7: Toby Shorin - The Shapes of Culture
Toby Shorin (Website, Blog, X) is a researcher, writer, consultant, and cultural anthropologist for the internet era. His interests and work include culture, identity, organizational design, psychology, cryptocurrency and blockchains, brands, health and care, spirituality, and social forms and institutions. Today, Toby works on Care Culture, a community and research platform focused on mental health and spirituality. Toby also co-founded Other Internet, a research institute known for its deep cultural analysis and work with crypto organizations. Conversations with Toby and his work—especially ‘Headless Brands’ and ‘Squad Wealth’—were deeply influential to my interest in crypto and related subcultures and ideologies. Over time, I have been even more energized by his broader thinking and ability to interpret cultural change especially with regard to evolving sources of meaning, identity, and connection. This conversation is primarily about themes I’ve noticed across his work and how those have evolved toward what he is working on now. In many ways, this is the pattern of modern culture “secularizing” more sacred forms—including but not limited to practice, faith, ideology, morality, and religion—and how that happens at individual and collective levels. Episode Transcript Timestamps:
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- Uploaded May 26, 2026
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Speaker A: Toby Shoren. We're live. How are you? Speaker B: I'm great. I'm great. Thank you, Jackson. Speaker A: It's really, this is, I, I was gonna say a long time coming, not a long time coming, but we had one head fake and it's very good to be here with you. Speaker B: I'm very happy that you're doing this, that you're here in San Francisco. It's delightful to see you as always. Speaker A: I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do this interview. Uh, you are a prolific person.
You are certainly a prolific writer and I don't know if there are many people who have energized me with their ideas more in the last few years, uh, which is saying a lot. Speaker B: And thank you. Speaker A: But you are also, you, you have a very, very kind of wide aperture, um, on what you've written about. And one of the things we'll get to is I think you notably had a pretty clear shift in the topics of your ideas pretty recently, the last couple years. And so with that all in mind, I'd like to kind of COVID a through line or a theme that I think has maybe been an arc of your writing and ideas publicly.
Certainly not holistic. There are lots of different ways we can take this, and I'm sure we'll talk about some of your other ideas in more specificity in the future. But for today's sake, I think it's safe to say you're a cultural anthropologist. Uh, and specifically one for the internet era and maybe one core through line is that you've interrogated sources of meaning and sources of morality and how as the pendulum swings, that changes for people today. And so the through line for me that really stood out as I was rereading much of your writing and some of your newer stuff was the shift between individualism and collectivism and the ways that we make meaning as individuals.
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