First podcast appearance - Leafbox

voice changers as auditory avatars

The LEAFBOX podcast is one of the more interesting ones I’ve come across online. It’s a labor of love by a successful serial founder that doesn’t even bother to publicly cite the host’s name, probably, I assume, as a kind of aesthetic decision aligned with the spirit of the project and perhaps also as an expression of egoic sublimation—i.e., the antithesis of a high-profile VC circlejerk like All-In with serial SPAC-grifter Scamath and the guy with the extremely nasally voice who everyone finds annoying (and yet he keeps on posting).

Remote psychoanalysis aside, it’s quite rare to see an individual autodidact with this wide of a range of interests, and also someone who’s willing to talk to guests both high-profile and low. I was pleasantly surprised when he reached out to me given that he’s interviewed much higher profile writers like Tao Lin and even a guy who won a Guggenheim.

You can listen to the episode here:

Interview: ARX-Han

One thing I want to comment on a little bit further is the stylistic choice around using a voice-changer. If you have even a minimal technical understanding of how voice modulation works, you’d quickly realize that there’s almost zero utility in terms of opsec/privacy in using one.

The real reason to use a voice-changer, in my view, is as part of an online persona.

There’s something uniquely powerful about the artificial reduction in vocal pitch that comes out of using a voice changer within the context of a persistent online identity.

It’s actually an intrinsic part of an avatar, and one whose aesthetic value is often underappreciated. Converting my natural speech through this simple acoustic algorithm amplifies a certain energy that is present in my normal voice but comes off completely differently when it’s focused and channeled in this way.

Simply put: it increases my power level.

Literally me.

To give you a preview of some of topics we covered, the host was nice enough to clip out some audiograms:

In this segment, I talk a little bit about what makes a fit meme replicate: its ability to active a psychological reward in its host brain.

In this segment, I talk about what distinguishes incels from alienated young men in the pre-neuroscientific-era:

In this segment, I talk about how grief is a repudiation of the most extreme, nihilistic, ideologically warped interpretations of evolutionary psychology that you see in ‘The Red Pill’ & first-generation manosphere writers. Note that these were later ratcheted even further into the extreme via the subsequent evolution of ‘The Black Pill’ ideology:

Finally, I closed with a bit of a half-serious, half-joking rant about my gripes with low-agency Asian-American artits & writers in which I referenced the Shia Labeouf meme from years back:

I think most of you will enjoy the interview, and I plan to do more in the future.

---

To close out, here are some other recommendations and things I’ve recently enjoyed:

• David Herod of Tooky's Mag has a new postapocalyptic novella out, which I plan to review next month. You can grab a copy here. Reviews I’ve seen so far have been very positive.

• Adem Luz Rienspect (who wrote the excellent Mixtape Hyperborea) did an appearance on The Carousel podcast.

• If you’re interested in the history of the manosphere, Katherine Dee & Gio's Content Corner’s Newsletter did a very interesting interview with Ross Jeffries, one of the original predecessors to the PUA subculture that co-evolved with the manosphere in the late aughts/early 2010’s. I was struck by how far removed he is from the modern blackpill ideology that is arguably lineally descended (or perhaps more arguably has degenerated) out of various dating strategies influencers of his generation developed at the time.

• An evergreen podcast interview with Justin Murphy of Other Life, one of my favorite creative projects, on the New Write podcast with Dan Baltic & Mattp969.