True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 363: Bannable Offense
Aired: 2024-03-21
Duration: 01:52:21


=== Drama at the Palace (10:35) ===

[00:00:00]  We got to talk about Kate.
[00:00:01]  I'll read it out.
[00:00:03]  What?
[00:00:04]  The thing you wanted me to read out.
[00:00:06]  What are you talking about?
[00:00:07]  The message, the link.
[00:00:09]  Oh, I forgot about that.
[00:00:10]  I do want to talk about that.
[00:00:11]  But before we get into that, which is this is unique to Truanon.
[00:00:17]  This is real boots on the ground info.
[00:00:20]  Incredible, incredible info.
[00:00:23]  But I just want to mention real quick, that photo that was released of the video of them walking.
[00:00:29]  Yeah.
[00:00:30]  Fuck no.
[00:00:30]  You don't think it's Kate?
[00:00:32]  I will say this.
[00:00:32]  It could be her, but it was taken in late November or early December.
[00:00:37]  Because the Christmas villages are up at the farm and there's tintal everywhere.
[00:00:41]  I looked at that video and I was like, all these people are like, it's not her.
[00:00:44]  And then I thought, for those who don't know, TMZ or somebody released a video.
[00:00:49]  TMZ released a video of Kate, the missing Kate Middleton and her husband, the king in waiting, Prince William, walking.
[00:00:58]  Excuse me.
[00:00:59]  I burped because I was so excited at the news.
[00:01:01]  Like a local farmstead.
[00:01:02]  A local farmstead, which are very English.
[00:01:08]  And people are saying it's not Kate Middleton.
[00:01:10]  Andy Cohen said it was not her.
[00:01:12]  Well, he's all snizzed up.
[00:01:15]  Which, by the way, when that came out, I was like, yeah, no shit.
[00:01:18]  That's why I don't want this.
[00:01:19]  It's Andy Cohen.
[00:01:20]  You are more in this world than I do, but for my brief interactions with Bravo land, I like Andy Cohen.
[00:01:25]  Yeah, he's great.
[00:01:26]  He should host all the awards.
[00:01:28]  Oh, and he should come.
[00:01:29]  He should host this.
[00:01:30]  He should replace.
[00:01:30]  Oh, my God.
[00:01:31]  He would be.
[00:01:31]  Andy Cohen on Truanon?
[00:01:33]  Instead of Brace?
[00:01:34]  Instead of Brace and Liz.
[00:01:35]  And then Brace goes on Bravo?
[00:01:37]  Yeah, he does the whole thing, and then we take, watch what happens.
[00:01:40]  A little switcheroo.
[00:01:40]  Freaky Friday.
[00:01:41]  Andy, let's do a Freaky Friday.
[00:01:43]  Let's do a Freaky Friday.
[00:01:45]  So you don't think that's Kate?
[00:01:46]  Well, I was looking at the video of the so-called Kate Middleton, of the so-called Kate Middleton walking down the street.
[00:01:53]  And I realized, I was like, I actually have no ability to tell if this is Kate Middleton or not.
[00:01:58]  Well, it's quite blurry.
[00:01:59]  So they're not giving us a lot of information.
[00:02:01]  I'm going to be honest, I can't, I've seen a million pictures of Kate Middleton.
[00:02:04]  I could not describe her for you.
[00:02:06]  I can't.
[00:02:06]  It's just awful.
[00:02:07]  Yeah, but you have face blindness.
[00:02:08]  I don't have face blindness.
[00:02:09]  When it comes to royals?
[00:02:10]  When it comes to white women.
[00:02:14]  I can go either way on it being her, but I do believe.
[00:02:18]  That it was an old video.
[00:02:19]  That it's an old video.
[00:02:20]  It's an old video.
[00:02:20]  I really, really believe it's an old video.
[00:02:22]  So we received a DM from a rock and roller over there in fucking England.
[00:02:28]  This is, I want to be clear, although there is a chain of custody for this information that I won't repeat because it would probably get in trouble.
[00:02:37]  The chain of custody seems legit, but this is unverified information that we were repeating uncritically.
[00:02:42]  It's gossip we're repeating uncritically.
[00:02:44]  I heard about the Rose and Will affair just over two years ago.
[00:02:49]  A couple of people who I think would know these things have confirmed it to me too.
[00:02:53]  Apparently, he has slept around before this occasionally over the years, but the Rose affair became very emotional and intense, and it was while Kate was pregnant with Lewis or Louis.
[00:03:02]  I want you to pause for a second.
[00:03:03]  I just want to be clear.
[00:03:04]  So remember, we were talking about with Rose.
[00:03:07]  Rose Snoggingham.
[00:03:08]  Yes.
[00:03:09]  The mulchness of Tumley.
[00:03:11]  The Chumney of Sardinia.
[00:03:12]  The one who I stand by.
[00:03:14]  You think she's striking?
[00:03:15]  Is quite striking.
[00:03:16]  Yeah.
[00:03:16]  Well.
[00:03:17]  She's very pretty.
[00:03:19]  Listen, I'm not going to say I would say no, but.
[00:03:21]  I will say, but so the rumors about her and Will, as our little tipster, Troops on the Ground, Boots on the Ground, says, like, those have been in the English tabloids and in Royal Watch.
[00:03:34]  People have said this for a while.
[00:03:35]  They've, yes, that there's always been this rumor, and that, yes, it was particularly potent, the rumor, when she was pregnant.
[00:03:43]  Okay.
[00:03:44]  Rose.
[00:03:44]  Like, from Titanic.
[00:03:46]  Or my grandmother.
[00:03:47]  My English grandmother.
[00:03:49]  Draw me like one of your public school boys.
[00:03:53]  Kate and Will live most of their time in Norfolk, Norfolk, Norfolk, and are part of this socialite set in Norfolk called the Turnip Tofts.
[00:04:01]  Yes, the Turnip Tofts.
[00:04:02]  I sent that to you earlier.
[00:04:03]  You did.
[00:04:04]  Rose and her husband are in this, quote, set, too.
[00:04:07]  So the affair was apparently mortifying for Kate, as well as being obviously emotionally horrific because it was just very known news amongst the circles, which is embarrassing.
[00:04:16]  Yes.
[00:04:17]  Also, she's obviously a little skinwalker-y.
[00:04:19]  Well, you think that she, like who, Rose?
[00:04:22]  Yeah, there's like definitely a single white female thing coming up.
[00:04:25]  Eventually, like a, well, neither of these single white females are single, but I get what you're saying.
[00:04:30]  Eventually, like a year or so later, the news picked it up a little bit, but mostly not the main press because of the relationship they have with the palace, et cetera.
[00:04:38]  Allegedly, Will and Kate have spent the last year or two trying to rebuild their marriage after the Rose affair and make nice with some of the people involved.
[00:04:44]  The Rose Affair sounds like an actual British military intelligence issue.
[00:04:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:52]  A bunch of like colonial British troops caught with bakabazis in fucking Afghanistan.
[00:04:58]  Kate has even been civil with Rose and went to a festival on Rose's estate last year at Houghton.
[00:05:04]  Who fucking, why am I reading this?
[00:05:05]  Houghton, or it's probably called like Hofton, but H-O-U-G-H-T-O-N Hall.
[00:05:10]  You can say however you want.
[00:05:12]  Yeah, facts, but British people are particular.
[00:05:16]  And then parentheses, it was last summer when the papers kept making a massive deal out of Kate going to a rave.
[00:05:21]  That's when they were reporting it because it was a big deal that she went to an event on Rose's estate after the affair.
[00:05:27]  All right, next page.
[00:05:29]  Apparently, all this was going well, but again, again, but in January, when Kate announced the abdominal surgery, which medically is so beyond vague, it could be a million things, I heard from someone who was involved in some of these things from a legal perspective that what had actually happened is after Christmas in the first week of January, Will serve Kate divorce papers for her.
[00:05:50]  Cue some sort of very dramatic sound effect.
[00:05:57]  That's crazy.
[00:06:00]  That is crazy.
[00:06:02]  Truly?
[00:06:02]  Do they get girls get divorced, though, right?
[00:06:04]  They did.
[00:06:05]  Charles' son.
[00:06:06]  Yeah.
[00:06:07]  For her, it came out of nowhere.
[00:06:08]  It also was immediately obvious to her that it had been planned for a long time between Will and the palace, and he was waiting for Christmas to be over.
[00:06:16]  But I don't know why they, I guess, the thing is.
[00:06:18]  Okay, wait, I'm going to pause you.
[00:06:20]  I know there's more to come.
[00:06:21]  Rock with it, baby.
[00:06:23]  I don't know why they would do this now unless they really think that Charles's time on this earth is passing.
[00:06:32]  Is passing colon has grown out of control, and all the young milk sops from down at Houghton Hall are unable to drain his colon as they were able to in the past.
[00:06:43]  It's not his colon, it's his prostate, right?
[00:06:46]  Oh, fuck.
[00:06:46]  What's wait, girls?
[00:06:48]  Oh, yeah, don't know the difference.
[00:06:50]  I'm completely up front with you.
[00:06:51]  That's crazy.
[00:06:52]  You should figure out because I know that because colon cancer, they're both in the asshole.
[00:06:56]  But colon, everyone has a colon, only fellas have a prostate.
[00:06:59]  Okay, so the fact that they want to get the divorce happen, if this is true from our dipster, what you're saying, that they would want to do this now means that they are preparing for Will to take the crown much earlier than perhaps some royal watchers would.
[00:07:18]  Prostates enlarged.
[00:07:20]  That's what you milk.
[00:07:21]  You don't milk a colon.
[00:07:24]  Jesus fucking.
[00:07:25]  Give me some milk, you'll milk my mandam colon.
[00:07:28]  Anyways, afterwards, Kate obviously flipped and became completely uncooperative with the palace, not responding or speaking to anyone.
[00:07:37]  They had to think quickly about the public engagements thing in an excuse, and that's why they said abdominal surgery because it buys them plenty of time.
[00:07:44]  Okay, so the theory is that she, or this is the tip, that she, no surgery, she's in hiding because Will wants to divorce her.
[00:07:52]  Yeah, and maybe there was some kind of abdominal thing, but probably not.
[00:07:58]  Kate is now strategizing because her main concern is the kids.
[00:08:02]  Well, titanation needed.
[00:08:04]  Because her, or who she will practically have very little control or custody over.
[00:08:08]  That's true.
[00:08:09]  That's true, because that's also, that's the line of succession.
[00:08:12]  Yeah.
[00:08:12]  She's already been refused on which school George can go to, so she is distressed with her mom, et cetera, trying to plan.
[00:08:19]  That's why she won't speak to media or hasn't been seen with the kids, et cetera.
[00:08:23]  This makes sense to me.
[00:08:24]  Okay, so I will say that I, because I've been, you know, totally deep diving in all of this stuff, my Twitter for you page is a lot of royal accounts that I would otherwise not see.
[00:08:40]  And there was like a couple of reports, I use reporters loosely because some of them have like, you know, Queen Mary avatars, shit like that.
[00:08:49]  They were saying that all of the messaging coming out is clearly coming from both like two different camps.
[00:08:54]  Yeah.
[00:08:55]  That you've got like Will's camp and like the palace's camp, and then whatever's coming from Kate's people.
[00:09:00]  Because I do think it's important to note that after the whole fiasco with the photo, the palace like left her out to dry.
[00:09:08]  Yeah.
[00:09:08]  Like they were like, they were like, oh, it's her fault.
[00:09:11]  Yeah.
[00:09:11]  As if she's making a composite photo on fucking on her iPhone.
[00:09:15]  Like it makes no sense.
[00:09:16]  It's so nonsensical.
[00:09:17]  Yeah.
[00:09:18]  But they were immediately like, actually, it was her fault.
[00:09:20]  And they made, you know, her Twitter account put out that bizarre statement that was basically like, we have a serious problem.
[00:09:26]  Yeah.
[00:09:27]  But so I think that like the fact that the idea of them not communicating seems apparent in the messaging coming out public facing.
[00:09:36]  So this is the final page.
[00:09:39]  And this is less reputable.
[00:09:42]  The other bit of gossip I've heard that isn't from a reputable source at all, so this is really just gossip, is that Thomas, who is the ex of Kate's sister, Pippa, I was wondering who Pippa was.
[00:09:53]  No, Pippa, yeah, Pippa's a sister was.
[00:09:55]  She's got the funky trunk.
[00:09:57]  I don't think it's that funky.
[00:09:58]  But that was people made a news that Pippa had a great ass.
[00:10:02]  And you got your head all the way up it.
[00:10:05]  At the wedding, she wore that ugly ass.
[00:10:08]  Yeah, I missed that.
[00:10:09]  I saw that those things on the other side.
[00:10:11]  People remember, I talked about this when we went through the timeline.
[00:10:15]  Thomas, one of their friends from the Turnip Dogs, blew his brains out.
[00:10:22]  Thomas was having an affair with Will.
[00:10:25]  Got out in their circles, and that Thomas, who's married but in love with Will, went home to his parents' house, told him what was going on, walked outside and shot himself in the face with a shotgun.

=== Popped Pimple Theory (12:15) ===

[00:10:36]  Popped his own damn pimple.
[00:10:37]  That's a bit of editorializing for me.
[00:10:39]  Will met Thomas years ago when he was dating Pippa.
[00:10:43]  That's crazy.
[00:10:44]  That's crazy.
[00:10:45]  That's too much like the movie.
[00:10:46]  What was that movie that everyone loved with the music?
[00:10:49]  Oh, fuck.
[00:10:51]  The one with the TikTok ass movie.
[00:10:54]  Yeah.
[00:10:55]  What about the estate?
[00:10:56]  No.
[00:10:57]  Saltburn.
[00:10:57]  Saltburn.
[00:10:58]  That's a little too saltburn for me.
[00:10:59]  That's exactly the plot of Saltburn Island.
[00:11:01]  Isn't it?
[00:11:02]  I don't know.
[00:11:03]  I think it is.
[00:11:03]  Has anyone in this room seen Saltbury?
[00:11:05]  He doesn't blow his brains out at the end, but he falls in love with someone and then it's like a whole manic thing and it's extremely gay.
[00:11:12]  How do you know that?
[00:11:14]  Because I know everything.
[00:11:16]  I do know he pops a bit of the old ball.
[00:11:19]  That's crazy because I didn't know.
[00:11:20]  That's literally the part I didn't know about the movie.
[00:11:22]  That's the only thing I know about the movie.
[00:11:24]  That's why I know all the other stuff about the movie except for that part.
[00:11:27]  He got the poo on me.
[00:11:29]  That's what he does, except for Tizy.
[00:11:31]  You know, he got the, I got wait, I got the poo on me from fucking Joe Dirt?
[00:11:36]  I got the poo on me.
[00:11:38]  I don't, I've never seen it.
[00:11:39]  Oh, he goes like that.
[00:11:41]  Oh, I got the poo on me.
[00:11:44]  Stop doing that.
[00:11:46]  Welcome to the show.
[00:11:47]  Ladies and gentlemen, I do not have the poo on me.
[00:12:11]  My name is Brace Belden.
[00:12:12]  I'm Liz.
[00:12:14]  The tuna tour for self.
[00:12:15]  And here we are.
[00:12:16]  Here's the peppermint punk.
[00:12:18]  Young Chomsky, the producer of this podcast, which is called Hello.
[00:12:24]  A minor gonging.
[00:12:26]  We have a guest today.
[00:12:27]  We do, which we didn't intro because we just started recording and started talking.
[00:12:31]  But we have with us today Max Reed from Substack.
[00:12:37]  The Max Reed show.
[00:12:38]  You've seen this byline everywhere.
[00:12:40]  Where?
[00:12:40]  New York Magazine.
[00:12:41]  Don't make me do this.
[00:12:42]  I don't know.
[00:12:42]  He writes for a bunch of shit.
[00:12:44]  So he's probably written in something you've read.
[00:12:46]  Yeah.
[00:12:46]  But he's a classic, longtime journalist, covered the technology sector for many years.
[00:12:51]  And we both like his Liz is an avid reader of Substack.
[00:12:54]  I am a significantly less avid reader, but Liz often recommends things to me that I like.
[00:12:59]  She recommended this guy's Substack, and I paid to subscribe.
[00:13:02]  I like it.
[00:13:04]  Yeah, we're here.
[00:13:05]  We're talking about everything.
[00:13:06]  TikTok, social media, Gen Z, Gen Alpha.
[00:13:10]  What else are we talking about?
[00:13:11]  We talk a lot of shit towards the end.
[00:13:13]  You know what?
[00:13:14]  I'm not even going to say it because I don't want to spoil it.
[00:13:16]  It's a very fun interview or conversation.
[00:13:19]  It's not an interview.
[00:13:19]  It's a damn conversation.
[00:13:21]  And you know what?
[00:13:22]  Let us cue up the millennial pause, which is when you're about to do something choogie, but you feel it's a little bit gay.
[00:13:30]  The millennial pause started now.
[00:13:43]  I was born in 85.
[00:13:45]  Strong memories.
[00:13:45]  I worked at a video store, things that don't exist anymore.
[00:13:48]  Like I know in New Jersey where I grew up.
[00:13:52]  And it's strong memories of like physical media and like having to draw maps on a piece of paper to know where I was going when I first moved to New York City or whatever.
[00:14:01]  And I think my brother's born in 89.
[00:14:05]  He probably had, you know, he has the same, there's some like vestigial understanding.
[00:14:10]  I wasn't raised by computer.
[00:14:13]  I was raised by a man.
[00:14:15]  But I didn't, I am a late adopter to digital goods because I didn't like my family had one, we had one computer, but I was only allowed on it for 30 minutes a day.
[00:14:25]  And so I've told the story on the show before, but like I tried to play EverQuest and that didn't work.
[00:14:29]  And that sort of ended my professional gaming career because it would take so long to boot up.
[00:14:33]  But I didn't get a smartphone until after high school.
[00:14:37]  Like I was 19 or something.
[00:14:40]  Oh, I mean, I was in college when the iPhone came out.
[00:14:44]  I had dropped out of college by then, but I was an extremely online tween and teen.
[00:14:51]  Like I was super into AIM and learning how to build websites.
[00:14:57]  I taught myself like all the computer coding and I'd be like, I'm going to build a Dawson's Creek GeoCDs so I can like teach myself how to, yeah, and like early fandom.
[00:15:11]  You do kind of, whenever we talk about our website and stuff, you do have like ideas.
[00:15:15]  I fucking know how to build a website in 2002.
[00:15:21]  But I do know, you know, I know my way around the old rinky dink of a computer.
[00:15:26]  But I was like, yeah, and then extremely early adopter of social media as well.
[00:15:32]  MySpace, obviously, but Friendster before then.
[00:15:35]  And then I remember how big of a deal it was when Facebook finally came to my college campus because it felt, I think everyone was sort of like, no, they think we're like a real college or something, you know?
[00:15:52]  But so I have like always been, I feel like I've always been like an extremely online person, even though I feel very proud to be not digitally native.
[00:16:02]  And I feel like I've always had like one foot in, one foot out.
[00:16:05]  Yeah, I had the exact same experience of waiting for, like, I was in that same college cohort where Facebook came to campus and there was a before Facebook and an after Facebook.
[00:16:16]  And I mean, I wish that it was some kind of thing where I could be like before Facebook, like everybody was like handsome and having fun right now on Facebook.
[00:16:23]  But I don't really remember the difference.
[00:16:25]  I mean, I don't remember anything about college, more or less except for the fact that Facebook arrived like halfway through.
[00:16:30]  But, you know, when I talk to, like, so I have a three-year-old right now, which is way too early to even think about this kind of thing.
[00:16:36]  But I notice all the time, I mean, he watches two, we let him watch two episodes of Bluey a day, which is seven minutes or whatever.
[00:16:42]  But like, the big thing I noticed is how easy, and this is the most obvious, this is not an original observation.
[00:16:49]  Anybody who's ever watched a kid in the 2000s will do in the 2010s or 2020s will tell you, is like, he knows how to use an iPhone.
[00:16:55]  He knows how to use an iPad.
[00:16:57]  He's like fully live.
[00:16:58]  Yeah, I mean, like, he knows how to click on stuff.
[00:17:00]  Like, in fact, when I give him my laptop, he is trying to, he's trying to like move icons around the screen using his fingers or whatever.
[00:17:07]  Like, there's a real, he's going to have a facility with this stuff, a kind of facility that is, that I didn't, certainly didn't grow up in.
[00:17:15]  And it's also a slightly different facility than the one you're talking about, Liz, where it's like, you know, you have to like force yourself to learn how to do stuff because it's not immediately apparent to you.
[00:17:23]  And, you know, I shudder to think what the social networks are going to be like when he is of the age where he's getting on social networks or whatever.
[00:17:30]  But even now, I'm sort of thinking about tech journalist, I guess.
[00:17:37]  But I mean, you know then that like you can't let your kid be using a computer.
[00:17:43]  Like, I don't want to say nothing.
[00:17:45]  I don't want to tell anyone how to parent or anything like this, but I'm telling you, when I finally get back in touch with my kids, it's like, you can't let them use the phone.
[00:17:54]  Like, it's, it's, because it goes, it drives them crazy.
[00:17:56]  You see them.
[00:17:57]  I see them at the park all the time.
[00:17:59]  And, like, it's like a little kid swiping.
[00:18:01]  It's so weird.
[00:18:02]  I don't think people, like, maybe it's because I don't see it that often because I try not to look at anything at the park except for my feet.
[00:18:10]  But I, and the beautiful sky, of course.
[00:18:12]  But I, you know, I look at, I look at these kids on the phone.
[00:18:14]  It's such a weird thing to see, to see a child swiping on a phone.
[00:18:18]  Little tiny.
[00:18:19]  I know.
[00:18:19]  It seems raw.
[00:18:21]  It's like perverse.
[00:18:22]  You know, there was just this study that came out, which I don't know.
[00:18:26]  I mean, who knows what I mean?
[00:18:27]  Studies are all fake.
[00:18:28]  I know.
[00:18:28]  All fake.
[00:18:29]  But, you know, who knows anything anyway, anything about anything these days, anyway.
[00:18:36]  I think I sent it to you guys in the group chat, but it was like about, it was a long-term study about screen time and its effect on language development.
[00:18:46]  I did read this.
[00:18:47]  Which was more interesting.
[00:18:49]  I haven't seen this angle before, I guess, because we were working on the study.
[00:18:52]  But it was less about motor skills.
[00:18:54]  I mean, I think there's a lot of work that's been done on that.
[00:18:56]  And it makes sense.
[00:18:57]  You know, you're not like kind of, you're utilizing and learning how to, you know, tune your motor skills on like a completely different thing than like just really like grabbing and holding things.
[00:19:09]  And, you know, your parents.
[00:19:10]  Like a pencil or whatever.
[00:19:11]  Yeah, totally.
[00:19:13]  But what they had talked about was actually both that what the effect of screen time for the kid, but then also the parents being on their phone had on developing language skills and that with the kind of decreased like talking with your kid and your kid,
[00:19:29]  either your kid talking or you just like having conversations around your kid, that they saw a like significant decrease in how many words kids were able to kind of understand, to speak, to, you know, all of these things, which was, I read that and I was just like, it all intuitively makes sense.
[00:19:48]  Although I don't know the difference between that and like reading all the time, although I assume that, you know, I think the phones have a different, a little bit of a different function.
[00:19:54]  You're not really just sitting there with a book next to your kid in the same way that you kind of passively just grab your phone or automatically grab your phone.
[00:20:01]  I mean, I think one, like, you know, my, we should just make this the true and unparenting episode.
[00:20:07]  Dispense parenting advice.
[00:20:10]  Like, the thing that I feel like I've realized most since having my son is that how much of, like, how much of who he is is already baked in and how little like the things that I tell him or try to teach him or try to do like really matter to him.
[00:20:24]  And it's, I mean, to me, right now, it seems very clear that like the best hope I can have to like having any influence on his development and personality or whatever is just modeling behavior.
[00:20:33]  You know, And I think that to me is like I catch myself all the time just staring at my phone while he's in the room with me or while we're out in the park or whatever.
[00:20:45]  And one way that a book or a newspaper or whatever would be different than the phone is it's like very clear what you're doing.
[00:20:51]  Like you have a book open, you're like looking, you're reading news articles.
[00:20:54]  When you have the phone, I could be looking at TikTok.
[00:20:57]  I could be texting with somebody.
[00:20:58]  I could be doing whatever.
[00:20:59]  My attention is like fully wrapped on this little black box.
[00:21:02]  And sad to say, I'm sure what he gets from this is both that my attention is not fully on him or like with him, but that it's also like fully inside, like enraptured by this particular little thing.
[00:21:16]  I mean, you know, like I always try to be really wary about the sort of the idea that phones in particular, that like social media apps or whatever, are specifically or uniquely bad or that they don't exist in a larger dynamic system or whatever.
[00:21:31]  But the sort of the thing that appeals to my priors about the study you're talking about is that it's not just about kids getting access to an iPad and scrolling through whatever.
[00:21:41]  It's about how like the ubiquity of the screens entirely across like their entire development, across their relationship with their parents, that full kind of, to reuse the word, that full ubiquity is what really affects and possibly retards their development.
[00:21:59]  The one thing that like these Silicon Valley cocksuckers always fucking talk about is that like, oh, this is, you have no idea how much the world is changing, how much technology is changing.
[00:22:08]  And obviously a certain part of, I think everybody who can even a little bit critically listen to these people is like, you're fucking lying, like you're trying to sell a product.
[00:22:17]  But like they are right in a sense.
[00:22:20]  Like everything, like, not just in the fact, like, obviously, especially discreetly, most of these products have very little effect on society.
[00:22:27]  I mean, the Amazons or the TikTok, whatever, they might, but like in in some, in total, and like the way that we interact now has changed so drastically from not only 20 years ago, but from almost the entirety of human evolution is so, I don't think that like we can even begin to grasp like the effects that this will have on people.

=== Revolution Of The Printing Press (10:38) ===

[00:22:51]  I think we're beginning to see them.
[00:22:53]  I think that like the horror that we've unlocked is beginning to kind of seep out of the box.
[00:22:59]  But I think it's going to be one of those things like in 100 years where our cyber archaeologists are looking back.
[00:23:06]  They're going to be like, this was a time of untold schizophrenia and madness in society.
[00:23:11]  I mean, a lot of people, I mean, you know, a lot of people have said this before.
[00:23:15]  I mean, I think even Matt Carson has said this before, where it's like kind of, you know, the advent of the printing press, you know, and what that did to in this, you know, when it was 16th, 17th century, whatever, you know, what was insane.
[00:23:32]  And I was reading up on, there's like some one specific book that is, I should have it in front of me, the name of it, and I don't, but that's like kind of the canonical read on like kind of what that experience was like in like mass communication and how that kind of altered things.
[00:23:47]  And it was funny because I was reading a section of it a while ago, and the writer, she was saying that one thing that just flooded the market was like how-to books immediately, which is just so funny to think, but it makes sense, right?
[00:24:02]  It was like how to use leeches.
[00:24:04]  Yeah, how to use leeches.
[00:24:06]  A lot of it was like how to make music, like how to play that instrument, or how to clean your house, or whatever.
[00:24:11]  And it's funny because I was thinking about that in relation to TikTok and other shit we're going to eventually talk about today, because there's so much content on social media that is very much like, you know,
[00:24:24]  to your point about it not being super unique or being in this kind of long, you know, arc of history or whatever, socially situated, like so much content that I think we're really enraptured by has to do with our interest in how people live their lives and our either desire or conflicted desire, I guess, and wanting to like share or mimic or learn from how other people live their lives.
[00:24:50]  And you see it in those books that are like, oh, you know, the printing press comes out and immediately it's like, how to do this, how to do that, like literally like self-help books.
[00:24:57]  How to take your first bath.
[00:24:59]  Yes.
[00:25:00]  Yeah, totally, totally.
[00:25:02]  Well, this is like, I mean, if you go like how many viral like Twitter threads or like Reddit things are people essentially asking if something is normal or like worse being like this behavior that fully half the population does is absolutely not normal.
[00:25:16]  Yeah.
[00:25:16]  And I will hear no arguments that it is, which is like sort of the even less useful version of what you're saying where it's like the peek into other people's lives or worlds is like so compelling.
[00:25:28]  I mean, when you think about, like, I mean, I think about this as a journalist, you know, as a newsletter writer, say, like, being able to talk about your own personal life is actually an insane growth hack, to use an awful phrase.
[00:25:43]  If you talk about who you are and what you're up to, and you talk about your family and you make your kids characters in your story, you can develop audience much more quickly than if you're just sort of trying to write.
[00:25:54]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:54]  Because you can develop that sort of bond with people.
[00:25:57]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:58]  And I think that the other thing I would say is that as we're sort of historically situating everything we're talking about, I think one question, because I fully buy the kind of idea that we're living through a revolution in mass communication on order of the introduction of the printing press.
[00:26:15]  It's like where do we want to date the current revolution that we're talking about, right?
[00:26:20]  Because are we part of a continuation that goes back to the radio?
[00:26:25]  Yeah, is this like TV but expanded?
[00:26:28]  Is the internet specifically different than TV?
[00:26:32]  I don't have an answer.
[00:26:33]  There's an overlap there because obviously I wasn't around for the beginning of the TV, but I have read a lot of books from the period.
[00:26:40]  And it does seem to be like a lot of the things that I think in my own little miserable brain about people who use the internet too much are echoed in the critiques of TV watchers from back then.
[00:26:53]  You're sort of glued to this thing for like eight hours.
[00:26:56]  It's a way to not think.
[00:26:57]  It's a way to get this kind of like, maybe you believe you're either being entertained or being enriched and knowledge or whatever, but really you come out of it like it's empty.
[00:27:10]  You don't come out of it anymore.
[00:27:11]  There's no nutrients in it.
[00:27:12]  It's sort of empty calories.
[00:27:14]  I would say that there's like an overlap.
[00:27:17]  It's like a wave that kind of like leaves that dark, the wet patch on the beach.
[00:27:22]  And then another one kind of overtakes that.
[00:27:24]  And I think that's what we're in now because I don't even think that at least that was different in even some of the logistical terms of like, you know, it was at home, but you also weren't a participant in it.
[00:27:36]  And now is like we're all participants in it.
[00:27:38]  And that is, that is, I don't think that's good.
[00:27:40]  But I think that's the difference.
[00:27:42]  I mean, I think there's sort of two things, right?
[00:27:47]  I think that there's something about the interactivity and the social aspect, not just in social media, but the actual built-in social aspect that's very different from passively watching the TV or pass or like even the social aspects of the cinema, right?
[00:28:01]  It's very, that's very different than the quality.
[00:28:03]  Like you go into a social media app like alone on your phone, going into a box, and through, I think, a kind of intensification of emotions, I mean, specifically literally designed to produce that, you leave with like an approximation of a social experience, which I think is very disorienting and disgusting feeling.
[00:28:23]  I'm with you on that.
[00:28:24]  But that feels qualitatively different to me, not just quantitatively.
[00:28:28]  I guess.
[00:28:29]  Absolutely.
[00:28:30]  But I think that also, to what I'm saying, there's two things.
[00:28:33]  I think that actually goes hand in hand with another huge development, which is related with the supercomputer, which is the fact that, no, they're just increased statification of everything and the ability, like live, I mean, this is very like Baudrillard, whatever, but the fact that we live in increasingly optimized statistical world, and AI is going to make that even more so in very weird ways that I think we should talk about.
[00:29:00]  But like the, to use your word, ubiquity of statistics around us and everyone's kind of, I think, reliance on statistical data as the only, or insistence as that's the only way in which to understand, Make decisions about and analyze the world goes hand in, like, is also creating a very,
[00:29:24]  very new experience for how we kind of relate to each other, how we understand what's going on in the world.
[00:29:31]  Yeah, I mean, I think the joke about doing tech criticism is that you lean on words like accelerate, heighten, like, because you know, a lot of the processes you're describing are similar to or even identical to earlier ones, but like they compound, they accelerate, they heighten, I think, in part because of the sort of data vacation of everything, where you suddenly have this really far-seeing access to a lot of numbers,
[00:30:00]  a lot of information about how the stuff you create is consumed, about how the places that consumption is happening are structured.
[00:30:08]  You know, I think, like, again, speaking as a journalist, and I don't know, like, I think podcast, well, let me start by saying, speaking as a journalist, that metrics, like getting access to metrics on what people read, how they read it, how far they read it, is like an unbelievably blackpilling experience.
[00:30:25]  Like, to realize that, like, and we all kind of know this now because it's all come out.
[00:30:30]  And I've always sort of thought that podcasts are like one of the last slightly safe worlds because you have just slightly less access to like what is we actually have the metrics, and it turns out that people generally only listen to about an hour of an episode.
[00:30:45]  Even if an episode is like an hour and a half, two hours long.
[00:30:48]  They're two notes.
[00:30:49]  So we try to make them an hour long because we're like, well, this is generally about, but sometimes you got a little bit more.
[00:30:54]  But you know what?
[00:30:54]  Sometimes it's like, fuck you.
[00:30:56]  I'm going to go for three hours.
[00:30:57]  Yeah, guess what?
[00:30:58]  My job is talking.
[00:30:59]  I'm sorry, bitch.
[00:31:00]  I'm at work.
[00:31:02]  Right.
[00:31:02]  And I see this in like Hollywood too.
[00:31:04]  Like the advent of streaming has allowed people to have deep access to how much of a given movie people are watching and what kinds of posters and all these things.
[00:31:14]  Exactly the same stuff that's been happening in journalism.
[00:31:16]  And I think you see the same kind of like deep cynicism taking over creative decisions in those industries.
[00:31:24]  And I think that one thing that you could say about both of these, about the sort of the datification or the kind of the way metrics creates new structures for creative production is,
[00:31:38]  and this relates to what we were talking about before about the distinction or differences between the moment we're in right now and say the moment like when TV was first invented or when cable television first came out is there's like so much less state interest in regulating that in like even just in like the most liberal forms of like consumer protection or like whatever else you would want to call it,
[00:32:03]  let alone in like, you know, state alternatives, state funding, like all the things that you might have expected to see in the 20s or 30s or even in the like 50s and 60s.
[00:32:13]  There's like no PBS equivalent.
[00:32:15]  There's no public option social media.
[00:32:19]  So one, two, three, four.
[00:32:23]  Right, exactly.
[00:32:24]  And so, like, the other reason that we use words like accelerates and the one reason we keep talking about how it's getting worse and worse and worse is that like the whole political economy around communications technology is different.
[00:32:35]  It's not just that the technology has changed, but like the appetite for restricting or regulating or figuring out how to deal with that technology is essentially gone.
[00:32:43]  And what's worse is that the political economy, or the coalitions you might assemble to try and stop it, you're also going up against, and again, this is something I'm sure will come up a lot when we talk about this, is the national security state, which is so excited by the datafication of everything.
[00:32:59]  I mean, even sort of, even when it has no use, the fact that they can track and watch and peer into all this stuff, which means that if you want to, like, if you want to shift the way things are made online, if you want to shift the weights of how stuff gets distributed or read or consumed, if you want to change the way the internet works, you're not just sort of fighting against a bunch of multi-billion dollar international conglomerates.
[00:33:25]  Which is its own problem, which is its own fucking problem.
[00:33:28]  It's also the Pentagon and the NSA.

=== American Middle Class Influence (03:50) ===

[00:33:30]  It's going to sit there and be like, well, hold on now.
[00:33:32]  We actually do need to know how many TikToks bracewatch because he's on like six different adult babies.
[00:33:37]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:33:39]  Nice diapy.
[00:33:40]  But you know what's interesting to me is like, I agree with that completely, and I think that it's, you know, there's no fair fight and it's an uphill battle on so many different fronts.
[00:33:50]  But then you also have a very like, you know, passionate and thick American middle class that fucking loves this shit.
[00:33:58]  Like that's the other thing is that it's popular.
[00:34:00]  People love it.
[00:34:01]  Like when, so let's talk about TikTok.
[00:34:03]  Like, you know, it came out and you had written about this, I think, last week about the possible impending ban of TikTok.
[00:34:10]  Let's use baby.
[00:34:11]  Congress rushed through a motherfucking bill.
[00:34:13]  Yeah.
[00:34:14]  Let's put that in quotation marks and we'll get into what that actually means or maybe means in a second.
[00:34:18]  But like immediately you had like TikTok superstars or whatever coming out being like, I can't believe Congress did like this is my livelihood, blah, blah, blah.
[00:34:29]  Like, you know, because they are hard work.
[00:34:31]  Those are the faces of hardworking American small business owners now, people.
[00:34:36]  And all of these, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording.
[00:34:41]  You know, part of the problem with social media, and we're all in here, we're, you know, recipients of this, is that it has opened up all of these new pathways to American Main Street, where you can set up your small business shop.
[00:34:55]  And so you have a very thick, very like, because of the nature of the business, extremely mediatized, extremely opinionated, and extremely active American middle class that has economic interests in keeping this shit open and unregulated.
[00:35:12]  Yeah.
[00:35:12]  A version of this fight is this is a dynamic I've been thinking about a lot.
[00:35:16]  So I'm in the WGA with the screenwriters, and we went on strike last year.
[00:35:20]  And like one of the, there are a number of different issues in the strike, and one of them was that compensation had gone down for, among other reasons, because the length of like job assignments had shortened essentially.
[00:35:31]  And part of what had gone over the last 10 years in the industry is because of the advent of streaming, and because of a lot of sort of VC and other kinds of money getting flowing into the space, more and more shows were getting made, which meant that more and more people were getting jobs.
[00:35:47]  And the union was in a difficult position that's not at all sort of unfamiliar, I don't think, in the history of labor action, where essentially, and I'm speaking just as a member, not like on behalf of WG, I think I would not characterize this the same way.
[00:35:59]  There is going to be less work for writers after this strike.
[00:36:02]  Like there is going to be less to go around.
[00:36:04]  And part of the point of the union and of the labor action is to set laws to enforce like more sort of work-filling mat, more work, like to, sorry, to set laws to enforce an actual market for labor that allows workers to be compensated, right?
[00:36:22]  And like social media does this at like an absolutely unbelievable scale.
[00:36:26]  I mean, this is one of the many things that has happened to journalism over the last 20 years, is all of a sudden, like the written word is incredibly easy to find for almost no money at all.
[00:36:37]  And so how, and some people are actually able to now get paid like I am just directly by readers or whatever else.
[00:36:45]  And so like, sorry, this is, we've gone a little bit of a tangent, I've gone a little bit of a tangent from what we're saying, but like this is, this is, this is like the marketplaces here have inserted themselves in such a way that not only have they destroyed the marketplaces that came before them, but they've found new like coalitions of small business owners like myself.
[00:37:02]  As a member of the petty bourgeoisie, I would despise it if you took away all the avenues for me to peddle my wares.
[00:37:09]  And it would be, it would be hard to co-even, even though I would prefer to live in 1997 when you could get paid $5 a word to profile Quentin Tarantino for a magazine that no longer exists.

=== Banned and Pro Palestine (11:35) ===

[00:37:20]  Since we're not going back, I don't know, it's very hard to think about the kind of regulatory apparatus that would, you know.
[00:37:28]  You mentioned earlier, too, the kind of coalitions that form up around this stuff.
[00:37:31]  And in particular, the TikTok ban.
[00:37:33]  And really whatever, because the TikTok ban has been in the air since like, what, 2019, when Trump first gave that executive order that he was going to ban TikTok.
[00:37:42]  Or he was going to force them to sell it to an American owner.
[00:37:45]  That's what ban means.
[00:37:46]  Forcing to sell.
[00:37:47]  It doesn't mean actually getting rid of the app.
[00:37:49]  It means forcing to sell it to Steve Mnuchin.
[00:37:51]  Yeah, so Byte Dance or whatever the fuck it's called would now be owned by ByteDance.
[00:37:57]  Byte Dance would sell TikTok to like a, would break off TikTok from its like company and sell it to an American.
[00:38:04]  And I guess probably retain some kind of shares.
[00:38:06]  Who knows?
[00:38:07]  I don't know how it's supposed to work.
[00:38:08]  But the coalitions that spring up around this stuff, because something that I always get frustrated with when hearing people talk about social media is, you know, I have a complicated relationship to social media because social media is part of the reason that we have this big podcast, part of the reason.
[00:38:25]  Real reason it's a podcast.
[00:38:27]  But you know, like it's helped this podcast grow big and it's done wonders for their career or whatever.
[00:38:32]  But I rarely use it anymore because it makes me feel strange.
[00:38:38]  And so when I see people's reaction to like the TikTok ban, I see it come from like, I understand the reaction, like, listen, part of this is at least in part motivated by the Israel-Palestine, like very nakedly motivated by a perceived or maybe real, who knows, bias towards Palestine in the TikTok realm or whatever.
[00:39:03]  And so you see people sort of defend it from that aspect.
[00:39:05]  Totally understand.
[00:39:06]  That makes sense to me.
[00:39:07]  But then you see people be like, it's actually like a way for us to like get real information.
[00:39:11]  And like it becomes this like liberatory vessel for people.
[00:39:16]  And, you know, I say this as somebody who makes a podcast that is, well, it comes out on something like, you know, Patreon or whatever, or SoundCloud, whatever.
[00:39:24]  It's a little different than TikTok.
[00:39:26]  But like, that's not where your liberation is going to come from.
[00:39:29]  Like, that's, it's, it's, it's, you're, you're, what you're doing is you're defending media consumption, which is fair to do on those terms.
[00:39:36]  But like to gussy it up in this sort of like to revolutionary language, I think is, is, is flatly ridiculous.
[00:39:43]  And so I have this thing where like I genuinely want TikTok to be banned.
[00:39:47]  I want Instagram to be banned.
[00:39:49]  I want Twitter to be banned.
[00:39:50]  I want all social media sites to be banned.
[00:39:52]  Doesn't matter.
[00:39:53]  It's Timu only.
[00:39:58]  Timu.
[00:39:58]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:39:59]  You should only be able to buy things on the internet.
[00:40:02]  You can't buy anything.
[00:40:02]  Just window shopping.
[00:40:04]  Yeah, there's no buyback.
[00:40:05]  Yeah, but it's like functions as a sort of Pinterest.
[00:40:08]  I think that's sort of what the social media is.
[00:40:11]  The Timu Pinterest management, where you're forbidden from purchasing.
[00:40:15]  The song plays constantly, and so it drives people away from the site.
[00:40:24]  I say this.
[00:40:24]  I say this with no exaggeration.
[00:40:27]  If I had the choice, if I could die today and every social media app would no longer exist, it would never exist in the future, in a heartbeat, I would take that deal.
[00:40:38]  That is a martyr complex.
[00:40:40]  Well, yeah, and also to be like, he died to make us more.
[00:40:44]  I'm a price-like figure for social media.
[00:40:46]  I see you.
[00:40:46]  I see.
[00:40:47]  I see you.
[00:40:48]  Christ would be like Brace-like figure.
[00:40:50]  Think about that.
[00:40:52]  But it's weird because I want TikTok to be banned.
[00:40:55]  I've been open about this for many years on this show and in my private life.
[00:40:59]  I think it's not uniquely harmful, but I think it's harmful in new ways.
[00:41:07]  And I think that that's what it's not going to happen.
[00:41:10]  But I also can't co-sign this bill because this bill is, well, I haven't read it because I don't think it's going to get passed in the Senate.
[00:41:18]  And so once it gets a little further, maybe I don't think so.
[00:41:21]  No.
[00:41:22]  Maybe it will.
[00:41:23]  It looks like Schumer doesn't even want to bring it.
[00:41:25]  Schumer seems to not even want to bring it to.
[00:41:27]  Just doesn't even want to deal with it.
[00:41:29]  Yeah.
[00:41:29]  Yeah.
[00:41:29]  And when Chuck Schumer is like, I don't want to hit China, then maybe it's not worth it.
[00:41:35]  I mean, the other thing I keep reading is that it would get challenged on First Amendment grounds almost immediately and would get turned over.
[00:41:42]  So it's not.
[00:41:43]  It's funny because from what I have read is they want to, they essentially want to sell it because for two reasons.
[00:41:49]  One is the Chinese who I keep seeing say the Communist Party owns Byte Dance, which is not true.
[00:41:57]  They love doing this.
[00:41:58]  I mean, I do know that the Communist Party of China has party sells in most major businesses, which is not a secret.
[00:42:07]  It is just the way it functions there.
[00:42:08]  Fantastic.
[00:42:09]  They have been like investment banks and shit.
[00:42:11]  Yes, of course.
[00:42:12]  It's pretty normal.
[00:42:15]  But that TikTok would potentially be giving data to the Chinese government.
[00:42:21]  And TikTok has said, and there's no indication this has ever happened before.
[00:42:24]  I mean, I'm sure it has, but like, there's no indication this has ever happened before.
[00:42:28]  And I don't, by the way, to be clear, I don't care that it has.
[00:42:31]  I do think there are some TikTok employees who've said that they've found not U.S. data, but that the CCP got Hong Kong protester data from TikTok, which sounds plausible.
[00:42:41]  I mean, this is one of those things you read it and you know that everybody quoted in the article is like, you know, has at least two handlers from three different agencies or whatever.
[00:42:51]  But it's like plausible.
[00:42:52]  I mean, let's win.
[00:42:53]  I'm not saying, like, here's the thing.
[00:42:55]  If I was China, I would do that.
[00:42:57]  So I'm not.
[00:42:58]  But I don't know what country would it.
[00:42:59]  Exactly.
[00:43:01]  Somebody was pointing out.
[00:43:02]  Spencer Ackman was actually just pointing out that just in December, the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee was trying to get Section 702, which is like the FISA Act that lets the FBI dip into all of the NSA's goodies.
[00:43:17]  Was like, we got to, you know, we got to.
[00:43:21]  And he was like arguing, he was like, well, we got to get in and look at all these pro-Palestine protesters and like we got to let the feds get in there and like check all that stuff out.
[00:43:28]  So we got to re-up this.
[00:43:30]  And it's like, well, that's essentially identical.
[00:43:33]  I mean, it's like, it's, it's functionally no different than whatever we're accusing the CCP of doing.
[00:43:37]  No, absolutely.
[00:43:37]  I mean, I think that's one of those things that like people, even like the TikTok, because I went on TikTok to look at some of the sort of like defenses of TikTok that TikTok creators themselves were putting out there.
[00:43:47]  And a lot of it was from a pretty understandable position of like, listen, we all know all social media platforms take all of our information and give it to whatever government.
[00:43:57]  Like, well, how does that change the status quo now?
[00:44:00]  And like, while that is kind of not a nihilistic viewpoint, I mean, it's a real viewpoint.
[00:44:05]  It's a real view.
[00:44:06]  It's true.
[00:44:06]  It's realistic.
[00:44:07]  I mean, it's kind of my viewpoint.
[00:44:09]  Well, like straightforwardly, as an American, like, I've been to protests in the, I've been to pro-Palestine protests in the city.
[00:44:15]  I've been to, you know, whatever.
[00:44:16]  It's like, I'm the CCP doesn't give a shit about me.
[00:44:19]  But like, presumably, if an NSA agent wanted to make my life really shitty for a few years, they absolutely could do that.
[00:44:25]  And so, just like from a purely cynical point of view, I actually care way less if the CCP owns my social media.
[00:44:31]  Well, I want the C, I mean, if we're going to listen, if we're going to do World War III, obviously, you guys know what side I'm on.
[00:44:36]  So, it's like, I'm like, stepping way back, I'm like, yeah, I think they should buy Instagram.
[00:44:42]  But it is, it is, it's just that's sort of the defense that's coming.
[00:44:47]  People are like, I don't care if China has my data because you already have the rest of my data.
[00:44:51]  And it's funny because I think that there is a, there's also a big age divide, right?
[00:44:55]  TikTok, while it's used by, I think it's like 100 and something million Americans, so obviously all ages, but it is extremely popular and sort of aimed towards younger people.
[00:45:06]  And younger people, as we all know, have the big divide on Israel-Palestine is mostly age.
[00:45:13]  And it's funny because there's been this sort of like paranoid fear that has erupted with like the ADL and all these different politicians being like, you know, this is our, we're losing the youth and like blaming TikTok, which in reality, like, TikTok is often either showing them, you know, somebody kind of lecturing them from their college or like pictures of dead children.
[00:45:36]  Yeah.
[00:45:36]  And so it's like, you can't like, the college thing, whatever.
[00:45:40]  You don't really need that.
[00:45:41]  I think the thing that people are most affected by, and this is on all social media platforms, are like the very horrible images that come out of Gaza of dead children or mothers weeping in front of a dead child.
[00:45:55]  Or Israeli soldiers, you know, sort of parading around.
[00:45:58]  Pissing on graves.
[00:45:59]  Yeah, yeah, pissing on graves and the lingerie of fucking right.
[00:46:03]  Well, the TikTok algorithm does promote dances more often.
[00:46:06]  So maybe that's actually what's happening.
[00:46:08]  They love to dance.
[00:46:08]  You know what?
[00:46:09]  They will dance against them.
[00:46:11]  It's just like politically expedient, right?
[00:46:13]  It's like two birds, one stone.
[00:46:14]  It's like, okay, if this helps, like, you know, put a, you know, tamp down a little bit like the youth dance movement that's taking that's taking Palestinian support by storm or whatever these fucking you know oldies in in DC think in Washington DC Um,
[00:46:31]  plus, you get to do a little bit of a like, ooh, the Eastern Man is so exotic and we don't, we need to make sure that we can understand, you know, like this, I mean, you sent us the op-ed in the New York Times about this.
[00:46:45]  That was one of the most like nakedly orientalist things that I've read in quite a long time.
[00:46:50]  But to be fair, I don't keep up with a lot of the China hawk crap because it's just so it's just not my bad.
[00:46:56]  They've been on the same thing.
[00:46:58]  They had a good time with the Uyghur stuff for a couple of years, but they've kind of gone back to the old, they're digging, they're digging back into the old supply.
[00:47:04]  Well, you can't do the Uyghur stuff now because then you're just, you're like, well, this abuse and attempts at ethnic cleansing of Muslims is one of the worst things you've ever seen.
[00:47:13]  Just ignore anything else that's happening.
[00:47:14]  Don't worry about it.
[00:47:17]  Yeah, yeah, totally.
[00:47:18]  No, there's like a real, the op-ed we're talking about is by David Sanger, who's one of the Times' dumbest national security correspondents.
[00:47:26]  And the whole thing, like his whole thing is this idea that there's some secret access that these Chinese engineers, that these devious Chinese engineers have accessed the American mind or whatever.
[00:47:38]  Obviously, that plays in DC, I suppose.
[00:47:42]  People are into this.
[00:47:43]  Racist shit plays in DC.
[00:47:44]  Yeah, clearly.
[00:47:45]  Well, I mean, this is an example of something.
[00:47:49]  This guy, Kevin Baker, who's a computer science historian, really good follow on Twitter.
[00:47:54]  And I think he's got a newsletter and a Patreon.
[00:47:56]  He calls it PSYOP Brain, which is just as like everybody in that particular echelon of elite national security, politics, media has come to believe since 2015 that anything they encounter online that isn't what they agree with is like the product of a foreign intelligence operation, that there is like some kind of something going on.
[00:48:20]  And so when you encounter like mass Pro-Palestine demonstrations at a scale that hasn't existed before, it's got to be the Chinese or the Russians, never mind that Russia and Israel are essentially like it's got to be somebody in there is like doing, is doing something.
[00:48:36]  Yeah, you see that on a minute level though, too.
[00:48:38]  You see that like on the like, like not even talking about like geopolitical shit, like you see that, with just the increase in people's paranoia and the constant anything that I see online that doesn't um, reaffirm my priors, is there's like an outside force That's bringing this in.
[00:48:55]  Yeah.
[00:48:55]  Right.

=== Baiting Behavior Online (03:18) ===

[00:48:56]  And it kind of like, I don't know.
[00:48:58]  I think that you see that that's more ubiquitous, as we in this room like to say.
[00:49:02]  Yeah.
[00:49:03]  Than just having to do with kind of I will say I think something structural about social media, especially the kind of social media we have that's advertising based, that tends to be like pretty heavily professionalized, is you train yourself without really thinking to treat everything like a gambit for your attention, which means that you're like sincerity is like you are suspicious that everything is insincere.
[00:49:29]  I mean, I'm like fully, like, I don't have psyop brain, but I have like bait brain.
[00:49:33]  Like I just assume anything I see on Twitter that makes me angry or a TikTok video that I don't understand is somebody who's intentionally baiting me to make me mad or to have a reaction so that I click on it or save it or whatever, which is like, I think that I think it happens more often than you'd think, but I don't think it's true that every single thing I encounter is bait.
[00:49:52]  But I like, I interviewed this kid who goes by the name Hoopify on TikTok.
[00:49:58]  He was like briefly viral last year for doing these insane videos about, I'm just going to say some words that are not in the Bible, about baby Gronk and whether or not he rizzed up Libby Dunn.
[00:50:08]  Some of you guys might remember this.
[00:50:09]  Some of the heads might remember this.
[00:50:11]  On his visit to LSU, Libby rizzed him up.
[00:50:14]  Libby even hugged Baby Gronk.
[00:50:16]  He might be the new Riz King.
[00:50:18]  And Hoopify is like this 20-year-old lacrosse player from UMass Lowell, not even one of the good UMasses.
[00:50:25]  And he's, and he, he's like, he's like a fine, broy kid, but he, the way he talked about what he does was so, he had that particular like Gen Z, Gen Alpha, like total, like it's almost like an earnest cynicism, Just like this unbelievable kind of nihilism about what he does.
[00:50:43]  That is like that, like he doesn't see he's not embarrassed by it, he's not shamed by it.
[00:50:47]  He's like.
[00:50:48]  He was like well yeah, people noticed that I wasn't blinking and they thought it was really weird.
[00:50:51]  So I just stopped blinking in all of my videos and I was like that's really fucking weird man.
[00:50:55]  That whole thing is weird.
[00:50:56]  And he talked about.
[00:50:57]  He's like I think my audience is mostly like sixth graders, so like I mostly do what I think sixth graders will like and like I don't really believe any of it, but it's satire, like they all have this definition of satire.
[00:51:08]  That's um, it doesn't mean satire.
[00:51:10]  It doesn't mean, like you know, sort of like arch humor about a particular target.
[00:51:13]  It just means like I don't, i'm not saying, i'm saying something that I don't actually believe.
[00:51:17]  Yeah, and This, this, like, having talked to that kid, it's now every time I see a 20-year-old do something on social media, like his voice is like ringing in the back of my head.
[00:51:27]  And I'm thinking, like, is this something you're doing?
[00:51:30]  And I, so it's like, in some sense, I can be sympathetic to somebody who, somebody who's like, just like fully, who's never encountered anything but Hasbro and like Zionist propaganda their entire lives and encounters a palate, like a articulate Palestinian protest and suddenly it assumes that it's bait, you know, it's psyop bait in some sense.
[00:51:49]  But like if you're a politician, if you are like, if you are, if you're, if your point is to like, you know, to read the tea leaves, so to speak, and to like democratically represent your people, like it's a really bad way to govern because all of a sudden you are way out on a limb assuming that everything that everybody is disagreeing with you about is the result of a of a of China owning TikTok and has nothing to do with like actual material conditions or like we could trace this back.

=== Russsiagate Resurgence (15:12) ===

[00:52:14]  I mean, we could trace this back much, much further.
[00:52:16]  I mean, with the, with the, what is the Zenoviev letter, you know, and, you know, it's like there's actually this secret plot by the communists to infiltrate everything.
[00:52:24]  Right.
[00:52:25]  I mean, James Jesus Engleton was like the, he almost died of psychopath.
[00:52:29]  Paranoia.
[00:52:29]  Yeah.
[00:52:30]  Yeah.
[00:52:30]  He was literally sick with it.
[00:52:32]  Yeah.
[00:52:33]  But and it's not paranoid enough, apparently.
[00:52:36]  But if it's, we can trace this much, a much shorter timeline, if you want, to back to like, you know, the Clinton Bernie shit, right?
[00:52:44]  I mean, I think it's funny because RussiaGate had such a vanishingly non-existent, so I guess that's kind of redundant, but it had a non-existent effect on anybody I knew in real life.
[00:52:55]  And I obviously know some people who are very invested in politics, but I also know a lot of people who do not pay attention to politics or the news at all.
[00:53:02]  And not one of them was like, this was an issue for them.
[00:53:06]  I know, I mean, most of the people, obviously, I know, I guess, would not be sympathetic to the RussiaGate stuff.
[00:53:10]  But like, even people like kind of like Libtars or whatever I know, who might be on some level or just ambiently from watching CNN, like nobody thought about it in a real way, but people in DC really did.
[00:53:23]  And whether they thought about it cynically or was it SYOP brain or like obviously some of it was just a lot of it was just sort of used as like a cudgel on the on the left or whoever they disagreed with.
[00:53:35]  But it's so neatly transformed from like Russian interference to now it's like this like great specter of Chinese interference.
[00:53:43]  Yes.
[00:53:44]  And how they are able to, I mean, I think on one part, it recognizes how potent these platforms would be in the hands of somebody who was really adept at using them.
[00:53:54]  But I don't think, while I do think on some level, obviously I do know they're all manipulated on some level, I don't know if it's as coordinated as people think it is.
[00:54:04]  Well, I mean, one thing about the Russia Gate stuff, I mean, two things I'll say.
[00:54:07]  One is the funniest thing about the Russiagate stuff to me is the idea that you would need a Russian intelligence operation to like sow division.
[00:54:16]  Like Americans are so good at just talking shit, saying whatever comes into their mind, yelling at people, inventing things.
[00:54:23]  Like we don't need Russians to do that.
[00:54:25]  We've been doing that for 200 plus years.
[00:54:27]  This is how we roll, baby.
[00:54:29]  Like conspiracies, that's what we've been doing forever.
[00:54:31]  We had a civil war before they did.
[00:54:33]  Yeah, I mean, come on.
[00:54:34]  And yet not a revolution.
[00:54:36]  Well, fake revolution.
[00:54:38]  That's why our legal system fucking stinks.
[00:54:41]  Right.
[00:54:41]  The American Revolution, not a real revolution.
[00:54:43]  Yeah.
[00:54:44]  But the other thing is, and this is something that I think is really interesting with the TikTok stuff is even if you take for granted the idea that Russia Gate was like a super effective operation, that it like successfully did whatever the Russians set out to do, this was done without any kind of inside, the Russians don't own Facebook.
[00:55:02]  They just know how to use it.
[00:55:04]  They bought a bunch of ads for like two grand.
[00:55:07]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:55:07]  It's like, oh, I'm going to do a RussiaGate on my podcast.
[00:55:11]  Exactly.
[00:55:11]  And there, and like, I mean, you talk to any, like, if you ever talk to engineers who work at companies like Facebook, like they have no fucking clue how the site works.
[00:55:23]  I mean, like, just a single guy really doesn't know.
[00:55:25]  But even if you like aggregated all the knowledge of everybody at every layer, they still don't really know how it works.
[00:55:32]  Like everybody, they have, you know, they're constantly tweaking something and then realizing that like, oh, shit, like we accidentally created a genocide in Myanmar because we like, we left the thing running over the weekend and I forgot to turn it off or whatever.
[00:55:44]  And so like, like the fact that RussiaGate is the kind of precursor to this China stuff is interesting, I guess, because the main, the fear you hear talked about a lot with TikTok is the idea that the Chinese control of the algorithm, you know, whatever the algorithm means in people's heads, is what's going to allow them to like sow propaganda.
[00:56:05]  When presumably, if, again, if you believe the Russia Gate story, they don't need that control at all.
[00:56:10]  They just need to pay attention to what makes people angry online.
[00:56:13]  They need to do what influencers do and just do it for China, basically.
[00:56:17]  Yeah.
[00:56:17]  So what China needs to start doing is hiring like maybe two masculine traditional men, surrounding them with about six OnlyFans models from Miami and just letting it rip on Israel-Palestine.
[00:56:28]  Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
[00:56:29]  And I hope that Xi Jinping is listening right now because I would love to see that.
[00:56:34]  I want to pinpoint something you said, which is like we're talking about this, the mysterious algorithm.
[00:56:40]  Because this is something we were talking about before we were recording, which is like there is this idea, and you hear it in these op-eds and the way people talk about like, oh, the crazy Chinese mind, but we cannot penetrate it.
[00:56:49]  We must crack.
[00:56:50]  Like literally, I think I like really was pissed off in that op-ed.
[00:56:54]  He talks about like dissecting the app, like as if it's this body that he's going to like open up in the lab.
[00:57:01]  I mean, it's like Chinese.
[00:57:02]  A fucking alien-oriental body.
[00:57:04]  It was like just really shockingly racist.
[00:57:07]  I got to say, even for the New York Times op-ed page.
[00:57:09]  Oh my god.
[00:57:11]  Where is the, oh, it's in the room.
[00:57:13]  The rumor is in this room.
[00:57:14]  That tiny room.
[00:57:15]  I know, listeners, that makes it sound like we have a lot of rooms.
[00:57:18]  Just go get the gong so you can gong when I talk about the Chinese body.
[00:57:28]  I miss that guy.
[00:57:30]  Sorry, folks.
[00:57:30]  I had to retrieve the gong.
[00:57:31]  Liz hid the gong from me.
[00:57:33]  That's not what happened.
[00:57:35]  Don't say that.
[00:57:35]  That's a lie.
[00:57:36]  That's big news.
[00:57:38]  No, but I do think that there's this kind of, you know, everyone kind of furthers this idea that there's like something, oh, something mysterious and crazy.
[00:57:46]  Like there's something particular about this magic box.
[00:57:48]  Not that this magic box is simply from China, but that like the algorithm, it's always like named that, the algorithm, as if it's this living thing, you know, that there's something particular about TikTok's the algorithm that makes it so, makes us so susceptible to these like teen dance crazes that we just can't stop shaking our bodies.
[00:58:08]  You know what I mean?
[00:58:09]  It's like very, you know, Salem witch trial or whatever.
[00:58:12]  There's some witch in there, some Chinese witch.
[00:58:15]  But I just want to like, you know, I passed on a piece from a couple years ago that was in, I can't remember, like some, one of Columbia University's like think tank, I assume it's a think tank.
[00:58:26]  It was one of the J school things.
[00:58:28]  Okay.
[00:58:29]  Arvind Narayan Narayanan at Columbia University, he wrote a piece called TikTok's Secret Sauce.
[00:58:38]  This is from a couple years ago, but I thought it was just, you know, it laid bare some like important facts about this.
[00:58:44]  And he writes, there's no truth to the idea that TikTok's algorithm is more advanced than its peers.
[00:58:48]  From everything we know, TikTok's own description, linked document studies, and reverse engineering efforts, it's a standard recommender system of the kind that every major social media platform uses.
[00:58:58]  And he goes on in that piece to talk about the thing that's unique about TikTok, to kind of bring us back, you know, to what we were talking about earlier with the TV, is the design of the thing.
[00:59:08]  And it's the swiping, it's the passive swiping of it.
[00:59:11]  And I think it's so funny.
[00:59:12]  I mean, it's very typical Washington, D.C., you know, boomers, whatever, us old heads, you know, being like, oh, I don't understand why the kids are so into this thing.
[00:59:22]  You know, why is Elvis chicken his pelvis like that?
[00:59:25]  But like, it really is, like, we're investing this kind of like magic bean quality to this thing.
[00:59:33]  And it's really actually the way that we approach it and the way that we use it, not some crazy magic brilliant code that they've figured out.
[00:59:42]  Like, the problem is coming from inside the house.
[00:59:44]  And I think it's important to talk about like why that is and what is specific to TikTok, because I do think that is what makes it a little bit more, you know, insidious in different ways than other platforms like Twitter, which has its own issues.
[01:00:00]  Well, I think part of it is that, and I think this is reflected in the way a lot of particularly addictive platforms work, but I think it also manifests in sort of new, not new, but exaggerated social behaviors as well.
[01:00:15]  So like, I think TikTok is like what you do.
[01:00:18]  You swipe and like, you know, you sort of have this kind of endless buffet of whatever you want.
[01:00:23]  And you don't ever have to make a choice.
[01:00:25]  You don't have to like be like, I'm going to, you know, you can not follow anybody.
[01:00:28]  I don't think I don't know if I follow anybody but me.
[01:00:30]  You like basically don't have a profile.
[01:00:32]  You don't have to, it's not social media.
[01:00:34]  And you don't find things like YouTube.
[01:00:35]  You don't land on, you know what I mean?
[01:00:37]  It's like something is just appears to you.
[01:00:38]  It appears to you.
[01:00:39]  And like you don't have to like follow anybody or like make any content or like follow people back.
[01:00:44]  It's like, it's not for interacting with your peers in real life.
[01:00:47]  I mean, some people use it like that, sure.
[01:00:48]  But like, I think the vast majority of people are just kind of seeing what's out there, you know, endlessly.
[01:00:53]  And I think that mirrors itself in like the way that people use dating apps and the way that people, like, the way that people, I think there's this like paralyzation of like endless choice that I don't think is like a huge social ill yet, but I think it's probably going to be in like 20 years of this like, of this, this, this vague nagging indecision that people have just that will carry through out of these kind of like the way that they use these social media apps into,
[01:01:23]  I mean, who knows?
[01:01:23]  I could be talking out of my ass.
[01:01:25]  I mean, I think the thing about TikTok, and it's funny you bring up the dating apps because I do think there is a similar operation a little bit, which is that with TikTok, you know, you're saying no until you say yes.
[01:01:36]  And so when you're swiping, you're saying, okay, this isn't for me, this isn't for me, this isn't for me.
[01:01:39]  And then when you land on something that you're interested in, you linger on it and you don't make any movement.
[01:01:46]  And in that kind of motion, you kind of invest a little bit like, oh, maybe now that the algorithm finally gets me.
[01:01:53]  Yeah.
[01:01:53]  Right.
[01:01:54]  Like, so there's a kind of, I would, it's sort of like a pickup artist in the sense that like in the, you're constantly rejecting it.
[01:02:02]  And then when you don't reject it, it feels like it knows something more about, like, it's more exciting when it feels like you're saying yes to it, like it has something right.
[01:02:13]  As a pickup artist, no.
[01:02:14]  It's really just like you just ask 100 and one says yes.
[01:02:17]  No, no, but it's like, you know, I think.
[01:02:19]  But TikTok's kind of doing the reverse.
[01:02:21]  They're doing the inverse of that, right?
[01:02:22]  They're giving you 100 videos and one of them is right.
[01:02:24]  And it turns out that it's so right for you that you really want it really badly.
[01:02:28]  That's true.
[01:02:28]  Yeah.
[01:02:28]  Yeah.
[01:02:29]  I mean, I think the one thing that we talked about after reading this article you're talking about, Liz, is that I think TikTok's real like social in comparison to the other social networks, in addition to the kind of the swipe, the scroll, the like,
[01:02:44]  the framework of saying no more often is that it removed the like the social network aspect of it, essentially. that we're also conditioned by Facebook essentially to think of social networks as places where you follow friends and family or even like YouTube, you sort of subscribe to creators and you have this parasocial relationship.
[01:03:04]  And TikTok's like, fuck that.
[01:03:06]  You don't have to do any of that.
[01:03:07]  Just you show up.
[01:03:09]  We'll give you the videos, the videos you want, don't worry about it.
[01:03:12]  And there's something, if I were looking for arguments, as we've been talking about, I'm wary about saying that TikTok is sort of uniquely bad compared to these other ones, though it might be bad in different ways.
[01:03:25]  We're not saying it's worse.
[01:03:26]  We might say it's bad in different ways.
[01:03:27]  I don't really know what it is.
[01:03:27]  It's like the sort of replicas.
[01:03:29]  Because I think Twitter is also very bad.
[01:03:31]  Yes.
[01:03:31]  And I do want to talk about that.
[01:03:33]  But once you rip the social skeleton out, you just end up with this pure, how do I put it?
[01:03:42]  One of the best books that—well, a book that I recommend to anybody who's interested in, like, this kind of stuff besides the Bible.
[01:03:47]  The second book I recommend is this book called Addicted by Design by this academic, Natasha Dauschul, who writes about— I've heard of that book, yeah.
[01:03:55]  She writes about people who get—gambling addicts, essentially, who specifically get addicted to, like, video poker.
[01:04:00]  And without wanting to go into pseudoscience about dopamine or brain chemistry or whatever, when you talk to the people, and this is from, she wrote this book in the late 2000s and doesn't talk about social media in it at all.
[01:04:12]  But the people love the, they call, at least one of the people she interviews in this book calls, you know, these are, if you've ever been to Vegas, you know, people who sit in front of these video poker machines or video slots machines, they'll sit for eight hours at a time.
[01:04:28]  And they call entering that, they say that's the machine zone.
[01:04:31]  They enter the machine zone and all of a sudden you're just free from obligation, you're free from thought, you're just completely dialed in to the sevens and the hearts and whatever else is on your slot machine.
[01:04:42]  And TikTok, like all social networks, I think, replicate that experience in one way or another.
[01:04:47]  And like TikTok, more than any other one, I think because it removes this sort of sociality that even a Twitter or a YouTube brings, that you're just kind of getting presented with new stuff.
[01:04:57]  It's like the worst of channel surfing on like somebody with a serious, with like the mega cable subscription, the worst of video gambling kind of like in one single app that can just take hours from your life without you, like you want to say without you noticing, but that's sort of the point, isn't it?
[01:05:16]  Like you want to, like one wants to enter into that because one wants is some kind of anxiety or some kind of like whatever it is.
[01:05:22]  And then they wonder like why they're afflicted with such like adedonia.
[01:05:25]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:05:26]  Yeah, there's that, there's a book that guy Richard Seymour wrote, Twittering Machine.
[01:05:30]  Yeah, he takes a lot of the stuff about the machine zone and applies that to social media.
[01:05:36]  And I think that book came out before TikTok's like surge in popularity.
[01:05:40]  So I don't know if he even really talks about it in there.
[01:05:42]  I think that like, too, I mean, it falls in line too with this stuff getting really, really big with COVID, which was like at a moment when, I don't know, there was just like this really big, it felt like collective drive to like maximize convenience.
[01:06:01]  Like, like closure delivery.
[01:06:04]  Yeah, that like maybe the goal of life was becoming to like, how do, how do we live with minimal effort?
[01:06:10]  Yeah.
[01:06:10]  Which immediately me, I mean, which, you know, I'm sorry, but there's just a class, you know, that is going to drive home a class divide.
[01:06:17]  And if you live your life that way, you know, because we live in a society, we live in a society.
[01:06:21]  Well, I'm kind of out there.
[01:06:23]  That, you know, like conducting your life in that way will be at the expense of other people.
[01:06:28]  Absolutely.
[01:06:29]  Right.
[01:06:30]  And so kind of the, you know, TikTok really rising in popularity at the same moment when there was this like extremely, you know, again, highly mediatized, very vocal, like the power users of the middle class out there.
[01:06:46]  I mean, it's just true, like out there on the interwebs extolling the virtues of, you know, having a convenient, the most, I mean, the middle class loans are convenient, the most convenient lifestyle.
[01:06:58]  Like these things are kind of dovetailing, right?
[01:07:00]  Or they're growing in tandem.
[01:07:02]  I mean, one of the interesting things about TikTok, and I don't have a theory about this, but especially early on, one of its big attractions, people love to make videos of themselves at work.
[01:07:10]  Oh, yeah, day in the life.
[01:07:11]  Woke up, fell out of bed.
[01:07:14]  I love that one.
[01:07:16]  Who likes those now?
[01:07:17]  I mean, you know, you see, like, especially during the pandemic, it would feel like there's airport baggage handlers and like cattle wrestlers and like Denny's chefs or whatever.

=== Unified Theory of Posting (15:38) ===

[01:07:26]  And there's something sort of, if you wanted to construct a defense of TikTok, and really what this is is a defense of like human beings being creative and interesting in their own ways is like the sort of window into that back world.
[01:07:36]  But I think it's, I think it's sort of ironic considering what you're saying that there's this kind of the content is often that kind of is like labor focused or labor intensive or was at some point.
[01:07:47]  Now it's all people making waters out of disgusting like sugar bags or whatever.
[01:07:51]  But for a brief moment, it was like actual people working or whatever that's being consumed by people who are increasingly disinterested in like ever leaving their apartments or whatever else.
[01:08:03]  Yeah, you like hope that there's some sort of like de Tocqueville and like utopian version of like, we could see the other map.
[01:08:11]  You can see all this people.
[01:08:13]  Look at how the Americans and their civil societies group together.
[01:08:29]  I want to switch gears for a second and bring up something that is from the archives of your substack.
[01:08:37]  Okay.
[01:08:37]  You wrote this piece, I don't even remember when it was, about the blog father, as I call him, Mr. Matt Iglesias.
[01:08:46]  That's not what you call him.
[01:08:47]  I do call him.
[01:08:48]  Oh, no, you call him something else.
[01:08:51]  Yeah, I also.
[01:08:52]  I'm not going to say what Liz calls him, but I've heard other people call him a fat pig lazy ass.
[01:08:59]  Well, he's, you know, slimmed down, so I don't know if we can say that anymore.
[01:09:02]  I feel like that actually, that nickname came from like early aughts blog circles.
[01:09:08]  And it might have been from busy.
[01:09:11]  Yeah, like the salon or sleep blog day.
[01:09:14]  There's no way salon called Matt Iglesias fat.
[01:09:17]  No, but it was like all those like early Obama bloggers that were going at each other.
[01:09:21]  It's a whole other universe, I think.
[01:09:22]  Such a universe.
[01:09:23]  I'm so not tapped into that.
[01:09:25]  Yeah.
[01:09:26]  Can't say you missed it.
[01:09:27]  I'm so fucking online.
[01:09:29]  No, but it was like a post.
[01:09:30]  It was kind of like a unified theory of posting a little bit, or at least blogging or substacking, whatever you fucking call it.
[01:09:36]  But it really was like about how he kind of understood something about the economy of the discourse.
[01:09:44]  And I think you were right on, and I'm just going to, this is so lame, but I'm going to quote you to you.
[01:09:50]  You said this understanding of publishing, talking about like the way that he was just like putting shit out constantly, like every day he's posting.
[01:09:57]  He's Mr. Poster.
[01:10:01]  This understanding of publishing, which suggests that rough and ready, quasi-automatic writing done on a regular, frequent schedule is ultimately more financially sustainable than refined and thoughtful writing when published when necessary and appropriate.
[01:10:14]  It can seem counterintuitive, if not unbelievably cynical and depressing.
[01:10:18]  And I think that like that really, you hit something which is like really important, which is the necessary aspect.
[01:10:24]  Because something that I've found, and this is part of what makes Twitter very insidious as well, I think, in different similar ways to TikTok, but that everyone is operating on a different time schedule.
[01:10:37]  And so the demands to say something, everyone has to say something, and everyone has to have something to say, even when there's nothing to say, and even when there's no point in saying anything.
[01:10:49]  And even when in this moment, and I don't mean like this specific moment, but a moment, what the demand should be, or the demand actually is, is to like not say anything, maybe to read or to think or to like take some time.
[01:11:03]  Like that is not, there isn't, you cannot take time in this economy, right?
[01:11:09]  Because if you do, you lose subscriber or you lose attention or you lose whatever, whatever.
[01:11:14]  Like there's too many, there's too many drawbacks.
[01:11:18]  And so all of the incentive is to keep saying, keep talking, keep going, keep going, keep going.
[01:11:23]  And even if there's nothing to say, and so what it ends up producing is, I mean, no wonder it makes us all fucking feel sick and crazy, right?
[01:11:31]  Because we're listening to all this noise, but the knockoff effects from it, the fact that now all media is starting to operate this way, I think cannot be overstated.
[01:11:41]  Yeah.
[01:11:41]  Yeah, this is actually, speaking of that Richard Seymour book, he calls this scripturiance, like the compulsion to write, that we've all been sort of called to like by these structures.
[01:11:50]  Like, you don't want to say by the algorithm, by the apps, by like something inside us, when we encounter this particular arrangement of forces, like compels all of us to constantly react to things by creating more stuff to be reacted to that just compounds and snowballs.
[01:12:05]  And that, you know, like even like, like you say, that removing yourself from it does very little to like stop that snowball effect, but also like probably diminishes your ability to later on like re-enter it because all of a sudden, you know, the entropy kind of like skates off of you.
[01:12:24]  And I think that, I mean, it's a terrible, like if you are a poster, if you spent time making money from like posting a lot or even just like generating followers, like, you know how draining.
[01:12:33]  Just making content.
[01:12:34]  Yeah, just making, it's like, it's draining.
[01:12:36]  It's incredibly draining to like feel like you are obligated at all times to be a part of what, what, whatever given conversation.
[01:12:46]  And like part of the point of this post is like the post that I wrote about Iglesias is, you know, if you wanted, like, if you want to make money doing this, you have to remove that sense of shame or that sense of like obligation.
[01:12:59]  Like you have to just kind of skim, you have to, you have to like sheer off your humanity to just become a guy who will, and I'm not saying necessarily that Matt Iglesias is not human.
[01:13:09]  I'm saying, you know, he's very good at turning off.
[01:13:11]  I don't know anything, but he's very good at, if he is human, he's very good at turning off the part of his humanity that might make him feel embarrassed by being wrong or it might make him feel like I've got nothing to say about this particular thing, so I'm just going to be quiet here.
[01:13:23]  I mean, the other thing I would say is like, I wrote this, I think, a little bit before generative AI had become such a huge new technology.
[01:13:31]  And it just seemed to like the sort of hand in hand, the way it's like human beings are compelled to write as much as possible at the same time that we're created this technology whose main use seems to be to create like enormous trenches of plausible human speech that doesn't really say anything novel or interesting.
[01:13:51]  It's like fascinating and interesting technology, but also just like, it's just there for filling all these spaces that we're creating.
[01:13:57]  There's something very, there's something awful about it in basically every direction you look at it.
[01:14:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:14:02]  Just more dust in the mushroom class.
[01:14:04]  I feel like there's like some, I'm sure Zijak has already said, by the way, it has a sub stack.
[01:14:09]  If people didn't know that.
[01:14:10]  I don't have much to say anymore, though.
[01:14:11]  Well, that's why it's the perfect medium for him.
[01:14:13]  Because he just like twice a week.
[01:14:15]  No, but he's just, Zijak loves to republish his own shit in like every book.
[01:14:20]  And so every post is like sort of a regurgitation of his like previous books.
[01:14:25]  He's just the perfect medium for him.
[01:14:26]  I think the thing with like, I think you see this with like TikTok and Instagram as well, but Twitter is definitely like where this is most acute.
[01:14:34]  Is this need to be involved in what they, I guess people call the discourse.
[01:14:39]  I wonder where the fuck that people even just started referring to that because that is such like a ubiquitous term now for whatever sort of topic is generally trending.
[01:14:51]  It's so funny because like at the end, I just got to look at it and be like, gee, it makes, I don't understand why I ever use Twitter.
[01:14:59]  I basically look at it and I find things that make me really fucking angry.
[01:15:04]  I find something, someone's saying something stupid about something, and it makes me angry, it makes me hateful, and I put my phone down.
[01:15:10]  And I'm like, well, why did I just seek out that feeling?
[01:15:13]  And I can tell you honestly, it's because the feeling is that you feel like you're left out, right?
[01:15:18]  Like that there's this big conversation happening and it's leaving you out and it's leaving you in the dust and like you aren't going to be tapped into something.
[01:15:24]  But like, what are you tapped into?
[01:15:25]  You're tapped into generally, and no disrespect to any of our listeners, I'm not saying I'm divorced from this to any listeners who use Twitter, but it's like, what are you tapped out from?
[01:15:36]  Generally, a bunch of like either hateful, spiteful people unleashing that in various ways in each other, people who have undiagnosed or extremely diagnosed mental illnesses that are overdiagnosed, overdiagnosed, possibly self-diagnosed, vomiting out onto the internet.
[01:15:52]  Or you have malformed children who maybe possess adult bodies speaking about something they don't know anything about.
[01:16:03]  Or you have people, when this is very common now, just like baiting other people for engagement.
[01:16:07]  Because I also think that something that can't be discounted now is that Twitter has this fake paid blue check thing where you can get paid for impressions and things like that, which is obviously, I think most people know it's a scam now or like completely fake.
[01:16:23]  But like, I think that the top earners are making like $150 a month from this.
[01:16:29]  There was like a few banner accounts that got like $20,000 from Twitter at the beginning, but that was a fake program.
[01:16:36]  They just gave people.
[01:16:37]  But that's not even the promise of Twitter.
[01:16:38]  I mean, yes, people wanted to get the Krasenstein posts that was like, I'm making $150,000 from a Corsair post or like whatever.
[01:16:47]  But people want the notoriety.
[01:16:49]  People want the social.
[01:16:50]  There's the social aspect as well.
[01:16:51]  And I think that for all of the malformed users on there.
[01:16:58]  Yeah.
[01:16:58]  I do think that you go into that thing whenever you do whatever year it was that you went in and through the social processes that happen on that app change you and change your behavior.
[01:17:14]  That's the stuff I'm interested in how is our behavior is shifting and all that kind of stuff.
[01:17:18]  And I think that like, you know, there is, you know, you can see like, I mean, how people interact on there, how they change.
[01:17:28]  Like there is a, there's something about, when I was saying that you go into TikTok, you know, you come out with this sort of a feeling of an approximation of a social kind of interaction.
[01:17:38]  Like there's something about the architecture of these things that fuels the kind of mob mentality, the sort of like the classic cancellation techniques, like that people are reaching, trying to grasp for something that feels like a social, like a, you know, like a social experience.
[01:17:58]  And in order to approximate that, they go to the basest form of sociality, which is the kind of like very classic, like Schmidian, like friend, enemy, you know, oh, we just make a team, and then that team fights against that team.
[01:18:12]  I mean, everyone, you know, sees this.
[01:18:14]  And in Twitter, it has, you know, specifically in media politics, Twitter, which is basically the one that we all live in, like, is, it has these weird ramifications because there are like there is Twitter is real and not real at the same time.
[01:18:31]  You know, like real, these platforms affect people's lives in real ways.
[01:18:36]  You know, like we have a following a lot of for a lot of reasons for our participation on that platform, we got a lot of listeners.
[01:18:44]  Yeah.
[01:18:45]  Yeah, but like, you know, whatever.
[01:18:49]  And people, I mean, look at the fall of the Ron Deion campaign.
[01:18:54]  Exactly.
[01:18:54]  Ron Dion, like his whole stat, and, you know, we can go back to Bernie and some of the people he hired from straight from Twitter.
[01:19:01]  You know, like, but Ron Dion was, I have to say it like that.
[01:19:05]  It's just so funny.
[01:19:06]  It's fucking crazy.
[01:19:07]  Foreign listeners should tell Ron DeSantis.
[01:19:09]  That his middle name is Deion.
[01:19:12]  That is so fake.
[01:19:13]  Named after the great senior Dion.
[01:19:15]  Yeah.
[01:19:15]  If you're going to be named after any Dion.
[01:19:17]  That's the one to be named after.
[01:19:18]  Or Sanders.
[01:19:19]  I would go for the singer.
[01:19:20]  I know, but I'm just saying you could do.
[01:19:22]  I don't think Ron DeSantis would do well named after Deion Sanders.
[01:19:25]  No.
[01:19:25]  I think it has to be.
[01:19:26]  Oh, there's a college crew.
[01:19:27]  Very interesting.
[01:19:28]  Okay.
[01:19:29]  So.
[01:19:30]  But so Ron Dion ran his whole campaign appealing to power users on Twitter, staffing up with group chat staffers, basically, like elite grapers or whatever the fuck is going on in the back end over there.
[01:19:47]  And he, you know, that's real.
[01:19:50]  That's real money.
[01:19:51]  That's like a real fucking, the guy who ran for president.
[01:19:53]  He's the fucking governor of Florida.
[01:19:55]  And that shit bombed.
[01:19:57]  So it's real and fake at the same time.
[01:19:59]  It's like hiring a bunch of powerful Mexican Nazis.
[01:20:02]  No, but I'm being serious.
[01:20:03]  Like, I mean, there's real, like, there's a real like social, like something, things are happening on there.
[01:20:11]  And it's very real, but it's also twisting everyone's fucking psyche and reproducing behavior and shaping behavior that has these kind of knockoff effects that no one really wants to take responsibility for also.
[01:20:23]  I mean, one thing about Twitter, like less so now that Elon bought it, but I think this is also part of the reason he bought it, is that it was the elite social network.
[01:20:33]  It was where elite members of, especially like what I guess you'd call like representational industries that you had journalists, politicians and political staffers.
[01:20:44]  You had tech executives and tech workers.
[01:20:47]  And you also had like a lot of, God, there's so many fucking TV writers writing about Trump for like a year there.
[01:20:53]  The least funny people on the planet.
[01:20:55]  Right, exactly.
[01:20:56]  I had never had to listen to a word a TV writer said except out of the mouth of a TV character before looking on Twitter.
[01:21:01]  And boy, rough.
[01:21:03]  It's no real colleagues there.
[01:21:06]  He's on there.
[01:21:08]  So anyway, so you have this, so you have like this weirdly direct access to the brains of some of the most powerful people in the U.S.
[01:21:15]  And also the brains of their assistants or their direct underlings or whatever that is not on this platform that is like, it's obviously not a mirror of reality, but it has some relation.
[01:21:29]  It mirrors reality in some way.
[01:21:31]  It smears or bleeds into.
[01:21:32]  Yeah, and so you have, so you end up making, if you make decisions based on Twitter like Ron Dion did, or frankly, like the Hillary campaign seemed to be doing for its entire run, you end up playing to, like, I mean, this is the most obvious thing.
[01:21:47]  We all know this now.
[01:21:48]  You're playing to this relatively small segment of Americans.
[01:21:51]  This is just not going to work out for you very well.
[01:21:53]  It's a classic candidate thing where you're big on Twitter and then.
[01:21:56]  Right.
[01:21:57]  But you can also, like, you can also, if you're smart enough to recognize, like, I think one way of thinking about the sort of the wave of cancellations between whatever, the height of cancel culture, what we'll call cancel culture, is it was a kind of realization by a bunch of people at relatively powerful institutions that they could leverage social media to affect like internal institutional change.
[01:22:23]  That like a lot of what you were seeing was top-level executives at Hollywood film studios, politicians who were shitty bosses or who were otherwise creeps, getting ousted, not because there was like a mass of what you might think of as genuine popular anger, but because people who had real knowledge or experience of these infractions could use Twitter as a crowbar to force them out.
[01:22:49]  And to me, this is one reason that cancel culture is a sort of annoying term for it is because to me, this is really clearly just about a balance of power and not really about a cultural, like a cultural puritanism or whatever.

=== Tumblr's Dark Shadow (04:01) ===

[01:23:04]  It really is more, because you'll see people on the right and stuff do it too.
[01:23:09]  Look at Ackman.
[01:23:10]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:23:11]  I think cancel culture is sort of a misknow.
[01:23:13]  I mean, I think it was originally wielded like many weapons in the technological arsenal, particularly well by like insane people who you might describe as woke.
[01:23:23]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:23:25]  There should be a platform that did not escape my use, by the way.
[01:23:31]  I've completely, well, no.
[01:23:33]  My like many times ago, ex-girlfriend made me a flower thing on it.
[01:23:38]  That's nice.
[01:23:39]  Because I couldn't afford a website.
[01:23:41]  But did not get many customers.
[01:23:45]  But I think Tumblr, Tumblr casts a long and dark motherfucking shadow.
[01:23:51]  But I think that, yeah, originally a lot of this stuff was used by woke people because they were used to doing that on Tumblr.
[01:23:57]  Like, you know, did you re-tumble this or whatever?
[01:24:00]  Like, blah, blah, blah.
[01:24:02]  And then it became apparent, like, oh, like, people have been sort of using social media willy-nilly for a long time to these audiences.
[01:24:09]  I feel like there was a period before where social media use really was only with your group of friends usually.
[01:24:17]  And then it became like we all joined in on this weird world.
[01:24:21]  And it's like, it's all mixed in together.
[01:24:24]  And so your stuff from when you were just talking shit to your friends or when nobody knew who you were or whatever, maybe still nobody does.
[01:24:30]  That stuff is out there.
[01:24:31]  It's just like this, this like era spanning thing that like the stuff from maybe the first era is not appropriate or whatever.
[01:24:41]  And so this is a pre-woke phase.
[01:24:42]  The pre-woke phase.
[01:24:43]  And I think a lot of that stuff is like, you know, you can, like, it was originally pioneered by these like psycho-woke people or whatever, but it's now just a completely like acceptable form of.
[01:24:53]  Yeah, I mean, it's just a weird, the other thing that I would say, like, because you talking about Tumblr reminds me of this, is that there's a whole set of, I'm sure Liz is familiar with, like, message board dynamics that have been transformed, like transferred to much bigger social networks in ways that people who relate to the internet, like, I think it's still, I mean, people will talk a lot about something awful, the like infamous something awful message board as having been like extremely.
[01:25:21]  You had to pay, there's a one-time fee to like, to like get in.
[01:25:24]  It was five bucks that you had to pay to like get an account.
[01:25:27]  That's a good, I think that's so, that's like a.
[01:25:29]  I mean, they will tell you, like, yeah, real, real, they call themselves goons.
[01:25:32]  Real goons will tell you like that was what made it.
[01:25:35]  But the other thing was it was like the culture was relentlessly bullying.
[01:25:39]  And like a lot of, I mean, Tumblr kind of was too, just it was a slightly less direct and cruel kind of bullying and like Live Journal had its own.
[01:25:46]  But that kind of like abject like cruelty to people who couldn't follow the rules was always understood as how you create like a specific and enjoyable culture.
[01:26:01]  And that transferred like almost one-to-one to Twitter in a way that I think like really like one theory I have about the Bernie Bro thing was just that you had a lot of like very earnest, maybe not that intelligent like Hillary staffers and DNC types.
[01:26:16]  And then they were like, and then a bunch of like power something awful posters who have been like honed like like diamonds like crushed in like the meanest, the meanest, funniest people you could possibly meet, just going in on them in ways they had never experienced before.
[01:26:31]  And it just like just it just broke them.
[01:26:33]  Like it just completely like if you if you didn't know about something awful and then you encountered like something awful posters coming at you on Twitter, like I could see that that is the kind of thing that would it would make you go completely insane.
[01:26:45]  And unfortunately, like because Twitter was the elite social network, some of those people were extremely powerful in charge of news networks and whatever else.
[01:26:53]  And it made them go crazy.
[01:26:54]  Let's not forget the snake emoji.
[01:26:57]  The Warren people were, I think, participated in major casualties there.

=== Twitter's Elite Madness (02:41) ===

[01:27:05]  In a very concentration tattoo.
[01:27:07]  It was a very sort of anti-Deutsch-esque move, getting their Holocaust tattoos.
[01:27:13]  If you have an Elizabeth Warren Holocaust tattoo, please hit the tip line.
[01:27:17]  If you have an Elizabeth Warren tattoo of any kind, hit the tip line, please.
[01:27:21]  I'd like to speak to you.
[01:27:22]  I need to know where you are.
[01:27:24]  You know what?
[01:27:24]  I'd like to have an Elon Musk style baby with you.
[01:27:28]  I would like to see what comes out of the union of your motherfucking egg and my rockin' sperm.
[01:27:34]  No sex needed.
[01:27:35]  I just want to see what the baby looks like.
[01:27:37]  The most perfect centrist.
[01:27:38]  And we're putting that kid in the iPad all day.
[01:27:40]  Absolutely.
[01:27:40]  This is Ben H. Esther.
[01:27:41]  This is Dune.
[01:27:42]  We're creating the Kwisatz Hotter Act between you and the Warren tattoo.
[01:27:45]  Oh, he is a Kwisatz Hotterach.
[01:27:49]  Can I propose something to you?
[01:27:50]  Hit me.
[01:27:51]  Are you still virile?
[01:27:54]  Interesting hesitation.
[01:27:55]  Is that a proposal?
[01:27:56]  No, not with me.
[01:28:00]  I mean, I'm not saying no.
[01:28:01]  I just don't know how that happens.
[01:28:02]  Have you thought about having another baby and raising it on the control group, normal baby?
[01:28:10]  I assume your one is Ricky Reed now.
[01:28:13]  And then you have another baby, Rodney Reed, and you kind of just give him the iPad, give him the Peppa Pig.
[01:28:21]  I love, first of all, I love this idea, obviously.
[01:28:24]  This is how you get around the replication crisis.
[01:28:26]  Yeah, and I think my wife, I think my wife would be absolutely.
[01:28:29]  I can't imagine any object.
[01:28:30]  Why wouldn't she?
[01:28:31]  She sat down with me.
[01:28:32]  Just get you another kid.
[01:28:33]  And it doesn't have to be related to you.
[01:28:36]  It's not a great control group.
[01:28:37]  Well, you do kind of want the same thing.
[01:28:38]  You just inject it with HDH mixed in with your own shit.
[01:28:42]  I love it.
[01:28:42]  And so Rodney gets all of the, gets all the iPads.
[01:28:44]  Rodney gets all the iPad, everything else, everything he wants.
[01:28:47]  iPad, Binky, what other kids?
[01:28:51]  Just cigarettes.
[01:28:52]  iPad, iPhone, Galaxy, Galaxy, Amazon Fire, Patrick.
[01:29:02]  I want Rodney Street.
[01:29:03]  Like, do you remember there was a viral video of some eight-year-old girls doing like a makeup tutorial thing that went around with this is modern society like being fucked up.
[01:29:13]  I want Rodney to be doing that at three.
[01:29:15]  Yeah.
[01:29:15]  Whereas Ricky doesn't even know about this shit.
[01:29:18]  Like Ricky is like playing in Prospect Park.
[01:29:20]  Where do you see?
[01:29:20]  Let's, let's, what's the hypothesis?
[01:29:22]  Where's Ricky in 20 years and where's Rodney in 20 years?
[01:29:25]  Ricky, well, unfortunately, there's a high chance that Rodney at some point murders Ricky.
[01:29:29]  Yeah.
[01:29:30]  But we're back to the Bible.
[01:29:32]  We're back to the Bible.
[01:29:33]  Exactly.
[01:29:34]  Thank God.
[01:29:36]  But I would say Ricky, we don't know because we don't know what kind of world is going to be there for a Ricky in 2015.
[01:29:41]  That's true.
[01:29:42]  Rodney, though, will probably be completely fine by the end of 20 years from now.

=== Cannot Read, Can't Relate (07:44) ===

[01:29:47]  You know, I was talking to a friend who's like a teaches pretty young kids.
[01:29:53]  And she was like, literally every kid that comes into my class now is like afflicted by like autism or like extreme ADHD.
[01:30:02]  And like, I don't know what to do with it.
[01:30:04]  And I hear like, no kids can fucking read.
[01:30:06]  Yeah.
[01:30:07]  It is, it is, and I sound like an old person.
[01:30:09]  She's to bring you in to teach the news.
[01:30:11]  No, this is like the last job left for you.
[01:30:13]  I literally just was at a dinner with a bunch of babies.
[01:30:17]  A bunch of babies.
[01:30:18]  No, one person who taught high school in a pretty like, you know, pretty poor school district.
[01:30:26]  Two people that taught in the humanities at a university and one person who taught in crazy enough astrophysics, which that threw me at another university.
[01:30:38]  And I was at, I mean, we were just talking about it, and they were saying that like, literally, like kids that come into these schools, you know, one, there was private universities, public university, public high school, right?
[01:30:51]  That they can't read.
[01:30:53]  That they, the, the astrophysics guy was like, they didn't understand fractions.
[01:30:59]  Like, they didn't understand fractions.
[01:31:01]  And both universities would not let them, would not let any teacher give a grade less than a B minus.
[01:31:10]  Jesus.
[01:31:11]  So kids, and this is the kind of shit that I'm going to be talking about.
[01:31:13]  I just said some of the same thing.
[01:31:14]  Someone is a college teacher or professor or whatever.
[01:31:17]  This is true.
[01:31:18]  I can't fail kids even if they can't read.
[01:31:20]  Yeah.
[01:31:21]  And so they're advancing these kids that are not knowledgeable, that are not like don't understand.
[01:31:26]  And in the case of this like one university that is like an Ivy League, whatever, all of the kids are going and getting jobs at McKinsey.
[01:31:35]  That's like where they recruit for these kids.
[01:31:37]  Like it is so blackpilling to kind of understand the pipeline here.
[01:31:41]  Imagine you're like a direct-to-consumer, like, you know, what a medical supply company or something, and you're going to need to restructure your call on McKinsey guy.
[01:31:49]  He's like, I can't read this, so I respect what y'all are doing here, but I do need you folks to maybe like a pictorial kind of thing.
[01:31:58]  Yeah, can you translate this?
[01:32:00]  He's a number I call this.
[01:32:01]  By a fourth, a fourth.
[01:32:03]  Wait, by fourth?
[01:32:05]  We could do that easily.
[01:32:06]  No, but it's like, it makes me feel like some crazy, like, what I assume to be sort of like based the subscriber to the free press or whatever devices like thing is.
[01:32:20]  You know, who's like, what's the crisis?
[01:32:22]  Fucking kids can't read.
[01:32:23]  Yeah, I live in Austin and I care about Palestine.
[01:32:27]  Yeah, the woke agenda is like fucking what, but, or on the flip side of that, like the crazy thing was like, oh, America's in decline, which, you know, and we, this is the sort of like Adam, Curtis, gerontocracy moment where all the institutions are hollowed out and we're turning into the classic American Coca-Cola swilling WALL-E people.
[01:32:46]  Well, I would say I'm coming at that from a different perspective.
[01:32:49]  It's what you, it's true.
[01:32:51]  This decadent country with their fucking sugar brain ass kids.
[01:32:56]  They don't teach them how to read.
[01:32:57]  They're just teaching them how to rape the third world.
[01:32:59]  That's it.
[01:33:00]  But no, it is fucking crazy.
[01:33:02]  It's, it's, it's, listen, I am stupid.
[01:33:05]  And I know you're, Liz always is like, no, you're not when I do this.
[01:33:08]  I am not traditionally intelligent.
[01:33:11]  I'm cunning, I would say.
[01:33:13]  I'm cunning.
[01:33:14]  No, I think that you're smart, but I don't know if you're cunning.
[01:33:16]  I have a degree of cunning.
[01:33:18]  I don't know about that.
[01:33:19]  I think that you're like doing the kind of like reverso.
[01:33:23]  Actually, I just listen to women too much.
[01:33:25]  I know she would have said that too much.
[01:33:27]  Which I do listen to women too much.
[01:33:29]  Okay, do you think that you're doing that?
[01:33:31]  Who else has a job?
[01:33:32]  Who else has a job where they go to work where half their job is listening to a woman?
[01:33:38]  Well, first of all, I don't know about that list.
[01:33:41]  Okay, fair enough.
[01:33:42]  And young Chomsky.
[01:33:42]  Look at this sweater and the pose he's doing so non-threatening, exactly like myself, except I have to lean towards the microphone.
[01:33:48]  I am not, I'm saying I don't know fractions either.
[01:33:51]  I'm saying that.
[01:33:52]  I do know how to read.
[01:33:53]  And I told you fractions.
[01:33:55]  This is the TikTok clip here.
[01:33:57]  This is you admitting that talking to women has made you stop learning fractions.
[01:34:01]  Star Wars, because I'm like, what's going on?
[01:34:02]  Because of the woke agenda, I don't understand math.
[01:34:05]  Stop learning fractions.
[01:34:06]  I don't understand maths.
[01:34:07]  You can eat only liver from here on out.
[01:34:09]  You can inject yourself into the drinks.
[01:34:10]  I do eat a lot of liver now.
[01:34:12]  But I have a crazy, my boy Sam is really into that stuff.
[01:34:15]  He says he cured his lactose intolerant by drinking water.
[01:34:17]  Yeah, you told me about this, and I still don't think you should.
[01:34:19]  But I, because I had to do it for six months, and I'll have direct, I don't want to.
[01:34:23]  Just go to the doctor.
[01:34:24]  What is a doctor going to cure me of being Jewish?
[01:34:27]  Yes, doctors tried that, Liz.
[01:34:30]  Okay?
[01:34:32]  Anyways, I got to say this.
[01:34:34]  I may not be Mr. Titan.
[01:34:37]  I may not.
[01:34:38]  I may not be Mr. Titan of Intelligence.
[01:34:41]  I'm just saying this.
[01:34:41]  I'm trying to relate to our Zoom.
[01:34:43]  First of all, if you can't read, hit the tip line.
[01:34:45]  Tell us what's happening.
[01:34:47]  Hit the tip line.
[01:34:48]  Child of the 90s.
[01:34:49]  Exactly.
[01:34:49]  Or actually, speaking of Jared Leto and child, if you know what I'm talking about there and you have some real facts, also hit the tip line because I cannot believe that.
[01:34:57]  I went through a tip line the other day.
[01:34:58]  We got some good stuff.
[01:34:59]  Fucking working.
[01:35:00]  We're going to do another tip line episode.
[01:35:02]  People are asking about it.
[01:35:03]  But if you have Jared Leto tips, please, please, please, please.
[01:35:06]  That is my white whale.
[01:35:08]  Anyways.
[01:35:08]  We know things about Jared.
[01:35:09]  I'm saying I am.
[01:35:10]  I do know things about Jared Leto.
[01:35:12]  I am not.
[01:35:13]  smart in the way book smart.
[01:35:15]  Let's say.
[01:35:15]  I actually have read a lot of books, but I'm retarded.
[01:35:19]  This is so fake.
[01:35:20]  By the way, you came, I just, no, stop.
[01:35:22]  I'm stopping you right now.
[01:35:22]  I'm starting again.
[01:35:24]  But you, we were at Thanksgiving and my parents were there.
[01:35:28]  Young Chomsky was there and his father.
[01:35:30]  And Brace strolls in and it's like, I'm cooking Thanksgiving for fucking 14 people.
[01:35:35]  And I'm like, thank God Brace is here because he's like the entertainment.
[01:35:39]  He's like the best person to have a dinner party.
[01:35:40]  Stop cutting.
[01:35:41]  Stop cunning.
[01:35:42]  No.
[01:35:43]  You just like take the mic, basically.
[01:35:45]  And I'm just like, great, I'm going to on over there.
[01:35:47]  You know what I mean?
[01:35:48]  But you, one of the people at our Thanksgiving was a professor, and she was delighted by you and was like, because you could, we're just rattling off random like novelists who were killed and like random French writers who were killed and revolutionized.
[01:36:05]  That's the only thing I can do.
[01:36:06]  And imagine she's actually a list fraction.
[01:36:09]  Exactly.
[01:36:10]  It's so insane.
[01:36:11]  It's a fucking Liz.
[01:36:12]  You don't understand it.
[01:36:13]  It's a Potemkin village.
[01:36:14]  It's a Potemkin village.
[01:36:15]  You don't understand.
[01:36:16]  I can't drive.
[01:36:18]  Me neither.
[01:36:18]  I know you can't, but that's because you're just- Somebody with cunning would be able to- You drive back?
[01:36:22]  Yeah, of course.
[01:36:23]  I drive in New Jersey.
[01:36:24]  How fast?
[01:36:25]  How fast can you fucking drive?
[01:36:26]  30, 40 miles an hour, probably.
[01:36:28]  I'm saying, how fast has you ever driven?
[01:36:30]  In my life?
[01:36:31]  Yes.
[01:36:31]  What's the fastest you drive?
[01:36:32]  I've hit like 105.
[01:36:34]  You've only hit 105.
[01:36:37]  Wait, where?
[01:36:38]  I think you're missing out on drive jersey.
[01:36:40]  You're talking about it.
[01:36:41]  You talk to you.
[01:36:42]  You should be missing out.
[01:36:43]  You're talking about a lot in the Wild West.
[01:36:44]  Oh, yeah.
[01:36:45]  People, you travel.
[01:36:46]  What?
[01:36:47]  You ever hit anybody?
[01:36:48]  Do I ever...
[01:36:49]  Have you ever hit anybody?
[01:36:50]  No, no, no, no.
[01:36:50]  I've never, I mean, Nuck Wood.
[01:36:51]  I've never actually been in an accident.
[01:36:52]  There's no incredible fucking driver.
[01:36:55]  Did you drive in the city?
[01:36:55]  Yeah.
[01:36:56]  I've got a Honda Fit 2017.
[01:36:59]  Driving, I feel like.
[01:36:59]  It's a Honda Fit.
[01:37:00]  Would you say that's the journalist car?
[01:37:02]  It's like the Cux car.
[01:37:04]  I have a Honda.
[01:37:05]  Yeah.
[01:37:05]  It's a great car.
[01:37:06]  It's not a fit.
[01:37:07]  Liz, let's be real.
[01:37:09]  Liz has a fucking Honda.
[01:37:11]  She's okay.
[01:37:12]  She's a Honda fish.
[01:37:13]  That travel sucks a little bit.
[01:37:15]  That's right.
[01:37:17]  I walk or I'm driven by kind of a drink.
[01:37:19]  I mean, I didn't drive here.
[01:37:21]  I took the B69, actually, to get here.
[01:37:24]  Sick.
[01:37:27]  Is it really derailed for five minutes?
[01:37:29]  People are, people, it's been way more than five minutes.

=== Partly Shaped Attitudes (07:43) ===

[01:37:31]  People are stupid now, and I understand being stupid.
[01:37:33]  I get that.
[01:37:34]  I feel that.
[01:37:35]  I was, but you got to learn how to read.
[01:37:38]  That's really what I was trying to say.
[01:37:40]  I'm not trying to say, I'm not trying to come at you from my ivory tower.
[01:37:44]  I'm just saying you really got to learn how to read.
[01:37:47]  It's gonna be difficult for you.
[01:37:49]  What it seems like to be is like, it's like context clues.
[01:37:52]  Like people do not understand context.
[01:37:55]  We're just in the bitching corner now.
[01:37:56]  I'm with you.
[01:37:56]  Yeah, people don't understand context.
[01:37:58]  No, fuck it.
[01:37:59]  I'll go like Barry Weiss on it or what I assume.
[01:38:01]  I don't know.
[01:38:02]  I'm not.
[01:38:03]  Well, they don't understand the history before.
[01:38:06]  I don't think this is Barry Weiss is not, there's like, no, that group, they don't want critical like context clues or whatever.
[01:38:11]  They just want, I mean, not to be whatever, but it's like they want super hierarchical, super straightforward.
[01:38:16]  Learn the thing that you're given.
[01:38:17]  They're mad that people aren't learning the thing that they've been given.
[01:38:20]  When, you know, that seems like they kind of, they probably are.
[01:38:23]  They're just not learning.
[01:38:24]  But when you were talking about Gen Z, Gen Alpha stuff before, when you were saying like, there's this weird sort of like cynicism or nihilism or like also using words that they don't totally understand the meaning to to describe.
[01:38:37]  I can't pronounce them.
[01:38:38]  But yeah, but saying like, oh, this is me being doing irony or this is me satire when it's like, you know, doing a sex on every star.
[01:38:45]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:38:46]  No, but I do think I've noticed there's like a, you know, I know this sounds like every generation.
[01:38:51]  So this is about, we're doing elderhead millennial corner now for sure.
[01:38:55]  If you are young, turn this off.
[01:38:56]  Exactly.
[01:38:58]  But I do think there's a crazy like mercenary attitude that I've noticed in like Gen Z people or even talking to friends who like have hired or worked with Gen Z people or Gen Alpha or whatever it is now.
[01:39:12]  I don't know, whatever.
[01:39:13]  The Young's people.
[01:39:15]  Where there's an attitude of just like, it's like real stripped down.
[01:39:20]  Like there's just, well, no, I just make, I just got to make money and just do whatever.
[01:39:24]  Like it is like extremely, I would say driven in a different way, because I also think they're very lazy in different ways and like make a lot of excuses for themselves in very creative ways, I will say.
[01:39:36]  I would say millennials are probably the laziest, but yeah.
[01:39:39]  But just like very, yeah, a kind of mercenary attitude to the universe and to the world that is sort of, I guess you could call it nihilism.
[01:39:50]  I feel like that's always wielded at like younger generations.
[01:39:53]  So I kind of want to like try to avoid that because I do think I'm kind of talking about something different.
[01:39:57]  I mean, partly it's like a subjectivity shaped by being on these platforms.
[01:40:00]  Maybe this is a hypothesis.
[01:40:02]  I'm not going to say that this is definitely the thing, but I think you could argue that like that particular kind of like, because a lot of this is like hustle-grind mentality.
[01:40:10]  Like all this stuff is like, is seems to be a big, based anecdotally at least sounds like it's a really big part of these kids' lives, especially like young boy.
[01:40:17]  Like what I hear from like teacher friends or whatever about young men is that they're like, we've raised truly one of the most awful generations of young men, not even just like misogynists or whatever, just like just the dullest minds that you could possibly imagine, like, you know, grind-centric entrepreneurs from the go.
[01:40:36]  And like, hard not to conclude to at least some extent that this is a function of like of sociality shaped by being on these platforms all the time.
[01:40:44]  And so your whole subjectivity becomes about marketing yourself, like new kinds of marketing or whatever.
[01:40:50]  And you don't want to blame it only on the platforms too.
[01:40:52]  They're also growing up in the context of having lived through not as adults one global financial crisis, 10 years of austerity and low wages, a pandemic probably hitting them right when they were starting to get laid or whatever.
[01:41:09]  And all that stuff is hard.
[01:41:10]  And their parents are Gen X probably, which is like awful.
[01:41:14]  Like awful seizures by Gen X. They're lacking in the parenting department.
[01:41:17]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:41:18]  The most right-wing.
[01:41:18]  That is like the most right-wing generation.
[01:41:20]  They're like GQ marketing executives.
[01:41:22]  Well, yeah, I think it's, you know, you see that movie, Children of Men?
[01:41:26]  Oh, yeah. That's my dream.
[01:41:27]  You know, which to live like, I want the like secret compound that has the record players and the amazing library.
[01:41:36]  Michael Keynes.
[01:41:37]  Okay, I want the secret compound that has like all the art in it.
[01:41:40]  You're talking about when he goes and visits like his brother or whatever.
[01:41:42]  Well, that scene always.
[01:41:45]  I read the book of Children of Men in middle school, which is a pretty good, very, very, very different story than the, than the movie.
[01:41:51]  They're both very good.
[01:41:52]  But they both have a sort of psychotic young generation in it.
[01:41:56]  But I think the movie does a really good job.
[01:41:58]  They only show this one kid, but it's like when they go into like the place where they have the Mona Lisa or whatever, he's like visiting his brother.
[01:42:04]  I can't, for some plot point.
[01:42:06]  They have like his like, his like sort of psycho looking kid who's just like using this like little handheld computer thing the whole time.
[01:42:14]  Oh yeah.
[01:42:14]  And like he's just like taking pills and shit like that.
[01:42:16]  And I'm like, I like the thing is like there's no, I'm not making a moral judgment on like young people now.
[01:42:22]  Like I think millennials are some of the whiniest, corniest motherfuckers to have ever lived in human history.
[01:42:30]  I would say without absolutely the millennial is the whiniest being that has ever been in the known universe.
[01:42:38]  That is also though partly because there's so many more of us.
[01:42:42]  Yes.
[01:42:42]  And so there's many more.
[01:42:43]  There's such a bigger generation than Gen X and then Gen Z even on the book and I'm like, I think, and I think that the millennial method of interacting is like somewhat warped by social media dynamics as well.
[01:42:57]  But it's like we were sort of saying at the top of the episode, it's like we're not digital natives just by dint of the fact that like we were born before this stuff became ubiquitous.
[01:43:07]  And to use that word again.
[01:43:09]  But the, but like Gen Z, it's like, yeah, a lot of the dynamics are shaped by that.
[01:43:15]  And of course, like there's a phenomenon of kids like addressing chat as sort of this like unseen figure in the room.
[01:43:21]  And it's done in this sort of like tongue-in-cheek way, but like it's also kind of not on a deeper level.
[01:43:27]  And like, I'm just like, it's funny because you see this reaction.
[01:43:31]  And we were talking about this before we started rolling, but like this reaction of like, right now there's this sort of trend for like sort of the OnlyFans moment is over and like the trad influencer moment is rising.
[01:43:42]  And I think that's mirrored in like there's a rising conservatism in general.
[01:43:46]  I think the sort of the woke moment's been done for a little bit now, but now something is kind of coming to replace it.
[01:43:52]  But like in that in that discrete instance of like the like the sort of only fans to whatever, Christian or whatever.
[01:44:03]  I think it like it's this, it's people searching for some kind of meaning.
[01:44:08]  And like they're they're they're learning these ways of meaning, these ways of being from other people on the internet.
[01:44:15]  And like it becomes its own like self-replicating, almost like digital native thing.
[01:44:20]  And like it's, I mean, obviously there's the clear, very plain hypocrisy, which is sort of boring to point out, of like, are you really traditional if like you're spending 12 hours a day online selling supplements?
[01:44:32]  No, obviously you're not.
[01:44:33]  You're just like a digital marketer, but you wear slightly more modest leisure.
[01:44:38]  But like it is, it is like there is new subcult.
[01:44:43]  There are new subcultures that are like appearing from this like digital unconsciousness that like freak me out because they don't have a real subcultures of all kinds have many problems.
[01:44:56]  But like what a boring statement, but it's true.
[01:45:00]  But like many of them at least have like roots in sort of reality.
[01:45:05]  And instead of this collective nightmare, which we call the fucking internet, that is like birthing these new things.
[01:45:10]  And like there can't be like beauty or goodness from that.

=== Complaining About Houses And Credit Cards (06:20) ===

[01:45:14]  Well, they're all about to get really, really resentful of millennials even more because millennials are about to be the richest generation to have ever lived.
[01:45:21]  Yes.
[01:45:21]  Yes.
[01:45:22]  Millennials.
[01:45:23]  Millennials are going to fucking go.
[01:45:26]  No, but it's true.
[01:45:27]  There's about to be the largest wealth transfer in history, as they like to say, is actually going to happen because millennials are all going to inherit their baby boomers' wealth.
[01:45:39]  This is like a big massive transfer that's going to happen as the baby boomers die off.
[01:45:44]  Are you serious?
[01:45:44]  That's like a real thing.
[01:45:46]  I mean, not all of us are not.
[01:45:49]  I like every person.
[01:45:50]  I know, but like, I mean, I'm not inheriting shit.
[01:45:52]  But like, those that are are the 1% of boomers that are going to die.
[01:45:57]  I mean, all that money is going to go somewhere and it's all going to go to this new generation.
[01:46:01]  Oh, I thought they had just spent it all.
[01:46:04]  No.
[01:46:05]  Like, they all have houses, among other things.
[01:46:06]  Like, all those houses are going to get dirty.
[01:46:08]  Well, millennials also have been buying up a lot of houses.
[01:46:10]  Which I don't understand because who is that?
[01:46:14]  A lot of people.
[01:46:15]  That's the American people.
[01:46:16]  The American home.
[01:46:17]  I know, but I thought the best.
[01:46:18]  The American small business owner loves to be busted out of like 68% of houses in Manhattan being bought with cash last year.
[01:46:25]  Well, that's a lot of blackrocks.
[01:46:26]  That's got to be, right?
[01:46:27]  Like just like investment funds buying that shit out.
[01:46:30]  Yes and no, but I mean, you have to, I think, you know, being such a coastal elite, we forget like, you know, the median house price is not.
[01:46:41]  Yeah, it's like cheap to live.
[01:46:42]  $2.5 million for a two-bedroom apartment, whatever the fuck it is in New York City.
[01:46:48]  At the same time, I mean, I don't know who's buying fucking houses at six, seven percent interest rates.
[01:46:54]  You know, I guess that's why you would put paying cash if you have it.
[01:46:58]  But as a kind of investment into equity, it makes literally zero sense.
[01:47:02]  Well, I mean, you know me.
[01:47:03]  Like, I obviously, like, I've always said on this show, like, in order to be a Maoist, like, you need to have multiple streams of income.
[01:47:09]  So, like, I have bought up a lot of like MLM, low-income properties throughout the country.
[01:47:14]  This is the second clip for TikTok.
[01:47:15]  Yeah, I rent them out.
[01:47:16]  And so, what I do here is I take out a loan from a bank, business loan.
[01:47:22]  I transfer, I pay my credit card debt with that.
[01:47:24]  I buy a new house on that credit card, and then I pay off that credit card debt with another business loan for another bank.
[01:47:31]  You can replicate this if you want.
[01:47:32]  And so, I just do that, and I do that, and I do that, and I charge, I'm going to say this, frankly, the highest rents in the country, and I get those fucking rents.
[01:47:39]  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[01:47:43]  I mean, that would actually be perfect for TikTok.
[01:47:45]  That exact clip.
[01:47:46]  I wish I had been filming it right there and we could have got the little, like, the subtitles.
[01:47:51]  No, you nailed it.
[01:47:51]  You see, this is this is cunning.
[01:47:53]  That was actually a little bit of cunning right there that you had it.
[01:47:55]  I can't remember it wasn't cunning.
[01:47:56]  I don't think you're cunning.
[01:47:57]  What do you mean about cunning?
[01:47:59]  I don't know.
[01:48:00]  That you know about.
[01:48:02]  I know about everything.
[01:48:03]  You don't know about everything.
[01:48:05]  I don't know about everything.
[01:48:06]  We got to wrap up.
[01:48:08]  Max, this has been fun.
[01:48:10]  This has been fun.
[01:48:10]  Yeah, this is a great conversation.
[01:48:12]  I think we solved all the world's problems, right?
[01:48:13]  I do.
[01:48:14]  Sounds like it.
[01:48:14]  And you know what?
[01:48:15]  If you're mad at us for talking about social media, take a look at your damn self.
[01:48:18]  Why would people be mad?
[01:48:19]  People always get mad when we – here's the thing.
[01:48:21]  People do get mad.
[01:48:22]  I think, and I understand this reaction on a certain emotional level.
[01:48:28]  It's like when you are like, this is bad for you.
[01:48:31]  People are like, you're haranguing me or whatever.
[01:48:33]  Like, you're just complaining.
[01:48:35]  It's a bit like, you know what?
[01:48:36]  It's good to complain.
[01:48:37]  Yeah, first of all, one got to complain about something.
[01:48:39]  I got to complain about something.
[01:48:40]  That's like, how else can you live life?
[01:48:42]  I grew up on Seinfeld.
[01:48:43]  Like, you complain about everything.
[01:48:44]  Got to complain about something.
[01:48:45]  That's the plot of the show.
[01:48:47]  So that's the plot of my life.
[01:48:48]  Second of all, second of all, I think that all, the other thing is that people assume when you're talking about something, you're somehow excusing yourself from it.
[01:49:02]  Which is why I always try to remind people constantly.
[01:49:05]  I'm always implicating myself in everything that I'm talking about.
[01:49:09]  Gonna be real.
[01:49:09]  I'm not implicating myself in the TikTok thing.
[01:49:12]  I mean, I'm not saying I'm any better than anyone else, to be honest.
[01:49:15]  Like, I'm literally, that's, I'm thoroughly mediatized.
[01:49:19]  I am thoroughly, like, in this fucking water.
[01:49:21]  I'm in this shit trash can with everyone else.
[01:49:23]  You know what I mean?
[01:49:24]  But I think that's what enables me to try, at least, or that's what like compels me to try to find some distance from it, you know, because I don't know.
[01:49:35]  I mean, I'm not better than anybody else.
[01:49:37]  I'm just a gal with the podcast.
[01:49:39]  I mean, and as we talked about, like a lot of the stuff that's wrong with TikTok is very similar to things that have been wrong with everything else that we are.
[01:49:45]  Like, not like, you know, we didn't watch a million hours of TV.
[01:49:48]  It's not like we didn't all become addicted to slot machines.
[01:49:51]  It's not like we didn't all fucking gamble, dude.
[01:49:53]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:49:54]  So, so we are implicated in some sense in the TikTok thing by analogy, if by no other way.
[01:50:00]  Well, if you loved that, you had a good radio voice, too.
[01:50:04]  Oh, thanks.
[01:50:05]  That's a sound.
[01:50:05]  You guys are so nice.
[01:50:07]  A horrible YouTube face.
[01:50:10]  The man is ugly, ladies and gentlemen.
[01:50:12]  No, he's great looking.
[01:50:13]  And in fact, this is more cunning.
[01:50:16]  This is more of you being cunning.
[01:50:19]  Because you don't know what I'm really thinking right now.
[01:50:21]  No, I don't.
[01:50:23]  What I'm thinking is.
[01:50:24]  But you got me wrapped around your finger, Bridge.
[01:50:26]  You got me.
[01:50:28]  I don't know how to sing that song.
[01:50:29]  Maxread.substack.com.
[01:50:33]  Fantastic.
[01:50:34]  Liz and I are both, and you know what?
[01:50:36]  I'm not sucking a dick with this, my brother.
[01:50:38]  This is the plain truth.
[01:50:39]  Liz and I are both paid subscribers to this.
[01:50:42]  Read it.
[01:50:43]  Fans, glad you came on the show.
[01:50:44]  Thank you guys.
[01:50:45]  Thank you guys so much.
[01:50:46]  Thank you so much.
[01:50:47]  Such a nice conversation.
[01:50:48]  You put it in your substack that you went on.
[01:50:50]  Oh, of course.
[01:50:52]  You can just copy-paste our group chat when we were prepping for it.
[01:50:55]  That's a little bit more.
[01:50:55]  Well, you have to copy and paste some of the stuff he said.
[01:50:58]  That's a little constant.
[01:50:58]  Some of the stuff he said was really awful to people.
[01:51:02]  Well, to specifically blur out some names, it'll be totally fine.
[01:51:07]  Yeah, I mean, it's crazy that you live like this in 2024.
[01:51:11]  Well, I'm not going to send the photos that I sent you.
[01:51:13]  But it makes sense that you're on Substack.
[01:51:15]  Well, yeah, that's the kind of brave truth telling me.
[01:51:18]  What is above sub?
[01:51:19]  Like, there's sub, there's normal, and then what's above supra?
[01:51:22]  We should have a supra stack.
[01:51:23]  We should make a supra stack for guys like me who can only get their views in certain languages.
[01:51:29]  No, fractional.
[01:51:29]  I should start a Chinese sub stack.
[01:51:31]  I should look at it.
[01:51:31]  You can watch that chord.
[01:51:32]  It's like giving me anxiety.
[01:51:33]  Watching the chord.
[01:51:34]  What's it going to bring down?

=== Jeffrey's Supra Stack Idea (00:45) ===

[01:51:35]  It's not going to be everything.
[01:51:36]  My phone.
[01:51:37]  It's like a seven-foot cord.
[01:51:39]  Anyways, I got to go home and read this book in preparation for Friday.
[01:51:47]  Max Reed, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us.
[01:51:50]  My name is Bryce.
[01:51:51]  I'm Liz.
[01:51:52]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:51:54]  The podcast is called, You know What?
[01:51:57]  You Say It.
[01:51:58]  True or not.
[01:51:59]  And we'll see you next time.
[01:52:00]  Bye.
[01:52:18]  Jeffrey Lexter.
[01:52:19]  Come out.
[01:52:20]  Come out.