True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 318: B for Ebola
Aired: 2023-09-07
Duration: 01:23:34


=== Tonight's Unusual Encounter (07:39) ===

[00:00:01]  This is Morgan Cage, gun captain of FEMA containment team Yeti reporting from Zone E, formerly known as Black Rock City.
[00:00:08]  Scout teams have retrieved the following reel-to-reel recording from an empty RV filled entirely with grappa and duck Riet's.
[00:00:15]  I present the unaltered recording below.
[00:00:23]  This is Le Monde, Buffet Page Correspondent G. Ormond.
[00:00:28]  I'm coming to you live.
[00:00:30]  Sandals on the ground, as they say, with an in-person episode exposing the dark pork belly of the Burning Man Festival.
[00:00:38]  My peacock-feathered RV is chock full of desert sundries and necessary provisions.
[00:00:45]  One bottle of water?
[00:00:46]  Check.
[00:00:48]  Yoga mat?
[00:00:49]  Check.
[00:00:50]  Duck, check.
[00:00:52]  Tallow, check.
[00:00:53]  Grappa.
[00:00:55]  Check.
[00:00:56]  Check indeed.
[00:00:58]  I'll be going around for the next few days, gripping my grappa, talking to all the weird and wonderful people I see.
[00:01:04]  I shan't be G. Ormond here on the playa, buffet correspondent of Le Monde.
[00:01:10]  During this sojourn into the impossible, I'll be using the ply name Michelangelo.
[00:01:15]  I will attempt to record as much as possible of my experience.
[00:01:21]  Night one.
[00:01:23]  Today has been wonderful.
[00:01:26]  I have met genuine people from all across America, indeed the world.
[00:01:32]  I made the acquaintance of an Italian currently based in Shanghai, trading on soy salmon futures and markets employing currencies I could scarcely believe existed.
[00:01:42]  A beautiful Armenian trollop from the village of Glendale, bejeweled as if she were a Bedouin queen.
[00:01:48]  Grover Norquist II, the foe of high taxes.
[00:01:52]  Only today he was doing battle with a particularly soggy pair of socks as he tried to leap, ungracefully as it turned out, to the beat of Diplo in the marshmallow hut.
[00:02:04]  I invited a beferred young woman I met at the Crystal Castle to tell me what brought her here.
[00:02:12]  What is your name and what do you do?
[00:02:15]  Nico Cheyenne, Palantir Data Analyst.
[00:02:17]  Nico, beautiful Nico, describe to me your experiences thus far.
[00:02:23]  Well, I came here in a fur car.
[00:02:25]  Now that's like a regular car, but we covered it in fur.
[00:02:28]  And when I came with a couple of my teammates from the Iron Box, that's what we call work.
[00:02:33]  It's been great so far.
[00:02:35]  I mean, I love the freedom of being out here on the playa.
[00:02:39]  You can do whatever you want.
[00:02:40]  I mean, everyone shares everything, and I do mean everything.
[00:02:45]  And Tiplo was so cool at the marshmallow hut.
[00:02:49]  I mean, he said that he could introduce me to David Gueta if I just did a little ketamine with him and signed an NDA.
[00:02:54]  Wonderful, wonderful.
[00:02:56]  Are you looking forward to anything in particular, young lady?
[00:03:00]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:03:01]  I mean, definitely the sacrifices.
[00:03:05]  Night two.
[00:03:06]  Today has been something of a disaster.
[00:03:10]  Not unsalvageable, but painful.
[00:03:13]  The dust has been oppressive.
[00:03:16]  Sometimes it feels as if every breath fills me with ancient sand.
[00:03:20]  The stuff of mummies and camels.
[00:03:23]  Ancient wild dogs and the savage pygmies who once made these flats their violent home.
[00:03:29]  I saw things today I find difficult to describe.
[00:03:33]  Art that abused me.
[00:03:37]  There's an evil glint in the eyes of some passerby.
[00:03:40]  They eat turkey legs in a manner I can only appropriately classify as malevolent.
[00:03:46]  The thumping bass of Diplo, always Diplo, ringing in my ears.
[00:03:51]  I plucked my dear Cheyenne from the dance floor at the marshmallow hut for an interview.
[00:03:56]  Hey, Michelangelo.
[00:03:59]  Good evening.
[00:03:59]  Good evening, my dear.
[00:04:01]  How was your day upon the plains?
[00:04:03]  I don't know.
[00:04:05]  I mean, I think it was amazing.
[00:04:07]  I can't really remember.
[00:04:08]  There's so much fur.
[00:04:11]  There's so many cool groovy people here, so many art bikes.
[00:04:15]  I just, you know, it's hard to believe that so many people are just so creative.
[00:04:20]  I was feeling pretty down this morning because last night, someone took my tent and sleeping bag and my wallet and stuff, and these guys in these art hoods with these art knives found me crying and took me to this stone thing.
[00:04:30]  And we did all this stuff to the sky.
[00:04:32]  We drank all his stuff, but now I like feel really good.
[00:04:36]  Like, I feel pretty good now.
[00:04:38]  I feel like I could do anything.
[00:04:41]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:41]  Like, I feel like I'm like God.
[00:04:43]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:44]  Like, I'm like God now, you know?
[00:04:58]  Night three.
[00:05:00]  I have drawn the blackout curtains on the RV's windows and added layers to the sound baffling.
[00:05:06]  What I witnessed tonight haunts me like a banshee, and while I cannot hear its screams with my tissue-stuffed ears, I can feel the reverberations of its wailing in my very spirit.
[00:05:17]  I have visions of writhing men and women, wet with viscous drippings, coming together and apart, and together and apart, and together and apart and together again, with the sound of a circus idiot voiding his bowels.
[00:05:33]  Diplo at the marshmallow hut was something I do not believe I can adequately describe.
[00:05:39]  Barbaric, demonic.
[00:05:42]  I'm running low on Grappa.
[00:05:46]  There is a banging on the windows?
[00:05:49]  Is that Cheyenne?
[00:05:51]  Can I come in for a moment?
[00:05:58]  Wow, it's really something in here.
[00:06:02]  So dark.
[00:06:03]  You know, you should really open up those blackout curtains, you know, let everyone see you.
[00:06:08]  Noted, my dear.
[00:06:09]  Note it.
[00:06:11]  Can I tell you something amazing that happened?
[00:06:14]  My dear, relieve yourself of all worries and pains, for perhaps you might solve my wounded soul in the telling.
[00:06:21]  Everything has been so wonderful.
[00:06:23]  I can't believe you're staying so cooped up in here.
[00:06:26]  Like today, we fed the eater, and he was just so hungry that he kept eating, and it seemed like he was never full.
[00:06:34]  Like, God, can he eat?
[00:06:36]  I don't know who brings their kids to Burning Man anyway, but the eater always says a mother's womb is a harbor of strange delicacies.
[00:06:46]  Yes, yes, I know.
[00:06:47]  I've heard that so many times on the radio here that I've grown weary of the very syllables.
[00:06:52]  Well, anyways, after we did the scything and after we dug the pit and then filled it, but you never guess with one people here are so artistic.
[00:06:59]  I mean, I can't even believe it.
[00:07:01]  So much fur and now so much more leather.
[00:07:03]  I mean, my teammates at Palantir are never gonna believe it.
[00:07:07]  And what?
[00:07:08]  What of tonight, my dear Nico Cheyenne?
[00:07:12]  Tonight, something amazing happened.
[00:07:16]  We went to the marshmallow hut, but everyone looked so weird.
[00:07:21]  Like, it was like black lights shining on them.
[00:07:23]  Only the light bulbs were regular.
[00:07:26]  It was just their skin looked like that.
[00:07:29]  And everyone was throwing up all of this black stuff in these big troughs.
[00:07:35]  They weren't dancing.
[00:07:36]  They were just all sort of swaying there.

=== Crazy Beaches and Marshmallow Huts (08:41) ===

[00:07:40]  And Diplo, he was DJing, and oh my god, it was so good.
[00:07:46]  His eyes were all red, like he was wearing contacts, and his hair was crazy, like there was like static electricity everywhere.
[00:07:53]  And he said that I could hang out with him if I just triple kissed with him.
[00:07:58]  And this girl, he says he was gonna, you know, she was gonna be a supermodel when she graduates.
[00:08:03]  A triple.
[00:08:05]  A triple kiss?
[00:08:06]  Yes, Diplo says he does it all the time.
[00:08:10]  And so I just did it.
[00:08:11]  And when it happened, I got this crazy feeling.
[00:08:15]  Diplo said I looked like I was taking dark Molly.
[00:08:20]  He said, I have to kiss you now, Mr. Journalist.
[00:08:25]  He said it's our duty as burners to share the love we felt at the marshmallow hut with the whole world.
[00:08:33]  Now put down that grandpa.
[00:08:37]  She's she's opening her mouth.
[00:08:39]  My god, it's distended.
[00:08:41]  Her teeth filed down to points.
[00:08:44]  And an ochre tongue.
[00:08:45]  The stench.
[00:08:46]  My god, the stench.
[00:08:47]  He's my grappa!
[00:08:49]  No!
[00:09:03]  At this point, the conversation ends.
[00:09:05]  After a brief moment, we can hear the sound of eating for approximately 27 minutes until the door opens and closes again.
[00:09:11]  We told Lamond that their correspondent took some bad ketamine and took off with a wook from El Cerrito.
[00:09:17]  The burning of the bodies continues apace and should be finished by September 10th.
[00:09:21]  Add this to the file.
[00:09:47]  Hello?
[00:09:49]  Hello.
[00:09:50]  Hello, Brace.
[00:09:52]  Hi.
[00:09:53]  Let's start with that.
[00:09:54]  Oh, wait.
[00:09:54]  I said it already.
[00:09:56]  What?
[00:09:56]  Your name.
[00:09:56]  My name?
[00:09:57]  Yeah.
[00:09:58]  Well, I go by many names.
[00:09:59]  I'm a man of many faces, many masks.
[00:10:02]  But for today, Brace Belden.
[00:10:05]  However, for any sort of actionable purposes, a Chinese guy, or excuse me, whatever is, he's from an Egyptian man named Mehmet.
[00:10:15]  We hired to do social for us.
[00:10:17]  So kind of anything involved in that realm is not us.
[00:10:21]  And he actually functions under a different LLC that's in another country that does have a different legal system.
[00:10:26]  So kind of unactionable there.
[00:10:29]  But on the podcast, Brace Belden, how you doing?
[00:10:32]  Hi, I'm Liz.
[00:10:33]  We are, of course, joined by Producer Yang Chomsky.
[00:10:35]  And this is hello, everyone.
[00:10:40]  How you doing?
[00:10:41]  How was Labor Day?
[00:10:43]  I don't remember.
[00:10:44]  What did I do?
[00:10:45]  It was very hot.
[00:10:46]  It was atrocious.
[00:10:49]  Crazy out.
[00:10:50]  It was crazy hot and it felt.
[00:10:52]  It was nice, though.
[00:10:53]  It did feel like a long weekend.
[00:10:55]  It felt like a long weekend.
[00:10:56]  Nice long weekend of fun.
[00:10:58]  Same work that we always didn't actually affect us whatsoever, but it was a yeah, it felt like Monday.
[00:11:06]  I was like, I can run.
[00:11:07]  Because usually on Monday, I'm like, I got to do the episode.
[00:11:09]  I got to do the episode.
[00:11:10]  But I was like, you know what?
[00:11:11]  I already had plans.
[00:11:12]  Yeah, you went full boat mode.
[00:11:14]  And I saw, and I just, I don't want to get too into it, but I saw a monkey on the bottom.
[00:11:17]  Oh, were you going to tell the monkey I swear?
[00:11:19]  I saw a monkey on Long Island.
[00:11:25]  And a no shit real monkey.
[00:11:27]  Sorry, fact check.
[00:11:28]  The monkey was on a boat in the Long Island Sound.
[00:11:32]  I saw it.
[00:11:33]  Yeah, but it wasn't on Long Island.
[00:11:35]  No, the boat.
[00:11:36]  No, except you're right.
[00:11:37]  The monkey was completely shorn of any connections to continents or trees or anything like that.
[00:11:44]  He was in a totally unfamiliar environment, which was the side of a boat shimmying along.
[00:11:49]  And he had a diaper?
[00:11:50]  He was, well, they often wear diapers.
[00:11:52]  He was diped up.
[00:11:53]  And I was a maritime monkey, if you will.
[00:11:55]  I was astounded by that.
[00:11:57]  I do feel like monkey with a sailor hat.
[00:12:00]  That feels appropriate.
[00:12:01]  He was not wearing.
[00:12:02]  That does feel very appropriate.
[00:12:04]  He was not wearing that.
[00:12:05]  He was not wearing it.
[00:12:06]  And then I thought about, like, I don't know if I really feel good about people having a monkey in that capacity.
[00:12:10]  Yeah, I don't like that.
[00:12:11]  Do monkeys swim?
[00:12:14]  That's an interesting question through the air.
[00:12:16]  Using sort of vines as their floaties.
[00:12:19]  With the greatest of ease.
[00:12:20]  With the greatest of ease, exactly.
[00:12:22]  But no.
[00:12:22]  And I told the first stranger I saw that we saw a great ape out on the water.
[00:12:28]  And to fetch the fetch the air.
[00:12:30]  I feel like it was an ape.
[00:12:31]  No, it's a monkey, but they're kind of like the same.
[00:12:33]  You know what I mean?
[00:12:34]  It's like girls and boys.
[00:12:36]  You know, like they're the same species, but different genders.
[00:12:39]  You know who didn't have a great weekend?
[00:12:41]  Who?
[00:12:41]  The people of Burning Man.
[00:12:43]  The people of Burning Man had a, let's say, an opposite of a burning weekend, more like a soggy, wet weekend.
[00:12:51]  Sludgy weekend.
[00:12:53]  Before we get into that, let's back up a second.
[00:12:55]  Brace?
[00:12:56]  Yes.
[00:12:56]  What is Burning Man?
[00:12:57]  Burning Man is— Which is—it's crazy, I will say, for us to be explaining this on the podcast. Because this has been—as a person who not just grew up in San Francisco, but then lived— PLC, person of city.
[00:13:13]  Yeah, person of city, but lived there for many moons in my 20s and worked in the belly of the beast for Burners, aka Hate Street.
[00:13:24]  Facts.
[00:13:25]  Which, by the way, I haven't stopped saying that.
[00:13:27]  You did.
[00:13:28]  Liz.
[00:13:28]  For a long time.
[00:13:30]  To fully expose you here, you work at a place that comes certain time of year, not as heavily as.
[00:13:37]  It was like close to as big as Halloween for us in terms of like shopping days and customers.
[00:13:45]  Liz worked at a vintage store that I would say was heavily trafficked by burners.
[00:13:49]  Yeah, and all these rich people would come in and buy their fuzzy hats and their chaps, always leather chaps.
[00:13:56]  And they were some of the most obnoxious people.
[00:13:58]  Anyway, what I'm saying is these have, I have known these people for quite some time and rude the day that something would happen to them.
[00:14:10]  I remember when a friend of mine in my sort of larger friend group went to Burning Man, a straight-edge guy saying for the band R Turn.
[00:14:20]  And when we asked him about it, viciously, he said it was to test his edge.
[00:14:25]  Oh my God.
[00:14:26]  I hate that.
[00:14:27]  Straight edge guys aren't.
[00:14:29]  I'm just testing my edge.
[00:14:30]  I was on a judge on the way over here and I was like, how come this guy is so mad about drinking beer?
[00:14:35]  And I was like, they're built in such a different way that I don't even, I can't even understand the mechanics.
[00:14:40]  Built different.
[00:14:41]  Anyway, so it's wild for us to be doing an episode about this just because this has been Burning Man has been part of our lives in one way or another for quite some time, but now we get to introduce the world to it.
[00:14:53]  I think people have an idea of it, but it affected us, I think, more because it was like a week where kind of all those people were gone.
[00:15:00]  Yeah, it was great.
[00:15:01]  San Francisco would be empty, which would rock.
[00:15:03]  It was, I think, the only thing that I can think of as a direct analog is like Coachella in LA.
[00:15:08]  Totally.
[00:15:08]  It's the same thing.
[00:15:09]  Same thing.
[00:15:10]  It's like you're suddenly the air is cleaner.
[00:15:12]  So let's break it down.
[00:15:13]  What is Burning Man?
[00:15:14]  So Burning Man famously was started in San Francisco on the beach, Ocean Beach, which is, I gotta tell you.
[00:15:21]  That's like one of the crazy beaches to do that.
[00:15:23]  Love San Francisco.
[00:15:24]  Ocean Beach, in terms of beaches, ranks pretty, it's a shit beach.
[00:15:28]  Yeah, it's not great.
[00:15:28]  It's a great, it's a great dump.
[00:15:30]  It's a bad beach.
[00:15:32]  But sort of those boho hippie types, you know, like San Francisco.
[00:15:38]  Think of this, listeners.
[00:15:39]  The coffee shop scene from Sorry America and Axe Murderer.
[00:15:43]  Yeah.
[00:15:43]  Sort of take it up a couple of notches and make the hats like a little bit taller.
[00:15:48]  Bigger hats.
[00:15:49]  Little steampunk.
[00:15:51]  If you introduced, if the coffee shop from So I Married and Axe Murderer took place in the same time period, but in the world of Wild, Wild West.
[00:16:02]  But also featuring another Mike Myers vehicle, Cat in the Hat.
[00:16:08]  Yes, Cat in the Hat and No, that was Jim Carrey.
[00:16:12]  I think Jim Carrey was Grinch, but Cat in the Hat.
[00:16:14]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:16:15]  I know.
[00:16:15]  There's always a long striped hat.
[00:16:17]  And I got to say, the love guru put him in.
[00:16:20]  And that hat then turns into an accordion.

=== Burning Man Pranks & Chaos (16:16) ===

[00:16:21]  It puts it into a court.
[00:16:22]  And you should see when they do it at the with that thing at the marshmallow hub.
[00:16:25]  Okay.
[00:16:26]  But every which way it's going.
[00:16:27]  I will stop the digression.
[00:16:29]  So, you know, they would get together on this beach and have this big party and kind of burn this effigy.
[00:16:34]  It's, you know, whatever.
[00:16:35]  I find it hard to actually, and listeners may be surprised at this.
[00:16:39]  I don't care.
[00:16:40]  You know what I mean?
[00:16:41]  Like, yes, it's not for me, but like, whatever.
[00:16:43]  That's better than the tech stuff that came, right?
[00:16:46]  But they would get together on the beach and burn this thing.
[00:16:48]  Then they kind of move out and combine with this other event out to the Black Rock Desert, which is a desert south of Reno, Nevada, one of my favorite cities in America, a city in which I have come out a big winner on occasion in my life.
[00:17:05]  Sometime in the 1990s.
[00:17:06]  And it's, you know, generally that kind of like 1990s artist stuff, like we're saying, you know, you can picture it.
[00:17:11]  You know, it's like a lot of cacophony society and like that was pranking was really big back then or like culture jamming.
[00:17:18]  So it's like a little adbustersy.
[00:17:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:20]  All that kind of stuff.
[00:17:21]  And, you know, there was, it's very libertarian, but I wouldn't say libertarian in the same way that like maybe some of the charter cities we talked about.
[00:17:28]  Kind of in like a very basic like, hey, why can't we just all love each other?
[00:17:32]  I'd say libertine.
[00:17:34]  Libertine.
[00:17:34]  Libertine libertarian, I would say.
[00:17:36]  I think more, it's a little more libertarian, big L libertarian now.
[00:17:40]  Yeah.
[00:17:40]  But, you know, very, like, very hippie barter.
[00:17:45]  You can only barter with things there.
[00:17:46]  You can buy anything.
[00:17:47]  I think it's still the rule.
[00:17:48]  You can sell anything either.
[00:17:50]  It's also a leave-in-trace kind of activity.
[00:17:53]  So there's like a lot of volunteers that come out and like, you know, pick shit up and people stay afterwards.
[00:17:59]  One wonders a little bit how green it could be with all of these people driving out to a desert, but you know, neither here nor there, also with tons of bottles of water.
[00:18:07]  You know, there's all these sort of rituals that people do.
[00:18:09]  You pick a playa name.
[00:18:11]  A playa is what they call the area.
[00:18:13]  And Liz, what would your playa name be?
[00:18:16]  Oh, wow.
[00:18:17]  Good.
[00:18:18]  Good question.
[00:18:20]  What would it be?
[00:18:22]  Anomalia.
[00:18:23]  Anomalia is really good.
[00:18:25]  That's spectacular.
[00:18:26]  Young Chomsie.
[00:18:27]  Young Chomsie is already kind of a playa name, but this urban playa.
[00:18:32]  What would your desert playa name be?
[00:18:34]  Dr. Gespacho.
[00:18:36]  Dr. Gespacho is really good.
[00:18:39]  Dr. Gespacho is really good.
[00:18:41]  That's good.
[00:18:42]  I think mine would be Aragorn, maybe?
[00:18:48]  Aragon?
[00:18:49]  Aragon?
[00:18:50]  Or it would either be Aragon Gondor.
[00:18:54]  Gondor, it might be, or Snakeskin.
[00:18:58]  You don't want to be Trandle?
[00:19:00]  Trandle, well, look what happened to Trandle.
[00:19:04]  We'll talk about Trandle later.
[00:19:05]  But no, that's like naming your kid Hitler these days.
[00:19:08]  So you pick a Playa name and you, you know, you kind of, you dress in your furs and you, you know, a lot of people, art cars, fashion.
[00:19:14]  Get your ass out, by the way, chaps on.
[00:19:16]  Oh, yo, yo, motherfucking, your cheeks are jiggling in the wind like sails upon the high Pacific.
[00:19:23]  But you're, yeah, you're flapping all over the place.
[00:19:25]  Art cars.
[00:19:26]  I got to tell you, since moving to New York City, I don't see fucking art cars anywhere.
[00:19:31]  There's no response from you on that.
[00:19:34]  You say that when we're off mic.
[00:19:36]  Stop that.
[00:19:36]  That's a fact.
[00:19:37]  That's such a bad running joke.
[00:19:39]  That you're anti-Semitic.
[00:19:41]  Well, at this point, it's more a war.
[00:19:42]  It's not X.com.
[00:19:44]  It's not X.com.
[00:19:45]  No.
[00:19:46]  It is, well, the ADL would not like you.
[00:19:49]  But you don't see a lot of art cars out here.
[00:19:53]  No, you don't.
[00:19:53]  You don't see a lot of art cars.
[00:19:55]  So that's really big of Bernie Man.
[00:19:56]  That's the whole thing is that people build out these big cars, these RVs, these things that they kind of camp and live in for the week as everyone is sort of building this libertarian, cooperative, like anything goes, like ephemeral city festival thing.
[00:20:13]  Yeah.
[00:20:13]  And so we mentioned sales and flapping in the wind.
[00:20:15]  I mean, I imagine lots of these cars have those.
[00:20:18]  Lots of sales.
[00:20:19]  Precisely, yes.
[00:20:20]  And lots of like sort of, I think, I always think of like the one-man band, but then like in car form.
[00:20:28]  Yeah.
[00:20:29]  You know what I mean?
[00:20:29]  So it's like, there's lots of like doohickeys like jingling and drundling about that are sort of like somehow steam powered.
[00:20:40]  Yeah.
[00:20:40]  Yeah.
[00:20:41]  It's very, it's very wild, wild west.
[00:20:47]  And, you know, there's dust everywhere and it's all like, you know, there's dust storms usually.
[00:20:53]  Quite the opposite of how this year turned out.
[00:20:56]  In the 2000s, with the dot-com boom in the Bay Area, it started attracting a lot of tech people who would like to let loose for a weekend of bacchanalian activities.
[00:21:07]  Famously, Google used Burning Man as the venue in which they interviewed Eric Schmidt, which I mean, this is when Burning Man really like also took off as like, but also became a like way bigger, crazier thing.
[00:21:24]  Yeah, there's like, I think with a lot of burning people burners, there's like a sort of divide between like prior to, I think they think of this era as selling out.
[00:21:34]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:35]  Like Burning Man, you know, sort of casting its past ethos aside and like really like cueing itself closer to the tech scene.
[00:21:43]  Yeah, basically a ton of like tech workers moved to the Bay Area and got very rich and then suddenly were like, damn, I'm going to shell out so much money to build the craziest art car and do the craziest drugs for a week.
[00:21:56]  And I think some of the more like eccentrics in the bohemian community got kind of not pushed out, but sort of like a little bit.
[00:22:05]  I mean, what's that joint near West Oak?
[00:22:08]  The Crucible?
[00:22:09]  It was like a big blacksmith theme.
[00:22:10]  Like those kind of people I think of.
[00:22:12]  And it's like, you know, that stuff to me is the type of people who do like suspension tattoo art.
[00:22:18]  But that's fully, thoroughly the opposite of my scene, not my scene.
[00:22:22]  When I was younger, I would be a massive hater.
[00:22:24]  Obviously, my brain still says you're corny, you're whack, whatever.
[00:22:30]  But my mouth is like, whatever.
[00:22:32]  I prefer you to the others.
[00:22:33]  This is people who are like, what if the circus was actually an artful theater?
[00:22:39]  And 24-7.
[00:22:41]  But Elon Musk, big fan, Grover Norquist goes every single year.
[00:22:47]  Grover Norquist goes to Burning Man every single year.
[00:22:50]  Jeff Bezos does as well, which by the way, I understand he's on human growth hormone.
[00:22:56]  He's got to stop sharing it with his wife's face.
[00:22:59]  Ticket prices have risen quite a bit since it started.
[00:23:04]  I think now they're in the thousands of dollars.
[00:23:08]  And it's very, it's like oftentimes there's like a big rush to get tickets.
[00:23:11]  People can't get in.
[00:23:12]  This erratically self-reliant kind of ethos that it started with is long past gone for many of the participants.
[00:23:20]  You know, they'll have these sort of pre-built camps that serfs will bring in.
[00:23:24]  And then the tech CEOs, Elon Musk, will fly in on a jet to Black Rock City airport.
[00:23:28]  He will dock, he will have...
[00:23:29]  Where is it exactly?
[00:23:31]  It is just in the motherfucking desert, south of Reno.
[00:23:34]  South of Reno.
[00:23:34]  South of Reno.
[00:23:35]  Okay.
[00:23:36]  South of Reno.
[00:23:36]  I love Reno.
[00:23:37]  I know you do.
[00:23:38]  We should think.
[00:23:40]  Okay.
[00:23:41]  Well, we should think about it.
[00:23:44]  Consider.
[00:23:45]  So the festival always culminates on the final night in the burning of the man.
[00:23:51]  Now, now, many of you DSA-style feminists may have had your ears perk up at that sentence.
[00:23:57]  However, it is merely an effigy of a man.
[00:24:01]  Unlike a Gundam does not contain a person.
[00:24:04]  I don't know if a Gundam contains a person, actually.
[00:24:06]  I haven't seen that show.
[00:24:06]  What was the movie?
[00:24:08]  Wicker Man.
[00:24:09]  No, not Wicker Man.
[00:24:10]  What's the Wicker Woman?
[00:24:12]  Wicker Woman?
[00:24:13]  Movie.
[00:24:14]  Okay, Valerius Alanis.
[00:24:16]  No.
[00:24:16]  No, Wicker Man.
[00:24:17]  Remake a Wicker Man already.
[00:24:18]  Oh, they put the man in the bear suit and then motherfucking Midsummer.
[00:24:23]  Wicker Woman.
[00:24:24]  Which, in retrospect, can we say a movie was not that good?
[00:24:27]  It was.
[00:24:27]  Well, you wouldn't like it.
[00:24:29]  He can't watch a scary movie.
[00:24:30]  Don't you know what?
[00:24:31]  I'm with you.
[00:24:31]  I don't like scary movies either.
[00:24:33]  I love scary movies.
[00:24:34]  Actually, I don't care about scary movies.
[00:24:36]  You know what's scary?
[00:24:37]  What?
[00:24:38]  A lot of people have died at Burning Man.
[00:24:39]  A number of deaths at Burning Man.
[00:24:42]  And to give him credit, 73,000 people in the desert every year taking experimental drugs.
[00:24:48]  The amount of deaths they've had is actually significantly less than you would expect.
[00:24:52]  Yeah, that's true.
[00:24:54]  There's been a number of deaths related to Burning Man.
[00:24:56]  Famously, a couple was run over in the early years while sleeping in a tent by an art car.
[00:25:01]  I know it caused a cleavage in the leadership of the organization.
[00:25:05]  Really?
[00:25:05]  Because some were like, let's keep going.
[00:25:08]  We view that maybe as a sacrifice.
[00:25:09]  And then some leaders were like, this is too much.
[00:25:11]  Shut it down.
[00:25:12]  I don't want to be involved in some of the people like getting run over in our car.
[00:25:15]  Totally.
[00:25:16]  Famously, and this is some wild pictures came out of this.
[00:25:20]  Do not look them up unless you have, you know.
[00:25:23]  Unless you're sick and twisted, like Bracefold.
[00:25:25]  Well, there's no graphic ones that I've seen, but a man with no previously reported mental health issues or drug problems or drugs reported in his system, although the coroner's report was never released, ran into the Burning Man itself a few years ago.
[00:25:42]  The effigy on the other.
[00:25:43]  So they burned this massive effigy.
[00:25:44]  They change it every year, but it's like an effigy in a temple made out of wood.
[00:25:48]  They burn it.
[00:25:49]  There's this massive sort of celebration on the final night.
[00:25:51]  And a guy straight up sprinted in and kind of in full view of everyone.
[00:25:56]  Third degree burns covering 97% of his body.
[00:25:59]  He survived?
[00:26:00]  Well, no, he died.
[00:26:00]  Oh.
[00:26:01]  Pretty much the next day.
[00:26:02]  He died the next day.
[00:26:03]  He was dead.
[00:26:04]  His body hadn't fully shut down yet.
[00:26:06]  That's horrible.
[00:26:07]  I think after that, they started surrounding the man with like, you know, people.
[00:26:12]  The Burning Man.
[00:26:13]  Yeah, the Burning Man.
[00:26:14]  I think there's now there's like a cordon of security basically around it to prevent something like that happening again.
[00:26:19]  I think it was really traumatic for a lot of people.
[00:26:21]  Imagine being on fucking acid and seeing a guy run into a burning massive.
[00:26:26]  No, I'm not imagining that at all.
[00:26:28]  I'm imagining that right now and just watching him run and you want to stop him and you can't.
[00:26:32]  So this year's Burning Man, things went a little wry.
[00:26:36]  It was just this last week, August 27th through September 4th, and yet people are still trapped there.
[00:26:43]  Oh, yeah.
[00:26:44]  This is from the New York Times.
[00:26:45]  Thousands of people at Burning Man Festival remained stranded there Sunday after torrential rains turned roads and grounds into muck, cutting off access.
[00:26:55]  Basically, like a huge storm, I think really like two huge storms, hit the playa.
[00:27:01]  La playa.
[00:27:03]  And turned all of that dust that ends up covering the Bay Area the week after everyone returns from the playa into mud and flooded the whole area.
[00:27:14]  It just turned it all into slush.
[00:27:16]  So organizers basically had to close down roads for the remainder of the festival this year.
[00:27:21]  So basically people who were coming who hadn't been there yet, who were coming up for the weekend, couldn't get in.
[00:27:26]  They had to turn around and go back because it was too dangerous.
[00:27:29]  The roads were just fucking flooded.
[00:27:30]  Head to Reno.
[00:27:32]  And everyone else who was already there was stuck inside.
[00:27:38]  And I think they're still stuck there.
[00:27:39]  They haven't been able to get out.
[00:27:41]  So as far as I know, at this point, there is currently a seven hour traffic jam.
[00:27:50]  Like if you, you know, you start, you're expecting seven hours of traffic if you're trying to pass the five miles to get to the gate because apparently today it's clear as of recording right now, but that could change.
[00:28:00]  And listen, if you are in your car and you get turned away from Burning Man, just head up straight to Reno.
[00:28:04]  Go to the Cal Neva Casino, one of the best casinos in America.
[00:28:08]  So this is basically what this, these storms led to basically 70,000, I mean shit ton of people.
[00:28:14]  I think maybe even 73,000 people stuck in a huge mud pit with a bunch of porta potties that were also flooded, no, like diminishing supplies, and no real internet access.
[00:28:31]  Yep.
[00:28:31]  Yeah.
[00:28:32]  There's like occasional cell phone reception for some people.
[00:28:36]  There's some Wi-Fi.
[00:28:37]  There's like a few things that have been trucked out.
[00:28:40]  But in general, you cannot connect to the internet.
[00:28:45]  There's also the mud is so bad that many people have reported that you can't wear shoes because they will just get sucked off.
[00:28:53]  They will just get your shoes.
[00:28:56]  You know, we were just talking about quicksand.
[00:28:59]  That's kind of a, that's sort of a quicksandy type related.
[00:29:03]  Let me tell you this.
[00:29:04]  I'm sitting on that motherfucking the G train and I see a girl or a guy, cross-legged pair of tabbies, the devil shoes like that.
[00:29:12]  I get on my hands and knees like a motherfucking basset hound and I put my fucking mouth on it and I suck those tabbies.
[00:29:21]  Now, the reason we're talking about this is because I would say the limit, the chaos that was kind of coming to light on social media as this was all unfolding proved to be a little opportunity for the old prankster.
[00:29:36]  Mr. Fireworks.
[00:29:38]  Mr. Fireworks, bad boy Brace Belden, who had a little fun at some burners.
[00:29:42]  Well, really, pretty much everyone's expense over the weekend.
[00:29:45]  Funnily enough, I think the burners were the least really effective.
[00:29:48]  Well, they didn't have any cell service.
[00:29:49]  They didn't have any cell service.
[00:29:51]  Although a few did manage to make counterclaims, which I, at that point, I got too bored to do.
[00:29:57]  Yeah, I think everyone else got a little bit messed.
[00:29:59]  Let's talk about what went down this weekend.
[00:30:03]  When was that?
[00:30:04]  Saturday night?
[00:30:05]  Yeah, I think it was Saturday afternoon.
[00:30:07]  Saturday afternoon, I was reading, preparing for the episode that we were going to do today.
[00:30:14]  Yeah, which is coming next week.
[00:30:15]  Which is coming next week.
[00:30:16]  And I was fussing around and I got to be honest with you, reading a very boring book.
[00:30:21]  Tell them what it's about.
[00:30:22]  Okay, but I was reading a boring poli sci book about the subject.
[00:30:26]  Snoozing in my motherfucking book.
[00:30:27]  No, you hear you say that.
[00:30:28]  And then people are going to be like, oh, it's one of Liz's ideas.
[00:30:31]  It's no, it was one of my ideas.
[00:30:33]  And then I was like, I was literally at the moment that I stopped reading the book, I was like, was this a bad idea?
[00:30:38]  And I get on the internet and I see that Black Rock City, which is what Burning Man calls the temporary town that is set up every year to celebrate.
[00:30:48]  That's like where everyone stays.
[00:30:49]  It's Black Rock City.
[00:30:50]  The BlackRock City Twitter account was basically saying like, do not travel to Black Rock City.
[00:30:56]  Access to the city is closed for the remainder of the event and you will be turned around.
[00:31:02]  And at first, I quote Tweetiet and said that I had something about like, oh, there's bombers on the way.
[00:31:07]  I'm here and there's bombers on the way.
[00:31:09]  And I was like, you know what?
[00:31:09]  That's too unbelievable.
[00:31:11]  And so then, and you know, I will say this for our podcast, we're never reading Twitter out loud to you guys.
[00:31:16]  We're forced to do it a little bit today, but bear with us.
[00:31:19]  Quote Tweetietten said, I wrote, or my social media intern Mehmet wrote, the rumors on the ground here are that there's some sort of virus on the loose at Burning Man that causes boils slash vomiting slash hemorrhaging.
[00:31:31]  Apparently, that's why they're not letting people in.
[00:31:34]  No idea if this is true.
[00:31:36]  Bid in RV all day.
[00:31:38]  And then source, Emmett Burning Man, Black Rock City.
[00:31:44]  Which is just a little goof.
[00:31:46]  And yeah, it was just your little goof.
[00:31:47]  Look, Brace likes, or Mehmet likes to goof around.
[00:31:51]  Goof around, like the Pharaohs.
[00:31:53]  We're all just having fun here.
[00:31:54]  Yeah.
[00:31:55]  I will say at some point in the evening, I got a little ping-bong on the little bing bong on the group chat, which was, oh man, my Burning Man shit is kind of taken off now.
[00:32:07]  Yeah, Mehmet, that's translate, auto-translate from he speaks in ancient Egyptian.
[00:32:11]  So yeah, I followed the initial one up with, they're not even letting helicopters take off from here.
[00:32:16]  So yeah, quote, mud is causing this.
[00:32:18]  People are really freaked out.
[00:32:20]  Yeah, so this did start to catch on on Twitter, particularly because you included screenshots of supposedly real text message conversations that people took to be direct evidence of testimony on the ground.

=== Hirache's Burning Man Alert (15:21) ===

[00:32:38]  So the first one is how I found out about it.
[00:32:41]  This is how I captioned it.
[00:32:42]  How I found out about it.
[00:32:43]  Stay input for now, but really freaked out.
[00:32:45]  And it is from a text messenger named Hirachi.
[00:32:52]  Hirache.
[00:32:53]  It looks like, I don't, what is the photo?
[00:32:56]  For the photo I used, I just googled guy having fun at Burning Man or something like that.
[00:33:01]  And then like went a little down on the images page to find a guy that like looked.
[00:33:07]  And so it starts.
[00:33:08]  Can you actually, can you, can you read Hirache's?
[00:33:10]  You start from the top.
[00:33:11]  Okay.
[00:33:12]  The first sentence is a little cut off on purpose.
[00:33:15]  Pumping, pumping, pumping.
[00:33:16]  Never seen anything like it.
[00:33:18]  Did you see the tail thing he got put in?
[00:33:20]  Then I responded with a question mark.
[00:33:21]  Yo, just figures you should hear from me first.
[00:33:23]  Daryl is crazy sick with something that has him coughing up really coagulated blood.
[00:33:27]  Medic showed up wearing a full suit.
[00:33:29]  No idea where he is now.
[00:33:30]  I would stay in your camper.
[00:33:31]  I wrote back, are you fucking serious?
[00:33:34]  I will say it does sound, it's like, it's pretty good.
[00:33:36]  You did a good job of like writing a little in medius rest.
[00:33:42]  In medius rest.
[00:33:43]  Yes.
[00:33:44]  Yes.
[00:33:44]  In medius.
[00:33:47]  So at this point, I'm like, all right, I'm going to try to pretend that there's, because it's taking off a little bit.
[00:33:51]  I'm like, I'm going to try to pretend that there's bubonic plague there.
[00:33:56]  And then there's another one I wrote that says they're putting up a fence.
[00:33:58]  And this one, it basically just adds to the previous one.
[00:34:01]  It says, but Hirachi says, Grendel told me they're putting up a fence on the west side of the playa.
[00:34:06]  Wrote who is, and he says outside agency.
[00:34:09]  And then I just found some screenshots.
[00:34:11]  And then I did a final one that I just wrote uh over.
[00:34:16]  And it's a picture of Drake as the sort of text avatar.
[00:34:20]  And his name is Scott in my phone.
[00:34:24]  He says, Finally got cell charger, saw your tweets.
[00:34:27]  You're never going to fucking believe it, LOL.
[00:34:30]  They're saying it's Ebola.
[00:34:33]  And so somehow, somehow, people really started to believe this.
[00:34:42]  So to be clear, this is a screenshot of a text message with the avatar is Drake.
[00:34:47]  A picture of Drake kind of like in a bed.
[00:34:51]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:53]  Sexy style.
[00:34:53]  Like when he'd send, like he's probably sent to Doja Cat or something like that.
[00:34:57]  You know what I mean?
[00:34:57]  Like a sexy style photo of Drake.
[00:34:59]  It is inarguably, though, and recognizably a photograph of Audrey Aubrey?
[00:35:06]  Aubrey.
[00:35:07]  Aubrey Graham Bell.
[00:35:10]  Aubrey Graham?
[00:35:11]  No.
[00:35:11]  Drake.
[00:35:12]  It's a photo of whatever his real name is.
[00:35:14]  It's a photo of Drake.
[00:35:16]  Inarguable.
[00:35:18]  It started taking off.
[00:35:21]  Yeah, a bunch of like serious journalists, like people with some real following, and I would say like who are, you know, real journalists.
[00:35:29]  Real journalists, real people who should know better, I will say that.
[00:35:33]  Like quote tweeted it, basically, you know, not saying, is this real, but kind of like, wow, something's going on here.
[00:35:40]  We need to investigate.
[00:35:41]  Can anyone corroborate?
[00:35:42]  Ba-da-da-da-da.
[00:35:45]  And they eventually deleted them because they could, I think someone probably DM'd them and was like, all right, man, this is obviously a hoax.
[00:35:51]  That's true and not, like, come on.
[00:35:53]  But not quickly enough.
[00:35:55]  Not quickly.
[00:35:56]  And I think, I think to me, I'm just astounded that anyone could see source M at Burning Man.
[00:36:03]  Be like, it's just, it seems crazy to me that anyone believed it even in the first place.
[00:36:09]  But the first people that really picked it up was the site Red State, which is a conservative website founded by Ben Domaneck.
[00:36:18]  Dominek, however you fucking say his name.
[00:36:21]  And they wrote an article and it's, it's, it's like a quick hit, basically like SEO article to maybe be first in line.
[00:36:28]  And I, you know, I followed it.
[00:36:29]  I followed these tweets, this thread up with like, you know, a tweet saying, if you're the person shooting something off at Burning Man right now, please stop.
[00:36:36]  People are freaked out enough with all the Ebola stuff now as it is.
[00:36:40]  So other people saw this and like, you know, I want to be clear here.
[00:36:44]  I didn't coordinate this with anybody.
[00:36:46]  I'm not like thinking about this in like a crazy way.
[00:36:49]  Like people, other people started posting like fake CDC screenshots.
[00:36:53]  Yeah, yeah, but they were just sort of picked up on the game, it seemed like.
[00:36:56]  Yeah, people sort of picked up on the game.
[00:36:59]  They started trying to have fun.
[00:37:00]  Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:37:01]  Having fun with it.
[00:37:02]  People were like posting like, you know, fake, or like, you know, how people will take a picture of like a tank on the back of a train and be like, is this headed to our cities?
[00:37:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:37:11]  And, you know, people obviously googled some old pictures of that and I added those to the thread.
[00:37:17]  I realized a lot of crypto blue checks were falling for it.
[00:37:21]  Yeah.
[00:37:21]  Like a.
[00:37:23]  Or were just getting in the game to yes, you know.
[00:37:27]  Well, a lot of them were replying fairly earnestly because that's, I mean, to be honest, like if you're an NFT guy, you will kind of fall for anything.
[00:37:37]  Like, I could piss on you and be like, dude, this rain is fucking crazy out.
[00:37:45]  And it's hot.
[00:37:47]  And it smells like the cloud ate some pineapple.
[00:37:50]  But, you know, I just started retweeting everything.
[00:37:53]  I figured there were a few notes that I had to hit.
[00:37:55]  And because I tweeted a lot more.
[00:37:57]  And there was a few notes that I had to hit to make this funny, I guess.
[00:38:04]  One is that I'm in an RV the entire time that I do not leave.
[00:38:08]  Two, it is fully soundproof.
[00:38:12]  Three, it is all windows and the windshield are completely covered in blackout curtains.
[00:38:18]  Four, I have no water, but I'm drinking grappa.
[00:38:21]  Five, I'm using Starlink to both navigate the RV, which is soundproof and completely blacked out, and to post, but the Starlink doesn't work that well.
[00:38:31]  And so that therefore I couldn't post pictures, even though I was posting images of screenshots.
[00:38:37]  Six, that I was listening to Avici, and that seven, and this was very important, that Diplo was related to the sort of ground zero Ebola exposure event.
[00:38:48]  So, because what happened was a video got posted of Diplo and Chris Rock showing that they had escaped the mud pit, basically.
[00:38:58]  That like everything had been shut down, but they were somehow able to like hitchhike it with some fans and get in some kind of Humvee or whatever it was, some off-roading vehicle and get on out of there, which is funny because then I saw Chris, there's photos of Chris Rock with Lizzo at Beyoncé last night.
[00:39:16]  Wait, like with her?
[00:39:18]  Because, all right, I just, some things happened with me and her at this nightclub with a banana and I'm just what I'm trying to say is that there was a lot of Diplo imagery out on social media, and our boy Mehmet was quite smart as the prolific prankster that he is and picked up on that as saw that as an opportunity to say that Diplo had Ebola, essentially.
[00:39:46]  Or Mehmet wrote, did not have Diplo and Chris Rock broke Ebola quarantine at Burning Man with the help of a mysterious unnamed fan on my 2023 dystopia bingo card.
[00:39:57]  But here we are.
[00:39:58]  And so that was because a lot of people were quote tweeting everything with saying dystopian bingo card.
[00:40:04]  Let me ask you this.
[00:40:04]  When was the last time you played fucking bingo, dude?
[00:40:07]  That's not how bingo cards are.
[00:40:09]  It's just numbers on there.
[00:40:10]  It's not like plague and, you know, boils or whatever.
[00:40:13]  It's just numbers.
[00:40:14]  And so at this point, I just kind of kept tweeting variations of just me, grappa, starlink, avici, blackout curtains, and the beats pill.
[00:40:23]  So Burning Man starts trending and then Ebola starts trending.
[00:40:28]  And then Ebola really starts trending.
[00:40:31]  Shit got really picked up fast.
[00:40:34]  So someone posted a video of LAX getting evacuated, which really did happen.
[00:40:37]  And then someone else stole that video and captioned it with a sort of just asking questions style post about it why it was being evacuated due to a flight from Burning Man that was quarantined because of Ebola exposure.
[00:40:51]  So the first actual journalist to reach out on the record, we got to give them credit.
[00:40:57]  God bless him.
[00:40:58]  God love him.
[00:40:59]  You know him, the Epic Times.
[00:41:01]  I got it.
[00:41:04]  That's so funny that they were the first ones to be like, let me just reach out to this guy and see what's up.
[00:41:08]  No, but the guy was like credulous, whoever one is where you believe it.
[00:41:13]  The guy believed it.
[00:41:15]  And then I think he like looked into it.
[00:41:17]  It's very obviously fake.
[00:41:19]  More sort of like news stories started essentially like the way it worked was like I post all this stuff and then other people post a few other things.
[00:41:30]  I sent you the Trandle thing in the morning.
[00:41:32]  Liz wrote the Trandle series of texts.
[00:41:35]  I survived which was fantastic when I used Delta 8 gummies as your burn chasm.
[00:41:44]  And you're, I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, your yeah, the names, the names that we used were Baggins, Hirache, Kindle, Trundle, Trandle, what?
[00:41:57]  Trandle.
[00:41:58]  Trandle.
[00:41:59]  Oh, yeah, Trandle, Trandle, Cheyenne, and Marcuse.
[00:42:03]  Marcuse was your name.
[00:42:06]  And I used Delta 8 gummies for your picture.
[00:42:09]  I cannot believe anyone for, and no disrespect, because I know some listeners probably did.
[00:42:13]  That's yeah, you're crazy.
[00:42:15]  It's Drake, bro.
[00:42:17]  But, but, you know, all these crypto accounts started sort of taking the screenshots and recropping them and then starting reporting it as there's rumors of Ebola at Burning Man.
[00:42:29]  Well, the best was when it made it to TikTok.
[00:42:31]  Yes.
[00:42:32]  Now there's some new terrifying information coming out that there's a virus on the loose in the festival and that people are getting really sick with boils, vomiting, hemorrhaging.
[00:42:41]  This is a text from one of the festival goers and he said, Yo, just figured you should hear from me first.
[00:42:47]  Daryl is crazy sick with something that has him coughing up really coagulated blood.
[00:42:51]  And then that got picked up by Barstool.
[00:42:53]  There is a very, very bad situation developing at Burning Man right now.
[00:42:57]  This Twitter account, True A N Pod, has been tweeting a lot about this.
[00:43:00]  He's saying there's rumors on the ground here are that there's some sort of virus on loose at Burning Man that causes boils vomiting, hemorrhaging.
[00:43:07]  Apparently, that's why they're not letting people in.
[00:43:09]  No idea if this is true, been an RV all day.
[00:43:12]  And then that got picked up by gay guys.
[00:43:14]  So yeah, no tears from me, but I hope everyone survives.
[00:43:17]  Ebola outbreak?
[00:43:18]  That's kind of crazy.
[00:43:20]  Everybody stay safe and take your emergency.
[00:43:22]  And then finally, that got picked up by just regular old classic crazy people.
[00:43:26]  To all of the people in Burning Man, I am sorry that you fell into their trap.
[00:43:30]  They is the bad guys, the evil ones, and they have an agenda 2030 where they want to get rid of half the population of the planet by the year 2030.
[00:43:41]  But, you know, you should have kind of expected something because they don't want you around.
[00:43:47]  And you just decided to go to Burning Man and say, hey, I'm going to walk right into the bad guy's trap.
[00:43:53]  And now they're flooding you.
[00:43:54]  And now they have Ebola over there.
[00:43:56]  So at this point, there are a number of debunking articles coming out.
[00:44:03]  So once you've been boomed, you got a deboom.
[00:44:06]  Exactly.
[00:44:07]  And Forbes, Forbes puts out one that is pretty straightforward in saying, like, this is a hoax.
[00:44:14]  There is no Ebola at Burning Man.
[00:44:16]  But because so many people, it said like, no, there is no Ebola at Burning Man.
[00:44:21]  But because so many people just retweeted a few tweets that were like, someone had changed it to say, yes, there is Ebola at Burning Man, they had to add an update to the Forbes article saying that the doctored screenshots were fake as well.
[00:44:35]  So they had to re-debunk on their own debunking article.
[00:44:40]  But a bunch of fake news starts coming out.
[00:44:42]  Namely, Fox 11 says death at Burning Man sparks Ebola rumors on social media.
[00:44:48]  This itself is fake news, as I did not know that someone had actually died at Burning Man.
[00:44:55]  Yeah, that didn't spark it.
[00:44:56]  It was Brace trying to get out of that.
[00:45:00]  It was Mehmet.
[00:45:02]  It was Brace texting Mehmet to try to get out of reading this poli-sci book for like 20 minutes while I fucked around the internet.
[00:45:10]  I had no idea someone had died.
[00:45:12]  All of these like, like basically like SEO, like that whole market of essentially like AI generated debunking websites, all Indian, start posting like, you know, it's the fake, fake, fake.
[00:45:25]  And then I think one of the piece de resistance is when the account belonging to the documentary died suddenly.
[00:45:35]  I love all of the replies in that are like, it's like, you know, some woman with like a white, kind of like icy cat avatar named like Lady Hectate.
[00:45:45]  And it's like, we knew Marburg was coming.
[00:45:48]  Yeah.
[00:45:48]  That's like all of the replies.
[00:45:50]  Yeah, everyone thinks it's, what the fuck is Marburg?
[00:45:52]  No, yeah.
[00:45:53]  Marburg's don't, don't tell us.
[00:45:54]  It's white Ebola.
[00:45:56]  I don't want to, everyone kept being like, oh, like, all of the things.
[00:46:00]  Well, it has some relation to COVID and COVID-19 vaccine 5G get the facts.
[00:46:04]  Gotcha.
[00:46:05]  Because a lot of the COVID 5G get the facts people were like, it's actually like this is happening.
[00:46:10]  There is Ebola-like symptoms and mass death at Burning Man.
[00:46:13]  FEMA is apparently.
[00:46:15]  I don't know where the FEMA thing came.
[00:46:16]  I think it's because of the fence thing that I said.
[00:46:20]  Earth movers, too.
[00:46:20]  It was a nice text.
[00:46:21]  I said that there's Earth Movers.
[00:46:23]  I was trying to imply that they're both putting up a fence and digging pits for bodies.
[00:46:28]  Burning Man, Ebola, 5G, coronavirus, get the facts.
[00:46:31]  But died suddenly, which is 500,000 Twitter followers.
[00:46:35]  It was a documentary that was feeded by all of the, you know, like really hardcore anti-vaccine people.
[00:46:43]  You know, the woke RMNA, RMRNA, shit or whatever.
[00:46:47]  They wrote, developing story.
[00:46:48]  We are getting reports that there had been a confirmed Ebola outbreak on the ground at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada.
[00:46:55]  Attendees have been sold to shelter in place allegedly due to all the flooding.
[00:47:00]  And one attendee has been pronounced dead without a cause of death given.
[00:47:04]  And then they posted a cropped version, meaning they took out the tail part of the text that Hirache sent me.
[00:47:12]  And I just want to tell you this.
[00:47:14]  There is no confirmed outbreak of Ebola at Burning Man.
[00:47:20]  There is a text that I sent to myself as Hirache in my apartment.
[00:47:28]  And then you have within, within like 15 hours, you have died suddenly who have staked their careers on combating the, you know, the medical, whatever, like the biomedical totalitarian state, completely just regurgitating it with absolutely not only no contextual awareness of like, this is so clearly fake,
[00:47:52]  or maybe even I should look into this besides just reading a fake fucking text screenshot from Hirache.

=== Alien Invasion Hoax (14:51) ===

[00:47:59]  And they knew they had to crop out Hirachi too because that would make it less believable.
[00:48:04]  Of course.
[00:48:05]  I mean, even Laura Loomer tweeted something.
[00:48:10]  That was, when it got there, I was like, all right, all right, all right, this is fucking crazy.
[00:48:16]  And so at this point, it was fully out of our hands.
[00:48:20]  And eventually I started pretending that I had Ebola and that Diplo was the source due to a triple kiss at ground zero, which I was.
[00:48:27]  I don't think I really followed this part of the story.
[00:48:29]  I kind of got bored and was like, well, not bored.
[00:48:31]  I was just like, if I tweet about this too much, it'll just like, I wanted to continue the storyline, but also like kill it.
[00:48:38]  You have to kill it.
[00:48:38]  I wanted to kill it because I wanted to post my usual stuff.
[00:48:42]  Yeah.
[00:48:42]  Mehmet's shirtless, all that.
[00:48:44]  Mehmet's pantsless, all that kind of stuff.
[00:48:46]  No, but like, yeah, I was just, I couldn't do it anymore.
[00:48:48]  But so those storylines sort of petered out, but for the lore, the triple kiss came, was the cause of the Ebola outbreak, and Diplo escaped while the two women succumbed to it at the camp.
[00:49:04]  At this point, though, it had fully gotten out of our hands and was being debunked by all these different sources, AOL, Newsweek, you know, USA Today, all that kind of shit, all debunking it, but not even mentioning us, like mentioning second order rumors of this, which is really, I mean, it spread.
[00:49:23]  It was almost a perfect host because Burning Man attendees.
[00:49:26]  In fact, the medical tenant Burning Man had to deny the hoax.
[00:49:30]  Ebola?
[00:49:31]  Okay, no.
[00:49:33]  I work here on the playa in the hospital and there is no Ebola.
[00:49:37]  Have you seen Ebola cases here?
[00:49:38]  No.
[00:49:39]  And then to cap it all off, I found a screenshot of somebody's like insane Twitter payout when Elon Musk started paying people, which, by the way, footnote on that afterwards.
[00:49:51]  I found a screenshot of somebody getting paid like $12,000 for their tweets or whatever.
[00:49:57]  And I posted that as if it would be paid to me and essentially implied that I had made all that stuff up in order to receive a large payment of Elon Musk.
[00:50:06]  A lot of people got mad at that.
[00:50:07]  A lot of people got mad at that.
[00:50:08]  People who, everybody got kind of mad at that.
[00:50:12]  Yeah.
[00:50:12]  But it was designed to get them in.
[00:50:14]  Absolutely.
[00:50:15]  Which, by the way, we, of course, clearly not verified.
[00:50:18]  Although I guess you could hide the checks now or whatever.
[00:50:20]  But can you actually, is that just a rumor?
[00:50:23]  I don't know.
[00:50:23]  One thing about that is it's very clear that Elon Musk coordinated all those people sharing their crazy Twitter payouts really big.
[00:50:29]  But if you look up Twitter payouts now, it's all people being like, I got $30 for like billions of impressions or whatever.
[00:50:36]  That was obviously just payola to like people he was friends with.
[00:50:39]  Despite all this, I think it's like very funny how quickly this all spread.
[00:50:43]  And I think I look forward to like six months from now when we get a, remember when there was an Ebola outbreak at Bernie Man viral tweet?
[00:50:50]  And still none of it will be credited back to you.
[00:50:53]  Which is good.
[00:50:54]  I mean, we've done hoaxes before, right?
[00:50:58]  We've did the dog eating.
[00:51:00]  There was a point where I was claiming that after the Try Guys scandal, which I can't remember that, I guess I got cheated on his wife.
[00:51:07]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:51:08]  That was the least of their worries because they made me eat a dog, a dog, a greyhound dog named Jabba on camera for BuzzFeed.
[00:51:15]  Yeah.
[00:51:15]  In our AOC episode.
[00:51:17]  Yeah, we did a little prank.
[00:51:18]  We like to do Little April Fools, you know.
[00:51:20]  And our, what was the last one?
[00:51:21]  It was commentary tracking.
[00:51:24]  Yeah, people thought that was serious too, which was a lot of people.
[00:51:27]  People got mad at us.
[00:51:28]  People got really mad at us for that.
[00:51:30]  Yeah.
[00:51:30]  And I think, you know, I think though, when people think of hoaxes or even like public pranks over the past like couple years, or really, it's been like almost 10 years now.
[00:51:40]  People really think about like the 2016 election, fake news, Donald Trump, Cambridge Analytica, whatever that means.
[00:51:48]  Facts.
[00:51:49]  Yeah, totally.
[00:51:50]  Frog people, Pootler, all of that.
[00:51:52]  You know what I mean?
[00:51:52]  I think that all kind of comes to mind.
[00:51:54]  But one of the most infamous and I think innocent hoaxes was the 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles, War of the Worlds.
[00:52:04]  Do you know about, everyone knows this story, right?
[00:52:07]  Of course.
[00:52:08]  Yeah.
[00:52:08]  Inspired by obviously the other Wells, H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.
[00:52:13]  But for people who don't know, the story goes like this.
[00:52:16]  Orson Welles, who I think maybe people know as the, you know, kind of gourmand-esque, I'll say.
[00:52:23]  One to one.
[00:52:24]  Ah, the French champagne has always been celebrated for its excellence.
[00:52:32]  Yeah.
[00:52:33]  He's both like, he has the most like aristocratic and yet like anarchic demeanor.
[00:52:38]  He absolutely is a rare breed.
[00:52:40]  Yeah.
[00:52:41]  He's one of my first loves.
[00:52:43]  But he's a war season.
[00:52:46]  Yeah, he directed Citizen Kane.
[00:52:48]  I think that's probably what most people know him for.
[00:52:52]  But before that, he had a little small radio show on CBS called The Mercury Theater on Air.
[00:52:58]  It had only been going on for about 17 weeks prior to the broadcast War of the Worlds.
[00:53:04]  And it would do like small little literary adaptations, really like highbrow culture hour, kind of like story tom.
[00:53:10]  And he's very like, I mean, if you know Orson Welles, if you've heard him speak, he has quite the voice for theater.
[00:53:18]  He's got a big chest and lungs to film.
[00:53:21]  Yes.
[00:53:22]  So for Halloween, he was like, hmm, we should adapt something a little bit different.
[00:53:27]  And so he and his producer decide to do H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, which was already a classic in the 30s.
[00:53:34]  This classic of the genre was published in 1898.
[00:53:38]  And it was kind of like a high point for like turn of the century sci-fi.
[00:53:42]  It was the first alien invasion story, actually.
[00:53:45]  And the book tells the story of an alien invasion where Martians are attacking England.
[00:53:50]  And they have all of these crazy weapons like heat rays or like poisonous gas guns, things like that.
[00:53:57]  And they easily defeat the British, which in my opinion is understandable, completely believable.
[00:54:02]  But to people at that time, it seemed very unbelievable given the state and the larges of the British empire.
[00:54:10]  We've defeated the Indians.
[00:54:12]  But then, unfortunately, the aliens get defeated by a virus.
[00:54:17]  Classico style, not Ebola, but something that they don't have natural immunity to.
[00:54:23]  And then they're kaput.
[00:54:24]  Let me ask you this.
[00:54:25]  So are you saying that the aliens perhaps died suddenly?
[00:54:28]  They did die unvaccinated.
[00:54:32]  We don't know.
[00:54:33]  Question mark?
[00:54:33]  Question?
[00:54:35]  So the book is somewhat a kind of satire of the British Empire.
[00:54:39]  But, you know, it also drew on kind of like popular astronomy books, all that, Moon, Mars, things of that nature.
[00:54:45]  So back to Orson Welles.
[00:54:47]  He and his producer, they adapt the story into two parts, which is actually, if you read the novel, that's kind of how it's set up as well.
[00:54:53]  The first is a series of kind of fake news bulletins that are describing the alien invasion.
[00:54:59]  Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News.
[00:55:04]  Metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial.
[00:55:07]  Something's happening.
[00:55:08]  The top is beginning to rotate like a screw in the...
[00:55:10]  He's moving!
[00:55:11]  Look at the man!
[00:55:12]  He's not here!
[00:55:13]  He's not going to die yet!
[00:55:14]  Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I've ever written.
[00:55:20]  And then the second is Orson Welles sort of doing this very Wellsian dramatic monologue where he is like the last man on earth like surveying the wreckage of this like liar is deserted.
[00:55:33]  He got feathers everywhere.
[00:55:34]  Yes.
[00:55:36]  So up to, you know, in the process of editing and writing all of this, they start making the first part, the first section longer and longer because I think they're getting like really into it and they start cutting the second part down.
[00:55:48]  They're like, okay, this is a little cheesy.
[00:55:50]  It's like too indulgent for Wells.
[00:55:53]  They start like through this editing process.
[00:55:54]  I mean, it's really interesting how this all comes together.
[00:55:57]  They start just cutting all of the references to time, sort of like battles that had taken place in the past or weeks before, like so much so that it starts to then read as if the broadcast is proceeding in real time.
[00:56:11]  But that wasn't just like the initial intention.
[00:56:14]  Years later, the producers go on to explain they're not trying to like fool people, but they were just removing all these references to lean out the story and try to like draw listeners in because it is a radio show, you know, and so they're really thinking of it in this kind of like theatrical way, trying to like, you know, develop some dramatic believability.
[00:56:34]  So and then in this process, the actors then get involved and they start suggesting all of this more believable dialogue.
[00:56:41]  You know, they kind of change things a little bit, get things a little bit more naturalistic.
[00:56:45]  One of the actors even like brings up and he studies the live broadcast of the Hindenburg as a reference of like how to kind of show or like act out like real-time horror and tragedy on air, which is kind of funny.
[00:57:03]  So the funny thing about the way this all worked was that the first section where it's all of these kind of news bulletins, it was like a whole run of almost like 40 minutes, which is a long time.
[00:57:15]  So for people just turning on the radio, they would have to be listening for a really long time for there to be any kind of intermission where you would hear, and now you're listening to the CBS News Hour or whatever it is.
[00:57:26]  This is Orson Welles, you know, the Mercury, whatever, like to let you know this is a radio play.
[00:57:31]  It was quite a long time.
[00:57:33]  And famously, a lot of people believed that it was a real broadcast.
[00:57:39]  This is a quote from one of the producers of the show.
[00:57:41]  Our actual broadcast time was less than 40 minutes.
[00:57:44]  During that time, men traveled long distances.
[00:57:47]  Large bodies of troops were mobilized.
[00:57:49]  Cabinet meetings were held.
[00:57:50]  Savage battles fought on land and air.
[00:57:53]  And millions of people accepted it emotionally, if not logically.
[00:57:58]  I think that is a really important point.
[00:58:00]  So dear, dear listeners, please, please put that in your mind prison.
[00:58:05]  Yeah, I mean, a lot of people really didn't tune in for the full 40 minutes.
[00:58:09]  They would just kind of like dip in and out, you know, and they would get sucked in for this like brief time, but then they would leave and they would tell all of their friends, oh my God, there's an alien invasion happening.
[00:58:19]  And this sort of spurred a bit of a mass panic.
[00:58:22]  Like thousands of people called the police, they called newspapers, they called CBS, like people showed up outside of the CBS offices.
[00:58:29]  There were people like fleeing their homes.
[00:58:31]  I think like some of the stories of the chaos that was drummed up have been a little over-exaggerated over the course of history.
[00:58:39]  But it's true, like not an insignificant portion of people believed that aliens were literally invading the US.
[00:58:46]  And actually, funny enough, a portion of those people didn't think they were actually hearing an alien invasion.
[00:58:53]  They thought they were listening to a live broadcast of a German invasion.
[00:58:57]  I can see him on the horizon.
[00:58:59]  He's lying on the ground and a woman is defecating on his chest.
[00:59:04]  I can't believe he must be a German.
[00:59:06]  No, but really, people thought that they were like, there was so much anxiety in 38, obviously, that they turned on the radio and they suddenly thought they were hearing a live broadcast of like Germans bombing and invading the U.S.
[00:59:21]  And I think there is something to be said there about people kind of half believing and sort of wanting to believe it and believing it in this emotional rather than, like you said, like they said, like a logical way.
[00:59:31]  Yeah.
[00:59:32]  You know, it's, it's, it's, I sort of relate that to when I saw this people sort of pouncing upon the Burning Man stuff.
[00:59:40]  I was like, there's no way that people can believe it.
[00:59:41]  But I think that a large part of it was people really wanting it to be true and emotionally feeling like it should be true and sort of almost playing along while being fooled at the same time, if that makes sense.
[00:59:53]  Yeah, I mean, I think that totally makes sense.
[00:59:55]  And I think that's a really important point because hoaxes, and I mean, or you could say fakes or I think even jokes, right?
[01:00:04]  They're performances that live or die based on the active participation of the audience.
[01:00:09]  Balloon boy.
[01:00:10]  Which, I mean, no, but it's true.
[01:00:12]  Like the audience's imagination is what the hoax depends on.
[01:00:16]  And I think in this way, you know, the faker and the audience kind of become collaborators in an interesting way.
[01:00:24]  I think, you know, unconsciously, really.
[01:00:28]  But that's how these sort of categories of what's fake and real kind of are able to dissolve a little bit, right?
[01:00:35]  Like the hoax ends up living in this kind of indeterminable space as it becomes something as more and more people imbue it with whatever they're throwing in there, right?
[01:00:48]  You know, the audience's imagination like imbues the hoax with this kind of like unstable and constantly changing significance and meaning.
[01:00:59]  And I think that active collaboration is like that blurs all these other categories as well, which is like who is the actor?
[01:01:08]  Who is the audience?
[01:01:09]  Like who's the hoaxer and who's the believer, right?
[01:01:11]  Because everyone's kind of putting all this stuff into it.
[01:01:14]  I mean, Orson Welles kind of says that a little bit when he's trying to speak to the press about, you know, taking some accountability for what he did.
[01:01:25]  Do you think, Mr. Wells, that you might have taken unfair advantage of the public in using a method as a conveyance for authentic news?
[01:01:33]  I don't believe that I have since.
[01:01:36]  It is not a method original with me.
[01:01:38]  It is used by many radio programs.
[01:01:40]  Well, every radio program tries to be more dramatic than life.
[01:01:44]  I would have been surprised if they'd been told that a presentation was less effective than life.
[01:01:49]  He also explored all of this in this movie that both of us love very dearly called F for Fake.
[01:01:58]  And I actually, I'll say, I've been wanting to talk about this movie for so long.
[01:02:04]  And we are not a movie podcast, but I do think that this film, which is really more like an essay, is quite germane to our episode.
[01:02:11]  It's also just a great fucking movie.
[01:02:14]  I can't recommend this enough.
[01:02:16]  When I saw this.
[01:02:19]  Oh my God.
[01:02:20]  I don't know.
[01:02:20]  I don't know how old I was.
[01:02:22]  I was probably like 18 or 19.
[01:02:23]  I was like so into movies.
[01:02:25]  So into film movies.
[01:02:28]  And this just like fucking blew my mind, man.
[01:02:31]  Like it was, it is so wonderful and delightful and zany and a true odyssey and mind-melting maze of wonder.
[01:02:44]  I had a roommate, one Mr. Martini, who's, this was his favorite movie.

=== Why It Blown My Mind (02:39) ===

[01:02:51]  That's really just his name.
[01:02:52]  Well, it really is his last name.
[01:02:54]  Yeah.
[01:02:55]  But yeah, his name is Mr. Martini.
[01:02:58]  And he would watch this motherfucker all the time.
[01:03:00]  So like the same thing when I was like 18 or 19, this saw this, but I wasn't really, it's kind of, I had some other things on my mind back then.
[01:03:06]  But it is a great fucking film.
[01:03:08]  Yeah.
[01:03:08]  And I actually think I will say it's streaming now on HBO.
[01:03:11]  So everyone listening, go watch it, but not until after you finished our episode.
[01:03:16]  So just a little bit about this movie.
[01:03:18]  This was the last movie directed and presented to the public by Wells.
[01:03:23]  It came out in 1975, which is almost 40 years after War of the Worlds.
[01:03:27]  And it was pretty much a total audience and critical bomb.
[01:03:31]  Like it had whatever the 1975 equivalent of Big Tomato Splat is.
[01:03:36]  That's what it got.
[01:03:36]  People hated it.
[01:03:37]  Hated it.
[01:03:38]  It didn't really get another life until the Criterion Collection RIP.
[01:03:43]  I don't know.
[01:03:44]  Did they?
[01:03:44]  Does that still exist?
[01:03:45]  I don't know.
[01:03:45]  It definitely still exists.
[01:03:47]  They re-released it, which is, I think, how I saw it because I was like real big DVD head back in the day when I was like movie person, hanging out at Kim's and shit.
[01:03:56]  But it got kind of like a second life, second wind when they re-released it.
[01:04:03]  And it's sort of like a quasi-investigation into the world of art forgery.
[01:04:08]  It tells the story of a prolific art forger named Elmer Dohori.
[01:04:16]  Elmir.
[01:04:17]  On a bissa.
[01:04:19]  And his biographer, as Wells would say, Clifford Irving, who, not coincidentally to Wells, authored a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, who is, fair to say, also a very controversial and mysterious figure himself.
[01:04:34]  Mysterious figure himself, yeah.
[01:04:36]  Now, that's a real lean, that's really not what the movie is about, but it does start there.
[01:04:40]  And I don't want to give too much away because you really just got to go and explore and enjoy it for yourself.
[01:04:46]  But we should say that the movie isn't so much about the crime of fakery as about the moment of the discovery of the fake.
[01:04:54]  Yeah.
[01:04:55]  And what that discovery discloses.
[01:04:58]  Now, this is a quote from Wells from the movie.
[01:05:02]  Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.
[01:05:07]  Picasso once said that he could paint fake Picasso as well as anybody.
[01:05:11]  And someone like Picasso could say something like that and get away with it.
[01:05:15]  But an Elmir de Hori?
[01:05:17]  Elmir is a profound embarrassment to the art world.
[01:05:20]  He is a man of talent making monkeys out of those who have disappointed him.
[01:05:24]  This film doesn't exalt the forger.
[01:05:26]  It denounces the art market because it is elementary, isn't it?

=== Bullshit Artists and Charlatans (12:55) ===

[01:05:30]  That if you don't have the market, the fakers couldn't exist.
[01:05:34]  Now, I want to put a pin in that.
[01:05:37]  Or wait, pinpoint that?
[01:05:38]  Put a pin in it.
[01:05:39]  Whichever.
[01:05:41]  I want to highlight that.
[01:05:42]  There we go.
[01:05:43]  Without a market, fakes can't exist.
[01:05:45]  I think that that's really key.
[01:05:48]  And there's no doubt that Twitter and other social media platforms are markets.
[01:05:52]  Absolutely.
[01:05:53]  You know, and I think the question then is, but what kinds of markets?
[01:05:57]  Well, I think that there's a few different aspects to that, right?
[01:06:01]  It was funny because I had a lot of people like sort of responding like, you're profiting off of this misinformation or whatever.
[01:06:07]  It's like, well, in the vague sense that we do a podcast and we can talk about it on the podcast, but I think this is a free episode, right?
[01:06:15]  Yeah.
[01:06:16]  But also we had another thing that we could just do the podcast anyways.
[01:06:21]  But, you know, I guess the people who were profiting off it directly were the people with the paid Twitter accounts who were reposting the screenshots and like pretending that there was a, you know, a big Ebola outbreak at Burning Man.
[01:06:35]  And then the people who had these sort of clickbait websites, the vigilant fox was one of, this also sounds like sort of a Wellsian character.
[01:06:43]  The vigilant fox, some bullshit, fucking Twitter-based bullshit on their website, which they've now taken down and apologized, but on their website, thevilligant vigilantfox.com posted all these rumors about the Ebola outbreak.
[01:06:59]  And so you have those people who are possibly actually profiting, although probably not in great dollar amounts.
[01:07:08]  But I would say we did profit in that it was fun.
[01:07:10]  And you kind of can't put a price on it.
[01:07:12]  It's sort of priceless.
[01:07:13]  I think that's a different kind of profit, though.
[01:07:15]  I do think that there is something, there's some kind of market going on there.
[01:07:20]  Absolutely there is.
[01:07:22]  Like Walter Benjamin remarked on he had a radio show too.
[01:07:26]  Some people might not know this, but he was a radio man.
[01:07:28]  The shadow.
[01:07:29]  No, he did.
[01:07:30]  He had a little radio show in Germany between 1927 and 1933 until it became untenable for him to have a radio show in Germany, as you could imagine.
[01:07:40]  And most of it was for children, which is very gentle.
[01:07:44]  But he, in one of his broadcasts, he wrote about, or not wrote, but he spoke about the world of stamp collecting and forgery.
[01:07:53]  Huge in Germany, by the way.
[01:07:54]  Yeah, and he had this series on, he had basically kind of a series of shows for children about various fakers and magicians and tricksters.
[01:08:01]  And I think these are all sort of one of the same category.
[01:08:05]  Like Kasperhauser, which classic German fake.
[01:08:10]  I think it's real.
[01:08:10]  Well, I think his funky ass was in.
[01:08:12]  Speaking of movies.
[01:08:13]  A lot of great movies about Kasper Hauser.
[01:08:15]  Never seen a single one of them.
[01:08:16]  But I know him.
[01:08:17]  You've never seen The Legend of Kasper Hauser.
[01:08:19]  No, I know him, though.
[01:08:20]  I know the real Kasperhauser.
[01:08:22]  But also Cogliostro and my personal favorite, obvious classic, Dr. Faust.
[01:08:28]  Dr. Fauci.
[01:08:30]  But in this essay on stamps, he says it so succinctly, very vignamine-esque.
[01:08:36]  He says, so forgery, you know, that whenever something is collected, it will be forged without exception.
[01:08:42]  But I think that's so great, you know, to pair that with what Wells said.
[01:08:45]  And I think that the question that's kind of relevant to our discussion with the instance of social media is like, okay, well, what's being collected and what's being forged?
[01:08:55]  And so much that we've talked about in the show, I think, has like tried to kind of, I don't know, map out some of the maze of social media.
[01:09:03]  The best description I've read is from Rob Horning.
[01:09:08]  He says, basically, communication, consumption, and sociality, which circulate and then, and I think this is the key, substitute freely for one another.
[01:09:18]  Social media supplies the infrastructure for this free exchange.
[01:09:21]  And I think that's really true.
[01:09:23]  Communication, consumption, sociality.
[01:09:25]  And those three categories get really blurry or those distinctions really dissolve, especially in the instance of the fake.
[01:09:34]  And more specifically in the instance of the discovery of the fake, right?
[01:09:37]  Like everyone who is participating in this in social media, like you were saying, it's like they're all kind of like joining in on the fun because when they want to like consume news, they want to do that.
[01:09:46]  But they also like kind of can see that it's sort of fun and we're all playing along.
[01:09:49]  They feel like they're in on the joke.
[01:09:51]  They feel like they're part of a group, but also they're consuming this media that's all coming, you know what I mean?
[01:09:56]  And all of these kind of categories of different things, communication, consumption, sociality, they all start to kind of substitute for one another and they start to get kind of get blurry.
[01:10:06]  It's almost all one thing, it feels like, right?
[01:10:09]  Well, I noticed there was a few people that were both sort of playing along, but I could tell that they actually kind of believed it as well.
[01:10:16]  And I think that is sort of an important type of person because I think that's all of us in some way, right?
[01:10:23]  Like there has been, I mean, like you mentioned earlier, all the fake news or whatever.
[01:10:28]  I mean, especially with the spread of social media, right?
[01:10:31]  And the fact that for some reason, even though we all intellectually, I think, know that like, okay, if you hear an outrageous claim, like, you know, you should get some pretty good evidence that it's true.
[01:10:42]  I think that standard has been drastically lowered, if not completely disappeared.
[01:10:46]  And so what you have is people sort of not really believing anything they see on the internet, but also kind of believing everything they see on the internet.
[01:10:54]  And that like combination, in the same way that alcohol and cocaine make a new drug in you that actually fucking rips ass, I think sort of that combination is, and I don't mean fart, I mean it rules, is a really intoxicating one that gets a lot of people, you know, to continue this metaphor kind of until the wheels fall off, really buzzed.
[01:11:14]  Yeah.
[01:11:15]  But then to continue even further, when they realize it's all fake, the come down.
[01:11:22]  The shame hangover.
[01:11:23]  Well, that's the thing.
[01:11:24]  That's the thing I have experienced many times in my life.
[01:11:26]  I have spent my life telling not little lies, but only really big ones.
[01:11:32]  I mean, when I was younger, I've told this on the show before, but when I was younger, we'd go on tour and we would kind of think of the most outrageous bullshit that we could tell people with a straight face and see if they believe us.
[01:11:43]  And so one big thing I did when I was 16, I went on a very long tour with my band.
[01:11:47]  And I would tell people that you could smell light because the scent spectrum is like the sun, it's like the light spectrum where you can only perceive, you only perceive a certain small area of the spectrum, but your body is actually absorbing the entirety of the spectrum.
[01:12:06]  And so the sun exists on the scent spectrum, but you can't actually smell it.
[01:12:10]  But that's what wakes you up in the morning is the smell of the sun.
[01:12:14]  And I tell you this, I probably convinced thousands of people of this over a year-long period.
[01:12:20]  But people get pissed when you tell them it's not true.
[01:12:23]  People get really pissed when you're like, no, that's not true at all.
[01:12:26]  But what do you think they get mad at?
[01:12:28]  I think they get mad at themselves.
[01:12:29]  I think they get mad at themselves too, but it's unbecoming.
[01:12:32]  And it's, of course, instinctually, you want to get mad.
[01:12:34]  I mean, this happens even when like, you know, you're in an elevator with somebody else and the elevator breaks down.
[01:12:38]  A large part of people like kind of want to blame the other person.
[01:12:42]  Like, you know, you look for someone else to blame, but it's really your own fault, right?
[01:12:46]  Well, it's not even your own fault.
[01:12:47]  I don't think it's anyone's fault.
[01:12:48]  I think it's sort of the fault of being, this sounds so fucking corny, but like being in society.
[01:12:57]  It reminds me so much of, I mean, speaking of magicians and charlatans, you can throw the hypnotist in there as kind of the classic performer.
[01:13:07]  There was the kind of one of the big critiques of hypnosis was that people weren't being cured.
[01:13:15]  They just were showing that they're suffering from being hypnotizable, which you can like put another way, which is that hypnosis discloses that we all actually have a lot of influence over each other.
[01:13:28]  Yeah.
[01:13:28]  And often in very intractable ways.
[01:13:31]  And I think like when that's put up as a spectacle, as a performance, it makes clear that there's also like a large appetite for being persuaded.
[01:13:44]  Yeah.
[01:13:45]  People want to believe.
[01:13:50]  Yeah, and I think that that makes people, especially politically minded people, very uncomfortable.
[01:13:56]  Adam Phillips said, he wrote, what the hypnotist exposed was just how lowbrow people really were.
[01:14:03]  It wasn't truth or goodness they were after.
[01:14:06]  They wanted to be moved.
[01:14:08]  And that quote reminds me so much of what, you know, to bring us back to this idea of like people, you know, with War of the Worlds being drawn in, they believed it emotionally, even if not logically.
[01:14:20]  I mean, the same thing with the Ebola outbreak, right?
[01:14:21]  If you think about it for two seconds, like it's very unlikely that a disease, especially with a disease with the incubation period that Ebola has, but a disease that has, you know, I hope appeared in this country for a long time, like, you know, almost like 10 years now, has suddenly reappeared in a mass casualty event at Burning Man, and that FEMA is putting up fences.
[01:14:45]  I think that people kind of want that to be true.
[01:14:48]  There's a spiritual truth that people feel to it.
[01:14:51]  And they want it to be true.
[01:14:52]  And that's something that like I had a lot of people that I know, a lot of people text me.
[01:14:57]  Are you at Burning Man?
[01:14:59]  Now, I don't think there's any circumstances in which anybody that I know personally in my real life would ever believe that I was at Burning Man.
[01:15:07]  There's almost no chance.
[01:15:09]  If you had told, you know, anybody that I'm friends with that I'm at Burning Man without the Ebola stuff, they would be like, you're lying.
[01:15:15]  People were texting me.
[01:15:16]  People were texting young Chomsky.
[01:15:17]  People were texting.
[01:15:19]  It's listen, a lot of people thought I was at Burning Man.
[01:15:22]  But it was, I think the thing is that people wanted that to be true.
[01:15:27]  They wanted their Ebola outbreak to be true.
[01:15:30]  And so in order for that to be true, I had to actually be at Burning Man and that Hirache had to actually be sending me text messages.
[01:15:37]  And so it's this emotional leap that sort of foregoes any kind of logic.
[01:15:42]  I don't know.
[01:15:43]  It doesn't, it's something, I find it very tender.
[01:15:46]  Me too.
[01:15:47]  Like I don't find it, I think a lot of people, and especially again, very like serious, you know, politically minded.
[01:15:54]  Like we, there was like some guy who got so mad who was like, there's, oh, if you want to see how disinformation, fake news panic spread, just tweet, you know, Google, tweet, whatever, search Twitter for Ebola Burning Man, and you'll see.
[01:16:10]  Facts.
[01:16:10]  First of all, absolutely facts.
[01:16:12]  Second of all, Mr. Policeman, if I can't spread fake news on the disinformation casino x.com, where the fuck am I supposed to do it?
[01:16:22]  You're thinking of Twitter, brother.
[01:16:24]  This is x.com now.
[01:16:25]  We can do whatever we want.
[01:16:26]  Yeah, it's fucking.
[01:16:27]  They never even communicated and noted my shit.
[01:16:29]  Dude, no rules, man.
[01:16:30]  Rules.
[01:16:31]  X.com.
[01:16:32]  I have a book.
[01:16:32]  I'm holding on to something that doesn't exist anymore.
[01:16:34]  I can fucking dunk.
[01:16:37]  But I also think that it's like, I think that there is, you know, it's not just that people want to believe.
[01:16:42]  I think they also want to be persuaded.
[01:16:44]  They want to be moved.
[01:16:46]  Yeah.
[01:16:46]  And I think there's something very tender about that, something that we shouldn't condemn or get mad at.
[01:16:53]  But I do think that it is very complicated and very messy.
[01:16:59]  Right.
[01:16:59]  Like, I think, I don't think there's like, you know, some easy answer of how to fix that.
[01:17:06]  I don't think it's something that can be fixed.
[01:17:08]  I think it's just something that can be recognized.
[01:17:10]  Yeah.
[01:17:11]  I mean, you know, we've talked a lot about the effects that the internet, I think, has had on people's brains and how we communicate.
[01:17:20]  And, you know, my, my, my, my view on it has been consistently and remains that like our brains cannot handle the way that we take in information on the internet.
[01:17:31]  Like it's just, we aren't meant to function like that.
[01:17:33]  That's not how we're designed to work by God who is real and did design us, except for some of us.
[01:17:39]  But it's like we're, it's, it's, it's something that's just unnatural, right?
[01:17:44]  And so what you're saying is correct.
[01:17:46]  I think there's only, you can kind of only diagnose it and look at it.
[01:17:49]  And there's no actual sort of putting the toothpaste back in the tube with that.
[01:17:53]  I think it's just something that's going to get worse is the right word, but like more widespread.
[01:17:59]  And we talk about a lot how people kind of live in different realities, right?
[01:18:03]  And like you can kind of construct your own reality.
[01:18:05]  But a lot of those realities that people construct for themselves online are sort of like grabbing from here, grabbing from there.
[01:18:10]  And like that's they're kind of building up them up brick by brick.
[01:18:13]  And I think of the Ebola at Burning Man as one of those bricks.

=== Constructing Personal Realities (03:48) ===

[01:18:26]  To be clear, earlier when I said I can dunk, I didn't mean that in, like, the Twitter.
[01:18:29]  Like I can quote tweet this guy and say that he's stupid.
[01:18:32]  I mean, I can literally physically dunk a basketball into a hoop with both hands.
[01:18:35]  Best of luck on your next fake news.
[01:18:37]  You've seen me do it.
[01:18:40]  This is okay.
[01:18:42]  All right.
[01:18:43]  What is this is steampunk?
[01:18:44]  Because that's a gaslight.
[01:18:46]  That's a gaslight.
[01:18:49]  I want to say one last thing, which is that there is, just because like we didn't really talk about it because that's not what the episode is about.
[01:18:57]  And also we're not a movie podcast.
[01:18:58]  But I just want to say one last thing about F for Fake.
[01:19:00]  There's the most beautiful scene at the end of the film that's quite memorable.
[01:19:06]  Yes.
[01:19:07]  Where Orson Welles is like walking amongst the foggy forests.
[01:19:14]  Yes.
[01:19:15]  And he comes upon, he's like talking about Shard, the cathedral.
[01:19:19]  And he says like this beautiful, like long monologue about the kind of, you know, he's talking, he's kind of sort of talking about the nature of like fakes and forgery.
[01:19:31]  And does it, does even like, does it matter who makes something?
[01:19:37]  When did it become, when did it become meaningful that someone, that an artist was attributed to something?
[01:19:43]  Yeah.
[01:19:43]  And that, you know, the kind of introduction of the fake required that signature in a funny way, right?
[01:19:51]  I know what you line.
[01:19:51]  I know what you learned.
[01:19:52]  But he's talking about then, he's like, then you look at something like Shart, you know, this Gothic Cathedral that took, I don't know how fucking long, 200 years or whatever, to make, to build.
[01:20:03]  There's no like architect.
[01:20:05]  There's no name on it.
[01:20:06]  And he's talking about, and yet it still stands and it's still here and we're still among its ruins.
[01:20:12]  And it will be here much for much longer than we'll ever be.
[01:20:15]  And it's this most, the most beautiful, I don't know, little meditation on kind of what it means to make something and leave a mark or not leave a mark.
[01:20:26]  I don't know.
[01:20:26]  You just, everyone's got to watch this movie.
[01:20:27]  It's so great.
[01:20:30]  And, you know, I love this.
[01:20:33]  For so long, I've spent so much of my life thinking about that category of like magician and trickster and prankster.
[01:20:39]  And it's really performer.
[01:20:43]  It's all one thing, I think, in a way.
[01:20:46]  And if you will forgive me the indulgence, I'm reminded of another one of my great loves, which is Shakespeare, who his last play was a play about a magician.
[01:21:01]  It was called The Tempest.
[01:21:03]  It's a very weird play.
[01:21:04]  And we're not going to get into what it's about or whatever.
[01:21:07]  But I think you could call it like a tragic comedy, even though they don't use those categories.
[01:21:12]  And it follows this sort of devilish magician named Prospero, who some say is inspired by Dr. Faust.
[01:21:25]  Christopher Marlowe wrote the first play about Faust, Dr. Faustus.
[01:21:29]  So that was always Shakespeare's little, like, you know, his little double that he was always following around or whatever.
[01:21:37]  But so Prospero is like Faust in this way, that he's this kind of like erudite sage, like magician, Wonderman, or whatever.
[01:21:45]  And all of his wisdom comes from his understanding of magic.
[01:21:50]  And the magician is, like I was saying, it's like another performer, right?
[01:21:56]  There's a great quote from Orson Welles, In F for Fake, where he says, a magician is just an actor playing the part of a magician, which I've always loved.
[01:22:06]  And in The Tempest, there's like probably, you know, one of the most beautiful stanzas that Shakespeare ever wrote.

=== Leaving Revels Behind (01:19) ===

[01:22:15]  And I'm going to read it right now because we haven't done that in a long time.
[01:22:20]  Our revels are now ended.
[01:22:22]  These are actors, as I foretold you.
[01:22:25]  We're all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.
[01:22:30]  And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all of which it inherit, shall dissolve.
[01:22:44]  And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a wreck behind.
[01:22:50]  We are such stuff as dreams are made on.
[01:22:54]  And our little life is rounded with a sleep.
[01:23:03]  My name is Liz.
[01:23:06]  My name, of course, is Rachel Jake, aka the Dark Cowboy, aka the Gourmand, aka Mr. Fireworks, aka the fucker.
[01:23:19]  That's a new one.
[01:23:20]  No, they've been calling me that down in the sewers.
[01:23:24]  And of course, we are joined by producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called Truinon.
[01:23:32]  We'll see you next time.
[01:23:34]  Bye-bye.