many types of LinkedIn posts as archetypes, including comments, use of emoji, extended metaphors, anything that people typically write on LinkedIn. How would you analyze the language of LinkedIn? And they said, the humble brag, the personal triumph, the corporate cheerleader, the thought leader, the life coach, the pseudo vulnerable. I love that one.

The poll starter, the networker, the one upper, the link dropper, and the emoji reactor.

I had a typology called, like, the reply guy

Yeah.

Who's, like, congratulating everyone on any new launch or job.

Yep.

Yeah. I feel like Claude did a good job.

I Yeah. But it's also like, it does a good job because LinkedIn content is regurgitatable. Yes. It it's slop.

LinkedIn user Kathleen Booth comments. Can we please stop shaming people for using AI to write LinkedIn posts? Yes. This post was written by AI, but it's still 100% me.

This got me to wondering if there's a more genuine way to communicate on LinkedIn and which types of posts do come across as more real. It feels like there's got to be a better way to talk about work or interact in a way that feels a little more human and doesn't just feel like hanging out with Claude.

I so I I have a lot of thoughts about that. And I I think this moment in particular okay. So I'm having multiple threads. One is about solidarity in this moment and LinkedIn having the potential as a solidarity platform, which feels crazy to say. But also, I think whether it's federal layoffs, tech layoffs, there's a lot of disruption.

And you can tell the difference with those posts. Right? Like, they feel more genuine than just a like, sorry for everyone affected by this. They sound different. I think there is like a potential right now as we are getting into AI generated crap that it is actually more salient when you can feel somebody's sentiment in a post.

I think that solidarity is an important idea and something we'd all benefit from right now. It really feels urgent for a particular subset, which is people who've been laid off. At a time when attitudes about work are routinely described in headlines as bleak, how does this group find support and solidarity here? And how do people talk about being laid off in a way that toes the line between professional, personal, and not too desperate. I spoke to Melanie about this.

Like, if you were to describe what a layoff post looks like on LinkedIn, like, what to you is a layoff post?

Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot because layoff posts have definitely evolved to be almost more about, like, the entire journey. I see a lot of, like, day a hundred of unemployment, you know, applied to this many jobs, have had this many interviews. So I'm seeing more people, like, chronicle from, like, day zero to wherever they are at this point in their journey because people are looking for jobs for a really long time. So Who do you think that that chronicling is for?

Yeah. I mean, like, psychologically, I think sharing is almost this, like, act of defiance against shame. You know? You're saying, like, I'm not ashamed of this experience. This is just what's happening to me, and I think it's, like, a moment of solidarity.

But I also think it's I hate using the word desperation, but it's even in the Discord, the laid off Discord, it's, like, a word used a lot of people are you know, have been out of work for so long, and they're doing all the things that you're told to do to get a job and aren't moving the needle at all. So it's like this way that they can kind of take control of their own narrative and put themselves out there through a channel they control when all of the other channels seem to be giving them nothing. So I think it's also a way to just be heard and recognize that they're doing their best. And, like, if anyone can help, great. And if at most, they can just, like, acknowledge their experience, I think that helps.

I'm not asking for a magic bullet on how you how you guide people to find a job, but I am curious if you have any particular takeaways in terms of, like, how you might talk about your layoff publicly after the fact.

Yeah. I talk a lot about, like, rejecting toxic positivity when it comes to how you talk to people who've been laid off. And I think I think it can also apply to what you're posting. I don't think you have to be like, everything happens for a reason. I'm gonna be okay.

Like, you don't have to, like, put a face up unless, of course, that's how you feel. Like, you should be authentic. That being said, I think really focusing on, like, building and nourishing a community of people that feel aligned or tangential to the work that you wanna do is really important. So, you know, showing off the work that you're doing while you're laid off. You know, it could be a personal project.

It could be I had someone recently who did an unpaid edit test and didn't get the job, and he was like, can I share this? We're like, I'm proud of this work. Can I share it on LinkedIn as, like, something that I did that I'm proud of? Reaction. And I think thinking outside of the box in that sense of like, you are still accomplishing.

Even like share your experience and and connect with people. So even if you're just connecting with like one person a week who can mentor you or give you advice or is just like in a community that you're interested in. One other thing I would recommend is like, look for people you're connected to that are connected to someone at companies you like and ask them to make an introduction for you. I think being really comfortable, even if it's, like, faking the confidence of asking for help, there's no shame in asking for help. So if someone you know knows someone else, like, I would just ask them to make an intro.

Mhmm. Mhmm.

What do you think is the biggest contributor to false hope on LinkedIn?

I think seeing all of these jobs that it says, like, you match nine out of 10 of the qualifications. It'll say, like, you know, you're a top contender for this. You're super qualified for this. For the easy apply, it'll be like someone viewed your resume or, like, if you I will say, like, a recruiter viewed your profile. So there's all these, like, little, almost, like, gamified moments that kind of, like, maybe the second you start to feel a little hopeless, it's like, well, this could be the one, but it never it never is.

Full of false hope on this platform, I started to wonder what a better alternative to LinkedIn would look like. Is there one out there? I asked both Melanie and Sarah, but neither could come up with a clear alternative. And to be honest, neither could I. I started this journey wanting to know exactly how we got here and remain unconvinced that this is the best version of professional networking technology can create.

My takeaway at the end of it all is whether you've been laid off or hiring or just trying to be a person with a career is to try to remain as human as possible. This might be how you post, how you reach out to people, or by saying something in your own words, even if it takes a bit more work. Although the product has shifted and the world has shifted, we don't need to treat each other in only the way that they've designed. Thank you to Melanie and Sarah for taking the time to speak with me. And I'm really curious, what do you think could be a better alternative to LinkedIn?

Let us know. You can find all the ways to contact us in the show notes.

You are about to hear a conversation between me and Kurt White. And I wanna just say, upfront here, who Kurt is and why we wanted to chat with him. We all know him because he's the cohost of a show called Unraveling. It's a podcast that looks at the world through the lens of mental health. It's published by the Brattleboro Retreat, which is a nonprofit psychiatric hospital in Vermont.

And Hans and Jason, who you know from Neverpost, also work on unraveling. But besides being co workers essentially, we're all just huge Kurt fans, honestly. He's a clinical psychotherapist. He's a group psychotherapist, a social worker, a teacher, but he's also just a very smart, very thoughtful, kind guy who is very reasonable, which is you know, think a rare quality. So we wanted to talk to him about something that's kind of been a theme throughout so many segments that we've done on Neverpost, which is how it is that the internet can help you become who you are.

And you know, as a psychotherapist, I think he's got the right set of skills to help us figure this out. There's so much fret and worry and anxiety over the deleterious effects, let's say, of algorithms and certain types of content and certain types of content for certain age groups and encountering certain concepts and ideas both generally and at different points in your life. There's so much conversation about the encountering and the misuse of concepts related to therapy and mental health. And so just taking all of this together as one big really messy conversation and we wanted to know from Kurt, how are these things impacting us? Are they?

People seem worried. Should they be worried? How can the internet really shape who we are? So, Kurt. I'm curious if you are familiar with this thing that people say online.

It's usually a comment that people leave under a video, and it says, I built this algorithm brick by brick, or I placed this brick myself, or things along those lines.

No. I don't know about that. What what does that mean?

Do you wanna take a guess as to what it might mean?

I I I have heard that people have a certain pride sometimes in the idea that the algorithm really gets them, you know, that they that they're careful about the things that they like or even linger on, I think. Right? So that they're only getting that sort of special unique content to them. Is that is that what that would mean?

You absolutely nailed it. Yeah. It's it's a way of describing the work that you put in to training the algorithm on social media, right, usually TikTok or Instagram, to show you really specific things. So I I've been thinking about this a lot, this like brick by brick idea. Alongside I think another much larger and more abstract idea, which is that like in the process of being online, a lot of us like figure out like who we are.

Or we figure out like who we could be, like what the options are. And the comparison that I make to myself a lot when I'm thinking about this is now is kind of like what the mall was when I was a kid. Just like a place that you can go, and you can see lots of different people all at once, and you can kinda get a sense of what your options are. What you might imagine yourself as at some point. Mhmm.

And I think maybe there's this thing that's happening, especially in the algorithmic internet, where people are going to the internet to make some versions of themselves, building this thing brick by brick while we also in a sense are built brick by brick by it. So it's this strange like funny recursive loop like making a feed that influences our sense of self, which is then reflected in the feed, which then influences our sense of self, which then is reflected in the feed. We ascribe a lot of agency to this technology, and we say it knows, and it puts you places, and it has figured something out. And it's just doing complicated math. And every once in a while, it's, you know, it's not imagining a version of me.

It's it's running an algorithm that will sort of never never be able to know or understand.

And the only thing it's really, the sort of way it's evaluating how it works is probably very simple, actually. Just are you do you stay doing it? How much do you do it? Yeah. And so it isn't necessarily even optimized.

I mean, not only is there no mind there, but, right, it's not even necessarily optimized to give us the thing that we'd like the most. It's just optimized to give us the thing that we don't stop doing. People often conflate pleasure and and sort of reward, and, actually, they're, like, related things neuro neurobiologically, but they're not exactly the same.

Right? Wait. Can you say more about that just as it relates to, like, the feed?

Yeah. Sure. I mean, you know, a lot I mean, a lot of this stuff I I studied and worked with folks with substance use disorders and addictions for a long time. And I really think an essential way of understanding that is to understand that there's a set of brain circuits that developed with a common ancestor that is so far back in the evolutionary tree that we share this set of circuits in common with as distantly related creatures as things like lizards. Right?

Sure. Like, it's way before the mammalian branching and things like this. And this was a set of circuits to sort of get like like a lizard can't do meal planning. Right? I mean, it does very poor at that.

You know? In a five year plan, absolutely nothing. Right? I mean, really low.

Lizards lizard's not thinking about bacon, a bunch of chicken breasts for the week, and

then Exactly right.

Yeah. Their credit report.

Yeah. But so you have to develop a a system that has nothing to do with conscious thought that involves getting them to eat the right nutrients in the right proportions and kind of do most everything else that it does. It has to reward the things at a basic biological level. And that works so well, you know, as an adaptation to the environment, you know, over millions and millions of years that, you know, it's still kind of like the basic system that most creatures use today. But there are hacks to this as it's sort of really how it is.

It's an unfortunate chemical accident that some substances, sometimes just naturally occurring and sometimes if you refine the heck out of them, they they sort of tell the brain that the reward part of it is super important when they take that in. Right? Cocaine, you know, like, oh, yeah. It's sort of like, you might feel good, the pleasure part, it's sort of a related circle in the dopamine, but then you take in cocaine, it also your brain says in a very particular way, I'm pretty sure this is a thousand times more important for me to do than anything I've ever done I'm I'm pretty certain I need to do this again. Right.

I've checked the math. I've looked at the numbers.

I checked the math. That's I've I've had this I've had this system a long time. Yeah. And I don't know how I didn't know about this, but I've gotta reorient what I'm doing. I kinda don't care about any of that other stuff anymore.

And some people more prone to that than others and social context, but we could do a whole thing about that. But but, basically, that that set of circuits is the right way. But drugs is not the only way to overwhelm the circuit, actually. You can you can do it through clever manipulations of people that sort of get your brain to produce its own chemicals that that get you into basically compulsive compulsive action. Right?

Gambling is the sort of classic one, of course. Right? But if you kinda look at what we've done with a lot of this kind of social social media, algorithmically based social media, it's people who know this and have consciously tried to optimize the algorithm to get as much of that dopamine to release to get you sort of compulsively behaving in that way, to not put the thing down or to pick it up again as soon as it's down. Put it down. Pick it up.

Put it down. Pick it up. They don't care if you like it. Yeah. They don't care if you like it.

Right? You if you do great. Right? I mean, it's like it's like, you know, you like cocaine the first time you try it. The thousandth time you try it, there may not really be much pleasure in it anymore, but your brain still thinks you

need I mean, it's amazing the number of sort of systems I have in my life to remind myself when I have spent too much time online that it's like, you're you could be hurting yourself right now. It feels like maybe you're having a good time, but like, let's check-in with the body and the brain and see. You know, I talk to myself the way that I talk to my daughter. Like, how are you feeling? Or we do should we take a moment?

It

makes effort. I mean, isn't it isn't that wild? Like, mean, that's one of the hallmarks of recognizing Yeah. When you're in a compulsive process. Right?

Like, if you say even if you're not using excessively, like, you say to yourself, when I go out tonight, I'm only gonna have three drinks. Right? Now you're you're having to put thought into controlling it. You don't say to yourself, I'm gonna wake up tomorrow. I'm have only two glasses of orange juice.

You don't have to do it. Right? Orange juice isn't that rewarding. It's just not. And so, you know, you just drink the orange juice you drink.

You don't have to think about it. Right? Even the effort to control that you suggest how out of control we are. Right?

So how does this construction of self or even the feeling of you are constructing yourself through these actions, like how does that relate? Are we I imagine it's probably different for different people, but is it like we have these compulsive actions and we want to justify doing them because we're just like, like, oh, but this is who I am. Or are those feelings just making us feel like this is who I who we are because in some way they're positive, and we associate sort of constructing the self with a positive effect.

Well, man, Mike, I didn't know you were gonna get my dark read on this. I don't know if you're gonna like my answer to this, but I don't I the darkest read of this, which I think is plausible

by the

way, is that all of that is a made up after the fact justification, but on a part of the brain that is just simply doesn't like that it didn't know what it was doing. There's a part of your brain that wanted what it wanted, wanted to pick up the phone, wanted to not set it down, wanted to do this, and it did it. And now you sort of say to yourself, why did I do that? And the brain doesn't really like that. You know, we sometimes call it confabulation.

The brain doesn't like a big hole in in its set of schemas, but that sort of compulsive part of the brain can connect directly to the motor cortex. It can get you in motion. It can get you doing things without being processed through sort of higher order cognitive functioning. You know? Even things just as simple as, like, intention and values and things like that.

And so you say you might say to yourself, I like this because I think it reflects who I am. And maybe that's actually total BS. Like, it's a lie your brain is telling yourself. That's a darkest read. K.

But I I I do think there's a slightly less dark way of of looking at it, which is that the world can be broad and narrow. And I think the great joy for me in discovering the Internet in 1991 was this sort of idea that the world that I knew in the suburbs of Metro Detroit was no longer the limiting factor in the people I could hang around, the kind of conversations I should have could have with people, the things that I was interested in, you know, the games that I I had, this love of this Japanese game, Go. Yeah. It's actually a Chinese game, Weiqi. And I found that I could play it on servers in the middle in the middle of the night with people from all over the world, which mostly just crashed at that time.

But I but it became, like, the most important thing in my life for a couple of years like that, like, doing that. And there was a real solace to it, you know, and I and I do think that, like, if I hadn't had that, you know, if I hadn't been able to find something, you know, that commune that group, that sense of self, even if it's playful and exploratory, I probably would have been more depressed than I was as a teenager. I think that's true.

In the middle of all of this, right, you have access to this information, these communities that really lets you expand your idea of what's possible both in the world and for yourself. There's all different kinds of things that you can learn about yourself, about the world. An infinite number of ways that you can go. And I'm curious about one particular very narrow, though maybe you'll tell me it's very broad, aspect of that, which is something that I see increasingly on TikTok especially. And that is diagnoses.

Seeing videos on TikTok, commenting in this brick by brick sort of fashion, somewhere between I've worked hard to get this algorithm, but also the algorithm knows some things about me that maybe I don't. And then at the end of

that

is, has the algorithm given me this video because I have ADHD? Then people being served videos by therapists, or psychologists, or whoever, who aren't diagnosing people online, but who are, you know, talking about symptoms, and then, you know, going to the comments and being like, well that seals it. That's gotta be me. And I'm curious about your perspective about this kind of thing that like figuring out this part of yourself using the internet. Because I imagine, as I said, it's I imagine it's extremely complicated.

I mean, can I give you a weird answer to it that backs that backs way up a bit?

Oh my god.

Absolutely. One has to see, I think, that the history of psychiatry and mental health treatment through the lens of its relationship, its complicated ambivalent relationship with science and medicine, and with the constructs of science and medicine as increasingly the unquestioned sources of truth and reality for us. Right? Freud, for example, was really kind of more of a humanist. You know, he was actually excluded from studying neurology because of antisemitism, and so had to sort of invent psychoanalysis as a way of as a way of understanding what people are.

In the ways that his approach was scientific in a sense and in other ways not so. But he used these sort of beautiful terms like soul, you know, psyche. I mean, they just would have conjured that. They use psyche, you know, meaning soul, you know, And having those associations more to sort of classical literature and experiences than this. The id is just the it, the I, and the beyond the I.

Right? I mean, this is poetry in a way, isn't it? And that kind of played in Europe. But he said when we translate this into English, you've got to think about the Americans. And the Americans are not gonna buy this.

They're not gonna take that seriously. And so I want you to use the Latin words for these things because that's what they use in science. They use the Latin words. And they'll they'll buy that, you know. So we have ego and id and superego.

Right? And the rest. And so sort of ideas that were sort of fundamental to the way that mental health treatment developed in America and the psychoanalytic version of that in particular had to do with this sort of wishing to be more a part of the structure of knowledge power dynamics that come from medicine and science. Medicine, however, never really wanted psychiatry, you know, and so I think there's been this struggle to be taken seriously as a profession and the sort of wish to have diagnoses. And by the way, we have, like, almost no lab tests for.

Right? It's diagnosis by checklist, basically. You know? It's symptoms, and it's a serious business. I'm not trying to poo poo it, but it's different than I think the way you often get diagnosed with a lot of things in medicine.

The rest of medicine, I guess, should say. And so finally, maybe it gets to a point where people are are sort of saying, oh, okay. It's a medical thing. It's like that. I can take it seriously.

I can have a medicine. I can have a diagnosis. And then almost right at that moment, on comes the Internet, you know, like a like a damn freight train, you know, and it's like, ah, here we are. Here's the we don't need to decide. We could just have a YouTube video about it.

You know? And I maybe it's the internal chaos agent in me where I'm like, bring it on. That's great. You know? You figure you out, man.

You know? That's okay. These categories, what whatever. You know? I I really don't feel like as a representative of the field that I personally don't really wanna to feel gatekeepy about it, you know.

Which isn't to say I don't believe in the construct validity of diagnoses. I do actually. But I don't really believe that that science and medicine and psychiatry or anyone else gets to fundamentally decide how you divide those things up, how you divide those categories up. And what I see in the Internet, even in this sort of weird versions of it that come out, is this beautiful interstitial intermediary play space version of things where people can toss around different ideas of the self, and they can be true for a minute and not true for not even a minute, ten seconds. It could be true for ten seconds, and then you're on to Scottish kids swearing.

You I mean, you almost like took the next question I had out of my mouth, which is like, do you worry about people over committing to things that they this is very loaded, think they've learned about themselves online? It sounds like the answer to that is no.

I don't really worry too much about it. Yeah. I mean, probably like if you were to study this, you'd find the most common thing is that people kind of toss it around in their mind for a while and think about it, and maybe it gives them a different sense of their self. Maybe they talk to a couple of people about it, but they're not gonna go schedule an appointment and and get a prescription for something or go see therapist. There but probably far more people don't do that than do that.

But the experience of it might really mean something to that group too. Right? It may have done something meaningful to them in opening up the sort of window of possibilities of the self just a little bit for them in a way that, like, I don't I don't think we can we could be in danger of underestimating the impact of that sometimes. And if and if some people do, they go, you know, like, jeez. Like, sometimes it's not subtle.

You know what I mean? It's sort of like, yeah. I don't know. Like, I'm I'm seeing people here talking about I discovered that this is why I have no friends, and this is why I've never turned a paper in on time ever. And I'm not and I gotten fired from three jobs because of this, and I'm late constantly.

And I'm in trouble for that. And these are real areas of suffering. And you go like, oh my god. I thought I was just a screw up. You know?

And they see that. They said, no. I I went and I saw someone, and I I have this trouble now. And I now but I'm getting help for it, and I'm liked anymore. Look.

I'm in a relationship. I have a job. It's better for me. And if that person calls the phone and picks up someone and says, I don't know. Do I know.

Like, great. Great. Great. You know? And if you don't have it, what's the harm?

Really, what's the harm? They're just labels. We shouldn't be so precious about it.

It's just a it's a perspective about this kind of thing that you just never ever hear online. And it's, I will say, extremely refreshing to hear a professional say, so what?

So what? And I don't you know, I'd refer to this idea, like, if you really wanna talk about self, you know, and self, how that develops. Like, you know, I've used this word play a couple of times, not accidentally exactly. Because I think it you could say fundamentally that the self develops through play relationships

k.

In in a developmental way. Right? Of sort of, like, you come out of the womb in a symbiotic way. You're not really exactly a person, but you develop being a person. You know, you're a person in the sort of usual legal sense of things.

I'm not gonna say that. But, like, you know, you don't really have an identity yet. And you develop that in relationship to others and in relationship to the parts of you that are only for you. And you do that by trying it on, moving in and out of letting things be true and not true at the same time. That's what play is really.

Right? It's you could have it's true and it's not true. And you do that over time, and then that gets and and then that's the sort of, we think, the sort of psychological basis for development of creativity, actually. That this kind of play structure never goes away. We just learn to do more with it, and we learn more about ourselves in doing that, which is more of a process than a result.

Right? The self the self as development rather than the self as a sort of an entity that way.

I built it. I built the self, and now

it's built. That's right. And that's the part that's wrong about that. It's it's not built. It's that you built a prison for yourself.

Any rigid idea about yourself is a prison. Any rigid idea. Right? We always if we don't have playfulness about things, then then we're going to start suffering eventually, maybe not immediately. And there might be some times where we really need to have that rigidity.

It's a protective function. But if we can't get it back, then they were in real trouble. And I think, like, the Internet can, like, it can be like a seed of that. It can sort of so, like, uh-uh. I'm not alone.

Uh-uh. Here's an idea. Uh-uh. But you need the relational part of it to metabolize it.

Yeah. Kurt, that's so good. It's making me a little emotional.

Yeah. I'm glad. I see it in your eyes.

I think the thing that's really beautiful about that is that there's a hopefulness to it that especially in this moment, like right now, you know, this week on the internet is very absent. And it feels agentive in a way that I think a lot of people don't at the moment. People feel really controlled. People feel really hemmed in, and people are really trying to like search for how it is to be themselves. Some people feeling I think like doing that is dangerous.

And so knowing that there's this like way to think about this which is just like, look out for you and just pay attention is I think really empowering.

Well, I think even the dark moments in in life are things that we can bring some some of that quality of openness to if we find the right way to do it, I think, with some people, with some community, I think you might find even that sometimes even things like despair, you can have a little bit of playfulness that creates a room around despair, where all of a sudden possibility opens up again where there was none for a minute. And I think that's the task of being human, quite frankly.

Even online.

Especially online. Why not? Not? Bring it on, man. You know, bring it on.

The online is just bad in the way that we're bad. And it's good in the ways that we're good. And if can find ways to use it to open us up, then let's rejoice in that. Let's rejoice in that. If it's bad, then let's just work together to to put it down when we need to.

That's that's important too.

Kurt, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate you taking some time to chat with me about these huge, complicated, extremely important subjects. Thank you.

It has been a pleasure.

Where can people find you and your work online?

Oh, well, we're at the Brattleboro retreat where we have a we have another podcast, Unraveling. If you're listening to this on the Never Post feed, check it out. We have some really interesting stuff going on, and, you can find me primarily on LinkedIn as sort of the only only place I keep a real presence, on on the socials.

Legit. LinkedIn, real hot right now.

Oh, yeah. Oh, well.

Thanks again so much to Kurt for talking to us. We talked for nearly an hour. It was a really great conversation. If you want to hear more of it, you can hear a longer cut over on Kurt's podcast that he does with journalist Mary Wilson, Unraveling. They have published our full conversation on their feed.

While you're there, please check out all of their other excellent episodes. There is one about how AI is starting to be and can be used in therapy. And it turns out, you know, it turns out it's more than just chat bots giving you advice. There's a lot to consider there, very carefully, which they're very good at doing. So thanks to Kurt.

Please go listen to Unraveling. That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, April 23. Give us money. The show is very hard to make.

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