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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And, you know, we have so many conversations about people like Chapel Roan wanting to put up boundaries or wanting to, you know, take a step back and let fans know that they can't take her presence for granted or they're not just like automatically like given access to her because they love her music. Musicians are still people. And I think that,
We're just maybe asking too much of them right now, considering what they're getting in return, at least for like indie and working class musicians.
I mean, I think part of it is that they're not unionized. So they don't have the collective power that, you know, a group like SAG-AFTRA does. Because I totally agree with you. I think at some point before the strikes happened, I remember the actress Sydney Sweeney gave an interview where she was saying that actors just don't make as much money anymore. And people came at her.
And obviously, Sydney Sweeney is like a very famous and very successful actress. But I think once the SAG-AFTRA strikes did happen and the writer strikes happened, people did sort of come to terms with the fact that like, Just because someone is very visible and very quote unquote famous, that doesn't mean they're as rich as we might assume that they are.
There's so many costs that come with being a musician. Like you're paying a publicist, you're paying a manager, you're paying a touring manager, you're paying your band and your backline crew. You have all of these people who are part of your operation. And I think musicians don't quite have the same sort of bargaining collective power that
Right, like I think the music industry, the way it's structured now is so...
independent and fractured in the way that like different artists are locked into different contracts there's a lot of competition so I think it's it's much harder like I think individual artists have had to opt out like you were saying earlier have had to say hey we're not going to tour anymore or you know I'm done recording music or you know they have to sort of bow out in the ways that they feel like they can but it seems like there's less space for them to sort of band together and make a big statement about the state of the industry or about what they'd like to see change and improve in the industry.
So I see the current interest in longevity research as having, in part, a religious character. I think we can look at it as part of a whole bunch of things happening, particularly in the tech world, but in the culture more broadly now. that have a kind of spiritual sensibility around the idea of developing the post-human.
This is associated with the transhumanist movement, with biohacking, with other forms of life optimization. But the idea behind it in many cases is that what it means to be human is to transcend our own humanity, to defeat death in the case of longevity research, or in the case of building AI, to build the thing that comes next. What if we build God rather than worship God?
And Brian Johnson is explicit about this on X. He specifically says, like, level one is you start a company. Level two is that you start a country. Level three is a religion. Level four is don't die. And level five is become God. So he's, you know, not exactly being subtle about it. He's not being coy.
This is not just that he wants to live forever because, you know, he personally wants to live forever and things to be kind of cool. He very much sees this as the frontier of the human experience. He is leading the charge to the post-human age.
This is all happening in and against the backdrop of the attention economy. Our time is money in a very particular way now because more and more of us, in terms of how we consume media, how we live our lives, so much of it online, our attention is in fact monetizable online. our time makes money for other people.
Something I don't want to overlook about Brian Johnson is that he is also in some ways could be considered a wellness influencer. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. His fame, his public persona is, He is able to do what he's doing in part because we are watching it. We can't look away. He is a fascinating reality show character. We watch the documentary that was made about him. We read his tweets.
And so he simultaneously perhaps is extending his own lifespan, but he's also a kind of very measurably taking from our lifespan in the sense that our time is being dedicated to him.
Absolutely. In an era where saving for retirement is a kind of a source of stress and impossibility for so many, the idea that infinite time is something to be looked at only with desire rather than fear does mean a long life is for the wealthy.
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.
There's been this like real Silicon Valley longstanding tradition of thinking you can use science and technology to hack yourself. But more recently, and I think more relevantly to both scientists Brian Johnson's desire to get rid of his rascal brain, as well as the interest in the power of AI, is a community known as the rationalist subculture or the rationalist community.
And this is a bit of an umbrella term for what basically started out as commenters and readers of a group of blogs, most notably Overcoming Bias, Less Wrong, and Slate Star Codex, that claim to basically help people think better. The idea is that You're a human. You're a dumb animal. You have self-serving biases and ways you look at the world that make you dumber. Here's how not to do that.
Certainly, there are ways you can, in fact, train your brain to not make certain kinds of errors. But it really turned into... A close subculture that had some kind of quasi-religious qualities. That language about self-overcoming became part of, let's say, the tech world mainstream. And a lot of rationalists as well were also interested in the problem of AI alignment.
And particularly the X risk, the existential risk that someone might accidentally create an artificial intelligence that is hostile to humans and wipes us out. How do you address that fear? One answer is to stop AI development. One is to ensure that whatever AI you are creating wants to work with humans or is going to be friendly to humans.
Showing 161–180 of 213 · page 9 of 11
← Previous
Next →