Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - [BONUS] Why Everything Feels Life or Death Now

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz          Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co Why has everyone become so obsessed with game shows where the losers die!? Over the past decade, “The Hunger Games” became a multibillion-dollar media franchise. Netflix’s “Squid Game” took off, and MrBeast's challenges are growing increasingly deadly. Teddy Brown is a freelance writer for the New Yorker. He wrote a fantastic review of The Running Man, a movie starring Glen Powell where game show contestants must survive 30 days while being hunted down by professional assassins.  He has been studying our obsession with deadly game shows. He joined me to chart the rise of deadly entertainment and discuss what the shifting stakes of game shows reveals about the current state of culture, the national mood, and where entertainment is heading. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz                 https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0                 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz      

You could do a real squid game and people would participate, which is like such an insane thing to say. Like, we would just do snuff films for game shows now. Lately, we can't seem to get enough of game shows where the losers die. Over the past decade, The Hunger Games became a multi-billion dollar franchise. Netflix's Squid Game told the story of a world where adults play deadly versions of children's games in the hopes of winning a life-changing amount of money. And Mr. Beast's challenges seem increasingly deadly by the day. Teddy Brown is a prolific freelance writer who just wrote a fantastic review of The Running Man for the New Yorker.

If you haven't seen the movie The Running Man, it stars Glenn Powell. And in it, contestants in a game show must survive 30 days while being hunted by professional assassins. Teddy has been studying our obsession with deadly game shows. Today, he joins me to chart the rise of deadly entertainment and talk about what the shifting stakes of game shows reveals about the current state of culture, the national mood, and where entertainment is heading. Hi, Teddy. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me, Taylor.

Okay, so today I wanted to talk to you about deadly games in culture. I loved your piece on The Running Man in The New Yorker, titled, I believe, the most dangerous genre. To start off, though, I want to kind of like talk a little bit about how we got here. We don't have to go back to the time of gladiators, but I definitely want to talk about maybe like the past 50 years

in game show culture and how we got to this point where like everything in culture is a deadly game. I don't know how old you are, but probably you weren't around, I guess, when the Price is Right started. But back in the day, I was just looking up, like, sort of the history of a lot of these game shows. And it was amazing how, like, wholesome they were.

Like, there's Jeopardy, Family Feud, The Price is Right? And no one was risking their lives in any of these games. I don't know how much you watched of these or sort of are familiar with that era of, like, game show. I used to watch the Price is Right After School with my grandmother, every afternoon. She didn't speak very good English, but we knew the prices right pretty well together, so it was very fun. I have great memories of watching game shows with her. But I think you're right. And thank God, thank you for not asking me to go back to the Colosseum and Gladiator Times.

That was like, one of the things I got emails from people about like, what about the gladiators? I'm like, we're not doing gladiators. They're a different, different thing. But yeah, I mean, game shows are very American. There's a proud tradition sort of in many different countries, but, you know, America is the cradle of all these game shows. It really was in the beginning. It's like, things of the prices right are basically like shopping shows. They're like, you know, we're going to gamify consumerism in a certain way or sort of figure out how to, you know, sort of make games out of everyday things, you know. The newlywood game was about trying to figure out how to game of relationships and family food is about how to gamify family trivia, but also family dynamics, things like that.

But then, yeah, once you get into things like, especially one of my favorites, the price is right, it's like literally guessing how much things costs is how you win different prizes. Now it would be so hard with like dynamic pricing and like all the different prices. I feel like it would be harder than it maybe even used to be. You have to figure out what day you're shopping and what the price is going to change to as you're looking at it. That whole era feels very defined by like this post-war like boom where there's sort of this like upward mobility aspect to it or like wholesomeness, but it's all about sort of like knowledge or charm or like you said like family dynamics. It all just felt very like aspirational almost.

Yeah, I mean, it was sort of this, how do we fill up time on network television? Before the Appenacable Television, you had to fill up the programming hours from, I think, put, like, 6 in the morning until 10 o'clock night when the sign-off was. And it's like, okay, well, we don't have enough sitcoms to rerun. So, like, let's fill up the time here and make these into games, and Americans like games and sort of, you know, and it became this big boom. So you have all these sort of celebrities made out of hosts. You have all these different formats. It really was about, like, creating, okay, you know, Americans like to play games. Let's figure out how to put them on television and money off of them.

It seems like things started to take a turn in the 90s and really early 2000s with the rise of reality TV and these sort of endurance-based game shows where obviously Survivor was so huge. There was fear factor and it sort of brought in a lot of inspiration from Japanese reality shows and game shows as well. But it seemed like a lot of the shift went from just like this wholesome sort of like capitalism, gamified to more things based around like, bodily danger or fear at least or physical risk or humiliation. You can go back even further than that with American gladiators, which is a show effectively about like how good are you at fighting off like a roided out monster chasing you? And then you have it with kids shows as well.

I mean, I remember growing up on Nickelodeon watching guts and Legends and Temple and all these shows, like these are physically challenging shows that are about sort of how agile are you in the face of danger, how much you want to risk in order to be able to make some money or wins and prizes. So yeah, you have this like physicality that's introduced, but I think you're right about things like Survivor, which is like legitimately how much pain will you put yourself through in order to win this money at the end of the day. It's funny you mention like guts and legends of the Hidden Temple. I feel like my friends and I would train for that. Like we were all convinced that we would be on Nickelodeon and would do these like sprints and be like, I'm going to do, you know,

I'm going to make it here. I know that I could make it here. And it was this emphasis on like, yeah, physicality. It seems like it was sort of not until the late aughts and really after the 2008 financial crisis that we started to see more of these like intense games or like this more of the idea of sort of like gaming for your life or this like challenges. I mean, I'm thinking of the hunger games, which came out around this time, the book and then the movie and then the series. And then there was those early episodes of Black Mirror, the 15 million merits one or white bear, which depict these like dystopia media. We're getting closer and closer to it every But it's like every, you know, where sort of like your ability to survive is monetized.

Yeah. And I should say that, you know, I think Stephen King's first book was The Long Walk, which turned into a movie I think was released this year last year. And the Long Walk was much more about Vietnam parable than it was a capitalist sort of critique. But regardless, you do see this like people thinking about these things. But I think you're right. Like we saw the advent of all these shows. And there's no, there's no sort of mistake here that The Hunger Games came from a writer who

had cut her teeth and writing for children's shows. goes and sort of it banked a lot in that. It baked the logic of like how it feels to be a child and scared of this game and playing and playing for life or death. It's also based off the Japanese movie Battle Royale, I'm almost positive. So there are a lot of that there's this emerging class of new media that comes out that is much more like this is life or death. And some of our critiques, some of some of them are satires, but it quickly gets stripped of that, which is, you know, what the piece is trying to get after is that we like get to a certain point where all this media becomes bereft of any of the critiques that actually sort of had and it becomes just entertainment. Yeah, it seems like especially in the aughts, we saw the rise of like social media and virality. And it started to feel very like winner take all in our economy and the internet maybe as well. Like, especially on social media, like you are so directly competing with people next to you for like likes and shares and popularity and opportunities.

And it feels like, I don't know, things just got more competitive in like daily life as well, just for average people. It becomes zero sum, right? I think that's sort of the premise of a lot of this stuff. And you know this better than anyone. I mean, the internet economy is very much either it's like, in order for me to win someone else has to lose, in order for someone to watch my video, they have to not be watching someone else's video, paid subscriptions, like that you need to be paying for me. So you're using your limited budget that you're not using on someone else.

And I think there is this idea that it very much is in order for someone to succeed someone else has to fail. And I think you see that really amplified in, you know, sort of social media and internet dynamics now, especially. And the rise of gig work, I feel like, as well. I think of like a friend of mine who was an early lift driver and having to compete for rides and just this like precarity and economic precarity and feeling like you have to sort of like work so hard every day. I found a stat that said 36% of U.S. workers currently have some sort of gig working arrangement, including a lot of people who have that as their full-time job. I'm curious like where else you saw this seep into like pop culture in the 2010s.

If you noticed any sort of shift in like game shows on TV, obviously we get into Mr. Beasts who, launches his channel in, I think, 2017 or 2018. But did you notice it sort of bubbling up anywhere else? Well, I think you see quite a lot of these more competitive, more like physically demand in game shows. I mean, you have game shows that are asking people to put themselves at genuine risk, both for their own sort of monetarily winnings, but also for the entertainment of people watching them. I think of this era to me, and I am not as familiar with traditional entertainment as I spent all my time online, but like 2014 with the rise of Vine, really to 2017, 2018, right before Mr. Beast was the ride of

of YouTube prank culture and just like prank culture on the internet. And so many of those pranks were really just like extreme challenges or being like survival or sort of like these or risking death. Like I mean, even in David Dobricks case, like he swung his friend off a giant like excavator or something and gave him permanent brain damage. And you started to just see a lot of like physical injuries happening to YouTubers as well because of this stuff. Which is such a funny contrast to someone who grew up in Jackass.

It felt like there was something like more sinister about that. because it was clearly for like, we're trying to get as many views as possible, where it felt like watching Jackas. Like, these are watching my friends do stupid things, basically. Like, they might be very sort of, sort of complex. And these, these gags meant it felt very much like almost not for an audience. It felt like it was for each other. Whereas I think there is this sort of engineering of what pranks look like on the internet for the Nelke boys came from that. The Paul brothers came from that, obviously.

Mr. Beets came from that. Like, there is this tradition of like how pranks have become this very, there's a self-weigh awareness around them. But I think you have created this pipeline of people who've gone from like sort of prank YouTube accounts to being very much dedicated to like the next thing they can monocide, the next more extreme thing that can talk about and sort of figuring out how to navigate things from there. Yeah. So we have sort of like the late 2010s like 2018, 2019. Mr. Bees is just getting started with his challenges. We have like prank culture sort of evolving. The economy, I feel like also 2018, 2019 is when all of these VC backed startups in the 2010s that were just like boom, boom, boom,

started to like scale back a little bit and you they started to get rid of their bonuses like everyone had to work a little bit harder and like I just feel like the culture started to feel more intense. Yeah. I mean, you see a very real moment of sort of decoupling of the economy where it's like you know, you have sort of with a cave shape recovery lines, right? You have people getting very, very wealthy. Everyone who had a lot of money at the beginning of COVID had even more money as goes COVID went on. And you have the exact opposite effect for people who didn't have money at the beginning of COVID. So you had this very serious bifurcation of an, of the economy in America where I do think that a lot of people who were struggling and continuing

to struggle now are so desperate for any sort of escape velocity from their current predicament. I mean, you have in not to sort of fast forward, it's in 2025, but like the meme about you have X amount of months to escape the permanent underclass. Like I think that really started in like 2019, 2020 where it's like, oh no, you're going to be poor forever unless you do something to get out of it. And that getting out of it could be, are you going to risk your life get out of it? Are you going to go, are you going to try and hurt yourself? Are you going try and like do the most extreme thing possible in order to get a lot of subscribers in order to exit, you know, whatever your lot in life is.

And so I do think the last sort of six or seven years, we've seen that really crystallize an American culture where it's like, no, I have to get out of this and I'm going to do whatever it takes to do that. And it leads to some very strange places. Well, I think of even movies like The Purge, which that franchise was so popular in the 2010s and sort of escalated throughout the 2010s like in the extreme, I guess like the extreme nature of survival in each video. And then another movie that stands out to me that kind of reminds me. And of course, these are movies, not game shows.

But like, it was filmed in 2019. I think it came out actually March 2020, right before COVID or right when COVID hit called The Hunt. Do you remember that? No. This movie was like, it was like canceled kind of for woke or something. There was it, people thought it was like about woke, but like something stupid.

It was about this woman who basically ends up being hunted by these billionaires. And then like, she sort of turns around and hunts them. And everyone was like, oh, she's shooting like conservatives. But like, there's a plot twist. That's not what it is. It's actually just like a great sort of horror movie thriller. But the story was about this like struggling working class woman and and going up against these like capitalists, you know, men.

And it actually felt pretty ahead of its time. Like I think a movie like that would have done better today, especially the fact that ironically came out March 2020 when I feel like people quite literally were competing for their lives. Like everything like, I mean, everyone was like fighting over respirators and toilet paper and it just seemed like all of that, like, came to such a head. Another thing that I remember also during, like, early COVID is sort of like the way that, like, game show culture started to come to the internet and specifically TikTok, where

you had a lot of people like TikTok battling or competing or just like doing extreme things. Like, I feel like live streaming started to really take off as well. And you saw people just doing sort of like really intense live streams. Like, I mean, of course, this got crazier with the advent of crypto and pumped up fun and all that. But it seems like things were like bubbling up and COVID, the beginning of it in 2020 and 2021 were sort of like you started to see this come out in culture. And then of course, 2021, we have the launch of Squid Game, which you wrote about. I'll say at the top, the Squid Game as a show, like as a piece of media, I like hate. Like, I don't think it's very well made.

I think it's like, I think it's corny, whatever. As a piece of media like outside of the consumption of it, I find it totally fascinating because I was talking to a friend of mine who was saying that children are dressing up as like Squid Game characters during Halloween. And I was like, that is so strange to me. That's like so in, again, like, you get into this idea of like, we consume things and then your brain sort of naturally, if you're sort of not watching it critically, your brain sort of naturally strips away any of like the nuance or the critique that's actually within those things. So the idea for this piece really came out of like watching Squid Gang get turned into this

franchise that you can turn into like an escape room and then Mr. B's making a show out of it. And it's like, this is so strange to me because it's like, Like, you're watching a show that is about the desperation of poor people in a country that really despises its poor, right? Like, I think Korea has like a lot of, just like America does, like, it's a country that does not, the things that poor people are moral failures. And what levels of humiliation they'll go through. I mean, probably the most affecting scene in the entire show is I think one of the opening scenes when they're playing that sort of that red, red square, blue square game in order to, like, recruit players. And you have this really handsome, wealthy guy keeps winning and he just slaps the shit out of, like, out of whoever he's playing.

as they lose. And like that image right there is like there should be the crystallizing thing from this. Like rich people will abuse the poor no matter what because they can sort of do whatever they want. But of course, we end up with sort of the squid game experience and squid game Mr. Peace and like. Which is, I know. It's so funny. It's so fascinating to me how much is about like dying. And I don't know if it's also just death has been so much more normalized in our culture since the beginning of the pandemic too. I mean, it was like 100. of thousands of children had lost their primary caregiver by 2022 just to COVID alone. And then all of the other sort of economic upheaval.

And then, of course, watching videos of Ukraine and Gaza and all this, like, horrific stuff. Like, it just feels like death is maybe a little bit more in the air on things where, like, people, I mean, I guess like kids are dressing up as like these victims potentially of, of like, that would be shot in the game or something. And it's not as if American kids are dissents to this violence, right? I mean, the tradition of school shootings and, and, these things. But I do think that you're right in that the acceptance of like death within this game sort of context is very strange and that this is like almost like a playful engagement

with death. But I think for for me, what I found really interesting about it was that it's quite literally an illustration of would you die to escape being poor and how that's a reality, like increasing a reality for people. And again, I end this piece with sort of the line from no country world men where it's like, would you take a coin flip to like get out of whatever you're in? And 50-50 chance you're going to die. And I think that like the squid game was the beginning of this like this conversation about like how desperate are you to not be poor 2021 it was also the year that crypto started to take off i covered the wall street bets stuff that year we saw the game shop like meme stocks became a thing and especially into 2020 you saw the

rise of these like meme coin economies and websites where people would like gamble everything or risk everything there's a great documentary called this is not financial advice about one of the biggest i think he's a investor in like doge coin or doge coin i think he'd be rich now i i can't remember what it was But like people were losing their livelihoods on this and they were just like, I'm so hopeless. I might as well. I'm running a very long piece right now for a magazine about gambling becoming everything in American society. And it comes out of the desperation. I think that when you think of like rich people gambling, it's like leverage finance basically.

But you think of like the average American gambling. It's like this crypto coin better go to the moon. This this parley, this eight leg parley I have on my last 20 bucks better hit because I got it. Like I have to win. And like that's why sports gambling is becoming so popular like billions of billions of dollars spent on like advertising especially the young men who are just trying to like, what can I do to get out of this? I'm willing to risk anything to do this. And I will go into debt.

I will try my best to pick the right coin, whatever it is. And it's like just this desperate gambling sort of psychosis that a lot of Americans have engaged with because there isn't like there's so little hope for any sort of progress out of their, out of their lot. Well, that's what it is. I mean, is it just that like our economy is getting more and more precarious that we're all sort of like watching more and more of these extreme games and everything is gamified and everything is a lottery, and so we just enjoy it.

But like, but I feel like the stakes are feeling so much higher. Like, it's like, especially with the Mr. B stuff and all of his many copycats, like half of YouTube. And maybe this is also just like online culture constantly having to up the ante of your last video. It just feels like things are getting more and more extreme. Absolutely. You know, in these movies and pieces of media that deal with death, it's, you know, the figurative, ultimate risk, right? Like, again, not to repeat my point and point again, over and over again, but it's like, how much would you risk to get out? of what you're dealing with. And so you do see like that the ante keep getting up. I mean,

that is both a like a critical engagement of what people are going through, but also like, I think to your point about like a lot of creators understanding that's how you get people to watch what you're making. And so it is these two sort of things feeding one another. And like this, you know, this feedback we constantly get on people making more matured-trum videos or more extreme pieces of content in order to sort of reflect back at people and their desperate, you know, sort of the desperate need for central liberation. I'm curious kind of where game show culture will go from here. I mean, I do think of a lot of the live streaming stuff.

Like, I think Pump. Dot Fund took their live streaming down after, do you remember that like 48 hours when it was up? No. So Pump. Fun, Memcoin Marketplace launched a live streaming feature that might be about a cup now with more moderation. But there was this 48 hour period or maybe 72 hours when it first went up where, I mean, people almost died. Like, everyone was doing the most extreme things and abusing themselves and physically harming themselves, you know, to try to pump their means. coin. Then, of course, they had to take it down because, again, people were, it was abuse, like what you were watching. And then I think of things like this app called Dare Market,

which launched recently, which is exactly what you can imagine, where people basically bet money to dare you to do something. And of course, the company says they moderate it, but you can already see how it's getting out of control. Wasn't there a movie called, like, Truth or something where it was like people, like daring people on their cell phones to do stuff? They're supposed to, must have been like four or five years ago. I probably saw it. I love horror movies. I watch all of it. If there wasn't a movie where like this took place, it was certainly reflected on Black Mirror. This trope, I feel like has always been this like sci-fi type of thing, but it's just increasingly becoming reality. And I'm wondering, like, kind of how we evolve past it or will people

just be debasing themselves forever? I mean, this is the interesting thing is that so for my most of my consumption is traditional media. And like, I avoid you to certain degree for like self-protection because it's where all the youth culture is happening, but it is like so overwhelming. And like you being in it every day, like, you can tell me more about this. But like, when I see what's going on on, you know, CBS or maybe whatever it is, like, Fear Factor is coming back. Like, we're returning to that sort of vein of like, let's have people do stuff that scares the hell out of them for money. I do think this is where it continues to go for a lot of young people who are desperate for any sort of, like, edge in being creators, right? I mean, so many young people are like, I just want to be a creator.

I want to make money doing this. And, man, if it's a kids who are doing, like, increasingly risky things in order to make money, I don't know where that stops because it's just, feels like that's true momentum moving in one direction. I don't know. It also just feels like we're seeing this devaluation since COVID started of like life and health and well-being and everybody kind of willing to throw anything out the window to work or to try to make it. And I wonder what the game show format too, kind of like what will happen. It seems like it's getting more and more interactive, especially as things move to live streaming. Because I feel like we went traditional media, daytime television show, YouTube media. And now we're in like the kind of

Isanat world of not that he's doing any of this, but it's sort of just like a real time kind of reality show that's interactive. Which in its own way is extreme as well. I mean, you talk about streamers who were just live, you know, live eight hours a day, seven days a week, and they realize that if they go offline for any period of time, they lose subscribers and lose viewers and lose that whole audiences. So I do think if you sort of latch that logic on to how we're going with game culture and gamification of things, like it's obvious where this is going. Like we are going to be seeing more and more people taking risks and gamifying their lives, giving them to find their relationships, people, like creating live stream game shows that have a lot of interactive capabilities. I don't see that leading any work good, given all the other ingredients that are sort of cropping up right now, all of the sort of other trends that are happening now with, you know, sort of people pushing themselves

to certain limits or taking certain risks. I don't see that going anywhere, right? You could probably find like 440 YouTube personalities if you said you can win a billion dollars, but there's a chance that you die at the end, like they would probably take. take it as like... Oh, 100%, which is so strange. But I think that, like, you could do a real squid game and people would participate, which is like such an insane thing to say.

Like, we would just do snuff films for game shows now. I think you could do it with 1 in 30. Just because of how many people risk their lives, maybe I'm getting older and I'm like, be careful up there, you guys, you know? I also just wonder, like, how many times can we remake this idea of, like, being hunted or being driven to the end of like, it seems like we've had, again, like, multiple decades of sort of like movies and hunger games type things. And yeah, I just wonder what's going to evolve past it.

I'm like, let's maybe get us there. Hopefully it's a better place. Hopefully we start to like value our lives and our health and well-being. But I don't know, the capitalism really grinds us down. And the thing is that this is not an old genre, right? Like the concept of people hunting other people for sport based on their class positions is like a pretty old trope. We just have it sort of much more codified and widespread.

And yeah, it just seems like a little bit more sinister now. Well, also, I saw, I don't know if you saw this, It came out that rich tourists, and this was actually, I think, like, back in the 90s, paid $90,000 to shoot civilians, including kids on human safari trips to Sarajevo. I saw that headline. Again, it goes back to the tradition of the aristocrat hunting, like, his servants on, like, you know, on his land or whatever, which has sort of been a trope in books for a very long time. It is like, that's like one of the more disturbing things I've ever heard, like getting like basically just going on human safari and it actually happening. I think it was like it was Italians who were doing it or something. something. I can't remember what the exact context was.

It was Italian tourists allegedly. And I mean, I don't know. It doesn't sound that different to me also than some of the testimonies we hear from the IDF in Gaza. Absolutely. Yeah. 100%. And it's like you don't have to be paying to that. Like, you're just doing that for free now. It is genuinely harrowing. Like, it was just awful to hear. Well, to get back to the Running Man, I'm curious your thoughts on this movie. It's interesting, too, because I feel like there's so much as being made of these like, idea of like Glenn Powell of it all too. So yeah, I don't know if you have any sort of final thoughts on the The Running Man, if you liked it, I haven't seen it yet, but I kind of, I really want to, actually, after reading your piece.

I will keep this a very brief. The original Running Man from 1987 is one of my favorite movies of all time, which I talked to my film critic friends there, like, you're crazy. That movie is just have to watch it through this, like, really strange lens. Like, everyone in that movie is a celebrity not for acting, which is very strange. But it was also much more satirical. Edgar Wright's Running Man. I think this was good. It's like I think it's an entertainment movie. It's an Edgar Wright movie, so it's going to be very, like. Like, there's this, it's very stylish, it's very interesting. I do think that for me, the more effective vein of critique for things like this is satire versus direct criticism. I'll talk about this a little bit in the piece.

Like, there are certain things in the Running Man that are basically trying to satirize American culture, but it's just, it's like, you can't do that because it's, we're already beyond parody at this point. Like, you can't put a show that is based on the Kardashians into a movie because we already have the Kardashians. And so it's like, what are you actually crucially criticizing here? So I will say that I think that it is a very interesting update because I think it takes things like surveillance culture and sort of inputs it into a new context. I will say that it suffers from the modern cinematic disease of like overwhelming exposition. Like there's a lot of explaining what's going on and which is a modern audience issue generally. But yeah, it's it's good. It's an interesting critique of things.

I think it's done very well. Edgar Wright's very stylish. Glenn Powell is like a very good. He was a stunt guy. He knows they do an action movie. And so, I don't know, I'm trying to remember what the actresses name. She's in Task, but she comes into the throughout the movie, and she's, she's wonderful. Amelia Jones? Yeah, she was very, I mean, again, it's like, it is, I'm happy in some ways that a very

direct critique of Capitalist Excess. Excess can be like a pre-holiday blockbuster film. But yeah, it's fine. It's like, it's a blockbuster, you know? It's interesting that the original was more satirical and like that era, whereas now it feels like more on the nose. The original was like, I don't know if it knew was satirical is the kind of thing. I think that's kind of why

it works. The director was a long-time TV director. Like, I think he was on Starsky and Hutch and stuff. So, you're never taken out of this mode of watching a TV show. But as I'm talking about the piece, Richard Dawson and his, like, letcherous game show host thing, is so, and Colman Demigo does a very

good job of the new movie, but having a real game show host who is known for being sort of slimy, like, I think was just this incredible casting idea, because it was like this perfect avatar of this like giant, you know, sort of fascist media empire. And it's like, it was just, it is pitch perfect makes the entire movie tick. Oh my gosh. Well, can't wait to watch it. Teddy, thank you so much for joining me to chat about all of this. I'm such an eternal fan of your work. Taylor, it was such a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me on.

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