Reply All - #58 Earth Pony

Episode Date: March 17, 2016

This week we learn the truth behind Carl Diggler, the internet's most successful election forecaster. And a special Yes Yes No featuring comedian/actor/podcaster Jason Mantzoukas. Further Listening Jason Mantzoukas' How Did This Get Made Podcast Further Reading Virgil on Twitter Felix on Twitter Columns by Carl Diggler Superforecasting The Good Judgment Project @SatelliteHigh's YesYesNo Tweet @RoyCalbeck's YesYesNo Tweet Sponsors Mailchimp Ministry of Supply Squarespace Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is just a programming note. If you are a regular Reply All listener, you probably know that there's usually a swear word or two in every episode. But even by those standards, this episode contains a lot of profanity. So if you're doing something like riding in the car with a child, you might want to cover their ears and just sort of scream at the top of your lungs until the episode's over. All right, here's the show. From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. Elections make me anxious.

I mean, I'm sure they make a lot of people anxious. but for me, it's just the fact that it's this huge event that has such massive repercussions and I have so little control over it. For the year leading up to election night, I pickle my brain in this brine of polling data and election forecasts and just worry incessantly about what's going to happen. On Election Night 2008, I was so stressed out that I had to turn off the election returns and instead chose to watch that movie Enchanted. You know, the Disney movie with Amy Adams?

The only things that in any way solve this anxiety are those election forecasting sites like 538. They feel like someone guiding me by the hand through a dark room. In the 2012 election, I found myself checking 538 every day just to watch those little lines

indicating the candidate's chances tick forward a tiny bit. And that year, when Nate Silver swept with his predictions on election night by calling every state correctly, I felt like, okay, I can finally relax because I know who to trust. This year, I have reached a new level of anxiety.

I mean, it's not like American elections are typically civil or orderly. But, God, this year. Then they said to me, what do you think of order voting? I said, I think it's great, but I don't think we go far enough. He can't move on. He called me a liar. They interrupted the whole time. To end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent,

and let's talk about the issues. This election is so completely unpredictable. Ideas that would have gotten people kicked out of Thanksgiving dinner are now being talked about as completely possible. And nobody saw any of this coming. Six months ago, all the forecasters were predicting the precise moment that Trump would drop out of the election. And a few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders was going to lose Michigan by 20 points.

Neither of those things happened. But there's this new guy. There's this new guy who I just started to follow, who actually seems like he knows what's going to happen. He predicted who'd come in first, second, third, and fourth among the Republicans in Iowa. He was calling Cruz in Idaho and Rubio in Minnesota when very few others were.

And as of this writing, he has an 84% success rate on his predictions. His presence has actually started calming me down a bit. His name is Carl Diggler, and his blog documents all the crazy things that he's done in the course of his political reporting. He writes a book, about how he went to Syria to report on the election campaign of Bashar al-Assad and how he was abducted by the Syrian government. He writes about how he was forced to renounce his American

citizenship on Russian state television. And last week, he agreed to talk to me. You said in your last column, actually, I love elections. What was it that, what is it that you love so much about them? Ah, you know, like the football player loves the big game. His equivalent in journalism, the other alpha jock, the political junk, reporter loves elections. I love the ceremony behind them. I love buying myself a big election cake that I can just tear into the night of the night of the caucuses and the primaries.

I love the I love the stump speeches. I love the predictions. I love just biting my fingernails while I watch the results come in. I love shoving in my rival's faces. You know, we are colleagues. We are members of the press, but there's a little competition there. On his blog, he refers to Colorado voters as bong water-soaked, Dr. Seuss hat-wearing toakers, and he writes almost as much about his grievances with family court as he does about the election.

So, honestly, this guy's pretty insufferable. But in his defense, he is the fictional creation of these two guys, Felix and Virgil. Hi, this is Virgil, Texas, internet cut up. Hi, this is Felix Spiderman. Felix is the voice of Carl, and both of them blog as Carl on the satirical websitecafe.com. Diggler is this composite character. He's a parody of punditry. But while he may be fake, his predictions are very real.

He's outperforming the very people he was meant to be ridiculing. People who Virgil describes like this. Hack, horse race, political riders, guys who obsessively follow elections but ultimately say nothing at all. You know, people who talk about airy concepts like momentum and expectations game. Carl doesn't bullshit people. He doesn't always hedge his bets and talk about, you know, oh, who's got the momentum or if this happens, this might happen. And, like, ultimately make no prediction.

Carl says, nope, here's who's going to win. And it's because these voters have these characteristics, which encourage them to be natural KSIC supporter. When Felix and Virgil use the word characteristics, they're talking about something very specific. They see the country through people's prejudices, and they think that you can understand our politics by assuming that everyone is racist and votes accordingly. Like a lot of people are like, oh, Idaho is Trump country. No, it's not.

They're not racist in the right way. Like, they're not, they're like, they don't, they're not racist against, like, the two main groups that Donald Trump is extremely racist against. And so, and they're already predisposed for, like, black helicopter, John Birch type shit. So, like, of course, they went to cruise, and we saw it coming. State polls predicted that Trump would win big in Idaho for months, but Felix and Virgil didn't believe it. The racial resentment that powers Trump's campaign, you see it more when communities undergo large population shifts. And you just don't have that in sparsely populated Idaho with a very, very small black population. These aren't whites who are threatened that black people or Latinos are coming to take their jobs.

They're whites who are just proud. to have a black friend. Talking about racial animus in such a stark, cynical way, makes me really uncomfortable. But it seems like it's getting them to the right answers. Or then, there's the case of Minnesota, where they just make these reckless, broad generalizations because there's no data to go from.

There was no polling. There was no polling. But I lived in Minnesota for three years. I grew up in the Midwest in general. So I'd like a pretty good insight. And people didn't know how to call it. And with a Republican side of things, it was like in crew, we, we spent three minutes on it. I thought about like every Republican I ever knew in Minnesota.

They were like a guy who always wears a fucking quarter zip fleece under a suit and tie and is, you know, just like he's a business conservative. And because he's Minnesota and he's like, oh, I, you know, Mr. Trump, I do not agree with you on your, on your characterization that you had relations with Ted Cruz's wife. and like, you know, just very, like, oh, you know, I don't know, I don't know about that. Oh, boy, you can't say that to Jeb. That is, that is just rude to Jeb. He's never done anything to you, buddy. And so, like, I was like, yeah, they're going to vote for Rubio. They're going to vote for Rubio because they're business conservatives.

And, like, they're fine with the idea of, like, bombing whatever country, but just, like, for the love of God, do not be impolite. And if you look at the results, Felix was dead right there. Twin Cities, Metro area delivered the votes from Arcoe and the Trump and Cruz split the rest of the state. Exactly. If Felix and Virgil sound dismissive of everyday Americans, they say that real pundits are much, much worse. A lot of people that write about politics, they do have complete contempt for the people that they write about. I remember Josh Barrow, he's a writer for Daily Beast, one of these fucking places. I remember he said once, like, oh, I'm flying over the middle of the country.

I guess this is where all the two broke girls viewers live. It's like, go fuck yourself. These are all the people that fight your dumb war. of conquest and vote for your fucking candidates and are the reason that you get to be, you get to live your life and like put on your little suit and fly around the country and say

things that are incorrect and cash six figure checks for no reason. And like this is finally year they're like no yeah fuck you back. Yeah they look down on people they patronize them they make up you know in inane bullshit ways of skewering the electorate like oh will SUV

mom's come out for Marco right my gut says yes. But it's weird because like some of the things that you guys talk about as being, like, reasons that you're able to correctly call difficult races like Minnesota, they have a similar timbre. That's reply all senior producer Tim Howard. You're saying, oh, well, because here, they're racist in this way. Here, they're racist in that way. I don't know. It's like, it's a weird thing because, like, there are totally people in a lot of these states who are going to hear stuff you say and think, fuck you, I'm not racist. Right. Well, I think, you know, that's a really interesting point. I, yeah, these people, like, they get insulted, denigrated shit on all the time.

I mean, I'm doing it right now. But, yeah, no, we don't just, like, come out and say, like, this asinine policy outcome of, like, forcibly deporting 12 million people and building wall and all this crap isn't motivated solely by racism. I mean, that's what it is. Carl's forecasting does the job. It calms me down. But Carl is the last guy I want holding my hand through the election. He writes stuff like, quote, the humanoid with a rat's face and a lizard's brain, Lawrence Lessig,

finally dropped out of the Democratic primaries. This is a guy who wears a sweater that doesn't even cover his belly. There's a photo of it. I've seen it. It's horrible to look at. How can this be a person who knows anything about anything, let alone the future of our country? So I got in touch with this guy named Dan Gardner. He's an expert on predictions.

He wrote a book called Super Forecasting, and I asked him about Felix and Virgil. I wanted to know if they were the real deal, if we should listen to them. And he says, well, there's no simple answer, but in some ways they remind him of this other really successful forecaster named Paul. You may recall that there was Paul the octopus. This isn't a nickname. Paul is an actual octopus.

There is a thing in germ. And they had two little boxes, and they would put the national flags of the two teams that were competing on the boxes, and they would put food in the boxes, in whichever box that Paul the octopus would go into, that was his prediction. Video of this is totally ridiculous. It's the clicking of camera shutters, the excited murmur of the gathered media, as an octopus slowly flops into a plastic box.

So, this German aquarium asked Paul to predict eight World Cup games. And Paul, the octopus, percent of the... Maybe version of the... Maybe Virgil and Felix are just a couple of lucky Octopi who are obsessed with racial prejudice. But if Carl is the oracle of American politics, Dan Gardner would be the got to ask. The book that Dan wrote, Super Forecasting, was based on this huge longitudinal project where people from all over the country were asked to predict world events by answering really hard questions. Questions like, will there be a new epidemic of mass killings in the Democratic Republic of Congo before January 1st?

And these people, by the way, were not experts on the DRC or really on any topics. But still, the study found something wild. One percent of the forecasters who are demonstrably excellent, and not just excellent once or twice, because that could be luck, but they're consistently excellent. They're excellent so often that you can be reasonably confident that we're looking at skill more than luck. And they were dubbed super... Super Forecasters.

Dan says that there are people that can forecast big, complex, geopolitical events, and they can do it better than government intelligence analysts, people who have access to classified documents. It sounds like magic. But these people walk among us. It's pharmacists and dentists and lawyers, and one guy was a former factory worker. There was one artist, a New York filmmaker.

Most of the things I was forecasting on, I knew nothing about. I didn't let my son. get intimidated by any questions. This is a super forecaster named Elaine Rich. She's a pharmacist, and this is from a video of her talking at the Wharton School at UPenn. One of my hobbies is oil painting. So I've learned in painting that sometimes just the tiny nuance here or there changes the

way the whole painting looks. And I think that's true in world events, too, and why you need a lot of different perspectives. So I'm wondering, are Felix and Virgil super forecasters? Can I trust them? And Dan says, all right, well, I know how to identify super forecasters. There's a couple traits that define them. Super forecasters don't claim to know how things will shake out if they don't know the subject all that well.

He gave me an example. One of the people that we profile, for example, is a retired Department of Agriculture employee named Bill Flack. And he lives in Kearney, Nebraska. If you go to Bill Flack and you say, you know, hey, Bill, you've got this great track record, give me a forecast about the Chinese economy. What you will say is, I don't know anything about the Chinese economy. Like, let me go and do some research.

Let me learn. Let me think about it. And let me get to the point where I think that I have sufficient information and reasonable grounds to make a forecast. Then I will make a forecast. Dan strongly suspects that George Soros is a super forecaster. Not just because he's made a bunch of money, but because he hears that classic super forecaster humility in him.

How are you so good at investment? How did you make all these billions of dollars? He always has this answer. I know. Okay. So humility. This is not the first thing I think of when I hear Virgil make sweeping generalizations like this. So, I mean, you know, I mean, this is obviously shorthand, but, you know, all right, if you hate trans people the most, you'll vote for Cruz.

If you hate Muslims the most, you vote for Trump. Right. If you hate yourself the most, you vote for Trump. for Marco. But on the other hand, I think there is kind of an intellectual humility buried under Felix and Virgil's contempt. They do something that looks not too dissimilar from what Bill Flack does. They get their information from as many sources as possible, from polling, reporter friends in different states, their girlfriends, they've even gone to a couple of primaries and met people involved with the campaigns. And once they get the info, they sit with it and see how it all feels.

You know, it's like making us do. You throw a few things in. It doesn't work. A lot of chain smoking and just going, what do you think? What about these people? What do they hate? What do they hate most in life? There's this other great quality that super forecasters have, which is that they're likely to say this thing that the rest of us hate to say. I was wrong.

This is basically, one of the basic fundamental insights of social psychology is that particularly if you stand up in public and you take a... I think, so you dig in on that position because to change your position at all is to acknowledge error, and we hate to acknowledge error, which is why you often see pundits, you know, dig into a ridiculous prediction. In fact, Philip Tetlock, the co-author of Dan's book, says that there's actually an inverse correlation between fame and accuracy. Seriously, it can be measured. Meaning that the more famous the pundit was, the less accurate his forecasts were. the person who speaks with clarity and confidence

and tells a good story and knows exactly a forecaster, but they're great TV guests. And so they do really well in the media, even though they're lousy forecasters. Pundits are trying to predict the future, but they're also trying to protect their reputations. They're trying not to look dumb. And maybe that's Carl Diggler's secret superpower.

It doesn't matter to him or to anyone if he looks dumb because he's not a real person. He has no reputation to protect, so he doesn't need to worry about admitting he was wrong. And he writes about his mistakes in his column all the time. As I described Carl Diggler to Dan, I could tell that he wasn't really sold on Felix and Virgil as super forecasters. But I took one more swing at it.

They gave us another example, actually, in the case of New Hampshire, and it was about Marco Rubio, and I was wondering if I could just play it for you very quickly. just let me play it for you and then I'll ask the question. When we got there, like everything associated with Marco Rubio was a fucking disaster. This guy, this is like a weird metric to go by, but like one day he, we got this, you know, press-blest email like, come have a pancake breakfast with Marco.

He didn't even bring ingredients for pancakes. They fucked that up somehow. He had muffins. He couldn't even get fucking pancakes, right? How do you promise people in New Hampshire pancakes and then show off and be like, oh, sorry, We don't know how to make pancakes, but here's some fucking Entiman muffins. We went to New Hampshire. We met New Hampshire people.

That kind of shit will piss them all. Yeah, well. More than anything else. Those people love diners. They love pancakes. They have nothing else going on. So, I mean, their predictions are based on these sort of cartoonish generalizations, of both political and racial sentiment, sort of around the country.

Is there merit to basing your predictions on that kind of thing? There may be, to some extent, some validity. in some of what they say. But Super Forecasters probably wouldn't say, you know, one thing. You know, Minnesotans demand politeness. Therefore, Minnesota will vote, you know, rely. They got the entire Democratic slate right on Super Tuesday. In Iowa, they got the first through fourth Republican primary winners, correct?

How successful would Felix and Virgil, the guys who created Carl, how successful would they have to be over what? period of time before you ask for your book to be recalled, you renounce all of your scholarly work? You know what? That's a really excellent question, and I would have to speak to a statistician before I attempted to do that. Spoken like a true super forecaster. I don't mean to dodge.

I don't mean to doc. And it is true. It is true. Look, if somebody comes along and they have a method and they can demonstrate it repeatedly and sufficiently to satisfy the statisticians, then you've got to respect that. In other words, it's still too early to tell whether Carl's forecasting the future

or just extremely lucky. What we do know is that uncertainty breeds profits. And when someone shows up who keeps getting stuff right, there's no way to tell whether they're a true profit or just polyoctopus. And really, there's no way to tell whether Paul the octopus was a profit or not. His hot streak was never actually broken.

He just ended up dying a few months after the 2010 World Cup. But other animal forecasters have been stepping up. Teddy Bear the Porcupine at a zoo in Dallas just called the Super Bowl. So did Ozzie the Grizzly Bear at Zoo Montana. There's also Apollo the Lion in Arizona. There's Koji the Macaw in Texas. There's Nancy the Galapagos tortoise. They're all getting things right.

So if Carl Diggler's predictive powers do go south, I've got plenty of other options. Dan Gardner's book is called Super Forecasting, and you can read the eerily accurate election forecasts of Carl Diggler on the website cafe.com. Just search for the tag the dig. Coming up after the break, the first salvo in a yes, yes, no war. Welcome once again to yes, yes, no, the segment on the show where we find some poor unsuspecting sap and make fun of them for not knowing about the completely trivial stuff that we know about. Normally, we do this with our boss, Alex Bloomberg.

This week we have a very, very, very... special guest who you will know from stage? Stage? I'm asking this question. Do we know you from stage and screen or just screen? It really depends on where you're from. You might know me from stage if you spent any time in New York or L.A. and we're a fan of going to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.

But for the most part, I feel like people know me from screen or podcasts. There's a lot of people who know me from. saying horrible things into their ears on a daily basis. That's true. So stage may be most likely screen and also probably ear. Our guest is Jason Manzukas. Jason, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me, guys.

You may have heard him a million times on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast. He also has his own podcast called How Did This Get Made, where he bravely wades into some of the worst movies I've ever seen. Yeah. Jason, you said in an email to me that even Alex Bloomberg looks accomplished on the internet compared to you. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, he comes on and he kind of gets stuff. And, okay, first I should say this. I am on zero social media.

Zero, zero? Zero, zero. I don't have a Facebook profile. I don't have Twitter. I don't have Instagram. I didn't have Friendster. I didn't have MySpace. I am like a zero.

I have opted out. So just like the very rudimentary things that people know about the lexicon of being on Twitter and so forth is lost on me completely. Okay, so we asked you to find a couple of yes yes knows for us. Can you tell us about the first one you've got? Well, let's see. What are we got here? Now I'm going to, now I'm going to, because you were kind enough to give me your login. I gave you my password because I wanted you to be able to look at tweets.

And also, I encourage you to tweet as me for a week. And by the way, you're welcome. I showed so much restraint in not tweeting horrible things when I knew you were no doubt asleep. In spite of the fact that I said, I'd love to be humiliated in any of the realty. I know. You really invited it. So what do you have? Okay. Number one, J.W. Friedman at Satellite High on Twitter.

tweets this, and it is in all caps, love to meme, L-U-V, the letter, the number two, M-E, M-E, and then the trademark T-M, okay? And then it's a box, and in the box are three boxes. At the top of the box, it says, infinite recursion starter pack.

In the first box is a pair of sunglasses, raybans, black rayband sunglasses. Okay. In the second box is a dog wearing a hat and shorts on a skateboard. Is this real? This is real. I swear to God. The third box that is below these boxes is, oh boy, is a box that contains this whole box. So a box within which is infinite recursion starter pack, sunglasses box, dog box, and then smaller box,

it's basically an infinity thing. Infinite recursion starter pack, sunglasses dog, ba, ba, blah, blah. You see what I'm saying? Sort of. I'm worried. I feel like the, like, cocky, like, 101 professor who just got a, like, Goodwill hunting question

and can't answer it. I'm looking at it, and I really, really don't get it. You don't? Ooh, do we have no, no, no? I think we instantly are at no. Have I fucking broken the game? Yeah. Oh, I am so excited right now. Oh, I'm thrilled. I am thrilled. Do you guys genuinely have no idea what's going on?

I promise, like zero zero zero. I think the best thing to do would be for us to retweet this on the day that this episode is released. Yep, that's fine. In the hopes that we can get people to explain it to us. Okay, but from now on, I would like to be known as the only, I think the only person who's ever gotten no, no, no. That's correct. You absolutely are. So screw you, Alex Blumberg. I'm coming at you, bro. I want to start a war. I want to start a war between me and Alex.

You came in our show in like six minutes. You broke this entire segment. Boom. I will just retweet it right now and I'll say, obviously I get this joke. But do other people? Please explain. So I know that you do.

Okay, so what's your other one? Okay, so this is, oh, okay, so I don't even know what I'm looking at. Okay, this is Scott Malcamson at Roy Calbeck is his Twitter handle. Okay, and then it's hashtag the triggering. That's one word and it's blue, so that means it's a thing that I can click on. Yes, yes, it is a thing you can click on. Yeah, it's a thing I can click on, and other people will probably be talking about the triggering, whatever that is. the fan fix I write all caps

contain more valuable social commentary than your racial studies degree program. Okay? That's what it says. And then it is a picture from a, I think a video game called Fallout. I know there's a video game called Fallout. I'm not a video game person just like I'm not an internet person.

Right. Okay, it says Fallout Equestria New Pegas. And it's like a space city, in a desert landscape. There's like cactuses and deserts, but then there's like a space city in the middle. And then there's two cartoon characters on the outskirts of the city

that are like, one's got like a little octopus head and glowy eyes and one's like a, I don't know, like a pink alien thing with a gun and a, I don't know, space stuff. So I'm assuming, I know what fan fiction is.

Okay. Okay, so I'm assuming this is some sort of fan fiction for the game Fallout. That's my guess. PJ Vote, do you know what this means? 45% comprehension on this. Jason Manzoukis,

do you know what this tweet means? I mean, like, in as much as I know what fan fiction is, I know what that is, so I'm going to say 10%. But no, no, the reality is no, I don't know what this is. This is nonsense.

Alex Goldman, do you know what this tweet means? I'm going to say yes on this. Okay, we're back on steady ground. Yeah, okay. That was nerve-wracking. All right, so wait, can I tell you what makes sense to me in this? Sure. This person seems like Gamergate or Gamergate adjacent.

Mm-hmm. Is that right? Yes. And the triggering is like referring to trigger warnings. Jason, do you know what trigger warnings are? I do not. So a trigger warning, it's this idea that you might put at the top of a piece of writing or a movie or whatever. You might say, like, if you've experienced some horrible trauma, like, say, like, sexual assault, this is a trigger warning.

Like there's descriptions of this in here. If it's going to upset you, you might not want to watch it. Got it. Okay, I get it. And there are people who are very mad that these things exist. They're just like... They're very mad that people are warning people about things? Yes.

Yeah. Got it. And so the triggering, I'm assuming, since it seems GamerGady, it's like they are going after people who would want trigger warnings to exist. Yeah, you've got the right idea. So, all right. Wait, there's more things I know. Okay.

I've played the game. fallout. All right. Oh, nice. But none of the characters that are in this, that are in this tweet are not really in fallout. I have enlarged this picture, and I have a guess about something.

What's the guess? I think this is My Little Pony related. You guys, you're piecing it together. Holy crap, really? I'm really proud of both of you. Wait, what was the My Little Pony clue? Equestria and New Pegas. And I was like, oh,

that's like horse shit. And then I was like, oh, there's so much weird My Little Pony nonsense going on right now that I feel like that's what this is, I bet. Because I heard a thing on Howard Stern where they went to BronyCon and talked to like adult men who are into My Little Pony sexually and all of the stuff that goes along with that, which was cuckoo bananas. Right. So wait, does this have brony implications, Alex? All right. So here's what I can tell you.

A woman named Lauren Southern, who is sort of a conservative, a conservative gamer-gatedish person on the internet, came up with an idea a few months ago. Here's her tweet. Can we start a day called The Triggering, where everyone just posts offensive things on their social media in defensive free speech? Oh, boy. It will take place on March 9th, the day after,

International Women's Day and the day before Osama bin Laden's birthday. So, people were posting things that they thought would be offensive to people who are usually pejoratively termed social justice warriors. SJWs? Yes. Got it. Man, you're way more on top of this than you. Just kidding.

I have no idea what that is. Are you serious? That's the actual acronym. Is the actual acronym that they used to call on the time? No, I'm assuming it would be. So they pejoratively call people who believe in sort of social justice and trigger warnings being part of that. Social Justice Warriors or SJWs. Good work, Jason. And one thing that a social justice warrior might do is major in racial studies in college.

So this person is saying the fan fiction that I write contains more valuable social commentary than your racial studies degree program. So they're writing, oh. So this is a person who writes. very valuable social commentary in the form of Fallout New Vegas My Little Pony crossover fan fiction. They also hate social justice and they want to simultaneously plug their fan fiction and insult the social justice warriors.

I'm offended that they're using the triggering for their own selfish interests. There's like, if you drill down into the next posting, there is like a description of the game. Mr. Horse's pet courier has been murdered and his property stolen.

And while the price of the killer's... Sorry. And while the price on the killer's heads is good enough to get any bounty hunter's attention, it's the bonus for returning a silly little poker chip that draws dead shot in. A pony could retire on that kind of jackpot. This game sounds awesome.

Well, it's not a game. This is actually, if you look, there are chapters. This is a book someone wrote. Oh, wow. Yeah. Someone wrote a book using the characters from, or the characters from my little pony. And the world of the fallout.

Yes. Or fallout. Can you just read the first paragraph of the book? Oh, wait. Okay, so spoilers for Fallout Equestria New Pegas, I guess. I'd be like if you hadn't read it by this point, it's on you. All right. Well, the first paragraph is just,

uh, one sentence. So do you want me to read just the sentence? Yeah. I was always pretty small, especially for an earth pony. Oh, this is amazing. Oh, guys, has Alex Bloomberg ever brought you anything this good? I have to say now. No, that's right. I win again, Bloomberg. I win again. for an earth pony too so that like already indicates that we're going to space I mean like that that first sentence says everything you need to know that is good writing it's just good writing I don't know where that leaves us on actually what we're at now I mean and I mean we think we've cracked I'm trying to now I do now understand what the triggering is. We've covered the racial studies part of it, which I thought was very confusing.

And we've gotten into Fallout Equestria New Pegas, which is a piece of fan fiction is set in the My Little Pony universe combined with the game Fallout. And I think that's it. I think that's the, I think that's what I'm looking at. Am I right? Yeah? Yeah? I think where, yes is yes. So I did tweet out that first, the first one that stunned us, I tweeted out asking for help, and I got a little bit of headway on it.

Ooh. Ooh, okay. Okay, so this isn't going to get us all the way, but it's going to help. Basically, there is a meme joke format online that is just the starter pack. This isn't a real one, but it'd be like, the college. freshman starter pack and it'd be like a bunch of pizza and like new books and like a dorm room. Like it's just these are the ingredients of this kind of person. Got it.

So this is like a very, very, very, very complicated version of that joke that I still don't get. But that's what they're working off of. Okay. Okay. But that makes sense, I guess. Like this is like a meme starter pack basically? Yeah. Or something like that.

that would go on forever because it's got cool sunglasses and a funny dog. Yeah. I still don't feel ready to say that I'm a yes on this one. Oh, no, I don't either. I'm, like, confounded by this. Jason, do you feel like, I feel like we're like, we're like product pitchmen for using the internet? Like, do you feel having this knowledge at all, like you're missing out on anything? No, zero.

And it is so overwhelming. Alex's feed is so stressful to me. that if I had to look at this daily, I swear to God I'd lose my mind. It just seems like everybody's like, oh, I just took a weird poo. And then it's a picture. And then it's like a picture of a dog.

You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I got to be honest. If I saw a tweet that said, I just took a weird poo and had a picture of a dog. That, by the way, is going to be the text, the tweet that I sent from your account.

Please send it. Please send it. If I can figure out all of the pieces that go into tweeting that, I 100% will do it. I will intermittently tweet as you over the course of the next week. In the meantime, I am going to put up a post that says I just took a weird poo and it's a picture of... No, that's my first tweet, asshole. You can't steal it.

You're stealing jokes. All right, fine. How dare you? How dare you? I won't do it. That's my tweet. That's going to be my first tweet. I'm very excited about it. So am I. I feel like what's going to happen is you're going to tweet it And then people will actually retweet it and they'll like it. And then you'll do another one and like the game of it will get you. Guys.

And then it becomes a meme and fucking Alex Blumberg brings it in and is like, what is this? That will finally be the last episode of the show. Don't let him know. Let him bring it in as a yes, yes, no. Ha! Manzukas wins again. That would like tear open this fabric of space time and we will just implode on ourselves.

That would be the infinitely recursive meme. That's exactly it. It's just in one box. It's me and Alex. In another box, it's the tweet of the dog in the... I just took a weird poo. And then it's that infinitely. God, Jason, this has been a pleasure.

Yeah, really. What a delight. You can hear Jason Magnzukas on the How Did This Get Made podcast, or you can see him in basically every comedy television show ever made. He's appeared on the Kroll Show. He's currently on Brooklyn Nine-N-9. He is a regular on the league. He's everywhere.

He is just everywhere. Reply All is PJV. and me Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Tim Howard, Shruthy Pinnaminani, and Fia Benin. Our editor is Peter Clowny. Production assistance from Mervin de Gagnos. We were mixed by Rick Kwan.

Matt Lieber is a killer drum break. Special thanks to Elise Spiegel. Our theme music is by the mysterious brakemaster cylinder, and our ad music is by build buildings. To watch the full video of the Elaine Rich interview, which we excerpted in this episode, you can go to the Knowledge at Wharton YouTube channel or go to knowledge.warton.upend.edu.

You can find more episodes at iTunes.com slash replyall. Our website is replyall.fail. We'll be back next week. Thanks for listening.