Let's watch the world's most terrifying game show tonight
Plus, how to seem much older than you are, and a job listing that smells like hypercapitalistic AI dystopia
We’re a couple days into summer, and already everybody in coastal California is incredibly grateful not to live anywhere else (especially Texas). The Pacific Ocean is like a vaccine against climate horrors, not perfect but extremely effective, for now.
When I was a kid, the local TV news in Miami would do segments about it being cold somewhere else. They’d show a clip of, say, October snow in Denver, with an undertone of “Look at these suckers! They haven’t figured out that they don’t have to live like this. Haha, idiots.”
The heat domes ravaging not just the US, but the whole planet, aren’t cute like fall flurries in Colorado. And I don’t know anyone who’s laughing at summer’s new dangers.
Here in NorCal, we’ve been spared so far. Which is good because my son is playing competitive baseball for the first time. His first tournament was last weekend in a distant exurb that’s 40 minutes and 30 degrees Fahrenheit from SF.
We were not prepared for this. We know nothing about being sports parents.
He’s playing three games? In a day? We have to get up how early on Sunday? So we’re just going to be hanging out at the field for 11 hours?
Other parents pulled up in SUVs and pickups, and then wheeled out enormous wagons stocked with high-tech collapsible chairs, shade-tents, coolers, and some gear that we never knew existed.
By comparison, our daughter is into theater. That’s much easier! You just appear at the shows, you applaud. The only gear required is a bouquet on opening night. It’s indoors.
Apparently if the baseball team does well enough, they’ll play in the regionals, which for some reason takes place in a small town in California’s central valley in July. It’s going to be 114 degrees there on Wednesday. So much for our isolation from climate horrors.
Tonight’s Presidential Debate is Like a Weird Game Show with Terrifying Consequences
The first presidential debate is tonight in Georgia, a state where one of the two men on stage is facing felony racketeering charges.
This debate is already very weird, because neither party has actually nominated their candidate for President yet, with the conventions still weeks off.
Typically, the presidential debates happen in the fall, signifying the start of the final act of the campaign. By this time, the American people have started to understand the choice, and the debate is an opportunity to more deeply comprehend and contrast the candidates’ visions for office more deeply.
But America already knows both these dudes incredibly well. Since 2015, Donald Trump has arguably been our country’s most discussed figure since Elvis Presley. Joe Biden has been President or Vice President for 12 of the past 16 years, and a national political figure for more than 50 years.
So neither of these guys need to introduce themselves. But at this point, most people are wondering how badly both men have lost their minds to age and stress. In that sense, the debate is going to feel like a game show called… (audience chants) “Who! Is! Lucid!?!”
The general media vibe is that Trump is getting ever-crazier and weirder, and that Biden is sundowning into a haze of dementia. Both of these men have undoubtedly seen better days, and haven’t we all?
If anything, this election should be a searing indictment of our two-party system. President Biden, in spite of brutally low public approval and lower confidence in his abilities, never faced any legitimate challenge for his party’s nomination. This is unhealthy for our country, and it makes his “defense of democracy” argument a joke.
The other guy is a convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government, and who holds positions deeply at odds with vast majorities of Americans. I honestly think the only reason this race is competitive is people aren’t aware of what Trump has said he’s intending to do in his second term. They may think he’s “good at economy,” but I’d wager that few voters know that his primary economic proposals are a massive tax increase on basic consumer goods, and a tax cut for the richest Americans and corporations. People also don’t understand how inflationary deporting 10 million immigrants would be. This might be the most useful outcome of the debate.
Unlike the Democrats, the Republican party held some debates and ran primaries this year, and their voters chose Trump again in a blowout. Republican primary voters at least had an opportunity to express their weird dark fantasies.
Like a lot of Americans, I’m sitting here thinking, “Why these two guys again? In a country of 340 million people?” And also thinking, “I’m going to put everything I’ve got into making sure Joe Biden wins reelection, because the alternative is catastrophic.”
Joe has a tendency to show that he’s more cogent than the viral clips of him spacing out. We know he’s 81, but some octogenarians are more mentally adept than others.
How to seem moldier than you are
One of the great pleasures of being middle-aged is watching people younger than you confront the anguish of feeling old.
In the early 2010s, I was working at YouTube, and in my late 30s. My job was presenting to advertisers this newly discovered species called “millennials.” Our research showed that they were profoundly optimistic about their futures, having been positively reinforced by parents and teachers.
So it was fun for me a few years later to see this generation deal with the reality that they were no longer America’s future — people younger than they existed.
Here’s one particularly gratifying example of this: For my job, I had subscribed to the YouTube channel of three millennial pop culture dudes. They declared their channel was “for the Nickelodeon generation!” which pissed me off because I watched Nickelodeon in the 1980s, but they weren’t talking about me. And it took me a minute to figure out why the content of the channel so solidly kicked me in the gonads: it was the first time I’d experienced someone else’s nostalgia that I was too old for. I’m still not sure who the fuck Pete & Pete were.
And so it was delightful (for me) a few years later, when they published a furious video about a planned “throwback weekend” on Disney Channel. They were deeply upset that Disney wouldn't be revisiting their shows, but rather shows for people who were 10 years younger. They’d literally never heard of some of these programs, because they were 17 when the shows aired. They were experiencing what I had, observing someone else’s nostalgia that they were too old for. And they hated it. Suddenly these guys in their mid 20s transformed into snarling olds. Welcome to our side of the Rubicon, guys!
Gen X isn’t immune from the universal instinct that things used to be better when we were babies. Olds are flooding TikTok now, and we are very, very cringe. Look at these classic songs that were popular on my birthday in 1985! It was never better than this. Not a phone in sight.
I just can’t get myself into this mindset. I still remember getting pissed off when an adult (or a TV commercial) would imply that kids “don’t have a care in the world.” Whenever I’d hear this, it would echo through my head all night as I pondered what I’d do in the last 20 minutes before the nuclear warheads landed, or how long it would be until someone broke into our house again, or how I would probably die a virgin because I was fat. Not a care in the world.
I worry a lot less these days. This is going to sound like a flex, but it’s not: I consistently surprise new acquaintances when I tell them I’m 50. It’s not my looks: I am the visage of any other dude who’s been through decades of normal human drama, injuries, illnesses, and parenting two kids, and hasn’t gotten a full 8 hours sleep since 1998.
I can’t really define what makes me seem less mature than I am, but I have observed some characteristics that make middle-aged people seem older than they are. You probably know people in their 40s and 50s who just have that senior citizen vibe. This feeling has nothing to do with wrinkles, sags, clothing, or gray hair, and everything to do with what they choose to say.
(Conversely, I’m grateful to have had people in my life in their 70s through 90s who reflect the opposite effect.)
So here are four ways that people talk to make themselves seem moldier than they are. Do these four things if you want to time travel into your elder future.
1: Demonstrate contempt for the present. I have a friend who’s about my age, and every time we hang out, I brace myself for hours of complaints about kids these days, and also parents these days, too. She’s the person I think of most when I say some people think society peaked when they were 12. “Kids respected their teachers. People respected the police. The music and TV were the best they’ve ever been. You could trust strangers.”
I love this old friend dearly, but I always end up arguing with her, since my 1985 was different from her 1985. “Kids were so mean to their teachers. Cops had a tendency to empty kids’ wallets. Have you tried watching an episode of Who’s the Boss? We were taught that strangers were probably murderers.”
The combination of a privileged childhood and nostalgia has led her to believe that civilization was perfect then — BBQs, summer camps, afterschool fun, the pop culture served by four TV networks and a handful of record labels. It was all great. Now it’s not. Everything about our present day is worse, uglier, cheaper, tackier. Saturday Night Live hasn’t been funny since Eddie Murphy left.
(On the SNL point, I love this video by a funny millennial who watched an episode from every season in its history to see how it evolved, and also to better understand olds who said the show ran out of juice long ago.)
Loving the past is normal and natural. Even teenagers feel the warm fuzzies of five years ago. (It’s Disney Channel’s throwback weekend!) But if nothing about the current world excites or inspires you, or if you can’t find any positive qualities in modernity, then you’re going to sound like a cranky senior. If you despise younger people instead of trying to understand them, you’re in for a miserable winter of life. Embrace it.
2: Assume everything you learned decades ago is still true. I hear this all the time when I’m speaking to anyone over the age of, say, 30. You read or heard something years ago. It may have been true at the time or maybe it wasn’t, but you’ve retained it as a core belief. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Korean cars are junk. Global warming’s been on pause since 1998. A little wine every night is good for you.
One of my favorite examples: A year after I’d moved to Berkeley, my girlfriend and I took a vacation to Costa Rica. Outside San Jose, we met up with an old friend of my parents we’ll call “Sam.” He asked me how I liked Berkeley, and then asked if I had been practicing something he pronounced “ghee-oh.” I didn’t know what he was talking about so he clarified, “I can’t believe you don’t know about ghee-oh. It’s the biggest thing in California! People get together in groups, and they smear themselves with mud and scream and yell about their problems. I’ve heard everyone is doing it.”
I’ve never figured out exactly what he was talking about, or why he thought it was “the biggest thing in California.” But I do recall from my childhood seeing old media from the 1960s and 1970s, when writers and TV producers from NYC would safari to Malibu, Esalen, or San Francisco and report back on New Age woo-woo rituals.
It’s likely Sam read one of these articles or saw a TV segment, and he’d internalized it as a dominant cultural force in “California.”
Donald Trump also does this all the time, in speeches and interviews. For a savant at media manipulation, his actual knowledge how society works often seems frozen in 1986, his worldview defined by his TV brain. He believes muggers and rapists crawl the streets and parks at night, and cops could stop criminal by shooting them in the legs, if only it weren’t for their by-the-book bosses. He may still think the Mets are good.
3: Try to act much younger. How do you do, fellow kids? Are we saying “slay” now? Slaaaayyy.
Yes, using anachronistic words will make you appear old. Especially ones that define people by race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, and disability. Keep up on what you’re supposed to call people.
But ironically, one of the best ways to call attention to your advanced age is to try fake being younger than you are. The younger you dare to go, the older you seem. Are you dressing like a teen style TikTokker? Are you a little too excited to talk about Fortnite or teen pop stars? Are you casually dropping Gen Alpha words you read in the New York Times? People can hear your Old accent!
You are not the rizzler, no cap. Nobody was ever really saying “cheugy” (although that’s a great concept, and it’s a shame cheugy didn’t take).
Just put on your dungarees and your tennis shoes and use the words you grew up with. (Whoa! Not that word.)
4: Complain about everyone being very stupid. There’s something about aging that makes us less tolerant of people and experiences that don’t meet our expectations. And there’s something about complaining about them that makes someone seem very old.
This isn’t entirely fair, because everyone gets mad or annoyed about stuff. And Yelp is now a 20-year archive of these complaints, often posted by people who have yet to sprout their first gray hair.
But complaints have undertones that sound old, and they include:
Declaring, “this is ridiculous.” I don’t know why this word is so powerful, but someone calling a situation “ridiculous” summons an ancient curse that ages them by decades. One example: Ron DeSantis scolding a group of college students for trying not bring COVID home to their parents.
Magnifying a trivial complaint into something huge. I was in a fast food spot some years ago, and while I was waiting for my order, an elderly couple approached the cashier. Instead of placing their order, the man complained while his wife patiently watched: “Only one of the double doors up front is unlocked. The other one doesn’t open! I tried to come in through it, but it was locked!” When the cashier didn’t know how to respond, he loudly followed up: “I hate that more than anything in the world.” In retrospect, he may have only been 45 or so, but he aged about 30 years in everyone’s eyes at that moment.
Rants with many details. One time a friend of mine was having trouble with his new Tesla, which required multiple trips to the dealership. That is legitimately frustrating! Did he just say, “I’m having a lot of problems with my new Tesla, which has required multiple trips to the dealership”? No! He detailed each problem, how they couldn’t solve each problem, how they told him one thing and then something else, how nobody knew what they were doing. It was ridiculous. We politely nodded and no way’ed through the whole story, instead of asking whether his supplemental Medicare insurance would cover therapy for the anguish of getting his luxury car to work. He has good friends.
OK, so that ends my overly detailed rant, and I think it doubled the size of my prostate. I’m sure I’m missing things, so please leave a comment! What other actions make people seem older than they are?
Rangelife Shorts
Only 6% of US renters can afford the monthly payment on a median home. This seems bad, but also I think Americans put too much emphasis on home ownership. We had our two kids in a rental duplex apartment, and it was fine. Buying a house is fucking expensive, and a lot of households would be better off investing that money in other, more liquid assets. The same study says that 23% of homeowners are “stretched worryingly thin,” and I bet that’s twice as high for people who bought in the last five years. This all matters because the highest growth regions of the country have discovered NIMBYism. Two-acre minimum lot size, anyone?
A job listing from AI dystopia. I got an alert from LinkedIn that this job could fit my profile. On the surface, it’s a $400,000 per year CMO role with an education tech company. In the details, it quickly turns into a dark techno-thriller. This is a stealth startup based in Austin (“center of educational innovation in US,” lol). The entire hiring process will be completed by AI. Instead of a team to lead, all your marketing tactics will be run by AI. Oh, and that salary? It’s just an estimate — you’ll be an independent hourly contractor. It’s the dark future of the C-suite.
Baseball scouting from the distant past. In keeping with the overall theme of this newsletter, MLB Network put on the air veteran manager Buck Schowalter to handicap this year’s draft. His scouting report was straight out of the 1980s: Does he have a beard? Does he have a “pancake butt”? What color are his eyes? You may have thought Moneyball killed the scouts who evaluated prospects based on how attractive their girlfriends were, but they apparently just moved to cable.
New crypto Trump shitcoin. Last week we detailed how Trump Media DJT 0.00%↑ isn’t a normal stock tied to financial fundamentals, but more of an idol dedicated to the worship of the God King Donald Trump. Lo and behold, the stock has been way up this week because people are betting he’ll do well at the debate, after suffering two weeks of losses because the company is issuing more stock just to remain in business. Just to make weird money around Trump even weird, ex-felon Martin Shkreli re-emerged to launch a Trump-branded crypto-currency, which he claims is in partnership with new high school graduate Barron Trump. Please don’t buy this.
SEC is cracking down on AI washing. Remember when an iced tea company said they were now a blockchain company? Also Kodak? That’s happening again, except every company in the world is now saying “we’re actually AI.” And then “AI” is a chatbot on their webpage, or maybe even an overseas team of wage-slavers. Get ready for a slate of enforcement actions and lawsuits over this crap.
The day rock died. In the year 2024, a lot of cool bands are still making innovative and passionate rock music. But few of them are widely successful, especially compared with the periods when rock was the dominant genre in America (and a handful of companies manufactured monoculture). Stat Significant shows this transformation in beautiful detail.
Also I read the job posting for that job and it is hilarious!! The hyperbole is just hysterical, as a former higher ed person, this was just *chefs kiss* “We are building an online community focusing on the most underserved customer base in US education - gifted and talented kids”. They are clearly THE MOST UNDERSERVED!! Hahahaha…
Welcome to the ‘club sports parents’ cult. :) We too did not expect this on our bingo card of life, and now experience the soccer version of this. We were also not prepared (mentally, physically or equipment wise ) for it either. I have learned getting really good stadium seats so your ass and back don’t hurt from siting on metal bleacher seats for HOURS is a good idea…