Pirate Wires - TikTok Loves Hamas, Pumpkin Spice Misogyny | Pirate Wires Podcast #21 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

EPISODE 21: This week, the Pirate Wires crew joins Solana to talk about why opinion on Israel-Palestine is so one-sided on TikTok, the "violent history" of the pumpkin spice latte, the viral Halloween candy incident, anchor babies, and Australia. Featuring Mike Solana , Brandon Gorrell, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.theindustry.pw/p/tiktok-dancing-for-hamas https://www.piratewires.com/p/history-pumpkin-spice-latte Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Brandon Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandongorrell River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:45 - Welcome Back To The Pod! 01:15 - Tiktok is Overwhelmingly One-Sided On Israel-Palestine 32:45 - Fall Vibes! Pumpkin Spice Latte Is Dangerous According To WaPo - Paying Homage To The Basic B*tch 39:25 - Viral Halloween Candy Video - The Right Blames It On Immigration 44:55 - Anchor Babies - This New Insane Trend To Have Babies In Different Country In Order To Obtain A Passport 52:20 - Australia Was Insane During C*vid 56:28 - See You Next Week! Pirate Wires Podcast Every Friday!

There is a dramatic skew, an overwhelming majority of the TikToks are in support of Palestine or highly critical of Israel. Young people 18 to 24 believe that the terrorist attacks on 10-7 were justified. If there is a terrorist attack in America tomorrow, are Zoomers celebrating on TikTok? Let's just take a pause from that for a minute. I want to talk about pumpkin spice lattes. She doesn't think too much about everything. She goes home.

She watches The Bachelor. She's happier than anybody working at the Washington Post. She's happier than me. Welcome back to the pod, guys. We have a wild kind of range of topics today. We're going to start with TikTok and get into sort of the, I don't know, bias on that platform, what might be accounting for it. Are the Chinese spying on us and controlling us or is it something else? be accounting for it. Are the Chinese spying on us and controlling us or is it something else? We've got a few kind of fall topics to break down. Let's just get into it. I want to start with, all right, TikTok. You're on TikTok. It is obvious that there is a tremendous bias on the platform in one sort of clown world direction.

I think, I don't know, maybe I don't know, you guys can kind of hit me up with your experience on the platform. My sense is always it's just that's the demographics. It's just young people and young people are sort of generally stupid and that's kind of what you get on TikTok. that's kind of what you get on TikTok. More recently, this week, there were a flurry of stories surrounding how Israel-Palestine was playing on TikTok. And there is a dramatic skew, an overwhelming majority of the TikToks are in support of Palestine or highly critical of Israel. Naturally, there is the question of, this is just TikTok. So this question always comes up. It's like, how much of this is authentic? What about these bot farms? I wrote a piece for the industry this week where Morris, was it, what was

the guy's name again? Jeff Morris. Jeff Morris. Thank you. So Jeff put a huge thread together where he kind of takes apart, not takes apart, where he sheds light on first the overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian perspective on TikTok. And then he suggests that a lot of this has to do with bot farms. And he says, I think his argument is like, the more it seems that people are supporting Palestine, the more people want to support Palestine to get attention online. I think I'm kind of like half there with him on this. I think that's just obviously true in terms of psychology and how social media works when there's a topic

that's getting a ton of attention. We, as I think people, naturally sort of try and understand what is the consensus position. And more often than not, we don't think through these things. We just adopt the consensus position. If that seems like Palestine, then maybe more people will be pro-Palestine. I don't think it has anything to do with bots. I think that actually the thing that no one really ever wants to talk about on these platforms, maybe they just haven't occurred to them, the demographics of these platforms.

on these platforms, maybe they just haven't occurred to them, the demographics of these platforms. We are speaking English and Americans are not the only people who speak English. And these companies are all, they exist all over the world on TikTok. So let's start with Twitter, actually, because everyone's blaming TikTok. But on Twitter, I was dogpiled over the, maybe a few days ago, by just like hundreds, if not thousands of Pakistanis. And it's like English speaking, Muslim, it's a Muslim majority country. Like 10% of them, I think speak, I believe it was 10%. I have to look at the numbers, speak English. Like this population online, it's just like, it's not American. We kind of assume that it is and we look around for a consensus american opinion but we're not really getting it this is what this is

what a global information landscape looks like on tiktok in particular it gets even crazier i looked up the numbers of sort of the most populous uh the largest populations on tiktok america is number one and i knew that It's over 100, maybe it might be close to like 120, 130 million. Indonesia is 100 million people on TikTok. That is another Muslim majority country. So I've been wondering just like how much of our perspective of this conversation online, not just on TikTok, but also on Twitter, also on Instagram, is actually being shaped by, not by even Americans. I mean, there are some Americans, but this is mostly, this is like a global conversation that's happening right now. And a lot of it is taking place in the English

language. So how much of it is really like the kids today are crazy, though we do have now some polling that suggests a slight majority of young people, 18 to 24, believe that the terrorist attacks on 10-7 were justified. Not that Palestine was right, but that the terrorist attacks on 10-7 were justified. But I don't know. Where are you guys on this in terms of the demographics? How much of a role do you think that plays in shaping discourse just generally? And how much of it is the CCP manipulating us from behind the curtain? Just as another matter of context, I just looked it up. There's literally 1.8 billion Muslims in the world and there's 16 million Jews in the world. So we've got like a massive differential just in terms of the populations that we're talking about right now.

Right. On this conversation that, and I sort of forget the population of Muslims. I think the more important thing is the population of English speakers and then where they exist in the world. So there are what, 330 million Americans. There are like 1.2 billion English speakers in the world. So automatically, like most of the conversation, if we're on English speaking platforms, it's not going to be an American conversation. It might look that way. It might seem that way to you because you're an American, I'm an American, and we just assume that everybody that we're talking to is American. But general it's not and then like how many of them uh you know have very strong positions on this shit uh that an american normally wouldn't yeah i mean i think if you're like a young person it's uh even though the

situation is not really analogous that like the actual situation of like what's happening isn't really analogous but the the way it feels online is very similar to like the om and 2020 like during the after the george floyd thing where it was like you feel obligated to say something and like everybody else is saying something everybody else is protesting so there's like this um sort of thing we were like well i better do something you know what i mean otherwise people are going to think that i'm that i like don't care about like dead palestinian children or dead black people or you know whatever the case may be. Or dead Jews, because there are plenty of people demanding that as well. I mean,

this is a weird... I think it feels equally maybe hysterical to the BLM stuff, but it's significantly different in that black Americans are a part of America, have been in America longer than most white Americans, right? The history of white and black America is inextricably linked. And this stuff was huge because it actually is an acutely American issue. It's ours. Palestine and Israel is truly not. There's some foreign policy piece of this where it's, oh, America did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, if you snapped your fingers and it vanished, it wouldn't affect America at all. So it really does feel like people are kind of like clunkily adopting something that a small minority of people in America care a lot about.

And then when you go online, there is this perception that you have to care about this. And again, I think I go back to the thing that is most interesting to me about this is that most people online are not American. So how much of that, and not just on this issue, I don't really, and just like a high level comment here, we're not the four of us. We're not here to solve Israel-Palestine. We don't really, and I just like a high level comment here. I don't, we're not the four of us. We're not here to solve Israel, Palestine. We don't cover Israel, Palestine. We don't know anything about Israel, Palestine.

Like I am interested in how these things are resonating at home and what it says about Americans. And when you look at sort of the way we react to things, I'm interested in how Americans are being influenced in different directions and perhaps why. But we're not going to solve Israel-Palestine. But on the other piece of it, why people are coming to these opinions and they're rapid and they're very intense, where else maybe is that breaking down for us? In what other dimensions might the foreign perspective perceived as the domestic perspective might, I don't know, confuse us or work in a way, in a manner against us and against our best interest? example, but just to sort of lend some data to the claim that young people are forming haphazard opinions on this conflict, that poll that is getting cited where a slight majority of young people think that the 10-7 attack was justified, I was looking at the data and their responses,

that same demographics responses to other questions that were asked are pretty incoherent, even in that context. Like that demographic was also the only age group that thought that law firms should refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas. And they... This is always the thing with polling, isn't it? If you dig down, if you ask like 10 questions, it gets really, really silly. Yeah. And they think that Israel, they do think that Israel has the right to defend itself. A majority think that Israel has the right to defend itself, uh, even with airstrikes on civilian areas, provided they provide, uh, warnings. So it's, you know, people

have been making a lot out of this, like 51% of young people are supporting young Americans are supporting Hamas. But I think that it really, what the data shows is that 51 of young people in america don't know what the fuck they think about any of this or more um higher and i think to me with my experience on tiktok that kind of that kind of validates what i've experienced on the app which is basically just that tiktok more than any other social media platform i've used, it kind of silos you in whatever world you choose to get into. And so, you know, for example, when I was learning German last year, I was, my whole TikTok feed was just like German grammar content. And I think that for me, it's difficult to say whether, like, I don't know if these American

teens are consuming content on TikTok that's like made by Pakistanis or Indonesians. My sense is that a lot of Americans are consuming content made by Americans. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, I think if you like it, if other people like what you're producing, that rockets it up the trends. So the more popular content generally, you get more of, everyone gets more of. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I just think that TikTok is kind of this chaos platform, essentially, where you can fall down

whatever rabbit hole you want. I do think, obviously, there's an element of Chinese propaganda because it's a Chinese company and the CCP like controls every Chinese company more or less directly and has, you know, absolute power to censor and whatever, get content off the platform. But I think that the actual user experience with TikTok to me seems much more chaotic than just, you know, these people are being brainwashed in a kind of straightforward way to, you know, believe either certain CCP beliefs or just accept a kind of majority opinion shaped by non-Americans. I think that TikTok is chaotic. And like what might happen, what might explain some of these poll results is like maybe these people were being fed a lot of content about the 10-7 attacks being justified by Palestinian grievances. And so they sort of rapidly formed an opinion on that.

But then they didn't think through any of the other contextualizing questions that they were subsequently asked in the poll and provided completely incoherent responses. completely incoherent responses. That's one way to reconcile how a majority can think that the attacks were justified and that people who support the attacks should not get hired by law firms. It's completely bizarre. That doesn't sound like that chaotic to me. That sounds, the way that you described it, especially your anecdote about learning German, makes me think or makes me more convinced that TikTok is an information super weapon. Like if you can funnel a specific type of content with precision to a person and they get addicted to it, there seems to be a lot of potential there to change people's minds on a massive scale. I mean, just imagine what happens when we are actually in a kinetic conflict with China over

Taiwan. What's happening on TikTok? I don't think there will be a TikTok. I mean, why would the CCP not? Yeah, I'll tell you what will happen with TikTok. Maybe TikTok gets banned. Shut down. Let's say it's not banned. Shut it down. Let's say we're at war with China and TikTok is still not banned. If we're at war with China and TikTok is still not banned, we deserve to lose at that point. I don't know.

Also, we're all dead because they have nuclear weapons, and so do we. I think TikTok is the least of our concerns of where it is. I don't think so. I don't think it's the least of our concerns. I'm actually think so. I don't think it's the least of our concerns. I'm actually... Yeah. So the real thing, I think this is maybe one of the really craze-making or craze-inducing elements of this entire Palestinian-Israeli conflict is it's not so much the attack. So the attack on 10-7 or anything that followed, but specifically though, it's October 7th. It's that terrorist attack is where everything begins. It's where the war reignites. That's where people, Americans,

are first tuning in. And when you look at that and people have such wildly different perspectives on what it means, that makes people, Americans at home, especially because it's sort of generational. So it's like older people looking at younger people thinking, holy fuck, what do you believe? And I think that is much worse to the average person who doesn't know anyone in Israel or Palestine. It's an abstract, horrible thing, but it's much more abstract than your younger cousin is, you know, saying Allah Akbar and shit and like out there waving Palestinian flags and celebration the day after the attacks. That is like, whoa, what is going on? And in the context of a war with China, I think I go back and forth on this. You know, there's a sort of meme right now. If there were a terrorist attack in America today,

Zoomers would be, you know, on TikTok dancing in celebration of it by Friday or let's say a few days from now. I think that's probably true for a lot of young people. as it is in this case, because in this case, things are sufficiently far away that you can abstract them into your easy little black-white divide, your oppressor-oppressed divide, your Western civilization versus whatever the fuck you would call the rest of the Muslim world divide. I would call it the Dark Ages, but that's a whole other conversation. I think it's easy to do that. If it was here, if it's New York City, I don't know. Maybe I just don't want to know. Maybe I just need to believe that if there were another September 11th, we would all be on the same page that it was bad. a Yale professor saying that like settlers weren't citizens or something like that. I mean, this was within hours and it came out. I mean, I think the discourse sort of interpreted that, I think rightfully so, that settlers, that word, colonizers, that word simply just referred to

white people for the most part. So I think on a terrorist attack on American soil, I don't see why you have any different of a reaction on Twitter and on TikTok than the one that we saw on October 7th. Maybe I'm just pessimistic. I'm hoping that you're pessimistic. I don't know. What are the residents? They crossed the Rubicon on october 7th in my opinion river and sojourner if there is a terrorist attack in america tomorrow next week are are zoomers celebrating on tiktok by like an islamist like uh full like al-qaeda style yeah i guess we got an american muslim terrorist i mean who else is going to be

dropping a nuke in new y City? A dirty bomb or something. It's another Islamicist. I can never fucking get the word out. My mouth will not work. Islamist? I can't pronounce it. So, terrorist. Praising Allah. Dirty bomb in New York

City. What are Zoomers saying about it next week? I don't know. You would have, like, you could find anybody on the internet who would say anything. I think there would be, it would be less, like, direct praise and more like what Bill Maher said after

9-11 and got lost a show for, which is like, oh, it's like the chickens coming home to roost, like that type of thing. Oh, yeah, there would be a lot of Glenn Greenwald sort of like well let's think about the reasons that they dropped a dirty bomb in new york it would be fucking river we would not i'm tolerating it in the palestine shit i would not be tolerating it bin laden was a cia asset it's a little you know what i mean so we got to think about long-term

consequences but no i mean i think there would i, I mean, it was in bad taste for Bill Maher to say that, like, right after 9-11. But, like, I mean, we did, like, we did not, like, think in the long term of, like, arming Islamists in the Middle East. Like, that probably, in retrospect, was a very bad idea. But, like, I think you'll see, you would see a lot more of that, a lot more of, like, oh, well, we should think about how we got here. a lot more of like, oh, well, we should think about how we got here, which is like, you know, to keep it classy, you wait a little, you wait for the smoke to clear from New York before you start thinking about like, what's the history that led us here? That is also different to give, you know, the Greenwalds and the Bill Maher directly following that, a little bit of credit that is significantly different than celebrating. Right. And most of the Palestinian flag waving,

which by the way, I've said this before, I don't like any flag waving in America. That's not an American flag, period. That's my rule about this. I don't want to see Israel flags. I don't want to see Palestinian flags. Someone was like, what about St. Patrick's Day? And I was like, you know what? I'm evolving on that issue. I think maybe shut it down. I don't want to see any other fucking country's flag, unless it's the Olympics. And and even then and you're in america and you're waving someone no get the fuck go home i don't want that here but on the i those to go back to the sort of like the bill maher of it all they were not actively celebrating most palestinian flag wavers are not celebrating there were people who were celebrating

a lot of them and that i think that is what like i understand i think being complicated i understand even if it annoys me and frustrates me that someone wants to jump up immediately following a brutal horrific attack and be like well there were reasons that this happened um but i i just very different than someone being like, hell yeah, BLM calling them freedom fighters with the fucking parachutes and shit like that. If that happened following an American terror attack, that feels like cultural endgame to me. How do you maintain a country if you have a significant number of people in your own country who are celebrating your own brutal attack? Sanjay, what is your perspective? Roughly similar as rivers? How many

zoomers do you think would be celebrating? I could imagine a vocal radical minority actually getting out and celebrating on the streets. I think that my take with zoomers and all the discourse about zoomers being radicalized is always that I think we're giving them way too much credit for being historically and politically literate. I think that a lot of people are basically just forming their opinions based on their friends' Instagram stories. And one thing I would add is also the majority of, well, 25% of American TikTok users are between the ages of 10 and 19. So it's like actually... What is that generation called? I don't know, actually.

God, I can't have another one that I have to worry about. Jesus Christ. Yeah, but I think that... I can't imagine that most Zoomers would be actively celebrating, but I do think that given how radical some of the the protests got during blm where you really had people uh saying that you know the entire enterprise of america was this like doomed racist state that had only contributed negative things to the world um i can see that group coming out again and if it and then if it becomes sort of

like fashionable um in a certain social circle, then I can see like those Zoomers joining the protest. I don't think it will be for coherent historical political reasons though. You mentioned most Zoomers, and it's funny, we give Zoomers too much credit or whatever. There's a meme going around. It's that Batman meme with like the Bane character with like the hands outstretched. And And it says boomers with misinformation from Facebook. And then the smaller guy is hand out stretch and says zoomers like full of misinformation from TikTok. They are, this is like a higher level thing. Boomers and zoomers to me are the same thing. They, um, they, they have similar impulses. They have similar like cultural, uh, when it comes to like, like When it comes to any kind of hot button political

issue, I feel like they're dividing in similar ways. But the real big funny one to me is technology, where we say that we have this idea that young people are always teaching older people about technology. That comes from millennials because there were so many computers everywhere all of a sudden and millennials in their teens were teaching their boomer parents how to plug shit in and turn things on. And we were learning and all the machines were different and it was like a very weird environment and we were all kind of like piecing it together as we went. Zoomers, they have that branding for some reason. I think because of the millennials, they have the branding. There's an assumption that... I have this assumption like, oh, I don't know how this stupid new app works. Let me ask a Zoomer. They have no idea. You guys have no idea.

You don't know how anything works. So it's a very... You guys are the same. The name is perfect. I love it. But on Instagram, we're learning what to think from our friends on Instagram. I think that's just human nature. I think that's how we all absorb information, which makes something like TikTok or Twitter in the wrong hands. If we're the malevolent actor actually aware of this fact and using it to drive narratives makes it potentially very, very powerful and very dangerous. In some ways, it's actually, I think, better that people are doing all this shit on the internet because, like, they're used... I mean, this phenomenon, like, exists to real life,

like, historically, where, like, people would be, like, in bars and they would be, like, reading about some news story where, like, someone from X ethnic group, like, killed someone from their ethnic group. And they were, like, everybody in the bar is just like, yeah, fuck them, let's kill them all. And they just, like, go burn down a neighborhood. Like, that's, like, the whole, like, history of, like, anti-Semitism in, like, the 19th century. It's like it happened in like to like the irish in various places as they're quick to remind you yeah but we're seeing black people in the south like you're saying you're making you're maybe hoping that it's only

happening online and that does if that were true i would agree that that would be better but it's not we just saw the mob in russia you know going after jews august and i mean it doesn't matter it's on twitter where did that happen where did they get those ideas where did they get excited about it where did they spread the information where did they all coordinate on on where to go that all happens online that's true you saw this throughout blm too i remember sitting in uh in my apartment while the riots were happening and the looting i would say let's say not say riots let's say there was looting specifically one day and i thought to myself like um let me go on on twitter and see what and back then it's this is the old days of twitter where

it's like curated topics and it was all very clearly pro blm i watched two different locations it was all very clearly pro BLM. I watched two different locations become a conversation in real time. One was Walnut Creek in San Francisco and one was Beverly Hills. And the question that was being asked again and again and again on Twitter was, why are we in our own neighborhoods? We should be in these neighborhoods. And that became a meme. And both of those locations became trending topics. Both of those trending topics led directly within six, eight hours to actual looting in the streets. And that was, I mean, one of my early... I found that just really fascinating, terrifying, and important. And I think that we're going to see that play out forever. Those are the real time, like when your emotions are really hot though, those are hard to

channel and hard to control, but they do already happen. So we do see the real world being impacted by the conversations we're having online. That's just the nature of society now, I would say. It's like they're the same. Internet life is real life. i get what you're saying i was just i'm just imagining like the type of zoomer who's like consuming like israel palestine tiktok constantly and i'm like they can't they can't even cook their own meals or they're gonna go do a lynching i don't i don't buy that americans in general low agency zoomers in particular i mean part of that is just they're young but like this is not a generation that seems to care very much about very much maybe it will change maybe palestine

is it maybe they this is like this is the future for zoomers go ahead sasha i was well i was just gonna say i mean they are in the few places where they have some control they are using it in tyrannical ways like they are actually in some cases harassing jews on college campuses and there's that viral video of like all these pro-palestine supporters uh cornering an israeli on on harvard's campus one of them was the law he was the editor of the law review it's crazy i would say like separate from the politics of it why does all of these people failed the marshmallow test like like even the posters being ripped down like you we don't even have to talk about like you know how do you feel about the posters going up what does that really mean should they be here what about people tearing it down we

should we can at least agree that that the act of tearing one down in front of a camera is extremely stupid like what possible like how how angry could you be and how satisfying could that possibly be that you want your face on camera doing it? It's crazy. I wonder how much of that in general is just reasonably smart people or borderline smart people looking at lots of very dumb people doing very dumb things and then getting scared that everybody is that dumb. I think maybe not everybody is that dumb. What's the marshmallow test? The marshmallow test is when you give a kid a marshmallow and you say, you can eat it now. That's all you get. But if you wait like five minutes or let's say 10 minutes, I'll give you another. You could extend it. It's like, oh, if you wait till tomorrow, I'll give you three or something. And your ability to pass the marshmallow test is to put off temporary pleasure for future gains.

And it correlates strongly with success, obviously. But it also correlates almost exactly with intelligence, like actual just raw IQ. Yeah. I don't know why they just don't put up images of palestinian people who have died or got yeah i mean that would be whatever like wouldn't that be the wouldn't that be a lot more palatable and useful yeah because i mean then you have the opportunity perhaps what maybe other people are going to tear those down and you have your own information weapon but to yeah to tear it down how do you not understand i wonder how much of this is also being lost in translation like is it a cultural thing that like i america is very i saw

these uh new yorkers uh i've seen this i saw two different videos of new yorkers one it's the person who tweeted it was jewish and said they were jewish i i have to believe them i couldn't really tell i just and then the other they specifically were not one was italian and was something else and they said this in the video um well they didn't say they were italian i think they someone called him lou and he sounded italian and i was like that dude's fine i'm from jersey that guy's italian don't rip that down you are doing something you're offending us yeah you are when you throw that on the floor you're later in the city in a minute i'm gonna litter the fucking floor with you so move the fuck on yeah he was like he was like i'm not a jew i'm not a jew he was like are you a jew and the guy was like i'm not

it was like it was so new york it was like that i was like that i know that guy that's that is lou from new york um but those in both of those videos uh you're they all just sounded like new yorkers to me and you're butting up against part of it is like no like I really am mad about this and the other part of it is like wait don't don't tell people what they can say or what they can put up or whatever there is a weird not a weird there is a slightly like um American knee-jerk reaction to that that is not shared by two groups of people one woke leftists and two Muslims this is is like, you can't draw famously, cannot draw a picture of Muhammad. That is like a huge no. We've seen this controversy

again and again and again from everything from Charlie Hebdo murder drama, in which I also remember people being like, yes, it's very bad that they died, but shouldn't you be respectful of other people's religions? And I remember it didn't south park was it south park that had the episode pulled down years ago this is like this is something that we know we know that uh culturally we are not on the same page when it comes to free expression i mean some of the people participating in these marches are not um and they maybe they're muslim but they they're clearly not devout like the two girls that you were talking about i think this is the case you're talking about new york ripping down the posters like i'm pretty sure those were lesbians they coded as like very lesbian to me they were

they're definitely not kajabis like no no it could have been middle eastern but i don't know but yeah both new yorker ones you had you had far in Middle Eastern looking guys who were pulling things down. But you're right. It's not just that. There are like Ryan and Workman we've talked about. She's not, to the best of my knowledge, Muslim. She's a- They.

Oh, no. Right. She's a they. I forgot who she was a they. She does not look like a they. That's a whole other conversation. I feel like if you want to come to me and ask me to call you a they you need to walk the walk like at least have a short haircut give me some wear it give me david bowie give me tilda swinton give me david this is bullshit how am i ever gonna guess that

you are just a cute girl i mean bloodthirsty yes but yeah the new york Times article about her calls her Mix Workman, which is the- No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not Ms., not Mr. Mix. I can't do it. I can't do it. This is where I draw the line. It's not the tearing down of the posters. It's like, I'm never going to call you Mix, and I am willing to ride over that.

I will not pass that marshmallow test. It's an anti-hero slur. Is it Mix, or is it like me or something? Is the X silent? I think it's mix, but yeah, I don't actually know. It would actually be perfect if they want you to pronounce it Ms,

but it's just an X spelling. That's classically what a leftist woke person would do to you. Anyway, we got to move on, man. I want to talk about two things. Let's let's get into Halloween-ish, fall, pumpkin spice. River, you just wrote a piece. We wanted to do this year, kind of like business history of this pumpkin spice phenomena. It is crazy. It came... This is such a weird thing to rock it off to, by the way. We're like Palestine and now it's like, let's just take a pause from

that for a minute. I want to talk about pumpkin spice lattes and i really do um this is a brand new phenomena it is not a classic american or any kind of uh whatever flavor um it's an entirely business concocted uh phenomena and i think that's fascinating how it could start as just that on a whim and become um as the was it the washington post reported an 800 billion dollar a year business river tell us a little bit about that yeah it's not 800 billion dollars a year but it is huge yeah correct it was 800 million which is wild because one commenter was like this girl really thought that pumpkin spice three percent of one day um that's one day yeah no uh yeah pumpkin spice lots are pumpkin spice as we know it today

is an incredibly new phenomenon it actually didn't really exist before 2003 when Starbucks debuted the pumpkin spice latte. Before that, all you had was pumpkin pie spice. That was sort of the closest equivalent. And that started being bottled by McCormick in the 1930s. But it was a very niche thing. It was something that your grandma bought to make pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. It wasn't this ubiquitous smell and taste that's in over like 300 products now, last I checked. So, it's, Starbucks created this product, or pumpkin spice lattes in 2003.

And my theory is that like, because it's something that you take with you it's like this mobile thing that people can smell and it smells sort of distinctive it became this sort of multi uh sense like sensation that people were like seeing and tasting and smelling and uh it just took over and now it's just how fall smells. There's pumpkin spice candles, there's pumpkin spice spam, there's pumpkin spice cat litter. Any product you can imagine,

there's pumpkin spice and it's all because of Starbucks in 2003. Not as the Washington Post said. September 11th, nobody then at that moment in history, which a lot of us can remember, knew what pumpkin spice lattes were. That's crazy. Pumpkin spice is fall. Starbucks created the taste of fall. Right. And yeah, it was all Starbucks. It had nothing to do with atrocities committed by the

Dutch East India Company in the 17th century in Asia, as the Washington Post suggested. Oh, wait, no, go off. Tell me, they refer to the history of pumpkin spice as violent. Yeah, the violent history of pumpkin spice. This is just like, they don't... It's not even pumpkin spice, it's just nutmeg. That's in a lot of shit. You know what I mean? Like, you see a... I mean, classically, when I i was in college the idea of pumpkin spice was um strongly associated with uh what we then a few years after that would refer to as a basic bitch and uh it was an actual like there was an archetype it was a white girl with ugg boots drinking a pumpkin spice latte um and she was seen as like kind of silly and ditzy or whatever else.

That is a woman who I have no strong feelings about other than now, actually, I guess I have a strongly favorable opinion. I think that she's funny. I think back then I was always sort of neutral about the basic bitch. The basic bitch for a certain kind of like Washington Post columnist is she, there's nothing more evil than this girl. Like they hate the basic bitch. And I think that the pumpkin spice thing is like, it's part of, we're not allowed to like anything. And it's like inevitably as pumpkin spice became not only, it was been popular forever, but now it is breached. The basic bitches have lost control. They don't own pumpkin spice anymore. You know, everyone is in on pumpkin spice. People just like it.

And once everyone likes something, like you're going to have that girl at the Washington Post who's got to find some way to make you feel bad about it. That's just what they exist. I think there's a lot of psychology there because the basic bitch drinking a pumpkin spice latte, she has a McMansion. She has a husband. She's probably, if she works, she's probably like a nurse. She probably has like a good, like fairly decent job, but she doesn't think too much

about everything. She goes home. She watches The Bachelor. She's happier than anybody working at the Washington Post. She's happier than me. And like, I think people envy that. The ideal is being rich, hot, and with a 95 to 100 IQ. If you can live like that, that is the ideal life.

And they know it. And this is why they're like, I don't know, you should feel bad about pumpkin spice because of Dutch imperialism. It's like, what are you talking about? They don't even have anything to do with me. I've never cared for the Dutch. Yeah, let us drink the latte. Yeah. You're right about the happiness thing too. And I think that the basic bitch has really

evolved over the years. I don't think that she's as unintelligent as you say. I know many, like, I think you can be basic and very, very smart or smart enough. I would say like, let's bump it up to like 120 IQ, 115 iq and you're you're like smart enough to know yoga is healthy so so this girl has evolved now she's wearing active wear she's going to yoga class um she is i think that she's she's not doing her finances but she's aware that they're she knows they're important and and she wants that taken care of and and i think that like that is yeah this this is i i feel a lot for her what i feel for karen i think that i think that a much smarter basic bitch could really ascend and be like um and there are different kinds of karen's you have your dark

karen's but like to be a good-hearted karen who just like socially polices make sure everything's copacetic in the in the neighborhood i i There's a connection there. I think that these people kind of keep the world moving. And yeah, I'm in support of her. Yeah. We need a girl named Ashley for president. Ashley. Her name is Ashley. I want to talk about this one because Pumpkin Spice has me thinking of obviously pumpkins, which has me thinking of jack-o'-lanterns. It was just Halloween. We were all kind of like, just, I think ticking off our halloween stories the crazy shit that we saw the ways that it was canceled weirdly like not that many costume cancellations i think people were distracted by the actually important things happening maybe in the middle east no one had the stomach to be

like why are you wearing an indian costume um they just seemed too stupid this year somehow but there was this one crazy viral video that I want to talk about where, um, on trick or treat night, you know, a family goes out or they just don't, they're, it's a little bit late. They don't feel like going out anymore and handing out candy. Uh, you, they, you might put a bowl of candy down and it says, take one. Um, and, uh, I would say that the idea of people taking more than one, at least as far as I can remember, that is something that was a risk and that you considered abhorrent.

And you were like, that's an evil person who would take more than one. It was this very strong sort of community policing moment. But it did happen. Lots of people just took one. We all saw a video in which a family bum-rushed a bucket and poured, like, get in. They're taking all the candy out. It's like three little bags. People lost their mind. I don't know. What do your guys take on leaving one out, on taking more than one? Is Western civilization collapsing? Is that what this is a sign of? I think i'm pretty sure i saw ain't colter blame it on immigration um what do you guys think well i mean i should just say like

i think the reason the video went so viral is that it's a family it looks like a mexican or central american family that has rushed this house that has a ring camera and it's like the moms seem to be the ones who are primarily taking the candy and stuffing it into uh their bags and the kids are like you know in the background taking a couple and then i think the dad comes back afterward to like make sure that they've gotten everything i didn't watch the whole video i did not know they came back that's yeah and and i mean the responses have been like pretty hysterical. From Turning Point USA, I think that they said, I'm looking for the exact quote, but it's something about how like this is what happens when we have open borders and like we're living in a low trust society now. And, you know, I think that's where the Ann Coulter comment comes from, is that like people are basically trying to draw a connection between this one Mexican family stealing a a bunch of like re-season and uh and what it means to be genetically mexican yeah and then like the erosion of a high trust society in america

um i tend to think it's a little bit of a stretch just because this kind of shit has always happened like there's always been the one you know asshole family or kid who just took a huge handful of candy from the nice older couple that left out the big bowl. But yeah, I mean. Yeah, it is. I was thinking, again, I do remember someone was like in rich neighborhoods, we don't have this. And it's still possible to have social trust. You just have to pay for it or something. And I was like, that's.

It's open. I don't like that. Most neighborhoods don't have that. I grew up in a middle-class or a slash working-class town in New Jersey. And Trick or Treat was awesome. And people really got along very well. And it was very nice. And still, it makes this beautiful... I mean, I loved Halloween. It was like a different world for me growing up. It felt like that. It felt like I had been transported into a parallel universe. I thought it was so exciting. It's different costumes and weird decorations. People would do their house. You could go into houses. There were mazes and stuff. It just felt cool. And everyone was trusting each other that your kids weren't going to be snatched or poisoned or something, even though we all had to watch those stupid videos in elementary school

every year, which I found out recently was all based on a single piece of misinformation from the New York Times many decades ago. Anyway, no one has ever gotten razor blades. No kid has ever been razor bladed yet, hopefully never on Halloweenlloween however even amidst that beautiful environment like sanjana you said that there was always one asshole um and it kind of only takes one because if you have one asshole who does it you you think to yourself man this bowl of candy is not safe it's not safe uh at all period it's like high level not safe uh even though it's not true you just have to take care of that one family um so like my thing is mom goes to jail and we can all live to trick or treat another day. Brandon thoughts on, uh, I mean, I think that video just turned into a particularly crappy

piece of right-wing propaganda for the most part. I think it's absolutely ridiculous to think that Mexicans are or whatever. I don't even know. Were they were they Mexicans? We have no idea. It just looks like sort of that they're like morally bankrupt. I know a lot of people that are from south of the border who have families and they're all beautiful, great, you know, highly ethical, tend to be more religious than the average American person. Yeah, would not do that.

So, I mean, it's just a good effective piece of right-wing propaganda. What I like for us all in this pod is we do all at least agree that taking more than one piece of candy is messed up. I agree with that. And that feels good. That feels like that's like a value alignment. And I feel good about that piece of value alignment. But speaking of immigration and I don't know, border hopping and anger babies. Well, no one's talking about it yet, but we're about to. River got me on a story of last week that I really wish I didn't know about because it drives me crazy this kind of

stuff um did not see it he pointed it out i was like holy shit tell us about anchor baby influencers river yeah so there's this uh australian influencer uh named shannon mckayla shannon mckayla she it's the most australian name ever a little bit uh she is an australian influencer she's sort of like into like crypto and like health nut stuff that's traditionally been her thing i've seen her a lot but recently she disclosed in a video that she had an anchor baby in costa rica and now she is selling some sort of like newsletter or something giving people tips on how you too can have an anchor baby in uh the country of your choice and it's like lists all the countries that have just solely uh citizenship uh what to do in the comments people are like you got to be careful because some

of them have a mandatory military service by 18 she was like oh yeah we checked for that so it's like you know she was like don't worry we for that so it's like you know she was like don't worry we picked a country where our child would have no obligations of citizenship don't worry and um the way she's spinning it is crazy um she says in the video more and more people in the west are searching for a plan b first of all you're still in the west you're in costa rica it's a catholic middle-class country um with an alternative passport you can always have an alternative place to go for protection in case anyone tries to restrict your freedom of movement you can choose the tax system you want to participate in and the more passports you collect the more opportunity you create for you and your family so like collecting passports like

pokemon just like just no loyalty to australia which i mean could you really blame her but like i don't know just the it feels like in stage consumerism where it's like you are buying your allegiances to a country like you're shopping around for countries it just feels gross to me it's like have some like pride in who you are where you come from i hope so i i want uh matt put up a map of what countries have uh birthright citizenship that's what it's called right birth birthright right so what is it what is an anchor baby i didn't even know it's not it's it's the new world so to back up a little bit what's happening here is like the new world north america and most south american countries have and there is a there are a couple else but very

few in the rest of the world have birthright citizenship so you go to a country you have a baby let's get you to america you're an australian you go to america you have a baby, let's say you go to America, you're an Australian, you go to America, you have a baby in America, that baby is an American citizen. Even if you're on vacation? That is seen, on vacation, it does not matter. The only way that it does matter is if you are a diplomat for another country, then it does not count. But if you're not, it does not matter how it happens. You come over here, you have a baby, that baby's an American citizen. That is seen as, so when you say something like, that's kind of a crazy rule and it shouldn't exist, Americans, American left typically loses their mind. They're like, this is a fucking sacred right. We could never get rid of it. No other countries in the rest

of the world, in the world, almost none do this because of shit like this. So you have this one piece that's... It's kind of antisocial to be collecting the passports where you have no intention of ever actually participating in the government or helping or participating in the society there or helping in any way. I think part of this does fall on us and our laws. I mean, why does this law, that's a crazy law. Like, why is that girl able to do that? That's just nuts to me. why does this law that's a crazy law like why is that girl able to do that that's just nuts to me well in america it's because uh it was a way to give freed slaves yes automatic citizenship um so it's in the constitution so you would have to like do a whole like change it like you have to

get two-thirds of the state to ratify it it would be like a really crazy process to get it removed but um in a lot of other countries like in costa rica i'm not uh sure but a lot of uh central and like south american countries modeled their government off of ours after they broke away from spain portugal whatever um but there's also just like in the new world you had a lot of people who were former subjects of like the crown you don't even really know who's there you know a lot of times and there's people you have immigrants coming from all over the place and you have native people who are there you have former slaves you have whatever and so it was just a way to be like okay everybody who was born here gets citizenship that way we don't have to like go through old archives and like figure out who's a citizen of

this brand new country so like it was a utilitarian thing that made sense at the time. But now it's being used for Australians to get extra passports, which is crazy. In the Australian, in slight defense of the nation of Australia, that's not mostly where our anchor babies are coming from. It's like border hopping and rich Chinese and Russians. That's a big industry too. You said that that that is something that i somehow had not occurred to me and is obviously a huge problem you cannot have

adversarial countries um you cannot have sit you could not have to be so easy to become a citizen uh of a country that you were in an adversarial relationship with that is just like obviously a risk down the road um or presently because this shit has existed forever so um i don't know what you guys yep oh and my there's miami actually where we live is like it's probably changed now because the iraq war there's more travel or the um ukraine war there's more travel restrictions now but for a long time Miami was like the go-to place for Russians and like other uh like families of like Eastern Europea like former Soviet oligarchs they would all come here on like a tourist visa rent a condo in Miami and just like wait to give birth and then they would give birth their baby has an American passport and then when the child

is 18 they can file um to bring their parents to america and then their americans can get or their parents can get citizenship so it's like a long game yeah shut it down is where i'm standing what about you guys what do you think about anchor babies um well i would say i have two thoughts on this the first one is that um this is something i mean i think it's morally reprehensible and this is something that does actually happen which the to do it to do it yeah the australians these australians going when they have no intention seemingly of like making active contributions to the economy of costa rica and raising their children there i just think it it's bizarre um it does happen even in countries where there isn't birthright citizenship though though, I'll say. In Southern Europe, a lot of these countries like Spain and Portugal have these golden visa programs that are mainly taken advantage of by wealthy Chinese and Russian oligarchs who have to pay, invest like half a million euros in real estate or something, and they put you on a path to citizenship.

And so they use it to get EU citizenship, which then gives them access to the free movement zone and that kind of thing. But what interests me more about the aesthetics of this Australian influencer going to Costa Rica is what she was saying about if your freedom of movement is ever restricted, which I think is very interesting because obviously Australia had some of the most restrictive COVID lockdowns in the world. And there's this kind of prepper dimension to these like influencers who are going to Costa Rica, I think is considered part of the global South. I mean, I agree that like it's, it's economically much more advanced than, um, some of its, its Central American neighbors. Um, but it's kind of bizarre to think of like these people from what we consider the first world going to mainly like South American countries, it seems like,

because they're not, I don't know about Australians going to like America to have anchor babies, but if they're going to Costa Rica or Argentina or something, it's like, there's some weird tacit admission of the fact that maybe the West is going to go to shit in their eyes. And so their children should take refuge in some politically irrelevant, in some contexts, country, and they'll be safer there, which I think is interesting in its own right. Yeah, there's an anxiety. I think it's interesting to bring up what happened in Australia. I was just reading a story about Australians having a hard time. Some Australians have lost their house because they have so many fines from the various COVID policies that went south in Australia. I think Americans, as bad as it was here, even we can't agree on how bad it was though i saw that what was her name brandon the ex-gawker woman um she was one of the co-founders of gawker they say she was like one of the first editors um he always says that i always forget her name she comes after me on twitter all the time um elizabeth elizabeth spires that right is that how you say her last name or spears yeah she was just saying there were no lockdowns. She was like, I lived in New York.

Let me tell you about lockdowns. They didn't exist. 70 to 80% of restaurants went out of business in LA. I mean- That's- Yes. You have people straight up looking you in the face now and saying, it never happened. And that is a whole other-

We could sit here and talk for an hour about the dynamics there, but as bad as it was in America, and now that we have to kind of deal with this sort of, I think because it was so bad, actually we have stuff like this where people are just like, no, it actually never happened. There were, there, there was no lockdowns. There was no loss of jobs. There was no loss of the business thing that didn't happen. The schools were not shut down. The statues were not smashed in the riots, right? Like none of those things happened. We maybe have to do that to even coexist with each other is we have to just pretend that it didn't happen because it's just, it was too crazy and too infuriating.

And it's just hard to forgive. Unspeakable, kind of. Yeah. Yeah. And so rather than beg for forgiveness, it's just like, let's just pretend we're memory holding it, I guess. Australia, as bad as it was here, way worse. I mean, you could not leave your neighborhood. That's- Oh, I was just going to say, it's always been crazy over there. I have an Australian friend who stays with me every summer and we were driving to new orleans last year the year before last and he was like i've noticed there's not any checks and i was like what do you mean he was like checks over people stop you on the road and like check like

breathalyze you and i was like what what kind of like a covid thing he was like no that's just what they do and i was like that's insane and he was like i guess it is kind of insane he thought they were gonna do it in it's what's really insane he thought they were gonna do it in new orleans where you have drive-through come get your purple drink in a drive-through and get sloshed on the road please yeah and i and i was like we kind of like started talking about it and he was like no like australia it's really shown in covid like we didn't think about how like it is a nanny state in every respect of the world. It's like they do have a good welfare state, but it's also like we give you all this shit and we expect something in return, which is basically like pretty basic freedoms.

And he was like, yeah, I mean, it's a country of like prisoners, but also like prison guards, which is the thing that everybody forgets. Yeah. I was like like damn damn so true well it was uh it was a great halloween for all of us i think we really learned something about pumpkin spice and palestine and the nation of australia uh cool i think that's it for this one we will catch you back here next week have a good one