Tara Isabella Burton
speaker
213 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 26 Dec
Tara Isabella Burton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
So I'm torn on this. Is this for the clout, whether or not it's for financial gain? But at the same time, I think it's also true that there is a long historical tradition of people living lives that are incredibly physically unpleasant or characterized by deprivation because they have chosen to do so in order to focus their attention and love on the ultimate reality. Historically, these have been
religious people. These have been hermits or mystics or monks who have willingly taken on a particular kind of life in order to focus on the hereafter. And what interests me, if let's assume Brian Johnson is in good faith here, is that the
What does it look like to want to have a life that is focused on the ultimate form of transcendence, a life that is focused on, you know, what you believe to be God, if you don't believe in a transcendent higher power? And I think what Brian Johnson is doing or claims to be doing is kind of serving as a model for what it might look like to basically be a priest in the religion of AI.
the kinds of high-level interventions Brian Johnson is doing are not really accessible to most people. But I think I don't necessarily see a strong distinction between what he's doing and two different subcultures, one of which is the wellness subculture, which is usually more sort of traditionally female-coded, I'd say, and life optimization or life hacking, which is often coded as masculine.
I think we're seeing... this proliferation of the idea that we owe it to ourselves to be our best selves, not necessarily morally, but in terms of how much work you put into self-improvement. You are earning your worth or proving your worth by constantly working on yourself.
Thank you for having us. Thank you.
It's Been a Minute · Am I a god?! Why "manifesting" your reality is easier than ever · 31 Mar 2025
podcast
You can make it happen by getting in touch with the inner workings of the universe, the divine energy, the force. There's a lot of different language that people use for it.
In a weird way, something that the internet and the attention economy have done to these sort of semi-spiritual phenomena like manifesting is that they kind of make them work, which is to say a life that is largely lived on an algorithmically driven internet that functions on the attention economy is a life where reality is fungible because what you see is what you want to see.
And if you like seeing something, you're going to see more of it. The world that you're looking at on your screen literally shapes itself in accordance to your desire. And so, you know, manifesting is true on the Internet, whether or not it's true offline. But algorithmic logic can shape what we think to be true when it comes to the news.
It shapes what we think to be true when it comes to our response to the scientific establishment, whether we trust it or not. The reality we see online does in fact shape the reality that we build offline. And to the extent that someone can capture the attention economy or hijack the attention economy and make a reality appear to us.
In that realm, it will, in fact, have real political effects, real economic effects. And so that doesn't mean I think manifesting is real, but I think that the internet and manifesting do exist in this kind of symbiotic relationship where the more time we spend plugged into the internet, the more it becomes kind of a little bit true that...
If you want something badly enough, you can, in fact, shape reality. Reality is something that can be shaped with desire.
What we're actually seeing is this overall normalization of the idea that the average person should try to become divine.
So the short version of New Thought is that in the 1860s, there was one New England clockmaker named Phineas Quimby who tries his hand at some faith healing.
Problem is, it only works sometimes. And he asks himself, like, what is it? Is it me that is not working? And he's like, no, definitely could not be me. It must be that the people who aren't getting better don't want to get better. And he comes up with this idea of what becomes known as New Thought, that wanting to be well is what's going to get you well.
And originally, New Thought is primarily about health. But there's a resurgence of this a couple of decades later in what's known as the Gilded Age, this time of incredible wealth inequality, where New Thought gets reinvented, but for money. And again, it's the same idea. If you're poor, it's your fault. And since this sort of dawn of wealth-related New Thought...
In the late 19th and early 20th century, there are various resurgences of this mentality. One of the most famous ones was Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote, I believe it was 1952, The Power of Positive Thinking. Yeah. He was also the pastor to the Trump family, make of that what you will. In the early 2000s with The Secret by Rhoda Byrne, popularized by Oprah Winfrey. But it's all the same.
There's this invisible energy. And if you want it badly enough, you can tap into it. And if you buy my book, you can tap into it extra. Or if you watch my TikTok, you can tap into it extra. You are your own god and the world is going to fall in line with what you want if you just want it badly enough.
Yeah. Some evangelical churches do make use of the prosperity gospel, which is this idea that God wants you to be rich. You can, in fact, attract these things that God wants for you to yourself. God wants you to have all these great things. And if you don't have those things, it's because you're not in touch with the divine will. The idea that God wants health and wealth for you is not a given.
I think a lot of religious traditions do start from the question of why do bad things happen to good people? And often the answer is, I don't know, or God is mysterious, or we're trying to learn some lesson, or a lot of other solutions to this problem, what's called theodicy, the study of why God allows evil, that don't blame the individual in quite the same way.
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