The Press Box - "Biohacking" Your Diet and a Meta Criticism on the Art of Apology | Damage Control

Episode Date: April 11, 2019

Many prominent people in Silicon Valley use extreme dieting in order to maximize their productivity; where's the line between "biohacking" and disordered eating (1:57)? Joe Biden's nonapology for unwanted touching drew a round of criticism from people on Twitter; when did we all become experts on the art of apology (20:03)? Hosts: Kate Knibbs and Justin Charity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Season 8 of Game of Thrones begins this Sunday, which means binge mode Game of Thrones makes its long-awaited return, with your resident experts Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion guiding you through each episode. And to get your fix every Sunday night, Chris Ryan joins Mallory and Jason on Talk the Thrones, a Twitter after show recapping each episode throughout the season. So make sure you check out the binge mode podcast on Apple or Spotify, Talk the Thrones on Twitter, and for even more Thrones coverage, you can head to the ringer.com.

I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us. So this week, we're going to talk about the modern obsession with public apologies from celebrities and other public figures, the latest apology coming from Joe Biden. But first, we're going to discuss a fascinating trend in the tech and business world.

A surprising number of Silicon Valley types are obsessed. with extreme dieting, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. He recently talked about his diet to the media and really, really shocked a lot of people, which led to the question, is there a difference between biohacking and just disordered eating? I feel so much more focused. And I think it's just this very, you know, ancestral, like, looking for, looking for where the food is. you have this very focused point of mind in terms of like this drive. And I certainly, you know, the time back from breakfast and lunch allowed me to focus more on what my day is.

Okay. So, so I have a little spiel. Speal alert. Speal alert. Because I really want to talk about Jack Dorsey's fasting diet and how popular it is because I think that the trend towards extreme dieting in the tech world is just very interesting. and is worth discussing. But I want to make it clear that one of the reasons why I am interested in all of the trends, you know, the intermittent fasting and the paleo and the keto and all the diets I don't even know about yet,

because I'm not in San Francisco. One of the reasons why I'm so interested in this because I am one of the many, many people in America with a tortured relationship with food. and I just want to be clear that figuring out what to eat and what works for your body to be healthy, it is extremely confusing and it's hard to figure out what is a good diet and what is good exercise. And I am very sympathetic to people who experiment with different diet and exercise programs. So, like, there are funny things about Jack Dorsey's extreme diet, like picturing him sort of stumbling around the Twitter office because he just refuses to eat granola bar is pretty ridiculous.

But I do, you know, he has, it seems like he has a genuinely fucked up relationship to food. And that's not really funny. Like, it's pretty upsetting. Well, so what's his diet? What is Jack Dorsey's diet? Well, he said that he only eats one. He fasts for 22 hours a day. So, and then he eats once a day.

And it's not like he's having some sort of chaos meal of like 2,000 calories. like he's eating like a small healthy dinner and nothing else. And then he doesn't eat frequently at all on the weekends. Like he won't eat from Friday to Sunday. And he exercises a lot. Like he walks to and from his office. So he pitches it to people as this like brilliant biohack. Like he's figured out a way to be more productive by like eliminating meals from his schedule that frees up a lot of time.

He claims that going into this super hungry mode makes him more focused. So that is his diet. Right. I would describe Jack Dorsey as a biohack, by the way. Like as a biohack. That is, I like that term, just not in the way that he means it. So. This is wild.

It's really, I mean. Freeing up time and making yourself more focused by eating like once. Yes, just a little baby meal. And like intermittent fasting is very popular. It's not just Jack Dorsey. Like it's a pretty big trend in Silicon Valley and it has been for a few years. And there's different versions of it intermittent fasting, which they call IF. I'm not saying that intermittent fasting in general is bad.

There's like evidence that it works for a lot of people. But what he is doing is like a super extreme version of that. Like 22 hours of fasting is so many hours of not eating. Right. You brought this up to me originally in the context of Silicon Valley culture. And this does seem interesting because obviously dieting culture is a big, broad thing. Yes. And this seems, this definitely seems like a subset.

This seems like it's not, this seems like it's hashtag productivity. It totally. Well, I think it's also connected to sort of the movement for efficiency in diet, like with soylent, which became really popular. amongst like startup types because it sort of eliminated thinking about food and freed up that brain space, I guess, to like code better or what have you. That is directly connected to what Dorsey is doing because it's this mindset that you need to your whole life is geared towards being more productive at work, including what you put in your mouth, what you put in your body, which I think is pretty dysfunctional.

Right, right. And it seems like the thing that makes it. it seems so Silicon Valley is that it, that seems like such a parody of like hypercapitalist dystopian more. Yes. The idea that your main concern in all of this is trying to maximize some weird labor ratio of your day-to-day life by like not eating food and making sure all of your time is freed up to work for Jack Dorsey.

Yeah, it's a really upsetting approach to food for me. Right. Amanda Mull of the Atlantic wrote a great piece a few months ago, I believe, talking about that, so you guys should check it out. But that orientation towards productivity is a bummer. I'm also interested in this because it's so strange as like a woman to see these things that I've encountered in my life, my whole life, being like portrayed as some sort of new innovative thing by the like tech bros. Like Soylent is very, very much slim fast. And like what Jack Dorsey is doing, like not eating, that's a diet, that's a pretty old diet trick. It's weird. Yeah, it's just very strange that it's like this a historical approach to food where things

that have been rightfully portrayed as disordered eating in the past are now being reframed is like just really smart new ways of thinking about your body. Yeah. I would also like to challenge Shaq Dorsey's suggestion that not eating makes you more focused. I had an eating disorder in college, and I would say the exact opposite. I would say that not eating or not eating sufficiently and having a disordered relationship with eating generally, like, completely destroys your ability to focus on anything.

It's not great. And it's weird because dieting, I don't think that we're going to pretend that we're going to solve dieting on this podcast. But it's tough because they're definitely, like, micromanaging one's diet, right? There are legitimate and constructive reasons why one might micromanage one's diet. For instance, if a doctor tells you to because you're managing some sort of problems, some sort of medical condition, you might micromanage your diet because you are a competitive athlete. And athletes definitely have to eat in specific ways. they have, you know, certain ratios of, like, protein to carbs to whatever.

But, like, I think the important thing about that is the reason you're eating in those ways where you're super duper mindful of, like, how many grams of X, Y, and Z go into your body and being super restrictive, at least that stuff is about, it's about productivity in a way, but it's about productivity in a way that is about your own well-being. Yeah. Right? So it's micromanaging your relationship. to food, but in a way that is ultimately about making sure that you're healthy and not going to

like pass out. Whereas this seems like the opposite. You're micromanaging a relationship to food in service of like all the ways that capital really owns you and your productivity and your time. And that's what makes this seem so wild and gross to me. Yeah, I agree because I do think that the idea that you can really dial in your diet to try to achieve some sort of goal, like there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's not impacting your physical and mental well-being. And it's great if you're doing that to achieve a goal, like a personal goal. Like this just seems so dark because instead of trying to be as healthy as possible, it's sort of just trying to manage Twitter.

I actually don't even know what his goal is here. Well, it just feels like a gimmick, right? Like, didn't Zuckerberg go through this? Well, he went through a phase. You know how he always does those challenges? Like he picks a challenge every year. Like this year, I'm going to build an AI with my hands. Yeah.

He did a year where he only ate meat that he killed himself. Okay. So he was out there for, full year like shooting cows and then butchering them. Wait, so he, okay, because there are two ways you could approach that challenge. You could either just go vegetarian or you could walk around with a rifle and shoot cows. So did he eat meat? Did he eat?

He ate me. Yeah, yeah. It was like all about, which I actually like, as low as I am to compliment Mark Zuckerberg, I thought that was kind of cool. I did. I think it's good to think critically about your relationship to like the industrial farming. complex. Sure. If you're super rich and you have the means, then I think that's a worthwhile

experiment, actually. Well, it is, but then it's, there's something about the term worthwhile, though, about Dorsey and about Zuckerberg, where it's, to me, the thing that's unclear is, okay, on the one hand, Zuckerberg, prominent figure, Dorsey, prominent figure. They're also part of this Silicon Valley culture that a lot of people admire and flatter and aspire to in some ways. But on the other hand, I'm never really sure whether Jack Dorsey or Zuckerberg is doing this purely as like a personal experiment,

like where their personal experimentation ends and where their influence to get other people to do this stuff begins. I feel ambiguous about where the distinction is between those two things. Yeah, I don't know. And that's why I saw a lot of people were really upset with Dorsey for talking about his fasting thing. This is, I mean, he's been talking about it quite a bit. Because he's so influential and people might take after him and what he is doing, I feel like you'd be hard pressed to find a nutritionist who would recommend that. Yeah.

And that's also like it's Jordan Peterson. No, he's not. Do you know what he does? What does he do? He eats only meat, like only beef, I think. But he might eat a variety of meat. He's on a meat-only diet. He doesn't know he does.

Have you seen photos of him? Yeah. He's sort of like, he's sort of like ranging. He still looks like a Muppet. Yeah, that's the thing. He looks very rangy. That's why I would never guess that he is on some pure protein diet. Did you?

Did you, I know we were just talking about the Lion King trailer. Did you watch it? I didn't watch. I saw that fur and I was like, I'm not looking at that. So Scar looks all like, like, malnourished and stuff. Oh, no. That's kind of what Jordan Peterson looks like now. He looks like scar and CGI.

Like, that's wild. Yeah. That is wild to take that. His daughter is, his daughter is basically, like, running a startup that promotes this all-meat diet. And people are upset because he, you know, a lot of people listen to him and look up to him. And an all-meat diet doesn't really make a whole lot of nutritional sense in the eyes of most, you know, medical professionals. I mean, following Jordan Peterson in general doesn't make a whole lot of nutritional sense. You already, like, the person who objects now. The person who, like, was down with Jordan Peterson until he got to the all-meat diet, I don't know, what happened there.

But, okay, so I think I'm also so into this story because I am, like, pretty susceptible to this kind of thing. Because I'm often so unhappy with my diet and trying to figure out what, like, how to be healthy. It's hard for me to be, like, super mad at Jack Dorsey about this because I understand the, confusion about how to what to do. Right. I mean, I would be, that's the thing, though. It's, to me, that's the difference between Dorsey and Zuckerberg, though, because Zuckerberg going on some quiotic mission to only eat what he kills, I think Dame Dash

did that once, too. Or he used to talk about that as a metaphor, and I thought at one point, Dame Dash also did the, like, literal manifestation of, I only eat what I kill. But the difference is Zuckerberg, maybe that's misguided, maybe it's whimsical, Maybe it's not really scalable for most people. But I don't think that the Zuckerberg experiment serves some dystopian end, whereas the Dorsey experiment is annoying

because it serves a dystopian end. It feels like the values, the virtues that he's underscoring with his diet when he talks about his diet feel like the most dismal shit. Yeah. Like, like marginally increasing your time. you can increase your labor for your boss.

And all you have to do is starve yourself. So your boss has 30 extra minutes a day for you to put things in Excel spreadsheets or whatever. It seems so... So joyless. Watching Jordan Peterson videos. Like, it's just everything about it sounds like the most gray, dank bullshit. I don't like it. It's bad.

I don't, I mean, I don't like it either. I mean, I think that, again, we're not going to solve dieting. But I feel like the reason so many people are susceptible to stuff like this is because they're thinking, well, I want to eat better. Well, why do you want to eat better? Well, because I want to look better. I want to take better care of myself. But it's like if your way of taking better care of yourself requires you to take worse care of yourself, then there's just a math. There's like a point at which just mathematically starts to cancel out.

It's like, okay, you're not eating fried chicken anymore, but instead you're dying because you're eating 200 calories every three days. and that's your diet. Yeah, or you might live longer, but you're going to be spending, like, you're spending that life, like, slowly sipping, like, room temperature tap water with, like, adaptogens sprinkled into it while you're talking to your boss. You're also not going to live longer because three months into this, your bones are going to disintegrate, and you're going to walk up, like, a very light flight of stairs, and your knees are just going to snap open, and you're going to go to the hospital.

Oh, my God. Yeah. because you were like purely eating, like, I don't want to think about, like, the weird powders that people are eating. The powders, that's like a separate episode, actually. My family, like, is obsessed with supplements. I don't really believe in them. But whenever I go home, we have, like, an entire shelf of, like, 9,000 supplements.

And there's all these, like, green powders that claim to give you, like, a full serving of vegetables. And, like, I don't understand how it works because it's not fresh vegetables. vegetables, it's like a powder. It's a powder, right? Yeah. I'm like, why don't, why not just eat fresh vegetables? Right. Right.

There's too much fat and fresh vegetables. That's true. It also takes too long to cook and eat or even staying in line at sweet green. You could be at work instead of in line at sweet green getting fresh vegetables. Oh, okay. There's something, I didn't even put this on the outline, but I'm going to tell you about it and I ask you about it because I don't know how you're going to feel about this. So there is another Silicon Valley dieting trend that I actually am on. board with in theory, and it is eating bugs because they're good for the environment.

And I think we should do that. But I tried to eat a cricket protein bar yesterday for the first time because I ordered them off the internet. And it tasted bad. It tasted bad. Well, it tasted bad. Was it bland? Was it off-putting?

Okay, it didn't taste crickety because I've actually had fried crickets before. And to be frank, they're better than the bar was. It just sort of tasted like your, like a generic. kind of shitty protein bar. Like, it had that, like, chalky. Yeah. Like, and it was really, like, I bought them just to test. I wouldn't buy them regularly because it was too expensive.

But, see, that kind of innovation I'm into, if you can link it up to doing something that's, like, eco-friendly, and if they could somehow figure out a way to make it taste not disgusting, like, I would be down to eat bugs. I would be giving high-fives to the Silicon Valley dudes who did that because, like, I do think that there's tons of room for innovation in, like, the American diet. I don't think it's bad that Silicon Valley is interrogating the American diet. Yeah, I think it's great to be adventurous about food. I think it's bad to be retentive and authoritarian about food.

Yeah. And it feels like the Jack Dorsey example is the classic retentive authoritarian approach to food that has made countless people miserable. Yeah. And also not really made them any healthier. or not made a lot of them that much healthier. Yeah. I guess in wrapping up, like, neither of us are doctors, like, do whatever your doctor tells you when it comes to food.

I'm not dissing intermittent fasting in general. I don't think extreme fasting is good for you. But, like, just in general, let's not be discussing diets and exercise and healthiness in, like, the framework of how will this make me more profitable as an employee. Like, that is bad. Yeah, a more efficient battery. Yeah. Literally talking about yourself as a doroasol battery. Yeah. That's bad. Religious fasting, fine. Dystopian fasting, bad. Yes. That's where we've come down. You know, social norms have began to change. They've shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it.

I get it. I hear what they're saying. I understand it. And I'll be much more mindful. That's my responsibility. My responsibility and I'll meet it. But I always believe governing, quite frankly, life for that matter is about connecting. Okay, so first, before we begin this segment, I want to shout out our fellow podcasters at the ringer, David Schumaker, Brian Curtis, who spent some time a few days ago talking about Joe Biden on Press Box. Go listen to Press Box. Also, listen to this. Like, listen to us right now. Listen to press box. Yeah, listen to this first. You're already listening to us. Okay.

Don't do your priorities in order. Yeah. Like, you can, come on now. You're listening to us now. You can listen to press box later, but I'm just putting it in your ear. So naturally, David and Brian, they were talking about the recent controversy surrounding Biden now that several women have published accounts about his unwelcome touching in professional high-profile settings. Now, I've written about these criticisms of Biden, among other criticisms of Joe Biden, for The Ringer. But today, I want to talk about the culmination of all this angst surrounding Joe Biden.

I want to talk about Joe Biden's public apology specifically. So Biden addressed the criticisms about his touchiness in a Twitter video. The video is strangely shot. It's shot from the waist up by someone. on his staff. The video is recorded on a smartphone. It looks like garbage. It looks, it's very weird.

It's not tangerine. You know what I mean? It's not like one of those eloquent iPhone movies that you'll see in theaters and at the Oscars. Soderberg did not shoot it. Yeah, right. It's not Soderberg. So Biden in this video is sitting in a bright living room.

You know, he's apologizing in this long, rambling way. The video is ultimately six minutes long. He's talking about social norms. he's talking about human contact. He's talking about tragedy and post-traumatic stress. And he's really talking about and summarizing the politics of intimacy. And the video is a lot. It's a lot for what it's supposed to be just Joe Biden apologizing for having touched somebody in a way

that they just felt kind of weirded out by at a public political event, right? And the apology didn't go over so well with some. of its general audience who largely ridiculed Biden for missing the point of the criticisms about his physical style. Hansy, I believe. His handsiness, right? And I think also people looked at the video and they were just like, what the fuck is this video?

This video is so awkward. He's so awkward in it. It's so awkward. I, like, didn't watch it, to be frank, but I looked at, you know, the discourse on the internet. And it was, it seemed like people were just. like really upset about the production value. Yeah, yeah.

And it's one thing to roast somebody. It would have been one thing if the video just sucked and they were like, we're roasting Joe Biden now. But instead of roasting Joe Biden, it also just seemed like every element of the apology was just kind of a disaster. And it felt like I almost felt like writing a film review and being like the production values on this are just atrocious. And this is really troublesome, because we're in a decade at this point,

we're on the eve of presidential election where lots of candidates, lots of politicians at the national level, know how to use social media. They know how to use a damn smartphone. We're over a year away from the election. Okay, you know what I mean. Okay. We're over a year away from presidential. That is nonetheless started, but we're over a year away from it.

Yeah, you're correct. This nightmare is going to go on for a lot longer. Right. This was kind of a disaster for. Joe Biden. It was a disaster in terms of, one, it was a disaster just because, again, we're still talking about Joe Biden and handsiness and whether he's creepy. I don't even think you should have apologized. I think you should have just never said anything. Like, not from a moral standpoint. From a moral standpoint, he should have apologized. From like a PR standpoint, just like,

dude, you're not going to win this one. I want to focus a bit on both of those. elements of this story, which is whether Joe Biden should have apologized or issued, let's say issued a public apology and how he should have done it. Because watching that video, I watched the video. I really did not want to watch the Joe Biden apology video. You had to for work though, right? Yeah. Yeah. I watched the video and I watched the reactions to the video. And we should clarify that some of the reactions came from Lucy Flores, who was the first person who at New York magazine wrote about Biden and her feeling like Biden had touched her in a way that was inappropriate. Again, not necessarily aggressive or sexual, but just inappropriate at a fundraiser.

Lucy Flores is a former Nevada Assemblywoman. She's a Democratic politician. And she wrote this essay at New York Magazine, not to say Joe Biden is key. canceled, but just to say, you know, Joe Biden is a really prominent example of a thing that men do that we should really talk about since this guy seems like he's about to run for president. I thought that that was a constructive conversation to have. And I thought, I thought Joe Biden could have engaged in that conversation in a constructive way, especially because a lot of the handsiness, God, we're going to keep using awkward words like handsiness for this whole episode. Sorry, that's really a bad word. But because so many people, I think, during the Obama years looked at that behavior from Biden and thought it was kind of charming and cute, I definitely think that there is a way he could have responded to Flores and these other women. In a way, it felt like he was willing to be a participant in an actually constructive, non-defensive conversation about the dynamics between.

men and women in like everyday situations. And instead, it became this disastrous apology video that makes me wonder, what am I or what is anyone else looking for from a public figure who's apologizing for something? Mm-hmm. Because as specifically funny and disastrous as the Joe Biden apology video is,

I watched people sort of offer feedback and be like, well, if Joe Biden really meant it, he would have said X instead of Y. Or the video should have been done like this instead of that. I don't always know that the sort of weird, meticulous arts criticism that has erupted around modern celebrity apologies makes me think that there is a right way that any of these people could do this. I think Joe Biden has the Joe Biden problem. And I don't think that there's any version of that video or any version of that apology that makes that many people think, oh, you know what, he actually did a good job here or like he gets it or he is good now. I'm trying to think back on public apologies that I've thought were well done. It's hard to remember.

And I feel like I remember more easily the ones that I thought were not well done. Remember when we talked about Dan Harmon? Yeah, Dan Harmon, I think that was the one for a long time ago. I think when Cam and you were doing this podcast, we talked about this. Like, he was, Dan Harmon was one of the ones who did it well because he was specific in on it. And he owned up to his actions in like a very specific way. So you felt like there is a sincere attempt at, you know, moving forward and repairing his relationships and like writing the wrongs, as best he could. I feel like generic, like the more generic you get, the more performative and

sort of hollow apologies seem. Like the, I remember the Luis C. K. Non-A apology as being particularly bad. Yeah. But at this point, honestly, like, I didn't feel like watching the Joe Biden apology video because I didn't think it would add anything to my understanding of him. Like, it didn't matter. At this point, I feel like I'm not super invested in celebrity apologies because they just seem sort of like a PR move. I'm more interested in what else they do. I don't know. Well, I think, so you just use the word performative, which I think is important because there's a, to me, there's a paradox at the heart of all of this, which is social media, web media, and a lot of ways have made it so that even if so with joe biden and lucy flores for instance realistically

that's an episode that happened between two people and to me and i i feel like this is the most basic thing and yet it's lost on the entire discourse about this to me an apology is joe biden going to lucy flores not to me by way of twitter but to lucy flores and being like hey i read this thing that you wrote, like, I'm sorry, my bad. Yeah. Right? To me, that's what an apology is, is you do something wrong to someone. That person calls you out on it, or maybe you yourself have some sort of a, and you

apologize to that person. So it's like we're instead looking at a public apology. You know what this is? What? It's damage control. Oh, my God. That's what he is doing. But that's the thing.

He's doing damage control. and I think that his critics are clamoring for him to do damage control. And that's what makes the sort of the criticism that, well, it's too performative. But it's performative inherently because it's a public apology. Yeah, yeah, you're right. And it's clear that the people who are extremely into the political implications of this, that's what they want. They want public apologies.

They want this, they want this sort of ceremony. And so to me, I don't know, there is no non-performative version of a public apology. That's true. And it's funny because the Lucy Flores criticisms, the fact that Biden answered them with a public apology, Lucy Flores comes back and says, and publicly says, you know, I respect that your intentions maybe weren't. because Biden is basically like, I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. And Flores was fine.

She says, look, I get what your intentions were. Trust me, I get what your intentions were. I get that you didn't intend X, Y, and Z, but that's how it made me feel. And that's what I was writing about. And it's like Joe Biden could have totally understood that if he just talked directly to her. And the fact that he's apologizing to the public,

instead of having this conversation with the actual person, also just echoes the entire criticism about Biden with regard to Anita Hill, right? Because he, Biden spent like six months in interviews, you know, being like, yeah, I wish I had managed the, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings differently. You know, I'm so, so, I'm sorry that I didn't behave differently. But then Anita Hill talks to the president is like, he's doing all these interviews where he's apologizing. He isn't apologizing.

to me. Yeah. And I feel like that's a theme apparently in Biden's behavior. But I also feel like it's a broader

theme in public apology culture in general. Because it's just the most uncanny thing watching people apologize to the public

for things that they didn't do to the public. They did the specific people. And as much as it's annoying to watch

the person apologizing do that, even though it doesn't really makes sense and is not how my mom taught me to

apologize. does. It's also weird because I feel like that's what Twitter wants. I feel like that's what news media want. They think that public apologies are a thing that in fact, like public figures owe us. Yeah. I actually saw a lot of, because when you said you wanted to talk about this, because I hadn't watched the Biden video, I had honestly been trying to ignore the whole Biden and discourse. Like, I'm trying to be picking and choosing where I focus my attention in the primary race. I was just doing some research, and I was surprised by just, like, the vast amount of different articles, analyzing Biden's apology and calling for him to apologize better.

And it really is a thing. Like, apology criticism is now a genre of digital content. Yeah, it's like Biden's apology video may as well have been. been Star Wars episode nine. You know what I mean? It's just like there are reviews of this guy's apology. And I don't know. It's just like the ideal apology is you privately talk to this person. And again, I get that he's a public official.

I get that he's going to run for president and that there are broader stakes than just this one interaction with this person specifically. I get that, okay, you have to put out some sort of public statement. You put out a statement and the statement says this. it says, hey, I had a conversation with Lucy Flores. With regard to this story, I apologized to her. The rest of it is between the two of us. She can relate whatever she wants to relate from that conversation,

but I talk to her specifically. I don't get why that can't be the thing that happens. See, you know, I don't want to lose you as my podcast host, but maybe you should go advise the freaking P.R. Because that makes a lot more sense. Or the Warren campaign. I mean, that's the thing. It's not even just.

Joe Biden. It feels like the... Oh, yeah. Like, Warren's apology about the... The ancestors. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

It's like, who are you apologizing to? Who you can't... There is no such thing as apologizing to Twitter. Well, her situation makes a little more sense because she ran a foul of an entire people. Right. Like... That's also true. That's not true.

That is also true. She committed a broader right. Yeah. Yeah. Again, I get it. And I, there's definitely a case to be made, right, that even though we're talking about specific women with specific accounts of Joe Biden's behavior being uncomfortable, we're also talking about the political connotations, the social connotations, like what these attitude, what Biden's attitudes about women, say, about his politics. Mm-hmm. I get that.

I get that there are larger issues than just the specific instances. but I just I don't Like you said We're more than a year away From the Presidential election And

All of these candidates are dumbasses How many apologies? How many apology cycles Like if we had to do Oh my God If we had to bet right now I want to bet And it's legal to bet now

We can gamble 12? You think 12? I think Are we doing Price's right rules? Yeah 19 Okay

How much are you betting? $10? $10. Okay. We're shaking on this right now. But one thing I wanted to bring up is like, so the Biden apology video got even darker when Trump tweeted about it. Oh, Lord. I have him blocked on Twitter. Trump tweeted like, welcome back Joe, right, all caps, the classic Donald Trump all caps.

And he shared a portion of the Biden video that had been Photoshop by somebody on Reddit, with Joe Biden's own hands coming up and like rubbing Joe Biden's shoulders and then Joe Biden leaning into frame. I'm sorry, it's bad that I'm laughing. It sounds kind of funny, though. It's very funny. I actually think it's quite funny. Damn it.

It's sort of making Joe Biden look creepy in a video where he's apologizing for being creepy and it's like edited in just this very... God. What a stupid world we live in. It's edited in a very pepe style, I'll say. But obviously a lot of people... looked at that and they're like, well, Trump's a hypocrite. Like, Trump is, you know, the worst to women.

Like, he has no room to make fun of Joe Biden. But the fact that Trump weighed in got me thinking about the fact that Trump really is the American politician who is the least likely to apologize for literally anything. It's his secret weapon. It's his secret weapon, but it's his secret weapon, I think, in this strange sense where if you think about the fact that Trump has this very, let's say, committed political base that loves him dearly. Like, he doesn't even apologize to them. Like, I remember at the end of the government shutdown over the border wall, you'll remember that Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh were the two conservative figureheads who sort of publicly pressured him into the stance that he ended up adopting of saying, no, we're going to shut down the government until the Democrats fund the border wall.

at the time it was sort of thought of as like Trump is coming off a bad midterm elections performance and the people on the right are sort of starting to feel like he's kind of a risky prospect, yada, yada, yada. So he gets pressured into this hardcore, he gets pressured deeper and deeper into his hardcore immigration stance. And yet, toward the end of the border wall crisis, I remember reading, it was either a tweet or it was like a soundbite from the White House. where Trump essentially called Anne Coulter a lunatic. Right?

And like, Anne Coulter is a prominent conservative. Like, Anne Coulter is one of the people in his corner. Justin, why are you making me like sympathetic? Now this is two Trump tweets that apparently I like. But even as somebody who is influential and in Trump's camp as Anne Coulter, Trump's not going to apologize to Anne Coulter for calling her a lunatic or whatever. And I think about the fact that Trump, Trump, his refusal to apologize for literally anything, it makes him look like a dickhead,

but it at least doesn't really allow him to look weak. Right. And I think that's an interesting thing because Biden's soft proposition is, look, I'm the guy who can beat Trump, right? And I think the unfortunate thing about this whole apology cycle with regard to Biden and his being handsy is, and I think the thing he knows is, Well, this makes me look weak. Like, now I have to navigate this very sensitive political issue that underscores his age, for one, and underscores the fact that he is not really with the modern currents in the Democratic Party. And I just look at that and I think, man, Donald Trump doesn't have this problem.

Like, Donald Trump just tells people to fuck off. And I'm not saying that Joe Biden should be Donald Trump, but I think that the difference between those two men, underscores a lot about what is kind of frustrating and feels a little too esoteric about the apology

industrial complex. It just feels like it both debases it like debases people including people who deserve to be debased frankly. But it debases people while also not really making anything better and not

making anyone happy. And I just feel like there has to be a better way to navigate this sort of, again, these sort of infractions. Rather than going through this weird ceremonial, like, figure skating scoring of apologies. Just opening up the notes app and tapping out. I don't know what would be better. I do know that the only apology video that has ever made me happy was when Johnny Depp and Amber Hurd had to apologize to the Australian government. I highly recommend. How long ago was that?

That was... It was a long time ago. What was the... Okay, so what was the context for that? That is, like, iconic. I remember being really weirded out. They, like, try to smuggle their dogs into Australia, and then Australia caught them, and then was, as their punishment, like, instead of going to jail or whatever, they had to, like,

release this... It's so funny. Is that in the video where Giant Depp looks like he's about to break out into tears? Yeah, they seem very... He looks like he's under physical distress in that video. Yeah, that video is great. That's the only public apology I like that has brought joy into my life. Yeah.

So I guess the takeaway is that the Australians should force more people to report. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't want this discussion to be me saying, why does Joe Biden have to apologize? I think you should apologize. I just think you should have apologized to Lucy Flores. And I think that more, I just, I need more people at this level of public life to process the radical idea that if you wronged somebody, you should apologize to that person.

And if you need to communicate about the conversation you have with that person, fine. I get it. I get that there are, there is brand management and public relations dimensions to all of this stuff. but an apology is the thing you do to a person that you wrong. It is not a thing you do to Twitter. It is not a thing you do to, like, CNN. Don't apologize to me. I don't plan on it. All right, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs.

Thanks for listening. We'll be back in two weeks.