Endless Thread - Li Ziqi: China's Quarantine Queen

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

While you were tending to your quarantine sourdough starter, Chinese YouTube star Li Ziqi was growing mushrooms, making peach blossom crowns and listening to the sound of blooming roses. Join Amory and Ben as they explore Li Ziqi, and why millions of isolated people worldwide have been drawn to the quiet intricacy and beauty of her videos. 

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, top three things you know about the Chinese Internet. Go. The Chinese Internet? That makes me think that I must know nothing about the Chinese Internet. It's big. Okay. It's different. And it's protected by what they call the Great Firewall. Hmm. Of like government surveillance? Yeah. And control. Okay, so now let's do top things you know about the last two decades in China.

Migration, wealth accumulation. Have any thoughts? Oh, wow. You're hitting me in all my weak spots. They're mine too, so it's okay. We're going to learn together. How much do you know about the influencer who the New York Times has called the Quarantine Queen or Leeds a Cheat?

I know only that you have mentioned her. to me. She's young, right? She's a teenager. No. No? Okay. Nope. Then also very little about this other question you're asking me. Oh for three. We're oh for three. That's okay. That's okay. Because I'm here to tell you about all these things with some help from people who are much smarter and wiser on these topics than me. And I want to tell you a story that I didn't really know myself until recently about this person whose popularity online and whose disappearance helps us, I think,

understand a little better all of the things we just listed. And maybe also gives us a snapshot of current online culture in China and what the future of online communities across the world might look like. Wait, she disappeared? I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Oh, okay, it's like that. I'm Amory Siebertson, and we're coming to you from WBUR. Boston's NPR station.

Okay, before we go further, Amory, we need to start, I think, with probably the most calming thing you have done on the internet in weeks. Are you ready? Oh, yeah. So I want us to watch this, for YouTube at least, extremely slow-moving, long set of videos. Are you ready? Mm-hmm. Okay. There's a young woman who is sawing some bamboo.

And now she's tying a bundle of bamboo sticks together and stacking a bunch of bundles of bamboo sticks. Okay, this is the good shit, the time-lapse camera that shows what she's planted, which I'm guessing are the cucumber plants growing, sprouting out of the green. Oh my gosh, she sticks her fist in, it's very satisfying. Her hand just disappears into the jelly. Stretch the starched dough.

Oh, that's really satisfying. Let the dough run through the sieve to make noodles. Holy shit. She's hanging these ribbon-like noodles out to dry. All right, Amory, what did you think? I think she has achieved a level of culinary magic and farm-to-tablehood that I can only aspire to. and that was like that was thoroughly impressive. What did it make you feel?

It just made me feel like the meaning of life is just to grow things and make things and appreciate what we have all around us and the magic that is planet Earth. I don't know. It's like these are the moments where I'm like, yeah, I should just run away to the way to the magic. the mountains and grow all my own stuff, but it's also so much work. Did you notice the number of views on the videos you watched? No. You know, I didn't even look at that. Is it a bagillion? Millions and millions and millions and millions of views. Yeah. So according to our YouTube channel, Leedsuchi has been posting there since 2017.

But it wasn't until a few years later, which is around the same time, I'd discovered her that she became a global phenomenon. 2019 was probably when she was really kind of becoming famous. So this is a woman I got in touch with Amory, who has written about Li Zichie. I'm Ealing Liu, and I'm a writer based in China broadly, currently in Hong Kong. And I write about the Chinese Internet and mostly interested in how it has kind of reshaped Chinese society in everyday life. Huh.

So she's writing. about China, but she lives in Hong Kong. Right, which I think we'll get at maybe in a bit. And Yiling actually discovered Leedsichi about a year before I did. I just got past Leedsichi's YouTube channel by a buddy of mine. We share a borderline unhealthy obsession with borderline dangerously spicy Sichuan food. And I basically got obsessed with her videos that way and then even more obsessed as her strange story played out.

But Yi Ling discovered her through a video interview from a Hong Kong newspaper called the South China Morning Post. Her life looks like one straight out of the fairy tale. Li Tzei impresses millions with her videos where she makes seemingly everything from scratch with her own two hands. I remember that the title at the time said that it was an exclusive interview. Like no one had spoken to her and they'd like cracked her mysterious persona. And I found that fascinating.

Like why is she so mysterious? Like why can't other people talk to her? Hmm. So why can't other people talk to her? Well, you probably noticed in the videos, Amory, she doesn't talk very much at all in the videos, right? Like she's very quiet. These are quiet videos, right? Yeah.

And I don't think that's always been super clear why she's, you know, so reclusive. But stylistically, Leitzichie practically never talks in her own videos. It's just this ethereal traditionalish Chinese music over the sounds of her gardening, chopping wood, cooking. And Yiling thinks this is part of the influencer's crazy popularity. The fact that she doesn't talk? Yes. She barely ever says a word in these videos. And so language isn't a barrier.

It's all very visual. And so, like, that just translates very well. Translates to this international audience of millions and millions of people. That makes sense to me. But there's also this escape factor, too. Like, she's not just popular because she doesn't talk. She's also showing this insanely perfect country living lifestyle. I was just like, huh, maybe I'll speak with her one day, which I think was a mistake.

I should have just spoken to her then. Yes, a perfectly country lifestyle, which Yiling says is another factor in Leeds'i's meteoric rise in the last few years. She's touched on a pretty global nerve, which is this universal urban malaise, this kind of frustration with living in a world of not only burnout and kind of profit-seeking driven machines, but also in recent years a coronavirus that is, you know, constraining everyone to their homes. That is a much better way of articulating what I was trying to articulate before, where it's just like, I don't know what I just watched,

but it's the meaning of life. I know, right? It's sort of perfect in this time of quarantining, right, that we would gravitate to somebody outside in nature. Nature is healing, right? and Leizuichi is in that nature, but she's also reclusive. She doesn't talk to anyone really. She doesn't really talk in her videos.

She's like the polar opposite of the Bo Burnham special. Like he's babbling in a room by himself about sending photos of his genitals on Instagram. You send me a beach. I send a carrot bag. You send a ferris wheel. That's pretty abstract. And like she's gently harvesting and washing mushrooms. not saying a thing, which again, during COVID, resonates, right?

But there's this other interesting factor to this, which is, at least according to some people, a big number of Leedsa Ch's millions of followers are not all from the country. They're city people. Leeds a Chi is this intriguing rural perspective in a phenomena that is somewhat urban or somewhat centered in, yes, more urban environments. Okay, so who's this? I'll let him tell you. My name is Karwin Morris. I'm a postdoctoral

researcher at the Manchester China Institute University of Manchester. I am currently based in London, and I am the adoptive father of two cats. So, presumably while ensconced among his cat children, Karwin has studied Leeds Eichi, but he's also looking in this bigger way at this potent online and offline mix of, shall we say, ingredients. Internal migration, food, instant messaging groups and activism. And then I kind of look at that across what I might call digital geographies, like thinking about digital territories and sovereignty. and the internet. It's a bit of a mishmash of stuff,

but I take a spatial approach to the internet and it sort of comes together in my writing when I can ever manage to publish anything. Karwin seems to see Li Zuchi as in some ways this thoroughly Chinese influencer who has transcended China, which in turn has also changed how she presents online. There's a positioning of her as a sort of

person who is famous outside of China. She has some sort of foreign flavor and some foreign popularity. She's often described as the most popular Chinese language YouTuber in the world. It's interesting to hear all of this after watching what I just watched and truly not looking at the view count and then hearing like, you just watched one of the most influential YouTubers in China. Yeah. Which is a massive country that could swallow. follow your own, you know? Yeah, totally.

And a big part of this popularity is the sheer beauty and perfection in her videos. These things are objectively, undeniably gorgeous. She's digging around in the dirt, right? She's planting garlic or whatever. Performing, like, this really difficult manual labor. And yet she's got this amazing raven black long hair. Outfits are all simple and perfect. And it's a full-on vibe.

And Carwin says, That vibe has resonated with a specific set of people, migrants and others who have left the countryside in the last decade or so and come to the city to find opportunity. Hmm. Tale as old as time. Right. But in China, it's a tale that in the last few decades is especially true.

There's been this explosion of the middle urbanite class. They've gone to these large cities to work. They're part of the rat race. They're hustling every day. And they're utterly exhausted. And for some of these people, this idea of leaving the urban sprawl that rat race is very appealing. I think that's a global phenomenon, really. And this is perhaps why Leedsuchy's videos are popular globally as well.

Karwin says Leeds Oce shows the beat-down viewer tired of the rat race that a different way of living is possible. But like so many of us who have imagined a simpler life, he says Leedsish's videos don't necessarily inspire a city workers to quit and buy a farm. But they may, in that case, just be there to calm the urban worker, to think at the end of the day when things are just not quite good enough anymore, you're at the end of your tether. Watching that video, having that calming effect, might enable you. to work for a bit longer.

Carwin's point about, like, having this calming effect on the viewer that enables you to actually go back to work, something about that really struck a negative chord in me. Like, it's just like, I really found that description from him to be, like, the most dystopian thing I had heard in a long time. Like, people move from the countryside to work in the city, they get ground down, and then on their lunch break and their, like, little slice of free time to help them pull their nose back onto the grindstone, they watch a little Leedsitchie. For anybody who has lived in rural China, they would know it. It's not real.

Tell me more what you mean by not real. There are a montage at the beginning of a Disney film with a Disney princess, really. You can imagine one of those videos is the beginning of the film. And then the person goes on, we realize the star of this video. is actually a princess in the making or something will happen to her and she will become the star of the film, right? So there is this sort of, yeah, Disney princess-esque beauty and the choreography of it all. She is filming this, you know, it's not just like she found out later like, oh, you were watching me, make my, you know, cucumber salad? Yeah, yeah.

That was never lost on me. Yeah. Well, you're, I mean, you're smarter than I am. But, but like, let's talk about fame for a minute. Like, I think one of the interesting aspects of internet fame, and also maybe fame before or outside of the internet, is that it's often described as sort of someone or something arriving at the exact right time.

So what came before that has set up Li Zichie to go stratospheric in your mind? A lot of things, including instant noodles and video games. And Karwin says China has this really long in internet years history of internet celebrity. And one big bump in that history was the beginnings of connecting online celebrities with online merchandising or online branding. A lot of early internet celebrities. I'm going to go for like the 2010s when there were a lot of video focus internet celebrities. they were online gamers. They were streaming League of Legends,

Dota 2, World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, things like that online. They would have Taubao, maybe let's say the Chinese equivalent of eBay mixed with Amazon. So they would have Taubo stores where they would sell pot noodles and they would sell mice

and mouse pads and things like that. And that would be how they would get their income. All right, you with me so far here? Yeah. As her videos started to blow up, Leedsa Chi also started to sell noodles online. Like, I can buy the noodles that she just made in that video? You can buy them. But first of all, this isn't that romanticized.

I had no money, so I ate ramen every night kind of noodle, right? This is ridiculously perfect food. And it comes in at 70, 80 bucks for a couple of noodle packages. This stuff is not cheap. And this is part of her expansion as a global influencer brand with a fan base that has some means. Leedsuchi's backstory is a little convoluted, but she was supposedly making her videos by herself at the beginning, and eventually she got linked up with this influencer management company. Here's the writer Yiling again.

All I know is that the talent management company, Hangzhou Wei Nian, is based in Hongzhou, and it's huge. And so they manage a lot of influencers in addition to Leeds-at-C. But apparently Leeds-I was kind of like one of their largest. So as this influencer starts to really pop off, she's got an online store. She's got 27 million followers on China's social media site, Weibo. 17 million subscribers on YouTube to videos that get 40 million views of pop. She still looks the same in her pastoral bucolic setting, sort of patiently, making the most gorgeous food you've ever seen for the most intimate meals of all time.

But there's this kind of invisible machinery being erected around her. So she was, I would say, over the course of 2020, 2021, just like slowly rising in fame, making a brand for herself, you know, creating this shop on Taubo, becoming a household name, being called quarantine queen by like a New York Times cooking writer. Then roundabout, I would say July 2021, she. just kind of stopped. And when you build that brand up to like such kind of, such a scale, like people are going to start missing you. And so that's when I started paying more attention to her story. Oh, no. Okay. So this is when she disappears and doesn't post anything else?

Yeah. Last summer, she disappeared, at least from the internet. And I'm going to give you a theory on why Leedsichi at the top of her game went missing from the internet and her strange return when we come back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity. to get you the answers.

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Recruit new talent. reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, Emery, if you were to guess Leeds-Zechi's background, like her backstory before she became a Sichuan province influencer, what would your guess be? Well, she comes across as a mountain gal, like of the land, for the land, knows all the mushrooms.

rooms to pick. So I would say, like, was raised by the cucumbers of the mountain. Yeah, which is a common... I'm close, right? Well, so Litsa Chi was supposedly part of this massive migration in China that has happened over the last few decades. Have you been to China, Amory? Oh, I have not. Someday. So this year is the 20th anniversary of the only trip I've ever made to China. Wow.

I went to the Great Wall as part of my trip. We were exploring the Great Wall in this sort of northwest region of China, you could say, very vaguely. They took us down from the wall, from the sort of official tour, and walked us through a village in the valley below the Great Wall. And, you know, these are farms with dirt floors. You know, this is like people with, you know, maybe their entire house is, I don't know, 50 square feet. They have one pig, right? In my limited, very limited experience, this is what I would say sort of the most humble existence of a man of humanity that I have ever witnessed personally. And the last 20 years has been part of this intense transformation in China, right?

Like a lot of it has been effectively driven by capitalism, but a lot of it has been at the direction of the Chinese Communist Party, which would probably say, no, no, no, we're not capitalist. The People's Republic of China is a socialist market economy. Whatever you call it, it's the reason for a huge push in the recent past to get Chinese people out of the countryside and into the city. And it's done this through a sort of public relations campaign, pushing, among other things, a lot of opportunities for migrant workers.

And Yiling says this push worked. When we see the rising skylines, you know, in Shanghai and just like the highways and all the kind of like trope images that we think of when we think of China's growth, like so much of that was fueled by the millions, hundreds of millions, of migrant workers who moved, kind of go, it's called going out, right, left home in search of better opportunities. It's a cultural shift well known in many Western societies, and now it's becoming common for young Chinese men and women too.

But, you know, at a certain point in, like, a country's economic history, like you just reap all the benefits of that growth. Like, the buildings have been built, the super highways have been built. you know, the factories are now full, and there is kind of a plateau. So Lee Zichie was presumably one of these migrant workers who decided the city was not for her, and she moves out west and buys a farm? Right. So she starts in the countryside. She moves to the city, and then she moves back to the countryside.

And we don't know why she moved back for sure. But for a lot of the people who picked up and moved to the cities, this social divide popped up between migrant workers, people who are coming into the cities and locals. That's connected to this broader sort of view. Here's our internet-e geographer, Carwin. The countryside in modern China has often been painted as a backward place. And to be from the countryside has almost been a slur of sort of,

or at least it's been a very derogative term used against people. You're from the countryside or you are, you're a peasant. You don't know anything. Yeah, the kind of country bumpkin sort of insult. Yeah. But I'm having so many thoughts about this. Go on. Because, you know, it's sort of to take a country way of living

and give it a platform on the internet, which is like a meeting. of the worlds in a way that maybe the powers that be in China didn't expect to be so desirable or influential. You're absolutely on the right track here. And what's wild is that in China, I think it's fair to say the intensity of government control has also made for some whiplash.

And in some ways, the government is grappling with this. Yiling says that 2021 saw more dramatic and drastic societal change than the previous five years. And back in the 1980s, the previous party chairman Deng Xiaoping had a mantra that was, to get rich is glorious. So it was all about the market economy,

moving into cities. But under Xi Jinping, the new leader, the government now has a different plan. They have a lot of and there are much and have a lot of and fan-sing-sys. Our men's-sense work

and there are not a lot of unru-ren-yed They have decided to shift years and realized that in the wake of kind of huge rural-urban socioeconomic inequality and the move is now

to clamp down on kind of uninhibited growth to clamp down on kind of a capital run amok and to ensure, quote-unquote, the common prosperity of all. Yiling never got to interview the massively popular Chinese pastoral princess, the quarantine queen, but she feels like she didn't miss out either. Basically, when I started wanting to write about her, the story was unfolding. Leeds-e-chi's silence on her various platforms got a ton of attention.

There were Reddit threads, conspiracy theories. A number of the theories referenced a history in China, starting with a far-reaching wipe of influencers off the internet about 10 years ago. Many of the large influencers who had built up large followings and arguably larger power bases, at least to influence the discourse within society, found their accounts banned or suspended and their platforms, taken away. And then things have evolved slightly under Xi Jinping. One of the first tasks, one of the first things that Xi Jinping did upon coming into power was to say to the media,

you need to support the party. And since then, there has been a growing party influence over a variety of new forms of media. So even as this influences happened, Emery, the internet in China has also just kind of gone bonkers in its scale and popularity in recent years. And presumably, or maybe it's not fair to presume this, but maybe gone rogue as well? Yeah, well, it's unwieldy, right? Like, it's insanely popular. You know, people become insanely popular on the Chinese internet very fast. Over the last 10 years, U.S. tech companies and social media companies have tried to gain a strong foothold there, but they haven't had much success.

And these homegrown companies, like Bight Dance, which owns TikTok, have exploded, as have influencers in China. And so more recently, even in the last six months, there has been another spade of influencers getting wiped off of the Internet in China. For reasons that people have speculated have to do with not being in alignment with the internet. the government's priorities. Examples of people who've been gotten, there was this celebrity called, a very famous actress called Zhao Wei, who just like overnight,

all of her stuff disappeared off Weibo. Just any mention of her, it's like, it's like Angelina Jolie just like disappeared off Twitter. That kind of... Scrobed, fully scrubbed. Exactly. So I'm guessing Lee Zichie is one of these influencers

that's been disappeared from the internet. So this is where, again, I think the story takes an interesting turn. A few months after she disappeared, Leizichi came back posting a message to social media that was weird. She put out some cryptic messages where she was like, capital is so annoying or like capital sucks. And like posted a selfie of herself outside a courtroom. She replied to a comment on Weybor complaining about the dirty tricks of capital. She deleted the comment. What does that make you think of?

It's like a cry for help. So I think Amory, a lot of people, including me, believed Li Dzi Chi had been effectively got by the Chinese Communist Party and reprogrammed. Like they got to her somehow. But our experts think it's more complicated. Leeds-Itschi's back-to-the-land brand actually lines up perfectly with the government's goal of moving millions of migrants back into the countryside. In the comments, Leeds-Itschi made online about capital seemed to actually just be about a money fight she's having with her influencer management company, about who gets a cut of what from her growing influencer empire.

That fight also lines up with a recent Chinese Communist Party theme of distrusting tech and influencers. So the government seems to be maybe throwing its support behind Leitz-e-le-Zechi, and Leeds-e-chi might actually be cool with that because it lines up with her own needs right now. Because there's been a broader pushback against maybe toxic or unethical. or using the word that is common for Chinese vulgar, influences and celebrities and the companies that are managing them. This would show that they are supporting the average person, the average rural person, the self-made woman, in the face of the exploitative capitalists and the exploitative companies.

And Yi Ling says, Li Zichi knows this, right? and understands the way that China's influence or economy is fundamentally unique. I guess the key difference between the Chinese Internet ecosystem and the one I'd say in the United States is that it has to respond to the state, right? But both of them at the end of the day respond to market logic. So they respond to the market, both of them. But in China, there's this kind of extra hot sauce of like state control.

Okay, number one, you got to love a hot. sauce reference in a story about an influencer from the Sichuan province. Right. But number two, this is so confusing. It's like make up your mind. Do you want people in the country? Do you want them in the city? You want them back in the country?

Do you want them to be successful? Not too successful. Like rain it in. You know, it's just like. Yeah. But they literally have a points system for living in a city, for being effectively allowed to be a permanent resident of a city. And you have to score points.

in order to be a local. And so Li Zuchi might not be being forced to be a mouthpiece for the government. She's sort of like evolving her influencer status and she is opting in. My interpretation of it, obviously hard to tell who is coming in and saying what, is that she read the wins quite shrewdly. And she just decided, hey, like all these influencers are getting axed. maybe I should like do my extra bit and stand out and say like I actually don't want to be an influencer. That's like the, you know, shrewd political reading of it.

The new influencer move is to refuse that they're an influencer. Exactly. Right. So I think you've given us a good sense of this one influencer story. But you promised something about the future of the internet. Yeah, I did. So for Karwan's part, he thinks Li Zichie is maybe representing the end of an era. Actually, on Do Yin, Chinese TikTok, Li Zichie's videos are all very short. I wonder, I guess, if Li Zichie has come along at a time when this form of the medium is at its peak.

Yi Ling is doing a lot of thinking right now about the history of China's internet again and about what that tells us about where we're headed next. I've been starting to kind of place leads at sea in the context of kind of influencers of her clout in the last 20 or so years

of the history of the Chinese internet. The female internet celebrity, says Yiling, has had several different eras. We'll start with a woman in 2005. The kind of star influencer at the time, who was called China's first internet celebrity, was a migrant worker from Shanzi called Furong Ziaje, or Sister Furong, who became famous for kind of trying to get into big city universities and posting these, like, lewd, like, provocative,

videos of herself, like dancing in cities. So there we've got this person who's headed to the city, right, and letting loose. That's what her influence or personality is about. To the young generation that was chasing wealth and opportunity and freedom in the urban landscape. She was, like, popular among university students who were just like, wow, this woman is so bold and provocative and crass and vulgar. So then you have actually a new female cultural,

identity emerge in China. It matures a bit, graduates, but stays in the city. And then fast forward to 2016, 2015, which I think of the kind of height of the influencer economy, you have a woman named Poppy Jiang, who was huge. And she put out these very short videos, mostly on Weibo. Interesting. A young year to know each other for you. A young internet star to pee-tie-frey-gat-a-son-a-girls.

A young internet star known as Puffy John. She was like the Shanghai Urbanite, fast-talking, very smart, kind of like stand-up comedy but online, who like poked fun at like, you know, like misogyny in everyday life and just like the daily grunt of being a white-collar worker. And now... We've got Lee's it. Gee, who is this, like, largely silent, like, ASMR-esque, like, past world princess living in the Situptanist countryside.

And so that trajectory and those reincarnations, you can really apply them to lots of different facets of the internet. kind of the wild west to the highly controlled, gorgeous, positive energy garden. That is a narrative that I have been seeing again and again, specifically when it comes to China. And I think this tells us a little bit about the risen power of China where the government's priorities are also the priorities of its influencers and the priorities of the influencers

eventually become the priorities of their followers, which you can see in the comments on Leedsidge cheese videos. It's like a mix of like, oh, like, here's a woman who like has it all, like, or here's a woman who's like independent and like needs no man and she's just out in the fields alone like making egg yolk pancakes. But then there's also like, I wish I had a wife like her, you know, like. And so there definitely in their last 20 years has been a greater emphasis on like domesticity and the role of the woman in bearing offspring and, you know, taking care of her husband

and taking care of her children. And so I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, part of it is that trend. And, you know, I think also that trend is to a certain extent. global. Global in part because in the future, China, its internet, its government may be the trendsetter. So, Amory, are you ready to imbib the positive energy garden on your lunch break from the rat race? You know what I have in my refrigerator right now, Ben? What?

A cucumber. I expect a 25-minute video of you slowly turn. burning that cucumber. That's a great idea. Let me see how many different dishes. Different ways I can chop it and prepare it. Well, thank you for this. This is fascinating.

And yeah, I'm going to spend the rest of the day watching our videos. So I hope you didn't need anything else from me, right? No, I'm good. No, you're good. Great. You're good. Yeah. Just as long as it helps you work longer later.

Oh, no. Damn it. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, my cucumber videos, Ben's instant mushroom noodle packages? Join our email list. You'll find it at WBUR.org.org slash endless thread. Also, do us two favors, pretty please.

Number one, leave us a review in your podcast app. It helps other people find and love or hate, but hopefully love. the show. And two, do the thing where the thing goes ding. Do the thing where the thing goes ding. Do the thing where the thing goes ding. What we mean by this is follow or subscribe to the show. Hit that little button so that when a new episode pops up, your podcast app of choice will tell you about it. This episode was written and produced by Ben and Quincy Walters. We're co-hosted by us, Amory Seavertson. And Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus and Emily Jankowski.

Special thanks to an additional production work from Dean Russell and Rachel Carlson. Endless Threat is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and the drug buffet from the video shoot of the worst rap video of all time made by a crypto enthusiast who's probably going to jail. If you've got an untold history and unsolved mystery or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. list thread at wb ubr.org. Goodbye. Zaitian.