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Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Doomscolling Through Fandom to Politics: Unraveling the Digital Influence on Ideologies with Joshua Citarella
Exploring the intersection of fandom culture and political engagement reveals a new landscape of activism and ideology. Our discussion with Joshua Citarella of Doomscroll emphasizes how passionate fandoms are shaping today's political climate, shifting the nature of activism beyond traditional frameworks and leading to a more dynamized political identity among the youth.
• The merging of fandom and political culture
• Young activists leveraging fandoms for change
• Challenges of superficial engagement in fandoms
• Emphasizing unity while honoring diverse experiences
• The need for substantive real-world connections
Listen to our episode for an insightful exploration into how fandoms are becoming vital players in political movements, fostering new narratives and diverse community engagement in the process.
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon
Hello, and I'm here with Joshua Centrella, author of Joshua Centrella's newsletter on Substack, host of Doomscroll and author of a really funny role-playing game that uses the shit out of me. Well, it's a card role-playing game, but still Based on political ideologies. Also, you did a series a while back called my Political Journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm going to maybe ask you about how that informs what you do on Doom Scroll, but the title of this episode and this is one of the rare times where I've titled the episode before we actually recorded um is fandom wars and cultural battles that's a good one, that sounds accurate, yeah um, because I think we have separately come upon a similar thesis, as with the, the pundit katherine d, who also has a similar thesis that fandoms somehow have become the model of political engagement and morality and that what I learned from your stuff and my political journey as a John just 40 something year old that I am that the youths basically replaced artistic and consumer subcultures with political consumer subcultures and, um, and consumer subcultures with political consumer subcultures. And is that fair as a deduction from your early work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean I largely agree with that. I think we can get in the weeds about all sorts of musical subcultures and different niche political groups on the internet, but yeah, I mean generally, I think that there's a convergence here where fandom culture and political culture have kind of merged into this one thing and in some ways that is kind of like the core of my interest and research and conversations I've been having. And there's a few examples of this. I wrote a piece about this maybe a few years back, but I isolated among them. I think it was in 2020 or 2021. I wrote a piece about this maybe a few years back, but I isolated among them. I think it was in 2020 or 2021.
Speaker 2:I forget exactly when it happened, but the streamer Destiny mobilized his followers to Canvas during the Georgia Senate runoff. During a certain period they had, I think, for two weekends in a row, they had more people on the ground than the actual Democratic Party, and that is quite literally a fandom. But then also doing, you know, maybe the lowest ask of political action, knocking on doors, but it is indeed something. And then, if you look at organizations like AFPAC, for example, the America First Political Action Conference, this is the fandom of a streamer, but then it is also a weird political group. So we're just seeing more and more of these examples over the last few years. I know we're both morbidly curious about MAGA communism. These guys now have a real world political party that maybe has dozens of members but is indeed an on paper political party. So there's some type of weird convergence that's happening. And then, of course, you get all of the unusual behaviors that come along with online fandoms and the weird obsessions and just the kind of quirks of forum and like web to attention economy stuff.
Speaker 1:So all of that is kind of merging into this same thing, which is a pretty, pretty interesting sphere yeah, one of the things that I hate to give anybody any credit for particularly Ezra Klein of all fucking people but the observation that these fandoms also lead to niche informational behavior which, okay, every centrist has complained about now forever, but seem to be ubiquitous, because what happened to the centrists who complained about it?
Speaker 1:Well, they actually became their own weird fandom, as the kind of center of the idw which, of course, moved more and more right ring over time was, and I uh I remember when my my uh frenemy of the show, douglas lane, and my eris wild mentor, um uh, interviewed the Weinsteins and they seemed fairly reasonable, even to me after the early Evergreen stuff. Now that I see them in political fandom world, they seem insane, right, right. So what struck me in listening to the my Political Journey? Because you were dealing mostly with Zoomers I don't know your age, but I figure I'm a little older than you and what struck me about that is I think I actually came into the online left at what was a pivotal moment for a lot of younger millennials and older Zoomers, and the reason I came into the online left was just because I was abroad and it was a way to participate in the politics of my country, as I had left um where, and so what can I ask what?
Speaker 2:what year is that for you? Because I remember hearing you on, uh, zero books, like way, way back in the day with douglas lane, like when. Um, yeah, what year are you thinking of?
Speaker 1:because there's different ways of this right 2010 to 2014 is when I moved online.
Speaker 1:I started working with Doug Lane on Diet Soap in 2011. I started co-hosting a podcast with him that has had several incarnations, called Pop the Left, and the original version was in 2012. The original version was in 2012. We came back, uh, you know, in the, in the, the, the last year and a half of the trump administration. Um, so I've been I'm old hat in in this. Uh, it's weird because my show's only three years old, but I've been around, right, you know the, the left pot. I was in left podcasting when it was literally like five of us who weren't Pacifica radio shows. Yeah, and I started out in philosophy podcasting, which is something that has actually declined in the last five, 10 years, and so I was just trying to engage with political trends back home, partly because I needed to for scholarly work and partly because I was interested. Occupy happened we saw it in Korea when I was there blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I've been. Yeah, I'm an old hat at this. It's funny that you listen to me back in cranky zero books days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I guess people are probably maybe a lot of people on YouTube are not familiar with my, my background for this stuff. So I'll just kind of explain like a little bit of what I've been been doing. But you know, I come from the art world. Like I show in galleries and museums. I still participate in that stuff. I have work up in I don't know half a dozen different museum shows this year, so I am like meaningfully involved in the art world. I have work up in I don't know half a dozen different museum shows this year, so I am like meaningfully involved in the art world.
Speaker 2:I have taught at many universities and I got really interested in this kind of explosion of memes and aesthetic materials online around, basically the emergence of the alt-right in 2016, when just everything became hyper-politicized and online and you know that was like very much in my, my corner of the art and tech world Um, I'm 37. So I saw a kind of you know, similar millennial experience of occupy wall street in the Arab spring and these kinds of like utopian hopes for democratizing. Whatever the fuck that shit was supposed to do. Social media is going to liberate everyone, give everybody a voice, and I was like actually this sounds super libertarian and kind of like bad news. Lo and behold, it was always super libertarian and very much bad news. But I've been interviewing for the last, let's say I guess I started doing it in 2020 or so. So I wrote a book in 2018 about a bunch of this material. I then interviewed a lot of the people who are around those communities for about four years and then in September I launched a kind of much larger version of the podcast. That is video that is on YouTube, but it's, I think, the first time that many people have heard of what I've been doing, because it's been pretty much a newsletter direct to your inbox through Substack or Patreon or something like that, and relatively much smaller. But in that project, my Political Journey, specifically the series that you're talking about I interview people I believe the ages are in that case from 16 to 22.
Speaker 2:Young people who were politicized online and ask you know what is the stuff they're encountering? Is it content creators? Is it memes? Is it videos? Is it podcasts? It won't surprise you that not a lot of Zoomers listening to podcasts. That's mostly a millennial thing, and through these conversations we try to uncover the, you know, sometimes literally the nodes in the network, like certain hashtags or memes or whatever, that represent a kind of fork in the road for their, you know, self-described political commitments, how they think of themselves, where they would ideologically fall on a political compass, and so on. And so from that there are various political commitments.
Speaker 2:You know we should caveat all of this that not everybody who watches a bunch of YouTube videos then goes out and does anything at all in the real world. Sometimes it's just like being a fan of sports, like you can listen to the sports radio all the time. It doesn't mean you're going to play the game. But there are other people who do get involved in political organizations. There are other people who take political action in the real world. It informs their decisions later in life. Maybe they choose to enlist in the military or choose to have children and, as you kind of roll these things back, those early influences in their media sphere sometimes turn out to be very influential. So I guess the conversations are like these deep, qualitative looks into how people get politicized in this very unusual media environment, weird internet stuff that comes along with it. But that has been the project for kind of the last I guess, four years and then yeah, since since September I've been doing much more of the video podcast and and my own stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do think they're kind of related. I was going to ask you after you interviewed JJ McCullough, famous Canadian liberal conservative.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, liberal conservative is a good yeah.
Speaker 1:Catherine Liu. Uh, socialist with some Fordist and Maoist tendencies. Uh, you know, um, uh, I think you've interviewed Amber A Lee. Uh, you've interviewed Amber A Lee, and I find that Embrace Belden, who I embrace as a guy I have an indirect relationship with, in that we don't talk to each other. We've never talked to each other. It's not because we don't like each other, we don't know each other, but for some reason, a whole lot of people in my intimate circle knew him before he was famous and I have no idea how that happened. Um, um, so it's, it's an interesting relation. I've actually never listened to true and on, except for their conspiracy episodes and they made me mad, so I've not listened to anything else. Um, you're missing out. They're kind of entertaining. Well, they're definitely funny. That's not, that's not my. The thing is what you don't understand, josh. I don't have a sense of humor. I'm like I have for years tried to figure out the appeal of Trappo Trap House, because I've never found anything funny in my life.
Speaker 2:But it's not. It's not a coincidence that so much of this sphere is uh. Yeah, I mean, I was saying this the other week to um I I forget who I I was talking on a podcast about you know, there's all of these kind of right-wing political pundits or like conservative ish, just kind of like mainstream popular, like the theo vons of the world, joe rogan's, like. Those guys are a lot of them comedians. You know, comedy is a very big part of like.
Speaker 2:You know, there are certain channels in which there are intellectual discussions that are maybe more rigorous and scholarly or whatever, but then when we're talking about, like you know, mass channels that have a giant listenerships and can shape, like you know, large political opinions, like, a lot of them are just comedians, which is a kind of very interesting moment to be in, where comedians might be quantitatively more influential than the New York times, for example. That's a that's an interesting world. But yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, um, my comfort zone has always been more so of like. I'm used to discussions of like 10 people in like an art world context. So theory, technology, ideology, like all that stuff is kind of fair game and it's very different to talk to a lot of people, so I'm still learning a little bit of the ins and outs of that, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Funnily enough, how I got my start as an interviewer and I know that the biggest complaint about me now is that I have conversations, I don't just interview, and that's true, like I give a lot of feedback and it's the masses complain about it in so much that I have masses that watch my show, which is not true at all. Um, but I I actually learned to interview from interviewing music, doing music journalism and uh in zine world at first, and then for small regional publications in the? Uh in the early aughts, in the nineties, in the 90s. Then I did a lot of action research, case studies, slash, religious studies, interviews in the late aughts for print. That's what I would interview. I also interviewed literary figures. You're going to find this, they were, that's what I would interview and I also interviewed literary figures. Um, and you're going to find this funny, but the? Uh, the first podcast I listened to was like the new books network and I still oh sure Like nerdy shit on the planet, Yep Um that's an institution though there.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, I mean that's a. That's an institution though they're. Uh, yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a very important oh yeah, good place to start.
Speaker 1:Um, and the other thing I listened to was like horror story fiction podcast and art podcast and like buddhist history podcast. I actually don't listen to, um, a lot of the popular big political podcast. I uh don't understand comedians apparently. Um, so, uh, this has always been like. I've tried to listen to joe rogan for years and all I get is like ohio guy oprah. Um, he's funny and used to do mma stuff.
Speaker 2:That's all I could ever figure out like um, well, if I if I can throw in a uh, you know one, one of the terms that people talk about. Uh, in these spaces of, like, how someone gets politicized, or let's even say like acculturated to political ideas, right, um, they, they draw these funnel diagrams which I think are relatively well. Or let's even say like acculturated to political ideas, right, they draw these funnel diagrams which I think are relatively well-known at these times where it's basically an analogy for how you monetize and recruit followers for marketing and so on and so forth. But, yeah, you become at the kind of top level of these funnels. There's these like broad reach channels that often have comedians that are much more approachable. They might talk maybe 20% about politics and mostly about other stuff, like you know, mma or DMT or whatever they get up to, and then from that, you know, within the roster of people that are on the show, there's gonna be someone who talks about politics. Some percentage of that following will then, you know, descend one tier down. Listen to these people who talk much more about politics. From that their views will become kind of increasingly niche and narrow. And you know, having followed people over like several years at this point, like those things very, very often track and I think at a certain point, if you're just an intellectually curious person, listening to the approachable, you know, funny, lighthearted banter from comedians is maybe not like what does it for you anymore.
Speaker 2:You know, my own taste in podcasts is probably, I guess, what people would consider pretty dry. You know, it's not like interesting, but I just, I really like those debates, I like those conversations, and you know, equally with the people that I've talked to, one potential trajectory that comes into mind is a young man who was listening to kind of all these pop culture podcasts, got really, really interested in the history of the left and then found his way to a platypus reading group, for example, and so that for him was like that's about as deep in the weeds as you can get. You know, but shit, that stuff is not fun. You know, like I've been there, they're, they're uh, they're not entertaining conversations. They're uh, rigorous, they're interesting, they're.
Speaker 2:The people have a lot of knowledge, but it's not entertainment at all. And so I think after a while, if you've spent, you know, let's say like four or five years in this space and your taste is still so like uncultivated that the rogans are doing it for you, um, you know, maybe you're just a sports person and you're not, like, a ideology person, which is fine too, but I think after a while you just kind of need something a little bit more. Yeah, interesting and niche and and whatever yeah, there's definitely like clearing houses.
Speaker 1:A progressive version of that would be like TYT, the Marxist Lenin, and this version of that is probably deprogram. You know, and the thing is now there's all these weird niches as a person at in the deep end of these funnel icebergs. I'm usually at the bottom tier of a bunch of different ones.
Speaker 2:That's good, that's a good place to be. Yeah, as long as you know where you are, then then you can work from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, I, I realize I'm one of these people who look at my audience and I'm like, oh, I have a very tiny audience, but then it's like hyper devoted.
Speaker 2:Um, yes, and also a lot of influencers listen to me, but their audience does not listen to me yeah, no, I mean, that's, uh, that I think that's literally true in that, like I remember listening to years and years ago and then, uh, you know my audience, which is maybe coming into this stuff, you know relatively younger they, they just haven, they weren't around during that time. And so there is this kind of relay system that happens. And I would also say that there are channels that are quantitatively smaller but then have much more crowdfunding support. Their footprint on YouTube might be relatively small, but then their footprint on Patreon is actually really big. And I think that's where you start to see the real influence, because there's people who have hundreds of thousands of followers, like giant YouTube channels, and then have no subscriber base because people aren't listening to them, they're not having their opinions shaped by the stuff they hear on the show.
Speaker 2:So that's actually, I think, a more important metric. Important metric and we can sometimes get, I think, a little bit, we can over index, like view counts on, on the attention economy, and think that that is influence. Like you have the biggest influence in the world. Kim Kardashian is not going to convince anyone to vote one way or another. You know what I mean. And then you find these places that have like very high conversion rates. Those are the things that are, like, I think, really influential. And, and the next kind of iteration of the internet, as things are being designed, I think we'll see that a lot more. But yeah, right now it can be kind of distracting, where we might think something that has a big reach, uh is actually shifting opinion and I think that's uh.
Speaker 1:That's rarely the case yeah, it was interesting being on zero books when that channel had a hundred, hundreds and hundreds of subscribers, uh, whereas I have about 5k subscribers, um, and the average video will get between a thousand and five thousand views over time. Um, and from a youtube metric, that's a failure, but I am one of those people that you're talking about, like, no, I'm not getting wealthy off of my Patreon, I couldn't even live off of it, but I'm still in like the upper 75%. Yeah, um, and it's. It's wild to see because there are people who have way more of a seeming public uh influence, who make less than me off their patreon, and I've actually like, but you're the first person actually talked about that. I've thought about it for a while. I've also thought about the difference between the patreon engagement landscape and the open podcast landscape. Podcast started off fairly conservative. They have gone back to being fairly conservative, uh, in the in the free world, um, if you look at like the top political podcast, it's like joe rogan, obviously, tucker carlson, candace, owens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you look on Patreon, the top podcast, not just political podcasts. The top podcast period are Chapo and If Books.
Speaker 2:Can Kill. Well, you know these big conservative channels. They tend to get money from a variety of places. You know what I mean. Not a lot of left-wing billionaires funding spinning up a media company anytime soon. So yeah, a little bit of an advantage over there.
Speaker 1:Well, part of that seems to be because the liberal left seems to highly invested in traditional NGO models as where their money goes. When people say there's no money on the left, I'm like that's not true, it's just not going to media apparatuses and para institutions, it's going to ngos yeah, I mean this stuff, this stuff is uh, deranged.
Speaker 2:Also, just the expenditure that I was looking I'm not going to name names, but I was looking at an example today of somebody who was just, you know, exorbitantly funded very, very big media organization and it was just such a small thing like their dollar per spend, of like trying to get any reach. I mean, I just I generally feel like basically all of these NGOs are just like irreparably corrupt and are like necrotic and collapsing under their own weight and it's basically a way to, like, you know, prop up weird side projects. That they're they're throwing money into a empty pit. Essentially, you know, prop up weird side projects. That they're they're throwing money into a empty pit. Essentially, you know, just fund something else.
Speaker 1:I think about the downfall of Steven Crowder and how much that exposed that there was money flush in.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Particularly in the beginning of the Biden administration, flush in this conservative ecosphere that there was no way they were recouping that money. This was a loss, uh, ideological a loss, leading ideological product project, which on the left doesn't really happen. I mean one of the one of the ironies about working as long as I have in left-wing media um, we have to be profitable, which is funny, right, yeah no, no kidding, yeah it's.
Speaker 2:It's ironic. Yeah, all the right-wingers are working at a loss and then the people trying to overcome the profit motive are are indeed small business owners. Yeah, I think the great irony of that is uh, yeah, I think about that quite a bit actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do too. It's something that amuses me and I do think that has unfortunate effects on the media stream. So one of the things that I don't do is I monetize my free podcast and I have a Patreon but I don't do is I monetize my my free podcast and I have a Patreon, but I don't monetize YouTube because, one, I cuss too much, I just don't want to deal with it. And two, even though I get downplayed in the algorithm and I know I do like I don't have nearly the censorship strikes that other people do. In fact, every time I've gotten them, it's from co-streaming from another channel. Um, thank you, gta and TIR, um, and so I, I think it's, I think that's that's a.
Speaker 1:An interesting dynamic that you have to face as a creator is like do I want to deal with the weird, uh, byzington labriff of youtube monetization? Um, which also can be taken away from me for random reasons that are constantly changing and you have very little appeal? Yeah, um, or do I take the hit on my organic, my organic growth, because I'm going to be deprioritized in their algorithm? Um, but just use youtube as, like, an archive and a place to get you know, frankly, low investment views. Um, I don't know. I mean, I'm one of the only people who've chosen actively that I know to not monetize their youtube, but, um, I don't know what the wise thing to do. I do know. However, maybe I want to talk to you about what you notice about this. That audience capture and this political fandom stuff is actually a weird feedback loop. What have you seen with that?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah. So audience capture if, um, people haven't encountered this before like we, we might think of like I guess uh, russell brand is like a popular example of this the people who were of a certain political ideological worldview. And then there's this dynamic of they start to feed a little bit of material to their audience or they accumulate a new audience for saying X, y and Z, and then the audience demands more and more of that and you generally see these creators like shift over time, incrementally, and then over the span of a few years, it's like they're just saying very different stuff than they were a few years ago, and so that phenomena of audience capture can be really, really powerful, even for talking about just certain topics. You know, it's like if your your topic is like whatever trans culture war stuff and you get a big audience for that because you had a post blow up, that's the only thing you're going to write or talk about for, you know, here on for forever, because that's the profitable part of your business. It's an interesting thing because there are, I think, real moments where people change their worldviews over time. Right, that is interesting. The outside world changes. People should update their beliefs as a result. All sorts of reasonable explanations for that. But then there's also this in some cases, I think, people who have decided to just shamelessly enrich themselves by catering to the, like, the worst elements of their audience. So, yeah, yeah, that that is kind of a big phenomena and you know, that's something that is not necessarily like a.
Speaker 2:You know, I think of this wonderful documentary that, um, we've streamed it in the discord many, many times called arguing the world right, the uh, the uh trotskyists of the 1920s at city college in new york, that then some of them at least go on to be part of the 1920s at City College in New York, that then some of them at least go on to be part of the Reagan administration in the 1980s, how that drift happened. You know, the kind of story of the 20th century and, yeah, that's a kind of interesting conversation. It's a fantastic documentary that has nothing to do with, like, the media theory moment that we're in and the kind of weird attention dynamics that take place over social media. So there is this whole other layer now that is, I think, influencing the people who tell society's stories. Right, like the analysis of the media landscape is going to tell you a lot more about how this person is making their decisions.
Speaker 2:You start to, you know, you start to feel at a certain point that there are content creators who are looking at a given situation and they might be on, you know, maybe the right on this issue or the left on that issue and somewhere in their head you know that they're like reverse engineering.
Speaker 2:What is the most inflammatory take that I can possibly come up with that will like build my audience or cater to this new audience or you know, all of those things, basically the kind of overwhelming power laws of views and monetization and whatever has just created this whole other landscape right now. And, you know, I guess it's possible that people can move from right to left, but in most cases, I think what we're watching is this kind of drift from a like Bernie social democratic thing a few years ago to some weird variation of this new right coalition, which is, you know, heterogeneous on its own. But I would say that generally, that kind of, you know, either side of the kind of populist dynamic from left to right is like the most popular track, with a lot of this audience capture stuff yeah, I'm not saying that I'm the only former right winger who is a hardcore marxist, but, uh, uh, I'm like one of five that I've ever met, and actually my.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I I find interesting is my first politicization moment did happen, partly online, but for my generation, which is younger gen x, older, older millennials and we can make too much of generational politics, but this is specific to america. We went to the online world to reinforce our meat space politics because we knew that we were very diffuse groups, right, right, and so that looks similar in the interface, and the time frame I'm talking about is like right after 9-11, right before, and also once I went to college and got stabilized and went through a bunch of weird stuff in my, my late teens, I I had what you could have called a. A well see, post-left existed actually at this time, it just meant something different, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:No, no, people don't know that post.
Speaker 1:post-left used to mean a different thing, and now it's like yeah, yeah, no, that's really important so I had this period when I was like 19, where somewhere between the old version of post-left, like bob black, and yeah, hell yeah and the new version of post-left, which is former socialists who kind of have conservative views.
Speaker 1:And then because of my experience at the battle of seattle as a teenager, um, right, and the delusion that I saw, even as a teenager, around that event, um, and what I got sucked into, and I mentioned antiwarcom and Lou Rockwellcom and all these weird paleo conservative and paleo libertarian spaces that were opposing the Bush administration, yeah, and that we, they were websites.
Speaker 1:There was no podcast yet that's, that's five to 10 years off, their websites. I had access to the web because I was a college student. I had access to the web because I was a college student and then and this tells you how old I am but we reinforced it with very niche live journal groups, right, right, so there was a kind of precursor to what we talk about in the aught teens all the way back, um, but one of the things that was interesting about these groups is they were not just political in the way that a lot of things are now. Like we talked about literature more, we talked about religious history more, and I threw this rabbit hole through doing paleo-conservative, anti-war activism in person, like with a professor even at my college, oh, wow, and then getting hyper online.
Speaker 1:I encountered a lot of people who were going to become important to like the alt-right really early Sure, sure important to like the alt-right really early, sure, sure, um, uh, so, like I, I knew who paul godfrey was by the time I was 21. Um, you know I knew who richard spencer was by by 25. He was not who he was later, nor who he is now. He was the arts editor for american conservative magazine at the time, um, and in a, and a conservative Adorno scholar with some very weird positions.
Speaker 2:Right, right, I can imagine Jesus.
Speaker 1:Right, as opposed to now where he's like right nationalist for Biden or whatever the hell he was. But that's the internet that I come out of, but that's the internet that I come out of, no-transcript. I started writing zines when I was like 14 or 15 years old and, and you know, I had some. I, my family, was blue collar but I had some some white collar office having parent friends who would let us use their photocopier, um, and we would photocopy these magazines and and, uh, I would use, um, I would use a computer on campus and then one that was that my, that my, my family had for my father's work and create these things.
Speaker 1:But that was a very Limited regional world. But you might have A thousand readers which felt which also this is a difference in the scale of the time that felt unbelievably huge to me. Um, in the 90s, if you were a regional, like publication or act, because you might ship your zine through one of these zine exchanges on the fact sheet, five or whatever, like you know, a couple, like 10 or 20 of them to a different region of the united states, but you were mostly not just in your state but like within like half of that state, and that was absolutely it. Um, that started to die pretty quickly. It was already dying by the the end of the 90s because, frankly, it was fucking expensive to photocopy shit, so we started putting it on yahoo email lists, right like kind of like a pro.
Speaker 1:I find Substack so interesting because it's like a bunch of technologies that have already existed for like 20 years and yet people revolutionized. Like you just combined WordPress with Yahoo newsletter and figured out a way to monetize it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I would even say that the the biggest innovation on behalf of both the Patreons and the sub stacks of the world. And you know there's there's other companies that do this too, but essentially what we're talking about is a $5 Fiat enabled paywall for an RSS feed. All of that tech is like that's not new. What happened was that the abundance, like the overwhelming, you know free to use ad driven media just drove the price of basically everything down to zero, right. So like in parallel to this, you're talking about zine specifically here, but like the same thing's happening to music, right? I remember going to see bands and like being excited to go to the music store and like buy cds and shit like music store and like buy CDs and shit like that, and then saw this transition where just like everything went up online and when everything goes online, just the price crashes like all the way down to basically basically for free, for either ad revenue or for subscriptions from Spotify or something like this, and so the the kind of long, uh large scale result of that is that the musicians that used to make a living touring and playing shows and selling records like that part of it goes away. The zines. It's too expensive to do it because everyone's reading their material, they're getting it online, so all of those things kind of go out of business. And then the $5 subscription on a Patreon or a Substack. It was like the $1 that people were paying for Apple music when Napster was giving it away for free.
Speaker 2:It was just the convenience of, like you know, this is totally hackable, that's it. For example, if I was your annoying friend and I was like, oh, can you send me that podcast that's behind the paywall? Like I don't want to get it and I'm going to ask you to do that like every week in perpetuity, for the duration of our friendship. Like it's like man, just pay $5 once, like come on, this is annoying. Like it is just the convenience fee. And so the tech is actually like totally immaterial, it's just a product of. Consumers got so frustrated that everything was given away for free that they were willing to again pay this convenience fee for like the quality stuff that they wanted, you know, but it's all of that is like. I think the only way to square it is that giving everything away for free crashed the price to all culture for zero. You know, video music, zines, what have you? All of it.
Speaker 1:And I think it has pretty big implications. Like I'm, you know, I am neither fan of the current sub-stack journalism where you don't have fact checkers, nor am I a fan of the old model where the fact checkers were also ideological consistifiers. We are quite honest um, uh, I, I, I don't like either. If I had to pick, I might pick the weird libertarian hellscape that we lived in today, but it has a shit ton of caveats.
Speaker 2:Yeah, community notes is like the kind of best existing solution for this stuff, existing solution for this stuff. But yeah, I mean, I share, I share your criticism that it is like you know, fact checking is it should be a great thing, but there is just such a like rigid and brittle ideology in all of these institutions that can afford to pay the fact checkers. It's like it's like the clergy. You know it's kind of hard to find a, yeah, quality information.
Speaker 1:And it's also led to this weird sphere that people complain about misinformation Now asterisk. I grew up in the 80s and 90s and I used to watch cable. You fuckers are wrong. They wouldn't put like just utter bullshit. Like have you seen ancient mysteries, or half of what was in any in the mid nineties? I mean, like are what the history channel became? Don't, don't talk to me like.
Speaker 1:Infinite information and media is new, um, and nor does going back to the fairness doctor and fix it either. Um, that just means you present two sides of misinformation, uh, but I do think that we have to acknowledge that when they, when the formal, like newspapers and stuff, finally figured out how to remonetize, um, like the new york times got its its subscription act together, the cost of reading a good newspaper without even a physical object involved went up dramatically. A subscription to the Times is always kind of expensive, but now it's kind of ridiculously expensive. Or like I used to read the Economist to know what my enemies think, and I'm not paying for that shit. Now, an Economist subscription's like know what my enemies think and I'm not paying for that shit. Now, uh, an economist, uh, um, subscriptions like ridiculously expensive. It's like a couple hundred. I mean, it's over a hundred dollars a year, um, and sure you get it weekly, but, like, I don't care that much.
Speaker 1:And so I find this interesting that the other thing these niche fandoms do is they sort information for you that you used to rely on other sorters of information for, and, having come out of the zine world, we used to do that with music. Like we never like you. Everyone knew you don't really trust the main, like, yes, you read rolling stones and you pay attention to the grammy, but it doesn't really matter. You know. You know that you need to go to the zines related to your local scene to figure out what people in the area have access to, what you're going to have access to. Uh, cds were expensive. They were like 20 in 1998, money, um, which you know. If I tell people like, yeah, we only have like 100 albums to listen to, they'd be like what? And I'm like, yeah, and that was a big investment too for a teenager right like you know, that's like your discretionary money, um, and people like 20 bucks.
Speaker 1:20 bucks is like a meal for two people at mcdonald's. Yeah, but not in 1998. It wasn't right. Right, you could buy groceries for 50 bucks for a week for two people. Thanks, Biden. Yeah, thanks. General economy of 3% inflation, then going crazy to six. I do think one of the things I find fascinating about your show, though both in your current show and in the my political journey is there was a tendency to remix seemingly lost political ideologies.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And bring them back. You know, you meet. There's not a ton of them, there's not. There's a few, a lot fewer of them than you meet. Uh say uh self-percept Marxist, leninist online who don't belong to any organization. But um, uh, you will. You will see um, council communists come back or I've, I presided over and I'm writing an essay about this now, but Glenn Beck putting Takun on a shit list.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah 2010 actually is part of what led to people finding live, calm and resurrecting Bordiga as even a minor figure on the lift direct line.
Speaker 2:That makes a lot of sense, actually, that's okay, okay, yeah, yeah, wow, it's big people start getting through this, because this is really important okay who gets big it.
Speaker 1:Um. It leads to communization being a word that some weirdos on on grad schools and on the internet no, they start looking at this french and italian tradition.
Speaker 1:Um, that there was websites that started in the mid aughts, that you know documented, but they were super exclusive. Um, and then you have some academics from california, new york and london put out this journal called in notes, and it spreads like wildfire because people have already been primed because of. Glenn beck said this sakuna shit's important. So now we're watching it. You know this. Who the fuck reads semiotics other than scholars? Most of the time, right, right, um, uh. So then this blows up because bordiga is mentioned by duvet, who is in the first part of the, and I know this because I went through it like I. What? For me it wasn't takun, it was, it was in notes one. That's where I discovered bordiga.
Speaker 1:And then at the time there was some radical reprints from like old council communists in the 70s who kept, who kept stuff around and nothing else right like um, now, now that border goes like a huge figure, but the fact that we all that, like there are people in the Anglophone world who know about this guy, who was basically written out of the history of the two communist parties of Italy, um that's really, it's really significant.
Speaker 2:I'll just I mean for a little bit of background. So a lot of the young people that I interviewed and had many conversations with over the years, they got super, super into Bordiga. They went through I don't know exactly the order, but like there was this moment of politicized and then the disappointment with the Bernie campaign, sabotage from the DNC. People kind of splinter and go in different directions, right. Some people go to this kind of new right position. Some people go to what was post-left at that time like insurrectionary anarchism type stuff, and then other people went left-com and they got really into Gilles Devey.
Speaker 2:They got into Bordiga and the number of Bordiga memes was just like explosive, you know, and I had spent my life in, you know, socialist reading groups and stuff like that, and this was not a guy that I had considered to be tremendously influential, but he was super influential to these kids and so I was really curious about why that was, and I think my way of squaring it at the time was that this is somebody who is, you know, is totally uncompromising and wasn't attached to any movement that you could be like ah well, like here's where it failed, you know that's why would you try this again If it already failed?
Speaker 2:It was. You know, this was the guy who just he wouldn't, he wouldn't budge on anything. So uh that that that was maybe a kind of like morally cleaner person to identify with was my way of squaring it, but it is. I guess what you're describing now is kind of like a big media funnel where glenn beck streisand affects uh the to kin, the coming insurrection. People then find the website that's hosted on, go to end notes and like that's actually a kind of beautiful, and then at the bottom of the funnel is portica and you get like as a as a result of that, many, many memes that just blossom in the years following, which is, yeah, I totally buy it.
Speaker 1:I there's not many people who, like it wasn't like people, joined the ict, the international communist tendency, which is dementis, not bordegas, but still in the same tradition, are the are the are the internationalist communist party. Those are still tiny, tiny fucking groups, but that name I wasn't.
Speaker 2:I wasn't going to name them, but those are some of the groups that people joined actually, right literally, yes but that name exploded.
Speaker 1:Um and uh. It's predictable. You, one thing I can say is Bortiga enjoyed another resurrection in the mid-70s when the new communist movement, which is kind of part of the new left and kind of not, but it's very, you know, maoist washed up on the rocks. There were all these European ultra-leftists who were responding to the failures of 68 and the failures of were all these european ultra leftists who were responding to the failures of 68 and the failures of the myth or wrong government and who didn't go into post-marxism. They went into, uh, left communism and you saw the council communist and whatever. That's where duvet comes from, right, right. So when there's a failed left movement, these ultra left tend to tend to benefit because they're relatively uncompromising and relatively pure until you actually dig into them and that's one of the problems with bordiga is that um bordiga has a myth of invariance that he puts around himself that he's not just uncompromising but they never changed. I have now read everything I can on that man and that is not true.
Speaker 2:That is actually an auto mystique and it's been put back on things, but it's actually good, um, but it's actually convenient, and you know, the more just to kind of like to tie the bow on this, the more that, like online political spheres become like fandom, the engagement can be like really really superficial, in the way that, like, you have a poster of a band on your, your bedroom wall, you know, and you kind of idolize these people and obsess over them. But, um, it's maybe not the the deepest engagement in, in most cases, certainly, on the more popular stuff, there are people within that who do get super into it, get politically engaged. But, yeah, a lot of this stuff is kind of like, you know, uh, flippant. You can, you know, put it on, take it off. Even we're talking about stuff that's pretty politically niche at this point. But even that can be like a identity that you try on, like you're punk this week and then you're a mob the next, and people can try on and off hats basically right.
Speaker 1:one of the things that that you documented, that I had made jokes about but never bothered to actually prove, is that between if, particularly if you were under 25, between 2012 and today, you may have radically shifted politics and entire political frameworks and not admitted it, and it have no real bearing on, uh, what you did in the real world.
Speaker 1:um I don't talk a lot about mega commune because, like the negative publicity but, um, but yes, I'm, I am, I am sort of morbidly obsessed with the development. And hazaldine, uh, you know I've read interviews by him. He doesn't say it, but he clearly started off as a Bordigast he uses the same phraseology Interesting and then he discovered the light of Stalin but also the light of the conservative revolutionary movement in Germany and some fascists and Dugan and a bunch of stuff and from my world coming up in this weird culture that I really encountered in college. Um, I definitely see how this mirrors other real cultures that used to be more prominent on the internet. So, for example, in the early internet and the aughts and a little bit into the aught teens, people thought that we were going to have like a reconstructionist pagan renewal movement that was mass because of growth on the internet, because there was all these, all that stuff. Actually, what actually happened is the baby boomer institutions around formal religious paganism all died, right, right happened is the baby boomer institutions around formal religious paganism all die, um, right, right.
Speaker 1:But, uh, there was all this appearance of movement on the internet. Um, on the aughts and aunt teens. Um, the other example that politically, is libertarianism, which, if you were to look at podcasts in between 2008 and 2012, you would have thought was the up-and-coming political movement in america, as annoying as it is, um uh. And yet, as I told people and I I've told people they should be careful about this with the bernie left, what actually happened was that those groups fragmented and they got different feedback loops and they either became trumpist or they became libertarians, who just eventually become progressives, or they became, um uh, vomis guys etc um, and you saw that happen over time, and one of the things about this niche fandom world that people don't realize that I've tried to really get people to look at is that okay.
Speaker 1:You think your faction is super fragmented and no one gets along and we need some kind of unity, even though I don't know how council communists and Hojas get along. And what world does that happen Other than?
Speaker 2:with the DSA, pretends that it's doing that.
Speaker 1:What you see is it actually leads to more and more fragmentation, because you don't have any non ideological ties, right? There's no in-person ties which mitigate you going. Well, we're friends, so you're gonna have to do more than this. Change your mind for me to feel like I, uh, can't abandon you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um if I could, if I could throw in this is one of my, uh, my favorite things to harp on, but like, okay, so I'm going to get very big scope here for for a second, but I kind of think that that was the the point of all of this. I think that building the internet if you look back at these early, trying to remember the name of it by John Perry Barlow it's the declaration of independence of Cyberspace, something like that and he says you know very explicitly that you know this is a place of freedom. He was a, you know, a grateful dead guy before this kind of you know, you know, countercultural 68 moment. Then they, that project is doesn't yield what they want. They're going to escape into this kind of world of individual autonomy network of computers where each individual has their own personal computer rather than, for example, giant mainframes or whatever. It's a very kind of libertarian conception of what this space could even be.
Speaker 2:And then I think that extends even into the design of a lot of these networks that they were like implicitly libertarian, where you're always working with, like the philosophical foundation of these individual atomized units, where it's like you have your own account, I have my own account. Um, everything is constantly like in competition with each other. If members of a band just to kind of keep this simple, like members of a band have their shared profile, but then they also have their individual profiles and in that way they're all kind of competing for attention. It's the same with magazines, where each of the individual writers has their own page and kind of the end result of that is finding this completely atomized archipelago of a social media landscape that is like kind of the utopian libertarian dream, right, it's like what they kind of want is to create this super liquid network in which you can move through this endless list of different political ideologies. And, you know, maybe you and I are going to score in the political quadrant on the compass quiz in generally the right place, but we're, like you know, three, two or three boxes away from each other. And so the design of these networks then leads people to kind of like fight out all of those infinite differences, and so that is. I think that the project itself by design is anti-coalition for anything. I think it's just a project of total atomization, politically, socially, in every, basically in like every possible way.
Speaker 2:My favorite example of this is that like the closest thing that we have to social bonds is actually through raiding with guilds in World of Warcraft, where a lot of people will kind of get. You know, because you do these things for like four hours, like two or three times a week, and after a while you kind of get bored of it. Like it's just, it's a lot of work, just the sheer number of hours you got to calculate like well, what else could I be doing with this? Like well, what, what else could I be doing with this? But as people get bored of it, they have a personal relationship with the you know 40 other people that you're rating with, or the 25 or whatever, um, and it's like, well, I'm gonna show up because I gotta support tony, like tony's gonna be there, so I, I gotta show up and like that stuff just like simply does not happen basically anywhere on the internet except for these, like you know, close, closest approximation we have of showing up to different events where you know, if you know, roll back several decades you and I were in a political discussion group or reading group or an organization and we had our differences.
Speaker 2:We would be more likely to resolve them because we could not as easily exit and just find a whole other you know group or scene or content stream to be a part of, and so I think that this is kind of the complete and total victory of libertarians to design a media landscape that has a structural advantage for what they believe in, which is all of us fighting out all of our niche differences, and they've done a fantastic, fantastic job of it. I all of that said, I think a lot of things can change in the next few years. Actually, I'm a little bit of an optimist about this, but yeah, there's a. I think the libertarians have played us all for fools.
Speaker 1:Basically, yeah, but the the funny thing about winning in this world, like as I tell people ironically, like look at, the people are worried about Christian nationalism, for example, and I just just tell them, like have you looked at the roles of people on who go to church? Um right right like like I am more religious than the average conservative now and I actually do attend religious services on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:They're not christian but nonetheless and I find that fascinating Because Anton Jaeger, you know, picked up the bullying alone thesis and ran with it. I think there's problems with it. There's stuff he doesn't deal with, but there is something interesting the left always thinks there are people who get hurt by this, but the right actually also thinks they're getting hurt by it Cause, like, church communities and and stuff have broken down and people have wondering, well, why is the right so? So weird now, and I, you know, and I'm like, well, they don't have it. They're also not in communities, motherfuckers, they're not that right. Yeah, like no, true, what you know. Like, why is jd vance doing weird shit with, with, with, uh, former neo-reactionaries or current neo-reactionaries on the internet?
Speaker 1:well, because he's on the internet like you know I read curtis jarvin too, when he was just a weirdo on a blog somewhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly Right.
Speaker 1:It was. It's interesting to think about that and to think about what it means for these political projects. I mean, the example of where people have tried to turn it into something substantive in person is like the DSA, which is an old organization. It goes back to the 80s, both online in a meet space right after Occupy, which then was a basis for helping the first Bernie movement, even though they probably didn't. That was probably more with leftists than it was with the general public. But even there, you know, as I like to remind people, like, okay, the DSA is under 60 K right now. Right now it might be it's going back up again because every every time there's a republican president, uh, left group recruit, um, but uh, at its height was almost 100k. But I like to remind people that um, while that's bigger than the communist party was in america and its point, which was the late 40s, we're also like double the population.
Speaker 2:Proportionally very small Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, 100K is like a borough of New York. You can, in geopolitical terms, you can drown that in a bathtub.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, there's also like I hate to say it, but there's also, uh, there's a lot of people in the organization that look like me, that are kind of like, you know, middle class graphic designers. Um so, it's a quantitatively large, but it may not be like the stuff of the working class, uh.
Speaker 1:So no, yeah, well, yeah well. The other thing is, when jacobin does polls of that or when Desi does polls of that, they have a floating definition of what working class is. Sure, yeah, yeah. But I find that, I find this interesting and I was going to ask you about something that you recently talked about the manosphere, which is an older you. You know it goes back to the. Maybe the way I mean the manosphere is, uh, goes back to the pickup artist community kind of having an existential crisis in, uh, the first obama administration right right, uh, and a lot of the ruches of the world, the like the original.
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah it's. I mean it's been thrown around a lot of the ruches of the world, the like the original. Yeah, yeah it's. I mean it's been thrown around a lot recently, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, because we had gender based voting patterns, although, if we are honest, the Democrats are exaggerating how, how gender based those were.
Speaker 2:Everybody is really like if I don't know the numbers off the exact top of my head, but I think it's something like young men went 15 points towards Trumpphere of like I'm calling it, bro, populism. Right, it's just a political ish, podcast, conservative ish. Maybe what they all have in common is that they interviewed Trump like a week or two before the election. Logan Paul, aiden Ross, theo Vaughn, joe Rogans he's kind of an outlier in this thing, but generally like younger group of guys and then the media is trying to basically like lump in like andrew tate, uh, with like logan paul, and those things are just, they're like totally different. So I've been saying to people like, if you're gonna go with that narrative I wrote this piece in substack, which is, I think, what you're referring to is that um journalist max reed, uh, also a writer on substack. I had him on the podcast to talk about this.
Speaker 2:This summer he wrote a piece called the Zinternet, which is just, basically the internet is now like it's just whatever is popular in the outside world is popular on the internet. Everybody has been onboarded. The kind of last people to get onboard were the normies, and now normie taste is just predominant on the internet. So you see stuff that caters to young men's interests, like comedy clips, light beer, the zin nicotine pouches which is where the thing gets its name from, you know clips of hot girls and like prank videos and this kind of shit. That was not the kind of niche internet that we thought of before. It's just like general popular content and he calls this the zinternet and it also marks the kind of you know developmental arc of social media where before you know, like we were gamers, for example, or interested in politics. So like you're seeking, you're seeking out those like niche communities on live journal that has, like you know, a few dozen contributors and you're like this is the real shit, like that was totally my experience. It was going through like pure volume and my space and finding like fucking noise bands and screamo and like that was so cool. I used to like burn all these CDs, make giant archives of this stuff. Going through this, the kind of, like you know, infinite archive of niche, uh kind of consumer preferences, essentially in terms of music. Uh, that is not the case anymore, where it's just like whatever is popular and normal is like what people are into and that's what does numbers on the internet.
Speaker 2:But to conflate, like, the influence of those comedians who have audiences in the tens of millions with people who have, like a anti-modernity critique of women's liberation or whatever. That's just such a huge swath of content and it's basically allowing the media to say that Trump won the popular vote because most people are anti-modernity, which is just entirely untrue. It's just so untrue and it's exactly the same thing that happened in 2016 under Trump won, when it's like, oh yeah, well, they voted for him because everything is alt-right, like capital A, capital R alt-right. Like a group of like what? Like 100 people that they then emboldened with this enormous megaphone, this giant amplifier, to reach an enormous audience. And so I you know, I told them it's like, don't refer to all these groups this way. Like by doing that, you are giving you know more, more visibility and free advertising to the worst reactionary elements among them.
Speaker 2:Um, and then those people are going to claim like, look, I'm some fringe reactionary who thinks that women should not be able to work in society.
Speaker 2:All of the popular internet agrees with me. Like, the tens of millions of people who are in the audience for like a Theo Vaughn are somehow, like I have the Roosh ideology as well like that kind of old school pickup artistry. That's just fundamentally not true. But that, literally, is what the media is saying, when they do not differentiate what the hell they're talking about. With the manosphere right, there's like all these guys are the same and everyone there has the same beliefs, and that's just. That's just flat out wrong. So, um, yeah, yeah, it's been a kind of infinite point of frustration. I kind of feel like the the legacy media stuff is um, you know, I share your, your, lamentation, for it would be nice to have something fact-checked once in a while, but I think it's just, it's irreparable, it's uh, these things are just going to get out competed by leaner media. They're they're not doing a good job seeking the truth or telling stories. So, yeah, this might be kind of the last kick of a dying horse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I hope I mean like to be fair. I want most of them to die, but people sometimes will hear my critiques of Substack and think that I'm somehow on the side of big media and I was like right right. Like I want them Like when people like, oh, msnbc might be going under, and I'm like, yes, right.
Speaker 2:Don't worry, it can actually get worse. That's, that's the important thing to remember that it can and likely will actually get worse. So whatever you can imagine is worse than MSNBC right now.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's going gonna be worse thing. Possibility blue anon is a thing right, oh yeah, I love these people, it's so the thing about the thing about that world is so fascinating to me is it's predictable, um, that you have cynical operators in partisan worlds who see, oh, this worked for the republicans.
Speaker 1:We don't really understand why, but we're going to try to bring out the weirdest elements of our own coalition to push similar you know, counter bullshit narratives, um, and I'm I'm sure democratic strategists be like we don't do that and I'm like you're lying, like you can't tell me that rachel maddow's extreme russiagate bullshit, and I'm actually gonna push back on people. So there wasow's extreme Russiagate bullshit and I'm actually going to push back on people. So there was nothing in Russiagate, because I've actually looked at a lot of it. There was a few random things in Russiagate that were concerning, but like nothing that would have flipped the election.
Speaker 1:What flipped the election is pissing off Wisconsin workers, um, but my, and in 2016, um, and the fact that, uh, the Dems decided to double down on a strategy of pretending that some like Richard Spencer and they're all right, which had been a fractious gaggle of, of, uh, a radical traditionalist and white nationalist, um, who, by the way, I mean before spencer got famous in in the trump period, like there was fault lines between those people I used to, like I follow the right and like spencer defected from the alt-right a brand that he actually came up with with, paul Godfrey to, I guess, appeal to Gen Xers when they were not yet old, and we see that the Dems ran with that and it made people much more afraid of this real fascist threat than was actually on the ground, and they're trying to do that now. I don't think it's going to work in the same way. It's not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not working in the same way, but it's basically like whatever from that playbook they can get away with a little bit. They're going to try and paint all of these just like kind of mainstream comedians as being somehow part of a reactionary manosphere, which is just, I mean, it's not true and I mean now like the numbers are just not on their side to kind of make those arguments. But before all this stuff was new to people, you know, and I think people were just not used to how the internet worked. We just kind of saw a lot of stuff get tried for the first time and so, yeah, you get a fringe group who is quantitatively very small and you're like this is everybody. Now they took over and they're like oh, thank you, thank you for the appearance on cnn and and the uh you know chance to address an enormous, enormous audience of people and grow our movement. They're very happy to get that, but yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be tough to do that now yeah, it's, it's.
Speaker 1:I'm also watching like legacy media, in this case I mean cnn. Uh, pick on, the weirdest left are not not even left tendencies to pretend that, like horseshoe theory is real? Uh, so, for example, who are they doing now? Yeah, cnn did a special on the macro communists in the acp. Oh, great, I haven't seen this yet, oh, okay, um, despite barely mentioning the dsa for the 10 year, for the 10 years it was going from 5 000 people to 100 000 people they pick a weird niche group of uh people on twitter, some of which have millions of followers.
Speaker 1:We have no idea who those followers are and if any of them are real.
Speaker 2:Um but I think I think there's a lot of botting on this, but I will say that jackson hinkle uh, in particular, has actually grown very, very substantially because he was doing all this coverage of palestine and just picked up a lot of new followers. So it's it's kind of been an interesting thing to watch where, if you look at the comments, people are like wait, what the hell is this account about? I thought this was updates from Palestine.
Speaker 1:Right, well, I mean one of the things with that is a lot of that. People who come in because they think he had good points on Palestine, see the rest of his his bullshit, frankly but they keep following him to hate, engage with him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, just which. I guess I do the same thing. I think some of those posts are pretty funny.
Speaker 1:I uh, guilty. I don't do that because I realized a long time ago that like, for example, all the people who were doing that in the in the late aughts, early aught, teens around Alex Jones were empowering him, um, that in the in the late aughts, early aught teens around alex jones were empowering him, um. And this is not because I believe in like, de-platforming people. I just like I don't think I should focus media on the most unserious elements of the things that I hate, even if I find it really fucking funny. Yeah, but I do find this this interesting that you know, when you did your 20 interviews and In the in the Gen Z meme world, you did talk about paleo conservatism, a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and third position ism, which, for those of you who don't know, is nazism. I mean we should just call a spade a spade on what that is.
Speaker 2:Um yeah, I think they just basically rebranded it because you couldn't say that you were a national socialist anymore. So yeah, they had to come up with something fancy to kind of cloak it right.
Speaker 1:well, I mean, if you look at like James Pizarro of American Front, who was an explicit neo-Nazi group, that became New Resistance and then he went and got involved in for political theory people in Russia and left the country, there's been rebranding for a while. The other thing this niche did that I don't know that you talked about, but so back in the day in the Lerndys and aughts, when you encountered very radically right wing stuff and even some radically left wing stuff, it was in code. You know the human biodiversity movement that was. That was stolen from a left wing anthropologist to hide what they were talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, folkish paganism, like that, was a way to hide shit under neo-pagan auspices. What these niches on the internet did with, like earlier millennials and Gen Z, is you no longer need to hide to appeal to a gatekeeper or a slightly larger popular audience. You can find your audience being as raw and inflammatory as you want, um, unless you get kicked off twitter, uh, which I. This might be a conspiracy theory, but I think some of the weird left-right hybrid movements actually are just right-wingers who realize that they wouldn't get censored if they, like uh, hid behind that could be, could be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I've always, um, I mean I think that is literally the case.
Speaker 2:There's a group I think it's the uh patriotic socialist front, um, that was founded by Richard Spencer's former bodyguard that showed up at some I this is not one of the things I generally talk about, but a lot of people in my kind of ecosystem, um, that they follow these like fringe meetups of, you know, dissident political groups on the internet and then kind of report back to the stuff that they saw.
Speaker 2:And there was, I think it was the maybe center for political innovation, caleb Maupin's short lived uh organization activation, caleb maupin's short-lived uh organization, which was, you know, extremely online but then also had a footprint in the real world that the patriotic socialist front, if I'm saying their name correctly I don't exactly remember, but it was a sword between a hammer and a hammer and a sickle and they had their logo, uh, that those guys had just clearly like rebranded from what they were doing before, um, and they got kicked out of the meeting, as I recall. So people did kind of catch on to it, but you know, they got in the door by just being you know who they were with their iconography. So maybe that's a kind of soft example of this national workers party was another one that did that.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, you know, and, and the funny thing is, in in the aughts there was this really obscure party called the National Socialist Libertarian Green Party. The what? The National Socialist Libertarian Green Party.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. Do they have a logo that I can look at? No, they don't. So it was basically I do this series of flags, that I collect these things. I got to make a note of that because that is fucking wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was during the Constitution Party's heyday and the highest point of the Greens. And then, if you got into the real obscure niche parties that tried to run a candidate, you find the National Socialist, libertarian Green Party Wow, great, tried to run a candidate. You find the National Socialist, libertarian Green Party, and so racist, who like environmentalism but also unlike traditional Nazis, are neither Fordist nor socialist. They're end caps. Basically, of course this was Of course. This probably had 25 members.
Speaker 2:Right, right, of course.
Speaker 1:But I do think one of the interesting things like the alt-right and one of the things that's frustrating about when people talked about the alt-right back when they talked about it, I do think it's interesting that neo-reactionaryism is the only part of that coalition that's still around and that's because it appealed to tech weirdos. They have money, I would say that some of the there was.
Speaker 2:so there was a lot of people who were in the capital A, capital R, alt-right, then kind of drifted over to this paleo-conservative thing and then from that, like I think that the people are still around, They've just kind of like taken on other names. You know Right.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing about the alt-right is that it was all like it came out of the racial end of paleo conservatism.
Speaker 1:That's why I point out that, richard, spencer worked for pat buchanan for a while at american conservative and also, you know, paul gobfried is an old, he's a makusa student. He was part of the the american like frankfurt school research program work for tila's magazine. But he's been like a hardcore right winger for probably my entire life, um, or at least my entire adult life, for sure. And um, he never got on the white nationalist train. It's hard for him to do so. He's, uh, although he would talk to them, um, he's a jew. So it's a little bit of an issue.
Speaker 1:But you saw this happen a lot in the past too. It just was so contained. But I think that observation that you have about the Zinnet versus the Zinternet, excuse me, versus this internet, excuse me, and the Manosphere actually does get to the problem in that elements of this have been mainstream. Like Curtis Yarvin can publish in Compact Magazine an American conservative without being laughed out of the room, which was not true when he was Minch's mole bug. Mark Fisher would talk about him, but that was about it. What I find fascinating now is that you know these zoomers. They didn't. The politics now goes the other direction and I think we talked about this before. It used to go in person to online back in person. Now it goes online in person, back online. Yep, um. And when people like, oh, the internet's not the real world, and I'm like, well, what the fuck is at this point, like what?
Speaker 2:no, the internet is. I mean, yeah, I have a friend who says we used to download our lives from the internet. Uh, and now we upload our lives to the internet. That, julian, we upload our lives to the internet. Julian from the new models podcast says it's all the time but it's a. It's definitely real life and, as people used to say that before, the narrative now from the mainstream media is that, you know, young men got influenced by podcasts and then decided to vote a certain way. So if they're going to say that, then they also got to say that the internet is real.
Speaker 1:Kind of hard to have it both ways Mainstream American media having something both ways, though, josh.
Speaker 2:I shouldn't expect consistency.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's true, but I do find it fascinating. I want to pivot a little bit so we can talk about your current project, doom Scroll.
Speaker 1:Although ironically, looking at who you interviewed and I know this is probably something you've thought about and actively do these are internet political figures. Right, I know JJ McCullough because he does Canadian videos. I didn't even figure out his politics were conservative for a long time, Although I have always found them a little bit obnoxious. But I, you know, I like Canadian cultural videos, even when they're by slightly conservative nerds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's kind of even like a Christopher Hitchens type of. He's not a you know, I think now it takes on a reactionary conservative kind of connotation. But I think his politics were kind of contrarian for the I don't know era of the like Iraq war, where he was just a very you know, able to articulate and make kind of defenses of the reason why things are the way that they are is because the world is complicated. And yeah, he's essentially now it's like a never Trump conservative.
Speaker 1:Yeah, although it's weird to be a never Trump conservative in Canada, but anyway, that's another thing the internet's done. I actually was talking about this, like in some ways, american domination of, say, european markets is actually over. But if you talk about cultural products, even diehard anti-American German intellectuals used to work for one on Literary Magazine intellectuals. I used to work with one on Literary Magazine. The arguments he would make against me were media arguments that he was exposed to on the internet and he had the taste of the New York Review of Books, but because he read it online. And so the weird thing about today, you see this.
Speaker 1:I think this is very clear. In specific, on x, I don't even know where the people. All I know is that people interacting with me speak english or spanish, but I don't know um often where they're. Even at a lot of them are not americans. If they, if they aren't bots, it's. It's actually a very interesting place. So you have weird people who influence you know net politics like back before Amy Therese made herself irrelevant who also are very they're not even from the area of the world that they're constantly commenting about, like that's the rear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really will the really obvious fandom parts of it. Yes, I know american politics affects everybody, but people are talking about, like new york state politics from australia, and I'm talking about dime square? Let's be right, right exactly whatever is.
Speaker 2:I mean, yes, american politics just kind of like dominates the conversation everywhere, and that's because it affects everybody, but also because there's american listeners and just like that's the thing that sets the news. It's like the power law for any other sphere of media. It's yeah, yeah, I mean, and it's um, this is something that jj complains about a lot too, which is that like, why are there so many Canadian podcasts about American politics? That's kind of unusual, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, although I will say one of Canada's great exports to us, other than tar sand oils and stuff like that, is conservatives of various stripes.
Speaker 2:It's just they do have quite a yeah, quite a number of them from david, from to the rebel media guys, like it's just right, I remember, yeah, yeah they send us their conservatives they don't send their best no um uh, but I do find this interesting.
Speaker 1:When you talk to someone like jj mccalla, because he's a fairly prominent internet figure, he's I, even though his politics annoys me, I can listen to enough of it. I mean, I listen used to listen to shows on the rag actually, because I kind of found them funny. Um, again, don't have a sense of humor, so that's probably why, but um, and it spoke to this weird like, like a view that I have of Canada. I have a tenuous relationship to Canada where, like I've decided a long time ago that if you're not Quebec or indigenous, that your identity as a Canadian is just that you're not American, and when faced with foreigners, you actually can't prove it.
Speaker 2:He actually might, sympathetically, he might agree with that one. Actually, his idea, furthest outside of the overture window, is that eventually the united states and canada will join into some like european union type of, you know, freedom of movement situation and and the first thing I told him is like, well, for your sake, I hope that doesn't happen because you're gonna have to pay for our wars also. But yeah, that's uh, I, I actually I think you might agree with you on that one. But I guess jj is, um, we had, uh we had someone who I I'm not sure how to describe his politics now. Um, maybe, uh, libertarian, techno, accelerationist, uh, something like that. Maybe I guess unconditional accelerationist would be the term that he's most likely to use.
Speaker 2:But we've had people from a few different perspectives on the show. I guess the way that we're thinking of it now is that I really published like a very small audience of people doing independent research on this stuff and things that are maybe not so dissimilar to what you know. I have friends who are researchers at think tanks and produce scholarly papers about this kind of material. My stuff was, you know, self-guided kind of aesthetic curiosity about these things, but that was to a pretty small niche audience and that happened to attract the attention of a lot of people who were involved in this media space. Kind of, as you said before, it's like you're influencing the influencers right, like people who are, you know, making like relaying big talking points to giant audiences, are listening to your show to get the kind of rigorous intellectual take and then they find a way to like fit that to you know, pop audience and dumb it down, smooth out the edges a little bit as needed. I think that we're trying to think of Doom Scroll as something that is in like more so the middle of the funnel, rather than, like you find Josh's material after you've spent a few years looking into weird internet politics and then you're just fascinated by this weird stuff.
Speaker 2:And I guess part of that was because, through these interviews and conversations with people is, I just saw a lot of opportunities where there were conversations that could be kind of interrupted earlier on. You know where I saw somebody get on one side of an issue that was kind of just a, like a, it didn't need to break that way. It was either a misunderstanding or it was something that they I don't know they they approached it from this and they thought that this was a right-wing issue. They thought that that was a left-wing issue. And these things are just, you know, as with everything of our time, they're kind of on the wrong sides of the spectrum in many cases. You know, there's like that, having nuclear power for a prosperous, flourishing society is somehow continuing the legacy of colonialism and extraction and doing white supremacy to nature or some nonsense like that, and it's like I don't know. I think in a flourishing socialist society we're going to want really efficient sources of energy that are centralized and sustainable and cleaner than renewables even. Like there's just a whole lot of reasons why you like it. But if you come to it through whatever kind of decolonial politics and you're just kind of sympathetic to these things, you're going to end up on the wrong side of that. So, um, yeah, I just kind of been uh thinking of that stuff and trying to make something that is a little bit less uh, niche intellectual conversation more approachable, but then, you know, has like a lot of kind of uh inflames these contradictions, like talks about the sensitive issues in a way that you're you're kind of not likely to hear by.
Speaker 2:You know, I think channels that have giant audiences because they are captured right, they're essentially captured one of my favorite artists, who I learned a lot of this left-wing socialist critique of technology from about 10 years ago.
Speaker 2:You know he was he was very much. A lot of the things I say in the podcast is just stuff that Daniel Keller was saying in 2012. And so to bring him on and see how his perspective onto these things has shifted, is it was really really meaningful, I think, but I think we're we're pretty resistant to. You know, I have my own, like I've class for social democracy, I'm all for it, like I want to see that happen. I also care about weird lefty accelerationist stuff that's at some indeterminate point in the future, but I think we want to take, we're trying to start on the right foot where we do not begin entirely audience captured and so we're willing to kind of take the hits and the negative comments and grow a little bit more slowly because of that Cause. I don't know, I just see, I just see a big opportunity with it, you know.
Speaker 1:I agree. So I've mentioned one article which I'm going to put in the show notes Uh, and people should definitely take out goom scroll, I agree. By the way, I was going to say you are, I think of your channel as nonpartisan post bread tube.
Speaker 2:Um, uh, okay, good, we like that.
Speaker 1:Um, in that you will occasionally interview people who are not leftists, which people will automatically push back on Right. I got in trouble once for interviewing Sohrab Amari on not my show, on someone else's show.
Speaker 2:These are important conversations to have, though it's like whenever I listen to Sohrab Amari, I feel like I, uh, I, I understand a little bit more of. We can recruit those people. You know, these are good, good things to know about. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them.
Speaker 1:No, um, and it depends on what you're talking about. So, for example, I also had Scott Horton on the show who was, uh, I guess now he's more trumpy than he used to be, but he's a right libertarian, um, and it was uh interesting, uh, it was an interesting situation actually.
Speaker 1:uh, because, because we agreed on foreign policy a whole lot and we even agreed some on framing the peace movement, but he felt the need to lecture me about why the free market was good for an hour and I felt the need to push back on that, but I bring that up Because I think we are sort of in a situation where the media capture and the ideological capture and this may change but is getting more and more extreme I hang on on both blue sky and and Twitter, and while I don't think blue sky is true social, for liberals it's awfully close, and yet I will totally agree. Since Elon came on power, I get weird conservative ads all the time on X, so it leaves me in lurch. But when I look at you know you were talking about the normification of the internet.
Speaker 1:Part of the problem is that a lot of people engaged in these ideological niches are operating on twitter and on micro blogging sites which are highly politicized. They're favored by academics, they're favored by subgroups and the educated and partisans. Um, there's, there's actually reasons for that that are not entirely obvious and have nothing to do with Elon Musk. While there's a lot of weird algorithm shit going on at Twitter as well as there is on Facebook, twitter does not downplay you sharing your own material the way that Facebook does, because Facebook wants you to pay them to share your own material. The way that Facebook does, because Facebook wants you to pay them to share your own material Right. And so you're right. Both the cost of generating the stuff made it a lot less valuable, but also the the the commodification of the major social media platforms. Being so thorough Also, I mean it effectively killed blogging.
Speaker 1:Like blogging didn't go away because people stopped reading, although they might not be able to now. Um, it went away because people, because there was no way to monetize it at all once you had to pay to get things seen on facebook. So people moved to twitter and as these cultural shifts happen, I actually find it interesting that we can talk about the death of legacy media, and we should. But, um, twitter and x seem to be becoming the same dynamic as fox and msnbc. I mean, twitter and x and blue sky seem to have the same dynamic as fox and msnbc.
Speaker 1:Once fox existed, msnbc went from being a moderate to a blue. Um, I see, yeah, yeah, right, uh, like the msnbc did not start actually as the liberal um news network, it, it responded to fox and so you have true social, which is the more right wing than you have x, which is, from my perspective, full of reactionaries, and then communist, bizarrely, um, and then you go to blue sky and yeah, they're leftist there, uh, but it's like scholars and liberals and stuff like that or got mad at x. Um, then you go to mastodon and, oh my god, is that the most liberal place on earth? I once got called racist for talking about crime existing.
Speaker 2:It's yeah, yeah, I mean I I kind of feel right now like blue sky, the people who are really bullish on blue sky. This is mastodon 2.0. Uh, it's, I don't even. I think it's what 15 million users like it'sa. It's what? 15 million users? It's about a tenth of the size of Twitter, or less.
Speaker 2:I do believe that Blue Sky will be one of the bigger networks in the future, but the idea that people are going to move over there all of a sudden and then quit X Network effects are real Bringing visibility to projects you're doing are real. If you're writing about something, whatever you happen to be doing, you need to reach a big audience. So I think there's going to be a lot of people coming back with their tail between their legs being like, well, I'm on X just for when I have to be and I'm mostly on blue sky, and I think that will kind of be the case for the next few years and then maybe you know, within a five year time frame, like there's a kind of ecosystem of different platforms. I wrote a piece about this actually a little while ago, which was one of the first kind of big sub stack pieces I put out, called the platform wars, which is basically every platform now has the identical suite of services, which is you can post your text, you can do live streaming video, you can do vertical video, you can. You know every capacity that exists on one now exists in all the others Essentially the tick tockification of disaggregating the content from the creators. They're all just kind of becoming increasingly similar, as the business models are.
Speaker 2:Just, you know, super, super clear about what is most competitive. And whereas there were opportunities for kind of collaboration, cross-pollination before moving traffic from, let's say, you could only do text on Twitter, images on Instagram and your MP3s were on SoundCloud, now those things are becoming more locked in and so we're going to see less portability between these networks. Punishments if you're trying to link out from, for example, to a Substack article from a post on Twitter, you're deprioritized. All of those types of things are going to get really, really real because Twitter wants you to be selling your posts on their platform. Just laws of competition here. So I see that happening and network effects in the short term are still super, super important. Term are still super, super important. I would be. Uh, yeah, I would give. I would just tell anyone to approach that if you want to. If you want to live in a filter bubble of people who who like the Democrats? Um, go ahead and join blue blue sky, but uh, don't expect to like, have the same. You know. Reach for your audience, for example.
Speaker 1:No, um, I know some people are trying to convince themselves that it will. I mean, the other thing that I tell people is like look, even Twitter is one of the smaller social media networks.
Speaker 2:Right, that's one of the other things to look at.
Speaker 1:It's just it's always peddled influence and partly because it used to not deprioritize things, you could get organic growth at least with videos, not so much with blog posts On Twitter. You can't do that now. I mean, you can still do it some, but there's a reason why people who are media people pay for Twitter. Now I don't, because I'm a cheap bastard and also because I don't really like the service.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not one of my main things either.
Speaker 1:It's a kind of yeah Right, Some people love it, but Weirdly, though, if you're like me and you interview academics, academics are much more likely to respond to a follow on Twitter, and then if you can get into their DMs, then they are to an email, probably because the way that school emails have gone, if I'm completely honest, yeah, that's interesting. So it used to be like when I started getting interviews I could email almost anybody and I at least get a yes or no. Now I get a whole lot of people who seem like they don't even look at the email, but if I contact those same people on Twitter, I can get them on my show. The problem is you have to be active enough on Twitter for people to start following you back so you can send them a video, which is not always great. But I guess this gives me to the idea of the liberal Joe Rogan.
Speaker 1:You wrote a piece on your subsect. I'm going to leave both pieces that we've explicitly mentioned about. Like these weird legacy media figures, my thing is we kind of already have several liberal Joe, our left wing Joe Rogan, not so much liberal, actually, and so much, like you know, chapo Trap House exists.
Speaker 1:Right right For liberals. Whatever Michael Hodge is doing exists. So if books could kill and maintenance phase and stuff like that, but all those are niche projects, you know, and that is an interesting place to be right now. So you, you've spoken with Taylor Lorenz, a person who I would not ever speak to uh, not because I dislike them, even, I just don't know what we talk about. Um, but this idea that there needs to be a similar internet for for normies like this I saw responses to it was like oh well, we've already had chopo trap house and, depending on who you are, you like it already exists, or or it's uh reactionary.
Speaker 1:So, matt brunick was like, because it already exists and I've had other people like oh, we have liberal joe rogan, and it was terrible, just chopo. People like are ableist and sexist and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah Great.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, right, let me think about the difference in the dynamics of the way this goes on. But what I? The way this is goes on in general, but I do think you get to something about messaging. The Democrats failed to message young men. I think one of the weirdest things about the about the Marxist left, josh is that we're mostly male and uh, but we do not talk about male issues at all.
Speaker 2:I mean any. I would say that any young political space is mostly male. Yes, and that's because, you know, girls get into other stuff, boys get into revolution, that's just. I think that's society, you know, um and uh. In under perfect conditions it might be different, but like, yeah, definitely, it was always been clear to me, since I wrote the original piece in 2018, that these are, you know, overwhelmingly male dominated space and, uh, you know it, yeah, younger and and and male essentially. But in the uh, just generally, in the substack piece, I had a tweet that I was not really thinking about in particular, just generally.
Speaker 2:In the Substack piece, I had a tweet that I was not really thinking about in particular. I just put it out that maybe the morning when a lot of people were talking about this, but something to the effect of, like, we don't need a liberal, the Democrats don't need a liberal, joe Rogan, you need a, you know sweet policy platform of universal social democratic programs. A lot of people are already listening to it. It could be a big hit, something like that, and it kind of like extrapolated out on this. I had the conversation with Taylor, I talked to a number of people about this and it was also kind of an opportunity to just run down like this moment of complete narrative collapse for, like, whatever the hell happened from I guess I'm writing in this piece too, and there are, you know, journalists among the readers of my sub stack that are in you know, liberal publications and institutions trying to grapple with what happened. And yeah, it's like I've kind of been saying this for a long time that media is shaping people's political ideology. It's not like you listen to one podcast and then go, go out and decide how to vote, but over the process of many, many years, people are kind of acculturated to these ideas. And now we just have an example that is kind of clear and undeniable from um, you know, this most recent election. So I just kind of like went through like timestamps from 2018 up until 2024.
Speaker 2:Like every time that I that I said it that we need to think seriously about having media, about using media for political education, about thinking about, you know, when people are open to new narratives and in particular, under the current, this is, I think, the kind of contentious part that a lot of the people in liberal institutions are maybe not so fond of, but I think is correct, in that there is this kind of, you know, weird parallel organization between the progressives and the Democratic Party. Movies and Hollywood and our legacy media establishments that have generally kind of similar set of values, legacy media establishments that have generally kind of similar set of values. And so if you're a young person who is unhappy with the status quo, the kind of easiest you know low lift for a 15 year old to do to counter signal the establishment is to just pretend to be a conservative and so a lot of this stuff on the early side of the funnel or like getting into political activity. You know, when you and I grew up it might have been like spray painting and anarchism sign and listening to punk bands and like that was the way to say F you to the kind of Reagan Christian evangelical conservatism, like all that stuff. But we don't live in that world anymore. We live in a world of progressive hegemony in our media and our, you know, in the democratic party. And so the way to counter signal that is to kind of LARP as a reactionary, and I'm saying that they are LARPing, they are open to different messages and so you got to think of those things seriously. I mean, I think the other thing that I do kind of like try to throw in there at the end I talk about. There's a conversation that Hassan Piker and Felix Biederman from Chapo had about this that I give a few notes on. But I think the note that I tried to end it on was that like we could also say that Joe Rogan is the liberal Joe Rogan right Like the media who is propagating this narrative that you need a Joe Rogan for the Democrats, they're afraid of Trump as a fascist, but basically liberals, like they throw around fascism to mean any part of liberal democracy that they don't like you know, like it is actually an incredibly cruel and brutal system that has been extraordinarily violent, propped up all sorts of regimes that it's totally antithetical to its purported belief system.
Speaker 2:Uh, and so I really do believe that we are in some I'm not sure what to call it Post neoliberalism. People are saying but like we're not in capital F fascism, trump is more authoritarian than other people in the past. But there is a lot of this that is just kind of, you know, plain old, ruthless neoliberalism, just gutting state capacity and so on. Those parts are really scary. There's other parts that I think are a bit more interesting of reshoring and stuff like that, which is, you know, potentially works in advantage that word. There's just so many problems throughout. The idea of like that Joe Rogan's messaging is going to be the solve for it rather than the policies, and also the idea that it would be specifically liberal is, I think, mistaken as well. I think it'll be like a social Democrat at the least.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find one, the idea of a liberal, joee worgen's, kind of funny. I don't know what liberalism is anymore, uh, and I am. I've studied it for a long long time. Um, the other thing I would say is uh, all you motherfuckers are liberals, whether you realize it or not. Um, none of you want your hatsberg kings. Even the people who say they want the hasberg kings aren't willing to do anything about it, right, um, and so I I've been fascinated by this call, because it's not like left media didn't exist.
Speaker 1:I mean, it did play a role in the bernie uh, ascension and failure. Um, and that fragmentation after 2020, I, I've been telling people if you paid attention to the dissident right um, uh, between 2007, all the way back to the first incarnation of the tea party, which was not nearly as astroturfed as the later incarnations of the tea party around 2010, um, which was basically a libertarian movement. Uh, libertarians liquidated because in the space that they cared about, they kind of won. And also you had these uh, tech businesses, through use of government contracts etc. Became such monopsony powers. There's no fucking way they're going to stay libertarian because they want to keep their comparative advantage, yep, um.
Speaker 1:But to get to the question, when I think about the, this idea of a liberal, joe rogan, our left show rogan, I'm also like, but we're not doing the same things, we can't be doing the same things. We have a show already that is obscenely comedy, um, that also talks about politics. I don't always love their positions, uh, um, but I think they're important. And even if I occasionally mock chapo and also jacobin magazine by calling it orleanist and or geronjin, depending on what, how pissed off I am that day, and that is a joke that only real french revolution nerds are going to get. Um, but, uh, it is, I do think it's, uh, it's. We are in this strange place where we also don't have a message that that is easily containable. In the same way, um, and you know, you have all kinds of memes about all kinds of figures. I'll tell you what you don't have means for. Uh, viable social democratic memes haven't really happened um, no, no, that's a very that's.
Speaker 2:That's a very good point. And and I guess the um, the part of the problem with this narrative, or I guess these conversations in general, is that the way that someone gets educated through a media ecosystem that then correlates to some political activity in the world later voting, protesting, paper, membership to an organization, whatever it happens to be those things happen over time through various channels. So the frame itself is mistaken. That Joe Rogan is the one point of influence. If you're designing, let's say, a media funnel that would move through various different channels that at the bottom, fed you into an organization that you were. Say, for example, they had a podcast or they had a newsletter. That was just the. You know, the DSA sends out its own newsletter, right, like, there are things that result in political organizations. There's other things that have just popular appeal and will kind of, you know, nudge you slightly in one way or another. But that's a large system with many layers and a lot of time over it. So it's not just this like oh, great, if we just had one celebrity who would give talking points for what I mean. That's just it's a very mistaken frame. And yeah, I mean I would agree with you that the kind of Bernie, you know, social democratic memes have not been especially as effective.
Speaker 2:I want to hold out the possibility that there may be some things like that in the future. You know, aesthetics, isy, hegemony within the Democratic Party and the institutions, that that didn't seem as kind of you know edgy or transgressive or whatever, because there's this other thing in the way and that narrative is now just like totally collapsed. So it would be plausible to me to see a kind of, let's just say, a broad coalition of people who are just very focused on labor, call it social democracy or not even call it like the like, this kind of new right, jd Vance type of you know compact. We'll sometimes call it literally social democracy, although they are conservatives. If they have memes that kind of, from a labor perspective, dunk on the more you know economic patchwork, exit types of the mold bugs and the so-ons that are also in this coalition, uh, that that are just the kind of you know labor versus capital dichotomy.
Speaker 2:I could actually imagine that being um, you know, the punchlines are simple. It's like you're you're getting paid less work sucks. It's pretty catchy, pretty memetic, uh, but yeah, I mean, I agree that they, they have not. The Bernie stuff that was really kind of successful in those fields were more so, just like um again dunking on the libs. But what does it look like when we have a memetic ecosystem without libs like they?
Speaker 1:just they, they lost, they're gone, you know yeah, when the thing is how, how gone do they stay?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm famous for saying that one of the ironies of the social democratic left is that they actually save the center of the democratic party. And in some ways, corbin did the same thing with labor, although it took kirsten armor a long time to do that and just implement the same policies as tories anyway, um, as his last immigration speech indicates. Um, I find that very fascinating, um, and I this is the problem with politics as fandoms is. On one hand, I agree with you, we have to deal with stuff on the internet and people who, who, uh, don't understand that, um, they can't coordinate, really, uh, with other groups, et cetera. On the other hand, politics is local and our media and I've talked about this a lot our media infrastructure is not good for that. Like, I don't have a lot of influence as a podcaster in Salt Lake yes, I have fans here, but there's not a ton. I have more influence as a labor rep, but those are completely separated, believe it or not, and so I find that you do need a vision for what these organizations could provide and do. The problem that I think we have and there's a lot of people who've come up with this, from Chris Catron to Alex O'Chile, to my friend Alex Gindler to to Sean at Antifada. We've all come to this idea that we need real institutions that are not wedded online, but then I actually say we still have to deal with the online world. You can't pretend that you're going to be a viable organization without an online presence somehow. Now, how much viable that is mean. One of the things that I've talked about a lot is you know, there might be hundreds of thousands of marxist leninist on twitter, um, but most of them are larping in the sense that are maybe massive online rpg-ing, even, um, right, right, uh, in so much that they're not in organizations, their attachment to marxist leninism is very academic in a lot of ways, even though they're not in the academy. And the other thing driving this.
Speaker 1:We were talking about men and I want to talk about this in terms of mark fisher in a second but working class. There's a weird coalition and a lot of and not just the left on all these groups of highly educated people. And then blue collar, specifically blue collar working class people who are underemployed but are, but can afford a cell phone and get on the internet as their main way of dealing with what is otherwise a fairly bleak, if you look at the statistics for working class blue collar men life, um, and that cuts in a variety of different directions. Um, and it's hard to tell liberals, hey, uh, the group that's experiencing the most decline is blue collar men. Maybe you should quit not speaking to them, right, and instead they double down on. This is proof of misogyny, and even some people that I respect have doubled down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, right, um, and I, just I, it's the same thing that you're talking about with. You know, with normie, tick tock and Instagram, um, being deemed as somehow the same as Alan Tate world. Yes, alan Tate world exists in that world, but, like, I don't get a lot of that. Like, if I'm just on Instagram and flipping around, I'm getting mostly normie, normie stuff and a lot of the stuff you describe. Actually, even as a left winger, I also get left-wing stuff, even though I don't want to. Um, uh, because Instagram also knows what I did on Facebook.
Speaker 2:Um, so, yeah, I I have a sense that, um, we we've gone through various periods of this too. I don't want to be too conspiratorial, but I think it's reasonable to to assume that, like when there are moments of political strife or, you know, uh crisis in the country, I think they turn the dials down on politics stuff. I think they're just definitely more. Yeah, yeah, here's some cooking videos.
Speaker 1:Here's some, you know, whatever you're into, yeah the only exception is the micro-blogging social media sites, that they don't seem to do that, but yeah yeah but, like you know, for example, a lot of the palestine people on instagram got smart and started like hiding this and recipes from palestine and lebanon uh like uh, and that's also why the watermelon. Yeah, that's how you really know, yeah, wow, incredible um, so it's. It's just something to note, right, but I want to get into this, though. There's an element of this that ties into mark fisher.
Speaker 2:Yeah, tell me tell me about Mark Fisher, Cause this is this has been like. I think if there's one writer who's brought up most on doom scroll, it's. It's probably Mark Fisher. Yeah, who you, who you know quite well and have worked with and, yeah, you have a little bit of a spicy take on, so to speak.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm going to break it down. I do have a spicy take One thing I think his hauntology thesis is true if you're looking at music and movies, but it is not true across the board. Okay, it might be it might be true across the board now, but it wasn't when he wrote the book um, and his examples were selective what were?
Speaker 2:what were the outliers are you talking about? Like different disciplines, like, uh, like video games people bring video games and, uh, television actually.
Speaker 1:Um, if you look at the end of the aughts, the early aught, teens television was actually at a cultural high point. That wasn't about remixing old shit, yeah, yeah, uh. Now it wasn't as experimental as the wild days in the 90s. But one of the things I often find with Mark Fisher is he ties things to capitalism and neoliberalism but he he's not good enough at political economy for that to be meaningful. A lot of the time it's just invoked as a vibe. You know, capitalist realism is likeameson as red as vibes right um this is true.
Speaker 1:This is true, yes so I, and I've actually pointed out we've had other time periods where that were not even periods of uh so uh, political, economic decline, where you had similar uh tendencies towards nostalgia. And when he was talking about music I was like, well, he's right about amy winehouse and adele who are pulling up the set, but he's missing that. For example, early grunge was a revival movement of, uh, pre of two things post-punk on one side, but the other side of it, grunge was never a coherent music category anyway. So the other side of it were people like pearl jam who are just blatant arena rockers from the 70s, like hair metal style, um, and yeah, they thought they were a rebellion. I mean, like eddie vetter's famous uh, defend yourself against the 70s line.
Speaker 1:It's really funny to me because I was like, but you sound like a 70s band if I actually break you down into your elements. Um, you know, there's not the what. What I think is true about that is while there is still innovative music. True about that is while there is still innovative music, that middle tier, that someone like apex twin was, example used in your show.
Speaker 1:Uh, are like japanese industrial noise music from the late 90s, early aughts, like mersbo or something that has gone away. Yeah, yeah, there's now an obscure tier of music, innovation and then there's the most generic shit in the world and then every now and then, you will have a very temporary kind of one off like little Nas X or something that really does sound new. Yes, all right. Yeah, the thing that annoyed me about the cancellation of the future was Mark Fisher. Another thing about Mark Fisher is Mark Fisher is a popularizer who applies these things to culture. He's not actually often coming up with these ideas. Hotology is Derrida, and Derrida stole it from somebody else. Anyway. Capitalist realism is a condensation of a lot of the ideas of Jameson from the 90s and of Frederick Jameson for the 90s and, for those who don't know, he also recently died and Fisher is making Graham pronouncements about the nature of capitalism off of a very temporary time period.
Speaker 1:Um, and he also, but the things that where I talk about, like political economy, even when he was alive and he published it, how I got to know him was publishing the vampire castle and then working at zero books after he left, which he held against me. Um, uh fine, I mean I kind of understand why, but, um, I actually have been kind of surprised at how precious people are with some of his work until recently and that when people read him they would only read parts of the articles that they liked. So the Vampire Castle people focused on the critique of identity politics. None of the Russell Brand stuff. Now I'm sure they ignored the Russell Brand stuff. Yeah. Of the russell brand stuff, now I'm sure they ignored the russell brand stuff. Yeah, and they ignore that. His attacks on the non-electoral left as uh, and critiques of corbinism and and and bernie sanders as uh, he, actually those are all vampires.
Speaker 1:People only focus in on the identity politics stuff yeah, they don't read the other stuff and if you read his other, like Democracy is Joy, he's like doubling down on defenses of people, like people who criticize Syriza or Podemos as being basically bad faith actors who, even though they claim to be leftists, they're academic killjoys who are destroying the left, not people trying to warn you that Syriza's about to go tits up. Um, and I find that very interesting that people miss that he's actually building a wall, uh, at quite like the way democrats do, to make it impossible to critique social democracy without being seen as a bad, bad capitalist realist actor. Hmm, um, and that's really clear If you read his 2015 works and if you read the vampire castle piece closely. I didn't even catch that when I published the vampire castle piece, even though I talked about it a little later. Um, and the other thing that, when I deal with Fisher, that kind of frustrates me is sometimes, when he's writing, he has a Marxist theory of class, sometimes he has a British theory of class, sometimes he has a class origins theory of class consistent, which is why he could say russell brand is working class, even after he made uh sarah marshall movies and all that shit, which was just like a lot of us on the left were, like that doesn't make any sense, like not that you have to be working class to have left-wing politics, but the idea you could argue to me that russell brand is speaking to working class concerns and even now in his weirdo phase there's elements of it that
Speaker 1:he probably is, um, but you can't tell me that he is working class.
Speaker 1:That's a ridiculous statement, right, and we would go back and forth on what class meant all the time, um, and the other thing that we disagreed on was that I agreed that America over focused on medical therapy, although we don't do that anymore.
Speaker 1:Talk therapy has gotten a lot cheaper and so people do it a lot more. So he, he would tell people basically that, like hope came from the social democratic politics and that would also do stuff like injured depression, right, which, in his case, was probably a bad bit of advice, given how we know that it all ended up. And so I've been like we need to talk about like these, these parts of Fisher that are kind of onto something but also are making two grand statements, and then what he's also doing, in a way, actually mirrors what we talk about the Democrats doing, because he doesn't want people to criticize Corbyn and Bernie, criticize Corbyn and Bernie Now, admittedly, he's also going after people with false anti-Semitism claims and stuff like that, but it seemed like he was really trying to say like, oh, you know, these critiques of the social democracy are actually just helping capitalist realism. Therefore, keep your mouth shut about Chariza, podemos and Corbynism Right therefore keep your mouth shut about sherry's a pedemos and corbinism right, right um so yeah, I find that interesting and I
Speaker 2:find it interesting it's not talked about yeah, yeah, so I I think that, um, well, this is this is the place to do it. You know, I think there's there's a few people that, um, you know, if I, if I was on a podcast where I I wasn't, I didn't assume that. You know, I think there's a few people that you know, if I was on a podcast where I wasn't, I didn't assume that. You know that your listenership is just very well educated, like you're familiar with the stuff. We can get a little bit more granular than you can in other cases, and I think that there are, you know, clear, important criticisms to be made. You know, video games being, I think, the most obvious one. And I had a friend, actually, who was at a lecture of Mark's and was talking about slow cancellation, and he asked him about video games, to which Mark responded I don't play video games. Well, that's a pretty big blind spot in the theory. But, yes, this kind of slow cancellation, hauntology, I think that generally tracks now, given the age of the internet, where we have enormous amounts of data from Netflix and they crunch the data to make new derivative shows and whatever, in a, you know, environment that is not incredibly profitable, everyone's risk averse. That just that just kind of makes sense. So, yeah, there are holes in the thesis, but what is most important about that work I would say what is most important about Fisher's work and why I've tried to promote it and meme it and put it everywhere and reference it is because it is incredibly useful in connecting your vibe, experience of culture to a political analysis, uh, in a way that makes politics approachable to people who are not coming from a background of being in a niche live journal marxist, leninist sphere. Right, right.
Speaker 2:So this is like an early pill for people who are, if we diagram this out, at the relatively top of the funnel, this may be the first thing, and these are exactly what the comments say. If you go under the doom scroll YouTube, it's like, wow, I've, you know, I've felt this way for so long, but I've never been able to articulate it. This is it's giving a kind of critique to these people's uh, you know their, their vibes, their experiences, and then it's kind of nudging them. It's like, well, you know, as all of life got privatized, things got worse, you could take less creative risks, and so that's, that's very powerful at the beginning. Yeah, I'm just going to go through kind of a few points here.
Speaker 2:I myself I believe in therapy. I see a Freudian. I think all of those things are important. I think that financial stress is an enormous part of depression for people. But yeah, there is also ways where I might've done this when I was younger, when I was just like I'm not, I'm not going to see that shit.
Speaker 2:That's just like a capitalism trying to offer you like a solve for like no, you actually do need to do this kind of important interior work and understand your own psychology. Not everything is political economy. Some shit is just that's you, that's a you thing. This is not like that's not neoliberalism, my friend, that's just you got to deal with your own shit. So, very important to disentangle those things. And there's a lot of people who will basically abuse that position of his and kind of use it in, I think, a disingenuous way to kind of like cover their own you know, weird mental, whatever bullshit they got going on. Um, I, I also. You know this is not something that I would. You know I would not normally discuss this outside of.
Speaker 2:People who have spent years on the left talking about you know very detailed conversations about this stuff, but I'm I'm very much of the same. Alex Hokely I you know. I had him on the podcast a while ago to talk about neoliberalism.
Speaker 2:There are there are flaws with social democracy, like it failed for a reason. It is not a sufficient enough program for people who are left-wing intellectuals to say that, okay, we turn the dial to neoliberalism and now we just turn it right back and we get social democracy and we get everything that's good about Europe and the post-war boom and all that happens at once. It's like the profit rates that sustain social democracy. They do not exist anymore. We're in a different period of capitalism and so, while I thoroughly believe that we can get social democracy back, it is going to be vastly impoverished compared to the social democratic period earlier.
Speaker 2:I don't think that means that you can't fight for it, but I think, as people who are on the left, we need to be honest with ourselves about that. If that's all that we have to offer people, it's not enough because, like it, it went out of business. Like, literally, capital was able to to out compete it. Uh and yeah, it's just it wasn't. It wasn't sustainable. So, um, for me that means other types of political imaginaries that are a bit more speculative pie in the sky type of stuff. Like I was inspired by nick zernick and alex williams as they wrote inventing the future. I've had nick on the podcast. I still feel, uh, very inspired by that work.
Speaker 2:I think it's a little I also had nick on the on a podcast, but like a decade ago, so yeah, yeah I mean, these are not, they're not new ideas uh, you know any anymore but, um, that that kind of uh you know, utopian, imaginary, so to speak, speak, is very important. I also think that the other thing I like to throw in here is that I think this will be a determining feature of the 21st century actually is the way in which massive transnational corporations have utilized economic planning. So the Googles, the Amazons, the Walmarts of the world have realized things that you know the Soviet planners could never have dreamed of. This kind of fundamentally upends the calculation debate of the 20th century. It makes everything that Hyatt wrote just. You have to consider it fundamentally differently, because now we have more perfect knowledge than he could have conceived of back then when he wrote it. So just, all of these things are, yes, I'm willing to say among friends and intellectuals on the left that social democracy is not the end game that we're going for. But when we're talking to enormous numbers of people, we got to be able to sell them on normal ideas like healthcare and the kind of benefits of the advanced world. I think that's important to lead with, and if we try to lead with space communism, that's going to be a little bit of a harder sell um the.
Speaker 2:The last thing I want to throw in here is that I like to use mark fisher, I think, specifically because, as you mentioned, how people fixate on the vampire castle thing and for a lot of young people who are 15 years old and they're just fucking fed up with the bullshit that's on their timeline and all of this shit is like woke scolds, whatever nonsense. When, when you look at the left and they're sympathetic to, like you know, right-wing populism, like the kind of bro populism podcasts, um, it's really revelatory for them to hear anyone from the left who does not sound like those people, and and so it was also really appealing to people who just wanted a critique of the identity bullshit and so, you know, capitalist realism exiting the vampire castle. They just kind of worked on a whole number of levels that made it a really, really powerful meme for people who are at the top funnel. And you know, during the time when I was really looking into this, material like Hasan Piker as a Twitch streamer did not exist right, like this was such a quantitatively smaller thing. There were not a lot of like entry points or top funnel points for people to even get interested in this stuff and then to later get an education several years, you know, further down.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I think, for all of those reasons I think it's important to kind of promote his work, for people to be familiar with it, but we should not mistake the entry points to a political education as being the entirety of the program, that is, without any theoretical flaws or proposes, you know, a viable plan for the 21st century and those kind of things. So you know, I guess that's why that's why it's nice to come here and to talk about this stuff, because there's just not enough people who are kind of, I don't know, familiar enough with the canon or or that you can even get to this, like, get to this point of talking about that social democracy in itself is insufficient. Right that that's not the 21st century.
Speaker 1:Social democracy is going to pale in comparison to the 20th century version. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, we'll get. We'll get, uh, mm, tears and other people mad at us when we talk about profit rates. But, um, and when I, and I'll even get the marxist, leninist mad at when I point out that the profit rates in china now reflect the rest of the world, um, and you know right, and the big profit rate brooms actually in India. You get real mad when I point that out. That is true, that's true and so. But I also like, well, that means a lot of these things that you want are going to be harder to do, right, and that's really, really demoralizing for people who are on the left to have to face that.
Speaker 2:But if we're unable to admit that to ourselves, then we're doing the larp right. If this is our whole critique that the internet politics is now fandom and people are larping, or whatever, if we can intellectually get to this point, we got to be able to kind of like swallow that pill and come up with something beyond it, because otherwise we're just lying to ourselves too.
Speaker 1:Right, well, I mean this is. I've done a long series on eco socialism, now gotten so fucking flustered with the bright green slash deep green are, uh, workerist versus degrowth? Um, because I'm just like none of those paradigms really actually make sense if you're talking about economic planning plus um massive infrastructure building for the entire planet. Eventually, let's not de-grow anything please.
Speaker 1:Right, but the idea is that this is something that you retool what exists and you invest in this, but you do it once. So you have massive upfront investment, which we don't do anymore. I mean, we're still living off the upfront investment. In the United States. That was done largely between the 30s and the 60s Right, so between the Great Depression and the World War II.
Speaker 1:Yeah, same bridges, same. You know our Internet's old as fuck, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean the Internet in general is not that old, but we actually have a lagging internet because our infrastructure is privatized, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I have to tell the social Democrats who are like well, socialism is when the government does nice things for me, where I'm like, but who's going to skill these people into doing this? Because the government doesn't have these skills either.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that you have to look at from you know you've used social democracy. That applies to Europe and America. We had Fordrone, ironically, has also picked it up, but not on the same political, economic terms that Fordism actually lays the groundwork for neoliberalism because it already starts the public-private partnerships, and that the social democratic countries actually had a lot easier of a time neoliberalizing because they could do it unilaterally from a central point of control, which I've talked about in terms of Sweden, of the Nordic models, why it did that. I've talked about it in terms of the liberalization of the markets in China and how extensive that that really was. I mean, like they ended public school in the rural countryside for girls in the 80s. I mean it's actually more laissez-faire than anything that happened in america.
Speaker 1:Um, and she is popular because he doesn't denounce dung, but yet also as actually he's the first person who reversed a whole lot of those policies in the countryside. Um, partly because, uh, if you know about the Bo Xilai incident, it was very clear that you were going to have a neo-Maoist movement if you didn't coming out of the countryside and it would have been hostile to the government. So I think we tend to project this as just stuff we can immediately do where I'm not a social democrat, you know I'm not a social democrat, you know that, actually, I know, you know that. But, um, I'm totally willing to work with social democracy because I do think, like, even though, yes, it's just ameliorating capitalism, medicare for all are even just making insurance not super shitty would be a massive boon to almost every class in the united states. Not, there's a, well, there's two classes that wouldn't be good for, but, um, a subset of the working class is tied into low skilled medical work.
Speaker 1:It would not be good for them because they'd become irrelevant and investors in the medical field and universities, and actually, it would be actively bad for universities, because a lot of the high-end universities make a ton of their money not off of student tuition but off of their hospitals. Sure, so we have to talk about this realistically. But you know, what you shouldn't do is you shouldn't go. Hey, person is just getting interested in socialism. Why don't you go listen to Varn's critique of everything that you just got introduced? To so that you feel like there's no hope.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, like, no, you have to work. I mean, I know this about myself.
Speaker 2:You have to work your way up to this, Like well, that's where I think that's where the planning stuff actually gets really, really interesting, because the the way in which Walmart does it specifically is that it's a cost saving measure, right? Uh, specifically, is that it's a cost-saving measure, right? It's not like there's some genius at walmart who just, you know, wants to do this calculation and, like, solve the great puzzle of the 20th century. They're just trying to cut costs. This is an austerity measure, right? So under these declining rates of profit, uh, the cost of finding price, of, of assembling all of that knowledge and then determine price, is actually really, really expensive, and so the possibility exists that having these markets may be more costly. And if we can start to look at whatever 21st century social democracy would look like, just taking those things out of the market as a cost-saving measure is actually, it's completely not. I know that's not how people want to talk about it. I understand it is a class movement and it requires organization and institutional power and all of these things. But there is also this other kind of converging factor, which is that it is more cost efficient, and right now, the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, are just taking enormous amounts of profit off of the table from other sectors of the American economy, and so, if that happens to be part of the squeeze that then allows this thing to happen, I think that those are things that are worth thinking about.
Speaker 2:For people who have spent many years on the left and are serious about seeing some of these things happen, it's not the thing that I would lead with. It's just too complicated. You don't, you know, you give somebody like uh, you give a 16 year old the communist manifesto. You don't give them capital volume three. Right, there's like a. There's a reason why you, you get into this stuff uh slowly. So, yeah, I think, um, I think that that is uh absolutely worth looking into and and for for us to be talking about yeah, definitely, and I, I, uh, you know this is maybe where we can start to wrap up here.
Speaker 1:I've used a lot of your time, but I do think, um, um, the one thing that I, I got really mad around the time of the second Pop the Left because I saw mean politics and then I saw you need a, you need graduate school to really understand this. Mark Fisher and this is a defensive hand for all my critiques that I made Fisher really did understand, at least in his own work, not necessarily in what he published actually for other people, at least in his own work, not necessarily in what he published actually for other people, but in his own work that you needed hooks to get people in on these, these ways of talking and understanding the world, and the hooks he used music, movies, music movies etc. Were kind of effective hooks. Now there are times where you've had Catherine Liu on your show.
Speaker 1:I am notoriously not a liker of the PMC thing because, even though I agree with a lot of what she's describing, I think it's not really a class phenomenon, it's something more specific than that, um, and that her book on political economy has no political economy in it at all. It's cultural observations, which, of course, given what she studies, that makes sense. Um, but I am no longer like against Catherine's work or against people talking about this PMC problem, because eventually a lot of people do come to the conclusion that I do that, like you don't really have a good way of defining this class, like that doesn't end up cutting in weird directions. Um, uh, what you're really talking about is two or three different things that share a cultural milieu because they have ties to the government. So, uh, that's the liberal domination of universities, the liberal domination of media and HR and hr. But if you try to make a theory that includes anyone who ever got a college degree and yet also speaking about cultural elites, you have a problem, because 40 of the population has a college degree and blue collar workers make up 15 of the population, like it's. It's just not, uh, what you particularly if you don't consider let me rephrase that if you don't consider, let me rephrase that if you don't consider service work, blue collar, then the manufacturing slash, logistics side of the economy has been automated to the extent. It's just not a major part of the workforce. In the same way, it will never be automated fully away.
Speaker 1:I'm still a Marxist. You need people involved to reap profits, otherwise you have no veritable capital. But you don't need a lot of people, and that's what I think. People have a hard time, you know, because they think, oh well, of course. Well, this minority of people have have a college degrees, I'm like, but it's still 40 of the population. If you're talking about like mid-century style factory work our logistics work are things that are traditionally blue collar you're really often talking about people who own their own businesses, which have a completely separate uh set of incentives for it or you're talking about, um, gilded trades, or you're talking about a very small and highly automated manufacturing sector.
Speaker 1:You actually are not talking about where the majority of the people are, and so you have this weird redefinition that's going on, um, and the other thing that you get to is, like well, how do you explain that? Pmc ideology like ran rampant through the Internet, even amongst people without high degrees of education, during the blog period? Academic trends, um, that that actually often came from outside of academia, such as settler studies. That comes from basically some maoist in the 70s, um, uh, where some people picked it up in the 80s and 90s and developed it into an actual academic discipline. And then, uh, in the last 15 years, you saw people actually calling back to like jay Sakai, reed Sedler, remember all that shit.
Speaker 1:What you start seeing is that there's a major way in which these fairly reified reconceptions of things that maybe came out of the working class a long time ago. Jay sakai you know, if his later interviews are to be believed, and I do believe them was a worker who got alienated, uh, trying to salt mostly white shops, and as an asian man in the 1970s, at the end of the new communist movement, um, uh, uh, the. The more famous one is how much the kombachi river collective has been like written as like an ur text uh, into even liberalism, uh, and also left liberalism and radical liberalism. Um, without dealing with I don't know what they did in the the 80s and 90s, um at all, uh, and you started seeing this work its way through. Uh, left-wing thought, post-occupy, to people who are not highly educated. It was not people who were in humanities graduate schools who were citing this.
Speaker 2:The woke scolding didn't just come from the students anymore and a lot of them were uh, kids too in middle school and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Right you know right, uh, I mean, and one of the weirder things about the current trajectory with zoomers is they're highly illiterate, but they also know about more stuff. Um yeah, we did yeah, I have stats to back it up. Like no way I would have heard about the fucking kabahi river collective at seven, at 16 they know they know about a lot of stuff they've never read.
Speaker 1:Yes, right, exactly, but they don't read shit. So, like it's, it's uh, it leads you to a very interesting way to engage. And so when people like, oh well, we just need to get them in the meat space and and, and then get them on traditional literature, and I'm like dude, if you want them to do that, you're going to have to teach them how to read a novel. It's just yeah, yeah, no it is really.
Speaker 2:It is really a problem. And I don't I don't mean to sound like I feel like you've heard this from the William F Buckley's of the world for decades and decades, but there there is actually a kind of reading comprehension problem with, um, today's media landscape. You know, um, I, yeah, I'm, I'm not sure how to how to fix it. I would, um, you know, if I was the leader of a global totalitarian regime, I would probably just turn off TikTok permanently, something like that. You know, I'm not sure about the road, the road back. It is, it is. It is very troubling.
Speaker 2:I think at, maybe to try and like summarize some of these, these things, a friend who is a documentary filmmaker, he told me once that when you investigate a subject, so you have this, you have this kind of horizontal line and you draw a bell curve right and at the beginning your understanding is very low and then, as you get into it, you have mastery and then you reach the kind of peak of this thing and you think you have a very good understanding of it and then, the longer you investigate it, then the bell curve slopes down and then at the very end of this, after being in it for many years. You're kind of back at the original place and it's like, oh man, this stuff is actually super, super complicated and it's like really rich and in depth and I don't feel like I have a mastery over it at all. And I feel like there's a similar thing even for, like a phrase like the PMC, for example, which is like we know what it's gesturing at. You know, it's like we know that it's gesturing at, we know that there's this group of people and they need to be criticized, and the weird irony is that the radical anarchists who are protesting on the street are using the same language as these fancy academics. And how is this possible? It's like who is the coalition? How does it exist on both ends of the spectrum? But there's this kind of mesh of of people, right and there's.
Speaker 2:You know, I think sometimes the hyperbolic or the the kind of maximalist ideas are rewarded in the institutions, whereas if you were to kind of, you know, for example, if you said in 2018, that we should think seriously about working class men as part of our political coalition for the Democrats, you would have been laughed out of the room. You know, now, in 2024, that's where most people are with it. But there is some kind of reward for these kind of maximalist positions, the most unfeasible positions within the academy. Essentially that's what they. Like, you know, let's not do anything that threatens the existence of this kind of, you know, elite endowment. Essentially, yeah, but then, like you know, the deeper you get into it, it's like just sticking with PMC as the example. Is it like? Is it culture, industry? Is it NGO? Is it salaried positions? Is it? You know?
Speaker 2:I know a lot of people who are precarious freelancers but then also assumed these, you know, just incredibly moralizing, fanatically moralizing politics. Even people in the great irony, who are being precarious and were being financially punished through these systems would sometimes just completely adopt their worldview and their rhetoric. So it's, yeah, it's really, really perplexing. And I think that the stuff that I'm interested in is kind of, like you know, again using this funnel analogy, where it's like to introduce a term like professional managerial class to a large audience of people who are grasping for some, some coin, to coin some kind of phrase to describe this phenomena. That is an incredibly useful.
Speaker 2:But if we are serious about being left-wing intellectuals and we want, like a kind of very firm, rigorous definition on this, you know, the edges get really really fuzzy and there's different cliffs and people get excluded and it's kind of hard to get the perfect language for it and people get excluded and it's kind of hard to get the perfect language for it.
Speaker 2:But those are things that, like, we're going to talk about, you know, in like closed meetings as we try to fully understand this thing, and then the messaging that we have to lead with is going to be, you know, it's OK that it's imperfect. You know, the Bernie campaign did, I think, a good job of this of just kind of generally messaging social democratic stuff and, you know, not having to approach profit rates and the way that those systems would be sustained in years past. So, yeah, I guess it's like it's time and place for these things. You know it's time and time and place, yeah, and also having the intellectual courage to kind of admit that we don't have perfect definitions of things and that there are questions that are unresolved and that we have to actually do hard work, as you know, so-called intellectuals of the left, rather than just kind of gesturing and moralizing at whatever you know. So that's why I really like the Alpha Bunga Bunga guys. I'm a big fan of Alex, george and Philip over there. I think that they're doing some important work now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like Philip and I Alpha don't see my eye to eye, although I really liked the book I published by him many years ago. It's a very good one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I love it. Yeah, I've got it on the shelf in the other room.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love it. Yeah, I've got it on the shelf in the other room. But Alex and I often agree I probably have a less forgiving demeanor, but I also actually realize that you need some skillful means here. For those of you who know Buddhist terminology, it means sometimes you have to be able to go like, okay, I'm gonna tolerate this entry-level shit that I think is actually not super accurate or great, because I have faith that as you get exposed to this stuff, that you're smart enough to figure out, that you're going to work through some hard questions, that this basic shit can't answer for you.
Speaker 1:Bernie campaign is a a big one of them and, you know, even though I got on the bernie train barely reluctantly and very late um, like in 2020, 2020 um, I did think that it was worth pursuing to get people to think about some hard questions about what would have happened if bernie won, what would have happened if he did what he did do and capitulate, what would happen if he actually decided to do what he did in the in the 80s and encourage people to start an independent movement, whatever that looks like.
Speaker 1:You know, right, those are all things that we need to look at and we can't be too precious about it. But I also don't want to silence, you know, people who disagree with me, and one of the things I like about doom scroll and I'm also increasingly taking this uh stance myself is I do need to talk to some people who are not part of the left. Um, not necessarily and I don't mean like tailing conservatives. I don't tend to think that actually works um, but like um, yeah, we're talking about working class men now, but let's still be honest a little bit. Like I've been told by people, even people who agree with me, like women who agree with me. Who's like oh, if you don't want us to fix the men, then I? I will concede that you have real points.
Speaker 1:Um, I'm like yeah, it's not your, it's not it's not women's job to fix men um, uh, but they're like, but I'm not going to say that in public because it would be, um, I would get you know, it would have social costs for me and I and then I was like okay, so talking about dating is coded right wing, talking about educational failure, right coded right wing.
Speaker 2:Talking about corruption in the democratic party is coded right wing going to the gym once and exercising makes you a capital f fascia straight out of the 1930s.
Speaker 1:That's right, yeah uh, being into sports coded right wing.
Speaker 2:Oh my god um, what isn't like? They're just giving up everything.
Speaker 1:Having hobbies is right wing is fucking yeah, I mean I, I remember back in the day and I I'm sure alfie uh con of civilization magazine regrets writing this, but I mean for a while he was like uh, video games are coded right wing.
Speaker 1:I'm like god damn it stop now alfie would never say something like that now he would never say something about that like that now. So I want to be clear on that, but it is. It is like it's important. When we talk about social reproduction, yes, we're talking about many things, including trans issues, but we're also talking about dating, dating fairness, what's happening to working class men, who's having children and why, and if the only people who can talk about that are right wing you are white, well fucked with a large majority of the population.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, um, you know, and I I do think that like, talking about the pmc uh does like I used to be radically against it, now I'm more just like, okay, I will grant that I do know what you're talking about as a vague phenomena, um, of elite capture when you talk about the pmc. But I'm going to take the christian Parenti line that we have to be honest. The PMC is like three or four different subclasses of people that just happen to have similar alignment and interest, and there's a lot of groups that can be peeled off of that. Nurses and teachers, um, are sometimes woodworkers and sometimes against them, uh, depending on how you define worker, but like they're not the same kind of people as your hr media people are like tenure track professors right, yeah, they're very, they're very different yeah, you know another group that's equally precarious is like treating adjunct professors like they're tenure track professors is a hilarious thing to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know what this is.
Speaker 2:It's not even just for the, for the left, but like, even like this new right coalition. Sam Chris had a great piece about it. I'm going to forget all the different categories, but there's, these's these, like you know, economic patchwork, exit, libertarian mold bug types. There's heterodox economic populists like the, the jd vance, and then there's whatever, I don't know, the kind of weird merchant right elements to it, but there's those. Those groups have like kind of important differences, particularly when it comes to, like the border, you know, and like is, is a nation state a contiguous block of territory or is it something that should be parceled up into these different competing fiefdoms? Or, like those people have important disagreements. And that level of complexity is kind of what you have to bring to all of these things, because clearly, the, the nurses which I think most people would not include in the pmc now, but you know the 1971 definition has, as nurses, for example, like nurses and tenured professors, very, very different interests.
Speaker 2:Uh, so, yeah, to have these kind of big blocks like, um, it prevents us from seeing, like the fault lines that emerge and like when one of those factions gains power over the other, for example, like that is really important. You know, like, what is going to happen to the American economy between, like, vivek Ramaswamy and Musk on one end, and then the JD Vance on the on the other. Like it would behoove us to know those differences, not call all of these guys the same category, because that, that, can you know, we can affect the way that those decisions uh get made. We can, you know, push in one way or another, support some things, not support other things, like that. Those are all really important to tease out those differences. So, um, yeah, yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess that is the uh, that is the work, right.
Speaker 1:Right, and I think the other thing that we have to do, like you know that you follow enough of the right wing and you can talk to people, um, and you have people in your life probably I'm assuming that are not raging lefties and although you know, you're in the East coast now, so that may not be true, but you know, as a person from Utah and I talked to Ben Studebaker about this I'm like he's from Indiana and I'm like we have to know what the different kinds of conservatives are, what the different coalitions are, because when I'm doing local stuff, I have to deal with, yeah, um, local politicians. I found it hilarious, uh, in the tale of the two shawns, uh, which it's a joke, I make a lot now, but sean o'brien and sean a fane right, yes, uh that people got what.
Speaker 1:People were surprised that the Teamsters, who are a, frankly, a more powerful union than the, than the UAW, that the Teamsters were more willing to to change who they back based off concessions and their own interest in the economy, than the UAW is. There's structural reasons for that that a lot of the left doesn't want to look at. The car industry in America basically only exists because we tear the shit out of Chinese EVs. There's a lot of weird incentives in all that, um, and it's hard to get people to look at what these incentives are. It was like how I was the downer during the whole strike, tober shit and the whole like, oh, the unions are growing and me going? No, they're not.
Speaker 1:I have stat after stat after stat this tells you that yes, they're new members but they're losing. Members are getting shut down in certain areas faster than they're gaining as a proportion of the economy. And if you don't understand that, like, no, we're not in the 1970s where the general population has turned against the labor unions, where the general population has turned against the labor unions. Um, and I'm also not one of the big people who's like, who's like okay. And also let's just start with the fact that, that it was not a conspiracy by reagan that made labor unions unpopular, that like they were becoming massive bureaucracies that were not particularly super interested in their own constituency for a while themselves. Um, and that the third way democrats knew that you bill bradley talking about it like so it wasn't just you know reagan's neoliberalism.
Speaker 1:It came in and just smashed everything up and I think those are harder lessons to deal with.
Speaker 2:They're uncomfortable to think about also.
Speaker 1:Right yeah. But to get back to our points about fandoms and cultural fandoms, cultural worship and fandom shit is high engagement, low understanding, like in fact they're kind of better if you don't understand yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like I've been called a Stalin apologist and a Trotskyist because you know, my actual take on the Soviet union in the 1930s and forties is pretty. It's pretty complicated. It's nice when you get both, that's a yeah, it's weird.
Speaker 1:It's weird. A lot of MLs like me, I don't get it. Um, a lot of ml's like me, I don't get it. Um, but um, although I do point out that even mal critiques stalin, like guys, he was just very careful about how he did it. Um, the.
Speaker 1:This idea you know my stance on, like the soviet union, is that the if you read, read the actual historical literature and look at the archives, it's not an issue of Stashman bad, nor is it an issue of Stashman good, which the meme politics wants to be given to because that's memeable, whereas the actual thing is, like Stashman did wants to be given to because that's a memeable, whereas, like the, the actual thing is like you know, a stash man did kill a whole lot of the old Bolshevik leadership, but a lot of the purges actually weren't entirely in his control, and that's harder to have a clean narrative about.
Speaker 1:You know, that's a much tougher thing to deal with. To have a clean narrative about that's a much tougher thing to deal with. And people shut down because they also want hope of some kind of alternative system that has existed in the past as a way out. And so there's a disincentive towards nuance to the point that if I say nuance, people will immediately attack me as being some kind of weird centrist liberal, like it's just that that word is coded like that. And I did find it funny that in all your explorers, explorations of your political journey, you didn't meet a 21 yearyear-old fucking centrist liberal who was really into Noah opinions and Matthew Igrejas.
Speaker 2:You know what. I'm sure that they exist out there somewhere, but I would say that you know sorry, I'm on a terrible nicotine fixation, let's spit out my gum. I would say that we're watching a kind of period of realignment, de-alignment, whatever you want to call it, and so generational politics is flawed. It's just kind of a question of time and historical development and so on. But there's a bunch of young people now who are kind of getting it worse than than the millennials in the past, and so they're kind of using the peculiar infrastructure of the Internet to seek out new narratives. That has led to a bunch of basically nonsensical fandoms from which people kind of move in and out very flippantly. But then among that there is also people who will get here's a perfect example there's going to be somebody who saw a capitalist realism meme and then has followed through a whole bunch of other stuff that maybe found the channel. And then now is that you know whatever, like three hours deep into this podcast to get to this exact point. And if that applies to you, then comment on the video below to get to this exact point. And if that applies to you, then comment on the video below. And there are people among these fandoms that have a rigorous intellectual engagement, that really care about these things, and I guess our job is to build a good media ecosystem that they can get to this point, because the institutional model is just so. Our existing institutions are so rotten and corrupt. There's not another way to do this right now. So using these things in whatever you know diminished, impoverished capacity that they've had versus examples in the past. This is what we're doing right now and then from that we will build new legitimate institutions. But we are where we are and so this is how we have to do it.
Speaker 2:And so I think, having just like I kind of as you framed it a little bit of a thorny take and prodding people who have a subcultural fandom of, you know, engagement with this material, that's kind of good for us. You know a little bit of bullying. You know it's just like oh, that's the you're into, you're into that stuff. Why don't you take like one step deeper, like, oh, you read capitalist realism, like well, why don't you read Jameson? It's like, why don't you read Derrida? Like just kind of you know breadcrumb along the way, and then among those people you know what, there might be somebody who they just want to listen to pop music and they like the hauntology critique, they like slow cancellation of the future and that's enough.
Speaker 2:And they're going to be part of this diffuse political bloc, but they're not going to be part of, like a, you know, intellectual debate where you know we try to coin phrases and terms and set agendas and things like that. You know that's fine, there's different roles for everybody. But, yeah, in large part, the kind of fandomification of this stuff, as Catherine has written about as many people have, has kind of been disastrous and I would say like, if we allow that to happen, that is basically the libertarian design of the internet for people to move freely and in a liquid fashion between consumer preferences, infinitely you know, as many options as there are people in the world. That is the, like, you know, utopian dream of neoliberals, of libertarians. It's a little fuzzy around there, uh, yeah, and so, uh, it's our job as people who want to like, take things out of this market for attention is to, yeah, kind of do these kind of rigorous conversations and build, build an alternative.
Speaker 1:Right yeah, and despite all the critiques I've made, I've also said actively many, many times if your movement requires the most sectarian, dogmatic position or the most intellectually rigorous position to be held by the least member, um, you are not a viable political movement, um and I happen to have the perfect political opinions on everything and I have one member in my party, so it's going.
Speaker 2:It's going great.
Speaker 1:We all agree over here right, you know, I I've, I've made the whole joke, but I actually also kind of mean it. Um, is I'm so sectarian that I'm non-sectarian because, like I'm a one?
Speaker 2:uh, and I know.
Speaker 1:I can't go it alone so I have to get.
Speaker 1:I have to get along with other people, so I end up being non-sectarian. Not because I think any of these people are right, because I know that you can't do shit alone. And I do think we do have to have a certain amount of toleration for fandoms and normie dumbs and whatnot. Not that I really think the normie is anything but a collective hallucination that we all have, um, but, uh, that we used to somehow differentiate ourselves from some npc who doesn't exist, um, but nonetheless, I do think that, uh, we are at a time period where we're gonna see a lot of this stuff radically change, like and and a lot of people are misrecognizing what it means.
Speaker 1:People like, oh, the left is dead, we're gonna have a jd vance presidency and it's gonna be the a thousand year reich of the republicans, and I'm like we also thought that in 2004, people um, I'm not trying to save the democrats.
Speaker 1:Actually, if they went away I would, I would be happy, but I highly don't think that you're going to that the cultural hegemony of the gop is going to be as deep as people think it is, because Trump legitimately won 51% of the popular vote. I mean, it's just weird to me to have that idea about the world. So one of the things I think we have to do right now is both a meeting people where they are, uh, and also like para institutions are going to be important, and we have to figure out how to do that without becoming NGOs, because the NGO world is the great killer of most left wing anything, um, and and leads to constant rent seeking, um, so we've been talking for three hours, thank you, and, uh, I said I was not going to do that, but I'm just, uh, I'm, I'm a big fan, so it's, it's nice to be here, uh, you know, over over on the channel um, after after so long.
Speaker 2:So I'm, I'm, I'm happy to do it. And there's few people, to your great credit, that you can really get like this deep in the weeds on the references and uh, you know, I'm used to like I pull out a whole bunch of like memes and kind of random, like whatever political sordid bullshit I picked up from, uh, teenagers, um, and then you just know all of them. So it's like it's a great, it's a great encyclopedic uh book for, yeah, yeah, the emergence of the communist movement is like, just you can't, you can't stump you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the Moon Book.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, the Moon Book Right. Yeah, it's a pretty good meme that was. They did well on that one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I actually find it interesting that left comms, you know, historically the least popular movement of the left period ever. Uh, although I also have I mean, in my heart I do have some ultra left sympathies, um, but uh, obviously that's why I know so much about it. But, um that, uh, they are better at memes, and, and the marxist leninists are better at memes, and the Marxist-Leninists are better at memes than, like normie, social Democrats are. I've always been fascinated.
Speaker 2:It's a shame, but it is true yeah.
Speaker 1:And I do wonder not to throw a friend of the show and my personal friend been purchased under the bus. The idea that we went social democracy by rational argument primarily may be part of why we're not memeable, Cause I've never seen a rationally compelling meme in my life.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's true, it's true, memes do not work on the level of reason, yeah, or at least by reason. By reason if we mean formal logic and formal rhetoric. Memes don't work that way. They're more recursive and meta, but they serve a function. But, thank you. And I really want people to check out Doom Scroll I mean it's funny because I think probably all my audience has probably checked you out. But watch the episodes with the people you don't agree with.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, uh, I still listen to I'm an interview by him, but I still listen to thaddeus russell to get an idea of what, like, what are the weirdo libertarians and post-libertarians and Glenn Lawry and all those people? What are they thinking right now, today? And leftists who are downstream from them and don't admit that they are, but they use the same frameworks and the same moral codes, often cannot model actively, cannot model, uh, the mind of their of of why anyone would be attracted to their opposition other than pathological misogyny, pathological racism, path pathological capitalism, etc. And that is a very bad place to be Like. You've actually set yourself up to not be able to attract people and also not be able to understand what your enemies are going to do. Right, and I don't know how you like. That's one thing about this fandom world that really does worry me is because it does make that easier to do. Um, yeah, but concluding thoughts, things you'd like to plug any of that?
Speaker 2:no, no, this is. This has just been an absolute uh pleasure. Um, I'm very happy to be here. It's wonderful to go over this stuff with you. Doomscroll podcast on YouTube. People will be able to find it. Then I do a newsletter on Substack. We're doing a bunch of new stuff. My name on all the platforms. I think YouTube is what we're trying to do for now. We'll be putting out some new episodes soon. Thank you again so much. This was a super, super fun.
Speaker 1:All right, is your podcast available off YouTube?
Speaker 2:It is now. Yeah, we did. The first six weeks we're only YouTube because we were launching the channel. But now, if you want to do the audio version, it's just Joshua Citarella doom scroll on Apple, spotify, just all the different platforms it feeds to all of them, sweet.
Speaker 1:All right, and with that we're out.
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