0:00

We got to talk about Kate. I'll read it out. What?

0:04

The thing you wanted me to read out. What are

0:06

you talking about? The message that... Oh,

0:09

I forgot about that. I do want

0:11

to talk about that. But before we get into that,

0:13

which is this is this is

0:16

unique to true and on this is

0:18

real boots on the ground info. Incredible,

0:21

incredible info. But

0:23

I just want to mention real quick that

0:25

photo that was released of

0:27

the video the video of them walking. Yeah. Fuck

0:30

no. You don't think it's Kate? I will

0:32

say this. It could be her but it was taken

0:35

in late November or early December

0:37

because the Christmas villages are up at the

0:39

farm and there's tinsel everywhere. I looked at

0:41

that video and I was like all these people were

0:43

like, it's not her and then I thought for

0:46

those who don't know Tmz or somebody released

0:48

a video. Tmz released a video of Kate

0:51

Middleton, the missing Kate Middleton and

0:53

her husband, the king in waiting Prince

0:55

William walking. Excuse

0:58

me. I burped because I was so excited at the news

1:01

like a local farmstead a local

1:03

farmstead which very

1:06

English and

1:08

people are saying it's not Kate Middleton. Andy

1:11

Cohen said it was not her. Well, he's

1:13

all snizzed up. Which

1:16

by the way, when that came out, I was

1:18

like, yeah, no shit. That's why I love Andy.

1:20

It's Andy Cohen. You're more in this world than

1:22

I do. But for my brief interactions with Bravo land,

1:24

I like Andy Cohen. Yeah, he's great. He's amazing. He

1:26

should host all the awards. He should come. He

1:29

should host this. Yeah. Oh my God. He's

1:31

going on Truinone instead of Brace. Instead of

1:33

Brace and Liz. And then Brace goes on

1:35

Bravo. Yeah, he does the whole thing and

1:38

then we take watch what happens.

1:40

We'll switch over to Freaky Friday. Andy, let's

1:42

do a Freaky Friday. Let's do a Freaky Friday. So

1:45

you don't think that's Kate? I was looking at the video

1:48

of the so-called Kate Middleton walking down the

1:50

street and

1:53

I realized I actually have no ability

1:55

to tell if this is Kate Middleton

1:57

or not. Well, it's quite blurry. But

1:59

even... I mean giving about of I

2:01

really honest. I can't I've seen a million

2:03

pitcher Kate Middleton I did not describe or

2:05

for you. I can't It's just ah. but

2:08

you have face blindness. I don't have face

2:10

blindness when it has Royals when it comes

2:12

to white women. Ah, I'm I. I.

2:14

Can go either way on it being

2:17

her but I do believe that it

2:19

was an old results in all videos

2:21

and all that I really really believe

2:23

it's not. So we received a Dm

2:25

from Iraq and roller ah over there

2:27

in Spain England's this is I want

2:29

to be clear or was he tweets

2:31

there is a is a chain of

2:33

custody said this information that I won't

2:35

be because it would probably get in

2:37

trouble ah the church as he seems

2:40

legit but this is on verified information

2:42

that will.than uncritically it's gossip were repeating

2:44

uncritically. I heard about the Rose and

2:46

Will affair. Just. Over two

2:48

years ago. A. Couple of people who

2:50

I think would know these things have confirmed

2:52

to me to apparently he has slept around

2:54

before this occasionally over the years but the

2:56

Rosa Fair became very emotional and tense and

2:59

it was locate was pregnant with Louis Louis.

3:01

Oh he paused or as I am I

3:03

will be this So member we're talking about.

3:06

Where. it's rose rose snogging vs the

3:08

muchness have some layer that some

3:10

the of sad the one. Who

3:12

I stand by. Using she

3:14

striking is quite striking. Yeah, well.

3:17

says. Very pretty I've listed.

3:19

I'm not going to say I would say no,

3:21

but I. Will say but. So.

3:23

The Rumors. About. Her and well, As.

3:26

Are loads of sir troops on the

3:28

ground? Boots on the ground? Says

3:30

like those have been in the English.

3:33

Tablets and enjoy watching feel of said this for awhile.

3:35

They do is. Yes, that there's always

3:37

in this rumor, and that, yes,

3:39

it was particularly potent the rumor

3:41

when she was pregnant. A

3:44

rose like from Titanic. Or

3:47

my grandmother. Trying to draw meet draw

3:49

me like one of your public school

3:51

boys and ah, T

3:53

and will live most of their time

3:55

in Norfolk Norfolk nurses and are part

3:58

of the social I said. Your phone

4:00

call the turnip. Toss Yes, the turn Of Toss

4:02

A substitute. Earlier, ten rows and her

4:04

husband are in this quote set to

4:07

so the affair was apparently more to

4:09

fine for Tate as well as been

4:11

obviously emotionally horrific. It's because it was

4:13

just very no news amongst the circles

4:16

which is embarrassing Yes, other simple obviously

4:18

little Skyn lottery or you think that

4:20

she barks who rose? Yeah, There's

4:23

definitely. A yeah yeah melting. eventual

4:25

eat like a while. neither who's single

4:27

a white females are single but I

4:29

give you say it's eventual like a

4:31

year or so later the news pick

4:33

it up a little bit but mostly

4:35

not the main press because the relationship

4:37

they have with the palace etc. allegedly

4:39

will to have said last year or

4:41

two trying to rebuild their marriage after

4:43

the Rose affair. Admit nice to some

4:45

of the people involved arose affair sounds

4:47

like an angel of light and for

4:49

it as slider military like a religion

4:51

or issue? Yeah yeah well bunch of

4:53

like. Colonial British troops got with

4:55

buck a bodies fucking census state

4:57

has even been civil with Rose

4:59

and went to a festival on

5:01

Roses estate last year House and

5:03

will. seconds of everything is some

5:05

seen or spoken like Austin but

5:07

H O U G H T

5:09

O M while decide you have

5:11

club or yeah sex but. Does.

5:14

People particular ah in and parentheses It was

5:16

last summer when the papers can make it

5:18

a massive deal out of keep going to

5:20

a rave. That's when our they're reporting it

5:22

because it was a big deal that she

5:24

went to an event on Roses State as

5:27

to be fair run next fix A purely

5:29

all this was going well but again but

5:31

again. But in January when Kate and as

5:33

the abdominal surgery which Mit medically a so

5:35

beyond very good to be a million things

5:37

I heard from someone who was involved in

5:39

some of these things. From a legal perspective

5:41

that what has actually happened is after Christmas

5:43

in. The first week of January

5:46

will serve kate divorce papers

5:48

or have. Some

5:50

sort of. Very

5:52

dramatic Scientists.

6:00

That. Is. Crazy. Truly do.

6:02

They girls get hours though, right?

6:05

They. Did our son yeah for Hurt came

6:07

out of nowhere and also was immediately obvious

6:09

to her that had been playing for a

6:11

long time. Between Will in the Palace, he

6:13

was waiting for Christmas to be over. The

6:16

I don't know why that I guess the thing as

6:18

okay, wait. A minute positive and others

6:20

more to com rock with. Or maybe. I

6:23

don't know why they would do this now.

6:26

It unless they really think

6:28

that Charles's time on this.

6:30

Earth is is passing as is because

6:33

it has grown as road and all

6:35

the young nukes office says on it's

6:37

often have are unable to during colin

6:40

as they were able to was a

6:42

pad such as school and it's his

6:44

prostate raise oh fuck what's with girls

6:47

who got don't have a difference for

6:49

premium from you'd that's crazy isa figure

6:51

out you know their to deploy cancer

6:53

they're both in the ass off Cohen

6:56

is everyone has a colon only sell

6:58

as as a prosthetic so. The.

7:01

Fact that they want to get the divorce happen.

7:04

If this is true wanted to I would assume.

7:07

That they would want to do this now means

7:09

that. They. Are preparing for well

7:12

to take the crown. Much

7:14

earlier. Than. Perhaps

7:16

some royal watches would probably

7:18

leads. That's

7:21

what you milk milk a colon sissies

7:23

as smoking or hear me some milk

7:25

your mug by red and gold. Anyways,

7:28

I. Afterwards, Kate

7:30

obviously slipped and became completely uncooperative

7:33

with the Palace not responding or

7:35

speaking to any once. they had

7:37

to sing quickly about the public

7:39

engagements thing. And an excuse. And that's why

7:41

they said abdominal surgery. because it buys them plenty

7:43

of time. Okay, so the theory is that seeds

7:46

or this is the tab that says. No

7:48

surgery season high eggs because well

7:50

wants to divorce. or yeah, maybe

7:52

there was some that of abdominal

7:55

thing mud? Probably not. Ah, I'm.

7:58

Cheetahs, Now started. Because her main

8:01

concern is the kids, Well, that is

8:03

needed because or or I or as

8:05

who, She will practically have very little

8:07

control across the over. That's true, That's

8:09

true because that's also that's the line

8:11

of success it. Yeah, she's already been

8:13

refused on which school George can go

8:15

to, so she's distress with her mom.

8:17

Etc tried to plants. that's why she wants me

8:20

to media or hasn't been seen with the kids

8:22

etc. This makes sense to

8:24

me. Okay, So I will say

8:26

that I. Have

8:28

been nino totally deep diving all

8:30

this stuff. My twitter for you

8:33

page is a lot of royal

8:35

cards that I wince ah otherwise

8:37

not seats on and there is

8:39

like a couple report on from

8:42

for eyes reporters loosely to some

8:44

of them have like Queen Mary

8:46

of to Spill. I that's by

8:48

it's they were saying that all

8:50

the messaging coming out is clearly.

8:52

Coming from but like two different camps? Yeah.

8:55

That you've got like Wills Camp and like

8:57

the Of Houses camp and. And whatever is coming

8:59

from Kate's people? Because. I do think it's

9:01

important to note that after the

9:03

whole fiasco with the photo. The

9:06

polish like left her out to dry. Yeah

9:08

fuck. They. Were like a as the really.

9:10

Well with her all, yeah. As if she's

9:12

making a composite photo on focus on our I

9:14

found like it makes no sense. it's so nonsense

9:16

Gold yeah but they were immediately likes. ah actually

9:19

was her fault and they meet. You know that

9:21

her twitter account put that bizarre statement that was

9:23

as the like we have. A non

9:25

serious problem. Ah bad.

9:28

So. I think that like the fact

9:30

that the idea of not communicating seems

9:33

appear it in the messaging coming out.

9:35

publicizing, say. This.

9:38

Is the final page. And. This

9:40

is less suitable. The other bit of

9:42

gossip I've heard that isn't from a

9:44

reputable source of all of this is

9:47

really just gossip is Thomas who's the

9:49

acts of Kate, Sister Pippa, Moana Heu

9:51

Pippa was not said that. Yep, this

9:53

is a Sister Venus or a Funky

9:56

Trunks. Side. of things up funky

9:58

his without civil military news that Pippa

10:00

had a great ass and you got

10:02

your head all the way up it.

10:05

At the wedding she wore that I believe the

10:07

clean dress. Yeah, I missed that. I saw that.

10:11

But people remember I talked about

10:13

this when we went through the

10:15

timeline. Thomas, one

10:17

of their friends from the donut dolls, blew

10:21

his brains out. Thomas was having

10:23

an affair with Will. They had gone out

10:25

in their circles and that Thomas, who was

10:27

married but in love with Will, went home

10:29

to his parents' house, told him what was

10:31

going on, walked outside and shot himself in

10:34

the face with a shotgun. Popped his own

10:36

damn pimple. That's a bit of editorializing for

10:38

me. Will met Thomas years

10:40

ago when he was dating Pippa. That's

10:44

crazy. That's crazy. That's too much like the

10:46

movie. What was that movie that everyone loved

10:48

with the music? Oh, fuck.

10:51

The one with the TikTok

10:53

ass movie. Yeah. What about

10:55

the estate? No.

10:57

Salt Burn. That's a little too salt burn for me. That's

11:00

exactly the plot of Salt Burn. I

11:02

don't know. I think it is. Has anyone in this room

11:04

seen Salt Burn? He doesn't blow his

11:06

brains out at the end, but he falls in

11:08

love with someone and then it's like a whole manic

11:11

thing and it's extremely gay. How do you know

11:13

that? Because I know everything. I

11:17

don't know. He pops a bit of the old- That's

11:19

crazy because I didn't know. That's literally the part I

11:21

didn't know about the movie. The only thing I know

11:23

about the movie is- How do I know all the

11:25

other stuff about the movie except for that part? He

11:27

got the poo on me. That's

11:29

what he does except for the rhythm. What? You

11:32

know, he got the, I got the poo on me. From

11:35

fucking Joe Dirt. He got

11:37

the poo on me. I've never seen that.

11:39

Oh, he goes like that. Oh,

11:42

I got the poo on me. Welcome

11:46

to the shop. What

12:02

is it, gentlemen?

12:09

I do not have the poo on me. My name

12:11

is Bruce Belden. The

12:14

Toonip Toforself. Here we are.

12:16

Here's the Peppermint Punk. Young

12:19

Champs. He's the producer of this podcast, which is called...

12:22

Toonah! Hello. A

12:25

minor gonging. We have a guest today. Which

12:28

we didn't intro because we just started recording and

12:30

started talking. But we have

12:32

with us today Max Reed. From Substack,

12:35

I guess. The Max

12:37

Reed Show. You see this byline everywhere.

12:39

Where? New York Magazine? I don't make me do

12:41

this. I don't know. He writes for a bunch

12:43

of shit. He's probably written in something you've read.

12:46

But he's a classic, long-time journalist, covers technology

12:48

sector for many years. And

12:51

we both like his stuff. Liz is an avid

12:53

reader of Substack. I am a

12:55

significantly less avid reader. But Liz often recommends things

12:57

to me that I like. She recommended

13:00

this guy's Substack. And I paid to subscribe.

13:02

I like it. Yeah,

13:04

we're here. We're talking about everything. TikTok,

13:06

social media, Gen Z, Gen Alpha.

13:10

What else are we talking about? We talk a lot of

13:12

shit towards the end. But you know what? I'm not even

13:14

going to say it because I don't want to spoil it.

13:16

It's a very fun interview. Or conversation.

13:19

It's not an interview. It's a damn

13:21

conversation. And you know what? Let us

13:23

cue up the millennial pause, which is

13:25

when you're about to do something chuggy,

13:28

but you feel it's a little bit gay. The millennial

13:31

pause started now. I

13:44

was born in 85, strong memories. I worked at

13:46

a video store, things that don't exist anymore. Here?

13:50

No, in New Jersey where I grew up. And

13:52

it's strong memories of physical media and

13:55

having to draw maps on a piece of paper to know

13:57

where I was going when I first moved to New York

13:59

City or whatever. and my

14:01

brother's born in 89. He

14:06

probably has, he has the same, there's some

14:08

like this digital like, you know, understand. I

14:11

wasn't raised by computer, I was raised

14:13

by man. But

14:15

I didn't, I laid a doctor

14:17

to digital goods because I didn't, like

14:19

my family, we had one computer, but

14:22

I was only allowed on it for 30 minutes a day.

14:25

And so I've told the story of the show before, but

14:27

like I tried to play EverQuest and that didn't work and

14:29

that sort of ended my professional gaming career

14:31

because it would take so long to

14:33

boot up. But I didn't get a

14:35

smartphone until after high school. Like

14:38

I didn't like 19 or something. Oh, I mean, I

14:40

was in college when the iPhone came out. So

14:43

like I was, yeah. I had

14:45

dropped out of college by then,

14:47

but I was extremely online, tween

14:50

and teen. Like I

14:52

was super into AIM and

14:55

learning how to build websites. I taught myself

14:57

like all the computer coding

14:59

and I would like, so

15:02

I'm very like, I'd be like, I'm gonna

15:04

build a Dawson's Creek

15:06

geocities. Really? Like teach myself

15:08

how to, yeah. And like early fandom.

15:11

You do kind of, where we talk about our website

15:13

and stuff, you do have like ideas. I

15:16

fucking know how to build a website in 2002. But

15:21

I do know, you know, I know my way around the

15:23

old rinky dink of a computer. But

15:26

I was like, yeah.

15:28

And then extremely early adopter of

15:31

social media as well. MySpace

15:33

obviously, but Friendster before then.

15:35

And then I remember how big of a deal it was

15:39

when Facebook finally came to my

15:42

college campus because

15:44

it felt, I think everyone was

15:46

sort of like, no, they think we're like

15:48

a real college or something. You know? But

15:52

so I have like

15:54

always been, I feel like I've always been

15:56

like an extremely online person even though I

15:59

feel very proud. The to be not digitally native

16:01

and I feel like up the always had

16:03

like one foot in one for out. The

16:06

I have the exact same experience of waiting

16:08

for like and where I was in that

16:10

same college. Coaches were Pittsburgh came to campus

16:12

and there was a before facebook and and

16:14

after Facebook and it's time you the I

16:16

wish to do with some kind of thing

16:18

where I go before facebook like everybody was

16:20

like the handsome and having someone who's been

16:22

I don't really remember the difference. I mean

16:24

I remember anything about it except for the

16:26

back to pay for derived like operator it's

16:28

arms but you I when I talk to

16:30

like us I have a three year old

16:32

I know which is way too early to

16:34

even think. About this kind of thing. but I

16:37

notice how the time him he watches to we

16:39

let him watch two episodes of Bluey a day

16:41

or seven minutes or whatever. but. Like

16:43

a big thing I notice is how easy and

16:46

this is the most obvious. This is not an

16:48

original observation anybody's ever watched the kid young and

16:50

that is as as well during that in a

16:52

twenty tens or twenty twenties or players like Steam

16:54

knows how to use and I phone he knows

16:57

how to use and I pads he's like slowly

16:59

lot yeah I mean like he knows how to

17:01

click on Sept like week when in fact when

17:03

I give him my laptops he is trying that

17:05

he's finally move icons around the screen using his

17:08

fingers or whatever. Like there's a real he's gonna

17:10

have a facility with the stuff. A kind of

17:12

facility that is ah. I didn't certainly didn't

17:14

grow up and and is also slightly different facilities in

17:16

the when you're taking well as a reply you know

17:18

you have to like forces have to learn how to

17:21

do separate has is not immediately apparent to you and

17:23

and I you know I I I shudder to think

17:25

what the social networks going to be like when he

17:27

is of the age where he's getting on social networks

17:30

or whatever. But even now and sort of thinking about.

17:32

And also says assistant or it's has journalists

17:35

are yards detector unless I guess but we

17:37

need that. You know then that my. Family

17:40

be is. Seen

17:44

as an hour time out of paranoia

17:46

like this but I'm times when when

17:48

hi fi get back into my kids

17:50

are is something that might with you

17:52

can't let them use the phone like

17:54

it's. It's as he goes, he dies and

17:56

crazy. Though I see them at the park all the time

17:59

and I could tell you. The kid swipe. it's

18:01

so weird. I was a people I'd I

18:03

maybe it's because I don't see it that

18:05

often because I don't have a look at

18:07

anything in the park except for my seats

18:10

but I and the Beatles guy course but.

18:12

I look at I look at these kids. On

18:14

the phone it's a weird thing to see to

18:16

see a child swiping on of mon know, Tiny.

18:18

I know it's a. It's

18:21

a subversion. the last. Just as study that

18:24

came out least I don't know. I mean

18:26

who knows. Studies have Also, I

18:28

know somebody else you know, who

18:30

knows anything anywhere and it's an

18:32

easy thing about anything these days.

18:35

Amy, I'm. Exists and

18:37

insurers. And group chat. but it was like. A

18:39

bow it was a long term said

18:41

he about ah. Screen.

18:44

Time and it's effect. On language

18:46

development as which was more. Into

18:48

Exile the I hadn't seen this angle. Before

18:50

it as as in Oregon City but.

18:53

It was less about motor skills of mean I think there's

18:55

a lot of work that's been done on that and it

18:57

makes sense. You know you're not like than of. Your

18:59

utilize saying and learning how to you

19:01

know these you know to new motor

19:03

skills unlike a completely different thing than

19:06

like her freely like grabbing and hearing

19:08

things and you know your public a

19:10

pencil or were yeah totally I'm said

19:12

it would they attacked about was actually

19:15

both that what. The effect of screen

19:17

time for the kid but then

19:19

also the parents being on their

19:21

phone tag on developing language skills

19:23

and that with that kind of

19:25

decreases talking with your kid. it's

19:27

and your kids either you keep

19:29

talking are you didn't like having

19:31

conversations around your kids that they

19:33

say like significant. Decrease and how

19:35

many words heads were able

19:38

to kind of understand to

19:40

speak to Reno all these

19:42

things on which was. I

19:44

read that and I was just like it all. intuitively

19:47

makes sense, although I don't know the difference from that.

19:49

Like reading all the time of those assume that you know

19:51

I think the phones have a different a little bit of

19:53

in should you not really doing sitting there with a book.

19:55

Makes your kid in the same way that you

19:58

could possibly just grab your phone. automatically

20:00

grab your phone? I mean, I think one, like, you

20:03

know, my, uh, we should

20:05

just make this the true and unparenting

20:07

episode dispense parenting. Yeah. The,

20:10

um, like the thing that I feel like

20:12

I've realized most since having my son is

20:14

that how much of like

20:16

how much of who he is is already baked

20:18

in and how little like the things that I

20:21

tell him or try to teach him or try

20:23

to do like really matter to him. And it's,

20:25

I mean, to me right now, it seems very

20:27

clear that like the best hope I can have

20:30

to like having any influence on his development and

20:32

personality or whatever, it's just modeling behavior. Yeah. Um,

20:34

and I think that to me is like, I

20:36

catch myself all the time just staring at my

20:38

phone while he's in the room with me or

20:40

while we're out of park or whatever. And

20:45

uh, and I, the one way that a book or a

20:48

newspaper or whatever would be different than the phone is it's

20:50

like very clear what you're doing. Like you have a

20:52

book open, you're like looking, you're reading news articles. When

20:54

you have the phone, I could be looking at Tik TOK.

20:57

I could be texting with somebody, I could be doing

20:59

whatever. My attention is like fully wrapped on this little

21:01

black box. And you know, I've said

21:03

to say like, I'm sure what he gets from this

21:05

is both that both

21:08

of my attention is not fully on

21:10

him or like with him, but that

21:12

it's also like fully inside, like enraptured

21:14

by this particular little thing. I mean,

21:16

you know, like I always

21:18

try to be really wary about the sort of, um, the

21:22

idea that phones in particular that like

21:24

social media apps or whatever are specifically

21:26

or uniquely bad or that they don't

21:29

exist in a larger dynamic system or

21:31

whatever. But the, the, the sort

21:33

of, the thing that appeals to my priors about

21:35

the study you're talking about is that it's not

21:37

just about kids getting access to

21:39

an iPad and scrolling through whatever. It's

21:42

about how like the ubiquity of the

21:44

screens entirely across like their entire development

21:46

across their relationship with their parents, that

21:48

that, that, that, that, that

21:50

full kind of, um, uh,

21:53

to, to reuse the word that full ubiquity

21:55

is what, is what, is what really affects

21:57

and possibly retires their development. The

22:00

silicone Valley toxic as I was fucking talk

22:02

about. Is that like oh this is.

22:04

You've no idea how much the world

22:06

sees how much technology has changed and

22:08

it's obviously at a certain parts of I

22:10

think everybody who cooks and even a

22:12

little bit critically the some these people

22:14

is like you're fucking line like you're trying

22:17

to sell products but like they are

22:19

right in a sense like everything like

22:21

it. It's not just in the fact

22:23

like obviously it especially discreetly Motors products have

22:25

very little effect on society. the Amazons

22:27

of the six or whatever they my

22:29

it's but. Like in In, as in

22:31

some in Total and Like to

22:33

Be The The The way that

22:35

we interact now has changed so

22:37

drastically it's from not only twenty

22:39

years ago, but from the almost

22:41

the entirety of of of human

22:43

evolution is so. I

22:46

don't think that like we can even begin

22:48

to grass with is like they'd be very

22:50

effective this will have on people I think

22:52

we're beginning to see them. I think that

22:54

like that that the be v like horror

22:56

that we've unlocked is beginning to gonna see

22:58

bout of the box but life I i

23:01

i think it's gonna be on a things

23:03

are gonna hundred years were like ours are

23:05

cyber I go archaeologists are looking back city

23:07

of into this was a time of like

23:09

on told schizophrenia and and man suspicious I

23:11

mean. A Lot as he thought. you know a lot

23:13

of people have said this with i mean i think

23:16

isn't that person says. For forward sites kind

23:18

as you know that the advent of

23:20

the printing friends and you know and

23:22

what that did zoo in this You

23:25

know when I'm one of the sixteenth

23:27

century? Whatever. Ah. You.

23:29

Know way it was was. Insane.

23:32

And I was reading advice through cycles.

23:34

Some. One specific book that

23:36

is Ice should. Have. An in front

23:38

of me the name of In and and Downs

23:40

but that's I kind of that that Canonical read

23:43

online and what that experience was like in like

23:45

Mass Communications yeah that's an altered things and it

23:47

was any because I was reading. as ring

23:49

section of it's a while ago

23:52

and and the writers were saying

23:54

that one thing that just flooded

23:56

the market was on how to

23:59

but yeah Immediately, which is just so

24:01

funny to think that it makes sense, right? It was like how

24:03

to use leeches How

24:07

to make music like how to play that instrument

24:09

or how to clean your house or whatever and

24:11

it's funny because I was thinking about That in

24:13

relation to tiktok and another ship we're gonna eventually

24:15

talk about today Because there's

24:17

so much content on

24:19

social media. That is very much like You

24:24

know to your point about it not being super unique

24:26

or being in this kind of long You

24:28

know arc of history or whatever socially situated

24:30

like so much content that I

24:32

think we're really enraptured by has to do

24:34

with our interest in how people

24:37

live their lives and are you

24:40

know either desire or you know conflicted

24:43

desire I guess and wanting to like Share

24:46

or mimic or learn from how

24:48

other people live their lives and you see

24:50

it in those books that are like Oh, you know

24:52

the printing press comes out in me. It's like how

24:54

to do this How did you like literally like

24:57

self-help books? Yeah,

25:01

totally totally well This is like I

25:03

mean if you go like how many

25:05

viral like Twitter threads or like reddit

25:07

things are People essentially asking

25:09

if something is normal or like worse

25:11

being like this behavior that fully half

25:13

the population does is absolutely not normal

25:15

Yeah, and I will hear no arguments

25:17

that it is It's just like sort

25:20

of the the even less useful Version

25:23

of what you're saying where it's like a peek into

25:25

other people's lives or world. It's

25:27

like so compelling I mean when you

25:29

think about like I mean I

25:31

think about this As

25:33

a journalist, you know as a newsletter writer

25:36

say like being able to talk about your

25:38

own personal life is actually an insane growth

25:41

hack to use an awful phrase that like if you

25:43

talk about what you're who you are and what you're

25:45

up to and you Talk about your family and like

25:47

you make your kids characters in your in your story

25:50

You can develop audience much more quickly than if you're just sort of

25:52

trying to write Because

25:54

you can develop that like sort of bond with people.

25:57

Yeah, exactly and I think that like The

26:00

other thing I would say is that the I'm. At.

26:02

You know, as were like sort of

26:04

historically situating everything we're talking about. I

26:06

think one question because I I I

26:08

i fully by the kind of idea

26:10

that we're living through a revolution amassed

26:12

communication on order of the introductions. The

26:14

printing press is like where we? where

26:16

do you want to date the current

26:18

revolution? Were talking about rights as like

26:20

are we part of a continuation that

26:23

goes back to the radio is my

26:25

eyes. Is this like T V but

26:27

expanded is it is the internet specifically?

26:29

Difference in Tv I don't like, I

26:31

don't have a I'll. Have an answer and

26:33

I would a lot of their because I

26:35

obviously I wasn't around from the beginning of

26:37

this T V Some I have read a

26:39

lot of books on the period and it

26:41

does seem to be like a lot of

26:43

a lot of the these things and I

26:45

think in my own little miserable brain about

26:47

people who use the internet too much are

26:49

echoed in like so the critiques of T

26:52

V Watchers from back then. you know you

26:54

glued to this thing for like eight hours.

26:56

It's it's a way to not saying it's

26:58

a way to like, Ah, you know, get

27:00

get this. Kind of like steer you boot.

27:02

Maybe. You believe your you to be entertained

27:04

or been. I've been enriched, sin and knowledge

27:06

or whatever. But really you come out of

27:08

it like in it's empty. you know god

27:10

of it anymore if there's no nutrients in

27:12

it's sort of empty. Calories are I would

27:14

say that there's like a as overlap. It's

27:16

like it's like a way that kind of

27:18

like liza you know the dark at as

27:20

well to as on the beach and another

27:22

one cat of overtakes that and I think

27:24

that's what we're in now be as I

27:26

don't even think that like the has at

27:28

least that was was. Different. In

27:31

even some of the logistical terms of like you

27:33

know he was at home but you also want

27:35

to participate in the Us and now is like

27:37

we're all participants in it and now that is

27:39

loud against goods that I think that's the difference.

27:42

I mean I think loss and there's sort of.

27:46

Two things right? I think that there's

27:48

something about the interactivity. And. The

27:50

social aspect not just in social media that

27:52

that the axial tilt and social aspect. that's

27:54

a different france tacitly watching the tv

27:57

or gas or like even the social

27:59

aspect of the cinema, right? That's

28:02

very different than the quality. Like you

28:04

go into a social media app, like

28:06

alone on your phone, going into a

28:08

box, and through, I think,

28:10

a kind of intensification of emotions,

28:12

I mean specifically literally designed to

28:14

produce that, you leave with

28:17

like an approximation of a social

28:19

experience, which I think is very

28:21

disorienting and disgusting feeling, I'm with

28:23

you on that. But that feels

28:25

qualitatively different to me,

28:27

not just quantitatively, I guess. I absolutely do.

28:29

But I think that also to, when

28:32

I was saying there's two things, I think that

28:34

actually goes hand in hand with another huge development,

28:37

which is related with the supercomputer, which

28:40

is the fact that, no, that

28:42

just increased stratification of everything. And

28:44

the ability, like live,

28:46

I mean, this is very like Baudrillard, whatever,

28:48

but the fact that

28:51

we live in increasingly optimized statistical

28:54

world, and AI is gonna

28:56

make that even more so in very weird

28:58

ways that I think we

29:00

should talk about, but like the, to use

29:02

your word, ubiquity of statistics around

29:05

us, and everyone's kind of, I think,

29:09

reliance on statistical data

29:11

as the only, or insistence

29:13

as that's the only way in which

29:15

to understand, make

29:18

decisions about and analyze the

29:20

world, goes hand in,

29:22

is also creating a very, very

29:25

new experience for how we kind of relate

29:27

to each other, how we understand what's going

29:29

on in the world. Yeah, I mean, I

29:31

think the like

29:33

joke about doing tech criticism is

29:35

that you lean on words like

29:37

accelerate, heighten, because you

29:40

know, a lot of the processes you're describing

29:42

are similar to, or

29:45

even identical to earlier ones, but like they

29:49

compound, they accelerate, they heighten, I think in

29:51

part because of this sort of data vacation

29:54

of everything, where you suddenly have, you

29:56

have this really far-seeing access To

29:58

a lot of numbers. The lot

30:00

of information about how the such you

30:02

create is consumed, about how the the

30:04

dub the places that consumption is happening

30:06

are structured and you know I think

30:08

like again speaking as a journalist and

30:11

and i don't have as like every

30:13

pocket while every service and seeing as

30:15

a journalist that am. Metrics:

30:17

Like getting access to Metric Tons. What

30:19

people read how they read at how far

30:21

they read it is like an unbelievably black

30:24

pilling experience. Yeah, like to realize that like

30:26

and we'll kind of know the I had

30:28

it's all Com Outs and I are

30:30

both. Sort of thought that podcasts are like

30:33

one of the last slightly safe world's because

30:35

you have to slightly less access to like.

30:37

Well what is. We. Actually, we

30:39

have the metrics and it turns out.

30:42

That. People generally only listen to about an hour

30:44

of an episode. Eleven episode is like an

30:46

hour and a half. Two hours longer to

30:48

so we try to mix them in our

30:50

yeah because when I go this is a

30:52

beds only rabbits. Sometimes

30:54

just like fuck you I'm gonna go for three.

30:57

Hours just want my job is talking

30:59

has sorry this I'm at work its

31:01

way and are you know I just

31:03

I see this in like Hollywood to

31:05

lead the advent of streaming has allowed

31:07

people to have like a d backs

31:09

as to how much of a given

31:11

movie people are watching and were kinds

31:13

of posters and all these things exactly

31:16

the same stuff that's been happening journalism's

31:18

and as a you see the same

31:20

kind of like deep cynicism taking over

31:22

creative decisions in those industries at the

31:24

enormous exhibit. that like one thing that

31:26

you could. Say about both of these

31:28

about the sort of them that data

31:31

fixation on a kind of the way

31:33

metrics creates be no new structures for

31:35

like Creative Productions is. And this release

31:38

over talking about before about the distinction

31:40

are differences between the moment we're in

31:42

right now and say the moment like

31:44

when T was first in bed, yet

31:47

when. When cable television

31:49

first came out his arms, there's

31:51

like so much less state interest

31:54

in regulating that in likes. Even

31:56

just in like the most liberal

31:58

forms of like consume. Protection yeah,

32:00

we're like or whatever else you wanna

32:02

call let alone in like you know,

32:04

state, alternative state funding. Like all the

32:07

things that you might have expected to

32:09

see in the twenties or thirties, or

32:11

even in the like fifties and sixties,

32:13

there's like no Pbs equivalent. There's no

32:15

is none of us like public option

32:17

of social thing with I'm a number

32:19

three on. Reddit

32:23

exactly. And so so like the other reason

32:25

bit worried you, we use words like accelerates

32:27

and I do. I do that. We keep

32:29

talking about how it's getting worse and worse.

32:31

and worse. Is this like the ball. Political

32:33

economy around communications technology is different. It's not

32:35

just have the technology has changed, but like

32:37

that appetite for restricting or regulating or for

32:39

yeah, how to do that? technology is essentially

32:41

gone. And and what's worse is that the

32:44

lights, the political economy like or it's or

32:46

the the coalition's you might assemble to try

32:48

and stop it like you're also going up

32:50

against. And again, this is something I'm sure

32:52

rules will come. Up a lot when we

32:54

talk about this is the National Security state which

32:56

is so excited by the date of occasion us

32:58

everything, some even sort of even even when it

33:00

has no use the fact that they can track

33:03

and and watch and pure into all this stuff.

33:05

Which means that if you want to like if

33:07

you wanna see if the way things are made

33:09

online if you want to shift that. The

33:12

kinds of the the weights of house

33:14

of his distributed or read or consumed

33:16

if you want us change the way

33:18

the internet works like you're not just

33:20

sort of fighting against a bunch of

33:22

multi billion dollar international conglomerate becomes it's

33:24

own grant which is frankly I also

33:27

the Pentagon and the and a say

33:29

it's Initial air and be like will

33:31

hold on all Sweden We actually do

33:33

need to know how many syntax place

33:35

was because he's unlike six different you

33:37

know in the delphine exactly I say

33:39

we had nice diabetes association. Was interesting to

33:41

me as I guess I agree with that completely and

33:43

I think that it's. An ounce.

33:45

There's no fair fight and it's an

33:47

uphill battle on some name of France.

33:49

But then you also have a very

33:52

light. You know,

33:54

passionate and said American middle

33:56

class? that fucking arses sat

33:58

down and that. Popular people

34:00

love it. like when so would suck about

34:02

to talk like you know it came out

34:05

and you'd written about this I think last

34:07

week ah about the possible impending ban of

34:09

to thought was. Fees they aren't is rush

34:11

through a motherfucker bill. Ah, splits that in

34:14

quotation marks and will get it with. That

34:16

actually means or maybe means. And as

34:18

I guess that like a media

34:20

leave you had like to. Talk

34:22

superstars or whatever are coming out

34:24

being like. I can't believe you

34:27

know Congress did like this. My life has

34:29

been like spell because they are hardware that

34:31

that those are the faces of hard. Working

34:33

Americans will disown are now

34:35

people systems and. You know all of

34:37

these and we're talking about this. Book before.

34:39

We start recording. You know part

34:41

of the problem with social media

34:44

and were all in here, were

34:46

you know recipients? Of this is

34:48

that it has opened up all

34:50

of these new pathways to American

34:52

Main Street where you can set

34:54

up a small business up and

34:56

say you have a very sick.

34:58

Very. Like meat. Because.

35:01

Of the nature of the business,

35:03

extremely media ties, extremely opinionated and

35:05

extremely active American middle class that

35:08

has economic interest in keeping this

35:10

it opened. An unregulated. Yeah of

35:12

a version of this fight is is is

35:14

a dynamic I've been talking about a lots

35:16

of i'm in the Wg a Widow screenwriters

35:18

yes yeah we went on strike last year

35:20

and and like one of the that are

35:22

a number different issues and estrogen and one

35:25

of them as compensation have gone down because

35:27

for among other reasons because the length of

35:29

like job assignments had to shortened since release

35:31

and it a. Part.

35:33

Of part of what had gone over the last

35:35

ten years, the industry is because of the advent

35:37

of streaming, because of and because of a lot

35:39

of sort of V C and other kinds of

35:41

money getting flowing into the space. More and more

35:44

shows were getting made, which method more and more

35:46

people were getting jobs and the union was in

35:48

a difficult position. That's not at all the sort

35:50

of unfamiliar I don't think in the history of

35:52

labor action were essentially and I'm I'm speaking just

35:54

as a member, not like on behalf of the

35:57

Of Easy as it would not characterize the same

35:59

works. Going to be less work

36:01

for writers have to the strike like there

36:03

is going to be left to go around

36:05

And part of the point of the union

36:07

and of the labour action is to set

36:10

laws to enforce. Like more

36:12

sort of works filling that the more

36:14

work like at like two two sides

36:16

descent laws to enforce and actual market

36:18

for labour that allows workers to be

36:20

compensated rights and like social media does

36:22

this act like an absolutely unbelievable scam.

36:24

and this is one of the many

36:27

things that has happened in journalism over

36:29

the last twenty years is all of

36:31

a sudden it's like the the written

36:33

word is. Incredibly. Easy

36:35

to find for almost no money at all. and

36:37

so so how is and ends and eat. Some

36:39

people are actually able to now get paid like

36:42

I am just directly by readers or whatever else

36:44

and so like sizes we've been a little bit

36:46

of attention. I've gone a little bit of a

36:48

ten mile loop with like this it's this, is

36:50

this is it. Thanks. Dad. The

36:53

marketplaces here have inserted themselves in such a

36:55

way that not only a be destroyed the

36:57

marketplaces the came before them but they found

36:59

New Blood Coalition's a small business. Owners like

37:01

myself as a member of the papers has

37:03

the I would not. I would despise that

37:05

if you took away all the avenues for

37:07

me to peddle my where's mom and it

37:09

would be would be hard to go even

37:11

even though I would prefer to live in

37:13

Nineteen Ninety Seven when you could get paid

37:15

five dollars. A word to profile Clinton Chino

37:17

for a magazine the no longer exists like

37:19

a Who A Since we're not going back

37:21

I don't. Know you know it's very hard to.

37:24

Think about the kind of regulatory apparatus that

37:26

would you know you met you mentioned earlier

37:28

see the kind of coalitions that former around

37:30

the stuff and in particular the Tic Toc

37:32

bands And me whenever is that the Tic

37:35

Toc ban has been here since. Like what?

37:37

Twenty Nineteen Twenty and from. Ask.

37:39

For spray an executive order is gonna

37:41

ban success or economic force them to

37:43

sell to an American owner Dan Means

37:46

which. For his name is, that doesn't mean actually

37:48

getting rid of the app. it means forcing

37:50

to sell dusty been outta yeah right dance

37:52

or whatever the fuck is call would now

37:54

be on by and in the final my

37:56

hands would sell to talk to like at

37:59

a over with would break off TikTok from

38:01

its company and sell it to an American. But,

38:04

and I guess probably retain some kind of shares?

38:06

Who knows, I don't know how it's supposed to

38:08

work. But the coalitions that spring up around this

38:10

stuff, because something that I

38:12

always get frustrated with when

38:15

hearing people talk about social media is, I

38:18

have a complicated relationship to social media because

38:20

social media is part of the reason that

38:23

we have this big part of the reason,

38:25

real reason it's a podcast. But you know, it's

38:27

helped this podcast grow big. It's

38:30

done wonders for their career or whatever. But

38:32

I barely, barely use it anymore. And

38:36

because it makes me feel strange. And

38:38

so when I see people's

38:40

reactions like the TikTok fan, I

38:42

see it come from like, I

38:44

understand the reaction like, listen, part

38:47

of this is at least in

38:49

part motivated by the

38:51

Israel Palestine, like very nakedly

38:53

motivated by a perceived

38:55

or maybe real, who knows, bias

38:58

towards Palestine in the TikTok

39:01

realm or whatever. And

39:03

so you see people sort of defend it from that

39:05

aspect. Totally understand, that makes sense to me. But then

39:07

you see people be like, it's actually like a way

39:09

for us to like get real information. And

39:12

like, it becomes this like liberatory vessel

39:15

for people. And you know, I say this

39:17

to somebody who makes a podcast

39:19

that is, well, it comes out on something,

39:21

you know, Patreon or whatever, SoundCloud, whatever. It's

39:23

a little different than TikTok. But

39:26

like, that's not where your liberation is

39:29

gonna come from. Like that's, what you're

39:31

doing is you're defending media consumption, which

39:33

is fair to do on those terms.

39:36

But like to gussy it up in

39:38

this sort of like to revolutionary language,

39:40

I think is flatly ridiculous.

39:42

And so I have this thing where

39:44

like, I genuinely want TikTok to be

39:46

banned. I want Instagram to be banned.

39:48

I want Twitter to be banned. I

39:50

want all social media sites to be

39:52

banned. Doesn't matter. You only. The

40:00

by things on a of a sudden

40:02

confining just window shopping years idea is

40:04

no biological over this is like some

40:06

says is a sort of interest that

40:08

sort of have a source of a

40:10

i sit ins ins as a system

40:12

where you're from britain from first puts

40:14

ideas in all. The sun place constantly

40:16

and her to drive civil way from the

40:19

say. Say

40:24

this. I say this with no

40:26

exaggeration. If. I had a choice if

40:28

I could. Die Today in every sense

40:31

of media. Would

40:33

no longer exists. It would never exist

40:35

in the future. In a heartbeat, I

40:37

would take that deal that is a

40:39

martyr complex. Like that

40:41

he died died to make us will. Now

40:44

where the what I like figure Professor Media

40:46

I buy you a brain. Size

40:48

would be library like think. Of

40:51

as but but but it's weird because I

40:53

want to talk to bit I've I've been

40:55

open about this for many years on yourself

40:58

any my private life I think it's as

41:00

a it's a not uniquely. On folks

41:02

but I think it's it's

41:04

it's harmful in new ways.

41:06

Ah and. I. Think that

41:08

I as as. Woods and Saga have

41:10

a but I also can't like posts on

41:12

this bill because this bill is on our

41:15

why haven't read it because and only as

41:17

a passing sentence that so once have given

41:19

the size of your. Arms

41:21

maybe? well, but I was like Schumer doesn't even

41:24

want a brain tumor. seems to neighbor want to

41:26

bring it. To. Not without doesn't

41:28

want to deal with that. Yeah yeah and

41:30

when summers like I don't want to appear

41:32

china them of maybe via it's not worth

41:34

it When I'm honestly I keep reading is

41:36

it like it's not it's it would get

41:38

showers and first amendment grounds, our security and

41:41

woods and woodyard over so it's worth And

41:43

it's funny to take these these the from

41:45

what I have read his they want to

41:47

be essentially want to sell it because for

41:49

two reasons. One is the Chinese who. i

41:52

she'd seen say that xyz communist party

41:54

owned by dance what it is not

41:56

true love doing offended as i do

41:58

so that like that Communist Party of

42:02

China has party cells in most major

42:04

businesses, which is not a secret. It

42:06

is just the way it functions there.

42:09

Fantastic. They have been like investment banks

42:11

and shit like it's, it's pretty normal.

42:15

But that TikTok would potentially

42:17

be giving data to the

42:19

Chinese government. And

42:21

TikTok has said and there's no indication this has

42:23

ever happened before. I'm sure it has. But like,

42:25

there's no indication this has ever happened. And I

42:27

don't follow it. Don't be clear. I don't care

42:30

that it has. I do think there

42:32

are some TikTok employees who've said that

42:34

they found not US data, but that

42:36

the CCP got Hong Kong

42:38

protester data from TikTok, which sounds plausible. I

42:40

mean, I have I this is one of

42:42

those things you read it and you know

42:44

that everybody quoted in the article is like,

42:47

you know, has, has at least two handlers

42:49

from three different. Exactly. But it's like, pause.

42:51

I mean, let's why not? I'm not like,

42:54

here's the thing. If I was China, I

42:56

would do that. So I don't

42:58

know what country would it like, exactly. We

43:00

have somebody was pointing out Spencer Ackman was actually

43:02

just pointing out that just

43:05

like just in December, they the Republican

43:07

head of the House Intelligence Committee was

43:09

trying to get Section 702, which is

43:11

like the FISA act that lets the

43:14

FBI dip into all of the NSA

43:16

is goodies was like, we

43:18

got it. We got it, you know, we got it for, for you.

43:21

And he was like, arguing, he was like, well, we got

43:23

to get in and look at all these pro Palestine protesters

43:25

and like, we got to let the feds get in there

43:27

and like, check all that stuff out. So we got to,

43:29

we have to re up this. And it's like, well, that's essentially

43:32

identical. I mean, it's like, it's functionally no different

43:34

than whatever we're accusing the CCP of doing. No,

43:36

absolutely. I mean, I think that's one of those

43:39

things that like people even like to tick because

43:41

I went on TikTok to look at some of

43:43

the sort of like defenses of TikTok that TikTok

43:45

creators themselves are putting out there. And a lot

43:47

of it was from a

43:50

pretty understandable position of like, listen, we

43:52

all know all social media platforms, take

43:54

all of our information and give it

43:56

to whatever government like, well, how does

43:58

that change the status quo? Now I'm like.

44:00

It's. A while that is kind of

44:03

a not a nihilistic viewpoint. I mean it's a

44:05

real viewpoint. A real is I grew his religion.

44:07

I mean it's kind of my v plants for

44:09

you have like a straightforwardly as an American like

44:12

I've been to protest since I've been to propel

44:14

separatists in the city have been Serbian or whatever

44:16

it's like I'm the Ccp doesn't give a shit

44:18

about me bit less presumably if an essay it

44:21

and wanted to make my life really city for

44:23

a few years. They absolutely to do that and

44:25

house Just like from a purely cynical point of

44:27

view, I actually care way less if it's easy

44:30

be owns my social media. I want. The

44:32

see I mean if we're goods and

44:34

listen for her to move or three

44:36

obviously as autonoma. Third side effects on

44:38

stepping away. but am I guess I

44:40

think this is my Instagram but but.

44:43

It is it is. It's this. Is

44:45

sort of the defensive sound pretty were

44:47

like i don't care of China has

44:49

my data because you already have the

44:51

rest of my data And it's funny

44:54

because I think that there's a there's

44:56

also a big Aids divide. Rights to

44:58

talk while it's use by having it's

45:00

like a hundred and something million Americans

45:02

so obviously all ages but it is

45:04

extremely popular Answer: The aim towards younger

45:06

people and younger people as we all

45:08

know have as is a dub. the

45:10

big divide in Israel Palestine is is

45:12

mostly Aids. ah I'm ads and it's.

45:14

Is funny because there's been this sort of like. Paranoid

45:18

spirit has erupted with like eighty yell

45:20

at all these different politicians. no idea

45:22

how this this this is us we're

45:24

losing the use and like blaming. Tic

45:26

Toc which in reality like Tic Toc.

45:28

Is often either showing them. Somebody

45:31

some lecturing them are in from their

45:34

college or like pictures of dead children

45:36

and so it's like you can't like.

45:38

That. The college thing. whatever you don't really

45:41

need that. I think the thing that

45:43

people are most affected by this on

45:45

also media platforms are like the very

45:47

horrible images that come out of Gaza.

45:49

Of of dead children are family on

45:51

my mother's weeping with in front of

45:53

a dead silent all these are in

45:55

or out Israeli soldiers era for. A

45:58

parade Or andres? Yeah, yeah. The

46:00

great honor the large array of of

46:02

fucking role that tic toc our them

46:04

does promote dances more often. Maybe that's

46:06

actually really many love to do what

46:08

they will dancing. With you know years.

46:11

it's just like politically expedient. riots. I

46:13

two birds, one stone. It's like okay

46:15

if this house like. You

46:17

know, That are, you know, tamp

46:19

down a little bit like the use, perhaps?

46:21

movement? That's. Not didn't

46:23

Palestinian support by storm. Whenever the

46:25

I can. You know all these. And

46:27

in D C thank in West and

46:29

disease. Ah plus you get to do

46:31

a little bit of a like oh

46:34

the East as mind so exotic and

46:36

we don't We need to make sure

46:38

that we can understand. You know, like

46:40

this is there any sense as the

46:42

Op Ed in New York Times about

46:44

there's that was the most like nakedly

46:46

orientalist length as I bread and quite

46:48

a long time. but A to be

46:50

fair, don't keep up with a lot

46:52

of the China Hawk crap because it's

46:54

so this is. this is not my

46:56

bag. Bonuses as a that they they had

46:58

a good time with a weaker suffer a

47:00

couple years for the Pentagon Iraqi. We'll dig,

47:03

dig and dig dig him back in the

47:05

old supply or has we the readers of

47:07

now because then you're just you beard. you're

47:09

like with this abuse and at at at

47:11

a cleansing of muslims is one of the

47:13

worst in me as he insisted on or

47:16

anything else to say we are so sad.

47:18

Yeah totally not a real bird bird. The

47:20

Op Ed we're talking about his by David

47:22

Sanger He's one of the times as dumb

47:24

as slides National Security correspondence and. The. Whole

47:27

thing. He likes his whole thing as

47:29

this idea that there's some secret access

47:31

that these surveys engineers that these lights

47:33

devious Chinese engineers have like access be

47:35

American mind or whatever that like that

47:37

at. you know, obviously that plays in

47:39

D C. I suppose like people or

47:41

people are into racists, it didn't He

47:43

didn't Actually, when will they? I mean

47:45

a bit. This is an example of

47:48

something. Has got

47:50

seven. Baker's is a computer science historian and

47:52

really heard follow on Twitter and I but

47:54

he's got a newsletter in a patron he

47:56

calls it sigh our brain which is is

47:59

just as like. Everybody in

48:01

that particular echelon of elite national

48:03

security, politics, media, has come to

48:06

believe since 2015 that

48:08

anything they encounter online that

48:11

isn't what they agree

48:13

with is the product of a

48:15

foreign intelligence operation, that there is

48:17

some kind of something going on.

48:20

And so when you encounter mass

48:23

pro-Palestine demonstrations at a scale that hasn't

48:25

existed before, it's got to be the

48:28

Chinese or the Russians, never mind the

48:30

Russia and Israel, or essentially it's got

48:32

to be somebody in there is doing

48:35

something. Yeah, you see that on a

48:37

minute level, though, too. You see that

48:39

on the not even talking about

48:42

geopolitical shit. You see that

48:44

with the increase in people's paranoia.

48:46

And anything that I see

48:48

online that doesn't reaffirm

48:51

my priors is there's

48:53

an outside force that's bringing this in. And

48:56

it kind of like, I don't know, I

48:58

think that you see that as more ubiquitous

49:00

as we in this room like to

49:02

say than just

49:04

having to do with kind of. I

49:07

will say I think something structural about

49:09

social media, especially the kind of social

49:11

media we have that's advertising-based that tends

49:13

to be pretty heavily

49:15

professionalized, is you train

49:18

yourself without really thinking to

49:20

treat everything like a gambit

49:22

for your attention, which means

49:24

that your sincerity is

49:26

like you are suspicious that everything is insincere.

49:28

I mean, I'm like fully, I don't

49:31

have psy-out brain, but I have like bait brain.

49:33

I just assume anything I see on Twitter that

49:35

makes me angry or a TikTok video

49:37

that I don't understand, if somebody is intentionally

49:40

baiting me to make me mad or to

49:42

have a reaction so that I click on

49:44

it or save it or whatever, which is

49:47

like, I think that I think

49:49

it happens more often than you think, but I don't think it's

49:51

true that every single thing I encounter is bait. I

49:53

interviewed this kid who

49:56

goes by the name Hoopify on TikTok. He

49:58

was like briefly viral last night. for doing

50:00

these insane videos about, I'm just gonna say

50:02

some words that are not in the Bible,

50:05

about Baby Gronk and whether or not he

50:07

rizzed up Libby Dunn, some of you guys

50:09

might remember this, some of the heads might

50:11

remember this. On his visit to LSU, Libby

50:13

rizzed him up. Libby even hugged Baby Gronk.

50:15

What might be the new Riz king? And

50:18

Hoopify is like this 20 year

50:20

old lacrosse player from UMass Lowell,

50:22

not even one of the good

50:25

UMasses. And he's like a fine

50:27

bro-y kid, but

50:31

the way he talked about what he does was

50:33

so, he had that

50:35

particular Gen Z, Gen Alpha, total,

50:38

it's almost like an earnest cynicism, just this

50:40

unbelievable kind of nihilism about what he does.

50:42

I know exactly what you're talking about. He

50:45

doesn't see, he's not embarrassed by it, he's not shamed

50:47

by it, he's like, well yeah, people noticed that I

50:49

wasn't blinking and they thought it was really weird, so

50:51

I just stopped blinking in all of my videos. And

50:53

I was like, that's really fucking weird, man. That

50:56

whole thing is weird. And he talked about, he's like, I think my

50:59

audience is mostly sixth graders, so I

51:01

mostly do what I think sixth graders will

51:03

like, and I don't really believe any of

51:05

it, but it's satire. They all have this

51:07

definition of satire that's, it

51:09

doesn't mean satire, it doesn't mean sort

51:11

of arch humor about a particular target, it just

51:14

means I'm saying something that I don't actually believe

51:16

to get around. And this, having

51:18

talked to that kid, it's

51:21

now every time I see a 20 year old do

51:24

something on social media, his

51:26

voice is ringing in the back of my

51:28

head, I'm thinking, is this something you're doing?

51:30

So it's like, in some sense, I can

51:32

be sympathetic to somebody who's just fully, who's

51:37

never encountered anything but Hasbro, and

51:39

Zionists propaganda their entire lives, and

51:42

encounters a articulate Palestinian protest, and

51:44

suddenly it assumes that it's bait,

51:47

it's a psyop bait in some sense. But

51:50

if you're a politician, if your point is to to

51:55

read the tea leaves, so to speak, and to like democratically

51:58

represent your people, like. a really

52:00

bad way to govern because all of a sudden

52:02

you are way out on a limb assuming that

52:04

everything that everybody is disagreeing with you about is

52:06

the result of China owning TikTok

52:09

and has nothing to do with

52:11

actual material conditions. We

52:13

could trace this back much,

52:15

much further with the Zenovia letter. There's actually

52:21

this secret plot by the Communists to infiltrate everything.

52:23

James James Angleton almost died of the psi opera.

52:29

He was literally sick

52:31

with it. Not paranoid enough

52:33

apparently. We can trace this

52:35

much shorter

52:40

timeline if you want to back to

52:42

the Clinton-Bernie shit. I think it's

52:44

funny because Russiagate

52:47

had such a vanishingly non-existent,

52:50

so I guess that's kind of redundant, but it

52:52

had a non-existent effect on anybody I knew in

52:54

real life. I obviously know some people who are

52:56

very invested in politics, but I also know a

52:58

lot of people who do not pay attention to

53:01

politics or the news at all. Not one

53:03

of them was like, this was an issue for

53:05

them. I know most of the people obviously I

53:07

know I guess would not be

53:09

sympathetic to the Russiagate stuff, but even people

53:12

like Libdars or whatever I know

53:14

who might be on some level

53:16

or just ambiantly from watching CNN,

53:19

nobody thought about it in a

53:21

real way, but people in DC really did.

53:23

Whether they thought about it cynically or the

53:25

psi-out brain, obviously a lot of it was

53:29

just used as a cudgel on the

53:31

left or whoever they disagreed with. It's

53:36

so neatly transformed from Russian

53:38

interference to now it's this

53:41

great specter of Chinese interference

53:43

and how they

53:46

are able to. I think on one

53:48

part it recognizes how potent these platforms

53:50

would be in the hands of

53:52

somebody who is really adept at using them, but

53:54

I don't think, while I do

53:56

think on some level obviously I do know

53:59

they're all manipulated. Them I will. I.

54:01

Don't know. This is coordinated as people says

54:03

it. Will I be

54:05

one thing about the Russia Good Step three Two

54:07

things I'll say one is the funniest thing about

54:09

the rest against up to me as the idea

54:11

that like you would need. A Russian

54:14

Intelligence operations like so division like Americans

54:16

are so good at just talking sits,

54:18

saying whatever comes into their mind, yelling

54:20

at people, inventing things that you don't

54:22

and we'll need Russians do that. We've

54:24

been doing that for yeah two hundred

54:26

plus years as is how we. This

54:28

is how we roll. Maybe like conspiracies.

54:30

this would be to forever sweet civil

54:32

war before they mean come on and

54:34

yet not relish and send her apartment

54:36

with a problem of his apple our

54:39

legal system. Find a sentences arrival of

54:41

America relish and not a real revolution.

54:43

Yeah. But at the As A

54:45

is the and and Mrs you know something

54:47

that I think is really interesting with a

54:49

tick tock stuff is even if you take

54:52

for granted the idea that received a with

54:54

like a super effective operation that it like

54:56

successfully did whenever the Russian set out to

54:59

do this is done without any kind of

55:01

inside the Russians don't own Facebook they didn't

55:03

know how to use it and any part

55:05

of the to add by to grow bigger

55:08

exactly like Obama to do arrested Day for

55:10

my dad, inadequate and there and and and

55:12

like I mean. At the bird the you

55:14

know at the you censor any like. If

55:17

you ever talk to engineers who worked at

55:19

companies like Facebook likes, they have no fucking

55:21

clue how to say worse. I mean like

55:24

just a single. I really doesn't know. but

55:26

even if you like aggregated all the knowledge

55:28

of everybody everywhere, they still don't really know

55:30

how it works. Like everybody their heads you

55:32

know, they're constantly tweaking something and then realizing

55:35

that like. Oh shit. like

55:37

we accidentally created a genocide Myanmar because

55:39

we like. A we left

55:41

the thing running over the weekend and turn

55:43

it off or whatever and so like it.

55:46

Like the fact the rest again is the

55:48

kind of precursors as a sign of stuff

55:50

is is interesting I guess because the the

55:52

the mean. To fear you hear

55:54

talked about a lot with Tic Toc

55:56

is the idea that the Chinese control

55:59

of the album. Them you know whenever

56:01

the algorithm means in people's heads is what's

56:03

gonna allow them to like So propaganda yeah

56:05

when presumably if if again if you believe

56:07

the Russia good stories they don't need that

56:10

controller lead us into like pay attention to

56:12

what makes people angry on like they did.

56:14

do what influences do and just do it

56:17

for China. Yeah so what China needs to

56:19

start doing is firing like may be too

56:21

masculine. traditional man. yeah shrine and with about

56:23

six only fans models from Miami and just

56:26

let it rip on Israel Palestine? Yeah I

56:28

think that's exactly right. And if. And I

56:30

I hope that Jinping is listening right now

56:32

because I would love to see that I

56:35

wanted. Ah, ten points on he said which

56:37

is like more time at this that mysterious

56:39

algorithms. this is something we are talking about

56:41

the foyer recording which is like there. Is

56:44

this idea you here in these are bad

56:46

And the way people talk about lights crazy

56:48

chinese that it's that he must fact like

56:50

literally I think I like really. Likes

56:52

with the software. In that off that

56:55

he talks about like dissecting. The

56:57

like as. If it's this body that he's gonna

56:59

like open up in the lab. I mean

57:01

Chinese or something a hearing and we were

57:04

you will find things just really shockingly races

57:06

as I didn't think that for the on

57:08

times said they'd spent playing golf. Instances: Where

57:10

is that Oats in the room is? Is

57:12

Adam rumors in this room that tiny read?

57:14

I know this that makes it sound as

57:16

we have a lot of our rooms. okay

57:18

since it's been a better than a dog

57:20

with a tease me it. Was

57:29

like I saw that either retrieve

57:31

the godless hid the gong from

57:34

snow up as the don't say

57:36

that that's a lie Cygnus I

57:38

know, but. Do think that there's this

57:40

kind as. Ceo ever further society

57:42

or that their sex or something mysterious

57:45

and great. It's like there's something particular

57:47

about this. magic box not that this

57:49

magic box is simply from china but

57:51

that likes the algorithm it's always like

57:54

named that the algorithm as if it's

57:56

this living same you know on said

57:58

there's something particular about talks the

58:00

algorithm that makes it so

58:03

susceptible to these like teen dance greysale

58:05

that we just can't stop shaking our bodies.

58:07

You know what I mean? It's like

58:09

very, you know, Salem witch trial or

58:11

whatever. There's some witch in there, some

58:13

Chinese witch. But I just want

58:16

to like, you know, I passed on a piece from

58:18

a couple years ago that was in, I

58:21

can't remember, like some,

58:23

one of Columbia University's like,

58:25

I assume it's a thing.

58:27

I think it was one

58:29

of the J school things.

58:31

Okay. Arvind

58:34

Narayan at Columbia University, he wrote a piece called

58:36

TikTok secret sauce. This is from a couple years

58:38

ago, but I thought it was just, you know,

58:41

it laid bare some important facts about this.

58:43

And he writes, there's no truth to the

58:45

idea that TikTok's algorithm is more advanced than

58:48

its peers. From everything we know, TikTok's own

58:50

description, like documents, studies, and reverse engineering efforts.

58:53

It's a standard recommender system of the kind

58:55

that every major social media platform uses.

58:57

And he goes on in that piece to

58:59

talk about the thing that's unique about TikTok,

59:02

kind of bring us back, you know, to what we were talking about

59:04

earlier with the TV, is

59:07

the design of the thing. And it's the swiping,

59:09

it's the passive swiping of it. And I think

59:11

it's so funny. I mean, it's so, it's very

59:13

typical Washington, DC, you know, boomers, whatever,

59:17

us old heads, you know, being like, well,

59:19

I don't understand why the kids are so

59:21

into this thing, you know, why is the

59:23

elevator sticking to pelvis like that? But

59:25

like, it really

59:27

is, like, we're investing this kind of

59:30

like magic being quality to this thing.

59:32

And it's, it's really actually the way

59:34

that we approach it and the way

59:37

that we use it, not some crazy

59:39

magic brilliant code that they figured out, like, the

59:42

problem is coming from inside the house. Yeah. And

59:44

I think it's important to talk about like, why

59:46

that is and what is specific to TikTok,

59:49

because I do think that is what makes

59:51

it a little bit more,

59:54

you know, insidious in different ways than

59:56

other platforms like Twitter, which has

59:59

its own issue. Well, I think part

1:00:01

of it is that and I think this is reflected in

1:00:03

the way a lot of I'm

1:00:05

particularly addictive platforms work, but I think it

1:00:07

also manifests in

1:00:09

a new not new but

1:00:12

but exaggerated social Behaviors

1:00:15

as well. So like I think tick-tock is

1:00:17

like what you do you swipe and like, you know, you

1:00:19

sort of have this kind of endless Buffet

1:00:22

of whatever you want and

1:00:24

you don't ever have to make a choice You don't have to like be

1:00:26

like I'm gonna you know, you can not follow anybody

1:00:28

I don't know if I follow anybody but me

1:00:30

like basically don't have a profile It's

1:00:33

not social media and you don't find things like

1:00:35

YouTube you don't land on you know I mean,

1:00:37

yeah something is just appears to you appears to

1:00:39

you and like you don't have to like follow

1:00:41

anybody or like make any Content or like follow people

1:00:43

back. It's like it's not for interacting with your

1:00:45

peers and real I mean some people use it like

1:00:47

that Sure But like I think the vast majority

1:00:49

of people are just kind of seen what's out there,

1:00:52

you know Endlessly and I think that

1:00:54

mirrors itself and like the way people use dating

1:00:56

apps and the way that

1:00:58

people like the way that people I think

1:01:01

there's this like parallelization of like endless choice that

1:01:04

I don't think is like a Huge

1:01:06

social ill yet, but I think it's probably

1:01:08

going to be in like 20 years of

1:01:12

this like of this this

1:01:14

this vague nagging indecision that

1:01:17

That people have just that will carry

1:01:19

through out of these kind of

1:01:21

like the way that they use these social media apps

1:01:23

I mean who knows I could be talking about my

1:01:25

I mean I think this thing about tick tock and

1:01:27

it's funny you bring up the dating apps So I

1:01:29

do think there is a similar operation a little bit

1:01:31

with that with tick tock, you know, you're saying no

1:01:35

Until you say yes, and you know when you're swiping

1:01:37

you're saying okay, this isn't for me. This isn't for

1:01:39

me This isn't for me. And then when you land

1:01:41

on something that you're interested in You

1:01:43

linger on it and you don't make

1:01:45

any movement and in that

1:01:47

kind of motion You kind of

1:01:50

invest a little bit like oh, maybe now that the

1:01:52

algorithm finally gets me Yeah, right like so

1:01:54

there's a kind of I would it's

1:01:56

sort of like a pickup artist in the

1:01:58

sense that like You're

1:02:01

constantly rejecting it, and then when you

1:02:03

don't reject it, it feels like it

1:02:05

knows something more about you. It's

1:02:07

more exciting when it feels

1:02:10

like you're saying yes to it, like it has

1:02:12

something right this time. Well, I have

1:02:14

a pick-up on it. No. It's really

1:02:16

just like you just ask 101 says yes. No, no,

1:02:18

but it's like, you know. TikTok's kind

1:02:20

of doing the reverse. They're doing the inverse of

1:02:22

that, right? They're giving you 100 videos, and one

1:02:24

of them's right, and it turns out that you

1:02:26

don't write for you that you really want it

1:02:28

really badly. That's true, yeah. I mean, I think

1:02:30

the one thing that we talked about after reading

1:02:33

this article you were talking about, Liz, is that

1:02:36

I think TikTok's real, like, social, in comparison

1:02:38

to the other social networks, in addition to

1:02:40

the kind of the swipe,

1:02:42

the scroll, the framework of saying no

1:02:45

more often, is that it removed

1:02:48

the social network

1:02:50

aspect of it, essentially. We're

1:02:53

also conditioned by Facebook, essentially, to think

1:02:55

of social networks as places where you

1:02:57

follow friends and family, or even

1:03:00

like YouTube, you sort of subscribe to creators

1:03:02

and you have this pair of social relationships.

1:03:04

And TikTok's like, fuck that. You

1:03:07

don't have to do any of that. You show up, we'll

1:03:09

give you the videos, the videos you want, don't worry about

1:03:11

it. And there's something, if

1:03:14

I were looking for arguments, you know, as

1:03:16

we've been talking about, like, I'm wary about

1:03:18

saying that TikTok is sort of uniquely

1:03:21

bad compared to these other ones, though it might

1:03:23

be bad in different ways. Like, we're not thinking

1:03:26

about it in different ways. You

1:03:28

could replicate that. Because I think Twitter

1:03:30

is also very bad. Yeah, absolutely. And

1:03:32

I do want to talk about that.

1:03:34

But like, if you pull, like, once

1:03:37

you rip the, like, social skeleton out,

1:03:39

you just end up with this, like,

1:03:41

pure, how do I put it, one of the

1:03:43

best books that, well, a book that I recommend to

1:03:45

anybody who's interested in, like, this kind of stuff besides

1:03:47

the Bible, the second book I recommend is this

1:03:50

book called Addicted by Design by the academic

1:03:52

Natasha Dao Shul who writes about- I remember

1:03:54

that book. Yeah. She writes

1:03:56

about people who get, gambling addicts, essentially, who specifically get

1:03:58

addicted to, like, video poker. And without

1:04:02

wanting to go into pseudoscience about dopamine or brain

1:04:04

chemistry or whatever, when you talk to the people,

1:04:06

and this is from, she wrote this book in

1:04:08

the late 2000s and doesn't talk

1:04:11

about social media at all, but the

1:04:14

people love the, they call, at least

1:04:16

one of the people she interviews in

1:04:18

this book calls, these

1:04:20

are, if you're ever into Vegas, people who sit

1:04:22

in front of these video poker machines and the

1:04:24

video box machines will sit

1:04:26

for eight hours at a time and they

1:04:28

call entering that, they say

1:04:30

that's the machine zone. They enter the machine

1:04:33

zone and all of a sudden you're just

1:04:35

free from obligation, you're free from thought, you're

1:04:37

just completely dialed in to the

1:04:39

sevens and the hearts and whatever else

1:04:41

is on your slot machine. And TikTok,

1:04:43

all social networks, I think, replicate that experience

1:04:45

in one way or another. And

1:04:49

TikTok more than any other one, I think

1:04:51

because it removes this sort of sociality that

1:04:53

even a Twitter or a

1:04:55

YouTube brings, that you're just kind of

1:04:57

getting presented with new stuff. It's like

1:04:59

the worst of channel surfing on

1:05:02

somebody with a serious, with the

1:05:04

mega cable subscription, the worst of

1:05:06

video gambling, kind of like, in

1:05:09

one single app that can just take hours from

1:05:11

your life without you, like you

1:05:13

wanna say without you noticing, but that's sort of the point, isn't

1:05:15

it? Like one wants to

1:05:18

enter into that because one wants

1:05:20

some kind of anxiety or some kind

1:05:22

of whatever. And then they wonder why

1:05:24

they're afflicted with such like, adedonia. Yeah,

1:05:26

exactly. There's a book that guy Richard

1:05:29

Seymour wrote, Twittering Machine. He really thinks

1:05:31

a lot of the stuff about the

1:05:33

machine zone and applies that to social

1:05:35

media. And I think that book

1:05:37

came out before TikTok's like surge in popularity. So I

1:05:40

don't know if he even really talks about it in

1:05:42

there. I think it's like, too, that,

1:05:44

I mean, it falls in line too

1:05:46

with this stuff getting really, really big

1:05:48

with COVID, which was like at a

1:05:51

moment when, I

1:05:54

don't know, there was just like

1:05:56

this really big, it felt like

1:05:58

collective drive to like next to next to next. convenience.

1:06:02

Like, like, yeah, that

1:06:04

like, maybe the goal of life

1:06:06

was becoming to like, how do we

1:06:08

live with minimal effort? Yeah, which

1:06:11

immediately me, I mean, which, you know,

1:06:14

I'm sorry, but there's just a, you know, that is

1:06:16

gonna drive home a class divide. And if you live

1:06:18

your life that way, you know, because we live in

1:06:20

a society, we live in a society.

1:06:22

Well, that, you know, like, conducting

1:06:25

your life in that way will be at the

1:06:27

expense of other people. And

1:06:30

so kind of the, you

1:06:33

know, TikTok really rising in popularity

1:06:36

at the same moment when there

1:06:38

was this like extremely, you know,

1:06:40

again, highly mediatized, very vocal, like

1:06:43

the power users of the middle

1:06:45

class out there. I mean, it's

1:06:47

just true, like out there on the interwebs

1:06:49

extolling the virtues of, you

1:06:52

know, having a convenient, the most

1:06:54

convenient middle class learners are convenient,

1:06:56

the most convenient lifestyle, like these

1:06:58

things are kind of dovetailing, right? Or

1:07:01

they're growing in tandem. I mean, one of the

1:07:03

interesting things about TikTok, and I don't have a

1:07:05

theory about this, but especially early on, one of

1:07:07

its big attractions, people love to make videos of

1:07:09

themselves at work. Oh, yeah, Day in the Life.

1:07:11

I woke up, fell out of

1:07:13

bed. I love that one.

1:07:15

We'd like those now. I mean, you

1:07:17

know, you see, like, especially during the

1:07:19

pandemic, it would feel like there's airport

1:07:21

baggage handlers and like, cattle rufflers and

1:07:23

like Denny's chefs or whatever. And there's

1:07:26

something sort of, if you

1:07:28

wanted to construct a defensive TikTok, and really what this

1:07:30

is, is a defense of like human beings being

1:07:32

creative and interesting in their own ways, is like

1:07:34

the sort of window into that back row. But

1:07:37

I think it's, I think it's sort of ironic,

1:07:39

considering what you're saying that there's this kind of

1:07:41

the content is often the kind of it's like,

1:07:44

labor focused or labor intensive or was at

1:07:46

some point now it's all people making waters

1:07:48

out of disgusting, like sugar.

1:07:50

And for a brief moment, it was

1:07:53

like actual people working or whatever, that's

1:07:55

being consumed by people who are increasingly

1:07:59

disinterested. interested in ever leaving their

1:08:01

apartments or whatever else. Yeah, you hope

1:08:03

that there's some sort of like de

1:08:06

Tocquevillian, like utopian version of

1:08:09

like, we could see the

1:08:11

aftermath. Look

1:08:13

at all the Americans and their

1:08:15

civil society group together. I

1:08:30

want to switch gears for a second and

1:08:32

bring up something that is from the archives

1:08:35

of your subject. Okay. You wrote this piece.

1:08:38

I don't even remember when it was about

1:08:41

the blog father, as I call him, Mr.

1:08:44

Matt Iglesias. Not

1:08:46

what you call him. I do call him. Oh

1:08:49

no, you call him the man. I'm

1:08:52

not going to say what Liz calls him, but

1:08:55

I've heard other people call him fat pig lazy

1:08:57

ass. Well,

1:08:59

he's, you know, slimmed down. So I don't know

1:09:01

if we can say that anymore. I feel like

1:09:03

that actually that nickname came from like

1:09:06

early aughts blog circles. And

1:09:08

it might have been from,

1:09:11

yeah, like the salon or sleep vlog.

1:09:13

There's no way salon called Matt Iglesias.

1:09:15

No, but it was like all those

1:09:18

like early Obama bloggers that were going

1:09:20

at each other. The whole of the

1:09:22

universe. I was actually not tapped into

1:09:24

that. Yeah, I can't say you missed

1:09:26

out on this. I'm fucking online. No,

1:09:30

but it was like a post that's kind of like a unified theory of

1:09:32

posting a little bit or at least blogging or

1:09:34

sub checking, whatever you fucking call it. But it

1:09:36

really was like about how

1:09:38

he kind of understood something about

1:09:42

the economy of the discourse. And I think you

1:09:44

were right on and I'm just going to this

1:09:46

is so lame, but I'm going to quote

1:09:48

you to you. You

1:09:51

said this understanding of publishing, talking about like

1:09:53

the way that he was just like putting

1:09:55

shit out constantly. Like every day he's posting.

1:09:58

He's Mr. Mr. poster. This

1:10:01

understanding of publishing which suggests that ref

1:10:03

and ready quasi-automatic writing done on

1:10:06

a regular frequent schedule is

1:10:08

ultimately more financially sustainable than

1:10:10

refined and thoughtful writing when published when

1:10:13

necessary and appropriate. It can

1:10:15

seem counterintuitive if not unbelievably cynical and

1:10:17

depressing. And I think that like that

1:10:19

really like you hit something which is

1:10:21

like really important which is the

1:10:23

necessary aspect because something that I found

1:10:25

and this is part of what makes Twitter

1:10:27

very insidious as well I think and you know

1:10:30

different similar ways to TikTok. But

1:10:33

that everyone is operating on a

1:10:35

different time schedule and

1:10:38

so the demands

1:10:40

to say something, everyone has to

1:10:42

say something, everyone has to have something to

1:10:44

say. Even when there's nothing

1:10:47

to say and even when there's no

1:10:49

point in saying anything and even when in

1:10:51

this moment and I don't mean like this

1:10:53

specific moment but a moment what

1:10:55

the demand should be or the demand actually

1:10:57

is to like not say anything maybe to

1:10:59

read or to think or to like take

1:11:02

some time. Like that is

1:11:04

not, there is, you cannot take time

1:11:06

in this economy right because if you

1:11:10

do you lose subscriber or you

1:11:12

lose attention or you lose whatever whatever

1:11:14

like there's too many drawbacks

1:11:18

and so all of the incentive is to

1:11:20

keep saying keep talking, keep going, keep going,

1:11:22

keep going and even if there's nothing to

1:11:24

say and so what it ends up producing

1:11:27

is I mean no wonder it

1:11:29

makes us all fucking feel sick and crazy

1:11:31

right because we're listening all this noise but

1:11:33

the knock off the facts from it, the

1:11:35

fact that now all media is starting to

1:11:37

operate this way I think cannot

1:11:39

be overstated. Yeah, yeah this is actually

1:11:42

speaking of that Richard Seymour book he

1:11:44

calls this scripturiance like the compulsion to

1:11:46

write that we've all been sort of

1:11:48

called to like by these structures like

1:11:50

you don't want to say by the

1:11:52

algorithm by the apps by like something

1:11:54

inside us when we encounter this particular

1:11:56

arrangement of forces like compels all of

1:11:58

us to constantly react to things by

1:12:01

creating more stuff to be reacted

1:12:03

to. They just compounds and snowballs.

1:12:06

And even, like you say,

1:12:08

that removing yourself from it does

1:12:10

very little to stop that

1:12:13

snowball effect, but also probably

1:12:15

diminishes your ability to later on reenter

1:12:17

it because all of a sudden, the

1:12:21

entropy skates off of you. And

1:12:24

I think that, I mean, if you are a poster, if

1:12:28

you've spent time making money from posting

1:12:30

a lot, or even just generating followers,

1:12:33

you know how to drain. Making content, you say.

1:12:35

It's draining. It's incredibly draining

1:12:38

to feel like you are

1:12:41

obligated at all times to be

1:12:43

a part of whatever given conversation.

1:12:45

And part of the point of

1:12:48

this post is this post that I

1:12:50

wrote about, Iglesias, is

1:12:52

if you want to make money doing this, you

1:12:54

have to remove that sense of shame or

1:12:57

that sense of obligation. You have to

1:12:59

just kind of skim, you

1:13:01

have to shear off your humanity to

1:13:03

just become a guy who will,

1:13:05

and I'm not saying necessarily that Matt Iglesias is

1:13:07

not human. I'm saying, you know, he's very good at

1:13:10

turning off. I don't know anything, but he's very

1:13:12

good at turning, if he is human, he's very good

1:13:14

at turning off the part of his humanity that might

1:13:16

make him feel embarrassed by being wrong or it

1:13:18

might make him feel like, I've got nothing to say

1:13:20

about this particular thing, so I'm just gonna be quiet

1:13:22

here. I mean, the other thing I would say is,

1:13:24

I wrote this, I think, a little bit before generative

1:13:27

AI had become such a huge new

1:13:29

technology, and it just seemed to like,

1:13:32

the sort of hand in hand, the way it's like

1:13:35

human beings are compelled to write as much as

1:13:37

possible at the same time that we're created this

1:13:40

technology whose main use seems

1:13:42

to be to create enormous

1:13:44

tranches of plausible human

1:13:46

speech that doesn't really say

1:13:48

anything novel or interesting. It's

1:13:51

like fascinating and interesting technology, but also

1:13:53

just like, it's just there for filling

1:13:55

all these spaces that we're creating. There's

1:13:58

something very, about

1:14:00

it basically every direction you look at it yeah yeah

1:14:02

yeah dust in the mushroom glass I feel like there's

1:14:04

like some I'm sure as you jack is already said

1:14:06

by the way it has a sub stack if

1:14:09

people didn't know that I don't have much to say anymore though well

1:14:12

that's why it's the perfect medium for him

1:14:14

yeah he just like no but he's just

1:14:16

do you like left to republish his own

1:14:18

shit yeah like every book and

1:14:20

so every post is like sort

1:14:22

of a regurgitation of his like

1:14:25

previous books I think the thing

1:14:27

was like I think you see

1:14:29

this with like tik-tok and Instagram as well but

1:14:31

Twitter is definitely like where this is most acute

1:14:34

is this need to like be involved

1:14:36

in in what they I guess people

1:14:38

call the discourse I wonder where the

1:14:40

fuck that people even just were started

1:14:42

referring to that because that is like

1:14:45

a ubiquitous term now for whatever

1:14:47

sort of topic is generally trending

1:14:51

it's so funny because like I like

1:14:53

I just got a look

1:14:56

at it like it makes I don't understand

1:14:58

why I ever use Twitter I think

1:15:00

look at it and I find things

1:15:02

that make me really fucking angry I find

1:15:04

something someone saying something stupid about something and

1:15:06

it makes me angry it makes me hateful

1:15:09

I put my phone down and I'm like

1:15:11

well why did I just seek out that

1:15:13

I can tell you honestly it's because like the

1:15:15

feeling is that you feel like you're left out

1:15:18

right like that there's this big conversation happening it's

1:15:20

leaving you out and sleeping you in the dust

1:15:22

and like you aren't gonna be tapped into something

1:15:24

like what are you tapped into

1:15:26

you're tapped into generally and I'm you

1:15:28

know no disrespecting our listeners I'm not

1:15:30

saying I'm divorced from this trying to

1:15:32

hear listeners use Twitter it's but it's like what do

1:15:34

you what do you tap out from generally a bunch

1:15:36

of like either hateful spiteful

1:15:38

people yeah unleashing

1:15:41

that in various ways in each other

1:15:43

people who have undiagnosed or extremely diagnosed

1:15:45

mental illnesses that are over

1:15:47

diagnosed possibly self-diagnosed vomiting out

1:15:50

of the internet or

1:15:52

you have you know malformed you

1:15:56

know children who

1:15:59

may be possessed adult bodies speaking about

1:16:01

something they don't know anything about. Or

1:16:03

you have people, when this is very

1:16:05

common now, just like baiting other people

1:16:07

for engagement. I also think that, something

1:16:10

that can't be discounted now,

1:16:12

is that Twitter has this

1:16:14

fake paid blue check thing where you

1:16:17

can get paid for impressions and things like that.

1:16:19

Which is obviously, I think most people know it's

1:16:21

a scam now or like completely fake, but like,

1:16:24

I think that the top earners are making

1:16:26

like $150 a

1:16:28

month from this. There was like a

1:16:30

few banner accounts that got like $20,000

1:16:33

from Twitter at the beginning, but

1:16:35

that was a fake program. They just gave

1:16:37

people money. But that's not even the promise

1:16:39

of, I mean, yes, people wanted to get

1:16:41

the like Krasnstein post-ups like, I'm making $150,000

1:16:43

from my course of posts, or

1:16:45

like whatever. But people want

1:16:48

the notoriety. People want the social, there's the

1:16:50

social aspect as well. And I think that

1:16:52

like, for all the malformed users on there, I

1:16:57

do think that there, you know, you

1:16:59

go into that thing whenever

1:17:02

you do, whatever year it was that you went

1:17:04

in, and through the

1:17:07

social processes that happen on that

1:17:10

app, change

1:17:12

you. And change your behavior. That's

1:17:14

the stuff I'm interested in how it's, our behavior

1:17:16

is shifting and all that kind of stuff. And

1:17:18

I think that like, you know, there is, you

1:17:22

know, you can see like, I

1:17:25

mean, how people interact on there,

1:17:27

how they change. Like there is

1:17:29

a, there's something about, when

1:17:31

I was saying that you go into TikTok, you

1:17:33

know, you come out with this sort of a

1:17:35

feeling of an approximation of a social kind of

1:17:37

interaction. Like there's something about the

1:17:40

architecture of these things that fuels the

1:17:42

kind of mod mentality, that sort of like

1:17:44

the classic cancellation techniques, like that

1:17:46

people are reaching, trying to grasp

1:17:49

for something that feels like a

1:17:51

social, you know, experience.

1:17:53

And in order to approximate that, that

1:18:00

they go to the basest form of sociality,

1:18:02

which is the kind of very

1:18:05

classic Schmidian friend enemy,

1:18:08

oh, we just make a team, and then that

1:18:10

team fights against that team. I mean, everyone sees

1:18:13

this, and in Twitter

1:18:15

it has, specifically in

1:18:17

media politics, Twitter, which is basically the one that

1:18:19

we all live in, is

1:18:21

it has these weird

1:18:23

ramifications because there are,

1:18:27

like, Twitter is real

1:18:29

and not real at the same time.

1:18:31

You know, like, real, these

1:18:34

platforms affect people's lives in real ways. You

1:18:36

know, like, we have a following a lot of,

1:18:39

for a lot of reasons, for our

1:18:41

participation on that platform. We got a

1:18:43

lot of listeners. But yeah. Yeah,

1:18:46

but like, you know, whatever. And

1:18:49

people, I mean, look at the fall of

1:18:51

the Ron Dion campaign.

1:18:54

Exactly. Ron Dion. And,

1:18:57

you know, we can go back to Bernie and some of the

1:18:59

people he hired from, straight from Twitter, you know, like, but

1:19:02

Ron Dion was, I have

1:19:04

to say it like that, it's just so

1:19:06

funny. It's fucking crazy. Your foreign listeners should

1:19:08

tell him Ron DeSantis. That his middle name

1:19:10

is Ron, is Dion. That is so fucking

1:19:12

crazy. Named after the great singer Dion. Yeah.

1:19:15

They're gonna be named after any Dion. That's the one that

1:19:17

we named it. Or Sanders. I would go

1:19:19

for the singer. I know, but I'm just saying, you could

1:19:22

do. Yeah. I don't think Ron DeSantis would

1:19:24

do well named after Dion Sanders. No. Oh,

1:19:27

there's college crew. Very interesting. Okay. So,

1:19:30

but so Ron Dion like ran

1:19:32

his whole campaign in appealing to

1:19:35

power users on Twitter, staffing up

1:19:37

with like group chat, you

1:19:40

know, staffers basically like, you

1:19:42

know, elite gripers or whatever the

1:19:44

fuck is going on in the back end over

1:19:46

there. And he, you

1:19:48

know, that's real. That's real

1:19:50

money. That's like a real fucking, the guy

1:19:52

ran for president. He's the fucking governor of

1:19:54

Florida. And that shit bombed.

1:19:56

Like, so it's real. We're in a bunch of.

1:20:00

powerful Mexican Nazis. No, I mean,

1:20:02

serious. I mean, there's real, like,

1:20:05

there's a real, like, social,

1:20:08

like, things are happening

1:20:10

on there and it's very real, but

1:20:13

it's also twisting everyone's fucking psyche

1:20:15

and reproducing behavior and shaping behavior

1:20:17

that has these kind of knockoff

1:20:19

effects that no one really wants

1:20:21

to take responsibility for also. I

1:20:24

mean, one thing about Twitter, like,

1:20:26

less so now that Elon bought it, but I think

1:20:29

this is also part of the reason he bought it, is that it

1:20:31

was the elite social network. It

1:20:34

was where elite members of, especially,

1:20:36

like, what I guess

1:20:38

you'd call, like, representational industries that you had,

1:20:41

you had journalists, politicians and

1:20:43

political staffers, you had tech, like, tech executives

1:20:45

and tech workers, and you also had, like,

1:20:47

a lot of, God, there's

1:20:50

so many fucking TV writers writing about Trump for like

1:20:52

a year there. And academics, researchers. There's so many funny

1:20:54

people on the planet. I had never had to listen

1:20:56

to a word a TV writer said except out of

1:20:58

the mouth of a TV character before looking

1:21:01

on Twitter. And boy, rough. It's unreal

1:21:03

college there. He's on there. So

1:21:08

anyway, so you have this, so you have

1:21:10

like this weirdly direct access to the brains

1:21:13

of some of the most powerful people in

1:21:15

the US and also the brains of their,

1:21:17

like, assistants or their, like, direct underlings or

1:21:19

whatever that, that

1:21:22

is not on this platform that is like, it's

1:21:25

not a, it's obviously not a mirror of

1:21:27

reality, but it has some, it has some

1:21:29

relationship, it mirrors reality and some. A mirror

1:21:31

they're bleeds into. Yeah. And

1:21:33

so you have, so you end up making, if

1:21:36

you make decisions based on Twitter, like, like Ron

1:21:38

Deontid, or frankly, like the Hillary campaign seemed to

1:21:40

be doing, like, for its entire run, you, you

1:21:43

end up playing to, like, I mean,

1:21:45

this is, this is the most obvious

1:21:47

thing. We all know this now you're

1:21:49

playing to this, like, relatively small segment of Americans. That is just not

1:21:51

going to work out for you very well. This is a

1:21:54

classic candidate thing where they, you know, you were big on

1:21:56

Twitter and then. Right. But you could

1:21:58

also, like, you could also, if you're, if you're smart enough to. recognize,

1:22:00

like I think one way of thinking about

1:22:02

the sort of the wave

1:22:04

of cancellations between whatever

1:22:06

20, the height of cancel culture,

1:22:09

what we'll call cancel culture, is

1:22:11

it was a kind

1:22:13

of realization by a bunch

1:22:15

of people at relatively powerful

1:22:17

institutions that they could leverage

1:22:19

social media to affect like

1:22:21

internal institutional change. That like a

1:22:24

lot of what you were seeing

1:22:26

was top level executives at Hollywood

1:22:28

Film Studios politicians who

1:22:30

were shitty bosses or who

1:22:32

were otherwise creeps getting ousted

1:22:35

not because there was like a

1:22:37

mass of what you might think of

1:22:39

as genuine popular anger but because people

1:22:41

who had real like knowledge or experience

1:22:43

of these infractions could like use

1:22:46

Twitter as a crowbar to force

1:22:48

them out. And like to

1:22:50

me that's like this is one

1:22:52

reason that cancel culture is a sort of annoying

1:22:54

term for it is because to me this is

1:22:57

like really clearly just about a balance of power

1:22:59

and not really about like a cultural, like a

1:23:02

cultural puritans. It

1:23:04

really is more because you see people on the right

1:23:06

and stuff do it too. Look at Ackman.

1:23:10

Yeah, exactly. Cancel culture

1:23:12

is sort of in this note. I

1:23:14

mean I think it was originally wielded

1:23:16

like many weapons in the technological arsenal

1:23:19

particularly well by like insane people who

1:23:21

you might describe as woke. By the

1:23:23

way, there could be. I

1:23:28

would say a platform that did not escape my

1:23:30

use by the way completely. Well

1:23:32

no, my idea like many times

1:23:34

ago, ex-girlfriend made me a flower

1:23:37

thing on it to

1:23:39

try to do because I couldn't afford a website but did

1:23:42

not get me a customers. But

1:23:47

I think Tumblr, Tumblr cast a long

1:23:49

and dark motherfucking shadow. But like I think

1:23:51

that yeah, originally a lot of this

1:23:53

stuff was used by like woke people

1:23:55

because they were used to doing that

1:23:57

on Tumblr. Like you know, did you

1:23:59

re-tumble this? or whatever, blah blah. And

1:24:02

then it became apparent, oh, people have

1:24:04

been using social media willy nilly for

1:24:06

a long time to these audiences. There

1:24:08

was, I feel like there was

1:24:10

a period before where social media

1:24:13

use really was only with

1:24:15

your group of friends, usually. And then

1:24:17

it became, we all joined

1:24:19

in on this weird world. It's all mixed

1:24:21

in together. And so your stuff from when

1:24:23

you were just talking shit to your friends

1:24:26

or when nobody knew who you were or

1:24:28

whatever, maybe still nobody does, that

1:24:30

stuff is out there. And just like this era spanning thing that

1:24:37

the stuff from maybe the first era is

1:24:39

not appropriate or whatever. And

1:24:41

so it was a pre-woke thing. A pre-woke thing. And I think

1:24:43

a lot of that stuff is like, it

1:24:46

was originally pioneered by these psycho woke people

1:24:49

or whatever, but it's not just a completely

1:24:51

acceptable form of. Yeah, I mean, it's just

1:24:53

a weird, the other thing that I would

1:24:55

say, you talking about

1:24:57

Tumblr reminds me of this, is that there's a whole set of,

1:25:00

I'm sure Liz is familiar with message

1:25:02

board dynamics that have been transformed, like

1:25:04

transferred to much bigger social networks

1:25:06

in ways that people who relate to

1:25:09

the internet. Like I think still,

1:25:11

I mean, the people

1:25:14

will talk a lot about something awful, the infamous something awful

1:25:17

message board is having been like, it's true. You had to

1:25:19

pay the event? What? You had

1:25:21

to pay, it was a one time fee to get in. It

1:25:24

was five bucks that you had to pay to get an

1:25:26

account. That's a good, I think

1:25:28

that's like a. I mean, they will tell you,

1:25:30

like, yeah, real, they call themselves goons. Real goons

1:25:32

will tell you like that was what made it.

1:25:34

But the other thing was it was like, the

1:25:37

culture was relentlessly bullying. And like a lot of,

1:25:39

I mean, Tumblr kind of was too, just it

1:25:41

was a slightly less direct and

1:25:43

cruel kind of bullying and like LiveJournal

1:25:45

had its own. But that

1:25:47

kind of like abject, like

1:25:50

cruelty to people who couldn't

1:25:52

follow the rules was always

1:25:54

understood as how you create

1:25:56

like a specific and enjoyable

1:25:58

culture. and

1:26:01

that transferred almost one-to-one to Twitter

1:26:03

in a way that I think

1:26:05

really, one theory I have about

1:26:07

the Bernie Bro thing was just that you

1:26:10

had a lot of very earnest, maybe

1:26:12

not that intelligent Hillary

1:26:15

staffers and DNC types,

1:26:17

and then a bunch of power

1:26:20

something awful posters who have been honed,

1:26:22

diamonds crushed, and

1:26:25

the meanest, funniest people you could possibly

1:26:27

meet just going in on them in

1:26:29

ways they had never experienced before, and

1:26:31

it just broke them. It

1:26:34

just completely, if you didn't know about

1:26:36

something awful and then you encountered something

1:26:39

awful posters coming at you on Twitter, I

1:26:41

could see that that is the kind of

1:26:43

thing that would make you go completely insane.

1:26:45

And unfortunately, because Twitter was the elite social

1:26:47

network, some of the people were extremely powerful

1:26:50

in charge of news networks and whatever

1:26:52

else. And it made them go crazy.

1:26:54

Let's not forget the snake emoji. The

1:26:57

Warren people were... Which we participated

1:27:00

in. Some big, major casualties there.

1:27:02

Yeah. More Warren people. More Warren

1:27:04

people with all their Hitler tattoos.

1:27:07

Very concentration camp. A very sort

1:27:09

of anti-Deutsch-esque move getting their Holocaust

1:27:11

tattoos. If you

1:27:14

have a Elizabeth Warren Holocaust

1:27:16

tattoo, please hit the tip line. If you have

1:27:18

Elizabeth Warren tattoo of any kind, hit the tip

1:27:20

line. Please, I'd like to speak to you.

1:27:22

I need to know where you are. I'd

1:27:24

like to... You know what? I'd like to

1:27:26

have an Elon Musk-style baby with you. I

1:27:29

would like to see what comes out of

1:27:31

the union of your motherfucking egg and

1:27:33

my rocking sperm. No sex needed.

1:27:35

I just want to see what the baby looks

1:27:37

like. The most perfect centrist. And we're putting

1:27:39

that kid in the iPad all day. Absolutely.

1:27:42

This is Benne Jester. This is Dune. We're

1:27:44

creating the Kwisatz Haderach between you and the

1:27:46

Warren tattoo. Oh, he is the Kwisatz Haderach.

1:27:49

Can I propose something to you? Hit me. Are

1:27:51

you used to a virile? The...

1:27:54

Interesting hesitation. Is that a proposal? No, no,

1:27:56

no, no, no, not with me. That's... I

1:28:00

mean, I'm not saying no, I just don't

1:28:02

know how that happened. Have you thought about

1:28:05

having another baby and raising it on the

1:28:07

iPad? Oh, like a control group baby. A

1:28:09

control group normal baby. I assume your next

1:28:11

one is Ricky Reed now. And

1:28:13

then you have another

1:28:15

baby, Rodney Reed, and

1:28:18

you kind of just give him the iPad,

1:28:20

give him the Peppa Pig. I love it.

1:28:22

First of all, I love this idea, obviously.

1:28:24

Yeah, because you get around the replication crisis.

1:28:26

Yeah, and I think my wife would be

1:28:28

absolutely... I can't imagine any of... She's down?

1:28:31

She's not down, we can just get you another kid.

1:28:33

And it doesn't have to be related to you. It's

1:28:36

not a great control group. You do kind of want the

1:28:38

same way. You just inject it with HDA for the next

1:28:40

one with your own shit. And

1:28:43

so Rodney gets all the iPad. Rodney gets

1:28:45

all the iPad, everything else, everything he wants.

1:28:48

iPad, Binky, what other

1:28:50

kids? Cigarettes. No, it's

1:28:52

the iPad, iPhone, Galaxy,

1:28:56

Gallery, and a Note. What's the

1:28:58

one that catches on fire? I

1:29:03

want Rodney's... Do you remember there was

1:29:05

a viral video of some eight-year-old girls

1:29:07

doing a makeup tutorial thing that went

1:29:09

around with this is modern society being

1:29:12

fucked up. I want Rodney to

1:29:14

be doing that at three. Whereas

1:29:16

Ricky doesn't even know about this shit.

1:29:18

Ricky is playing a prospect part. What's

1:29:21

the hypothesis? Where's Ricky in 20 years and where's

1:29:23

Rodney in 20 years? Unfortunately,

1:29:26

there's a high chance that Rodney at

1:29:29

some point murders Ricky. But we're back

1:29:31

to the Bible. We're back to the

1:29:33

Bible. Exactly. He can't escape it. He's

1:29:36

God. But I would say Ricky... We

1:29:38

don't know because we don't know what kind of world is going to be there

1:29:41

for Ricky in 20 years. That's true,

1:29:43

yeah. Rodney, though, will probably be completely fine by

1:29:45

the time he's done it. I

1:29:49

was talking to a friend who's

1:29:51

like a... I teach his

1:29:53

pretty young kids and she was like, literally

1:29:55

every kid that comes into my class now

1:29:57

is like afflicted by

1:29:59

like... autism or extreme ADHD and

1:30:02

I don't know what to do with

1:30:04

it. And I hear like, no kids can fucking read.

1:30:07

It is, it is. And I sound like

1:30:09

an old person. She used to bring you into Teaspoonie's

1:30:11

podcasters. It's like he's the last job left for you.

1:30:13

I literally just was at a dinner with. A

1:30:16

bunch of babies. A bunch of babies. No,

1:30:19

one person who taught high school

1:30:21

in a pretty poor school district, two

1:30:27

people that taught in the

1:30:29

humanities at university, and

1:30:31

one person who taught in crazy

1:30:33

enough astrophysics, which that threw

1:30:36

me, at another university. And

1:30:38

I was at, I mean, we were just talking about

1:30:40

it. And they were saying that like,

1:30:42

literally, like kids that come into these

1:30:45

schools, there

1:30:47

was private universities, public university, public high

1:30:49

school, right? That they can't

1:30:52

read. That

1:30:54

the astrophysics guy was like,

1:30:57

they didn't understand fractions. Like

1:30:59

they didn't understand fractions. And

1:31:02

both universities would not let

1:31:04

them, would not let any teacher

1:31:07

give a grade less than a

1:31:09

B minus. So

1:31:11

kids, this is the kind of shit

1:31:13

that kind of like read. I think someone's a

1:31:16

college teacher or professor, whatever, I know. I can't

1:31:18

fail kids even if they can't read. Yeah,

1:31:20

and so they're advancing these

1:31:23

kids that are not knowledgeable,

1:31:25

that are not, like don't understand. And in the

1:31:27

case of this like one university that is like

1:31:30

an Ivy League, whatever, all of the kids

1:31:32

are going and getting jobs at

1:31:34

McKinsey. That's like where they recruit

1:31:36

for these kids. Like it is so black

1:31:39

filling to kind of understand the pipeline here.

1:31:41

Imagine you were like a direct to consumer,

1:31:43

like, you know, what a medical

1:31:45

supply company or something. And you're gonna need to restructure

1:31:47

and call on the McKinsey guy. He's like, I

1:31:50

can't read this. So I will, I

1:31:52

respect what you all are doing here, but

1:31:54

I do need you folks to maybe like

1:31:57

a pictorial kind of. Yeah, can you translate

1:31:59

these? I need to come by call

1:32:01

for it and they're like what? It's

1:32:07

like it makes me feel like

1:32:09

some crazy like what I assume

1:32:11

to be sort of like based

1:32:14

the Subscriber to the

1:32:17

free press or whatever Like Palestine

1:32:28

Woke agenda is like fucking with

1:32:30

bit Or on

1:32:32

the flip side of that like the crazy

1:32:34

things like oh America's into climate Hmm, you

1:32:36

know and we this is the sort of

1:32:38

like Adam Curtis Jaron talker see moment where

1:32:40

all the institutions are hollowed out and

1:32:43

we're turning into the classic American Coca-Cola

1:32:45

swilling Wally people Well, I would say

1:32:47

I'm coming at that from a different

1:32:49

perspective. It's what you it's true. There's

1:32:51

a decadent country Kids

1:32:58

Rape the third world I

1:33:04

am stupid and I know you're Liz always is like

1:33:06

no you're not when I do this. I am NOT

1:33:09

Traditionally intelligent. I'm cunning.

1:33:12

I would say I'm clean No,

1:33:14

I think that you're smart bottom of your cutting. I

1:33:17

have a degree of cunning I don't know about that.

1:33:19

I think that you're like doing the kind of like

1:33:21

reverse. So like I Just

1:33:23

listen to women too much But

1:33:27

I do listen women too much, okay Do

1:33:29

you work to a lot at your job?

1:33:32

Well, there's a job where they go to

1:33:34

work where half their job is listening to

1:33:37

a woman Well, first of all, I don't

1:33:39

know about that. Okay fair enough Yeah,

1:33:42

and young try look at this sweater in the pose is

1:33:44

doing so non-thwep mean exactly like

1:33:46

myself except that the lean towards the microphone I

1:33:48

am NOT I'm saying I don't know fractions either.

1:33:51

Yeah, I'm saying that I do know how to

1:33:53

read I and I I think you know for

1:33:55

this is this is the kick-off clip here This

1:33:57

is you you admitting that talking to women has

1:33:59

made you stop Learning process. Must

1:34:02

go to the. Woke agenda I don't

1:34:04

understand. Fashion I don't

1:34:06

mean liver from here on a message to

1:34:08

some I did you eat a lot of

1:34:10

this is now have a crazy my my

1:34:12

boy Sam is really into that studies as

1:34:14

he carried his last isn't arm a drink

1:34:16

and yeah he told me about this and.

1:34:18

I saw nothing is it but I guess is as

1:34:21

do for six months and I'll have dire I don't

1:34:23

wanna go to the doctor. What is

1:34:25

a doctor gonna die soon

1:34:27

as you're being Jewish? Just

1:34:29

doctors tried that. Liz. It's

1:34:31

okay. Anyways, I got assists.

1:34:33

I may not be. Mr.

1:34:36

Tie My mammals. As

1:34:39

I said side of the tell us on

1:34:41

our way toward a the result is you

1:34:43

can't read said the to blinds yes awesome

1:34:45

display cases. it's other than ideal or actually

1:34:47

speaking of your little m child if you

1:34:49

have it gives you know time, a beer

1:34:51

and he have some real facts although he

1:34:53

the debunked because I cannot believe I wonder

1:34:55

if I'm the other day we got some

1:34:57

good so fucking worked in finance or we're

1:34:59

going to do another of one episode we

1:35:01

won't ask about. but if you had your

1:35:03

loads of. Please. Please please please

1:35:06

that is my white whale. Ah anyway

1:35:08

we know things to by San I

1:35:10

am. I do nothing about your little

1:35:13

I am not smart in the were

1:35:15

a book smart lesser actually read a

1:35:17

lot of books but I'm retarded and

1:35:20

and this is so thanks You too

1:35:22

I didn't know stop unsavoury was actually

1:35:24

did you. We were Thanksgivings and my

1:35:27

parents were there and Trump's he was

1:35:29

there and his father embrace Roseanne and

1:35:31

it's like I'm cooking the Thanksgiving for

1:35:34

fun. And fourteen. People and on likes

1:35:36

think job races here because he's like

1:35:38

the entities like that for says it's

1:35:40

I fired his honeymoon cottage cloud know

1:35:42

if you decide to the might basically

1:35:44

and I'm just like gray ominous on

1:35:46

over there you know to me and

1:35:48

say. You one of the people

1:35:50

that are at Thanksgiving was

1:35:52

a professor and she was

1:35:55

delighted. By you

1:35:57

and was likes to cook ware rattling

1:35:59

off. Random like novelists who

1:36:01

were killed and like random french

1:36:03

writers who were killed Somebody

1:36:20

with cunning would be able to drive. Yeah, of

1:36:23

course. I grew up in, New Jersey how fast

1:36:25

I can drive 30-40

1:36:27

miles an hour probably How fast have

1:36:29

you ever driven? In my life? Yes, what's the fastest

1:36:31

you've ever done? I've hit like 105 I've

1:36:34

respectfully Wait

1:36:37

where? New Jersey

1:36:40

Turnpike That shit is a

1:36:42

lot in the wild west Oh, yeah people

1:36:44

I yeah, I get to drive what?

1:36:46

You ever hit anybody? Do

1:36:48

I have a have you ever hit anybody? No, no,

1:36:50

no, I've never I mean knock wood I've never actually

1:36:52

been an accident. I'm an incredible fucking driver. You would

1:36:55

drive in the city? Yeah, I've got a

1:36:57

fit without Driving it's

1:36:59

a Honda fit. Would you say that's the

1:37:01

journalist car? It's like the cucks

1:37:03

car. Yeah, it's

1:37:06

a great car Or

1:37:18

I'm driven by kind of drive here

1:37:20

I took a I took the b69

1:37:22

actually to get here I

1:37:27

Really good to rail for people are people

1:37:29

who spend way more than five people are

1:37:31

stupid now. I understand being stupid I get that

1:37:34

I feel that I was but you

1:37:36

gotta learn how to read I'm

1:37:40

not trying to say I'm not trying to come

1:37:42

at you from my ivory tower I'm just saying

1:37:44

you really gotta learn how to read it's

1:37:47

gonna be difficult What it

1:37:49

seems like to be is like it's

1:37:51

like context clues like people do not

1:37:54

understand context We're just in the bitchin

1:37:56

corner. Yeah, people don't understand context. No,

1:37:58

okay. I'll go like very well advice on it

1:38:00

or what I assume. I don't know, I've never,

1:38:02

I don't know that. Well, they don't understand the

1:38:04

history before. I don't even know. Their

1:38:06

advice is not, they're like, no, that group, they

1:38:09

don't want critical, like context clues or whatever. They just

1:38:11

want, I mean, not to be whatever,

1:38:13

but it's like they want super hierarchical, super straightforward,

1:38:15

learn the thing you're given. They're mad that people aren't

1:38:18

learning the thing that they've been given. When,

1:38:20

you know, that seems like they

1:38:22

kind of, they probably are, they're just not learning. But when you

1:38:24

were talking about Gen Z, Gen Alpha

1:38:27

stuff before, when you were saying like,

1:38:29

there's this weird sort of like cynicism

1:38:31

or nihilism or like, also

1:38:33

using words that they don't totally understand

1:38:35

the meaning to describe. Yeah,

1:38:38

well some people can't pronounce it. But yeah, no, I

1:38:40

definitely. No, I'm saying like, oh, this is me being

1:38:42

doing irony or this is very satire when it's like,

1:38:44

yeah, I'm doing it, that's not exactly what I'm talking

1:38:46

about. No, but I do think I've noticed,

1:38:48

there's like a, you know, I know this