AI Summary
5 min readWhen taste becomes a liability
Wyatt Sanak has a confession: his favorite internet rabbit hole is watching hour-long compilations of 1970s and 80s television commercials. Not for nostalgia exactly, but because those ads feel like a lost form of culture — stuff people spent real time and money making, with a silliness and craft that digital video never quite replicated. "It's kind of what TikTok has become," he says, "except these commercials are very much out in the open trying to sell me something. They are not hiding the fact that this is a commercial enterprise."
This observation becomes the entry point for a larger argument about what Panic World host Ryan Broderick calls "the crisis of taste." Over the last fifteen years, tech companies have flipped media's economic model on its head. The commercial was once the center of gravity; now it's incidental. And in the vacuum, something stranger is happening: Silicon Valley is trying to figure out how to automate taste itself.
The moat that isn't there
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **Introducing the Crisis of Taste** - Ryan Broderick frames the episode's core problem: tech companies flipped media on its head 15 years ago, making commerce incidental and forcing us to ask how we make culture when taste is outsourced.
- 2 (03:05) **Poison Ivy as Metaphor** - Ryan connects a gruesome poison ivy story to the "colonization of taste" by AI, setting up the episode's thesis.
- 3 (03:53) **Guest Wyatt Sanak and His Online Obsession** - Wyatt explains his love for 1970s-90s commercial compilations on YouTube, sparking a discussion on nostalgia, craft, and the shift from overt advertising to algorithmic data scraping.
- 4 (10:03) **The Loss of Craft and the Rise of AI Slop** - Ryan and Wyatt lament that AI allows people to outsource even "their slop," replacing the careful work of commercial actors and producers with celebrity-driven, algorithm-optimized content.
- 5 (15:10) **"Taste is the Moat"** - Ryan introduces the Silicon Valley mantra that taste is the economic barrier protecting businesses from competition, and critiques the absurdity of AI evangelists teaching "taste."
- 6 (17:47) **The Thrill of Personal Taste vs. AI Safety** - Wyatt argues that the joy of making anything is "these are my tastes, I hope someone else likes it too"; AI removes that human risk and reward.
- 7 (20:50) **Encountering AI in Professional Life** - Wyatt shares a friend's evangelism for Claude as a "writer's room," but questions whether it's any more helpful than sleeping on an idea or talking to humans.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Why does culture feel so much less... human than it used to? Wyatt Cenac joins Ryan to discuss the “crisis of taste” — or how, in the past 10-15 years, tech companies have flipped media on its head.
People used to spend more time making things and shaping culture, and then tech responded to that culture. Now tech is using AI to try to manufacture culture so you don’t need to develop your own taste because our tech overlords will tell you what taste to have.
Ryan & Wyatt reflect on why nostalgia is more popular than ever right now, and how we can even get comfort from simply watching commercials from the ‘80s and ‘90s, because craft, human talent and ambition drove cultural tastes — rather than today where everything is a brand just trying to get a direct sale or to scrape your data and then sell that to be used in some algorithm.
Our guest Wyatt Cenac is a comedian and actor. You can find his work and subscribe to his mailing list on a good old-fashioned website: https://www.wyattcenac.com/.
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