[rock music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I'm your co-host, Francis Zehr. And I'm Daisy Alioto. Your other co-host.
Um, a reminder before we get started that we are recording a mailbag episode on Thursday, or on Friday. I believe we're recording on Friday. We're recording on Friday. We're recording your questions by Thursday.
We need your questions by Thursday, yeah. Yeah. Um, sorry for the confusion. So we can prepare ahead of time.
So if you have any questions you wanna ask us, um, about any of the topics we've talked about on here or- or Yes... send them to tastelandpod@gmail.com by end of day Thursday, December 19th.
End of day is, like, midnight. EOD. And, you know, thanks to everyone who already sent questions in. Yes. You're- We- we've got them. Thank you... you won. Overachievers. Um, who are we talking to today?
Today we're talking to Josh Citarella. He's an artist, writer, podcaster and researcher who's best known for his work researching Gen Z political extremist communities on the internet.
Haven't heard anything about that lately.
Um, [laughs] he's the founder of Do Not Research, a nonprofit artist community, and he's currently a dozen episodes into Doomscroll, which is an in-person video talk show exploring online culture and politics, and I'm excited to talk to him about that because of our aversion to video.
Mm. Um- I know. Maybe he'll convert us... he's putting it... He's putting it all out there. He's, he's really investing. It's really high quality. Mm-hmm. It's a really high quality product. It is, yeah.
I, I, I, I watched it... Even still, like, I watched it yesterday while doing other stuff, and I, like, had it... You know, I've got my laptop and my monitor, and I had it small on my laptop.
But I did keep looking over, 'cause, you know, you're getting the man- you're getting the, the mannerisms. You're getting the, the hand movements. Some of us do talk with our hands. Mm-hmm. Famously, yeah.
Um, it was good. Yeah, I've been... I've- I'm excited to talk to him. I- I've never met him before. I think you have, right? Um, no, only digitally. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Um, I've been following his work for plenty years, the, you know, whatever, in the mid-2000s, seeing some of the... I don't know if I knew they were his at the time, but some of those, like, jogging images, famously.
You might have seen a beer in a baguette as a koozie type of thing. You don't remember the beer koozie, the baguette koozie? [laughs] No. It's, like, a famous image. I don't know. Um- Okay. Okay... I, I, I re- I re...
I- I wouldn't remember probably, except I did see it, um, on one of his old posts I was reading yesterday. Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you've seen that. Oh, Josh hasn't posted on Tumblr since 2014.
We have to confront him about that. Mm. 20- 2014. I was never a Tumblr user. I, [laughs] I act- actually I did have one. I briefly had a Tumblr. I wonder if I could find it. In, um- Was it thematic? Yeah, it was in...
I made it, I did it in, like, s- sophomore or freshman year of college when I, I was do- what I was doing was I was taking tons of screenshots on, like, Facebook, whatever else.
I would just take really highly cropped screenshots of, like, somebody's eye or whatever. It was, it was weird. Anyways, Josh is here. Let's let him introduce himself.
That's a typical thing you do when you are in college in Portland. Exactly, when you're in liberal arts college. Hello, Josh. Hi. Hi. Hi. Thank you for coming on, Josh. Good to see you. Glad to be here.
Okay, maybe, maybe this is a little hard to start. We are recording. I was hanging out with our mutual friend, Harris Rosenblum, this weekend. Big fan. Yes. Yeah.
And I asked him what I should ask you, if he had any ideas, and he said to ask you- [laughs]... uh, what accelerationism is.
God, God, yeah, the, uh, the single most, uh, misused and widely applicable term on the whole of the internet. What is it? You can... There's a good friend of mine, uh, Greg Guevara, known as Jreg on YouTube.
And he does, I believe, an entire, an entire alphabet, uh, A through Z, of all the accelerationisms. Mm. So yeah, your guess, your guess is as good as mine.
Um, I would say that just very generally speaking, accelerationism is a vibey political theory, cultural theory that emerges in the '90s. It's very popular with art people and also tech people. Mm.
So, um, in that context, this is like post-1989. Like, Soviet Union, Berlin Wall has fallen. Like, the idea of socialism is, like, not gonna happen.
Uh, and so accelerationism is this kind of pop philosophy among academics and intellectuals that is like, "The only way out is through," and so we'll find vectors within capitalism for us to make our utopian society.
And sometimes in the early years that was applied as, like, copy left. Um, it was very popular among hackers.
Uh, it's changed a lot in obviously the last 30 years, and now you have, like, basically an infinite sprawling genre of all sorts of different groups.
Right accelerationism, left accelerationism, unconditional accelerationism, effective accelerationism. This is a recent one on Twitter. Um, there's Z-acc, uh, G-acc, gender accelerationism.
That one's actually kind of interesting. Mm. New to me. Which is the, uh, the, the idea that industrial society has produced,
uh, essentially hormone-disrupting chemicals at a global scale such that the turtles are now changing genders. Mm. Is this... So this is like the, they're making the frogs gay. This is like that?
Yeah, but I mean, that's... So that's real. Frogs have always been gay. Okay. Did you even read Frog and Toad? [laughs] They were lovers. [laughs] They were roommates. History will say they were roommates.
It's, it's, it's, it's fiction canon. Anyways, okay, actually- Not to be, not to be a stickler- No, be a stickler... they're not, they're not gay. They're, they're intersex. Okay.
So the, uh, atrazine, which is a, uh, I believe an agricultural pesticide that runs off into the water supply, is absorbed by amphibians- Mm...
that have, you know, an order of magnitude more exposure to this stuff than humans because their skin is porous.
And so it will cause them to developAll sorts of like multiple genitalia and like just having a whole, whole wild party, um, you know? Okay, wait. But so, so that's the same or separate from the turtles?
Uh, no, it's r- it's related to it. Okay.
It's related to it because the, uh, in the particular example of the turtles, I'm gonna forget whatever ocean current it comes from, but the, uh, temperature of that, uh, you know, uh, Gulf Stream, jet stream, whatever water these turtles are swimming in, uh, it raised in temperature and that also, uh, there were certain chemicals from whatever industrial production was upstream such that these turtles were exposed to, uh, thi- xenoestrogens essentially.
Without getting like too in-depth, there's a lot of, um, chemicals in our industrial environment that are metabolized by different organisms as estrogen, and so the turtles transitioned. They w- they became female. Mm.
Um, it's written by a pretty niche Twitter philosopher who describes herself as lesbi-NRX, lesbian neo-reaction. Mm. Mm. So this is, you know, um, neo-monarchy. It's...
I, I'm not even gonna explain it because it doesn't make sense, but [laughs] there's a lot of accelerationisms. This is the point.
The E in EYK actually stands for estrogen, and that's why venture capitalists are so into it. [laughs] And the Z in Z EYK stands for zin. I don't know if you guys knew that. I like that. Yeah. I like that.
Um, how much do you know about eels, Josh? Eels? Yeah. I think... Uh, I don't know. What, what is there to know about eels? So much.
I read a whole book about eels a couple years ago, and we don't really know like where they actually spawn or how they like know where to go.
I read a really interesting thing about eels actually the other week, last week. Was, I think it's the Vittles newsletter. It's like a London- Vittles is a fantastic newsletter... newsletter. Yeah, it's really good.
Newsletter and restaurant out of London, yeah.
So it's this really good piece about like the disappearing pie and mash shops in London and how this is like this old, like working class London culture thing, and it would be, I'll probably get some of it wrong, but you know, it was just your pie- Mm...
your mashed potatoes, and then this like, um, [lip smacks] this cilantro liqueur, liquor, whatever.
Um, and I think it was the pies that were eel, and it dates to this time when like, you know, the Thames was full of eels, which were imported from Holland.
They weren't actually this British thing, so it's this like disappearing British culture that's like, you know, this kind of fake nostalgic, um, idea of British working class w- when, you know, eels aren't even actually this originally British thing.
So that's everything I know about eels. Lovely. That's all you know. Wow. Yeah. Um, I listened to The Bridges podcast. I'd never heard of The Bridges podcast. Mm. I'd heard of Destiny.
I'd never heard of The Bridges podcast, but I listened to the episode you were on a month ago yesterday on, at 2X speed. First, uh, for the first two hours. [laughs] Still a long episode. It's really long.
Well, for the first two hours. That's, that's a three-hour meal right there. I did. It's three hours. I did 1.5X speed.
Um, but one thing I wanted to get into that you mentioned as an aside there that I figured, you know, you didn't get into there, so why don't we, uh, take those leftovers here.
Um, you said, "I would like to redesign social media and make it a division of the post office and put digital stamps on everything."
So I'd love to hear you talk about this, and then I also couldn't help but read that in light of Trump saying that he wants to privatize the post office. Yeah. Yeah. What a, what an absolute shame. Um, okay.
So I will, uh, not shut the fuck up about this. I've been saying this for a decade. Mm. Happy to go into it, uh, very in depth. Please.
Well, can I first just preface that Destiny gets a lot of heat online, and I'll just give some of the backstory about why I did that podcast.
Previous to people knowing about Destiny in the, his current instantiation now- Mm... which is, I think, a contrarian status quo defender, which is, uh, less productive than he was a few years ago.
There's a young man whose name is Caleb Kane. He went by Faraday Speaks online. He released a video in, uh, late 2018 or early 2019 called How I Fell Down the Alt-Right Pipeline or Alt-Right Rabbit Hole.
I for- I forget right now. Mm. Um, coincidentally, he is also the young man featured in the New York Times Rabbit Hole podcast. He is the first three episodes of that. That's his story about getting radicalized. Mm.
He was on Doomscroll for episode 10. Uh, interviewed him, got his side of the story. He was also, uh, profiled by Kevin Roose, who's a journalist for The New York Times, in a piece called The Making of a YouTube Radical.
That is Caleb's story. It includes the quantitative data of what he watched and for how much. You've got two YouTube, uh, YouTube accounts that's like everything he ever viewed, his entire history.
Incredibly revealing, um, and an enormous amounts of content that he was viewing.
So, uh, famously, Caleb attributes his getting out of this right-wing pipeline to a debate between Lauren Southern, who was, if you're not familiar with the context, this is someone who is a, a libertarian leaning, but, uh, became far right in the kind of arc of 2016.
Was one of the first people kicked off of Patreon because she was on a boat that was blocking, uh, a migrant ship from docking in, uh, Italy.
So she happened to be filming a YouTube video at that time, um, and this was understood as, uh, the maneuvers of the boat risked, I, if I recall correctly, capsizing the migrant ship. Um- So it's illegal.
I mean, it's a, it... I don't kn- I don't particularly know if it was illegal. It was against the terms of service. Mm-hmm. I could say that confidently. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Because this would create a, a, a real world risk for harm, right? Mm-hmm. Like, she is making this content, but then also people are gonna be injured in the process.
Right, like if you were s- if you were like live streaming on Patreon and speeding your car, it's the same thing, right?
Yeah, or, or, you know, I mean, a more extreme example, if you're storming the Capitol, you know, y- you're doing property destruction or something like that. There are rules around these things- It's crazy to me-...
that if you- Yeah... do such a thing. Exactly. Exactly.
So, uh, I, I just offer all of that to say that like this is someone who is not just a commentator online, but is like actively involved in, you know, right-wing movements in the world. Mm.
Uh, Destiny-Humiliated and embarrassed this person- Mm...
by pulling citations from The Economist that she based her entire arguments off of, reading his own passages that just flatly, 180, like, complete 180 turn disproved what she was saying. Mm-hmm.
Um, and he did that not just for Lauren Southern, but a lot of different people.
So in a certain period of internet culture where young people were getting radicalized towards, like, you know, really, really far right, uh, reprehensible ideas, Destiny was invaluable and was the only person who was able to do that.
So for all of the stuff that he has done that I, you know, um, [laughs] completely disagree with, his positions on Israel, all, all of these types of things, his positions on Ukraine, all of that, I didn't wanna touch any of that in the podcast.
I just wanted to sit down and, uh, communicate my talking points that socialism in the 21st century is different than the conversations you have been having. I think it was successful in that capacity. I should say...
Well, no, let me say, I mean, I listened to the whole thing, even if it was on 2X speed, so I probably didn't absorb it. It was, it was really good.
I didn't know much about him until this year and, like, seeing clips of him on Twitter with, like, Norman Finkelstein and, and then recently with Adam Friedland, et cetera.
Um, so but I, I don't know, I think one of your great talents, and this is kind of what Doomscroll is all... This is really what your, all your work is about is, like, you know, going into these spaces and, like,
speaking to people in a, in, in an objective manner and getting them to open up and, like, just be honest and discuss these things kind of without judgment. Um, so that's...
I'll frame, I'll frame you and frame this podcast in that way for the listeners now. Um- Charles, can I just ask something? Yeah. Mm-hmm.
You said something really interesting, sorry, and I don't think you meant it, I think you meant it more as an aside, but you said that he's become, Destiny's become a defender of the contrarian status quo.
And can there be such a thing as a contrarian status quo, or does that run against the- Right... point of contrarianism? Right. No, no, so that's, um, that, that's a great point.
But, uh, when one swims in the ecosystem of online media- Mm-hmm... the incentives for sensationalism and polarization are, like, even more than, you know, traditional print media- Mm-hmm...
and, and tabloids and, and whatever. So in the context of these, like, extremely online subcultures, being in the center is kind of like the apex troll position. Mm-hmm.
Uh, and he does that extremely well, 'cause he has just an incredible rhetorical ability, willingness to kind of, n- you know, digest and memorize all of these different talking points. So he's, uh, incredibly equipped.
Does that require him to be constantly recalibrating his views, or he, is he sort of like the,
the point around which the discourse pivots and he's not moving, and so he's always sort of in a contrarian position relative to people who are evolving their viewpoints?
He, um, I mean, it's a, I, I mean, we could do a whole, uh, we could do a whole Lord of the Rings length trilogy on, uh, Destiny lore. But [laughs] he was on, more so on the left- Mm-hmm...
let's say like eight years ago. Mm-hmm. Um, there was a famous debate between, uh, Destiny and Hasan Piker representing the left, and Sargon of Akkad and Nick Fuentes representing the right. Mm.
All of those four people have very different views now, but at that time it was not es- explicitly clear about what their differences were.
Classical liberalism versus paleoconservatism and, you know, omni-liberalism, as Destiny would refer to it, and, uh, whatever Hasan is now, democratic socialism- Mm-hmm... something like that.
Uh, those rifts had not yet emerged.
But I think in the process of cultivating a more left-leaning following, 'cause he was debating these right-wing figures, Destiny became alienated by just the kind of, you know, crazy communism aspect [laughs] that teenagers get up to on the internet.
Mm-hmm. Like, "Oh, I've got a hammer and sickle in my bio, and we're doing revolution." Mm-hmm. And he was like, "No, actually, I think," uh, like he's, he wasn't a socialist to begin with, you know?
This basic, like, MMORPG identity adoption type of stuff that, that your work covers, you mean. Like, he was like- It's a big part of it... "This is bullshit," and like, "Let's like, let's...
I wanna ground this in something that I think is real," is what, is where he's coming from. I, I tend to think that even the, even the liberals now are kinda doing... We're all doing MMORPG- [laughs]...
to politics, you know? Not that. It's like we've got our iconographies, we've got our talking points, our identities, right?
It's like, I mean, we use it in a disparaging sense, but role-playing is an incredibly powerful tool. Hm. No, absolutely. Right? Like, the Rand Corporation does this, like radical...
Like, I mean, I was in a Discord server with the CSETI Institute as they organized a role play environment. Like, these are, um, yeah, these are ways of testing different realities.
They open up the political imagination. All that stuff is, uh, essential. But- CSETI is actually the only fun place it'd be to role play, 'cause like we can all be Captain Jack Sparrow. We're on a boat.
Um, I was gonna say, like, it would be a shame if the, the Postal Service was privatized, because I actually got a letter in the mail the other day that said, um, that I'm actually the only person with perfect political opinions, and- [laughs] Oh, who sent that?
Who isn't posturing. Um, I don't know. It wasn't signed. I... SIMGod. [laughs] That's a... Yeah. Yeah, that's a, that's a- But wait, you know, let, let us, let us take that.
Let, let, let's go back to the, um- Let's take that and run with it... redesigning social media- Yeah... and making it a division of the Post Office. Okay. I'm really curious. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, okay. All right.
This started out as a, a joke between, um, myself, Mike Pepe, who is the author of Against Platforms, that's coming out in January from, uh, Penguin, uh, and Brad Troemel, uh, artist, collaborator, uh, writer, uh, longtime, uh, friend and collaborator of mine.
And we used to joke about this in reading groups back in like 2011, that, um, we should just nationalize Facebook now. We should make it a division of the Post Office.
I think the answer has been kind of sitting in front of us this whole time, that it is in fact... It's, it's implicit in the word post, right? Like, we have rules about how human communication is supposed to operate.
Um, so, so taking a kind of really holistic position, uh, to, to redesign some of these things, I would say that the, the underlying to set the frame for this, the underlying antagonism is this public versus private sector thing.Um, a lot of the, like, exit politics that came up in the twenty tens, where libertarian groups like the Seasteading Institute were looking ways, looking for ways to exit the sovereignty, the regulations, the jurisdiction of nation-states.
Sometimes that meant going to international waters literally for the, uh, Seasteading Institute, and in other cases it meant, um, founding something like, uh, Prospera in Honduras, where you would create your own regulatory stack, and you could do innovations and experiments and, um, you wouldn't be burdened by, like, you know, the FDA and different, different things like this.
Bureaucratic red tape that held back entrepreneurs and, and whatever. Um, in other cases it could be as simple as tax avoidance and, you know, uh, crypto or Cayman Islands or, or whatever.
So there's the kind of exit with your feet, and then there's capital exit, but all of them, um, embolden the private sector against the regulatory power, uh, of the state.
So, um, yeah, I, I wrote this piece, maybe this is, like, a year and a half ago now, called The Platform Wars, which was looking at how, um, we're, we're kind of watching this fight between these different platforms happen, how that's, like, reshaping social media, and that works through a four-part series up to this essay called Statebook [laughs]
A Public Option for Social Media. Um, and I just kind of meticulously go through all of the ways in which I would transform it.
Um, so I, I think at this point in, like, twenty twenty-four it is ba- it is impossible to nationalize Meta.
Um, I do expect at some point that the US government will just merge with either Meta or Google, something like that.
We will get an American analog to WeChat, um, and I, I think that will be mostly for the worse, uh, to be clear. But, um, my proposal was to start a public option that runs parallel to all those private couriers.
So in my mind, Twitter, uh, Meta, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, all of those things are like U- UPS and like FedEx and DHL or whatever. They're private couriers.
But then we also have the post office, and the post office has, you know, slightly different economies. Um, there are other services that are guaranteed to you, like a universal service obligation.
Um, and, and in this kind of emerging antagonism between the governance structure of private platforms and, uh, states as we have known them thus far in the twentieth century, there are a few kind of key aspects that start to come to light, which is, uh, cartography, uh, currency, and identity.
So these are the conventional roles of the state as we've known them since, like, basically the Treaty of Westphalia [chuckles] Mm-hmm...
like a territorial dispute between the French and the Germans in like the fucking sixteen hundreds or some shit. But like a state is like a thing that is defined by these lines on a map.
Um, and now it turns out that platforms are kind of doing all of those things, right? Like literally there's this famous example of, um, Nicaragua invading
Honduras, uh, by accident because they set their military patrol maps through Google Maps, and there was a clerical error that put the line between those countries, you know, a few miles into the sovereign territory of Honduras.
And so yeah, they're like, "Wait, are we being invaded? Like why is there this military Jeep running through our, our territory?"
Um, so which is, I mean, the most I think heightened example that, uh, practically speaking, states no longer delineate where they are and are not, right?
We have kind of ceded these, uh, conventional functions of the state to platforms. Mm-hmm. Uh, identity, kind of an easy one, which is the blue check system, right?
There's all sorts of methods of identity through these platforms, um, which is not used to your state, not like your state ID or something like that. Mm-hmm.
There's even examples of, I think the most exaggerated one is something called Worldcoin, which i- Have you, have you heard of Worldcoin? Is this- I have unfortunately. I've walked by- [laughs]... a place.
There's a place in Manhattan where they've got like the orb that you- Yeah... you verify. How, what do you do with the orb? It's a, it's like a silver bowling ball. It's like kinda spooky.
Um, you put your face up to it, and it scans your eye because- Scans your retina. Yeah, exactly. It's a retina scan.
Every individual in the world, even identical twins, have the same, uh, or sorry, have, have a unique, uh, retina scan. So you have an, um, unspoofable form of identification from it.
I would do it if I got TSA PreCheck as part of it. You get some money actually. There's an, there's an incentive. There's a bounty for it. I think you get like a hundred and fifty bucks. I mean, that's so
exploiting the poor coded. But, um, I mean, I agree with this framework of cartography and currency and identity, but not to put a bee in your bonnet, but I would add a fourth function of the state- Mm...
that has been taken over by private companies I don't think cleanly falls into all three of these but touches all of them. Do you wanna guess what it is? Is it something to do with polling and democracy?
No, it's storage. Like file storage or archives like libraries? All storage. Yeah. Yeah. No, I hear you. Yeah, yeah. That's really... Right. [laughs] Francis has heard me talk about storage so much.
It is one of your things.
Actually, um, sh- shout out to Max Neely-Cohen, who just did an amazing, um, like interactive essay through I think the Harvard Lab about digital storage and the next one hundred years of storage.
It starts off in the premise, I haven't finished it yet, but it starts off from the premise of like if you had to store something for the next hundred years, what would be the most secure way to do it? Um,
but storage is one of my areas of special interest because I think it explains almost everything in contemporary life, um, and increasingly is not,
uh, is not all public or all private, and there's a lot of areas where it's actually not clear
who is responsible for storing things that have, you know, kind of a load-bearing, um, role in history, um-And I guess identity car- I, that's what I'm saying, it touches identity cartography and currency.
Like, I think of cryptocurrency as the first storage-backed currency- Mm... um, even more so than, you know, American currency, which hasn't been backed by, you know, precious metal in a very long time.
I, I mean, uh, in terms of, like, software design and the, like, i- i- incredible, uh, anomaly of, like, library archives existing- Mm...
throughout human history, like, these were endeavors that were largely undertaken by states, either kingdoms under feudalism or, like, 20th century states under capitalism, because it's really fucking expensive.
It's really [laughs] expensive to store the stuff, keep it temperature controlled, like, make sure it doesn't get damaged. It's expensive to lose stuff too, though, right? Like, it's expensive when things have to be...
Like, methods have to be rediscovered that were already discovered. Yeah. Yeah. Um- Well, uh, so storage in, in social media, like, obviously I'm thinking about digital footprints- Mm... obviously Luigi Mangione.
Um, I, I still, I still know I'm pronouncing that name wrong. Um, anyways. Mangione. But, um- Josh, are you Italian? I, I am, yes. 100%? Mm-hmm. As an Italian expert, you, you did a fantastic job. What percent?
I like half. Okay. But, um, but no, it's like, I mean, as immediately, you know, after his identity was revealed, then it's people trawling up the Good Reads and all these other things. Mm. Mm.
And like, so social media is, like, the storage for identity, right? In terms of social media being a storage.
Like, I mean, s- storage for other things too, but it's a storage for identity maybe in the same way that, like, a state has, like, whatever data on you, your fingerprints- Mm...
you know, social security number, everything attached to you. Like, the social media is this other type of storage that's like a more... a less abstracted identity, right? Your spot on your app.
I, I, I think, I, I think for me, the, um, the direction that this points is kind of the most, uh, extreme example is, is Worldcoin, which is, to be clear, uh, it's, it's on crypto rails.
So this is a stateless infrastructure- Yeah... with un-spoofable identity. Once you get your retina scanned, you then have a wallet that is, you know, bio, uh, biologically connected to your retinal scan.
It deposits your money, so there's an incentive to do it. Uh, and then, uh, easily on top of those crypto rails you can build all sorts of, you know, uh, correspondence and other types of transactions.
So that to me looks a lot more like 21st century governance. Um, yeah, but I, I guess to, to kind of
just steer us into the, the state book idea before we lose track of this too much, like, clearly the, uh, attention economy of social media as it's currently designed is having downstream political implications that nobody particularly likes, right?
So that, that was kind of like the in for me to start to make this argument about what a public option for social media could be, um, and, and why that would be desirable.
Um, so introducing some different, different incentives, uh, in, in this, uh, case. So I, I think the kind of famous, uh, example that always comes to mind is that when we have these conversations, uh, we,
when we talk about something like privacy, we tend to think of this as, like, a technical problem, right?
Like, we, we have all been trained to kind of think like software engineers, because those are generally the most powerful people that make big political decisions in our society. Oh, don't tell them that.
[laughs] I, I mean, credit where credit is due. These are, these are the designers of, uh, of our current world, and, um, they also have to take responsibility for the world that they built.
If that's, if that's what they wanna say, then you gotta be like, "Okay, I guess we did fuck this up a little bit." Yeah.
Uh, but, but imagine, imagine a situation like this, is you are tasked with creating, um, a, a method of communication between subjects or users within your platform, either a state or just Facebook or whatever, and you need to make sure that this cannot be interrupted, um, and, and people can't, like, read each other's messages, right?
So the, the, I think the immediate thing that we go to is, like, well, we need to do Signal, we have to have this cryptographically sealed.
We need, like, the highest kind of tech that not even quantum computing can break, and we just start to, like, seek out all these political solutions. There's a very simple one.
There's a, you know, incredibly, uh, revelatory technology- Pigeons... uh, still in use today. It's called an envelope. Pigeons. Pigeon. [laughs] Yeah. We, we will- Being carried by pigeons... pigeons carry envelopes.
[laughs] We will consider adding a pigeon department. I think pigeons, they have little spools in their f- little foot, little backpack.
Well, they had, I mean, I guess wax was how you, the wax seal was how you made sure- Mm-hmm... the, the letter wasn't opened.
But- But, um- But the envelope being a type of technology that contains the messages, a message enru- and, uh, hides it from- The envelope, the en- It's not just the envelope as a physical protection.
The envelope is backed up by law. Law still exists and does not need a technical solution. It's in fact incredibly easy to break an envelope. You can... It's even less secure than the wax seal on the pigeon. Yeah.
But it doesn't require a technical solution. It requires the power of the state. If you open someone else's mail, you go to jail. Yeah. And, uh, the same thing happens on Facebook. Statebook, fuck.
[laughs] I'm in the post office just licking other people's letters. [laughs] Come and take it. I think they might... You know, they're- Don't tread on me... they're pretty tolerant over there, actually.
They're pretty tolerant. We should make a version of the don't tread on me flag. I forget the real name, but it's like, um- Gadsden snake... yeah, Gadsden snake, but for envelopes.
Where it's like a snake holding an envelope? I would, I would be into it. I know you would. It's just the type of nonsense that you go for. [laughs] Um, okay, separate thing.
I read your guest post on Katherine Dee's Default Blog last night about Politigram. Um- Friend of the pod. Mm. I'm gonna quote you at length here. Uh, you say, "I'm not a journalist.
I don't have a blue check on any platform. I used to teach in art schools, now I write and talk about radical subcultures on the internet.
I think that the honesty, generosity, and participation of these subjects could only happen because they've trusted me to represent their stories accurately."Even when I disagreed with what they said, which is kind of what we were talking about earlier about re:Destiny.
Anyways, you say, "I've done my best to approach these subjects with empathy and an earnest hope to better understand how they view the world."
So I'm interested in the first two sentences there, but I wanted to give the full context. So the first two sentences being, "I'm not a journalist. I don't have a blue check on any platform."
Um, and then one of the first comments on that post on Substack is, "This is modern journalism at its finest." So I'm interested in you- [laughs] That's very nice. Wow.
Well, but I'm interested in you identifi- identifying explicitly as not a journalist, but then, like, it being interpreted as journalism and, you know, and, and, and what I do on the, my other podcast newsletter, Creator Spotlight.
Like, I'm very interested in the line between creator and journalist, and as it blurs- Mm-hmm... and journalists who really don't want the label, journalists who accept it, blah, blah, blah.
Um, I'm interested in this tension for you, like you identifying as not a journalist, but other people identifying you as one. Yeah, yeah. I mean, um,
uh, well, look, I've got another, uh, 45 minutes of, uh, State book stuff if we wanna crack open that. [laughs] We'll get, we'll, we'll get back to that another time. Unfortunately, we only have 25, Josh, so sorry.
[laughs] Thank you a lot. Um, yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I like to say that, you know, I was trained as an artist. Like, I read media theory in college and, you know, turns out that stuff is very applicable now.
But journalism is a real profession. Um, there are, you know, uh, all sorts of institutions. Fact-checking is important. I think editors are important.
All those things are, are great, but the problem is that the professional class is just wildly untethered to most of American life right now.
And so when you say journalists, generally this means someone who is out of touch, an elite, uh, they in some cases are not even paid especially well, but they just are acculturated to all of these elite values, uh, and, uh, luxury beliefs as they're sometimes called.
So, uh, I think if I had been, like, for example, you know, I was at a magazine or some, like, newspaper or something like that, I don't think that my questions would've been answered.
Uh, but because I was an artist, you know, I was open to, like, all weird types of utopian th- utopian thinking. Overton window is wide. You get all these different weird philosophies like, you know, uh,
neo-speculative materialism type of bullshit that people love to talk about in the art world. So it's very open and approachable.
Um, and I think just time is the thing that, that is the proof here, is like, find me the other fucking journalist that spent this many years talking to this many people.
Like, no one else could get this access, um, and, and I think it says, uh, a lot about their field that they did such a poor fucking job that a guy who never took one class in this field, uh, is, is taking, is eating their lunch.
So- Mm-hmm... um, yeah, I mean, obviously just fucking talk to the people who are shaping, like, the most important beliefs in internet culture.
Like, if you think these things are real and important, go interview them, find out what they think, find out how they find their ideas in the first place.
And, uh, you know, to be honest, no, none of these journalists, not, not none of them.
There are, there are fantastic journalists who do very important work that I have long-term relationships with, whose writing I believe in.
But there's also a lot of people who just, uh, you know, kind of throw some clicks together and, um, say things that, like, even damage their own positions, for example, you know?
I, I did I don't know how many media appearances about the quote, quote, manosphere, uh, in the last few weeks, like post-election. But the, the idea that people are...
I mean, they're trying to conflate, like, mainstream comedians who have audiences in the tens of millions- Mm-hmm... uh, with, like, niche far-right influencers and then lump them together under some, like,
uh, label as if all those people have the same beliefs. It's like you just, you can't, you can't say that, and that damages your own positions.
Like, you are, you are essentially making the argument for your political opponent in that you're saying the vast majority of Americans have fascist beliefs. [laughs] Like, that is...
And we need to preserve democracy by letting them vote. Like, y- you... It's just, it's so self-contradictory, but, um, yeah, never, never put it past a journalist to sabotage, uh, their own political agenda.
So yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm... I don't call myself that. I call myself an internet culture writer. Most of what I do is writing theories, writing, um, you know, the interviews in some cases.
I tend to think of, like, my work as not the weekly newsfeed. I'm writing about stuff that is, you know, we are kind of on the horizon of this. Like, what is governance gonna look like in the 21st century?
What is culture gonna look like in the 21st century? And so I'm not really, like, doing a beat on-the-ground reporting on stuff, so, uh, not, not quite a journalist.
But, um, it's an interesting choice of words from the commentator. [laughs] They could use it if they so choose. Hmm.
I wanted to ask you about the role that the manifesto is going to play or increasingly going to play, especially in Gen Z political identification and, you know, Gen Z being sort of the vanguard of political party realignment.
I think millennials are a very, I would say, democratic generation, like we're the Obama generation. Yeah.
Um, and obviously some of the disillusionment with the Obama administration has trickled down and led to the creation of content that Gen Z now consumes. But
I think, you know, obviously in the last two weeks we've had two very high-profile manifestos. The second one came out yesterday.
Very different, um, belief systems represented, but the manifesto is sort of like the envelope in that it is a, it's a genre of communication.
It can be a Google Doc, it could be a printout that you have on your person at McDonald's for some reason.
Um, are we gonna see, like, more discussion about manifestos and, like, what is the, what is the, [laughs] what is the MVM? What is the minimum viable manifesto in your opinion?Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I, I've been diving deep into Luigi Mangione. Um, I've, I think I've looked at all of the available primary source material online. I mean, you can't say all of it 'cause there's, there's always- Mm-hmm...
something that you missed. But, uh, my understanding right now is that the manifesto manifesto is in the spiral notebook in the backpack that has not been released publicly. Mm.
And I think the most likely thing to assume is that the, uh, what is being referred to as the manifesto that's, like, maybe a 250-word, uh, thing that begins with him [laughs] thanking the feds for some reason, um- It's 286 words, I remember, 'cause it was, like, 200 short- Oh, right...
of that 288 number that he's, uh- That was the abstract. Yeah. He didn't get a- Yeah... chance to upload it to JSTOR. That was supposed to be the abstract.
I, I think that that is more likely- It was the executive summary. I, I think it's for the cops, is, is what I would have to guess. Mm. Mm.
Um, if I were, if I were someone that, you know, was a political ideologue and I knew the world was gonna read my manifesto, of all the people I've interviewed in the last few years,
I would not name Michael Moore as my influence, right? It's like you would be getting in the weeds. You'd be mentioning all the deep cuts. You'd be name-dropping, showing off all your political philosophy.
Uh, so I think that there's a longer form manifesto that we will eventually get maybe, but the document we have right now is, like, I think pretty, pretty slim.
Um, and, and clearly just based on his Goodreads, his social media profiles, and, uh, his correspondences with various writers, like, Luigi knows quite a bit more of philosophy than, uh, he is, is pointing towards in that document.
So yeah, I think it's pretty disappointing for, for most of us because, uh, he has kind of, from what I've been able to put together, a pretty interesting belief system that is complicated and involves twists and turns.
Um, and so it's just kind of unsatisfactory to read that document and be like, "Oh, this is why," 'cause yeah, we all knew healthcare was bad, you know? Yeah.
Like, so he's- It's basically like a disappointing version of his, uh-... 15 years old... of his, his, uh, Ted Kaczynski review on Goodreads. It's, like, the same length. Yeah, yeah.
It's just, it's not, it's not that substantial, and a lot of these people, like- But to be devil's advocate, why does it matter? He already did the praxis. Like, why do you need a manifesto when he...
Like, most of political communication online is, like, it's all manifesto. It's all signaling. Yeah. It's all philosophy. So few people actually go out and do something. He did something.
So why is identifying why so consuming? 'Cause people are gonna abstract it and, like, I mean, what have people been doing the past two weeks on the internet?
Just, like, putting so much meaning on it and, like, interpreting it. But they'll do that anyway.
Yeah, but then that's, like, at least one rock you can put in the stream that, like, is a little harder to erode the meaning of, right? Maybe not. I, I mean, for, for me, I, I wanna see the, uh...
I wanna see his ideology spelled out so it's explicitly clear that this is someone who was, uh, trained and educated to valorize entrepreneurship, to valorize tech and innovation.
Uh, and, you know, even his, all of his kind of ideological political training led him to do this act, you know?
I want it to just be very clear that this is not somebody who is reading, like, Rosa Luxemburg or some, like, left-wing theory. So, uh, I think, I think it's useful in, in that respect, but, uh, yeah, I mean,
the American healthcare system- But why? Why, Josh?... is so fucked. Why do you care? Because you care about the truth? Bec- because I want to, uh, I want...
I think this will be a demonstration that despite all the ideological programming in the other direction, the American healthcare system is actually so fucked that someone who has been trained their whole life to valorize that system can actually be turned against it.
Mm. Like, I think that that will be important. But, I mean, I would largely agree with you that, like, what we say on the internet often does not matter. Uh, sometimes it does, but it mostly doesn't.
It's a lot of talk, and doing stuff in the real world is when things really matter. So yeah. Well, I think everything matters. Like, words obviously
matter, although [laughs] on our episode with Kat Francis, I feel like I kinda went into how this year I sort of had a crisis of language where I realized for the first time that for a lot of people, words don't matter.
Um, they obviously matter to you, Josh, because of your vocation. They matter to me obviously as a writer. But the majority of people will not engage with the manifesto in the text.
They will engage it, with it on a level that's memetic. They're already engaging with the idea of the fact that there is a manifesto on a memetic level, and they're engaging with the praxis itself on a memetic level.
And so I guess, like, that's why I think manifestos are so interesting because can there be a manifesto that is actually engaged with by the broader public in detail substantively?
Or are we so far into the way that everything is distributed and consumed online that things will only ever be shallow signals?
I mean, I think in this case you would be hard-pressed to say that the Unabomber manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, did not have some impact on Luigi- Mm-hmm... you know, two years later. Mm-hmm.
So, uh, I think that that is a unique example admittedly, but there are manifestos that, you know, shape actions in the real world but are mostly engaged with.
I mean, how many people read that document every year and then don't go out and do anything? So- Mm... yeah, yeah, no, I, I, I hear you on that. Um- Do you read it every year? Are you like, "Oh my God- [laughs]...
January 1st, time for my annual Ted Kaczynski reread"? I think, I think I did it in, like, 20... I think I did it in 2020, and I haven't gone back since. Mm-hmm. It's, it's pretty, it's pretty dense.
It's like Elena Ferrante for boys. I thought that was NausicaaI don't know who that is, so definitely- Get out. Just kidding... for boys. [laughs] Um, that's okay. We'll educate you. Um, wow. Wait.
I think we covered everything actually. [laughs] No, we have not covered everything. [laughs] Um, I... Wait, I have a question about, so the idea that people get more conservative as they get older, right?
Like, I always remember I was in, like, English class in senior year, and I remember my teacher telling me, like...
I think we were, my friend and I were like, "It should be illegal to be a millionaire," or something like that.
We were, I don't know, we were talking about something, and my, my teacher was like, "You guys are gonna be, in 10 years, you guys are gonna be Republican," or something. Not true. Uh, didn't happen 15 years on or so.
Um, do you think this, like, like, this common knowledge that people get more conservative as they grow older, do you think that's true? Do you think that's changing?
I don't know, like, based on people you've tracked and kept in touch with for, you know, a long time in your research by now. Is it, is that an idea that's changing at all?
There was a popular meme a few years ago, this is probably back in 2018, um, I wrote a viral piece about TikTok that was about the, um, let's say, anti-SJW backlash among Gen Z teens. That they were- Mm...
kind of satirizing the millennial snowflakes, and they would make these kind of sensationalist, outrageous, offensive TikToks that were, in many cases, very funny, whatever.
But they were virtue signaling to the right, is how I described it in the piece. Um, at a- around the same time, there was a study that was looking at, um, Gen Z as the most conservative generation.
Spoke to the people who conducted that study. They said the media interpretation of their work was, was wrong. It was not what they intended. It was a very small sample group.
It was not meant to be indicative of, uh, you know, an entire generation for everywhere other than, like, a very narrow portion of the UK where they actually talked to these people and did, did polling.
Um, but you know, a lot of people on the internet took that to mean much more than what it was.
And it looks interesting now when we see the, you know, results, uh, of the election in America, where young Gen Z men went 15 points, uh, towards the Republicans, young Gen Z women went 11 points towards the Republican.
Those things are, you know, uh, anomalous in most elections.
Um, I mean, I think when we start to talk about coordinates and political drifts, the, uh, the analogies are kind of, they're useful if you're diagnosing something that happened in the past, but these are all floating points.
So the center is not a stationary point. Mm. The polls of the Democrats and Republicans have drifted a lot within, you know, uh, the boomer experience, millennials, and, uh, everybody.
Um, we're also undergoing a political realignment where the interests of capital between finance and manufacturing are, are finding different, uh, levers in different parties.
You know, you see the, uh, you, you see this GOP support for labor, you see the, the Teamsters speaking at the RNC.
So, uh, things, things are happening that are just not the same kind of political blocks that we grew up with.
Uh, my favorite example for this is there's a fantastic book by Fred Turner called From, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which is the story of people who went out to the communes in the '60s and '70s, back to the land movement in California, the hippies as we might know them, and then- Whole Earth Catalog, Steve Jobs.
Yeah. All of the- Yuppies... all of these guys. We love talking- Exactly... about yuppies on this podcast. Or yunnies. And you know, when they- Yeah...
when they moved back into, uh, you know, the, the Bay Area, they then became, like, kind of cyber libertarians, uh, more or less, uh, the founders of today's culture of Silicon Valley.
And so there is a kind of ideological through line of prizing individualism, of, uh, you know, skepticism of mass scale collectivities, class-based movements, things like this.
Uh, and, and what happens is that over the course of those 30 years, those were things that you may have attributed to the left before, and then you would contrib- you would attribute to the, you know, at that time, the kind of Newt Gingrich, neoliberal Republican right in the '90s.
So it's a, it's a weird drift, but it's the same group of people. It's the same belief system. I think we're going through a similar period now.
So, uh, I've spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at different examples of that, of people who drift between what we would generally call left and right over time, but there's actually a, a coherent arc through it.
Um, I, I would say that
the kind of most expedient through line through this whole thing is that the drift of the Democratic Party within all of our lifetimes has been whatever labor constituency existed in its, you know, impoverished form when we were born, that has completely eroded.
There's no representation for labor. The Democratic Party now represents the interests of a metropolitan professional class, and their values are just totally out of step.
Literally, the words that they use, people don't know what they mean. Um, there's just a huge cultural drift, uh, in a lot of these cases.
And, uh, yeah, that's alienating to most people who have to work for a living, and those people...
I, I mean, there's less and less people who are going into higher education, particularly in the humanities, which is just, uh, you know, crashing. People are going into STEM and other kind of professional fields.
They're more likely to do air conditioning repair than to study poetry. You know, complete flip of, of values, which is, I mean, just a reasonable move because you see how poorly it worked for millennials.
Anyone who, who took a creative career is just, uh, you know, downwardly mobile compared to the generations in the past. So if we're in a society that is producing less professionals,
and the party represents only professionals, like, of course there's gonna be a popular drift towards the Republicans.
And that's, you know, is most pronounced for the Gen Z kids, but it's also true for basically every demographic, no matter how you slice it. [laughs] Yeah.
Well, I think what's interesting is it's like, it's not necessarily like the idea of like, oh, you grow more conservative as you get older.
Like, the word conservative there is like almost me- becomes meaningless, wh- which is kind of what we were talking about, where it's like
it's more you're, you just want change, where the, the Democratic Party has become more conservative in these kind of like traditional status quo ways. So it's like it...
People may be becoming less conservative but more Republican. I don't knowFiscally conservative, culturally- Yeah...
conservative, all sorts of interpretation for it That book, um, Cyber Culture, or Counter Culture to Cyber Culture, Harris recommended I read that a few months ago.
I haven't bought it yet, so I- he obviously got that from you. Um, I, I came across it in a lot of- It's a banger. It's a banger. Banger. I need to read it.
I do wanna talk briefly, we have a little bit of time left, about Doomscroll. I watched, um, watched/listened to most of like three or four episodes over the past couple days.
Um, my favorite one was, what's this kid's name, Peter? He's like vaping in it. He, he- [laughs] When he was 11. Peter James Fowler. Yeah. I really, I really liked that one.
Um, but so with Doomscroll, like you've been, you know, podcasting in various forms for, for years.
A lot of the guests you've had on this are people, I mean, people you've like worked with or friends of yours, et cetera, for years, but you've also had like at least half of them, I think, on other versions of other podcasts before.
Like Catherine Lu was on, um, a radio show you did, the Montes Press radio show this summer, right? Yep, yep. Why did you start Doomscroll? Tell us like how you get to starting it. Is it just like...
Well, first [laughs] I'll, I'll answer it for you. Is it because of distribution? Because clearly you've reached, it's like one point whatever million views now. Um, why did you start Doomscroll?
Why was this like a new version of your work you had to create? Yeah.
Well, the, uh, the idea probably started, uh, maybe a year and a half ago now, um, when myself, Real Rock Dector from Memory, and Clark Filio, uh, artist and producer, all sat down to consider doing some type of a film project.
And what we came up with was a documentary that, uh, standard practice when you shoot these things is that you'd have a two-hour conversation with somebody, and then you'd use a five-minute clip as a talking head in, you know, to tell the story of the doc.
And we decided that we could kinda do both of these projects at the same time, where we would produce the podcast, have those long-form interviews, we'd take the clips for the documentary story, but then we'd also just publish those conversations.
Uh, practically speaking, we had no video to show anyone at all. [laughs] I'd been doing the podcast for like four years, uh, and it looked like shit when I was on Twitch. It was just, I mean, it's like what I'm on now.
It's like a little webcam and stuff, so- You think that we look like shit? No, I d- your, your, uh- Well, the public that feels great... setup is great. Like mine is fucked. Publishing this as a video. Yeah. You know?
This is, yeah. Well, that's why nobody can tell where you live, 'cause you're in a bunker. That's... I, I started in my mom's basement, and then I did stream from underground for a few years, so. Many such pizzas.
[laughs] Many such... Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, so everybody for season one was just someone that I could like text or email- Mm... and be like, "Hey, you're a fan of the podcast. Do you trust me enough to take this leap?
And I promise the video will look good and you won't sound stupid." Uh, so I picked the most, um, the voices that I wanted to hear from to tell these important stories.
And for season two that we're shooting starting tomorrow- Oh, exciting... at, uh, 8:30 [laughs] yeah, um- How many episodes, wait, how many episodes total are in season one? There's 12 out right now. How many more?
We did, yeah, we did a block of 12. Oh, okay. So we did, uh, three-month, uh, weekly uploads for three months. That was season one.
We filmed all of that in advance, and now we're calling it season, we're just starting a rolling schedule to release stuff. Mm. Uh, because we did, we did not know, I mean- How good the response would be...
the audience expanded like te- 10X, you know? Yeah. Maybe more than 10X on some days. There's 300,000 views on the Matt Healy one on YouTube, for one example. Yeah. Yeah.
And from like a, you know, niche intellectual newsletter and podcast where I was talking about really detailed, in the weeds, like research quality stuff- Mm...
that's not, you know, especially clickable and entertaining or whatever, it's just a totally different animal now. Is this the growth, is the growth the network effect of YouTube?
Uh, yeah, it's, it's the recommendation algorithm on YouTube. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Plus the guests. Yeah, I mean- Plus the stature of the guests... there's a reason Matt Healy has 300,000. Yeah. Right. Right.
But there's also, uh, Catherine Lu has, um, 5,000 subscribers on Substack, and that's her biggest platform. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So there is also this other thing that's going on where, uh,
people are just resonating with that video, which is now at a quarter of a million on its own. There's a comment that's like, "I wa- I, I listen to this video every week," or whatever, on your podcast. Oh, nice. Yeah.
Nice. [laughs] Yeah, she's real- she is really talented and really special. I'm a huge proponent of her work. Uh, yeah, yeah. But I mean, um, all of that is to say that like Doomscroll is continuing.
This is the project now.
It's a little bit surreal, 'cause I still think of myself as an artist and I, you know, have niche conversations in the art world, but now there's also this other thing that I guess more people know me for than what I was doing before.
And so when you think of yourself as like, "Oh, I'm the guy who does this now," that's a kinda surreal thing. Mm-hmm.
Um, but we're- Well, you kind of are now a modern journalist who like, you know, niche internet subculture politics is, is your beat, right?
Like whether or not you wanna call yourself a jour- I think that's kind of where the acceptable meaning of journalist is going.
Like we were talking about how, you know, people associate the word journalist with all these like stodgy norms and like, you know, you don't trust them, whatever.
I think the idea of the modern journalist is what you're doing. Well, the reality is that it's dominated by either comedians or MMA fighters. [laughs] So I think an artist is, is maybe an upgrade in that kind of sense.
Absolutely. Or- I know you for the baguette koozie, actually. Mm-hmm. Oh, shit. Really? No. That's- Francis told me about it an hour ago. I thought that actually. [laughs] That was, yeah, yeah. That's, um- Well-...
that's a deep cut. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Anyways, uh, we're great- we're grateful for your work. I really, I need to go back and listen to them. Um, I, like I said, I listened to like most of three or four of them.
You're, you're very good at what you do. The way, I mean, we, we've been talking a little bit about words and, you know, words not having meaning. Mm.
You are somebody for whom it is very impressive how much specific words have specific meanings. It amazes me how you're able to hold all these different anarcho monarchy, et cetera, these terms- [laughs]...
and, you know, actually juggle those things. It's, it's very impressive. I, I, I appreciate that. It's, um, I wish I didn't ever have to learn it- [laughs]... 'cause I'm now just poisoned with, yeah, knowing- Mm-hmm...
and all the accelerationisms and the techno libertarians and the, it's, yeah. Would you consider yourself black pilled? No, I try to be an optimist. I try to be- Mm. Yeah. A, a left accelerationist, you know? Mm-hmm.
I'm, I'm white pilled. Um, I, I think, I think we got some good indications actually happening, you know? I think it's, it's kind of, it's too easy to be like- Yeah... doomer. Mm. I think that's a good place to end it.
Be optimistic. It's not that bad. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. See you next week on Taste Lead. [laughs] This has been Taste Lead. Thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me. No, this is great.
Uh, a huge fan of what you guys do, so very happy to be here. [upbeat music] It tastes just like it costs.