Offline with Jon Favreau - Trump’s TikTok Edge and Why Birds May or May Not Be Real

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

Birds Aren’t Real founder, Peter McIndoe, joins to talk about the impact of the satirical conspiracy that captured the imagination of Gen Z and what he learned about the appeal of false realities after spending years in character as one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists. But first: Is TikTok helping Trump win? Why is Google telling people to eat rocks? And what’s the story behind the “All Eyes on Rafah” image going viral across Instagram? Jon and Max break it down. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

You know, even beyond being in character, I think my real training was being that person talking to the Birds Aren't Real guy. When I was living in Arkansas, when I was arguing with the homeschoolers around me, people in these churches, you know, when the Trump era comes around, feeling like I'm just hitting a wall, like, how are these people not hearing this? And I felt crazy. And I realized my approach was ineffective now I look back and think okay where could I have found not even a middle ground but a bridge like where could I have found a way to I don't know something I say a lot is if someone is in a dark room it's really hard to tell them they're in a dark room if they've been there for a long time

and their eyes have adjusted. That's just a room. The way to do it, you have to turn on a light somewhere else. I'm Jon Favreau. And I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, Peter McIndoo, founder of the Birds Aren't Real movement.

It's about time we heard from him on this show. If you haven't heard of the Birds Aren't Real movement, you're probably a bit confused right now. And if you have, you know that from 2017 to 2021, Peter was one of the nation's leading conspiracy theorists, traveling the country with his followers, spreading the message that all birds in the United States are not in fact real.

They're actually surveillance drones used by the federal government to spy on Americans. And Peter's movement took off. They got a ton of press coverage, even a Fox News documentary. But of course, it was all a prank. In a 2021 interview with the New York Times, Peter revealed that Birds Aren't Real was a parody and that he and his followers were all in on the joke. Wait, hold on. So are birds real or are they not real? That's up for you to find out. Do your own research, Max. Since then, Peter has spoken about what playing his birds aren't real character taught him about conspiracy theories,

including why people are drawn to them and how we can help them get out. So I invited him on the show to talk about all that and convince me that the real threat to our privacy isn't TikTok. It's birds. It's birds. It was a great conversation. It's really fun. Okay. I can't wait to hear it. And you'll like it because it really, we get into what we have talked about a lot, which is why people believe in conspiracy theories, why people join these movements and these communities, these very online communities, because they're looking for community and belonging. It serves a real need. It's not just something that happens if your brain is broken from being too online.

It's back to your, you know, conspiracies are fun. Listen, we all love Taylor Swift. We all love Taylor Swift, who is a conspiracy. I mean, that's kind of what the... Anyway, you guys get into it. Anyway, speaking of threats to our privacy, before we get to my conversation with Peter, we got to talk about why our favorite Chinese spyware app just may help elect our favorite convicted felon president.

34 times convicted. 34 times convicted. How's that for a segue, huh? It's pretty good. I think eight out of 10. I liked it. So there's been a lot of consternation in democratic circles about the role that TikTok is playing in this election. Our pal Dan Pfeiffer summed it up well in his latest message box, appropriately titled, How TikTok is Helping Elect Trump. Dan's concern is because more people, especially more young people, are getting more or sometimes all of their news from TikTok.

And because we have no idea what kind of news the algorithm is actually feeding people on TikTok, there's a lot of bad information getting through to voters that Biden and Democrats don't really know how to counter. What do you think about that? So it's very hard to measure persuasive impact, but the numbers on attention and what the algorithms do actually appear to be promoting on TikTok are really, really concerning if you care about Trump not getting reelected. According to TikTok's own data, which is a side note, it's not really clear to me why they suddenly released this information to news outlets. They're being very shady about who put this out and why.

But anyway, according to their data. It's all up to President Xi. That's right. Pro-Trump content beats pro-Biden content on TikTok by two to one for the number of videos and by three to two for the number of views. It's 9.1 billion views for pro-Trump content, which is, that's a lot of views. That's a really big number. This is not just some app that like a small number of people are accessing. The Trump 2024 hashtag outperforms Biden 2024 by 12 to 1 for views, 6.5 billion views to 558 million. That's pretty concerning. And the context for that is that TikTok users are unusually likely to get their news from the

platform. 43% of TikTok users say they get their news from it, which is higher than any other outlet tied with Facebook. And for impact, like recall that experiment we talked about the other week that measured what happened when people deactivated Facebook and Instagram for a few weeks reading up to the 2020 election. And that the conclusion of that was that being on Facebook and Instagram in that election made you 2.6% likelier to vote for Trump, which is a big enough number to swing a national election for sure. And that was a moment when those platforms were behaving, which is not true now, especially not for TikTok. So I think it is safe to say that in an election that will be very close that these numbers are enough.

So there's, I've talked to a lot of Democratic strategists, and I will say that over the last couple of weeks, this is like one of the top concerns in the world of people who are working on this election. Like people are pretty freaked out. What are they saying about what they think is- Well, so there's two separate issues, right? One is what you just talked about, which is that there is just the pro-Trump content is just kicking the shit out of the pro-Biden content. So there's just like, there's that analyzed the characteristics and content of the top 1000

US political creators on TikTok from January 1st to April 30th. 43% are consistently progressive. And about a quarter of those, a quarter of the top politically progressive creators on TikTok are sharing anti-Biden rhetoric and anti-Biden content all the time for a total of 391 million views over that time. And can you give us some context for what anti, does anti-Biden mean like, I disagree with him on this policy? Or do we think it means like, implicitly vote against Joe Biden? So the big ones are Gaza.

Sure. Right. And then Biden's stance on TikTok itself and signing the legislation. Okay. And then there is just the hodgepodge of he's old. Here's a crazy thing Joe Biden said once, sort of some of the stuff that you see come up from right wing media as well. And the challenge here is that it's, in this study, it's creating a permission structure for voting third party or abstaining from voting,

even for TikTok users and young people who don't see Gaza as their top issue. So this is how you sort of reconcile a lot of the polling you see that is, okay, young people are upset about Gaza. A lot of people are upset about Gaza. They don't rank it as one of their top issues in terms of like how it's going to decide their vote.

I see. Same thing with like the college protests, right? When you really find out like how many colleges, how many protests there are, like it's smaller than you think. But it is creating a permission structure out there that it is uncool to be for Joe Biden or that it is just bad to be for Joe Biden. So even if you, even if you're not really engaged with what's going on in Gaza or you're not really engaged with the TikTok

legislation or care them, there is just this feeling out there that like, yeah, you don't want Joe Biden. Did you see that semaphore poll of under 30s that just came out? I feel like that is very helpful context for understanding that the semaphore poll of voters under 30, 43% said it does not matter who wins the election at all. And only 26% say that it does matter. And there are a bunch of results like that.

65% say that nearly all politicians are corrupt. So there does seem to be, I mean, I know young people always have a sense that like the political system doesn't work for me. The political system is broken or they are more inclined to that belief. But it does seem like that is unusually high among a demographic that is also unusually likely to use this app. And I know it's difficult to untangle how much is this driven by TikTok versus TikTok is reflecting things that are already out there. I do think that we can pretty safely say, as is so often the case with social media algorithms, that it is taking something that does exist outside the platform, but then is exaggerating it in scale and in reach in a way that does... And amplifying it and fueling it.

Right, right. In a way that does then feed back into that feeling. And it becomes more than just about like, well, this is a neutral reflection of what's out there, or it's turning up the degrees on a little bit, but it does actually change it, I think, in kind. It's such an important point because I do think the debate online, as most debates are,

really just like, is TikTok tiktok making kids uh anti-gaza or our tiktok is tiktok making kids against the war in gaza is that is the tiktok brainwashing them all it's like you know mitt romney i think said to tony blinken yeah um and we've talked we talked about that on the show or is it like you know this is just all young people just are against the war. And this is where they're getting there. And I really do think not only in Gaza, but just in the broader context of the 2024 election and Biden and Trump, it's both of those things. Right. And those things are it's they exist to like sort of feed each other. And it's also an important point you made that Gaza is the dominant issue.

I think it's like our circles. It's like something that people you and I know, and probably a lot of listeners in this show, care a lot about. But that is not actually true for all of the wider electorate. And there are a lot of people for whom it is a issue, but it is not the top issue. And I think it is important to separate out the degree to which this effect that we see from TikTok, where it is driving up this kind of political nihilism, and this like, it's not worth engaging, they're all corrupt. All the parties are the same as something that is playing out through every issue. And I think that's true. And then I think on the pro-Trump side, there is the Trump folks in the MAGA movement have, you know, somewhat successfully

now defined what they're doing as counter-cultural yeah which is wild right well there's always been i mean they're like pepe the frog the like 4chan the gamer there's always been a little bit of an element of that and so they are capitalizing on the sort of uh how people are you know are have low trust in institutions, and especially young people, and they are sort of anti-establishment, anti-institution, anti-politician in general. And that helps with the candidate who is saying, I am outside the system. And even when I was president, I was outside the system. And it's okay, and it's cool. They're creating a permission structure where, despite what many of these people know to be true about Trump,

which is that he is a lying, racist lunatic, right? They're like, well, I don't know. And I saw this video of, you know, there's some black people with Trump and there's some Latinos with Trump and there's some funny music there and it's okay and he's with some young people. And like there's some Latinos with Trump and there's some funny music there and it's OK. And he's with some young people. And like their whole thing is to create a permission structure where it's OK to vote for Trump, even if you know he's a lunatic. Well, this is a lot of what happened, I think, in 2016, where there was there was a lot of 2016.

Right. Where there was like on the one hand, a like MAGA core that like saw what Trump was selling and like really loved that in the merits, loved the white nationalism, love the authoritarianism. But then there were a lot of people were like, well, I'm dissatisfied with the system. I don't like the system. Trump is against the system and he wants to change it and smash it. And I am abstractly for that, even if I am not particularly engaged in the specifics of what he's pushing for. I do think the like scale of TikTok and social platforms generally being so pro-Trump is also something that has been consistent since he basically appeared. And there's like we have a lot of research that shows that just social media algorithms as a rule are pro-Trump. They are very pro-Trump regardless of like before Gaza, after Gaza, for Joe Biden, after Joe Biden, that there's a fundamental thing happening where social media

algorithms consistently privilege certain emotions and certain sentiments that just so happen to be the ones that Trump is both promoting and benefits from. Like I can give you a couple of examples. There was in 2016, multiple analyses of Twitter and Facebook found that posts with the types of words that Trump used, like moral outrage expressions, us versus them, outgroup derogation, significantly outperformed the types of words that Clinton used, regardless of who actually sent those posts. boost over Hillary Clinton in terms of their posts, but that anyone who expressed or felt a worldview or ideology similar to Trump's got a boost and anyone who felt or expressed an ideology similar to Clinton's got that suppressed. So that is like changes the worldview of people on those platforms. And then in 2020, the exact same thing, the Facebook algorithm promoted Trump content over Biden content by 20 to one, even though Biden at that point was significantly more popular than Donald Trump. So there's absolutely a real thing here that I'm not

discounting that people are very dissatisfied with Biden for a number of reasons that we've talked about a lot on the show. There is also a thing happening here where everything about Trump and Trumpism is something that these social media algorithms love. And this, the TikTok thing is both specific to TikTok, but it's also just the latest iteration of something that we have seen over and over again that has a real impact. And by the way, it even goes beyond Trump. Like, what do functioning liberal democracies require of us? They require an ability to see nuance, complexity, to have empathy for others, to have patience. All of the stuff that just does not happen on social media platforms. None of that stuff performs well.

Every incentive on the platform is to push you away from all the things that everything is black and white. It's us versus them. You're angry right that's right there's also it's something that we've talked about before that i think you really see in these results for pro-trump content is the culture of doomerism that gets rewarded by social media platforms and especially by tiktok and again i'm not saying that there's nothing to like be concerned about yeah there is some doom out there in the world. But there is also a very specific, like, demonstrable, empirically known thing where social that unemployment has never been higher when in fact it has never been this low for this long since the 60s. And doomerism is just an ideology that complements Trumpism very, very well. Even if

you are coming to that doomerism from a left-wing progressive position, because it says institutions are broken, it says everybody's corrupt, it says says smash the system and it says that we are supposed to you know kind of take the most outrage take and it was also something that just like does not work very well with pro-biden messaging if you're trying to get an 81 year old incumbent re-elected and in fact it doesn't work well with any incumbent right right i mean it's just it's a good challenger message which is is why it worked for Trump in 2016. And it seems to be working for him now. And it was probably it didn't work for him as well in 2020 because it's not like Joe Biden was some like young outside the system challenger then. Right. But we were in the middle of a pandemic.

Trump was the incumbent. He was mismanaging it. So whatever else he thought about Trump, the incumbent and the guy who was running the government was fucking things up and it was making people annoyed. And I think it's not for nothing that every Western leader has extremely low approval ratings right now. We are in an era when- Across the political spectrum.

Across the, regardless of how the economy in that country is doing, regardless of their left wing, regardless of the right wing, which again is not to discount that there are like Biden-specific, Gaza-specific factors here that absolutely matter., it's not for nothing that in the entirety of the social media era, we have had one incumbent reelected and it was in 2012, the very beginning

of the social media era when like upworthy content was the only thing you would see on your Facebook feed. Like, and there are a lot of reasons for that that are not social media specific. Like you've talked a lot about how we're in a just low trust and low trust in institutions era, which is something that exists outside of social media, but is also very much amplified on it. But it is just, it is a moment worldwide, regardless of the specific conditions of the race, regardless of the candidates, where it is very, very hard for people to get excited about the idea of maintaining the status quo, basically. Yeah, no, I totally agree.

All right. Last week, Google's new tool called AI Overviews made international headlines after its AI-generated search summaries provided users with comically ridiculous search results. Users who Googled, how many rocks should I eat, were given the result at least one small rock per day. And users who Googled cardio exercises that can increase your heart rate and require concentration were told to run with scissors. John, are you putting the glue in your pizza? Yeah, they told people to put glue in their pizzas.

Honestly, it's impossible. There were like a hundred of these, like hundreds. Google has defended AI overviews, saying that the product largely produces high quality information. But after many, many screenshots of absurd Google results went viral, the company announced they would take swift action to remove AI overviews on specific search queries. Max, how on earth does something like this happen at Google of all places,

which also just had the whole controversy that we talked about with Gemini, which was generating racially diverse Nazis. Remember that? We've had so many fucked up AI stories. Google gave us overly woke AI, and now it's just giving us fucking stupid AI. Now it's giving us pizza glue.

So I think there are two origin stories for this. And I think they're both true. And I think you need both to understand what's happening. Number one is that Google leaders believe that the company was in this like all or nothing breakout race on AI to be the first to develop very specifically a ubiquitous personal assistant AI. That would be like Jarvis from Iron Man, I guess is what they would use internally. Like you remember there was the like... No, so not ScarJo, this is more Iron Man.

This is a like English-accented, super smart butler who will handle all your daily tasks. That is according to a post by a recently departed Googler named Scott Jensen, who said on LinkedIn that AI search was imagining the company as a first step towards that AI assistant that they thought every company was racing towards,

and that it would, quote, lock you into their ecosystem so hard you would never leave. So it would be like an ultimate, like, forever business solve. And that the fear is they couldn't afford less someone else to get to that first. So hence the premature launch. And the other origin story for this is that, as we have discussed before, Google search became really shitty over the last few years. It was stuffed with ads. There was like all of this like search bait that was really hard to find good information. Everybody knows this one workaround that became really popular, especially among tech people was to add Reddit on the end of a search. Did you ever do this? No.

It's actually great. It works really, really well. If you're trying to like, I don't know, I did this because like the laundry machine or the washing machine was broken. And it's like searching how to fix your washing machine gives you crap. But if you add Reddit at the end, you get a bunch of Reddit posts of people talking about how they fix their washing machine. It's great.

Really effective. So something that Reddit or something that Google did recently is they just started paying Reddit $60 million a year to train their Google, their AI search on Reddit data. They said like, we're going to take this workaround that people have done and we're going to build it into search. It's a good idea in theory, not if your execution fucking sucks, which it did, which is why so many of those terrible results that you get trace back to Reddit posts. And what happened was the Google AI was scraping jokes from Reddit. And because they had a lot of upvotes, interpreting that as accurate information and pushing it out to people. So that was those two things combined.

And just the fact that they were like not actually trying to make it a good product. Isn't this a larger problem with AI, though, and especially, like, some of these large language models? Like, if the intelligence and artificial intelligence is just collected from the entirety of the Internet, and the Internet is not necessarily known for its intelligence collectively at this point, isn't that going to be a problem? Well, it depends where you go, right? I mean, it's like Wikipedia has great information. But we're back to the essential problem of our politics and culture right now, which is the problem of trust and bad information.

And if there are no trusted sources, or you can't tell what a trusted trusted sources is and you think Wikipedia is trustworthy, but then someone says no. And, you know, it's like an AI I feel like is just going to amplify that problem. Unless you, I mean, I'm sure they'll fix it someday. There was one quote in the Time story about this that really just captures everything. It's this guy, Thomas Monteiro, who's a Google analyst at investing.com. And he said, Google doesn't have a choice right now. Companies need to move really fast,

even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up. Jesus. That just sums it all up to me. It is so wild to me that we are still in the Facebook move fast and break things era when like that phrase has become a byword for the Myanmar genocide caused by the Facebook algorithm. Or that's how I always hear it used anyway. And it's just so like the only focus is commercial here.

Like these companies are racing each other on AI and we just got to we just got to. And then now, you know, the open AI is doing this with like, in contrast with China and other countries, right? It's like the reason the US has to go so fast is because the other countries are doing, we can't let them beat us. And you know, if we, if we break a few things along the way, cause a few wars, you know, just sort of disintegrate society, you know, it's worth it. We gotta, we gotta win. We gotta win. It does. It is, it is a reminder of a point that people have made many times, which is that we are really not in the era anymore where Silicon Valley is making products to fill needs. We're not getting the iPhone. We're not getting the iPod Nano anymore. They

are making products and then trying to force adoption on us. No one was asking for Google AI search. They're putting it at the fucking top of Google search because they want to build a habit for something that you don't want, didn't ask for, don't need, isn't effective. I will say that I am like to try to be like in fairness to like, what will AI actually do? I'm trying to keep this like whiteboard in my head of like all the times AI or large language models have done something that works or was effective or was cool. And all the times they've done something that's bad or not effective or shitty. And I feel like the bad stuff is always to your point, or very often on the end of trying to gather useful information. Large language models, this generation of AI just seems to

really suck at that. And it seems like the more they try to lean into that, the more it's going to like have these terrible launches and also going to create huge problems for the world. Like, I don't know if you're super online, you saw all of the like shitty Google AI search results, glue and pizza, and you know not to trust it. But I'm sure some number of people didn't see that, got a bad result and acted on it. I mean, yeah, they're eating pizza with glue on it. It's the same people that injected bleach. Donald Trump told them to. But this is the, you know, it's tough

because what I don't think that AI can do yet is it doesn't have a sense of judgment. And that is ultimately when you're trying to find good information and curate good information. I don't know that you're going to be able to replace human judgment when this computer is just scraping the information that's out there, some of which is excellent information and very helpful to people, and a lot of which is garbage. But we'll see. Maybe they'll figure it out. Speaking of seeing more AI in our lives,

an AI-generated image with the phrase, all eyes on Rafa, is spreading like wildfire on Instagram. The meme, which shows that phrase spelled out with refugee tents in a mountainous landscape that is definitely not Gaza, has been shared more than 47 million times as of Thursday, making it probably one of the most viral posts of all time. But the post has sparked debate online over the use of AI and whether a sanitized and generic meme like this distracts from genuine images of the conflict or from more effective forms of advocacy? Yes and yes. Max, what do you think? So on the surface, this is a puzzle, right? Because this is a conflict that has produced so many unforgettable images, so many moments and headlines that are really galvanizing and like really make you want to do something and to act so like why is the thing to

go viral this obvious ai fakery that has this weird uncanny valleyness to it and looks terrible and has no emotional weight to it there's like very little about this that makes you want to get involved like why is this the thing um ryan broderick had a good theory on this which i think is probably at least part of the equation that um the fact that it's obvious AI fakery is part of how it is going so viral. Because, as we've discussed before, Meta and a lot of other companies are now actively suppressing news with their algorithms, which they're very open about. That's not us making up a conspiracy theory. Not just Gaza news, just news.

Right, right. Yeah, it's not a Gaza thing. They just want out of the news business. They want out of the news business. So something that is like weird and fake might be likely to go viral. Something we also talked about a couple weeks ago was that like if you go on Facebook, it is absolutely flooded with AI images. So this might just be like Instagram catching up with just like weird AI fakes that just get pumped into the system a lot. I do think to me what this is most of all is just the latest iteration of a trend that has been really

common on social media every time there's something terrible and really horrifying but also like kind of tough to grapple with in the world since like the coney 2012 thing which is just this kind of like slacktivist content which is it's not a phrase that i love because it feels like a value judgment and i'm i'm not saying that if you shared this you're a bad person no no we're not saying that like it's a it's a bad or harmful um it's just lowest common denominator stuff it's lowest common denominator it is something that is succeeds because it is low stakes and succeeds because it takes what is a big complex subject and that like flattens it into the most banal, inoffensive image imaginable and also shoehorns what is

a very big, scary, complex problem into the most simple, uncontroversial call to action imaginable. It also saps the emotion from the conflict and from the issue as well, which is interesting, because it's like, I mean, there's a lot of

images, videos, people could have posted around George Floyd's murder. which is interesting because it's like i mean there's a lot of a lot of images videos people could have posted around uh george floyd's murder sure and when it became just the black square right and then remember all the white people were posting the black square and it was a whole thing um but it's like people i think just from a human level people are like okay i can do this because the other day when um the israelis uh launched that strike on the on the refugee camp and you know those kids babies died it was just fucking horrific and someone had posted a video of um kids in that camp before um the strike and they were like smiling and talking and it was like i i watched it and i first of all it's just like it really hits you like fuck um and i almost i i ended up

retweeting it because i was like i i just people should see this people should think about what it's like urgency right but i i paused because i'm like it's a real emotional thing to share that and like you don't want to do you want to bum people out who don't want to hear this? Do you want to force it on people? So like, and that was just something that wasn't graphic. It was the kids before the, but I get why something like this is easier for people to be like, okay, I'll just share this. I think that it's that. I think that it's low emotional stakes. And I think the black square comparison one is really apt because both of those are things that implicitly tell you that the real problem here is not one of, you know, Israeli war crimes or like tough questions about securing domestic political pressure to try to get Biden to change strategies on it.

It's awareness. It's awareness. Right. That is the Kony 2012 thing. Everyone thinks now I just I'm just trying to draw attention and awareness. Right. To what end? Exactly. Right. It's a start.

It's definitely a start. It's something that does well because it's a very easy ask, but it's also an ask that lets you, the user, center yourself a little bit. And the implied message is that the real problem here is that people aren't paying attention and that all that I have to do in order to complete my responsibility, in order to be done and like I've checked the box and I've done what I need to do, is like and share the post on social media and then go back to scrolling. And that's something that's very effective at producing a viral image because it's an ask that anybody can participate in. Not something that's as effective in ending horrible conflicts that have been going on for hundreds of years. Right. Yeah. I also, I don't think the problem here is that the world's eyes are not on Rafa. Like the ICC just announced a fucking arrest warrant for, or they are seeking

an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galan. How about eyes on Bibi? The world is paying attention to this. And I understand why it's appealing to people. Like something we've talked about a lot is that like, it's very distressing to feel like you have no agency over this conflict. And there is something that is a salve in a way that is not necessarily bad that now you feel like you have agency because you've shared the post that told you all you have to do is share the post to tell other people to share the post, and now you're done and you're good. I don't know if I feel like I'm ready to get to the point to say this is distracting from other more meaningful forms of advocacy. I don't know if it's that zero sum. I don't think that it's helping. Yeah, I don't think it's harmful. I don't think it's helpful. Yeah.

That's sort of my, I think it's just, it's nothing. Right, yeah, I think that that's right. I think that's why it's done well. I will say that something that it has done is apparently a lot of like international sports stars who have not spoken out on the conflict did share this. So maybe there is something to like getting a lot, no one seeing the same news anymore. Right. That like the role that prominent people and celebrities have or can have. Yeah. Like if an international soccer star posted that, right? And someone who doesn't pay any attention to this saw it and was like, what is that all about? And they start Googling Rafa.

Yeah. And like, yeah, then you might get, but again. I don't know if we're at that point. Right. And there's so many times that I'd like, have been covering some like international conflict and trying to get people to care about it. Like the war in Yemen,

like when that was really, really peaking around like 2016, 2017. I think so many articles try to get people to care that like tens or hundreds of thousands of children are going without food. And there would be a moment when some like image would go viral and it would be like this.

It would be like all eyes on Yemen. like everybody pay attention to what's happening there. And you would get kind of excited because you would be like, wow, nobody's been fucking reading my articles on Yemen. Nobody cares. Nobody knows about it. Maybe now they'll finally care. And I never felt like I saw any actual impact from it. Yeah. Which again is not to say that it's bad that people did that. No, but it's just surface level. That's right. Yeah. All right. Before we get to the interview, some quick housekeeping.

Vote Save America's 2024 volunteer program, Organize or Else, has already driven almost 6,000 volunteer signups, but we still need you to take action and join this competition for the fate of democracy. Just go to votesaveamerica.com slash 2024, get assigned Team East or Team West. Team East. Team West. And get matched with opportunities tailored to you and the causes you care about. And don't worry if you're new to volunteering. Vote Save America is hosting regular welcome calls to de-scarify.

That's not a fucking word. Phone banking and make it easier than ever to maximize your impact on the ground. I love this. I love that it's a way if you've never done organizing before, you've never done activism before, here's a way. You know what? It is de-scar? It is descarifying. I think it's a good word. I like it. Descarifying. Team East is for descarifying.

Well, Team East is kicking our ass right now. Team West ass. Leading with 38,000 more voter outreaches. So if you live on the West Coast, we better see you at kickoff soon. Head to votesaveamerica.com slash 2024 now and get ready to organize or else. This message has been paid for by Vote Save America. You can learn more at votesaveamerica.com. And this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. And this is how I know that Austin really doesn't like me. It says, all of me wants all of you to tune into the newest episode of Inside 2024 with special guest John Legend. Except the way that it was written here was like wanting me

to sing it, which I'm not going to sing all of you right here. I'm so sorry. That's one of the very famous, very good songs. Anyway, the 12-time Grammy Award winner joins zero-time Grammy Award winner me. That's funny. To talk about the pros and cons of celebrity political endorsements.

For those of you thinking we're just... I didn't get this far. For those of you thinking we're just ordinary people who we don't know which way to go, we say head on over

to crooked.com slash friends to join Friends of the Pod and watch this exclusive series. Wow. Amazing. Shots fired to the pod listeners. You know what?

That's fantastic. After the break, my conversation with Birds Aren't Real founder, Peter McIndoo. Peter McIndoo, welcome to Offline. Thanks so much for having me. I'm just going to start with a simple question. For people who may not be familiar, what is the Birds Aren't Real movement, and why aren't birds real?

That's a great question. Well, the first thought that comes to my mind is the Birds Aren't Real movement is possibly the most important project in history. The second thought that comes to my mind is that the Birds Aren't Real movement is really simple. It's a patriotic American organization that really has its roots in anti-surveillance and animal rights. We believe that the U.S. government systemically murdered over 12 billion birds over the course of 1959 through 2001, ending with the Patriot Act, of course. They did this by using a poisonous toxin dropped from airplanes that spread like a virus among the birds, killed 12 billion of those innocent souls. And when our movement started in 1976, you know, it was a mix. Some animal rights activists met up with some anti-surveillance activists and they were like,

we hate how these beautiful creatures are being slaughtered by the American government, but we also don't want to, you know, live under a surveillance state. We don't want to, you know, feel this wet, heavy blanket above our heads all the time, knowing we're being washed. So that's when a beautiful marriage was formed between these two ideologies where they came together to create the Birds Aren't Real movement, just designed to let people know what's going on here. But more so, our mission is deactivation and repopulation. We love birds. We think birds are beautiful creatures and animals. We do not hate birds. We do not like fake birds. That's the issue. Birds are no longer real. We'd like to make them real once again. Please join us in our cause. Book out

June 4th. Thank you very much. Make birds real again. There it is. Okay. So this is a conspiracy you made up and essentially a character that you played for several years that launched an entire movement and fooled quite a few people, including several media outlets. How did the whole thing start? It's a great question. Totally by accident is the answer. It was a complete accident. I was in Memphis, Tennessee, visiting some friends.

We turned to the corner. This was in 2017, Tennessee, visiting some friends. We turned to the corner. This was in 2017, right after Trump got elected. And we saw these nasty old white guys with signs. We were like, what do they do? Who are they protesting? We looked over, there was a woman's march happening early 2017. And we were like in the middle of this absurd situation at this time of absolute lunacy and reality breaking in America. And at that time, I just happened to be a very obnoxious 18 year old, who, for some reason, thought it would be funny to have a sign at the rally that had nothing to do with anything going on at the rally, you know. So I picked up a sign and found a sharpie and just wrote the three most random words that could come to my mind which were birds aren't real uh it didn't mean anything

it had no thought behind it it was just like what would be a funny three-word combo what would be a funny word recipe and uh i started walking around with the, and of course people were like, what is that? You know, what do you mean birds aren't real? And I was just messing around, so I was like, oh, it's a movement. I'm a part of a movement. It's been around for 50 years, actually. Like, why haven't we heard of this before? I'm like, oh, it's been censored so heavily.

What do you mean birds aren't real? Oh, they're surveillance drones. You know, they're surveillance drones. They're surveillance drones. And sort of this lore and concept was improvised. It never meant to be anything, after I'd long forgotten about this, I receive a video of myself carrying this sign in Memphis. The video has like a million views. It was on Facebook, too, which is weird, like a viral Facebook video. The boomers got to you it was me they got to me which was really interesting because they they saw this video and with their i guess media literacy sensibilities or you know maybe not as accustomed to prank culture or things of that nature they saw this video and all the comments were like oh my god like all the comments were like, oh my God. All the comments were like,

there is a dangerous new conspiracy sweeping this nation, showing up at these rallies, and people were debating it. Because as I was marching around, I was saying, kind of spreading little tidbits of lore, just making up. I was like, oh, birds sit on power lines because they're charging their batteries. That's the real reason behind stuff to make you think of stuff to get your gears grinding a bit um but so all

the comments were debating this on a serious level and i became infatuated with that and infatuated with the idea that this character was almost this Rorschach test, depending on where you were in American culture, what age you were. If you saw that and thought that it was totally legitimate, living in this reality with that, it's kind of a testament to the times. It's kind of like, oh my God, if you see a guy with a sign that says birds aren't real, your first thought is, there it is again. Not good, not great. So it started at this Memphis rally, and then you saw the video. And at what point did you decide that you were going to commit to the bit so intensely that you were going to basically play this character full time? Yeah, I pretty much

bet my entire life on it. I saw this thing happening in Memphis. And the thing that made me tip over the edge, I mean, I was going to the University of Arkansas for psychology and had no plans of doing anything like this. And what tipped me over the edge was seeing these videos. I started getting a very organic movement blossoming in Memphis, Tennessee, where I got sent this video of a high school cafeteria, hundreds of kids standing up on their tables chanting, birds aren't real, over and over again. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is going on here?

I started getting sent other videos. You know, I didn't know anyone in Memphis. I knew a couple people in Memphis. So I was just kind of this mythical idea to the city. going on here, I started getting sent other videos. You know, I didn't know anyone in Memphis. I knew a couple people in Memphis. So I was just kind of this mythical idea to the city. I was this character that came in and out. But it kind of had this hold over the culture there. It started getting graffitied everywhere. Birds aren't real, birds aren't real.

I'm getting sent pictures. So I'm sitting there at the University of Arkansas doing psychology homework, watching these videos come in on my phone, thinking I would always regret it if I didn't lean into that a bit and see what would have happened. Because it really wasn't like I started a movement. It was I kind of just rolled a tiny little snowball down a hill by accident and then leaned into the organic energy of people who were very interested in embodying this idea which i have a bunch of thoughts about you know why um but yeah that led to six years of playing a character turning the movement into something with 50 chapters across the nation, millions of followers, rallies with thousands of people

showing up to them. And it was all built through a story, a character-led story, sort of a year-over-year public theater-esque soap opera, where you can't just say birds aren't real every day, right? So it was really building something around this guy. Who is this guy? You know, who are his friends? Who else is involved with this? Is there an anonymous counsel above him? Is he just one of many public information officers? How was he hired? Where did we know where they getting their confidential leaks from? Who were their whistleblowers? Like, you know, you can really build out a little universe there. And so, yeah. So it didn't come to me.

I'm not a boomer, so I'm not on Facebook. So it didn't come to me that way. I'm also not Gen Z. It finally came to me when I saw the clip of you being interviewed by a local television station. And I believe you threw up during the interview. I told you. That's when it really broke through to an aging millennial like me um why do you think why do you think that was a very uncomfortable experience it was uncomfortable to

watch but it was very enjoyable to watch too i will say um why do you think you just mentioned this why do you think so many people wanted to be in on the joke? Why do you think this took off? That's a really good question. I think, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts about that. I mean, the real answer is I don't know. You know, the real answer is I can hypothesize and I can guess or look at my experience and think, hmm, you know, what do I see there? But it is somewhat of a mystery to me, still, to this day, as it was at the very beginning when I wasn't expecting anything to come from it. That said, though, I have had thoughts about people's desire to

gather and belong in a space that isn't intense, and that is disarmingly absurdist to where anyone can really exist in that in that community um it kind of is almost like unzipping another dimension where i mean you're playing characters you know so i show up to these rallies there's a thousand kids there and they're all talking in character with me like we're not living in our world we're living in this fantasy world and through that we don't have to deal i don't know it's like if you're living in a in a tumultuous space and you can like unzip a little dimension for a bit and go into it and there are no enemies other than one enemy that you all agree upon. And you all have shared beliefs, interests, lore.

It really mirrors the reason people get into conspiracy theories in real life. Yeah, I was going to say, we've talked about conspiracy theories a lot on this show and misinformation and sort of online communities. And it does seem like the through line for a lot of these communities and groups is that people find joy in them. People find belonging. And that's true of conspiracies. That's true of people who've gone to Trump rallies, right? They say, this is what you get. It's like a big party. And at this point now, Trump is like a sideshow at the end, right? They're just there for the day to tailgate and have a good time. And I do wonder if there's something going on with culture and politics today where people feel the need to come together in community because, you know, I think in a way the internet and, you know, especially post-pandemic have made us all just a little more separated.

Totally. It's an identity crisis. I mean, with the internet, there's no longer a cultural macro national identity as, you know, I guess the politicians of the old would have liked to think about it. You know, there's no, it's now, which is a good thing. We have the internet and we're able to see truths, you know, and we're, we're, we're able to see things about our government that aren't so great in our country that aren't so great. And I think that when that happens, the other is sort of a macro identity crisis in the collective of America where it's like, well, what do I belong to then? You know, if I no longer identify with the idea of this group that I was a part of, then what is my group? You know, we need a group.

You need a tribe. What we have is almost people like huddling up in tribes that reflect their ideology and kind of building a space around themselves. I mean, I grew up in Arkansas, you know, as I mentioned, a very hyper religious conservative community where it was just kind of drenched in conspiracy theories. You know, everyone I knew was a conspiracy theorist. And I feel like that was really the training for this project and for understanding anything about it. Why do you think you turned out to be not a conspiracy theorist, but someone who plays one? Like, with that upbringing?

Hey, you don't know? You know, being in a very conservative Christian family in Arkansas, like what was your sort of outlet or what was the sort of event that made you think, hmm, maybe this is not what I believe? Yeah, I don't know. Just from an early age, it felt that way.

I think I had an uncle who turned me on to some good influences like Joseph Campbell, the power of myth, kind of early on in my life. I started work at 14 in restaurants. Even though I was homeschooled in the woods in Arkansas, I would go out into the real world because I had to I got a job and I had to work at 14 and so I was in kitchens with line cooks and waiters and just I guess receiving and realizing there's way more of the world there's other belief systems you know these people believe in there's just as much as my parents believe in there so what's what's you know who's to say and I think that that gradually just kind of yeah opened up into something where there are yeah i think a lot of people from arkansas well not the

majority but a lot of my friends i think were able to go through i guess see it from a different perspective you um you gave a great ted talk last year which started with you in character and then finished with you out of character um where you talked about how you felt when people treated you like a conspiracy theorist, the people who believed that you were actually spreading this conspiracy intentionally. What was that like? It felt really different than I expected it to, honestly. It was very strange. I, you know, went into this, it was a performance, and I, I,

I'd always been on the side of my community in Arkansas where I felt like I was more of an observer than a participant. You know, I felt like I was, uh, watching this thing happen in front of me and honestly kind of, uh, getting through it by joking about it. You know, I had like anonymous Twitter accounts. Uh, I had one called 501 homeschooler that was, uh, Twitter accounts. I had one called 501 Homeschooler that was Twitter accounts that I started to satirize the homeschooling community in Arkansas and just kind of made this whole character out of it. It was all anonymous. But anyway, I had been on the observer side of that issue for a while, the issue the fringe and so what was strange was embodying the character and feeling like i then could understand a bit more what those

people i grew up with were feeling i would be out in public a lot uh as i was on the road with birds aren't real as i mentioned we had 50 chapters every state in the U.S., except for Alaska. Except for Alaska. We did have Hawaii, though. And they were a great chapter. They would do a dance at the rallies. It was awesome. But I would be out there in the van.

I went to visit each of the chapters. So I got this $3,000 white van from Arkansas, a classic conspiracy van, popped some satellites on the top of it, decals on the sides of it, you know, birds aren't real, if it flies, it spies, totaled lore dumps riddled with typos, you know. And on the road, people would come up to me. Like I mentioned, I was in character for a long time. I'd be on the road, people would come up to me. Because like I mentioned, I was in character for a long time. I'd be on the road totally in character, even in the van sometimes,

seeing how long I could just keep it consistent. And really kind of sunk into the mindset. I was really obsessed with Andy Kaufman at the time, after a reporter asked me if I was doing an Andy Kaufman thing, and I didn't know who it was. And I looked it up, and I was like, oh, this is the daddy of what I'm trying to do here. And so then started leaning into the way he thought about some things,

which, you know, not to get too into it, but he really looked at if you're just being a personality in public, if you're trying to be a version of yourself, then you're playing a character in a way. You know, when you're trying to say things that will hit right with the people around you, and you mold your personality to different groups. He didn't really look at it like acting, he just looked at it like plugging a different version of yourself into your body and being that. And so I went like way deep in Andy Kaufman world. Well, and it's a performance. And now we're all performers because we all exist on the internet all the time,

and our internet selves and our online personas are all performances. So it's people who grow up that way are now very equipped to go be performers in real life. It sounds like, though, when people would come up to you and call you crazy and all that kind of stuff, you started having empathy for people who are conspiracy theorists, at least in the sense of when someone attacks you for your beliefs, this should be obvious, but I guess it's not today.

When someone attacks you for your beliefs, you're not likely to change those beliefs as a result or really get anywhere with that person yeah i think that's where i learned a lot with birds aren't real was it turned into an accidental social experiment where i could see how people treat conspiracy theorists in real life when no one is watching because that's the in-between space that really defines the culture you know it's not just about these moments that are really big publicized. It's those small in-between conversations, how you act with people in stores

in real life, on the internet. Oh my god, I was so surprised by how I felt when I was in that character mindset. I'd be out there in front of the van, parked outside of a gas station or whatever, handing out flyers in Arizona.

And somebody would walk up to me or walk past me and say, I mean, right to my face how stupid I was. They'd really think I was serious. They'd say, you are a truly uneducated, stupid person. You need to like... They said things I don't even want to repeat here. They were so mean. and in those moments i didn't think like oh wow this is a fascinating moment where this person's like thinks i am this

character this is funny it's working instead i really felt truly hurt because at that time i felt the emotions of the character instead of myself and not just hurt. I felt really emboldened. Yeah. It made me want to go deeper into my group, the people that validated my somebody-ness and not this person who's trying to tell me that I am all wrong. You know, it's like, it's like you're saying, wow, what a shock. It's like, if you make somebody feel totally othered, they're not going to want to come over to your side more. You know, I think it's so interesting. It taught me a lot about, I guess, ways we can approach that dynamic way, way better.

Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on this just because I've had a career in politics. So it does feel obvious because when you're trying to talk to voters, you don't want to call them stupid, ignorant. These are not ways to sort of bring people into your coalition. But it does feel like a predominant strategy, especially with a lot of online liberals and leftists is, you know, when someone is spouting a conspiracy theory, you either call them dumb, you attack them, or you say, oh, they're just believing this misinformation or disinformation. And if we only fact check them or give them the correct facts,

then like they'll change their minds. And we just got to fact check our way out of this. And of course, that is not proven to be effective by any studies any research shows that it's not it's just not no but like that you you've learned that just from like having the very human experience of being on the other side of it have you now had experiences where you've changed people's beliefs or at least caused them to question those beliefs with sort of a different strategy for persuading people or talking about misinformation or conspiracies that they might have learned? It did teach me a lot. Yeah. And I, you know, even beyond being in character, I think my real

training was being that person talking to the birds aren't real guy. When I was living in Arkansas, when I was arguing with the homeschoolers around me, people in these churches, you know, when the Trump era comes around, feeling like I'm just hitting a wall, like, how are these people not hearing this? Like, and I felt crazy and I realized my approach was ineffective. Um, I think that now I look back and think, okay, where could I have found not even a middle ground, but a bridge? Like, where could I have found a way to, I don't know, something I say a lot is if someone is in a dark room, it's really hard to tell them they're in a dark room if they've been there for a long time and their eyes have adjusted. That's just a room. The way to do it, you have to turn

on a light somewhere else. You need to show the contrast. And so I think in Arkansas, gradually taking on an invitational tone rather than one of condemnation helped me make way more progress in the conversations I was trying to have. For instance, I have a friend in Arkansas, love him to death. He lived back in kind of the rural area that I did 30 minutes outside of Little Rock. And there was this disagreement we were having. You know, I was a Bernie boy, not going to lie. I was a Bernie boy.

I'm talking about corporations. I'm talking about the 1%. And, you know, he was sort of having these issues with that. He's like, that's insane. Like, they're paying this much. Like, you know, and it turned into this argument, you know, and it got to this point where there was no real communication happening. You know, it was just like, cause what's the goal is the goal to live in a shared reality

or is the goal to feel victorious and have your ego propped up, uh, you know, feeling intellectually superior. So, you know, or is it like, oh, i want to like live in a shared reality with my friends and like i just want people to do the right thing and um so i think what helps steer that conversation in the right way was not beginning at the level of corporation but was it talking about the concept of power and money and going back to the Bible, which is where his kind of like, that's his language, you know? So if I'm trying to go at him and be like, Hey, this is not your language at all. I want you to separate,

not only your belief system, but also your political identity. It's like, I need you to get rid of all of it. Instead I've tried kind of to validate the underlying beliefs, if they're not toxic or hateful, say, hey, you know, but then go to that source material and look at scripture about greed, look at, you know, points of rep. And that is what actually drove those conversations forward. And it wasn't done in a way where it was like, look, your own thing says this. It was done, like I was saying, with an invitational tone. It was, it's really about less about the words and more about the atmosphere. And, you know, I think that before I embodied the Birds Not Real character, I had 18 years in Arkansas and probably a decade

of trying to figure out how to communicate with people I really disagreed with. And I think that, yeah, that plus being a character were a nice little lesson for how to communicate with people. You mentioned earlier that part of what was attractive to so many young people about these Birds Aren't Real chapters is that it was a bit of an escape from sort of how crazy the world is and it's a fun community. Young people, Gen Z, are of course like the most disaffected with politics right now, from politics right now, disengaged. You did something pretty rare, which is really organize and galvanize young people, even if you didn't set out intending to do that.

Do you see lessons there for political organizers, for communities to exist like that, that are fun, but also have a sort of larger political purpose? I really, really do. And that's what I'm excited about right now, especially. I've had some great people, I guess, reach out over the course of Birds Aren't Real and afterward just saying, okay, how do you mobilize young people for something? Because there's a lot going on. And why is none of it hitting? That was kind of the question. Why is none of it hitting? There's a lot to get

emotional about. There's a lot to get emotional about. There's a lot to get charged up about. People are emotional. People want to do something. So why is it so hard to get people to show up? And I really think it's a messaging issue. You know, I think there needs to be a new writer's room. I think that's something I've had some fun with in New York since I moved here about a year and a half ago.

I have a dear friend here named Chi Osei, who is a councilman in Brooklyn over Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights. The youngest person ever elected in the state of New York in history. He's 26 right now. And he talks just like this. He's a person. And it gives me a lot of hope for the future seeing how he communicates and together him and i as director of communications elijah our friend adam come together to figure out how do we mobilize people in brooklyn young people for things that

we all actually care about and affect us. For instance, there was the rent board guidelines meeting last year where they were trying to raise the limit to 16% for how high landlords could bump rent. A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck. That would literally dehouse a lot of people. A lot of people could no longer continue living in their communities. So I worked with she on applying the birds aren't real rally strategy and tactics and the messaging. And we ended up breaking the record, I think by 800 people for the amount of people who showed up to the rent board guidelines meeting to show up and talk about this to go take the mic. Usually they try to hide it from the public. Usually it's only landlords that show up and, you know, they're, advocating for themselves. But with Chi, we worked on a video

series. We made some TikToks and thousands of people came out to the meeting, lying around the block all day long, talking into the mic. It ended up being bumped down from 16 to 4 percent uh wow and hopefully resulted when you say that you use the birds aren't real like strategy and tactics in this like how did that look in the tick tocks you made and some of the communications that you that you guys did were you was it was the actual birds't Real language? Or was it just like a... No, it wasn't actual Birds Aren't Real language. It was the concept of... I mean, I would recommend people

go check out Shio Sei on Instagram. He's doing this in a great way. A big part of it is gamifying and making the process personal and making people feel like their presence actually matters there. Because I think for many years, young people are told, like, this is the year we save democracy.

This is the year we save democracy. You can only say that so many times. You can only have young people go out and beg for something and then not have it work so many times. You can only promise people something so many times, you know. So I think that young people are really, really disaffected, so many times you can only promise people something so many times you know uh so i think that young people are really really disaffected which of course would happen you know if i go up to somebody and ask them for something 100 times they say they're going to give it to me and they

don't i'm probably no longer going to show up to ask them you know um so i think what really helped with this was letting people know like i mean with mean, with that, it was somewhat simple. I mean, I think a lot of the mobilization we've done is just letting people know how powerful they are. Really, I think the world of social media and American politics is a bit like a bug's life. Where if you think about it like that, there are way more ants than grasshoppers. And bear with me. In a very literal sense,

if you can get people to feel that feeling and know that, oh, if I show up, like we just told people, hey, usually 100 landlords show up here. If literally 1% of the people who see this video show up like we just told people hey usually a hundred landlords show up here if literally one percent of the people who see this video show up we can change rent in new york and literally save people from their houses we need a hundred people you know and then three thousand show up you know or it's really just about finding the pockets in the areas that they don't want you to see or are

unaware because i think the internet you're just shouting into this void all the time. It's not really doing anything. You continue watching the world burn and it's like, it's a powerless feeling. It's an awful feeling, you know, it's so depressing. But, and this is not as much of a legislation example, like the Rent Board Guidelines meeting. This is more of a fighting lunacy with lunacy example. But we did the same thing with Truth Social, Trump's social media. We had an idea. It's like I frequent Truth Social.

It's a great space of inspiration for what I do. And I saw one day that the trending tab, there's only like 500 people talking about each hashtag. So it's like, oh, wow, it only takes 500 people talking about something to blow it up on Truth Social. This is the only app Trump is obsessed with. So if you can get more than 500 people to share a hashtag, it's going right to the eyes of donald trump you know um at the time we were like what can we what hashtag can we do it's like make tiktoks and stuff and tell people to go flood true social and so we ended up landing on like flooding his own app with names of his opponents and making him feel really insecure and like if his own base was flipping on him. And he starts posting about it on True Social.

He's freaking out. He doesn't know what's going on. Because if it was like, you know, if you go on and just say, for instance, like, oh, lock him up, he's going to be like, oh, it's just libs. It doesn't matter, you know? But if you convince him that his own base is switching on him,

that's enough to cause the man to break down a bit. What ended up happening wasn't just a little, you know, prank on our boy Donnie like that. It ended up crashing the app. So it ended up the whole app went down because it got, I mean, it couldn't handle the traffic. It was flooded. The TikToks got millions of views. But I think that the common thread, and those are in Birds Not Real rallies, is just the sense of agency and that you can actually matter. I think that people are told so many times in this watered-down messaging year over year

that it'll matter, and they don't see it. So I think that just sparking that Bugs Life instinct in people in a tangible way and reality that's not in the digital void is really important. Agency, community, and shared reality. I feel like those are sort of like the building blocks to getting us out of this mess. We could really use you guys on the campaign trail

between now and November. So I hope you have some more fun stunts planned. And the book is out this week. It's called Birds Aren't Real, as it should be. And it's filled with all the lore that you guys came up with over the years that you did this. So everyone should go check it out. Peter McIndoo, thank you so much for joining Offline. This was really fun. Thanks so much. Bye. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher.

Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Mixed and edited by Jordan Cantor. Audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, and Reid Cherlin for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.