Reply All - #188 Into the Depths

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Inspired by @depthsofwikipedia, this week we dive deeper into three of our favorite weird Wikipedia pages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Replyul. I'm Emmanuel Jochi. And I'm Alex Goldman. And Alex, you and I are joined actually by a new producer. He's been working with us for the past couple months. Her name is Kim, Native Fame Peterson. Hello, Kim. Good job, Emmanuel. You pronounced that so well. Oh, good job unlike your last name.

Yeah. I wasn't even going to attempt it. I mean, I've said it in the credits, like several times now. That's true. So I am so excited to be here now because I wanted to talk to you guys about this one idea that I had for a thing that we could do on the show today. The idea comes from this social media account, and it's called Deps of Wikipedia, and I have spent the last few months just eating this thing up. And I like it so much because I know that Wikipedia can be really

dry and kind of like go on forever, but the person behind this particular account does all of this work to surface the most like obscure, strange, hidden gems in the Wikipedia universe. And I recently had the joy of talking to the person who made this. Okay, I want to start with a question that might be formal, but I like it, which is, can you introduce yourself? My name is Annie Rowderda. I am a 22-year-old, and I just graduated from the University of Michigan. and I post screenshots from Wikipedia on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, and the account is called Defts of Wikipedia.

So a couple of years ago when Annie was a sophomore in college and COVID hit, she was spending a lot of time at home going through Wikipedia and getting lost in the strangeness that is there. Was there like one particular thing that you came across on Wikipedia that, made you feel like I want to share this with the world? Like, do you remember what your first post was? Yeah, I was on an article basically about like brain-to-body ratios in the animal kingdom. And there was a little animal called the bony-eared ass fish. And it has the smallest brain-to-body ratio. So it's just really dumb.

And it's an ass fish. And it made me laugh. The things that Annie finds, it's like they all. all open doors into these weird little worlds. And so that's what I want us to do today. I want us to hang out in the depths of Wikipedia. So me and two other producers, Anna and Sonia, we have decided to take our favorite posts and go even deeper.

So today on Reply All, we have three stories for you. Cute aggression, the Pittsburgh toilet, and Guy Standing. That's after the break. back to the show. Up first, producer Sonia Dasani with cute aggression. When I saw that there's actually a Wikipedia article for something called cute aggression, I was immediately like, oh, I think my friend Marie has this. And just for context, Marie is the kind of person who we could be having the most intense conversation, like two-way street of trauma dumping, and then a corgi walks by. And she's completely out of commission.

So I called her up. Are you excited to hear what this is about? I'm honestly, like, more nervous than I should be. There's no reason to be nervous, but I am. What does the phrase cute aggression evoke for you? Oh, my God. It is both my religion, my burden, my obsession. Your pleasure, your pain.

I think probably for as long as I've been sentient, I've had the urge to absolutely drop kick cute things. I like squeeze my hands into a fist. I'm like, I need to punch something. So yes, Marie has cute aggression. And honestly, that explains so many bizarre things she said. There was this one night when we were at her apartment watching Charlie's Angels, the one with Lucy Lou, obviously.

I was snuggling with her cat, Jasper, and she kept saying she wanted to throw his stupid little body against the wall. I want to fucking roll him into a ball and punt him like a football. Like straight through the end zone. I regularly tell my cats that I want to crush them. And I don't actually, hopefully by this point in the story you've explained that it's not that I actually want to harm them. just that I'm experiencing an overwhelming amount of positiveness that will either come out in tears or in a misplaced emotional desire for aggression.

Now, at this point in the story, I should probably explain that it's not that Marie actually wants to harm them. It's just that she's experiencing an overwhelming amount of positiveness that will either come out in tears or a misplaced emotional desire for aggression. That's a distressing feeling. and happens to Marie a lot. I do think I have it worse than a lot of other people do. If I had to rate myself, I'd be like an 11 out of 10 on the QDaggression scale. Like, does it interfere with my everyday life?

Maybe a little bit. Why do you think you have it worse than most people? I don't know if I have it worse. I mean, I definitely have it worse than you, you know? Wow, drag me. I've never had anyone be so confused by my QD aggression. Like, every time I say something, you're like, that's fucked. Stop, dude. That's not true. I understand cute aggression. It is true. I fundamentally do not understand cute aggression. When I see a corgi on the street, I register its cuteness and then I just keep walking. My hands relaxed by my side, jaw, looses a goose. So now I'm just wondering what's going on in Marie's brain that makes her want to drop kick her cats. So I called up Dr. Oriana Aragon. Hello. How are you?

Good. How are you doing? She is the person who, just seven years ago, published the first ever scientific paper on cute aggression. It hadn't been recognized in the literature and never been empirically investigated. And yes, I did think of the term cute aggression. It's a great phrase. I didn't know it would take off like it did. I really didn't. She first noticed cute aggression a decade ago in 2012. She was watching Conan. The guest was this actress named Leslie Bibb. Oh, that baby's so cute. I just want to punch it in the face. As a grad student studying emotions and how people express them,

Oriana had a million questions. Is this a special case? Does it only happen with cuteness? So she started studying cute aggression in the lab. She brought in volunteers. And I hopped them up on baby photos. And then I know. It was actually really fun to run.

She showed people photos of animal babies, human babies, human babies Photoshop to make them extra cute. Large foreheads, big eyes, small mouths, big cheeks. And then she measured how people responded, with brain scans, questionnaires, and even bubble wrap. Like, how many bubbles does a person pop when they see a computer-manipulated super cute baby? And she's convinced that not only is cute aggression real, but it actually serves a useful function for people like Marie who tend to get all can't breathe, can't think, conked out by cuteness.

The people who were like, er, you know, I want to pinch it. Those people come back down off that baby high, you know, faster than the people who didn't. Just having that aggression helps you come down off the baby high. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Baby high. People get ripped on baby. That is weird to me, and it gets even weirder. Oriana said that sometimes a baby high makes the brain produce another contradictory seeming emotion, cute sadness. The corners of their mouth will go completely down and they'll go, oh.

Oh, yeah. Like they're like so sad. Right. And even their forehead wrinkles, like it was just like they just saw the most horrible thing in there. So if you snapshot that and you show it to people and you say, what are they feeling? They're like, oh, they're overwhelmingly sad right now. It's like, no, they saw a cute. baby. Okay, so at this point, I'm loki spiraling because, like, duh, of course, I've seen people do

cute sadness, even done it myself, but I didn't realize that it's supposed to be an involuntary reflex. I thought we were all doing it on purpose, you know, making a conscious choice to communicate. Yes, I see and acknowledge that your baby is, in fact, cute. Oriana's saying, no, no, no, for other people, it's happening involuntarily. Their brains are trying to emotionally, regulate because they literally cannot function due to the cuteness. And even though it seems like cute aggression and cute sadness are just random levers that the brain is panic pulling, Oriana thinks that each of them is actually signaling something distinct to whoever is observing. So imagine you're walking down the street with something conventionally cute, like, I don't know,

a human baby, and someone comes up and smiles. I know that there's positive. within their smile. I know they're probably going to treat my baby well. And there's a really nice social signal. But cute aggression and cute sadness are better signals. Let's say someone comes up and they're all like, oh my God, I just want to pinch your baby's trippy little cheeks. That's giving extra information that you want to be extra sort of playful

and rev that baby up. And they want to sort of roughhouse with my baby. Which maybe you're like, no thanks. It's not rev up time. It's actually nap time. But if someone comes up and they're like, aw, what a cute baby, in kind of a sad way, they like your baby too, but they're calmer

and they're probably not going to mess up the nap. You just want to see it and sort of marinate in the cuteness. And that's what our research shows. And so it might be the reason why it's been evolutionarily preserved because it's just a really good signal. The smile doesn't deliver the extra information of how you'll interact with the baby. The smile is actually the poker phase. in all of these instances.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's giving less information. So cute aggression, says Oriana. It's a societal glue, a communication tool, one that I personally have no use for, which is why I was so shocked to learn that 60 fucking percent of the population experiences it. Statistically speaking, you, you sick freak listening to this right now, you probably do too. And Oriana was pretty surprised too. Once she started looking into it and poking around, she discovered that people all over the world

had already named acute aggression in their own languages. In Indonesia, they say Gamas. In the Philippines, they call it Gigil. In Guatemala, they actually just call it the thing. Like, that puppy gives me the thing. It feels like I'm on this lonely island, surrounded by a turbulent sea of cute. cute aggressors. And I like it here. I just think it's more relaxing this way. But it might not last.

Because a couple weeks ago, something happened that made me realize that nobody, not even me, is totally immune to cutaggression. Let me explain. When I first started working on this story, I was talking about it with my editor, Damiano Marquetti. And like, Qigression is very not Damiano. He's a fellow inhabitant on my island of composure. He's famously loved. even frustratingly so. Like, he's been described by colleagues of mine as possessing... Equanimity to the extent of, like, full dissociation. And serenity in the face of brewing conflict.

I call him flowy Damiano. He's always just trying to smooth the waters, I feel. But a couple weeks ago, Damiano messaged me that he hasn't been able to stop thinking about our conversation about this story. Because, at 32 years of age, Damiano has fallen prey to cute aggression. I asked him if I could interview him for this story. He said, and this is a direct quote,

Oh, hell no. Are you recording me? Okay. What? Ready? Well, you want me to just talk? I'll ask you some questions. Well, I was, here, I'll just tell you.

I'll just tell you. It was just like, okay, you told me about the cute aggression thing. I don't know. All of this is so humiliating. I don't know why, but. I'm just like, oh, God. Oh. All right.

I'll say it. Damiano's been feeling a lot of cute aggression lately for his girlfriend. I'm not like an extremely like cutesy person. You know, like some couples are like baby way being everything. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Like that's not me. But these last few weeks, it's like his insides have turned to mush

and he's leaking love and tenderness from every single poor in his. his body. He's way past baby way being. And somehow it's still not enough. There's like an itch you can't scratch. That's what I feel like I have now. It's like the roof. Like you know when like the roof of your mouth is itchy? And like I have to just like take it to keep taking it to new extremes like this morning. I went up to her and I was like, you're just so fucking cute. Like I just want to like I want to peel your skin like a banana. And I want to like eat the insides like a like a like a like a, like a, a flesh of a banana. And I was like, you're fucking weird.

And I say shit's like that to her all the time. That's evocative. And I feel like something's wrong with my brain. Yeah, it's called hormones. See, Damiano's girlfriend is pregnant. And he said that's the only thing he can think of that would have triggered these, quite honestly, deranged feelings. On a scale of like one to peeling skin like a banana,

where were you on the acute aggression scale pre-pregnancy? I was like a two, man. I feel like her being pregnant has activated. Like, she has released some, like, feramode into the environment that we live in that has just, like, turned me into a simpering, sloppy mess. My girlfriend, like, calls me a simp now. She's like, you are a fucking simp. A simp for her or for your baby. For her. For her. Okay. I just follow her around the house. Like, I want to core you like an apple. Even though to me all of this just sounds really exhausting, Damiano was like, well, it's not bad. It's kind of like when a 16-year-old is caught up in the turmoil of a debilitating crush. You feel like a teenager is what you're saying.

A little bit. I think it's nice. I think any time that you get to feel like a teenager as an adult is great. It's great, right? And you should savor that for sure. Yeah. And as you like get older, your feelings just get like a lot more tempered and like the dark stuff is darker. and the light stuff is less light, you know?

Do you know what I mean? Can you embarrass yourself now? Because I've embarrassed myself. I would have chosen death over admitting this to Damiano in that moment, but listening to him describe those feelings made me a little jealous. Like, maybe I'm missing out on something great. Because I don't actually think his brain is malfunctioning. It just kind of seems like he's about to start an exciting new phase of life

and he's actually getting to indulge in every ounce of that excitement. And so maybe it's actually very beautiful and correct that Damiano is so overwhelmed by tenderness for the mother of his unborn child that he wants to, quote, crawl under her skin like a worm you get in the river and kill her. But in a cute way. After the break, more from the depths. Welcome back to the show. Next up, producer Anna Foley with the Pittsburgh Toilet. If you've ever used a Pittsburgh toilet, and I mean this with 100% sincerity, you are brave.

Because a Pittsburgh toilet is a toilet installed in the basement of a home that has no wall surrounding it, no door. It just sits completely exposed to the vast expanse of the basement. So say nature calls and you go to use your Pittsburgh toilet. You're sitting there and you're just trying to let nature run its course. And absolutely anybody, your mom, your cousin, your nosy neighbor who somehow has a key to your home, can just open the door to your basement and see everything. I mean, come on now, it is not just my southern prudery talking here. That is literally a nightmare.

Why would anybody in their right mind choose to install one of these in their homes, let alone use it? I had never heard of this horrifying toilet until I came across the depths of Wikipedia entry for it, which was odd for me personally. My dad's whole family is from Pittsburgh. I used to visit there all the time. I know about Permanthes and the parogi run at PNC Park and the horrible merge lane on Fort Pitt Bridge. So why have I never heard of the... Pittsburgh toilet. Dad? Hello. Hey. Can you hear me? Come, I can't see you. I can't see you. I call, I called you

FaceTime audio. I just, I FaceTime audio do you. That's crazy. It's not crazy. If you want to pick the least likely way to get a hold of me, that would be it. I figured my dad, born and raised there, could tell me about the Pittsburgh toilet. But when I asked, did Uma and Papa have one in the house that I went to when I was a kid? No. And I never had one. We had basements in both of the houses that they had in Pittsburgh, and we never had one. Any basement that I can think of that I was in in like high school and whatnot, there was no toilet.

So I was a little bit surprised that it had a name. Uh-huh. And it was a name of the place you grew up and had never seen one before? I've never heard anybody call a toilet in the basement, a Pittsburgh toilet. I was not expecting that. Like, are Pittsburgh toilets more lower than reality at this point? So I decided to call the one person I know who might know Pittsburgh better than my dad. Hello?

Hi, Joe. Can you hear me now? Yeah, I can hear you. Good. My friend Joe from college. I tell him. there's a thing that I need to ask him. That I think could really help me understand this, which is the Pittsburgh toilet.

Let's go. Okay. Okay, so you know what it is. I know what it is. What is your first memory of one? I want to say it was high school. Okay. It was high school and it was, I can't recall the person's house, but it was someone was having a party.

and there was a toilet there in the basement. And so, yeah, it was just, you know, wall-to-wall high schoolers. And a toilet. And a toilet. No one was using it, thank God. We all had the common decency among us that we knew that was the line we weren't going to cross. I guess I have to ask, though, have you ever used a Pittsburgh toilet? I have not.

Every time I run into one, I'm with a group of people. Do I lose points? Am I penalized for that? Joe does lose points in this particular assignment. I think he scores a solid C. Like, yes, he helped me confirm that Pittsburgh toilets do exist to this day, but he can't speak to the experience of using one. So I asked Joe, is there anybody you know who might have a Pittsburgh toilet? Probably my brother's friend. His name is John Baylog.

Okay. John, Joe told me, is what they call a yinzer. A lifelong, died in the wool, never missed a fish fry during Lent in his life lover of Pittsburgh. Did a couple of summers selling beers at PNC Park during Pirates games. He's got a Turner's Tea sticker on the back of his car. What does that mean? Turner's Tea is a local brand of ice tea made in Pittsburgh. Yeah. I think in the past couple of years it started to be marketed as Yinser Fuel. As a matter of fact.

John was at home when I talked to him. His new home, actually. He just bought it from his grandma, and he was really excited about it. Before you bought it, can you describe it for me? Like, what did it look like? How did she decorate it? Kind of paint me a picture? Well, luckily, I don't need to paint it because it still looks like it.

He showed me the living room, floor-to-ceiling fake wood. She has panel walls. Peak 80s. The kitchen backslash that looked like it was painted like brick. So I'm thinking about what I'm going to do with all that. And then the basement. So I just walked out. on these stairs here.

Okay. Pretty narrow. Very steep. Yep. It's unfinished. Uh-huh. Okay. Nothing's really ever been done to it. Here's the chimney that goes through the house.

We actually used to, like, ride our bikes around this chimney growing up. Yeah. And there's the toilet, too. Oh, my God. There's the Pittsburgh toilet. Oh, my God. The toilet was wedged in the corner of the basement, up against a cinder block wall right next to John's half-packed moving boxes. It was sitting on its own pedestal of poured

concrete and directly faced the door to John's backyard. Honestly, aesthetically, it fit in. And you have toilet paper down there too, very dignified. Yeah, exactly. No like shower curtain or anything. I mean, back in the day, what people would do was, you know, they could park their car out in that garage back there, right? If they were a mill worker or whatnot, And I still do this. Like, if I am dirty outside, I will walk directly down into here. And I can go to the slop sink and clean up. Yeah.

Where I have a drain down here. Uh-huh. And I can go to the bathroom, too, without really having to go back upstairs or worrying about dirtying, you know, like, dirtying up my one toilet upstairs. So you've used your Pittsburgh toilet. It's not just for show. No, it is not for show. Definitely not for show. John does actually use his Pittsburgh toilet. He's fearless. But weirdly, the more I looked into it, I learned that Pittsburgh toilets weren't really meant to be used at all, at least not as actual toilets. They were installed as sort of an overflow valve to deal with fickle sewage systems. By having a toilet in the lowest part of your house, it meant that if there was a sewage overflow, it went to your basement, not into your nice, have company over bathroom upstairs.

Lots of cities all over the Northeast had them, but Pittsburgh is the place where these toilets stuck. It's the place where they grew from a plumbing solution to a legend, the one John just told me about, the one about the millworkers. I've also heard it about steel workers, coal miners, all of the people who, for a lot of Pittsburgh's history, were the lifeblood of the place. Those people, they've mostly disappeared. But in a lot of ways, Pittsburgh is still strangely frozen in time, more than anywhere else I've been in the U.S. Whenever my family goes up there, my dad takes us on a driving tour of his neighborhood.

And it's sweet. I get to see everything the way that he saw it when he was a kid. His old street. The house that I grew up in, the elementary school I went to. His first job. Cool Springs driving range. I didn't know.

You worked at a driving range? I worked at a driving range. What did you do? I picked up golf balls. I was too young to work at night. You just feel closer to history there. Whenever I'm always walking around going, oh, look, there's that and there's that, everything. That's where I grew up.

And you can see that history everywhere, like even in the toilet that's sitting all by itself in the middle of the basement. In its own way, it's beautiful. And now, Kim Nettervain Peterson. with Guy Standing. So the post that I got interested in is about this page on Wikipedia for someone whose name is Guy standing.

First name Guy, last name, standing. And in 2014, the main picture on Guy's Wikipedia page was of him in a beige blazer, powder blue polo, and he is sitting in a chair. And someone saw this

and decided to change the caption of his Wikipedia picture so that it says, guy standing, sitting. A tiny joke, but big enough apparently to start a battle on his Wikipedia page. For seven years now,

editors have removed the joke saying it has no place here, and Vandals put it back saying, yes, it does. A screenshot of the joke went viral, throwing way more fuel in the fire. I love it because it's like you're seeing the best of Wikipedia,

this careful structure that makes this huge crowdsource encyclopedia, work at all, except it's fritzing out on the silliest possible slice of it. Kind of like watching a roombug get caught in the corner of the living room. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about the joke, except arguably the one person that actually mattered. Guy standing. I wanted to know what he thought of the joke.

So I decided to reach out to him, but as soon as I sat down and went just the tiniest bit deeper on who he is, I know this sounds absurd. but I started feeling really nervous. Guy Standing, it turns out, is no joke. Guy Standing is probably the most serious man this could have possibly happened to. I'm Zany Mitt and Beddows from The Economist. With me is Guy Standing.

For many of you, Guy needs no introduction, but for those who don't know his work, Guy is one of the leading advocates for basic income worldwide. Guy Standing is 74 years old, a professor at a university, in London, a senior official and consultant to the UN. Co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network and leading expert in labor economics. But he's also, I think, and forgive me, I think he's become the moral conscience, or one of the moral consciences of the wef. Guy is best known for this term he coined, the precariet,

to describe the countless people who live on the edge of poverty. And he has spent his entire life trying to make their lives better. So yeah, I'm feeling pretty fucking sheepish. When I send him that email and I tell him that I'd like to talk about his Wikipedia page, that I imagine he knows what I'm referring to. I am reaching right past all of the things that he cares about and reaching straight for the fluff. And Guy Wright's back and says he'll talk. Hello.

Can you hear me? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yep, I can. Okay. Clearly. Will you just introduce yourself? Yeah, kind of what's your name?

Okay, I'm Guy Standing. I've been a professor of economics at various universities, and I, many years ago, founded the Basic Income Earth Network, where we'd be piloting basic income, promoting basic income around the world. My main books are about rentier capitalism, about the growth of the precariat as a new class in the world and about economic insecurities that are multiplying. So that's a brief overview. So I find this stuff really interesting. And I feel, yeah, very kind of silly and to be honest, a little embarrassed because of all of the very important work that you do, the thing that I reached out to you about is perhaps the dumbest thing on your very extensive Wikipedia page.

I'm longing to hear what it is. I will tell you about it at a moment. And so I just want to ask, how familiar are you with that page and with like the joke around it? Is it something that like takes up space in your life? I can honestly say I've never looked at it. Incredible. I was told by somebody that it exists. Okay. But I've never looked at it.

Okay. And I'm not going to do so after this conversation either. But, but what is the joke? We'll get into the joke. Probably much more than you want to. So essentially, okay, so the place that I want to start is that in 2016, a meme went viral, right? So a little, you know, screenshot of a part of your Wikipedia page, and it was of this joke. And I think what I want to do is maybe tell you both what that screenshot is and then read you the discussion.

that happened on the talk page. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. And what I would love to know by the end of it is whether or not you think that the joke should be there. My goodness. Okay, so the first time the joke shows up on your discussion page is in February of 2015. Someone makes a request to edit the caption of your profile picture,

which is you reclining in some chairs at a conference, and they want the caption to say, guy standing, sitting. And it was rejected. And then a few years later, somebody says, reinstate the sitting photo. Humor in education is a well-known and endorsed method of increasing learning. And then they cite an article from the American Psychological Association,

that's the APA to support them. Wow. And then somebody says, Wikipedia is meant to be form. and factual, not funny or opinionated. And then somebody says, yes, but it is factual. It's in fact more factual than the current revision because the man is in fact sitting.

And then somebody says, no, we don't caption the lead image on Stephen Hawking, quote, Hawking sitting in the 1980s because that would be stupid. And then somebody says, of course you don't, because Stephen Hawking was pretty much always sitting. Guys standing on the other hand, dot, dot, dot. So I think the question that I have to ask you is, where do you stand on this? My goodness. What a waste of people's time, I'd have thought. It's sad.

So why do you say that? Well, I think one of the sad things about social media and that goes to Wikipedia is how it superficializes connectivity and how trivializes our use of time. And it plays not in this particular case, or it's a joke that I don't think is particularly funny. It's a schoolboy-level joke playing on your name and playing games with that. I've had to put up with that all the whole of my life. You know, the funniest one is that when I make love to a woman, there's always a misunderstanding.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. That one I much prefer. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, if I make love to a young woman, right, there is a misunderstanding. Got it? Because a misunderstanding, you're playing on the word misunderstanding, you see. So a miss, a miss being a woman. Oh, my God, oh my God.

You got it now? You got it now. I mean, you know, I can. Okay. No, I mean, that's, to me. An unmarried young woman. It's hardly amusing. Yeah, well, exactly.

Exactly. But there are a lot of people who have far worse names than mine for being teased. I just feel that we are at a moment when all of us should be devoting as much time as possible to getting a better world. We're talking with a background of a disgusting war. And as it happens, we're talking on the same day that we've heard that the Supreme Court in the United States is going to throw out Roe versus Wade, which is a terrible step back. And that's what we're really concerned about.

And when you see Wikipedia, which is a comment, and you see that, you see that. that process being subject to trivialization, then I find, you know, my humor is stretched, but no, the joke is fine. I don't mind the joke if it amuses people. But I hope that in that it draws people's attention to the serious messages that I've been trying to convey through my work. And if it's a little aside that draws people to smile, that's great. Because we need a little humor in our lives, especially at this horrible time. Okay. Okay. Well, thank you, thank you for humoring me on all of that. And the good thing is, we're both smiling at the end of the discussion. So that's okay. Yeah, so I would love to take also the time and the fact that we are here to talk about

some of the ideas on your page. If there's one thing that you would want people to learn from stopping by your page for this kind of useless thing, what would that be? Without a doubt, I would want them to understand that a basic income as a right of every individual in every society is a realistic possibility. It should be a source of joy. It should be a source of joy. that we could find the means to make sure that every man, every woman, every child, each month can get a modest amount of income as a right with each to meet their basic needs. And I just hope that your generation, if you like, are going to take this up. And if you can mix that with good humor, good,

company, good sex, good whatever else you want, that's great. But we must take a different approach. And that, I think, is the key message I want to give you and I want all of us to give to each other. Today's episode of Apply All was produced by me, Kim Nader Fain Peterson, Sonia Desani, Anna Foley, and Fia Bennett. It was edited by Tim Howard. This episode also wouldn't have happened without the rest of the reply-all team. Emmanuel Jochi, Alex Goldman, Damiano Marquetti, Lisa Wang, Bethel Hobte, and Aaron Edwards. Our intern is Sam Gubauer.

This episode was mixed by Sam Baer, with fact-checking by Isabel Cristo, and music and sound design by Luke Williams. Additional music by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, Mariano Romano, and Tim Howard. Special thanks to Kalila Holt, Catherine Stavreflis, Michelle Harris, Sadia Ali,

Samantha Craby, and the Wikipedia editor known as Formal Dude. Also, Damiano's baby is here. Welcome to the world, teeny tiny person. And thank you for listening.