- 15
- Episodes
- 3
- Ratings
- Weekly
- Cadence
- 2022
- First episode
About discourse brunch | jasmi.news
The anthropology of tech. Hosted by Jasmine Sun and friends. Transcripts and links at jasmi.news. jasmi.news (https://jasmi.news?utm_medium=podcast)
- Publisher
- Jasmine Sun
- Category
- news · technology
- Language
- en
- Explicit
- No
- First episode
- 3 Jul 2022
- Latest episode
- 29 Jan 2026
Latest episodes
15 episodes in the feed.
29 Jan 2026
🌻 anthropicology (ft. irene zhang & kai williams)
Live video discussing Dario's "The Adolescence of Technology" and the Claude Constitution with Irene Zhang from ChinaTalk and Kai Williams from Understanding AI. Get full access to @jasmine’s substack at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
18 Nov 2025
🌻 expanding the market for culture (ft. celine nguyen)
People are panicking about the literacy crisis, about waning attention spans and why technology is making everything worse. But some people — like writer, software designer, and literary critic Celine Nguyen — have managed to not only retain their engagement with art and culture and literature, but actually deepen it with the help of the internet and social media. Today we chat about:[00:00:00] Jumping from Silicon Valley to the art world[00:11:00] The internet and “research as leisure activity”[00:26:34] Contrarian optimism about AI and art[00:48:57] How can we measure progress in culture?[01:04:47] Celine’s personal tech/media habitsFollow Celine's work at personalcanon.com (http://personalcanon.com) and Jasmine at jasmi.news (http://jasmi.news). Get full access to @jasmi.news at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
10 Nov 2025
🌻 don't take the bait
VOICEOVER: A short essay on how vice signaling is eating Silicon Valley. Get full access to @jasmi.news at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
12 Oct 2025
🌻 how dems lost the future (ft. kelsey piper)
These days I am quite stressed about the fate of “liberal democracy.” It’s not a concept I previously felt very attached to, mostly because I didn’t like the way the Dems talked about it. But now, we are in a far, far worse place. Masked ICE agents are grabbing people off the streets. Millions of kids will die due to mindless aid cuts and anti-vax policies. Free speech is in the worst place it’s been in decades. I wanted to talk to somebody who is a believer in “liberalism,” but who can also be candid about liberalism’s future, its threats, and why people have become increasingly skeptical. I thought that Kelsey Piper (https://substack.com/profile/19302435-kelsey-piper) would be the perfect first guest. She’s a staff writer at The Argument (https://substack.com/profile/351373560-the-argument) and previously a senior writer for Vox’s Future Perfect (https://www.vox.com/authors/kelsey-piper). Today we discuss: [00:10:00] How the Democrats alienated tech [00:50:33] Zoomer nihilism and authoritarian envy [01:02:11] Improving the “user experience” of government [01:16:46] AI and democratic institutions [01:30:03] Kelsey’s journalism career and joining The Argument Get full access to @jasmi.news at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
23 Jul 2025
🌻 from counterculture to cyberculture (ft. fred turner)
Today's podcast guest is Fred Turner, a Professor of Communication at Stanford and probably the best historian of Silicon Valley culture over the past 100 years. His book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5592.From_Counterculture_to_Cyberculture), is my favorite book on Silicon Valley's history, focusing on how hippies and hackers came together from the 60s to the 90s. But he’s researched essentially every Silicon Valley micro-movement, from Buckminster Fuller (https://fredturner.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj27111/files/media/file/turner-buckminster-fuller-technocrat-for-the-cc.pdf) to the maker movement (https://fredturner.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj27111/files/media/file/turner-millenarian-tinkering-tech-culture-2018.pdf) to diversity posters at Facebook (https://fredturner2022.sites.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj27111/files/media/file/turner-art-at-facebook-poetics-preprint.pdf). Fred is also one of the warmest, most enthusiastic storytellers I know—the kind of history teacher everyone wishes they had. You’ll leave this listen with a bunch of fun facts about the Whole Earth Catalog, Burning Man, and the Italian futurists; but more importantly, a deep appreciation for what humans and the humanities can offer. Topics: - The two types of Bay Area hippies - How the cyberculture got corporatized - Disembodiment and dating apps - The dangers of accelerationism - Teaching the humanities in 2025 Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
11 Jul 2025
🌻 forecasts vs. fiction (ft. daniel kokotajlo)
Sometimes, a piece of writing goes so viral that it becomes an event in and of itself. One of the most successful recent instances of this is AI 2027 (https://ai-2027.com/): a detailed scenario outlining how AI might doom humanity within a few short years, as accelerating capabilities intertwine with US-China competition, recursive self-improvement, deceptive misalignment, and job loss. I’m skeptical about some of AI 2027’s predictions, but appreciative of the format and conversation it sparked. There are plenty of others writing policy reports and op-eds; we need new styles to shock people into thinking in new ways, and to consider a broader-than-usual range of possible outcomes. Therefore, I invited AI 2027 author Daniel Kokotajlo (https://substack.com/profile/1831134-daniel-kokotajlo) on the podcast to discuss his team’s approach to creating AI 2027, answers to common critiques of forecasting (e.g. is it just bad sci-fi), and why he thinks writing scenarios can improve your thinking. Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
12 Jun 2025
🌻 media training (ft. kevin roose)
Kevin Roose, New York Times tech columnist, explores the cultural differences between Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and evangelicalism with Jasmine Sun, offering storytelling tips and discussing the future of nonfiction books in the age of AI in this interview.
9 May 2025
🌻 you can just do things (ft. anson & hudzah)
I invited my friends Anson Yu (https://ansonyu.me/) and HudZah (https://www.hudzah.com/) to chat today, as young people thriving amid these ~unprecedented times~. Our conversation is very much about agency: how it’s nurtured by family and by community; how it’s shaped by stories, books, and films; and how AI can instill it or take it away. Anson and HudZah are both graduating seniors at the University of Waterloo. Anson studied systems design and HudZah math. They're both involved in organizing Socratica (https://www.socratica.info/), which recently rallied 2500 young people around the world to fill a hockey stadium (https://x.com/socraticainfo/status/1908272482228068804) for a giant demo day. They also have a million other projects under their belt. But to highlight two, Anson spent six months on a road trip filming Unstuck (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHeOWLIcbco), a feature-length climate documentary with a friend, and HudZah is perhaps best known for using Claude to build a nuclear fusor (https://x.com/hud_zah/status/1880353827771076947) in his kitchen. Now, they’re cofounding an AI-for-hardware company together. I recorded this conversation to learn from them, and I think you will too. Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
17 Apr 2025
🌻 notes on notes (ft. me)
I'm obsessed with web-highlighter / read-it-later app / research assistant Readwise, so I was honored when to be the first guest on Readwise’s podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhiGGf_-xuI&t=3s). It was a fun conversation, so I'm cross-publishing it here. Among other things, we discuss: * Why Substack built Notes & how the algorithm works * Growth & confidence tips for beginning writers * My research/revision stack (ft. Readwise, Claude, ChatGPT) * Why I’m no longer as worried that AI will steal my job Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
2 Apr 2025
🌻 doing DOGE right ft. audrey tang
Today's podcast features Audrey Tang. She's the current Cyber Ambassador of Taiwan, a principal author of the book Plurality, and a major inspiration for my approach to tech. Audrey is like no other politician you will ever encounter. She's a middle school dropout and an autodidact. She has worked on Siri at Apple and founded startups before joining the pro-democracy Sunflower Movement and then the Taiwanese government. Among other things, we discuss: - Substack, Bluesky, and Partiful as pro-social media - What DOGE gets wrong about hacking the bureaucracy - How LLMs can scale citizen participation - Going from a consumer to a producer society - Audrey’s live-stream with Laura Loomer Read the full transcript and links at jasmi.news. Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
14 Feb 2025
🌻 infinite cornucopia (ft. mills baker)
Today’s podcast features the brilliant and singular Mills Baker (https://substack.com/@mills). Formally, he’s the Head of Design at Substack, where we met, and also fallibilist, New Orleanian, and OG blogger extraordinaire. Among other things, we discuss: * Is the “literacy crisis” real? * The case for reading novels * Why humans are not just fleshy LLMs * Parenting for a post-AGI world * Why Mills didn’t become a full-time writer * Girardian scapegoating Find transcripts & links at jasmi.news. Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
1 Feb 2025
🌻 the china model (ft. tianyu fang)
Today’s show features my dear friend Tianyu Fang (https://chatgpt.com/)! Tian is a writer and researcher focused on tech policy and US-China relations. He’s currently a Tech and Democracy fellow at New America (http://New America), and is a cofounder of the iconic Chinese internet newsletter Chaoyang Trap. We discuss: * How Tian became a teenage China watcher * The death of the China journalist * Why Chinese founders don’t blog * Censorship and its discontents * Has the “China model” won? * The Falun Gong’s alternative internet Transcript and links at jasmi.news. Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
17 Jan 2025
🌻 builders vs. prigs (ft. arjun ramani)
This episode is an accompaniment to my “ (https://jasmi.news/p/tech-right)tech right (disambiguation) (https://jasmi.news/p/tech-right)” post (https://jasmi.news/p/tech-right) from last week. My guest today is my good friend Arjun Ramani (https://arjunramani.com/). We've known each other since freshman year of Stanford when we got into a late night dorm argument about critical theory in high school debate (which says a lot about our friendship). Arjun is currently a PhD candidate in economics at MIT. And for the last few years, he's been a correspondent for The Economist covering topics like finance, AI and India. Among other things, we discuss: * Mark Zuckerberg’s new look * PG’s new essay on The Origins of Wokeness (https://paulgraham.com/woke.html) * Why tech leaders admire Malcolm X and Robert Moses * How 21st century billionaires differ from 20th century ones * Non-Silicon-Valley reasons for R&D mania * Growth rates in the US, India, and UK * Buying the dip on effective altruism * Cars as an analogy for AI impacts * Why “human-like” AGI may be the wrong goal Find a full edited transcript, a list of links/books, and more content on jasmi.news. Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
3 Jan 2025
🌻 statement of purpose
Announcing my 2025 project: an anthropology of disruption. (Voiceover) Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
3 Jul 2022
🌻 audience of one
I remember being a freshman in college and finishing the book “Young Money (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17899438-young-money)” by Kevin Roose, which follows eight recent graduates’ journeys into the opulent yet cutthroat world of investment banking. I’d been curious about finance—widely advertised as a reliable career path for the directionless humanities major—until the book turned me off entirely. Memorably, what scared me most wasn’t the accounts of cruel bosses and hundred-hour workweeks—it was the effect on these young people’s minds, the subtle rewiring of their thinking patterns toward the kind of calculated instrumentality their desk job rewarded. At the end of two years of observation, Roose writes: They were slower to smile and quicker to criticize. Many of them began to talk about the world in a transactional, economized way. Their universes started to look like giant balance sheets, their appetite for adventure waned and they viewed unfamiliar situations through the cautious lens of cost/benefit analysis. I’m glad I’m not a banker now, but my 18-year-old self missed the broader lesson in the allegory. You are what you eat. You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It’d be naive to assume that work—any work, not just finance—doesn’t shape you in the same way. Immersing myself in Silicon Valley over the past few years has certainly made me feel more agentic (https://jasmine.substack.com/p/state-of-exception): I’m much more confident that I can dream big and make s**t happen, that the things I want are within my reach. But along with that agency, or perhaps because of it, I’ve noticed myself becoming much more strategically-minded, even pragmatic to a fault. Surrounded by constant talk of narrative change, business metrics, great men, and idea machines; I’ve begun to frame every endeavor in terms of efficiency and “leverage.” Work smart, not hard. The goal, always, is to maximize impact per unit of work. You can’t have impact without an audience. I abandoned my high school dream of becoming a professor when I realized how niche most academic work was. I didn’t want to live in the ivory tower: products are meant to be used; writing is meant to be read. Yet there’s a reason that the job of truth-seeking is mostly insulated from public pressure. When working on editorial for Reboot (https://reboothq.substack.com/), it’s impossible to disentangle the perceived quality of an essay from the number of subscriptions it drives. My intern at Substack proposed a research project the other day, and I told him, “That’s intellectually interesting, but what’s the business case?” I hated myself a bit for saying it, but the thing I fear most these days is shouting into the void: If I create something and no one’s around to hear it, did it really make a sound? I notice this change most when I try to write. I think working a lot has made me a worse writer. 90 percent of the words I consume and produce in a week are emails, strategy docs, research reports, and documentation—text designed to be as digestible as possible for a busy, distracted end user. My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane. A month or so ago, I was talking about writer and theorist Maggie Nelson with a couple coworkers. Her most recent book of criticism, “On Freedom (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269292-on-freedom),” is sharp, timely, and possibly the best thing I read this year; but her pseudo-memoir, “The Argonauts (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22929741-the-argonauts),” contained some of the rawest and loveliest sentences about relationships ever written. Just take this in: I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now—two years out—my insides feel more quivery than lush. I’ve begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado? I think so, but sometimes struggle to find the way. Whenever I think I can’t find it, Harry assures me that we can. And so we go on, our bodies finding each other again and again, even as they—we—have also been right here, all along. “I wish I could observe life like Maggie Nelson,” I said to my manager. “You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what's amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It's like, ‘What genre do I want my internal monologue to be in?’ and most of us are default-choosing ‘enraged op-ed.’” This stuck with me. Enraged op-eds, soulless copy, carefully couched emails to execs. Is this what I want my internal monologue to sound like? Is this why I can’t write creative nonfiction anymore? I’ve spent the past few months trying to reverse these effects, mostly by thinking about and consuming a lot of art. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve increasingly viewed art as enjoyable but auxiliary, secondary to the real work of politics. In high school, I traded in creative writing for debate club; in college, museum docenting for consulting and campaigns. Art seemed too aesthetic, too unserious, too easy to have its radicalism coopted by reputation-washing robber barons or the CIA. But I have begun to come around on this: art—or at least good art—is defined by its non-instrumentality. Art is not useless, but it is use-agnostic, and that’s what makes it so useful after all. The first distinction is between being an artist and being a “creator.” In an essay for ARTnews (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/digital-economy-artists-creators-patreon-1234589596/), writer Kyle Chayka notes that most titles for people who make things—painter, DJ, choreographer—“signify a particular craft or practice, a discipline that takes years to develop, an identity that one doesn’t just become overnight.” Meanwhile, the modern “creator” is “generic [and] commodified… defined by the ability to monetize online.” In the same vein, my friend Wendi Yan, a digital artist, writes about her distaste (https://reboothq.substack.com/p/crypto-artists) for how NFTs bind artistic to market value: “True art doesn’t care to be appreciated, obsessed over with, or owned. It holds a certain self-respect that knows enough of its own value to not plea for attention.” I feel this tension often with my own publication: How much time should we spend producing great writing, and how much trying to prove it to the world? Or like a Substack writer recently told me about the pain of self-promotion, “I don’t like having to sell myself like a bar of soap, but here I am.” The second distinction is between art and politics, which, when conflated, can be just as reductive and repressive as commodification can. In the first essay in “On Freedom (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269292-on-freedom),” Nelson defends art’s independence from moralism, even when it incites controversy: “Art is characterized by the indeterminacy and plurality of the encounters it generates… We go to art… precisely to get away from the dead-end binaries of like/don’t like, denunciation/coronation—what Sedgwick called the ‘good dog/bad dog rhetoric of puppy obedience school’—all too available elsewhere.” Or in this brutal review (http://19933.biz/whitneybiennial.html) of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, which is indelicately political in its curation: “The exhibition could use more secrecy. The secret is a useful metaphor for art in that art's content is always something that resists articulation and remains unstated.” Although art can have political causes and political effects, its primary impact is much more localized to each viewer, and thus hard to predict. Meaning emerges not universally from the artist’s intent, but from the multiplicity of affective and reflective encounters that result. Business and politics are both based in marketability and maximization. Being obsessed with leverage means being obsessed with power and public opinion and how to steer them—concerning oneself first and foremost with entertainment value, virtue signaling, clarity of meaning—that is, being obsessed with what other people think. But creativity can’t thrive under that kind of self-consciousness. Neither can independence, courage, or truth. When I imagine the quintessential artist, I think of Hanya Yanagihara as portrayed in D. T. Max’s New Yorker profile “Hanya Yanagihara’s Audience of One (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/17/hanya-yanagiharas-audience-of-one).” Yanagihara is author of the 800-page bestseller, tearjerker, and controversy magnet “A Little Life (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22822858-a-little-life?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_13),” a book that follows four close friends in New York City navigating achievement, addiction, love, and abuse. It is an objectively unrealistic story, but so meticulously executed as to keep readers within its reality distortion field. Critics lambast Yanagihara for torturing the gay protagonist, Jude, and his suffering is enormously painful to read, so they’d be right if the plot was documentary, parable, or prescription—but it isn’t. In the profile, Yanagihara comes off as intense, brilliant, and utterly unconcerned with public perception. She speaks and writes with full ownership of her work; she is upfront about not trying to make the book a pleasant read or a popular one. Max writes: Yanagihara told me that she wanted the story to feel like a relentless piling on. And she pointed out that, though “A Little Life” may seem unconstrained, it has a precise structure. Each of its seven chapters contains three sections, each subsection of which totals eighteen thousand words. This scaffolding was there to organize, but not dilute, the story’s corrosive emotions. She did not separate the subsections with white space, “to deprive readers of natural resting places.” The piece goes on to detail how Yanagihara fought her editor and publisher on the book’s length, its odd cover image, its gratuitous violence: She had been willing to walk away if she could not have the book published her way. She didn’t need Doubleday’s acceptance “for my finances or my sense of identity,” she said. “I knew it was good enough that someone else would buy it.” And on the anticipated reception of her newest book, “To Paradise (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57739876-to-paradise),” which is radically different and even stranger in style, Yanagihara responds: “I write only to please myself.” At this point, I’ve read this profile at least five times over, feeling more envious each time not only of her literary achievements, but of the capacity and purity of her mental state. She is extreme—uncaring, even—but what an achievement that is. This struggle, ultimately, is the struggle not to sell out your own mind. I think about Obama, Drake, and every other public figure derided for succumbing to the hivemind, to design by committee, to the tyranny of the majority. The more you expose your work to the world, the more you are vulnerable to its petty infringements and unsolicited opinions, which threaten to destroy the very originality that awarded it popularity in the first place. Personally, I feel very lucky to have a career doing the things I love: reading, writing, thinking about communities and technologies and the intersection of both. But in noticing the shift of my internal monologue, a budding preoccupation with impact and leverage and metrics and growth, I am reminded of the danger in letting your entire creative practice become professionalized, and of the corresponding importance of carving out space for the non-instrumental. I will always believe in impact, but I also want to read more novels about people I will never meet or be, and to see more films that must be experienced more than explained. I want to, as Joan Didion describes in “Why I Write (https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/),” train a mind for noticing “physical facts,” for conjuring “images that shimmer around the edges.” I want to develop Susan Sontag’s “vocabulary of forms (https://employees.csbsju.edu/dbeach/beautytruth/Sontag-Against%20Interpretation.pdf)”: to find the precise language for every extraneous emotion, every ineffable vibe; I want to learn to sin and write in purple prose. I want to become a better artist/writer, and maybe, in that process, I will also become a freer leader and thinker and builder and friend. And if I don’t, at least I’ll have a better understanding of myself. I return to Maggie Nelson: Art plays a unique and crucial role in working out “what … we might want when we’re not under surveillance.” While we can never be entirely free of surveillance of some kind or another (and not always from the usual suspects), that doesn’t mean we don’t have a real need to create spaces or forms wherein we can temporarily suspend its grip, and practice a certain fugitivity from the “cops in the head.” I share personal essays, reading recs, and life updates here every few months. Sign up to get them in your email: 🌱 quick life updates * I’m moving to San Francisco in August! I like a lot about New York, but over the past year, found myself heading west every 1-2 months for work/friends/family anyway—and was getting sick of all those cross-country flights. (Also, I miss trees, the ocean, good fruit, and a host of other little things about the West Coast Way of Life™.) * At Substack, I started a new role in product research a few months ago, which means I talk to lots of writers and readers, then write about what I learn. It’s kind of lame to like your corporate job, but I really do. * I still serve as director of Reboot (https://reboothq.substack.com/). Right now, the team is working on the second issue of Kernel Magazine (https://kernelmag.io/), and I spend most of my time on “professionalization”: strategy, fundraising, paperwork, sustainability. * I finally managed to graduate and get my Stanford degree this June. * My number one priority these days is trying not to burn out. I’d also love if you shared a comment or email reply with an especially moving or memorable or provocative piece of art (music, visual, book, film, etc). — jasmine Get full access to @jasmine at jasmi.news/subscribe (https://jasmi.news/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
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Podcast Authority Score: 17 / 100
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