Aside from my newsletter, there’s one piece of media I’d point to as a starter guide understanding my worldview: this 3 hour marathon podcast episode I recorded with Jackson Dahl in early 2025.

I’m grateful to Jackson for giving me the right place and time to talk through some big ideas:

• Why solving coordination problems between people remains the hard problem
• Why gift exchange lowers the barrier to coordinating, by opening a higher bandwidth communication channel than market incentives can alone
• Why gifts help us cross thresholds, and assist with the work of becoming
• Why the rules of gift culture lower the cost of listening, which is the limiting step of information transfer

And many more ideas in a packed 3 hour discussion.

“Gift-giving is an unbelievably effective way to communicate information. Gift exchange is a high-bandwidth channel for establishing two-way information transfer between people, in a way that commerce is not.

While commerce is a great facilitator of information across people and cultures, gift exchange is that on steroids—a whole order of magnitude more. When you buy an item from me, the meaning of the object you received is whatever you ascribe to it. On the other hand, if I give you a gift, the meaning of the object to you is what I ascribe to it. That information has just been transferred from me to you.

When a gift is transferred, information is exchanged, and this is how information grows, and how ordered structure in the world is created.

The wonderful thing about information is that while there’s no copying cost, there is a reception cost. It costs nothing for me to broadcast information; it costs nothing to shout. It *does* cost to listen. Gift culture is how you lower the cost of listening, and that’s why information is actually received.”

You can find full links to the episode on the Dialectic website.