You are an NPC living in billions of simulations at the same time

Also, Max is a better name than HBO Max. Fight me!

Howdy, and a special hello to our six — oops, seven! — new subscribers. Whew, boom times around here. Hope Substack can handle the volume better than Twitter did for the DeSantis launch. (By the way, did you see DeSantis’s extremely weird launch video/Elon crush video? It’s worth a gawk.)

Thanks for sharing Rangelife with your friends, your family, your godchildren, and your breathing coaches. I do this for the love.

I’m going reference Mr. Show three times in this issue, so be warned. Pit Pat says hi.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same

And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same

“Little Boxes” (1962) by Malvina Reynolds. Above, you can see the houses she was writing about from my backyard.

A few weeks ago, in my newsletter about how most Americans think poorly of public transportation because they never actually take it, I shared this photo I snapped on a crowded Las Vegas Monorail en route to a construction trade show.

This ride was hilarious to me because the construction company owners on it were clearly unfamiliar with traveling in anything other than their own trucks and maybe Delta. Most were visibly uncomfortable standing in a moving vehicle. Their comments and jokes were really funny, too!

You may notice something else in the photo, especially if you’re a city-dweller like me, and that is the lack of diversity. In fact, I’d argue that that this trade show was the least diverse place I’d ever been in the USA. (Full disclosure: I’ve never been to a Republican political rally in Utah.) Everywhere I went, I saw groups of uniformly white men over 35, all with a combination of ballcaps, beards, t-shirts, black-and-white American flag logos, Under Armour gear, and sunglasses on their heads.

After a while, they started to blend together. The repetition became unsettling yet also very funny, too. This is an incredibly rude and dehumanizing way to think about individuals with values, families, beliefs, and love in their hearts. But it’s where my brain went.

They transformed into NPCs. How rude of me.

This (right) is the line for the bar. Much less demand for Kosher (left).

If you’re not a gamer, an NPC is a “non-player character,” a term that goes back to the days of analog role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. In the videogame era, NPCs bring to life the imaginary worlds that human players explore. Modern open-world games can be stocked with countless variations of NPCs. But generally within a game, NPCs will become repetitive, and over the course of play, you’ll see the same people saying the same lines over and over.

A few years ago, people on the alt-right started using “NPC” to dehumanize people they didn’t like online, meaning everyone who wasn’t alt-right. The idea was that everyone who hadn’t redpilled themselves into hating women were effectively not individual humans anymore, but just babbling bots wandering around the world-sized game map, repeating things they’re programmed to say, like “you’re racist.” (You see still this on Twitter today, with an army of paid-blue-checks who put “free independent thinker” in their bios.)

Ayn Rand brought the NPC idea to life decades ago in The Fountainhead. Our hero, the rapey individualist architect Howard Roark, is meeting with a Real Housewife of NYC, who is a repository of strongly-held, very basic opinions about the house she wants. Roark eventually zones out and decides she’s not a real human, but a mere meat puppet plugged into a collective idiot consciousness.

There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture post cards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.

Calling someone an NPC is actually a horrible, dehumanizing insult, enough so that a 29-year-old man in Washington state recently chased and stabbed an 11-year-old boy when he called the man an “NPC” from across the street.

According to police, the children said they had called Pence an “NPC” in the past too.

I guess that really stings coming from a group of 5th graders.

My experience at the construction show got me thinking: whose NPC am I? We casually dehumanize people all the time, whether calling another driver an idiot or complaining about the people ruining our favorite bars.

I could absolutely seem like an uncanny-valley computer-generated drone when I’m surrounded by other Gen X white dudes in jeans and hoodies. After all, the construction show wasn’t the first time in my life that I felt trapped in a game that was glitching.

About 10 years ago, my wife and I went to see Bob (Odenkirk) and David (Cross), who were performing some new sketches and some old Mr. Show favorites to promote their wonderful book of rejected screenplays. It was excellent.

As I was washing my hands in the men’s room after the show, the restroom started filling up with NPCs. First an unshaven Gen X white guy in a hoodie walked in. Then another unshaven Gen X white guy in a hoodie. Then another. I started laughing as I exited the men’s room. An unbroken flow of seven or eight variations of That Guy entered the men’s room as I was leaving. Then I entered the Palace of Fine Arts lobby, which was full of these dudes. And if I hadn’t come directly from a work event, I would have fit right in.

I was…a little shook. Because I realized at that moment that we’re all not just living in our personal Matrixes. We’re also living in everyone else’s.

Actually, Max is a better name than HBO Max

This week, HBO Max changed its name to Max. You may have seen the ads. Or maybe just the jokes.

You may have also heard from armchair marketing and brand experts that this has to be the dumbest, most incompetent business decision since New Coke.

Those people are wrong.

I grew up with HBO. My parents subscribed when I was 9. I faked sick from school to see the premiere of Cannonball Run, which I then watched at least six more times that month. Tales from the Crypt, Inside the NFL, Friday night boxing, Rich Little specials, I watched all of it. Last year I even read an 1,100-page book about the history of Home Box Office, how it emerged from constant near-death moments to become Time Warner’s Crown Jewel of Television. (Somehow this book, in all its pages, literally never even mentions the existence of Mr. Show, which is just a perfect encapsulation of how HBO treated it.)

As an adult I’ve been paying for HBO nearly continuously since graduating college. They’ve gotten thousands of my dollars.

But when they rolled out HBO Max, I was very confused. Maybe you were, too. Within this app was HBO’s prestige content, but commingled with DC cartoons, basic cable pablum, children’s programming, stoner Adult Swim shows, an assortment of old network sitcoms, and so many reality shows.

HBO had struck gold in the 1980s by positioning itself as “not TV,” and now here was an app called HBO Max that was very much TV. (Here’s a hilarious, filthy video about HBO being “not TV.”)

But this HBO Max app had programming at various levels of the brand heirarchy. Have you seen Hacks? It’s a fantastic series; it’s also not an HBO show but a “Max Original,” which is different. Many other shows are Max Originals, including spinoffs of Gossip Girl and Yogi the Bear. It’s not HBO, it’s TV.

So I think that calling the app HBO Max actually did more damage to the HBO brand than it elevated the other content in the app. It would be like if Nordstrom bought Old Navy, and then they called all the combined stores “Nordstrom Navy,” and just mixed in the fancy Nordstrom stuff with the cheap Old Navy staples. When you walk in, you see piles of cargo shorts and polyester-alloy jeans, but also a fancy $230 designer shirt you might wear to a wedding. That’s not good for Old Navy, but it’s really bad for Nordstrom.

By point of comparison, Disney is a majority owner in Hulu, and they’re consistently strategic about what goes to Hulu vs. Disney+. The Bear, a very adult show produced by FX (also owned by Disney), appears on FX on Hulu. Miss Marvel goes to Disney+. Disney knows the brand and protects it.

Now let’s be clear: Discovery AOL Turner Time Warner f***ed this up bigtime, and they seem determined to ruin the HBO brand one way or another. It’s no accident that Emmy darlings like Succession and Barry, which both wrap up forever this weekend, predate the merger. Maybe their CEO Davisd Zaslav should stick to terrible commencement speeches.

How’s China going to rule the world without Chinese people?

I’m going to keep returning to this topic when I see something relevant about it, because I think that collapsing fertility rates across the entire planet is the most underrated social phenomenon to impact the future of humanity.

Last week’s Economist cover is about China, and particularly an emerging consensus that China can’t keeping growing their economy (and their power) forever. Maybe they’ve already peaked. Things that used to be tailwinds for China — smart planning, hundreds of millions of exploitable people, an unprecedented balance of trade — are becoming headwinds as their government transitions to a permanent dictatorship with tighter control over enterprise, labor demands more compensation and protection, and financial bubbles pop.

The Economist’s lead story asks the question “How soon and at what height will China’s economy peak?” Being The Economist, they don’t try to answer the question, but instead present several projections and scenarios. It seems like everyone has abandoned the assumption from a decade ago that China would surpass the US’s economic output in the 2030s, and grow to 50% larger a couple decades later.

In this chart below, you can see how Goldman Sachs, for one, has re-evaluated China over the past decade and found itself less bullish, projecting China to take nine additional years to overtake the US economy and then peaking around 15% larger. (Not sure how these projections incorporate the US possibly defaulting on its debt and destroying the global supremacy of dollar, but that’s for another day.)

So, you can see above, the light gray line (Goldman’s 2022 forecast) is a lot flatter than the dark gray one (Goldman’s 2011 forecast), meaning they expect China’s economic output and power to be lower than they projected a decade ago.

And then we have, more specifically, the issue of China’s disastrous, decades-long one-child policy and the subsequent unwillingness of young people to procreate once the policy lifted.

What you can see here is that even Goldman’s more bearish 2022 forecast assumes Chinese women will start having more than one kid on average. However, you can see that their economy and thus their power declines even more precipitously if fertility falls instead of rising. The calamitous “0.8-0.9” babies per woman isn’t unthinkable — in fact, it’s higher than South Korea’s today! And personally, trends across the world portend this is not a lower-bound scenario, but something that feels quite plausible.

I didn’t really grok the impact of this until I actually did the math. It’s exponential, after all. A generation of one child will be half the size of the prior generation. Two generations will be one-fourth the size of two generations ago — meaning four grandparents combine to produce one grandchild. Another generation, and you’ve got an 8-to-1 ancestor-to-descendant ratio, meaning you’ve effectively reduced your future population by 88%. When the fertility falls below 1, this goes into hyperdrive, and soon your population is very old, not economically productive, and requiring a good deal of care.

Back in 2010, George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century posited that the future is actually highly predictable, almost predestined, if you can discern the larger, more meaningful trends from the unsustainable, shorter-term ones.

I remember thinking that Friedman seemed awfully certain of his unorthodox predictions, like Poland and Mexico rising to be unlikely global economic powers, a return to Cold War between USA and Russia, and Japan building a first-strike military operation on the dark side of the moon (seriously). But also, I remember this book being the first I’d read that projected that China’s ascent to power had a ceiling, and that it was destined to turn inward and reduce its international influence due to demographics and internal fissures.

Friedman’s central thesis is that mega-trends matter more than recent performance, and that destiny is determined by geography, resources, and people.

Depopulation, like climate change, is a mega-trend whose impact will be felt slowly, and then intensely. Unlike climate change, governments and societies can’t really do anything about it, except (a) welcome more immigration, (b) some kind of horrifying, dystopian Handmaid’s Tale-style fertility fascism. Which of those do you prefer? You’ll soon be able to decide for yourself by choosing to living in a blue state or a red state.

Some quick hits

Happy 20th birthday to the Streisand Effect. You want people to stare at you? Tell people not to.

Happy 10th birthday to WHAT’S UP, DENNY’S.

My post about how America needs to remove hundreds of millions of guns from circulation clearly went viral in Serbia, because after two mass shootings there, Serbians are surrendering their weapons, and the government is going to crack down on illegal gun ownership starting next month.

An artist on Instagram is making incredible Mr. Show-inspired art. This is Bob Odenkirk as the falsetto milking machine.

Next time: What would have happened if Yahoo had bought Google in 1998 or 2002? Was not buying Google the worst business decision since New Coke?