Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - JK After The Fact (False Alarm! part xiii)

Episode Date: October 24, 2018

A handful of tech barons now own the news but only one can rule the fake news. A chat with the comedy team behind the CBC’s This is That satirical news show turns into breaking news about Elon Musk.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Just Kidding After the Fact. When I first started this series, False Alarm, one of the things I knew I had to figure out was how to continue using both fact and fiction on my show. Because let's face it, right now, a podcast in which you have to work hard to figure out what is real and what is fake is definitely not the thing people are rushing out to get their hands on. Well, a Canadian friend reached out to me and told me I should check out this radio show that airs on the CBC, Canada's public radio, called This Is That. This show, my friend told me, is doing really interesting and provocative things

with the real, the fake, comedy, and satire. So I gave it a listen. Nova Scotia was a province with a problem. Its prison system was overcrowded and running out of room. But instead of building new prisons, the government found a solution by literally thinking outside the box. Last year, a new pilot program was launched that removed inmates from teeming prisons and rehoused them in some of the province's unused condo units. And while it's saving the government millions of dollars, some condo owners are not pleased. Joining me on the line to discuss this pilot project

is Nova Scotia's Department of Justice spokesperson, Laurie McDermott. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. It's an absolute pleasure to have the opportunity. Thank you. Okay, so just to be clear, then, the province actually purchased these empty condominiums? Right, that's right. Some are purchased and some are rent. You know, some are actually just through Airbnb. What security precautions are you taking? We're not giving them the fob.

The fob. The fob. So that means, you know, if they go out of the building, first of all, they've got to get past the concierge. That's not going to be easy. And then second of all, if they actually do make it out of the building past the concierge, they can't get back in because they don't have a fob. So then they've... They're stuck outside. They've escaped.

And they can't come back in. And you've got to think, a lot of these guys, they're in some pretty nice condos. Okay. Ridiculous stories that sound real simply because they're on the CBC? That's pretty amazing. Plus, these guys have been doing their show since 2010. That's totally amazing. As I listened to this first episode, I felt a thrill of new discovery. I knew right away that this show would soon be part of my weekly listening routine.

But then, I heard this. Now trust us, Canada. This is news you actually can believe. After eight seasons of This Is That, we've decided this is our last season. Thank you, Canada. I am always just one second too late. But still, I was curious to learn more. Were these guys giving up? Did the CBC pull the plug?

Or have these comedy geniuses figured out a new angle? Do they have plans to take satire to the next level? I had to know. So I got the whole This Is That crew in the studio for a chat to learn more about this thing they'd built and why they were shutting it all down. My name is Pat Kelly, and I'm one of the co-hosts of This Is That. I am Peter Oldring, and I am the other co-host component to This Is That.

And I am Chris Kelly, the producer of This Is That. All right. Well, let's go back to the beginning. Let's hear something. Let's hear a clip from your very first season, which is 2010. This is an interview with the director of a Calgary aquarium who is sad to be announcing that everything is closing down. Why don't you guys set it up? Sure. I mean, this was literally one of the very first ones that we ever did. We were still in this mindset of like really being true to the mimicry,

to this conceit that we never wink. And so there's not a lot of jokes in the setup of it. And we were just driving towards this punchline. Yeah, let's give it a listen. You can't simply release these animals back to the ocean because, you know, they've lost that natural instinct. It's also not easy to just simply shuffle them off to another aquarium. You know, they've lost that natural instinct. It's also not easy to just simply shuffle them off to another aquarium. You know, the shock of that type of change can often be too much for an animal to bear. So then what is the plan? Well, this Saturday, what we're doing is we're inviting families to come down to the aquarium and we're basically having a big grill out.

You can come into the aquarium, point at any of the fish in any of the tanks that you want, and we'll simply grill it up on an open pit barbecue. Well, I want to thank you for joining us here today, Mr. Dryden, and I'm sorry that an aquarium didn't work in Calgary, and all the best with the closure of it this Saturday. Well, thank you very much, and we'd like to remind families to get there early on Saturday. It starts at 11 o'clock, and it may be one of the only chances you'll have in your life to enjoy grilled manatee or sea otter. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. So, from my understanding, this is a pretty seminal moment in the This Is That history.

Tell me why. The reason it's significant is it's like what totally paradigm shifted us from when we created the pilot and even some of the first episodes. We had no lens on like satire. No, I mean, I just don't know what even what we're satirizing in that story. In that. I mean, I think is it pancake breakfasts in Calgary? Outdoor dining? The CBC thing was like, so we could kind of do sketch comedy.

And then we got all these calls and we were like, oh wait, like this is like... Are we in trouble? This is calls from listeners. Yeah. This was like completely the eye-opening story

that made us realize, you know, the power of what this show could do. We received a lot of feedback in regards to a story we did about the Calgary Aquarium shutting its doors. We'll play that interview in a minute, but first, here's what you had to say. The story about the Calgary Aquarium shutting down, what they're doing with the animals is they're going to eat them. I think this is absolutely outrageous and disgusting.

And very disgusting. Disgust. I don't know how people are getting away with this. They're going to grill up the fish and the sea otters? I've never heard of anything quite so barbaric. They have said they're going to have a grill out? I think it's very disturbing. I don't know. It just sounds really, really, I don't know, not mean, but just weird. I just feel absolutely outraged. What's going on here? I'm sure there's people out there that feel the same way. This is shocking to me, and I just hope it's a joke. We get asked this all the time, are those calls real?

And people are absolutely floored to find out that they are. Let me just scratch that from my list of questions. Yeah, there you go. Nine years later, the calls reacting to these stories on our show are absolutely real. And that's a thing that we've never really stoked that fire on purpose. And it really was after it had aired that we realized, oh, people, they don't sort of see this as a very funny juxtaposition of character and tone. They think this is true. I kind of feel like it added validity to the blurred lines of whether it was real or not.

Because those calls are so authentic. Like, they're just, like, because they are. Like, they're real. And so everything else in the show is fake. And so because they're real, it makes people question whether everything else is real. And I think it also acted as kind of, like, the defining marker

for those who are in the club and those who aren't. Yeah. Because the people that are fans of the show, they always say that's their favorite part too, is to hear those people react. So it sort of acts as this, oh, you get it, you don't. And this doesn't mean a diminishing number of calls over time. I mean, the people in the know can't be the ones who keep calling. No. You know, radio is a passive thing,

so you're always floating in and out of it. And yeah, maybe diehard fans know when our show is on, but we're just like the one satirical show in a 24-hour clock of programming. Even for people who know the show, our tone is so similar to the other programming and i think it's only after nine years that people are finally going like that's so crazy oh wait really oh oh it must be this is that so you're saying there's like a guy in a car in winnipeg 2010 he hears this and he calls in he's mad and then he's saying in 2013 he calls in again forgetting that like, oh yeah. Yes. Definitely.

That happens. I do not doubt that. I have family who say to me, you tricked me again. And it's like my voice. So there's every good reason to believe that someone could have unknowingly called our show several times over the past nine seasons, angry at many things, never knowing that it's a joke. Well, let's jump ahead to 2016. We're going to play something from an interview you did with a guy

who's getting complaints over some condos that he built. Condos missing bathrooms. The people who have purchased these condos are upset to discover that their condominium did not come equipped with a bathroom. However, from where I stand, and this needs to be heard loud and clear, we are not liable for this mistake. And I'll tell you why, Peter. The show suite that we had at the sales center did not include a bathroom.

So theoretically, what happened here is we had customers lining up to buy a condominium in this project, knowing full well that there wasn't a bathroom, and they went ahead with the purchase anyway. So all I'm trying to do is keep up with what the market is dictating, and what the market is telling me is build more buildings as quickly as you can. If there happens to be some mistakes made along the way, you know, always look on the bright side of life. We actually have one customer in this building who is not suing me. And you know why? He doesn't want a bathroom. He's actually found a way to make the kitchen work for him.

This one is pretty significant in the story of This Is That. Tell me about why. It went crazy viral. Viral in a way that we just never really experienced before. On an iPhone, when you swipe right, there's like a news widget. And it was at the top of that in North America. It got like 2 million views in like 24 hours. It just flooded the CBC. You know, anything that had gone kind of viral,

they'd gone harmless viral, if that makes sense. This one was different in the sense that it was around the start of Trump and fake news and this sort of attack on which news outlets are legitimate. And because it was so prominent on the iPhone interface as just saying CBC, for the first time in eight years, the people at the news division of CBC were like, we can't have this. Yeah, if the whole argument about fake news

and the whole media landscape around that time, like shifting and changing really part and parcel with Trump, I really feel like stories that people can't tell whether it's true or not. And we're not, we're not sort of holding their hand through that. It's like that has a different connotation now in a very, very real and sad way. Yeah. For me, it's, you know, as I also mix, you know, fake and the real on my own show. And I've almost felt that my listeners just don't want that anymore. Like there's so much of that, that this is just more of the stuff that's driving them crazy. Yes. Yeah, which has been reflective of, I mean,

arguably the bathroomless condo is a pretty goofy premise. But I would say in the last like couple years, we've definitely leaned more on lighter, kind of goofier ideas that we would maybe in the early days of the show shied away from because we would have had this filter which we did that was

oh it's too sketch, that premise is too sketch comedy but now in the last couple years we've just sort of said you know, let's just do them I used to think in a similar way like if I just made things ludicrous, then it would be obvious to the listener that they, you know, they can't take this at face value and they should, you know, do a little more investigation. But as you've learned, that is not enough. People still believe they still think it's all real. But tell me what happened when the bosses and the news division from the CBC got involved. What did they make you change?

Well, we had to put a disclaimer on all the things that, not on the show, on the radio, but anything that kind of went out on the internet. All of our blog posts had to have the disclaimer that it was satire. For a brief brief period of time and then until they had kind of like a bit more of an elegant fix which was it would be labeled as coming from cbc this is that so cbc's you know thought at the time and i think it's still true is like well it's like this is a show called this is that and you should know that this is that as a comedy show and if it's your first time here well guess what it's like, this is a show called This Is That. And you should know that This Is That is a comedy show. And if it's your first time here, well, guess what? It's a comedy show and it does, it does, you know, this kind of satirical stuff. As we've been making new projects moving forward, we have been like letting people know upfront, hey, this is comedy. Because it's like when you

do that nowadays, especially since 2016, it's just like, okay, God, thanks. It's like one less thing I have to worry about to fact check or whatever. It's like you can just enjoy the ride of the comedy as opposed to this weird, like the tension of it all. It makes the experience more enjoyable. There's a real audience out there that's looking for a comedy

that doesn't hit you over the head that this is a zany comedy show. And I think that's something that we've kind of decided to take with us into other projects that we're not trying to fool people with or have people take it as truth. We're trying to say this is a comedy show

and this is how we deliver our comedy. So as I said at the beginning of the show, you guys have just announced your retirement. I feel like, you know, once again, I've discovered something great too late. But what kind of response have you guys gotten from your listeners? It's actually been pretty awesome.

I mean, you know, lots of folks have kind of sent us nice messages, you know, just kind of saying we've really enjoyed the show. Like, that's been pretty cool. Well, Pete, I didn't tell you this, is that I got a phone call for the last week's show. And, you know, when we announced that it's over and she was like super mad about the prison condos.

Oh, yeah. And like clearly very serious about it. And then at the end of the call, it's like, gosh, I'm so sad that your show is ending. Oh, my God. It's one of my favorite shows on the CBC. It's one of the only places that reports very unusual pieces of news that we need to know. That's right.

Oh, man. Can you guys tell me what you're going to do next? Well, can we talk about it? Who are you asking, Chris? I'm asking you, Pete. Yeah, definitely. Let me just text him to see if I... I don't understand what you're...

Yeah, he's good. He's good. He's good? Let's do it. Before we had gotten to planning our final season, we were approached by Elon Musk with an offer to do some work for him. Oh, wow.

So I know that a couple of years ago, Elon tried to buy The Onion, and when he couldn't, he decided to just start hiring Onion writers to do his own thing. Is this the project you're joining? No, this is... That fell through.

That's done. Yeah, they tried to unionize. You don't. Wait, wait, let's back up. How did this happen? Canada's not a very big place, and it's pretty common to kind of three degrees of separation we all kind of know each other so my cousin is knows the singer grimes

is actually because she's canadian she's a friend of the show in the first couple of seasons grimes would reach out to us all the time she fell for one of the early stories, she said. Which one was it? The bike ride on the 401. She actually wanted to do the theme song, too. Chris, do you have the rough track? We, yeah, actually, you know what? I do have the original demo. Great.

I want to hear that right now. Yeah. It was just kind of angular Angular and it was also just It's not the energy Like you hear this song And then the last thing you want to do Immediately after is laugh

Because it's You're just in this tone of like Like you're a bit more self-reflective I think We did mention it to the people at CBC And none of them knew who she was. Truth. Okay, so you're saying that after Elon Musk's Onion Project fell apart, Grimes, his girlfriend, hooks him up with you guys.

Yes. She hooked us all up on a group message on Signal. Do you use Signal? Well signal well no i don't use it but you know yes i know what signal is right well you should do it but that's that's actually how we met e unbelievable and now you guys are like working with him for real in person yes we were flown down there uh to one of his houses in Bel Air. It was in Bel Air. Yeah, mm-hmm. That was, well, I mean, it's... An infamous weekend.

Yeah, it was a bit of an infamous weekend. It was the weekend where Azalea Banks was there. No, no. You're saying that the reason Azalea Banks was complaining on Instagram about wandering around the Musk mansion alone was because Elon and Grimes were like jamming with you guys. No,

no, no, no, no, no, no. We were ignored too. I mean,

we were just sitting there with, with her. Yeah. Um, cause they were fighting. Cause like Grimes and Musk. Yeah. Yeah.

It was like one of those weird ones where it's kind of like, you know, we're, we're just there while they're fighting, kind of twiddling our thumbs. And, uh, you know, so Azalea was pretty, I mean, she was pissed.

Really pissed. Oh, my God. She called Elon a trash-ass beta male pig and Grimes a dirty sneaker inbred out of the woods, paps beer or something. It's kind of partly our fault. What do you mean? Because we were kind of, well,

when they were gone and we were kind of like, we were just kind of riffing. She was mad. We were stoking it and we were like oh that's funny she said something funny we're like wait wait were you guys like helping her with her instagram stories well we were just riffing i mean sitting around having lemon cellos and she was fired up and we're just kind of joking with each other you know what i mean the dirty sneaker inbred yes thing that was ours i mean that came from an improv we were doing yes because pete's shoes had fallen into the pool that was us but then she kind of embellished on it and in in comedy you would say that she was working blue wow wow wow if you guys were jamming together, were you recording this for the pilot since you didn't have Elon around to work with? No.

I mean, we didn't record it because we don't just do audio anymore. I mean, we're doing all kinds of things with social media, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. Because that's what we're doing for him is everything. So it can be radio, video, written stuff that's either for the internet or not. He just texts it, don't talk about the VR stuff. But that's so fun.

That's fine. It's so good. That's fine. Okay, what can you tell me about what you're doing for him? You know, the thing that was really like when he started to do a deep dive on our show, the thing that he responded to the most was again, like you, we talked about earlier as these calls and he very much was attracted to this

idea of like, some people just don't get it. Yeah. And he was like, that's what I want to do with all of my stuff. Yeah. And that it's like, is,

is sort of present this idea to the, you know, to the world. Like, if you don't get it. It's. That's okay. It's your fault. Yeah, it's your fault. And it's okay because this is satire. So it's just a joke.

It's just a joke. So you kind of. He wanted to sort of frame most of his communications sort of moving forward. Like, either you get it or you don't. Either you don't get it or you don't and it's a joke and if you don't then which for for a creative for a creative individual you don't have any filters on what you are putting out but that's also as as a as a businessman uh that can be obviously dangerous but when but when you when you put everything out in the ambiguity of um satire it's a bit of a safety net but i don't want to look at it that way i don't think he looks at

that way well it is though he does because like if you think about it you know the sec just like filed a lawsuit interestingly the same day that you guys announced your retirement i don't i mean i don't know if this is planned but you know he's basically they sued him for this whole business about like it was the stock tweet and his defense was it was a joke yeah they didn't get it it was a they didn't get it it's a good it was hilarious like anybody that's in like weed culture right well and also like that's the beauty of social media which we've started to learn now that we've kind of drifted away from doing the radio show primarily is, you know, when you get on social media, kind of that sarcasm and sort of mimicry is easier to do with something like Twitter. Yeah. It takes away this idea of like winking with, you know, a deadpan tone.

You can just literally type something and then later say JK. Wow, and this is something you guys really got down from doing your show for eight years. But come on, you got to tell me something you guys are going to do together. One of the big components of This Is That for all the years was a lot of the music stuff that we did. And I think because of whatever was going on with him and Grimes,

he was like, I want to put out a song that is like better than hers. Like to get her back or like? No, kind of to just be sort of like. I'm Elon Musk. Yeah, you can do. I can do the Grimes thing too or whatever. Yeah. It's like I can also do music.

Now, why don't you see if you can get you know people into outer space yeah yeah exactly so you made this thing together can i hear it can we hear some of it oh my god yes yeah i know he wanted it to drop it here he knew we were doing this that's what he was hoping he wants people to hear him hear him sing hear his music. Yeah. On the moon, in the booth, at the lab, on the mic Hyperloop, Tesla car, spinning discs at the bar SpaceX launch, Elon Musk, looping tracks as I bust Smoking spliffs like a boss, AI skills, what's the cost? Ha! Musk has done it again, created a new sound Grimes is cool, but she's lost You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

This installment is called Just Kidding After the Fact. The This Is That guys also have a podcast called This Sounds Serious, which is a fake true crime show. And there's also one whole season still left to go of This Is That. But before you run off to listen to that, I'm going to tell you about another podcast. Well, after this message. Dashlane makes identity and payments simple and secure by providing a tool that generates strong passwords, stores, and autofills them securely everywhere on the internet, seamlessly across all of your devices. It centralizes your online accounts using a patented zero-knowledge encrypted security architecture where they can be accessed, managed, and updated with ease.

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and you will get 10% off Dashlane Premium. All right, so Benjamin, you made an appearance on somebody else's podcast this week. I did. How was I? You haven't listened yet? Well, I have already heard it, Andrew. I was there when it was recorded. Okay. Well, yeah, no, I listened, and I think it's great. I mean, and it, you know, of course, it ties into a lot of the stuff we're

doing on False Alarm. The show is called How Do You Like It So Far? Why don't you tell us a little bit about how you ended up on it? Well, it's hosted by the great Henry Jenkins, who's a professor at USC. He also taught for a long time at MIT in the media studies program. He's really interested in media and technology and culture and something he calls a civic imagination. And he invited me on his podcast to pair me with Wu Ming to talk about conspiracy theories. Okay, so you mean like one of the Wu Mings? Yeah, it's kind of a complicated they. Right, that's like a collective pseudonym, sort of, for a group of Italian authors. And provocateurs. They famously wrote a book called Q in the 1990s,

which was about basically an individual who's pulling all the strings and going to lead the people to freedom. And obviously the Trump folks have caught on to this with the whole QAnon conspiracy, which basically plays out just as it does in the book. Right, but it's also like part of the theory is that, you know, the 4chan people were getting pranked by Q. Or by Q fan.

Or by Q fan of some kind. So it's unclear whether, you know, it's like 4chan are fans of Wu Ming or like. Sure, sure. And we didn't really go into that. What was more interesting was talking about how conspiracy theories like that can fester and make their way into the ecosystem. But what we really talked about was the response to that. How do you even do something like debunking today?

That's what I really enjoyed talking about. Yeah, no, Wu Ming had a lot of great stuff to say about that. Let me go ahead and play a clip. The fact that gatekeepers are discredited is the precise reason why debunking doesn't work. Because debunking is very often done relying on some sort of authority, political authority, journalistic authority, academic authority, which is precisely what those people reject. Because when you believe in those conspiracy theories, I think it's kind of a distorted way of a critique of capitalism.

Okay, it's a diversionary narrative. Conspiracy theories, believing in them, make you feel like you're against the powers that be, against official truth, you took the red pill, that kind of stuff inspired by The Matrix, of course. It's not only about fun, about a game-like experience, it's not even only about hatred or racism, those things are there. But there's also the fact that there's a lot of anxiety

of anger around, and people confusedly feel that the system doesn't work. Conspiracism provides them with an easy explanation for that, okay, with scapegoats to blame. I depicted it like that. It's a parody of the way capitalism works. The world depicted by conspiracism is a parody, albeit unintentional, isolating the kernel of truth of a conspiracy and work on that in a way or another. And also, we should find ways of debunking conspiracy theories that are as interesting, as intriguing, and provide people with the

same things that conspiracies usually provide in an exploitative way. That's more or less our line of reasoning. Yeah, it just seems super hard to do. Yeah, I know, I know. But with our pranks in the 90s, we did it. Different time. Ben, what are your thoughts about how, if debunking doesn't work, what is the way we regain some control over truth in our society? To echo Wu Ming there, that I would love to learn the poetry of debunking.

But to be honest, I'm a little less optimistic. It feels that, you know, we're kind of trapped, like these kernels of truth that we need to sort of grasp and find a way to provide, you know, acknowledgement and maybe even answers to, I feel are much darker. I feel here in America, from my perspective, especially spending so much time with this, you know, the real kernel of truth is that for, in many cases, there's such a hatred and anger of the elite and a disconnect between who the elite really are. In other words, less anger that no bankers went to jail after the financial crisis of 2008 and more anger at, you know, the people cleaning the bathrooms at the office where they work at.

And I feel that that disconnect plus some of the wild, wild, easy to debunk with factual evidence claims that power so many of these dark conspiracy theories doesn't give me as much optimism. I would love to be more optimistic. I don't want to be as pessimistic as I am right now. But in terms of finding a way to debunk this, I'm with this idea that like, we can't just return to the authority of the gatekeepers.

That's obviously not going to work, but I'm a, I'm a little less optimistic on like what this poetry would be, man. I'm all ready for it though. Well, you sound more pessimistic in this conservation, the conversation than you actually sound in the podcast. Yeah, we really got into it, thinking about where we could go. Later on in the show, I do talk about how I am more optimistic about Europe, and he seems to be more optimistic about America.

So it could be that we're just both still deluded. But have you thought any more about the poetics of debunking? Yeah, I think that's just going to be where we're going to end up this whole series. We've got two more episodes to go. Fuck yeah. Well, you should definitely listen to the rest of the interview. I mean, there's so much more that Wu Ming and Benjamin had to discuss. Yeah, we'll put a link to that on the Theory of Everything

show page. I will. Yeah. Thanks, Andrew, for pulling these clips together. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. Special thanks to Chris Kelly, Pat Kelly, and Peter Oldring of This Is That. And thank you to Elon Musk.

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