Reply All - #98 Fog of Covfefe

Episode Date: June 8, 2017

The last person on earth who has not heard about covfefe walks into a studio, and a strange journey begins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is a reply all. I'm Alex Goldman. And I'm PJ Boat. Welcome once again to yes, yes, no, the segment on the show where the students become the teachers, and we go to our boss, Alex Bloomberg, doesn't know much about internet goofs and gaffs. And we teach them about stuff that's going on on the internet. Goofs and gaps. So, do you have some tweets for us? All right.

So this is a tweet that I found. This tweet feels like it has levels. It feels like it has like... I'm confused in many, many ways. So I'm like, I'm very eager to have this explained to me. And it's a tweet within a tweet within a tweet. You mean... Yes, that's right.

It's a series of embedded quote tweets? It's a tweet quoting a tweet that's quoting a tweet. Oh, my God. This is like inception. It is. This is the inception episode of Yes, Yes, Yes, No. All right, go. All right.

Can we play some inception music? No. Ready? I'm putting my foot down on... Ready? Here comes. Ah. That was all...

Oh, that's right. The entire thing is just... Do it again. Do it again. Sorry, let's just... You're right. I've ruined the fun. Okay.

Ready? Yeah. All right. So I guess I'm going to start from the top, the outer level. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So the tweet is a guy named Dollars Horton.

That's the name, and then it's at Crushing Bort. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know Cushing Bort. He's one of my favorite tweeters. Oh, really? Yeah, I really like him. All right. And then his tweet is...

simply the caption is five months from now, and then he has an embedded, and then he's linking to a tweet. And the tweet he's linking to is from Hillary Clinton, and I got to believe that this is a fake this is a Photoshopped Hillary Clinton tweet.

Yes. And Hillary Clinton, in this alleged universe, is tweeting the following. The only kerplappy... That's funny words in it. It's going to be hard for me to get through. The only kerplappy that cofefees in these gips ae

are the millions dead exclamation point SpongeBob face. Okay. You got it? Okay. I'm going to read it one more time. The only kerplappy that cafees in these gulps ae, and then it's just like a bunch of A's and weird and ending in the number five, are the millions dead exclamation point SpongeBob face.

And then that tweet quotes another tweet from Donald Trump that says, The media ignores my sincere kerplappy to Australia. No one will report nuclear missile create jobs. Okay. Oh, wait. And it doesn't say ignores. It says in gores. Okay.

Where are we at on this? PJ Vote. this tweet? Yes. Alex Bloomberg, do you understand this tweet? No. Alex Goldman, do you understand this tweet? Yes. We're home again, guys. The fact that you're a no on this makes me think you haven't looked at their computer in a while. Yeah, there's like a... Okay, I know about Cofephe. Okay, okay, okay. That's a good place to start. Yes. I know that it's a thing, and I know that it's a thing that emanates like everything on the internet today from Donald Trump. But you don't know more than that?

And I think, no, I don't really know more than that. Okay. It's exciting to get to tell you about this thing. Yeah, seriously. Okay, so late last Tuesday night at like midnight. Yeah, it was 12.06. Trump had just gotten back from, like, the Europe trip. And, like, he hadn't really tweeted in any sort of Trumpian way all week.

And so he gets home and, like, everybody else goes to bed and he's alone with his phone. and he did this tweet he did this thing that he often does on Twitter which is that he'll start like a rant like he'll he'll say something kind of inflammatory but it won't finish the sentence and then like everyone will react and go crazy and like wait for him to finish the thought

and sometimes it takes him actually quite a while to finish the thought like an hour and it's never clear like whether what's happening is like a bunch of people are like wrestling with him for the phone or he's like enjoying like the crowd that assembles or like he just got distracted like you kind of don't know but when you're there when it happens

it feels kind of exciting. Right. So. And you were there when this happened? I was there. And it was a tweet from him. It was a tweet that said, despite the constant negative press cofifé,

and like everybody went crazy. In a way that, for the record, like the next day, people were kind of making fun and people were going so crazy. But if you were there, it was a very exciting moment. Because it was very clear

that he meant to say, despite the negative press coverage, and he just like, so profoundly screwed up? And then it was literally just the claws? Yeah. And he never, all night, all night, he never followed up on it. So it's just literally like somebody saying,

let me just say one more tegagan, gaga. And then that's it. And then that's it. And you're like, wait, what's the next thing? Okay. So he tweets that out and just like more so than any other time. there's like the long like everybody just kind of goes nuts who's awake right then and it's like there's this like golden period where every joke was funny like like the worst jokes were like so

funny because you're just so excited about the weirdness of it like what were some of the good ones i don't even okay they're not gonna like it's like i feel like i don't want to say them to you guys because they won't they don't stand up to the light of day oh let me look at the ones that i favorite in the moment i thought were funny oh this is going to be sobering Okay. Like, I don't remember liberals freaking out when Obama could Fefefefei. Cfefei, I barely know Fefefei. Ooh, this is tough to listen to.

Wow. But I don't want, I don't want to be, like, crapping on people's tweets because in the moment, these tweets were so good. I get it. I get it. Give me some more, though. Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy despite the constant negative press, gofefei. Oh, my God. That's kind of good.

That's all right. That's all right. That was like the highest point of it was like just successfully rhyming. Right. And you were like, does the human imagination know no bounds? You know what else, though, that occurs to me? What? Is that all of you people who thought you were like so different from the president you were mocking,

you're all doing the same thing. Yeah. You're all up too late tweeting shit you shouldn't tweet. You were getting owned so hard. by Alex Bloomberg right now. This is not what I come to this segment for. Yeah, it's totally true. Anyway, the thing that happened the next day was like...

It was like Cinderella had turned back into a pumpkin. Yes. But then there were all these people trying to put on Cinderella shoes. In fact, I woke up, having not been awake for the thing for the original tweet, just being like, what are all these rotten pumpkins strewn about Twitter? This joke is bad. The sort of like the point where I think like even the people who were like, but it was funny last night, like had to give up. Do you have the Hillary Clinton tweet?

I don't. Hold on. Oh. Yeah. You see where this is going? The joke killer in chief. Yes. Here. So the day after Caffe fever, Donald Trump tweeted, made like a totally unrelated tweet that said,

crooked Hillary now blames everybody but herself, refuses to say she was a terrible candidate, hits Facebook, and even Dems and DNC. And so she responds probably 12 hours after this joke is like fully, fully, fully dead. And she says, people in cofefefe houses shouldn't throw cofefefe. And she quotes them. And it gets 306,000 retweets. Yeah. She didn't do a great job with the joke. She just kind of replaced a couple words with the gibberish word.

And it's just like, that feeling of like, oh, God, the thing we had to suffer through for like a year of like Donald Trump says something wild and unintelligible. Hillary Clinton, like, makes a joke about it. It's not very funny. And it was like, at least like the election was supposed to end that. And so it was just like, it's not a good feeling. There's actually like a whole other facet to the story, which we haven't really talked about, which is while you were rolling your eyes at Hillary Clinton's lame joke, the Trump internet saw Caffe a, something totally different. So there is this idea among sort of ardent internet Trump supporters that no matter what he does,

he's always, he's always like several steps ahead of people and he's actually much smarter than anybody gives him credit for. He's a chess master. Yeah, he's playing what they call ten-dimensional chess. So everybody just rightly agreed that Coffefe was a typo, except for the Trump. Like the super diehard. Fortune and like the Donald subreddit people, they decided that it was not a typo.

Really? That it was deliberate. And what did it deliberately express? Can I ask you guys to do me a favor? Yeah. Okay. I've got up Google Translate. Can you go ahead and type in COV?

Wow. C-O-V. Space. Space. F-E-A-postrophe. Okay. What does it say? Oh, it says in, oh, apparently that's an Arabic word that, or an Arabic sentence that says, I will stand up. So, if you believe the 10-dimensional chess version of Donald Trump, what he said was, despite negative press, I will stand up.

Now, a bunch of Arabic linguists have said, that's a terrible translation. No one speaks like that. But what do they know? Right. But what do they know? Donald Trump was doing some 10-dimensional chess. Native Arab speakers. That is so funny. Isn't that crazy? Oh, man.

So if we return to our original tweet, Alex, are you at a point where you could try to explain this? Yes. Oh. This might be the hardest recap yet. There have been some tough ones. I know, but not like inception level. Thank you.

Oh, God. I'm going to make it so you can't edit it out. I have so much hatred in my heart. Just like watching like a running joke gets forced in. All we have to do is one more callback and that'll be funny. It's so much. It'll be funny. Okay.

All right. Okay, so Dollars Horton, once again, the tweet is five months from now. And then he is quoting a fake tweet from Hillary Clinton that says, the only kerplapi that confepa is in these gulps are the millions dead SpongeBob face. And then that fake Hillary Clinton quote includes a fake Donald Trump quote that says, The media engores, my very sincere kerplappy to Australia, no one will report nuclear missiles create jobs. Jobs is all capitalized.

All right. So what does this mean, Alex Bloomberg? All right. So what this means, it all goes back to a tweet that Donald Trump sent out a couple weeks ago, or about a week and a half ago. It was she said, despite the media cofefefe and then just stopped. And then 12 hours after that, in Waltz's Hillary Clinton with a tweet that had a bad joke in it. So that was the original event.

And that was sort of that was the whole confephe cycle. And now, so Dollars Horton in this tweet is imagining the confepa cycle just sort of like continuing. on for months and months and months, and in this imagined future, five months from now, Donald Trump has accidentally nuclear bombed Australia, which if it really happened, I wouldn't be laughing at, just so everybody knows. He's accidentally nuclear bombed Australia, followed by a tweet in which he says, which is really a funny scenario. I mean, it's not a funny scenario, but the imagine this tweet of like, if I accidentally bombed

Australia, this is what I would be tweeting. But in this imagined future in which he accidentally bombed Australia with nuclear weapons, his first act was to tweet the following. The media in Gore is My Sincere Kerplapi to Australia, no one will report nuclear missiles create jobs. So that was like, which is actually a very, I feel like a very effective satire of a Donald Trump tweet. And then Hillary Clinton, also in a very effective satire, has sort of gone completely off the rails in this imagined future and is just sort of like jumping on in all sorts of confused and jangled ways and trying to poke fun and also point out how actually horrible it is to accidentally nuclear bomb a country

in a confused sort of muddled way that results in this tweet. The only kerpa-clippi that confepaes in these gulps-f are the millions dead SpongeBob face. I think we're at yes, yes, yes. Feels good. Goldman, you want to play us out? No. You guys can't even pull off. What's the theme song of our fucking segment, dude?

Oh. This is really the gang that couldn't shoot straight. More yes, yes, no, coming up after the break. Are you ready for another one? Yes. All right, this one, this one is so weird. Good. Let's start with the name, shall we?

Yeah. The tweeter. Gregory Catbotherer. The Twitter handle is at Cat Beltane. Cat Beltane wrote this tweet recently. The Dog underscore Rates account. We'd like to apologize for saying dogos think sweatshops are H-apostrophe king bad, hecking bad, and vows to be neutral about sweatshops.

You guys are laughing. It's a good joke. It's a good joke. We're still stuck in Cafefei. PJ Vote, do you understand this tweet? Yes. Alex Bloomberg, do you understand this tweet? No.

Not even close. It's not exasperated. So the first thing you need to know. Good. There's a lot of thinking. Out of 7 million. Okay. So here's a question.

How far can you go into this tweet before you're confused? What is the first thing that confuses you? The second word. Okay. Dog rates. Dog underscore rates. Okay. So there is a Twitter account that has over 2 million followers.

Okay. And it is devoted to rating people's dogs. Rating them. Yeah. So like scale 1 to 10. Oh. Except they always give them above 10, like every single time. Can I just show you the best moment in we rate dogs history where a guy got angry that he felt like the rating system was skewed?

Okay. So this guy, Brandt? Yeah. He was like, at dog rates, your rating system sucks. Just change your name to cute dogs. And then we rate dogs, we're back. Why are you so mad, Brant? And then he said, well, you give every dog 11s and 12s.

It doesn't even make any sense. That's a guy who is not in on the joke. Yes. And then we rate dogs. And then we rate dogs says, they're good dogs, Brent. Brent, it's a cheap gimmick. We rate dogs. Well, Brent, the people love it, and I'm doing it for them, not you.

Brent, all I'm saying is you could have real legitimate ratings instead of just saying every dog is a 10-11 or 12. So, like, that is basically, that is like a good encapsulation of what is good about this? Alex Bloomberg is losing his bono. Oh, the good dogs, Brent, is really funny. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, they're just good at, they're both funny and they're good at, like, whatever the internet chichistu is of that. Like, they made that guy look dumb, but not in, like, a particularly mean way. Do you know what I mean?

I know. Every once in a while we'll be doing one of these EECS knows, and I'll, and I will have the feeling about a tweet the way that you sometimes feel about, like, a line of poetry or something, where it's just sort of like, it's so, it's so, it's so, it's so, there's a world in the line. You know what I mean? And that's how that feels. Their good dog sprint is just so, there's so much. in there. Yes. Yes. And it's so delightful when you know the backstory. There was a while where you could just say, like, they're good dogs, Brent or they're good dogs, brunt.

And it was just, like, a very nice passphrase or whatever. Right. And when would you say it? Use it in a tweet. Well, I wouldn't use it in a tweet. But, like, I'd be at the dog park. And, like, I'd be there with Lola and she'd be like, we would fall into that really simpering, horrible, just like, cute overload thing where you were just like, that dog's

cute, that dog's cute, that dog's cute. And then you'd just be like, they're good dogs bronzed. Or you could do it, if somebody was really mad in a way that was missing the point, you would just be like, they're good dog's bronze. And it would, do you know what I mean? Right. So you could use it either literally, about actual dogs. Or as a way to be like, you're really mad and I'm just going to squeeze a clown nose right now.

Yes. It's like this de-escalating absurd thing. Cedar it down. Yes. But in a funny way. Yeah. And like sort of everything they do is like that. Like their avatars are cute dogs.

They talk in this like made-up cuty dog language. say hecking all the time. That's why it says like age asterisk. They're like hecking bad. I'm saying this like a beleaguered person. I love this so much. It makes me really happy. It's a horrible part of me that will like look at dog internet and just like feel joy the whole time. Just full disclosure. Got it. Love dog rates. So basically the only thing you need to know is that the we rate dogs account is extremely good at the internet. It has made this thing that everybody likes and nobody ever gets mad at, like, never messes up

until the night of Caffe. Yeah. What? And it was this crazy thing. He was a Caffe Calfi casualty. Where he's like, I think never blundered, and it was like, blunder city in this way that was like truly insane, like, truly, truly insane. What happened?

Okay, so, confepfe goes down, people get very excited. The dog rates guy makes a post where he's like, he tweeted a picture of a hat and it said, I'm so sorry at the top. And it was a picture of a hat that he'd made that said,

cofefefe a. F, which means I'm cofefe as fuck. Right. And he was selling this hat. And right away, people were upset about it because it just seemed really crass, like the moment this meme breaks that this guy just was like, oh, I'm going to make a hat for it, trying to make a quick buck. People, like, got really annoyed at him. And then he tried to apologize.

He said, he said, pup date, half of all profits will be donated to Planned Parenthood. So that was like him trying to dig himself out of people who were like, you shouldn't be profiting off like a Trump tweet, I guess. And then all of his followers who were conservative, all these people got really angry at him because they were like, I come here for cute pictures of dogs not to like see you support abortion. Right. So then he tried to apologize to those people.

And he was like, he wrote this really long, like, out of voice thing that was like, let me actually find it. It was like, he said, I let my personal beliefs. infiltrate an account that's not meant to share them. If my actions offended you, I'm sincerely sorry. Alienating a portion of my audience is stupid, unnecessary. Different opinions are good. Conversations about those opinions are valuable.

I'll do my best to put the train back on the tracks to the wholesome, pure, escape from reality account you all have come to love. In a note that he titled regarding the events of last night. So then people were angry because they were like, how dare you? You don't stand with women. You don't stand with women's rights. The conservative people were mad because he made it about abortions. The progressive people were mad because he'd made about abortion and then like flinched when people got angry. Like it was like, it was so crazy.

Like I never, it was almost beautiful. And all I was trying to do was make a buck off a meme. Yes. Wow. The other thing is that it really, really demonstrated to me how like we really can't enjoy anything without it turning into a political fight. I know. Like the entire internet is like Thanksgiving. the in-laws.

All right. So now I think I got it. Okay. I think it's time for a recap. All right, let's go back to the tweet. The tweet is from Gregory Catbotherer. The dog grates account would like to apologize for saying, quote, Doggos think sweatshops are hecking bad and vows to be neutral about sweatshops.

So this is a tweet that is in the wake of what I now know to be the dog raids controversy. And I would say this is coming from the progressive side of things. Yes. Where he's like, at dog rates for going back on his, like, progressive stance and sort of, like, imagining a world in which, instead of tweeting about abortion, he tweeted about sweatshops and saying sweatshops are bad, and now in imagining a world

in which there has been sort of conservative backlash against the anti-swet shop tweet, and now he's saying that he's going to be neutral about sweatshops. Where are yes, yes, yes, yes. All right. All right. Okay. Sorry, let me just get my bearings. Okay. So that last conversation made I was on Monday. It's now Wednesday. I have a small but exciting update about dog rates. But also, there's this thing that I've been really excited about telling you guys that I forgot to tell you. You know about it, but Alex, I don't think you know about it.

Uh-huh. So, like, I feel like we've actually now, there's been like a couple of UCSS.S. where we talked about, like, Ken Bone or, like, whatever, that there's a thing that happens where the Internet really loves somebody and they want to know everything about them until they find the thing they don't like. and then they hate the person as quickly with the same force. And there's a word for that, which I didn't know. Great shorthand. Milkshake duck. So there was this viral tweet by this account, pixelated boat that just says,

the whole internet loves milkshake duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes. Five seconds later, we were going to inform you that the duck is racist. So people rapidly become milkshake ducks. Yeah. So you'd be like, oh, And I think he did kind of like a rare like double milkshake duck.

Like he like milkshake ducked himself to the conservative side of the internet. Then he milkshake ducked himself to the progressive side of the internet. Like it was like usually you just do one. And you don't double down. Yeah. So I wanted to talk to the guy who did this. So I actually, I called dog rates yesterday. Okay.

Really? Yeah. He's totally nice guy. His name is Matt Nelson. Hello? Hey, Matt. Yes. Hey, this is PJ. How's it going?

Good. Exciting slash scary last 72 hours-ish. So I don't know who I was picturing would run the We Rate Dogs account, but it definitely wasn't Matt. Like, he's a college sophomore, and his whole motivation for doing this thing, it's not really money. It's like he just has a very pure love of the feeling of writing a funny tweet and lots of people liking it.

Like, I think his motivation is basically, he's like a class clown. for the internet. So it's been really weird for Matt to suddenly feel like his tweets have gotten him in the cross airs of what to him feels like a national scandal. So the National Review Online has now made three or four articles on this now. Really? Which is, yeah. Okay, Ian Tuttle has made two. He himself has written two full-length articles about the We Raid Dogs to Fife incident. That to me, like, what? So part of why this is so confusing for Matt is because this wasn't like his first political post.

Like he's done a bunch since the election. Every time he did him, mostly people liked him. And if somebody got mad, Matt would just do the internet jiu-jitsu stuff we talked about before. Like he'd managed the situation. It would turn out fine. And like, it just wouldn't be a problem. Like, for instance, he talked about this post

he did back in January after the women's march of this dog with a sign that said, I march for my moms. And then someone responded, Like, I don't like to see this on my timeline. Just, and I said, this is something you can't ignore right now. And then someone said 100% unfollowed.

And I said, I 100% don't give a shit. And so, like, someone, someone screenshoted that. And that went just as viral as the actual post. So from that, and like, we, so that was our most unfollowed day ever. We, like, lost 800 people, but we gained 37,000. In the right, it seems like the thing you had started to identify is, like, there are certain issues that are, that you can be a bit, political and people will like it. And then if someone says something to you and you retort,

people are really excited to see dog rates kind of like having a backbone. Absolutely. Well, first of all, if you enter an argument with my avatar online, you've already lost because you look like an idiot. Because you're yelling at a picture of a cute dog? Exactly. Exactly. But I don't understand then why this, he treated this particular situation as a teachable moment where he had to walk it back. Yeah, I mean, Matt seems confused by that, too. Like, I think that he described Caffe Night the same way I did.

Like, I do think a mysterious fog rolled into town and clouded everybody's judgment. He thinks he made a big mistake. And some of that was the joke wasn't even funny in the first place, and he kind of knew that. And for him, the thing he, like, most regretted was just the apology. He's like, it wasn't in my

voice. It didn't sound like me. It came from a place of fear. I just shouldn't have apologized. See, the thing about the internet for all like the thing that like I feel like I've talked about this before but the thing that is like it's really annoying and it's like crowd and it like all like it reacts in this crazy

way and it's got mob mentality but it does it is really really really good at pinpointing exactly when people are disingenuous and that's the thing that drives it crazy and that's what he was doing yeah he flinched and he sort of knows that I've accepted that with a

following such as mine you can't please everyone in this case I tried to. I can assure you there's going to be more mistakes coming. Like, that's just, that's this the nature of it. Like, there's going to be, I think, I believe there was, uh, there's a picture of a dog and there was like a peeled banana in front of him, uh, and then some other bananas. And I said that, uh, he unpeeled the banana. And immediately people were like, no, he peeled it. And so I was like, oh, shit. What, what do I do? Like, I looked it up and I was like, it can be either. What, what, what do? What, what do I I do.

It's like unpeeled or peeled. But those are the things I should be worrying about. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. The show's produced by Shruthy Pinnamineni and Damiano Marquetti. The show's edited by Tim Howard and Jorge Just. The theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder, and our ad music is by Bill Buildings. Matt Lieber is a playlist that has that Beach Boy song,

Wind Chimes on it, but then right after that song ends, Snowblind by Black Sabbath. comes on. Our show is mixed by Kate Balinski. Congratulations to Rick Kwan, who's out this week because he just had a baby boy. We can seriously hardly wait to meet him. You can find the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. There's still no internet, so we've landed on a nearby planet full of

infinitely rearrangeable beats. You know that kid's game with the dice? Yeah, bottle. You just shake them up, and they rearrange them I've used that one before. Let me see. Yeah, that sounds familiar.