{"id":95506,"date":"2025-05-08T03:00:33","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T07:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=95506"},"modified":"2025-05-07T16:07:55","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T20:07:55","slug":"ted-gioia-is-apparently-the-guy-you-consult-about-the-total-collapse-of-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/05\/08\/ted-gioia-is-apparently-the-guy-you-consult-about-the-total-collapse-of-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Ted Gioia is apparently &#8220;the guy you consult about <em>the total collapse of everything<\/em>&#8220;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading <a href=\"https:\/\/www.honest-broker.com\/p\/are-we-living-in-a-time-of-cultural\" target=\"_blank\">Ted Gioia<\/a>&#8216;s work for a few years now, but I somehow failed to pick up on the fact that he&#8217;s some kind of Bond supervillain:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I&#8217;ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one <a href=\"https:\/\/www.honest-broker.com\/p\/the-atlantic-visits-me-at-home-and\" target=\"_blank\">published on Monday by <em>The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Whoa! That makes me feel like a Bond villain.<\/p>\n<p>I need some henchmen \u2014 any volunteers?<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_95507\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Ted-Gioia-goons.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-95507\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Ted-Gioia-goons.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-full wp-image-95507\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Ted-Gioia-goons.png 600w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Ted-Gioia-goons-480x360.png 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Ted-Gioia-goons-150x113.png 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-95507\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ted appears to like the classic goon uniforms for his to-be-recruited legion of minions.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>What an unexpected turnabout! For many years, I was known as an expert on music, especially jazz and blues.<\/p>\n<p>But now I&#8217;ve taken on a new guise. I&#8217;m the guy you consult about <em>the total collapse of everything<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t sing the blues. I don&#8217;t write about the blues. I now <em>deliver<\/em> the blues. <\/p>\n<p>I originally declined the interview request from <em>The Atlantic<\/em>. But their staff writer Spencer Kornhaber pushed back, insisting that I was an essential source for his article.<\/p>\n<p>The subject was, he explained, a &#8220;pervasive suspicion that we&#8217;re in an era of cultural decline, especially in arts and entertainment&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He said that I needed to be part of the story \u2014 because everybody saw me as the decline-of-culture guy.<\/p>\n<p>This caught me surprise. But I thought it over. maybe this is why I don&#8217;t get invited to many parties anymore.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dammit, Ted, we&#8217;re trying to have some fun here \u2014 and you keep droning on about the collapse of the Roman empire.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I eventually agreed to a phone conversation with Spencer, and that went well. And this led to him getting on a plane, and visiting me at home here in Austin.<\/p>\n<p>To help him in his research, I laid out more than 40 books on a countertop in my library \u2014 these were essential works, I explained, for anyone studying social or cultural decline.<\/p>\n<p>[At a future date, I will provide more details about these books, and share a reading list on \u2014 to quote <em>The Atlantic<\/em> \u2014 the &#8220;death of civilization&#8221;.]<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-08-at-16-02-05-Are-We-Living-in-a-Time-of-Cultural-Collapse.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-08-at-16-02-05-Are-We-Living-in-a-Time-of-Cultural-Collapse.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"728\" height=\"336\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-95508\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-08-at-16-02-05-Are-We-Living-in-a-Time-of-Cultural-Collapse.png 728w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-08-at-16-02-05-Are-We-Living-in-a-Time-of-Cultural-Collapse-480x222.png 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Screenshot-2025-05-08-at-16-02-05-Are-We-Living-in-a-Time-of-Cultural-Collapse-150x69.png 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 728px) 100vw, 728px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>But this begs the question: Is our culture really collapsing?<\/p>\n<p>I spoke with Spencer for many hours about this subject. But only a few of my comments found their way into the finished article.<\/p>\n<p>So today I&#8217;ll offer a fuller diagnosis for your benefit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading Ted Gioia&#8216;s work for a few years now, but I somehow failed to pick up on the fact that he&#8217;s some kind of Bond supervillain: Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I&#8217;ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,28,13],"tags":[262,477,122,200,1365,101],"class_list":["post-95506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-magazines","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-risk","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-oQq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95509,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95506\/revisions\/95509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}