The New Counterculture

Welcome back to The Honest Broker interview series —also available on our new YouTube channel. You can also find it on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms.

Today, I’m pleased to share my conversation with Ted Gioia.

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Ted needs no introduction here—The Honest Broker is his newsletter, after all. But I want to tell you a little bit about how Ted and I started this project.

I received a message on Substack last year, and when I saw it was from Ted, I assumed it was fake. But it turns out it was real, and Ted asked me if I wanted to get lunch. After talking for a few hours about books, Substack, and new media, Ted asked if I wanted to launch a podcast on The Honest Broker. His only rule: I needed to find the most interesting people as guests. Well, this meant that eventually I had to interview Ted. We sat down to talk about media consolidation, building alternative institutions, and human creativity.

Below is a transcript of part of our conversation. For the full interview, check out the video at the top of the page.I know you’ll enjoy this.

A CONVERSATION WITH TED GIOIA

JARED: Ted Gioia, thank you for joining me.

TED: Well, thank you for having me. This is something we’ve long awaited.

JARED: I want to start off with a big question. I think it’s fair to say that we’re living in a time of it institutional collapse. We had these prestige institutions that we used to rely on: The New York Times, The New Yorker, academia. And people could rely on them to vet new writers, vet ideas, and movements, and they just did a lot of credibility building for us. It took a lot of the work out of our hands. I think we just don’t have that same trust in those institutions anymore, and people don’t rely on them in the same way anymore. And things are increasingly more decentralized.

Now, part of me finds this really exciting because it means for people who operate outside of those systems—I think you and I would be two examples—it means there’s more opportunity. But it also raises the question of whether or not we need to start building new institutions.

TED: Well, there’s been a great promise that the internet would open up everything to us. All of a sudden, if I’m a writer, a musician, a visual artist, a videographer, all of a sudden, I could reach my audience directly with the internet. And we thought this was going to lead to an enormous blossoming of culture where everyone had this freedom and a thousand flowers blossomed.